Our Favourite Indian Stories (31 page)

She never could understand or explain the malignancy of fate decreed that that very day, the bus that Sajan took every day to go to work should meet with an accident and he should be critically injured. He lay in a coma for four weeks in the hospital and then became a statistic along with the others who had died in that accident. She didn't even know the address of his father to cable him the news, but the university office supplied her with it. By the time everything was over and she recovered from the deathwatch, the funeral, the shock, it was too late to terminate the pregnancy. What Sajan could not have achieved while living, he had achieved by dying, she thought in her bitterness.

There were many who showed sympathy but no one could understand the confusion in her mind compounded of sorrow, bitterness, and a dry, grey hopelessness as well. She shut up her apartment, took leave of absence and went to live with her mother. Life in that little, sleepy, small, monotonous town made her mind go numb. Every day would pass with the same blankness while she would swing back and forth on the porch swing. She could not think of what she was to do now, nor of what was to happen to her child. Finally, it was the child that brought her back to life. It kicked her from inside. It insisted that it was alive. That 'clump of cells' changed her body, it made her awkward, heavy, sick. Finally it made her aware of its existence in spite of her numbed mind. Although intellectually she had realized that 'clump' was her baby and Sajan's, she only accepted it totally when the son was born and she saw that he looked exactly like Sajan. And she realized with a new, jolting certainty that there was no Sajan any longer. That was the first time she felt the pure pain of the unending loss of his nearness. That feeling had no bitterness in it, no grey dryness, just sorrow at the memory of Sajan. A deep sense of loss of all those qualities that were Sajan: his guilelessness, his shyness, and his intelligence.

When she talked to her parents about this, she realized that contrary to what she had earlier thought, nobody had really understood or accepted Sajan. In fact, although nobody said, 'good riddance,' she could nevertheless detect a general sense of relief that he was no longer around.

And so, she quietly returned to her own house and work. She found a live-in help and resumed work. There was relief in work. But there was sorrow in watching how much the growing boy resembled his father. Once, while she was giving him a bath, she wondered why she had named him after her own father and not Sajan's. And on that thought she got up and searched the whole house and found Sajan's old passport and looked for his father's name: Bishambhar Singh. She could not really get her tongue around the unfamiliar mix of consonants and vowels. But she thought it sounded sweeter than the strange sound of her son's neither-here-nor-there name: Peter Robert Singh. On the first page of his passport was also an address. Who knows on what impulse she sat down to write a letter?

The letter never got written. The phone rang. It was her lawyer calling to tell her that the mater of compensation for the heirs of the victims of the accident was finally settled. She could come next week to the office of the bus company. A letter was on the way to that effect, but her lawyer had called first with the news. That check adorned with a lot of zeros scorched her fingers in the bus company's office. She thought, 'While living, I rated his value at nil, but dead, he is worth so much to this bus company! She kept the check in the drawer of her desk and didn't think about it for a while. But one day on her way to work, she took a detour and ended up at a travel agent's office. After a little hesitation, she asked him about India. He scattered colorful advertisements and brochures on the desk. In front of her bewildered gaze sparkled the Taj Mahal, The Gateway, The President's residence, village beauties, tribal dancers, Kashmiri houseboats, snow covered peaks of the Himalayas, temples of Tirupati and Jagannath, Ajanta and Ellora.

With her Bankamericard she bought a ticket right away. It was the first time the agent had seen a customer wander into his office for a casual inquiry and go away with a ticket. He muttered something about it being quite warm there now and quickly rang up a few numbers to settle the matter. He took it upon himself to get her a visa and happily waved her goodbye.

Anita really felt the impact of her decision for the first time when she landed in Delhi. She was dead tired by the twenty-four hour long journey. Peter was screaming. She thought she had entered an oven. She was used to hot summers in Texas, but this was something else. Everywhere there was a sea of contusion, of noise, of people. Some dressed in suits and some looked just the way Sajan had in the beginning. There were airhostesses and other pretty women in saris, hippies in jeans and tunics, youngsters in mod clothes; it looked like a carnival. She wondered why everyone was shouting all at once.

The baggage conveyer had broken down, so her bags came in after two hours. Peter had cried himself to sleep. She held him somehow with one arm, shifting from foot to foot. It she could, right then and there she would have jumped onto a plane that would take her back. When finally her suitcases did arrive, she dragged them one by one to the customs counter. But people pushed and shoved her and rushed ahead of her. When Peter got up and started screaming again, an officer spotted her and brought her to the front of the queue. She had nothing to declare except Peter's clothes and hers, so she was let out at once, and when she came out, she just stood there petrified. She had just upped and left, and now she did not know where she was to stay, what she was to eat, or drink, or who to approach in need. Nor did she know how to get to Sajan's father. She simply stared in front of her, and rocking Peter, stood near her suitcases. A hippie came to ask her where she was going. She checked the address in the dairy from her purse. Roorkee. He shrugged his shoulders, said 'I don't know. Ask the cop. Do you have any money on you? Anita shook her head. The hippie finally took pity on her and led her to the policeman, but he could not understand her, so he took her to a table where a sign said, 'May I help you?'

The attendant at that desk advised her that the best thing would be to stay in a hotel overnight and go to Roorkee by taxi next morning. Without asking her permission, he rang up and booked her a room in a hotel. By the time she came back for her baggage, the suitcase with her clothes in it was missing. She felt so desperate, she even forgot to weep. Again the policeman. He still couldn't understand. Again the interpreter. Some documents were made, some signatures were necessary. An address was given where she could purchase a few clothes. Finally when the taxi brought her into the air-conditioned coolness of the five-star hotel, she felt the tension snap and tears flow. Poor Peter at last lay silent in the cool darkness of the room. His skin was already raw with prickly heat. At least this hotel is like any other American hotel,' she said with a sigh of relief and, after a shower, dropped into bed.

When she resumed her journey the next day, she felt that the nightmare had also resumed afresh. There was the larger oven outside and the smaller inner oven of the old taxi in which six people were stuffed to be baked and roasted. Everyone was sweating and gasping. It was as if they were incapable of doing anything else in this heat. The parched, dusty soil, dried up, leafless trees, skin-and-bone cattle, dark, stunted people, here and there a man looking like Sajan, tall and turbaned; everything passed unheeded before her hot and tired eyes. Peter was shrivelled up from the heat. He was not screaming any more, just whimpering. When Anita's mind started to revert to numbness as an escape from the horrible reality, she made a strenuous effort to shake it alive, and asked the man sitting next to her who was sticky, sweaty and smelly, 'Are you going to Roorkee?' He just grunted. She asked again, 'Do you know Doctor Bishambhar Singh in Roorkee?' He only stared at her. As it was, he had shrunk as much as he could so that he didn't have to sit jammed up against a strange woman, a foreigner at that. Yet, whenever the man on the other side pushed him, he would fall against her and apologetically try to move as far away as he could.

Anita was not much surprised to see six people stuffed in so small a car. She had seen the ocean of people everywhere around her, and could understand the shortage of space. But she had become wiser after paying an exorbitant bill for just one night's stay in the hotel that morning, and had inquired first the fare before getting into the taxi. Thirty rupees each. She saw that the driver charged the same fare to everyone. She thought it reasonable, and so had got in.

On the way she was dismayed to see only dusty, sun-parched industrial towns lining the road, with shabby, crummy little shops, dry, steaming hot lanes, and mud-brown houses with a lost, forgotten, godforsaken look. Where was that dream world of the Taj, snow-clad peaks, the swaying coconut palms, colourful village beauties? She began to think that perhaps the grand fountains, the broad roads, the tall buildings with air-conditioned rooms and gardens full of flowering trees and lush green lawns that she had left behind in Delhi had been a mirage in this desert. While crossing the bridge on the Jamuna, the driver had turned back and said for her benefit: 'Jamuna river.' But since she did not know what Jamuna was, nor why one should be curious about it, the information was wasted on her. All she felt at the sight of the small trickle of water in the middle of a broad, sandy bed was a little contempt.

When the taxi stopped at some place and people got down, she thought she had reached her destination and started getting her suitcases out, but the driver said, 'No no. Meerut. Tea.' God knew how they were drinking the steaming hot tea in this terrible heat. After drinking tea, of course, they all began to perspire more freely. The man who had sat next to Anita offered his seat to the gentleman next to him, perhaps thinking, 'If this woman starts to talk to me after just an hour's journey, heaven knows what she might get up to after three!' The other gentleman was not ready to give up his seat next to the window, but after a little persuasion, he came and sat next to Anita. Quickly he took out a piece of candy from his pocket and offered it to Peter. 'Sweet baby! Take sweet!' Peter resumed his crying at this overture by a total stranger. The gentleman shrank away hurriedly, saying, 'Sorry madam!' Embarrassed, Anita explained, 'He is a bit shy.' At that the gentleman broke into a lengthy speech about shy children and outgoing children. All his children and grandchildren apparently had no fear of strangers.

Then he asked, 'You are foreign, no?' Anita nodded. 'Where you are going?'

'To Roorkee.'

'You know someone there?' 'My father-in-law.' 'What name?'

'Doctor Bishambhar Singh.'

'Oh ho ho! So you are Doctor-
sahib's
daughter-in-law? Poor fellow,
how may calamities can fall to one man's lot? Is this his
grandson? Good, good. It seems you have come to look after
him? At last now he might recover after seeing his grandson.
And where is Doctor-
sahib's
son?'

Anita, staggering under the weight of all these questions, somehow managed to say, 'He died last year in an accident.'

'
Arre... re... re... re
! So that's why Doctor-
sahib
is so sick! What a fate! Even the promising son had to die! And this poor child is now without a father!'

The gentleman then translated this conversation for the benefit of everyone else in the taxi. A flood of sympathy issued. Anita felt like crying. Their quaint English, and peculiar way of expressing themselves amused her, but she could also feel the genuineness of their feeling through it, which surprised her by its strength. So they all knew the 'Doctor-
sahib'
! Then how come they did not know of Sajan's death? And what was wrong with the Doctor's health? She asked them, but no one knew enough English to explain that to her. The gentleman next to her said, 'I shall show you his house. It is quite close to our
kothi
. His hospital is closed now, but people still go to him anyway. How unfortunate the Doctor is! Such a saintly fellow! Well, what can one do against God's will?'

Everyone said something similar and equally philosophical. God had not made a bed of roses for Anita either, but she wondered why there were so many exclamations of sorrow at the very mention of the Doctor's name.

Roorkee seemed no different from the other towns that they had passed by on the road, she thought, when she got out of the taxi. There were perhaps a few more trees, a few more open fields around it. There was a large canal just before entering the town. It must have been a famous one, since the driver had again pointed it out to her. The gentleman with her got her suitcase down and assisted her into a cycle-rickshaw. He haggled with the owner and then came and sat in it himself. When the poor, skinny rickshaw-
walla
, sweating under the blazing sun, started pedalling the rickshaw that pulled them and their luggage, Anita felt such shame that she wanted to jump out of it. After about fifteen minutes, they were on the outskirts of the town. More trees, a broad road and fast trucks on the road. The gentleman next to her pointed to a compound with tall, solid walls, and said, 'Jail. Very big. Very bad people here.' He seemed proud even of the jail in his town. As she was turning her gaze away from the jail, the rickshaw came to a halt. Five or six houses stood in a row, sharing a long outer wall. In front of that wall pierced with doors, in a little space between it and the road, under scrawny trees, stood a buffalo with her calf, some donkeys, some dogs, a couple of goats, and about a dozen naked children. On seeing the rickshaw stop there, the children made an uproar, and when they noticed a strange, white woman in a dress, they yelled for their mothers to come out. Some women peeped out with their dupattas pulled over their foreheads. The gentleman approached them and said, 'Doctor-
sahib's
daughter-in-law!' A woman came forward and beckoned to Anita to follow.

A slightly older boy pulled her suitcases out. Anita got down and was about to thank the gentleman but he had already climbed back into the rickshaw, which was on its way. When she saw him look back and wave and shout to her, 'See you, see you!' she too waved and followed the woman in through a door. Blinded by the sun, she could not see anything inside. But her nose took in the stench and she felt sick. She leaned against the wall waiting for her eyes to get used to the darkness inside. The woman went ahead a few paces towards the inner courtyard and waited for her. Peter hugged her neck and started crying again, perhaps frightened by the darkness and the stench. Someone from inside the room on the left asked something in a low, rough voice. The woman went in and answered hurriedly, and the same voice said something more. The woman returned to Anita and led her in, holding her hand, and then going to the other end, moved a curtain away from a hole-like window in the wall. A string-cot was visible in the light from that window, and on it a sack full of old clothes.