उसके हाथ - १

बात उन दिनों की है जब मैं कॉलेज से निकल कर दिल्ली में पहली-मर्तबा नौकरी कर रहा था. नौकरी में उस वक़्त के हिसाब से पैसे ज्यादाही मिलते थे और काम भी बहुत ज्यादा नहीं था. नयी नयी नौकरी थी, हाथ में पहली बार पैसे आ रहे थे. दोस्तों के साथ बहुत ऐय्याशी के साथ उड़ाये पर जल्दी ही उकता भी गया. दोस्तों की बातें फूहड़ और बकवास लगने लगी – हर वकत वोही टर्र- टर्र – लड़कियों के पीछे लार टपकाना और डींगे हांकना. मैं उनसे अलग ही हो गया. नौकरी में भी उत्साह जल्दी ही मर गया या यूँ कहिये की मार दिया गया. समझ नहीं आ रहा था की इतना कम काम करने के लिए मुझे इतने पैसे क्यूँ मिल रहे थे और इतनी देर क्यूँ बैठना पड़ता था. कॉलेज में तो तब भी क्लास्सेस बंक कर सकते थे, यहां तो स्कूल वाला हाल था. उस पर मेरा बॉस भी अव्वल दर्जे का घटिया आदमी था. बहुत कम आता था और उम्र काफी ढल चुकी थी उसकी. इसीके डर से घूमता रहता था की कहीं नौकरी न चली जाये या कोई मजाक न कर रहा हो. अपने काम से ज़्यादा यह फिक्र में रहता था की दूसरे क्या काम कर रहे हैं. दूसरों की परेशानियों और विपदा के किस्सों में उससे बड़ा मज़ा आता था पर ऐसे बनता जैसे सहानभूति कर रहा हो. हाय राम, बेचारा, च-च! मुझे ऐसे आदमियों से सख्त घृणा है जो मुंह पर कुछ और दिल में कुछ और रखते हैं.

कई बार सोचा नौकरी बदल लूं. पर आर्थिक मंदी के दिन आ गए थे – चाहता भी तो कहीं और नौकरी नहीं मिलती, या यूँ कहिये ढूँढने की मेहनत नहीं करना चाहता था. नौकरी मिल भी जाती तो और मेहनत करनी पड़ती जो मेरे उस वकत की मानसिक दशा में कम ही मुमकिन दिखाई देता था. जिस तरह से एक नयी साइकिल को स्थिरावस्था से गति देने से पुरानी साइकिल को कभी कभार पेडल मार कर चलाते रहना आसान होता है, ऊसी तरह नौक्रियों का हाल होता है. पुरानी नौकरी में बस सही टाइम से आओ, दर्जनों बार उठ कर चाय पियो, जो काम आये उसे कर दो. काम भी अक्सर ऐसा होता है की खाना-पूर्ती – चाहे जितना बेमन से किया हो, बस कुछ-कुछ हो जाना चाहिए. अच्छा कर दो तो शायद उल्टा भोगना ही पड़े -- ऊपर बैठने वाले पीठ पर पिशाच की तरह बैठ जायेंगें और अपना सारा काम भी आप ही से करायेगें और सारा श्रेय आपस में ही बाँट लेंगें. काम में अगर बेरुखी और मंदी का आलम रहे तो आप भीड़ से बाहर नहीं दिखोगे, कोई खून चूसने नहीं उतरेगा. कभी कभार टिप्पणियाँ मिल सकती हैं पर उसकी भी उम्मीद कम ही है – ऐसी नौकरियों में काम का स्तर बहुत नीचे होता है. कुछ हैं जो पूरा भार संभालते हैं: कुछ इसलिए के बेचारे मिजाज़ के मारे हैं – आदत है की अपना स्तर न गिरने दें चाहे स्थिति जितनी ही खराब हो – मैं ऐसे लोगों को मूर्ख ही मानता हूँ, और अपने पिताजी की गिनती ऐसे ही मूर्खों की सभा में करता हूँ. और कुछ हैं जो सोचते हैं की, बस, अगर अच्छा काम करेंगें तो तरक्की और जल्द मिलेगी. पर वो भी नासमझ हैं. ऊपर उठने के लिए काम के अलावा, बहुत मस्खे मारने पड़ते हैं. मेरे कुछ संगियों ने यह राह भी अपनाई. मेरे बौस की हर बात में हाँ में हाँ मिलाते, बल्कि उसके उत्सुक कपटी कानों में अफवाह-बाज़ी करते, और उसके मजाकों पर ऐसे ठहाके लगा कर हँसते की वो भी समझ जाता की ज़बरदस्ती हंस रहे हैं. एक जनाब तो दिवाली पर उसके लिए घर से इतने पैकेट मिठाई लाये जैसे अपनी लड़की का रिश्ता करने आये हों. इनमें से ज़्यादातर मेरे कॉलेज के सहपाठी ही थे और इन्ही के साथ मेरा शुरुआत में बाहर उठाना बैठना था. शायद इन्ही वजहों से उनसे मैं दूर होता गया. कॉलेज में जो कुछ-कुछ अपनी खुद की पहचान और दुनिया की ओछी रीतियों से दूर रहना की बातें थी, उन्हें शायद बातें जान कर हॉस्टल के उन बरामादों में ही दफना कर आना चाहिये  था. उन्हें उस तुच्छ इंसान, जो सहयोग से हमारा बौस था, की चापलूसी करते देख कर लगता था जैसे कॉलेज में इंतिहान के बाद चंद नंबर बढ़वाने के लिए वो प्रोफेस्सरों के कमरों के बाहर चक्कर लगाया करते थे. जैसे भूके मरियल कुत्ते रोटियों के टुकड़ों के लिए किसी कूड़ेदान के आस-पास मंडरा रहे हों.

उनके साथ रहते-रहते भी मैं अकेले रहने लगा. पहले तो मैंने उनके साथ बेबाक दारु-नशा किया, थोड़े दिन जुए की भी लत् पाली, पैर मुझे इन सब नशों में कोई दिलचस्पी पैदा हुई. दूसरों को यह सब करता देख कर समझ गया था कि जिससे वो उत्साह समझ रहा हैं, वो असल में हकीकत से भागना है. मुझे अपनी हकीकत से डर नहीं था, मैं उससे समझना चाहता था जिसमें मैं असमर्थ था. मैंने सारे ऐब एक-एक कर के पाले, इस हद्द तक किये कि दोस्त भी डर गए: बड़े-बड़े ब्रांडों के जूते-कपड़े खरीद कर फ़ेंक दिए, जुआ खेला तो ऐसा खेला की सब दांव पर लगा कर हारा, दारु पी तो धुत्त नशे में सड़क पर ही गिर कर सो गया, एक-दो बार फिजूल की मार-पिटाई भी की – और फिर यकायक सब छोड़ दिया. अब मेरे दोस्त जब पार्टी करने बाहर जाते, तो बहाना मार कर घर पर बैठा रहता और कुछ नहीं करता. पहले पढ़ने कि थोड़ी-बहुत आदत थी पर किताब अब उठाई ही नहीं जाती थी. टीवी पर जो शो आते बहुत फूहड़ लगते थे, समाचार में रिपोर्टरों की बेफिजूली की उत्तेजना और चिंता के स्वांग को देख कर उन्हें जल्द-से-जल्द जिस खौफनाक मौतों का वो तमाशा बना रहे थे उससे कहीं बदत्तर मौत कि दुआ देता. घर पर फोन करो तो पिताजी से मेहनत के ऊपर लेक्चर और माँ से दूर के चाचा-ताऊ के किस्से सुनना पड़ता जिनके निजी जीवन से मुझे कोई दिलचस्पी नहीं थी. मुझे उन दिनों बस कुछ कलात्मक फिल्मों देखने का मन होता पर जब वो देखता तो बहुत बेकरारी होती की जाऊं कहीं और कुछ करूं पर जब आजीवन कुछ न किया हो, तो अब करता तो कहाँ से शुरू करता. वोही साइकिल का उदारहण – इस पुरानी खटारा पर निरुत्साहित पेडल मारे जा रहा था, चाहे कितना ही उतर के बदलने का मन न हो.

उसी वकत मैंने एक दो लडकियां पटांईं. की शायद किसी प्रेमिका कि सौबात में ही राहत मिले. बस राह-फिरते जो अच्छी लगती जा कर पूछ लेता. कुछ ने जूती दिखाई, कुछ डर कर भाग गयीं, कुछ शर्माते-शर्माते मान गयीं. उन्हें मैंने कॉफ़ी हाउस में कॉफ़ी पिलाई, लोदी बाग में हाथ पकड़ कर घूमा, घर ला कर चुम्मा-चाटी की. पर क्षण भर के मज़े के अलावा और कुछ न मिला. एक भी लड़की न मिली जिसकी अक्ल एढ़ी में न बैठी हो, जो खुद को दुनिया कि नज़रों में न देखती हो. कहने को कुछ नहीं होता था पर मुंह पर कभी ताला नहीं पड़ता. सोचा सभी लडकियां ऐसी हो होती हैं – जो बाद में ही पता चला कि ऐसा नहीं है. शायद मेरा उस वकत भाग्य ही खराब था.

इसी बीच एक लड़की मेरे गले पड़ गयी. शादी की रट लगा ली. धमकी देने लगी कि मेरे नाशिक-वाले घर पहुँच जायेगी पर मैंने उसे वहाँ का पता पता न लगने दिया. फिर कहने लगी कि उसने अपने घर पर सब बता दिया है और अल्लाहाबाद से उसके पिता रिश्ता पक्का करने कभी भी मेरी चौखट पर आ धम्केंगें. मैं परेशान हो गया और सोचा कि अब तो कोई और मकान ढूँढना ही होगा. अपने फ्लैट के मित्रों से मैं वैसे ही तंग आ गया था और कई बार ठानी थी कि अकेले ही कहीं खिसक लूँ.  पर मैं निहायती आलसी आदमी हूँ. पीठ पर खुजली करने के लिए भी हाथ तभी उठाता हूँ जब बर्दाश्त के बाहर हो जाये. सोचा कि चलो इस बहाने इन दोस्तों – जिनसे न पहले कि यारी, न कोई सहानुभुति रह गयी थी – इनसे निजात मिलेगी.

Notes from a blood donation

The nurse files the form in a drawer and rises and ushers me to a room behind the desk, a small vestibular affair, with a narrow desk crowded with ampoules and instruments, and three straight-backed chairs circling it. Another door at the back, frosted glass plate embossed with the wing logo and trimmed with steel. Niranjan hesitates to follow us and balks at the door. The nurse ignores him and pulls a chair near me and, in a smooth flurry, shakes and slips a thermometer shaped like a schoolmaster’s paddle inside my mouth, straps the cuff of a blood pressure instrument tightly to my upper arm, reclaims the thermometer and notes my temperature in a small slip, works the machine, pumping the band around my arm and then releasing the air, notes the reading from the monitor in the same slip, removes and rolls away the cuff and then, taking my hand in hers, cleans the pad of the middle finger with a spirit-soaked cotton ball – all without looking at me once. I examine her face with unconcealed challenge: the oiled wispy curls fallen from the tightly-pulled bun beneath the cap, the dark pitted brow, the fixed eyebrows, the surprisingly long lashes, the thick wings of the nose, the clefts at the corners of the thick lips, the full and healthy juts of her breasts. We sit so close, her face bending into mine, that she must surely sense the trespass of my eyes, but she remains frigidly indifferent, the cold clamp of the palm wrapped around my wrist. The lapel pinned to the sari announces her name –

‘Are you from Bangalore?’

‘The eyes lift for a moment, ‘Kochi.’ They fall and that is it. None of the commingling affinities of the world outside, here, only the unmixing water and oil of the nurse and the subject.

The prick startles me but does not sting. She squeezes a drop from my finger, coaxing it like a much-used tube of toothpaste, onto a slide and slips it inside a small lidded box. She rises without a word or a glance at me, and opens the door at the back and steps aside. I turn to Niranjan who smiles and gives me a thumb up.

 The door opens to a vast white room, a row of donor chairs in blue vinyl running along the wall, each with its own set of stainless steel cabinet and IV stand and as snug as a private bed in an opium den. I take the chair she points to me; my neighbour, the only other donor in the room, looks up and nods; in his early fifties, strapped, the cuffs of his shirt rolled up and one hand spread on a luscious armrest. An orderly in shapeless light-blue pyjamas straps me with the same practised brusqueness as the nurse’s. My nerves tauten under the tourniquet like thin vine spreading on a wall. The dab of the spirit and the poise of the needle, the keen precision of its cold tip the very antithesis of the blue warm gurgling artery it moves to insinuate: it enters anticlimactically with the faintest sting.

An intelligence long suspected

It was Aniruddha’s birthday and we had been invited as a couple. It had been a few months since the day I had bumped into Sandeep, now twice the size and all but bald, and just as I jokingly asked him whatever happened to that girl he was dating from preschool, she joined us, pushing Aniruddha ahead in a pram. ‘What do you think?’, he gathered and squeezed her to his side, ‘She is the mother of my child now!’

Nidhi had to work late that night and I turned up alone an hour late. They had booked something like a conference room for the party, a large hall, darkened at one end, where a projector spilled their story on a wall –of growing together from school-bus to Anirudhha – as the ladies sat on sofas and chairs, and dutifully clapped now and then. I paused at the steps: the space was packed with suits and dazzling saris with kids racing and lacing between them like bees. I understood now what he meant when he had emphasised twice on the “something formal”.

 ‘I am wearing a shirt, dude’, I half-joked. Over jeans and sneakers. He smiled tightly and with a brisk pat on the back, returned to fawn over a huddle of bosses.

‘He’s very nervous about the promotion’, she smiled apologetically, ‘He should have got it last quarter, you know.’ I nodded.

‘Where’s Aniruddha?’

‘Oh, he was running a mild fever. So I put him to sleep in another room.’

I walked to the front and leant against a pillar to watch. A passing waiter brought me my whiskey. Three fat wives who could only belong to the middle-aged honchos I had seen him sucking up to, were spread in the middle sofa , bedecked and sporting enormous beehives, ignoring and cackling loudly over the slideshow. Some of the younger wives spread around them smiled and chatted between themselves, some sat alone, blankly staring at the screen. All of them wore an inordinate amount of jewellery for a kid’s party, but tasteful – all of them were very pretty. A particularly young woman, who reminded me of a girl I had once known, rocked a sleeping infant across her shoulder.  

Krithika came hurrying, still the harried wife – dabbing at her perspiring face with the end of a sari or a dupatta, scurrying to the kitchen every five minutes, and apologizing about Sandeep’s last minute cancellations – underneath the makeup. I braced myself when she paused one her tracks suddenly, expecting her to turn around, something forgotten, and come rushing into me. But she remained rooted at that spot, by my side, watching the photograph like she had never seen it before. Them together in a school snap, the boys standing and the girls seated.

She blinked and turned and saw me watching her. She laughed embarrassedly and shook her head. ‘Is there anything left to know after twenty years?’, I asked. Anirudhha was born on the very day they had first met: the undiminished magic of their great love.

I don’t know what it was but I felt something change in her then. A slowness entered. She turned to stare at the photograph again. A stillness. ‘Sometimes you can spend a lifetime with a person and still not understand him’, she spoke flatly.

A slide clicked in place, the light on her eyes shifted. I turned to see the very snap Sandeep had kept framed over his desk, curls and lips. ‘I was a hopeless romantic then. I really believed us when we said we were different, that we had learnt from the sad mistakes we had seen our elders live in, that we would never become like them.’ I watched her profile, lit like a Vermeer from the reflection on the wall, and realised how young and beautiful she herself was. A group crossed before us, bustling and laughing, their gaiety hard and coarse like a callus, casting a shadow on her. When they, and it, passed, she was looking at me, for the first time in the eye. Something had changed – between us.

‘When are you two getting married? You are almost a couple already!’ She laughed.

I hesitated and looked away. ‘Not now. We are happy as it is.’ As always, I was pretending that it was me who was tarrying; paraphrasing her.

‘Spoken like a man, Gaurav’, she spoke evenly again, ‘You want to love but not be bound.’

It stung like vinegar. I watched the whirr of another slide click into place and then turned and told her. ‘It’s her. She does not want to.’

K

The door to his studio flat is open as far as it can on the rough arcing groove, etched over the years by the frame sagging on its hinge.

His room; six-hundred square feet of it. A small hall, a closet-sized kitchen at the back, and a three-steps bathroom along the passage leading to the kitchen: a step forward to enter and approach the mini-washbasin, a step sideways to the right to stand under the shower, and another with an about face to drop the pants and squat. The bed, lumpy and greasy mattress-pillow-quilt, lies rolled neatly in the middle of the hall and the books have been stacked against a wall in three canting columns rising to my shoulders, the built-in cupboard at the back bolted. The floor, a debris of books ash and plastic cups the last time I was here, is bare and glistens in the light streaming from the old newspapers stuck on the windows and blotched with the penumbral mottles from the letterings of a large headline; freshly mopped: damp patches still dry at the corners and the pail peeps from behind the door, the mop floating limply in the brown sludge. Even the smell of cigarettes is gone.

I walk to the end of the passage, to the kitchen. The sink is scrubbed and empty, only the kitchen rag drying on the ledge and a wet green soap. The thin supply of utensils – a pan, three unmatched mugs, a skillet, a spatula, four steel plates, a smattering of cutlery – are stacked hurriedly on a shelf. The electric stove stands alone on the rough four-by-one granite slab, two polythene bags filled with refuse under it, and the small window over it is thrown open. But despite the open window, despite the absence of clutter and smells in this narrow confine, I feel that anxiety again and walk back to the hall and look around as if I expect him to materialize in a corner any moment now. I notice the lump of the laptop under the mattress and hunker down to pull it out. My hands discover the rolled bundle of notes underneath it. I do not have to count them.

The man at the shop tells me that he did not see him go anywhere. ‘Bhaiyya cleared his account today’, he adds as I turn to the stairs. I turn to look him in the eyes but they do not tell me anything.

A thin ledge running along the parapet leads to the wide space at the back of the room where a black metal ladder climbs along the side of the open kitchen window to the roof and beyond, to the top of the water tank. A man in a vest watches me climb up with small, incurious eyes from a balcony – weight on beefy arms gripping the railing – of the building opposite, the building one amongst an uneven row of matchboxes standing on their edges, some of them tipping forward dangerously like drunks. He turns his head and goes back to his staring at a spot where there is nothing to stare.

I reach the top of the concrete tank and, after a moment of hesitation, walk to the edge where he sits. He has grown even thinner, vertebra poking out of the thin Tshirt on his hunched back, the shoulder seams dropping to the arms. I take a tentative, vertiginous, peek of the choked honking alley over which his knobby knees hang. The wires, like scratches keyed on a lift-door, would break his fall but probably electrocute him, leaving him hanging upside-down, wings splayed, a dead bat.

I light a cigarette and still see nothing of his face but the hair, grown to his shoulders now, skeins of silver running through them; not even the tip of his nose. I snap my fingers and offer the cigarette to him. He turns his head and looks up.

The man pauses at the gate and looks inside. I imagine what he sees –the tree lined front lawn, the driveway curling around it, the jut of the portico, the bungalow – but not me, sitting on the roof, watching him. He lifts the latch and steps inside, leaving the gate open behind him. The guard-room is empty – Gopal has stepped out to pee behind the alleys.

The man. Matted hair like a nest containing the wild eggs of his eyes; hair spreading to a shaggy beard and mangy tufts on the naked torso; a sooty rag wrapped at the loins; large bare feet, the rinds chapped and torn, the soles ashen.

He strides along the driveway, a cocky swing to one side, and leaves it to follow the path that cuts through the side of the house, separating it from the side lawn, and curving to an intersection where one path leads to the servants’ quarters and the other to the flimsy wooden double-door at the back of the kitchen courtyard. I follow his progress silently along the parapet, placing my feet in the bald patches where the gravel has been torn out of the tar, to make no scraping sound. The man pauses at the intersection and then takes the turn to the door and pauses at its doorstep – it is flung open. I crane my neck a little forward, hiding behind a black tank set at the corner of the roof, and see chachi sitting alone on the takhat, sifting grains on a chhaj. A rumble from the man’s chest startles us both – a clearing of the throat, a sharp admonition, a loud guttural belch. Chachi looks about uncertainly and then gingerly gets up.

She gathers a few handful of grains in the hem of her sari and rises from the takhat. She crosses the elevated courtyard shaded by a slab of roof, like a card resting on the bridges of the rooms spilt by the space of the courtyard, descends the two steps to the cracked stone floor of the lower courtyard, crosses the stacks of utensils piled on the square brick-lined basin under the tap – a sluice cut into the basin which gurgles with scummy brown water when Ba washes the utensils as it runs along the wall to disappear under the door beyond which the man waits. I watch the approaching black of her neatly oiled, centre-parted hair, peeping out of the half-crescent blue of the pallu, pause at the grey-brown ropy strands falling to his shoulders. I imagine the grease-smeared eyes holding her lowered gaze; of having unwaveringly followed her progress. Her hands rise, holding the hem of her sari, and diffidently offer the wedge of grains rolling and shuffling in its folds, waiting for him to bring a bowl under its tip. After an eternity, the man moves a hand below the rag at his waist and brings forth something – a dark tamarind pod.

Chachi turns and runs away – the hem abandoned, the grains scattering on the stone like beads from a broken necklace. No shout of shame or horror escapes her lips, even when she almost trips over her fallen pallu on the steps; only the slam of the inner door to the house. His palm opens, pink and callused, and the pod falls and disappears in the folds of the loin-cloth again. The head jerks, turns and lifts, and his dark eyes pin me at my spot. I lurch backwards, my legs, fallen asleep, buckling under me, and I fall on my back. A terror seizes me and I wriggle on my back, my shirt tearing on the gravel, my skin scraping, till I find the strength to turn over, rise and scamper away.

The smoggy skyline thins to a red strip over the straggly antennas-crammed roofs; the air dense and sticky.

‘It’s going to rain.’

He rises without comment, my hands poised ready behind his neck lest he stumble, and I follow him down the ladder to the room below, to the mattress where he squats to pull out the laptop and rolled bundle. I stand at the door, my arms folded, as he approaches me and offers them to me.

‘I told you I don’t want them back.’

‘No, take it – I can’t’, the words come in thick glottal stops as if snagging and tearing on phlegmy cobwebs. I do not unfold my hands; after a long pause, he crosses me and lowers them on the floor outside the edge of the jamb.

‘What about your book?’

‘There is no book. I do not have any story to tell.’

‘You are coming with me.’

‘No’, he steps behind the door, a hand resting on the edge of the open door, and declares with finality, ‘I am not going anywhere. Please go.’

I shake my head and my arms tense, expecting him to slam the door on me any moment. He does. I block the swinging door with my shoulder, and after a struggle, he flings himself at me. A long fingernail slashes under my eye and I pin his arms to his side as he pushes me with his head under my ribcage. I repulse him, his arms held pressed to his sides under my palms, his push hardly even makes me sway back on my feet. His feet climb over mine and he heaves again and again, but I do not yield. He collapses suddenly, his legs bucking under him, his head falling on my stomach, and I grab and hold him up by his bony arms. We stand like this for a long time, the sweat pouring from his hair from the struggle, soaking slowly through my shirt, my vest, its wetness reaching my skin.

‘Let me pack some clothes’, he mutters blankly.

Chronicle of a slow death

For months, I would know what to write and yet no words would frame around the thought. And then an imagery chanced carelessly and they would spew forth.

The imagery that inspired this piece was this - one of Mary Cassatt's beautiful portrayals of mothers with their tots. I chanced upon it while reading about her late role in the Impressionist movement.

The passage of death through photographs is also inspired by Cassatt's chronicle of the slow death of her sister, Lydia.

The answer, in case any of you wonder, to why he took the photographs is the same as why Monet painted Camille on her deathbed - because he could not do anything else.

When we asked Ba about her life before us, she told us that her mother had died a long time ago and that her father was always drunk and in his rages would beat her and the new mother who was retarded and there were goats to take out to graze and there were the mountains and rocks she would scamper over before evening fell and then the scattered flock had to be herded and brought back. We accepted the unfaltering finality of her monotone, unbroken by a pause for breath, and asked nothing more. The idea of her life before us was not without a tinge of jealousy, suffered only with the consoling reasoning that she had to be somewhere till we were yet to be born. In fact, the brevity which summed her life before us sounded reassuring, very much like the waiting which it ought to have been.

Ba’s story for us began with the unspoken story of mother’s slow death.

Much of this story I came to understand from the cache of albums I discovered once in a storage loft in one of the rooms of Windsor Manor that I reached by climbing over the grill of the window-frame. These were not like the few photographs I had seen of her –sticking her tongue out as a young girl, holding a dazzling smile in place for the photographer in a gathering, laughing as she posed in a group in front of an excavation site, the Bear crushing papa and her in with a giant paw, the wedding album. There was no self-conscious posing in these discovered albums, no smiles and laughs held in place. Instead, they seemed to chronicle unconscious everyday intimacies where she would be combing her short hair in front of an oval mirror, chewing at a pencil as she frowned at a book laid on the easel of her raised legs on a chair, or raising an eye from a book, cheek resting on the palm of a propped elbow with the other hand holding the place in the book, to look straight out of the photograph to me, the smile suggesting not a coquettish flirtation with the lens but a serene assurance – of heels dug firmly in place and the reins of the life they were building firmly in her grip.

I never saw the albums again – they might be lying buried in the rubble somewhere or perhaps they really got lost – but all my imagined memories of her got overwritten by those photographs that day. When I would develop enough sensibilities, I would realise that they were brilliant portraits, even though all I saw papa ever click with the Pentax were artefacts. But at that moment, and for many days after, I was overwhelmed by a grief that seemed larger than myself, and understood, even as a child, why the adults had interred these albums here. And I asked myself again and again, through silent rage and tears, why? – why had papa taken these photographs? Because they were not only the narrative of their life together but also her slow painful passage to death.

I had always imagined her death as something which had happened to us suddenly, something from outside which had come hurling and caught us all unaware. The albums told another story. Even as Preeti entered the albums, even as ma suckled her beneath a blanket, bathed her, put her to sleep over a shoulder, buried her face in her tummy and made her cackle with delight – even as she grew in her arms – it was clear that she had started to slowly wilt like a flower in a vase. Her eyes widened at first, with fatigue, and the surprise springing perhaps from the first brushes with the idea of her fragility and mortality, as each bout of infection left her weaker and weaker.

It is here that Ba entered the photographs. Her first photograph showed her as a little girl standing behind ma’s chair as she held out the bowl in which ma dipped a cloth, probably sponge-bathing the infant Preeti spread on her lap, Ba’s other hand resting lightly on ma’s shoulder. Slowly, she shifted to the foreground as Preeti grew – combing her curls, feeding her from a spoon, washing her legs on a basin, drying her after a bath – while ma watched from a divan on which she rested heavily, a hand on Ba’s shoulder if she happened to be sitting below her on the floor, playing with Preeti. In another photograph, she held out Preeti to kiss ma lying weakly on the bed, Preeti’s tiny arm wrapped around her neck, the blur suggesting a nuzzling of cheeks and many kisses, a long exposure, a night time and a goodnight kiss – papa never used flash.


The surprise slowly waned to tired resignation as she seemed to sink deeper and heavier into the divans and beds she would rarely been seen out of now, the eyes drooping and closing. In one of the last photographs, ma lay in bed, covered in white quilt, her head resting on a big soft white pillow; her hair, which I imagined must have grown because sitting for a cut took too much toll on her fragile health now, seemed to be tied in a loose bun behind. A cup rested on the side-table beside her head and an arm fell protectively over Preeti’s lap, who sat in a chemise beside her, her loose curls spilling over her face as she appeared to peer at something in her hand. Her tired eyes watched Preeti, the mouth slack and without a smile. I imagined Ba must have been nearby, waiting to catch Preeti if she tumbled down, but she’s not in the frame. The palm of ma’s other hand was cupped loosely over the swell of her belly underneath the quilt, discernible if you were looking for it.

It was the only photograph I tore from the album and brought down with me, hiding it in the pages of a colouring book.

Facebook and the protagonist

Around the same time, I join one of the popular social networking websites. Hundreds of faces and names suddenly bloom marking the disremembered motifs which had marked my life since Windsor Manor – corridors, truancies, football, picnics, borrowed bikes, canteens, photocopied notes, binges, lectures, politics, night outs, messes, beer cigarettes and marijuana, fall outs, uniforms – competing narratives snagging chafing and bending against eachother – and yet all bereft of their underpinning now; the intimacies which had defined these shared lives forgotten like shifting dunes.

I peek into the pages of these separated lives, read the comments they pile on each other’s photographs and statuses and flip through the albums marking their passage from ranging bachelorhood to domesticity – a wedding, a spouse, a honeymoon, rearrangements for better for worse, a bundled newborn, visiting greying parents, a toddler finding his feet, reunions, another child – gathering along the way the trappings of new-found prosperity. Their footprints criss-crossing the globe from Goa to Las Vegas to the seven wonders of the world to the thousand places to see before dying; some of them pinning and sharing their conquests in maps. How far we have travelled – and yet never strayed.

The eyes in the photographs suddenly swivel and pin me down behind the peephole. Friendship requests pile, I get tagged in a few photographs, poked, notified, receive invitations from groups around start-ups indie-bands communities books, launches applications links are suggested, howdy where’ve-you-been messages stream in. The vortex sucks me inside; briefly I resist; but the ache to belong is stronger than the anxiety. Within a week, I have added a hundred friends and more eyes swivel and more requests and invitations rush in.

A friend surprises me with an intimate message. He tells me about a failed marriage and how depressed he is and how he remembers the times from college as the best years of his life and how he was thinking of me only the other day – I take a day to frame a reply but instantly decide against posting it when his next message informs me that he would be in Gurgaon the next week and looking forward to catch up. I do not respond in the end and after a reminder message he also falls silent.

The professor

‘Why have you come here?’, his bloodshot eyes bore into me from behind the bush of unruly half-hennaed beard spewing out of the brown monkey-cap, donned even in this airless heat. He sits across the cluttered desk, half turned, a hand crossed across the chest and tucked under the armpit, the other holding an open book close to his half-moon Dumbledore glasses. ‘First time since you left?’

‘Yes.’

‘You did not come before because you thought that I would ask you what you have done with your life – and you would have no answers.’ I remain silent. ‘What do you do?’

‘I am a project manager.’

‘You’re not planning to embark on a campus caper?’, he waves the fresh copy of the bestseller at me, ‘He was your batch-mate, right?’

‘No, senior.’ I noticed the parcel it must have arrived on, a gutted yellow-brown affair embossed with the name of the publisher, scraping on the floor with the occasional wind.

He flips the pages with a coarse thumb, ‘How is it – crappy or awful?’

‘There is a generous reference to your character.’

He scoffs and starts to cough, ‘Hah! I – cough – wish – cough cough – he’d spared me the ignominy!’ His coughing eases and he throws the book on the littered desk upsetting a few files, pages fall from them onto the floor in muted shuffle but he doesn’t glance at them. ‘Do you still paint?’

‘No.’

‘Pity’, he raises himself with some effort from the old armchair, ‘You had some talent there with colours.’ He shambles to a corner, soot stain rising like volcanic ash, and places a kettle on a stove. The battered copper kettle with the turned wood handle on the Primus spattered with years of rust and burnt tea; I look around – everything in the clutter the same, only timeworn. The stove rests on the TV trolley instead of the shaky tripod I remember. He catches me looking.

‘I stopped that bloody film society after one of the girls complained of pornography to the dean.’ He mentions the name of the movie – ‘Used to be your favourite’. He turns to add water to the kettle from a jug. Behind the greasy panes of the lower shelf, I can still make the out the old Akai VCR and the stacks of VHS tapes we watched, their tapes mouldy and crumbling now I’m sure. I imagine the old television finally kicked the bucket one day, beyond any more resuscitation by generous thumps at its side, and he threw it from the window.

The afternoon sun streaming from the window behind his desk, arrested by the grime of the panes and the hanging dust, tints the room in sepia. Only a burning slit of it sneaks from the crack between the sash and the sill and saws one of the bookcases. The weather-bound books I had reverently perused through once now gather dust on them. Dust pervades – spinning under the slow creaking blades of the begrimed fan, gathered in the corners in balls and stirring under his shuffling feet, sitting in a film on the books on the shelves, the reams of files and sketch sheets tossed on the desk and the side table, only sparing a rectangular patch on the desk, and on the mildewy paintings scattered on the walls. The domineering abundance of paper in the room, in books and notes and lines, piled on the groaning bookcases, their shelves buckling under their weight, lends this tableau an air of fragile weightiness.

He complains as he adds the tea – the usual problems with the authority, the ever-increasing stupidity of the students, curtailed budgets, the times – pausing only to sniff at the milk in the packet. The moment, tentative and unsure, in the gentle blurry haze of the dust, comes as a mirage – the steady hum of the mini-fridge the singing sands –a world at its brink, doubting itself. The tenuous dusky shadow of a world already disappeared.

He limps to a book shelf, shuffling violently through piles of scrapbooks neatly stencilled with a name and a batch on the bottom right corner of their cover – diaries of our everyday experience with art around us – a newspaper cutting, a dead flower, a photograph, a sketch, a scroll, a muse. He pulls out a term book – that’s what we called it – and tosses it at me without looking at me, rising with a grunt and shuffling back to the kettle nearing boil. I flip through a few pages.

‘What do you make of them?’

I say something about the violence of the strokes and the overabundance of yellow.

‘What would you say about the artist?’

My eyes pause on a painting – the last of them. ‘Deeply disturbed.’

‘His name was Mukund Sachdeva. Tiny bastard with owl-eyed specs. He committed suicide shortly after this painting’, he turns and nods in the direction of the page spread between my hands, ‘Perhaps the last thing he did. I later got to know that he had dropped from every class but this. Perfect attendance – quite a thing for my classes. And I hardly ever noticed him there.’ He sieves the tea sloppily, spilling much of it in the floor, and thrusts a chipped mug at me. ‘What’s he written about me, your friend? Am I one of those endearing professorial buffoons, or an eccentric? I remember the bastard well enough – beamed at me like an idiot sitting over there’, he jabs a finger at the chair adjacent to me, ‘Trying to suck up to me, spoke straight from the notes but knew as much about art as a machine’, he settles back against the backrest, ‘Or perhaps, I am the villain in this junk – I did give him the only B out here, after all. Broke his perfect ten – and his heart too, I guess.’ His broken-toothed grin is a weak attempt at wicked levity. I leaf through Mukund’s sketches again. Despite the honesty, there is nothing in them but desperation; a doomed Icarus jump into the empty air. Any value there is to them now is in the fact of his death.

‘Is the company you work for big?’

‘No, quite small.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘You wouldn’t have heard of it.’

‘Hah!’

I offer the term-book back to him but he careless tosses it away to the same corner of the desk where he tossed the bestseller; it falls away taking a bundle of files with it.

‘That’s what I do now – to all of them – just throw them away at the end of the term and let my TA grade them.’ Another noisy slurp. ‘Every year, I put the same questions as the last year – they all know it now – How does the impressionist connect with his subjects? Discuss the inspiration and significance of Picasso’s Guernica in less than five hundred words? – my faithful TA tells me that even the answers are the same every year.’

‘I should have done this long time ago. I shouldn’t have wasted my breath on you slimy bastards – just taught from the text and let you waste the night mugging and be spared from sifting through your puke. Pity’, he points to the best-seller, ‘he would have scored a perfect ten if he had been here now.’

He stares at a spot on the desk, ‘It was a mistake coming back here. A mistake. You boys want to become what these places make you become. What crap you guys write about yourself these days! How unashamedly you crown yourself. Crème de la crème! The best! The brightest! What do you know of genius – you yellow-hearted runts! Afraid to struggle, to stand and fail for an idea!’

I light a cigarette unflinchingly like old times. The smoke trails lazily across the desk and a strand reaches his nose; he coughs. I stub and throw the cigarette away.

‘Are you married? ‘

‘No.’

‘Some rich pathetic kid I don’t even remember now sent me a snap from somewhere once – New York, I think. And all I can remember now is that I wanted to do his wife real bad. Why did you come to see me this time?’

‘I heard that you were sick.’

‘You thought I was dying!’

For a while, I had stood in this empty room deciding whether I should wait for him or check him out at his quarter – retiring for the day leaving the door to his office open would not be unusual from him. A faint rustling sound and I cocked my ear. I moved to the door, leading to the inner room where once he would secretly paint, and knocked. I heard something stir, a creak and a thin croak that I decided meant to summon me inside. I pushed the door. He sat at the edge of the folding bed, his body slumped forward, the blanket crossing a shoulder and tumbling from his lap like the robe of a Greek god in a painting, his hands clutching the edge of the bed. I remember his eyes, big and frightened as they took me in with the jaw hanging loose in a half-gape, the sparse hair on his head in disarray, the sunken cheeks – he looked around with the same befuddled terror – it was not me alone he was trying to place but the room and himself.

‘Are you?’

It took him a few seconds to recover before he was smothering his hair with a hand and scowling at me as if I had disturbed him in some deep thought.

‘Hah, it would take a hell lot more than this to kill me.’ I smile, and so does he, for a brief moment. ‘Why did you turn it down?’, his eyes soften with pain. I lower my head – I cannot look him in the eyes. I had been desperate when I wrote to him – I never really expected him to do anything about it – with his reputation for fights and my grades, what chance could have been there? And yet, against all odds, he had pulled it off. And I had failed him then.

‘Because of a girl’, I mutter.

‘Are you still with her?’

I shake my head.

‘Good. The canteen would be open now. This tea tastes like shit!’, he barks at me like I was the one who’d made it.

Faces - I

There are some faces that do not belong to a person but are abstractions, of ideas and times. A model’s face splashed on a magazine cover does not belong to her – it is a tablet etched with the ideas which a time – a place – the people inhabiting that intersection – define themselves with; a mirror they hold to themselves. It is the makers of opinions, the shapers of thought, who give these incorporeal ideas – of beauty, of virility, of fertility –a shape: tangible, seeable, sellable. Strokes of fingers, of scalpel, transmuting them to the lump of human clay – pressing, pulling, squeezing – fluting its curves, chiselling its features, carving its angles – and a face emerges. A vessel; scourged and emptied of its own idea – eviscerated; reduced to a container. To be broken and buried in the shifting space of time; and new vessels to be fashioned from its shards in their turns.

A scene from IIMB

Ordinary piece of writing. I was trying to imagine IIM Bangalore after not seeing it for almost half a decade now. I sometimes took long walks along its corridors in the night and the sense of surrealism still remains. There were corners and nooks so quiet, so alone that for a moment it felt that you have broken through the skin of the world to enter a new one.

____________________________________________________

The temperature drops immediately as I enter the campus and the smells of woods and pollen fill the air. A tree-lined driveway curving around a wooded lawn brings me to the side patio of a grey stone building where I park the bike and step inside. A network of corridors opens in three directions: to my left, my right and straight ahead. No one in sight: I walk straight. The corridors shift space as I walk. The width of the walkway expands and contracts; tunnels break into open spaces, walls give way to pergolas lined with colonnade of pillars two stories high, unbroken ceilings to trellis running like rail-tracks overhead and laden with vines; whole section of walls get eaten by climbers, the veins of their branches pressed flat and gray to the granite like fossils; corridors run alongside separated by rows of pillars or green spaces only to disappear around a corner where others meet; they lead to stairways, climb steps to inner passages, run around central courts, drop to an amphitheatre, end in doors – I get lost.

I walk out of the dormitory and stand uncertainly in the middle of the corridor, trying to remember the tortuous route the hostel prefect had taken to bring and abandon me here. No one in sight. Absolutely quiet but for the rustling leaves. And yet, an overwhelming sense of their presence here once – like the wet stains of their shadows which had fallen across the courtyard and this corridor have just dried. A thought – am I dead? I am still ten but I know what it feels to be dying: the dark suffocating passage through its crypt. Is this the aftermath of dying – I wonder. Crawling back to the very world one has left the others weeping behind and denied, too, of their presence forever? Does heaven mean having the world to yourself and yet be condemned to chase shadows around the corner? Mirages baking in the distance, breaking and disappearing in a smoke at the last lap of approach; footprints ahead in the wet sand sucked back in the tide; rooms where the blades of the switched-off fan still turn and the food untouched on the table still warm. What is hell then?

A couple of guards whispering at a nook. They direct me to follow to the end a corridor branching at a tangent and watch for a wide open space boxed between two lecture-halls on my left.

The space is wide, flanked by flights of steps leading to the lecture-halls and opening at the back to a stone-paved walkway melding into darkness. Strings of green lampposts had lit the open passage which had led to here, the phosphorescent light between them seaming passages of radiance and gloom; here, rows of tube-lights bracing the ceiling like girders frame the scene in milky unshadowed lucidity. Again, no one around but a scrawny boy in a black suit, sitting on the steps and arranging a pile of papers on his lap, two fingers hooked like talons crawling along the sheaf, one marking the spot where a sheet is pulled out and the other where it is inserted back.

Time imagined is passage of thoughts. My mind remains numb.

Time sensed is breaking of rhythms; culmination of actions. He pulls another sheet out and slides it back.

I stand still and silent – as if a ripple stirred and sent quivering on the surface of this tableau of limbo and it would dissolve again into labyrinthine corridors. The talons meet and the boy shuffles the stack one last time, lines the sheets – three taps along the short edge on his knee, a quarter rotation, three taps along the long edge – and places them in a folder. He looks up and notices me. ‘Yes?’

The clock starts ticking again.

Story in two sentences

I love you.

But.

Earlier stories.

Rains again

K leans over the balcony railing, watching something. ‘There are pigeons sleeping there’, he points to the top of the balcony down below. We watch them over cigarettes and he rolls his parathas in his hand and munches them thoughtfully. A clap of thunder follows a lightening tearing the dark sky like a thin old cloth. We stub our cigarettes and sign off for the day. I go to sleep, K to his book.

I wake up at three to a steady drumming noise outside – the slash of the rain on the glass door to the balcony. I heave myself from the bed and my feet find the slippers. I pull away the curtain, and pull the sliding glass-door slightly ajar – even at this height, I can smell the wet earth below. The curtain gently billows with the wind that sneaks in through the crack. I strip naked, leave the slippers inside, and walk into the balcony. I stand holding the railing, my eyes closed against the rain.

‘Why does it rain?’, I ask Ba looking at the dark clouds as we take shelter under the tin shed.

‘To make us wet, buddhoo! What else?’, she laughs.

I feel the water rise against my ankle. I gingerly move towards the switch on the balcony light, switch it on with a short jab from the finger and look towards the drain, and find a rag blocking it. I remove it and lay it over the railing, and the water level recedes. I switch the light off, go back to the railing, and close my eyes again to the warm rivulets tracing their streams from my hair to the hollow roundness around my eyes to the mounts of my cheeks to the nape of my neck to my torso to my legs.

‘We all have our own memories of the rain’, she tells me as we watch the rains sitting on the steps of the front door, our bare feet getting wet, ‘It’s like the moon – we don’t share it with everyone like we share the sun – it speaks to each of us differently.’ She pauses and the rain drums louder on the leaves. ‘Every monsoon which comes reawakens a joy in me. But it’s always a little sadder than before.’ The rains fall harder and we pull our feet in. She hugs her shins and rests her chin on the valley of her knees. ‘I wonder why’, she whispers.

The orange glow behind my eyelids from the sudden glare of the bulb darkens to a purple and slowly blacks out.

Because it reminds us of what we’ve lost.

first rains - 4 - End

‘Say’, Abhay’s closed fist yanks out of his pocket, pulling it inside out, and opens to offer me the diamond he had discovered when we were digging in the back garden; Ba had dismissed it as a pendant from the chandelier but we knew better. ‘Say it’, he brings the open palm under my nose, and rolls the crystal in it, tempting me with its flirtatious winks. ‘Say that you hate Preeti too.’ I look up anguished at his mud-crusted face, the tear stains like dried rivulets, the welt under his eye where she had punched him before rubbing his face in the flower-bed turning a strange purple. ‘I can’t’, I weakly mewl again.

I came to our small world two years after her, and like a leg trailing the other a step ahead, I chased after her, pulling at her heels, mimicking her, demanding and claiming the same as she did. Sometimes she would stop exasperated and push me away; I would pick myself up and hurry after her again.

I have no memories of discovering her. I must have discovered her the same way I discovered my toes as an extension of my essence. We fought, we laughed – but love? Hate? These verbs which defined the world of our relationships held no meaning between us.

The only time before Lucknow when the chasm between our selves revealed itself was when she bitterly told me that I had killed ma; that she had started dying since I came. I crawled beneath the bed and lay their hiding in the dark, my heart throbbing, too scared to breath, to comprehend. Ba pulled me out and holding me with one hand, she dragged Preeti with the other and sat facing us. ‘What did you say?’ she shouted at Preeti, ‘What did you say to him?!’ Preeti remained silent, her hand limp in her grip. Ba let go off my hand, and slapped her. A tear coursed through her cheek but she did not cry, till I fell on her crying, and then both of us cried on Ba’s shoulders, and laughed between our tears to hear the strangulated way Ba would weep in.

Preeti digs her heels between papa and Badi Ma and stares defiantly at the lens in the platform, half-clutched hands dangling at her sides ready to pull out the six-shooters, only we could see the fear knit in her frown. I lie slumped across Ba’s shoulder, my face unseen but it’s not hard to imagine me from behind– eyes half-closed, mouth half-open and drooling, hands clutching at her back.

I could not follow her in the world that began from that photograph. The legs cleaved.

I sulked on the parapet as I heard her scraping and shuffling behind me. A day ago, I had put my head into a room and she had lain on the bed staring in my direction. I had hit my head on the awning in the hurry. Clambering below, she greeted me with an indifference which made me decide that she had not spotted me. Evidently, I was wrong.

After a few minutes, I turned my head and she stood at the edge of the parapet of the dining room. She turned away and I reluctantly got up and followed her. She sat on the awning of the sky-window opening to the drawing room, her feet dangling a few inches above the tar, her face solemn. I dragged my feet and stood in front of her.

‘Take out your hand and swear.’

‘Swear what?’

‘That you will not tell anyone about this. Not even Ba. And especially Abhay.’

I swore.

‘On papa? On Ba?’

I nodded.

‘Now you swear that you won’t tell too!’, I shot back bristling.

‘Of course, I won’t’, she shrugged and hopped from her seat to her legs. ‘Anyway, I don’t swear’, she walked away dusting the back of her frock.

The fierceness with which Preeti took on this new world surprised everyone – even me. By the time I recovered enough to join in the games, she was the ring-leader. I never saw her beat anyone else other than Abhay in their skirmishes but I saw how they flinched when she would freeze and turn her eyes on them. In a wedding, a boy rushed ahead of a mob following us and asked us something and then howled at our accents; the next time he drew in again, she whirled and stamped a raised leg flat on his stomach; after the crying and wailing had been done away with, after the chap had been thrashed a second time by the mother he had pulled along, he was eagerly plucking the choicest marigolds from the strings and fetching them for Preeti, and, as a further appeasement, offering them to me which I eagerly grabbed by the bunchful, while Preeti disdainfully picked a single orange bloom and plucked at its petals indifferently.

I knew it was an act; that she was as frightened as I was. That she fought for us – two waifs stranded on a shrinking ground between the sea, papa absent, Ba snatched away. Once, as they were being pulled away from a fight, Abhay landed a kick at her ribs; we all heard the crunch of the toecap against the bone, but she remained impassive, her hands dangling loosely at her side, watching him being dragged in a weeping bundle by chachi. After affecting a boredom for a minute, she walked away and disappeared behind the portico. I followed her to the corner where she lay crumpled behind the pipe. I squatted beside her silently and touched the rib below her pressed hand and watched her crying in silent convulsions.

Her struggle to master the language of this world was just as vehement. True it was a truncated world now – so everyone told us and so the old servants grumbled. The house which had so overwhelmed me was but a shadow of what it had been once. During the time of my grandfather, the front would be filled to the driveway with the daily supplicants and dropper-bys. They would crowd under the portico fans in the summer and sprawl in the lawn under the winter sun, and drink from the hand pump on the broken pedestal at the edge of the lawn which had gone dry. Even the chairs and rugs, now piled in mouldy corners, laid out in the shades then fell short and the lower sort (Jwala – the half-mad geezer who screamed and argued with an invisible companion between his day-long routine of dusting and re-dusting the sideboards, pausing to keenly listen to the other side of the argument – pursed his lips in grim satisfaction) had to squat in the lawns to share their tales of woes.

Ramdei would nod dejectedly towards the huge cauldrons and tell us how an army of cooks once cut the vegetables under her supervision to prepare the feast to fill the leaf plates for fifty men everyday in the leaping flames of a giant choolha – and look at them now! – she would point at them with the end of her smouldering bidi –Gathering dust in a dark corner, turning their black arses on the present!

The house was so full with relatives that the courtyards became dorms with rows of khaats smothered in mosquito nets stretching across their length and more than once, Bua tittered, an aunt had been woken up shrieking by a wrong uncle fumbling in the darkness.

And of course, there was the monochromatic evidence of those abundant times spilling out of their black scrapbooks: Nehru lunching in the lawn under a shamiana sitting in the middle of a row of white-clothed tables, a famous movie star sitting in the drawing room with a young Bua bursting with glee on his lap, grandfather bending his head to hear the soft words of the diminutive prime minister; ministers, bureaucrats, cinestars; and always, a sea of people behind them, faceless, with folded palms in supplication.

Whatever little world remained, preeti set out to conquer it with a doggedness I had never suspected in her; I had always worn her out. Within no time, she was dancing and singing to the folk songs in the ladies sangeets to delighted applause while I shyly hid behind the pallus. The aunts fawned and beamed at her interest in the feminine rituals of the household. The oiling of hair on Sunday mornings when they would congregate on the steps of the courtyard after their baths, smelling of sandal and jasmine, and spread their lovely black hair, dripping and staining the granite a dark grey: I can see her sitting behind chachi, opening the cusp of her hand slowly as she runs it along the length of her hair and spilling slowly the oil cupped in it. The clinking of the bangles as her tiny hands rummages between theirs through the white muslin the choorhiwallah would spread and squat a distance away; ‘Do!’; ‘Chhah’; announcing the price by the dozen of the bangles lifted to his eyes. The ceremony of preparing of the henna, the preparation of the rangolis, the washing of the brass gods by Badi Ma, … – she absorbed it all, stopping only at the rituals of cooking and washing because that would undermine her feminist war for the right of birth with Abhay.

‘But who was she?’, Preeti asks about a stranger who had just sat outside the kitchen chatting and laughing raucously with the aunt and munching on the dried red chillis laid out on a newspaper.

‘Arre, she is the wife of Sarju uncle, the son of Poorab chacha!’

‘Who is Poorab chacha?’

‘A family friend.’

‘Whose friend?’

Sarla chachi looks up from the pan and frowns at the wall for a moment. Then irritatedly she picks up the plateful of diced onions at her sides and tips it into the pan in a fury of sizzling smoke, ‘Arre, must be someone’s! Aise hi thode aa jaate hongein!’

I would hop in from school to find her sitting between the scene of dicing vegetables, fermenting pickles and grounding spices, her satchel tossed on the takhat and a rag doll or a book in her hand which she pretended to be occupied with. But, I knew, she was listening intently to the murmurs of gossip which passed from the servants to the ears of the aunts and Badi Ma. I tried joining her, despite her frown, sprawled over a sketchbook, badi Ma idly stroking my hair, and trying to listen and understand, but all I gathered were opaque whisperings of adult intrigues. It took me some time to accept that she could actually find her steps through some rooms of the labyrinth of people that encircled us, that she could connect the names and faces to us and even place them to some degree of proximity with each other. When in doubt, she would cross-examine hard, poke savagely at the fabric of tales, find holes and retreat to think and compare evidence; and then come with dark startling deductions.

‘There must have been another grandmother who died. Grandfather must have married twice. Chacha is not Badi ma’s real son.’

She spoke in our argot of Russian, Kazakh, English and many other tongues. We usually spoke it when we were alone. It made others uneasy and we used it less and less in public though Preeti would sometime throw a most irrelevant remark in my direction when we were with the other kids, I suspect, to add to her aura of impenetrability. And when Ba would chide us to speak in Hindi in that very khichdi tongue, the eyes of the aunts would narrow with suspicion.

‘How can you say that?’, I asked her in a whisper strangulated with intrigue.

‘How else can papa have three grandmothers?!’, she snapped, ‘Why does she dote on papa so much? And why else does everyone call her Badi Ma, chacha calls her Badi Ma, but papa calls her just ma?’

She turns away from me and sits hunched and frowning on the lower step, deep in thought. I sit beside her, waiting in suspense for more, waiting, and after some time, getting up and ambling away towards the bent guava tree. I turn to look back at her but she still frowns at nothing. I climb up the tree and sidle up a branch. Locking my feet, I fall and swing upside down and close my eyes and think about it.

Papa had changed after coming back. Not only his absences were more prolonged, coming back only in the breaks between the semesters, but his withdrawal from us when he was there. Preeti and I never spoke about it and we never complained to him. Instead, we clung to his neck when he would tiptoe into our bedrooms to kiss our foreheads, and once when he read softly from a book we smiled like the ritual from the apartment had never been interrupted. On the two occasions I remember when he secreted us in the backseat of the car and drove to the milk booth on the bank of the river, we smiled brightly over our bottles of flavoured milk and never asked him why we could no longer sleep with him, why we could no longer eat together, why did he look through her and never speak, why we could not still have our apartment in the twice-as-big smaller wing of the house. Because we sensed that more than us, it was he who was struggling to balance that secret world of deserts, excavations and our little apartment within with the world whose patriarchal sceptre had now been thrust in his hand. He was the weakest of us. In a way, Preeti was protecting me, and both of us papa; trusting that she could look after herself and, secretly, over all of us.

We blamed Badi Ma. For keeping him locked in his study when he was home and completing his sequestration by opening the room adjacent to the study, installing a new single bed there, and sun chairs on the verandah which he never used, since, she told everyone, he needed his privacy for his work. The lawn separating that wing from ours became a no man’s land where no idle chatter could corral and no child, even us, could play. Servants could walk across only with assigned tasks. Ba no longer kept his books; Badi ma assigned Ram Lal, grandfather’s lanky clerk with a mop of white hair and a brown half-sweater on his spindly chest even in the hottest summers, to that task. In the morning Mahadev would walk across to do the dusting and mopping. It seemed that the only time papa stepped out now was when he sat in the secluded room adjoining the puja to confer with Badi Ma on the affairs of the household and the many trusts she still ran, and to receive a screened batch of visitors. He even ate alone in his study, the food brought in by the Brahmin cook Hargovind and the plates brought back by Ram Lal; away from the dining room where Preeti and Abhay would squabble over a chair, where the servants would line against the wall holding the pots and ladles waiting to serve the circle of male relatives and VIP visitors only after she had hobbled out of the puja, plopped on the gaddi bolstered with many cushions with a groan and nodded towards them to go ahead. The wiring of the bell in his study to summon help from the main wing was fixed again but papa never used it. These rules, and roles, were never spelt out but understood in the same manner everything Badi Ma wanted was understood – unspoken.

It seemed ridiculous that the aunts had to bring in the chapattis to the dining table instead of one of the servants brining out the daal and the sabjis (Badi Ma would growl if a roti was served without enough ghee rubbed on it). Ridiculous like how Hargovind had to go and summon the ever unemployed chacha to fetch water from the brass pot for Badi ma every time she felt thirsty when he could have fetched it himself. But everything in that household, I realised later, had a meaning in its order; it was her way of keeping things and people in place. At least the appearances when things were no more what they had once been. There were hours for everything: when the household slept, when it woke, when it ate and when a certain amount of commotion could be tolerated. There were rooms where only certain people could walk into, bathrooms restricted to certain members of the household and visitors, cupboards cutlery and pots only particular servants could touch. The men ate before the women, the women before the servants, and some servants ate from steel plates, others from pattals, some of them seated on wooden pedestals, others squatting. Each servant had his task cut out, from the washing of plates to the laying of the beds to the serving of tea and lunch to the visitors; there were rules even to whether the visitor would be offered a chair and served in a steel or a leaf plate and whether requests for more tea would be entertained.

I ask chachi why Ba doesn’t eat at the dining table with us. She gapes and beckons Ramdei to come closer; they bend over me and she holds me by the arm. ‘Did she eat at the dining table there?’, the thrill barely suppressed in their whispers. I stand mute, frightened that I have betrayed something again. Suddenly chachi shoots upright on her feet and Ramdei rushes away to the rice she had been separating from the husk. I look behind to find Badi Ma staring tight-lipped at a blushing chachi pretending to look busy with an empty pot in her hand. She had this quality of leaving her hobbling groans and almost floating around the house to catch people with their guards down.

By isolating papa, she was trying to protect a weak king from the whispers of the mob. This was her love for her son, this was her way of protecting him from himself.

I startle and open my eyes. Preeti stands upside down staring through me. ‘She is not Badi Ma! The Badi Ma died and then she came! She must be Chhoti ma!’, she pauses, ‘Vimla bua called grandfather’s mother Badi Ma. She must have taken her name after she died, after both of them died.’

Her eyes suddenly focus on me, ‘Papa is younger to chacha. In fact, chacha is our tau!’

My legs slip and I fall on my hands and stomach. ‘Don’t tell this to Abhay’, she tells me.

I believe not all of it was kindness; it was also to suppress the secret of the advantage Abhay gained if chacha became elder to papa. But I knew better. Swinging back and forth, I had suddenly been overwhelmed by the epiphany that in this clockwork hierarchy of privileges and duties, I sat at the top. I had rushed that day inside the puja where papa and Badi ma sat poring over the ledgers and hid behind his chair, while the rest of the cousins and even Preeti balked at the doorsteps. Badi Ma shooed them away and then turned to smile indulgently at me and passed the key to her forbidden almirah from her karghani to the bending bracket of Ram Lal and told him to fetch a Threptin for me. Suddenly I understood. She was the stewardess holding on to the vestiges of the crumbling empire that papa had inherited; and that I was going to inherit it after him.

The crack had fallen off in plastery rubble and been resealed with fresh concrete. But I was now tall enough to climb the mesh and reach the ledge under the parapet, and directly swing to the low wall from there. I peeped over the roof of the dining room and she was there, squatting under the awning of the window to Badi Ma’s room.

I had long given up on that game. The only time I looked over now was in the hours of siesta, with a sketchbook spread below to watch them sleep. Badi Ma lying on her side, the drape of her sari across her cheek and spilling across the bed like a stray thick brushstroke. Below her, sitting upright but with his head resting against the edge of her bed and one hand still on the feet he had been pressing, Lallan, the village lad who taught me to climb the mango tree. Chacha on his stomach with his hands at four and eight o’clock, looking like a bird which had suddenly forgotten to fly and dropped with a splat. Chachi buried under a blanket even in the warm afternoon. Abhay on his stomach too, squashed between them, his butt half-risen in air. I would watch them: painter with the brush poised in mid-air pausing to stare at his freeze models. I would fill my insides like a diver with the air of their lines and forms, and then duck my head out under the awning and furiously attack the sketchbook before the vision, its memory, dissipated like bubbles breaking and vanishing at the surface, like a dream melting away.

Mostly I remained on the side of the outer rooms, walking across the low wall, to the other house, where Arjun, the boy servant and my companion, would be flying a kite while the family took its own siesta. I would take precaution to be never seen as Badi Ma had lost a son, and papa a brother, when he fell off the edge of a stepped farm into an abyss while chasing a kite. (Sukhi dada, the caustic octogenarian, the only relative I knew Badi Ma feared, who referred to us as pille, dog’s litter, shouts over his lunch, ‘Is there any onion? Or did somebody die eating that too?!’) Preeti knew; but then I knew many things too. So we both ignored.

I did not climb the roof now only to fly kite. And she to eavesdrop. It had become a secret world we shared without sharing, where we could be alone in our parts to catch our breath in its silence, to be unseen, to imagine. We wanted to tell her too but we were afraid that she would forbid us to climb up anymore.

I watched her cock her ears close to the window and tilt her head a little towards it.

I thought that no one knew our secret. But one day as I sat over the parapet, papa stepped inside the back garden and walked around the courtyard to the orchard and paused at the mango tree in its centre. I would have ducked away from his view but I was too surprised to see him there, I had never imagined him there. ‘I planted this tree’, he suddenly said without turning. And then he turned and looked directly at me and smiled, ‘I must have been your age then.’

I told Preeti that we had to take more care of not being seen; she shrugged and said that she only listened and never peeped, which was true; and anyway, she hardly even did that anymore, she waved her Blyton in my face. True again. And which was why her statue-like stillness, the unblinking glint in her eyes, piqued me and I approached her. She bade me to be quiet with a finger on her lips and remained intensely locked on to whatever she was eavesdropping on. I put an ear to another window and heard the deep sibilant echo of whisperings. I tried to follow the context but it was too vague for me. A word rang again and again, voh, followed by three matras – he she them. I lifted my head and gesticulated towards Preeti –What? She held a finger to her lips again. I turned and started climbing over the shade to peer inside; it had been so long since I had done that and the spiders had weaved thick cobwebs that I had to headbutt through. I saw Mahadev’s huddled form bending over Badi Ma’s ear, lying on her back, her bun open and thin grey hair scattered on the pillow like a half-crown above her head, staring straight ahead and looking sad but brave. And then Preeti pulled me out. ‘What?!’, I gesticulated angrily at her again and walked away angrily, sure that she was pretending.

That night, as Ba rose after tucking us in, Preeti held her hand and whispered, ‘Mahadev was telling her something about him again.’

Him!

I rush into her room but she’s not there and it’s his arms I fall into. His teeth flash, his eyes burn on his face and I flail in silent panic. He laughs, bellow, and lets me go and I rush out dizzily. I claw hard at the pillow, and I hear Preeti draw her breath.

‘You and him.’

Ba paused and then ran a hand over her forehead, ‘Piya, you shouldn’t eavesdrop dear.’ I heard her kiss her forehead, the shuffling of the sheet she drew and tucked under her chin, move to my bed and pause at my sleeping form, and then she walked out of the room, switching off the light after her.

I lay paralyzed and cold with terror in the darkness. Wrapped in a terror I had never known possible and yet realised I had known once: deeply etched in the birth of my consciousness, the terror of mutely and helplessly losing an essence so deep so deep.

That terror became a face.

The face of Badi Ma. Lying on her bed and mutely listening. Unbudging hardness glinting under her pudgy sorrow. The face I had seen hanging on the wall of his room that night.

That night, too frightened to even cry, I lay frozen like that day I crouched under her bed, suffused with only a primal terror and incomprehension no words could unfathom. The next morning, I was found wrapped in a drenched bundle of my sweat. I fell sick again. But my sickness could not keep her from taking her away from me.