When Prabhakar came home for lunch, he found her huddled in the kitchen blubbering while Siddharth and his friends sat at the dining table making conversation, pretending that nothing was wrong and that the sobbing they could hear quite clearly was perhaps coming from the TV in the living room.
The certain age. Maybe it came upon her when she saw the fond indulgence in her adult son’s eyes replaced by an irritation bordering on disdain. Or maybe it hit her when she stopped marking the calendar on the day her periods began and instead her husband took to the hospital pharmacist every month a prescription for thirty tablets of Trika.
Thirty days hath September, April, June and November …
‘What about the rest of the year?’ Janaki grumbled.
But he had a solution, like he always did. He was a good
provider. So he remembered the months with the extra day and reminded the doctor about it.
What about him? What had happened to him in those years?
Men don’t really change that much. Or so women like to think. They bald a little, their eyes grow dim, but they still insist on checking the door after their wives have locked up.
He was no different. The beating of his heart slowed him down, sometimes it crashed in his ears, but he didn’t forget his place as a husband, father and provider.
She didn’t think he loved her any less because of her mood swings. He just understood – an understanding person always suffers.
Not that it was true of him. He didn’t suffer. She had tried very hard to be a good wife and mother. It was only now, this certain age, that had made her so, well, sensitive.
‘Tell me, do you know of any other couple like us? Our son is well settled. We are secure and healthy. We live in our own house. After forty years together, what more can one ask for?’
They had it all, didn’t they? They even had sex (how she detested that word) once in a while.
‘When my parents got to be our age, they stopped living. I don’t mean they died. They breathed, ate, slept. Yes, that’s all they did with their lives,’ she told this foe who lived in her mind and questioned her marriage.
There was a certain something that he and she shared. A tensile connection that is there between most couples who have been married a long time. She didn’t know how to describe it. As companionship? As friendship? Or a mere complicity that springs between people who share a bed, a child and a life? Whatever it was, she didn’t see it between her son and his wife.
Janaki pitied the girl and she wished she could take her
son’s chin in her palm, like she used to when he was a little boy and being fractious, and tell him sternly – You’ll drive her away from you with your callousness, with your cold sullen expression. Is this how your Dad is with me? So who taught you to be like this?
Then it occurred to Janaki that perhaps it was her he was emulating. That the selfish streak had been her contribution to his gene pool. That she was to blame and no one else.
When they had guests, when they had family visiting, when the house was echoing with sounds and laughter and she was in the kitchen, dishing up a meal, Prabhakar would hover alongside wanting to help, unwilling to leave her alone. And even if there was nothing for him to do, he would stand leaning against the kitchen counter, clinking the ice in his rum and soda and wait.
‘Go on, I’ll join you soon,’ Janaki would say, but he wouldn’t budge.
Sometimes if it was a couple who they enjoyed having over or a cousin whom Janaki had adored as a child, he would whisper in her ear, ‘Happy?’
And she would smile. At that moment she felt truly happy.
Janaki placed the Trika on her tongue and quickly sipped from the glass of water. Then reaching out, she switched off the lamp.
She didn’t know why this room made her feel uneasy. The strangeness bothered her. They had only come in to Bangalore this morning from Hyderabad where they had been visiting friends, and were supposed to stay with Siddharth for a week. A week seemed forever in this room.
This bed, with its frilled bedspread, sheets patterned with cabbage roses and pillow slips in muted pink, was out of a magazine advertisement. Even the quilt had pink satin piping. The bedside lamp was a cloud of rose on a terracotta base. It overpowered her, this room.
Jaya, their daughter-in-law, in her gay, affluent child voice had prattled, ‘We call it our pink room. It’s Suchi’s room, which is why we have done it up in pink. But I have removed all her toys and games so it doesn’t look like a child’s room. I hope you will be comfortable in it.’
Sometimes her daughter-in-law got on her nerves. But she deflected any antagonism between them with the composure she had worked hard to acquire. When you get to a certain age, nothing matters. You only want to cling to your serenity and leave the dreaming and storming for those with steaming blood in their veins. Emotions are for the young; the elderly have no use for them. It doesn’t become them either, she had decided a long time ago.
Janaki thought of her mother. Distraught at how her children took her for granted. Unable to accept the senility forced upon her, so that all they had to do was humour her. She had vowed never to be like her mother, eyes streaked with tears, voice cracked with sorrow. When you get to a certain age, nothing matters but your serenity.
After their wedding and honeymoon, Siddharth and Jaya came visiting. All day, Janaki felt Jaya’s eyes follow them, Prabhakar and her, as they went through the ballet of household chores. A synchronized performance that years of practice had fine-tuned to perfection. He chopped. She cooked. He washed the dishes. She dried and stacked them. She hung out the clothes to dry. He brought them in. She turned down the bedclothes. He switched off the lights.
A couple of mornings later, as Janaki made dosas in the kitchen and Prabhakar sat at the dining table chopping vegetables for the sambar, Jaya sipped her tea and said, ‘Mummy, you are so lucky to have a man like Uncle for your husband. He helps you in just about every way he can, doesn’t he?’
Janaki watched her husband beam and thought to herself that it was true. She couldn’t do a single thing around the house without his help.
‘Ever since Papa died, Mamma has had to do everything by herself. But she says that has made her a stronger woman than most.’ The pride in Jaya’s voice caught at Janaki’s throat. For some reason, it made her feel inadequate. Are you saying that I am a weak, helpless creature, she wanted to demand.
Prabhakar looked up from the cutting board. He paused in the middle of slicing an onion and said, ‘Just because she needs me to open the mixer jar or chop onions for her, you mustn’t think Mummy is a weak woman.
‘When we were just married and I was stationed in a small town near Hyderabad, one afternoon, our neighbour Mrs Bhatt who was eight months pregnant went into labour. There was no one Mummy could call for help. There were no telephones then, no autorickshaws or taxis at every street corner. And the nearest hospital was five kilometres away. You know what she did … Mummy went to the main road and waved down a truck. The truck driver and Mummy took Mrs Bhatt to the hospital. If Mummy hadn’t done that, Mrs Bhatt would have died …
‘She might seem delicate and cosseted to you, but she is a strong woman. Mummy is very capable when she wants to be.’
He told that story to everyone. He told that story with such pride that it made Janaki grit her teeth. He told that story as if it was the only worthwhile deed of her life. She wanted to fling down the spatula, upturn the bowl that held the dosa batter and slap his face till the pride crumbled in his eyes and scattered in the air. She wanted to scream, ‘Don’t call me Mummy. I’m not your mummy. I am your wife. Remember, you used to call me Janu once. Wife. Darling. Sweetheart. And if you find it hard saying those, call me woman, but don’t call me Mummy!’
Janaki felt her daughter-in-law’s eyes on her and turned her face away. She didn’t want her to see the fury in her eyes. Janaki wanted Jaya to think of her as a composed and contented woman.
Janaki switched on the bedside lamp. He had been in the bathroom for more than fifteen minutes. Where was he? She couldn’t hear the familiar comforting noises. Had he slipped and fallen? Had he felt a strange weakness overtake him as he slumped on the floor? She would wait for a few minutes more before she got up and went looking for him. She had never fussed over him. He would think it strange if she started doing so now.
What did her mother feel when her father died? What would it be like when he was no more?
Janaki refused to think of it. Siddharth brought it up in conversation every now and then:
‘Mummy, when Daddy is gone, how will you stay by yourself in that huge house?’
‘You will have to make your home with us one day or the other.’
‘My friend deals in real estate. When the time comes, I’ll mention it to him.’
Janaki changed the subject every time Siddharth raised it. But there was no turning away in this room. What would it be like when every night stretched into the horizon?
You could be the one to die first, a little voice said. But I won’t, I know. Janaki felt a tear slide down into her hair. It would be her lot to endure. Souls like his savoured life. They swept their way through births and deaths, not once but a million times.
What would it be like to sleep alone in a bed and to wake up in a room all by herself? Early mornings, nights. Alone, alone. Please god, Janaki prayed, let me fall asleep so that I don’t have to think.
When it was time for Jaya to be admitted to hospital for the Caesarean, Siddharth called his parents. ‘Please Ma, will you two come? Jaya’s mother is here and she is perfectly capable of managing, but if you were around I would feel a lot more secure.’
‘Do you want to go?’ Prabhakar asked Janaki.
‘How can we not go?’ Janaki said as she began to pull out saris from the cupboard and arrange them in little stacks on the bed for Prabhakar to pack. ‘He is our son. We have to be there for him when he needs us.’
By the third day, the squabbles began. Prabhakar had known they would. Ever since Siddharth got married, almost everything his mother said or did infuriated him. It was as if he had begun to measure his mother with a new yardstick and each time she fell short of what he expected of her. Janu was the same, he thought. She complained that her son had changed and that she no longer knew this man whose voice, when it was directed towards her, was heavy with a suppressed dislike. A suppressed dislike for what? What have I done wrong? she asked Prabhakar again and again.
There were no real reasons for them to snipe at each other but they always did. She and Siddharth tossed veiled insults at each other as if they were a ball while Prabhakar stood in the middle, unwilling to take sides.
Then one day, as Prabhakar lay on the bed in the guest room, he heard Siddharth say, ‘You are spoilt. Everyone you know has spoilt you. Your family and then Dad. You are such a princess. You want everything done your way, your selfish way. And if someone doesn’t do it the way you want it done, you know how to sulk and get them to do it. I can’t help but compare you to Jaya’s mother. I see how generous she is; how she is willing to give all of herself to her children. You don’t do that. When have you ever thought of anyone but yourself?’
Prabhakar had stormed into the dining room where they were and said in an ice-cold voice, ‘Janaki, pack your things. We are leaving right now. You don’t have to take any of this nonsense from him. How dare he talk to you in that tone of voice!’
‘Dad, stop being so melodramatic. You always take her side no matter who is at fault. Listen to what I have to say as well. You are the reason why Mummy is the way she is,’
Siddharth said, flinging his arms out in a gesture of helplessness.
‘You,’ Prabhakar said, wagging an angry finger, ‘shut up. I will have nothing to do with you until you apologize to your mother first. And if I don’t take her side, who will? I’m her husband, goddamn it, and I bloody well will take her side.’
Janaki began to cry. Contrite, Siddharth had gone on his knees and pleaded with his mother to stop crying while Prabhakar watched, anger making his face pale and drawn.
Later in the night, he had said, ‘We will leave in a couple of days. There is no point in staying on if there is this air of unease all the time. But more than anything else, what bothers me is that if this is how he is with you when I am alive, what will he do to you when I’m dead and no longer around to take care of you.’
But Janaki had put her hand on his arm and tried to breach the cracks as well as she could, for that was what mothers were meant to do. ‘Don’t let it upset you. He is not a bad son. I know he is tense about the baby being born ill; I know that his work pressure is high; it’s the stress that’s making him nasty. He is not a bad son. I know that.’
A shaft of light came from the bathroom door. Janaki saw him framed in the doorway and felt relief flood her. ‘Where were you? I was about to get up and come look for you,’ she said, sitting up. ‘I was afraid that … that something had happened to you.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said as he padded to his side of the bed. ‘Would you like me to ask them for another blanket? There is just this one quilt for us.’