Ghachar Ghochar

by Vivek Shanbhag

  I had broken into her world when she wasn’t around. She would certainly not have approved in her present frame of mind. Still, I persisted. I sifted through her jewelry, wrapped a string of beads around my fingers. I touched her clothes. I rummaged through her papers. I weighed in my palm a pendant cast in the form of the sun. Anita’s entire world was contained in that wardrobe. We had not bought anything together after our time in Ooty. I leaned into one of the shelves, amid the clothes, and breathed deep. It was a smell I could not identify, but I had come to know it so well. I took a sari and sniffed it. The scent seemed to diminish rather than intensify. It was the same with any garment I picked out of the wardrobe. Whatever fragrance the whole wardrobe had was missing in the individual clothes it held. The more keenly I sought it, the further it receded. A strange mixture of feelings I could not quite grasp—love, fear, entitlement, desire, frustration—flooded through me until it seemed like I would break.

  • • •

  The next Sunday, that is, the day before yesterday, we were all together at home. Anita was still in Hyderabad, due to return soon. It was a dull, overcast day. I took a nap after lunch, then lazed about in bed for a while. I got up, washed my face, and, as I came down the stairs for some tea, I saw Amma.

  She was sitting alone in the living room staring at the wall. The TV was off. She seemed deep in contemplation. I thought of that night, years ago, when I woke up to find her squatting in the kitchen, gazing at the wall by the glow of a flashlight. “What is it, Amma?” I asked. She started. I had used the same words that night, too, and she’d reacted the same way.

  “Come,” she said. “I’ll make some tea. Didn’t feel like making some just for myself so I was waiting for one of you.” I could guess what she had been thinking—the chaos Anita had created the previous week, how to clear the muck that had risen to the surface when Anita had stirred up the waters.

  I followed her to the kitchen door. The counter was sparkling—Amma always cleaned up after lunch. I stood in the doorway as she made tea. I couldn’t help remembering the day we first got our gas stove and how she had made tea with such eagerness. It seemed like only yesterday. Now, as she put water on the stove, she said, “Call Appa. I can make his tea along with ours.” I didn’t feel like leaving the kitchen. I called out for him, but it was Chikkappa and Malati who came down the stairs. “Good job,” Amma said. “Now I can make tea for everyone in one go.” She added more water to the kettle on the stove. The clouds thickened outside; the house turned a shade darker. It had been years since she’d made tea like this for the whole family. The last time she had, it was not a happy occasion—it was the day Malati stormed her husband’s house and returned with her gold. I had entered the house to find everyone else gathered in the living room, and Amma had gotten up to make tea.

  I took out cups and saucers and set them on the table.

  That morning Appa had brought home my favorite rusk. It came from a bakery near our old house. He’d been over on that side of town after a long time. I used to find this particular rusk so irresistible that if left to myself I’d eat the whole packet. “It’s a good thing he remembered,” Amma said. She must have asked him to buy it. It had been a while since Appa had bought anything on his own initiative.

  I took one and raised it to my mouth. After all this time it still tasted the same. If anything, it was richer now for evoking a simpler time. I felt light.

  We sat down at the dining table, one by one. Only Appa was still missing. Amma was clearly overjoyed at seeing all of us gathered like this. She said nothing, but you could see it in the briskness of her stride, her movements, the way she looked at us. The light from the clouded-over sky dimmed further. Now it felt exactly like our old house. Amma brought out the tea. Malati sang out, “Pour it fast, Amma,” as she used to when she was a child. The light, the taste of rusk, all of us close together took us back to the old days. But there was still no trace of Appa.

  “Where is our Coffee King?” Chikkappa asked.

  That single question eased knots that had tightened over the years. At one time, Chikkappa had given nicknames to everyone in the family, and Appa’s had been Coffee King. Chikkappa might say, “Looks like Coffee King has had a long day,” or: “Today’s sales must have been good. Look at Coffee King’s swagger,” and you’d see Appa soften.

  There was a story behind each of our nicknames. Appa’s was given to him on one of our Sunday outings for snacks. We had passed a shop selling coffee powder and noticed a board outside that read, Coffee King—the king of kings. Later, Appa and Amma shared a coffee as usual. As Appa slurped his coffee, Chikkappa said, “Coffee King is drinking coffee,” and we all laughed.

  I had acquired a reputation for grumbling as a boy and so was called Kurkure. Malati was Queen M. “Hello, Queen M, you’re looking stunning today,” he might say, and her face would light up with pleasure. I’ve always wondered if she’d have turned out as spoiled without his pampering. Amma was Annadaate, because it was she who fed us all. At times when she kept us waiting for meals, we might call out: “O Annadaate, please Annadaate, won’t you give us some food?” Chikkappa was Jugnu to me and Malati from the time he animatedly described to us a scene from the film Jugnu in which Dharmendra descends headfirst down a rope from a high roof to steal a diamond.

  These names had more or less fallen out of use once we moved to the new house. We no longer spent enough time in one another’s company to invoke them. Even when we did meet, at mealtimes and so on, we tended to be distracted. Had things gone on as before perhaps Chikkappa would have given a nickname to Anita, too.

  Amma shouted out to Malati from the kitchen to go call Appa. Malati rushed off and returned with him. He could not have failed to notice the festive air. Amma served us all tea, asked if anyone needed more sugar, then sat down at the table.

  “Nothing like the rusk from Appanna’s bakery,” Chikkappa said.

  “Yes. He doesn’t skimp on the butter,” Amma said.

  “He adds milk powder to the dough. He once told me himself,” Malati said. “But his rusk costs five rupees more than others.”

  Appa quoted the saying: “Cakes as good as the coins they cost.” It was literally true in this case and we all laughed. Appa beamed. It seemed like years since any of us had acknowledged his jokes.

  Chikkappa drank his tea quickly and said to Malati, “Queen M—what do you say to another round of tea?”

  “Anything for Jugnu,” she said playfully, and got up to go to the kitchen.

  “I have something for you,” Chikkappa told Malati. When she asked what it was, he said, “First the tea. I’ll give it to you if the tea is good.”

  “At least tell me what it is,” she said.

  Chikkappa yielded. “Earrings,” he said. “I accompanied a friend yesterday while he shopped for his sister’s wedding. They were all buying earrings. Thought I’d buy a pair, too.”

  “Thank you, Jugnu,” Malati said. “No one in this house has bought me a thing since my wedding.”

  I said, “But you’re always shopping for yourself.”

  “Oh, you keep quiet,” she said, smiling, and went into the kitchen.

  Amma called after her, “The tea powder is on the opposite shelf.”

  Malati emerged in a few minutes with a large cup of tea. “Hotter and stronger than Amma’s,” she said, placing it in front of Chikkappa.

  He laughed. “As if I wouldn’t give them to you regardless,” he said. “I bought them for you, after all.”

  The house had come alive with banter. It was as if Anita’s absence had allowed us to be ourselves again, without inhibitions. Amma was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen for a long time. Appa was in good spirits, too. He launched into some news from his morning’s expedition. “You remember Manjunath who lived on our old street? It seems his father died in his sleep the other day while he was visiting Manjunath. The same man who w
on the best-teacher award . . . They’ve run his photo in the paper today.”

  Malati said, “Wasn’t he the one who found it hard to live in Bangalore and so moved back to his village?”

  “Yes, that’s him. I stopped by this morning to talk to Manjunath.”

  “I don’t know,” Amma said. “I get the shivers when I think of that house. Who knows if he died in his sleep or if it was something else . . .”

  “Why do you say that, Amma?” Malati asked.

  Appa cut in: “Oh, she’s always been suspicious of anything to do with them . . . She said similar things when Manjunath’s wife died.”

  “Of course I did,” Amma said. “The whole town knows Manjunath killed his wife. Wasn’t it just after that that the old man ran off to the village?” She looked at Appa: “Of course, you would take her side anyway. I wonder what it was about her . . . All these men would hang around Manjunath’s house on the pretext of wanting to talk to him just to get a glimpse of her. They’d sit at his shop in groups. She was fine in the evening. How did she end up dead later that night?”

  “Amma, whatever you do don’t bring these matters up when others are present,” Malati said.

  “Why should I bring anything up?” Amma said. “Anyway, there is no one else here at the moment. And none of those types who will point out the mustard seed under your feet, but are blind to the pumpkin beneath them.”

  It was clear whom she was referring to. Everyone laughed; I joined in, too, and regretted it even as I did. I had betrayed Anita.

  Chikkappa spoke: “None of you know the whole story about Manjunath’s wife. Everyone heard the commotion in the morning about her being unconscious. They saw her being carried into a van and rushed off somewhere. But no one knows which hospital they took her to or what they did there. They returned with the body in the evening. I’ll tell you—she was already dead when they left the house. They didn’t even go to a hospital. They just drove around all day and returned in the evening with the body wrapped in a white cloth. The police were bribed; the body was cremated hastily. Her family was naïve, too—they were even looking forward to Manjunath marrying her sister. He went back on his word soon enough, of course . . .”

  “She wasn’t blameless,” Amma added. “There was a terrible fight about her behavior in the night. It seems she said something terrible to her husband and he lost his temper and strangled her. He probably didn’t think she would die.”

  “No one knows how exactly she died,” Chikkappa continued. “The family went around claiming she had all sorts of ailments, but it was complete nonsense. She was perfectly fine. Who dies suddenly of natural causes at such a young age? You’ve got to hand it to Manjunath, though. He’s managed to get away with it without any consequences . . .”

  There was a long silence. Then Malati chimed in with an altogether different story. There’d been a report in the newspaper about a woman who had died two years ago of burns resulting from a gas leak in the kitchen. It had been proven that her husband’s family had planned the accident. “They knew she was the first to enter the kitchen in the morning,” Malati said. “So they left the gas on at night and closed the kitchen door. She was on fire as soon as she turned on the light switch. The family didn’t come to her help for the longest time despite her screams. She said so in her statement before she died, and the husband and in-laws confessed under questioning. But in court they claimed it was all an accident and that the police forced a confession out of them. They were all released . . .”

  “These days murder has become commonplace,” Chikkappa said. “People go ahead and kill someone, but then they get caught. Remember that techie who recently killed his wife? He was caught because of his overplanning.” He laughed.

  Malati said, “You’re talking about that Suniti murder, right? The poor fellow was caught despite using two SIM cards to hide his location. She was my friend’s brother’s colleague. Very argumentative at work. And apparently with her in-laws as well. No wonder he was driven to get rid of her.”

  “The idiot,” Chikkappa said. “He confessed that he killed her because she wasn’t taking care of his parents. She’s dead and he’s in jail. Who’s taking care of them now? If only he had planned a little better . . .”

  Malati asked what he could have done.

  Chikkappa sighed. “This is what happens to people who think they know everything just because they are educated and have watched a few films. You should hear Ravi talking about his gang’s exploits. Some of the accidents they’ve planned are simply unbelievable.”

  “Who? Your friend Ravi?” I thought Malati’s voice sounded a touch more excited than it needed to be.

  “The very same. You should hear him and his friends making plans—theirs is an entirely different world. He once told me that the murder weapon is crucial in murder cases that go to court. So the best way to protect oneself is to not have a weapon at all.”

  “Meaning what? Use one’s hands?”

  “That’s what I asked, too. He said to stop being silly. No, they have all sorts of ways. They have people come in from faraway states who vanish as soon as the job is done. Say a man is walking on a lonely street and a vehicle without plates knocks him to the ground and speeds away. Who are you going to catch? Ravi said it’s those who kill in anger, smash someone’s head in, or stick a knife into their victim . . . They’re the ones who get caught. Not the levelheaded ones. Think about it, there are so many ways a person could die . . .”

  “What are you people saying?” Appa asked. He looked upset. “You’re talking as if it’s all right to kill someone when it suits us.”

  Chikkappa sighed. “Coffee King is living in another age,” he said. “These things are not as big a deal today. I haven’t brought it up before—but do you know how much I pay as protection money on behalf of Sona Masala? Everyone else does it, too. You never know when you might need these people. It’s practically a collective responsibility of businessmen now to ensure they are looked after . . .”

  There was an awkward silence. We all knew Appa hated anything even mildly unscrupulous. Usually we made sure no such talk came up—what if he reacted in some extreme way? What if he decided he’d had enough of all this and gave away his money?

  As usual I hadn’t said anything, but my very silence implicated me. Appa got up and left; then the rest of us, too, one by one.

  I rushed to Coffee House in some agitation. As Vincent placed my coffee on the table, I said to him distractedly that I hoped his family was well. He nodded, and with a faint smile said, “Blood is thicker than water, isn’t it, sir?”

  I began to shiver at the mention of blood. Whatever the meaning of the saying, why should he bring up blood at a time like this? He was at least kind enough to pretend not to notice my discomfort. He went away without speaking another word.

  • • •

  Now it’s Tuesday. Anita hasn’t called since she left. Going by the ticket I booked for her, she should have been back yesterday afternoon. I haven’t returned home since I left yesterday morning. Haven’t been able to summon the courage. Slept on the sofa in my office at the warehouse. Roamed here and there all morning, and now I’m at Coffee House. It’s imperative I speak to Vincent. I keep telling myself everything is fine but I can’t convince myself. Why hasn’t she called? She would have if she’d arrived. No one else has called, either. Chikkappa saw me this morning, but said nothing.

  I’m sitting here, waiting anxiously. For what, I don’t know. The phone rings. I grab it and look at the screen. An unknown number.

  I answer: “Hello?”

  A voice at the other end: “Hello, Gopi, is that you?”

  No, it’s not.

  “Wrong number,” I say, not very politely, and hang up. My mind is in a whirl. Why today of all days must I receive these useless calls? First that insurance agent, now this. Could it be a sign?

  May
be Anita hasn’t returned from Hyderabad. Or maybe she’s back and hasn’t called because she’s still mad at me. Could she have had an accident on her way from the train station? What if a lorry slammed into her as she got out of the auto-rickshaw outside our house? Or could something have happened to her after she came home? What if she’s killed herself? Everything she might need is there. A roll of rope, electric current, sleeping pills. A tall building not too far away. Two women to goad her—what agent of death is as discreet as words?

  Enough of this madness! Let me go home now. I reach for the glass of water in front of me. It shatters in my hand. Vincent comes running, folds up the tablecloth, making sure none of the water falls on me. He seats me at the next table and brings another coffee without my having to ask.

  I sit there trying to compose myself, sipping the coffee with some determination.

  As he’s passing by on his way to another table, Vincent says, “Sir, you may want to wash your hand. There’s blood on it.”

  I freeze. What is happening? What have I become entangled in? There must be some way out of all this. The words rush into my head of their own accord: ghachar ghochar.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author and translator thank: their agents, Shruti Debi and Anna Stein; the editors of the Indian edition, Ajitha G.S. and Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri; for the enormously perceptive comments and edits that shaped this edition, Lindsey Schwoeri; and the others at Penguin USA who helped bring this book to its final form, including Patrick Nolan, Emily Hartley, Roseanne Serra, Colin Webber, and Elke Sigal.

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