V. Mirrors, Their Faces
V
Mirrors, Their Faces
Ruhee. Ru-hee. She always made us place emphasis on the u so that the syllables afterwards fell forwards lightly. Once, Gita Miss had asked me who my closest friend was. It was the first time I went to her flat. And it wasn’t Ru-hee’s name I took then, it was Ganesh’s.
About three months after my father left, we were leaving the gymkhana when I spotted my father standing underneath the awning of the closed stationery store, about halfway up the road from the gates.
I ran towards him so fast that my legs hurt.
I crashed into him. It was the only occasion in my life that I remember hugging my father, and he hugged me back.
What was strange about that first time wasn’t that my father brought me to Gita Miss’ apartment.
It was that when she answered the door, he left.
I did not see them together in domestic surroundings: the fridge humming, the building watchman going up and down the stairs, a knife-sharpener on the street outside calling out loudly, the sparks chipping off his metal wheel.
This was a newer place in a newer part of the neighborhood.
The outskirts. It had light-colored ceramic tiles on the floors; not stone, the way ours had.
The walls were all the same color, white; not pale pink laid over blue; the way ours did, because my mother had the interiors repainted every few years for Diwali, and she always picked a color that wasn’t white.
Gita Miss stood up and went to the fridge.
There was barely anything in it, and everything was in its place, neatly organized, clean; not like ours, stuffed with fruits and vegetables and leftovers and pickles and eggs and milk.
There was a neat row of Vijaya Dairy almond-flavored milk on the inside door.
Gita Miss brought a bottle to the table but did not pour it into a glass for me, the way my mother would have.
She put the straw into the bottle and handed it to me.
She said it was okay if I didn’t like it.
I remembered my mother telling me gleefully that Sugunakar Rao, who ran our local kirana shop, refused to sell groceries to Gita Miss.
That she had to go all the way to the supermarket on the other side of the city to get her groceries.
Though he didn’t tell me, I supposed my father intervened when her flat owner wanted to evict her.
I’d thought that outside school, without the glamour of being different from everyone else, fallen from grace, unemployed, Gita Miss had to be less in some visible, tangible way.
She wasn’t dressed in ‘going-out clothes’―as my mother called them.
She was wearing an old chocolate-colored sweater and blue jeans.
She wore her long hair pushed back, with an elastic headband; the kind Priya wore to school―wide, black, worn just far back enough that a section of her hair was visible around her face, spilling around her ears, falling around her shoulders, all the way to her waist. She looked so beautiful and sweet I wanted to hug her.
“Ganesh … not from our school?” Gita Miss asked.
I shook my head. And what did it matter if I told her the truth?
She had no society. It was only Gita Miss, who used to be my Sanskrit teacher, who was removed from her job, who went all the way across the city on the bus and lugged back heavy jute bags of groceries, never forgetting to bring the glass bottles of almond-flavored milk I liked even though her palms turned red from carrying it up all those flights of stairs.
“Didn’t she feed you?” my mother said when I returned. “The whore cooks, does she not? Or does she only know how to let him lie on top of her?”
Priya was at the dining table, having dinner.
She was watching television, not paying attention.
I thought it would all be over that day.
That it was in this way that my father chose to end things with Gita Miss―taking me to her apartment while he worked it out with my mother, apologized, made reparations.
It was okay that Priya could overhear them, she was too young to understand anyway, only I had to be kept somewhere else.
But no. My father did not stay. After bringing me home, he went back to Gita Miss’ apartment. I wondered, seeing all that anger on my mother’s face, if she was as disappointed as I was. It was painful to miss someone who rejected you, and my mother and I, we understood that about each other.
“What did you eat? Did you eat in her house?” my mother demanded.
The almond milk was sweet. Cloyingly sweet and cloyingly rich.
There was a quarter inch of milk fat on the surface, and because Gita Miss did not shake the bottle before she opened it, it was the rich cream that filled my mouth first. And the bottom of the bottle was coated in powdered almonds, I pushed with my straw but they did not budge.
The fridge hummed all the time I was there.
“Come again,” Gita Miss said. “Bring your friends.”
I said no. I ate nothing.
“Did she offer you anything?” she asked.
I said yes. “Almond milk.”
“And you didn’t drink it?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no.”
“How did you say it.”
“I made a face, like I smelled garbage.”
“The nerve of her!” My mother screamed. “Offering my child food. Go take a bath right now, I can’t even look at you.”
In the bathroom, I turned on the tap. Over the sound of water striking the bottom of the metal bucket, I could overhear my mother sobbing in the next room.
The next morning was the book fair.
In the middle of the summer holidays, my school organized a book fair to buy textbooks for the following school year, and parents came to meet the new class teachers.
We wore civil clothes and not uniforms, and they gave us a ‘snack box’ in the afternoon after the fair ended, along with mango ice cream.
Because of what happened the night before, I went to the book fair by myself.
I did not ask my mother. I went to the auditorium, where the teachers were speaking to parents.
One of the teachers saw me standing there alone, and seemed like he was going to say something, but I got scared and left.
If I didn’t buy the textbooks now, I’d have to go to Abids and buy them from the wholesalers, if they were still in stock.
Sometimes they ran out. I knew this because I lost a textbook in the middle of the year once, and I had to make do with Xerox copies from the teacher.
The next time my father came to take me to Gita Miss’ house, I’d have to tell him. I knew he’d come again.
Outside, in the grounds there was the Scholastic stall for primary school children, where they could buy Goosebumps, or comics like the Tinkle Digest.
I stayed in the Scholastic stall the whole time the fair went on.
I sat on a small plastic table in the back, re-reading Goosebumps Series 2000: Jekyll and Heidi―half human, half beast. There was a small girl beside me reading a picture book, she glanced at my cover and averted her eyes.
It was still scary, the cover. I still did not know what a ‘parka’ was.
Yet, I still heard the zipper-sound when Heidi pulled it up.
And when she got off the bus and knocked on the door of the creepy mansion over the hill, I still had the same trepidatory feeling; despite knowing exactly what would happen to her there.
After the fair ended, we could take our snack boxes and mango ice cream and go home, but most of the students stayed and ate them in the corridors.
Despite the trepidatory feeling, I stayed too.
Nothing had changed. Everyone still ignored me.
Still, I stubbornly refused to go home. I loitered.
The others from my class were playing corridor cricket, jovially throwing the grid-paper ball against the exam pad, stopping now and then to munch on some khara mix from the snack box.
I leaned against the windows, and waited for the ball to accidentally come my way, and when it did I threw it back.
It was then that my mother arrived.
She was wearing a freshly pressed, starched sari. It was pink, stiff at the creases. She looked like a powdered, paper doll. A deathly silence fell as she walked through the corridors. A ghost everyone could see. She was weeping.
We were all standing next to the staff room door.
What was beyond the staff room’s redwood double doors had always been a mystery to me, until that day, when my mother threw it open and asked the teachers, one after the other, to please tell her, if they knew where my father was.
She wouldn’t blame them for knowing. Please, tell me.
As the students crowded into the mouth of the staff room, I saw over their heads.
The teachers were all eating. First they were bewildered, then they were ashamed for her.
They wouldn’t look at her face. They looked at the contents of their steel tiffin boxes.
The same stacking style boxes that my mother used to pack for my father every morning.
A moment later, someone calmed her down, gave her a kerchief to wipe her face. Sympathetic, pitying. Gave her a tumbler of water to drink. Think of your children. You must think of your children.
When she came out of the staff room, she was still sniffling. Everyone parted way for her. I thought she didn’t see me.
“Arjun,” she said. She stopped in front of me. Held my gaze. “Arjun. Do you know where your father is?”
I said I didn’t know.
After she left, I could see the faces of my classmates. Their expressions. They were kinder, their faces. All of them mirrors of one another.
Up until then, the tide had been one way.
A young, impressionable girl trapped in the clutches of an old lecher.
Positively a kidnapping. But now, my father wasn’t a lecher.
It was Gita Miss. It was all Gita Miss, her cotton dresses, her high heels, her beauty, her evil, trapping gaze.
How different she was, they all knew from the start, from the very first glimpse, that loose, tarty north-Indian.
Now, if my father returned to teach at the school again, nobody would blame him, they’d give him his job back, and nobody would blame me either.
It wasn’t my father’s fault, it wasn’t my fault, that he was taken in, made a terrible mistake.
And he had a wife, two children, after all.
This poor woman, his wife, they’d welcome my father back for her sake.
Allow everything to go back to how it was, for her sake, and for the sake of her children.
Pretend as though nothing happened, so long as he returned to be with his family.