The Private Life of Mrs Sharma

by Ratika Kapur

  But he could also be serious, my husband, because my husband is a good man. Even Doctor Sahib thinks so. He performs all his duties. I don’t have a brother, and when my father passed away in 1998, my husband performed the last rites as a loving son. And as a loving husband, a loving friend, he was always there with me. I remember how much he cried. When we had gone to the hospital to collect my father’s body and the attendant pulled the sheet back from over my father’s face, a face hard and grey and I don’t know how but still full of pain, when I saw that face I just sat down there on the floor of the morgue and cried, and when my husband saw me, it was the first time that he was seeing me cry because I hardly ever cry, I never even cried on my wedding day, but when my husband saw me I remember that he sat down next to me and also cried. And not only that, my husband also took care of everything. Bobby was not even three years of age then, but my husband would give Bobby a bath and feed him. My husband even tried his level best to cook our meals and clean the house for those first one or two weeks. That is the type of person my husband is, that is the type of friend he is.

  I am also his friend, I think. He tells me that from time to time, and it seems that he is telling the truth. In the evenings, for example, when my husband was still in Delhi, after he came back home from the hospital and had his bath, he would lie down on the divan with his cup of tea, and leaning against me he would tell me all about what had happened that day, about problems that he was having with some other physiotherapist, about delays in purchasing medical equipment, and what not, and I would listen, and many times I would give him advice. And even though I am a woman, I think that he always listened to my advice.

  Actually, I have helped him through many difficult times. Some years ago, for example, when his younger sister refused to get married, but she, Neelam, is, by God’s grace, happily married now and expecting a baby in July, but when some years ago she was totally against the idea of marriage because she wanted to do an MSc in Biotechnology, and my in-laws were putting pressure on my husband to talk to her, to make her change her mind, who helped him through all this? After months and months of fighting and tears in the family without any positive results, even my husband’s older sister could not do anything, who was the one who made her sit down one day and finally put some sense into her head? I basically convinced her that her husband-to-be was a broadminded man and that if she performed all her duties as a wife he would surely allow her to pursue her higher studies. And Neelam listened to me and agreed to the marriage. But actually, this was not her fate. Her husband thought that an MSc, or any other type of further studies, was timewaste, and did not allow her to pursue it. But at that time how was I supposed to know what type of man her husband was going to be? How was I supposed to know that he would be just like most other men? But at least I helped my husband and her family get her married, and at least this man allowed her to work and Neelam got a well-paying job in a pharma company.

  Yes, I am my husband’s friend. Even today, when he is sitting far away in Dubai, he is always asking me for advice, always seeking my help. What am I supposed to say to the boss about my leave? he will ask me. How am I supposed to tell my roommate that it is his turn to pay the power bill? And what not. I think about his problem carefully, then I tell him what to do. Like a friend.

  But we were also lovers, my husband and I. There was a lot of friendship, there was a lot of fun that we had and pain that we shared, but there were times, many, many times, when we put all that away on one side, along with our clothes, and quietly got into our bed, while Bobby was sleeping peacefully on the folding cot in the corner. I don’t like to boast, but my husband could never keep his hands off me. He actually thinks that I have the most beautiful bones in the world, and he is a physiotherapist so he has seen many, many bones in his life. He would keep stroking my shoulders, nibbling them, and he would always tell me that no type of exercise, no type of physiotherapy, could create the type of perfect shoulder joints that I have, and that they could only be a gift from God, God, the engineer of all engineers. Obviously now I am a little bit plump, and I have become plumper since he left, and these bones that he loved now hide under a thin blanket of fat, but I think that he will still want me when he comes back. Yes, my husband could never keep his hands off me and the truth is that I also could hardly keep my hands off him. We would switch on the washing machine, Neelam and her husband gave it to us before they had left for Canada, and it is a very good LG-brand semi-automatic washing machine, we would switch it on so that the sounds that the machine made could hide the sounds that we made from Bobby, and then my husband and I would get into bed. I can’t forget those days. Even now, when I switch on the washing machine, which is only on the second and fourth Saturdays of every month, I think of those days. And from time to time I touch myself. And there is nothing wrong with that. A long time ago I read in one of the magazines at the clinic that masturbation, even for women, is normal and healthy, and a doctor wrote that magazine article. You won’t grow hair on the palms of your hands as the nuns used to tell us in school. And, actually, many women masturbate. They are just too ashamed to say that they do.

  I know all about sex. I have been married a long time. I even know about porn. Bobby thinks that I am a fool, he thinks that I have no idea that he looks at porn on the Internet. But I know that he does, and I know a lot about those dirty photos and videos and stories that he looks at, the types of things that all boys, and all men, even my own husband, look at these days. Man on top, woman on top, this style, that style, doggy style. I was not born yesterday. And I know how men think, I know what they want. At the clinic, for example, day after day men come in with their wives and take small, little plastic cups into the toilet to collect their semen. I think that some of those men think about me when they are inside the toilet. I see how they look at me.

  It is not even ten thirty now, but it seems as if it is two o’clock in the morning. Everything is quiet. The only sounds that I can hear are the sounds from Outer Ring Road, the sounds of trucks and fancy fast cars. Only truck drivers and rich young boys are not at home with their families on Sunday night, and also those men who are far, far away working in some foreign country. But my husband told us this morning that his boss has promised him that he can take his annual leave during the Eid holidays at the end of August. This would actually be very good for us because my in-laws will be leaving for Canada next month for my sister-in-law’s delivery. Neelam has already sent the plane tickets, which I don’t think is wrong even if she is the daughter, because in this case the daughter has more money than the son, and these are modern times and today we know that the daughter is no less than the son, you see it on all those girl-child advertisements, and I explained this to my husband who was not very happy when my in-laws first told him about it. So, yes, my in-laws are going to Canada and they won’t be coming back until October. It will be just like the early days. In exactly one hundred and one days’ time, it will be just my husband and Bobby and me.

  5

  Thursday, 2 June 2011

  Bobby was sick. Actually, Bobby was very sick. Stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhoea, one full week in hospital. The boy suffered, and when this boy suffers he wants his father. This boy always wants his father. But then every son wants his father. And the truth is that my husband is a loving father, a patient and loving father. Bobby knows his father’s love, he knew it even when he was two weeks old. When he was a baby troubled by colic, troubled by night-time, troubled by car alarms and fireworks, Bobby became calm as soon as his father lifted him to his chest. That small, little baby, that small, little baby heart, felt his father’s love.

  Still, how could I have told my husband to come back just now? How could I have just called him up and asked him to come back home? He would have lost his job, he would surely have lost his job, and along with that we would have lost everything that we had planned for. So, I told my husband, as I had told my in-laws, that there was nothing to worry about, that Bobby had onl
y got a bad attack of food poisoning.

  And, by God’s grace, Bobby is well and truly fine now.

  But even if I had asked my husband to come back, which obviously he would have, and he would have jumped on to the first plane to Delhi, but even if I had told him to come, what could he actually have done? Could he have actually slept on that dirty floor of the general ward for six nights? Could he have washed his son’s vomit off his clothes, off the bed, off the floor? Could he have fought with the nurses to change the IV drip? Could he have lived on tea and bananas for seven days’ time? Maybe he could have done all this, I don’t know. Maybe he could have spent hours and hours standing in line at the chemist stalls outside, maybe he could have run to call the doctor on that second night when Bobby just fell down to the floor suddenly. Maybe he could have stayed with Bobby for one or two hours so that I could have gone back home at least one time in those seven days to have a bath. Rosie from the clinic kept telling me to call him up to come back. She said that it would help me, that it would help Bobby. But how could I have done that? How could I have risked my husband losing his job?

  Rosie has to know all this. Rosie has to understand such problems. My husband got the job in Dubai through Jacob, her husband. Like many Malayalis, Jacob went to work in Dubai so that he could earn a better salary, so that he could give his family a better life. And when I told her about all our money problems, she was the one who told me to tell my husband to speak to Jacob, who then gave us the contact information for the placement agency that got my husband his job. I should say here that it took me almost one year just to make my husband call up the agency. I can’t live without you! he kept saying. I can’t live without my family! I won’t be here to see my son grow up. My parents are growing old. And what not. And Bobby would also cry and cry when he heard us talking about Dubai. No! He would say. No! Papa will not go anywhere! No! No! No! I sometimes think that it is actually a miracle how countries and companies survive when men rule them. But in the end my husband came to his senses. By God’s grace my husband came to his senses and he called up the agency, and eight months after that he was working in a huge, modern, fully air-conditioned hospital in Dubai and earning a suitable salary.

  Poverty is a type of punishment. And like so many other families, the poverty that my family suffers from is punishment for a crime that we did not commit. It is a jail, a jail. Now when you are stuck in this jail, you have two choices. You can just keep sitting, quietly sitting and suffering inside the four walls of your cell, or you can stand up and try your best to break those walls down. Both choices bring their own difficulties, bring their own pain, and Rosie knows this. Rosie also knows that one of these choices will bring some freedom. The only thing that you have to do is to look at your life with the right zoom setting, like on a digital camera. When you use the right setting, when you zoom out, it is very easy to see which choice is right. The problem is that people are so stuck on what is in front of them, they are so stuck in the present trying their level best to make sure that the present time is easy to live through, that they make wrong choices that will only bring bigger difficulties in the future.

  That is what happened with my mother, and sometimes it makes me very angry. Not even one month after her thirty-sixth birthday she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had always been sickly, but this was cancer. This was horrible. And she was so young. And I was only thirteen years of age. My father brought her to AIIMS in Delhi so that the best doctors could give her the best treatment. The doctors there said that they would have to do an operation to remove the lump, but they also said that with the operation and some rounds of chemotherapy after that, she had very good chances of survival. But my mother said no. No. Give me as many pills as you want, she said, but no knives, no needles! My father then took her to many different private hospitals both in Delhi and in Meerut, but all the doctors in all the hospitals said one and the same thing. Operation or death. Still, my mother refused to agree. No, no, no! she said. I remember how my father begged her, day in and day out he begged her. I remember how he made me beg her. Still, she listened to nobody. Not her husband, not her only child. My father cried. I had never ever seen him cry before, but during that time he shed tears like a woman. But the only thing that my mother thought about was the pain of the present, the pain of those knives, those needles. She did not think about the suffering that would come in the future, first her own suffering, and then her husband and child’s suffering after she was gone. Maybe she did not suffer the pain of an operation, the pain of needles, the side effects of the chemo medicines, but in less than one year the cancer ate her up like a mad and hungry animal. My mother died eleven months after she was first diagnosed with cancer. She was four months younger than I am today. And sometimes that makes me angry, and sometimes the anger seems a little bit like that cancer.

  But what does this horrible story tell us? What is the lesson here? You don’t have to read a Moral Science textbook to know. My mother was granted a choice, just like everybody is granted a choice, but, just like most other people, she was so stuck in the present that she made the wrong choice. She made a choice that killed her.

  Whatever it is, many years after that my husband and I made a choice, but we made a choice with our eyes fixed on some point in front of us, on the future, on our child’s future. It is difficult just now, I can’t lie. I am alone, I am tired, and my husband is far away. But this is how it has to be.

  See, we tried. My husband and I tried our level best to save money when he was here. We worked hard in our jobs and we worked hard at home. My husband took the bus to his hospital, not his scooter, to save petrol money. And at least three times a week he stayed in the hospital until late at night to earn overtime. From my side, I ignored one empty womb hungry for more. I don’t like to boast, but my husband and I could have produced a cricket team. But we decided to have only one child. And I know that people think it is because we could not have any more. Yes, that is how hard we tried. I rinsed out milk packets with water to make sure that not one drop was wasted, I cooked masoor dal day after day because moong dal was too costly, I put potatoes in every dish to fill up my family’s stomachs, I even made small, little deals with some of the suppliers at the clinic. Still, we could not save one paisa. And we were so happy together, the three of us. We were well and truly a model family, the type of family you see in car advertisements on TV, even if there were only three of us. But we were still prisoners of poverty. We were happy together, but together we were jailed. And so the choice was simple. My husband had to go to Dubai to earn a better salary. Still, the choice was also difficult. We knew that we would have to make some big sacrifices. But only a fool believes that there is such a thing as an easy choice. Only a fool thinks that he can escape sacrifice and still get what he wants. As my father used to say, Without death there can be no heaven.

  6

  Sunday, 5 June 2011

  That front-office woman from Vineet’s hotel, Neha, called me up. I answered her call only because I did not recognise her number. She said that Vineet thought that something had happened to me because he had not seen me at the station for ten days and I had not answered his calls or replied to his smses. He was very, very worried about me, she said, and that is why she called me up. I knew that I should never have given her my number. Even the first time that I met her I thought that there was something odd about her. What does she think? Why is she interfering like this? And what does Vineet think? So what if he has not seen me? Who is he to me that I have to call him up every time I see a missed call from him or reply to every sms he sends? The man does not even know that I am a married woman with a fifteen-year-old son, and Neha tells me that he is worried about me? It is such a joke. Worried about me? Do any of them actually know the meaning of worry? These people are like children, they behave just like children. But then without a husband or wife, without children and in-laws, you are always a child, no matter how old you are.

  I am tired. I am tired in
my heart, I am tired in my mind. The truth is that worrying about people makes me tired. I can feed a person and I can give him a bath, and I can do it day after day. I can go all the way to Shahdara to buy the purest herbal medicines and run off to the Jhandewalan temple every evening to seek Mother’s blessings. I have done these things. I have done these things for my husband, my son and my father-in-law. But these things only make my body tired, and my body can recover quickly. What is actually difficult is trying to understand what a person needs day in and day out. What is difficult is the worrying day in and day out. Is he fine? Why is he sleeping such a lot? Why are his eyes looking like that? And it never stops. It never ever stops. Like his father, and even his father’s father for that matter, that boy Bobby will never ask for anything, never say anything at all. He will lie around the house with a long face, he will lie around with his headphones stuffed in his ears, but he will not speak one word. And so you spend every second of every day and every second of every sleepless night trying your level best to understand what he needs, what he wants, what he is feeling, trying your level best to find some signs in his voice, in his breathing, in his eyes. This makes me very tired. Sometimes I want to shout at him. Bobby! I want to shout. Give me peace for just one day so that maybe I could sleep in peace for just one night! But who am I trying to fool? I think that it will only be the sleep of death that will grant me that peace.

  It is a little bit odd, but when I think about my mother’s illness I can’t actually remember feeling this tired. I went to school in the mornings, because my father never ever let me miss one day except when we brought her to Delhi, and then I came back home and cooked and looked after my mother while my father was at the shop, and even then I don’t think that I ever felt this tired. For almost one year I fed my mother, sponged her, gave her medicines, and I was only thirteen years of age, but I never ever felt like this, and it seems that it was because of the type of person that my mother was. She was a simple person, and her demands were always simple and direct. Get me a cup of tea, Renu, she used to say. Press my legs, Renu. Help me sit up, Renu. The demands were only made on my body. The demands on my head and heart did come afterwards, obviously, but that was after she was gone.