“He’d never do that. Oh, no.” Better than anyone, she knew the pride the judge took in himself and his ancestral possessions. “I’m sure she’s a you-know-what. He must have taken her out of one of those houses—he owns half of them, anyway,” she said, stifling her usual wry amusement at that sector of her husband’s substantial family properties.
A day or two later, the judge had to be returned to the hospital. He stayed there for a week, and when they sent him home again he began to spend all his time in his bedroom. Apart from a few irritated instructions to Binny, he accepted her ministrations in silence; now and again, he asked for Yasi—reluctantly, as if against his own inclination. It took him some time to overcome his pride and demand a visit from his son.
Binny was so excited. It was probably to do with his will, with the woman. “You have to go! You must!” she urged Yasi. He agreed, on condition that she not listen at the door. “As if I would!” she cried indignantly, though both of them knew that she would be crouching there—and, in fact, when he emerged from his father’s bedroom he found her hastily scrambling up from that position.
“What is it? What did he say?”
On the rare occasions when the judge had tried to talk alone with his son in the past, Yasi had recounted the conversations to his mother, with some embellishments: how the judge had had to clear his throat several times and had still been unable to come out with what he wanted to say, and instead had babbled on about his student days in London and the wonderful English breakfasts he had enjoyed, bacon and eggs and some sort of fish—“kippers, I believe they are called,” Yasi had repeated, in the judge’s own accent, to entertain his mother.
But now it was as if he was protecting his father: he wouldn’t tell her anything. It wasn’t until she challenged him, “Whose side are you on?,” that he said, “He wants to see her.”
“He wants to bring her here?”
“He’s sending the driver.”
“The fool, the first-class idiot,” Binny said. Her scorn for the judge soon turned to angry defiance: “What do I care? Let him bring her—bring all the women he’s been keeping for twenty-five years.” But, beneath it all, there was a sort of thrill—that at last something dramatic was happening in their lives.
There was nothing dramatic about the woman the driver brought the next day. She arrived in a plain white cotton sari and wearing no jewelry—“as if she were already a widow,” Binny commented. Binny herself was a far more appealingly feminine figure: short and plump, in tight-fitting harem pants and very high heels, draped with the costume jewelry she preferred to the family jewels; at the salon they had bobbed and curled her hair and made it gleam with golden streaks. By contrast, Phul—that was her name, Phul, meaning “flower”—was as austere as a woman in constant prayer. Leaving her shoes at the threshold, she glided into the judge’s bedroom; and though Binny lingered outside, no sound reached her to indicate what might be going on.
This performance, as Binny called it, was repeated the next day, and the next. After the fourth visit, she declared to Yasi, “This can’t go on. You have to do something.”
She had always depended on Yasi to get her out of difficult situations. In earlier years, when she still had a few women friends, Yasi had helped her cover up some secret expenditures—such as losing at cards, which she and her friends had played for money. She appreciated the way Yasi had circumvented the judge’s disapproval. She had always been proud of her son’s intelligence, which he had inherited, she had to admit, from his father.
Friends had asked her why she had married the judge, who was in every way so different from her. But that was the answer. Before meeting him, she had lived in an adolescent world of flirtations carried on in the cafés and on the beaches of Bombay. The judge, some twenty years older than she, was already a highly regarded lawyer with a private practice in Delhi when she met him. He was working on a professional assignment in Bombay with Binny’s father, an industrialist, who had invited him to the family table—usually the dullest place in the world for Binny. But, with the judge there, she had sat through every course, not understanding a word but understanding very well that the guest’s attention sometimes strayed in her direction. Afterward, she lingered in the vestibule to give him the opportunity to talk to her, though all he did was ask, in the weighty tones of a prosecutor in court, about her studies. A tall, heavy person, he habitually wore, even in the humid heat of Bombay, a suit, a waistcoat, and a tie, which made him stand out from everyone else, especially from her friends, who floated around in the finest, flimsiest Indian garments. She loved describing him to these friends, who exclaimed, “But he sounds awful!” That made her laugh. “He is awful!” By which she meant that he was serious, somber, authoritarian—everything that later oppressed her so horribly. One day, after posing his usual question about her studies, he went to her father to ask for her hand—for her hand! How she laughed with her friends. Wasn’t it just like an old-fashioned novel—Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet! Or, from another book on their matriculation list, Heathcliff. In fact, she began to refer to him as Heathcliff, and to think of him as the gypsy lover who had come to steal her away.
The driver was sent to Phul every day, and every day she remained with the judge in his bedroom. Although this bedroom had meant nothing to Binny for many years, now her thoughts were concentrated on it, as they had been at the beginning of the marriage. The judge had been an overwhelming lover, and those nights with him had been a flowering and a ripening that she’d thought would go on forever. Instead, after about two years, the judge’s presence in their bed was changed into a weight that oppressed her physically and in every other way. It had been a relief to her when Yasi was born and she could move with him into her own bedroom. She never returned to the judge’s, and when he came to hers, she was impatient with his need. Mostly she used Yasi as an excuse—“Sh-h-h! The child is sleeping!”—ignoring her husband’s protest that a boy that age shouldn’t still be in his mother’s bed. The judge’s visits became less and less frequent, and finally they ceased altogether.
She hardly noticed and, until Phul came, thought nothing of it. On his good days, Yasi was always there for her, and she for him. He had a large group of friends and went out most nights. She would wait up for him, and, however late he came home, he would perch on the edge of her bed to tell her about the music festivals he had attended, the poetry recitals, the places where he had dined and danced. He was quite frank with his mother about the girls he slept with—she knew the sort of modern, fashionable girls who formed his social circle and had even learned to recognize the subtle Parisian perfumes that clung to him.
Then there were his bad days, when he didn’t get out of bed, and when he did, he was silent and somber—yes, just like his father. But whereas the judge’s anger was always contained, controlled, Yasi’s was explosive—sometimes he would hurl a glass, a vase, a full cup of coffee, not caring where it landed. A few times he had struck her, suddenly, sharply. Afterward she pretended that it hadn’t happened, and never spoke of it to anyone, and certainly not to him. This silence between them was a mutually protective one. Living so close together, perpetually intent on each other, each was wary of disturbing the other’s balance, so precariously achieved, of anger and resignation, revolt and submission.
Alert to every sound from Yasi’s room, one night she heard voices from there that made her tiptoe to his door. She found it open and the judge standing inside, ghostlike in his long white nightshirt. He was talking to Yasi, but as soon as he saw her he shut the door in her face. She had every right to open the door, to know what her husband was saying to their son, but it was not only the judge’s prohibition that prevented her, it was Yasi’s too; for there were times when he was as forbidding as his father.
The next day, she impatiently waited to question him. But he had hardly begun to speak when she interrupted him. “Probably he’s left her everything. Very good! Let her have everything. Only don’t think I won’t get th
e best lawyer in the world to see that she has nothing.”
“He knows how difficult it will be for you to accept the will. To accept her. He says she has no family at all.”
“She doesn’t? Then where did he find her? Wasn’t there a whole tribe of them, in one of those rooms where they play music and people throw money?”
“He took her away before she was fifteen, and she’s stayed all those years where he put her. So now he thinks she’s like some tame thing in a cage—with a wild creature waiting to get her as soon as she’s released. He made me promise to protect her.”
“Against me?”
She shouted so violently that he shushed her. They were speaking in English but they knew the servants would be listening and, even without understanding the language, would be perfectly aware of the drift of the conversation. Now she spoke more quietly, and more bitterly. “That’s what he’s wanted from the day you were born. To turn you against me. To have you on his side—and now on hers too.”
Tears, rare for her, streamed from her eyes, streaking her makeup, so that she did at that moment look like a wild creature. At first, Yasi felt like smiling, but then he felt sorry for her, as he had felt sorry for his father, that proud man pleading for a promise.
Binny had never allowed her circumstances to depress her. She had been very impatient with her women friends’ constant complaints about unreliable servants, bad marriages, worse divorces. By the time she was in her fifties, she had dropped all of them except one. And finally there came the day when this friend too had to be abandoned. It happened over cocktails in their favorite hotel lounge. Binny was speaking about her close relationship with her son when the other woman interrupted her: “It’s all Freud, of course.”
“I see,” Binny said, after a long silence. “Freud.”
She got up. She took out her purse and deposited her share of the check on the table. She gave a brief, cold laugh. “Freud,” she repeated. It was the last word she ever spoke to this friend.
So nowadays she comforted herself with her own amusements: shopping for new outfits and jewelry, intense sessions at a salon run by a Swiss lady. Her last stop was always Sugar & Spice, for Yasi’s favorite pastries. If the judge warned her that Yasi was getting too fat, she suppressed her own observation that Yasi was getting too fat. She countered that it was the judge himself who should be careful: a man with two heart attacks, she reminded him.
But that morning when she arrived home with the pastries and said to the servant, “Call Yasi Baba,” she was told that he had gone out. “In a taxi?” she asked casually, licking cream off her fingers. The servant said no, Judge Sahib had sent Yasi in the car—and by the way he said it, with lowered eyes, she realized that it was something she wasn’t supposed to know. She stood fighting down a flush of anger, then suddenly she shouted, “Don’t we have any light in this house?” All the shutters and curtains were closed to keep the sun out. The servant turned on the chandelier, but its luster was absorbed by the Turkish rugs, leaving only a thin shaft of silver light. Binny alone illumined the dark room, with her embroidered silks and the golden glints in her hair.
The judge’s longtime driver was always at her disposal, and she had arranged with him that some of her destinations should be kept secret from his employer. She hadn’t realized that the judge had made a similar arrangement. It didn’t take her long to persuade the driver, to whom she had always been generous, to reveal the address where he had taken Yasi, as well as his instructions to take him there again the following night. She called for a taxi for the same time and went there herself.
It was across the river, in one of the first new colonies to be built in the area some twenty-five years before, far from the judge’s prestigious neighborhood of shady old trees and large villas. Binny’s taxi took her into a lively bazaar—the open stalls lit up with neon strip-lighting, the barrows of fruit and nuts with Petromax lanterns. Radios played film songs; chickens hung in rows from hooks. Opposite Phul’s residence was a clinic, with patients waiting inside, and next to it a shoe shop, where Binny could try on a variety of ladies’ footwear. This absorbed her so much that she almost missed Yasi’s arrival. She glanced up at the opposite house when she heard the downstairs tenant assuring Yasi that the upstairs tenant was at home. Then she quickly returned her gaze to her feet, which were being fitted into a pair of bright blue sandals with silver heels, which she liked so much that she bought them there and then.
Yasi returned home very late, and as usual he perched on his mother’s bed to tell her where he had been and what he had done. He had attended a music festival, he told her, and he sang her a phrase and swayed to it, his eyes closed. He loved music, which was something he’d got from Binny, though for him it was classical music, whereas she loved swing and jazz.
“So that’s where you were all night?”
Alerted by her tone, he opened his eyes.
She said, “That’s not what I was told.”
Yasi said, “He sent me with the driver. I couldn’t say no. She played her harmonium and sang. It was horrible, and I left as soon as I could.”
“Then where were you until two in the morning?”
“I told you: I was at the music festival. You always think the worst of me. Oh, I’m sick of it! No, don’t talk to me! My head’s bursting!” And, indeed, his face had changed in a way she knew and had dreaded since the first breakdown.
The next day he slept late, and she sat beside him in his bedroom, where he lay with the tousled, tortured look of his sickness. She blamed herself for having been angry at him. She looked at the array of medicine bottles on his bedside table—she didn’t know which were his sleeping pills and which were those prescribed for his moods, or how many he had taken. Usually so particular in his personal habits, he hadn’t even changed out of the shirt he had been wearing the night before. A faint smell rose from it, not the delicate scent of his girlfriends but the heavy bazaar perfume she smelled whenever Phul entered the house.
Her pity for him turned into rage against his father. In earlier years, whenever she had felt her life to be intolerable, she had packed her suitcase and announced her decision to return to Bombay. At first, the judge had used a defense attorney’s arguments to dissuade her; later, he had said nothing but simply waved his hand dismissively over the packed suitcase. And after a while she had unpacked it again. But this time she would not do so, would not retreat from her decision; for now it was not she who had to be considered but her son.
Leaving Yasi asleep, she walked through the house, through the many unused rooms, some shrouded, others shuttered, and before she had even closed the judge’s door behind her, she announced, “I’m taking him to Bombay.”
These days, she hardly ever entered the judge’s bedroom. Everything was still in its place—his colonial armchair with the extended leg rest, his big bed and bigger chest of drawers, its brass handles too heavy for her to pull, and the mirror too high for her to look into—but there was a subtle change of atmosphere. Well, not so subtle! For there was Phul squatting on the floor by the judge’s feet, massaging them as any devoted wife might do. He was gazing down at her with a look that Binny recognized as the expression—of father as much as of lover—that had so thrilled her in her youth.
When Binny entered, Phul turned and smiled—partly in apology but also with some pride at fulfilling a duty that she clearly felt was her right. She was a woman in her early forties, but her smile was peculiarly childlike: her teeth were as small as milk teeth and her gums showed up very pink against her complexion, which was much darker than Binny’s. When she noticed that her sari had slipped off her shoulders, she tugged it back, though not before Binny had seen that she was very thin and with no breasts worth mentioning.
“Get up, child,” the judge told Phul, his voice as tender as his gaze on her.
Child! Binny thought. Never since the day of their marriage had he called her anything except Bina—never Binny or Baby, as everyone had called her at home
in Bombay. And now, as he shifted his eyes from Phul to her, his expression changed completely: for Binny was not at his feet but standing upright and facing him in hostility. She said, “We’re taking the evening plane.”
“The boy stays here,” the judge pronounced.
“Here with you? And with her?”
Since the judge’s last return from the hospital, a carved Kashmiri screen had been placed around the washstand installed for his minor ablutions. Although husband and wife were speaking in English, which she couldn’t understand, Phul had quietly retreated behind this screen. Her absence made no difference to Binny, who continued, “And now you’re sending him to her house at night! Shame on you—your own son! To take her off your hands and do what with her, with a woman old enough to be his mother?”
“You’re an educated woman,” the judge said. “You can count. You know that she would have had to be a very precocious seven-year-old to become a mother.”
“Not a day longer in this house! We’re going to Bombay. He has to see a doctor.”
“We have very good doctors here.”
“And what have they done for him, stuffing him full of drugs meant for psychos. He’s nervous, high-strung, like his mother—yes, I know you think I’m strong as a horse and yes, I’ve had to be, to bear almost forty years of marriage with you. But now—today, he and I . . .”
The judge was facing the door and he saw Yasi before she did. “Your mother wants to take you to Bombay,” he told their son.
Binny spun around. “Tonight. The seven-thirty plane.”
“Why do I always have to be caught between the two of you?” Yasi said. “Between a pair of scissor blades.” He spoke in Hindi, and his parents looked warningly toward the screen. There was no sound or movement from behind it. Binny said, “Come out,” but it was not until the judge repeated the command that Phul emerged.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 24
