The City Son (15 page)

Rukma tells Tarun that there are moments when she wonders if the mutual observation in the marketplace really happened. She was feverish and hallucinatory those days, and the marketplace incident could have been a waking dream, a result of her yearning-soaked memories of the past
blurring with her fantasies of the future. It’s quite possible that she saw someone like him, someone who resembled him, a twin-like Newar lover. After all, there are hundreds of mustached men with luscious lips in this town, aren’t there? She might just have needed to see a replica of him in order to brush her hands clear of any remnants of that affair. As she went home, she might even have made promises and vows to herself: no more men, spinsterhood, focus on career, and so on. But once she reached home and faced the disappointed, miserable personas of her parents, she knew her resolve wasn’t going to last.

“So, are you still seeing him?” at home her mother asked dolefully. “Is that where you’re coming from?”

She shook her head. Her mother had been crying since the day she came upon the letter, and her eyes were red.

Rukma put her hand on her arm and said, “Mother, why are you crying so much. Let it go. It’s over.”

“That’s what you say, but whenever you go out I think you’ve gone to see him—what can I do?”

She and her mother might have been in the kitchen then, and her father was within earshot, his hands in his pockets, his head down.

“He’s marrying someone else.”

“Yet the damage has been done.”

“Rukma,” her father said, “you realize, don’t you, that once people hear about this, it will have very negative consequences. I don’t even know where to begin …”

“What do you propose we do, father?” Rukma said. “I
can’t undo what has happened. What do you think is the best solution to this?”

He was surprised, as though he didn’t expect her to say it. Her mother stopped crying, and the two exchanged looks.

“Will you do what we ask you to do?”

Rukma knew what was coming. “Yes.”

“Let us find you a boy, and let us move quickly before this gets out.”

Her mother stood next to her, and now it was her hand on Rukma’s arm, like they were playing a game of tag.

“That’s fine with me.”

“You’re not joking?”

“I’m not joking.”

She hugged Rukma. Her father uncharacteristically hugged her. More tears were shed. At that moment when she thought of her Newar lover it seemed like she’d known him a long, long time ago, whereas it hadn’t been too long since their break up. How’s that possible? Rukma asked Tarun. How can something that happened to her turn so fluid and flimsy within days? That’s something she doesn’t understand about this life. We become so wrapped up in, so intensely engaged with, our present moment, she says, and soon after the moment passes, its hold over us dissipates.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
HE SECOND NIGHT
in bed when Rukma kisses him, he kisses back gingerly. He feels petrified, and his body is cold and unresponsive to her touch. After some light kissing, he gently pushes her away. It’s not that he doesn’t like the kiss; he’s deathly afraid of what it’ll turn into. “Is something wrong?” she asks, and he says that he’s exhausted. She’s satisfied with that answer, but when he gives the same answer on the third night, then the fourth and the fifth, a knot forms on her forehead. On the fifth night, she ignores what he says, and her hand roams his body as she attempts, unsuccessfully, a longer, deeper kiss with him, one with more feeling, the kind she clearly thinks a wife and a husband should be sharing. But he has an
avoidance mechanism with the kiss, whereby after a few seconds he moves his lips and plants them on her forehead, as though he were kissing a sister. On the fifth night her hand rubs his crotch, and harder, with desperation, when she finds that there’s no movement down there at all. All this time he’s lying there stiff as a corpse, his heart pounding loudly like a gong inside him.
Please stop, please stop
, he thinks.
This is like rape
—this thought assaults him.
I am being raped
, and he jerks himself up from the bed and sits, facing the other way.

“What’s wrong?” she asks him, her voice hoarse. She’s trying not to cry.

He contemplates the floor.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you acting like this? Why—am I not—what is it that’s my fault?”

“Who says it’s your fault?”

“Then?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Is it because of my revelation? What I told you about my past?”

“It’s not that.”

After some silence she says, “I misjudged you. I thought by getting everything out in the open I’d gain your trust.”

“It’s not about your past.”

She lies down and closes her eyes. He, too, lies down. He knew this was coming, and yet when it’s here, it’s worse than
how he thought it’d be. The fifth night of their marriage and already there’s an impasse so big it appears insurmountable. She is disappointed in him, and he simply wishes it’d all go away, that she wasn’t here, that he had the bed to himself. He’s not meant to be with anyone.

He closes his eyes, and here comes Didi, with her smile. She’s giving him a bath, her strong hands rubbing soap on him. Her hand moves down to his crotch, gently fondling his penis.
No, no
, Tarun tells himself as he reaches down under the blanket and begins to stroke himself. This is the only way he can feel good right now, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. His hand moves faster. The bed creaks, but the pleasure is too intense for him to stop, and of course, as usual, he discharges quickly in his pajamas.

She’s in disbelief over what has just happened, then she doubts herself, tries, desperately, to convince herself that she has imagined the squeaking of the bed. Surely, her new husband wouldn’t be masturbating on the same bed after repeated failed attempts at sex with her?

He busies himself at work the next few days and finds some solace in the catching up he has to do. His mother’s death and the wedding have pushed everything to the background. He has to make quick moves to salvage a couple of business deals and face one irate loan officer who claims he’s in hot water with his bank because some key documents hadn’t been signed on time. He makes phone calls and pacifies people and averts crises. His staff comes into his office,
but he barely smiles as he accepts congratulations for his wedding. When a couple of them try jokes and innuendos about newlyweds with him, he’s annoyed and responds with questions about their work.

Even as Tarun spends long hours at the office, the slobbering anxiety looms large in the background, his dread about Didi: what is he going to say to her about what he’s done. During brief office breaks, he clasps his head with his hands. He thinks that he should have sneaked out during the mourning period or taken a brief moment before the wedding to explain what was happening, to ask for her forgiveness. Now the days are slipping by, and he’s feeling as though small slithering things are crawling inside him, making him squirm. He yearns for her, shivers when he thinks of her face looking at him in adoration, her voice that’s sweet as honey, her dark brown shoulders that he loves to plant his lips on. Didi lingers in the back of his head—people think of the recent dead watching over them, but here he is, having had barely any thought of his mother since her death.

In the house Rukma appears to converse normally with Mahesh Uncle and Sanmaya. During mealtimes she smiles and piles food onto Mahesh Uncle’s plate, despite his protestations, like a good daughter-in-law should. In the kitchen she tucks the end of her dhoti into her waist and goes to work, cooking the favorite dishes of the men in the house, thereby receiving even-bigger toothless smiles of approval from Sanmaya.

But as days go by, it takes her longer to smile, a couple of seconds more to meet the eyes of the person addressing her. She’s lost in thoughts more often, and when she and Tarun are together in the living room or the bedroom there are moments she seems to find solace in leaning back and simply closing her eyes.

A couple of Mahesh Uncle’s friends throw parties on the newlyweds’ behalf, and they attend these parties and act normal. Later at night in bed, when she asks him how he enjoyed the evening—they’re still trying to converse, despite the strain—he says that these parties tire him, then turns his back to her and closes his eyes, hoping, praying, that she, under the influence of one or two glasses of wine she’s consumed, won’t attempt anything. He waits, and she doesn’t lean over to rub his shoulder or chest. He’s immensely relieved, yet despondent. He’s sure that her thoughts are filled with her Newar lover.

A few weeks after his wedding he leaves Putalisadak early in the afternoon and goes to Ladys Fashion. The sewing shop is in a large room of the second floor of a house in Pako. He stands in the doorway, listening to the clacking and clattering of a dozen or so machines operated by women. Didi is in a corner, close to the window, and she doesn’t look up from her work. The owner of the shop, a small woman with a large mole on her nose, greets him, and he nods and goes to Didi. In this moment of anxiety and trepidation as he approaches her, he finds it difficult to maintain his official
face, a young man who is in charge of a company at twenty-three. What he really wants to do is crouch before her, in front of her machine, and ask for forgiveness. But eyes are watching them, so he pulls up a stool and sits next to her. “I wanted to come earlier,” he says, “but I simply couldn’t arrange it.” Her eyes are glued to the thread that’s hammering itself into the seam between her fingers. He keeps on with his low voice. She continues as though he’s not there, and he, a married man now, briefly contemplates getting her attention by banging his head against the floor.

“Why did you come here?” she says finally, after an excruciatingly long time. Her voice is filled with days of crying. But she spoke, which means she’s cracked a bit inside. He can even smell onions on her, faintly, from this morning’s cooking. He savors that smell for a moment, then says, “I have something for you, something I need you to see.”

“I don’t have time to see your silly things.” She bites off a thread with her teeth.

“It won’t take long. Half an hour at the most.”

She finally turns to face him. Her eyes are puffed up. Her cheeks slightly swollen. She turns back to her machine. He waits. The
clickety-clickety-clickety
of the sewing machines in the room—it sounds like there are thousands of them—fills his consciousness.

“You must be very happy with your—”

“I don’t care about her.”

She says nothing.

“I didn’t come here to talk about her.”

“Why?” She puts down the dress she’s been sewing and faces him squarely. “Is it because you’re having so much fun with her?” Her voice has risen slightly, attracting the attention of some women in the room. “Because she’s so pretty?” It’s as though she doesn’t care if the others think it sounds like a lovers’ quarrel.

He wants her to keep her voice down but doesn’t want to jeopardize the fact that she’s finally engaged him. He decides to use her language. “You know I don’t care for these
sahariya
girls.”

“Then why did you marry her, so soon after the death of your so-called mother, as if you couldn’t wait to get your hands on her?”

“I had no choice.”

“No choice,” she says. Her voice is low now. “Did you think about me, for a moment? What my state will be?”

Tears have come to her eyes. He wipes them with his thumb, intensely aware that several pairs of eyes are on them. One of the women, a mousy one, has a small, knowing smile on her face.

“Please,
jauna ma sanga
,” he says.

She’s stopped running the machine. Apparently the whole thing had become too much for her.

“It’s not far,” he says. “I want to see you smile again. Please.”

She presses her palm to her face. A man has entered the shop and is exchanging sharp words with the owner near the door, which has the other workers distracted. “Go wait
for me downstairs,” she says, with her palm still covering her face so that her voice is muffled.

Didi is quiet as he takes her to their hideout. Before they climb the stairs she says, “Where are we? Where are you taking me? If you’re taking me to meet your new
chhaundi
, I’m not interested.” But she knows his wife is not up there. “It’s a surprise.”

On the second floor is a shop with copying and long-distance phoning facilities, and a young man there, his hands in his pockets, looks disinterestedly as they go up. It’s hard to say what’s on the next couple of floors—renters? shops?—but at one point she leans against him, breathing hard, and says, “Just a moment.” By the time they reach the top she’s so breathless that she’s wheezing, and she keeps saying, “It better be good since you’ve made me suffer so much,” but she finally has a trace of a smile, and her cheeks appear to have regained some color. He feels light and buoyant.

“Okay, what do you have here?” she asks, but the gleam in her eyes tells him that she’s beginning to understand. He holds her hand and leads her past their room to the roof. His tie flutters in the wind. She surveys the scene. “Oh my, what a nice view,” she says. “Is this what my betrayer son brought me to see?” But she knows there’s more; she’s simply playing along, like she used to when he was younger, when he used to lead her by the hand to some surprise, perhaps Sumit hiding behind the door.