I stare at my nails. I begin filing them again.
I raise my eyes and see Shyam’s gaze fixed on me. ‘You shouldn’t be filing your nails at twilight,’ he says.
I stare at him, baffled. ‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what my grandmother always said. It probably has a very sound and scientific reason.’ His eyes shift back to the TV.
Shyam is a strange mixture of superstition and rational thinking. On the one hand he believes in most of these silly superstitions and on the other hand he is the first to adopt and use technology, be it gadgets or practices. Despite having known him all my life and intimately for eight years, I am unable to comprehend how his mind works.
There is
Baywatch
, for instance.
How can a man of his intelligence watch such inane stuff, I wonder. But he smiles and says, ‘It doesn’t require an effort. I just sit here and watch. You must try it some time. You don’t need to turn everything you do into an intellectual exercise, you know.’
I sense a barb there. These veiled barbs have been coming my way with greater frequency in the past few days. I realize that he doesn’t aim to hurt, but he doesn’t care if I am. I know fear then. This is a Shyam I do not recognize.
He zips from one channel to the other. There are six Malayalam channels to choose from. He will switch a fight sequence for a song, an advertising commercial for a piece of dialogue. All evening it goes on, and it makes my head spin to try and catch up with him.
‘Why do you do this?’ I ask. ‘Why don’t you just watch one channel at a time?’
He doesn’t say anything. I go back to filing my nails.
I wonder if he knows. What is the point, I think. They are all dead now. My mother and the two brothers, one of whom was my father and the other an uncle. The only thing is, I am not sure who is who. Even if they were alive, would it matter?
‘Shyam,’ I say.
‘Hmm …’ His eyes remain fixed on the TV screen.
‘Shyam,’ I say his name again.
He turns the volume down and looks at me.
‘Did you ever hear anything strange about my parents’ wedding? You must have been about seven years old then, weren’t you?’
I see the expression on his face change. When Shyam is engrossed in a movie, it is easy to gauge the emotional content of what he is watching by the expression on his face. He will smile with the hero and suffer with him. The navarasas and a whole ancillary of subrasas come and go. But when he looks at me now, his face is wiped clean of all expression. More and more, Shyam wears a mask of
impassivity when he is with me. A dutiful, but deadpan and disinterested face.
I do not like this wooden Shyam. He worries me.
‘What did you hear, Shyam?’ I ask, dropping my file on the table.
Shyam sighs. ‘I was seven years and four months old then,’ he says and rises to take away the newspaper I had spread on my lap to catch the nail dust. He puts the file away in its case.
‘Your mother, my aunt, was to have married the elder brother, your uncle Mani, but he disappeared three nights before the wedding. So your father married her. Didn’t you know?’
‘No,’ I say, shaking my head. Was that all?
‘Well, it was common knowledge. I assumed you knew,’ he says, raising the volume again.
I sit there, oblivious to the voices from the TV. What I hear is: ‘She is mine, isn’t she? Tell me …I can see it …She looks nothing like you or that runt brother of mine.’
I leave the room. I go upstairs to my parents’ bedroom. I have left it untouched. No one sleeps here. But the bed is made and sachets of sandalwood dust perfume the wardrobe. There are too many rooms in this house, I think. And too many secrets.
My grandfather buried his past in its walls and my parents interred their past here as well. This house welcomes and encourages secrets.
I go downstairs and take my manicure case with me. There is a bag of toiletries hanging on the bathroom door. Shyam must have left it there, I think. He probably intends to put it away later. I decide to surprise him. Then I notice a packet of sanitary napkins. I feel that familiar swell of rage. Why does he have to buy even sanitary napkins for me? Why can’t he let me breathe and bleed on my own?
I pause suddenly. I can see last month’s packet in the bathroom cabinet, lying untouched. I feel a little bolt of shock. I rush into the bedroom. I have a little calendar there. I flip through the pages. I look at the dates, counting and calculating. I am ten days late.
I sit down. My legs are shaking. I may be pregnant, I think. I touch my abdomen. Can it be possible? After all this time, and when I least want the responsibility?
What am I to do now? It must have happened the night when Shyam raped me. Shyam will never let me go if he knows I am carrying his child. What would Chris say if he knew? How can we even think
of life together with me carrying another man’s child? Are you entirely sure it is Shyam’s, a voice asks me. Don’t forget you made love again, two nights after the rape. It was the last day of your safe period. Accidents are known to happen.
Don’t panic, I tell myself. I will wait another week and then, only then will I think about it.
‘Are you going out?’ I ask Shyam.
‘I may. Why?’ He frowns. He hates being disturbed, particularly during the last few scenes of the film. The hero, a brawny man, six-feet tall, is mouthing expletives that are meant to pack as much punch as his fists. The villains stand quaking in their sandals as his voice thunders.
‘Can you drop me off at Uncle’s? I need to speak to him,’ I say. ‘It is important.’
‘Why don’t you call him?’
‘His phone isn’t working,’ I lie.
‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’ he says.
‘No, it can’t,’ I snap. ‘It’s ridiculous that you won’t let me drive. Why do I have to beg and plead when I can easily drive myself there?’
‘Enough. I’ll drop you. You can’t drive. I have seen you drive. You have no traffic sense and you use the wrong gears all the time.’
I glare at him. I drove all over Bangalore when I lived there, yet he talks as if I don’t know my clutch from my brake. I will have to resume driving again. That will show him that I am not to be pushed around, I tell myself.
‘Get ready,’ he says. ‘This will be over in a few minutes.’
‘For what? I am only going to Uncle’s. What I am wearing is good enough.’
‘Won’t you see Chris?’ he asks in a silky voice.
‘I think Chris is away,’ I lie. I can’t see Chris yet, I think. I can’t till I know for certain.
Suddenly I long to see him again. It is an excruciating urge. Just to feel his arms around me and tell myself that nothing had changed.
The night sky is overcast. Thunder rumbles. Shyam walks with me to Uncle’s house. He takes my elbow as we walk through a dark patch of ground. I ache to shrug him off, but I don’t. I dare not
offend this new Shyam.
‘Your phone isn’t working,’ he tells Uncle.
Uncle frowns. ‘No, it is …’
‘It wasn’t when I tried a while ago,’ I say quickly.
Uncle lifts the receiver and holds it to his ear. ‘Ah yes, I have had this problem for a few days now. There’s no saying when it works and when it doesn’t.’
I wonder if Shyam knows that Uncle is covering for me.
Shyam doesn’t say anything. He looks down at the books spread on Uncle’s table. I can see that he would like to tidy up. He says, ‘Don’t you get bored? What do you do here by yourself?’
Uncle smiles. ‘I read, I write, I doze off, and then there is Malini. It is a very full life.’
When Shyam leaves, Uncle looks at me for a long moment. ‘What is it, Radha? Is there something on your mind? Is it Chris?’
‘I think I may be pregnant,’ I tell Uncle.
I see the shock in his eyes. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I am quite sure, but I’ll wait another week and then see a doctor,’ I say.
I see the question in his eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, thinking that for now I prefer the uncertainty of its paternity rather than the thought that this child could tie me to Shyam for life.
He doesn’t say anything for a while. Is he thinking what I am? That history is repeating itself? Like mother, like daughter. Does wantonness, like diabetes and multiple sclerosis, pass from one generation to the next?
‘What will you do?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I cover my face with my hands. ‘Perhaps it is just a mistake. Perhaps I am not pregnant at all,’ I say through my fingers.
‘Who was my father? Which one of the two brothers?’ I ask him. I don’t try and couch the implications. I don’t even try and phrase it better.
Uncle removes his spectacles. His eyes are tired. Will he tell me the truth, I wonder. Uncle rubs the bridge of his nose. ‘You know who your father is.’
‘No, I don’t. Do you remember the time Uncle Mani came? I heard him quarrel with my mother. He was claiming me as his daughter.’
‘And what did your mother say?’
‘She didn’t say anything. But you must know. You know the truth,’ I tell him.
Uncle’s face wears a faraway look. I don’t want to interrupt or hurry him. I can see that he is choosing his memories.
‘Mani. My brother Mani. The brother who, when I stood unsure and uncertain, not daring to intrude, took me by the hand and pulled me into the family. I loved him more than I did anyone else.
‘Forever hungry. Forever demanding …he treated life as if it were a chicken leg to be gnawed on till the last shred of flesh was in his mouth and then he would crack the bones with a loud crunch and let the marrow coat his tongue.
‘Mani seldom wasted time thinking about how the world perceived him. It was a kind of raw courage. When he was in the third form, what you would call class eight, he set his heart on winning the all-rounder’s prize at the school festival. His marks were good and he had a long line of sports trophies, but he needed to win a prize in a cultural activity. He saw that most events had a long list of contestants except for the classical music competition which had only three. Mani decided to enroll as the fourth contestant. Mani, who had never had a single singing lesson, can you imagine? All he knew was a varnam that was part of a Singing Lesson programme on the radio. He sang that and won the third prize. But it required courage, a foolhardy reckless courage, to pull it off. That was the kind of person Mani was.’ Uncle smiles.
‘When we were boys, your grandmother often set rat traps around the house. There was a room in which paddy was stored.’ He turns to me suddenly. ‘What do you fill it with these days?’
‘It’s empty,’ I say. ‘Like most of that huge house.’
He nods.
‘The paddy was an open invitation for rats to come and set up home. My mother was tired of them. They didn’t just steal the paddy, they made holes in clothes left to dry, gnawed huge chunks out of vegetables, left droppings, and were a great nuisance. So the rat traps
were brought out. But she was much too squeamish to kill the rats once they were trapped. And my father couldn’t be bothered with such trifles, she thought. I had left home by then.
‘Mani was the official rat killer. He didn’t thrash them to death with a broom like anyone else would have done. He would open the rat trap into a sack and then tie the mouth of the sack and take it to the washing stone.
‘When he was sure he had an audience—the servant maids, our mother and perhaps even a few children from the neighbourhood—he would say, “Look at this gunny bag. How did it get so dusty? I suppose I have to clean this as well …” And he would beat the sack on the stone till the rat was pulverized, while everyone else giggled. Mani knew how to make even death seem comic.
‘Everything to him was calculated in terms of a laugh or the ability to provide pleasure. He loved life so much. That was what I loved about him. His capacity for happiness.
I think my father had no capacity for happiness at all. Everything was constructed around social standing and honour. If something was acceptable to society, he liked it. If it bore even the slightest taint of the illicit, he refused to have anything to do with it. Was he always this way? Or did he become so rigid in order to ward off any gossip or speculation about his family? I can only theorize …
‘When we were young men,’ Uncle begins again, ‘Mani was the same. Instead of squashing rats, he took to seducing women. That was all it was for him: a sport. An unconventional sport, but no more than that. He was handsome and exuded charm. The women loved him. He was Prem Nazir, Gemini Ganeshan, Shammi Kapoor and Gregory Peck rolled into one. Do you see what I mean? There was a particular pose he affected when talking to women. He would cross his arms so that they squared his shoulders, and lean forward. He was tall, so he loomed over the women, and he would affect a look that merged intensity with a faint glimmer of lust. It worked, each time.