Chapter 1
N was a man of indistinguishable calm and stately demeanour. Standing before the thickly coated green lacquered door casings, he would demurely fling open the doors every morning and walk towards the end of the hedgerows surrounding the compound wall. The other day, he lodged firmly beneath the door, a log of wood, for the street dogs occasionally stole into his veranda. He grabbed the door and shook it a little, the hinge was lax and needed mending; perhaps, he could run the cotton cord (that his wife weaved all through the day) around the length of the wooden shaft, and through the dry twigs where hay was puckered tightly into folds. Present season’s harvest did not yield enough to lay over a roof of opal tinted tiles. Mopping his brow, N observed his neighbour’s roof that ominously slanted both ways in straight lines of alternating furrows and polished curved backs of an army of red frozen tortoises. The election was round the corner and congress party workers were leaving their palm prints on the trail, on the chalk white walls of the neighbour and hung up posters of optimistic men between the two electric poles at the end of the street.
Sun was breaking through the thick mist; a cloud of mournful freedom whispered heavily about the men who boozed tirelessly the night before. Sickly fever wrapped itself tightly around B as she gathered her torn blanket and raised it above her folded knees. Poor thing, to cover her face, she had to trade off up until her knees, for the blanket was small and N would wave his leonine head firmly, if he sensed a whiff of complaint. Presently, flaring his thick nostrils was the earthen stove they had bought from the potter men in fair last summer. N cupped the exposed palms over his face that was weathered; skin on his cheeks had grown cracks and he had an ulcer that snuggled under his lower lip. With chattering teeth, he lent his ears to the lanky neighbour’s habitual boorish morning humour; it served as a wake up call to B and most of the neighbourhood. Slowly, all the women were stepping out of their homes, some to feed cattle and others to merely gaze. From behind the hay stacks, a cow or an ox would rise up, for its master had untied them. The lonely hawker closed his peripatetic cart and the thick shouldered bearded hag opened the shop that sold sweet milk bread and tooth powder that felt like burnt ash and tasted like a low grade biscuit.
Women fought over nothing in particular, men were too preoccupied and children threw themselves helter-skelter on the streets. Little by little, the lazy haze drew itself out, the slumber wore out of natural order and men and women readied up to hit the farms. Dressed as if knights wore deshabilles at night, they all set out to work; N, digging his teeth into the custard apple (B plucked them off the trees on the way home from farm the other day, and stored them under rice bags where the fruits were known to ripe faster than usual), nodded silently to the wife’s remonstrations of their neighbour’s insolent spittoon marks on their recently whitewashed walls. N’s son R who was recently married, was to come home that Sunday. Wife J, who was presently folding the blankets, found a spider crawling towards her baby who snuggled warmly into the folded sheets. She shooed away the spider, lowered the baby into its cradle, and thoughtfully hovered her gaze over the last night’s dishes that were to be cleaned. Her feet and finger tips were numb, she wondered for a moment, what her baby would become as a grown up. J had ambitious plans for her son who was not named yet. That was in the cold sluggish winter of 1985, in a remote village W of A.P state in India.
Chapter 2
‘Hey Mom, what’s for breakfast?’ K welded onto the soft cushioned brown sofa, crooned softly as his mother was casually delivering monotonous advises to her cousins on the phone, on marital problems and how to tackle them. There was a power outage, and J picked her hand phone, dialled the watchman downstairs to fire up the generator. Obligingly, the lift ascended up to fourth floor and her husband stepped out with a bag full of fresh vegetables. J, with a calm that only one other person in the family, her uncle, could have carried off, raised her eyes as sun light poured in through her golden rimmed spectacles. It was a Sunday, and her son was at home, lazing around. “I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.” Reading out from the paper back penguin edition of Anton Chekov, K translated the meaning to J in telugu. J let out a growl, and quickly dropped her eyes on the news paper before her.
Towards the afternoon, the maid had left after cleaning dishes, washing clothes and scrubbing the kitchen sink clean off the sediments. J was free now, and ruminated aimlessly over the financial wrestle her brother had indicated to her; he was a marriage broker and worked on barely enough margins. Moreover, his bureau was informal, and extended only to the caste. J’s elder sister had troubles too, with her marriage, and kids. The marriage led up to altercations within the family, and J’s elder sister grew old and tired with the endless qualms she was subjected to, especially by her son in law who demanded for piecemeal dowry every once in a while. ‘Mom, what’s for lunch?’ K interrupted her train of thought. J suggested they have chicken. She liked to cook delicacies for her son; most of her day, she would occupy herself with what to feed her son and when. Her husband, who was on a conscientious diet, savoured a fruit or two; her daughter, who was pursuing her masters in computers, presently busied herself rubbishing something nonsensical, with her father. The father and daughter vouched for each other, while the mother and son stood apart. The duo of father and daughter was sensible in their argument, strictly obedient, rational in their treatment and all the more lovable in conduct, but was docile and irreparably conservative. The mother and son however, were argumentative, judgemental, bold and experimental. If not for the mother’s beaming mental aptitude, the duo were susceptible to irascible rashness, for instance, they went out for shopping every weekend and bought what they could have done without.
‘But I don’t want to marry, do not hasten mother’ J’s daughter billowed her exasperating voice, for she saw marriage as a tether that cannot be undone once hooked. ‘But, you ought to’ J swept the other two mute spectators, father and son, with her hollowed gaze, and continued ‘one must obey one’s parents. You should have seen the way I was married, and how my parents bore upon me the thrust of responsibility one fine morning’. J’s husband returned her gaze with a meditative look.
That night, J reflected upon her marriage.
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