XIII. The Doors
XIII
The Doors
Ruhee proposed a move back to Udupi. I hadn’t told her about being let go from the water office.
Nobody noticed anything. Sometimes, when the maids came up to the roof to hang the drying, I moved to the other side of the water tank where I wouldn’t be visible.
Ruhee said she didn’t want to be in Hyderabad anymore.
I knew what she meant. Happiness did not fit here.
“I miss Udupi,” she said. City living got on your nerves if you weren’t used to it. The crowds, the vertical lives. Queues everywhere. The small irritations. She needed somewhere without traffic noise, where at night things grew hushed. Udipi was on the seaside. There were beaches, clean air.
The other day when she came home and I had the chicken alla diavola ready on the table, though she complimented the dish and ate well, I sensed something like restlessness about her.
Maybe it was the cooking that got to her, I thought, and resolved to skip cooking now and then, keep the fridge empty of leftovers, let the house go a little.
She took a breath and broached the next subject carefully: In Udipi, I could attempt a new line of work, she said.
She sighed and sank into the sofa and rested her face in the heel of her hand.
She’d been in surgery all morning, I knew.
She hadn’t even changed out of her surgery clothes.
I was sorry to have been such a burden on her, I wanted to say, but I knew it would make her feel worse, so I kept that to myself.
She said, “You know, Arjun, I always thought you would be an artist of some kind when we grew up.” She smiled involuntarily, as if she were seeing me as a child.
“Remember the watercolors you used to make when we were little? All summer we used to sit on your porch, playing pachis, or eating mango puree your ma made us.”
“Those were nice days,” I said, and touched her cheek.
I said yes, we could move to Udipi. For Ruhee, I’d move anywhere.
All my old calculations came back: what I had saved in the savings account, the fixed deposit, the provident funds, the stock portfolio.
We’d live in Udupi, close to the beach we’d take a shingled house where stepping out the door we’d hear the noise of waves, smell salt in the air, the soil underfoot so silty and rocky we wouldn’t even need to keep a garden.
I caught hold of an agent and asked him to find us a two-bedroom close to the beach; I knew the name of Ruhee’s old hospital, so I asked that he keep the distance to work in mind also.
Even before he found us a place, I went to the hardware shop and bought large boxes.
I put up the furniture and the washing machine for sale.
I gave the flower vases to the building watchman.
At the railway station I reserved two first-class tickets with open dates.
I told Priya, and in retrospect that was a mistake. Because my mother showed up one night, just as we were sitting down for dinner.
“Oh, Aunty!” Ruhee said, when she answered the door. “Did you come alone? It is so late.”
Quickly, I picked up our beers and went into the kitchen, shoved them into the spice cabinet and closed the doors.
When I returned to the living room, I was reminded forcefully of the time my mother showed up at school after my father and Gita Miss eloped.
She was dressed the same―a crisp cotton sari, her face neatly arranged.
It felt as though two distinct moments of my life were colliding.
I’m outside the redwood double doors of the staff room again.
I simply knew what was going to happen next.
It was all my fault, of course. I shouldn’t have abandoned my mother.
Gone one Sunday when she wanted me, took Ruhee with me instead of going to the flower market.
Gone alone instead of wasting away all my time on the water tank.
Priya had never abandoned her when she moved out.
I did. I’d devalued my mother in the same way that my father had.
What happened the last time I tried to leave her?
The job I had lined up in Bombay after graduating from college.
My mother asking me to stay in Hyderabad, my father telling me I shouldn’t.
And there it was one morning―a sheet of paper laid on the dining table next to my breakfast plate.
A medical bill on the Hospital’s letterhead.
Amount due. Patient’s age. Patient’s name.
What my father had managed to keep from me.
“Will you eat dinner, Ma?” I said.
“No. Priya came home unexpectedly,” she said, addressing Ruhee. “‘Ma―I simply felt like seeing you,’ she says. Then we had a family dinner together. The two of us.”
I swallowed. Ruhee glanced my way. She liked to believe in the best of people. Generally everything escaped her notice. But that glance did not escape my mother’s.
“It made me want to see you, Arjuna. How are we even a family without you?” she said, touching my chin. “And Ruhee, you too, of course.”
“That is so sweet, Ma,” Ruhee said, putting her arm around my mother and giving her a sideways hug. My mother needed confirmation that none of this was Ruhee’s doing, and she got it now. It was all me.
Over the course of the next forty minutes, we had dinner, the beers growing warm in the cabinet over the stove.
Ruhee got all kinds of gently general advice, all laid together with flattery.
That she must focus on her career, that being a doctor―and a woman, at that―was an extraordinary achievement that she must never take for granted.
While society may make a woman think that having a family, or children, or behaving or living exactly the way expected of a woman was what fulfilled you, what gave you dignity, position; the only accomplishments that mattered, it simply wasn’t true.
That if she herself had known better she would have remained unmarried, childless.
Pursued a career. A meaningful life could have been hers. Alas, such was fate.
Ruhee was visibly touched.
I went into the kitchen and took a swig of beer from the cabinet.
Then I ate some fennel seeds to cover up the smell that lingered on my breath.
When I returned they were talking about childhood.
My childhood. What a sweet baby I was; I rarely cried, never disobeyed even as a toddler.
Or a teenager. “He was such a good child,” my mother said.
“My sweet baby. Not like some other neighborhood kids,” she said. “Remember that adopted tribal boy?”
Ruhee turned to me. I didn’t meet her gaze. I was looking at my mother. I was sorry, I wanted her to not do this.
“Oh, it was so terrible. People think he ran way, or committed suicide, or something, but no―he got drunk at the Red House and fell off the roof! No matter what you give some children, they are bent on turning out to be bad seeds. Disobedient children.”
“Arjuna, remember?” she said to me. “Remember once he came to our house to cut down the papaya tree?”
My mother knew I was sorry. Of course, she did, but she did not stop.
“My Arjun is so very soft-hearted,” she said to Ruhee. “He made his father take care of the boy. He goes to see that boy.”
“You know, in the hospital?” she said to Ruhee.
My mother looked at me again.
I would have fallen to her feet, begged her not to say any more.
“He goes every Sunday. Used to―until your wedding.”
“Doesn’t Ruhee know?” she asked me. “I thought she knew that boy, for some reason.”
Ruhee looked disoriented, confused. She scrunched up her face. Her mouth was gently open, her lips parted, a sliver of her teeth visible. She wasn’t blinking. She was in shock. Even so, how beautiful she was.
It grew quiet.
“No,” I said. “She didn’t know.”
When my mother got up to leave, Ruhee walked her to the door, and I went into the bathroom.
I looked in the mirror, the glass with our toothbrushes on the sink, the towels drying on the metal bar.
Our clothes crumpled on the floor. There was still a little wetness lingering in the air.
I wept. Wept loudly, in a way that was audible over the sound of water hitting the ceramic basin.
When I came out, the lights were turned off.
Ruhee was in the bedroom, the door locked from inside.