‘Black Pants?’
‘You should remember. You were there.’
‘I was where?’
‘No, maybe you were too little. It was the time that the fan was sending messages.’
The fan had been sending messages for a while. Often, these were innocuous messages that had very little impact on the family. The fan – or the people in the fan, we were never sure since the singular and the plural were both used – might dictate a jam sandwich to be consumed at three o’clock in the morning or the washing of the curtains a few days after they had been hung. But this time, the message was clear. Take your son and leave the house.
She did.
‘I think it was some time in the afternoon. You didn’t want to go but you came anyway because in those days you followed me around with a sad look in your eyes. Did I ever tell you that you broke my heart?’
‘Repeatedly.’
‘I hope you carry some guilt around.’
‘You must stop reading those American magazines.’
‘Who brings them home in the first place?’
Mother and son wander out on to the road. For a moment, Em seems uncertain about which way she should turn but she knows she will have to move quickly or the friendly neighbourhood watch that keeps an eye on her, an informal eye out for her or for her children, will be alerted. When she begins to walk, she’s sure. This is the path they intend her to take. She knows almost every time she takes a wrong turn that she’s going the wrong way. The boy tires quickly since he has been promised nothing. There is no treat, no film, no circus, no cream cake, no friendly aunt, nothing at the end of this endless walk in the sun.
And he is barefoot.
‘Black Pants pointed it out to me.’
Black Pants stops the woman and the child and asks, ‘Where are his shoes?’
‘Shoes?’ Em asks.
‘The boy. He will get blisters.’
Em looks down. The boy is accustomed to being barefoot. His mother has never seen the point of footwear and has let him run around rough. But it is hot today and the ground beneath his feet has begun to sear through his tough soles, and he is hopping from foot to foot.
‘I will carry him,’ says Black Pants and picks the boy up. The boy whines and squirms and twists and pulls at his own hair and knuckles his eyes. He is accustomed to this being enough. He gets his way with this much.
‘I took you from him though you were too big for anyone to carry. But the voices were still there. They were shouting now. I could not make out what they were saying. It was all very confusing and in the middle of it, I found us in a restaurant and Black Pants was having tea and you were crying, a-haan, a-haan, a-haan. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go home. But I had ordered something. I don’t know what. I didn’t have money. An ice cream came for you. You refused it. I knew then that it was poisoned and they had come for you.’
The woman is now thoroughly confused. The voices are not so loud now but they have decided that she must pay for not listening attentively enough. Now, they speak in one voice but they speak in code. ‘Fate is a sea without shore,’ they say. ‘Love and Death have dealt shocks,’ they say. ‘How did you come to eat your ring finger in a sandwich?’ they ask. Sometimes they sing. They sing fragments of hymns and Hindi film songs. She knows they are Hindi film songs because she knows the tunes; she does not know the words. There are times when she believes that she might be able to help everyone if she knew the words.
‘Yes, I know Hindi,’ the man is saying.
‘I can teach you Hindi in one hour,’ the man says.
‘But I am leaving town tomorrow,’ the man says.
‘He can play as we learn,’ the man says.
‘I have a room nearby,’ the man says.
She does not want to go. The voices are very quiet now. They are watching her very carefully. This will decide what will happen next. They have never done this before. They have always been clear about what they thought, who should be in the papers the next morning, what she can no longer say. The terrifying thing about them is that, today, she can’t tell what mood they are in. She can’t tell anything except that she knows now that Black Pants wants to have sex with her. As they walk, he is touching her wherever he can.
‘Is this what you want?’ she asks them aloud. ‘Is this what it will take?’
There is no answer. Just a whispering. No, not even whispering; they’re rustling, like satin handkerchiefs left too long in a box.
Black Pants is urging her on faster as if he has caught some of her anxieties, her ambivalences.
‘Forgive me,’ she says to her husband, in her head. She thinks of him and something warm breaks through her eyelids. She is crying, from both eyes. Her son notices. He screams now, screams and vomits. This is not an ordinary child’s crying but the sound of a child in despair. She sets him down to speak to him but immediately a crowd has gathered. The boy is struggling with her, trying to hit her because he is now on the verge of hysterics. The man tries to intervene. The boy’s screams become shrieks. In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is wont to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.
The crowd sizes up the situation immediately. Kidnapping, the crowd thinks. The woman has kidnapped the boy. She looks respectable but the boy is barefoot. He must have been playing around the house. She must have taken advantage of him, lured him away with some sweets or a poison. That’s why he has vomited. They do not know her here, not her or the boy. One of the women pulls her hair. Another slaps her face. The boy goes berserk with grief. He tries to throw himself at the women who would be his avenging angels. They think he is seeking protection. One of them sweeps him up in her arms. He begins to wail in earnest, sure that he is going to be separated from his mother. Black Pants slips away through the crowd.
‘How old was I?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe two or three.’
The women take her to the police station.
‘Didn’t you explain?’
‘I was trying to tell them about the voices.’
‘Why not tell them I was your son?’
‘I didn’t think of that.’
At the police station, Em gives the inspector-in-charge a number to call. An hour or so later, The Big Hoom is in the police station.
‘He must have been in a great mood.’
‘Oh don’t. He was. But he couldn’t say a word to them.’
I knew why he couldn’t. Somewhere, there was a file. Somewhere, there was a file with a bus conductor in lotus pose, perhaps. Money had changed hands and the police had promised that the file had been wiped clean but no one could be sure. Suicide was a crime, the only one where you could be punished for failing. The Indian Penal Code lays it down clearly under Section 309: ‘Whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such offence, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for term which may extend to one year (or with fine, or with both).’
So you could be miserable enough to kill yourself but the law will pay no heed to misery. It’s an old law, a colonizer’s law for the colonized, and it’s not such a stupid law as it looks. How else to throw a troublemaker, fasting unto death, into jail? How else to deal with the likes of Gandhi?
But then, what of the Jain monks who simply stop eating and drinking? What of Vinobha Bhave, who decided it was time and went peaceably? The law could turn a blind eye if it wanted.
In Em’s case, it had done that, helped by a little of The Big Hoom’s hard-earned money.
But it might change its mind this time. We simply went home.
• • •
A few days later, we got a telephone. This in itself was a magnificent feat. A telephone line was not an easy thing to acquire. It required intervention at the ministerial level, even if you had a valid reason, such as a ‘heart patient’ in the house. Few people had phones and those who did often found themselves with a dead instrument. This gave rise to some dramatic protests such as the instrument being carried in a funeral procession through the streets.
‘He made me swear to call him the next time the voices spoke to me,’ Em said.
This fragile thing, the word of a woman who was mentally ill, was what kept the family going. We could not afford full-time nursing. And even when we could and did have a nurse, things still went very badly wrong. A nurse had been present when Em had slit her wrists, a nurse who had fallen asleep on the one afternoon when she should not have been sleeping.
So all we had was Em’s word.
‘You won’t do anything silly?’ The Big Hoom would ask her before he left in the morning.
‘No,’ she would say and her voice would sometimes be a sick moan. ‘No.’
He would hug her and for a moment, her brow would clear, but soon he had to be gone and she would be shivering and hugging herself and asking for another Depsonil or death or a beedi. Even smoking was not a pleasure on her bad days. She would inhale deeply as if looking for something in the first fumes and when she did not find it, the despair would be back. The surcease was for a second only and after a couple of puffs, she would drop the beedi, literally drop it, sometimes burning her clothes, often letting it extinguish on the floor. The good thing about beedis is that they go out almost immediately.
Held by a single ‘No’ and by those beedis, she would wait for him to return. When he did, she would immediately ask for release.
‘Kill me.’
‘I might go to jail,’ he would say patiently. ‘Do you want that?’
‘No,’ she would say, but her voice would hold no real belief. She did not care one way or another. I remember the hurt I felt when he tried another tack once.
‘I might go to jail,’ he said, ‘and who would look after the children?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said and she didn’t have to add, ‘I don’t care’. Both Susan and I knew it was the subtext. It was easy to forgive; we could see how much pain she was in. It was not easy to forgive; her pain sealed her off from us.
But how did The Big Hoom forgive? How did he hold on?