Once Upon a Curfew

by Srishti Chaudhary

  When they had finished talking to Kittu, he followed her into the kitchen, still chuckling. The cupboards inside the kitchen were nearly empty and Indu stared at them, wondering if they could store other stuff there.

  ‘Do you want some tea now? I’m asking Esha to make some,’ she asked Rana.

  ‘Yes, thank you, but where is she?’

  ‘Must be around here somewhere . . .’

  They walked around to find her in the other room, her hair falling over her face as she bent over the notebook.

  ‘How many times have I told you to braid your hair, hun?’ Indu told her in a disapproving tone. ‘Do you want to be a chashmish, working with your hair all over your face like that?’

  Rana uttered a tch-tch and said, ‘Better listen to her,’ as Esha giggled. He picked up the book she had written the numbers in and Indu asked her to boil some water for tea, for them and for whoever else wanted it. ‘But first, eat your banana, it’s in the kitchen,’ Indu said, and Esha sprang up instantly.

  ‘How does she do this accounting so well?’ Rana asked, stunned when he saw Esha’s calculations in the book.

  ‘Oh, she’s brilliant,’ Indu said, taking the book from him to glance at it herself. ‘When she was a child, her mother taught her tables when she couldn’t sleep at night. She’s so precise, I never even double-check.’

  ‘This is crazy.’

  ‘I know. What do we have to order from the grocers, do you remember?’

  ‘Well, we could do something for her, right?’

  ‘I suppose we can.’

  Indu smiled in satisfaction, wondering if she could dare to imagine that it could actually change lives, this library. Wasn’t that the aim? It was going quite well, even beyond Indu’s expectations. Granted, it wasn’t a big venture that needed a lot of care and coordination, and Rana’s presence definitely helped. But things remained under control; only a few books had been lost, and most of them were usually returned on time. They personally got to know each member who came in and learnt quite a bit about their lives. Some women did not find themselves benefitting in any way, so they never returned, but quite a few of them turned up almost every day.

  They weren’t always good days, but there were enough of them. There were many empty days, especially in the beginning, when they just sat and talked, wondering if anything would come of it. But people did trickle in, one by one, and at first Indu couldn’t stop engaging with them. Apart from managing the library, each day, she decided to meet more and more people, to spread the word as far as possible. With the help of Mrs Bala, she spoke to several girls. ‘Put it out there,’ Mrs Bala told her. ‘Show them what you have.’

  Rana then went on a letter writing rampage before leaving for Lucknow, where he would spend his summer. He wrote to every newspaper and publication, drafting a press release about the library, inviting them to have a look. When one newspaper picked it up and wanted to do a story on Delhi’s first library ‘by a woman, for a woman’, the rest picked it up as well. The results were little mentions in city newspapers, and free subscription to newspapers, periodicals and journals. Eventually, they had a stream of people lining up for membership.

  ‘But we don’t even have the space for so many,’ Indu had said to Rana.

  He had pffed in response. ‘Do you think all of them will come every day? If fifty sign up, only one of them will likely be a regular.’

  But then he left for Lucknow for the summer, and Indu felt the difference. They were closer than Indu had thought they were, more than she cared to admit, and she realized she looked forward to seeing him every day. Before leaving, Rana had laughed and told her reassuringly not to worry, that they would spend time together when he came back.

  But he was essential. Whenever there were holidays, to Indu’s delight and distress, it started to get busy. Girls streamed in from everywhere, having all that free time on their hands, especially the younger ones. Parents felt comfortable allowing them to engage in something academic and safe. But Indu had to organize a range of activities to keep them interested, and found it more difficult to do it single-handedly. Rana’s easy manner always lightened things up. When he returned, Indu was more grateful than she let show, and more annoyed when he didn’t show up sometimes. But he already gave so much of himself to it without expecting anything that she could never utter a word of complaint.

  That evening, Fawad turned up, and he and Rana stood outside, sniggering.

  Indu walked up to them and asked, ‘What are you two giggling about?’

  ‘Indu,’ Fawad gushed, ‘how goes life?’

  ‘It would go a lot better if you didn’t watch my girls all the time,’ she told him.

  ‘Me? Come on, it’s your boy here who’s the danger,’ he pointed towards Rana, who tried to look as though he had never been subjected to worse slander.

  ‘Yes, because I’m the one with Sangeeta on my mind.’

  ‘For me, at least, it’s just one. A library full of them aren’t enough for you.’

  ‘Good point, Fawad,’ Indu said, looking at Rana with mock disgust. ‘You are no better than that little Sardar.’

  ‘I wish someone wouldn’t be so jealous of my charm, you know,’ Rana told Fawad, nodding.

  ‘Jealous, me?’ Indu laughed with contempt.

  ‘You’ve begun challenging the authority, hun?’ Fawad asked Rana, grinning at Indu.

  ‘It’s my favourite thing,’ Rana replied as Indu raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t mind it, Indu,’ Fawad said. ‘Authority is meant to be challenged. Just like I love challenging the authority of our other Indu here.’

  Indu shook her head. ‘I’m glad you feel enough familiarity with her to address her by a nickname, but I’m sure it’s harder to challenge her authority.’

  ‘There’s where the fun is,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll have this debate again,’ Indu said.

  Rana pretended to bite his nails in fear. ‘I’d be scared if I were you, Fawad. It’s a good thing you have Sangeeta, hun?’ he asked him, patting him on the back, looking at her bent over her books at the far end of Number 7. ‘Just that she doesn’t know it.’

  ‘Yet,’ Fawad said with a grin.

  Thankfully for Indu, Fawad’s confidence would plummet when he was around Sangeeta, and he would retreat into the room allotted to the boys.

  * * *

  A week later, Rana came in late and they didn’t get the chance to speak very much; Mrs Leela had multiple concerns about her needlework course, and Indu could hardly bear her overenthusiastic manner, so she left Rana to deal with it.

  After a while, Natty turned up.

  ‘When do I have to take Amita madame home?’ he asked Indu, who looked over at her sister and then at the clock.

  ‘Another half hour. But wait,’ she said as he turned around to walk away. ‘Bring the books from the car, the ones you picked up from Shashi uncle’s last week. But leave the other package there, we don’t have space for it.’

  ‘She’s not easy,’ Natty said to Rana, looking at him tiredly.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Rana replied, shaking his head in mock exasperation.

  ‘Uff, I’ll come downstairs, nothing gets done till I do it myself . . . now come, what are you sniggering at with him?’ she said to Natty.

  When they returned with the books in their arms, Indu noticed Rana wasn’t standing alone. She walked over to them and almost dropped the books.

  Fawad and Rana stood next to a woman who looked familiar. Within a couple of seconds, it hit Indu as she looked at the short, wispy hair that reminded her of that party at Mrs Bala’s. She looked slightly different now. She wore a small, stylish nose ring, loose beige pants and a sleeveless black blouse. Indu observed the way she was leaning towards Rana.

  Fawad was in the middle of saying something when they noticed Indu. When nobody said anything, Rana broke in.

  ‘Indu, do you remember Runjhun? She was at Mrs Bala’s that time when we met?’

&nb
sp; Indu gave a tight smile and narrowed her eyes. Of course she remembered her.

  Runjhun stuck her hand out to Indu and she took it, touching as little of it as she could without breaking the handshake.

  ‘Runjhun also wants to be a member here,’ Rana said, looking at all three of them. ‘She has many plans. We met a few weeks ago and she was totally blown away by me.’

  Runjhun laughed and hit him on the shoulder, shaking her head at Fawad as if she couldn’t believe this guy. ‘You’re the one who kept sending me notes, asking me if I would go out with you.’

  Indu stared at Rana, her fake smile slipping off her face, her chest knotting up.

  ‘Well, you are my girlfriend now, aren’t you?’ Rana said to her.

  Indu shot Rana a hard look, her eyes blazing; she thought she saw something rueful in the way Fawad looked at her, but she couldn’t be sure, so she adjusted the dupatta on her shoulder and walked away towards the bookshelves, leaving them mid-conversation, her head held high.

  9

  Indu had not been the most well-behaved child, and for some time, Amita had been the target of her mischief. The phase had lasted only a couple of years, but those years had been long and tough for Amita. Indu had begun doing exceedingly well at school, especially at sports. She had held the title of the fastest runner in her year for a long time, something that made her proud even now, for a good student wasn’t rare—that was something all girls were taught to be—but excelling at a sport was more special.

  Indu would show off her skill and subject Amita to her taunting, despite being much younger. She would pull her sister’s braids whenever she came upon her in the corridors, darting off to giggle with the other little girls at her sister’s slow reactions. At home, she lobbed slingshots at her at the dining table, tripped her up at every possible opportunity, and made up lies about Amita’s non-existent boyfriends to her parents. ‘You were a horrible sister,’ Amita often reminded Indu later in life, ‘but I wanted to be your friend so badly, and it crazed me that you wouldn’t give me the chance.’

  Indu was quick, outspoken and determined, insisting to everyone she knew for many years that she would be a great Bollywood actress one day. Her parents laughed away this childish fantasy, but for Indu, it had been a very real aim until she grew up to realize that most actresses had to follow a debauched path to get to where they were. It was the profession of women without families, of those who had to make it in the world on their own, and not of girls hailing from respectable, educated backgrounds, she was told.

  Yet, for a long time, Indu believed she would rule Bombay, and that belief only strengthened when Simmi became her new best friend. She had recently joined school because her father had been stationed in Delhi for a few years. The girls instantly got along, for both of them were like each other, strutting around the school like they owned it. ‘It’s not like we seek attention,’ Indu and Simmi would say, blinking their eyes innocently when the teachers confronted them about the boys lining up outside the school asking the guard to call them out, ‘it’s just that we get it.’

  Indu felt betrayed when Simmi actually heeded the attention and went out with one of the boys from the boys’ school. To Indu, at the time, it appeared tasteless and forward, for she considered herself too superior to actually accept the attention that was bestowed. Its acceptance by Simmi was the ultimate form of treachery, especially because it was something they didn’t do together. After a very public fight that provided the school much gossip, the girls bitterly parted ways and Simmi joined hands with a new group of girls who were fascinated by the fact that she had a boyfriend.

  Indu never forgave Simmi, and as competition became more intense in each successive year, they resented each other even more. When the time came to go to university and Simmi never took the exams, Indu decided that in the larger scheme of things, she had won, and bid goodbye to school in peace. Moreover, the rift with Simmi grounded her and brought her closer to Amita, and so Indu decided that it was all for the best.

  Indu had thought she would never again harbour feelings of hostility equal in intensity to those she had for Simmi. But now, she was proven wrong. Each time she saw Runjhun, with her nose ring and her short hair, both of which she considered exceedingly stupid, Indu gritted her teeth and looked the other way, almost as if it caused her physical pain to even see the other girl. She did everything she could to be as different as possible from Runjhun, whether it was brushing her hair diligently in contrast to Runjhun’s unruly curls or wearing the most ethnic of her clothes while Runjhun dressed in everything western.

  When Runjhun came to the library for the first time as a member and Rana greeted her earnestly at the door, Indu forced a smile and asked her in her most contemptuous voice possible, ‘Wait, what’s your name again?’

  Rana, at first embarrassed by Indu’s malice, eased the mood by taping a small piece of paper to the hem of Runjhun’s blouse with her name on it, saying loudly, ‘Just so everyone knows everyone’s name,’ and Indu gave a weak laugh.

  The more time Runjhun spent at the library, the more Indu distanced herself from her and Rana, preferring to work on her own or sit with her sister, concentrating entirely on the affairs of the library, running about the flat as if she had absolutely no time to spare. Annoyingly for Indu, Runjhun had an opinion about everything, right from the functioning of the library to what the hero should have done in the latest movie, and always felt free to voice it. Indu increasingly found herself taking up the opposite view, even if she did not believe it wholly. She’d raise her eyebrows at Runjhun’s opinion like it was the most preposterous thing she had ever heard, looking at Rana in utter exasperation, telling them that she didn’t think so at all.

  Indu could bear it even less that Runjhun seemed to live as freely as Rana. One day she wanted to do a job, the next, study further. She didn’t seem tied down at all by the same constraints that brought them all together at the library. As much as her being present in the library was a nuisance, Indu still preferred it to her not turning up at all, because most of the time, when she was absent, Rana would be too. Indu didn’t want to think at all about what they might be up to together.

  Indu couldn’t help feeling a sharp stab of jealousy whenever she saw Runjhun, even though she knew it wasn’t right. Once, when she was sure that Runjhun was within earshot, she couldn’t help saying loudly to her sister, ‘It’s fine if they want to protest at India Gate. Why do they have to wear those ugly khadi kurtas?’

  Earlier, she felt like she understood Rana, but now she felt completely misled. She had thought that certain things he did were just for her, that she brought them out in him. She missed how he would tell her that she behaved like a queen, and speak of them as if they were one entity. When she saw him behaving the same way with Runjhun, extending to her the same courtesies that Indu thought were reserved solely for her, she didn’t know what to be think.

  Yet, she felt strongly that there had been something between them that defied understanding, and felt pleased and vindicated when, at first, most of the girls in the library were shocked to learn that Runjhun was his girlfriend, not her.

  ‘What? No, no,’ Indu said, overly casual, peeking over her shoulder to see if Rana was listening, when Sangeeta said she saw only the two of them together. Divina was completely aghast and asked Rana if it was a joke, and when he said that it wasn’t, she refused to speak to him for two days, which amused him very much.

  Yet, when Indu felt the wave of surprise turn into a wave of pity, she laughed away the whole thing, saying Rana’s stars were not shining that brightly yet. She added that she had a fiancé in London, and was looking forward to even maybe moving there with him. She found her sister staring at her at moments like these, but Indu would look away like nothing was amiss.

  Sometimes, Runjhun didn’t turn up but Rana did, and Indu liked those days the best, for she had his absolute, undivided attention and didn’t have to play silly power games with her to emerge as the cool
er girl. Rana had, in fact, arrived early that morning, whistling and smiling at her when she nodded in acknowledgment of his arrival. It was much colder today than it had been the past few days, and Indu wondered whether if it would be too much to wear her coat indoors. She chuckled to herself as she remembered the last winter, when Rana had eyed her coat with exasperation, asking her why she needed such a thick one anyway, and she had been eager to wear it just because it had newly arrived from London. Then she remembered how he had opened his arms wide, telling her he had another solution for the cold.

  ‘Indu, do you mind putting these books back?’ Rana asked her as she walked by. ‘Up there, on the top shelf, under P-Q.’

  Indu hmmed at him and picked them up. She thought of how they had set up the entire place from scratch, adding bits and pieces so that now it all came together like a strange kind of patchwork quilt that somehow worked. She thought of how he had approached her honestly and confidently, saying outright, ‘I want to help you, I want to set it up with you’. She wondered now what had made him come to her, whether it was the connections he would make or the chance to spend time with her.

  She decided it was the latter, considering he hadn’t yet asked to be connected to anybody.

  Evening rolled around and found her, Amita and Rana sitting together at a desk. Indu slid a few pens down the table and nudged Rana’s arm, prompting him to pick them up. When he didn’t respond, she nudged him again, laughing.

  He gave her an expression of mock exasperation and picked the pens up with a sigh.

  Rana closed his book and said, ‘I wanted to ask you two something. It is Fawad’s birthday on Saturday and we are inviting our friends home in the evening. Will you come? I was really hoping you would.’ He looked at Indu particularly.

  Indu exchanged a long look with her sister. ‘Can we?’ she asked her. Amita nodded slowly, considering it.

  Indu gave Rana a plain, poker-faced look. ‘Yes, I guess we . . . might show up.’

  She saw that he was about to say something, but then changed his mind and nodded with a smile, telling them he looked forward to having them there.