All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  “Myshkin?” he called again. “Come, let me see . . . you’re taller.”

  He advanced towards me and I stepped back, as shy as if he were a stranger. He put his head next to mine and an arm around me for a clumsy embrace. We were both stiff as tree branches. The bag on his shoulder fell to the ground when he bent towards me. I pulled away. He was gaunt, his hair was growing back from being shaven, he had a straggly beard, he smelled of old sweat. He did not feel like my father at all.

  Noticing the gaping faces of Banno Didi and the others, he said, “This is Lipi, my wife. And her daughter, Ilavati. We will call her Ila, now she is my daughter too.” Before he could say anything more, Ram Saran began to shuffle off and then broke into a run saying something too incoherent for us to understand.

  Dada came back from the clinic at a pace much slower than Ram Saran’s and found my father going through the house, remarking on this and that, the woman and her baby in the outbuilding. I stood at the edge of the kitchen courtyard, able neither to go any closer to the outbuilding nor to stop staring at it. Lipi came out now and then to the outbuilding verandah casting around for help. Banno Didi muttered, “If that woman thinks she can order me to bring her hot water and all the rest, she’s wrong.”

  Dada disappeared with my father into his own bedroom, the door closed behind them. The woman came to the verandah again and spotted me across the courtyard. She called me—not by my name, but with a gesture—and I walked slowly towards her. In the slant of her eyes she resembled my mother, in other ways not at all. Where my mother had been slender and small-built, this woman was stocky. She was not pretty, like my mother, nor anything as stylish. She wore a coarse white-and-brown sari which flapped over her ankles, and her head was partly covered with it. Her nose was pierced with a dull gold stud. A few bangles and a twisted red thread around her neck. The parting of her tightly tied hair was filled with red sindoor. As I approached she said in Hindi, “Do you know, for me this is like being in a new school. Will you help me? Tell me where the bathroom is. And the kitchen.”

  My father summoned the barber and sat outside with a towel round his neck, having his beard shaven. He turned to me, his face covered with foam, and said, “Go to the clinic, Dada needs you there. He says you go on house calls together. That is good. It is valuable to know how people suffer.”

  My grandfather did have a house call to make and we sat through the tonga ride without speaking. I fixed my eyes on the horse’s ears. They were white, though the rest of the horse was dark brown. The tonga-walla yelled at passersby to move out of the way and clanged his bell against the wooden sides of the carriage.

  Dada cleared his throat and said over the clopping of hooves, “It will take time, but one day you might be glad of little Ila’s company. A sister.”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “A friend, then. You will grow up together.”

  After Dada and I were back at the clinic, Lisa McNally and Boy appeared with tea and hot chocolate even though it was not yet teatime. There were also three pieces of gingerbread cake. News of my father’s second wife had reached Lisa and as soon as she came in, she said, “Batty, Batty, Batty! Wonders will never cease! The Buddhist has married again. Tell me all this minute, I insist.”

  “Ah, Lisa, she seems a pleasant person. I am sure it will be good for all of us to have another woman around the house. Too many men make a mob.”

  “Much younger than our Nek, I hear? Younger even than Gayatri? And what is she? A Nepali?”

  Piecing together what I overheard in the clinic and what I know from my father’s letters home, I have understood that from Benares my father had gone eastward, to Calcutta, where he remained for a month or so, and after that further north, towards the Himalaya. His destination was the Buddhist monasteries of Sikkim, but by this time he had run through much of the money my grandfather had sent him, and was tired and ill. He stopped walking and took trains, but where the railhead ended he had to start walking again. He fell in with a group of other pilgrims he had met on the train. His feet were already badly blistered and the air was so cold and dry that his fingers were oozing blood through cracks in the skin. He bought a thick shawl with the last of his money which he used as a wrap during the day and as a blanket at night, but it did not keep him warm enough when sleeping outdoors.

  The others walking with him were much hardier: they were accustomed to the cold and the altitude. They moved faster. They became small, distant figures on the next hill even as my father was wheezing his way up the first. He stopped at a tea stall somewhere on the banks of a river. There was fire in his chest, he could not breathe, his head hurt so terribly he felt his skull cracking. He had passed gorges, waterfalls, peaks incandescent in sunlight, monasteries—all the sights for which he had waited his entire life—yet he was aware of nothing but the pain in his chest. His rib cage had turned into red-hot iron hoops against which his lungs pushed for air. At the tea stall the man offered him a corner for the night and lit a fire. He gave my father an extra blanket as well as tea and steaming barley gruel for which he would not take money. For the first time in days, my father was warm, but still his breath rattled in his chest and he had to doze all night sitting up because he coughed without pause the moment he lay down.

  When he woke he found himself surrounded by a large Indian family, originally from the Kumaon, they said. Sunauli, at the Nepal border. My father told them of Rai Chand, of Rozario & Sons’ shop in Nainital in the old days. After that they would not listen to a word of refusal from him: he was almost family. In fact they did believe one of their relatives had worked for Rai Chand! They did not live too far away, they said, they insisted they would take him with them. It was at their house, weak and asthmatic, that my father encountered the woman who was to become his second wife.

  “A hill woman? A village girl?” Lisa McNally said, as softly as she could, but still not softly enough.

  “Maybe, maybe not—she has only just arrived, Lisa. How would I know? She speaks Hindi, and seems educated. No English, though.”

  “Did they fall in love? Really one never knew Nek had it in him to be romantic after Gayatri. He was so devoted to her—well, he certainly was when he went all the way to Delhi to propose marriage. Remember how surprised you were? Nek Chand the Ascetic who had loved his teacher’s daughter without a word for years! And now he has done it again.”

  “I am not sure your romantic fantasies are correct, Lisa. From what Nek told me, he felt . . . what did he say? An infinite sense of gratitude. Also compassion. Compassion is a good thing. I’m proud of my son. And he said rage. He felt rage at her situation.”

  Lisa snorted. “Stop being sarcastic. Compassion’s good for kittens, Batty R, it doesn’t make for happy marriages. Now you’ll ask me how would I know, having never entered into holy matrimony? But I do know, Batty, a girl knows these things. And with a child! Whose child?” She leaned forward, avid.

  “Lipi was the youngest son’s widow. Bad luck, they thought her—a woman whose husband dies young. She has that little girl—if it had been a son, the family might have treated her better. She tended to Nek, brought him his food and so on. He saw her all day around the house, slaving. It occurred to him that this was what the Buddha had intended all along.”

  “I thought the Buddha had abandoned his wife. For his Search.”

  “I have to get acquainted with my son all over again, Lisa. I don’t understand so many of the things he says, all these books he reads. Living meditation, he calls it. What do Christians call it? They must call it something, they have a name for most things. He is not just following Buddhism, he says he is living it.”

  “You don’t marry to serve God, Batty.”

  The day after his return, my father came to me with a decision: I was to call his new wife Maji. That was what they called mothers in Lipi’s part of the world.

  I made a decision too. I would never call her anything at all.

  My father was charged with a new z
est for life. He met old colleagues and friends he had not seen for months. Mukti Devi had been released from jail while he was on his travels and he started again his crack-of-dawn walks with her group. He went back to his job at the college. He started writing articles for newspapers. He bought three copies of the paper when the first of his articles came out—it was an essay about the beginning of his journey, when he left Muntazir and began walking to the next village with no fixed destination beyond.

  “The world thought it was an unbalanced thing to do, but anyone who is truly spiritual is both mad and selfish. So many great seekers have spurned family and children, left them bereft for years on end: Was not the Buddha similarly guilty? And yet, would anyone say that it was a mistake for him to have left? How many millions over how many generations have been saved because he had the strength to sacrifice his family? My own misguided quest ended in failure of sorts: I learned at the feet of great masters, but my attention wandered. My back ached. My insect bites itched. In short I discovered I was human and pitiful and my physical needs were greater than my spiritual hunger. These are bitter things for me to confess but necessary: the first necessity in the quest for knowledge is truth.”

  And so on and so forth. But it did impress the editor of the paper, a pious man with nationalist inclinations who sensed that his readers were hungry for celebrations of austerity. He asked my father to do a series of essays on his travels: what adversity had taught him, what he had found out about the hamlets he had spent time in. My father came back from work, ate a small meal, hardly speaking to anyone, then disappeared into the outbuilding and soon after, the hammering on his typewriter began. If the child cried or I persisted with my gun, he complained that there was so much noise he could not hear himself think. The clack-clack-clack from his impatient fingers chopped up the birdsong at dusk and went on until the owls’ tentative hoots were silenced too. He emerged only at dinnertime, his hair standing on end, his eyes blazing with thoughts and ideas he could not communicate to anyone else in the house.

  I knew instinctively that it was important for my father’s new wife to please me. Lipi would praise me when I had done nothing worth noticing, she would tell Ila that she must grow up and be like me. She would lay out fresh clothes on my bed before I got back from school, and after I had washed and changed I would go to the dining room and find that she was waiting for me there. One day when I saw the plate of puffed-up poori and tomato-red aloo she placed before me, I said, “It was the same thing yesterday. Banno Didi knows I don’t like that.”

  “You ate it so happily, I thought . . .”

  In a dim, unarticulated way I sensed even at that age that there was something pitiable about Lipi’s efforts to fit in and make everyone happy. For the first time in my life I had a sense of my own power.

  I pushed back my chair and got up. “Lisa Aunty will give me cake.”

  The next day, as I had anticipated, Lipi had made sure there was cake for me in the afternoon. She waited, watching me chew each mouthful, and I had to turn my face away so that I would not feel stared at.

  “How is the cake?” she said. She had a low voice with a lilt. “Ram Saran got it from Landour Bakery, he said it’s the one everyone in this house likes.”

  I kicked the chair leg and didn’t answer until I had finished my mouthful. “It’s all right, but Lisa Aunty’s is better. She makes it herself.”

  I was half out of the room when I saw Lipi reach out for the rest of the cake. She took a bite, such a big bite that her mouth was stuffed to bursting. She could barely chew, she moved her swollen cheek as if she were a frog. She managed to swallow that mouthful and another. She sniffed hard as she chewed, even so, her nose dripped. I stood there staring, not able to go, nor to stop her as she ate all the pieces on the plate, then I escaped into the courtyard. There were sounds of retching interrupted by words in a language I could not understand.

  I ran out of the house, down the road, past the river towards the railway line, and flung myself down in the grass by the cutting where Dinu had shot a man. I buried my head in the prickly grass. A train clattered by. I looked up, my eyes blurred with my tears. A goods train. A few yards away, an old tonga horse wandered the scrubland where it had been abandoned. Its belly had caved in, one foreleg had a red, oozing wound. It paused its grazing and turned its head to regard me with its dark-lashed eyes, as if expecting something.

  My head crawled with as many thoughts as a hive full of bees. They buzzed and collided and fought with each other: my dislike of Lipi, my horror of what I had done to her, my need to run away and never see anyone at home again, my longing for my mother, my rage at her disappearance. I could make no sense of anything.

  I don’t know when it was that I dozed off, but I was woken by the sound of another train approaching. This one went past as slowly as a tonga. In the violet softness of dusk, the rectangles of the windows were bright yellow with light. I could see people inside, their faces striped by the bars of windows. The dining car appeared, lit up with men and women holding glasses and cups as if they were actors in a moving film. One day I would see my mother on that train: at that moment, it felt like a certainty. I would come every day at this time, now that I knew when the passenger train went that way, and eventually it would have to happen, she would be in one of the windows.

  The last carriage went past. The grass rustled. There was an enormous emptiness and silence as if the world were a dark blue tent which stars were starting to puncture and I was the only human being alive in it.

  18

  WHEN MY FATHER first came back with his new family, it felt as if the house was not ours any longer—we had visitors who simply would not leave. My grandfather and I were both careful, stiff, unnatural at home. He stayed away for long hours and so did I.

  But the weeks passed and turned into months, and we began to get used to the strangers. Dada took to chatting with Lipi, and he seemed to like sitting with her even if they were not talking much. As soon as he came home, she would tell him the things that had happened through the day and the new pranks Ila had thought up. Dada would beam and chuckle indulgently and pick up Ila to give her a kiss. I felt an anger I could not fathom. Once, when nobody was looking, I pinched her leg hard enough to draw blood. She claims she still has the scar.

  Dada came home one day at lunchtime with a package. I sidled up to him and turned it to examine the stamps. Nederlandsch-Indië? He pushed my hand away and said, “Not this one.” He held it out towards Lipi and said, “It has been so many months, and I realized I never gave the new bride a gift. Lisa helped me with this. I hope you will like it.”

  Lipi’s face turned into a round caricature of disbelief. My father might have rescued her from a life of drudgery and poverty, but he was not the kind of person who bought anyone gifts. The only things he had bought her since they came back were five white khadi saris with borders in green, saffron, and white, the colors of the Congress Party’s independence flag. These were what Lipi wore every day. You could never tell when she had changed because each sari was exactly like the other.

  Lipi undid the packet with great care so that she would not tear the paper even though it was just brown paper from the shop tied with a red ribbon. What emerged from the wrapping was a sari of the palest lime green, with tiny silver sequins all over it. Along with it was a box. Lipi opened it and broke into a disbelieving laugh at the slim rope of gold and the two long earrings that lay on red velvet inside. She took the box and went to the hat stand that stood in the verandah. It had three mirrors, big and small, on adjacent panels, angled differently, and she looked at herself in each one holding the earrings to her ears.

  But her luck had run out—at just this moment my father came back.

  “What’s this?”

  Lipi swiftly took the earring away from her ear, startled, even a little scared. She turned to Dada for help. My father held up a corner of the sari.

  “You don’t wear clothes of this kind, Lipi, you don’t like the
m,” my father said. “Where did you . . . ?”

  “It occurred to me that nobody had given her a wedding gift,” Dada said. “A father-in-law is supposed to bless his daughter-in-law with a big gift.”

  “It’s a nice thought, but you see, she wears only handspun saris. Didn’t the two of us vow to live our lives with simplicity, purity—Lipi? All this . . .” He gestured at the necklace and the sari. “All this is not for us.”

  Having pronounced his verdict, he went inside. We could hear him calling for a cup of tea. He came out for a minute and added as an afterthought, “She is free to wear what she likes, of course. These choices have to come from within.”

  Lipi had long since put the earrings and necklace back in their box. She stood by the table, absently stroking the new sari, and then sat down beside my grandfather. He lit his pipe, and although he was usually spiritedly conversational, he gazed into the distance with faraway eyes, his pipe a tiny smoking volcano. The smell of his tobacco wafted across the verandah.

  Lipi began fiddling with a bit of knitting, only pausing when two people, a man and a boy, appeared at the gate calling out, “Golak Bhai, bring out the grinding stones. Let’s give them some life.” They knew their way around, they came every few months to resurface the heavy, flat stones on which Golak ground spices. They went to the back of the house towards the courtyard and after a few minutes came the sound of chisel hitting stone. A rapid, irregular rat-tat-tat. They would chisel in fish, waves, flowers, until there was a delicate arabesque of indentations all over the stones for the turmeric and chili to be ground against. I ran to the courtyard to watch the patterns emerge.

  In my letters to my mother, I wrote about my animals. There was another dog now, who had wandered in one day as a puppy and decided to stay. Rikki’s puppies were to have been called Tikki and Tavi, but since she had none, this new dog claimed the name Tavi. I said nothing about Lipi or the child to my mother, only that my father was back from his travels now. I was afraid that if my mother came to know there was another mother in the house, she would never come back.