by Pia Padukone
He is also looking forward to opening Ammama’s book and reading it solidly for the seventeen-hour flight. But when the engines rumble underneath him, humming and vibrating, he has to fight sleep, pushing it away like an obstinate child. He looks down over the land, with the slanted corrugated roofs of the shanties cresting over the expanse for miles. He sees the division of major roads and highways cleaving the earth like two halves of a sandwich. The space stretches out beneath the plane wing, and he wonders where, in all the snarls of homes, offices, cars, bullocks and carts, Ammama is below them, preparing her evening meal and shuffling about the flat, opening the cupboards to replace the sheets from Karom’s makeshift bed and putting her home back in order. The plane rises into the sky, gaining miles in moments as the staticlike hum of the atmosphere increases. The weight of Ammama’s book is heavy in his lap. He caresses a hand over the raised letters on the cover, opens the book and begins to read.
* * *
The Invisible Husband, Part II
From the moment Janaki was born, she was like a parcel being passed from bough to bough, just like in the age-old nursery rhyme, on the brink before it broke and she came tumbling down. Just as she learned her place in a new family, she’d be whisked off and pulled into all the discomforts of another. Just as she slid softly into her new chores and responsibilities to justify her existence there, she’d be moved and others would demand differently. There were changes in clothes, in bedding, in education. She wore saris and petticoats, skirts and blouses, school uniforms and salwar kameez. She wore her hair in two braids, in buns and shorn short so that she—or her guardians—didn’t have to worry about lice or hairdressing.
As her own parents had passed her off to family members because they couldn’t afford schooling, uniforms and the meager amounts of food she ate as a gangly girl, all elbows and knees, her relatives played a game of keep-away around her as she was tossed this way and that. Her spinster aunts in Friends Colony lived in a sprawling six-bedroom bungalow with outdoor space that overlooked a slum, while her six-year-old self had known the contours of only a cramped one-roomed flat that she’d shared with three cousins and their surly parents. She had no favorites; even those small houses held hidden gifts and surprises. Those same three cousins taught her how to make up round-robin stories and pass the sentences from mouth to mouth, whispering under their breath, the sheets tented over their heads, before their parents would shush them into sleep.
She grew up amid alcoholism that ran rampant in her family, tempers that circled the ceilings, things being smashed against the walls—Johnnie Walker bottles, denture glasses, once, a ship in a bottle that an uncle had gifted her from Ceylon. She grew up feeling walls with trembling fingers in the middle of the night, afraid to step on her uncle as he lay on a mat on the floor snuffing like a baby elephant, finally lubricated by the numerous shots of gin he’d earlier poured down his throat.
Each morning, before she went to college and before she married, she would rise and pick up her bedclothes, which were usually a makeshift pile of sheets in a room or folded into a piece of furniture in the living room that she would have to vacate before the house would begin to buzz with activity. She’d give herself a quick wash, either in the outdoor bucket or a bathroom if the home was luxurious enough to have one. Then she’d collect her few personal belongings: a stubby candle, a stainless-steel tray and a small capsule of vermilion powder that she’d been given on her cousin’s wedding day. She’d light the candle, drip some wax onto the tray, plug the candle into it, dip her finger into the slightest amount of vermilion powder to caress the tiny little grooves that had been carved between her eyebrows as a little girl, face the wall and close her eyes.
She would feel her parents in her body in these early-morning hours. They would rise up into her throat, then her forehead and sit quietly at her temples as she rehashed her prayers each morning. They would sit quietly as she murmured softly, thanking her aunts or uncles or family friends for taking her in, embracing the people who had raised her to this stage. Her parents were there, still there at her temples, and when she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to the cool, dark floor, they disappeared into it, caressing her forehead once before they left.
She never knew her real parents; they were in a small village eight hundred kilometers away. Her father was sickly and his medicines were egregiously expensive. He sold half his land in order to afford them, and her mother took responsibility for the remaining fields, overseeing the tending and the culling and the tilling. During her early years, when she could just remember running barefoot through the paddies before she was sent away, Janaki remembered the sweet loamy scent of irrigation. But there was no place for her with her parents—no place and no money. Her mother had no time to care for her; all their profits from the tenuous earth went straight to the moneylender, whom they owed for years past. Her father was bedridden and could barely speak. Her only memory of him was of a ghostly, shriveled man who lay on a straw bed, his skin stretched taut across his bones like an artist’s canvas.
From time to time, Janaki had a recurring, fleeting thought that she immediately felt flustered and guilty over each time it passed through her mind like smoke. If her father was so sickly and so cloistered and so seemingly useless, why couldn’t he just die so that her mother could send for her and she could help her on the land and Janaki and she could live as part of a family and not constantly on the outskirts? It wasn’t as though her parents were in love or her father contributed to society through poetry or philosophy. He was dead weight.
When she was seventeen, Janaki’s father finally did succumb. Her mother had morphed upon her husband’s death, assuming widow’s garb and becoming an ascetic, praying throughout the day, eating only a few crumbs in the morning. She shrank into herself, both in body and spirit. The sale of the lands garnered enough money for Janaki to go to college, her father’s dying wish. Janaki felt more regret and remorse about not feeling anything than she did about his departure from the Earth. But, she consoled herself, she scarcely knew her father; she scarcely knew her parents. She had been sent home once during the summer of her eleventh year but had been first terrified and then bored in the little hut. Her mother spent the whole day outside, seeing to finances and ensuring that the fields were earning enough profit. She would reenter her home in the evening and search Janaki’s face for a few moments, as though seeing her for the first time, before brusquely turning toward their hodgepodge kitchen and preparing a hasty meal that the three of them would share in silence before bedtime. During these long days, Janaki had been unable to speak to her father, who lay outstretched in a corner of the room, the concave arches of his chest dipping up and down with each laborious breath. When he did speak, it was in a terrifying rasp that sent her cowering to the walls of the room until she gathered her wits and brought him a tumbler of water that she dribbled over his thin parched lips. The people who visited Janaki during her prayers weren’t these specters, the parents she could hardly remember. She conjured up new people, smiling, supportive and present.
What should she pray for? A home, a life, somewhere she belonged, someone to whom she belonged, with whom she would never feel alone? She wasn’t sure. Her prayers were jumbled, assorted. Besides, it wasn’t that she believed that they would eventually achieve something tangible; it was simply some semblance of structure in her life. She could count on them each morning to bring about a sense of order. They weren’t conventional either; the words she uttered were a compilation of the prayers she’d picked up over the years: one for good health and blessings, one for wealth and happiness, even one for fertility, although she didn’t even know it. Her ritual, a subconscious conglomeration of other people’s dreams and desires, of their deepest secrets, wasn’t even completely hers.
When she first became engaged to Arun, he would visit her at the hostel near her college, waiting for her quietly in the sitting room and then scooping her u
p in his arms in a bear hug like she had never experienced in her life. Arun had always been handsome. His trimmed sideburns aligned with the parallels of his earlobes while he kept his thick black curls insouciantly boyish, coiffed, styled and shining with hair oil. He was tall, broad and protective, wearing shirts half a size too small so that she could see the cut of his muscles and feel them move like coiled snakes against her body when he leaned flirtatiously against her on the couch in the sitting room. Looking back, Janaki couldn’t remember how they spent her half-hour study break; they certainly didn’t have philosophical conversations or engaging debates. Once, she had made the mistake of asking him what he thought of ahimsa; did he think it could succeed? He’d looked at her with such searing in his eyes and his lip curled in such loathing that she’d hurriedly changed the subject to his motorcycle. But even though their union had originally been arranged by her aunts and his father, their courtship entered a second level of tempest, fire and longing that was coaxed along by her jealous hostel mates whenever Arun visited. He was enamored with her, this smart, self-sufficient woman who had endured so much being bounced among family. And he charmed everyone around her. When her hostel mates deliberately swung by the sitting room to catch a glimpse of the reticent Janaki sitting with her attractive male caller, Arun always called out to them.
“Come, join us. Are you one of Janaki’s classmates?” He would beckon to other girls to sit across from them but continue to hold Janaki’s hand or place his hand on her knee, a gesture that made the other girls avoid looking either Arun or Janaki in the eye, squirming as they made simple conversation. Later the girls would giggle together in Janaki’s room—how handsome Arun was, how genuine, how possessive of his fiancée.
Janaki’s own stomach would curl with anticipation when the girl on front-desk duty announced that she had a visitor. She’d brush her hair excitedly until it would crackle with electricity and then descend down the stairs elegantly, just as her spinster aunts had instructed her on the afternoon they had introduced her to him at their bungalow.
“Janaki,” they’d said. “You’re under no obligation, but a young man in our community wants to meet you. He and his father have heard of your talents at the university.”
She had been the one to open the door at the bungalow and had stepped aside as both he and his father entered, smiling broadly at her from the soles of her feet to the parting in her hair.
“Please come,” she said. “It’s much cooler in the parlor.” And the two men followed her inside, where her aunts sat expectantly on their adjoining sofas as though they were the ones waiting to be appraised.
At once Arun offered Janaki a package from the bag that he clutched between his fingers. “For you,” he said, almost shyly. It was a rectangular package wrapped in brown paper, heavy and tied with twine. “Open it.” Janaki looked at both her aunts and they nodded before she slipped her fingers underneath the string. Inside was a brand-new book. The gold lettering was intact; the corners hadn’t curled from being banged about in a secondhand shop. She turned the book over so that the title was visible.
“Great Expectations,” she breathed. “Have you read it?”
“No,” Arun said, leaning in conspiratorially toward her. “But I thought it was a good title.” The conversation carried on with her aunts leading most of it with Arun’s father, but Janaki held the book in her lap, turning it over and over. This would immediately become her most prized possession, a new book that was hers alone. There would be no sharing or reselling at the end of the semester. The gift immediately endeared Arun to her. If she had to get married—and she did, for she had no one else in the world to care for her—this man who seemed to understand her from the start wasn’t a bad option. From time to time for the rest of that afternoon, she looked up from the book in her lap to find him staring at her, and instead of being embarrassed at being caught, he would smile at her knowingly.
Even on their wedding day, Arun remained the flirt, winking at her brazenly from her approach to the mandap, making her giggle and play her appropriate role as a blushing bride. He poked her foot when the priest wasn’t watching and whispered a dirty joke into her ear when the family closed their eyes for prayers. But for Janaki this was going too far.
“Shh,” she hissed. “Please pay attention. It’s important.” Arun’s eyes lit up in a brief fiery rage, but he sat back and watched her quietly as she closed her eyes with the group who sat around the fire. She peeked out from under the heavy gloss of her eyelashes adorned with kajal and met his eyes. His chin was set hard and the round sphere of his temporomandibular joint flexed subtly under his perfectly parallel sideburns, two latent rattlesnakes poised to strike. Just after the ceremony, when they waited together silently in the antechamber to enjoy a few moments of solitude before joining their wedding reception, Arun came toward her, his eyes gleaming and his turban askew. Janaki steadied herself for a few moments of long-awaited shared passion in the crowded back room. But Arun gripped her arm with his stubby fingers, the nails peeled down to the skin, a habit he wouldn’t break throughout their life together, leaving little crescents of keratin all over the house. The force pinched her, bringing tears to her eyes and causing her makeup to smudge.
“Did you pay your respects to my mother today?”
“I... She was there. In the photo on the mandap. We acknowledged her in the first mantra. How I wish—”
“She wasn’t there. She’s dead, Janaki. She’s been dead for ten years. And no amount of prayer and no magical mantra will bring her back. Where were your parents today?”
Silence.
“Exactly. Your father withered away and now all your mother can do when she’s summoned to attend her only daughter’s wedding is turn her back on the whole affair and pray. This is what prayer does to people, Janaki. Makes them insane. Makes them think that adorning a photograph with a garland of flowers and applying some red powder to the glass will honor their soul. Makes them think that by lighting a few candles, it will bless a ceremony from afar. This isn’t religion. This is obsession. And it’s the worst kind.”
At first, Janaki’s heart had leaped. Arun understood: religion was personal and how you made it personal was what counted. But as time went on, Janaki learned that Arun wanted no part of religion, or ritual, for that matter, no matter what shape it took or how he could mold it. Religion was left at the front door of their flat. And both religion and Arun would wait one another out until one of them gave in.
At dawn a few weeks later in their new but cramped little apartment in East Delhi, her husband had stumbled back into the house, his boots booming in the hallway. Janaki heard him but wouldn’t break her concentration as she prayed, keeping one ear perked only to ensure that her daughter, a toddler at the time, continued sleeping in the adjacent room. Arun growled once or twice as he tripped over an umbrella stand, then knocked a small basil plant to the ground. He was pouring himself a tumbler of water; she could even hear as it chugged down his gravelly throat. He was in the hallway as he clicked on the light and peered at himself in the mirror, taking in his bloodshot eyes and unkempt hair. Then he was next to her, and she could feel him though her eyes were closed as he slid down to the floor, his knee pressing against hers as the stench of cheap liquor pulsed from his every pore. Janaki hesitated in her breath but continued her words quietly. This is all I have, she argued fiercely to herself underneath the Sanskrit words. This is all that’s mine. Even my daughter, whom I love without condition, is half his. This is all that keeps me going through each day.
It didn’t seem as though Arun was going to interrupt her. He sat quietly, even, breathing hard and rocking a bit to the rhythm of her voice. It almost appeared as though he were in a trance, that he’d been lulled to sleep sitting up. It would have been insensitive not to acknowledge him sitting there next to her, so she moved to swipe some vermilion on the seam of where his hairline met his forehead—even befo
re she blessed herself. All at once he leaped to his feet, roaring and knocking at her arm, kicking at her tiny makeshift shrine and the candle she’d lit, grinding it into the floor. He upset the small silver capsule of red powder, and it sprayed dramatically like drops of blood across the stone floor.
“I detest religion. You know this. Why would you bring it into my house?” He towered over her, leaning over slightly with the weight of his head, heavy with an approaching hangover. Janaki didn’t answer him; she couldn’t. She was tightly bound within herself, her arms wrapped around her knees and her head tucked between them. She shook her head back and forth. She could hear her daughter fussing in the next room and a single peal of crying.
“Maaamaaaa!”
“Don’t do this again, Janaki. You’re testing me.” Janaki peered out from the crevices of her arms and met his eyes. She nodded. “Go see to the girl.” Arun stalked off to the bathroom, where she heard the bucket being filled before she crept into the baby’s room. Maya’s chubby face was tearstained and she held her fat arms toward Janaki. Janaki scooped her up and pressed her into her chest.
“Bad dream, little one? What happened?”
Maya snuffled her face into Janaki’s neck as she walked them about the small apartment together. When they passed the bathroom door, Janaki could hear Arun sloughing dirt off his skin, mumbling to himself as he worked.