by Akhil Sharma
“He will be all right,” I said.
Turning toward us, Ma said, “When he goes, he wants to make sure we all hurt.” She was crying. “I thought I didn’t love him, but you can’t live this long with a person and not love just a bit. He knew that. When they were bringing him here, he said, ‘See what you’ve done, demoness.’”
The world slipped from under me. Ma had often said she hated Pitaji. I became dizzy. One second Ma was herself and then, the next second, there was no one in the world who loved me.
Rajesh took her away. Kusum also left, so that she would not be tired for her laboratory in the morning. I spent the rest of the night awake in a chair next to Pitaji’s bed.
Around eight, Ma returned. While we were there, I kept looking away from her, because it made me too sad to see her face. I went to the flat. In the days that followed, it was I who replaced Ma in the morning. Kusum lived at home while Pitaji was sick, but she came to the hospital only once.
At night, Kusum, Rajesh, and I slept on adjacent cots on the flat’s roof. I sometimes played cards with Rajesh before going to bed. Kusum did not join us. Instead, every night, in preparation for going abroad, she read five pages of an English dictionary. She would write down the words she did not know. Kusum did not brag about her work as I might have.
I had thought I would be anxious alone with Pitaji. After Ma caught Pitaji and me, he and I were rarely together. When we were, it was either in public or with Ma in a nearby room from which she would periodically appear. Her surveillance made me feel that she had no faith in me. Now, despite the other patients in the room with Pitaji, I worried that since only Ma knew how dangerous he was, he might be able to hurt me. Even asleep, Pitaji looked threatening. But the medicines kept him unconscious. When he woke, it was only to ask for water or food, then he fell asleep again. If I did not respond quickly enough to his demands, Pitaji screamed and I cringed.
Two or three days after I began staying with Pitaji, I was looking out the window at the autorickshaws lined up across the street when Pitaji shouted something at me. I turned to him, saw his mouth opening and closing like a digging machine or a dog, and I thought, I can leave right now. I can be home in twenty minutes in one of the autorickshaws. Suddenly I could see only Pitaji. Everything else vanished in a white rage. I felt as if I were tipping forward.
In a few hours the anger was gone. Once it stopped, I doubted its intensity.
When I replaced Ma the next morning, she greeted me by nodding toward Pitaji. “He won’t die a natural death,” she said with a strange pride.
The anger came back momentarily. I nearly said, “Let’s kill him, then.”
That afternoon Pitaji wasn’t able to sleep. He told me again the story of how an exorcist had been called to beat his mother sane. Pitaji had been unable to watch. But he could not leave, for he felt he would be abandoning her. He stood in the doorway of their one-room mud house, looking out as she was beaten behind him. A crowd of children had gathered beyond the front yard. Whenever his mother screamed, the crowd whispered. Pitaji told the story calmly, as if it were someone else he was talking about. When he finished, he changed the topic. But Pitaji had told the story before, so the desire to create a reaction was obvious. I was looking out the window at the groundskeeper. He was walking around the compound sprinkling the dust with water from a bag the size of a man’s body that was slung over one shoulder. When I did not turn around at the story’s end, Pitaji said, “I’m sorry. I’m an old man. I shouldn’t always be trying to get pity.” This self-awareness made me feel for the first time that Pitaji need not have raped me. I had been raped because for Pitaji no one was as real as he was, so nothing he did to others had substance. My anger kept me from moving. When I did begin turning to him, I was frightened I might stab him with the scissors on the stool near his bed.
This rage did not evaporate. I now hated Pitaji constantly. It was like a steady buzz in the background. Once, he screamed at me for not giving him his food on time, and I took his lunch and scraped it into the trash canister. “What will you eat now?” I said. I stopped giving him his lunch till he asked. If he forgot to take his medicines, I did not remind him.
I also imagined Ma getting pneumonia that caused her lungs to collapse. I liked to think of her struggling to breathe. But to neither one did I show my feelings directly. I might show disrespect or challenge Ma over every petty thing, but to say something directly about what Pitaji had done felt like the end of the world.
I did not see Rajinder for the two weeks I was with my parents. But thinking of Rajinder was a comfort, like the reality of the bed during malarial dreams.
My hatred was so constant that it was as if gravity had increased. It exhausted me. But when I slept, as soon as I gained a certain minimum relief, I woke. My eyelids sometimes twitched for a minute at a time. My temper was wild. Kusum suggested I should go to a doctor; I answered, “My eyelids twitch, Kusum, because I work all day while you read in your air-conditioned laboratory.”
Around eleven the day Pitaji was released, an ambulance carried him home to the Old Vegetable Market. Two orderlies, muscular men in white uniforms, carried his bulk on a stretcher up the stairs into the flat. Fourteen or fifteen people came out into the courtyard to watch. Some of the very old women, sitting on cots in the courtyard, kept asking who Pitaji was, although he had lived there six years. A few children climbed into the ambulance. They played with the horn till somebody chased them out.
The orderlies laid Pitaji on the cot in his bedroom before leaving. It was a small dark room, smelling faintly of the kerosene with which the bookshelves were treated every other week to prevent termites. Traveling had tired him. He fell asleep quickly. Pitaji woke as I was about to leave. I was whispering to Ma outside his bedroom.
“I don’t know when I’m coming back. I have my own family.”
“How much I suffer, only God knows.”
“You should have made him go to a doctor right in the beginning.”
“What could I do? I can’t make him do anything.”
“Are you talking about me?” Pitaji tried to call out, but his voice was like wind on dry grass.
“You want something?” Ma asked.
“Water.”
As I started toward the fridge, Ma said, “You can’t give him anything cold.”
I got water from the clay pot. Kneeling beside the cot, I helped Pitaji rise to a forty-five-degree angle. Ma had undressed him. He was wearing only his undershorts. His heaviness, the weakness of his body made me feel as if I were embracing an enormous larva. Pitaji held the glass with both hands. He made sucking noises as he drank. I lowered him when his shoulder muscles slackened. His eyes moved about the room slowly.
“More?” he asked.
“There’s no more,” I said, even though there was. Ma was clattering in the kitchen. “I’m going home.”
“Rajinder is good?” He looked at the ceiling while speaking.
“Yes,” I said. “The results for his exam came. He’ll be promoted. He came second in all Delhi.” Telling him this felt like a taunt, as if I was suggesting he was a failure.
Pitaji closed his eyes. “I feel tired.”
“All you’ve been doing is lying in bed. Go to sleep.”
“I don’t want to,” he answered loudly.
Remembering that in a few minutes I would leave, I said, “You’ll get better.”
“Sometimes I dream that the heaviness I feel is dirt. What an awful thing to be buried, like a Muslim or a Christian.” He spoke slowly. “Once I dreamed of Baby’s ghost.”
“Oh.” I was interested, because Baby’s importance was confusing.
“He was eight or nine. He didn’t recognize me. Baby didn’t look at all like me. I was surprised, because I had always expected him to look like me.”
There was something polished about the story, which indicated deceit. My hatred increased. “God will forgive you,” I said, wanting him to begin his excuses and disgust me furthe
r.
“Your mother has not.”
Had she forgiven Pitaji for what he had done to me but not forgiven him for making her unhappy? “Shhh.” Now there was so much unhappiness that even anger was overwhelmed.
“At your birthday, when she sang, I said, ‘If you sing like that for me every day, I will love you forever.’”
I was on my way home. “She worries about you.”
“That’s not the same. When I tell Kusum this, she tells me I’m sentimental. Radha loved me once. But she cannot forgive. What happened so long ago she cannot forgive.” He was blinking rapidly, preparing to cry. “But that is a lie. She does not love me because I—” he began crying without making a sound—“I did not love her for so long. Radha could have loved me a little. She should have loved me twenty for my eleven.”
Ma came to the doorway. “What are you crying about now? Nobody loves you? Aw, sad baby.” Holding the sides of the doorway, she leaned forward. She appeared eager.
“You think it’s so easy being sick?” he said.
“Easier than working.”
“I wish you were sick.”
I watched them. For a moment I didn’t have the strength to stand. Then I remembered, I can go to my home.
My sleep when I returned to my flat was like falling. I lay down, closed my eyes, plummeted. I woke as suddenly, without any half-memories of dreams, into a silence which meant the electricity was gone, the ceiling fan still, the fridge slowly warming.
It was cool. But I was unsurprised by the monsoon’s approach, for I was in love. The window curtains stirred, revealing TV antennas. Sparrows wheeled in front of distant gray clouds. The sheet lay bunched at my feet. I felt gigantic, infinite. But I was also small, compact, distilled. I had everything in me to make Rajinder silly with tenderness. I imagined him softening completely at seeing me. I am in love, I thought. A raspy voice echoed the words in my head, causing me to lose my confidence for a moment. I will love him slowly, carefully, cunningly. I suddenly felt peaceful again, as if I were a lake and the world could only form ripples on my surface while the calm beneath continued in solitude.
I stood. I was surprised that my love was not disturbed by my physical movements. I walked out onto the roof. The wind ruffled treetops. Small gray clouds slid across the pale sky. On the street, eight or nine young boys were playing cricket.
Tell me your stories, I will ask him. Pour them into me, so that I know everything you have ever loved or been scared of or laughed at. But thinking this, I became uneasy that when I actually saw him, my love might fade. My tongue became thick. What shall I say? I woke this afternoon in love with you. I love you, too, he will answer. No, no, you see, I really love you. I love you so much that I think anything is possible, that I will live forever. Oh, he will say. My love will abandon me in a rush. I must say nothing at first, I decided. Slowly I will win his love. I will spoil him till he falls in love with me. As long as Rajinder loves me, I will be able to love him. I will love him like a camera lens that closes at too much light and opens at too little, so his blemishes will never mar my love.
I watched the cricket game to the end. Again, I felt enormous. When the children dispersed, it was around five. Rajinder should have left his office.
I bathed. I stood before the small mirror in the armoire as I dressed. Uneven brown areolae, a flat stomach, the veins in my feet like pen marks. Will this be enough? I wondered. Once he loves me, I told myself. I lifted my arms to smell the plantlike odor of my perspiration. I wore a bright red cotton sari. What will I say first? Namaste, how was your day? With the informal you. How was your day? The words felt strange, for I had never before used the informal with him. I had, as a show of modesty, never even used his name, except for the night before my wedding, when I said it hundreds of times to myself to see how it sounded—like nothing. Now, standing before the mirror, when I said Rajinder, the three syllables had too many edges. Rajinder, Rajinder, I said rapidly several times, till it no longer felt strange. He will love me because it is too lonely otherwise, because I will love him so. I heard a scooter stopping outside the building, the metal door to the courtyard swinging open.
My stomach clenched as I walked onto the roof The dark clouds had turned late evening into early night. I saw Rajinder roll the scooter into the courtyard. He parked the scooter, took off his gray helmet. He combed his hair carefully to hide the emerging bald spot. The deliberate way he tucked the comb into his back pocket overwhelmed me with tenderness. We will love each other carefully.
I waited for him to rise out of the stairwell. My petticoat drying on the clothesline went clap, clap in the wind. How was your day? How was your day? Was your day good? I told myself, Don’t be so afraid. What does it matter how you say hello? There will be tomorrow, the day after, the day after that.
His steps sounded like a shuffle. Leather rubbing against stone. There was something forlorn to the sound. Rajinder, Rajinder, Rajinder, how are you?
First the head: oval, high forehead, handsome eyebrows. Then the not so broad but not so narrow shoulders. The top two buttons of the cream shirt were opened, revealing some hair, a white undershirt. The two weeks since I last saw him had not changed Rajinder, yet he felt different, somehow denser.
“How was your day?” I asked, while he was still in the stairwell.
“All right,” he said, stepping onto the roof. He smiled. His helmet was in his left hand. In his right was a plastic bag full of mangoes. “When did you get home?” The you was informal. I felt a surge of relief He will not resist, I thought.
“A little after three.”
I followed him into the bedroom. He placed the helmet on the windowsill. The mangoes went in the refrigerator. I remained silent.
Rajinder walked onto the roof to the sink on the outside bathroom wall. He began washing his hands, face, neck with soap. “Your father is fine?” he asked. Before putting the chunk of soap down, he rinsed it of foam. Only then did he pour water on himself. He used a thin washcloth hanging on a nearby hook for drying. When I am with him, I promised myself, I will not think of Pitaji. It’s much more than seven years since Pitaji touched me.
“Yes.”
“What did the doctor say?” he asked, turning toward me. He was like a black diamond.
“Nothing.”
I watched Rajinder hang his shirt by the collar tips on the clothesline. I suddenly became sad at the rigorous attention to details necessary to preserve love. Perhaps it is easier for other women, I thought, women who are braver, who have less to be afraid of, who have more trust. That must be a different type of love, I thought, in which one can be careless.
“It will rain tonight,” he said, looking at the sky.
The eucalyptus trees shook their heads from side to side. “The rain always makes me feel as if I am waiting for someone,” I said. Immediately I regretted saying it, for Rajinder was not paying attention. Perhaps it might have been said better. “Why don’t you sit on the balcony.” The balcony was what we called the area near the stairwell. “I’ll make sherbet.”
He took the newspaper with him. The fridge water was warm. This slight disappointment was enough to start melancholy pooling. I gave him the drink. I placed mine on the floor near his chair, then went to get a chair for myself. A fruit seller passed by, calling out in a reedy voice, “Sweet, sweet mangoes. Sweeter than first love.” On the roof directly across, a seven- or eight-year-old boy was trying to fly a large purple kite. I sat down beside Rajinder. I waited for him to look up, because I did not want to interrupt his reading. When he looked away from the paper to take a sip of sherbet, I asked, “Did you fly kites?”
“A little,” he answered, looking at the boy. “Ashok bought some with the money he earned. He’d let me fly them sometimes.” The fact that his father had died when he was young was encouraging. I believed one must be lonely before being able to love.
“Do you like Ashok?”
“He is my brother,” he answered, shrugging. With a sip of
the sherbet he returned to the newspaper. I felt Rajinder had reprimanded me.
I sat beside Rajinder and waited for the electricity to return. I was happy, excited, frightened being beside him. We spoke about Kusum going to America, though Rajinder did not want to talk about this. Rajinder was the most educated member of our combined family. After Kusum received her Ph.D. she would be.
The electricity didn’t come back. I started cooking in the dark. Rajinder sat on the balcony with the radio playing. “This is Akashwani,” the announcer said, then the music like horses racing which plays whenever a new program is about to start. It was very hot in the kitchen. Periodically I stepped onto the roof to look at the curve of Rajinder’s neck. This confirmed the tenderness in me.
Rajinder ate slowly. Once, he complimented me on my cooking, but he was mostly silent.
“What are you thinking?” I asked. He appeared not to have heard. Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! I thought, shocking myself by the urgency I felt.
A candle on the television made pillars of shadows rise and collapse on the walls. I searched for something to start a conversation with. “Pitaji began crying when I left.”
“You could have stayed a few more days,” he said, chewing.
“I did not want to.” I thought of adding, “I missed you,” but that was not true. Also, he had not indicated he missed me.
Rajinder mixed black pepper with his yogurt. “Did you tell him you’ll visit soon?”
“No. I think he was crying because he was lonely.”
“He should have more courage.” Rajinder did not like Pitaji, thought him weak-willed. “He is old. Shadows creep into one’s heart at his age.” I felt as if he were telling me not to be hindered by my doubts. The shutter of a bedroom window began slamming. I stood to latch it.
I washed the dishes while Rajinder bathed. When he came out, dressed in his white kurta pajama with his hair combed back, I was standing near the railing at the edge of the roof. I was looking out beyond the darkness of our neighborhood at a distant ribbon of electric light. I was tired from the nervousness I had been feeling all evening. Rajinder came up behind me. “Won’t you bathe?” he asked. I suddenly became exhausted. Bathe so we can make love. The deliberately unsaid felt obscene. I wondered if I had the courage to say no. I realized I didn’t. What kind of love can we have? I thought.
