NOBODY LIGHTS A CANDLE
Anjali Deshpande
16
Sunday. A day to laze around. For others. He was tired of lazing around even then he woke up very late. Even Varun was up who never stirred out of bed before nine on holidays, and was probably downstairs. He knew because his place beside him was empty. He saw a pile of washing lying on the floor, heard the grumbling of the washing machine competing with the noise from the road. Pushpa was doing her Sunday chores her face sullen. She came in to sort out the washing to load the machine.
“Up?” she asked indifferently.
Yes, there are lucky blokes who go to sleep at night and never wake up, instead hitch a free ride on the shoulders of others to their final resting place. Adhirath was not so lucky. He had to get up to see a sulking wife. He fixed his gaze on her face. She was digging into the pockets of the trousers he had worn yesterday, and brought out things she did not expect to see. A broken piece of a turquoise bangle of thick glass, a handkerchief stained with mud, a small piece of sheer cloth with a frill of tiny beads, a torn end of a dupatta by the look of it, a receipt from the petrol pump, a golden button and some loose change. She placed the stuff on the corner of the bed and strode towards the washroom with an armload of soiled clothes. He pushed the stuff under the mattress and placing the button in his palm and gazed at it. It was definitely gold. And that glittering piece of something in its centre must be a diamond. He closed his fist and opened it to stare at it again. Was it diamond? Must be worth at least a lakh. Or was it? Just how much do diamonds cost? However much, this diamond must be worth more. How much would that man pay to get it back?
“Whose trunk is that under the bed?” she asked. “Nitesh gave it to you or what?”
Okay, so he had already told his bhabhi!
“Go ahead, tell him I have got it,” Adhir snapped,
“I don’t tell anyone anything. I have learnt to keep my mouth shut,’
He kept quiet.
“When the government paid you to do all this, you complained all the time. Now you want to spend your own money doing this?” Pushpa was back in the room.
This aspect had not occurred to him. All this enforced rest had begun rusting his faculties.
“Will you get up? I got to put the sheet in the washing. Just think what mummy papa will say. Papaji has been fetching Varun from school every day. You are never around. And they take out their annoyance on me. The moment I enter the house I have to hear taunts about how much they are doing for me, my child...and Varun is picking up his foul language...”
He said nothing. Had he been the additional in-charge of his thana this same woman, his wife, would not be so bothered about Varun learning some abuses. She would be roaming around the lane her head held high with pride. But then, his mind corrected him, Varun would be going to school in the van with other children, not with his gutter-mouth father.
“So where have you been going?” she asked once again.
He sat in sullen silence. Just because his earnings had dropped had he lost the authority to make decisions and even his right to step out without informing anyone? Would they have dared ask him this a year ago when he was additional in-charge of a thana?
“You too have changed,” he said and went out onto the narrow landing from where the steps led down to his parent’s part of the house.
When they had married he had built this upper portion, one room, with a partition, like the one downstairs. One part for the cooking and washing, the other to sit and sleep in. Where was there to go? Across his house were those neighbours he could not stand. In the small open space between houses lay a pile of metal rods, rivets, strings and polythene bags. Windows studded into the jaundiced walls of houses around this refuse seemed to beat their heads in despair at having nothing to take inside, not even a handful of clean crisp air. All around him were neighbours, gargling, abusing, spitting and staring. On the road were cars and cycles and cycle rickshaws, vegetable vendors and khomchas and the continual sound of people haggling for pennies.
He sat on the top step, buried his head into his knees and withdrew into himself. He woke up with a start when Varun shook him. Amazing, he thought, you can shut out any amount of noise if you truly did not want to hear it. Is hearing not involuntary? Is it true? All those people who come to the police stations and claim they have not heard the screams of people being beaten to death, are they speaking the truth? At least some of them?
“Papa, will you take me?”
He laughed.
What did the boy want? Where did he want to go? Varun looked confused. He saw his son’s face pucker and folding him to his chest he said, “Of course I will take you. But you have to ask me once again, after you have given me a very very sweet kiss. Ok?”
Varun planted a moist pair of lips on his cheek and told him. He wanted to go to the zoo. The tiger had had cute little cubs, he had just seen it on the news channel and grandpa wouldn’t let him watch cartoons anyways.
That is how Pushpa found him on the top step of the staircase his child in his arms and both of them smiling.
“Go, get ready then,” he turned Varun away from the door towards the staircase and gave him a push. His mother could bathe and dress him.
Pushpa touched him on the shoulder and they went in. She began to fuss with the bed. He looked at her.
He came up behind her and hugged her close. She stopped pulling off the edges of the sheet from under the mattress.
“Should I change the sheet now or later?” she asked him raising an eyebrow meaningfully, a naughty question in her eyes.
He pushed her onto the bed.
She was smiling at him. “Happy now?”
“I don’t probably know what I am supposed to do. Always dissatisfied. Do you mind?” he asked hesitantly.
“Oh, no,” she said turning around in the circle of his arms and rubbed her cheek against his. Her eyes smiled into his. He laughed.
“Listen, you can tell papaji you are doing your rounds to push for an early enquiry,” she said and squirming from underneath him, kissed him fully on the lips, then pinning his shoulders down straddled him. Tracing the line of his jawbone from his ear to his chin with her index finger she smiled radiantly at him. “You do whatever you want to. Don’t worry about anything. Not even money. I will provide for the house. Do what you want,” she said, her eyes shining with pleasure.
He jerked her off, got off the bed and walked out on her banging the door behind him. She lay where she was, on the mattress with its sheet half tucked in. She pulled the sheet out from under the mattress viciously. The piece of broken glass kangan under emerged to pinch her elbow. The loose coir threads in the mattress scratched her.
He came back after a while to grab the keys to his motorcycle. She was lying there on the crumpled bed, her eyes glazed.
“The best contraceptive in the world,” he said and walked out again. “Am going to the zoo with the boy. You don’t have to suffer my face anymore,” he screamed banging the door again.
He leaped down the stairs and heard his father lecturing his mother. “Three apples are rotting. You think the money comes from your father’s house that you can waste...”
At night he heard Pushpa’s tears, falling softly on the pillow as she tightly pursed her lips trying to hold in her sobs.
Would he ever do anything right? He turned his back on her.
email: anjalides@gmail.com
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