The slum made even less of an impact as I sped past. Yes, the scenic route again. Counter-strike on Bannerjee Road—those opposing the previous strikers. Same result for the Calcutta citizen: blocked roads, pointless delays, senseless detours.
This time I saw a baby's corpse being prepared for cremation while waiting for the light to change. Its mother—that's who she must have been, a very young girl, not more than sixteen herself—decked the small stretcher with blue flowers. The baby's face was wrinkled, like those of the very elderly or the terminally ill. A large dot of vermillion adorned the wee forehead.
The mother then tried to close the baby's open eyes. Apparently not as simple a task as one would've thought—I mean, you think you can do what you want with at least the dead, don't you? She kept pressing the open eyes—gently, as if the dead baby could still feel—but the waxy lids wouldn't budge.
"What difference does it make? It can't see any more, you illiterate moron," I shouted from my car, my blood boiling at the sight of her useless effort. She looked at me with a sort of dazed shock, as if hearing my noise but not my words. The light had changed—angry honks from those behind me, hugely eager to hurry up and wait at the next light. I obliged; I moved my car-pawn to the next square.
Anoop cried a little when I told him of Mother's lump. He cried like a child: wildly streaming eyes and rapidly reddening nose, lips pushed out in a pout. A bit revolting, seeing this in a grown man. So I reminded him that we had only half-an-hour left, and he turned his tear-streaked face to mine and kissed my lips, the heat of my skin drying the wetness of his cheeks.
"Smita, I fell the rains coming," he whispered.
"And I am scared," I replied, putting the final touch to our rite.
* * * *
I sat by Mother's bedside after the mastectomy. White-clad doctors and nurses floated by on soundless feet, like ghosts from the next world who have blundered into this. Shadows moved behind white-screened cubicles like the dramatis personae in puppet-theatre, their moans and sobs like dove calls.
In my cubicle, I kept my eyes on my charge: I was waiting for anything else she might let loose. Drugged, and in a pain that took new dimensions during her infrequent waking spells, she still managed to hold on to the cunning of the truly weak. All she said, again and again, like a toy with only one squeak programmed into it, was: "Smita! Papaji hung himself!"
We had come back to Calcutta after Ramghat. Papaji had begun to make amends to his wealthy parents for a lifetime of independence and headstrong will. One evening, Anoop and I had come home from school to a wailing crowd. Papaji had had a heart attack.
* * * *
"I've known about Papaji's suicide—don't look like that Smita, that's what it was, a suicide, don't fight the word—I've known about it for ages now. Our beloved mother told me not to tell you and Anoop. I guess she felt I could handle it, being the oldest. Though I was only thirteen then. I think she needed to tell someone to deal with it herself..."
My pale older sister droned on, her manicured hands carving concepts in the air. Twenty-five days a month, Pritha is a clinical psychologist at the city's mental hospital. The other five she spends in her room, alone with the blood and cramps of her monthly period, reliving the horror of the twenty-four-hour vigil on the roof in Ramghat, loonier than her most memorable madcaps—but that's the way it seems to be with most shrink-types.
With an impeccable sense of timing, Pritha had chosen that day on the roof to menstruate for the first time. I still remember the glaze of pain and shame dilating her eyes as a steady flow of blood—and an occasional fat clot—trickled down her legs and plopped into the water all around us.
I looked at her now. There was nothing in the lemon-coloured face that suggested anything other than calmness, control and breeding. But then again, I had never seen her during her "off "days. I'm probably the worst looker in the bunch, I thought. My fondness for scotch and frequent late nights had left puffed ridges beneath my eyes; cigarettes had stained my teeth for good.
Pritha's sudden sob made me jump. In a flash, the smooth face I had envied crumpled. She said in a little girl's voice: "I miss Papaji. You never got to know him. You were so young..."
* * * *
Mother was soon better and sullenly reconciled herself to her single boob. We shopped for suitable undergarments, and she wore them with defiance. They gave her a curiously lop-sided appearance—the rotundity and pointed symmetry of the false breast drawing attention to the sagging imperfection of the real one.
"Maybe I should remove the other one, too. At least they'll look alike," she mused.
* * * *
Close to November, Anoop left for a medical conference in Darjeeling. My grandparents had left us their red brick house in that hilly city, snug in an apple and eucalyptus wilderness. High enough in the Himalayan range to be braced by crisp, cool air, yet safe below the ice that frosted the peaks.
I sat in my room all afternoon, watching the wind chase dried leaves in circles. Calcutta was preparing for the monsoons...
Later that evening, I drove to Anoop's Park Avenue clinic and sat in my car, as if my waiting would make him materialize in the doorway. His being away was made more unbearable by the fact that his Mrs. was with him. I felt the painful loss of a wife whose husband has left her for his mistress. It was in moments like this that I was most tempted to tell them all—Mother, my husband, Anoop's wife. Flaunt in public my right to him. Hold his hand, lay my head on his shoulder for all to see. Who has more right to him and his body than me, his fetal partner?
Maybe the seeds for this inevitable mingling of flesh with flesh were sown in the days we shared Mother's womb, watched each other grow, helped each other flee her body. When it finally happened, we were twenty. I had gone to Darjeeling to recuperate from chicken-pox, Anoop from his third year med school exams. We were walking by the eucalyptus trees that stood, weary sentinels, around the house. The sickly sweet smell of the leaves clung to our clothes, our hair, our skins as we walked, maintaining a safe ten-foot distance between us. It was a thing we had learned to do as children, like staying away from fire....
A sudden flash of lightning called our bluff—we ran hand-in-hand to the house, to my bedroom, to my bed.
"Smita, it's raining," he had whispered.
"And I'm scared," I had replied, mainly to bolster him, to hold up his spirit as I held his thing in my firm, fearless hands, so that he would not chicken out from carrying this moment through: touch to kiss, kiss to coitus, then everything depleted, the waters ebbing and leaving nothing behind but things too broken to be spirited away. Twilight encroached, a crone with a curse, and painted the room as black and blue as we were after we were through with each other. In bed, arms and legs entwined around each other in some unconscious mimicry of the twin snakes in Mercury's Caduceus, we spoke—not of what we had just done or what people would say—but of Ramghat. It was the first and last time we were to do so.
"Did you see Papaji's face, Smita? When all those men and women on their roofs began shouting at him? Cursing him? As if he knew the storms would come. They saw the valley themselves. They should've seen the danger—of living in the middle of mountains..."
"I won't ever forget the look on his face. It's how I remember him—not the strength or the stubbornness. The disintegration is what I remember..."
"After that he was as good as gone..."
"The death was an after-thought..."
"A mere token gesture..."
