The Sex Lives of Married Women

5. Rani

5

Rani

Ali was bored. He didn’t want Rani to read him a book, he didn’t want to play with his Duplo blocks, he didn’t even want to go out to the park when she suggested it. All he wanted was that damn iPad. She had downloaded a counting app to help teach Ali numbers, but instead he was hooked on a game inside the app where you had to pop all the bubbles leaving a fish’s mouth before they got to the surface.

‘Fish! Fish!’ Ali screamed. His fingers, still sticky with the jam from the toast he ate for breakfast, reached into the air, trying to grab the iPad off the high shelf where she had placed it. His addiction was her fault, of course. And unsurprisingly his three-year-old mind hadn’t fully understood when she tried to tell him the boundaries of iPad usage – one hour a day. Ideally separated out to half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon, as the early childhood nurse had said. At other points in the day he was to entertain himself with the many toys and books crammed inside their small apartment so his neurons didn’t develop in such a way that made him prone to hyperactivity. But the reality was that Ali was easily on the iPad two hours a day, and that flared her mum guilt badly.

She looked at the clock. It was still only 8 a.m. The day stretched out before her and she wondered if this was how she was going to spend it: wrangling her agitated toddler, figuring out how to fill the hours that lay before them, heavily suggesting that he have a nap when he was well past wanting to take naps during the day. At some point they would go to the park, where her eyes would glaze over and she would think about how she would rather be anywhere else but there, as she pushed him on the swing for the hundredth time.

‘He should go to preschool,’ she had told Daniyal, though everyone called him Dan. It seemed everyone in this country shortened names to one syllable. Dan liked it. It made him feel less Indian, he said.

‘But why have the expense when you’re home?’ Dan had said, and she didn’t know how to argue with that. She had completed her business degree in Australia before Ali was born. But then she went back to India, got married and had Ali. Now that she had a toddler, the thought of embarking on some kind of job in business terrified her, though she would never admit that to Dan. And how would she go about finding a part-time job with no work experience?

She had considered going back to the sort of work she’d done as a student but the thought of it made her shudder. At one of her last shifts at the pub, she’d become needlessly annoyed at a patron who had left her phone at the table and, when Rani had returned it, hadn’t even bothered to thank her. Not that Rani ever showed that annoyance outwardly. Afterwards as Rani wiped down the table her annoyance spiralled into anger – what was she doing there? After all the money she had spent coming to Australia from India, was this what she was worth? Wiping up spills from drunk patrons and going home smelling like alcohol for the rest of the day?

She had taken some deep breaths and tried to make peace with the fact that at the pub she was little more than part of the furniture. An object that could be shoved and bumped – and once, even spat at. She would never forget that man, with his small beady eyes and his red bulging neck. The football had been on and it was crowded. She was trying to mop up a spill when the handle of her mop accidentally bumped into him, splashing some of his beer. She’d apologised right away and no damage was done, but he had become so enraged he roared at her, calling her all sorts of names she had to block from her memory. White noise she didn’t want to home in on, so she could still get up every morning and act like this whole country didn’t hate her.

In the months after the spitting incident the job wore away at her. By the end, she should have been used to not being seen. But for some reason, the blonde woman not saying ‘thank you’ was the last straw – perhaps because, by then, Rani was tired and had had enough. She’d wanted to call her parents, admit defeat and go back home to Hyderabad. She hadn’t told her family about how hard it was living in Australia. How the course she was doing seemed easy and unnecessary but she had to do it to get the Australian qualifications that mattered more than the ones she had acquired in India. She hadn’t told them about working in a pub. They would have been disgusted and called it haram, but despite the working conditions the pay was good. It was money in the end; what did it matter where it came from?

She hadn’t told them any of this. What she wanted to tell them most was that she missed them. That she missed her sister’s hugs and her mother’s never-ending belief in her. She missed her father talking with her after the evening’s news about the stories of the day and she missed her younger brother bringing back fresh jalebi, her favourite dessert, after he finished college.

And then she’d remembered the divorce, and all thoughts of going home vanished in an instant. That night after she had cleaned up the table where the group of women, especially the tall blonde one, had progressively got drunker as the night went on, Rani finished her shift and headed towards the train station. She came into this part of the city for work. It took her ninety minutes each way on a train and then a bus, but she didn’t mind that. Much of the time she sat staring out the window letting the day seep away. In the darkness her tired reflection stared back at her. Strands of hair had escaped the tight ponytail she tied earlier that day. She didn’t wear make-up, but under the harsh strip lighting of the train, the hollows under her eyes looked so dark that she promised herself she would buy some concealer. She was thirty-two years old, but she felt a lot older.

By now the best part of her life was behind her, or at least that’s what she believed her family back home thought. She should’ve had a couple of children by now, living a few minutes away from her parents. The tech scene was just starting to take off in Hyderabad so she could have been working for a firm somewhere close, while her mother looked after the children during the day. And she and Tariq would take the rickshaw together to work.

And here a lump appeared in her throat. Tariq. He was the reason she fled.

She was sharing an apartment with three other Indian women in the western suburbs. The women mostly kept to themselves. Rani liked it this way. It was why she stayed in the tiny flat, despite the cramped bedrooms and the bathroom shower that leaked and the odd smell of gas that emanated whenever any of them lit the stove. The other women worked odd hours, two of them as commercial cleaners in the city, and the third didn’t talk much about what she did, though Rani suspected she was either working at a massage parlour or maybe even doing some hostessing. It didn’t matter to Rani, as all three women were out in the evenings, which meant that Rani often had the apartment to herself.

After work, if she didn’t have an assignment for her business studies degree, she would stretch out on the couch and watch whatever show she wanted on the small TV in the living room. She purposely didn’t watch the Indian soaps the other girls did because she wanted to learn about Australian culture. And what better way to know about a culture than to watch the local TV programs? She got into a soap opera about white people living by the beach. Sometimes she spoke out random bits of dialogue that the characters spoke, trying to copy their accent. There was no one to hear her make a fool of herself, so she had fun with her attempts, sometimes exaggerating the accent to make herself laugh.

‘Naauuww waaay!’ she’d shout at the screen. ‘Gaoww orrnnn,’ she’d growl.

Most nights she would speak to her parents on the phone. Sometimes her brother and sister would also come on. That night, she’d made herself a cup of chai, then called her mother on a whim over WhatsApp. She didn’t know if she would answer. But after a couple of rings her mother’s face appeared. Rani could see up her nostrils.

‘Why do you answer the phone like that?’ Rani laughed.

‘Arre, beta, this is such good timing. We were just speaking about you,’ her ammy replied.

‘Good things, I hope,’ Rani was in the midst of saying, when her sister Hafsa’s face appeared on the screen. ‘Did you just snatch the phone from Ammy? I was going to speak to you anyway, you didn’t need to rush ...’

‘Baji,’ Hafsa interrupted her. ‘You need to get married. Ammy and Papa won’t let me marry until you are. Again.’

Then her father’s face was on the screen. ‘Rani, how are you?’ her father asked, as if Hafsa hadn’t said what she just had.

‘Uh, what’s Hafsa talking about? And why are you all grabbing the phone like that? I called Ammy.’

In the background she heard her mother say, ‘I’m still here.’

‘Hafsa is just getting a little bit passionate.’

‘I’m twenty-six! Me and Javed have been talking about marriage since we were in college.’

‘Arre, chee! You and Javed have not been talking about such things since you were—’

‘Yes we have, Ammy! You know he and I have been seeing—’

‘No, stop. I won’t hear such things. A girl from such a good family being known for seeing a boy—’

‘It’s 2017, for the love of god.’ The whole conversation between her mother and sister took place off-screen while her father smiled sheepishly at the screen.

‘So you just finished work? Don’t work so hard, beti. I told you I would send money if you ever need it,’ her father said, when Hafsa and her mother had stopped talking.

Hafsa grabbed the phone from her father. ‘Javed’s parents want to formally come and ask for my hand, but Ammy and Papa say that it’s weird for me to get married when you’re not.’

‘Well, I mean, you know what my situation is. I tried marriage.’

‘Tried doesn’t mean that you give up.’ Her mother was on the phone now. ‘I didn’t know how to bring this up before, so I’ll say it now. Feroza Khala’s neighbour has a son in Sydney.’

‘No, please just stop.’

‘He’s got residency. If you marry him it will be much easier for you to get the same.’

‘Ammy!’

‘And then we can forget this whole business that happened with Tariq. We can move on with our lives.’

‘I didn’t want to tell you this before, but’ – Hafsa was back on the phone – ‘Tariq’s married. Some girl who lives in Canada. He’s going to move there.’

Rani wanted to throw the phone across the room. Her heart was beating so hard she wondered if her family could hear it over the screen.

Her father’s calming face now filled the screen. ‘He doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened before,’ he said.

‘No one is saying any of it matters,’ she heard her mother’s voice. ‘We are all so proud of Rani and what she has done to pick herself up. No one is saying otherwise.’

The screen shook a little. It seemed there was a tussle for the phone between her parents. Her mother’s face appeared on the screen.

‘Just meet him and see. And if somehow you get on with this man, then we can maybe have two reasons to celebrate. Yours and Hafsa’s wedding together.’

‘And what if she says no? Do I have to spend the rest of my life as a spinster because my older sister refuses to get married? I mean, you can’t say that she didn’t already try the married life. Maybe it’s not for her.’

‘Hafsa!’ her mother shouted. Rani could see the look she was giving her younger sister.

Regret was flooding Rani’s bones. The tiredness from earlier was beginning to hit her.

‘I’m going to go,’ she said flatly to her family over the phone. ‘I worked a long shift. I need some sleep.’

‘Yes, yes, you sleep,’ her father cooed. ‘Did the restaurant give you food to take home? Did you make sure you ate it?’

‘Yes,’ Rani lied.

‘Good. Now forget all this nonsense,’ he said.

‘It’s not nonsense,’ Hafsa interrupted. ‘It’s just the small matter of my life. But of course, as the middle child, I always get neglected!’

‘You yourself said how hard it is to get residency in Australia.’ Her mother was beside her father, their faces squeezed together to fit the screen. ‘If you get married to someone who has residency, you know it will be easier for you.’

‘I will go brush my teeth now and get to bed before the other girls arrive and want to use the bathroom,’ Rani said, ignoring her.

‘Yes, you go rest. We will talk to you later,’ her father said.

Suddenly Hafsa’s face appeared on the screen. She looked sad. ‘Just think about it, okay?’ she said. ‘I miss you.’

‘I miss you too,’ Rani said, and hung up the phone.

She dragged herself off the couch and got ready for bed. But sleep didn’t come to her as she expected it would. Instead her tired mind drifted, not so much to what her parents had said but what Hafsa had revealed. Hearing that Tariq was marrying another woman was like a punch in the guts. How could he be with someone else when they had promised they would be each other’s and each other’s alone? He was the boy next door, the first child she had played with. She hadn’t had any siblings until she was six years old; her mother’s struggles with fertility had been spoken about so much in the neighbourhood that even Rani, as a young child, knew all about it. She had accepted that she would be their one and only child till miraculously her mother got pregnant with Hafsa. And then a year later, with her brother Hassan.

When she had announced her engagement with Tariq, Hafsa had said that it was so predictable, everyone was surprised they had waited so long. But they wanted to finish college before they got married. They were engaged for three years before her mother lost her patience and demanded they set a wedding date.

By then they had pretty much done everything married couples would do, in a natural progression. They first held hands when they were ten. By the time they were fifteen he had already kissed her. When she started college at eighteen their kissing sessions became more heated, and when he wanted to do something like feel her breasts or press his hardness against her thighs, she didn’t resist. She wanted him as much as he wanted her. The engagement was so they could take their relationship to the next level.

‘You have to promise you’ll marry me before we do it,’ she’d told him, and he had looked at her as if she had briefly lost her mind.

‘Was there any doubt that I wouldn’t marry you? Who would I marry if not you, Rani?’ he had asked.

When he put it so simply, of course it made sense. There could be no one else for either of them.

Rani and Tariq, Tariq and Rani. It was written in the stars.

Her parents knew him so well they didn’t even think twice about questioning the amount of time the two of them spent alone together. They never suspected a thing when she went over to his place when his parents weren’t home. And even though they did study, they did other things too.

After they got engaged, there was even less reason for her parents to be worried, so when she told them that she was going on a camping trip with Tariq and a few of their former college friends to Ananthagiri Hills, they hadn’t questioned her much about who was going with them. Which for her was a relief, because she wasn’t a particularly good liar and the only people actually going on the trip were Tariq and Rani.

Rani thought of that first night in the tent with Tariq. The way they were both giggling and excited, acting like they were on their honeymoon, knowing even though it hadn’t been verbalised that this would be their first night together. They had their own sleeping bags that rested on top of the camp beds, and they made the pretence of going to sleep in their separate areas. But before long he looked at her with an expression she was getting to know well. Soon he was unzipping his bag and inviting her to sidle in beside him. And she, like a moth to a flame, went to him.

Every time she thought of that night emotions sizzled in her body. The guilt she felt was quickly overcome by the immense feelings of desire. She’d wanted him probably as much as he wanted her, maybe even more. When they reached a point from which there would be no return, he stopped and asked her if she wanted to continue and she looked at him with almost a sense of fury – how could he stop when everything in their bodies and it seemed perhaps the whole world, the universe and the stars, all wanted them to go on? She placed her hands on his hips and pushed him towards her, grunting as she did, seeming to say, how dare you even think of not going on?

The memory once again brought a smile to her face and as they also sometimes did, her fingers reached for the part of her that throbbed. Never did she think that night and the cascade of nights that followed would live within her, feeding a desire that she wished would die.

A crash outside her bedroom door disrupted her thoughts, and her fingers moved away from where they were headed. She looked at her phone and saw that it was almost 4 a.m. One of the girls must have dropped something. Rani went to investigate.

In the bathroom she saw Priya on her knees picking up bits of glass with her hands.

‘Stop, you’ll cut yourself,’ Rani said when she saw her.

Priya looked up with an apologetic face. ‘I’m so sorry, I was hoping it wouldn’t wake anyone.’

‘It’s okay,’ Rani said. ‘Just wait, I’ll get the dustpan.’

By the time she had returned to the bathroom, Priya was standing, gripping the edge of the sink. Her head was bent and Rani could tell she was crying.

By now she had come to understand that there would always be moments when at least one of the girls she lived with would be crying. Sometimes they would silently weep standing in the kitchen while mindlessly staring into the fridge. Other times she would hear them crying louder in their rooms. She understood, without having to be told the exact situation, that they were all dealing with complicated lives and had loved ones who they had left behind to be here.

Rani acted like she didn’t notice the tears. She quietly swept up the glass and wiped up the liquid that had seeped out of the bottle with some paper towels before going to dispose of it in the kitchen. When she returned to the bathroom, Priya was taking off her fake eyelashes.

‘I’m such a mess. I’m sorry you had to see that.’ She spoke matter-of-factly, her eyes still red.

‘You don’t need to say sorry,’ Rani said.

‘I do, I woke you up. I broke this bottle of stupidly expensive serum. Why would they even put that in glass?’

Rani knew better than to ask what the serum was.

‘This whole night’s a bust.’ Priya ran her hands through her hair and started to pull some of it out. Rani’s eyes grew wider.

‘Don’t worry,’ Priya said. ‘They’re extensions. I clip them in. I’m not crazy enough to pull my actual hair out. Well, not just yet.’ Priya’s mood seemed to be brightening.

‘I wasn’t sleeping anyway,’ Rani finally said, as Priya finished pulling out what seemed to be half the hair on her head. All this time Rani had admired Priya’s glossy, thick locks when, as it turned out, Priya’s hair was as fine as hers.

‘Why couldn’t you sleep?’ Priya asked. She started rubbing some cream she scooped out of a small purple tub over her face, removing her make-up.

‘I don’t know ...’

‘Don’t tell me, thinking about a boy, right?’ Priya stopped scrubbing her face and peered at Rani through the reflection in the bathroom mirror. Rani looked away.

‘Why do we do it to ourselves? Honestly! We have better things to do with our lives than lose sleep over bloody men. I just ruined my make-up crying over a guy. And trust me, by now I should know better than to lose any tears over that. But then there’ll be a tiny voice of hope, the voice I can’t seem to smother. It tells me, maybe this guy, maybe he’s the one. But guess what?’ She turns around to face Rani, looking at her in the eyes. ‘He’s not. There’s no such thing as the one.’

Rani didn’t know what to say. Priya splashed her face with water till the cream washed off, taking all her make-up along with it. By the time she had dabbed her face dry with a towel, she had transformed back to someone who looked much younger. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty-five. Younger than Hafsa, Rani realised, but already with such a heavy heart. Rani imagined Hafsa growing to carry such a heavy heart, her eyes becoming cold, her hopes dashed so often she never allowed herself to feel anymore. The thought saddened her deeply. She could never let that happen to her younger sister.

‘It’s okay, whatever you’re going through. You will find a way to get through it,’ Priya said, coming to sit beside Rani on the edge of the bathtub. She felt bad for this young woman having to console her, when it should’ve been the other way around.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Rani said. ‘But what about you?’

‘Me?’ Priya shrugged and then let her shoulders slump. ‘I have no choice but to be okay, right? Just like you, we have to keep going. But thank you. Not many people ask me how I’m doing.’

‘I’m here if you ever need to talk.’

Priya gave her a sad sort of smile in return, and then she reached over and touched the side of Rani’s face. ‘You have good cheekbones. Has anyone told you that? In fact, your features are very pretty. You could make a good living with such features, if you wanted to.’

‘Yes, I’m making such a good living cleaning up spilt drinks at the pub,’ Rani said sardonically, but Priya’s face grew serious.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean the pub. I could help you find other types of work.’

Rani let her eyes run over Priya, taking in her tight black skirt that barely covered her thighs and her low-cut top that didn’t leave much to the imagination. In an instant she realised the sort of work Priya meant.

‘Don’t look so terrified!’ Priya laughed. ‘I’m not forcing you to do anything. Just giving you options.’

‘My parents would kill me.’ Rani laughed, trying to keep the conversation light.

‘Oh, but you can never let your parents know.’ Priya shook her head at the thought and then looked at the ground. ‘Though, I think if my parents knew, they would just say, oh but that’s exactly what we thought she would end up doing.’

Rani wanted to say that Priya didn’t have to do whatever she did that was making her sad. That she could maybe even clean for a living or work at a pub, or a cafe or a supermarket. These were all good, perfectly acceptable options.

Priya gazed up at Rani. ‘You’re feeling sorry for me. Don’t ever feel sorry for me. You want to know how much I made tonight?’ She picked up her handbag that was sitting beside the sink and pulled out a small plastic bag, emptying its contents onto the floor. A flurry of ten, twenty and even fifty-dollar notes spilt out.

Rani couldn’t even imagine making that much money in a month, not even two months, and here was Priya making it in a night.

‘Why, if you’re making so much, are you living here?’ It was the first thought to fly out of Rani’s mouth.

‘You should know better than most, Rani. All this money, I send it back to my family. Even if they say bad things about me they’re still happy to take the money. But as long as it means my little sister gets an education and can live a better life, I’ll do whatever I need to.’

She bent down and scooped all the notes back into the bag, before getting up to leave.

‘Don’t waste sleep over some guy. He’s not worth it. Think of the future. Now is just something you have to get through.’ She walked out of the bathroom, leaving Rani sitting there in a haze for a moment.

The next day Rani called her mother and agreed to go meet Feroza Khala’s neighbour’s son. She wasn’t doing this for herself, she justified, but for Hafsa.

When she first met Dan he explained he wasn’t exactly Feroza Khala’s neighbour’s son. Their connection was more tenuous: he was Feroza Khala’s neighbour’s cousin’s friend’s son. Rani had laughed at that and Dan had smiled and when he did a dimple flashed in his cheek which gave him a boyish, cute quality. It was the dimple she focused on whenever she felt herself getting upset with him. Not that they ever had any real arguments. Not like the passionate quarrels she and Tariq would get into about all sorts of topics. Once they’d got so heated arguing about the way communism was being practised in China, of all things, she threw the pot of yoghurt she had been eating at him, and he had laughed, wiping his t-shirt with some napkins before coming over to hug her.

It was these memories of Tariq she was trying to dispel from her head. Comparing Tariq to Dan only led to heartache when there was no comparison. She had to, with all her mental fortitude, extract herself from such thoughts.

She put Tariq firmly out of her mind when she told her parents that the meeting with Dan had gone well. And they had been so happy. After a few dates with Dan, his parents had jumped the gun and gone to see hers, asking for Rani’s hand in marriage. Her mother on the phone commented how open-minded and modern they were, which Rani knew meant they hadn’t let Rani’s divorced status and her age get in the way of the proposal. She didn’t want to tell her ammy that Dan himself was approaching forty, that he’d had a few failed relationships, that his parents were probably as relieved as her own that their child was deciding to settle down.

She tried not to think of Tariq on the day she was getting married, even though he clung to the edges of her mind, hanging like a shadow, creating waves of what she claimed were nerves even though she knew it was really grief.

Dan seemed like a fine enough man. He was good enough to create a life with. Good enough. That’s all it took. No one was going to be perfect. There would never be another Tariq. Dan was adequate. He was perfectly fine looking. He was educated and seemed respectful enough. He came from a nice family who got on well enough with her own. He was employed. He had an apartment, even though it was small; she could move in with him and he didn’t need to arrange for any difficult visas because she was already in Australia. Everything seemed fine. And as long as she ignored the shadow of Tariq and the pangs of grief, she would also be fine.

And she was fine, for the most part, even though she didn’t like to think of the fact that the night she conceived she’d allowed Tariq to enter her mind as she had sex with her husband. Only then did her body open up, accepting the idea that it was okay to create a life. A part of her felt guilty, but another part of her felt elated that the secret to having good sex with her husband was to think of the man she once loved, and in many ways, would always love. Tariq then became her secret partner when it came to lovemaking. The answer to her achieving an orgasm. All she had to do was close her eyes and picture him on top of her rather than Dan.

When she got pregnant with Ali the mood was joyous. It occurred to her then how a pregnancy and then a birth could mask so many problems. She and Dan didn’t feel the need to share all their thoughts and feelings and emotions and wonderments about life with each other, but she got the impression he was happy. His eyes sparkled when she told him the pregnancy test was positive. He accompanied her to most of her hospital appointments. He bought her any of the foods she was craving, travelling far and wide to buy them. When the baby came, he couldn’t hide his excitement. He stared at his son’s face in amazement for hours at a time. He was mesmerised. Rani could tell straight away he would make a great father. They soon got into a routine with her looking after the baby, then the toddler, and him being the economic provider for his family.

Her sister Hafsa no longer spoke to her that much, busy as she was with her children and her husband and his family, all of whom she adored. Rani didn’t know how day-to-day life was for her. But she knew that Hafsa was happy because her parents told her she was. That she had everything she wanted. She’d even said as much to Rani on the day they got married to their respective partners. ‘Thank you for giving me everything,’ she had said.

And so now, what reason did Rani have to complain? There was a child, a husband, a happy sister and parents who seemed content. And her brother Hassan, the quiet one who went about his business, finishing college, getting a job. He was in his early thirties now but no one pressured him to get married. He had all the time in the world, according to her parents and Indian society.

She had everything that was reasonable for a woman from her situation to expect. And yet ...

There was something missing and she wasn’t sure what that was. Perhaps a job would help, but she doubted her ability to even find work. Questions to which she had no answers swirled about in her mind. Where would she even go about finding a job? Who would hire her? And Ali, wouldn’t he miss having his mother around? Plus the house, when would she have time to cook and clean? And anyway, who would want her?

Don’t be an idiot, a voice said, bringing her spiral to an end.