by Shruti Swamy
Versova was an odd choice for a young couple—aside from the fisherfolk who had been, it was said, Bombay’s original inhabitants, few people lived in the village year-round. Instead they kept their second homes entirely for their pleasure, deciding on a whim to escape the heat of the city some weekends or weeks, a private calendar I seemed to have no access to and could never predict. Being so far north, and rather isolated, it felt apart from the city, though it lay within its limits, and therefore apart from my own history, and my husband’s: out of reach from my mother-in-law’s influence, clean and new, where we could be the people we were only to each other and not to anybody else. I was determined to preserve the girl I had presented to my husband in my letters during the first two years of our courtship, and later, our meetings, a girl slim, dark, intense, driven, and free, determined not just to preserve this girl to my husband but also to myself. It was not a dishonest portrait, but, of course, a selective one, or perhaps I should say a hopeful one: my husband made me hopeful.
But why not, we asked each other in our letters, why did we have to be the people who the world expected of us? Why could not a union between a man and a woman contain their lives as artists and equals, instead of only lust, breadwinning, housework, and slow-growing affection? He wrote to me from England, where he was finishing his schooling—it was only by chance he had seen me leaning out my window at the college, and again dancing in the play, for once he had been on holiday, and the other called back to India by the death of a distant relative, and both times taking advantage of his stay to visit his friend Anand, who had been his dearest friend in his boarding school days, and continued to be despite their distance. In my letters, the reader was unhitched from his physical form, which lay sprawled across his university bed, separated first from me by a vast expanse of sea, time, and culture, conveyed in the sky by a vast roaring metal machine whose movements and velocities I studied even as I struggled to grasp its existence in reality, the tones and feelings of a body in flight. When we met on his visits home, and after he had completed his studies and come back to India to live, he was in flesh a stranger whom I knew well, who knew me well, a shock in flesh, always a little different than I had remembered, taller, softer. We did not touch, like lovers, or how girls touch, so easily looping one’s arm around another’s shoulder or linking hands as they walked across the courtyard to class, and so my body, charged with his presence, at times nearly buzzed with the pressure of our not-touching, a sensation that felt at times superior to me than the sensations of flesh, though I often felt a shame as I returned to the hostel, not at my impropriety, but at my lack of it.
Only once we had breached the limits we had tacitly imposed, having stranded ourselves at the desolate Parle station after a concert gone late—so late that the trains had stopped running for a few hours, forcing us to wait in that liminal purple hour that was neither night nor morning. The station was empty but for two yellow and black dogs that loved each other extravagantly, almost frighteningly, curling up against the other’s mangy body, nipping at the other’s throat. They would explode into motion running down the platform for the joy of their speed, doubling back, barking in fits of ecstatic communication, ugly dogs that stirred in me a strange feeling—embarrassment, perhaps, or pleasure. Very suddenly he took my hand, then bent his face to mine and kissed me. His lips were warm, dry, as subtle as paper, and through them I sipped the surprising air issued in exhales, almost sighs, that were colored by his mouth, his tongue, tasting faintly of the crumpled taste of tobacco, and of a warm and distinctly animal scent. I wanted to be kissed again and again—and not at all, for I wanted too to remain the mind he loved: so pure, unsullied by the realities of the body.
What of my husband’s mind? I had it in my letters. As I held those letters, densely inked with his confident, angular hand, I felt as though I was holding his mind, it somehow never occurring to me that his “I” in the letters could have been as hopeful as my own. He talked often of his homesickness, which made him lyrical about the city he so missed, a city very different from the one I lived in, though we shared a knowledge of its streets and landmarks. I was fascinated by the ease with which he moved within the world, which was apparent from both our meetings and our letters, not in the least because with his native charm he gave the impression that it was not he who caused the world to be so pliant but rather, that he was revealing its natural state, which had all my life eluded me, turning toward me an indifferent face. Once he had taken me to the cinema—extravagant enough—and then he had suggested a stroll along the beach, and I had agreed, knowing that each step we took now together took me a step further from my life at the chaali, and even at the college, and deeper into the shared life we seemed to be inventing, in speech as well as silently, privately, through a subterranean understanding or perhaps simply a mutual longing, a knowing that grew against reason, or at least beside it. If I had followed my usual course, we would not have even met, he would have passed beneath the window of another girl as he visited his friend Anand during his holidays, and would have taken another photograph at the play, the frame empty of me, and this knowledge was electric to us; our opposites, my dark and his fair, my poverty and his wealth, my femaleness and his maleness, seemed to make our shared understanding of the other more intense, more destined, or blessed: to look in the eyes of another so different from one’s self, and find a friendly soul there, one whose path you never should have crossed, was to feel the hand of destiny itself bending the universe toward you. The breeze from the sea was lovely, so cool, in the leopard-light. If I looked at him, it was only dartingly, through the corners of my eyes, but he didn’t care to disguise his gaze and I didn’t mind. I wanted him to look and be sure. (But I had never asked myself if I was sure, as I walked farther and farther out, passing by many familiar things, and leaving them behind.)
“Are you hungry?” he asked me, and I said no, but he asked me again and then I said I was, a little. He stopped then at a fried-snacks vendor and asked, “What would you like?”
Looking at the vendor, and the four or five options laid out before me, I was again silent. I didn’t know. I was incredibly hungry and I felt baffled. Each was delicious, each I seemed to have developed a special fondness for. But he had already paid for the movie, though there I had successfully evaded his offer of snacks during the interval, saying that I had just eaten. I was used to managing my hunger and would not have minded waiting to eat until I was back at the hostel, but there, with the smell of food and the possibility of food right in front of me, oil and fat and salt, the wet, green-licked chutney, potatoes in a sighing, perfect gold, I could not help but feel my hunger in a crazy, almost unspeakable form and I thought almost that I would cry.
“What’s the matter? You don’t like?”
“No, I—”
“Brother, we’ll have one of each,” he said to the vendor, who had been watching me curiously.
“No, no,” I said, horrified. “I’m not even hungry.”
“Have a bite of each, then, and throw the rest away.” He handed the vendor some small, crushed bills. Then I did start to cry. I was embarrassed and I tried to wipe my tears from my face discretely. But he noticed.
“Have I done something wrong?”
“No.”
Not wanting to embarrass me, I think, he didn’t say anything more, and he didn’t try to take my hand or touch my shoulder. He took very lightly the end of my pallu and held it in his hand.
In our home I lived free, no portrait of my mother hung upon my walls, and almost no vestige of any of my former possessions, for my textbooks had all been sold, my clothes all discarded in favor of a new wardrobe, austere but tasteful (so I hoped), which I purchased at the urging of my husband. Instead, there were tasteful decorations, framed concert posters and prints of his photographs, including, despite my protests, the portrait he had taken of me after I finished my lotos dance. Two rooms in the house, both laid with marble tile that was cool against the soles as one
walked or danced, and arched doorways that separated the rooms from one another, from which we hung sheets of printed cloth, as there were no doors, and a window from which I could look out at the garden that separated our little cottage from the landlord’s large bungalow between us and the sea. Our landlords were an Anglo-Indian family who lived in the modern fashion, free from in-laws or parents or extended families, only themselves and their three children, and their staff of ayahs, butlers, chauffeurs, and housemaids. Knowing my husband from his childhood, they had offered the cottage for a modest fee, therefore siding with us and against my in-laws in accordance with their modern values. “It’s all too, too romantic,” said Mrs. Kelly as she handed us the keys, nearly spoiling her kindness with the repetition of such pronouncements, but then she was gone and we shut the door and were alone in our marriage.
Versova was small. I was nervous to run into my dance teacher now that we lived in the same neighborhood, and took pains to avoid the same small lanes and alleys she might use to reach the commercial road where vegetables were sold. Once or twice I did see her, always at a distance, and I was always able to remain out of her line of sight, all the time watching her as she went about her daily tasks, testing the weight of a turai in her palm, or bringing a bunch of fenugreek up to her face to smell, laughing with the vendor as they parried good-naturedly over the price of ginger, and walking down the road with her small basket now filled with fresh vegetables, which seemed brighter in her care than they had at the stall. I had never before seen her outside her home, and it brought me a strange comfort to see her move. She didn’t walk as a dancer, walked maybe like the leopard I had once seen at dusk at the edge of my grandmother’s village, whose body seemed to express movements both deliberate and unconscious, and with an equal awareness of its power and the threats that might be posed to it: a body wholly in accordance with itself.
One afternoon she was wearing a fresh cream–colored sari with a green-and-gold border that seemed untouched by the dirt of the road or the diesel-blackened air, a deliberately austere choice that stood her out among the colorful clothes of the other shoppers, as perhaps it was intended to. Each time my eye lapped against the pale cloth, it produced in me a soft, wistful calm, and I followed her. Down the lane that led to her house there were fewer people, in fact the street was nearly empty, but she took no notice of the ghost that trailed her or at least gave no indication of an awareness of its presence. Had she forgotten me? All those afternoons we spent together. My action against her had been so odd and so unconscious, the words I spoke coming out of my mouth as though from a dream; I could not regret them. They felt destined. But watching her walk I almost started to cry. When she reached her door I called her name and she turned around in a fluid movement, but I could tell she had been startled.
“Vidya?” she said. Before an expression hardened on her face it was just as I had remembered it, soft and open.
“Yes,” I said. The smile was tight on my lips. She was not smiling at all.
“So, you’re married now.” For I wore, dutifully, red in the part of my hair, red between my brows like a good wife. I liked the look it gave me, though I still didn’t fully believe it, one of bold, adult modesty, a woman whose eyes may be lowered not out of shame but as a trick, to disguise her thoughts, her self, from the looker. Sometimes—though not always—my married aspect parted men like a blade: no one touched me.
“Yes.”
“And dancing?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling careful, not wanting to break the spell of her not-anger with me.
“Well?”
“I saw you perform. At the summer festival.”
“What did you think?
“Oh,” I said. I stepped closer. “For days afterwards I almost didn’t feel like speaking.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. I felt like you had made something so delicate I didn’t want to disturb it.”
“Who are you studying with?”
“No one.”
“In fact, I saw you perform too, at the festival. I came early to see you. I was curious.”
“You did?” It left me almost breathless. I had not seen her, sitting simply, her face. Not felt her, as I imagined I would.
“You did it justice,” she said, “But I never gave you that piece.”
“I taught it to myself, remembering you.”
“You made a clay idol of me and practiced before it,” she said, “is that it?” She was, finally, faintly smiling. “Shall I ask you to cut off your thumb?”
“Is there another student you love better?”
“No,” not joking now, almost sad. “Come in, Eklavya.” She opened the door. Her birds began to cry as soon as they became aware of her presence, and she spoke to them soothingly as she put away her groceries, and began to tear up a stale roti to feed them. She filled a small dish with water and placed it in their cage along with the roti. “Do you want tea?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll make it.”
She was satisfied with this, and sat at her small table at the corner of her kitchen where she could watch the lovebirds and me as well, and the jade-colored sea. She seemed just the same, all but her eyes, darker and a little more worn. “The tea-leaves are in that red tin,” she said, when she saw me looking for it. “Make it strong, na?”
“I’ve been practicing.”
“Making tea?”
“No, dance.”
“You’d be better off with tea,” she said. “Your husband lets you dance?”
I put the cup of tea before her without answering and she cooled it a little and drank. The birds, now sated on their food, were drinking too, dipping their small orange beaks in and out of the water. Their black and yellow eyes seemed flushed with a shared, alien knowledge. “I was wrong, didi.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve never loved more the way that anyone has moved.” I sat at her elbow with my own cup, so we were not facing, but very near.
“You’re a strange girl,” she said. “It’s funny that you showed up today. I was thinking of sad things.”
“What sad things?”
She looked at me, appraising me. “Nothing. I was thinking of time, time passing.”
“That’s not so sad.” It had been a long while since I had sat with any woman at all and talked. Not once, not really, since I married my husband, for I had lost touch easily with all of my schoolmates, all but Farnaz, who had returned to Iran and was very diligent about responding to letters; as for the others, some had stayed in Bombay and found jobs, some had married and quit their careers, and some had gone abroad like Radha to continue their studies or seek better employment. Radha and I—we did not speak, we had not written, or at least, the letters I wrote to her I never sent—after her graduation ceremony she had all but vanished from my life, though, strangely, had maintained her presence—in some ways her presence grew only stronger. For as she vanished from my life, she appeared more and more naturally in my imagination, where she took on more color, shape, and depth than she might have acquired from the faint polite words of her letters. Still there remained that smear of shame, but this feeling deepened the others around it, a bitter note that added complexity to a good dish.
“You’re too young to know it is.”
“Yes, maybe,” I said. “I live here now, you know. With my husband.”
“In Versova?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a long way from the city.”
“I don’t mind. I like it. I like being so close to the sea.”
“Yes, you like the sea, don’t you. I do too. It’s good for humans to live near it. It keeps us closer to our natures.”
“Didi, what you danced in the summer festival—I want to move like that. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“You want to study with me again?”
“Yes.”
“Your turns, my dear. That’s just to start. Without a teacher you’ve lost some good years of study.”
“I’ll make it up.”
“And then what, leave again?”
