In the Convent of Little Flowers (19 page)

Prakrit, being Prakrit, is properly horrified at my suggestion. “Nitu, you are my
wife,
” he hisses. “What would the MD think? What would people think?”

Munshi grins again with barely concealed satisfaction. His face is smooth, like a much-used mortar stone, brown like dirt. “Fourteen floors, memsahib,” he says, holding up ten fingers and then four.

“I know where I live, Munshi.” I go into the cool darkness of the building, sweeping as majestically as I can past Munshi’s smirk, and confront the lifeless lifts. If I leave my bags in the little cupboard in the lobby and return for them when the electricity comes back, half their contents will have disappeared. The lifts gape back at me, their faces painted a mocking, hospital green. Munshi’s color choice. The
association voted for blue, but for the budget we had, Munshi got us green … cheap, very cheap, memsahib.

As I stand there, someone else comes in. The light is behind her and for a moment I cannot see her face, only a thin figure clad in jeans and a loose T-shirt that hangs in the still air. I look away as she approaches, it would be rude to stare, but strangely she comes up to me and smiles.

“Hello.”

I turn in surprise. People rarely talk to one another in our building, we just bestow on-the-edge-of-civil pleasantries as we take the lift or meet in the lobby. Unless the woman you are trying to ignore is your husband’s manager’s wife, then you smile very much at her until she ignores you. This is the way building hierarchy works. Of course, the company does not own the entire building, just fifty flats. But I can tell civilians from company workers. Was this girl one of Prakrit’s juniors’ wives?

I turn away from her with a cardboard smile, playing my part as best I can. Prakrit is not very senior yet, but one day he will be, and I need to learn how to do this.

“It looks like the electricity is off, but this is not the right time for it to go, is it?” she says.

“No,” I reply, despite myself. “Today it has gone off much earlier.” Now I see her properly. Her face is as though unfinished, no lipstick, and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She must be someone’s daughter; no wife can be so young nowadays. They all seem to wait, to finish their degrees, to
get jobs, to have children. They wait with a voice I did not have; now I will never have it.

“Fourteen floors is a long way, can I help?” She starts pulling packages from my arms without waiting for a reply.

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I know who you are. I’ve seen you before with your children. They are beautiful, like little gods. Such perfect, unspoiled faces. Like yours a little.”

I look at her, mute. So much praise. I am suspicious. Who is this girl? What does she want? As I try to wrestle my belongings from her, she waves me away and says, “We are in 8A. Jai, my husband, he works with your husband, same department. Our flat faces the slums, terrible view, but what interesting and smelly lives they lead, always fighting, always screaming at each other, but at eight o’clock when
Rishta
comes on Channel 5, everything stops. Jai and I watch them when we have nothing else to do.”

Eighth floor. Definitely Prakrit’s junior, although the way she says it, it seems like they work together in the same position. But the higher you live, the more senior you are in the company. Eight is almost half of fourteen. I must not be too familiar, but gracious.

“Coming?”

She has the door to the stairs propped open with one Keds-clad foot, her hip holding it in place. I nod and follow her through, trying to be distant. After so many years of wearing a sari, I have still not mastered the art of climbing stairs gracefully in one.
Kick your pleats as you walk, keep your
back straight, head high,
not one lesson sticks. Prakrit always says I lumber in a sari, no grace, stick to
salwars,
Nitu. I plod ahead of the girl, one hand holding my pleats up from the ground. I can hear her skipping up the steps behind me. Even when I was her age, I did not skip; girls were in training to be ladies. I stop at the first landing, already out of breath. Fourteen landings loom in front of me, this girl will leave at eight, how will I go up the rest alone?

“I will come up to your floor,” she says. “Jai tells me the view is fabulous from your flat.”

“Jai has been to our home?”

“Yes, a few months ago, right after we were married, before I came to Mumbai. My Bapa did not want me to leave home so soon after the wedding; he convinced Jai to let me stay for three weeks saying I had to get my completion certificate from college.” She laughs, a trilling, youthful sound. It makes her face glow. “I need the certificate to get a job here, only Jai does not want me to work, not yet anyway. He thinks we should start a family first. But this morning I went for an interview at an advertising firm. They offered me a job.”

So candid, so much information in just a few minutes of knowing her. This is the new way. In my day, we did not talk so much or so openly. And that too about having children with those smiles—we blushed when we talked of children for they came through, well, you know, the way they come.

“When did Jai come to our home?” I ask again.

“Let me see …” Her well-sculpted eyebrows meet in thought as we climb the stairs again. Thankfully, I am not
talking anymore. But her voice goes on. “July, no August. No, no, it was July. We were married in May; Jai came back here almost immediately. I followed in July.” Again that laugh, white teeth shining. “I guess I stayed back home with Bapa longer than a few weeks.” A wink now. “My college is very backward in giving out certificates, then I had to get my marks sheets also.”

“Jai did not mind?”

“Oh, I think he minded. But Bapa can be very strong when he wants. I don’t have a mother; she died when I was two. Bapa brought me up alone, did not marry again, he thought the new wife might be cruel to me. Sometimes, though, I wish he had, it would have been nice to have a mother. Like when I got my period. At first, I simply could not go to Bapa and ask him to buy me sanitary napkins.”

“What did you do?” I ask, interested despite myself. A single man bringing up a girl child on his own. People must have talked. And so unusual to not want a wife who would take care of the child.

“I thought of going to the neighbor auntie’s house, but she and Bapa always squabbled over something or the other. She would tell him not to let me wear jeans, unwomanly she would say. The next day I had five new jeans and I wore them each day until she fought with Bapa again. There was no one else around. The neighbor auntie only had boys, I could not ask them. In the end, I asked Bapa.”

I am horrified and stop on the stairs, panting a little. But the curiosity again. “What did your Bapa do?”

“He sat me down on the drawing room sofa and drew a picture of a uterus, the ovaries, and explained how an egg was released and what a period was. Then, he went to the nearby pharmacy and came back with a newspaper-wrapped package. I read the instructions on the cover and did the rest myself. For the next few months Bapa bought me the napkins; then I started to buy them. It was horrible how the shop boys grinned at me. What a fuss about something normal.”

“Poor thing,” I say.

We stop on another landing, number six. Here too the walls are painted green and white, smudged at shoulder level. There is a staggering smell of old urine rising from the floor, and crushed
beedi
stubs are everywhere.

The girl sniffs, wrinkling a broad nose. She wears a diamond nose stud. For all her talk, she is old-fashioned enough to wear a nose stud. “Bathroom.”

“What?” I manage between heaves of piss-filled air.

“This was the bathroom,” she says. “See, the chap leaned his hands on the wall here.” She points. “He urinated here. Gross. Let’s go.”

We move on, almost running up the stairs this time. She has her face buried in the plastic bag from the Sari Emporium. “Gross,” she says again.

The only gross I know is a measure of weight.

“Do you remember the man who lived on the landings? Fourth landing sleeping area. Fifth the kitchen. Sixth was the bathroom. Until Munshi found him and kicked him out.”

“He was Munshi’s brother,” I say, panting.

“Really?” She turns
kajal
-rimmed eyes at me. She has a classic face. Big eyes, thick lashes, big nose but a nice big nose, lips that pout. Even her body is an Indian man’s dream. Lushly rounded with a span-with-two-hands waist, like the carved stone maidens adorning temple walls. Completely unsuited to jeans and a T-shirt. She should be clad in an almost-transparent chiffon sari with a backless blouse. “How do you know?”

“Munshi let him stay in the landings, until the load shedding started and people started taking the stairs. The MD came home one day for lunch, unexpectedly, and found the man asleep on the landing. It was then Munshi pretended to have suddenly discovered he was living here.”

“The bastard.” She says this casually. When I was growing up, I could not even say
bloody.
She must be only fifteen years younger than me, around twenty-five or so, yet she seems so wise, so confident.

By the time we reach the fourteenth floor, I am exhausted. The plastic bags slip from my sweating hands. As I fumble with the keys, she looks out of the landing window. I drag myself into the flat and sit on the drawing room sofa. I did not leave the windows open, the cool of the air conditioner has long since evaporated, and the room is stifling. She unlatches the windows and stands there, heat blasting through the grill, borne on an undercurrent of sweet air. That betraying hint of the monsoons, mocking and not to come for many months yet.

“Can I have some water please?”

“Of course.” I start to rise.

“No, no. Tell me where. I will go get it.”

I point to the kitchen and listen as she finds two steel tumblers and fills them with ice water from a jug in the fridge.

“Thank you for helping me with the bags.”

She sits next to me on the sofa and fingers the parcels. “You went to buy saris?”

“Yes, for the party.”

“Which party?”

“At the MD’s house. Oh, you are not invited?”

A laugh scurries over her face. “No, not yet. Jai is too junior, you know, to be asked for dinner at the managing director’s flat. One day he will get promoted and then I will have to be stolid and sulky like the other managers’ wives.”

I never dared to talk like this, with such disrespect. “The children will be coming from school. I have to make them something to eat.”

She gets up and stretches. Her arms are long, reaching mid-thigh when she lets them down. “I have to go plan dinner. Jai wants a full dinner every night.
Chappatis,
rice, a
dal,
a
subji,
and a dessert. I tease him that he did not marry a cook but a wife. No use, you know.”

“Was yours an arranged marriage?” The words slip out without my realizing. I flush. I was becoming a manager’s wife, asking the same prying questions I had been asked when I first came here.

She turns, hands on her hips. “Yes. The neighbor auntie pestered my Bapa until he agreed to let Jai come to see me.
She is his aunt, his mother’s cousin. The auntie thought that since I had reached womanhood it was unseemly to let me live alone with my father.” She wrinkles her nose and lines pepper her forehead. “How ugly people can get.”

“She is right, you know,” I say gently. This girl is a child, with a child’s naivete, a child’s supreme and misplaced confidence.

“I don’t love Jai.”

Shock tears over me at those words.

“Well”—her mouth twists—“I
like
him, but I don’t love him, not like all those women in the Mills & Boon romances. I thought it would be the same as living with my Bapa. Just substitute one man for another. But it is not the same, not worse, but different.”

I am still appalled. Again, something I will never dare to say. Prakrit is my life. He is supposed to be; he is my husband, my
patidev,
my husband-who-is-akin-to-God. I will not say in public, or even think in private, that I do not revere and respect him. My mother teaches me this. Now I know why this girl does not know how to talk about Jai—because she has no mother.

She comes up and stands in front of me, one eyebrow raised. It arcs over her forehead like a perfect rainbow. I like this quizzical look in this woman-child. She slants her head over one shoulder, then another. My panting has ceased now, and an errant breeze washes over us from the grill-clad window. I am sunk into the sofa’s cushions, my stomach folded over the petticoat of my sari. I pull the
pallu
to hide it. She
reaches to my head with a long-fingered hand, nails painted pearl silver. When I flinch she says, “Wait.”

She pulls the rubber band from my hair and it splays over my shoulders. I feel decadent, sitting there with my hair out. It is not Sunday, the only day I wash and let my hair loose. “What lovely hair you have, so thick, do you use
amla
oil?”