A Breath of Fresh Air

by Amulya Malladi

  “I am so happy,” Harjot said, tears streaming down her face.

  Shell-shocked, I looked at Harjot. Her words exploded in my mourning heart. How could she be happy?

  “What?” I barely managed to say.

  “I really am, Anjali. She made Punjab a battlefield.”

  “How can you say that?” I cried out. “She is . . . dead.”

  “And that makes all her mistakes right?”

  I couldn’t believe Harjot could think that Indira Gandhi’s death was a good thing. “She was killed by Sikhs. Is that why you are happy?”

  Harjot was the only friend I had had for months and I was arguing with her over a dead person neither of us knew much about. “Yes, actually it is.”

  “Really?” I asked, ignoring the fact that besides her I had no friends in Bhopal. “How can you be so unpatriotic? She was our leader.”

  “She was your leader, not ours. To the Sikhs she was just another Hindu tyrant,” Harjot said, before she stormed out of the house leaving the door wide open. I slammed the front door shut.

  The little bitch! I decided never to speak with Harjot again. She was a Sikh; what did she know about loving India? All Sikhs wanted their own country, wanting to break away from India anyway—traitors, all of them.

  When Prakash came home, I burst into tears, partly out of anger and partly out of grief. I told him what Harjot had said.

  “Colonel Dhaliwal has been saying things like that for a long time,” Prakash said, and wiped my tears with his fingers in an effort to soothe me. “They are probably throwing a party.”

  “But he is an army officer,” I protested, moving away from Prakash as anger took over again. I wiped away the remaining tears on my face and said sarcastically, “And I thought everyone in the army was green.”

  Prakash made a sound in disgust. “One would think so. But these Sardars are just . . . they killed Indira Gandhi. Heads are going to roll because of this.”

  Prakash was right. The riots began almost instantly. It was a massacre. The Hindus were outraged at the killing of Indira Gandhi and started slaughtering Sikhs wherever they could find them. News of Hindu mobs burning down Sikh homes with the people in them became rampant. News about Hindu mobs running around with swords beheading Sikhs became an everyday affair. The riots were worse in big cities, like Delhi and Bombay, with some of the anger and rage spilling into nearby states like Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh. Bhopal, nestled in the center in Madhya Pradesh, didn’t see much of the bloodshed because the population of Bhopal was largely Hindus and Muslims. But the cloud of despair and uneasiness encompassed the entire country and I mourned along with everyone else the needless death of Indira Gandhi as well as the brutal deaths of the Sikhs. I couldn’t blame an entire religion because of what a few of their members had done.

  However, my broad-mindedness did not include speaking with Harjot. I heard from Mrs. Sen that no one was speaking with Mrs. Dhaliwal either. Apparently Colonel Dhaliwal had thrown a party for other Sikh officers the day after the assassination. I was disgusted.

  I vowed never to speak with Harjot again.

  But I couldn’t keep that promise to myself. And I was thankful that I couldn’t.

  Three weeks after Indira Gandhi died, the riots and the bloodshed hit very close to home. Bad news always travels fast and when I heard from Prakash what had happened, I had to see Harjot and be there for her.

  Colonel Dhaliwal’s relatives were trying to get away from Delhi. They wanted to come to Bhopal, where they could be safe from the riots. They managed to come halfway, but didn’t succeed in reaching Bhopal—at least, not all of them.

  Colonel Dhaliwal’s four brothers, their wives and their five children, had been traveling together by train. All of a sudden, the train had been stopped. All the Sikh men were ordered out and butchered to death by Hindus right in front of the eyes of their wives and children. It was rumored that the Hindus were also raping Sikh women, and everyone in the EME Center agreed the same fate had befallen Colonel Dhaliwal’s female relatives.

  The door to Harjot’s house was open. Everywhere I looked inside the three-bedroom army flat, women were dressed in white for mourning. A young woman held on to a young boy, her body wracked with sobs. The boy stood perplexed in his mother’s embrace, looking around the room with astonished eyes. He didn’t seem to understand why his mother was crying or where his father had gone.

  Harjot was in a white salwar kameez, sitting on a straw mat in the living room surrounded by women in white. Her eyes were red as if she had been crying for a very long time. She didn’t say anything when she saw me, she just walked toward me and hugged me tight.

  I stayed with her for the rest of the day. I helped in any way I could. I cooked and cleaned and made sure everyone ate. There were several people in the house. The newly widowed wives, the five young children, and Harjot’s parents and brother—all seemed incapable of carrying out the everyday tasks. The extent of their sorrow was beyond measure and there were no sympathizers except for a few other Sikh families. I was the only Hindu in the EME Center who had bothered to visit them after finding out what had happened.

  When I got home in the evening Prakash was already there. When I told him where I was he got angry.

  “They celebrated when she died. They deserve this,” he thundered.

  “No one deserves this, Prakash. How can you say that?” I said. “I may have to spend the night there, just to help out.”

  “You are not stepping out of this house,” he ordered.

  And for the first time in my dismal, half-assed marriage I didn’t obey him. Harjot was my friend and I was not going to let Prakash’s prejudices come in the way as mine had.

  “Yes, I am,” I said softly. “And the door had better be open when I get back.”

  “How dare you?”

  “How dare you?” I turned on him. “All her uncles were murdered, and instead of showing sympathy, you want me to turn away. What kind of a person are you?”

  “I love my country.”

  “You just don’t like the people who live in it. You can’t just like the Hindus and not like the Sikhs. They are all Indians,” I yelled. “And don’t ever tell me what I can or cannot do. I don’t stop you from doing anything, so you can show me the same courtesy.”

  I was shaking uncontrollably when I walked out the door. I didn’t even know I had it in me. Prakash seemed to be just as shocked at my behavior as I was. He continued to try and stop me from seeing Harjot but I was stubborn and ignored him and everything he had to say.

  The resentment I had been feeling for him since we married amplified with his behavior regarding Harjot’s family. We fought about it for a few times in the first couple of days, but after that he muttered under his breath and I muttered under mine. For the first time in our marriage I was doing something he had explicitly asked me not to do and he felt impotent at making me bend to his will.

  Instead of living like strangers under the same roof as we had been, the incident made us even more distant from each other as my slowly building apathy for him was replaced with immense dislike.

  Harjot and I became closer as friends in the next week. Army officers and their wives came to Harjot’s house and shook their heads in sympathy and left immediately. No one wanted to have anything to do with the Sikh officer who had celebrated Indira Gandhi’s death.

  “If people high up find out, Anju, there might be trouble,” one army officer’s wife warned me on her way out of Harjot’s house. “This could damage Prakash’s chances of being promoted. They will post him in some hell hole next time because of your behavior.”

  “I am helping a friend out,” I said, and she shrugged.

  “They are Sikh; right now they are the enemy.”

  Mrs. Dhaliwal couldn’t believe that her friends, women she had played cards with and invited to dinner and lunch, were turning their backs on her. The line had been drawn. The army was green all right—just Sikh green and Hindu green.


  “Thank you so much, Anjali,” Mrs. Dhaliwal said when I brought her a cup of tea. She was sitting in the master bedroom with her sister-in-law who hadn’t spoken since the incident.

  “She just won’t talk,” Mrs. Dhaliwal said, wiping her tears. “I can’t make her talk. I don’t know how to.”

  I wouldn’t know how to either. This woman had seen her husband being butchered and burnt alive, while she had hugged her daughter close to her, hoping against hope to protect her against the Hindus that were bent upon revenge. This woman who had probably been raped while her daughter watched could not be blamed for not speaking. What could she say?

  Bela Chaudhary came around the same time to pay her condolences. “I am so sorry for your loss,” she said demurely to Mrs. Dhaliwal. And then she left. They were all putting on a show of sympathy while most felt the way Prakash did: the Sikh officer threw a party when Indira Gandhi died; therefore his relatives deserved to die.

  The whole country was in the same frame of mind, blaming the Sikhs for killing Indira Gandhi and instigating the riots. It was as if Indira Gandhi’s ashes had become a dark cloud and settled on the country.

  “I don’t like that woman,” Mrs. Dhaliwal said as soon as Bela left.

  “She’s nice,” I protested. “She is so beautiful.”

  Mrs. Dhaliwal frowned. “I am going to tell you something I shouldn’t. But you need to know. Do you know why Prakash was posted out of Udhampur?”

  “His tenure was up.”

  “He had been there just one year,” Mrs. Dhaliwal said. Tenure usually lasted two years, but this was the army. Plans were altered unexpectedly. Prakash had told me so.

  Mrs. Dhaliwal, however, told me the truth. “He was having an affair with Bela Chaudhary. That’s why they sent him here. I am surprised Colonel Chaudhary was posted here. It was a . . .” She paused to assess the damage done to me by the revelation that my husband had had an affair with Bela Chaudhary.

  I was staring at her, trying to make sense of her words. The world was moving around me in slow motion as I repeated in my mind what she had just said.

  Affair? My Prakash? Nonsense!

  “Well, everything was hush-hush and no one said anything,” she said, and added, “and he seems to have reformed since he married you. . . . But I have heard some rumors that he and Bela spend time together.”

  I could feel each nerve ending in my body, each singing a different mourning tune. Images flashed through my head.

  Prakash and Bela talking.

  Prakash and Bela drawing away from each other when I had seen them together behind the officer’s mess at a Tambola party—what had they been doing?

  Prakash and Bela meeting by the samosa stand in the Open Air Theater.

  Prakash disappearing for the other half of the movie.

  Prakash and Bela . . . together!

  “The commanding officer of the unit, Brigadier Joshi, asked Prakash to get married so that things would . . .” She patted my hand, understanding the searing pain that enveloped me. “You need to know, so that you can save your marriage. Fight for him and don’t let that slut do this to you.”

  I nodded vaguely and left for home without even speaking to Harjot. When I got there, I had to admit the gods above wanted me to know something. It was an omen, a bad one, but an omen nevertheless.

  Bela Chaudhary was standing with my husband outside my house. They were talking and Bela was laughing softly. It was a scene out of a B-grade Hindi movie. The wife was catching the husband with the other woman. Usually the wife forgave the husband and he came to his senses. Usually the husband realized his folly and came back to his wife because marriage was sacred.

  “Hello,” Bela said with a smile, and I almost choked with feeling. I actually liked this woman. She was screwing my husband behind my back and I liked her!

  “Hello. Would you like to come in for tea?” I asked politely.

  “Yes, please come in,” Prakash said a little too eagerly.

  I made the tea like an automaton, while they sat in the drawing room. I added a plate of fresh ladoos to the tray and set it on the center table.

  “You have been helping Mrs. Dhaliwal during this terrible time,” Bela said, sipping her tea. I wasn’t sure if she was accusing me of being a traitor to Hinduism, or if she was complimenting me for being such a Good Samaritan.

  “Harjot is my friend.”

  “Yes, but you have to see the way things are. I mean . . . Colonel Dhaliwal threw a party. Can you believe it?”

  Well, that cleared my doubts. She was accusing me and I didn’t like her anymore. It had nothing to do with her feelings about Harjot. I didn’t care what her stance on Indian politics was. I was furious with her for messing up my life. My new marriage! She was the reason Prakash had changed. Since she had arrived in Bhopal—how long had it been? two months, three?—Prakash had reverted to his old self.

  “How do you know he threw a party?” I challenged.

  “Everyone knows,” Bela said brightly.

  “How does everyone know?” I demanded. “It is like saying a married man is having an affair with a married woman— everyone knows, but no one specifically knows anything.”

  What I was saying had nothing to do with the party Colonel Dhaliwal had thrown. I knew I was being more blunt then any sensible married woman should be, but I wasn’t in a rational mood. I wanted to vent my anger. I wanted them to know that I knew. The outraged wife would stop the mistress from stealing the husband away. She would not ignore the affair and wait for the husband to be reformed.

  “Anju? What are you talking about?” Prakash muttered. He made a motion with his hand, asking me to shut up.

  “The only way you can find out if a married man is having an affair with a married woman is if you are under the bed, where they commit adultery,” I said, impervious to his eyes and actions. Nice Hindu housewives usually didn’t talk about “bed” and “sex” this openly. “You would have to be at the party to really know that it happened.”

  Bela tittered self-consciously. “You should be a lawyer.”

  I almost said that she should be a whore, but I was raised to be polite to my guests—within reason.

  After she left, Prakash charged at me. “What was all that about? She is a nice lady. Couldn’t you be nice to her? Colonel Chaudhary used to be my CO.”

  I looked my husband in the eye. “I don’t have to be nice to the woman you are having an affair with.”

  It was probably just a reaction to what I had said. I don’t think he truly meant to do what he did, but whatever his reasons, it did not reduce the force of his slap. My body swayed a little with the impact, both physical and emotional.

  We both looked at each other in bewilderment. He couldn’t believe he had slapped me any more than I could.

  I walked into our bedroom and pulled out a suitcase. I started piling my clothes in randomly.

  “Anju, I am sorry.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “It was a mistake. Please . . . don’t go. Please listen to me. Anju, I am so sorry.”

  I dropped the blue silk sari, which my mother had so lovingly given me after my wedding, and collapsed on the floor. I hid my face in my hands and sobbed.

  Prakash sat next to me and awkwardly took me in his arms. “I am so sorry,” he whispered over and over. And I believed him. And that scared me.

  I couldn’t even leave him, I thought desperately. I loved my husband and I wanted to have a happy marriage, not a lackluster one like ours. I wanted babies and I wanted him to love me. And I wanted him to stop seeing Bela Chaudhary.

  He promised he’d do all those things, and he even started talking about my getting off the pill so that we could try and have a baby.

  For a week, things were perfect. And then they went back to normal.

  It was then that I realized I could blame Bela, but she was not the real culprit. Her husband should be the one to accuse her. Prakash was my culprit and I his victim. I married P
rakash with a pure heart and he had abused our marriage, our vows, and me. If it hadn’t been Bela Chaudhary, it would have been someone else. Prakash couldn’t help himself. What did wives of men like him do? I didn’t know. But I could guess. Wives stayed home and made babies and ignored that their husbands were making love to other women.

  Out of the blue, I asked Prakash to book me a train ticket to Hyderabad. I said I wanted to see my mother. He didn’t discourage me. He bought my tickets and arranged for an army Jeep instead of a taxi to take me to the railway station. He even made sure I was settled inside my train compartment.

  I asked him twice if he knew when I was coming back. “You’d better be here. The train gets in late and I don’t want to be stranded at the station,” I warned him.

  He promised to be at the station when I got back. He said he couldn’t wait for me to come back. He said he would miss me. But he hoped I would have a good visit and would enjoy seeing my parents again.

  He even kissed me on the mouth before he left. I guessed he was going to cheat on me again.

  FIFTEEN

  PRAKASH

  If Mamta, my daughter, had not insisted, I wouldn’t have gone to the parade grounds. But Mamta was just eight and didn’t understand the word no very well. My son, Mohit, at the age of five, wasn’t interested in Dussehra and burning effigies. He enjoyed playing with his Lego blocks, making trains and cars with them for Indu and me.

  If Mamta hadn’t been with me, I would have gone and said hello to Anju’s parents. They were good people and had always been nice to me. But I would have said hello for another reason—I wanted to meet Anju’s husband.

  He was wearing a kurta over a pair of dark pants and epitomized the stereotypical professor. But he looked like a nice man—Indu was probably right, Anju did seem happy with her new husband.

  There was another thing I was curious about. The boy in the wheelchair. Who was he? Not her son? A chill ran through me. If her son was in a wheelchair, she couldn’t be that happy, could she? I found some perverse solace in that. The fact that even I realized it was perverted made my self-disgust rise.