In Times of Siege Read online

  When he doesn’t respond, she shrugs, lights a cigarette, and studies his face.

  “You look like you could use a field trip to the real world,” she says. “What do you say we run away for lunch—I know a good little place at least fifteen kilometers from the Department. Is that far enough for you?”

  Amita and Shiv have slept with each other a few times. But perhaps “slept with each other” is inaccurate. They have, on four occasions, had extended lunches; lunches which have extended to hurried, unsatisfying sex at her house. All four times she lay in bed afterwards, her face veiled by cigarette smoke, watching him dress; each time he let himself out of the house and got back to the Department, feeling like a truant schoolboy.

  Amita’s greatest fear is boredom. And loneliness, she has found, is usually accompanied by boredom. Her husband is a successful chartered accountant; he holds the income tax secrets of many rich and powerful men in his files. Amita and Shiv have never spoken of him, but Shiv doubts that the man has ever tried to unravel his wife’s melancholy file of accounts.

  Now Shiv says to her, gently, “I can’t. My ward—an old family friend’s daughter—is at my place with a broken leg. In fact, I am going to have to apply for leave. Her parents have asked me to look after her. And I have done nothing for her all the years she has been in Delhi.”

  Amita’s thin eyebrows go up and she stubs out her cigarette. Shiv can tell she is hurt, but she is gamely sticking to the unspoken rules of their relationship—or whatever halfhearted little thing there is between them.

  As Shiv drives to Yusuf Sarai to look for a pair of crutches, he is filled with an absurd sense of well-being. The briefcase on the backseat is stuffed with papers. His copy of the leave application—privilege leave for personal reasons—is in the briefcase, along with notes for a new lesson to be written, other lessons to be edited, and assignments to be corrected and graded. He has stopped worrying about informing Meena’s parents. After all, the girl is in her twenties, she must be allowed to make her own decisions. And Meena, from what Shiv has seen of her for a day, certainly seems to know her own mind.

  As he slows down for the traffic lights ahead, he becomes aware of a persistent honking behind him.

  Shiv looks into the rearview mirror and glimpses a large white car bearing down on him, and then it disappears from view. A second later it is alongside him to the left; a noisy, brash whale edging him out, a plebeian Maruti fish. He hangs on, trying not to be pushed in the way of cars zooming down the road on the other side.

  The white car is now abreast of his so that Shiv can see the grinning occupants. Three boys, the one at the wheel with blow-dried hair and earring in place. The car is built like a tank. Pulsating music and horn bray in joyful disharmony. Young men in a hurry to go nowhere, young men screaming for attention. Their gleaming Mitsubishi Lancer is too big for Indian roads; it also has one headlight bashed in, a war wound that declares these young warriors mean business.

  “Scum,” Shiv says to himself. “Rich lumpens.”

  Though they couldn’t have heard him, they assume he is mouthing a challenge. They probably prefer their victims to be women drivers, but for the moment he will do. Shiv sees a flash of jeering faces, hears a burst of drums as the music reaches a hysterical pitch; and the car abruptly cuts to the right so it is just a few inches before his. He steps on the brake as far as it will go. Other cars behind him begin honking.

  Meanwhile the white car—its back an impenetrable wall, its antenna a swaying lance—is racing ahead. The boy at the back turns around to wave Shiv a derisive goodbye.

  The shop Shiv finds after several inquiries is a hole in the wall, every inch of wall space covered with luridly colored gods and goddesses. Appropriately below the picture of the divine Lakshmi seated on a lotus is a sticker that declares: Corruption is National Menace. We Must Root Out Corruption in All Parameters of Activity. The shop owner, a plump, cheerful man, gestures grandly at his wares when Shiv tells him what he needs. Under the watchful eyes of the pantheon, Shiv looks at the crutches lined up against the wall. There are also calipered leg splints of all sizes, walkers that look like little enclosing gates, and even a couple of chairs with neat holes on their seats to make an Indian-style toilet more infirm-friendly.

  Shiv selects a pair of light aluminum crutches and tries walking with them. The shopkeeper cheers him on, admiring his attempts at negotiating the patch of space between the rows of empty calipers, strapped and ready to be filled in.

  As he puts the plastic-wrapped crutches in the car, Shiv notices a shop selling ice cream. On an impulse, he locks the car and goes into the shop. Rekha and he always buy old-fashioned vanilla, so he assumes Meena would like something different. Back in the car, he puts the bag with a brick of chocolate chip and another of Pistachio Paradise on the seat next to him. No encounter with lumpens this time; all the way home Shiv is stuck behind a truck with advice painted on its rear in cheerful colors. A big arrow points to the right; below it are the words RIGHT SIDE. To the left is another arrow, captioned with the cautionary word SUSIDE. The truck spews evil-looking and evil-smelling smoke, but it negotiates the narrow road at an exemplary sedate pace. Shiv raises the window glass, says goodbye to the petrol budget, and switches on the AC.

  Meena is waiting for him in her small room, lying in bed, reading. Already this has become her room. What used to be Shiv’s study table is now covered with her things: books, magazines, newspapers, clothes, a hairbrush, an alarm clock. The ceiling fan hums furiously.

  Meena is transparently pleased to see him; Shiv finds something touching about this. Whatever she thinks or feels is there on Meena’s face, not just faithfully mirrored, but multiplied in intensity—as if her face has captured the potent essence of every passing emotion. Kamla has given Meena her lunch and been to check on her twice. But she’s bored, she’s so bored; and the leg in the cast is itchy; and she feels dirty, she wants a proper bath.

  Shiv switches on the cooler though it was drained of water several weeks back. There is a blast of warm air, then the cooler settles down to a deep bass drone, harmonizing with the ceiling fan.

  He pulls the crutches out of the plastic bag and Meena tries them out. They are too tall for her. He fiddles with the screws and adjusts them so that they are just the right height for Meena. Shiv is amazed by his success; theirs is the sort of household where Rekha has to call an electrician to change a lightbulb.

  Meena is like a child with several new toys—first the new crutches; then the tubelike plastic bag the crutches came in, perfect, she says, to cover the cast when bathing; and most of all, the chocolate chip ice cream. Then Shiv tells her he has applied for leave, and that he will be home to look after her.

  The spoon that has been moving regularly between the bowl of ice cream and her mouth pauses. She looks up into his face through a long unruly curl that hangs over one eye. Even Meena’s face, he sees, is capable of keeping a secret or two. But her look, though it is a look Shiv cannot read easily, convinces him. He can play guardian to Meena, his yet-to-be-discovered ward, at least for a few weeks.

  THREE

  AUGUST 25–SEPTEMBER 3

  They are settling down to a routine, Meena, Kamla and Shiv. Meena’s suitcase is unpacked; Shiv has persuaded her to give away the battered thing to Kamla. The narrow wooden cupboard in the study, which used to be stuffed with Shiv’s files, now holds Meena’s clothes. The telephone is by her bed. Shiv offered to move the music system into the room but Meena said there was no point; she claims to be tone-deaf. He moved the television set instead, though he notices her attention wanders as much as his does when they watch a couple of daytime tearjerkers.

  Shiv has just one picture on his study wall—a simply framed photograph of the Hampi ruins in South India. In the foreground to the right is a wheel of stone, one of four wheels supporting a stone chariot. In the photograph only one wheel is visible. Shiv has never tired of looking at this wheel of enormous dimensions, standing still as if froz
en for a moment before it begins to rotate again. In the background of the photograph looms a majestic hall, a rock-hewn elephant guarding its entrance. The hall is lined with rows of singing pillars—each pillar is reputed to sing a different note when struck. The pillars are decorated with exuberantly sculpted scenes from everyday life: street scenes, hunters, dancing girls.

  The day Meena’s roommate brought a plastic bag full of things from their hostel room, two new pictures went up on the wall. Posters, stuck on the wall with Sellotape, one on either side of the photograph of ruins. One of the pictures is a feminist poster of some sort; no words, just an image of matchstick women holding hands to make a perfect circle.

  The other poster has a gray line drawing of a face of indeterminate gender in the background. On the face, smudgily printed in black, are the lines by the Reverend Martin Neimöller, the German pastor who spent eight years of his life in Nazi concentration camps:

  In Germany they first came for the Communists,

  and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

  Then they came for the Jews,

  and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

  Then they came for the trade unionists,

  and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

  Then they came for the Catholics,

  and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

  Then they came for me—

  and by that time no one was left to speak up.

  At the top of the poster are the words in screaming red Speak Up! Before It’s Too Late. Shiv reads this and feels a twinge of discomfort. But after all, he tells himself, Rekha is not around to disapprove; and it’s just a couple of harmless posters, part of growing-up paraphernalia. He says nothing to Meena about his study’s new political look.

  Kamla has lost her look of virtuous suffering, having discovered how ferociously independent Meena is despite the cast. Now that she has no worries about extra work, or about juggling hours in all the houses she works in, Kamla is free to express human interest in the situation. She cooks a delicious meal once a day and washes dishes. She offers Babli after school hours to fetch and carry, or keep Meena company. And Shiv—for the first time in his life he makes breakfast for two; tea for two; snacks for two. He goes to markets he has not been to for years, unlikely shopping lists to hand. A white plastic stool for Meena to sit on while bathing. A showerhead and tube he attaches to the bathroom tap so that Meena does not have to bend for a bucket-bath. Girlish skirts because Meena cannot wear her shalwars and jeans. Ice cream, chocolates, fruit, even flowers. Meena approves of all the edible gifts but is indifferent to the flowers. She does not seem to notice when Shiv moves them to his room upstairs.

  Meena is a sociology student; she is writing a thesis on what she calls women’s stories, stories of women affected by the anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. She has finished doing the interviews—the fieldwork. Bedbound, this is the ideal time to begin putting it all together. Shiv tells her as much. “But how do you write in bed?” she says. “I am not even sure I can think, lying around like this all day.” Instead they fill up the empty hours with games. A game of chess; he beats her easily. Then Scrabble. Cards. Shiv knows only two games, rummy and blackjack. Meena knows an astonishing number of card games, all learnt, she says, on long train journeys.

  Shiv searches his daughter’s cupboard for other relics of her childhood. At the back of a shelf he finds a dusty round wooden board, neat black lines on it like the latitude and longitude lines of the globe in a school atlas. With the board there is a box of little wooden animals: twelve white sheep, one yellow tiger, its mouth open, the paint on its tongue still startlingly red. He has never seen the game before. Perhaps Rekha or her mother played with it. He takes it down to Meena and they spend an evening making up different versions of a strategy game. When Shiv is the tiger, he is only allowed to move ahead one step a turn. Meena’s sheep move in all directions, a step forward or backward, two steps diagonally. By the time it is Meena’s turn to play tiger, they have altered the rules of the game; neither tiger nor sheep can move backward.

  As Shiv puts away the animals in their box, he studies the tiger in his hand. Even though its face is crudely painted, it is expressive. The sheep faces are somewhat bland, but the wooden tiger looks hungry: single-minded. A little like Arya’s new look.

  But side by side with Arya’s ugly bigoted face, Shiv remembers another, equally evocative one. The face of Arya’s blind child, a face so oval and delicate that the vacant look about the eyes comes as a shock. Arya is completely devoted to this child. When Arya’s eyes rest on his child’s face, when his eyes brim with tenderness, where does his hatred go and hide? Shiv remembers Arya’s wife saying to Rekha in one of the rare social gatherings of their Department, “Akshai’s papa does everything for him. He won’t even let me bathe the child.” She looks both proud and pained as she says this; she laughs a strained, artificial laugh, a laugh she has to cough up like a foreign body stuck in her throat.

  On an impulse Shiv tells Meena about the two Aryas, the Department-Arya and the father-Arya.

  “You’re trying your best to humanize him, aren’t you,” says Meena. “Why should we rack our brains figuring out his life? Finding out what made him such a twisted piece? He’s like all his ancestors—tyrants capable of personal acts of kindness. Nazis who responded to music and poetry.”

  Meena listens intently when he tells her about Arya and the meeting. “I’m not surprised,” she says. “They’re crawling out of the woodwork now that it’s their season.” She looks at Shiv in the way she has, directly into his eyes, her chin cocked in a sideways, challenging stance. “You don’t like confrontations, do you?”

  It has been a week since Shiv went to a meeting. The Head’s secretary must be back. He wonders, in passing, if there is an awkwardness in her now. A self-consciousness about being labeled a foreigner, a minority. A little fear, or at least discomfort, when she comes face to face with Arya. Shiv has been to the Department a couple of times, briefly, to see to work arrangements while on leave. But more and more the Department, the Head and his team, the entire B.A. History correspondence program—all are growing distant. As if they belong to a life already lived out, a life to be reflected on because over and done with. Or a life on hold. Though he works every day on the papers he has brought home with him, his real life now converges on a house with two people. A nurse and patient team: he is the nurse, Meena the patient.

  Wherever Shiv is in the house, whatever he is doing, he is aware of another presence. The woman in the narrow bed in his study, a young woman. Almost a girl, except that she seems more worldly-wise sometimes than he. She talks of causes and street theater, gender and courting arrest, with the ease of a veteran. She too, he has discovered, is a frequenter of meetings, though her meetings are played out in a world where a different language is spoken—where it is possible to feel passions foreign to him. Though she lies in bed, her leg encased in fiberglass, she does not seem aware of her powerlessness.

  And though she has been in his house for just a week, already there is a minor conspiracy of silence they have become partners in. Or not quite partners; it was she who decided her parents should not be told about the broken knee. Or about his playing guardian for the first time. Or about their being alone together.

  Sometimes, when he sees Meena in her bright yellow T-shirt, the polished brown face framed by the halo of tangled hair, Shiv thinks of her mother, his childhood neighbor Sumati. He has forgotten what Sumati looks like as an adult. What he remembers of her, or what her daughter summons with an occasional raising of her well-defined chin, is the picture of a playmate. A summer playmate of two or three years’ standing, a girl with untidy curls escaping her two plaits, shrill-voiced, mocking. A swift runner. The kind who does something to you, and before you have registered your hurt or indignity, takes to her feet. Shiv knows nothing about his old friend’s life now,
about her tussles with less unsuspecting playmates, her success with hit-and-run tactics. It is her daughter who has now been hurt; and for the time being she cannot run.

  The next morning Kamla does not come down to cook. She sends Babli to say that she has a fever. Shiv goes up the winding stairs once again. Kamla is in bed, fast asleep. Babli has not gone to school. She comes to the door, looking important, and takes the strip of aspirin he has brought. She whispers, “I’ll look after her, Sahib. My father will come clean the house before he leaves for work. And I will sit by Didi when you have to go out.”

  Shiv gives her cheek a gentle pinch and looks at Kamla’s flushed face on the mattress laid out on the floor. He hesitates, but two patients are beyond his newfound nursing abilities. As it is, he will have to cook for Meena and himself till Kamla is better.

  Meena is amused by his look of dismay. “I’ll help you,” she says like Babli. “It should be no problem.”

  “But do you know how to cook?”

  “I’ve never tried, but so what? You drive, I’ll navigate,” she says breezily.

  She limps with her crutches to the dining table and sits down, the leg in the cast stretched out, the foot resting on a stool. For a novice, she is surprisingly competent with a knife. Shiv watches entranced as her fingers disappear in a blur of swift, coordinated movement. The onions collapse on the board in a cascade of slivers. Then cabbage, beans, garlic, ginger. He tosses the vegetables—inexpertly, some of them escaping the pan—in a spoonful of hot oil and mixes it all with the rice he has cooked. Lunch has a festive feel to it; they bask jointly in a glow of achievement. Then Shiv remembers he will have to do it all over again at dinnertime, and that blunts the triumph a little.

  At night, reading in bed upstairs, Shiv hears Meena’s bell. She no longer calls him professor—to his relief. Also to his relief, she does not call him the ubiquitous Uncle, an address he has grown to loathe. For the present, he remains her nameless companion.