‘We’re staying the night,’ Sumi had said, but it is obviously going to be a much longer stay. The girls who have brought nothing with them but a nightdress and a toothbrush apiece have to keep moving up and down between the two houses, getting the things they need for each day, living, not out of suitcases, but out of plastic bags. Aru, with her innate sense of order has to work hard at not becoming part of the house, putting things in a kind of temporary order, so that the mattresses, rolled up each morning, are left on the floor and the clothes, folded as soon as they are dry, are not put away but piled on the table. The room is like a guest’s, who, having to catch a train in the evening, is almost packed and ready to leave. Kalyani enters the game, too; the extra cups, plates and glasses go back into storage after every meal, from where they have to be retrieved each time they are needed.
‘How long do we go on like this?’
Aru has just returned from her third trip of the day, getting some books, and her face is hollow with exhaustion. ‘Do you think, Charu, he’s dead?’
‘Don’t you think Sumi would have known if he was? No, I don’t think he’s dead.’
‘But then what? My God, we’ve got to do something.’
‘What do we do? Put an ad in the paper saying—“Come home, Papa, Sumi ill, all forgiven”. Or do we stick him among the missing persons on TV?’
My father a missing person? Do we put him among the juvenile delinquents, the retarded children and adults? And what do we say? Missing, a man of—forty-six? No, forty-seven. And—but how tall is he? He’s thin—so thin you can count his ribs. So we say ‘of slender build’. And a wheat complexion—that’s how it’s put, isn’t it? He has a scar over his left eyebrow. Wears glasses. Speaks English, Kannada, some Marathi, and a kind of Hindi we all laugh at. Fingers like mine—knobbly, large-knuckled, tapering at the tips. Feet like Seema’s—long and narrow. When he’s pleased with you, he says ‘Shabaash’ and when he speaks English, he begins almost every third sentence with a ‘You see’, pausing after that. And I said to him once, ‘But what is it we have to see, Papa?’ and he laughed.
Suddenly, Aru stops. But I don’t know him, I don’t know him at all, she thinks despairingly. All these things mean nothing, they don’t add up to anything, certainly not to a reason for walking out on us. Even Sumi says she doesn’t know why he did it and I have to believe her, she doesn’t lie, but ....
‘You see,’ Charu says in reply to Aru’s long silence, ‘there is really nothing we can do.’
Aru is soon to realize something else: they are trapped into inactivity by that greatest fear of all—the fear of losing face. Gopal’s desertion is not just a tragedy, it is both a shame and a disgrace. There was a time when a man could have walked out of his home and the seamless whole of the joint family would have enclosed his wife and children, covered his absence. Now the rent in the fabric, gaping wide, is there for all to see. Nevertheless it has to be concealed, an attempt made to turn people’s eyes away from it. Aru realizes that none of the family have visited them, not Goda, sharer of all Kalyani’s joys and sorrows, or her daughter Devaki, Sumi’s special ally, or even Ramesh, so close to Gopal, and such a constant visitor to their house. Their staying away is deliberate; they know, but they don’t want to come to us with the knowledge. Only Nagi, after ten years of working with Kalyani, has no such scruples. She knows—has Kalyani told her? Or is she guessing?—and makes this clear to them by her repeated ‘poor things’, her clucks of sympathy.
‘Stop staring, Nagi,’ Aru exclaims angrily. ‘Have I suddenly grown an extra nose?’
‘What’s the use of getting angry with me? It’s all our luck, it’s written here, we can’t escape it. Look at my poor Lakshmi, we thought he was such a good man and he left her for that other woman ....’
‘Oh God!’
‘What’s wrong with your sister?’ Nagi asks Charu when Aru stalks out.
‘Nothing, you know how she is. And for God’s sake, Nagi,’ Charu tries to change the subject, ‘what is that you’re wiping the floor with?’
‘It’s Amma’s petticoat. What can I do? I don’t want to ask Amma to get me a mopping cloth, not at such a time, I know she has troubles, and you—don’t you waste your time talking to me, you go on with your reading. Yes, you study and get a job soon so that you can help your poor mother.’
Aru hears her and thinks—maybe Nagi’s way of saying it straight out is better, after all. Anything is better than this deviousness, this circling round the truth.
But the truth is that there is no moment when tragedy is certain. Each moment they are balanced on the edge of hope; every time the gate creaks, it could be Gopal, each time the phone rings there is the possibility that they will hear Gopal’s voice saying ‘Gopal here’. Even Sumi, despite her apparent stoicism, is not immune from this hope. Aru realizes it the day she comes home with Gopal’s scooter and Sumi, alerted by the sound, rushes out. Aru, getting off the scooter, sees the eagerness on her mother’s face, watches the hope dying out. For a moment they stare at each other wordlessly. Then Sumi goes back in and Aru thinks, I’ve got to do something.
That same night she rings up Premi.
Premi’s arrival is like the acknowledgement of a crisis. For the first time something is spelled out that none of them has admitted so far. Perhaps it is this that makes Sumi say abruptly to her sister, ‘Why have you come?’
She recovers and corrects herself almost immediately. ‘That’s a stupid question to ask. Who told you?’
‘I did.’
The way Aru stands next to her aunt, confronting her mother, is like a challenge. But Sumi ignores it. She reverts to a normal tone, speaks of the usual things—how is Nikhil? And Anil?
To Premi this conversation conveys a message—not so much ‘we’re not going to talk about it now’ as ‘I’m not going to talk to you about it.’ She finds it impossible after this to say the things she had wanted to say, to ask the questions that have been thronging her mind since Aru spoke to her.
The questions come only after Sumi has gone to bed. Sumi has moved out of the room she shared with her daughters into a bedroom in the other wing. With the large hall between them, it is almost impossible for her to hear them; nevertheless they speak in low tones. The conversation centres around: where is he? Has no one any idea? Only when they have exhausted all the possibilities of this do they go on to the ‘why’.
And now Premi, practical and matter-of-fact as she had decided she would be, brings out the list she has ready. Quarrels? Money? Is it because of what happened in the Department? His resignation was a hint that Gopal was not in a very normal frame of mind. No man gives up a University teaching job just like that! Perhaps the attack on him by his students threw him—here Premi hesitates, for these are Gopal’s daughters—off balance?
But the girls have nothing to offer her, no answers to any of these questions, only an acceptance of the fact of his having gone away as opposed to her disbelief.
Premi ventures on her next question with even more hesitation, and this time not because she is speaking to Gopal’s daughters but because she is talking of Gopal and Sumi. (And this is the thought that has been beating in her mind since last night—Gopal walking out on Sumi? I can’t, I never will believe it.) Is there any other woman? she asks.
She is astonished that there is a pause, a kind of jerk before a reply. The two sisters give an impression of having spoken about this, of having argued about it.
‘There was an anonymous letter to Sumi a year back.’
‘Don’t be silly, Charu. Nobody believed that. Sumi laughed, you know that. Kantamani and Papa! She was such a—so pathetic! And anyway, Premi-mavshi, she isn’t here any more, she’s gone abroad.’
‘What does Sumi say?’
‘Nothing.’
Premi shouldn’t be surprised, not if she remembers Sumi’s response to Gopal’s resigning. ‘For Heaven’s sake, does it matter why he’s doing it! He doesn’t want to go on and that’s that!’
‘But, Sumi, what about money? I mean, how will you live?’
‘He’ll get a job—he told me someone has already approached him, they want him to write some articles, maybe even work for them. Oh, I’m not worried!’
But, for God’s sake, this is her husband and her marriage of twenty years, Premi thinks ....
Their talk becomes rambling and inconsequential after this. They keep pulling things out of the past, each memory like a grappling hook bringing up a question—was it because of this? At times the talk gets snagged on the unsaid things that lie between them: They must have quarrelled, I heard them once, late at night ....
Perhaps it’s because of me, the things I said to Papa when he decided to resign ....
Sumi took Gopal and her marriage too casually, she never cared as much as she should have ....
‘Fate.’
The word, thrown into their midst by Kalyani, startles them. Premi had been both anxious and apprehensive about her mother’s reaction. How has she taken it? Will she create a scene? But Kalyani has been surprisingly silent, especially this last hour, and entirely still, except for the ceaseless movement of her hands stroking her tiny feet as if they hurt her. She has made her presence felt only by her loud yawns at regular intervals. And now suddenly she says ‘Fate’. And just as abruptly walks out, leaving the word lingering among them. None of them is inclined to pick it up. In fact, no more is said.
Lying in bed, listening to the easy breathing of her two nieces on the floor, Premi is thinking of how they are always on the same side of the invisible dotted lines that mark out alliances and divides in families. The relationship between them arouses a sense of deprivation in her. Sumi and I, we were never like this. She was ahead of me and I was forever trailing behind, never able to catch up with her. And it makes no difference that I am now a successful professional, mother of a seven-year-old son, wife of a prosperous lawyer. The moment I come home, all this dwindles into nothing and I can feel myself sliding back into adolescence, getting once again under the skin of that frightened child Premi who’s always waiting here for me.
‘Why are you here?’
At the question, all Premi’s sense of being needed, of being able to offer solace and help, had seeped away from her, leaving her again the child who, heart thudding in fear, had climbed up the forbidden stairs, opened the door and met the blank stare, the question: Why are you here?
‘My father never spoke to me until I was ten,’ she had told Anil after their marriage and he had not believed her. Just as she wouldn’t have believed, if she had not seen it herself, that there could be families like Anil’s. At first it had been like watching a movie—it was pleasing, interesting, pretty, but it could not possibly be true. People did not really talk to each other so easily, they did not hug and touch and use words of endearment so casually. No, it was a false picture. The truth was a father who stayed in his room, who never came out, never spoke to you, a mother who put her hand on your mouth so that you did not cry out ....
‘My father did not speak to me until I was ten.’
But that’s not true. ‘Why are you here?’—those four words he had said then had meant nothing. He had scarcely looked at her when he spoke. The first time he really talked to her was when she had completed her medical finals; he had called her up to his room then, summoned her actually, to tell her she would be marrying Anil.
Since then, going to his room has been a formality she has scrupulously observed on every visit home. And he speaks to her—no, not as if she is his daughter, she has seen Gopal with his daughters and she knows that this is not how fathers speak to their daughters—but as if she is an acquaintance. But even this is an ordeal for her; the early years have so marked their relationship that she finds it difficult to speak to him. She is stiff, uneasy, often, like a stupid child, repeating his words as if bereft of her own. It will be the same this time too, she thinks, climbing the stairs slowly, reluctantly, as if there is still the possibility of being dragged down, of her fingers being prised away from the railings.
And it is—exactly the same. He asks her about Nikhil, speaks of Anil and of Anil’s father, who had been his colleague at one time. Nothing is said about Gopal and Sumi.
Of course, he cannot speak of Gopal. To mention Gopal, to speak of what he has done, is to let down the drawbridge into his own past. Nothing has changed, nothing ever changes here. I was a fool to imagine I could do something, that I could be of any use.
‘I think I’d better go,’ she tells Aru apologetically. ‘I’d stay if I thought I could help, but there’s nothing I can do. If we knew where Gopal was, perhaps, but ... You’ll call me, Aru, won’t you, when you find out where he is?’
‘That may never happen.’
‘Don’t be silly. Any time you need me, for anything, even if it’s not important, just ring me up and I’ll come right away.’
PREMI’S VISIT, IF nothing else, has opened a door through which the family enters, converging on Sumi and her daughters to perform its role. They congregate like mourners after a death in the family—but a death in a distant land, a death without a body. There is a blank space where the body should have been. None of the stock phrases, none of the comforting formulas, fit. Even to speak of what has happened as a tragedy is to make it one, for it is like affirming that Gopal will never return. There is an awkwardness about the whole thing, and discomfort and uneasiness pervade more than grief and anger.
Sumi, the person they come to comfort, is an enigma. She accepts Goda’s dumb sympathy, Devaki’s fierce loyalty and Ramesh’s stupefied bewilderment, as if they are all the same to her. Unable to find the right way of dealing with her apparent stoicism, they are reduced to treating her as an invalid, bringing her fruits, magazines and books.
‘You didn’t have to bring this, Ramesh.’
Kalyani makes a formal protest when Ramesh comes with a large pack of ice-cream.
‘I was just passing by,’ he murmurs.
‘He’s trying to cheer us up, Amma.’
Ramesh gives Sumi an embarrassed, almost agonised look that silences her.
It is when she is serving the ice-cream that Aru suddenly asks Ramesh, as if she has been pondering on this all the while, ‘Don’t you have any idea where he could be? You must be having some clue, maybe there are people we don’t know about ....’
‘I’ve tried all the places I could think of, Aru. And I’ve been trying to get in touch with anyone who had some contact with Guru. But it’s so hard to explain, I don’t know what to say to them ....’
‘Say it, Ramesh, say he’s missing, say he’s walked out on his wife and children. It’s got to come out some time, how long are we going to hide it from the world? And do you think people don’t know? I’m sure they do and frankly I don’t care.’
‘You don’t care?’ Aru’s reaction to her mother’s words is violent and sharp. ‘That’s wonderful. You don’t care about his having gone, you don’t care where he is, you don’t care what people think—but I care, yes, I do, I care about Papa having left us, I care about not having our own house. I don’t want to live like this, as if we’re sitting on a railway platform, I want my home back, I want my father back ....’
After a moment’s stunned silence, they move towards the sobbing girl, all of them except Sumi, who walks out.
When Ramesh comes out in search of her, he sees her standing still, her face lifted to the sky, a reflective look on it, as if she is weighing something. A lover watching her would be intrigued; but for Ramesh, it only means a moment of respite he welcomes. When he joins her she has resumed her pacing. They walk together in silence for a while, Sumi scarcely aware, he thinks, that he is with her. She speaks only when they reach the gate.
‘I never thought Aru would take this so hard. I was more anxious about Seema, but ....’
Sumi has suddenly stopped. The strong odour of the plant which Kalyani swears keeps snakes away, assails them and they move on.
‘Once wh
en Aru was little we’d gone somewhere, I don’t remember where, now. At night, I can remember this, she wouldn’t go to bed. I want my own bed, she kept crying.’
‘I never thought Guru would do such a thing, I never imagined he’s this kind of a man ....’
‘What kind of a man is he, Ramesh?’
Ramesh looks at her in surprise. But no, she isn’t being sarcastic, she’s entirely serious, she wants the answer to her question.
‘Yes, tell me, Ramesh, what kind of a man do you think he is? Sometimes I think you know him better than any one of us does. Sudha was more like a mother than a sister to him, you’re a kind of brother, not a nephew. He was closer to you than anyone else I know.’
‘Guru? I was eight when he left home. I don’t know why he left, nobody ever told me. When you’re a kid, you accept these things, you never ask why. But I can remember that my mother was very upset, that she used to cry a lot. And I can vaguely remember us, my parents and I, sitting in a train and my mother crying. I think that was the time we left him in Shivpur. Something happened to him then, my mother told me that later. He suddenly decided he didn’t want to live with us in Bombay, he decided he’d join a college in Shivpur ....’
‘Gopal himself never spoke of this to you?’
‘No, never. He did come home during vacations, not every vacation though. It was only when he got a job and stayed here in your house—I visited him, remember?—it was only then that we became friends. I went back home so full of “Gopal this” and “Gopal that” that my father began to call him “your Guru”. And that’s how he became Guru—Sumi, do you think he’s had some kind of a breakdown? I can’t help thinking it has to be something like that.’
A Matter of Time Page 2