Love Story #1 to 14

by Annie Zaidi

  Just like there had been no way of knowing about his house, his bed. Whether someone else did not run all over the house on alien, illicit feet, touching plates and spoons, touching her toothbrush, the too-fat pillows. There was no sign of such things. If there had been, she wouldn’t have known how to talk of it. How does one confront the suspicion of somebody else’s access to a home where her own access was not quite licit?

  She murmured to the gecko as she washed the soap off her body.

  ‘Do you know I saved your life today?’

  The gecko didn’t blink. Under its watchful eyes, she towelled herself dry, wrapped the towel around her torso and hurried out.

  All evening, she thought about how the gecko had clung to a corner in the bathroom, long after the bathroom was wiped dry. It must be frightened, she thought, or too drained by its near-death experience. Fighting, floating, flipping, hanging on. All it needed to do was breathe. Then it would go looking for food.

  But when she got home from her meeting, it was still there, crouched in the same corner of the bathroom. One moment, she was filled with irritation, the next with terror. Did it die after all? It wasn’t moving but its eyes were still open. Did geckos’ eyes close when they died?

  She stamped her foot. It did not move. She tried making clicking noises with her tongue. She even brought the wiper from the terrace and poked the soft end near the gecko’s tail. Finally, she turned the tap on and tossed a tumbler of water on its body, hoping to frighten it into movement. It still didn’t move.

  Then she shut the bathroom door and switched off the light, hoping the silence and dark would persuade the creature to move. Maybe it was paralyzed with fear. If only it would change position, turn its head, blink. Anything to show it was alive.

  She went into the bedroom and sat in the darkened room. She had done this often until a few weeks ago. Sitting in the dark. Alone. Sometimes she would be startled by a gecko streaking across the wall on which she was leaning. Then she would jump up and switch on the light, shake out her clothes. Most evenings she sat still, willing the phone to ring. The night would grow silent, and chill, and the stray dogs would bark and then stop barking, and then she would keel over sideways and fall asleep.

  The phone had rung. Only twice, perhaps, over two months. Still, she sat in the dark, the cold weight of the phone in her lap.

  But the dense oil of silent nights had given way to crisp, light mornings. It was summer. And work calls came. Like hot, salty fritters, she crunched up work. She learnt to dial numbers again. Different people, different reasons. Not him.

  The two times he called, his voice had been bright to breaking point. He repeated himself, telling her things he had already told her before, asking her things he already knew, claiming she had never told him this or that thing. Again and again, he repeated, ‘How are you?’ Again and again, she had repeated, ‘Okay. I’m fine.’

  After all this time, she was sitting in the dark again. Not waiting. The waiting was gone out of her. Just sitting. The night grew cold, slid in between the windowpanes, settled around her hair. She had been okay, after all. Damaged, cornered, drained. But she hadn’t sunk. She had waited until she got her breath back, then she moved on.

  When she went to the bathroom and switched on the light, there was a sudden flash of movement, a streaking across the floor. She was starting to mutter ‘Finally!’, and then she noticed. Her gecko was still lying where it had been. It hadn’t moved an inch. The streak was another gecko, a few feet away. This one had lost half its tail.

  She stepped backwards, not taking her eyes off the other gecko. It began to move, watching her steadily, and came to a stop near her gecko.

  She wondered whether her gecko was stupid – did it think that by not moving it was protecting itself? Hiding? Playing dead? Were the two going to fight? Had they already been fighting in the dark when she had walked in?

  There was no fighting now. For a long time, the two geckos just stayed like that: heads touching, neither moving.

  And then her gecko moved. A very tiny bit. Perhaps only about one-thirtieth of an inch. Its body shuddered. Whether in fear or relief, or in a final, indefinable show of hope, it was hard to tell.

  LOVE STORY # 13

  (aka The one that was washed up by the tide)

  He stands under the cottage. On the balcony, looking down, there is nobody. Last night there were three of them – brown, oily, moon faces, all the creases ironed out by the dull night of the village. She, sandwiched between the other two, stood grinning at the stars. Happy about nothing in particular.

  He had known it wouldn’t be so straight, so innocent. When was it, ever?

  She was innocent. Of course, of course, of course. She was not . . . he doesn’t know the right word for it. Not crass. Not filthy. Not dishonest. Not frail. Not desperate. Not stubborn. Not forthright.

  On the list inside his head, he ticks off all the things she is not. She is not forthright, that much he knows. But she is also not cheating on him. He is sure of this. As sure as you can be when all you have is a drop of faith. Is there a God? Is she faithful? Is there redemption for smugglers who die in their mother’s arms? Who can answer such questions?

  Difficult questions are not what bring him here, following her across the black sand all the way to Parabel. The ferry took less than an hour and it cost only sixty rupees. He does not mind the time or the money spent. But he doesn’t like having to cross the sea.

  For twelve months she has been singing to him of the sea – the aching constancy of it, the black guarantee of it. The softness of the sand that she wants to sink into is like a moist underskin, like coarse language and its shape-shifting soul. The water’s chameleon colours are the names of her desires.

  Be sand to me, she says, and I will cross the seven seas for you. She sings it into his ears some mornings. Saat samundar paar main tere peechhe peeche . . . Across the seven seas, I came looking for you. Except that she didn’t cross any seas to get here.

  Sometimes, she buries her face in his shoulder and she says, let us be like sea and sand to each other. When she wants to tease him, she sings the song about wanting a bungalow near the sea. Or even a cottage. Like the one at Parabel, she says.

  When she was first brought into the city, she had cried. Not in front of them. She needed them to let her stay, just like she needed them to take her away from the landlocked misery of her childhood. That place of his childhood too. They had both grown up in the same district, though they never knew each other.

  Still, he can imagine her childhood. He senses her girlish nightmares about being trapped in that small, touristy town. It is a special kind of small-town misery, the special misery of natives who watch tourists come and go. Others come to their hometown for the sake of its beauty and history, or maybe searching for something larger, something that gives meaning to jobs and good food and sex. But for young people who grow up in such towns, there is nothing but misery. They cannot go anywhere. And yet, getting away seems so easy for other people – other people are always coming and going. It was torture. He too had suffered.

  But he suffered only a little. He needed only an excuse to escape, a moment in which he could be persuaded that home wasn’t good enough. It is different for girls. They suffer the torture of knowing they can never leave. Not unless somebody else comes looking for them and takes them away. She must have worried that she might be married in the same town, and then she would never, ever, be able to leave.

  She told him this. That she feared a husband, a stranger who would demand love and loyalty. And she wanted to run away to the big city where the world’s grief comes roaring at you, riding the crest of grey waves before it is smashed at your feet. That place where they make grief so beautiful that you willingly hand over a week’s earnings to watch it unfold – grief flavoured with hummable music, queenly colours, shapely bodies. That was where she wanted to live. A city where nobody is afraid to be sad, because nobody has the time or space to remain sad. A
city where you can shake the jasmine out of a neat plait and leave your wiry, uncombed mess to float down to your hips.

  She would gladly be a maid who runs a comb through such hair – thick, black ropes of hair on the head of a film star. She has always known she would not be a star. Her smiles would not make millions smile; her cracked grief would not make millions go mad. She didn’t mind. All she wanted was to sit on the fringes of such a city. Watch the stars shine. To see somebody shine. To see open seas and high tides instead of the black walls of her ancient, landlocked town where only the tourists are ever excited about anything.

  For twenty-three years, she waited for something to happen. She has told him this – I was about to shrivel up and die; dying on the inside, you know. But then one day, they arrived. They, who had had another baby too soon on the heels of the first one. It was their hometown too, so they came to seek out their grandmother. They wanted help. They were going insane trying to bring up two children without help.

  A minor god must have granted that prayer, which she hadn’t even dared to whisper aloud. Of all the thousands of poor, single women who knew the alphabet and could count up to a hundred, they picked her.

  And his personal god must have been listening too, for she was brought into his apartment complex. Here, where he had been waiting, for years, for something good to happen. Millions of men in this city, but she was destined for him.

  She was carried to him, she likes to say, as if a sea breeze had scooped her up around the armpits and made wings of her arms.

  But she had cried when she first got here. At night, as she lay on the kitchen floor on a rough coir mattress, with the street pouring in like a night lamp that couldn’t be switched off. They would not allow curtains in the kitchen. They wouldn’t let her sleep in the living room either. That’s where the cook slept. Had slept there for thirteen years, and the old woman couldn’t be displaced. Besides, it was too much trouble moving the furniture around every night and every morning to make room for a new person. She was assigned a mattress she could barely lift and was asked to sleep in the kitchen.

  So she cried. Because the dazzling city night seemed to go on and on and she couldn’t sleep. One night, she sat up shaking with fatigue. Unable to bear the bright silence of the kitchen, she slipped out to the stairwell. Under the stairs, she sat down to cry with violent, shaking sobs. This is how he saw her for the first time.

  It must have been providence. He had been to the night show of Mangal Pandey. He felt he must see it, being a Pandey himself, but it went on too long. It was nearly two in the night when he saw the girl crouched under the stairs and, for a moment, he thought it was his overworked imagination. The widow in the film had cried like this – knees drawn to her chest, dramatic sobs.

  But then he came close and squatted beside her, and she turned her face towards him and he saw her face was a real face, not a crumb of fantasy. And that is how he met her – a girl who cried because the night was long and the city was too big and too bright, and because she didn’t want to go back home.

  He didn’t want to go back home either. And he didn’t want her to go anywhere. It was clear to him now why he had had to spend so many years in this sodden fish-smelling city. It must have been destined.

  Then one weekend, the family took a trip to Parabel and they took her along. It was such a blow. He had thought the family would go away for two or three days and the house might be empty, except for the cook. He and she could finally be alone in a proper house. She too had been teasing him. Humming the lines from a song he knew well. Akeli hoon ghar ma tu aaja baalma. I’m alone at home, come in, love.

  But all that excitement came to nothing. They needed her even on their vacation. The babies needed to be watched. They were going to live right next to the sea.

  She couldn’t swim, she argued. They laughed. They said she wouldn’t need to swim. She just had to watch the children. Feed them when it was time, change their clothes if they got sandy or wet. Just enjoy.

  She must have enjoyed. She came back from Parabel full of sand and sea and sunshine. He remembers the day she returned. She crept down to the stairwell where he waited, lying on his bamboo mat. The bedsheet was drawn up to his chest. She sat in front of him, took his hands in hers. Her eyes shone as if lined with condensed drops of starlight. Pure starlight. Her mouth was an uncreased oval of joy as she began to tell him about Parabel.

  He was afraid. Her escape into this unburdened joy frightened him. After she returned from Parabel, she had become bolder. She would often lie down with her head in his lap. And she would speak of love. And swings. Cottages. The balconies lush with dark night and tiny white flowers. The sound of the tides. Yellow sand. Black sand. Sand the colour of sand.

  Be many things, she had whispered to him once. Be everything to me. And never go, except to come back. Be the tides. Why do you speak so coarse? Why do you grow impatient? Who can we run from? Can the sea? Can the sand?

  It fills him with foreboding. Where has she learnt to talk like this? It must be the songs. She borrows the words from the radio. Dariya kinaare ek bangla. And, mujhko chand laake do, idli-doo, idli-doo. And, ye raatein ye mausam nadi ka kinaara. She laughs as she sings the words out to him. Then she says, okay, forget about the seaside bungalow. Just take me to Parabel. Just you and I, nobody else.

  He cannot take her to Parabel. He cannot afford vacations. Only once has he gone anywhere in five years. That was Gokarna. He took a bus and stayed at a small hotel for 200 rupees a night. It was a waste, he says now, nothing to see. Except for the temples, of course. Other visitors found pleasure in golden sand and roaring sea. And in each other. Everyone had come with somebody. Only he was alone.

  What does it matter? Sunshine, shifting grains of the earth, tides lowering themselves and arching up as if to suck at the lips of humans who walk past – what is so special about such things? The couples especially annoyed him. They had been behaving like the lead pair in some silly romantic film – hands wrapped around waists, leaning into each others’ bodies, running into the water, splashing, sucking at icelollies in lurid colours. And him? He walked about, glaring at the couples everywhere until the very sand on the beach seemed to turn cold at his approach. He clearly remembers that his foot had brushed against a cluster of shells. Abandoned homes, he had thought. Tombstones without memory. He had resolved never to go to a beach again.

  But she is so full of the beach. What has she found in Parabel that she craves so desperately to return? Twelve months later, she is still sick with longing, still lisping sweetnesses that made him afraid. And now the family has gone off to Parabel again.

  She has gone willingly this time. Excited, she jumped up and down when she told him: we’re going, we’re going, they’re taking me again. This time, she has not said that she wishes it was just you and I, nobody else. And so he caught the evening ferry and followed her to Parabel.

  It is dark when he reaches the cottages. Swings that you can lie down in, and be rocked like a baby. There are several resorts along the beach, but he knows he must look for one with swings stretched between coconut trees, and a banana grove behind that, and behind that a cluster of wooden cottages with the railings on the balconies painted a flashy red.

  Guided by an instinct like that of a planet taking position in the night sky, he finds the right cottage. And there they are – three silhouettes on the top floor. She, the cook, the driver.

  He knows the family has a driver. He knows the man’s face – a heavyset man in his fifties, always dressed in a white uniform. A man who goes up the stairs twice a day – once to take the car keys, once to return the keys at night.

  His heart slams against his back, his throat, his shoulders. They might have different rooms, he thinks. Or it might be one long room for the servants. Maybe they sleep on mattresses on the floor. Why does it matter? The cook is also there. But the cook is just an old woman who sleeps soundly, snores loudly.

  She has told him this several times because
the cook makes sleep impossible. So if the cook sleeps soundly and there is only one room between the three of them, there will be her and the driver . . . But so what?

  He watches the three of them with their wind-teased hair, their bellies pressed against the warm balcony railing. The older woman. The middle-aged man. The girl. He knows she is not unfaithful. Or desperate. Or frail. Or stubborn.

  What is he afraid of? He asks himself this as the stunted palms sway from side to side, as if the night was threatening to wallop him. But he cannot tear himself away. He stands in the shadow of the palms, listening. She will laugh now, he thinks. She will turn to one of the others and she will laugh, her teeth catching the yellow moon. Or she will sing. Ye raat ye chandni phir kahaan.

  But there is a feeble cry, like a baby making up its mind about whether or not it should let out an outraged wail. Before the cry can grow louder, she disappears.

  He cannot hear her voice but in his head he can see her, holding the child, swaying like the palm trees around him, and her lips murmuring ‘Sh . . . shhh’.

  There are no lights. No lamp-posts. No lights on inside the cottage either. The cook and driver remain where they are, smiling vacantly into the night. The gap left between their bodies after the young girl’s exit has stayed intact.

  He looks around. There is a shed with slats of bamboo and thatch for a roof and three walls missing. It is a restaurant, full of the sound of the sea. The lights are bright and the soft music wanders between the tables like stray kittens looking for scraps of fish. He finds a banana tree to hide behind.

  They are there. Just the two of them, eating off thick white plates. There are very few guests at this time of year. They laugh gently, eat slowly. When the meal is done, the woman touches her husband’s arm lightly and pouts in an insistent fashion. He sighs, disappears and, minutes later, he reappears with a sleeping child pressed against his chest. He is followed by those three. The cook, the driver, and her. She is carrying the smaller child in her arms.