In Times of Siege Read online

  He goes down and finds her sitting up in bed. Though the fan in the cooler is on full blast, her face is damp with sweat. “I can’t sleep,” she says. “I’m so restless.”

  “What about a game of cards? Or chess?”

  “I’m sick of games. Just sit here and talk to me.”

  “What about a drink?” Shiv asks. She agrees to a rum. He pours her a small one and a large whisky for himself. He sits down on the chair by her bed.

  He looks at the papers lying on the bed by her. She picks them up and stacks them in a pile on the table. He passes her a paperweight, an odd-shaped round stone he picked up outside the ruins of Hampi.

  “How did you manage your interviews?” he asks Meena, gesturing at the pile of handwritten sheets. “Was it difficult getting the women to talk to you?”

  “It was. For the first week, I thought it was going to be impossible. I went with a friend who speaks fluent Punjabi and I thought that would help. But the women were tired and suspicious.” Meena breaks off, takes a little gulp of her rum, and continues. “They were tired of telling their stories to all kinds of people who came and asked them painful questions, then went away never to be seen again. Suspicious, because they knew by now that their stories were going to be used by people. Twisted by different groups to suit their own purposes.”

  “Then? How did you get them to believe you were different?”

  “It wasn’t me. It was one of them, a young woman who had lost her husband and her father. She was a few months pregnant when they were killed; she miscarried a week later. It was she who said, ‘Behen, I’ll help you. I don’t know what you will do with your tape of our stories. What use our empty lives will be to you in your studies. But I have lost so much—I have nothing left in my stomach but anger. I also have a hunger that says, tell your story, tell it again and again to whoever will listen.’ It was she, young Jasbir Kaur, who convinced the others that they should talk to me.”

  “Courage is a strange thing, isn’t it?” Shiv says, watching Meena grimace at what is left of her drink.

  She looks at him questioningly as if she has not heard him right.

  “Not just courage, but also anger, passion—the combination of all three I should say. I was thinking of my father.” Shiv takes a deep swallow of his whisky. “He was a freedom fighter, but for him the freedom movement didn’t end in 1947. In fact, the burdens of the new world—the travails of a free India—sat heavy on his shoulders.”

  Shiv pauses; Meena waits for him to go on. “He disappeared,” Shiv says, standing up and taking her empty glass. “He was the bravest man I knew, but still he couldn’t keep it up; it must have finally broken him. He went to Indore for a meeting of Congress workers and sent a telegram home about the date of his return train journey. Later my uncle found his name on the passenger list. But he didn’t come home to Coimbatore; the ticket officer said a man was in the third-class seat—seat 16A—for the first part of the journey. Someone in the same compartment said he got off at a small station.”

  “Did you hear from him again?” Meena asks, her eyes soft with sympathy.

  “No. There were the usual newspaper advertisements. My uncle tried everything he could think of, made the journey to Indore and back several times looking for information. My mother spent the rest of her life performing all sorts of pujas to lead him back to us. But nothing—we never heard of him again.”

  Shiv brings back freshly filled glasses and they sit listening to the duet of the fan and cooler. Though they drink in silence, the little room is snug. It holds the two of them in a cocoon of companionable sympathy. Or if not sympathy, understanding; of what is not easily said; of what is best left unsaid.

  It is very late into the night when he says goodnight to Meena—still sober, a young woman who knows how to hold her liquor. He wishes he were half as sure of himself. He bends over her and straightens the covers. Then he gently pushes into place a strand of hair falling across her cheek. She smiles, a mysterious, sleepy smile. His fingertips take away with them a touch of her warm, moist cheek.

  But it is a different softness that seeps into Shiv’s dreams that night, the soft residue of some old, blurred images. The rocking motion of a bullock cart. His father’s hand holding his, his father’s hand not as soft as his mother’s. His father’s booming voice, used to shouting slogans for freedom, exhorting his countrymen to resist colonial rule, fills the cart. The cart smells of bullocks. One of the bullocks, the long-tailed one, shudders over a bump in the road and they sway as if they are in a boat being tossed about in a storm. The cow lifts its tail and shoots an arc of pee into the wind. He squeals in delight and tugs at his father’s arm. His father turns to him and smiles. The smile hangs in the air teasingly, then fades. His father is gone. Now he is watching his mother light the kitchen fire. (But he was older when his father disappeared, why is he such a little boy here? And why does she wear a happy face instead of her usual grieving one?)

  Early morning light, pale, a reluctant blue, gently dripping down the mean little skylight. His barefoot mother, slim, compact, on her haunches before the mound of ash and kindling sticks. Her soft muttering monotone of prayer, as if she is humming without knowing it. The sound of the iron rod in her hand scraping, spreading out the ash and the charred lumps from the day before. Then the humming goes away. She bends forward, her face close enough to the stove to whisper secrets. She blows. Exhales like wind, almost whistling as she speaks to the fire in the only language it knows. Then she gets up, goes out to get wood. He tiptoes to the stove and peers into the little pit. The vessel-shaped cave. The cave looks back at him. Its mouth is full of hard, glittering red eyes. They wink at him before his mother returns and pulls him away.

  Shiv woke up at his usual hour, refreshed despite his whisky-induced dreams. Meena slept late into the morning; Shiv’s guess is that she would still be sleeping if the fan had not come to a standstill. He has not seen Babli all morning. The house is silent, weighed down with its burden of sullen, humid air.

  Meena moves her fingers through her long, messy hair. Every now and then her fingers meet an obstructing tangle. She frowns, tugs at the knot till it gives way. Her conquering fingers move ahead, down the length of her hair; then begin all over again, from the top, with another thick and rebellious strand.

  Perhaps, in her whole life, this might be the time she is most beautiful. Shiv thinks this and she holds out a strand of hair before her, squints at it disapprovingly and asks him, “Will you help me wash my hair? I could sit on a chair and lean back over the bathroom sink.”

  Shiv feels like a priest at a ritual. He places a plastic chair in front of the sink, a stool by it. On the stool, a bottle of shampoo, a towel, and the head of the handheld shower he has improvised for Meena. He takes Meena’s crutches from her and helps her to sit as comfortably as she can on the chair. The leg in the cast stretches out before her like a shapely log of white wood. Meena examines the shampoo bottle—which he has brought down from Rekha’s cupboard—and grins wickedly. It’s called, Shiv now notices with some embarrassment, Femme Fatale.

  Meena leans back, lets her hair fall into the sink like a dark curtain. Shiv places the showerhead in the sink and connects the tube to a tap, then runs the water. The water is cool and refreshing; she shuts her eyes as he moves the shower around her head. He has some trouble opening the bottle of Femme Fatale but he finally manages to squeeze too much of it onto the palm of his hand. The bathroom fills with a potent fragrance. Meena, her eyes still shut, sniffs. “Very fancy,” she murmurs, “I won’t know myself.”

  This is becoming a game, a better game than rummy or tiger-and-sheep. Shiv smears the shampoo over her head, then massages her scalp with it. She exhales. He works the lather down the length of her hair. The rinsing is not so easy; he splashes himself and gets her neck and T-shirt wet. His eyes dart to the stiff nipples visible under her T-shirt, then back to her hair, half-ashamed. When she straightens her dripping head, she leaves behind an unhappy g
ray puddle of grit in the sink. For some reason he is grateful she cannot see this. She leans back again and he rinses her hair once more. It is now a heavy thing in his hands, glossy and alive in the filtered light coming in through the bathroom window.

  Later, sitting on his chair in the study, her leg resting on the bed, Meena towels her hair dry. Her face glows. Her face, Shiv thinks, must always be animated. But it wears now a look of inward absorption—similar to her look when she is eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream. A look of concentration, as if firmly focusing on something within reach.

  He stands there, watching her, unwilling to let go of his priestly role. She seems to sense this. Almost magnanimously she passes the hairbrush to him. Wordlessly he goes to work at the tangles, the headily fragrant masses of wet hair, a craftsman before his half-finished masterpiece.

  Meena in a T-shirt the color of grapes. A white skirt that deepens the brown of her bare right leg. Her washed, combed hair held back neatly with a fat velvety rubber band. A pair of silver earrings shaped like raindrops hang from her ears. She is sitting up in bed eagerly awaiting her friends who have rung up to get Shiv’s address.

  Two boys and a girl. (Or, Shiv corrects himself, two young men and one young woman.) One of the boys, a tall, unshaven one, shakes hands with Shiv, taking in the man and the house in a quick, sweeping glance. “I am Amar,” he says. “This is Jyoti, this is Manzar.” The two nod at Shiv unsmilingly.

  Meena calls out impatiently, “Hi—I’m here—come on!” Shiv follows them to Meena’s room; they embrace her one after the other. Amar sits on the bed; Jyoti on the chair.

  “Shall I get another chair?” Shiv asks. “And tea or something cold?”

  “No,” says Meena, her eyes shining. “Just shut the door, please. So our noise won’t disturb you,” she adds as an afterthought.

  Outside the shut door, in the instant before he moves away, Shiv hears Meena’s voice say, “Tell me what’s been happening. I’m bored out of my mind.”

  Shiv goes upstairs, resolving not to come down till he gets some work done. His desk looks at him reproachfully. It is weighed down with neat piles of lessons, letters, syllabi, and half-read assignments. Holiday homework. A full new lesson to be written, a lesson on the rise and fall of the medieval Vijayanagar empire. It was some years ago he visited the ruins of this empire—the Hampi ruins, now a World Heritage site in the state of Karnataka. He has all the notes ready on his desk, both from the usual texts and his own journal of the trip. He is, for once, looking forward to writing a new lesson. He has assigned this particular one to himself as something of a treat.

  The grandeur of Vijayanagar persists even in its ruins. The palaces and temples and fortification walls in Hampi dwarfed Shiv, just as they must have amazed and diminished its citizens hundreds of years ago. He looked at all this evidence of might—might laid waste—and was struck afresh by how small a thing a single life is. How small, how trivial and fragile, without the weighty anchoring of the past. But it is all too easy to look at the Hampi ruins and fashion only two images of the past. One as a testimonial to imperial grandeur, the other as a testimonial to the human capacity for destruction. Surely the past is more than a mere fossil? Or a perfect cast whose mold has been broken? Shiv feels a sudden rush of ambition: he would like to write a lesson that weeds out stereotypes, makes realistic assessments. To take this fragment from the medieval past and reconstruct an entire range of possibilities.

  Simple challenge, big challenge. The kind Shiv’s father would have echoed with approval. “Shiv,” he can hear his father’s ghost say to him now, “if you want to get hold of something and learn all about it, know it, it doesn’t matter whether that something is in the past or the present. All that matters is that you are freethinking. That you have moral courage.”

  This should inspire Shiv to put pen to paper immediately, but instead his mind drifts to Arya and his band of pirates, looters of the past. He puts his pen down; he catches himself listening for sounds from downstairs. Is that the front door being opened then shut? Meena may be alone again. She may need him. Shiv pushes back his chair, stands up. The desk, and its burden of history, can wait another hour or two.

  FOUR

  SEPTEMBER 4–6

  Shiv opens the door and peeps into his study, setting of gloomy thoughts and prosaic history. But this room has opened its arms to the light. To the dazzling summer sky. How did the sun get into his study? A shiny, ripe piece of sunshine?

  The day after Meena’s friends visit her, she has to see the doctor for the first time since her leg was put in plaster. By the time Shiv goes down to her room in the morning, she is already up, dressed and ready to go. She is wearing a long skirt, a modest brown. She has one shoe on. Her hair is knotted in a fat coil at the back of her neck. She could be a girl impatient to go to a long-awaited party, her face bright with anticipation, her shoulder bag on the bed by her.

  “I’ve been so revoltingly good,” she says to Shiv. “I’ve rested the leg exactly as the doctor said, for two whole weeks. Do you think he will take off the cast next week?”

  Virtue is always rewarded. This lesson learnt in childhood persists, turning into a comforting superstition when other infantile certainties are left behind. What can Shiv say to Meena when she looks at him with such hope? With such appeal in her eyes, as if he can persuade the doctor to set her free? But he is saved from mouthing cautionary platitudes. A sudden noise cuts him off, a crash in the living room where Kamla’s husband is dusting, sweeping and swabbing all at once.

  Kamla’s husband is one of those men who seem to have been created only to prove that appearances are deceptive. He has the graceful, elegant body of a dancer. His features are borrowed from an exquisite, romantic miniature painting. But there is a bull lurking in this pretty picture. If a thing is breakable, he will break it. If it cannot break, he will spill it, tear it, dent it. By the time Kamla is well, Rekha’s arty objects and copper-bottomed pans will probably look like survivors of a domestic genocide.

  Now, in the living room, Shiv sees that the latest victim is the telephone. Kamla’s husband picks it up and eagerly shows it to Shiv so that he can see it is not broken. Shiv takes the receiver and puts it to his ear; the dial tone is gone.

  “It’s dead,” Shiv snaps at Kamla’s husband. “What have you done?”

  Kamla’s husband stares at Shiv, his slanting, thick-lashed eyes full of reproach; then he blinks, falls to his knees and picks up the wires. This drives Shiv frantic. He knows that when Kamla’s husband fixes anything, the result is invariably more dramatic than when he cleans it.

  Meena has followed Shiv to the living room on her crutches. Kamla’s husband lets go of the wires and stands up, his face filling with an infuriating meek innocence. “Never mind,” Meena says to Shiv, “we’ll be late if we don’t leave soon. The extension in my room is working anyway. Why do you need so many phones?”

  Shiv is not sure if Kamla’s husband has understood what Meena said, but he smiles at her to say that she understands, her priorities are right. He flicks his duster one last time at the dead telephone. “I’ll repair it when I return,” he promises, and picks up his duster, broom and bucket. Shiv notices that the filthy, dripping swab cloth has shed several stringy edges. They lie on the freshly swept floor like coiled gray worms.

  Outside the house Meena halts, takes a deep breath and looks around as if seeing the world for the first time. Shiv waits for her to look her fill before taking the crutches from her. Seen through her eyes, the familiar campus acquires vast and mysterious dimensions. Was its skyline always so bare and awesome, were the buildings always so forbiddingly opaque, enclosing unfathomable secrets? The bougainvillea bush across the driveway blazes purple sunlight.

  Getting into the car quickly cures Meena of sentiment and benevolence. “Shit,” she mutters, her teeth clenched as she slides herself onto the backseat and Shiv shuts the door. The glass on the windows has to be raised so she can lean against one window and fl
ex her feet against the other.

  Shiv gets in, looks at her to see if she is all right. Her forehead and upper lip glisten. “Do you want the AC?” he asks her, pulling out his handkerchief. She shakes her head and takes the handkerchief from him.

  The hospital is a newly constructed building separated from the outside world by an impeccable crewcut lawn. The potted plants along the driveway stand at attention as if they wear stiffly starched uniforms. On either side of the hospital, there are empty lots piled high with garbage and construction rubble. Shiv drives past a large sign with a stern warning: No Outside Food Allowed. Beyond, to the side of the building, he parks near a ramp for patients with wheelchairs.

  Meena refuses to wait in the car; “I am getting squashed,” she says. “Help me to get out of here.” But she finds it difficult to maneuver the crutches up the ramp. Shiv hurries inside to find a wheelchair. It is only when the wheelchair and attendant arrive that they realize Meena cannot sit with both feet on the chair’s footrest. The attendant moves to pick up the leg in the cast. Shiv hastens forward; he can’t bear the thought that the attendant may not be gentle enough. Equally, he can’t bear seeing a stranger touch Meena’s cast. Shiv asks the attendant to push the wheelchair instead; Meena balances the leg in the cast midair; and Shiv heads their little parade, holding Meena’s leg, walking backward into the waiting room.

  The air is a delicate mixture of phenol and incense. One of the walls in the waiting room has a large glass-covered cupboard. Ganesha, by virtue of being Remover of Obstacles, sits imprisoned inside, his trunk resting limply on his rotund belly. He looks on without comment as Shiv pays for the X ray and consultation in advance. Armed with all the receipts, they head for the X-ray room.