She padded down the corridor, unheeding, towards the dining table. Her father, from one of the cane chairs: ‘You remember you had to call Vikram back?’
Leela slowed down, forgot what she had wanted in the kitchen, came out holding a glass of water. ‘I’ll call him,’ she said.
She went back to her room. She was about to have a bath, she was in the state of being about to have a bath, she was sitting on the armchair and listening to birds outside: babblers. They sounded like Donald Ducks quacking at each other, cartoonish, comically disoriented.
She looked at the slim book on her bed, picked it up, read a few lines. She put it down, and stretched out her legs. She would have a bath, perhaps even do a few sun salutations, some stretches. She would meditate. She imagined herself doing so. The sun meanwhile came in from the balcony door and left a hot strip on the tiles. She put her foot in it, and the skin became more alive. She closed her eyes, and remembered yesterday and the journey back from Bombay.
‘We should just get married, you know,’ Vikram had said. He’d smiled at her. They had been in the taxi, driving her back, and about to pull into a service station so that the driver could have tea and a cigarette, and Leela go to the bathroom.
‘Huh?’ She had been pleased he was willing to say it, but warier than she had expected to be.
‘I could marry you tomorrow, you know. I don’t have any doubts.’
‘I could marry you tomorrow, too,’ she’d said. They’d discussed it earlier, in the days of their friendship: the need to reach a certain phase in one’s life, to become a householder, to enter the world and leave behind the selfish days of youth. To establish oneself, to decide things, so that everything else, life, could take place. She’d agreed that it was what she needed, stability. She went shakily off to the bathroom and peed squatting in the Indian-style loo. She watched and smelt her own pee, pee-smelling, come out and go down into the not-overly-clean ceramic basin. At the sink, she washed her hands with someone else’s leftover paper soap; she never remembered to carry it. The toilets smelt of phenyl. Outside, the service station smelt of petrol and frying and men’s piss and cigarettes and tea. All these things were real. She tried to imagine her future life as another real thing among them, Vikram her husband, waiting for her in the car, in the sun outside.
She didn’t call him back; in the afternoon he had to call again. For the whole of that week and half of the next she didn’t go to work. She called Joan to say she had a stomach bug, which was vague but serious enough to be indisputable. When she did go back to Bombay, determined as a ghost returning to the scene of the crime, she handed in a note at the hostel saying that she was leaving, and giving a month’s notice per the terms of her contract. She handed a similar letter, typed, to Joan, saying she had valued her time at the charity and thanking Joan for her kindness. Sathya was not in the office. His mother was dying of a late-discovered cancer that had metastised.
‘I didn’t know,’ Leela said.
‘I thought y’all were such good friends, I’m surprised he didn’t tell you,’ Joan said.
Over the next month, Leela saw Vikram several times. They met in the park near the hostel, and talked into the evening. Sometimes they sat on a bench that looked onto the shore, where, in the morning, you saw people who lived in the nearby slums shitting, then washing themselves. Sometimes they sat atop an artificial hillock in the centre of the park; when a girl Leela knew by sight from the hostel passed, she would cringe, then think, What does it matter?
Vikram cried. He said he’d never love anyone else. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I’ll be single now. There’s no point being with someone else. It wouldn’t mean anything.’
‘You’ll get married before I do,’ Leela said.
Chitra helped her pack her things the day before her mother came to pick her up. ‘Better than going through with an engagement, then calling it off,’ she said.
‘Did you think this would happen?’ Leela asked. She couldn’t bear to think of her failures as signal to all the world but herself.
‘Do you want these newspapers? You can give them to the bai to sell if not.’
‘No.’
‘I wondered if you’d get bored with him,’ the other girl admitted.
‘What if it was time to settle down, what if this is the wrong thing to do?’
‘Nothing is irreversible. You could tell him you’ve changed your mind now, if you wanted.’
Leela stood irresolute. She sat on the end of the bed. She would miss this room, which would not remember her or register any trace of her passage.
‘So you’re going back? To UK?’
‘It’s not back. This was back. I don’t know.’
As the car drove through Bombay – behind VT, then up Tulsi Pipe Road and through Parel, she looked down from the flyovers to the small balconies and windows of chawls, decorated with plants in hanging pots, clothes drying, here and there a man in a vest.
Her mother, wearing sunglasses, talked about the servants at home, about a friend of hers who was unwell, about whether they’d be home in time for lunch. The sun grew higher and hotter. Leela thought of the hostel, of her room, and of the sea at Marine Drive, sparkling, impersonal.
She sent Sathya an email at his non-work address, asking if everything was all right, saying she’d heard about his mother’s illness and that she was sorry. Another paragraph began:
You might have heard from Joan that I
She stared at it and pressed the backspace key.
A day later she sent a text: Hope you are okay, so sorry to hear about your mother. Let me know if I can do anything. Leela.
She called a day after that.
‘Ah, Leela.’ His voice sounded not only older but further away, as though transmitted by radio from the 1950s.
‘How are you?’ She was in her room, on the bed, half cross-legged. She stared with concentration at a cupboard.
‘Not great. Amma died yesterday.’ She was relieved he was so matter-of-fact.
‘What happened?’
‘She just – she hadn’t been well for some time, we kept going for tests. Suddenly it turned out she had this thing. It started in the breast. Then it was everywhere –’ But now he was weeping. It sounded like sniffing and swallowing. ‘She was in a lot of pain at the end, that’s the really fucking awful part. Sorry Leela.’
‘Don’t say sorry. I’m sorry,’ Leela said.
‘Everyone’s sorry.’
‘Shall I – do you want me to come for –?’
‘It was this morning. Don’t come now. Everyone’s here – relatives, friends. People have been very nice, neighbours sending food and stuff. Come in a couple of weeks when it’s quieter.’
‘Okay. I’ll call you in a few days to find out.’
‘Leela, lots of people are turning up. Let me call you back in some time.’
He rang off. She went into the drawing room. ‘Sathya’s mother died.’
‘Your friend from the office?’ asked her mother.
‘What happened?’ asked her father.
Leela sat down at the table. ‘Cancer. It was sudden. She wasn’t well, then all of a sudden she was diagnosed. I didn’t even know. Just yesterday. I just spoke to him. I’ll go there, but not yet.’
The familiar things of her home – a red melamine bowl on a cupboard near the table, a brass vase that her mother had had the servant polish but which hadn’t yet been used, a set of the pills her parents took with their breakfast – looked different, like a stage set. Sathya must be thinking that now, looking at the furniture of his mother’s life and imagining clearing it away. It was a fact that a person was there at one time, and your ideas of her were so strong, the attachment and antipathy she inspired, and then she was gone in a final way. The ideas remained in you, what did you do with them? The clutter too. At fourteen, she had helped her mother clear out her grandparents’ house: boxes of books, a trunk of letters, saris with rents in them, a hoarded box of Camay soap.
Many of those things had migrated to this apartment with her parents.
She eyed her father now. Mr Ghosh was reading. He looked up and caught his daughter’s eye. ‘Terrible,’ he said, with genuine sympathy. His glance was again caught by the book.