Chapter Sixteen

The Monday after the very volatile weekend with Mother and Dr. Apte was different from others. The alarm rang and I reached, to no avail, to clamp it down and stop its irritating buzz in my ear. Finally, I opened one eye to locate the offensive aggressor. Now get this—small things seem larger when unexpected. I stared into a giant glaring eye sharing my pillow. If you think beetles have a body, I would have, at that moment, strongly argued otherwise: it’s only one large eye that makes up a beetle. An eye that can get you out of bed like no alarm clock can. I scrambled from the sheets in response.

But no, this is not the difference I speak of. Shortly after I arrived at the college, I encountered, close-up, another insect that I had spent the last five years flicking off my sleeve.

The staff room was quiet except for Ms. Raikar slurping her tea from a saucer in loud satisfied noises. I looked at her in the corner blowing the steam from the saucer to cool down the tea. Disgusting habit…reminded me of Billy—another disgusting memory. I am told that the students have set out a marriage in some imaginary heaven between Ms. Raikar and me. Nothing could be more repulsive to me—and I guess that she feels the same, unless I am reading too much into the rude way she turns her back. A shame, really, I think absentmindedly; I would quite like to run my hand through that thick, straight hair down her back, and that skin… clean and smooth; she’s good looking, if one ignores that disdainful curl of her lips when she eyes me. I overheard her once say how “Western” I looked with my suit and tie. “Why can’t he look Indian?”

I sighed. She was all that was wrong with this city, I thought resentfully, following as prejudiced a path as her thoughts of me.

“Good morning, Ms. Raikar.” Still on formal surnames after five years of being on the faculty and sharing the staff room.

“Good morning,” she said, without turning.

Exasperating! How difficult is it to be civil? This was not a good way to start the morning or the week. It was time to confront her, and so I walked up to her from behind and stopped just a foot behind her, prepared to—Hell. Were those teardrops blotting the paper in front of her? Nothing is more surprising than when you see someone you don’t like exposing their vulnerability.

I pushed back my first instinct to welcome her to the human race, but spontaneity long having been suppressed by a mind absorbed in quadratic equations, I restrained my sarcasm. Surely my “good morning” could not have brought on the tears? Focus Peter, focus, it is not about you. I set aside my belligerent thoughts and stood still there behind her—as all creatures of my sex, not knowing what to do with a crying woman.

“Sorry,” I said softly.

“Why?” she asked, but no longer in that sharp tone I was used to.

“Why are you crying? Do you want to talk?”

“Oh you won’t understand…”

“I can try to.”

“You are so structured and unemotional,” she said.

When one delivers a comeuppance of someone who barely tolerates you, it helps if one looks good and dignified. Ms. Raikar, however, not so endowed right now, blew her nose loudly and turned her even less appealing red-rimmed eyes towards me. “Mathematical about everything,” she added. “How can you understand true feelings?”

“I can try.” My incomprehension of this illogical trend of thought, and my own repulsion of her suddenly changed. Here she was, vulnerable, not seeing my caste, community, but only me as a person. True, I have been quite unemotional, uninvolved and very distant from her at least; so I looked at this phenomenon with interest—I am a person to her…

“Ms. Raikar, can I ask you your first name?”

“Shiela,” she said, now looking at me like…like, I don’t really know, but differently.

“So, Shiela, let us start over,”

She smiled. Oh my God! Five years and I had never seen her smile. Her teeth, white and even, and lips now red with all the biting she had done… I swallowed.

“Peter,” I said, holding out my hand.

She nodded, ignoring my hand. Ok, never mind that. At least she smiled.

“Now, that we are on first names, tell me what is wrong.”

“Peter,” she said, “have you ever been in love?”

“Let’s talk about you,” I said, not wanting to confront this issue, least of all to Shiela. One does not go to a funeral and have discussions about oneself, or one’s views, with the grieving widow. “You are important at this time.”

“I am in love with this man.”

“Love makes you cry?”

“No, but he is marrying another woman this Saturday.”

“The bastard—forgive my language—are you telling me he has been seeing you and now marrying someone else?”

“Yes, but he says he told me right at the start that we could never get married even if he loved me.”

“So why did you continue to date him?”

“I thought that he would want me so much that he would change his mind.”

“Why did he say he couldn’t marry you even if he loved you?” “He is a Brahmin.”

“Maharashtrian?”

“No.”

Interesting. Maharashtra for Marathis, but not in love?

“You know it is best to forget him, don’t you think? Need I say?”

“It is easy for you to say. You are a cold bachelor.”

I must say this woman managed to alienate my sympathies just when I was warming up to her, but at least she looked more normal now. “You don’t know that.”

“So have you been in love?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, she turned you down?”

“No. I never asked her.”