by Manil Suri
I felt just as frayed. Somehow I had reverted to being the obedient younger sister—the role Paji and Biji had ingrained in me when I was a girl. I found myself preparing Roopa’s breakfast, heating the water for her bath, waiting to hear what she wanted for lunch. “I’ve never had so many bananas in my life,” she complained, upon my return from the market. “It might be a bit late in the season, but did you bother to check if they had any grapes?”
By the time Roopa returned from Shirdi and stayed another two nights, the whole house was in disarray. The bathroom cabinet over-flowed with her toiletries, the fridge festered with foods I had bought that she refused to eat. Her clothes (including, much to your embarrassment, two brassieres) were strewn everywhere, just like when we were young. The ganga had still not returned after Roopa scolded her the first morning for not sweeping out the floor under the cupboards. You, meanwhile, were also chafing, over a quiz your aunt had taken it upon herself to administer to you the previous morning, to test your preparedness for a geography test. When I informed her you hated to have your studies supervised, she replied that it was something I should start doing, something she had done for her children. “And look, it works—they’re now both in college, aren’t they?”
“When is Roo auntie’s train?” you asked, the Saturday she was supposed to depart.
When Roopa had left for Shirdi, I noticed that the two twin beds were pulled apart. Thinking nothing of it, I pushed them back. Now, as she finished packing her first suitcase, she told me to help her separate the beds again. “It doesn’t look right for them to be connected, as if it’s the same bed. Ashvin’s a growing boy—he’s getting much too old for that.”
Before I could demand to know what exactly she meant, Roopa continued. “You’re spending much too much time with him. A boy that age needs space to breathe, to make his own friends. I almost feel like I’ve blundered into the house of an old married couple—all these routines with him in which you’re so set. I went into the bathroom and couldn’t even tell your toothbrushes apart—they’re both red.” She looked at me as if she dared me to refute this damning piece of evidence.
“What are you talking about? Ashvin’s toothbrush is half the size of mine, and it’s the only color they keep at General Stores—red.”
“Look, Meera. Ravinder’s been posted on a ship before. I know how lonely it can get. It’s a terrible thing, loneliness. Especially if you’re staring at a whole lifetime stretching ahead. But there’s no reason you should think you have to lean on just Ashvin. There’s no reason why, with some luck, you shouldn’t find someone else. I know Dev would’ve wanted you to.”
“What do you know about what Dev would’ve wanted or not? You weren’t the one married to him for sixteen years. Throwing yourself at someone every once in a while doesn’t make you an expert on his soul.”
Roopa sighed. “Let’s not do this, Meera. I didn’t come here to fight. If it makes you feel better, you can hurl all the insults at me you want. But you have to let these things go. Otherwise the resentment will burn a hole through your gut. So what if Dev loved someone less or more? You can’t keep plunging into this pool of jealousy. The thing is, he’s gone now—it’s time to let the bitterness drain from your heart.”
She patted my hand. “Now listen to me. There’s someone I know—the brother of our neighbor next door. He has two children—he cremated their mother only a year ago. He’s a typical Madrasi, short and dark, but surely you shouldn’t let that make so much of a difference now. Come out and visit us—I think he’d be agreeable—but even if he refuses, what have you lost?”
My first reaction was to fling Roopa’s short and dark Madrasi back into her face—to tell her she ought to marry him herself, so that he could keep her company while Ravinder was away. But then I realized something momentous had transpired. Roopa’s slights over the years had just crossed a line, brimmed over a threshold beyond which I felt free to disown her as my sister. I no longer had to worry about what she thought or said or did. I would take her to the station and never see her again.
“It’s settled then,” Roopa said, as she filled her second suitcase with all the shopping she’d done—the perfume bottles from Crawford Market, the purses from Colaba, the salwar kameez suits, the georgette saris, the Kolhapuri footwear. “You’ll come and visit as soon as Ravinder is back. We’ll have a lunch, invite my neighbor over with her brother. It might be a good idea to buy something less dowdy than the outfits you go around in.”
Roopa’s train was at three-thirty, but there was no longer any reason to endure five more hours of this. “Come, Ashvin, it’s time to get dressed. We’re taking Roo auntie to the station earlier than I said.”
ALTHOUGH I TRIED to put Roopa’s visit out of my mind, it was difficult to dismiss everything she said. Was I letting my own needs get the better of my judgment? Was I being too overbearing, too suffocating with my love? Even if she had ascribed more to my affection than there was, what effect must the constant limelight of my attention have on you? Already you were always kissing and hugging (and tickling!) me. Was this more than other children your age?
I found myself staring at the beds while you were at school, and finally shifting them away from each other—not as far apart as Roopa had done, but so that a conspicuous gap opened between them. All afternoon, I agonized over reasons to explain the change—the beds would shake less this way when one of us turned, it was easier to change the sheets and the bedcovers. But although you must have noticed the difference, you simply seemed to shrug it off.
I decided to stop sitting in the balcony every day, waiting for you to return from school. It was too easy being lulled into a sense of hopelessness, to spend my time plowing through the disappointments of the past. I found a simpler remedy than Roopa’s suggestion to get remarried—I went back to work.
It had been over a decade, but the publishing company still had its office at Opera House, with Mr. Hansi still the proprietor. He was overjoyed to see me. “I must warn you, though, we’ve had some changes. We don’t do anything historical anymore—our target audience is a little different.” He beat about the bush some more before confessing sheepishly that they no longer published books at all. “What we’ve come to realize is that our strength, basically, lies in comics.”
Mr. Hansi assigned me Casper and Superman and Richie Rich—I translated them into pirated Hindi editions. The comics were crudely reproduced, by photographing the originals, whiting out the balloons, and manually typing in the translated words, before sending them on to the press. Occasionally I also performed more legal translations—tales from the Ramayana or Mahabharata, from Hindi comic books into English. To your delight, the company soon added Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to their list of pirated clients.
During my previous stint there, Dev had always worried about the loose impressions people might form about a woman in their workplace. Nobody paid attention to me back then, but now that I was a widow, every second look I received from my male coworkers seemed to be a leer. Several mornings, I would find a heart-shaped piece of paper stuck into my typewriter, sometimes with ‘I love you’ typed in red. Mysterious calls for me came in on Mr. Hansi’s number, with nobody at the end of the line when I picked up the receiver. Both Mr. Phadke and Mr. Malkani invited me to eat lunch with them outside—I finally said yes, provided they also brought their wives. Even Arun, the baby-faced print setter, offered shyly to blow on my tea one afternoon break, to cool it for me.
I suppose I should have expected such behavior, given how things had changed, even in my neighborhood, after Dev died. The shopkeepers downstairs lost little time in becoming markedly more familiar in their manner—the General Stores proprietor tried to woo me with free bars of soap twice. The bania at the ration shop winked at me one evening while I shopped for lentils—in the face of my fury, he called me his sister and claimed there was something caught in his eye. Dev’s long-lost musician friends showed up sporadically for months, to offer their condolenc
es and to see if I was sufficiently recovered to accompany them to tea.
The most blatant attention, though, came from within my building. Each time I ventured outside, somebody’s husband seemed on the prowl, waiting to accost me on the steps. Mr. Karmali and Mr. Hussain exchanged strong words one day as they vied with each other to carry down the radio I was taking for repair. Mr. Hamid almost broke his collarbone rushing down from the floor above to help hold open my door.
More invitations for tea accompanied these encounters, each one dropped so casually that it had to be rehearsed. My suitors invariably suggested one of the cheap Irani restaurants around to rendezvous, throwing in some convoluted reason for not inviting their spouse. Not that I would have agreed, but couldn’t they have made their overtures more imaginative? Lunch somewhere, perhaps at the newly opened Caravan Grill—or even the modest Cream Centre, for an ice cream sundae? Instead, the only unusual proposition I received was from Mr. Hamid, who offered to take me to Borivili for a viewing of his factory, where they manufactured prosthetic limbs.
In the contest for the most preposterous of my would-be paramours, Mr. Dugal emerged as the winner. I had always considered him a little wan before, someone whose personality made him fade obligingly into the background. All this changed the night he came knocking, ostensibly to borrow some sugar—“just a tea’s spoon.” Tea, however, was not the beverage of choice for the evening—his breath was so laden with alcohol, it seemed syrupy. I came out of the kitchen with the sugar bowl in hand, to find him in the living room, holding on to a chair for support. “Your husband was always such a good friend of mine,” he began, but was soon complimenting me on my teeth. “They’re so white and shiny—what toothpaste do you use?”
Before I could nudge him out, he plopped down to the floor. “My wife has grown too fat, she doesn’t pay the slightest attention to her appearance anymore. It’s good you’re still maintaining your looks after what happened, it’s the sensible thing to do. Look at me—even though I feel so young inside, I know I’m almost bald.” He leaned his scalp forward. “It’s the amoebic dysentery, you know.”
He started reeling off the remedies he had tried unsuccessfully—the ayurveda, the homeopathy, the colonics. “I was always sick, even as a child, all the bronchitis I used to get.” Interspersed through his ramblings were wistful comments about my figure, my face, my clothes. “That’s such a pretty nail polish,” he said, swiveling towards my feet, and I drew back as he tried to pet my toes.
I escaped by sending you to summon Pinky from her flat to come tell him he was needed at home. In the morning, Mrs. Dugal seemed unsurprised when I apprised her of her husband’s visit. “Oh, he just likes to come by and chat—don’t mind anything he says.”
“This wasn’t just chatting—he was drunk, and sitting on my floor.”
Mrs. Dugal laughed as if it were all a big misunderstanding. “No, no—he only has a tiny peg at night, so he can sleep. Don’t worry, it won’t happen anymore.” She couldn’t quite hide the embarrassment in her eyes.
The next evening Mr. Dugal was back, but this time I was more prepared. “Your wife told me she just bought a big bag of sugar for you this morning,” I said, and closed the door.
THE ONE PERSON, surprisingly, who didn’t cast his lot in with these crude attempts was Arya. He started writing to you soon after we came back from our 1972 Independence Day trip to Delhi. He wrote his letters in Hindi, because it was important to know the national language, he said. Since you hadn’t learnt to read in Hindi yet, I read them aloud to you when they came.
In the beginning, his letters were routine and dry. He updated us on Babuji’s condition and the construction of the new Nizamuddin station. He spent whole paragraphs enumerating everyone who sent their love from Delhi. At the end was a checklist of questions to fill up the page—what sports you were playing, how your studies were faring.
But he soon opened up, writing about things that he thought would interest you—a trip with Rahul and Tony to Connaught Place, the new children’s train inaugurated near Okhla station, the red-haired dog that came by every evening to eat leftover scraps. How these days he was learning a new subject, cooking, from Hema auntie, to give Mataji a break on some evenings. He told you about the role of Dashrath he had agreed to play for the reading of the Ramayana during the Dassera festival—he was having difficulty memorizing his lines, he confessed. His letters arrived from such far-flung states as Orissa and Tamil Nadu, where he traveled to set up new offices for the HRM. “Today I sat in the train all day with my Ramayana in my lap and watched this vast nation of ours go by. Sometimes I imagine I’m truly one of the characters in the epic, making the same journey as our Lord Ram did.” All the travel was exhausting, he wrote. He wished he could turn the clock back to conducting the recruits in their morning exercises as he used to long ago. “There’s nothing I miss more than the mud and sweat of the wrestling pits.”
For a while, he related stories about your father. “He was always such a happy baby, laughing more than he cried in the crib.” Even when he was a boy, their parents invited the neighbors to come hear Dev sing. “On some Sundays, my mother used an old sari to convert the balcony of our flat into a stage. Your father held his head under a stream of cold water—to awaken the music cells in his brain, he said. He emerged on the balcony with his long wet hair curled into a knot like a prince, and gave the signal for the curtain to be raised. A cluster of people gathered on the street, and soon there would be twenty or thirty or even fifty spectators watching the concert from two floors below.”
The lyricism that emerged in Arya’s letters surprised me. He described a field trip to Kashmir with his colleagues and spoke of flower-strewn lakes and valleys carpeted in green. He filled an entire page writing about a misty mountainside in Assam, where women appeared and faded “like angels” as they harvested tea. He started adorning his text with snippets of poetry. Sometimes he became reflective and wrote of the vagaries of life and perseverance in the face of tragedy. “People change all the time, but it’s up to those around to recognize this. Your uncle is no longer the same person he was ten years ago, or even five.”
These last philosophical musings, I guessed, were meant for me. They were written in a refined and flowery Delhi Hindi which even I had trouble deciphering. Living in Bombay for all these years, where people spoke a pidgin version, had stultified my vocabulary. I brought in a dictionary once I went back to the translation agency, to keep handy while reading his letters.
When it came time to reply, it was once again I who had to transcribe the response for you. Each word I formed, each page I filled, further wore down my resistance, made it feel less bizarre an idea to be corresponding with him. I addressed the letters to Yara uncle and signed them “Ashvin,” but it was impossible to ignore that it was my handwriting on the paper, my sentences running down the page.
Must Arya have become as used to my letters, as I did to his? The cream-colored prepaid envelopes with the embossed blue stamps—must he, too, have learnt to recognize them instantly when the mail came? Were there bundles of old letters saved for some reason, sitting in a box on his cupboard shelf as well?
I took you to Delhi during almost every vacation now, where Arya remained as proper and formal towards me as before. But the letters communicated a more intimate set of feelings. “Every person harbors an image of perfect beauty within,” he wrote once. “It’s only when that idea is captured that the person can become truly fulfilled.”
IN ONE LETTER, ARYA pointed out a curiosity he discovered in the English spelling of your name. One could rearrange the first five letters in “Ashvin” to form “Shiva.” But also, replacing the first letter A with a U, your name became an anagram of “Vishnu” instead. He wove elaborate tales about Shiva and Vishnu competing to claim you as theirs. Each time you were lost in your own world, Shiva would point out that you were meditating, to be more like him. But then Vishnu would counter with occasions when you were energetic, even mi
schievous, in emulation of his own incarnations.
Your favorite story had the two gods descending to Tardeo to have a fight over you. Shiva grew even taller than the building we lived in, so that with one foot planted in the street in front, the other foot reached all the way to Bombay Central. He struck his trident into a cloud to charge it with lightning, so that he could envelop objects in giant fireballs just by pointing the prongs at them. Not to be outdone, Vishnu appeared as an enormous eagle, whose wings stretched from Colaba to Mahim. He attacked Shiva with his talons, tried to rip him apart with his beak—in the ensuing fight, half of Tardeo was destroyed. In the end, neither god won—each realized he was fighting himself, they were simply two faces of the same being. “That’s why Ashvin should be so proud that be brings Shiva and Vishnu together in his name,” Arya wrote. After that, you insisted on “Ashvin” whenever Paji tried calling you “Ace.”
chapter thirty
I FOUND MY JOB AT MR. HANSI’S EASY BUT NOT VERY COMPELLING— translating cartoon blurbs could provide only so much variety. Coupled with that, my male coworkers continued harassing me—I felt myself worn down brushing off their advances. As it turned out, I didn’t have to work there very long. Four months after I started, the Indian Express published an exposé on the thriving copyright infringement industry in India. In response, the police raided the sidewalk hawkers selling pirated Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins novels near Flora Fountain. They also appeared at lunchtime one afternoon, to arrest Mr. Hansi and close down our office.
