by Shruti Swamy
From this time onward, I became friends with Radha. “Don’t even ask her, she won’t help you,” Farnaz said when first she saw me standing at the door with my work in my hand, hoping for Radha to answer. But Radha did open the door for me, perhaps to rebuke Farnaz’s warning. After that, instead of going to the room with the other girls, I would walk down the corridor and knock quietly on her door. As often as not, she would not answer, she would not even move from where she sat, which was on the floor, surrounded by her open books and her notes, and several grubby sheets of paper where she made soft notes with a pencil and worked the complex differential equations that also populated her dreams. I didn’t feel rebuffed. I understood the space she needed for her studies and for her mind to grow, to grow like a tree with its roots moving downward and its branches moving upward and outward. That was work the tree did alone, and in silence. If she did not open the door I would sometimes return to my room, or sometimes, craving a human voice, I would go to the room of the women with the same question I had taken to Radha, asking one of the older girls for help—freely given, with gentleness but with haste. But Radha was a patient teacher, like my father had been, carefully guiding me from one step to the next. It was years later when I realized that this ability, seemingly as ordinary as water, was another facet of her intelligence, for her mind allowed her not just the vital leaps from one plane of knowledge to the next, but also the capacity to move down to the mind she spoke to and sought to instruct. What had once been a pretext for company now became a need; or if not a need, then a pleasure, because I loved the warmth her voice took on when she discussed the problem, I loved being able to use the sharpness of her mind to cut through my work; though I did not exactly wield it, I understood what it might be like to. If when we finished, she turned back to her work, I left, though she never asked me to: as she returned to her chaotic pile of books and papers I felt as though I were witnessing something so private that I left of my own accord.
After a while I began to visit her later in the evening. She put away her studying neatly before she began to talk though the day’s problem, and after we solved it, she offered me some of the biscuits she kept to eat in her room, as she often missed the mess hall meal. Knowing her poverty to be even greater than my own, I would break a biscuit and eat the half; she herself did not eat more than one or two. We didn’t eat together in the mess hall, but I started to watch for her at dinner: if she did not appear, I would save some food to share with her later in the night.
“I don’t mind being hungry,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
Still, she accepted the chapati I had folded in a handkerchief for her, then tore it and ate half. The other half was for me. As we ate, we sat in a silence we had grown between the two of us. I got the feeling that Radha was surveying the things she had planted in her mind earlier in the evening, to make sure they had taken root, or perhaps just for the pleasure of seeing them alive inside her.
“What is it today?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s the matter, no?”
Yes, but I hadn’t wanted to tell her. We all collected these small injustices, the professor who never called on us though we were the only one with a raised hand, the mistake that the professor deducted points for, but had let a similar one slide on our male neighbor’s test. Radha got it the worst. A rumor circulated that she did favors for the physics professor; her “mannish” looks were discussed just out of her earshot; they mocked her English; once, a boy had confronted her, humiliated to the point of tears at his failing grade, humiliated by her, and her eyes flickered with something like pity. These insults, against others and ourselves, were the kind of thing we shared in Saheli’s room along with the consoling teasing and the gossip, but since she never visited we never heard her version.
“When Prof. Sundaram gave me back my test today, he asked me in front of everyone if I was ashamed of myself.”
“What was your mark?” asked Radha.
“Eighty-nine.”
She didn’t say anything, but her eyes widened.
“What?” I said. “It’s not bad.”
“It’s not good.”
“You’re taking his side? Others did much worse.”
“Boys.”
“Yes, boys. He said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Made such a big fuss to be allowed in. Now here you are, taking some chap’s spot, some chap who needs this degree that you’re obtaining as timepass. Ruining some poor fellow’s life for your timepass.’ And of course, no one else said anything. They agreed with him.”
“What did you say?”
“What could I say? I was worried I would start crying.”
“Did you?”
“No.” Not then. I had held my tears in until I reached my room, and then cried into the creased pallu of my sari.
“Why don’t you give up dance? Why are you trying to do both?”
“Does it bother you that I dance?”
“No, of course not. But you can’t do both well.”
“I can do one well,” I said.
“So you’ve already chosen dance. Why don’t you give up your studies?” I understood her question: I was not like the other girls in our college, I had not bothered to make myself exceptional. Why come here, then, she must have wondered, if not to be exceptional? But it was simple. There might have been easier ways to find a quiet room for myself, to live, for a time, alone, not with my father and brother or with my husband’s family, keeping my mind and body free of all but the responsibilities I gave them, that of my dancing, and to a lesser extent my studies, but if there was I had not found it. In this room, so private and singular, my life was full of dance, for if there was any inclination I would spring into movement, I would utter the bols or rhythmic sums under my breath as I worked—and if I did neither, then there was always the possibility of movement, of rhythm, as though, by virtue of my interest the space had become charged with it. After my studies, I thought I might find an engineering job that would allow me to live alone, but I thought this vaguely, with none of its difficult particulars.
“Do you too think I’m ruining the life of some poor chap?”
“No, not that—your life and this imaginary boy’s have nothing to do with each other. Only, you should work harder, Vidya. You know they’re waiting for you to fail, so why should you listen to what they say about you?”
“It’s so easy for you!” To my shame, I cried this out like a child.
“Easy?” she said quietly. “Do you know what people say about me?”
I shouldn’t have been, but I was startled. She had wrapped her arms around her knees, her gaze cast down. How alone she was. How far away from home. Other girls had come from just as far, but they had made a home in Saheli’s room, mothered one another and let themselves be mothered, as Radha had not. She had no one but herself, her mind, her textbooks, her studies, her ambition—and, I thought proudly, me.
It was late, very late at night. Our curfew had long passed. But I had a strong desire to be outside with Radha and to walk where we had walked before to the small temple in the dark. I thought perhaps our arms would brush against each other in the dark. I don’t know why I felt this way. The day’s heat had been so intense that it had almost made me sick, I had begun to get the first pains of a bad headache, but in the evening I took a bath and felt cured. Some breaths of evening air came in through Radha’s open window, and I went to stand beside it, smelling the air, which was freshened by evening as though by rain. A feeling was coming into my body that I had no name for. It had a kind of wideness, a good feeling, that moved up and outward from my center.
“Radha,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you ever miss your home?”
“No,” she said, and then, “I miss my sisters. Not all of them, just my eldest.”
“What about your mother?”
“No, I don’t miss my mother.”
“Why not?”
“She’s a tired woman.” For a moment she was silent. “Anyway, if you miss your home, go visit, you can take the bus there and see your mother tomorrow.”
“Yes.” I hadn’t gone home once since I’d started staying in the college.
“I’ll come see you dance,” she said suddenly. “But after exams are finished. Will you have a performance then? Or, maybe you can make a special performance just for us.”
“Us?”
“The other girls would like it too,” she said.
I wanted to dance for her.
When I parted from Radha that night we were both half asleep. We were sitting on her floor so drowsy speaking of the rivers of our childhoods, mine the “ocean” I had not returned to since the summer my mother had, with her swinging anger, broken the ties between my father and his family, Radha’s the silt-silver Bagmati, which she had believed infinite until she had arrived in Bombay and seen for the first time the true infinity of the sea. She was allowed to swim freely, a safe distance away from the higher-caste ghat, and she looked at me with surprise when I told her I’d been forbidden. What did it feel like? “Oh,” she said, “quite lovely, cool and weightless. If you let your body go limp you could float on the surface but I could never quite understand how to do this. My legs were always dipping under, or my head.” I walked down the dark hall, half asleep, thinking of this. I lay in bed until my bed seemed to be a boat on water, rocking side to side. It was a river I moved on, alone, a shining flat of water that made me squint my eyes if I kneeled to look. If I lay back there was blue forever, just sky. But then the scene changed. Instead of lying on my back looking up, I was standing at a window looking down at myself bent and prone on the ground. I was very far away from myself, looking down, but I could see my eyes staring open and one of my legs twisted back at an unnatural angle. I was standing and looking at myself in horror, yet I felt I must look. Look! I shouted to myself from the ground, though my lips did not move. Look! I woke with a cry and it was morning, though only a few hours had passed since I lay down to sleep. Still, I had no desire to return to sleep and pulled myself out of bed. I sat at the edge of it, taking in deep breaths of morning, until dawn came.
After many months I did go home. I dressed myself carefully in my dearest item of clothing, indeed, my most prized possession: a yellow dress given to me by an elder girl who had noticed my admiration of it—my desire, which I could not disguise, though it embarrassed me—and given it to me as a birthday gift several weeks later, like a mother would. The dress was not made of cheap cotton but a lush and silky polyester. It pained me to accept it, and after putting it on at the urging of the girl I folded it carefully and placed it on one of the many shelves of the dressing table each room came equipped with, glass shelves that in my room remained mostly empty: my paltry possessions occupied just one. I had a couple saris, with their petticoats and blouses, one old blue fit-frock that had once held a tiny bit of glamour, but had become thin with age, almost transparent, and the skirt of it now too short anyway, as it was several years old. And my books, carefully covered in newspaper, and my ghungroos. Atop the dressing table I kept a single decoration, a branch from a tree I did not recognize, upon which had grown many rows of neat yellow berries that had dried into dull gold, resembling the brass of my bells. This branch had been presented to me by Radha, and I was impressed by the eye that had first found its beauty, which arose from the straight orderly nature of the berries, and the wild dark curves of the wood, a beauty I surely would have missed.
Absent from my room was a picture of my mother. I did not keep one in my room—that is to say, I did not hang one on the wall, where she would have gazed benevolently under a pane of clean glass, glass cleaned by me and garlanded by me, and marked with a smear of kumkum and sandalwood paste after the pujas I performed to honor my dead. With no such picture my room was the room of a mothered girl, and so they did not look at me with pity. I was as ordinary to them as they were to each other: for the joy of being ordinary I gladly sacrificed the memory of my mother: only in private did I pull out a small photograph of her that I had found some years before, and measure my face against it as I often did, noting, as I grew, our faces parting, though once they had been alike: my nose grew, my lips stretched, my cheeks plumped over her glamorous hollows. In secret I imbibed this image; almost compulsively I took out the photograph when I was alone, looking at it so long it would print itself on the backs of my eyelids in reverse when I closed them. Too late, I realized that a static image would replace the living ones I had tried to salvage from the years, but they could not be consulted like a photograph, and so degraded quickly, her final face, the one that loomed large over my own and smiling with that strange kindness, was replaced by the face in the photograph, whose eyes, reaching out through the screen of years were so powerful they seemed to overshoot the viewer—looking past her into something unseen, unknown, and unspeakably far.
I put on my new dress. In it I felt so different from the girl who had left home, a village girl though she lived in a city, unsophisticated and unwise, and in the mirror in the bathroom I beheld a shy, slender grown-up in perfect lemon yellow; no matter how dark, the reflection pleased me more deeply than it ever had before. The same girl who had given me the dress had also waxed my legs for me, taking each foot in her soft hand as she ripped the hot cloth from my calves, and though the pain was quick and real, it was the efficient tenderness with which she held each foot in turn that pricked my eyes with tears. When she was finished my legs were dull and gleaming, like an object made of brass.
I wanted to show myself to Radha. The other girls had seen me and teased me in a way that had heightened my embarrassment and my pleasure, but it was Radha’s reaction to my transformation that would solidify it: if she laughed at me, I would feel foolish and abandon it, but if she admired me, well, it would be me then, truly, the city sophisticate who had slumbered so long inside the village bumpkin. But on this day, Radha was not in her room; possibly she was at the temple, as she had also been absent on the day they had waxed my legs and I had put on the dress and twirled in front of them, the other girls, so she did not have this image of me and perhaps never would.
From where I boarded the bus it was almost empty and I was able to find a seat. As the bus moved through the city it began to gather bodies, then more. The seats were quickly filled and then the aisles, then a bouquet of people bloomed from each door, front and back. The bus passed through a posh part of the city where the streets were wide and leafy, and where there was a large park with grass where children played, then as the bus moved farther on the streets became more and more crowded, mimicking the bus, crowded not just with bodies but by vehicles of all sorts, cars and motorcycles and rickshaws and bicycles, and vendors dragging their carts to more optimal locations, and children begging at the stopped and stalled vehicles, shooed away by their occupants. Here the streets began to take on the texture of home, like a well-worn garment one has cast away, and then, after many months, decided to put back on. It didn’t quite fit now: it was constricting: and you looked at yourself in the garment and wondered how you had suffered for so many years in such an ill-fitting thing, but even still, there was a sweet feeling, one of pain to see yourself in it again. New saffron unfolded in windows at the corners of buildings, wide cotton flags that were already beginning to dirty at their edges with the soot and grime of the city. Beyond this, it seemed that little had changed. I elbowed my way off the bus, leaping from the crowded door as the vehicle slowed but didn’t fully stop, and walked down the familiar street to the chaali. The vegetable vendor called out to me, sounding offended that I had not stopped to say hello, and when I did stop and offer an apology he smiled and sold me a few karelas for supper, admiring my grown-up air, which he couldn’t help but take at least some credit for; he had, after all, fed me for so many years with his vegetables, of which, he said, he had always saved for me the very best and at the fairest prices. It was late afternoon and the Manekji
chaali was flush in a rich light, the neighbors’ laundry slung across its shoulders, brightly colored and flapping, some deep in borrowed wet colors, some already dry in the heat. Boys were playing in the courtyard, and, lifting my eyes to the fourth floor, I could see the black square of our doorway, though not quite through it, the door propped open to let in the scant breeze. The sight of the open door struck within me a feeling of joy and dread. Someone, then, was inside.
As I climbed the stairs I passed two neighbor aunties, en route to a kitty-party at a third’s; the two lived in flats on the top floor, with the nicest views and bathrooms that were equipped with private toilets, though the third lived a floor below, in a darker flat that nonetheless was more expensive because it had more rooms. I remembered this now, though I could not remember who told me, if I had ever been told. The women were dressed nicely, wearing their real mangalsutras with the full gold. They seemed surprised to see me—Look at you! How you’ve grown! And your lovely dress, we almost didn’t recognize you—echoing the same feeling I myself had, that of a bride returned for the first time to her natal village. These women, fierce and critical gossips, under whose gaze I had many times been uncomfortably caught after my actions proved me more and more strange, took my hands in theirs gladly, clucking over me as though a daughter, and the warmth of their reception, though it was given automatically—they greeted me as they would have greeted any girl returned home, no matter how distant or prodigal—moved me so much I had to will myself not to cry. Each was old enough to be my mother, and both had known her—but even she wouldn’t have greeted me like this. They stroked the polyester admiringly, taking the skirt of the dress between their fingers. “Your father and brother are living like two bachelors up there,” they said. “You must come home more often, they need a girl’s presence—they need a feminine presence to soften their lives. And your brother still too young to be married. And what are you doing over there, studying what? Child, someone must tell you, you’ll ruin yourself this way, no one wants a daughter-in-law who has so much education, someone must explain to your father—”