by Sid Bahri
It was on one of those nights that I couldn’t sleep because my mother was unwell. The next morning, we ferried her to the hospital on the back of a scooter that my father had borrowed from a neighbour. The apathetical nurse kept us waiting for over an hour before the doctor saw my mother. The doctor, who seemed more like a novice intern, checked her and asked a few irrelevant questions before pronouncing his diagnosis – “She is pregnant”.
It had to be the way the intern looked that my father was forced to take a second opinion from Dr Mukherjee. It was ridiculously unbelievable that she could be pregnant after all these years.
“I suspect that she’s pregnant. The tests will confirm it,” he replied.
He obviously did not know what my father would’ve given him if he had said these words about ten years ago.
“How can that be? She couldn’t conceive. We even went to Chandigarh to get her check-up done.” I can’t forget the look on my father’s face at that moment. He was hit by a bolt of lightning.
“You get the tests done, I am reasonably sure that my diagnosis is correct. The tests will confirm it,” he reiterated.
The laboratory report came in the next day, confirming Dr Mukherjee’s diagnosis. My mother was pregnant. It could almost be a miracle considering that twelve years of a sexually active marriage hadn’t led to conception. I was an omen, they said, it was my luck that had rubbed off on them. There was a blissful acknowledgement that there was God.
It was a bright Sunday morning, roughly eight months after my mother’s visit to the doctor that the pains started. Mild at first, they gradually intensified until they left her gasping for breath on that dark Sunday evening.
I slept on the chair, to be woken up at dawn by my father. Excited, ecstatic, almost insane, he had transformed from that sombre-looking thirty-eight-year-old into a child who had just experienced his first roller coaster ride.
“You have a sister, Radhika,” he said through the tears and the smile that adorned his face.
I rushed into the nursery to see her. She was quite a disappointment. A tiny flailing creature lay in a crib, unconvinced that it had made the journey from her mother’s womb into the stark surroundings of the hospital’s nursery. Unsure, if it had gained the right to be called an infant, when it had always been called a foetus. I had expected a larger child, like the ones that they showed in the Johnson and Johnson commercials, but this creature wasn’t even close.
I didn’t quite like Natasha, my sister, because she took away so much of my father’s time. Even before she was born, I didn’t quite know what to do once I was back from school. After she was born, I felt neglected. In the little time that my father would have, it left me feeling that I was loved. He would still bring back my gift. He would help me with homework and I wished that he could teach me in school. After all, he was so much better than the teachers at the government school. In school, I made friends but because it got dark so early in the winters, I wouldn’t go and meet them after school. If someone asked me who my best friend was, I would say Leechi for I loved the white female pigeon.
Aditya
I enter Jasleen’s house. It has ceased to be mine. The day I sold off my house, she signed a lease on this house. Jasleen has no qualms in letting me know, at every instance, that she is running it. I ring the doorbell and she opens it but stands in the doorway refusing to let me enter. I am greeted by a blood curdling glare which demands that I answer her question, “Where have you been all night?”
I want to tell her the truth about the night that has turned me into a gigolo or whatever a male prostitute is called. The truth that she will frown upon and render me a homeless destitute. I choose the comfort of a lie.
“I slept over at a friend’s,” I say
“Who?” she asks.
She is obviously suspicious. I don’t have many friends and the few friends that I do, live in Delhi or abroad. Worse still, I have never slept over at their house. Never.
“Rakesh,” I say. I wonder how I come up with such a horribly unimaginative, fabricated name. I am losing my sharpness. The rust of not working my brain is so apparent that it doesn’t even allow me to be imaginative in choosing a fictitious name for a fictitious character.
“Who’s he?” she asks
“A friend,” I say, stating the obvious.
This response is as dumb as Microsoft Office Help; it gives you the most logical answer that doesn’t make sense.
I am still standing outside the house while she stands in the doorway blocking my entry. I say to myself that she could be a security guard one day. Outwardly, I am as quiet as a rat. Her build almost scares me – she’s five feet nine and almost as broad.
“Never heard of him,” she asks. She is still unwilling to accede and grant me entry into the house.
“He’s a new friend,” I dodge her and enter the house. This move helped me score so many goals on the soccer field and it doesn’t let me down today.
She hasn’t finished her questioning. She follows me into the kitchen.
“You spent a night at a new friend’s place?” she continues the interrogation
The long walk has left me thirsty so I fill a glass of water. I make her wait. She looks unhappy that I am making her wait and a frown appears on her forehead. When she’s frowning, she can cause a cardiac arrest. I am immune because I see it every day. I don’t want her to be upset lest she turns me out of the house. I keep the glass down even though it’s still half full.
“Yes, I attended a party at his place. I had a few too many, so just slept there,” I say, straight-faced. I speak with such conviction that a polygraph will fail to catch me lying.
“Ever thought about trying to find work with the same intensity that you drink?” she says
This is so familiar that I am actually beginning to enjoy it. Every conversation over the past year always leads to this point. Every conversation is an opportunity to belittle me. Every conversation depreciates me. I have reached such a stage of immunity that I can make a self-mutating virus jealous.
“I am trying to network. Rakesh works in a call centre and he will help me find a job,” I continue to lie. I finish the glass of water and refill it.
“And what makes you think he’ll find a job for a drunken sod like you?” she says.
The male ego doesn’t exist anymore. It has been trampled so often that it has preferred to die.
I just nod my head. I want to go somewhere she will not follow me; a place that can be locked from inside: the bathroom. Most conversations with her lead me into the bathroom. She thinks I have an irritable bowel syndrome. I know that is the only thing that will distract her from demeaning me.
“I am leaving for work; make sure the maid does the washing and cleaning.” She calls out behind me.
“Will do,” I say. I am cheerful that I will not have to languish in the bathroom.
She walks out of the door and I lock it. In the confines of the home and with no blaring horns to break my chain of thoughts, I go back to the events of this morning and last night. I feel torn – caught between what my heart thinks is immoral and my brain justifies as essential. I let both of them have a conversation to sort out the mess
“I was wrong in what I did,” the heart says.
“In the circumstances, what other options did you have?” the brain asks.
“You could have told Divya to do what she could and walked out the door,” the heart says
“Naked?” the brain asks.
The brain has such a bad habit of being logical. The brain hates ambiguity. I think if the brain was a man, he would be an accountant. He’d want the assets and the liabilities to be equal.
“You could have called for the clothes,” the heart feebly reasons.
“Who’d have paid for them?” the brain puts it back in its place.
“What you’ve done is immoral and illegal, its prostitution,” the heart says, taking the moral high ground.
“It is a service that you
provided her; it’s like the bank – they needed you, they kept you. It’s just demand and supply. Are we all not whores, in that sense?” the brain is unforgiving.
“Why did you hide it from your wife?” the heart asks.
“Did you tell her why you don’t love her or can never love her? There are so many things about you that she doesn’t know. Let this be another one,” the brain says.
I justify and re-justify my stance on what I had done. Very long ago, someone told me about the Mamma test. If there is something that you are confused about, ask yourself if your Mamma would approve of it. My actions failed the Mamma test. After all, which son can walk up to his mother and say, “Mom, I just had sex for money”. It definitely failed the Mamma test.
I wish that it could be a lesser sin, something like lying to my boss, something innocuous that I don’t have to hide. I wish I had someone to share it with, maybe even Jasleen. I imagined how the scene would play out when she came back in the evening and I told her, “Jasleen, I was in bed with another woman. But I have the money that you want me to contribute in the house.”
I laugh to myself. This will just have to stay inside me.
Radhika
Natasha was over six months old when we made a visit to Chandigarh to meet my biological parents. My biological father Suresh was leaving. Out of sheer luck, he had found a job as a mechanic in the Gulf. His children were growing up and so were their needs. I wondered if he would’ve left earlier if I had still been a part of his family.
Back in Solan, my father got promoted. They said, it was Natasha’s luck that brought them the paltry salary hike. I sometimes wonder if Natasha wasn’t born, would his boss have retired. In perfect hindsight, I think I was jealous of her. The undivided love that I was used to had diminished.
I was still in the government school where they refused to teach English. I grew up thinking that it wasn’t really a language. My father knew a little bit of it but we wouldn’t speak in that language. I was good in mathematics and grasped it well. I could add and subtract even before my teachers at school had a chance to teach it.
Even before I was seven, my mother was pregnant again. She was almost like a dam, holding the eggs behind a concrete wall for all these years, and suddenly, the ovulation had started with a vengeance. While it wasn’t abnormal to have three children in those cheap times, there would be a strain on the budget.
We were usually short on money; it always took a lot of thinking to spend. With my mother’s frequent pregnancies, a lot of responsibility came my way. I would often go to shop for vegetables at the farmer’s market across town. Often, the green grocers would try and steal a bargain from a seven-year- old. I learnt from my father the art of bargaining. I would have a weekly budget. Often, I would save a few rupees from that budget to put into a piggy bank at home.
When my mother’s labour started, we were so convinced that it would be a boy that we didn’t even think about girl names. We went back to the civil hospital for her delivery and waited while she was in the labour room with my father. After an endless wait, he emerged out of the labour room with mixed emotions; happy, yet a little subdued in expressing it. Elated, because there was another child; disappointed for it wasn’t a son.
‘You girls have a sister,’ he had said, walking away to get himself a cup of tea. The joy that had been him at Natasha’s time was missing. He was happy, but he still looked forty. He wasn’t that young kid that I had seen him become.
Studying in class 2 of the government school, my routine was still the same, but my father didn’t bring the gifts anymore. Maybe for him, it was a struggle to be fair. He would have to buy three gifts for each of his daughters and, therefore, avoidance was best for his budget. Even then, he loved me. It’s not always that gifts show how much you love someone. Sadly, I couldn’t say the same about my mother.
Often in the evenings, there would be the sound of the two adults at home grumbling. In the two-bedroom government quarter, where the contractors had pocketed the most part of the construction budget, the walls couldn’t hold the sounds.
My father would say, “I don’t make enough money to raise three children; my salary is quite inadequate.”
“I told you not to adopt her,” my mother would reply.
I would hear it, but didn’t quite understand what they really meant. My father didn’t shirk my responsibility that my mother was willing to and would always try and find a solution.
“I think I’ll start taking tuitions in the evening to earn some extra money,” he replied.
Time passed by and I was fourteen, grown up enough to understand that puberty had arrived. When I think back to myself at that time, I can best describe myself as ugly. I was taller than normal and thin as an eel. Sometimes, I felt like an earthworm. My hair was my only saving grace on an otherwise unkempt face. It had to be the hormones that covered my otherwise fair face with dark hair. I think it happens to everyone; it’s just that some people have a budget to go to the parlour and some don’t. I think if I had broken into my piggy bank, I might have had the money to do it. I think mothers teach you this stuff but mine was almost non-existent.
I had been able to break away from the pigeons because my board examinations were scheduled that year and my father would help me at homework after the other students he taught had gone home. I was doing well at school; my grades were amongst the best, except for English. It got introduced when I was eight, maybe nine. I didn’t speak it very well, even though I understood it and could write it. In a government school, most teachers can’t converse in English and so I had little exposure to the language.
Ashima was now six and Natasha, eight; the bout of fertility that my mother had had was probably seasonal. It was as if the desert had got a season of rain and then went back to being a desert. At a time when contraceptives were a rarely- used commodity, my mother had been successful in not being pregnant for over six years - until now.
The frown lines that my father had lost for some time were beginning to show again. The mere thought of providing for another child was giving him sleepless nights. He wasn’t getting younger and the small side income that he had coming from the tuitions was already dwindling. The last decade of the century had started and India was increasingly getting obsessed with coaching centres. In these changing times, a part time tutor who specialized in mathematics was having a difficult time making ends meet. Almost forty-eight, and less than ten years away from his retirement, his wife was pregnant. The situation implied that he would have a nine-year-old child and three daughters to marry off after he had retired from his day job. Although there would be a small pension that the government would provide, it would be inadequate. He was ageing faster than his years; the grey tuft of hair was almost white. His financial future was bleak and he still didn’t have a plan on how he would be able to manage post-retirement.
The thought of an abortion had crossed his mind, but there was also the matter of progeny, of having a son who could look after him and provide for him when the daughters were married off. It was a gamble –a son would be an insurance policy; but if the child turned out to be a daughter, it would then thrust him into even deeper dungeons of financial instability. Soon, when my board exams would finish, I would study at the Inter College, a higher secondary school that charged fees higher than the school that I was studying in. A fee that he could ill-afford.
In sharp contrast, was his brother and my biological father Suresh in Chandigarh. He had gone to the Gulf and worked as a mechanic. He had been able to buy a house in Chandigarh and was on the verge of repatriating to lead a life of retirement. As kids, his brother had been the one who wouldn’t study, the one whose only career option had been to be a taxi driver and yet, he had been able to accumulate enough to retire. On the other hand, he, who had been brilliant as a student was still unstable, and unsure of his future.
I wasn’t the nervous wreck that I used to be as a child. I overcame my fear of ghosts when I didn’t see one
for fourteen years. Even then, my habit of fiddling with my hair refused to leave me. I detested exams, not because I didn’t study well, but because of the pain of unknotting my tangled hair.
My love affair with the pigeons was dwindling because of my exams. They were loyal, still thronging the building in front of our house. When my father got promoted, he was given a larger flat in the same complex. It only meant that I had to go and sit in the courtyard to see them. Leechi was dead and I had new favourite – Ehsaan, the grey male.
Aditya
I am accustomed to long walks; I was once a soccer player and that gives me a nervous energy that refuses to let me be home. The walks provide me a release of that energy and are also a refuge from Jasleen. It has been a few days since the events at the Piccadilly Sipper when I take a walk down the cycle track that runs alongside the Rose Garden in Chandigarh. Alone and secluded, the setting is ideal for my thoughts to wander. The ghosts of the events have refused to leave me, although they could’ve been forgotten. I haven’t heard from Divya after that, neither has she given my number to any of her friends. I am almost disappointed in that. I often look down at my phone, expectantly, to see an unfamiliar number flash. I hope that someone, anyone, will call and use my services. The banks don’t need me anymore.
In times of adversity, there is a willingness to believe in God. Even an atheist like me wants to believe in a God that I thought had never existed. The time and situation is such that belief is your only saviour. The economic downturn is even worse than was earlier forecast; there isn’t a company that is hiring. Most enterprises have lain off people by the thousands. The financial analysts are predicting more doom.
I am more than willing to compromise, in rank and in money, yet that one job is elusive. Anything will do; anything that gives me some money to tide over this period. Like all things that go down and come up, I believe that the economy will be back in shape. I am convinced that I will have a job that will fit my stature, again.