The Narrow Road to Palem (8 page)

Well, the worst seemed to have happened.

It seemed from the weeping that Bhoomi had failed her semester. This would set her back a little bit, but it would also teach her some valuable lessons. College was for studying. The fun and the boys had to be kept as far away as possible. This was why he had told Arundhati that they ought to put her in a girls’ college, but had she listened? No. She had said that the world was not a girls’ college, that the real world had men in it too, that Bhoomi had to learn to mingle with them.

All hogwash.

He furiously wrapped himself in a new cloth and strode into the room, where Arundhati sat with her arm around Bhoomi. Her eyes had become dark sunken holes, and she had become thinner than he remembered her. His heart softened for a moment, but then he remembered her phone, and the anger came back.

‘What happened?’ he said. ‘Why the tears?’

Arundhati got up and led him into the inner room. She shut the door behind them, bolted it. ‘Sit down, Swami,’ she said.

‘Just tell me what happened.’

‘I will tell you only if you promise not to get angry.’

In the entire twenty years of their marriage, Arundhati had said those words five times. All five times, he had ended up blowing his fuse. ‘Just tell me what happened.’ His fingers had clenched into fists, and his eyes had begun to pinch.

‘Bhoomi got an abortion.’

The words hung in the air, between them, and after a few seconds, dropped and disappeared.

As if she had never spoken, Rama Shastri asked, ‘What?’

She told him about the boy. How he had noticed her on her first day back. How they had met. How he had told her that he wanted to marry her. How they had snuck away for a Saturday and Sunday to a hotel room. How he had spurned her afterward. How he had denied knowing her after she told him that she was pregnant. How he had made fun of her in front of his friends. How the whole college knew. How she had mustered up the courage to go to the hospital on her own. How she had gotten it done.

Rama Shastri listened, wondering if this was not all a movie story. Were mother and daughter playing a trick on him? He looked up, and saw that Arundhati’s own eyes had a sunken look to them.

No, they weren’t.

He fell onto the chair. It creaked under his weight. He covered his face with his hands. He said, ‘So the wish came true.’

* * *

That night, over dinner, Bhoomi did not once look at her phone. She did not once smile. She just stared into the distance and chewed slowly on the food that Arundhati put into her mouth. Rama Shastri thought of asking her about her exams, whether she participated in essay writing this time, whether she would again come first in class – but every time he looked at her eyes, he looked away in fright. The Bhoomi that chattered away on her phone was much better, he thought, than this one.

Well, she had come just that day. Perhaps she would sleep it off.

She didn’t. Over the next week, Bhoomi would take walks on her own in the temple compound, deep into the night. In the afternoons she would lean back against the wall and gaze at the window for hours, and then would break down and sob into her arms. In the mornings Rama Shastri would find her in the temple backyard, by the tank, tossing stones into the clear water and speaking aloud to herself.

They took her to a big doctor in Dhavaleshwaram, and he said that she was going through post abortion trauma. He said it was common among young girls, especially if the procedure had been their first. It wore itself off in a couple of weeks, on most occasions, he said, and asked them not to worry.

Was there anything they could do?

Just give her these tablets, one in the morning, one at night, and keep her in your sights at all times.

The tablets helped her sleep better. But they did not stop the weeping and moaning. If anything, she spoke aloud to herself more than before. After another week of watching his daughter waste away in front of his helpless eyes, Rama Shastri called Arundhati into the room and told her of his idea.

* * *

‘You said the lingam had no power,’ said Arundhati, looking at the amulet in his hand. ‘You said that they were all stories.’

‘They may be. But what if I was wrong? Remember? The beggar said three wishes, one for each of us.’

‘Can we ask for our old Bhoomi back?’ Arundhati’s eyes lit up with hope.

‘We cannot undo the past, Arundhati,’ Rama Shastri replied. ‘We cannot undo the abortion. We cannot undo her love affair.’

‘But we can ask for her happiness.’

Rama Shastri felt hope kindle within him too. He nodded. ‘Yes, we can ask for her happiness.’

‘Wait.’ Arundhati looked at the lingam, joined her hands at it, bowed to it. ‘What if all of this has got nothing to do with this? What if it all – just happened?’

‘If so, what are we losing by asking?’

‘But what if it comes true in a way we don’t want it to?’

Rama Shastri closed his fist around the idol. ‘What can go wrong with happiness?’

Arundhati thought for a moment, and then nodded herself. ‘Yes, what can go wrong? Yes, that
is
what we want for our daughter, isn’t it?’

‘It’s settled, then.’ Rama Shastri closed his eyes. Then he said, ‘I wish that our daughter, Bhoomi, is happy in her life, no matter what her troubles.’

* * *

The next morning, Bhoomi woke up laughing.

And she laughed and she laughed and she laughed. She laughed while brushing her teeth. She tore open her blue satin pajamas at the thighs and hurled the pieces into the air and laughed as they floated away in the breeze. She spurted over her milk, giggled over her breakfast, and sang to herself in a loud, screeching voice.

The devotees that came to the temple saw her skipping along the edge of the tank with unkempt hair, in her torn clothes, and asked one another what had happened to the priest’s daughter. She had been one of the brightest students in the village all through school, and now she was studying in the big city. She had come home three months ago, had she not, and she had been all right.

What had happened now?

Bhoomi did not hear them. Even if she had, she would have thrown something at them, pointed, and laughed.

With a lot of effort, Arundhati enticed her with a sugar cube and led her back into the house in time for lunch. When Rama Shastri entered, he saw Bhoomi sitting in a green and gold half-sari, with her legs splayed apart, minutely observing an ant, breaking into a giggle every second.

Happy are the mad,
thought Rama Shastri. He looked around him. ‘Arundhati?’ he called out.

No answer.

He went into the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. On the stove were covered non-stick vessels, and the smell of fried potatoes came to his nose. ‘Arundhati!’ Something awoke deep within his mind, and made him run to the bedroom, even as his shoulder cloth fell to the ground. Bhoomi’s attention was caught by the fabric, and she crawled over to touch it with one hand, as if it was burning hot. When she found that it was smooth, she chortled in pleasure and began to slap it.

Rama Shastri kicked open the door, and found Arundhati standing in the middle of the bedroom, with the lingam in her hand.

‘Don’t!’ he said. ‘Don’t say a word! Put it aside.’

‘Swami –’

‘No, nothing.’ He went in and slammed the door behind him. ‘Don’t say anything. Just put it aside. We’ll take her to the doctor today.’ He pulled away the amulet and threw it against the brick wall. He took her by the hands, looked into those hollow eyes. ‘Okay?’ he said, slapping her cheeks. ‘It will all be all right. We will take her to the doctor, and he will give us some pills, and we’ll get her back. We’ll get our Bhoomi back.’

Arundhati listened until he had quieted down. Then she said, ‘I have already made my wish, Swami.’

Rama Shastri blinked. He thought once again that this was not happening. No, this was all a dream, or a movie. Bhoomi was in the big college in the city. She was studying. She would come to visit in a few days. She would be playing with her phone. She would crinkle her nose at whatever Arundhati made. All of this – he would wake up from all of this.

‘What did you wish for?’ he heard his own voice say.

‘I – I wished for peace,’ she said. ‘I wished that she would be at peace. Anything to stop her from giggling like a mad woman.’

‘No,’ said Rama Shastri.

‘Why, Swami?’ said Arundhati. ‘What could go wrong with peace?’

* * *

As if in answer, they heard Bhoomi’s running steps, and Rama Shastri wrenched the door open to hurry into the living room. ‘Bhoomi!’ he called. ‘Bhoomi!’ Behind him, Arundhati stumbled and hurt her head against the wooden doorway. A red smudge appeared to the side of her forehead, and when she rubbed it with her hand, it covered her fingers in blood. But she did not notice any of it. ‘Bhoomi!’ she cried.

From the kitchen came the answer, a low, weak, happy wail.

Rama Shastri wanted to run, but found that he could only walk. His legs became heavy as clubs. One laboured step followed another, as the voice from the kitchen – singing a song that he did not recognize – descended to laboured sighs, as if it was drowning.

They stopped a few feet away from the kitchen door. The sounds stopped. Only silence awaited them on the other side.

When they looked down at the floor, they saw two slender red streams, almost parallel to one another, run across the doorway and hit the opposite wall.

Peaceful are the dead.

Rama Shastri tumbled to the ground. Arundhati’s cries seemed to come from far away, from deep within a dream. He only heard the beggar’s voice, clear as the tinkle of the first temple bell.

Happy are the mad, said the voice, and peaceful are the dead.

Today she sat on her grave as I had first seen her, as a nubile nineteen year old.

I did not like her like this; I preferred to see her sagging and shrivelled like I am. That young couple – Seeta the milkmaid and Gopal the barber, who made eyes at each other every morning for months in the long summer of 1972 – now belonged to another world, another life. When you’re young, your heart races at the sight of a woman’s flesh. But as your hair whitens and your body bends, withering folds appear in the mind, one at a time, until you realize one day that a clutch of giggling girls have walked right past you and you haven’t even noticed.

I entered the graveyard after slipping Daanayya his five-rupee coin, watching Seeta, with her legs crossed. From under her pink half-sari I could catch a glimpse of the pea-sized black mole on her inner thigh. The Gopal of 1972 had had sleepless nights of the sight of this mark. The Gopal of today wanted some grey in her hair, and a few more warts on that spotless, dusky face.

‘You know I don’t like roses,’ she said, when I bent down to leave the flower in my hand at her feet.

‘They were out of jasmines.’ I took my seat on the other corner. ‘You seem to have grown younger since yesterday.’

‘Yes, about thirty years younger.’ Her voice had changed too. Husky and loud, like that of a girl of fourteen. None of yesterday’s quivering. And clear, too. Today I could understand every word, and see every white tooth when she smiled.

‘You’re in a good mood.’

‘Did you have your idli?’

‘I did. Did you have your glass of milk and omelette?’

‘I did, though I don’t have to anymore.’

She turned her head away from me, so I could catch a look at the bundle of jasmines in her hair. Perhaps because they caught the light of the rising sun, they seemed to be tinged with yellow, though each flower was in full bloom. I leaned closer to her out of long habit, but they did not smell like they used to. They did not smell at all.

The jasmines she had worn on our wedding night had been all white. Her mother had arranged for the family cot to be brought out into the veranda, under the full moon. We had lied down together, with my arm pillowing her head, looking up at the stars. I was too nervous to pull her to me and give her a kiss, not least because I could still hear the giggles from behind the shut windows of the house. Later, she told me that she was shy to look into my eyes, too.

But I remember the jasmines. Not all of them were in full bloom; here and there was a bud, a few frayed petals, but how divinely they smelled!

‘They don’t smell, do they?’ she said, and I blinked, and that faraway night transformed into a warm morning. I shook my head. ‘You look just like you did on the first day you spoke with me.’

I shook my head again, this time with a smile. I knew she was lying. ‘Rashi and Arun are coming home tomorrow,’ I said, to change the subject.

We had been talking about the kids for a few days now, so I was not surprised by the change in her face. Her eyes became clearer, and her bottom lip disappeared under her teeth. ‘I hate them’ she said. ‘You know I do.’

I looked up at the gate. Daanayya was walking up and down, tapping the ground with the metal end of his leather staff. He had pestered Inspector Ramana Reddy for years for a police stick. Looks like his wish had been granted. Every few seconds he looked up in their direction, as if to make sure that I would not run away. I waved at him. He raised his stick at me, a frown on his face. Perhaps five rupees was not enough. From tomorrow I should give him ten.

Cemeteries tended to be silent, especially when you made statements of a confessional nature. The wind stilled, and the air weighed down on us. So I raised my voice a little, to make sure that she could hear. I’d said this to her before, but some truths deserved to be repeated, every single day.

I said, ‘I hate them too.’

* * *

I returned after lunch. I’d stopped by at Polayya’s shop on the way and emptied a packet of toddy into my mouth. It did not simmer on the tongue just as well as the stuff from the city did, but it was good enough to cool the stomach. By the time I reached Seeta’s grave, my step was a bit unsteady. I kicked the edge of the stone where they wrote her name and almost stumbled into her lap.

She laughed.

She laughed like she used to before Arun and Rashi had come, with her head thrown back, hands clapped to her chest. It had always been her fear that the pallu of her sari would fall off when she laughed in that manner, and that people would stare at her cleavage.

I used to tell her that she wasn’t well endowed enough for that to happen – and she really wasn’t – but she would hit me on my scalp with a knuckle and that would be that.

Seeta’s belly protruded now, I noticed.

‘The kids are kicking,’ she said.

‘It is you who wanted them.’

‘Yes.’ Her hand went to her stomach, caressed it. ‘If I had known what they would make of us, I would never have had them. I would have hit myself with a rolling stone until they died inside me.’

Seeta became more sensible after her death. All during their lives I had told her how the kids were draining us – of money, of love, of life – but she would not listen. She would say that a man’s responsibility was towards his family, that he should get his children into school, and then into college, and watch them become ‘big people’, one of the big people in the city that she said she hated.

‘Why don’t you have jasmines in your hair anymore?’ I asked, looking at her bare, thinning locks.

‘I have to give the babies their milk.’

‘Why don’t you wear the white sari that you wore on the night of our wedding?’

‘The kids have to be fed, they have to be put to sleep.’

‘Will you come after the kids have gone to bed?’

‘Yes, Gopal. I promise.’

‘You always say you’re too tired.’

‘Not tonight. I promise.’

The sun beat down, and I sweated from my neck, my temples, my back. Sweat was in my hair, and it was between my fingers. Seeta just sat there, caressing her stomach. Outside the gate, Daanayya walked up and down with his police stick, stealing furtive glances every few seconds. A cow had come and dropped a fresh pile of dung on the grave next to Seeta’s. It belonged to Lingamchaari, who used to teach science at the school when the kids were young.

The smell of dung reminded me of Lingamchaari’s words: your boy will one day grow up to be a great engineer, Gopalayya. And Rashi, you just had to tell her something once and she remembers it. Gifted, your children are. Gifted!

‘We must send our children to college,’ Seeta had said that night.

‘I was thinking he could help me out at the shop.’

‘Do you want to make him a
barber
?’

‘What’s wrong with being a barber?’

‘I don’t want my son cutting other people’s hair when he could be in an office, working on a computer. And I don’t want my daughter to milk a cow.’

I took out a roll of sweet paan from my pocket and put it on the stone, next to Seeta. She took one look at it, then shook her head. It was on the night of that very conversation, when I had gone to Polayya’s shop afterward to get some nourishment inside me, that I noticed the jasmines sticking out of Ranganayaki’s hair.

‘You smell,’ said Seeta, looking up at him with a wooden face. Her brinjal-like complexion turned a little darker on sunny days. ‘There is toddy in your breath.’

‘I stopped by Polayya’s shack on the way here,’ I said. ‘Just a little after lunch.’

‘Did you stop by for a packet on the way home this morning too?’

‘I did. Yes.’

‘The kids make you drink, don’t they?’

I nodded. ‘They make you work so hard that you don’t bring me flowers any more. They make you earn so much that you must keep the shop open for fourteen hours, and after that – after that, a man does have to get his rest, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had not looked at another woman until Arjun was five. Seeta knew that. I had not stopped bringing her the flowers until she stopped wearing them. She knew that too. I had not raised my arm on her once until she began to think that they had to grow up and become these – these ‘big people’.

‘At least you don’t smell of jasmines,’ she said, and looked away at Daanayya.

Before the kids came, I emptied one packet a day. After, I had to have one every three hours or my fingers would tremble. And trembling fingers were bad for a barber looking to make a lot of money to get his children educated in the city.

‘If we didn’t have them,’ she said, ‘we would have loved each other like we did on that first night.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t I kill them in my womb, Gopal? Why was I too foolish to see what was so plain to you?’

The year of 1977, I went to Dhavalaeshwaram to start a second barber’s shop there, so that we could buy two Jersey cows. Seeta fed them with bales of green grass, and milked them for two hours every morning. She woke up at four and went to bed at eleven, after the kids. I stayed for six nights of the week in Dhavaleshwaram and came back to Palem on Sunday.

Even on the one night I was in the village, Seeta did not wear jasmines in her hair. ‘I am too tired,’ she would say.

I got up to my feet and felt the dry afternoon wind blast my face. ‘I will come in the evening,’ I said.

* * *

Five more rupees went into Daanayya’s pocket at sundown, and I staggered toward Seeta’s grave. She was there, waiting, in the white sari and black blouse of our wedding night, but her hair had fallen off. What little remained of it was white as sugar, and when she smiled at me I saw that her teeth had fallen off.

She also had a black circle around her left eye. Her right cheek was bruised.

‘How much money will you spend on this poison?’

‘I will spend all that I want. It is
my
money.’

‘It is the money you earned for your children.’

‘It is
my
money.’

‘And how much money will you spend on that prostitute?’

‘What did you call her?’

‘A prostitute. That’s what she is. Ask anyone in the village.’

‘That prostitute gives me more love than you have in years.’

Seeta patted the grave and wiped it clean of dust with her hand. The light of day was receding. Outside the gate, washerwomen stopped on their way back home from the riverbank. They stood talking to Daanayya, and they all looked at us out of the corners of their eyes.

‘The kids made you go to Rangi, didn’t they?’

Her voice seemed sincere enough, but I did not reply. I thought back to the day I had first slapped Seeta across the face. There were many after that, and they disappeared in the haze of my memory, but that first night stands clear – her burst lip, my bruised hand, her weeping, the shadows of the children huddling together behind the cloth partition in the same room. Arun whispering to Rashi. Holding her close.

I’d felt an itch in my hands that night, a tickle similar to what I felt now when I didn’t drink for a few hours, and I went at Seeta again, grabbing her hair, bending her over, raining blows on her back, wherever I could see her skin exposed in the dim yellow light of the night lamp. The more I hit her, the quieter the hut grew, and the more she bit on her lip to stifle her weeping. Mustn’t wake up the kids.

Even with me smacking the shit out of her she thought only of the kids.

The kids. The kids. The kids.

‘Yes,’ I said at last, to the cool night air of the graveyard. ‘Do you not remember how much we were in love, Seeta?’

‘I do.’

‘The whole village said that we were made for each other.’

‘We were.’

‘And we did love each other, didn’t we, for those first two years?’

‘We did.’

‘Remember the movie we went to in Dhavaleshwaram, and how scared you were when we were returning on the bicycle?’

‘I do.’

‘But it all went away, didn’t it?’

‘It did.’ Now Seeta was an old crone. Her voice croaked. Now she was weeping, not for the kids but for us. She did not bite on her lip, did not smother her sad moans.

‘Then what happened to us, Seeta? Why did we start hating each other?’

‘Because of the kids.’

‘I told you this would happen.’

She was nodding amid tears.

‘I told you this would happen on that night you said you wanted a baby. I told you that they will snatch our lives from us.’

‘You did.’

‘And all your life you did not believe me,’ I said. ‘You said that they were our kids, that their lives are ours.’

She shook her head, and her voice quavered. ‘So foolish.’

‘You had to die to realize that you were wrong.’

I felt woozy in my head, and it seemed that the ground would open up into a well, and I could jump into it. I would hold Seeta’s hand and we would go back to that first night on the cot under the full moon, and we would promise each other that we would never, ever have children in our lives.