All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  It must be getting hot already in Muntazir—or is the springtime there still? You must be in your cool room, drinking your icy G&T on the sly & slipping a few drinks down the stairs to my father-in-law. One day someone will call him the Drunk Doctor & it will all be your fault! Such a puzzle of a man, so very elegant, ever civilized & considerate, yet hard to know. He found a hundred ways to make me feel better in the days when I first came to Muntazir, still crushed by the death of my father & cut up about being married off in such a hurry. He could see from the start that we were not well matched, NC & I. He didn’t get into battles with his son, how could he? Come between a man & his wife! Tauba, tauba!

  But he found many ways to tell me he understood my misery. Gave me books, a desk to sit & work at, words of praise if I made anything at all: whether a rogan josh or a painting. I didn’t find a way to repay his kindness—he has great self-sufficiency—it’s hard to see what one could do to make a difference to him. You are able to—somehow you’ve always known how to make him smile. You have such a gift, I envy you.

  Tell me all the news. Is Dinu behaving himself? I worry he will make Myshkin grow up too soon. You say he reads & re-reads my letters in the clinic. How happy that makes me, & also how terribly sad. I wonder what you are doing at this moment. I worry about you too, managing everything on your own. You have so much to do & to add to it, my father-in-law and his wounded heroes. WS laughed & laughed when I told him about how the two of you patch up revolutionaries on the sly. He says it’s lucky the Dutch don’t have to deal with Lisa & Batty or their East Indies empire would certainly collapse.

  I am folding in a scrap of a silk scarf with this letter. I hope it reaches. It is meant to match your green silk dress.

  Write to me. Soon. I need your words.

  With much love

  Gay

  2 July 1938

  Dearest Lis,

  I have received both your letters—they came together. You’ve no idea what they mean to me—I’m parched earth waiting for rain. I pine for news. It is a miracle any letters reach across all these seas & continents, I should be grateful only a few get lost. These letters to you have become a diary for me, you know, I almost forget I am writing to you, just scribble & scribble over many days. A letter is chatter in written form, Rabi Babu told me, when he sat on the deck writing one on that old journey. He said everyone has a special notebook, it has loose leaves, and it is for writing to which nobody attaches value. It is for writing that turns up disheveled, no turban on its head or shoes on its feet. It goes where no questions are asked for coming without reason, its whole reason for arriving is to chatter aimlessly.

  That’s what my letters to you are. They are me running down to your guesthouse without purpose or need, just to talk. I never know when I start a letter how many days it will take me to finish it. That’s wrong, isn’t it, & you must find it annoying, all my rambling. Do you? Now I can see you getting up from your chair & stomping out of the room saying, “I’ll come back when you get your head in place, Gay.” You never had room for mawkishness.

  But I am in a sad, mad, bad temper. I was not there for Myshkin’s tenth birthday for the first time in his life. How I used to wait for the 30th of June every year, to see his starry eyes when I held a wrapped present towards him in the morning. Instead, this time I went to a temple to pray for him. I had not stepped inside a temple except into the courtyards for the dances. But I felt the need to do something, so I woke early and when I walked down the street there were women putting out leaf cups filled with flowers and incense on their doorsteps. I never pray & I felt an impostor, I looked for a place to leave my slippers, but a man standing around there gestured to say I need not be barefoot. I suppose he could see right away I didn’t know the first thing about praying at a temple in Bali (or elsewhere) but he didn’t stop me. I was tongue-tied & I fumbled with the offerings, but maybe God, if he or she exists, understood what I was trying to say. My body is torn into a thousand pieces with the pain. How could I do this to him? Will I be able to live with it? At this moment it is unbearable to think of my callousness. He’ll hate me forever. (No, he won’t, he’ll forgive me when he grows up.)

  I cannot write any more today. I will try and come back.

  Two days later: I am posting this, Lis, with nothing further added. I haven’t written for so long I want to send you something quickly, but seem unable to write words that will even qualify as aimless chatter. On some days I feel heavy, can’t make myself get up from my cot in the morning, can’t muster up the appetite for work or talk. A blackness inside me that will pass—it is missing poor M’s birthday that has started this fit of bottomless gloom. Tell me if you baked a cake for him and if he got a gift from his grandfather. I cannot bear to think of a little boy spending his tenth birthday with neither of his parents by his side. I have done this to him.

  With all my love,

  G.

  Sept. 1938

  Dearest Lis,

  So many changes! To think NC has come back with a new wife. How will she be with Myshkin? What did you think when you met her? Is she a kind person? Will she be gentle to him? They say a loving woman heals many wounds—I just didn’t have it in me, I suppose, to be a loving woman. I was always the one causing the wounds. No, I was not cut out to be a mother— strange that there are so many opposing pulls & tugs in us—it is not as though I don’t miss Myshkin achingly, fiercely. I do. But it is not a constant missing. I am glad to have time to work. There I’ve said it! I can confess it to nobody but you. At times when he was tiny & ailing I forgot his medicines & his meal was late because I was daydreaming or doing who knew what. Then I’d spend a week eaten up with guilt, spoiling him till he was thoroughly confused. He is so easily turned into a quiet mourner who goes into a shell. Does he still hide in that broken carriage, I wonder. He’s always thought that nobody knows he goes there.

  But to marry a village woman with a small child—madness! (Oh, but each time I write these things I want to scratch them out—who am I to criticize? When I’ve done what I’ve done? I’ve forever lost my right to pass judgment on anyone.) Myshkin has not told me about any of this. It’s over a year since I left home. Myshkin at first sounded so impatient about coming here, & now he hardly asks. I suppose he’s lost hope, or forgotten. Children tend to forget things quickly. He writes once a month or so and does not sound unhappy, which is a great blessing. It allows me to work & plan for the future. I have saved some amount already & I think that by the early part of next year, or at most the middle, I will be able to go—or perhaps send you the money and you can bring him!

  My thoughts change every minute, such a mess, my head. Can it be that there is still no news of Brijen? How is it that people think he has killed himself? That is a demented notion & it makes me go wild with anxiety even to think about. He couldn’t have done himself harm, he is not like that. I need news of him, please tell me anything you find out. There is no other way I have of getting news . . . one of the miseries of leaving has been not being able to write to him for news—where would I write? To his home address? There is no choice now but to tell you—I said nothing then & I don’t know if I have the courage now—will you forgive me? Will you think of me in the old way when you know? But you guessed, did you not, about Brijen? You know me too well not to have had suspicions.

  For so many years it was only about music & the stories he wrote & my painting, finding a sympathetic soul next door where there were none. Someone for whom music was the point of living, as painting was for me. I can’t put my finger on when it changed—at least two years ago—it stole up on me. I don’t know when it was that I found we had a different way of looking at each other, seeking each other out. I would feel his eyes on me and when I turned towards him, he would hold my gaze as if there was an invisible thread between our eyes, twanging with life. On the days when my head & heart felt as if they would explode from suffocation at home, it was a relief to find him, to know he was next door when I fell asle
ep & when I woke. Yes, he did sing me to sleep from his roof. Sometimes whole ragas through the late night, Bageshwari & Bahar, I could not fall asleep without. I lay in bed long after everyone else (despite Banno’s endless sarcasm) right till Myshkin went on & on with his cycle bell—because Brijen used to sing the Bhatiyar from his roof. He would start before the sun rose & go on through the change of light, the songs of birds, while I lay there listening.

  Lis, do not think me an adulteress, it did not feel like that. I had never been in love before, it hit me like a hammer. For a long time I could make no sense of what had happened to me & there was nobody I could talk to. Not even you. What would you have said? What would any sane friend have said? I did not tell a soul, Brijen included. Nothing was ever spoken between us—it didn’t have to be—and the first time he kissed me it was without a word said, as if all had been mutually, miraculously settled. Our lives had been converging over the years to this & this point alone. No time for the niceties of proposals & plans. I did not stop to think about anything—home, husband, child—who might overhear us or see us. Not one thing. The Dodge stopped beside me when I was out in the market one day. He was alone in it, and even before he had driven us off far into the fields, his hands were recklessly off the wheel and all over me. Are you filled with horror? Revolted? I should have been.

  When I came back home I shut the bedroom door & took off all my clothes and stood before the mirror. There was a stranger in it. A woman with smoldering red embers for eyes. I felt as tender and bruised as a rain-sodden rose. I scanned my legs, my hips, my shoulders—all of me—as calmly as I might examine a stone sculpture on a wall. But with a racing heart. Why was I looking that way at myself? I feel almost ashamed now—I think I needed to know what he had seen. My body had been nothing but a thing for a lifetime, like a disregarded, uncared-for, unloved house I had lived in so long I hardly noticed it. To see for myself what a man had seen and desired! I don’t know how long I was in front of the mirror that day. I locked myself in for many days after that, sitting before the mirror, drawing my own body. Every stroke of my pencil on the paper made me feel his touch.

  I’m sorry, Lisa, to be writing all of this—do you think me crude and disgusting? I may never post this letter. But I need to tell you, who else can I tell! It was only with Brijen that I understood there is nothing well-mannered or pretty about love, it is raw and fierce, it’s not poems and songs, it is torn-off clothes, snapped buttons & sweat & blood & body parts & it scorches whatever is in its way. It destroyed all that I knew.

  How I managed to keep my good-wife face on after that is beyond me. I suppose I wasn’t entirely successful—things grew so much worse between NC and me, do you remember, you asked me why that was so? And I began to think it was altogether too dangerous when I spent every single minute of that last summer holiday in the hills longing for Brijen—I was happy enough but it was disastrously incomplete.

  And at the same time, on that holiday, I could see I was already starting to retreat from him. One afternoon when everyone was dozing in our vacation cottage, I sat watching one of those fat round clouds come down onto an opposite hill. You know how clouds in the mountains come down low and make everything misty & romantic. So it was. Then it started to fade away & the hill became visible again & with that, I felt I could see Brijen more clearly somehow—what I had been trying not to see for many months, but now I could no longer un-see. Even as I pined for him, I could tell I was tiring of him—his wit & waywardness, all that charming irresponsibility, his conviction that the world revolved around him, his ever-tousled hair & fine muslin clothes—the very things I adored & what made him who he was—I could see its self-love & I was weary of it. It was as if a chain had begun to bite into my flesh. Suddenly that was Brijen to me.

  How contradictory I am, Lisa! These civil wars inside me are continuous and exhausting. One part of me fighting another with remorseless ferocity. I was still in love with him—and yet I wanted to be free of him. I did not love him, I have come to understand, I merely loved his addiction to me. I am not made for love. I want nobody. I need to be absolutely free. I am repelled by my indifference. I wish I were another kind of woman, a lovable one, not so cold and hard that I am hateful to myself. Maybe it is my own self-love that I saw in him and was disgusted by.

  The train journey down from the hills last summer—my father-in-law ill, poor Golak scuttling about the coach trying to medicate him—I could not stir myself to help or care. Why do we come to these agonizing crossroads where each fork leads to despair? Beryl had spent days in Muntazir and then each one of those days in the hills convincing me to go away to Bali with them—a chance at another life, the one I was meant for—she would make the arrangements, she would take charge, she said. I had never been more torn in two & never so sure . . . I knew at the end of the journey that my mind was made up. Brijen sat hunched over his knees when I told him I was going away. He left the room all of a sudden—not a word said—we hardly spoke after that—of course he took it as a betrayal. He had wanted to take me to Bombay with him, start a new life—as though that would make either of us happy. He is even less capable of loving than I am, only he has more delusions about himself. In his own eyes I am sure he was a romantic hero who was rescuing me. Imagine the hero’s annoyance with a heroine who does not want to be rescued!

  I laugh at the wrong times. I’m dangerous & evil, I ruin things, it would have been better if I had never been born, Lis! He doesn’t have my address here, even if he wanted to tell me where he is, he cannot. Will you give him my address when—if—he comes back?

  Tell me you understand. I did no wrong other than in my own head. Doesn’t everyone? I destroyed no families, not in the way I might have if I had stayed.

  With much love

  Gay

  24

  I HAVE NO MEMORY of how I had reached there but all at once, it seemed to me, I was in a market in the old city surrounded on all sides by vegetables, smells, people, cars, cycles, rickshaws. I stumbled along, colliding with people, flanked by tomatoes, beans, pumpkin, brinjals, heaps of scarlet chilies, yellow bananas strung across ropes—everything that was good and plentiful and promising about life. Shopkeepers shouted their lowest prices, they cried at me to stop and consider the redness of their melons and taste the sweetness of their mangoes, but their calls grated on my ears, the colors and smells made me nauseous. I would never want food again as long as I lived. My mouth was sour and dry, my head was pounding hard enough to blur my vision.

  I could not bring myself to unread my mother’s letter just as she could not make herself unsee Brijen’s true self. I directed a silent stream of curses at myself for reading those letters at all. Better by far to have followed my first instincts and thrown the packet unopened to the back of a cupboard. Why exhume the dead when corpses have a stench?

  Once when I was six or seven, Brijen Chacha crept up behind me in a half-lit room in Dinu’s house, and took my spectacles away. I could see nothing, I could only hear his drunk voice telling me he would not give them back. I went towards his shadowy form, reaching out for my glasses, and he retreated into the darkness, laughing, then emerged again asking me why I did not come and get the glasses before he broke them. The whole episode probably lasted a few seconds, and I know now it was only a prank, but that sensation of blind terror, as if I were drowning, did not leave for a long time. I had an intense fear of Brijen Chacha after that, retreating if I saw him. I can see now that I had no sense of the danger he actually represented.

  Would my mother have abandoned us if not for her affair with him? Was he responsible for the cataclysm in our lives?

  Over the next few weeks, struggling to understand, I went back to the Bengali novel I had been reading, by my mother’s contemporary Maitreyi Devi. This time, as I read of Amrita’s love affair with Mircea, I found myself reading it differently. It was no longer a book about forbidden love, it was the story of a young woman very like my mother, who fell in love not only with a
man but also with the idea of a different kind of life. Amrita spoke and I heard my mother’s voice. Where the book said Amrita I read Gayatri. I read of Amrita’s pain after her parents found out about the affair and it was as if I were a voyeur prying into the deepest recesses of my mother’s mind.

  Their homes were similar too. Amrita lived in a joint family home, as my mother’s house in Delhi had been: dozens of terraces, courtyards, verandahs. Rooms that had been added as the need arose. A maze of a house. As in my mother’s old home, there were uncles, aunts, and their families, poor relatives who had been given shelter, houseguests who stayed for months, visiting neighbors, servants. The house was like a big, watchful eye forever following Amrita with its gaze. She had to devise strategies to be with Mircea without arousing suspicion.

  The narrow corridor outside Mircea’s room leads to a verandah where the letterbox is. The postman puts letters into it, the letterbox is locked, and I have custody of the key. I open this letterbox two or three times a day and collect our letters. Although the post comes at set times, and I don’t need to keep opening the letterbox, I cannot resist. Several times a day I go down to see if there are letters in that box. Especially in the afternoon when the house is at peace—although not asleep—nobody sleeps in the afternoon in our house, everyone reads—afternoons are when I feel like going down in search of letters. I know why I want to do this, I have the brains to know. How much can I deceive myself? Although Mircea has said I am either foolish or a liar, I know I am neither. This afternoon I am convinced I need to go down and see if there are any letters . . . I find myself downstairs, I don’t know when I came. I see that Mircea has lifted his curtain and is standing at his door, saying, “So, did you find a letter?”