A Bad Character (4 page)

Like my mother, I’m a loner. I’m sitting by the river near the banyan tree in Agra, she is calling out to me from the house at dusk, my father’s ancestral home on the edge of town. He’s still out working in Singapore but he’ll return, he hasn’t abandoned us quite yet. I hear my mother calling but I don’t reply. She’s fearful, imagining all the terrible things that can happen in the dark.

When he comes back he holds me in his arms. He smells of cigarettes. Of Old Spice aftershave and whisky. When he comes home he acts like nothing’s changed.

My mother, she’s suddenly awake, she’s been nervous for days, cleaning the house, getting everything into shape for his arrival. She fixes her hair and puts on her best sari and thinks everything will be OK. When he turns up he brings gifts, all the latest electronic goods, kitchen things. They put on a big party for him—the family lays out all kinds of food on a long folding table, they put out the drinks in plastic cups, they blow up balloons, and everyone comes to meet him. He likes the crowds, my father, he likes the parties, he’s a natural showman—handsome, a charmer. He shows off some magic tricks. I stand in the room watching him, watching my mother waiting. Now and then he passes by and runs his fingers through my hair, and when he puts me on his shoulders I hold him tightly, smell the Brylcreem with my eyes closed.

When the food is finished, the music played, when everyone has drifted back home, he takes my mother into the
bedroom, he pulls her by the arm. I recognize that look on her face. He doesn’t go to sleep when they’re done, he watches TV in the living room and I slip out my door to crawl beside his chair. He never sends me back to bed. Instead we watch TV together for hours, until I’ve fallen asleep. In the day when there’s no one there I go and lie on their bed, dwarfed by it as my mother is, watching the folds in the sheets turn into vast mountain ranges, tracing the caravan through the passages, laden with Arabian gold.

He’s gone as quickly as he came, the thief.

Later I learned of his own father, my grandfather, the godman. He ran away too when he was young. Barefoot from village to village performing miracles, reciting the ancient texts by heart, sometimes speaking in tongues. From where he learned these no one knows. I met him several times when he was already old, but I understood nothing of him then, and by that time God had already left him in the corner of the room, like a lamp without a bulb, gathering dust.

It’s the first year of college and the pleasant shadows of dreams have been banished by the spotlight of Aunty’s world, where everything is good and right and clean. In this world there are no moments to yourself, for what’s the need? Why do you need to keep your door closed? What are you hiding in there? It makes no sense at all to Aunty, this simple demand from the girl to please be left alone.

No, she’s expected to be the same as them, to smile the right way, to say the right things, to be grateful at all times, to be seen and not heard. She sees this very clearly, in cars, in apartments, in homes, in pujas, in the same words and ritual learned by rote.

It’s in this desperate life of preservation that death is held. Holding on to life only to die unblemished, to make it to the end, untouched by sin. And for what? What then? The girl sees this, and yet there’s nothing to be done, nowhere to go. Nothing for her to do but grit her teeth, calm the voices inside.

Aunty knows the resistance in her, her reluctance. She chides her for it, calls her a snob sometimes. Says she only wants the best for her, that’s why she says these things, because she cares. But she can’t understand the behaviour of this girl.

On Diwali night she talks to me, after a rare drink, on the balcony watching the fireworks. The freezing shawl of smog envelops the city, makes the explosions flash like the synapses of a dying brain.

She says wistfully, In college your mother was a shy girl, a person I would describe as too shy, too quiet, a good girl, too sweet, everyone was very fond of her, everyone wanted her to do well. But every so often she would shock us with some strange words, she would say something completely unexpected, which took us all by surprise. She really lived with her head in the clouds.

She smiles apologetically, clears her throat, tugs her dupatta over her heavy breasts. From the balcony we watch the sky on fire and the city bombarded with light.
She gets nostalgic; she says, Life has been good to me. I’ve had all the advantages in this world. I’ve married well. I planned ahead. I have security now, though I’ve had my setbacks like anyone else. But you cannot just run and play in this life, you can’t live on air alone.

She’s only thinking of me, she says. I’m too young to understand, too much like my mother still. But my situation is precarious. Marriage is important. It needs to be handled well. One stray step and well, let’s not talk about that.

It wasn’t for love that my parents married. They were placed together in their awkwardness, in their deficiencies, through the taint of their blood, though it was known he was very handsome and she was oddly beautiful in her own nervous way.

My mother, who makes me read books. Who forces them on me, even as she drowns in loneliness, superstition, gossip and boredom, like so many good housewives before her. And not just any books, but the classics: works of great literature. There is a whole series in the library. We go through them together, one by one. She
doesn’t even know what’s inside them, never reads them herself, just forces them on me the way another mother forces diamonds down her daughter’s throat before the soldiers knock at the door.

In Bombay I hold her hand. I hold my father’s too on the local trains, hold on for dear life. He says if either of us lets go then that will be it, the beggars will have me, they’ll cripple my legs and send me to work.

Technicolor Bombay, that crack of hope, the heartbreaking city, clinging to the edge of India, falling off the century like a cartoon. We lived there awhile, not even a year—my father was posted from Agra for work.

When we moved my mother was happy at first, it breathed new life into her. There was that rotting fish smell, the salt of sea in the air, the trawler stench, the song of gulls, the relentlessness of jet planes taking off. It all held a breezy promise Agra never could.

In Khar West, it was an apartment building on the fourth floor, not the Delhi kind, not a mausoleum like Aunty’s but bright and crumbling, open to noise; you could hear the others, their music, their TVs, their arguments; everyone on top of everyone else, palm trees growing up past the windows, coconuts ripening and crows swaying on the branches like happy drunks. Often I forget we lived there at all, it’s a punctured dream of glossy print, clothes drying out on the balcony lines, blood oozing through Konkan saris in my sleep.

She dresses my hair with a Minnie Mouse bow and sends me outside to play with the other girls. Instead I climb to the roof to watch the ocean beyond the bald heads of the apartment blocks and the planes taking off in the haze.

I wait for Sunday all week. My mother is holding my hand on the way to the chicken shop with the money for the evening meal. It’s so sunny here. The meat is hanging in great mean lines on the hooks, and scattered behind there’s the scene of blood. Terrified, fascinated, I wait
all week to see this flesh being chopped, but I pull away, almost close my eyes to it, when it comes. She buys one whole chicken, has it wrapped in paper, and at home she prepares it lovingly, with great concentration, with her tongue peeking out the corner of her mouth and a beatific look on her face. When we sit to eat in the evening, I’m amazed by the alchemy of this, the life made out of death.

There’s a birthday party in the building one day and the girl whose birthday it is, her mother has told my mother I’m invited. And she’s very excited, my mother, eager for me to go and be with the other girls, to dress up and play. I want to go too, to be accepted, to be with everyone else and adored.

So she bathes and dresses me. She puts me in a red dress with blue satin panels and ties a ribbon in my hair. Then I’m pushed out into the corridor and sent downstairs. But I never make it inside. I stand outside for an hour or more, unable to bring myself to knock on the door. When other people come by I run away and hide, pretend to be busy with something else. Eventually I escape to the roof. I cannot bear it, can’t explain it either. The agony of being alive, of functioning like a human being. Can you understand this? This is who I am.

When I come down from the roof my mother is excited. She wants to know how it was, wants every detail of it. And I lie, I tell her it was wonderful, I had such fun, I made many friends. She’s so happy for me.

But later she hears the truth from one of the mothers downstairs. She defends me at first, says it’s a lie, I went there. And the woman says, I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl of yours.

Father comes home to find her howling in a corner, me hiding in my room.

I’m eleven years old. Back in Agra, full of rage. But only with my mother do I show it. Twenty years old and nothing’s changed. Only the voice for it has been misplaced.

Twelve, looking through a friend’s brother’s porn smuggled in from abroad. He’s hidden them behind the cupboards though we know where they are.
Playboy, Penthouse
, we look through them giggling, pretending to be ashamed. But I sneak one home and read it by
torchlight under the sheets. I like the letters pages best of all.