They were meeting after a month. He had come to see his ailing mother in his hometown. His young wife had joined him after a month because she had gone abroad on work. Married for three years now but she could never get past the reserve that her husband acquired in his family home. In the presence of his sisters and mother he turned into a stranger. As if he was a different man. In complete oblivion of their intimate sparks of incomparable chemistry and smouldering passion. She hated the way he looked at her. Impersonal and distant.
‘Bhai, can you come out for a minute?’ That was his sister at the door.
‘Yes, yes. Just coming.’
He shot a half apologetic grin at her and was out of the bed and room in seconds. Thus ended their only few hours of solitude after a gap of a month. Their phone conversations during the period had been stilted and one sided. He focussed on what the Doctors had said, how his sisters were upset, how much they all were doing for Ma.
He came back to take his pillow. One of the sons in law of the family had arrived. He would sleep with him in the guest room.
‘You can sleep in Runu’s room with her.’
She looked annoyed. His eyes held an appeal which she ignored.
‘I am going back to Delhi tomorrow. You stay on here.’
‘But you have just come. What will they all say?’
‘I don't really care. It is always about them. And your incredible sense of duty. I really couldn't care less. Let me go back to work.’
The voices outside were getting louder. There was a half smothered giggle from somewhere. Hushed whispers just outside the door. She caught the words ‘battle begun’ and a loud peal of laughter.
‘Ok, let me go.’
‘Me too,’ said she, picking up a sheet and a pillow.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the terrace. I need to sleep. It is breezy out there. Or do I need to take permission from your sisters for that too?’
She swept past him with the sheet trailing after her, pillow under the arm and her phone.
Their bedroom was never theirs anyway. Always converted into a guest room for a son in law or a relative. Or someone just decided to sleep there randomly because the concept of bedroom for them never really existed. Except for the night of their wedding. When a flower adorned bed, tall glasses of hot milk, a priest whispering the sacred time of consummation now were all the red flags she ought to have recognised.
‘Bhai, please put the pedestal fan there for Jiju. And yes, keep the fan direction fixed towards him. Don’t rotate.’
Climbing the stairs, she heard him dragging the fan towards the room. He was the sixth child of the family and born after five daughters. She had heard a lot of stories about how he had been born after endless prayers.
‘I did not eat fish for two years. I had to have a son, a brother for these girls.’
Her mother in law had told her this innumerable times. In the tone of a self glorified martyr.
‘Yeah, of course. So you could put him at their beck and call while you convalesced comfortably in the Nursing Home nearby.’
She muttered angrily to herself as she walked up. She saw nothing remotely privileged in his family’s treatment of him. A brilliant Scientist who worked in a top Research Institute of the country turned into an errand boy in his own house. In her three years as member of the family, she had never heard him being offered a glass of water. There was always a sister hanging around in the house. Throwing her weight around, being rude, interfering but noone seemed to notice. Always taking a short holiday in her mother’s house, being waited on hand and foot by their many maids. And these maids always made themselves scarce when the son of the family visited with his young wife. One decided to visit her village then, one always fell sick and one was the sole attendant of Ma. Ma was not supposed to do any household chores. So, always after a tiring long journey, she would quickly wash up and make themselves some tea before being summoned for whatever duties entailed to be done during their visit.
‘Kunu’s uncle in law expired. You have to attend their ‘shraadh’ ceremony.’
‘That’s next Monday, isn’t it? But I have to go back on Sunday.’
‘Go back if you want to. I am a helpless old woman. How can I stop you? Kunu will have to listen to a few more barbs, that’s all.’
She heard him speaking on the phone later. ‘Yeah, let’s postpone it.’
Tonight was a beautiful night. She wished he could join her on the terrace. She had spent a month in California and she meant to discuss with him an offer that had come her way there. The moon was round and luminous in the sky, visible through the tall swaying eucalyptus and deodars around the house. The silhouette of a tree, bent under the weight of plump glistening lemons, was clear under the light of the bright moon. Staring down at the sprawling family home from the terrace, she softly whispered to herself
‘and may her bridegroom bring her to a home where all’s accustomed and ceremonious.’
Her father quoting lines from an Yeats poem. Yeatsian dream for his newborn daughter was a far cry from reality in this dark, almost gothic culture of the family her father chose for her.
Her marriage was arranged through relatives who claimed she was the luckiest girl to be marrying into this family. An only son, lots of money and the boy was very intelligent. The entire idea did not make sense to her. She was a bright girl who had just completed her PhD and wanted to work for a few years. Her father was keeping unwell and wanted her settled.
He had seemed nice and intelligent to talk to so she agreed. He had implied that his mother and family were important.
‘My mother has had a difficult life. My father wasn’t too responsible. By the time I was born, he was ridden by many illnesses. And died soon after. She depends a lot on me. I hope you will understand.’
She had appreciated his honesty then. Now she was not too sure.
She had been gripped by a moment of panic when his mother had stared at her on their first meeting. Unsmiling, the eyes hard as flint and the mouth a thin line, almost hostile. And that look disappeared the next instant. Almost as if it had never been there.
She stretched herself and settled down on the rough floor of the terrace. The air was still and warm. The dark river flowed gently behind the huge house. The plantains and coconuts fringed the walls. She could hear splashes now and then. Maybe a boatman rowing his way back home. Or someone needing a late night swim. It was so humid and warm. She wished she was back home. This was never home for her. She could never be herself in this house. There was that constant vigil, the silent reprimand, the censure which she could never put a finger to and understand.
She heard voices from the ground floor. Voices raised in anger, the banging of a door and then silence. Doubts about her marriage resurfaced. It did not feel right to her. He never seemed to need her as she did. At least not when they were in his family home.
Every creak that the bed made seemed to embarrass him, made him cock his ear to check if anyone outside had heard it.
‘Why do you behave like this? Fix the bed if it troubles you so much. It is not always sex that makes the bed creak, you know.’
He laughed, pulling his earlobe in a very cute way which made her hug him tight.
‘I don’t know. I am not like this in Delhi, am I?’
‘No, you are not. That’s why I don’t like you here. You become strange. Your eyes become wary and restless.’
‘Come on. Nothing like that.’
She thought she heard a nervous break in his voice. A twitch in the corner of his mouth.
She turned her head towards the stairs leading up to the terrace. The door was shut firmly after her but she could hear shuffling of feet. She got up and opened the door. Runu stood there with one hand raised as if to knock. There was no bolt on this side of the door. She could have opened it had she wanted to. But they all apparently believed in being conscious of lines drawn. No borders were ever transgressed. A soft call ‘Bhai’ in the midst of passionate love making did not qualify as transgression. After all, there was always a subtle cough, a clearing of the throat, a particular look to give away the almost invisible merging of borders.
‘Yes, Runu.’
‘Bhai said you are to sleep with me.’
‘I am ok here. Will go down if I feel like.’
‘Ma will not like it when she hears you slept on the terrace.’
‘I will explain when she gets well. Don’t worry.’
Runu started walking down the stairs, suddenly stopped and turned around.
‘Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. It never works. Fighting it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Runu ignored the question. She stared past her into the darkness.
‘She is there. Always.’
‘Who? Have you gone mad, Runu?’
Runu ran downstairs without a reply. Her loose slippers making a loud flip flop noise on the smooth red coloured steps. A door closed somewhere and again silence.
She shivered a little. Opened the terrace door wide and hooked it firmly to the wall. The breeze was cool and soothing to her hot skin.
The month long stay in California had been very hectic but she had enjoyed every moment of it.
Old Ramsay had said, ‘Come back. We will make you an offer you cannot refuse.’
She had asked for time. It seems she needed time to figure out many things.
Runu was the younger sister of her husband. The seventh child of the family born after him. She seemed to have an abnormal streak in her. She wore the red vermilion in her hair with a vengeance. Thick and pasty red streak right across the centre of her face, from the middle of her forehead. As if she used a thickly laden middle finger to dot her forehead and then suddenly, streaked across her parting in a clumsy uneven line. Red spilling onto her fair and sweaty face. When she broke into her loud peals of laughter, she made quite an alarming sight. This parting shot from her now was also abnormal.
The extent to which the family can go to have their way. She shook her head in disbelief.
She spread the sheet under the open sky, placed the pillow under her head and closed her eyes. She wished her husband could join her. It was a beautiful night and she knew that he too would be tossing and turning in bed. Without the reserve that he acquired in the presence of his family, he was a nice guy. They could make a success of their marriage if she could get him to distinguish between love and this overwhelming sense of duty he felt for his family. If everybody else had reciprocated in a similar way she could understand. He was always under some huge obligation it seemed.
She turned and her hand touched something. A thick hardbound notebook was lying near the sheet, half covered by it. Had it been lying there? She clicked the flashlight in her phone. Pages and pages scrawled with a tiny neat writing in an unfamiliar script. The top left corner of every page had a drawing. A lotus, a boat, a girl and plenty of insects. Two legged mosquitoes with menacing fangs, scaly reddish brown cockroaches, scorpions with their tails upright, centipedes, caterpillars, both black hairy ones and those without hair, tiny newly born ones drawn in bunches, making her shudder and close the book. It was a lined copy and the writing was unusually clean with no scratches or overwriting. The drawings were all neatly restricted to the space where a date used to be written for school assignments. Who could have written this? Though she was familiar with some Indian scripts, she was baffled by this one. The curves, dots and lines were different. She leafed through the pages trying to understand what the indecipherable writing was trying to say. The writing was a feminine one she could bet her life on it. The way one would write sprawled across a bed, on the stomach, legs crossed and a dreamy faraway look in the eyes. Who could the writer be? She looked around the large terrace. There was a tiny shed like structure in one corner of the terrace.
‘An extra toilet, for unexpected guests.’
‘How many more do you need? There is already more than you people require.’
‘When we all lived here, before the girls were married, we had a caretaker family living here.’
‘In the toilet?’ she had giggled, much to his amused annoyance.
‘No, jaan, they used this toilet but lived in the backrooms behind the coconut tree.’
‘How inconvenient for them. To run upstairs everytime for a pee or a poo…’
She walked across the terrace and stood in front of the tiny shed. There was a huge padlock on the door and the solitary tiny window was tightly shut. The walls were made of huge stones she noticed on close inspection. Misshapen boulders, rusty brown in colour and with a sieve like texture. Almost as if a hot liquid had been poured and burrowed holes through them. Huge pieces put together and patched and splattered with lumps of freshly mixed cement. She ran her hand over this structure and wondered. Her finger felt a gap in between the stones and she sat down on her haunches to peer in. It was dark around her except for the streaming moonlight above. She fixed an eye on the tiny crack between the stones and started.
It wasn't a toilet. She could see a bed with a neat yellow and blue sheet. Legs of a tiny table and chair and plenty of notebooks like the one she had in her hand strewn all over the floor. The profile of a woman sprawled on the floor, writing copiously into one of them. Long black hair, tumbled on to the floor. She was in a saree. The woman turned her face slowly towards where she squatted on the terrace floor outside the tiny shed like room. Flat face with broad features. Eyes were tiny slits in an otherwise large fair face. Very pale, almost yellowish skin. And she grinned. A very knowing grin. A puckish grin showing tiny even teeth stained with betel juices.
She stood up in shock. As if she had inadvertently pried into the privacy of another. And as if the other woman knew that her privacy was being invaded.
She splashed cold water on her face. Took a deep breath. Wiped her face with the soft towel on the rack.The soft purring snores of the family could be heard in the dining room where she had seated herself.
'Can you give me a sweet?'
Three years back, a little Gorkha boy tugging on her saree. Round, fair and a flat face. This was on the third day of her wedding. He was the playmate of the children of the family. He would accompany his grandfather to the house at 4pm every evening. The old grandfather would sit under the tree at the gate reading. A thick book and he would keep flipping pages with the earnest of a well read man. While the little boy joined the boys of the family in all their robust games around the house. Hiding behind cupboards, under the bed, sometimes behind the huge trunk that she had brought to the household. Part of the subtle innuendos of expected dowry. Full of copper utensils which she would never use. The smiling boy shusshing her from behind there not to reveal his hiding place to the others.
She took out a bag of gummy bears. Offered him a handful. Squiggly pieces of coloured jelly. The boy stared at them and screamed. Shrill and long blood curdling screams which brought everybody to her room. Her mother in law stood there, looking regal and distant. Eyes brittle and cold, unnerved by the screams. The boy covered his eyes and he had turned white.
' Take them away. They bite. They are insects that bite.'
'These are sweets. Children love them. Why are you scared? You wanted sweets, didn't you?'
She was almost in tears now. Her mother in law looked away and made a sign to the old man.
The old grandfather drew him close and soothed him.
'Hush, don't cry. Let's go home now.'
As they left the room, she heard him say, 'Did she come last night again?'
'Yes. She kept crying that insects are crawling all over her. Cockroaches, large scaly ones, crawling out of the hole in the toilet and all over her. Mosquitoes that bite. Centipedes, scorpions and caterpillars all over her. The stench of the toilet was terrible. She can't breathe in there. 'Somebody save me', she says every time.'
Maya could hear the soothing tones of the sad grandfather as he escorted the little boy out of the house. Hunched figures both. Fair broad nosed face with slits for eyes.
The bedroom door opened. Her husband came out rubbing his eyes.
'You didn't sleep?'
'No, I didn't. Did I ever tell you that you have Nepali features?'
He looked at her sharply. She noticed a reddish hue tingeing his pale face.
Her mouth tightened and she got up. Carefully picked up the notebook from the table and walked across to the door.
Months later, she sat in the balcony of her apartment in Bay Area in overlooking the Redwood trees, rereading the letter from an old friend. Good old Gurung.
'It is a strange story. Strange because it seems to be written in the mid twentieth century. Plenty of Gorkha cultural context. And the Indian homes which offered them employment. But hiring of the womb was unheard of until the recent past. Where did you get it? Admirable writing skills. The woman seems homeschooled.Tell me more.'
She folded the letter and put it away
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