X. Slut
X
Slut
In the end, Ruhee and I decided on a registrar marriage.
“Marriage rituals needed all sorts of gestures,” Gita Miss said. “With mothers and fathers.”
It seemed like she was the only person who knew a way out of this quagmire. “It’s better this way,” she said. “And afterwards, make it a small reception. I will attend that. I’m sure I will be on time.” Which meant she’d arrive an hour before anyone important.
For the reception, we chose a small banquet hall at a hotel rather than a proper function hall.
Neither of us had enough relatives that could attend anyway.
Hers were all in Udupi. Mine didn’t want to come, though I shouldn’t tell Ruhee this―my mother insisted.
Even Shital-atha hadn’t committed to coming.
It would be embarrassing, my mother said.
“Seventy or hundred people scattered across a function hall that can accommodate a thousand? They’d ask questions, wouldn’t they?
It’s better we have a small hall that feels overcrowded. ”
“She’s coming, isn’t she?”
“It won’t affect me one bit. You’ll see, Arjun. He will also see. I’m not a weak woman.”
The flower decoration fellow came the day before.
A cheery, skull-capped Muslim man bearing photo albums full of past functions.
He seemed, on the entirety, like the only person who resembled a wedding guest. The way normal people organized weddings, felt excited about them.
I couldn’t explain it, but I felt such overwhelming affection for the man.
I chose one of his most expensive designs; the entire backdrop of the stage would bear white and baby pink roses set closely together.
“It is better if bride and groom wear clothes that match the background,” he advised.
“Yellow or orange outfits won’t look good, for example. ”
Priya had already made the clothes I was going to wear.
She said she didn’t care, but she spent hours and hours on my outfit.
A navy bandhgala suit with gold buttons and a blood-red pocket square.
She made me try it on thrice. All three times I said it fit well, it was beautiful, she should take it easy, but she stood there and shook her head, a pin stuck in her mouth, a tape around her neck.
She altered it again and again until she was satisfied.
“Will he come,” I asked. “Your boyfriend, the novelist?”
She smiled absently but didn’t say anything.
Ruhee said she hadn’t picked out her clothes yet.
“But the wedding is only a week away,” my mother protested. “Why is she leaving it so late. Shall we do the shopping for her?”
Though I said no, she and Priya went and bought her a ridiculously expensive pink and gold Kanjeevaram sari from a weaver Priya knew.
“It can just be a gift if she doesn’t want to wear it,” my mother said, wrapping it in muslin and putting it back inside the box. “But it will be there if she needs it.”
Nowadays the house was empty quite a bit; my mother was out on errands or paying visits all day.
But when I asked Ruhee if she wanted to come over, she said no every time.
Since the day she asked me to marry her, we didn’t have sex.
I couldn’t understand it. When she and her mother visited us, Ruhee would be quiet, not saying anything unless her mother asked her a pointed question.
Now and again, when her mother threw a sharp glance at Ruhee, she’d say something, smiling forcefully. Of course, my mother noticed nothing.
Still, I went to Ruhee’s hospital to talk to her.
I’d never been there before. It wasn’t a very large hospital.
I simply went up to the uniformed nurse at the reception and asked for Dr. Ruhee.
She asked who I was to the doctor, and I told her unhesitatingly that I was her fiancé.
The change in her manner was instant. She took me to the doctors’ lounge, sent an orderly along with a cup of tea in a saucer, alongside a tray of orange cream biscuits laid in a semicircle.
I waited almost an hour. Doctors went in and out of the lounge but none of them asked me who I was. Chatting amongst themselves, they smiled and nodded my way.
Finally, Ruhee came. She looked upset. I said I was sorry I came without telling her.
“I just need to know if you are okay,” I said. “With things happening. You seem … you seem like you don’t want this.”
“Oh,” Ruhee said. She sat down next to me and looked into my face as though seeing it for the first time. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m making you marry me.”
How could she make me? It is what I’d wanted my whole life. But I didn’t say so.
“Ruhee, I love you,” I said.
She looked away. She bit down on her lip, but she couldn’t stop herself from crying. She wiped her cheeks, tried to act like she wasn’t.
“None of this is your fault, Arjun,” she said.
“Is this about Ganesh?” I wanted to say.
“You wanted to marry him, but instead you are marrying me,” I wanted to say.
“I know where he is,” I wanted to say.
“Not ten kilometers from here. I can take you, Ruhee.
You will see that being dead would be better than what he is now.
He can open his eyes. He can blink. Sometimes he looks at me, I think.
But no more. You see he is like an old man, a baby.
All shriveled. All gray hair, skin sliding over bird-bones, gums missing teeth. He is nothing. He is some living thing.
“Every Sunday, I go and shave his cheeks. I do it with the window open and the curtain drawn back, the sunlight skimming across his skin. I don’t suffer the way you suffer, Ruhee, because I do not care about him. I suffer differently. I suffer because he refuses to die.”
For now, I said nothing. I let her apologize to me. Reassure me that she wanted to marry me.
Ruhee became my wife.
We rented an apartment close to her hospital, close to her friends who worked at the hospital.
I bought a car, stopped taking the bus. On Sundays, we went to the flower market and got fresh-cut roses and lilies that we put into vases all around the apartment.
Sometimes we had sex on the floor, the roses and lilies littered all around us.
I love you, I told Ruhee. And sometimes it was possible she could almost say it back.
After these sudden, frenetic encounters, I tried not to ask any questions.
Why would I? I was willing to take whatever she gave me, I didn’t deserve her whole.
I’d get dressed and go into the kitchen and fill the vases with water.
But once, we were so loud that the neighbors turned on their television.
We did not stop, the bass from the music channel was radiating from underneath us.
I crumpled a rose in my hand and said, “Do you, Ruhee? Do you love me?”
Five seconds passed. Ten seconds passed. Then she pulled away.
Ruhee knelt and pushed her hair behind her ears, her bare knees touching mine.
I don’t know what was on my face, but she put her thumb on my bottom lip, brushed her fingers through my hair and said, “That first time, Arjun, in your room?” she said.
I nodded.
“I wanted that part over. Before anything. I was afraid that was only thing you wanted from me.”
“The way Ganesh wanted,” I wanted to say.
Who else was she going to talk to about Ganesh? I was the one who brought him into her life, ruined her.
This what she thought happened: Ganesh had gotten what he wanted from her and simply vanished from her life.
He didn’t wait for her outside her house anymore, didn’t bring around the Lancer to take her to a movie, didn’t meet her at the Red House, didn’t even come to the gymkhana anymore.
And her going to the gymkhana asking after him was a terrible mistake, the boys weren’t nice boys.
They came up to her with angry, hateful faces, seemed to think that Ganesh committed love suicide because she rejected him―it was beyond ridiculous, a rumor like that.
Why would she reject him? She didn’t. She loved him. Why would he abandon her?
So she didn’t go back to the gymkhana, didn’t like being attacked as if she were the monster; the injustice of it. Instead she came to my house.
Hello Uncle, is Arjun home?
He’s sick beta, he has chicken pox, we’re keeping him home from school.
Uncle, can I see him?
No beta, he can’t see you.
Even months after school started, and I was still being kept in my room, Ruhee came around to my house again and again, never allowed inside. One day my mother answered the door.
“Oh, Ruhee!” my mother had said, “Why aren’t you at school?”
Ruhee said. “I wanted to see if Arjun was home.”
“Oh … no dear. His chicken pox is almost over, thank god. But we sent him to his grandaunt’s place in the village. Some greenery and clean air will do him good. He missed so much school we thought what’s a few more days. Anyhow Uncle is a teacher, Arjun will catch up, and anyhow he is so bright.”
Ruhee stayed at the door as if to say something.
“Do you want to come in and have some buttermilk, beta?”
Then Ruhee asked about Ganesh―Our friend Ganesh was how she put it―“Oh,” my mother replied.
“I don’t know, dear. Arjun never mentioned him.
Ganesh, you said? Is it that boy who used to live at the big house?
He came here once, to cut down the papaya tree for us.
” Ruhee said something I couldn’t hear. “Oh, everyone thought he was one of the sons but no, he was some tribal kid they kept, to help around the house. He was even going to be married soon … I can’t think of why Arjun would know him well.
Those tribal louts … who knows? Drunks, all of them.
Uneducated. Runaways. Exploiting schoolgirls up and down the street. ”
I watched her go, close the gate behind her. She looked so forlorn. I wished she dressed more conservatively, it would have been protection against what my mother was about to do to her.
After all, it was a small, insular neighborhood. The same maids were employed up and down the street. People talked.