THE USE-BY DATE

SAVITRI’S GRANDMOTHER HAD felt it was almost improper to cross over the chalk line that separated ‘her’ century from the new millennium. The future, however, was shamelessly waiting. Slowly it encroached on her life, presenting an endless track of noughts. Sometimes it felt as if she’d be using those noughts as stepping stones for the next thousand years – if only she could take steps. As it was, she was pushed into the twenty-first century on wheels, thanks to the damned multiple sclerosis.

Everything about her room remained as it had always been. She had a display cabinet with exquisite glasses from a business trip to Czechoslovakia she’d taken with her husband as a younger woman. In those glasses the Iron Curtain still hung, and she still told stories of the guards at the country’s borders. In her room, Gandhi was still alive in a statue carved out of sandalwood, even though it had long ago lost its fragrance and had half lost a hand, which now dangled loose, holding a book. Even so, with his head stooped, Gandhi had travelled with Dadi into the Asian century.

She also had a broken cuckoo clock from her trip to Switzerland, where as a young woman she’d spent a month at the famous Bircher Institute, trying to solve her digestion problems. Unlike Dadi, the cuckoo had long ago transcended time, giving up on the precision of the coil fashioned by its makers. If anyone asked why it had stopped working, she would tell them about how Siddharth, aged six, had stood on a chair to take the bird from its perch and tucked it under his pillow. Then she would move on quickly to stories about the Bircher Institute, especially the one about the discovery of amoebas in her stool. So rare was the discovery in the alpine purity of Switzerland that everyone in the institute was invited to look through the microscope at the squirming splodge, with its pseudopodic dance of rearranging endoplasm.

There was nothing about the twenty-first century that ever entered her room, except her grandchildren, and they continually tried to drag the new century in with them, brandishing its temptations.

‘Dadi, why don’t you stop using that landline? We can give you full wireless access, no problem.’

Dadi didn’t need a phone that could slip out of her hands and find a new home in her bedsheets. She liked being able to reach out to the Bakelite receiver by her bedside, neatly connected with curling wire, and let her fingers dial the numbers of her beloved ageing cohort with ritual accuracy. Every morning she’d do what Savitri called ‘the rellie rounds’, ringing each of them up to ask them how they felt on that particular God-given day.

‘Aapka tabiat kasa hai?’ she’d ask again and again, as if the ailments of her cohort were the social glue that kept them all here in the twenty-first century. ‘And did you have a bowel movement today?’ She was always happy to discuss bowel movements with the ancient ones – indeed, they could all pontificate on them for hours, and you didn’t need a Blackberry or an Apple for that.

Her deepest wish, the one that she would never articulate in public or in private on the phone to her contemporaries, was to be no longer held for trial in God’s waiting room. Her only constant companion in this whole business of ageing was Buddhi Ayah, the grandchildren’s nanny, who had long ago stopped spoon-feeding Savitri and Neel and begun to look after Dadi’s ablutions instead. Buddhi Ayah was getting old herself, though, and it wouldn’t be too long before she would need someone to be doing the same for her.

You could say that it was a mistake to have come this far, but it was more than that. Dadi had been pulled into the future by a prediction that Arunji once made: a prediction that she would only be able to rest in peace once Savitri was married and the future was secured, and that this in turn would secure a spiritual destiny for her heirs – all of them – for the millennia to come. A transformation of sorts. A legacy.

When Arunji had first come up with these words, Savitri was a literature student specialising in feminist writing and sacred texts written by celibate seers from the Vedic era – two fields of study that didn’t lend themselves to marriage. Nor did her Manglik status, an astrological curse that stated no man could marry her without some threat of death in doing so. She adored her granddaughter, but she seemed to ‘suffer’ from too much education. What to do about her stubborn nature and her refusal to get married?

Dadi decided to call Arunji over to see if there was anything she could do to help the girl, especially with the whole problem of … the problem of … she didn’t like to say the word Manglik. She didn’t like to think of her granddaughter as someone with a curse – not now that they’d entered the twenty-first century. She didn’t like to think of her granddaughter as anything but a goddess.

Arunji had failed to report the exact troubles around Savitri’s chart, even though his own destiny was bound to the Kailash family’s in a cosmic collusion of the most outrageous proportions, and you could even say he was obliged to tell them about the upcoming incidents. He had never offered to explain how Savitri’s mathematics of destiny and Dadi’s commitment to seeing Savitri married could be untwined. Yet Dadi remembered every prediction her ‘son’ had delivered, including his promise that she would live to see her granddaughter married – and yet Savitri’s marriage was not even on the distant horizon. What was he thinking?

‘Arunji, tell me more about my tryst with destiny?’ she asked when he came to see her.

Arunji understood this euphemism – taken, as it was, from Nehru’s Freedom at Midnight speech.

‘Mataji, I am not knowing what kind of independence you are seeking,’ he replied.

Dadi made it clearer still. ‘All right. No tryst with destiny. Tell me one thing: what is my use-by date?’ She was not one to have a tantrum, but she was getting impatient.

There was no escaping her question this time. What Arunji’s spiritual mother meant was that she wondered when Savitri’s date with destiny would arrive, given the fact that she had rejected every eligible bachelor her parents had introduced to her and was in no hurry to find herself a suitable boy.

Arunji began to randomly write some numbers and rewrite a few more.

‘Tell me, is there some kind of problem with Savitri? Apart from the Manglik, which we can of course manage.’

He didn’t respond. Instead, his comb-over fell off the top of his head, which was otherwise boiled-egg bald. He recognised the hair falling down as a sign that he was lying. It always happened when he refused to speak the truth of his numbers. The hair fell, and his bald head was revealed like a brown crystal ball that spoke only the truth. There must have been a hunch in the back or a twitch in the neck that made this happen whenever Arunji had to present the future as if it were unknown and adopt the innocent ignorance of events that were either too obvious to highlight or too disastrous to unveil. Yes, the hair always fell, and the bald patch was always exposed, yet it was invisible to anyone else as a sign. What’s more, this sign occurred regularly with the Kailash family, because just as they had triggered an intervention in his destiny, he had conspired to intervene in theirs, with love and compassion, whenever there were issues that simply needed to be concealed. It was a sacred duty, he believed, this whole business of concealment, and by some strange twist, an act of cleansing not too different from the original role he had played as their washerboy in the old house when he was a child. There were so many secrets in those stars that needed to be wiped clean of significance before he could possibly present them to his patrons as predictions. He readjusted his comb-over and continued to draw some signs and circles and tokenistic gestures in honour of the science of Jyotish.

‘You haven’t told me. You’re hiding something.’

Arunji felt a terrible burden of responsibility. He had tried to demonstrate his gratitude to Dadi in every way possible, because she was a mother to him – she hadn’t given birth to him, but she was responsible for his rebirth, and he had honored the gift with regular visits, not to mention attention to her laundry needs, for many, many years after the obligation should have ceased to exist. Even when he was a junior academic at Delhi University, Arunji used to come every Sunday to personally hand-wash Dadi’s clothes, as he had promised his father he would always do. Dadi used to beg him to stop, but she loved seeing him. She loved hearing the stories of good fortune and the gratitude that accompanied these tales.

‘You must stop thinking about when you’ll be going to your heavenly abode, Mataji,’ Arunji insisted. ‘It’s not healthy.’

Besides, he’d never before issued any terminal numbers, even when his most famous clients had asked for them. Whenever they appeared in his calculations he skipped over them – looked away and instantly forgot the figures – because in his mind the date of death was only a single point on an ongoing journey. A turning point in a story.

But Dadi applied the same persistence to her interrogation as she had to Arunji’s education.

‘Why won’t Savitri get married?’ she asked again. ‘She’s never been interested in a single boy we’ve introduced to her.’

Arunji thought about his professional duty. Like journalism, his art demanded a semblance of truth. Yet, like a doctor who has taken the Hippocratic oath, he still had an obligation to ‘first do no harm’. So how should he tell her of the hurdles that lay ahead? Instead he repeated a prediction that he could stand by.

‘You will live to see your granddaughter as a married woman.

And how!’

Dadi began to weep. ‘Hai Ram, if only Neel could help Savitri find someone!’

Now those noughts of the new millennium stretched across a thousand more years till the end of time. What hope was there for Savitri?

‘Maybe Neel will help Savitri!’ Arunji responded.

‘Neel will be walking around the fire and Savitri will have nobody. How will it look?’

What Dadi meant was that the Bedis and the Jains and the Kapoors would wonder why they’d let Neel get married before his sister, even though he was three years younger. By birthright and order of descent, she deserved to be married first.

Seeing Dadi’s distress, Arunji began afresh with his prediction. ‘You will live to see this miracle of Savitri as a married woman and you will see it in all its splendour, so please don’t be getting anxious, Mataji.’

Dadi tried to think about Savitri and a potential husband. She tried to remember the exact chemical formula that such an attraction required, but nowhere in her physical memory could she detect the place in the human body where one can accommodate such desire. It had disappeared long ago, when she had lost her legs and all sensation from them. Her only wish now was for a departure, and that seemed like many, many millennia away, due to Savitri’s reticence to even look at a potential suitor, let alone agree to marry one.