Priya

by Namita Gokhale

  Bucky Bhandpur and Manoviraj Sethia, the two samdhis, both dressed now in cricket gear, boogied into the spotlight and took a bow. Then they launched into a song and dance number from Lagaan. ‘Chale Chalo! Chale Chalo!’ they sang. Or perhaps they lip-synched it, I really couldn’t tell. The women of the family joined them, glittering in designer lehngas, earthen pots balanced on their heads. Or perhaps they were strapped on. Everyone was having a great time. A GR8 time. We are like that only.

  ‘In the old days, films were entertainment,’ Ved Saheb remarked. ‘But now everything is entertainment. Everything. Politics is entertainment. Cricket is entertainment. IPL is mega entertainment. Not only marriage, even divorce is entertainment.’

  I looked at him with awe. ‘You are so right!’ I exclaimed. ‘I never thought of it like that before . . .’

  ‘Even war is entertainment now,’ he continued. ‘We filmstars are being edged out of business, except when we are having affairs!’

  Suki had seized the mike again, and was presenting a hot Bollywood dance number to the latest cheeky lyrics, to do with a mofussil-sounding pain relieving balm. Of the kind her grandmother would have stopped using when she sped up the society ladder. There was a fog machine and a hidden orchestra, and every so often Suki would thrash her head from side to side and lift up the hem of her glimmering golden skirt to display her long legs. I wondered if she was on drugs. She concluded her vigorous performance to enthusiastic applause. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Bhaiyon aur Beheno, now for the Food of Love! Dinner is served!’ she announced, to a concluding roll of drums.

  It was a wedding feast of staggering proportions. The tables groaned with khaana, Italian and Thai and Mexican, crabs, oysters and salmon, tacos and spring rolls, noodles and sushi, pasta and paella, shahi paneer and shepherd’s pie—typical Delhi fare that no sane person would assemble on the same plate at home. This international menu was laid out in alphabetical order. I walked my way through aaloo, anchovies, artichokes, arvi and asparagus, all the way to zucchini and zabaglione. It was unsettling to see so much food on display. Women in Delhi never seem to eat anything, yet they are usually obese and talk compulsively about their weight. I was getting there. I had to be careful.

  Bucky had not forgotten his ancestry and there was a separate section of traditional Rajput food set up by the swimming pool. This was where Shriela and I now gravitated, following Ved Saheb and his acolytes. It was full Rajasthani fare, lal meat, and dal baati churma, things like that, served in gleaming bowls and shining silver thalis.

  Into my second fried mawa kachauri, I observed my husband emerge from the side entrance. Suresh was walking with an unfamiliar macho strut, both jaunty and cautious, and something in his gait alerted me. He was followed by the glamorous Pooonam, she of the three os, Pooonam who had only just professed her friendship and admiration for me. What were they doing together?

  I turned around to check if Shriela had noticed, but her normally mischievous eyes were hooded and blank.

  I didn’t confront him. Of course two people can walk out of a corner together, can’t they, without suspicious wives jumping to lurid conclusions? Suresh came and sat beside me. ‘I’ve been searching for you everywhere, jaan,’ he said. ‘I was worrying about where you were.’ I don’t think he noticed that I didn’t believe him.

  The Rajput power-group gave Suresh an enthusiastic welcome. I got him some basundhi and jalebis and some for myself, and we settled down to enjoy the remains of the feast.

  Bucky had changed back from cricket gear into his white linen suit. He introduced us to a devastatingly handsome man with a cleft chin and a dramatic wing of grey hair. ‘This is Janab Imran Aziz, the new Pakistani High Commissioner,’ he said. ‘His Excellency is an ex-test cricketer. He knows more about the game than anyone in India . . . or the neighbouring country.’

  ‘And a yoga expert tooo,’ a shrill sweet voice piped in, and there was Pooonam by my side again. The stray hairs in her blonde streaked birds-nest chignon were back in place and she looked very pleased with herself. She took a piece of jalebi from my plate and dipped it in the basundhi.

  ‘Sorry to steal your jalebi,’ she giggled. ‘I couldn’t resist the temptation.’

  And what else, I wondered. All sorts of ghastly images surfaced in my mind.

  ‘You may of course have heard this before,’ Aziz Imran said, in the deepest, most thrilling voice I had ever heard. ‘It was a wise man once said that cricket is an Indian game, invented in England. Or a Pakistani game, if you hear it across the border . . .’ My head was still buzzing from the champagne. Now it buzzed some more. As a young woman, I’d had the inevitable crush on the incredibly glamorous Pakistan cricketer Imran Ahmed. It now spilled over to his personable namesake. I was smitten, so smitten that I almost forgot about Pooonam and her innuendos.

  All of us in India are obsessed by our neighbouring country. Our Neighbourer, as Suresh refers to it. A strange refrain sprang up in my head: ‘Love thy neighbour. Love. Love.’ I feared I was drunk. I waved at a passing waiter for another glass of champagne.

  ‘You may have heard this before,’ Suresh said, quite unexpectedly. ‘What another wise man said. Most countries have armies. But in Pakistan, your army has a country!’

  The High Commissioner gave my husband a polite smile and disappeared graciously. Pooonam doubled over with laughter, displaying her globular boobs to spectacular advantage. I found that disgusting. I was fascinated.

  The men were talking business now, the stock market scandal, the nuclear deal with America, the decline of the dollar. Odds and ends of conversation darted around me like fireflies.

  ‘. . . but in the end there are just eight hundred people who matter in this country, yaar,’ somebody remarked. His tone of voice indicated that he was one of them.

  ‘Not eight hundred . . . maybe one thousand? Maan gaye, not more than that, even if India has a billion plus.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with India—we are an elitist democracy, bhai!’

  I looked at them, bathed in the golden light of the illuminations and the fireworks, framed by the darkness around. The eight hundred people who mattered in my country. And I was one of them. Almost.

  THAT NIGHT, AT AMRANA FORT, I SHARED A SHAKY FOUR-POSTER BED with my husband. We sleep in separate bedrooms in Dara Shikoh Marg. Here, I lay in my corner (always to the left), wondering if he would reach out to me, wondering if I really wanted him to.

  Sharing is a habit we have forgotten. We tugged and pulled territorially at the covers all night. By the morning I was lying next to him, snuggled up close. The hair on his chest is greyer than I remember, but the smell of him hasn’t changed. How long since we made love to each other? Long enough that I can’t remember.

  I slept, and dreamt I was enjoying a romantic candlelight dinner on a lonely moon-swept beach with Aziz Imran. Or was it Imran Aziz? . . . Their faces blurred into one as the waves broke and crashed on those distant dream sands.

  The air conditioner was humming ineffectually. I could feel a hot flush coming on. It rose in waves; from my feet, my palms, within each hair of my scalp. I pushed away the Jaipur quilt. Suresh rolled over and pulled all of it to his side of the bed. Male instinct.

  A glass of chilled water normally does the trick, but nothing helped. The restless fire was circulating through my body, pulling and ebbing. I tiptoed barefoot into the narrow balcony fronting the room and tried to breathe slowly. Very slowly. It was cool and quiet and I felt calmed.

  A peacock stood on the parapet, calling and moaning in a harsh voice. A champa tree in an antique pot stirred in the dawn breeze and left a shower of dewdrops on my face. Dawn is different from dusk, and yet they are the same thing, really. Villages and fields lay before me like a patchwork quilt, the orange glow of the morning awakening them all. I thought about Janab Aziz Imran and my lonely fantasy about him. Now if I’d been Paro, things might have developed further! ‘It’s menopause,’ I told myself sternly. ‘Watch out for those hormones,
Priya—you know the symptoms.’

  Why had Suresh been so rude to the High Commissioner? Maybe his mother was to blame. She had been from Lahore, and their family had known the scars of partition; Pakistan was forever the enemy.

  Love thy enemy . . .

  The hot flush receded, my skin stopped scalding. Menopause may be a whisper or a joke, but not for those who are living it. Women’s magazines skim the Change, except for ultra-advanced older citizens’ skincare supplements peddling enzymes and creams made of fresh placentas. During my first pregnancy, before I miscarried, I had bought a book titled EveryWoman. It’s proved a trusty guide to my body. After turning fifty I’ve read up conscientiously on the Change: The process of the ovaries shutting down is a phenomenon involving the entire reproductive functioning from brain to skin. In the face of extreme anxiety, mood swings and unprovoked irritability, EveryWoman provides a label for my sadly departing femininity.

  The peacock had followed me almost into the room, its rich plumage sweeping the dust behind it. Suresh began on his morning sounds, the series of grunts, burps and low groans that are his rev- up to face the day. ‘Hurry up Priya,’ he said, ‘I have work waiting in Delhi.’ There was a menacing note in his voice. We rushed through our breakfast and out to our car, where he read files and talked on the phone and looked distractedly out of the tinted windows as though he were searching for something but didn’t know what.

  It’s not a long drive from Amrana fort to Delhi, less than two hours. The only conversation we had was about Food Processing. The Food Processing Industries Association had organized a felicitation ceremony for my husband. Suresh read out the speech he planned to make there. ‘You are a Housewife—I want to see if it interests you, Priya,’ he said.

  It went, I think, something like this: ‘The Food Industry is the Sunrise Sector of the Indian Economy. Poised to attain Global Heights, it is a Boon for Busy Housewives, Working Couples, Executives, Holiday Travellers, and Foreign Investors.’ He continued in a solemn voice about ‘Technology Upgradation, Modernization, Integrated Cold Chain Facilities, Mega Food Parks, and Modernization of Abattoirs, etc.’

  I didn’t ask him about the etc, but listened with growing impatience to his grandiose dreams about the National Milk and Cheese Alliance and the National Meat and Poultry Processing Board. ‘Processed Food is Hygienic, Healthy and Nutritious. It complements today’s Fast Food lifestyle. Together, we shall at last unleash the Dedicated Age of Advanced Food Technology— DAAFT,’ Suresh concluded, all in a rush, giving me a tender look, or through me perhaps to his imagined enraptured audience.

  Something snapped inside me, the ‘Housewife’, like a taut too- tight bra-strap. ‘Mr Minister,’ I heard myself say, ‘you must surely be aware that this laudable Fast Food Lifestyle hasn’t trickled down to the bottom of the heap yet? May I bring to your notice that villagers in Orissa, in Kalahandi and places like that, feel privileged to eat just an occasional snack of roots and mango kernels?’

  It was not just the Change. I was sick of his political flatulence.

  Suresh turned over and studied me carefully. His half-rimmed spectacles were perched mid-way on his nose. His eyes were tired, but also surprised and worried. ‘Are you all right, Priya?’ he asked me, almost tenderly. ‘Is there something the matter? Of course I know of the imbalances in the patterns of our agricultural development. But I’m Minister of State for Food Production, and that’s my brief. Trust me, I’m not being insensitive.’

  ‘I’ve just not been feeling so well recently,’ I responded lamely, retreating. My husband returned to his files and I slipped into a wistful departing-hormone daydream featuring a masked ball in Venice and me in a strapless velvet gown.

  Luv will be returning home soon. He studied for his BFA at the Delhi College of Art for a year, before impulsively decamping to join an expensive art college in New Mexico, funded through a special bursary by Good-Mart, an American retail group. It was a one-off scholarship; maybe they hoped Suresh might return favours so they could catch up with Bhambani retail, and all the rest who are busy trying to change our shopping habits and put the local bania and kirana shop out of business.

  ‘This is a new generation, Priya!’ Suresh propounds, when I worry overmuch about the twins. ‘Don’t judge Gen Next by how you were! This is the new Republic of Youngistan. Remember 54/24—fifty-four per cent of India’s population is under age twenty-four. The future of India lies with its youth, with your sons and millions of others like them!’

  ‘Our sons,’ I correct him, whenever he starts on this script. Suresh gets confused sometimes about whether he’s addressing an audience or just me. ‘And our sons are not a statistic, Suresh. Or a votebank. And as their mother, it’s my job to worry about them.’

  It’s Luv that I really worry about, not Kush. I remember him staring at me with trusting eyes as the doctors rushed him to the incubator. Kush tumbled out next and let out a loud baby war cry. He was a chubby baby, exceptionally cute and charming, but my heart had already rushed to the weaker twin. I never let my partiality show, and was equally patient and impatient with them both, through all those years of Luv’s maths examination debacles and Kush’s confrontations with Hindi and Sanskrit teachers.

  I spent the afternoon sorting out Luv’s bedroom. I’m not welcome there, forbidden from cleaning it. I rationalized with myself that dusting and clearing is not to be confused with cleaning. Of course I wasn’t snooping—I wouldn’t dare! Mothers don’t snoop, they rummage to check the minutiae of their children’s private lives.

  His room yielded no clues. No photographs of girlfriends. No letters, diaries, dirty magazines—all unbelievably tidy, as though Luv had deliberately swept away all clues to whatever he was up to before he left.

  A stack of unframed paintings stood against the wall. I studied them, one by one. Naked breasts and buttocks floating around in unconnected ways. And that oval shape with a slit in the middle— was that a . . .? His signature was splattered across the backing. ‘Luv’. Just that, with the dates. And the baffling titles: ‘Painting with CatS’; ‘Self Spliced to SplinterS’. What was going on in his head?

  I discovered a notebook in a drawer. It was like a funky adolescent scrapbook, with a glued-on collage on the cover. The title page read ‘I, Luv Picasso’ and had scraps of torn-up Picasso prints stuck into intricate mosaics, with speech bubbles and think balloons inked around them. On closer examination, I discovered that our resident artist had scissored and vandalized an expensive coffee-table book that I particularly treasured.

  The opening page had a one-eyed Cyclops with a cubist guitar pasted over the mouth and a carefully calligraphed speech blurb: ‘What is a face, really? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest?—P.P.’ Then a thought bubble, with smaller ones leading to it: ‘Double Faced Bitch.’

  I couldn’t make much sense of it. ‘What is a face, really?’ I found a blank canvas and contemplated it. Emptiness. I haven’t painted for years, but something happened to me then. I took a scrunched-up tube of vermilion, pierced it with the safety pin that held my sari pleats together, and squelched it over the canvas in concentric circles, as though I were frying a jalebi. Then I squiggled through it with the safety pin until it formed a drizzly sort of pattern. It looked quite nice, really. I propped my painting against the wall and left it to dry.

  ‘This is Art,’ I told myself, as though a speech blurb was floating from my mouth. A thought balloon followed: ‘You can always squeeze more colour out of a dried-up old tube of paint!’ Luv had inherited his artistic DNA from me. Clearly. ☺

  Off to the airport early morning. Ghafoor was driving me. He’s from the stable of chauffeurs in the ministry pool. A kattar Muslim, devout to a fault, he reads the namaaz five times a day, halting the car at will to roll out his prayer mat and invoke Allah and Mecca-Medina. We are a secular nation, and none dare reproach him. He’s not the most sought after of drivers and has therefore, perhaps, been assigned to me.

  Bu
t I like Ghafoor. He is courteous and kind and does not have the problem of body odour that some younger drivers have. He smells of chameli ka tel and his socks don’t stink up the car. Ghafoor’s sparse hair is streaked with varying shades of henna, as evocative in its way as one of Luv’s layered paintings. His eyes, lined usually with a fine layer of kohl, carry a mystic sense of detachment. I feel safe with Ghafoor bhai. Maybe it’s the Bombay influence—Bombay, before it was Mumbai. The city used to belong to everyone, and Allah’s chosen were visible everywhere, as the rest of us. In Delhi one tends to see them only in Purani Dilli and Nizamuddin, unless they are one of us, if you know what I mean.

  I was whisked through airport security into the VIP waiting room with the anaesthetic ease that accompanies my movements as a minister’s wife. But the plane, being Air India, was running late. Then, suddenly, he was there, standing before me, my son Luv, thinner and loopier than I remembered. A small steel safety pin pierced his left brow, another, miniature version hung from the bottom of his lower lip. I rushed to hug him, and he returned awkwardly to my arms before disentangling himself. ‘Mom!’ he grinned. ‘It’s good to be home—and for a change Kush isn’t around to hog all the attention!’

  All through the drive home, I was examining him hungrily, taking in his long lank hair, his lean frame. I was eager to please, afraid to provoke him. I wondered if the safety pins hurt and if he took them off at night.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ he snapped. ‘You know it makes me nervous, Mom.’

  Through the chaotic morning traffic, Luv stared at the streets outside as though he were seeing them for the first time. ‘Delhi’s weird,’ he pronounced at last, ‘and the airport is enough to depress anybody.’ He hasn’t been away that long, I thought. We returned home to quiet, tree-lined Dara Shikoh Marg. As the gates closed behind us, the security guard executed a languid salute and returned to scratching his balls. Luv let out a loud sigh. ‘Back to detention days,’ he whispered, mock-tragically, to himself. ‘Brightest in dungeons, Liberty thou art!’ He seemed quite pleased at the prospect.