If Today Be Sweet

by Thrity Umrigar

  Rain and snow. The perfect way to describe the difference between Bombay and America, Tehmina thought. One was loud, chaotic, tumultuous, and erratic. The other was calm, antiseptic, genteel, and polite. So ironic it is, she thought. In Bombay, where everything is dangerous, people live their lives bindaas, fearlessly, almost thoughtlessly. Here, where there is no reason to fear anything, these people are afraid of life itself. How can they survive like this, watching and weighing everything? From terrorism to germs to the flu, these people were frightened by everything. A whole country going into a panic because there was a shortage of the flu vaccine. And sealing their pain pill bottles in such a tamper-proof way that no adult with arthritis could ever open one of them. Even their drinking straws came wrapped in plastic. Whereas, in Bombay, dear God, we breathed the foulest air and ate food at roadside stalls where they washed the plates in water as brown as mud. And look at me—a robust, hale and hearty sixty-six years old. Old Dr. Mehta always used to say, “If there’s ever a plague or global catastrophe, Tehmi, I swear those Americans will die like flies. They have no immunity against anything. And us Indians, with our iron constitutions, we will rule the world.”

  It was the same thing with seat belts. My God, how Sorab and Susan used to look at her when she’d refused to wear her seat belt during her first visit here. Like—like they were personally disappointed in her, the way you’d be in a relative who insisted on committing suicide before your very eyes.

  Tehmina tossed in her bed, willing away the memory that was emerging. Last year, when they had vacationed in California, she and Susan had taken Cookie shopping while the two men stayed back at the hotel. Susan’s hands were laden with gift bags and Tehmina was holding on to Cookie as they waited for the traffic signal to turn. They stood in a crowd of friendly, tanned, ice-cone-licking tourists, waiting on the sidewalk to cross the street. So much for land of the free, Tehmina thought to herself in amusement. Not a car in sight but still they all wait like sheep for the sign to tell them to Walk or Don’t Walk. In Bombay, a thousand people would have crossed the street six times by now. Perhaps it was the thought that propelled her forward, but the next second an impatient Tehmina tugged at her grandson’s hand and began to cross the street. Behind her, she heard Susan gasp, “Mom!” but it was too late to stop. By the time they got to the other side, she knew she had done something wrong. Something uncivilized. Something—well, something—Bombayish. Something Indian. Something uncouth.

  Despite the hot California sun, Susan’s face was pale as she crossed the street and faced her mother-in-law. Tehmina noticed that her lower lip was trembling. “Beta, I’m sorry,” she began, but Susan didn’t hear her. “I can’t believe you did that, Mom,” she began. “I can’t believe you exposed your only grandchild to that kind of danger.”

  Danger? There had not been a car in sight. “Susan dear, the road was clear and—”

  “That’s not the point.” Now Tehmina noticed with wonder that there were tears in Susan’s eyes. “The point is, you’re teaching my son unhealthy habits. What happens if he tries darting across the street when he’s at school? After all, we’re not with him twenty-four hours a day. And what if a car had suddenly appeared from somewhere? You know how these people drive here, anyway.”

  Tehmina felt a confusing array of emotions—outrage, shame, guilt, disbelief. People were watching them, their mouths puckered in disapproval. But disapproval of whom? Susan, for making a public scene over a trifle matter? Or at Tehmina, for being a stupid, dumb peasant who didn’t know how to cross the street?

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I…I—what to do, dear? You know, we are so used to crossing the street like this in Bombay that I wasn’t even thinking. You know the last thing I would do is hurt Cookie.”

  At the mention of his name, Cookie began to cry. “Mom, stoppit,” he said. “Stop yelling at Granna.”

  Susan pursed her lips. “Oh, shoot. Let’s all just get out of this sun and go back to the hotel, shall we?” She looked down at her son and her face softened. “I’m not yelling at Granna, honey. It’s just that Mommy is upset because Granna scared her, okay? Tell you what. Let’s go for a swim in the pool when we get back, all right?”

  Susan tried to carry on a light conversation in the cab all the way home and Tehmina responded, happy to be distracted. Because otherwise the dark, heavy feeling of shame and sadness that was weighing on her would have to be acknowledged. It had been many years since someone had spoken to her, had scolded her, the way Susan had. And that, too, in public. There were no boundaries in this country, no divisions between the public and the private.

  Late that night, when she and Rustom were lying in bed, she described the incident and her mortification to him. To her surprise, her voice cracked and her eyes were teary as she repeated Susan’s chastising words. But she should’ve known better than to expect Rustom to side with her. So many times, she had noticed, Rustom stoutly spoke up for their daughter-in-law, even siding with her against his own son. It was Rustom’s own way of putting the harmony and well-being of his son’s family over all else, she knew. “Crazy old woman,” he now said gruffly. “Of course Susan was upset. What do you think this is, your run-down, beaten-up Mumbai? These people are used to discipline and good manners. And there you come, Mrs. Ghaati Bombayite herself, breaking all the traffic rules and corrupting our Cookie on top of it. And you expect Susan to just stand there and take it? It’s a good thing she didn’t push you into two lanes of traffic.”

  “But that’s the point. There was no traffic,” she began heatedly, but then she saw the gleam in his eye and she began to laugh. “How come you side with everybody in the world except your own wife?” she asked.

  Rustom put his arms around her. “Because you are the strongest person I know. Other people need defending. But you—you are a pillar of strength. You don’t need my protection.”

  Wrong, Rustom, she now thought. Wrong, my darling. Look how I am floundering without you. Look how I can’t make the smallest decisions without you.

  Tehmina got out of her bed and made her way barefoot to the small desk under the window. Opening the drawer, she groped around in the dark until her fingers found the cool metal of the small picture frame.

  Her hand on the light switch above her bed, Tehmina hesitated. The last thing she wanted to do was have the light spill from her room and disturb the children as they tried to get some hard-earned sleep. She decided to turn on the small lamp by her side instead. Sitting up in bed, the down comforter wrapped around her so that only her cold hands stuck out, Tehmina opened the double picture frame. She had bought this frame from Akbarally’s just before she left for America this time, knowing that she had to carry her Rustom close to her if she was to survive the long journey away from the land where her beloved husband had died to the land where her beloved son lived, worked, breathed. She had hesitated over which two pictures to carry with her—one of their wedding pictures? The picture of Rustom holding Sorab for the first time, a half hour after Sorab’s birth? Rustom’s passport picture in which he looked uncharacteristically serious and stern? In the end she had decided on a picture of a young Rustom in his twenties and a picture of him a few months before he died. How much time, how many lifetimes, had passed between those two pictures. In that flash of time between the two clicks, they had had a son, raised him on a diet of parental love and pride and worry, felt that same trinity of feelings—love, pride, worry—when he’d left for America, been saddened but not shocked when he’d announced that he was marrying an American woman, had accepted and come to love Susan once they’d spent some time with her, been delirious with joy at the birth of their grandson. In that same sliver of time, they had attended the funerals of their parents, lost some of their close friends to an assortment of illnesses, survived Rustom’s own scare with prostate cancer. (Till today, Tehmina believed that Rustom actually did have prostate cancer at the time of his test but that her most sincere and heartfelt prayers had altered the biops
y results.)

  So much of her life had been lived with this man who now stared back at her from his glass prison. Holding the picture frame up to her face, she brushed her lips against Rustom’s full, sensuous lips. It was hard to believe that someone as passionate, as hot-blooded and larger than life as Rustom could be confined to a small, cheap photo frame. It was hard to believe that all that gusto for life, all that grandeur, all that magnificence could be felled by a heart attack, that the bones and flesh of this man were now decomposing in the well at the Tower of Silence, no different from the flesh and bones of more mediocre, frightened men. What was the point, Tehmina thought, the point of all his hard work, his success, his passion, his hunger for life, the buzzing energy that coursed through his veins, the relentless ticking of his intelligent mind, what was the point if all that could be snatched away at the age of sixty-seven, as abruptly as someone stilling the hands of a clock? Not to mention the labor pains his mother must have experienced when she gave birth to him, and the sacrifices that his parents made to send him to good schools, the sitting up with him when he burned with a fever as a child, oh yes, all the love that they—and later, she, Tehmina—lavished on him, and the pains that she took once they were married to make him happy—to make him saffron rava for breakfast every Saturday morning, to learn to make dhansak that tasted just like his mother’s, to make love to him even when she wasn’t in the mood—was none of this powerful enough to keep him alive beyond sixty-seven? So much went into the making of a man—the amount of rice and sugar and lentils that had to be grown for him to consume, the number of chickens and goats and lambs that had to be slaughtered so he could have meat in his curry. And it was more than even this, really. It went back to the beginning of the world, to the splitting of the continents, to the rise of a species who could walk upright, who had opposable thumbs, and it carried on, down to the invention of fire, to the making of the fist, to the throwing of the first stone. How many untold thousands had died trying to figure out which berries were poisonous and which weren’t? Who was the first man or woman to discover that rice needed to be boiled for twenty minutes or that corn tasted better roasted? How many empires rose and fell, how many millions died, in the search of spices? And all this labor, all this knowledge, all this blood and sweat, all these tears, all this achievement, all this triumph, all the glories and all the miseries of human history, for what? So that a man—a man as grand as a mountain, as large as the ocean, as generous as a continent—so that such a man could die at sixty-seven?

  Tehmina, Rustom said. Darling, forgive my saying so but you’re going a little potty, my dear. A man as generous as a continent? Please, darling, I’m blushing at your verbosity.

  Tehmina looked around the room. She had heard Rustom’s voice as clear as if he was lying in bed beside her. But there was no one else there. I’m going mad, she thought to herself. No wonder the children have been worried about me.

  But then she saw Rustom, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed in the corner of the room. When he saw that she had spotted him, he got to his feet in one swift motion, without the revealing grunt of middle age that accompanied every movement that Tehmina made. Even as it snowed outside, Tehmina noticed that Rustom was dressed as if they were going to a movie on a warm Bombay evening—dark pants and a pale blue half-sleeved shirt that revealed his strong, muscular forearms, brown and shiny as leather. Despite the faint light in the room, she saw the familiar thin scar that ran across Rustom’s left arm and her fingers itched to caress it as she had a million times before. But then fear overtook Tehmina as her dead husband crossed the small guest room and stood in front of her. “Rustom,” she whispered. “How? What? What are you doing here? Darling, you are—”

  “Baap re, woman. You should see your face right now. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Rustom grinned at his own joke.

  Despite herself, Tehmina smiled reluctantly at the teasing affection she heard in her husband’s voice. This was so much like Rustom, to rise from the dead and walk into her room halfway across the world and then to mock her for her astonishment. This is what she had loved and this is what she missed about him—the casual ease with which he occupied space wherever he was, the benign assumption that the world would give him his due and respond to him with friendliness and generosity. And some of this had rubbed off on her so that while he was alive it had been easy to delude herself that life was indeed hers for the taking, that the world was a house ready to be moved into and occupied. How effortless, how untroubled living had been when Rustom had been alive. Like riding in a Mercedes-Benz, Tehmina now thought, with tinted windows that kept the outside squalor at bay and shock absorbers that smoothened and muted all of life’s bumps. And now, without Rustom at the wheel, she suddenly felt as if she was traveling in the old Ambassador her father used to own, with its rattling doors and the kind of shocks that made you feel every pothole at the base of your spine. Her fall from grace had been as quick and astounding as Rustom’s heart attack.

  But then again, here he was, in her room in Rosemont Heights, pushing her gently as he got under the covers with her. For a moment, Tehmina was sickened at the thought of sharing her bed with a dead man. But then she felt the warm heat of Rustom’s body as it brushed against hers, smelled that stomach-dropping, familiar combination of Old Spice and sweat, felt the hair on Rustom’s legs tickle the smoothness of her own, and her whole body seemed to sink deeper into the bed, as she felt herself give up a burden, a grief, that she had had no memory of carrying. How stiffly she had been holding herself since the day she last saw her husband at the Tower of Silence, Tehmina now realized. She saw now what sorrow had done to her body, how it had made her heart feel as if it were a nylon bag that carried in it a thousand sharp pebbles, how a permanent nausea had wormed itself into her stomach, how depression had weighed down her tongue, sat on her eyelids, had conferred a kind of prickliness on her skin.

  But all that was gone now as she touched Rustom’s collarbone and felt the strap of his white sadra under her fingertips. How many of these muslin-cloth sadras she had stitched for him over the years. When they had first married she had insisted on ironing the thin undershirt for him until he at last put his foot down and told her that he had married her for love and companionship, and if he’d wanted someone to wash and iron his clothes, he would have married his dhobi instead. That, too, was part of Rustom’s splendor—despite being always well dressed, he was the least vain of men. And his sense of fairness, his moral outrage at the inferior status of women, made him an object of good-natured ribbing from his male friends and Tehmina an object of whispered envy from their wives. How many times had one of those women pulled Tehmina aside at a party and expressed wonder at the sight of Rustom helping her in the kitchen. “What’s the secret, Tehmina, yaar?” they would whisper to her. “How did you train him so well?”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” she would respond, trying to keep the pride drained out of her voice. “He came to me this way. My Rustom is the fairest person I know. He believes in equal rights for women.”

  But now, her fingering of the strap of his undergarment conjured up another, unwelcome memory. Of her well-groomed husband lying on a slab on the floor of the Tower of Silence, stripped of his usual clothes and dressed instead in a simple white sadra and pajamas. Even in death Rustom looked powerful, the muscles of his dark legs pushing against the thin cotton of the pajamas. But when the woeful-looking professional pallbearers came to lift Rustom’s body to take it to its final journey to where the vultures were circling over the well, Tehmina had to admit that even Rustom could not beat death, that death had managed to turn the tanned, brown face to a kind of chalky gray, that it had opened and twisted Rustom’s mouth into a grotesque O, that death’s dark bolt of lightning was greater than the electric energy that had buzzed through Rustom’s body. How pathetic, how small Rustom suddenly looked, how dirty and disheveled he seemed as the pallbearers lifted him up against her sobbing protests. For months later
she had tried to blind herself to this final insult, had tried to forget how rigid with anger she had been when she realized that all the stony-faced pallbearers saw was a corpse, a lifeless body not much different—except perhaps a bit taller and heavier—than all the others they had carried. That they were completely immune to the uniqueness of Rustom—how his laugh seemed to encompass an entire octave, how he jiggled his leg or tapped his fingers impatiently if he ever had to wait in line, how he had a joke or an Omar Khayyám quote for every occasion, how he did a wonderful Charlie Chaplin imitation. But like death itself, like the vultures who hovered over the dreaded well, the pallbearers were indifferent to all this. And it was this indifference, the realization of this indifference, the acknowledgment that the world would continue to spin without Rustom in it, that had made Tehmina rigid with anger and pain. Until the rigidity had become a shell around her body, until it had become as natural as skin.

  “Tehmina,” Rustom was now whispering to her. “Tehmi, open your eyes. Listen to me. I have a message for you.”

  She opened her eyes and saw the heart-twistingly familiar brown eyes staring intently into hers. “Tehmina. Darling,” Rustom said. “What I want to say to you is, be brave. Courage, janu. That’s who I’d fallen in love with in the first place, my brave, outspoken wife. Who is this mouselike woman in her place? This woman I don’t recognize. So please, janu. Be happy. Life goes on, you know?”

  “Can you stay?” she whispered. “Then I will be happy.” But she saw the pained, distant look that came over his face and immediately regretted her words. “Will you at least come visit again?” she tried. “Come see me again?”

  This time Rustom smiled, a smile so kind and loving and timeless, that Tehmina felt that all of history, all of the immensity of the universe, was in that smile. “Tehmina,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. What do you mean, come and visit you? How can I do that, when I’m always at your side?”