Home (2 page)

The wife repeated her threat. She would rather eat poison.

‘It is our son’s happiness we have to think about,’ said her husband severely. ‘If he wants a love marriage, he shall have it. He has worked sincerely all these years. He has never had a holiday, never taken one paisa. His younger brother travels with me, spends what he can, while the elder one is simple and retiring. Who knows what he might do if he is thwarted in the only thing he asks for?’

‘Better he had asked all his life than stab us in the back like this,’ muttered the mother. The thought of her favourite son entrapped by a clever, manipulative, dowryless creature made it barely possible for her to look pleasant during the visit her husband forced her to make. She looked at the blushing girl and found nothing remarkable. If it was beauty the boy wanted, she could have found a dozen such, accompanied by similar backgrounds and suitable dowries. Adamant though he might be about Yashpal’s happiness, she knew her husband had planned to aim high with his son’s marriage. Those hopes were now ruined. She could tear the girl’s eyes out, mischief-makers, tear them out with her bare hands.

Meanwhile the girl’s side was apprehensive. They were small people. In marriage they could offer nothing but their daughter, whose heart was golden like her name. They did not wish any regret to follow this alliance. The boy’s side should think carefully and contact them in Meerut if they wished to pursue the matter. Sona’s father said he understood young people to behave irrationally; wisdom lay in greater introspection.

Yashpal wanted nothing to do with greater introspection. If the girl’s parents did not agree, he would devote himself to the life of an ascetic. His parents made a trip to Meerut to finalise the marriage.

Perhaps her relative poverty would ensure the necessary amount of gratitude needed to be an ideal daughter-in-law.

The news spread through Sona’s community in Meerut. The girl was going to marry the Banwari Lal Cloth Shop in Karol Bagh! How adroitly had her looks been used! It is all the mother’s doing, cunningly she has been pushing her daughter forward since the girl turned sixteen. She must have known there was a marriageable son in that shop, or why did she pick that particular place to go with her blouses? As though you can’t dye blouses in Meerut. Now she will think she can do the same with Rupa, but let us see if she has the same luck with the sister, who is so much darker.

And did you hear what the father said to the boy’s side? We have nothing but our daughter – we are small people. And the cloth shop was forced to say their only interest was the girl. Will Sona, from an educated family, be happy with shopkeepers? The boy is only high-school pass, but Sona now says she does not want to study any more, she wants to remain on the same level as her husband.

Babaji was consulted about the wedding date, which was fixed for six months later. The marriage took place with the ceremony due to the eldest son of the Banwari Lal Cloth and Sari Shop. The barat travelled to Meerut, the shop closed for one day, and by the following evening Sona shifted to her new home.

Why, this house is smaller than mine, thought the young bride, as she surveyed the small paved area between front door and gate, the angan at the back, with its toilet and kitchen on opposite ends, and the four rooms in between.

‘Who lives upstairs?’ she asked her husband a few weeks later, when some of the timidity had worn off.

‘Tenants,’ he replied, caressing the peach-like skin and tracing the red lips with his fingers.

Playfully she held the finger between her teeth. ‘Shall I bite you?’ she asked.

‘Just try,’ he invited.

She giggled. He was her husband. How could she bite him? Her thoughts wandered. ‘I didn’t know the whole house was yours.’

He put his hand over her mouth.

‘Whose?’

‘Yours,’ she mumbled.

‘Naughty. Married a whole month, and still saying yours. Say ours.’

‘Ours,’ she repeated, flushing with the pleasure of togetherness.

‘Maybe, when the children come,’ said the husband, caressing the wife’s still-flat belly, ‘we can move upstairs. Or Pyare Lal can use it after he gets married. We can’t bring his wife to the dining room.’ For that is where the younger brother-in-law had been shifted after Yashpal’s marriage.

‘I don’t want to leave Baoji and Maji,’ said Sona, trained from an early age to love, serve, and obey her in-laws.

Her husband looked at her with approval. ‘You are my everything,’ he murmured into her ear. His parents in the next room were sleeping, he could now lock his door, now undress his wife, still shy. With the lights off, he at last got what he had longed for all day.

Yashpal’s love was so overwhelming that he was driven to demonstrate it endlessly. In the way his eyes kept seeking her face, in the small gifts he secretly gave, in the way he waited for her to finish eating before leaving the dining area, in the way he hung around the kitchen when she was cooking, in the way he demanded her presence even when he was talking to his mother.

The mother’s eagle eye noted these variations in her son’s behaviour. Truly you never knew your boy till he married, she thought bitterly. All her years of silent suffering after fleeing Lahore, the years of sacrifice for her children, were now to be rewarded by the obvious preference for a wife. She had known nobody else would matter from the moment he fell in love. Her overwrought feelings made this knowledge public.

Yashpal knew his mother was distressed; since childhood he had been attuned to her moods. He turned to his wife, giver of so much joy, and expected her to bring the same joy to his mother.

‘She can’t help herself, she spent nights and nights in camps wondering how we would survive, and then my father had to sell her jewellery when they came to Delhi, and when Pyare Lal was born there was no one to help her. She was all alone.’

‘So were thousands of others,’ pointed out Sona, possessor of the husband’s history, bound by love to try and make him feel better. ‘Besides, you supported her in every way. You cooked, you shopped, you cleaned, you looked after the baby.’

‘She feels things deeply,’ sighed the son.

Even the eighteen-year-old Sona knew the difference between feeling things deeply and voicing them loudly, but she was in no position to destroy her husband’s illusions. ‘I want to be a daughter to her,’ she sighed, ‘but sometimes I feel Maji does not like me.’

‘Never mind,’ said Yashpal, pulling her close for the second time that night, ‘once we have children, she will melt. Sometimes she gets into moods.’

By now Sona knew this. When the two of them were alone, she could see how her mother-in-law had to struggle to even talk to her. Every gesture suggested the daughter-in-law had no right to exist, and if she had to live, why was she doing it in their house? Only when the men came home at night was there the semblance of a caring family.

So between day and night Sona seesawed between love and something more unnameable. Had it been outside the family it would have been called hatred.

Sometimes she cried and told her husband she wanted to go home, nobody had asked him to marry her, her self-respect did not allow her to be subject to such treatment.

‘She’s not threatening or beating you,’ reasoned Yashpal.

‘No,’ sniffed Sona.

‘Then patience, my life, patience. Once we have children, you will see how she changes. Inside she is all love.’

At this Sona allowed her tears to flow copiously, which drove her husband to take her for a little outing to cheer her up, without making sure it was convenient for everyone else to accompany them, thus adding to the black marks against his wife.

Two years passed. Sona still wasn’t pregnant, though twenty and old enough. ‘Enjoying, enjoying,’ muttered the mother darkly, imagining the use of birth control. Sona said nothing. Her husband’s steady love helped inure her to these taunts.

By this time the younger brother’s marriage was arranged. One love match was all any family could sustain, and Pyare Lal had turned twenty-one when his father told him he was going to wed the daughter of one of the wholesale cloth dealers in Chandni Chowk.

‘Whatever my elders decide,’ said Pyare Lal, showing that model sons could not be judged by daily behaviour. His father was pleased with him. He had a head for figures, he managed the bank work and his separate bookkeeping for the number-one number-two money was meticulous.

The girl was in her first year of college, but marriage provided enough reason to discontinue her education. She was reasonably pretty, reasonably fair – to be too extreme in the looks department could be deceptive, look at the eldest daughter-in-law, still without issue.

Once the engagement was decided, the tenants upstairs were asked to move. A bride of this quality could not be asked to share a dining room. Silently Sona watched as Pyare Lal’s father-in-law gifted a scooter to his future son-in-law and furnished the four rooms of the second storey with a fully stocked kitchen, fridge, cooler, double bed, dining table, chairs, and an upholstered sofa set in red velvet. She realised as she had not realised three years ago, how poor in gifts her own marriage had been.

The upstairs kitchen would not be used for regular cooking, just tea, snacks, and special meals should someone fall ill. Otherwise, everybody would take their meals downstairs, the new daughter-in-law sweating in the small, hot kitchen along with the older one. Listeners to these explanations nodded, yes, wisdom lay in this only. Separate kitchens led to a sense of mine and yours, dissatisfaction, emotional division, and an eventual parting of the ways.

If families did not even eat together, what was the point of living as a unit? You might as well emigrate, pursuing your autonomy in lonely isolation.

Meanwhile in Sona’s heart festered the bitter knowledge that had she had children she would have been the one upstairs, with or without a kitchen, while Sushila, Pyare Lal’s bride, would have been the one moving into their old bedroom, next to the parents-in-law.

She indulged in one wild fantasy, maybe Sushila will not have children, then sadly got rid of it. Her sister’s condition led her to believe hers was the fault, but this knowledge was too frightening to contemplate, let alone discuss openly.

Pyare Lal’s prospective sons lay upon her consciousness like a stone. How their mother would shine, how little by comparison would there be to recommend her in the family’s eyes! What had she given them? So far as wealth was concerned, they had chosen with their eyes open, it was not expected she provide gifts like Sushila. But no children? How could anyone justify that? To blame nature was a poor excuse, she did not even try. She trembled at her future, and lay awake for hours with her adoring husband snoring gently beside her.

But how gaily she participated in the plans for the coming wedding, how completely she agreed with all who described the joy she would feel as a new sister entered the house, how pleasantly she acquiesced in the insinuation that the barren spell would be broken with babies to gladden the grandparents’ hearts.

During the wedding, none looked happier than she, none more loving and tender to the bride, none more delighted about upstairs being done up so nicely, none more willing to show every curious visitor how much the bride’s family had given.

And over the three-day festivities none so beautiful as she. She shone, she glowed, her husband looked at her and thought he would never wish to exchange places with his brother, despite all the obvious advantages of an arranged marriage. He was continually attracted to Sona, and though he knew Pyare Lal would fall in love within a few months, his own method of doing things was vindicated every time he looked at his wife, more beautiful than when they had first married.

Sona’s fears were realised sooner than she had anticipated. Sushila exhibited no difficulty in conceiving; within a year she gave birth to a baby boy.

Great was the jubilation at this first grandchild. (Sunita’s son Vicky, born six years earlier, did not count.) The male line was augmented, courtesy of Sushila and Pyare Lal. A boy brought up within the nurturing ambit of the shop would in turn ensure its continuing prosperity when he grew up.

The new aunt was secretive about her feelings. Yashpal was not to know how jealousy raced up and down her veins like sharp-pointed needles when he came home and called for the baby to play with. He actually thought she would be happy when he proffered the child to her, and said, look, now our house is full, actually thought she would be happy. Was it men, or the exceptional large-heartedness of her husband?

Covertly Sona became even stricter in the rituals she observed. Where could she turn except to God? Her face was already in that direction; now she did not allow herself even a sideways glance.

Every Tuesday she fasted. Previously she would eat fruit and drink milk once during this day, now she converted to a nirjal fast. No water from sun-up to sundown. She slept on the floor, abstained from sex, woke early in the morning, bathed before sunrise. For her puja she collected fresh white flowers, jasmine or chameli, unfallen, untrodden, from the park outside the house.

In the evening she went to the local temple, buying fruit on the way to distribute to as many Brahmins as she could.

By the time Pyare Lal was twenty-six he was the father of two sons, and Sona thought it was not possible to be more miserable. There must be some deficiency in her prayers or a very bad past karma that made her suffer so in this life – and that too when she had the appearance of every joy a woman could have. Beauty, a fair skin, an attentive husband, a well-to-do family. She had tried to make sure her in-laws never regretted her husband’s transgressive love, proving her suitability every day, year after year. She was humble, easy to mould, and ready to please. Sona was gold, like her name. But what use was all this if the Banwari Lal blood did not pass on in its expected quantity?

The fruits of Sushila’s womb delivered with so much promptness caused the gold in Sona’s nature to bend under their weight. As she lay in bed, she could feel the fecundity of life upstairs, falling through the floor and pressing upon her heavily, so heavily, that for nights and nights she could not sleep.