An Obedient Father (6 page)

I did remember Rajinder opening the blue door to the room where we spent our first night. Before we entered, we separated for a moment. Rajinder touched his mother's feet. His mother embraced him. I touched my parents' feet. As Ma held me, she whispered, "Earlier your father got drunk like the pig he is."

Then Pitaji put his arms around me. "I love you," he said in English.

The English was what brought the tears. The words reminded me of how Pitaji came home drunk after work once or twice a month. Ma, thin arms folded across her chest, stood in his bedroom doorway watching him fumbling with his clothes. I tried to be behind Ma. This was after Pitaji was caught with me. I had to watch. To leave was the same as saying I had nothing to do with all this.

Usually Pitaji was silent. But if he was very drunk, Pitaji might call out to me, "No one loves me. You love me, don't you, my little sun-ripened mango? I try to be good. I work all day, but no one loves me." He spoke in English then, as if to prove he was sober. The "little sun-ripened mango" was something he used to call me before we were caught. Eventually Pitaji began crying softly. After a while, he appeared to forget that he was being watched. Sometimes he turned out the lights and wept in the dark.

Those nights Ma served dinner without speaking. When Rajesh saw what was going to happen, he might take his food to the roof Sometimes Kusum was there. Mostly it was just me.

There were beautiful lines in the story Ma told to explain everything. Lines like "In higher secondary, a teacher said, in seven years all the cells in our body change. So when Baby died I thought, it will be all right. In seven years none of me will have touched Baby" Ma did not eat dinner. She might stand still as she talked, or she might walk in circles around me. "I loved him once," she usually said many times before she began talking of Baby's getting sick, the telegrams to Beri for Pitaji to come, his not doing so, her not telegramming about Baby's death. "What could he do?" she might conclude, while looking at the floor, "although he always cries so handsomely." I knew, of course, that everything was about me.

When Pitaji woke from his drunken sleeps, he asked for water to dissolve the powders he took to purge himself by vomiting. On my wedding night, while Pitaji spoke of love in English, it was the soft wet vowels of his vomiting that I remembered.

Rajinder bolted the door of the room where we spent our first night together. There was a double bed in the center of the room. Near it was a small table with a jug of water and two glasses. The room had yellow walls. The mattress smelled faintly of mildew. I stopped crying. I was suddenly calm. I stood near the bed, a fold of the sari covering my eyes. I thought, I will just say our marriage has been a terrible mistake. Rajinder lifted the sari's fold. He looked into my eyes.  "I am lucky," he said. He was wearing a white silk kurta with tiny flowers embroidered around the neck. With a light squeeze of my elbow, he let me know I was to sit. He took off his kurta, folded it like a shirt, put it on the table. No, wait. I must tell you, I said. The tie of his pajamas was hidden under his drooping stomach. Hair rose in a cord up his belly. At his chest it spread into a stain. What an ugly man, I thought. No. Wait, I said. He did not hear or I did not say. Louder. Tou an a very nice man, I am sure. He took off his pajamas. His penis looked like a slug resting on lichen-covered rocks. He laid me down on the bed, which had a white sheet dotted with rose petals. I put my hands on his chest to push him away. He took both wrists in one hand. No loving tonight, I said, but he might not have heard, or I might not have said. I wondered whether it would hurt as much as it had with Pitaji. My breath quickened from fear. Rajinder's other hand undid my blouse. I felt its disappointment with my small breasts. The ceiling was so far away. The moisture between my legs was like breath on glass.

Rajinder put on his kurta, poured himself some water. After drinking he offered me some.

Sleep was there as soon as I closed my eyes. But around eight in the morning, when Rajinder woke me, I was exhausted. The door to our room was open. One of Rajinder's cousins, a fat hairy man with a towel around his waist, walked past to the bathroom. Seeing me, he leered.

I had breakfast with Rajinder's family in our room. We sat around a small table eating parathas with yogurt. I wanted to sleep. Again Rajinder's mother talked the most. Her words were indistinct. I would blink and my eyes would remain closed. "You eat like a bird," she said, smiling.

After breakfast we visited a widowed aunt of Rajinder's who had been unable to attend the wedding because of arthritis. She lived in a two-room flat whose walls, floor to ceiling, were covered with posters of gods. The flat smelled of mothballs. As she spoke of carpenters and cobblers moving in from the villages to pass themselves off as upper castes, the corners of her mouth became white with spit. I was silent, except for when she asked me what dishes I liked to cook. As we left, she pressed fifty-one rupees into Rajinder's hands. "A thousand years. A thousand children," she said.

Then there was the bus ride to Rajinder's village. The roads were so bad I kept being jolted awake. My sleep became fractured till I dreamed of the bus ride. In the village there were the grimy hens peering into the well and the women for whom I posed demurely in the courtyard. They sat in a circle around me, murmuring compliments. My eyes were covered with my sari. As I stared at the ground, I fell asleep. I woke an hour later to their praise of my modesty. That night in the dark room at the rear of the house, I was awakened by Rajinder digging between my legs. Although he tried to be gentle, I just wished it over. There was the face, distorted above me, the hands which raised my nipples so cruelly, resentful of being cheated, even though there was never any anger in Rajinder's voice. He was always polite. Even in bed he used the formal you. "Could you get on all fours, please?"

Winter turned into spring. The trees in the park beside our home swelled green. Rajinder was kind. When he traveled for conferences to Baroda, Madras, Jaipur, Bangalore, he always brought back saris or other gifts. The week I had malaria, he came home every lunch hour. On my twenty-second birthday he took me to the Taj Mahal. When we returned in the evening, he had arranged for my family to hide in the flat.

Rajinder did not make me do anything I did not want to, except for sex. Even that was sometimes like a knot being kneaded out. I did not mind his being in the flat. The loneliness I felt, however, when Rajinder was away on his trips was not based on missing him. It was only the loneliness of being a person in the world. I do not think Rajinder missed me on his trips, for he never mentioned it.

Despite my not thinking of Rajinder when he wasn't there, he was good for me. He was ambitious, and watching his efforts gave me confidence. He was always trying for a degree or certificate in something. Anything can be done if you are intelligent, hardworking, open-minded, he would boast. Before Rajinder, I had not actually believed one event pushes into another. I took a class in English. Because I studied it two hours a day, I progressed quickly. Rajinder told me there was nothing whorish in wearing lipstick. Wearing lipstick and perfume began making me feel attractive. Along with teaching me to try, Rajinder took me to restaurants where foreign food was served, to plays, to English movies. He was so modern he even said "Oh Jesus" instead of "Oh Ram." The world seemed slightly larger than it had been before.

Summer came. Every few days, the luu swept up from Rajasthani deserts, killing one or two of the cows left wandering unattended on Delhi's streets. The corpses lay untouched for a week sometimes, till their swelling tongues cracked open their jaws and stuck out absurdly.

For me, the heat was like a constant buzzing. It separated flesh from bone and my skin felt rubbery. I began to wake earlier and earlier. By five, the eastern edge of the sky was too bright to look at. I bathed early in the morning, then after breakfast. I did so again after doing laundry, before lunch. As June progressed, the very air seemed to whine under the heat's stress. I stopped eating lunch. Around two, before taking my nap, I poured a few mugs of water on my head. I liked to lie on the bed imagining the monsoon had come.

So the summer passed, slowly and vengefully, till the last week of June, when I woke one afternoon in love.

I had returned home that day after spending two weeks with my parents. Pitaji had been sick. I had helped take care of him in Safdarjung Hospital. For months a bubble had been growing at the base of his neck. We noticed it when it looked like a pencil rubber. Over two months it became a small translucent ball. If examined in the right light, it was cloudy from blood. We told Pitaji to have it examined. He only went to a herbal doctor for poultices. So when I opened the door late one night to find Kusum, I did not have to be told that Pitaji had wakened screaming that his pillow was sodden with blood.

While I hurried clothes into a plastic bag, Kusum leaned against a wall of our bedroom drinking water. It was three. Rajinder sat on the edge of the bed in a blue kurta pajama. I felt no fear. The rushing, the banging on doors seemed to be only melodrama.

As I stepped into the autorickshaw which had been waiting for us downstairs, I looked up. Rajinder was leaning against the railing. The moon behind him was yellow and uneven like a scrap of old newspaper. I waved. He waved back. Then we were off, racing through dark, abandoned streets.

"Ma's fine," Kusum said. "He screamed so loud." She sat slightly turned on the seat so that she faced me. Kusum wore shirt pants. "A thousand times we told him. Get it checked. Don't be cheap. Where's all that black money going?" She shook her head.

I felt lonely talking of our father without concern. "He wants to die," I said. "That's why he eats and drinks like that. He's ashamed of his life, of his bribes, all that." This was one of the interpretations Pitaji had been suggesting for years, so it came unbidden to my tongue.

"If he was really ashamed, he'd change. He's just crazy."

I had not meant to defend Pitaji, for I did not think he needed defending. I viewed Pitaji impersonally, like a historical event.

"The way he treats Ma. Or the way he treated you. I remember when he'd stamp his foot next to you to see how high you'd jump. If he wants to die, he should do it quietly. You and Ma are cowards."

"Ma hates him," I murmured. The night air was still bitter from the evening traffic. I wondered if Kusum's capacity to expect things from people was due to her not being raised at home. I said, "We have to live with him. Why be angry?"

"That's what he's relying on. Be angry. It's a big world. There are a lot of people worth loving. Why waste time on somebody mediocre?"

In the hospital there was broken glass in the hallways. Someone had urinated in the lift. When we came into the yellow room that

Pitaji shared with five other men, he was asleep. His face looked like a shiny brown stone. He was on the bed nearest the window. Rajesh stood at the head of the bed. Ma sat at its foot, her back to us, looking out at the bleaching night.

"He will be all right," I said.

Turning toward us. Ma said, "When he goes, he wants to make sure we all hurt." She was crying. "I thought I didn't love him, but you can't live this long with a person and not love just a bit. He knew that. When they were bringing him here, he said, 'See what you've done, demoness.' "

The world slipped from under me. Ma had often said she hated Pitaji. I became dizzy. One second Ma was herself and then, the next second, there was no one in the world who loved me.

Rajesh took her away. Kusum also left, so that she would not be tired for her laboratory in the morning. I spent the rest of the night awake in a chair next to Pitaji's bed.

Around eight. Ma returned. While we were there, I kept looking away from her, because it made me too sad to see her face. I went to the flat. In the days that followed, it was I who replaced Ma in the morning. Kusum lived at home while Pitaji was sick, but she came to the hospital only once.

At night, Kusum, Rajesh, and I slept on adjacent cots on the flat's roof I sometimes played cards with Rajesh before going to bed. Kusum did not join us. Instead, every night, in preparation for going abroad, she read five pages of an English dictionary. She would write down the words she did not know. Kusum did not brag about her work as I might have.

I had thought I would be anxious alone with Pitaji. After Ma caught Pitaji and me, he and I were rarely together. When we were, it was either in public or with Ma in a nearby room from which she would periodically appear. Her surveillance made me feel that she had no faith in me. Now, despite the other patients in the room with Pitaji, I worried that since only Ma knew how dangerous he was, he might be able to hurt me. Even asleep, Pitaji looked threatening. But the medicines kept him unconscious. When he woke, it was only to ask for water or food, then he fell asleep again. If I did not respond quickly enough to his demands, Pitaji screamed and I cringed.

Two or three days after I began staying with Pitaji, I was looking out the window at the autorickshaws lined up across the street when Pitaji shouted something at me. I turned to him, saw his mouth opening and closing like a digging machine or a dog, and I thought, I can leave right now. I can be home in twenty minutes in one of the autorickshaws. Suddenly I could see only Pitaji. Everything else vanished in a white rage. I felt as if I were tipping forward.

In a few hours the anger was gone. Once it stopped, I doubted its intensity.

When I replaced Ma the next morning, she greeted me by nodding toward Pitaji. "He won't die a natural death," she said with a strange pride.

The anger came back momentarily. I nearly said, "Let's kill him, then."

That afternoon Pitaji wasn't able to sleep. He told me again the story of how an exorcist had been called to beat his mother sane. Pitaji had been unable to watch. But he could not leave, for he felt he would be abandoning her. He stood in the doorway of their one-room mud house, looking out as she was beaten behind him. A crowd of children had gathered beyond the front yard. Whenever his mother screamed, the crowd whispered. Pitaji told the story calmly, as if it were someone else he was talking about. When he finished, he changed the topic. But Pitaji had told the story before, so the desire to create a reaction was obvious. I was looking out the window at the groundskeeper. He was walking around the compound sprinkling the dust with water from a bag the size of a man's body that was slung over one shoulder. When I did not turn around at the story's end, Pitaji said, "I'm sorry. I'm an old man. I shouldn't always be trying to get pity." This self-awareness made me feel for the first time that Pitaji need not have raped me. I had been raped because for Pitaji no one was as real as he was, so nothing he did to others had substance. My anger kept me from moving. When I did begin turning to him, I was frightened I might stab him with the scissors on the stool near his bed.