“But, Mona, that’s what makes the house so beautiful!”
“They have to go.” I knew how I sounded. Petulant. Pigheaded.
But maybe Dilip heard something else. “If it matters that much to you,” he said, “they can go.”
Once, in a letter I wrote Dilip but never gave him, I said, you have been the anchor of my sanity.
At my mother’s pyre, as the only family member present, I’d had to put the torch to her body. Burning, the jasmines gave out a smell like bitter oil.
The day after Dilip and I moved into our new house, I’d gone out to the garden armed with shears. But when I touched the leaves, their glossy, vibrating green, I couldn’t do it.
I like to think that my mother is happy about this when she looks down on our porch with her star-steadfast gaze.
* * *
BUT HERE IS my father, standing on my doorstep after ten years. It is a moment I’ve dreaded and longed for, that I’ve daydreamed over and over.
In the dream my father looks just as he did on that last day, elegant in a pencil-thin mustache, wearing a navy blue suit so new its creases could cut your hands. He is about to step into the taxi that is to drive him to the airport. The reason he has to take a taxi is because Mother has given Hari Charan, our chauffeur, the day off. (Does she believe this will stop my father from leaving?) My mother, who has wept and pleaded since morning, now stands silent on the upstairs veranda. My father faces carefully ahead. Perhaps in his mind he is already gone. He has with him one small suitcase, even though Air India allows him two large ones, as if there’s not much that is worth taking from his old life into his new one.
I digress. All this is merely reality, not part of my daydream.
In the dream my father asks if he can come in. Certainly, I say, smiling graciously. Dangerously. He doesn’t notice. When he steps forward I slam the door—thwack of wood on flesh, crack of bone—in his face.
BUT THIS FATHER, on this unsuitably beautiful spring day, ambushes me. How old he is, his head shiny with hairlessness, his loose-skinned face where I cannot find any traces of the man I hated. I stare at him as he leans on a cane and peers through thick glasses with the anxiousness of the aged. When he asks if he may come in, the words whirl around inside my head, dizzying me.
Then everything happens at once. Dilip appears, lugging two enormous suitcases. (Why? My father’s only supposed to stay a single night.) Bijoy squirms down from my grasp and takes a step—his first. Dilip says, “He walked! He walked, did you see that?” My father drops his cane and bends to catch Bijoy just as he loses his balance. “You smart, beautiful boy! How did you know to come to Grandpa?” A smile moves across his face, full and unhurried, like molasses, strengthening my sense that this isn’t really my father. I find that I, too, am smiling at this old man’s pleasure in my son.
Then he straightens and says, almost in surprise, “You’re beautiful too, and so much like—”
He bites his lip, but it’s too late. The unspoken words rise in a jagged line between us like the broken glass embedded into our compound walls back home to keep out thieves.
I HAVE NOT been totally honest in stating that I’d done nothing to prepare for my father. I’d put a vase of jasmine on the bedside table in the guest room. And I’d ironed my mother’s sari to wear to dinner.
IT’S AFTER DINNER and I’m at the kitchen sink, ostensibly doing dishes. I rattle spoons to create an impression of diligence, but in truth I’m watching my father.
At dinner he looked at the sari as though he’d never seen it in his life and complimented me on the chicken curry. He said the guest room was very pretty. Is my father tougher than I’ve imagined? Or—this possibility fills me with dismay—has he forgotten all I remember?
In the family room my father opens his cases and lifts out toys. Bright Snurf balls, Playskool blocks, Mattel trucks in every size, some operated by remote controls that look unnervingly like guns. He has brought batteries too, my father who believes in leaving nothing to chance, and now he triumphantly aims the remote at a red-and-white ambulance which comes to life with a screech and a flashing of lights.
I tighten my hands into fists to stop myself from covering my ears. The wail of the ambulance is a black hole through which I’m tumbling into the afternoon when I found my mother doubled over with pain in the easy chair on the veranda. I’d called for an ambulance at once. But there was a strike in Calcutta that day. Angry protesters marched along the street in front of our house, shouting, carrying placards demanding the resignation of some high-up official whose name I’ve forgotten. The ambulance was caught in the melee—I could see it from the veranda—its lights pulsing a rapid, futile red as its driver tried to navigate his way to our gate.
Bijoy loves his ambulance, though. He picks it up and hugs it, squealing with delight at the spinning wheels. Everyone smiles, even me. Then I notice the clothes. My father has brought a whole wardrobe, little playsuits and onesies and sailor shirts, but also big-boy clothes, neat, buttoned-down shirts a kid could wear on his first day at kindergarten, a baseball outfit complete with catcher’s mitt, a white jacket for a summer piano recital.
It comes to me that he is afraid this visit—his first—is also his last. The clothes are his hopes for his grandson’s life. He doesn’t expect me to allow him to return, to share with Bijoy any of the things they promise.
For a moment I see myself as he must: the daughter who carries a mountain of grudges on her shoulder, vengeful as any evil fairy in a childhood tale, and as filled with power. Can I say he is entirely wrong?
The thought is a jolt, so sharp and physical that it makes me drop the bowl I have been soaping. Glass shatters loudly all over the sink.
“Are you okay, Mona?” Dilip asks. “Did you cut yourself again?”
I barely hear him. It’s my father’s gaze I’m aware of, the eyes which have widened slightly at that again. Under their scrutiny I dwindle, no evil fairy but a clumsy teenager once more, left behind because I’m not worth taking along. I mumble something about being just fine, about getting the rubber gloves for cleanup, and escape down the corridor.
ON THAT LAST day in Calcutta I stood on the veranda next to my mother, ready to tell my father something suitably acerbic that I’d been rehearsing all day. I would call this out when he turned to wave us good-bye, I’d decided, and it would humiliate him into staying. But he hadn’t turned.
As he walked toward the taxi with that ridiculously small suitcase, my father’s whole body leaned forward in terrible eagerness, as though he were a patient discharged from a hospital he never thought he’d live to leave.
When the taxi took off with a belch of black fumes, my mother moaned softly. It was an eerie, nonhuman sound. I felt it taking shape in my own throat, the way one wolf might as it watches another one howl.
It was my duty as a daughter to comfort my mother. A part of me longed to do it. But what could I say to a woman brought up on sayings like The husband is God? Whose elders had blessed her since childhood by saying, May you never become a widow. Who believed—as I, too, did on some unacknowledged level—that tragic though widowhood was, abandonment was worse.
I said to my mother, in my coldest voice, “For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together.” I turned on my heel and walked away.
I’M NOT SURE how long I spend in the bathroom, staring at the cleaning supplies. By the time I come out, the family room’s surprisingly quiet. I peer around the corner, taking care not to be seen.
Bijoy’s fallen asleep in Dilip’s lap, limbs flung out in the uncaring absoluteness of sleeping children. The two men are watching him. From time to time they speak in whispers.
My father puts out his hand and rubs Bijoy’s foot. I know how it feels, the soft, unblemished sole, the budlike toes, the smooth fit of that ankle in the curve of a palm. What I haven’t counted on is how I feel, this swift welling of a joy I don’t fully understand.
My father is speaking slowly, slurredly, each word
a stone placed on his tongue. “People do things, you know. They want something so badly, every minute feels like they’re being held down underwater. Then years later they look back and can’t believe they could ever have felt anything so strongly. . . .”
I’m suddenly furious. What he did, no amount of talk can make it right. He’d taken my mother’s life, precious and fragile as this silk I am wearing, and ripped it apart. And now he wanted the easy solace of confession.
I clatter down the passage, purposely loud. Maybe I’m afraid, too, not ready to hear something that might confuse my loyalties. So I busy myself with picking Bijoy up.
“I’ll put him in his crib and then go to bed myself,” I say. “I’m exhausted. I’ll clean up tomorrow. Good night.” I say all this very quickly, so that my father will not have a chance to complete what he started to say.
But as I carry Bijoy away, breathing in his milk-and-talcum smell, clean and uncomplicated, I hear him behind me.
“Except regret,” says my father.
SINCE BIJOY’S BIRTH I’ve learned to wake at his first cry, to be at his crib before he can replenish his lungs. Sometimes I smile at the irony of it, I whom my mother used to tease about my love of sleep.
Tonight when Bijoy cries, Dilip says, “I’ll get up. It’s been a hard day for you.”
“No, thanks,” I say shortly. “You’ve done enough already.” I’m annoyed at how amiable my husband has been toward my father, and I want him to know it. Besides, I have no wish to give up these treasured night moments with my son.
Now I bend over Bijoy’s crib, thinking how easily my body assumes this familiar stoop, how easily an old tune out of my childhood, Chhele ghumolo, para jurolo, Baby sleeps, the neighborhood is peaceful at last, hums itself from my throat. I stroke my son out of his nightmare and into sleep again, until his muscles soften under my hand.
I want one of my mother’s sayings, something that will encapsulate this moment of parenthood in its exact glow, but what comes to me is quite different.
I HAVE PRESENTED myself inaccurately as the lone connoisseur of Shakespeare in my family.
Long ago, before a husband’s desires and a child’s needs usurped her life, my mother had gone to college. Like me, she had studied English, though she had quit uncomplainingly, good daughter that she was, when it was time for her to marry.
I had forgotten this. Or perhaps, self-absorbed as children alone can be, I had never really believed that my mother had an existence of her own before I was born.
This is how I was reminded:
When our relatives knew that Father had left, they descended upon us in hordes, armed with sympathy and suggestions which made me smart for days. The worst was Ila Mashi, mother’s cousin. “How could you let him go?” she’d say. “Now what’s going to happen to you two? He hasn’t been sending money either, has he?” Or “Monisha should write him a letter begging him to come back, or at least to arrange for your green cards.”
I refused to give her the satisfaction of a response. But after she left, I’d berate my mother bitterly. Did she have no self-respect? No backbone? If I were her, I wouldn’t let Mashi into my house again.
“What to do,” Mother said. “Sometimes you have to forgive people.”
“Forgive! Forgive! Next you’ll be telling me you’ve forgiven my father for what he did.”
“I haven’t,” said my mother. “But I keep trying. I have to, more for you and me than for him.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that last part, but I didn’t like it. “Keep me out of it,” I said. “And let me tell you something. That man doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”
She’d stood up straight then and looked at me, earnest in her desire—the desire of all mothers, I know that now—to give her child something vital to navigate her life by.
“Give every man what he deserves,” said my mother, pulling the half-remembered words haltingly out of her youth, that time when everything had seemed graspable, “and who shall ’scape whipping.”
BIJOY SLEEPS CURLED on his side, knees drawn up, hands tucked under his chin. Watching him, I marvel again at the uniqueness of it. Neither Dilip nor I sleep this way. Once Dilip told me that probably lots of babies did that, we were just too inexperienced to know. I nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew my son was special.
I could stand here all night watching him, this child already with secrets to his life, dreaming things I’ll never know. But I think of having to face my father at breakfast. I’m going to need all the rest I can get. I cover Bijoy with his quilt and close the door.
That’s when I notice the light coming from the guest room.
No, I say to myself. No, Monisha. Let things be. But already I am walking down the corridor.
WHAT DO I want as I walk to the room where my father lies sleepless?
The answer: I wish I knew.
I have a vague notion of confrontation, accusation, of perhaps tears. (His, not mine.) My head is congested with images I need him to see: my mother’s face, gaunt with sickness; the broker bringing strings of prospective buyers to the house; the day I sent the servants away because there was no more money; my hand setting the pyre alight, those jasmines burning.
All the things he walked away from, leaving them for me.
ONCE AGAIN I’VE misjudged. My father is not tossing, guilt-ridden, on his bed of thorns. He’s asleep. He just hasn’t switched off the lamp.
I venture closer to see why. He’d been reading when sleep struck him down, so suddenly that he didn’t have a chance to remove his glasses or cover himself. The red cloth-bound book splayed by the pillow looks just like the holy texts mother used to read before she died.
There’s an irony in this somewhere, but as I try to figure it out, my eyes fall on my father’s face. How different it seems in repose, the tension melted out of it. I see that he’s been afraid of this trip as much as I have. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t removed the vase of jasmine from the bedside table but merely pushed it all the way to the edge.
The night has grown colder, and my father sleeps curled on his side with his knees drawn up. Denuded of fear, his face could be an adolescent’s, soft-chinned and self-willed.
And for a moment I’m looking into the core of my father’s existence, who he was. Is. The boy-prince I read of in the old tales, his face always turned toward adventure. The prince who never grew up, who, trapped by the mundane demands of a household, believed he could free himself with a single, graceful slash of his sword.
Not so different from me, slashing through life with anger as my weapon of choice, after all.
I lift the glasses from his face, shake out a blanket over him. I’m careful not to touch him. But his eyes flutter open. I hold my breath until I realize that he’s still mostly asleep. Even if he saw, it would only be a blur of white and red, my mother’s sari which I am wearing.
I lift the jasmines from the vase and hurry toward the door intent on escape.
Then I hear my father call out a sleep-softened word. Is it my mother’s name? Someone else’s? I wait for the prickly heat to rise up under my skin, but there’s just a slight tingling. When did the answer cease to matter as much?
It’s only a little thing. I cannot call it forgiveness.
My mother would have disagreed. She’d have said, Ocean is nothing but water drop upon water drop. And if I said, I don’t know if I’ll ever have more than this one drop to give, she’d have smiled.
My father sighs and turns, tucking his hands neatly, familiarly, under his chin.
I switch off the lamp and close the door. In my grasp the jasmine stems are tough and knuckled, like fingers. I think I will start collecting sayings of my own. Invisible flowers spread greater fragrance. Home is where you move fluently through the dark. In our bedroom Dilip is lying awake. When I reach him, I’ll begin to tell him about my mother. How she died. What she lived by.
It’s a story that has waited a long time.
WHAT THE BODY KNOWS
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WHEN HER WATER breaks, Aparna is standing on a chair in the baby room, hanging up the ceramic flying-fish mobile Umesh and she had purchased the day before. As the wetness gushes out of her, warm and unpleasantly sticky, she notes for one wondering moment the instinctive reactions of her body—the panic drying her mouth, the legs clamping together as though by doing so they could prevent loss. Then terror takes over, sour and atavistic—just what she had been determined not to succumb to, all through the carefully planned months of doctors visits and iron pills and baby-care books and Lamaze classes. It floods her brain and she cannot think.
She drops the mobile and hears it hit the tile floor with a splintery crash. Somewhere in the back of her mind there is regret, but her body has suddenly grown clumsy, and all her energies must go into getting down from the chair. She negotiates the newly dangerous floor to the kitchen where Umesh is fixing an omelette just the way she likes it, with lots of onions and sliced green chilies. She can smell their crisp, buttery odor. She opens her mouth to say he’s the best husband—No, it’s something else she must tell him, only she can’t recall what.
But already he’s abandoned the omelette and rushed across the room.
“Aparna, sweetheart, are you okay? You look awfully pale.” And then, as she holds her stomach, the words still lost, “No, it can’t be! It’s only July—three weeks too early. Are you sure? Does it hurt?”
His face is so scrunched up with anxiety, his eyes so eloquent with guilt, she has to laugh. His fear lessens hers. She puts out her hand to him and the flood in her brain recedes, leaving only a few muddy patches behind. “I’m fine,” she says. “My water broke.”
She likes the way he fusses over her, making her lie down on the sofa, arranging pillows under her feet. Her long hair falls over the edge of the sofa, glossy and dramatic, hair that might belong to the heroine of a tragedy. Only this isn’t a tragedy, it’s the happiest event in their lives. Maybe it’s a comedy—the way, in his hurry, he misdials the hospital number, getting a Texaco instead. He’s sweating by the time he gets the labor ward, shouting into the phone. She smiles. In her mind she’s already making up the story she will tell her son. Do you know what your father did, the day you were born? She thinks of the hospital bag, has she packed everything the Lamaze instructor listed? Yes, even the sourballs she is supposed to suck on during labor—she picked them up on her last trip to the grocery, just in case. She feels pleased about that.