The Lilac House (7 page)

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Authors: Anita Nair

Tags: #Bangalore (India), #Widows, #Contemporary Women, #Domestic fiction, #General, #College teachers, #Fiction, #Cultural Heritage

BOOK: The Lilac House
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‘What?’ Meera asks. ‘I thought you said I was the one person who would understand. And now it seems I don’t understand you. Is that what you are bringing this down to? This middle-age caper of yours… Is that what this is about?’
Giri shakes his head. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? How I feel, what I am going through. How do I make you understand?’
That is when something snaps in Meera and she rises, her teeth baring into fangs and her eyes daring him to speak further. ‘What about us? The kids, I… What are we to do while you find yourself?’
‘Sit down, Meera. Sit down. Everyone’s looking at us!’ Giri hisses.
Meera looks around her wildly. Then she drops into the chair. What is the use anyway?
 
She hears him speak. Nuts and bolts of how they would separate and what would need to be done. Their lives, their children, their joint account and what they had shared once. How simple it is to unravel a skein if one wants to.
Long ago, Giri told her, ‘Patience, Meera, patience. That is all you need to work any knot open. Keep teasing it and you’ll find a knot with a bit of slack and once you do, you are home.’
Giri, Houdini of matrimony. Where did he find that slack bit?
‘Then there is the house. I asked you, begged and pleaded with you to sell the house. With the money, I would never have had to work for someone else. I could have pursued my dream, my chance at happiness… but you wouldn’t listen. You kept brushing the thought away. You indulged me with a “not now, we’ll do it later”, as if I were a child hankering for the moon. I have to move
on, Meera. I don’t know what it is I want to do. I know it is too much to expect you to understand what I am going through. Or for you to look at this objectively. But I want you to know that I didn’t intend to hurt you or the children.
‘You may have to seriously consider selling the house now. I won’t be able to contribute much till I have sorted things out. The kids’ education and their essentials – that is my responsibility.’ He pauses and looks away. Then, in a firm voice, as if to beat down any protests she may have, he says, ‘I have other responsibilities, too, now.’
Meera searches his face. Is that what it’s all about?
All those times when he was working weekends, the late evening meetings… how did I not see it? Mummy is wrong. I am not a good wife. Or, wouldn’t I have sensed it? The presence of another woman in your life. How did I go so wrong? Who is she? Where did you meet? How long has it been going on? But I won’t ask you who she is. I won’t give you the chance to unburden your guilt. I will not sit here and listen to you say, ‘Meera, you are the only one I can say this to… you are the only one I could ever say anything to.’
From somewhere in the back of her mind a thought rises: if you love your life, you are lovable. If you hate your life, you become hate worthy. Did she read it somewhere? Or is it one of those Lily – Saro aphorisms that after a while became a part of her system, swimming to the surface with unfailing accuracy of time and circumstance? Making her mouth fill with ashes as once again she realized the truth of all that she had dismissed as their narrow-minded nonsense.
Meera sits there one last time with Giri, spooning the cinnamon speckled foam into her mouth and tasting nothing.
She watches him leave and thinks: what now?
W
hat now?
They have already kept her waiting for ten minutes or, as Meera calculates it, for Rs 52.65. This is the fourth time. The last three times they kept her waiting only to tell her that Randhir Sahi was in a meeting or elsewhere. ‘What about his mobile? Has the number changed? I can’t reach him on that either. Can’t you give me the new number?’ Meera tried to keep the plea out of her voice.
But they refused. ‘Please try again, ma’am.’ ‘Please call back later.’ ‘We’ll tell him you called.’ And Meera waited for him to call her. He didn’t.
Meera gnaws at her lip. The meter is ticking. The theme song of
Titanic
plays on in her ear. A hysterical giggle flutters in her throat. What could be more appropriate? A sinking ship and her… ‘Hello,’ she says into the phone. ‘Hello, hello, hello…’
 
As she stepped out of the house, Nikhil asked, ‘Why aren’t you calling from home?’
‘It is cheaper,’ she said. ‘I can keep an eye on the meter. Here I’d just prattle on.’
‘You don’t prattle. They do!’ he retorted. ‘They are the ones who talk too long on the phone.’
‘Hush! It doesn’t matter. They are trying, Nikhil. It is not easy for them,’ Meera said, trying to not let her lip wobble. These days even the slightest hint of kindness unsettled her. She could handle rage and anger, frustration and even rudeness. But kindness… it unnerved her.
 
The old ladies tried. Meera watched Lily and Saro meticulously move one button into the box after each call. Meera had said they must. ‘Each button represents one free call. We will be billed after a hundred free calls. And you’ll have to ask me when you need to make a long distance call. I have locked that facility. We need
to economize now. Really. I’ve also changed all our cell phone connections to prepaid plans.’
They looked at each other, Lily and Saro. This was a Meera they didn’t recognize. A Meera with home economies. A button a call. The pink papers and news magazines cancelled. No more half loads in the washing machine. Lights and fans switched off when not needed. Reheated leftovers. And a measuring spoon that didn’t brim any more. But they said nothing. The stern cast of her face alarmed them more than Meera realized. At night, in the privacy of their bedrooms, they heard the echoes of the clamour in Meera’s heart: What are we to do now?
It was Lily who said, ‘I don’t need a cell phone, Meera. Anyone who wants to reach me can call here. It is too much of a nuisance really! All kinds of strangers calling at strange hours, wanting to sell you things you don’t need.’
And Saro, who couldn’t even bear the thought of sharing a bottle of marmalade with anyone else said, ‘She and I can share mine. Why waste money on two connections?’
‘It’s fine for now. I’ll tell you when we may need to give up one of the connections,’ Meera said quietly.
 
‘Yes, Meera,’ his voice booms over the line. Her publisher and lifeline.
‘Hello, Randhir,’ Meera says in as steady a voice as she can muster. ‘I tried calling you several times but couldn’t reach you.’
‘I heard,’ the voice at the end of the line says. Meera waits for him to make excuses, even apologize, perhaps. In the past, he never failed to call back. And at book events, he was always there, ebullient and full of gruff humour and telling anyone he could grab hold of, ‘My bestselling cookbook writer. Except, how can you call her a cookbook writer? She’s more than that. She’s the corporate wife’s Spencer Johnson, an inspiration for every woman whose husband is part of the corporate world!’
Meera would smile, partly in embarrassment at his exaggerated
claims for her and partly out of affection for him. He had been a rock all along.
 
She didn’t actually set out to write a cookbook. In fact, if Meera had nurtured literary ambitions, she would have chosen loftier, weightier themes from her Greek myths. Or traced the life and writings of a poet, perhaps. Or crafted a series of literary essays on books and writers.
Then one Saturday evening, three years ago, she found herself at a loose end. Saro and Lily were away visiting friends. The kids had gone out for a movie and Giri was in Singapore on work. Once upon a time Meera used to go with him on his foreign trips. But after that time when they were in Brussels and Nikhil fell ill, Meera was increasingly reluctant to leave the children alone. Now they holidayed abroad once a year, with the children. Meera preferred that to sitting around in hotel rooms all day or strolling aimlessly through the streets of some foreign city, waiting for Giri to be available after a day of meetings and presentations.
She sat at the dining table, cutting up vitamin pill strips into neat little squares of aluminium foil. She kept them in a round glass candy jar so that each of them would see it and remember to swallow one just after breakfast. She thought of the dinner party they had been to a week before. A young colleague of Giri’s had hosted it. They had arrived at the apartment two streets away, exactly at 7.15 p.m. as they had been asked to, only to find a flustered host and a distraught hostess.
‘The maid didn’t turn up and the baby kept crying through the day…’ Tina, the young wife had murmured, trying to hide the fact that she had been weeping all evening. ‘And there was a power cut last night and the food I had kept ready in the fridge has spoilt. Neeraj is angry with me for calling in food but what else could I do? And then the dog ate up the kebabs I had placed on a platter for heating up and serving. And he says it’s all my fault. That I should be more organized.’
Meera saw the red-rimmed nose and the puffy eyes, heard the wobbly voice and felt her heart go out to her.
‘Don’t worry,’ Meera, the legendary hostess, smiled. ‘We’ll put a smile on Neeraj’s face. Now, what do you have in your kitchen?’
Later, as she sat watching Tina charm Giri and the other men with stories of her former workplace, Meera smiled to herself. At least she wasn’t as clueless as Meera had been. Meera, at her first dinner party, had tried to introduce literary trivia into the dinner table conversation, thinking it would amuse and entertain and perhaps even start a discussion. ‘Did you know that Sylvia Plath actually used a thesaurus?’ she had said.
Giri’s boss had spooned pulao into his plate and murmured, ‘Sensible woman! What’s poetry anyway but the same thought in different words? One might structure it better with a thesaurus. Now Meera, did you make all of this? Excellent food and a superb menu! I especially love the flavour of pineapple you have brought into your pulao. Giri, you are a very fortunate man. She is an asset!’
Meera had felt her smile falter, her topics for discussion sink in the middle, and she dwindled into silence. Over the years she had learnt to rein in her impulses and seek those worlds where it was enough to float rather than probe or analyse. The price of gold was good, as was a new restaurant they had eaten at, or a movie she had watched; international celebrities and a description of a visit to a quaint place full of atmosphere and antiquity were perfect, especially when one had overseas guests. And when all failed, Meera brought in Daddy’s tea estate years and Lily’s cinema days. Meera’s parties would never be a riot. Instead, they were elegantly structured, perfectly orchestrated symphonies with never a wrong note. Meera, conducting with a twirl of her wrist, had just one mission – that the boss went back happy and Giri’s colleagues went home envying him the life he had.
The magazines referred to people like her in rather dismissive terms. The soufflé sort. The Teflon type. It hurt, especially because deep in her it rankled that she who in her student years had
worshipped at the feet of Germaine Greer and Marilyn French, Andrea Dworkin, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker and Simone de Beauvoir – the devis of womanhood who taught her how to shape her femininity and female thinking – had become this. All it took was one long look at Giri, and the devis and their theories had evaporated. And now she was the kind of woman who mouthed gibberish.
‘Thanks, Meera,’ Tina had whispered in her ear as the party progressed without a hitch. ‘You should really write a book for wives like me. For corporate wives like me so they don’t make a hash of their husband’s career and their marriage!’
Tina was more than a little drunk by then but Meera, sitting at her dining table with a fistful of vitamins, found herself taking one of Nikhil’s exercise books and scrawling on the first page:
THE CORPORATE WIFE’S GUIDE TO ENTER TAINING
1.
Thou shalt be dressed, perfumed and ready by the time the guests arrive.
2.
Thou shalt not drink too much alcohol.
3.
Thou shalt not forget to show appreciation for the perfumed candle brought by the boss’s wife. (The very same candle you gave them a year ago during Diwali.)
4.
Thou shalt not dawdle over serving, or race through the meal.
5.
Thou shalt not monopolize the conversation.
6.
Thou shalt not discuss thy office politics, or thy ailments, maids, drivers, servants and in-laws.
7.
Thou shalt not air thy views on company policies even if thou hast a management degree from IIM or Wharton.
8.
Thou shalt not flirt with thy spouse’s boss. Even if he looks like Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin or Saif Ali Khan.
9.
Thou shalt not find fault with thy spouse even if thou would like to crack his knuckles with a nutcracker.
10.
Thou shalt remember to smile at thy spouse ever so often. Bosses know a happy man is a happy employee.
Over the next few months, Meera no longer had empty evenings. In those hours, she worked on her book and with the same detached secrecy with which she had written it, she took a printout and sent it to one of the best known publishers in India – Watermill Press.
One of the news magazines that specialized in literary gossip reported how Randhir Sahi was so enchanted by what he read that he called Meera the night he finished reading the manuscript and signed her on. In six months’ time Meera became the bestselling author of a book that corporate men gifted to girlfriends, fiancées, wives and in some cases, their mothers as well.
 
‘If you don’t get through to me, all you have to do is email me, Meera. I may not always be able to come to the phone,’ he says. ‘And now, what can I do for you?’
‘Well, it’s about the new book,’ Meera begins. ‘I was waiting to hear from you on the proposal I sent… the one on desserts.’
He sighs. And Meera feels her expectation curl at the edge.
‘I am not so sure that we will be able to publish it,’ he says. ‘I sent you an email. Didn’t you get it? It just doesn’t sit well on our list!’
Meera had read the email in puzzlement. What had the editor meant by saying it wouldn’t fit into their publishing programme for the year? A mistake, surely? She had run her fingers through her hair and thought, I will have to talk to him myself. The editor perhaps didn’t realize who she was or what Randhir thought of her. His star, he called her.
‘Randhir, I was taken aback by the email. I thought you hadn’t seen it…’
‘I see every email that is sent out, Meera.’ His voice wears an edge now. ‘
The Corporate Wife’s Guide to Entertaining
was a hit, I agree. But
The CEO Lunch
hasn’t taken off as I expected it to. And Giri, after saying at the book launch that he had found a tie-in to buy back 1000 copies, hasn’t reverted. I had to make some enquiries
and I hear that you are separated. That changes the whole angle, you know. And ‘Just Desserts – Desserts for When the Boss Comes to Dinner’ is too niche and too much of a risk!’
 
Meera listens. I will not beg. I will not plead, she thinks. But she hears herself say, ‘What am I to do now?’
‘I really don’t know. Think of something else. A cookbook that no one else has. Like you did with
The Corporate Wife’s Guide to Entertaining
. Send me the book proposal first, though.’
A container truck thunders past the narrow road. A medley of horns blare. ‘Where are you calling from, Meera?’ the voice asks, suddenly curious.
 
Meera hangs up quietly. Later she would send him a polite email explaining she had been cut off, and couldn’t connect again. She needs him more than he needs her and she is prepared to grovel. But for now, she takes a deep breath and stares at the phone as if it were Randhir. ‘Bastard! The fucking bastard!’ Meera mouths softly in the confines of the telephone box. Abuse trips off her lips easily these days.
Why hadn’t she signed the two-book contract he had proposed after
The Corporate Wife’s Guide to Entertaining
? Why hadn’t she done what authors everywhere were doing? What use now this mad bid to hold her freedom to herself? Giri had urged her as well: ‘You could have asked for a bigger advance!’
‘It’s not the money, Giri,’ she had tried to explain.
‘It’s always the money,’ he cut her off. ‘It’s a commercial book you are writing. He is going to make money from it. You should too! But when do you ever listen to me?’
Now Meera walks back to her home quietly. She has spent Rs 110 on a call that has amounted to nothing. At least she has been spared the humiliation of her mother and grandmother hovering, eavesdropping and then huddling together to speculate about what would happen next.

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