Interfictions (28 page)

Their daughter lay asleep in her room, curled like an embryo among the sheets. She was twelve today, there was going to be a big party, what was she, Divya, doing, standing in the doorway of the child's room, thinking about alien universes! The child herself—how much longer a child? So strange, so different from the squalling, wrinkled little creature she had first held in her arms twelve years ago! Her face still so young, so innocent, and yet on the inside she was developing layers, convolutions; she was becoming someone that Divya as yet did not know. Divya sighed and went out of the room, drifting through the apartment, touching and straightening things as though to make sure they were there, they were fine. She picked up the glasses from the coffee table and went into the kitchen, which (being on the northwest side of the apartment) was still in darkness. With the usual trepidation she turned on the light.

As light flooded the room, mice fled to dark corners. Divya stepped gingerly in. The kitchen was never hers at night but belonged, for that duration, to the denizens of another world. There were cockroach cocktail parties and mouse reunions, and (in the monsoons) conferences of lost frogs. In the kitchen sink, the nali-ka-kida, the drain insects, whatever they were, waited hopefully for darkness, waving their feelers. None of the other creatures—mice and muskrats and frogs—bothered Divya like the cockroaches and nali-ka-kida. But it unnerved her that she had somehow, quite unknowingly, surrendered ownership of the kitchen at night.

She put the glasses noisily in the sink. Kallu the crow flew down to the windowsill from the neem tree outside, and cawed at her. His presence was a relief. She gave him a piece of the paratha that she had been saving up from last night to eat later. The parathas were fat, stuffed with spiced potatoes and peas, the best that the cook Damyanti had ever made. For a moment Divya wanted desperately to curl up in bed with the parathas and a book with a title like
The Aliens of Malgudi
or
Antariksh ki Yatra
. The day stretched before her, rife with impossibilities—to get all that food cooked, the whole house cleaned, and then to entertain the families of Vikas's colleagues without a faux pas ... It simply couldn't be done. She wasn't made for such things—she was from another planet, where you danced with trees and ate parathas and read trashy science fiction novels.

But it had to be done. “Take me with you, Kallu,” she told the crow, but he only cawed sardonically at her and flew heavily off. She sighed and began to wash the glasses. If only Vikas hadn't gotten that big promotion, she thought, feeling guilty for thinking so. Now he was junior vice-president, which was not at all as exciting as a president of vices ought to be—and they had to move amongst the upper echelons of the company, VPs and CEOs, whose houses were completely air-conditioned and windows all shut, so that mice and cockroaches and frogs would have to line up and come in at the main entrance, with the permission of the doorkeeper, like everybody else. The most innocent of things, like children's birthdays, were now minor political extravaganzas with the women all made up, clinking with expensive jewelry, sniping gently at each other while calling each other “darling,” and the men talking on like robots about stocks and shares.

She went to the back door and found the newspaper on the landing. As she straightened she smelled it—a stench rolling down from the top of the stairs. The pungent, sharp, stale odor of urine.

The old man was responsible for the smell. He lived on the top landing, which was little used because it led to the rooftop terrace. Divya looked at the door of the servants' flat. It was shut tight. So was the door of the apartment opposite hers, where the morose and silent Mr. Kapadia lived. She took a deep breath and knocked loudly on the servant quarter door, where Ranu, Mr. Kapadia's cook, lived with her husband.

The woman herself opened the door. She turned her nose up at the smell.

"All right, all right,” she spat, before Divya could say a word. She turned and yelled for her husband. “Wash the stairs, you lazy lout, that good-for-nothing fellow has wet his bed again!” She looked at Divya, hands on hips, nostrils flared.

"Satisfied?"

"Why don't you let the old man use the bathroom in the night?” Divya said angrily. “The poor fellow is your father-in-law—treat him with some respect! And listen, make sure the stairs stay clean all day. We have people coming over!"

In answer Ranu slammed the door. Divya went back into the house, feeling sick. She wondered if the old fellow was ill again. She let him run little errands for her, like getting the milk from the milk booth in the mornings, for which she would give him a little money or food. He was a small, thin, emaciated, bird-like man, with a slurred speech that had resulted from some disease of his middle age. Sometimes he would tell her stories of his bygone days and she would nod at intervals although she hardly understood any of it, except a word here or there, like bicycle, or river, or tomato chutney, which, put together, made no sense at all. In her more fanciful moments she had thought that perhaps the old fellow was an alien, speaking to her in an exotic tongue or in code, delivering a message that she had to try to decipher. But he was just an old man down on his luck, with no place to go but the nest of rags at the top of the stairs, subject always to the whims and frightful temper of his daughter-in-law. Divya resolved that later on she would find out if the fellow had fallen ill. He hadn't come by yesterday for the milk. She would have to send Vikas to the milk booth today.

Divya was hungry.

She had been cleaning all morning and had skipped lunch. By the afternoon, the house was sparkling. She hadn't known what to do with most of the things that they had accumulated—the piles of books on the floor all over the house, the loose photographs on every surface like schools of dead fish, the magazines sliding off stacks in the bathroom. But she had found in herself unexpected reserves of cunning—she'd hidden piles of books behind the beds in the bedrooms, given the magazines to the kabari man without asking Vikas if he wanted to keep any of them, collected the photos and put them in a plastic bag in the clothes cupboard. The cleaning woman, who was lazier than a street dog in the sun, loved parties and had worked with great enthusiasm to make the floors shine, knowing that some of the good food would come her way later on.

Late afternoon, Divya was standing in front of the stove, stirring the matar-paneer. There was sweat gathering on her forehead, under the hairline, and steam rising off the big karhai as the peas bubbled in their sauce of onions, ginger, tomatoes, cumin and coriander. Big chunks of paneer like white barges in the gravy, and the aroma! The aroma was enough to make the head swim. Divya had never been so hungry, and was regretting not having had lunch. She was paying for it now: her stomach rumbled, her mouth watered, she felt faint with desire. It should have been easy to munch something while cooking.

But the fact was that she was afraid of the cook. Damyanti was a small, stern woman who stood no nonsense from her employers. She took great pride in her creations and had, Divya thought, an unreasonable code of conduct: you did not eat before your guests, you did not filch from the serving dishes, and there was no need to taste the food unless you wanted to insult the cook. Damyanti had already scolded her once for trying to throw away the carrot-tops.

"You've left so much of the carrots on this, I can easily take it home and put it in a sabzi; and the greens can go to Karan's cow. Don't you know what happens to those who waste food?"

The reason Damyanti could bully her employers and get away with it was because her cooking was sublime. The fact that she had condescended to stay and cook for much of the afternoon meant that Divya was, by tacit agreement, completely under her thumb.

"What happens?” Divya asked, trying to sound unconcerned.

"People who waste food end up being reborn as nali-ka-kidas,” said Damyanti, setting hot onion pakoras into a cloth-lined serving dish. Divya shivered. Imagine that, having those horrible, long feelers, living in dark drains, emerging at night to eat the leavings of others!

The matar-paneer was done; Damyanti was setting up the big dekchi for the rice, putting in the ghee, the cardamom, a cinnamon stick, cloves. It smelled like heaven. Divya clutched the wall with one hand. The thought occurred to her that she should let the party go to hell, dismiss Damyanti and sit on the kitchen floor, surrounded by vats of fragrant dishes, and fall upon them in a frenzy. She collected herself. Maybe she should simply go get the parathas she had been saving in the fridge. They would taste divine, even cold. She had surely never been so hungry as now!

But Damyanti (coming to get the dhania leaves) caught her at the fridge, with her hand clutching a piece of paratha halfway to her mouth.

"Chee chee!” she said. “Don't you know what happens to the woman who eats during cooking? Do you want to make all the food jootha?"

Divya never found out what terrible fate would have resulted from her almost-lapse because at that precise moment Vikas came in with the cake, laughing and trying to fend Charu off because she wanted to see what it looked like. Divya had to put the parathas back and make room in the fridge for the enormous cake. Vikas touched Divya's disheveled hair as she turned away—she suppressed a desire to bite his hand.

"Are you going to face the guests like this, Divu? They'll be here in an hour! Go dress!"

"I have to get the chholey cooking,” she said irritably, following Damyanti into the kitchen. There was a knock on the back door.

"I'll see who it is!” Charu said, flying off resplendent in a new blue dress, happy because the cake was her favorite kind, triple chocolate. Divya went back into the kitchen, got the other karhai on the stove, put in the oil and the spices and the onions. When Damyanti's back was turned for half a second she popped a piece of paneer into her mouth from the dish of matar-paneer, and burnt her mouth. She could hear Charu talking to someone at the door, running into the house and back to the door again; she heard the soft, hesitant, mangled words of the old man upstairs. So he was up and about, the old fraud! Pissing in his bed, stinking up the stairs, giving her a headache first thing in the morning! And she had had to get the milk herself earlier, because Vikas had to go out to get the drinks! Tears welled up in her eyes. If only she could eat something! How absurd this was, to be afraid to eat in your own house!

She was about to purloin another piece of paneer, burnt mouth or no, when Vikas came in.

"Divya, you'll never believe what I saw in our room! A mouse! Really, when will you stop feeding every living creature in the area! They think our house is a hotel! And we have all these people coming ... where did you put the rat poison?"

He had gotten it last week, a small blue vial of death that she hadn't been able to bring herself to use. It stood on the highest shelf in their bathroom.

"It wasn't there,” he said when she told him this. “Divya, really!"

He knew she didn't like using the poison, but the traps they had used hadn't worked either. Vikas had taken the traps to the park every morning and let the mice out, but they had wasted no time in returning. Stricter measures had been called for.

What Divya remembered was this: she was ten years old, and had been visiting an aunt's house in the summer. It was an old bungalow, ridden with denizens of all kinds, including an army of mice. Her uncle had set poisoned food all over the house and killed off the army. Divya had a vivid memory of the tiny corpses, their bodies twisted with the final agony, all over the house. Then, a day or two later, there had been the smell in her room, which had finally been traced to a nest behind the big wooden cupboard. Twelve baby mice, pink and hairless, had died of starvation after the adults had been killed. All the time Divya had been reading her mystery books and sipping her lemonade, those babies had been dying slowly. She had cried for days.

"Vikas, this is no time to be setting out rat poison,” she said, but he was already distracted by the pakoras. “Smells good,” he said wistfully, leaning over the glass-covered dish.

Before Divya could utter a word, Damyanti had put two pakoras and some tamarind chutney on a plate and handed it to him, all the while smiling approvingly as Vikas ate. Divya stared at him, and then at her, speechless with indignation.

"But...” she started to say, when she heard the fridge door open and shut and there was Charu walking past the kitchen door in her blue dress, holding Divya's precious parathas in her hand.

In an instant she was in front of her daughter, confronting her, snatching the parathas away. She stared at Charu, breathless with anger.

"What are you doing with my parathas?"

Charu stared back, eyes wide with confusion.

"I was just giving it to the old man, he said he was hungry, Ma—.—.—."

There was a roaring in Divya's ears. She felt momentarily dizzy.

"Tell him we can't spare any,” she said, more harshly than she had intended. “Don't you have better things to do? Where are the presents you were wrapping for your friends? Did you get enough for the other children, too?"

An expression she could not identify flickered over the child's face. Divya knew Charu was not happy about the other children, the strangers who would be coming to the party. Apart from Charu's three friends there would be a fourteen-year-old boy, the nephew of Vikas's new boss, Mr. Lamba, and an eleven-year-old girl, daughter of the Pathanias. But all that—the sulks and protestations—had been over and done with, or so Divya thought. She saw the tears rise in Charu's eyes.

"It's my birthday,” the child said, fiercely. “You're not supposed to scold me on my birthday!"

At that moment Divya was aware that certain knots had come into being in the smooth tapestry of her life, knots she would not necessarily know how to untangle, but there was Vikas calling out that the Chaturvedis were already here, and Charu was already at the door, talking to the old man. Damyanti took the parathas from Divya's limp fingers and pushed her, not ungently, in the direction of the bedroom.