Civil Lines

by Radhika Swarup

  She never stepped out of line again. She studied well, breaking off her burgeoning relationship when Ma counselled it. When she was awarded a scholarship to study at university in America, she turned to Ma again, who told her that she would find all the by-lines she needed in India itself.

  The scholarship was turned down, then, and when I won my own scholarship, Ma expected me to follow my sister’s example and reject it. Her anxiety was palpable from the moment the acceptance letter arrived. She drove to school to pick me up, which should have tipped me off. Normally, the old po-faced driver, Bahadur, waited at the school gates for me, but there Ma was, waving to attract my attention, and tapping at her watch to hurry me up.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked gracelessly, but she just rushed me to the car.

  Once seated, she pulled out the envelope. ‘It came with the morning post. I’ve been picking it up every two minutes, and once or twice, I was tempted to open it myself.’ She noted the arch look I shot at her and held her hands up. ‘But I didn’t, ok? It’s been killing me since the morning, but I knew I had to respect your privacy.’

  She thrust the envelope in my hands, as I squealed, out of nerves and anticipation, she said, ‘It’s thick. Maya’s acceptance letter was thick too.’

  Once the letter was opened, once it was scanned and snatched out of my hands by an impatient Ma, and once it was retrieved and re-examined, Ma asked, ‘When will you reply?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ she smiled. ‘You know how proud I am of you, don’t you?’

  I blushed. ‘Thanks, Ma.’

  ‘My brilliant girls. But there are enough great colleges in India too.’

  She was leaning across the clutch and hugging me, and it dawned on me for the first time that she meant for me to refuse the offer.

  ‘Ma,’ I said. ‘I want to go.’

  ‘No, darling,’ she replied. She held me at arm’s length, taking an indulgent survey of my features. ‘No, no,’ she repeated.’ She turned to start the car. ‘We’ll write the letter together.’

  I fully expected Ma to get her way. I told her I was not going to reject the offer, and she suggested I sleep on the decision. One day turned into two, and then a week passed, and still Ma’s rhetoric remained unchanged. There was no need to leave home.

  I was sure Papa would side with her, but when he didn’t, I grew more resolute. ‘Listen to me,’ Maya advised me after a particularly fraught evening’s arguing. ‘Ma knows what’s best for you.’

  ‘And what,’ I asked my shocked sister, ‘if she doesn’t?’

  I did go, in the end, and even though Ma claimed she supported my decision, she cooled in her treatment of me. Increasingly, she would leave me to decide matters for myself. ‘You know best,’ she began to say anytime I asked her for her opinion, and it felt to me that if she was to have no rights over my future, she would take no interest in it either.

  For as long as I could remember, Ma’s world had revolved around the three of us, and central to that world was our presence in her house. She seemed not to have any interest outside of us. She was there at every school play and debate, was a committed cheerleader at annual sports days, and if she had a social life outside of us or Tasha-di, we didn’t know of it.

  She found it difficult to deal with the changes that my move brought, and though she was always cordial when I called, she herself never rang. There was always an excuse ready—the time difference was too great, or she worried about disturbing me at my studies—but we both knew her behaviour had changed. She was no longer the hovering, over-protective mother I sometimes found stifling. After a while, I grew resentful, and called her less. Papa and I still spoke, but a week would pass, and then two, between calls with my mother. As for Maya, she never stepped out of line again.

  V

  I waited to speak to Maya in the morning. She had been stand-offish as we ended our evening, but there had been moments in our conversation when I had sensed a chink in her reserve.

  I thought of how worried Tasha-di had been about her, and I thought of all the questions I had been on the point of asking her about her writing and how she spent her days. I didn’t know who her friends were, or if she had any. I didn’t know if she missed Ma, if she still idolised her, or if she could conceive of a life away from her shadow. She didn’t know the challenges I had faced in London, and in some ways, hadn’t seemed curious about a world outside her own. I didn’t know if this lack of interest was personal. I didn’t know enough about her to know if she meant to offend.

  I waited till noon, then knocked on her door. There was no response. I debated going in but was wary of entering unbidden, and instead, I returned to the lounge and tried to occupy myself. My phone was no use to me; there was barely any reception available, and I spent a little time refamiliarizing myself with the country’s newspapers.

  Shanti came by asking if I was hungry, and I told her I would wait for Maya.

  ‘Maya baby,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I thought she would have been with you.’

  Shanti hadn’t seen her all day, hadn’t heard the car start or the front door open. I walked to the veranda, opening the windows, and as Delhi’s sun hit me, I looked out. There was no sign of my sister.

  A framed photograph caught my eye, and I wandered in its direction. Our pictures hadn’t been updated in over a decade and I knew all the items displayed by heart. I had looked at the same faces and smiles all my life, and yet, here was a dusty print on the mantelpiece opposite where Ma liked to sit that I didn’t recognise. I walked towards it. The photograph was indistinct behind the layers of dust that had gathered, neither the faces nor location discernible, and I began to wipe at the glass of the frame with my hand.

  My palm was soon thick with dirt, but the faces grew clearer. It was a graduation scene, the students in caps and gowns, and as I peered, I recognised the senate building at my university. ‘It’s from your undergraduate degree,’ I heard Maya say, and as I turned towards her, I saw she had come from the staircase. I smiled. She hadn’t been avoiding me, then, or at least not ignoring the calls from inside her bedroom.

  ‘Ma,’ Maya was continuing, ‘was so proud of you.’ She smiled, half embarrassed. ‘Kept telling everyone you had achieved a first class degree.’

  Maya was shaking her head as if Ma’s preening about me was habitual, but the truth was she hadn’t attended my graduation. Maya hadn’t either, and it had only been Papa who had flown across to see me receive my degree. Ma hadn’t called after the ceremony, and I had told myself I hadn’t expected her to.

  But here it was, right in front of where Ma sat, my graduation photo from the university Ma hadn’t wanted me to study at.

  ‘She was very proud of you, you know.’

  I snorted.

  ‘She was,’ Maya was insisting. ‘We both were.’ Her face scrunched up a little. ‘I still am.’

  And there, unbidden, were the tears I hadn’t cried for a year or longer. The tears that should have been shed at Ma’s passing, at the loss of my job, at the continuing troubles with Benjamin, at my failure to check in on my bereft sister. She was reaching forward, for all her prickliness of the night before, and with infinite, excruciating care, she was putting a hand around my shoulder. ‘What brought that all on, silly?’

  ‘It’s all such a mess.’

  Maya was shaking her head.

  ‘It is,’ I repeated, the younger sibling again, insisting my voice was heard. ‘My job has gone…’

  ‘There will be other jobs.’

  ‘No,’ I said, tinny, high-pitched. ‘I’ve been applying for jobs for a year or longer. No one is hiring.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, detaching herself from me. She sat down on Ma’s old seat. ‘It’s a tough world out there.’

  ‘It’s never been this hard before…’

  ‘It is always harder for us.’

  I blinked dumbly.

  ‘Come on,’ she was saying, nodding in emphasis, impatien
t at my lack of comprehension. ‘You know that it is always harder for women.’

  I stared. She was only a few years older than me, and yet her attitudes—her opinions, her passiveness, her fatalism, her willingness to admit defeat—were pure Ma. Where had this note of sexism crept in? Was it an explicit prejudice, or the fears Ma had poured into her? Or had she ventured out into the world after Ma’s passing and found her path blocked?

  ‘You’ve always been so idealistic,’ Maya was saying, ‘But you have to face facts. Life is always just that bit harder for a woman.’

  I tried the door that led off the landing again, to no avail. It was a broad, thick old structure, and though I pushed hard, and then ran at it as I had seen in the movies, I didn’t make an impact.

  There was, I remembered, another staircase on the other side of the house, from behind the kitchen. I had never climbed it in all the years I had lived in the house. There was something Shanti had said to me as a young girl, something about ghosts lining the service staircase, that had filled me with fear, and I had never attempted to tackle the stairs. The second floor was where she carried out her housekeeping duties. This was where the bedsheets and clothes were taken to be ironed after they were washed, and I had seen her all the time, scurrying away with basket-loads of air-dried washing, and had never once followed her.

  Even now, as I tried to penetrate the areas of the house that were closed to me, I didn’t think of climbing up the stairs behind the kitchen. Still, Shanti must have seen me hover in the area, as she asked me if I needed anything.

  ‘No,’ I said to her, and then, ‘I tried to get into the second floor, but found it locked.’

  Shanti sighed. A strand of hair escaped from her bun, and she tucked it swiftly back into place. ‘Baby,’ she said. ‘That floor has been shut for months.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. I could feel my mouth turning down with a juvenile petulance, and she nodded patiently.

  ‘What can your poor sister do?’ she asked. ‘The house was crumbling before your mother died, and if I’m to be honest, it needed work even before you left for England.’

  By the time I visited after Ma’s death, the walls were a study in shading. The gardener came and maintained the garden, just as Shanti took care of the house and its inhabitants, but the bigger issues that transcended maintenance were overlooked. Plaster peeled off the outside walls, and there was no mobile reception in any room barring the living room on the ground floor and a certain spot in my bedroom on the floor above. A bookcase had caved in the library and had not been repaired. And that was just a brief list of what I had seen. I had largely refrained from marching into Shanti’s kitchen, and as for the floor above the one I slept in, I couldn’t think of the horrors the locked door masked.

  Shanti shook her head, lowering herself gingerly onto a chair. She rubbed her knee slowly, as if rubbing ointment on a bruise, and I said to her, ‘You need to slow down.’

  She waved her hands at me.

  ‘You do,’ I insisted. There it was again, the petulant tone in my voice. Somehow, I always ended up sounding like a child in this house. These were the ghosts Shanti always warned me about, but they weren’t the shadows of strangers. They were the spectres of my own infancy. ‘You do too much around here,’ I said. ‘Running up and down all those stairs.’

  ‘The ghosts carry me around,’ she laughed, but I refused to join in her hilarity. This was not the same household I had grown up in. There had been two chefs when I was at school, and two boys to help Shanti with her labours. There were the cleaners who came in every day, and Shanti largely had a managerial role in the house; keeping all the staff in order. She saw me shaking my head, and put her hand in mine, ‘The house is getting old, baby,’ she said. ‘Just like your Shanti.’

  ‘You’re not old,’ I replied stoutly. Then I remembered I had said the same about the others I had loved; Papa and Ma. I thought of her house in the village. Every year Ma would give Shanti a bonus on our birthdays, and it was with these supplemental gifts of money that Shanti had built her home. One year’s gifts would pay for the shell of the house, the next for the doors and windows. She furnished her house the following year, and slowly, added to her possessions; kitchen utensils, a coir charpai, and then, after much encouragement, an outdoor toilet. ‘Maybe,’ I said to her, ‘you could retire to your house in the village?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, smiling. Her hand remained in mine, and she gave it a squeeze.

  ‘But seriously,’ I was saying. I got up from where I sat, removing my hand from Shanti’s. ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘I can’t leave my girls.’

  ‘What’s stopping you?’ I asked. ‘Are you worried about Pradeep? He can live with us for as long as he wants to. This is his home as much as it is ours.’ I looked at her nodding patiently, as if she were indulging me, and a new thought occurred to me, ‘You do want to go back to your home and your husband, don’t you?’

  Shanti rose from her chair and came towards me. Once more her arms straddled mine, as if I were the one in need of comfort. ‘No,’ she said to me with immense kindness. ‘No baby, I don’t want to go home to my husband.’

  I had begun to take a walk of a morning. There was no exercising in Delhi otherwise; we drove everywhere, and that too was often a production. The car had to be retrieved from the garage, and by the time we had the ancient motor running, Shanti would have run out of the house, offering Pradeep’s services or requesting we pick up provisions from the market. Most days we would only be able to leave an hour after an outing was first spoken of. On my walks, my time was my own. There was no need to remember to take the keys, no need to return within the hour or with staples. I was largely guided by the heat, which began to grow unbearable earlier in the day as my stay continued. I adjusted by starting my walks earlier in the morning, leaving at six and before breakfast.

  I asked Maya several times to accompany me, but she was always busy. She told me she was writing, or that she had to meet a friend, but I never saw her leave the house, and I never saw her byline appear on any publication. Our interaction was civil enough, but stilted, and there was no reprising the intimacy I had so briefly sensed at the start of my visit. I walked, then, on my own, and started to bump into other regulars; workers on errands, and residents from neighbouring houses. I didn’t recognise most of them; the houses I had grown up next to had invariably been turned into palatial flats. There were many more families around than I ever remembered, and I was often joined by a grandmother on her way around the locality. The woman, a Mrs Bhatnagar, lived with her daughter and her young family in a house a few doors down from ours and went out for her exercise as soon as her grandchildren had been sent off to school for the day. Her day out started towards the end of my walk, but she would fall in line with me, giving me unprompted snippets of her life, and in return, asking for details of my life and prospects.

  For all Mrs Bhatnagar’s prying, I began to enjoy her company. There was a familiarity to her prejudices; telling me to cross the road to avoid a black cat, scolding her little errand boy when she saw him dawdling outside. She was always skittish around stray dogs, clutching my arm as if that offered a talisman against an attack, and this homely claim was welcome. This woman, with her constant diets and frequent calls to her religious guru was a mother unlike my own had ever been. She was credulous and silly and superstitious and endlessly fallible, but there was a warmth to her that I found hard to resist.

  She was handy with gossip too, and after Maya’s froideur, I found her loquaciousness refreshing. We passed by a stationary car, and Mrs Bhatnagar told me about the Bollywood starlet who was inside. ‘She went to Modern School, you know. She’s very much a local girl.’ And then, around the corner, her voice dropped, her words grew worshipful, and she pointed at a large, freshly painted house. ‘And that’s Raja Singh’s palace, of course.’

  ‘Raja Singh?’

  ‘You know, the angel guy…’

  ‘Angel?’

&n
bsp; ‘Angel, you know.’ She wiped sweat off her upper lip as she searched for the right word. ‘Angel investor. He’s made a ton of money as India has changed. He’s invested in online delivery companies, in TV stations, in those mother-in-law-daughter-in-law TV serials. He’s like a modern day Midas. Knows everyone who’s anyone. And his wife—what a woman.’

  Mrs Bhatnagar paused in front of the house, and I looked through the gaps in the gate.

  ‘She is gorgeous, of course. Always dripping with diamonds…’

  I was still peering at the house, and Mrs Bhatnagar pulled at my sleeve. ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, Mrs Singh, of course.’ Mrs Bhatnagar pursed her mouth at my inattention. ‘What lavish parties she hosts! What clothes she wears! She’s just back from Santorini, you know!’

  ‘Santorini must be hot at this time of year.’

  Mrs Bhatnagar looked pensively at me. I thought she was on the point of walking to the Singh house to introduce me to Mrs Singh, but she turned away. ‘I’ll have to ask my maid,’ she was saying. ‘She knows the Singhs’ maid, you know. She keeps me up-to-date with all the goings on in the household.’

  I worried that I had embarrassed Mrs Bhatnagar, and rushed to change the topic. I guessed her daughter was around my age, and asked her if she ever joined her on her walk. Mrs Bhatnagar let out a loud hoot. ‘Rashmi,’ she told me, ‘thinks that walks are too common.’

  ‘Too pedestrian,’ I offered, but the irony appeared to escape her.

  ‘She only likes to go to the gym,’ she told me. ‘She drops her children off to school, and then is in the gym until lunchtime.’ Mrs Bhatnagar swerved past a champak tree, and though I paused to smell the fragrance, she tugged me on. ‘She will spend all morning there, going to her classes, sitting in the sauna. Sauna!’ she cried, ‘As if Delhi itself isn’t a sauna! And then,’ she said, ‘She’ll visit the salon and have some food at a restaurant. She never returns home to eat,’ she sniffed. This more than anything seemed to affront the woman, ‘Says Indian food is too greasy. Bah!’ she cried, holding me back from a speeding car, and I wasn’t sure if she was more affronted by the motorist or her child. ‘The kids follow her lead too, and they will only have pizza or pasta for dinner.’ She sniggered. ‘As if there isn’t any grease in all that fancy, fancy food!’