XIV. Sweet Baby
XIV
Sweet Baby
I went to Ruhee’s hospital but didn’t go inside.
I sat on the lawn amongst other hospital visitors, chose a spot from where I could see the oncology ward.
I stayed for an hour or so, and for a few moments I was able to catch sight of Ruhee, her back to the window.
She was leaning over a patient, speaking, talking to a nurse, noting things down on a clipboard, all the gestures of the person she’d become and remain.
I was sorry that Ruhee found out. Glad, however, that she hadn’t found out earlier in life.
It would have ruined her, like it did me.
Ganesh was so passionate. Full of lifeforce, the will to live.
People like that should not be confined to a room all their lives, as immobile quadriplegics, able only to blink, look at me and me alone with bright brown eyes.
Say nothing, even when I laid down next to him and held him and said I was sorry.
It didn’t bring him back to life. Nothing I did would bring him back. My father knew that.
I didn’t insult her by asking her to stay, or giving her an explanation. In any case words were useless, they caused more harm than good. She would leave me and move back to Udupi, I knew that. I left a note at the front desk for Ruhee: Ganesh’s room number, the address of his hospital.
When Ruhee came it was already evening.
The sun was bright red turning to blue, the lovely light filling every inch of Ganesh’s room.
I sat on the metal stool by his bed. I closed the shaving kit and put in on my lap, wiped the moisture from his cheeks with a soft dry towel.
I straightened his new clothes. I smoothened a piece of stray hair that was falling across his forehead.
When I looked up, Ruhee was there. I don’t know how long she’d been standing there.
In the hospital room with Ganesh and me, Ruhee didn’t look angry. Or livid, or disappointed, or rageful. Instead, on her face was something unexpected. She looked from me to Ganesh and back again, as though it brought home something she hadn’t really registered.
For a brief moment she hesitated: It was a chance to take it back, step away, tell her I was stepping out so she could have a moment alone with a man she’d once loved.
But I stayed where I was. I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear the thought of taking the shaving kit off my lap and leaving it on the floor, standing up, taking a step back.
Instead, I grabbed Ganesh’s hand, as though I was afraid Ruhee would take him away from me.
I don’t know, I might’ve cried. I don’t know.
“Oh, Arjun,” Ruhee said.
His hand was so warm in mine, I couldn’t care about anything else.
I held his hand to my chest and wiped my tears against my sleeve, the way a child wept, not a man.
Ruhee said my name again, said she would have understood.
If not her, who else was there to understand?
She was my friend, I should have told her.
What do you understand? I wanted to say but didn’t.
I hope I gave her peace.
She moved back to Udupi and lived in the shingled house I’d rented for us.
It didn’t have a garden, and at night everything grew hushed, the waves rolled in, the crickets chittered and the bullfrogs gave out long croaks.
It suited her enough that she got a dog, a chocolate-colored Labrador that pranced beside her when she went on beach walks.
Ganesh had lied to her about who he was, but he had loved her.
Their future had been snatched away from them by an act of god.
He hadn’t abandoned her, hadn’t left her to suffer, wouldn’t have permitted it.
Remember how he beat on the boy to protect her honor?
I remember vividly his anger, the way he’d lingered on her face afterwards, allowed her, in his own way, to let things go.
How beautiful this life was, things came around and around again.
Still, it was a nice feeling. To hold Ganesh’s hand in front of another person.
To see in her eyes the dawning look of understanding and recognition.
All love stories had interlopers. Me? I was their interloper, she’d forget about me in later years; just someone who’d gotten in the way, as interlopers are wont to do.
I was glad to have given her this small peace, she deserved it.
Some weeks afterwards, I was cleaning out our apartment, and I discovered the beers still sitting in the cabinet.
I wanted to drink them, taste one sweetly rotting mouthful of such brief happiness.
I poured them down the sink, but kept the bottles.
I put them on my desk, in my room. Next to my terracotta pig.
Whoever was hired to replace me at the water office rarely answered the phone, rarely reported the pressure readings to the engineer on time, according to my supervisor.
They’d had an expensive main line accident, they were happy to have me back.
There was my desk facing the digital monitors, looking undisturbed, there was the phone that only rang when someone called to complain that their taps were dry.
Leaving the office, I stopped at the supermarket and bought a few bars of my old soap again, to overwhelm the smell of chlorine on my skin.
When I returned home, I left my shoes outside but kept my socks on.
My feet were damp. I stopped and picked up a bottle of water from the neat row my mother kept on our dining table.
The rice cooker was beeping. The TV was on, the intro to the evening news was playing.
Anyway, it was Sunday tomorrow. Priya would come home for Sunday breakfast. I’d leave with my shaving kit, spend the day with Ganesh.
To be completely truthful, this is the only rhythm of life that fits me, one that contains some living thing to love. I really believe that.