by Pia Padukone
After this, Janaki began her ritual in her mind, from putting a one-rupee coin into the stainless-steel plate, to settling her sari around her so she could sit comfortably. If Arun was home that morning, he lay unknowingly in the bed, snoring and farting like a buffalo in heat. If Arun was still out with his buddies, Janaki would take a risk and say her prayers out loud, but not daring to get out of bed or light candles lest he walk in the door as he had that morning when he’d ground her capsule of vermilion into a flat silver disk with the heel of his boot. And when he did come home and she heard his key catch in the lock, she closed her mouth, turned over to her side, shut her eyes and finished her prayers deep within herself, imagining a chakra, a wheel spinning in the pit of her stomach that didn’t slow until she finished her last words. Arun never caught on and it was only a few weeks after his final departure, when Janaki was quite sure he would never return, that she dug out the stainless-steel plate she’d hidden deep in her wardrobe and reestablished her ritual each morning.
Arun hadn’t always been a terror. But he’d always been a physical man, not an intellectual one.
At times, she would remember those moments when Arun had been gentle, when he’d been kind. She remembered his gentle proffering of the first book she’d ever owned, the time he had taken her to buy her a pair of glasses out of his own pocket money. She remembered how he would press her to him lovingly when he visited her college dormitory. She hadn’t been able to believe that once they were betrothed, she would have a permanent place in life where she would finally belong. She wasn’t sure she could stay in one place forever. She certainly hadn’t before.
But in the end, it was Arun who turned out not to know how to stay put. Janaki could remember the day itself intimately. She remembered the sari she was wearing—deep purple with lavender flowers. She could remember the weather—bright and brisk without a cloud in the sky. She could remember what she’d prepared that morning for breakfast—watermelon dhodak, made from the shaved white portions of the rind, which would have been otherwise thrown out. The day had begun like any other: Janaki went through her ritual in her mind, tugged on her daughter’s plait to rouse her for school, prepared tea and breakfast, and just before she fried the batter into round brown disks, she shook her daughter again because she was going to be late. Arun’s shift normally lasted from 5:00 p.m. until midnight, but he was never home then. He usually cavorted with his colleagues or his friends from the cricket club until the early hours of the morning, when he would return to the house and sleep it off until he had to report for work. So it didn’t surprise Janaki when he didn’t show that morning or even that afternoon. He must have gone straight back to work, she thought. When he didn’t show again shortly after midnight, she became concerned and called the head office. A man informed her that Arun had in fact reported for work and was out investigating an unanswered alarm somewhere in the vicinity. She hung up the phone and crept back to bed. When Maya inquired about him, Janaki said that he’d taken on another shift and would likely be late again tonight. And that happened again and again before Maya herself caught on and stopped asking where her father was.
For some time, Janaki readied herself as though Arun would return midmorning, gruff from a long night of patrolling an empty office building to slink home with his uniform crumpled and worn. She prepared his favorite foods: a cooling drink made of yogurt and fresh mango, tapioca with green chilies and lentil seeds, hard, flat pancakes of jackfruit and jaggery. She pressed his extra uniforms and his Punjabi suits for weddings they were to attend together, weddings that she would eventually attend with only Maya in tow. She cleaned the grooves of his comb, the bristles of his shaving brush, polished the extra motorcycle helmet he kept in the hall closet.
She would startle suddenly as she imagined his boots banging in the entryway, him pushing one off with the toe of the other so they lay askew in the hallway, where she had learned to push them to the side so as not to trip on her way to the kitchen. She would start from her silent prayers, certain that he had somehow crept into the bedroom unbeknownst to her and was watching her mouth form her prayers with curled nostrils and an angry little smile on his face that would erupt without notice. Sometimes while she was cutting vegetables in the kitchen, she would put her knife down and peer over her right shoulder in the event that he was standing there watching her. She couldn’t shrug off the feeling that he hadn’t simply disappeared. But after two weeks’ time, it was clear that he had.
For some time after that, she toyed with the idea of collecting all of Arun’s belongings and handing them off to the trash man, but she knew how furious he would be if he ever came back. So she left them there: his clothes on his side of the closet, the sweaters and shirts folded carefully on the shelves, his bottle of aftershave, and a comb with three of the teeth missing and thick black curls ensnared within the remaining ones. But his absence continued to mock her; each time she opened the wardrobe, she’d receive a whiff of his cologne or her hand would begin to burn after she accidentally grazed one of his dress shirts or the Nehru jacket he’d worn on their wedding day. She nostalgically cracked open the wedding album that had been gifted to them by her father-in-law. In it, she noticed the squared jaw of her husband and the pose he adopted in all his photos: one hand cradled in the other, one of them poised to peel the nails off a finger before he surreptitiously dropped the opaque arcs onto the ground. She began to think of Arun each time she placed a rupee into the stainless-steel dish. It was the closest she’d ever come to praying for him. His face entered her mind at this last gesture of her ritual, cool and steely, chiseled and taut, the round of his jawbone working constantly, continuously, wherever he was.
She recalled the time when their wedding ceremony was over and they were cemented together in the antechamber. She’d stood with him as he gripped her forearm like a vise as she scrolled a mental list of their similarities and differences through her mind. And then he had strode out onto the dais to address the wedding guests with her in tow.
“Dear friends and family, can I have your attention, please?” Arun’s stature and stentorian voice quickly cast a great net of silence over the room. “Thank you all for joining me and my family on my wedding day. This is a special day because I have married a very special woman.” There was a polite smattering of applause here while Arun took in another breath. “She is a lovely woman, both in heart and in looks. She is kind and supportive and she’s a brain. Did you all know that she stood first at her college?” There was another pause for golf claps and the buzz of conversation began again before Arun silenced it with his voice. “I have married a very smart woman, who I need by my side. I will not let her go, you can be sure of that. You can be sure that I will take care of her and she needn’t lift a finger except to feed the many children we will have together.” At this there was uncomfortable laughter and the tittering of the children who were sitting together in a corner. “Thank you all again. We appreciate your blessings.” He’d stepped down from the dais and held his hand out to Janaki, who stepped down after him and joined the group as they moved into the next room for the reception.
After some time, when the dust had settled around Arun’s side of the bed, Janaki still fleetingly thought of him from time to time. When there were elections, she wondered if he’d voted, if he’d been partially responsible for the goon they now had in office. When there were riots, she wondered if he’d been in the thick of the action, pulling hair and beating people off others, holding people back while he took their punches.
Once Arun left, Janaki let his family think that she had been provided for, that he’d left a fund in their names that would care for them both and potentially even added to it surreptitiously from time to time. But truly, all Janaki had was her massive collection of one-rupee coins that she’d ferreted away during all those morning rituals, a rapidly dwindling bank account that Arun had abandoned but certainly didn’t add to, a pile of wedding jewelry that
her in-laws made very clear that they didn’t want leaving the family under any circumstances and the husband that would begin to appear in the early-morning hours after a long night’s work.
This version of her husband was slighter and softer, and he wasn’t exactly filled in completely. But not in terms of muscle: he appeared in muted, sedate black and white tones while the rest of the world was in color. He was almost ghostlike, drifting about the apartment without making the same sounds that her real husband had made, whether in the bathroom, the kitchen or even the bedroom. He looked exactly like Arun, down to the symmetrical length of his sideburns and the thick curls on his head. He was soft to the touch when she grazed against him in the bed and he never raised his voice. He stepped into the kitchen and silently began to chop the mound of onions that teetered on the countertop for that evening’s dinner. He met the kabadi wala at the door, having rounded up all the old pieces of scrap metal and recyclables that they no longer wanted. He was part husband, part housemaid. It was the best arrangement Janaki could ever have imagined.
Except that was the problem: he didn’t quite seem to be real. At least, she thought she could see him, that ghostly lingering in the early-morning hours when the spiritlike husband would actually rise a few minutes before she did in order to light her candles himself so that all Janaki had to do was place herself in front of the altar and pray. But she tested herself one afternoon as she sat in the living room darning socks and her husband sat opposite her shelling peas. Maya came in, holding A Tale of Two Cities.
“Mama, I don’t understand this,” she said, twirling her pencil between her fingers. “I have to write an essay and I just don’t understand the symbolism.”
“Why don’t you ask your father to help you?” Janaki asked. “He loves Dickens.” She looked at her shrunken husband then diligently scooping out the contents of each pea pod into a metal bowl. Maya looked at her mother and to the chair opposite and then back to her mother.
“What? Why? Has he come back?” The look in Maya’s eyes was unsure; on the one hand, her eyes sparkled with the anticipation, but her mouth remained tight-lipped as though she wasn’t sure that was the best thing for the two of them. Janaki looked from her daughter to her husband and back again. Maya followed her gaze and settled a quizzical look on her mother. Janaki shook her spinning head as she regarded both a suspicious Maya as well as her husband sitting quietly in his chair.
“No. He hasn’t returned,” Janaki said. “I’ll take a look at your essay as soon as I’m finished with these socks. And the peas.” That was the first and only sign Janaki needed to realize that her new husband was a figment of her imagination, but somehow his presence made her life a little easier.
It was easier to believe that he existed. Not the form of him that had actually existed, because that version was better left in the past, but a softer, quieter, more humble version who appreciated his wife as she was and made every effort to make her life easier. She liked this version and encouraged it each day. One day she had come home from the market to find that he had prepared a whole meal by himself so that all she had to do was set the table and call her daughter to dinner. She was so thrilled that she sat down in the living room and helped herself to one of Maya’s film magazines, sitting indulgently in a chair flipping the pages until the darkening of the living room jolted her upright to scurry into the kitchen to make an actual dinner.
She didn’t realize how much of a problem this was becoming until she caught herself responding to a wedding as a threesome: herself, Maya and this undetectable man. “This has to stop,” she told herself in the mirror that evening as her husband stood behind her massaging her tense shoulders. “It’s unhealthy. It’s not right.” She shook him off her and went to bed.
But in the morning it went right back to the way it was. Maya had a track meet that morning and had already left by the time she awoke to find a teapot on the bedside table covered with a cozy, tendrils of steam still escaping from the spout. There was a plate of her favorite biscuits covered with a napkin. She sat up in bed and poured herself some tea, leaning back against the pillows. After her first cup, she padded to the kitchen. The table was set with fresh flowers and on her plate there was a note in her husband’s handwriting: “Had to run out. Check the warming box; breakfast is served!” Janaki could scarcely believe her eyes. There was a fresh omelet in a grill pan and two pieces of brown bread that had been griddled in ghee. Her favorite. She inhaled the food and sat back, tracing her finger around her teacup over and over.
When Arun returned from his errands at the market, Janaki and he had the day to themselves. They went for a long walk around the compound and then sat luxuriously on the terrace warmed by the sun, where Janaki allowed her husband to massage the tense spot in the back of her neck caused by constant hunching over the stove. As the door banged open and Maya threw her cleats onto the ground in the hallway, Janaki called out to her.
“We’re in here.”
Maya came charging onto the terrace, looking tired but elated.
“Hi, Ma,” she said, sinking down to the ground with a slight groan. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Your father and I,” Janaki said. “We’ve been discussing how lonely the house will be when you leave for college next year.”
Maya looked at Janaki carefully, as if trying to read her face.
“Ma,” Maya said slowly, as if talking to a child, “Papa hasn’t been here for years. Are you telling me that you’re sitting here talking to him?”
“Maya, don’t be impertinent. Of course he’s here. He’s just—” Janaki looked to the chair where not moments before Arun had been folding freshly dried sheets. “Well, he was there.”
Maya looked worried. She knelt next to Janaki and took her small hand in her own. “Ma, Papa is gone. He hasn’t returned. I think you’re seeing things. Are you not feeling well?”
Janaki shook her head. “I don’t understand it. I keep seeing him everywhere. He must be here, Maya. He made me breakfast this morning. He left tea at my bedside.”
“That was me, Ma,” Maya said sadly. “I woke up early for my race. You’d said you’d make me breakfast, but when I looked in on you, you looked so peaceful that I decided to do something nice for you instead. So I left the teapot and the biscuits and made you the omelet. Papa’s gone. He’s not coming back.”
Janaki could feel her eyes fill with tears, but in all the years she had spent alone with her daughter, she’d never allowed herself to cry in front of her. She blinked back the water and swallowed hard, willing herself to look brave. Maya didn’t let go of her hand the whole time. After what seemed like an hour, Maya spoke.
“Ma, I know things haven’t been easy for you. Not ever. Not growing up. Not during your marriage; I know life with Papa certainly wasn’t easy. And that it hasn’t been easy since he left. But we’re a team, Ma. We’re going to figure this out together. We’re going to make it so that we can not only survive but we’re going to be happy. I don’t know who you’ve been seeing in the house or why you’ve been conjuring Papa up, but I sense it’s because you’ve been feeling so alone. And you’re not. You have me. Even if I go away to college, or even if I am not here with you always, we’ll make it work. I’ll get a job during school and help with the bills. You’ll come visit or you’ll follow and stay with me. You’ll always be with me. I promise.”
Janaki looked away, her eyes smarting even harder now with the promise and strength of her teenage daughter, who had pledged to devote herself to her mother. That was love. That was belonging. For the first time in her life, Janaki had finally found a home where she belonged. Not this tiny cramped East Delhi apartment, where there was no end of unhappy memories and sad stories buried within the walls but with her daughter, no matter where she went. Her place was with the family she created and the family who would continue to be there for her. Home was where her heart was, and her heart
was with Maya.
* * *
Amid the chatter and flurry to be the first off the plane, Karom suddenly starts as though he has forgotten something. Sure enough, when he circles his fingers around his wrist, there is nothing. The stories in Fairytales of Freedom have jarred him; between them, he has dozed through lucid dreams that startle him awake so that he has to remember where he is and where he is heading. When he awakes, he isn’t sure where reality lies and where the story has ended. Something has awakened in him with these stories. It is more than just the passion and the fervor. It is the way that all of Ammama’s characters are underdogs, downtrodden and slated to fail, but then something or someone picks them up and carries them on their way. It isn’t necessarily always skill in each instance or even luck. It is destiny. That is the lesson of each fable: that you can’t control your destiny, because your destiny controls you. This is anti-everything-that-Karom-has-been-raised-with, though his parents were culturally religious, not fanatically so. But he understands the idea of karma, the idea of cause and effect and how every action causes a reaction. It is more scientific than religious. How can his life continue if he keeps toying with it, tempting, caressing it to follow his every whim? How can he continue like this, staring down traffic, popping puffer fish into his mouth, dancing with death?
He can’t believe Kamini’s strength. She has carried so much heartache and burden all her life in order to transform them into stories, weaving them into translucent ideas with her tiny shriveled fingers, searching down into the depths of her imagination and using the details of her own life to sketch out fables, parables and lessons that he is sure he and Gita will carry in their hearts for a long time. So this is her truth: she’s spent her whole life constantly abandoned by relatives, so she’s never felt a part of something.