PART 4 #3
Maa’s not wrong; she keeps quite busy. But after Papa’s death, the image of Maa wandering around the house not knowing what to do started to haunt me and seared itself into my consciousness.
Her person, the one supposed to be with her for life, Papa, was now gone.
We knew he’d started dying the moment he saw his son’s body hanging from the fan.
Soon after Gaurav’s suicide, we moved out of the city and the apartment that had brought death to our lives and moved to Dehradun where the silence descended on the Madan household.
Once the silence retreated, we realized Papa didn’t speak any more.
He would sit in an old, tattered chair in the corner and just stare endlessly out of the window.
His grief sucked away at him, and it started to take a toll on him; colds came first, then a murmur in his heart and pain in his limbs, followed by arthritis.
It was as if he was killing himself; not in the violent way his son had done, but by making his organs fail slowly.
While Maa and I recovered—as well as you can when someone in your family thinks it’s better to kill themselves than live with you—Papa didn’t.
At first, we resented him for not joining us in our healing process.
Yet, how long can you stay mad at someone when they are so broken?
His slow death lasted for a year and a half.
After watching him slowly die for so long, it was a relief that his suffering finally ended.
But, as usual, the women were left to grieve alone.
I enrolled in a psychology course and Maa joined the Lioness Club—a committee of women who celebrated festivals, chatted and held lively kitty parties.
Initially, it was an escape from all the time she used to spend caring for Papa, but eventually, it became an all-consuming obsession, and she poured all her time and energy into it.
She reached the rank of president and grew the club’s membership three times its original size.
In two short years, the Lioness Club was a legitimate charity organization working under the garb of just a few women hanging about.
Maa had gone from housewife to cut-throat deal-cutter in the blink of an eye.
Now, when I look at her, I recognize that it was not Papa but Maa who had instilled my drive in me.
I can’t help but wonder how many women remain hidden in the shadows of their partners when they could be managing a team of 200 housewives, hopping between twenty WhatsApp groups and organizing jagratas and blood donation camps with equal gusto.
‘Find someone for you,’ says Maa. ‘. . . I need to go. Eat properly, okay?’
She always needs to go. I’m sure though, she will call back later and ask me to try harder to find someone.
She will say I need someone even though she’s like a lone lioness prancing through life.
Sometimes we end up fighting and I tell her she just wants me off her back.
Part of it is true. I have become clingy. She’s my only family left.
‘Next time you come to Bangalore, I will have a few more lined up,’ says Vanita.
‘I don’t know when the next roadshow will be.’
‘Whenever it’s happening, give me a week’s heads-up,’ she says.
‘Also, I talked to Rajat, he has a bunch lined up in Delhi. We will get you married off before the end of the year, you will see, pregnant by the next, and then, finally, I will give you the breast pump I have saved for you. I’m so excited! ’
‘What’s it with married friends wanting their friend—’
‘—having similar life experiences is what bonds people for life,’ Vanita cuts in.
3.
Daksh Dey
I’m outside Summer House in Alaknanda, and I’m told the words I haven’t heard in the longest time.
‘Stags aren’t allowed.’
‘A friend is about to join.’
The bouncers and the manager are unmoved.
For a moment, I feel angry. Does he not know I’m a decent guy, a family man?
And then I check my thoughts. Of course, he doesn’t.
We, as men, have pushed ourselves into this corner.
I can no longer look at a cute baby in a mall or on the street and think, ‘Oh, wow, cute baby!’ without their protective parent looking at me as if I’m a paedophile or a kidnapper.
And right now, there’s no way the bouncers can know that I wouldn’t go inside, get drunk and harass someone.
If there’s a girl, then the girl takes the responsibility.
So like the other guys—in their mid-twenties—I’m standing there, a thirty-four-year-old man, waiting for Heena, my date, to arrive so that we can go inside.
When she spots me, recognition flashes in her eyes.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, as she waves, smiling at the bouncer and telling him, ‘He’s with me.’
‘It’s our fault,’ I counter. ‘We did stupid things and now we have to stand outside clubs as if we’re in a line-up of pickpockets.’
‘They are a little strict,’ she says. ‘Heena, by the way.’ She thrusts out her hand at me and I shake it.
It’s still early by Delhi lounge-club-drinking-scene standards, only eight, so the place is half empty, the lights are on, the music isn’t ear-splitting yet and the floor’s not sticky with spilt drinks.
I’m immediately struck by how old I have become.
Most of the people around me are in their early twenties, closer to Rabbani’s age than mine.
I had asked her once if she would feel embarrassed if she encountered me at a club, dancing with other thirty-three-year-old friends of mine.
She replied that she wouldn’t care; what does age have to do with having fun?
But age has everything to do with it. Looking at these kids chugging back shots of vodka with no fear of consequences, I can’t help but feel a little envious of their metabolic rates.
It’s something I used to have too. I feel like an uncle. No, correction—I am an uncle.
‘This place used to be called Turquoise Cottage back in the day,’ I tell Heena, like a legitimate uncle talking wistfully about the old times. What will I do next? Tell her about how we used to ride horses to school?
‘Did you like it back then?’ she asks.
‘Never gave that much thought,’ I say with a shrug.
Heena, a software engineer at Infosys, has been chatting with me for three days now. She told me over the chat that the most attractive thing about me was my grammar. Then she googled me, found my podcast, discovered that I’m divorced and yet kept talking to me.
‘What did you mean when you said you’re an old soul?’ I ask her as we nurse our beers. It was a part of her bio.
‘I’m old-fashioned,’ she answers. ‘. . . in love, in the things that I do. I like to take it slow. Also, I was running out of things to write in the bio.’
‘What do you like to do?’
‘I read books,’ she answers. ‘Mostly fiction. I heard your podcast. I know you’re more into non-fiction.’
‘Only parenting-related non-fiction though,’ I clarify, ‘not the productivity books.’
She laughs. ‘Those are the worst.’
‘I agree.’
‘My female colleagues keep talking about how these types of books are all written by men for men because, for women with a family or elderly parents, productivity is just not an option. You can’t zone out from the rest of your life just to work.
It’s only possible if your mom or wife or sister takes care of everything else. ’
‘That’s what my sister says too.’
‘You look younger than your pictures,’ she remarks. ‘And that’s saying something.’
‘You look exactly like your pictures. I mean that as a compliment.’
She smiles. ‘You never know with dating apps. Dating is a minefield, isn’t it? You don’t know what you will step into.’
‘People who walk into literal minefields would take exception to that analogy,’ I say. ‘And I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been dating. So, how’s work?’
She talks about her work and asks me about the motorcycle trip across Europe that I organize every year with a small group of twenty people with the will to go on a messy trip and the money to spare.
Heena and I drink slowly and yet the bottles keep piling up on our table.
‘How you raised your sister is amazing,’ she says. ‘Even grown men wouldn’t have been able to do that.’
‘To be fair, Rabbani is amazing. She raised herself. And who knows how I would have acted if I wasn’t pushed into it.’
‘Stop pretending to be humble,’ she brushes me off. ‘I stopped doing that long ago. The more you say it, the more people believe it.’ She takes a sip and catches my gaze. ‘Why did you swipe right on me?’
‘My sister did,’ I start with the truth. ‘She thinks I need to go out.’
She smiles. ‘And you don’t agree with her? You’re like mid-thirties. It’s natural for her to think that you should . . .’
‘Settle down? On my way here, I was thinking about it. Settling down. But then I thought, I have done all of that. Raised a child, been with someone, then not been with someone. What part of settling down is left?’
‘Having someone to grow old with? Not returning to an empty house?’
‘My father is the busiest person you will meet. He has built an entire city around himself. Co-workers, friends, running partners, poker partners. So yeah, I’m a little on the fence regarding that. But, Heena, you want to settle down? That’s like . . . what you want.’
‘That’s why I’m on this first date, right?’
I nod, trying to hide that this will probably be the last time I will see her. It has nothing to do with her. She’s intelligent, smart and attractive. But I don’t see the point.
‘. . . but of course, I know this is going to end on this first date,’ she says with a smile.
And she’s intuitive.
‘Why do you say that?’ I ask her.