Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

by Tanuj Solanki

  Good People

  For Ankush and Taruna, married life had begun to settle into a pleasant routine in its very first month. On weekdays, Ankush left for office at 9 a.m. and Taruna began her work from home after that. When Ankush returned at around seven in the evening, they joined forces to cook dinner – something they were getting better at with each passing day. Of the four weekends that they had lived together in Mumbai, they had ventured out of the flat only once. That was when their mutual friend Amit had come to visit them on a Saturday and they had all gone out to have lunch at a nearby restaurant. Amit had an interest in photography, and on that get together, he had gifted them four large framed photographs from their wedding. On the Sunday that followed, Ankush and Taruna had tried to find enough wall space for the photos in their 600-square-foot flat. They were able to affix only the smallest one in the living room. The remaining three had to be packed away. ‘What an effort,’ Ankush had said, and Taruna had laughed in the knowledge that it was the most exertion that they had had on a weekend.

  The other weekends had been times of blissful inactivity. They stayed at home reading – Taruna her classic fiction, Ankush his modern thrillers. There were no friends or relatives to oblige – despite having worked and lived in Mumbai for six years by then, Ankush hadn’t fostered any such relationships. This suited Taruna, for she wasn’t the gregarious type. Friends like Amit sought her out, rather than the other way around. Having come from Delhi, she saw Mumbai as a city where she had to meet new people and make new connections, and somehow she preferred solitude over relentless socializing.

  Working from home was new for Taruna, and she had mixed feelings about it. She liked how it was apparently free of hassle – no daily commute, no forced chit-chat in the office. But it also meant no easy collaboration, and sometimes she missed looking to her left or right to get ideas from other people. She also found herself with a lot of free time – something that could be pleasant or deflating, depending on her mood. She had always found herself busy in Gurgaon.

  In her free time, Taruna sometimes found herself thinking of their honeymoon. Those four days at a resort in Lonavala were coalesced as a single experience for her, and often ran in her mind in a single piece. The times she and Ankush made love, when they whispered sweet nothings into the other’s ear, or goofed around in the lawns, and even the sleeping hours – it all came to her together. But, apart from this general montage, there was a short conversation with Ankush that sometimes came back more distinctly than the rest – as if it stuck out from the overall smoothness of the memory.

  The conversation had taken place on the final day of the honeymoon. They had returned from a short afternoon hike in the hills close to the resort and were showering together in the bathroom. Their nudity was making them giggle. Marriage had added a proprietorial element to how they viewed each other’s body, and the change was both comic and erotic. Ankush started rubbing soap on Taruna’s back, and after a few seconds Taruna realized that he had grown silent. She thought that he was getting aroused. Several times during the past four days, hilarity had led to lovemaking.

  But it wasn’t so this time. ‘I’ve always wanted to ask a question …’ Ankush said. There was a note of hesitation in his voice. And he had stopped rubbing the soap on her. Taruna took the loofah from his hand and asked, ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve wanted to ask you. How exactly did he … how exactly did that man abuse you?’

  Taruna turned to look into Ankush’s eyes. She couldn’t see through the water falling at speed; so she turned off the shower. ‘What made you think of it?’ she asked.

  ‘Umm … nothing. Just that I’ve always wanted to ask you this question. I know it’s not a nice thing to be curious about. Horrible thing, in fact. And if there is a better time to talk about this, you can tell me.’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ Taruna replied, ‘you’re my husband now.’ She felt good that they could talk about a difficult matter.

  ‘So, what did he do?’

  ‘Fingers,’ Taruna answered. Then, with her voice taking a detached, clinical tone, she added, ‘He put his fingers inside my vagina.’

  Ankush nodded imperceptibly and then turned on the shower. After a few seconds, he asked, ‘Once?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did he do it once, or repeatedly?’

  ‘Many times. It happened over two months. It was the summer vacation. I was eight.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘That you were eight. You’ve told me that before.’

  Ankush didn’t ask anything after that. They rinsed the soap off their bodies, then dried themselves and stepped out of the bathroom. A heavy silence thrummed between them. They lay down on the four-poster bed, clean and smelling of soap, the bed’s white sheets and the white curtains around them somehow deepening the quiet. Staring up to the ceiling and its faux-antique ceiling fan, Taruna wondered what had made Ankush raise the question. She heard him whisper something. She looked and saw tears on his cheeks. And she heard what it was that he was whispering.

  Bastard.

  Ankush was crying for her. He was cursing her abuser. To see that was everything for Taruna: no one had ever been so moved by her pain. She kissed Ankush’s tears, and then his lips. He hugged her tightly and they stayed that way for several minutes.

  It was in that embrace that the specificity of that episode dissolved in the general memory of the honeymoon. Now whenever it came back to Taruna, she couldn’t help but smile to herself. There was that frisson of validation for having married a good man, a man who could be pained by her pain. It was the most novel among all her feelings in the past few days.

  Although she had spared Ankush the details, Taruna had revealed the outlines of her big trauma to him on their second date itself. Not being ashamed of what had marred her life at the age of eight – rather, since the age of eight – was something she had coached herself into by the time she met him. She was scarred by abuse and was self-aware enough to know the depth of that scar. She also knew that, unlike her, not every victim was scarred, that there were some who just forgot about it, or even some who could laugh about it. But Taruna wasn’t the forgetful or forgiving type. She could not forget those knobby fingers, those cracked fingernails, the dirt under those fingernails. She could not forget the hair just below the knuckles. It had happened during the boredom of summer vacations, during hot afternoons when others in the family, including her parents, dozed.

  Over the years, she had struggled against random associations that brought back the dark memories. She struggled against summer afternoons. She struggled against dirty fingers. She struggled against men in kurta pyjamas who kept their top button open. She struggled against the sight of tobacco drool. These things brought back images, and the pain reached across all those years to sting her present – often assimilating new objects and images for its future invocation, bent on broadening its net of associations.

  Marriage, Taruna hoped, would end the struggle. She loved Ankush. With him, it seemed that a resolute happiness could finally fill the big fault line in her past. There had been joys in her life, even when her struggle had been at its peak. She wanted to acknowledge those joys as joys. When she thought of the honeymoon in general, or of that instance of Ankush’s empathy for her, she was convinced that she would heal, that not only was there a good future waiting for her, but her past was destined to see an improved assessment from her as well.

  Honeymooning where they had, in a resort not far from the weekend outpost of Lonavala, was not the initial plan. For a good period after the engagement ceremony, they had discussed the prospect of going to Iceland. Their phone conversations had been all about fjords and geysers and aurora borealis then. Ankush had even started incorporating some Icelandic murder mysteries in his reading list. The idea of visiting a cold country in January didn’t daunt them. They had compared Reykjavik hotels online and, despite Taruna’s advice to the contrary (she though
t all research could be done through free online portals), Ankush had even bought the Lonely Planet for Iceland.

  But it was clear even then that big money was going to be spent in the wedding. Taruna’s father had remained adamant about hosting a no-holds-barred show for his army of relatives, even if that meant gravely depleting his savings. He was stubborn when it came to showcasing an image – and in that Taruna found him to be the stereotypical Delhiite. On Ankush’s side, his father had died five years ago and his mother, who lived alone in a house in Muzaffarnagar, kept an open hand. For Taruna, there hadn’t been much clarity regarding Ankush’s finances before the marriage. She had feared that their mutual enthusiasm about Iceland would gloss over the financial burden that the trip would entail, and that the pinch to their pockets would be felt later. She had known she couldn’t fund the two-week Icelandic honeymoon on her own, and felt it was tactless to plainly ask Ankush about his financial situation. They had never talked about money till then. Also, with the slow unravelling of the financial martyrdom that her father took pathetic pride in, which included splurging on all showy things in the name of wedding shopping, Taruna had begun to equate expensive with unnecessary. This had ultimately included Iceland.

  The eventual four-day Indian honeymoon had been paid for by her. Manzia Resort was high-end, located a few kilometres outside the town of Lonavala, next to a water body called Pawana Lake. Their room – cottage, rather – opened to picturesque views on two sides. The furniture, the upholstery, the bathroom fittings, the bed and the curtains – everything was tastefully done. Each morning, they saw a late-January moon set behind the mountains in the west, and as the sun rose from the east, the lake surface slowly changed its colours – from grey to turquoise to blue. ‘Postcard level,’ Ankush was compelled to say more than once. They never once thought of Iceland in the resort or after that.

  Ankush, too, fondly remembered the honeymoon, although his memory focused more on the sexual element. And since the bodily intimacy wasn’t just restricted to the honeymoon, and had understandably seeped into their lives in Mumbai, Ankush’s memory of the honeymoon was that of a highlight period in the already glittery early days of marriage. The conversation about Taruna’s abuse had been filed away by him; he would think of it only if asked to (which was improbable). At work, he often found himself talking of a healthy turn in his lifestyle, to which his older colleagues responded to with patronizing comments. He didn’t mind that. He, in fact, had begun to seek the company of colleagues who were married, and had begun to think of the unmarried people in his company as juniors. Already there were signs of weight gain, and on afternoons when he had little to do, he sat vacantly in his cubicle and wondered if he could even have that thing that most serious men possessed – a little bit of a belly. He had mentioned this to Taruna once, and she had jokingly reprimanded him for the decadent desire. But it was true that Ankush could afford some kilos, and he felt good that all his typical nutrition issues were a thing of the past.

  Ankush loved Taruna. His own love had at one point surprised him, for, unlike with his earlier girlfriends, he had sustained a long-distance relationship with her – a Mumbai–Delhi thing – for almost two years. Their first meeting had been a chance incident, the kind of tiny miracle that all love stories begin with. It was at the birthday party of his social-sector friend, Amit. Ankush didn’t even know Amit well, but for some reason he had chosen to go to the party that evening. Inside Amit’s flat, there were a dozen or so people, and a heated argument was going on. A woman whom Ankush had never seen in this circle before was at the centre of it. That woman was Taruna, and she was arguing with Amit; their disagreement was about whether the issue of child sexual abuse could be thought of as lying within the ambit of the larger movement of feminism. Taruna thought it was natural to do so, while Amit’s point was to let feminism be unencumbered with a peripheral issue. Ankush could see that Amit’s smug manner was having an effect on Taruna. So it was a gesture of sympathy when he chose to side with her when asked for his opinion, even though he was unsure of his own position with regard to it all.

  At any rate, the altercation was soon drowned out by other immediacies. There was good liquor available. When they eventually got talking one to one, Ankush discovered that Taruna was in Mumbai only for a short, work-related trip. ‘That’s disappointing,’ he blurted out. Taruna smiled at that. She worked in a non-profit organization in Gurgaon, in ‘the space of’ (as she called it) sexuality education in schools. He introduced himself as a ‘middle-manager in a fin-serv company, nasty bosses, slackening reportees – the shebang’. They exchanged phone numbers in the most innocuous fashion possible, almost mid-conversation. Then Taruna talked about feminism again, how the movement could encompass the fight for the rights of the male child as well. Ankush nodded in agreement, noting the streaks of hazel in her dark eyes.

  That first meeting laid the ground for everything that followed. They chatted over WhatsApp for a whole week, not taking long in confessing their attraction for each other. The flirting came close to sexting, and a couple of weeks later, Ankush found himself taking a flight to go to Taruna’s place in Gurgaon. At that time, she was living in a shared apartment in an area called Sushant Lok. Soon, regular arrangements began to be made to spend weekends together. Ankush travelled to the Delhi branch of his company at every pretence; Taruna increased the frequency and duration of her engagements in Mumbai. Within three months of this to and fro, love became a reality. And a year after that, the question of marriage was raised. That question, too, quickly transformed from being an emotional hillock to being a logistical problem – the incorporation of hundreds of people in a series of ceremonies, with as few residual grudges as possible.

  They had first met in December, and their engagement took place in the second October after that. By then, they had arrived at the conclusion that it would be relatively easier for Taruna to shift cities after marriage. It was an agreement that Ankush had had to work hard for. Initially, Taruna hadn’t liked the idea. She was beginning to make a name for herself in NCR and wasn’t sure about starting from scratch in Mumbai. Also, ‘following the husband’ didn’t sit well with her. Ankush convinced her that it had nothing to do with ‘that thing called patriarchy’. Her shifting to Mumbai was the most logical thing to do, he told Taruna. He also promised that they would shift to Delhi after a year or so, once he had gained a promotion and could hope for better opportunities in the city. The eventual shift to Delhi would also make sense for him, he assured her, as his mother lived in Muzaffarnagar, a town only three hours away from Delhi.

  Taruna’s firm was fine with her working from home. Her salary would, of course, be reduced to sixty per cent of the earlier amount. Once the decision to move to Mumbai was taken, it didn’t make sense for her to pay the rent for the Sushant Lok apartment any longer. She shifted to her parents’ house in Dwarka till the wedding. But this also meant that spending weekends with Ankush became impossible.

  They met, in fact, only once between the engagement and the wedding. It was in late-November, when Ankush was able to craft an office trip to Delhi. The meeting took place in a Japanese restaurant in Connaught Place, where they talked about Taruna’s struggles with ensuring that her abuser was not allowed in the wedding. ‘Someone came home to talk about it; asked me to let it be,’ she told Ankush.

  ‘Who is this someone?’ Ankush asked.

  ‘A close relative. Shit, I don’t want to tell you who.’

  Ankush could guess why Taruna didn’t want to tell him the name of that person. ‘So, what exactly does that someone want?’ he asked her.

  ‘To let him come to the wedding,’ answered Taruna.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It would be awkward … his absence. Everyone would ask about him.’

  ‘And what’s your stand?’