Three Bargains: A Novel (25 page)

A blaring honk from the bus warned it was going to depart. Boarding the bus, Madan said to Jaggu, “How did I get so lucky to get a friend like you?”

“You certainly made some deal with Waheguru in your last life,” said Jaggu, and he waved and waved as Madan’s bus pulled out, the sun peeking over the fields of sugarcane.

T
HE NIGHTS WERE NEVER SILENT HERE. UNLIKE GORAPUR,
which fell into a deep slumber for at least a few hours, Panipat throbbed constantly throughout the night, trucks and lorries plying its roadways to the northern towns. As he did every night, Madan silently counted the days, the weeks, he had been away. He’d never been out of Gorapur for this long. His face had healed and the bruises had faded, but the pain would not go away.

When can I come back? When can I return? he asked Jaggu again and again on the phone, needing Jaggu to believe, to concur more than anything else that he could come home. He knew of nowhere else he could live.

In turn, Jaggu cajoled him to stay for a few days more. Now more than three months had passed.

“What’re you going to do?” Jaggu asked during one of their calls. “Walk up to her house and knock on the door? All you’ll get is a bullet in your heart.”

There was actually very little news of Neha. Like Madan, she’d vanished into the dust swirling around the town. Gorapur was rife with rumors about Madan as well, but no one connected the two. Mostly everyone thought Neha was back in Delhi, and that Madan had been sent away for work or Avtaar Singh had set him up somewhere—he was running a new business or factory in another town.

But Madan didn’t want to talk to Jaggu about rumors, he wanted news.

“You’ve got to forget her,” said Jaggu. “We have to plan what you’re going to do next.”

There was no such choice. He would go over and over different scenarios with Jaggu. It’s good, he would say to Jaggu, that I’m here for now. It’ll make Avtaar Singh realize how much he misses me. Avtaar Singh must already be regretting his decisions. Jaggu gave a disbelieving laugh. “When has Avtaar Singh ever regretted anything?” he reminded Madan, but it did not stop him.

Avtaar Singh would be happy to see Madan alive. He would take him back. He would speak for him to Neha’s family. With Avtaar Singh’s blessing, they could get married and take a loan. He didn’t know much about babies, but they had family to help. Once everyone understood how they felt about each other . . . yes, they were young, but it was not impossible. Avtaar Singh would guide him; he would make Trilok-bhai understand.

And if not, all Madan had to do was find out where she was—they could live anywhere. “It’s such a big country, where will they look for us?” He could take care of her, take care of them; getting a job was not a problem. It was simply a question of making contact with her and getting away.

“You can’t shift the gears your way,” Jaggu said. “No one says your name here now, it’s like you never existed.”

Every morning when the shutters rolled up in a welcoming clatter at All World Carpets, Harbans, clapping and rubbing his hands together, would say, “Today we’ll make some good sales, ha, Madan?”

Jaggu’s cousin, Harbans, had been kind and generous to Madan ever since he’d picked him up at the bus station. Madan saw in Harban’s face how bad he must have looked; no wonder everyone on the crowded bus had given him a wide berth. But Harbans did not say much. He took Madan to a doctor’s office, where they fixed Madan’s nose as best they could, taped his ribs, applied salves on his raw, bloody wounds, and then Harbans took him to his home, a place above his carpet shop, where his wife fed him. They showed him around the showroom downstairs. Rugs piled in flattened plateaus or grouped in rolls crowded the room. A bed was set up for him in the tiny office.

Assisting Harbans in the shop, Madan soon discovered that there was not an overwhelming local demand for hand-knotted wool carpets. Most people preferred the machine-made polyester. And unless it was pious ladies visiting the prayer halls of Shri Ram Sharnam Temple, most people did not turn off the busy highway to enter the town founded by the kingly brothers of the
Mahabharata
. Lost in the warren of lanes, old forts stayed forgotten, and markers of epic battles waited unseen. In the center of town, horse-drawn carts clopped under the floral arch of an ancient Mughal gate, its thick stone walls squeezed in on either side by precariously constructed multistory buildings of more recent origin, as it continued to witness the commerce and the bustle of the market.

Though All World Carpets was near enough to the highway, the competition from the other carpet shops and hand-loom stores up and down the street meant that Madan and Harbans sat silently most days, watching an unwitting fly try to escape the confines of the store, buzzing near the doorway but never finding its way out.

Harbans perked up when a tourist passed through, his sales pitch repeated word for word to each potential customer. “Madan, show the one with the horses,” Harbans would say, and Madan would unfurl the rug, a hunting scene, a beautiful garden, or some fruit in a bowl woven into its woolen yarn.

“No two pieces are the same,” Harbans said to a finely dressed lady or suited man. “With hand knotting you have a unique carpet, each weaver makes his own piece different.”

Madan’s mind often drifted off as Harbans delved deeper into his sales pitch. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the sawdust beneath his feet instead of silky-smooth carpet. Yet at other times he struggled to recall the way the pipal trees bent in the wind as they pointed to the factory, or the look on his grandfather’s face when Swati fed him. Shaking himself out of his reverie, he forced himself into the present, before panic set in.

Today, when the phone rang around lunch, it startled both Madan and Harbans, who were in their deep yet separate contemplations. To Madan’s surprise, it was Jaggu.

Jaggu’s occasional calls were usually in the evenings after he finished his shift at Dhingra Motor Garage. For a second Madan thought it could be his mother. They had not spoken since he’d left Gorapur, and Jaggu said the same thing he said about everything, give her time.

“Madan,” Jaggu said when Harbans handed him the phone. “I’m telling you this, but it’s because I won’t feel right not to tell you. You just listen, okay?”

“What’s going on?”

“It seems like Neha’s been at her house all this time. But not for long.”

“Why? Where’re they taking her?”

“To Karnal, to Sheetal Family Hospital. She’s ready any day now . . . to have the baby.”

“How’d you hear all this?”

“It was Bhola, their driver. He brought their car in today. The old guy was quite upset. Said he had overheard her brothers saying that you were gone. You’d always been so respectful to him, he couldn’t believe that they would have, you know . . . to a nice boy like you. And he told me she and her mother were going to Karnal at the end of this week.”

Madan was silent. Finally some news, finally the hands on the clock ticked forward.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do with this information . . . no, there’s nothing you can do, should do.” When Madan didn’t say anything, Jaggu panicked. “Madan, you’re going to go there, aren’t you? I shouldn’t have said anything. You ass, we saved your life for nothing, or what? She’ll still be with her family, you know, it’s not like she’s there alone.”

A hospital with lots of people who did not know him, did not know his face. Except her mother. There was a way. To Jaggu he said, “You’re right, what can I do?”

But he was already on the move.

He told Harbans he was leaving, and thanked him and his wife for all their care. They were circumspect. People came and people went. Relatives always asked for favors; he had stayed longer than most, but they all knew it was temporary.

The old walled city of Karnal was a short bus ride from Panipat. It took longer to find Sheetal Family Hospital on the outskirts, far enough for discretion. He sat in a small dhaba across the road from the hospital’s entrance. The gate stayed open all day, cars belonging to patients and doctors going in and out. While scoping out the grounds the day before, he walked through the parking lot to the garden, which was empty. For a while he sat on a bench by the garden pond, the floating green scum mirroring his own idleness. He watched a car pull up and a family tumble out, everyone clucking around a moaning woman as they wheeled her in.

Today he walked up to the front when one such car pulled up. It was a big family, with a husband and, from what he could make out, a mother and mother-in-law, plus a younger sister or daughter and an elderly gentleman. In the confusion, he strolled in with the family.

There was a check-in desk to the side of the reception area. While the husband spoke to the clerk, Madan walked through the double doors that led to a clean white hallway, bright lights illuminating the signboard. Arrows pointed toward the patients’ rooms and the operating wings.

He proceeded toward a bank of rooms, peeking into an empty one. There was a well-made bed and a TV perched in the corner wall. Orderlies and nurses in starched white outfits passed him, but no one said anything. The small hospital did not have strict visiting hours. His eyes scanned the name plaques outside closed doors,
MRS. P. GUHA, MRS. NIRMAL SINHA, MRS. JYOTI KISHAN
and so on, and one that read
FAMILY SINGHAL
.

Madan walked out, waving to the clerk behind the desk, who gave him a confused look, waving back politely as though he remembered him. Madan took up his post at the dhaba again until the gate shut in the evening, and then caught the bus to the youth hostel, to the one bed that he could afford. He had saved money doing odd jobs when he was not helping Harbans at the carpet shop, though it was not much.

His duffel bag was stowed under the bed; it still held the few clothes that Jaggu had packed for him when he’d left. He supposed he should find a safer place for it. This was a common dormitory with over twenty beds, but right now he did not have the energy to care.

When Trilok-bhai’s car drove up the next morning, he recognized it at once. Madan watched from near the gate. The driver, Bhola, emerged first and, after retrieving a wheelchair from the reception area, opened the car door. Neeta memsaab got out, leaning in and offering her hand to the person inside. Neha stepped out and, except for the drawn look on her face, she seemed the same. She glanced about indifferently as her mother talked to her. When Neha turned toward the wheelchair, Madan made out the unfamiliar shape of her body under the loose shirt of her salwar. Bhola wheeled her in before coming back outside to park the car.

Madan waited. He couldn’t go up to the front with the driver parked right there, sitting in the car and listening to the radio. He wanted to run in, shout her name till it echoed down the sterile hallways. He fought with the insistence inside him, holding himself back. He had waited this long, he could wait a short while more.

Resuming his surveillance from the nearby dhaba, he was on his third cup of tea when he saw the car drive away, Neeta memsaab in the back. He was not sure how long she would be gone, but this was his chance. As soon as the car was at the end of the road, he was inside. The reception clerk seemed unsure when he saw him; it could have been his faded, scruffy jeans or his T-shirt pockmarked with holes, but Madan strode with confidence to the desk.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Jyoti Kishan,” he said, recalling a name from one of the plaques on the rooms from the day before. The clerk nodded and turned the register toward him.

“Sign here, please.”

Madan signed,
Ram Kishan
, and said, “Room twenty-three, right?” The clerk checked his book and smiled. “Yes,” he said.

Madan retraced his steps through the double doors, following the arrow pointing toward the patients’ rooms, again scanning the names. He nearly walked past the room for
FAMILY THAKAR
before realizing that it was Trilok-bhai’s last name. He could hear the sound of the TV.

He pushed the handle down slowly and stepped into the room. She was in bed, the blanket covering her waist, and her back against the raised top of the bed. At the sound of the door, she opened her eyes and sighed, turning her head and staring vacantly at him. Then she gave a small cry, her hand flying to her mouth. She tried to push herself up, to sit straighter, but failed; she gulped for air, looking around frantically.