My Mother's Lover and Other Stories

by Sumana Roy

  She sat talking to him, flirting with her earrings and holding them with her hands, looking like a girl whose teacher had punished her by asking her to hold her ears. She was happy. The sound of the earrings, innocent and unchanging, oblivious to the currents of time, made it possible for her to believe that the war would one day be over.

  He shelled peanuts for her and they ate together, he rubbing the peanuts between his palms and blowing the husk away into the evening breeze, she eating them whole, like her Home Science professor had asked them to.

  ‘Where will we live after the war?’ she asked him, the evening light increasing the forlornness and gravity of her question.

  He wanted to say that he didn’t know but that would have been too cruel. Instead, he said – a place where both of them had never been to, of which they had no memories, so that everything would be new for them and they would discover this newness together.

  The answer pleased her, but only partly.

  ‘Here?’ she asked, meaning West Bengal. That word, of course, would gain wings over time so that when, twenty years later, she would ask her children whether they would move from ‘here’, it’d mean a journey abroad, away from definitions.

  He nodded.

  And suddenly they felt married.

  He touched her earrings and her earlobes. She wanted a little more.

  And suddenly there was the sound of the airplanes. She, who had so long held her ears affectionately, out of love for the new earrings, now held them tight. The noise was deafening.

  He pulled her away to a cycle shed.

  After the plane had gone, he touched her earrings again. But their sound was lost in the fear.

  ‘We’ll get married,’ he said, ‘war or no war.’

  She looked at him, touched his day-old beard and asked, ‘Even if we’re show caused?’

  Close Reading

  ‘The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.’

  —Nikolai V. Gogol

  MY PARENTS ARE DIVORCED,’ Amla says proudly, as if that were a part of the code of her teenage rebellion.

  Some of her classmates are angry – they feel deprived of this experience. Their parents are still a team, more than eighteen years after they were born. It’s a surprise to them, that ‘forever’ could be that long, longer than school life.

  I pretend to not notice. I’m not going to let a student’s divorced parents hijack the reading of a poem.

  But Amla is insistent. ‘Your parents are divorced too, right?’ she asks Sabiha, who’s sitting next to her but behaves as if she’s far away. She speaks to everyone in the tone of someone who’s at the other end of a long-distance call.

  No is the answer.

  But she doesn’t have to remain disappointed for long. Two seats away there is endorsement and identification. ‘Yes, I read it like you too,’ says Priti. ‘My parents are separated’.

  I’ve heard that tone before. I keep thinking where. It comes to me soon, Akash saying to me, ‘I am gay,’ when we met eighteen years after school. I’m not an immigration officer and you’re not declaring your citizenship, I’d said. Forced humour. Six years ago.

  The rest of the class is looking at the poem we will read together. This piece of information that comes from two of their classmates are like red highlights in their hair that they don’t care to notice. When I tell them to read it to themselves once, before we begin working as literary detectives to decipher codes in the poem, I pause for breath. And pay wholesome attention to each of their faces as they read or snatch a glance of a friend reading. I compare, though I don’t want to: they are half my age; I didn’t have a single friend whose parents were divorced. That was only two decades ago. What happened in these twenty years? I turn divorce into a disease and I look for its causes. The Internet. I blame it first, like every parent today, though I’m not a parent. (I’m not even married.) Satellite television. The workplace that hijacks the day and its possibilities of togetherness.

  My time for investigation is over. I return to the class, to the students. But something has changed in these few minutes. I sense an annoyance in me whose source I can’t locate. It is as if I want to be angry.

  ‘Close reading,’ I correct Shruti, ‘not closed reading’.

  Shruti apologises. I don’t look at her.

  ‘Stanza. Not paragraph,’ I correct again. I feel uncomfortable with the sharpness in my voice but don’t know how to rid myself of it.

  ‘Do you like the poem?’ I ask, and am immediately angry with myself. As if liking should be the trigger for close reading! The intelligence services closely study only what they are suspicious of. And the words tumble out of me, though I didn’t mean to say them at all. ‘Are you suspicious of the poem?’

  They raise their heads together. It’s a rare moment when I have their attention. (We used to study every pleat of the saris our teachers wore, even notice missing stones in wedding rings. My students wouldn’t know the colour of the shirt I wore yesterday.) I feel slightly nervous. Their collective stare reminds me of the time I was in college, when groups of boys would study me as if I was a dead body and they students of anatomy.

  I notice that Jyoti is about to say something. I must stop her. I sense my word turning into a question in her mouth. ‘Suspicious?’ That’s what she’d say. She loves questions. We – all her teachers – know that about her. I suddenly remember the remark I left on an essay she showed me last week: ‘There’s a difference between “last love” and “lasting love” – in no other place perhaps has “ing” been so powerful...’ But now I can’t remember what her essay was about. This betrayal by my memory shocks me. It makes me conscious of my birth certificate.

  In a flash I’ve imagined the parents of all my students. I’ve given their marriages health certificates – the faces and body weight and clothes of my students, their children, are enough. Jyoti’s parents couldn’t be divorced, I am certain. She smiles a lot in class. But so does Amla. I’m not getting it right, I am not. I abandon the thought.

  I return to the poem I’d left. How kind of the poem to wait for me, how kind of poems to wait for us. How well-behaved they are, never to show their impatience. How restful poems are.

  When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

  I summon up remembrances of things past

  I have been intoxicated by these lines for years, for decades. The sibilants – sessions, sweet, silent, summon, remembrances, things – are whispers, I’ve told my students. Thoughts are whispers, close your eyes and imagine someone saying them – you’ll feel the breath of these words on the back of your shoulders, as if a lover was standing behind you and saying them to you. The eroticism of those lines makes me shiver, I get goosebumps. I think of the man I wanted to marry.

  No, no, I’m not a lover. I’m a teacher. I’m supposed to teach this poem, not be drugged by it. I have to be the poem’s surgeon, expose its veins and arteries and hidden tickling places to this group of fifteen girls. I’m not its masseur.

  ‘But we finished reading Sonnet 64 last week.’ It’s Jyoti. This statement ends with a question mark even though she can’t see it.

  I return to my senses. I have to bluff my way out of this now. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I wanted to remind you of these lines so that you notice how the character of intimacy is different in every relationship. The proximity of bodies, of whispers, in Shakespeare’s sonnet is not for this married couple. Even when they sit next to each other it is a long-distance relationship.’

  I sneeze. It’s the air-conditioning. I hate its taunting cold air.

  I notice Jyoti laughing, as if a sneeze were like a fall, a prompt for others to laugh. I am annoyed – I want to tell her that her teeth are always stained with food from her last meal. I scold myself. I find myself turning into a stereotype – the cranky spinster. Do they think of me as that, my students, even though I teach them the most passionate love poems in the world?

  ‘Every poem is a love poem,�
�� I tell every group on the first day each semester. Let us not categorise them as anything else. The teenagers agree without resistance. Love is my religion, one of them will inevitably declare seriously every year, and I will air my fake-funny remark: ‘But that doesn’t mean that every poem is a religious poem.’

  It is true, I read every poem as a lover. I wonder whether it is because I wanted to marry a poet. Something stirs in me suddenly. I feel guilty for my annoyance with Priti and Amla.

  I think of the history of reading – how every reader reads from his own sense of victimhood. All philosophy was born from a sense of deprivation: Marxism and feminism and postcolonialism and race and class and caste, everything. We pine for what is not? That is the code of reading – we seek in literature what life will not give us. That is why every poem is a love poem for me. And why Amla reads her classmate’s poem about a long drive as a poem about a divorced couple.

  ‘Failing and Flying’ by Jack Gilbert. I repeat myself twice. A teacher’s tic.

  Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

  It’s the same when love comes to an end,

  or the marriage fails and people say

  they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

  said it would never work. That she was

  old enough to know better. But anything

  worth doing is worth doing badly.

  Like being there by that summer ocean

  on the other side of the island while

  love was fading out of her, the stars

  burning so extravagantly those nights that

  anyone could tell you they would never last.

  Every morning she was asleep in my bed

  like a visitation, the gentleness in her

  like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

  Each afternoon I watched her coming back

  through the hot stony field after swimming,

  the sea light behind her and the huge sky

  on the other side of that. Listened to her

  while we ate lunch. How can they say

  the marriage failed? Like the people who

  came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

  and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

  I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

  but just coming to the end of his triumph.

  I read the poem once and wait. It’s like waiting for the meat to marinate.

  ‘What’s the title?’ It’s Shruti, the quietest student I’ve had in fifteen years of teaching. There’s the preface of a cough in her voice.

  ‘Failing and Flying,’ I repeat.

  ‘F-words!’ says Mayurika. I can never be sure of her, whether she treats me as one of her friends, or whether she is indifferent to my presence. Her responses in class are a bit like the bed hair with which she walks into class every morning – an indifference to decorum.

  I pretend not to hear. Increasingly these days, I have to do that – pretend to be air.

  ‘Why does everything bad begin with F? Failure. Fuck. Fuck.’ Mayurika again.

  I’m not going to give up so easily, I decide. ‘Really? What about “first”?’

  ‘Flower,’ Shruti adds to the list. I look at her. This is the first time she’s speaking in class this semester.

  ‘Fool.’ That’s Mayurika.

  ‘Fountain.’

  ‘Fox.’

  They’ve begun treating this like a badminton match. I’m losing control of the class.

  ‘Flying and Failing,’ I say.

  ‘Failing and Flying,’ Jyoti corrects me.

  I smile, trying to hide my nervousness. Why do these young girls make me anxious when I know more about everything than they do, more about life and literature, more about love and loss?

  This thought, instead of calming me down, takes me on a different route. ‘Look at the words beginning with “L”, how beautiful they are,’ I find myself saying, ‘Life, love, literature...’

  ‘Lust...’

  ‘Laziness...’

  I want to tell them that lust and laziness are not necessarily bad things, but I must return to the poem.

  ‘Are we studying this poem for sounds?’ It’s Mayurika.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ I adjust my hair.

  ‘With the exception of three – perhaps four – lines, all the lines have “L” sounds.’

  I rush to investigate the poem. This fact, undiscovered so far, wasn’t a part of my reading. I don’t know what to do with Mayurika’s discovery. It’s like an unnecessary dish ordered at a restaurant, one that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the ordered dishes.

  Mayurika doesn’t stop. She never knows how to. ‘I mean, if it’s the sounds that are important for poets, why not more “d” sounds. Die. Divorce. Doom. Why isn’t the poem called “Dying and Divorcing”?’

  I feel unprepared to teach this class anymore. All my years of teaching – and learning, all the nights spent with the French thinkers and English writers and American academics – seem useless against what these girls, half my age, are telling me. I am partly to blame for this, I know: I’ve spent the last week telling them about the use of sounds in poetry. It’d been a fun class. We’d walked out of the classroom talking about the similarity of sounds in words across languages: the ‘ap’ sounds in ‘slap’, ‘thappar’, ‘jhaapar’, for instance.

  I smile and begin reading again.

  Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

  It’s the same when love comes to an end,

  or the marriage fails and people say

  they knew it was a mistake…

  I pause to breathe. It is September. The humidity has affected my asthma like it does every year. But there is no space for the illness of teachers in a classroom, not unless one is on medical leave. I don’t like the classroom, its cold artificiality, its elision of emotions, its turning of relations into input-output ratios. Only once did I tell my students that I wanted to finish the class three minutes before time because I was famished, that I couldn’t carry on anymore. I said it in fear, not knowing whether it’d be held against me, not just in my student evaluations but for generations of student gossip that would follow. Later, walking back to the faculty residential quarters, I thought to myself: how hunger and thirst are rarely, almost never, discussed in the way we respond to literature.

  Returning to the poem seems to get more difficult each time. Before the ten-minute break, we’d read a poem each written by them. Sabiha’s poem had been about her parents talking to each other in a car, after dropping their daughter in boarding school. ‘Why did you marry me?’ That was the refrain in the poem – the mother’s words to the father every time the car braked. I’d been touched by the affection in the poem, the quasi-rhetorical question that brings in immediate intimacy. The surprise of Amla’s question still hadn’t left me. ‘Your parents are divorced, aren’t they?’

  Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

  It’s the same when love comes to an end,

  or the marriage fails and people say

  they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

  said it would never work. That she was

  old enough to know better. But anything

  worth doing is worth doing badly.

  ‘Apart from the leaping reference to Icarus, you’ll notice that there are no metaphors in the first seven lines of the poem,’ I say.

  ‘Why, is it to represent the seven-year-itch?’

  It’s Mala. She’s smiling at me, like someone who’s just discovered her smartness.

  I’m flummoxed. I smile at her, and then at the rest of the class, which is, for the moment, an abstraction.

  ‘Look at the verbs in the lines: fails, work, doing... They seem borrowed from a capitalist work-life, don’t they?’ I say.

  ‘There’s a fridge magnet in my father’s new apartment which says – “Marriage is a lot of work. I opted for Voluntary Retirement.” These words remind me of that.’ It’s Amla, chewing the
end of a curl of hair.

  ‘My mother says that she’s working all the time. If a relationship also needs work, then she’d rather not be in it. I agree with her. Who wants to be an employee 24X7?’ Priti joins in.

  ‘Notice that the poem is relying on axiomatic and idiomatic lines. See the first line about Icarus – you could take it out of the poem and it’d stand alone. Almost like a proverb...’

  ‘Almost like how a marriage stands out in the history of all relationships one makes or breaks in a lifetime.’ Mayurika – she doesn’t complete her own sentences, she doesn’t let others complete theirs.

  ‘I agree,’ says Priti, ‘they have “Marital Status” on all these stupid government forms. They don’t ask you whether you’re someone’s brother or sister or friend or enemy!’

  ‘“But anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” See how this adage is used to justify...’ I feel my asthma returning. I am angry that no studies of victimhood will consider a teacher in a classroom a victim even if she’s asthmatic, suffering from diarrhoea, dysmenorrhoea or heartbreak.

  ‘Why don’t we have a discipline – or a course – called “Relationships?” It’ll be far more useful than studying race and gender and caste and...’

  ‘And Marxism!’

  Priti and Shruti are completing each other’s sentences. I wonder whether they know that my relationship didn’t work out. Students find out everything. They are worse than detectives. This generation that decides on the value of books from reading blurbs before reducing them to an ‘ism’ – the fault of the education system that taught them to do this – will they understand that my parents refused to let me marry Arup because he was a poet who did not have a steady income? Will they frame our relationship within a Marxist framework? If this was not a classroom, I’d have laughed at myself, at these inconsequential and hilarious imaginings. And so I force myself to return to metaphor.