Monsoon Memories (22 page)

‘Why don’t you go, then?’ Her voice loud, grating.

‘When I return home, I will do so with you. You are my wife and I am proud of you. I am not going to hide you away like a guilty secret.’

She understood. It would be a betrayal of her if he went back on his own. It would look like he was tacitly admitting her culpability. ‘No pressure on me, then.’ Why was she being like this, so sarcastic, when all he was doing was speaking his mind, finally, after years of skirting the truth? She was hurt. She had not realised this was how he felt. If she was to be completely honest, she had not been thinking about him at all; it had all been about her. Her feelings, her shame, her guilt. ‘I’m going to go see the counsellor again. And then we’ll go back. Together.’ She looked up at him.

His voice gentle, ‘I’m happy here, Shonu. With you.’ He closed
The
Economist
, sat up and moved closer to where she was sitting on the armchair, hugging her legs with both arms, head resting on her knees. Madhu’s favourite squatting position. Madhu sitting in the kitchen, beside the hand grinder, nursing a tumbler of tea, smiling at her…
I need you, Madhu. I need you now.

‘But visiting the counsellor is a great idea.’ And then, ‘What about Switzerland?’

‘Huh?’

‘You wanted to go away at Christmas?’

The secret to their marriage: don’t talk about things that matter. Talk about something else instead. Like a holiday they both knew they wouldn’t take. She knew she should talk to him, now that they were finally airing things in the open, eleven years too late. But instead, she played along, relieved. ‘We could rent a chalet. Hibernate. Perhaps even learn to ski...’

That made him smile and she was inordinately pleased. ‘Really?’ The twinkle in his eyes that she absolutely loved. ‘Do you remember what you said after we went ice-skating that last time?’

‘I didn’t say anything. It was you, complaining about the cold, complaining about falling, the pain in your knees, your back. You’re just too old for this sort of thing...’

‘Oh, I am, am I?’ He reached across and with one finger traced a line under her arm where she was the most ticklish.

‘Hey, not fair. You always resort to underhand means to win an argument.’

‘I didn’t know we were arguing.’ In one fluid motion, he had gathered her in his arms. She stiffened. ‘Eh, Shonu?’ he whispered in her ear. Slowly, she relaxed against him. ‘I know why you want to go away this Christmas...’

‘Stop whispering in my ear. It tickles.’ She turned to face him. ‘Why?’

‘So you can get out of attending Jane and Neil’s party.’

She buried her face in his jumper. ‘How did you know?’ she laughed and it came out all muffled.

Every year, Vinod’s boss Neil and his wife Jane hosted a posh Christmas party. And every year, when all the guests were seated at the table, Jane turned to Shirin and asked, her eyes shining in anticipation, ‘So tell us again, how did you and Vinod meet?’ like the answer was Shirin’s best party trick.

Where did she begin? How did she tell these people who couldn’t fathom a relationship without having known the person first, been in love with them, about how things really worked in India, how you grew up watching your mother squirrel away bits and pieces of gold: ‘for your dowry’ and you knew what was coming; how the village matrons started sizing you up as soon as you turned fifteen, shaking their heads and muttering ominously, ‘This one will need a lot of prayers’?

If she was really honest, she would say it all began with the note, the summer she turned eighteen...

That summer, Jacinta embarked on her most important task as the mother of an Indian girl.

Finding a good match for the eldest daughter was vital. If the eldest set a good example by marrying into a decent Mangalorean Catholic family, then chances were that proposals for the siblings would follow suit. If the eldest daughter did something foolish—like married outside the community, or fell in love, with a Hindu or, God forbid, a Muslim—the siblings would in all probability not get married at all, as no self-respecting suitor would associate with, let alone marry into, a disgraced family.

Shirin had her first marriage ‘interview’ a few months after she switched colleges. Her hair had started to grow back and was now shoulder-length, just fitting into a neat plait. Tariq visited her regularly in her dreams, his intense eyes lighting up when he saw her, his hands caressing her face, his lips meeting hers… She always woke when she got to this part, hot and flustered, and spent the rest of the night fantasising about what would happen next, her body aching, arching, wanting… Anita had reported that Tariq had returned to college a week after Shirin left, his arm in a cast, his jaw bruised, left eye swollen, and that he kept well away from Deepak. Once, when Deepak was ill, he had approached Anita, whose school was next door to the college, and asked how Shirin was doing. Anita had walked away without replying, knowing that Deepak’s friends were watching…

The suitor’s name, Jacinta informed Shirin, was Anil. Anil and his family arrived an hour and a half later than they were supposed to. Shirin waited, feeling the sweat trickle down her back and pool around her armpits. She was sure it would leave tell-tale marks on her sari blouse. The unfamiliar jewellery that her mother had insisted she wore itched. The many gold bangles made a sound if she so much as lifted a finger.

Anil’s mother grilled Shirin for the best part of an hour. ‘Bit dusky, aren’t you? And on the heavy side…What is your weight? Do you dance, cook, sing? Do you wear contact lenses? What is that mark on your skin?’ Every blemish was questioned, examined and commented upon. Anil hardly spoke except to agree with his mother: ‘Yes, she is big-boned. Yes, it would be handy if she knew how to sew. Yes, it’s a shame she can’t cook North Indian food. Yes, she shouldn’t have cut her hair; it looked better long, like in the photo attached to her CV. Yes, in her CV she said she was skilled at Bharatanatyam.’ And finally, when Shirin thought she could stand the litany of her imperfections no longer, it was over and they were saying their goodbyes. As Shirin turned to go inside, Anil’s mother called out, ‘Don’t be disheartened if we don’t get back to you. Anil has five more girls lined up.’
Good luck to them,
Shirin thought.

After they had left and Shirin had changed, she went to Madhu, who was washing clothes by the well. Madhu held Shirin, her hands dripping suds all over Shirin’s face and blending with her tears: a salty, soap flavoured cocktail. She rocked Shirin back and forth like she had when she was a child, the clothes lying forgotten and forlorn on the washing stone, gently pushing Shirin’s hair which was escaping the confines of the plait away from her face with wet hands, ‘Shh, it’s okay, Shirin. They were horrible people. Not everyone is like that.’

When she came back in the house, Jacinta, who was reading the
Udayavani
in her housecoat as she was wont to do in the evenings, peered up at her from above her spectacles. ‘Come here, Shirin. Sit by me.’

Shirin sat on the cool cement floor beside Jacinta’s cane chair. ‘You did well,’ Jacinta whispered. Shirin wondered if she’d heard right. The heaviness in her heart eased the slightest bit. The tube light flickered, died. ‘Low voltage, again,’ grumbled Jacinta as she always did when this happened, ‘How are we supposed to do anything after dusk, if there is either low voltage or no power?’

Outside, crickets kept up their nightly song, frogs croaked and rain drummed on the tiles. Dogs howled and old Ananthanna walked home drunk, teetering precariously on the little mud lane between the fields and managing to maintain his balance—just—unaware that he was getting completely soaked. He shouted insults to his wife, who had been dead ten years, loud enough for the whole neighbourhood to hear. His voice carried over the rain, strident and vitriolic. He would stand there, shouting in the rain until his harassed daughter-in-law ventured out into the muddy fields with an umbrella and coaxed him home.

In the dark, Jacinta’s hand found Shirin’s, squeezed, and settled there. Shirin accepted it like a gift, and they sat like that until Madhu came in from the kitchen carrying lit candles and grumbling about the government and how there was never any power in the villages and if there was no electricity how was she supposed to grind the rice and lentils for dosas now that ma’am had insisted she use the mixer and had given the hand grinder to Muthakka.

The whole cumbersome process of arranging her marriage, more gruelling than the worst job interview: the hunt for eligible bachelors, the visit from the suitor and his parents, the interrogation, the wait for the results, to find out if she’d passed scrutiny, won their approval—did get better after that, perhaps because Shirin learnt not to take the rejections, the hurtful comments, the emphasis on her many imperfections, too much to heart. What hurt was to see Jacinta waiting on tenterhooks after a prospective groom had been to see Shirin, hope mingling with worry on her usually unreadable face and then, after each rejection, the hope draining out to be replaced by a drawn, haggard expression—until the next proposal. What hurt was to overhear the village gossips say, within Jacinta’s earshot, ‘If only Anita had been the eldest, she would have been snapped up by now,’ or, ‘How old is Shirin now? Oh... In danger of becoming an old maid...’ And, ‘Soon, Anita will be of marriageable age. She will have a long line of suitors no doubt, and poor Jacinta will still have Shirin on her hands. If only Shirin had a lighter complexion, if only she were thinner...’

What hurt was the unavoidable fact that she was not the daughter her proud, beautiful mother deserved.

Gradually, the proposals dwindled and the lines on her mother’s face multiplied. Shirin waited for her Knight in Shining Armour, knowing that it was fantasy—who would want her anyway?
Tariq.

Tariq. His beautiful tawny-gold eyes. Those full lips that she so wanted to kiss. She had given up hope of ever seeing him again—and he had turned up at her university. Every morning, she said goodbye to her mother’s displeasure and dumpy Shirin who couldn’t snag a suitor and climbed aboard the ‘Sugama’ bus that would take her to college. As the bus turned the corner, she pushed and elbowed her way through the heaving, sweaty crowd, her face in people’s armpits as they struggled to hold on when the bus juddered over potholes, catching a glimpse of the bespectacled face waiting patiently for her in the shade of the banyan tree by the bus stop. She would stagger off the steps and see his face light up at the sight of her, and she was transformed; she was Shirin, delicate swan, beautiful princess. They would walk up to the main building together, he carrying her books for her, and part at the entrance to go to their respective classes. They met up at break and shared a tea in the canteen, and her lips touching the tumbler after he’d sipped from it felt as intimate as a kiss. They would skip the canteen altogether at lunch, and walk to the sea. They would sit, side by side, not quite touching, and sketch their initials in the sand, boldly entwined, and it always felt like the worst kind of betrayal to hunt for them the next day and find fresh white sand, unsullied, to realise the waves had erased this evidence of their love. He held her hand sometimes, as they walked back to college from the beach, letting go just as they left the cover of trees and came onto the road, and she was left wanting more, so much more. She desired him. She had certainly wanted him to kiss her that evening when they’d sheltered from the rain by the electronics lab, darkness caused by the power cut a cover, their breath punctuating the silence. She had seen his face illuminated by a flash of lightning, very close.
Kiss me, please
, she had thought, inching her face closer, shocked by her brazenness.
Crush me against you. I want to be held, touched all over. I want to know what it feels like.

But when it came right down to it, could she brave being disowned by her mother, bringing disgrace to her family for Tariq? No. Not after what happened with the note… ‘You are the eldest. You are required to set an example. The eyes of the whole village are on you. If you step one toe out of line, you are not only ruining your future but hers as well.’ Her mother had yelled that horrible evening, her eyes flashing, one finger pointing at Anita. ‘Look at her. Do you want to destroy her? Think, Shirin, think,’ her voice softening suddenly, ‘with your head, not your heart.’ Her hand reaching out, gently caressing Shirin’s shorn head, her bare neck. Had there been tears flashing in her mother’s eyes?

What would her mother do if she found out about Tariq now?
No.
Shirin was so careful. Her college was far enough away. Deepak and Anita were away at college in different states. And her mother was preoccupied with fixing her marriage.

The passion from the romantic novels is not for me. I will learn to love the man who marries me, duty-bound, until duty becomes truth. And one day, when my children are old enough, I will let them choose, will vicariously participate in their passion as they fall in love. No arranged marriages, no forced humiliations for my children,
she told herself every night, as she prayed for a good proposal to come, for a suitor to say yes to marrying her, so the worry could be wiped off her mother’s face, so she could see her mother’s rare open-mouthed smile again.

And then one day Aunt Winnie—one of the many ‘aunts’ who weren’t related—arrived with news of a prospective groom. She knew someone who knew someone who had heard about this family—Mangalorean Catholics settled in Bangalore, own business, two sons—who were looking for a well-brought-up Mangalorean Catholic girl for their younger son. He was called Vinod.

‘The older son. Where’s his wife from?’ Jacinta asked as she heaped rice and two fat pieces of fried pomfret onto Aunt Winnie’s plate.

‘He’s not married.’

‘
He’s not?
Why?’ Jacinta sounded shocked.

Aunt Winnie prised the fish off the bone and divided the rice into several little mounds, topping each with a piece of fish. ‘He doesn’t want to, it seems. Some love affair gone wrong when he was younger, after which he swore never to get married. And now, the younger son is of marriageable age and the parents are not prepared to wait for Prem to change his mind any longer.’ She squidged each mound into a ball and popped one in her mouth, closing her eyes as she chewed. ‘Hmm. This is nice,’ she said, ‘If you ever want rid of Madhu, I’ll take her.’