Saraswati Park

They heard the door catch: Mohan was home.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. He took off his sandals and came to stand near them, tentative but eager.

‘He wanted to see some of the old photos,’ Lakshmi explained.

Mohan reached down and took the picture Ashish was holding. It had a white border and scalloped edges, and showed a formal group. A plant stood in one corner; on a sofa sat a woman in a sari, now the ubiquitous six-yard variety, holding a toddler on her lap. Two boys stood next to her; at the side was her husband, his hand on the elder boy’s shoulder.

‘That’s my grandparents with my mother, Vivek mama and you, isn’t it, Mohan mama?’ Ashish glanced up; his uncle’s face was inscrutable.

‘Yes, the three of us and our parents. Look at your mother’s face.’

‘Hm.’ Ashish reached up for the photo. The toddler, fatkneed, had the familiar aggressive expression. ‘So Vivek mama was about twelve. You must have been six or so? Everyone looks so different.’

Mohan snorted. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ Ashish said. ‘You all seem more serious or something.’ The photographs were different, say, from those of him and his sister growing up. The figures here regarded the camera with greater intensity; they seemed more present than people in pictures today.

His uncle looked down at him. ‘Well, these photos were taken in a studio, we had to pose. Best clothes, a lot of waiting. Your mother used to get very bored and start shouting.’

‘I bet.’ Ashish looked back at the photo. The elder boy, Vivek, already looked pompous; he was sticking his small chest out, and his brilliantined hair showed the marks of a comb. Ashish’s grandfather seemed preoccupied; his grandmother was a definite entity, as though the photographer had drawn a thin black line around her. The middle child, his uncle, appeared to be elsewhere. His eyes were remote, and his smile engagingly goofy, as though he were gratified to have been included. Already, he looked like a person used to spending a lot of time on his own.

‘Can I have this?’

Mohan looked startled.

‘Can I keep it in my room?’ Ashish modified.

‘I suppose. There’s no frame.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’ He thought perhaps he should explain why he wanted it. ‘I don’t really have any old pictures of the family,’ he said. It would be a warning, he thought, feeling a kind of self-doubting impatience towards the boy in the photo. Wake up! he wanted to shout at him. Get on with it!

‘All right, take it.’ Mohan started to put the other photos in an ancient envelope that he slipped into the back of the album. He wrapped it in a piece of old sari that acted as its shroud, and replaced it carefully in the tea chest; he shut the lid. Aha, thought Ashish: only people who’ve had truly happy childhoods can afford to forget about them. He went to his room and stood the photo on his desk, against the window ledge.

After dinner he prowled around his uncle, who was sitting in the cane chair reading.

‘Mohan mama.’

‘Hm.’

Ashish circled the chair. The light glinted through his uncle’s steel-coloured hair and onto his scalp, which showed, oddly pale, at the crown.

‘Have you ever thought of writing something?’

‘Ha! Apart from letters and money order forms, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

No answer. Ashish continued to hover about the chair, dragging one rubber slipper along the tiles until it squeaked. His uncle lowered the book and looked at him.

Ashish grinned. ‘I was looking at that book, Become a Writer. You should try writing some stories, you know, short stories. You must know a lot of stories, from all the people you meet.’

Mohan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s a very different thing. It’s difficult to be a writer, not everyone can do it,’ he muttered.

‘Yes, but you already write a lot anyway.’

‘That’s different.’

‘And also you read so much.’

His uncle regarded him for a moment, frowning. Then his face cleared. Unexpectedly, he laughed. ‘I was published once,’ he said. ‘Have I ever shown you?’

‘No!’

‘Hm, I wonder where it is now. It was in a magazine.’ His face had begun to gleam. ‘Come, I think it might be in your room.’

He bustled out of the living room and into the kitchen. Ashish had just begun to follow him when Mohan reappeared with the stepladder. He went into Ashish’s room and planted it between the bed and the window.

‘Do you want me to do that?’ Ashish mumbled, but he enjoyed the sight of his uncle hurrying up the pyramid-like stepladder, which creaked loudly under his weight. In the upper reaches of the shelves near the bed Mohan began to rummage in various piles of paper.

‘Chhi,’ he said perfunctorily. The dust here was thick and silky; it floated down to the floor in flakes. ‘Got it.’ He descended the ladder, his face triumphant, eyes bright, and a dirty smear on the bridge of his nose. Ashish, long-suffering, folded up the stepladder and carried it back to the kitchen. When he’d restored it to its dark corner he hurried to the living room. His uncle stood under the bare bulb; he had gingerly unfolded the ageing, brittle newsprint.

‘See, here.’

Ashish bent, and read:

Dear Sir,

I am a faithful reader of the Junior Diplomat and I am writing to ask you print more short stories.

Yours faithfully,

Mohan V. Karekar (age 4½).

‘Aged four and a half! Mohan mama!’ Ashish crowed. He was still more entertained when his uncle removed the paper from his grasp. ‘We used to get the Diplomat every Sunday, and I loved reading the Junior Diplomat, the children’s section, it was very popular. Here, this paper’s old, it’ll crumble.’ Carefully, he refolded the page and put it on the reading table.

‘So you were already published at four and a half?’

Mohan smirked, and sat down in the cane armchair. ‘There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,’ he said. He opened his book again.

Ashish had heard a familiar music in the distance; he listened, part of his brain thinking it might be a song he knew. Then he ran towards his room: it was his phone.

Later that night, he was about to go to sleep when an electronic shrieking began in the flat below; it was in the room underneath his. He cocked his ear and listened: an urgent trill of three rising notes. It must have been Madhavi, the plump girl: she was of the right age to have exams. Setting an alarm for revision, or to signal the end of a timed question, was the kind of thing serious students did. But no one came to switch off the alarm; it shrieked itself into catalepsy and, with a squeak, died out.

Ashish sat at the desk and thought he would read a little more. He was thinking about Sunder, about his lazy, deep voice, and his inarticulateness, and about how they were to meet the next day; at the same time, he was reading, but too fast to notice any of the words that passed his eyes like long distance trains at night, noisy but unmemorable. At once he felt eyes fixed on him, and heard a gobbling sound. Very slowly, hairs rising on his neck, he looked up. Two round white faces, enormous, dark, knowing eyes, and a look of surprise modulated by the polite pretence of disinterest. In the open window of the empty flat opposite sat two white owls. They rocked slightly, their eyes scanning the darkness. As his eyes met theirs, one of the birds unfolded like a threat suddenly swept aside and Ashish’s heart contracted; the whiteness of its wings flashed into a V, then a line; it swooped through the glow of the street lamp and was gone.

His aunt, who couldn’t remember whether the apartment door had been double-locked, came out of her room after midnight to check. On her way back she saw the line of light under Ashish’s door and was surprised; none of their children had studied this late, especially so far before the exams. He must really be serious, she thought. She went back to her room and quietly closed the door.

Chapter Five

Her day held its breath until Mohan and Ashish had been safely eased into the world. When the morning’s whirlwind was over – tea cups and clattering arrivals in the kitchen, departures for the bathroom, reappearances in different stages of readiness, last-minute forgetting of things – she felt like a sports coach who retreats into his private life between moments of crisis.

The cleaning over, she went to the bathroom, stripped off the old salwar kameez in which she slept, and watched the red light of the water heater come on. A good stream of hot water came out of the tap and filled up the bucket. She threw half a mugful over herself, flinched, and added more cold water. Her skin was still soft and pale below the neckline. She picked up the cake of citrus soap, streaked in yellow and green; its slight tackiness and the hint of steam, the scent of lemon and clean skin that lingered in the bathroom, were all signs that her husband and Ashish had been there before her.

She came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, and considered what to wear. Her cupboard was full of saris, ironed, folded and stacked like important documents, but these days she mostly wore ‘suits’: long, fitted kurta, baggy salwar, and a matching dupatta. The suits were easier to look after. Unlike cotton saris, they didn’t need to be starched, and they went uncomplaining into the laundry and then to the ironing boys’ blue hut from where they were collected, pressed and submissive, by Mohan in the morning when he was on his way back with the bread and milk.

Still, the sari, and the ceremony of putting it on, retained some glamour. Today she stood in front of the open cupboard and thought she’d wear one. She scanned the shelves: her eye passed appreciatively but without great interest over the heavy silks, the practical synthetics, which in their way had been exotic years earlier, and the few chiffon saris that her daughters had given her, and which she rarely wore. It was hot today: she wanted a cotton sari. She put her hands in and pulled out a slim, pale blue spine. It was a simple one, with large grey dots and discreet embroidery on the border. The matching short-sleeved blouse looked saggy and depressing until worn, when it filled with the authoritative curves of upper arms, shoulders, and breasts. The petticoat too became more graceful, a vestige of a milkmaid’s outfit in a painting, like the one they had hung in the bathroom, a fabric calendar picture of Krishna teasing the gopis. This was an unlikely gopi, of course – she regarded herself, in the latest instalment of the daily conversation with her own image, and checked the lines between her nose and mouth, and the grey hairs at the side of her head. She’d put on a little weight in recent years, and probably looked better for it. But the eyes gazed back, doubtful.

She unfolded the sari, shook it out and examined it for any rents or stains; then, with absent-minded grace, tucked it in so that it made half a round of her petticoated lower body. Her arms danced as cheerfully as the limbs of an automaton to pay out the fabric, pleat it, and secure it at the front. The neatly gathered folds made her think of the last letter they’d had from their youngest daughter, who was working for a computer company in America. Her life was unimaginable; she had no family of her own yet but no help either, and had to work long hours as well as manage her own food, laundry and cleaning, though she said that these were simpler affairs than at home. Lakshmi glanced in the mirror to check the pleats fell straight and her mouth curled; she liked this impudent daughter’s freedom. Megha would find it difficult, though, when she married; there were so many things – but all that was a later worry, and marriages, also, were different these days.

She wrapped a further length of the fine cotton about her body, stretched the remaining cloth along her left arm, scrutinized it for holes, and threw it over her left shoulder. Then she went to the small idol of Ganesh near the window, lit a stick of incense in front of the god, and said a prayer. It was a ritual she performed every day, though not because it was supposed to achieve anything; it was a counterpart of her bath, and created a quiet corner in her mind that might, with luck, survive the rest of the day.

The building was quieter; earlier there had been the sounds of office workers opening and shutting their front doors. Now it was the domestic traffic. Cleaning women were arriving at some houses. Here, too, the doorbell rang loudly; it must be the rubbish collector, a leering, dark, and cheerful youth who wore brightly patterned shirts. He came whenever he pleased between the morning and lunch time, except on Sundays, when he arrived promptly at eight; later, she or Mohan would see him out and about, nattily dressed and with brilliantine in his hair, so that he looked as if he were on his way to meet a girl.

She put her head into the passage. ‘Yes?’

‘Kachra!’

‘Yes yes,’ she replied, ‘wait a minute.’

The kitchen basket already smelled ripe. She picked it up and went forward, her nose wrinkling; she was opening the outer door when something dark and solid, sensing its imminent danger, shot out of the basket, along her arm and off her shoulder.

She screamed.

‘Oh, a lizard! Ugh!’ She found herself trembling with disgust. It wasn’t a pale green house gecko but one of the dark, shameless outdoor lizards that wouldn’t take fright decently even at loud noises.

The kachrawala grinned; wretched fellow, he’d enjoyed the show. ‘It’s good luck,’ he said. ‘You’ll come into some money.’

‘Ugh!’ She opened the door, and handed him the bin, which he emptied into his bag, knocking it so that the last vegetable peelings fell out. He pointed just outside the outer door. ‘There he is,’ he said. ‘Looks like he’s waiting to come back in.’ The lizard skulked next to the jamb.

Lakshmi’s neighbour opened her door and began to berate the kachrawala. ‘It’s after eleven. When are you going to start coming on time?’

He smiled and nodded, and gave Lakshmi back her bin.

Ashish had gone out; he said he had to go to college for something. Outside, it was hot and still: the last days of summer before the rains came. The empty hours stretched ahead. She thought of various things she had to do: change the sheets, put more camphor pellets in the cupboards before the monsoon started and insects multiplied; perhaps, in the evening, go and collect a new suit that she’d ordered two weeks earlier from a tailor in the market.

Instead, she sat near the window, looking out at the lane, which had come to a midday lull. The watchman had disappeared, probably for his lunch; the ironing boys were inside their hut; she heard their radio. She could do one of the more infrequent cleaning jobs – the shelf next to the stove, for example, where salt and other condiments were kept. But the idea had neither reality nor urgency. The crows on the electricity wires were quiet after their early morning exuberance; soon they’d find some shade to sit in until it was cooler again.

A single bird sang out: a falling sequence of four notes, with a cheep at the end. It sounded oddly familiar, yet she hadn’t, she thought, heard it before. Maybe it was a bird that used to come near their childhood home, in Tardeo? Its song – she hummed it to herself – brought no specific recollection, only a vaguely poignant feeling.

It was hard to work out, sometimes, how she had come from that house, with a family full of loudly talking, cheerful people, into this one, where, often, each person withdrew into silence, nursing his or her own dreams, oblivious to everyone else. Only her elder son, Gautam, resembled her family; he’d also spent most time with his cousins from that side. He talked and laughed more loudly, didn’t think deeply about every single thing, and, like her, seemed to exist most clearly when he was speaking. Like her, he narrated aloud to himself whichever action he was about to take (‘Hm, I mustn’t forget to get that CD for Alka’), a habit that bemused and irritated his father, who would wonderingly ask, ‘How does saying it aloud help?’ and privately, no doubt, add: ‘And why are you intruding such banal reflections into my world?’

She ran through the rest of the day’s tasks, murmuring some of the words aloud. ‘Vegetables…’ No, she’d looked, there were enough for dinner. ‘Newspapers.’ Yes. She made herself a cup of coffee, and sat near the window where the light was good, the pile of last week’s papers and the scissors next to her. She clipped out a picture of a polar bear, and a recipe for macaroni cheese with baked vegetables, the sort of thing that Ashish might like. It was nice, this process of revisiting the novelties of a few days earlier, which now seemed agreeably tired – it was a habit from childhood, though then the paper had been Navshakti, or old issues of Stree or Kirloskar that a neighbour provided for her scrapbook. There was something she had been meaning to clip, but she couldn’t remember what – it bothered her for a few minutes, and she turned over the pages. Then she found it: a column on the edit page about Seema Kulkarni, a classical singer whom she’d admired very much when she was younger. The article was about the tradition of singers as divas, and the often extravagant caprices they displayed. Lakshmi had gone, more than once, to hear Seemabai sing; she always turned up a couple of hours late, while the audience sat patiently waiting. Finally the singer, richly dressed and made up, with kaajal, lipstick, and an enormous bindi on her forehead, appeared on stage; she smiled, did namaskaar to the audience, sat down, then snapped at the tabla player before closing her eyes and beginning to sing. Here an odd thing happened, each time: the woman of so much personality completely disappeared, and only the music was there till the raga ended.

The newspapers now addressed, Lakshmi piled them near the door, ready for the wastepaper man.

After lunch she found herself drawn to the television, though at this time of day there was nothing she wanted to watch; her favourite serials were aired much later, in the evening. There were two: one ran on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Both were about the travails of young women newly married into traditional families, and how they dealt with the women around them: their sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law. She preferred the first one, Daughters of the House. On Wednesday, when for fifteen minutes they overlapped on rival channels, she was distracted, flicking between advertisement breaks and trying to keep up with the stories.

She put on the television and waited with the usual tense expectation of pleasure as the screen flickered into a point of light, then animated. There really was nothing to watch – some terribly dry cultural programme on a Marathi channel, endless cooking shows in English – and she turned the television off again and resealed its clumsy plastic wrapper; it was supposed to protect the set from the corrosive sea air, but made it appear to be a sort of cranky deity that had to be kept in check.

‘Sheets…’

She went to get the clean ones from Ashish’s room and became diverted while searching for a packet of camphor pellets that she was sure was in a bottom drawer of one of the big cupboards. Instead, among candles, ballpoint pen refills and curtain hooks, she found a thin envelope with four small pieces of paper inside: ‘Baby boy, 8.34 a.m.’, ‘Baby girl, 5.21 a.m.’ and so on. They were from the nursing home where her children had been born; though they were years apart, the writing was the same politely curling convent-school hand. They had carefully preserved each record relating to the children, in case the government, which might be omniscient in such matters, spotted and rebuked neglect; there was a vague feeling of contributing, by this scrupulousness, towards national housekeeping.

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