by Shruti Swamy
“Even if you didn’t care for money, what’s wrong with enjoying it?”
“They wouldn’t tolerate my dance.”
“You never let yourself enjoy anything, Vidya.” Having regained his patience, his voice was tender. “It’s good to eat until you’re full.”
“I do. I have a different stomach.”
“Yes,” he couldn’t help adding, though he knew the joke would hardly advance his cause, “a much larger one, in fact.”
“Is this funny to you?”
“I wish it was funny to you. I wish anything was funny to you right now. I haven’t seen a smile on that face for weeks.”
“A smile?” I said, for a moment, stunned. What I had been trying to hold together was tearing irreparably: the husband that lived in my mind and the husband who stood before me. “We planned, Rustom. My career—your career—this house—”
“Life resists plans, I suppose,” he said, I think, to the wife in his head, the wife he was struggling to hold together too with this mixture of desperation and cheer. “Accidents happen in love, and one just has to make the best of it. I’m happy,” he said, “I wish you could be.”
“Weren’t you happy before?”
“How can a man be happy when his heart is being torn in two?”
“Torn in two? You’re not making sense.”
“I don’t make sense to you,” he flared finally, his voice raised, “because you have no family. You can’t understand what you were asking of me.”
“I have a family.”
“You can throw yours away when it suits you. It doesn’t cost you anything.”
“Cost me. Only a rich person thinks like this.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I thought—” But then he stopped himself. Shrugged. My friend was gone. My husband lit a cigarette. His face was handsome and hard, a man’s face. I began again to feel a sense of vertigo. Who, if not his family, would help me raise the child? For unlike the chaali, where children were largely left to their own devices, with a distracted eye of some mother glancing out from time to time over each child, and come suppertime a child could be fed in any house it visited, there was no group of women here to join and throw my lot into the communal pool, my hands helping some with their day’s work as some hands would come help me with mine, and to contribute some little crumb to the afternoon’s store of gossip. Some days I listened to my landlord’s servant and the neighbor’s exchanging small news over the wall as they hung up the washing: they were sisters, I later learned, who had managed to find such proximate employment, and their words to each other, irritated or sweet, and their dry, teasing laughter, seemed too humble a thing to be envious of. But I could protect myself from many things with my ability to sleep, deeply and vastly for hours on end, a sleep that didn’t compromise my nighttime hours. Some animals did this, dreamed deeply, impervious for months to outside weather. I kicked myself back into sleep, and lay back into the vast dark pool of my dream.
Into the sleep-room came my brother. So much dreaming, though forgotten, robbed me of my surprise. I was not expecting him, but I let him in when he knocked on the door, then went to wash my face and my mouth. When I came out of the bathroom he was standing next to his shoes, having no idea where to sit: the unmade makeshift double bed (its scandalous width and my condition gave it a distasteful, seedy aura); the unsteady wooden chair where my husband, seated at the rolltop desk, wrote his poems by hand and then banged them out on his typewriter; or the floor, of which there was not much, the largest expanse being in the kitchen, where my husband and I ate our meals. I went to the kitchen and he followed me and sat. His shoes. I took a second look. Then I moved my eyes away as though I had seen something illicit. Deep brown leather, worn, they looked too small for his feet. And.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?”
“Yes, when I wake up all the way.”
“So the wife of a rich man spends all day sleeping?”
I moved slowly about the kitchen, fixing some tea. I had some dry bhakhari I kept in a tin only for myself, as my husband didn’t care for it, and this I set down in front of him with only a bit of irony. It had been months—maybe longer—since I’d seen him, and his body startled me: it was long and thin, the color of amber, and it glowed with a false health, almost a feverishness. His hair was too long, and unkempt, it kept falling into his eyes as he spoke and he brushed it away with a distracted irritation. “So this is where the wife of a rich man lives?”
“He’s not a rich man.”
“Tell that to the ladies at the chaali. They can’t stop talking about it.”
“I’m not worried about what they think.”
“Yes, the troubles of petty mortals do not penetrate such lofty heights.”
So long had it been since I had spoken Gujarati with anyone—months, or longer—that despite my brother’s bitter words, or perhaps because of them, the language seemed almost unbearably sweet. And it was as though a door opened through time, stepping into the language as one stepped into a city inhabited by long-vanished creatures; I was my brother’s sister, my father’s daughter, even my mother’s—the act of feeding my brother even this small snack returned something also to me: time that I had felt careless in, those afternoons returned from school, a mother in the other room, and my itchy mind straining toward something, to be free of chores so that I could spend some small time with my little knotted rag-doll, or with my sums, or browsing through the day’s many miscellaneous thoughts: the way names, for instance, could doom or save someone’s nature, like how a naturally bitter person, given the name Mitthoo, would through some mysterious alchemical process reconfigure herself to the sweetness of her moniker, or how Kacharo’s parents succeeded in warding off the evil eye by naming their beloved son after garbage, and thus he survived his infancy while all his elder and nobler-named siblings had perished, or even I, fulfilling the destiny of the original Vidya, the dancer whose image had so enchanted my mother through the black-and-white grain of the newspaper—so many thoughts I had, so eager was I to think them, that it felt to me my mind was a large blooming tree whose many branches I longed to scamper around and explore. I had wanted those days to be over quickly, over so that I could be free to explore them. Alone. Yes, and they had gone from me willingly, while I had been like a girl racing back from the well, so eager to reach her destination, and so sure of abundance of water in her jar, that she does not choose her steps and is heedless of the water she spills against her dark braid and in the dust of the road, believing she will never be thirsty. Those days in which my mother had still been alive.
“Where did you get those shoes?”
“The old man gave them to me,” he said. He took the tea from me, and the bhakhari. “I never thought I’d see you like this.”
“What ‘like this’?”
“With child,” he said in English with a smirk.
“Why not?” I asked, and when he shrugged I said, “Have you grown taller?”
“I’ve been at this height for several years. You might get used to me this way if you came more often to visit.”
“You too could visit.” I sat on the floor of the kitchen. My lap was occupied by the bulge of my belly.
“Well here I am.”
“Yes, here you are.”
He looked perfectly natural in my kitchen, though this was the first time he’d been in it, and though the image of him sitting there so naturally troubled me, wearing rougher versions of the refined clothes my husband often wore, thin bell-bottoms a little bare at the knees, a red-and-purple printed cotton shirt open at the throat. On his upper lip there was a nice thick and carefully kept moustache. When people saw this young man walk down the street, did they see the boy’s eyes in the man’s face? They were bright, slightly yellow around the core, and some fine tracery of veins marked the edges: eyes that held a direct, almost accusing gaze that could not disguise their hurt, even
a stranger could see it.
“You came here to tell me something.”
“I wanted . . .” he said, and his demeanor started to shift, almost despite himself, into something a little more boyishly shy. “I wanted your advice, or actually, I think I wanted to ask you a favor.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, the old man’s told you, I’m sure, that he’s fixed my engagement?”
“Of course.” The engagement ceremony had been only a week prior, but I had been too sick to go, or so I’d said. I’d sent a letter to my future sister, a young girl I had never met before but who I was told was fair, along with a present of a small gold bangle. The reply I’d received was exceedingly polite. She had asked to meet me some afternoon in the coming weeks, but I had demurred, citing my illness; in truth, I did not want to be met like this, especially not for the first time, and had promised to receive her gladly once the baby was born.
“I won’t marry her, Vidya.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. I won’t marry her.” He couldn’t help but smile a proud smile.
“Why did you agree to?”
“I don’t know—I was—confused. I thought it would be nice—to have a girl in the house—again.”
“And now?”
“And now I love someone else and want to marry her instead.”
If there was a fault in the boy it was, in part, mine. I had not brought him up with a thought to the next day, to the grown man, only to the boy wailing or quiet in my arms, hungry or sleepy or needing to be washed. “Why is it you only come to me with trouble?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Have you told father?”
“No. I was hoping you would.”
“Me?”
“Yes, I think he’ll take it better coming from you.”
“I won’t help you with this. You’ll ruin that girl’s life. The engagement has already been announced.”
“But I could just explain—I mean, you, and I, and the old man, we could all just explain that the fault wasn’t hers. We’ll say she’s a very good girl from a good family. We would tell everybody. We would say that I am to blame.”
“Why didn’t you fall in love before you got engaged?”
“You’re hardly one to lecture me about proper marriages.”
“My marriage didn’t ruin anyone’s life.”
“Except mine!”
“Yours?” I looked at him, surprised. “Don’t be ridiculous, how did I ruin yours?”
“You left me,” he said. I could see his cheeks flush dark with blood. But how long would it be until I could no longer find the child’s eyes in the man’s face? How long until he would be grown? He looked away, wiping at his eyes. Looking very small for all his leggy length, and very alone. And how did I look to him? My body was already reflected in a warped mirror. But the eyes that looked at him were unknowable to me, my eyes and what he saw in them.
“Your tea’s getting cold,” I said, and then I asked again, “Where did you get those shoes?”
“I told you, the old man gave them to me. Well, I found them, and I asked to have them.”
“Where did you find them?
“In the almirah, where else?”
“Did he tell you whose they were?”
“Yes, my mother’s. And before that they were her father’s.”
“Her father’s?”
“Yes.”
“He died when she was young.”
“She was seven.” But I hadn’t known that all those years my mother wore her father’s shoes. I longed to turn them over in my hands, even to smell them. At the same time I had the perverse instinct to hurl them out the window, throwing with such force they landed in the sea. “Couldn’t you marry Alopa?”
“No.”
“Who is this girl you love?”
“You know Urveshi from the third floor?”
“You mean the Kapadias’ girl? Isn’t she very young?”
“Well, so am I, aren’t I?”
“What a mess,” I said. I got up, again very heavily, to take his empty cup and rinse it in the sink. “Do you want some more tea?”
“No, this is enough. Are you angry with me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you should talk to Father about it.”
“I’m talking to you about it. Don’t you care at all?”
“I don’t understand why he gave you those shoes. It’s bad luck twice over. You shouldn’t have brought them here.”
“You’ve really changed,” he said, scornfully. “You never used to believe in superstitions.”
It was not superstition, not quite. The shoes were exactly parallel to each other, pointing away from us, toward the door, or beyond it, their ancient dust-gray laces untied. Each shoe suggested a foot, two shoes two feet, and those two feet two ankles, bared as the wearer lifted her sari slightly, the lifted sari suggested hands to pull up the fabric and then to reach down to tie the laces, and a golden back fully bent, and the slip of a thick braid over a shoulder, dangling like the loose end of a rope, and then there she was, just from the shoes, not whole, in pieces, turned away from me as she put them on. And so the shoes must have been for her, suggesting other feet, other legs, a father’s rare brown hands, the shocking vulnerability of his old-man neck, and the thin curve of a spine through white cotton.
“You don’t know, do you, how Mother died?” He brandished this question at me in a sly way, the way the robber shows the knife. We had always known how dangerous questions were. He was angry, that made him ask it: his anger made him brave, to pick up and wield the weapon.
But I did know, for all at once, I did know, in fact I had always known; it was not the feeling of a memory freed from the dark reaches of the mind and floating up to burst like a bubble of air in water, fully fresh and intact, but a thing as dull and steadily known as my own name. “She jumped off the roof of our building, and when she hit her head, she died.”
“You knew?” he said.
And how could I explain it, even to myself, but I did. I remembered shutting my eyes on the bed, trying hard to sleep, but I had heard a sound—a scream, and then a long wail—and I had gone to the window and looked behind the shade. My mother was on the ground. Her leg was bent back at a weird angle. There was a deep color around her head, almost black, which it took me a long time to understand as blood. Her eyes, were they closed or open? This I could not remember.
“You know she had me with her when she jumped?”
“What?”
“She wanted to kill me too.”
“No.”
But he was right. I had been alone in the room. The scream must not have been my mother’s—maybe a neighbor’s. And the wail was his. Someone had run down to pick him up as I stood there watching. She rocked him back and forth. I don’t know why, but I thought of Radha then, of our last afternoon. Somehow the two memories had knotted up together in my confused mind, and now they played together in tandem. A body in a bed, a body on the ground. Pleasure twisting through, and a cold distance. I don’t know why.
“You remember?”
“The old man told me.”
“You asked him?”
“Yes.”
“But you weren’t hurt. When she fell.”
“No. Because of how she landed, you see. She could have survived the fall. If she fell another way she wouldn’t have died. But she hit her head on that step. The old man says she must have changed her mind. From the way she fell she was protecting me. But I don’t know.”
“She didn’t want to be apart from you.”
“No,” he said, “she wanted to kill me.”
“She wanted to take you with her.”
“I guess we can’t know.”
“I know, I was there. She loved you.” I was very far away from myself, from my brother and from my body. Distantly, I felt something like envy. Even in this, the last, she had loved him more, and thought nothing of me: she h
ad left me and kept him. Then she had died for him, instead of living for me. I felt an emotion like fear as I looked at my brother. There it was, the moment had come so quickly—I had lost the child in him. He looked—even old, very much like our father in the gritted cast of his face.
“Are you—okay? You look—ill—” He didn’t want to look at me either, shifted his eyes away from me. He had wanted something else. But what? I couldn’t give it. Now the true story had been spoken we couldn’t have another one.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” I said, pulling hard at the words until more of them came. “You know, I’ve been so sick, the first weeks I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach. I felt sick all the time, and I was so worried I was going to be sick for nine full months but luckily I can eat now. I don’t feel sick except sometimes I get headaches.”
“Like mother.”
“Yes,” I said. And then the words dried up again and I could only manage to say, “Please, take the shoes away from here. You should—destroy them.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t have come.”
“No,” I said. “I’m—glad—”
“Well, I’ll be going then.”
“Yes,” I said. I sat down on the bed and turned my face away from him. When he left, I shut the door and latched it. I felt—I think—cold. It was a strange feeling that visited my limbs first, then my groin then racing up to my head. All the hairs standing up and almost a pain—I think it was cold. I just stood there looking at my furred arm. After a while I began to shiver and my teeth were chattering. Yes: I had been cold once: on a night-train: sleeper’s class with dark air streaming in from the window: I wrapped only in a shawl: dozing against my mother. Now the feeling came over me I remembered it. I took a sheet from the bed and wrapped it around myself. It was not enough to staunch the cold. I remembered how I thought being cold would be a clean feeling, a white feeling, like ice. I had been wrong. No, it was a dirty feeling. I realized I was a little dizzy because the breaths my body was taking were so small, only like little sips. I could not expand my lungs quite enough to take a good deep breath, but I could make my breaths a little longer. Curiously I felt fine. It was like listening to something underwater. My husband had said it was easy for me to throw my family away. Not easy—but I had. After a while I was warmer and I took off the sheet.
