In the Convent of Little Flowers (6 page)

Bikaner tried to pass the officer-grade exams three times; his failures reduced him to a caricature in the office. He came home every day in a bitter mood. Meha tried to console
him. Better not to be an officer,
beta,
she had said, too many transfers to small towns and villages. Better to be a clerk. Bikaner shouted at her when she said anything, and Meha was reminded of those early days when he did not know English, when his schoolmates had called him names,
lallu,
lout, clod, farmer’s son, as though that last were an insult. Bikaner wanted to be a manager one day. Clerks did not become managers. Officers did. Everything snapped the day Chandar retired from the bank. He had come home, his eyes full of tears, the watch gleaming on his wrist.
“Give it to me,” Bikaner said all of a sudden as they were eating dinner.
“What?”
In response Bikaner leaned over, wiped Chandar’s hand on a nearby towel, and slipped the watch off his hand. He said calmly, “I would be an officer if you were not a
chowkidar
at the bank. Do you think they don’t know that you are my father? Why do you think I have not passed the exam? Because I am a farmer’s son—worse yet, a
chowkidar
’s son.”
It was as though he had hit Meha.
All this time it has been strangely peaceful, almost joyful. At this memory Meha flinches. She hopes Chandar does not see the pain in her eyes. Shiva, let him not remember that day, she prays. Not now. Not now.
*  *  *
“What are you doing, Bikaner?” Meha cried. “Give your father back his watch.”
He ignored her and kept on eating. Chandar, stunned into silence, put a hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Beta …”
“Keep your hands off me!” Bikaner yelled, and even as Meha and Chandar reacted to the sound of his voice, he lifted a meaty arm and slapped Chandar’s hand away.
The sound of the slap echoed through the silent flat as a red flush spread over Chandar’s hand. He looked at his hand and then at his son in disbelief. His son had hit him. How could it be? How could he even raise his voice at his father, let alone …
An hour later Bikaner was penitent. He came to beg forgiveness, touched Chandar’s feet with his forehead. He even cried as he had when he was a child, with great, heaving sobs. But the watch stayed on his wrist. It was a sign of things to come. Chandar’s pension was deposited into Bikaner’s account at the bank. Bikaner was briefly shamefaced, but insistent about this and they let him be, thinking that all they had was his anyway. A few days later, when Chandar sat where Bikaner did not want him to sit, the back of the son’s hand slashed across the father’s face. Again, he apologized, but there was more time before the apology and less sincerity in it. When Chandar stopped to talk with a friend on the street while bringing the children home from school, the broomstick was used to thrash him.
From this point on, there was only Bikaner’s anger, no more justification, no explanations, no regrets. Over the next
few years Meha and Chandar grew frail with fear. They talked in whispers. They were moved out of the kitchen to the balcony, huddling in one damp corner during monsoon nights. Bikaner’s voice and his beatings just grew louder and wilder. The daughter-in-law stayed aloof, seeming not to see or hear anything—these were not her parents, but Bikaner’s. He could do what he chose with them. It did not distress Meha and Chandar; they had not expected much from her and got little. But from Bikaner …
There was no room for disbelief, no one to turn to. The shame of being beaten by their own son made Chandar and Meha dumb. Although Bikaner did not beat his mother, merely pushed her around when he was angry. They did not step out of their four-by-six balcony. When they had first bought the flat, Meha had looked down from the balcony at the concrete below and shuddered. So far from the earth, so high in the sky. When she went out to hang the clothes she always did so without looking down. Now they lived on the balcony, and did not go anywhere.
But where would they go? Whose eyes could they meet anymore? The neighbors were not allowed to see their pain because they would not allow it. The neighbors all knew, of course. They had heard Bikaner’s yells, heard the sounds of his beatings, perhaps even heard Meha cry. Yet Meha and Chandar could not have borne pity. That much pride still stayed in them, fierce and unrelenting. They would not turn to strangers for help. This was a family matter.
But finally it got to be too hard to stay outside on the
balcony all the time. Chandar lost weight; Meha did too, but she only saw Chandar’s pain. His bones stood out brittle in his face, his shoulders bowed under the weight of a son’s betrayal. Meha wrote to one of Chandar’s brothers, digging deep inside herself for words to call him to Mumbai, to tell him to look after them. But before she could mail the letter—she had thought of asking the neighbor’s wife for a stamp—Bikaner saw it lying underneath a bundle of their clothing in the balcony. That evening, huge ugly weals sprang on Chandar’s back. A punch in the chest left him gasping with two broken ribs. Bikaner still would not touch his mother, even though Meha tried to come in the way of the beatings.
The next day—
yesterday, Meha thinks, was it only yesterday
— Bikaner came to them with a sheaf of papers. He covered the top and pointed to a line and said, “Sign here.”
Chandar, propped against the balcony wall, one hand held under his ribs to support the pain each time he breathed, turned away from this monster he had created from his own flesh. “No.” The word came out quietly. He would not sign what he could not read. He would not sign what they both knew to be the title to the flat to be turned over to Bikaner.
That denial cost him the hand he was holding to his chest. Bikaner pulled it away and bent the fingers back one by one until the bones broke. In her corner, Meha cowered, screaming in whispers. Bikaner turned to her and grabbed her hair in his fist. Dragging his mother to his father, he shoved her head in front of Chandar and said, “Sign, you
matachoth,
or I will throw her over the balcony.”
When she heard that word, Meha, who had been pulling weakly at Bikaner’s grip on her hair, dropped her hands over her ears. Shiva, she cried to herself, how could he call his father that?
Matachoth. Matachoth.
Motherfucker.
The fingers of his right hand hanging by his side, his chest wheezing with every breath, Chandar signed the papers with his left hand. That night, lying against each other, they made their decision.
It was too late for anything else. Too late to change what they could have done to make Bikaner a better man. When he was five, the little monkey had been smaller than him. As an adult, the bank officers’ exam had defeated him, and there was nothing he could do about it. Except this, perhaps. Chander and Meha were too old, too feeble to defy him.
In some senses, Meha thought, they had steadfastly shut Bikaner from their lives. At first it was because they did not want a child, then because they did not want
him.
He had been such a flimsy child, one with so little strength of character. It had been easy to be repelled by him. Easy to turn to each other, to have Bikaner only at the fringes of their affection for each other. And Bikaner knew this. But now, all that mattered to Meha was that Chandar and she would take this last step together. To a place where Bikaner could no longer touch them, where he was not invited, where they would go without him.
She helped him, Meha thinks, she helped the man who had come to her that first night they were married and called her
jaaneman.
Chandar
had no more strength left, so Meha held his hand and pushed him off. Then she clambered off the ledge of the balcony she was even afraid to look down from, and launched her thin-with-hunger body into the air, down sixteen stories.
She watches now as he hits the ground with a soft thud, blood spurting from his head, a rib protruding under his white
kurta.
So long, she thinks, it takes so long to meet death. So much time since they stepped off the balcony ledge into the night. Before they left Meha wrote out their story, in her broken English, using the language Bikaner had taught her. The papers lie folded in Chandar’s
kurta
pocket, now already stained with his blood. But people must know, Meha thinks, that their lives were once worth something. That they once lived and breathed and loved. That they did not ask for this end, although they made it happen. People must know…. There is no shame anymore about a son who beat them.
They have fallen without a sound through the dark night, for they were always quiet people. Except for that laugh at the beginning when Meha first stepped out. That feeling had been like those early days of their marriage when they laughed all the time, when they smiled, when they were joyous.
She wants to touch Chandar again, this one last time before the end, but she knows she will land away from him. She closes her eyes as the ground comes to meet her.
The final thought is … how long did it take?

The Faithful Wife

Though destitute of virtue, or pleasure seeking else-where, or devoid of good qualities, yet a husband must be constantly worshipped as God by the faithful wife.
—Manu Smriti, T
HE
C
ODE OF
M
ANU
(c. 200
BC

AD
300)
It is the letter that brings him back, because he did not know she could even write. So he comes here to stand in the courtyard, in front of this man who was once so beloved. The letter rests carefully folded in his shirt pocket, the strap of his camera holding it to his chest. The man seated in the armchair, his grandfather, will never see it. He has not even asked why Ram is here. Anger claws at the air around them, cleaving through their stillness. But outside, in the village that hugs the foothills of small, unnamed hills, all is still quiet.
Morning mist hangs gracefully over Pathra, swallowing the small village in its white folds, swirling between the leaves of the many-armed banyan in the center square. The
streets leading in, rutted by bullock carts, are empty. In a few hours, the square will be noisy with life: village elders sitting in choice spots under the banyan, pedantic with endless cups of chai; women gossiping on their way to the vegetable market; urchins chasing stray dogs with a reckless wickedness that comes only in childhood.
Generations have thus used the old banyan, the village square, the vegetable market—why, even ancestors of the pariah dogs. Now, though, there is the added blare of film songs on the chai shop radio. Yet this is an outward change. Inside, in the people, the village lives in many ways like it did hundreds of years ago.
And that is why Ram is here.
On this cold December morning, as the sun struggles to burn away the mist and announces the arrival of a new day, the square is silent. A cock crows valiantly in the distance, sounding surprised at the lateness of the hour. Within the houses, wives and daughters awake to sweep doorsteps and light
chulas
that will burn well into the night. Later these women will join the throng in the market, shopping bags hung on arms strong from hard work. In the grandfather’s house, however, there is no such simple peace for the two men in the inner courtyard.
The man in the chair has seen many years; his hair is whitened by the hand of time, his skin creased by sorrow, and love, and hatred through the years, each stamping its signature. The other, in normal times, is impudent with impassioned eyes and a shock of brilliant black hair. Apart in
their thoughts, the younger still has the look of the older; his mother was bred of the man in the chair, and she has given to the boy the fire in his eyes, and the chin that stands firm even against his grandfather.
The old man moves finally, his hand striking a match against the grainy wood of his chair. As the match flares in the damp morning air, Ram looks up, lifting a defeated face. His hair falls in an uncombed mass over his forehead. His clothes are crumpled—the suit stained, the previously white shirt no longer a recognizable color, the tie long discarded. Mud cakes his once-shiny shoes, creeping up the cuffs of his trousers in tendrils of brown.

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