Someone Else's Garden (40 page)

‘Oh, for every one of your stories I could tell you a hundred. But does that make them true? I came here because my father survived lightning. Yes, don’t look at me like that, it’s true. My bapu got stuck to an electric pole in the monsoon time, you know when the streets get so flooded and you can’t see the open manholes. Every monsoon one or two people disappear down those same manholes, probably swept into the blessed Ganga washing their sins in the river with their dying breaths and achieving nirvana if nothing else.’ Mamta reaches a horrified hand almost to Eyebrows’ mouth to stop her blaspheming, but stops short, suddenly remembering the difference in their status.

‘Anyway, no one dared to free Bapu because they knew the minute they stepped in the water the electricity would grab them too. Right then, as he was shaking on the pole, eyes bulging and arching into backbend, lightning struck. Instead of finishing off poor bapu, the lightning knocked down a workman’s ladder from on top of the electric pole which fell so hard on his arms that it broke his grip on the cable. My bapu was thrown free of the pole and the water.’ There is mirth in her eyes. ‘I’m told the people in my village now routinely leave ladders on top of electric poles. After all, who is to say which one of them will need saving next!

‘I was a very small girl then, but I can clearly remember how he looked when he got home. His hair was spiky like an angry cat’s tail, he was shaky, and had two black patches on his palms.

‘When he touched my amma, she jumped away from him, screaming, The current has caught me, the current has caught me. After that, she wouldn’t let him come near her. But four days later she realised that her backache had disappeared, and she said it was because of bapu’s shock treatment. So he started giving shock treatments to people to cure them of all kinds of aches and pains. He received such joy from helping people that he wanted me to do the same. My mother would have been happy to keep me ignorant on the farm, but not my father. I am what I am because of him.’

Mamta’s eyes glisten and blink, she looks to her clasped hands and then around her. The dispensary is empty. Eyebrows has put up the Closed sign on the door, not that it stops the worst cases. The smell of disinfectant is fresh and clean. It is the first time that Mamta has seen the countertop folded upon itself, simultaneously sandwiching a roll of cotton wool and creating a strait between the erstwhile separate spaces of pharmacy and waiting room.

‘And that’s that. It was a miracle, all right, that brought me here, but now I have an ordinary life.’ She holds out her hands. ‘Oh, you are disappointed. Disappointed because I say I have an ordinary life. What is an ordinary life worth, you ask? In our own ways, we all have ordinary lives.’

‘Not me, Didi. I don’t have an ordinary life. It is because of someone . . . someone very special that I have this life. Come with me, just this once, come with me. You’ll see for yourself.’ Her pleading costs her. She cannot plead as an equal, it sounds like begging.

‘If you didn’t so hate the male race, I would say you were in love with this Lokend Bhai of yours.’

Now Mamta laughs loudly; her mirth, released from bondage, is a blithe young thing. ‘Love that saint?’ She shakes her head from side to side. It is not a no, but an acknowledgement of absurdity.

‘Well, think of it. It’s always Lokend Bhai this and Lokend Bhai that. Lokend Bhai gave me sweets on my wedding . . .’

She says the word
wedding
as if sharing a secret bordering on a lie. That much Mamta has told her, but nothing of the scar, nothing of her stepdaughter, nothing of her husband – who Eyebrows thinks is a fabricated character, an invention that brought her friend from the village to the city.

‘I don’t think I can ever love anyone. I don’t think it is in me,’ Mamta half-lies to protect herself from her own emotion. If you don’t climb high, you never have to fall; if you don’t have anything, you never have to lose.

‘Everyone can love if they put their mind to it. It is a skill,’ says Eyebrows, secure in the knowledge that she has no intention of putting her words to the test.

Mamta is so tempted to let this woman, who, over the past two years has become closer than family, see her scar and tell her of that precious night when Lokend protected her. Instead she presses her lips tightly together, unable to pass her tongue between them, afraid to let runaway words tumble from her mouth.

‘All right, I’ll come. By the way, it’s the Congress Party, of the flag and palm symbol. Your man Lokend Bhai is standing for the Congress Party, though you are right to ignore the Party. In this case it might be better to put your trust in a man rather than an organisation.’

‘Your man Lokend Bhai’ – she likes the strength of those words, or is it the weakness? ‘He is bringing my sister Sneha,’ she says, changing the subject. ‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to jinx her coming by talking about it.’

‘What superstition. You people only ever say something unflattering by way of a compliment.’

‘Remember when Sadhana said how nice your sari was, and you spilt daal on it straightaway. Remember? Remember?’ She is bullying, she wants to win a fight on some level. Any level.

‘Come, come now,’ Eyebrows says, cajoling. She is very fond of Mamta, but it will never be in her nature to show it. ‘Come on, let’s go or we will be late.’

Lata Bai’s hut is empty of purpose, of industry. She coughs into her pallav. Her husband lies on the straw mattress, occupying it all. She has taken to the floor. She hardly goes to the well to draw water. With just the two of them, once in four days is enough. That’s enough cooking too, especially with Mamta’s money orders halted. She turns her thoughts away from her runaway daughter.

She can hear him shift and moan, trying to get comfortable in a body that’s badly let him down. Who is this man? A collection of aspirations, dreams, emotions; a representation of something so familiar that all meaning’s lost in the comprehension. He must have felt the same breath of winter wind, slowly turning summer away in gentle parts of nights. He must have rejoiced in someone’s touch, felt a rush through his frame sometime in their youth. He must have cried for at least one other person, perhaps in secret. But what did he stand for?

She is glad he is dying. This is her retribution for what he did. She has waited for this day from the time he beat her into a huddle on the floor.

With his body, his beliefs are also dying. His corn-husk skin covers bent bones that connect awkwardly, he stands half-erect like a praying mantis on its hind legs. Now each time she coughs, he winces, hoping she won’t die and leave him to his dusty, brittle body. She has that over him. Her coughs make him shudder. At last her actions evoke responses from him. But so what?

No one comes to their hut. They are not shunned, simply forgotten. His will be a flaccid death, a slow release of energy, like the dying sigh of a doused fire left to smoke, collapsing into itself without control.

Except for her cough, she too is softly silent. In this place, she mistakes the wind as weeping for her lost past when in fact all it seeks is a new pitch. Nevertheless, there are times when she doesn’t truly believe she has been wronged. Whenever she met her life, it showed her a different face: a daughter, a sister, a bride, a wife, a mother, a friend. Life tolerates no excuses, it only recognises finality, an exact computation. And in her life of fixed paths she has dreamed up many final reckonings. But reality is not an intuition, it isn’t a thought or even a fruition of the past, it is a wilful creature aimless in its wandering. Acceptance is the only defence, the only sanctuary left to her.

‘Lata, Lata.’ His voice still has a modicum of bullying force. He will be heard, it is his birthright. ‘Lata, Lata.’ Bloody woman.

She looks at the body, calling to her, head thrown back, lips open, producing a sound she carries in her pores. How many times . . . and yet today she sees it as something new. She almost wishes she hadn’t given her best green sari to Sneha to take to the city, she thinks she would have liked to have worn it. She stays staring from outside the hut, head held up like a burden, her gaze loose but not locked.

‘Lata, Lata,’ he calls again. ‘Lata . . .’ he is about to start with the words, but she doesn’t let him. She walks away, taking her cough with her. Later, when he is asleep, she will leave food for him within reach. She will not allow a shadow of discomfort to befall him, except the withdrawal of herself, her spirit, her presence.

Each time he wakes, he recognises the bitterness that has seized his heart. At first it was for her, but with her gone, his bitterness has turned on himself. Not as an apology for his actions, nor regret or disappointment, but more because he doesn’t understand why she has stopped talking; and why, when he needs her most does she choose to find a lone place somewhere where she can hear his voice but not listen.

The breath slips out of him, each time with a softer ‘Lata’.

She has an illicit urge to look in the cracked mirror. Will she even recognise herself? All this time she has lived for others. Suddenly she wants to be something, someone. Someone not so much wife and mother. A daughter, a sister, a bride, a wife, a mother, a friend and now a widow.

She carefully wipes the sindhoor out of her middle parting, wetting the pointed end of her pallav in spit for the final erasure. She meticulously takes off her lone bangle, and slides off her toe ring. She will never have use for the trappings of marriage again. Not in this lifetime. Lata Bai believes in the next life as firmly as she does in this one. That’s why she is not surprised by the gentleness of her husband’s death. Of course he’d deserved worse, but who is to say what lies ahead. ‘Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho.’

She should be singing a prayer for her husband’s soul to ride on. But she cannot. She looks at the twigs in her earlobes. The left was pierced crooked. That is how it always is, one ear is pierced perfectly, and then, for the other, the head anticipating pain, moves. A crooked, jagged hole. It will bleed if she wrenches the twig from it. Her gaze slips to the reflection of her eyes. Still clear. Still alert.

Very little of her face is familiar. Before Mamta was married she would look at the photo to remember what she used to look like, but with the photo gone, she has nothing but the mirror to tell her things.

‘Lata Bai, Lata Bai. Are you there? Arey-oh, Lata Bai.’ The widow Kamla arrives, bringing sound and life with her. Should she reply? Should she dive under the blanket with her husband and pretend that she’s dead too? Should she cover the corpse with a reed mat and pretend it is grain?

‘Now what are you shouting at the top of your voice for, loud enough to wake the dead?’ A sudden giggle escapes her lips, unintentional as a stubbed toe, irreverent as an uncovered head, festive as a noisy wristful of bangles, and loud, loud as freedom itself.

Kamla has news. ‘Arey-oh, Lata Bai, that Lala Ram has finally done it. The bank’s open. Right here, right now, you can go and get a loan from the Bank of India. Even I can. Can you imagine? Me – a widow. And the best thing of all, the manager is a manager-didi, a woman. A woman running a bank in Gopalpur. Now we’ll see where it gets that dog Ram Singh.’

‘Seeta Ram is dead.’ She says her husband’s name for the first time. Still mired in reverence, she points to her hut and the body it contains respectfully with her thumb instead of her forefinger. Even from the dead her husband commands her actions.

‘Bastard, he’s sucked us dry for the last time. What!’ ‘Yes, I am a widow too.’ She shows her scalp to Kamla, standing perfectly still, pulling her hair apart, waiting for a critique from someone with experience.

‘The funeral?’ Kamla ignores the scalp, pink as the underbelly of a newborn rat.

‘I’ll not take a loan for it.’ ‘So then?’ ‘I’ll think of something.’ ‘What about Mamta’s money?’ ‘Don’t mention her name.’ Now it’s a habit, this rejection of her runaway daughter. ‘There is no more money.’

‘What will you do with your life?’

Lata Bai looks away. ‘My life . . .’ She pauses a long while and then says, ‘Live it, I suppose.’

The lightning is shrieking around them. No one will be out on such a night. Two figures balance a corpse unsteadily between them. Not because the body is heavy, but rather because the deed is.

‘Come on!’ Kamla is in command, even though it isn’t her husband’s body they are disposing of. As the person in charge, she has the legs, the lighter side.

Lata Bai hoists the head further up her arm. Its weight bears down on her. For a brief second she’s afraid her husband is alive, pressing down on her. He slips from her grasp, she catches him mid-fall by the upper arm.

‘Uffo, come on. Do you want to spend all night dragging this’ – Kamla doesn’t know what to call it: thing, body, corpse, husband, Seeta Ram – ‘this . . .’

‘It isn’t so easy, I have the heavier side,’ the wife complains. ‘He’s stiff.’

‘He would be stiff, no. Never did do what you asked of him in life, why should he start now?’ Kamla laughs.

Suddenly the thorough absurdity that usually lies concealed in truly dangerous situations is revealed to them. They both laugh so hard they drop the body on the ground. The lightning illuminates their burden. They are convulsing now, doubled up, genuflecting with mirth, paying obeisance to the Goddess of Glee.

‘Jai ho Devi.’

‘Jai ho Devi.’

‘Devi jai ho.’

‘Devi jai ho.’

The river is low and Lata Bai has to wade deep into its centre to let Seeta Ram go. She has earned herself a heap of sins in this lifetime for not giving her husband a decent funeral. But it has been well worth it.

Kamla pulls her up the bank. She slaps her wet hands together, as if dusting them of flour. ‘That’s done.’

They will tell no one about her husband’s death. Lata Bai will be able to continue to wear her coloured sari till someone notices the absence of sindhoor in her hair, the bangle on her wrist or her missing toe ring. Most will believe that Seeta Ram walked out on her, just like her two sons did.

What would women do without other women?

Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho.