The Blue Bedspread (15 page)

In the centre of the city, where buses and trams begin and end their routes, not far from where Sarah Parker once lived, there’s a huge building the colour of chocolate, its windows black glass, its steps black marble, smooth and shining, like your mother’s hair.

When the city becomes a desert, hot and lonely, when wherever you look, it all looks the same and the wind blows sand into your eyes, this building is an oasis.

When the city becomes an ocean, wet and heavy, when the crowds are waves hammering your body, pulling you down, this building is an island.

For here they come, walking or swimming, at first, in ones and twos. And then in twos and threes, every five minutes or so, until half an hour later there’s a small crowd.

Men and women, eighteen to fifty years old, some even sixty or seventy, holding on to the railing for support, brushing the sand off their clothes, wiping the spray from their face.

It must have been bad last night, maybe they couldn’t sleep, the fans were still, the lights off. There was a power cut in the neighbourhood, they spent the night fanning themselves with the newspaper, rolled up, looking at the clouds, through the iron grille in their windows, hurriedly travel across the moon.

Or perhaps they had nothing to do, they just sat in the balcony and watched the pigeons flutter in the cage across the street, tried to identify what was there in the garbage heap: cracked plastic buckets, vegetable peels, clumps of women’s hair dropped off combs.

They all walk up the steps, careful in case they slip; their shoes, slippers slide on the smooth marble, washed and scrubbed at least four times a day. They shuffle in, past the metal detector, a couple of beeps for the cigarette boxes, the keys, they walk past the uniformed guards, to wait in the lobby.

They look at the latest posters from the Museum of Modern Art, a splash of colour behind the glass frame. Or the photograph poster from NASA, blue-black, dark and cool, with some planet and some stars.

While they wait, they tilt their heads to look at the ceiling, they can see the city’s sky through the glass, white at this time of the day. They are called in, one by one, they open their bags, they can see the sand covering the brass buckle, their handkerchiefs drenched in the ocean’s waves. They bring out their IDs, college fee books, company cards. A woman in a skirt with a laminated card around her neck, like a necklace, takes down their names. She then goes to the computer, they hear her type, some bend to see their names come up on the screen, letter by letter, the cursor flashing at the end.

She peels off the barcode stickers from a roll, pastes them onto the cards, they sign, their elbows leave sweat marks on the glass-top counter. Carefully, so that no one can see, they wipe it with their shirt sleeves. The cards are ready.

They scatter all around. Some sit on the beige sofa, let the body sink into the leather, some lean against the steel backrest, cold against the skin. Their shoes are covered with sand or spray, they pull their feet in underneath the tables, embarrassed, so that no one can see.

The sweat begins to evaporate; outside, the wind continues to blow across the desert, the waves continue to churn in the ocean, through the Venetian blinds in the window, they can see the air shimmer as if in a mirage, the little boy selling lemonade, the sun winking off the glasses.

The Stars and Stripes droops in the heat like a huge handkerchief put out to dry.

They get last week’s
New York Times Sunday Magazine,
look at the Georges Marciano girls in black skirts and tight white shirts waiting to be kissed. They peel off the perfume strips on the next page, rub their wrists and smell themselves.

They go to the bathroom, stepping lightly on the green carpet, the cold faucet is blue, the warm is red, they wash their faces, pour out the liquid soap that floats, like cool green jelly, in their palms. They tear out the tissue paper for the first time in their lives, watch it stain dark in patches as it soaks in the water from their washed hands.

On the way back to the sofa, they stop near the Fiction section to drink water. Chilled water in pretty little styrofoam cups. They return, cool and fresh, their wrists smelling of Elizabeth Taylor’s perfume, they can see the black man in the Ralph Lauren shirt, they touch his chiselled face.

Now it’s time to choose their apartment in Central Park West with a spiral staircase, French doors, sun-filled elegance, a gorgeous granite kitchen with maple mantles. And as they keep flipping the pages, the perfume rises; they can hear the air conditioner hum, the cool draft blowing across their face and their eyes; through the drapes they can see flashes of the sun outside.

The lemonade boy has gone, leaving behind a patch of water fast disappearing on the pavement, the apartment in Central Park is now a sprawling house in Long Island, the snow covers the field and with the magazine still open, the Mazda, with the airbags, to the left, the Banana Republic woman to the right, they fall asleep.

Half an hour and they will get up, put the magazines back in the places they came from. And they will walk out of the American Center Library into a city which is no longer a desert or an ocean, they will get into buses, no sign of the sand or the spray, each will go his or her way. Back to their homes to wait for the power cut, to watch the clouds hurriedly travel across the moon. Or listen to the pigeons fluttering in the cage and look at the empty street, black and shining, like your mother’s hair.

There’s not much in the fridge, let me remember. Just a couple of potatoes, old, with things, some curly, some straight, corning out of their skins. A bottle of ketchup, its cap stuck because of the crust. There’s a lettuce, cut and chopped, its leaves dry, what remains of its head quivers every time the fridge coughs.

There’s not much in the kitchen cabinets either. Or in the spice jars, just two sticks of cinnamon, smelling like my breath when I have fever. There’s one egg, an onion, I could scramble it, fry it, but I’m too tired to cook now, there’s a pouch of toned milk I got two days ago. That should do.

I will have to get up in five minutes, take a break. let the pen rest for a while, the ink on its nib breathe in the night air, let the words sleep before they are called once again to perform to our bidding. For there’s a long way to go.

First, I have to wash the smell of the hospital from my face, my hands. In my hurry to get down to these stories, I forgot to remove my socks; the nylon and the sweat, the water heater doesn’t work, the water must be cold.

How long will you remain in that towel? No, I’m not going to disturb you now, when you wake up in the morning, we’ll change you, clean you up, get breakfast ready.

Once upon a time we had the Calcutta Milk Corporation Van, white and blue, dented, strips of steel bent and jutting out, but it came tearing down the street as if it was brand new. It lurched, shuddered over potholes, the milk inside was kept in aluminium cans so the driver didn’t care, let them rattle against each other. So that half an hour before sunrise, the Van woke up the neighbourhood, first the pigeons in the cage, then the birds in the trees and then all of us.

The Van stopped a few years ago, now they’ve set up a milk booth down the street where people begin lining up one full hour after sunrise, their eyes wide open as they drop coins and wait for the light to turn green, for the milk to flow, precisely measured, gurgle into their steel cans, drip drip at the end, the froth collecting at the top of the jar, spilling over when they put on the cover. I skip all this, I buy the pouch.

I shall boil this milk; I’ve seen mothers on TV test the milk against their wrists, I shall do the same and when its cool, when I am sure it wont hurt your lips, I shall feed you the milk, I shall pour the milk into your mouth carefully so that the rim of the spoon, its steel edge, doesn’t scrape your gums. And I shall hold the spoon close to my chest so that if you wish to, you can imagine I’m your mother and the milk flows, drop by drop, from her breast.

Maybe my hands will shake, I am not a young man any more, your head may jerk and the spoon may tilt, the milk will run down my shirt but it doesn’t matter, it’s milk, cool to the touch, I can always wash up later. What’s important is you don’t miss your mother tonight.

At first, we try the cinema hall.

Three days of the week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I leave the office exactly at five, wait for her at the crossing of Amherst Street and Bowbazar, right in front of the Lady Dufferin College and Hospital. Around five thirty, after her anatomy class, she walks out. My Princess, tall and dark, with a black leather bag, its strap running over her left shoulder, between her breasts, up her back.

Her hair catches the wind, bounces off her shoulders like that of the shampoo girls on TV when they twirl on their toes.

Above the swirling crowd of patients, pregnant women and sick children hanging on to their fathers’ index fingers, between the ambulances with streaks of metal showing through the paint, against the yellow building with dirty glass windows, her face floats like that of an angel in the sky.

My heart aches.

I have already paid the rickshaw, told him where to go, how to go. Without a word, we hop on, take the short cut via Sonagachi, the city’s largest whorehouse, watch the pimps scratch themselves, the prostitutes’ children play with the cows, poke them in the udders with broomsticks, the NGO girls counting condoms, we reach Grace Cinema, College Street, buy two dress circle tickets, pay fifteen rupees extra for the back row, wait for the lights to go down, for the commercials to get over, the house to settle down.

Until it’s dark, as dark as a moonless night, except for two faint stars, the EXIT signs, one on either side, glowing like two red boils on black skin; the usher’s torch bobs up and down like a glow-worm lost its way.

She wears a skirt.

She always wears a skirt on our cinema nights. To let me slip my left hand between her legs. No unbuttoning of buttons, no noise of zips being unzipped. Nobody hears her skirt ride over her knees; she’s dark, I’m dark, the cinema hall is dark and so nobody notices my left hand press her right knee.

As the credits begin to roll, my fingers move up her leg. Her skin, smooth up to where she rubbed the cream after her bath. By the time the music director’s name appears on the screen, I can feel her legs clench, her legs give way.

I slide my fingers deep, through the warmth, through the wetness. And when they slip in, I write I L-O-V-E Y-O-U on the inner wall inside her, letter by letter. By the time I reach the second O, she’s trembling.

She writes too: I L-O-V-E Y-O-U T-O-O on the terry-cotton fabric of my trousers, Rs 125 per metre, stretched tightly over my hardness. Our passions peak, the movie begins, we get up and walk out.

She has to be home by seven, her mother is waiting. My trousers are stained so I pull my shirt out, let it fall below the waist. It doesn’t look good, the end of the shirt, all crumpled up, but it covers the evidence.

On our way out, we stand in the lobby of the theatre to look at the stills of the movie before we step out into the city’s falling light. I see her off at the bus stop and walk home.

On the fourth evening, the usher sees us; that too by accident. His torch slips out of his hand, he bends over to pick it up and as he raises himself, the glowing torch in his hand, the light falls on us. On my left wrist, on her right thigh.

Our cinema nights are over.

*

So we try the park. It’s not exactly a park, just a clearing in the block of moss-covered buildings near St Paul’s School, less than a mile from her medical college, heading north. We reach there, there’s a football game on, schoolboys, in blue shorts and white shirts, some with ties, some barefoot, their shoes, piled up, used to mark the goalposts.

We stand near the rusted iron turnpike at the entrance, our lust buzzing so hard we are afraid someone may hear. A mother sits on the iron bench, in front of us, so that we can reach out and touch her, admiring her son play, tying and untying the plastic strap of his water bottle around her fat fingers.