A Matter of Time

by Shashi Deshpande

  But it is in her relationship with Kalyani that Aru reveals her ambiguous feelings the most. The change in her behaviour towards her grandmother, since Premi’s revelation, is marked. She veers from being protective and sympathetic to provocation—a kind of gentle needling, as if she’s gingerly testing the sharpness of a blade with her fingertips.

  The truth is that Aru is puzzled. Brooding over the impenetrable mystery of Kalyani’s mind, she is now continually watching her grandmother. She finds it hard to connect that despairing woman left stranded in public to this Kalyani, chuckling over the radio, scolding Nagi, teasing her when she comes in a new sari, bullying Shyam and Shweta into eating when she finds them sitting outside their locked door, like a couple of refugees, waiting for their mother to come home.

  And there is the day Charu comes home after finishing the last paper of her preliminary exams. Euphoric, she flings her books away and throwing her arms around Kalyani exclaims, ‘And how are you, my dear granny?’ Speaking in English. And it is in English that Kalyani replies, an American-accented English at that, an attempt at it, rather.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m okay.’

  Charu stares at her transfixed, mouth open, then suddenly grinning, chucks her grandmother under the chin saying, ‘Cho chweet, Amma.’

  ‘Get along with you.’

  But Kalyani is obviously delighted by the effect of her joke.

  ‘You think your grandmother can’t speak English, eh? Let me tell you, I went to an English school for a few months, yes I did, a posh school where we wore the smartest uniforms. I can still remember my History lessons ...’ And to the accompaniment of their laughter, she recites, ‘Babar the Brave, Humayun the Kind, Akbar the Great, Shahjehan ....’

  And while Charu questions her, ‘Why did you leave that school, Amma?’ Aru stares in amazement at Kalyani. Thinking of Premi’s story, she wonders: can she have forgotten? Can you possibly forget such a thing? When Goda’s son Satish, home on his annual vacation, visits them, noticing Kalyani fussing over him, Aru thinks: Does she remember her son when she sees Satish? Is Satish the mark on the wall against whom she measures that lost son of hers? And when Kalyani signs her name, carefully spelling out ‘Kalyanibai Pandit’, Aru is amazed. How can she still have his name, for God’s sake? Or, and this is the most bizarre thought of all, has she forgotten all that happened, has she put it away where it belongs—in the past?

  Until one day when the curtain lifts, giving Aru a glimpse of Kalyani’s mind, just a glimpse, but enough to prove that all of Aru’s assumptions have been wrong.

  It begins with a conversation between Kalyani and Goda, an argument really. About names again, for the two women having picked up the threads of the past, seem reluctant to put them down. It’s the name of Kalyani’s and Goda’s grandmother, the woman who died young.

  ‘Indubai,’ Goda calls her.

  ‘Who’s Indubai?’

  ‘Why, Kalyani-akka, what do you mean? She’s our grandmother.’

  ‘Rubbish. Her name was not Indubai. They called her Indorebai because she came from Indore.’

  ‘What was her name then?’ Goda is unusually belligerent and Kalyani, prepared to give battle, falters. She can’t remember. She knows it wasn’t Indubai, she’s sure of that, she’s determined she’ll prove it to Goda.

  ‘Does it matter, Amma?’ Sumi asks when she sees her going through piles of papers, old diaries and letters. But Kalyani won’t give in, she’s sure she’ll find the name somewhere. Suddenly, in the midst of a chore, she says, ‘Sitaramkaka! Why didn’t I think of him earlier? He’ll know.’

  ‘Sitaramkaka? Who’s he?’

  Learning that he was the family priest in Kalyani’s house when she was a girl, they are incredulous. ‘You think he’s still alive?’

  Kalyani knows he is. She met his grandson Giridhar, with whom the old man lives, just a few months back. He was still going strong then, Giridhar said. ‘I think I’ll pay him a visit,’ she says.

  The old man’s grandson, Giridhar, is himself nearly sixty. And the child, toddling unsteadily in the hall, is his grandchild. Which makes the baby—what? The old man’s great grandson? Aru, who has accompanied her grandmother, quails at the immensity of his age.

  But there’s nothing awesome about the old man who’s lying propped up on a hard pillow, the picture of a well-tended child. He looks heart-breakingly clean, as if his bones and his eyes have been scrubbed the same way as his clothes. He stares at them blankly while Giridhar’s wife tries to prod him into an awareness of the visitors.

  ‘It’s Kalyaniamma, Ajja. I told you she’s coming. Remember? Surely you remember Kalyaniamma?’

  The old man comes suddenly out of his apathy, nods vigorously, laughs and mumbles something they can’t make out.

  ‘He’s so good sometimes.’ The woman sounds like the disappointed parent of a child who’s refused to perform before guests. ‘He understands everything we say. I don’t know what’s the matter with him today’

  Over coffee and large plates of snacks, Kalyani explains the purpose of their visit. Aru, listening to her, is embarrassed. It seems absurd, intruding into the lives of these strangers—strangers to her, if not to Kalyani—in search of something as unimportant as a name from the past. She is amazed that the family doesn’t seem to think so; on the contrary, they gather around listening in fascination to Kalyani, pressing food and coffee on them with much warmth and goodwill, they apologize over and over again for the old man’s inability to give Kalyani what she wants.

  In spite of the chaos resulting from so many people in the house (there are three generations—no, four, if you include the old man) living together, there is a sense of cohesion. And if the furniture is shabby and the house untidy, there is a feeling of lavishness in the house, not of opulence or luxury, but of plenty, of comfortable living. Giridhar, the fountainhead of all these comforts, is obviously a very successful accountant, yet there is more than a hint of patronage in Kalyani’s attitude towards him, towards the whole family. And Giridhar too keeps repeating, ‘It’s all your blessings, Amma, yours and your parents’. If your father hadn’t helped my father to study, we would never have got all this.’

  Giridhar’s wife, the one the old man most easily relates to, makes another attempt to rouse him before they leave. This time Kalyani talks to him as well.

  ‘Don’t you know me, Sitaramkaka? I’m Kalyani, Vithalrao and Manoramabai’s daughter.’

  The old man titters as if she has made a joke. The woman pats his hand gently and says, ‘All right, ajja, all right.’ Suddenly the old man’s eyes fall on Aru.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asks clearly.

  ‘I’m Arundhati.’

  ‘She’s my granddaughter, Sitaramkaka. My Sumi’s eldest daughter.’

  The old man doesn’t seem to hear Kalyani. He’s still looking at Aru.

  ‘Kalyani.’ The name emerges clearly.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Kalyani is excited. ‘I’m Kalyani, Manorama’s daughter.’

  ‘Poor child,’ he says, still speaking to Aru. ‘She was so frightened. Poor child.’

  ‘Let him be,’ the woman says when, having lost interest in Aru, he goes on mumbling ‘poor child’ to himself. ‘I don’t think he will remember anything today. Go to sleep, ajja.’

  They leave him lying flat, eyes closed like an obedient child, arms by his sides.

  Kalyani’s silence on the way back, a silence that gives Aru the feeling of a shutter having come down, continues even after they get home and it is left to Aru to tell the others about their visit.

  The next day, however, Kalyani is back to normal and Aru, returning home, finds her in a state of frenetic excitement.

  ‘Giridhar rang up. His grandfather woke up today, absolutely clear and lucid and when they asked him for the name, he told them.’ She pauses for dramatic effect. ‘You’ll never believe this. She was Arundhati.’

  ‘What!’

  Kalyani is satisfied, triumphant, crowing over Goda when she
comes in the evening. Nothing can mar her pleasure, not even Aru’s doubt.

  ‘How do you know it’s the right name? He heard my name, remember? Perhaps that’s how it got into his head. He could have got things mixed up. He called me poor child, remember?’

  ‘He said that? To you?’ Goda asks.

  ‘Yes, he kept saying—“poor child, she was so frightened.”’

  Kalyani and Goda exchange a quick glance and to Aru, who sees the look of shared complicity, it is clear they know what the old man meant. Amma knew it yesterday, which is why she was so silent. ‘Poor child’—was it Amma he meant?

  But Kalyani says nothing and Aru will hear the story later, from Kalyani herself, though not all of it, for Kalyani will blame herself, absolve her mother of all wrongdoing. She was disappointed in me, she will say, she expected me to be like her, but I was too timid, too dull, she will say.

  Timid, yes, and unsure of herself. And, with a mother like Manorama, with a sense of inadequacy as well. It was this that made the letters so pleasurable to her. They made her feel admired and appreciated. Kalyani was fifteen then, and pretty in a dainty, fragile kind of way. The young man who watched the girls going to school obviously thought her very pretty. And so the letters, one each day, which came by way of a little boy. There was nothing in the letters to identify the sender, they were unsigned. And innocent. Romantic in a poetic kind of way. Kalyani was enchanted. But Goda, two years younger, was troubled. It seemed wrong somehow. And finally, when the letters came close to asking for a meeting, she spoke to Manorama about it.

  At first Kalyani was, oddly enough, relieved to have the burden of her secret taken off her. And totally unprepared, therefore, for the intensity of her mother’s anger. Manorama. made it seem that Kalyani had done something obscene, she asked her questions the girl did not understand and could not answer. Terror drove her into dumbness and to her mother her silence confirmed her guilt. Vithalrao, realizing that his attempts to shield her made things worse, withdrew. Even the family priest was touched by the girl’s plight, but no one dared to speak to Manorama.

  That was the end of Kalyani’s schooling. Manorama never let her go out of the house after that and within a year she was married. Even today Kalyani speaks with regret of her lost education.

  ‘I envy these girls, don’t you, Goda? They are so free.’

  ‘You want to wear pants and ride a scooter like them, eh, Kalyani-akka?’ Goda teases her but she knows what Kalyani really means. For if anyone knows the whole story, it is Goda. She was a spectator, a guilty one and the thought still haunts her: why did I speak to Mami about that letter?

  And yet Kalyani is right in playing down everything but her mother’s disappointment in her, for it was that which played the biggest role in her life. Manorama wanted a son; instead there was Kalyani. Not an unloved child, no, never that. But for Manorama, she became the visible symbol of their failure to have a son. And then, she fulfilled none of the dreams Manorama had for her daughter. Her daughter, she had thought, would be beautiful, accomplished, she would make a brilliant marriage that would be Manorama’s triumph, that would show them, the family, all those women who had treated Manorama, the daughter of a poor man from a village, with such contempt. Instead there was Kalyani, who could do nothing that pleased her mother.

  Except once, when she gave birth to a son. There was great rejoicing then. Vithalrao, joking, had called it a red carpet lying-in. It was literally that, for there was a beautiful red carpet by Kalyani’s bedside for her to put her feet on, the moment she got out of bed. And the fire under the huge copper pot burned all day, so that Kalyani had hot water to wash even her little finger. The naming ceremony was the occasion of a lifetime. The house was full of guests, fragrant with flowers, gleaming with silverware. The poor were fed and the dustbin in the street was overflowing with used banana-leaf plates for two whole days.

  But the child turned out to be an idiot and Kalyani came back home, a deserted wife, with her two daughters.

  Kalyani is forever speaking of miracles, she sees them everywhere, even in this matter of a name.

  ‘When we named you Arundhati, the name didn’t come out of nowhere, it was put into our heads, I’m sure of that,’ she says with sibylline sagacity. (Ignoring the fact that it was Gopal who chose the name.)

  The family smiles at her predictability, they humour her, none of them believe in her miracles. They don’t seem to realize that the real miracle is Kalyani herself, Kalyani who has survived intact, in spite of what Shripati did to her, Kalyani who has survived Manorama’s myriad acts of cruelty.

  Manorama died unforgiving, she never relented in her anger towards her daughter. There was more to it than the disgrace of her coming back home, a rejected wife. Manorama’s treatment of her daughter led to a breach between Vithalrao and Manorama, the first since their marriage. Vithalrao was a changed man after Kalyani’s return home. To everyone’s surprise, the man of science turned to astrology and a different astrologer came home every few days. It was as if Vithalrao was searching for someone who would tell him, ‘your daughter will soon be reunited with her husband, they will live happily together.’ If it was a search, it was a solitary one, for he never spoke to anyone about it, he never associated his wife with it.

  The rift between them never healed. Vithalrao had a stroke soon after and for this, too, Manorama held her daughter responsible. She would have liked to punish her by keeping her away from her father, but that was not possible.

  It was painful for Manorama to see the man Vithalrao had become. She had enthroned her husband, put him up on a pedestal; it did not matter to her that he did not want to be there. She never realized that he laughed self-deprecatingly at the position he was forced to occupy by his wife. His collapse into a broken, suffering human being was hard for her to take. His tears—and he cried a great deal—horrified her. ‘Stop it,’ she would say, scolding him with a rough tenderness. ‘You shouldn’t do this, stop it.’

  But Kalyani was never embarrassed by his tears. She gently wiped them away as if he was a younger sibling, patted his hand and sat silently by his side until he recovered. He seemed soothed by her presence, something that filled Manorama with an angry grief. A few days before his death he kept repeating some words none of them could catch. It was Kalyani who finally understood what it was he was trying to say. ‘Put me down.’ He wanted to be put down on the floor; it was as if he knew that death was coming and he had to prepare himself for it.

  Manorama refused to accept this. No, Kalyani was wrong, that wasn’t what he was saying. And she wasn’t going to allow them to move him from the bed. The fact was she was terrified, she wouldn’t let him go, she refused to understand that Vithalrao wanted to die, that he was straining after death. Kalyani, unable to bear her father’s agonised pleas, had him removed from the bed and placed on the floor when Manorama was away. She was rewarded by the peaceful look on his face. He died in a short while and to Manorama, it was as if Kalyani had killed him.

  ‘You are my enemy, you were born to make my life miserable.’ The words echoed in Kalyani’s ears every night.

  Yet in her own last illness, Manorama would let no one but Kalyani look after her. Even Goda, towards whom her favouritism became more blatantly obvious, was not allowed to do anything for her aunt. Kalyani is the only one who knows what she had to endure, for Manorama in her last days was not only tyrannical, she became suspicious and fearful, charging Kalyani with trying to kill her as she had her father.

  And then she wrote to her brother, a fact that Kalyani learnt from Goda. It was when the builders came to build a room upstairs that Kalyani realized Shripati would be coming back to live with them. She lay awake at nights, terrified, waking out of fearful dreams when she did finally fall asleep, her body drenched in sweat. Shripati came home and, as if she had been waiting for this, Manorama died soon after.

  Aru tries to connect the two women, the Kalyani left stranded by her husband in public and this Kalyani who
seems to have exorcised all her ghosts. And fails. How can she not fail when she knows nothing of the long journey that lies between these two points, of the different points on that journey? Later, when they spend much time together, Kalyani will speak to her of it, of some of it. And strangely, she will speak without bitterness, as if she has, indeed, exorcised her ghosts.

  But certain things will remain: Kalyani’s mulishness, as Goda calls it, in refusing to wear her mother’s diamonds or saris, the furtive air with which she mends clothes, as if expecting her mother to come upon her and say, as she so often had, ‘haven’t you anything better to do than this beggarly occupation?’

  The truth is that Kalyani, her mother’s despair, the girl who had seemed such a weak, feeble creature, was the one who defeated her mother after all. Manorama had taken charge of her own and her husband’s life, she had given it a shape that was to dazzle everyone. She herself took an enormous pride in her husband’s position and her own public activities, which included instituting, with her husband’s support, a school for girls: The Yamunabai Pawar School for Girls.

  But Kalyani destroyed all this. When she returned home, a deserted wife, and, as Manorama saw it, a disgrace to the family, Manorama gave up everything, she never took part in any public activities again.

  ‘GARDENING?’

  Kalyani is surprised to see Sumi in the kitchen garden, planting bulbs in the bed she’s got Bora to prepare for her. The soil here is rich and wet and yields easily to Sumi’s probing fingers.

  ‘What’s that you’re planting?’

  ‘Those white flowers, they’re delicate and fragrant—I don’t know their name ....’