19. Pyaar Mujhse Jo Kiya Tumne Toh Kya Paaogi
Sleep was an alien concept. Night? What was that? Gautam couldn’t feel his face after seventeen hours of no sleep. He had gone without it for longer before, during his truck driving days and then again during his starting up of GK Textiles. But now, his body just worked like it was half of itself.
“It’s the age,” Maya laughed, her own eyes droopy after the night of bawling they had had.
The last month with MM had been… interesting. They would fall in love with her in the morning with all her cute smiles and yawns, then begin to question the existence of children by night, only to fall more in love with her the next morning. Their house was a mess, even after Gautam had doubled up the shift of his cleaning staff. The food, thank god, was regular, fresh and delicious thanks to his cook. He had gotten Dr. Rekha to give him a mix of scientific and old-school remedy diet for Maya and she was choking it down between feeds, nappy changes and power naps. He, on the other hand, was the backup that was always ready, working from the sofa of his hall to take over from Maya whenever she was overwhelmed, which was often.
Gautam had realised that she wouldn’t show how distressed she was in the first few days, thinking it wasn’t his job to help her with this. So Gautam had begin to hover around her, pick up MM whenever she was down, just seamlessly merging into Maya’s routine with her baby. And within a week Maya had begin to let go. Trust him. Rightfully order him. It had come to a point where she snapped her fingers at him and pointed to the baby cot whenever MM cried and she knew it was nappy change and not feed.
Gautam had fallen prey to that the first few times, the naive man he was. Then he had learned to identify the types of cries too and nudge her for alternate nappy changes. Like right now.
“You,” she snapped, vegetating on the sofa. “Your turn.”
“In your dreams!” He snapped back, becoming half-Maya in his sleepless state. “I went two hours ago.”
She stomped her foot and stormed away, making him chuckle in his sleep. His eyes were closing when Maya screamed his name. He straight up sprinted, his heart in his mouth as he stopped just before the cot in Maya’s room.
“What’s wrong?”
“She is following me with her eyes!!!” Maya was jumping, MM’s eyes fixated on her mother. Gautam let out a breath — “Say that out loud along with your scream next time, M!”
“Shit, shit, shit! My baby is so f-ing smart…”
“Language, Maya, language.”
“Look.” She held steady in the field of MM’s vision, waiting to hold her gaze. Then very slowly started walking to the side. And the eighth wonder of the world! MM was following Maya with her eyes. Gautam was amazed as Maya returned to her spot and MM was still following.
“Yaaayy!!!” Maya clapped. “Megha is the smartest girl. My beauty with my brains!”
“My turn, my turn,” Gautam nudged her off her place and stood, waiting for MM to fixate. When she did, he began to move. But midway she looked away.
“Nooo… try again, MM, I am your favourite person in this house.”
“I give her food, why are you her favourite?”
“I let her out of her swaddle,” he grinned, returning to his original spot. But she wouldn’t follow. His face fell.
“Awww,” Maya pulled his cheeks, reaching up to nuzzle his nose. “My big baby.” She cooed in her baby voice. He grunted. “Go and wear a bright coloured shirt,” she laughed. “I am wearing fuchsia pink. You are wearing white. Babies stick to bright colours.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. Gautam raced into his room, pulled out his brightest piece of clothing, which happened to be a cobalt blue formal shirt, and ran back. He waited in MM’s periphery again, hanging on for her to fixate on him. Once she did, he moved. Very slowly. One step at a time. Almost in slow motion.
And she held on!
“Yes!” He whooped, returning to his spot and doing it again. And again. And again, until his baby girl was tired and went to sleep halfway. Maya chuckled, lounging on her bed.
“This was fun.” he lay down beside her and closed his eyes, formal shirt and all. They had an hour before MM woke up again.
————————————————————
The end of second month drew to a close, and MM kept turning more and more pretty, if that was even possible. She also kept becoming more and more human as she slept regularly. And Maya was softer. Mellower. She was still the goofy girl that made every day fun, but when it was MM, there was this inner core that shone from within her, a mother’s core.
Gautam had seen many forms of Maya, at 19 and then again at 34. The transformations he saw in the last two months took his breath away. She was fun and mature, kind and smart. But now she was… tender.
“G, hold her,” she transferred her wet and squirming in her towel out of the bathroom and into his waiting arms. Like the perfect relay partner, Gautam accepted the bundle, smelling perfectly of baby soap and shampoo, and lay her down on the bed, drying her and playing peek-a-boo. She liked her baths, but she liked this game of theirs even more.
The doorbell rang. He didn’t care. He held one hand on her tummy and got her nappy fixed, then reached for the onesie Maya had laid out. MM had the cutest clothes. Some had been gifted by Maya’s friends and office colleagues, some she had bought. The biggest bunch of those he had been ordering online from wherever he could. His search engines were also beginning to only throw the cutest baby girl things at him. What could he say? He was their easiest, most willing victim.
The bell rang again.
“Go, I am all wet,” Maya nudged him, her T-shirt dripping from MM’s bath. She took his position buttoning up their girl and he rushed to get the door.
“Gautam Kumar?” The courier guy passed him an envelope with his name. Gautam signed and let him go, checking the package. The envelope was crisp, with his name and address on it. The return address was Kumar bhai’s. He stilled. A beat passed. Then he tore open the envelope, only to reveal a smaller, shabbier envelope inside with his name scrawled in Hindi. The handwriting was loose and loopy.
He brought the letter close to his nose. Sniffed. Alcohol, mud, damp, dirty things. He wanted to stuff the letter in the dustbin. But something stalled his hand. This was it. The last of her words. He wasn’t sentimental about it, but what would she have said? What would a dying woman say to her only son who she had sold, then thrown out of the house when he returned, then refused food. Gautam believed he had gotten over those days, those pains, so he sliced open the dirty letter to illegible scrawls on a piece of paper. It was written in different inks, as if she would write something each day and fold it away.
The letter was short, the words a mix of Hindi and Pahari scripts, the sentences jumbled. His Pahari was rusty after all these years, so it took him a while to get a hang of reading it. Gautam couldn’t make out what she wanted to say in the first read, so he went again, and again, and again, until her messages began to make sense. And each one, each pointer was aimed to wound.
No family can have you
Your life was wasted and you wasted mine
How can you not come and see your old dying mother?
You will go through my pain
Live and die alone there like me
There’s still no food here for you if you come
You should come
Our god has written our fates alone
“Where did he go… where did he go…?” Maya’s baby voice sounded from far away, as if from the end of some tunnel. Gautam turned, feeling his ears begin to roar. She was walking dramatically towards him, MM seated in her arms, facing him. “There he is!”
He blinked, the roar suddenly busted to make way for the two of them. Maya began to rant about something not fitting MM and that he was useless in clearing her old stuff.
“You can’t hoard onto everything, G! Just look at the amount of stuff she has already outgrown… I told you we should only keep one keepsake and give the rest away and you said you will choose the one you want but what have you been doing? It’s all the…”
“It’s not my job!” He cut her off. She stopped. Gautam turned away from her and began to stride to his bedroom.
“Gautam?”
“It’s not my job, I said,” he stalled, turning over his shoulder. “Keep whatever you want, throw whatever you want. I am useless anyway, no?”
She opened her mouth, then closed. “That’s not how I meant it. I just meant…”
“What? What did you mean?”
“That… is everything ok?” She eyed the envelopes in his hand. “What are those?”
“None of your business.”
“You need sleep. Go to sleep, I will take care of everything here.”
“No, Maya, do not talk like that to me. I am not some child that you are sending me off to sleep and being the adult.”
“Then what do you want me to do? What’s happened?” She hiked MM around and lifted her on her shoulder.
“Nothing,” he swallowed. “Just leave me alone.”
“That is why I said, go and sleep.”
“No. In life. Just leave me alone for some time. Actually,” he turned and began to stride towards the main door. “I’ll go out.”
“In those old tracks?”
He glanced down. They were old and ratty, and had MM’s spit-up milk on it. Gautam changed tracks and went again for his room.
“Wait,” Maya held his bicep midway. Her face softened — “What happened? Tell me. Is it something about the spices business?”
That kindness, that compassion, that concern? He was not made for that. That downy head with a whole lot of curls, sweet and pretty in the crook of her mother’s neck? He wasn’t made for that either.
“I am going.” Gautam announced.
“Where? Turkey?”
“To my new house. You stay here with MM.”
“Hang on, hang on, hang on… you are asking me to stay in your flat while you go to that new bungalow of yours? Like shift?”
He nodded. Maya remained silent, trying to read him. Then she turned and padded to her room, returning without MM.
“You mean you are breaking up.”
“When were we in a relationship?”
“Right. We never signed a contract or something.”
“Don’t act smart with me now, M.”
“No, I’m just following your cue. You said let’s get together, so let’s get together. You became this solid partner, almost a father figure to my pregnant belly — let’s do that! You stayed in the labour room, became this… parent to my daughter, helped me day and night with her — let’s do that. Now, I should be thankful you stuck around until she had learned to sleep better. Thank you, Gautam. You may shift. I will shift out from here as well…”
“No.”
“Excuse me, why would I listen to you? Are we in a relationship? Are you Megha’s dad?”
He tautened. That blow hit worse than the words from the letter.
As if his expression had given away all the poison churning inside of him, Maya crossed the distance between them and grabbed his shoulders, her eyes beseeching — “Talk to me, G. Talk to me. Don’t leave like this. I can see what’s going on between us. All three of us. Don’t leave this.”
“I have to,” he stepped back, and her face paled. As if stricken. One tear, then two. Her head bowed, but he could see them fall one by one, dripping to his floor. A shiver racked across her shoulders.
“May…”
“How did I become this?” She dropped her face into her hands. “Shit, shit, shit. How did I become this again?” Her head rose, and blank eyes bore into his — “I never begged my own parents for affection., didn’t beg my husband… and I became your charity case? Begging you to love me? To love Megha? To be ours when you clearly have been looking to walk out?”
“It’s not you.”
“It’s good Megha is so small… she won’t see her mother like this… she won’t remember you and ask for you…” Maya began to retreat to her room, but this time he stopped her with a hand on her bicep.
“You are not going anywhere, I am. End of discussion.”
“You cannot ord…”
“Think logically. She is small, you cannot transport her everywhere. Just stay here.”
Before she could argue, he was walking out of the house, in his old tracks with MM’s spit on them and his mother’s letter in his hand.
————————————————————
His bungalow by the sea was under renovation. He had been delaying the work himself in the last few months, ordering new additions. Gautam didn’t even veer to check those, dismissing the workers as soon as he entered.
He went around the house, not even noticing the interior, nor checking if the courtyard’s changes had been implemented, or if the locks had been installed. He walked around aimlessly, from garden to courtyard, house to outhouse, room to room. Daylight soaked into the house, but it didn’t create the kind of magic it did in his flat, where she was. Where MM was.
His phone buzzed.
He frantically pulled it out, scared it was MM. His chest relaxed. It was his interior designer.
“Yes.”
“Hello, Mr. Kumar? I just got an update that you stopped work for today. Sir, if we keep delaying like this we won’t be able to deliver on time. The deadlines have already been pushed after your latest changes…”
“It’s ok.”
“That would mean the budget would…”
“That’s fine. Thank you.”
He ended the call and threw his mobile in a fit of rage. B******d! What was his mother trying to do to him from the other side?! Why was he still so rattled by her? B******d. B*********d!
Gautam scratched the letter out of his pocket and thumped down on the grass in his courtyard, opening the paper again and reading. He kept reading it, again and again, his eyes tearing up as those words did even more damage.
Your life was wasted and you wasted mine
You will go through my pain
Live and die alone there like me
There’s still no food here for you if you come
He cried, for the mother who had died, who once had fed him. He cried for himself, for that little boy who had not wanted to leave her but had known a better life awaited in going away, in moving on, in fending for himself. How could a mother be like this? How could she do this? In life and in death? How could she be so cruel?
Gautam cried, bracing his palms on the grassy ground and letting all of his chest spill. He hadn’t cried since he was twelve. He hadn’t cried when he didn’t have food to eat. He hadn’t cried when his masters had beat him up and thrown him out of their mansion. He hadn’t cried when his mother had refused to give him food. He hadn’t cried when he was on the verge of losing all his savings at the mill. He hadn’t cried when a 19 year old Maya had thrashed him with her cruel words. He hadn’t cried like this and now he couldn’t stop. B******d.
He punched the ground, again and again, until his knuckles were angry and bruised, until he couldn’t feel them, until he had no more tears left in him. He trudged to the verandah running around the courtyard on all sides, then collapsed there, feeling his eyes fall close. Nothing flashed in front of his eyes. It was peace. He went to sleep.
————————————————————
MM was crying. Gautam blindly tried to reach for her cot. There! He began to rock the bar of her cot in his grip — “Shhh… MM, shh…”
The bar pricked his palm. And he came awake. Gautam blinked, looking around himself, placing his surroundings. He was lying on his back, on the cold marble floor of his new house’s verandah, the morning chill seeping into his bones. Waves of the sea crashed somewhere in the distance and he could hear some early morning traffic.
Gautam pulled his hand back and realised he had caught onto the prickly stem of a succulent planted beside one of the arched pillars. His palms had tiny pricks, some bleeding. He began to suck them, making a mental note to have all of these removed. MM couldn’t grow up crawling and walking around here with this hazard.
His mind whirred to a halt. MM. M. The letter. The meltdown. The breakup. No! His lack of sleep of the last few months with that letter had destroyed everything! How could he have let M believe they were breaking up? No, wait, he had let her believe they weren’t in a relationship to begin with! How was that even possible? They were a couple, and new parents for all intents and purposes.
Gautam immediately got to his feet, his joints groaning after more than 15 hours of sleep on the floor. He had spoiled his body by sleeping on fancy mattresses and exorbitant thread count sheets. It was punishing him now. He glanced around.
The letter was floating around his garden, borne on the wind. He grabbed it, tore it without reading it again and found the nearest worker’s bin to dispose of it. This was his past, he had mourned it. It didn’t define him, neither could it hold him back. He had repented enough in this life for his mother’s weaknesses. Not anymore.
He wiped his bloodied palms on the back of his tracks and made a dash for his home. The real one, where M and MM lived.