The Private Life of Mrs Sharma (7 page)
Read The Private Life of Mrs Sharma Online
Authors: Ratika Kapur
I wish that I were twelve years of age again, when worry was just a word that you heard around you, not something that you suffered like a sickness. It was such a nice time then. I was only a reason for worry, and even then not very much because I hardly gave my parents any trouble. But I never ever had to feel any worry. My mother was still quite healthy then, when I was twelve years of age. She was still strong enough to press my school uniform, oil my hair and make my plaits, and cook, and sing to me. She was still strong enough to be a mother. And in those days my father was also a happy man. He used to walk me to school each and every morning, giving me mental maths problems along the way, and in the evenings he switched on the radio and helped me with my studies. A lot of people grow up, but they still don't stop being children. I stopped being a child at thirteen years of age, when my mother fell sick. I stopped being a child when I was still a child. But until I was twelve years of age, I lived without worry. And at that time I had only ten toenails to cut.
Everybody at the clinic was kinder to me than normal when I went back to work this morning after eleven days' leave, and this was because I had lied to them, as I had lied to everybody else, as I had even tried to lie to myself. I gave them the same sad little story about how Bobby had got a very serious case of food poisoning. If I had told them the truth, nobody would have spoken to me. Maybe I would have even lost my job. Doctor Sahib was very, very kind to me and called me into his room. I sat down on one of the patient's chairs opposite him, because he asked me to, and he ordered tea for me, which came in a white and pink teacup with very pretty flowers on it. Doctor Sahib actually looked very worried. He asked me all types of questions about Bobby, his diet, his stools, the colour of his skin, and what not, and he said that he could get me an appointment with the top gastroenterologist in Delhi if I wanted a second opinion. He even told me that I could take more leave if I
needed it. It was very, very kind of him. I felt very happy. But then suddenly, just like that, he asked me if I needed money. He got up from his chair, walked around the table, sat down on the chair next to me and actually asked me if I needed money. Financial help, those were the words he used. Financial help, as if they would sound less like charity, as if they would sound less like an insult.
But I did not give Doctor Sahib a tight slap across his face because I knew that he did not purposely want to insult me. I did not leave the room and my job because I have seen, I have seen for some time now, that there are many things that Doctor Sahib and his type of people just don't understand. And I did not spit on him. I just said, Forgive me, Doctor Sahib, but I don't need any financial help, and then I started talking about one of the lab assistant's leave applications.
I left the clinic half an hour early to meet Vineet for a cup of tea at his hotel. It must have been forty-five degrees outside, on TV yesterday they said that there would be a heat wave this week, and there was a burning wind that was blowing outside, a wind that was like fire, but behind the clean glass walls of the Amaryllis Hotel it was like a February morning. Actually, it was so cold inside Vineet's hotel that I had to wrap the pallu of my sari around my shoulders.
We sat in the restaurant, which, except for one bearer, was empty. I told Vineet that I was sorry for not calling him up. I told him that I had been sick, and that was hardly a lie. A child's
illness is also his mother's. As I talked about strong medicines, hospitals and doctors, Vineet listened to me quietly, his eyes small and serious and wet, as if I was speaking about death. As if I was speaking the truth. I felt bad, I felt very bad. In these three months that we have known each other, today was the first time that I actually lied to him. If he does not know that I am married, that I am thirty-seven years of age, that I have a child, it is only because he has never bothered to ask me. And I will never talk about things without reason, I will never talk about things without being asked about them. In all this time, he has never ever asked me about my family, and so I have not said anything. That is my only crime. Still, I felt bad. He is a good person, and as I talked I saw kindness in those small and serious eyes. So then I thought that I should tell him a little bit more about myself. What did I have to hide? But I had just started to talk, I was just going to say in a cool, calm way, with a bit of a laugh, because a laugh normally makes these types of situations a little bit less difficult, so I had just started to say, Oh, but you know nothing about me, when he said, Stop. He fixed his eyes on my eyes and said, Stop, I don't need to know anything more about you than what you want to tell me.
I should have felt relieved. My body, which felt as if somebody was holding it from top and bottom, and twisting it into a tight coil like a dupatta, my body should have loosened, but as long as his eyes remained on my eyes, every muscle in me remained tense.
It is like this, he said, looking inside his teacup. A person should never demand more than he is given. Supposing
somebody gives you an envelope with fifty-one rupees in it on your birthday. You don't say, Uncleji, can I have a little bit more, please? Do you?
I was quiet. The truth is that I liked what he said. But then it is so easy to say deep and pretty things. The question is whether he can actually live by all this poetry. I will wait and see. I will wait and see how long it takes for Vineet to finally break, to finally break and hit his fist down on the table and demand from me all the facts of my life. But until that happens I will not allow myself to be carried away by his poetry.
So, I remained quiet and he also did, until Neha entered, floating into the restaurant like a heroine from a hit film. She came up to us, hugged me like I was her sister and sat down at our table.
A crow trying to walk like a swan, that is what I think when I see her. Everything about her is imitation. The way those lipsticky lips move, the way those hands move when she is saying something, when she is saying anything at all. And those imitation diamond studs in her ears. All of it is fake, and I suspect that all of it is for Vineet.
After she sat down, Neha looked at Vineet, then at me, then at Vineet again, and then she squeezed my hand and said, Thank God you have come. You don't know how worried this poor Vineet has been. Actually, she did not say this. Actually, she sang this. I have seen that Neha does not speak. She does not speak properly like you and I speak. Her words come out like songs, cheap love songs.
Vineet turned his face to the window.
I am telling you, Neha said, I have known this boy for almost two years but I have never seen him behave like this before. He was behaving like some love-struck teenager!
Like some love-struck teenager. These words came out of Neha's mouth with giggles.
I wanted to give her a tight slap across her face. Nobody, nobody in the world, dares show such disrespect for me. I wanted her to know this, and I wanted to make sure that she would never ever do such a thing again. But Vineet interrupted me. I let him. Neha is a stupid woman, he said, looking straight into her eyes. Don't pay any attention to her. She watches too many films.
In one second that woman came crashing down to the ground. In my ears I heard the thud, and the truth is that I enjoyed hearing that sound. I should say here that I don't need another person, and I don't need a man, to fight my fights. I don't have parents, remember, and my husband is far away. Still, just like Vineet must have felt good fighting for me, I also felt good. The only problem now was that I looked at him in a different way. Now he was not just some sweet person who was always dressed in a nicely pressed shirt and pants. Now he was a man. Underneath those nice clothes there was a man's body.
But how do such small, little foolish thoughts matter? How does Vineet matter? What matters is that just now I cannot get sleep. I am frightened to close my eyes.
It is late at night now, that time in the night when the sky above is screaming with planes that bring people to their
families, or sometimes take them away. The house is quiet, my son and my in-laws are sleeping peacefully, and I can't close my eyes. I can't close my eyes because as soon as they close my drunken son appears, howling, growling on his hands and knees, a mad dog vomiting and crawling around the bodies of two almost dying boys lying on the roadside. Each and every time I close my eyes I see Bobby crawling around his dying friends, a mad animal sniffing and scratching at their dirty, drunken bodies. And I don't know what to do.
Not such a long time ago, when my eyes closed for the night, a smart young man would be standing in front of me, a smart young man in a navy-blue suit that was stitched at the tailoring shop that Doctor Sahib goes to, the one in Connaught Place with an English name, Something & Sons, and this young man, my son Bobby, who looked like a young man in an advertisement for Raymond suits, was carrying not a briefcase but a slim laptop bag, in real leather, and his hair was cut short, and he was shaved and smart and clean, and standing straight, standing in front of me, his mother, and was saying bye-bye to me before he left for the office, which was located in one of those very modern new buildings in Gurgaon. This was what I would see night after night. This was the picture that would bring me peace and allow me three or four hours of sleep.
I know that I sound like just another mother gone mad with foolish fantasies about her son. But the truth is that my Bobby has everything that is required to be that picture. I don't like to boast, but the truth is that my Bobby has all the brains to get admission into an IIM for his MBA, and he is also six feet tall and has a handsome face, and his skin is so fair that
in winter his cheeks glow pink. All that he has to do is forget about all those stupid cooking shows and recipe books, and apply himself a little bit more to his studies, and he has to stop slouching and fix his posture, and get his hair cut more regularly and shave at least one or two times a week. Then the whole world will see. That day he made a mistake, yes, but all young people make mistakes these days. But he also learnt his lesson, and I made very, very sure that he did, and one day, mark my words, one day my Bobby will be more than that man in the Raymond advertisement.
The anger was not going away. I tried my level best to push it to one side, to swallow it, to dissolve it in prayers, everything, but wherever I went it followed me. Wherever I went this anger followed me, pulling on my sari pallu like some needy child. The picture of my Bobby and the two dying boys was not going away. Each and every time I closed my eyes, each and every time I blinked, that picture appeared. I had to know what happened. I had to get my hands on the animal that sold that poison to three young boys, the animal that almost killed two young schoolboys and maybe almost killed my Bobby. I had to get my fingers around that animal's neck. But Bobby refused to tell me anything. All this time he has refused to say anything at all about that day. He has not even allowed me to meet the parents of the other boys. But I had to know. I had to come face to face with that animal. Then this morning, after begging him and threatening him for days and days, Bobby finally agreed to show me the shop from where they had
bought the alcohol, but only if I allowed him to come with me. Obviously I had wanted to go alone. I did not want Bobby to see his mother be the animal that she had to be in front of another animal. But he would not listen, even though I tried my level best to convince him. That place is too dangerous, he kept saying. That place is too shady. You can't go there alone. So, I agreed to allow him to come with me.
It seems that evil lives closer to you than you would suspect it to. It seems that evil is even easier to buy than bananas. The shop from which Bobby and his friends bought the alcohol was closer to my house than the fruit seller that I go to every evening. And Bobby was right. It was well and truly a very shady place. From outside it looked like any workshop, a small, little shed filled with towers of old and new tyres, and there were small, little dirty boys loitering around. It looked like the type of place you went to to get a puncture repaired. But behind this shed was a small room, and I only call it a room because it had four walls and a ceiling, and as soon as I entered this small, dark and dirty room, or hole, or whatever you want to call it, as soon as I stepped into it, I wanted to vomit. I actually retched. There was the most horrible smell, a smell worse than anything that I had smelt before, a smell of kerosene and shit and chemicals all mixed together. And in every corner, on every shelf, there were packets and packets of what looked like powdered masalas, but were drugs, surely, packets and packets of them just sitting there openly on the shelves along with hundreds of bottles, small, little glass bottles, filled with a urine-coloured liquid that must have been the cheap country liquor that my Bobby had drunk. I quickly did some deep breathing. Then, in my strictest voice,
I told Bobby to wait outside, but he just stood behind me and refused to move. I looked up at a picture of Ganeshji above the door to steady myself.
I had thought that I would see a fat old man with a fat stomach in a vest and pyjamas, with henna-coloured hair and paan-stained teeth. That is what TV does to you. But instead of that what stood in front of me was a slim man who seemed to be about my husband's age, dressed in a baby pink shirt and grey pants, a balding man with metal-framed spectacles, who only had to wear a white coat to look like a lab technician in a doctor's office. I looked up at Ganeshji again, and then I turned to the man and spat on his face.
Bobby, who was standing behind me, caught my hand. I shook him off. And the man standing in front of me? He just took a folded white handkerchief out of the pocket of his pants, unfolded it, gently wiped my spit off his chin, folded it again and put it on the counter. Then he smiled.
Madamji, he said, looking not actually at me, but at some point behind me, at my son maybe. Madamji, what can I do for you?
I could not speak.
Madamji, you won't find what you are looking for over here.
I turned to Bobby, who looked like he was just going to cry, then I turned back to the man.
Madamji, he said, now looking up at Ganeshji's picture. Madamji, as a mother you pay not only for your own sins, but also for the sins of your child. And then he just left the room.
I tried my level best to stand steady, I closed my eyes and tried to do some deep breathing again, but all that I breathed
in was that horrible, horrible smell of chemicals and shit. I turned again to Bobby. His eyes were now filled with tears.
When we walked out of the shop I felt the June sun attack my bones. It seemed that the anger that I had felt all these days had slowly burnt through my skin, burnt through my flesh, so that the June sun could attack my bare bones directly. Now, thirteen hours after the visit to that shop, my bones still feel that same heat.
As a mother you not only pay for your own sins, but you also pay for the sins of your child. How dare he say such things? How dare such an animal say such things? What does a criminal know about being a mother? What does a man know about being a mother? And what do they even mean, those stupid words? How can one person pay for the sins committed by another person? And why only the mother? Sharma Sahib, where are you? You were supposed to spend a month with us every year. Come back just now! Come back and take control of your son. Come back and pay for his sins. But what do you even know of your son's sins? Oh, my Bobby, you say. Oh, my poor Bobby. Oh, my sweet and studious Bobby. What do you know of your sinful son?
Many times when I am walking in the market or standing in a crowded train compartment, basically, whenever I am surrounded by a lot of people, I think about how each and
every one of these people has or has had a mother, and then I think of all the hours, all the days and nights, all the years that are spent looking after children, and it seems that my head is going to burst. Such a lot of time! Such a lot of care! I wonder if anybody has ever bothered to think that if there are six billion people on this earth, and each and every one of them has a mother, dead or alive, what the total time spent would be on caring for others, on caring and compromise and sacrifice. I am sure that if anybody actually bothered to make such a calculation, that person's head would also burst.
Obviously there are those mothers who have easy lives. There are those mothers like my mother who were let off from their duties very early or mothers like Doctor Sahib's wife, modern maharanis, who have one ayah to feed their children, one ayah to clean their noses, one ayah to clean their shit, and what not. But then that is how the world is.
It is night-time. Papaji and Mummyji are sleeping in the hall, and Bobby is sleeping here in the corner on his cot, his headphones still in his ears, a cookbook resting on the pillow next to his cheek. You have to see this boy, this tall, beautiful boy. This man, almost. He would make any mother's heart burst with pride.
But what am I saying? Am I so stupid a woman that I could forget so quickly that this is the boy who betrayed his mother, who brought shame to her? Have I forgotten that this is the boy who drank?
It is night-time again, and again sleep will not come to me. Maybe now I have met the man who has blood on his hands. Maybe now I know the face of evil. I stood in front of it and spat on it. But then what? I still can't close my eyes. You won't find what you are looking for over here. That is what he said. And the truth is that what he said was right.
When I came back home from that man's shop I prayed. Except for preparing lunch and dinner, the only thing that I did today was pray. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. I prayed until Mummyji came into the prayer room, and actually caught my shoulders and shook me, and asked me if I was fine. I prayed, but nothing. No answers, no peace, no peace that comes from answers. It seems that God was also saying one and the same thing to me. It seems that He was also saying, Madamji, you won't find what you are looking for over here.
But was it actually a sin that my Bobby committed? Is drinking such a sin? On Friday, when I met Doctor Sahib at the clinic, one thought came to me, the thought that if Doctor Sahib drinks alcohol, and I know that he does because his bearer had told me a long time ago about how his sahib drinks two glasses of whiskey every evening without fail and from time to time even the memsahib does, so if Doctor Sahib, who is such a respectable man, drinks, then why is it such a bad thing if my Bobby did? Should I have become so angry? Obviously Bobby is just a child, and he drank some cheap country liquor that almost killed him, not the imported whiskey that Doctor Sahib enjoys. Still, was it a sin or just a child's mistake?
God help me. What am I thinking?
I am not fine, Mummyji, I am not fine. Shake me up again. You are a mother, Mummyji. Only a mother can know the suffering of another mother. Help your daughter-in-law, Mummyji. She has gone mad. Tell your son to come back. You say that every boy has to have his father near him. Mummyji, every woman also has to have her husband near her.