Bent Over Backwards

Chapter 28

The past is that god - or devil - whom we cannot worship but whois present everywhere, surrounding us inside and out, holding us in itsclutches. We are merely a miniscule part of it. We are helpless.

I was helpless from my childhood. Helpless in my desperation tosave mai, helpless in not being able to save her, and then helpless before ourfrustration and that resounding silence that was our history, mine, and Subodh’s,separately.

Subodh believed that we had successfully punctured that silenceand become free. He was happy to see my self-sufficiency - I lived alone,drove a car, painted. I had gone to England and it had been like a homecoming.Subodh wanted me to come there to stay. When it was past sunset in this big cityof our big land and it became necessary to escort a girlfriend back toher place, he would say, ‘Suni, we have none of these problems there, you cango out anytime at night, sit anywhere in a cafe, meet anyone. One is mobile.’

He was after me to come to England. We would have an exhibitionof my paintings. Something would work out. There was so much scope. And here,half the time here goes in preparations, half in covering tracks. What isleft for work?

Babu’s face was lined with wrinkles. Where is Subodh takingSunaina now? If she goes there who will be left to be saved from ruin?

Mai still did not voice disapproval. Life keeps carving its ownpaths. Let it. Let them.

We were after her, saying, ‘Mai, you come too. Subodh has ahome there - wouldn’t you like to see it?’ Babu had however made it clearwithout saying as much that one doesn’t spend thousands of rupees withoutcause. Subodh had gone to study, and that was different.

When the rationale for my going had been agreed upon, babu’swrinkles became deeper and deeper but he couldn’t say ‘no’ even tohimself. Subodh had dizzy spells, someone from home should be with him for hiscare, so Sunaina should be the able to go.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he would say, ‘who is with him?Someone from home should be there.’ ‘But there’s nothing to worry about,’he’d say again, ‘I too have dizzy spells if it gets too hot, but we shouldask the doctor anyway.’ ‘But we should not get involved with a doctor,’ he’dsay yet again. ‘The doctor has to earn his living so he’ll certainly saythere’s an illness and make someone perfectly normal into an invalid. Subodhshould come home and mai will make hurt all right. Bring him back with you.There’s no one to give him good food there.’ And then finally he'd say, ‘Writeto him to come home, there’s no need to go at all.’

But those times when he could have stopped me from going weregone for good. He came to see me off at the airport. Mai sent besan laddus. Anda letter: ‘Write all the news quickly. Health is everything. If you find thekind of sweater you got for Bhondu in a sale, get two or three, it pleaseseveryone because they are foreign. My blessings...’

Babu kept saying his beads in the taxi - 'Turiyatit baba... baba..baba…’ He panicked when he saw that travelling with me would be labourersgoing to the Middle East, unemployed and in search of jobs. ‘...baba baba...there are no restrictions even on planes. God...’ He told the passportcontrol, ‘My daughter is going. Alone. Please ask one of your officers to takecare.’ I flashed a pitying smile and shrugged my shoulders helplessly. I feltI should hurry up and disappear inside before I too began to see wolveseverywhere.

Before going inside I forced babu to go to the airportrestaurant and ordered two glasses of orange juice. Babu drank it up but scoldedme as well, ‘Why are you so restless? Think of baba, peacefully.’ When hegot up he told the waiter that the tea had been slightly sour and had not evenbeen hot!

That was my first time on an aeroplane. It took me no time atall to become an excited little girl again. But how nice it would have been if,instead of the sheikh next to me, I could have had mai. I would talk to herabout everything I saw. Look down here, the ocean on this side, the ocean onthat. Strange, isn’t it, we on top of the clouds, and the sun playing below?The clouds as solid as if they had been the earth? There is Dubai, here the WestAsian desert, Jordan, Kuwait, look, the whole atlas spread out! The snow on themountains below is covering them like a white sheet. Then the sea again,Istanbul, the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Lintz - mai, the horrible Hitler’scountry - Germany, Alps - look at the greenery - London. Taste a little, I wouldsay, this is champagne, just a little. We would fly together.

I have had dreams like this from childhood that keep circlinglike clouds and enter the house through doors and windows. Some even burst intorain.

Childhood was past and dreams were clouds gathering anddispersing and mai was a burden which we had been carrying around, sometimesadvancing carefully, sometimes stopping when tired, sometimes wishing to putdown the bundle in despair, unable to do any of the things easily.

Mai waited for us with babu at the house. We kept going back,sometimes alone, sometimes together. The house was peaceful with babu’s guestsvisiting, bringing their wives along. They would be delighted to meet us becausewe had set foot on the hallowed land of England. Subodh was definitely a herobut I was no less a heroine. For my English, my travels, my freedom, and becauseall these were mine and not their own daughters’.

We came again and again. Because mai would be lonely. Babustayed out the whole day. How could the fields and wells make up for the companyof humans?

It was sometime during those days that Vikram came home with me.He was at work on a field survey in a nearby village. Subodh was not there but Iinvited Vikram home. Babu might still have tried to say that Subodh’s friendhad come on work, but Heinz was also working on the same project and staying insome guest house in the city. He came to pick up Vikram every morning and I wentalong too some days.

Babu could find no excuse for Vikram staying with us. He toldmai that when both the boys were working together why did they both notstay in the same guest house?

I crackled like lightning- ‘Can my friends not stay here?’

Babu’s tongue ran away with him - 'Peeeople...people do notlike it... you should not call a man.. a fr...a friend.’ And finding himselfinadequate to the delicate demands of the situation he whined to mai - ‘Youshould tell her. The children are old enough to understand the differencebetween right and wrong now.’

And he sneaked away without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Mai did not say anything. She would give Vikram his dinner withaffection. She threw away his torn bag quietly and made another one exactly likethat of strong denim with a zipper and everything. When Vikram was leaving heasked me for a glass of water and as soon as I turned around he bent to touchmai’s feet.

Vikram left and babu kept ranting and raving, repeating to mai,‘It is gelling difficult to even go out now. People keep asking all kinds ofquestions. At least they should not go out together in this town.’

He avoided me and left mai’s side when he saw me. If he didn’tsee me he would look around carefully and reach mai. ‘I hope you’ve toldthem. I hope you have forbidden them.’ Just then I would appear and he wouldsuddenly tell mai in a loud voice, ‘Stitch the button on my shirt.’

We had always been concerned about this - this habit of puttingmai in front to say and do everything. I would follow mai around so that shecould not find herself alone with babu. If I left home I would keep worryingabout what was happening there and what babu was doing to mai, and how mai wouldnever tell.

Alas. That I could save mai. Our wish was so stubborn that wecould not imagine that there was something unattainable about it. Or that someextraordinary steps might be needed to attain it.

‘Leave, mai,’ I kept saying, ‘Subodh is calling. At leastyou can go to visit. Babu too if he feels like it.’

Chapter 29

But since when does life follow anyone’s directions? It leavesfamiliar paths and turns to new ones all by itself. Babu went to Lucknow on worksometimes. He went once with some people and just as they entered our town ontheir way back a truck ploughed into their car. Babu and his three companionswere thrown afar. It was dark and no one discovered them till morning. When theydid, it was found that two had already passed away and babu still breathed butwhile his breathing was more or less normal, everything else in him was twistedand broken.

We rushed home and just on that day when we were not up tomeeting anyone, bumped into some childhood friend of Subodh’s - Arif or Zamiror Jiwan, something like that. He had studied with him in Sunny Side Convent. Hewas a businessman in Bengal and met Subodh occasionally when he came home.

We were suffering. He was in a hilarious mood. Since we did notwant to talk about ourselves and had on a mask of normality, we had to toleratehis banter.

‘Do you remember...,’ he was recounting memory after memory.‘The carefreeness of those days when we came to the station for fun? Stoodaround on the platform drinking tea? And remember when so-and-so mail wouldcome, we would dash inside in a crowd and grab the seats, thrilled that theup-down people thought there was no scat, peeping and moving on to othercompartments? The whistle would blow and we’d jump off, guffawing that a wholecompartment was going completely empty. Remember...?’

He went on and on. Subodh sat hiding behind am unnatural smile.

I was on my own because I did not know him much. I was safe andwas beginning to wonder, were Subodh’s and my childhoods separate as well?

But we had come back together as ‘we’, aghast at life’sunpredictability. So aghast that we reached the edge of suspicion: -where infact faith begins - can everything happen without a reason? Can life indeed beso fearful, chaotic, meaningless, random?

We had thought that the age-old rusted doorway had begun tocreak open, and found that suddenly new, strong stakes had planted themselvesall around mai. And she was imprisoned again.

Mai dropped everything and got busy picking out the glass piecesfrom babu’s tangled hair.

Babu’s body was broken. He was covered with plaster all over,but his head remained irretrievably bent to one side, his shoulder protruded onthe other, and his waist was crooked forever. His feet would not fall straight.Babu dragged his broken body from one spot to another, made some noises with anunsteady tongue and did everything with mai’s hands - bathing, dressing,eating.

Mai was trapped - holding the forefinger of this ‘child’ ofhers to make him walk.

A new cry of despair escaped from us. How very trapped she was!Worrying, we would drop our work, take time off, keep coming back home.

A shadow wandered around in the busy house. It had done so rightfrom the beginning. Now there was a gloomy pall all over, all the time, of utterfailure. As well as that shadow...

Babu also became a shadow.

It was in those days that ‘she’ came. She did not have mai’shandknitted sweater on but something clicked in us and we recognised her. Eventhough her body never juggled with loose fat under her clothes.

Mai kept sitting, close to babu on his bed, changing the bandageon his forehead. The strange woman sat nearby on a chair, the head of herumbrella sticking out of a coloured plastic bag.

I remember a few things clearly. She was coughing repeatedly asif she had an ordinary cold, and after each cough said, ‘excuse me.’ Thecough arose in her throat and, even if it did not come out, the ‘excuse me’came out. She was like girls educated in English medium schools who, as theygrow up, cover their knees carefully with their frocks, join their legs,straighten their backs, make their hankies into balls in their hands on theirlaps, and at everything move slightly and say ‘Sorry’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Pardon’,‘Excuse me.’

The wind was fierce and mai told me to close the window. I gotup and went. The trees and plants outside were beating their limbs, as it were,in agony. I thought of my institute behind which the sea must be going mad.

When I saw the gulmohar leaves falling, I saw in my mind’s eyemai’s back, before it had become so bent, which I had seen shining with waterdrops and in the middle of which fell a long, shiny, shadowy split, like abranch.

I stopped, lost between these various thoughts. Babu was lyingbehind me broken, ‘that’ woman was sitting there and to close the window Iwas having to hold the curtain again and again. Which was getting work out andwas flapping madly like the trees and plants and seas as if it thought it wasalso a part of nature.

That woman spoke, whether to mai or babu, I do not remember. Ihad a kind of premonition. I looked at mai and saw on her face a dawn-like peaceand then a golden contentment.

Up on the roof Subodh was depressed. Mai had to suffer so much.

I cast my gaze full of confusion on him. He was unravelling thetangles of gender and society and tradition - mai who was bent over, mai whostooped, if it had been mai and not babu who had become bed-ridden wouldeverything have changed the way it had in the house?

Now it became even more difficult to leave mai to herself. Webecame even more anxious in our desire to save her.

Subodh had to go back to England. He made me fill in this andthat form and took it with him.

In the meantime I retuned to the house, bringing all my paintingparaphernalia with me, with instructions to Vikram to keep coming there, on somework or the other, or even without any.

Babu’s eyes seemed to glint with a drop at the edges. ‘Aa...baa...’he stammered unclearly to mai.

Mai came to my room - now she slept in babu’s room - and satdown without a word.

When I asked her what it was, she said that if possible, the twoof us, Vikram and I, should not stay together here as we did.

She left. There was a cold weakness in my veins in the place ofblood. I could not leave mai and go. And if I asked Vikram to stop coming...?

I realized with a shock that mai for the first time in my lifehad asked me for something, and then, too, not quite asked, just...

Judith had argued with us that she held us in her grip and if wedid not fight loose, we could not grow. She was the one who had imprisoned to,not babu, not dada, not dadi. ‘You will not grow. You will not becomeanything. You will drown in this swamp of sticky intimate belonging.’

It was not as if mai told me to get married, or else leave him.How much did she understand?

When Vikram came the atmosphere was unbearable. I would wait forhim to leave. I tried to avoid being alone with him because even then it seemedwe were not alone.

On my canvases floated new images, in extremely closed rooms,watched by two silent eyes or a quiet shadow or a speechless fluttering sariend. The eyes open in the middle of a void. The shadow standing on one side of awall. The sari end tied to the arms of a chair. As if these were peeping in frombehind, responsible for making each scene a ‘private’ one and for it notbeing private either.

Vikram left. But that strange woman began to visit.

And mai spoke no more to babu in that feeble, dying, pitifulvoice. Her tone had a force, her hands a business, every movement had a purpose,her eyes had confidence. If she saw babu do something wrong she raised her voiceslightly and directed - ‘Oh, oh, what are you doing? Sit down ..no, do notbend over, sit down right there, immediately... someone else will pick it up...sit.’

Chapter 30

Mai was my guide - for what I must not be.

Mai was trapped. She remained trapped.

Babu's illness quietly swallowed up the little spot of contemptthat had entered us and all we could feel was an infinite sadness well upinside. In spite of that woman. Or maybe because of her.

We had not learnt to ask questions. We just stood quietly on oneside, casting a pitying look on mai.

We felt pity for babu too but the truth is babu was only anexpansion of mai for us. If he existed at all. He was tied up with her.

And mai, in our sight, was tied up with us. In spite ofeverything that we had seen.

There is a trap formed by words, indeed one formed only bythoughts, in fact one formed merely by the tiniest doubt. The person thusentrapped sees everything only in a certain colour, even things of quite adifferent colour.

Our sight had been sharpening since childhood. The faintticktock of some unfamiliar clock was audible but as if our ears were deceivingus. Some unseen flutter did reach us, but we considered it an illusion. If wesaw some unfamiliar glimpse of mai we blinked our eyes in surprise and thenre-drew our old familiar image.