by Abha Dawesar
“Yes, Mom,” I said as I went back to my room. I couldn’t understand myself. I didn’t really care all that much for Neeta, but I was still overwhelmed with emotion. My parents controlled everything. I wished I could just go and meet India and hang out with her in the middle of the night. I wished the woman from the slum were at my beck and call. Images from Hindi art movies in which the upper caste brahmin falls in love with the lower caste servant and has passionate sex with her kept whirring in my head. I wanted to fast-forward my life.
iii
The Physics of Fun
On Sunday I plunged into my books. I solved every problem at the end of the thermodynamics chapter and read my class notes from the intro to quantum mechanics chapter. On Monday I couldn’t gauge if I had done well on the test, but I thought I had passed. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t pay any attention to classes the rest of the day. When I got home I didn’t even change from my school skirt. I unclasped my belt and tumbled onto my bed. Then I heard the bell ring. I thought it was part of my dream so I didn’t move. But it kept ringing.
The woman from the slum was standing at the front door. The woman with the hitched sari. I could practically see her peeing, the memory was so vivid.
“You?” I said.
She looked at my skirt and gasped.
“I thought you were a boy,” she said in Hindi. I didn’t respond.
“Didi,” she said, addressing me as older sister even though she was clearly older.
“What?” I asked in Hindi.
“I’ve come to work, Babyji,” she replied. Was I a baby or a Didi? Babyji was such a contradiction in terms, conveying too much respect that the age of a child doesn’t warrant.
“You’re the new servant?” I asked, stepping aside to let her in. I was flattered she had thought me a boy.
“Yes,” she said, hiding a smile and lowering her eyes. I wondered if she had followed me from the construction site, but I kept silent.
She was wearing her sari low on her hips. Her hair looked freshly washed. She sat under the sink in the kitchen where there was a water faucet and began to wash all the utensils that were piled up. I never understood why servants preferred to squat while cleaning vessels. If I ever did the dishes at home I did them standing up and using the faucet in the sink. I perched myself on a ledge in the kitchen and stared at her, my legs dangling down. Every now and then she looked directly into my eyes. When she did that I couldn’t hold up to her fierce stare and would have to lower my eyes. After she was finished washing the vessels, she asked if there was anything else.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I can massage your legs. They will become strong for when you cycle,” she said.
“All right,” I said. She had acknowledged that she had seen me cycling.
I went to my bathroom and got some lotion. Then I lay down on my stomach. I heard her rub the lotion on her hands. The sound of her hands rubbing was powerful. It was as if she were in charge or a decision were being made. My father usually rubbed his hands together when he was trying to make up his mind about which unit trusts to buy. Sleazy men in Hindi films rubbed their hands when they hatched a plot. Dr. Iyer rubbed his a second before giving you the prognosis. I was thinking all these things in my head when she lifted my skirt all the way up past my underwear, gripped my left leg firmly, and started to massage it. Involuntarily, my legs went taut. Her hands were a little rough but strong, and after a few minutes my body started to relax. The sensation of her hands taking over my flesh, kneading it, stretching it, and squeezing it was comforting. When she was done I walked her to the door and shut it behind her without saying anything.
I had always expected that something would happen in my life, something that would change it. After I’d reached puberty I was a twinge disappointed that almost everything continued as before. But now it seemed as if the wait were finally over. I wasn’t sure what exactly was going to happen or what it would mean, but I was being propelled by a force no one could temper. I was experiencing things that I was sure my friends Vidur, Ashima, Sheela, Preeti, Deepa, Sonali, and Tina had not experienced. In fact, my momentum was such that I was almost certain the class hoodlum, Chakra Dev, who was taller and more physically developed than any of the other boys, was soon going to be left far behind. I was suddenly ahead of everyone. More grown-up. I looked forward to coming home from school the next day and the servant woman showing up. I didn’t know her name. I’d imagine the dramatic red sindhoor in the parting of her hair when I thought of her.
In the evenings she would come around seven and cook dinner under my mother’s instructions. While we ate she would bring us hot rotis from the kitchen. I would ignore her. When we were finished she would eat the leftovers. My mother had given her Neeta’s plate and glass.
The whole week went by with the servant massaging my legs. She made a point of looking into my eyes without blinking. She stared at the chasm that separated my higher birth from her lower one and hopped right over it, even though she called me Didi every now and then and addressed me as one would a better. At night I would lie awake, suspending the harsh reality of being sixteen and a flimsy female with no money to my name, and imagine that I was the man from the movies. I wanted wealth, power, or fame, something that would help me to get the things that the rules of the world did not permit.
On Saturday I went over to India’s house again. I felt bold. I had spent so much time thinking of myself as the man from the movies that I felt I had already lived his experiences. I rode over on my bike thinking myself a stud, a man of the world.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said, breaking into a smile.
I parked my bike in her garden and leaned forward to hug her. It felt natural to hug her. She kissed me on the cheek and ran her hand through my hair.
Once inside the dark curtained coolness of her air-conditioned home, I was at a loss for words. She spoke in her genteel way about this and that. I was waiting for something to happen. I felt as if we were wasting time. We had an hour and we’d already let forty-five minutes slip by discussing the power cuts in the colony and the syllabus for the first graders.
I wanted to tell her I loved her. I tried to say it suddenly. But as soon as the words came to the tip of my tongue my hands shook. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I said to the face in the mirror, Look, she’s going to laugh, she’ll never want to see you again, what do you know about love? You’re just sixteen. She sees a kid when she sees you.
“We have a new servant,” I said to her when I stepped out of the bathroom.
“You do.”
“She’s really sexy.” I watched India’s face for her reaction.
“She is,” India said. Her face registered no interest.
“I guess I should go home.”
When India saw me to the door she said, “Come again.” It was anticlimactic.
At home the servant was stooped over the kitchen sink doing the dishes. When she did the dishes in my presence she always squatted with her sari hitched halfway up, and I could see her legs. Her legs were covered now. My mother was calling her Rani, which means queen but is often the generic term people use for servants. She was saying, “Rani, scrub the vessels thoroughly.” I felt a pang of tenderness and protection toward Rani.
Rani scrubbed the dishes harder and harder. Periodically she lifted her face to make eye contact with me. Her pride and fierceness bored through me. That night I dreamt that I called her “Rani” in a soft whisper and asked her to come away with me to a place where she would no longer be a servant.
On Sunday morning, like every Sunday, my parents read the papers and watched TV for a few hours. We got all the daily newspapers on Sunday and some weekly newspapers and magazines as well. I read an article in the color section of the Sunday Mail about how AIDS was more dangerous than any other STD. One Indian doctor who was interviewed said it was only a matter of time before it spread to India from the West. There was a reference in the article
to Rock Hudson having AIDS. I had never heard of him, but the article said he surrounded himself with beautiful boys. Nothing else in the papers was as interesting as the AIDS article. I was bored. I hated watching television, so I considered riding my bike to India’s house. The previous day had left me with a sense of failure. Being with India had felt less intimate than it had the week before. But I couldn’t convince myself that it would feel different if I saw her again. And to fail two times in a row would be worse, so I let it pass.
I had another physics test the next morning. My school had introduced a Monday test system, and we had a test in one subject every Monday. The physics teacher had taken this further and added a test every Monday. So I had history and physics this week. History was easy. One only needed to remember facts, not comprehend them. When the history teacher spoke I imprinted her words directly onto my brain like newsprint and regurgitated them without effort. Physics was a major pain in the rear. I hated it. I loved it. I lay down on my stomach, propping myself up with my elbows, and solved problems on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. I was up to my ears in quantum mechanics. It was bad enough to have to know that a photon was both a particle and a wave. On top of that Mr. Garg said that it was impossible to simultaneously measure the position and the momentum of atomic particles with any accuracy. And there was a single constant that actually quantified the combined uncertainty in position and speed. I sat around rewriting this constant all over my notebook with little Greek symbols on the side. If modern science accepted duality and measured uncertainties, what difference did it make whether I was Rock Hudson chasing beautiful boys or the village brahmin in love with the shudra’s daughter? Science had told us this century that nothing was certain. The universe was chaotic and relative; these aspects measurable. There were few hard facts on which one could base a way of living one’s life. I’d always scoffed at religion as a crutch for the masses, so it wasn’t even a consideration. We’d spent two thousand years only to find out that we didn’t know. That moment, sprawled on my bed, changed my whole life. I was free all of a sudden. Free of the burden of knowledge and therefore of any morality that proceeds from knowledge. Only feelings counted. And sensations.
I placed my head on my physics book and daydreamt. I had fantasies about India and Rani. I mixed them up in my head till Rani was articulate and well dressed and India sensuous and earthy. If particles could be waves and waves photons then India and Rani could be each other. All sense of reality escaped me. I couldn’t believe I’d been living under my parents’ regime all these years without even whimpering in protest. At dinner I ate quietly and in awareness of the fact that I was different. I was free. Nothing mattered.
My parents went to sleep early. After their light was out I went to the veranda in the rear of the house, unlocked the door to the service lane, and walked over to the slum near the construction site to look for Rani. I approached the jhuggi quietly. I didn’t want to be seen. As I neared it I heard only male voices. The area was dark except for a few kerosene lamps flickering here and there. They cast menacing shadows. Men were squatting together in small groups and laughing. Their laughs sounded sinister. They spoke in some dialect, not in pure Hindi. I could not follow them. All the women were in their oppressive six-by-six hutments, putting their litters of children to sleep. I felt unsafe. I wanted to run before someone leapt at me in the dark. I stayed in the shadows and walked quickly but cautiously so that I would not make any sound. When I was standing out on the main street again I stopped to catch my breath. I was sweating.
It was already quite late, but I decided to call on India. The streets were quiet. Her building reverberated when I rang the doorbell.
I waited at the door for five minutes before she softly asked, “Who is it?”
“Anamika.”
I heard her jerk the chain on the door. India stood in front of me wrapped in a sheet.
“What’s the matter? Are you all right?” she asked, touching my head.
“I’m fine. Can I come in?”
“Are you all right? What’s the matter?”
“Can I come in?” I repeated. I had no idea what I’d tell her.
“Of course,” she said, stepping aside to let me in. Once I was inside she made her way to her room and flicked on her bedside lamp.
I couldn’t tell what she was wearing under the white sheet. Nothing, it seemed to me. She sat down carefully on her bed, making sure the sheet didn’t fall off. She sat with her head and shoulders propped against the wall.
“What’s the matter?” she asked again. She was sitting uncomfortably straight.
“Nothing. Can I spend the night?”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“What happened? Where are your parents?”
For a second my inner voice squeaked, You’re a teenager. She thinks you’re a kid. But I stifled it and thought of the equation from my physics textbook, p(q) = Planck’s constant and reminded myself I was free.
“My parents are at home. I want to spend the night here,” I said matter-of-factly.
She was quiet for a second. I could not even hear her breathe. I held my own breath, wondering what she would say. Maybe she would laugh at me. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Okay.” She turned off her bedside lamp.
I kicked off my shoes and got into her bed. I was at my wit’s end. I hadn’t expected this to happen at all. I should have planned. I lay down far away from her and shut my eyes tightly, repeating to myself that the world was entirely uncertain. Nothing was fixed.
“What are you wearing?” I asked her.
“Nothing.”
The information was too much. My body stiffened.
“Should I wear something? Does it bother you?” she asked, as if trying to comfort a child who was throwing a tantrum.
“Not at all,” I lied. I was afraid of moving and accidentally touching her. There was a naked woman right beside me. There was no uncertainty about that. It was now very hot under the covers. I was wearing my jeans and my thick denim shirt.
“Do you mind if I take off my jeans?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“I don’t mind.”
I stumbled out of bed and got my jeans off. Then I got back into bed.
“I wish you’d tell me what’s going on. This is all rather sudden,” she said.
“I know.”
I was feeling a little foolish. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I focused again on the wave-particle duality and remembered I was free. I had nothing to lose. If my parents found out I’d be toast anyway, regardless of what I did with India. If she got angry I could just leave. It was all about an instantaneous point in time since nothing was stable. I was never going to do this again.
“Can I touch you?” I asked.
“Huh?”
I didn’t think India’s reaction was what you’d expect from someone who was vigorously objecting. I decided she meant yes and slid closer to her. Then I tentatively took her hand in mine and waited for her to yell and scream and throw me out of her house. She didn’t. I let the palm of my hand explore hers, then her wrist, her forearm, her shoulder. Eventually she touched my hand in response. Our toes were touching now, and our calves. Then our knees and hips touched. Then I lost my powers of observation.
“Your skin is like a baby’s,” she said.
“Yours, too.”
We must have caressed for hours. I felt as if I was living outside of my body and outside of time. At some point we drifted off to sleep and then woke up, stirring only slightly before drifting off again. I couldn’t tell if she had woken up first and touched me or if I’d woken up first and touched her. My hands needed to touch her so much they moved up and down her back, her stomach, and her arms without any intervention from me.
Drifting off, I dreamt that India and I were revolving around each other as particles and then suddenly transforming into waves, tides, currents. Mr. Garg had said something about the duality that I had not noted down. He
had said that if you cross a donkey and a horse you get a mule. Is a mule a donkey or a horse? It’s a stupid question was his point. Something about the comment jarred in my sleeping brain. Particles weren’t becoming waves and waves, particles. These were just properties of photons, and I wasn’t as free as I thought. In fact, the uncertainty of Heisenberg’s equation only went to prove that one could even quantify uncertainty. How could I have possibly thought that I was free and simply walked out of my house at night? I couldn’t tell my parents that I was at a divorcée’s house spending the night. They’d ground me on holidays. I shook India awake.
“I have to leave before my parents wake up,” I said, slipping on my jeans and shirt.
“Give me one last hug,” she said.
I went over and embraced her.
“I’ll come after school tomorrow,” I said before leaving, my heart suddenly heavy.
I shut her main door quietly and walked home. There was not a soul in sight. I got to the service lane of my house. The door opening onto the veranda was still open. I locked it and tiptoed across the veranda. The back door of the house was open, too. I shut it behind me and went to my bedroom. The alarm clock on my table showed five. Just in the nick of time I lay down on my bed, feeling relieved. My mother woke up early every day and made me tea before going to a yoga class at the community center. Some days she would spend time gardening, even though our garden was really only a small patch of grass not much bigger than a carpet.
At school I plowed through the history and physics tests in a stupor. In physics class Mr. Garg introduced Schrödinger’s thought experiment and talked at length about a cat that could be either dead or alive till one actually decided to observe it. One’s observation made a difference even though it shouldn’t. If there was no objective truth I could be a prima donna.
At the end of the day I got home and collapsed on my bed. I decided I’d take a nap and then go to India’s. When the doorbell rang I was jolted out of my sleep. I had forgotten about Rani. She was there to do the dishes, entice me. In her long black slithery plait she had woven a string of jasmine flowers. I knew she had dressed for me. I let her in. The sense of freedom that had overtaken me the previous night evaporated. I felt constricted by my choices now. Rani was right there, fresh and beautiful. I was supposed to visit India. It all had to be done before my mother got home. Discrete human beings and exact places were involved without any uncertainty. Time was limited. I had to revisit the Heisenberg chapter with a cool mind and reinterpret it.