My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  Instead of the rectangular flag of India, there was a triangle opposing the wind, mimicking the obstinacy of the mountains.

  Prerna, who had cut the Indian tricolour diagonally, had decided that rectangular flags stood for the flat plains. The hills needed triangular flags.

  The Seventh Day

  ‘For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely be put to death.’

  —Exodus 31:15

  IT IS CLOSED AGAIN.

  We use words of annoyance in Bangla, aware that no one will understand them here. It’s the third time now. When we see the shop from our window, people get in and come out with packets in their hands. Some come out eating, carrying half-eaten food with them. We can’t make out what it is that they eat, but we are curious, very curious. Greed is perhaps more contagious than fear and tears, and so we make plans to get our lunch from there. We want to eat what they are eating. We spend time speculating whether beef might be mixed with other kinds of meat – this we have learnt only a few days ago, from other tourists. We are tourists too. Italy – a dream, sold to us by Henry James. We were classmates studying Literature at university, and then we got married – to other people. But we knew we had to come here one day. (We say ‘we’ as often as we can – life hasn’t allowed us this opportunity, and so this is our real holiday, to use the plural pronoun without dust.)

  It’s been three days, but, also, only three more days remain. We have to be back on Sunday. Our feet are tired – the cathedrals and the monuments, the streets and the houses that punctuate them, the language as unfamiliar as the weather, all of these are meant to be experienced, and they must be experienced only on foot. The pain from the foot climbs up, like age does, moving northwards, from knee to back to eventually rest painlessly on the hair – that white is the colour of rest, of afternoon sleep, the space between paragraphs. We put our feet on each other, we become each other’s resting places.

  Near the Duomo in Milan, where pigeons behave more like tourists than the humans around them, showing an extravagant curiosity about everything, we stood next to each other, still shy and unsure about the show of proximity of our bodies. It would be the first time we’d be in a photograph together. The photographer – he was Pakistani, from the Punjab, he said, while establishing familiarity with us in Hindi – would throw a handful of corn around us, and the pigeons would rush towards the grains. That was supposed to be the photographic moment, an equivalent of standing in front of the Taj in Bombay. Birds are better than a monument, we agree, while standing like two teenagers in their early fifties. And yet, when we asked for double copies of the photograph, one for him and one for me, the brittleness of the moment became evident. But we allowed it to blow away, treating all weather as good, as the dying perhaps think of life.

  We would condense a life into a week – it was possible, it was in the Bible, wasn’t it? The seventh day we’d have to go away – the relationship’s long rest, if we ever saw each other again, or the end, if we didn’t. We have families to return to – we were ships, our families ports. That awareness makes every moment heavy – we try to load each moment with as much as we can, events and expectations, as children load food and toys on trays, when allowed such a treat. Every moment brings an odd mix of exhilaration and frustration – the cup never fills. We laugh when a smile would’ve been enough, we gag on exclamation marks when just a stare would’ve worked. Everything has become amplified – perhaps we’re trying to make up in depth what we’d lost in time.

  We walked into a Prada store in Milan knowing we wouldn’t buy anything. How ugly the bags were. People came here not to buy things but to admire price tags. Yes, to look at price tags the way they’d just marvelled at the old and lustrous sculpture outside – numbers were all, the age of the statues, the steep prices, the greater the number the greater their value. We’d been formed by a different aesthetic – to not say everything, to keep something to ourselves, the beauty of hiding. Who’d stitched our clothes or who’d woven our saris was as hidden to us as the names of those we loved. The world had changed – everything had to be said, spelt out. The name ‘Prada’ was on every bag. They looked like school uniforms. When we walked out together through the narrow corridor leading to the door, our bodies so close that it felt like the intimacy had escaped from inside us and had now returned as an avalanche that was rolling us together, he told me, ‘I didn’t know that Jaya Prada was so wealthy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, not getting the context.

  ‘These bags, with her name on them – they cost more than I earn in a month. Who buys them? They’re making her rich.’

  ‘Prada. No relation of Jaya Prada.’ I couldn’t stop laughing.

  The other stores that fell on the way we mispronounced too – Gucci, he said, almost saying ‘luchi’; Versace, I said, proud of my pronunciation, to which he said, ‘Like attache’; Leonardo da Vinci we knew, but not Caravaggio, which we mispronounced as if the last syllable was ‘go’. It was liberating – after a life spent on aiming to do only the right things, it was in these mistakes that we built our nest. The statues tired us – we were exhausted of meeting strangers whose names we knew we’d forget immediately. And the angels – they were everywhere, with their wings, resting on walls and pillars, friendlier than birds but more reserved than humans. They never looked at us, no matter how close we were to them. More angels in this country than humans, we said, before we returned, again, to our very first enthusiasm that had turned into this trip. Tapan-da’s canteen in university, our friends inside, singing with spoons and steel plates, and the two of us, sitting on the moss-eaten stairs, asking the same question to each other at the same time (how, how could it have been possible?!): DH Lawrence and Browning before him, and Henry James – what had Italy given them?

  We liked these writers, vastly different though they were from each other, and we wanted to know what a culture – a country – had given them. We decided that we’d find out – when we were older, when we had jobs and money, when…

  Everywhere we went we looked for an answer – or answers – to this question. After visiting the houses of the gods and their attendants (who else were the angels except for efficient housekeepers of the gods?), we went to see how people lived. There was a fancy word for it – architecture. We mispronounced it purposely – Archie-tecture, since everything in this country had the ‘ch’ sound: Dolce, Vercelli, and so on, the few words we’d begun pronouncing like residents here. We stood at the head of streets and watched families of houses. Some of them were tired from standing for too long. It was the balconies that we loved most. We looked at them as if we were watching a film – it was a place of action, of the outside meeting the inside, like our mouths. The balconies in India, in Jaipur and Calcutta, in the Mughal monuments, even in temples, had somehow seemed different – it was as if they’d migrated from these lands and acquired girth and volubility on the way. Here they were shyer, more secretive, even intimate, but also proud, happy to be watched. That explained their ornateness, of their grille, of flowerpots brimming from their margins – these were eyelashes to the balcony’s eyes. We pointed them out to each other, choosing favourites. We noticed how certain shapes invited the morning light while others tried to shy away from the afternoon light. We imagined the personality and habits of the inmates, turning them into characters from fiction, but most of all, we gave personalities to the houses. We’d come to them from watching ceilings of monuments, of churches and cathedrals – the murals on the ceilings, their ornaments, replicating an imagined life in the sky, with its quasi-human-like gods. The gods and their wealthy worshippers demanded a craning of human necks, an imitation of looking up at the sky, where humans have imagined their creators’ residencies. The balconies were a liberation from that perspective – it allowed its occupants to look down at passersby below and, more importantly, to look at each other across street
s. It was the equivalent of prayer at the altar, a spatial proximity to God – one could be in one’s house while also belonging to outside it, almost, but not quite, on the street. This difference I came to hold as the difference between marriage and love outside law – how one allowed oneself to look at it. Marriage was ceiling, love without its seal balcony.

  In between the houses on either side were stream-like streets with the air of amateurs, as if they were not really meant to be there, hesitant because they were not as professional as roads. The sky felt like a ceiling – its unchanging nature, that arrogant blueness of an amnesiac summer sky that’s forgotten its grey and gloominess. We swallowed everything with the zealousness of tourists – at times I watched young couples kissing on streets and escalators as if they too were part of the experience of being in Italy. We watched Italians eating pasta, rolling the linguini on forks with the kind of expertise that only South Asians have for eating rice with their hands. I sometimes looked at him like a tourist too – so many years, a lifetime, had passed since we’d been together like this. Student life had meant sitting beside each other – in the classroom, on buses, in cinema halls. It seemed like this was the first time we were sitting opposite each other in restaurants. These little things were part of the tourism too. All through this, and never stopping for a moment, was the fear and anxiety of it coming to an end.

  We’d made our excuses to our families – a conference on Shakespeare to be attended, lectures to be given, the seven-day period filled with made-up events. And yet, both of us were not Shakespeare scholars. We were ordinary lecturers who’d managed to find jobs in Bengal in the late 1980s. We’d taught the same things for years. Family, housekeeping, raising children, savings in the bank – all of these had taken over our lives gradually. We had no illusion about our ordinariness. That, too, we shared in common. We were so aware of the unremarkability of our appearances that from time to time we asked each other – particularly me to him – whether I was spoiling the view with my frizzy hair in a bun and my salwar kameez.

  How old was Italy? How old was human love? Far away, without really bothering us, are the Alps, a mix of fog and ice sticking to the mountains like a cold that would never leave. The light towards the end of the day is like honey – there are times when I want to lick it off the ground or wipe it with my fingers, using them like a spatula. The mountains, the light, honey, the stars and the night – all metaphors of aged and pickled time, of a seeming unchangingness, of near-permanence. Following them is my feeling of deprivation – how these have been denied to us. Nothing helps, not literature, not philosophy. The celebration of the present, contentment in something as tiny as a moment – how could it not leave anyone thirsty? It is strange how guilt rarely scratches at our actions, or perhaps even our imagination. We’d returned to a past while having become different people from those who’d lived in that past. Sometimes, when I looked at him, I wondered whether we were still alive or whether this was a dream, or perhaps a life after death. It is impossible that this is true, that we, who’d lost each other to others, have managed to find each other again. As I thought of the seventh day, God’s day of rest, a metaphor that just wouldn’t stop coming to me, I never stopped wondering whether we still loved each other. Love comes to rest too – it must, after the exhaustion of activity, of fighting bad weather and anxiety. The end of love – like the end of life – must be an unchanging straight line. Would we reach that on the seventh day, since we’d set out to compress a lifetime into a few days?

  We lie awake night after night, looking at the mountains outside our window, but always outside our reach. They are our planetarium. We know we are looking at the same thing, the same light, the same night, but I can’t help wondering, again, whether we’re thinking the same thoughts. Once, when my overgrown nail scratched against his skin in the darkness and it chipped but didn’t break, I thought of it immediately as the equivalent of the seventh day – would something similar happen? We do not really know what we’re doing – we’d wanted to become fish and that desire had made us jump into the water. Inside the water everything looked plumper and mobile – our seven-day lives did too.

  We’d come to Italy, we’d told ourselves in our youth, in a time when travelling abroad was uncommon and only for the wealthy. It would’ve meant nothing – a half-joke, like travelling to Mars – had air travel not become easier and affordable. Now that it’d come true, we were surprised at ourselves – as if we’d invented something with which we didn’t know what to do.

  The simplest things seem new to us because we’ve forgotten that these experiences had once been ours. We now lived in flats – he on the third floor, me on the fourth, in different cities of course. Living in this rented apartment on the ground floor revives our older selves – memories of pushing open a window, but always carefully, so as not to hurt the creepers lurking outside. Outside are houses with sloping roofs, like they’d been in his village and in the town where I’d grown up. We discovered something that we hadn’t in our early lives – that these roofs had more grace than the flat roofs of our apartment blocks. It was the grace of letting go, of not accumulating what did not really belong to it. These little things make us tourists of our own lives. It is almost the equivalent of time travel. And yet, at the end of every such discovery are the lines we’d learnt together from Shakespeare: But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.

  When we got onto trains, not always to go to places but to be in travel, for it fermented our sense of togetherness, making it grow in volume larger than it actually was, I’d grow jittery when the last stop came. The Italian word ‘terminal’ would be announced by an invisible speaker. The last stop – as if aiding our rehearsal of the seventh day. I’d be listless, wondering what to do, taking our actions as foreboding for what would really happen on the seventh day. The anxiety was perhaps because while we’d planned the six days, cramming them with tours and visits, and keeping the nights to ourselves as if it were pocket money, but we’d not discussed the final day. I was in a queue to get down with the rest of the passengers when he pulled me by my hand. We waited for the train to empty out and then fill up again – we returned to where we’d started from. Would that be…

  In Turin’s Piazza San Carlo, we’d been told how the streets had been broadened to control the mob, possibly during the time of Mussolini. For a moment, I imagined the heart as such a street, one that was capable of being widened from time to time. Why didn’t social conventions widen like that? My mind reached out to metaphors all the time – I know that it is turning into a disease. The metaphor, I taught students, is a passionate reaching out to another world, for comparisons are possible only between different things. We had become metaphors ourselves, in hurtling towards this foreign place and, once here, we seemed to encounter people who had had the same urge – to imagine man and God as metaphors and the space between them as a relationship. For this, they’d turned their love into stone, into statues. But the flesh is a gymnasium, and the muscles of our hearts had turned us into gymnasts.

  I’d spent years cutting paper – blank paper, newspaper, packets, every kind – with a pair of scissors. It was a secret habit, one that I’d managed to keep from the world, including my family. I knew exactly when it’d begun, and I tried to push the memory away – his last letter to me, a naked postcard, giving me his new address, his new place of work. I didn’t allow myself to memorise it. With an old pair of scissors, that was as old as my parents’ marriage, I cut the postcard into thin strips until our old maid Maya-mashi said that she’d like to take them to burn and create a dark kumkum powder from it. She appeared with a dark brown bindi on her forehead the next day. I remember thinking – that is how addresses disappear.

  That moment comes back to me often when I see him, particularly as he types messages on his phone. We don’t talk about our families – they were a given, they existed, like God. Wi-Fi connects us to them – they’ve become flattened in our memory, their d
imensions in our consciousness smaller, as their bodies are inside phones. We didn’t ask about each other’s families – as if they were untouchables in our conversation. It is from them that we’ve taken a holiday. And yet, by the fourth day, in spite of the exhilaration of taking a lift up to the sky-like ceiling of the Mole Antonelliana in Turin – the city’s highest point, from where it seemed that it was possible to see the world, even our houses in India, a thought which made me want to climb down from there immediately – something has begun to loosen in me. Desire congeals, becomes a bolus as wide and long as our body, so that we feel nothing except it. What happens to desire when at low tide? I begin to feel something like that, muscles of habit hardening inside me. Sometimes I mishear female voices for my daughter calling me. It has begun to seem slightly artificial – this time, this borrowed time, like time borrowed from life for living a vicarious life inside a cinema hall, that it is not like living inside a painting, chained by the frame.

  We rarely left each other alone, except for making short phone calls to the people we knew as home. Only once, when he wanted to sleep, I rented a taxi and asked Alfredo – the driver we’d come to trust – to take me to its suburbs. The paddy fields, submerged in ankle-deep water, and some with plough marks on land, their agricultural script as it were, made me miss home. I felt the weather changing gradually, for emotions are the real weather, just as desire is ceiling, asking us to imagine how much we can extend beyond ourselves. Returning to the city meant a return to a skyline pockmarked by civilisation, by the unequal height of exhausted chimneys. In that too I looked for meaning. When I opened the door to the rented apartment and found him sleeping, unaware of my going and coming, I felt an urgent desire to wake him up and remind him of how he’d left me nearly thirty years ago. I didn’t.