My Nine Lives (3 page)

Otto shrank into a querulous, quarrelsome old man. It was Susie he quarreled with now—not the way he used to fight with Nina, but in niggling, spiteful arguments. They often made separate appointments with me, so that each could complain about the other. After I had cleared out Nina's apartment and Otto had given up the lease, he had wanted me to move in with himself and Susie; but she said it would be difficult because she had turned one of the bedrooms into her studio—she had begun to paint watercolors, mainly as therapy—and the other was needed for guests (though, so far as I knew, she never had any). So I rented a room in some old lady's apartment—on a temporary basis, I thought, because soon I would be going back to India. However, week by week, month by month, I had to postpone this return because of the situation between Susie and Otto; and in the end I had to move into their apartment because Susie moved out of it. She checked herself into a hotel; staying with Otto,
she said, had ruined her nerves and she was heading straight for a nervous breakdown.

After he died—he did not survive a second heart attack—she moved back to the Madison Avenue apartment. By this time I had a tutoring job at Columbia, so she thought it would be more convenient for me to live uptown, nearer my work. She phoned me every day and often I had to go visit her, if she had a cold or the pain in her back was bad. But she appeared to thrive on her own in the apartment with the fine furniture that Otto had inherited from his family. Some of it came from hers, for she was from the same sort of prosperous German-Jewish family as Otto's. Susie used to refer to Nina as “from the wrong side of the tracks” (she liked using these phrases—of my unmarried state she would say, for instance, “You've missed the boat, Rosemary”). Susie was always very tense about Nina, which I suppose was only natural, especially as Nina had never really bothered to hide her opinion of Susie. “That mouse,” she called her—she even nicknamed her “Mousie.” It was true that, in comparison with Nina, Susie was quite insignificant, in looks and personality. But later, when she was alone and in sole possession of Otto's apartment, she came into her own. From being sandy, mousy, she became as pastel as the watercolors she painted. Wearing a pale blue-and-pink smock, she sat in her studio, which was also pastel-colored, and grew serene. All her nervousness dropped away; she painted not for therapy now but for fulfillment.

I was around thirty at this time and Susie in her fifties, but we were like sisters and I the elder. We were also united by our financial interests, Otto having left half his estate to each of us. Although he had not, as she had predicted, ended in the gutter, he had in his last years lost all interest in his business and had finally sold it for much less than expected.
There was enough left for Susie and me to live on, but every now and again it struck her that our money might be running out. Then I had to reassure her and also make some financial adjustments. As she rightly pointed out, I didn't need much whereas she had all those expenses. These worries, as well as her constant difficulties with domestic help, so wore her out that the doctor had often to prescribe a cruise or a vacation in Europe. And it was true that, when she returned, she was serene again and very affectionate and charming to me. One year she came back with her face smooth as glass, and when I congratulated her on the beneficial effect of her holiday, she smiled, though painfully as though afraid something might crack.

As the years passed—and not just two or three years, for she survived my parents by over twenty—Susie became more and more opposed to my going to India. I had already given up my winter trips because, as she said, I could hardly expect her to be alone for Christmas. Then she began to fret when the summer vacations came around; and if she didn't fall ill before I left, then it happened more than once that I had to be recalled for some medical or other emergency of hers.

Even when I did manage to get away, I could never recapture the complete ease, the freedom, the irresponsibility of my earlier Indian years. In Delhi, I still stayed with Somnath's family, but here too circumstances had changed in the course of the years. There had been a number of deaths—I was there for his mother's funeral, which was treated as a joyful occasion since it was an old person who had died, rich in years and offspring. I saw Somnath dance in that procession, laughing and spinning around, though with tears of grief rolling down his cheeks. And there were other deaths—that of a brother-in-law who died suddenly after a hernia operation, leaving his widow and three young children with no one to provide for
them except Somnath. His own children were growing up—especially his eldest daughter, Priti, of whom he was very proud because she had won a scholarship to go to college. There she met girls from very advanced homes and became scornful of her own family's oldfashioned ways. She cut off her hair and also brought home some very modern ideas, which made Somnath smile with pride in her, whom he loved most deeply. But the women shook their heads, taking her advanced opinions as a sign of worse to come. And worse did come, when she was discovered in secret meetings with a college boy who was not only not of their caste, he wasn't even a Hindu but from a family of Christian converts who ate beef and pig.

With the widowed sister and her family moved in, the house was too crowded now for me to stay there. Anyway, I no longer spent much time in Delhi, but following the subject of my thesis, I traveled all over the country, to the places where she had escaped till brought back by her family. All she had wanted was to be in the company of some holy person, usually a dead one, in a tomb or in a sacred spot marked by a little whitewashed temple. And all I wanted was to be in her company; but, like her, I too was brought back—always by a telegram or trunk call from Susie. Once I was in what I thought must be the remotest part of a remote province, trying to decipher the inscription on a Sufi poet's grave, when a horde of excited children descended on me, shouting, “Mem! Mem! Telephone!” They led me back in triumph to the telephone in the post office, which was only another village hut; and everyone, adults and children, stood around smiling and commenting while Susie called down the line to me to come soon, to come quickly because her bathroom ceiling had sprung a leak and she was too ill with nerves to deal with it. I laughed, was exasperated, yet I had to go back.

Susie never revealed her age, but by this time she must have
been in her eighties. Physically she was marvelously well—of course she was very careful, taking regular massage and salads with no dressing—but her mind was more fragile. When it was no longer possible for her to live on her own, I had to move back in with her. It became impossible for me to leave New York. Besides the nursing arrangements for Susie, I had to make financial ones for both of us. There was still my tutoring job but since I had not yet managed to complete my PhD thesis, I couldn't apply or hope for more. I sold some good pieces of furniture and silver, and in view of the sliding market, I had to learn about stocks and have meetings with our accountant and stockbroker. I discovered we owed back taxes as well as estate duties, and to pay them I had to sell more stock, more silver, and also some of Nina's jewelry—this last with great caution, but Susie never noticed. She remained completely serene. Even when I could no longer afford the maintenance on our apartment and had to move us to a cheaper place, she maintained her daily routine of eating and napping, often humming to herself happily in a way she never had in younger days.

I had letters from India. Somnath wrote about his family, always beginning with the regular salutation, “We are all well and happy.” Occasionally I had no time to read further, so that I may have missed certain items of not so good news. I did read how his daughter Priti had gone away to marry her Christian boy friend—his feelings on the subject were confined to this simple statement of fact, followed by other facts such as the high price of staples and vegetables. I don't remember any mention of his own illness. When I was too busy to read his letter to the end, I stuffed it in my pocket for later and then forgot about it and put it through the washing machine; so he may have somewhere mentioned the mysterious illness and the tests and the hospitals and the expense, the expense.
By now I knew for myself what it was to be consumed by worries, eaten up by Life not in the radiant Nina-sense but as something insidious as a worm. Finally his eldest son wrote. The letter was dignified, calm, weary with acceptance the way Somnath himself had been. It might have been a fitting elegy if it hadn't lacked that other element I knew to be his: that sudden leap of recognition—as when listening to poetry or music—that this is how life could be and maybe, somewhere else, really was.

Susie also died—or passed away, she would have said—as serene in her pastel nightie as she had been for the past two decades. By that time our money was gone, mostly on round-the-clock nursing for her. Fortunately I myself was an old woman by then and could draw my social security. It was not enough to live on in New York but would see me through a modest existence in India. I bought a one-way ticket to New Delhi where I have been ever since, first in the upstairs flat in the new colony with the landlords living downstairs. I've stopped traveling—I'm not planning to finish my thesis, for even if it were to be awarded the PhD degree, I'm too old to get a teaching appointment. But it's all right, I don't have to travel far now to be where my subject had been. Every Thursday evening I take a bus to Nizamuddin, to listen to the singers in the courtyard of the mausoleum compound. There is a wash of pink-tinted light over the white marble until the sun finally sets; then the sky, stretched between tombs and mosque, is a soft silk cloth with stars sewn into it—such a beautiful setting for the words of praise and longing so lustily sung for rupees by the muscular performers in shirtsleeves. One of them smiles and sways to the sounds he is squeezing out of the harmonium, and peace flows from the
night and the music, soothing the madmen in their chains who have been brought here to benefit from the influence of the live music and the dead saint. Other evenings I take another bus, which deposits me near the river. Here I join a little group of women—most of them widows, all of them old—and they too are singing, in the same strain though to a different god or, in their case, gods. I sing along with them, while they laugh at my pronunciation and try to teach me better. They have no difficulty accepting my alien presence, for though my face is white, it is as wrinkled as theirs; I have taken to wearing a cotton sari, which is more convenient, especially to draw over one's head as a protection against the hot sun. We are all singing the same songs and all enjoying the river when it is in spate or, when it is not, the liquid luminous sky flowing above the bed of dry mud.

I notice I've been using the present tense—as though all the above were the present. But it is not. If it were, I might have been able to end my days as serenely singing as Susie did hers. One day, while returning from an excursion to the river, maybe still singing and smiling to myself, I heard someone behind me in the bus line calling my name. “Is it you? Really you?” She embraced me as no one had done in a long time. It was Priti, Somnath's daughter, though it took me some time to recognize her. I had last seen her when she was a student, in love, with a defiant short haircut and ideas to match. Now it was many years since her romantic elopement and she was almost middleaged. My bus arrived, and when that happens, there is no time to waste (more than once, unable to move fast enough, I've been knocked down in the rush to get on). I just managed to shout my address to her, and she came to see me the very next day. It was a holiday and she didn't have to work. Yes, she had a job—not a good one, underpaid, in a travel agency run by a greedy
and tyrannical woman; but the hours were good, so that she only needed part-time help at home. Fortunately, her children were bigger now—sixteen and seventeen—and her husband, thank heavens, no longer lived with her but was drinking himself to death in Bombay.

She came often; she said she loved to be with me and talk about the past. But it was mostly the present we talked of,
her
stressful present, which included a bad relationship with her brothers and sisters, all of whom had made conventional arranged marriages and felt themselves entitled to look down on her. (At that she proudly tossed her hair, still short, the way she used to.) She also loved, she said, to be with me in my cozy, comfortable little place—here her eyes roved around, in the slightly calculating way of women who have for years had to look out for themselves. I was surprised: “cozy and comfortable” were not words truly applicable to my little whitewashed room, at least not for anyone but me. I had a string bed with a mat beside it on which I slept more often than on the bed. The room was on the roof, so there was a lot of light—also heat, but I possessed a big black table fan that I had bought from my landlords when they installed their airconditioner. Priti said she felt more peaceful here than anywhere else. At home, the children brought back friends and played loud music, which was disturbing to her when she returned from work, often with a headache brought on by the stressful situation with her employer. How she would love to come and relax in a place like mine—although of course she didn't want to disturb me in any way. I suggested that, if I gave her my key, she could just come and rest here for an hour or two when I was out. Well, I was always out at dusk when I went down to the river or, on Thursdays, to Nizamuddin. This worked out perfectly because those were the same hours that Priti was finished
for the day, and it was a great relief to her to have my quiet place to come to.

I began to suspect that she did not come there alone, but I didn't mind. I even liked the idea of Priti bringing a friend. I knew she had had a bad marriage—she told me details that I didn't want to hear—and I also knew that she was, like my mother, a person who thirsted for love. This too she often told me, and in any case, didn't I remember her as a young girl defying her whole family and all her caste and traditions, for the sake of love? I began to stay out later than usual so as not to disturb her time together with her friend. By the time I arrived home she had gone, with everything as I had left it, except sometimes for a lingering smell of liquor and tobacco smoke.