III. Puli Raja
III
Puli Raja
The next day around noon my desk phone rang.
I picked up the receiver out of habit. “Municipal water office.”
Had I known who it was, I wouldn’t have answered at all. My mother must have given her the number.
“You are going to meet me,” Ruhee said. “You will, Arjun.”
Her voice sounded more or less the same. The sweetness in it, the edginess, the demand; she claimed me now, impatiently, the same way she used to claim Ganesh.
“I know where your office is,” she said. My instinct told me to hang up, but at the last minute I changed my mind and pressed the receiver against my ear again.
I glanced around the room as if looking at it for the first time. Everything offended me―the meters, the desk with the paperweight, even my shoes. She couldn’t see me here. She couldn’t see me in my parents’ house. It was all wrong.
“Somewhere else,” I said finally.
“Fine. I have an hour off this afternoon―”
“Today?”
“Yes. Today. The water will keep coming even if you aren’t at the office, you know. Come―this afternoon―there is an Irani chai place near my hospital. Café Niloufer―you know where it is, right? You live in the city after all. 2 p.m., Arjun. If I don’t see you, I’ll come to your office.”
Even after she hung up, I held on to the receiver for a few moments.
My heart―when was the last time I felt it beat so rapidly?
Felt my pulse quicken like this, making me breathless, the tremors at my fingertips, my palms all sweaty?
When was the last time I was so afraid? Before I could remember, the tremors ceased, I felt all right.
It was only Ruhee, after all. The girl I wished all my life was my wife. The only girl I ever loved.
I thought of my mother, how much she liked the idea of it.
And most of all, a wedding―my wedding―would be the one way she could have everything that she missed and never stopped missing―a sense of ‘society’ as my mother called it; meaning our relatives.
My mother’s parents had passed when I was a newborn, she had no siblings, no friends of her own, had never maintained ties to people she’d known from school or college.
Ever since she married my father and moved to the city, he―and later Priya and I―were her everything.
And the people that connected her to the web of society―my father’s sister and brother, their spouses, their in-laws, second cousins, their children; she’d considered each of them her own.
But after what our father did, they abandoned my father; excommunicated him from their family.
But they did not consider how that would affect my mother.
Or us. We were all of us equally tainted as far as they were concerned.
But a wedding―one that was occurring so far away from the domino that fell, at a place in time when the shadows of the past could not reach, would be an occasion for them to re-enter my mother’s life again.
And this was Ruhee, after all. I should try.
I made my way across the city, took the metro and then the city bus at the next junction feeling perfectly calm.
The bus crept through traffic over the Khairatabad flyover, I began once again to feel the tremors at my fingers.
Ruhee always caused these tremors―the first girl I ever loved―first I ever kissed―whose idea it was to go up to the Red House. Always they were her ideas.
Outside Café Niloufer, I waited. A few minutes later, I went inside and sat down at the first unoccupied table. I motioned at the server for chai. I was halfway done with my cup when Ruhee showed.
What did I expect? She wasn’t a faceless being in a white lab coat, a stethoscope hovering over her head like a halo.
My imagination, I realized, was comical.
Of course, she’d change before she left the hospital.
Of course, she was not sixteen still, she was nearing forty like me.
Simply being Ruhee was not enough to arrest time.
She did not spot me straightaway, she was checking the tables at the very front.
When her eyes met mine, I raised my hand, and she came over.
She didn’t sit down. She stood beside me and checked the other tables behind us.
“That one is empty,” she said. “Near the window.” I picked up my teacup and saucer, and followed her towards the last table in the café, next to the window.
My cup rattled as I set it down. Instead of waiting for me to finish, she told the busboy to get two cups of chai.
She glanced at my half-finished cup as she did so.
She always was like this―forceful, but in a way that made you feel like you were the center of her world.
All her attention would be showered on the person she chose to heap such a gift upon, and all the force would be applied to the surroundings; people, places, to make things happen―as she used to say, pausing after each word for effect.
It was like this back then too, the way she heaped her attention on Ganesh, and all the force on me.
Like the time she made me steal condoms from my house for her and Ganesh to use.
I turned away from that memory. It was unpleasant.
“So,” Ruhee said, pulling up her hair into a ponytail. “Where were you yesterday? Tell me the truth.”
“I couldn’t―”
“Wait―first off, Arjun, I have to say this. You are so good-looking. I mean! It is unbelievable. You look like Milind Soman. I mean―when did that happen? I haven’t recovered from it yet, I cannot stop staring at you. Your eyes have this … spark? I feel like you are looking into me.”
I laughed.
She widened her eyes and pressed her lips together. “See? Even that laugh. How in the world are you single still? Unbelievable.”
The server placed two cups on the table, and Ruhee motioned at him to take away my half-finished cup.
“Cheers,” Ruhee said, clinking her cup against mine. “Well, Arjun, what about me then? What do you think?” she said, turning her face this way and that. Her cheeks still dimpled. Her skin was pink from walking.
I swallowed, but she didn’t notice.
“This is the first time I’m choosing to have myself appraised,” she said.
“Instead of someone doing it to me―after I spend an hour draping a tissue sari that refuses to fall right. And doing my makeup, which I hate doing. And matching my bangles with my earrings and enduring the weight of jhumkas on my earlobes for an hour. See now, I just walked out of work and you think I’m stunning, Arjun.
I can see it on your face. You always thought me stunning. ”
Ruhee didn’t look away, as though she wanted to see the effect of her words on me. Her eyes were roving over my face and it was difficult to look away.
Of course, I thought her stunning. What chance did I stand of thinking otherwise.
“It was never about how you looked,” I said. “It was about how you made the people around you feel.”
Something, some emotion, passed over her face. She waved her hand, as if say that such things never mattered anyway.
“It was all fine till I was twenty-nine. That is the cutoff age until which I could still do the rejecting―which I did a lot of, by the way. But after that things took a nosedive, Arjun. I got a whole roster of divorcés, which was still OK, but mostly I got the unmarriable ones. The ones who thought their wives should serve them tea in the morning and press their office clothes and wait at home all day between the washing and the cooking. This one guy told me what I’ll be expected to wear, at home and outside.
So. Here I am. Being appraised by the unbearably handsome Milind Soman. ”
“I am not appraising you,” I protested. “And I do not look like Milind Soman.”
“I disagree,” she said, smiling. “And how did it all go for you?”
I shrugged. The truth was that in all the years my mother had been bullying me into meeting women, it was now, and only now that I’d relented.
I’d never been with a woman in my life. A fact that I hoped Ruhee wouldn’t guess, by the way I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips when she talked.
I didn’t want her to think I was strange.
Unsocial, friendless, stuck in life, at home with no society―an unmarriable. So I lied.
“There was a close call once,” I said.
“Arranged?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “It was love.”
“Did your parents say no?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“I’m sorry, Arjun.”
I swallowed, I nodded, I took a sip of tea.
On the street afterwards, she asked me whether I was glad she made me come.
Of course, I was. “You always needed to be bullied into doing things you like,” she said.
I laughed, brushed my hands through my hair and said it was true.
She was watching me keenly, and I suspected I saw something tender in her eyes.
It was a strange, haunting sensation I experienced when she looked at me like that.
I wasn’t happy, or sad exactly. I felt shy. And a little afraid.
“I’ll call you again,” she said. “Or maybe I’ll drop by your house without calling first.”
I shrugged.
“Watch out, Arjun. I’ll catch you,” she said playfully.
It was after rush hour when I returned. The bus was less crowded.
Unconsciously I found myself adding up everything I had in my bank account: my fixed deposit, my savings accounts at the post office, the mutual fund, and my stock portfolio.
I liquidated it all, I bought a home, a car.
We’d live in Udupi. Everyone outside speaking a language I did not understand, it would be comforting.
I could stay home, look after the children when Ruhee was at the hospital.
I had no trouble with that, I’d give her anything, be anything she’d want.