An Obedient Father (12 page)

The memories of the following days are so morbid—the newspapers under Anita to keep the sheets clean, the painful penetration each night, an ejaculation which I would try catching in my hand because I was afraid of pregnancy, Anita going to wash the blood from her vagina—that in later years I tried blotting them from memory.

It was obvious that something was very wrong with Anita. When she walked, she looked pained. She almost stopped talking completely, and only when I scolded her would she eat. Radha was watching all this, I knew. Watching perhaps in confusion or in growing certainty.

But for four or five nights there was the same horror. The details of what we did, Anita holding her cries in and breathing as though there were sand in her lungs, were so terrible that whenever I finished I felt as if I were swallowing my tongue. Yet each night Anita sat on the edge of her cot and I closed the door and switched off the light before turning around.

Maybe Radha came down to the courtyard to pee and then heard something. Or maybe Anita's condition over the last few weeks had finally forced her to admit the obvious. Or Radha might have just wanted to see if we were sleeping all right.

And there I was, arching on top, Anita flat and still far below me. Radha was silhouetted in the doorway before I had even turned my

head. The roUing off Anita and pulling up pajamas and sheet seemed incredibly slow and clumsy even as I did them. Radha stood unmov-ing long after I was on my back, my pajamas at my knees, the sheet reaching my waist, and Anita beside me.

Radha moaned. Then she grabbed Anita by the arm and swung her onto the floor. "Go upstairs," Radha shouted. For a moment Anita stood there. Then she hobbled out.

I sat up.

"What's this?" she said, noticing the newspapers. Radha slapped me, and the heel of her hand struck my nose. I tasted the iron flavor of blood. She hit me again. "Dog. Disease," she shouted. She kept slapping and cursing. "If people knew about you, they would kill you like a mad dog. They would break your head with bricks. If I told my brothers, they would cut you to pieces with a machete. Do you know what you've done?" I had so much adrenaline in me that I felt no emotion. Radha's blows did not get weaker. I said nothing and did not try to protect myself "Your own daughter, animal. What is going to happen to her now? Have you done this many times? Have you been doing this long?"

Her questions cut through my befuddlement and made me wail, "I don't know why. I'm a leper." Now that the worst had happened, I felt none of the relief I had expected would come when things ended. I could imagine Radha telling everyone and me being driven from my home and becoming a beggar on the street. "I swear I haven't been doing it long. God is good and let me be caught the first time. I deserve to die."

"Kill yourself, then," she yelled.

"I should. I should." I nodded and wept. A part of me was interested only in escaping blame. Another part would actually have liked to die.

"Do it, then. Use a knife. Use rope. Drown yourself in a spoonful of water."

"I should." As I said it again, I think we both simultaneously realized that this would not happen.

Radha became quiet. "Who will marry her?" she asked. I think she said this only because this is the type of question they ask in movies after a rape. Suddenly Radha took off her rubber slipper and swung it hard at my cheek. The sound was like a wet cloth whipping against a rock. I felt as if my cheek had peeled off I howled and then became abruptly quiet. Radha grabbed my face and, holding me by my lips and chin, slapped me again with the rubber slipper. I howled and stopped as soon as I could. Radha punishing me herself made me think that she would not tell anyone of her discovery. Immediately following this came grief at what I had done. I tried to speak, to beg pardon, but no words were right. My crime stood out terrible and solitary in my mind. It was sick.

All night I sat there as Radha cursed and hit. By dawn my face was purple and Radha was staggering from exhaustion. When she spoke, her sentences sometimes made no sense. Sometimes she wept. "I should kill myself and the children," she said at one point. "I should pour kerosene over all of us and set us on fire." Part of me wondered if this would not solve my problem.

After Rajesh and Kusum left for school that morning, Radha, Anita, and I went to Hanuman temple. My face was still purple and I could hardly open my lips. Radha and Anita sat in a corner all day and prayed. Most of the morning I crouched on my knees before an idol of God Ram, with my forehead pressed to the floor. Over and over I asked God to take away my evil and madness. I cried and stopped, cried and stopped. I knelt till cramps caused me to fall on the floor. Then I lay there praying, with my face to the floor and my arms stretched out before me. This was a Tuesday, God Hanuman's day, and so the temple was especially full. I was praying in the main chamber, and by early afternoon even this was so crowded that people could no longer go around me and had to step over me.

That night we sent Rajesh and Kusum to bed early and talked with Anita in the living room. Radha and I sat on the sofa. Anita sat across from us on a chair so high that her feet did not touch the ground. We had agreed that Radha would be the one to do most of the talking.

"We don't want you to have any confusion about last night," Radha began. Radha had accepted my story that I had entered Anita only once. Anita pushed herself as far back in the chair as possible and sat still. "Your Pitaji did something bad. It is a shameful thing that he did and God will one day punish him." Since Anita's face was expressionless, Radha stopped and said, "Yes?" Anita nodded, and Radha continued from where she had stopped. "You can't tell anyone about what he did. He is ashamed. He will never do anything again." Radha looked at me and, as if overcome with emotion, slapped me. "But you have to forget what happened. From now on, you empty your head of everything that has happened. What happened wasn't anything." There was a long silence when it was difficult to know if Radha was looking for more words to say or whether it was time for Anita to speak. "You understand? Empty your head." Anita nodded again. The day of praying had made me so remorseful that I felt outraged on Anita's behalf But I was glad for what Radha was doing anyway. I wondered whether it was in fact possible for Anita to forget. All three of us understood, though, that what actually mattered was Anita's silence. The conversation had lasted not even an hour when we kissed Anita's forehead and sent her to bed.

Radha and Anita started sleeping in the same room. A few weeks after she discovered me, Radha sent Kusum to live with her mother, saying to her mother that she did not feel capable of taking care of three children. Radha offered no excuse to me.

I stopped drinking. For a long time I did not fight with Radha or even raise my voice in anger. If I started to speak loudly, my voice grew hushed on its own. For a while I went to temple every day.

Radha never again mentioned what had happened with Anita. But in the first few years after I was caught, every time she became angry at me I felt shame and fear shoot through my blood. Anita behaved as if she had completely forgotten what I did. I was glad when we moved out of the house where everything had occurred, because I thought it would hasten the process of erasure.

In two or three years I was going to saloons again. I would drink and cry as always, but I tried not to seek anyone's pity when I got home. Radha and I fought, though not as much. I returned to the brothels. I went to them until my heart attack, but I never had sex with someone younger than sixteen, and I never touched Anita again.

We drove past a large whitewashed rock which read 5 beri KM in black paint. Fields stretched into the distance on either side. Some of the land had been tilled in preparation for planting, and the overturned soil was black. Other fields were a crumbling brown. The sun was directly overhead. I could feel the heat, but it was as if I were generating cold.

After Radha caught me, twenty years passed, and in her forties, she lost her faith in God. Becoming an atheist made her bitter. She grew so thin that the skin on her arms and face hung in folds. My weight increased till the width of my shirts matched the width of my cot. The more years Indira Gandhi spent in office, the more my income grew, for more and more things fell under the government's aegis and we civil servants were the gatekeepers. I bought a toaster, a blender, a refrigerator, and a television. Anita went through higher secondary and into college. She grew up shy and easily panicked, but there was nothing that marked her as damaged. Rajesh completed a Ph.D. in Hindi and then could not find any position as a teacher. Kusum won a government award for her Ph.D. on peanut plants and went to Canada, then America.

The bus stopped at the edge of Beri, in front of a large dirt yard which had an unpainted cinder-block restaurant and automobile repair shop at its back. "We'll be here half an hour," the driver called, and hurried off the bus. He went to a wall and uri-

nated against it. A short young man in a red raw-silk shirt tucked carefully into creased black pants came out of the restaurant toward the bus. "Time to worship your stomach!" he shouted. "Samosas, roti-subji, sweets! Come eat! Come eat!" The bus emptied.

The young man told me where the ice-cream factory was. It had been five years since I was last in Beri, and the water pump and ration store he described on the way had not been there when I was last in town. I had hoped for nostalgia, but being in Beri made me feel nothing special.

Even several streets from the ice-cream factory I could hear the beat of a drum. The factory was on a cracked and pitted dirt road, with tilled fields on one side and single- and double-story houses along the other. In front of the factory, a man had a bear with a rope around his neck. A boy stood nearby playing a drum strapped to his chest. The bear was on his feet and walked swaying, like a drunk.

The factory was squeezed between two houses, and because its fa9ade was no wider than an ordinary shop's, the only indication that it was a factory was the Toyota ice cream painted in blue above the entrance and the whirring and splashing sounds coming from inside. As I came up the road, I saw a crowd of forty or fifty people, mostly dark peasant women with heavy silver bands around their ankles and children with bone-thin legs, standing in a ragged line in the fields just beyond the edge of the road. These were the poor of Beri. A smaller and better-dressed crowd stood on the road in front of the factory, eating ice cream off leaf plates with small flat spoon-shaped paddles of wood. In the shade of the factory a table held leaf plates of dissolving ice cream. To keep the crowd from raiding the ice cream, the road was patrolled by three men with bamboo staffs.

I was about forty feet from the factory when the pundit stepped out of its doorway. I immediately recognized his thick wrestler's body and buck teeth. He was holding a leaf plate so heavy with food that he had to keep both hands beneath it. Right behind him, talking, and also carrying a plate of food, came my brother Krishna. I was so startled I stopped in the middle of the road. Krishna was still thin and wrinkled, with a thin mustache. I moved into the fields, hoping to hide in the crowd until I found a way to speak to the pundit alone. I wondered what the pundit would think of my coming to Beri and not attempting to see my brothers.

Perhaps a third of the children in the crowd had the swollen bellies of starvation. Most seemed to be seven or eight years old, although they may have been older. Some of them were naked except for shirts or blouses held closed by one or two buttons. As I left the road and entered the crowd, a starving boy with a shaved head and ringworm scars on his scalp burst toward the ice-cream table. He kept a hand on his belly while running, as if he were balancing a pot of water. He traveled two or three meters before one of the patrolmen took a half step toward him and swung his staff It was as if the dry whir of the swing, not the blow, sent the boy rolling along the dirt road. People from the crowd along the road cursed the patrolman. The drum was beaten faster and the bear shuffled faster. The patrolman turned his back on the crowd and walked away.

The boy lay on the ground for several minutes. He must have been there without his mother or family, because nobody tried to help him. He got up and, hunched almost in half, went through the crowd and several meters into the field. He lay down on his back in the dirt. I went up to him. His eyes were shut. He was so thin and gray with dust that he looked like a squirrel. My heart was racing and my hands felt icy. Perhaps because of all the remembering and Asha and seeing my brother among the guarded, I felt as if I had hit the boy. I wanted to cry at what I had done. "Take this," I said, crouching down and pressing twenty rupees into one of his hands. He opened his eyes, saw the money, but did not appear to recognize it.

As I stood, I suddenly became dizzy. I lurched to one side and, while moving, vomited. The vomit felt cold in my mouth and was almost clear. I leaned down and stood with my legs apart and my hands on my knees. Some of the vomit splattered my shoes. The ground rose and fell as if it were breathing. My heart was racing so fast that I became frightened of another heart attack. I shivered and threw up once more. From the noises around me, I realized that the crowd had begun to notice me. After several minutes I began to make my way back to the road, but my knees gave and I fell. I was looking at two lumps of dirt with hay and dried leaves embedded in them, then I drifted into a bright haze.

A man gripped my underarms and another grabbed my ankles. "Heatstroke," I heard, and then as I was slowly lifted: "He's worth two men," someone said, grunting, and people laughed. We entered the crowd along the road. A woman said, "Feed him ice cream." There was more laughter, but before it had time to die, another woman suggested, "Take him into the factory. It's cold there." "Into the factory," repeated a man. Suddenly several pairs of hands were pulling me up. "Ice cream. Ice cream," I heard.

As the five or six men, women, and children who were carrying me passed the dancing bear, it jerked forward and nudged a young boy who was pretending to buoy me with one hand. The boy jumped back, screaming. The people carrying me stopped to watch him hop in place and howl. I laughed, but no sound came out.