An Obedient Father (10 page)

Later, Radha would say that even at the beginning of our life together, I took advantage of her pliability and innocence. As an example of this, she pointed to my returning home late after drinking with my friends and expecting her to be smiling and ready with food. Another example she used was our summer trips to Beri. Living in Delhi had made me miss village life, and when I told Radha I wanted to spend the summers in Beri, she acquiesced hesitantly. Radha had never lived outside Old Delhi, but she felt obligated to come with me. Village life is especially hard on women. All day Radha was running to the well or collecting firewood and cow dung to burn. My sisters-in-law hated Radha, perhaps because they kept thinking that I might claim some of the land that they wanted their husbands to inherit, and they tormented her. They would hide the laundry soap from her and give her the hardest work. Radha could not get used to the water and was often sick. Yet she kept accompanying me to Beri until Baby was born.

But I do not think Radha was referring to my selfishness and indifference when she said I took advantage of her. After all, at the beginning of our marriage she was mostly happy I think Radha meant I should have known that my love would not last. I had misled her, she believed, by treating her as if she were my heart walking unprotected in the world.

Our love wore out after three years, I think. There are always problems between two people, even when one is willing to give in on nearly everything. Despite Radha's demureness and traditionalism, which kept her from challenging me, she had a practical and calm intelligence that saw through all my illusions. When I fantasized out loud that I could move from being a teacher to being involved in citywide education administration and that from there it would be only a few steps to advising politicians and then finally running for election, Radha looked at me with such dismay that I invariably grew angry. Once I began believing that she saw through me, all her mannerisms of innocence, the way she covered her mouth when laughing, struck me as deceptive. Also, of course, there was the eroding power of familiarity.

Radha located the end of our love with Baby's death. Baby was our first child. If he had lived to six months we would have named him Dil, because he was our heart. For many years I accepted this explanation. Now I think there must have been a hidden romantic in Radha for her not to have admitted that our love simply got used up. Instead, she chose a dramatic boundary. Baby was born in February 1955 and died four months later of some water sickness. I was in Beri and Radha was in Delhi, because she thought she could take better care of Baby there. Once he became ill, Radha sent me telegrams telling me to come home. She told me he had a fever that had made him wrinkled and dry, that there was blood in his stool, that he no longer even cried. But I thought she was exaggerating as a way to punish me for leaving her in Delhi. She sent me six telegrams. After the fourth, angry at the money she was wasting, I stopped responding, and when Baby died, Radha did not send a message.

The evening I returned to Delhi, Radha told me she had put the torch to Baby's funeral pyre herself I sat on a cot in our single narrow room as Radha described the cremation arrangements: the pyre the size of a bush, the kindness of the pundit, the way the people in her family scolded her for going to a crematorium. Radha stood stiffly before me with her arms hanging straight down beside her and her fingers stretched apart. She looked like a student making a presentation. The room opened directly onto a busy road, and the noise of the evening traffic was so loud that Radha's words sometimes got lost under horns and people calling out. I cried as she spoke. After Radha stopped talking, she stood and watched me cry. Then she went and made dinner. Night came. Traffic trailed off When dinner was ready, Radha came to me and said, "Don't cry, even though you cry such handsome tears." I did stop, but it was because the contemptuous words made me think that perhaps not only was she angry at me but she hated me.

For months after Baby died, Radha would begin to weep without any apparent reason. She could be doing the laundry or cooking dinner and suddenly she would have to wash her eyes. This reminded me of myself at my mother's death, and made me realize that although I had thought I loved Baby, because I was not crying as I had before, I obviously did not have deep feelings for him. Sometimes I went up to Radha and held her. Other times I got angry and left the flat.

I was so unhappy myself that I could not have taken care of anyone. I must have been at least partially unhappy about Radha and Baby, but also because I believed I was heartless, I thought I was just unhappy about being blamed.

Baby's death exhausted me. I used to sleep twelve or fourteen hours a day About this time, by providing crates of mangoes from Beri to my principal and his supervisors, I was able to switch from teaching to administration. The new job had longer days. Soon after I got home, I would eat and go to bed.

I began drinking regularly for the first time. Until then, I had drunk only with friends. Even in company, drinking depressed me. Now, once or twice a month, I went to a saloon and sat in the back with fried peanuts and a liter of beer. When I first started drinking by myself, I cried loudly, hoping to attract attention. After a young boy who was a waiter there whispered in my ear, "Shut up, fatso," I began holding my tears till I got home. When I returned to the flat and Radha became angry at my drunkenness, I would shout, "Do you think you're the only one with a heart?"

Radha lost interest in my foolishness and I, embarrassed by her clear-sightedness, avoided her.

Radha found a guru and began to pray three times a day, an hour each time. I returned to visiting prostitutes. After a while I thought of Radha only when I wanted something. Even then, she left few traces in my thoughts. Still, Anita came a year after Baby Kusum followed two years later, and Rajesh after another two years. I remember how Radha would stare up at me expressionlessly as I struggled to climax and to make myself come I would say, "Mine, you are mine. What do you think of that?" I only went to her when I had not had time to go to the brothels on GB Road and my lust had begun nagging at me so much that I could not sleep. By the time she was thirty, Radha had stopped oiling her hair and changing her clothes regularly Also, when Rajesh was born, Radha clenched her teeth so tightly they all shifted, and within a few years they had splayed out. Radha became, like my children, only a reminder of all the things I had done wrong.

Sometimes, as if seeing my children for the first time, I noticed their tiny hands and mouths and I would feel the responsibility of protecting them. Then I would want to be a good husband to Radha and might try for a few days to look at her when we talked.

I justified my resentment toward the children by saying that at least I took care of them. After seven years in administration, I knew enough people in education and was well known enough that I could nearly double my five hundred rupees a month by arranging admission for children into particular schools or meetings between businessmen and bureaucrats. This was during the second of Nehru's five-year plans, when it was common knowledge that since corporate donations to political parties were illegal, the Congress Party was selling monopolies to raise campaign money. There had always been corruption, but it was so much in the open now that people began viewing it as natural that they could offer me money for favors. My family did not live well, but we drank milk each day.

I never felt any guilt for accepting bribes. And the tremors of remorse I felt for going to the prostitutes on GB Road were so slight that I brushed them aside like cobweb strands.

The prostitutes I went to ranged from sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds to some in their mid-thirties. I preferred the younger ones because, even though I used a condom, I thought they would be less likely to have diseases than older whores. I also found their bodies, so firm that they seemed superhuman, attractive, and I liked the unevenness of our strengths.

I visited the brothels only during the afternoon, when the wide GB Road is crowded. People buy light switches, generators, bathroom fixtures, and such things from the narrow shops on the groundfloor of the three- and four-story buildings in which the brothels, sometimes stacked on top of each other, are located. No matter how often you have been to a particular brothel on GB Road, there is always a sense of physical danger when you are in one. In the GB Road brothels, you have sex in wooden closets. They are arranged in a row against one wall of the long room that is the brothel. These closets are so narrow you have to climb onto the plank bed, making sure not to step on the whore, before closing the door. Adding to the claustrophobia is the distraction of the brothel's life going on a few inches from you. Women and children are sitting on the floor. "I'm hungry. Anybody want food?" "Dev Anand is much better than Rajesh Khanna. If I was in a movie and had the songs from Anand, my movie would be a hit, too." Sometimes pimps get into loud arguments a meter from where you are in the closet about how much of a commission they should get for bringing in a customer. Outside the room, in the doorway to the hall or stairwell that connects the brothel to the sidewalk, whores sit shouting at a possible customer who stops on the sidewalk to peer at them. "Come, my dream!" they yell, flashing their breasts. The seediness and the fear usually make the sex sad, difficult, abject. Occasionally these very qualities will make the orgasm astonishing.

So the years passed, far more quickly than I could have imagined. My father died and Nehru died, and I cried for both, surprising myself with the earnestness of my tears. India fought Pakistan, China, Pakistan. I used some of my new wealth to start a small restaurant, but there was little money in it and my workers cheated me. I bought two rickshaws with a cousin and leased them out. I did this for a year and a half, till my cousin was murdered, stabbed in the throat by a rickshaw driver over a dispute involving less than forty rupees. Once, Radha developed a habit of eating very little, and after a few months she had to be hospitalized because she was waking up at night screaming from stomach pains. When she got out of the hospital, she told her guru that she wanted to leave worldly things and take sanyas, and travel from pilgrimage site to pilgrimage site. Her guru then came to our home for the first time and berated

Radha in front of me. "You have three Httle children, faithless woman. Your home is your temple." To guarantee his help in the future I went to him for several weeks to learn yoga for my back pain. To strengthen my spine he recommended I drink water while lying flat. Anita, Rajesh, and Kusum grew into odd children who played only with each other and who were so quiet that strangers at first thought they were slightly retarded. Even when no one was around, they spoke quietly. When I heard the children murmuring to each other, I often wondered whether they were speaking of me. All those years gone so quickly that even describing them does not take long. Big things do not happen to you and so you think time is not passing. You jiggle the years in your pocket, thinking you are a rich man, and suddenly you have spent everything. I was thirty-eight and an old man overnight, and Anita was twelve and so young that seeing her was like looking down from some great height into a misty valley and wondering what will be revealed when the sun arrives.

One afternoon, Anita fell asleep beside me while we listened to the radio announce that Indira Gandhi had become Prime Minister for the first time. The room was dark and the quilt that covered us heavy and warm. I was dozing off as well. In her sleep, Anita rolled over and put her hand on my penis. I woke immediately. I started to remove Anita's hand, but stopped. There was something mysterious and erotic about lying beneath the warm quilt with Anita's light touch, listening to her breath and feeling her weight against my side. I became hard. After a few minutes, Anita rolled over once more and removed her hand.

Later that day I told myself that I had been slightly dazed from sleep and that this was why I had left her hand on my crotch. But my mind was adept at reducing its presence when my body did something shameful. I do not remember whether, before this, I had seen Anita in a sexual way. Probably I had, because I wondered what it would be like to have sex with nearlv everyone, even children I saw in the schools I went to. But I am sure that, before the afternoon when Anita touched me while the election results were announced, she had held no special attraction for me. Anita was not a pretty girl. Her hair was dry and short, and she had a round, thick face and a large nose.

One afternoon, a day or two after Anita's hand first fell on my crotch, I played a game of tag with her in the courtyard of the house where we then lived. We laughed and bounced about as I dodged Anita's lunges. But as I swayed in front of her, I kept positioning myself so that when I did let Anita touch me, her hand might brush my penis. One of her dives to tag me finally pressed her open hand against my penis. I felt such a shock of pleasure that I became perfectly still. The mineral flavor of lust filled my mouth. Anita also stopped. She looked frightened. I immediately realized that I must not let Anita associate anything bad with touching me, so I laughed. Our game continued for a little while after that. Then I went off and masturbated.

The pleasure and relief of masturbation was so strong, I knew right away that I would repeat this game. My conscience did not bother me. I reasoned that Anita was not being physically harmed. I was also not damaging her emotionally, because the games hid my intentions. Nor did I wonder when or where the games might end. They would continue till they came to some quiet and natural conclusion.

Games of tag or hide-and-seek, during which I tried getting Anita to touch me, became common. We usually played these games on the roof of our house after I had returned from work. The sky might be fluttering among shades of purple, and the nearby roofs were always crowded. Sometimes people watched us play: Anita trying to tag me and me hopping, swaying, shouting challenges, just out of reach. I would become giddy from the excitement of waiting, and after a while became so distracted that I sometimes got tagged by mistake. Anita and I played till we lost our breath from laughing and running. Then, because I wouldn't let it be any other way, we stood a foot or so apart, trying to pat each other and jump away before being tagged back. Occasionally Kusum, Rajesh, and Radha came upstairs and read or talked or played games, pausing every now and then to watch us. I was so confident of the game's camouflage that before all these people I touched Anita's thighs, the backs of her legs, and sometimes, rarely, her chest. The fact that I was able to do this before so many people confirmed that I was not doing anything wrong.