A Matter of Time

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A Matter of Time Page 4

by Shashi Deshpande


  ‘She’s all right, Amma.’ Sumi sees her mother’s still trembling hand. ‘Don’t be so scared.’

  But it isn’t Aru’s fainting that has got Kalyani into this state, it’s something else none of them has noticed: her rush towards Aru when she fell, her realization, an almost instinctive one, that she was next to Shripati, his abrupt walking away from her. Now she sits unusually silent, frozen into an immobility, unable to shake off the paralysis of fear. She takes no part in the unloading, and it is left to Sumi to instruct the men to distribute her things about the house.

  All the extra furniture, except the girls’ beds, goes into the small room next to Sumi’s bedroom. This room becomes a place of refuge to the girls, a kind of re-creation of their home. Seema, when she is in one of her moods, lies long hours on the large bed, which is the repository of all the extra mattresses, oblivious to everyone, uncaring of anyone calling out for her.

  The boxes and trunks are pushed into the storeroom where they settle down as if they belong, soon knitted into their new place by the cobwebs, sealed into it by the dust that settles down on them. Books and clothes find their way to their owners, but the rest of the things lie about for them to stumble on, until, in the mysterious way of all articles, they are absorbed by the house and become part of it.

  The girls, too, no longer have the air of visitors living out of suitcases. Their clothes now flutter on the lines till evening, the underclothes stay on (‘in purdah’, as Charu says, since Kalyani conceals them by hanging towels on the next line) until they are pulled off before their baths the next day. The girls give the impression of having taken up the threads of their life. They are no longer living on the edge of crisis, they have found a routine in which grief and fear have a minor place. Once, however, Sumi sees her two older daughters coming together, holding each other for an infinitesimal moment, giving the impression that it is for mutual comfort, and then parting.

  Sumi is the one who has the air of being lost, of having no place in her childhood home. She shows no outward sign of distress, but the girls notice a new habit in her, of touching them, holding their hands, smoothing their hair, as if this physical contact is a manifestation of some intense emotion within her. The first time Aru comes home and finds her mother in the kitchen, she feels as if a weight has been lifted off her. She’s all right, she thinks, she’ll be all right now. But there is a kind of purposeless extravagance about her movements, an exaggeration that is different from her normal vivacity and quickness. When evening comes, she paces up and down in the front yard, the way she had done the day Ramesh had found her there, from the porch to the gate and then back, pivoting on her heel to make each turn in a stylized manner.

  And then one day, she decides to learn to ride the scooter. She begins all by herself, until Prasad, the outhouse tenant, comes to help her. Aru is there to aid her the next day, but it is not long before she dispenses with all help and rides it herself, going in circles round the pond, slowly, ready to put her foot down the moment she feels unsure of her balance. Shyam and Shweta, Prasad and Ratna’s children, watch her in fascination, Seema sits dreamily on the steps staring at her mother and Kalyani goes in and out with a nervousness she cannot conceal. The spasmodic sputter of the scooter becomes part of the normal tapestry of sounds and the watchers go back to their usual occupations, except Kalyani who cannot keep away. The next day, Sumi suddenly gathers speed and in a burst of confidence, goes out of the gate.

  ‘She shouldn’t have done that, she shouldn’t have gone out on the road.’

  ‘Amma, she isn’t learning to ride the scooter to whiz around in your front yard!’

  Nevertheless, Aru is anxious too; she wanders to the gate and waits there until Sumi returns and runs back in after her. Sumi stops and holds both her arms above her head in a triumphant gesture. The scooter rocks, she clutches at the handlebars and Aru, rushing to her, holds her in a hug that steadies her. Kalyani comes out attracted by their voices, their laughter, unware that above, Shripati is watching the mother and daughter, too, the expression on his face almost identical to Kalyani’s.

  Three sisters—the very stuff fairy tales are spun out of. Aru must have made the connection even as a child, for there is a story, not apocryphal as family stories often are, of her asking the question: why is the youngest sister always the good and beautiful one? Why can’t the eldest be that?

  Aru doesn’t wholly believe the story herself, she is embarrassed by it (secretly pleased, too, as we all are by tales of our childhood exploits). The story has had a footnote added to it later, Charu’s comment: So Aru and I don’t get Prince Charming? And then, a typical Charu retort: Who wants him, anyway! Seema can have him.

  But to imagine Seema as Cinderella is impossible. Her hair, her clothes, her very shoes have the gloss of much care and rule out the possibility of any association with rags and cinders. She’s always ‘tip top’, as Kalyani says approvingly. And as for Seema slaving away while her sisters go out dancing—this is an even more impossible thought; it is actually the other way round.

  ‘Why do you make Seema’s bed, why do you iron her clothes? You’re spoiling her,’ Charu charges her sister. Aru offers excuses that sound lame even to herself. The truth is that she cannot give up the habit of babying Seema which began when Sumi had been ill and unable to look after the new-born baby. The sense of responsibility that began then, when Aru was only six years old, and Gopal brought the baby back from Kalyani who had looked after her until then, seems never to have left her. She is still that girl, her small face anxious and puckered, trying to soothe the baby who never seemed to stop crying.

  Even Charu’s protests aginst this coddling of Seema are rare; she, like the rest of the family, accepts the fact that Seema is special, isolated not only by the five-year gap between them but by something else that none of them can spell out. They don’t try to, either; the awareness of this is cloaked in silence.

  In any case, the three sisters could never qualify for a Cinderella story, for there are no ugly sisters here. Actually, there is not much resemblance between the sisters; they are not even, as siblings often are, variations on a theme. And they emphasize this dissimilarity by the way they dress, by the length and styling of their hair. Yet they are alike in this, that all three of them just escape beauty. Aru, who has no vanity at all about her looks, thinks of herself as the ugly one in the family. My nose is too big, she thinks, my lips too thin, my forehead too bony. She does not realize that she is at her worst when she is looking into the mirror; her unsmiling face looks severe, her jaw more angular than it really is, her cheekbones prominent. It is when she is relaxed and smiling that her face softens, that it is touched by beauty. But this is the face she never sees. Her sternness, like Charu’s plumpness and Seema’s curious blankness, is the one flaw that mars the picture.

  It was Sumi who, after seeing Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, chose the name for her second daughter; but sometimes, watching Aru in one of her rare skittish moods, she feels that Aru is the one who is more like Ray’s heroine, moving suddenly, unexpectedly, from a sombre gravity to a childlike playfulness. Now, these moods are a thing of the past and Aru is wholly steeped in earnestness. She has taken on a great many of the chores at home. It makes sense, in a way, that she leaves Charu free for her studies in this crucial second year of her college. But there is more to it. She wants to be the man of the family, Sumi thinks, when Aru insists on accompanying her mother to the dentist. She wants to take Gopal’s place, she wants to fill the blank Gopal has left in our lives. But Gopal never went to the dentist with me, he didn’t do so many of these things Aru is now doing. And yet his absence has left such a vast emptiness that I can’t find my bearings, there are no markers any more to show me which way I should go.

  Perhaps what Aru is trying is to steer her mother and sisters through the stormy passage of change. In this, however, she comes up against Kalyani.

  Kalyani’s pattern of housekeeping, a routine carefully built on a foundati
on of pain, has been disrupted. She finds herself incapable of absorbing four people into her order of things, yet is reluctant to accept help. The result is that the larger issues of treachery and desertion, of grief and anger recede, making way for the minor irritants of food, meal-times and the sharing of chores. Aru finds this heartburning over trivial issues undignified, a kind of comedown. And after Sumi’s housekeeping that allowed them to pitch into anything they wanted to do, she finds Kalyani’s restrictions hard to bear.

  Sumi, caught in the practicalities of moving house, has so far stayed aloof from the problem. But listening to Aru’s increasingly irritable responses to Kalyani’s questions one morning, she decides to interfere.

  ‘Aru should be studying, Sumi, she should be having fun, she shouldn’t be involved with this—this mustard seed of domestic life.’

  ‘And at your age, you shouldn’t be burdened with us, either. God knows none of us wants it, but there it is, we’re stuck in this situation. So let’s make the best of it.’

  ‘But, Sumi, I don’t like the idea of a child like Aru slogging.’

  ‘Aru’s not a child. And listen, Amma, if we’re going to stay here, and who knows how long it’s going to be, you’ll have to learn to take everyone’s help. If you can’t, it’s going to be hard on all of us.’

  It’s not a threat, but it seems to frighten Kalyani. Her capitulation is absolute and she endures the occasional forays of the girls into her kitchen in stoic silence. But when Aru comes down with a heavy cold, she can’t help sounding triumphant.

  ‘I knew it, I knew you were doing too much, look at you now.’

  ‘It’s only a cold, Amma.’

  By evening, Aru has fever, mounting so rapidly that she is lying in a kind of stupor, breathing heavily through her open mouth, her lips cracked and dry. Sumi, sitting by her, can feel the heat emanating from her body.

  ‘You should have removed her tonsils, I always said it. My father had it done for both Goda and me and ....’

  ‘She’ll be all right, Amma.’ Sumi replies, not to Kalyani’s reproach, but to the fear in Kalyani’s voice, the fear in her own self. At night however, when Aru seems delirious, she succumbs and rings up Ramesh.

  After he has gone—‘it’s only a virus, she’ll be okay by morning’—Sumi settles down in a chair by Aru, overruling Kalyani and Charu who want to sit up with her. ‘It’s not necessary for all of us to lose sleep. I’ll call you if there’s any need.’

  Aru, moving in a strange, shifting, chaotic world, is unware of everything. The jumble of voices, the constant movement about her bed, seems miles away. She wakes up sometime during the night with parched lips and a burning in her throat.

  ‘Water,’ she mumbles, ‘water.’

  There’s someone by her bed, a glass is held to her lips, she can feel a hand supporting her head. Gratefully, she swallows the water and goes off to sleep again. When she wakes up in the morning, clear-headed, her body light and hollow, there is a sense of peace and quiet in the room. The shifting shadows, the confused voices of the night seem to belong to another world.

  ‘Oh God, Aru, I’m sorry I dropped off to sleep.’ Sumi is apologetic when she wakes up. ‘Don’t tell Amma and Charu I slept through the night.’

  ‘But you didn’t! You woke up to give me water.’

  ‘I? No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  It must have been her grandfather, Aru says, remembering the tall shadow on the wall, the feel of his hand against her head.

  ‘It can’t be.’ Sumi dismisses the idea. ‘Baba never comes down here, you know that.’

  Yes, I know; nevertheless I know it was not a dream, I know it was him. And why is it, it suddenly occurs to her, that he never comes down here?

  In a day or two, Aru is up and about, and Ramesh coming to visit them in the evening exclaims in satisfaction at the sight of her sitting up with the rest. Chitra and the twins have come with him and later, Goda and her husband, Satya, join them. The house is full of noise. For the first time since Sumi’s return, there is no sense of participating in a wake. Instead, there is a release of spirits, as if they have just escaped some danger and have to celebrate. Part of the liveliness is because of the twins, Jai and Deep. It is a constant source of wonder to everyone who knows them, that parents as quiet and subdued as Ramesh and Chitra can have children like the twins. Even Seema emerges from her self-absorption when they are around. She is both puzzled and fascinated by their enormous energy and high spirits and they, in turn, seem to need her as an audience. Hrishi and Charu come in from their class a little later and the babble of sound enlarges to include Hrishi’s loud voice, Charu’s laughter.

  Kalyani and Goda try to persuade Aru to go to bed, but Aru resists, not so much because she wants to be with them, but more out of a lassitude, a reluctance to face the thought of the coming night. She feels herself encased in a bubble, her connection to the world, to all these people, a tenuous one that can snap at any moment.

  And then the thunder of Bhimsen Joshi’s voice, regally unrolling the Raag Mian ki Malhar which has formed a background to all this noise, suddenly ceases. None of them notice it—except Kalyani, who stops suddenly in the middle of a sentence, a word, really. It is something she is scarcely aware of, almost a knee-jerk response. Her body becomes tense, her head is slightly raised as if she is listening to the silence upstairs.

  Aru comes out of the bubble, her mind razor-sharp and clear, she sees a situation she has taken for granted for years. Why doesn’t Baba ever come down? Why doesn’t he have his meals here with the rest of us? Why doesn’t he ever speak to Kalyani? She is his wife, isn’t she? And why is she so frightened of him? He rings the bell and she responds, he controls her from a distance. What has Amma done to make him behave this way towards her?

  Poor Amma, Sumi says, poor Amma. But why?

  In her confusion, Aru’s mind spirals towards Gopal, and his desertion no longer seems a bizarre independent occurence, but connected somehow to the curious story of her grandparents, a story, she realizes only now, she has very little knowledge of.

  GOPAL, WHO HAS had no intention of making a mystery of his whereabouts, is living scarcely a few miles away from Sumi and his daughters in the house of an old student of his. This is in an old part of the town, where tiny lanes criss-cross one another and homes, small shops and restaurants jostle together in a jumble of noisy existence. Gopal’s room, above the printing press that belongs to his student, is an odd place for a man to ‘retreat’ to—the thought will occur to all those who visit him. But like the truck drivers, who, after a night of frenetic driving, go to sleep in the womb-like interiors of their driving cabins, wholly insulated from the outside world, Gopal is unaware of the jangle of noises in which he is living his life.

  Now the interlude of peace suddenly ends for him. Shankar, still the student, unwilling to sit down in Gopal’s presence, is there to tell him that Ramesh had rung up.

  ‘And you told him I was here? It’s all right, I never wanted to hide the fact from anyone.’

  So Ramesh has traced me here. I should have guessed he would be the first; he has his mother’s doggedness, his father’s sense of duty. And so, he will be the first to ask me the question, ‘Why did you do such a thing, Guru?’

  I had prepared myself for this question, I had rehearsed my answers before I spoke to Sumi, I had been ready to counter her arguments. Now I have to be ready to face Ramesh, I have to brush up my reasons, for Ramesh will not let me off easily. What do I say? What were the lines I had prepared?

  I heard a voice ....

  No, I can’t say that, it sounds utterly phoney. Even Joan of Arc didn’t get away with that one.

  It’s a kind of illness, a virus, perhaps, which makes me incapable of functioning as a full human being, as a husband and father ....

  This is the right answer to give a doctor and Premi may accept it, but will Ramesh? No, he won’t leave it at that, he will ask me for my symptoms, he will tr
y to connect them and ultimately, yes, I’m sure of this, make an appointment for me with a psychiatrist. No, best leave this alone.

  I thought of Purandaradasa’s line, ‘Listen, the hour strikes’ and I was terrified, I knew I was running out of time.

  Sumi is the one person who may understand this, she will know what I mean. But this is not enough; I have to be more honest with her, more explicit.

  What then? What do I say?

  I stopped believing in the life I was leading, suddenly it seemed unreal to me and I knew I could not go on.

  Is this the truth? Is this why I left my home, my wife and children? Could I have said this to Sumi?

  In the event, there was nothing for me to say to Sumi, for she asked me nothing. I am thankful I never had to suffer the mortification of wading through this slush of embarrassing half-truths. I have not been fair to Sumi, I know that now. I should have spoken to her earlier, given her some hint of what was happening to me. But how do you interrupt the commonplace with melodrama? There is never the right time in daily life for these things. The knock on the door, the peal of the bell bringing news of disaster, they can only come from the outside.

  Since coming here, I have been dreaming of my father. How do I know that the man I see in my dreams is my father? I was only eight when he died and nothing of him has remained with me, neither his face, nor his voice, nor his manners, nor any memory linking the two of us together. Just a blank. It is odd, yes, when I think of it now, I realize how curious it is. Can one erase a parent, even a dead parent, so completely? To some extent, of course, Sudha was responsible for this. She put away everything that was our parents’, even their pictures, immediately after their death. I accepted it then, but now, thinking of it, I can imagine that she must have worked in a frenzy, sweeping the house bare of their presence. And I know this too now, that she did it for me. It was this, and her almost immediate marriage to P.K., that helped the quick transformation of a house of mourning into a normal home in which a family lived. Man, woman and child. P.K., Sudha and I. And so I forgot, how quickly I forgot the faces of my parents. No memories at all. Except that, sometimes, when Sudha laughed, it seemed like something I had heard once.

 

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