The Homing Pigeons... (4 page)

Radhika

A
few  years  later  when  the  teacher  explained  the  word ‘adoption’ was I able to appreciate the gravity of what had occurred on the day after my third birthday. I was adopted by my Uncle and Aunt. Even though I was a sapling, I felt uprooted. It was almost a week after our arrival in Solan that I presumed that there was something amiss about this vacation. I wasn’t wrong.

My father, or rather my foster father, Rohit Kapila, was the billing clerk in the electricity department. Solan was a small, yet ever-expanding hill station, two hours north of Chandigarh. In those early days, his job didn’t pay very well. But somehow, he was able to bring back a gift for me. The gifts weren’t extravagant, the poor can’t afford to be, but it would be a lollipop one day and candy flosses another. It was a ritual that he refused to forgo.

It wouldn’t even be four before I would half hang outside the  balcony  of  the  government  quarters  that  were  allotted to my father, waiting for his return. The small house on the first floor overlooked the street and the valley below. Even before he had turned the bend, I would run the three hundred metres to be in his arms. I would rummage through the cheap imitation leather bag for my gift. He would carry me home on his shoulders. My biological father wasn’t a bad man, but he couldn’t be called a good father. For the first time, in my short life, I was experiencing undiluted love. Perhaps it was a good thing that I had been adopted.

My foster mother was quite a novice when it came to raising a child. For one, she didn’t know that children need something or the other to keep them occupied. You couldn’t really blame her because she didn’t have children. She had married my Uncle, now father, over ten years ago and they had been unable to conceive a child. They had waited for her to conceive for over two years, before reaching out to the astrologers. The astrologers had swindled them, taking relatively huge sums of money to perform prayers to appease the Lord and bless them with a child. Only after the Gods had disappointed had they recognized it as a medical problem.

Given her failings as a mother, I didn’t have too much to do those days. I would often sit out on the balcony and see the flocks of pigeons that had their nests in the buildings around our house. They were fascinating creatures and I couldn’t help admire them. There was something about those birds, maybe their courting, that I could remain on that chair for hours waiting for my father to come home.

My father was an honest, upright man. I don’t know why God hadn’t given him his own children. I guess God is a little convoluted. He doesn’t always favour good people. My father had even been to the PGI at Chandigarh where they diagnosed my
mother’s problem as an Ovulatory failure. In the early nineteen seventies, the fancier technologies that help infertile couples conceive were yet to be patented. Not that they would have been able to afford it. They had craved for a child, seeing much younger couples bearing fruit, while they continued to be deprived. It was only after I was born that they seriously considered adoption. I’m not sure my mother was bought into the idea but my father was adamant.

It was only fortunate that I had been born; an unwanted third child to his younger brother. A girl child, to top it, who brought with her the responsibilities of accumulating
dowry. They dwelled over the question for over two-and-a-half years before gathering the courage to broach the subject with my biological father. About a month before my third birthday, their desperation reached a peak and during a family wedding, my Papa, as I fondly called my foster father, had taken his brother aside and spoken to him about adopting me.

My day really started when Papa would be back from work. I would usually while away time sitting on the balcony because I didn’t have many friends. There were a couple of children in the neighbourhood but they were much older. In the hills, it’s difficult to find a playfield. When the boys in the neighbourhood played cricket on the street, I was relegated to field. I didn’t know how to and after a few balls were lost in the valley, they refused to let me play with them. With a mother who wasn’t the best for company, the pigeons were my only hope.

Most times, I would miss my biological mother. She made a few trips in the first month that I moved to Solan, but those trips had dried up. I was sure that my mother missed me too. I sometimes wish that Papa hadn’t spoken to my biological father, Suresh that day. Maybe it was the intoxicant in his blood that had made him agree immediately. He didn’t even bother asking my mother. I must have been really unwanted for him to have made a decision that soon. My mother was resistant. I guess, it’s the same with the pigeons, for I saw the females fight a cat for their young. Like the chicks fly away, she had let me fly in the interest of the family economics. She had put forward only one request: to keep me for another month, until my birthday.

It wasn’t long before I was five and attending school at the Government-run primary school in Solan. Housed in a small dilapidated building with a rustic stone exterior, a small metal board proclaimed its existence. Education at primary school was free – a good thing, because it was the only school that we could afford. My school was a long way away from my home, unless you took the trail through the forest of pine and rhododendron. Every day I would walk back home through those woods, skipping and kicking the rocks that lay on the steep mountain trail, until it emerged out onto the street just below our house. I wasn’t afraid at day, but by night I was a disaster.

I don’t know why I was such a nervous wreck as a child. I think I feared the ghosts. In the mountains, everyone has a tale to tell. I might have overheard one of those gory stories. The mountains are naturally dark and ominous at nights, and it doesn’t take a lot to scare a five-year-old child. I would often wake up in the middle of the night and fiddle with my hair. It was just because my parents slept in the same room that I wouldn’t be scared.

It was on one of those nights that I couldn’t sleep because my mother was unwell. The next morning, we ferried her to the hospital on the back of a scooter that my father had borrowed from a neighbour. The apathetical nurse kept us waiting for over an hour before the doctor saw my mother. The doctor, who seemed more like a novice intern, checked her and asked a few irrelevant questions before pronouncing his diagnosis – “She is pregnant”.

It had to be the way the intern looked that my father was forced to take a second opinion from Dr Mukherjee. It was ridiculously unbelievable that she could be pregnant after all these years.

“I suspect that she’s pregnant. The tests will confirm it,”
he replied.

He  obviously  did  not  know  what  my  father  would’ve
given him if he had said these words about ten years ago.

“How can that be? She couldn’t conceive. We even went to Chandigarh to get her check-up done.” I can’t forget the look on my
father’s face at that moment. He was hit by a bolt of lightning.

“You get the tests done, I am reasonably sure that my diagnosis is correct. The tests will confirm it,” he reiterated.

The laboratory report came in the next day, confirming Dr Mukherjee’s diagnosis. My mother was pregnant. It could almost be a miracle considering that twelve years of a sexually active marriage hadn’t led to conception. I was an omen, they said, it was my luck that had rubbed off on them. There was a blissful acknowledgement that there was God.

It was a bright Sunday morning, roughly eight months after my
mother’s visit to the doctor that the pains started. Mild at first, they gradually intensified until they left her gasping for breath on that dark Sunday evening.

I slept on the chair, to be woken up at dawn by my father. Excited, ecstatic, almost insane, he had transformed from that sombre-looking thirty-eight-year-old into a child who had just experienced his first roller coaster ride.

“You have a sister, Radhika,” he said through the tears and the smile that adorned his face.

I rushed into the nursery to see her
.  She was quite a disappointment. A tiny flailing creature lay in a crib, unconvinced that it had made the journey from her mother’s womb into the stark surroundings of the hospital’s nursery. Unsure, if it had gained the right to be called an infant, when it had always been called a foetus. I had expected a larger child, like the ones that they showed in the Johnson and Johnson commercials, but this creature wasn’t even close.

I didn’t quite like Natasha, my sister, because she took away so much of my
father’s time. Even before she was born, I didn’t quite know what to do once I was back from school. After she was born, I felt neglected. In the little time that my father would have, it left me feeling that I was loved. He would still bring back my gift. He would help me with homework and I wished that he could teach me in school. After all, he was so much better than the teachers at the government school. In school, I made friends but because it got dark so early in the winters, I wouldn’t go and meet them after school. If someone asked me who my best friend was, I would say Leechi for I loved the white female pigeon.

Aditya

I enter Jasleen’s house. It has ceased to be mine. The day I sold off my house, she signed a lease on this house. Jasleen has no qualms in letting me know, at every instance, that she is running it. I ring the doorbell and she opens it but stands in the doorway refusing to let me enter. I am greeted by a blood curdling glare which demands that I answer her question, “Where have you been all night?”

I want to tell her the truth about the night that has turned me into a gigolo or whatever a male prostitute is called.
The truth that she will frown upon and render me a homeless destitute. I choose the comfort of a lie.

“I slept over at a friend’s,” I say

“Who?” she asks.

She is obviously suspicious. I don’t have many friends and the few friends that I do, live in Delhi or abroad. Worse still, I have never slept over at their house.
Never.

“Rakesh,” I say. I wonder how I come up with such a horribly unimaginative, fabricated name. I am losing my sharpness. The rust of not working my brain is so apparent that it doesn’t even allow me to be imaginative in choosing a fictitious name for a fictitious character.

“Who’s he?” she asks

“A friend,” I say, stating the obvious.

This response is as dumb as Microsoft Office Help; it gives you the most logical answer that doesn’t make sense.

I am still standing outside the house while she stands in the doorway blocking my entry. I say to myself that she could be a security guard one day. Outwardly, I am as quiet as a rat. Her build almost scares me – she’s five feet nine and almost as broad.

“Never heard of him,” she asks. She is still unwilling to accede and grant me entry into the house.

“He’s a new friend,” I dodge her and enter the house. This move helped me score so many goals on the soccer field and it doesn’t let me down today.

She hasn’t finished her questioning. She follows me into the kitchen.

“You spent a night at a new friend’s place?” she continues
the interrogation

The long walk has left me thirsty so I fill a glass of water. I make her wait. She looks unhappy that I am making her wait and a frown appears on her forehead. When she’s frowning, she can cause a cardiac arrest. I am immune because I see it every day. I don’t want her to be upset lest she turns me out of the house. I keep the glass down even though it’s still half full.

“Yes, I attended a party at his place. I had a few too many, so just slept there,” I say, straight-faced. I speak with such conviction that a polygraph will fail to catch me lying.

“Ever thought about trying to find work with the same intensity that you drink?” she says

This is so familiar that I am actually beginning to enjoy it. Every conversation over the past year always leads to this point. Every conversation is an opportunity to belittle me. Every conversation depreciates me. I have reached such a stage of immunity that I can make a self-mutating virus jealous.

“I am trying to network. Rakesh works in a call centre and he will help me find a job,” I continue to lie. I finish the glass of water and refill it.

“And what makes you think he’ll find a job for a drunken sod like you?” she says.

The male ego doesn’t exist anymore. It has been trampled so often that it has preferred to die.

I just nod my head. I want to go somewhere she will not follow me; a place that can be locked from inside: the bathroom. Most conversations with her lead me into the bathroom. She thinks I have an irritable bowel syndrome. I know that is the only thing that will distract her from demeaning me.

“I am leaving for work; make sure the maid does the washing and cleaning.” She calls out behind me.

“Will do,” I say. I am cheerful that I will not have to languish in the bathroom.

She walks out of the door and I lock it. In the confines of the home and with no blaring horns to break my chain of thoughts, I go back to the events of this morning and last night. I feel torn – caught between what my
heart thinks is immoral and my brain justifies as essential. I let both of them have a conversation to sort out the mess

“I was wrong in what I did,” the heart says.

“In the circumstances, what other options did you have?” the brain asks.

“You could have told Divya to do what she could and walked out the door,” the heart says

“Naked?” the brain asks.

The brain has such a bad habit of being logical. The brain hates ambiguity. I think if the brain was a man, he would be
an accountant. He’d want the assets and the liabilities to be equal.

“You could have called for the clothes,” the heart feebly
reasons.

“Who’d have paid for them?” the brain puts it back in its place.

“What you’ve done is immoral and illegal, its prostitution,” the heart says, taking the moral high ground.

“It is a service that you provided her; it’s like the bank – they needed you, they kept you. It’s just demand and supply. Are we all not whores, in that sense?” the brain is unforgiving.

“Why did you hide it from your wife?” the heart asks.

“Did you tell her why you don’t love her or can never
love her? There are so many things about you that she doesn’t know. Let this be another one,” the brain says.

I justify and re-justify my stance on what I had done. Very long ago, someone told me about the Mamma test. If there is something that you are confused about, ask yourself if your Mamma would approve of it. My actions failed the Mamma test. After all, which son can walk up to his mother and say, “Mom, I just had sex for money”. It definitely failed the Mamma test.

I wish that it could be a lesser sin, something like lying to my boss, something innocuous that I don’t have to hide. I wish I had someone to share it with, maybe even Jasleen. I imagined how the scene would play out when she came back in the evening and I told her, “Jasleen, I was in bed with another woman. But I have the money that you want me to contribute in the house.”

I laugh to myself. This will just have to stay inside me.