The Age of Shiva (19 page)

Dev and Freddy were the last to emerge. I watched as my husband offered his hand to steady Freddy, who seemed to be suddenly having trouble descending the steps. All through the boat ride back, she kept laughing at whatever Dev said—I had never told her my husband had such a sense of humor, she declared to me. I consoled myself that it didn't matter—I had been through more with Dev and Roopa, managing to keep myself above jealousy. “What was that expression again on Parvati's face?” one of Freddy's friends threw into the group, and I felt my cheeks turn red.

“Did you have to be so obvious?” I asked Dev when we got home.

“At least you could have wiped the strings of drool off your mouth periodically.”

“What a filthy mind you have,” Dev replied. “Is that all you can think?” He went to sulk in the other room. Later on, I heard him hum the same Mukesh song from the boat to himself.

THAT WEEK, FOR THE
first time since I had started going to college, Dev showed up after classes to pick me up. “I thought I could also thank Freddy, in case we see her, for that round samosa she brought, made of kidneys.”

We ended up going to the Cream Centre for tea with Freddy's group. It was just like at the picnic—Dev as oblivious as before, Freddy leading him on, and the entourage giggling—not only at him, but now at me as well. I kept dreading another attempt by Dev to burst into “Awara Hoon,” but to my relief, it didn't materialize.

I'm not sure how he got the time off, but Dev started showing up every second or third day after that. One afternoon, he came with us for lunch—on another, he accompanied us to see
An Affair to Remember
at the Regal. (“Next time we'll try to find you a movie with more songs in it,” Freddy promised.) There came an evening when I glanced out of the balcony and saw him being dropped off at ten by the white Mercedes.

“It's really nothing,” he said when I confronted him upstairs. “Freddy wanted to see the studio, so we waited, but the recording didn't end. We'll try again on Saturday—I have the morning off—you can come along too, if you care.”

I fumed all night. I would search out the boy who followed me last year, I told myself. Show up together at the studio on Saturday to let Dev know two could play the flirtation game. I actually looked for my stalker the next day in college—surveying classrooms from the outside, peering into the men's canteen, searching nooks in the library, but he was nowhere to be seen.

On Saturday, I told Dev I did want to be present at the studio. “As you like,” he said, checking his nostrils in the mirror and tamping down a curl of hair behind his ear. He fastened his sleeves with cuff links in the shape of miniature eagles, then dabbed on the last drops from a bottle of Godrej after-shave.

The air-conditioning was off in the studio lobby. Dev's Godrej fragrance dissipated within the first half hour of waiting. Circles of sweat formed at his armpits, but he did not unthread the eagles to roll up his sleeves. “Perhaps the traffic is jammed at Nana Chowk,” he conjectured when an hour had passed. “I should have told her the A-1 chip factory—her driver must be having a problem with the address,” he said at 1 p.m. “There could have been an accident—I hope to God Freddy's not been hurt.”

Freddy never showed. My first instinct, that Dev was not somebody she could be interested in, proved correct. Like a swirl of butterflies taking to the air simultaneously, Freddy and her friends left him behind, in search of the next bush on which to alight. The invitations to badminton courts and the Cream Centre ceased abruptly, the Mercedes stopped rolling around the corner of our street.

Although I was relieved to be no longer one of Freddy's projects, Dev took it very hard. I could tell he blamed me for somehow sabotaging things. He put away the eagles and didn't replace the bottle of after-shave for many months. On some nights, he seemed so forlorn that I wondered if I should be cheering him up—even, perhaps, trying to broker a meeting with Freddy. His ego had become more fragile, his confidence readily shaken, after months of drubbing at the recording studio. He stopped going to Jogeshwari not too long after, discontinuing his voice lessons without telling me.

Freddy herself mostly ignored me after that, except for one brazen request to sign a petition against a move by the principal to hold some classes in Marathi. A few of her friends, though, took to making jokes about me. One of them even came up whenever she saw me, to address me as “Parvati.” I started delaying my entry into classrooms to the very last moment so I wouldn't have to encounter the winking glances and knowing smiles. It occurred to me that I had three more years of joint classes with my tormentors ahead of me.

I needn't have worried. When the First Year Arts final exam results were posted that May, I found I had failed, and would have to repeat the year.

P
AJI SENT ME A SLEW OF SCATHING LETTERS WHEN HE LEARNT THE NEWS.
In the first one, he informed me that I had not only shamed myself, but humiliated him in front of Dr. Dastoor as well. “Were you too proud to ask his daughter for help just because she's smarter?” When I couldn't think of how to reveal the flirtations between Dev and Freddy, he accused me of failing on purpose, just to anger him. “If that's how ignorant your thinking is, then just remember, you're only hurting yourself.” I was composing a reply about how difficult my transition had been after the loss of my baby, when another missive arrived, listing all the money he'd spent on books and fees. “Perhaps I should have adopted a street urchin—I'd have been more appreciated had I sent him to college instead.”

Something rose within me, something that made me tear up the explanation I had been trying to articulate. If that was Paji's attitude, then fine, I would absorb his anger, savor it, even find ways to provoke him further. Perhaps this was the way to soothe the injury inside, that still hurt so much every time I thought about it. I resolved to sit on the beach through all my classes in the coming year, picturing the money wasted every minute. It was unfortunate that colleges did not insist on uniforms—I would have enjoyed the extra coins draining from Paji's pocket.

The person who deflected me from this headstrong path, was, strangely enough, Sharmila. It must have been Paji's frustration with my performance that prompted him to turn to her in desperation. She had always been the least promising student of us all—lost in her own dreamy world, with an academic record as consistent as it was wretched. From the time she was little, she seemed serene in her vision of her future, one where Paji and Biji would hand over the baton of her care to a carefully selected husband. All she had to do was finish her schooling and matriculate, and the gentle burbling pleasures of a wife and mother would, soon enough, float her way. It was therefore a tremendous shock for her when this future suddenly vaporized in the intensity of Paji's attention. Over Biji's furious protestations, Sharmila found herself plucked from the living room viewings by prospective bridegrooms and deposited instead into the confines of Ramjas College (which just a few years ago Roopa had attended with Dev). Her letters to me were heartrending—filled with terror at this unforeseen turn of events, against which she had been too timid to protest.

But then she surprised everyone, not least of all herself. She took to her studies like a wick to oil, absorbing knowledge from books, from lectures, even, it seemed, from the university air itself. She woke up every day at 5 a.m. to pore over her notes and talked about her favorite subject, chemistry, with a fanaticism Biji found horrifying. She did so well in her first-term exams (science, too, not arts) that the college declared her a role model for their fledgling class of females in the sciences and even talked about awarding her a special new medal. Her weakening eyesight (due to all the reading she was doing, Biji charged) led to a pair of glasses which lent her appearance an older, more studious air.

The aftershocks of Sharmila's transformation made their way to me across the country through Paji's letters. “Can you imagine? She's aced the prelim in Physics.” “My own daughter, a scientist—I can hardly believe it.” “Did I mention they're going to fete her on Republic Day?” Suddenly his exhortations for me to study waned—he no longer seemed interested in my dangling promises to improve. “I'll really have to think about it, Meera. Whether it makes any sense to pour in more money for another year if you happen to fail again.” The looming threat of being cut off made me abandon my notions of non-cooperation and return to my books. In 1962, the same year that Sharmila blazed her way to an honors B.Sc. in chemistry, I managed to squeak across the finish line with a third division history B.A.

Sharmila's studiousness didn't end there. She went ahead and finished her master's in organic chemistry in just two years and then became the first woman to enroll in the newly instituted Ph.D. program in the sciences at Delhi University. The
Indian Express
even published a photo with a brief interview, in which the main question seemed to be when, exactly, she planned to marry. “Eve chooses test tube over family” was the caption under her picture, much to Biji's dismay.

WHILE SHARMILA SLAKED
her unexpected thirst for knowledge, I wondered what to do with my degree. At the time I graduated, Paji, engrossed in Sharmila's M.Sc. efforts, distractedly suggested I get a job. “Why bother?” Dev said, each time I brought up the idea. “Surely what they pay me at Famous Studio is enough for the two of us.” For a while, I did nothing, but I was no longer used to staying at home or content with a daily stroll to Chowpatty. Paji put me in touch with a publishing agency near Opera House, for whom I started translating historical books from Hindi to English.

It was not the most stimulating of jobs, but the proprietor, Mr. Hansi, was very solicitous. “Your father is an inspiration not only to every publisher, but every citizen in this country,” he said. “You're lucky to be the daughter of such a great man.” He gave me a desk in the largest of the three rooms, a room I shared with the two typists. It was hard to ignore their sounds at first—the zip of the cartridge, especially, set my teeth on edge. I wondered if I would have to ask to be moved, but fortunately, the noise merged into the background after the first fortnight.

Dev seemed unusually concerned that I not discomfort or tire myself. His solution, when I mentioned the typewriter noise, was that I simply quit. “Why get all drenched for a few rupees?” he said to me each time it rained. “Why go in at all, why can't you just sit at home and translate?” I told him there were too many reference books at work that I needed, too many words and phrases I couldn't process without Mr. Hansi's help. It wasn't the real reason and Dev was by no means convinced. “Be sure to let everyone know you're married—nobody expects a working woman to be a wife. Especially the men you see day after day—who knows what goes on in their heads?”

Dev's apprehension made me keep everyone at arm's length. I was always on guard, starting at even the most innocent of overtures as if an invisible line of etiquette had been crossed. I stole away each afternoon to the café in the courtyard of the Opera House movie theater to eat lunch by myself. There were tables set out under a canopy, and as long as I ordered a cup of tea, I could consume my jam sandwiches (egg on Wednesdays and Fridays) undisturbed there.

The day dawned when I received my first pay—Friday, the twenty-eighth of September, to be exact. A peon went from desk to desk distributing khaki brown envelopes with employees' names written across the top right corner in red. I tore mine open and counted twenty-five ten-rupee notes inside, two one-rupee coins, and sixty paise in change. I had started on the seventh, but Mr. Hansi had given me a full month's wages.

That afternoon, when the Opera House waiter brought my tea, I asked for a Mangola instead. He came back with my bottle and flipped open the cap, catching it expertly in midair. I opened my sandwich packet, and it being Friday, detected the slightly sulfuric aroma of egg. I had boiled it the night before, as I always did, and doused it with pepper precisely to reduce this smell. The thought of the chopped yolks and whites entombed in their mushy slices depressed me. It was quite profligate, I knew, but I had to call the waiter back. “Do you have pakodas on your menu?” I asked. “Or samosas, better yet?”

At home, I waited until Dev was sitting at the dining table before setting the khaki envelope in front of him. He rubbed it warily as if testing the paper, as if apprehensive he might find something offensive about the texture itself. “What is it?” he asked, finally, without looking inside.

“My first pay. Two hundred and fifty-two rupees.” I took out the money, not just to show him, but also because I wanted to feel the crispness of the notes between my fingers again. “It was two ninety-two sixty, but I spent eight annas on lunch and gave the waiter a ten-paise tip.”

Dev stared at the empty envelope as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed, as if the paper had been revealed not only to be disagreeable, but toxic as well. “Two ninety-two sixty,” he said.

“I've been ordering tea there every afternoon and I'd never given the waiter anything, so I—”

But Dev had already put the envelope aside. “I have to get to the studio early tomorrow. The only time they could get both Lata and Rafi to show up for recording a duet was at eight a.m.”

After that, Dev always became irritable on the last Friday of each month, when I was paid. We didn't talk of what I did with my salary, though he must have known that I deposited it into our savings account. I ordered not just samosas from Opera House, but mutton sandwiches as well. Sometimes, when it was very hot, I even splurged on a second Mangola.

One afternoon in January, I found the heavy iron gates to the Opera House compound were chained. Inside, I could make out the closed doors of the café—even the advance booking window for the cinema was shut. A watchman came up behind the gate and rattled his lathi against the bars. “There's a strike,” he said, “haven't you heard? All the movie theaters in the city are closed, to protest the new government tax.”

The next evening, Dev was at home when I returned. The actors' union and the musicians' guild had voted to join the protest (adding their demands for higher pay to the list of grievances). The studios had all shut down, and the whole film industry was now officially on strike. Dev could be out of work indefinitely—it would now be my salary that was crucial for our subsistence.

Dev took this as a direct blow to his ego. He started withdrawing my earnings in secret after I deposited them in our savings account, never asking for any of it directly. He became distant and moody, idling around in the dining room all day, drinking twice as much as before. A money order sent by Paji to help us out enraged him so much that he refused to sign the slip (I had to go to the post office myself the next day to retrieve it). Finally one morning, as I was about to leave for work, he barred my way by standing in front of the door. “I would rather dig ditches in the street,” he said, “than continue living like this on the charity of a wife who works.”

“Why don't you, then? It'll be better than staying at home drunk all the time.”

“I see they not only pay you at your office, but also sharpen your tongue for free. Is this why I allow you to go, so that you can learn how to speak back to me?”

I tried to get past Dev, but he didn't move. “What will you do, write to your daddy if I stop you now? He's the one who first put this idea of working in your head, isn't he? Do you have to be such a good daughter that you always have to please him?”

“Don't forget that if it weren't for my father, you wouldn't have this house—you'd be living on the street. If you can gulp down all his money without a burp, why such pretensions taking it from me?”

“Yes, yes, keep telling me how worthless I am. How I'm a leech on you and your Paji—isn't that what you think? And as for your
respected
father—” He didn't complete his sentence, but slunk into the other room.

I went to work that day and every day after that, weathering Dev's taunts as best I could. My hope was that once his work resumed, he would calm down and revert to his earlier peevish but tolerant attitude.

But I underestimated the rage he would store up in the ten weeks the strike lasted. As soon as he started getting paid again, Dev disappeared every evening, coming back at 3 and 4 a.m, long after Auntie's had shut down. Thoroughly inebriated, he collapsed into the living room couch as soon as he returned. In the mornings, he was surly and ill-tempered and refused to answer the questions I posed. “It's none of your business—think you can still wave your money in my face?”

Finally, one night I confronted Auntie in her bar at 10 p.m. “What makes you imagine I keep track of my customers' whereabouts?” she snapped. Then she softened. “He only pops in here for a single drink these days—he spends most of the evening down the road, at Banu's place.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It's one of
those
kinds of establishments. I can't believe I'm revealing this, but if we women don't come to each other's aid, who will?”

“You mean it's a brothel?”

“Not quite that sordid—only some dancing, or so I've heard. But a full rupee per glass she demands, this Banu does—imagine if I started charging that. I suppose she can get away with it, the way she struts around putting everything she has on display.”

So this was what Dev had sunk to. I imagined going to Banu's place to retrieve him. Opening the faceless door to enter the hallway lit in garish pink. The drumbeat of a tabla starting up somewhere above, a woman clearing her throat and beginning to sing. Dev adding his voice to the suggestive lyrics, hands clapping, ankle bells chiming, a harmonium joining in. “Stop!” the hall attendant crying out, as I squeeze by the furniture and go running past him. My feet pounding on wood as I vault the steps, my breath coming in rasps as I part the strings of beads that screen the chamber upstairs.

What would I be greeted by? The scenes I had witnessed so many times in films? Clouds of attar-scented smoke, the gaudiness of painted-on gold, translucent curtains billowing in the wind. Courtesans reclining languorously around the room, customers leering drunkenly from the sidelines, musicians plying their instruments on the patterned linoleum floor. The thickly caked makeup on the dancing girl's face, the tiny white buds of motiya braided with tinsel in her hair. And Dev—Dev at her mercurial henna-painted feet, so rapt in his song that he doesn't even notice me there.