Something passed between us in that gaze. It was as though he had stepped inside me and plucked out some hurt. ‘I do not know your name,’ the Guru said softly, ‘but I shall call you Bhavani, because I see the goddess in all women. You too are a goddess, but you have forgotten your beauty, your strength, your spirituality.’
‘But what should I do about Pooonam?’ I asked, interrupting his mystic flow.
‘The world is full of people,’ he continued, ‘of Bush and Obama, of Modi and Gandhi, of Shahrukh Khan and Salman Khan. The skies are circled by spy satellites, the earth grips nuclear weapons in her bosom. The sea has secret submarines. Everywhere there is anger and aggression. But what can you do about it? What can most of us do about it?’
The young priest was at the door again, pleading for the Guru’s attention.
‘What can you do about it, Bhavani? Can you change the world?’
No, I nodded. I could not change the world.
‘But you can change your world,’ he continued. ‘Your world, your samsara, is about your family and your immediate duties. You have to fight like a mighty warrior to defend your world.’
Yes, I nodded again. He was right. I had to defend my family, my samsara.
‘And what is the mantra when things go wrong?’ he continued. ‘Shall I teach you the mantra?’
I nodded eagerly, consumed by the guru’s radiance, enthralled by his gentle, voluptuous voice. I have a thing about voices.
‘The mantra is this: there is no mantra. The mantra is silence.The secret is silence. When things go wrong, be silent, look within, and smile. Troubles pass; the world goes on. As long as you protect your samsara, do your duties.’
The lights went off. The light bulb flickered alive for a minute, then the room was dark again. I could hear the generator groaning, and the smell of diesel, but no lights.
The guru was whisked away by the impatient priest. He left a blur of luminous haze behind him. Alone, in that dark room, I looked at the river, at the half moon that hid behind the clouds. The world would go on.
Returning to the taxi I found the driver still listening intently to old film songs on the crackling car radio. I checked my mobile. No message from Suresh, or the twins. Had no one noticed my absence?
‘Find me a good hotel,’ I said to the taxi driver. ‘The very best.’
We drove up the hill to a new yoga spa resort. I watched the half moon that sheltered behind the clouds, and the river that wound like a silver ribbon through the hills. A spartan lobby and a luxurious bedroom, with wooden floors and soft pillows. I slept the sleep of the dead and awoke feeling as though I had just been born. As the morning mist crept through the hills, I paid my bill, declined the offer of a free yoga session, had some toast and jam and coffee, and set back for Delhi.
Back in Delhi, I booked myself into an expensive salon for a complete cosmetic makeover. For an Ayurveda facial. An ultra- rejuve hand-and-foot treatment. A haircolour. And a haircut, perhaps.
When I got married, my aunts had given me a ritual milk and turmeric bath. The local hairdresser had fixed a pin-on chignon, and I had a manicure pedicure and bleach, though the henna on my hands and feet had nuetralized that. But that was a long time ago. I deserved the best now, and I would get it.
At the salon, poring over the shade chart, I decided this wasn’t the time for surprises. Chestnut 5.5 again. A French manicure, and the same for my feet. ‘Why don’t you try something new, Madame?’ the hairdresser asked me. He’s called Daniyal, and has trained under Jayanti. The Jayanti. Pooonam’s ex-hairdresser. Manoviraj’s ex-girlfriend. ‘We all need a change, you know.’
Daniyal is plump, broadfaced, with a plume of green in his hair. His words struck a chord. ‘We all need a change,’ I repeated to myself, like a mantra. ‘We all need a change.’ It placed things in perspective. I decided to get my hair lowlighted in a glowing blonde-brown, with speckled highlights in the crown.
A sad-looking assistant deposited a pile of magazines on the chair beside me, all the newest women’s glossies. I read a short instructive piece on nail care and the dangers of buffing too much, and gave up halfway through a harangue—‘Crash-Dieting: Some Basic Cautions’. Adjusting my specs, I picked up a Femina. The staid, trusted periodical of my youth had endured a makeover. It carried precise instructions on ‘How to seduce your husband— Again!’ I flipped through the advertisements for lipsticks and shampoos and haircolour and tampons. Reading the girlie magazines, you would think it’s not enough to simply be born female. One has to work at it, ceaselessly refurbishing and reupholstering oneself and using the exact shade of foundation, simply to remain a woman.
I had a haircut as well, a bold departure from my boring pony tail. Daniyal layered it along the lowlights, and feathered the crown highlights, and gave it volume and bounce. He left some straggly curls to peep out here and there.
On another spool, even though the Guru had moved things to a different plane, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Valentine card. ‘The nice curve of your hips/the shape of your lips’. What sort of man would use the word ‘nice’ in a poem? ‘Nice’ hips??
Returning to the pages of Femina, I began reading a story titled ‘Silence’. It was about an army wife who discovered her out-of- town husband was having an affair. She went to her Ma-in-Law for advice. The canny old woman quoted a Sanskrit shloka to her. ‘Maunam Sarvarth Sadhanam,’ she told her heartbroken bahu. ‘Silence is always the most effective tool.’
The truth revealed twice, first through a Guru and then an epiphany in a women’s magazine. ‘Maunam Sarvarth Sadhanam.’
An Indian Woman is a goddess with many arms. One arm might wield a battleaxe while the other guilelessly holds a tender lotus bud. Red lacquer for my fingernails, and my toes too. I was a mighty warrior defending my Samsara, my world.
Switching on the TV, I found myself watching Omkara. It’s a Bollywood version of Othello, except that it’s set in the UP badlands. There’s something about Bollywood and the Bard of Avon that always works, maybe it’s all the coincidences and melodrama.
I had studied Shakespeare for my Correspondence Course BA degree. ‘Othello, A Quick Guide’ by Dr Ramji Lall. I remember this line I read in the kunji version of the play: That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give. I felt like Othello, only the opposite, if you know what I mean.
The dhobi presses our clothes in the servant quarters. There is another ironing board in the verandah behind the kitchen. I took the grey-bordered handkerchief there, and ironed it carefully. The steam iron hissed out surrogate tears, but I continued smiling. I returned to our bedroom and placed the handkerchief in the middle drawer of Suresh’s wardrobe, along with all the other handkerchiefs.
As for the red-and-gold embossed Valentine’s Day card with that pathetic poem about hips and lips, I stored it in the clear plastic folder I keep in my cupboard, along with all the other important and unimportant things that crowd my life.
Ghafoor’s son has set up a footpath stall in Chandni Chowk, selling bootlaces. He came to see me last evening with his father. They brought me a box of sweets, a kilo box of Habshi Halwa and a steel degchi with kewra-scented sevian ki kheer, to thank me and to celebrate Afzal’s new start in life. And the wedding in our family.
‘Bootlaces?’ I wondered. ‘Who buys bootlaces in this day and age? Is that still a good business to get into, Ghafoor bhai?’
He assured me that it is, and that a lot of people buy bootlaces, still.
I wondered about Afzal, and what he was really up to. It’s difficult to trust anybody anymore.
TODAY, THE DAY BEFORE THE WEDDING, A SPECKLED SNAKE SLITHERED across the back lawn and settled beside the swing. It was sunning itself sleepily in the grass when the mali discovered it and raised an alarm. Soon, everybody at 18 Dara Shikoh Marg had ventured out to observe it and comment on its species, length and purpose of visit. The secretaries, the PS and the PA, the security guards, the drivers, the dhobi and his family, the malis, the se
rvants and sweepers and chaprasis, all the (human) denizens of the bungalow, hovered and stared from a safe distance at the coiled serpent.
No one knew how to lure it away. Killing it was out of the question. Kush emerged from the annexe and suggested that I locate a snake charmer.
‘Snake charmers aren’t listed in the yellow pages, son,’ I snapped, and returned to the house to telephone Suresh for guidance. Safe in the shabby splendour of Udyog Bhavan, Suresh processed the information about the serpent in our garden. He asked me about its size, colour, and where in the lawn it was sunning itself. Then he fell silent for a while.
‘Well, it sounds like a good omen,’ he said finally. ‘A snake is the symbol of power, of Rajayoga. Place a saucer of milk before it, Priya. Who can tell? Now that I’ve got Independent Charge . . .’
I married a rational man, but the illusion of power has undone him. I returned to the back lawn, fretting about which saucer to use for the milk to be offered to the snake. The mali had in the meanwhile displayed heroic initiative and persuaded the snake into a jute gunnybag. The security gaurds helped him carry it away, tied up to a pole which they held horizontally between them.
The morning of the wedding. I woke up early, and sat on the cane sofa in the verandah nursing my first cup of wake-up tea. There was Kush, in striped blue pyjamas, ambling around the lawn, his tousled uncombed hair like a halo around his face. I hadn’t noticed how long it had grown around the edges, though he’s balding prematurely over his forehead.
He was looking troubled, I thought, but his face lit up when he saw me.
‘Come and sit with your mother, Kush!’ I called. ‘We found a snake in the garden yesterday. You shouldn’t be walking barefoot in the grass.’
He settled himself beside me, stretching out his legs and examining his bare toes as through some deep mystery resided between them. His feet are shaped just like Luv’s feet—twin feet, though the resemblance reduces as the gaze wanders up. His toes had bits of damp grass on them.
He looked up, and his brown eyes met mine. It was as though he had let the shutters down.
‘I’m not like brother Luv,’ Kush said suddenly, in a quiet voice. ‘It’s time you knew. I’m not straight. I’m made differently. Not that I’m ashamed of it, but I thought you and Papa might be. When I was a boy, I wasn’t sure. I liked girls, even fell in love a time or two. Now I know who I am, finally, and I’m not troubled by it. I think I’m in love too, and I’d like you to meet him, Ma. Who knows, we might be getting married next.’
I looked at Kush with a new way of seeing. My son. Was he the man or the woman in the relationship, I wondered. It seemed to matter that I should know. But I didn’t ask.
I’ve spent all the years since their adolescence worrying that one of my sons would tell me just this, that he was my daughter. Another time, another moment, I don’t know how I would have handled it. But our eyes had met, and we had looked deep into each other, somewhere. I observed my son’s toes with the grass still sticking on them, and his tousled hair, and I wasn’t shamed or embarrassed by what he said.
‘I’d like you to meet my boyfriend Akshay,’ Kush said shyly.
‘I’d love to meet him,’ I said, ‘or perhaps I have, already.’
Kush twiddled his toes some more, trying to shake the grass. ‘Don’t tell Papa,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’m ready for that, yet. But you know, and you understand.’
And I do. We are each of us different, and still the same, somehow. Everybody needs to be loved and reassured, and not to be mocked or scoffed at.
‘You marry who you want,’ I said to Kush. ‘I’ll stand by you.’
‘Don’t you have any secrets, Mummy?’ Kush asked. ‘There must be bits of you we don’t know about . . .’
I shook my head and smiled. ‘No secrets, son,’ I said. ‘I’m just an ordinary housewife.’
The shaadi. Luv weds Paromita. A forest of fairy lights illuminates the garden at 18 Dara Shikoh Marg. There we are, me and Suresh, smiling at our children, at our guests, at each other. A moment in a photograph, to be framed and cherished forever. It all seems very distant, the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
‘I want to tell you something, Priya,’ Suresh had said awkwardly while we were getting dressed.
‘What?’ I asked suspiciously. My feet were hurting already in the bronze high heels with jewelled toes and a serpent’s bite which I had rashly undertaken to wear.
‘You were the most beautiful bride I had ever seen. And you still are. Beautiful, I mean.’
Bullshit. ‘I love you true. Without you I’m blue,’ I replied, with a toss of my spunky new haircut. He looked anxious, but let it pass.
The pundits had calculated the exact auspicious muhurat for the wedding ceremony. There was confusion as Geeta’s watch was running ten minutes ahead of Suresh’s. I fell into a panic, I wanted desperately that the stars be right for Luv and Paromita and all that awaited them. The world was never an easy place, and the way it is changing is absolutely terrifying. My son and his wife and the harsh crowded world which is their inheritance—I want Venus and Mars and all the rest to be in alignment for Luv and Paromita.
At the kanyadaan, Suresh and I sat beside each other while the priest poured ghee into the sacred fire. I could feel the heat of the flames warming my cheeks. The newly weds began the saptapadi, the seven sacred steps. There were tears in my husband’s eyes, from the smoke perhaps.
‘An Indian marriage is a sacrament, not a contract,’ he observed, in his lawyer’s voice.
I married Suresh without even knowing him. A stranger descended from a black-and-white photograph and a folded-up sheet of paper with a horoscope scrawled upon it. I thought of all the years that have passed since. It needs grit to hang on to a marriage. Had I lived life, or had life lived me?
Clicking through the wedding pics on a digital slideshow. Luv looks like a young royal, wearing the solitaire earstuds which had belonged to Paromita’s grandfather. The bride radiant in her purple Jerbanoo Darzi couture lehnga, with multiple strings of pearls and a heavy jadau kundan set that had belonged to her mother. Geeta resplendent in glowing white silk.
The young man in the towel—Akshay—is in the photos too. He’s dressed in an elegant shervani and a purple jamavar stole, a hint of kohl around his eyes. Kush introduced us, but I didn’t get to talk to him in the middle of all that din. I’ll surely meet him again, soon.
The Prime Minister couldn’t come, he is on an official tour. But the Speaker was there, and the Leader of the Opposition, and all of Suresh’s cabinet colleagues. The new home minister in a spiffy Nehru jacket. Rita Ray draped in an exquisite Dhakai silk hajar-booti sari. Didiji turned up as well, to everybody’s surprise, swinging her large trademark handbag. Rajkumar Khanna came too—I had made sure he got a card, and he arrived in a blue pintuck kurta, looking dapper and young. The diplomatic corps were in attendance, including my secret heart-throb, the charming Pakistani High Commissioner. Large tracts of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh seemed to have descended on Delhi with the baraat. Some businessmen, and yes, a few arms dealers as well. Everybody was there. Except Pooonam, that is.
A troupe of folk artistes from Geeta Devi’s constituency performed on a side stage, and their songs could be heard under the noise and the chatter like a soulful undertone.
After the VIPs dispersed the children got busy pulling down the festive marigold strings. Rajkumar sang old filmi songs for us. Jimmy Batata jumped onstage and performed a vigorous Bollywood-style number, waving his red handkerchief to the beat of a Helen number. Geeta Devi danced too, and Suresh joined in, and Luv and Paromita, Kush and Akshay, and all their friends. The staff were all dancing as well—the dhobi from the quarters, the driver Ghafoor, the warring PA and PS. Also Dolly and Atul, whom I forgot to mention, and their son Tanmay and his American Desi bride Tanya (in the flesh this time).
A remix rhapsody, in every sense of the word.
Luv’s ex, Monalisa Das Mann, arrived, ad
ding a thirteenth-fairy drama to things. She strode through the crowd, small and proud, escorted by two tall young men with shaven heads. Luv explained to me later that they were not her boyfriends but a steady couple. Monalisa’s friends sang a rap number with very strange wordings. This is how it went: ‘Me wan’ girl like soni koodi/Me wan’ girl like sweet jalebee.’ Miss Das Mann filmed this on her handycam and Luv tells me it’s up on YouTube now.
Shriela Shetty described the wedding as a ‘political alliance’ in her weekly column. She referred to Geeta Devi as ‘the lady politico to watch out for (oh, and man does she wear one!)’ This was followed by another item, announcing the ‘secret’ engagement of Sukita Sethia with the cricketer Gaurav Negi. Well!
One of the local Hindi papers published the iconic photograph of the bride Paromita’s father: Lenin atop a donkey, leading the March of the Powerless. The photograph had caught him at an odd angle, and a trick of the flash had given him a halo. That is how I shall always remember him, with a strange light shining behind his long hair and straggly beard and a determined expression on his dreamy face.
And I didn’t forget my promise to him, about the strawberry ice-cream, which we served in gallons, along with the laddoos and rasmalai.
The night after my son’s wedding, I couldn’t sleep. The sound of gunshots echoed in my head. I saw fire billowing out of a window near the sky, an overcast sky, and I heard someone speak my name. I woke up, just before dawn, and walked through the garden, examining the remains of the feast. There was an acrid smell, as though of rubber burning. Overturned glasses were strewn about in corners. Two trampled bouquets of flowers— lilies and gladioli—lay in the middle of the lawn. I found a pair of abandoned high-heeled gold sandals, as though somebody had tossed them off and forgotten them, walked home barefoot, perhaps. Separate parties of cats and dogs were attacking the leftovers in the dustbins. Marigold garlands were lying forlornly in the grass, pulled out by children, the petals torn to shreds.
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