So as we glue each picture back, you listen, sometime during the night, you rest your head in my lap, as if you are five years six years old, your eyes wide open as I tell you a fairy tale for the very first time.
You laugh when I tell you how difficult it is to buy a candle on your first birthday because it’s a Sunday and all shops are closed and we finally get one but it’s not a birthday candle, it’s a tall one that’s used to light the room. That’s why the candle is the oddest, biggest thing in your birthday picture.
And you slip into sleep, I do not wish to wake you up. I keep looking at your face, your eyes closed, your hair tangled, in need of a comb or brush, a wash. The glue has dried on your fingers, your sweater is streaked with dust from the album and I stay perfectly still, I don’t want to move.
It’s been such a long time since I have held you, I want to feel your weight against me for as long as I can.
~
‘It’s raining,’ he says when he calls back.
‘I didn’t even know.’ I have been inside the house the whole time.
‘It’s very light rain but it will cool us down. We needed it.’
‘What have you been doing?’
‘I haven’t been able to sleep since I knew she was here. I want to meet her but you are right, there’s no hurry, I will wait.’
‘I have told her about us, I don’t know if she heard.’
‘Don’t make it about us. This is about her. Let’s find out why she is here.’
‘You are right.’
‘I am up the whole night so let me know if you need anything.’
‘Sure.’
‘I love you,’ he says.
MAN
Love Letter
Taxi Driver is gone.
And he is back from The Leela, in Apartment Complex, in his house, in The Room.
This time, Balloon Girl doesn’t follow him, she must be tired after all she’s done for him through the day, and although he knows she will return if he wishes her to, he needs to be alone. His body aches as if he’s been beaten all over which, in a way, he has, when Taxi Driver thrashed around while he held him down – like a fish out of water, just before it’s sawed in two.
He lies down, imagines himself in the mortuary at AIIMS, on the cement counter, next to the beautiful dead woman still warm. His breath slows down, he opens his eyes and looks along the floor at the coloured umbrella in the corner, at the butterfly mobile that hovers above, catching a faint wind from the air conditioner below.
Earlier this morning, he aired The Room.
Gone is its stale smell; the oak wardrobe is open and, through its doors, he can see Kahini’s winter clothes, coats and sweaters, shoes. He gets up, walks to the wardrobe, takes out a letter from its top drawer, lies down to read it. This is the first letter Kahini wrote to him, each word written in her hand and spoken in her voice, coming to his ears from another life.
~
Dear:
You tell me to write you a love letter and when I ask why, you say no one has written me one, that’s why. A love letter on demand? I think about it, yes, I am in love with you so why shouldn’t I write you one. About the first time we met. So if we do have a life and a future together, this letter will also serve as a record.
I meet you at a friend’s house. By accident. Whose house I do not recall, there are many people in the room, there’s some sort of a farewell for someone. Usually, I never do such things, going to places where I know no one, but this evening, I have a fight with my mother and I need to get away, I need to be alone, with strangers. It’s raining because the entrance to the apartment is wet and muddy where everyone has wiped their shoes on the mat. Inside, the atmosphere isn’t that of a party, that’s quite clear. In fact, it’s quite dull, like the room itself. Cement floor, bare walls, a mattress on the floor pushed against the wall. Some people sit on it, many sit on the floor, some stand. Someone offers me a glass of beer.
I stand in a corner, watch my friend move from one circle to another. Each minute seems to crawl like an hour, I need to use the washroom, someone points it out to me and on my way there, something happens, I am not quite sure what, I have a glass of beer in one hand and a paper napkin in the other. And the napkin, crumpled into a ball, falls to the floor. I bend to pick it up and I discover that I am a few feet away from four or five people who are standing in a circle and chatting. And you are one of them, you are the one I hear. You are the one speaking, the others are listening.
I hear you before I see you. Maybe it’s the weak light in the room or the fact that you are in half-shadow. I remember the words, all of them. Because that’s the sentence that scares me before it makes my heart beat so hard I think everyone in the room can hear.
You say, there is a woman standing behind me who’s just dropped something on the floor and I can tell you right away that she doesn’t have a father, she doesn’t have a father for a very long time and that’s why she’s never happy. She always misses her father.
And you laugh before the sentences, the words, have even registered themselves on those standing around you. Their faces look startled, their smiles awkward. They are all looking at me now, they know I have heard but you act as if you think I am not there, you slap the man next to you on his back and say, let’s go for another beer. They fidget, they turn, I hide myself in the washroom, I lock myself in for at least ten minutes because I don’t want to come out, because I am frightened. I even cry, I think. What happens next I am not going to write down, that’s something you know. What you may not know is that that is when I fall in love with you.
Only yours
K.
~
His eyes closed, he can see Kahini sitting across from him when they first meet for coffee.
She talks, she talks, she talks.
He listens.
And they laugh when she tells him her name means a story and he says, so sit still so that I can read you. She tells him he is right, her father is dead, she asks him how he knows about her father and he says I have the sixth sense and they both laugh over that. She tells him he frightens her. She tells him The Exorcist is released the year she is born and maybe that’s why she loves things that frighten her. And they laugh over that, too. She tells him the small things first. Like how the window pane in her bedroom has a thin crack and although she has taped a cardboard strip to it, it gets so wet in the rain that the paper gives way, the wind keeps slipping in through the tear. Like however hard she tries, she is a terrible student in college, in her final year, and she has no idea how she got through the first three years. Like how difficult it is for her to fall asleep and how she is trying to find a way to get around that. And when she runs out of Alprax, which she gets by bribing the boy who works in the pharmacy, she does the train thing in her head. She imagines she is lying down on the roof of a train hurtling in the dark, very high speed, faster than sound, maybe, and all movements are such that she is perfectly balanced so that if she moves even a fraction of a millimetre, this balance will get disturbed and she will roll off the train’s roof to certain death. She, therefore, lies still, hears the wind whistle and screech in her ears, the howl of the engine, sometimes she can smell the engine’s exhaust, the odour of burnt diesel, and as night falls harder, the sounds begin to fade away, the movements get smoother and smoother, and all this stillness, all this concentration helps because soon the only sound she hears is the shuffle of the coaches, rhythmic, as they glide over the tracks, push her deeper and deeper into sleep.
The way you describe it, you make me want to go to sleep right here, right now, he says, and they laugh over that.
Kahini, you are such a story, he says.
And one morning, six months, seven months later, Kahini runs away from her house to come and live with him.
In Apartment Complex, New City.
CHILD
Cycle Rickshaw
There is a knock on her tarpaulin door.
‘Kalyani?’
; She knows the voice. It’s Dr Chatterjee.
‘Are you there, may I come in?’
She doesn’t reply, she cannot reply, she is lying down on the floor, she tries to speak but each word tears at her insides in a fit of coughing so fierce it pulls her up, forces her to support herself by holding the wall next to her bed. Her head swims, she covers her mouth with a towel which only muffles the noise, brings tears to her eyes. He doesn’t wait for her, he parts the sheet and steps inside. She raises her head to look at him but that hurts, so weak she is.
‘You lie down,’ he says, ‘you don’t need to get up.’
~
He sits on the floor next to her.
‘I got your message,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘I tried calling you but no one was picking up. Remember I told you that you needed to see the doctor but you didn’t listen. But you don’t worry, I am here to help. Mrs Chopra said you called her and said it was TB. Can I take a look at the doctor’s papers?’
Kalyani points to the plastic bag on the floor, propped up against the wall, which has all her reports, the prescription, the record of her medication.
Dr Chatterjee goes through her records. ‘Seems all is on course,’ he says. ‘You just have to keep taking your medicine and wait for it to work.’
Kalyani has gone back to sleep.
Her eyes closed, he can hear her breathe. Shrivelled, she almost disappears under her thin white sheet.
He looks around the house.
~
The last time he was here – and he’s embarrassed remembering that – he was only interested in letting her know how he felt about her. He came with a proposition of sorts but his words got all mixed up, he never says them, and the moment passes. That’s why he keeps avoiding her and it’s only when she calls saying she is not well that he knows he has to see her again, help her in whichever way he can. That’s the only way he can make up for the selfishness that brought him here last time, help him salve his guilt.
Next to a tiny gas stove and a kerosene lamp, squats a small pile of aluminium utensils, bowls, saucers, spoons, each one turned upside down to drain the water in which it was rinsed.
Where do the other four members of the family sleep?
The room is so small Dr Chatterjee cannot imagine the space he thinks they need. For, across from where Kalyani lies, barely four, five steps away, the floor ends in another corner of the room where there’s a quilt wrapped around a pillow. Above it, on the wall, a row of nails is hammered into the cement, these serve as hooks from which clothes hang: two thin red towels, one yellow shirt, a girl’s dress. From one nail hangs a calendar with a picture of a bunch of flowers, the only splash of colour in the room. An incense stick has burnt to its end, dropping a heap of ash on the floor, filling the room with the whiff of a sweetness that mixes with the odours of Kalyani’s medicine.
~
‘You must be Pinki,’ he says to a girl who stands at the entrance, a look of shock and surprise on her face.
She is little more than a child.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I am Kalyani’s sister.’
‘She told me about you, I worked with her in Little House,’ he says, getting up, stepping out of the house.
‘I will wait outside, you go in,’ he says. ‘I just came to check on her.’
‘She stopped going to Little House long ago,’ says the child.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Are you Doctor Babu? She talks about you.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And where do you work, Pinki?’
‘Across the Metro line.’
‘And what do you do?
‘I look after a child, a four-year-old boy.’
Dr Chatterjee watching, Pinki walks to Kalyani’s bed, touches her forehead to check if she has fever, arranges her quilt and her sheet, pats them down, gets a glass of water, helps her sister to get up, helps her with the pills and then, with her thin, small arm behind Kalyani’s neck, helps her lie down again.
‘I am going for a walk in the neighbourhood, I will be back soon, I need to speak with your father,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she says. And Pinki gets back to work, her elder sister fast asleep, preparing her home for the night ahead.
~
The sun is setting, the first residents are returning home, maids and gardeners, nannies and cooks, most of them women and children. Most of the men will return later in the night, from their daily-wage factories off the highway or construction sites scattered across New City, driven home by trucks or hanging from footboards of buses crammed beyond capacity. Children play with mosquitoes in black-brown puddles of water that’s leaked or dripped from no one knows where. Smoke rises from coal ovens being lit for the evening’s cooking. Standing on the raised verandah, outside Kalyani’s room, that runs all along the row of houses in this part of the slum, Dr Chatterjee is aware that he gets a second glance from almost everyone coming into the colony. Of course, he is not unwelcome. For there’s not the slightest hint of hostility or menace in any eye, just the awareness, cold and clear, that he is only a transient who has strayed into their space. That he belongs to the world that exists across the street that skirts their slum, beyond the dumpster that’s not been cleared in a month, beyond the Metro line, where restaurants and apartments, villas and condominiums are. Where CCTVs record entry and exit to check for all suspicious movement, where laminated IDs screen suspects.
~
‘Doctor Babu.’ It’s Baba, Kalyani’s father. He has wheeled his rickshaw in, right up to the entrance to his house.
‘Pinki told me you have been waiting. My shift is still on but I returned to check on Kalyani. She speaks a lot about you.’
‘We all miss her at Little House,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘I heard she is not well.’
‘Please come inside. Have some tea, Pinki says you have been here for a long time.’
‘No need for any tea, I just wanted to find out how she’s doing.’
‘You have seen it for yourself, Doctor Babu, what can I say?’
‘She will be all right. Her TB is the type that can be cured but it will take time and a lot of care.’
‘That’s what the doctor says.’
‘Take my number,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘Call me any time if you have a problem.’
‘There is only one problem, Doctor Babu,’ says Baba.‘Money is always the problem. I have saved some but I don’t know how long that will last. Kalyani’s TB medicine I get for free but I have to buy fruits, fish every day. You have seen how she has become, as thin as a ghost. I don’t know how long I can manage this. You know how it is, I drive a rickshaw, how much can I make? Pinki, you have seen her, she should be in school, but what can I do? We need her money too. Ma and Bhai bring in something but all of us are working very hard and I am frightened that one of us will fall ill.’
His words come in a rush, almost breathless, as if Dr Chatterjee, by his mere presence outside his house, has brought all the hope he needs.
‘Here’s some money for the fruit.’ Dr Chatterjee hands him a 500-rupee note. ‘This should take care of her share for a few weeks, buy fruit for everyone in the family. Let Pinki eat some, too, she is a child, she needs that.’
Baba doesn’t know what to say, how to say it.
He reaches out to touch Dr Chatterjee’s feet.
‘No, no, no,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘You take care of Kalyani, I will keep sending you money for the fruit and the fish.’
‘Please come in, please see Kalyani one time before you leave,’ says Baba.
‘I have seen her, she is sleeping.’
‘No, please come in and take a look.’
~
The room is dark.
Pinki has lit an incense stick, its glowing tip the only light in the room. Kalyani lies in the shadows.
Dr Chatterjee sits down on the floor again, takes Kalyani’s hand in his. It’s cool, damp to the touch. There is no fever, he can smell sweat and sleep on her skin and in her clothes. H
er wrist is so thin he’s afraid the bones inside may break under pressure from his fingers. He gently lowers it, lets it rest on the bed. He feels a slight movement of her fingers.
Kalyani is awake, her eyes are open, she is looking at him. He smiles at her, unsure if she can see him in the dark. He covers her hand with his and she lets him, too weak to draw her hand back.
~
‘Doctor Babu, let me drop you off at the Metro station in my rickshaw,’ says Baba.
‘No need, you go ahead, I will walk.’
‘No, Doctor Babu, I won’t let you,’ says Baba. ‘Please get in, I am going that way.’
Pinki is at the door, she smiles at him, he smiles back as the rickshaw begins to move.
It wends its way through the narrow lanes in the slum, almost scraping the walls on either side, sending dogs and chickens scurrying away. They are out on the street now, Baba says something but Dr Chatterjee cannot hear above the sound of the traffic. This is the evening rush-hour, cars headed for Delhi are backed up almost a mile, crawling to enter the highway. As Baba pedals the cycle rickshaw, Dr Chatterjee can see his thin shoulders strain and stretch under his thin vest, the veins in his calves distended under the skin, sweat dripping down his back, his entire frame balanced on the seat, pushing his slight weight forward, as frail as his daughter who lies in the dark.
MEANWHILE
At the Protest Not Far from the AIIMS Mortuary
He is eighteen and he loves her.
She is eighteen, too, and, of course, like anybody else in love anywhere in the world, he loves everything he sees in her.
The way she looks she talks she walks she turns she eats she bends she sits she writes she reads she lifts she carries the world she does anything. And, again, like anybody else in love anywhere, he loves everything about her that he cannot see and because they are both first-year medical students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, the country’s finest medical college, ranked No. 1 in all college surveys, 200,000 taking the test for fewer than forty seats each year, when he thinks of what he cannot see, the first thing he thinks of is what lies inside her.
She Will Build Him a City Page 24