A Breath of Fresh Air

by Amulya Malladi

  “I wanted to apologize for that. I think I took too much for granted.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . I thought that Sarita might have given you some ideas . . .”

  “Shh,” someone said, and we both fell silent.

  I blindly looked at the stage for a while, not in the least interested in how Titania and Oberon would make up. I had behaved like an arrogant swine. Did I really think that this wonderful woman would fall all over me?

  I couldn’t stand it any longer as guilt made me ignore the fact that we were in a theater. When Bottom began to sing, I leaned over again. “I want to apologize. It was very rude of me.”

  She turned around right then and our noses clashed. She giggled first and I joined her. Someone from the crowd again said, “Shh.”

  “Out,” she whispered, then leaned over to tell her friend something. We stole out of the auditorium like thieves.

  “I like A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she accused me with a broad smile as soon as we were outside.

  “I am sorry,” I said with a broad smile. “I think I have apologized enough, don’t you?”

  She seemed to think it over, her arms folded against her chest. “Maybe chai will ease the pain of missing the play and soothe hurt feelings.”

  “Chai?”

  “Yes,” she said, then sighed. “I am not trying to wrangle a marriage out of my stay here at the university. I am just going to get my master’s and leave.”

  “Who talked about marriage?” I asked, feigning ignorance.

  “You yelled at Gopi for trying to set us up,” she said in an accusatory tone.

  “Well . . . it was stupid of him and Sarita.”

  “I agree,” she said, and I wished she had disagreed with me.

  So began an unusual friendship.

  Yes, we were friends. I think we became lovers and got married because we were friends. We met each other regularly after that night. Sometimes she would wait for me to show up at the canteen or the library, or I would meet her after one of her classes.

  Gopi and Sarita gave each other sly glances when the four of us were together, while Anjali and I tried to convince them that we were just friends. A novelty, certainly. I hadn’t seen too many single men being “just friends” with a woman. But it was true in our case.

  I discovered I was in love almost a year after the night we missed watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  It was the end of her master’s and she was in my flat studying for finals, since the dorms were crowded and noisy despite the need for silence.

  Her breath was labored and each time she inhaled she made a hissing sound. She was studying on my dining/study table in the living room. I was trying to cook a decent meal for us in the adjoining kitchen.

  I asked her if anything was wrong and she shook her head, but when she clutched at her chest trying to breathe, I started to panic. I wanted to call an ambulance, get her into an emergency room. And then her eyes bulged out and she fell to the floor. Needless to say by then I was insane with panic.

  She managed to grab her bag that was lying by the feet of the chair she had been sitting on and yanked out an inhaler from inside it.

  When she could breathe again, she told me she had asthma and how she had gotten it. I listened intently, in rapture that she had survived one of the worst chemical catastrophes of the century. I had read about the Bhopal gas tragedy, and they still talked about it on the news two years after the fact. Analysts had likened it to the atomic bomb disasters in Japan. And Anjali had been there that night, breathing the poisonous gas. And she was here now with me, struggling to breathe.

  I couldn’t get a handle on it.

  “What about your ex-husband?” I asked her. “Was he affected, too?”

  She shook her head. “No, the wind blew in the other direction.”

  Even though the Union Carbide factory was only four kilometers from the EME Center where her husband was, the wind was blowing toward Bhopal City, away from the EME Center, and that had saved her husband’s life. She also told me that the night of the gas tragedy he forgot to pick her up at the railway station.

  “If only he had come when my train got there,” she said, “I would’ve been saved. . . . Well, I was saved, I didn’t die.”

  “Is this why you divorced him?” I wasn’t curious or prying by nature, but in my mind her ex-husband had taken a life of his own.

  “No. I left him because he cheated on me,” she said simply, and her tone indicated the end of that conversation.

  After that she didn’t talk about him much. The divorce was still in the recent past and she mentioned him only once in a while. Prakash was her ex-husband, but she always said that she didn’t think of him like that. They had been married for less than a year and the marriage itself had seemed like an experiment or a test to her. She may have failed the test, but she was not going to give up on life because of it.

  Anjali’s asthma attack made me take stock of things. For an instant I had thought she would die and that had all but crippled me. It was a simple thing. Firecrackers didn’t go off and the earth didn’t move, but almost like a breeze caressing me, I realized that I was in love with Anjali. It was a pleasant thought and a comforting one. She was one of my closest friends. I enjoyed her company. She was playful, smart, strong, and independent. She wasn’t the type of woman who would sit at home and keep house for her husband; she would go out and stand shoulder to shoulder with men.

  She would be a partner and a wife; she would be a friend and a lover. I knew I wanted to marry her and I asked her as soon as her finals were over.

  The students were celebrating the last day of their master’s all over the university campus. Some of the students were coming back to do their M.Phil. and some wanted to pursue a Ph.D. I knew about Anjali’s plans; she wanted to become a schoolteacher. She didn’t want to live in Hyderabad. She wanted to live in a quiet, small place, “A place where the air is fresh and hills are kissed by rolling fog.”

  I was glad I met Anjali at Hyderabad Central University. In another university, I would have lost my job and she would have been suspended for fraternizing with a professor. Here things were slightly different—more open. That was one of the reasons why I had taken up the job there. My class syllabus was flexible, and I could take a class to the canteen if my students were hungry. I could sit outside under the trees and teach my students, or go on a hike during class. I had free rein in teaching my students and I enjoyed that. My personal life was not judged by anyone and that was an added bonus. It was the broad-mindedness of the university that allowed Anjali and me to have a healthy friendship instead of a scandalous affair.

  I didn’t know how to propose. I had no idea what to say to Anjali. She was chatting with one of her friends as we sat around a bonfire burning away the past year. Anjali turned to me and smiled, while I nervously fidgeted with words in my mind.

  “I am going to miss you,” I said, and she smiled again, that dazzling smile.

  “Why, Professor, one would think we are never going to see each other again,” she mocked with amusement.

  “Not as often, at least.”

  “We can meet during summer vacations, or . . . I don’t know, make an effort to meet, if we want to.”

  “Or we could get married,” I blurted out.

  She looked like I had slammed a fist into her solar plexus. She swallowed visibly. “I thought I heard you say that we should get married.”

  I nodded blindly.

  She covered her face with her hands for a moment and then raised her head to look at me. Her eyes widened and she all but stopped breathing again. I hoped she was not going to have another asthma attack. I didn’t think my ego would be able to handle that.

  “You want to get married?” she asked.

  “Yes . . . to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” My mind raced to find answers, to find convincing arguments, but all I could say was, “Because I am
in love with you.”

  The confusion on her face fell and she smiled.

  A month later, we got married in the Hyderabad registrar’s office, with a smug Gopi and Sarita as our witnesses. It was the best wedding I had ever attended. This one was small, didn’t have too many unnecessary guests, just Gopi and Sarita; it was extremely inexpensive (especially compared to the farce my sister went through); and best of all I was marrying a woman I was deeply in love with.

  I had called my sister before the wedding to tell her about Anjali and had promised her that we would visit them in Delhi soon. Komal was disappointed that there was not going to be a “real” wedding, and that was the first thing about Anjali she didn’t like. Once she met Anjali, there were other things she didn’t like about her, so we never told her about Anjali’s previous life as an army officer’s wife.

  Anjali and I threw a party in the university auditorium a day after the wedding, inviting all our friends. Anjali had invited her parents, but they never showed up.

  I was dazed—it had happened. I had fallen in love and I had married.

  But I couldn’t help wondering how Anjali felt. She was getting married without her family, without the usual trappings of a large wedding. It was a “sign here, please” kind of wedding, miles apart from her first one where all the ceremonies had been held and no expenses had been spared.

  Again, I wondered about Prakash. Had he been this incandescently happy when he had married my Anjali?

  TEN

  PRAKASH

  "I saw her at the market today,” Indu told me as soon as she came home. “She was with her husband—simple-looking man. I think they are very happy.”

  I shrugged as if it didn’t matter to me.

  Our cook took the vegetables from Indu and she sat down on the sofa. She sprawled on it, her body meshing with the velvet fabric, yet she managed to look alert and sharp. It was a lazy posture, but Indu never looked lazy. She looked ladylike, no, queenlike.

  “I can’t imagine why you divorced her,” Indu said. She simply couldn’t waste such a perfect opportunity to bring up the past and my failures.

  Maybe I should have told the truth to Indu from the start, that Anju had divorced me. But pride had come in the way. I didn’t want Indu to know that I was divorced because I had committed adultery.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  Indu smoothed the pleats of her sari and smiled. She looked so smug: as if she knew all my secrets, as if she knew what made me tick, as if she knew me. Sometimes I wanted to tell her about what had happened with Anju, just so that I could wipe that smug all-knowing look off her face. Unwittingly I had left Anju to die the night of the Bhopal gas tragedy—that was my terrible secret. And sometimes I wanted to tell Indu about it. To show her that she didn’t know everything about me and that I had done far worse things than divorcing a wife.

  “Oh, just that she seems your type,” she said, with a nonchalance I could barely stand. “She must’ve been a good-looking woman. Now . . . she needs a serious makeover, but she is quite a looker.”

  I gritted my teeth against saying anything. Why did Anju have to live here? It was easier when Indu spoke about my ex-wife when she couldn’t picture her. Now Indu had seen her, heard her voice, spoken to her, and she punished me for that. For having an ex-wife, for having an ex-wife she had had to meet.

  Indu was a leftenant general’s daughter, and knew no world outside the army. It was always a given that she would marry an army officer. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. After the divorce I had been posted out of Bhopal to Baroda, where Indu’s father was commanding the EME College.

  While I was reeling with shock from my divorce, Indu had been reeling me in as her husband. She hadn’t known about my divorce in the beginning, when we first started seeing each other. When I told her about Anju, I thought she would leave me, but she didn’t. She told me she was in love with me and it didn’t matter that there had been a woman in the past.

  “She seems the doormat, Prakash,” Indu said, looking into my eyes, trying to see how I was reacting to the knowledge in hers. “Perfect for you. Wouldn’t you have been happier with a smitten doormat than with me?”

  Why did she always have to test the limits of my patience? Sometimes I thought about leaving Indu, but divorcing her would ruin my career in the army. When Anju and I divorced, we’d been married less than a year and everything was forgotten and forgiven by the army. I had been a captain then; now I was a brigadier. Things were different. Indu was different. She wouldn’t disappear into the night the way Anju had. Indu would stand up and tell the world that I was at fault, and my chances of promotion would be sealed within the papers of my second divorce.

  I could become the leftenant general of the EME Corps. Age was on my side and my records were impeccable. And I had just secured a prestigious post at the EME Staff College, here at Wellington. I was set to succeed, to command the entire EME Corps, and that to me was more important than finding peace without Indu. She knew that. She knew that her father could and would use his influence when the time came for me to become leftenant general. We both had that one common goal—so we smiled together at parties and came back home to claw at each other. If Indu had been submissive, like so many army officers’ wives were, my life would have been easier. But Indu was not docile and no matter how I tried I couldn’t bend her to my will.

  “You think she is more beautiful than me?” she asked suddenly, and I was off balance again. But I had lived with her for thirteen years now; I knew her just as well as she thought she knew me.

  “I divorced her, remember.” I perpetuated the lie. “What is this about, Indu?” I changed my tone to soothe her, to gain her trust again, as she sat there looking at me with accusing eyes. She drove me to madness sometimes with her ability to push all my right buttons.

  It was during these times that I wished Anju had never divorced me. When things were terrible with Indu, I blamed Anju for my life. If she had stayed, if she had given us another chance, I wouldn’t be married to Indu. Other times when things were good, I was glad that Anju had left, so that I had the chance to build a new and better life with Indu. I felt like a yo-yo, changing positions as my circumstances changed. My relationship with Indu had never been this bad before, but Indu had never met Anju before. Now that she had, some bizarre sort of anger was eating her up. She always had her nails sheathed. Now they were unsheathed and she was clawing at my soul.

  “She seemed very happy with her simple husband and she probably has a simple life,” Indu spoke suddenly, and I sat down next to her. Her tone was not as sharp as before and that meant she was not going to throw something at me.

  “She is not part of our life,” I soothed.

  Indu laughed mirthlessly. “You were married to her once. She will always be part of our life.”

  I ran my hands through my hair impatiently. “Why do you have to bring her up? She has moved on, I have moved on, so why the hell can’t you?”

  Anger was usually not a good approach with Indu when she was in one of her intractable moods as she was now. My anger fed her anger and she became downright hostile. On the other hand, when I went from angry to caring, I got better results.

  “She is in my past, Indu,” I said softly, sitting down next to her and taking her hand in mine. “And we had an arranged marriage. You know how those work? We barely spoke to each other before we were married.”

  “But you did after,” she pointed out, though the fight and taunt had left her voice. “All marriages work somehow. I mean . . . I don’t know anyone who is divorced, except you.”

  I stroked her cheek gently. I abhorred the situation we were in. We were caught up in a game. We wore masks all the time. During parties, during sex, when we were with our children— all the time we wore the damned masks. We had been wearing masks for so long, our real faces were gone. We had expressions for occasions, moods, and points in life.

  “I am sorry t
hat I didn’t meet you a year before I did,” I said, putting on a charming smile, which had lured many a woman to my bed in the past. “If I had, I would have married you and Anju would be—”

  “Why do you call her Anju? Her name is Anjali.”

  I bit my lip. I was walking on eggshells with Indu. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Anjali was Anju to me.

  “I love you, Indu.” I leaned down and slowly let my lips brush against hers. Before I could deepen the kiss she pulled away.

  “No,” she said, pushing me away. “I just saw her and a wife doesn’t like to be seduced when she is thinking of how her husband lay naked with another woman.”

  I didn’t stop her when she walked out of the drawing room. If only Anju hadn’t divorced me, I wouldn’t be in the mess I was in today. If she had only stayed.

  Sweet, beautiful, sexy, intelligent Anju! Now, much of the beauty and sexiness was gone. Yet there was something within her that hadn’t been there before. It was her eyes, I remembered. Her eyes were bright now. As if she had found her purpose and her meaning. When we had been married she’d had stars in her eyes, now she had confidence and maturity.

  When I first saw Anju, I’d wondered if I should run as fast as I could, or stay and deal with it. In Udhampur, from where I had been posted out of (rather, thrown out of, because of a certain delicate matter), Colonel Chaudhary’s gorgeous wife had not been as discreet as I had hoped and certain key people in the command had learnt about our affair. It soon became an open secret and the silent accusations were deafening. The commanding officer of the unit, Brigadier Joshi, called me into his office, handed me my transfer papers, and advised me to get married. He gave me a month off to find a wife and then report for duty in Bhopal, where he hoped I would be a good husband and avoid scandals.

  I was twenty-five, cocky, and ready to jump into bed with anything gorgeous—unmarried or single. I preferred experience and kept away from the innocent-looking ones. The innocent ones were dangerous—some of them were beautiful and beckoning and dangerous because they could trap me into marriage. As soon as I saw Anju, I knew she was the innocent type and I had wanted to run.