IV. The Bat #2
Then I knelt, slid my bat underneath my bed.
I didn’t turn around for some time, I pretended to search for something underneath my bed.
The pressure between my shoulders returned.
I sat back, touched the spot, massaged it.
When I finally turned around Ganesh was at the window.
He’d eased himself out, perched like a large brown bird on my windowsill.
But instead of climbing out, he stopped, he turned to look straight at me and said, “When I’m older, Arjun, it won’t be like this.
I’ll be somebody. You’ll see.” Then he was gone.
“The harm,” Priya said, “is that you’ve disturbed the truce.”
She’d overhead my mother talking on the phone. “She’s asking me to move back home!” Priya cried. “‘What will people say? It won’t look good that the groom’s sister lives on her own.’ Ugh. And did you know?” she added, “Shital-atha is sending over this year’s mango pickles. Ugh.”
Shital-atha was my father’s sister.
“She’s forgetting everything Arjun. She’s forgetting how they made her leave when she went to visit them.
They didn’t even let her cross their thresholds.
What was her fault? Was she the one sleeping with our Sanskrit teacher?
They made her pay because they were too afraid of him.
And it was in his power to make them treat Ma well―you know that.
To repair things at least on the surface, for her sake, make it so that she was invited around for things, some courtesy phone calls.
He could’ve done it, but no. He let them punish her.
Because somebody has to be punished―it can’t be him―it can’t be his keep―so it’s Ma.
And look, she’s testing the waters again,” she said.
“The least you could have done was see Ruhee in secret. Why did you have to tell her? That was idiotic. Not to mention selfish. It isn’t even like you know for sure Ruhee wants anything to do with you.
And knowing you, even if she’s interested, you’d be too chicken to do anything about it! ”
I was at my desk at work. Priya was screaming at me. She’d come all this way to do it. It must have been two metro connections and a long walk.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry! I just get so angry sometimes.
It makes me so mad that she has no self-respect.
Why’s she like that? I’m not like that, you aren’t.
Why didn’t she just tell him to get lost. Cut him off from any contact with us.
Taken the house, and taken every penny he was worth.
Make him pay alimony. Child support. And she’d have gotten everything too.
She could’ve―and she did!―raise us all by herself. ”
“That’s not true.”
She rolled her eyes, took a deep breath, massaged her temples. “Why do you always defend him? Why can’t you hate him?”
“Here, have some water,” I said. She was going hoarse. “Or we can go out for some tea. I’m sorry you feel so angry with me. I shouldn’t have told her. She looked so sad and I wanted to cheer her up…”
Her face softened. She pulled out the chair and sat down. “Well. What’s the verdict then? Do you like Ruhee? Do you really?”
In the two weeks since our meeting at Café Nilofer, Ruhee hadn’t called again. Now I had opposing promises to keep, one to my mother and one to my father.
Maybe I’d been wrong, read too much into the way Ruhee said she couldn’t look away from me, how attractive she thought I was.
I remembered that it was how Ruhee had always been: sweet, flattering.
Always making you feel like the center of her world.
How can I say that she really meant it? For the tenth time that day, not even caring that Priya was there to witness it, I picked up the receiver and quickly put it back in the cradle again.
Yes, the dial tone was present. No, there were no crackles on the line.
Yes, it had retained the ability to ring.
“What did he say?” Priya said, meaning our father.
“Nothing,” I lied.
Priya could generally tell when I was lying, but not if the lie was about our father.
She was so emotional about him that she couldn’t think straight where he was concerned, couldn’t apply logic or reason to anything remotely connected to him.
She hated him, that was the real reason she moved away at the first opportunity.
Maybe it was because she was a girl, as Priya often said―she was a girl, and so was our mother, and that seemed to make them interchangeable.
But I admired that my father never responded to Priya’s open hostility, nor did he use her as a stand-in to vent his feelings about our mother.
He was as good a father to her as he was to me.
I never told Priya that our father knew about the man Priya was living with now; an unpublished novelist. Tall, bespectacled, lanky-framed.
Utterly shy and completely unlike my sister.
My father was the one who convinced the landlord into renting the apartment to them, even though he did not allow unmarried couples.
She is an intelligent girl, my father told me.
I trust her to make good decisions, and if this turns out to be a bad one, it will only each her how to make good ones.
I don’t want her to live her whole life trying to gain my approval.
I picked up the phone again.
“Play hard to get,” Priya advised. “Or you won’t get. Trust me.”
Every other day, my mother asked me if Ruhee called, if there was ‘any news.’ I shrugged. I shook my head. She looked disappointed, but I could tell she hadn’t lost all hope yet. She was pleased, therefore, and not completely surprised when the doorbell rang on Sunday morning.
Priya and I were eating. The house smelled of hot oil and mutton curry.
While Ruhee and my mother exchanged pleasantries in the hall, Priya watched me scarf down whatever was left on my plate.
I went into the kitchen, put the plate in the sink, hurriedly washed my hands with soap.
Ruhee was still in the hall. I went into my room, brushed my teeth at the sink, changed into a long-sleeved T-shirt and pair of soft joggers like the ones I wore when I escaped Ruhee the last time she was here.
My heart was hammering wildly, my hands were chilled.
I cupped them, blew into them, checked my breath.
I was so glad my father was at Gita Miss’ house.
Ruhee, the only girl I’d ever loved, the girl I wished to marry for twenty years was here, in my house.
I think I might have said it out loud. “Are you talking to yourself?” Ruhee said. I turned around.
She stepped into my room, glanced around without particularly noticing anything. “I wanted to talk in private,” she said, motioning at the door with her head. I crossed the room and pushed the door close, but not all the way. I left a sliver open. But Ruhee pushed it closed.
Ruhee sat on the edge of my bed.
She smiled at me but I could see that something was the matter.
I didn’t press her. She got up and walked around my room, looked at the old cricket posters on the wall.
She sat at my little desk and ran her hands along the edge.
So cute, she said, picking up my terracotta pig and shaking it.
The coins jingled inside. She looked at my family photograph, the ink pen in the pen stand.
Absently she pulled out my drawers, which were empty.
“It’s adorable that your mother left things exactly the way it was. And so clean,” she said.
“I wish I could go back to my old house,” she said sadly. “Hey, do you remember my room?”
I did. Her walls were ink blue. Her window looked into the veranda of her house.
You could always hear sparrows fluttering about the windowsill, sometimes they came inside to peck at the mirror on her dressing table.
She had a poster of Marat Safin over her desk.
I went and stood beside her. My hand on the back of the chair, I realized I was standing quite close to her, I could smell her hair.
“He always looked so angry,” Ruhee said, looking up at me.
“I guess you liked that, the way he smashed tennis rackets when he got mad,” I said. She laughed.