VII. Train Dreams
VII
Train Dreams
After we had sex in my room, I’d told Ruhee I loved her. That she was the first and only girl I’d ever loved. First and only I’d ever kissed. She looked at me, smiled in a sad way and said nothing. I really didn’t feel hurt. I didn’t feel anything, I never did.
But my father was right. I wasn’t stupid. Nothing good could come of me continuing this with Ruhee. I didn’t call her. She didn’t, either.
“Give it time,” my mother said.
“That’s great,” Priya said.
Then a whole month went by. But something came of this whole thing―my mother re-establishing contact with my father’s relatives, for one.
She told me that she was now included in Shital-atha’s kitty parties.
And she insisted that I drive her there in my father’s car.
“I can’t go by bus,” she said. “It won’t look good. ”
When I borrowed the car from my father, I knew my mother had told him about things ending with Ruhee. I could see it on his face, the approval or affection for me.
All day long at the office, I would stare at the telephone. I would never pick it up and call Ruhee, defy my father like that. But nobody said I wasn’t allowed to stare at the phone.
“Don’t you want to see her again, Arjun?” Priya asked. “Tell me the truth. You like her, don’t lie.”
Priya was the only one in our family who refused to live with her eyes shut. It was what made her the unhappiest of us all.
It was Ambedkar Jayanti, or Gandhi Jayanti.
I don’t know, a public holiday for which I was home.
I’d driven my mother to her kitty party.
I parked the car outside, along the compound wall.
It took me three of four tries to get the angle right, still the tire hit the pavement outside.
I got out and checked to see if I’d scraped the wheel well.
I didn’t even notice Ruhee until I was almost at the door. She was sitting on the stoop, in that same way I did when I found myself incapable of cutting down the papaya tree. Ruhee’s papaya tree; as I’d come to refer to it over the years.
Ruhee said, “I live with two other residents, all on rotation, and one of them is always asleep on the sofa.”
I didn’t understand why she was telling me this. I asked her inside.
After that, we began to have sex in my room regularly.
Whenever my mother was at her kitty party, I called her.
I didn’t insist we go to her place because I sensed that it was only possible in my house, in my childhood bedroom that bore all the marks of being stuck in time.
It was as if all those objects floated around us when we were together―the old newspapers, the He-Man stickers, the impression of the papaya tree outside.
The teenaged ghost of Ganesh, stepping through the window.
And I felt something like happiness. Always we were quiet.
Every time Ruhee came after that, I’d want to say No.
If she showed up, I wanted to turn her away.
But then a remembrance would pass through my mind―the graceful way in which her hair fell down her back, or the childish way she touched her cheeks as though wiping something away.
I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t say no. I would let something escape from my heart when Ruhee looked at me like that.
Ruhee mourned Ganesh. She mourned him when she smiled at me sadly. Her being with me was a kind of grieving, I came to understand. She loved him all her life, and in me she saw a person who also loved Ganesh.
My father had been wrong; I didn’t tell her the truth.
He was alive―I didn’t tell her. He was at the hospital―I didn’t tell her.
I put him there―I didn’t tell her. Every Sunday, I didn’t tell her, I went there to see him, talk to him, ask him what he needed of me.
Ganesh’s cheeks, for instance, I touched them, ran my hands down his cheeks, felt pinpricks.
Not like when we were teenagers. That’s why I took my shaving kit, my straight razor.
The Gillette. It was my way of looking after him.
I didn’t tell Ruhee that my Sunday visits to the hospital were the only reason I was put on this earth, allowed to live and breathe and live and breathe, only because I could return Sunday after Sunday to lay my fingers against Ganesh’s cheeks for a second, put my thumbs under his chin, let the light catch in his curls, scatter across his skin, then fall on me, because I too was a living thing.
Though I loved Ruhee, though she was the only girl I’d ever loved, I didn’t tell her.
One afternoon she was getting dressed, her back towards me. She bent her neck to gather her hair, pulled it through an elastic band she’d left on her wrist. I don’t think she knew I was watching her. She took a deep breath and remained still.
I didn’t understand what she wanted from me, what I could give her.
I wished to enter her mind and hear her thoughts, see myself through her eyes, see through the window into the yard.
Something. Anything. Give me anything, I thought.
Perhaps she felt like apologizing for the distance she’d maintained between us, because she said, turning towards me, “Arjun, my friends are coming over tonight. Just a small get-together. Do you want to come?”
“Yes of course,” I said, wishing I’d paused, at least waited for her to turn away before answering.
In the evening, I dressed carefully. A button-down shirt, which Priya said made me look ‘less old’ and pressed khakis.
For whatever reason, when I told my mother I was going to Ruhee’s for a party with her friends, she looked annoyed.
She said she didn’t want to be up late to let me in, she was tired and her legs hurt.
I told her the party was bound to be a bore. I was going to be back very soon. Sorry Ma.
I took a cab to Ruhee’s apartment even though I could have walked, I didn’t want to be sweaty or smell like road dust. I was nervous about getting there too early so I arrived well after the apartment was packed, the music was blaring, and Ruhee nowhere I could see.
At first, I walked through the house in an attempt to locate Ruhee, and then I kept doing that on the pretext of trying to find Ruhee, though I’d established not finding her at this point.
Nobody said hello or looked at me for longer than it took to flash a quick, polite smile.
It seemed as though I was the only guest who had come alone.
It was excruciating and baffling to be in a room full of strangers talking amongst themselves.
It was a birthday party I surmised, because there was a badly disfigured cake in the kitchen, likely because someone’s face was in it; but, looking back it seemed more like a mixer for the senior doctors to meet the juniors.
Still, I imagined it was a nice thing to be celebrated like that, an apartment full of people showing up to sing Happy Birthday and press your face into sweet icing.
Ruhee, when I finally saw her, grinned with her eyebrows raised, as if surprised to run into me.
She did not come closer, or hug me or say anything else.
Someone said something in her ear and she turned their way.
I waited for them to finish, but then someone else touched her elbow, or steered her or hugged her hello or goodbye.
How elegant she looked in her long blue dress, her hair pulled up into a sleek knot, her burgundy lips, a gold watch with a rectangular dial on her wrist. Watching her, it made sense she’d become this person.
Her charm, her elegance, I felt proud watching her.
I picked up a beer from the fridge and retreated to the balcony.
Today I was glad to be a smoker; it was something to do, room to draw away from others.
And there were always other smokers, fellows in arms; a balcony full of doctors smoking away, what a joke.
Just as I had this thought, the man next to me turned my way and said, “say, anyone tell you that you look like Amitabh Bachchan?”
That was a new one. I wondered if he expected me to feel insulted―I didn’t look sixty for sure.
“No. Not from right now,” he said, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth.
“You look like Amitabh from Zanjeer. Not while he’s throwing chairs or smashing people’s heads in or whatnot, but when the heroine asks him to give up vengeance.
Something about the eyes…” He waved his cigarette hand around his eyes.
I laughed.
He said his name was Jiten, oncology. He shook my hand and said, “Let me guess … hmm, actually you are hard to guess. Say, PM&R?”
I said no. Before I could say I worked at the municipality he said, “Oh don’t tell me,” he groaned. “Psych?”
“I’m not a doctor,” I said, laughing.
“Oh thank god. Someone interesting. How do you know Ruhee?”
“We grew up together … just down the road from here, actually.”
“Childhood friends. That’s cute.”
“What’s cute?” the smoker next to Jiten said.
“Zanjeer here is Ruhee’s childhood friend.”
“That is cute.”