The City Son (13 page)

He loves the idea of being able to shatter the world. He thinks of this thin woman sitting next to him wielding a giant hammer, bursting open and releasing things that need to be let out. Something stirs in him, a glimmer. But he remembers how he’s late for Bangemudha, how Didi must be beside herself by now, and whatever had tried to emerge retreats inside. This is mere conversation, with the colorful Japanese garden as a good backdrop for two people who are seemingly contemplating marriage. Soon this conversation will be over, and he’ll head to Bangemudha. Yet what comes out of his mouth alarms him, making him regret it instantly, “So, have you ever been in love?” He’s not sure why he asks her that; he’s not interested in it—it’s an inane question.

She’s startled. “Have you?” There’s caution in her voice.

He shakes his head. “What about you?”

“I can’t tell you,” she says. “It’s too private.”

She senses something and glances at the window, where she spots the shadowy figure. “Is that your mother?” she asks. “How is your mother? Is she doing all right?”

“She’s as fine as she can be, I guess,” he says. “It’s no secret, what has happened to her.” He wants to check what time it is but is afraid of offending the girl again, so he refrains. A knot is beginning to form in his stomach. He can see Didi, sitting at the edge of the bed, palms on knees.

Mahesh Uncle steps out. “
Kura sakyo?
Or do you two need more time?” he asks as he approaches.

In front of Mahesh Uncle the girl’s body language changes, becomes more closed, tighter, more obedient.

“How do you like our garden, Rukma?”

“The garden is very nice, Uncle.”

“And I think you look very nice in the garden.”

They go into the living room, where there are more smiles. Rukma’s parents and Mahesh Uncle seem to think that the encounter has gone well: the young couple has been observed to engage each other in the garden.

Sanmaya has emerged from the kitchen to bid goodbye to the visitors. Her toothless smile is more toothless, more joyous, today.

The upstairs door creaks open, then silence. Mahesh Uncle puts his arm around Rukma’s shoulders and says, “Come,” but her father is quick: “Is that
Apsaraji
? Since we are already here, it would be nice to meet her too.
Hoina hajur?
”

Mahesh Uncle looks a little uneasy. “Now, this is not a hidden matter.” He lowers his voice. “You must have heard about her—”

“Of course we have. We all have problems, don’t we,
Maheshji? I think a quick meeting with the mother will be good.”

“Of course.” Mahesh Uncle calls Tarun’s mother, but there is no movement upstairs. Tarun is assigned to fetch her. He goes up: she is standing at the top of the landing and watching him. Her dhoti is crumpled, but her hair is combed. Did Sanmaya comb it in anticipation of the guests?

“Let’s go down,” he says. She doesn’t put up any resistance. They descend the stairs. At the bottom she stops and stares, first at the father, who does a
namaste
, then at the mother, who smiles falsely, then the gaze settles on Rukma.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
T IS ALREADY
dark when he reaches Bangemudha. Didi is in the kitchen, her back turned to him. Sumit is home. “Oho,
dai
,” Sumit says with a pleased smile. He is so polite, Sumit, so happy. He has friends who care for him and want to spend time with him. His teachers at the college love him; the neighborhood shopkeepers give him a little extra—the butcher his choicest meat, the spice dealer a sample of a new fragrant spice. His smile doesn’t leave him; he doesn’t have a bitter, angry bone in his body. Even when the vagrant and drug-addled ways of his older brother come up in conversations Sumit says, “Yes, Amit
dai
is like that,” as if to say,
What’s the point of berating him
? If it’s necessary to provide help to his troubled brother, Sumit does it quietly. One
time Sumit brought Amit home late in the evening, Amit’s face bruised and swollen. No one knows how Sumit got the news about his brother’s condition, but he took care of his brother for two days, bringing him the hot-water bottle for his aching body, soothing him when he ranted, and applying iodine to his face, until Amit became better and vanished again.

“Why so late today,
dai
?” Sumit says. “Too much work?” He admires Tarun, has dropped by the office in Putalisadak a few times to watch him work. “How did
dai
learn all this?” he often says to Tarun. “You’re so good when it comes to business matters.”

Didi hasn’t turned to him at the sound of his entry and his conversation with Sumit, so he goes to her. Sumit watches him go to her; if he thinks there’s anything odd with the way Tarun and his mother interact, he doesn’t show it. He may simply think that for some reason she has a bond with Tarun that’s deeper than the one she has with her own sons. Sumit doesn’t resent Tarun for it, and his affection toward his stepbrother hasn’t diminished. There are days when Tarun thinks that such naïveté is foolish and dangerous. One day Sumit is going to be hit hard—either by what he discovers about his mother and his stepbrother or by something else—and it’s going to destroy him.

In the kitchen, Didi doesn’t speak to Tarun. He stands beside her, waiting. Until she turns to him and speaks with that special sweetness in her voice, he has to wait. There is no other choice. This is his life. He has chosen it,
this union with Didi. It encloses him like a narrow steel cage, with so little room to move that his breath is forced back inside his gullet. “Didi,” he whispers, and he remembers the blinding swiftness with which she dismissed his mother and sent her crawling and sniveling across town. He needs to touch her flesh, to press his lips against hers, to accept her lips, warm and nectarlike, on his face and cheeks and mouth and neck and bare shoulders. “Please. Will you please look at me?”

She doesn’t, and he continues to writhe. It’s his fault—this truth is so clear to him now that it’s like a blinding white light. She hasn’t yet eaten today because on Saturdays she waits to eat lunch with him. Every Saturday she feeds him first, watching him happily, then she eats as he fills her in on what has been happening throughout the week. But even as he is overwhelmed by his debilitating guilt, he fears that her withdrawal today isn’t simply about his inexcusable lateness. It’s as if she’s sniffed out his choice of someone else over her. But how does she
know
?

Should he confess? Out of the corner of his eyes he notes that his father, sitting cross-legged on his bed, is staring at the wall, the one with the window facing the street, as though he’s transfixed by a movie showing there. Sumit is sitting on a chair, engrossed in a book. He reads voraciously, that boy, and Tarun suspects that he writes poetry on the sly and has perhaps even published a poem or two under a pseudonym. Tarun briefly flirts with the notion of shutting the kitchen door so he can embrace Didi openly, make her
face him, perhaps even plant a quick desperate kiss on her lips. But the kitchen door hasn’t been pulled shut in years, and now it looks stubbornly stuck to the wall against which it rests. Besides, shutting this door would be a direct signal to the family about him and Didi. It will surely disturb Sumit, and, if he can help it, Tarun wants to spare his younger stepbrother any immediate suffering. The best thing to do now is to confess to Didi, let it all out so that she can then punish him, and it’ll be over.

“What could I do, Didi?” he says. “I was getting ready to come here, when Mahesh Uncle brought these visitors.”

There’s no response from her.

“Please believe me, Didi, I really didn’t want to meet her.”

She stiffens, and the tiny hairs on her arms—is he imagining it?—rise. She still doesn’t turn to him.

“He’s worried about me,” he says, referring to Mahesh Uncle. “I feel like I’m trapped.”

“Who is she?”

Briefly he closes his eyes to savor the sound of her voice. She has given him an opening. But the battle is ahead of him now, and he knows it. He can’t squander it away—he can’t. “It’s just some girl,” he says dismissively.

“How do you know her?”

“I don’t. Mahesh Uncle invited them, the family.”

“Is that why you’re late? Because you were
goofing
with her?”

“I wasn’t goofing! I left at the first opportunity I could.” He lifts his hand toward her arm, but she inches away from
him so that his fingers get only a fleeting contact with her skin.

“So, what’s the conclusion? You’re not going to come here anymore? You’re going to spend time with—with this …” Her distaste for this unknown woman is so great that she can’t complete her sentence. “I can smell her on you. You let her touch you, didn’t you? You let her do whatever she wanted with you.” She leans her head back, as though he’s reeking.

He’s aware that Sumit has lifted his head from his reading, but the boy immediately returns to his book: this is the not the first time that Didi and Tarun have engaged in urgent whispers in the kitchen. “I didn’t let her touch a single hair on my body. She means nothing to me.”

“If she means nothing to you, then why did you leave me stranded here, alone in this …” She turns toward him, not to face him but only to indicate the flat, with her cuckolded husband and her smiling son.

“I will never let it happen again,” he says. His feelings for her are so deep and true that they make him want to weep. All he wants to do is gaze at her, touch her lips with his fingers, inhale the faint powdery food smell that comes off her neck. It’s crucial she understand how much she means to him and that he’ll go to any length to … the picture appears before him without any effort: he and Didi in a room; the door is shut; there are no prying eyes.

It’s clear, it’s simple: now he knows what he needs to do.
“I have a surprise for you,” he says. His voice is low, conspiratorial. “It’s a gift.”

“I don’t need your gifts.”

“Please let me do this. I want to see you happy.”

Finally, finally, she turns to face him. Her eyes have a faint crimson streak in them as though she’s been drinking. It’s because of the hurt he’s inflicted. “Next week,” he says. “I’ll take you to a special place.” He knows exactly what he wants; he’ll be able to secure it in a week.

She continues to stare at him. “And what about that woman?”

He moves closer to her and takes her hand. “She’s nothing. She means nothing to me. I don’t even remember her name.”

The week that follows is a frenzy of two activities: finding a room in the city for him and Didi and resisting Mahesh Uncle, who is insistent that it’s a mistake to let Rukma slip through their fingers. “Dart away from our palms” is the expression he uses.
Hatbata futkyobhane
. I’m not ready, he tells Mahesh Uncle, who is gently persuasive. “Once you get married, you won’t regret it. Besides, who is asking you to give up anything?” Throughout the week he tells Tarun, “It’ll cure your loneliness.” Sanmaya, as she serves food in the dining room, chimes in: the girl’s family is fabulous.

Tarun scours the city, looking for an appropriate place: a simple room for a few hours a week, if that, so nothing fancy, nothing that’ll call attention to itself, an expense that
he’ll not even need to record or justify. It’ll be better if it’s a place close to where Didi works and lives so she won’t have to travel on a bus or in a taxi. He can’t assign one of his office staff to look for a place because he doesn’t want any questions or suspicions, so he canvasses the city himself. A place close to where she works will allow her quick escapes. On the fourth afternoon of his search, he finds a room at the top of a building, which is so tall and thin that it seems to be competing with Dharahara, the city tower which is only a couple hundred meters away. The owner lives in the next neighborhood.

The next day Tarun has a mattress and two chairs delivered to the room. They’re rudimentary, the room and the furnishings. The room is the only one on the top floor, basically a single room on the flat roof. The owner informs him that he ran out of money as he was constructing, so more rooms will be added on this floor, but not for the next couple years. The roof affords a nice view of the city: the surrounding houses, the parade ground, and the thin, white, pencil-like tower nearby. Tarun feels good about this procurement; he is confident no one will discover them here, in this room that’s five or six stories up. It’s in the middle of the city’s ruckus, with shops crammed into little spaces at the street level and street vendors hollering and yodeling and poor migrant women walking around begging with sickly looking babies in their arms. And the mouth of the stairs that zigzag up the outside of the building is tucked away to the side. Who in their right mind
walking below would think that something is happening all the way at the top?

Didi will be pleased. Once the furniture is delivered, he walks around the roof. There are no railings to enclose the space, so, should he decide to leap, it’s an easy drop. In a few seconds he could be a pile of blood and meat on the pavement below. It’s late afternoon. There’s not a shred of cloud in the sky. The noise of the city rises above with a small din, like a muted but energetic chant. He stands close to the edge and opens his arms wide and closes his eyes to feel the air.