Serious Men (2 page)

He walked down the dim corridor of the third floor, which was the top floor. It was flanked by ageing pale yellow walls with huge cracks that ran like dark river systems. There were about forty open doors here. Unmoving shadows sat on the doorways and gaped. Old widows calmly combed their hair. Children ran happily on the ancient grey stones of the corridor.

He knocked on the only door on the corridor that was shut. As he waited, he felt the turbulence of all those open doors, and the milling shadows. An old familiar sorrow rose like vapour inside him. Oja was trapped here with him. Once, her youthful words used to rush out like a giggle; she used to sing to herself in the mornings. But eventually the
chawl
seeped into her. The darkness grew, and it sometimes stared at him through her big black eyes.

The door opened, somewhat slower and with far less anticipation than it used to years ago. Oja Mani appeared, her luxurious dark hair still wet from a new bath. As delicate as ever, entirely capable of touching her toes in the unlikely event of being asked
to do so. But she was not sculpted by the vain exercises of those forward-caste women on the Worli Seaface. Beneath her thin red cotton nightdress, she had a slight paunch that might flatten out if she rested on her back.

Their home was exactly fifteen feet long and ten feet wide. There was a cleared patch of smooth grey stone floor at the centre. Along a wall were a television, a washing machine, a benevolent golden Buddha and a towering steel cupboard. At one end of the room, by the only window that was reinforced by a rusted iron grille, was a rudimentary kitchen that ran into a tiny stained-glass bathroom where one would fit, and two would be in a relationship.

Oja left the door open and went back to sit on the floor and stare at the television. From seven to nine every evening, she was hypnotized by the melancholic Tamil soaps. During this time she encouraged everybody to disappear. Ayyan sat beside her and watched the serial patiently.

‘Why is that woman crying?’ he asked to irritate her. ‘Last night too she was crying. She has no dialogue?’

Oja did not respond. Her own large interested eyes were moist.

He told her, ‘I come home after a hard day’s work and you just sit and watch TV?’

Her nostrils flared a bit but she chose to remain silent. That was her strategy.

‘You know, Oja,’ he said, as he began these things, ‘rich people have a name for everything. They even have a word for the time a man spends with his family.’

‘Really?’ she asked, without turning round.

‘They call it Quality Time.’

‘It’s English?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why should they name something like that?’ ‘They name everything out there,’ he said. ‘You know, Oja. There are people in those tall buildings who suddenly begin to
wonder, “Who am I? What am I?” And they have a name for that too.’

There was a knock at the door. Oja muttered that there was no peace in this place. When Ayyan opened the door, two little girls walked in. One was about ten and the other must have been two years younger. They said, both at once, ‘Guests have come to our house, we need chairs.’ And they carried away the two plastic chairs.

Oja shut the door and latched it firmly as though that would protect her from other intrusions that were lurking outside. She then sank onto the floor again. But the television erupted in the cheerful jingle of a shampoo commercial. She got up briskly and went to the kitchen. She knew the exact lengths of the commercial breaks. The first break was the longest and in that time she always tried to do most of her cooking.

‘Look at this,’ Ayyan said pointing at the commercial. ‘This woman has a problem. She has a big problem, actually. Her hair is thin and weak. That’s her problem. Now she is using a shampoo. Look now. She is happy. Her problem is solved. A man is ogling her and she looks at him sideways. Now her hair is very thick and strong.’

Ayyan was laughing, but Oja knew that the muscles around his temples must be moving. She did not turn from the trembling vessel on the stove. She waited for him to empty all his hate.

He was saying, ‘This is what these bastards think is a problem. Hairfall. That’s their big problem.’ Then he asked, ‘Where is Adi?’

Oja answered, ‘Girls and butterflies; boys and monkeys.’

Ayyan did not understand most of her proverbs. ‘Oja, where is he?’

‘God knows what that weird boy is up to,’ she said. Yet, it was she who had enthusiastically asked him to go away when the serial was about to begin.

O
N THE VAST
tar-coated terrace that was surrounded by distant looming buildings, people sat in small scattered groups. Beneath the starless sky children screamed and ran. One boy, about ten maybe, stood silently in a corner. His hair was oiled and severely combed. He was in a T-shirt that had the image of Einstein sticking his tongue out jovially. The boy had clear black eyes: Oja’s eyes. A hearing-aid was strung to his left ear. Its white wire ran into his T-shirt.

He did not seem very keen to run around, though he appeared very interested in what was happening around him. After a while, the children came together, close to where he was standing. They were panting gleefully, and someone decided that since they were all very tired they would play husband-and-wife. In their opinion it was a relaxing game.

Without too much conflict they split into pairs. A remaining girl was quickly joined with the silent boy. She looked at him condescendingly, because she was a girl and he was just a boy. Though he didn’t ask for directions she explained the game to him. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, as an incentive. They had to just behave like parents. All the other pairs walked away to various nooks of the terrace where there were imaginary markets and theatres. The boy looked at his girl for a few seconds wondering what they must do that parents did. Then a solution entered his oddly large head.

He gently eased the girl to the ground and spread her legs. She looked confused but tried to figure out what he was trying to do. He climbed on top of her and bobbed his hips clumsily. The
young mothers, who until now had gazed lazily in intervals at their children like wild animals on grassland, came to life. They let out embarrassed chuckles and rushed to separate the boy from his temporary wife. The boy went back to his corner with a foul look on his face. The girl disengaged herself from the adult intervention. Now that she understood what he was doing, she continued with the game by pretending to tie her hair, a hint of boredom on her face. Then she went to sleep on the tar-coated floor.

Since all the pairs were busy, and his own mate was asleep, Adi went home. Oja let him in. The boy walked into the house with a wise calm and pulled out the
Encyclopaedia Britannica: M—P
from the lower portion of the television stand.

‘Forgot to tell you,’ Oja told her husband, ‘his teacher has written a complaint in the handbook again. You have to meet the Principal tomorrow morning.’

‘What has he done now?’ Ayyan asked with a proud smile. Adi looked up at his father and gave a mischievous wink.

‘You are the one who is spoiling him,’ Oja said. ‘They are going to kick him out of the school one of these days.’

She went to Adi and twisted his ear gently. ‘He asked one of those questions again in the class,’ she said.

‘What question?’ Ayyan asked, now chuckling. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t know even if you told me now. This boy is crazy.’

‘What did you do, Adi?’

‘The science teacher was saying that if you throw anything up it has to come down. Basic things like that. So I asked her if the acceleration due to gravity of any planet anywhere in the universe can make an object travel faster than light.’

Oja looked distressed. ‘And he was reading one of your books in the class,’ she said in an accusing way. ‘I don’t know how he took it with him.’

Ayyan made a conspiratorial face at his son and asked which book it was.

‘Brief History of Time,’
Adi said. ‘I don’t like it.’

Oja was staring at her son with a mixture of fear and excitement. Ayyan loved that look on his wife’s face, that sudden awakening in her from the gloomy acceptance of a life in BDD.

‘He is just ten,’ she said. ‘How does he understand these things?’

Last month, in the middle of the class, Adi had asked the science teacher something about arithmetic progression. A few weeks before that it was something else. Oja heard these stories from his teachers who were usually in some sort of happy delirium when they complained to her.

That night, Adi was sleeping near the fridge, as always, and his father lay next to him, holding the glass-bangled hand of his wife. Ayyan wondered if he must build a wooden loft. He turned towards his son who was facing him, but he was fast asleep. After a few minutes the boy turned in his sleep and hid his face under the fridge. That was a heartening development.

A pale light was coming through the rusted grilles of the kitchen window and Ayyan could see Oja in the blue glow. Her open palm, with its clear fatelines, rested loosely on her forehead. Her red nightgown was far less arousing than the saris she used to wear after marriage. She was always in a sari in those days because her mother had said that she should not come across as liberal. Oja’s legs were joined together and folded at the knees. Her silver anklets lay still. Ayyan ran his hand over her waist. She opened her eyes without confusion or protest. She lifted her head to check on Adi. The couple moved with skill. They could caress and even tumble and roll a bit without making a sound.

They were in a sort of common entanglement, with Ayyan’s shorts hanging at his knees, Oja’s nightgown lifted, her legs parted, when she, yawning, decided to check on Adi again. He was sitting with his back resting against the wall.

‘They wouldn’t let me play that yesterday,’ he said.

In the morning, when Adi was having his bath in the glass enclosure, Ayyan told his wife, his eyes dejected and voice deep, ‘I have something to say.’ Oja looked at him and then at the
boiling milk. ‘For the sake of our son,’ he said, ‘we must stop seeking our own pleasures.’

One hour later, as he was walking Adi to school, Ayyan thought of how Oja had readily accepted his decision. She had nodded, with one eye on the milk. It was an image that stayed with him till he reached a back lane in Worli and approached the tall black gates of St Andrew’s School. The decay of a man, he told himself, is first conveyed to him by his wife.

Oja’s face, in the inconvenience of love, was now a cold face that did not seem even to register pain any more. Once she used to moan and make short gasps and turn coy. Now, when he made love to her, she looked as though she was waiting for the bus. When she first began to assume that hollow gaze, he used it as a device in a private game in which the goal was to extract a reaction from her – a yelp, a sigh, a moan, anything. Then the game transformed. He imagined he was a powerful tea-planter raping a worker who had come to him asking for a loan. But the blank stare of his wife continued to haunt him. Eventually he put an end to all his private games. And he accepted her detached love in the same way that he accepted her cups of tea.

But her blank disenchanted face sometimes frightened him. It reminded him that the woman he loved so much was stranded in a dull life because of him. There was a time when he thought he could save her from BDD and everything else, that love alone could make him superhuman and somehow take them to a better life. But that did not happen, and it probably was never going to happen.

He felt an irresistible urge to fall down and go to sleep, like the perpetual drunkards of the chawls. He felt like fleeing to some place far away where he would be single, where he would expect nothing from people and people would expect nothing from him. He would eat from the fruits of a tree owned by no man, and sleep under clear blue skies, lulled by the sound of the waves and the winds from faraway lands. He imagined himself on a giant hoarding, his back to the world, walking on a long tapering
road towards an endless sea, and from the horizon of the sea rose the incandescent words – ‘Free Man ®’.

But, he knew, the freedom of a bachelor is the freedom of a stray dog. On such days, when he felt stranded in family life, he always invoked the memory of the evening when Oja had first walked into his home as a terrified bride. She was so beautiful, and her fear was so arousing. But on the first night, when he sat beside her on the conjugal mattress that was filled with funereal roses left by neighbours and friends, he discovered that his new wife had cut her arms and legs with a Topaz blade. She had done it very carefully and methodically so that she did not damage her veins. She wanted an excuse to be left alone. It was her way of saving herself from being undressed by a stranger.

‘I was afraid’ was the first thing she ever told him.

‘Of what?’ he had asked. And she looked even more frightened.

Ayyan had read that a woman had to be ready, whatever that meant. So he decided to wait. Sometime in the second month of their marriage, Oja’s cousin was sent by her mother under the guise of a casual visit to check if everything was all right. In the middle of churning curd, the girls talked about private matters.

‘He has not done it yet?’ the cousin screamed. ‘Something is certainly wrong with him.’ She spoke of the dark thing, ‘that looks half eaten,’ that nailed her even before she could give her man his milk on the wedding night.

‘It was big and it hurt,’ the cousin had said in a whisper. ‘I walked like a spider for two days.’

Ayyan did claim his rights soon, one Sunday afternoon, when Oja was sitting on the stone floor cutting onions. When it was over, Oja looked up at the ceiling, an onion tear running down her cheek, and asked, somewhat disappointedly, ‘That’s it?’ Then, unexpectedly, she lifted both her legs and pressed her knees to her face in a curative exercise. The first year of their marriage went by in their endless chatter about things they no longer remembered, and in moments of loneliness that
sometimes bore the gloom of exile and at other times the sweet isolation of elopement. And in their infrequent physical love through which Oja maintained a calm, interested gaze. And in Ayyan’s perpetual knowledge that a box of condoms in their home outlived a jar of pickles.