VII. Train Dreams #2
So long as I wasn’t a doctor none of them cared or asked what I did.
I was referred to as Zanjeer, and I found it wonderful.
When Ruhee finally had a moment, she came over to where I was standing with Jiten, an appreciative smile on her lips at how well I was getting along with her friends.
For whatever reason they all seemed to share a hatred for psych, or perhaps it was specific to this hospital.
I realized with a jolt that I did not know Ruhee’s specialty―I was ashamed to ask now, and stayed on the alert in case someone dropped a hint.
Jiten seemed to know Ruhee the best, as if he spent more time with her than others; so perhaps it was oncology.
In the middle of Jiten’s story about being stranded in a village med camp during the rainy season, Ruhee leaned her head against my shoulder and I didn’t hear the rest of the story.
It was really nice, beautiful like that, as if I’d entered another dimension, a place where I had friends.
Ruhee wrapped her arm around mine, and glancing at her watch I remembered my promise to return home early.
“Stay awhile,” Ruhee said. “What’s the rush?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I really was.
“Bring him around more,” Jiten said. “Where’ve you been hiding him. See ya, Zanjeer.”
Zanjeer. I liked that, who cared why? It was comforting and exhilarating to be amongst strangers and new friends. I walked home in the dark night, the stars glinting above, feeling at peace.
At the end of September, about six months after Ruhee and I met at the Irani café for the first time, she came to the water office unannounced. I was at my desk.
“Do you want to get married?” she asked.
“My mother, did she call you?” I said. “Just ignore her.”
“No. I’m asking you. Do you want to get married?”
She looked sad in the same way she did when I said I loved her.
All my life, I’d wanted to marry her. What reason did I have to say anything but yes?
Afterwards, though it wasn’t a Sunday, I went to the hospital. I climbed the twenty-eight steps, ran into a new orderly who insisted it wasn’t visiting hours until I slipped him a rolled-up fifty-rupee note.
I told Ganesh. “We are getting married,” I said. I held his warm hand for a while. “I won’t marry her if you don’t want me to,” I said.
Of course, Ganesh said nothing.
On the anniversary of my grandfather’s passing, my father performed a ritual called ‘the remembrance of fathers past.’ It was during the period, that summer, when I was avoiding Ganesh after visiting his home.
I was sitting cross-legged in our yard, between the priest and my father, wearing a dhoti, a cotton towel covering my torso, a shrine to my grandfather in front of us.
My job during the ritual remembrance of fathers past, was to stay by my father’s side.
To repeat the Sanskrit verses the priest asked us to repeat, to touch my father’s elbow, just a little resting of my fingertips against his skin, when he touched the three rice cakes in front of the shrine, one each for every father that came before him.
Touch his elbow, while he repeated the name of his father.
We offered water to the departed souls. Sesame seeds. Barley. Milk. Honey.
My father uttered the names of our forefathers in my ear, and I memorized them and repeated them out loud. Then we stood up and I washed my father’s feet with water.
And just like the day he’d cut down the papaya tree, Ganesh arrived at my house, opening and closing the latch of our gate as if he lived there.
He was holding a bundle of dry grass. As he came near I looked up at him, to show him I felt annoyed by his intrusion into this private family ritual, or that I didn’t want him there, or that I expected to see contrition from him for not trying to reach me, but when I looked, I saw that he felt sad and emotional, watching me and my father, as though something liquid and painful was moving around inside him.
And I felt it too, his pain, a sensation that brought a sharp ache to the center of my brow.
I wiped the tears in my eyes with the cotton towel around my shoulders. I felt so sorry for him.
Ganesh handed the bundle of grass to the priest. I held out my hand, alongside my father, for the priest to tie blades of grass around our ring fingers, offer blades of grass to the departed.
After the priest left, I was told to put the rice cakes near the trees, for the crows to take away. Ganesh stood up when I walked towards him, waited until I placed the rice cakes near the roots of the hibiscus tree.
“Stay for lunch,” I said.
Though my mother had made it a point to take Priya and leave before even the priest arrived, in the kitchen she’d cooked and left a hot lunch; just like she sent for the special dried grass Ganesh brought us.
She’d also left a covered bowl full of the round jaggery frites made only on the day of remembrance.
My mother did all this for me, so I could have this experience.
Ganesh and I sat on the kitchen stoop together, eating the sweet treats and saying nothing at all. What a good day that was, with the sky a clear pale blue, sifted here and there with white rolls of clouds, the sounds of songbirds and crows, the garden tap dripping away.
“Did you see your stepmother again?” Ganesh asked. “She’s such a nice lady.”
He was the first and only person to address her as such.
Of course they never married, because my mother would never divorce my father, but that’s who Gita Miss was, whether or not the society said so.
My stepmother. I told Ganesh no, I hadn’t seen her.
There was no reason for me to lie, and perhaps if Ganesh hadn’t referred to her as my stepmother I would’ve told him that I saw her at the bus stop that day and followed her home.
For some strange reason, she was at our neighborhood bus stop near the lending library.
She was changing buses, I realized; she might have missed the one that went to her apartment, or maybe the route was canceled that day.
She looked so frightened to find herself in our neighborhood, carrying the heavy bags of groceries.
I stayed in the library, to avoid her the discomfort of being seen by me, but when she got on the bus, I’d gotten on too.
Ganesh was saying something, but I didn’t hear him. “Do you want to come?” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Ruhee and I are going.”
I didn’t like that: Ruhee and I. What an irritating phrase. There was no Ruhee and I. The only reason they know each other at all was me. I said, “Where?”
“We’ll see.”
Though I had absolutely nothing to do, and was already planning my route around the neighborhood to avoid the time my mother would arrive home with Priya, I said, “What time?”
“What time? What big plans have you got? I’ll pull up to your gate and beep the horn. You’ll come.” With that he left.
As I waited for them on my stoop, I wondered how far their plans to have sex in the Red House had come.
That whole summer, I can’t think of a single day we weren’t together.
At least a few hours together if not the full day.
Ruhee had continued to go to her ‘math tutor’s’ and we hung out at the Red House instead.
It used to be that Ruhee and I spoke to one another, recalled funny events from our childhood, or chatted about Priya or her school or my school, and Ganesh, who had no way to contribute in these topics, was the listener-in.
But now, even those who knew Ganesh only in passing at the gymkhana would tease him, yelling, “There goes Tiger!” or make growling or hooting noises when we left the grounds, and he’d respond with, “Shut it!” looking equal parts pleased and annoyed.
The noises or the Tiger comments weren’t meant for me, of course.
It wasn’t a wonder they knew something was going on between him and Ruhee; people were always watching for these things.
Back then, love suicides were all the rage.
It was the transitional decade between strict arranged marriage culture and love marriage culture; if the parents don’t agree, you’d make a pact to die together.
Sometimes, falling in love was enough reason to make the death pact, without needing to ask the parents at all.
Because love suicides were common, love stories were also common; in fact, the more improbable the better, because it didn’t make sense to go to all that trouble for a probable love story.
Improbable ones had the ring of believability.
Take Gita Miss and my father, for instance; wasn’t that improbable?
Stepmother. How easily Ganesh had said it.
On the day I followed her home from the bus stand, Gita Miss had stuck out.
This wasn’t the neighborhood for dresses that bared one’s ankles, gauzy blouses; really anything abutting western clothing stuck out.
By the time I made it through the rear entrance of the bus, taking care not to be seen by Gita Miss, I was comfortably obscured by the throng of people between the ladies section in the front and the gents section in the back.
I wasn’t carrying any money, but I knew the conductor wouldn’t have time to reach me.
She was standing, holding two heavy jute bags of groceries, her delicate wrists straining with the weight.
She was being too polite, not nudging the women around her to make room for her bags. At her stop, I got off before she did.
For a few yards, I trailed her. The idlers and loafers sitting on the pavement, variously smoking or shooting the breeze, turned their heads to look her up and down.