VIII. Sweetness of Water
VIII
Sweetness of Water
One night, after my engagement to Ruhee was announced, I saw my parents sitting in the living room together.
They were together in the way they used to be when Priya and I were little, before everything.
It used to be an old ritual: after dinner they sat together on the living room sofa without turning on the TV or reading the paper or making the grocery list or talking about the bills or about me or Priya.
They’d talk, intently to one another, now and then turning their faces towards each other, about how their day had gone, the unexpected thoughts that had passed through their minds, the small irritations of daily life.
I used to recognize it as a moment when I was expressly not needed, and made myself scarce.
Even Priya knew she could sit near them with her dolls, but she wasn’t to intrude.
Like the people in their wedding photographs, they were like people who’d met in a world in which their children did not exist. How nice it was to once again feel like we were a family.
It meant a lot to me that I made it happen.
Then, one Sunday my father stayed home. He ate breakfast with me and Priya; of course Priya hardly said a word. When he finished, we went to wash up, but he came back to sit at the table.
“You should pay a visit to Gita, invite her to the wedding. Ruhee should go also, if she wanted, but it is her wish, of course.”
My father had called her Gita. Go to Gita’s house.
Our mother wasn’t in the kitchen or the garden or in her room. She was right there, near the table, holding a bowl of fresh puris. It was as if he didn’t see her.
Involuntarily I looked at her. My father staying home on a Sunday like this, she too had, like me, let herself believe that my getting married caused this, caused him to return to make our family whole again.
Neither Priya nor I dared to speak until he left. He took his time, gathering his things, closing the gate behind him.
Quietly we ate what was still on our plates. A moment later I turned to my mother, but she wasn’t there.
“You’re not going!” Priya burst out. “What’s the matter with you Arjun? You are an adult. You can’t let him dictate your life.”
“I’m the one who disturbed the truce,” I said.
“So you’re going to go?”
“I haven’t said that.”
“But you are considering it, aren’t you? Don’t lie, Arjun.”
I said nothing.
I smelled oil burning and went into the kitchen to find the stove on. I turned the gas off and came back to the table.
“I need to get out of this place!” Priya fumed.
She washed up, gathered her things and left before I attempted to stop her.
I picked up her plate, stacked it with mine and our father’s.
The maid didn’t come on Sunday so I found a bar of Vim and washed the plates in the sink, left them drying on the rack.
I disposed of the oil in the trash and left the wok to cool outdoors, beside the kitchen stoop.
I felt like sitting on the kitchen stoop but didn’t.
Instead I wiped down the counters, drank a glass of water.
Then I went into my mother’s room, which used to be my parents’ room.
I rarely ever came in here. There had been no changes to the Decolam furniture, the bed, the dresser beside it, the almirah in the far corner.
The curtains were drawn so the light was dim.
She was resting on the bed, her head on the pillow, facing away from me.
I knew she was awake, knew she didn’t want me to see her like this, but didn’t want me to go either.
So I stayed awhile and said nothing. On the dresser there were some photographs in plastic protectors.
I picked them up and leaned against the dresser, looked at the photographs.
They weren’t family photographs. In them, my mother was a young woman, thin like a rail, with large beautiful eyes, fashionable-looking hoop earrings dangling from her ears.
She was standing with four other women on a beach, the waves crashing against their feet.
My mother was laughing, her face open and cheerful.
With one hand she was picking up the edge of her sari so it didn’t get wet, with the other she was keeping strands of hair away from her face.
In another photograph she was eating Chinese food someplace cold, judging by the scarf around her head, the sweater draped loosely over her shoulders. There were a pair of sunglasses on the table beside her plate.
The protectors had neat holes punched alongside the edges. Meant to be put into an album. But I could tell they had never been in an album. It made me sad. I wished she could have continued being the woman in the photographs, I’d never even seen her wearing sunglasses.
For weeks after, my mother stayed in bed.
I cooked after I got home, took her meals to her, asked her to take a walk.
She said nothing, didn’t move, didn’t eat unless I made her, didn’t bother when my father stayed at Gita Miss’ Sunday or not.
It had broken her, Gita Miss’ name being uttered so casually under her roof.
All the joy she’d had in my engagement had drained out of her.
A ghost of my mother from years before, the mother from the first months after my father’s leaving―the ghost who cared nothing of me emerged.
I stayed at work for longer, and with difficulty I prevented myself from falling into the old childhood habit of loitering in the neighborhood.
Of course, I didn’t tell Ruhee anything. It would make a bad impression.
I let things go for a month, then I went to speak to her.
“Ma,” I said. “I won’t marry Ruhee. I’ll tell her that I can’t. And I won’t meet Her. If there’s no wedding, there’s no reason to invite her. Ma, nothing needs to change. Things can go back to how they were.”
She looked at me, touched my cheek. “You are a good son,” she said. “Every mother should be so lucky.”
I kissed her hand. “Please come out,” I said.
“Don’t you worry about me. It is a parent’s job to worry about their child, not the child’s.”
I stood up, put out my hand to help her up, but she shook her head. She held her palms together as if praying, then covered her face and swept her hands away.
“Don’t you say anything to that beautiful girl,” she said, sitting up.
“Ma, I’ll simply tell her that I changed my mind. She’ll understand.”
“No!” she said. “Don’t you dare.”
I must have looked confused.
“You are marrying Ruhee,” she said. “Listen to me, Arjun. I want you to take Ruhee and go and meet Her. Invite Her. Tell Her to come to the wedding. Make it so that she does come Arjun, I want her there.”
Only she didn’t say Her. She said that thing.
We had to wait a week or so until Ruhee was off rotation. I asked that she not tell her parents about Gita Miss. It’ll look bad, they’ll disapprove.
“I wasn’t going to, Arjun,” she said. “Families are complicated. I understand.”
It occurred to me that Ruhee liked my mother, and was doing this for her, not for me or for my father.
I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, but Gita Miss still lived in the same apartment.
The same compound wall, the same gates, the same life.
Only everything was aged, here and there on the building’s facade there were cracks from the foundation settling.
They were filled in with cement but not painted over.
On the stoop, before ringing the doorbell, Ruhee and I looked at each other.
I don’t know what I wanted to say to her.
The last time I was in this exact place it had been with Ganesh.
I didn’t need to go to the roof, I knew the surrounding area had developed; there was a timber mill, shops, newer apartment buildings, stretching far beyond the railway tracks.
But I still saw the view in my head, the stream and boulders, the open sky, the lone eagle skimming air. My god, this is terrific!
There began a ringing silence in my ears. Ruhee said something and rang the doorbell again, but it came to me muffled as if I were underwater. I reached out to hold Ruhee’s hand, but before I could, Gita Miss answered the door.
What had remained the same about Gita Miss was her sweetness.
I didn’t know what else to call that quality.
Sweetness and such distance. She welcomed us inside, she and Ruhee exchanged pleasantries, but I didn’t really hear it because of the silence, the loud, ringing silence filling my ears, for the second time in my life.
It was so loud it felt like there was something burning, splitting away skin from bone, in both my ears.
I avoided looking directly at her, kept my eyes a few inches above her head. She said hello, how nice it was to see me after all these years. How tall I am. How handsome. How much I resembled my father.
The last time I heard her voice was the night Ganesh was discovered in the woods behind the Red House.
It was late, and my father was with her.
I rang their phone and asked to speak to him.
Maybe I was shivering so badly I was incoherent.
I had to repeat myself, and in her eagerness to be helpful she made me repeat everything thrice, asked that I tell her what the matter was; she’d help, let me help.
Only when I stubbornly said the same thing again and again: I need to speak to my father did she finally wake him up.
Those few minutes might have made all the difference in the world. Who knows? Who else did I have to call?
We went inside, but I didn’t notice the apartment. We sat at the kitchen table. The ringing in my ears.
“Would you like some almond milk, Arjun?” Gita Miss said. “You always used to like it when you were young.”
When I looked at Gita Miss’ face, her pale, heart-shaped face, her thin sweaters and her long skirts, all I wanted to do was close my fingers around her small throat, choke the life out of her. I would really do it, I didn’t even care that Ruhee was there.
Only once before had I experienced such intense, uncontrollable hatred. But unlike the last time, it passed.
What reason did I have to despise her? She’d shown nothing but kindness towards me. Gita Miss had cared for me all these years, I realized. She cared and she remembered such little things.
I said yes, and she went to the fridge and brought out two bottles of chilled Vijaya Dairy almond-flavored milk.
We sat at the same kitchen table. Ruhee and I were on one side, Gita Miss across from us.
A gentle pitter-patter rain began falling against the windowpanes, like it did in someplace blissful.
I felt like crying. How long had it been since I felt like crying?
This clenching feeling inside my stomach, my ears thudding, the back of my throat tight, the nerves in my neck straining to keep everything together.
The pitter-patter rain. God! This is terrific.
All the memories came up. The sweetness of water in my mouth, the pitter-patter rain.
I took the handkerchief Gita Miss handed me and wiped my tears.
They kept running down my cheeks and I kept wiping them away.
It was so wonderful. I could have stayed like that forever.