by Sid Bahri
It is bright, sunny and pleasant as the early days of winter are. I call out to Ghanshyam, the servant, who scurries over. He looks hassled and I can empathize with him. He has been as traumatized by the relatives as I have been.
“Ghanshyam Bhaiya, chai,” I say to him. He nods and rushes back to heed my command. They make me feel like a tyrant who will whiplash them if they don’t run away when I ask for something. I sit on the wrought iron chair on the lawns, trying to relax my frayed nerves in the warmth of the mid-day sun.
From where I sit, I look at the house that is at least a hundred years old. The architecture is fabulous and looks even more beautiful by night when the light strings that adorn the house are lit. It is quite a sight but it took a fortune to cover the mansion and the lawns with lights. I hate this extravagance for it is so unnecessary. Yes, I can afford it, but somehow my middle class upbringing refuses to understand. At heart, I am still the poor three-year-old girl, who was happy to wear a new dress. I can’t forget those days, for they are too severely etched in my memory. It was one of those rare occasions that I had worn new clothes: A soft, pink frock that had small red flowers on it. Even though the heavy sweater was going to cover the flowers, I loved it. My mother had worked by night to have it ready for today. I was turning three and there were preparations for a birthday party. As it turned out, the party was really an overstatement. It was a small event that had four children if you didn’t count my brothers, who were five and seven. There were no adults invited, except my uncle and aunt. I wasn’t even sure if they had been invited or were in town by accident. They came to Chandigarh pretty often.
“Radhika, don’t dirty your clothes. The guests will be coming soon,” my mother cried out from the bedroom. She was packing a bag. I was too young to understand if the packing of a bag meant anything but I listened to her. I stepped back from the muddy yard and sat on the small wooden stool in the courtyard of our house, waiting eagerly for the guests to arrive.
I was still sitting on the stool when the children from the neighbourhood came. They were carrying boxes wrapped in brightly-coloured paper, you know, that shiny, cheap thing which shimmers in the light. I remembered when my brother had unwrapped one of those boxes to find a plastic helicopter. I almost wanted to tear the paper apart immediately but when my mother told me not to do it, I didn’t. I was still smarting from the spanking yesterday and so, I obeyed.
We went inside to see a cheap cake that had a wafer thin icing. The baker had controlled his costs but created something that hovered between ugly and obnoxious. A plate held samosas that slouched, when they really should’ve been sitting. The crystallized syrup on the rasgullas told a nostalgic tale of grubbiness.
It was a shame, but then, what more could you expect from a father who was a cab driver. He’d be up before four and leave for the Chandigarh railway station to pick up passengers arriving on the overnight train. It wasn’t short of a miracle that he was being able to provide for a family of five. Within his means, he could only afford a birthday party as extravagant. Even then, I had loved it.
I loved it even more when the guests had left, leaving me alone to open the gifts. My brothers were scavengers, the vultures that hover over the lions to get a morsel of flesh. They waited for something that may not be worth my while, but were disappointed.
In that small one bedroom house in the non-descript by- lanes of Chandigarh, it was nearly impossible to have guests. On the few occasions that we did, we would have to move the furniture to the courtyard. The folding cots were laid out in the drawing room where we would sleep. My uncle and aunt were given the bedroom while we slept on the cots, huddled up together like sardines in a can. It was a difficult fit for two adults and three children to sleep on the two folding cots but we were so used to it.
I woke up to the sounds of my mother weeping. She never really cried. In all that was wrong in our lives, I never heard her cry. I didn’t even know why she was crying but I hugged her. She continued to weep while my aunt sat next to her, consoling her. She remained inconsolable.
My father walked into the room. Suddenly and without warning, my mother’s bawling died. It was as if my mother had been programmed to stop crying the moment he entered. For a while, there was complete silence until my father broke it.
“Have you spoken to her?” my father asked gruffly
“Not yet,” my mother replied, barely able to get the words out of her parched throat.
I thought it was the start of a vacation when my mother said through the tears that had been rolling down her cheeks, “Radhika, you’ll have to go with Uncle and Aunt. They will look after you.”
It was a December morning when we made the journey in the back of a cranky public transport bus that refused to stop vibrating. Worse still, the windows wouldn’t stop the cold mountain air coming in. I was cold and huddled up closer to my aunt. She wasn’t doing very well in keeping me warm. The bus reluctantly covered the short distance that existed between my home and my uncle’s home. I was blissfully unaware that I would stay here longer than the vacation that I thought it was. Maybe, because of that morning, I have always detested the winters.
Aditya
I wonder if Divya will order a steak for breakfast; she is such a carnivore, a flesh eater. The number of love bites that she has given me leaves me with a risk of being punctured. It is a good thing that my wife Jasleen and I never have sex anymore. Otherwise, my misdemeanour would be very apparent. I am not used to this amount of physical intimacy and even while the pleasures of the flesh are obvious, I feel like a cheap whore for having done the act.
Divya turns over and lies on her stomach. She says, “You’re good. Probably one of the better ones that I’ve had.”
This is a shocker. All along, I have been led to believe that the entire episode is an outcome of circumstances. Just how one night stands happen – A lonely guy meets a lonely woman and they end up in bed having uninhibited sex.
“You do this often?” I ask
“About twice a week but lately, work’s kept me very busy,” she replies nonchalantly.
She speaks so casually that anyone could believe that she is talking about going to the gym. She intrigues me. Even in my wildest dreams, I haven’t met a woman like her. I am as curious as a kitten when I ask her, “Do you always pick up guys at bars?”
“No, usually I just pay them in Delhi. I don’t know any gigolos in this city. Good thing I found you,” she says
I am pretty sure this isn’t a good thing, but Jesus, she is interesting. I probe on for the learning. I already know what they call male prostitutes.
“Do you have family?” I ask
“Yes. Parents live in Mangalore. I divorced my husband about four years ago,” she replies.
I wonder if she is the stereotype: A single woman whose physical needs compel her to buy satisfaction.
Like a lawyer who has finished examining a witness, I don’t have any other questions to ask her. She turns over in her search for the clock, “What’s the time?” she asks
I continue to sit in bed, a little dazed and very vulnerable. My hangover refuses to leave me and there’s a novice carpenter inside my head. He keeps banging a hammer even though the nail’s been driven home. Despite him, I am trying to comprehend what has just occurred.
“It’s 8 o’clock,” I say. It brings in a realization that I will not be able to run today. I hate it every time I miss my routine. It is an addiction, just as smoking had once been.
“I have a flight to catch; I am going to rush. Just call up housekeeping and ask for your clothes,” she says and walks into the bath, naked. I see her jiggling bottom which reminds me of my mother’s pineapple jelly. She was such a disaster in the kitchen.
I ask myself – If calling for clothes was this simple, why didn’t I just do it before she conned me into sleeping with her?
I am still wrapped in a sheet when the laundry boy knocks on the door. I just open the door an inch to get my clothes back.
>
I have never liked clothes better than now. I put my clothes on and wait. She is still in the bathroom. One part of me wants to just slip out and melt into the crowd of office goers. Another part remembers that there has been some mention of money. I wait.
She comes out dressed in a white bathrobe and looks at me strangely. She probably expects me to have left, but I am still here. I want to know if I have excelled. I want to know if I am eligible for the ‘performance incentive’. I almost feel like I’m back at the bank that I got fired from. They would always hang out a carrot and I was always the donkey.
I think it is my imploring eyes that make her walk to the luggage rack. She picks up her purse that is large enough to house a pygmy colony. For an inordinately long time, she fiddles with the bag. I fear that she will con me again by not paying me.
Half her arm is inside the purse and it finally emerges with a fat wad of currency notes. She counts out ten five hundred rupee bills and hands them to me. Despite my atheism, I can’t help believing that there is a God. Just last night I was penniless and broke, and now I am earning again, albeit a little dubiously.
“Thank you. It was a pleasure meeting you, and I’m sorry I had to blackmail you into doing this,” she says.
It’s almost business-like; it’s almost like shopping for grocery. I don’t know what to say. The events of the last hour have left me speechless. I say to myself that you have to say something. Maybe, a parting speech but the novice in the head won’t let me think. Somehow, I say, “Thanks”. It’s as eloquent as I can be.
I turn around to walk out the door and have almost reached it when she says from behind me,
“Give me your number. Will it be alright if I called you the next time I am visiting?”
I nod my head to jolt the carpenter and we exchange our phone numbers.
“Is it okay if I give your number to some of my friends?” she asks.
I am horrified with myself. I still don’t know what I am getting into. I don’t quite understand when my morals have faded to this shade of black. Not only have I been unfaithful to my wife, but am consciously degrading myself too. I question myself if it’s for the money or is it the sex. I lead a celibate life. Divya thinks I’m good, but I can’t have sex with Jasleen. Something inside me stops me from making love to her. In any case, I am sure that I will not have some strange women call me up asking me to have sex with them. I will just have to refuse her.
Instead, I hear myself saying, “Yes”.
With that involuntary word, I know that my life will never be the same again.
I exit the hotel and try to find my bearings. I am in Sector 35, where an entire row of hotels stand in line. I wonder why they even have different names when you can’t differentiate one from the other. I think about taking a rickshaw, but I prefer to walk. One, it will give me the exercise that I have foregone this morning; and secondly, it will give me a chance to introspect. In the small city of Chandigarh, nothing is too far away. Nor is my wife’s home.
I start walking in the general direction of my wife’s home, stumbling over the stones that the municipality has so carelessly strewn. My mind fills with questions. I seek answers from myself for what I have just done. My first thoughts are of regret. I know what I have done is incorrect, immoral and maybe even unethical. It isn’t right in every way that I look at it. I just know that I’ve degraded myself. It isn’t long before I’m justifying myself. I needed the money and it is definitely better than suicide.
I’m just an average middle class guy. My upbringing doesn’t allow me to do what I have done. A thought goes out to my estranged parents. They stay in the same city, less than two kilometres away from my wife’s house, but I still don’t meet them. I have let them down, I have let my unlovable wife down, and I have let myself down. The cool of the currency notes in my pocket provide a consolation, but even they aren’t cold enough to douse the fire that rages inside me. The streets are busy at this hour. Lost in my thoughts, I almost bump into a car as I cross the final street to reach my wife’s house.
Radhika
A few years later when the teacher explained the word ‘adoption’ was I able to appreciate the gravity of what had occurred on the day after my third birthday. I was adopted by my Uncle and Aunt. Even though I was a sapling, I felt uprooted. It was almost a week after our arrival in Solan that I presumed that there was something amiss about this vacation. I wasn’t wrong.
My father, or rather my foster father, Rohit Kapila, was the billing clerk in the electricity department. Solan was a small, yet ever-expanding hill station, two hours north of Chandigarh. In those early days, his job didn’t pay very well. But somehow, he was able to bring back a gift for me. The gifts weren’t extravagant, the poor can’t afford to be, but it would be a lollipop one day and candy flosses another. It was a ritual that he refused to forgo.
It wouldn’t even be four before I would half hang outside the balcony of the government quarters that were allotted to my father, waiting for his return. The small house on the first floor overlooked the street and the valley below. Even before he had turned the bend, I would run the three hundred metres to be in his arms. I would rummage through the cheap imitation leather bag for my gift. He would carry me home on his shoulders. My biological father wasn’t a bad man, but he couldn’t be called a good father. For the first time, in my short life, I was experiencing undiluted love. Perhaps it was a good thing that I had been adopted.
My foster mother was quite a novice when it came to raising a child. For one, she didn’t know that children need something or the other to keep them occupied. You couldn’t really blame her because she didn’t have children. She had married my Uncle, now father, over ten years ago and they had been unable to conceive a child. They had waited for her to conceive for over two years, before reaching out to the astrologers. The astrologers had swindled them, taking relatively huge sums of money to perform prayers to appease the Lord and bless them with a child. Only after the Gods had disappointed had they recognized it as a medical problem.
Given her failings as a mother, I didn’t have too much to do those days. I would often sit out on the balcony and see the flocks of pigeons that had their nests in the buildings around our house. They were fascinating creatures and I couldn’t help admire them. There was something about those birds, maybe their courting, that I could remain on that chair for hours waiting for my father to come home.
My father was an honest, upright man. I don’t know why God hadn’t given him his own children. I guess God is a little convoluted. He doesn’t always favour good people. My father had even been to the PGI at Chandigarh where they diagnosed my mother’s problem as an Ovulatory failure. In the early nineteen seventies, the fancier technologies that help infertile couples conceive were yet to be patented. Not that they would have been able to afford it. They had craved for a child, seeing much younger couples bearing fruit, while they continued to be deprived. It was only after I was born that they seriously considered adoption. I’m not sure my mother was bought into the idea but my father was adamant.
It was only fortunate that I had been born; an unwanted third child to his younger brother. A girl child, to top it, who brought with her the responsibilities of accumulating dowry. They dwelled over the question for over two-and-a-half years before gathering the courage to broach the subject with my biological father. About a month before my third birthday, their desperation reached a peak and during a family wedding, my Papa, as I fondly called my foster father, had taken his brother aside and spoken to him about adopting me.
My day really started when Papa would be back from work. I would usually while away time sitting on the balcony because I didn’t have many friends. There were a couple of children in the neighbourhood but they were much older. In the hills, it’s difficult to find a playfield. When the boys in the neighbourhood played cricket on the street, I was relegated to field. I didn’t know how to and after a few balls were lost in the valley, they refused to le
t me play with them. With a mother who wasn’t the best for company, the pigeons were my only hope.
Most times, I would miss my biological mother. She made a few trips in the first month that I moved to Solan, but those trips had dried up. I was sure that my mother missed me too. I sometimes wish that Papa hadn’t spoken to my biological father, Suresh that day. Maybe it was the intoxicant in his blood that had made him agree immediately. He didn’t even bother asking my mother. I must have been really unwanted for him to have made a decision that soon. My mother was resistant. I guess, it’s the same with the pigeons, for I saw the females fight a cat for their young. Like the chicks fly away, she had let me fly in the interest of the family economics. She had put forward only one request: to keep me for another month, until my birthday.
It wasn’t long before I was five and attending school at the Government-run primary school in Solan. Housed in a small dilapidated building with a rustic stone exterior, a small metal board proclaimed its existence. Education at primary school was free – a good thing, because it was the only school that we could afford. My school was a long way away from my home, unless you took the trail through the forest of pine and rhododendron. Every day I would walk back home through those woods, skipping and kicking the rocks that lay on the steep mountain trail, until it emerged out onto the street just below our house. I wasn’t afraid at day, but by night I was a disaster.
I don’t know why I was such a nervous wreck as a child. I think I feared the ghosts. In the mountains, everyone has a tale to tell. I might have overheard one of those gory stories. The mountains are naturally dark and ominous at nights, and it doesn’t take a lot to scare a five-year-old child. I would often wake up in the middle of the night and fiddle with my hair. It was just because my parents slept in the same room that I wouldn’t be scared.