The Space Between Us (9 page)

Bhima gets up from her haunches and removes a note from the end of her sari. She waits for her change, but the woman stares back at her. “This is the right amount, mausi,” she says finally. “I gave you a good-good price today. Anyone else I would’ve charged extra. Such freshum-fresh produce you are getting.”

Any other Saturday Bhima would’ve argued, would’ve stood her ground until she got some money back from the woman. After
all, bargaining is a time-honored tradition at this bazaar. Also, unlike most of the servants who shop for their mistresses, Bhima tries never to waste a paisa of Serabai’s money. To Bhima, it is a matter of trust. Serabai trusts her enough to send her grocery shopping on her own. So it is right to protect Serabai’s finances as zealously as she would if she were spending her own money.

But today she is tired and has other things on her mind. Also, her own grief has made her more alert to the misery of others. For the first time, Bhima notices the dark circles around the woman’s eyes, the premature traces of gray in her hair, the small hole in the sleeve of her sari blouse. Today, she can’t think of this woman as her adversary, someone with whom she must engage in a battle of wits. The few rupees that she will save by arguing with her suddenly seem meaningless. “Okay,” she says abruptly. Then, to Rajeev, “Let’s go. I need some potatoes and onions.” As she leaves, she feels the vendor’s puzzled stare behind her.

She is not nearly as nice to the man who sells her the potatoes and onions. He is a short, bespectacled baniya in a small, narrow shop, and he treats her with less respect than the other vendors do. And ever since she caught him placing his hand on the scale to weigh it down, she has mistrusted him. If Bhima had things her way, she would never patronize his shop, but Serabai likes the man’s produce and insists that Bhima shop there. So Bhima now eyes him grumpily. “Five kilos of potatoes,” she says curtly. “And make sure none of them are rotten. Last week, two of them were so bad we couldn’t use them.”

Instead of looking apologetic, the shopkeeper sneers. “Everything in Mumbai is rotten,” he says loudly. “The air is rotten, the politicians are rotten, the public transportation system is rotten. Why should a few of my poor potatoes not be rotten?” He snickers, showing brown-stained teeth. The sickly-looking teenage boy with the long, thin arms who works in his shop shakes his head in
admiration. “Well said, boss, well said,” he says, flinging Bhima a hostile look.

“You hear this?” Bhima says to Rajeev, loud enough for the shopkeeper to hear. “Such badmaashi you have to put up with, even when you spend your hard-earned money. I’ve a good mind to take my business elsewhere.”

The shopkeeper suddenly looks nasty. “It’s not your money you’re spending, it’s your mistress’s,” he says. “You could never afford my wares and my prices, you old woman. Now stop wasting my time.”

Bhima flinches from the truth of the man’s words. But before she can react, Rajeev has taken a menacing step toward the shopkeeper. “You watch your tongue, you,” he says. “Lots of shops here that sell potatoes and onions. I can make sure not one of my customers sets foot in your shop again.”

Suddenly, Bhima wants nothing more than to be done with this. She still has to go to the fish market, and she shudders at the thought of wading through the smelly, dirty, slippery, wet floor, making sure that a fin or a fish scale does not get in between her foot and one of her rubber chappals. She hates the din of the indoor market, the shrill, insistent cries of the fishmongers as they try to lure customers to their stalls. She hates the dumb, glassy expressions on the faces of the dead, defeated fish and the slippery feel of the coins when the vendor hands her the change. While Rajeev and the shopkeeper are growling at each other, she takes the money out of her sari and puts it on top of the stacked potatoes. “Here,” she says hurriedly. “Here’s your payment. Now give me my change and let me go.”

She watches as Rajeev places the bags into his basket. Usually, the teenage helper assists Rajeev as he squats on the ground to lift the basket on his head, but today, the boy folds his hands and watches impassively as Rajeev struggles to his feet. The basket is
filling up now, and Rajeev staggers for a moment under its weight before he steadies himself. Bhima catches his faltering step, and pity slashes through her chest. She looks away, angry at herself for her uncharacteristic sentimentality. She has enough troubles of her own without taking on the world’s problems, without feeling the pain of every vegetable vendor and transporter she meets. Gopal always used to tell her that her heart was too soft, that the world would take advantage of that softness, and hadn’t time proven her husband a genius? Hadn’t he been absolutely right? And the fact that Gopal himself had been the one to leak the softness out of her heart and transfuse it with a cold, cementlike hardness, well, that had just been the final irony.

“Where to next, mausi?” Rajeev asks, and she points toward the fish market.

After they are done shopping, Rajeev sets the filled basket by her feet and says he will go find them a cab. This is their weekly ritual, but today the memory of Rajeev’s coming to her defense still plays on Bhima. “Chalo,” she says. “Before you do that, let us get a hot cup of tea. You have a full load to carry today.”

Rajeev looks at her curiously but nods. “That will be fine, mausi. Many thanks.”

They stand outside a small café and sip the light brown liquid from the short glasses. The owner, a portly man with a big belly, sits at the entrance of the café, placing spiced potatoes rolled in batter into a huge wok with oil bubbling in it. The smell of the battatawadas makes Bhima’s mouth water. She thinks about how much of Serabai’s money she will have left over after she pays for the cab and quickly calculates that she can afford to treat herself and Rajeev to a snack. “Two battatawadas in bread, chutney on the side,” she calls out to the café owner, and when the snack is served to her on
a piece of newspaper, she wordlessly hands a sandwich over to Rajeev. The basket carrier looks delighted. “Many thanks,” he says and wolfs his meal down. Bhima wants to buy him a second sandwich, but she is excruciatingly aware of the fact that this is Serabai’s money she is squandering. Instead, she forces herself to stop eating her sandwich and pretend as if she is full. “These battatawadas are big,” she says. “I can’t finish it. You want this, Rajeev?” The sandwich is out of her hands before the words are out of her mouth.

In the taxi, Rajeev rides up front with the driver while she sits in the backseat with the basket propped next to her. The meal has put Rajeev in a good mood, and he wants to talk, turning around to make frequent comments to her. But she is not in a talkative mood, and pretty soon Rajeev faces the front and strikes up a conversation with the cabdriver instead. Under the protective shield of the two male voices, Bhima is free to get lost in her thoughts, and she stares out the window. She leans over the basket and rolls up the right window, to guard herself from the exhaust fumes of the bus in the next lane. She had rolled up the left one as soon as she entered the cab. The shut windows make the vehicle unbearably hot, but even the heat is preferable to the violent convulsions her lungs have started going into when assaulted by exhaust. She misses the air-conditioning of Viraf’s car, misses gazing out on the outside world while her skin is kissed by sweet, sharp coolness.

Bombay slips past her window, quietly and swiftly, much as most of her life has slipped by her.

S
era wakes up with a groan. She peers at the alarm clock and feels a rush of relief when she sees that the dial reads 4:00
A.M
. She can sleep for at least another hour. She feels a moment’s resentment at having to get up so early this morning. In a few hours, she will be picking Bhima and Maya up at the bus stop near their home. The plan is for Bhima to continue on her way to work while she, Sera, takes Maya to the abortion doctor. Three days ago, she had been flattered when Bhima told her that Maya had requested Sera accompany her to the doctor. Now, lying awake, staring at the darkness of the room, Sera feels irritation. She had not bargained for all this when she volunteered to pay for Maya’s college education. Paying Maya’s fees every term is one thing; accompanying the girl to a doctor who will flush out her illegitimate baby is quite another.

But you’re not doing this for Maya, she reminds herself. You’re doing this for old Bhima. The thought is immediately accompanied by a dull ache below her shoulder. It is a phantom pain, she knows, a psychosomatic ache, but still she feels the hurt. After all, it has been many years since the blow that made her arm swell and ache for days. On the other hand, who knows? Perhaps the body has its own memory system, like the invisible meridian lines those Chinese acupuncturists always talk about. Perhaps the body is unforgiving, perhaps every cell, every muscle and fragment of bone
remembers each and every assault and attack. Maybe the pain of memory is encoded into our bone marrow and each remembered grievance swims in our bloodstream like a hard, black pebble. After all, the body, like God, moves in mysterious ways.

From the time she was in her teens, Sera has been fascinated by this paradox—how a body that we occupy, that we have worn like a coat from the moment of our birth—from before birth, even—is still a stranger to us. After all, almost everything we do in our lives is for the well-being of the body: we bathe daily, polish our teeth, groom our hair and fingernails; we work miserable jobs in order to feed and clothe it; we go to great lengths to protect it from pain and violence and harm. And yet the body remains a mystery, a book that we have never read. Sera plays with this irony, toys with it as if it were a puzzle: How, despite our lifelong preoccupation with our bodies, we have never met face-to-face with our kidneys, how we wouldn’t recognize our own liver in a row of livers, how we have never seen our own heart or brain. We know more about the depths of the ocean, are more acquainted with the far corners of outer space than with our own organs and muscles and bones. So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties.

But if this is true, surely the body also remembers each kindness, each kiss, each act of compassion? Surely this is our salvation, our only hope—that joy and love are also woven into the fabric of the body, into each sinewy muscle, into the core of each pulsating cell?

Out of the blue fog of time, Sera remembers the blow and the balm; the tormentor and the healer: Feroz and Bhima.

She and Feroz had moved out of Banu’s flat and into a home of their own by then. By the time the first blow landed, she had already forgotten how the fight began. All she could focus on was Feroz’s face—the vein throbbing angrily in his forehead, his eyes bulging in fury, his skin flushed a rusty brown. And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the brass candleholder in his hand and the fast, furious strokes in the air before it came crashing down on her arm, the arm that she had lifted in an effort to protect herself from the gust of his anger. A sharp, bitter pain flooded her body, and a high-pitched animal scream had escaped her lips before she forced her mouth shut. She collapsed on the side of the bed, holding her bruised arm, but still Feroz would not stop, raining blows on her back, this time with his bare hands. She thought she would pass out from the pain, but the beating ended as suddenly as it had begun, as if someone had turned off the switch that had made his hands perform their violent deed.

In the past, after the torrential downpour of his anger had ceased, he would look at her uncomprehendingly. Then, the tears and the apologies and the self-recrimination would come. He would sob and beg her forgiveness; he would slap himself hard on his cheeks or hit himself behind the head. But today, Feroz simply stood looking at her, and when she finally managed to look up at him and saw his face through the distorting lens of her tears, the look of revulsion made her heart stop. He was staring at her as if he loathed her, as if the very sight of her crumpled, bruised body made him sick. “Today you went too far,” he hissed. “Today, you deserve what you got. Your damn pride, your arrogance—you’re a ballbuster, not a woman at all, you know that?”

They had been married for enough years for Sera to know better than to answer him. Feroz was like a man possessed when he was in one of his black moods, and the slightest provocation could make the furies within him whirl and twirl even faster, like a gath
ering dust cloud. So she looked away, thankful that Dinaz was at the park with Bhima, that her child was protected from having to overhear the sounds of her parents’ breaking marriage. And while she was counting her blessings, she should probably be grateful for the fact that she had the kind of skin that healed quickly, so that she was spared the humiliation of being one of those women who wore the signs of their husbands’ violence on their bodies like a window display for all the world to see.

But this time, the bruises didn’t heal. Three days later, her arm was still black and blue, and so swollen she could barely lift it over her head to wear her sadra each morning. Even tying her kasti, the traditional Parsi sacred thread that was woven with seventy-two strands of wool and worn around the waist, caused her arm to ache. There was also the bruise on her upper lip, where she had hit the bed as she fell to her knees. But at the moment, she didn’t care. She wanted to stay in bed all day long, flooding her mind with numbness, the way her body was being flooded with pain. Each morning she got up long enough to send Dinaz off to her nursery school class before getting into bed again. There she stayed, until it was time for Dinaz to come home.

The day after the beating, Feroz had come into the bedroom and announced that he was leaving for Pune on a business trip. She knew he had made up the trip as a way of getting out of the house, but she didn’t mind. She was thankful to have him gone. That way, there was nobody to look at her contemptuously when she went back to bed by 9:00
A.M
.; there was nobody to tell her to snap out of it or else she would end up like one of those old boodhi Grant Road Parsi women if she wasn’t careful; no one to criticize the way she looked or walked or smelled; no one to claim that the bruises on her body were fake, that she was deliberately clinging to them as a way to make him look bad. Still, despite her relief at having the house to herself, her heart leapt each time the telephone rang or the
postman knocked on the door. She kept waiting for Feroz to apologize by mail or phone, to acknowledge her pain, to inquire about her bruised body. But when he called each night, it was only to say good night to Dinaz. This time, there would be no apology. The usual pattern of unleashed violence, followed by the flood of tears, apologies, sweet talk, kisses, and promises, would not occur this time. This time, there was simply the drought of silence and distance. She felt acutely the loss of their usual cycle of fighting and making up. It was as if another phase of their marriage had ended, and now Sera didn’t even have the sweetness of being wooed back to look forward to. Feroz’s indifference hurt as much as the bruises on her arm did.

On the fourth day, Bhima came to work holding a small bundle. Sera eyed it disinterestedly when she opened the door to let Bhima in and returned to her room. A little while later, Bhima came into her bedroom, holding a plate with two slices of toast. “Come on, bai, get up,” she said. “You’ll get more sick, staying in this bed. Anyway, today Bhima is going to fix you. All these dark spots on your arms will be gone by the time the sun sets, I promise.”

Sera smiled weakly. She was too tired to pay Bhima much mind. Even when she heard her pounding something in the kitchen, Sera didn’t pay it much attention. But she looked up when Bhima brought the Primus stove into the bedroom. “Bhima, what are you doing with that thing in here?” she cried.

“Shh, shh. Bai, you just let me do what I’m doing. This is my Gopal’s mother’s recipe, from his village. One time, when we were visiting his old mother, one of the village girls was raped and beaten by a gang of goondas. When we went to see her, bai, this poor girl was so discolored, you couldn’t tell what color her skin was. Even doctorsahib didn’t know what to do with her. My mother-in-law went back home and returned with these dried leaves and some hot oil and applied them all over this girl’s body.
Believe or don’t believe, by the next morning, the girl had skin like a newborn’s.”

Sera wanted to protest, but she was too tired. So she lay back and watched while Bhima took a pinch of the dark brown powder and mixed it in the oil. She turned the stove to its lowest setting and warmed the mixture for a few seconds. Then she poured the oil on her rough, callused hands and began to rub Sera’s arms.

Sera recoiled. Bhima had never touched her before. She tried to muster some resistance but found that she couldn’t come up with one good reason for why Bhima’s hands should not touch her. The oil stung Sera into awakeness. Although Bhima’s thin but strong hands were only massaging her arm, Sera felt her whole body sigh. She felt life beginning to stir in her veins and couldn’t tell if this new, welcome feeling was from the oil or the simple comfort of having another human being touch her in friendliness and caring. Even at the sweetest moment of lovemaking with Feroz, it never felt as generous, as selfless, as this massage did. After all, lovemaking always came with strings attached—the needs of the other had to be met, so that even when Feroz was concentrating on giving her pleasure, she was always aware of his own throbbing body, of how closely he was watching her, of how he waited to see his own performance reflected in her response to it. When you got right down to it, sex was ultimately a selfish act, the expectations of one body intrinsically woven into the needs of the other. But here, with Bhima, there was none of that. Here, she could just listen to the sound of her body uncoiling, watch as the sting and venom left the bruises on her flesh, until they appeared as harmless as black butterflies on her arm.

She almost groaned in frustration when Bhima stopped for a second to make more of the mixture. Now Bhima was gently turning her on her stomach and undoing the back buttons of her dress.
“Poor Serabai,” she was murmuring. “So many burdens this poor body is carrying. So much unhappiness. Give it up to the devil, give it up, don’t carry this around.” While her hands circled Sera’s smooth back—plucking at the stringy muscles, pounding on the painful spots, her fingers moving up and down the vertebrae as though they were piano keys, Bhima kept talking to her in words and languages Sera barely understood. As her body relaxed under Bhima’s wise hands, Sera felt herself receding, moving backward in time, so that for a moment she was a young bride sitting astride her new husband’s lap as he rocked her back and forth in a sexual rhythm, and then in the next moment, she was a young child on her mother’s knee, being rocked to sleep after a hot, restless night, and then she was older and younger than even that—she was a small fish floating around in a warm world of darkness and fluids, a being as formless and translucent and liquidy as her bones felt right now. And still Bhima was talking to her, her words flying out of her mouth as fast as sparrows at dusk, her tongue working as fast as her hands were, so everything was a blur of words and rhythm; of speech and motion. And Sera was fading now, caught in the undertow of an ancient, primal memory, drowning in a pool of sensation and feeling, old hurts and fresh wounds being exorcised from her body, leaving her feeling as bright and new as the day she was born. Paradoxically, as the hurt left her body, she began to weep, as if now that pain had stopped occupying her body, there was at last room for tears. The tears streamed down her face and were caught by the pillow, but if Bhima noticed the heaving of her back, she did not comment on it. Bhima appeared to be in a trance herself; the strange murmurings continued over Sera’s soundless weeping, a fact that Sera was grateful for.

The last thing she remembered before she fell asleep was the smell of the oil in the room. It reminded Sera of the smell of her
grandmother’s apartment, and the thought of her grandmother, a stout, gruff woman with a large, pillowlike bosom, to which she would press her granddaughter’s head, made Sera smile.

When she woke up a few hours later, the bruises on her arm had shrunk. If they had originally looked like the map of the world, now they were down to the size of the map of Brazil. Any other time she would’ve been surprised, but after the dreamy strangeness of the massage from Bhima, anything seemed possible. She rose from the bed, slid her feet into her rubber slippers, and walked into the kitchen. Suddenly, she felt unaccountably shy in front of the woman who was leaning over the sink, scrubbing dishes with the same intensity with which she had rubbed her back a few hours ago. She wanted to thank Bhima for her kindness, wanted to explain to her how hot and wonderful life felt when it trickled back into one’s veins, wanted to tell her about how cold her heart had felt after this last encounter with Feroz and how Bhima had warmed it again, as if she had held her cold, gray heart between her brown hands and rubbed it until the blood came rushing back into it. But a net of shyness fell over Sera as Bhima looked up from the dishes and at her. She had long accepted that Bhima was the only person who knew that Feroz’s fists occasionally flew like black vultures over the desert of her body, that Bhima knew more about the strangeness of her marriage than any friend or family member. But now, Sera felt as if Bhima had an eyeglass to her soul, that she had somehow penetrated her body deeper than Feroz ever had. “Better?” Bhima asked, unsmilingly.