A Breath of Fresh Air

by Amulya Malladi

  Each day I hoped Amar was gaining strength and each day I was reminded this child of mine had been given less than a few years to live when he was born. Anjali hadn’t known that the effects of that deadly night in Bhopal would lead to a child with a weak heart and weak lungs. She hadn’t known and because of that even though I wanted to blame her for our son sometimes, I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair and above all else I wanted to be a fair man.

  But how could a husband be fair, when his wife’s eyes brightened at the mention of the man who was to blame for their son’s hasty life?

  Anjali came into the kitchen and wrapped her arms around me, her face leaning against my back.

  “Are you angry?” she asked.

  I shook my head and turned around. I kissed her softly on the mouth and shook my head again. “About what?”

  “About his wife?”

  I wrinkled my nose in affected confusion. “I should be angry that he has a wife?”

  She stuck her tongue out playfully and genuinely laughed. That’s what I was good at, at making her smile even when she didn’t want to, even when she thought she couldn’t. It didn’t matter that Prakash was in her past when I held her in my arms. This beautiful, wonderful, strong woman was mine. She was my wife and I loved her, loved her for who she was, and who she wasn’t.

  “Do you want me to cook tonight?” I asked, as I usually did on weekends, and she shook her head, as she usually did.

  I would do anything for her, but I didn’t think she realized that. If the time came and she wanted to leave me for a better life, I wouldn’t stop her. For all that she had been through, I wanted her to be happy. But happiness was elusive; like a chimera it slipped through our fingers. A year after we got married we had Amar. The ecstasy of having a child was shadowed by the pronouncements of the doctors. We had spent all our savings, everything we had, which was not much, in finding better doctors in the hope that they would tell us that Amar was all right and that the other doctors were wrong. But the writing was on the wall; Amar didn’t have much time. So we dragged each minute as long as we could and hoped for that unlikely miracle to occur—for Amar to wake up one morning and say, “I am fine,” and mean it.

  She leaned away from me, frowning. “Why don’t you hate him?”

  She had asked that question several times before. I hated Prakash, I most certainly did. He had touched my wife’s lithe body, he had kissed her wide mouth, he had caressed her breasts. The possessiveness of those acts made me cringe with jealousy. Prakash had married her in a lavish wedding; I hadn’t. Our wedding had been a simple, sign-on-this-piece-of-paper affair. She had seemed happy, enthralled, but I wondered if she compared the two weddings. And if she did, did I fail miserably?

  “Hate is a very strong emotion,” I said calmly. It was not a complete lie. I would hate her first husband, whoever he was, but I didn’t know if I hated Prakash, the man. He had been young, just twenty-five when he married her. Being married at a young age, even though by the standards of society he was old enough to be married and have a couple of children, must have been difficult. But he had made more mistakes than his age could excuse. Adultery was not something I condoned, but hate was too strong an emotion to subject oneself to, even for adultery.

  “Do you at least dislike him?”

  I kissed her again, hoping she would let the matter slide. Her obsession with making me admit that I hated Prakash led to my obsession with being fair. It would be grossly unfair for me to hate a man for marrying her before me.

  “Do you?” she prodded.

  “I will dislike anyone you want me to dislike.” I kissed her. “I will hate anyone you want me to hate.” I kissed her again. “And—”

  “Even at this age . . . you two.” Komal saved me from saying anything more. Her eyes were full of reproach as she came into the kitchen. Anjali and I had been married thirteen years now and Komal couldn’t understand our intimacy. Couples were not supposed to be this amorous at our age. It probably boggled her mind that we even had sex . . . with each other.

  Anjali tried to withdraw from my embrace, but I held her tightly. “Yes, even at this age,” I said to Komal in a “no nonsense” tone she recognized. This was none of her business. My relationship with my wife was ours alone—no one told us how to live our lives.

  I looked down at Anjali and she was trying her best not to laugh by pursing her lips tightly. Komal made a disgruntled sound and left us.

  Anjali burst out laughing as soon as Komal was out of earshot, and I joined her, drawing her close to me.

  NINE

  SANDEEP

  When I first met Anjali, I barely noticed her. She slipped past my eyes. If it weren’t for my colleague and friend Professor Gopalnath Mishra, who we all called Gopi, I wouldn’t have known her at all. He introduced us on the side of a road, on a hot day in July, when you could smell the sweat on human bodies from miles away.

  She had the sun in her face and when she looked at me she shaded her eyes with her hand. It had been a chance meeting. We were on our way from the department building to the canteen to get a cup of tea and some university gossip. Gopi knew Anjali well. He had been a friend of the family.

  She was working on her master’s in education, while Gopi and I taught at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the Hyderabad Central University.

  We talked aimlessly for a short while and then I suggested we go to the canteen, “before one of us has a sun stroke.”

  She said she was tired and would like to go back to her hostel. Apparently she was taking some summer classes. I wanted to ask her why she wasn’t going back home for the summer, but decided it was none of my business. I had no idea, then, how much of my business everything about Anjali would become.

  I was thirty-one, past the social average age of marriage. There was no one to question me. My father died when I was eighteen and my mother passed away when I was twenty-five, just when I was finishing my Ph.D. I spent the next six years building a career and arranging my sister Komal’s marriage.

  That done, I lost my taste for marriage. Komal’s wedding had been a damned negotiation. Her heart was set on marrying a bank officer and Jaydev was a bank officer. He said he would like to marry Komal right after the bride-seeing ceremony. But his parents warned me that their boy was a catch, and as such demanded a high dowry. I was against the idea of perpetuating the despicable custom, but Komal insisted.

  “All my friends are married and they all had to give a dowry. Why do you have to start a crusade now? You don’t have to take any dowry when you get married, but I want to get married. Now.” She wailed for a long time, and finally I gave in.

  I sold our parents’ house, added my savings to the money I got from the sale, and married Komal off. It was a relief to see her go. She had become a thorn in my side—living with me, nagging me. She was like the wife I never had, and with her gone, I didn’t feel like replacing her.

  And even if I did want a wife, the path to marriage seemed to be cluttered with too many obstacles.

  There were two ways to get married: either your marriage was arranged or you fell in love and got married. I didn’t really believe in falling in love—it seemed like it was part of a book or a movie, not real life, and arranged marriage seemed to be a gamble I wasn’t ready to risk my life on. I wanted to marry—I didn’t want to be celibate and alone for the rest of my life, but I wanted to know the woman before I married her. It didn’t seem too much to ask, did it? I just wanted to know the person I was to spend the rest of my life with, before I committed myself to spending the rest of my life with her.

  Gopi always told me that was a “charming” idea, but I would have to move out of the country to do that. I had seen friends and others fall in love and get married. The idea of meeting a woman and falling in quasi love with her, knowing her, respecting her before I married her, seemed wise. However, intelligent women were scarce and I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life with a bubbly little girl who had he
r heart set on a professor. The girl would have to be incredibly stupid, too, if she wanted to marry a middle-aged professor—our kind didn’t make a whole lot of money and I was thirty-one. Most young women wanted to marry the wealthy M.B.A. types or the doctors or the army officers. Professors were one of the last resorts for most girls and their parents.

  By the time a man reaches my age, people start wondering why he is still single. Maybe he is impotent! Maybe he is already married and isn’t telling anyone, and so on and so forth. It was a standard question people asked me: it started with “Where is your wife?” and ended with “Why aren’t you married?”

  Gopi’s wife Sarita had tried to marry me off and had given up. Sarita would warn me, “You will die alone, ever thought about that?” and I would tell her that we all die alone.

  Gopi and Sarita had an arranged marriage and, for the most part, they seemed content. They too lived on campus and I visited them often. The professors’ accommodations were decent. The roof never leaked (well, it did once), but they fixed it before the monsoon ended and the overhead water tank saved us from waking up at four in the morning to fill buckets of water—especially in the summer when water was scarce. To me it was a luxury to have a water tank that collected the water whenever the Hyderabad municipality released it. All my life, I remember waking up at strange hours, filling up every empty utensil we could find at home with water.

  The university provided me with a one-bedroom flat—a pigeonhole—because I was a bachelor. Gopi was elevated to a two-bedroom house because of his married status. I spent many nights in Gopi’s house, not because it was better than mine, but because Gopi and Sarita were the closest I had to family in Hyderabad.

  I had been leading a good life; when I met Anjali—it got better.

  I saw her again, two or three weeks later at Gopi and Sarita’s house. She had come over for dinner and I realized that Gopi and Sarita were trying to fix us up.

  They had it set up well, though they were not subtle about it. Sarita went inside the kitchen and refused Anjali’s offer to help. Then she called out to Gopi, who instantly left for the kitchen. They were probably peeking out of the kitchen door, watching the two of us. We both knew what was going on. I was trying to feel outraged but the amusement in Anjali’s eyes made me wonder if Gopi and Sarita were off the mark. I had expected she would be demure and eager; instead, she was casual and not at all eager.

  “If I’d known, I would have worn my nice salwar kameez ,” she said with mock sweetness, and I laughed.

  “And I would have worn something nicer myself,” I joined her, looking disparagingly at my worn black nylon pants and white cotton shirt that used to have blue stripes several years ago.

  “I am sure your parents wouldn’t want Sarita and Gopi to find a husband for you,” I said seriously.

  What were Gopi and Sarita thinking? Anjali’s parents would be extremely upset if they learned of Gopi and Sarita’s machinations. I didn’t even know if we were from the same caste. Not that it mattered to me, but it could matter to Anjali and her parents.

  “My parents wouldn’t care,” she said, which surprised me.

  “They must be very broad-minded.”

  She made a sound that was halfway between a genuine laugh and hysteria. “They would have a seizure if they knew I was getting married—” She paused gently and then looked into my eyes. “—again.”

  I slumped into my chair. “Oh, you are married. I think we misunderstood our friends.”

  She shook her head, biting her lip nervously. “I was married.”

  “I am so sorry. When did he pass away?” I was relieved to learn she was a widow. For a moment there I thought Gopi, Sarita, and I were making asses of ourselves.

  She made a face. “Why is it that everyone thinks that the only way a woman can get rid of her husband is when he dies?”

  I was not a chauvinist by a long shot, so for a moment what she said confused me a little. How else could she have been married? And yet . . . no, she wasn’t talking about divorce. No one divorced in this country. Divorces happened in movies and with film stars and rich people. Middle-class people didn’t divorce. They got married and lived . . . ever after— together.

  “You see my parents didn’t approve of the divorce,” she said almost conversationally. “So they’ve written me out of the family will.”

  Her voice, tone, and behavior indicated the divorce had been a simple and normal thing, almost as simple and normal as buying vegetables in the market. Her tone made me feel she was joking, but what she was saying was not a joking matter. So I wondered if she was putting me on.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” she asked, noticing my confusion and disbelief.

  I was about to say something, probably something stupid because my mind had stopped working rationally, when Sarita came into the living room, flustered. She announced that dinner was ready.

  I asked Gopi about it later and he told me that Anjali had divorced her husband two years ago. Gopi didn’t know the reasons and he had never tried to find out. She had been distraught after she came back from Bhopal, where she and her husband had lived for less than a year. That was how long the marriage had lasted. Apparently, she didn’t have any place to go for the summer, so she stayed at the hostel.

  He didn’t give too many details, because he didn’t know much. For all her vivacity, Anjali seemed to keep to herself. In any case, I yelled at Gopi for pulling the “fix-up” stunt on me and made him promise to never put me in such a situation again. Gopi took it in good humor and so did Sarita. They both agreed, teasingly, that Anjali deserved better.

  I had wondered then if Gopi had made a slip of the tongue when he said Anjali had divorced her husband. Women didn’t go around divorcing their husbands. Although it was rare, if a divorce did take place it was almost always the man’s doing.

  I didn’t lose any sleep on trying to figure out who was responsible for Anjali and her husband’s divorce. I forgot about her for the rest of the summer.

  I visited my sister and her husband for a couple of weeks that summer and listened to Komal complain about not having any children. Komal and her husband had both taken fertility tests and the tests clearly rested the blame on Jaydev and his low sperm count. Of course, it had to be a big secret. Jaydev could hardly tell his family and friends that he was not a “real man,” as he put it.

  So after all the dowry I had given, Komal was not happy with the bank officer she’d had her heart set on marrying. I listened to her complain about her fate in life and I listened to Jaydev complain about his fate in life. They both felt free to complain to me and tell me their sad stories because I was the most “nontraditional” person in the family, as they put it. This meant that I wouldn’t be pointing fingers at them anytime soon, which would have been the case if anyone found out that Komal and Jaydev were having serious marital problems.

  Komal said her husband wasn’t addressing the situation and that everyone in his family was blaming her for not having children. Jaydev said that Komal emasculated him by always talking about his low sperm count. She would make one concoction after another—from recipes dug out of ancient books like the Kamasutra to recipes given away for ten rupees each by quack sadhus—to improve his sperm count. Jaydev was taking some medicines, but they weren’t working either. Much of the problem was that Jaydev just didn’t feel like having sex anymore because he felt his masculinity had left him when he found out about his low sperm count. Since they were not having sex, there was no chance for a pregnancy.

  It was almost four months after the “set-up” dinner at Gopi’s that Anjali and I met again. She was talking to a friend outside the auditorium where the students of the Department of Literature were performing a play. As a member of the faculty I had a free ticket, and since I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night I went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Our eyes met as we waited to go inside the theater, and before I could turn away and pretend I didn’t see h
er she waved lightly. I waved back uncomfortably. I felt uneasy. After all, Gopi and Sarita had tried to set me up with her. I wondered if she was hopeful because of that.

  I noticed that she stood out in a crowd because of her shoulder-length straight hair, her height, and her beautiful face. I on the other hand was thirty-one years old and looked like the average man on the street. No one would give me a second look—I wasn’t that ugly or that handsome. We would make an incongruous pair. For the first time I wondered about her ex-husband. I didn’t know his name, but I tried to give him a face, a character, and a personality. I tried to fill the idea of her ex-husband with life, to see who this striking woman had been married to and then divorced from.

  She made her way to me and asked me how my summer was. I had no choice but to be polite, though I didn’t want to talk to her. She probably had some ideas about me, about herself and me—thanks to Sarita—and I wanted to discourage her.

  She realized soon enough that I didn’t want to speak with her and left. I should have been relieved, but I wasn’t. I felt guilty for being so presumptuous.

  I saw a flash of her white dupatta as I entered the auditorium, and I don’t know what possessed me, but I sat in the empty chair next to her. She didn’t notice me, since she was turned the other way, speaking with her friend in a hushed voice.

  When the lights went down, without much deliberation or thought, I leaned over and whispered, “I am sorry.” The reaction was not what I expected. She squealed and all heads turned to look for the squealer. The curtains went up and the crowd went back to looking at the stage. Anjali and I sat frozen, her squeal still ringing in our ears.

  “Sorry again,” I whispered, and she was breathing heavily, assuring her companion, who seemed agitated, that everything was all right.

  “I didn’t expect you to sit with me after . . .” she muttered, looking ahead at the stage.