“He is wonderful with him and me. He . . . is so solid, I can really lean on him.”
My mother nodded nervously. “He looks the kind. I . . . we came here because . . .”
“Because?” I prodded when the silence stretched.
Mummy smiled sadly, her wrinkled skin twirled around her face. “Daddy had a heart attack three months ago.”
The sieve I was holding dropped and the flour rose like a small white cloud. How many people were going to get sick around me? I thought desperately.
I wheezed suddenly and it began. I tried to breathe but couldn’t, and my mother’s eyes widened in shock. Even before she finished calling Sandeep’s name, he was in the kitchen with my inhaler.
Komal cooked that night while I lay in bed resting. Mummy sat beside me and told me what had happened to Daddy. It was his first attack and he would do better if he just watched what he ate, she said.
“Mummy, this is really bad news,” I said.
“I know.” She patted my hand. “And you’ve been through enough bad news, haven’t you? I keep thinking how it must have been for you in Bhopal, lying in that hospital before we got there.” Her voice was filled with sorrow. “I want you to know this because I know I haven’t told you how I really feel. I believed you when you said Prakash . . . when you told us about him. I believed you. Your daddy still doesn’t, but I believed you.”
“Why didn’t you help me then?”
My mother used the edge of her cotton sari to wipe her tears. “You were talking about divorce.”
“And?”
“And?”
“Yes,” I said. “He treated me very badly and he married me to avoid scandal and he was sleeping with another woman. A married woman. What did you want me to do? Be his wife despite all that?”
“Yes,” she said unflinchingly. “You were his wife and marriage is forever. It is a relationship that is meant to be for seven lives and you turned your back on it.”
“You still think I should’ve stayed with him.”
She shrugged. “I see you with Sandeep and I am happy for you. Even with all your problems, you look happy with him. One heart attack and you should see how we are falling apart. I am scared he’ll die and he’s scared he’ll die and . . . we aren’t taking care of each other like we’re supposed to.”
“You’ll be fine, Daddy will be fine,” I said, and took a deep breath, enjoying the feel of oxygen. Since the gas tragedy one of my biggest fears was losing my breath, losing the ability to breathe. And after asthma attacks, I savored the feeling of drinking in fresh air as if it were for the first time.
“No,” she whimpered. “He will die and what will I do then? Your brother is married to that cunning bitch. She won’t take care of me.”
I don’t know what possessed me to say it, but I did. “I will take care of you.”
“I can’t stay in a daughter’s house. What will people say?” she said, as if I had suggested that she commit murder. It was the rule: a daughter’s marital house was off limits to her parents. A daughter never truly belonged to her parents; she belonged to her in-laws and her husband.
I grinned. “I got a divorce and fell in love and got married again. You really think I care about what people will say? You can stay with whomever you want and you can stay with me. But . . . Daddy looks healthy and we won’t have to talk about this for a long time.”
My mother was scared and I realized that her fears and mine were miles apart. I had come a long way from being just her daughter to the woman I was. If I hadn’t made the choices I’d made, I would be like her, afraid to lose the only anchor in my life. I was terrified of losing Sandeep in some freak accident, but I was not worried about my survival if he passed away. I was not looking for someone to take care of me if something happened to Sandeep. I could take care of myself. Unlike my mother I wouldn’t be searching for a place to live, trying to figure out who would be the best candidate to live with. Mummy knew after Daddy died she couldn’t stay with me because she was worried what people would think; her only alternative was living with my brother.
Mummy never liked my brother’s wife. Sanjay and I were estranged and he hadn’t spoken to me since my divorce. It was amazing how my family had abandoned me, while strangers had opened their arms to me. I had always thought that the relationships we make with strangers are the hardest and the relationships we have with family the easiest. For me the opposite had been true. The family I was born into was not really my family anymore, while the family I made for myself out of strangers was mine.
“Sanjay still is just the way he was,” Mummy went on. “He comes home with that woman and—”
“You arranged their marriage, Mummy.”
“I know.” She scowled. “But she was different then. She put on an act so that we would say yes. Once she got married, her true colors came out. She won’t even let me see my grandchildren. Whenever we want to visit them in Mysore, she says that they are going out to visit her parents in Chennai.”
The irony of that didn’t escape me. I invited my parents all the time, and they never came. They were drawn to my brother’s family even though he didn’t want them. The son was the heir, the one who was supposed to take care of the old parents, while the daughter was someone else’s property unloaded at the first available opportunity on a husband and in-laws.
“She is just terrible. But the children—” She smiled. “—the older one . . . just so naughty and the younger one . . .”
She went on, telling me about her other grandchildren. The healthy ones.
Sandeep was adamant about not letting me do any housework that day. He went into panic mode whenever I had an asthma attack. I had tried several medications to cure my disease. But my asthma was related to the methyl isocyanate gas from the Bhopal gas tragedy—it was just one of those diseases that had to be “managed” and couldn’t be cured. I probably would have dwelled in self-pity, but for Amar. The gas tragedy had hit him much harder than it had hit me, though he hadn’t even been a thought the night I breathed the poisonous air.
“Maybe we should try the fish medicine again,” Sandeep suggested. “It has been a few years since the first treatment, maybe . . . now it will work.”
I cringed at the idea. The fish medicine was not pleasant. You stood in line for hours and someone dropped a live murrel fish stuffed with herbs and water inside your mouth, which you had to swallow. The treatment lasted three years, which meant once every year for three years I would have to go through the same ritual again. It was not a myth that people got cured. I knew several people who had recovered from asthma and bronchitis after the three-year treatment. It just hadn’t worked for me.
“I don’t know, it is a three-year commitment and I don’t want to commit to anything right now with Amar not feeling all that well.”
Sandeep raised his eyebrows. “But you want to choke all the time?”
“I am not choking all the time,” I protested. “I am fine all the time. I am just . . . vulnerable—”
“—all the time,” Sandeep finished. “You scare the hell out of me. I can’t believe this. You haven’t had an attack for almost a year and now . . . all of a sudden.”
I shifted on the bed and got close to him. “Mummy told me Daddy had a heart attack.”
Sandeep nodded. “He mentioned it to me. Asked me to take good care of you.”
“They came here. That was a big step for them.” Sandeep muttered something unintelligible and I grinned. He was in a bad mood. It didn’t happen often, so it was a novelty of sorts.
“I am fine. I can breathe. Look.” I took two deep breaths to prove my point.
Sandeep was about to say something in response when Amar called out to me. He sounded distressed and we both rushed to him without further thought about my asthma attack. Compared to my son’s illness, mine was the common cold.
Amar’s chest was hurting and we gave him his medication to ease his pain. By the time he fell asleep that night, both Sande
ep and I had forgotten about my asthma attack.
The rest of my parents’ visit was uneventful—until the day before last.
In the parade grounds nearby there was always a big celebration for Dussehra, something Amar looked forward to every year.
We walked to the parade grounds, and Sandeep pushed Amar’s wheelchair, my father walking with them, talking to Amar about the Himalayas and how much taller they were compared to the hills surrounding Ooty. Mummy, Komal, and I were walking ahead of Sandeep and Amar.
“I never thought this would be your life,” Mummy said, as she turned to glance at Amar.
“Neither did I,” I agreed.
“I never thought . . .”
I raised my hand to stop her. “I am happy.”
“No, you are not happy,” she mourned. “If only my children were happy. I must’ve done something wrong in some previous life. Otherwise why would both my children be so unhappy?”
Komal snickered and we both looked at each other with identical expressions of weariness. Mothers, I presumed, were the same all over the world.
“My mother used to always say that. She said that until she died,” Komal whispered to me. “She said it to Sandeep, too.”
We walked silently for a while and then Komal leaned over again. “And we were happy when she was alive. Now . . . things are different.”
“Sandeep is happy,” I said tightly.
Komal looked at Sandeep and Amar and frowned.
We found a nice spot to watch the effigy of Ravana burn with the flames from arrows shot by young men standing below. Torn from the pages of the great epic Ramayana, it was the age-old story of good versus evil. It was on the day of Dussehra that Lord Rama, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, had killed the demon Ravana.
Amar clapped when the first arrow hit Ravana and started a small fire. A few more arrows struck the effigy tied to a wooden pole and the flames rose high. Cheers went through the crowds and Amar was jubilant.
The parade ground was noisy and crowded. People were bumping into each other and the noise was deafening, but I heard my mother’s squeak distinctly.
Instantly I worried that something had happened to my father and I looked to him. But he seemed perfectly all right talking to Amar and pointing at the burning effigy.
“I saw him,” she said wildly, looking at me with big eyes. “He is here.”
I tried to decipher what she was saying by following her line of vision and saw a man holding the hand of a young girl, looking straight at us.
Sandeep gave me a questioning look and I shook my head in an effort to tell him everything was fine. I pretended nothing was wrong and Sandeep went back to looking at Amar’s happy face. While I tried to make out what my ex-husband’s daughter—healthy daughter—looked like.
FOURTEEN
ANJALI
I always wanted to have children.
I wanted to have a child as soon as I got married the first time. Prakash didn’t, so I went on the pill. That always made me uneasy, his nonurgency next to my urgency to conceive.
Why didn’t he want children? Children meant permanency, a rite of passage into adulthood. I would be someone’s mother forever and a mother was always an adult.
After the abysmal first summer of my marriage, I waited impatiently for Harjot to come back from college for the Dussehra holidays. We had kept in touch with letters for the past months and I missed her. She was the only real friend I had in Bhopal, and since things with Prakash had reverted back to how they used to be I missed her even more. I needed a shoulder to cry on, to help me sort this mess that was my marriage. I couldn’t discuss my problems with the other wives who would gossip about them. Mrs. Bela Chaudhary initially had seemed like someone who could be my friend, but she was Prakash’s friend and I was just his wife. I understood that they were close—after all, Prakash had served under her husband. Before we were married, he used to go to their house for homemade dinners. She had fed my husband when I wasn’t there and I couldn’t hold that against her.
I often saw them together. It all seemed like a coincidence, for the first few weeks at least. They would be talking at the Saturday evening Tambola party, and I would see them together at the Open Air Theater samosa stand. Prakash would go to get samosas during the movie’s interval, and he’d leave the samosas with me and disappear for the rest of the movie.
I later found out that gossip amongst the wives had reached fever pitch while I was still naïve enough not to put two and two together. I couldn’t imagine Prakash having anything to do with another woman. Middle-class men didn’t have extramarital affairs.
When I went to play cards with Mrs. Dhaliwal and some of the other wives one day, Bela Chaudhary was there. Bela was in her early thirties, but she didn’t look her age; she looked like she was as young as I was. I liked her. I couldn’t help it. She was the kind of woman I wanted to grow up to be— sophisticated, elegant, and above all a woman who held her head high.
The other wives seemed nervous seeing us together in such close proximity. They probably didn’t realize that I was stupid enough to like the woman my husband was having an affair with. Worse, they didn’t realize that I didn’t know he was having an extramarital affair.
She wasn’t very good at rummy, while I had learnt the art of playing cards in the past few months. I helped her learn the finer points of the game. I taught her how to read, from the cards thrown down by other players, what sets the other players were making and how it would affect her game. I taught her what I knew and hoped that this would be the beginning of a new friendship.
As it usually was, the topic of discussion besides the card game at hand was movies.
“Did you see the new Amitabh Bachchan movie?” Mrs. Mehrotra asked, and silence fell.
“Silsila,” I said with a deep sigh. “It was wonderful.”
Everyone shuffled their cards around, sipped their soft drinks, and tittered uncomfortably.
“What?” I asked, perturbed.
“Nothing, dear,” Mrs. Dhaliwal said, as she dropped a card on the table. “It was a nice movie.”
“I mean seeing adultery in a Hindi film,” I continued. “I don’t know how they could make the movie. It took a lot of courage to discuss that subject.”
“I agree,” Bela said.
It was a controversial movie. At that time it was rumored that Amitabh Bachchan was having an affair with the reigning actress, Rekha. In the movie he was married to his real-life wife, Jaya Bhaduri, and having an affair with Rekha’s character. No one had dared to make a movie about adultery quite so blatantly before. The Hindi cinema still portrayed women as husband-worshipping wives and puritans. But in Silsila, the people were real, the circumstances were real, and the fact that the actors in the movie were facing a similar problem in real life added to its intensity.
I was playing the real-life wife in my small world, while Bela was playing Rekha. She knew that; all the women sitting around the card table knew that; I didn’t. So I talked about the movie and complained about the fact that the hero stayed with his wife when he was really in love with the other woman.
“So you think a man shouldn’t stick to his marriage if he is in love with another woman?” Mrs. Sen asked.
“Absolutely,” I said with conviction. “Marriage is sacred, of course, but if he is cheating on his wife, I think it would be better if he left her and married the woman he is really in love with.”
I didn’t know then that I actually meant what I said. I wasn’t just stringing words together for effect; I truly believed in the sanctity of marriage and I did not want a husband who cheated on me.
Harjot came back to Bhopal for the holidays and didn’t leave for a long time.
It was a mild October afternoon and, since it was the last day of the month, the kids had a half-day at school. Harjot was at my house telling me about the latest news from her college.
“But things are getting so difficult for us,” she complained.
Harj
ot was a Sikh and after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered army troops to attack the Golden Temple in July, the Hindu-Sikh rift had expanded.
“But here, we are all the same,” I consoled her.
In the army all religions were accepted. All holy days from Christmas to Diwali to Id to Guru Nanak Jayanti were celebrated. From what I had seen, no one noticed if you were Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or Christian. I had been shocked at how open-minded everyone was. In Hyderabad it was different. Not only did it matter what religion you belonged to, your caste was just as important. Being a Brahmin was better than being a Reddy and people from the same caste stuck together. I didn’t have too many friends who were from the backward class. We mingled with our own people, but in the army I didn’t even know what caste anyone belonged to.
Harjot and I were listening to Hindi songs on the radio, humming along with the singers and pointing out some of the bizarre lyrics, when we heard the bad news. One of our favorite songs from an old black-and-white movie was playing when a harsh voice cut off the song with a special announcement. Harjot and I groaned at the interruption.
When the harsh voice continued with the special news bulletin, Harjot and I knew she wasn’t going back to college for a while.
We switched on the television immediately. There was only one channel and we devoured the news, staring at the television screen, afraid that if we looked away we would miss something. The downcast news anchor gave the nation the devastating news. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was dead.
She had been assassinated by her Sikh guards. The guards she had been asked to fire by her colleagues in the Congress-I party just a few days prior. She had refused to fire the guards and had also refused to wear a bulletproof vest. She had said she trusted her guards and wouldn’t insult their loyalty.
Harjot put her hand against her mouth in shock.
Tears pricked my eyes. This woman had been a constant in our lives and now she was gone. The great woman was no more. I kept waiting to hear more, for the news anchor to come back and tell us that it had all been a mistake and that Indira Gandhi was alive. I couldn’t imagine the Independence Day parade without her, I couldn’t imagine watching the news without her. She was a politician, no one I knew personally, yet she belonged to me as she did to everyone else I knew who was a Congress-I supporter.
A Breath of Fresh Air Page 10