by Akhil Sharma
Prasad Kumar put his hand on his son’s thigh. The bus swung around a corner. The conductor, a young man, was watching them in the rearview mirror. Prasad Kumar continued now in a full flow of tears, “If Mrs. Chauduri would just retire, I would then become senior junior officer. She comes to the office only once a week.” Arun stared out the window. He was unhappy. He sat still under his father’s hand. Where had his anger gone—the anger he’d felt when he heard his father shouting “Happy?”
Prasad Kumar gave several long shaking sighs, as if in satisfaction. Then he said, “I wonder what Mrs. Chauduri’s husband thinks of her not having breasts.” By the time they had crossed Malka Ganj and Arun could see the Old Clock Tower, his father’s sighs had almost ended. As they slowed for their stop, Prasad Kumar wiped his cheeks with both hands. “If I didn’t drink,” he said, “everything would be different for me.” Prasad Kumar yawned and unbuttoned one of his cuffs. Then he started on the other one, as if he were already home and undressing.
ARUN WAS TO BE MARRIED in three days. This was the last time he would be allowed out of the flat until the wedding. (The wedding deposits were nonrefundable; he had to be kept from the evil eye.) ‘‘As a wedding present, I’m going to hang myself from the fan above your bed,” said Suresh. Suresh was Arun’s twelve-year-old brother. “You’ll come into your room, turn on the light and the fan at the same time, and my body will start twisting.”
“You don’t weigh enough to choke by hanging,” Arun said.
“I’ll tie bricks to my feet.”
“If you want to stop the wedding, remember to kill yourself before, not after, we are married.” Now that the wedding was only a few days away, the family had begun making nervous jokes about how the marriage was a mistake.
It was night, and they were walking home through the Old Vegetable Market. The paths between the stalls were narrowing as their owners, in preparation for shutting down, threw rubbish out for the cows to eat. Only a few of the stalls still had their kerosene lamps lit, and at these the owners were stacking the plates of their scales. The air smelled of coriander and wet green things.
“Why don’t you run away?” Suresh said. “I can give you twenty-three rupees.” He had meant this to be a joke, but as this was all the money he had, the words came out with too much gravity. “Shoelaces cost ten,” Arun said.
They stopped and bought several bananas, each just a little longer than an index finger. Arun, distracted by his thoughts, was talking less and less these days. The brothers had only two more nights of sleeping on side-by-side cots on the open roof. All the nights after that, Arun and his new wife would be hidden from view in the roof’s only room, a small yellow one.
“I have to get strong for my wife,” Arun said, shoving a whole banana into his mouth.
Suresh put two bananas into his mouth and, pretending they were tusks, began to swing his head.
They continued walking. Suresh said, “She probably stinks because she’s fat.”
“Don’t say such a mean thing,” Arun said.
Suresh felt chided.
They took a few more steps and Arun slipped an arm around Suresh’s shoulders.
They left the stalls and proceeded along the high sidewalk that ran till Old Clock Tower Road met Malka Ganj Road at the police station. A few cots had been set out on the pavement, and there were men sitting on them and playing cards by candlelight. “Reasonable people cannot behave badly toward each other when both know that a marriage is for life,” Arun said.
They had reached the mouth of the alley that led to their doorway. Suresh wanted to say something, but he did not know what. “Let’s go drink some milk.”
“I want to get home,” Arun said. He paused, noticing how his silence was affecting Suresh, and added, “I’m not unhappy, I’m frightened.” He pinched the back of his brother’s neck. “Let’s go sleep.”
THE CEREMONY WENT ON all night in a tent in a field near the bride’s house. When the prayers had been said, Arun’s mother, Indira, hurried the bride along so that Arun’s relatives could go home and rest. There were about thirty in all, and by seven a chartered bus had unloaded them in the Old Vegetable Market. By eight they were all squeezed into the Kumars’ small flat, most of them (including three snoring children beneath the dining table) on the floor. Relatives were everywhere, all now deep in slumber. It was dark, and the only two people stirring were Namrita and her new mother-in-law.
Namrita was in the flat’s entry hall, sitting on a corner of a thin mattress in the entry hall. The rest of the space had been taken up by members of two heavily breathing families. Namrita was expected to stay up in case friends and well-wishers came around to call on her.
Her mother-in-law was squatting underneath a counter, looking into the flour tin. Indira, all sinews and deeply wrinkled loose skin, was anxious about the amount of food she was going to have to cook for the relatives. The kitchen was so narrow that only one person could move between the counters. As she examined the flour, she thought that mostly their relatives were selfish and unreliable.
“Where is the shampoo, please?” Namrita asked. She was standing in the kitchen doorway with her sari pulled up to veil her face. She was plump enough that her stomach hung over the waist of her sari.
“We don’t have shampoo,” Indira said.
Namrita didn’t move.
“Could someone get shampoo?” Namrita asked.
“Use soap,” Indira said abruptly, and more loudly than she had intended.
Namrita left.
After marrying Prasad Kumar, Indira had moved into his family’s home, where, disliking her without cause, his sisters had hidden the soap. She had remained silent on the matter, not wishing to appear a complainer. Now, in a similar situation, Namrita’s question appeared so bold that Indira wondered whether something was wrong with the girl’s mind. There had already been difficulties in getting the promised dowry. To be completely deceived into accepting a daughter-in-law who was crazy did not, under the circumstances, appear impossible. In fact, Indira knew of several marriages in which madness (and worse) was discovered after everything had been done, and the only solution had been divorce. A nephew of hers was still with a woman who was periodically possessed by ghosts. And the son of an acquaintance had married a heroin addict, whose habit was discovered only when syringes started clogging the toilet. A cousin had married a man who always wore socks, even when he was in the bath. Later, her cousin tugged off his socks while he was asleep and found leprous purple stumps.
Forty minutes later, Namrita returned.
“Can I do some yoga?” she asked. “Otherwise I might fall asleep.”
Namrita’s eccentricity was starting to make Indira genuinely afraid.
“Where?”
“On the roof, maybe?”
On the roof! She imagined her heavy daughter-in-law sitting up there before the world, trying to drag a leg behind her neck. She was now certain that Namrita was mad.
“Go back and sit,” Indira hissed.
Indira washed her hands and then went to wake her husband. Prasad Kumar was asleep on the floor with his body halfway beneath a cot.
Indira nudged her husband awake.
“Come outside,” she whispered.
They went onto the balcony, which looked down over a squatter colony made up of mud huts. It was so hot they were both sweating.
“This girl,” Indira said, but her voice came out so shrill that she stopped. She climbed a short flight of steps to the roof. Her husband followed.
Arun was sleeping in the roof’s small yellow room. “This girl is crazy,” Indira said in a quieter voice. She told him about the shampoo and the yoga, glancing at Arun’s room as she spoke.
“That’s not so bad,” Prasad Kumar said. “You’re that crazy yourself?”
“Going to the open roof to do yoga? The day after your
wedding?”
Prasad Kumar lifted a shoulder in a tired shrug. “You haven’t slept,” he said
.
“I was seventeen when I married you and had better manners. Namrita is twenty-three.”
“Her mother is crazy, too,” said Prasad Kumar.
They heard steps coming up the stairs. It was Suresh. The latrine was near the balcony.
“Has there been a murder?” he asked.
“Your mother thinks Namrita is crazy.”
Suresh smiled at the possibility of scandal. “Why?”
Indira explained.
“That is strange,” he said, and a moment later added, “My question is, where is the dowry?”
Namrita’s family had provided the dowry in the form of furniture instead of cash. They had done this without consulting anyone. But there was no space in the flat, and the furniture had been returned and a promise of cash extracted. Arun’s family had expected the money at the wedding, but only a few thousand rupees had turned up.
“They give us a washer and we have water two hours a day?” Indira said. Arun’s family had been persuaded to keep a large washing machine. It had been put in the yellow room on the roof. “Would sane people do that?”
“Oh, God,” Prasad Kumar sighed. The possibility of no dowry suddenly seemed real.
“Return the girl,” Indira said. She was feeling cheated.
“We could have got a motorcycle, a Honda, for Arun,” Suresh said, needling his father. “But if you return her now, her parents will go to the police saying that we demanded money.”
“How could I know they would be so cunning?” Prasad Kumar said in a heavy voice.
Suresh went to the room on the roof and knocked.
“Hello,” Arun called from inside.
He was smiling when he opened the door, and Indira wondered if he had been awake, listening to them. The ceiling fan was spinning, and the floor was wet from the water Arun had poured out to evaporate and dull the heat. Arun went back to the bed and lay down. He was wearing only shorts, and his stomach spread out on either side of him. Everyone stepped inside and sat along the edge of the bed.
Indira told the yoga story once more. Telling it so often was beginning to take away its power for her.
“Couldn’t she be crazy?” she asked.
“She’s not like us,” Arun said softly.
“Who gives a washing machine to someone in the Old Vegetable Market?” Prasad Kumar asked. The washer was in a corner, covered with a yellow sheet.
“What about the dowry?” Suresh asked.
“That money is gone,” Arun said, and chuckled.
“What are you showing your teeth for?” Indira said.
“It’s a good day. I’ve gotten married. That’s why I’m laughing,” Arun said. He grabbed his stomach and shook it.
“The boy’s gone crazy for the girl,” Prasad Kumar said, disgusted.
“See, ‘crazy,’ ” Arun said, holding his stomach to be looked at.
“Quiet,” Indira said. “All Delhi is sleeping downstairs.”
Suresh lay down beside his brother and fell asleep almost immediately. Then Prasad Kumar crawled over them and put a pillow beneath his own head. Indira stood and watched and still felt that some wrong had been done her, but she did not know whom to blame.
“You can’t sleep because of the pain that big smile causes?” Indira asked.
Arun giggled. He did not close his eyes, and Indira did not move. She had begun to feel tired.
There was a knock. It was Namrita. Arun covered his bare chest with a pillow. Namrita was holding a tray with five cups of tea and a saucer of sugar. She kept a fold of her sari over her face by clenching it between her teeth.
Namrita eyed the room. “What’s under the sheet?” she asked.
“A washing machine,” Suresh answered, staring at her.
“Why?”
“Your father gave it,” Prasad Kumar said.
“You don’t use it?”
“Two buckets of water a day would be more useful.”
When Namrita realized the problem, she began laughing, and the fold of sari that had been covering her face slid onto her shoulders. “You can store clothes in it,” she said. Arun began laughing, too. Namrita smiled at him, and Indira thought for the first time that what she had first seen as a sign of insanity might just be directness.
It made her think of her own marriage, how bravely and willfully she had entered it. She hadn’t asked questions of anyone; she had wanted only to do what was expected of her—that, she believed, would win her happiness. A sadness rushed upon Indira, and she spilled her tea.
“There’s more in the pot downstairs,” Namrita said.
Namrita held the tea tray by her side, between thumb and forefinger, as she stood before them, drinking from her cup. For Indira, this casualness suddenly looked like cheerful hopefulness.
“Sit, Namrita, if you want,” she said.
THE RAINDROPS FELL so fast on the bus roof that the clicking was like hail. It was the first rain. Prasad Kumar awakened and pulled himself up straight in his seat. The monsoon had been delayed again and again, until even August had appeared likely to pass without relief. He pushed open the bus window a little. Because there were no trees in the Old Vegetable Market, Prasad Kumar wondered whether the sweetness he smelled might be coming from the concrete of the buildings along the road. Within minutes, summer was gone. The plastic of the seat did not burn. It was possible to look into the sky without squinting.
As the bus moved slowly through traffic, clumps of naked boys began to appear on the sidewalk. Women with loose hair came out, and could be seen standing around, talking. And old men who believed in the healing powers of the first rain began climbing onto the roofs one by one. They were dark against a dark sky.
At the bus stand, the passengers got off slowly in newfound ease. The puddles on the road looked as if they were simmering. Prasad Kumar decided that he would buy samosas on his way home, and his family would eat them together and drink tea. He was glad to be returning home instead of going to work. Since the wedding, three months earlier, he had found himself wanting to be home more often. When he was out in the world, he felt as if there were too much of himself.
Soon after the bus started, there was a commotion in the back. A twelve-year-old boy was trying to get on without paying. The conductor was hunched over, his arms wrapped around the boy, who then lurched backward and dropped to the floor, slipping from the conductor’s grip. Within a few seconds, the boy had crawled to the middle of the bus. He was wearing blue shorts and a dirty white shirt that was too big for him.
As the boy got up, he began to sing. He stood confidently, with one hand in his pocket, swaying a little with the motion of the bus.
He sang without appearing to pay attention to the song, but his voice was so steady, emotional, and intelligent that Prasad Kumar was startled. He himself had once been a very good singer, and this almost forgotten talent had remained one of the secret sources of his own sense of himself. Meeting someone else who could sing as he had sung made him uneasy.
The boy’s first song was well-known. It was about a saint who had gone on a fast to persuade God to end a drought and had died as the rains started. In the boy’s mouth, the saint seemed to have a pride that Prasad Kumar had never noticed before.
“Here,” a young woman said, and held out a two-rupee note to the boy. The boy started an Amitabh Bachchan song about all the fat, short, tall, thin wives a man could have and what it meant for his happiness. The song was famous from the movies, and went over even better than the one about the saint. This time several passengers held up money for the boy and tried talking to him in a friendly way when he came around to collect it. He only said thank you.
“For every song I now sing, I want fifty rupees,” the boy then announced. Prasad Kumar had never heard a street performer make such a demand.
“A heart is such a heavy thing that we’re always looking to give it away,” the boy sang sweetly, and Prasad Kumar closed his eyes to listen. Ever since Arun got married and got his new job, Prasad Ku
mar’s life had changed: parts of what he had always imagined to be his fixed nature seemed to be leaving him. He had not been drunk in months. He was rarely angry. Now that he had completed one of his great responsibilities—marrying off his elder son—he had begun to see that his final task of protecting Suresh would not be impossible. Or perhaps he just felt old.
For the first song, the boy gathered sixty-eight rupees. For the next, he received fifty-four. But for the third he got only forty-one. Prasad Kumar wondered if he was going to show some contempt for his audience.
“Thank you,” the boy said, grinning. He then went to the front steps of the bus and stood there without looking back. When his stop came, the boy turned and shouted “Goodbye!” and then got off.
On the sidewalk, he walked with purpose, as if he were going somewhere in particular. The bus started, and the boy was out of sight.
Prasad Kumar bought samosas on his way home. In the flat, Arun and Namrita were reading a magazine together. Suresh was doing his homework. While Indira made tea, Prasad Kumar climbed onto the roof and stood in the rain like the rest of the old men.
YOU ARE HAPPY?
“Break her arms, break her legs,” Lakshman’s grandmother would say about his mother, “then see how she crawls to her bottle.” What she said made sense. Lakshman’s father refused to beat her, though. “This is America. I will go to jail and you will be sitting in India eating warm pakoras.” To Lakshman, his father seemed unmanly for not taking charge.
Every time they went to a party, it was the same thing.
Before they left the house, his father would wipe down his comb. He would tuck a handkerchief into his pants pocket. He would get out the notebook in which he kept the lyrics of movie songs because he liked to sing and hoped somebody would ask him to.
The parties were segregated: there was the kitchen where the women gathered and there was the living room where the men stood and talked about politics, investments. His mother was thirty-two, short, stocky, curly haired. She would stir up trouble. Even the way she said ordinary things sounded doubting. “You are happy?” she would say to a woman, as if the woman were overlooking something. The surprised person would then feel she had to explain her happiness. The other women in the kitchen were not used to this kind of behavior. They would grow quiet and look at her and his mother would stand silently, appearing pleased, and take a sip of scotch. The fact that his mother drank was also unusual. Perhaps she did it to be different from the other women, perhaps it was to be like a man and therefore more important. When she had gotten a little bit drunk, she would go into the living room. She would stand among the men and drink from a small glass and talk about stocks and the World Bank. The men looked at her with condescension and irritation, not so much because she was a woman but because she was a woman and pretending to know things she did not, and vanity and foolishness that were tolerable in a man were not tolerable in a woman.
