Married Woman (11 page)

Astha shut her mouth quickly.

And of course she is going to have headaches. Time will not improve her condition.

At the thought of everything going from bad to worse, all power of decision left Astha.

The family took a second opinion, and surgery was decided upon.

Astha was in hospital four days. Her nose was heavily bandaged and hugely swollen. She could hardly breathe. It was not a good beginning to a life of easy breathing, and a head that didn’t pain.

Hemant spent a part of every evening with her, while Papaji supervised in the factory.

‘Poor little baby‚’ he murmured as he stroked her hand, ‘does it hurt?’

Astha nodded, and tears rolled down either side of her bandaged nose. She tried to talk, but then her nose moved, it hurt more, and the tears came faster.

‘Baby, don’t talk‚’ said Hemant tenderly. Astha wished to capture his expression in her heart for ever. She looked more beseeching, more piteous, and Hemant pressed a soft kiss under the swollen lump, lingering long on the salty lips.

‘How are the children doing?’ croaked Astha.

‘Do not worry‚’ said Hemant, head of the household, the type of person his wife could depend on, poor little thing. ‘Mala is very reliable when you are not there. She knows she can’t try her funny business with me. Besides they love being with Mummy, she thinks they are not dressed well enough, and has bought both of them new sets of clothes.’

After he left, ‘How good Sa’ab is‚’ said the day nurse with a sigh. ‘Coming to see you every day. Not every husband is so nice.’

‘Yes, he is‚’ said Astha.

‘Love marriage?’ asked the night nurse.

‘No.’

‘Arranged is best‚’ said the night nurse with an even larger sigh, and then proceeded to tell the story of how her husband had first seduced and then married her sister. She could hardly bear to speak to him when he came home at night, that is why she had taken up this job, otherwise she came from a respectable family where the women didn’t work, but now what else could she do, it was very bad madam, her sister looked after all the children and ran the house.

After her operation, Astha came home, waited for her headaches to go and life to become pain free. But the headaches continued, and Hemant was naturally not as attentive as he had been in the hospital.

If that nurse could see her now, her envy would be greatly diluted, thought Astha as she fretted over absent husband, and often absent children as well.

Where were they? Upstairs. Five days had been enough to establish this pattern. When she called them down, this was seen as objecting to their being with the grandparents. She tried talking to Hemant about this.

‘It upsets the children’s routine if they are up for so long‚’ she protested. ‘And if they eat so much junk, their appetite is ruined for dinner.’

‘You fuss too much. Besides their Dada Dadi are lonely. They complain they do not see enough of the children.’

‘I send them up whenever I can, Hem, you know that.’

‘Yes, but you know how it is with old people, they think they have little time left, all rubbish of course, but if it cheers them to have the children, why not?’

‘What about me? As it is when I am in school Himanshu is upstairs. When I come home I want the children. I hardly have you, I should have them.’

Tears came to her eyes. More tears for Astha, poor thing.
She was climbing a mountain, and when she reached the top her face sweating, her heart going at its fastest, all she could see was another mountain. As she gazed at the jagged edges, her head began to ache, and the blood that was pounding in her heart obliged by moving to her head and pounding there.

Hemant rolled his eyes, and drew out a handkerchief to dry her face. ‘What rubbish‚’ he repeated. ‘It is all your imagination. When don’t you have me? You are the one who keeps wanting to stay at home with the children, or your school work, or your books when we are invited to parties, or when I want to go to the club.’

‘How can you say that? I always come with you.’

‘And hate it, don’t deny it. Half these invitations I refuse because of you. I am the one who is lonely, and without company.’

By what sleight of hand had their problems become identical?

She continued with her sketching, but found herself scribbling poetry, her father’s encouragement more firmly in her mind now than when it was first given. She wrote about gardens and flowers, the silent dark faces of gardeners tending plants and never getting credit. She wrote about love, rejection, desire and longing. The language was oblique, but it was her own experience endlessly replayed.

Writing alleviated the heaviness within her, a heaviness she found hard to deal with. Discussing her feelings with Hemant usually led to argument, distance, and greater misery. In the struggle to express herself she found temporary relief.

After Astha had written about two hundred poems, she felt she needed to go somewhere with them. Publication would make her work seem less futile, but how to get there? She started revising them, typing them out on the small portable typewriter Hemant had brought back from the States.

After she did twenty she showed them to Hemant. As a man of the world, she trusted his sense of how to do things.

‘Poems?’ he remarked, looking pleased. ‘I didn’t know you were still writing.’

Astha smiled and said, yes, she was still writing.

The last he had seen her poems had been on their honeymoon, he reminisced, while Astha smiled some more. ‘That was about a lake‚’ he went on.

‘I don’t write about things like that now.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I’ve lost interest in Nature. I’m older, I think differently‚’ said Astha.

‘But you look as young‚’ responded Hemant automatically. He put his arm around her for a moment before turning his attention to her writing.

Astha waited nervously. It was the first time anyone was seeing her poems. Hemant frowned, shuffling through the twenty typewritten sheets. To his wife’s horror he started reading one out in a puzzled voice:

Hemant stared at her. Astha cringed. ‘Actually, forget it‚’ she said. ‘They probably need more working over.’

‘But I am here to help you‚’ said Hemant genially. ‘I personally thought the one you wrote in Srinagar was very good. I said so at the time, didn’t I?’

Yes, you did, you did, you did. But now it’s all changed, and I want to bang my head against the wall because you never understand anything. ‘I thought you might help me in deciding what to do with them‚’ she said tense and calm.

Hemant continued riffling through the papers, sparing her the embarrassment of more loud reading.

‘You don’t like them?’

‘I don’t know what to make of them. Look, I am no reader, but they sound rather bleak, don’t you think?’

‘Do they?’

‘Good heavens, Az, they are all about cages and birds, and mice, and suffering in situations that are not even clear. There is not one happy poem here.’

‘Poems are about emotions‚’ defended Astha. Maybe now he would ask her why she felt sad and they could really talk.

‘What kind of emotions? This person sounds positively neurotic.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘If others read these poems, they might actually think you weren’t happy.’

‘No, no, they are not about me‚’ said Astha quickly.

‘I know that. But people are so quick to put two and two together and come up with five, quick to gossip, you know Az.’

‘Perhaps I should test that by sending them somewhere‚’ said Astha looking down, not wanting to see his face.

Hemant looked doubtful. ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s up to you.’ He held out the poems and she took them forlornly.

That night she thought long and hard of ‘Changes’. How self-indulgent it had sounded when Hemant had read it out. And this was one she had considered her best, evocative and moving. Maybe he was right, they were all too alike, she would be exposing herself to the world.

She gave up writing and continued rather sadly to draw, sketching with the soft pencils and coloured charcoal that Hemant got her from Japan. Nobody could put two and two together about painting, say it was negative rather than positive, say she should paint lakes in Kashmir instead of mice, birds and cages. Maybe one day she could do something with her art, but for now her school and herself were audience enough.

That summer Astha’s mother announced, ‘I am going to Rishikesh for a month.’

‘Why?’ asked Astha.

‘Swamiji is giving a course.’

‘So? You listen to him here, don’t you?’

‘His ashram is by the banks of a river. It will be a different experience.’

‘I think you should stay here,’ said Astha uneasily.

‘In my stage of life one is free from places. Soon I will be retiring. I have to think of what to do – where to go.’

‘You can stay with us‚’ said Astha, who had not learned the futility of making this statement.

‘Why don’t you come too?’ asked her mother with equal futility. ‘It will help your headaches.’

‘I’m all right‚’ said Astha. She looked at her mother, who was smiling benignly. Astha became suspicious, it was not like her mother to smile, and that too at nothing in particular.

‘Ma is going to Rishikesh‚’ said Astha to Hemant that evening.

‘Why?’

‘She says she is free of places.’

‘Very foolish of your mother.’

‘Talk to her.’

‘I will, as soon as I find the time‚’ said Hemant.

Which turned out not to be before she left.

From the banks of the Ganga in Rishikesh Astha’s mother sent her a parcel containing a letter, a commentary on the
Gita,
and a small booklet entitled
The
Purpose
of
Life.

Astha stared at this communication. Where did these thoughts come from, what was happening to her mother, a helpless widow, with her child too caught up in the web of daily life to go and free her parent from another web. If only Hemant had talked to her mother, but then why should she rely on Hemant every time.