My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  MY MOTHER’S LOVER

  and Other Stories

  MY

  MOTHER’S

  LOVER

  and Other Stories

  SUMANA ROY

  BLOOMSBURY INDIA

  Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

  Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4, DDA Complex, Pocket C – 6 & 7,

  Vasant Kunj New Delhi 110070

  BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY INDIA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in India 2020

  This edition published 2020

  Copyright © Sumana Roy, 2020

  Sumana Roy has asserted her right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes

  ISBN: TPB: 978-93-89165-63-0; eBook: 978-93-89165-64-7

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  ‘I have a disease; I see language.’

  —Roland Barthes

  CONTENTS

  Blind Water

  My Mother’s Head

  Untouchability

  The New Provincials

  My Mother’s Lover

  The Mountain Disease

  The Seventh Day

  Literature and Other Ailments

  Sleep

  ‘How Are You?’

  Close Reading

  On the Brink

  ‘I’m Not Sure’

  Beside the Madman’s House

  About the Author

  Blind Water

  ‘Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.’

  —Margaret Atwood

  ANOTHER DROP WASTING AWAY. She hears it in her sleep and turns to the other side. Tempted to get out of bed and put an aluminium pot under the leaking tap, she sits up. Next to her is the man she married twenty-four years ago. His face is half-covered – he’s drawn the quilt up to his face. She knows that the man she married isn’t as young anymore. It’s not his face or hair or gait that tells her that. In this soundless dark, his sleep gives away his age. Tiredness has accumulated inside his nostrils and mouth, in orifices that allow escape. He tries to push them out in his sleep every night, but they are like stubborn stones inside a kidney. Though he’s covered by folds of sleep now, she knows that he’ll wake up as soon as she gets down from the bed. He’ll shout at her in his sleep, louder than he does when awake. She’s more scared of him now than she’s ever been before. It’s because of how he ascribes everything to her ‘abnormality’ – she finds it more hurtful than being called fat or ugly.

  She looks at the cell phone – 2:37. Another six hours for them to wake up properly. Even if there was a drop every minute – and she’s certain that there are at least three drops a minute, if not more – that would be 360 drops. That’s enough for a person to brush their teeth. No, she couldn’t let this water waste away.

  She pulls her legs out of her nightie as if they were a folding table and tries to cross over the sleeping man. Just then her body betrays her – a cough erupts out of her, it’s like a ball running away. She tries hard to catch it, but it’s out of her reach already. The ball hits her husband – the cough wakes him up. He is livid, more angry than someone who’s been hit by a ball.

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  The night – its unattested sense of purity – doesn’t allow her to lie. She’d decided that she’d say she was going to the toilet, but truth forces itself out as if it were dysenteric. ‘Water’s leaking from a tap. Why waste…’

  ‘Go to sleep right now! Enough of your madness!’ the sleepy man shouts, freezing her movements.

  She sits still, waiting for him to return to a deeper sleep. She touches the Baba Loknath locket on her chain and says a little prayer. This moment is important for her, important enough for a prayer.

  When all looks well and favourable, her feet land silently on the floor, no less important than Neil Armstrong’s on the moon. She waits there, for all sounds to disappear. Then she tiptoes to the kitchen and takes out a handi – she is angry with metals, that they, like infants, make sounds when disturbed. She tries hard to think of something that doesn’t make any sound when moved – no, even air and water make sounds. Suddenly conscious, she regulates her breathing to mildness. And she thinks – only my heart doesn’t make a sound when it’s moved; everything should be like my heart.

  The handi travels with her to the bathroom, its floors scaly from dryness. She places it in the basin and waits. Nothing happens, not for minutes. Impatient but pretending to herself that she isn’t, she touches the mouth of the tap to check for some hint of wetness. She can’t be sure. She turns it on full force and tiptoes back to the bedroom. The bedroom seems to have lost weight since she was away – it looks smaller now, in the darkness. She puts half of her body on the bed and waits, scared of waking up her husband. The bed creaks – all things betray, like all men. She waits, one half of her hanging outside the bed. A little later, that half joins with the rest of her body. The darkness helps this painless surgery.

  She lies down and waits. For one sound that’d justify the midnight expedition to her. But it doesn’t arrive. She eventually falls asleep.

  When she gets up the next morning, her husband is no longer beside her. The day takes him away from her – she has no choice but to let him go. Scared that he’d discover the handi, she leaps out of the bed and runs to the bathroom barefoot. It’s locked. She waits there, nervous and slightly sweaty, in spite of the November cold. Then she goes to the kitchen sink and turns on the tap. Not even a tiny drop flows out. She waits, hoping for the familiar music of her childhood, things taken for granted – ‘running water’, that the maid called ‘rani water’.

  Rani water, indeed. What prognostication.

  It’s been nine days since a full-bodied drop of water has emerged out of the taps. The water-carriers, the poor men who ferry water across the town, collecting water from faraway jhoras and lugging them in containers hanging from their heads, have disappeared. Like the water in this town. There are rumours that schools and colleges will be closed from next week. The buildings stink from a distance, the toilets have no water, students have stopped carrying water bottles to school because water is now drunk only after meals, at home – and, if the situation doesn’t get better, possibly offices too. There’s been an unofficial rationing of the sale of bottled drinking water. No more than four bottles per family. The fifth only if one has a medical certificate to prove that there’s an ailing person in the family.

  Standing on the balcony of Lama Building, not looking at Happy Valley Tea Estate below but aware of its presence the way one is of the sky even with one’s eyes closed, she stares at the Kanchenjunga. Not its beauty, now frozen in the human imagination, but at the snow. Her deprived mind changes its state of being – from solid to liquid, ice to water. If only the mind had greater power.

  Uneasy, she looks at her skin, dry, from not having bathe
d for days. Returning to the dining space, she wonders whether she could use a bottle of drinking water for bathing. The thought, and the two choices, run inside her head from one end to the other, almost as if they were touching ear to ear, endlessly. It exhausts her, she is thirsty – one gulp of water, just one for now.

  Her husband emerges out of the bathroom, wrapped like a gift, ready to go to work. He looks the same every day, as if he were an ATM machine. If he were a banker, he might have been granted leave, but he’s a policeman. She’s asked him twice already, whether they could leave the town and return only when water returned to it. He says he’s been refused. It is a time of emergency. She regrets marrying a police officer. Marrying a sales representative would’ve been better.

  ‘Breakfast?’ she asks, like every day, taking out bread from the fridge.

  ‘I’m tired of having bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner.’ He walks away.

  She feels accused, as if it was her fault that there was no water, and people had stopped cooking because cooking needed water for boiling, for curries and gravies, and utensils needed cleaning. Business for bakeries had gone up – people were eating bread for most of their meals, along with moori and chips and chanachur, things that came in packets and didn’t need cooking.

  ‘Let’s go home to Malda for just two days. At least we can bathe and drink water and go to the toilet…’

  Her husband leaves, her words never reach him.

  It infuriates her. She feels like throwing the bottle at him, but no, it’s a bottle of water. It’s more precious than everything else now.

  When she walks to the glass door, to bolt it after her husband, she notices some commotion on the road. They live on Ladenla Road, the busiest street in Darjeeling. ‘Ki bhoyo?’ she asks, in the little Nepali she’s scavenged for survival here.

  Two young men respond in Nepali, the rest are busy shouting at each other. There’s a red plastic bucket in the hands of one of the men. Someone is trying to take it away from him. It’s about water. Drawing this conclusion, she walks back hurriedly to their rented flat and locks it from inside. And then, without paying it great thought, she takes three bottles of drinking water and puts them in the Godrej almirah.

  Between phone calls, mostly to friends and relatives outside Darjeeling, who cannot really understand what it feels to live without water, who tease her by joking about it, she cleans herself with Lakme cleansing lotion and cotton pads. From time to time she walks or runs to the taps, opens and closes them, always surprised by what registers in her head as betrayal – taps are supposed to spurt out water as the nose is always supposed to be full of air. With no cooking to do, she arranges her clothes. Instead of the wardrobe, her attention is now on the pile of unwashed clothes that have spilled out from the laundry bag to suitcases and travel bags. She’ll have to buy new underwear soon – only a set of fresh bra and panty remains. Is it possible to send bras and panties for ‘dry wash’?

  ‘Hello,’ she calls her husband on the phone, ‘can’t we go to Siliguri for a day, check into a hotel, wash all our clothes, fill all our water bottles and cans, and come back the next day?’

  ‘I’ve heard that the Chief Minister is trying to do something. We might get water in a day or two.’ He hangs up.

  She controls her anger. She’s never understood what policemen actually do when there are no thieves to be caught. What keeps them busy?

  Losing control of herself, she calls him again, ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Busy doing what?’

  ‘Work.’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘Work.’

  ‘What? Did you catch any water thieves?’

  Her husband disconnects.

  She won’t take this anymore, she will leave him, she will leave the town, she will… She pulls her legs out of a pair of warm salwars, then pauses for breath and pulls the nightie out of her head. The cold gives her goosebumps immediately. Her nipples swell up. She rushes for her thermals. Uff, they are stinking. And so only the kurta, made from warm cottswool. Then her yellow cardigan, and over it a black jacket. The dupatta wrapped around her face and head in a way that makes her unrecognisable to everyone, including herself. Socks – which she brings close to her nose to check whether they can be worn for one more day – and sneakers.

  She is ready. ‘I’m going to Chowrasta to buy a bra,’ she types, a text to her husband.

  The text fills her throat and mouth with the taste of tea from Glenary’s, but she shakes her head at the thought. All the eateries in town – even Glenary’s, almost the town’s mascot – have been closed.

  But it’s not for a bra that she’s stepping out of home. She will go to Senchal Lake, from where Darjeeling’s potable water comes.

  She locks the door and drops the keys in the pocket of her jacket where they hit something in plastic. Two tiny bottles of water. In the inner flaps of her jacket are neatly folded plastic bags, a roll of sealing tape and a shaving blade. She has plans that she keeps even from herself. She will get some water. Anyhow.

  The November air is sharp. The sky and its light, both bright, deceive. She keeps walking, her experience on the planet telling her that it is possible to grow indifferent to extremities of weather for a short period of time, that it’s like crying – one returns to normal, for one can’t keep crying forever.

  She’s never been there before. She’s heard the name, inevitably at moments of crisis – when there’s a water emergency or when a dead body’s been discovered in the lake. Google’s told her everything she needs to know about the place. She knows the numbers – 11 kms from Darjeeling town, at an elevation of 8,160 feet, opened in 1915. The lake that is housed in the wildlife sanctuary is fed by a mountain spring. The route she’d find out – she’s walked through Ghoom and Jorebungalow before. The only way to get anywhere in Darjeeling is to walk anyway. (She can climb up through Hooker Road to Mall Road without stopping for breath even once, she reminds herself with pride.)

  On the way, past Chowrasta, and straight ahead, towards the train station, past the street where one must stop breathing to survive, because the stench of centuries of urine soaked in walls makes it impossible to breathe, she keeps walking. She’s walking fast. How long can it take? An hour’s walk at the most? She could’ve asked her husband, but she didn’t. In any case, now it’s impossible. She’s left the phone at home. There was no space – the water bottles in her pockets, the house keys, the folded plastic packets. And what if she lost the phone?

  Walking away from the town makes her feel liberated but also oddly sad. It feels a bit like leaving an infant at home. What if it wakes up before she returns? She feels that way about the taps. What if they begin talking in the old language of water while she’s away? Has she turned off the taps? It’s too late – she can’t walk back to the flat anymore.

  She walks fast, faster than she’s ever walked before. Soon she’s left everyone behind – she’s the only human on the road. Tourists have stopped coming, and so there are hardly any vehicles. When she can’t breathe anymore, she stops and takes a tiny gulp of water from one of the tiny bottles. Darjeeling has made even her thirst thrifty. She begins walking again. This time a new sound besides the shy squeaks of her sneakers accompanies her – it’s the sound of water inside the bottle. Full bottles don’t make sounds, half-full bottles do. She smiles as she makes a note of this, to tell her mother and cousin, the only two people who laugh at her jokes.

  As she walks intuitively towards the lake, two things begin to happen: the number of humans becomes inversely proportional to the number of trees. Here it is darker than it is in the town. Trees eat light, she always knew. Here they’ve eaten almost all of it. She wonders why she’s suddenly scared of trees here as she’s never been in a city, not even in Darjeeling’s Botanical Gardens. She thinks of the water running through them and feels jealous. Is there no machine that could extract water from trees from its xylem (or is it phloem, she can’t remember) like
they extract sap from rubber trees? And then the thought of animals inside the forest comes to her – are they still alive or have they died?

  But no, thoughts won’t stop her, nothing will. She must reach the lake soon. The cry of an animal somewhere – she can’t recognise what animal it is, except that it must be an animal, for trees don’t shout. As she walks – not letting anything get in the way of her feet, not the cold, not fear, not her thoughts – she stops. Where could the animals be getting their water from? Should she enter the forest to check?

  Year after year in Darjeeling – though it’s only been three years since she’s been here – she’s heard the same thing: Senchal is dry, lake pura dry chha, ek drop pani chhaina. But surely the animals don’t feel the same way? They’re not as stupid as humans – they don’t drink water from a tap. If only humans had continued to drink water from the ground there’d have been no water crisis. And now they’re looking for water on Mars! Everything they kill and exhaust on Earth they look for in space! Fools!

  But this is not the time for thoughts – thoughts are brakes, they delay. She has to keep walking. She changes idioms and proverbs as she walks, now beginning to run out of energy: not light at the end of a tunnel but water at the end of a journey, and so on. How much longer to the lake?

  Two months ago, when the water crisis had just started, a surprise because it was immediately after the monsoon, when one usually didn’t need to worry about water, she had begun to look for stories and anecdotes about water problems that British engineers, missionaries, botanists, civil servants, teachers, tea planters and, of course, their families might have faced, in letters they wrote to friends and relatives at home in England, but also in various presidencies and sanatorium towns in India. But there was hardly any such news in these letters. It was possible that the white men were not even aware of where their water came from – through pipes, or carried in giant buckets by thin men and women who lost the use of their brains from carrying such heavy weight on their heads. Locals called these innocents ‘laata’. She knew a few of these water-carriers – she’d bought water from them a few times. Would she meet any of them on the way? Where were the streams and jhoras that they said they got their water from? Had these people become like animals, who knew where water sources were, from instinct and intuition, instead of relying on visual signs like taps and pipes?