Читать книгу A Matter of Time - Shashi Deshpande - Страница 10
ОглавлениеPREMI’S VISIT, IF nothing else, has opened a door through which the family enters, converging on Sumi and her daughters to perform its role. They congregate like mourners after a death in the family—but a death in a distant land, a death without a body. There is a blank space where the body should have been. None of the stock phrases, none of the comforting formulas, fit. Even to speak of what has happened as a tragedy is to make it one, for it is like affirming that Gopal will never return. There is an awkwardness about the whole thing, and discomfort and uneasiness pervade more than grief and anger.
Sumi, the person they come to comfort, is an enigma. She accepts Goda’s dumb sympathy, Devaki’s fierce loyalty and Ramesh’s stupefied bewilderment, as if they are all the same to her. Unable to find the right way of dealing with her apparent stoicism, they are reduced to treating her as an invalid, bringing her fruits, magazines and books.
‘You didn’t have to bring this, Ramesh.’
Kalyani makes a formal protest when Ramesh comes with a large pack of ice-cream.
‘I was just passing by,’ he murmurs.
‘He’s trying to cheer us up, Amma.’
Ramesh gives Sumi an embarrassed, almost agonised look that silences her.
It is when she is serving the ice-cream that Aru suddenly asks Ramesh, as if she has been pondering on this all the while, ‘Don’t you have any idea where he could be? You must be having some clue, maybe there are people we don’t know about ....’
‘I’ve tried all the places I could think of, Aru. And I’ve been trying to get in touch with anyone who had some contact with Guru. But it’s so hard to explain, I don’t know what to say to them ....’
‘Say it, Ramesh, say he’s missing, say he’s walked out on his wife and children. It’s got to come out some time, how long are we going to hide it from the world? And do you think people don’t know? I’m sure they do and frankly I don’t care.’
‘You don’t care?’ Aru’s reaction to her mother’s words is violent and sharp. ‘That’s wonderful. You don’t care about his having gone, you don’t care where he is, you don’t care what people think—but I care, yes, I do, I care about Papa having left us, I care about not having our own house. I don’t want to live like this, as if we’re sitting on a railway platform, I want my home back, I want my father back ....’
After a moment’s stunned silence, they move towards the sobbing girl, all of them except Sumi, who walks out.
When Ramesh comes out in search of her, he sees her standing still, her face lifted to the sky, a reflective look on it, as if she is weighing something. A lover watching her would be intrigued; but for Ramesh, it only means a moment of respite he welcomes. When he joins her she has resumed her pacing. They walk together in silence for a while, Sumi scarcely aware, he thinks, that he is with her. She speaks only when they reach the gate.
‘I never thought Aru would take this so hard. I was more anxious about Seema, but ....’
Sumi has suddenly stopped. The strong odour of the plant which Kalyani swears keeps snakes away, assails them and they move on.
‘Once when Aru was little we’d gone somewhere, I don’t remember where, now. At night, I can remember this, she wouldn’t go to bed. I want my own bed, she kept crying.’
‘I never thought Guru would do such a thing, I never imagined he’s this kind of a man ....’
‘What kind of a man is he, Ramesh?’
Ramesh looks at her in surprise. But no, she isn’t being sarcastic, she’s entirely serious, she wants the answer to her question.
‘Yes, tell me, Ramesh, what kind of a man do you think he is? Sometimes I think you know him better than any one of us does. Sudha was more like a mother than a sister to him, you’re a kind of brother, not a nephew. He was closer to you than anyone else I know.’
‘Guru? I was eight when he left home. I don’t know why he left, nobody ever told me. When you’re a kid, you accept these things, you never ask why. But I can remember that my mother was very upset, that she used to cry a lot. And I can vaguely remember us, my parents and I, sitting in a train and my mother crying. I think that was the time we left him in Shivpur. Something happened to him then, my mother told me that later. He suddenly decided he didn’t want to live with us in Bombay, he decided he’d join a college in Shivpur ....’
‘Gopal himself never spoke of this to you?’
‘No, never. He did come home during vacations, not every vacation though. It was only when he got a job and stayed here in your house—I visited him, remember?—it was only then that we became friends. I went back home so full of “Gopal this” and “Gopal that” that my father began to call him “your Guru”. And that’s how he became Guru—Sumi, do you think he’s had some kind of a breakdown? I can’t help thinking it has to be something like that.’
‘No, I don’t think that’s what’s happened. He was very clear and very calm when he spoke to me, he was ...’ Suddenly she shivers. ‘I’m feeling cold.’
‘Shall I get you a shawl?’
‘No, let’s go in.’
‘What are you going to do, Sumi?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything, not as yet. Premi wanted me to go to Bombay with her, but I can’t think of anything, not as yet. I need time, Ramesh, give me some time.’
Lying in the semi-darkness, listening to the patter of raindrops on the mango leaves, each sound distinct, framed in the surrounding silence, Sumi is tantalized by a sense of deja vu. I have been in this room before, I have woken up here, just this way, watching the morning light slowly fill the room, relieved to see the menacing shadow in the corner become a cupboard. It’s a child’s fear that comes back to me. Did I ever sleep in this room as a child? This is my grandfather’s room, the room where he lived and died. Perhaps that’s why Kalyani didn’t want me to move in here. But she didn’t say that.
‘Why do you want to be alone?’ she had asked.
Not to lose sight of my loneliness, not to let the empty sound of it be muffled by the voices of other humans during the day, by the sounds of their breathing and rustlings in the night. It takes time to get used to sharing your life with another person, now I have to get used to being alone.
Of course, Sumi had not said any of this to her mother. She has to smile at the thought of it. And the truth is that it is not loneliness that is her enemy right now, it is a sense of alienation. The sight of Premi flanked by her daughters, the hostility on Aru’s face as she said ‘I rang her up’, had made Sumi feel suddenly vulnerable.
The three of them ranged against me. Am I the enemy? Do my daughters blame me for what Gopal has done? Do they think it is my fault? Why can’t I talk to them, tell them what I feel, how it was? Why can’t I open my heart to them?
Sa-hriday—Gopal and she had argued about the meaning of the word once. Smiling at her attempt to find an English equivalent, Gopal had said, ‘There’s no word in English that can fit the concept. English is a practical language, it has no words for the impossible. Sa-hriday in the sense of oneness is an impossible concept.’
Then, abruptly, he had pulled her close to himself and said, ‘Listen, can you hear? It’s two hearts beating. They can never beat in such unison that there’s only one sound. Hear that?’
It was these unexpected quirks in Gopal that had at first fascinated Sumi. Not for long, though; she had soon ceased to find them amusing or interesting. Nevertheless, she knows now that they were hints, telling her that it was always there in Gopal, the potential to walk out on her and their children.
Unlike her daughters, Sumi has no fears of his death; on the contrary, there is a certainty of his being alive, of his steadily pursuing his own purposes. While the others are trying to find reasons for what he has done, she knows that the reason lies inside him, the reason is him.
Sumi remembers, now, the night she had gone to his room, knowing that only this way could she break out of her father’s authority. But Gopal, to her consternation, had closed himself against her. ‘Go back, Sumi,’ he had said, almost coldly. Only her stubbornness and the thought that she could not possibly return to the room she shared with Premi, had kept her there, alone in the room, that whole long night, while Gopal sat out in the tiny, open veranda. Until morning, when he had come in and put his arms about her, as if folding her into himself, into his life. And she had heard his heart beating.
Two hearts, two sounds. Gopal is right. Sa-hriday—there is no such thing, there can be no such thing.
‘Is he all right with you?’ Sudha had asked anxiously when they had gone to visit her and P.K. after their marriage.
‘All right? Do you mean, does he scold me and beat me? No, he doesn’t.’
I was only eighteen then, I could joke about it. But Gopal’s sister did not laugh. She knew him, yes, she did, much better than I did. Or still do.
‘Destiny is just us.’
Gopal’s words come back to Sumi when, clearing up the large cupboard to make room for her things, she comes across the photographs. Deep inside, as if someone has thrust them as far back as possible. Two photographs in an envelope brittle with age. The photographs too, brown with the years, the edges frayed, the corners splitting, the backs slightly gummy to her fingers as if they had been stuck into an album some time earlier.
There are two girls in one picture: Kalyani and Goda, of course, she recognizes them, Kalyani’s arm protectively around Goda’s shoulder. Kalyani, about fourteen or fifteen perhaps, is already wearing a sari, the sari on her child’s body having the effect of a masquerade. A child wearing her mother’s sari for fun. But Kalyani’s face is anxious, the slight suggestion of a squint accentuated, as it always is, by her distress or anxiety.
Goda provides a contrast both in looks and expression. (It’s so hard to remember that Kalyani and Goda are not sisters but the children of a brother and sister, that the lack of resemblance between them invariably comes as a surprise.) Goda, pleasingly plump, is smiling at the camera, obedient perhaps, to the photographer’s command. She is wearing a ‘half-sari’, as the diaphanous veil on her shoulders shows. This, along with her large eyes, her chubby face and the flowers in her hair, gives her the look of a heroine of a South Indian movie of the fifties. She seems docile and agreeable, and though only a child, already good wife-material. It is clear from the picture that she will make some man a good wife, whereas Kalyani ....
It is the other picture that startles Sumi. A classic post-wedding picture, bride and groom formally posed against a dark background, the bride sitting in a chair, the groom by her, a tall table with paper flowers in a vase placed on the other side for symmetry. The bride is wearing a heavy silk, the sari much too heavy for her scrawny girlishness. Her left arm, exposed by the sari’s being held up by a brooch, is childishly thin and the weight of the heavy chain and necklaces she is wearing seems to make her neck droop. She is looking not at the camera, but at someone standing by the photographer, the uncertain look of a child seeking approval—am I doing it right? The man on the other hand is stern, his eyes hooded, arms folded across his chest in the usual ‘manly pose’ demanded by the photographers for such pictures. But the sternness here is not a pose, it is real. And the way he is standing, he gives the impression of being by himself, wholly unaware of the girl sitting by him. His wife.
Husband and wife. Bride and groom. Kalyani and Shripati, my parents. To see them together, even in a picture, gives me an odd, uneasy feeling. It seems wrong somehow, unnatural, even slightly obscene.
‘Destiny is just us.’
Yes, their future is here, it can be seen in this picture, clearly, what is to happen to them, to their marriage. We don’t always need astrologers, palmists or horoscopes to give us a glimpse of our future lives. They lie within us.
Sumi, who has heard Kalyani say ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ for everything, from the milk boiling over to a sudden death, has never been able to take the word seriously. It was something innocuous, a domestic pet, a cat that lay snoozing in your home. Harmless, though there was always the chance that you could trip over it, fall and hurt yourself. But Gopal’s use of the word ‘destiny’ gives it a different colour. A deeper tinge.
‘Destiny is just us, and therefore inescapable, because we can never escape ourselves. Certain actions are inevitable because we are what we are. In a sense, we walk on chalked lines drawn by our own selves.’
Chalked lines? What a strange way of talking about what the living of life is all about, she had thought then. For her, it was a magician’s bag, full of odds and ends. Put your hand in and you never know what you might get hold of: a rabbit, a bird, a string of silk scarves, a chain of ten-rupee notes. Chance, yes, haphazard, yes, that too, but nothing predetermined.
But, she thinks now, I forgot one thing. A magician is an entertainer, and therefore he can’t take the chance of ugly, frightening things coming out of his bag. He has to guard against that hazard. So perhaps Gopal’s theory fits better after all. Destiny is just us.
And yet, if Gopal’s life is shaped by his being what he is, what about us, the girls and me? We are here because of his actions: how does this fit in?
But I have no desire really to pursue these thoughts. Unlike Aru, I know that getting answers to questions will not provide me with any solution. The ‘why’ that all of them are pursuing leaves me cold. I know that they find it impossible to believe that I have not asked him anything. The truth is, I could not have spoken to him that night—no, it was impossible. But even if it had been possible, if I had asked him ‘why’, would I have got an answer I could have made sense of?
‘I could no longer stand in a position of authority before my students.’
This was his explanation for resigning his job! Just like Gopal, I had thought, both irritated and annoyed, to give such an impossibly metaphysical reason for resigning a job. If I’d asked him, ‘why are you leaving me?’, I’d have got just such an answer and what would I do with that?
And yet, she thinks, if I meet Gopal I will ask him one question, just one, the question no one has thought of. What is it, Gopal, I will ask him, that makes a man in this age of acquisition and possession walk out on his family and all that he owns? Because, and I remember this so clearly, it was you who said that we are shaped by the age we live in, by the society we are part of. How then can you, in this age, a part of this society, turn your back on everything in your life? Will you be able to give me an answer to this?
It is now over a month since Gopal left home and Sumi knows one decision has to be taken, and immediately.
‘Vacate the house? You must be joking!’
Aru is incredulous. As long as the house is theirs, they still have a home and the hope that Gopal will return, that they will be able to resume their lives. To give up the house, as Sumi is saying they have to do, is to pronounce the death sentence of that hope. Aru wants to say something that will stop her mother from taking the step, but she has no arguments that can contend against the reality of money; she knows herself that they cannot afford to pay the rent for that house any longer.
But Sumi’s hurry to have done with this has more to it than these financial considerations. With Gopal’s going, it was as if the swift-flowing stream of her being had grown thick and viscous—her movements, her thoughts, her very pulse and heartbeats seemed to have slowed down. It had worried her family, but it has been a necessary physical reaction to her emotional state, as if this slowing down was essential for her survival. Now, like a stunned bird coming back to life, there is a frenzy of movement, a tremendous flurry of activity, a frenetic shaking of feathers. Sumi cannot be still.
On the day they are to move, she is impatient to be gone, to set to work. She frets while Kalyani delays them for breakfast, she paces up and down waiting for Seema to make up her mind about accompanying them, so restless that Kalyani says, ‘you go on, if Seema wants to go, I’ll ask Hrishi or Devi to take her.’
The house, even in this short time of being unoccupied, smells musty. There is a thick film of dust on the floor, on which their footprints show clear and distinct at first. For a moment, as they stand and take it in, what they have to do seems impossible, their silence becomes a cry of despair: we can’t do it. But Sumi allows them no time for melancholy or nostalgia, she sets to work almost immediately and the girls follow. With remarkable swiftness they begin to sort out things, so that when Devaki and Hrishi come to offer their help, old newspapers, bottles and tins have already been set out in the yard.
Watching Sumi and her daughters united in the camaraderie of wordless, rhythmic work, they realize their help is not needed. Hrishi, after some mumbled words to his mother goes away, but Devaki stands about like a visitor in a hospital, watching the doctors and nurses working with both skill and efficiency, knowing she can do nothing, yet unable to go away. She finds the silence in which they work, chilling. No questions are asked, nor is there any sharing of memories; baby clothes and old nursery books are disposed of in the same way as an old wick stove or a pan with its base worn out. Only once there is a slight hiatus when Charu, looking at their old chess-board, hesitantly asks, ‘Shall we take this with us?’
Sumi has been ruthless; anything that is of no possible use is discarded. But now, seeing her daughter’s face, she says, ‘Why not?’ And Charu smiles, as if Sumi’s response, as well as retaining the chess-board, has lifted some of the oppression off her.
Devaki gets them lunch a little later, from the restaurant round the corner.
‘Why are you eating this, Devi?’ Sumi asks, as if noticing her for the first time. ‘Cold idlis and watery chutney—this isn’t for you. And what about your work? You go on, we’ll manage.’
By evening, most of it is done. It has been a swift dismemberment. The furniture stands, stark and skeletal in the empty rooms, while bundles, trunks and cartons have been stacked in the front hall, ready to be carried out in the morning. When the door of the steel almirah is banged shut, the clang resounds with a hollow boom through the house and Aru’s heart throbs in a panic-filled response, as if she has received an ominous message: it’s over, it’s over.
The girls fall asleep on the bare mattresses on the floor, exhausted, but Sumi has reached the stage of extreme fatigue in which it seems impossible that she can ever sleep. She feels charged with a kind of energy that makes her think she could go on working all night; her hands itch to pull the mattresses from under the girls, to roll them up and pile them on the stuff in the hall. If the truck was here, she thinks, I would have carried out everything and loaded it myself. But there is nothing left for her to do, and lying down on the sagging sofa, eyes closed, she tries to sleep.
For the first time, the thought comes to her: this is my last night in our house, Gopal’s and mine. Sumi has never had the passionate attachment to her home that she has seen in other women, in Devaki and Premi. But now, in the silence of the night, listening to the infinitely pathetic crying of the new-born next door, the house rushes forward to claim her with memories. She has a strange sense of seeing all of them, even her own self, moving about the house, as if they have come together for one last time, reenacting scenes from the past for her benefit.
Gopal, coming out of the bathroom, vigorously towelling his head, shaking the water out of his hair, singing ‘Do naina’ ....
Aru, pinning down a cockroach with a piece of paper, and then, with an agonised face, stamping wildly on it. And Charu, looking on, screaming with laughter.
Gopal saying ‘Shaabash’ to Seema and Seema’s pleased smile ... Aru and Charu playing chess, and Charu’s comically astonished look as Aru triumphantly knocks Charu’s King off the board.
Though it is nearly dawn before she falls asleep, she is up before the girls. Seeing her mother’s face, hollow-eyed, hair dishevelled, Aru feels a pang; this is how she will look when she is old. But when Sumi comes out of the bathroom after her bath, smoothing down the pleats of her sari, she looks so reassuringly normal that Aru has a sudden lift of spirits. Perhaps things will work out, maybe we will be able to go on, even if we can’t go back.
When Shripati comes with Seema, Aru’s light-heartedness reaches out to her sisters and the three of them flit about the house calling out to one another, to their mother, exclaiming over things, laughing. The brief flare of gaiety evaporates with the arrival of the truck and in a moment the house is full of the loaders’ footsteps and their voices. A few neighbours come out to watch the operation. The grandmother next door balances the child she is carrying on the wall and stares at the proceedings with unblinking interest. Her curiosity finally makes her get hold of Sumi, and Aru, seeing them together, wonders what Sumi is telling her. The truth, she thinks, knowing Sumi as she does.
As for Aru herself, she avoids people’s eyes. To see their belongings in the open hurts her, they look so pathetic and vulnerable; the stares of the neighbours seem like a violation. Aru’s uneasiness extends to the landlord who joins them now. Surely there’s an air of familiarity about him that wasn’t there before? And why does he look at Sumi that way? Her hackles rise and she doggedly follows them while Sumi, cool and matter-of-fact, takes him round the house on an inventory.
‘Oh good,’ Sumi says when Devaki and Chitra join them. ‘That’s two cars, which means we can take everything away at once. And is Hrishi coming?’
‘Not much for a family of five, is it?’ she asks no one in particular when the truck is finally loaded. ‘It’s a good thing neither Gopal nor I were acquirers.’
Finally, the house is empty and everyone stands about awkwardly, unable to break away, as if waiting for something. And again it is Sumi who, businesslike, says, ‘Let’s go. What are we waiting for?’
It is like a caravan when they set off, Hrishi leading the truck on his motorbike, the two cars following and Aru on her moped trailing behind them. When she gets home, Aru does something that astonishes all of them, something that Charu is never to forget. One moment she is stepping over the threshold, parcels in hand, and the next moment she keels over. For an instant no one realizes what has happened, they imagine she has stumbled and fallen. When she continues to lie there in a heap, they rush to her.
‘Aru, what’s happened?’
‘Get some water.’
‘Aru, Aru ....’
‘I think she’s coming out of it.’
Aru sits up, water streaming down her face, her dazed look turning to shame as she realizes what has happened.
‘She hasn’t had any breakfast, I’m sure that’s it.’
‘And nothing last night, either.’
‘Sumi, how could you?’
‘Oh, God, don’t fuss, everyone. I’m all right, I’m perfectly all right.’
‘Kalyani-mavshi, get her some coffee—with lots of sugar.’
But Kalyani, standing in the doorway, looks petrified, she doesn’t move, she scarcely hears Devaki. It is Charu who gets the coffee, Devaki who sets out the breakfast for everyone, while Kalyani, silent and still, watches them eat.
‘She’s all right, Amma.’ Sumi sees her mother’s still trembling hand. ‘Don’t be so scared.’
But it isn’t Aru’s fainting that has got Kalyani into this state, it’s something else none of them has noticed: her rush towards Aru when she fell, her realization, an almost instinctive one, that she was next to Shripati, his abrupt walking away from her. Now she sits unusually silent, frozen into an immobility, unable to shake off the paralysis of fear. She takes no part in the unloading, and it is left to Sumi to instruct the men to distribute her things about the house.
All the extra furniture, except the girls’ beds, goes into the small room next to Sumi’s bedroom. This room becomes a place of refuge to the girls, a kind of re-creation of their home. Seema, when she is in one of her moods, lies long hours on the large bed, which is the repository of all the extra mattresses, oblivious to everyone, uncaring of anyone calling out for her.
The boxes and trunks are pushed into the storeroom where they settle down as if they belong, soon knitted into their new place by the cobwebs, sealed into it by the dust that settles down on them. Books and clothes find their way to their owners, but the rest of the things lie about for them to stumble on, until, in the mysterious way of all articles, they are absorbed by the house and become part of it.
The girls, too, no longer have the air of visitors living out of suitcases. Their clothes now flutter on the lines till evening, the underclothes stay on (‘in purdah’, as Charu says, since Kalyani conceals them by hanging towels on the next line) until they are pulled off before their baths the next day. The girls give the impression of having taken up the threads of their life. They are no longer living on the edge of crisis, they have found a routine in which grief and fear have a minor place. Once, however, Sumi sees her two older daughters coming together, holding each other for an infinitesimal moment, giving the impression that it is for mutual comfort, and then parting.
Sumi is the one who has the air of being lost, of having no place in her childhood home. She shows no outward sign of distress, but the girls notice a new habit in her, of touching them, holding their hands, smoothing their hair, as if this physical contact is a manifestation of some intense emotion within her. The first time Aru comes home and finds her mother in the kitchen, she feels as if a weight has been lifted off her. She’s all right, she thinks, she’ll be all right now. But there is a kind of purposeless extravagance about her movements, an exaggeration that is different from her normal vivacity and quickness. When evening comes, she paces up and down in the front yard, the way she had done the day Ramesh had found her there, from the porch to the gate and then back, pivoting on her heel to make each turn in a stylized manner.
And then one day, she decides to learn to ride the scooter. She begins all by herself, until Prasad, the outhouse tenant, comes to help her. Aru is there to aid her the next day, but it is not long before she dispenses with all help and rides it herself, going in circles round the pond, slowly, ready to put her foot down the moment she feels unsure of her balance. Shyam and Shweta, Prasad and Ratna’s children, watch her in fascination, Seema sits dreamily on the steps staring at her mother and Kalyani goes in and out with a nervousness she cannot conceal. The spasmodic sputter of the scooter becomes part of the normal tapestry of sounds and the watchers go back to their usual occupations, except Kalyani who cannot keep away. The next day, Sumi suddenly gathers speed and in a burst of confidence, goes out of the gate.
‘She shouldn’t have done that, she shouldn’t have gone out on the road.’
‘Amma, she isn’t learning to ride the scooter to whiz around in your front yard!’
Nevertheless, Aru is anxious too; she wanders to the gate and waits there until Sumi returns and runs back in after her. Sumi stops and holds both her arms above her head in a triumphant gesture. The scooter rocks, she clutches at the handlebars and Aru, rushing to her, holds her in a hug that steadies her. Kalyani comes out attracted by their voices, their laughter, unware that above, Shripati is watching the mother and daughter, too, the expression on his face almost identical to Kalyani’s.
Three sisters—the very stuff fairy tales are spun out of. Aru must have made the connection even as a child, for there is a story, not apocryphal as family stories often are, of her asking the question: why is the youngest sister always the good and beautiful one? Why can’t the eldest be that?
Aru doesn’t wholly believe the story herself, she is embarrassed by it (secretly pleased, too, as we all are by tales of our childhood exploits). The story has had a footnote added to it later, Charu’s comment: So Aru and I don’t get Prince Charming? And then, a typical Charu retort: Who wants him, anyway! Seema can have him.
But to imagine Seema as Cinderella is impossible. Her hair, her clothes, her very shoes have the gloss of much care and rule out the possibility of any association with rags and cinders. She’s always ‘tip top’, as Kalyani says approvingly. And as for Seema slaving away while her sisters go out dancing—this is an even more impossible thought; it is actually the other way round.
‘Why do you make Seema’s bed, why do you iron her clothes? You’re spoiling her,’ Charu charges her sister. Aru offers excuses that sound lame even to herself. The truth is that she cannot give up the habit of babying Seema which began when Sumi had been ill and unable to look after the new-born baby. The sense of responsibility that began then, when Aru was only six years old, and Gopal brought the baby back from Kalyani who had looked after her until then, seems never to have left her. She is still that girl, her small face anxious and puckered, trying to soothe the baby who never seemed to stop crying.
Even Charu’s protests aginst this coddling of Seema are rare; she, like the rest of the family, accepts the fact that Seema is special, isolated not only by the five-year gap between them but by something else that none of them can spell out. They don’t try to, either; the awareness of this is cloaked in silence.
In any case, the three sisters could never qualify for a Cinderella story, for there are no ugly sisters here. Actually, there is not much resemblance between the sisters; they are not even, as siblings often are, variations on a theme. And they emphasize this dissimilarity by the way they dress, by the length and styling of their hair. Yet they are alike in this, that all three of them just escape beauty. Aru, who has no vanity at all about her looks, thinks of herself as the ugly one in the family. My nose is too big, she thinks, my lips too thin, my forehead too bony. She does not realize that she is at her worst when she is looking into the mirror; her unsmiling face looks severe, her jaw more angular than it really is, her cheekbones prominent. It is when she is relaxed and smiling that her face softens, that it is touched by beauty. But this is the face she never sees. Her sternness, like Charu’s plumpness and Seema’s curious blankness, is the one flaw that mars the picture.
It was Sumi who, after seeing Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, chose the name for her second daughter; but sometimes, watching Aru in one of her rare skittish moods, she feels that Aru is the one who is more like Ray’s heroine, moving suddenly, unexpectedly, from a sombre gravity to a childlike playfulness. Now, these moods are a thing of the past and Aru is wholly steeped in earnestness. She has taken on a great many of the chores at home. It makes sense, in a way, that she leaves Charu free for her studies in this crucial second year of her college. But there is more to it. She wants to be the man of the family, Sumi thinks, when Aru insists on accompanying her mother to the dentist. She wants to take Gopal’s place, she wants to fill the blank Gopal has left in our lives. But Gopal never went to the dentist with me, he didn’t do so many of these things Aru is now doing. And yet his absence has left such a vast emptiness that I can’t find my bearings, there are no markers any more to show me which way I should go.
Perhaps what Aru is trying is to steer her mother and sisters through the stormy passage of change. In this, however, she comes up against Kalyani.
Kalyani’s pattern of housekeeping, a routine carefully built on a foundation of pain, has been disrupted. She finds herself incapable of absorbing four people into her order of things, yet is reluctant to accept help. The result is that the larger issues of treachery and desertion, of grief and anger recede, making way for the minor irritants of food, meal-times and the sharing of chores. Aru finds this heartburning over trivial issues undignified, a kind of comedown. And after Sumi’s housekeeping that allowed them to pitch into anything they wanted to do, she finds Kalyani’s restrictions hard to bear.
Sumi, caught in the practicalities of moving house, has so far stayed aloof from the problem. But listening to Aru’s increasingly irritable responses to Kalyani’s questions one morning, she decides to interfere.
‘Aru should be studying, Sumi, she should be having fun, she shouldn’t be involved with this—this mustard seed of domestic life.’
‘And at your age, you shouldn’t be burdened with us, either. God knows none of us wants it, but there it is, we’re stuck in this situation. So let’s make the best of it.’
‘But, Sumi, I don’t like the idea of a child like Aru slogging.’
‘Aru’s not a child. And listen, Amma, if we’re going to stay here, and who knows how long it’s going to be, you’ll have to learn to take everyone’s help. If you can’t, it’s going to be hard on all of us.’
It’s not a threat, but it seems to frighten Kalyani. Her capitulation is absolute and she endures the occasional forays of the girls into her kitchen in stoic silence. But when Aru comes down with a heavy cold, she can’t help sounding triumphant.
‘I knew it, I knew you were doing too much, look at you now.’
‘It’s only a cold, Amma.’
By evening, Aru has fever, mounting so rapidly that she is lying in a kind of stupor, breathing heavily through her open mouth, her lips cracked and dry. Sumi, sitting by her, can feel the heat emanating from her body.
‘You should have removed her tonsils, I always said it. My father had it done for both Goda and me and ....’
‘She’ll be all right, Amma.’ Sumi replies, not to Kalyani’s reproach, but to the fear in Kalyani’s voice, the fear in her own self. At night however, when Aru seems delirious, she succumbs and rings up Ramesh.
After he has gone—‘it’s only a virus, she’ll be okay by morning’—Sumi settles down in a chair by Aru, overruling Kalyani and Charu who want to sit up with her. ‘It’s not necessary for all of us to lose sleep. I’ll call you if there’s any need.’
Aru, moving in a strange, shifting, chaotic world, is unware of everything. The jumble of voices, the constant movement about her bed, seems miles away. She wakes up sometime during the night with parched lips and a burning in her throat.
‘Water,’ she mumbles, ‘water.’
There’s someone by her bed, a glass is held to her lips, she can feel a hand supporting her head. Gratefully, she swallows the water and goes off to sleep again. When she wakes up in the morning, clear-headed, her body light and hollow, there is a sense of peace and quiet in the room. The shifting shadows, the confused voices of the night seem to belong to another world.
‘Oh God, Aru, I’m sorry I dropped off to sleep.’ Sumi is apologetic when she wakes up. ‘Don’t tell Amma and Charu I slept through the night.’
‘But you didn’t! You woke up to give me water.’
‘I? No, I didn’t.’
‘Then who did?’
It must have been her grandfather, Aru says, remembering the tall shadow on the wall, the feel of his hand against her head.
‘It can’t be.’ Sumi dismisses the idea. ‘Baba never comes down here, you know that.’
Yes, I know; nevertheless I know it was not a dream, I know it was him. And why is it, it suddenly occurs to her, that he never comes down here?
In a day or two, Aru is up and about, and Ramesh coming to visit them in the evening exclaims in satisfaction at the sight of her sitting up with the rest. Chitra and the twins have come with him and later, Goda and her husband, Satya, join them. The house is full of noise. For the first time since Sumi’s return, there is no sense of participating in a wake. Instead, there is a release of spirits, as if they have just escaped some danger and have to celebrate. Part of the liveliness is because of the twins, Jai and Deep. It is a constant source of wonder to everyone who knows them, that parents as quiet and subdued as Ramesh and Chitra can have children like the twins. Even Seema emerges from her self-absorption when they are around. She is both puzzled and fascinated by their enormous energy and high spirits and they, in turn, seem to need her as an audience. Hrishi and Charu come in from their class a little later and the babble of sound enlarges to include Hrishi’s loud voice, Charu’s laughter.
Kalyani and Goda try to persuade Aru to go to bed, but Aru resists, not so much because she wants to be with them, but more out of a lassitude, a reluctance to face the thought of the coming night. She feels herself encased in a bubble, her connection to the world, to all these people, a tenuous one that can snap at any moment.
And then the thunder of Bhimsen Joshi’s voice, regally unrolling the Raag Mian ki Malhar which has formed a background to all this noise, suddenly ceases. None of them notice it—except Kalyani, who stops suddenly in the middle of a sentence, a word, really. It is something she is scarcely aware of, almost a knee-jerk response. Her body becomes tense, her head is slightly raised as if she is listening to the silence upstairs.
Aru comes out of the bubble, her mind razor-sharp and clear, she sees a situation she has taken for granted for years. Why doesn’t Baba ever come down? Why doesn’t he have his meals here with the rest of us? Why doesn’t he ever speak to Kalyani? She is his wife, isn’t she? And why is she so frightened of him? He rings the bell and she responds, he controls her from a distance. What has Amma done to make him behave this way towards her?
Poor Amma, Sumi says, poor Amma. But why?
In her confusion, Aru’s mind spirals towards Gopal, and his desertion no longer seems a bizarre independent occurence, but connected somehow to the curious story of her grandparents, a story, she realizes only now, she has very little knowledge of.
