‘Yes,’ I said, holding my breath. At the end of those two hours, I must have dismayed her with my paltry purchase: an electronic mobile that played Mozart tunes when the baby kicked out in a particular direction.
When I picked my husband up from work later that evening, Manas had exclaimed at the sight of Manju’s gift. ‘Isn’t that too small, Vedika? Should we get her flowers, too?’
‘You pick them up. I’ll park by that Everest Florist.’ He returned shortly with a large, generous basket and I was angry that he’d spent so much.
‘I thought you’d want to make up with Manjushri,’ he said. Manas was usually a bystander on such matters, but sometimes he just said the wrong things and he didn’t even know it. I held my silence till we reached the clinic.
When we entered the maternity ward, what hit me was the strong smell. A pleasant smell—a mixture of breast milk, infant formula, baby powders and oils—but nothing could have been more unsettling that evening. The place brought back memories of Sajan’s birth. Manjushri occupied a private room with a single bed, and we had to cross the general ward to get there. On both sides, lay rows of mothers with newborns—small little creatures wrapped in white towels or green hospital robes—in metallic white cribs by their side. Little beings, whose curling fists and creased foreheads had been summoned from some remote otherworld. Miracles surely, but miracles that could be snatched away by a ruthless god.
Manas asked a nurse for directions to Manjushri’s room. She pointed towards a section of private rooms, to the right of the general ward, and I followed numbly. Manas must have sensed something because he laid a gentle hand on my back—he was normally shy about touching me in public—and said he wanted to take me out for dinner that night. ‘To a really nice place,’ he said. ‘You choose.’
‘For what?’ I responded. ‘To celebrate our son’s…’
His hand slipped away at once. A few minutes later, I was walking alone. He had dropped off near the turning from the general ward. Now I had to go in and face Manjushri alone. But I felt better already. Better because I’d expunged the demon that was inhabiting me. Better because I’d broken through my husband’s goodwill and restraint. It was easier to focus on us, on a conflict between me and him, than on the shapeless terror inside.
Even as I walked into the private room, with a perfectly cheery ‘Hi Manju, I’m so happy for you’, I was already making plans to make it up to Manas. I’d cook a special meal, massage his back, retrieve the wine he had bought last month. Make love to him, as I rarely did. I lifted Manjushri’s baby and held her up to the light.
‘She’s so beautiful,’ I said, rocking her gently.
‘Isn’t she?’ Manju said, beaming proudly. ‘I plan to call her Aishwarya.’
Inside the master bedroom, Manas had fallen into a pretense sleep. I bolted the door, remembering the nights when Rhea suddenly slid between us. I gently opened my wardrobe and extracted something I had folded into a drawer for years and never worn. I shook it out and held it briefly against my figure, gazing into the dressing mirror. As I slipped on the sheer red nightgown that Manas had gifted me just before Sajan’s accident, I turned to look at my sleeping husband. Something seemed to flicker across his face. A dream? A feeling, an awareness of my entry despite my whisper-soft movements? Was he still angry? If it had been me, I’d have sprung up and confronted him: ‘How could you rebuff me like that?’ But not Manas. He disliked conflicts more than I did. They pierced his notions of life as a smoothly-paved linear graph that slowly bumped its way upwards. Of course, Sajan’s death had already created a hole large enough to suck us all in. Surely, it was unfair, to subject him to my outbursts on top of everything else?
I walked into the toilet and turned on the powerful light above my magnifying makeup mirror. I hadn’t made up my face in ages. I had always scoffed at movie and TV heroines who seemed to glide into bed with makeup on, and miraculously wake up without their hairs ruffled or lipsticks smudged. Just for tonight, I wondered if I could pull it off. I patted on the pink-beige glossy foundation, brushed some glitter on my cheeks, lined my eyes with thick kajal, curled my lashes with bluish-black mascara, and finally touched up my lips with Manas’ favourite shade: a plummy purple. I always knew that makeup could conceal my age lines and the acne scars that dotted my cheeks. But I hadn’t realised how makeup could make me feel differently about myself. I even giggled softly. Forget therapists, I thought. Paint over your feelings at a salon.
I gently lay down on the crook of Manas’ arm, on a spot that almost felt like it had been carved out for me. He shifted with a grunt. There was a simmering anger in him still. More than the usual irritation he usually displayed at such times. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, gently stroking his face with my fingertips. ‘I was wrong to have said that.’ I gently turned on the bedside light and waited for him to open his eyes and take in the new me. Someone who was trying harder than ever to revive the magic.
His eyes stayed shut but something was uncoiling inside him. He tugged me tightly against his chest and I expected his fingers to stray towards my upper back, beneath the elastic snap of my bra strap, as they always did. Instead, he started heaving with quiet sobs. I was usually the one who cried, Manas the one who comforted me. This was new, and also unnerving. And it drew forth a sort of remorse that his anger could have never evoked in me. I kissed the tears slowly streaking down his face. ‘I miss him so much, Vedika. Miss him more than anything else. There are some days, when I don’t feel like carrying on with anything. When I just want to give up.’ I continued to kiss him. ‘Manas, don’t say this. Please. You know I need you to stay strong. So does Rhea. Please, I’m so sorry for being selfish.’ I was willing to do anything that night, anything to obliterate my husband’s grief, to restore him to his even-tempered, bouncy self.
My hand wandered towards the buttons on his pajamas. Only when he started returning my kisses, with his fingers acquiring a familiar urgency as they groped my breasts, the tang of regret started receding. I sank with relief into the fleeting oblivion that only Manas, with patience and a willingness to heed, had learned to evoke in me. Why was it always so brief? Why couldn’t that forgetfulness stay with us forever?
Later, as I lay coiled against his shoulder, and he continued to stroke my hair, he said: ‘What did you do to your face?’
‘Did you see it just now?’ I laughed without joy. ‘When it’s all over?’
He turned his face away, like he didn’t want to look into my eyes. ‘I lied about that nest. It was there earlier, when I cleaned Sajan’s room. I think our boy brought those twigs in. Since I hadn’t told you about it earlier, I didn’t want you attacking me. So stop asking other people--.’ Sajan created a thorny nest inside his drawer? Why was that more bewildering than Rhea’s distressed response to its presence in our house? Of course my boy brought in objects like other kids, but he wasn’t the kind to carefully arrange thorny twigs into shapely circles.
‘Sajan didn’t care about birds,’ I said. ‘Why on earth –’
Manas said, ‘Vedika, we don’t know everything about our kids.’
Strangely, for the first time in my life, I was disbelieving of my husband. Was this really true? Had he really seen the nest earlier? Or was he just trying to dissuade me from probing its origins outside our home? I knew I couldn’t trust any of the other women around the complex, not after the manner in which Manjushri had betrayed me. But whom could I turn to if I couldn’t trust Manas too?
I trudged back to the toilet, and stared at my painted face in the mirror. How could I have thought I looked good like this? I looked like a tart, like a woman who had nothing more to lose because she had already lost everything. I grabbed a cotton swab and roughly scrubbed off the colours with a liquid remover. The remover must have expired, because the lotion stung my skin.
Just then, Manas inserted his face into the magnifying mirror. ‘Why’re you taking it off? You look stunning.’
TWENTY
TWO WEEKS LA
TER, MANJUSHRI invited us to her daughter’s cradling. For the special day, Krish had decorated the place with extravagant flowers. A profusion of yellow and orange chrysanthemums curtained their doorway, an elaborate rose petal rangoli patterned their garden. Manjushri had invited all the Royale villa owners, including Tushar and his towering but reticent wife, Asma. We were lucky to be included. There was also the usual tug-of-war for the attention of the selectors. Who constantly paraded their successes and busy lives, who were picky about which events they attended.
At the function, I was feeling surprisingly upbeat. Inside the puja room, the priest and the blissful couple crouched around a fire. The rest of us gathered in the living room, in a wide circle, sipping almond milk. The talk revolved around contemporary issues: the state of the country, its seesawing economy and its stagnation on other fronts. Sid Shah mentioned the bribe he had paid to register his Fantasia property, how despite a computer system that generated a computerised receipt, cash was demanded under the table. Jacob Mathew, despite how everyone else was cooing at Simran and her new baby boy, flirted with all the pretty women. Women inside the complex had started assessing their own allure based on whether Jacob eyed them with a glint or not. That day, he was also talking about his father’s encounters with the country’s most glamorous women. ‘He was a media man, an editor at the India Times. Had the who’s who of the nation at his beck and call.’
As the adults blathered on, my attention was seized by a little boy, with a rounded head covered by a tangle of curls, who darted between the backyard and dining room. The other kids, including Rhea, were upstairs, playing some video game. The boy must have been slightly younger than Sajan would have been then. His mother, a stumpy Bengali woman, had mentioned they lived in Arcadia, just across the golf course.
The talk, by then, had shifted to politics in India, to how every party and politician was so despicable. ‘What you need,’ Tushar said, in his measured, lawyerly voice, his jowls quivering, ‘is a two-party system. So many bloody parties here, nothing moves forward.’
‘Congress and BJP, that’s all you need.’ Raj vigorously nodded his balding head. ‘It’s the lefties who stonewall everything.’ Raj remained a staunch BJP supporter, having raised significant sums for the party in his California days. ‘And dole money out to people who don’t work. Take that NREGA scheme, these people are not willing to work anymore. Because they get handouts for free. All this funded by our bloody taxes. Instead of building roads, we’re building a nation of good-for-nothings.’ Though Tushar and Jacob leaned towards the Congress, though every view had its dissenters, the get-together fostered a pretended consensus. They were all on the same side, after all.
The curly head which had caught my eye now had twigs in his hands. I moved into the dining room, to get a closer look. He continued bringing twigs in, one at a time, and laying them in neat circles on the breakfast ledge that separated the dining room and kitchen. I held onto Manjushri’s dining chair as something inside me throbbed. My palms felt cold and damp. Several images bubbled into view: the nest that had choked my son, the drawer filled with thorny twigs in his room. Also, I was afraid of Rhea coming down and spotting them. Fortunately, a closer look revealed that these twigs did not have thorns.
The child’s mother, who seemed engrossed in the talk, which had turned, inevitably, to Bollywood, glanced briefly at her boy’s fevered activity, then glanced away like she didn’t want to be involved. Her hair was curly at the roots, but chemically straightened at the ends. Her lashes, lengthened with thick mascara, concealed her dark brown eyes. Why wasn’t she reprimanding her boy? When I rejoined the circle, I touched the woman on her shoulder and said: ‘Your son’s dirtying the ledge with twigs.’
She laughed: ‘Always like that, so naughty. What can we do, won’t listen.’ She paused and introduced herself: ‘I’m Bishnu.’
‘Don’t you think you should tell him to stop,’ I said, watching him scoot to the backyard again to fetch more twigs. In the meanwhile, the priest, who was conducting the cradling rites, had raised the volume of his Sanskrit chants and folks had turned their attention towards the ceremony. Behind a screen of white jasmines threaded with pink lotuses, Manjushri and Krish, luminous in green-orange and white silks, held their quilt-wrapped bundle. I remembered our own ceremony at Fremont, when Sajan was born. I had been sure then that the little bundle in my arms was our ticket to happiness. Who could have predicted the tragic turn of events?
It was almost like Bishnu had read my thoughts, because soon enough she asked, ‘So, do you have children?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Didn’t she know, I was Sajan’s mother? Inside the community, our family story was widespread. Hadn’t she heard? Fortunately, she didn’t follow up with how many.
When Manjushri walked into the kitchen to check on the catered food, she was flustered by the twigs on the ledge. ‘Who put these here?’ she asked. ‘That Arcadia kid,’ I said, sweeping them carefully off the ledge with my palms and shaking them into the kitchen trash.
‘Oh, how sweet,’ laughed Manjushri, ‘there will be no end to kids’ pranks.’ Then she pinched me hard on my bare arm. ‘A good luck pinch,’ she said. ‘When you and Manas have another baby, your life will change.’
For the past few minutes, the kid had stayed out in the backyard. So I opened the mesh door that led to their backyard lawn and pebble garden. The boy was seated on his haunches, his back facing the lawn. Against the wall, some poor bird was splayed in a fleshy heap, its neck twisted at an odd angle. Had the bird fallen down, injured its neck? How was that possible?
‘What happened to the bird?’ I asked. Someone had tied a deflated black balloon to its pink feet. Had the kid done that?
The kid stared at his own hands, stained with the bird’s blood, as if he were engrossed in counting something.
‘What’s your name?’ I knelt down, moving closer to him.
He was still looking at his hands, averting eye contact.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked again.
‘Bee, bee, bee...’
‘Bee? Is it Bijoy?’
He nodded his head. For a few minutes, the scene in front of me shattered into a million pixels, the colours fading, the sharp edges of solid objects dissolving into tiny dots. I felt lightheaded and dizzy. Something inside my stomach was clenching, distracting me with its cramping pain. How stupid I was! I should have known. After obsessing about this kid for so long, I should have spotted him at once.
I squatted by his side, consciously gathering my breath, and focusing my thoughts. I couldn’t let this pass, a rare opportunity to question the kid in the absence of his parents.
‘Bijoy, did you play with Sajan that evening, you know, by the generator?’
For a startled few seconds, he looked up at me. He seemed to comprehend what I was saying. But he didn’t say anything.
‘Can you tell me what happened that evening, when the smoke filled the room?’
‘Juh, juh, juh…’ he said, looking at me momentarily, with a plea in his eyes. Then he turned his eyes away and continued to stare at his own hands. I gazed at the angelic face crowned by soft curls, at his shy eyes framed by long, curling eyelashes. He was an endearing child, a child who might have won my affection under different circumstances.
His mother stepped out just then.
‘The bird...,’ I said, waving my arms at the poor creature.
‘He loves animals,’ she said.
‘Which school does he go to?’ I asked.
‘He goes to Akriti, a school for special children. He has speech apraxia.’
Bijoy, the boy who was being accused of killing my son, also had a condition? He didn’t seem to know what he was saying or doing. The little assassin that I had been waiting for was defenceless, more defenceless than my son had been. How could I blame him, this gorgeous but tongue-tied child?
Was he trying to say Joel? Had Joel or Suhel provoked him into pushing Sajan inside the DG1 box? But who had bolted
the door? Or handed him the clown doll, to clutch as a marker of sorts? There was much more to that evening than the parents were willing to tell me. However much they tried to thwart me, I wasn’t willing to let it go.
TWENTY-ONE
MY HUSBAND MUST HAVE started worrying about me again, at this point. Shortly after my encounter with Bijoy, he invited my parents to visit. I had been on edge already, but now I was edgier about their impending visit. After all, I didn’t think I needed their care or attention. I was still anguished about Sajan’s death and distressed about Rhea’s safety, but I wasn’t falling apart like Manas thought I was. Besides, now I also had to deal with the muddled feelings my stepmother evoked in me.
After Ma died, and after my marriage to Manas, Baba had, unexpectedly, married our Marwari neighbour. A decision that appalled me more than it should have because my parents, who bickered about other things, were unified in their derision of Asha. ‘She’s so materialistic,’ was Ma’s verdict. ‘Can only think of jewellery and money.’ To which Baba had always nodded vigorously. I felt like he betrayed my mother’s memory by shifting his stance so quickly.
Asha wasn’t a typical Indian woman. Sure, she expected to be waited upon by her maids, with a steaming morning chai and hot parathas, with small services like a head massage or back rub, but in other ways, she was quite singular. Widowed early, she had raised two children without a fuss, and run an impeccable household. In my teenage years, I used to be in awe of her. Despite being a single woman in a conservative community, she forged a hectic social life. Tall and elegant and sloe-eyed, she was popular at the Tollygunge Club, where she was a formidable bridge player, willing to raise the stakes to levels that even the men shied away from. Her daughter, Shoma, was a school friend, and we accompanied her together sometimes to watch her mother play: Asha’s eyes glinting mischievously, her giraffe neck thrown back, her throat throbbing behind the lilting laugh of a sixteen-year-old. Over the years her face had aged, no doubt, with crows-feet around her eyes, small wrinkles near the corners of her mouth, but her voice, when she laughed, was still young and high-pitched. What baffled me later was not why Baba had picked her. Why had Asha, a candid pleasure-seeker, picked my quiet and retiring father?
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