Charu sensed something was wrong, and wordlessly brought me gifts the whole week: first a white rose made out of crepe paper; followed by a lumpy papier mâché Ganesha that a friend of hers had made; then a vase she had fashioned out of reeds. She cleaned my courtyard with rediscovered concentration. She brought water on her head from a far-off stream when my taps ran dry.
By now five letters had come. I realised I had begun to wait for the postman as expectantly as Charu and it seemed silly for me to keep up the pretence that I did not know who the letters were really from. After the third one came, I said to her in a casual tone, “There’s a letter from Kundan Singh for you.” A look passed between us, I turned to go and fetch the letter, and she knew she was safe. She never mentioned her friend “Sunita” again. She began to interrupt our lessons with unexpected nuggets about Kundan Singh: how he had been with her every night of her vigil when her cow was dying, how they used to meet every afternoon at the Dhobi Ghat, how they had once stolen away and gone to a fair at the Army grounds together and he had bought her a bead necklace. She told me about his parents, his job. It was as if, by talking to me, she was reassuring herself that he was real.
I found myself thinking about them in the middle of my working day, creating sagas out of her stories. In my mind’s eye, I saw her and Kundan haloed in the sunlight of the forest clearing the time I had observed them unseen. From there it took only a minute for me to slide into that afternoon in Hyderabad’s forest reserve when Michael had kissed me and held me against a tamarind tree.
It was not all day-dreaming; I was anxious too about Ama’s reaction. She was venomous without restraint about other transgressors, such as Janaki’s teenaged daughter. “Shameless hussy!” she had spat. “Doesn’t care that everyone knows she’s carrying on with that boy at Liaquat’s medicine shop. He’s not just a different caste, no — he’s a Muslim!” What would she do when she came to know of the secret life her own granddaughter was leading?
I thought back to that fortnight when my father had virtually imprisoned me at home after he spotted me with my arms wrapped around Michael, as we drove past him on the motorbike. I was in the middle of laughing at something, my chin on Michael’s shoulder, my hair streaming behind me in the breeze, when I had noticed my father, limping from the opposite direction, stopping to stare when he noticed us, his head turning to track us as if following a ball at a tennis game where not a stroke could be missed. His eyes had locked into mine as I passed, and for that long moment we were tied together by a thread stretched more taut with each turn of the wheels, which snapped in half when he receded too far into the distance for me to see him any longer. I would never forget the horror on his face that day. Michael’s parents were second-generation Christians, and my father was contemptuous of all Christians — even though he was happy enough to send me to St George’s Grammar School for Girls on the first rung of his grand plan to turn me into an industrial magnate. I had stopped early in life trying to make sense of my father’s paradoxes, as had my mother. He was the natural born lord of all he surveyed, he needed to explain nothing. He ruled over factories and fields and two younger brothers. He spoke little and to the point. He was a short square man, with a bald head that shone in the sun. His bad leg ensured that his silver-headed stick never left his side. It may have been this stick, or his lazy right eye that wandered so that you never knew precisely what he was looking at. They combined to create a subtle suggestion of violence, which nobody wanted to test. By the time I grew up, I was as afraid of him as his brothers were.
The summer nights grew warmer. I could not fall asleep however long I lay in bed, however tight I shut my eyes. I sat for long hours looking at the forest fires outside my window. They happened every summer and they could go on for weeks. When beaten down, they would go underground and travel unseen below the thick matting of pine needles, to spring out in another part of the forest. I could hear a faint crackling. At some distance down the slope, there was a glowing orange line as if someone had flung a long necklace of flames into the forest. Beyond it was another such ring and further away, another still. In the blackness beyond the arc of light from my table lamp, I could see the shadows of soldiers as they raked paths to stop the flames spreading. To the left I could see one of the fire-lines creeping up towards the clerk’s cottage.
As the summer wore on, the air turned heavy with smoke. It gave everyone colds and coughs and Diwan Sahib’s breathing made a sound like rustling leaves. A chir tree near my house had been burning for three days. Flames leaped out from a hollow halfway up its long straight trunk. Its resin oozed down the trunk and made the fire burn more fiercely. There was no water with which to douse it.
I stayed up those nights correcting school homework. I circled words in the grubby exercise book before me: “Ashu was quite”, Guddu had written. “It was quiet cold”; “The mouse in the house sat very quite”. He got it wrong each time. In the next exercise book, Anil had flipped every single S, B, and P to face the wrong way, as he always did. I pushed the books aside. My head sank between my hands onto the table.
In the dark hours my thoughts took a form I would not have recognised in the daytime. If I slept at all, I woke from contorted dreams in which, night after night, Veer held me till I slept, or insistently kissed me awake, or crushed me to bloodied pulp with his jeep, or drove away saying not a word. Sometimes Charu appeared, and sometimes even Kundan Singh. But never Michael. If I shut my eyes and tried to visualise Michael, the elements of his face refused to coalesce into anything recognisable. I discovered I could no longer hear his voice in my ears, or the sound of his laugh, or the way he cleared his throat every few sentences when speaking.
I sifted through my mind for whatever I could retrieve of him, reconstructing our years together: the way I pretended sleep so that he would bring tea to our bed each morning, tugging a tuft of my hair to wake me. How we would eat omelettes day after day because we had failed somehow to shop or cook.
I longed for the simple joy of being married to him, and to have him there to confirm my memories — was our cupboard black or brown? Did the neighbours really have a dog called Simona? Where was that bouldered and scrubby place we went to, the day his motorbike was delivered after weeks of waiting? He had driven very fast and we were wildly gleeful, like children who had escaped school.
I had been told that if you put your ear to a railway track, you could feel the vibration of a train many miles distant. Could Michael, wherever he was, hear me if I called out to him? I dreamed myself back to Hyderabad’s long-ago summer afternoons, birds and mosquitoes falling exhausted in the scorched air, the heat-dead stillness churned by the creak of our ceiling fan. We lay on the bare, cool floor sometimes, and sometimes in the narrowness of our single bed, pillows, sheets and floor slipping away as we tore at each other as if after days of starvation. I had to touch Michael all the time, to make sure he was next to me when I slept and was still there when I awoke. When the monsoon came that first year it had rained as it never had before. We could hear nothing but the shout of rain on the roof, on and on all night, as we slept and woke and murmured to each other and slept and woke again, as if the night itself were something fluid we were swimming through, pausing for breath, then swimming again. I would memorise Michael’s face with my fingers as he slept so that I could travel its ridges and valleys through the hours of his absences: lines had been made on it by thoughts I would never know. I was jealous beyond reason of his past. If I had my way, I would not have shared his shadow with anyone else. “Was it the same for you?” I wanted to ask him now.