Someone Else's Garden

by Dipika Rai

  Once Mrs Sahai left, the others deserted him too, starting with the Party members, then those who had to return to Gopalpur, and finally the stragglers who had once been mesmerised by his charisma. At Eyebrows’ urging, even Prem deferred his hospital visits, bequeathing a long tender healing time to Mamta.

  At first she was just content to stand in the doorway and look at him. Then, when Mrs Sahai left, she moved to his bedside, arriving before every other visitor and staying till the close of visiting hours. Each time he woke, she was to there to meet his needs: rearrange his pillow, feed him, wash the night clean off his face. The nurses rewarded her diligence and consistency with their trust, and every now and then they let her bathe him, change his bedpan, help dress his wound. They didn’t know what to make of the village woman, obviously decades younger than the patient. First they conjectured that she was a Party supporter; then that she was family; and now they are confused, because her attention is so close to that special kind of service – both greatly loving and impersonal.

  There were nights of terrible pain for Lokend, who struggled for a long time with death. His dreams suddenly turned into nightmares of deep, drowning red. At such times his arms would rise involuntarily out of the sheets aching to hold on to something real. And Mamta was that reality, standing steadfast as a lighthouse, her shoulders an impersonal crutch for his flailing arms. Night after night.

  One night on its way back down to his side, his left hand had brushed her skin at the dip in her neck, and continued its intimate journey down her breast. That touch, unknowing in Lokend, had left her in a heady panic from something akin to ecstasy, and she was only able to set her world right side up again by taking his limp hand in her own.

  Only a life-threatening trauma could have pushed those two from their separate and unfelt lonely spaces into each other’s lives. Was it he who took her hand, or was it she who offered it? It couldn’t really have been that she made the first move. The times wouldn’t have allowed it, such public intimacy with a man; her caste wouldn’t have allowed it, touching someone so far above her; her being wouldn’t have allowed it, this much pain for someone she hardly knew. But the times did allow it, her caste did allow it, her being did allow it. All that stolen, perhaps wrested, possibly sanctioned, and now here she is, grasping his hand.

  She realises she is ready to accept the companionship of another man. In fact she is ready for more than just companionship; she is prepared to love him, having already loved him for so long. But the thought of a relationship with even one such as Lokend who she knows will never betray her, remains a looming abyss. She has no idea how deep the darkness is or might become.

  But the long and lonely hospital visits and Lokend’s endless pain have made a friend of that abyss, and she finds herself whispering stories into his unconscious ear, purging herself of the poison of history. She shares her most intimate thoughts with him, tells him of her loveless marriage, of her stepdaughter, of her father, of her benign dreams in a world of dread. She believes he hears her, perhaps not with his ears, but with something deeper. And as she speaks, her fear evaporates.

  How does one go from loving to declaring; from declaring to hoping for love in return?

  She is happy just to love. It is an intensely familiar emotion. It has been her enemy and her most faithful friend. Oh, Devi, let me love him. Just love him. He has been with her through her life, she let her thoughts stray back to that quiet look each time destiny knocked her in the dust and it was to him that she returned with every piece of good news.

  And what of Lokend? Why does he love her? Perhaps because the moment they touched, he felt that Mamta needed him far more than any creature ever had before. For Lokend, all female kind, indeed the world, had coalesced into her being. In that instant, she became Devi, universal female energy, absolute divinity. That could be one explanation. Perhaps there are other, more mundane ones. Perhaps he is committed for planting those sweets in her trembling hands at her wedding, or for seeing her at her most vulnerable – beaten by her husband, the under-the-banyan-tree rules, and by social mores. It could be for anything. Who is to know why two souls come together?

  Still holding her hands in his and tracing ever so softly, he asks, ‘Why do you come every day?’

  ‘People would die for you, Sahibji. You know that.’ Don’t tease me. Her throat can hardly move, the words sound as if they are coming from far away. ‘I . . . I, I am just a small person, nothing . . .’

  ‘Let no one tell you who you are or must be.’ He offers these words to her with gratitude. For the first time in his life, he feels that he might be of this world. If she lets go, she will be able to fill the room with her tears.

  ‘Lokend Bhai, Lokend Bhai.’ Prem dashes into the ward. He whips the sheet off Raja’s cage as he approaches. ‘Raja missed you more than all of us put together, I think,’ says Prem, assured, mature and comfortable in Lokend’s presence.

  Raja pokes his nose out of the cage; the bars allow him to get as far as his whiskers. He leans forward, bringing all his weight to push him through, till his flesh is doubled back on itself. Lokend puts two fingers into the cage, giving the struggling animal some respite. Mamta looks on, she looks at the fingers, Raja’s cheek against them, and she is happy for them both. She herself has been found. She too has stopped straining against her bars.

  Chapter 16

  ON THE DAY HE WAS DISCHARGED, she packed his things in a small cloth bag and they left just like any other couple. Without hesitation, she took him to Eyebrows’ dispensary. There Prem had knotted a sheet between two nails on opposite walls to give Lokend his own room. The brother said nothing when he saw his elder sister help Lokend on to the cot and place his clothes and her own, some side by side, and some – one on top of the other – in the cardboard box he’d set aside for Lokend’s cupboard.

  But companionship is easier to share than intimacy.

  Mamta made sure she was never exclusively alone with Lokend, she would pull back the sheet and tie it to one side during the day, and would find some reason to ask Prem to share their evenings. It cost her to set up her life so precisely, she was constantly in turmoil, much as she had been in her husband’s hut, this time for not wanting to accept love too eagerly, wanting to delay its guaranteed caprice a little longer.

  And so the weeks passed, with Mamta and Lokend living side by side, but not together, and helping Eyebrows in the dispensary. While bandaging arms and legs and cleaning wounds, Mamta often allowed Lokend to look into her eyes and smile with the knowingness of lifetimes. It pleased her when his arm accidentally touched her own, without eliciting a hint of acknowledgement or a tremor of a response. He simply asked nothing of her, bringing a normality to her life that was extraordinary.

  Their roles are precisely defined. Mamta does the cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending: all those things she learned in the village, leaving the purchase of medicines to Eyebrows and Lokend. The regulars remark at how the dispensary smells more of impatient spices than disinfectant, most definitely a change for the better. And so, Mamta starts preparing two sets of meals, one bland for Lokend and the other, village-style, for herself and Eyebrows and all the other hungry patients who come to their door at two in the afternoon hoping to share a bit of the trio’s lunch. Once again she is excellent with clothes just as she was as Mrs D’Souza’s unofficial dhobi.

  She works every waking moment, even harder, if that is possible, than she did in Mrs D’Souza’s house, because she tells herself that the dispensary is her own place. But really it is because she wishes to stay busy, distracted, much too busy to think about him and her, the one thing that occupies her every waking moment.

  But life wins in the end, as it always does: wins over death, over hurt, over anguish and, most importantly, over fear.

  It happened the night a baby was born at the dispensary. A pregnant girl, still in her teens, had knocked on the door hours past closing. She was gasping, as if she had run a long distance. Sickly thin, she looked
hardly five months pregnant, though she was close to delivering. She must have known she would die without help, so she’d rushed to Eyebrows’ door, the place she’d heard about from her battered sister.

  The banging had woken Mamta first. She always slept the sleep of a new mother, able to rise at a moment’s notice and able to fall asleep equally quickly. Mamta reacted instantly; she’d seen many babies born casually in her village.

  She let Lokend sleep, she knew night time was his only relief from constant pain. Instead she woke up Eyebrows and together they prepared the girl for her difficult birth. The birth canal was too small, the girl too weak, her will too vitiated. Whatever the reason, the baby was stillborn. By then it was morning and Eyebrows had to attend to other patients, so Mamta was the one responsible for sending the girl home.

  The girl hadn’t cried, and Mamta had held her hand, looked into her face and said firmly, ‘It’s better to cry,’ sanctioning her grief.

  ‘I know,’ the girl had replied with a wilted smile, ‘I know, but I don’t feel anything. Is that bad?’ Then the girl said something that changed Mamta’s life. She said: ‘What would I have done with this baby? In a way I am saved. I can go back to my old life now.’

  Mamta felt a sensation of enormous loss on the girl’s behalf. She realised that she mourned not so much the death of the baby, but the death of the girl’s future. The instant she delivered that dead baby, the girl knew that she would go back to her old life, her future unchanged. She gave up the one moment capable of shifting her life-scenario from one in which she was a helpless child-mother to one in which she was a strong woman, in charge of her own destiny.

  The loss of belief in the girl’s future had brought her own future into focus. Unlike the teenage girl, Mamta realised that her old life did not have a hold on her any more. She had to go forward, so she decided she would go forward with him, her heart-keeper, Lokend.

  Go forward.

  They were meant to be lovers.

  He’d clasped her hand and pulled her close to him. She’d slid beside him, carefully avoiding his wound. He’d folded her in his arms without speaking and kissed her birthmark. His caresses were tender and immature, unpractised and gentle. She tried to stop the comparisons, the flashbacks, the coupling without preamble, but her body finally tuned out the pictures of her previous sexual experi ences. Trembling, she’d given in to him, flowing with him, dancing with him to the fugue of small, silent, discreet laughter; laughing that little laugh that occurs in physically intimate situations only in the context of complete trust. There are lovers who go through lifetimes without the company of such healing, shared joy.

  She’d fallen asleep cradled in the crook of his arm, into such an unusual and deep sleep that left her satisfied, swollen and rumpled when she awoke. That day she knew she had slept in a place of absolute safety for the first time in her life.

  Chapter 17

  EVERY MORNING, HER LOVE SLIDES ACROSS the table, warms the tea and butters the chapatti. She does the same things her mother did for her father, but with a difference. Her actions aren’t automated by habit or dictated by duty, but burble from her laughing heart that dances with the passion of a rose in a monsoon wind. At last she is able to give in to her great lilting love that has shattered her peace only to put it higgledy-piggledy back together till she has to stop herself from giggling at the thought of them together.

  But she cautions herself that this much happiness isn’t a good thing. What has she been taught? Never laugh too much, never expect too much, never ask for too much, never, never, never. Laughter and tears will be hers in equal part. Cause and effect. But she can’t muzzle her delight. No place can contain her big love, so close to worship, that the gods might surely be offended if she didn’t placate them with prayers three times a day.

  Now that she has been with him for almost a year, she can hardly remember a time when they were apart. She has been his companion longer than he has been hers, but now, it seems they are one. For her part, she’s learned his lessons well, that is the gift she promised him, silently inside her heart: to live a better life, not for him, but for herself.

  She feels so much a part of him that she has never fully realised the truth of their commitment. She is devoted, that’s all she knows. She is grateful, that’s all she knows. If he were to leave her without a word, she wouldn’t be devastated or hurt, she wouldn’t question, she’d accept.

  But he does love her.

  She senses something tragically magical in his feelings for her and she shudders with guilt each time she sees the crinkled corners of his eyes and his big white teeth shining through his smile, thinking how hard it must have been for him to give up his world of lofty, unseen bliss for this, her fickle world of Maya, illusion, the dream of duality in the empirical universe. She thinks he is able to visit her world, the place of pleasure and pain, only because he can very clearly see a finite end to his life. She imagines his spirit struggling with his feelings by day, and each night, triumphing over her world of duality, returning to the heavenly heights of those ascetic places which she still imagines as lonely and cold.

  He smiles more on the outside now. For that he is grateful to her, and in turn, she is indebted to him for allowing her to think herself deserving of a pout on her lips and an angry tear in her eye because of some imagined slight, just like any other woman.

  When they lie entwined on their mattress, Lokend talks about his day. They dissolve into each other like honey and warm water. She feels a solid sense of companionship, so different from her mother’s warnings about love, pregnancy and childbirth. Her mother was right on every account, but for the fact of the incredible love that overwhelms her. At those times she wishes to climb under his skin, till there is no one who can say which body is which.

  And yet, outwardly, theirs is an ordinary union. Mamta has that untidiness of appearance that goes with so many women who have never felt attractive in their lives. She spends no time in front of the mirror and even less pulling her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. She knows it isn’t for her looks that he is with her.

  For a year now they have lived out of the back of Eyebrows’ dispensary.

  For a year she has tried to contact her mother, first through Cynthia D’Souza, and then Prem. She has described her miracle-life in florid detail without mentioning Lokend in her letters home. But there has been no reply from Gopalpur.

  Mamta has sent a box of sweets to her mother, a box with the picture of Devi on it, the same kind that Lokend gave her on the first day they met. Mamta thinks that sweets on Diwali – their favourite festival of lights, firecrackers, fancy food and prayers – will turn her mother towards her. But she is wrong.

  Lata Bai has made a hard-headed pact with herself not to forgive – and that is the word she uses each time her thoughts stray to Mamta – her runaway daughter. For Lata Bai, Mamta is Sharma’s wife, shit-smeared and raped, a disgrace. She has kept the news of Mamta’s newfound freedom to herself just as she has news of Seeta Ram’s death.

  ‘This is the first time I am celebrating Diwali on the correct day. For our kind, Diwali always came one day later than for the rest of Gopalpur. The morning after, we bigger ones would head out into the forest and fields looking for unspent firecrackers, while the little ones waited in line at the back door to the Big House’s kitchen for leftovers,’ Mamta says.

  ‘Yes, I remember that, the queue outside our kitchen. Asmara Didi was always so kind.’

  ‘Yes, it’s easy to be kind when you have everything,’ she says, bitterness tainting her words. She bangs the side of her hand into the floor, furiously beating out a pattern. Then she quickly checks herself. ‘We knew you were home if the sheets were dragged into the courtyard laden with sweets! Oh, how we wished to see you.’ Thump, thump thump, go the prints, just like someone walking, emerging first as toeless soles. She paints the toes with the tips of her fingers, first the thumb, then the pointing, middle, ring and finally the little finger. ‘Amma
used to do this every year. Each year she would invite Lakshmi into our house.’ The baby footprints of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, have started their journey at the front door, snaking deep into the dispensary. Thump, thump thump, fine red dust escapes from under her hand like warm breath to shower her blouse, ‘but the goddess never came, instead we listened to the sound of other people’s firecrackers and dreamed of leftovers from your kitchen. The night after Diwali, Amma would light a single oil lamp once again, and take down your sweets from the rafters. We would eat your sweets and pray all over again, begging Lakshmi to come to our house . . .’ She starts on the rangoli, a special painted square filled with secret meaning, its esoteric pattern rendered in edible powders: turmeric, rice flour and crushed rose petals. She clamps her tongue between her lips, the lines must be unbroken, drawn accurately by a steady hand, without any mistakes. She carefully releases a stream of coloured powder from between her thumb and ring finger to form a pencil-thin line. ‘. . . But she never did.’

  Her words are tinged with sadness. He knows it pains her that her mother doesn’t approve, doesn’t write. ‘Mamta, Lakshmi is here today,’ he whispers, just loudly enough to calm her soul.

  ‘She knows nothing about us, you know. I can’t write to her about you . . . I . . . I . . . won’t allow them to . . . to . . . I won’t allow her to . . .’

  ‘Mamta, it is beautiful,’ says Eyebrows, bounding in with an armload of oil lamps. ‘Prem is coming over to light these this evening, then we will burst crackers and feast.’

  The dispensary is filled, floor to ceiling, with presents from grateful patients, new mothers, old wives, grandparents: clothes, sweets, crackers, pots and pans, even a milking goat tied outside. Eyebrows will start giving away everything tomorrow, barring what they use. It is the same every Diwali. The givers come back the next day as receivers. It has become a game. ‘And tomorrow we will have to clean up this mess,’ says Eyebrows, always practical, ‘and treat the burns and the chest infections from poisonous smoke.’