A Breath of Fresh Air

by Amulya Malladi

  The caresses were warm and gentle, just like our relationship.

  SIX

  ANJALI

  The first night!

  I had expected amazing lovemaking, just like in the books, and I had expected the man to be gentle and wonderful, a teacher. I was a virgin, and I was warned about the pain during sex for the first time. I ignored it believing that women had pain when the men didn’t arouse them. Prakash Mehra was going to arouse me before he breached my womanhood. I was convinced of that. He was a gentleman and he always held the door open for me. Why would he be different during sex?

  The first night after the wedding, like most first nights, despite what I had wanted it to be, was a nightmare. Sex that had seemed so beautiful in books and in my imagination turned out to be a rutting session that I didn’t want to go through ever again. To me the first night was the first time I would have sex; to Prakash it was probably a simple act of consummation.

  I had worn a light pink silk nightgown for the occasion. I was horribly tired after the long five-day wedding. Everything had been chaotic and I had felt like a doll as I was paraded in front of everyone. Prakash’s family members came one by one to see if maybe, despite the rumors, I was actually ugly. His grandmother made me open my mouth to check my teeth, while his great-aunt made me walk just to make sure there was nothing wrong with my legs. All this after the wedding had begun. They all wanted to make sure Prakash was getting an appropriate wife.

  My parents had spent an exorbitant amount of money on our lavish wedding. Thousands of pictures were taken by a professional photographer hired to catch every memory, every nuance of the wedding, in color. Everything had been done according to scripture and tradition; the only problem had been Prakash. He had issues with everything. Instead of just going through all the ceremonies, he questioned all of them. He had tried to convince his parents and mine that the wedding should be a small affair, but no one listened to him. When he asked me if I wanted a large wedding, I had nodded sheepishly. I was twenty-one, I wanted to show off, and I didn’t know any better. That enraged him and we had our first fight before we walked around the fire seven times.

  We were in my parents’ living room and he walked out in midsentence—my midsentence. Half an hour later he came back and apologized. I started to cry and he brushed my tears. It was the first time we kissed. I had been shocked by his audacity. After all, this kind of kissing was done after the marriage ceremony. His hands had roamed my body and he had touched my breasts. I was excited but embarrassed, too. We were both saved from our passions when my mother walked into the room. I think she knew what we had been doing, but she pretended not to.

  We spent our first night as husband and wife in his parents’ house, as tradition demanded. Prakash’s old bedroom had been decorated for the event. His mother had painstakingly sprinkled rose petals on the white sheets of a newly purchased double bed and had sprayed a cloying rose perfume around the whole room.

  An auspicious time had been picked out for the first-night ritual of copulation, and I was supposed to be ready for my husband. My mother installed me in the bedroom an hour before Prakash was supposed to be there. She made sure my nightgown was not crumpled and complained about my drooping eyes, then left me alone to wait for my future.

  When Prakash entered the room I could smell alcohol on his breath. I instantly wanted to throw a tantrum about it, but this was our wedding night and I didn’t want him to think I was a shrew. I realized then that I knew nothing about Prakash, and that he knew nothing about me. Divya Auntie had said that he didn’t drink alcohol and she was obviously mistaken, which meant that he was a mystery and every day would be a revelation. It was intimidating and exciting. We had a lifetime to get to know one another and I couldn’t wait for the lifetime to begin.

  As soon as he closed the door behind him he started taking his clothes off. The enormity of what was to happen struck me. All my life my parents had worked toward protecting my virginity. Now this man, a veritable stranger, would breach my virginity and honor and my parents were happy about it because he had tied a mangala sutra around my neck.

  I clamped my mouth shut when Prakash sat down on the bed, crushing rose petals, and started to remove his underwear. I had never seen a naked man in my life. His body was hairy and his penis . . . I looked away. It was sticking out of his body and it looked big. I knew the basics of sex and my mother, despite my protests, had explained the process. Her rules were simple: lie down and let him do whatever he wants to do.

  “A woman doesn’t have to enjoy sex. There is nothing to enjoy really. It is the means to have a baby and men like it,” she had said.

  My mother’s explanation aside, I had started taking birth control pills two weeks before the wedding. Prakash had told me that he didn’t want children for at least one year after the wedding, and I agreed. It would be like one long honeymoon, my delusional brain deduced.

  He sat next to me on the bed, naked. “Are you scared?” he asked politely, and I nodded, not looking at him at all.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  I looked up then. “Have you done it before?”

  He seemed angry and uncomfortable with my question. “I am sorry,” I immediately soothed. “It was a stupid question.”

  The anger left his eyes as soon as I apologized. But I had my answer. My army officer had done this before. I should’ve been angry, and I was, but I was also excited. He was an experienced man; he would know how to do it right. Just like the tall, dark, and handsome men in romance novels.

  His hands found their way to the ties of my nightgown and I held my breath. He slipped the shoulder straps down my arms and the nightgown slithered to my waist and almost immediately his hands launched an attack on my breasts. I was too nervous to be aroused or excited. I kept wondering why he didn’t kiss me. The kissing after our fight had been fun. This part, however, scared the living daylights out of me.

  He pushed me onto the bed and removed my nightgown. My white panties followed. My thighs instantly crossed, trying to protect my virtue. Prakash seemed too far gone to care what I felt and, in less than a minute after my panties had joined the nightgown on the floor, my army officer forced himself inside me, while I cried bloody murder.

  He pounded in and out and I kept crying. His eyes were closed and his breathing was harsh. Finally, he heaved and groaned and then fell over my body. To make matters worse he was heavy. I tried to push him off me gently, not wanting to insult him in any way. I was his wife and this is what I had to put up with. My mother was right, damn her.

  He moved on his own accord in a few minutes. He slumped on the bed on his stomach and opened his eyes to look at me.

  “Good night,” he said politely, and fell asleep.

  I stared at him, hoping he wasn’t sleeping. Was this it? This was sex? Where was the romance I was promised in the Mills & Boon novels? I wanted an explanation! But he started snoring, and all my shaking him did was stop the snores for a while.

  SEVEN

  ANJALI

  It was a Sunday when I saw her again. In the market, wearing the same woolen coat. This time, she carried a small dark leather hand purse and Prakash was not with her.

  Sandeep patted my shoulder. “Do you want to buy bhindi or not?”

  I looked at the plump okra and nodded. “Two kilos,” I mumbled at the vendor, and picked up the weights he was using to check if they were lighter than they were supposed to be.

  “I am not a cheat, Memsaab.” The vendor smiled, showing his cracked and yellowed teeth. “Everything here is—”

  “I know how everything is here,” I snapped. “And put that bhindi you took out back on the plate.”

  I felt unsettled. The market was turning into a “meet your past” carnival booth.

  Sandeep put the okra in a cloth bag and paid the vendor. We surveyed the other shops and avoided banana peels and rotten vegetables on the cobbled stones as we walked around the market.

  “Fruit,” I sa
id, when Sandeep asked what else we needed. “Amar asked for an apple yesterday and we didn’t have any.”

  “Sure . . . where are the apples?” Sandeep asked, looking around.

  “There,” I pointed out.

  “Where?” he asked, not looking exactly where I was pointing.

  “There,” I said in exasperation. “Can’t you see? Are you blind?”

  Sandeep stopped me from moving by putting his hand under my elbow. “What is the matter with you? You were fine a minute ago and now you are the incarnation of Durga Ma.”

  I swallowed uneasily. How much could I tell him? Should I tell him? I knew I would eventually tell him the truth, one way or the other.

  “Are you okay?” he persisted, so I decided to tell him what the problem was.

  “I . . . just . . . saw his wife.”

  “Where?” Sandeep looked around and I jerked my eyebrows in her direction. “Very pretty,” he said, then turned toward me. “Of course, she doesn’t hold a candle to your beauty.”

  “Of course,” I said sarcastically.

  “They live here, Anjali. We are going to keep seeing them in the market, the cinema, somewhere or other,” he cautioned. “Are you going to be in a bad mood each time it happens?”

  I understood what he was saying, but I didn’t think he understood how I felt. It was envy, pure and simple. That was supposed to be my life. I was supposed to be an army officer’s wife. I was supposed to be wearing the pretty saris and carrying the expensive purses. I was supposed to be going to all the parties and living the frivolous life; instead I was living a life that didn’t compare to what I had thought I wanted. I felt guilty as soon as I thought that. I loved Sandeep and I was thankful that I was not married to Prakash anymore. That was reality. In my head, however, I wanted to be someone else; I wanted to have flights of fantasy like I did when I was twenty-one.

  “No, I am not going to be in a bad mood because of her or him,” I said, and went toward the apple vendor.

  Sandeep and I walked back home in silence. I knew he was angry—he only fell that silent when he was angry.

  EIGHT

  SANDEEP

  I never understood why Anjali was still so obsessed with Prakash.

  She said she hated him, didn’t feel any warmth for him, and most of the time she believed herself, I think, but deep down I knew she missed her life with him. Life with me was simple and predictable. I was a professor. I talked about math and I talked about making ends meet by tutoring rich children on the side. Our son was sick and each day we prayed for a miracle that would let him live longer, spend more time in this world. Other days we prayed for his pain to go away, for him to sleep peacefully throughout the night. We prayed that he would walk around the garden without tiring himself. And added to all that, my sister lived with us.

  It was probably the total opposite of what Anjali expected from life. She had wanted to be an army officer’s wife with all its glamour, and here she was married to our problems and to me.

  As we walked back home from the vegetable bazaar, I wondered about the past and the present. Since Prakash had appeared in Ooty, Anjali seemed more agitated, more stressed, and somehow, more happy. It was as if she had been waiting for this day, and now that it was here she was going to indulge in it. Prakash had apologized to her and I knew that it meant more to her than she was making out of it.

  Seeing his wife had torn her up with jealousy. She wasn’t jealous because I thought his wife was pretty; she was jealous because Prakash’s wife was . . . well, Prakash’s wife.

  I couldn’t even argue with her; after all, she had always been honest with me. Always told me her secrets, no matter how dark they were, so how could I tell her that her feelings hurt me? She didn’t even know she felt the things that hurt me. Her eyes lit up at the name of Prakash, but I didn’t know if it was with anger or with pleasure.

  She had loved him once, deeply, and I was tortured with jealousy at times. Yet I wouldn’t change a thing. This is what made Anjali the woman I love. Her vivacity, her love for life, and her fierce passion made Anjali, Anjali—and I could not hold that against her.

  But I was tormented nevertheless. When Komal told me an army officer came to see Anjali in school, the jolt had been worth a million volts, but I stayed calm. My wife was a lot of things; a cheat she was not. She would leave me before she cheated on me and sometimes I worried that she would do both.

  Oh, I knew we loved each other and that she took her marriage vows just as seriously as I took mine. But there was Prakash in the past, and he kept peeping into our lives each time Anjali’s body remembered the Bhopal gas tragedy, and now he lived just a few kilometers away.

  Anjali didn’t know this, but I had seen her first wedding photo album. It had been buried under books and papers in some long forgotten box in the attic. It had been a depressing day when I had been sifting through the junk from our pasts. The gold on red leather, the words PRAKASH WEDS ANJALI flashed, ensnared me.

  She had been a gorgeous bride, all bright-eyed and fresh, and he had been handsome. He probably still was. I was considered “nice” looking, hardly the material used in men’s suit commercials on television. My hair was graying, though I still had most of it. At forty-five I was no catch, and I had been no catch at thirty-one either when I met Anjali.

  Prakash on the other hand looked perfect, perfect for her. Did she feel that she had made the wrong choice with me? I wondered about that, too, but the insecurities didn’t burden my life. They raised their ugly head whenever she mentioned Prakash and I remembered the one picture from the album that was sealed in my memory. He was holding Anjali’s hand at the reception and she was looking into his eyes. She was looking at him like he was the only man in the entire world, and while they had been married, he had been the only man for her in the entire world.

  I felt like I was the consolation prize. It wasn’t just about good looks. It was more the aura Anjali associated army officers with. I had met several men and women like Anjali, who thought that army officers were perfect men. Patriotic, well dressed, and more Western than most of us civilian saps. Especially after a war or a publicized border skirmish, army officers looked even better to the public. To Anjali, they were demi-gods, or at least they had been. Now she seemed to feel the opposite, and even though I believed her, I had my doubts. Small, inconsequential, almost unthinkable doubts.

  Prakash was her past and now he was in her present and I was terrified of what might happen.

  Komal was in Amar’s room when we got home and I could hear them talking. Despite how she was with Anjali, my sister loved Amar. She sat with him, cared for him, and allowed both of us to have jobs. Jobs that brought the money necessary to keep Amar alive and all of us afloat. Komal didn’t cook often, which bothered Anjali. But Anjali didn’t complain and I appreciated her for that. She came home tired and immediately started to cook every day. On Sundays she cooked lavish meals, coaxing Amar to taste new dishes.

  She worked very hard at home and at work. Before she left for school every morning, Anjali swept the house, her back curved as she used the soft broom to clean out the day’s debris from the tiled floors of our rented home.

  Anjali had wanted the house as soon as we saw it. It had three bedrooms. Amar’s and ours were next to each other and a bathroom was between Amar’s and Komal’s bedrooms. And the price was just right for us. There were problems—the leaky roof in the kitchen, the cracked tiles in our bathroom, and some of the windows wouldn’t open and some wouldn’t close properly. But the house had a garden and Anjali wanted Amar to be close to that. She wanted him to step out of the house to smell the freshly cut grass, touch the roses, soak in the sunlight, and bond with nature.

  I loved the garden, the flowers, and the lawn. I pulled the weeds, watered the plants and cared for them, made sure they stayed alive through the season. In winters when the frost covered the grass in the lawn and the rose bushes shriveled, we still sat on the veranda, looking at our little piec
e of paradise.

  Anjali wanted her own house; I knew that. She wanted us to buy a home, but she didn’t once complain about the lack of funds that would allow us to do so. Compared to other wives, Anjali had never asked for one thing and that agitated me more than anything else did. Did she not ask me for anything because she knew I couldn’t afford it?

  I had seen her wedding pictures, the lush jewelry she wore and now didn’t have. After the divorce, the jewelry had given her the financial freedom to get an education so that she could stand on her own feet. I couldn’t replace her jewelry then and I couldn’t now and that made me feel impotent. When we went to weddings, her hands were the barest and her neck the one with the lightest gold. I couldn’t give her material comforts, and even though I didn’t really believe that the man should be the only breadwinner, I knew that was how she had been raised. I wondered if she looked at me and saw a lesser man. A man who needed his wife to work to pay the bills. Anjali liked to teach, but I wish she didn’t have to do it. I wish she could spend her days with Amar.

  When Anjali went to check on Amar, I washed the tomatoes and okra we had bought at the market and left them to dry on a wooden board. Amar loved Anjali’s okra curry, and that’s why she made it as often as the prices and the season would allow it. My son was smart and understood the financial intricacies of our lives. He told Anjali that if he ate okra curry too often he would stop enjoying it and he wanted to continue to like it. Anjali had laughed with him and then cried with me. It was not fair, she had said, that a little boy knew what his parents’ limitations were. Parents are supposed to be infallible, perfect creatures, but Anjali felt we were bad parents because our son knew we were fallible. It was not because we couldn’t afford okra every day; it was because we couldn’t protect our son and save him from his own body.