My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  That thought recharges her – if they can, she can, too.

  Yes, she can now sense the presence of water, it couldn’t be too far away. It is true that water is not like light, that its presence can’t be seen from afar, but one can hear it walk, as on a seashore, or fall sadly without fear, when trapped inside a filter or coffee machine. She knows that she is near water. No, that’s not completely true. She feels that she’s near the presence of something that holds water, like one can sense that people live in houses from the clothes hanging out to dry in balconies. Just a few more minutes and she’d be able to see it – it is just that water’s address isn’t always as fixed as a human’s.

  She takes off her jacket – the long walk has squeezed water out of her, her body’s dripping in sweat. She’s angry and curious – she’s hardly drunk any water today, where has the sweat come from? There is more water inside her body than there is in the taps and pipes and tanks in Darjeeling. Is it possible to convert sweat to drinking water? She’s heard about a Japanese – or is it African? – company that can convert urine to drinking water. Why not sweat? What if she could cut her sweat glands and use that water? Why isn’t it possible to collect sweat like one collects blood in bottles?

  The shawl covering her face and head, the scarf that was wrapped around her neck until a little while ago, and the jacket are now in her hands. It seems it’s been years since she’s bathed. Memories of jumping into the Ganga in Malda, her Malda, the town of her childhood, with the sweetest mangoes in its orchards, come to her – a clump of soil breaking from under her feet and falling into the river almost at the same time as her body, diving into the water greedily on a summer day. How much water there was in the river – it was a universe, bigger than anything imaginable, larger than the sky! Unlike rooms and houses and other places on land, it’s never refused her entry.

  She doesn’t realise that she’s crying.

  ‘More water! Where is it coming from?’ she shouts at herself angrily, staring at the tears that are now in her palms. She turns her face towards the sky just to check if she’d be able to force the tears back to where they’d come from. Not a drop of water can be wasted.

  She thinks she hears a cow moo, but after that, there’s the same rigid silence and the unchanging view of sharp pines pointing their arrow-like snout at the sky. The road seems like a dictionary – she wouldn’t ever be able to get to the end. Hurrying towards a bend, hoping to get a sight of the water, she stands like a person who can’t remember what she’s lost.

  Instead of water, there are lines, like graphs from her college economics textbooks. The haze of fog separates these upwards climbing graphs from each other. It takes her some time to realise that these are mountain ranges. She takes out a plastic bag from her pocket – fog is water, if she can trap parts of it (what else to call them except parts?) in her bag, they will turn into water later. The plastic bag flares up, its handles like ears, its body energised by air – but no water accumulates inside it. She waits for the fog to travel towards her, for it to behave like water, easier to catch, but no such thing happens. She cannot take it anymore – there’s so much water in front of her, the clouds and the fog, the icy peaks of the mountains, but they are inaccessible to her as water. It’s like God being everywhere but actually invisible. No, it’s worse. She can do without God, she cannot do without water anymore.

  Tiny yellow birds fly past her, beginning their descent not far from where she is. That is where water – the lake – must be? She begins walking, angry that the road she has to take is not the same as the birds’, that they will get there before her. What if they finish drinking the little water there that remains?

  When she sees water at last, it is like sagging skin on the lake. She doesn’t recognise it, like one sometimes can’t an aged actress, from having only seen her tilted young face on a giant screen. Confused, she wonders why she’s here. She’s forgotten. The shawl and the jacket and the empty plastic bottles and packets have all fallen on the way. She doesn’t remember them.

  She only wants to bathe. She wants nothing more. The birds have left. So have the clouds. The sky is naked, like it is at this time of the year, naked for a few moments just before it swallows light for the day. The yellow sweater is wet in parts – underarms and the back, from sweat. But her clothes might as well be a part of her. She has no consciousness of their separateness – they need to bathe along with her, as the rest of her body, her hair and feet. Swallowing the remainders of dryness inside her mouth, she dives into the lake.

  ‘Why did she jump into a dry lake?’

  ‘If the lake hadn’t been completely dry, her dead body would never have been recovered. The people of Darjeeling would’ve been drinking…’

  ‘She must’ve thought it was the Ganga…’

  ‘At least her death brought the Chief Minister and water to Darjeeling – let us be grateful for that.’

  ‘Was it suicide? Her husband is a police officer who…’

  ‘What was her name? Maybe we can name this place after her, Shahid Something, like Shahid Bhagat Singh, you know? Tourists would love…’

  ‘How about Water Martyr Point when we bring tourists next year?’

  ‘That sounds like matar paneer…’

  My Mother’s Head

  ‘I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart.’

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  NO ONE CAN SAY exactly when my mother’s heart became her head.

  I do not know which ages faster – the head or the heart. I only knew about legs; responding to gravity made them older than every other part of the body. And my mother’s legs had stopped being legs a long time before her heart became her head.

  When I was young, not when we were children but when, as my mother likes to say ‘we were her children’, signifying a time before we began to belong to other people, I ignored her pains as something mysterious. Pain was rare in childhood, and it seemed like a foreign thing when my mother spoke about it or sometimes held the soles of her feet and wept silent tears. I felt helpless but also distant – this thing called pain is like God; one needs to experience it to believe in it. I watched it as an outsider and it was invisible. This quality it shares with ghosts. I was scared of ghosts; I still am. How could I have protected my mother when I feared them myself?

  I also did not like my mother very much when I was a child. She seemed to be a distant figure, her life directed by invisible things like pain and love. She invoked the latter in every single conversation until it began to resemble the ‘rupees’ plonked before a number to give it material value – we were to do everything she instructed us to do because of the love she had for us. I began to detest the burden of that love. Glue is always difficult to peel away from, and when I wanted to move away from the stickiness of that love, it left its serrated half-glued edges on me. I didn’t realise it then that when my mother wanted to move away from pain; it had the same effect on her.

  And she did try to unglue herself from it. There were the pink painkillers that she kept in her wallet like young adults keep condoms – one never knew when one might need one. But those tablets did not lessen the pain, the heart’s hurt. The realisation that she had married wrong came as a belatedly received insight. It haunted her. How could it have not? Her husband – my father – was a man who was so self-obsessed that he did not notice those around him. My mother longed to be noticed. She had the kind of sophisticated beauty that gave evidence of gentleness even in adversity. Physical pain came to give her face a sad grace like it did to the wrinkled skin of fleshy fruits.

  There were also the contraceptive pills of the time that destroyed the bones of women like her. They were invisible agents that were part of a barter economy: in return for preventing children from being born, they bleached away the calcium from women’s bones. It was a moral: that women had to live with pain as payment for being unwilling wombs. I, of course, did not know all that. I sometimes noticed the name
s of days written on the back of a tablet strip and wondered whether Wednesday-pain was different from Sunday-pain. Of course, these were things that were so peripheral to my childhood that they never manifested as questions. It is one of the wonders of my childhood and adolescence that I never asked my mother the ‘How are you?’ question even when her suffering hung like a watercolour painting in our house.

  It was only after I’d leave home for university that I’d begin to see what life without the constant punctuation of pain could be like. For we were young, my hostel mates and I, and the only kind of pain that affected us intermittently had to do with the heart. It began in the throat, sucked everything together into a cyclonic lump and then suddenly, out of nowhere, without the show of paths or passages, it was inside the chest, like a skyscraper, its height and its weight crushing the walls of the heart and, then, once again suddenly, it had changed shape into a ball, a ball that couldn’t be moved, not with hands, not with feet.

  Though we only experienced it individually, we made it sound like a disease peculiar to our age group – heartbreak. We were angry that there were no medicines for the pain, and that our parents and teachers and doctors and the ‘system’ did not consider it important enough to miss examinations. When a senior committed suicide after his girlfriend married a young paediatrician, I wondered whether this was why people used painkillers – meant for flesh, nerves and bones – in grossly exaggerated quantities to stave off injuries of the heart.

  By the time I had reached my early twenties I had grown so distant from the small middle-class world of my parents that I had forgotten that their bodies also had hearts beating inside them. When I visited them during holidays, I saw only the worry and tiredness on their faces. When we spoke – and those moments were few and rare – it was only of sad things, like their dreams for me and my current inability to fulfil them; their physical and financial investment in me and my refusal to let that investment fuel my professional ambition. Then I got married and left them in a climate of permanent sadness.

  Only to discover that my marriage was a dull paraphrase of theirs. I quit it immediately.

  Familiar sadness was easier to deal with than new pain. I moved back in with them.

  It might have been my recent disgust with the man I’d married (a terribly wrong choice as I soon discovered) but my habit of recording and analysing his ways and manners made me look at my parents anew. I was shocked to discover that they had aged – even their complaints had grown feeble. I wondered whether it was my bad marriage that had produced this alchemy. I only knew that I began to feel, for the first time in my life, that I might be related to them after all.

  It was around this time that I began noticing some weird habits my mother had developed. She was in a state of permanent absent-mindedness. If she wasn’t as old as she was, her forgetfulness would’ve been mistaken as a symptom of an extramarital relationship. A part of her seemed to be taking notes all the time. Sincerity, her defining characteristic, kept her efficient – the house was managed perfectly, the meals were always on time, the fridge was always full of vegetables, fish and meat, the clothes ironed and the bed linen starched, tucked in tight, with fitted folds. When things are so ordered and perfect, they are evidence of an imperfect world elsewhere. Two ugly relationships and a bad marriage had taught me that.

  Living on my parents’ money, pretending to be sadder than I was, so as to avoid looking for gainful employment as long as I could, I began to feel a new interest in my mother. I was conscious that it wasn’t the affectionate interest of a daughter in her mother. I felt like a detective. I began to follow her around with my old disinterested face, to avoid her suspicion of being scrutinised.

  The first of her unusual ways had to do with her post-phone call behaviour. She did not know – or learn – how to look for phone numbers using the ‘Contacts’ or ‘Address Book’ tab on her phone, and so she wrote everything down. She dialled numbers slowly, looking for each digit from the back of her notebook, her fingers terribly scared of making a mistake. She spoke to friends and relatives exactly as if they were sitting in front of her, refusing to make a distinction between face-to-face conversations and telephonic speech. It made her look slightly comical, even endearing. The subjects of these conversations were funnier – truant house-help, an accident of burnt milk, stomach upsets of grandchildren, disobedient daughters-in-law. But what followed them was completely unexpected. She would stealthily take out a piece of paper and write down a succession of digits, as if it were a shorthand code for the conversation she’d just had. I gradually began to find these scribbles everywhere, on old newspapers, brown paper packets, discarded invoices, registers and notebooks, everywhere. What were these, and what did they mean?

  But their tenor was secretive. I found it difficult to ask – rather confront – her on their meaning. For all one knew, I might have been imagining a connection between the doodled numbers and phone calls.

  But one day, when I couldn’t check my curiosity anymore, I decided to ask her.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, as I’d expected.

  Later, when I was sitting on the terrace, having my afternoon tea, she walked soundlessly and stood behind me. ‘These telephone companies are cheats. They are always cheating pensioners like us,’ she said.

  ‘Why, what happened?’ I asked, not looking at her.

  ‘They always steal our money from the phone. Once, when you were not here,’ she said, and then realising that she shouldn’t have brought up my marriage – for they avoided the subject as if mentioning it would bring more bad luck to their daughter (and thus to them) – she clarified, ‘I had ₹125 as balance. I went to sleep and when I woke up I found that I had only ₹25. They had stolen a hundred rupees from my phone overnight.’

  ‘Then?’ I asked, without interest. I couldn’t get what this uninteresting back story had to do with the scribbles on the writing surfaces in our house.

  ‘Then your father called those women at the – what do they call it, wait, I forget – Customer Care. He called them every day, day and night, morning and evening, until they were forced to return the money to me, to my phone.’

  I allowed myself the laughter, a relief from the stern and no-nonsense image I’d chosen for myself in this house. ‘So much drama for only a hundred rupees?’ I asked.

  ‘Only? You don’t get even a litre of mustard oil for a hundred rupees anymore,’ she replied, stung by my light-heartedness. I was reminded, not for the first time, about my parents lacking a sense of humour. I had no childhood memory of us laughing as a family, nothing except the canned studio laughter that came from watching Jaspal Bhatti’s Flop Show or Wagle Ki Duniya on our aged Telerama television set. Laughter seemed foreign to their middle-class sensibility. ‘What does that have to do with your scribbles, Ma?’ I asked, hoping she’d leave me alone.

  ‘That is what I’m trying to tell you. Why are you so impatient? Listen. Since that day, I’ve been noting down these details.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of when I call, when I disconnect, the duration of the call, the amount of money I had before the call and the amount the company deducted. Everything.’ She said this with a lot of pride, another show of her bureaucratic diligence that her daughter had not inherited.

  Days passed, and my interest in espionage on her passed as well. Until one day my cousin called from the faraway frontier town they lived in. I had avoided my relatives all my life – in each of them was a spud of an annoying habit that had also sprouted in my parents. It wasn’t the cliched nosiness or noisiness that bugged me as much as the limits of their intelligence. Their worlds were the size of their handkerchiefs and they, therefore, had to concentrate, with all their energies on staying within its perimeter. My parents did the same. Their lives had the taut focus of nothing except a part of themselves – their feet. The world was lost on them.

  It is perhaps the subconscious that drags in the feet as a metaphor here. For it, indeed, is about my m
other’s feet. So when my cousin, with her full-throated laughter on the phone, told me about my mother’s habit of mentioning the exact time at which she had called earlier but which hadn’t been received, I began to wonder whether it had anything to do with her feet. Because I hardly spoke to her on the phone – I rarely moved out of my room, I had begun to find the world an ill-lit theatre – I did not know about these tics. But after they’d been pointed out to me, I noticed that they were true: ‘I called you at 2:52 pm yesterday and then again at 6:54, but there was no response from you,’ I heard her tell my brother one day. Yes, it had hardened into a habit.

  When I pointed it out to her, she did not notice anything odd about it. As the years passed softly, without anyone noticing their passage, because everything looked the same and seemed unchanging, as if our lives had been left wrapped in plastic, conversations between my parents almost stopped. Worries had been the glue of their relationship, and now there really wasn’t much to worry about. My father, after having performed his role as husband, father and father-in-law, returned to the more comfortable life of a public commentator – he sat in front of the television all day and competed with noisy newscasters in broadcasting his own opinions. My mother, interested in neither the television nor the lone audience sitting in front of it, sat alone on the balcony, sipping from her cup even when the tea had finished. Her legs no longer had the power to carry her for long distances; her voice on the telephone had become weak too. One day, when I saw her calling out to the cook who was walking out of the gate, it struck me that her voice and her legs had become related in a way I hadn’t noticed – her legs had the strength to carry her only till the radius of where her voice could reach.