‘You’ve lost weight,’ she says at once. It is said as if it is an accusation.
‘And you’re still eating those greasy office lunches.’
‘You’re darker too,’ she goes on, ignoring my words and welcoming smile, still scrutinizing me.
Well, of course. It’s the sun. In Bombay you don’t really get to know the sun. It keeps it’s distance. When it approaches you, it does so deviously—from between buildings, through chinks in curtains, filtering through sparse foliage. Here, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, between you and the sun. It attacks you directly with it’s two weapons: heat and glare. And you have nothing to fight back with, except the pigment in your skin.
The next hour is chaotic. I have to cope with tea, the children’s excited conversation, and Sushama following me about chattering. I can relax only when the table has been cleared. The children instantly go out and resume some game of theirs. The three of us sit out in cane chairs, the only sound at first being the hissing noise Sitabai makes between her teeth as she washes up, squatting at the low tap a little distance away. We watch the sunset. The vast panorama of the sky is always overwhelming here. Now, it is dramatic too, a corner of the stage illuminated as if a spotlight has been turned on to it. It is like a flamboyant finale when the sun finally goes down in flaming colours. Each time I see this, I feel some kinship with those ancient Aryans who sang paeans to the Being who made all this possible. A tinge of freshness touches my jaded mind. All at once it is evening. There is that curious hush which is only an interlude before the night sounds begin. We speak in low voices now as if it would be wrong to break this stillness. The children are unaffected and their high, excited voices punctuate our conversation.
‘God, it’s wonderful here,’ Sushama says. ‘Peaceful. All the same I wouldn’t like to live here. Terrible.’
I know what she means. Everything here is limitless, immense. Your eyes go easily all the way to the horizon. The immensity makes nothing of you and your concerns. Sometimes it soothes me, this idea of my own insignificance. Often, however, I am angered that it makes so many years of my life take on the grey colour of futility.
Vasant is now arguing with Sushama and she retorts with spirit. She says, ‘Your Agricultural Research Station’ and ‘You research scientists’ with a sharp note of sarcasm in the words. ‘You Bombay people’ he says disparagingly, and I know he will soon go on to ‘You lawyers’ and the final withering ‘You women lawyers’. He gets to it at last and then says, ‘And as if that isn’t enough, you have to turn into a feminist as well.’
I wonder why the word ‘feminist’ invariably sounds derogatory. Is it the way it is pronounced? But Sushama is irritated by the very word. ‘I’m not a feminist,’ she says firmly. ‘That’s too vague. What we’re trying to do is very concrete. We want women everywhere to become aware of their legal rights. Nothing more.’ She has already told me she is here to attend a meeting in a town very near us. ‘We’ve roped in the local women’s clubs and associations,’ she says and tells us what they’re planning. Even Vasant gives up his supercilious pose and listens. Seriously. And I remember their last encounter.
She had fought against his decision to take up this job which brought us here. ‘Look,’ she had said, ‘you have an alternative. A perfectly good job in Bombay. But if you go there, what about Hema? What can she do there in the middle of nowhere?’
‘She can teach. Or something. There are schools in the next town.’
‘For God’s sake, man, she’s a lawyer, not a teacher. Would you change your profession that way overnight?’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Why?’
Unable to move him, she had turned on me. ‘You’re a defeatist,’ she had said. ‘You’re just giving up.’
‘Well, what can I do? This is the work he always wanted to do. So he’s going anyway, in any case. Period. Maybe I can continue here with the children—I’ve thought of it. But it means two establishments. Money problems. A week-end, not a vacation marriage. The children without their father for months, me without a husband for months, he without a wife and children for months. So…?’
Now, after listening to Sushama, Vasant suddenly turns to me and says, ‘Look, Hema, why don’t you get involved with this thing of Sushama’s? You can go once a week, maybe….’
You don’t have to feel guilty, I want to say to Vasant. It’s my doing, this coming here. Nobody pushed me into it.
‘Sorry, Vasant, it won’t work,’ Sushama says.
‘Why not?’
‘Ask Hema.’
I move indolently in my chair while I think of what to say. I’m a pure professional, I want to say. Like you. I’m a lawyer, not a social worker. But I don’t say any of this. Instead I mumble, ‘Oh, I’m all right as I am. After all, I’m a good housewife now.’
I’m not being bitter or ironic. I mean it, but somehow it silences the two of them. After an awkward pause, Vasant changes the subject. ‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. They’re starting on the fence tomorrow.’
I have been asking for it for quite a while now. When we first came here, I had had a queer feeling that there was something wrong with this house. Something more than the fact that it was squat, ugly and purely functional. It took me a few days to realize that it was the lack of a fence. You stepped out of the front door and were immediately swallowed up into immensity. It had daunted me and I had begun agitating for some sort of a fencing.
‘Oh good!’ I say.
We are on a safe track now. Vasant tells Sushama about his work and Sushama, impressed, but determined not to show it, says lightly, ‘Well, well, I can see you’re heading for a Padma Shri at least.’ He protests laughingly, but I can see he is pleased. And Sushama goes on, ‘And here she is, the woman behind the successful man, the one to whose support you owe everything, the devoted, self-effacing wife ….’
‘Oh shut up!’ I say, smiling to show I know it is a joke. But the words stay with me. Self-effacing. Suppose you go on effacing yourself until you’re wholly blotted out? For some reason I think of the cry of the new-born. A triumphant assertion of being. Of existing. And I also think of how there is no difference between the cry of a female baby and a male one. When does it become a virtue to stifle that cry?
I don’t know the answer to this question. I only know that I bitterly envy Vasant when he comes home tired, satisfied and full of what he has been doing. Formerly he used to share his day with me. Not any more. I wonder why. Maybe, it’s because I have nothing to offer in exchange. The small cash of my day seems paltry in comparison.
At night, after the children and Vasant have gone to bed, Sushama puts me through a cross-examination. Am I happy here? What do I do with myself? Can I go on this way?
‘I’m busy,’ I tell her. ‘I have enough to do. I cook, I clean, I wash, I iron, I read, I listen to music, help the kids with their lessons, I visit ….’
I am forced to stop for lack of breath and Sushama pounces on me. ‘Visit? Who? Or, is it whom?’
‘Whom, I think. Families like us. There are a few houses on the other side of the farm.’
We visit one another with scrupulous regularity. I have now got used to the monotonous grind of the conversation, the sameness of the topics we touch. What I cannot get used to is the way I feel when I’m with them. It’s like Ido when the minibus moves away from me in the mornings, my own reflection sliding past me in a continuous series. So many identical reflections of my own self—they make me uncomfortable.
‘For God’s sake, Sushama,’ I say finally, ‘don’t make me out to be one of your exploited women. I know all my legal rights.’ She knows when to stop. She gives up and we begin to reminisce. I go to bed in a good mood, but I am surprised by a fierce surge of longing to be one of those women who carry their work about with them—a writer, a painter, a musician….
The next morning they are all to leave at the same time. I rush about getting breakfast ready, suddenly eager to have the house a
nd the day to myself once more. The children shout warnings when they see the bus approach. Sushama smiles and says, ‘Well, when are you coming to Bombay?’
‘I don’t know. Some time.’
‘I may come here myself for another meeting.’
‘Lovely,’ I say, but somehow I don’t look forward to it. In some way, Sushama threatens the tenuous peace I’ve built around myself. The bus comes and they all get in. It begins to move and mechanically I count my reflections … one, two, three, four. Then they are gone. I am sure Sushama is already looking through some papers. Vasant will be reading too, the children squabbling over seats. I go inside and Sitabai asks me, ‘Have they gone? Your friend too?’
There is a gleam in her eye which tells me she is going to grill me about Sushama—is she married and how many children and where does her husband work? I hurry to offer her a bait that will turn her thoughts elsewhere. ‘Sitabai,’ I say, ‘they are coming to put up the fence today. Barbed wire.’
‘Barbed wire?’ Sitabai sniffs in contempt. ‘What’s the use of barbed wire? They should build a wall. It’s safer.’
A wall? As the work goes on and the fence goes up around us, I think of her words. Finally it is done. Five rows of barbed wire. And only then I understand Sitabai’s words. A wall is safer. With a wall, you can’t even see what’s on the other side. But suppose the dangers are inside? What do you do then?
The Cruelty Game
‘It’s bad news,’ my mother said when Father rushed out of the house in his crumpled clothes, a small bag in his hands, ‘your Kumar Uncle is dead.’
Kumar Uncle lived in Bombay and we had seen him very rarely; but the funereal atmosphere in the house got to us and for a day or two we spoke in whispers. When Father returned, he had Sharu and her mother with him. They were to live here, with us, we gathered; it was Grandfather, the whispers went on, who had asked them to come. But strangely enough, when Grandfather came upon us in the garden a few days later, he didn’t seem to know who Sharu was. His eyebrows wrinkled as he stared at her, as if he was trying to remember who this new girl was. Then abruptly he said, ‘Hum hum,’ in an awkward and uncomfortable way and walked off, the cane he was clutching with both his clenched hands wobbling violently. Suddenly he stopped, turned back and said—to my astonishment, he spoke directly to me—‘Look after her. Are you doing that?’
‘Yes, Grandfather,’I said and heard the others sniggering.
‘Look after her!’ Mahesh exclaimed scornfully when Grandfather was a safe distance away. ‘He thinks she’s a baby.’
Actually, Sharu was only two years younger than me, but with her wide open staring eyes and curly hair she did look babyish. Her size too made her look much younger than she was. She was skinny—her ankles and wrists looked as if they would snap if you held them hard—and though she was nearly a year older than Lalita, she was an inch shorter than her. I know, because we measured them both on the wall of the side veranda, Mahesh standing on a stool to make sure the ruler was held absolutely level. When Sharu moved away from under the ruler, Lalita triumphantly cried out, ‘I’m taller, look at that, my line is higher.’
I was almost sure Mahesh had held the ruler slanting for Sharu, but Lalita was my sister and Sharu still a stranger from Bombay. And so I joined the others in chanting ‘Shortie, shortie’, dancing around Sharu at the same time in a kind of triumphant war dance.
Suddenly our cries and shouts died away. Pramila Auntie, Sharu’s mother, had come out of her room and was standing, tall and unsmiling, looking steadily at us. That was the effect Pramila Auntie had on us, on me, at least. She awed me. It was not only that she was, quite unlike the other mothers, calm, imperturbable and unfussy; there was also the dramatic story of Kumar Uncle’s death which set her apart from everyone else. It was Sharu who told us the story and for a few days she basked in the glory that the story shed on her as well.
‘My father was very sick. He was always going to the hospital and when he was at home, he slept on the bed most of the time. One day he and I were playing cards when a crow—no, two crows—came and sat on the window of the room.’
She looked at us, gauging our response to this. Seeing none, she went on, ‘And then our servant told me—if a crow comes in it means something bad will happen in this house. Someone will die.’
Her huge, light-coloured eyes, so glassy as almost to seem like marbles, invited us to take in the enormity of this.
‘Go on,’ we prodded her impatiently, eager to get on to the deadly climax which we knew was coming. We were so fascinated that we didn’t even mention the glistening pearly drop that hung down the tip of her nose, something that was to give us so much delight later. Normally, the drop was sniffed in the moment it reached this perilous stage; but now, engrossed in her story, she forgot all about it.
‘When I told my mother what our bai had said, she was very angry. She said it was all nonsense. But the next day, after I came back from school and was eating my food, I heard my mother scream. I went in and saw her holding my father, shaking him and the bai was trying to hold her. And then my mother fell down, just like that, on the ground and the medicine bottle broke and cut her cheek and the blood poured out. And I thought …’ for the first time she was not looking at us for the effect of her words, ‘I thought she was dead. I tried to wake her, but she wouldn’t. And the bai told me she had fainted. And then …’ she looked hesitantly at us and I knew she was going to lie, ‘I also fainted. For hours and hours.’
She seemed relieved that none of us countered this, that we received it in a respectful silence. More confidently she went on, ‘And when my mother woke up—and I woke up also,’ she hastily added, ‘she held me tight and said—"you are all I have now. I don’t have anyone else."’
Her normally bloodless face was suffused with blood as she said this. And now at last she sniffed, drawing in the hanging drop just before it ran down her upper lip with the deftness of long practice.
‘You are all I have now.’ How strange the words sounded to us, specially to me whose mother’s usual words were: ‘Maya, what were you doing all this time?’ ‘Maya, you’re the eldest, don’t you have any sense of responsibility?’ ‘God, look at the state of your clothes. Why has God given me this daughter?’
It appeared Sharu’s mother never said ordinary things like these. As a matter of fact, we rarely heard her say anything at all. It was Sharu who told us all the things she said. ‘My mother says….’ ran through her talk like a refrain.
Though I wanted fervently to believe in Sharu’s dramatic story, it was somehow difficult to imagine that this silent, composed woman could have spoken and behaved like the distraught person of Sharu’s story. Her composure was a total contrast to Sharu’s frenzied behaviour. After Sharu started school, the moment she came home she flung herself at her mother, hugging her, clinging to her as if they had been parted for days. Her mother accepted all this silently. But I noticed how, if Sharu was late, she paced up an down, up and down, until she came home. I had presumed that like all of us Sharu would go to the school of which Father was the Principal. It was a shock when I saw her one day dressed in the smart uniform of the convent school. ‘If she can go to that school, why can’t I?’ I attacked Father.
‘If you too desert your poor father’s school, who will come to us?’
‘Mahesh and Lalita are in your school. And Geeta and Gopal.’
‘It won’t be fair, will it, to send you alone to a different school?’
‘Then why is it fair to send Sharu? And you can send all of us to the convent school.’
‘Where’s the money to come from?’
It was my mother who said that and I could see that, unlike Father, she wasn’t joking.
‘How does Sharu’s mother have the money?’
‘Oh, she’s smart, she knows how to get around people ….’
Father hushed her, but soon everyone was speaking about Grandfather paying for Sharu’s schooling. It was strange how all the wom
en had become friends since Pramila Auntie came home. Pramila Auntie didn’t seem to mind that they rarely spoke to her. Her work done, she went to her room and stayed there. I went in once to give her a letter and saw her sitting in that bare ugly room—all the rooms in our house were like that, the paint peeling, the plaster falling, cobwebs decorating every corner—doing nothing. She never spoke even when she saw us tormenting Sharu; she just looked at us. I don’t know what that look did to the others; as for me, it made me want to crawl away, somewhere far away from those eyes of hers.
Why did we torment Sharu like that? We were not savages, we were not brutes. My mother often spoke of, ‘Your fate being written on your forehead’. Perhaps Sharu’s fate of being a butt was written there, on her high smooth forehead, bordered by dark, curly hair which dipped to a point in the centre in an intriguing widow’s peak. We realized early enough, soon after the shine of her unusual dramatic plight had worn off, that it was ridiculously easy to make a butt of Sharu. She laid herself wide open to us and each time it happened she seemed wholly taken by surprise. And then came back to us once again, her eyes as wide and trusting as before.
There was the time we took her to the deep pit at the back of our compound, the pit that had, perhaps, at one time been used to make compost—in those long-ago days when Grandfather had been a District Judge and the house had had a garden and a mali.
‘We go down there to play a special game,’ Mahesh told Sharu.
‘Want to join us?’ Sharu nodded. ‘Okay then, jump in. You first, then I, then Maya ….’
She jumped. I suppose she could have broken her legs, her arms or something; but she only grazed her knees and her forearms. We could see them bleeding as she stood there, looking up at us expectantly, waiting for us to join her. Even when she finally realized she had been tricked, her eyes only showed enormous surprise at our treachery.
‘But you said—you said …’ she stammered. Her bewilderment only increased our hilarity. And it was only after we walked away from her that her wails began.
The Intrusion and Other Stories Page 13