Joy
(written in 2004)
12th December 1999
I am a doctor, not a writer. I write reports, not poems. The words I choose are dry and dull. I read, so I know the pretty words, but when I write, I don’t remember, and when I do, they don’t flow and they don’t fit. And where would I use the pretty words – in my patient reports?
“Dry, dull, and dead,” Rohit whispers into my ear, as he leans over my shoulder to read the night report I am writing. “Constipated. Like the English.” He is leaning further and futher forward, breathing down my neck now, lower and into my chest now, into the space between my tight blouse and my chest. “English,” he whispers. The “sh” is cool. I feel cool, between-teeth air go down my blouse. “Englishshsh,” he repeats. And again. With the soft of my palm, I push his forehead away. Gently. His hair is in the spaces between my fingertips.
He gives me a quick peck on my cheek and stands up. Suddenly straight. Suddenly distant. My neck turns – involuntarily. A breath stops in my chest.
“Your head,…” He reaches into my report and draws a square and a triangle on top of the square: a storybook house, with a red brick roof, like the ones in English storybooks, (do houses in England look like that?) “… is a house.”
Inside the house, he draws rectangles: bricks. All the bricks are words of three and four letters. One line reads: CAT CAN DO DOG.
“The house was built by your Anglo-Saxon granny. It has no windows. No doors. You can’t get out.”
He drops the pen. From behind me, he runs his index fingertips under my eyes, down my cheeks, by my nose, and touches the nose studs on either nostril. I crane my neck up to his face and his upside down lips smile. And they do not mock me.
Love … flows.
But that’s not true, what he says. My sentences are brief and active, yes, but only because that is how they told me to write at Medical College. Thanks to my grandmother I am one quarter British, and although my hair is thick, long, and crow black, my skin is light. I have long lashes and big eyes and my breasts are full but my hips are not – and so, for Indian men, I am beautiful. I am grateful for that beauty. But I am not constipated. I get sad and angry and happy. I try to let my feelings flow. And when I handwrite my reports, the letters are cursive not printed, and they flow into each other, and the words begin and end with a little curl. A little flourish.
And I am not always direct. I don’t always get straight to the point. I haven’t told you my point yet, have I?
I try to read poetry – a little Shakespeare or Dante, sometimes Tagore – every working night.
I am from Bengal, and in her heart, a Bengali woman is a poet.
The Ganges flows from ice. I think poetry flows from pain. And I have felt pain.
15th December 1999
When I read the words I write, they jar me. They come in bursts. They don’t flow; they stick. My paragraphs are unconnected within themselves.
Poetry flows from pain. From the melting of long-frozen pain? Or from a sharp, intense downpour?
They say talking helps, but I have no one to talk to.
Maybe, soon, the words will flow. Maybe my story will end with a flourish?
Sheetal is a troubled, underweight thirty-four year old, suffering from an as yet undiagnosed psychotic disorder. Two months ago, Sheetal was admitted into the psychiatric ward of the Delhi hospital where I am a resident doctor. At twenty-six, I am the newest and junior-most doctor and so from Sunday through Friday, I am assigned to the night shift.
In the evening, when my husband Benoy returns from work, he drops me off at the hospital. I have with me a couple of books of poetry and my purse. For the first couple of hours, I try to read. Sometimes a patient will distract me. Mrs. Singh, who has been here for a year, will come running out of her room in her nightdress, or sometimes without her nightdress, and she will run straight to the second floor exit, to the door with the green-tinted, one-and-a-half-inch-thick glass, and through it. Or so she thinks. I hear the thud and the heavy body, sometimes in the rustling cloth, sliding against the glass and I lift my sari above my ankles and run out. By the time her attendant comes running out of her room she is on the floor, holding her head, tears rolling soundlessly, hiccups shaking her body. The attendant and I will pick her up and drag her, her thick legs sliding on the floor, her nightdress billowing wide from the wind of the ceiling fan – an open umbrella, to her door. He holds her, I open the door, prop it open, he drags her in, and I lock the door from the outside. A double-stemmed mushroom. Round legs – bulging out then in, thighs swelling, shins curling in to toe the heels. My last view.
In another hour, I will begin to drift in and out of sleep. Read, then sleep, then read, then sleep. The words are unclear now. Maybe they are subconsciously entering my head? Maybe I will be a poet in the morning?
In the morning, I comb my hair, wait for the day doctor, and when he gets here I take the bus back home. I’m very tired. Often, I am terse with my husband. Sometimes I am rude.
17th December 1999
It’s Thursday today. Another Thursday night, two months ago, Sheetal was admitted to the hospital. And a week after Sheetal was admitted to the hospital, I heard a sharp rapping on the locked door of the second floor entrance. Three sharp, loud, distinct knocks. Because I am only the night doctor, I have no need for a proper office with the other doctors’ offices. My room – the Doctor on Duty room – room is beside the nursing station of the Psychiatry Ward, on the second floor of our six-storey building. Behind my “Doctor on Duty” sign, on my desk beside the nursing station, I had drifted off to sleep with my head on the newspaper.
I walked around my desk, outside my tiny room and past the nurse on duty at the nursing station. She was rubbing her eyes and as I walked past her, the eyes looked past the rubbing hands to show me their chagrin. From the green-tinted glass on the top half of the locked door, I saw what I thought to be a tall boy, in blue jeans and a green sweater. Behind him stood the watchman, with his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The hand was meant to restrain, but the shoulder was still. There was no tension, no desire in that shoulder to break free of the hand. The watchman looked at me with uncertainty. I looked at my watch. It was three a.m.
A foot away from my face, the boy rapped on the glass again. He had a military green rucksack on his back. His black hair was cut short, like a soldier’s, very short, almost shaved on the sides, and a half-inch long on top. I unlocked the door and opened it about six inches.
“Hello doctor,” he said in American-accented English. “I’m very sorry to bother you – at this time – but my sister, Sheetal, is in this hospital. I just flew in from the U.S. Landed an hour ago. I need to see her.”
He was about six feet tall, broad shouldered, and big boned – raised on milk and meat – and dressed like a very proper American educated boy would be, in a faded, collar-less t-shirt and a button shirt that hung loose on top of the t-shirt, over old, overbled jeans that hung loosely over his legs. It was casual clothing; it showed disdain – the working classes wear long-sleeved shirts tucked into belted trousers, and breeding – it was quiet, dark green and blue, not loud-colored or checked or striped. He wore sneakers, not leather shoes, which made him even more boyish, but the sneakers were dark blue and quiet, not loud. The hair was fine and straight, and cut short, like it was never meant to be, it stood on end.
I must have been inspecting him for a little too long because the watchman’s hand had fallen off the shoulder; somehow they were both inside the hallway now, and the boy was looking past and around my five feet five inches and straggles of undone hair, at the rooms behind me.
“I think she is in Room 19,” he said, and indicated the door with his chin. He spoke with a man’s voice, low, clear, and distinctly spaced.
“What’s her name?” I asked, then remembered that he had told me. At that the watchman slipped out the door and as the door swung shut behind him, I awoke.
“You have to leave. Come back in the morning. Do you know what time it is?”
But his eyes smiled, although his lips stayed straight and serious and he didn’t respond to my words. He didn’t need to. After a moment the eyes turned to my lapel, bold upon my lapel, upon my husband’s name, bold so they burned through my lapel, so I felt the heat on my breast. His eyes turned serious. Then, softly, from deep within his throat, he spoke. I think he said: “What’s wrong with my sister, Doctor Dé?”
19th December 1999
He came up behind me softly as I read and I knew he was behind me and I did not turn. He touched the side of my right upper arm. I turned full circle and stepped into him and my lips were on his.
I think it was about two o’ clock on the night after he came. He had received permission to stay in his sister’s room, they told me. I was nodding off into Tagore’s Gitanjali. Actually, I had nodded off. My cheek was resting on Gitanjali and I heard his steps and I was on my feet, my senses were sharp as cut glass. Now, again, my senses are cut glass.
His sneakers were soft outside my door. So soft I could pretend to be engrossed and not hear. My feet were asleep. I stood up, went up on my toes, settled on my heels. Up then down. Soundless. Even my shoes did not clop. I did not turn, pretended to be reading. Standing to stay awake? Enthralled by the beauty of the words I read? My mind was darting. I was light, very light, as if I was filled with helium, sealed, and eager to float. On the skin of my bare stomach, I felt my silk sari; it was caressing. When I breathed out, my stomach sank in, and silk parted from skin. The skin was awake, anticipant. When I breathed in, my breasts strained against the tight, blue blouse. Moist rings of sweat on my underarms. A bead was rolling down from one of the rings. He was behind me.
His fingers on my arm, slipped inside the arm of my blouse, a little inch then nothing, light and creeping a hello, then they were gone. I spun around.
My breasts were crushed against stomach muscle; my hair was inside his shirt, on his chest. I was digging into him, eager to fall into him. He eased back, stepped back – surprised? I stepped forward with him. He pulled his upper lip away from between mine and I fell into his chest, holding his shirt by the open lapels and breathing into him, wanting to be inside his clothes, wanting to hide within his chest hair.
“I know you,” he whispered into my neck, in my ear. It was low, a smiling whisper. I couldn’t look up into his face but I saw the smile.
“I know you.” A growl.
“Why do I know you?”
Then he kissed me again, stepped forward, enveloping me, his legs around mine, and his feet were walking, and he was holding me up, pushing me back, walking me until I was walled by white cement and muscle. And when my back touched the wall I slid to the floor and my legs opened under my sari and he leaned forward, his hands on either side of me, leaned into me, his chest on my breasts, weight on me, hard weight upon my breast, then he was off.
He was hard against me, holding me up by my arms, tight on my arms, soft on my face, … then away. Watching me – closed-eyed me? Smiling benevolence upon eager me? Hard on my breasts, soft on my lips, so soft a soft lip touching my shut eyelid, dancing upon my ear, peeking under my chin, searching my neck hollow, hovering,… he hovered over my open lips, … nothing. Hard then nothing. I feel, crave, lunge for hard. He breathed deep and from his lips he spread cool air on my face, down my neck, into me, and he sank. Rested his torso upon mine. His arms in soft wool around my bare arms, his chest on my breasts. But he started to away and I wanted him on and I pulled his shoulders, his chest, his hair, him, onto me, and his thigh came between my legs where I cradled it in my warm and I held … tight.
He was laughing now, laughing noiselessly as he sprang open the clasps of my blouse, pull so I strain, strain against cotton cloth, release, laughing at me, with me, for me, laughing. No malice. No pain. No hurt. No anger. Just joy. When my breasts fell out of my bra, my eyes were shut, and he was laughing and when he stopped laughing, he was smiling, smiling in anticipation, when his lips came down upon my breasts they were smiling. With happiness. He was happy. It was happy. Joy! Happy! You hear me? I was happy!
It’s all I want.
Sex! I’ll say it again! I want sex. Again and again and again. And again. And then I’ll die.
20th December, 1999
He teaches History in the U.S. In Chicago. Or some small town outside Chicago. He was born in India, moved there with his father when he was twelve. He’s not a boy; he’s twenty-five, but he is happy, he looks younger. He’s not a banker or an engineer or a Computer Engineer. He teaches History.
His father is an engineer. At first he wanted his son to be a businessman. Then, he realized, Rohit was quiet, an introvert. He’d be a good doctor. He would make good, steady income. You will save life, he told him. But Rohit didn’t want to be a doctor.
I want joy, love, happiness. I want high, the love high. Forever high.
I want to be like him – free.
22nd December, 1999
It is Wednesday tonight. You know now that I am in love. Know now that I am alone in love. Rohit left for the States a month ago. For the past two weeks, I have lived as if he were here.
I have written – and relived.
Must I know that he will never return to me?
I feel like a tree whipped long by an incessant storm, now left to ponder. For a whole month, when he was here, I didn’t think, just watched as the wind bent me and twisted me, snapped my twigs, caressed and fondled me, shook my roots.
Now the wind is gone and my roots are moved.
What shit!
I am shrill as a broken violin, leaky as a cowdung hut in a nonstop rainstorm.
I look through the glass of my room to the nurses’ station. The blinds are all the way up and I can see that nurse on night duty is asleep. So is the watchman. I guess I have no one to speak with.
That’s a joke.
They are always asleep. And I don’t say a word when they are awake. I have nothing to say to them.
What would I speak of? Tagore? Or Wordsworth, perhaps? My feelings? Should I flirt with Matthew, the neat, handsome nurse? Tap my pen on the table, turn up my chin on my palm, hold my neck tilted to the left and my eyes tilted back to the right, pout my lips, the insides a juicy smile, the outsides thin, curled into exasperation, and flash my big eyes. Yes?
I’ve done that.
I stopped talking. It began a year ago, when we first moved from Calcutta to Delhi. I had no one to talk to. So, slowly, I stopped. A psychologist would say I was adjusting. I needed to talk. To whom would I talk?
There are the nurses. They’re all from Kerala, the educated state of the south; they moved north so they could work, feed themselves, send some money to the struggling family, and then, marry. They have a twelfth standard education and two years of nursing college.
My friends?
What friends?
Mary? She’s pretty, perhaps the prettiest of all the nurses. Often, there is a man with her when she comes to the hospital. If she sees me coming, getting out of the car, she will wait until Benoy drives off, brush down her Salwar suit self-consciously, and fall into step with me. As a conversation starter, she begins to complain about the man who just dropped her off. Then she will start on that doctor who likes her. Then, perhaps, she will brighten, talk about the clothes sale at MotiChor’s. I don’t face her, don’t nod; I give no sign that I’m listening. When we get to the door, she sighs a heavy sigh – men! Work! – she could be complaining about anything, shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and smiles at me. I look at her for that smile, then away when she smiles that smile. I know she will smile. I wait for that smile. It will make me feel like shit for the next few minutes, I know. We come to the door. I pull it open for her. She smiles. I jerk away from that repulsive fakeness. She doesn’t notice.
What about the happy ones?
What happy ones?
I guess a few of them… a couple? – truly care. They don’t get involved but they don’t make fun of the patients. But sometimes, when the cleaning man or the Chaiwallah’s boy make a joke about a patient, they laugh.
Sometimes, we all do.
If they are unmarried, they are unhappy, unfulfilled, and thirsty. And they’re stupid. Beronica is noisy, a loud-mouthed, guffawing optimist. Milicent … is quiet. She’s reticent. When I know her, I will know that she is mute because she is empty.
Well,…
She touched me. Milicent did. The night that Rohit left, with her eyes. She knows about Rohit, knows he left. A soft glow from a tentative Deepawali° diya,° and I was cold. So she flickered out.
Why would she talk to me?
Why talk? I didn’t even speak with him, when he was here – just lived, satiated. Took him in, let him do with me what he did.
Why talk? Do I need to talk?
23rd December, 1999
Every morning, when I step out of the hospital to walk to the bus stop, I take off my shoes and walk on bare feet through a small garden outside our building. It is 30 yards long, and 20 yards wide, our garden.
But every morning, when I leave my building, I stand on the top step that leads down to the garden and look up, around me, at the grey city.
It is six-thirty and already the city has begun to smoke. On the road home, there is an endless line of soot-greying cars stuck to one another. Somewhere in that line, my bus is stuck to the mating line; as it gets hotter inside, people sweat until they could stick. In a half hour I will get on that bus.
There is a parking lot just outside the garden. Cars are closeted, one stuck to another, just fifty yards away. Some have drivers who are waiting for their masters, reading the newspaper or a lurid Hindi novel, waiting. Some are just hovering, some alone, some in swarms. They encircle me. If I look at them I see that they watch me with interest. If I don’t I can pretend they don’t exist. Today, they will not exist. I’m in a prairie – a grassland where there is only grass and I ... I walk.
After every few yards I run an eight around a circle of a purple-flowered, light green leafed Azalea bush. For a while I walk around the purple upon light, light green, and I am upon darker green, of the grass around the purple, and I walk on – and grass takes over. I need to look no further because I am within, within a sea of grass that has no end. My head hangs low, leans thirsty into the dew, I’m bent like a stork leaning into life-giving water, and there is only life giving water – I will drown in the grass – and from the corner my eyes see a light green sheath around dark and … I almost ran into a tree. Light, yellow-green leaves or are they flowers?; they ring the dark, deep green within. And I ring circle upon circle of the tree and feel the wet green pricks upon my bare soles and insoles, between my toes and underneath, in the crook where the toes meet the thick arches of my Bengali feet. And when I am almost full, I turn, return to walk a circle of the garden and another and another, and then I see the red. Red! Red flowers shock the green. They hedge the greenness, they shock the green. I look back at the green upon green of my tree, the purple green of the Azalea, and the red upon green of the hedge – I step back. I stumble back. I’ve discovered the pattern. Circles! Concentric rings of color!
Every morning I discover the pattern.
Why can’t I rejoice in the love that we had? What fun – oh, so much fun! Each moment we spent together was joy.
Actually, I know only that each moment I was in joy.
Can I relive that joy?
Every day.
For the rest of my life.
24th December, 1999.
It’s Christmas Eve and it’s a Friday and I don’t have to be here – but I volunteered. I told Benoy that I had to be here because the other night doctor couldn’t make it. Benoy is a dear.
Benoy tells me he loves my eyes and so when I married him I began to inspect them in the mirror. Now, I look at them in the mirror each night, before I go to work. When I draw soft rings of eye-liner around them, the black is luminous within the liquid white and the black outside is a duller – it makes the inner white clash with vivid, jet black. Yes. They are beautiful.
Rohit never said a word about my eyes. He never gave me a compliment, except once. He was talking about Sheetal and how she raised him like a mother. I told him that Sheetal was angry with him. He looked at me with a quizzical expression. For a moment he was bemused. Then his eyes widened. His face widened, the little cracks disappeared, as if a light beneath the skin had been turned on. He looked at me with admiration, then tenderness, and then a thank you I cannot forget. “You’re very perceptive,…” he said. I think he stopped because he had forgotten my name.
For twenty minutes each morning Benoy and I are alone. I return from hospital and he has jam, butter toast and coffee ready for himself and rice or chapatti, dal, and a vegetable – dinner – warmed for me. For twenty minutes he tends to me. Here is what happens.
He is sipping his coffee and reading the paper. The bell rings. He folds up his paper in a hurry and smushes it up more than a little, slips into his chappals°, sometimes one or the other has slipped far under the dining table so he can’t find it, and then when he runs to the door his feet shuffle unevenly and his hair is falling over his anxious eyes and they are so eager to see me.
We hug tight. He holds me for ten seconds and then, too soon, too sudden, with a jerk of his arms as if he is done, done with a job, he lets go. “You’re so tired,” he always says. “You need to stop working these crazy hours.”
He knows and I know I have to work these crazy hours if we are to live in a South Delhi flat, have a small car, if I am to be a woman who hires a woman to do the floor and the laundry, and someday, maybe, has a child. I’m tired. I walk past him. He shuffles after me. We eat. He looks at the paper, eats, looks at me with guilt, shuts the paper. Midway through my meal he begins to looks at his watch and his eyes become apologetic because in two minutes he must leave.
26th December, 1999
Many people tell me that I have poise. They say I am unruffled. I am proud of that. My father taught me the value of being outwardly serene.
My mother is like a sparrow. She chatters because that’s what she is. A chatterbird. When I was a child, all day she chattered – her voice nervous, high-pitched, and chopped into clumps of dissonant words, her words short and sharp-edged – about anything and everything. Everything worried her: if I walked barefoot, I would catch a cold, if I walked with socks, the socks would get dirty, and if I walked with slippers inside the house… the slippers had been outside, they belonged at the door. But when my father came home it was as if the sparrow had been fed white bread dipped in sleep-drugged milk. She was quiet and calm, her eyelids fallen to half shut. She moved about the house in slow, heavy steps, and they were measured evenly, with composure, not hurriedly, with trepidation, and her voice, when she spoke, was soft and level. Peace descended upon the house.
When Rohit rapped on the door I had poise. Never mind that he woke me up at three in the morning with my cheek stuck to the newspaper on my desk. My chin was high. I walked to the door with poise. But when the door banged shut behind the watchman, when Rohit walked first to the wrong room, then, after entering and being rebuffed, towards the nurses’ night station, when he peered at my name on my office and walked inside, when I walked into my office behind him, stood looking at his tall back curved, slouched on the chair in my office, his face in his hands, I did not know the meaning of the word poise. I was not Amina Dé, physician, daughter of Ashok Bannerjee, physician, calm in adversity. I was standing, I think, because I was trying to
find me.
27th December, 1999
Indians know that the eyes can tell stories. The classical vocalist spends years to learn control over her voice; the Kathak dancer, who tells a story from her fingers and eyes, learns to play with her eyes. She relates epics – without opening her mouth. And if you know how to watch, you will know why. People of culture have steady eyes; eyes that express. People of culture don’t use their mouths when they can use their eyes.
My husband? I have tried to teach him the language of the eyes. He asks me, eager love in his eyes, how my day was, and I answer, with my eyes, and he repeats his question. “How was your day?”
How do I tell him that words are ugly and limited, that words express little, that words are inexact? That they mean many things and so nothing, that when they come out of his mouth they are sometimes hoarse and sometimes shrill, sharp and short, dull and tired, and they say so many different things and they don’t know what they say. He doesn’t care to know what they say. And they are restless, they are pungent, and they rot, the little droppings, they fester restlessly in the space between us.
My husband is eager as a puppy dog. He wants to please me, to make me happy, to keep me happy all the time.
We haven’t had sex in six months.
December 28, 1999
Yesterday, I told puppy dog.
He runs up to me when I walked in the door, my puppy dog, and he hugs me. He doesn’t kiss. He hugs.
“Your sari is wet,” he complains as his leg brushes the bottom of my sari. His voice is concerned. Behind his glasses, are his fat eyes suspicious? The fool.
“I’ve been with someone, you fool.”
“What? Today?”
“What do you mean, today?”
“What?”
I look into his eyes.
Finally, he is blank. A half-minute. He starts again. “You’ve been with someone,” the words come out slow, spaced, not clean and intentional and attention seeking. He’s not slow and enunciated, not haughty and supercilious, not angry. Just soft, breathing out words in little bursts.
Rohit is gone. Why am I telling him now?
“Yes.” I walk past him into the living room, pull one of our straight-backed, wooden dining table chairs. I sit and it wobbles under me and I steady it with my feet on the floor. My back is straight. I wait for him.
“I’ve been with someone, Rohit. I mean Benoy. Sorry, Benoy. Benoy.” I repeat, firmly, a little angry. My feet are strong on the floor. My legs are tight; inside my shoes, my feet are curled tight around flat floor.
I will be clear, calm, confident.
“I’ve been with someone, Benoy. His name is Rohit. Not today, not last night. I mean, I’ve been with someone. I’ve had an affair.”
He takes his place at the table and his fat eyes blink at me with uncertainty, indecision. A tuft of hair has fallen onto his glasses. I always brush it back. I reach out and put it back in place. His eye beneath the glass beneath where the hair was – it pools. Now it pools over. A tentative tear creeps out. Now it is swift down his flat cheek.
“It’s ok,” I say.
I put a hand on his two hands, folded on the table. I cover half the small, hairy back of his palms, the bones jut out. The knuckles are sharp, they poke out from between my forefinger and thumb. There’s black hair on the backs of his fingers, on the back of his hand, covering thick green veins. Tiny hair sprout in between poking knuckles. He seems to be watching the hair. His neck is tight. Under his slipping jaw – he is only thirty, he is thin, his clothes hang, but his jaw has slid to the middle of his neck – I think his jaw is clenched. He is very still.
Why am I telling him?
He jerks up. His neck cranes so his eyes can see the clock over my head. It’s time for work. “I have to go.”
“Ok.” Needless.
“I have to go.” His voice is dull, not angry, just dull. But he sits.
Then he stands up, looks around, and walks out the corridor, out the door. My legs relax; my toes uncurl. I breath a deep breath, smile with relief. With anticipation.
I see his briefcase on the floor.
He’s left his briefcase. He walked over it actually, neatly sidestepped his work. I stride to the door.
“Benoy!” He starts, looks back at me, fat eyes, widened by glasses, small mouth open. A triangle of goldfish O’s bulging wide with mistrust. Pathos curves their ends into tiny tails.
I’m going to eat you, goldfish.
I hold out his briefcase.
“You’ve – been – with – someone.” His breath spaces out the words, a little burst of air between each word. There’s no anger or shock in the voice; no, his voice is not shrill, not the way it gets when he’s shocked or in deep sorrow. Four soft, little words carried on a rocking breath. He turns around, walks to the car. From the car, he looks at me once, then backs up and drives away.
29th December, 1999
The house is fraying. The wallpaper is tearing off in chunks. When Benoy gets up from his chair, he grinds it hard against the ground so I feel like crying in pain and anger. Today, when arrive home and put my key in the lock, I heard his chair shuffle in uncertain haste, just like it used to. His feet shuffled too, in his slippers, but then the noise stopped. As I pushed the door open, I looked down the narrow corridor that leads into the living room: Benoy standing in uncertainty. His newspaper was still in his hand. When he saw me, he sat down in his chair and with his feet he pushed back against the floor. The top of the chair hit the wall, his head hit it behind the chair, and both Benoy and the chair slid to the ground against the wall. There is a three-foot long, jagged rip in the wallpaper now.
Another thing. Benoy keeps rubbing his back against the walls of the house. He’s got the itch so bad it’s funny. He walks around looking for something to rub it against. He walks up and down the house and he looks for new places, first it was walls, then wall corners, stair corners, closet doors moving with his back as he moves from side to side, even the backs of the chairs he sits upon. And he rubs and rubs and rubs. It’s funny!
30th December, 1999
William Tell was a great bowman; the greatest in the canton of Uri. As punishment for his insubordination, he was ordered to shoot an apple from his son Walter’s head. The son stands, tied to a tree, waiting, while Tell takes aim. Tell takes aim …
He is so angry! But he loves me, the poor fool.
Until today, he didn’t want to know what happened. Or he didn’t want to ask. And I didn’t care to tell.
Tell had the guts to wait, to be sure. He drew an arrow and Walter waited. He carefully drew his bow and he held the arrow in place – and waited . How did it feel, Tell? How did it feel to know that inside, your son twitched with fear, to know that every second you waited was stretched out for your son, that his fear grew, and to know that you could bring the torture to an end. And you didn’t shoot. You waited.
He wants details. Not the why, but the when, the how, the where.
“Where did you do it?”
It’s my night off. I’m shut in my room, traversing Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Naked, on a cool Delhi winter night, between warm blankets. With the twin metal rods of the room heater glowing red heat on my uncovered arms, hands, book, and face. Like I’m on fire. In an idyll of languor. I’m on fire in a pit of dreams.
In a couple of hours I’ll heat some parantha from the fridge, make some Darjeeling tea, get back in bed, read. I will read all night.
He walks in, early from work, into our bedroom. I read.
He is taking his clothes off, first his pants, then his shirt.
“Where did you do it?
I look up at him, comprehending, unsure of what to say.
“Where? How, I mean, was it good? Was he good?”
His pants are off. His briefs are completely covered beneath his shirt and tie. He is in the dark entrance, by the closet. His hairy legs are dark beneath the white silk shirt, dark, spindly, naked. One leg is shaking, shivering, cold, nervous.
He watches me watch him.
“Are you naked?” he asks suddenly.
“Put your clothes on.”
I return to my book. He watches. Waits. His leg is shaking the floor, the bed, my book. He turns, fumbles with his tie. Facing the closet, his head in the closet, he says it again, muffled, irritated. “Where did you do it?”
His shirt is off now. He throws it into a corner, turns to me.
“Where did you do it?” It’s a demand. His crotch, across the bed, at eye level, is bulging.
“In the hospital.” I hold his eyes. “He was a patient’s brother.”
“How? I mean, how was he?”
“What?”
“How was he? I mean,…”
“What?” Surprise in my eyes.
“Oh, my God, how could you?” Anguish in his eyes.
Fake anguish?
One of my life’s most liberating discoveries: I don’t have to shoot! To be free in a world of death-driven bunnies who rush, rush, rush, want me to rush, rush between noisy cars, within angry traffic, rush to kill and be killed, I know now that I don’t have to shoot. Do I have to have the guts not to shoot?
I start scribbling on the margin.
Freedom, Tell,
Is the strength
To let him wait
Endless.
Joy, Tell,
Is the prize
For the arrow
Unshot.
In his pajamas, he walks out. Slams the door.
31st December, 1999
He hugged me when I walked in the door today.
It had been a long, hot, and hard night. A new patient – tentative diagnosis, Suspected Paranoid Schizophrenia – refused to take her medication. God would punish us if we forced it upon her, she said. For two hours, we reasoned, cajoled, threatened. But she knew that the medicine was evil, that it was corrupting her brain. Towards one in the morning, I was beginning to feel very evil. I called Dr. Vaidya, head of the Psychiatry department. “Give her the shot. Haldol,” he said. “Twenty milligrams.”
So we held her down, the night watchman, her attendant, Milicent, and I – we have no straps in this hospital – and she bit and kicked and scratched for a half-hour. Even then it wasn’t over. I couldn’t sleep – couldn’t shake off her screams.
I was tired when I returned home. I struggled with my large set of keys, tried the right one, then a few wrong ones, just kept trying key after key. When I pushed the door open and walked in, he was standing by the door, ready. And he hugged me tight, his arms going over mine and behind my back, his neck folding into the side of mine, his face buried in my shoulder. He had coconut oil on his hair and tiny specks of dirt and nothing stuck on the smelly, sticky black hair – his mother oils his head with coconut oil. His hug was suffocating: oil on my cheek and brushing my nostrils, my arms were trapped between his, and I tried to free my neck, to lift it and breathe, and he began to cry. He was holding me with all his strength, this short man whose neck fits into my shoulder when he’s straight not bent, and shaking and crying, and I was trying to breathe. I’m claustrophobic, I’ve found. When my nose or my mouth can’t get to fresh air – under a blanket, or when someone shuts the windows in winter, I hyperventilate.
I try to be calm. I take a deep breath and try to push it in, but just below my throat, my windpipe has shut. I inhale; the air goes in, stops at my throat, bounces back. I crane my neck, lift my nose to the sky, away from the hair and the oil in my nostrils, the smell of stale coconuts on my face, and I try to breathe. The air bounces back.
I begin to struggle in his hold. He tightens his clutch, pulls me closer, his face wets my shoulder. A hair pokes into one of my nostrils. I twist my head. There’s hair in my ear. I lean back further. Maybe I could fall to the ground. Just buckle and fall. I start to fall but he steps forward, his face still jerking spasms into my shoulder, and suddenly my back is against the shut door. The door handle is against the small of my back, it digs in when he jerks, and it hurts. And above the handle, his hands are wrapped around each other, fist around wrist, squeezing. I am gasping. I push against his arms with my shoulders, upper arms. He tightens his grip. My head is spinning, my eyes are watering, and I am still getting squeezed.
And I raise myself a little and press back against the door. Actually, no. I squeeze my stomach and raise myself until his hands slip to the small of my back, and I hit the door handle where the small of my back should have been. As hard as I can. He yelps and jumped back.
“Why?” He screams. He’s holding his hurt hand.
I’m bent at the waist, my hands on my knees, looking up at him, breathing a mouthful that stops, then one that goes. The air jerks in my throat, shaking my body, bounces out. Then it goes in. I’m taking lungfuls.
He’s moved away, moved so his back is to the wall. He’s staring at me with malice, with hate, and he’s sliding away with his back against the wall. He reaches the entrance of the corridor, where it opens up into the living room. He’s looking into my eyes and rubbing his hands against each other and rubbing his back against the edge of the two walls, scratching left and right, wincing, scratching hard. His eyes are red and stubborn and his cheeks are swollen and he’s rubbing his back against the wallpaper. Oil is spreading a smudge on the corner, the wallpaper is turning dark, wearing thin. I see dark beginning to seep from the back of his shirt. I see the wallpaper turning lighter in his favorite places and then I see it getting darker, dark and red, in the places he likes most, like the edge of the wall where the entrance corridor opens into the living room and light, it is dark and red with blood.
He slides to the floor along the sharp edge and I see a thick stain of blood following him down. His shirt is smudging it, dragging the line all over until it’s a blob. He’s sliding down blood. I see myself slide down with blood, the line between my hips, the hollow of my spine, my red blouse slide down a wall, my legs open, a tall dark man, big shouldered, looms in front of me, something hard, a hard thigh, muscle, sinew, rubs against me. I pull him onto me, my sari and my petticoats come up around my waist and hard is pressing against me, against my thin, white underwear sticking to dark me. Hard is pushing, straining, trying to slide within wet me, open me, gore me. My panties slide to a side. Hard slides in, in, in, in…
From behind him, down the corridor, I heard a cough, his father’s. His mother and father are in the living room, at the table! Now he’s sitting on the floor and his mother is leaning over him, now, kneeling down into him, now, she looks at me a moment, with hate, hate, hate.
Why?
I gather myself. Walk a careful, head-lowered walk past them into the living room, into his oncoming father, the father moves back and almost falls, and I’m past him and into my room. Our room. Shut the door and lock it. Out of my sari and onto our bed. Into the sheets and my eyes shut and my hands go down between my legs. There’s a blackness in my head, a memory of shut-eyed, thoughtless sensation, and then shuteyed darkness has taken over. I’m fever. My fingers are fast, probing, knowing, they’ve never been so knowing. I’m so hot, so open, so awake, every pore is aware. Blood is coursing through every pore, to each fingertip. Each fingertip tingles. I’m open, open like I’ve never been. My thighs are soft wet, wet mud and my hands are hard. Water within, water without. My fingers, my nails, they probe, they claw, they scratch. The inside of my arms on my breasts, my tongue on my hands, my spit on my nipples, my thighs clutch my hands. I’m open. I open! Joy!
Joy!
Joy!
1st January 2000
His parents are living here.
Happy New Year.
3rd January, 2000
It’s been four days.
They hate me. They don’t know what to do, the poor people. They don’t want their son’s marriage ruined. It’s so improper, so unprecedented, so impossible to have a once-married son looking for another bride. They can’t imagine it, never thought about it, have never seen it happen. They hate me.
But they can’t see beyond me.
They will just keep hating.
And I will keep trying to deflect the waves of hatred that crash into me when I walk in my door.
He hates me, too. Every morning, welcome flickers in his red eyes, and then it fades into cloudiness. And the red eyes blink and pool and blur into mine.
Then I look away. I will go create a poem – or a fill my journal with insight.
I’m not Anna Karenina.
He doesn’t come to the door – just cowers behind his paper, and when I walk behind the paper, and turn, and look in – I have to look in – black orbs shine at me, through red-specked glass. For a moment, I see feeling. Then, he straightens his back, turns to his paper, shakes it with a jerk. It crackles and submits, it straightens, but it needed no straightening.
He hates me.
Moong daal° and Haldi° have taken over the house. Jeera° is frying in vegetable oil. And that alien odor… it’s his mother’s kitchen odor – Curry Putta°. I never use Curry Putta.
His parents are sitting around the dining table. They’re eating. His mother is at the stove, flipping dough from hand to hand, then onto pan. I’m walking through my kitchen, my arms are straight, pressed to my side and my hand is still stiff because I force it still but below my wrist, a vein – it twitches.
I would take over. It’s my job.
She looks at me tentatively, nervously. Fearfully.
I smile at her. But she has looked away. Straight at her, but she is away, and I stride straight and past, into my room. My bed. It’s not my job!
He doesn’t leave before I get home, though. He could, but he doesn’t.
I undress under my sheets. My hands are cold. I fumble with my blouse, kick off my petticoat, kick the clothes off the bed, rub my hands together. Soon, they’ll be warm.
He doesn’t come into my room. I think he wants to, though.
He hates me.
6th January 2000
There’s a new man-nurse on my shift. He smiles a lot. When he says something funny, he smiles. When he says something that could be sad, he smiles, too. – in commiseration? He smiles when he’s angry, too. Mrs. Singh – she’s been here for a year now – Her relatives have left her to become a vegetable – If they visited, if they gave her love, they might be able to take her home – He’s angry. Outraged. A little smile. It’s not a fake, lippy smile – it shows teeth, it reaches his dimples and rises up his face. But the teeth are together. Mine open when I smile. His are together.
And then he changes the topic. The cash-crazed Redline bus drivers killed two kids and their mother today. They’re killing pedestrians every day. Anger. Outrage. Smile.
The anger?
He holds it inside with his teeth, inside that smile, and he swallows it with no sign of a swallow in his throat. Like air going down.
His hair falls on his forehead when he leans forward and if he is leaning forward and I enter, he looks up and he doesn’t brush back the hair that is falling over this eyes. He flashes that smile. Smile thinks it is cute and thinks it can win a smile from me because it is cute. I smile. Idiot.
I’m scheduled for a vacation. Maybe I’ll go home – to Calcutta?
Some time alone, some peace of mind –
A movie? Superstar is playing.
No. It cries, it cribs, It smiles –
But out of tears. It’s sappy.
A black-eyed whore from Calcutta,
Tired bones adrift in alien
streets. Late, one graying sky,
drifts into a nebulous nimbus,
grim, water-laden, and moist.
All of a sudden,
Mary is nigh.
“Repent,” she screams. For you are sin!”
“Why?” I cry!
Flush proud, flash angry
From deep dark, I cry: “Not I!”
The black-eyed whore from Calcutta.
Long live love
lovelonglive
longlove
is happy?
My first poetry. But I’m dripping sleep from my fountain pen now. I’ll be blotting lines with shapes soon.
I wrote those late last night or early this morning – before I fell asleep. I don’t think they work.
Today, I return, to a door opened by a neat – a handsome tie – and pressed, Benoy.
He’s going to work late, he tells me. He wants to talk.
I should worry.
I don’t care.
He told his parents to leave. They were getting intrusive, he says.
“I don’t want them to come between us.”
He’s made breakfast. Eggs, coffee, and toast. Gleaming silverware. The kind we never use because it is for special occasions.
Toast is burning. He runs, pulls it out, burns his fingers. I sit.
There’s a mountain of pots, pans, and ladles in the sink. Four eggs. Six dishes.
All through breakfast, every few minutes, he looks up over his food, and smiles.
“Good?” he asks, and nods his head rapidly in answer.
I love him.
“Good?” he asks me again, and I realize that I haven’t even thought of a response – I’ve just been looking into his eyes.
The eggs have onions, tomatoes, and green chilies. They’re fluffy – slow cooked over a low flame, and for the last minute, covered with a top. They are good.
After breakfast, I notice that the sun is shining. I’m still tired, but now I’m full stomach tired. He leans back, pats his little tummy, smiles at me. He burps.
My puppy dog.
I used to be exasperated.
Exasperation. I’d smile, rue my luck, shake my head, go to bed, and be exasperated tomorrow. Life.
“Coffee?” He asks me.
‘Happy New Year?’ he seems to be asking me.
10th January, 2000
Mun maangé more. My heart wants more.
The silly ditty of the Pepsi advertisement tells me that my heart wants more. The Pepsi advertisement plays on every break of this day-night cricket match on the television in my office. Tonight, all the keepers of this zoo are crowded around my desk. For years, they petitioned for a TV set. When the hospital director changed recently, they got the TV set. He couldn’t install the set in the open reception, so he picked my twelve-by-ten-foot cuboid. Tonight, it is being goggled by my four fellow night workers. India is playing Pakistan. I couldn’t possibly not let them watch India play Pakistan.
The new male nurse and I sit on a bench and the others sit on the floor beside us. It’s 12:30 now and the match is headed for a cliffhanger so they’re silent and I have peace. I sip coffee. With my notebook open on my lap, I watch.
There’s an advertisement break after each Over – about every two minutes. In my head, the coffee is singing Mun maangé more over and over and over. Mun maangé more!
Tomorrow evening, I leave for Calcutta, on the Howrah Express. It takes the night and most of the next day to get there. I’ll be home – my parent’s home – on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, at two in the afternoon. On the Howrah Express!
I’m restless.
Every summer, I lay on the top bunk of our airconditioned, first-class compartment of my Rumbletrain: the Howrah Express. Every summer, we came from Calcutta to Delhi and then returned, my parents and I, on my Rumbletrain. And I lazed: lay on Bunk One, or Bunkum, the name depended upon my mood, and I lazed. Bunk One was my high seat of surveillance: the higher of the two-tier, reddish-maroon A/C Sleeper Class bunks. From my throne, I watched over the world. Bunkum was my hideout. I walled the open side, the one that looked down upon my parents, hung a black bed sheet or a big towel across, turned on the wall-light, and cozy in my cave, I watched. And I read.
Either way, I was on top, in charge, over seeing: directly on top of my mother, sitting with an onion and a steel plate on her lap – lop off a top, chop, chop, chop – chopping angry, crying onions, and across from Daddy – reading, or simply staring out the window. And every now and then, I’d look down upon Daddy, and Daddy would look up, and we would smile.
My Daddy loves me.
My Daddy will hate me.
Benoy should hate me.
“Outttaaaiiii!!!”
Everyone – the two nurses, the watchman, the three attendants – are on their feet, appealing to the umpire – to declare the batsman out. Yelling in my ten-by-twelve foot room. I hate the bastards.
They all know.
The Indian bowler, his index finger up in the air, is still beseeching the umpire. The umpire ignores him. The bowler looks at him in disbelief. He looks like he’s ready to cry. Everyone in my room is protesting. Even Milicent is looking at the T.V. set with anger. But the umpire is firm. Moin Khan is not out.
I don’t understand cricket. When I was a child, when every one was either playing cricket or watching, I was reading.
It’s between Overs. Here comes the advertisement break. The new male nurse looks away from the T.V., into my notebook. I look into him. He smiles, unembarrassed, and begins to explain what happened in the last Over. It was a Maiden Over – very good for India. Bastard.
I sip my coffee. I pretend to listen. Why do I pretend?
I don’t sleep too much. I get to work. The world rolls. Upon it I tread, and part of it, I roll as I tread. A treadmill train spinning beneath me; a little bit of it, I spin. And I watch. It’s a funny world.
And sometimes I watch myself watch and I break into smile. I’m headed home on a packed Delhi bus and I see that I’m smiling full and wide – into the tall man next to me. His chest is six inches from my nose. He smells of the sweat that runs through his shirt. A mason? – he does look like semi-skilled labor. He’s tall, unusually so for a man of his class: the moustached class, the blue-collar class. He seems proud. Beneath his curling black moustache, his tobacco-blackened lips are curled with insolence. He stares at my smile with uncertainty. He’s puzzled. Then he grins, steps closer, so his hips are touching mine, his arm – holding onto the banister brushes my hair; he grins stink into my face. His teeth are tobacco brown, misshapen, holed.
I turn my back to him. He pushes into me. With a bus turn, I stumble a backstep and between my hips I rub into his groin.
He steps back. Surprised?
He’s closer now. One arm comes around, upon my bare stomach. It’s a sure arm. His hands are wet with sweat; rough fingers, wet palms. They feel clammy and grainy at the same time. I don’t like his hands.
I lean forward with the bus, then lurch back. My sharp left heel is on his toe. I lean into my left heel. He yelps. I walk to the exit. It’s a stop before my stop, but I’ll walk.
The commercial is back. Mun maangé more!
When Rohit was here, no one would crowd around my office. He would walk out of his sister’s room, past Beronica or Milicent and into my room, shut the door, and let down the blinds. And there was no reaction.
But now there is reaction. They all know. With their mouths, they say nothing. But their eyes talk. Behind my back, they talk. And the doctors pretend not to hear, but they do. The doctors know. Dr. Karandikar no longer smiles at me. Or he smiles too wide. Like I’m a patient. He doesn’t talk to me. Just takes the night report in the morning, when he comes in, and walks off. Sometimes he looks troubled, when he looks at me. The bastard. Like I’m a patient and he’s worried about me.
I’m not making this up.
Everyone. Everyone, everyone, everyone looks. Every one knows. And every one cares.
Fuck them.
I write to wash out these memories, to clean them. I drub them on the rocks of this river, rinse them, beat them against the wind, and set them out to dry in the sun.
And when I’m dry, someone will use me again.
The male nurse is sliding closer to me.
He thinks I’m a whore.
He’s beside me now, still looking up at the television, pretending, like everyone, to be engrossed in the match. They’re all watching me.
He puts his right arm around my waist. He’s breathing upon my neck. He’s doing something to my hair. His fingers are poking into my neck. He’s trying to massage my neck. The coffee has made it tight. It’s unyielding. But his fingers keep going. While his eyes watch the television, his fingertips work. They circle. My chin falls to my chest.
His fingers are strong. Digging deep into the hollows. He does this often.
My eyes close.
He’s behind me. He’s probing in circles and the circles are going lower down my back. I slouch forward and with his other arm he catches me across the stomach. His palm is upon my bare stomach. He sits, enfolds me. I’m pushed up to the edge of the bench, his legs are around me, his chest against my back. I fall, he holds me firm. I’m loose, his fingers mold me. My body is tired. He pushes into me. He holds me up.
It’s so easy when you’re loose, so easy to fall. Into dark. I’m falling into dark.
All the lights are off. Every one is asleep. I’m sleepy, too, on Rumbletrain, reading late on Bunkum, sandwiched and cozy and comfy and drifting with the rumble. But I need to go to the bathroom.
I stumble out my bedsheets, aside my blacksheet door, down the stepladder. They’re all asleep. When I come out of the bathroom, I feel the draft. The door to the outside is open. Now it bangs shut. Swings open. Darkness beyond. A flash of white – chalk? between dark pebbles? I’m at the open. There are no lights anywhere. But I can make out the hills – or can I? Behind the door, the ground rushes, rushes so I can make it a blur. I hold on to the rung and lean forward and look, look until I can’t see the stones by the tracks, can’t see the wheels of the train. Just like Anna? Hair whips my face, rocks crunch in my teeth, water runs down my cheek, my hair is dust. But I am numb. The whizzing world is a blur. I can step into the blur. I can be the numbed blur.
Almost morning. I just brushed back my hair, washed my eyes clear of the grains. From my window, I can see the smoke rising from the huts in the slum behind the hospital. A hundred yards away, a little girl comes out of a hut, she’s still sleepy, a tin can of water in her hand, drops her dirty Salwar, a flash of brown bum, and she is crouched right in the middle of the street. She opens a big yawn, looks up, right into my window, into me, it seems. Piercing black eyes reflect flint into mine. God! I flinch.
In a few minutes, Mrs. Singh will run out of Room Number 11, and into the locked, green glass door of the psychiatry ward. Her attendant will run after her, pick her up off the floor, open the door, and lean her upon her own shoulder. They will walk out the door, outside, to walk in the grass. The Chaiwalla’s twelve-year-old runt will bring my tea, with too much sugar – there he is now, early, grinning cheek – and I will smile with exasperation, with the understanding with which my father looks at my mother. I am the last teacup of the morning.
I smile. No exasperation today. I smile at the unchanging freshness. His grin widens. Cheekier still. He turns, skips out the door. He’s free.
In a few minutes, Benoy will come to pick me up. He’ll wait for me to finish my walk, then drive me to the station. Soon, I’ll be on the Howrah Express. Soon, I will be free.
*