Three years passed on that footpath. They were moved a few times. Each time the good citizens of Mumbai considered the footpath-dwellers a blight on the landscape, they moved. From one footpath to another, in another street, in another part of town. In each place, there were new people to get used to, new sounds to block out at night, new bus routes for Bikaner and Chandar to learn. Then for another two years they rented a shack in a jhopadpatti— rows of thatched huts with a dirty canal on one side and an array of skyscrapers on the other. As she walked on the street between the huts of the jhopadpatti, Meha would look up at the flats towering above them and think of mosaic floors, concrete walls, a toilet that flushed, water out of taps.
All the money she saved was put into an account at the bank by her memsahib. Every night almost, Chandar and Meha would look over the passbook and she would explain the numbers to him, trying to remember what her mistress had taught her. Here was the credit column, here was Chandar’s monthly salary paid in, here was the fifty rupees in the debit column they took out to pay for firecrackers for Diwali. Slowly, the credit column grew and Chandar and Meha had enough for a down payment on a tiny flat on the outskirts of Mumbai. One bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, a small balcony. Three hundred and fifty-six square feet with walls. It was in one of the big buildings on the sixteenth floor. For the first few months Meha walked up the stairs every day, not trusting the old, clanking lift. It terrified her to get into that iron box with its metal crisscross folding screens. The first time, she held her breath almost all the way up, watching blocks of concrete and open floor spaces rise successively before her eyes. It frightened her to live so far above the earth that she loved. She did not look down from the balcony for many years.
They adjusted to Mumbai life and became Mumbai-ites. Meha survived the big city, thrived in it in fact, and Chandar continued his job as guard at the bank. Those were happy days, with no foreshadowing of what was to come. Bikaner finished his Intermediate and even got a BA in economics and then sat for clerical exams at the Farmer’s Bank.
The first day he went to work, pride in their son nearly killed both Chandar and Meha. She woke early that morning to iron his shirt, his polyester-cum-cotton-weave pants, even his undershirt. That morning as a special treat, Meha put the chappatis and curried eggs in front of Bikaner instead of his father.
Chandar left first in his khaki security guard’s uniform, the name and logo of Farmer’s Bank emblazoned across his chest pocket in red thread. Bikaner left at nine-thirty A.M., a whole hour after his father. Meha cried as she swirled the flame of the aarti around his bright face and marked his forehead with a streak of vermilion.
By the time Bikaner arrived at the bank, Chandar was already on his stool outside the huge glass doors. The heat had begun to pick up and beads of sweat dotted his forehead under his Nehru cap. He leapt up smartly and brought his hand to his forehead.
“Salaam, sahib,” he said, almost choking.
Bikaner stopped and looked at his father. “Bapa …”
“Go, go inside, sahib,” Chandar said, opening the door for him. Waves of air-conditioned air swung out and Bikaner squared his shoulders, wiped his sweaty palms against the front of his shirt and stepped into the bank. Behind him, reverently and firmly, Chandar shut the glass door.
Later he told Meha of this first morning, because she pestered him about it. When he came to this part, she had been anxious. Why are you ashamed? she remembers asking him. Not ashamed, just … now Bikaner is a big man. We should not pull him down, he can go far, he had said.
* * *
Meha shakes her head and closes her eyes, thinking of this man next to her, her husband of so many years. What a big mistake that had been.
No one at the bank knew Bikaner was his son. Chandar saw no reason why they should. His place was here, on the concrete steps leading to the bank—and Bikaner’s was on the other side, enclosed in an English-speaking, ledger-rifling glass world where a uniform did not point out his occupation.
For the next few months, as Chandar salaamed with alacrity and jumped from his stool to open the door, Bikaner’s nods of greeting became more and more distant, just like the other clerks and officers at the bank. The only time he looked at his father was when he was slow in opening the door. But Chandar did not complain. Every day, at least a few times, he flattened his face against the sunglare of the glass and looked with pride at the bent, well-oiled head of his son, the bank clerk. Every day, Chandar came home with his uniform armpits and back ringed with sweat and the soot of Mumbai, and Bikaner returned home flush with the pink coldness of air-conditioning.
Three seconds.
A year later, while Meha pored over horoscopes of girls for Bikaner, he told them he wanted to marry a fellow clerk at the bank. Chandar knew the girl, of course, but he told Meha later that night that she was of a different caste. Even after seventeen years in the city, Meha and Chandar were not used to living shoulder-by-hip with people from all castes. Things were simpler at home where they rarely met or saw other communities. Everything had an unquestioned system—the village well, the patshala, the vegetable market timings, but here…. They thought for a long time, agonizing almost. Bikaner was going to bring home a bride who was not Kshatriya, not of their warrior caste. But things were changed now, everyone said so. Besides, they could not argue with their son. He had told them of the girl, not asked their permission.
Their first shock came when she visited with her parents. Meha cleaned the flat meticulously. The mosaic floor shone with scrubbing; their mattresses and bed linen were piled neatly in one corner; the kitchen counter glowed with trays of golden laddus and jalebis and onion bhajjias; and ginger and cinnamon simmered in the chai water, awaiting the guests and tea leaves. Meha dressed in her second-best sari, a green-and-pink Banarasi silk Chandar bought for her the day Bikaner started working. Then they found they had no paan at home. Chandar rushed out to the corner shop for ten paan leaves and a small packet of betel nuts. On his way back, he met his future daughter-in-law and her parents.
She stopped and looked at him in surprise. “Why, Chandarnath, what are you doing here?”
He stood at the bottom of the stairs gazing at her stupidly, a deep ache beginning to fill him. The only thing he could think of was that Bikaner had not yet told her who his parents were. His words came out with a slow, cold force. “I live here.”
The smile on her face faded briefly. She patted her sleek hair and said, “I am here to see my new in-laws. Bikaner Sahib, you know.”
Chandar nodded, the paan weighing down on his hands. There was nothing to do but follow her upstairs. They got into the lift together, Chandar standing at the very back, counting the levels with his eyes on the ground. At the sixteenth floor, he got out also. The girl said, “Did Bikaner Sahib hire you to do some extra work for today?” Then she ignored him as they all went to the door. Meha saw their confusion and threw questioning glances at Chandar, but he explained nothing, simply slipping into the flat to take his place by his son, his hands folded in a namaste. To her credit, the girl too covered up her shock. A wedding date was arranged.
By now, the tiny flat Chandar bought had tripled in value. It was fully paid off. In Mumbai where every little square inch was covered with either humanity, animals, hoardings or buildings, Chandar and Meha owned three hundred and fifty-six square feet of prime property. The local paper said that even in New York City space was not so expensive. The new daughter-in-law settled in quite happily in the bedroom while Meha and Chandar slept on the floor of the kitchen. The flat was more than adequate compensation for a security guard father-in-law. But the girl insisted that Meha stop working; she could not go to the bank and tell her colleagues that her mother-in-law cleaned other peoples’ latrines, she said.
When she spoke like that, Meha was ashamed too. For many years she had swept and mopped floors, washed vessels and clothes, kneaded atta for chappatis, cleaned latrines, even wiped the snotty noses and the dirty bums of her mistresses
’ children. The money she earned had paid in part for the flat, had paid to get them off the footpath into their own home. But now she was ashamed.
Bikaner and the daughter-in-law had two children; first, a boy born much in the same mold as his father, then a girl who looked like Meha. Then Chandar retired. The bank rewarded his loyalty with a small pension and a gold-plated watch.
Over the years Bikaner had grown more and more irritable with his parents, somehow more restless with himself. Meha wonders if they had done something wrong, if there had been some way to teach him peace along with those alphabet lessons under the halogen streetlamp. It was not something taught, but something earned, she knew. For all their troubles, Chandar and she still smiled. They smile even now. Now when there is no turning back.
Bikaner tried to pass the officer-grade exams three times; his failures reduced him to a caricature in the office. He came home every day in a bitter mood. Meha tried to console him. Better not to be an officer, beta, she had said, too many transfers to small towns and villages. Better to be a clerk. Bikaner shouted at her when she said anything, and Meha was reminded of those early days when he did not know English, when his schoolmates had called him names, lallu, lout, clod, farmer’s son, as though that last were an insult. Bikaner wanted to be a manager one day. Clerks did not become managers. Officers did. Everything snapped the day Chandar retired from the bank. He had come home, his eyes full of tears, the watch gleaming on his wrist.
“Give it to me,” Bikaner said all of a sudden as they were eating dinner.
“What?”
In response Bikaner leaned over, wiped Chandar’s hand on a nearby towel, and slipped the watch off his hand. He said calmly, “I would be an officer if you were not a chowkidar at the bank. Do you think they don’t know that you are my father? Why do you think I have not passed the exam? Because I am a farmer’s son—worse yet, a chowkidar’s son.”
It was as though he had hit Meha.
All this time it has been strangely peaceful, almost joyful. At this memory Meha flinches. She hopes Chandar does not see the pain in her eyes. Shiva, let him not remember that day, she prays. Not now. Not now.
* * *
“What are you doing, Bikaner?” Meha cried. “Give your father back his watch.”
He ignored her and kept on eating. Chandar, stunned into silence, put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Beta …”
“Keep your hands off me!” Bikaner yelled, and even as Meha and Chandar reacted to the sound of his voice, he lifted a meaty arm and slapped Chandar’s hand away.
The sound of the slap echoed through the silent flat as a red flush spread over Chandar’s hand. He looked at his hand and then at his son in disbelief. His son had hit him. How could it be? How could he even raise his voice at his father, let alone …
An hour later Bikaner was penitent. He came to beg forgiveness, touched Chandar’s feet with his forehead. He even cried as he had when he was a child, with great, heaving sobs. But the watch stayed on his wrist. It was a sign of things to come. Chandar’s pension was deposited into Bikaner’s account at the bank. Bikaner was briefly shamefaced, but insistent about this and they let him be, thinking that all they had was his anyway. A few days later, when Chandar sat where Bikaner did not want him to sit, the back of the son’s hand slashed across the father’s face. Again, he apologized, but there was more time before the apology and less sincerity in it. When Chandar stopped to talk with a friend on the street while bringing the children home from school, the broomstick was used to thrash him.
From this point on, there was only Bikaner’s anger, no more justification, no explanations, no regrets. Over the next few years Meha and Chandar grew frail with fear. They talked in whispers. They were moved out of the kitchen to the balcony, huddling in one damp corner during monsoon nights. Bikaner’s voice and his beatings just grew louder and wilder. The daughter-in-law stayed aloof, seeming not to see or hear anything—these were not her parents, but Bikaner’s. He could do what he chose with them. It did not distress Meha and Chandar; they had not expected much from her and got little. But from Bikaner …
There was no room for disbelief, no one to turn to. The shame of being beaten by their own son made Chandar and Meha dumb. Although Bikaner did not beat his mother, merely pushed her around when he was angry. They did not step out of their four-by-six balcony. When they had first bought the flat, Meha had looked down from the balcony at the concrete below and shuddered. So far from the earth, so high in the sky. When she went out to hang the clothes she always did so without looking down. Now they lived on the balcony, and did not go anywhere.
But where would they go? Whose eyes could they meet anymore? The neighbors were not allowed to see their pain because they would not allow it. The neighbors all knew, of course. They had heard Bikaner’s yells, heard the sounds of his beatings, perhaps even heard Meha cry. Yet Meha and Chandar could not have borne pity. That much pride still stayed in them, fierce and unrelenting. They would not turn to strangers for help. This was a family matter.
But finally it got to be too hard to stay outside on the balcony all the time. Chandar lost weight; Meha did too, but she only saw Chandar’s pain. His bones stood out brittle in his face, his shoulders bowed under the weight of a son’s betrayal. Meha wrote to one of Chandar’s brothers, digging deep inside herself for words to call him to Mumbai, to tell him to look after them. But before she could mail the letter—she had thought of asking the neighbor’s wife for a stamp—Bikaner saw it lying underneath a bundle of their clothing in the balcony. That evening, huge ugly weals sprang on Chandar’s back. A punch in the chest left him gasping with two broken ribs. Bikaner still would not touch his mother, even though Meha tried to come in the way of the beatings.
The next day—yesterday, Meha thinks, was it only yesterday— Bikaner came to them with a sheaf of papers. He covered the top and pointed to a line and said, “Sign here.”
Chandar, propped against the balcony wall, one hand held under his ribs to support the pain each time he breathed, turned away from this monster he had created from his own flesh. “No.” The word came out quietly. He would not sign what he could not read. He would not sign what they both knew to be the title to the flat to be turned over to Bikaner.
That denial cost him the hand he was holding to his chest. Bikaner pulled it away and bent the fingers back one by one until the bones broke. In her corner, Meha cowered, screaming in whispers. Bikaner turned to her and grabbed her hair in his fist. Dragging his mother to his father, he shoved her head in front of Chandar and said, “Sign, you matachoth, or I will throw her over the balcony.”
When she heard that word, Meha, who had been pulling weakly at Bikaner’s grip on her hair, dropped her hands over her ears. Shiva, she cried to herself, how could he call his father that? Matachoth. Matachoth. Motherfucker.
The fingers of his right hand hanging by his side, his chest wheezing with every breath, Chandar signed the papers with his left hand. That night, lying against each other, they made their decision.
It was too late for anything else. Too late to change what they could have done to make Bikaner a better man. When he was five, the little monkey had been smaller than him. As an adult, the bank officers’ exam had defeated him, and there was nothing he could do about it. Except this, perhaps. Chander and Meha were too old, too feeble to defy him.
In some senses, Meha thought, they had steadfastly shut Bikaner from their lives. At first it was because they did not want a child, then because they did not want him. He had been such a flimsy child, one with so little strength of character. It had been easy to be repelled by him. Easy to turn to each other, to have Bikaner only at the fringes of their affection for each other. And Bikaner knew this. But now, all that mattered to Meha was that Chandar and she would take this last step together. To a place where Bikaner could no longer touch them, where he was not invited, where they would go without him.
She helped him, Meha thinks, she helped the man who had c
ome to her that first night they were married and called her jaaneman. Chandar had no more strength left, so Meha held his hand and pushed him off. Then she clambered off the ledge of the balcony she was even afraid to look down from, and launched her thin-with-hunger body into the air, down sixteen stories.
She watches now as he hits the ground with a soft thud, blood spurting from his head, a rib protruding under his white kurta. So long, she thinks, it takes so long to meet death. So much time since they stepped off the balcony ledge into the night. Before they left Meha wrote out their story, in her broken English, using the language Bikaner had taught her. The papers lie folded in Chandar’s kurta pocket, now already stained with his blood. But people must know, Meha thinks, that their lives were once worth something. That they once lived and breathed and loved. That they did not ask for this end, although they made it happen. People must know…. There is no shame anymore about a son who beat them.
They have fallen without a sound through the dark night, for they were always quiet people. Except for that laugh at the beginning when Meha first stepped out. That feeling had been like those early days of their marriage when they laughed all the time, when they smiled, when they were joyous.
She wants to touch Chandar again, this one last time before the end, but she knows she will land away from him. She closes her eyes as the ground comes to meet her.
The final thought is … how long did it take?
The Faithful Wife
Though destitute of virtue, or pleasure seeking else-where, or devoid of good qualities, yet a husband must be constantly worshipped as God by the faithful wife.
—Manu Smriti, THE CODE OF MANU (c. 200 BC–AD 300)
It is the letter that brings him back, because he did not know she could even write. So he comes here to stand in the courtyard, in front of this man who was once so beloved. The letter rests carefully folded in his shirt pocket, the strap of his camera holding it to his chest. The man seated in the armchair, his grandfather, will never see it. He has not even asked why Ram is here. Anger claws at the air around them, cleaving through their stillness. But outside, in the village that hugs the foothills of small, unnamed hills, all is still quiet.
In the Convent of Little Flowers Page 4