Authors: Anita Nair
Ladies Coupe (14 page)
Then it was my turn to be wheeled in. A cold stillness. Tubes and monitors. A huge round lamp loomed over my body. It looked like a plate with many compartments; the kind small vegetarian hotels use to serve their meals.
‘How are you feeling, Margaret Shanthi?’
Beneath the green cap, I recognized my doctor’s face.
How do I feel? I don’t know … the words formed on my tongue. Would she understand if I tried to explain? I looked at her face and realized that it was a routine question. Perhaps one they asked everyone who was brought into the operation theatre.
I smiled. ‘Fine,’ I said, knowing that was what she wanted to hear.
Another doctor inserted a needle into my vein and began a drip. A mask was placed over my face and someone said, ‘Count backwards, Margaret.’
So I did. Today. Yesterday. The day we fixed to have an abortion. The day I knew I was pregnant …
Hours later, or was it years later, a voice, reedy and hurried, called from within the back of my skull, ‘Margaret, Margaret, wake up!’
I did. Coming back to consciousness reluctantly. An emptiness. An ache. A sense of flatness. Low in my back, an angry fist drummed on my spine. Coils of pain. I felt the pad of cotton wool between my legs. A quiet bleeding.
A slow tear dripped.
Love beckons with a rare bouquet. Love demands you drink of it. And then love burns the tongue, the senses. Love blinds. Love maddens. Love separates reason from thought. Love kills. Love is methyl alcohol pretending to be ethyl alcohol.
A week later, around midnight, Ebe woke me up with his fumbling. ‘What are you doing?’ I murmured half asleep.
‘Nothing. I just want to touch you.’ There was a strange note in his voice.
His fingers touched and probed. ‘My little girl!’ his voice crooned. ‘My darling child.’
I felt afraid. What had got into Ebe? ‘Ebe, Ebe,’ I whispered, unable to keep the panic out of my voice.
‘I love it when you call me Ebe, Ebe, just like you did now. Like a little girl. I like you like this,’ Ebe murmured. ‘So untainted and clean. My little darling. My lovely girl. With no big bouncy breasts and horrible woman’s bush. I never want you to change. I want you to remain like this all your life.’
Where was I in all this? Margaret Shanthi, the woman. In
Ebe’s eyes, had I ceased to be? What did he see me as? A little girl he could rule and mould, make love to and jolly around? It was as if he had negated all that was grown-up and womanly about me … What would happen to us when I changed? When time caught me and left its marks. When I was no longer Ebe’s little girl with shorn hair, buds for breasts, naked vulva and delicate ankles … In the dark, a sob strangled me.
Ebe’s eyes, had I ceased to be? What did he see me as? A little girl he could rule and mould, make love to and jolly around? It was as if he had negated all that was grown-up and womanly about me … What would happen to us when I changed? When time caught me and left its marks. When I was no longer Ebe’s little girl with shorn hair, buds for breasts, naked vulva and delicate ankles … In the dark, a sob strangled me.
I had a pile of lab record books in front of me. End-of-term evaluation time. But for the first time in many years, I couldn’t concentrate. I thought of him, of us, of what I had to do next. If I were to leave him, where would I go? Who would be there to reassure me that what I had done was right, that what I needed to do now was to put it behind me and start a new life of my own? Who would offer me a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on?
Over the years, my family grew to love and admire him even more. They saw him as a successful man, a respectable member of the community, a good husband, and thought that I, with all my numerous faults, overweight and barren, and given to long morose silences and a melancholic disposition, ought to go down on my knees everyday and thank the heavens that he, my husband, had still stuck by me.
When I tried to talk to my mother about the unhappiness that swelled my flesh, shadowed my thoughts and tied my tongue, she dismissed it saying, ‘It is normal to quarrel with one’s husband. Every day won’t be the same when you’ve been married to a man for years. There will be bad days and there will be good days. The trick is to remember the good days. And like I have said many times before, it is a woman’s responsibility to keep the marriage happy. Men have so many preoccupations that they might not have the time or the inclination to keep the wheels of a marriage oiled. Ebenezer is a busy man. The principal of such a large and prestigious school. You must understand this and
behave accordingly. Not greet him with your glum silences and bitter words when he returns home after a day’s work.’
behave accordingly. Not greet him with your glum silences and bitter words when he returns home after a day’s work.’
What about me? I wanted to ask. Don’t I have a right to have any expectations of him? Don’t I work as hard as he does and more because I run the house as well? Why do you think he is busy and I have all the time in the world? Shouldn’t you as my mother be on my side? Shouldn’t you listen to my point of view? What happened to this thing called unconditional love that parents are supposed to feel for their children?
My mother, like my father, I knew then, didn’t want to hear anything that threatened the idyllic world they had created for themselves. Retired with a good-sized pension and living in their own comfortable home with a pretty garden; both daughters married to eminent men and well settled in life; eldest grandchild a board-exam topper … So how could I take into that house of order and calm, my bitterness, my anger, my hate, my unhappiness?
Besides, there was the stigma of divorce. No one had ever been divorced in my family. What God had put together, no man or woman had cast asunder. In respectable families such as ours, no one gave up on their marriage. They gritted their teeth and worked harder to preserve it. If I left Ebenezer Paulraj, I would have to be prepared to lose my family as well.
What do I do? I asked myself again and again.
When the school bell rang, I hurried out. The school was only a few minutes away from the street we lived on and every evening I walked down the tree-lined avenue, stopping at the little vegetable shop at the corner. I bought just enough for each day. Ebenezer Paulraj didn’t approve of vegetables that had been refrigerated. But that evening, I decided to make do with what was left over from the previous day. A restlessness seemed to urge me on. To break routines. To do things differently.
When I reached home, I put the kettle on and switched
on the TV. The silence of the house unnerved me. With music, laughter and advertising jingles, I populated the empty rooms of my house. I changed my clothes and then I sipped my tea.
on the TV. The silence of the house unnerved me. With music, laughter and advertising jingles, I populated the empty rooms of my house. I changed my clothes and then I sipped my tea.
We never had a child. I never conceived. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with either of us. They said that one of these days it just might happen … I tried not to think about it. But sometimes a baby crawled into my head; a baby that tried to hold onto the walls of my mind and hoist itself up; a baby that reached for me …
I decided to begin cooking. It was the second Friday of the month, the day the coterie came for dinner. Ebenezer Paulraj always got rampageous on coterie nights. I tried very hard to merge with the walls or the curtains but it didn’t take much to set Ebenezer Paulraj off. The coterie was his audience and he enjoyed enthralling them with his mellifluous voice and malice disguised as humour.
When Ebenezer Paulraj was offered the post of Principal of the S. R. P. Trust School four years ago, we left Kodaikanal to come to Coimbatore. As his wife and a postgraduate in chemistry with a degree in education and ample experience, I was offered the post of Head of Department of chemistry. I was expected to teach the senior school. ‘But since this is the first batch and there is only one class, you might have to handle some junior classes too,’ Ebenezer Paulraj said, as he described the school, the teachers, the challenge his job posed, the wonderful opportunity it was going to be for him. I listened quietly, wondering why he bothered at all. He had already made up his mind.
The coterie formed in the first year of Ebenezer Paulraj’s reign. It wasn’t as if he set out to form a power group. Ebenezer Paulraj in his new role of ‘Father of the State’, for that was how he thought of himself in relation to the school, instituted a monthly lunch to be held at our house. The teachers were asked to bring their spouses and a dish each. We had a full house the first few times. But slowly the
numbers began to dwindle until only the coterie was left. The lunch became dinner and Ebenezer Paulraj’s power became supreme.
numbers began to dwindle until only the coterie was left. The lunch became dinner and Ebenezer Paulraj’s power became supreme.
Now that there were only six mouths to feed and six minds to entertain (none of the coterie was married), I was expected to provide dinner. The coterie couldn’t be faulted. They always brought something – a box of cakes, a packet of chips and sometimes fruit. In Ebenezer Paulraj’s eyes, they did their bit and I had to do mine.
‘I don’t ever ask anything of you. So if this is such a chore, I’ll ask Premilla or Daphne to cook the food. Except, think of how it’s going to make you look,’ he said when I complained the first time after a few dinners.
‘But why do we have to have them over every month? It isn’t as if you don’t see them every day,’ I said, irritated by the thought of having to open my house to a group who I knew thought of me as the principal’s misfortune.
‘I don’t have many friends. Do you have to grudge me even this?’ he said quietly, walking out of the room.
Ebe never argued. Ebe never lost his temper. Ebe never raised his voice. He shut himself in and sat there in stoic silence till I weakened and grovelled and gave in to doing whatever it was that he wanted.
When we were first married, Ebe wanted to play Daddy. He wanted to do his share of the household chores. He insisted when I refused his offers of help. I had a maid to do the more laborious chores and he, like all men, as I had heard my mother tell my father, simply got in the way.
But after things began to sour between us, I realized that Ebe treated the house like a hotel. He expected everything to run by itself without having to do anything except pay for the services. Food on the table. Laundered and ironed clothes for him to wear. Beds made, shelves dusted, towels changed, bathrooms cleaned, errands run, all by invisible hands. I suppressed an occasional burst of irritation at his self-absorption and let it continue. But it rankled that he
never bothered to appreciate how well everything was managed.
never bothered to appreciate how well everything was managed.
When we moved to Coimbatore, things changed. My teaching hours grew longer and my responsibilities heavier. But Ebe was impervious to how our lives had altered. I found I could no longer cope, as I had done earlier, without his help. The irritation that I could rein in once began to show, in my speech, in my tone of voice, in the way I ran our house.
He complained about the food when I warmed up leftovers. The maids were found unsatisfactory: he found their nails were dirty, their voices loud and raucous, their manner shifty and their hair everywhere. ‘Get rid of her,’ he would say after a few days of each maid’s tenure.
‘Kasturi was just like them. But you never complained then,’ I tried to argue.
‘Kasturi was never in the house when I was. She didn’t get in my way. These ones do. Frankly, I don’t think we need a maid at all. I’ll buy us a washing machine and that’ll take care of most of it,’ he said, flinging a glance at the maid who was sweeping the floors.
What about the washing up? The sweeping and mopping? The numerous little things a maid takes care of? I thought wearily. Angrily.
As my fatigue increased, our quarrels became more and more petty. I stopped hiding my annoyance at his callousness. He retaliated with sarcasm. The more derisive he was, the more I nagged. We were little children competing to see who could be nastier.
We fought over the food I cooked, which he said was so basic that we might as well chomp on raw vegetables and boiled meat. ‘Why don’t you cook then?’ I would retort. He would walk away from the table with his unfinished plate and I would find him scraping the remains into the bin.
We argued over spider’s webs that I had failed to detect and the dirty clothes he left on the floor expecting them to
walk by themselves to the washing machine. ‘Oh, stop nagging, will you? I said I’ll put the clothes in the machine. Why does it have to be done right this very minute?’
walk by themselves to the washing machine. ‘Oh, stop nagging, will you? I said I’ll put the clothes in the machine. Why does it have to be done right this very minute?’
Then there were Ebe’s certificates. Every competition that Ebe had ever won, from his nursery school days when he came first in the infants’ class Frog Jump race to the inter-college debating competition where he was awarded the best interjector, was framed and hung.
The certificates occupied a whole wall and had encroached onto the other walls as well. Ebe complained that I didn’t dust them often enough. That the glass looked filthy and when he took down a frame, he could see dust lining its top. ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ I snapped. ‘This is silly. Which grown man would hang up a certificate that says he came first in threading the needle when he was three and was second in the sack race when he was four? Don’t you realize, Ebe, that even your own friends laugh at you?’
In the beginning, I would tell Ebe about every little thing I did, every thought that crossed my mind; I thought he would want to know the details of my day like I did his. One day I noticed that he wasn’t listening. He was only pretending to. I saw a fog of disinterest settle over his eyes as I talked. I saw him reach for a magazine and flick through its pages. I stopped. I didn’t know what else to do. That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept asking myself: if I can’t tell him, who else is there for me to talk to? The next day, I was quiet. I waited for him to notice the silence; to ask me if everything was alright; to find out what was bothering me. He didn’t. I realized then that Ebe didn’t care what I did with myself when he wasn’t around. And slowly, I stopped talking to him. If he wasn’t interested in knowing, I told myself, I wasn’t going to tell him.
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