Chitra and her roommate finished listening to Leela complain after dinner. She was sick of men bumping into her on purpose, or punching her in the breast when she walked home. She couldn’t understand why everyone was so unfriendly. Everything was complicated. Going to the bank took ages.
‘Why did you come back? I don’t understand,’ Chitra said. She started to laugh; she had a big laugh.
‘I thought Bombay was some kind of lost home. I thought I’d find that missing sense of belonging here. It sounds insane,’ Leela admitted. She heard herself say it and giggled; it was so boring. ‘I can’t remember. But how did we get here, of all places?’ All three looked at the fluorescent-lit dining hall, the formica tables, the shutter to the kitchen, which Datta, the handsome, Byronic cook, was now shutting with a great clatter. He began to wipe it energetically.
‘We should go,’ Shobha said. She laughed. ‘I think he wants us to.’
‘Come to our room,’ Chitra said.
Leela’s heart leapt. ‘Aren’t you busy?’
‘With what?’
They shared a room on the same floor as hers, larger than her room and with two single beds. ‘This is nice,’ she said, wondering if she would have been able to bear sharing. Shobha was very sweet. Yet how would Leela have managed without being able to shut the door of her room, and silently rage about the world and its failure to welcome her? ‘Did you know each other before?’ she asked.
‘No, we just met a few months ago,’ Chitra said. ‘I’ve only been back a few months.’
‘Oh?’
‘You know how you get three years, then you have to move out?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But if it’s been more than three years since you left you can do another term.’
‘Oh.’
‘I didn’t complete my last term. It was just a few months.’ Chitra looked angry now. Leela was confused. ‘I was at home for a while.’
‘Then you came back?’
‘Then I came back.’
‘And she became my roomie!’ Shobha, who was smaller and thinner, came to wrap her arms around Chitra and hug her. The two of them beamed at a startled Leela. Chitra said later, resigned, and when they were alone, ‘I wanted to live in a single. I begged them. And my income was the right level. But they decided to put me with a roommate. Shobha’s a sweetie, it’s not that.’ Her face darkened. ‘My father had just died when I came back, and I was engaged but it fell through. There were some weekends I didn’t get out of bed at all. I think Pawar wanted to make sure I wasn’t alone.’
Shobha brought out some chocolate. They pressed it on Leela, who didn’t want to cut into the precious supply.
‘Go on,’ said Chitra. ‘You don’t have to worry about your weight.’
‘I’m trying to put on weight,’ said Shobha.
Leela was amused. ‘Well, I think I have been putting on weight. I keep buying myself little bags of Gems after dinner. I don’t even know why.’
‘You’re lonely,’ said Chitra.
Leela was embarrassed. ‘Maybe.’
‘What do you do, Leela?’ Shobha asked.
Leela told them how she’d applied for jobs, and put up her CV on a website for the non-profit sector. ‘It’s terribly paid, it’s for the Sohrab Trust.’
‘I’ve heard of them, of course.’
‘I look after the grant applications, write some stuff for the website, that sort of thing.’
Shobha worked in a corporate law firm. ‘The hours are crazy,’ she said.
‘She’s out of hostel at seven sometimes,’ Chitra said. ‘Not back till after ten.’
They carried on talking, about their lives and families, making jokes. Leela sat straight-backed on Shobha’s bed and waited for the inevitable slackening of conversation.
‘I’m exhausted,’ Chitra said.
‘It might be bedtime,’ Shobha said. She smiled at Leela.
‘Of course. Good night!’ She hurried to the door. In the corridor, and in her room, checking the time – a quarter past ten – she was warm with embarrassment. She should have left earlier; no wonder she wasn’t making friends.
She took to going home every other weekend. She left the hostel when it was just becoming light, and took the bus on empty roads to the station. In the ladies compartment, she’d watch the scenery for ten minutes as they rolled out of the city, slum upon well-established slum. Then she’d fall into a deep swoon, neck jolting this way and that. Near Pune, she’d reawaken, often as the train passed Shivajinagar. She’d rub her eyes and roll her neck as they pulled into the city.
For a while those trips kept her sane amid her anxiety about conforming to a world whose rules she didn’t understand, either because there weren’t any, or because they were too multi-layered, a cascading interdependent set of priorities.
Her parents were misfits too, she recalled. In their home, faced with her mother’s angst about the availability of broccoli, or sprouts that could be trusted (‘but think of the water they must’ve used’), or tofu, or wheat-free biscuits, and her father’s gently irrelevant conversation, and both of their lack of engagement with the world around them – her father would drift over to turn on the World Service television channel, rather than watch the news on a local channel – she could bask in their collective strangeness, their being, as a family, out of joint with the times.
She’d arrive, blasted with tiredness, eyes rubbed with sleep, in the morning, say hello to her parents and the bai and the cook and sit in the living room talking to her father or alone with the papers till the cook finished in a flurry of cleaning the kitchen and putting saucepans away and she and the bai smiled and left together.
There would be relative silence, and peace. They’d have lunch, and elliptically discuss their states of mind, though never in the thorough way she’d observed in other people’s families: how have you been, or how did this or that go? When she was younger, she had resented the apparent lack of interest. She would go home then and try to follow her mother around, telling her what had happened in college and the events of her and her friends’ lives. Mrs Ghosh would listen for a while but respond by asking not ‘How did you feel?’ or ‘What happened then?’ but, ‘Have you thought about an internship, darling?’ or ‘What are your plans for when you graduate?’ Her father, when Leela directed her conversation at him, would also listen for a while then, so mildly that it was hard to be openly angry about it, his hand would find itself reaching for a magazine or the book in which he was presently immersed. His face, if Leela complained, was a mix of sympathy (ostensibly for her but really, she knew, for himself) and wheedling apology. ‘You’re not listening, Baba!’ she’d point out, and he, still clutching the book or magazine, would say plaintively, ‘But Leela, I’ve been listening to you for twenty minutes now.’
Some months after the first monsoon, when she was beginning to accept her life, and looked less than once a week at the unused portion of her return air ticket, there was a week when she lost her appetite. She felt feverish, bright with energy, and raced around at work. Every time she sat down to eat, a wave of nausea rose in her.
‘I feel sick,’ she confessed to Sathya when they went out for a dosa, as they now did every few weeks. ‘Some sort of bug.’
He looked at her attentively. ‘Pull your lower eyelid down. Look up. Hmm. How’s your pee?’
‘What?’
‘Is it brown?’
‘No!’
He shook his head. ‘Better go see a doctor first thing.’
She went to the sardonic, expensive GP everyone in the hostel saw. ‘Get a urine test if you want,’ he said, ‘but I’m telling you it’s jaundice.’
The next day, with the test results, she called Sathya. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said. ‘Better call Joan.’
Leela called Joan. ‘Oh no,’ said Joan.
‘Four to six weeks,’ said Leela, not without satisfaction.