The Homing Pigeons... (24 page)

Radhika

It was on Sunday morning after my escapade at Rodeo that I wanted to tell him that I had a strong hunch that I was pregnant, but I wanted to be sure before I brought up the topic. I wondered if in his current state of mind, he would be happy to listen to me talking about missed periods.

We finished up the breakfast and stepped out of the house. There was no love making today. We reached Barista, one of those now rare occasions that we would go there. We sat there, short on conversation until I suggested that he drop me back, if he didn’t want to talk. He agreed. Normally, he would’ve resisted, but today he didn’t.

His behaviour was troubling me. He refused to tell me what happened over the weekend that changed him. It almost seemed that he was trying to avoid me. I decided that I needed to take the bull by its horns. Just as we were about to enter the car, I said, “Aditya, I need to talk to you. Can we go back inside?”

“Are you crazy? We just came out of there?” he was visibly
irritated.

“Yes, but I want you to tell me what’s bothering you?” I
asked.

“Nothing.
I don’t know. Work pressure, maybe. Don’t know. Can we go now?” he said, carefully hiding behind work as an excuse.

As vague as it sounded, perhaps it was best to let this conversation be. It wouldn’t lead anywhere.

I was at home before lunch; an extremity by my standards. I was met by stares from the rest of the women who sat out in the living room. “I am sorry about last night,” I quickly apologized. The surly expressions on their faces changed. It had been taken in good humour. I had probably only made a fool of myself, innocuous babbling that probably spoilt the mood but didn’t leave memories bad enough to hold a grudge. Then why was Aditya so upset with me?

With nothing else to do, I retired to my room and read a book written by Khalil Gibran. I turned to the chapter of the book where a prophet speaks about love:

‘To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.’

This brought me back to another painful truth. I was still
not bleeding:  that elusive spot had still not appeared and neither had the pain.

My periods hadn’t come on Monday. I thought I’d give it another day before I used the pink strip to seal my fate. I really wanted this child. Unlike the last time, when the child had been so unwanted, this time it would be cherished. I felt that I had matured over the past couple of years and I was
much better prepared for motherhood. Aditya wasn’t in office on Monday, and so, I had no one to talk to about my gnawing fear.

He wasn’t in office even on Tuesday. I checked with his colleague and learnt that he had had a death in the family and would be out for a couple of days. I hoped that everything was
well with him. Maybe that explained his leaving in a rush and not answering my calls. I hated myself for always jumping to conclusions. I took the rickshaw back home, stopping en route at the chemist to buy a home pregnancy test.

On Wednesday morning, my hunch was confirmed that I was pregnant. I called him up, but he didn’t answer. I reached the office, grumpy and upset. Even if there was a death in the family, that didn’t stop him from returning my calls. I thought that he was taking me for granted; it almost made me feel like a fixture on the wall that one can so easily ignore. I saw him during the lunch break but couldn’t talk.

I hated him in that moment, but loved him way too much to be upset with him for too long.

It was Wednesday evening when he picked me up on the street close to the gate; he was sombre and not his usual jovial self. Sometimes, I felt that the Aditya I fell in love with had disappeared. The man who sat beside me in the car was an impostor who had taken on the shape of my lover.

“I have something to tell you,” I said.

“So do
I. But you go first,” he said.

“I am pregnant.”

Aditya

N
ow that I am divorced, I feel free. It feels like the stress has been lifted from my shoulders.

It is not that the marriage had ever stopped me from doing anything, but it was like a parasite. It was there somewhere on your body or on your mind but you couldn’t feel it. I wonder if I should take a break and go to the Himalayas. The Himalayas give me a peace that the city could never give.

I had last gone there when I was troubled about my relationship with Radhika. The Himalayas gave me a tranquillity to introspect and understand what I wanted to do, with my life, with her and with us. I lied to my boss that someone in my family had passed away and it would take me a couple of days to come back. Instead, I drove to Mussoorie, a hill station in the lower Himalayas that while commercialized, still had a few pockets of isolation. I didn’t even bother to inform her where I was going.

I found a cheap hotel, the kinds that have a dirty bed linen and a musty smell, but that didn’t bother me. I was only going to sleep in it for a night and then be gone. I had come here to understand what I wanted, and a dirty hotel room was the least of my worries.

As a child, I had visited Mussoorie often and remembered a particular place that had been etched in my memory. At day break – I drove to the Kempty Falls, about ten kilometres out of town. It was early in the tourist season and there weren’t as many tourists revelling in the water. Nevertheless, I trekked up the falls, a kilometre, maybe more. The sun was out by now, shining furiously as it always does in the mountains. At a point, the entire stream that makes up the falls passes between two round boulders. One can lie across the boulders and hear the water gushing below you. I took a dip in the chilled, icy cold water and lay on the rocks questioning myself.

Why did I have to make a choice between my parents and her? Why couldn’t they co-exist?

The stream gurgled on below; the tiny drops of water that had cut through rocks left me untouched. They refused to break my chain of thoughts.

One part of me wanted to rebel and marry her. It would leave me with guilt of not being a good son. I wasn’t sure if my parents deserved a child for whom they had sacrificed so much. It would be obnoxious of me to forget that my mother had sold off her jewellery to buy me an education. I already struggled to be a good son and I would only give them more heartbreak.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to reconcile. After I had come back from Chandigarh and when I thought that tempers had cooled down, I called my mother, “Mom, why don’t you just meet her once?”

“What is the point? We will not be a part of any ceremony even if you want to go ahead. I will think I have no son.”

Emotional blackmail is a woman’s forte and she had played her part well. If she had such strong views, I shuddered at the thought of talking to my father.

My thoughts went back to Radhika. The seed that had been planted by my parents was now a weed – it was growing like a parasite, eating into the cells of the brain that dealt with love. I tried to justify her leaving, but my brain refused to understand. I don’t know if I was thinking correctly or not, but my brain ruled my heart. I even thought she might be having an affair with one of those two guys at Rodeo. Despite everything that I was thinking about her, I still thought I loved her. I was torn because I was committed. I had given her my word that I would marry her.

Time passed by like the stream below. It was afternoon. I dipped into the small bag that I had carried and pulled out a packed sandwich that I had asked the hotel to put together.

Late in the evening I left, back to Delhi and its moronic grind. My decision was made.

The more I thought about it, the more the situation became clearer. I, simply, did not have the courage to rebel against my parents. I don’t know what it was that made me feel like that, a deep-seated respect, and compensation for their sacrifices or simply, gratitude. I would have to be the sacrificial lamb; the same sacrificial lamb that Radhika had once been.

I still loved her and I knew that I would hurt her by my decision. Jesus, hurt was an understatement, it would shatter her. I knew that she depended on me. Her relationship with her parents was almost negligible and I wasn’t only her lover, I was her father figure.

Yet, I would need to do it. I would need to do it because I was weak and how can a weak man support anyone when he can barely support himself?

The third part of the equation was me: my aspirations and my ambitions. I had reconciled to the fact that my ambitions and aspirations could be sacrificed. I would still be able to
sustain my career, irrespective of whether I married her or not. When this aspect moved out of the equation, the thinking was a little clearer. It was a simple choice of choosing between the parents and her. I had made my choice.

I would just need to make sure that she wasn’t shattered by what I had decided. There had to be a way of manipulating the situation such that I could make it look like her decision. She would still be able to walk away with her head held high. My plan would mean that she would think of me as an asshole, a bastard, a coward and a cheat. I would have her hate me than be shattered. It was sad that my story
was going to meet a tragic end.

Radhika

Ranikhet isn’t quite the eight hour drive that Shipra made it out to be. We drive overnight on the broken roads. I realize that the distance that has been created between Shipra and me is going to be much more than that. It is a good thing that Divya has agreed to come with me. It gives me company for the arduous journey.

It has been over three months now that Shipra has moved away from Delhi. I have never been to this side of the country and I looked up Ranikhet as a destination. The website said that it is a cantonment town in the Kumaon Himalayas that houses the Kumaon Regiment. It promises great views of the Greater Himalayas. After making this back-breaking journey through some of the most horrendous highways in the country, I pray that the websites are right.

I don’t know what it is about Divya that she doesn’t feel as tired. I guess it’s about one’s state of mind. We are almost the same age but she has oodles of energy that doesn’t make her stop talking. On the journey from Delhi, I pretty much know her entire story.

She belongs to Mangalore where her parent’s still stay. She has been married once but had divorced her husband on
grounds of infidelity. She’s quite unashamed in stating it and it surprises me that her husband had suspected her of being adulterous.

“Was it true?” I ask her.

She nods her head unashamedly.

I can choose to remain quiet but I don’t know why I ask her about the details.

“Why?” I ask her.

“He couldn’t satisfy my sexual needs, so I had to look out,”
she says nonchalantly.

I had been in the same position with Vimal but I had never ventured out. He was much elder than me and of the six years that I had been married to him, he had spent three years in and out of hospital. Even then, I hadn’t.

It’s about eight in the morning when we cross the busy town of Haldwani. As we go a little further up the hills, the weather starts to improve. I grew up in the hills and I love them. I have always longed to go back to them. Sometimes, I even harbour strange thoughts about moving to the hills. I know that life is tougher here. City dwellers have difficulty adjusting here, yet, I think about buying a cottage here with all the money that I have saved. I don’t want it to be the piggy bank that I left in Solan. Now that Shipra is also here, I will also have company.

Divya gets one of her strange calls again. She doesn’t have the luxury to go to a secluded place, so she continues the conversation in front of me.

“Yes, Ratna,” she says into the phone

Ratna must have said something when Divya says, “I’ll check with him if he’s free today”.

There is a slight pause in the conversation. After a slight pause, she says, “Twenty thousand an hour.”

In  the  peak  of  the  recession,  Divya  is  sitting on  some goldmine, I think to myself. I wonder what she’s dealing in that commands that rate.

She hangs up the phone and looks at me. I turn my face. I am not really interested in knowing whatever she was dealing in. She makes another call to someone and promptly calls back Ratna. I am a mute spectator. I only take in the fresh mountain air. It’s the middle of August and the rains are on. July came this year too, but it wasn’t the same. Laxman stops the car for some time because the rains have caused a landslide. I step out of the car to admire the green of the valley. In some strange way, it reminds me of myself on the porch. The valley is almost as green as the moss that threatened to cover me back then.

It isn’t long before we are in Ranikhet. Shipra gives us directions over the phone to reach the Bungalow that the Army has given to her. We are greeted by the twins and I can’t help wishing that I had a child of my own. Maybe, if things had panned out a little differently, I might have.

Aditya

We were driving when she told me that she was pregnant. I had been so certain until last night that I was going to break up with her and suddenly, this came up. My first thoughts were, why couldn’t she have used oral contraceptives to prevent this? We were only twenty-four; what was the point in having kids that early? Hell, we barely had enough money to afford a priest to solemnize a wedding.

Fatherhood was a huge responsibility. I had to be someone of consequence, even before I could dream of having children. I had had a difficult childhood; there were so many times that teachers would call out to me in the middle of class and say that my father hadn’t deposited the fees. It had been embarrassing and I had vowed to myself that my child would never face the same. I needed a little more security, the safety that manifests itself in a large bank account.

Secretly, I hated myself, my family and her. I wished that my life was simpler. I wished that my parents would just agree. I wished that she hadn’t married. I wished I was born a Hindu or she a Sikh. I wished I were a year or two older to be able to afford the marriage and the child. Most of all, I wished I had a backbone that wasn’t crumbling in the face of adversity.

I kept driving, dazed by what she had just told me. The Maruti was a bitch, rattling at every pothole that it encountered. The  rattling of  the  plastic  was  disrupting  my  thoughts,  it wasn’t letting me find a solution to this conundrum. I turned around to face her, she looked steadfastly ahead. I wish she would understand that I would never be able to express myself for fear of hurting her. I would never be able to tell her that my parents loved a God that they had never seen. They loved Him more than their own son. I would never be able to tell her why I was behaving the way I had been for the past few weeks. I drove past the half constructed structures that the realtors had sold, but not bothered to construct; through the tall grasslands that the
realtor’s greed hadn’t yet reached, until I had to take a left for her house. Instead, I drove straight to the dead end on the road. The government funding for the road had stopped abruptly and so had the contractors will. The sun was about to set over the fields of Gurgaon. The city was still caught between the agriculturists and the real estate mafia; even within the civilization, were pockets of countryside untrammelled by road rollers. I stepped out of the car, still lost in my thoughts, still not being able to make a decision. I was alone despite her presence. I stood there looking at the setting sun. She was right beside me, as lost as I was.

It was almost dark when the labourers, returning home on bicycles, gave us suspicious stares. Rightly so, when neither of us had any business in standing at the end of a road that didn’t lead anywhere.

Finally, it was dark, a deep moonless dark that matched the darkest side of me. I turned towards her and said, “I am not ready. Let’s get an abortion.”

She didn’t respond, she didn’t chide me for announcing my decision. She didn’t even want to know how or when. She just went and sat back in the car, a sign to say that we had
reached the end of the road and we would need to turn back. I opened the creaking driver’s side door of the Maruti and sat inside. I turned the key and the engine started with a meek purr. I changed the gear, backed out and drove back, first to her house and later mine. We didn’t sit in the car as we normally would. I could have so easily been mistaken for a cabbie that had dropped off his fare and left.

I was certain that I had hurt her but still remained unrepentant. I wasn’t ready, I justified it to myself. I was only twenty-four and had a career to make. I had to be a good son. I had to be a good husband and a good father, but how, I didn’t know.

Robin opened the door and gave me one of his wisecracks through the nasal twang that had stopped bothering me. “Not today,” I shouted at him and he quickly withdrew, hiding himself in the warmth of the kitchen.

The mutton was tender and juicy, but it didn’t enthral my taste buds. The tea that I would have before retiring to bed felt bitter and acidic. Nothing seemed good, nothing was right. I wished I could just run away somewhere and hide. A place where there was no pressure of expectations. A place where the boss didn’t want cards to be sold. Run to a place, where my parents would support my decisions. Hide out at a place where Radhika and I could be together making babies that didn’t have to be aborted. A place where you didn’t have to buy
anything and everything was free in return for love.

The muscles at the back of my neck screamed that they needed a pillow. They were taut with stress. My head was throbbing. I pulled out the travel kit and popped in a pill to ease the pain. The pain eased somewhat, but what could I do about the pain that I was giving to her.