Читать книгу Shadow self - Paula Marais - Страница 10

When I married Clay, we had enough between us to start life independently. But with my first marriage we had nothing, so Rajit and I moved into his parents’ house. Asmita and Kandasamy renovated the little granny cottage in the garden. It had its own little kitchen, with a microwave – a bit of a novelty, then – a two-plate hob and tiny oven. The double bed was moved from the main house, but always seemed too short for me. When I woke up in the morning I’d feel my feet peeping over the end of the mattress. When I mentioned it to Rajit, he tucked the duvet under my feet after kissing me gently on each toe, though he probably had the same problem.

“Best I can manage,” he said.

It wasn’t going to improve my sleep anyway. The baby woke up the moment I lay down, jumping on my bladder until I couldn’t last an hour without a pee.

Although my mother hadn’t taught me much about love, I really thought that watching her had taught me how to cook. I’d seen her often enough, a wisp of hair tucked behind her ears, an apron tied over her twinsets and pearls. What I hadn’t discovered yet, and would soon, was that nothing I cooked could satisfy Rajit. Consulting a vegetarian cookbook I’d found at a second-hand bookshop, I set to work winning over his palate. Butternut risotto was “too sweet’, asparagus quiche “had a weird texture”. Aubergines – in any form – were “meaty”, “too rich” and “actually rather disgusting”. Sweet corn soup was “insipid”. I made bread, which “made his stomach blow up” and pasta that was “overdone”.

On her way back from campus, Annie put her feet up on our bed and ate the leftovers.

“Delish!” she would exclaim about almost everything.

“You’re a poor student – not very fussy.”

“Have you ever thought Raj might just be too fussy?”

Rajit didn’t like Annie to be there when he came home from the days he spent at UCT.

“I want to spend time with you, not Annie,” he told me.

“I get lonely,” I said.

“Do something with my sisters,” Rajit said. “Kesiree adores you.” He dug in his pocket and extracted some cash he’d earned tutoring. “Go to the movies, the two of you. I’ve got an evening lecture tomorrow. I’ll get Amma to lend you the car.”

When we got back in the early evening, Rajit was already waiting for us in his mother’s lounge.

“What did you see? How was it? Can I see the ticket?”

I didn’t understand this ticket obsession, but early in my marriage I learnt to keep evidence. Squirrel it away, just in case.

“Amma’s made dinner,” Rajit said. “We’re eating here tonight.”

And after the inquisition I watched him wolf down Asmita’s lentil curry like he hadn’t eaten for months. Licking his lips, he smacked and sighed, his single hand moving like a darter. Before Asmita had even sat down, his plate was empty. Asmita smiled, heaping another giant spoon of rice onto his plate, then the curry.

I didn’t know how to eat with my hands. I tried, but my chin ended up slimy with sauce, the tablecloth in my corner a turmeric yellow. I spooned the curry, trying to get used to a taste that was too spicy for me, though I didn’t say anything.

“Isn’t Amma a brilliant cook?” Raj said.

“Wonderful,” I agreed.

Kesiree smiled at me across the table. She had a secret boyfriend that only I knew about: a Muslim, the son of an imam no less. Waafiq was even more unsuitable than I was, and Raj’s parents would have been beyond furious if they’d known. I hadn’t even told Rajit. It turns out the movie was the perfect subterfuge: Waafiq had met us at the cinema, and I’d watched the two of them saunter off, hand in hand, to watch The Karate Kid, which I didn’t want to see. Waafiq reminded me of a wild boar, his black hair bristled stiff like a spine on the top of his head and his nostrils too big for his face. I wasn’t actually sure what Kesiree saw in him.

“Please, Thea,” she’d begged me. “You know what it’s like to be in love.”

I couldn’t resist. I reasoned that at least if I kept my eye on them there’d be no chance of the shag-fests Rajit and I used to have in the car at Signal Hill. No more unplanned babies like the one inside me.

The problem was that the movie outing hadn’t solved my loneliness. I’d watched Romancing the Stone alone, picking at my popcorn. By the time Kesiree and Waafiq emerged fifteen minutes after I did, my sister-in-law’s heart-shaped face was alight, her dark eyes glistening and her hand still firmly clamped in his.

It had been ages since Raj held my hand that way.

And hanging out with Kesiree wasn’t the same as seeing Annie. Though I did catch up with her now and then, she was slipping away from me. She spent her time partying in Observatory, going to the odd lecture and sunning herself on Llandudno Beach. I’m not saying she wasn’t supportive. She’d even secured me a cot from a neighbour she used to babysit for; it was wedged firmly between our bed and the cupboard. But things weren’t the same. Our lives were taking different paths, and though I swore to myself I wouldn’t regret it – regret my husband and my baby – I wondered sometimes what would have happened if things had been different.

If I hadn’t been sitting here in this foreign place, spooning dhal over my rice to neutralise the spices.

I gulped down water and thought longingly about the strawberry yoghurt in our little fridge.

“So, how was today?” I asked Rajit.

“Lectures,” he said dismissively. “Ma,” he said looking at Asmita, “can you teach Thea how to cook?”

I just about spat out my dhal as Asmita beamed at me.

“I can cook,” I said.

“Not our way,” Rajit replied.

“Amoy Ayaa taught me. It could be fun to cook together,” Asmita said, looking at her mother hunched on the other side of the table. Rajit’s grandmother wafted in and out of reality so I wasn’t sure if she’d even heard she’d been mentioned.

I looked at Asmita hugging Raj, who crumpled into her like a custom-made glove.

“Could you?” Rajit said in a little-boy voice I suspected would someday be used on me. “I can’t eat anything she makes.”

I felt the heat racing up my cheeks.

“You need to give Thea a chance,” his father said. Just when I was giving him a grateful smile, Kandasamy continued: “She’s young. She can’t help it if she doesn’t yet know how to be a proper wife.” Kandasamy dipped his hand in his dinner, the food disappearing between his greased-up lips.

“And you’re getting thin, Rajit.” Amoy Ayaa looked up from her meal. “Eat. Eat.”

It was like everyone ganging up against you on the playground; even Kesiree, my new best friend, whose secrets I was guarding so closely, didn’t defend me. Mentioning Waafiq would have changed the conversation, and I was sorely tempted.

“You need to start by buying some proper ingredients,” Asmita told me.

Proper ingredients, as she termed it, required money, which we rather lacked.

“I’ll get a job then, shall I?” I said.

“Every wife needs to add value,” Kandasamy said. “That’s the first lesson.”

“No one’s going to hire you with that belly,” Asmita commented. “And no qualifications. We’ll shop together.”

“And then cook together,” said Raj.

“Great.” My voice said otherwise.

“Eat, Raju, eat,” said Amoy Ayaa. “You’re wasting away. Asmita, why aren’t you cooking for your son?”

I leant forward to say something, but Rajit shook his head. Nevertheless the movement must have caught Amoy Ayaa’s attention.

“Now who are you, dear? I don’t think we’ve met,” she said to me. “Asmita, you should have mentioned that we have a visitor. And look, Asmita, our guest is having a baby!”

And that’s actually how I felt, like a guest. Just then I was missing the aromas of basil and garlic wafting from Mother’s kitchen. Nothing about living in this house, with this family, was familiar to me. Here the overwhelming scents were of coriander, garam masala, onions and frying fat. My mother’s home had an understated elegance, everything placed exactly so; Asmita’s home was all overstuffed pillows, loud fabrics and religious statues and images everywhere, the meanings of which I hadn’t yet untangled. And no privacy. At Asmita’s, neighbours were constantly arriving – and then leaving with food parcels of sugar beans curry and basmati rice.

“I don’t understand it,” I said to Rajit. “Surely just feeding us is enough?”

“It’s our way,” Raj said. “We’ll go down the road for a meal if you like. Selvie Ayaa makes a delicious potato curry and roti.”

Great. More strangers. More curry.

I’d liked the feeling at first; it was a bit like living in another country. But after a few weeks I wanted someone to speak my language.

Back in our little room outside, Raj transformed into the man I thought I’d married. We played gin rummy, lay on the bed and read to each other, and Raj gave me foot rubs as my feet started swelling. We debated names for our child, though it wasn’t much of a debate since Raj had already decided.

And I liked the name Sanusha for a girl. It sounded like music. Boys’ names would follow Rajit’s family tradition. If it was a boy, our son would be named for his grandfather – not my dad, Stuart, but Rajit’s dad, Kandasamy.

I didn’t mind. I loved Rajit and what he wanted mattered to me more than what I wanted. I guess I wasn’t much of a feminist, and my ambitions were limited. I wanted a happy home, a new foundation for my dreams.

But as the pregnancy advanced, and I began to nest, Rajit grew restless. He was on a fully paid sponsorship but he earned extra cash tutoring statistics. I didn’t resent those after-hour activities, but I began to suspect he wasn’t always telling me the truth.

“But why do you have to tutor so late?” I would ask.

“That’s the time she asked for,” Rajit would answer. “Don’t you want me to go? How are we going to pay for the car seat?”

When he rocked up near midnight, he was usually in a good mood. A bit too good.

“You’ve been drinking,” I said.

“One glass of wine, Thea. Do you want me to look like a wuss?”

But it wasn’t just the wine. It was the way, when he took me to Pick ’n Pay, he’d have one arm around me and his eyes on any beautiful woman that passed him. He didn’t try to hide it either.

“So what?” he said. “Looking is free.”

“I’m pregnant, Raj. I’m not feeling my best.”

“Well, Thea, you’re not exactly looking your best either. It’s a phase. Get over it.”

I tried to look better. I spent hours blow drying my hair and touching up my face with make-up I bought on special at Clicks. I exercised religiously and ate very little, especially in front Rajit.

“You’re ballooning,” he said watching me climb out of the shower.

Fighting back tears, I wrapped myself in a towel and tried not to hate the little being who was taking over my body.

I tried to find pretty Punjabis to wear – I always thought Indian women looked so elegant pregnant. Asmita came with me, even nodding at my colour choice.

“Turquoise looks good on you,” she said.

But I never felt that I ever looked good enough, even when Annie bounced in for a quick visit while Raj was out.

“T, you look gorgeous. You can’t even tell you’re preggers from the back.”

“Raj doesn’t think so.”

“Raj is a fool. If I look even half as good as you when I have a baby, I’ll celebrate.”

I wanted to believe her, but my thoughts kept returning to Raj and what I could do to make him happy. The night before, I’d dressed in a lacy number before bed and padded into our little room in bare feet. Looking up from his textbook, Raj had smiled at me with the old smile from our courting days, and a wave of relief had washed over me. He put the book on the bedside table and sat up.

“That must feel a little tight,” he said. “Remember how sexy you used to look in it?”

My reaction must have registered in my face.

“Oh, let’s have a cuddle, anyway.” Raj gestured for me to sit next to him, then kissed me on the forehead, his hand wandering to my moving belly.

“I need you to be nice to me,” I told him. “I’m doing my best here.”

There was silence, then Raj pulled me onto him, his lips caressing my neck. “And I need to go out later when we’re done,” he said. “I promised the boys a game of poker. You can buy a new nightie with my winnings. Just think how that will cheer you up.”