Love Story #1 to 14

by Annie Zaidi

  He walked until his thighs felt like they were being twisted loose from his pelvis. He hailed a cab and went to the airport.

  She was in a good mood the evening he returned. The baby hadn’t cried all day. She had been able to put on a Pink Floyd album, albeit at very low volume. The friend had brought over a dish of butter chicken. The maid had fixed thick butter parathas. Her husband didn’t like butter, but he wasn’t around so his likes and dislikes were irrelevant. She was almost happy that evening.

  When he arrived, the food was already laid out on the table. She waited for him and didn’t complain about being kept waiting. He went in to shower, changed his clothes and came to the dining table. He sat down. The baby was awake now, sitting in a high chair, banging a plastic spoon on the table.

  He took the spoon away. She frowned. ‘It’s just a plastic spoon. Let him play. He’s not making that much noise.’

  ‘It’s annoying.’

  His voice was so quiet that she knew at once. Something was wrong.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You tell me. What is it?’

  She looked at his face, his steady eyes. She wished she could summon up tears. But for some reason, the ever-willing stream of the last two years had suddenly dried up. Her fingers ran nervously along the length of the table. Why was she nervous? She hadn’t done anything.

  He seemed to be on the verge of saying something. Twice he opened his mouth, then stopped. He reached out instead for the food. Then he noticed.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t cook chicken any more. You said the uncooked flesh makes you nauseous.’

  ‘I didn’t cook it.’

  ‘The maid is vegetarian.’

  ‘Yes, she is. So?’

  He looked at her, willing her to meet his eyes. But she didn’t look back at him. Not straight. She was busy heaping her own plate.

  Why should she feel guilty? She began to eat. A close friend dropped in with a dish of butter chicken. That’s it. It was true. The absolute truth. Why was she feeling cornered?

  She forced a laugh. ‘We have ordered chicken for dinner before, haven’t we? Hundreds of times.’

  ‘This isn’t restaurant chicken. It is home-cooked stuff.’

  ‘What is wrong with you? I could have cooked it too, couldn’t I?’

  ‘I’m just asking. Did you?’

  ‘Is this some new thing, this obsession about food? First you were drowning us in cheese, now this chicken inquisition.’

  His fingers toyed with the dish, turning it round and round. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It? Who is “it” what?’

  ‘There is another man in your life. Comes to my house. No?’

  His eyes lifted. He took in her trembling hands, mouth working. He laced his fingers and put them in his lap.

  She sat still, trying to summon the outrage she knew she should feel. Now was the moment for her to stand up, let the chair fall over, let the baby start howling with a nameless fear. She ought to sputter with indignation. She ought to howl, ask how he could be so insensitive. All these months of being cooped up, bearing his child, all these years she’d given him, and now that she has a friend, a woman, just look at him . . .

  But when she tried to speak, the words that came out were the wrong ones.

  ‘What makes you think there is another man?’

  ‘Why don’t you just answer, yes or no?’

  ‘This is crazy.’

  ‘It is a question. Yes or no.’

  ‘You’re trying to insult me? Drive me away?’

  She finally managed to hit a high note of indignation. But her voice still sounded funny. There was no conviction in it. Just a huge, dry lump of guilt throbbing in her throat. Was there somebody else? Of course not. She could just say no. No. Why was it so hard?

  He shook his head from side to side. His hands were back on the table. He needed to do something with them. Then he uncovered the casserole, picked up a paratha, put it on his plate. He examined it, touched the white melting butter. He put the paratha back into the casserole. He stood up.

  ‘This wasn’t cooked for me,’ he said.

  ‘What are you trying to say? I don’t even understand. Where is all this coming from?’

  ‘This meal. What is this? I’m just incidental, no? Somebody else cooked it, or you cooked it for somebody else. I’m here, so you offer it to me. Like to a guest. It has been like this. Months. You don’t seem happy to see me walk through the door. I don’t know why it took me so long . . .’ He was pacing the room, buttery fingers laced. ‘If you don’t love me, you could . . .’ and he stalled. ‘What were you thinking? What did you think I would do? What should I do?’ and he stalled again. ‘What did I do?’

  He waited but she didn’t say anything. So he went into the bathroom, washed the butter off his fingers, and he went to lie down in the bedroom.

  She continued to sit at the dining table for a while. Then she finished feeding the baby, changed the diaper, rocked him for a bit and put him to sleep. Afterwards, she switched off the lights in the living room and lay down on the sofa.

  It was odd, she thought, how there was so little anger. No tears either. She felt so horribly settled. The first time she had this feeling was when she had fallen in love and had decided she was going to marry her husband, despite the backlash, the religion nonsense, the difficulties of getting by without family help. But she had been calm. That night when she wanted nothing more than to breathe, and to revel in the security of knowing who she belonged with. And now again, she knew what she must do. It was so easy to decide that it made her nervous. Surely, it would backfire?

  The next morning, she woke him up with a cup of black coffee and sat beside him. He was confused and just stared at the cup for a while.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she joked. ‘I am not going to poison you.’

  He didn’t crack a smile. She tried again.

  ‘I was upset last night. So I didn’t want to talk. It’s not like you think. Maybe I was trying to figure myself out. This motherhood thing. It’s new. I wasn’t enjoying it. You probably always knew who you are, what you want, what you don’t want. I thought I wanted the same things. At first I was just happy to be with you. Now I want more from life. But I still need you. And to answer your question, no. There is no other man.’

  She could see that he didn’t quite believe it. There was too much evidence.

  ‘Look into my eyes and say it,’ he demanded.

  She did. ‘There is no other man. I swear. I have a new friend. She comes over often. She likes to cook, but she lives alone, so she doesn’t know who to feed it to. She brings over those dishes. It is not a man, I promise.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Old friend. You haven’t met her. From school. Now she’s like my best friend.’

  ‘I thought we were best friends.’

  She saw that he was going to cry and she moved quickly to draw him into her arms.

  ‘We were. We are. I don’t know. I suppose I need a woman friend. You won’t grudge me that, no?’ she asked. But she knew it was going to be alright.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked hoarsely. This was going to be very difficult, he thought. It didn’t matter what her answer was. He already knew. She loved someone else. And nothing could be done about it. What could you do when you have a baby and your wife needs a woman friend to love? What could one do?

  Meanwhile, she was whispering into his ears. She was asking him not to cry. She was saying: ‘I love you, I always did, I always will.’

  LOVE STORY # 2

  (aka The one that came limping back)

  The truth dawned late, but it did eventually dawn. He did not love her.

  There was no other explanation, though doubt still scratched at the back of her neck, seducing her with the idea that love was something one could (and should!) take for granted. After all, when a man proposes, o
ne should no longer consult one’s heart about whether or not he really, truly loves you.

  But now he was calling off the wedding, she had to accept the truth – he did not love her. She had tried to console herself. Perhaps a mystifying streak of fear and self-loathing was making him resist a firm commitment. Perhaps he needed to trust her a little more. But sneakily, snarkily, the other bit of truth returned: he had not actually proposed.

  What he had said, was: ‘Okay, let’s get married then.’ And in the wake of the relief washing over her, doubt seemed irrelevant. Even faithless. What did she expect? She scolded the doubting corner of her heart: would he have to hand over an affidavit swearing eternal bondage?

  Stupid, stupid, stupid! It was not even an illusion. She was being soft on herself. Delusion was the right word. That’s what she had been: deluded. And she was too old to believe him when he said, ‘I love you, but we need to trust each other a bit more.’

  The dichotomy of love and trust is a game only the very young can afford to play. ‘I have trust issues’, ‘I love you, you know that, but how do we know we will want to stay together forever’, ‘I love you more than my life. But you have to earn my trust. We’re worth it’. Silly games for kids.

  Trust is a cog in the machinery of love. An organ within the generous body of love. Even a mistrustful person finds a new willingness; boundaries become elastic. The only people you couldn’t trust were those whom you couldn’t love.

  So she decided not to play the trust game. She accepted that he does not love her. And once she accepted the truth, she was galled to think how obvious it must have been to everyone else. Her mother had expressed doubt, despite her anxiety to see her married and gone.

  She saw it clearly now. He asked her to marry him (cruel note to self: he had agreed to marry her) after she brought up the subject. Family pressure was high. They were planning her wedding already. They were lecturing her on the consequences of unreasonable expectations. She wanted to be reassured.

  She had brought it up. The wedding had to happen some time, and you can never start planning too soon. And besides, there were others to think of. Everybody else would need to plan too, right? Some family member would be flying across the seven seas, she had said. Everything needed to be booked months in advance these days. Not that they needed to do anything elaborate. Small was good. Quiet was better. She asked when his sister was coming down from Australia. That might be a good time, no? That might be an added incentive for his sister to stay longer. Which would make his mother very happy, wouldn’t it?

  He had listened, nodding. Finally, he had shrugged and said, ‘Okay, let’s get married then.’ Swimmy-eyed, she had said ‘Yes!’ – as if he had asked a question.

  That was the first thing her mother had asked, she remembers. Ma had asked whether it had been his question or hers.

  She was taken aback. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  Her mother had sighed, and plodded into the kitchen. It was getting to be a routine between mother and daughter – this question of what the other meant, followed by a ponderous wagging of the head, and walking off. The day would limp around cautiously like a dog who has been kicked, eyes and ears sagging towards the floor.

  She told herself that it was alright. Mothers asked annoying questions. All her friends agreed. Every tender maternal trait morphed into a source of tyranny in adulthood. They had come to the conclusion that all mothers carried the seeds for conflict within them and the more carefully they tended the flower of their womb, the stronger sprouted these seeds. Hers was an unusually tender mother, after all.

  When she met her fiancé, the edge of conflict with her mother had been blunted. All exhortations and critiques and forbidding turned into a sullen silence that ended with an annoying question. Mother and daughter went shopping. They phoned relatives. And still, her mother asked, ‘Did he actually ask you to marry him?’

  But she was tripping on a crackerburst of joy and answered with a roll of the eyes, as if she was amused by a child’s persistent question. The last time her mother had repeated the question was a week before the wedding. She had snapped, ‘What? Ma, do you even want me to get married? Ever?’

  Ma had disappeared into the kitchen, where she quietly made kheer. Later, she made mournful calls to family members, inviting them to attend each and every ritual and feast through the coming week. While on the phone with the great-aunt’s daughter-in-law, Ma had burst into tears.

  As her mother dolefully rubbed tears off her square jaw, she felt herself go cold. But she had tossed back her hair and made herself smile. A nice-looking man who ran a nice kind of business was going to marry her. And she was determined to be happy. She was going to be very happy, she decided, and skipped towards the phone, twisting it out of her mother’s grasp.

  It nauseated her to think of it now. That awful chirpy determination. Her refusal to understand what her mother was trying to say. And one day later, her fiancé calling to ask if we couldn’t push the date. No, there was no emergency, but he needed more time. Didn’t she feel it too, the need to be sure?

  She was angry, of course. It wasn’t just the fact that he couldn’t love her madly, blindly. Or that he couldn’t bring himself to go through an austere ceremony. She was angry at herself for assuming that he wanted it all – shared nights, moving in together, honeymooning, family. Oh, that she should not have waited to be asked!

  The memory of saying ‘Yes’ when no question had been asked rang shamefully in her ears. It throbbed inside her head, a tumour of regret. It shamed her and enraged her. More than the memory of holding him when he needed holding, or holding him off in the bedroom, more than anything else, she regretted that ‘Yes’.

  If she could take back any one thing, it would be the sound of her own voice squeaking out that blighted ‘Yes’. That, and putting her wet cheeks against his chin, sniffling apologies about being so horribly sentimental, about being overwhelmed. If she could only replace it with a calmer response. Something like ‘Sure, let’s do it’, or even a cheeky ‘Okay, why not?’

  But done was done and her pride could not be restored. She was a rational young woman, and was used to picking herself up. She had survived a fall from a tree when she was just shy of her twenty-second birthday, and had been in a plaster cast, neck down to her ankles. She had confronted the possibility of never being able to walk again, and then carefully rejected it. No, she couldn’t have that happen. And she had learnt how to stand upright, and walked unassisted within a year.

  And so, she told herself, this wedding cancellation wasn’t such a major crisis. If she could recover from seven fractures within a year, she could pick herself up and dust off this wedding in a day.

  After rejecting thirty-eight calls from the fiancé, she called him back. She told him in dry, precise words that she was sorry.

  ‘I owe you an apology,’ she said.

  He started to interrupt. ‘Can we just please give this a little more time? I don’t want to hurt you, but –’

  She cut him off. ‘Yes I know. You are not ready. But I am.’

  She had the bridal outfit ready. She had the jewellery ready. She had fixed appointments with the hairdresser and the mehendi girls. She did the lunch menu herself. It was to be a morning wedding and food was to be their main extravagance. He didn’t want too much tamasha. He had used that word and she was angry all over again for not having confronted him at the time – ‘What do you mean by tamasha?’ – but she already knew what he meant. No love.

  He was saying something else now. ‘Please don’t say that. I am –’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said.

  Then she told him that since he had called it off, the onus of explaining to everybody was his. She was going to forward all calls from her number to his. He began to protest, but she wasn’t listening.

  ‘Also, could you please break the news to Ma?’ and with that, she hung up.

  He said ‘Hello?’ a few times, and he tried calling her again. But she h
ad already switched off her cell phone.

  Ma was the first to call. He hemmed and hawed. He didn’t know where her daughter was, and no, he wasn’t likely to see her in the next half hour, and yes, he understood how nervous she was and the chaos at home, but there was no need because, oh didn’t she tell you, there wasn’t going to be a wedding? Not yet.

  The filthy names he was called, the curses, the threats of eternal bad luck, the insinuations about his parentage, were minor details. He was telling himself that it was okay. They would laugh at this drama some day. A year later. Or perhaps this nonsense would be over within a month. But anyway, the important thing was that he wasn’t getting married by the end of the week.

  Relief overwhelmed him. She had pushed him too hard, and finally, he stood his ground and admitted that he didn’t want a wedding. Her mother was just a temporary irritant. So he heard out the woman he had already begun to address as ‘Ma’, until she slammed the phone down with a single, clean, forceful motion reminiscent of guillotines.

  Friends’ calls came next. One set of friends asked if they should wear matching blue lehengas. Another friend asked if gifts of digital media would be appreciated. Another wanted to know if she would be forgiven if she showed up just for the reception. Wasn’t there going to be a reception? Enquiries about trains, flights, levels of excitement or apprehension, allergies, flower arrangements.

  He began to disconnect calls and send back a template response: ‘There’s a problem. The wedding is kind of postponed. We are both too upset to talk. Call you in a few days.’

  The few days stretched into six weeks. For six weeks, nobody heard from her. They kept trying her phone, and since the call forwarded to him, they would ask what had happened to her. If he said he didn’t know, friends and relatives abused him for not knowing. An uncle threatened to file a case against him for fraud. An aunt said she would get him arrested, thrown into jail for dowry harassment or mental torture or abetment of suicide.

  He hadn’t imagined there were so many laws applicable to this sort of situation. The possibility of suicide hadn’t occurred. But his main feeling was still relief. His fiancée was probably okay. No danger of suicide. Too selfish for that.