The Age of Shiva (36 page)

For a while, Zaida just sat on one of the chairs and waited. “Had my clothes not been in the bedroom cupboard, I may have packed them and left, though I probably would only have come here, to your flat. I noticed there were ants already beginning to be attracted by the milk on the floor, so I dampened a cloth in the kitchen to wipe up the spill. I examined the glass Anwar had thrown—it had chipped very slightly around the rim. I kept looking at it for a long time after I had rinsed it, unable to decide whether to return it to the cabinet or throw it out. Finally, I set it on the counter, opened the bedroom door, and went in.”

Anwar was lying absolutely motionless on the bed. “As if he were a patient on an operating table, and I the surgeon to whom he had entrusted his fate. His face was so bloodless that I thought he had suffered a heart attack. I imagined letting him lie there as I watched the life ebb out of him. He gasped, and I drew closer—so close that I could feel his breath on my hand, though I didn't touch him. I realized he was trying to say something, but I wasn't sure I wanted to hear it. What if he was using the last of his energy to dredge up the words he had been unable to summon earlier? But there must have still been some remnant of the noble presence within me—or perhaps I just felt pity, now that his last moments seemed near. In any case, I found myself smoothing out his forehead, holding his hand, telling him I was there. His eyes opened, and they were surprisingly clear—I drew back, startled by the realization that he was not quite on his deathbed. He started whispering again, and this time I put down my ear next to his lips. ‘Aneez,' he was saying. ‘I'll never be able to marry my Aneez, thanks to the churail.'

“I suppose the presence inside me must have abruptly vanished, because I spat in his face. He made no move to wipe the spittle off, but stopped whispering for a moment. Then he started repeating Aneez's name once more, over and over again, as if he were chanting a prayer. I watched the dark hole of his mouth open and close, framed by the thick fleshiness of his lips. I spat at him again, repeatedly, striking not his nose or his lips or his cheeks, but the flowing white beard that made him look like a mullah, that he took such fastidious pride in. I spat until I could work up no more spit. He neither winced nor made any attempt to protect himself. Then, even though I could see that he was no longer a tiger but a mouse again—an older and frailer one at that—I slapped him. It was the only way I knew by which I could stay married to him.

“After that, he was silent and still. When it was time for dinner, I thought about eating all the chicken myself, and serving him a mixture of gravy and custard with crusts of bread soaked in. But I couldn't make myself do it. Instead, I divided the meat between two plates, though I gave the smaller piece to him. He didn't touch his plate. I tried to spoon some rice into his mouth, but he turned away. I was never quite sure if he was still lamenting Aneez, or if his need for penance was too great.”

It took a week for Anwar's paralysis to end. Zaida came by to visit every day, giving me updates. “He seems to be hungering for further mistreatment, but I don't feel the need anymore. As long as we both understand each other now, and the bluff of his two hanging words has been forever swept away.” She rehired the jamadarni that very week, then got a ganga to come in as well, to cook the food and clean the floors.

Two months later, I was surprised to be invited to Zaida's place again on a Saturday afternoon. Ever since things had been straightened out, Anwar stayed at home that day, listening to the radio or puttering around the flat, and Zaida came over to our place instead. “I sent him out,” she said, as she opened the door. “I couldn't stand his restlessness.”

“But where?” I asked.

“To visit his ‘brother' in Sewri, where else? It was more than I could bear to watch his long face every week, to follow his pitiful shuffling movements as if he was a hundred years old. If it's a mouse hole he needs, then fine, let him have it—now that we both know I can be the only wife. I can ensure he's well-fed and take care of him when he's sick, but affection is not one of the obligations I'm going to fulfill.”

Then, before I could ask her any further questions, Zaida showed you the Beatles record her cousin had just lent her. “Come, Ashvin, I'll put it on so we can twist.”

B
ARELY HAD ZAIDA'S CRISIS BEEN RESOLVED THAN ROOPA DECIDED TO PAY
us a visit, jarring us once more out of our day-to-day tranquillity. “Ravinder's being posted on a ship for a month and the twins' college starts again next week. I feel so guilty not having come earlier to be by your side, but this is the first chance I'm really getting to be alone. Tell darling Ashu that his Roo auntie can't wait to see how he's grown.” I almost wrote back asking her not to come, but then relented, remembering how fond you had been of her the times you'd met in Delhi.

At the station, Roopa hugged us both simultaneously to her chest, telling us how shocked she had been to hear about Dev. There were tears in her eyes, which puzzled me—should I remind her that her condolences were three years too late? I soon understood the real reason behind her visit—she had pledged to make an offering at Sai Baba's shrine in Shirdi. “I told Sai Baba I'd visit, but he had to give both Dilip and Shobha good marks at the college in exchange.” There was no easy way to get to the remote town from most parts in the country—Bombay was one of the few accessible starting points for the overnight bus trip. She tried to convince the two of us to come along, suggesting we make a proper excursion of it by spending the night there in a hotel room (something she was afraid of doing alone). “If not for yourself, then come for Ashu's sake—even more so, for Dev's. Remember, Sai Baba was his favorite saint. It would give such peace to his soul—how he would have cherished you making the pilgrimage for him!”

“I'm sure you'd be much better at getting Sai Baba to bless his soul than I would,” I replied. “Dev himself might appreciate it more to hear the prayers from your lips.”

I did offer you the choice of accompanying your Roo auntie. But it was apparent you didn't want to go—in fact, you were relieved to see her leave. The two days Roopa spent in Bombay had not passed well. You were disappointed to get clothes as a present (two pairs of pants, stitched specially for you, Roopa claimed, but which didn't fit). You no longer had any interest in having her make up your face—the experiences of being Pinky's wife had cured you of that phase. The very first evening, you brought in your aquarium to give Roo auntie the chance to feed your snails, and were offended by the look of revulsion on her face. You missed your school bus two mornings in a row because she occupied the bathroom too long. (“Just a minute,” she'd say, and then take ten more.) You didn't even like being called “Ashu” now, but she laughed it off each time you reminded her of this. “You're too young, Ashu, to mind about such things. What is it, nine now?—you couldn't be becoming an adult so quick.” What galled you even more was that at the same time, she declared you too grown-up to sleep between her and me on the bed, banishing you to your half mattress instead.

I felt just as frayed. Somehow I had reverted to being the obedient younger sister—the role Paji and Biji had ingrained in me when I was a girl. I found myself preparing Roopa's breakfast, heating the water for her bath, waiting to hear what she wanted for lunch. “I've never had so many bananas in my life,” she complained, upon my return from the market. “It might be a bit late in the season, but did you bother to check if they had any grapes?”

By the time Roopa returned from Shirdi and stayed another two nights, the whole house was in disarray. The bathroom cabinet over-flowed with her toiletries, the fridge festered with foods I had bought that she refused to eat. Her clothes (including, much to your embarrassment, two brassieres) were strewn everywhere, just like when we were young. The ganga had still not returned after Roopa scolded her the first morning for not sweeping out the floor under the cupboards. You, meanwhile, were also chafing, over a quiz your aunt had taken it upon herself to administer to you the previous morning, to test your preparedness for a geography test. When I informed her you hated to have your studies supervised, she replied that it was something I should start doing, something she had done for
her
children. “And look, it works—they're now both in college, aren't they?”

“When is Roo auntie's train?” you asked, the Saturday she was supposed to depart.

When Roopa had left for Shirdi, I noticed that the two twin beds were pulled apart. Thinking nothing of it, I pushed them back. Now, as she finished packing her first suitcase, she told me to help her separate the beds again. “It doesn't look right for them to be connected, as if it's the same bed. Ashvin's a growing boy—he's getting much too old for that.”

Before I could demand to know what exactly she meant, Roopa continued. “You're spending much too much time with him. A boy that age needs space to breathe, to make his own friends. I almost feel like I've blundered into the house of an old married couple—all these routines with him in which you're so set. I went into the bathroom and couldn't even tell your toothbrushes apart—they're both red.” She looked at me as if she dared me to refute this damning piece of evidence.

“What are you talking about? Ashvin's toothbrush is half the size of mine, and it's the only color they keep at General Stores—red.”

“Look, Meera. Ravinder's been posted on a ship before. I know how lonely it can get. It's a terrible thing, loneliness. Especially if you're staring at a whole lifetime stretching ahead. But there's no reason you should think you have to lean on just Ashvin. There's no reason why, with some luck, you shouldn't find someone else. I know Dev would've wanted you to.”

“What do you know about what Dev would've wanted or not? You weren't the one married to him for sixteen years. Throwing yourself at someone every once in a while doesn't make you an expert on his soul.”

Roopa sighed. “Let's not do this, Meera. I didn't come here to fight. If it makes you feel better, you can hurl all the insults at me you want. But you have to let these things go. Otherwise the resentment will burn a hole through your gut. So what if Dev loved someone less or more? You can't keep plunging into this pool of jealousy. The thing is, he's gone now—it's time to let the bitterness drain from your heart.”

She patted my hand. “Now listen to me. There's someone I know—the brother of our neighbor next door. He has two children—he cremated their mother only a year ago. He's a typical Madrasi, short and dark, but surely you shouldn't let that make so much of a difference now. Come out and visit us—I think he'd be agreeable—but even if he refuses, what have you lost?”

My first reaction was to fling Roopa's short and dark Madrasi back into her face—to tell her she ought to marry him herself, so that he could keep her company while Ravinder was away. But then I realized something momentous had transpired. Roopa's slights over the years had just crossed a line, brimmed over a threshold beyond which I felt free to disown her as my sister. I no longer had to worry about what she thought or said or did. I would take her to the station and never see her again.

“It's settled then,” Roopa said, as she filled her second suitcase with all the shopping she'd done—the perfume bottles from Crawford Market, the purses from Colaba, the salwar kameez suits, the georgette saris, the Kolhapuri footwear. “You'll come and visit as soon as Ravinder is back. We'll have a lunch, invite my neighbor over with her brother. It might be a good idea to buy something less dowdy than the outfits you go around in.”

Roopa's train was at three-thirty, but there was no longer any reason to endure five more hours of this. “Come, Ashvin, it's time to get dressed. We're taking Roo auntie to the station earlier than I said.”

ALTHOUGH I TRIED
to put Roopa's visit out of my mind, it was difficult to dismiss everything she said. Was I letting my own needs get the better of my judgment? Was I being too overbearing, too suffocating with my love? Even if she had ascribed more to my affection than there was, what effect must the constant limelight of my attention have on you? Already you were always kissing and hugging (and tickling!) me. Was this more than other children your age?

I found myself staring at the beds while you were at school, and finally shifting them away from each other—not as far apart as Roopa had done, but so that a conspicuous gap opened between them. All afternoon, I agonized over reasons to explain the change—the beds would shake less this way when one of us turned, it was easier to change the sheets and the bedcovers. But although you must have noticed the difference, you simply seemed to shrug it off.

I decided to stop sitting in the balcony every day, waiting for you to return from school. It was too easy being lulled into a sense of hopelessness, to spend my time plowing through the disappointments of the past. I found a simpler remedy than Roopa's suggestion to get remarried—I went back to work.

It had been over a decade, but the publishing company still had its office at Opera House, with Mr. Hansi still the proprietor. He was overjoyed to see me. “I must warn you, though, we've had some changes. We don't do anything historical anymore—our target audience is a little different.” He beat about the bush some more before confessing sheepishly that they no longer published books at all. “What we've come to realize is that our strength, basically, lies in comics.”

Mr. Hansi assigned me Casper and Superman and Richie Rich—I translated them into pirated Hindi editions. The comics were crudely reproduced, by photographing the originals, whiting out the balloons, and manually typing in the translated words, before sending them on to the press. Occasionally I also performed more legal translations—tales from the Ramayana or Mahabharata, from Hindi comic books into English. To your delight, the company soon added Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to their list of pirated clients.

During my previous stint there, Dev had always worried about the loose impressions people might form about a woman in their workplace. Nobody paid attention to me back then, but now that I was a widow, every second look I received from my male coworkers seemed to be a leer. Several mornings, I would find a heart-shaped piece of paper stuck into my typewriter, sometimes with ‘I love you' typed in red. Mysterious calls for me came in on Mr. Hansi's number, with nobody at the end of the line when I picked up the receiver. Both Mr. Phadke and Mr. Malkani invited me to eat lunch with them outside—I finally said yes, provided they also brought their wives. Even Arun, the baby-faced print setter, offered shyly to blow on my tea one afternoon break, to cool it for me.

I suppose I should have expected such behavior, given how things had changed, even in my neighborhood, after Dev died. The shopkeepers downstairs lost little time in becoming markedly more familiar in their manner—the General Stores proprietor tried to woo me with free bars of soap twice. The bania at the ration shop winked at me one evening while I shopped for lentils—in the face of my fury, he called me his sister and claimed there was something caught in his eye. Dev's long-lost musician friends showed up sporadically for months, to offer their condolences and to see if I was sufficiently recovered to accompany them to tea.

The most blatant attention, though, came from within my building. Each time I ventured outside, somebody's husband seemed on the prowl, waiting to accost me on the steps. Mr. Karmali and Mr. Hussain exchanged strong words one day as they vied with each other to carry down the radio I was taking for repair. Mr. Hamid almost broke his collarbone rushing down from the floor above to help hold open my door.

More invitations for tea accompanied these encounters, each one dropped so casually that it had to be rehearsed. My suitors invariably suggested one of the cheap Irani restaurants around to rendezvous, throwing in some convoluted reason for not inviting their spouse. Not that I would have agreed, but couldn't they have made their overtures more imaginative? Lunch somewhere, perhaps at the newly opened Caravan Grill—or even the modest Cream Centre, for an ice cream sundae? Instead, the only unusual proposition I received was from Mr. Hamid, who offered to take me to Borivili for a viewing of his factory, where they manufactured prosthetic limbs.

In the contest for the most preposterous of my would-be paramours, Mr. Dugal emerged as the winner. I had always considered him a little wan before, someone whose personality made him fade obligingly into the background. All this changed the night he came knocking, ostensibly to borrow some sugar—“just a tea's spoon.” Tea, however, was not the beverage of choice for the evening—his breath was so laden with alcohol, it seemed syrupy. I came out of the kitchen with the sugar bowl in hand, to find him in the living room, holding on to a chair for support. “Your husband was always such a good friend of mine,” he began, but was soon complimenting me on my teeth. “They're so white and shiny—what toothpaste do you use?”

Before I could nudge him out, he plopped down to the floor. “My wife has grown too fat, she doesn't pay the slightest attention to her appearance anymore. It's good you're still maintaining your looks after what happened, it's the sensible thing to do. Look at me—even though I feel so young inside, I know I'm almost bald.” He leaned his scalp forward. “It's the amoebic dysentery, you know.”

He started reeling off the remedies he had tried unsuccessfully—the ayurveda, the homeopathy, the colonics. “I was always sick, even as a child, all the bronchitis I used to get.” Interspersed through his ramblings were wistful comments about my figure, my face, my clothes. “That's such a pretty nail polish,” he said, swiveling towards my feet, and I drew back as he tried to pet my toes.