My Nine Lives (20 page)

I became more sick and miserable, and Dharma took me to a lady doctor who told me that I was farther along than I had suspected. On the way home, Dharma said, “You'll have to decide.” I
had
decided, and Dharma didn't try to dissuade me. But she said, “For God's sake, don't tell L.K. He's such a sentimental old fool.” She showed me how to do things like jumping down the stairs and riding on motor rickshaws that shook violently. Nothing worked, and Dharma said we would have to make arrangements. She confessed
that she had several times been in the same situation, on tour abroad as well as in India, so it was nothing new to her.

She found a doctor—this one was not a lady doctor but an unshaven little man in a tenement within a city alley. The stone stairs up to his flat were littered and betel-stained, but they opened on to a wide verandah overlooking the city. There was no doctor's name on a board but a nursery class was being conducted on the verandah by a thin and harassed-looking woman. She took no notice of us other than waving us inside, as she carried on with her lesson. Dharma whispered to me that she was the doctor's wife who had started the school to keep them going after he lost his licence to practice.

We entered a small unfurnished room, and then the doctor appeared and took us into another small room; this one had a bed covered by a greyish sheet with faint bloodstains on it, and also some kidney bowls and other semi-clinical objects. The doctor spoke to me about America which he had visited thirty years ago, I don't remember whether as a student or a tourist, anyway he had met some famous doctors there and also gazed on wonders like the Niagara Falls. He didn't have an assistant but operated by himself, without anesthetic and with an instrument I didn't wish to look at. Well, I was young and Dharma believed in positive thinking. Afterward, in view of my invalid state, she took me home in a taxi, which was expensive but rattled just as much as the rickshaws we usually rode in.

By the time L.K. and Vidia came back, I had fully recovered. They were both elated by the success of their tour. L.K., quoting verses about battle and victory, shook his stick in the air and cackled in his old-man way, which was at the same time youthful, childlike almost. Vidia was silent, a half-smile on his lips and his eyes shining as though he were in love—
with his future, with himself, and (I thought) with me. Now, years later, this is one way I remember him.

That night, when we were in bed together on the balcony, he didn't tell me much about their tour but what had to be done next for his campaign. One of his student friends had gone into advertising, and he had designed some very effective posters and other printed material to be distributed to voters. They had calculated the cost and it was high, higher than the funds at the disposal of Vidia's campaign.

“Have you told him yet?”

“Told who what?”

“Your father, who else.”

Then I had to inform him that there was no more baby to tell my father about. At that he rolled away from me. He lay on his back; he looked at the stars; he was silent. I sat up and peered into his face, lit up by the yellowish street lamp. Gone was his half-smile; instead his lips were drawn into a thin, thin line. And that is the other way I remember him.

He said nothing more to me but next morning confronted Dharma, and they had one of their violent quarrels. L.K. sat in the middle of it all, dipping rusks into his glass of tea while reading the paper. But finally he threw it aside and said he could not stay in a place where one was not even allowed to read the newspaper in peace, though it was all nonsense and lies that were printed there. Vidia pointed at his mother and said, “Do you know what she's done?” Dharma cried “No!” and she ran into the bedroom in fright. And then, when Vidia told him about the abortion, I too became frightened of L.K. and the way he suddenly changed. His grey hair seemed to stand on end as he snatched up his stick and pursued her into the bedroom. “Murderess!” he cried—and when I followed, I saw that he had caught hold of her hair and was beating her around the shoulders with his stick. I shouted
above their shouts that it was my fault, that I had asked to have it done—but as I tried to get between them, Vidia came and dragged me into the other room. He wrapped his arms around me—not in a tender way but to restrain me, and he did not let go till the shouts from the bedroom had subsided. When I went in, I saw Dharma huddled on the bed, with her hair wild and loose, and her bruised face swollen with tears. L.K. stood in front of her, drained of anger now, his head lowered in contrition. When he tried to touch her, she shook him off fiercely. After a while he went into the bathroom and returned with a wet cloth to wipe her face. She pushed his hand away several times but at last allowed him to sit beside her and wipe away her tears. Both were silent.

The cost of the posters designed by Vidia's friend turned out to be too high; and anyway, L.K. said they were suitable for an urban electorate but not for the villagers and landless laborers that their party represented. So when Vidia lost the election, no one blamed it on the lack of those election posters. L.K., who had been through many defeats of various kinds, took this one lightly and at once began to plan for the next campaign, in five years' time. “Five years!” Vidia said with a dry laugh. But he too was not at all cast down by his failure. Unlike L.K., he didn't speak of the future but seemed silently to be turning over plans in his mind. This gave him a closed, more determined look, as if a veil of sweetness had been torn away and another person revealed underneath. I loved him not less in this new character but differently; and it seemed almost right that he too should be different toward me.

I was often alone at night now, while he was away somewhere, not returning till I was already asleep. During the day he no longer wanted me with him as before. When I asked him to take me, he said it would not be appropriate. I understood that it wasn't his former coffee-house friends he met
now, and when I asked about them, he waved them away as though they were child's play he had outgrown. It seemed he was meeting other sorts of people now—“serious people,” he said. I was hurt; weren't our ideas serious too, I asked, and everything we had talked about and thought we were living for? In reply, he made the same sort of dismissive gesture as he had done when speaking of his student friends. But then he kissed me and I felt all right, especially as he began to take more interest in my appearance. He said I should no longer wear my hair cut so short, or the kurta-pajama outfit I liked but a sari or salwar. I was glad to oblige him, but even so he never took me along to these new places nor to meet the new people he was seeing.

When I met him again recently in New York, he failed to recognize me. How could he, why should he? We hadn't seen one another for thirty years. But I think I would have recognized him, even if I hadn't known that the reception at the consulate was in his honor. He probably hadn't thought about me much in the intervening years, and I didn't think that much about him either. But I was always interested to hear about him and had many opportunities to do so. Although I had never returned to India, I had kept in touch with Indian organizations like the Indo-American Friendship and the Asia Societies, and after my father died and left me most of his estate, I made donations to these and other organizations and was invited to sit on some committees and to be a patron at their fund-raisers. So I often heard about Vidia, who had become an important public figure in India. He was a leader of his party, which had remained in power for several years. He had held some important portfolios and might have become the Prime Minister, if it hadn't been for the scandal
in his private life. Soon after my departure, he had married the daughter of a rich industrialist and they had several children. But he had left his family to live with a woman who was herself involved in politics
—
she held some important post, which he had maneuvered for her. They were said to be very useful to each other.

She too was there at the reception
—
not as his companion of course (India wasn't that advanced yet) but in her own right as the Commissioner for Women or whatever it was she represented. I looked at her with interest, which was easy since she took no notice of me: I was just another guest at the reception in Vidia's honor. She wore a badly draped sari that kept falling down, revealing an expanse of naked fat flesh swelling out from under her blouse. But she moved her big bulk with the easy self-confidence of a successful person and was very responsive to those important enough to talk to her, often laughing out loud with two perfect rows of healthy teeth.

It took me some time to get near Vidia, who was surrounded by Indian and American officials, several Indian businessmen settled in New York, and maybe some secret service personnel. I was shy and nervous of approaching him
—
and when at last I did, what I had feared happened. He stared at me with the fixed smile and the questioning regard with which important people shield themselves. I had to tell him who I was. For a moment the smile left him, but was almost at once replaced by a very cordial one
—
the sort extended to a former acquaintance whom one has not seen for a long time and is not anxious to see again. All around us there were others eager to talk to him and more coming up, and I had to give way. I'm not sure that I was not pushed aside by one of the secret service men in big shoes.

*

It was not long after Vidia lost his first election that his new contacts arranged a kind of semi-official job for him. I was never sure what this was, but it brought him into the orbit of some powerful politicians. He began to attend official functions, and sometimes an official car and chauffeur were sent for him and were admired by the children in our alley. The chauffeur was too grand to get out to open the door, so Vidia had to clamber in by himself. All the same, as he sat in the back of the car and was driven away to a destination unknown to us, he was already beginning to look like someone from a world superior to the inhabitants of our neighborhood, including ourselves.

L.K. was mostly away at this time, and in his case too among people and places far removed from us. Weeks passed and we heard nothing from him and Dharma grumbled, “Not even a postcard to ask if we're alive or what.” She was not at all her usual self during his absence—she didn't even paint herself much but sat in an old cotton sari with her feet drawn up on the chair and her elbows propped on her knees. “Anyone can send a postcard—but no, it's too much trouble for him. And next time he comes I'll tell him ‘Get out—get out of my home!' I've told that many times to grander men than he: get out! And they've cried and wept, yes right here at my feet,” and she pointed at them propped up on the chair, broad brown dancer's feet, one of them adorned with a toe-ring.

But sometimes she spoke admiringly of his work as a union organizer and how he went to remote places where no one had ever heard of labor laws. He sat under a tree and waited, and slowly people began to come to him and he told them how to work together against being exploited. “What does he eat when he's out there for weeks and months on end, where does he sleep? No one knows. And for what?” she
always ended up. “For nothing. No one pays him one single pai for his work, it's all for others. For him—starvation and jail. Do you think that's what I want for my son? Never. First carry away my corpse and burn it.”

Though Vidia's work often kept him away till late at night, when he finally came home he was as fresh as he had been when he left in the morning. He only pretended to be tired when he said, “Meetings meetings meetings.” He never explained to me what these meetings had been or where or with whom. But I realized that whatever it was that was happening, it was something wonderfully hopeful for him. More than ever I loved to look at him and see his wide open, wide awake eyes sparkle in the light of the streetlamp. Sometimes he turned to me and held me hard against himself, and then I had no thought that his happiness came from anything other than myself.

He never quarreled with me the way he did with his mother. I suppose he couldn't because I didn't know enough Hindi and that was always the language in which they fought. They used what sounded like some very violent invective, and it often ended with things being thrown and broken, usually by her but sometimes by him. Once he swept all the pots of paint off her dressing table. She was so furious that she threatened to jump out the window and already had one leg over the sill when he pulled her back. We were only on the second floor, he pointed out, and all she would do was break her other leg and limp even more. As he said it, he laughed, and then she laughed too, and whatever unforgivable thing had happened between them was completely forgotten.

Although he was never really angry with me, he began to be irritated—by small things I had done or omitted to do, and he remembered them for the rest of the day, and the following day too. He often accused me of not looking after
his clothes properly, for he was even more particular about his appearance than before: naturally, since he had to be seen by many important people in important places. If the washerman hadn't starched his shirts well enough, it was my fault, and I often found it easier to have new ones made. I went back to the textile merchant and to the tailor where they kept Vidia's measurements; and with the jewelers' market so conveniently close by, I also bought new little jeweled studs to fasten the new shirts with, because I knew how much he appreciated them and was always grateful.

I still hadn't told my father about our marriage, and whenever I asked Vidia if it wasn't time we did, he always said to wait. In the end I never did tell my father—in fact, he never knew that I had been through a marriage ceremony in India, and he always thought that my second marriage (of which he, rightly, disapproved) was my first. What happened to that piece of paper that Vidia and I signed under penalty of a fine or jail sentence or both? Vidia told me not to bother about it—to forget it, he said—so I don't know what strings were pulled to make it disappear. It never surfaced before or during any of my subsequent marriages. Vidia too seemed not to have been troubled by it.