An Unrestored Woman (15 page)

How long ago it seemed.

When they reached his cottage they entered through the back of the house, by way of the kitchen, and it was only then that Mohan noticed the people who had gathered outside his front door, peering in through his window. He jumped back in surprise. He stopped D6, who was still in the kitchen, and slammed the door shut.

“What? What is it?” D6 asked.

Mohan was shaking violently. He clenched his fists. “A mob,” he said. “Outside.” Sounds of shouting and banging on the front door reached them. When he opened the back door a crack, to see if the car was still there, Mohan saw that one or two of the men were making their way toward the back, and the driver had gone running. He slammed the door shut. The kitchen had a barred window in the back and through this the two men began throwing rocks. They yelled to the men in the front, They're back here! Mohan and D6 were now pressed against the door to the front room, away from the rocks that were being flung at them. It was early afternoon and the sun glinted off the raised machetes of the men gathered now in the back. Some of the men had sticks. Mohan counted a dozen, maybe more. The rocks kept coming, and they were saved only by the fact that the barred window kept out most of the bigger ones. Mohan shielded his face, already cut and bleeding, and when he peeked through his fingers he saw the rage in the faces of the men. You're a traitor, they yelled. You gave our land to the katwas, they yelled. They were crowded at the window, white teeth glinting like the machetes and the dark, dark darkness of their skin crowding out the light. Mohan thought of the front door but he knew,
he knew
that the latch door on the well was open and that if he and D6 made a run for it, they would chase them into the well.

He looked at D6. He too was shielding his face. His sixth finger stuck out of the side of his face and Mohan thought that this was what he had always wanted. A limb or an appendage or an organ that was unbendable, unyielding, attached to his body but free of it.

The mob pushed closer. The door rattled on its hinges.

Mohan had never believed that people's lives flashed before their eyes in the moments before death, but in a way, his did: he saw his father's friend. His heart recoiled. The men with the machetes disappeared because they, in the end, were no kind of threat. But this man—his father's friend—
he
was indiscriminate. Mohan pushed tighter against the kitchen wall, felt the roughness of the sheet his face was being thrust into. No, he didn't care. He didn't care if you were his friend's son, or a dreaming little boy, or a boy breathing slowly, sleeping under a thin summer sheet: he took a machete to them all.

 

S
UCH A
M
IGHTY
R
IVER

Alok Debnath sucked on his sixth finger, dangling off the pinky of his right hand, for eighty-four years before he lost it. It was so simple: one quick slash of the knife and there it lay. On the table. Detached. It was moist and trembling, like a snail without its shell, and he looked at it with curiosity, as if it were a museum piece or an artifact that had once belonged to someone else. But it was his, all right. This recognition lasted only a moment because in the next, blood began to pour out of the raw flesh and exposed bone where the finger had once been. Even the little snail on the table was now floating in a pool of blood. Alok Debnath clutched his left hand over the gushing wound. Blood seeped through his fingers and landed on the dirt floor with the pretty plop of fat raindrops. All the blood in his body seemed to be emptying itself through its new faucet. He screamed and screamed. “Shut up, shut up,
shut up
,” Naagi said. Someone came up behind him and stuffed a rag into his mouth. With his mouth plugged up Alok Debnath's eyes watered, darted around the room. Everyone—Naagi, the fat man, the little bird—eyed him nervously. Except for Rekha. Rekha just stood there placidly, voluptuously, watching him. Who was this woman? Had he loved her once? He might have—he couldn't be sure, his mind was muddy—but he was certain he did not love her now.

*   *   *

It was toward the end of December, a little after the ayananta but before the children's winter holidays, when Rekha didn't come. He had bought her for the afternoon but she failed to show. Alok Debnath waited nervously. It was unlike her to be late; he was without doubt, in the case of Rekha, of certain things: she would brutalize him with her cruelty, seduce him with her ass, and she was always, always on time. It was nearing five o'clock; his daughter would return at six with the children, his son-in-law at eight. Alok Debnath waited by the window. The street his daughter lived on looked out onto a row of affluent houses in Taktakpur. Her husband had made money in textiles, and theirs was one of the biggest homes on the block. But Alok Debnath cared for none of it: the big house, the money, much less his avaricious son-in-law. He sat morosely at the window of his lavish room sucking on his sixth finger and wondered what to do. He shuffled around the room, unsure what he was looking for, then he put on his coat and his scarf and his knitted hat and walked out of the door without a paisa to his name. He even forgot his keys. When he got to the end of the block he remembered: he was looking for Rekha. With this thought his mind and his spirits lifted like a kite in a strong wind, and Alok Debnath breathed deeply of the chill winter air. The scent of woodsmoke and the Ganga mingled and entered his blood, swelled his heart, and he set off again with conviction. After he'd walked about ten paces he found it was no use, his mind was dull again, but he continued doggedly. It would come to him. And it did, four blocks later: don't worry, he said aloud and with great solemnity, “I'm coming, Sarojini, I'm coming for you.”

Alok Debnath had just turned eighty-four. It was the winter of 1976 and he was living with his married daughter in Benares. His daughter had three children but he preferred not to see them. They were noisy, they confused him, and they pulled on his sixth finger as if it was one of their plastic toys. The youngest, three-year-old Bunny, once grabbed it as she would a handful of bhelpuri and said, “Why is it all wrinkly, nanaji?”

“Because it's old and tired from you pulling it all the time,” he said. Though the truth was that when he was alone he liked to lie on his bed or sit at his window and suck on it. It was not a new habit; he'd had it since he was a little boy. It gave him comfort, or something close to it, and for a few minutes it lent his foggy mind a rare clarity: it took him back to the days of his childhood, to memories of his dead wife, Sarojini, and lately, to an understanding of something less pleasant, less wistful, but more necessary: it reminded him that he was at the end, that the places his sixth finger took him were the farthest places—and the only places—he had left to go.

Another thing he had trouble remembering was what exactly he used to do: it was a cruel irony that Alok Debnath had mapped half the subcontinent in his long career as principal cartographer for the Indian Geographical Society but that oftentimes could not name his own street. All Alok Debnath could really recall was the feel of Rekha's body against his own. The chocolaty edges of her round buttocks pressing into his crotch, her skin sometimes smooth, sometimes rough from goose bumps he had caused, the cold had caused, or—as she was quick to point out—because she was thinking about her pimp, the only man she truly loved. “Your pimp,” Alok Debnath asked her, “how could you love
him
?” She'd scoff, and say, “Who would you rather I loved? A limp drooling old fart like you?” It's all right, it's all right, he thought, gently stroking her hair. Her words didn't matter so long as her body lay next to his. But then she'd sit up and say, “Your time's up.”

“But I paid for the entire day.”

“No you didn't, you paid for two hours.” Was she lying? She could easily do so and he would never be the wiser. “But,” he'd begin … it was then that it all came back to him. In a way. His mind with its dark and empty recesses, the lost hours, the lost days, the confusion of starting for someplace and ending up in another, the horrible, horrible decay of age, entire years lost like a broken shoelace, and worst of all was when he looked in the mirror and the face looking back at him was unrecognizable, misshapen, and as battered as a bridge on the verge of collapse.

*   *   *

He was in Calcutta. It was a warm spring afternoon in 1920. Alok Debnath had been married for two months. His new bride, Sarojini, was a girl from a middle-class family in Jamshedpur, sweet and loving and awkward (since they had only met on the day of their wedding), with delicate dark gray eyes and lips as moist and plump as a bumblebee. He couldn't stop kissing them, and when he was away from her, which was most of the day, he would trace their shape onto the maps strewn across his desk, trying to find the perfect constellation of cities that matched her lips. Sometimes, though he tried not to, he thought of those lips sucking on his sixth finger. It was nothing he'd ever ask her to do, it was his deepest secret, but it made him almost cry to think of the simplicity of the gesture, the great intimacy of such a small and awful thing.

At the time Sarojini worked as a typist in a municipal government office. They had decided she should work until he was promoted to senior cartographer, which he expected within a year or two. She was fine with the arrangement, though she was new to the city and so every day at 6:00 p.m. Alok left his office at 45 Ballygunge Circular Road, walked to her office near Lansdowne Market, and then they walked together to their flat by Elgin Park. It was, for both of them, their favorite part of the day. But on this warm spring afternoon Alok was held up in a meeting, and by the time he got to Lansdowne Market it was 7:30 p.m. and Sarojini was gone. He went back to their flat, assuming she had come straight home, but she wasn't there either. He waited a few minutes then set out again, imagining the worst, not knowing where to begin, but determined to find her. Under his breath he said, “I'm coming, Sarojini, I'm coming for you.”

*   *   *

He wandered out of Taktakpur, walking aimlessly but drifting toward the ghats. He'd only been living with his daughter for six months, since his diagnosis, and had never been to the shores of the Ganga. But he knew there were slums along the ghats and that Rekha lived in one of them. That's all she ever talked about: living with her beloved pimp on the western edge of the Dharahara Mosque, near Pancha Ganga Ghat, but Alok Debnath didn't get much past the Arabic School before he felt hungry. He walked into a restaurant, the first he saw, and ordered vegetable biryani, chicken 65, and a mango lassi. He ate with great relish, the sour sweet creaminess of the lassi a frigate to the spicy sting of the chicken. When he had finished his meal and the waiter brought the bill, Alok Debnath checked his pockets. They were empty. He checked them again and when he found they were still empty, he sat, perplexed. “Somebody stole my wallet,” he said.

The waiter laughed. “Is that right, old man,” he said. “And I bet somebody stole your mama's chutia too.” He stopped laughing. “Pay up.”

Alok Debnath looked at him helplessly. Where could his wallet have gone? The waiter reached down and grabbed him by the lapel, shaking him. A diner at the next table intervened. “What's the problem?” he asked.

“These old people,” the waiter said. “They think they can pull this little act and get out of paying.”

The diner asked how much the bill was for and paid it along with his own. By now Alok Debnath was shaking. The wrinkles under his eyes were wet with tears. The diner helped him up and when they got outside he asked where he was going. Alok Debnath looked at his hands and honestly could not remember. He concentrated hard for a moment. “Ah,” he said, “I'm going to look for my wife.”

“Where is she?” the diner asked.

He looked again at his hands. He didn't recognize them; they were the hands of an old man. “She works near here, near Lansdowne Market,” he said.

The diner looked at him strangely. “Come to my house,” he said. “You can have a nice cup of chai and then we'll figure things out.”

“No, no, no,” Alok Debnath said. “I have to find her, there's no time to waste.” He was nearly at the corner when the diner ran after him, put a rupee coin in his hand, and said, “Go with God.” Alok Debnath looked at the coin and dropped it into his pocket. A few steps later, when a thin beggar girl approached him, her eyes as bright and beautiful as lamps, he dug in his pockets, pulled out the coin, and gave it to her.

*   *   *

Alok retraced his steps back to his office. His wife was nowhere along their usual route. He looked in every shop, around every stall, ran up and down stairs; he even looked under the road crossings. The perspiration gathered under his arms, his heart raced. He told himself, Calm down, you won't find her unless you calm down. Then he said to himself, She's been in Calcutta for two months, she certainly knows the way home. With this thought he seated himself beneath the Corinthian columns of his office building. The russet-colored walls, under the twilit sky, shone like stripped bark. He could imagine sap running down their lengths. The palm trees swayed and bent with the wind. And even the sky seemed strangely blushing or bruised, as though just then, in that instant, it had learned what it was to have a face only to have it promptly punched. He thought of Sarojini with sudden despair. She was lost. He could feel it. He could feel her wandering alone in this vast city as well as he could feel his own breath. He leapt up. He raced to Maddox Square. He didn't know what he expected to find but there was nothing, only an open field. There was a boy sitting next to a monkey. A few men loitered on the edge of the field, smoking. He heard the cries of boys playing cricket in an adjoining field. He turned back to the boy and the monkey. The boy was wearing a cotton shirt and a lungi, and there was a pan in front of him and around this pan danced the monkey. She (Alok presumed) was wearing a little frock, just the kind of frock a little girl would wear. In fact, it probably
was
a child's frock. It had been pink but was now dirty and stained and a dull gray. The boy looked up at him, the monkey stopped dancing, and she too looked up at him. The monkey's eyes were curious but the boy's were blank. “Do you want to see a trick?” the boy asked.