by Sumana Roy
It would have been obvious to anyone that loneliness had abetted my mother’s depression. But neither my father nor I – my brother lived in a different country, a different planet really – noticed it. It was because we did not want to notice it. We were used to – and thus indifferent to – her tears. Anything could make her cry, one could never tell. My father, the only time I spoke to him on the subject, said we should treat it like an infant’s smile – there was no ‘logic’ (his favourite word) behind it. When she became forgetful, we put it down to her age, though we knew that she was only sixty-three.
It was on a morning that we realised that sadness – and its allies, absent-mindedness and forgetfulness, for sadness occludes everything else, every other sense, every other emotion – was a gun waiting to fire any moment. When my father woke me up in fear, I rushed to the kitchen to see my mother standing with a matchbox in her hands in front of the gas stove, a look of complete non-recognition and forgetfulness on her face. I was scared. She didn’t say a word, didn’t respond to our incessant queries. She only seemed to be pressurised by her inability to remember something important. The gas knobs had been left open – it was their smell that had woken up my father – and she, early riser and drinker of morning tea, had forgotten, at the very last minute, what she was supposed to do with the matchbox, and what the relationship between the gas knobs and the matchsticks was.
We saved her from her sadness murdering her – it seems odd to say this, but it’s true. Over the next few months, though we paid attention to the things that could cause her physical injury, we remained indifferent to the invisible, to the things that were bleaching her head and her heart. She began forgetting the names of people and places, and we didn’t mind. When she couldn’t recognise faces of familiar people, we pretended that it didn’t matter. If she mixed the rice with the curry but forgot to put it inside her mouth, one of us completed the task with the help of a spoon.
Even the numbers on blank writing surfaces stopped appearing. Her words dried, but not her tears which sometimes flowed even in her sleep. I wanted to be angry with her – surely her life couldn’t be so tragic that it had turned her into the saddest person in the world? One can be angry with stone but not with a shadow.
One day, when the doctor came to check on her, he asked her about the pain in her legs. She didn’t respond, only released the hair from her bun so that it fell on the pillow. It didn’t surprise us – almost nothing about her did anymore. That sadness could make a person do unimaginable things was once a notion completely foreign to us, but it now seemed normal. Then the doctor asked if he could check her heartbeat.
‘They say “sweetheart”, don’t they, doctor?’ she asked.
We were surprised to see her talking.
‘Yes,’ said the doctor, smiling. ‘You’re his sweetheart,’ he added, pointing to my father.
My mother didn’t seem to hear – or care for – the man’s words. ‘Why doesn’t anyone say “sweet-head”?’
The doctor smiled. ‘You’re so intelligent,’ he said, as if he’d suddenly discovered that sad people could also be intelligent.
‘Sadness affects your legs first. Then it travels upwards. And corrupts the body, the knees, the intestines, everything. I was a physics teacher, doctor,’ she said, as tears coursed down her cheeks, ‘I taught my students about the laws of gravity, about how one could be disobedient to God but not to gravity. This is the only thing that dares gravity – sadness. It climbs up like we climb trees, and then pulls everything up to the head – legs, appetite, womb; everything is here now.’ Her right hand was now resting on her head.
The doctor, startled by this new lesson in human anatomy, looked unsure about where to place his stethoscope.
The patient came to his assistance. She pulled the resonator of the stethoscope towards herself, forcing the doctor to bend towards her.
Putting it right on the middle of her head, she said, ‘This is my heart’.
The doctor – either absent-minded or obedient to the natural gravity of sadness – put the stethoscope on my mother’s head and recorded her heartbeat.
And my mother’s heart became her head.
Untouchability
‘“Things” don’t “biodegrade” as one might wish or believe.’
—Jacques Derrida
MRS CHAKRABARTI WAS ASHAMED of herself, but she was helpless. She washed her hands again, pouring a few drops of the reetha-soaked water into her palms. There was hardly any lather, but she was gradually getting used to it. Bubbles were only a show of cleanliness – there was cleanliness before the invention of chemical bubbles just as there was sweetness in food before the production of industrial sugar. Mrs Chakrabarti was argumentative to a fault – it was mostly herself that she argued with. Hardly anyone knew what was going on in her mind.
All of this hadn’t come to Mrs Chakrabarti overnight. She’d spent the three years after her retirement from her teaching job thinking about this. Her husband had died nine years ago – it was unexpected, as all heart attacks usually are, but it hadn’t shocked her completely. She knew the phrase: ‘lifestyle disease’. Her husband used to travel too often and eat out too often. It wasn’t natural, she reasoned later. A lifestyle conditioned over centuries – a diet, a pattern of rest and work – was being uprooted and replaced by one fit only for machines. Her late husband had suddenly been forced to live the life of a machine. When he’d work late into the night, she’d sometimes wake up and tell him, ‘You’ve become a fridge. The fridge works when we sleep’. He’d laugh and ask her to go back to sleep.
Their son, Pinaki, now thirty-three years old, was living like a machine too. At times she wondered whether working with machines – he was an engineer – had turned him into a machine. Increasingly he spoke like one, exactly like the recorded voices on gas-booking numbers and banking services did. She remained silent when he spoke, just as she wasn’t allowed to say anything when speaking to automated voices, only press numbers. Indrani, his wife, was a banker. She rolled numbers inside her mouth like Mrs Chakrabarti chewed fish bones. She was terrified of their smartness. When they came to visit – usually for about a few days every year – she was scared and anxious all the time. They measured everything in numbers. A litre of oil each, for one person every month, not more; not more than a tiny spoon of sugar every day; seven hours of sleep; ten thousand steps a day (a watch counted their steps like a PT teacher in a school).
Mrs Chakrabarti felt no great attachment for life, but it wasn’t that she wanted to die either. Her only sister, Mohua, had died four years ago. It was cancer. Just a year before her retirement from her school-teaching job, the only person she’d known all her life (her parents were dead) was gone. This had caused her greater shock than even her husband’s death. Mohua – whom she called Mou – was two years younger than her. She’d never married – their father’s pension and savings had been enough for her. Mou took such great care of herself – she ate her meals on time, ate lots of fruits and vegetables, moisturised her skin, paid electric bills before the due date. How could she get cancer?
Soon after her retirement, Mrs Chakrabarti rented her house to two tenants, on two floors, and moved into what had been her childhood home. At first, she couldn’t sleep at night – she felt the presence of her sister and her parents, as if they were lying beside her on the same bed. A week or ten days into her stay, she began cleaning the house, a corner every morning. It wasn’t the dust and cobweb that surprised her as something else. Everywhere there were piles of plastic bags, folded and arranged beneath mattresses, inside cupboards and wardrobes, drawers and plastic bags inside larger plastic bags. What had Mou been up to?
Cleaning the kitchen brought greater shock. Inside the cabinets was an inventory of plastic containers of all sizes and shapes. What did she do with them? She cleaned every single one of them – they’d been filled with all kinds of things, ground spices, lentils, beans, bay leaves, many containers of bay leaves in fact, rubber ba
nds, buttons, safety pins, old bills, even coins and some currency notes. Mou’s world had been stored in these plastic boxes. After the tears, Mrs Chakrabarti felt something close to wonder: had she become a collector of plastic things, boxes and packets? For in the bathroom cabinet (the mirror was dotted with imprints of stick-on bindis) were rows of empty plastic containers of cosmetic creams. They looked tired from waiting. Mrs Chakrabarti took them out and threw them into a broken bucket where they landed with unexpected sounds, like someone who’d been woken up from a deep sleep.
That is all Mrs Chakrabarti did for the next few months – like a detective she went about looking for, and then discarding, plastic bags and containers. It exhausted her but it was also oddly energising. If she didn’t find any the whole day, she felt disappointed. Once she woke up in the middle of the night and began looking inside her pillow case to check whether Mou had hidden any plastic packets there. But, because she was self-conscious about the way she led her life, she soon became aware of what was gradually turning into an obsession. Plastic things meant a lot to Mou – that was all she took away from her discovery.
One day, quite by chance, she discovered a book behind the bed. It might have fallen off Mou’s hands, she surmised. It was wrapped in brown plastic paper, and so she couldn’t see the title of the book at first. She tore it open urgently. Cancer. The title was self-explanatory. Mou had bought it to learn more about her disease. Mrs Chakrabarti read the book all night. When the milkman rang the doorbell, she’d just fallen asleep. Startled by the sound, she woke up slightly disoriented.
The sight of milk in the transparent plastic bag made her furious. She had no control over herself. ‘No more milk from tomorrow,’ she shouted at Poltu, the milkman.
‘Why Didi?’ he asked, baffled.
‘Why should milk come in these plastic packets?’ she said, tying her hair into a bun.
‘That is how Himul company sells it, Didi,’ he responded.
‘Everything in plastic! I don’t want such milk. Please collect the money due to you at the end of the month. But not a drop of milk from tomorrow.’
The truth was that Mrs Chakrabarti had had a dream that Mou’s cancer had been caused by her obsession with plastic. Though she wasn’t afraid of dying, she’d decided that she didn’t want to die of cancer. Scared – even slightly embarrassed – of sharing her thesis with anyone, she let it harden inside her into a conviction. She’d grown up in a world where illnesses came mostly through contagion, and conditioned to attributing both physical and mental disorders to touch, she decided to change her ways of living dramatically. Food poisoning, common cold, skin diseases, not just these physical ailments, but even the case of bad company, the proverbial rotten apple spoiling the rest – all of these were the result of touch. And the most deadly disease, whose name she was scared of uttering even silently in her mind – AIDS. It was only a matter of time before scientists confirmed what she now knew intuitively – it was the intrusive touch of plastic that caused cancer.
Was there cancer before the invention of plastic? She’d find out gradually. But she wouldn’t wait for knowledge, scientific and historical knowledge, to kill her before that. And so began her single-minded devotion to the eradication of plastic from her life.
She started with all the plastic containers in the kitchen – it made her slightly sad at first, throwing away the yellow Dalda containers that had been permanent members of the kitchen, and had actually become family, but no, they had to go. She didn’t want to touch them, and so she put her gloves on – then, realising that the gloves were made of rubber (‘Plastic!’), she took them off immediately, screaming in panic, as if she’d been touched by a poisonous wind. She took out her husband’s black woollen gloves from the almirah and continued with her job. Her hands were quite obviously smaller than his had been, and so they slipped out of her hands as she worked. She found two rubber bands and tightened the gloves at the wrist, so that they didn’t fall off. But soon she was shrieking in fear – the rubber bands were made of plastic. She discarded them immediately, replacing them with the sterner grip, if not grasp, of safety pins.
Every day was frustrating – it filled her with awe and wonder how plastic had taken over the world, the entire world. Getting rid of it was turning out to be more difficult than getting rid of pigmentation marks from her face and neck, or even pubic hair. Just as parents often find it difficult to remember what their lives had been like before their children took over their lives, the world had forgotten life before plastic. Plastic packets and nylon bags – no one remembered the jute and cotton bags anymore. And plastic pipes, plastic doormats, plastic plates and bowls, forks and spoons, plastic curtains and table covers, even plastic flowers! Was there nothing that was not available in – and sometimes only in – plastic?
So thinking she entered the bathroom, sweaty, but also oddly proud of her mission. She’d begun thinking of herself as a gardener weeding out the unnecessary and life-sucking elements from life. But barely had she taken off her dull sweat-patched pistachio-coloured blouse, she was screaming again. The buckets and mugs were made of plastic! She stopped bathing and ran out naked. It was as if plastic had turned into a monster and chased her away. The next moment she was making phone calls to people to help her buy iron buckets and mugs of the kind that now almost belonged to museums.
‘Ma go!’ she screamed in the middle of the conversation with Nupur, the geography teacher in the school where she used to teach.
‘Are you okay? What happened? Did you fall …’
There was no response. There never would be, again. No, it wasn’t because Mrs Chakrabarti had died. It was because Mrs Chakrabarti would never touch a phone again in her life. She’d just realised that the outer case of the phone was made of plastic.
When Nupur came to see her after school, worried that the retired woman needed help, all Mrs Chakrabarti would do was request her former colleague to stop using the toy globe in her geography class. ‘Better to use the Frank School Atlas, isn’t it?’
‘The children love spinning it, you know…’
‘It’s made of plastic…’
‘So?’
Just as the eye looks for the moon in a naked sky without being aware that it is this that it is seeking, Mrs Chakrabarti’s eyes sought – and found – plastic. As Nupur spoke, Mrs Chakrabarti’s eyes registered, with concern, the plastic strap of her watch. ‘The world’s become plastic, space has become plastic, time has become plastic,’ she said, pointing to the watch with her eyes.
Like fear finds corners, like water, from where it drips, the ageing woman’s avoidance of plastic caused plastic things to return to her more regularly than it did others. This was the law of nature – what we avoid pursues us.
‘I brought you daab,’ said Nupur, taking out a tender coconut from a black plastic bag. ‘The electrolytes in tender coconut water are good for you…’
‘Aren’t black plastic bags banned in this town?’ said Mrs Chakrabarti, without any show of gratitude.
‘Oh, it’s an old plastic bag I found in my handbag,’ said Nupur, laughing.
Old plastic is even worse than new plastic, Mrs Chakrabarti wanted to say but didn’t. She herself wasn’t absolutely convinced of her thesis yet.
But when Nupur affectionately pierced the exposed membranous lip of the coconut with a drinking straw, Mrs Chakrabarti couldn’t hold herself back any longer. ‘Nupur!’ she screamed, scaring Nupur, who dropped the coconut from her hands.
‘What…’
‘That drinking straw is made of plastic!’
Nupur left soon after, certain that something was wrong with Mrs Chakrabarti, but unable to make out what exactly it was.
When she saw her many months later, sitting on the balcony of her house, Nupur thought she knew what had been missing. ‘What happened to your specs, Mrs Chakrabarti?’ she said from the moving cycle rickshaw.
Mrs Chakrabarti’s answer didn’t reach Nupur. ‘I discarded them. They were
made of plastic.’
Neither the ophthalmologist nor the opticians could convince her to wear glasses again. ‘You’ll go blind,’ Matri, her young neighbour, told her.
But she didn’t listen, of course.
When she developed an eye infection, she refused to take eye drops because the medicine would have to be administered to her with a plastic dropper. She’d stopped writing a long time ago – there were hardly any pens which were not made of plastic. Now she’d had to stop reading – the eye infection at first, then the discarding of eyeglasses.
Mrs Chakrabarti grew thinner and lonelier. Though she wasn’t rude to anyone, friends and acquaintances stopped visiting her – it is easier to and commiserate with the physically ailing than one whose suffering is invisible. They began to think of her as a person who was being purposely difficult – they had nicknames for her, names of female politicians: Mamata, Mayawati, Indira Gandhi. One of them, a distant relative she used to call Tapan-jethu, called her ‘Scheduled Caste’. No one really understood what it signified until the ninety-three-year-old man explained it himself: just as the lower (‘Scheduled’) caste people were considered untouchables, Mrs Chakrabarti had turned plastic into an untouchable, ‘Scheduled Caste’.
Did all this gossip reach her? It was unlikely – she’d discarded her phone and, in the process, lost contact with her son and his family; no one visited her anymore. Even if it had reached her ears, it wouldn’t have mattered. What she did didn’t reach them either. So it wasn’t until she was seriously ill that Matri, not having seen her in the garden for weeks, went to see her and found her unable to get out of bed. There was no food in the kitchen. Matri quickly got two packets of Maggi from her house and put a pan of water on the boil. Then, noticing her dishevelled appearance, she ran to get a comb from the dressing table.
