II. The Hospital
II
The Hospital
On Sundays I went to the Hospital with my shaving kit.
I both dreaded and looked forward to this pilgrimage all week, though I’d been doing it for the last twelve years; ever since I’d graduated from college.
Unlike Priya, I attended college from home, but when I graduated I had a job lined up in Bombay.
My mother had asked that I stay back for a little while longer, only a couple of weeks until I got my certificates in the mail. But I never left.
It was the same cycle of emotions in the same order every week: fear, first. Then lethargy, complete and utter unwillingness to move. Followed by an irresistible need to move, unbearable restlessness till I got to the Hospital.
Before leaving I’d check the shaving kit to make sure it had the good Gillette in it, then I’d set out, taking the same route―walk down the street, pause on the corner from where the Red House was visible, then turn and go the other way, to the bus stop.
Only this morning, when I awoke, for the first time in twelve years, I didn’t immediately think about my pilgrimage to the Hospital.
I thought about the slip of paper with Ruhee’s number on it.
Though I didn’t need it anymore. In the week since I’ve had it, I’d dialed and hung up so many times I had the numbers memorized.
It was unsettling, the fact that Ruhee was living in the city.
Every action I took felt watched, I was almost afraid to go to the Hospital.
My mother’s ritual for Sunday mornings was to make puris. Puri with mutton curry; a ‘special’ breakfast that once used to be reserved for when our relatives visited; before our eviction from decent society. My father would be at Gita Miss’ apartment on Sundays. Though no one ever said so.
I stayed in bed for as long as I could. My room smelled like old newspapers.
My mother had run out of room in the storage attic, so she’d begun storing things under my bed.
Old newspapers she was gathering to be sent away to the junk dealer.
Old clothes she wanted to neither throw away nor donate.
It smelled nice, the old newspapers. I heard Priya in the kitchen, talking to our mother.
Priya was studying textile design at the NID.
It was a prestigious program at a prestigious institution.
It was also urbane, hip, sophisticated. Soon after starting, she came home with a tattoo of Shiva sitting in meditation snaking up her arm, smoking, drinking, and not bothering to hide either habit.
Our parents watched her with awe, her mannequins and her drapes of fabric and the fluidity with which she talked of old looms, weaver villages, Pochampally and Gadwal, as if she were an exotic foreigner touring our home.
Priya wanted to stay at a hostel rather than at home, even though her college was only an hour by metro.
“You’ll have Arjun,” she’d said.
When Priya was six or seven, I remember she brought our mother’s needle out of the biscuit box in which the sewing things were kept, and without warning she stabbed me in the arm with it.
At a point above my elbow. I’d screamed out in pain.
But she looked so scared that I said it was okay, it didn’t hurt.
I made myself get out of bed. Brushed my teeth, washed my face, straightened up my room.
This was the room I’d occupied as a child and as a teenager.
There were gluey impressions on the walls where my He-Man and SWAT Kats stickers used to be.
But the faded newspaper cutouts of Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly at the World Cup still papered the wall above my desk.
The desk was too small to be used now, but my terracotta pig with the coin slot on its back was still there; I’d never broken it open.
If I opened the top drawer, it would still have my junior college notebooks, underneath them a stack of pink report cards numbered in reverse order, from kindergarten through tenth grade, the last page stapled with my class photograph, noting my height and weight at the beginning of the school year and again at the end.
In the first eight photos, Ruhee would be there.
I changed into my jogging pants and an old T-shirt I’d gotten in college.
I threw the window open, fished a cigarette out of a pack I’d left in the trousers I’d worn the day before.
My window looked out onto the street, the small yard, and the gate.
The window grille used to have loose screws, that was how I used to sneak out at night to go to the Red House with Ganesh and Ruhee.
The first time we went there, it was only Ganesh and me.
Ruhee hadn’t showed. I smoked my first cigarette that day, Ganesh was the one who gave me one, taught me how to smoke.
I had the sudden urge now, to get out of the house through the window. I stuck the cigarette between my teeth and tested the grille. It did not even rattle. I put the cigarette out on the sill, left the butt there. At some point, my mother let it pass, me smoking at home.
When I went out, Priya was sitting on the kitchen counter. She met my eyes and made a face and I knew that my mother had already told her about Ruhee, and she’d been recruited into the plan of making me call her.
In the kitchen, my mother wiped her face with the end of her sari. The puris were piled high in a wide steel basin she used for that express purpose. I took a plate from the dish rack mounted on the wall and picked a couple of puris from the top, but my mother made me put them back.
“Go sit at the table,” she said.
She always wanted me to have the ones that came off the wok. She checked the wall clock, “Why don’t you go a little later than usual today?” she said. “Go later in the afternoon.”
I shrugged. She said this every Sunday, and each time I shrugged and left for the hospital at the same time.
Priya came to join me at the table, pulled the bowl of mutton curry towards her and said mockingly, “Okay if I take some first, Arjun-sir?”
Our mother bustled in, not paying attention to Priya. She pulled the bowl of mutton towards me and ladled some onto my plate.
“I don’t know why I bother coming home,” Priya snapped.
“What are you going on about? Look how skinny you’ve gotten. What are you eating? Are you dieting? If you tell me you’re dieting I’m going to make you live at home again, you hear?”
“Won’t you eat?” I asked my mother.
She shook her head the same way she always did, as though I’d asked her to commit something sinful.
She fasted on Sundays. She only ate when my father returned, no matter how late that was.
It used to be that my father disappeared for a few days at a time.
But that was years ago, before my mother began her fasts.
She cleared her throat, looked meaningfully at Priya.
“Won’t you wear better clothes?” Priya asked me, imitating the tone I’d used with our mother.
“What?”
“She called. Asked if she can come today, it’s her day off.”
I was on the point of eating but stopped. “Ruhee isn’t coming here,” I said.
Priya looked sideways at me.
“Tell me she isn’t.”
“What is the big deal, Arjun. It is as if you’ve never met a girl in your life.”
I said nothing else. I ate as fast as I could. I went back into my room.
Priya called after me, “Wear a button-down, but not the ones you wear to your office. Remember that green and black pinstriped one I gave you for your birthday? Wear that. With jeans. It makes you look less old.”
I stopped near the hall closet and slid the toolbox from its shelf.
In my room, I shut the door. I went into the bathroom first, got the shaving kit out from under the sink, opened it to make sure it still had the good Gillette in it.
Then using the tool kit I unscrewed the window grille as soundlessly as possible.
My mother would make up a completely believable excuse; she’d say I had to leave earlier than usual.
She was good at it; making excuses. She was even capable of convincing Ruhee to stay until late evening.
I knew I could only safely return home at nightfall.
It took some effort, but I managed to pry the window grille out of the casing. Dropped it into the garden below.
Walking down the street, I realized that I was still in my jogging clothes, but it didn’t matter, nobody at the Hospital cared what I wore.
As long as I brought my wallet with me, the compounder would expect that.
The shaving kit rattled as I walked. At the end of my street, before turning left for the bus depot, I stopped and gazed at the Red House on the dead-end street.
In all these years, I haven’t gone any closer.
I looked at the rusting gate from here. Made out the caved-in roof of the outhouse, near the end of the property, beyond the woods.
The cement stairs still did not have handrails, or even wooden posts for safety, just metal spikes jutting out at odd angles, just like the first time we went there.
The plan became that we’d sneak into the Red House at night, after dinner. Ruhee and Ganesh and me.
“We’d need a torchlight,” Ganesh had said.
He asked if I could bring it. I said I could. He asked if Ruhee could sneak out of home after dinner. Ruhee gave him a look, an intense, glowing expression, then said, “Yes.”
Back then, my window bars were screwed in so lightly that they rattled when it grew windy.
That night we first went to the Red House, all I had to do was insert a coin into each of the four screws and turn.
I’d lowered the frame into the garden outside much the same way.
The night had been cool, the sky blue-black, the papaya tree in the yard smelled of sap, softly acidic, but sweet underneath.
The Gurkha was coming up the street, tapping his big stick against the road now and then.
I hid in the shadow of the papaya tree and waited for him to pass.