Married Woman
Manju Kapur
For
my daughter
Amba
&
Ira
Astha was brought up properly, as befits woman, with large supplements of fear. One slip might find her alone, vulnerable and unprotected. The infinite ways in which she could be harmed were not specified, but Astha absorbed them through her skin, and ever after was drawn to the safe and secure.
She was her parents’ only child. Her education, her character, her health, her marriage, these were their burdens. She was their future, their hope, and though she didn’t want them to guard their precious treasure so carefully, they did, oh they did.
Her mother often declared, ‘When you are married, our responsibilities will be over. Do you know the shastras say if parents die without getting their daughter married, they will be condemned to perpetual rebirth?’
‘I don’t believe in all that stuff,’ said Astha, ‘and I think, as an educated person, neither should you.’
Her mother sighed her heavy soul-killing sigh. ‘Who can escape their duty?’ she asked, as she put in a steel almirah another spoon, sheet, sari, piece of jewellery towards the girl’s future.
*
Every day in her temple corner in the kitchen, she prayed for a good husband for her daughter.
‘You pray too,’ she insisted as they stood before the shrine on the shelf, ordinarily hidden by curtains made from an old silk sari border, woven through with gold so pure that if the cloth was burnt, the metal would emerge in a little drop.
Astha obediently closed her eyes to delicious images of a romantic, somewhat shadowy young man holding her in his strong manly embrace.
‘Are you praying?’ asked the mother suspiciously.
‘Of course I’m praying,’ replied the daughter indignantly, ‘you never trust me.’
To prove her sincerity she fixed her gaze firmly on Krishna, Krishna the one so many had adored. He would send her marriage, love and happiness. She fingered the rope of tiny pearls around his image. On either side were miniature vases with fresh jasmine buds. There was also a picture of Astha’s dead grandparents, a little silver bell and thali, two small silver lamps which were lit every evening, while a minuscule silver incense holder wobbled next to it. Whatever meal Astha’s mother cooked was first offered to the gods before the family ate. She believed in the old ways.
*
While her father believed in the new. His daughter’s future lay in her own hands, and these hands were to be strengthened by the number of books that passed through them. At least once a day he said to her, ‘Why aren’t you studying?’
How much studying could Astha do to satisfy the man? Through her school years she never found out.
‘Where is the maths work I asked you to do?’ he would continue.
‘I haven’t finished it yet.’
‘Show me whatever you have completed.’
Sums indifferently done were produced. The father tightened his lips. The girl felt afraid, but refused to show it. She looked down.
‘You worthless, ungrateful child. Do you know how much money I spend on your education?’
‘Don’t then, don’t spend anything,’ she muttered, her own lips as tight as his.
Driven by her insolence, carelessness and stupidity, he slapped her. Tears surfaced, but she wouldn’t act sorry, would rather die than show how unloved and misunderstood she felt.
Her mother looked on and said nothing. Later, ‘Why don’t
you do the work he tells you to? You can’t be drawing and painting all the time.’
‘So he hits me?’ She didn’t want her mother’s interventions, she hated her as well as him.
‘It’s his way of showing concern.’
Astha looked away.
The mother sighed. The girl was good, only she got into these moods sometimes. And how much she fiddled with brush and pencil, no wonder her father got anxious, there was no future in art. If she did well in her exams, she could perhaps sit for the IAS, and find a good husband there. You met all kinds of people in the administrative services, and the girl was not bad looking. She must tell her to frown less. Frowns mislead people about one’s inner nature.
*
The girl’s body was nurtured by walks that started every morning at five.
‘Get up, get up. Enough laziness.’
‘You will thank us later when you realise the value of exercise and fresh air.’
‘How can you waste the best part of the day? This is Brahmakaal, the hour of the gods.’
So Astha dragged her feet behind her parents’ straight backs as they strode towards the dew and space of the India Gate lawns. Her parents arranged their walk so that they would be facing the East as the sun rose, showing their respect for the source of all life, while Astha, lagging behind, refused to participate in their daily satisfaction over the lightening sky, or the drama of the sun suddenly rising behind India Gate.
When they came home they all did Pranayam together. Pranayam, in the patchy grass surrounded by a short straggly hedge outside their flat. Inhale through one nostril, pinch it, exhale through the other, pinch that, right left, left right, thirty times over, till the air in the lungs was purified and the spirit uplifted.
*
At other times Astha’s father took her for a stroll through the colony in the evenings. Away from her studies he was more amiable. He didn’t want his daughter to be like himself, dissatisfied and wasted. You have so much potential, you draw, you paint, you read, you have a way with words, you do well academically, the maths is a little weak, but never mind, you must sit for the competitive exams. With a good job comes independence. When I was young, I had no one to guide me, I did not know the value of time, did not do well in my exams, had to take this job, thinking later I can do something else, but once you are stuck you are stuck.
Here he grew silent and walked on moodily, while Astha linked her arm through his, feeling slightly sorry for him.
After her father died and experience had drilled some sense of the world into her, Astha realised how emancipated he had been. At the time she felt flattered by his attention, but bored by his words.
The family counted their pennies carefully. Their late marriage, their daughter still to be settled, their lack of any security to fall back on, meant that their pleasures were planned with thrift firmly in the forefront. Once a month on a Sunday they went as a treat to the Bengali Market chaat shop. They gazed at the owner sitting on a narrow platform, cross-legged before his cash box, a small brass grille all around him. His dhoti kurta was spotless white, his cash box rested on a cloth equally spotless.
‘This man came from Pakistan, a refugee‚’ said the father.
‘Look at him now‚’ echoed the mother.
And the shop grew glitzier every time they came, with marble floors added, mirrors expanding across the walls, extensions built at the back and sides. The tikkis and the papri did not remain the same either, but grew more and more
expensive. What was in the tikki that made him charge one rupee per plate?
‘The potatoes he must be buying in bulk, so that is only one anna worth of potato, the stuffing is mostly dal, hardly any peas, a miserable half cashew, fried in vanaspati, not even good oil, let alone ghee; the chutney has no raisins, besides being watery, and what with the wages of the waiter and the cook, the whole thing must be costing him not more than … than …’
Father, mathematician, closes his eyes to concentrate better on the price of the potato tikki.
‘Not more than eight annas, maximum‚’
‘Hundred per cent profit‚’ said the mother gloomily. ‘How much does he sell in a day? Five hundred?’
They looked around the crowded restaurant, with its tables jammed together, and the large extended section behind the sweet counters. They looked at the people being served on the road. Yes, five hundred would not be wrong.
Then they calculated eight annas multiplied by 500 made 250 rupees. And this was just on potato tikkis.
What about the papri, the kulchas, the dahi barhas, the gol gappas in spicy water, the gol gappas in dahi and chutney, the kachoris with channa, the puri aloo, the channa bhatura, the newly introduced dosas, the dry savouries, sweets, and chips that he was cunningly displaying in glass cases, what about every one of those? How much money would he be taking home at the end of just one day? To top it all, he was uneducated.
‘I could make better tikkis at home‚’ offered the mother.
Astha stared miserably at her plate of two small swollen tikkis, buried under sweet and sour chutney. Then she stared at the fat man behind the payment counter. He sat there with his paan-stained mouth, taking people’s money, opening the lid of the cash box, calmly lifting the change katoris to add to the growing piles of ones, twos, fives, tens, hundreds.
‘Do you want anything else, beti?’ asked the parents after they had eaten every crumb from their little steel plates.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go home then.’
‘That was a nice outing, wasn’t it?’ they said to each other as they started the old Fiat and headed back to their flat on Pandara Road.
Over these smaller worries, loomed the larger one, their unbuilt house, the place they would go to when they retired, the shelter that lay between them and nothingness. It was towards this end that they counted every paisa, weighed the pros and cons of every purchase with heavy anxiety. From time to time they drove to the outer parts of South Delhi with dealers to look at plots. Somehow, the places they wanted to live in were always outside their budget, the places they could afford seemed wild and uninhabitable.
‘There was a time when Defence Colony too was on the outskirts of Delhi‚’ pointed out the mother. ‘Let us at least buy wherever we can‚’
‘No, Sita‚’ said the father irritably. ‘How can we live so far away from everything?’
How far do we have to go before we can afford something, thought Astha, who was forced to come on these expeditions, she couldn’t be left alone with the servant. She herself never intended to land in any house on any tiny plot they were looking at. Her husband would see to it.
Meanwhile Delhi grew and grew, and plots they had once rejected as being too far, now became part of posh and expensive colonies, and not as far as they had once thought.
*
Retirement was coming nearer, the pressure to buy was growing, when in the early sixties, ministries started forming co-operative housing societies.
‘Thank goodness‚’ grumbled Astha’s mother, ‘at least the government will do for us, what we have not been able to do for ourselves‚’
‘It’s one thing to form a co-operative housing society, another thing to get land allotted to it, and still another to build a house‚’ said the father, born pessimist. ‘In what god-forsaken corner will they allocate land to a ministry as unimportant as relief and welfare, that too you have to see‚’
‘Arre, wherever, whatever, we have to build. Otherwise you plan that after retirement we live in your ancestral palace?’
The husband looked pained at his wife’s coarseness.
*
They continued to worry. When would their housing society have land assigned to it, how many more years for the father to retire, how many more working years for the mother, how long before they had to leave this government house in the centre of Delhi, so convenient?
Once the land was allotted, how much would it cost to build, how much did they have in fixed deposits, in their provident funds, how much could they borrow, how much interest would they have to pay? After discussing all this, they allowed themselves to dream a little.
‘I will have a special place for my books‚’ said the father, ‘cupboards with glass to protect them from dust and silverfish‚’
‘I will have a big kitchen‚’ said the mother, ‘with screen windows to keep flies out, and a stainless steel sink, not like this cement one which always looks filthy. I will have a long counter, so I don’t have to unpack the mixi every time I need it. I will have a proper place to do puja, rather than a shelf‚’
‘We will have a study, maybe an extra bedroom for guests‚’ mused the father, and then they looked frightened at the money their dreams were going to cost. Maybe not a guest room, their voices trailed off.