The Blue Bedspread (16 page)

The sun has fallen behind the school’s church, the street lights have been switched on but they burn uselessly against the bright sky, the sun falling but still pretty strong, stretching the boys’ shadows to absurd lengths. We stand there, now leaning against the turnpike, now straight. She takes out her tiffin box and we share her lunch.

Two slices of bread separated by a thick omelette drenched in tomato ketchup and lots of fried onions spread in between.

While we eat, we watch the shadows rather than the boys. Tall, thin, dark forms flitting across the park in the falling light of day, mixing and merging, touching our legs, floating over the iron railings onto the road, sometimes even underneath the bus.

By six, the boys have gone, the park is empty, the mother with the water bottle has gone.

We sit down on the bench, today she wants me to write on her breasts. My left hand moves up, beneath her red top with black stripes. The fingers slow down over her vertebrae, speedbreakers on the road of her back, before unclasping her bra, unclasping its hooks.

And then the hand moves, across her back, below the armpit, feels the gentle brush of its hair until it reaches her breast, my writing pad. She is leaning against me now, my fingers trace the curve, write, move between her breasts to the base of her neck, up her voice box to where her chin starts and she leans her head backwards, I smell her hair, black and shining, and I am about to close my eyes when I see a child walk into the park, a ragpicker.

He picks up scraps of paper that maybe fell from the schoolboys’ pockets. Maybe someone dropped, during the game, a sheet of paper with all the answers. Or all the questions for homework. There will be one worried-to-death child in the city tonight.

The child looks at me and smiles, keeps picking up whatever he can find and when his hands are full, he drops the bunch into a huge gunny bag that he drags across the ground. Behind him, the lights are coming on in the balconies of the flats as wives emerge to collect the washed, dried clothes before their husbands come home.

On our third evening, a police constable walks into the park to pee. She sees him first, jerks back, pushes my hand out of her top, puts her bag on my lap to cover my hardness, it is too late.

We try everything.

The service lane behind the college but the children use it for their cricket matches; the Sealdah vegetable market, right at the end of the row of vegetable shops where they sell coloured fish and baby parrots which can talk. The problem is there are too many cockroaches there.

One day, she even sneaks us into her anatomy lab, we go down on the floor between the tables on which two cadavers lie, one on each table, one grinning, one with no face at all. A headless body. But the smell of formaldehyde makes me throw up and we spend all our time trying to wipe the muck away.

Until she comes up with the Idea.

And one evening, we don’t meet outside her college but go straight to her house. I hold her mother while she injects her with something I don’t know. Mother kicks, mother screams, I push my hand in her mouth, she bites hard, I stifle my scream, it doesn’t matter, it has to be done, the traffic drowns the noise as my Princess takes the scalpel from her leather bag and I turn my face away while she does what has to be done. It’s all over in just under thirty minutes, even the dressing, the cotton gauze drenched in disinfectant, wrapped like a blindfold, mother fast asleep.

I ask her no questions as we tear at each other’s clothes, our love mixes with our crime, dissolves, like an ice cube out of the freezer, in the smell of her bedsheet, the musical clock on her wall, the mercurochrome stains on her fingers, the noise of the trams, and most important of all, my Princess next to me, undisturbed.

As for those eyes that float in the Horlicks jar, she will know what to do.

One night, in the same room in which you sleep, where the pillows are, I sat there, looking at the phone, the same black phone which rang tonight, the same black cord, the only difference, its spirals were closer together, tighter, the black was blacker, the steel rings on the dial shone white, like silver newly polished.

Every ten minutes or so, I kept checking to see if the phone was working.

Our neighbourhood wasn’t part of an electronic exchange, there were no twenty-four-hour telephone booths, with glass cubicles, at street corners. And quite often the phone would die, suddenly, so that when you picked it up, you couldn’t hear the dial tone of its breath, just a strange silence sometimes broken by a buzz or a rustle.

She was going to call me that night, my Princess, tall and dark, the phone was alive.

Once I was in love in the only way I could be in this city.

I was younger then, this house had already emptied its two hearts into the city, Father and Sister, one was dead, the other had gone. Bhabani was still there, she had washed and ironed the blue bedspread, kept it away in the cupboard, rolled tiny mothballs into its folds. For some reason, I had begun to like only black and white.

The bedspread gone, I had got myself a new bedsheet. Black with a giant white conch shell drawn in the centre and tiny white conch shells all around the four sides of its rectangle.

The TV was black and white, they kept showing an Australian movie, late in the night, where the actress, white, wore a velvet gown, black, and she looked through the window at a garden covered with snow, there was a black coffin in the middle of the garden, all around its four edges, were black stones.

The phone rings, I am lying on the bed, on my stomach, my hands pressed like sepals against my face, I push the newspaper away, black and white, I lean forward and pick up the phone, my chest presses against the conch shell, the black stones in the garden, I begin talking.

I tell her that I am happy, safe, that I am ready to take on this city with her by my side. I will soon get a job that will pay me well, my house is exactly the kind she tells me stories about, it has warm towels and cool sheets, the bathroom is dry, the soap smells nice, the taps don’t drip.

I tell her she can do up the house any which way she wants, change the rooms, make the living room the bedroom, the bedroom the study, it doesn’t matter, all that matters is that she come and live with me, her mother won’t watch us any more, we can go to cinema halls to watch the movie, not look for the usher’s torch. We will go to the park to watch schoolboys play football, the goalposts marked with their shoes. And stand there, hand in hand.

We shall keep our love for the house, not for the city, I say. We can go to the Howrah station to watch the local trains leave in the morning, sleep in front of the Victoria Memorial until it’s time to go home.

And while I am telling her all this, my words soft and loving, flowing as if in a torrent let loose, the fan cuts the air in thick slabs that drip onto my body, onto the bedsheet, a fly comes from nowhere, to rest on the receiver, black on black, I brush it away, it returns, ‘What’s happened?’ she asks.

‘Nothing,’ I say, and I continue talking and I tell her that she is the woman I love, and like the long-awaited rain, she has filled the cracks of my life, washed the dirt away.

‘So will you marry me?’ I ask.

‘Let’s see,’ she says.

We never met again. She stopped calling, and for the next few months I kept running to the phone whenever I thought I heard it ring but then it was only the tram. Or the bus conductor jangling the bell. Sometimes it was nothing, just in my head.

Like lonely lovers often do, I kept thinking things, I conjured up worlds where we were husband and wife, we had taken a house, all for ourselves, with a tiny garden in front.

And for quite a while, every day, I kept drawing and redrawing the same scene, filling it out with colours and noises.

It’s evening and I am sitting on my chair, my legs raised on a table, I am reading aloud to her. Outside, our child lies on his stomach, in the garden, he’s playing with a twig, a leaf, an ant.

And while he is playing, he keeps staring at us, through the window where there are tall white curtains billowing in the wind.

She laughs at something I have read and I tell her, ‘Let me finish and then you laugh as much as you want to.’ She laughs again, I get irritated but I know it’s time to call in the child since it’s getting late and we all are eating out tonight.

So I close the book, get up, walk to my wife, and we both go to the window and call out to our child, we can see him drop the twig, look at us, smile, and we can hear his feet on the steps, he walks into our arms.

It’s a scene I have squeezed into fiction now, best played out only in our minds. For if she had said yes that night, if we lived in a house with a garden in front, I might never have been in this neighbourhood, I wouldn’t have been here when your mother came on that April night, you wouldn’t have come to this city.

No one noticed.

It was seven in the evening and the wind was so light that no one saw the curtains rise and fall a fraction of an inch. No one heard, above the noise of the double-decker buses and the trams, the taxis and the trucks, the leaves tremble in the topmost branches of the banyan tree across the street.

No one stood in the balcony and looked below, through the iron grille, to wonder why the garbage heap was quivering as if some strange animal, small and wild, were trapped inside.

Why bits and pieces of trash, the lighter ones, had begun to break free and move in small circles at first and then slowly in large spirals until one, a slip of paper, reached the tram tracks in the middle.

Surely, someone out there, on the street, across the Hooghly, on the Howrah Bridge, someone in this city of twelve million people, must have noticed it.

Or even felt it.

Certainly, some tired passenger, on his way home from work, standing on the footboard of the tram, his copy of the newspaper or his imitation leather suitcase flapping like a bird against his knee, must have felt a sudden draught against his face.

Or a little child staring out of a bus window must have pushed his hand out, just like that, and felt the wind run through his fingers. And when his father told him, ‘Don’t do that, it’s dangerous, pull your hand inside,’ the child must have turned his face away, embarrassed at the reprimand in public, and then just as he turned his face he would have felt the wind in his hair.

But then in this city, even a child, at times, doesn’t notice the wind.

She will run away tomorrow.

She has prepared for it. For the last three years, she has been walking to college, saving the money her father gives her for the bus fare and for tiffin. She prefers notes, not coins, it’s easier to keep the notes in the Bata shoe carton she uses as her make-up box. With the lipstick, the three shades of nail polish, and four pairs of earrings.

Using differently coloured rubber bands, she separates the one-rupee notes from the twos, the fives and the tens. She doesn’t count every day, like Silas Marner she’s read about, she just keeps putting the notes in their respective bundles. She knows what she will wear tomorrow: the blue skirt with a white top with tiny blue stars. She wants to look good but she doesn’t want to get noticed. He will wait at the College Street intersection.

She has got it all worked out, she will get up in the morning, wait for the newspaper man to throw the paper into the house, wait for her father to read the editorials, finish his tea, go for shopping. The thick wooden door makes a lot of noise so when Father leaves she will not shut the door behind him.

She will wait until she hears the sound of his footsteps change, from the sharp clap clap of rubber on stairs to the gentle shuffle shuffle when he reaches the landing. Then, two or three minutes later, she will pull the door gently, keeping it slightly ajar so that when the time comes, no one will hear, no one will notice.

But first she will wait for the maid to go into the kitchen, begin breakfast, she will wait until she hears the kettle being put on the gas stove, the click of the lighter, the pop of the flame. And when she is staring at the oil in the pan, watching the sides curl up, the first bubbles rise to the surface, she will run away.

With the notes stuffed at the bottom of her bag, all of the three thousand rupees, covered with some of her clothes, the nicer ones, she will walk into the waiting taxi and leave what has been her world for the last nineteen years. Never to return.

The wind picks up. It lifts the blue plastic mug from the garbage heap, tosses it two to three feet, lets it roll into the drain where it comes to rest against a brick. It whistles through the banyan tree, slips in through the cracks in the window, lifts the curtains, topples the wooden doll on the television set, the two tiny glass ducks in the showcase, cracking one beak.

Bhabani is standing in the kitchen watching the oil snap, the wind teases her hair, blows the onion peels across the floor, dries the sweat on her back. Father is sitting in the living room, back from work, leaning over to untie his shoelaces. He rolls his grey socks to his ankles before pulling them off, the wind blows in through his toes.