A Breath of Fresh Air (9 page)

THIRTEEN

ANJALI

"I am sorry that Sarita brought ... Prakash up,” I apologized to Sandeep as we lay in bed. “I told her, and I—”

“That’s okay,” he said in his calm voice. He was lying on his back, reading a book. I was lying on my side, running a finger over his arm.

“You are angry about something.” I could tell he was holding something back.

“Why should I be angry about anything?” He sounded amused, but I wasn’t buying it.

“You’ve been angry ever since . . . we saw his wife.” Sandeep put his book aside and turned to face me. “I am not angry.”

“Something is wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong.”

“I know you, something is wrong.”

He sighed and lay on his back again. “You can really nag sometimes, you know?”

“I am learning from Komal.”

Sandeep grinned. “She
is
pretty good at it.”

“So, what’s wrong?”

Sandeep closed his eyes and didn’t answer. I poked him in the stomach with a finger. “Tell me.”

He took my hand in his and brought it close to his lips. “I am happy. I am content. I am not angry.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I turned off the lights and snuggled close to him. His body was tense and I lifted my head. “Something is wrong.”

He laughed, this time uncontrollably, and I joined him. He never did answer my question.

Sandeep was not the most open person I knew. His feelings were locked within him, nothing gave him away, and I never knew how he was feeling unless he told me. He didn’t express his emotions as freely as I did and it sometimes bothered me. It was a compromise—I got a close-mouthed clam, who was loving, affectionate, and understanding.

A few days before the
Dussehra
holidays I received a letter from my parents. I was shocked—the letter said they would come to Ooty for a week. It had been just a couple of weeks since I had written to them inviting them to our home. I had written several letters like this in the past. They had always politely declined my invitation with a reasonable if hastily contrived excuse. This time, however, I had written to them on Sandeep’s insistence about Amar’s failing condition, and the results were quite different.

Sandeep went to pick them up at the railway station and I crossed my fingers, praying that my parents’ visit would go smoothly, without any unnecessary emotional upheavals.

I gave Amar a bath and dressed him up in a nice silk
kurta
pajama, which my parents had sent for him on his last birthday. Amar liked my parents and they adored him. Whenever we took Amar to Hyderabad, they treated him well, despite his illness. They took him on outings to the zoo, the planetarium, and the Birla temple that sat high up on a hilltop. Amar was inundated with gifts and trips to the ice cream parlors. I was thankful for their attitude toward Amar. He gave us a thread, a connection that was almost severed after my divorce.

I hadn’t seen my parents for almost two years. The last time we were in Hyderabad we’d had a fight. I couldn’t remember what the reason was—one reason mingled with another and one fight faded into the next. My parents never adjusted to my new life. They had found me a good-looking husband, an army officer with great prospects. I had blown that away and now had to settle down with a professor and a sick child. This was not the life they had planned for me. This was not the life I had wanted for myself. But I wouldn’t change a thing—besides making my son healthy if I could. When they arrived with Sandeep I noticed that they had aged in the two years I hadn’t seen them. They looked old and tired. As if they were ready to die.

My father seemed to have lost a lot of his domineering attitude. We’d never had a great relationship, but that was expected. Daughters didn’t have great relationships with their fathers. He had thundered and raged when he found out I had filed for a divorce. He had wanted me to hang on to a bad marriage because their “noses would be cut off in society.” I told him my life was too high a price to pay to save his idea of honor.

Now he seemed quieter, beaten.

Komal was a well-behaved woman with them. I probably appeared like a regular Jezebel, in contrast to Komal, who always wore white in deference to her widowhood. Komal was soft-spoken in front of them and very respectful, unlike me, and she followed all the religious rituals and had not left her husband or disgraced herself after his death by marrying again.

I was sifting the wheat flour for dinner when my mother finally tore herself from Amar, with whom she had spent most of the day in the living room playing, and came to talk to me. I knew she was going to talk to me instead of throw accusations on my face because she didn’t start her words with “How could you . . . ?”

“He seems better,” she said. “What do the doctors say?”

I ran my fingers through the soft flour. “His lungs are not getting any better and the heart operation . . . well, the valve is malfunctioning again.”

“So . . . ?”

“We’ll see.”

She couldn’t ask the question I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even think it. He was sick and in pain, yet I wanted him to live just another day because in another day maybe science would catch up with his disease and cure him.

“Sandeep takes very good care of him,” Mummy said. This was probably the first time she was saying something nice about Sandeep.

“He is wonderful with him and me. He . . . is so solid, I can really lean on him.”

My mother nodded nervously. “He looks the kind. I . . . we came here because . . .”

“Because?” I prodded when the silence stretched.

Mummy smiled sadly, her wrinkled skin twirled around her face. “Daddy had a heart attack three months ago.”

The sieve I was holding dropped and the flour rose like a small white cloud. How many people were going to get sick around me? I thought desperately.

I wheezed suddenly and it began. I tried to breathe but couldn’t, and my mother’s eyes widened in shock. Even before she finished calling Sandeep’s name, he was in the kitchen with my inhaler.

Komal cooked that night while I lay in bed resting. Mummy sat beside me and told me what had happened to Daddy. It was his first attack and he would do better if he just watched what he ate, she said.

“Mummy, this is really bad news,” I said.

“I know.” She patted my hand. “And you’ve been through enough bad news, haven’t you? I keep thinking how it must have been for you in Bhopal, lying in that hospital before we got there.” Her voice was filled with sorrow. “I want you to know this because I know I haven’t told you how I really feel. I believed you when you said Prakash . . . when you told us about him. I believed you. Your daddy still doesn’t, but I believed you.”

“Why didn’t you help me then?”

My mother used the edge of her cotton sari to wipe her tears. “You were talking about divorce.”

“And?”

“And?”

“Yes,” I said. “He treated me very badly and he married me to avoid scandal and he was sleeping with another woman. A married woman. What did you want me to do? Be his wife despite all that?”

“Yes,” she said unflinchingly. “You were his wife and marriage is forever. It is a relationship that is meant to be for seven lives and you turned your back on it.”

“You still think I should’ve stayed with him.”

She shrugged. “I see you with Sandeep and I am happy for you. Even with all your problems, you look happy with him. One heart attack and you should see how we are falling apart. I am scared he’ll die and he’s scared he’ll die and . . . we aren’t taking care of each other like we’re supposed to.”

“You’ll be fine, Daddy will be fine,” I said, and took a deep breath, enjoying the feel of oxygen. Since the gas tragedy one of my biggest fears was losing my breath, losing the ability to breathe. And after asthma attacks, I savored the feeling of drinking in fresh air as if it were for the first time.

“No,” she whimpered. “He will die and what will I do then? Your brother is married to that cunning bitch. She won’t take care of me.”

I don’t know what possessed me to say it, but I did. “I will take care of you.”

“I can’t stay in a daughter’s house. What will people say?” she said, as if I had suggested that she commit murder. It was the rule: a daughter’s marital house was off limits to her parents. A daughter never truly belonged to her parents; she belonged to her in-laws and her husband.

I grinned. “I got a divorce and fell in love and got married again. You really think I care about what people will say? You can stay with whomever you want and you can stay with me. But . . . Daddy looks healthy and we won’t have to talk about this for a long time.”

My mother was scared and I realized that her fears and mine were miles apart. I had come a long way from being just her daughter to the woman I was. If I hadn’t made the choices I’d made, I would be like her, afraid to lose the only anchor in my life. I was terrified of losing Sandeep in some freak accident, but I was not worried about my survival if he passed away. I was not looking for someone to take care of me if something happened to Sandeep. I could take care of myself. Unlike my mother I wouldn’t be searching for a place to live, trying to figure out who would be the best candidate to live with. Mummy knew after Daddy died she couldn’t stay with me because she was worried what people would think; her only alternative was living with my brother.

Mummy never liked my brother’s wife. Sanjay and I were estranged and he hadn’t spoken to me since my divorce. It was amazing how my family had abandoned me, while strangers had opened their arms to me. I had always thought that the relationships we make with strangers are the hardest and the relationships we have with family the easiest. For me the opposite had been true. The family I was born into was not really my family anymore, while the family I made for myself out of strangers was mine.

“Sanjay still is just the way he was,” Mummy went on. “He comes home with that woman and—”

“You arranged their marriage, Mummy.”

“I know.” She scowled. “But she was different then. She put on an act so that we would say yes. Once she got married, her true colors came out. She won’t even let me see my grandchildren. Whenever we want to visit them in Mysore, she says that they are going out to visit her parents in Chennai.”

The irony of that didn’t escape me. I invited my parents all the time, and they never came. They were drawn to my brother’s family even though he didn’t want them. The son was the heir, the one who was supposed to take care of the old parents, while the daughter was someone else’s property unloaded at the first available opportunity on a husband and in-laws.

“She is just terrible. But the children—” She smiled. “—the older one . . . just so naughty and the younger one . . .”

She went on, telling me about her other grandchildren. The healthy ones.

Sandeep was adamant about not letting me do any housework that day. He went into panic mode whenever I had an asthma attack. I had tried several medications to cure my disease. But my asthma was related to the methyl isocyanate gas from the Bhopal gas tragedy—it was just one of those diseases that had to be “managed” and couldn’t be cured. I probably would have dwelled in self-pity, but for Amar. The gas tragedy had hit him much harder than it had hit me, though he hadn’t even been a thought the night I breathed the poisonous air.

“Maybe we should try the fish medicine again,” Sandeep suggested. “It has been a few years since the first treatment, maybe . . . now it will work.”

I cringed at the idea. The fish medicine was not pleasant. You stood in line for hours and someone dropped a live murrel fish stuffed with herbs and water inside your mouth, which you had to swallow. The treatment lasted three years, which meant once every year for three years I would have to go through the same ritual again. It was not a myth that people got cured. I knew several people who had recovered from asthma and bronchitis after the three-year treatment. It just hadn’t worked for me.

“I don’t know, it is a three-year commitment and I don’t want to commit to anything right now with Amar not feeling all that well.”

Sandeep raised his eyebrows. “But you want to choke all the time?”

“I am not choking all the time,” I protested. “I am fine all the time. I am just . . . vulnerable—”

“—all the time,” Sandeep finished. “You scare the hell out of me. I can’t believe this. You haven’t had an attack for almost a year and now . . . all of a sudden.”

I shifted on the bed and got close to him. “Mummy told me Daddy had a heart attack.”

Sandeep nodded. “He mentioned it to me. Asked me to take good care of you.”

“They came here. That was a big step for them.” Sandeep muttered something unintelligible and I grinned. He was in a bad mood. It didn’t happen often, so it was a novelty of sorts.

“I am fine. I can breathe. Look.” I took two deep breaths to prove my point.

Sandeep was about to say something in response when Amar called out to me. He sounded distressed and we both rushed to him without further thought about my asthma attack. Compared to my son’s illness, mine was the common cold.

Amar’s chest was hurting and we gave him his medication to ease his pain. By the time he fell asleep that night, both Sandeep and I had forgotten about my asthma attack.

The rest of my parents’ visit was uneventful—until the day before last.

In the parade grounds nearby there was always a big celebration for
Dussehra
, something Amar looked forward to every year.

We walked to the parade grounds, and Sandeep pushed Amar’s wheelchair, my father walking with them, talking to Amar about the Himalayas and how much taller they were compared to the hills surrounding Ooty. Mummy, Komal, and I were walking ahead of Sandeep and Amar.

“I never thought this would be your life,” Mummy said, as she turned to glance at Amar.

“Neither did I,” I agreed.

“I never thought . . .”

I raised my hand to stop her. “I am happy.”

“No, you are not happy,” she mourned. “If only my children were happy. I must’ve done something wrong in some previous life. Otherwise why would both my children be so unhappy?”