DHANI

THE WOMAN LOOKED up and smiled. The small silver rings in her nostrils trembled, her face gleamed like new leaves.

‘Damn crowded here today, no? Sit, if you like.’ She shifted to make room on the metal seat, painted grey like the monsoon sky.

She was right about the crowd, except it wasn’t just today that the restaurant was crowded. It was crowded every single day. It was the busiest restaurant on the Bombay side of the Bombay–Pune highway. I should know, I make this trip every weekend and am familiar with every restaurant, tea stall and food cart along the highway. However, this isn’t about me. This is about the woman with the twin nose rings who was looking up at me, her head tilted to one side, her bright eyes seeming brighter against the monsoon day dim with clouds, and offering me perhaps the only available seat in the restaurant. Still, I hesitated. I had good reason for doing so. This woman was a complete stranger, and I try my best to avoid engaging with strangers. If truth be told, I avoid engaging with those known to me as well, but like I said, this isn’t about me. I looked around once again – not a vacant seat in sight. The seat opposite hers was firmly claimed, too, a backpack, a biker’s helmet and a heavy-looking document holder heaped on it. I decided to accept her invitation. Not because she was smiling in a way as to fill the entire field of sight, like a dominant note claims the entire ear drum. No, not at all. My reasons for accepting the seat were practical and had nothing to do with her. Firstly, I had been jostled in the crowd while carrying the food tray; as a result, the sambar in my tray had sloshed over the idlis and I wanted to eat them before they soaked any more of the liquid and disintegrated. Secondly, when on a journey, I am not one to dawdle over food, or anything else, on the way. I believe that one should not linger, there is no point in drawing the journey out. Finish and get it over with, that’s how I think.

I set my food tray down on the table. ‘If you are sure this isn’t an inconvenience…’ I began.

‘What inconvenience? We are here to eat. It isn’t as if either of us is planning to spend the rest of the monsoon here!’ She laughed.

I pulled a couple of tissues from the plastic tissue box and looked sideways at her while wiping the cutlery. Not because I didn’t wish to meet her eyes, which I admit had a way of looking at one that was too direct, but because that’s the only way to look at someone seated next to you. How can you see someone alongside you squarely? For that you have to face them. Anyway, I do not want to keep explaining myself. That’s one of the reasons I avoid engaging with people, and in any case, as I have mentioned already, this isn’t about me.

The woman was dressed in a dark vest and a pair of jeans. I noticed she held herself very straight. She had good ears. They seemed larger than average – though the reason for that could be that her hair was cut very short, exposing her ears entirely – but they were otherwise quite a handsome pair of ears, pale and translucent, shaped like shells, with their lobes free and well-proportioned. From where I sat, I could see the delicate whorl of bones leading to the smooth, flushed tunnel within. She had shown good sense in not disfiguring them with piercings. I can never understand why people stick bits of metal into their ears, as if they can somehow improve their perfect, flawless shape. As you may have guessed, ears are my particular speciality. I am a technician to an audiologist, and in my line of work, I examine many pairs of ears in a day. However, I can’t say I get to see such young and healthy-looking ones very often. I mostly have to deal with aged ears, wrinkled and marked with liver spots, slack and veined, unable to perform their function efficiently, as if the sounds and words of a lifetime have accumulated inside the ear canal, encrusted the membrane, benumbed the nerve endings. Of course, I am aware that’s not the case; I am a trained audio technician after all. But despite my training, I approach ears with a sense of mystery. They are such sensitive organs, intricately, even secretively, shaped – cartilage, bones, membranes all arranged in a fine, impeccable balance. I often wonder how my patients bear my examining their ears with such composure, allowing me to probe, poke, peer at the dark, hidden places inside. And yet, all of them do so without even a murmur of protest. There they sit in the cushioned examination chair, tuck their hair back, tilt their necks and offer me their ears eagerly, like someone holding out their hand to a palmist, unafraid of the past and the future that could be read in it. Anyway, and I repeat, this isn’t about me. All I want to say is that there is a certain kind of pleasure in seeing a pair of well-shaped ears such as the woman with the nose rings possessed, and it is for this reason that she interested me.

I picked up my spoon and hesitated. It was true that I didn’t know her, and yet, she had shared her seat with me. It felt awkward to eat while she sat meal-less, her arms resting on the table, fingers drumming softly upon the metal top, and even more awkward to offer her food from my tray. I wondered what to do. Should I ask her whether she’d like to try an idli and wave to a waiter to bring an empty bowl so I could share one from my tray, or would it be better to offer to order a separate plate of idlis for her? I sat there, wavering, spoon in hand. My mother gets annoyed at my silent ditherings. He has got a borrowed mouth which he must return, she says caustically; that’s why he is afraid to use it. Before I could make up my mind, a man carrying two trays laden with food came over. He was one of those well-built men who wear shirts that are ridiculously tight across the chest and short in the arms, to show off pads and mounds of muscles.

‘Here, I think I got everything that you wanted. Nice and hot – kotambir vada, kande pohe, seera,’ he said and placed the trays before her.

‘Everything I wanted?’ She was looking up at him, smiling.

The man slapped his forehead. ‘I forgot the vada pav!’ he said and darted away.

The smile remained fixed on her mouth as she followed him with her eyes. I pressed an idli with my spoon; sambar had seeped into it, it broke into three pieces.

I ate in silence. Some people are proud of their ability to converse, I am proud of my ability to be silent. I prefer silence to the chatter people fill it with. You would, too, if you spent entire days in an audiometry lab listening to sounds at different frequencies and pitches and shouting instructions into deaf ears. Still, it is true that sitting next to that silently smiling woman, I felt an urge to talk. Though, what can one say to a stranger beyond the commonplaces? I chewed the unuttered, meaningless words with a mouthful of soggy idli. Outside, the clouds had thickened. I have often noticed that the blue-grey light of a monsoon day softens the most mundane and ugly of objects it falls upon. The tarred road, the dustbin shaped like cartoon cats, a lone, straggly tree trapped in concrete – everything acquires a mellow magic.

The man returned. This time he held two paper plates piled with steaming hot vada-pav, the pav-buns sliced and stuffed with crisply fried potato balls, liberally sprinkled with powdered red chilli and coconut. The savoury fragrance made my mouth water.

‘There,’ he said, placing the plates on the table, ‘now I really have got everything.’ He pushed the helmet, backpack and document folder aside, and sat opposite the woman.

‘Everything?’ The woman’s smile never wavered. ‘This restaurant has everything? Everything I wish for?’

‘You want something else? They have more options.’ The man made to rise.

As I have said, the two of them were strangers to me, their business was none of mine, and yet, I was present there, co-opted as a witness. Breaking my own rule, I spoke to them. ‘Perhaps they don’t have everything, but they definitely have an extensive menu and they make everything fresh here. Their vada-pav is better than the stale, oily ones we get in Bambai.’

The man looked at me. ‘You are absolutely right. Best food on the highway. We’ve come here after a long while and nothing’s changed.’

‘We have come here after a long while and everything’s changed,’ the woman intoned.

They looked at each other, smiling, but their smiles were entirely different. Her’s was bright and sharp, drawn deliberately like the curved blade of a katar; his emerged flickeringly like a doubtful firefly. I am not explaining this well for I know nothing about smiles, I only understand sounds. Thankfully, they are less complicated than smiles and such like – they enter the dark tunnels of your ears, make their way to your brain and you know what they are, whether a loud whistle or a soft murmur. There’s no endless wondering whether they mean one thing or another, and if you find yourself wondering, it is time you came to the audiometry lab and got your ears looked into.

‘Nothing needs to change, Dhani,’ the man said earnestly. ‘Everything could go back to the way it was. None of this is irreversible.’

The woman’s smile deepened. ‘We are still trying to figure out all that has changed, and by the time we do, everything would have changed all over again. That’s the way things are.’ She mixed a spoonful of seera with rice flakes fragrant with turmeric and coriander.

‘You keep saying so, but tell me what has changed? We are here together, and like always, you are eating sweet mixed with savoury.’

‘But the flavours – they are all different.’

The man leaned back. ‘It is just a notion you’ve got hold of, Dhani…’ He broke a piece of the kotambir vada and chewed the coriander-encrusted savoury.

They had forgotten my presence. It began to rain. First, large, heavy drops pierced the watery, blue-grey light like so many glass bullets, then the rain set in in earnest and fell in wind-waved grey sheets. It fell with equal fervour over the patchy concrete of the highway, the straggly tree, the mist-veiled mountains. Each time the glass door opened to admit groups of dripping, laughing travellers, the rushing, beating sound of rain filled the restaurant.

The man broke off another piece of the thick fritter. His eyes rested on me absently.

‘You come here often?’ he asked.

‘Yes, every week.’ This is another of the reasons I avoid talking to people. They begin with asking questions – where do you live, what do you do, how many in your family, and next you know, they have taken a flying leap from enquiring to giving advice about how you should organize your life. I have heard every kind of advice from strangers encountered as fleetingly as bird-shadows over grass, the gist of which always is that I shouldn’t be living the way I am:

‘You should bring your mother and sister to Bombay to live with you.’

‘You should return to Pune to be with them, that’s your duty as a son.’

‘You should move to the south, there are big hospitals there.’

‘You should go north, the weather is better there.’

‘Wherever you go, just don’t think of leaving your own country. You’ll regret it one day.’

‘What will you earn here? Go abroad and make some money while you are still young…’

I have to admit, though, that the man, whatever be his faults in choice of clothes, wasn’t nosy.

‘We are making a trip to Pune after a while,’ he said slowly, his eyes still resting on me absently, the forgotten fritter crumbling slowly between his heedless fingers.

I felt obliged to say something. ‘You’ve chosen the perfect time of the year to do so. Monsoons are best experienced in the ghats. The greenery and the waterfalls will all vanish in a month or two. But for now, the ghats are beautiful.’

The woman rested her spoon on the rim of the paper plate. ‘We are not going for the beauty of the monsoons.’

‘Oh … you are visiting relatives perhaps…’

‘Unhnn,’ the woman shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Dhani…’ the man pleaded.

The woman turned her head, her eyes falling on his like a shining blade. ‘We are returning to Pune to get a divorce,’ she said.

I was taken aback. In all of my thirty-three years, I had never once come across a situation like this. Uncertain, I looked down at my wilting dosa, crumbling idlis and cooling sambar. It was difficult to go on eating mundanely after the woman’s momentous announcement. A server in a blue uniform stopped by and proffered a tray of tea in clay tumblers and filter coffee in stainless steel glasses. They chose the tea – I could smell the sugar it was laden with. Before I could make up my mind, the server moved to the next table.

‘Here’s a real change’ – the man sipped his tea – ‘waiters in uniform.’

‘The staff seems new, too, and the owner, the old man who used to sit behind the cash register, is no longer there. Perhaps he sold the restaurant,’ the woman suggested. ‘That’s a kind of divorce too, isn’t it?’ she added, still smiling her bright, flinty smile. I felt tired just watching that smile.

‘It was all her idea.’ The man looked at me apologetically. ‘I mean, getting a divorce…’

‘Getting married was my idea too.’

The restaurant was filled with the dull drone of conversations and the muffled sound of rain coming down with a detached ferocity. I felt tired of those sounds too. The whole situation had begun to annoy me.

‘We are making you feel very uncomfortable, aren’t we?’ the woman too turned her gaze towards me.

‘There’s nothing to all this, really,’ the man reassured, ‘just one of her notions. I have known Dhani for the last ten years, right from the day we joined the architecture school. She just runs away with an idea from time to time … There’s nothing to it all.’

The woman raised her brows. ‘There’s nothing to us getting divorced?’

‘You know what I mean … There was really nothing, at least, not from my side … If you thought … you could have always said something, Dhani … You still can, you know…’

The woman watched him in silence.

‘Dhani’s always been like this. First, she insisted we move because of the frogs and now this divorce…’ The man shrugged his muscular shoulders, the shirt straining at the seams.

‘Hello, you are the one who had a problem with the frogs!’

He shrugged again. ‘It was a really nice flat too. Very conveniently located, train station ten minutes away, no water or electricity disruption issues, and to top it all, very reasonable rent. But then you came up with the frogs.’

‘I didn’t come up with the frogs, they were just there. And you were queasy about the frogs, not me.’

‘I wouldn’t even have noticed them if you hadn’t pointed them out. We could have stayed on in that flat and everything would have been fine.’

The woman arched her neck and laughed. The twin silver rings in her nostrils glinted, her ears flushed. When she stopped laughing, she looked at me. ‘We have thoroughly confused you, haven’t we?’

I confess I felt a tad lost, the way I had felt when I saw an audiogram for the first time. To me, the fine, rising, peaking and dipping lines and numbers on the x and y axis made no sense, but the doctor who had studied innumerable audiograms and all the known maladies of the ear had taken one look at them and said with assurance that it was noise-induced hearing loss, the cochlea was impacted and sounds at higher frequencies would pose a challenge. What I mean to say is that those two could follow the lines and curves of each other’s thoughts, which, naturally, I couldn’t, for example all that talk about frogs in a flat.

‘I understand the difficulty of finding a reasonably priced flat near a train station. If you find one, you should stay put. However, this is your private matter. Perhaps I should move to another table—’ I made to rise, though the restaurant was even more crowded than before. The unstoppable rain had driven travellers into its shelter, and groups of people stood around balancing plates of food in their hands, talking, eating, waiting.

‘Not at all,’ said the woman shaking her head vigorously. ‘If you get up, someone else will sit here. This place is bursting with people. Anyway, nothing’s private any longer. Everything has been filed in the family court and anyone can pay the court fee and look it all up.’

The man let out a deep breath. ‘Once something gets into her head…’

‘The frogs were in my head?’ She gulped her cooling tea and shifted slightly in her seat to face me. ‘Let me tell you about the frogs, then you can decide for yourself.’

The man withdrew the arm he had placed along the back of the seat and leaned forward. ‘Dhani, be reasonable. He could be in a hurry, he might need to reach somewhere.’

‘So are we, but it is raining like crazy. Besides,’ she tilted her head and looked at me, ‘you don’t look like you are in a hurry. Or are you?’ She was smiling again, the ear turned towards me was tinted a delicate ruby.

‘I am in no hurry,’ I answered glancing towards the man. His eyes were fixed on the woman. I was not planning upon leaving until the rain let up and this wasn’t because of the woman, or her scimitar smile, or her flushed ear. It was because of the rules at the audio lab I worked at. I had learned early on in the job to be careful about my health. Most of our patients are elderly, prone to catching any microbe lingering in the sequestered lab environment, so anyone with even the slightest cold or cough is immediately shifted to quality-control duty in the factory where the hearing aids are machined. Factory duty is tough – commuting for hours on bumpy roads amidst intrepid truck drivers casually speeding up, missing you by a hair’s breadth. Add to it eight-hour shifts, punching your card even for toilet breaks, and everyone from the foreman to the supervisor asking you when you planned to get married. It was far better to stay put to avoid getting drenched in the rain and listen to the story about the mysterious frogs.

‘It isn’t the Ramayan that it would take hours to tell,’ the woman said, biting into a green chilli. ‘This happened about a year ago when we moved from Pune to Bombay. If you’ve ever lived in Pune, you’d know what that means.’

I nodded. I had lived in Pune until three years ago and had no desire to move back there to live in the house my father had built, now sinking deeper and deeper into shade as buildings rose higher and higher around it. Still, every time I entered the quiet lane with the old trees, I felt a strange quickening inside me. An inexplicable desire to toss my bag over the gate and vault after it, whistling, like I used to do years ago, would rise within me.

‘And I had always lived in Pune, literally my entire life. Mummy-Daddy, my sisters, my friends, everyone’s in Pune—’

‘But you never cared much for Pune,’ the man interrupted. ‘You used to complain how narrow and limiting it was. One time you even wanted to go to Australia.’

‘Yes, for a year. To do a course in environmental architecture, not to live there. Anyway, you’d chickened out.’

‘We had just begun working then, Dhani. We had no money to speak of. We were learning the ropes, learning to be real architects. We weren’t even married.’ The man looked at me and shook his head. ‘You see what I mean when I say she gets these ideas. For a whole six months she was wild about going to Australia, and two years later, she didn’t want to leave Pune and move to Bombay.’

‘So we didn’t go to Australia to study because we weren’t married, and moved to Bombay to work because we were,’ the woman continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted. ‘And in the interim, we learned being real architects by copying Hong Kong offices, New York apartments and holiday homes in the south of Spain. If you see an ugly, shiny, tall building in Hinjewadi or Yerwada or anywhere else in Pune, there’s a ninety per cent probability that we designed it. We had learned all about green buildings, harmonious landscaping, local material, climate-conscious designing back at the school, and what did we end up building? Glass, chrome and pre-fab eyesores that guzzled energy. That’s what we did for four years.’

‘You exaggerate, Dhani. Our designs had technical excellence, design integrity. They are appreciated, the buildings we built are useful. It’s only towards the end that the job became frustrating. Too many projects didn’t take off. The whole Pune construction scene was tapering off. We’d work hard on site-surveys, sweat over AutoCAD, and then something would go wrong – either the financing fell through, or the land had wrong Vaastu.’

‘Actually, that was the only saving grace. Imagine, if every monstrosity we ever designed was uglifying the city right now.’

‘You mustn’t think that we did bad work,’ the man spoke earnestly. ‘This is just Dhani’s way of exaggerating everything. We are very good architects.’

‘We are very good architects who design very bad buildings.’ The woman stirred the green chutney with the little finger of her right hand.

‘We were so good that we got better jobs with large firms in Bombay.’ The man’s tone remained even.

‘You got the job in Bombay because you applied for it and ditched the plan to set up in partnership with Prakash and others. And I got a job because I had no choice.’

At last, the man looked at her. ‘That’s hardly fair, Dhani. You knew I was applying. We didn’t burst our asses in architecture school to play at mindful designing and ethical construction with friends. What would we have achieved by working with Prakash and his gang? They hated every developer in and around Pune. Who would have given us work? We were lucky to get out, lucky to find good jobs.’

The woman wiped her finger with a napkin. The green from the chutney made a dark stain on the soft, white paper. ‘So that’s how we came to Bombay – because we were lucky.’

The man sighed. ‘Yes, and because we were lucky, we found a perfect flat. It was owned by an alum, a very successful one, and was close to my work. There was a market and a temple nearby too, and the cherry on top was that the landlord was a very decent man. He didn’t even ask us to put up a deposit.’

‘That was because you volunteered me to tutor his daughter,’ the woman said.

‘What was wrong with that, Dhani? Ria’s a sweet girl and you enjoyed coaching juniors at our college.’

‘Because they wanted to learn. It wasn’t that I would be talking about Antoni Gaudí’s design scheme, and they’d ask why I was wearing red nail polish with my blue kurta.’

‘Now you are exaggerating again,’ the man challenged. ‘You used to be kinder to the juniors, used to cut them so much slack. Besides, Ria isn’t like that at all.’

‘Why don’t you say how she is then?’

The man flushed. ‘I am not saying she is brilliant like you…’

‘Neither am I.’ The woman flashed. ‘Anyway,’ she turned to me, ‘we’d been in that flat for a few months when one morning I step into the bathroom and there’s a kind of movement, you know, the kind that you don’t quite see but sort of notice from the corner of your eye? At first, I think maybe my eyes are playing a trick. Sometimes, just after you wake up, you get these visual illusions, don’t you? You see patches of colour or the outlines of objects seem wavy.’

Though I know nothing about eyes, I agreed with her. Often patients complain of a harsh ringing or a persistent drip-drip or some other sound amid the soundproof silence of the audio lab. If ears can play such tricks, who was to say that eyes don’t?

‘I switch on the lights and there’s a frog in the corner, no bigger than a coin and a neutral beige in colour. I look carefully and there are several of them – under the window sill, in the corner by the shower, even in the small basket I stored soaps and shampoos in.’ The woman turned her head slowly and looked at the man. He was leaning back, arms folded. ‘Once our eyes got accustomed to spotting them, we saw them everywhere in that one-BHK flat. We found them in the shoes we had just stepped out of, among the freshly folded clothes, in the unwashed utensils in the sink … they were literally everywhere. Perhaps they’d always been there, only we hadn’t learned to see them.’ She rested her chin on her two hands wrapped around each other, but her eyes remained on the man, their lids trembling slightly every now and then, like fish tangled in a web.

‘I have seen frogs in my stairwell in monsoons,’ I offered as the silence stretched out. ‘Our yard turns into a swamp when it rains.’

The woman shook her head. Her breast heaved in a long breath.

‘This was in December. And there wasn’t a leaf of grass to be seen anywhere in the building; even the potted plants were plastic. The nearest tree was an hour’s journey by train.’ She smiled slightly. ‘Come to think of it, it could easily pass for one of the buildings we designed – concrete compound and flaring façade studded with large metal discs that had no purpose unless you can call reflecting sunrays and starting an occasional garbage fire in the dry season one!’

‘It was a new, well-built apartment complex,’ the man said. He was collecting the crumbs of the kotambir vada and building a fragile, mini tower on his paper plate. ‘No one else had faced any problem there. Our landlord got a pest exterminator to come in, but he couldn’t do anything to solve our problem.’

The woman shrugged her bare shoulders. ‘It wasn’t a problem that could be solved. I thought I was okay with the frogs at first, but it was exhausting to always be on the watch for them…’

‘I was just tired of everyone talking about them.’ I was startled by the harshness in the man’s voice. ‘Wherever I went, it was always the frogs: Are you still facing the problem? It’s been a long while, why don’t you do something to solve it? Everywhere I went, the problem stuck to me like a poster. It became impossible for me to relax. I don’t know whether anyone can understand what I mean…’ the man trailed off.

I understood them perfectly. Although I had never faced an infestation of tiny frogs like them, I, too, had felt the nagging discomfort they spoke about. The first place I worked at after completing my technical training, I had felt a similar sense of unease. The work was all right and the salary was fine too. The doctor I worked with was young and newly qualified and knew all about the latest technologies and machines. The only issue was that he had a strange lisp, which caused his ‘s’s and ‘sh’s to emerge with a hiss that echoed ominously. The stark silence of the audio lab, protected from all external sounds by careful soundproofing, susurrated with those hissed ‘s’s. Every time he tuned a machine correctly, his celebratory ‘Yesss!’ uncoiled like a long snake in the sterile space of the lab. Often while working with complete concentration, his hisses startled me like a jolt of electricity. Gradually, it came to a point where I was always on the alert for those sibilant ‘s’s, my neck, shoulders and back tense, my ears straining after the smallest sound he made. I found myself unable to relax anywhere; even my dreams resounded with his hissed words. After a few months, I had to quit the job. I could not endure it any longer.

‘I understand,’ I assured them.

‘I understand too,’ the woman echoed. She leaned forward, reaching out and touching the man on the shoulder lightly, briefly, before dropping her arm on to the table.

The man looked at her intently, his puzzled eyes raked her, his hands hovered over hers. ‘You do, Dhani? Really? Then why all this, all this…’ he threw an arm out, unable to capture his confusion.

The woman stood up and stretched her arms, her body undulating like a wave. ‘Chal,’ she looked down at me, ‘we will make a move. The rain’s stopped.’

‘But…’

‘We are getting late for the court. Today’s the final hearing.’

The man rose. He looked lost, confused.

‘Please excuse me,’ I said, unable to contain my curiosity. They paused and turned towards me in unison. ‘Do you know what happened to those frogs? Are they still infesting that flat, or were they finally gotten rid of?’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘We have no idea,’ the woman said shortly.