XII. The Eagles Are Dying
XII
The Eagles Are Dying
“I’ve moved. I won’t ask you to do anything, just come to my new place. Please.”
It was Priya again. My sister was relentless.
“Your place?” I said. Nobody got invited to Priya’s, not even our parents. I was tempted.
“Bought it,” she said.
“You bought a house?”
“I bought a flat. You’d know, if you bothered to talk to me.”
“I’m sorry, Priya,” I said.
“Say congratulations, Arjun.”
“Congratulations, Priya.”
“I need you to come, Arjun. Please.”
I said I will, and took down the address. It was in the old neighborhood. I changed into my office clothes but didn’t look in the mirror before leaving.
“He hasn’t been coming home at all,” Priya said of my father.
We were in her kitchen. She was filling up a saucepan with water.
“It’s funny. The last time he left like this? Not returning for days or weeks, he did that when you graduated from college, and you were supposed to move to Bombay for that job. He didn’t do this when I left.”
By her tone, Priya was interpreting this as a lack of affection for her.
Her apartment was large and sparely furnished.
The door to the smaller bedroom, which her boyfriend was using as an office, was shut.
I could hear him puttering inside, but it didn’t bother Priya; she didn’t seem to think it awkward at all that he didn’t come out to say hello. I really wouldn’t mind saying hello.
“What’s with the stupid beard?”
I laughed.
“It looks terrible on you. And you’ve gotten so skinny. Are you dieting? Tell me the truth, I’ll make you live at home again you hear.”
I laughed.
Priya looked over her shoulder and smiled at me.
She lit the gas under the saucepan. She opened the cupboard and took out the tea box, put in two spoons.
She went to the large steel fridge and brought out the ginger box, broke off a nub, smashed it in the pestle and added it to the saucepan, turned up the heat.
I admired her looking so capable like this.
So domestic. So grown up. So independent. I loved that for her.
While the tea boiled, she came to sit at the granite island. “I really like the apartment, Priya,” I said. “It’s great.”
“We bought it,” she said.
“We?”
“Yeah,” she said, tilting her head towards the smaller bedroom.
Priya’s new place was on the top floor of a giant new apartment building, erected across four plots of land which previously contained old-fashioned cottage homes.
Up and down the street the old homes were being razed to make room.
The choice did not suit Priya, I thought.
I saw her as a person who’d buy an old house, admire the value of old-fashioned things.
“Ma helped me.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Did you get married, Priya? Is that what you’re telling me.”
“I don’t believe in marriage.”
She got up and went over to the stove, turned it down to a simmer. She added milk, swirled the saucepan to check the color and added some more. “Do you like it sweet?”
I nodded, because I knew Priya liked her chai sweet.
She added sugar, a few pods of cardamon, put the tea back on the stove and came back. “Anyway, I told her to stay out of it, we will never get married, and we could buy it whether or not I contributed, it didn’t matter. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She seemed to think that would put me ‘in debt.’”
I was certain it was our father who was behind it. He wouldn’t let her buy an apartment with someone and not have tangible rights over it.
“Where do you think she got it? The money?”
I shrugged.
Priya rolled her eyes and said: “‘Who else is there to look after me in my old age, anyway? Other than my daughter.’”
“I see.”
“She’s really angry with you, Arjun. I know I said I won’t ask you for anything, I’m sorry, but you really should go see her.”
I went to the stove and checked the color. “Where are your teacups?”
She pointed to the cabinet above the sink.
I brought down two teacups, opened a drawer out of habit as if it were my own kitchen. But the drawer had a sieve, and I poured out the tea.
Priya said: “It is a good thing. If she gets over it, it’s a good thing. We are both grown up and living away. They can finally be rid of each other forever.”
Priya did not know the first thing about our mother.
But I didn’t tell her that, I let her have the mother she wanted.
She was the little one, and she will have her childhood; that’s what it meant, to not say anything to disrupt her memories, even if it was the truth.
In carrying within her a mother wanted, she also carried a brother she wanted.
Someone pure, unmarred. She alone knew a part of me that remained so, because she’d kept it safe within her.
I went to her and hugged her. Priya stopped mid-sentence, and hugged me back. We stayed like that awhile.
Leaving her apartment, I took the stairs.
At each landing I looked over the parapet wall, at the solid ground below.
They used granite tiles to pave the driveway; what a ridiculously expensive choice, I thought.
We were pretty high up. The air was so good, the building brand-new; it all reminded me so much of Gita Miss’ apartment when she and my father first moved in together.
Then I understood Priya’s choice, why she chose to live in a new place like this.
All new apartments had that smell of fresh paint, ceramic floors, brand-new electrical wiring, spare furnishings.
Cleanness―that’s what it smelled like. Like cleanness.
I wished that Ruhee and I could live in new apartments forever, and never have anything that grew old and permanent.
That ridiculous granite driveway solidly under my feet, I walked out of the gate.
I attempted to return home straightaway.
Travel & Living was doing a show on Italian food.
I liked Italian, it was a flexible and adaptable cuisine, but most importantly, it took well to spice and heat, took well to veg, didn’t suffer from the problems of other continental cuisines that necessitated using beef or pork.
I’m sure Ruhee would love this dish I wanted to try: chicken alla diavola.
It sounded like chicken vindaloo, though the Italian version was a dry item.
On the street outside I ran into the maid who worked at my mother’s house, as one is wont to do in this neighborhood.
“Arjun-sir, going to see your mother is it?” she said. “How’s your missus?”
What freedom to loiter the old neighborhood again, dusk falling, the smell of mosquito coils enveloping me like a warm blanket. Before I knew it I ended up at the Red House.
You see, the land behind the Red House on good days―when the rest of the city was covered in pollution and development, when the eagles were dying, the monkeys were homeless and the landscape of streams and dry brush and massive boulders of Deccan rock have all vanished―on good days the woods behind the Red House remained caught in time, it was almost two acres, swollen with thornbushes, the ground wild with weeds and white chrysanthemums, like an ode to my childhood.
I went up the stairs to the roof. I looked at the beautiful chrysanthemums covering the ground below.
It was as perfect a place as I could ever imagine. My god, it was terrific.
Remember love suicides? Who committed those anymore, who loved like that anymore? What a joke.
Gita Miss’ apartment was on the outskirts back then, at any rate it was too far.
I couldn’t walk or run there, couldn’t risk her knowing what I did.
When finally she gave my father the phone I only remembered the instruction he gave me: Don’t touch anything.
Stand in the yard outside, near the hibiscus tree.
Wait for me, don’t do anything. I don’t know how long I waited, only that it was too long.
When my father came he sprayed me with the hose and told me what to believe. Yes, Daddy.
Time made all the difference. How alone Ganesh was in this perfect place, all the while I called and my father answered and he told me what to do, Ganesh was alone. Time made all the difference.
I looked at the welcoming field of thornbushes and chrysanthemums below me and thought, god, it was terrific. My god. How wonderful it would be to fall into the flowers.
But it wasn’t graceful or dignified, standing like this on the roof of the Red House. The maid had seen me, Ruhee would be ringing the doorbell. I moved. Got myself out of the woods, the gate, and managed to keep walking towards home.