An Obedient Father

by Akhil Sharma

  Many of the brothels had long balconies, galleries almost, attached to the front of each story. That night I noticed for the first time that some of the men, women, and children on the balconies wore village clothes and some wore city clothes. This made me realize that neither customers nor prostitutes would sit around chatting or listening to music on the radio. The people on the balconies were probably visiting someone who worked there. I had never before thought of brothels as places where people lived for years at a time.

  I overcame my embarrassment and asked a man working at a betel-leaf stall for directions.

  I walked down the street. A fat woman with an enormous bindi painted on her forehead was sitting sideways on a bicycle before the brothel’s narrow door. I asked her if she had a “young girl,” because I could not say child.

  She immediately said, “Twenty rupees.”

  I was so shocked by the price that I thought the woman had misunderstood me. “I don’t want a virgin,” I said.

  The woman eyed me. “For twenty rupees you get firewood, not a forest.” Probably because I did not say anything, she added, “You’ll get your own room and can enjoy yourself with respect. With respect.” I gave her the money and she tied it inside a handkerchief and tucked it between her breasts.

  Usually I became hard as soon as I entered a brothel, but as I followed the woman up a dimly lighted stairway and down a narrow hall, I stayed soft. We were on the second story. Small waist-high windows lined one side of the wall. Voices from the street rose to us. I looked down and could tell where people were, because they were even darker than the streets. I wondered whether I would actually have sex with the girl. I believed that if she looked truly young, something at the last moment would deflect me. I did not think I, myself, could do much about what would happen.

  The fat woman brought me to a small blue room, where a girl was sitting on a cot reading a comic. The girl looked up at me. I had not remembered that thirteen was so young. She had an oval face, a broad hooked nose, and round bulging eyes which, because she appeared to blink only rarely, gave her an unchanging, startled expression. Her legs were no thicker than her arms, and her breasts were just beginning to grow. She looked so young in her pale green salwar kameez that I felt the enormity of her helplessness. “Half an hour,” the woman said as she left the room. She did not close the door but drew a curtain with a weighted bottom across the doorway.

  The girl continued staring at me. I sat down beside her. I wondered if she thought the same things each time a man was brought to her room. I told myself I should leave, that twenty rupees was not so much and maybe the woman would let me have another prostitute for the money. “What’s your name?” I asked. She did not answer and her eyes did not change. I wondered if she was drugged.

  “Chandni,” she suddenly said, as if I had only just asked my question.

  I knew that prostitutes renamed themselves when they joined the trade, often using the name of a flower or a precious stone, and I felt rebuffed by the pseudonym she had given. “Is that your real name?”

  “Stop asking questions,” she said.

  The girl stood, in the same sudden way that she had given her name. She pulled her shirt over her head and unhooked her skirt. Her pubic hair was sparse. Her waist was no wider than my thigh. She looked almost sexless. I was still not hard. But I stood also and gathered a breast in one hand. That breast was the softest thing I have ever touched. It was like water. I kissed her nipples and laid her on the bed. Her nipples had wide areolae and, like her eyes, appeared astonished. As I took off my clothes, the girl spat into her hands and rubbed the spit into her vagina. This disgusted and excited me simultaneously. I finished becoming hard.

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “For twenty rupees you only get to fuck.”

  I was embarrassed, for the questions were a way to own her more completely. The embarrassment made me protest, “Twenty rupees is a lot of money.”

  She grimaced, as if she was disgusted by my poverty. “All you get is fucking.”

  Sex with her was not much different from that with an older woman, except the vagina was shallower.

  “Do you like this?” I asked when I was in her. I often asked this.

  “No,” she said, and then a little later added, “I hate men like you, sweating and talking, talking. Wanting things for free.”

  “Is it ever good?”

  “Never with men who pay”

  I had been insulted by prostitutes before, but never this much. As I rode a rickshaw back to the ship, I felt shame. Thirteen was so young that she and I might as well have been different species. I swore out loud: “I will never go to a whore again. For the next three months I will give a tenth of my salary to charity.” But there was no solace in words. After a while memories of my mother began coming to me, the way she always walked around barefoot, her taste for sweets, how I moved my cot next to hers when she was sick and dying. I began to cry, because it seemed to me then that being good was, for me, one of those impossible tasks which are given to the heroes of fairy tales.

  After I had sex with the girl, I began discovering so many brothels with children that I thought it was a new fad, in the same way that Raj Kapoor’s Charlie Chaplin walk would become popular. When I went to a brothel and learned I could have a child, I was always tempted. Occasionally while masturbating, I conjured the little girl spitting into her hands and rubbing the spit into her vagina. But I never again went to a child prostitute.

  I left the navy when I was twenty-two. After the first year and a half, all the problems of being trapped on a ship with people I disliked had become unbearable. Thievery was so common that even my undershirts and socks were stolen. A man who slept in the bunk above me masturbated every night by mounting his pillow and rubbing against it until he came.

  I left the navy in late June and immediately took a job as a physical education teacher in a boys-only school in Delhi. Teaching exercise did not take much time or effort. Most of any day I could be found drinking tea on a cot near the gate at the school compound. Five months after I started my new job, I married Radha.

  A year or two after our marriage, Radha told me that she and her sisters were so frightened of their father that since he did not like to see dry laundry still hanging on the clothesline, they took down the laundry while it was moist.

  Radha was nineteen when we married. She was thin, with slightly jutting teeth which kept her mouth open and brittle hair that could never grow beyond shoulder length no matter how she took care of it. But Radha soon became beautiful to me.

  Despite everything I had done in the navy, I believed that once I married I would be a faithful husband. Since marriage is so important a part of anyone’s life, I thought I would be desolate if I was faithless.

  And Radha had a capacity to watch and pay attention which made me feel safe. We spent the first week of our marriage in Beri. Radha had brought a bag of toffees to hand out to the children of all her new relatives. I asked her if her mother had suggested the sweets as a way to charm the relatives.

  “No,” she said, and then paused. It was night and summer, but because we had just gotten married, we were in the house instead of outside in the wind. Radha was sitting on our cot as I undressed. She was looking away from me. We had not made love yet because Radha was still anxious with me. “When I was a child, a neighbor got married and his wife gave out candies. I thought she was smart.”

  I was amazed Radha had carried this fact for years. I felt glad to be with someone this intelligent, because it meant she could take care of me. “You’re smart, too.”

  “Not smart. I am understanding,” Radha said, and became silent as if she had revealed too much.

  Getting Radha to tell me a joke was as thrilling as teaching a wild rabbit to lick sugar from my palm. I took great pleasure in serving her and in furnishing our future together. The ritual of purchasing bedsheets and stainless-steel pots, a poster of a fat pink baby, a clock with hands t
hat glowed in the dark soothed whatever concerns I had about the shape of my life, which seemed increasingly dominated by the silliness of my job, supervising children while they did jumping jacks or making them turn out their pockets after they finished playing table tennis so that no balls were stolen. Buying mangoes for Radha on my way home from work and telling her that she was my mango tree, my wish-granting tree, was a way of replacing the rest of my day. Once, early on, I saw her with her fingertips wrinkled from bathing and I felt lucky to be able to age with her.

  Later, Radha would say that even at the beginning of our life together, I took advantage of her pliability and innocence. As an example of this, she pointed to my returning home late after drinking with my friends and expecting her to be smiling and ready with food. Another example she used was our summer trips to Beri. Living in Delhi had made me miss village life, and when I told Radha I wanted to spend the summers in Beri, she acquiesced hesitantly. Radha had never lived outside Old Delhi, but she felt obligated to come with me. Village life is especially hard on women. All day Radha was running to the well or collecting firewood and cow dung to burn. My sisters-in-law hated Radha, perhaps because they kept thinking that I might claim some of the land that they wanted their husbands to inherit, and they tormented her. They would hide the laundry soap from her and give her the hardest work. Radha could not get used to the water and was often sick. Yet she kept accompanying me to Beri until Baby was born.

  But I do not think Radha was referring to my selfishness and indifference when she said I took advantage of her. After all, at the beginning of our marriage she was mostly happy. I think Radha meant I should have known that my love would not last. I had misled her, she believed, by treating her as if she were my heart walking unprotected in the world.

  Our love wore out after three years, I think. There are always problems between two people, even when one is willing to give in on nearly everything. Despite Radha’s demureness and traditionalism, which kept her from challenging me, she had a practical and calm intelligence that saw through all my illusions. When I fantasized out loud that I could move from being a teacher to being involved in citywide education administration and that from there it would be only a few steps to advising politicians and then finally running for election, Radha looked at me with such dismay that I invariably grew angry. Once I began believing that she saw through me, all her mannerisms of innocence, the way she covered her mouth when laughing, struck me as deceptive. Also, of course, there was the eroding power of familiarity.

  Radha located the end of our love with Baby’s death. Baby was our first child. If he had lived to six months we would have named him Dil, because he was our heart. For many years I accepted this explanation. Now I think there must have been a hidden romantic in Radha for her not to have admitted that our love simply got used up. Instead, she chose a dramatic boundary. Baby was born in February 1955 and died four months later of some water sickness. I was in Beri and Radha was in Delhi, because she thought she could take better care of Baby there. Once he became ill, Radha sent me telegrams telling me to come home. She told me he had a fever that had made him wrinkled and dry, that there was blood in his stool, that he no longer even cried. But I thought she was exaggerating as a way to punish me for leaving her in Delhi. She sent me six telegrams. After the fourth, angry at the money she was wasting, I stopped responding, and when Baby died, Radha did not send a message.

  The evening I returned to Delhi, Radha told me she had put the torch to Baby’s funeral pyre herself. I sat on a cot in our single narrow room as Radha described the cremation arrangements: the pyre the size of a bush, the kindness of the pundit, the way the people in her family scolded her for going to a crematorium. Radha stood stiffly before me with her arms hanging straight down beside her and her fingers stretched apart. She looked like a student making a presentation. The room opened directly onto a busy road, and the noise of the evening traffic was so loud that Radha’s words sometimes got lost under horns and people calling out. I cried as she spoke. After Radha stopped talking, she stood and watched me cry. Then she went and made dinner. Night came. Traffic trailed off. When dinner was ready, Radha came to me and said, “Don’t cry, even though you cry such handsome tears.” I did stop, but it was because the contemptuous words made me think that perhaps not only was she angry at me but she hated me.

  For months after Baby died, Radha would begin to weep without any apparent reason. She could be doing the laundry or cooking dinner and suddenly she would have to wash her eyes. This reminded me of myself at my mother’s death, and made me realize that although I had thought I loved Baby, because I was not crying as I had before, I obviously did not have deep feelings for him. Sometimes I went up to Radha and held her. Other times I got angry and left the flat.

  I was so unhappy myself that I could not have taken care of anyone. I must have been at least partially unhappy about Radha and Baby, but also because I believed I was heartless, I thought I was just unhappy about being blamed.

  Baby’s death exhausted me. I used to sleep twelve or fourteen hours a day. About this time, by providing crates of mangoes from Beri to my principal and his supervisors, I was able to switch from teaching to administration. The new job had longer days. Soon after I got home, I would eat and go to bed.

  I began drinking regularly for the first time. Until then, I had drunk only with friends. Even in company, drinking depressed me. Now, once or twice a month, I went to a saloon and sat in the back with fried peanuts and a liter of beer. When I first started drinking by myself, I cried loudly, hoping to attract attention. After a young boy who was a waiter there whispered in my ear, “Shut up, fatso,” I began holding my tears till I got home. When I returned to the flat and Radha became angry at my drunkenness, I would shout, “Do you think you’re the only one with a heart?”

  Radha lost interest in my foolishness and I, embarrassed by her clear-sightedness, avoided her.

  Radha found a guru and began to pray three times a day, an hour each time. I returned to visiting prostitutes. After a while I thought of Radha only when I wanted something. Even then, she left few traces in my thoughts. Still, Anita came a year after Baby. Kusum followed two years later, and Rajesh after another two years. I remember how Radha would stare up at me expressionlessly as I struggled to climax and to make myself come I would say, “Mine, you are mine. What do you think of that?” I only went to her when I had not had time to go to the brothels on GB Road and my lust had begun nagging at me so much that I could not sleep. By the time she was thirty, Radha had stopped oiling her hair and changing her clothes regularly. Also, when Rajesh was born, Radha clenched her teeth so tightly they all shifted, and within a few years they had splayed out. Radha became, like my children, only a reminder of all the things I had done wrong.

  Sometimes, as if seeing my children for the first time, I noticed their tiny hands and mouths and I would feel the responsibility of protecting them. Then I would want to be a good husband to Radha and might try for a few days to look at her when we talked.

  I justified my resentment toward the children by saying that at least I took care of them. After seven years in administration, I knew enough people in education and was well known enough that I could nearly double my five hundred rupees a month by arranging admission for children into particular schools or meetings between businessmen and bureaucrats. This was during the second of Nehru’s five-year plans, when it was common knowledge that since corporate donations to political parties were illegal, the Congress Party was selling monopolies to raise campaign money. There had always been corruption, but it was so much in the open now that people began viewing it as natural that they could offer me money for favors. My family did not live well, but we drank milk each day.

  I never felt any guilt for accepting bribes. And the tremors of remorse I felt for going to the prostitutes on GB Road were so slight that I brushed them aside like cobweb strands.

  The prostitutes I went to ranged from sixteen- or seventeen
-year-olds to some in their mid-thirties. I preferred the younger ones because, even though I used a condom, I thought they would be less likely to have diseases than older whores. I also found their bodies, so firm that they seemed superhuman, attractive, and I liked the unevenness of our strengths.

  I visited the brothels only during the afternoon, when the wide GB Road is crowded. People buy light switches, generators, bathroom fixtures, and such things from the narrow shops on the ground floor of the three- and four-story buildings in which the brothels, sometimes stacked on top of each other, are located. No matter how often you have been to a particular brothel on GB Road, there is always a sense of physical danger when you are in one. In the GB Road brothels, you have sex in wooden closets. They are arranged in a row against one wall of the long room that is the brothel. These closets are so narrow you have to climb onto the plank bed, making sure not to step on the whore, before closing the door. Adding to the claustrophobia is the distraction of the brothel’s life going on a few inches from you. Women and children are sitting on the floor. “I’m hungry. Anybody want food?” “Dev Anand is much better than Rajesh Khanna. If I was in a movie and had the songs from Anand, my movie would be a hit, too.” Sometimes pimps get into loud arguments a meter from where you are in the closet about how much of a commission they should get for bringing in a customer. Outside the room, in the doorway to the hall or stairwell that connects the brothel to the sidewalk, whores sit shouting at a possible customer who stops on the sidewalk to peer at them. “Come, my dream!” they yell, flashing their breasts. The seediness and the fear usually make the sex sad, difficult, abject. Occasionally these very qualities will make the orgasm astonishing.

  So the years passed, far more quickly than I could have imagined. My father died and Nehru died, and I cried for both, surprising myself with the earnestness of my tears. India fought Pakistan, China, Pakistan. I used some of my new wealth to start a small restaurant, but there was little money in it and my workers cheated me. I bought two rickshaws with a cousin and leased them out. I did this for a year and a half, till my cousin was murdered, stabbed in the throat by a rickshaw driver over a dispute involving less than forty rupees. Once, Radha developed a habit of eating very little, and after a few months she had to be hospitalized because she was waking up at night screaming from stomach pains. When she got out of the hospital, she told her guru that she wanted to leave worldly things and take sanyas, and travel from pilgrimage site to pilgrimage site. Her guru then came to our home for the first time and berated Radha in front of me. “You have three little children, faithless woman. Your home is your temple.” To guarantee his help in the future I went to him for several weeks to learn yoga for my back pain. To strengthen my spine he recommended I drink water while lying flat. Anita, Rajesh, and Kusum grew into odd children who played only with each other and who were so quiet that strangers at first thought they were slightly retarded. Even when no one was around, they spoke quietly. When I heard the children murmuring to each other, I often wondered whether they were speaking of me.