by Annie Zaidi
All three are asked to sit down at a separate table. The waiter is called and he takes a long time coming. In the meantime, he watches her face.
She is barely a few feet away, her left profile turned to him. He watches the way she turns her head as the waiter approaches, her nervous glance at the blackboard upon which the day’s specials have been boldly listed in pink chalk. He strains his eyes to read just like she does.
But the waiter does not approach her table. It is they who decide. The couple peers into the menu and they tell the waiter what food to bring. Then the cook is summoned to their table, to carry away a stack of untouched rotis and a bowl of leftover curry. A moment later, the waiter brings over another dish of curry and a heap of rice. The baby in her lap stirs, sleepily wails. She pats the child back to sleep with her left hand, eats with the right. Her eyes are fixed on the distant palms.
The couple takes turn at calling out every few minutes. Everything okay? Do you want more? Pickle? Rice? Okay? Enjoying?
He keeps his eyes fixed on her face. There is something new in her eyes. At first he thinks that perhaps she has seen him. She seems to be looking directly at him. But she says nothing, does not smile, or cry out in surprise. Her eyes seem to have hardened. She does not talk to the cook or the driver. Not a single word.
The waiter hovers nearby, lazily, deliberately turning to look at a clock nailed up on the kitchen wall. All the other guests have left.
The older child wakes up, sits up, demands to be fed again. The young couple exclaims, laughs. They are drinking coffee, and they pour out some milk into a glass. They call out her name, and they repeat, in English – Enjoying?
She gets up, goes to the washbasin, washes her hands. The couple stands up too, their arms linked. He sees the way she steals glances at them – their touching bodies, their interlaced fingers.
On the way back, the cook is muttering to herself, peering warily at each stone and bush on the path leading up to the cottage. The driver hurries ahead with a torch. She walks behind them, carrying the baby on one shoulder, and leading the older child by the hand. The child’s chatter is innocent and high-pitched, and her silence finally yields.
The child asks if she is not afraid to sleep alone. She says, yes, I am, but whenever you are afraid, you must sing. At the door, the child pauses and asks her to sing. She sings a line before taking the children into the cottage. Sagar kinaare dil ye pukaare, tu jo nahin to mera koi nahin hai.
When the moon has disappeared and the resort is completely silent, he emerges from behind the banana grove. He steps into the restaurant with its three missing walls. He touches the table at which she has eaten, runs a finger along the edge. It is grimy and damp.
The sea is loud and foaming white at the mouth, like an unruly, excited toddler with spittle running down his chin. Or like a fiercely apologetic lover who offers to kiss away all hurts, all wrongs. Or like a night working hard to churn out a plump, buttery morning.
He finds a hammock large enough to swallow him and he falls into it, face down. The trees sound busy and the sound of the sea exhausts him. He shuts his eyes, knowing he will start crying any minute now. If she was to come outside and find him there and ask him what the matter is, he would say the night is too long, the stars too bright, the sea too loud, and yet, he cannot bear to go back without her. He cannot bear to be anywhere without her.
LOVE STORY # 8
(aka The one from Radheshyam (B) Cooperative Housing Society)
She found out through the notice board of their housing society. Even that was a coincidence, because she never looked at the notice board. But that day, she looked.
She had just returned from the market, weighed down by ten kilos of groceries on her right and left arms – three kinds of fruit, bags of rice, spinach, potatoes, onions and a can of paint. Just another five seconds, she had been thinking, and her arms would break. At the very least, there would be a shoulder dislocation. And so, she paused for a minute and set down the heavy bags in the lobby, near the building lift.
The watchman was putting up a new notice on the board. So she glanced at it and there it was: ‘All residents of Radheshyam (B) Cooperative Housing Society are invited to B-402 for a puja, to be followed by lunch, on the fourth-day ceremony for our beloved father.’
It was signed by names she hadn’t heard: two male names, probably his sons. She knew he had two sons. His wife’s name was there, of course, and three women’s names. Two of them must be daughters-in-law, she guessed, and one would be a daughter, the youngest.
She read the notice twice over, then she read all the other notices on the board as well. Then she hobbled to the lift, fished the keys out of her handbag, and put the bags into the lift, one by one. She stood still inside the lift for a few seconds, feeling her arms and hands return to her body. She shut the lift doors, jabbed the 5 button, and shuddered up to her landing.
By the time she stepped into her living room, she was too tired to curse, although she wanted to. She wanted to curse for so many reasons. Like this system of stepping directly into living rooms. She hated it. Why didn’t builders in this city think of how awful it was to knock on someone’s door and then end up peering directly into their living room? Everyone needs a little lobby, a passageway or corridor of some sort, which leads into a living room, which should have its own separate bathroom. Why should you have to open your front door to strangers who aren’t welcome, and have their eyes invade your life?
She lay on the sofa for a minute, massaging her forearms. One shouldn’t have to have conversations with people standing at the door, raking your life with their gossipy eyes. Living rooms were for those who lived in them, not for strangers.
It was too late, of course. The building had been built, the flat had been bought. Two years ago, when she broke all her fixed deposit savings and poured them into the acquisition of this tiny hole in this dump of a city. And nothing was going to change. Most houses were like this, and she couldn’t afford a house with a passageway. Not in this lifetime.
She put the groceries away, each in its right place. Spinach in the fridge; potatoes and onions in a blue, tiered basket; rice in the translucent plastic jar with snip-snap clips on the sides; paint bucket on the broad wooden plank nailed to the bedroom window so that it formed a makeshift ledge. That’s where she kept her brushes, tiny buckets in which to wash the brushes and mix paints, cleaning rags, paint. It was her little studio.
Before she had the plank nailed in, her brushes and rags lay on the floor in a corner of her bedroom. It was he who had found the plank for her. She never did ask him where he found it. Nor why he had bothered to help.
One day, she had been fretting aloud about the brushes and paints and the way they kept getting knocked down when she walked past. She was complaining about having to bend over double to reach the paint buckets and then straightening up again a hundred times an hour while she painted
He had asked then. ‘Paint?’
So she had told him about her project. A little bashfully, for she hadn’t told anyone else yet, not even the two ladies from upstairs who came to visit, kids in tow. In another kind of housing society, she might not have felt the need for such secrecy. But here, it would be the thing that marked you out. It would become a stain on her home, her soul, her family, her sex.
In housing societies of this kind, it is dangerous to be different. People are remarkably intolerant in impossibly large cities with impossibly tiny houses. Small, fearful hearts beat within their tired bodies and they have small patience with artists. This city misunderstood its own genius, turned its face away from the truth of its goddesses. Who would understand a woman who painted nudes?
Besides, she wasn’t painting cute naked baby cupids, or even goddesses. She painted grandmotherly figures with ancient crumpled breasts and flaccid bottoms. Women with all the vigour and gleam of sex sucked out of their skins. Animal figures, almost. The upstairs ladies certainly wouldn’t understand, even though it could we
ll have been their own bodies on her bedroom walls. No, they were far too respectable around here.
And yet, she had trusted that he would understand, that he would not judge her, nor tell other people. Perhaps it was a foolish trust. She didn’t know him well enough. She didn’t even know his full name at the time. All she knew was that he sat outside her building, on the roundabout where the builders had promised them the delights of a real fountain with running water piddled out from the private parts of a white marble toddler.
‘Imported. From Eetali,’ the estate agent had assured her.
Builders being builders, they never got around to importing any fake marble statues. Instead, what the residents got was a four-headed metallic lamp-post sitting atop a concrete platform, and in the end, everyone agreed that a lamp-post was more practical. The platform was now their ‘roundabout’, around which they gathered to chit-chat in the evenings.
It didn’t matter, not to her. The piddling statue would have been a piece of amusement for local oafs. It would have been nice to have some kind of art inside the colony, but on second thoughts, no art was better than bad art. She didn’t want to look at pseudo imitations of things from Eetali.
In the afternoons, the roundabout was home to unemployed or retired men. When it wasn’t them, it was the watchmen or servants. In the evenings, a bunch of young women clumped around the lamp-post, having left their husbands with a cup of tea and a plate of fried bhajiya. They chattered, and kept an eye on their kids, and every once in a while, a young mother gave a child a smack and sent her off to do homework.
Later still, when the lamp had begun to glow a pale yellow, older women would come down for a stroll. The younger ones would drift away, back to chores and to daily soaps on TV. Later still, teenagers and college students would take over the roundabout. Mixed groups of boys and girls that grew hushed and looked sulky if an older person like herself walked past.
The only time the roundabout stood empty was in the late mornings. That was when he came down, between nine and ten-thirty in the morning, and between four and five in the evening. In the morning, he would perch himself on the concrete roundabout, legs dangling like a child’s, and begin his light exercise regimen. He would raise his arms, rotate his wrists, then the whole arm; right first, then left; clockwise first, then anti-clockwise. His legs would keep moving too, ankles rotating, toes wiggling. He would bend a bit, side to side, his T-shirt crumpling and bringing his taut paunch to attention. In the afternoons, he did nothing. He just sat there, staring at the driveway, at the scraggly potted plants hanging in a few windows, at passers-by.
If someone stopped and said hello, he would nod and say hello. If someone stopped a moment longer and asked how he was doing, he would smile and say, fine, and ask, how are you?
This was his daily routine and she had watched him do this for two years. Without talking to him, she had known that they had things in common. You know a kindred spirit when you see one. She sensed that, like her, he did not belong to this city, this building, this cubbyhole, this retirement. He did not belong to flurried silences, flaccid mornings and the utter desolation of a metropolitan noon.
She also knew that he may once have belonged here, to this claustrophobia, these flats, the eternal hurry to get home, the late nights. All of that. But not any longer. He was a different man now, a lost alien. But he would not complain about how nothing felt right.
There had always been a family, she knew. There is a difference between lonely old men and old men who actually live alone. He was too well groomed to be isolated. His T-shirts were always pressed. His hair was oiled, plastered down with water, combed to the side. He periodically disappeared for meals and his eyes were not misty, neither restless nor relentless in their quest for a human touch.
But he was lonely. She knew this. Her own mother had developed the lonely look after her father died and none of the children wanted to make a home with the old lady. Not even her. She had refused to move back in with her mother despite her brothers’ pestering. It is time to take on your share of family responsibility, they had said, over and over. That had made it worse. She was galled by their endless claims upon her time, all because she had not been able to find a man and sucker him into a wedding. They assumed she was eternally available to play nursemaid to the old, besides being a free babysitter-cum-companion-cum-chaperone to young nieces. Out of sheer stubbornness, she had refused. But she did go often to visit her mother. She helped supervise the maids, took stock of the valuables and moveable furniture, and whenever she visited, she cooked some dishes that would last several days and were easy to warm up in a plastic casserole in the microwave. That gave her mother a breather from the maid’s assault of pure grease. She had even bathed her when the old lady fell sick. The painting project had been rooted in her discovery of her mother’s failing body.
It had filled her with wonder – this new body hanging on the bones of a woman she knew so well. One didn’t see such bodies in magazines or on TV. It seemed fresh to her. Untainted by familiarity and untouched by ambition. She would have such a body too, she thought. Another ten years, maybe twenty. Soon enough. It preoccupied her, these old-new bodies.
It should have been easy to ignore her brothers, and get past their bullying. She could just move back into her mother’s house instead of spending so much money buying a new house and wasting time commuting back and forth. She could make it easier on herself. She knew she needed to take a more intimate look at the fast emptying eyes of her mother, to take charge of a body that she was doomed to occupy some day.
Perhaps, it was the intimacy she was afraid of. All her life she had stubbornly refused to look intimately at anyone. She had turned down men in her youth, resisting the burden of being at the centre of anyone’s world. She would not now become an anchor for her mother. So, against everybody’s advice, she settled in this far-flung suburb where living was expensive and friendship non-existent.
There was nobody she could call a friend in this colony. She went through the first three months without having a conversation with anyone at all, unless she counted the short, perfunctory sentences exchanged at grocery stores, or at the milk centre or with the newspaper boy.
He was the first neighbour she had spoken to. Or rather, he was the first who spoke to her. She had been in Radheshyam (B) for three months, and had already noticed him sitting on the roundabout in the mornings and late afternoons. Once, she had come downstairs with a stick in her hand, poking about in the heap of rubbish at the back of the building. He must have been watching her for a while. When she headed back into the lobby with a paintbrush in her hand, he caught her eye. He nodded. She stopped.
He asked, ‘Do you need something?’
A brush had fallen down, she told him, pointing to the window grill on the fifth floor. What she really needed was a cabinet, she explained, or a table for her painting things. A worktable. But she couldn’t afford to buy anything new. So she was using the window as a storage space.
The very next day, he had rung her doorbell with a ten-inch wide plank of wood in his arms. She never asked him where he found it. Perhaps it was amongst the rags and broken furniture in the rubbish heap. Or, he might have walked to the second-hand furniture store near the third gate, and salvaged some old, unusable piece from the workshop. Who knew? Perhaps he had even walked to a far-off place, looking for this object that would serve as an introductory gift.
She had been bothered at first. Annoyed that he remembered, annoyed that he sought to fill this small gap in her comforts. Faced with his slow smile, his extended hand, the plank of wood, she had felt a fog of fear descend.
Was this man now going to come over regularly? Did he follow her upstairs? No, he wouldn’t do that. Her name was painted on the board in the lobby, along with all the other owners of apartments in the building. Was it because of the painting? No, he couldn’t have seen the painting yet. Why did he ask questions about her painting work?
She resented it. His s
howing up, introducing himself, taking an interest in her. Perhaps it was only his age. She had spent years fobbing off attention from old men who were either bored or newly widowed and found her attractive because she was unmarried, men who were unable to see why she should not be grateful for any attention at all, seeing that she was middle-aged and unlikely to get anyone better. She got cornered by landlords and neighbours and senior colleagues. And so she was rather gruff that first time.
She did not invite him to step inside for a minute, nor offered him a cup of tea. He deposited the plank of wood at her feet, folded his hands in a polite namaste, and then he was gone.
She remembered feeling hollowed out by his gesture – the slight bow, the folded hands, the unperturbed smile, his slightly stooped, retreating back. The next time she saw him at the roundabout, she stopped to say thank you. He smiled a respectable, neighbourly smile.
She felt compelled to say something beyond ‘good morning’. So she told him that she was going to use the plank. Once again, she began to talk about her brushes, the little buckets of paint, and rags. There was no room to keep her things. The cupboards were all full. The bedroom was too cramped, and if she stored painting materials in the living room, the new marble floor would surely be ruined.
He had nodded a few times, looking into the distance. Just when she was about to walk away, he had asked: ‘Waters or oils?’
So she told him about her mural. She didn’t mention nudes. People, she said. ‘I am paining people. Ordinary people. Women.’
He had nodded. A slow smile, a tilt of the head, as if to say, of course. As if he had always known that she was the sort of woman who would paint ordinary people, women.
She had been painting across three walls and she told him that she wanted the fourth wall to be a solid square in deep ochre, or perhaps a midnight blue. Ochre would nicely set off the flesh tones, but blue would be a better choice if she wanted to add an extra dimension. A mood of foreboding, or despair, or reflection.