We go on talking but I can see a faint shadow on his face—he is puzzled and doesn’t know what it is that is puzzling him. I move closer to him, into his arms and the shadow is gone. And the tune comes back, flows into my mind, on to the tip of my tongue.
‘And Then…?’
‘I tried and I tried but I just couldn’t pronounce "r".’
‘Never?’
‘No, never. So everyday my grandfather made me stand in front of him and say,’ "Dharmakshetre, kurukshetre". And you know what I said?’
‘What?’
‘Dhalmakshetle Kulukshetle.’
She laughs delightedly. ‘And then?’
‘And then? Let me … yes, my grandfather said he would give me a present, anything I wanted, the day I said the words correctly. So I tried harder. And one day I said it correctly—just like that. Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre.’
‘And you got your present?’ she asks anxiously.
‘Yes, I got it. My grandfather would never cheat.’
‘What did he give you? What did you ask?’
What did I ask for? What did I want? It takes me some time to remember, tunnelling my way back through the years to the child I had been.
‘I wanted those sweets, they called them orange and lemon sweets, I don’t know if you still get them. They were like this….’
As I draw a crescent shape in the child’s warm sticky palm, something stirs in me and I can see myself as that jubilant child, dancing in glee. But what has that child to do with this woman sitting here? I let the memory go and turn back to Dipali who is impatiently prodding me, saying, as she always does, ‘And then?’
‘And then ….’
The door opens and Asha comes in. ‘Not asleep yet?’ she asks the child reproachfully, but somehow the reproach seems to be directed at me and I squirm uneasily. Dipali, however, bursts out excitedly with the story I have just told her.
‘Mummy, Mummy, do you know when Amma was small she could never say "r" properly and her grandfather said to her….’
For some reason, as the story is told by the child to her mother, it seems to wither, it begins to sound foolish and made-up; and the joyous child we had evoked so vividly between us seems to slink away abashed. It makes it somehow worse that Asha listens patiently to the end and then says, ‘That’s nice. And now you must go to bed.’ She tucks her back into the blanket firmly. Ignoring her protests. ‘If you don’t go to sleep right now, I won’t take you to the beach tomorrow.’
‘Only five minutes, Mummy, just one more story. Amma said….’
‘Amma is busy. Close your eyes.’
‘All right then, you tell me a story….’
I leave them to it, the mother and the child, unwilling to be an accomplice of either and wander into the kitchen where the food is all ready, waiting to be heated and transferred into the serving dishes.
‘Amma is busy…’ I know Asha is not cruel, she didn’t mean it that way, it was just said to quieten Dipali. Nevertheless, it’s as if she had rubbed salt into my wounds. Amma is busy. When the truth is that there’s not a single thing I have to do in this, my son’s, house except look after my own needs.
Sunita, mopping the floor, asks me, ‘Dipali sleeping?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Tai knew it—she said she won’t sleep if she has someone to talk to….’
Is that meant to be against me? I’m getting paranoid, I tell myself, but for a moment my mind goes blank, my body doesn’t seem to belong to me at all and the babble of sound from the living room seems as distant as the sound of the sea.
‘Ajji, just move a little ….’
Sunita is trying to nudge me aside, to wipe the corner I’m blocking her from. And there is Vishwa putting his head round the door, calling, ‘Asha ….’
‘She’s with Dipali, trying to put her to sleep.’
‘Oh!’ He goes out but instantly returns to ask, ‘What are you doing here, Amma?’
‘Nothing. Asha hasn’t left a thing for me to do.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that, I meant why don’t you come out and meet some of our friends.’
‘What interest will they have in me, Vishwa? I have nothing to say to anyone, you know that.’
He hastily covers up his look of impatience, but not before I’ve seen it. ‘They’d like to meet you, Amma. Come out just for a while.’
I know he wants to get back to his guests, I know he’d like to feel easy about me, I know his annoyance is lurking just round the corner….
‘All right. But I’ll send Asha out first and come when Dipali is sleeping.’
‘Oh good!’ He sounds, even looks enthusiastic, but bitterness wells up in me. What’s good about it? What choice do I have? Why can’t they leave me alone in my dark hiding hole? Doesn’t he know what an ordeal meeting strangers has become for me? It’s as if the fort I was so safely living in has suddenly fallen and I’ve been left vulnerable and defenceless. And to meet people’s pitying looks, their words of sympathy, is like going through it all over again.
‘She’s sleeping,’ Asha whispers, gently closing the door behind her. She hesitates then says, ‘Amma, why don’t you come out for a while?’
‘A little later. You go on now. Vishwa was looking for you.’
They’ve talked it over, they’ve discussed the problem of what is to be done with me when they have this party. They think they can placate me by asking me to join them ….
‘It isn’t a party, Amma, just a few friends we’re inviting. We’ve been putting it off for so long, we thought ….’
Earlier, perhaps, the thought would have hurt me—they’ve forgotten, they can go on with their lives as if nothing has happened. Not any more. Do anything, call it anything, I want to say, but leave me out of it. But they can’t do that, and it’s easier to give in than to resist. But sometimes, like now, I feel as if all the sorrow, all the bitterness I have stored within me will burst out and engulf us all. It frightens me.
The tumult dies down, as it always does, at the sight of the child who is now sleeping. But even my pleasure in her is tainted. I have to keep reminding myself—she is not mine, not mine. My husband, I had said and he went away leaving me alone. My Vishwa, I had thought and now I am just a burden and a responsibility to him. My Anju, I had cried out and she walked away from me without compunction or pity.
I can see that scene now, the two of us in the garden: I, pinning up the washing on the line and Anju playing with a hard pebbly lime she had picked off the ground. Ceaselessly throwing it up and catching it again in her hands. And saying to me, ‘Amma, I’m going to the States.’
As I listened to her plans, I stared at the clothes, flapping noisily, wetly in the wind and thought—only my clothes on this line now, only my clothes. The woman next door came out into her yard and called out something to us, something I could not hear, as if Anju’s words were drowning out all other sounds. But what was Anju saying? I had heard nothing after the first words—Amma, I’m going to the States.
‘Let’s go in, Amma,’ Anju said as I went on staring at the woman pulling her baby’s clothes off the line. ‘We can’t talk here.’
Is there something about the outdoors that blunts the edge of emotions? Does melodrama shrivel in the open air? For it was only when we went into the house that the impulse rose in me to cry out—don’t go away, don’t leave me alone and go away, don’t leave me alone here, I’m frightened ….
Even as the words framed themselves in my mind, I remembered that they had been spoken by Anju herself. It was her first day at school and as I was leaving her, she had clutched at me and sobbed, ‘Amma, don’t go away, don’t leave me here and go, take me with you, I want to go home with you.’
But I had hardened my heart, prised my hand from hers and walked away.
My pleas died unspoken. Instead I said, ‘You should get married first, Anju.’
‘Amma, I’ve told you so often …’
As we argued, her determination beca
me clear to me. She was going. I could rage, throw a tantrum, burst into tears—nothing would stop her. And yet, knowing I could change nothing, I went on arguing until irritation began to creep into her words, desperation into mine. Both Vishwa and she had been gentle with me since that terrible day when my life went to pieces; her asperity now hinted that her patience had worn thin, that she was going back to her normal relationship with me. I was not prepared for that—not yet.
Finally I used my most powerful weapon. ‘You know your father wouldn’t have liked you to go without getting married. You know how he used to worry about you.’
‘Appa? Appa knew I was going. I’d talked to him and he understood my point of view.’
The treachery of the dead is worse than the treachery of the living; it is unalterably final. Ever since Anju spoke, the thought would not leave me—why didn’t he tell me? Why did he keep this from me? And the worst thought—how many more things did he keep from me?
Suddenly, that day, I had felt a distaste for both of us, Anju and me, using the dead man as a weapon, moulding him, like children do with plasticine, to the shape we wanted. Perhaps that was why I said what I should not have done. ‘You’re selfish, Anju, you always were. You don’t think of anyone but yourself.’
‘Selfish? Maybe. But I’d rather be selfish than become like you.’ Seeing my face, she had gone on more gently, ‘Amma, would you really like me to sacrifice myself for you? And become bitter and hate you and myself for it? No, Amma, I can’t, I won’t do that. And it’s my life, after all. Let me live it the way I want.’
What about my life? And I had thought then of my grandmother who had six sons and two daughters and of her hard calloused hands that never stopped working. And of how she died, as she had lived, in the midst of her children and grandchildren.
Anju and I declared an uneasy truce after that day. She went ahead silently with her preparations and I did all I could to help her. But on the day she was to leave I told her I would not go to the airport with her. She accepted that too silently. Yet at the moment of leaving she suddenly clung to me, crying out, ‘Amma’. And I thought of that child I had taken to school all those years back. She recovered herself immediately and saying, ‘Look after yourself, Amma,’ left.
I sat up that whole night. Anguished cries and moans seemed to seep through the silence of the night as if all the cries I had stifled through the years were coming back to me. In a while the baby next door began to cry; mingling with its melancholy wails was the grandmother’s maddeningly repeated tongue-clucking. Soon both died away and there was an absolute silence.
My mind jumped from fact to fact, from emptiness to emptiness. In the early morning the lights went off, leaving me in darkness. I sat where I was. I won’t get up; I thought; I won’t do anything, it makes no difference to anyone now, whatever I do or don’t.
But habits, our daily routine, are the best crutches. At the servant’s knock I got up. While she washed the front yard, swishing the water noisily around with her broom, I switched on the copper heating pot in the bathroom and boiled the milk. I made coffee for both of us and had a bath. Then the woman left and fear and loneliness came whistling in through the bolted doors. I could smell both, I could feel them about me, I could almost taste them. At that moment, I longed even for the extremity of my grief of those early days. That sorrow had been a companion keeping loneliness at bay. It had filled my life, leaving no room for emptiness. The silence was terrible, but when the phone rang, shattering it, it was worse.
‘Amma?’ It was Vishwa. ‘Anju got off all right. I’ve just come back from the airport. She asked me to ring you … Amma, what’s the matter? Amma, Amma, what is it? What’s the matter?’
‘What shall I do, Vishwa? What shall I do?’
I could say nothing else. It was as if there were no other words in the world, as if I knew no other words.
Vishwa came the next day and brought me here to Bombay.
‘Amma,’ Vishwa’s voice rouses me from my thoughts, ‘come on, we’re waiting for you,’
The smiles drop off, the laughter and the talk falter when I enter the room. Does sorrow put barriers round a person? Do I carry my grief with me like a shield keeping people away? For the first time I remember Anju, who met me head-on, with a fierce honesty, with gratitude. It hurt, but at least I did not feel invisible like I do now, when they turn away from me—with relief, I can see, even if they try to conceal it—and go back to their talk.
‘I am Nobody. Who are you? Are you Nobody too?’
Anju had scrawled the lines on a piece of paper and shoved it under the glass top of her table. ‘What’s that?’ I had asked her.
‘Poetry,’ she had said unwillingly, reluctant as always to share anything private with me.
‘What kind of poetry is that? Who wrote that?’
‘Emily Dickinson,’ she had said curtly.
‘I can’t understand such poetry,’ I had said. But now, suddenly, I know what she meant, that Emily Dickinson, whoever or whatever she was.
‘I am Nobody. Who are you? Are you Nobody too?’
‘Hello, Auntie.’ I turn round. It’s a young woman, her short curly hair standing like a halo round her face. ‘Do you remember me? I’m Anju’s friend. I used to visit you people when you were in Delhi.’
‘You’re Shaku.’
‘That’s right. I’ve put on so much weight, I was sure you wouldn’t recognize me.’ The face breaks into a smile. ‘Just last week I visited your house in Bangalore, but it was locked.’
‘What were you doing in Bangalore? I thought your husband lived in Kanpur?’
‘Still does. I’ve left him.’
I don’t know what to say. After a moment I falter out a ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not. Not sorry I left him, I mean. I’m sorry I married him, though. He was, still is, I guess, a skunk. A mean skunk. Just my tough luck to have married him. Oh well,’ she sighs and shrugs. ‘And to think that I believed in that fairy-tale nonsense of "and they lived happily ever after". I wonder if anyone ever does that.’ She sees my face and quickly adds, ‘I’m very sorry, Auntie, about Anju’s dad I mean ….’
Her hand moves out to meet mine but I keep mine balled into a fist in my lap, rejecting her sympathy. What can she know of my grief, this young woman who has walked so lightly away from her husband and marriage?
As if she guesses at my feelings, she changes the subject and begins to tell me about herself, about the job she now has in Bangalore.
‘When I wrote to Anju about it, she wrote back asking me to meet you. She seems very anxious about you.’
Guilt. It breathes through every word of the letters she writes so often, in every word she speaks to me on the phone.
‘I should have come to you right away, but I got caught up in lots of things. You know how it is—new place, new job, etc. And then, when I finally did go, they said you’d come here. So I rang up Vishwa—I’m here for just a few days—and invited myself over.’
‘Where do you stay in Bangalore?’
‘Nowhere right now.’ She grins. ‘I was in a Working Women’s Hostel. I wasn’t very popular with the management there. I asked too many questions, made too many demands. What the hell, I thought, they take so much money, they owe us something. But they seemed to think I should be grateful to them for giving me a place to stay. Now I know what they mean.’ She gives me a wry smile. ‘You can’t imagine, Auntie, how hard it is getting a place. What, they ask, wherever I go, no husband? You’re living alone? As if it means I’m going to have ….’ She bites off her words, realizing perhaps who she is talking to, coughs and lamely ends, ‘It’s hard.’ Then she suddenly bursts into a flurry of words. ‘I was wondering, Auntie, whether you could give me a room in your house? It would be a strictly business proposition, of course. I mean I would pay. And it wouldn’t be very inconvenient, for you, would it? I mean, you’re all alone now….’
How dare she! I can feel my hackles rising. There’s a sens
e of being humiliated, of being exposed in my poverty, my shame ….
‘I won’t be a nuisance, I’ll eat out, I’ll observe all the rules you lay down ….’ She flings promises recklessly. My silence finally seems to sink in and she asks me doubtfully, ‘You are going back, aren’t you? Or will you be living here with Vishwa?’
Back? To be alone again? I push down the panic and say, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought of anything. I must talk to Vishwa, ask him about it.’
When she stands up, in spite of the cheerful smile on her face, I know she’s disappointed. She realizes it’s a refusal. But I cannot sympathize with her. She can’t feel anything, no woman who speaks that way of her marriage and her husband can.
At night I wake up, as has become usual for me now, after two hours of sleep. But the thoughts that come crowding into my mind are not the usual ones of pain and loneliness. Instead I find myself thinking of Shaku. And is it the story I was telling Dipali of me and my grandfather that brings Pandu into my mind? Pandu and his two wives—Madri who died and Kunti who lived on. And Anju saying—it’s my life, Amma. I thought she doesn’t care about me, but she asked Shaku to see me. Is that a hint? But how can I take on the responsibility of a strange young woman? I promise I won’t be a nuisance, Auntie. How do I know? And what if…? No, I just can’t take on any burdens now. But how long can I stay here?
Dipali whimpers in her sleep. I wait for Asha to come and croon her back to sleep as she always does; when she doesn’t, I go to Dipali myself and sit by her until she is asleep again, her hand holding mine tight. Anju holding my hand, Vishwa holding my hand … but that’s the past, that’s all over. It’s I who am holding their hands now. How long can I do that, how long? And yet what else is there …? Finally I calm myself with the thought—why am I agonizing? I’ll leave it to Vishwa, I’ll ask him what to do.
The Intrusion and Other Stories Page 16