The City Son

by Samrat Upadhyay

  She can’t think of telling any of this to her mother. She can’t imagine telling her that when she’s trying so desperately with Tarun and he’s not responding, she begins to think of her Newar lover. Her Newar lover was, if anything, a master of licking and crooning and whispering sweet nothings. His fingers were soft and sensitive as they meandered over her body and touched and tormented her. He knew how to move forward boldly and to withdraw, to bring his breath close to her ear and tell her how special she was, and oh what would he do without her. He composed poems about her, and he read them to her with his lips burning with love.

  Rukma can’t imagine saying to her mother that one morning in bed she asked Tarun whether they should go see a doctor. She was careful to say “we” instead of “you.”

  “What for?” he asked, not meeting her gaze. He was fiddling with the radio.

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something medical.”

  He found the station he was looking for. “You think it’s a medical issue?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Tarun,” she said, raising her voice. “I just want to solve this.”

  He turned to her. “Look, I know you’re having difficulties with me, but I don’t want to visit any doctors.”

  She said nothing more.

  There’s a melancholy quality to his face. A sad child, that’s what he looks like: shoulders hunched, eyes large and bewildered, trying to understand an incomprehensible and unpredictable world that has thrown him around quite a bit. She can’t even imagine how disorienting and traumatic it must have been for him to move away from Bangemudha to Kupondole and to have his mother’s mental state deteriorate so rapidly. But whenever she has prodded him about his childhood, he’s been reticent.

  One day when the two are in the living room she brings up the topic of his childhood. He tells her that in the end, things haven’t turned out so badly for him, have they? Although Mahesh Enterprises suffered a blow, business has started to recover. He doesn’t lack for money, and he has Mahesh Uncle as a father figure. When she asks him whether he misses his mother, he says that her mental illness prevented his mother from being present in his life when he needed her the most. His face becomes transformed. “Now Didi is my mother. She’s everything.”

  The “everything” pinches her, but she decides to ignore it. “Aren’t you going to take me to visit her?”

  “One of these days.”

  “But, Tarun, it’s been weeks since our wedding, and you yourself said that she’s more like—”

  “She’s a bit possessive of me.”

  “Possessive?”

  “Yes, she has a tendency toward—how shall I say it? She can be—”

  “Jealous?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Jealous of me? But I’m your wife.”

  “She just needs some time.”

  “What are you saying? I’m married to you, and she’s like your mother. Wouldn’t she also want to see me?”

  He stands from the sofa and moves toward the stairs. “She’s not ready for you.”

  She has to hide her hurt and shock because Mahesh Uncle has come down for tea. “What’s the conversation between the newlyweds?” he asks. He still calls them newlyweds, even though close to seven weeks have passed since the wedding. “Nothing,” she mumbles. Is Mahesh Uncle blind to the strained relationship she has with Tarun? But increasingly Mahesh Uncle does resemble a man who feels like his duties are done, both at work and at home. He lounges in his room all day, drinking his frothy coffee and listening to his raag. He has cut down on most of his social events. “I’m too old,” he says, and he acts old, shuffling around the house in his robe, his back slightly stooped, holding a newspaper in his hand that he seems to read and reread throughout the day. When he comes down, he peers for long stretches at the Japanese garden. He’s still attached to that garden but not enough for him to open the French windows and step out and muddy himself. When Tarun and Rukma sit with him in the living room, he is pleased but shortly afterward he goes upstairs, to give them privacy, Rukma presumes. This is your house, not mine, he appears to be conveying, and increasingly his demeanor is one of a long-term paying guest who is waiting for a message to come so he can pack his bags and leave. And Sanmaya—she is so giddy in her own world, so beside herself that her Tarun babu is married and that there’s another woman in the house, that she is blind to clues about things not right between the couple. But Rukma can’t blame her: her world has been one of men, of serving men and taking care of their needs. So it wouldn’t cross her mind that the wife may be unhappy.

  Out of the frying pan into the fire. From her Newar lover to this.

  One morning she recalls the proclamations she made to Tarun during their first meeting, about the need to do something good in this world. Where had all that high philosophy gone? How quickly, wrapped up in her domestic drama, has she forgotten. There’s nothing preventing her from getting up and going out. So that morning soon after Tarun goes to work, she leaves the house. Mahesh Uncle is still sleeping, and Sanmaya is singing and pottering around in the storage room when Rukma sneaks away.

  She goes to a shelter near the temple of Pashupatinath. The shelter doesn’t match the grandiose words she’d thrown at Tarun, but it matches the smallness inside her. She knows this place through a college friend, who brought her here about a year ago. The friend was an idealist, and Rukma was at that time swaying only to the love tunes of her Newar lover. She thought her friend, Sahara, was too giving, too self-punishing and austere, wanting no pleasure for herself. On the road to the main temple complex, it’s a shelter to take care of the destitute, the sick, and the elderly. Either through a sense of cruelty or irony, one of the founders had named it Swarga. But it’s far from the heaven its name suggests. A dilapidated house that includes a large veranda open to the gaze of passersby, it’s filled with cries of pain, mad ramblings, and open and festering wounds where flies congregate. The air stinks. That day a year ago Sahara immediately got to work: comforting an old woman whose son had kicked her out of her home, encouraging a sick and emaciated man to take his pills, inspecting a young girl who was suspected of having been sexually abused by her uncle. Rukma watched Sahara, then it became too much for her, and she left. She phoned her Newar lover from a shop on the way. As she went to meet him, an intense feeling of dislike arose in her toward the people she’d encountered at the shelter, even as she understood that they were incapacitated and needed help. This thought strode into her mind aggressively: I want no part of it. It’s not my life! You bring what you bring into this world, and you need to deal with it, by yourself.

  Now, visiting Swarga provides some solace. She goes there in the afternoons, and just like Sahara did, she holds the wrinkled hands of old people, talks to them in a calm voice whether they comprehend her or not. One day she ends up cleaning an old man who has been suffering from chronic diarrhea. Usually there’s another woman who performs these low tasks, a taciturn woman who executes them with an alarming serenity. But this woman isn’t in today, and here’s this old man with soiled trousers. “La, eta aunus,” Rukma commands him. He’s squatting on the veranda, and he stands with some difficulty and walks into the room where there are a few other people in various forms of misery. Watery feces drip from his trousers; there’s a big brown spot on his crotch area. She leads him to the inner room, which serves both as the kitchen and the bath, with one corner for a stove and pots and pans and the other with a tap. “Suruwal kholnus,” she tells the old man when they reach the tap. With fumbling fingers he struggles with the string of his trousers. This goes on for a long time, so she reaches out and tries to pry open the knot. But she can’t. So she kneels and uses her teeth to gnaw through one knot that’s refusing to budge. The stench coming off his body makes her gag. The old man appears perplexed by her action, but he stands like a good patient, once in a while a soft hmm escaping his mouth. By the time she manages to get his trousers off his legs, her stomach is silently convuls
ing. She steps away from him and takes deep breaths.

  She removes his soiled underwear and, using a couple of buckets, begins to wash him. His behind is splattered with his excrement, and diarrheal rivulets run down his legs. I can’t do this, I can’t, she tells herself—yet she continues to wash him. She rubs her index finger up and down his anus as she pours water over it. She soaps and rinses his scrotum. She washes his thighs and knees and ankles. This is not my job, what is wrong with me, how pathetic my life has become—these sentiments are at the forefront of her mind. But she continues bathing the old man until his skin shines. By the time the buckets are emptied twice, he is smiling. She wipes him off with a paper-thin towel that someone has briskly handed to her; she wraps it around his waist and asks him to stay put. She runs to the shop across the street, buys a pair of cheap trousers and a shirt (what better use does she have for the money?) and returns to Swarga. The old man breaks into a smile, and with his new clothes on him he puts his hand on top of her head in blessing. She laughs derisively. On her way back home she carries with her a small smile, one that gradually diminishes as she approaches Lazimpat.

  Rukma goes to visit her parents. Her father has a couple of errands to run, so he leaves shortly. Her mother asks her how things are, but before Rukma can respond fully her mother starts complaining about her husband. Rukma offers counsel. After a while her mother stops her complaints and tells Rukma how happy she is for her daughter. “You are lucky. You have found a husband who doesn’t give you any grief.”

  Didi asks Tarun to take her to a movie. He is surprised, for she has not expressed interest in movies before. She’s aware of some of the popular actors, but she’s snatched their names from conversations or from advertisement posters. “Come pick me up at work,” she says. And when he goes to Ladys Fashion after work and observes her from the door, he is slightly taken aback by the amount of makeup she’s applied to her face. She’s also in a bright red sari, something she might have worn on her wedding day in the village. The owner comes to him and says, “You and Didi attending someone’s wedding today? I’ve never seen her this decked up.” He’s slightly embarrassed and mumbles, “Something like that.” Didi comes to Tarun, takes his hand in hers, and says to her boss, “Today my son and I, we have our own plans.”

  It’s clear that she has thought of this outing as akin to a date. She sticks close to him when they stroll through the swarm of New Road toward Ranjana Cinema Hall. At one point, she even slips her hand into his. He likes it but is embarrassed by it, so he slowly pulls his hand away. Once they purchase the tickets inside the theater compound, she expresses a desire for golgappa. He takes her to the golgappa cart, where the vendor dips the wafer balls into a bucket of spiced water one at a time, and they eat them standing. Didi wants to be fed by Tarun, so she asks him to put the wafers into her mouth. She licks his finger as a girlfriend might. He looks around. He wonders what Rukma would think if she saw them now. Inside, in the dark theater in the back row against the wall, Didi kisses him deeply, as she kisses him in Bangemudha. He returns the kiss, and intermittently throughout the film they exchange kisses.

  Rukma has lost touch with most of her college friends, a couple of whom have also married and are now engrossed in their own domestic lives. Two of her friends have gone abroad, to England and America, for further studies. With one or two remaining friends she occasionally talks on the phone, but their chirpy voices have begun to depress her, and the conversation fizzles out because she often doesn’t have much to contribute. A friend makes plans for a reunion. But when she considers what that gathering might look like, she decides not to go. What will she talk about? The mountain-like silence between her and Tarun? When her friends delve into nostalgic remembrances of the past, will she walk out because she’ll be reminded of how much she’s lost? Besides, that younger Rukma, the one who spent hours shampooing and hennaing her hair, who liked eating kulfi, and going to upscale restaurants and dance parties, now appears to her as from the wrong end of a telescope, a figure so tiny it might as well be someone else. The Rukma that’s most visible and present to her, in a twistedly painful way, is the Rukma with the Newar lover, and that Rukma, in her besottedness and her gaiety, is such a foolish Rukma, such a loser, that this Rukma has developed a strong revulsion toward her. So the gatherings that her friends organize occur without her.

  Day by day the silence between Rukma and Tarun grows. They will be in the living room, for example, sitting on the same sofa, and he’ll be busy reviewing some office documents or on the phone with someone, and she’ll be reading a book or a magazine, or pretending to. She’ll want to say something to him, but the words rise to her throat and linger, then descend to her chest, where they become lost in a confusing swirl. As the days go by, the silence deepens.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ON SWARGA’S VERANDA Rukma is trying to feed jaulo to a demented woman when she hears someone calling her name. She turns toward the streets; there is Sahara, the friend who initially brought her to Swarga. “I am so surprised to see you!” Sahara exclaims. She is wearing dark glasses, a pair of fancy trousers, and has a bright, glamorous shawl wrapped around her. In contrast, Rukma is in an old sari that, because it’s seen so much use, has begun to resemble a dhoti now. How much difference a short time makes. When they came to Swarga last year Sahara was the one wearing the simplest of clothes, cheap jeans and a frayed shirt that Rukma had thought was a hand-me-down, whereas Rukma wore recently tailored pants with flared legs and a tight waist and a kurta-like shirt that had been purchased at a boutique in Durbar Marg.

  “What are you doing here?” Rukma says to Sahara, embarrassed to be caught like this, of the work that she’s doing, of her … poverty? What is she thinking? What ludicrous game is her mind playing against her?

  “I had to pass by this area, and I needed a glimpse of the Lord Pashupatinath before I get to my meeting. Then I spotted you on the way back. How have you been? So?” Sahara arches her eyebrows, indicating Swarga. The jaulo is getting cold, but the woman Rukma is trying to feed it to doesn’t open her mouth.

  Rukma takes a spoonful to the woman who pulls her head back. Rukma wishes Sahara would simply move on, but she doesn’t, so she says, “It’s good to see you, Sahara. Where are you these days?”

  Sahara steps up to the veranda, crouches down next to Rukma, and takes off her glasses. She has blue eye shadow on. “I work for an NGO that does literacy work. But forget about me. What’s with you? You hated it when I brought you here, and now look at you.”

  “I enjoy it,” Rukma says, but in such a grim manner that she feels like laughing at herself.

  It’s Sahara who laughs. “What has happened? What’s wrong?”

  Tears well up, so Rukma turns her face away. Sahara calls for another person to come out and take over the feeding. “Come, let’s go somewhere where we can talk in privacy,” she says to Rukma. Rukma asks her about her meeting, and Sahara says to the hell with it, she’s tired of these NGO meetings anyway. “There is simply just a lot of talk, lot of blah-blah-blah, empower this and empower that, with money going into people’s private pockets instead of the projects they are allotted for. I’m sick of it.” She catches herself. “But I didn’t come here to regale you with my NGO woes. I want to hear what has happened to you. I heard you got married to this young gun of a businessman. Why was I not invited? That’s okay, I’m just joking—I heard later that you decided to wed the quiet way, which I approve of. People spend way too much money to get married, especially the parents of the brides, taking out huge loans to finance these lavish weddings. It’s a disease, don’t you think, Rukma? It makes me never want to get married. But who’d marry me, anyway? I’m too shrill for most of these men.”

  A man comes from inside to take over, and the two women go to a dank tea shop around the corner, where Sahara tries to pry from Rukma the reason for her unhappiness. But Rukma simply cannot allow herself to reveal her marital problems to a woman she barely knows, someone who was mo
re of an acquaintance during college than a friend. So Rukma tells her nothing is wrong. Sahara gazes at Rukma’s face intensely and asks whether it has anything to do with her Newar lover. “You were, if I remember correctly, smitten with this man. There were rumors—your confidants might not have been as discreet as you thought. What was his name?”

  “It’s not important,” Rukma tell her.

  Sahara thinks that Rukma’s reluctance to bring his name to the surface is a strong sign that she still can’t let go of him. “I knew it, I knew it,” Sahara says excitedly, banging the table. “Ah, first love! Who can forget their first love?”

  Rukma says nothing.

  “Do you miss him?”

  Rukma remains silent, which Sahara takes as a yes. Rukma doesn’t know what she’s getting out of misleading Sahara, who has been nothing but nice to her. The truth is, of course, that she’s moved past her Newar lover. But she can’t fault Sahara for thinking that her present unhappiness is a result of that unfulfilled love. Rukma, too, has scraped underneath her emotions to see if there are any remnants she’s not aware of. She hasn’t discovered any yearnings toward her Newar lover, but she has concluded this: despite what she’d thought earlier, there was something authentic about the swooning, swaying Rukma, ridiculously in love even when that love eventually was found to be not-love. Ultimately it turned out to have no substance, but while it was happening it was real, alive, and it made her happy and vibrant. She’d rather have that, even knowing it was illusory, than this dead black bird inside her now.