And then there he was. In one swift motion he was kneeling at her feet with his arms around her waist. ‘You are so lovely …’ words that she barely heard. All she could think of was the feel of his touch through the silk of the caftan. His fingers splayed on her skin, seeking, moving, a
spider hunting for its prey. When his hands cupped her breasts, she gasped.
Prabha Devi wanted to scream, shriek, rake her fingernails down his face, bunch her fingers into a fist and smash his nose, knee him in the groin, kick his shins … But the shock of what was happening to her froze her into saying nothing, doing nothing. His hands continued to knead her flesh. His mouth murmured words that she no longer comprehended. This is not happening to me. This violation of my body is not happening to me. This is just a nightmare. I’m asleep in my bed and I will wake up any moment now …
The clock struck the hour. And suddenly Prabha Devi came alive. ‘How dare you?’ she screamed, thrusting his hands away fiercely. ‘How dare you come to my house and take such …’ she fumbled for a word ‘ … liberties with me? Don’t you have any sense of decency? Get out of my house. Get out before I have you thrown out.’
‘Oh, come now,’ Pramod said, circling her wrists with his fingers, pulling her towards him. ‘Quit playing the good wife, will you? Remember you chased me first. You enticed me with your smiles and coy looks. And now you are accusing me of making indecent advances. Prabha, you want me as much as I want you. You can deny it as long and as loudly as you want, but I know.’
Prabha Devi pulled her wrists out of his grasp, raised her arm and slapped him on the cheek. ‘Get out, I said. I never want to see you again.’
He moved towards her to retaliate. But from the veranda the child called. He stopped mid-stride, stared at her for a moment and said, ‘There’s a name for women like you. I don’t have to say it. I think you know it.’ Then he turned on his heel and walked out.
And then the enormity of the incident struck Prabha Devi. A sledgehammer that slammed into her and had her crouching in the chair hugging her knees to her chest. What if the servants had come in at the wrong moment and
seen her in his arms? What if they had overheard the whole sordid encounter between Pramod and her? What if one of them took it upon herself to inform Jagdeesh or his parents of what had happened? What if they didn’t believe her version? What if she was condemned as a brazen woman and thrown out of the house and family?
She wept into her hands, ashamed and afraid. Maybe she really was to blame. Maybe she had led him on. Maybe her body had sent him all the wrong signals. The what-ifs and maybes twisted and turned; puncturing dreams and expectations she had of life and swiftly draining away her confidence. When there were no more tears to shed, Prabha Devi made a decision. She would camouflage this body that had sent such reckless messages to the world. She would lock away that gay spirited woman who had caused her such anguish, and unlearn every single mannerism she had worked so hard to acquire. She would never again ask for anything and would be content with what was offered to her. She would withdraw herself from life. She would revert to being who she was when she first married Jagdeesh. A woman beyond reproach and above all suspicion.
Prabha Devi became the woman her mother had hoped she would be. With eyes forever downcast and busy hands; embroidering, pickling, dusting, birthing babies, preserving order and bliss in the confines of her home and all the while chanting to herself: this is who I ought to be, this is the way to be happy.
Some nights Jagdeesh would lie awake as she slept. He would turn towards her and gaze at her sleeping face. What had happened to the woman who had wrapped her legs around his body and teased his senses with her lips? She had been right after all. Once the first child arrived, everything had changed. In fact, it changed the moment he realized that she wanted him to make her pregnant. One day she was a confident girl with desires and needs that she
demanded be met. The next day she was the cringing shy girl he had married, who asked for little and gave all of herself.
He was glad even though he missed the passion she had fuelled their lives with. She was a good wife and an excellent mother. What more could a man ask for?
What more could a woman need apart from a happy marriage and healthy children? he thought as sleep curled into his eyes.
That September afternoon, Prabha Devi stood before the full-length mirror in her room. Unbidden, an echo of a nursery rhyme popped into her thoughts.
‘Prabha Devi, Prabha Devi, where have you been?’
‘I became a woman, neither heard nor seen,’ the mirror retorted, rhyming grimly.
‘Prabha Devi, Prabha Devi, what did you do there?’ the parody continued.
‘I waited and waited till ash speckled my hair.’
Prabha Devi smiled. A narrow humourless smile. Women dwindled to faded specks as the years went by. And cats tormented mice even under the queen’s chair. That was the rule of life, her life, she told herself as salt rimmed her eyes. Tears for herself. For the woman she had become. For ceasing to want more for herself.
When she had dried her eyes, Prabha Devi realized it was time to pick up her son from his tennis lessons. The children had been born in quick succession. A girl came first and then a boy. Children who even from birth seemed to have an in-built sense of decorum and Jagdeesh’s equable temperament. So when friends and relatives remarked, ‘How lucky you are to have such delightful children,’ Prabha Devi didn’t know whether she ought to be sad or glad that neither of the children had inherited any of the quirks that had surfaced in her so briefly.
Nitya was in college and had a schedule so hectic that it left her with little time to spend with Prabha Devi. Nitya
doesn’t need me, not like she had needed her mother when she was eighteen, Prabha Devi often thought when she saw her daughter rush out of the house to go to a friend’s home or to college or for a film or a music lesson. But at least there was Vikram. Fifteen-year-old Vikram, not sure whether he was man or boy, and still available for his mother to love and cherish.
Vikram hadn’t finished his game and so Prabha Devi decided to stroll through the club grounds while she waited for him. For a long time she had avoided the club, afraid that she would run into Pramod there. Once the children were born, she no longer needed to make any excuses. The children required her attention. Her hours and thoughts were filled from seam to seam with vests and knickers, geometry kits and drawing books, school uniforms and vitamin tablets, homework and vacations …
This afternoon, Prabha Devi found that it was possible to put aside the corollary that hinged itself to her mind when a child’s mealtime was delayed: He must be hungry, he must be tired. I ought to take him home right away and feed him till the fatigue is pushed out of his bones and smoothened out of his features. Prabha Devi discovered that it didn’t matter so much anymore. So she didn’t hover by the tennis courts willing the tennis coach to finish as she usually did. Instead she walked.
The sprinklers were on. By dusk, the lawns would be green and moist; the crackle in every blade of grass dampened with a relentless spray of water. Prabha Devi skirted the sprinklers and walked down the path till it ended abruptly at a wall covered with cascades of pink and white bougainvillaea. A little gate in the wall beckoned. Another schoolgirl memory tumbled into her mind. Was this how Alice felt when she saw the little door in the wall? What wonderland lay beyond it?
Prabha Devi opened the gate and went in. A pool gurgled, its blueness mirroring the skies. Touch me, it said.
Prabha Devi crouched by the poolside and let her fingers
slide through the water. There was no one around. On one side was a bamboo clump. Its feathery leaves created an arc of shade. Prabha Devi moved to the shaded spot and sat down by the side of the pool, her feet dangling in the water. The pool made little cooing noises. The water tugged at her ankles. Come in, it said.
Prabha Devi felt a great desire possess her. She had never known anything like this before. She would, she decided, learn to swim.
Prabha Devi wished she could tell someone how she felt. The excitement, the tingling of her toes, the surge of blood into her head at the mere thought of entering the shrugging waters of the rectangular pool, of being able to swim. But it would have to remain a secret. Jagdeesh would neither approve nor commend her decision. In fact, she knew it would horrify him. Perhaps even more than the time she had suggested he use a condom, she thought with a giggle. Already she felt like a girl again.
So, with subterfuge and stealth that is as much a good housewifely virtue as pickling onions, bottling mango chutney, selling old newspapers or converting worn-out towels into bath mats by merely folding them and stitching together the edges, Prabha Devi plotted and schemed.
She bought her swimsuit from the shop where she bought her lingerie. Navy blue with a little frill around the hip.
‘Would you like a pair of bicycling shorts? Most ladies wear one and pull the swimsuit over it,’ the saleswoman said, fingering a row of lycra shorts. Then lowering her voice, she added, ‘They tell me that way their thighs are covered and they needn’t worry about catching any infectious diseases from the water.’
Prabha Devi nodded. Every time she shopped for underwear this happened. An instant camaraderie seemed to spring up between her and the saleswoman. A bonding so familiar that for a moment, she thought, this is how it must be with a sister or a best friend. Beneath what their clothes
made them out to be, they were the same. Their problems were the same. Bra straps that cut into the skin. Thickening of the waist. Mottled thighs. A heart that ached to be needed. A mind that longed to soar.
Prabha Devi tried on the swimsuit. The mirror told no lies. She ran her palms down her flanks, feeling the fabric slide under her skin. ‘At least you don’t have hips like pumpkins or a paunch that sticks out farther than your bosom. And even if it did, it shouldn’t matter. You are doing this for yourself For the first time in many years, you are doing what you want and not what everyone else thinks you ought to want,’ she told herself sternly.
When it was time to draw up the bill, she asked them to write down the items as mere numbers. Jagdeesh gave her as much money as she wanted. But he liked every rupee to be accounted for. ‘Don’t forget to pick up the bill when you buy something,’ he said each time he gave her a stack of notes.
Discreet enquiries at the club house revealed that there was a swimming coach but he came in the afternoon and the class was only for children below fourteen.
‘He conducts special camps for ladies in the summer. Perhaps you can enrol then,’ the clerk suggested.
Prabha Devi felt her excitement drain away. But only for a minute. It surged back when the clerk suggested, ‘Why don’t you just observe what the coach does for a few days? Swimming is not all that easy. Last year, many of our lady members stopped halfway through the camp. They said it was much too difficult and tiring.’
Prabha Devi decided that she would learn to swim by herself. No one had taught her how to welcome her husband into her body. Nor had anyone shown her how to nurse her children at her breast. An instinct had worked then. She would have to call that instinct to the fore again. After all, she had spent nine months in her mother’s womb swimming.
For the next three weeks, Prabha Devi went an hour earlier than usual to pick Vikram up from his tennis lessons.
‘What is the need for you to go there so early?’ Jagdeesh asked one morning.
‘If I don’t go there, he fools around instead of playing,’ she lied. How did I get to be a woman who has to account for her every hour besides every rupee spent? Jagdeesh had never been such a domineering man. I let him rule me and now he knows no other way to treat me, Prabha Devi realized with a pang. There is a lesson here. Someday I will have to tell my daughter all about it. How women set the tone of a marriage.
‘Daughter,’ I’ll have to say, ‘show him you are incapable of doing anything beyond the periphery of your home and he will manage your life, from sending postal orders to balancing cheque books to booking railway tickets to managing household expenses. He will pet you and cosset you at first, for after all, you are appealing to the male in him to protect and safeguard. But it will be only a matter of days before he turns into a tyrant who will want to control your every thought.
‘There is an alternative. You could choose to demonstrate how independent you are and show him how well you manage by yourself Except that when you need a pair of arms around you, someone to hold you and cherish you, he might not be there because you have always let him know that you don’t need him. Where is the middle path, the golden mean? Daughter, I wish I knew. I wish my mother had told me what was the right thing to do. Or perhaps the truth is, she didn’t know either.’
Prabha Devi stood by the swimming pool trying to sort the chaos within her.
‘Which one is yours?’ the swimming coach floated towards her and asked with a sweep of his arm.
‘None,’ she smiled.
‘So what are you doing here?’ he prodded, not that he particularly cared. But it was a relief to talk to someone who
wasn’t snivelling or screaming for their mother—and was not fourteen years old.
‘Trying to learn to swim,’ Prabha Devi said, not taking her eyes off the children who held the steel bar at the shallow end and kept kicking at the water furiously, desperately, trying to hold their breath, stay afloat, conquer their fear of water and not draw the attention of the coach to themselves, all at the same time.