by Annie Zaidi
One night, the wife made a remark about not wanting to make it painful, for the child’s sake. He asked her what he was supposed to do. He hadn’t planned on something like this happening in the first place. The wife retorted by calling him insensitive and manipulative.
The next morning, the phone call came. It was her. She said, hi, erm, we met ten days ago. I was supposed to call, do you remember me?
He remembered thinking it was smart to wait ten days before calling. Waiting only one week would seem too impatient, even a bit disrespectful of his time and the innumerable claims upon it. Waiting two weeks would have been hard. He might forget her. Ten days was safe. It would allow him to say he hadn’t had the time to look at her stuff. It would allow her to say, okay, okay, no rush, but when might be a good time to call next? It made him smile, this precious little calculation on her part.
He hadn’t looked at her stuff, he admitted to her. But he would. Could she call back in a couple of days?
She had called after three days. He liked her work, but he didn’t tell her outright. He suggested she come to a fancy coffee shop. He had arranged to meet his three best friends at the bar at the same hotel. The plan was to simply hop over to the coffee shop, spend a few minutes talking to her, then go back to his friends at the bar. It would put everything in its proper place and perspective. He would only squeeze her into his life, between all the other stuff that kept him busy.
He hadn’t been able to explain the small throb of anticipation at the appointed hour, his glancing at his cell phone. One of his friends noticed, so he said he would have to disappear for five minutes. A minute later, his phone rang.
At the coffee shop, she stood for a few seconds, scanning tables and faces. A bandana around her head, like a college kid. He remembered her neck arching that way and this, a slightly lost look on her face that made her look younger than she was. Then the smile, with her woman’s eyes reaching into his eyes, plucking a smile back for herself.
He had said, your work is interesting. She had said, yes? He had said, yes, I like it. She had said, I’m glad. There was a brief silence.
She had said, is your head hurting again? He had stopped rubbing his throbbing temples. No sleep still? He had shrugged.
That’s when the playfulness caught hold of her. She reached out one finger and touched the dark moons under his eyes, pulling the bruised skin downwards. Just like a doctor. Open your mouth, she’d said, and show me your tongue.
He had played along, opening his mouth with an ‘aaaa’. She had caught his wrist and drawn it close to her ear, pretending to listen to his pulse, while one finger probed the skin under his cuff. Then she’d wagged a forefinger at him, saying, there is a problem.
He’d smiled. Oh no! Can it be fixed?
Maybe. If you listen to the doctor and follow her orders strictly. And, whipping out a pen, she had grabbed a paper napkin and written out a lengthy prescription.
Here, she’d said, putting it in his hands with a flourish. The scribbled prescription read:
1] Go to the forest rest house in Lalmaati for three nights. Don’t do anything except breathe, eat and sleep. (I will organize it.)
2] Go to a foreign country, preferably with a quiet, undemanding friend. Look around at whatever seems interesting.
3] Get massages. Try to sleep after a massage and also to wake up to a massage.
4] Drink a cup of tea in absolute silence in the morning. Read the newspaper for fifteen minutes.
5] Go shopping. Buy things in bright colours. Buy yourself flowers, or potted plants, if you prefer live things.
6] Amrutanjan. Rub it on your temples and across the bridge of your nose, switch off the lights and lie down in silence. Your eyes might burn and there might be tears. Don’t worry. Tears do not cause any negative side effects.
While he read it out loud, she kept interjecting, giving instructions on dosage – This first course has to be taken for three days. After the course is over, that one for two weeks. The third one, twice a day, until there’s some improvement. The fourth one in the morning, before breakfast. The fifth one is for pain relief, as and when required. The sixth one is only for instant, temporary relief, which I will give you right now.
She brought out a small, disc-like box from her purse and pushed it towards him.
He had smiled, carefully folded the prescription and put it away in his wallet along with the flat round box of Amrutanjan.
Through the evening, he smiled. His friends had slapped his back, asked why he looked so pleased. He had told them about the prescription. Such a strange girl, he’d said. A godsend, they’d said. She’s offering to cure you, isn’t that sweet? Isn’t that obvious?
But he shook his head. She’s talented, she’s ambitious, that’s all.
He had managed to fall asleep that night. Only for three hours though. Then he snapped awake from a strange dream, where an unknown woman dipped her hands into bagfuls of unrefined sugar, then held her hands out towards him.
Three days wasn’t so hard, he decided. He needed silence and sleep to function even at a bare minimum. So he called the girl to say that he had decided to take at least the first course of medication prescribed. And also to ask about the doctor’s fees.
She had laughed and chattered on about Lalmaati. She warned him against doing holiday-excursionary things. Treat it as a retreat, like a hospital, not like a safari.
And he had resisted the temptation of asking her to come along. Cowering in a corner of his heart was the slight hope that his marriage wouldn’t fail. So he packed, booked himself a ticket, showed up at the forest rest house claiming to be a freelance writer. A mid-ranking forest officer was talked into giving the necessary orders. A room was opened up. An old waiter-cum-caretaker-cum-peon brought meals on a tray, thrice a day. And tea in a pot, with heavy China cups and saucers, twice a day.
It was costing him so little that that fact alone cheered him up. A few times a day, he would stand in the veranda outside his room, breathe deep, then burst out laughing.
Listening to the sound of his own breath calmed him. It thrilled him to discover how much he liked breathing. There was, at least, that. But the nights were harder. The first night, he tossed a lot and slept in late. The second night, he lay back on clean, white sheets, feeling the texture with his fingertips. He couldn’t stop his mind from conjuring up the girl, frowning the way she had as she peered into his open mouth. What a strange girl, he thought, then corrected himself. Woman. And when he fell asleep, he was imagining that the woman was there, holding him tight.
All through the next day, he walked through forests, refusing offers of a jeep safari, trying to shake off the memory of his fleeting disloyalty – the thought of sleeping in another woman’s arms. Exhausted by evening, he fell asleep in an armchair in the veranda. He slept until the old man brought him his tray of dinner.
He ate in the open, the tray in his lap. He told the old man he was certain the insects had something to do with the nice crunchiness of the fried gobi and baigan bhaja. He smiled at the expression on the old man’s face.
On the third night too, when he went to bed, he imagined himself in her arms. The image in his head was so vivid that he could feel the veins on the inside of her wrists as they pulsed against his cheeks. He told himself it didn’t mean anything. It was just a thought. His world was one of imagination. Imagining was a habit, a professional hazard. He knew all about dreams and stories and cooking stuff up inside your head and starting to believe it. But what you visualize had nothing to do with the life you lived as a husband and father. There’s no need to get creative, he told himself. This isn’t a fairytale. You go home after a day and you try to keep the family together.
He returned home to a note on the fridge. The wife and child had gone off to visit his parents, since he seemed to want his own space. He could imagine the wife’s cutting, twisted expression as she wrote out the note. It said that she, too, needed some time away. He could call, of course, to spe
ak to their child. He was not to worry about the household; the servants just need to be told whether or not he would be eating at home, that’s all. His parents would be informed, gently, about how things stood between them.
A blinding headache came on. He began to pace the house like a caged animal, looking for something to break. He finally broke a few china plates, hurling them into the metallic kitchen sink. But it brought no relief. He drank a bottle of cold water from the fridge. It made the headache worse. He wanted to whimper with exhaustion and ache.
He shut his eyes and dug up the quiet memory of the rest house, the forest, the fake comfort of having dreamt of sleeping in the arms of another woman, one who understood him. Thinking of her reminded him of the Amrutanjan. He brought it out and rubbed it on his forehead and temples. Within seconds, his eyes began to water. He wiped away the rivulets running down the side of his face, wetting the pillow. Without warning, the sobs came too. Horrible, wracking sobs he didn’t know he had in him.
He waited until morning before calling his wife. His parents had been told, she said, and she had confessed that the unhappiness was all on her side; he was content enough to stay in the marriage. The wife was telling him indirectly that she had kept his good name intact. Next she would visit her own family, his in-laws. The phone was passed on to the child who sounded so incredibly small and sweet that he sat down on the floor and sobbed once again.
The day passed and slipped away, and another day and then another. He decided he had to get out of the house. He ought to meet someone, go somewhere. He knew whom he wanted to call, but he didn’t know how. What was he going to say? How would he explain that he was now thinking of her as the ‘other woman’ in his life? She, with whom he had shared a bed in his dreams. For one wild moment, he wondered if she knew. And what if she did?
She would think, of course, that he was the sort of successful artist who expected young women to sleep with him in exchange for promoting their work, or collaborating. It was what they all did.
If he tried telling her that he fell into a deep sleep each time he imagined the two of them sleeping together, she would think he was a pervert of the worst kind – using his sorrows or faking illness to get her sympathy and then get her into bed. Men did this all the time. If he explained the crisis at home, said that his marriage was falling apart, she would think it was a ploy; it was the standard thing married men said when they were on the prowl.
But what if he said it anyway? What would she say if he told her that she was good for his health? She might wonder. One relationship had scarcely fallen apart, and here he was, wanting to jump into bed with another woman. Could he tell her that he hadn’t touched his wife in more than four months?
But he didn’t want her to think he was looking for sex. He didn’t even see himself having sex with her. He only dreamt of sleeping with her arms around his body, almost as if she was a child. Perhaps it was one of those weird psychological manifestations of insecurity, helplessness, abandonment. Child-like feelings. Maybe he needed a nursemaid. Or maybe he was missing his daughter. Or mother. Maybe it was something messed up in his head. But he already had a very simple, loving mother, and he could go visit her. Maybe he wanted a complicated mother who understood complicated feelings.
He shook his head to clear it. The less he dug into this mess, the better. All he knew was that he wanted this woman. Like a friend, perhaps. He could just ask her for a hug, just tell her that he needed to be held. How about that?
It wouldn’t hurt to try. On the other hand, it would never do to try and then have to explain. Maybe he should just call her about work. He could say he had a new project in mind. There were half a dozen possibilities. She would be grateful for a chance to work with him. She would come hopping and skipping. All he had to do was pick up the phone. But would she feel betrayed if he hired her and then asked her for hugs?
So he decided not to call her and rubbed some more balm on his forehead. He switched off the lights and in the minutes before he fell asleep, he conjured up a scene where she walked into the room, threw herself on the bed, kicked off her sandals, smiled, then reached for his head and gently began massaging it with her rough fingertips. And he fell asleep.
Two days later, she sent a text message asking whether the first course of medication had helped. He sent back a message at once, saying it had helped, but he was currently obliged to use the sixth medicine. She sent a message saying, why not the fifth course? He replied saying, I never do retail therapy alone; I have a phobia.
She didn’t reply for nearly an hour. Then the message came: it was unusual for doctors to accompany patients outdoors, but this time she would help, especially since she happened to need similar therapy herself.
Meeting in town was his idea. Nobody he knew lived in town and he didn’t want to bump into familiars. She was sitting with a magazine in her lap, practically sprawled on the steps leading up to the mall.
He bought one striped pullover with what looked liked fifty different colours on it. And a blue jacket with real silk lining. And one cotton T-shirt, soft as pashmina. She held it against his cheek so he could feel the fabric. Except for that gesture, she didn’t try to guide him through his shopping. Instead, she followed him about in the men’s section, nodding thoughtfully if he picked up something, tilting her head to one side, biting her lower lip if she didn’t like something.
He asked what she wanted to buy, but she led him instead to the cash counter. Then she led him outside, towards a flea market across the street. Here she picked out five skirts, three pairs of chappals, two shirts and one nearly transparent dress. She said she’d never wear it. He asked, why not. She said, it is too, too, too, well I suppose I’m too old for it. He rolled his eyes. You’re just a girl, he said. I’m not, she said.
They went to a tea place – a formal place with crisp linen, very white menu cards and neat potbellied waiters. She ordered fancy tea, tiny samosas, bread rolls as small as his thumb. He asked her about school, college, portfolio, expenses. She told him. The words came out slowly, as if she was reluctant to reveal too much of herself.
He wanted to ask about love. About heartbreak. About how she learnt to play doctor. How long did it take for her to turn into this creature with light eyes, irises ringed with grief? He wanted to ask if there was a man around.
But he didn’t. He decided there probably wasn’t any man. How could she look into his eyes so fiercely if her heart was with someone else? On the other hand, she could be a married woman, and maybe being married wasn’t enough. Like himself. How was he to know?
They sat in silence, sipping tea, like one of those long-term couples who come to restaurants for a weekly lunch outing, but cannot find any conversation beyond daily trivia. No magnetic glances, no touching. They looked at other people at other tables. They listened to jazz trumpets. Her eyes tracked a toddler who was running between tables, grabbing strangers’ hands. Suddenly, she asked, do you have children?
He frowned. Yes, he said, one. Why?
One, she repeated. A girl?
How did you know? You look like the father of a girl. What is that supposed to mean? I don’t know; I just don’t see you as a boy-daddy. A boy-daddy? Yes, the sort of daddy who plays football or cricket with a small boy, and gives hi-fives while watching sports on television. I give my daughter hi-fives. That’s different. How is that different? It is different. How? You won’t know. I’m asking. It can’t be explained. I think you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
Her face seemed to be receding, getting smaller, blurry-lined, opaque. I suppose, she said, I wouldn’t know.
He glanced at her bare fingers, all ten of them. Are you, he began, and stopped. Are you, he chose his words carefully, planning on having kids?
She raised her brows. I’m not married, she said. And after a brief silence: shall we go?
He spent the next few moments wanting to reach for her hands across the table. But he didn’t. He offered to drop her home inst
ead. She said there was no need. It is a very long drive, she said. I like long drives, he said.
It was a busy area. The market outside her colony was lit up with creeping strings of blinking colour. Noisy. People spilling onto pavements, stray dogs. Outside her building, he stopped, engine idling. He was thinking of something to say. She undid the seatbelt and broke the silence.
Are you really this nice, or did you have to make a special effort today?
He raised his brows. I’d like to think I am a nice person. After a pause, he added, but I did make a special effort today.
She stepped out of the car and walked around to his side. She tapped on the window. He rolled it down. She stood there for a few seconds, resting her fingertips on top of the window, leaning against the body of the car. Finally she said, thank you.
Pressing on the edge of the glass, her restless fingertips seemed to say a little more. He knew he should say something. Even if it was just ‘no, thank you’. It was one of those moments when no matter what you say, it is sure to turn into something more. But he could think of nothing, so he just nodded. She stepped away from the car.
For one insane minute, he thought of asking if she’d like to go out for dinner. Then he looked at the time and thought of how tired he was. He was growing into an old man, and she looked so very young, standing there, a bereft mood tugging at the corners of her mouth. It was all so foolish and speculative. No. He couldn’t afford to make a mess of it. No more mess in his life. He waved goodbye without looking at her.
The wife came back the same night. When he returned to the house, he found the child was waiting up for him, sleepy and cranky, furious at not having seen him for so many days. He immediately threw his newly bought clothes on the floor, swept up the child in one arm, and went about taking off his socks and shoes with the other hand.
He walked all over the house with the child pressed to his chest, until she fell asleep. He put her to bed, then he walked into his own bedroom gingerly.