by Akhil Sharma
Those introductions, like this one, were held in Vikrant, a two-story dosa restaurant across from the Amba cinema. I liked Vikrant, for I thought the obvious cheapness of the place would be held against us. The evening that I met Rajinder, Vikrant was crowded with people waiting for the six-to-nine show. We sat down. An adolescent waiter swept bits of dosa from the table onto the floor. Footsteps upstairs caused flecks of blue paint to drift down.
The dinner began with Rajinder’s mother, a small round woman with a pockmarked face, speaking of her sorrow that Rajinder’s father had not lived to witness his two sons reach manhood. There was a moment of silence. Pitaji tilted slightly forward to speak. “It’s all in the stars. What can a man do?” he said. The roughness of his voice, the danger that his enormous body always projected, sharpened my anxiety. I shifted toward Ma.
The waiter returned with six glasses of water, four in one hand, with his fingers dipped into each. Rajinder and I did not open our mouths until ordering our dosas. At one point, after a long silence, Pitaji tried to start a conversation by asking Rajinder, “Other than work, how do you like to use your time?” Then he added in English, “What hobbies do you have?” The door to the kitchen in the back was open. I saw two boys near a skillet, trying to shove away a cow which must have wandered off the street into the kitchen.
“I like to read the newspaper. In college I played badminton,” Rajinder answered in English. He smoothed each word with his tongue before letting go.
“Anita sometimes reads the newspapers,” Ma said.
The food came. We ate quickly.
Rajinder’s mother talked the most during the meal. She told us about how Rajinder had always been favored over his older brother—a beautiful, hardworking boy who obeyed his mother like God Ram. Rajinder had shown gratitude by passing the exams to become a bank officer. Getting from Bursa to Delhi was three hours in the bus every day. That was very strenuous, she said; besides, Rajinder had long ago reached the age for marriage, so he wished to set up a household in the city. “We want a city girl. With an education but a strong respect for tradition.”
“Kusum, Anita’s younger sister, is finishing her Ph.D. in molecular biology. She might be going to America in a year, for further studies,” Ma said slowly, almost accidentally. “Two of my brothers are engineers. One is a doctor.” I loved Ma very much in those days. I thought of her as the one who had protected me all my life. I believed that she had stayed with Pitaji for my sake. Therefore, whenever I heard her make these incredible exaggerations—the engineers were pole climbers for the electricity company while the doctor was the owner of an herbal medicine shop—to people who might find out the truth, I worried for her. Ma did not believe her stories, so she was not crazy. Ma just had no control over her anger. I looked down at the table.
Back then I felt Ma believed that I had partially seduced Pitaji. I thought Ma’s aimless anger came from having to sacrifice herself for someone like me.
I put my hand on the back of Ma’s neck. I liked to touch her. She was the person I loved most in the world.
Dinner ended. I still had not spoken. When Rajinder said he did not want any ice cream for dessert, I knew I had to say something. “Do you like movies?” It was the only question that came to me.
“A little,” Rajinder answered seriously. After a pause he added, “I like Amitabh Bachchan most.”
“Me too,” I said.
Two days later, Ma asked if I minded marrying Rajinder. We were in the living room. Ma was sitting on the sofa across from me. I thought, What is the hurry, after all? I’m just twenty-one. But I believed that Ma was worried for my safety at home.
I did not think my marriage would occur. Something was sure to come up. Rajinder’s family might decide my B.A. was not enough. Rajinder might suddenly announce he was in love with his typist.
The engagement took place a month later. Although I was not allowed to attend the ceremony, Kusum was. She laughed as she described Pitaji, the way his blue jacket rode up when he lifted his arms, revealing that the shirt he wore underneath was short-sleeved. Rajinder sat cross-legged before the pundit on the floor. He was surrounded by relatives. The room was light pink. Rajinder’s uncles, Kusum said, pinching her nostrils, smelled of manure.
Only then did I understand that Rajinder was to be my husband. I was shocked. It was as if I were standing outside myself, a stranger, looking at two women sitting on a brown sofa in a wide bright room. Two women. Both cried if slapped, laughed if tickled, but one had finished her higher secondary when she was fifteen, was already doing her Ph.D., with the possibility of going to America; the other, her older sister, who was slow in school, was now going to marry, have children, grow old. Why was it that when Pitaji took us out of school saying that we were all moving to Beri, Kusum, then only in third grade, reenrolled herself, while I waited for Pitaji to change his mind?
As the days till the wedding evaporated, I slept all the time. Sometimes I woke thinking the engagement was a dream. At home the marriage was mentioned only in connection with the shopping involved. Once Kusum said, “I’ve read you shouldn’t have sex the first night. Just tell him, ‘No loving tonight.’”
The wedding occurred in the alley outside the compound where we had a flat. The pundit recited Sanskrit verses. Rajinder and I circled the holy fire seven times. When told, we put necklaces of marigolds around each other’s necks to seal the marriage. I was wearing a bright red silk sari which had the sour smell of new cloth. There were many people surrounding us. Movie songs blared over the loudspeakers. On the ground was a red dhurri with black stripes. The tent above us had the same stripes. The night traffic passing outside the alley caused the ground to rumble.
The celebration lasted another six hours, ending about one in the morning. I did not remember most of it till many years later. The two red thrones on which we sat to receive congratulations are only in the photographs, not in my memories. There are photos showing steam coming from people’s mouths, so it must have been especially cold. For nearly eight years I did not remember how Ashok and his mother, Ma, Pitaji, Kusum, Rajesh got into the car with us to go to the dharamshala, where the people from Rajinder’s side were spending the night. Nor did I remember walking through the dharamshala’s halls, passing rooms where people were asleep on cots, mattresses without frames, blankets folded twice before being laid down.
I did not remember any of this until recently. I was wandering through Kamla Nagar market in search of a dress for Kusum’s daughter and suddenly felt the shock of my shopping while Pitaji was in his room waiting to die. The waste. My life was a waste. I was standing on the sidewalk looking at a display of hairbands. I thought of Kusum’s husband, a tall yellow-haired American with a kind face, who I believed had taught Kusum kindness. Standing there, I thought of the time I loved Rajinder. I started to cry. People brushed past. I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk so that someone might notice and ask whether anything was wrong.
I did remember Rajinder opening the blue door to the room where we spent our first night. Before we entered, we separated for a moment. Rajinder touched his mother’s feet. His mother embraced him. I touched my parents’ feet. As Ma held me, she whispered, “Earlier your father got drunk like the pig he is.”
Then Pitaji put his arms around me. “I love you,” he said in English.
The English was what brought the tears. The words reminded me of how Pitaji came home drunk after work once or twice a month. Ma, thin arms folded across her chest, stood in his bedroom doorway watching him fumbling with his clothes. I tried to be behind Ma. This was after Pitaji was caught with me. I had to watch. To leave was the same as saying I had nothing to do with all this. Usually Pitaji was silent. But if he was very drunk, Pitaji might call out to me, “No one loves me. You love me, don’t you, my little sun-ripened mango? I try to be good. I work all day, but no one loves me.” He spoke in English then, as if to prove he was sober. The “little sun-ripened mango” was something he used to call me befor
e we were caught. Eventually Pitaji began crying softly. After a while, he appeared to forget that he was being watched. Sometimes he turned out the lights and wept in the dark.
Those nights Ma served dinner without speaking. When Rajesh saw what was going to happen, he might take his food to the roof. Sometimes Kusum was there. Mostly it was just me.
There were beautiful lines in the story Ma told to explain everything. Lines like “In higher secondary, a teacher said, in seven years all the cells in our body change. So when Baby died I thought, it will be all right. In seven years none of me will have touched Baby.” Ma did not eat dinner. She might stand still as she talked, or she might walk in circles around me. “I loved him once,” she usually said many times before she began talking of Baby’s getting sick, the telegrams to Beri for Pitaji to come, his not doing so, her not telegramming about Baby’s death. “What could he do?” she might conclude, while looking at the floor, “although he always cries so handsomely.” I knew, of course, that everything was about me.
When Pitaji woke from his drunken sleeps, he asked for water to dissolve the powders he took to purge himself by vomiting. On my wedding night, while Pitaji spoke of love in English, it was the soft wet vowels of his vomiting that I remembered.
Rajinder bolted the door of the room where we spent our first night together. There was a double bed in the center of the room. Near it was a small table with a jug of water and two glasses. The room had yellow walls. The mattress smelled faintly of mildew. I stopped crying. I was suddenly calm. I stood near the bed, a fold of the sari covering my eyes. I thought, I will just say our marriage has been a terrible mistake. Rajinder lifted the sari’s fold. He looked into my eyes. I am lucky, he said. He was wearing a white silk kurta with tiny flowers embroidered around the neck. With a light squeeze of my elbow, he let me know I was to sit. He took off his kurta, folded it like a shirt, put it on the table. No, wait. I must tell you, I said. The tie of his pajamas was hidden under his drooping stomach. Hair rose in a cord up his belly. At his chest it spread into a stain. What an ugly man, I thought. No. Wait, I said. He did not hear or I did not say. Louder. You are a very nice man, I am sure. He took off his pajamas. His penis looked like a slug resting on lichen-covered rocks. He laid me down on the bed, which had a white sheet dotted with rose petals. I put my hands on his chest to push him away. He took both wrists in one hand. No loving tonight, I said, but he might not have heard, or I might not have said. I wondered whether it would hurt as much as it had with Pitaji. My breath quickened from fear. Rajinder’s other hand undid my blouse. I felt its disappointment with my small breasts. The ceiling was so far away. The moisture between my legs was like breath on glass.
Rajinder put on his kurta, poured himself some water. After drinking he offered me some.
Sleep was there as soon as I closed my eyes. But around eight in the morning, when Rajinder woke me, I was exhausted. The door to our room was open. One of Rajinder’s cousins, a fat hairy man with a towel around his waist, walked past to the bathroom. Seeing me, he leered.
I had breakfast with Rajinder’s family in our room. We sat around a small table eating parathas with yogurt. I wanted to sleep. Again Rajinder’s mother talked the most. Her words were indistinct. I would blink and my eyes would remain closed. “You eat like a bird,” she said, smiling.
After breakfast we visited a widowed aunt of Rajinder’s who had been unable to attend the wedding because of arthritis. She lived in a two-room flat whose walls, floor to ceiling, were covered with posters of gods. The flat smelled of mothballs. As she spoke of carpenters and cobblers moving in from the villages to pass themselves off as upper castes, the corners of her mouth became white with spit. I was silent, except for when she asked me what dishes I liked to cook. As we left, she pressed fifty-one rupees into Rajinder’s hands. “A thousand years. A thousand children,” she said.
Then there was the bus ride to Rajinder’s village. The roads were so bad I kept being jolted awake. My sleep became fractured till I dreamed of the bus ride. In the village there were the grimy hens peering into the well and the women for whom I posed demurely in the courtyard. They sat in a circle around me, murmuring compliments. My eyes were covered with my sari. As I stared at the ground, I fell asleep. I woke an hour later to their praise of my modesty. That night in the dark room at the rear of the house, I was awakened by Rajinder digging between my legs. Although he tried to be gentle, I just wished it over. There was the face, distorted above me, the hands which raised my nipples so cruelly, resentful of being cheated, even though there was never any anger in Rajinder’s voice. He was always polite. Even in bed he used the formal you. “Could you get on all fours, please?”
Winter turned into spring. The trees in the park beside our home swelled green. Rajinder was kind. When he traveled for conferences to Baroda, Madras, Jaipur, Bangalore, he always brought back saris or other gifts. The week I had malaria, he came home every lunch hour. On my twenty-second birthday he took me to the Taj Mahal. When we returned in the evening, he had arranged for my family to hide in the flat.
Rajinder did not make me do anything I did not want to, except for sex. Even that was sometimes like a knot being kneaded out. I did not mind his being in the flat. The loneliness I felt, however, when Rajinder was away on his trips was not based on missing him. It was only the loneliness of being a person in the world. I do not think Rajinder missed me on his trips, for he never mentioned it.
Despite my not thinking of Rajinder when he wasn’t there, he was good for me. He was ambitious, and watching his efforts gave me confidence. He was always trying for a degree or certificate in something. Anything can be done if you are intelligent, hardworking, open-minded, he would boast. Before Rajinder, I had not actually believed one event pushes into another. I took a class in English. Because I studied it two hours a day, I progressed quickly. Rajinder told me there was nothing whorish in wearing lipstick. Wearing lipstick and perfume began making me feel attractive. Along with teaching me to try, Rajinder took me to restaurants where foreign food was served, to plays, to English movies. He was so modern he even said “Oh Jesus” instead of “Oh Ram.” The world seemed slightly larger than it had been before.
Summer came. Every few days, the luu swept up from Rajasthani deserts, killing one or two of the cows left wandering unattended on Delhi’s streets. The corpses lay untouched for a week sometimes, till their swelling tongues cracked open their jaws and stuck out absurdly.
For me, the heat was like a constant buzzing. It separated flesh from bone and my skin felt rubbery. I began to wake earlier and earlier. By five, the eastern edge of the sky was too bright to look at. I bathed early in the morning, then after breakfast. I did so again after doing laundry, before lunch. As June progressed, the very air seemed to whine under the heat’s stress. I stopped eating lunch. Around two, before taking my nap, I poured a few mugs of water on my head. I liked to lie on the bed imagining the monsoon had come.
So the summer passed, slowly and vengefully, till the last week of June, when I woke one afternoon in love.
I had returned home that day after spending two weeks with my parents. Pitaji had been sick. I had helped take care of him in Safdarjung Hospital. For months a bubble had been growing at the base of his neck. We noticed it when it looked like a pencil rubber. Over two months it became a small translucent ball. If examined in the right light, it was cloudy from blood. We told Pitaji to have it examined. He only went to a herbal doctor for poultices. So when I opened the door late one night to find Kusum, I did not have to be told that Pitaji had wakened screaming that his pillow was sodden with blood.
While I hurried clothes into a plastic bag, Kusum leaned against a wall of our bedroom drinking water. It was three. Rajinder sat on the edge of the bed in a blue kurta pajama. I felt no fear. The rushing, the banging on doors seemed to be only melodrama.
As I stepped into the autorickshaw which had been waiting for us downstairs, I looked up. Rajinder was leaning against the r
ailing. The moon behind him was yellow and uneven like a scrap of old newspaper. I waved. He waved back. Then we were off, racing through dark, abandoned streets.
“Ma’s fine,” Kusum said. “He screamed so loud.” She sat slightly turned on the seat so that she faced me. Kusum wore shirt pants. “A thousand times we told him, Get it checked. Don’t be cheap. Where’s all that black money going?” She shook her head.
I felt lonely talking of our father without concern. “He wants to die,” I said. “That’s why he eats and drinks like that. He’s ashamed of his life, of his bribes, all that.” This was one of the interpretations Pitaji had been suggesting for years, so it came unbidden to my tongue.
“If he was really ashamed, he’d change. He’s just crazy.”
I had not meant to defend Pitaji, for I did not think he needed defending. I viewed Pitaji impersonally, like a historical event.
“The way he treats Ma. Or the way he treated you. I remember when he’d stamp his foot next to you to see how high you’d jump. If he wants to die, he should do it quietly. You and Ma are cowards.”
“Ma hates him,” I murmured. The night air was still bitter from the evening traffic. I wondered if Kusum’s capacity to expect things from people was due to her not being raised at home. I said, “We have to live with him. Why be angry?”
“That’s what he’s relying on. Be angry. It’s a big world. There are a lot of people worth loving. Why waste time on somebody mediocre?”
In the hospital there was broken glass in the hallways. Someone had urinated in the lift. When we came into the yellow room that Pitaji shared with five other men, he was asleep. His face looked like a shiny brown stone. He was on the bed nearest the window. Rajesh stood at the head of the bed. Ma sat at its foot, her back to us, looking out at the bleaching night.