As soon as he reaches the last step, he knows exactly what this is about. His impulse is to retreat upstairs or to quickly exit through the front door. But their eyes are already on him: Mahesh Uncle’s, the father’s, the mother’s, and the girl’s—yes, the girl. She’s dressed in an orange sari; she has a serious face; she is pretty.
The father of the girl stands, then moves forward to shake Tarun’s hand. The mother does a stiff namaste, and her eyes have taken in everything, from his crumpled shirt to the slouching posture. The smiling Sanmaya carefully carries a tray of tea and coffee and juice and biscuits and fritters. She is wearing her best dhoti, one she wears only for special occasions. The elders engage in idle chat while the tea and biscuits are consumed. The girl sneaks glances at him. In Bangemudha, Didi must be watching the clock and wondering why he’s not there. He can picture her dismay rising.
The conversation turns to Tarun. “I hear you’re already handling most aspects of Mahesh Enterprises,” the girl’s father says between slurps of tea, the loudness of which elicits gentle elbow jabs from the mother.
“I’m doing what I can.”
“And he’s doing it remarkably well,” Mahesh Uncle says. “I just wish we were doing better than we are, but, Shankarji, you know what the market is like. Still, I expect us to get roaring within a year or two under Tarun’s able leadership.” He smacks Tarun on the back.
It’s a loud smack, and Tarun winces, which brings a smile to the girl’s face.
“And you finished your intermediate recently?” Mahesh Uncle asks the girl.
She replies in a soft, sonorous voice, “Yes, now just waiting for the results.”
“Tarun,” Mahesh Uncle says. “Why don’t you take Rukma out to the garden? You young people will have things in common to talk about. Whereas we fogies”—this elicits laughter—“will stay here and discuss our old-age concerns.”
“Today was Bangemudha—”
“Go, go, it’ll do both of you good to get some fresh air.”
His reclusive tendencies have been a source of worry for Mahesh Uncle, Tarun knows this. “You should go out with your friends sometimes,” Mahesh Uncle has said in the past. When Tarun spends long hours in the office, Mahesh Uncle says that the business doesn’t need that much attention. “Just leave it be, Tarun. Some of these things will take care of themselves. Or let the managers handle them. I don’t want you to lose all of your good years.” Tarun doesn’t tell him that he likes the solitude that work provides. He’s unable to hold on to friends for long; they simply drift away.
“Girlfriend-shirlfried chhaina?” Mahesh Uncle had asked on several occasions, pretending he was joking.
“I don’t have time.”
“A young man like you—aren’t you interested in girls?”
“I find them …” He didn’t complete the sentence, for nothing that he could say would sound right. Besides, he himself doesn’t know what he finds them. He finds them an enigma, a mystery, or he finds his own emotions about them a swirl of confusion. “Alli kasto kasto lagchha,” he said, which was a vague enough expression of discomfort that it would be interpreted in numerous ways. Then he said something that sounded right, that he might have read in a magazine, or heard in a movie. “Besides, the right woman has to come along.”
Obviously Mahesh Uncle had been mulling that over, for soon thereafter he asked, “How will you know about the right woman without experimenting?”
“I’ll know.”
“What if I look for someone right on your behalf?”
Tarun hadn’t answered.
Now this.
He and the girl step out to the Japanese garden. The day is somewhat cloudy, with the thunder rolling lazily in the distant hills. “What a nice garden,” she says. Her face is slightly more open now, as though someone has let her out of her prison cell for fresh air. “You must spend quite some time here,” she says to Tarun.
Tarun nods, says, “Yes, it’s pleasant here.” But one is expected to say more, so he says that he’s so busy with work that he rarely comes out. He is aware of his mother’s presence at the window, watching them. She must have been instructed to stay in her room by Mahesh Uncle, lest the girl’s parents panic. It occurs to him that his mother might know more about this than he does. She might have been informed of who is coming, and given how she lurks behind the window she seems to realize that someone of consequence has been brought to the house.
“You seem lost in thoughts,” the girl says.
“I have a slight headache.”
“Not feeling well?”
“Just a small headache.” He checks his watch unobtrusively, but she’s noticed, because she says, “Do you have somewhere to go?”
He says no, and it’s clear that she doesn’t believe him. His chest tightens at the thought of what Didi is doing right now: she’s sitting on the bed, facing the door, waiting for him.
They are standing next to a seating area with chairs and a table, but neither of them sits down. Her arms are crossed; she looks pensive, and she’s avoiding his eyes. The silence stretches. Finally, the girl says that they should go back inside.
“Your wish,” he says, “but we head back in now, those people in there will be scared witless.”
His choice of words elicits a tiny smile. He asks her whether she likes the city.
“Yes, I like the city,” she says. “Why shouldn’t I? Don’t you?”
To this he answers that he doesn’t have a strong feeling either way.
“Then why ask me,” she inquires, “when it doesn’t seem to matter much to you?”
“I was just making conversation.”
“Don’t feel compelled to be chatty,” she says with pursed lips. “We can stand here silently until you deem it appropriate to go back inside without scaring anyone. Witless.”
He suspects Sanmaya is also peering out from the kitchen window that has a partial view of the garden. And in all likelihood Mahesh Uncle and this girl’s parents are also stretching their necks to see how the two are faring. “Please sit,” he says. “I’m not in a hurry to get anywhere.”
She softens a bit at his tone. But her arms are still crossed at her chest. “It’s not easy,” she says, “this type of meeting.”
“We might as well sit down for a few moments.”
She does, slowly, as though she’s unsure of what he’ll say next and she might have to simply stand and leave.
“What aspirations do you have in life?” he asks clumsily. The words are very difficult for him because he has to pull them out from a dark pit inside his head. “I mean, what do you want to do once you complete your studies?”
She has sharp, intelligent eyes. There’s also a type of sadness etched around them. Her controlled manner of sitting, the pulling together of her body, makes her seem as if she’s posing for a portrait by a painter. Tarun has nothing to give her, and she’ll soon be disappointed in him—of this he is certain. She’s saying something to him, and he doesn’t hear. “I’m sorry?” he says.
“You’re not even listening to me,” she says. “What’s the point?”
“No, no, it’s not that.”
“I was saying that we live privileged lives. Well, at least you seem to live a privileged life, no? Is there anything you lack?” She waves her hand to mean the garden, the house. Then she’s conciliatory. “I don’t mean just you. I also meant to include me. We don’t lack anything, yet there are thousands of people in this country who are leading painful lives because they lack something.”
“You can’t always measure—”
“Doesn’t it amaze you that we happened to be born in one of the poorest countries on this earth”—he has a distinct impression that she’s recited this combination of words often, to friends, at parties—“and here we are, can we truly, truly say that we have lacked anything for even a single day? Tell me honestly.”
“Well, I—”
“I want to do something—something big that’ll shatter thi
s world, shatter me, shatter everyone around me, change me completely. But then I feel that I’m not up to it. It’s just my little self going around in circles inside me, like a dog chasing its tail.”
He loves the idea of being able to shatter the world. He thinks of this thin woman sitting next to him wielding a giant hammer, bursting open and releasing things that need to be let out. Something stirs in him, a glimmer. But he remembers how he’s late for Bangemudha, how Didi must be beside herself by now, and whatever had tried to emerge retreats inside. This is mere conversation, with the colorful Japanese garden as a good backdrop for two people who are seemingly contemplating marriage. Soon this conversation will be over, and he’ll head to Bangemudha. Yet what comes out of his mouth alarms him, making him regret it instantly, “So, have you ever been in love?” He’s not sure why he asks her that; he’s not interested in it—it’s an inane question.
She’s startled. “Have you?” There’s caution in her voice.
He shakes his head. “What about you?”
“I can’t tell you,” she says. “It’s too private.”
She senses something and glances at the window, where she spots the shadowy figure. “Is that your mother?” she asks. “How is your mother? Is she doing all right?”
“She’s as fine as she can be, I guess,” he says. “It’s no secret, what has happened to her.” He wants to check what time it is but is afraid of offending the girl again, so he refrains. A knot is beginning to form in his stomach. He can see Didi, sitting at the edge of the bed, palms on knees.
Mahesh Uncle steps out. “Kura sakyo? Or do you two need more time?” he asks as he approaches.
In front of Mahesh Uncle the girl’s body language changes, becomes more closed, tighter, more obedient.
“How do you like our garden, Rukma?”
“The garden is very nice, Uncle.”
“And I think you look very nice in the garden.”
They go into the living room, where there are more smiles. Rukma’s parents and Mahesh Uncle seem to think that the encounter has gone well: the young couple has been observed to engage each other in the garden.
Sanmaya has emerged from the kitchen to bid goodbye to the visitors. Her toothless smile is more toothless, more joyous, today.
The upstairs door creaks open, then silence. Mahesh Uncle puts his arm around Rukma’s shoulders and says, “Come,” but her father is quick: “Is that Apsaraji? Since we are already here, it would be nice to meet her too. Hoina hajur?”
Mahesh Uncle looks a little uneasy. “Now, this is not a hidden matter.” He lowers his voice. “You must have heard about her—”
“Of course we have. We all have problems, don’t we, Maheshji? I think a quick meeting with the mother will be good.”
“Of course.” Mahesh Uncle calls Tarun’s mother, but there is no movement upstairs. Tarun is assigned to fetch her. He goes up: she is standing at the top of the landing and watching him. Her dhoti is crumpled, but her hair is combed. Did Sanmaya comb it in anticipation of the guests?
“Let’s go down,” he says. She doesn’t put up any resistance. They descend the stairs. At the bottom she stops and stares, first at the father, who does a namaste, then at the mother, who smiles falsely, then the gaze settles on Rukma.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT IS ALREADY dark when he reaches Bangemudha. Didi is in the kitchen, her back turned to him. Sumit is home. “Oho, dai,” Sumit says with a pleased smile. He is so polite, Sumit, so happy. He has friends who care for him and want to spend time with him. His teachers at the college love him; the neighborhood shopkeepers give him a little extra—the butcher his choicest meat, the spice dealer a sample of a new fragrant spice. His smile doesn’t leave him; he doesn’t have a bitter, angry bone in his body. Even when the vagrant and drug-addled ways of his older brother come up in conversations Sumit says, “Yes, Amit dai is like that,” as if to say, What’s the point of berating him? If it’s necessary to provide help to his troubled brother, Sumit does it quietly. One time Sumit brought Amit home late in the evening, Amit’s face bruised and swollen. No one knows how Sumit got the news about his brother’s condition, but he took care of his brother for two days, bringing him the hot-water bottle for his aching body, soothing him when he ranted, and applying iodine to his face, until Amit became better and vanished again.
“Why so late today, dai?” Sumit says. “Too much work?” He admires Tarun, has dropped by the office in Putalisadak a few times to watch him work. “How did dai learn all this?” he often says to Tarun. “You’re so good when it comes to business matters.”
Didi hasn’t turned to him at the sound of his entry and his conversation with Sumit, so he goes to her. Sumit watches him go to her; if he thinks there’s anything odd with the way Tarun and his mother interact, he doesn’t show it. He may simply think that for some reason she has a bond with Tarun that’s deeper than the one she has with her own sons. Sumit doesn’t resent Tarun for it, and his affection toward his stepbrother hasn’t diminished. There are days when Tarun thinks that such naïveté is foolish and dangerous. One day Sumit is going to be hit hard—either by what he discovers about his mother and his stepbrother or by something else—and it’s going to destroy him.
In the kitchen, Didi doesn’t speak to Tarun. He stands beside her, waiting. Until she turns to him and speaks with that special sweetness in her voice, he has to wait. There is no other choice. This is his life. He has chosen it, this union with Didi. It encloses him like a narrow steel cage, with so little room to move that his breath is forced back inside his gullet. “Didi,” he whispers, and he remembers the blinding swiftness with which she dismissed his mother and sent her crawling and sniveling across town. He needs to touch her flesh, to press his lips against hers, to accept her lips, warm and nectarlike, on his face and cheeks and mouth and neck and bare shoulders. “Please. Will you please look at me?”
She doesn’t, and he continues to writhe. It’s his fault—this truth is so clear to him now that it’s like a blinding white light. She hasn’t yet eaten today because on Saturdays she waits to eat lunch with him. Every Saturday she feeds him first, watching him happily, then she eats as he fills her in on what has been happening throughout the week. But even as he is overwhelmed by his debilitating guilt, he fears that her withdrawal today isn’t simply about his inexcusable lateness. It’s as if she’s sniffed out his choice of someone else over her. But how does she know?
Should he confess? Out of the corner of his eyes he notes that his father, sitting cross-legged on his bed, is staring at the wall, the one with the window facing the street, as though he’s transfixed by a movie showing there. Sumit is sitting on a chair, engrossed in a book. He reads voraciously, that boy, and Tarun suspects that he writes poetry on the sly and has perhaps even published a poem or two under a pseudonym. Tarun briefly flirts with the notion of shutting the kitchen door so he can embrace Didi openly, make her face him, perhaps even plant a quick desperate kiss on her lips. But the kitchen door hasn’t been pulled shut in years, and now it looks stubbornly stuck to the wall against which it rests. Besides, shutting this door would be a direct signal to the family about him and Didi. It will surely disturb Sumit, and, if he can help it, Tarun wants to spare his younger stepbrother any immediate suffering. The best thing to do now is to confess to Didi, let it all out so that she can then punish him, and it’ll be over.
“What could I do, Didi?” he says. “I was getting ready to come here, when Mahesh Uncle brought these visitors.”
There’s no response from her.
“Please believe me, Didi, I really didn’t want to meet her.”
She stiffens, and the tiny hairs on her arms—is he imagining it?—rise. She still doesn’t turn to him.
“He’s worried about me,” he says, referring to Mahesh Uncle. “I feel like I’m trapped.”
“Who is she?”
Briefly he closes his eyes to savor the sound of her voice. She has given him an opening. But th
e battle is ahead of him now, and he knows it. He can’t squander it away—he can’t. “It’s just some girl,” he says dismissively.
“How do you know her?”
“I don’t. Mahesh Uncle invited them, the family.”
“Is that why you’re late? Because you were goofing with her?”
“I wasn’t goofing! I left at the first opportunity I could.” He lifts his hand toward her arm, but she inches away from him so that his fingers get only a fleeting contact with her skin.
“So, what’s the conclusion? You’re not going to come here anymore? You’re going to spend time with—with this …” Her distaste for this unknown woman is so great that she can’t complete her sentence. “I can smell her on you. You let her touch you, didn’t you? You let her do whatever she wanted with you.” She leans her head back, as though he’s reeking.
He’s aware that Sumit has lifted his head from his reading, but the boy immediately returns to his book: this is the not the first time that Didi and Tarun have engaged in urgent whispers in the kitchen. “I didn’t let her touch a single hair on my body. She means nothing to me.”
“If she means nothing to you, then why did you leave me stranded here, alone in this …” She turns toward him, not to face him but only to indicate the flat, with her cuckolded husband and her smiling son.
“I will never let it happen again,” he says. His feelings for her are so deep and true that they make him want to weep. All he wants to do is gaze at her, touch her lips with his fingers, inhale the faint powdery food smell that comes off her neck. It’s crucial she understand how much she means to him and that he’ll go to any length to … the picture appears before him without any effort: he and Didi in a room; the door is shut; there are no prying eyes.
It’s clear, it’s simple: now he knows what he needs to do. “I have a surprise for you,” he says. His voice is low, conspiratorial. “It’s a gift.”
“I don’t need your gifts.”
“Please let me do this. I want to see you happy.”
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