My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  There was no one downstairs. Tina’s three-year-old son whom my mother used to fondly call Keeda, meaning worm, lay sideways on the divan, sleeping. I called out Tina’s name and then for my father. No one answered. I suddenly felt scared and ran up the stairs.

  I can’t remember what I’d said when I entered my mother’s room. I only remember seeing Tina sitting on the edge of the bed looking out towards the verandah. She didn’t respond to any of my questions.

  My father had burnt all my mother’s manuscripts before the smell of smoke could reach Tina. It was not anger, he explained. Her things, the sticky words which had been dearest to her, had to be burnt like her to be allowed their journey from her room to her new home; it could not be otherwise, he said later.

  That night I lay awake beside Tina, talking about things we’d never spoken about, death, spirits, planchettes and our mother. We spoke about her in a way we’d never done before, allowing her passages to the deepest parts of our memory where only those who have no more journeys to make live, in that invisible region from where recall seems easiest but is actually impossible, for no child can describe a dead parent except as the protagonist of an imagined fantasy. Suddenly, conscious of our tears, we tried to avoid talking about her, as if words would bring greater sorrow, not realising that she’d come to our lives, from then on, like a favourite tune, unbidden, but always welcome.

  As Tina fell asleep in the early hours of the unlit morning, I suddenly saw my mother walk across the room and take the pillow from beneath Tina’s head, shake it and take out a piece of paper from its inner fold. She looked at the piece of paper and then dipped it in a bucket of Robin Blue liquid.

  I screamed.

  When I opened my eyes that morning, I found the maid Ramdulari’s face close to mine, as if trying to see where all the sleep had come from.

  I, who’d never believed in spirits or even the soul, began to believe in the dream. A piece of paper I had seen only in a dream would perhaps not have acquired such significance had my father, unthinkingly, not burnt my mother’s handwriting the previous night.

  I found three sheets of paper tucked in a pillow that noon. It wasn’t my pillow, neither Tina’s nor even my father’s but Ramdulari’s. I don’t know why I’ve never tried to investigate how those pieces of paper found their way into the pillowcase of an illiterate maid.

  I am giving up on understanding. I only look at the fingers of people who walk into my dreams without shoes, people like my mother.

  The sheets of paper revealed a long, incomplete, unpublished poem.

  She’d written it for herself, a rare indulgence for a ‘famous’ writer, and bared her soul without recourse to the beam-balanced ethics of autobiographising.

  I translated it, almost immediately, and thus poorly and almost thoughtlessly, over the phone for my American husband.

  ‘Life will not stop here,

  Not even after you die, on the way, to the next station;

  I’ve told the guard

  He’ll wave the red flag

  And the world would know,

  Only after me though,

  That you’ve disappeared without your husband’s last name…’

  These were your words, weren’t they, in that letter You wrote from Cochin?

  I decided to lose the words before I lost myself in them

  As my hands had, so often, without your permission,

  Lost themselves in the warm depression

  That you left behind on my brown sofa

  On soggy afternoons

  I’ve also lost other things ever since,

  Abhimanyu,

  Domestic gestures that you, worldly life’s bachelor,

  wouldn’t know:

  A catalogue of prayer flags,

  An ashtray full of burnt words,

  A bucket with a broken handle,

  full of myth-wet clothes I forgot to hang from the clothesline,

  A flowerpot in which I’d planted the grass from your back,

  The grass in which Radha, love’s eternal loser, lost her toe-ring,

  And my daughters’ ribbons, black at home, white in school,

  Black and white,

  Ribbons which tied me to the posters of my bed every night

  And a few other things too,

  Things you made me lose,

  Things so precious that they caused discomfort;

  I have thought of losing you too,

  Losing you like I once lost those things,

  Mindlessly, without adverbs;

  Then I have hidden you

  Which is just the same

  For isn’t hiding about losing

  From view?

  Don’t move from behind the curtains I say,

  Don’t.

  When you enter the classroom and open the book

  To page number seventy two,

  And ask Lakshman or Urmila

  To read out the words

  Which, as you say,

  sounds like damp breath inside a winter quilt,

  How do you feel?

  How do you feel to snatch them out of my mouth

  And put them in the mouths of strangers

  Who care for them as much as they do for bird-droppings?

  You, after the world, called my solitary hiss, poetry,

  You, with the world, called me the tree-hole’s poet,

  I laughed,

  I hadn’t bargained for more

  Poets do not love men, you said once

  And I agreed,

  Persuaded by my favourites –

  Kalidasa and the bumblebee

  I loved once

  You, who came crying into the world, fifteen years after me,

  Were still at your mother’s breasts then,

  You could’ve been my son, unfit for this late love,

  That would have been better,

  Perhaps

  Dying with a disease whose name is difficult to spell in English,

  In what would perhaps be my last autumn,

  The last season of sunning my thoughts,

  With the pillows, in the withering backyard,

  I think of that moment of

  Coincidence in the corridor

  Near the Town Library

  Where we first met

  You had come to look for a book of poems

  And I to look for bookmarks I’d left behind

  I found a reader who read like a saint

  And you a poet who’d forgotten how to count

  backwards, you said later

  We were looking for neither

  Abhimanyu,

  I met you

  When I’d tired of the world’s monologues,

  I (wife, mother and the late parents’ second daughter)

  Had become a plant,

  Always spoken to,

  Whose silence was to be its sap,

  I was learning a new language then,

  Of an imposed maturity,

  In other words,

  on how to draft a report

  about the theft of childhood at eighteen,

  I had learnt two languages already,

  The first, speaking under water, with bubbles, like a fish

  The brown language of secreting unwanted resin at the nodes, the second

  But this was not sufficient

  The master at home knew only one,

  The language of numbers, in ledgers and account books

  He was impatient with my slow learning

  And my daughters, my paper-boat twins,

  Who I thought had come to me like two quills

  dipped by Saraswati in her milk ink-pots

  Spoke only in English

  Which came to my ears residually, like eavesdropping,

  They grew up, suddenly, without informing me;

  I,

  Who for so long had hidden my words from them,

  The people I lived with, the crew of my soul,

  Adopting pen names like cheap mas
ks,

  Changing them, nervously, like the parting of my hair,

  Wanted to tell them – my daughters –

  That I was also more than I,

  Or perhaps less, if they said so

  That I, who they’d seen as a tablecloth that could

  not move

  Unless re-moved

  Had another life

  Beyond night and day

  Beyond the domestic lifeboats of saucers and nail cutters

  That I could,

  If only they spoke in their mother’s tongue

  – In Hindi, the only language

  in which the word for ‘life’ and the ‘love’ are the same,

  (‘Jaan’) –

  Be the words on a printed page

  In a bound book

  From which their favourite teacher,

  Abhimanyu Singh,

  Read out a poem or two

  In ‘Compulsory Hindi’ class every week,

  Where they sat as close to his table as possible

  To see the words move from the page to his eyes

  And then from there, without show of passages,

  To his lips

  They sat there

  Looking at his lips

  Touching the words

  And they wished the words were longer

  So that they could see him being touched,

  As if bitten by a mosquito,

  Making the poem seem like an auditorium of bites

  I heard them talking about you,

  One wishing that you spoke about love in English,

  The other asking me once, while I hung the mosquito net,

  What ‘Abhimanyu’ meant,

  And on discovery of how your namesake had been killed,

  Hacked by geometry and trapped by the enemies’ mathematics

  In a concentric code which only let people in,

  Killing them by making them enter,

  She had cried

  And bought an English translation of the

  Mahabharata

  With her pocket money the next day

  I wanted to console her,

  Ask her not to cry,

  To tell her that the ‘chakravyuh’ that had killed

  Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu

  In Kurukshetra

  Was only a poem

  Which enticed a reader in,

  Leaving him without escape,

  With only the possibility of surrender

  To the soft quick under the poet’s dirty nails

  I wanted to tell them other things

  To show them my poems,

  The half-torn tickets of my wig-less afternoons,

  I even wanted to tell them

  About you, the kind bat’s shadow on my dark night

  But their words made me insecure

  Like the water near the brim in a glass,

  Incapable of translation

  Only you let me be a cloud

  Let me change every moment

  before you could give my shape a name

  These are things you already know

  But don’t forget that I am a poet,

  That by calling me a poet

  You have asked me to repeat what you already knew

  Without sounding like a multiplication table

  Or a wife’s nagging,

  That you have asked me to mimic,

  Though with the illusion of distance that the glasses

  on your nose creates,

  The rhythm of the breeze squeezing out sunlight from my wet clothes

  And the metre of my asthmatic breathings

  The Poem

  My poem,

  My horoscope of uncombed desire…

  This man, to whom she had dedicated one of her poems, calling him ‘Sahrydya’ in the title, the writer’s other heart, for whom she had brought down her once-lavish curtains of guilt, in whom she had found what we, her ‘blood’s bakery’, had not been able to give her, the incompleteness of a relationship that she so valued, like ‘torn slippers…stopping me in the middle of my pilgrimage…stranded in the bliss of non-fulfilment’. Abhimanyu Singh, the man whose name she’d taken for the first time in this poem, had provided her poet’s soul with an invisible scaffolding, of hinges without the noise of a creaking footnote; he had lit the lamps of her heavy-hipped evenings while we’d chased kites in coagulated skies. And he had loved her without lying.

  He, her dark-striped confidante, I still find it difficult to say, had been my mother’s lover.

  The Mountain Disease

  ‘I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness – a real thorough-going illness.’

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  IT WAS ADMISSION SEASON in college and I was tired of being a recorded message. Explaining the logic of the admission process, filling up forms, and repeating the instructions to all the candidates individually on a hot summer afternoon can be more exhausting than running a marathon in a hot desert. The waywardness of unexpected questions would bring a mix of annoyance and comic relief. Rajak would wink, Jha laugh, Pramanik work hard to suppress his amusement, I would look at the candidate’s face and summon up my greatest reserves of empathy.

  Prerna was the last candidate to buy an admission form on Saturday. Her face revealed newly acquired confidence, the kind that makes young people attractive to their fellow mates and slightly repulsive to their teachers. After the routine explanations, she raised her hand slightly to intervene with a question. I smiled, asking her to go ahead.

  ‘Ma’am,’ she said, ‘is it true that people from the plains are more intelligent than those from the hills?’

  None of us, not me, neither my colleagues, had done our homework on the subject. We looked at each other, ignorance annotating our hesitant smiles. We could – should – have been prepared. Our college was, after all, situated right on top of a mildly sloped hill.

  Prerna had applied for Honours in English Literature, choosing Political Science as her second option. I felt a strange kinship with her self-doubt, the kind I have often been ridiculed for feeling for incompetent Hindi film actresses from small towns. My sense of victimhood, when it came tied with geography, was terribly prickly and sensitive.

  ‘Just as whites imagined themselves as superior to blacks, so people from the plains like to think of themselves as more intelligent than hill people,’ I said, trying hard to choose my analogy so as to be intelligible to an eighteen-year-old girl.

  The best – or the worst – was yet to come. ‘But whites are more beautiful than blacks, Ma’am,’ she replied.

  Rajak looked at me, Pramanik hid his face inside his cloth bag where I imagined his teeth touching newspaper-covered books. I looked at the Nepali girl – she was fair, wore her straight hair up to her waist, her mouth was painted in a pink shade of lipstick, her eyelids were crowded with a few shades of eyeshadow. Like most young people from the eastern Himalayas, she looked good enough to be inside a fashion glossy. I checked that thought as soon as it arrived in my mind – I did not want to be guilty of the same essentialism as this prospective student.

  ‘Isn’t Michelle Obama beautiful?’ It was Jha. He was a new appointee and had just arrived from Bihar’s Chhapra district. His admiration for the American president’s wife was easy to spot. He was wearing a white T-shirt that made his ample infatuation evident: in studious black, on the wearer’s chest, was a bust-size image of Mrs O, but her name had undergone an epiphanic transformation, as things usually do on pop tees. Michelle Obama was now Michelle ObaMa.

  ‘Who? Oh, Obama’s wife? No, Sir. How can she be beautiful? She is so dark and has ugly teeth.’

  I admired the girl’s straightforwardness. I even envied her uncomplicated worldview, but I was a teacher. My side of the table did not allow me to forget that.

  Jha, however, was not one to give up so easily. This son of Michelle Ma got up from his chair and asked, almost like a student, ‘Isn’t there a single dark-complexioned person whom
you find beautiful?’

  ‘Sir, who has ever found a crow beautiful?’ she replied promptly.

  This was going to be a difficult semester.

  The days following that short but semi-quixotic interaction with Prerna were filled with various kinds of speculation in the faculty staffroom. Biswakarma, who was the lone Nepali professor in college, watched the discussion from the sidelines. He told me that he had been stung enough times to know that he should be a lizard on the wall.

  ‘I won’t even do the lizard’s teek-teek-teek,’ he told me, as if partaking of a vow.

  There were very few people he spoke to or trusted. I was one of them because he believed that northern Bengal, where both of us had lived all our lives, bound us together like ‘Calcutta tied all South Bengalis’. And though we had never said that to each other in words, we were aware that a common dislike for Calcuttans had made us friends, the kind of temporary friendship allowed to colleagues.

  Jha looked visibly disturbed every time I ran into him. ‘Something must be done to change this racist outlook,’ he pleaded with me. I later learnt that he had done the same with everyone except Sen, a professor of Botany. This wasn’t because Professor Sen was what they call ‘the senior-most’ teacher, but because Jha believed that botanists wouldn’t really understand racism.

  ‘Let classes begin,’ I consoled him. I had spent enough time in educational institutions to know that the classroom was a self-enclosed chamber and that the ‘learning’ inside it rarely influenced life outside the window. Male professors who taught feminism did not let their wives seek employment for fear of the workplace ‘corrupting’ their innocence. This was a male colleague’s confession to me.

  But Jha was young, in his late twenties – he had been a student leader once and that contagion of idealism had still not left him. I wanted to be on his side. But I did not have his reserve of time. My life was structured so tight that even a delay of a few minutes could lead to a family capsize. For at home, where my mind lived, even as my body walked through classrooms and corridors in college, I had a fourteen-year-old son who had been diagnosed with multiple ailments. I only knew that he could not speak the language we used and that I was the only one who understood what he wanted. I was in my late forties, late enough for the fire of idealism to seem like a light-and-sound display in a historical monument, and youth, like Jha’s, was a vulnerable historical monument.

  It seemed strange to me that everyone turned to the Zoology professor for an answer. Was there evidence, was there evidence... Everyone had the same question. Biswakarma and I looked at each other when Sengupta mentioned empirical details from journals (‘with high impact factor’) that proved that Prerna’s apprehension might indeed have been true. There was iodine deficiency in the hills, a government survey had found out, and, hence, the introduction of iodised salt in the country, he paraphrased for science-ignoramuses like me.