Tea for Two and a Piece of Cake
Read Tea for Two and a Piece of Cake Online
Authors: Preeti Shenoy
Tea for two and
a piece of cake
Tea for two and
a piece of cake
PREETI SHENOY
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
Copyright © Preeti Shenoy 2012
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
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EPUB ISBN 9788184001273
For Satish,
who makes it all worthwhile with his
unwavering faith in me.
This one is for you, my love.
Our share of night to bear,
Our share of morning,
Our blank in bliss to fill,
Our blank in scorning.
Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way.
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards—day!
—Emily Dickinson (1830–86)
Contents
With a Little Help From My Friends
Prologue
I
am bathing our seven-month-old baby boy when my husband calls to tell me that our marriage of eight years is over. I rush out of the bathroom, wrap the baby in a towel and am cradling the phone in my ear, with one hand on the baby to prevent him from rolling over the bed, and go crashing to the floor. My hands are still wet, and I wipe them hurriedly as I pick up the phone. When my husband tells me in a calm voice that it is over and he is leaving me, I fail to comprehend.
Then my heart starts beating at what feels like a thousand beats a minute. No, it starts pounding and all I can hear is his steely calm voice saying, ‘Hello—you there?’
If this was a scene in a movie, this would probably be the moment when I drop the phone and collapse in shock on the bed while a melancholic soundtrack is introduced in the background. But this is real life and all I feel, at least right now, which is the beginning (but I am yet to know it), is that he is playing some sort of a cruel joke on me. But it isn’t the first of April and it is the steeliness and edge in his voice that shakes me up.
I do not know what to say. So all I do is answer his question.
‘Yes, I am here,’ I hear myself say, my hand still on baby Rohit, who is gurgling in delight as he always does after a warm bath.
‘I am sorry it has to come to this,’ he says. But the steel in his voice does not go away. And he does not sound sorry at all. In fact, there is no trace of emotion in his voice.
‘Look, Rohit needs his feed and nap. I have to go,’ I say and hang up, choosing to ignore this sword that has been driven right into me. But there is a silent scream inside my head which I am unable to stop. It continues in the background like a supporting orchestra.
I carry Rohit to his high chair and strap him in. I prepare his baby food on auto mode. I even manage to sing his favourite rhyme and make him have his full quota of baby cereal. ‘He would make a good model for an advert of baby food,’ I think to myself. He is chubby and bubbly and the twinkle in his eyes refuses to dim, a lot like his dad.
I try to think of everything besides Samir’s phone call to me. I cannot believe him having said something like this. Ours is a happy marriage. Or so I had thought. This has come as a total bolt from the blue. Or perhaps the signs were already there, but I had chosen to ignore them, subtly brushing them away under the bliss of domesticity, amidst Rohit’s giggles and seven-year-old Tanya’s endless chatter. I don’t know.
But surely our marriage isn’t so bad? Conversations like these happen only when there are years of hurt, years
of pent-up frustration, and years of fighting. We haven’t even been fighting of late. I don’t even remember when we fought the last time. I have always been patient and, whatever be my weak points, one of the greatest strengths I pride myself on is never losing my temper.
I am lying next to Rohit, patting him absent-mindedly. He is a good baby and drops off to sleep within minutes. Thoughts are whirling around in my head. I realize I am involuntarily holding my breath. I exhale slowly with a deep, long sigh. What have I been missing? Why is this happening to me? How can he say something like this? I have no clue. I have always tried hard to please him. I have kept our sprawling home immaculately clean. I have never complained about his late-night office parties. Above all, I have been a good wife and a great mother, even if I may say so myself. Yes, I admit I may have put on a bit of a weight since baby Rohit came, but surely nobody leaves a spouse for this reason?
I truly do not know what to do. Tanya’s school bus will be arriving anytime now and once she comes, it will be a mad rigmarole of trying to divide my time between two children and trying to get dinner organized, issuing instructions to the cook and overseeing that the vegetables and rotis are made just the way Samir likes them. He is fussy about his food, but a sweet guy otherwise.
The kind of sweet guy who has just told his wife of eight years that their marriage is over.
And he has chosen to do it over the phone.
Is there another woman in his life? Does the cliché ‘the wife is always the last to know’ hold true after all? I have no idea.
All I know is Rohit and Tanya need me right now. So I forcefully shove aside the disturbing phone call and pick up Rohit who has now woken up from his nap. Holding him in my lap, I open the door to let Tanya in, greeting her chirpily as she enters.
I am frightened, upset, hurt. I am not yet shattered or devastated. That is to come later. Yet I am not angry. My world as I know it has just come crashing down, but I am still smiling, still pretending, and still being a perfect mummy, hugging Tanya, listening to her chatter, serving her a snack as though nothing is amiss.
Time has never crawled this slowly before. I keep glancing at the clock, waiting for him to come home to make sense of it all. I am so afraid to call him. I am terrified of what he is going to say. I have no guts to face him or this fireball that he has bombarded me with. I want to duck, but I am frozen.
So I wait, going through all the motions required of being a good mother, glad to have something to keep me busy.
It is only when I finally put both kids to bed after dinner that I realize that maybe he is not coming back tonight after all.
The night sky is littered with a thousand twinkling stars and I gaze at them from the balcony of my living room on the fifteenth floor. I pace the length of the balcony restlessly. The cool night breeze caresses my cheeks. I walk inside. I continue to wait, engulfed by the darkness in the drawing room, and go sit on the leather armchair where I usually read my morning paper, too afraid to call, too afraid to try to make sense of it
all, and too afraid to look, for fear of what I will find as my life hangs in suspension. And as I wait for my husband to come home, my mind races back to that time in my life before I became a wife and a mother, the time when he had first walked into my life and swept me off my feet.
Waiting for Saturday Night
February
2001
Mumbai
W
hen you are twenty-six, slightly plump, and have never been on a date before, a chance date with the office hunk sounds like manna from heaven. Well, it is not really a date, but still, I am going out
alone
with Prashant Mathur to the Taj Hotel, no less.
Prashant—the casanova whom women swoon over and will give an arm and a leg to go out with. And he will be taking
me
, Nisha—the plain Jane. Actually that should be Nisha-the-
plump
-plain-Jane.
Okay, so this is not a
real
date, but it still is the closest that I have come to one.
The travel agency where I am employed has received an invite from Magellan International, one of the big players in the travel industry, for a grand party happening at the Taj hotel. Our agency, Point to Point, is a very minuscule one, small fry in comparison to the big players in the business. All we do is pass on our ticketing requirements to them and they do the bookings for us. We are simply a collection and drop-off point for passports and visa requirement forms. We are not even
a proper travel agency in the truest sense of the word, but I absolutely love my office, my job, and my colleagues.
There are just six of us employed here—three men, Prashant, Sanjay, and Akash, and three women, Chetana, Deepti, and me. We don’t even have an office peon. And among the men, Prashant is without doubt, a
very
goodlooking man. He is nearly six feet tall and slim built, with hair stylishly slicked back. His phone is always ringing off the hook, but he makes himself deliberately ‘unavailable’ to prying girls through us. At times, he talks in a low voice and we know instantly that he is fixing up a date.
If our measly salaries could afford a mobile phone, I think he would have been on it all the time. But back then, mobile phones were just playthings of the rich, and so we continue taking Prashant’s personal calls, making excuses for him when he does not want to talk. Sanjay already has a girlfriend, and as soon as office gets over, he rushes off to meet her. The guys are all on the sales team. Their job is to go out and get business for the agency and file reports at the end of the day. The girls man the counters, which means we mostly answer phone calls and smile sweetly at whosoever comes to the agency. My job may not be the greatest in the world, but it means the world to me. It is my very first job and I landed this after a travel and tourism course. The pay isn’t much but I love the sense of belonging I have here. It is also the first time in my life that I am earning my own money, giving me a sense of achievement.