It’s like a Sunday with the corridor full of playing children. Games are already in full swing. Once or twice the dustbin lid falls off with a loud clang; as one of us runs round the corner at full speed and bangs into a dustbin. If you don’t put the lid back, you get a terrible stink, a mixture of stinks really—rotting vegetables, fish and all kinds of queer things. In a while, heads pop out of doors, calling children home for tea. Sometimes Panna’s mother calls us in and asks us to have tea with Panna. We always refuse, but I feel left out when the others go in. Not for the food, really, though, to be honest, sometimes it’s also the food. Like the days they were frying onion bhajias in Vidya’s house. I almost died.
Now we go in, have our milk and biscuits—they’re so soggy, Chhaya refuses to eat them, the spoilt baby—and then go back to play. We’re playing hide and seek when Mummy comes home. I’m sitting on the floor, my eyes tightly closed, my back against the wall, counting in tens, when I hear Chhaya scream ‘Mummy’. I open my eyes—I’ll have to start counting all over again now—and there she is looking angry and sad. But she only says, ‘Why are you sitting in that filth, Megha? Come on, get up.’
‘Auntie, she’s the den. Megha, you’re cheating, you opened your eyes. Count again.’
‘No, that’s enough of games. Come in now.’
As soon as she opens the door, she sees the clothes flapping. ‘Oh God!’ she says. And then, ‘Who hung them up?’
‘Tarabai…’
‘Did she expect you to stay in this?’
‘No, Mummy we went out to play as soon as she went,’
She looks at her watch, tightens her lips and says, ‘Five hours?’
In a rush, she takes off her slippers, flings her bag away, washes her feet and begins rearranging the clothes. Chhaya gets excited and makes a game of it, hiding behind something and saying babyishly, ‘Where am I?’ Her hands are grimy and she leaves a dirty mark on Papa’s pyjamas. Mummy sees it and gives Chhaya a slap. A little one really. She can’t slap properly, like Papa does. Sometimes. For, of course, Papa is rarely home long enough to punish any of us. There are days when Chhaya doesn’t even see him. He goes to work before she wakes up and she’s asleep by the time he returns.
There was a time when he used to come home much earlier. But then he had a job. ‘Now it’s my own business,’ he told Rashmi and me once. ‘And I have to work very hard for a few years. Once I get going, I’ll be able to spend more time with you children.’
‘By which time,’ Mummy had said with a smile that was not really a smile, ‘the girls will wonder who you are when they meet you.’ Strangely, soon after this, we met Papa on the road and Chhaya didn’t recognize him. ‘There’s Papa,’ Rashmi had said. ‘Where?’ Chhaya asked. ‘On the other side of the road, you silly.’ But Chhaya. kept saying, ‘Where?’ until he came right up to us.
We laughed at her and told Mummy about it. But she didn’t laugh. That night, I heard her speaking angrily to Papa and Papa saying, ‘But it’s for them. We’ve got to struggle for some time.’ And I heard Mummy say, ‘How long? My God, how long?’
Now Chhaya cries until Mummy babies her and soothes her. Finally they both lie in Mummy’s bed, Chhaya with her thumb in her mouth. Mummy pulls it out—it comes out with a pop—but in it goes again. I look about for Mummy’s plastic-netted bag, the one she carries in her handbag when she goes to work. She always brings home something in it—vegetables, of course, but also biscuits, samosas maybe, or some cakes. Today it’s empty.
‘Mummy, I’m hungry.’ It seems hours since we drank our milk.
‘Didn’t you get anything for us?’ Rashmi asks accusingly.
Mummy opens her eyes slowly, as if she’s too tired even to do that. ‘I forgot,’ she says. We stare silently at her. ‘I was too tired,’ she adds We stand glum. Suddenly she smiles—and when she smiles she looks like Chhaya does when she knows she’s done wrong and is trying to mollify you—and says, ‘Why don’t you go to the corner shop and get something for yourselves? Take some money from my purse.’
Rashmi points out some cakes to the boy—she’s so bossy, she never gives me a chance to choose—and a man waiting for his change smiles at me. The huge man behind the counter pushes some coins and notes across the glass top. The man pushes back a note and says, ‘A bar of chocolate’. The boy brings our cakes and goes for the chocolate. I stand on tiptoe and watch the squiggly figures as the man makes our bill. The boy brings the chocolate for the man and Rashmi carefully counts out the money. ‘Here, baby, for you,’ the man says to me. I’m too surprised to do anything but take the chocolate from him. But Rashmi, picking up our change, turns round instantly, snatches the chocolate from my hand, plonks it on the counter and drags me out of the shop She walks fast, without a word, until we reach the crossing. As we wait to cross, I look back. The man is going in the other direction.
‘He’s gone,’ I say.
Rashmi relaxes her hold on me. The lights turn green. When we’re across, she says angrily, ‘Why did you take chocolates from him? Don’t you know better than that?’
I do. Mummy has told us long back—don’t talk to strangers, don’t take anything from them, don’t go anywhere with them.
‘I didn’t take it,’ I say defensively. ‘I was just going to give it back when you….’
‘Taking things from a man!’ Rashmi hisses at me. ‘Don’t you know what men do to girls?’
‘Of course I do,’ I say with dignity. ‘I know everything.’
I know the word, anyway. And I also know it’s the most dreadful thing that can happen to a girl.
Rashmi speaks in a more friendly tone now. ‘Now, don’t go and tell Mummy about it. You know how she fusses. She won’t ever let us go anywhere alone.’
I promise. But somehow I blurt it out, after all. We’ve eaten our cakes and sorted out our books for tomorrow. Mummy has put the cooker on for our dinner and sits with us for our usual chat. Then I tell her about the man. She says nothing, only pats Rashmi approvingly. But I know she’s going to talk it over with Papa when he comes home. She’s waiting for him now; we all are. It’s time for him to be home.
But he doesn’t come. He’s very late today. It’s funny how, when you’re waiting for someone, the tick tock of the clock becomes louder than usual. That, and the sounds of other people’s footsteps. Each time we hear footsteps outside the door, Mummy sits up and listens intently. But the footsteps go on and she droops again. At last she says, ‘Let’s talk of something.’
‘Mummy, tell us about when you were a girl,’ Rashmi and I coax her.
We love to hear stories of her school, her friends and her teachers. But today she talks of her home.
‘I had a beautiful home,’ she says and looks at us with that ‘oh, you poor children’ expression on her face. ‘It had a tiled roof. Do you know how friendly the rain sounds when it falls on a tiled roof? And how gently it slides off from it on to the ground? It’s a steady drip that can put you to sleep. Once, I remember, a bird came in, sheltering from the rain. It sat in the rafters the whole night. Once or twice I heard it ruffling its feathers. Otherwise it was absolutely silent. And outside, when it rained, the waters ran whoosh whoosh in the gutters. We used to wade in them. The water was never dirty—nothing in it but twigs, leaves and mud.
‘Sometimes, in summer, we slept in the courtyard. We could lie in the dark and watch the stars come up. And everything was so quiet that when we spoke the words came out soft, as if we were afraid of hurting the silence. The only sounds were the sounds of birds going to bed, or those insects that go on tik tik all night. Sometimes, after it rained, we could hear the frogs croaking. You can’t imagine how—how soothing that sound is. Otherwise ….’ She pauses as a bus screeches angrily to a stop, starts with a roar and goes on. ‘… there was just silence. I wonder whether I’ll ever hear silence again,’ she says sadly.
‘Hear silence? How can you hear silence?’ Rashmi challenges.
‘You’ll know some day—if you
ever get out of this place.’
‘Sounds silly to me, hearing silence,’ Rashmi says scornfully. Rashmi has to be rude to Mummy these days. And if Papa says, ‘Now, Rashmi, that’s not the way to talk to your mother,’ she bursts out with, ‘You hate me, you’re all against me,’ and stamps out. And Papa says with a sigh, ‘Growing pains.’ And Mummy says, ‘It pains me too.’ And Papa laughs.
But it’s true. Rashmi is growing. She won’t let Mummy help her to wash her hair, she acts funny with Ravi next door. And she’s either sulking or in a temper. Except with her friends, of course. With them she’s—oh, so jolly!
‘You don’t even know what silence is, do you?’ Mummy says pityingly to her. And I think of how our friends yell for us—RASHMI—MEGHA. And we yell back—COMING.
All this while, we’ve been listening to the footsteps, hoping to hear Papa’s among them. There are fewer now. Chhaya is almost asleep. Mummy suddenly rouses herself and says, ‘Have your dinner, girls. Chhaya, wake up.’
We finish our dinner but still no Papa. Chhaya goes to bed. Rashmi and I argue about whose turn it is to sleep on the ‘camel’. That’s Papa’s word for the hard, slippery sofa on which we have to sleep on alternate nights. It’s my turn today. Rashmi goes off to her place near Chhaya, grumbling about how much space she’s taken up. I try to make myself comfortable on the ‘camel’, but the pillow keeps slipping away from my head. I can’t sleep, anyway. Why is Papa so late? I can see Mummy is worried. She snaps at Rashmi who’s still grumbling. Rashmi pulls her blanket over herself and turns her back on Mummy; even her back looks angry. But Mummy doesn’t notice.
Why is Papa so late? I am now sure he has had some accident. Suppose he’s dead? I imagine all of it and what we’ll do and how sorry everyone will be for us. My tummy feels funny as if I have to go to the toilet. I envy Rashmi and Chhaya for being so peacefully asleep. I wish I could go to sleep too and wake up in the morning to find Papa shaving at the small mirror propped in the corner of the window.
Finally, when I’ve given up all hope, I hear his key in the lock. Mummy gets up instantly. I hear Mummy asking him something as he takes off his shoes and puts away his umbrella. He replies softly as if he’s afraid of waking us, but when Mummy goes on, his voice gets louder. I close my eyes tight, I feel cold. Don’t make him angry, Mummy, I plead. It’s terrible when he is angry. He doesn’t see us, he doesn’t look at us, he goes about as if we’re all ghosts. And Mummy does look like a ghost—an angry ghost, that is. As the angry words go on, I pray—let it be the kind of quarrel that doesn’t last. Sometimes, it doesn’t. I wake up in the morning after a quarrel and for a moment there’s nothing, then there’s me and the day, and I’m happy. Then I remember the quarrel and the happy feeling goes away.
But when I get out of bed, it’s peaceful. There’s Papa shaving, squinting at himself in the mirror, whistling when he finishes and going off to wash his shaving things. And Mummy’s in the kitchen, looking young in her night-dress, her hair in two plaits. She’s rushing about, but I can see that it’s a kind of happy rushing about, not an angry, holding-herself-in kind of thing. But some days it goes on and on and I feel a$ if the house is too small. I want to run away.
Now their voices are like small, hurting stones. I put my fingers in my ears to keep out the sounds. My wrists and fingers start paining and I remove my fingers. There’s silence. But the silence seems even more terrible than the angry voices. Maybe, it’s better than those whispers, though. The whispers that I sometimes hear from the other side of the curtain. When I hear them, I think of what Suchitra in our class had once told me, her eyes gleaming, her face excited in a nasty sort of way. And then I had hated Suchitra and myself and my parents and everyone and I wished I had a room of my very own.
Does Rashmi feel this way too? Is that why one day she said, ‘I’m going to sleep in the gallery from today.’
‘Can you sleep standing up?’ Papa had teased her. The gallery has room only for brooms, brushes, old tins and other junk. But Rashmi had kept on and on and Papa had said, ‘Maybe one day, when we get out of here, you can have your own room….’
And Mummy had asked, in the funny voice I don’t like, ‘Will we?’ And that night I had heard them arguing once again, with Mummy saying, ‘No, no.’
I wake up with a start to find that my pillow has fallen down and my neck is feeling stiff. I grope for the pillow and lie down on it, wondering—is it time to wake up? Then I hear the sounds of running water and I know it’s still night. We get water in the taps only at night and Mummy and Papa have to store it up then. They work in silence. Only occasionally I hear them say something in a husky, middle-of-the-night voice. Soon the sounds cease. The lights are switched off. And there is silence.
But only inside our house. Outside I can hear the truck rumbling past. From a distance comes the hoot of a train. Soon the milk vans will start. The tramp-tramp of factory workers going to work. People going for milk. The screech of buses. These sounds don’t trouble me, though. I’m used to them. They tell me I’m at home, in my own bed. And it feels good and comfortable even if I’m on the ‘camel’, with a stiff neck because my pillow keeps falling down.
But just as I’m drifting back into sleep, I see a picture before my closed eyes. A house with a tiled roof. The rain falling on it with a soft patter. A bird sitting silent and still, huddled up because it’s cold. And I think of Mummy’s words and wonder, like Rashmi had done—can you hear silence? Will I hear it one day?
It was Dark
‘Are you awake?’
I came out of an ugly dream, in which I was wandering all over an unfinished skeletal building, looking for someone….
‘Yes.’
At first there was only a relief that I was in bed, not on a scaffolding, hopelessly searching for something.
‘Will you come and have your tea?’
‘In a minute.’
As I spoke, I felt the foulness of my mouth, both the smell and the taste; it brought me out of a hazy world of blurred details into now and here and today. Waking, the whole burden of my grief came on me in an instant. I was not in my own bed, I was in the child’s room, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. The feeble early morning light could not pierce the drawn curtains, and I could only just see her, sleeping in a foetal position, on her side, knees drawn up. I had an instant’s longing to get away, anywhere, even back into that ugly dream. But it had already retreated from me.
‘The tea’s getting cold,’ his impatient voice reminded me when I was brushing my teeth. He hadn’t come in here, into her room, since we brought her home yesterday.
‘Is she sleeping?’ he asked me, when I joined him. He had made the tea but waited for me to pour it out. He had taken over some of the household chores from me since the day it all began. Strange, how even sorrow imposes its own routine. We were now used to this—his participation in my tasks, the silence in the house, the feeling of isolation.
‘Yes.’
‘Did she sleep well?’
‘No.’
He stared at me, as if expecting me to say something more. ‘What does she do?’ he asked impatiently, finally.
‘She lies in bed and stares at the ceiling.’
‘The ceiling? Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
He gave me a strange look, as if I was evading him, as if there was something I could say and didn’t. But there was no more to say. She just lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. I had found myself staring at the spot her eyes were fixed on, as if I could find it there, the thing she wasn’t talking about.
Now his tea over, he pushed his cup away and slumping slightly into his chair, began tapping on the table, a rhythmic tattoo.
‘Don’t!’
‘What?’
‘That.’ There was something about those fingers ….
‘I’m sorry,’ he said absently. Then, turning his gaze on me, he spoke abruptly, as if this was what he had been thinking of all this while. ‘What if someth
ing Happens?’
‘Something?’ I stared at him blankly.
‘I mean,’ he went on, anger touching his face as he realized he would have to put it into words, ‘I mean… suppose…. ‘ He stopped and stared at me, looking for something, help maybe, or comprehension. Then he went on, more firmly, ‘After all, she was with him three days….’
‘No!’ It came out as a cry for help. Involuntarily his hand reached out to me. I drew back my own and looked at him in anger. ‘No, it can’t, it isn’t possible, how can you…?’
‘It was the doctor who spoke of it,’ he said defensively. ‘She said it’s a possibility we should….’ His voice trailed away.
Once in a hospital I had heard a woman uttering hideous sounds as she struggled against some fearful pain. I had tried to imagine that pain and had failed. Now I knew.
He waited until I raised my head from the table before asking me, ‘When is her next time?’
‘Why?’
This question—it was much worse than his entering her room. Couldn’t he see that?
‘We’ve got to know. If it’s necessary, the doctor says…’ Again he hesitated, casting about for the right word, ‘They’ll have to do… do an… MTP,’ he ended lamely, obviously using the doctor’s own words.
Medical Termination of Pregnancy—he couldn’t have found words more innocuous sounding; but relating them to my fourteen-year old daughter, I found them obscene. I felt sick.
‘Do you know her date?’
‘No, I can’t remember.’
‘Try to remember,’ he said, pinning me down.
Those three days when we had waited for her to come home were like an abyss, cutting us off completely from the past.
‘You’ve got to remember.’
‘Later.’
‘No, now. I must know.’
I sat sullen, silent, calculating.
The Intrusion and Other Stories Page 3