I turn the mirror towards Yusuf as I enter the parking lot. ‘Tell me, you’ve known both of us so long. Do you have any answers?’
There’s a dim light from the street falling on him. Under it, I see a look of understanding pass over his face. And, without judgement, Yusuf, the ever wise one, only smiles. As if he has looked into the future and knows how my Second Peloponnesian War will end, but will not spoil the fun by telling me what he has seen. And, as always, I realize I’m taking myself less seriously than I was until a moment ago.
Love
Whatever I was looking for was always you.
Rumi
11
Arrival
It is May finally. For the last eight months it had loomed on the horizon, getting closer every day, yet seeming forever out of reach. So, now that it is here, it’s a little difficult to believe.
Ira must be winding things up and packing her bags. But the fear hasn’t left me that she might cancel her ticket if we fight one more time. So I’ve restricted our communication to the bare minimum. I avoid calling her. In my messages I keep the tone flat and business-like: what time is her flight, is she done packing, will she have to pay rent for the months she’s gone. And she adopts the same tone in her texts to me. If she’s sad about leaving New York and saying goodbyes to all her friends and Laura, she does not tell me. If she is dreading coming back and having to be in the same house with no one other than me, she does not tell me. It’s like we have reached some sort of agreement on the code of conduct in the days before we meet again.
I have to be on my best behaviour—not only to ensure that she does in fact come back but also in the interest of a peaceful four months, which is the time I’ve decided to give our marriage. If things don’t start looking up by the time she has to go back to New York in September, I will tell her again I want out. I’ve worked it out in my head.
It’s not just the constant fights. We’ve had those before too. It’s more to do with what they say in divorce cases: irreconcilable differences. It was a cliché until I experienced it first-hand. Now I do feel Ira and I have unbridgeable divides, interests that have been diverging little by little all these years—call it what you will. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve accepted that I’m domestic. I want to have a steady job, build a career, be rooted in one place. Ira on the other hand wants to change cities and countries, not be tied down, and get a PhD perhaps. She is a wild spirit, an adventurous nomad—things I admire about her all right, but I don’t see how we can make it work together. For a month I was sad that it should come to this. But I’ve had my day of reckoning.
And there is Tanuj’s wedding, of course. It is to take place in Kolkata within a week of Ira’s return. I do want to attend it, especially after he said I was the first person he invited and the only one who readily agreed to come despite the distance. I need peace to prevail so that Ira doesn’t refuse to come along. Not showing up or, worse, showing up alone when Ira is back in Delhi are scenarios I’d like to avoid. She has told me in a text that she doesn’t mind coming, but I have to ensure she is agreeable enough to oblige once she is here.
My mind wanders back to the laptop screen in front of me. It’s night but the room is hot. The floor exudes heat, making me irritable. There is one last thing I have to do before I turn in. I had bought tickets for Ira and me on the Sealdah Express to Kolkata the day bookings opened. Now I go to the Air Vistara website and book us seats on a flight from Kolkata to Bagdogra two days after Tanuj’s wedding, with a return to Delhi on the sixth of June, our second wedding anniversary.
*
Ira arrives in twelve hours, which seems like enough time to do all the things I have planned. I scrub the bathroom floor, shine the taps, clean the kitchen platform with soap water, lay fresh sheets of newspaper in the drawers and neatly stack the utensils on them, remove cobwebs from the nooks between the ceiling and the walls and dust the photo frames. Just getting the slimy, thick layer of oil off the blades of the exhaust fan in the kitchen takes up an hour. By the end of it, my fingers are blistered and burning. When I look up at the wall clock, I’m stunned to see it’s three-thirty. I’m an hour behind.
I get into a T-shirt and jeans, pick up my car keys and rush to INA Market to buy fresh fish and coconut milk. I had learnt to cook from Ira but I never learnt to enjoy it. It remained a cause of discord between us even after we got married. She would get angry with me for refusing to help out in the kitchen and would say that cooking together is something that would bring us closer. I would scoff and refuse to give in.
But today is her day. The first thing she should taste after being away for eight months should be her favourite prawn curry with rice and fried pomfret.
It’s almost five by the time I get back, and I start sprinting from one thing to the next. I put the prawns in a bowl of hot water to defrost them. I get my laptop and look up the recipe online. I chop onions, chillies and tomatoes and arrange all the spices I need in a line. Then I take a saucepan and heat a tablespoon of oil in it, adding mustard seeds, chopped onions, a bit of turmeric powder, some whole pepper and cardamom. But when I add dried red chillies, the mixture immediately turns black and there’s a blast of smoke that makes me cough. I turn off the gas, realizing that I added the chillies too late and I will have to start from scratch. One look at the clock and I’m almost in tears. I don’t want to mess things up on the day Ira is returning. For a moment I toy with the idea of taking her to an expensive restaurant for dinner straight from the airport. But I set the thought aside with a mental note that that is an escape route I’ve always taken and tonight needs to be different.
Feeling thoroughly overwhelmed, I set about chopping the onions all over again. Thankfully, this time around, I remember what Ira had once said: ‘There are only two differences between the food Shobha cooks and what I make—love and low flame.’ So, instead of rushing things, I slow down. I pass the first test by not creating a black, soggy mess a second time. After pouring a mug of water into the saucepan and adding the prawns, tomato puree and coconut milk, I put a lid on it to let the curry simmer and come to a boil. When I take off the lid ten minutes later, I’m greeted with a delicious aroma that immediately makes my stomach growl and I know even before I’ve tasted the curry that I’ve got it right.
Next, I measure a cup of rice, wash it thoroughly, immerse it in water in a container and put it on the stove. On the chopping board I create a mix of turmeric and red chilli powders, salt and water. In a second saucepan I heat two tablespoons of oil. I coat the slices of pomfret with the mix and drop them in. The kitchen is full of the smell of fish. The pomfret takes a long time to turn the perfect shade of crispy golden brown but I’m patient. One by one I fry the fish as the clock ticks, hoping that the taste, despite my lack of practice, will carry me through.
After I’ve finished cooking, I stare at the clock and the sink. Great food sitting alongside unwashed vessels will do me no good, and so I start doing the dishes in spite of knowing that I’m cutting it too close.
Momo is restless all through my four hours in the kitchen. At first I think it’s the smell of the fish that’s driving him crazy and I give him some food. But he keeps running about the house, rolling on the floor and imploring me to open the kitchen door. When I do, he runs to the bedroom and slips under the bed. I look under and assure him I’m not going to hit him. He comes out and starts to bark wildly, thwacking me with his fat paws. I don’t know what is wrong with him. Perhaps there’s going to be an earthquake. Just to get him out of the way, I put him in his cage and dart into the bathroom for a nice long shower. As I look at my bathrobe hanging from a hook on the back of the door, I note in passing that, come tomorrow, there will be Ira’s next to it once more, and I feel oddly happy. The pleasantly tepid summer water relaxes me and I lose track of time. I regret it when I come out of the bathroom and realize that Ira’s flight lands in fifteen minutes. Even if immigration keeps her for half an hour, I barely have enough time
to reach the airport, park my car and stand at the arrival gate in time for the first glimpse of her emerging from the terminal.
I quickly wear my jeans and a black full-sleeve shirt with dark blue stripes that Ira had once long back told me I look handsome in. I turn out the lights and am about to close the main door behind me when Momo gives out a pitiful yowl from inside his cage. I don’t want an angry Anju to be the first thing greeting Ira on reaching home, so I go back in, put Momo on his leash and put him in the back seat of the car. ‘Idiot,’ I say to him sternly. ‘If you dribble on my seat, I’ll leave you at the airport.’ He looks terrified and I laugh.
Thankfully, there’s no traffic and I weave in and out of gaps between exasperatingly slow-moving cars and reach T3 at five minutes past eleven. Her flight was scheduled to land at ten-fifty. I am running late. The underground parking lot echoes with a shrill screech as I drive into the first empty spot I see and jump on the brake. I leave Momo looking bewildered behind the window pane and lock the doors with the remote.
T3 is a huge terminal and has several levels. I lose a minute just waiting for the lift to come down to the basement. Once I’m out two floors above, I break into a run like my life depends on it—down corridors, up escalators and finally along the waiting area outside the arrival gates. I stop for breath and look up at a flight information display screen. Ira’s Jet Airways flight via Brussels has landed. If it did as per schedule, I say to myself as I look at my watch, she would be out of the terminal by now. I start looking through the crowd for her familiar face. There are cars speeding and stopping, men and women hugging and letting go, people crossing each other’s paths with trolleys. I didn’t want to call Ira because I thought spotting her in the crowd would be fun, but now I am afraid I may have missed her.
That is when I see her in the distance. She is at least a hundred feet away, turning a corner and emerging out of an arrival gate. She only has a backpack sitting heavily on her shoulders. She looks around but doesn’t see me. Once, a few weeks back, during a short spell when we weren’t fighting, she had told me that she had cut her hair. I’ve known her thirteen years but it’s the first time I see her with hair that ends at her neck. She looks … different. But other than the hair, she’s in the same full-sleeve blue-and-red check shirt and beige corduroys that she had worn on the day of her departure. In her hand she holds a large KFC Krushers plastic cup covered with a dome-shaped lid, drinking out of it through a straw. She sees me now as we draw closer.
I had gone over this moment in my head several times and wondered how it would play out. But I am not prepared for how it does. We don’t run towards each other like characters in films. We don’t even smile. As we come within a foot of each other, her lips still closed around the straw, she looks up at me tentatively, a little vulnerably, as if to ask if I will treat her well this time. She makes me aware of my power over her, not physical but emotional, and I embrace her tightly.
There’s no overwhelming burst of emotions. I take the backpack from her shoulders and we start walking to the parking lot. A little formally, I ask her how her flight was, if she managed to get enough sleep, if she’s jetlagged. She answers the questions and we are civil on the whole. As we step out of the lift, I start walking ahead of her because I want to get out of the parking lot before the first half hour is over. I dump her backpack inside and leave the door open for Momo to see Ira.
He looks from me to her. At first his face seems blank, or at least impassive. But as she smiles and screams his name—I hadn’t told her Momo is in the car—he barks loudly, jumps out and, without allowing me time or even a reflex to catch his flying leash, goes bounding towards Ira. He leaps at her with such force that she is knocked off her feet, and he starts slobbering all over her face as she falls down to her knees without protest.
If I can see her face through his fur, I think she is a little teary-eyed. Dare I say she is home?
12
Wedding
Ira and I are like new acquaintances in the car. The awkwardness, the wait for the destination to arrive, the hunt for things to say—a third person could hardly tell we have known each other for years. But, at the same time, there’s no mention of the last time we spoke, and I’m glad to avoid that conversation. I wonder if the silence is temporary before the inevitable talk finally takes place or if Ira too has decided to take the next four months as they come. I choose not to ask.
As I turn on the lights in the flat and enter, she walks from room to room to familiarize herself again to the place we called home. She criticizes my rearrangements of the furniture and says that I have no taste as she one by one notices the new things I’ve acquired over the past year. But she says this without the sting of our fights, and through it all I’m oddly pleased that she retains her sense of ownership towards our rented home despite setting up a new life for herself elsewhere.
What really bugs me is that she fails to notice, even after seeing me change in the full glare of the tube light, that I have finally lost the paunch she was after me for years to lose. So when she asks me, ‘What’s for dinner?’ I look guilty and tell her I thought she would have eaten on the plane. Her face falls and I quickly suggest going out for a bite to Potbelly. It’s only when she starts to look really upset that I lead her to the kitchen, take the lids off the pans and direct the aroma of the prawns and the pomfret towards her nose. Perhaps to punish me she does not praise the food when we sit down to eat. She tells me not to expect her to be grateful that I have cooked for her for the first time since we got married. But when I wake up startled at four that morning to see her helping herself to a second dinner in bed according to New York time, it feels like recognition enough for all the hard work. Gratified, I put an arm around her waist, for the first time in eight months, and go back to sleep.
*
My attempt to keep Anju away from Ira is not so successful. The next morning I’m reading the newspaper on the pot when the doorbell rings. At first, I assume it’s Shobha, but then I hear loud voices from the door. I can tell it’s Anju but fail to imagine what it could be this time. Momo has been calm after Ira returned and threw open all the doors that I would keep shut to prevent him from chewing up footwear and cushions and pillows. I rush out and appear at the door behind Ira as Anju stands outside and screams. Neighbours watch from behind their safety doors.
‘See, just see what a ruckus he makes,’ she says. I have to push Momo away to stop him barking at Anju.
‘Dogs do that,’ Ira says, trying to sound reasonable. ‘For him, you’re just a stranger at the door. I’m sure he doesn’t make noise like this otherwise.’
‘What do you know?’ she snaps back. ‘You haven’t been here for months. Ask your husband if you don’t believe me. He has faced the worst of it.’
I see what she is trying to do. ‘What happened now?’ I ask, not letting the landlady enlist me on her side.
‘The dog pooped outside my door,’ Anju declares dramatically.
‘He has been home all morning,’ I say.
‘How do I know that? How do I know he didn’t do it last night when I saw you two take him upstairs? I’m no expert at analysing how fresh poop is.’
‘Listen,’ Ira says, and I can tell she is getting angry—not because of the allegation but because Anju won’t stop shouting. ‘Our dog is trained. Maybe it is some other dog who did it.’
‘Twenty years we have lived here and no dog has ever dared to shit outside our house,’ she says, even louder this time. ‘Even if it’s some other dog, he’s coming upstairs only to meet yours, I’m sure. They know there’s another of their species living here, thanks to all the noise he makes. It’s his fault if they are treating this building as their toilet now.’
And before Ira can say a word, I match Anju’s tone and shout back, taking even myself by surprise, ‘We can’t help what a stray dog does outside your house. Please don’t create a scene outside ours and ruin our morning. If you have a problem with us, give us one month’s no
tice and we’ll vacate the place.’
Anju looks too stunned to say anything. I know Sunil well and he is not the sort to care more about a mutt than his money. There aren’t too many tenants willing to pay twenty thousand in Shahpur Jat.
‘You’re being very uncooperative,’ she says. ‘You won’t even come downstairs and take a look.’
‘What for?’
‘You know, I didn’t even say bye to my children when they left for school. I was that disturbed after I opened the door and stepped into the poop. What a way to begin my day! And you can’t even come and see what has happened.’
I want to tell Anju that her children are teenagers and do not care that she did not see them off to school. But I restrain myself and say, ‘Look, we have already told you it’s not our dog who has done this. You better find out who has and deal with him.’
I make to shut the door but Anju is not done. She turns to Ira and says, ‘You are the one who got him, aren’t you? I had seen you carry him home that day. You shouldn’t have got him if you didn’t want to look after him. It’s the first rule of being parents also. Check your capability before you add to your responsibility.’
‘Our responsibility,’ I snarl back. ‘Momo is not her responsibility but ours. And one of us is perfectly capable of looking after him. Thank you.’
I slam the door in Anju’s face and, breathing heavily, sit on the sofa, trying to resume reading the newspaper. Ira sits next to me. I wonder if she will scold me for losing my cool or for offering to move out. She is here only for four months and I’m sure does not want to spend those house hunting all over again. But she takes my hand in hers and says softly, ‘We’ll figure out what to do. Don’t be upset, okay?’
The Story of a Long-Distance Marriage Page 9