My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  Instead, I walked to the shop to buy some food. I’d eat whatever was available – though my body longed for rice and ghee, for saltiness.

  The shop was closed, yet again. This was my fourth attempt. Outside, on the wall, was a tiny sign in green: ‘Fresca’. I’d never heard of any dish by that name. It began to seem personal to me now, even racist – that this shop should choose to be closed whenever we visited. I returned to the apartment and ate biscuits. How similar they were – the man I’d married and the man I was with now, both of them addicted to sleep in a way I could never understand. I wondered whether his wife’s frustrations were similar to mine – did holidays become sleeping days for her husband too?

  Eating biscuits that air had hardened, I felt curious about his sleep. Was he dreaming about his family like I had? It’d felt like cheating, that I should think of them when I was with him. A waiter’s words came to me – Coppia and Duo, couple and two respectively, when indicating seating space. They’d turned away a man who had come to eat alone, they didn’t want to waste a table on him. She called us a couple, and it felt good because it wasn’t true. I held the thought in my throat, not letting it pass out of me – that it was a relief that we were not a coppia. I looked at him, trying to eat his pasta with failing efficiency.

  It is Friday already. We haven’t made love in all these days. It hadn’t happened naturally. Losing practice in our marriages had perhaps made our imaginations lethargic. We touched each other delicately – once I felt like a teapot that was being touched to check its price tag. He turned my wrist to read the time on my watch. It was as if we were in a store, and though we’d set our minds on something, we hadn’t yet made the purchase. We didn’t really belong to each other. The feeling intensified at nights as the walls between us grew, as sleep took us away from each other. We didn’t speak very much to each other – the things I’d wanted to say to him for years were now lost, as one loses things when changing houses, and he’d lost the innocent verbosity of youth to the adopted quietness of middle age. At night, as we lay beside each other, I felt as if we were the hydrogen and oxygen of our school textbooks that were waiting to turn to water. But that didn’t happen. Would that happen on the seventh day?

  Nothing that had happened so far had been a surprise, an unexpected gift. Perhaps Venice would change that. Venice, where we were supposed to go the next day, before flying to where we’d left our houses, hoping that they’d still be there, obedient and expectant.

  Sitting on the bed next to him, still thinking about food, about the eatery which wouldn’t open for us, I also noticed the map of approaching baldness on his head, like one can predict the rains from sooty clouds. I’d tell him about the abortion I’d had to have, I thought. I arranged the words carefully in my head. It wasn’t his fault that I’d got pregnant, but that he’d left without thinking that he might have left something behind… How could he have? I would tell him at last, though I hadn’t come here to tell him this.

  My fingers were suddenly in his hand. He was playing with my forefinger. It made us young again – an old habit returning at an older age.

  ‘Ah, you voted,’ he said, smiling at the ink mark on my finger. Who did you vote for, Jyotsna?’

  ‘You?’ I asked.

  ‘The BJP, who else?’ he said, still rubbing his thumb on my index finger. When we were students, I used to call this action ‘genie’, as if rubbing my finger would make a genie appear.

  ‘What!’ I said, unable to say anything more. This staunch leftist, the young boy leading all marches and protests with a red Students’ Federation of India flag in his hand – those eyes, broad forehead and beard about which friends teased him, for their supposed resemblance to Marx – had voted for the BJP.

  ‘And you?’ he asked, not noticing my incredulity.

  Before I fell asleep, I remember thinking of all the slogans we’d written together before student elections in our university – the red ink on our clothes and bodies, where we became extensions of the office of the SFI. I heard him laughing in his sleep after midnight. When he went to the toilet, I was still awake, reclined against the headrest.

  ‘You didn’t say who you voted for?’ he said.

  I saw his teeth in the dark. The beard of his early adult life was gone – it was as if every part of his face had suddenly become visible to me after all these years.

  ‘Huh?’ he said, touching the dark bluish mark on my index finger again.

  I didn’t say anything. We’d left a day after voting. Election results would be out three days after we’d reach home – on Thursday.

  I felt myself being gradually – and noiselessly – pulled towards a pond of sleep, a pond after a day of swollen heat.

  The road hits the sky as if it were a wall. Only softer, so that if it actually hit it, it’d pass through it as water does through a sponge, not be rejected as a ball is by a wall. The word ‘rejects’ stirs anxiety in me. I wonder how I’ll say it. All through these years, I’ve imagined the moment when I’d say yes if he’d ask me the question. But now, as I sit beside him as he drives us to Venice, I am thinking of the opposite. How do I say no?

  The car brakes. I’m woken, as if from a lost life. He touches my chin. I think he is smiling. But I don’t turn to look at him.

  I think – what has brought us together?

  I think – what is taking us apart?

  To both I say life, and my mind goes quiet, as if it’s reached the end of a catalogue.

  His finger touches my chin again – like the sun touches an inverted mountain peak on a lake. So, not really touching, but a preparation for subsequent touches. His finger feels like a foreign language, like the Italian I see splattering out of people’s mouths like crackling popcorn (I don’t like popcorn, nothing about it except its sound sometimes; I imagine that my skull will crack open with the same sound when I’m put in fire at the end); no, not popcorn, but long and sticky, like melted cheese that doesn’t let go of lips.

  I try to smile, but I’ve become the mountain of my simile – frozen. I’ll crack if I move, if I smile. I now understand why relationships are imagined as brittle – why it’s called ‘break’-up. Only brittle things break.

  The sun is like light bandaged to the sky – it is of the sky and yet not of it.

  I do not ask why he is getting out of the car. I feel like I’m about to die, that I’ll die inside the car, but I push the thought away, as one swallows a cough, keeping it away for as long as one can. The clouds hang from the sky like bats – I think of them as the sky’s lungs. They shrink and swell like those things inside my chest, only slower.

  I’ve seen this place from the sky – this red-tiled roof city, its sloping roofs echoing the mountains in instalments. From the car they look like they belong to the sky – that they are the sky’s turbines. My eyes follow them, as if seeking their end, waiting for them to stop, but the eye, so used to seeking calm in a flatland of green or bluish water, can’t rest. The mind looks for echoes – the shapes of roofs and conifers and mountains are like one quoting the other, the sea has its family in the volatile postures of the palm. I look at him without looking at him – he’s outside the car, but I can see him even with my eyes closed, as I have all these years. I am moving the words in my head – no, not like a juggler, but like a jeweller, setting them as one would for permanence…

  The mind has many sites of injury. Even after years, the impression of bandage strips remain.

  Like death, the mind is lazy. It stops at too many places on the way.

  It takes me some time to realise that this was a dream. I feel deprived, as one does from not having been able to see a dream to its end. I pack my things while he sleeps, grateful that clothes are not infants, that they don’t make sounds when moved. I know I’ll never see him again. For a moment I wonder whether it is this that made God rest on the seventh day. I fumble to write him a last message. What could I write that would explain my leaving? My mind trawls memories, and suddenly an oft-
used phrase that did the job as slogans rises to breathe: ‘Go Back…’ Student unions in my college used it even now – Go Back. I began typing on my phone: ‘Go…’

  On the table, next to where I’d kept my tickets and passport, is a blank sheet of paper. In my bag are pens with blue, red and green ink. I take out the red-inked pen and write something that I’d last written about thirty years ago as a student union leader: GO BACK. This is not like music, it doesn’t need riyaz. I have a visual memory of my students using it recently. Was it ‘Go Back Modi’?

  I leave the poster on the dining table: GO BACK.

  Later, in the taxi, I wonder who the words were meant for – him or me. Go Back.

  I also wonder whether these were the same words God used on the seventh day – for himself or for man. Go Back.

  Literature and Other Ailments

  ‘Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.’

  —Jane Yolen

  I KNOW SOMEONE WILL die today.

  Something bad will happen.

  ‘This will be our goalpost.’

  ‘This? These two trees?’

  Little boys can turn anything into a game – the world exists only as a prop for their sport. But it is the sight behind them that is new. A football is now travelling from one pair of feet to another, as if it were a kind of dialogue. The feet belong to the two little boys, cousins and occasional friends. This is the only way they can talk – with their bodies. For, at seven, they have no shared memories that make conversation possible. They converse like animals – with hands and feet, even with their chests, hitting, beating, pinching, pushing, kissing, kicking, licking, even biting. Joy moves through their bodies like fire eating paper. Leaves, now waterless, crack under their feet. They pick up a few from time to time and break them. They test their brittleness – that leaves can break and not have to be torn is still a discovery to their young fingers. In this, too, they compete with each other – whose leaves crackle louder. They behave as if they were the producers of the brittleness of these leaves.

  Behind them are their grandfathers – too young to be grandfathers, too young to think about death. And yet, it is their fear of dying that has brought them together. To this forest of dried leaves, to this, which they are calling a picnic. Five brothers, four sisters – that they are related seems like a fantasy now, so different they have turned out to be from each other. Middle age, its tiring endlessness, has pushed out everything that existed before it – childhood, when they turned from newborn strangers to siblings, scraping against each other’s skin and wounds, seems now to belong only to others, like their grandchildren. But this place, remote and inaccessible, seems to have unwound something in them. The forest has become a time machine that has taken them back to the time when their legs were exposed to the world without a thought.

  Winter, ‘picnic season’, is almost over. Plastic packets and bottles lie with the leaves. They make almost the same sound when squashed by feet, making one wonder whether they were once as alive as the leaves. There are others who are here for a picnic too. They are invisible. Hindi film songs from the 1990s declare their presence – it also marks their territory. We don’t want to go near that sound, as if it were a dog’s bark scaring us away.

  From here, sitting on what is the remainder of a tree trunk, I see them all as if they were inhabitants of a silent film. Only the silence has been replaced by the sound of dried leaves, like a scratchy cassette. I can’t hear anything from here. Everywhere, including from the sky, there is the sound of leaves – being crushed, stomped on, resisting the wind, as if ‘nature’ were being munched like potato chips. I see my aunts laughing, laughter stretching their bodies like bows, laughing urgently as if laughter’s expiry date would be over by day end. From this distance, it looks comical, this exaggeration, this dependence on bodies for what their words are unable to do.

  I know that they do not like each other. They share a history of periodic affection and withdrawal from each other’s lives. But it is as if these quarrels were created by the walls and doors and ceilings and windows of a house, not its inhabitants. They’ve left that behind them for the sunlit day, as they have their toothbrushes. Or it might just be the forest – its openness, and that of the blue-swept spring sky – which have opened up the minds of these people.

  I see them calling me, their hands waving at me, the fingers moving towards themselves, as if I was rice on a plate that they were drawing towards them. I hadn’t wanted to come here. But pressure from family is like the weather – it forces us to wear clothes we don’t like and do things against our will.

  The fragrance of basmati rice has taken over the forest. It moves faster than men, than animals, for the dried leaves are deceptive – they hide stones and pits, and one has to walk as one does on a swamp. I don’t know the rest of the menu. I wonder whether there’ll be fish fry. It is not the fish cutlet I love as much as the onion slivers in mustard that is served as an accompaniment. I see them eating something – even my mother, the anchal of her green sari now protecting her head from the sun in an ad hoc manner, has forgotten me. I’m slightly anxious that it might be the fish fry.

  So when they call again, waving at me as if they were on a boat that was about to leave an epidemic-ravaged island, I decide to walk towards them, measuring my steps, trying not to compromise my dignity in the face of my greed for a fish fry. When I reach them, their attention has shifted from me to the two boys. They’re all counting – 66, 67, 68, 69… The football is thrown up in the air and collected safely. The count is therefore of the number of times the football has been saved from falling on the ground; no, not the ground, but the leaves. Humans will invent anything to bury their time, I say to myself. They’re all counting, made delirious by the increase in number. At that moment it seems to me that the ball will never fall from Tojo’s hands. It is not an unhappy thought – to be here for the rest of one’s life with one’s family and relatives might not be as difficult as having to deal with the strangeness and strangers of the world.

  But the ball does fall. The urgent sound of tortured leaves competes with the chorus of adult sighs. Both sounds die equally fast.

  And everything is immediately forgotten. For out of nowhere, like adulthood, a new game has started. They are blindfolding Buro-kaku with a dupatta. There’s a stick in his hand. Far away – about fifteen steps away – is an upturned clay pot. The blindfolded person will have to break the pot. It seems like a straightforward game to me. I don’t understand their excitement. I think it is as fake as their laughter, all a performance of human joy.

  What I haven’t allowed to climb to the surface is my fear. No picnic – except innocuous school picnics, sometimes not even them – ends without a tragedy. It’s not the newspaper reports that have accumulated into a bad vibe inside me. It’s the literature and films – someone is lost, someone dies, someone drowns, something irreversible happens in excursions. It couldn’t be superstition. And so, as I watch them play, I also wait for something that they are innocent about – I know that someone will die, and if not that, something bad will happen.

  Why does something unexpected always happen during picnics? Perhaps our bodies are too tiny to contain our excitement. Why the outside – being in the open, a temporary life without walls – should create this surplus energy in humans is beyond the comprehension of science.

  I tell myself that nothing will go wrong – that it’s a bright day, that we are only thirty-six kilometres away from the town where our home is, that we have cell phone connectivity, that one of us is a doctor, one a banker, another the owner of a petrol pump, and so we won’t be short of money or petrol or even medical help.

  Everyone else is on their feet, everyone except my mother and the two maids. The underside of my mother’s feet is like a riverbed: the calluses are stones; the boils, leaking pus, become dense streams. Walking is a punishment for her. Her lips quiver all the time, like water on the sea, tremulous, wa
iting to host excitement any moment. Pain has distorted her feet, but even when one can’t see her feet, one recognises it immediately in the shape of her eyebrows, for they look like damaged ferns to which one hasn’t bothered to pay any attention. The maids, sitting on the red plastic chairs beside her, have been instructed to do just that – to sit and enjoy, to do no work at all, to be on holiday. They smile when our eyes meet, the three of us aware of the artificiality of the situation.

  But everyone’s eyes are now on Buro-kaku. A chorus of voices is guiding him towards his target. My mother, who hardly speaks nowadays, says ‘Poor clay pot, what has it done to be beaten like this?’ in a whisper. It’s a rare moment of relaxation from the leaves, which do not let us hear anything, no conversation, no music, unless from inside headphones.

  Straight.

  No, no, right.

  Not so much.

  A little to the left.

  Keep on walking straight.

  Stop now.

  Stop, stop.

  Hit. Hit. Hit.

  Uff.

  Instructions flow in from all directions. Everyone’s waiting for Buro-kaku to hit the pot with the wooden stick. I notice the stick – its beauty, the gentle curves where the tree wanted to be aberrational. One of my aunts pulled this out from the pile of leaves. She has a gift for excavation – a few days after her wedding, she found a stone resembling a Shivalinga from the family pond in the village. That established her superior status in the family.

  ‘Hit,’ she instructs, laughing.

  ‘Should I, really?’ asks Buro-kaku.

  I close my eyes and plug my ears with my fingers. I cannot bear to hear things breaking – even the sound of someone chewing chicken bones makes me nervous. My mother’s whisper returns to me – what has the innocent pot done to deserve this? My teeth chatter from fear of the pot breaking.