My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  ‘When was the last time you slept, slept well enough to feel happy?’ the therapist intervenes. He looks at his watch; the next batch of insomniacs must be getting restless in the lobby.

  ‘As I told you, sleep has nothing to do with my happiness quotient. But to answer your question, I really can’t remember when I slept the last time,’ I say. I’m not lying. ‘You need to be really stupid to sleep well, you know. I don’t know one intelligent person who would choose to sleep over staying awake.’

  Whatever bravado I might show to the world, only I know how greedy I am for a night’s – even a single night’s – sleep. I have read an encyclopaedic amount of literature about insomnia. I have heard lullabies in twelve different languages. I have tried lavender aromatherapy and temple-massage techniques. Every night, I hold my wife tight, wake her up into concern, ask her to remind me when our day should begin. I do all this with my eyes closed so that she can’t see what’s in my mind. My eyes are worse than bad breath – they give my immediate past away. Semanti pats my eyelids, draws their outlines, and even after all this indulgence, when sleep does not visit, she scolds me – she can’t bear to see how sleep deposits itself into fossils of wide nights below my eyes.

  ‘Why do you not try, Prakash?’ she pleads with me some mornings. Then she pets me. And then I don’t regret being sleepless all night.

  Every night it is a new word. It is Moby Dick to my Ishmael. I chase it all night. I catch it in its middle age. If only I knew where it comes from and where it wants to go, I know I shall be cured. But all night we play serve-and-volley. No one wins. Though I am defeated. Semanti sees me as a victim all day. Sometimes I just give in: ‘How do you sleep so soundly?’

  I know the question is in poor taste, it is ambitious in an ugly way, too much the poor man’s jealousy at the haves and so on. But if I can’t ask my wife, who can I ask this to?

  ‘I switch off completely,’ she offers kindly, making sleep sound like a technological invention. Clearly, I’m a Luddite in this regard.

  ‘How?’ I ask, like my mother-in-law asking ‘Where?’ when asked to ‘Enter’ on her cell phone.

  ‘You know you forget the day, you forget your work, you forget the maid, you forget your enemies, you forget your friends, you forget yourself, you forget your partner...’ she chants.

  I’m clearly not hypnotised, rather alarmed, ‘You forget me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says cruelly.

  To sleep one must be cruel: that is the lesson I learn for the day.

  To begin with, I wash only my plate and glass after breakfast. I spend an eternity in the bathroom. I fill only my bottle of water from the water filter. But Semanti doesn’t even notice. Selfishness, I learn, is a social vice, entirely a comparative one. I have failed. And so I cannot sleep.

  ‘I’d like to be Rip Van Winkle, Simu,’ I tell her at midnight. She pats my face in her sleep, indulgent, like a mother who tells her six-year-old son that he’ll play cricket for India one day.

  The rest of the night is spent working against that ambition. I’m again a deep-sea diver. Sleep is a speck of dust forming into something precious inside an oyster. One day it shall be mine. Though I deny it to everyone, including Semanti, I try to obey the sleep therapist’s dictums to the dot.

  The first principle is to shut your eyes, he’s told us. I do that.

  The second is to flush out all office gossip from one’s being. I do that.

  Get all the gas out of your belly. I think I’ve managed that too. Pawanmukta Asana.

  I run all the eleven dictums in my mind. I tick mark them. If sleep was a theoretical exam, I’d be the first boy in class.

  When I wake up the next morning, I am confident that sleep will come to me that night. The last night was a dress rehearsal – I’ve got all the props ready, also the costume. The stage is set as it were, sleep will begin its night-long monologue and I shall wake up to claps the next morning. It can’t get wrong the next time. I’ve got everything ready to perfection.

  With that knowledge, I go to sleep therapy class after office. I am the first one to sign in. The therapist (it’s hard for me to call him sleep professor; I’ve known many sleepy professors in my life) asks me to sit in the front row. ‘Which word was it last night?’ he asks.

  No one’s ever asked me that question. I think hard and say the word: ‘Secular’.

  ‘Secular?’ Clearly, he’d been expecting something sexier.

  Yes, I say sadly. That’s my fate – chasing such words at night when my friends and colleagues are adapting to wet dreams Version 3.0.

  ‘So what did you do with “secular” all night?’ he asks like a policeman speaking to an underage boy caught red-handed at a nightclub. ‘I mean, you surely couldn’t have chased secular in any sense?’

  I fidget for a response, and then I am suddenly angry. ‘I didn’t run around trees with “secular”, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No, I thought you chased proper or common nouns in your sleep. I still can’t fathom how one could chase concepts, especially in a sleepless dream.’

  ‘I’d rather a very common noun called sleep chased me,’ I say, trying to sound clever but also meaning that sincerely.

  ‘Imagine chasing “democracy”. Oh my God!’ he says, shuddering at the thought. His facial expressions make of me a Cartoon Network Pied-Piper figure who lures a billion men and women into a polling booth. ‘Have you ever done that?’ he asks sincerely.

  ‘I think I did a few days back, I’ll have to look,’ I reply.

  ‘Look? Where?’

  ‘People write what they did during the day in their diary. I record my nightlife in it. Every morning write down the word that killed my sleep the previous night.’

  He makes me promise that I shall get my sleep notebooks for him in the next class.

  I find myself unable to tell friends the truth about my evenings. I’d have found it easier to tell them if I was being treated for infertility.

  ‘Is it a new woman?’ Suvir asks me in the office one day.

  Before I can guess where that question is coming from, Suvir proceeds to help: ‘I saw Semanti alone at the DLF Mall the other evening. I don’t find you in any of the office parties. Kahan rehte ho yaar? Kiske saath?’

  I smile. Can I tell Suvir? I’m not doing anything illegal or immoral after all. Suvir is my closest colleague, and even though I envy the way he sometimes snores at office meetings, I think I can trust him with this bit of a secret. Some day, when I’m a master of sleep (‘MS’ – Semanti’s mischievous title for my MS degree), a real pro, I’ll be able to laugh about the fact that I had to take tutorials for sleeping. Who remembers one’s first bicycling lessons after all?

  But before I can answer, Suvir begins speaking again. ‘I asked Semanti about you. She seemed to fumble for a reply. I didn’t probe any further.’ His right hand is now on my shoulder, ‘Dekh bhai Prakash, Semanti is a nice woman. She is attractive, even at this age. She packs your lunch box, yaar. Which wife does that these days? Listen to me. Keep her happy. Be happy with her. Ulta seedha mat kar. Don’t sleep with some young woman, yaar.’

  Suddenly I am very angry. ‘Sleep?’ is all I find myself being able to say.

  ‘Ha, don’t sleep with a girl, yaar. Don’t flirt even. These days you flirt with a girl and the next thing you know – she wants to sleep with you.’

  ‘How do you know, Suvir?’ I ask. It’s my time to get back at him.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I see it in the movies...’

  ‘Which movie?’ I ask, genuinely curious. I once tried watching a home video that Semanti made for me – a set of songs where the characters are in bed, singing or being sung to, adult lullabies, love songs, snippets of conversation followed by the Beatles’s ‘I’m only sleeping...’, and so on. All was going well until I came to the last bit of a film credit. The film was Sleepless in Seattle. Semanti had clearly forgotten to erase that portion. Perhaps I’d ha
ve fallen asleep had that disastrous title not hit me, who knows. One can never guess with sleep. It’s like a thriller.

  ‘I can’t remember.’ Suvir walks away.

  It’s Friday evening and I’m sitting before the sleep therapist. He looks like a man in his fifties. His specs are dust-spotted, I’ve never seen him from so close. My fingers itch to scrub out what looks like a drop of solidified dal. I notice that the black thick-rimmed glasses hide the man’s dark circles.

  ‘When were you born?’ he suddenly asks me.

  I’m hesitant about declaring my age. I know I look younger than many – the women who sit in the first row, who can’t sleep because they worry about sons eating beef and dying of mad cow’s disease; men who wake up in the middle of the night thinking about white men in their daughter’s beds.

  ‘Obama and I were born on the same day,’ I say.

  ‘Really?’ he asks. ‘Or is that a joke?’

  ‘It’d be a joke if Michelle O paid for the president’s sleep therapy classes. America couldn’t sleep if its president was counting sheep at night, could it?’ I reply.

  ‘Did you suffer any head injuries – collisions – as a child?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think about your dead parents a lot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Religion, if you don’t mind?’

  ‘I’m a convert. Buddhism it is,’ I say self-consciously.

  ‘You’re a Buddhist?’ he asks in disbelief.

  ‘Yes. Why?’ I ask.

  ‘I never thought Buddhists could be insomniacs, you know,’ he confesses.

  I am irritated. ‘Why, sleep is easier to find than nirvana?’

  He offers me a glass of water. I refuse.

  ‘If you slept – please, please imagine this as a hypothetical situation – would you snore?’ he continues.

  ‘That’s like asking whether I’d be able to blow out all the candles on my one hundredth birthday cake!’

  His phone rings. He looks at it and makes a face, his first show of familiarity to me, and ignores the call. The phone rings again. ‘I’m busy with counselling, dear,’ he says. I overhear a woman’s high-pitched tone passing down what seems like instructions. It is an unfamiliar language: Semanti never speaks to me like that. After he’s hung up, he smiles like a schoolboy and says, ‘My wife ... just woke up. She couldn’t find the toothpaste tube.’

  ‘Now?’ I ask. 4:52 pm. ‘She doesn’t live in the country?’

  ‘She works at a call centre. Inbound Call Centre,’ he replies, stressing the name of the BPO.

  ‘Oh, you mean, you don’t sleep together? Sorry, I mean at the same time? That’s interesting.’

  ‘Interesting?’ he asks, clearly peeved.

  ‘Yes. I mean ... how does it affect a marriage if the husband and wife don’t sleep at the same time? Together? That is interesting,’ I say, fumbling for words, and thinking of how Semanti would have scolded me for this.

  ‘How does it affect a marriage if the husband remains awake while the wife sleeps beside him? Like yours? Isn’t that interesting?’ he asks.

  The next morning, when I note down the word that kept me awake the previous night, Semanti tells me, ‘I couldn’t sleep a wink last night.’

  ‘Fraternity,’ I write down. Above it are last week’s words: ‘Justice’ and ‘Equality’.

  ‘How Are You?’

  ‘Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.’

  —Virginia Woolf

  AT ALL TIMES, A student’s life is most difficult: the war-like attention to details during examinations, the guilt of failing to wake up at six every morning, the shame of not following the ideal student’s routine, the tentative search for the perfect future, the secret worship and imitation of a senior, the bird-like attention span, and the mixture of joy and agony at the realisation that of all roles played in a lifetime – child, employee, spouse, parent – this was the most temporary. And yet, like all students who forget their roll numbers within a year of passing examinations, she anticipated the forlornness of a life without the busyness of annual examinations, year-end trials of commitment to a life that seemed unnecessary to those who lived it, and felt sad without knowing it. She also did not know that she was a devotee of the examination system: she liked to ‘get’ marks on her report card. It made her feel important and worthy – a few numbers (not without reason was it called ‘grand total’) could do what no word of praise could.

  But that year there would be no examinations.

  Or that, at least, was the rumour.

  War had been declared; it did not matter who had declared it. India or Pakistan, it was all the same. It didn’t matter who had begun the quarrel, mother or father; either way, it was her parents fighting. (No, she didn’t like the analogy. She could never be a writer.)

  The violence of living to a regime set by unseen paper-setters and examiners was gone. And with it the indolent silence that followed examinations. But there was no peace. For the familiar sound of rustling paper that accompanied examinations like breathlessness was everywhere. It wasn’t the sound of pages being turned, the hurried gulps of knowledge that was an accompaniment to examination eve. Instead, it was something more brutal, more urgent, and less temporary. They were tearing all the paper they could see – newspapers, magazines with thicker pages – all kinds, the literary Desh; Nabokallol, UltoRath, Cinema Jagat, full of the make-believe gossip of the film industry; the latest issues of Khelar Maath, filled with metaphorical descriptions of the Indian cricket team’s first success in the West Indies and dull grainy pictures of a young Gavaskar, then still without a skull cap; even old examination questions compiled as ‘Test Papers’, the typist’s diaphanous ‘copy paper’ and the imitative but always helpful ‘carbon paper’. (Her mother later told her that only toilet paper had been spared.)

  Paper would turn Calcutta into a dark continent; paper would, like a magician’s handkerchief, fool the enemy; paper, like a womb, would hide and protect them from planes and bombs and men and martyrs. So they sat all day, all nine of them in one room, and cut out pieces of paper to fit into the untidy squares of the windowpanes. They became paper-tailors, cutting and stitching their lives from danger. ‘No, this doesn’t fit,’ shouted one; ‘Smaller, smaller,’ said another; ‘Oh, this is too tiny to fit into the big square here,’ said yet another. No one seemed to be able to cut out the perfect size of paper for the window squares.

  When they met for lunch, happy and sad at the same time, like children who had lost a game but were just happy at having been allowed to play, they confessed and consoled: they were bad at geometry; it was good that their parents had forced them to take up Home Science; if they couldn’t cut out perfect squares from paper, how could they have ever calculated perimeters and areas and a hundred other complicated things of ‘real’ squares which had names like ABCD? ‘Home’ was, after all, no ‘science’, they knew; it was cruel, they said (though what they really meant was ironic), that the boys from Science College lived in a hostel just next to theirs. Never would they quarrel with the boys again when they said that ‘home’ was only an abstraction, like a Pi, a 22/7, a ‘black hole’ which sucked people (especially women) in, who, in turn, sucked other things and people – everything, sleep, dreams, ambition, food, water, soap, money, and lies.

  But after lunch (increasingly frugal these days: think of what our soldiers are eating, the hostel superintendent had begun to say every morning), they became tailors again and however ill-fitting the burkhas (Razia called them that) they had stitched for their windows, they glued them to the wooden frames patiently while the boys from the Science Hostel taunted, ‘Aar koto din ei amabashya cholbey?’ (How long will the moonless nights continue?). They stuck the last square piece on the bathroom window and signed their names on it, all of them – Rina, Shipra, Mou, Puja, Shefali, Aruna, Ila and Mandira. Only she signed her pet name – Tiya; it meant parrot and she wanted to hide behind her nickname.
This was because she wanted to confuse historians in the future: if they all died, as the Jews had a few decades ago (‘Students are the new Jews,’ a Naxal student union leader had shouted from a microphone a year back), the historians would not know where she had disappeared. She, coward at all other moments, was courageous only about her imagined death. One girl, two names; one found, the other missing. It was so easy: a name was all it took to confuse historians, professors whom the Science Hostel boys called ‘scientists of time’ in their own manner.

  Then they all washed the rice glue off their hands, said their evening prayers, and suddenly, they all felt safe.

  At first, she thought that it would last only a few days. She was, in fact, inwardly grateful for it: a break from the teeth-brushing monotony of student life, she thought that the war would be like a holiday. A few red-inked days on the calendar and it would be over, in four or five days, like Durga Puja. But it didn’t go according to plan, at least not hers. Did wars ever work to anyone’s plan? her daughter would ask her exactly twenty years later when an American president called Bush – whose surname would remind her of the name of a Naxal leader during her student days, a man called Jangal Santhal, ‘jangal’ meaning forest – would attack a country called Iraq. It was a strange name for a country she would think; the bigger the name of a country, the more powerful it was, she was convinced. United States of America, United Kingdom; look at what happened to USSR – two years ago, it became Russia, and it immediately lost all its power! That is why she was sure that India would have been a more powerful country if its name had been Hindustan.

  First, it was the strangeness of the familiar. After sunset and the prayers, their hostels grew darker with the hour. Not allowed to switch on lights and shielded from enemy planes by paper windows, the place suddenly became unfamiliar to them. The routine of ‘study hours’ was gone, and with it the charm of untimely gossip. Dinner began to be served early, the chewy rotis, which they called Bata sandals, and a curry of the cheapest seasonal vegetables (nothing was cheap now, the Oriya cook would declare at lunch, nothing except men’s livers), and this they ate without pleasure, warding off mosquitoes with one hand and stuffing the roti hurriedly into their mouths, as if this was a punishment they wanted to be relieved of. ‘Thank God it’s winter,’ one of them would say occasionally, imagining a life in this darkness in a sweltering summer in Calcutta, and immediately someone else would respond in this single candle-lit darkness, ‘Oh, I’m sure the enemies wouldn’t be able to make us out from the humming of our ceiling fans’. They said all this without hope, without joy, often without will. They spoke because it was the only activity that was possible in that darkness. Perhaps they also spoke to distract attention from the tastelessness of the food. War food was always bad, these students of Home Science told each other while washing their hands, as if they’d seen and survived many wars in their lifetime. But then, one war was exactly like the other: everyone, loser and winner, went hungry.