‘Yes.’
‘He loved you very much.’
‘Yes, Mummy.’
‘He was never very open to us. That was his nature. It was tough to know what was on his mind. But last week, he was quite unhappy.’
‘Why? He missed Dadaji?’
‘No … not only that.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘Some things. To me. To your bua. It all seems so strange now.’
‘What?’
‘That our children don’t want to know us.’
‘Is that what he said?’
‘Yes. I think he wished that you had been here after your grandfather passed away. I told him that he should talk to you more often.’
‘He did call me yesterday’ Gunjan said. ‘He wished me a Happy New Year.’
The next day, relatives from farther away visited the house. Her mother wasn’t crying all the time and her maamis were serving tea to anyone who didn’t refuse it altogether. The men were out ensuring supplies for the ceremony on the fourth; they needed to follow up with shocked shopkeepers with whom her father had already placed orders. Bade Maama’s car was used for any trip to the city. Just before lunch, when the men were out, Gunjan took the Jetta to the market to buy substitutes for all that she had left behind in the suitcase in Delhi. Hers was the biggest car in the tiny market, a cause for jams. She bought some plain T-shirts, track pants, slacks, undergarments, a pair of slippers, and some sanitary pads. Her reasoning was that it would be fine to just hide the T-shirts under a jacket or under one of her mother’s cardigans. As she was driving back from the crowded Shiv Chowk, a scooter bumped into the Jetta. She rolled down the window and yelled at the scooterist, but he just grinned back at her, mightily amused.
Once outside the house, she examined the resulting scratch on the car – it ran the entire length of the right-side rear door. She shook her head and walked inside. Apart from the family members, there were three or four visitors in the living room; she nodded to everyone and walked past.
In the innermost room, she found Chhoti Maami hunched over a steaming cup of tea. Gunjan gestured to her to keep quiet and dialled her boss in the ad agency to inform him that she would not be coming to work any time soon. This was difficult, because she had used her grandfather’s death as an excuse to skip work for the whole of the previous week. When the boss asked for the reason now, she had to tell the truth about her father’s death. He sounded unconvinced, but did not commit the indecency of displaying his incredulity on the phone. ‘Okay, take care’ is what he cut the call with.
‘You didn’t go to work the previous week?’ Maami asked Gunjan once the call was over. She was smiling. ‘Hope you had fun.’
Gunjan smiled back. Maami was in her mid-thirties; an attractive woman. Of a fit age to marry Mahesh – the stray thought entered Gunjan’s mind. Maami taught biology in a secondary school in Noida, where Chhote Maama ran a pharma distribution company.
‘Well, you couldn’t have known,’ Maami said before walking out of the room.
Gunjan then thought of WhatsApping Mahesh about the scratch on his car. She typed the message but didn’t send it. She knew it wouldn’t bother him one bit; and for a moment she felt angry that it was so – that Mahesh’s money allowed him a calmness that could even be misconstrued as having spiritual origins. It was the very thing that had attracted her to him, she reminded herself.
On the morning of the fourth, Gunjan’s mother and bua decided that it would be improper of her to wear T-shirt and track pants on the terahvi. They insisted that she try one of Chhoti Maami’s saris. Given that Chhoti Maami and Gunjan were nearly the same size, the blouse fit satisfactorily. When Gunjan tried on the whole outfit, it was unanimously decided that she would be wearing it for the day.
The arrangements had all been made by her father. There was a large, open lawn in front of the farm director’s bungalow. Her father had taken permission to set up a tent in the lawn, to seat guests there – all facing a picture of his own father. There would be a buffet lunch after the formal mourning, prepared by the halwai troupe that he had fixed. But now, his own framed picture accompanied his father’s photograph, a sight that made people sigh and shake their heads uneasily.
Gunjan noticed how her grandfather’s picture was in colour, and had clearly been photoshopped to improve his appearance. This was her father’s attention to detail. But his own picture was a recent one, from one of his field trips, and in black-and-white print. The picture had been arranged in the morning, she knew, when it hit Jagvir Chacha that nobody had thought of it. He then went to a cyber cafe with a flash drive, but unfortunately the guy only had a black-and-white printer. If there was any positive from the photo, it was that it presented her father’s death as some sort of afterthought, or rather as the simple shock that it veritably was. Nevertheless, Gunjan could not escape feeling responsible for the quality of the photo. She should have cared for such details, for what else was she doing anyway.
The apparent cosmic cruelty in the fact that her father’s arrangements now provided for his own mourning, that his own portrait accompanied his father’s in his public invitation for sadness, was commented on by several people during the day. Each time Gunjan heard this sentiment reflected even broadly, she felt irritated, the way one would be while reading a cliché in a magazine article. There was nothing more notable than sheer absurdity in her father passing away a few days after her grandfather. Each attempt to grant it a significance larger than just that was irrational, according to her. It was as if people could not accept the reality of these two deaths unless they could explain them as a single, tragic story, driven by an internal logic whose complex justness had to be accepted.
The day turned out to be rather hectic. Almost everyone who came to the terahvis in the tent also paid a visit to the house, which was only a hundred or so metres away. The kitchen garden was thoroughly trampled without any protest from Gunjan, though she wondered what would remain of the last of her father’s additions to the world. Inside the house, any woman meeting her mother would invariably cry, and this astounded Gunjan each time it happened. How were these women so quick with tears? She herself hadn’t cried even once. Even to make a forlorn face, she could summon only a general sadness implicit in life and nothing related to her father in specific.
She was, not surprisingly, the centre of attention among the women. She overheard many of them talking about her, about how good she looked (sari!), how she was in her late twenties and didn’t have much time left, how her mother now surely needed help in finding the best match for her, and so on. Some of the women walked up to her and hugged her, often saying something that amounted to: you have to take care of your mother now. One of them asked her to pull the sari pallu over her head.
Outside the house, her uncles made her meet several men along the day, men their age or thereabouts. Many of these uncles recited a memory of her father’s. A couple of them had made short speeches under the tent, where a mike-and-speaker system had been set up.
Then there were the kids. They ran to and from the sequestered narrow road connecting the house to the lawn, squealing with excitement about the number of games they could concoct in the open space. A game of rudimentary kabaddi was set up in one half of the kitchen garden. Every once a while, a father would try to hush a kid into understanding the gravity of the situation. The kid in question would nod understandingly, only to relapse into jollity a few minutes later.
By afternoon, the terahvi was more or less over. The families that had stayed back counted themselves as the close relatives, and had moved to occupy the chairs set up in the backyard. There were two rounds of tea, both prepared and offered by her maamis. Surprisingly for Gunjan, sadness seemed less and less pervasive. She caught light tones in conversations, people using the occasion to discuss their own lives. She was somewhat relieved to see the social function of such a gathering manifest itself.
It was only around six in the evening that the last
of the relatives left. There was another round of tea then, for the family members who had been there since the beginning. Gunjan learnt that her maamas would leave the next day, in the morning, and so would her bua. Jagvir Chacha would stay back a couple of days to sort out the papers. Which papers, Gunjan wondered.
While sipping tea, her elder maama elaborated upon how everything – the tent, the food, the mike system, the flowers – had already been paid for by ‘Bhaisaab’ and started sobbing violently, something that was so out of line with his general demeanour that it shocked everyone. Gunjan’s mother consoled him over several minutes. This burst of grief made Gunjan uncomfortable – she shared none of its intensity. She got up and went inside her room. She was actually somewhat ashamed of her ineptitude at being sad, and it didn’t help knowing that everyone in the family had seen this numbness only as a sign of shock. There had been moments in the day when she had felt like a fraud, like she was someone impersonating her father’s daughter, or like an actor caught inside a film she had never chosen to be a part of.
She changed out of the sari and put on more comfortable clothes, with an old sweater on top. It was building up to be a very cold night, and just as she considered switching on the room heater, the electricity went off. She thought of calling Mahesh, but abandoned the idea as she didn’t have anything to say. With him, too, she had often felt like a fraud, as if the life they shared didn’t belong to her. And what was that life? In the darkness of the room, the answer seemed easier. They partied, they went to plays and art exhibitions, met friends in the pubs of Hauz Khas or Gurgaon; she let him fuck her the way he wanted, even enjoyed it most of the time; he bought her Calvin Klein dresses, let her change the paintings in the apartment, let her change the furniture as well; she used one of his credit cards, drove his Merc to an office where her peers came on scooters; they had gone to the Philippines last year; she had met his mother twice …
And all this was lived by someone else, she thought, an avatar of hers that was committed to a din and clutching on to its garbled tunes. It weighed upon her that even as she felt out of her element here in Muzaffarnagar, in her late fathers’ government-granted bungalow – with its chipped paint, its dimming tube lights, its power cuts, its bureaucratic squalor – Mahesh’s swanky apartment in Delhi had never felt like much of a home either. But the real malaise, she knew, was that she was already jaded enough to regard this homelessness as definitive of adulthood.
The next morning, her maamas and maamis made to leave – something that brought fresh tears to her mother’s eyes. Bade Maama spoke of Bhaisaab’s kindness, and announced how he was what he was because of the twenty-thousand-rupee loan that Gunjan’s father had given him twenty years ago. Chhote Maama repeated the dismay of the twin tragedy that had struck the family.
After the emotions, the uncles called Gunjan closer and told her that it was now her task to take care of her mother, that she should not give her mother any stress, and that in a year or maximum two years, she should get married. They then asked her to dedicate some time to sorting her father’s papers.
‘Find the insurance papers as soon as possible,’ Chhote Maama said. ‘The companies throw tantrums with late claims.’
She nodded.
‘And Gunjan, there is one more thing,’ said Bade Maama, before looking at Gunjan’s mother hesitantly.
‘Yes, tell her,’ her mother said. ‘Explain it to her and explain it to Jagvir too.’ She then went inside to call Jagvir Chacha, who was in one of the rooms with Bua.
‘The thing is,’ Bade Maama continued, ‘as you know, your father was a government servant. In U.P. government service. And, although we are all immeasurably saddened by his untimely death, there is some good in the timing. Given that it was god’s will and was always going to happen.’
What Maama said was too cryptic for Gunjan. ‘What do you mean? How is the timing fortunate?’
‘You know your father was due to retire at the end of this month?’ Chhote Maama said.
Gunjan felt shame at not having cared enough to remember. Of course the retirement was in January – she’d spoken to her father about this a couple of times last year. Is that why her father was disappointed with her when grandfather died? Had he sensed that she had forgotten? This bungalow would have needed to be vacated soon, and her parents would have taken a place on rent. Was that on her father’s mind? The change that a move to a rented apartment would entail, how it would emphasize his failure to build a house for himself.
‘Since he was still in employment at the time of his death,’ Bade Maama said, ‘his demise means that you have some options, as granted by the government.’
Jagvir Chacha came and stood next to Gunjan. He was five years younger than her father, but he had never been as physically active. He had a stoop and looked older, frailer. He could be next, Gunjan thought for a moment.
‘What options?’ Gunjan asked her maama.
‘The department rule says that in the event of an employee’s passing, a direct dependent can seek a job from the same government department. On compassionate grounds.’
‘Okay,’ said Gunjan.
‘Had Bhaisaab passed away post retirement,’ Chhote Maama said, ‘say, after a month, this option would not have existed.’
‘That’s why I said that there was some good in the timing,’ Bade Maama said. ‘It’s as if Bhaisaab thought of giving back to his family even in his time of death.’
‘Bhabhiji can easily take the option,’ Jagvir Chacha joined the conversation.
‘It is likely to be something clerical; something you can easily manage,’ Bade Maama said to his sister. ‘I’d spoken to director sahab yesterday and it seems there won’t be a problem once we have the paperwork ready.’
‘But what will the impact on the post-retirement pension be?’ Mummy asked. ‘There will be some impact on the pension, right?’
‘I checked about that as well,’ Bade Maama said. ‘You will get Bhaisaab’s pension even after you take the job. But since a government employee can avail only one dearness allowance, the pension’s allowance will be cut.’
‘So the pension will be halved, more or less,’ Jagvir Chacha said.
‘Yes.’
During the conversation and even after her uncles and aunties left, Gunjan felt pained by her ignorance. When were all these discussions happening? Why was she still someone who needed to be told these things by elders? They all said she needed to take care of her mother; but they had all gone about securing that care without involving her. Would it have been different if she were a son and not a daughter?
In the afternoon, after her bua had also left, Gunjan went up to Jagvir Chacha. ‘So how do we start?’
‘The death certificate,’ he said. ‘We will go to the municipal office tomorrow. You know where that is?’
‘Yes.’
The municipal office compound consisted of a three-storey, red-painted building facing a ground that might once have been envisaged as a lush green lawn but had now turned into a parking lot of sorts. Gunjan remembered how she would take the road in front of the compound while going to and returning from the Holy Angels’ Convent School, where she had studied all her school years. As a child, she had little idea what the building was for, or what work happened there. Once every year, she would see a big crowd of men congregate in the grounds, and at some point, she had learnt that all those men were seekers of rickshaw-pulling permits. She had found it strange that such a large office granted permits for something as simple as rickshaw-pulling.
Gunjan parked the Jetta in the grounds, between two diminutive Altos. She and her uncle entered the building corridors and asked for the office that issued death certificates. The men answering always stared at Gunjan, who was dressed in one of the two saris that her maami had left behind for her benefit. They were told that the office was at the rear of the building. There, the corridor branched off into a section that had three to four separate rooms along with a toilet that gave off a s
mell as bad as a morgue. Atop the door to the second room to their left, a board mentioned ‘Birth/Death Registration’. Inside, they saw a single desk surrounded by four Muslim men (all had beards and caps). A road accident had killed five people of their family.
The stink from the toilet filled the room. Gunjan found it impossible to wait there and walked out into the corridor. Her uncle would manage the certificate, she thought. A bit farther ahead, the corridor opened to another small ground. There were some teenaged boys there, and a game of cricket was on. It was queer, Gunjan thought, that this was allowed during office hours; she drifted into watching the game. But the boys stopped at the sight of her. They looked curious, as if a novelty had entered their domain. Then, as if breaking from a still image that the entire group constituted, one of the boys came towards Gunjan, rubbed his crotch with his right hand and made an oohing sound. He then motioned as if he were holding a woman by the hips and taking her. Gunjan, repulsed, moved away. She heard the boys laugh behind her back. She retraced her steps and waited for Jagvir Chacha to come out with the damned certificate. The putrefying smell disturbed her; but she thought it would all end in a matter of minutes.
Jagvir Chacha came out pinching his nose. ‘There is a small problem,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Gunjan asked.
‘Here, see the doctor’s note.’
She took the paper in her hand and looked at it. She had read it earlier; its contents included three punctuation-less sentences: Mr Ranbir Singh 58 brought at 6 a.m. Unfortunately dead on arrival. Cause of death possible heart failure. That morning, Gunjan’s mother had found her father unresponsive and rushed to the neighbours for help. The neighbours, aware that he was dead already, had nevertheless taken her father’s body to a heart specialist, who had handwritten this note on a letter. The same letter had to be produced at the municipal office to register the death and get the certificate.
Diwali in Muzaffarnagar Page 16
