Authors: Sindhu S.
The Plunge (10 page)
School days had been the best time in her life so far. Anjali loved adventure. It was her idea to visit the toilets of the senior girls to discover what the metal boxes in the corner contained. They were twelve years old. One of their classmates had said that the boxes had snake skins, like the kind they had spotted near the pink bougainvillea next to the main gate of the school.
They had selected the afternoon break for the adventure. When three of them, Anjali, Beena, and Swapna, had reached the restroom area, Anjali opened the lid of the box kept in the corner of one of the toilets, ignoring the disgust and fear that made their hearts race. They could not quite figure out where the objects inside came from: cotton pads soaked with dry blood. They looked like stinking bandages.
The sight only puzzled them more. It led to a volley of questions. They asked anyone who they thought might have some idea. The quizzing finally brought answers. Sujala, who was a year older to them, had solved the mystery.
“Stupids, they are sanitary pads girls use during periods,” she said.
“What periods?” asked Anjali, with raised brows, eyes wide open.
Sujala explained that it was a monthly pain that they would soon encounter. Periods brought an awful ache in the stomach for some girls, and lasted for five days, a bloody leak from a secret source between their legs.
“Did it happen to boys, too?” Beena was curious.
“I’m not quite sure. I’ve heard that some white liquid comes out of their pendulum,” she said with a giggle.
The knowledge that menstruation would elevate them to grown-up status made their panties the most interesting piece of clothing. Whenever it was lowered, they would check for that eventful red mark.
“Will it flow or only stain?” Anjali kept asking Swapna, who shrugged each time.
A year later, she finally saw the stain while changing into her nightgown, just a dark red stain. No pain, no flow. It still made her feel important.
College days were exciting. The hostel was a cheerful place. Four girls shared a room: four beds, four study tables, four of everything.
However, except for a lot of sex talk and scribbling of anonymous love notes to classmates or to boys who interested them, they got into no mischief.
They discussed Mills & Boon titles, Harold Robbins romances like
Never Love a Stranger
, and William Golding’s
The Inheritors
, which served as their reference books on sex.
They learned about love and lust, and about what men did to women during lovemaking. She understood what Madhav felt for her that night. Anjali had felt shy, foolish, and scared, when she realised it. It made her nervous when she met Madhav in Kochi a year later.
The doorbell woke her up from the reverie. Priya was back from work.
.
T
he Paschim Express would reach Delhi sixteen hours after it rolled out of Mumbai Central. Unlike most train journeys, this one was exciting for Anjali.
“Right time,” said the elderly man who occupied the sleeper opposite her.
She felt a little tired, despite the comfortable journey. It was mid-February, a month since she had resigned from her job.
Was she taking a huge risk in moving to Shimla with this writing assignment? She was not sure now.
Swapna had warned her, “Don’t do this, Anjali. Please don’t. Don’t you realise this move is suicidal?”
Swapna had tried to dissuade her with all the arguments she could think of.
“Reconsider. Come over. Let’s think it over together.”
She had even tried to play the guardian. “Give me his number. I will give him a piece of my mind.”
Anjali did not feel even slightly persuaded at that time.
Priya was shocked, then angry, when she had announced her plan to resign.
Anjali had made up her mind the moment Siddharth told her about the book project. He knew the publishers. He said she was the kind of writer they were looking for. And, besides, it would bring her closer to his city. Shimla was only about seven hours away from Delhi, by road. He could visit her often, he had said.
Random thoughts kept her occupied through most of the journey.
Her mother was OK with her job switch. No one else was ever interested in her life anyway.
Would ammamma have liked this move, if she were alive? She would not be against love, for sure. But this was not exactly an ideal love story, Anjali knew. But neither was ammamma’s.
Anjali was shocked when she first heard that ammamma was initially married to grandfather’s elder brother when she was barely fifteen years old. Within a year, she gave birth to a daughter, aunt Shanta. Then, one day, her husband disappeared. People said he had taken up
sanyas
.
“He went away,” ammamma had said with a sigh. Why or where, she never knew.
“Soon after Shanta was born, I realised that your grandfather liked me. My husband had disappeared a few months before your aunt’s birth. I was sad and lonely,” she heaved a sigh.
“One day, I was having a bath at the well with my cousin sister. She was helping me apply turmeric over my body. She used to envy my body,” ammamma said, glancing down at her full bosom.
“Then I realised that she was not the only one around. I was shocked to see your grandfather watching me from a distance. He looked away when he saw me stare back at him.” Ammamma paused, as if to recall the moment.
“He felt ashamed and feared I would complain and make it an issue. Your grandfather left the village the same day to join his maternal uncle’s restaurant business in this village. I waited for my husband, who never returned. I then started waiting for your grandfather, who I imagined still loved me.” Ammamma had looked at her with another sigh, perhaps for a reaction. Anjali smiled. She understood love. At seventeen, anybody would.
“I wasn’t wrong. But, it took him a year and a half to come for me,” she said. “He told the family he wanted to marry me, and all hell broke loose.”
Anjali imagined the row it would have caused in a conservative family such as theirs, especially in those days.
Nobody would agree in the beginning. But grandfather was adamant. And then ammamma herself expressed her wish to marry him. They were finally allowed to be husband and wife.
After grandfather passed away, ammamma lived with Ramanan uncle, her elder son. She had three sons and three daughters in all; Amma was the youngest.
Her stories had kept Anjali company when she was sleepless in the school dormitory. Ammamma used to share them when they were alone, mostly in the afternoons. They sat on the steps of her house watching passersby through the partially open gate. She would stare at some distant point and narrate the stories, punctuating them with deep sighs or smiles.
Ammamma’s father employed many labourers in their rice fields. One of her favourite stories was about the workers’ mealtime.
“After work, the men and women would sit in a row in front of the house.” she always began the story thus.
“The tired men and women would dig holes on the ground with a halved coconut shell. One of us would drop plantain leaves in front of them. The workers would tuck the leaves firmly into the holes. Someone would pour ladlefuls of brown ragi porridge and drop some mango pickle onto those leaves.”
Listening intently, she would imagine a red, spicy mango pickle splashed with oil on a green leaf next to a heap of brown finger millet porridge. It made her mouth water, each time, every time.
The porridge story had been her companion almost every night during school days. Many years later, it still made her mouth water. How powerful the mind is!
She drifted into sleep as the train gained speed towards Delhi.
A few hours’ wait at Delhi felt like an eternity. Anjali felt relieved when she was finally in the connecting train to Kalka.
The travel from Delhi to Kalka by Shatabdi Express would take four hours. The compartments were mostly empty by the time it reached Punjab. Most of the passengers got off at Amritsar or Chandigarh.
Anjali was the last to leave the coach at Kalka, which was in Haryana state. Kalka bordered the hill state Himachal Pradesh, where Shimla was. The porter lowered her shoulder bag and suitcase onto the platform.
After over twenty hours of travelling, she was exhausted.
The narrow-gauge train to Shimla left Kalka early the next morning. It would be another five hours by train to Barog, a little before Shimla, where Siddharth would be waiting for her.
The room Siddharth had booked for her at the railway guesthouse had stained walls, a dirty washbasin and bathroom, and crumpled bed sheets. Disgusting place, but was safe to spend the night alone, being on the station premises. A bath and rest were a must.
In the evening, Anjali scaled up the track to the local market. She had not imagined it would be so cold in February.
The shops perched on either side of the steep market road were a stroll away from the station. They displayed everything from woollens to pirated CDs of the latest remix songs. Hawkers sold fried potatoes, fish, and chicken from makeshift carts pitched on the sidewalk.
The weather and landscape of Kalka gave a hint of what to expect in Shimla.
At night, Anjali glanced through the information she had jotted down in her diary.
The history of Shimla was fascinating. The town was still very much the Queen of Hills. During the 1860s, it had been the summer capital of the British Raj. Now, the hugely popular hill station was the capital of Himachal Pradesh.
Initially, she was apprehensive about adjusting to the chill of Shimla. The summers are pleasant and winters snowy; Siddharth had tried to make it an attractive contrast to the hot and humid Mumbai, while persuading her to accept the offer.
Shimla was draped in forests, mostly pine and oak. The hills had been occupied by the British East India Company in 1816. The company had built beautiful summer homes for its officials. There were more than hundred cottages in Shimla as early as 1837.
The British viceroys in India turned Shimla into a summer retreat for the rich English residents. The town, now a busy tourist destination, is still known for its colonial-style architecture.
Once the decision to move to Shimla was made, she had thoroughly researched about the place. Google was her window to Shimla.
She had even jotted down details about historical monuments like the Kalka-Shimla Railway. Built in 1906, the World Heritage Site was still the longest narrow-gauge railway line in India, with 806 bridges and 103 tunnels along its route. Interesting!
Every exciting event that happened in those colonial days had an equally important person behind it. Among them were Sir John Lawrence, who shifted the administration between Calcutta and Simla, now Shimla, twice a year during the 1860s, even though the winter and summer capitals were over a thousand miles apart, and Lord Lytton, who had developed the Simla town in 1876.
Thanks to the many private notes of old British residents, now available online, she could mentally recreate the slow makeover of a sleepy hillside into a tourism hub.
Anjali glanced through her notes.
