The Blue Bedspread (13 page)

First Point:
It’s evening, still too early for the neighbour’s TV set to laugh and sing. The sky is the six o ‘clock colour, between blue and purple. Sister is standing at the washbasin, the tap’s running, I can hear the soap.

It’s late in the afternoon, Saturday, Sister is all dressed up to go somewhere. She has polished her slippers until their buckles shine. On the way back from school yesterday, she stopped at the shop, where we buy pencils and outline maps, to pick up a sachet of shampoo and lipstick.

Today, she’s used both: her hair, black and smooth, falls over her shoulders. Her lips are red, she wears a blue skirt and a white top with tiny blue stars.

Sister never looked so beautiful.

She’s told me her plan. She’s told me her friends have bought tickets for the movie in Globe Cinema and after the movie they’ll go to Flury’s on Park Street to have an ice cream each. Her friend’s brother has arrived from the United States, he’ll also be there. He’s smart, handsome, he’s got a Casio synthesizer and he knows the tune to
Raindrops are falling on my window, teardrops are falling from my eye.

I ask her if she is in love and she laughs, she kisses me, wipes the lipstick off my cheeks.

Father stumbles in at three, it’s Saturday, half-day at work, he’s louder than the traffic. I see him locking the door. Sister tells me to go to the other room and close my eyes, cup my hands to my ears. ‘I will tell you when to see and when to hear,’ she says. ‘Until then, keep your eyes and your ears closed otherwise you will see the Wicked Witch in your dreams tonight.’

I do exactly as she tells me.

I hide in my favourite place behind the drapes and I cheat. I listen through my fingers and I can hear Father asking her: ‘Where are you going dressed up like a film actress?’

I cheat again, I keep one eye closed, open the other just a chink, and I see sister handing him the thin yellow slip of paper, jagged along one edge, it’s see-through paper, I can see black lines and scribbles on it, it’s her cinema ticket. Evening Show, five thirty to eight.

Father looks at the ticket and laughs, Sister smiles, he tears the ticket in two and laughs harder, he teeters for a while, tries to balance himself by holding my sister’s shoulder and suddenly his face changes, he’s not laughing any more, he’s making a face as if he’s in pain. And he throws up what I think he had for lunch. On sister’s blue skirt, on her white top, in between the blue stars.

A drop spatters on the drapes where I stand. Both Father and Sister are laughing, Father begins to cough and then she leads him to the chair where he sits and she brings him a glass of water. And a huge red towel in which he wipes his face. He drinks the water, coughs to clear his throat, drops the two halves of the ticket onto the floor, where his lunch lies.

‘Stay at home,’ he says. It’s too hot outside.’

It takes five minutes, this whole thing, and I am scared Sister will find out that I saw and I heard. So I fling the drapes aside, run to the bedroom and lie down, close my eyes.

When I get up, it’s an hour later, dark and quiet in the house. I need to wash the unslept sleep from my eyes, homework needs to be done, and I see Sister standing at the washbasin, we can hear the people, the cars and the buses from the streets. She has changed into house clothes, she is holding her blue skirt, one end in the white washbasin and she’s scrubbing it with soap. She smiles and gestures to me to go away.

Second Point:
There’s a bird cage hanging from the iron hook. Father and Sister both hold an old blanket and cover the cage. Then Father leaves and she stands there for a while, lifts one end of the blanket, blows a little kiss.

‘Why are you crying?’ asks Father. And Sister tries to smile but she can’t hide her tears, I am standing beside her, I can hear her heave deep breaths, her chest rising and falling.

‘Why are you crying?’ Father asks again, softly.

He’s come back from work early and today his breath is fresh, his glasses shine, his clothes smell nice. Outside, evening has fallen.

Sister sits down, at the dining table. I keep standing, Father’s leaning against the door, still in his office clothes, and we listen to her tell us the story of the pigeon which flew out of the oil mill cage this morning and sat on the tram wire. She tells us about the No. 12 tram, from Esplanade to Galiff Street, which didn’t stop. And when she comes to the bit about the old man shouting at the tram driver to stop and then shouting at the bird to fly away, fly away, she begins to cry again.

For some reason, although I don’t care about the birds as much as she does, I too begin to cry and she puts her arm around me. Father leans over the table, pats us both. My sister on her shoulder, me on my head.

‘Wait, you two,’ he says and he leaves. We can hear him opening the door, we can hear the door close, he’s going down the staircase, we can hear his steps, the scrape of his shoes.

Sister and I rush to the balcony, look down and we can see Father walking fast as if he has to catch a bus. He looks handsome, in his white shirt and dark trousers, walking with a purpose we have neither seen nor know about and Sister squeezes my hands and although we are crying, we are smiling as well.

Father turns into the lane which leads to the market and Sister takes me to the edge of the balcony, so close to the grille that I can smell the rust on the iron and she tells me to look but I can’t see anything. She points at the manhole, turns me around, tells me to move a little to the left, a little to the right until I am exactly in line and there it is, the reddish-brown stain on the manhole cover, difficult to see in the dark but very clear in the headlights of approaching traffic.

‘That’s the pigeon,’ she says, and we both look at the oil mill, the old man has gone, the cage is dark and quiet, the birds must have gone to sleep by now.

We wait for Father for half an hour or so and then sister tells me to go do my homework, sharpen my pencils for tomorrow, arrange the books and the exercise books in my bag, check my diary. There’s nothing left to do, so I read the story book about the Faraway Tree again, evening slips into night, Bhabani is done with the dinner, we can hear her washing the dishes.

When I join Sister in the balcony again, she’s still looking at the manhole, the reddish-brown stain is now a mere blotch. She’s stopped crying, the tears have left lines on her face mixed with the dust from the iron grille but she still looks beautiful and we stand there, waiting for Father, watching the double-decker buses and the taxis pass by, their stream thinning down with the night.

I must have gone back, had dinner and gone to sleep because I don’t remember what happened next until I woke up to a noise from the veranda.

Sister isn’t in bed, I get up and walk to the veranda, her voice, soft and muted, mixed with a gentle fluttering as if wings had entered the house. And I am right, I see a brand-new cage hanging from a hook. And in the night, in the shadow of both Father and Sister, I see two white pigeons, baby pigeons, in the cage looking this way and that.

Sister covers the cage with an old blanket. She tells me that birds like to sleep in the dark and she blows a little kiss and we return to bed, we lie awake for a while, hear the flutter and the cooing of the two birds in the cage and Sister says they’ve come to our house for the first time and that’s why they are so restless.

And we both close our eves and thank Father from the bottom of whatever is left in our hearts.

Third point:
Father’s gone, Bhabani is gone, I am so tall now that the washbasin comes to my waist, Sister’s hair is still black and beautiful, the iron hook is still there but the cage is gone, the birds where I don’t
know. Your mother and I are leaning against the bedroom door, her left hand is on the hinge, her right is in mine, a nor’wester blows but the rain has stopped, the smell of wet earth and the wind run their fingers through her hair, there is a power cut outside, the sodium vapour lamps are switched off and we can, in the dark, see the stars. For some strange reason, even the garbage heaps have been cleared, the tram lines glint, it’s like in happy stories and movies, the neighbourhood is as pretty as it should be when a brother and a sister meet, for one day and half a night, in fifteen years.

There’s the white washbasin, there’s the black iron hook and there’s the brown hinge of the bedroom door. If you stand in the veranda, a couple of feet away from the wall, and look at these three things, you will discover that all three are in a straight line. Absolutely straight.

From a distance, it looks like a rubber band, the kind women use in their hair, but if you come close enough, you will see that it’s a white circle, more like a ring, about an inch in diameter. Its rim is split, it’s made of some kind of plastic, she can open it into a large semicircle and when she lets go, it snaps back with a click you hardly hear.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asks.

‘It’s a curtain ring,’ she says.

It fell in the maternity ward, onto the floor, when she tugged and tugged at the drapes, grey and heavy, to look out of the glass window. ‘No one saw it fall,’ she says, ‘so I put it in my bag.”

A brown leather bag with zips, long and short, opening and closing several pockets, big and small. The ring has been lying there, marking the years, holding her stories within its frame: the nurse at the hospital, her safety pin. Or the lights on Park Street, her husband standing on the terrace, his white shirt stretched tight across his back.

An hour ago she told him about the women at the office, their mothers-in-law, their tiffin boxes. Now she’s playing with the ring, he looks at the fingers, longer than they once were, slender, there are now veins in her hands, like branches of a tiny tree pressed flat beneath her skin, the tufts of leaves the patches of wrinkled skin over her knuckles.

The ring falls to the floor, she doesn’t notice, it rolls a little distance, bounces a fraction of an inch, trembles, comes to rest beneath the chair. He picks it up and while she continues with her story, he can see her hair, as it was, long, black and shining, and he says, ‘Why don’t you use the ring as a hairband?’

‘Why don’t you use the ring as a hairband?’ he says again, holding it between his fingers, stretching and unstretching. She laughs and turns, he’s looking at her back now and she says, ‘Go ahead,’ he gets up, leans forward, holds her hair, bunching it all in one hand, black and shining. She leans backward, he opens the white ring with his fingers and clasps it onto her hair, the ring stays, although it’s split it doesn’t give way, the circle is held intact by the weight of her hair, marking out the curve of her neck where once his head fitted exactly. More than twenty-five years ago.

(Two stories in one)

Her son has got a job in Kharagpur, at the huge railway yard, where they fix engines, check all electric connections, the wheels, the tracks, before sending out the trains on their journey to Calcutta and beyond.

She came to our house as a maid but there were a lot more things than dishes to clean. She came as a young woman, already grown up, but she grew up with us as well, she was the one who shouted at Father when someone needed to shout at him and although she didn’t live with us, she went every night, after dinner, to the adjacent shanties where her husband and her children waited, she always left behind, in our house, something to mark her presence, to tell us that she would be back the next morning.

Sometimes, it was her slippers, sometimes, her earrings on the kitchen table, or a safety pin, a glass bangle. And on those nights when we couldn’t play our blanket game or we couldn’t set the stars free on the blue bedspread, we would look at these things and the night would pass.

Because she was a maid, she couldn’t say much, she couldn’t change much. So like the house, its walls and its floors, she stood and silently watched Father drink and laugh, Sister leave one night, Father die, I grow up. Any other maid would have left long ago, perhaps to go to some other household where the sound of dishes being washed mixed with the laughter of the family.

But Bhabani stayed.

And now she’s leaving.

Ten minutes and she will be gone. There is not much to say, we are in the living room, she’s sitting on the chair, I am on the floor.

‘Tell me a story,’ she says.

‘I know how you came to this city,’ I say. ‘I know how you came into our house.’

She laughs. ‘You will never know how I came here,’ she says.

‘I know,’ I say.

‘OK, tell me.’

‘Listen,’ I say, and she looks at me, with the same eyes with which she looked at me the first day she walked into this house.

‘Wake up,’ your husband says, ‘wake up.’ His hand is on your shoulder, he’s shaking you hard. You open your eyes, the sari, bright yellow with red flowers, has slipped off your head, you draw it back, there’s a Stranger standing three feet in front of you, near the door, brushing his teeth.