by Annie Zaidi
‘Are you going to leave me?’ she asked.
The words were distinct, slow. It hurt her to speak, he could tell. The engine hummed and went quiet. He turned the key again. Her hand reached out and touched his. He cut the engine.
‘I wish you’d say it,’ she said. ‘You want to leave me? Say it.’
His hands tingled. He must do something with them. He ran them through his thinning hair. He rubbed his face. ‘I wish . . .’ he began and faltered.
Her chin was wobbling again. ‘I don’t understand. One day everything is fine. Then you just . . . what did I do? Did I do something to you? I tried to do everything . . . why are you punishing me?’
He stared at her. It took a long moment to realize that she really was asking a question. And she was crying in earnest. Her head was bowed over her chest, her hands on her thighs, palms upturned. Dirty, scratched palms, like a beggar’s. He saw that her feet were bare and there was blood on one foot, whether hers or somebody else’s, he couldn’t tell.
He stepped out of the car again. He lifted her out, carried her into the elevator. At home, he helped her out of her dirty clothes and led her to the bathroom. He brought a wet towel and a bucket of warm water. She hadn’t stopped crying. Noiselessly, like a punished child.
Then she was finally lying in bed and she was saying, ‘You stopped talking. I thought maybe it was a bad mood. But it wasn’t that one day. You just don’t talk any more. So I thought maybe you want to leave me. Maybe you don’t know how to tell me.’
‘Really? ’he asked. ‘What about you?’
‘Me?’
He told her he knew. The way she dressed for her meetings. The handsome man and his mansion. The way she went out during curfews, near fires and blasts. She looked like she might cry again. He was close to it himself.
‘There was no need. If you were unhappy, you could have told me. Left me.’
She shook her head. Then she told him. About pounding blood, sharp senses, paranoia. Not knowing where she was or how she would get home. The constant terror, for nothing any chemical did was worse than what other human beings could do to you.
‘My brother used to say he didn’t want to collect my body from a gutter. So I went to the clinics. But they didn’t understand. It wasn’t the thing I wanted. It was that feeling of just letting go, knowing it might hurt. That fear. It was a special high.
‘I used to get out of moving cars. In college. The boys would challenge me and I would do it. And here, the wine shop. No other women around. But I go there. I used to stand there, just looking at all those bottles. It was like coming to the edge of a cliff, dangling a foot over. Maybe it never goes away. Inherited, genetic maybe. I don’t know. Even as a child, I’d wander out of the house, stand out on the main road. Cars rushing, right, left, horns, tyres screeching. Afterwards, I was punished. But that feeling of being jolted out of my skin, knowing that I still want to live . . . You know?’
He didn’t know. But he didn’t interrupt.
‘NA kept me busy for a while. Just thinking about things, people. Funny how there is so much danger in ordinary, everyday lives. I heard stories. Retired people, housebound women, children off the streets. The risk of their lives was like a magnetic force around me. It was a high, listening to them talk, talk, talk about how they were at the brink of the abyss. Then I got bored. Needed a bigger high. Those guys I hang out with, at NA, they are like me. We drink, smoke.’
He didn’t need her to say the rest. The clothes, the high heels, taking a walk with an attractive man, knowing she could accept his offer of a lift, knowing she could invite him in for a drink if she wanted to, knowing her husband had his own key. She was too content in her marriage and so she played with fire.
‘I don’t want to be like this,’ she was saying. ‘With you, I felt I could be a different person. I tried.’
He looked down at his hands. She had tried, yes. Fourteen years. Not one of those had been a bad year. He had been a content man.
‘So what do you want me to do now?’ he asked. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to be your wife,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind.’
He couldn’t bear to look at her just then, so he adjusted the pillows and drew the quilt around her shoulders. She shut her eyes, and she fell asleep.
He sat there and wondered at this woman he had chosen. This woman who had been an addict, who was headed to places where rape and gun-battles were common. If he wanted to, he could have picked a different woman. He should have been afraid, marrying a woman like this one. Perhaps, she is right. Fear is a special high. He has known what it feels like to stand at the edge of an abyss.
He went out to the sofa and poured himself a glass of wine. And then another, and another one. When the bottle was empty, he was once more a content man.
LOVE STORY # 9
(aka The one that climbed out of a bucket)
Here she was, running behind schedule as she stood in the bathroom with soap all over her body, hair twisted on top of her head and clamped in place with a purple buckle-clip, because there was no time to wash or condition it properly.
And there it was, sitting in the tumbler, gawking at her.
If she had been the shrieking type, she would have shrieked. As it was, she simply gasped.
Lizards are so creepy, she thought. This one was a gecko, of course. A house lizard. There were many in the house, at least half a dozen. She should have gotten used to them by now. But she couldn’t help being startled when she caught sight of one. Creeping around on the walls; crawling over the jars in the kitchen; sprinting across the top of the fridge; hiding behind the clothes she left hanging on nails hammered into her bathroom door; draped over the door handle; perched precariously on pelmets so that she couldn’t slide windows open without worrying about one of them falling on top of her head.
A long time ago, she had accepted that she was afraid. It didn’t matter that they were harmless little geckos. She had heard that it wasn’t a bad thing having house lizards. They help with pest-control. God knows there was enough food for them around the place. Hundreds of insects. But she couldn’t stand it. The way they soft-footed it everywhere – silent, watchful, stuck to ceilings – and the way they moved, so fast.
The sight of a gecko would invariably make her think of creepy, clingy little feet and then a horrid picture would form in her head – a gecko clinging to her body, not letting go. On her head, or foot, or back, or even worse, her face. She was not convinced that they didn’t bite. They probably had teeth sharp as knives. They were dangerous, no matter how small they were or how easily killed.
Besides, she thought of them as toxic. Perhaps it was one of those horrid Hindi films she had seen as a child. One in which somebody tries to poison somebody else by dropping a lizard into a pan of boiling milk.
Strange things, Hindi films. The way they put things into your head that you could never take out. Like that film she’d seen about a boy who brooded and the girl who taught him to laugh. She must have been five when she saw that film. It had done something to her internal wiring. Ever since, she had fallen for men who brooded a lot and laughed too little. The last one had been slightly different. He brooded, but only when he was alone. When he was with people, he laughed a lot. He made her laugh too.
It had worried her, their laughter. When she was little, a great-uncle from the village had warned: those who laugh a lot now will cry a lot later.
She sensed that there was truth in this. As a child, whenever she wanted to laugh too hard, she clamped a hand upon her mouth, eyes large with apprehension.
Even now, she remembers herself like that. Like a photograph someone takes when you aren’t looking: one hand clamped on her mouth, worrying about what the universe might do to her as a punishment for having laughed too much. Later, when she went to see her brooding man and he drew her into his arms, or laughed into her eyes, she would send up a quick child’s prayer to whoever made these things happen. ‘I am not laughin
g too much,’ she would say to the universe.
Often, she would cry. For no reason at all, lying beside him, the tears would come. If he was awake, he would sigh. As if he had expected it. As if all his efforts at bringing laughter into her life had failed, as if he was used to such failure. Sometimes, he would pretend not to notice. He would go out into the balcony and light up. He would stay there, unsmiling, for a long time.
When she discovered his little escapes into brooding and self-pity and suppressed rage, she actually felt a twinge of relief. He wasn’t all that different from her. It wasn’t all laughter and play. So it was going to be okay.
She missed him. Even his brooding in corners where she wasn’t welcome. Although, on second thoughts, his whole house had slowly become a string of corners where she didn’t feel welcome. Not on his balcony. Not in his work space. Not in his guest bedroom, because she wasn’t a houseguest. Not in his kitchen. He particularly didn’t like her in his kitchen. Nor in his laundry basket. There were times when she wondered if he resented her keeping a spare toothbrush in his bathroom.
Funny. Now she thought about it, there were no geckos there. She had never seen any in his house. Maybe because there hadn’t been any insects. He did use a lot of insect-killing sprays. She had told him, twice, that she was allergic to the stuff. It brought on violent coughing fits. But he hadn’t stopped spraying the whole place up and down.
Maybe that’s why she had so many geckos. She couldn’t spray the house. The only time she sprayed the poison stuff was when her brother’s kids came visiting. The kids needed to be protected against mosquitoes, or whatever else was out there. At least three times afterwards, she had found gecko corpses. The maid was on leave and she had to do the sweeping herself.
The other funny thing was how much she disliked gecko corpses. Not in the same way as she disliked live geckos. Those she was afraid of. She didn’t want them to touch her, or look at her, or come in contact with anything she was going to eat or wear. Alive, they made her feel icky and squeamish and screechy. Dead, they twisted her heart.
Gecko corpses seemed so utterly fragile, so small and harmless and repugnant. Like dead goldfish in fish bowls. When she had to reach under cupboards with a broom to sweep their unresisting corpses into the dust pan, her hands had begun to shake. At first, it was because she wasn’t sure if they were really dead. What if they suddenly sprang back to life and jumped at her, clinging to her fingers? But when they didn’t move at all, her heart filled up.
She swept up each corpse gingerly, dropped them into the dustbin. Every time, a deep regret welled up. She wished that the creature wasn’t dead. She wondered how old it was. If it looked small and pale, she wondered if it was only a baby. How did it die?
She had hoped it wasn’t a violent death. She had even wondered if she should attempt to throw it in the garden, instead of the dustbin. That might count as a sort of burial. Of course, since she lived on the terrace, the garden was not a smart option. If the landlord caught her tossing dead lizards into his petunias . . . no, it was not a good idea.
Shivering now, she looked at this particular creature. It seemed to be looking at her. You couldn’t be sure, of course. With geckos, it always seems like they are looking right into your eyes. That was one of the things that scared her – why did they keep staring at you?
She waited, the soap swiftly drying on her body, for the gecko to move. It didn’t. It just stayed there, inside the tumbler that was gently bobbing around in the bucket of water.
How did it get into the damn bucket in the first place? Geckos didn’t like water, did they?
This one seemed not to. There was a tiny movement. Its paws . . . or were they called claws? Or just feet. Feet, she decided. Its feet moved, pawing the rim of the tumbler, retracting quickly when the water lapped an inch closer. No, it certainly didn’t like water.
She cursed under her breath. ‘Why the fuck did you get into the bucket if you don’t like water?’
The gecko’s head moved slightly, first to one side, then to the other. As if it was saying, ‘I didn’t get in. I fell in.’
That was plausible. Must have lost its grip while streaking across the ceiling. Maybe it couldn’t swim.
Just like her. She couldn’t swim either. He had said he would fix that. He had said, ‘It is shameful. You have to learn. I will teach you.’
She had agreed at once, ‘Okay. Where? When?’
Then his face had retreated into one of those awkward corners. ‘Let me think . . . The thing is, you live so far.’
She should have known that it would never happen. He wouldn’t teach her. Not in this city, where each lane and club and hotel belonged to the various corners he occupied. Corners she couldn’t occupy. But back then, she had wanted to believe. So she dug into her guts and brought up an excited laugh. ‘You think and tell me. We’ll both swim.’
It was a pity she couldn’t swim, she thought. She might have enjoyed the sea more. All her friends went on beach vacations and they went wild – ripping off their shirts as they raced on the sand, raced to meet the water like odd brown fish, their backsides rising, disappearing, surfacing. Her friends, too offered to teach her, but she wouldn’t learn. It wasn’t for her, she would tell them.
It certainly wasn’t for this particular gecko. If it could have swum, it would have crawled out over the sides of the bucket. She could help, of course. She could lift the tumbler out of the bucket and empty out the water. She could do that, she told herself. But she couldn’t. Twice, she reached out to grab the tumbler, but with the gecko’s eyes fixed on her face and hands, she couldn’t.
The gecko moved, tilting the tumbler a tiny bit, which only led to its filling up with more water. The gecko’s front feet began to thrash about as it lost its grip on the wet surface. The tumbler bobbed, filled with more water and then sank to the bottom of the bucket.
The gecko jumped out of the tumbler just in time. Now it was thrashing about in the bucket. How hard it fought, like a drowning person.
She couldn’t stand to watch. The creature fighting to stay afloat, craning its neck to keep its head above the water. She turned the tap to cut off the water so that the hot stream wouldn’t hit the gecko’s head. And then suddenly, it flipped over. Belly up.
She remembered then. A photo of him, belly up, in a pool. He must have been about twelve. Old enough to suggest his adult face: the cunning in the eyes, the sadness in the grin. Young enough to look vulnerable. He didn’t know how to swim properly at the time. He had only been floating, in a hotel pool perhaps. Nobody had private pools in those days.
His eyes were open, limbs splayed. As if he was playing dead. She had often looked at that photo. He didn’t keep it framed or pinned up like the dozens of others he had taken, of his friends, his ex, his parents. That one was stuffed away inside an old envelope, in a drawer.
He would lock that drawer. On days when he had to go out for a few hours and she chose to stay behind in his house and wait for him, so they could eat dinner together. He didn’t like that, she knew. He would have preferred it if she went away and came back the next day, or perhaps just went away instead of hanging around in his house as if it was hers too.
He would never say that, of course. He would just take a spare set of keys and lock up a few drawers before he left. He tried to be discreet. Perhaps he thought she didn’t notice. Perhaps he didn’t care if she did. But sometimes he would also forget to lock the drawers. Or maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he knew that she would open them.
She had opened them, of course. Bank statements, invitations, some photos. And there was this envelope. Again and again, she would come back to it. These careful photos from his childhood and early youth, which he wanted to hide away. Or, perhaps, wanted to show.
Perhaps these were clues that he wanted her to find, without it seeming as if he wanted to be found out. The photo of his child self in the pool. Him with his father, in a park, near a cluster of very large dahlias. The photo with hi
s ex. Side by side, quietly formal. Probably a photo taken by a family member. Perhaps at a meet-this-boy-meet-this-girl kind of family meeting. It may have been awkward. But the meeting must have gone well for someone to have taken a picture. Their families must have approved at any rate.
His family wouldn’t have approved of her, she knew. But he hadn’t told his family. There were so many things he didn’t tell. She would always put back the photos before he returned, taking care to place them exactly as they had been. She did not want him to know that she was picking up on the clues he left for her to find.
The gecko may have drowned by now, she thought. Should she bring a tumbler and fish it out of the bucket? But just then, it flipped over again and hurled itself against the side of the bucket. Its feet clung, slipped, thrashed, slipped.
Her hand went to her mouth as she fought back a surge of sympathy. Her hand was soapy still, she realized. She turned on the tap and washed her hands. The gecko flipped again. Belly up.
She turned off the tap and wondered what to do. She couldn’t be standing here all night. She was already late, and showing up late for a work meeting was the quickest way to a bad impression. She looked all around the bathroom. She didn’t know what she needed: a stick? A spare tumbler? But what would she do with it?
The gecko made one more attempt at flipping itself over and grabbing the sides of the bucket. Slipping, falling, gasping for air, space, help. A way to stick around a bit longer. She couldn’t stand it anymore, so she stepped forward and tilted the bucket on its side. The gushing water flooded the bathroom for a minute. The gecko clung to the rim of the bucket with all its might. Then it hopped out and moved to the side of the bathroom.
She ran the water again, rinsed out the bucket and filled it again. She couldn’t bring herself to use the tumbler, having seen the gecko’s feet madly scraping the rim. She filled it with detergent and washed it out before finishing her bath.
This is silly, she told herself. This cleaning of gecko-touch. ‘It must be running all over the house when I’m not looking. On the glasses, spoons, my bed. There’s no way of knowing where it has been, what it has touched.’