Room in our Hearts and Other Stories

by K L Chowdhury

  ‘But I don’t even have ₹4,000 to spare, not to speak of ₹4 lakh, nor do I see any possibility that I can raise it anytime.’

  They looked at her in surprise. The women started whispering with each other. Veena couldn’t figure out if they believed her or not, and Shaban didn’t bat an eyelid; he continued looking at the floor. The elders went into a huddle, discussing in whispers, grimacing, shaking their heads, scratching their beards. It went on for some time when Tariq rose from his seat to make an alternate proposition with which they readily concurred—that Shaban be given the option to buy Venna’s orchard if he so desired and if it suited her.

  The elder addressed Veena, ‘We have been given to understand that you wanted to sell your orchard ever since your mother was ill. Would you like to sell it to Shaban?’

  ‘I have no objection if I get a fair deal,’ Veena replied.

  Shaban woke up as if a dream was suddenly being realised when the elder turned to him, ‘Would you like to buy the orchard from her?’

  ‘Certainly sir, if it is an affordable price.’

  ‘What is the market rate of the land in this neighbourhood?’

  ‘Sir it is ₹1 lakh a kanal as fixed by the revenue department.’

  ‘This orchard is 11 kanals. That means it should cost ₹11 lakh. Let us deduct the cost of the tress from the cost of land and ask Shaban to pay her up. Isn’t that a fair bargain?’

  ‘That is a fair bargain,’ was the general refrain.

  ‘I don’t understand what is fair about it,’ Veena asked in irritation.

  ‘Shaban buys your land for ₹11 lakh and you write off ₹4 lakh in lieu of the tress he has planted and nurtured.’

  ‘You call this justice? That a person loses nearly half of her land value because someone decided to occupy it illegally and plant tress without permission?’

  ‘But we cannot write off the investments and hard work he and his father have put in. You owe them gratitude for taking care of the land and not letting it go to total ruin.’

  ‘Even if I allow for the price of the trees, I am not being offered the going rate for my land.’

  ‘What in your opinion is the going rate?’

  ‘All of you sitting here should know better. I hear it is ₹3 lakh a kanal. That should be ₹33 lakh for my land. You are offering barely a third of that.’

  ‘You are talking of underhand deals where black money changes hands,’ one of the elders said sternly.

  ‘But that is the rate at which people are transacting land here. That is the rate you would sell me your land if I wanted to buy.’

  ‘That is a purely hypothetical proposition. Please don’t go into it. We are here to help you retrieve your land or pay a fair price for it,’ he continued severely.

  ‘You speak as if you are doing me a great favour,’ she made bold to say.

  His tone mellowed a bit. ‘Look, this is a conundrum; we are only being helpful.’

  Veena felt trapped. She saw no way out. It seemed like daylight robbery. You grab someone’s property, build upon it, and then claim nearly half the property free. But she was aware of the insurmountable problems in reclaiming her land through legal or administrative channels. She had almost written it off; it was providential that Abdul Salaam’s conscience had woken up during his dying days and a dead case had got a new lease of life. Why should she not grab the offer? Get something where there was no hope. She nodded her assent.

  ‘Okay, the land costs ₹11 lakh. You will write off ₹4 lakh in lieu of the trees and Shaban will pay you ₹7 lakh. Let the transfer deed be signed here in presence of everyone,’ the head decreed in a tone of finality.

  But a hitch arose in the mode of payment. Shaban expressed his inability to raise the entire sum at such a short notice. He offered to make a down payment of ₹3 lakh and the balance in two instalments of ₹2 lakh each over the next two years after each harvest. The elders looked towards Veena. But she was horribly confused. It seemed like another ploy to deny her due. She felt extremely dejected and lonely, and wanted to get it over with it. The deal was done, documents signed and ₹3 lakh paid to her in cash. Ruhi invited her to stay the night in their house. The next morning, she was given an emotional farewell with hugs and tears by the ladies of the house.

  There was news of a bountiful harvest that year. Veena waited until after the harvest, but the instalment never arrived. She phoned Ruhi who called Shaban, but the latter made one excuse after another and promised to pay up as soon as possible. Another harvest season came and went, but there was no instalment. Veena was not surprised. Exile had taught her to look at the positives in life. Although she had received just ₹3 lakh for the orchard that was worth ₹33 lakh, it was better than getting nothing. Had Abdul Salaam not refused to die until she took back a curse that she never uttered, she would have forfeited even that paltry sum. She soon forgot all about her land, about Langet and the wily people there who were witness, and party, to the great fraud that had been perpetrated on her.

  Abdul Saalam, meanwhile, was with his maker!

  One morning, nearly five harvests later, when Veena was bathing her mother, her phone rang. She felt a sense of déjà vu and at once picked the phone.

  ‘Veena, I am Ruhi from Langet, your old neighbour...’

  ‘Look, I have not cursed anyone if that is why you made the call,’ Veena replied tersely.

  ‘My brother Shaban has been in coma after a massive stroke. He is on a ventilator, not responding to treatment at all. The doctors have given up, but life doesn’t leave him, death doesn’t accept him. Please release him, take back the curse. We know you didn’t curse him consciously but a curse must have arisen from your heart. We know its power; we will make amends…’

  NOTES

  Inshallah – God willing

  dupatta – scarf

  kanal – nearly 420 sqaure metres

  KUMODHINI

  I have known Kumodhini since the day I was called to check her in the surgical ward of our hospital where she had been admitted with pain in her loins and fever. She had been put on intravenous fluids and had developed ankle oedema. The surgeons asked for my opinion.

  This seven-year-old girl was bloated, her face puffy, her sharp brown eyes embedded in swollen eyelids, giving her a kind of mongoloid look.

  She eyed me suspiciously. ‘Are you going to give me more shots?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I reassured her, patting her cheek affectionately as I went through the examination.

  I suspected acute glomerulonephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys.

  ‘I don’t like this needle in my arm,’ she moaned, pointing to the intravenous line.

  ‘Neither do I.’

  She looked at me amusedly.

  She was receiving dextrose in saline. This was a double whammy—fluid and salt overload both from the underlying acute glomerulonephritis and the intravenous fluids. She could go into pulmonary and cerebral oedema. She could even have convulsions.

  ‘As a first step, I am going to shift you to my ward, remove the needle from your arm and give you a pill to get rid of excess fluid from your body and restore your pretty face.’

  She gave me a wide smile of approval. That was March 1982, 36years ago. Since then Kumodhini has been my devoted patient and I have been physician to four generations of her family.

  This time around, Kumodhini brought her father. He had survived a third heart attack six months earlier. Besides, he suffered from multiple complications from diabetes and hypertension—chronic kidney failure, neuropathy and related problems. He had improved marginally after the previous visit. Since I was breaking off for a month, I had given her detailed instructions about his medications. I had decided not to go out of town but to stay home and enter the ‘cave’—stay aloof and undisturbed by patients, friends and relatives while I gave finishing touches to an anthology I had penned during the long confinement of my mother. Kumodhini was to phone me only if there was an emergency.

  She
phoned in the third week to inform me that her father was breathless, bloated and unable to take even one step unaided. I asked her to increase the diuretic dose, but the next morning she was on the phone again, desperate and crying.

  ‘Mahara, I know you are on vacation; I know you make no exception and don’t see patients during this break, but this is very urgent. Father’s condition is precarious; he is so breathless he can’t speak a sentence. You know if something happens to him, the last hope in my life and my only support will evaporate.’

  There was a strange poignancy in her speech. She had a husky voice and a stammer that she carried from her childhood. It went straight to the heart.

  ‘All right, I will make an exception. Get him here early tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I will report early when the world is still asleep. I know you start your day at cockcrow.’

  Kumodhini has a tragic life. She is the only child of her parents. An adorable kid, they brought her up with loving care and she grew to be a vivacious girl—diligent, deeply religious and steeped in tradition. She wanted to be a doctor but couldn’t qualify. She opted for Library Science and graduated with honours, but failed to find a job in any of the state-run schools or libraries. After many applications and interviews, she was offered the job of librarian in a Central school. It was well paid, but she was posted far away in Ludhiana, Punjab. There was no choice. Her parents encouraged her to accept the offer. They had been looking in vain for a good match for her. They believed it would be easier after she settled into a job.

  In fact, there was a proposal soon after she took up the assignment. Ashok was an Ayurveda graduate. He was fair, stout, and rather taciturn—just the antithesis of the light brown, slender and exuberant Kumodhini. Her parents grabbed the offer. If their daughter couldn’t become a doctor, she could at least marry one.

  Alas, it took just a couple of weeks after the wedding for Kumodhini to realise that destiny had once again tricked her. Ashok turned out to be bipolar. He would swing from one extreme of euphoria, insomnia, hyperactivity, talkativeness and aggression to the other —sloth, sleep and total withdrawal. There were not many lucid periods. His parents took offence when Kumodhini’s father confronted them about hiding their son’s psychiatric history. Instead, they blamed Kumodhini for his affliction.

  Kumodhini rejected the advice of her parents to seek a divorce. She believed a Hindu girl could marry but once. It was her duty to take care of her husband for good or for bad since she had taken the seven steps round the fire with him. What if Ashok had been normal before marriage and then came down with the affliction? Would she abandon him? Hadn’t she herself gone through illnesses right from her childhood? No, she would not leave him.

  My phone rang early the next day. It was Kumodhini informing me that her father was panting for each breath and had fainted while she tried to help him get inside the car. It was her cousin who was going to drive them to my house.

  ‘Mahara, it is not possible to bring him to your clinic. You will have to pay a home visit. I will send my cousin with the car. You are like my father; can’t I ask this favour?’

  I had no heart to say no.

  Kumodhini’s cousin led me inside a gate onto the footpath leading to a small one-storey house. While I was appreciating the freshly mown grass of a tiny lawn, the large mango tree shading the house and a bed of porchuloca in full bloom, I saw Kumodhini coming out of the house, her face wreathed in smiles. By the time I reached the porch, she surprised me, strewing petals of marigolds and roses on the tiled floor. As I stepped across, careful not to step on them, she showered more petals on my head, her eyes lit up in joy.

  ‘This is not done, Kumodhini; I don’t like treading on flowers. This is very embarrassing,’ I admonished her.

  ‘It is no ordinary person walking into my house,’ she stammered. ‘Wouldn’t I do it if God were ever to grace my humble home?’ Her guttural voice, choked with emotion, turned pleasingly bass. I was speechless at her intensity, at the genuine display of reverence and gratitude.

  Her father lay in bed, deathly pale, labouring hard for each breath, his chest heaving and the taut muscles of his neck standing out. I tried to make him sit up but he slumped to one side. He was bloated, the veins in his neck bulging as if ready to burst. His pulse was racing and blood pressure low. He was in shock from end-stage cardiac failure. There was hardly any healthy muscle left in the heart from multiple infarctions sustained in the past.

  My suggestion that he should be admitted to a hospital did not go well.

  ‘I have no one here to help me. You know the chaotic condition in the hospitals, overflowing with sick and dying patients. My past experiences there have been nightmarish. Please write your instructions; I will arrange everything possible at home—blood tests, ECG, oxygen administration—that you might suggest. Please don’t send him to the hospital.’

  We propped the patient up and hooked him to the oxygen cylinder that she always kept handy.

  ‘All right, let me see what you have here in the medicine cabinet,’ I asked her.

  She opened two large boxes with pills, capsules, ampoules, intravenous tubes, syringes, cotton, adhesives and ointments. She had built a small pharmacy of sorts from her long years of caring for her parents, delivering the medications religiously from time to time.

  I gave him a shot of a diuretic and wrote out my instructions—insulin, beta blocker, spironolactone, aspirin, statin, nitro-glycerine—and looked around for a place to wash my hands.

  Kumodhini led me to the washbasin in the dining room.

  ‘What else have you here in your pretty little house?’ I asked while drying my hands on a towel as my eyes fell on a small anteroom with an open door and a large calendar with the picture of a Goddess hanging from the wall directly opposite the door. ‘Is that your thokur kuth?’

  ‘Mahara, this is my father’s house; I never had the fortune to own a home,’ she replied with a sigh.

  I had forgotten for a while that Kumodhini had been living alone with her ailing father. After she married Ashok, she hardly lived with him and his parents except when she was home during vacations from her various postings in Punjab and Haryana. Her pleas and petitions for transfer to her home state on the grounds of her husband’s psychiatric illness had fallen on deaf ears. Meanwhile, she had given birth to two children, a daughter and son, who grew up under her care for they could not be trusted with their father. Ashok had failed to get a job. He had started a practice that never picked up and had resigned to being a total burden on his wife and parents.

  After serving in the neighbouring states for 17 years, Kumodhini had been finally transferred to Jammu on compassionate grounds. Her mother was in a terminal state of renal failure, undergoing regular haemodialysis. Her father was not able to cope with his own afflictions far from being able to attend to his wife. Kumodhini had no choice but to live with them. The kids, too, had moved with her. A year later, her daughter had taken up a course in physiotherapy at Delhi, and two years later her son had gone to Bangalore to study engineering. Her mother had finally succumbed after three years of regular twice-a-week dialysis, leaving Kumodhini to turn her attention entirely to her sick father.

  My curiosity led me to the anteroom. It was poorly ventilated, about six feet square, numerous calendars with pictures of gods and goddesses adorning the walls, most of them faded and frayed by the gusts of air from the ceiling fan. In a corner were an army of idols and images of gods smudged by vermilion stains, and the floor was cluttered with books on religion.

  ‘This place is overwhelmingly, suffocatingly sacred. Why don’t you clean it up, get rid of the shabby calendars, paint the walls, clean up the floor, get a Shiva lingam and place it in the centre. No other idols, no pictures, just Shiva.’ I had no problem speaking my mind to this wonderful woman.

  She smiled, shook her head in affirmation, and stuttered, ‘Mahara, this is a store room that we converted into a temporary puja room after mother was too sick to walk. I
f you have the time…’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I replied.

  She led me outside from a side door to the back of the house and along the left to a small structure detached from the main house with a dome on top and a low door. So it was here already, the thokur kuth, nay, a regular temple to Shiva!

  She opened the temple door. I removed my shoes and entered, lowering my head a little to avoid bumping against the lintel. And there it was—a good-sized Shiva lingam of shining black marble in the middle of a small room, flower-bedecked, mounted on a saucer-shaped pedestal, drops of water dripping onto it from a brown metallic pot hanging above, a subtle fragrance of incense in the air. Peace reigned supreme in this unusually quiet room with no embellishments. Light filtered inside from two large windows on the side walls.

  There was a mat on the floor in front of the lingam, a Gita in a book holder, an earthen lamp nearby, a conch and a small bell. I sat down instinctively and closed my eyes for a brief while. A strange peace descended. This looked like the perfect place one could retire into.

  As if reading my thoughts, Kumodhini stuttered, ‘You have been telling your patients about retiring inside a “cave” during your vacation. What about this place?’

  ‘I would love to, if there were no intrusions and no other worries. Here, I will have to juggle the whole day between your father’s ailments and your queries.’ I joked.

  ‘Mahara, I will not let that happen; I will stay guard outside and let you do your sadhna unhindered, uninterrupted.’

  ‘Thank you, but you have enough on your hands, my dear.’

  ‘Frankly, it will be an honour...’

  I had been trying to prepare her slowly for the inevitable but had never really explained the grim prognosis as her father lingered on from one crisis to another. I didn’t know how she would take it; she seemed so delicate, so lonely and fragile. Yet I knew, inside that tender frame that betrayed vulnerability, she retained an inner core of great strength. I thought this was the right moment to inform her.