The Age of Shiva (6 page)

I got up to clean myself. Wrapping the sheet like a shawl over my blouse, I crept through the darkened room next to ours. Hema was snoring on a mattress near the outer door, but I was able to open it enough to just squeeze by. There was still no moon, but enough illumination from the street now for the dirt ground within the courtyard walls to gleam a peculiar yellow. An extra charpoy rested stacked against a wall, next to a hand-cranked pump, and the wooden post where Hema said they had once kept a cow tethered.

The toilet was built in one corner, a short cement stall raised three steps above the ground. An old cockroach, its wings bedraggled, shuffled into a crack next to the footrests when I turned on the light. Under a tap in the wall stood an empty tin of cooking oil, its top cut open so it could serve as a mug. A faint smell of phenol hovered in the air, trying vainly to conceal the underlying reek of waste.

I squatted and washed myself, then my petticoat, as best I could. There was less blood than I thought—could it have been an injury received during the sexual act? I opened the door and stepped into the fresh air. Was this something recurrent one had to endure?

Standing at the bottom of the steps, his undershirt gleaming in the night, was Dev. I looked at him in surprise. “I just went to…” I began to say, then stopped. The shadows on his face were thicker, the pattern of muscle more pronounced. The shoulders sprouted tufts of hair.

Arya stared at the sheet that barely covered my blouse, at the wetness that blossomed down my petticoat. He took a step towards me, his jaw set in a line, his eyes devoid of expression. For an instant, as I squeezed past with my sheet gathered tightly around, I thought he was going to reach out and grab my arm. But he stayed where he was, not stepping aside to make my passage easier, but not making a move to impede me, either.

My heart beating, I returned to the bedroom and turned off the light. I thought I heard the sound of the gate to the street being opened and closed. I kept listening for Arya's footsteps in the adjoining room, but he didn't return. I arranged my petticoat loosely over my legs so that the fan could blow on it. When I awoke again, to the receding call of a train, the dampness was gone.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS
both my dowry and I were on display.

Early the first morning, Hema burst into the room, saying that the handcart pushers from the factory had arrived with the refrigerator Paji had sent. After several absurd attempts to push it through the tiny kitchen opening, Arya had the men set it down in the living room instead. Mataji lit incense to welcome it, as she would a new member of the household, Babuji broke a coconut at its feet, and Arya marked a red holy mark with vermilion on its forehead.

Dev's family had asked for a Kelvinator fridge, but Paji had refused to pay for a foreign brand, saying it would be an Indian-made Godrej and nothing else. Ardeshir Godrej had become famous by finding a way to make soap out of vegetable oil instead of the animal tallow so offensive to many Hindus. His brother had expanded the company rapidly after Independence, branching to talcums and toiletries, large steel cupboards, and very recently, appliances. The fridge Paji had managed to procure was a prototype, not even available for general sale as yet. “I hope they had the sense to get at least the important parts from England,” Babuji remarked, as he peered skeptically into the freezer.

Hema went up and down the block, announcing to everyone that the fridge (the first one in the colony) had finally been delivered. Somewhat spitefully, she even told the stationmaster's family next door that henceforth, they would be able to ask for ice at any time they wanted. At one point, fifteen neighbors (mostly children) were milling around in the living room, gawking at Hema playing with the compartments and trays and knobs. The crowd lost interest somewhat when they found out that the ice cubes Hema had promised might not be ready for several hours. One of them tried to climb the shelves to get at the freezer, at which point Babuji used an umbrella to swat them away.

By teatime, the radiogram had been delivered as well. The enormous cabinet housing the components was made of a fine-grained wood stained so dark it was almost black. Mataji declared the color inauspicious, and suggested painting it something more cheery, like red. Hema wanted to alert the neighbors again, but wasn't able to tear herself from the gramophone, on which she kept playing the same film record over and over again. She hadn't listened to it for two years, ever since the family gramophone had broken, she explained. Babuji seemed taken at first by the multiple shortwave channels of the radio and the glow of the tubes inside. Later, however, he complained to Arya that they could have repaired the gramophone, that the old radio had been just fine. “It's mostly wood, this radiogram—why didn't we ask for more money instead?”

Me, they exhibited mostly in the bedroom. Each morning, Mataji selected the sari and jewelry set I was to wear that day, from the dowry chest I had brought with me. She was the one who orchestrated the viewings, making sure my gunghat was in position before the visitors entered, smiling proudly when they commented on the beauty of my ornaments (and, just as often, me). “Truly, Dev has brought Lakshmi to your house,” the women said, and a few reached out to appraise the heft of the gold in my bracelet or the size of the jewels in my necklace (one of them even pretending to brush back my hair in place so she could get a better look at my earrings). “Such full cheeks. Such nice eyes. And not too dark-complexioned, just right.” The questions they asked me were like those one might put to a child—what was my name, where did I come from, how I liked it in Nizamuddin. Afterwards, Mataji led them on a tour of the refrigerator and the radiogram and the kitchen utensils, tantalizing them with the myriad feats of magic reputedly possible with the pressure cooker (another first for the colony, this time imported in its entirety from England). “All we really wanted was Meera, but look how they insisted, look how they've given us so much,” she said.

It was good that there was so much activity those first days in my in-laws' house, since it prevented me from steeping in regret every waking moment. Mataji must have understood what I was going through, because she quickly started introducing chores into my day. She would notice me staring balefully at Dev as he sat down to his evening liquor with Babuji and Arya, and quickly pull out a soda water bottle from the fridge. “Tell them to roll it over their foreheads before they open it. The way Babuji keeps grumbling about the fridge—it will remind him how warm his drinks were before you came.”

Every time I entered the toilet and braced myself for a cockroach to scramble over my feet or whir into my face (“The old one's Shyamu,” Hema informed me. “You can kill the ones that fly, but not him”), I thought back fondly to the clean white tiles of bathrooms past. I smelled rich curries and Basmati biryanis each evening as I tried to plow through the clods of Sandhya's rice on my plate. The sound of children playing outside transported me to the park in Darya Ganj where Sharmila and I played badminton every summer and flew kites in the spring. I even pictured myself back in Paji's dreaded library, standing in the cold rush of the air-conditioning vents, each time the electricity failed in Nizamuddin.

Most agonizing of all was not knowing when I would see my parents again. Mataji had made no mention of it, although it was clear from her supervision that I was not to venture out by myself. I was too timid to ask her directly, though Hema somehow zeroed in on what was on my mind. “Everyone knows the bride isn't supposed to return to her father's house for three months,” she declared. “Didn't you see that movie? Suraiya goes back after only five weeks and her husband gets bitten by a snake and drops dead.

“Don't think your mother can just come by whenever she wants to see you either. She's from the girl's side, so she needs a proper invitation from us before she can show her face here. And who knows how many months it will be before Mataji and I both agree it's time?”

ON MY THIRD EVENING
in Nizamuddin, I decided to escape. The idea materialized on the spur of the moment—Mataji was with Hema in the kitchen, berating Sandhya for not browning the onions enough, and the men were all in the living room, their voices already a little unsteady, and punctuated by the pops of soda bottles. Why not sneak out to Darya Ganj while nobody was looking? Perhaps never to come back? My heart began racing at the prospect. I could be sitting on our terrace in less than an hour, enjoying guavas plucked freshly from the tree downstairs. My incarnation as a bride left behind like a spent nightmare—from which I could cull the more harrowing tidbits anytime I wanted to frighten Sharmila.

Then I felt a pang of regret. How to retrieve my dowry? For an instant, I wondered if I could gather up all the jewelry and saris and sling them over my shoulder in a bundle when I left. But there was no way to access the trunk in the bedroom unseen. Besides, it wasn't as if I could tote along the radiogram or fridge. The only choice was to leave everything behind.

The actual getaway turned out to be smooth and quick. I walked along the courtyard perimeter to the gate, pretending to examine the dung fuel cakes stuck to the walls, left over from the time the family had owned a cow. The doors opened at a nudge, the chain clinking noisily, the wood groaning like something alive. But nobody seemed to notice, no voice called out to challenge me even when I stepped across the threshold and closed the doors behind.

It was dark already, but I blinked, as if emerging into bright sunlight. The air was thick with the pungency of chilies being fried in rancid oil—this, I told myself, was the scent of freedom, of liberty. I allowed myself to be swept towards the station in a surge of elation, gliding over the muddy street in my red and gold bridal regalia, the folds of my sari held raised so that the embroidered border didn't get dirty. The vegetable hawkers beamed at me from behind their baskets, their tomatoes shiny and ruddy-cheeked in approval, their eggplants glistening vibrantly in encouragement. I passed the shops selling metal parts, the shanty huts made of gunnysack, the line of rickshaws by the station—all sights familiar from my days of stalking Roopa and Dev. How long ago had that been—years maybe, centuries even? Would this be the last time I set eyes on them? Rummaging through the garbage heap behind the station was the same brown and white cow I had petted so many times for good luck. It interrupted its activity to look up and nod as if in recognition, a wedge of watermelon rind in its mouth forming an enormous green grin.

I stood outside the station steps, contemplating the best way to proceed. I still had the rupee coin Sharmila had pressed into my palm for good luck at the wedding. Was that enough for a rickshaw to Darya Ganj? Or should I take a bus—one of the brightly painted vehicles spewing exhaust fumes opposite the station, the conductors shouting out routes through the windows to cram in as many passengers as they could? There was also a local train that ran during the day, but I didn't know if it went close to where we lived.

Then a more alarming question occurred to me. Even if I made it to Darya Ganj, what was to say that Biji would take me in? Hadn't she always impressed upon us that a woman's place was by her husband, that he was her god, her Shiva, her pati-parameshwar? “Good or bad, she must accept him as her fate,” I heard her intone. I remembered all the times she had related to us the tale of Sati, who threw herself in a fire when her husband Shiva was insulted. A strange intensity would light up in Biji's eyes each time she got to the part where the pyre was being prepared, as if this was a test to which she herself aspired, just to prove her mettle. I thought of all the bitterly unhappy years of Biji's own marriage through which she had stuck by my father's side. What if I appeared at her doorstep and she turned me away?

But there was always Paji, who didn't believe in such things. Paji, who had tried to change Biji's views so tirelessly. Paji, who quoted Jung and John Stuart Mill, who read out entire chapters from volumes written by Nehru to his daughter, to teach us we were equal to men. Except could it be possible that he wielded these texts so zealously to convince not us but himself? Hadn't he been the one, after all, with the final say in my marriage, the one who had ultimately said yes? The one who had contracted to hand me over to Dev's family even as he told me exactly what I could expect? “One hundred and ten rupees for the pressure cooker, two thousand for the refrigerator, eighteen hundred for the radiogram,” I heard him recite, each figure enunciated with a chilling preciseness. “And that doesn't even include the jewelry or the twenty thousand in cash.” If he had spent so much to give me away, why would he now want me back?

I had nowhere left to go, I realized. The only house that remained open to me was the one I had just left behind. All around me people flagged down rickshaws, boarded buses, scurried over tracks to catch trains. Was I the only one without a destination? No matter to whom I turned—relatives or friends or neighbors, what was to prevent my parents from finding out and returning me to Nizamuddin?

“New bride?” It was an old woman on the station steps, squatting with a group of other villagers while the men crowded around the ticket window. Thick silver rings adorned her fingers and her nose, and her gold earrings were so heavy that elongated holes had opened up in her lobes. “So pretty,” she said, in a rural dialect of Hindi. “Such a pretty dress. But what are you doing here alone? Where's your husband? Did he go to get tickets too?”

I looked at her, unable to speak. Could this be it? The single point that my existence had been reduced to? Where my husband was, and why wasn't I with him? Was this the essence, the distillation, of all those years of Biji's intonations? Why I wasn't next to my god, my pati, my parameshwar? I started to suffocate at the unfairness of it, my necklace tightening around my throat, my sari weighing on me like a shroud. The woman on the steps looked up in concern, then rose and caught my arm in case I should fall.