by Akhil Sharma
Sleep was there, cool and dark, as soon as I closed my eyes. But around eight in the morning, when Rajinder shook me awake, I was exhausted. The door to our room was open, and I saw one of Rajinder’s cousins, a fat, hairy man with a towel around his waist, walk past to the bathroom. He looked in and smiled broadly, and I felt ashamed. I was glad I had gotten up at some point in the night and wrapped the sari on again. I had not felt cold, but I had wanted to be completely covered.
Rajinder, Ashok, their mother, and I had breakfast in our room. We sat around the small table and ate rice and yogurt. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to tell them to go away, to stop talking about who had come last night and brought what, and who had not but might still be expected to send a gift, tell them they were boring, foolish people. Ashok and his mother spoke, while Rajinder just nodded. Their words were indistinct, as if coming from across a wide room, and I felt I was dreaming them. I wanted to close my eyes and rest my head on the table. “You eat like a bird,” Rajinder’s mother said, looking at me and smiling.
After breakfast we visited a widowed aunt of Rajinder’s who had been unable to attend the wedding because of arthritis. She lived in a two-room flat covered with posters of gods and smelling of mothballs and old sweat. As she spoke of how carpenters and cobblers were moving in from the villages and passing themselves off as upper-castes, she drooled from the corners of her mouth. I was silent, except for when she asked me about my education and what dishes I liked to cook. As we left, she said, “A thousand years. A thousand children,” and pressed fifty-one rupees into Rajinder’s hands.
Then there was the long bus ride to Bursa. The roads were so bad that I kept being jolted awake, and my sleep became so fractured that I dreamed of the bus ride and being awakened. And in the village I saw grimy hens peering into the well, and women for whom I posed demurely in the courtyard. They sat in a circle around me and murmured compliments. My head and eyes were covered as they had been the night before, and as I stared at the floor, I fell asleep. I woke an hour later to their praise of my modesty. That night, in the dark room at the rear of the house, I was awakened by Rajinder’s digging between my legs, and although he tried to be gentle, I just wished it over. His face, flat and distorted, was above me, and his hands raised my nipples cruelly, resentful of being cheated, even though I never heard anger in Rajinder’s voice. He was always polite. Even in bed he was formal. “Could you get on all fours, please?”
SO HEAVY AND STILL did I feel on the first night in our new rooftop home, watching Rajinder sleep on the moonlight-soaked mattress, that I wanted the earth and sky to stop turning and for it always to be night. I did not want dawn to come and the day’s activities to start again. I did not want to have to think and react to the world. I fell asleep then, only to wake in panic an hour later at the thought of the obscure life I would lead with Rajinder. Think slowly, I told myself, looking at Rajinder asleep with an arm thrown over his eyes. Slowly. I remembered the year between my B.A. and B.Ed., when, through influence, I got a job as a typist in a candle factory. For nearly a month, upon reaching home after work, I wanted to cry, for I was terrified at the idea of giving up eight hours a day, a third of my life, to typing letters concerning supplies of wax. And then one day I noticed that I no longer felt afraid. I had learned to stop thinking. I floated above the days.
In the morning I had a fever, and the stillness it brought with it spread into the coming days. It hardened around me, so that I did not feel as if I were the one making love or cooking dinner or going home to see Ma and Pitaji and behaving there as I always had. No one guessed it was not me. Nothing could break through the stillness, not even Rajinder’s learning to caress me before parting my legs, or my growing to know all the turns of the colony’s alleys and the shopkeepers calling me by name.
WINTER TURNED INTO spring, and the trees in the park swelled green. Rajinder was thoughtful and generous. Traveling for conferences to Baroda, Madras, Jaipur, Bangalore, he always brought back saris or other gifts. The week I had malaria, he came home every lunch hour and cooked gruel for me. On my twenty-sixth birthday he took me to the Taj Mahal, and arranged for my family to be hidden in the flat when we returned in the evening. What a good man, I thought then, watching him standing proudly in a corner. What a good man, I thought, and was frightened, for that was not enough. I knew I needed something else, but I did not know what. Being his wife was not so bad. He did not make me do anything I did not want to, except make love, and even that was sometimes pleasant. I did not mind his being in the flat, and being alone is difficult. When he was away on his trips, I did not miss him, and he, I think, did not miss me, for he never mentioned it.
Summer came, and hot winds swept up from the Rajasthani deserts. The old cows that wander unattended on Delhi’s streets began to die. The corpses lay untouched for a week sometimes; their tongues swelled and, cracking open the jaw, stuck out absurdly.
The heat was like a high-pitched buzzing that formed a film between flesh and bone, so that my skin felt thick and rubbery and I wished that I could just peel it off. I woke at four every morning to have an hour when breathing air would not be like inhaling liquid. By five the eastern edge of the sky was too bright to look at, even though the sun had yet to appear. I bathed both before and after breakfast and again after doing laundry but before lunch. As June progressed, and the very air seemed to whine under the heat’s stress, I stopped eating lunch. Around two, before taking my nap, I would pour a few mugs of water on my head. I liked to lie on the bed imagining that the monsoon had come. Sometimes this made me sad, for the smell of wet earth and the sound of rain have always made me feel as if I have been waiting for someone all my life and that person has not yet come. I dreamed often of living near the sea, in a house with a sloping red roof and bright blue window frames, and woke happy, hearing water on sand.
And so the summer passed, slowly and vengefully, until the last week of June, when The Times of India began its countdown to the monsoon, and I woke one afternoon in love with my husband.
I HAD RETURNED home that day after spending two weeks with my parents. Pitaji had had a mild heart attack, and I took turns with Ma and Asha being with him in Safdarjung Hospital. The heart attack was no surprise, for Pitaji had become so fat that even his largest shirts had to be worn unbuttoned. So when I opened the door late one night and saw Asha with her fist up, ready to start banging again, I did not have to be told that Pitaji had woken screaming that his heart was breaking.
While I hurried a sari and blouse into a plastic bag, Asha leaned against a wall of our bedroom, drinking water. It was three. Rajinder, in his undershirt and pajama pants, sat on the bed’s edge and stared at the floor. I felt no fear, perhaps because Asha had said the heart attack was not so bad, or perhaps because I just did not care. The rushing and the banging on the doors appeared to be the properly melodramatic behavior when one’s father might be dying.
An auto rickshaw was waiting for us downstairs, triangular, small, with plasticized cloth covering its frame. It seemed like a vehicle for desperate people. Before getting in, I looked up and saw Rajinder. He was leaning against the railing. The moon was yellow and uneven behind him. I waved and he waved back. Such formalities, I thought, and then we were off, racing through dark, abandoned streets.
“Ma’s fine. He screamed so loud,” Asha said. She is a few inches taller than I am, and although she too is not pretty, she uses makeup that gives angles to her round face. Asha sat slightly turned on the seat so that she could face me. “A thousand times we told him, lose weight,” she said, shaking her head impatiently. “When the doctor gave him that diet, he said, ‘Is that before or after breakfast?’ ” She paused and added in a tight whisper, “He’s laughing now.”
I felt lonely sitting there while the city was silent and dark and we talked of our father without concern. “He wants to die,” I said softly. I enjoyed saying such serious words. “He is so unhappy. I think our hopes are made when we are young, and we can never adjus
t them to the real world. He was nearly national champion in wrestling, and for the last thirty-seven years he has been examining government schools to see that they have the right PE equipment. He loves eating, and that is as fine a way to die as any.”
“If he wants to die, wonderful; I don’t like him. But why is he making it difficult for us?”
Her directness shocked me and made me feel that my sentimentality was dishonest. The night air was still bitter from the evening traffic. “He is a good man,” I said unsteadily.
“The way he treated us all. Ma is like a slave.”
“They are just not good together. It’s no one’s fault.”
“How can it be no one’s fault?”
“His father was an alcoholic.”
“How long can you use your parents as an excuse?”
I did not respond at first, for I thought Asha might be saying this because I had always used Ma and Pitaji to explain away my failures. Then I said, “Look how good he is compared with his brothers. He must have had something good inside that let him be gentler than them. We should love him for that part alone.”
“That’s what he is relying on. It’s a big world. A lot of people are worth loving. Why love someone mediocre?”
Broken glass was in the hallways of the hospital, and someone had urinated in the elevator. When we came into the yellow room that Pitaji shared with five other men, he was asleep. His face looked like a shiny brown stone. He was on the bed nearest the window. Ma sat at the foot of his bed, her back to us, looking out at the fading night.
“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 did not 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 have done, demoness?’ ”
Asha took Ma away, still crying. I spent the rest of the night dozing next to his bed.
We fell into a pattern. Ma usually came in the morning, around eight, and I replaced her, hours later. Asha would take my place at three and stay until six, and then Ma’s brother or his sons would stay until Ma returned.
I had thought I would be afraid of being in the hospital, but it was very peaceful. Pitaji slept most of every day and night because of the medicines, waking up every now and then to ask for water and quickly falling asleep again. A nice boy named Rajeeve, who also was staying with his father, told me funny stories about his family. At night Asha and I slept on adjacent cots on the roof. Before she went to bed, she read five pages of an English dictionary. She had been accepted into a postdoctoral program in America. She did not brag about it as I would have. Like Ma, Asha worked very hard, as if that were the only way to live and one needn’t talk about it, and as if, like Ma, she assumed that we were all equally fortunate. But sometimes Asha would shout a word at me—“Alluvial”—and then look at me as if she was waiting for a response. Once, Rajinder came to drop off some clothes, but I was away. I did not see him or talk with him for the two weeks.
Sometimes Pitaji could not sleep and he would tell me stories of his father, a schoolteacher, who would take Pitaji with him to the saloon, so that someone would be there to guide him home when he was drunk. Pitaji was eight or nine then. His mother beat him for accompanying Dadaji, but Pitaji, his breath sounding as if it were coming through a wet cloth, said that he was afraid Dadaji would be made fun of if he walked home alone. Pitaji told the story quietly, as if he were talking about someone else, and as soon as he finished, he changed the subject. I could not tell whether Pitaji was being modest or was manipulating me by pretending to be modest.
He slept most of the day, and I sat beside him, listening to his little green transistor radio. The June sun filled half the sky, and the groundskeeper walked around the courtyard of the hospital in wide circles with a water bag as large as a man’s body slung over one shoulder. He was sprinkling water to keep the dust settled. Sometimes I hummed along to Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi singing that grief is no letter to be passed around to whoever wants to read.
There were afternoons when Pitaji became restless and whispered conspiratorially that he had always loved me most. Watching his face, puffy from the drugs, his nose broad and covered with blackheads, as he said again that Ma did not talk to him or that Asha was indifferent to his suffering, I felt exhausted. When he complained to Asha, “Your mother doesn’t talk to me,” she answered, “Maybe you aren’t interesting.”
Once, four or five days before we took him home, as he was complaining, I got up from the chair and went to look out the window. Beyond the courtyard was a string of yellow-and-black auto rickshaws waiting under eucalyptus trees. I wanted desperately for Asha to come, so that I could leave, and bathe, and lie down to dream of a house with a red-tiled roof near the sea. “You must forgive me,” Pitaji said as I looked out the window. I was surprised, for I could not remember his ever apologizing. “I sometimes forget that I will die soon and so act like a man who has many years left.” I felt frightened, for I suddenly wanted to love him but could not trust him enough.
From then until we went home, Pitaji spoke little. Once, I forgot to bring his lunch from home and he did not complain, whereas before he would have screamed and tried to make me feel guilty. A few times he began crying to himself for no reason, and when I asked why, he did not answer.
Around eleven the day Pitaji was released, an ambulance carried Ma, Pitaji, and me to the Old Vegetable Market. Two orderlies, muscular men in white uniforms, carried him on a stretcher up three flights of stairs into the flat. The flat had four rooms and was part of a circle of dilapidated buildings that shared a courtyard. Fourteen or fifteen people turned out to watch Pitaji’s return. Some of the very old women, sitting on cots in the courtyard, asked who Pitaji was, although he had lived there for twenty years. A few children climbed into the ambulance and played with the horn until they were chased out.
The orderlies laid Pitaji on the cot in his bedroom and left.
The room was small and dark, smelling faintly of the kerosene with which the bookshelves were treated every other week to prevent termites. Traveling had tired him, and he fell asleep quickly. He woke as I was about to leave. Ma and I were speaking in whispers outside his bedroom.
“I am used to his screaming,” Ma said. “He won’t get any greasy food here. But once he can walk . . .”
“He seems to have changed.”
“Right now he’s afraid. Give him a few days and he’ll return to normal. People can’t change, even if they want to.”
“What are you saying 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, “Nothing cold.” The clay pot held only enough for one glass. I knelt beside the cot and helped Pitaji rise to a forty-five-degree angle. His heaviness and the weakness of his body moved me. Like a baby holding a bottle, Pitaji held the glass with both hands and made sucking noises as he drank. I lowered him when his shoulder muscles slackened. His eyes were red, and they moved about the room slowly. I wondered whether I could safely love him if I did not reveal my feelings.
“More?” he asked.
“Only fridge water,” I said. Ma was clattering in the kitchen. “I am going home.”
“Rajinder is good?” He looked at the ceiling while speaking. “Yes,” I said. A handkerchief of light covered his face, and faint blue veins, like delicate, almost translucent roots, showed through the skin of his forehead. “The results for his exam came,” I told him. “He will be promoted. He was second in Delhi.” Pitaji closed his eyes. “Are you hurting?” I asked.
“I feel tired.”
I, too, felt tired. I did not know what to do with my new love or whether it would last. “That will pass, the doctor said. Why don’t you sleep?”
“I don’t want to,” he s
aid loudly, and my love drew back.
“I must go,” I said, but made no move to.
“Forgive me,” he said, and again I was surprised. “I am not worried usually, but I get frightened sometimes. Sometimes I dream that the heaviness is dirt. What an awful thing to be a Muslim or a Christian.” He spoke slowly, and I felt my love returning. “Once, I dreamed of Baby’s ghost.”
“Oh.”
“He was eight or nine and did not recognize me. He did not look like me. I was surprised, because he was my son and I had always expected him to look like me.”
I felt exhausted. Something about the story was both awkward and polished, which indicated deceit. But Pitaji never lied completely, and the tiring part was not knowing. “God will forgive you,” I said. But why should he? I thought. Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
“Your mother has not.”
I placed my hand on his, knowing that I was already in the trap. “Shhh.”
