‘Don’t mock her,’ Janaki said. Janaki, who could very well have been her mother and theirs. How easily they slipped into familiar roles. Mother and three daughters. Two siblings ganging up against one.
‘She is serious. Can’t you two see that?’
Akhila shrugged. ‘I don’t know if you will be able to help me. But you must tell me what you really think. Can a woman cope alone?’
‘Is it advice you are looking for?’ Janaki asked.
‘I don’t want advice. I just want you to tell me if you think a woman can manage alone,’ Akhila said in a low voice.
Janaki peered at her face, searching her eyes. Akhila sat there saying nothing. Janaki sighed. ‘They,’ she said gesturing to the other two, ‘are closer in age to you. You should speak to them. Their opinion will mean much more than mine. I am the wrong person to talk to. My husband and I have been married for forty years. That’s a long time for a couple to stay together. How can I tell you what it means for a woman to live alone?’
There was silence in the coupé. For a moment, Akhila had thought they had established a connection. Foetuses jostling within the walls of a womb, drawing sustenance from each other’s lives, aided by the darkness outside and the fact that what was shared within the walls wouldn’t go beyond this night or the contained space.
‘I don’t know enough about the world or you to offer advice. All I can do is tell you about myself, about my marriage and what it means to me,’ Janaki began suddenly, slowly, as if every word had to be chosen with great care. ‘I am a woman who has always been looked after. First there
was my father and my brothers; then my husband. When my husband is gone, there will be my son. Waiting to take off from where his father left off. Women like me end up being fragile. Our men treat us like princesses. And because of that we look down upon women who are strong and who can cope by themselves. Do you understand what I am saying?
‘Perhaps because of the way I was brought up, perhaps because of all that was instilled in me, I believed that a woman’s duty was to get married. To be a good wife and mother. I believed in that tired old cliché that a home was a woman’s kingdom. I worked very hard to preserve mine. And then suddenly, one day, it didn’t matter any more. My home ceased to interest me; none of the beliefs I had built my life around had any meaning. I thought if I were to lose it all, I would cope. If I ever became alone, I would manage perfectly. I was quite confident about that. I think I was tired of being this fragile creature.’
Akhila searched Janaki’s face. What did she mean by ‘was’?
‘But you have changed your mind now. Why?’ Akhila asked.
Janaki patted the air pillow as if it were her husband’s hand and said, ‘Now I know that even if I can cope, it isn’t the same if he isn’t there with me.’
A Certain Age
Feathers. Soft wispy down. The swish of satin on the skin of the inner arm. Every night Janaki lay on her side, cradling her face in the crook of her elbow, and thought of all the nice and soft things in life. Anything to drown the noises that seeped through the walls of the bathroom. Noises that she had heard almost every night for the past forty years.
The gurgling of the cistern when he flushed. The splash of water on the floor as the shower spat out fifty-two jets of tepid water. He was that kind of a person; extremes of any sort worried him. His tuneless humming as he soaped himself vigorously, allowing the fragrant white lather to coat his body. Make-believe amniotic fluid before he curled up into a foetal ball beside her. More splashes. The tinkle of his teeth in a china cup. He brushed his dentures and his remaining teeth faithfully every night. Gargling. Spitting. The tuneless humming again and again.
Do I really hear these noises? Or, is it just what I know? Janaki asked herself Have we really lived together for thirty years?
Janaki married Prabhakar when she was eighteen and he was twenty-seven. Theirs was an arranged marriage; the
horoscopes matched, the families liked each other and they were considered perfectly suited for each other. Janaki didn’t know what to expect of marriage. All through her girlhood she had been groomed for it. Her mother and aunts had taught her the arts of cooking and cleaning, sewing and pickling … she wasn’t expected to know what it really meant to be married, and neither was she curious about it. It would come to her as it had to her mother, she thought.
On her wedding night, when he touched her lips with his, all she felt was a stiffening within. It wasn’t just shyness. It was perhaps the strangeness. She had never been alone with a man in a room, with the door locked. The company of men had always been frowned upon and suddenly because she was married they said it was all right for her to be with him, let him touch her and even undress her.
‘He is your husband and you must accept whatever he does,’ Janaki’s aunts had whispered as they led her to the bedroom adorned with jasmine and scented with incense sticks.
He lay down next to her and drew her palms to his chest. ‘Touch me,’ he said and all she could think was how coarse the hair on his chest was.
He nuzzled his chin against her neck and again that wave of repulsion washed over her: What am I doing here? What have I let myself in for?
He touched. He stroked. He caressed and fondled and yet all Janaki felt was a locking within.
Their marriage remained unconsummated for more than two months. He didn’t force himself upon her. It wasn’t as if he didn’t try to make her more receptive. He coaxed, cajoled and even pleaded. He tried very hard to make her accept him into her body. But each time, she flinched at the slightest twinge of pain, and he withdrew and left her alone. She began to wish that he would stop being so gentle and would force himself to close his eyes to her reluctance. She
was afraid, you see. That if she didn’t give him what he wanted, he would go looking for it elsewhere.
So Janaki finally conquered her revulsion, matched his caresses, opened her arms, parted her legs, ground the pain when it came between her teeth, and swallowed it down with a cry that threw itself up her throat. That night, he held her close and whispered against her hair again and again, ‘You are my wife. You are my wife.’
Nothing else mattered then, she thought, but the knowledge that she was his wife and that she had pleased him.
In the weeks after she had allowed him access to her body, she began to discover the pleasure hidden in rituals of togetherness. Wearing his old shirts to bed, feeling the fabric slither on her skin. Sharing a cup of tea, tasting his mouth in hers. Bathing together. Splashing each other, the loofah a living creature as their fingers teased and caressed skin. The fluffy white cotton towel was a device that said ‘Look how much I love you’ as it gently wrapped them in a cocoon of warmth, sucking moisture with a thousand lips.
When did they stop going into the bathroom hand in hand? Before the baby came or after?
When you have been married long, bathing becomes simply a means to cleanse yourself The rest of it is over with the honeymoon.
Janaki turned on her back and drew the quilt up to her chin.
Every night, Janaki lay awake until she heard the bedsprings creak and groan as they accepted his weight. Only when he had settled for the night, arranging his body so as to not intrude into her space, did she allow herself to drift into sleep. He knew that she didn’t like the sheet rucked or the blanket tangled around her legs. So he kept his distance with a separate blanket. He tossed and turned. She didn’t.
In the morning, when they woke up, it was as if they had slept in separate rooms in separate beds.
Some nights they talked. Random pieces of conversation. About their son. A neighbour. Or, perhaps a film they had seen earlier that night. Sometimes they slipped into reminiscences. Memories that were dicephalous. He didn’t remember it the way she did. But what did it matter? In retrospect, it was the sharing that counted.
Some nights his body sought hers. His shape moulded hers. Some nights she welcomed him and other nights bore with patience the warmth his skin, lips, hands and thighs inflicted on her so benignly. Later, when spent, they would arrange themselves into separate entities and fall asleep.
After forty years, there were no more surprises, no jarring notes, no peek-a-boos from behind doors. There was just this friendly love. It was the kind of love advertising companies liked to capitalize on.
Take out an insurance policy so that the retirement years are spent blissfully walking the dog on the beach, building sandcastles with grandchildren and sipping coconut water. None of those wind-in-the-hair bike rides. Or rolling down a mountainside. You drank your Horlicks and reaped the benefits of your insurance policy.
Why do they make these years seem like a waiting period for death, Janaki thought. She switched channels each time a life insurance commercial appeared.
But wasn’t that the way they lived? Borrowing moments from television commercials. The jokes, the laughter, the nostalgia as they looked at photo albums together. Friendly love. The curve of the rainbow before it disappeared into the haze of clouds.
Janaki groped for her glasses on the bedside table. What time was it? When she put her glasses on, she saw there was no clock; the familiar white alarm clock that stood by the side of her bed at home was absent. Instead there was a rosebud-shaped clock on the wall … She would need to
put the light on. She felt along the side of the table. There was a switch here somewhere. Why couldn’t they make space for a bedside clock instead of all these silly knick-knacks littering the surface of the table? She shouldn’t complain, she thought. This was her granddaughter’s room after all and they were just visiting.
She nearly knocked over the water glass.
Every night for the past ten years, he had laid out a single tablet of Trika with a glass of water for her. Somehow when he did it, it didn’t seem so bad, her inability fall asleep naturally.
The doctor had helped her lift her legs out of the stirrups slung over the examination table and had smoothened the aqua-green hospital smock over her thighs. He had smiled and assured her, ‘You are absolutely alright. As for your not being able to sleep …’ he had shrugged casually. ‘When you get to a certain age, sleep does become difficult.’
A certain age. She was a woman of a certain age. But what about him? He was a restless sleeper but he had no trouble falling asleep. Like a baby. Baby blue. Bonny, bonny baby.
When they had been married for about seven months, in those days when every day had brought with it a delicious tinge of discovery that made love seem like a whole new theory he and she had infused with meaning, they had fallen into the habit of baby talking each other.
Goo goo, juju mani, she would croon. Lu lu, he’d murmur nibbling at her ear lobe. Nonsensical sounds only they knew how to decipher.
Then one day Janaki discovered she was pregnant. She craved the taste of tobacco and smoked the butts he left behind in the ashtrays. When he put his arm around her, she lifted it off with barely-concealed rage. She hated him, god knows why, but the doctor explained that it was natural for her to feel that way. Blame it all on the hormones, he said with a laugh.
When the baby began kicking, the hate went as her
craving had. She increasingly baby talked him, ruffled his hair fondly and began work on a patchwork quilt for the baby’s bed. And like all fathers-to-be, he pressed his ear to her stomach that rippled. A water diviner waiting for the inner forces to tug and draw him closer.
When the baby came, they made it smile with rattles and monkeys that beat on drums when wound with a key. They counted its tiny toes, held it close to their hearts and mouthed gibberish.
In bed, their conversations dwindled to – Is the nappy wet? Did you check the teddy lamp? I thought I heard a cry. Did you?
They stopped doing little quizzes on ‘How much do you understand your partner?’ or ‘Is your marriage still romantic? ’ Instead they ticked boxes to find out if they were good parents and if their child was growing up right.
It didn’t bother them, this invasion of their privacy. They looked at the child and saw themselves in him. He was an extension of their images. When he came home with a silver cup, the prize for a school tennis match, their hearts sparkled. Can you believe it, he came from within us, they signalled to each other in telepathic ecstasy.
There was no stopping this wonder child they fed on cornflakes and milk, toast and butter, soft-boiled eggs and multivitamins for breakfast. He made their lives so full. Report cards, band-aids, summer vacations, birthdays … this child of theirs made their marriage so much more complete.
At parties, they were the golden couple. When she was ready to leave, he knew it and would rise from his chair, setting aside the drink he had been nursing all evening. She would smile and murmur polite words of farewell while he pumped various hands and laughed through his leavetaking. In this marriage, he was the partner with bonhomie and verve.
When they reached home cruising through the city roads, keeping an eye out for meandering drunks and
speeding trucks, it would never be later than half past ten. He would park the scooter while she fumbled with the house keys. Together, they would go into their son’s room. She would give the boy a glass of warm milk to drink and he would watch from the door.
Later, in bed, she would feel his arm snake around her waist. ‘Did you have a good time?’ he would whisper. (When the boy was a baby and still slept in a cot in their room, they had talked softly so that they didn’t wake him up. The baby was almost fourteen now and slept in another room, but they still whispered in bed.) She would murmur drowsily, ‘Mmmm … nice time.’ Even in that semi-comatose state, she would utter a silent prayer to God. This man made her forget what the mirror and the daylight reminded her about so annoyingly. The lines on her neck, the droop of her breasts, the sag of her puckered and scarred belly that had never quite recovered from having held captive another live being. Those days, she hadn’t got to be a woman of a certain age.
When did the certain age creep up on Janaki? Did she realize it first when she no longer liked his arm around her waist? Or was it when there began a tightness in her temples that grew worse when he laughed as he always did, loudly? Or was it one evening when they took their son, their almost grown-up six-foot tall, broad-shouldered Siddharth, shoe shopping and she watched Prabhakar try and steer their son towards his preferences? Supple leather shoes with well-fitted soles. Middle-aged men’s shoes. Janaki saw her son’s face tighten in rebellion. He didn’t like the shoes. ‘Not this,’ he said. ‘Not this, either.’
Prabhakar threw up his arms and let his vexation show. ‘What are you looking for? This is the fourth shop we have been to this evening and nothing seems to suit your fancy. What is it you want? Do you know what you want?’
And she felt this queer rage uncoil within her. ‘Let him choose what he wants. I don’t understand why we should
be here. Siddharth is old enough to be trusted to buy a pair of shoes on his own,’ she hissed.
‘I was just trying to help,’ he said.
‘That’s not helping. You just want to control him. You want to control everybody. You want everyone to do your bidding,’ she said, not caring who overheard.
‘Janu,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong? Are you feeling alright?’
‘Oh, leave me alone,’ Janaki snapped and walked out of the shoe shop leaving father and son together.
Or was it the day when Siddharth brought home with him six other boys from his class for lunch and Janaki stood at the door, smiling a welcome, trying to curb her panic? There was barely enough food to stretch to four. Flustered, anxious, Janaki rushed into the kitchen to cook some more and discovered the gas cylinder was empty and that she had forgotten to call the gas agency and book in advance for another one. Janaki stood by the stove that refused to burn, looked at the washed and soaking rice, the chopped vegetables, and burst into tears. What am I going to do? What will Siddharth’s friends think of me?