The Age of Shiva (14 page)

“Paji, I—”

“Yes, yes, I know. I'm being unfair. It's the natural instinct to breed. All mammals find it hard to control—females, especially, who feel they haven't lived unless they lactate. But don't you think you could have stopped for a moment to lift yourself above your animal nature? Waited a few years? Is he so flawless, that husband of yours, that you had to lie on your back right away and reproduce another version of him?”

“But we weren't even trying to, Paji. It just happened.”

“Ah, it was an accident. A mistake. And now you're asking me to help so nothing happens to it. This accident that you say is my grandchild. Tell me, why should I do anything, why should I care about it? Half its blood will always be your husband's, won't it? How do I know it won't
want
to prostrate itself in temples, march around in HRM parades? You don't come and tell me, ‘Paji, please help me, I want to study,' or ‘Paji, please save me, I want to be independent.' No, you spit on my dreams of sending you to college, just like your sister did. You let this man's seed sprout in your womb so you're forever tied to him. To a whole family of bigots, you announce to me today. Well, let me assure you, Meera, I feel nothing for this thing you're incubating in your stomach. I feel no relation, no responsibility towards it. It's only you that I care about, only your education, your welfare.”

Paji got up from his chair and began looking through a row of books. I took this as a sign I was being dismissed, but he indicated that I should stay. “There's a remedy for everything now, you know—a smallpox vaccine, antibiotics, even a treatment for TB these days. What you have isn't so complicated that they don't know how it can be fixed.” He selected one book, then put it back and selected another. “That novel by Dutta—why can't I find it?—about a woman who has the same accident you did. I thought you might read it, to know that life can go on—all one has to do is seek out the right cure.”

I stared in incomprehension as Paji continued rummaging. “It's very different nowadays—not like Dutta's heroine who had to disappear for months. I'm sure Dr. Mishra could suggest someone safe and reliable in Darya Ganj itself. A person as young and healthy as you—the problem would be solved in an afternoon, before you even knew it. It probably wouldn't be worse than going to the dentist and getting a tooth removed.”

Paji abandoned his search and turned around to face my blank look. “You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?” he asked, and I shook my head. “I'm talking about you, Meera, your life, your independence, your self-sufficiency. Being prepared to accept what this world has to offer, being able to stand on your own two feet. Not flitting through life as the shadow of your husband, like your mother or her mother before her. I'm talking about you going to college, realizing the potential that's waiting to be tapped inside. Of getting away from your in-laws, of being free to forge your own existence. It's what you asked of me, it's what you wanted.

“But perhaps I shouldn't be the one to explain—perhaps it would be better if your husband did. Why don't you ask him to be here at noon tomorrow, so that I can talk to him? Tell him it'll be his last chance to make it to Bombay.”

“I'M JUST SAYING IT'S
an option to consider,” Dev said the next evening. “I'm not suggesting we actually do it.”

“An option,” I repeated slowly. Paji had referred to the baby in my belly, the living, breathing being I was nurturing, as a “thing,” as an “it.” I supposed I should regard Dev's term to be an improvement.

“It's not like this is our only chance to have a child, Meera. We can always do it later, once we're settled in Bombay, once you've finished college, once I've broken into the music business. But this really is the last chance for an offer like this. He'll personally buy the flat for us, he promised, even give us money for another radiogram and fridge. All we have to do is let this one go, postpone things a bit.”

“Let this one go. For a flat, a radiogram, and a fridge. That's about what Paji offered your family for me, isn't it?”

“I know how this must sound, Meera, but just hear me out on this. At first, I was shocked as well. This is your father, I thought—this baby would be his grandchild. I wondered if he hated you, if he was trying to take revenge. Could he still be angry over what you did on Karva Chauth, perhaps even over you marrying me? But then I looked into his face, and all I saw was sympathy. ‘I know how difficult this is going to be,' he told me. ‘But I'm thinking about the future, about my daughter's long-term happiness. You have to make her understand this.'

“Do you know what else he said to me? That I was wasting my time in Delhi. That my destiny lay in Bombay, nowhere else. ‘Go there and make me proud to be your father-in-law. Go and become as successful as Saigal.' Even my own father has never given me such a blessing. And to think I imagined Paji didn't like me.

“He really does have our best interest at heart, Meera. It's much too early for us to have a baby. You shouldn't have to spend your life flitting around in your husband's shadow. You should be ready to accept what the world has to offer, prepared to be able to stand on your own two feet. There's too much potential inside you waiting to be tapped.”

I recognized Paji's words from yesterday. In some corner of my mind I felt momentarily let down by Dev's delivery—it was nowhere as commanding as Paji's. Then the outrage caught up to me. “My father has already given me this speech—I don't need you to memorize it and vomit it back. Why don't you go back and haggle some more over the baby's price with him—demand that he throw in a pressure cooker as well.”

“Please, Meera, just try to think about this.”

“No, you think about it. How could you repeat something so ugly? This fatherly affection that you're talking about—why do you think he's suddenly showering you with it? Are you really so easy to hoodwink? If he loves you so much, why don't you try asking him to send you to Bombay by yourself? I'll stay behind here and have my child.”

Dev went through every tactic he could think of over the next several weeks to change my mind. He tried to win my sympathy by telling me how defeated he felt, how drained and despairing, from mindlessly filing papers, morning to evening at his job. When that didn't work, he accused me of selfishness, of using the guise of motherhood to ruthlessly destroy every dream he had. He pointed out that my pride was to blame for the entire predicament—had I just gone along with Paji's directive on Karva Chauth, we would have been in Bombay long ago, with nobody to stop us from having a child now. On some nights, he pulled our talais apart angrily, on others he curled up next to my talai and stared at me pitifully like a pet denied.

Although outwardly I did not show any weakening in my resolve, my level of dismay was rising quickly inside. Every day of his campaign made it harder to ignore the fact that Dev did not want this baby. For a while I consoled myself with the possibility that he would have a change of heart when he actually saw the infant. But what if he didn't? How would I raise a child whose grandfather and father would have both preferred never to see it alive?

I thought several times of confiding in Sandhya, but the shame of revealing what my own father had prescribed, what my own husband supported, was too much to bear. In a corner of my mind, I worried also that she would tell Arya. The nightly antics between Dev and me had brought back the watchful gleam to his eyes. Although he had gone no further, I wondered if once the baby was born he would revert to his lechery.

Then one day, Dev received a call at his office from Paji. “Your father wants to see you tomorrow at eleven,” he told me over dinner that evening.

BIJI WAS AGAIN NOT
around when I got to Darya Ganj. “I sent her off to visit Varsha auntie in Agra,” Paji said. “I haven't told her anything—it's best not to let too much emotion cloud the issue.”

To my surprise, Paji ushered me into the drawing room this time, telling me how cold he knew the library could be. He even waited until I had seated myself first, before taking the chair across from me.

“Look, Meera,” he said, leaning forward earnestly, as if by drawing closer, he could make me better understand what he had to say. “Dev tells me it's been well over four months already. When you first came to see me, perhaps some herbs or powders might have been enough to do the trick. But now it's getting so late that even Dr. Mishra's friend doesn't want to take the risk. It's all illegal you know—if he gets caught, he'll wind up in jail. Still, I've negotiated a price, that if you're willing, he can do it today.”

I dabbed my throat with my handkerchief. This was my opening to recite the lines I had been crafting. That I respected my father's opinion and also my husband's, but only a woman could truly appreciate the life of a baby blossoming inside. That it would be the greatest sin of all to force me to “crush this bud before it got a chance to flower” (I had lifted the phrase from a sad love song by Suraiya). That as a parent Paji would surely understand what it meant to have the chance to love and cherish one's offspring.

Paji stopped me as soon as I began. “Yes, yes, Dev has told me all about what you've decided. But tell me, if he doesn't want it, how are you going to force it on him? Will you leave him and bring it up yourself, or will you stay and have him hate it all his life?”

“I'll do what needs to be done, Paji. And forgive me, but it was you who turned Dev against the baby by putting all that greed in his head.”

“I merely tested him, and he failed. And if I dangle anything else in front of him, he'll leap at it, ravenously, every time. Is this the man whose child you want to be tied with? What if two or three years down the road you want to be free?”

“I'd never want to be free of my child.”

“Oh, then you'd leave your husband and raise it yourself, would you? A married woman with an infant living alone in Delhi. This isn't Paris or New York that you can do such things. They'd circle you like sharks, they'd eat you alive.

“And even if nobody bothered you, what would you live on? Such willfulness is expensive, you can hardly expect support from Dev or me. At least if you had an education you wouldn't have to starve yourself, starve your own child. Is my idea so outlandish that you first go and study something?”

Paji got up and began pacing. “All my life I've tried to make sure I treated everyone fairly. Daughters as if they were sons, women equal to men. But what am I supposed to do if nobody wants to cooperate? If nobody wants to act rationally, if nobody wants to take responsibility for themselves? Your mother, fine, she's not educated, it's like trying to open a door by repeatedly banging my head against it. But my own daughters—first Roopa, then you? And tomorrow Sharmila?

“You wanted to get married to that bounder, I didn't object. To tie yourself to that gold-digging family, I gave everything they said. Even that slap in my face on Karva Chauth, I decided not to take offense.” Paji nodded. “Yes, that was for my benefit, wasn't it? I thought Dev had forced you, but he explained you were simply
asserting
yourself. Good for her, I said to myself, I'm trying to run her life and she's not letting me get away with it. For once a woman's showing some mettle, getting her point across to her men.

“But not this time, Meera, this time it's not about control or revenge. Sometimes experience gives your elders more height to stand on, they're able to see further than you can. This is the moment to which you'll look back, five years down the road, or eight or ten. And be thankful, I promise you, that you listened to what I said.”

Paji sat down on the sofa next to me and put his hand on my arm. “I know I can be harsh sometimes and blunt in how I speak. I know I've not been the perfect father, I know I've made mistakes. But don't take my love for hatred, don't punish me for it. Don't take it out on yourself by ruining your life like this.”

Perhaps if Paji had stopped there, he wouldn't have succeeded. What broke through my last line of defense was something totally unexpected, something brilliant, shocking. Paji started crying.

By the time Dev came to pick me up, I was sitting in Paji's lap as I would when I was little. “My little Meera,” he was saying, as he stroked my hair and squeezed his chest against mine. “I'm so sorry,” he kept repeating, as I insisted he shouldn't apologize.

Paji didn't come with us. He said he couldn't bear to see me through it. He stood outside the taxi and gave Dev two rupees and eight annas for the fare. As we drove away, I was finally able to witness what I had craved so much from my doli—the sight of Paji standing in front of our house, waving goodbye to me. The taxi window was too dirty to make out if he was still crying.

WE WENT PAST DELHI GATE,
then down the boulevard leading to Irwin Hospital. I braced myself for my nostrils to be assaulted by the smell of chloroform. But we drove right past the cluster of buildings, into the crowded bazaar behind Kotla Road. The driver stopped twice to ask directions from street hawkers. He finally pulled up in front of a shop selling bathroom fixtures. “It's upstairs,” Dev said, leading me through the maze of ceramic toilets and washbasins spilling out over the pavement.