Mohan had begun to fade. Eventually, Lakshmi returned from the kitchen with her own plate, and ate with Malti. She said to him, ‘You must be tired.’
‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘I did sleep on the train, but you know how trains are.’
‘All the jolting and noise and tamasha!’ Chintan said.
‘Everyone’s so noisy,’ Malti agreed.
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked around at their faces. There was a certain family resemblance, though he thought his wife looked more like Malti than anyone else; there was the same brightness about them.
‘We’ll sleep,’ Lakshmi said.
They got up.
Finally, he closed the door of their room. He put on the light and she turned on the air conditioner, which began to wheeze asthmatically.
‘So,’ he said.
She sat down on the bed and took out her hairpins. She began to comb and plait her hair, as though this had been any other night. Had she lost weight? He sat nearish her, coughed, and put a hand atop hers. She moved hers and sighed. ‘I was very angry with you,’ she said.
He stared ahead of him, then squinted at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said stiffly.
‘I know,’ she said. She smiled suddenly, at the strangeness of this conversation, then glanced down at her comb, where a few erratically curly white strands were tangled. ‘My hair’s so thin now,’ she said irrelevantly.
He scanned the side of her head. ‘I can’t tell.’
‘Of course, don’t be stupid, when I was younger my plait used to be this thick’, and she made a circle with her hand. She folded her legs to her chest and put one arm around them. ‘So Ashish told me about this competition you won.’
‘I didn’t win. When did you speak to him?’
‘I called – to see how his exams were going.’
‘Oh, that. We had quite a time the night before his first paper,’ he said.
‘But he’ll pass this year.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ he said, his mind a haze of nights under the electric light.
‘And he’ll manage while you’re away?’
‘I think so. Mrs Gogate said he can go to their house for meals. He and Madhavi have become quite good friends.’
She nodded.
The air conditioner was beginning to bother him. ‘You sleep with this on?’
She exhaled irritably. ‘It’s hot here,’ she said.
‘All right, I was just wondering.’
‘You know, it wasn’t just about Satish. Of course that was very bad. I feel awful myself. For him to go like that, completely alone –’ She sighed. ‘Still, it wasn’t your fault, really. But this other business – you, your writing, that’s all you were interested in. And the way you used to behave earlier, as though your whole life had been a tragedy because you didn’t get to go to college, become educated, write books. I was so sick of it.’
He frowned, and leaned back on the dreadful pink satin bedcover. ‘I never said my life was a tragedy.’
‘No, but you always behaved that way. You were distracted, when things were happening – the children’s exams, or going away; when the boys and Uma got married. Those things happened and you were there but you were outside it.’ She held the comb in one small square hand and waved it like a teacher’s pointer for emphasis.
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ he said, although, suddenly, he wasn’t sure whether she wasn’t right.
‘No,’ she said, and sighed. ‘Not really. Not if it’s true.’ She got up, went into the bathroom, and came out a little later in her nightclothes.
In the morning he slept late, and woke to find a cup of tea on the table next to him. His wife was dressed; she sat on the bed, reading a section of the newspaper.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Almost eight o’clock. No hurry – these people all eat breakfast at different times. Chintan has left for work, and Malti’s getting Sachin ready for playschool.’
Mohan got up and went to clean his teeth. He came back and sat on the bed drinking the tea, which was hot and had ginger in it. Despite the air conditioner, he had slept deeply for the first time in weeks; he was drowsy and cushioned.
‘What do you want to do about the will – Satish’s will?’ he asked.
‘Do? You mean contest it? No no,’ she said. She turned the page with a crackle.
He stretched out one leg and winced at the sharp click of the knee. ‘But – it’s strange the way he managed things in the end. It’s good for Ashish, of course. Now if he wants, he could go abroad to study, even if he doesn’t get a scholarship. But –’
She lifted her head. ‘I don’t feel bad about it. I didn’t think Satish would have anything to leave, and even if he had, I knew he wouldn’t leave it to me. He’d made it clear. In his mind it made sense. He always said, ‘I don’t have to worry about you, Mohan will be there to look after you and the children’, and for him that was good enough. Besides, it’s true, we don’t need the money; we have the house and the money from your father’s business. And anyway, when you write a book we’ll become rich. Until then, there’s the money Megha’s been sending.’
‘Book?’
‘Yes, aren’t you going to write one?’
He found himself blushing and she grinned and took a sip of her coffee. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘It’s been nice to be here, especially at first, but now I’m a little bored. They don’t need me as much now. I’ve had enough.’
He nodded immediately. Then he couldn’t help asking, ‘Why?’
She made a face. ‘They’re good people but they live in a nightmare.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Chintan and his wife have so little time for each other. She’s exhausted, and he’s fed up – work and then his father to worry about. They’ve been good to me and I’ve tried to help where I could, but it’s not enough.’ She looked at him directly. ‘I saw him play-fighting with the little one, who of course is horren-dously spoilt, and they were hitting each other, but Chintan suddenly started hitting the little boy harder and harder, really hitting him. The child is tough despite everything and he didn’t want to give in but his father is so much bigger. Finally he started to bawl.’
Mohan was appalled. ‘Did you speak to Chintan?’
She shook her head. ‘It was too awkward. Besides, I haven’t spent enough time with them over the years. I just tried to look after the child more often.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Mohan decidedly, putting his cup down as if he would set off that instant.
‘Arre! At least let’s stay for a day or two. They’ve been asking after you and they were curious to meet you after so long,’ she said inconsistently, then laughed.
He smiled too, despite the air conditioner, the pink bedspread, the terrible ornaments, the strangeness of the house. ‘So you’ll come home?’ he asked.
She nodded, and a half-smile broke out on her face.
They had to return by road a day later, a long and tiring journey, because the school and college holidays meant it was impossible to get a reservation on the train. At Dadar they emerged from the bus, an air-conditioned, Hindi-film-music-playing torture chamber, into the sun and humid heat of Bombay. Ashish was there; he wore a clean shirt and held a small bunch of flowers that he presented to his aunt. ‘Have you lost a lot of weight?’ she asked.
‘No no, Madhavi’s mother’s been feeding me well.’ He took her bag and led them towards a taxi.
In the flat, she examined everything. She was bemused to discover the nearly clear table and the cleaned bookshelves, and in the kitchen she said ‘Hm’, and opened the cupboards. She picked up a packet of tea and turned around, an eyebrow raised. ‘We don’t buy this kind of tea.’
‘Well, they must have run out of the normal one when I went,’ her husband said, looking sheepish.
She smiled. Perhaps it was good to be home: the familiar objects sang out to her. ‘Get it right next time,’ she said severely. ‘It’s the Red Label.’
Although she was tired after the long journey, sleep, normally so ready, was just out of reach in the dim room where the well-known furniture made dark masses. Mohan’s breathing and his gentle snoring continued. In the first part of the night he slept on his back; she regarded his unmoving bulk under the sheet while the fan whirled hectically. The usual sighs, followed by the gravelly exhalation every third breath, were at first reassuring; soon after, they began to irritate her. Slightly later, everything oppressive in the room and the world – the dark furniture hulking against the light, the silence outside, the intractability of sleep – all these evils, which might have been minor at another time of day, seemed to emanate from the serene, infuriating exhalations of the figure next to her. She got up and adjusted the fan. There was no satisfactory setting for it. When at a slower speed, it nearly forgot to turn, but at medium it flew into a frenzy.
She lay down again, wrapped the sheet about her, and allowed her feet and arms to escape its confines. Mohan turned to his side; as he settled into the new position, he gave a drawn-out, snuffling sigh. It made her want to scream, the ease with which he had transported himself elsewhere, out of this room and this moment. She rolled over, so that she faced him, and studied the parts of his face that she could see: his straight nose; eyelids secretively closed into tight pockets; the lines that ran between his nose and mouth. It was remarkable that she couldn’t feel angry with him; he was so hermetic that it was hard to imagine blaming him for anything. She sighed, rolled onto her back and watched the fan, then turned towards the faded yellow curtains. An orange glimmer found its way under them, from the street lamp at the end of the lane.
Quickly, there came an aggressive wind through the trees; she heard it sweeping the leaves and branches. A storm began and rain lashed the house. But a strange thing happened: the bird whose song she had noticed months earlier started to sing now, in the middle of the night. It trilled through its phrase, ma ga re sa, cheep! in the lustiest, loudest way imaginable. Was it enjoying the storm?
Much later, she was aware of Mohan’s movements, though their sequence was unclear – he was up, that much she knew, but she was too tired to tell whether he had just woken or was about to take a bath. Doors opened and closed; shapes of clear morning light printed themselves on her consciousness. Eventually, she rubbed her eyes. She could tell from the warm colour of the sun under the curtains that it was much later than normal. She sat up. When she saw the lukewarm cup of tea at her bedside she prepared herself to be irritated; then she smiled.
Chapter Twenty
It was raining; he stalked around the flat. Finally he went to the telephone and dialled.
‘Aunty, it’s Ashish. How are you, aunty. Aunty, is Mayank there?’
There was a crackle and a yell in the background, then his friend’s voice came on the line. It had deepened but in timbre remained unchanged since their childhood.
‘Hey, what’s up?’
‘Look, don’t get all American on me,’ Ashish snapped.
‘What’s wrong with you, bhai?’
Ashish clutched the receiver and stared at an old calendar picture of a houseboat in Kashmir that hung on the passage wall. ‘I think I’m bored,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it supposed to be great when we finished exams? Didn’t we keep saying, “I can’t wait till the exams are over”?’
‘Yeah, I know, now there’s nothing to do but wait till the results come out. Already my parents are asking me about jobs, what are my plans. I’m supposed to meet someone my father’s friend knows in case he wants to give me a job.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I don’t know. Something. Air conditioning or something.’
‘God.’
‘Yeah, but still. Or maybe I’ll enrol for a master’s. I’ve been telling my dad you can’t get a decent job without qualifications these days.’
‘Master’s in?’
‘Mass comm, maybe.’
‘Oh…yeah.’
‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Nothing. I think…I don’t know.’
‘Going to see your parents?’
‘Yeah, not for a couple of weeks.’
‘Let’s go see a movie.’
‘Yeah. I don’t know.’
‘What do you want to do then?’
‘Something. Nothing. I don’t know. I’m bored,’ Ashish said irritably, as though naming an unarguable medical complaint.
‘You want to meet up, at least?’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’ He didn’t want to leave the house and get on the train; on the other hand, what else was he going to do? Home made him twitchy; the thought of going out was tiring.
‘Three thirty in the Cafe Idiot-Idiot?’
‘Okay. The one at Shivaji Park? Okay.’
‘So what are you going to do, Ashish?’ Madhavi enquired. They were sitting on the terrace one evening, on a couple of plastic chairs that someone had left there.
‘As in?’
‘As in with your life. No, as in, in the next year. Now you’re fabulously wealthy and everything.’ She looked owlishly happy and self-satisfied; Ashish smiled at her plump, intelligent face.
‘Oh yeah. No, I don’t know. My cousin is saying I should apply to university in the States, see if I can get in last minute to one of those courses, film-making, animation, screenwriting, that type of thing, somewhere in California.’
‘Yeah, good idea. Hey!’ Madhavi sat up suddenly. ‘You should go to one of those agencies, the ones that do applications for you. My friend went and they did all her stuff, she got admitted into three places, one even with scholarship.’
‘Yeah? But I doubt my grades are going to be amazing.’ He let himself slide further down the plastic chair till his neck rested on the top, and looked into the evening sky, bright with different types of pollution cloud: orange, peach, greyish-purple.
‘No no, these are all new colleges. Even if you don’t get scholarship in the first year, you know, because it’s late, you might get some for the next two-three years. And you’d probably like the place as well. You know.’
‘As in?’
‘As in, you know, it’s easier there – to be gay and everything.’
Ashish twisted around. ‘What?’
‘Oh, come on Ashish.’
He pulled himself up, folded his legs and clutched his knees with one arm. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘It’s obvious, surely. So tell me, what was going on with you and that guy, the tutor? Was something happening?’
‘Well –’
She waited, and Ashish began to tell her, in a confused order, all about Narayan. Madhavi interrupted. ‘Wait wait. Start at the beginning.’
When he’d finished talking it was pitch dark, and they were surrounded by the usual smells of open-air night in Saraswati Park: traffic fumes, cement, flowers, something chemical in the breeze. The main road, apparently far away, made itself heard now and again in an anguished horn blast or the faint growling of engines.
‘Does anyone else know?’ Madhavi asked.
‘No. I mean, I haven’t told anyone.’
She nodded. ‘I bet your aunt guessed. About you at least.’
‘I don’t know – she hasn’t been here.’ Ashish felt relieved, but strange too; he rubbed his stomach and felt his own thinness and insubstantiality.
‘Yeah.’ The orange light from the street lamp caught the edge of Madhavi’s spectacles. She nodded her curly head. ‘I didn’t know if I should mention this, but I heard something about him – Professor Narayan. About how he had an affair with some post-grad student, some Bengali guy, I don’t remember the name, and that’s why he had to stop teaching at the university.’
‘What?’ Ashish felt sick. ‘But,’ he began to argue, ‘people don’t just leave jobs because of rumours. If it had really been proved then he would have been disciplined, it’d be common knowledge.’
‘No, it depends. One of my friend’s mothers teaches there too, she said there was
no official complaint but he was warned. Maybe it was office politics and someone used it to get rid of him, but that’s what she said.’ Madhavi shrugged. ‘Don’t think about it too much. It’s just one of those things. When you’ve been out of Bombay for a while you’ll hardly even remember it.’ She tutted. ‘Lecherous uncles, the worst possible thing.’
Ashish began to laugh. ‘Narayan’s not really a lecherous uncle.’
‘No?’
‘No! Well –’
‘Yuck, wait till he’s older. So undignified, watch my French films, chhi.’
Ashish giggled, scandalized, but also comforted.
‘So you’re all packed?’
He and Mayank were eating a farewell custard in the Military Cafe. It had been preceded by a farewell lunch in a tiny diner on Colaba Causeway, and was to be followed by a farewell cup of coffee at the Gateway.
He stirred the last, trembling fragments of custard; it went through his mind that the dessert was suffering as it cringed away from the spoon and he was amused, then appalled at himself. America, what would it be like? There might be men – he hoped there would. He’d be able to replace his present sufferings with new ones, until he could look back at Narayan with only amused nostalgia: oh, I was so young then.
‘No, well, sort of. Basically.’
He didn’t even know exactly what he had to pack; he had a few books with him, his new computer, and some clothes. Every day his aunt would appear at the door of his room with something she was sure he would need, from snacks to socks to digestive ayurvedic sweets. Yesterday she had come in looking shy and vaguely sentimental, and given him a small packet wrapped in a handkerchief. He opened it and found a cardboard box; inside was a wristwatch with a leather strap.
‘It was my brother’s,’ she’d said, her face lighting up. ‘I thought you should have it because he was obviously fond of you.’
He’d tried to give it back but she’d insisted, and Ashish, bemused and secretly harried, had put the watch, for now, into a dark corner of the cupboard.
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