Six

Shashi suddenly started laughing and all the other women – they had no idea what had made her laugh – looked at her and smiled. “Masi, when you were telling us that story about those women in London, I suddenly thought of my friend Sona. That girl was completely mad! Her poor husband tried so hard to teach her English so that she could be a bit modern and go to parties with him. But she hated learning it and when she found out he was cheating on her… you’ll never believe what she did,” said Shashi and she looked at them, a naughty glint in her eye. She knew the women would be shocked when she told them about Sona, but there was no harm. Let them know a little bit about the world outside their kitchen. It will give them a thrill. And anyway she was tired of chopping vegetables now.

Shashi put the knife down and began her story.

SONA’S STORY

The dust laden winds carried a scent of rain when Sona rose at dawn to check her husband’s trouser pockets. She dug her hand deep into the pockets, feeling the soft lining with her fingertips. Both were empty but later when she turned them inside out and shook them out before throwing them into a plastic bucket full of soapy water, a crumpled ball of paper fell out. She opened it out carefully, smoothing the edges with her wet, slippery hands…it looked like a cinema ticket. “Love and God” the ticket said. Sona read slowly holding the pink piece of paper against the window as if the sunlight would make it easier for her to read the washed out letters.

Her English was still not very good though she had been trying to learn how to read and write for two years now. As soon as she learnt a new word, saying it over and over in her head all day long, the ones she had learnt earlier escaped from her mind. She could only carry one word of English at a time, storing it in her head where it sat like a ball of lead, giving her a constant dull headache.

Gautam had given up trying to teach her. “Your head is like a block of wood. Not a word I say goes into it,” he had shouted, throwing the Rapid English Reader-Part 1 out of the window. Sona had brought it back into the house, dusted the earth off its covers and wiped the picture of a pretty boy and girl on a swing. Then she stored it in her saree cupboard under the starched cottons so that it would remain flat. She took it out sometimes in the afternoons when the house was quiet and amah, her maid was asleep in her quarters, and looked at the pictures. The boy and girl she loved but their parents she thought were a little cold and snobbish. The father always wore a false smile and the mother looked like one of those women who would never share a recipe with you or might give you the ingredients but leave one important thing out. The letters, written in bold on the first page of the book, were familiar now to her and though she did not know what they meant when they were written together, she could recognize each one separately. M she liked best because it reminded her of a small bridge, S too was one of her favourites since it could be written easily and she saw it was used in many words, usually at the end. X frightened her and Z she thought had something evil about it. When she looked at the letter, turning the book around, it looked liked a serpent about to strike. A, b…c…d…f…z…o…b… English, English, English, she sang when she bathed but she never spoke to Gautam about these funny letters that whirled about in her head because he was hardly ever at home.

She could have spoken to him in those early days of their marriage when he used to try to speak to her in English, especially when they made love. “Darling, darling…sweetheart…” he would whisper and later, when he lay with his head on her breast, smelling of her, he would explain to her what they meant in Hindi. But she had not paid much attention to the strange words then because her mind had wandered far away from her body. Anyway her head was always so heavy with a delicious languor in those far away times. “I will teach you English, my sexy little peasant, you wait and see how quickly you will learn,” he said to her, laughing. They used to laugh a lot those days.

The she-cat was around even then though Sona had recognized her scent only a few months ago. Hers was the main scent though sometimes there were others too, but her musky odour rose above the other faint scents demanding immediate attention and that is why Sona had named her she-cat.

She had not been afraid of her then.

There had been talk at home about some girlfriend. “There was a girl, some Anglo-Indian but then Gautam’s mother threatened suicide and all that love-shove nonsense was buried,” her sister told her a few days before her wedding. They had laughed then because everyone had a lost love tucked away but marriage was something your parents decided for you. The old love faded away like a dried flower pressed in a book. Years later you opened the book and tried to remember the scent. But Gautam had not done that. His love had not been buried at all. He had brought it with him to their married life and Sona saw it everyday on her husband’s sullen face, smelt it on his body, read it in his indifferent eyes. All he had done was keep it aside for a few months while he explored her and then like an old disease that lay dormant in his body, it had resurfaced, maybe stronger than before.

Sona had seen the she-cat once in a shop. A thin boyish face with short hair. She hardly had any breasts Sona noticed quickly before she turned but there was something very unusual about the slow yet sudden way she moved. Like an animal waking up after a long sleep, relaxed yet totally alert to any danger. Gautam had said something to her in English and she had walked away with a laughing look at Sona. Though she had not come close to them, Sona could smell her special scent as her eyes followed her till she disappeared. Gautam was very nice to her that day, bought her a new saree and sat patiently while she chose a matching blouse. At first she had thought the she-cat was the only one around but gradually she could smell the other women too.

Sona roamed the house at night, repeating the alphabet and wondering if it was safer for her husband to sleep with one woman or a crowd of women. Each woman had a different scent. One smelt of stale roses, another seemed to have bathed in mustard oil. One day she smelt a new one that had drenched herself in sandalwood along with some foreign perfume. She attacked Gautam that night, crying and whimpering and forced him to make love to her. Sona suddenly started laughing. All the women were standing around the bed, watching, waiting for Gautam to finish. She heard them whisper and giggle right next to the bed, filling the room with their clashing scents. Sona did not mind the she-cat, after all she had been there right from the beginning but she hated and feared the others because she could not see their faces. “One extra woman – outside the marriage, there is no harm,” she heard her mother say. “You know he is a rich man. In the olden days all important men had to have a mistress whether they wanted to or not. No one respected them if they stayed at home with their wives. Why, your grandfather had two mistresses. My mother invited them to my wedding, of course they never came but sent a gift. I forget what it was – something heavy, pure gold. You should not mind. He gives you enough money to run the house plus whatever extra you want for jewellery and sarees. Let him have her, takes the pressure off you, you know…his demands in bed, but he should not have more than one woman. That may complicate things and god knows which of them might get pregnant. One you can keep track of, but two or more mean trouble for sure. You should try quickly for a son. That will tie him down to you forever. Nothing like a male child to rope in a roving husband,” she said. “Buy and buy. Shopping really helps you to feel better.” So Sona began to buy.

She had hundreds of sarees with shawls and bags to match, two refrigerators with automatic defrost, a microwave, five T.V sets, three cars and two drivers. They had a cook but Sona liked to cook all the meals. “The only thing he likes about me now is my cooking, so I will not give that up,” she told her mother when she scolded the cook for watching T.V while Sona made puris in the kitchen. The she-cat could not cook. Sona was sure because she was educated and everyone knew that educated girls could not cook. Sona had been to school but her grandmother ordered her father to take her out when she turned ten. “I do not want her to wear short skirts and show her knees to the whole world. She has learnt enough. She can read and write Hindi, count in English till hundred. What more is needed for a woman? The more you let them study the more difficult it will be to find a good boy for them. Already she is so tall and her skin is not very fair either. Education will weigh her down even more heavily.” So Sona left school and began to learn how to cook a rich curry without using onions or tomatoes, make pickles out of every known vegetable, embroider endless tablecloths which were never used since they ate on the kitchen floor.

Gautam’s father and her father were childhood friends. Their marriage was arranged when Gautam was five and she yet to be born. “If my next child is a daughter, she belongs to you,” her father had said though he was scolded later by his mother, her grandmother. “You fool, do not be in such a hurry to ask for a female child. You have only two sons so far.” Sona was actually promised to Gautam’s older brother, but he ran away to Bombay to join films. Some said in the village that he had married a Muslim girl. Gautam’s family spoke about him in the past tense, reading his letters aloud as if he had written them posthumously, their voices sad but respectful.

Gautam was married while he was still in college “before he grows wings” his father said when they brought the engagement sweets and sarees. Sona did not really see much of him in her first year of marriage because he went away to England to study further. Maybe that is where he got a taste for white girls with short hair. Like a tiger who has tasted human flesh and cannot do without it, Gautam too was addicted to alien flesh. Her body was too much like his own, they belonged to the same religion, caste, village and even looked alike. She bored him like his mother and sisters did with their familiar faces and dull everyday talk.

Sona picked up the cinema ticket which had dried crisp in the sunlight. She held the stiff blurred-with-black-dots ticket in her hand and saw Gautam in the cinema hall, his handsome face half lit in the dark, his mouth open as he watched a kissing couple in an English film. The she-cat’s head rested on his shoulders, her short hair gleaming like a silken cap. Sona went to the cinema once in a while with Gautam’s mother and they always saw a religious film. During the interval when the lights came on, Sona’s mother-in-law would take her prayer beads out and chant loudly. Once she carried a huge bag of sweet puffed rice and Sona had to pass it down to the entire row. Then the usher came and stopped her but he too took some in his cupped palm. When the film was over and they were leaving the hall people came up, did a namaste to her and some touched her mother-in-law’s feet. It was a happy day for both of them.

Sona folded the cinema ticket before putting it in the drawer where she kept all the other evidence of Gautam’s love affairs. Three green beads (glass), a hair clip (for short hair), a lipstick stained handkerchief, a bracelet (artificial not gold), and several bits of paper with names written in English. These Sona was not sure about but since they had a strong scent, she stored them with the other items. As she placed the cinema ticket, Sona saw that the drawer was quite full. When she had started collecting these items of her husband’s unfaithfulness Sona did not know what she would do with them but it made her feel good to keep them safely. This way she could control the situation. Locked up in the drawer these tokens of her husband’s desire for other women, could not spread their scent and maybe they would shrivel up and die. Then she would bury them one by one in the garden. She could burn them too but then the smoke would carry their scent all over the house and then he would inhale it too and it might bring the longing back into his heart. No, it was best to keep them locked in this small drawer.

Then one day, to ward off the evil eye which sometimes stared at her when she touched the other women’s things, she began offering the tokens to the gods. “I must give money with them or else the gods will not accept these silly, cheap things. And I must steal the money from him. It will be like a fine. Then the gods will not punish him for being unfaithful to his wife.”

At first she took only the small change lying on the table where he kept his car keys but as days went by, the gods wanted more. Today she had taken Rs 50 from his shirt pocket. This week’s total was quite a lot. That five hundred rupee note in the old jacket he had asked her to send to the drycleaners was a windfall. That would settle the score for the cinema ticket. The gods were not unfair and they only wanted a fair exchange. Each piece of evidence had to be compensated with money or the gods would get angry and strike them dead. Or worse take her unborn baby away. The baby understood English when she spoke to it and kicked her playfully.

Till now she had managed to settle the score, keep the balance, but it was getting difficult. Gautam never noticed the missing money but now the gods wanted to be paid in cash and on the same day she found any evidence of his cheating. Today’s cinema ticket was paid for and the gods appeased but who knows what she would have to give them tomorrow.

Sona closed the drawer and walked out into the garden. It was still hot though the sun had set. Gautam would be home late again. His secretary, she was also one of them Sona was sure, had rung to say he had a late meeting. “Sir said please do not wait for dinner, he will eat something in the canteen,” said the girl.

Sona wondered if this conversation could also be taken as evidence and she would have to pay a fine for these words too…. No that would not do. The gods only wanted something that she could hold in her hands. Not thoughts, not voices and not scents, thank god or else she would go mad trying to pay all the fines…. The house was full of scents all day, swirling around her head and filling her nose, her mouth and ears. She must run around all day and try to pay for the scents. “Run…run,” she shouted. She had read it in the English book. “Run…run…run.”