We had a guest for dinner that night. A client of my husband's. I sent the kids over to my mother's house and polished silverware. I thought the client was attractive. Lean cheeks, long lashes. Like Anoop. Like me.
Leaving them to their business talk, I walked into the living room and read the two fan letters I had received that day. Both were from teenage girls who "loved romances." The night outside was raucous with the merry-making of crickets. Starlight mingled with the blue glow of the street lamps that guarded Park Avenue's silent houses. Palm fronds stretched spiky fingers to poke out the eye of the moon. Somewhere out there was the idea for the Novel. Maybe someone was already writing it.
Mother made tea for us when we drove there to pick up the kids. My husband, flushed with the success of a clinched deal and an excess of whisky, protested: "Tea will keep me up all night."
He looked at me and slowly winked.
"Maybe that's not such a bad idea..."
God, how loathsome he has become! He was crude and coarse when young but that had always been linked to a sort of boorish handsomeness. Now the links have come apart, and all the handsomeness has taken off on its own like a rogue railway car, leaving behind this de-railed wreck that is only crude, only coarse, only boorish. I couldn't bear to even look at him. He laughed proudly when I dropped my eyes, fooling himself that my not looking at him was a sign of an Indian woman's much-valued coyness.
I let my mother do my wifely duty and laugh coquettishly. She pulled her sari a bit too snugly over her huge boobs and led me to the bedroom.
The sight of my six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter asleep in the same bed jolted me. Mother read my look—or so she thought.
"They are brother and sister. No harm. Anoop and you used to bathe together. In—Ramghat."
She shot me a quick look in the mirror as she said that. But her voice halted and slurred at the mention of Ramghat.
We each carried a sleeping child to the car, and I, out of sheer spite, let her carry the girl, who though younger, is much heavier than her brother. I studied Mother's face in the darkness of the drive, wondering how innocent her remarks really were. She had taken to wearing white after Papaji's death, like an orthodox widow. But I had always suspected that her preference for white was more for what the colour did to her golden skin, suffusing every moist pore with a shivering glow.
As the car started, she bent close to my ear and whispered: "Have an appointment tomorrow. About—the lump."
I watched her rather loose lower lip quiver, and her eyes welled up for an instant. Then she turned and went into her house, a top-heavy little ghost in white silk.
While my husband snored and bragged in his dreams about his business acumen, I walked out of the bedroom into the tiny balcony. The ground below was still moist from the afternoon rain, and the fresh air caught the breath of jasmines straight off the opening petals.
I knew then, with a clarity that was almost blinding, that I would never write the Novel. Because I never could. There was a fatal passiveness in me. A lack of passion. No self—or any great or moving depth. Juvenile smart-ass sarcasm masquerading as world-view. Brittle defensive two-bit jokes instead of the risk of real insight. All that could ever come out of me were fantasy romances. No strain, no drain.
This realization must have been lying dormant within me, like a trailing shadow one suddenly sees. Because I felt no pain. I only felt a dull, numb relief—like I'd been let off the hook, set free. I think I laughed out loud, for my neighbour's sixteen-year-old son materialized—pronto—behind his bedroom window, looking at me through misty curtains that didn't quite hide his fresh crop of ripe-for-the-picking cherry pimples, or his bovine, pre-masturbatory gaze. I stared at him coolly, coldly, until unnerved, he vanished, leaving the curtains swirling like smoke in his wake, and me on the balcony as the sole witness to the death of another dull Calcutta day.
* * * *
Mother often used to whine about how the rains of Ramghat had made my older sister Pritha a screaming wreck every month, led Anoop on a lifelong chase after money and power over people, and had left me a shell, scooped out of human feeling and warmth.
Anoop and I were five then, Pritha thirteen, and Ramghat was a tiny valley in the midst of the Himalayas. When we first arrived, wild blue flowers stretched for miles on end, like a tranquil sea. We were heartbroken when Papaji told us the flowers would have to go, as houses would have to be built for all of us.
Today's economists would consider Papaji an idealist—or an idiot. That is, if they consider him at all. A certain self-indulgent masochism that's a part of this city—and hence of me—pushed me once to go to the public library and read up on him. All Papaji had to show for his life was a footnote in a book on Calcutta University, written by some bilious British bitch who has clearly never forgiven us for cutting loose from the Empire. The footnote summed him up thus: Roy Ghosh, head of the Department of Economics and Commerce, such-and-such year to such-and-such year. Nothing at all—not a word—about why he left Cal U. How he wanted to put in practice his "back-to-the-barter-system" theories. Now that I have said it so simply, yes—he does indeed seem like an idiot. Not even worth that footnote.
All we knew then was that no money was ever used in Ramghat. The families living there kept accurate accounts of favours done, and that was our payment. We grew green beans, tomatoes and snow peas. Balram, who lived next door, gave us milk in return for the vegetables. Krishna Sen repaired our roof when the winter wind blew it off.
Life in Ramghat was an endless stretch of the greenest fields meeting the bluest skies, with tiny red roofs puffing smoke in the distance. One day blended into the next with a fluidity I have since encountered only in dreams and their sibling-rivals, nightmares. We worked hard with our parents a good part of the day, and sat down to dinner and lessons in the common courtyard at night. Papaji on economics, ex-politician Balram on history, mathematician Krishna Sen on math, mother on music and art....
When the storm announcements were all over the radio, Ramghat prepared for the worst. As I dragged our clothes off the clothesline, the shrieking wind kept tugging at my cotton skirt, to the amusement of Anoop.
All laughter and teasing ceased, though, when the skies wept that night. Great, gashing drops, tearing into the flesh of the earth, boring holes with the force, like bullets. And the wind! The madness and the fury! The great teak trees that guarded Ramghat's western front were flattened in an hour, like the matchstick soldiers in our childish games. As we scrambled to the roofs of our houses, waves of water came crashing down, obliterating both mountain and sky with their monstrous hydra-like heads. They bore down with them into a newly created abyss all our worldly goods and possessions. Dawn saw us perched on the roofs, wet and cramped, our feet spread like the talons of birds of prey. Balram's bloated body floated up to our roof. I held Mother, who screamed hysterically and almost fell off the roof, while Papaji pushed the corpse away with his foot.
We were left on our roofs for a whole day before the government sent rescue squads in little helicopters. And as the day tolled on, we watched the corpses of friends and neighbours fight for a place on the water's surface with wooden planks, chairs, kitchen utensils and water snakes.
Papaji never raised his head. The first morning light had shown him the unforgiving sight of a wrecked dream, like a childhood doll with its eyes gouged out.
* * * *
Mother's lump was malignant, as I fully expected it to be. Fat anywhere on the body does nothing but ill. And what are huge breasts but huge masses of fat? My heart beat steadily in my own bud-like breast as she gave me the news. I watched her lower her head into her palms and cry silently. This—these dramas, and the chaos of the city—this was the stuff of my life. Ramghat rapidly receded into the depths of the dream-sea that had churned it.
I observed Mother's hair as it curled gently near her hips. Not one grey strand. She raised her face and grabbed my hands in her tiny moist paw: "I'll have to have it removed."
Her spare hand unconsciously touched the lump on her left breast, as if trying to knead it out of existence. I found the thought of Mother with one big breast even more obscene than Mother with two.
"It's just fat. A big, revolting lump of grease. Think of it that way," I offered helpfully.
And this is why I don't really like to help people—all you get for your trouble is a kick in the teeth. Here she was, looking at me like a truculent cow, her eyes stopping their production of tears and hardening as she calculated where precisely to place her kick. But nothing really prepared me for the following pearls from her mouth: "Smita. You need to know this, in case something happens to me. Papaji—Papaji did not die of a heart attack. That's what I told you then, because you were a child. The truth is—Papaji—he hung himself."
