An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

Another thing he had trouble remembering was what exactly he used to do: it was a cruel irony that Alok Debnath had mapped half the subcontinent in his long career as principal cartographer for the Indian Geographical Society but that oftentimes could not name his own street. All Alok Debnath could really recall was the feel of Rekha’s body against his own. The chocolaty edges of her round buttocks pressing into his crotch, her skin sometimes smooth, sometimes rough from goose bumps he had caused, the cold had caused, or—as she was quick to point out—because she was thinking about her pimp, the only man she truly loved. “Your pimp,” Alok Debnath asked her, “how could you love him?” She’d scoff, and say, “Who would you rather I loved? A limp drooling old fart like you?” It’s all right, it’s all right, he thought, gently stroking her hair. Her words didn’t matter so long as her body lay next to his. But then she’d sit up and say, “Your time’s up.”

  “But I paid for the entire day.”

  “No you didn’t, you paid for two hours.” Was she lying? She could easily do so and he would never be the wiser. “But,” he’d begin … it was then that it all came back to him. In a way. His mind with its dark and empty recesses, the lost hours, the lost days, the confusion of starting for someplace and ending up in another, the horrible, horrible decay of age, entire years lost like a broken shoelace, and worst of all was when he looked in the mirror and the face looking back at him was unrecognizable, misshapen, and as battered as a bridge on the verge of collapse.

  * * *

  He was in Calcutta. It was a warm spring afternoon in 1920. Alok Debnath had been married for two months. His new bride, Sarojini, was a girl from a middle-class family in Jamshedpur, sweet and loving and awkward (since they had only met on the day of their wedding), with delicate dark gray eyes and lips as moist and plump as a bumblebee. He couldn’t stop kissing them, and when he was away from her, which was most of the day, he would trace their shape onto the maps strewn across his desk, trying to find the perfect constellation of cities that matched her lips. Sometimes, though he tried not to, he thought of those lips sucking on his sixth finger. It was nothing he’d ever ask her to do, it was his deepest secret, but it made him almost cry to think of the simplicity of the gesture, the great intimacy of such a small and awful thing.

  At the time Sarojini worked as a typist in a municipal government office. They had decided she should work until he was promoted to senior cartographer, which he expected within a year or two. She was fine with the arrangement, though she was new to the city and so every day at 6:00 p.m. Alok left his office at 45 Ballygunge Circular Road, walked to her office near Lansdowne Market, and then they walked together to their flat by Elgin Park. It was, for both of them, their favorite part of the day. But on this warm spring afternoon Alok was held up in a meeting, and by the time he got to Lansdowne Market it was 7:30 p.m. and Sarojini was gone. He went back to their flat, assuming she had come straight home, but she wasn’t there either. He waited a few minutes then set out again, imagining the worst, not knowing where to begin, but determined to find her. Under his breath he said, “I’m coming, Sarojini, I’m coming for you.”

  * * *

  He wandered out of Taktakpur, walking aimlessly but drifting toward the ghats. He’d only been living with his daughter for six months, since his diagnosis, and had never been to the shores of the Ganga. But he knew there were slums along the ghats and that Rekha lived in one of them. That’s all she ever talked about: living with her beloved pimp on the western edge of the Dharahara Mosque, near Pancha Ganga Ghat, but Alok Debnath didn’t get much past the Arabic School before he felt hungry. He walked into a restaurant, the first he saw, and ordered vegetable biryani, chicken 65, and a mango lassi. He ate with great relish, the sour sweet creaminess of the lassi a frigate to the spicy sting of the chicken. When he had finished his meal and the waiter brought the bill, Alok Debnath checked his pockets. They were empty. He checked them again and when he found they were still empty, he sat, perplexed. “Somebody stole my wallet,” he said.

  The waiter laughed. “Is that right, old man,” he said. “And I bet somebody stole your mama’s chutia too.” He stopped laughing. “Pay up.”

  Alok Debnath looked at him helplessly. Where could his wallet have gone? The waiter reached down and grabbed him by the lapel, shaking him. A diner at the next table intervened. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “These old people,” the waiter said. “They think they can pull this little act and get out of paying.”

  The diner asked how much the bill was for and paid it along with his own. By now Alok Debnath was shaking. The wrinkles under his eyes were wet with tears. The diner helped him up and when they got outside he asked where he was going. Alok Debnath looked at his hands and honestly could not remember. He concentrated hard for a moment. “Ah,” he said, “I’m going to look for my wife.”

  “Where is she?” the diner asked.

  He looked again at his hands. He didn’t recognize them; they were the hands of an old man. “She works near here, near Lansdowne Market,” he said.

  The diner looked at him strangely. “Come to my house,” he said. “You can have a nice cup of chai and then we’ll figure things out.”

  “No, no, no,” Alok Debnath said. “I have to find her, there’s no time to waste.” He was nearly at the corner when the diner ran after him, put a rupee coin in his hand, and said, “Go with God.” Alok Debnath looked at the coin and dropped it into his pocket. A few steps later, when a thin beggar girl approached him, her eyes as bright and beautiful as lamps, he dug in his pockets, pulled out the coin, and gave it to her.

  * * *

  Alok retraced his steps back to his office. His wife was nowhere along their usual route. He looked in every shop, around every stall, ran up and down stairs; he even looked under the road crossings. The perspiration gathered under his arms, his heart raced. He told himself, Calm down, you won’t find her unless you calm down. Then he said to himself, She’s been in Calcutta for two months, she certainly knows the way home. With this thought he seated himself beneath the Corinthian columns of his office building. The russet-colored walls, under the twilit sky, shone like stripped bark. He could imagine sap running down their lengths. The palm trees swayed and bent with the wind. And even the sky seemed strangely blushing or bruised, as though just then, in that instant, it had learned what it was to have a face only to have it promptly punched. He thought of Sarojini with sudden despair. She was lost. He could feel it. He could feel her wandering alone in this vast city as well as he could feel his own breath. He leapt up. He raced to Maddox Square. He didn’t know what he expected to find but there was nothing, only an open field. There was a boy sitting next to a monkey. A few men loitered on the edge of the field, smoking. He heard the cries of boys playing cricket in an adjoining field. He turned back to the boy and the monkey. The boy was wearing a cotton shirt and a lungi, and there was a pan in front of him and around this pan danced the monkey. She (Alok presumed) was wearing a little frock, just the kind of frock a little girl would wear. In fact, it probably was a child’s frock. It had been pink but was now dirty and stained and a dull gray. The boy looked up at him, the monkey stopped dancing, and she too looked up at him. The monkey’s eyes were curious but the boy’s were blank. “Do you want to see a trick?” the boy asked.

  “What can she do?”

  “She can tell your future,” he said.

  Alok laughed. “My future then,” he said.

  “First the money,” the boy said.

  Alok dug into his pocket and all he had was an eight-anna coin, the rest were rupee notes. The coin clanged when he put it into the pan. The monkey, at the sound of the clang, sprang into action as if she were a windup toy. She danced a little jig, ran to and fro, then she took the coin Alok had placed in the pan and put it in her mouth. “She’s swallowed it.” He chuckled.

  “No she hasn’t,” the boy said, “she’s telling your future.”

  “Well, what is it?”


  “You’ll soon see death,” the boy said.

  Alok’s heart buckled. Sarojini! “You lie,” he screamed back as he ran. “You and that damned monkey.” The boy looked away but the monkey stood still, watching him, and seemed to smile.

  * * *

  Benares was dark by the time Alok Debnath found himself in Nadesar Park. He continued wandering down Raja Bazar Road and then onto the grounds of the Sanskrit University. He sat on the edge of the fountain with the stone swans and began to cry. He felt as lost and as afraid as a child. He thought of his mother. When he was six years old she had taken him shopping with her one evening. She had bought vegetables for dinner, eggplant and potatoes and ginger, a few sprigs of cilantro, and when he had tugged at her sari and asked her to buy him a pomegranate, she’d said, “No, not today, I don’t have time to take out all those seeds for you.” They had squabbled for a moment and finally she had given in and said, “If I buy it for you you’ll have to take them out yourself.”

  He’d stood defiant—all six years of him—and said, “I will.”

  “You will,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise,” he said.

  She had bought the pomegranate and as they walked home Alok had let go of her hand to watch a snake charmer on the side of the road, and as the snake had emerged from the basket a landaulet turned the corner and one of the horses reared in fright and the other horse swung to the side and caught his mother’s rib, and by the time Alok understood enough to run to her she was dead. A crowd had gathered. Two British women who had gotten down from the landaulet were shielding their faces, sobbing, and repeating, Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. All the other people around his mother were Indians, peasants, and they looked on silently. Alok turned from them to his mother and saw that the pomegranate had rolled and been crushed, and was lying at the tip of his mother’s outstretched hand. It looked to him like she was taking out the seeds for him, after all. He walked to the middle of the circle of onlookers, bent down, picked up the pomegranate and began to eat it. A man standing beside him slapped him. “How dare you,” he said. What could Alok say? Not even he understood. It took him many years, more than twenty, to finally figure out the reasons he had picked up the pomegranate and eaten it in the moment of his mother’s death: he had wanted to make her proud, to show her that he could, that he knew, he sensed, even at the age of six, that he would never again be a child, and that nothing, not even her death, could keep him from continuing, from living—which is what she would have wanted—and that, most important of all, he, Alok Debnath, her son, would always, always keep his promises.

  Alok Debnath looked up from his tears but the swans stared back without a sound. “What’s wrong with you?” he shouted at them. And then he said to himself, Why couldn’t I be made of stone. A gust of cold wind whipped past him and he tugged his coat closer. He turned around. Behind him was the main university building—red and Gothic and leaping into the dark night like a tongue of flame. Its portico was protected from the wind and he crawled into one of its far corners and drifted to sleep. He dreamed that somebody was tugging at his sixth finger and he mumbled, “Bunny, stop it.”

  * * *

  He ran and ran and ran. All of Calcutta, all of India, every little boy and every little monkey, filled him with rage. They would not take another woman from him. He wouldn’t let them; he forbade it. He returned to Lansdowne Road, looked wildly about him, and decided Sarojini had gone to the Victoria Memorial. They liked to go to the building site on Sundays to see what had been added. It was like watching the Taj Mahal being built. Then they’d sit on the banks of the Hooghly and eat roasted peanuts. All this whizzed through his mind—the peanuts, the river, the Taj Mahal—as he raced up Lansdowne, across Elgin Road, and then north on Chowringhee Road in a hired rickshaw.

  It was dark by the time the rickshaw wallah pulled onto Queen’s Way. The Victoria Memorial glowed like a white hot candle against the warm night sky. He raced to their usual spot: a sort of pier that was built along the reflecting pool. The wooden boards clattered and shook as he raced up and down the viewing area, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there. Alok crumpled onto the pier, the water in the reflecting pool lapping gently at his hunched body. He cried out, “Sarojini!” The few people taking their after-dinner walks looked at him, and then moved away. One or two children hid behind their father’s legs. The memorial seemed to flare with laughter, with its white and awful and treacherous teeth, as if it had conspired to hide her. Alok closed his eyes. The only thing left to do was to go home. But he couldn’t face the empty rooms, not yet. He glanced at the reflecting pool and saw in the dim light that there was something at the bottom of the pool. A dark form. It couldn’t be! He jumped in, stretched out his arms and tugged at the water. When he reached it he plunged deeper into the pool and lifted it tenderly with both hands, but it was only seaweed. Floating without a care on an enclosed body of water that was not at all connected to the sea. So how did it get there? Alok dropped it back into the water with a splash and let out a cry. It was a question that he too asked himself. So how did I get here? The answer, if there was one, seeming dizzyingly simple or dizzyingly complex. He turned back toward the pier and under the thin light of the stars the white marble of the moon and the white marble of the Victoria Memorial were the same, as if one had been chiseled from the other, and they bathed his dripping body in a pearl-like luminescence.

  “Hey, hey, get out of there.” It was a chowkidar, standing on the edge of the pier.

  Alok stopped.

  “Hey, you, I’m talking to you. What are you? Deaf?”

  He recognized him. He had a paunch, and a handlebar mustache. He patrolled on Sundays.

  “I know you! Have you seen my wife?” Alok yelled back.

  “Your what? I said get out of there.”

  “My wife.” Alok took long strides toward the pier. When he reached it he stayed in the pool and looked up at the chowkidar. “My wife,” he said. “We come here sometimes on Sundays.”

  “Get out of there, I say.” He looked up. “Pagal! You’d think it was a full moon tonight.”

  They were silent.

  “How did that seaweed get there?” Alok asked.

  “Seaweed? What seaweed?”

  Alok pointed to it. The chowkidar arched his neck to have a look. “That’s seaweed?” he asked. “Looks like a crocodile.”

  “It’s not. It’s seaweed.”

  The chowkidar shrugged. “Who cares,” he said. “Get out of there before I have to come in after you.”

  * * *

  Alok Debnath left the grounds of the Sanskrit University. He guessed it was between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. It was a moonless night. Most of the streetlights were burned out. Why are the streetlights burned out? he asked himself. What is the year, what is my name? “My name is Alok Debnath,” he said into the dark. “I am eighty-four years old, the year is 1976, the year of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, and that’s why the streetlights are burned out.” This series of thoughts, instead of making him less anxious, made him more anxious: What am I doing out here in the middle of the night? He could practically taste the river now. Such a mighty river, the mightiest. He’d mapped it so many times—it and its tributaries—that he could lay down against its twists and turns as if it were the body of a woman. That’s it, that’s why I’m out here: I’m looking for Rekha! His sense of purpose was renewed and he increased his pace, roughly following St. Kabir Road. By the time he got to the Durga Mandir he was exhausted. He sat on the steps of the orange and ochre temple and wondered which direction Pancha Ganga Ghat was in. He couldn’t possibly know. He decided instead to head straight for the river and to then look for the ghat.

  As he neared the river the alleyways narrowed. They cut into one another, some ended abruptly; the smell of incense was thick in the passages, most no wider than he was. Holes were cut into several of the walls along the corridors, and when he ducked into one he saw that
it was a temple, small and dank and flooded with red and golden light. A young Brahmin was in the interior, chanting prayers, petals drifting down the deity’s jewels and silks and landing at the priest’s feet. Alok Debnath folded his hands and said a prayer. “May I find her,” he whispered, and edged out of the tiny opening. He stepped back into the passageway. He passed a niche cut into a stone wall with a seated Ganesh, his belly rubbed bright red with kumkum, and then another temple, with an old sadhu sleeping under its eaves, and then the horizon seemed to lighten but no, it was the river. Alok Debnath looked out at the Ganga. There were a few small white swells on its surface but mostly it was gray, with a sandbar peeping above the water in the distance. He heard the water lapping against the stone steps. People were huddled and sleeping, and not wanting to wake them, he stepped around them gingerly. He noticed with dismay that all the slums—where Rekha most likely had lived—had been razed. Gandhi had taken care of them as well as the streetlights, but it no longer mattered, he felt lucid. He felt more lucid than he had in years.

  It was as he was standing on the Brahma Ghat that Alok Debnath was approached by a young man. He could tell he was young by his voice. He could also tell he was thin. It was still too dark to see him clearly, though when the man struck a match to light his beedi, Alok Debnath saw his betel nut–stained lips, the dark hollows of his eyes, and the flash of greed in them. Remember them, he told himself, remember his greedy eyes.

  “Where are you off to, grandpa? A little early for bathing, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not bathing,” Alok Debnath said.

  “Oh?”

  What was it he was supposed to remember? He scratched his head. “I’m looking for someone,” he finally said.

  The young man slapped his shoulder. He took a drag of his beedi. “I’m your man,” he said. “I know everyone from here to Sarnath. Who is it?”

  “Her name is Rekha.”

  “Rekha! I know hundreds of Rekhas. Give me a little more, grandpa.”