Love Story #1 to 14

by Annie Zaidi

  She could have gone simply because it was death and it had taken a neighbour. She could at least have knelt beside him, touched the edge of the white sheet, patted the heads of his children. She could do that much; it would not be out of place.

  For the first time in her life, she thought about the rituals, and how unsatisfactory a cremation was. It was too final. It was as if the world was telling you that a person, his history and hopes, all his potential was ash. It was less tangible than sand, and slipped away easily into the wind. It was like being told that your life will be so light and flaky that it is foolish to hold on to anything.

  It wasn’t right, she thought. Death was goodbye, but it didn’t turn a body into ash. The dead didn’t fly away from the living, nor could they be carried away by slothful rivers. They stayed and stayed.

  Her father hadn’t gone away. She had watched his ashes slip away into the Ganga. Yet, he lingered – the sound of his slow, rasping breath in another room; a phone call that brought the news to her mother; the shuddering sound made by the almirah in which her mother’s half dozen good sarees lie. None of it was ash.

  She went to her bedroom, flung herself on the bed, squeezed her eyes shut. All evening, she kept her eyes closed and hunted down pictures from her memory – him standing at her door, the DVD hidden by his large hands; him at the roundabout rotating his arms, lifting his knees; looking into the distance, nodding, tilting his head.

  She remembered how she tried to walk past the roundabout, a few days after the Diwali maha-bhoj. She had pretended to be in a big hurry, mumbled ‘hello’ in passing. Her arms were weighed down by two buckets of Prussian Blue.

  He had turned to look at her, and said ‘hello’ quite loudly, deliberately. She was forced to stop and acknowledge his greeting. She saw him take in the paint buckets, and his mouth opened as if he was going to say something. But he said nothing more, just ‘hello’.

  She had walked on. But a few steps later, her face crumpled and she felt like her chest was hurting. She had put down the buckets and turned around to face him.

  ‘How are you?’ she had asked.

  He had nodded uncertainly. When he spoke, his voice came out leaden, as if struggling out of a sand pit. As if speaking was costing him more than he could spare.

  ‘I am just an old man. An old man. What do you expect?’

  She had shaken her head. ‘You aren’t that old.’

  ‘Old enough. Nothing left to do anyway.’

  She had lingered, torn between running away and wanting some more of him. Finally, he had nodded at the paint.

  ‘Doing your work?’

  ‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘The fourth wall.’

  ‘Good. Do it. Don’t worry about what will happen. Nothing finally happens to anyone. Or rather, the same thing happens to all. Still, people do what they do. And it ends when it ends.’

  She had looked into his eyes then, but he wasn’t looking at her really. It was as if he had accepted that this was all there was ever going to be – encrypted hellos on the roundabout, and watchful eyes in the balconies and window-grilles. When she lifted the paint buckets again, he had raised a hand to wave goodbye, but had somehow not managed to lift it beyond the level of his heart.

  LOVE STORY # 11

  (aka The one with enough insurace)

  Those six years, I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t happy either. Starting from the time when he left her and until he came back to her, I was just kind of drifting. Not that he really came back to her. Or to us. He just came back. To the house, I suppose.

  We have a really nice house. I didn’t know that, of course, not until I started going to other people’s houses. She wouldn’t let me go anywhere when I was little, but after he left, she had to take up a job, and there was no option. She had to give me a key to the house, and though she would look stern and ask me to come back home straight from school, I didn’t do that. And she knew I didn’t.

  I used to go off to my friends’ places after school. I didn’t really want to, but I couldn’t stand being alone at home those days. That first year, she cried a lot. Each time she came home and found that I was out, eating at some friend’s place, she would start crying. She would say things like, this isn’t about you; you must never think like that.

  It was very annoying. But once she got into one of these crying fits, I would try to say polite things. I would say, I know, it isn’t about me; it isn’t about you either. It is about him. He is about him.

  The first time I said it, I was eleven. She looked stunned, then she grabbed me, and put me on her lap and cried harder. She kept saying, such a wise creature, such an angel my baby is.

  This got to be a pattern. She’d cry, then she’d ask whether I really felt what I’d said, and what about the things she had done wrong? I didn’t do much to comfort her. I would just sit there, waiting for her to finish. That may have bothered her. Maybe it froke her out. Maybe she thought I was in shock, or scared. She began to control herself, and said things like, she’s okay, we would both be okay, we didn’t need anybody.

  Still, it was an awful year. We had to make a few trips to the police station to see what could be done to find him, make him come back. She would take me along because she couldn’t trust the neighbours. She took me along to the market, to the jewellery shop, to her old college to dig out her degrees and mark-sheets, to an NGO office, to her friends’ houses where she would sit and cry until even her friends grew impatient.

  A year later, my section changed. I was grateful. My new classmates hardly asked questions about him. I got friendly with a group of girls who walked to school. On our way back, I’d skip the bus and walk with them instead. One of these girls invited me home one day.

  It was the smallest house I had ever seen. No marble on the floor. I didn’t even know you could have floors without marble. No balconies either. Just a weird rusty grill on the window, like a prison. Actually, it reminded me of some illustrations I’d once seen, of a mental asylum. Perhaps it was in one of those nineteenth-century historical thrillers.

  Apparently, people did go mental over there. My new friends told me of at least three people in their building who were completely off.

  I went to their houses more often. She didn’t approve, of course. But she knew disapproval wouldn’t get her anywhere with me. Everybody said that about teenagers, even Reader’s Digest. But she did make me read an article in Reader’s Digest about child abuse. So I nodded my wise nod, and told her I would never be alone with a man at any time.

  My new friends were very solidly middle class. I am not exactly rich, but when I first saw the area where they lived, I thought it was a slum. But then our class teacher took us into a real slum for a field trip. My new friends were as taken aback as I was. We kept wondering where the kids’ room was. I had learnt by now that other kids had to share bedrooms, even grown-up boys and girls, until they got married. But none of us had seen houses where there was just one room, and where kids slept with parents, grandparents, married siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins. I wondered what Reader’s Digest would make of that. But it never said much about people who lived in one-room houses.

  Anyway, I began to understand then that there were many kinds of middle class. And I was always being amazed at the way my new friends lived. Their walls would leak and grey patches formed on the ceiling. Black cracks crawled down the building like fat millipedes – concrete bandages to keep the whole thing from dying. Open gutters with wire meshing over them to keep babies from falling in. Babies toddling about in their big brothers’ vests. Noisy boys playing cricket with plastic balls. Some little kid being goaded to go get the ball from somewhere difficult. And overweight ladies playing badminton in their nighties with a dupatta around their necks to suggest that they were covering their breasts. They clung to the dupatta with one hand and barely took one step right or left to try and hit the shuttlecock. It was weird.

  I grew to like those ladies, though they needed something far more vigorous t
han badminton. What I liked most about this building was that everything seemed to fit. Little girls rushing into houses, but taking their shoes off first, fit beautifully with large plastic drums and small lengths of pipe. The ladies in their nighties fit perfectly with the flimsy dupattas covering large breasts. Their rubber slippers fit in with their pulled-back hair, large cheeks, their grunts as they bent to pick up the shuttle-cock. It was all part of something larger and they were content to be part of it.

  Their contentment fascinated me. At least, it did for about two years. Then it began to disgust me. I couldn’t stand being around them. So I stopped going to the houses of my friends who came to school scrubbed clean, doused in contentment, like it was a smelly kind of oil.

  I began to tell them that I had to go straight home. They may have assumed it was because of my mother. I never explained why. Those kids probably guessed a lot without my telling them. They too lived with things they never talked about. All kids do.

  I wasn’t discontent myself. I had always known that my parents weren’t happy. But that was okay. Because I knew within five minutes of stepping inside other people’s houses that nobody was happy. There is a blinding, sunshiny timbre to happiness. Housing colonies and apartment complexes cannot contain it for too long. Other people choke in its presence. They want to hurt somebody, or themselves, when they see real happiness, because it doesn’t allow for the possibility of mere contentment. It mocks those who live at the less-than-happy mark. Happiness makes most people angry.

  I was alright not being smothered by happiness. But now that I wasn’t spending the evening outside, I realized that she wasn’t home until seven or eight at night. When she came back, saw me waiting, she grew flustered. She explained that she had a lot of work. And I was a responsible girl, wasn’t I? I could fix myself a snack and sandwich if she wasn’t around; I could read a comic, couldn’t I?

  Of course, I could. And I did. It was quite nice, having the whole house to myself. Quiet and cool. The Kashmiri carpet and lighter bits of furniture had been sold off that first year, so the marble floor was bare and I could walk around barefoot, kicking up my legs like the dancers in pop videos. All sorts of wild ideas simmered inside my head. Like the notion that I was not a love-child. I read the word in a book somewhere and kept wondering what it meant – love-child. Did it mean that only some children were made of love? What about the rest? I wondered if I was made of love or hate. Was it an assault on her? Why were there no more children after me?

  I knew by now that most people fell out of love pretty quickly and it was children that kept them together. Or houses and joint bank accounts. Mostly it was because they loved the kids. Maybe the kids meant something – some happiness stolen from grubby, smoky city nights; a hushed love made when nobody was looking. Maybe kids are the only love that is safely allowed.

  But I had failed in my kid role, after all. I was not that glob of glue that could stop him from walking away. He left despite the house, despite the joint bank account, despite me. Was it because I was a source of pain, a reminder of evildoing? Had I not been the memory of a fleeting joy?

  When I was fourteen, I asked her if I was an accident. Her brows went up. She bit her lips, then she said, we need to talk, later in the evening. I suppose she needed to look for some particular Reader’s Digest article, or ask other women for advice. Anyway, that was the horrible evening of sex education talk. She began to tell me about babies and where they come from. I interrupted her and told her, I knew all that. I had biology, right? I just wanted to know if she had wanted a baby. She started to say then that she loved me, that I was the most important thing in her life. Then, I knew for sure.

  Knowing wasn’t so bad, not as bad as wondering. But it was too much for her. She upped the affection ante at once. Parathas in the tiffin box. Plans for a birthday party, three whole months ahead of schedule. It was unbearable. If I had had siblings, I would have attacked one of them.

  Anyway, the rest of that year and the next two slipped away. I don’t remember difficult phases. She didn’t cry. I went to school. I read. I watched videos. I passed exams. She got one promotion, and I had to sit through one of her colleagues’ dinners. Once or twice, her friends came over for Sunday brunch. They tucked their feet up on the sofa. The sofa had a new cover.

  I had just started college when he came back. It was as sudden and as simple as his leaving. I come home, ring the doorbell. She opens the door, hugs me, leads me to a sofa and bursts into tears. Exactly like six years ago. Except, there he is.

  He hadn’t changed much. He seemed shorter than I remembered. Which was fine, because I had expected to find him shorter, slightly bent perhaps, whenever I saw him next. But I had not expected to meet him in this house. I thought I might have to go find him, in another city perhaps, and he would be quite old by then.

  He was just starting to grey. The tips of hair on the left side of his forehead shone white. It didn’t do much to distinguish his face, but it didn’t damage him either. His clothes were the same sort. There was something new in his eyes, though. Something like fear, or hunger.

  It wasn’t until I was standing there, watching him watch her that I realized she had turned into a different woman. For one, her arms were bare. I hadn’t even realized when that change happened. But she wore mostly sleeveless blouses now, and jeans on weekends. She had given up salwar-kameezes. No sindoor, no rings on her fingers. Her hair fell in sharp, silken waves down the sides of her face, the centre-part in her hair was razor-neat.

  When he left, she had been another creature – hair slightly unkempt as it disappeared into a thinning bun; fading kurta with lycra pajamas underneath; flat sandals on her feet, as if she was ready to walk out too, if only she knew where to go.

  But now he was back. She stopped crying and told me to say hello, as if he was some new man she was introducing me to. As if I hadn’t recognized him. I was annoyed at that, so I jumped up and hugged him.

  That wasn’t very clever, because now he started crying. I don’t deal very well with weepy people. It annoys me. I feel like I have to comfort them, say it is okay, or everything will be okay, things like that. I patted his back and told him not to cry. Then I went into my room.

  I sat on my bed and thought about what would happen next. If this was a Hollywood movie, now would be the scene when the mother enters my room – after knocking, of course; Hollywood mothers always knock before entering kids’ rooms – and sit down next to me. We would have a philosophical conversation about families and love, or maybe she would just ask if I was okay. Perhaps we would have a long overdue conversation about why he left in the first place. Perhaps she would bring out that little photo – I had already opened her bedside drawer to look at it, six years ago – and explain that slim stranger in a bikini.

  But she wasn’t very Hollywood and, in a way, I was glad. I just wanted to sit in my room, alone. My head was mostly empty. I did think about how much she had changed. How her jowls didn’t sag as they used to, although she was older now. She hadn’t gotten any fatter, though she never went to the gym. She bought her own night-shirts now, having given up wearing his discarded T-shirts. She wore more beads, hardly any gold. But now he was back.

  We had dinner together that first night. I was glad I was allowed to eat without having to answer questions, or being made party to a reconciliation talk. She was quiet in a dogged sort of way. I remembered this expression from six years ago. It was like a low-grade, recurrent fever that wasn’t serious, but it wouldn’t let her function very well.

  He, on the other hand, was quiet in a new way. A content way. The expression on his face was similar to what you see on the faces of people who show up at weddings where they aren’t close enough to either bride or groom. They feel no anxiety, no envy, no real curiosity. They just sit by themselves, smile abstractly, eat and are content to have been invited. That’s what he looked like – a guest who was content to be here, but who wouldn’t have been missed if he hadn’t shown up.<
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  There was too much food. She had overcooked because she had been tossed off her neat approximation of how much to cook for two people. And there wasn’t enough food at breakfast because she hadn’t cooked at all.

  She left earlier for work earlier than usual, shaking me awake just before she left. All she said was, good morning and take care. She didn’t leave any instructions about what I was supposed to do.

  So I woke up and made myself some tea. Then I noticed he was up, sitting quietly on the sofa. I asked if he would like some tea. He smiled, said, yes. He made a silly comment about me being so grown-up that I actually knew how to make tea.

  I was irritated and wanted to remind him that I had always known how to make tea, even before he left. But he looked small and so much like a distant uncle trying to make polite conversation that I just smiled back.

  I asked if he would eat dinner leftovers for breakfast. He hesitated. So I offered cornflakes instead. Then I looked in the box and saw there wasn’t much left. So I gave him the cornflakes while I ate leftover rice fried with fresh tomatoes. He seemed appreciative, and wanted some of my rice too. So I gave him half my breakfast. There was nothing left to take in the tiffin box.

  It took me three days to figure out that he didn’t have any work. At least, no job that required him to step out of the house. All day he would be home, sitting in the balcony or lying on the sofa, with the air-conditioner down to a freezing sixteen degrees C. When I returned home, he would smile, or sigh contentedly. Often, he would say, we are so lucky to be a family, like this. But it seemed to me that he was actually saying that he was lucky he had a house like this.

  I was mad at him because he was so useless. The maid came in to do dishes and floors; another maid came for the bathrooms, thrice a week. He didn’t even carry a dirty mug to the kitchen, but he did begin to insist that the bathroom-cleaner show up every day. He didn’t like to leave the bathroom floor wet, he said, and then he tried to bargain. But he actually ended up doubling the maid’s wages because the mistress of the house was refusing to intervene.