The City Son (10 page)

“You think I don’t know?” Didi says. “You think I’m a fool? Is that the kind of love you have for your mother?”

“But, Didi, it’s nothing. I’ve only thought about her a couple of times.”

“Who is she?”

“Just some silly girl. She’s not important.”

“What’s her name?”

“Luna.”

“Ah, a city name. She must be the type who’s out and about.”

“But, Didi—”

“Well, now that you have her, what do you need me for?”

His world is beginning to spin. Her face has changed. Her eyes are narrower; her face is tighter. She’s no longer looking at him. She’s on her way to withholding her affection, and his stomach is contracting, a coiling of muscles that’ll keep tightening and that won’t relent until her face softens in forgiveness. She turns away from him and faces the wall. He should have never brought up the girl. He shouldn’t have even thought about the girl. He’s a fool. Now he has ended up hurting Didi. It’s all that stupid girl’s fault. She and her silly hair and her dumb name and her coquettish ways.

He’s whimpering a bit by now, apologizing to her, stroking her arm, pleading with her to look at him, telling her that she’s just someone at the bus stop, that he really doesn’t have any feelings for her. But she doesn’t turn. She’s immobile, like a sleeping elephant. He weeps, calls out her name, tells her that he’ll purge thoughts of all girls from his mind.

He stands on the bed and bangs his head against the wall. When she doesn’t budge, he bangs harder, repeatedly. The sound resembles the
thud-thud-thud
of someone hammering a nail. His forehead is sticky with blood, but he’s
determined not to stop. He needs to show her his repentance. She needs to know that he’d rather hurt himself than see her unhappy with him. She still doesn’t turn, and, gritting his teeth, he bangs even harder. His head feels like a pumpkin, ready to crack open and shatter into pieces.

The bed lurches, and she’s beside him, holding his head in her arms. He pushes against her so he can hurl himself at the wall again, but she is too strong for him. Blood from his forehead has trickled down to his eyes, making his vision blurred; it’s also running down to his neck. Sharp, seizing pain is pulsating in his head, then shuddering through his spine. She’s whispering things to him, planting kisses on him.

She has him lie down on the bed, then hurriedly fetches a wet towel, with which she cleans him. He closes his eyes as she inspects his injury. His forehead is swollen, he can tell without her saying anything. She rubs a cream on his forehead, then gets some gauze and wraps it around his head. She’s silent, and her mannerisms resemble a mother taking care of an errant child. She hands him an aspirin, which he swallows with water. She makes kindly noises, then goes to the kitchen and makes some
kheer
. When it’s ready, she spoon-feeds it to him.

When the Masterji and Sumit return home, they ask what happened. Didi scolds them for pestering him with questions when he’s clearly hurt. “He tripped, the poor boy, and he fell, okay? Now leave him alone.” Sumit goes to the corner to study, and the Masterji sits on the bed, dazed. He
notices the speckles of blood on the bed; then his gaze falls upon the wall, where there’s a crimson patch, with a few strands of hair sticking to it.

“Tripped and fell” is the story he provides to Mahesh Uncle and Sanmaya. That evening he runs a high fever. His mother comes into his room—Sanmaya must’ve told her—and stands by the bed, watching him. “I’m fine,” he tells her, “you can go back to your room.” But she continues to stand. Then she crumples to the floor, as though her legs have given out on her. He bolts from the bed and goes to her. She’s shaking, her teeth rattling. But there are no tears in her eyes. She gazes into his face, and it’s he who finds that his cheeks have become moist, and it’s he who is consoling her, telling her everything is fine, that everything is going to be fine. He holds her tightly in his arms, and her fingers reach out, explore his face, attempt to wipe away his tears, but her fingers are trembling.

PART 2

CHAPTER TWELVE

N
OW TWENTY-THREE YEARS
old, Tarun has gotten into the habit of following women around the city. This usually happens after work, on the average of once every other week. He leaves the office of Mahesh Enterprises in Putalisadak and, telling the driver to take the car back home, walks. At some point he ends up following a woman. It’s never planned; he doesn’t have roaming eyes that settle on a target. He’s not a hunter; he’s not searching for prey. In fact, he suffers from the impression that he’s the one preyed upon, by an unknown force that’s constantly on his back. He doesn’t need to turn his head to look—it’s not that type of threat. It’s more a brooding presence that hovers above his head. It’s some type of a
dance: he’s following these women, and this thing is following him.

He doesn’t even have to think about a woman during these walks. He’s often thinking about something else. Mahesh Enterprises, for example. He’s thinking about how to make the business grow again, for it has been declining in the last couple of years, ever since a senior manager absconded with a large sum of money, leaving Mahesh Uncle devastated and the company in doldrums.

When his mind is on Mahesh Enterprises and its troubles, there’s a pensive quality to Tarun’s evening walks. He’s mulling the problems at work as he’s meandering through streets and lanes. At a young age he’s now the director of the company. The senior manager’s betrayal has delivered a blow to Mahesh Uncle, and lately he has withdrawn from the company’s activities and left Tarun to handle its day-to-day affairs. The plan for the five-star resort has failed because investors pulled out in the aftermath of Mahesh Enterprise’s financial woes. The volume of import-export the company engages in has been reduced to half; so has the number of employees. Now Tarun oversees a staff of five at the Putalisadak office. He blames Mahesh Uncle’s overgenerous personality: the old man trusted the senior manager, allowed him total access. Tarun has cut down on expenses that he thought were extravagant on Mahesh Uncle’s part. He questions his staff when they take more than an hour’s lunch break. He doesn’t allow the new senior manager to handle large sums of money. He doesn’t feel like he’s an
unreasonable boss: he compliments jobs well done; he’s sympathetic, to a reasonable degree, toward his workers with family and children they need to attend to; and he allows his staff time off for major festivals, even if he has to take on extra work himself.

The older among the staff miss Mahesh Uncle, who makes only sporadic visits to Putalisadak. He knew the names of his workers’ children. He held annual picnics to which family members were invited and where they were acknowledged by name. He gave his staff regular bonuses. He sent them on all-paid seminars and trainings. Tarun, on the other hand, doesn’t get emotionally close to his workers. He’s brisk, efficient; he can even laugh and convey a joke or two with his office staff. They go along, but they know he’s different. There’s a severely reserved quality to him, as though something is physically wrong inside; something about his body, the way it’s so tight and contracted, as if, as one staff member put it, “there’s a giant metal weight inside his chest that makes it impossible for him to feel joy.” It’s not that they dislike him, but they dislike it when they find themselves becoming sad in his presence, as they often do. He’s a lonely figure: as he sits at his desk or when he’s on the phone or when he studies a document or dictates a letter to the typist—even when he’s drinking tea. The typist once complained to her husband at night, “When I have to spend more than a couple of hours taking dictations from him, I feel like my own world has become dark. Even the thought of him makes me depressed.”

Tarun is aware that many people shy away from him. It’s not hostility. It’s a reaction akin to stepping back from someone with foul breath or with body odor. It makes him morose, his inability to connect with people, the “smell” he exudes.
You are a smelly, abhorrent person
, the voice inside him tells him, in a half-contemptuous, half-pitying tone. That is your lot. Yes, this is my lot, he acknowledges, and the thought brings a brief calm. He uses the line as a mantra:
This is my lot
. Sometimes it generates acceptance; sometimes an overwhelming sorrow.

Even during parties he finds himself either engaged in serious, short-lived conversations or by himself in a corner, nursing a drink. These days he’s more or less stopped going to these parties, where businessmen drink heavily and brag about their accomplishments or complain about how hard it is to do business in this country. Now he only attends parties if not attending could jeopardize a business prospect. He is fine with working by himself in the office, his doors closed, handling transactions over the phone in which he can be clipped and concise and still get the job done. He’s not sure he likes the world of business, the negotiations and the haggling and the
chaplusi
and the loudmouthed braggadocio. It’s just not him. But he has taken on this responsibility from Mahesh Uncle, and he’s going to fulfill it to the best of his ability.

“I hate to put you in this kind of position so early,” Mahesh Uncle had said when he first proposed to make Tarun the director. “But I no longer have it in me to go to
the office daily and handle the details. Every time I walk in, every time I look at the staff, I think of Biswa and his treachery, and I lose interest in everything.”

“What’s happened has happened. Biswa will get his due at some point. We need to move on.”

Mahesh Uncle looked like he was about to weep. “I had such high hopes for Mahesh Enterprises, high hopes for what shape I’d leave it in for you.”

“I’m fine with the shape it’s in. I’ll take care of it—I don’t want you to worry.”

His routine with Didi hasn’t changed much over the years. When he goes to Bangemudha on Saturdays—now almost every Saturday—after some chitchat the Masterji and Sumit leave. Then it’s him and Didi. He lies in bed. She exits, locks the door from the outside, then returns through the back door. He waits for her impatiently. She approaches him and undresses him, leaving him in his underwear. She often doesn’t wear a bra so when she unbuttons her blouse he has full access to her breasts. The sickly pleasure of being with her is still the same for Tarun; if anything, it seems to have intensified because his libido has increased. She has learned to be even more patient, gentler, more teasing with her fingers so that his arousal is greater, and when he achieves orgasm he spurts more. She kisses better, her tongue performing more tricks, darting and taunting, sliding and attacking and submitting.

Over the years she hasn’t aged. When he comments on
how she looks the same, how her skin has become even smoother, she says, touching his lips, “You’ve kept me young.” He smiles, but he has been noticing more creams and lotions and oils inside cupboards and on tables, in the bathroom. Now during their love sessions she also puts on a lipstick-like substance that gives color to her lips and tastes like oranges or bubble gum when their lips meet. These days she likes to give him hickeys, which he covers with a scarf, even on hot days. One Saturday when the Masterji arrived home, by himself because Sumit had gone on an overnight trip with this college friends, Tarun forgot to cover the hickeys. His father, with concern, approached him and said, “Tarun, these red burns on your neck …” He trailed off once he realized what they were and, red faced, shuffled to the bathroom.

She also likes to call him her lover. “You’ve grown so much now,” she says, “you’re like my lover.” She pronounces it
labar
. When she first said it, he’d laughed, for although he’d heard her utter Nepali versions of English words—
pilastic, taybul, restooran, iskool—labar
sounds too filmy. “Where did you hear it?” he asked her. She feigned offense. “Why? You don’t think our types can use this word? Only your city seductresses can say it?”

He has considered going to see a therapist about what ails him. He has pictured himself lying on a couch while the therapist takes meticulous notes, saying,
Hmm, hmmm
or
Go on
. What would Tarun say to the therapist?
I was a young boy when we started our relationship. She is the only mother I’ve known
. This declaration alarms him. He has had his own mother all this time, so why would he say such a thing? Yet it’s true: when he thinks,
Mother
, he thinks of Didi.