The City Son (14 page)

At home, Sanmaya tells him as soon as he enters that his mother fell down the stairs and bruised her forehead. A doctor is looking at her upstairs, she tells him, and Mahesh Uncle is with her. Where were you? Sanmaya asks. We tried to reach you in Putalisadak, but you weren’t there, and no one knew where you were.

He bounds up the stairs. His mother is lying on her bed, a bandage around her head. Her eyes are closed when he enters, but she opens them when she feels his presence. The doctor is sitting on a stool, writing. Mahesh Uncle tells Tarun there’s nothing to worry about, just a minor concussion according to the doctor. Tarun sits on the bed, tired and guilty. He ought to have been here, or within reach. Thank god Mahesh Uncle was home. Tarun asks her how she’s doing. He doesn’t expect her to talk, as she hasn’t talked for a long time, but today she says, “You get married now.”

He looks at Mahesh Uncle in surprise and annoyance.

“I haven’t told her anything, okay?” Mahesh Uncle says.

“You get better first, Ma,” he says.

She clasps his hand and squeezes it. She’s surprisingly strong, and it hurts.

“Why didn’t you call Sanmaya up instead of going down the stairs yourself?” he scolds her. There’s a buzzer next to her bed that she can use to summon Sanmaya from below. Apsara is staring at him intently. It’s unsettling, her focus. Her nails dig into his hand as she whispers, “Rukma?”

Sanmaya must be filling her ears with the girl’s name. Tarun can picture her, Sanmaya, standing next to his mother and talking, her knobbly, wrinkled, paper-thin fingers performing near her mother’s ears, articulating for her those attributes of the girl that make her suited to this household. He panics at the thought of another meeting with Rukma.

“Bring Rukma here,” Apsara says.

“Ma—”

Her right palm flies through the air and strikes him on the face. The disbelief of what has just happened stuns him.

Mahesh Uncle reprimands her, but she doesn’t let go of Tarun’s hand. “He’s my son,” she hisses to Mahesh Uncle.

During the night her condition worsens. She begins to breathe hoarsely. They gather in her room. There is talk of taking her to the hospital; there is talk of calling the doctor again. Tarun sits next to her and administers cold compresses to her forehead, even though fever is not an issue
right now. As earlier, she is clasping his hand, but her grip is weak. Her eyes are slightly rolled up toward the ceiling. They continue to discuss taking her to the hospital, but there’s also a reluctance, a sense that it might be better, in her case, to let nature take its course. She has suffered enough—this appears to be the silent understanding.

Just before she passes away at dawn, his mother looks at him steadily. “She’s a good girl,” she whispers. “A good girl.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
HERE’S SOMETHING IRREVOCABLE
about a dying person’s last words. Tarun is determined to be firm, but as the days go by—as his mother’s body is burned by the river, and he shaves his head and dons all-white clothes of mourning—her words ring in his ears, and her slap hovers around him, near his cheeks. Mahesh Uncle continues to pressure him. It’s imperative, he says, to have a good female presence in the house. When Tarun can’t argue with Mahesh Uncle’s constant appeals any longer, he says, “Okay, okay, do what you need to do.”

“Shall I make the arrangements, then?” Mahesh Uncle asks.

Tarun nods. He feels older, depleted.

The wedding is a quick, somber affair, in deference to the mother who has just passed away. Some people voice the concern that it’s not allowed, and far from auspicious, for the son to get married so soon, within days of his mother’s death. But the problem is, Mahesh Uncle points out, the mourning period lasts for a year, which is simply too long of a wait. It’s Rukma’s family that puts the pressure on. As sympathetic as we are to the loss, they say, we also have to think about our daughter. We cannot wait for a year. Who knows what’ll happen in a year? Mahesh Uncle agrees. “After all,” he says to Tarun, “it was your mother’s wish that you get married to Rukma. I don’t think your mother would mind if this process gets sped up.”
I don’t care
, is what Tarun thinks. He hasn’t had a chance to go and visit Didi, and neither she nor his father has come by to offer their condolences—Mahesh Uncle had sent someone to notify them. He hadn’t expected Didi to come, but he had hoped that the Masterji would show to pay his last respects to a woman he’d once so ardently loved. But he can picture the Masterji, sitting on that bed, wondering if he should go to the
aryaghat
where his second wife is being burned, checking Didi’s face, wondering if she’d say,
If you need to go, go!
And in the end, just giving up and accepting the cup of tea that Didi hands to him.

Throughout the wedding ceremony, which takes place in the Dakshinkali Temple, Tarun wonders what he’s going to say to Didi to justify what he’s done. He doesn’t want to
think about how upset she’ll be, how easily he’s caved to Mahesh Uncle. This temple, on the outskirts of the city, was chosen because of its isolation. “Is there a need to invite people?” Mahesh Uncle had asked Tarun. “Should we have guests?” Mahesh Uncle answered his own question, saying that they should just go ahead and not bother with inviting anyone. Maybe they’ll throw a party later. “But you might want to call the family from Bangemudha? No? I think the Masterji must be invited, even if he doesn’t preside over the ceremony as your father. Otherwise he’ll never forgive me.”

Tarun said, “Let’s simply not bother with anyone. Let’s not make it complicated—get this thing over with.”

Mahesh Uncle readily agreed, lest Tarun change his mind about the whole thing.

At Dakshinkali, Rukma arrives, already decked in her bridal sari, with her parents, and a couple of servants acting as attendants. She says hello to him. Hello! She doesn’t act the demure bride; her face is open, yet her forehead is creased: like him, she appears perplexed by how fast they’ve moved ahead with the wedding. And—he’s convinced of this—in all likelihood she doesn’t want to get married to him. Yet here she is. Briefly, he imagines telling her, tonight, about his relationship with Didi. An all-out confession. That’ll really hello her, won’t it? He doesn’t mean to be cruel to her. He realizes that he actually likes her, the small flashes of anger she shows, how honest her expressions are. But it’s not going to work; that much he knows. He’s already
dreading tonight. He’s already dreading her hand on him, her expectations, and it exasperates him that he’s been put into this situation.

A young priest performs the ceremony. It’s a hot day, with the sun on a gleeful rampage across the sky, and the shirt he has on seems to be made of some type of scratchy wool. Surrounding them are Rukma’s parents and Mahesh Uncle and Sanmaya. The ceremony lasts only about two hours, with Mahesh Uncle urging the priest to move quickly, concentrate only on the essentials. “The crucial thing is that the groom and the bride are agreeable to this union,” Rukma’s father says. “The rest is just ritual.” The relief and the happiness on her parents’ faces are evident when the ceremony is over. They climb back up to the parking lot, where the parents hug Rukma and get into their cars. And Rukma gets into the car with Tarun. Now they are husband and wife. “That must have been the quickest wedding in the history of this country,” she says as the car takes off.

That very night, he discovers the reason for the parents’ concern: Rukma has recently come out of a messy affair—her lover ditched her—and the parents are afraid a leakage of that matter will stigmatize her for life. It is Rukma who tells him this, after they have gotten into bed. She clasps his hand and says she’s tired. “Are you tired?” she asks. He nods, relieved. She puts her head on his chest. He doesn’t know what to do, and immediately he thinks of Didi, what
her reaction would be to this intimacy between him and his wife. His wife! He has a wife now. He can’t even imagine what’s going to happen tomorrow. He’s so worried about how he’ll explain himself to Didi that he’s becoming numb. Meantime, it’s clear that Rukma wants to talk.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

S
HE HAS A
past, Rukma tells Tarun that first night, and the past is not pretty. She had this lover, a Newar boy, for nearly a year, and her parents had no clue. Many of her friends had no idea that she was seeing someone. Two of her close friends knew, but she had sworn them to secrecy. Every day she was petrified that they would inadvertently let it slip, but they were good friends, and they managed to keep a tight lid.

There were days when she thought that all she needed to do was go to her parents, perhaps her mother, because she felt closer to her, and tell her that she had a Newar lover and that she loved him very much. Her parents were educated people; they were what she thought of as progressive.
They had Newar friends they socialized with. In fact, one of her father’s closest friends was a Newar: the two went to school together, grew up together; he still visited the house. She thought that her parents would understand and that they would tell her that the world has changed and they are open-minded so they, too, have changed.

But one day Rukma’s mother said something that made her doubt all that. They had been talking about the daughter of someone they knew who had eloped with her college classmate of a lower caste. The girl’s parents were devastated. “She should have preserved herself,” Rukma’s mother said. Rukma thought that what she meant was that the girl should have stayed away from all boys, but later she began to wonder if in her mother’s mind the girl should have preserved herself because the boy was of a low caste and that perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d vanished with a boy of the same caste. In Rukma’s mother’s mind, her own daughter would never stray from the straight and narrow. That’s why they allowed her to socialize with boys and attend parties. Rukma is a good girl, her parents liked to say. And she was a good girl. She did very well in her studies, she didn’t drink or smoke or dress provocatively, and she had, until her Newar lover, “preserved” herself.

Her Newar lover was a tall, wiry man with a mustache and the sweetest lips that she’d ever seen on a man. He was charming, a real seducer. That glistening mustache, those impeccable lips. He was soft-spoken, so much so
that sometimes it was hard to hear him. In this city of loud and brash men, she loved that about him. He was a tourist guide, so he spoke a smattering of different languages, French, German, Spanish, and in the midst of talking to Rukma he’d move smoothly into another tongue, like,
Mon ami, mon chéri
or
Mi sei mancato molto
. They made her swoon, these exotic tongues, transported her to different landscapes, a European village in the mountains with narrow cobblestone pathways or giant castles perched on hilltops.

One day he ended up becoming engaged to someone his parents had chosen for him. That’s when Rukma’s mother found out about him. Rukma had composed a long letter to him about her devastation. She harbored hope that once he read her letter he’d see his error and return to her. After all, he was only engaged, not yet married. Her letter was nearly ten pages long. It detailed all the good times they’d had; it talked about the cruelty the society practiced by forcing people into castes and creeds.

Before Rukma could deliver the letter, her mother discovered it. Instead of getting angry, she wept in disappointment. Her father also moped around the house, didn’t go to work, and spoke to her in delicate tones, as though his daughter were a fragile thing. Her mother handed the letter back to her, but how could Rukma send it now?

One day she saw her Newar lover in the market with his fiancée. He looked happier than he had been with Rukma. There was a shine to his face, an anticipation of the future,
which was a clear signal that he wasn’t coming back to her. He was showing his bride-to-be something hanging outside a shop—a dress, a hat, Rukma didn’t remember—and the fiancée looked rapturous. He saw Rukma, right after he pointed at the merchandise. He spotted her across that narrow, busy lane. She must have been quite a sight for him. Her face was botched and swollen from bouts of crying; she had worn the same dress for days now, and her hair was tied in a knot at the top for some odd reason, possibly because she didn’t want to bother combing it. She must have appeared like an apparition, the woman he had loved materializing out of thin air, with the shoppers’ to-and-fro intermittently blocking the view. He might have thought that his mind was playing tricks on him. It gave him a small thrill, Rukma was sure, the sight of her watching him in a teeming marketplace—it made him aware of the kind of power he had. As he spoke to his fiancée he continued to look in Rukma’s direction. A cow came and nudged his fiancée on the hip, a friendly poke that elicited gleeful alarm.
“Arré, arré, arré!”
said her Newar lover and pushed the cow away. His bride-to-be clung to him. A few bystanders laughed congenially, and he glanced in Rukma’s direction as though ensuring that she witnessed his happiness.