‘What are your plans for this evening?’ I asked.
‘Evening?’ Kalpana said. ‘Weekday, what do you expect? Usual stuff.’
Just then Joanne joined the group. ‘Manju, just heard the good news. That’s awesome, congratulations. I’m so, so happy for you.’
I was suddenly flustered. And baffled by the tone in their voices. For a few seconds, I felt like I was losing track of where I was, of what they were saying. Something had started whirring inside me, something sharp and jagged. I should have stayed silent then, but my mind wasn’t working like usual, so instead I asked: ‘Congrats for what?’ Manjushri turned to me, and there was this expression on her face, a sort of embarrassment and guilt overtaken by a bubbly mirth. It washed over me like a flood, the sudden knowledge of what those secret conversations had been about: Manjushri was pregnant.
‘When did you know?’ I asked. ‘Has the doctor confirmed it?’
‘It’s the third month, I was going to tell you soon but I wasn’t sure if this was going to be hard on you.’
‘Congrats,’ I said, and I could already sense the colour draining from my face.
Even worse, the others seemed strangely solicitous. ‘Vedika, you’ve lost your child, so it’s natural to lose your bearings. Maybe you should see a counsellor so that you and Manas...’ Kalpana said. I was too choked to counter her assurance. I wanted to respond with a biting: ‘We’re happy already, my marriage is stronger than ever.’ Instead, I was surprised by shaming rivulets flowing down my cheeks. I turned my back on them, trying to obscure my telltale tears. Unfortunately, Rhea had run to my side, flustered: ‘Mama, are you okay? What happened Mama?’
‘I need to go home,’ I said, yearning for my study with its loud music and oakwood bookshelf. That was the place I needed then, a place where the world was banished. A place where people didn’t think that my marriage was crumbling or that I hated their kids.
‘Shall we come with you?’ Manjushri asked.
‘No, no, I’m fine,’ I said, smiling weakly through my tears, gripping Rhea’s small arm in my palm.
An hour or so later, Manas returned from his long day at work. I heard Rhea greet him at the front door: ‘Papa, Mama’s crying.’
‘Crying? Why?’ Manas hoisted her on his shoulder and thumped up the stairs. I was engrossed in folding our Fantasia brochures into rainbow-colored tarantulas and I pretended not to hear him when he crept into my study.
‘Vedika, are you well?’ he said. ‘Happy anniversary.’
‘Vedika, what’s up, I’ve bought you something.’ I didn’t want it, whatever it was, I didn’t want his gift anymore. My satiny spiders quivered on papery legs.
‘Vedika, what happened? It’s our anniversary, why don’t you look here for a minute?’ I could hear the impatience creeping into his voice. Manas didn’t know how to deal with me in these moods.
‘Go away,’ I said, listening to my own voice as if it belonged to someone else. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘I’ve bought pastries also.’
Pastries! When I was expecting a party? I knew I was stung by Manjushri—for deserting me, for seeding doubts about our marriage. I was also envious of the camaraderie the other women shared, the snug manner in which their lives seemed to fit into each other’s like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Why did my life, which seemed so formulaic at one point, always acquire odd contours that singled me out?
But I could hardly yell at them or at Manjushri, so I hurt Manas instead, hurt him with my savage silence. Hurt him by moving the sheet closer, retreating into its folds.
Later, after a subdued Rhea had retreated to a dollie corner and my husband had stomped into the family room, where he turned the TV on at a deafening volume, I emerged from my eight-legged world to peek at his gift. It was a flat box wrapped in newspaper. I ripped the wrapping to retrieve a framed picture of Sajan I had never encountered earlier. The camera had captured our little boy, a few weeks before his death, bouncing on his foam mattress. The fogginess may have started appearing by then, but in that picture, his eyes were large and sparkly.
‘I thought we could start putting up his pictures again, I think you can handle it now,’ Manas said, drawing me close.
After I had shaken off the evening’s silliness, Manas and I sipped wine by the fireplace. I peered at the picture again. I hadn’t noticed it earlier, but now it stared back at me, almost daring me to see it. On my son’s bed, lying by his side, was a doll, a cloth doll with a clown’s face. The doll that the guard had given me. The doll that stirred up my strange dreams. How had it entered my son’s collection of toys without my knowledge?
Since that first morning after Sajan’s death, I had skirted his room entirely. I couldn’t deal with all his things lying around, his homework undone, his colouring half-finished, his trousers fallen in a familiar round heap. I couldn’t confront his absence in such stark terms. Weeks later, when Manas had cleaned his room out, I was almost relieved that I wouldn’t have to handle that onerous task. But now, I wondered if I might have missed vital clues that had been hiding in my son’s room. Clues that might have been discarded already.
‘Manas, that doll,’ I said, pointing to the corner of the photograph. ‘When did Sajan get that?’
‘What doll?’
‘The clown, the one in the photograph.’
‘Don’t remember Vedika, why?’
‘It wasn’t there earlier…’
‘He had so many toys, we can’t possibly remember --’ But I could. After all, I used to visit his room every day. I knew everything about him, or at least I believed I did. With each passing day, I was less sure.
EIGHTEEN
I HAD BEEN AFRAID of re-entering my son’s room. Afraid of encountering not just his objects and surroundings, but also aspects of myself that I had been shunning since then. The darker feelings that loomed over the slivers of normalcy, the regret, the guilt, the unplumbed depths of sorrow. Now that I had seen that photograph, I had no choice anymore.
In Sajan’s room, the ceiling sloped at a steep angle over his cozy attic-study. A wooden ladder led from his bunk bed to his study, where a tiny desk, chair and bookshelf were arranged one behind the other. Manas had organised his furniture, and arranged his books, erasing the clutter that had marked Sajan’s presence. That morning, sunlight slanted onto his teak desk and tidily made-up bed, on the Winnie the Pooh sheets we had acquired at Disneyworld. The cork boards and walls, usually tacked up with posters and drawings and water-colour paintings, mocked me with their emphatic blankness. I suddenly wished I had been around, before Manas cleared up. I should have known that my husband, with his well-meaning but pragmatic approach, might have imagined that blotting out the past would heal our wounds faster. But he’s still here, I told myself. I could hear his giggles in his bathtub, his sniffles before a flu, his tantrums during a tough homework assignment. We used to play a game each night, sometimes Scrabble, sometimes Dumb Charades, sometimes I-Spy. Rhea, too small for word games then, scampered in our midst. At first, Sajan always won. Till Manas refused to give in: ‘He has to learn to lose, and compete in the real world.’ It was Sajan who consoled me: ‘It’s okay Ma, I don’t mind losing.’ I seated myself on his bed, patted his pillow, held his frayed security blanket against my nose. That ineradicable smell of formula milk and Cerelac spills, of apple juices and spinach soups, refracted memories from all over that room. There he was, darting across the empty desk, perched on that sagging bookshelf, a shadow within reach and yet untouchable. I’m going to find out, I whispered, what they did to you.
I climbed up the wooden ladder, crouching in his attic space. I slid a desk drawer open. Many objects were crammed into that drawer: his cricket gloves, his ping-pong balls, a set of cards, Pictionary, his school badge, his Kindergarten Certificate, photographs from his first birthday. And underneath, a grey cardboard file filled with his drawings and paintings. The first few drawings, his clumsy but valiant attempts to capture his parents and his home
in smudged watercolours. Then trees with summery greens or snarling branches bereft of leaves. Primitive houses with white walls and red roofs, geometric V-shaped birds. Then trains and planes and motorcars, a mechanical and more masculine phase fostered by school-going peers. And then a drawing I hadn’t expected to find, a crayoned drawing of Fantasia. My heart lurched. This looked like a child’s drawing, but maybe it wasn’t. Certainly not Sajan’s. The glossy blue lake and shimmery green forest were almost as idyllic as the pictures on Kusro’s brochures. The drawing had been done on ruled notepaper. My eye was drawn by three grey squares. Going by their topographical position behind the forest, those would have been the generator room, the sewage treatment plant and water softening unit. What was more unsettling than the inclusion of those ugly blocks was a grey cloud above them. Was that a low-hanging monsoon cloud or was that smoke? Had someone in our complex foreseen the future? Or was it a sinister warning? I peered at it more closely. On the right-hand corner, he had written his name in block print. That was his handwriting. The j too loopy, the n too rounded, the S too wide. Had a friend done this and asked Sajan to affix his signature? Which friend?
The friend who goaded my son into entering that metal room inside the generator? Had they been playing some ‘fire’ game for many weeks? Was my grief pushing me over the edge, blurring the lines between the real and surreal?
Just then, almost as if he were dispatched to console me, Thambi bounded into the room. He tumbled into my arms as he did these days, his warm fur displacing my fear with joy and relief. I stroked his neck under the collar and he purred softly. ‘You love that, don’t you Thambi?’ I said.
Still cradling him in my arms, I slid another drawer open. This one had been emptied by Manas, its white surface slightly dusty. Below the dust motes, something glinted, something rectangular and plasticky. An ID card. I picked it up and examined its surface. It was old, its edges honey-coloured, the owner’s face smudged into a pinkish blot, the writing worn off except for a few letters….VANSH. Vansh? What was that? It wasn’t a company that Manas had worked for, ever. Had Sajan found it somewhere? Why had this drawn his interest? I stroked Thambi’s back thoughtfully: ‘What do you think this is?’ His eyes seemed to refract my question. I tugged at the drawer below it. I was still puzzling over the card when my fingers roved the surface and encountered something prickly. The whole drawer was filled to the brim with twigs, thorny twigs arranged in a nest. I dropped Thambi and he growled with surprise and an almost accusatory hurt. ‘So sorry, Thambi,’ I said, as I picked him up and felt him all over. ‘Are you hurt?’ He tried leaping from my arms, towards the thorny nest in my son’s drawer. Stretching a leg out, I smacked the drawer shut, and fled the room with a squirming Thambi held tightly in my arms. When I had regained my breath inside our master bedroom, and eased myself into an easy chair by the desk, I talked myself out of my mounting panic. It might have been a thorn that poked Thambi and a pigeon’s nest that snuffed out my son’s life. But surely, that had nothing to do with the twigs in my son’s room? Like most other kids, Sajan collected feathers, shells, vividly coloured seeds and rounded stones. Could this have been one of his collections, something Manas missed when cleaning the room? But twigs with thorns? And arranged in a nest? Were these twigs taken from the Bougainvillae creeper outside Joel’s room?
That night, I asked Manas, who was watching NDTV’s 9 o’clock news while Rhea cavorted around with Thambi: ‘In Sajan’s room, there’s a drawer filled with twigs. Was it always there?’
My husband’s attention flickered momentarily from the TV channel to the messages on his phone: ‘Don’t remember Veds, think I cleared almost everything.’
‘Rhea, do you know anything about the nest in Sajan’s room?’ My daughter, till then, was riveted by the cat-and-mouse game she was playing with Thambi. Thambi was the dodging mouse that cat Rhea chased across, under and over the divan. But when she heard me, the colour drained from her face, and her eyes widened with a surprising fear. ‘Mama, no, there’s no nest, no nest.’ The game was forgotten and the child broke into inexplicable sobs. Even a surprised Thambi nuzzling upto her did not allay her distress.
‘Why are you crying, baby? Did anyone frighten you about a nest?’
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she screamed, flinging the remote on the floor and uncharacteristically ignoring Thambi.
‘Why baby? What’s wrong?’
‘Don’t talk about it.’ She buried her head on my lap and continued to cry. Manas muted the TV’s high-pitched ad and switched to the Disney channel.
‘Did the big boys tell you something about a nest? Inside the dark room?’ Given Rhea’s fondness for all animals, her response was unnerving. What had they said or done to her?
‘I hate Chota Bheem. Turn it off.’
‘Vedika, don’t scare her,’ Manas said. But I hadn’t spurred her outburst. It was something else, something I couldn’t fathom yet.
Later, Manas rationalised, that Rhea must have overheard our talk about the chimney being blocked by a pigeon’s nest. ‘Don’t ask her about it, Veds. You’ll traumatise her.’ I didn’t respond to Manas, but my thoughts still whirled around Rhea’s bewildering response. She hadn’t seemed frightened that night, after playing with Joel and Michael. Why was she hysterical now?
My maid, a spindly, large-toothed woman, seemed as terrorised as Rhea when I mentioned the nest in Sajan’s drawer. Clapping her hands to her cheeks, she said: ‘Madam, you know this place is haunted. By ghost birds.’
‘What are you saying, Thimakka? I don’t believe in ghosts, they don’t exist.’
She went on to elaborate, as if she were explaining something arcane to a confused child, that many birds had been killed when Fantasia was constructed. And their winged ghosts still roamed above our complex.’Most of the bird-calls at twilight are from dead birds,’ she said.
I knew I couldn’t shake my maid’s belief in village lore. But I was afraid that her crazy notions were messing up my daughter. ‘Thimakka, have you ever spoken about this to Rhea?’
No, she shook her head. ‘Children see everything.’
‘Please never ever tell Rhea this, she’s already scared for no reason.’ Rhea must have heard the dead bird stories from other kids. What else was she imbibing inside this place? Should we really be staying on here or consider moving out?
I cleaned out Sajan’s drawer, but I left one twig inside. I wasn’t sure if I would need it in the future, as evidence of something.
NINETEEN
IN THE PERIOD LEADING up to Manjushri’s delivery, I was rather standoffish. We met occasionally, but I stopped calling her up or inviting her home. The first few weeks, she didn’t seem to notice. Gradually, however, she started backing off. And became, in turn, slightly chilly towards me. For instance, she had a potluck lunch, and didn’t invite me. I think the others must have sensed the rift, but didn’t say anything.
If we met at a common venue, or at someone’s home, we were superficially civil and I’d even ask her how the pregnancy was going, and what the doctor had said. After one of those occasions, Manjushri called me at home, and tried to converse like in the old days. My tone was polite but my responses restrained. As far as I was concerned, she was just a friend, not a close friend.
Then her daughter was born. I heard the news on our morning walk, when we spotted Krish, driving back from the clinic, red-eyed and delirious. ‘What happened?’ Hansika said, shouting across the garden. ‘We have a girl, a beautiful baby girl.’ Krish halted his Audi and rolled his window down, his usual surliness vanished. ‘Please go and see her at the clinic, because Manju’s missing all of you.’
‘Normal delivery?’ Damini said.
‘No, no, C-section. Some tension last minute, but now it’s all fine.’
‘We must pop some champagne.’ Damini twisted her wrist to mime the act.
Everyone chirped in: ‘How exciting’, ‘Let’s visit Manju together’, ‘We can give her a group gift’, ‘Will you joi
n us this evening Vedika?’
I muttered something about being busy that evening. ‘With what?’ Kalpana asked. Rather thoughtlessly, I said I had a doctor’s appointment.
‘Which doctor?’ Kalpana said. ‘My friend’s a really good fertility doctor.’
‘Not for that,’ I said, and turned back towards my villa. I decided to visit Manjushri alone, or better still, with Manas.
The next afternoon, I drove to the nearest baby shop to pick up a gift for Manjushri. My maid was babysitting Rhea at home. Children were discouraged from visiting the clinic, to avoid the transmission of infections to preemies. I didn’t remember when I’d last visited a baby shop. It must have been a few years ago, around the time of Rhea’s birth, because I was truly astounded by the explosion of baby things in that short period. That particular shop, on the second floor of the Forum Mall, didn’t have too many customers, and the shop assistant, a dark, wispy girl behind the counter, was eager to assist. ‘Which age group Ma’am?’ she asked, while my eyes spun from stacked shelf to shelf.
‘Can you show me what you have for newborns?’ I said absently, absorbing the scent of baby soaps and oils from the bath counter.
‘Of course Ma’am,’ she said, ‘would you like to look at these hypoallergenic towels with Disney imprints?’
‘Disney? No, not Disney. Do you have anything with a clown on it? Like a mobile with a clown’s face or a doll?’
‘A clown, Madam? I will check.’
She rifled through her wide range of products while my eyes quickly scanned the designs. We moved through towels, delightfully decorated with cartoon mice and bunny rabbit paws to ever-dry napkins with paisley leaves. Then from napkins to imported bottles with a baby’s face etched on the plastic. To mobiles ranging from Winnie the Pooh to a flute-playing Krishna. To a whole range of lab-tested, educational toys printed with colourful alphabets. It was all quite fascinating and I hadn’t realised that I’d spent more than two hours in the shop, without finding a single clown product in stock. ‘Your first baby, Madam?’ she asked. ‘So exciting, no?’
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