Love Story #1 to 14

by Annie Zaidi

  Ma hadn’t called him again. Or rather, she did call but disconnected as soon as he said ‘hello’. After six weeks, he got himself a new phone and got back with an ex-girlfriend who was going to spend Christmas and New Year in Cambodia. Really, how long could you go on taking the blame for this sort of thing? There was nobody to blame for this sort of thing. Things worked out. Or didn’t.

  She, meanwhile, was still blaming herself. Every night, she sat in an armchair in a hotel room in some dusty, completely unfamiliar town. She would sit curled up, hugging her knees, the lights switched off. And she would remember that it was her own fault. It was plain to see, but she wouldn’t see the truth: he didn’t love her.

  The first two weeks were the hardest. After she switched off her phone, she quietly packed a bag and headed to the airport. It wasn’t until after she landed at Kanpur that she sent a message to her mother, just to say that she was in Kanpur, but didn’t want to talk, not now. Would Ma please just sit back and not panic until she returned?

  Ma had just finished a round of telephonic abuse, stunned at her own vocabulary, and was too worn out with crying to protest. She didn’t know how her daughter intended to deal with her grief, but Kanpur was where the girl did her BCom. It was natural to assume that her daughter was hiding at the home of some old, trusted girl friend from college.

  But her daughter was hiding at a rundown two-star. When she had stayed there two nights, she asked to use the STD line at the hotel’s reception desk.

  She called Ma and said, ‘Still in Kanpur, still alive, still not in the mood to talk.’ And she hung up.

  Ma could only shrug as the line went dead. She carefully noted down the number her daughter had called from, and early the next morning, she rang back. An obviously drunk bellboy picked up the phone and asked her to call back at ten-thirty in the morning because there was no ‘call re-direct facility’.

  At ten-thirty, Ma called the hotel again and was put on hold for twenty minutes. Then she was told that her daughter had already left, at eight-thirty in the morning.

  She had checked out as soon as the bellboy came up to tell her that someone from home had called, and would call again. She didn’t even bother to finish the check out formalities. The advance she’d put down more than covered room rent, and she hadn’t eaten a thing for two days. So she just picked up her bag and walked out of the hotel.

  She caught a bus to Sitapur next. She had no connection to the place. No old college friends. No family. But there was a state transport bus that left Kanpur exactly six minutes after she reached the bus terminus, and it happened to be going to Sitapur.

  ‘What’s wrong with Sitapur?’ she thought. And when she got there, she asked to be put down on the main street leading to the bus stop, lined with cheap hotels on either side.

  She checked into a hotel room. Her head was spinning from not having eaten so long, so she asked for tea and toast.

  The toast arrived dripping with butter. She ate it and promptly, violently, threw up.

  For ten minutes, she lay flat on a bed that smelt of dust and despair. She rang the bell. Someone knocked. As she sat huddled on an armchair, someone stepped in and changed the sheets and checked the toilet. The sheets, she noted, were chequered red, black, brown. She did not look at the face of the boy who had entered. When the door shut with a soft click, she called room service again. She asked for another round of tea and toast, and this time she was careful to chew slowly. She succeeded in not throwing up, and then fell asleep without brushing her teeth.

  Next morning, it took her several tries before she managed to get her mother’s phone. It was constantly engaged since her mother had been hysterically calling everyone she knew in Kanpur. When she got through, she said, ‘Ma, relax. I’m alive, in Sitapur. Don’t say anything to me right now.’

  Ma tried to say, ‘But do you know how I feel –,’ but was interrupted rudely.

  ‘I don’t care much right now about how anyone else is feeling,’ and with that, she hung up. She had called from a public booth. She had decided to spare the hotel staff the gossip of her personal misfortunes. With mothers, you never knew what they might do.

  In Sitapur, she spent two days watching TV. The television set was so old that she had to get up from the chair to change channels. There was no remote. When she got tired of getting up every five minutes, she stayed in a chair for hours, and watched a bad recording of a Ram Lila performance on a local cable network.

  She slept soundly the first night, but didn’t sleep the next. On the third morning, she checked out, bought a dozen bananas and boarded a train to Lucknow. She called Ma from a phone booth at the railway station. She knew it would reassure her mother that she was in a bigger city with better hotels.

  But she didn’t spend the night in Lucknow. Instead, she boarded another train going east, travelling in the general compartment where she squatted on the floor and suffered a colicky baby through the night.

  She got off the train at Varanasi and went straight to the ghats. Here she sat and watched six dead bodies burn. When all the pyres settled into ash, she found a cycle rickshaw, woke up the boy who sleeping on the seat, and asked him to take her to a cheap hotel.

  A loose pattern formed. If she could sleep, she slept. The rest of the time, she thought about her delusion. The absolute idiocy of conjuring up a relationship out of a stopgap arrangement. Perhaps, all relationships were stopgaps and love was just a feeling that came over you when you felt like you couldn’t negotiate the world alone, or grew insecure about getting sex.

  Her fiancé had had a steady girlfriend before, and he still said, ‘She was the love of my life’. He said it so often, she began to believe that he had given his best, that she couldn’t hope to be loved better. But perhaps he was lying.

  Perhaps he was already with someone new, and perhaps he would now say that she was ‘the love of my life’, and perhaps he would marry the next one, or the next. Perhaps her own role in his life had been to help him transition. When they met, he had just broken up with his girlfriend of eight years. He was used to having a woman around. She was around. It was a stopgap arrangement for him. Why did it take her so long to see that?

  Some people fail in business. They keep failing, and still they won’t accept that they can’t run a business. Others think such people are idiots who deserve to fail for not being able to see, for not reading signs. She too had failed in love, again and again, and more spectacularly each time, until she was literally dumped at the altar. Patterns!

  Somebody had once told her that if people don’t learn to recognize their own patterns by the time they’re thirty, chances are they never will. She saw her patterns now, but all she could do to avoid falling back into her patterns was stay on the move. Take buses. Take trains. Take hotel rooms. Put one foot after another. Order tea and toast. Avoid making plans. Avoid using any of the tools she had used to build her life. Find a new pattern.

  The phone numbers kept accumulating on her mother’s notepad. Varanasi. Allahabad. Mirzapur. Moradabad. Agra. Bharatpur. Jaipur. Sikar. Nathdwara. Palanpur. Jamnagar. Porbandar. Navsari. Surat.

  Ma had bought a mini-Atlas focused on India, one with detailed road and rail maps. Every morning, she would heave herself off the bed, squat on the carpet and frown at a map of the state she had last been called from. She willed the map to speak, unlock some mystery, point to some clue. Was there a pattern to her daughter’s movements? Was she headed south? Or west?

  Varanasi sounded promising at one point. Ma hoped that the crowds, the ghats, the showy aarti, and the crushing reminders of mortality might work as a salve to her injured child. Varanasi could show her how humanity seeps sorrow from each pore, and how silly it was to fret this long about cancelled weddings. But her daughter did not stay there long.

  When she called from Jaipur, Ma hoped that that the colours and the touristy charm of Rajasthan would help distract the girl. But from there, too, she fled. And what about Palanpur? It made no sense. What�
��s in Palanpur? Even the food would be bad. And when she thought of what her daughter might be eating, Ma would begin to weep.

  Meanwhile, friends relayed information to Ma. They mentioned the ex-girlfriend, the one who had dumped her daughter’s fiancé. Those two were a couple again. Her friends spat abuse over the phone. They cursed this on-off relationship and hoped it would come apart, preferably just before New Year’s Eve. Let him suffer. Then they asked about her. They said, thank god she had been in touch, at least. Is there something they could do?

  These days, Ma would hang up in the middle of a sentence. What could anyone do? She also stopped taking calls from the family. What was there to say? There was no news, only a new point on the Indian map.

  After Surat, there were no more updates. Her last call was four days ago. Fear seemed to ricochet around the house. Ma had nearly thrown a vase at a visiting cousin, who used her phone to call up some distant relative, and then stayed on the line for half an hour. When the damned woman finally got off the phone, she said, ‘Oh, by the way, I think someone was trying to call. There was that funny beep-beep sound again and again.’

  Not screaming or breaking something had required great reserves of civility. Ma politely showed her visitor out, and sat down with the phone in her lap. She sat all evening, but the phone did not ring. Not the next day, nor the next.

  After four days and four nights, the phone rang early in the morning. Ma tripped over a rug in her haste, and tore an ankle ligament as she fell.

  Ma got to the phone on her knees. It was still ringing when she reached it, and she remembered to send up a quick ‘thank you’ to her favourite god.

  It was her. She was saying, ‘Can you come to pick me up from the station?’

  It irritated her mother that she should say it without pronouncing the question mark at the end of the sentence. A question was not being asked. She was taking it for granted that Ma would come. But she only asked, ‘What time?’

  ‘Now. I’m reaching soon.’

  Ma picked herself up, grabbed her purse, and hobbled out of the house. Out onto the street, she hailed an auto and got in without checking if the driver was willing to go to the railway station or not.

  It was only when the auto driver asked ‘Which station?’ that she began to calm down. What side? Which station? Where at the station? She hadn’t said anything, and she was calling from a phone booth, so there was no way of calling her back to ask these questions.

  Ma tapped the driver on his shoulder to signal that he should pull over. He stopped. Then he turned around in his seat and stared in alarm as Ma lowered her plump face, buried it in her hands, and burst into tears.

  It took her seven or eight minutes to finish crying. The auto rickshaw’s meter had more than doubled, standing in that one spot, engine idling. When Ma noticed, she began to yell out of habitual outrage; auto drivers were always skinning hapless passengers. Then she stopped. This driver had been sitting patiently, watching her cry. He was not cribbing about old ladies who didn’t know where they wanted to go.

  Ma took a deep breath. She had the rail map by heart, and she remembered that most trains from Gujarat arrived at New Delhi. It made sense to go there. However, she remembered, there was one train that stopped at Cantt, and culminated at Old Delhi. It was the worst train to pick. But judging from her daughter’s recent behaviour – small towns, small hotels, chhoti line trains – there was a good chance that she would take this slow train back.

  Ma asked the auto driver to go to Old Delhi station, but a few kilometres later, she began to panic. Could there not be a train that culminates at Nizamuddin? Besides, there was no knowing whether the miserable girl was coming from Surat. It could have been some other place else entirely.

  She tapped the auto driver on the shoulder once again and asked him if, in case she had the station wrong, he would take her to New Delhi station instead. He stared into the rear-view mirror for a few seconds, and mumbled something about how people just could not make up their minds. But a moment later, he said, ‘Well, why not? Yes, why not?’

  She was there, at Old Delhi. There was no need to dash to another station. She was there, waiting.

  Ma watched her as she sat on her bag, near the pre-paid counter. Her hair needed cutting and her legs needed waxing. She was wearing her jeans rolled up almost to her knees and she had lost too much weight, which brought out her eyes in a scary, sick way. As if she was recovering from something terrible, like TB. The shirt hung too loose on her bosom.

  She sat easily on the bag, quite still. The bustle of passengers arguing with taxi drivers, struggling with their bags, the slippery queue. She was watching it calmly. As soon as she spotted her mother leaning out from the auto, she stood up.

  Ma noticed that she was walking with a slight drag in one step. The straps at the back of the bag were broken so that she had to carry it in her arms, like a baby. She reached the auto, threw the bag in, and got in herself. She didn’t reach out to hug her mother.

  The auto driver didn’t need to be told where to go this time. He turned around and headed back the way they had come.

  ‘Why are you limping?’ Ma asked.

  ‘Blisters,’ she said. The ride back was quick, dusty, silent.

  When they got off at the gate, she noticed that her mother was limping. She asked, ‘What happened?’

  A runnel of irritation went up her mother’s throat. She hadn’t even said ‘hi’ yet. Once more, she hadn’t pronounced the question mark. Ma waited until they were both inside the living room.

  ‘Why have you started asking questions like this?’

  She said, ‘Like what?’

  Her mother said, ‘Like this! Like they aren’t questions. Just all flat. Like you don’t want to know the answer.’

  She shrugged. She didn’t say anything else, and certainly did not ask any questions. She ate a roti, bathed, went to sleep. Two days later, she switched on her cell phone and reversed the call forward.

  There were no phone calls for a week. At the end of the week, he called.

  She stared at the cell phone, hesitating. She was about to answer when she caught her mother’s eye. Ma was sitting at the opposite end of the room, foot propped up on a stool, nursing it with an ice pack. There was a very definite question in the tiny lift of the brows.

  He had to say ‘Hello? You there?’ a few times.

  She went to the window with the phone, pretending the network was bad.

  ‘So, you are back?’ he asked. ‘How are you?’

  She suddenly realized what Ma was talking about. This way of asking questions like statements, as if it didn’t matter what the answer was. She had caught the habit from him.

  ‘Are you really asking me?’ she said, and she remembered to put a lift at the end of the sentence.

  ‘What? I mean, yeah, I hadn’t got any calls for you on my phone for the last few weeks. And your friends have also stopped abusing me.’ A small, nervous laugh. ‘I was starting to miss it actually. Anyway, I thought, is she back or what? I would be the last person you would call, anyway, so I thought maybe I should call.’

  Quietly, she repeated, ‘Were you really interested in asking how I am?’

  He sighed. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. I really care for you, you know. Hello? You there?’

  She said nothing, so he went on, ‘You hate me, don’t you?’

  She said, ‘No.’

  Saying it, she realized it was true. She didn’t hate him and she heard relief in his voice.

  ‘If I told you that I am truly sorry, and that I really, really like you, even now . . . I mean, I saw how wrong I was. I am actually ready, you know. I just didn’t know it until now.’

  She could feel her mother’s eyes on her. ‘What exactly is your question?’

  ‘So what I am saying is that I’m truly sorry about last time. I was a disaster. But I mean, it’s real, right? So . . .’ and she heard him take a deep breath. ‘So, let’s get married, na?’

&nbs
p; She waited a heartbeat. ‘Is that a question?’

  He sounded confused. ‘I’m sorry?’

  When she heard the upward lilt at the end, she started laughing. ‘Okay! That certainly sounded like a question. But how can I answer it? I don’t know if you are sorry or not.’

  Ma sighed, kicked the ice pack off the stool, and painfully hobbled into the kitchen. She followed her mother’s unsteady progress with her eyes.

  He was saying, ‘You sound different. Happier. The break was good for you, was it?’

  ‘My break! Forget that. Ask me something else. A real question.’

  He said, ‘I’m sorry?’ again.

  This time she laughed out loud, gasping up great lungfuls of air. Then she asked, ‘Would you like to apologize to my mother?’

  ‘Sure. I could. I mean, I should. Yeah, I should, shouldn’t I?’

  She shook her head. ‘Questions. Questions. So many questions. No answers.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘There you go again!’

  She followed her mother into the kitchen and placed the phone near her mother’s ear. She said, ‘Ma, he wants to speak to you.’

  Ma tried to shrug her off and clicked her tongue, but she persisted. ‘Ma, he wants to say sorry,’ she said quite loudly.

  On the phone, his voice was mumbly and sheepish. ‘Er, hello? Aunty? Hello? I just had to say that, I mean, I’m sorry?’

  They heard his bewilderment, the upward tilt to the ends of all his words. She bent over double, laughing.

  There was shrapnel in Ma’s voice. ‘Should I ask if you had a good time in Cambodia?’

  He said, ‘Excuse me?’

  Ma began to feel very tired. She had enough to wear her out without playing these foolish games. She thrust the phone back at her daughter, and said, ‘Tell him, no. From me, it is a no. I will never say yes for him.’

  She took the phone back and said, ‘I don’t know what you asked Ma, but she says to tell you, her answer is no.’