‘Let’s go down to the sea,’ I said suddenly.
‘Now?’ He seemed surprised. ‘Let’s go in the morning.’
Yes, but before the morning there’s the night—I quailed at the thought. He saw the look on my face and smiled at me.
‘It’s going to be dark soon. Look at the way.’
A little path went zig-zagging crazily down the cliff.
He put his arm round my waist. ‘You don’t really want to go down, do you?’ It was said in my ear, almost a whisper, and it sickened me, like those furtive touches and glances from faceless, nameless men in crowds. My mind shied like a frightened horse from the words, from the thought.
‘Come on in.’ He pulled at my arms. ‘It’s getting chilly.’
So it was. And dark as well; we had to switch on the lights in the room. Someone had removed the tea things and made the beds. I thought with a wistful pang of my own narrow bed at home and of how I would lie on it, curled into a comfortable ball, reading into the late hours of the night. I felt a constriction in my throat, a longing for all the things I had left behind me forever: a melancholy that always assails one when away from home at this time, neither day nor night.
He seemed unaffected by the atmosphere or any melancholy and noisily opening his suitcase, took out some clothes and went in to change. I sat quietly for a minute, then flew to the veranda, unwilling to admit, even to myself, that I didn’t want to hear the intimate sounds that were seeping through the thin walls and flimsy door. I stood there, leaning against the wooden railings, tugging savagely at my hair, wishing I were anywhere but here, with a strange man in a strange room. Wishing that I could project myself into the future, gulf this intervening time and become all at once an experienced, mature woman; one who would not turn a hair at anything. Just then he called out my name, using it so familiarly, with such a proprietorial air that I was startled. A little angry, too. Reluctantly I went in.
‘Why don’t you change?’ he asked and it seemed to me that there was something insinuating in his tone, something eager and excited about him that put me off.
I changed, thankful that my night-dress was modest. His eyes slid over me briefly and he was once again a nameless stranger. Then they slipped away from me. I opened the door to the veranda.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Nowhere. Just out here.’
‘Come here.’
‘Let’s stand out for a few minutes.’ I was pleading now.
‘No. Come here.’
Unwillingly I turned and went to him, my legs as heavy as lead. And suddenly his arms were round me, his face close to mine, his rough chin scraping, hurting my cheek. His embrace was too sudden, too rough, and I wanted to scream, to cry out. But somehow I knew that this was just between the two of us. I turned my face away from him, trying to escape, so that the kiss he intended for my lips landed in the air. He let me go abruptly. There was a foolish, angry look on his face. His glasses had fallen down in the struggle. Mutely I picked them up and gave them to him. He was silent while he wiped them and put them on. When he finally spoke, his voice was shrill, almost with a note of hysteria in it. ‘What’s this? Why are you behaving like this?’
‘Like what?’ I tried to keep my own tone level, innocent.
‘Avoiding me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed it. Ever since we came here you’ve been… been… avoiding me,’ he ended lamely.
‘No, I have not, I’m not…. It was the reflex denial of a child.
‘Do you think I enjoy feeling that I’m forcing myself on you? What’s the problem? Why are you acting so strange?’
I felt contrite at the sight of his bewildered face. But I had nothing to say.
‘You’re not an innocent little girl, are you? You know ….’
Yes, I did. No, I was not innocent. In fact, just before the wedding, I’d read a book. Not furtively, hiding in dark corners, but openly. And it was my mother who had blushed like a girl on seeing it. As I’d read it, strange shivers had gone over me; finally I had thrown the book away in disgust. What things, I had thought, one has to do just to propagate the human race!
I stood silent. Angry, hurt, crestfallen, he waited for my answer. ‘We… we scarcely know each other,’ I stammered at last.
He seemed flabbergasted. ‘Know each other? What has that to do with it? Aren’t we married now? And how will we start getting to know each other if you put on such a touch-me-nottish air?’
I want to know all about you, I wanted to say. What you think, what you feel and why you agreed to marry me? And what did you think of as we went through all those ceremonies together, and do you like the things I do and will we laugh together at the same jokes, enjoy the same books? And there were all those fears crouching in me—would his breath smell, and were his feet huge and dirty with uncut toenails, and did he chew his food noisily and belch after meals? I wanted to tell him how shy and frightened I was about exposing the mysteries of my body to him and how homesick I was for my mother’s face, my father’s laughter and my sisters’ chatter.
But I could say none of these things to him. Even if I did, I thought, looking at his face, he would not hear me. He was all keyed up for a different experience and for him other things would come later. While I wished to talk now, sitting up the whole night, so that in the morning we could smile at each other like old friends. I stammered as I tried to explain, I flushed, I almost burst into tears looking at his angry face. The eager look in his eyes died as I spoke, and finally he turned away from me, violently flung himself on a bed and lay there still. I felt as if I had committed a crime, yet there was a light-hearted sense of escape, too. Quietly I went to my bed and lay down, trying to sleep, while countless erotic images came out of the pages of the book I had read and tortured my distracted mind. I lay wondering if I was that thing I had read about, a frigid woman, incapable of love. And what we would do if it were so. I imagined myself returning to my parents’ home, shamed and rejected, and the consternation and grief it would cause there, my sisters’ marriages held up forever, my parents disgraced—all because of me.
Simple and sophisticated, I told myself, choking myself with my blanket to prevent my gurgle of laughter from being heard. But how can I, with a man I scarcely know? It’s not fair, I thought angrily. It’s indecent. He should have given me some time. What a way to spend our honeymoon, I thought, imagining him sulking the whole time, and I, moving around with a load of guilt, shame and fear. What will we tell the others when we go back?
I must have drifted off into sleep at some time because I woke to the dull, booming sound of the sea coming in. There was scarcely any pause, I noted drowsily, in the thundering noise. I did not wake up all at once, but drifted for some time between sleeping and waking, struggling out of a confused dream that I was lying there on the beach, where I had so longed to go and that the waves were pounding me.
And then I woke up to realize that the sound of the sea was real, but I was on a bed, not on the beach. And it was not the sea that was pounding my body but he, my husband, who was forcing his body on mine. I was too frightened to speak, my voice was strangled in my throat. I put my hands on his chest to push him away, but it was like trying to move a rock; I could do nothing. He put his hands, his lips on mine and this time I could not move away. There was no talk, no word between us—just this relentless pounding. His movements had the same rhythm, the same violence as the movements of the sea; yet, I could have borne the battering of the sea better, for that would hurt but not humiliate like this.
At last, mercifully, it was over, my body having helped him by some strange instinct beyond and outside me. And the cry I gave was not for the physical pain, but for the intrusion into my privacy, the violation of my right to myself. I drew the sheets over myself and lay quietly, afraid to move, thinking of nothing, my mind an absolute blank. When sensation and feeling came back with a surge, my first thought was that I could not hear even the sea now. I wondered why, till I realized that there was ano
ther sound drowning it. I looked at him. He was lying on his back, legs flung apart, snoring loudly and steadily.
Death of a Child
How does a woman know she has conceived? Impossible to explain. I only know that I know.
‘You can’t be sure,’ he says. ‘Not so soon, anyway.’
His tone is light. His casual words enrage me. I try to calm myself.
‘I know,’ I feebly repeat myself. ‘I have this… this conviction.’
‘I thought you were going to say instinct.’
This time the smile is obvious. But his eyes are still on his paper. He hasn’t looked at me yet. Now rage floods me, makes me move. In two strides I am beside him. I wrench the paper out of his hands.
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Listen to me. I’m serious.’
His eyes are angry as they turn on me, but anger turns to concern when he sees the state I’m in. His hands, which are reaching out for the paper, pat my shoulder instead. Perfunctory pats. He does not believe me—not as yet.
‘Are you sure?’ he asks again, inanely. ‘you women have a phobia about pregnancy,’
‘I’m late,’ I tell him bluntly.
‘A little irregularity—it can happen to anyone,’
‘I’m sick.’
He seems, strangely enough, to understand that I’m speaking literally. ‘When?’ he asks.
‘Today. And yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.’
Now, at last, he looks grave. ‘But how…? We’ve been….’
‘You forget those two days.’
A little forgetfulness, a little casualness—and then this tangle. Tangle—yes, that’s the right word. I’m all tangled up inside. Suddenly my mind races back to those fevered moments when the risk had seemed minimal, unimportant. How could I have felt that way?
He is silent, as if thinking the same thought. Then he looks up at me and says, ‘Well, Nitu is nearly a year and a half. We’ll manage somehow,’
An angry exclamation is wrenched out of me at the word. Manage! Good God! What a weak, what an ineffectual word! A word without welcome. I will have no child I cannot welcome. There is an unexpected sense of release at the thought.
He sees my face and goes on. ‘Don’t get into a state. It’s not as bad as all that.’
‘Not so bad!’ I echo his words despairingly. Not so bad? Hysteria rises in my throat at the thought of going through it all again.
‘I don’t want it, I can’t,’ I burst out. Now that I’ve said the words, I’m calmer.
But he seems amazed. ‘Why?’ he asks.
I grope for words. To me it is simple. I feel trapped. I feel like an animal. The third time in less than four years. It isn’t fair.
I try to explain. I stumble over the words, then stop. So uncomprehendingly does he look at me that there seems to be no link between us. And this is the father of my child! Panic surges into me.
‘But if it has happened,’ he says at last, ‘why not accept it?’
His very reasonableness infuriates me. I am all on edge. Raw, as if the skin has been hacked off me, and I’m open to every minute sensation, every pain.
‘No,’ I say sharply. ‘I can’t, I won’t. Life is complicated enough….’
‘You make it so.’ He is crisp and sharp, losing his grip on gentleness for the first time. ‘It’s quite simple really—having a child. What’s complicated about that? You know we can manage. Why do you get so disturbed?’
Manage? That word again! Yet his logic unnerves me and my own thoughts turn wild, start floundering. But I cannot agree. I cannot isolate the child from the rest of my life. I cannot imagine that the main purpose of my life is to breed.
‘Simple? Yes, any cow, any bitch can breed,’
I am purposefully coarse, but he is not shaken. He says nothing.
I try again. ‘Children stifle your personality. You become just a mother—nothing more.’
‘You’re talking like a book, you’re parroting words out of some book,’ he says coolly.
I flush in anger. I know my words sound pedantic but I mean them. How can I convince him? Procreation has always repelled me. I love my two children, but I have never had any milk for them.
‘I want to live.’ I feel frantic at my inability to communicate to him my sense of desperation. ‘My life….’
‘Your life—is that all that matters to you? How can a mother be so selfish? What about that life?’
I shrug. ‘As long as it isn’t born, it doesn’t exist for me.’
My words are not mere bravado. They are the truth. I have always wondered about those women who swear to a gush of mother love the minute they hold the baby. It has never been so for me. My first feeling was awe. Then inadequacy and fear. Love came later.
He is still silent.
‘Well,’ I go on airily, ‘it’s easy nowadays. Getting rid of it, I mean.’
My words fall like sharp pebbles into the silence. I have shocked him now. But that’s not what I want to do. I’m trying to untangle the skein of emotions that wind round a simple fact.
At last he speaks. ‘Why not wait. Give it some more time?’
He looks so wan, I feel sorry for him. And I agree, knowing that time will change nothing, knowing that I cannot wait too long. It’s strange that he, a father, should feel this way. To a father an unborn child rarely has the same reality that it has to the mother who harbours it. Perhaps, like any other Hindu male, he wants another son. Perhaps I’m wronging him by this thought. But hostility to him is now embedded in me. I find his words, his touch, even his look distasteful. And besides, it is unthinkable, unbearable that he should have any other reason for his reluctance. I cannot face this thought, for if I do, the reason might confront me too.
As the days pass, the nebulous feeling of life within me becomes a hard certainty. I feel the trap closing in on me. He watches me covertly. And I feel I’m losing time. I am terrified he might convince me. Terrified I might submit. And have years sliced off my existence again. Years before I can go back to doing anything else. Years when my actions are dictated to, not by my will, not by my desires, but by the sheer animal needs of the children.
I ring up the doctor and fix up an appointment myself.
‘It’s up to you,’ he says when I tell him what I’ve done. ‘You have to bear the brunt of it, you have the right to decide.’ I listen in a stolid silence. Suddenly his voice rises from a dead monotone as he exclaims, ‘But, by God, I’m glad I don’t have to decide!’
I feel immensely strong when he says this. I have decided, I have no doubts at all.
Marriage, childbirth destroy something in a woman. A reserve. A secretiveness. An innocence. There was a time when I wouldn’t have changed with my mother in the room. Now I lie on the examination table, in that undignified, humiliating position, a wanton attitude almost, without a second thought. Then self-consciousness creeps in and my body grows tense. I try to alienate my mind from my body. I close my eyes. But there is the inevitable prick of pain and I react. I cannot disown my body. Luckily it is soon over. The doctor is a competent woman. Very competent.
‘You can get up,’ says her cool voice.
I dress up deliberately, keeping her waiting. But she shows no impatience. She is writing something, as if she has forgotten my existence. When I come out from behind the dingy curtain she seems surprised to see me.
‘You are pregnant,’ she tells me baldly.
‘I know,’ I say, feeling a little quickening in my pulse and heart. The words arouse something in me. ‘I don’t want it,’ I quickly blurt out.
She doesn’t blink an eyelid. Nothing is new to her. She has seen everything. lean imagine her being blase even about her first baby.
‘Think it over,’
She says this because she must. It doesn’t matter to her at all. Nor to me. I have made up my mind. I have a momentary pang of pity for the thing unborn. It has no chance at all. And suddenly, illogically, I am grateful to my husband for feeling t
he way he does. Or did.
‘What about your husband?’ she asks, as if reading my thoughts. I shrug carelessly, as if there is no doubt about the matter at all.
She comes out with me. He is sitting with a faraway look on his face and I am aware of a fierce envy. He can get away—from me, from the children, even from himself. I can never get away, not even from my own body. I am tied to these things in a way he never will be.
‘You’re lucky,’ I hear the doctor saying. ‘It’s quite straightforward. You’ve come early. And now the law is on your side.’ She speaks wryly. There is something cynical about this woman. I don’t like her. The right type, of course, for what I want her to do. But if I were to have the baby? I smother the thought, but it rises again like the fragrance of a crushed flower… if I were to have the baby?
While they discuss the details, my mind clutches thankfully at the thought—I’m getting out of the trap. I will feel human again. Three times in less than four years. It’s not fair.
We go home and wait for the day. I can feel his eyes constantly, accusingly on me. He thinks me callous. When I kiss and fondle the children, I can feel him wonder—how can she?
The day before he asks me, ‘You mean to go on?’
I am irritable, impatient. ‘Why not? Nothing has changed.’
‘You don’t care?’ he probes.
I want to explain. It is because I care too much, love too much. I feel a strange pain as this thought takes shape, becomes concrete. It is true. I have to give all of me or nothing. Now I want to reserve some part of myself, my life.
But I say none of this to him. I know he will not understand, he will think I am trying to be enigmatic. ‘No,’ I say at last, ‘I don’t care.’
In a way, this too is true. At this moment, I feel nothing, only a desperate desire to blot out this fact before it blots me out. I feel it is an impossibility for me to go through the whole process again, for a third time. And yet, when Nitu snuggles up to me, kicking me with her sturdy legs, I try to protect myself. Then I realize what I’m doing. It’s not necessary. Why should I care now? My mind wavers, stumbles, then goes on again.
The Intrusion and Other Stories Page 5