by Ellen Datlow
• • •
I have never gotten used to seeing Pampi without her husband. She seems so wretchedly alone, as if I too have faded away. She has never recovered from Chandrasekhar’s death, or her children selling the house and packing her into this modern-shodern multi-storey building along with me. But then, she looks like a mirror image of me stooped in that chair at teatime, grumbling about the heat in summer, about the cold in winter, about how her children don’t visit enough, about how I eat all the mishti in the fridge before she can have any. Always complaining, like me, like I’m complaining right now. Chandrasekhar’s absence is as vast as the loss of walls and a roof above our heads—the house we all lived in gone, the walls closing in on us in this small flat, despite it being higher above the streets. But Pampi should be grateful that she still has a son and a daughter and three grandchildren.
I should be thankful too, that I have a nephew and a niece.
And a sister.
During Chandrasekhar’s shraddha, my tears were for my sister, not my brother-in law, though I would of course miss his sturdy presence in our lives. It was her sorrow that was the knife in my chest. But when she gripped my hand like an infant grabbing a thumb, and stared shell-shocked at the garlanded monochrome photos of her husband through the stages of his life: clean-cut teenager; the solemn young man she was wed to; the white-haired patriarch with his crisp dress shirts and kurtas, his horn-rimmed glasses and pipe, all I could think of was that Pampi needed me now, more than ever before. My older sister finally needed me.
She never held my hand like that again. If anything, she seems to need me even less now that her husband is gone, because back then I gave her some respite from his relentlessly masculine presence. Now she sleeps, and eats, and sleeps, and fades away into the walls of this place, and I remain no guardian of anything, same as ever.
• • •
I should check on Pampi. She was acting very strange just before the power went today. I woke up from my afternoon nap to go make tea because Kalpana stayed home sick (Charu dropped by some food in the morning, which was sweet, though I told her I am still capable of cooking). I walked into the living room, and there was Pampi sitting in the rocking chair in the corner, with all the lights turned off even though the power wasn’t gone. It was just evening, and our living room windows don’t face the sunset, so it was quite dark. I asked her why she hadn’t turned on the lights—it was so dim I could barely even see her face under the cowl of her saree. Why she was wearing the saree with the cowl over her head in this heat like a new bride or a mourner, I don’t even know. The ceiling fan was groaning above her head, turning slow circles with its blades. That smell like something rotting was quite strong, and I wondered if Pampi wasn’t bothered by it. I was about to ask her.
When I reached for the switch, she said, “Don’t turn on the light.”
I told her I could barely see, did she want me to walk into furniture and break a hip?
I thought I heard a little giggle from her, so soft it felt like a memory. A memory of when Pouloma was fourteen and I was ten, and she would wake me up in bed and stare at me, her face pale blue in the moonlight from the windows, and I would tell her to stop it, but her face wouldn’t move and I would be paralyzed in fear that she’d become a bhoot, that she’d died in her sleep and become a monster like in the stories.
But I don’t think she giggled. I haven’t heard her laugh in a long time, let alone giggle. Looking at her sitting in the twilight gave me that feeling you get, there must be a word for it—that sadness that comes with the evening light, when sunlight begins to drain away and it’s still just enough to see by but not enough to keep the lights off. Again I moved my hand towards the switch. Again she said, “Don’t turn on the light.” She sounded like she had a cold, like her throat was thick with phlegm.
I asked her what had gotten into her, that it was dark.
“You don’t want to see me like this,” she said.
I asked her, like what, like an old woman? We’re about thirty years too late for that, I told her, trying to get her to laugh. I’m no pretty young bride myself, Pampi, I said to her. This made me think, again, of the way she was wearing her saree over her head so it held the shadows under it, thick over her face. It made my heart skip a little—this odd little personal reminder of my perpetual identity as the spinster in my elder sister’s shadow. I asked whether she was feeling unwell.
“I’m so ugly,” she said. It sounded like she was smiling, though her face was invisible.
No, I’m the ugly one, I nearly said. I’ve always hated when pretty people call themselves ugly. But she’s an old woman now, like me. Does that make her ugly? Perhaps that is the world we live in.
I told her she used to call me ugly all the time when we were children. I asked: did she remember that?
“No. Do you remember?”
What, I asked.
“You don’t remember the good things I do for you.”
I told her that wasn’t true. That I remembered her reading to me from books when I was young, and taking me out with money sneaked away from our parents’ purses to get kulfi in the streets, knocking down sour rain-wet mangoes from trees with stones and sharing them with me only for us both to get a stomach upset.
“You don’t remember that I gave you two children,” she said.
Pampi, I said. What are you saying? You have children, they are your children. You are the one with the children, I told her.
“You’ve inherited them, like everything else. If I had a stroke instead of Chandrasekhar, you would have moved in with him.”
I asked her what rubbish she was talking. Did you just wake up from a bad dream? Is this about Charu and Pratik not visiting enough? Uff baba, they come every week, I don’t know what you are on about, I told her, I told her all these things.
“Don’t turn on the lights,” she said again, as my hand moved, again toward the light switch. “You don’t want to see me like this,” she said, so low I could barely hear the words. I felt the way I do when I slip and nearly fall in the bathroom, and imagine my bones breaking like so many of my fellow acquaintances and family who’ve reached their elder years. Pampi sometimes has episodes, gets angry, forgets things, but this felt strange. This felt bad.
She didn’t say anything after that at all, and all I could hear was the whining of mosquitoes coming in with the gloom, the familiar traffic sounds from the distant main road riding the warm breeze from the verandah, the hard cawing of crows on the sills calling for the sun to either come back to the sky or hurry up and leave.
So I left the lights off, and went to my bedroom, carefully using my walking stick to mark out my path, and switched on the light there instead. I was so confused by the whole conversation I entirely forgot to make any tea. Surely she had been sleep-talking while taking a nap. Maybe she’s in one of her moods, missing Chandrasekhar terribly.
• • •
Every day at five or so, when the load shedding usually happens, I sit at my desk by the grill of the south-facing window of the flat. I sit with my tea, some water, my medicines, my plate of glucose biscuits, my pen (Charu has got me a ballpoint pen now that I have trouble refilling fountain pens, though I still prefer those), and my diary. They all sit on the desk, which used to belong to Chandrasekhar, and still smells faintly of his pipe smoke. Kalpana brings it all to me. She’s a good girl. Charu and Pratik hired her—her mother works for them as a maid, and her father cuts hair on the footpath near their building. Sometimes I wonder if I would have already been dead by now if it weren’t for them and Kalpana. When I thank them by saying things like that they get irritated. They don’t know how unappealing it is to be helpless. I once left this country alone, with nothing but my accented English and my mother’s knitted winter clothes. Now I can’t even leave this flat without feeling like it might be too much.
Kalpana has to bring two old women in a city flat their tea and biscuits and groceries and meals, dust the furniture a
nd mop the floors day after day. No school for her. She must be so bored, the poor thing. I let her watch the TV with me and give her some extra money when I can. When she sits on the floor with her knees tucked under her chin, watching the soaps with me, I wonder what it would be like if she were my daughter. If she were an orphan, could I have adopted her? Probably not, with her caste. Charu and Pratik used to sit on the floor on hot summer days in the huge living room of the old house when they were children. They’d sprawl at their mother Pampi’s feet, listening to Chandrasekhar’s gramophone play Hindi songs. I would be filled with envy, watching them, willing them to come sit by my feet instead. They never did. I was just Mashi, not Ma.
Even though Kalpana will never go to school or sail—well, fly, now—across the oceans to university in England, she will at least get married once she’s old enough, and have children, unless something goes wrong. Even she has her destiny to fulfill, unlike me. When her parents send her back to their village to be wed, she’ll no longer be able to work here. I think how I will miss her, but then I realize that by that time, I probably won’t be around any longer.
• • •
I don’t usually read the pages after I write here—but when I try, I can’t. My handwriting is bad. I can’t make out all of it. I can’t let Charu or Pratik see this, they’ll worry about it. Or maybe I’m the one worrying too much.
I can’t seem to remember writing some of what I am reading.
• • •
When the power goes out, I can see the whole neighborhood go dark, the low skyline of stubby buildings with their pipes and TV antennae and rooftop clotheslines going black against the blue of the twilight sky. It feels like the city has gone to sleep, closing its electric eyes. Or perhaps like it has passed away unexpectedly. I can hear the old ceiling fan go dhok-dhok-dhok until it accepts its powerless fate. The sound of fan blades in the sudden silence is like a scythe swinging above my head. This reminds me of that movie with the knight playing chess with Death. I think Death had a big scythe in that. I saw that movie on video cassette recently with Charu; she and Bijoy drove me to their flat so I could watch on their TV with the cassette player. Very sharp, you could even read the subtitles properly. I hadn’t seen that film in so very long. The first time I saw it was at Lighthouse Cinema, a long time ago. The actors and actresses looked so beautiful against the screen, though the image from the projector was faded and flickering. It was raining when we came out of the cinema hall—I went with Pampi and Chandrasekhar, as always, having no husband to take me—and under the cloudy light New Market looked silver and grey, like the world behind the big screen and the thick velvet curtains. I felt warm as we stepped out, despite the spray coming into the cramped area by the box office. Pampi said she didn’t understand the film. I felt like she had understood plenty, but was just pretending not to for her husband, to make him feel smart. Chandrasekhar started to list all the movies by that director. I just wanted to talk to my sister about the film, tell her all the things it had made me feel, but he kept talking. I felt like plucking them apart and pushing him into the puddles by the footpath. The perfect husband and wife pair. And there I was, no one to hold my arm and tell me about who directed what, and from where in Europe. I had been to England, I wanted to shout at him. I had voyaged in a ship as big as an entire neighborhood, seen the broad blue road of the Suez Canal under the late summer sky, greeted Britain’s shores in the rain, studied and lived in a foreign country, in the heart of the empire, and come back with a degree just like his, albeit in English instead of Chartered Accountancy. But still no husband and daughter and son for me. Not even the English boys would dance with me at the socials, a short, ugly brown girl from India instead of an exotic oriental princess. I came back a woman with an education, but still I was just a girl to everyone because I had no husband to hold my hand and lead me into adulthood. And there Chandrasekhar was to greet me as I got off the train from Bombay, handsome and hair-slicked and an utter stranger to me, and there Pouloma was with the blooms of love on her cheeks. My sister a wife and mother of a healthy boy, belly round with a girl on the way. I cried and she cried and we held each other right there on the dirty platform of Howrah Station, but I felt like I was crying from pain, not happiness, even as my parents waited their turn to hold me after years, their beaming smiles filled with hope for a future where there was a man by my side and a baby inside me, too. In my heart, between my hips, I knew the future—I had come back not with the pride I was hoping for, alongside a degree from Oxford for my parents to tempt suitors and their families with. No, I’d come back with a secret like a black fruit plucked from the mouth of an English gynecologist with a bedside manner as cold as his hands—the monstrous pains that plagued my periods meant that I might be infertile. So I returned with shame, with the future held in the ache below my belly—the future where my parents would give up on finding me a husband because at least Pouloma and Chandrasekhar were there to give them grandchildren. I was a lost cause. I was damaged goods, shipped back sullied along the Suez Canal.
I wanted to shout all these things at Chandrasekhar as he pontificated about European cinema while Pampi looked on starry eyed, her face damp from the mist of raindrops drifting against the sheltered steps of Lighthouse Cinema. I thought: Why did she look younger than me, leaning against her man, when she was the older one?
The power just went out, the scythe is swinging above my head. I call out for Pouloma, ask if she’s awake. No answer, so she’s probably napping. Kalpana answers instead from the kitchen, asking if I was calling for a lit candle. I tell her no. Pampi sleeps too much, since Chandrasekhar went.
• • •
The pain has lessened with age, but never goes away. Now the doctors give it a name—endometriosis. Their tone when talking to me is always one of judgmental solemnity, as if this sickness is a curse given to me because I never found a husband, instead of a curse that prevented me from getting one. Or maybe I have always just imagined this in their voices. I still take homeopathic medicine for the pain, on Pampi’s recommendation. I don’t bleed any longer of course, but the throb of the baby I will never have sits eternal in my womb. Strangely, my heart remains healthy, the pain there, of a love I will never have for a husband, untethered from my flesh.
When I first heard over the phone that Chandrasekhar had died in hospital, his brief one-week coma ended, my first instinct was to smile. Real tears rolled down my cheeks, but there was that half a second of a rictus, like something had possessed my face. I went to Pampi in Chandrasekhar’s room, bearing the news like a terrible present. She had been combing her silver waves of hair. We used to comb each other’s hair when we were younger, deliberately surprising each other by yanking the knots. She staggered up and shuffled to the phone to ask her children to pick us up and take us to the hospital. They said not to worry about it, that they would bring the body to the house, and then we’d go for the cremation in the cars. Afterward, Pouloma sat in silence by the phone. I looked at the black and white framed portrait beside the phone. It was of Chandrasekhar and her from two decades earlier, standing on the steps of the house we were in.
Half a year later, we’d be here in this flat, the house sold off by her children because it was too large, too empty now that my parents and Chandrasekhar were dead, too expensive to maintain.
• • •
Not long after I returned from Oxford and moved into the family house with Pampi and Chandrasekhar and my parents, we went to visit Victoria Memorial. My sister, her baby bump, her husband, and their son. Ever since the news that I wasn’t the fertile bride-to-be they had expected to return from England, my parents acted like I had personally misled them into investing in my foreign degree only to find out that it made no difference—my marriageability was doomed by my condition. They took me to multiple local doctors, who agreed with the English one. I didn’t blame my parents for their bitterness. I was as disappointed in myself, in my body, as they were. My body had always refused to atta
in the beauty Pouloma’s body seemed to so effortlessly radiate, and in time I had learned to live with this. But this was a betrayal I didn’t know how to handle. So I helped take care of the house, of my sister’s boy, of the cooking and cleaning, stayed out of the way of my parents, and snuck out to the sweet shop to eat hot rosgollas whenever I could. Bereft of the duties of a housewife, I fantasized about getting a job tightening rivets on bombs like those women I’d read about in America, who took over the men’s jobs when their husbands all left to fight in the war.
The outing to Victoria Memorial was my sister’s idea; she was trying to make me feel at home again in Calcutta, taking pity on my unmarried and childless state. The grounds were flushed bright and green after a shower, and Queen Victoria’s bronze cheeks were wet. I didn’t feel any less alone, back in my hometown, overwhelmed by a familiarity that grated against the loss of the life I was supposed to return to. Even the Victoria Memorial just reminded me of England, and how different it had been, and how it had yet changed nothing about my life in the end. But I was filled with gratitude. I thrilled at the touch of Chandrasekhar’s fingers on my arm, to steady me when I slipped a little on the slick and pebbly paths around the monument. Suddenly, there was a man next to me, a man not of my own blood living in my home. Pratik tottered between his parents, eyes wide and round like the pebbles under his small feet, locked sometimes on the monument, and other times on me, the strange new mashi in his life. “He really likes you,” Pampi kept saying, though Pratik showed at best a wary familiarity with me, nothing more. She kept trying to pass his small hand into mine so I could walk with him. I resented being made to become a placeholder wife next to her husband, with their child a conduit for the illusion. And yet, all I wanted to do was shower her with thanks for even this small kindness, though I felt no real connection towards Pratik at the time. Perhaps because he wasn’t mine. With age, I have better come to terms with this. On the way back home, Pampi even insisted we stop for a hari of rosgollas fresh and warm from the sweet shop. The lump in my throat was like a stone.
