My Mother's Lover and Other Stories

by Sumana Roy

  ‘It’s not goat, it’s crow meat actually,’ says Sumit-kaku to the little boys.

  ‘When I grow up, I’ll go to China and eat cockroaches. I’m not scared of anything,’ comes the prompt reply.

  And then the mutton arrives, like a bride, its perfume first. Everyone is shy but eager. Everyone wants the best piece – the best part of the goat.

  Buro-kaku can’t hold back his greed anymore. ‘Give me only two pieces, but both must have fat,’ he instructs.

  The boy serving mutton begins looking into the bucket from which he’s serving – it’s suddenly become a well from which a lost ring must be recovered, so hard is the task of finding a piece of meat with a blob of fat sticking to it like a sock from a foot.

  ‘I want crow legs. I love chicken legs,’ shouts one of the boys, impatient with expectation.

  Suddenly, without any kind of prologue, a dust storm begins.

  Everyone is unprepared, everyone except me that is. I knew something bad would happen. But a dust storm is still a surprise. I try to remember whether I’ve read about a dust storm interrupting a picnic in any book that I’ve read. The genre doesn’t matter.

  We’re all sitting with our eyes closed. I at least am, and imagine others must be too. Instructions follow: Close your eyes and don’t move – to the boys. Cover the mutton curry – to the boy who was serving.

  ‘It’s not Baishakh – winter’s not left yet. How can we have a kalbaishakhi…’

  ‘Don’t talk. Sand will get inside your … chhya what is...?’

  ‘It’s like a game of statue. You’re not allowed to move.’ It’s one of the little boys again.

  Our right hands, still messy with food, are of no help. I feel sand collecting on my wet fingers. Without caring for table manners I open my left eye slightly and look for my glass of water. I don’t know whether it’s mine but I dunk my hand in it with relief. I imagine that the women are in an advantageous position, we with our dupattas and anchals of saris. But the men?

  Do people die in dust storms? Since my reading of literature doesn’t suffice, I wish I could look at my phone. Google knows everything – everything that has happened in the past that is, though not the future. If someone has died in a dust storm, it’ll be able to tell me. But it has no power of prediction – it can’t say whether a dust storm can kill someone. I wonder whether literature is like that too. No, there’s the imagination – but can imagination help to predict things? My thoughts tumble over one another, I feel asphyxiated. This is the moment – we’ll all die. Or someone will die. I am that someone.

  ‘We must leave.’ It’s my father’s voice. Even the storm hasn’t changed that baritone.

  Sand particles hit against our skin, just as the insects were a little while ago. Our bodies are now the sand’s dartboards.

  ‘Do you all know how to swim?’ My eyes are closed. I think it’s my eldest uncle’s voice.

  ‘Swim?’ A chorus of the same question.

  I’m certain my uncle is drunk. I’ve seen it in films – how men smuggle alcohol into family picnics. I sniff the air, but sand gets in. I sneeze. I sneeze again, and then again.

  ‘Let’s walk through this to the cars. I mean, let us walk as if we were swimming. Let us pretend that the sand is water.’

  There – this is the beginning of the end, I’m sure. The first sign of insanity – I’ve read about this in novels, how the entire pack will now accept the mad person as their leader. This is the beginning of the doom. And so I say ‘No, I don’t know how to swim. And this is not water.’

  I can’t see the responses on their faces. I can’t really say whether I have everyone’s support. What is the use of the power of prediction that comes to me from literature if I can’t avoid a calamity?

  There is a weird kind of silence – not silence as we understand it, but the absence of human sounds. The noise of the storm gets louder every minute – higher than I imagine the music is inside a claustrophobic disco. Sand competes with sound to enter my ears. I have only two hands – but there are the eyes and ears and the nose and mouth, too many orifices to cover. I begin walking with my eyes closed. I should’ve played the game – it’d have given me practice. I imagine that it is night and I am going to the toilet with my eyes closed. I can even manage to find my slippers with my eyes closed. So I begin walking, telling myself that I am walking towards the toilet.

  Is it possible that they’ve abandoned me, that they’ve forgotten about me and left me here? They might’ve been in a rush to leave, but even my mother? Am I walking too slowly? Will they never find me? I turn to the only source of information I have – literature, to Robinson Crusoe. They found him, they’ll find me too. I only need to be patient and wait, like Crusoe. But Crusoe survived because of provisions he managed to save from the ship. How will I survive? There’s the mutton curry, but it must be run over by the dust and flies by now.

  ‘Why are you walking like that?’ It’s my father’s voice.

  Oh, they haven’t left me. I wonder how I should feel – what did Crusoe feel when he first met the sailors on the rescue ship?

  ‘Open your eyes!’ my father instructs.

  I think I’ve misheard. All my life, particularly my childhood, I’ve heard him say the opposite when I wouldn’t sleep: ‘Close your eyes’.

  When I open my eyes the world is as I had left it, as after a sleep – clean and dust-free. Everything’s packed and ready to leave, as if this outing was a school day, and one must leave for home because it’s afternoon. I’m sure that this thought is not mine, that this must have nested in my consciousness from some poem by Tagore or some Bangla adhunik song.

  My mother is sitting by the window of the blue car whose name I’ve forgotten again. I can’t remember the names of cars – hardly any writer takes them seriously. I don’t even know the name of the car in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik. My mother is calling me. I know she’s kept a place for me to sit beside her. It’s an old habit, a continuation from my childhood. I wonder which novel or film she picked it up from – putting a hankie to keep a place.

  Everyone is washing their face and neck and arms. The little boys are throwing water at each other. ‘What a storm!’ someone says; ‘And how sudden!’ says another. There’s more splashing of water. Someone scolds the boys.

  My mother is looking at me. Though my glasses are dusty, I can see her gentle smile – the equilibrium in its curve that has made acceptance of everything, every joy and every adversity, possible. Though I take after her, I will never have her smile – mine is forced laughter, a late acknowledgement of the world. She is still looking at me, as if there was nothing else to see. She worries for me – she only wants me to eat and sleep well, that is all she wants for me from life, she is certain that just that is enough to keep someone well.

  An incident from my childhood, about her giving me wrong medicine, comes back to me, as it does to people in such situations in films and novels. I had to be hospitalised…

  ‘What?’ my father says loudly, interrupting my flow of thought.

  We are never surprised by his high-pitched voice, and so we don’t pay it much attention.

  ‘What?!’ my father says again. ‘How?’ he says after some time.

  I turn back to look at him. Who is he speaking to? The boys have gathered near him, as if expecting the next instalment of a story, as if the picnic were a story. ‘What happened?’ they ask, almost together.

  ‘A crow was killed…,’ he says.

  ‘A crow?’ asks a woman’s voice. I don’t turn to see whose voice it is.

  ‘We eat birds because we are more powerful than them,’ says one of the boys, quoting my father.

  ‘A crow was killed,’ says my father.

  My mother, who’s behind the glass window of the car, can’t hear anything. She’s gesturing to me to get into the car, to sit beside her. She’s not interested in anything else.

  ‘A crow,’ repeats one of the boys. ‘Ma, does man eat crows? Do the Chine
se eat crows?’

  ‘Only a crow was killed … electric wire … short circuit … my house … the two wooden ceilings on the terrace … books, drying clothes, my university certificates … everything… They’ve called the fire brigade … we need to reach before everything is… But thank God, only a crow was killed…’ My father says these words to no one in particular, as if it was a public service announcement.

  I want to hold my father and tell him that I knew this would happen – that it was destined to. How could it not? It had happened – and been rehearsed – too many times in the pages of books and in film reels to not occur as soon as life created an opportunity. Everything was, after all, only a rehearsal, a part of a cycle – life imitating art, art imitating life, endlessly. But it was only the wooden ceilings of two storerooms that had been gutted by the fire – the rest of the house was still standing, waiting for us. I move these words inside me just as a writer does, before they leak out of him on paper.

  But when I walk to him, to pull him towards the car, to sit next to my mother, literature rushes out of me like vomit: ‘Only a crow was killed by India’s first nuclear bomb test at Pokhran on 18 May 1974.’

  I try hard, but cannot remember where it’s from. That’s the thing about literature – like the cold, one doesn’t always know where one gets it from.

  Sleep

  ‘The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.’

  —Leonard Cohen

  SLEEP IS AN ALLERGY, a reaction against the day’s useless welfare programmes. It is alright for people to have no memory of dreams in their sleep, but to have no memory of sleeping is a nightmare. But truth be told, insomniacs sleep much more than they think they do. Only their definitions of sleep differ from the person they sleep next to. They suffer from persecution complex every night, never forgiving those who sleep well or better. Their nights are a study of deficit.

  I write all this in shorthand on my skinny notebook as the teacher in our sleep therapy class explains 11 Methods on How to Sleep Well in bullet points.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ he asks a woman in the first row.

  I’m a backbencher. To me, she looks like the most attentive student in the class. Even her hair looks sleepy – in an obedient way – to me.

  ‘My nights are a replay of my days. It’s like watching a home video, you know – I watch myself performing the events of the day when I try to sleep,’ she says, stressing on ‘performing’.

  ‘Why do you do that? Do you like watching the same movie on repeat?’ asks the sleep therapist.

  The woman shakes her head, her eyeglasses fall to the floor, she doesn’t notice. It’s as if her sleepy eyes are stuck to her specs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says like a schoolgirl who knows she’s going to fail a class test.

  The sleep therapist walks close to where she stands, picks up her glasses and asks, ‘Can you do me a favour? Can you leave your eyes on the bedside table like the way you leave your glasses on it?’ He is very clearly a patron of sleep.

  The woman says she will try.

  I draw cartoons of everyone’s sleeping disorders. A woman who treats the phrase ‘sleep cycle’ literally – I draw her riding a sleepy-looking bicycle (the horn is the alarm clock). The man who forgets to sleep – I make Sleep look like a librarian who scolds him for forgetting to return a book on time.

  By the time my turn comes, I am bored. And who knows, maybe even a little sleepy. ‘What’s your problem, Mr Z?’ the therapist asks and then laughs at his silly joke. The ‘z’ is a play on my being the last person in sleep class as well as the zzz sign used for sleep. The cartoonist’s joke is now on me. I imagine myself being turned into a comic strip as I stand up to speak to him.

  ‘My problem is that I don’t think it’s a problem at all,’ I say bravely, quite aware that I’m drawing the attention of twenty-nine insomniac students to myself.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asks the therapist in a sudden change of accent.

  ‘I said that I don’t think it’s a problem at all. I don’t sleep...’

  ‘You don’t get sleep is what you mean,’ he says interrupting me.

  ‘Whatever. It’s the same thing to me. I don’t sleep. But I don’t think it’s a problem. There are many who find it difficult to keep awake during the day. If that’s not a problem, why should sleeplessness be a problem?’ I say, making it a point to answer with a question mark. That’s my version of arrogance.

  ‘Sure. Why did you enrol for this course then?’ he asks, moving away from me, putting his hands into the back pockets of his denim pants, a coming-into-late-style posture that I notice a lot these days.

  ‘My wife insisted I do. In other words, she paid for this course!’

  The entire class bursts into laughter, the first time this has happened in the six lectures we have attended together. Otherwise, we all pretend to be sleepier than we actually are. It will help us to get better, we are convinced. Sleep is a serious thing, it’s keeping awake that is the laughing matter.

  ‘Why can’t you sleep?’ probes the therapist, his tone warmer now.

  I make a weird facial gesture, one that I imagine would make me look smart in the mirror. It clearly works. The class gets laughing again.

  ‘Okay, let me put it this way. What do you do when your wife sleeps?’ the therapist asks again. Clearly, he is not one to give up. That, or he values my wife’s money more than I do.

  ‘I wait for her to wake up,’ I say matter-of-factly, for that alone is the truth.

  The therapist now folds his hands into a box and asks calmly, ‘What do you do until she wakes up?’

  But before I can answer that one, he clarifies, ‘Besides waiting that is...’

  I want to cooperate with him but I don’t have the mental furniture. So I end up sharing my most private secret. It’s the one I’ve not shared even with my wife, but I don’t know what happens to me at that instant – I tell him the truth. Clarification: my truth.

  ‘Every night a new word appears in my mind. It’s like a fish that’s risen to the water surface. I feel it coming out of my forehead. Sometimes I slap my forehead in despair. I don’t want it there. I don’t want it anywhere. It swims in my mind, inside my head, inside my brain, even inside my eyes and ears. I chase it. I don’t know how I chase it, but believe me, I do. I know that if I manage to catch it, my restiveness will disappear and I will be able to sleep. Every night I fail. And so I get no sleep,’ I manage to say. A little later I realise that I’ve been speaking with my eyes closed. I feel embarrassed and open my eyes wider: it’s as if I’ve become a surprise to myself.

  ‘Are you sure it’s not a dream – a recurring dream – that you have every day?’ the therapist asks.

  I’ve been forewarned about how sleep therapists are actually shrinks in hiding. So I say no. ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘Is it an unfamiliar word every day? Which language is it in?’

  ‘It’s always an English word, always.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s your mother tongue?’ a woman who must be someone’s mother asks.

  ‘I grew up in an orphanage. I’m not sure what my mother tongue might have been,’ I say. I am suddenly reminded of my father-in-law’s face, his reaction to the same words when I first met him.

  An awkward silence fills the room. Thirty people observe an impromptu silence for my deceased parents thirty-three years after they died or abandoned me. I join them, pretending to be grateful.

  ‘Which language do you use at home?’ Questions begin again.

  ‘Assamese, Hindi, English, Silence,’ I reply. I am irritated.

  ‘Four languages?’ the therapist asks, and, perhaps reading the sarcasm on my face, asks, ‘What’s the fourth language you mentioned?’

  ‘Silence,’ I say, as if it’s Spanish or some other foreign tongue. Everyone laughs.

  The therapist is clearly irritated. The muscles on his throat reveal th
eir tectonics when he tells this to me in a near giant whisper: ‘Perhaps you should be practising the last when you sleep?’

  I realise that this is getting nowhere, so I tell him that I’d like some time to sit and think. He looks relieved. After spending a few moments practising silence, I say, ‘I think I don’t have a sleeping problem. I have a problem with sleep.’

  Everyone in the class nods. They are happy for me, happy – perhaps even grateful – that I’ve made this startling piece of self-diagnosis.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ someone asks.

  A worthless question, but I decide to answer. ‘I’m not sure whether that has anything to do with my lack of faith in sleep, but I teach writing.’

  I notice estimates being formed about my daily routine, my personality, my pay cheques, and reasons for my insomnia deduced from that particular declaration. A sudden surge of self-worth fills my being. I feel superior to everyone in that room. I sit down and untie my shoelaces when a woman suddenly turns back to look at me and asks, ‘How nice! And I’d thought no one taught cursive writing these days!’ Her mouth curls at ‘cursive writing’, mine swears silently.

  ‘Paragraphs. Sentences. Words. Punctuations. Voice. Tone. Things like that. I teach students how to...’ I don’t complete my sentence. I’ve begun feeling like a word mechanic. Perhaps I should have told them the truth, but ‘political cartoonist’ sounds so scatological sometimes.