I open my eyes to find the nurse and Baba looking at me. ‘Don’t get up,’ the nurse says. ‘You fainted.’
Dutifully I lie back. I am conscious of a great physical exhaustion as if I have traversed miles, years—no, a whole lifetime with my dead mother. I get up only when Shilpa rushes in, unaware of what has happened, and abandons herself to a violent, childlike grief, shielding her face from the sight of her dead mother.
Watching Shilpa through the next few days I know it is all waiting for me too—the terrible, vitals-piercing sense of loss, the reliving of those most terrible moments, the guilt. Yes, it will come to me too. But in the meantime, I am cocooned in detachment.
Shyam holds me close before leaving. ‘Come back soon,’ he says. And then, ‘Don’t overtire yourself. You look…’ he holds his hands apart as if to say ‘taut’.
‘I’m all right,’ I reassure him, the small exchange heartening me. It is true. I can cope with all of it. I even get a photograph of Akka’s enlarged and framed. Shilpa, folding her children’s clothes, watches me stonily as I put it up. When I have done, she suddenly says, ‘Why did you…? It makes her so… really dead.’
She breaks down and cries forlornly, her face buried in Tiny’s dress. As I try to comfort her, she looks up and thrusting her hair off her wet face cries out, ‘You never cared for her.’ Then adds contritely, ‘Not as I do… did.’
‘Perhaps. But this—it’s not that kind of sentiment. It’s because of something she said.’
‘What?’
‘About her own mother. She seemed—it seemed to weigh on her that she never knew her name or how she looked.’
‘Oh! I wonder why?’ Shilpa’s face, still wet with tears, is puzzled. ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.’
Doesn’t matter? On the contrary, it matters very much. I don’t know why, but I know it most emphatically does. Perhaps it is for me now to find out why it does. Maybe I can begin by tracing the name of that woman who died leaving no name behind. And then…?
Can I prove to my mother—my mother? no, myself—that even if they never chant a litany of their names at a wedding, these women are real?
‘There! It’s done. She doesn’t need any flowers or kumkum. It’s enough she’s here.’
‘I want to see, I want to see,’ Tiny rushes in and cries out when she sees us looking at the photograph on the wall.
I lift her up and she stares solemnly at the picture. ‘She is your grandmother,’ I tell her. ‘Her name was Sumati.’
‘And I,’ Tiny points a little finger towards herself, ‘I am Karuna.’
‘And I,’ I imitate Tiny’s gesture, ‘am Sujata.’
‘And I,’ Shilpa joins in the game, ‘am Shilpa.’
We laugh in unison, Tiny’s delighted chuckles going on longer than, ours. The darkness and despair lift. I can imagine my mother’s pleasure in our laughter.
Ghosts
She peered out of the window. A grey world. Even a fog would be better than this nothingness, she thought. In a sudden spurt of anger, she rubbed at the glass vigorously with her palm. As if the gesture had conjured up something—people, sounds, even, maybe, a touch of colour—she looked eagerly through the clear circle. Nothing. An empty street. Houses, like the one she was in, on either side. And above all, silence. A sepulchral silence. Abruptly she let the curtain drop into place and turned into the room, looking around vaguely as if it was a strange place. Then her eyes focused on the sleeping baby. A silvery line of saliva was trailing out of the corner of his mouth. She gently wiped it and then, as if she had made up her mind, picked him up. The baby responded with a miraculous rightness. He opened his eyes—they stared at her blankly—and then his mouth. She waited for an outraged roar. There was none. Only a whimper that changed into a smile when he became aware of her. Poor little fool, she thought with scornful tenderness. To have a world consisting of one face only and to be happy in that world! What would it do to him? She had a bizarre picture of him as a man, flitting from woman to woman, in a tireless chase of variety. And, maybe, one day a psychiatrist would ask him—tell me about your childhood. Your infancy. Ah! There you are! An unnaturally isolated infancy.
Her movements, as she went about her tasks, were hesitant and uncertain, like a person’s in a strange house. It was only the baby she handled with ease and familiarity. She put him down on the carpet in the centre of the room, but every few minutes she came back, as if to reassure him, though he lay quiet and seemingly content, his eyes following her as she moved about. While she fed him and changed him, a thought nagged at her, filling her with uneasiness. For a while, she let it remain just that—a vague disquietude. Then it became, all at once, loud and clear. There was no bread in the house. She had to go out and get some. She kept even this distinct thought at bay for some time. Finally, looking at the time, she got up. Reluctantly she began to dress the baby who, gorged and content, whimpered his protest.
Her turn now. Would she never get used to all these unfamiliar accoutrements? They never seemed to be part of her, all the warm clothes she had to pile on herself. And what’s the use anyway, she thought, of this hateful exercise? The minute she stepped out of the house, she realized how vulnerable she was. It was her face that bore the brunt of the attack. The cold was her enemy and the wind its weapon. Her eyes began to water, her nose too was soon shamefully running. It is like a parody of grief, she thought, as she removed her gloves and fumbled clumsily for her handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, feeling like a bad actress enacting grief.
No wonder they went away, these people, so many of them, out of this hellish place, to warmer ones. Which is why they came to my country and that is why I am here now, sniffling and snuffling, walking like a brown ghost, among people who don’t know I exist. There was a faint satisfaction in thus relating history to her own self, but the complacency soon evaporated when she remembered the manner of her arrival.
Heathrow Airport. And the man who took her passport saying something she didn’t understand. The contempt on his face when he realized she didn’t. ‘Bloody women,’ she heard him mutter. ‘Why the bloody hell do they come here?’ She had been too overcome by amazement—how could she be defeated by the accent, she who knew the language so well?—to retort, to show her anger. To him, she was obviously no different from the group of women—Pakistanis?—in beautifully colourful brocade-bordered salwars and kameezes, who giggled softly each time they were asked a question, covering their faces with the ends of their dupattas. She could remember an older woman, also in a salwar kameez, who was stolidly mopping the floor, emptying the ashtrays of butts, and how drab she was, as if she had lost all her colour after staying in this place so long.
‘These bloody women, why the bloody hell do they come here?’
Just a few hours from Bombay. Garlands of tuberoses and marigolds. Faces pressing on her. Voices. ‘Look after yourself. Keep warm. Take care of baby. Write to us. Have a nice time. Have a nice time. Have a nice time.’ The sickening fragrance of the dying, crushed tuberoses. Garlands abandoned in chairs, curled up like sleeping snakes. The heat. So warm that the coat she held over her arm seemed huge and heavy, a burden she could not carry. Sweat trickling down her face, her back, her thighs. Now, walking home, it seemed so far away, it could have happened to someone else. Not to her. Not to this woman dolefully wheeling a pram down an empty, grey street. It was strange how deserted she felt, deserted not only by the others, but by all the myriad beings that had gone into the making of her.
An excited girl running, her plaits flying behind her. A girl, pleased and tremulous, wearing a sari for the first time. Pink. Flecked with gold. A jubilant woman crying out… England? Suddenly she began to hum. Her voice came out hoarse, as if with disuse. She cleared her throat and began again. Only after a moment she realized that it was the tune of a song from an old Hindi film. A song, popular once, buried in oblivion now, the singer forgotten, perhaps dead. Why had it returned to her here and now? And the words … m
y heart is breaking into a thousand pieces … how melodramatic they sounded, how silly! Specially when she said them, hummed them rather, to the same tune, in English. Involuntarily she giggled, then abruptly stopped. What if someone heard her?
She looked guiltily around, then up. Yes, there she was, the woman in the window. Almost invariably there at this time of the day. At one time, hungering for company, for conversation, for female gossip, she had hoped … for what? A smile, maybe, a wave, perhaps a hallo, or even, ‘Why don’t you come in and join me for a cup of tea?’ Now, she was just the woman-in-the-window. A woman in a pink cardigan, a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth, doing God knows what, because there was never any more of her. She was cut off at waist level. A cut-out figure, pasted on cardboard, flat and one-dimensional.
She resumed her humming. ‘They lie all around you, you trample them under your feet, my heart….’ A little louder, defiantly louder, as she passed under the window. But the woman would never hear her. Not with a sheet of glass between them. In fact, she had an odd feeling that, even if the woman raised her head from what she was doing and looked at the road, she would not see her. For her, there would be nothing. Just an empty street.
Back home. She banged the door hard. Noise, any noise was welcome. Once, when her husband had gone north for a seminar, she had lived with silence for a whole week. The only words she had heard had been—Ta, love. Sorry, dear, we don’t have that. How many bottles, darling? A nation of shopkeepers. Well, at least there was that; which is why she haunted the little shops instead of the large self-service stores, where people walked around her, not seeing her at all, their faces knit in concentration as they stared, as if hypnotized, at the shelves. In the little shops, sometimes they talked to you. Once a girl had even said—haven’t seen you for ages, dear. And she, feeling suddenly uplifted at that, had begun an explanation. But the girl had turned away from her to serve someone else and that was the end of that!
She was ashamed to show how much it meant to her, these brief moments of contact. Once a man, walking on the common, his beautiful dog prancing about him, had said, ‘Missing your lovely warm country, eh?’ The tears, taking her by surprise, had spurted out of her eyes. Turning her face away from him, she had said briefly, almost curtly, ‘Yes,’ and walked away.
Never let anyone know your humiliation. Never reveal how shamefully, humiliatingly isolated you are. How utterly lonely. Keep writing home … yes, it’s wonderful here. I’m having a lovely time. I’m enjoying myself terribly. (Terribly? Why terribly? And yet, how appropriate it was, they would never know, all those who read her letters, envying her, perhaps, her experience.)
The smell of cooking, strange cooking, enfolded her as she stood in the hall, putting away the pram. It filled her with unease, reminding her that she shared the house with strangers.
‘We have to share the bath and toilet with the people downstairs,’ her husband had told her.
‘Who are they?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never met them.’
‘Indians?’
‘No, but coloured. Like us.’
‘I can’t possibly use the same bath as strangers,’ she had complained once.
‘For God’s sake, don’t act the pure Brahmin. Not here. Not now. It’s going to complicate matters immensely.’
Pure Brahmin? For an instant, she had been outraged, the words clashing against the image she had of herself as a liberal. But maybe he was right. And she couldn’t bring herself to use the bathtub. She finally solved the problem by filling a bucket under the kitchen tap and having a bath standing in the tub. Every day. But they got back at her with these strange, nauseating smells. She felt suddenly nostalgic for a curious medley of odours. Jasmines in summer. The night queen. Ripe mangoes. Fresh ghee, liquid and brown. Spices.
She closed the door, shutting out the smells. ‘I have a headache,’ she said to herself. Her words made a small dent in the silence. She’d got into the habit of talking to herself recently. The headaches had become a habit too. She had learnt to put up with them, though, after her last visit to the doctor. She had to wait ages in the small room reeking of the odours of sickness. And tobacco. The cough-cough of smokers and patients. The regular whine of the swinging door telling them that one more patient had come in, or gone out.
‘Headache?’ the doctor had asked her when she went in, scarcely looking at her. ‘All women have headaches. Tension, nervousness, imagination. Here, take this.’
Not even the pretence of a cursory examination. A prescription handed blindly. She took it and walked out and the next patient walked past her unseeingly. The door whined behind her. No one looked up.
It frightened her, the way people looked past her, through her, over her, beyond her. The Tube, particularly, terrified her. Rows and rows of faces—all blank. So many eyes that never seemed to rest on her, or, if they did, registered blankness. Some nights, after she had gone through this ordeal, she flung herself at him hungrily, greedily. Sometimes he responded. But it was only a fumbling in the dark. (So many clothes. His hand, groping, unsure, often missing the mark.) And then, when it was over, they turned their backs on each other in perfect unison, as if they had practised this earlier. He went off to sleep—she could hear his soft, steady snores—but she lay in the dark trying to burrow through the silence.
Most of the time, however, he ignored her frantic overtures. As if it shocked him. Or embarrassed him. Or, maybe the simple truth was that he was too tired. He would turn his back on her, and there was only her own self left. She would pass her hands, softly, tentatively at first, fiercely later, over her own body. But there was no reassurance there. She had to get that reassurance—yes, you’re here, you’re real—from someone else. And so, giving it up, she would lie in the dark, in the silence. An absolute silence, not even the tick-tock of a clock to ruffle it. Sometimes, rarely, the baby cried. Soft, whimpering cries, stifled almost by the bedclothes. Muted, as if they came from the depths of a deep, dark grave. Strange to think of graves. But, why not? More natural, really, to think of graves here, rather than a brightly burning, scorching, cleansing funeral pyre.
Dinner was done at last. And just in time. Her timing was now almost perfect. It would never do to be late and miss something. At first she used to switch on the TV only in the evenings. Then she found herself watching, avidly waiting, for any programme—for school children, for toddlers. Now she kept it switched on even when there was nothing, just a blank screen, as long as there was some music. Once or twice the set had broken down. She had watched the wavy zigzag lines, the distorted faces, the crazy cut-up images in despair, fiercely willing them to be normal again. Ultimately they had had to call in the repair man. A huge, coloured man who whistled as he worked, chucked baby under the chin and said things to her she couldn’t understand because of his accent. And then he had done; and though it was bliss to have the TV working again, she had been sorry to see him go. She had rushed to the window in time to see him stride purposefully away, distant now from her as if she had never been. She had gone back thankfully then to the TV.
She sat down now to watch. The room was filled with noises; no more silence. It became warm, peopled by faces that were more real than the rows of blank faces outside. These people—they were all her friends. She was not alone now, because they didn’t exclude her. A woman smiled, and it was at her she was smiling. A man winked, and they became fellow conspirators, she and he. She was part of them, a real person, not a ghost whom people looked through. A ghost who moved invisibly in a grey world peopled by blank-faced strangers.
She sat and stared at the screen, uncaring really of what it was she was watching. Once she got up to feed the baby and change him. He went off to sleep after that, a smile on his face, as if the noise and the warmth had reached him too. As if he was, like her, cocooned in a sense of belonging. Once she went to the window, wondering vaguely why her husband had not come home as yet. She twitched the Curtain aside. Nothing but a grey s
ilence. A grey fog that cut her off from everything. A figure, shapeless, muffled and silent passed under the dim, jaundiced light of a street lamp. She shivered. Once, in a fit of bravado (Look, I’m not scared! Look, where I’m standing! Look, no hands!) she had gone out alone into a night like this one. And it had tasted—no, smelt—flat and dull, like the smell of her own loneliness.
Hastily she dropped the curtain and came back into the room. The screen was now full of dancing, singing boys and girls. What was it about? She didn’t care. It was enough that they kept silence away from her. In a little while, he would come home and she would get up to serve their dinner. After they had eaten, he would sit and watch for a while, then go to bed. But she would sit on, watching until the last possible moment. And then ….
No, she would not think of that now. It was enough to watch, to smile, to respond, to know that, at least at this moment, she was not alone.
It was the Nightingale
The last time, I say to myself, as I fit my key into the latch. Then I smile at myself—what a portentous phrase! I have always had a hatred of exaggerated emotions, I have learnt to play down my own—most of the time anyway. Today is one of those other times when I can’t. I’m brimming, spilling over with feeling. Before opening the door, I make a fierce attempt to cork them in. I succeed, but it makes no difference. The atmosphere in the house is redolent with emotion. His resentment and anger come across to me, nebulous like a rising mist, but tangible enough to choke me. All the way home I have been indulging in a savage self-flagellation. Thinking—how shall I excuse myself? How shall I show him how desperately sorry I am about coming home late? Now, seeing his face, everything dries up in me. There is nothing I can say which will undo what I have done. And yet, there is no anger on his face. Only I, who know him so well, can sense the storm behind the imperturbable calm. I know his very stillness is intended to be a loud reproach.
The Intrusion and Other Stories Page 9