Happy Birthday!: And Other Stories (10 page)

Turning on the lamp next to her bed, the first thing that Bhanu sees is Genevive's swollen belly. Inside that belly is a baby, warmer than the air around it.

Sick to her bones, Bhanu turns her head towards the window, from where she and Genevive used to pelt unsuspecting passers-by with water balloons every Holi. The panes are streaked and sooty now, a crust of dirt on their edges.

‘Bhanu?' Genevive says. Her voice wavers gently, like a tiny sparrow hopeful for a speck of food.

Bhanu doesn't respond, looking instead at her own face, hazy and undefined in the window's reflection.

The clamour from the street below, the peak-time traffic, reaches Bhanu's ears with all the ferocity of Mumbai on a Friday evening. This noise has been there all her life and she doesn't even hear it any more, except in moments of anger or irritation. Which one is she feeling now?

Genevive continues, ‘I've made masala chai for you, exactly the way you like it. Without sugar, just a teaspoon of milk.'

‘I take my tea sweet, and black now,' Bhanu says, flatly lying.

‘Oh—' Genevive says slowly, as if pulling her voice out of a deep well.

Her breath smells sour, of the sweets she eats all day, the sugar that should have rotted her teeth by now.

Taking a white-and-red packet out of a polythene bag, Genevive adds quickly, ‘I bought your favourite pudina wafers from Camy. Should I get a bowl or do you want to eat from the packet?'

‘I'm not hungry,' Bhanu replies curtly. She really has no appetite.

Genevive starts shaking her right leg, as if she doesn't know what else to do with herself. It is rare for her to be the one making up.

Bhanu sees this and bites down on her lip to stop herself from saying something more, something compassionate. It's an old habit; difficult to break.

Genevive shoves the packet back into the bag, pulls it out again, and then plonks it clumsily on the edge of her chair. It falls to the ground. She doesn't pick it up.

‘Bhanu, why are you still refusing to see me? I can't bear it any more. I miss you.'

Her leg shakes harder.

A sharp pinprick of guilt pierces Bhanu. Then she looks at Genevive's belly, which has grown since the last time she saw her. The loathing comes back.

~

Bhanu and Genevive are childhood friends. They attended the same school, studied in the same section in eighth grade and lived in the same building in Dadar. Initially it had seemed unlikely that the girls would get along. Lanky and dark-skinned, with a gentle voice, Bhanu lived in the five-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor, where her conservative Marwari joint family had resided for three generations. Genevive, meanwhile, was a gregarious Anglo-Indian girl with radish skin, light tan hair and wheat-coloured eyes. She had recently moved into a studio apartment on the ‘underground' floor that no one in the building had seen. To add to her notoriety, she lived with only her mother, Carla, and their two cats. In the absence of a credible ‘Man of the House', mother and daughter were much spoken about. So Bhanu, in the way she ignored the spit stains on stairway walls, pretended not to notice them.

Then one evening, uninvited, Genevive showed up at Bhanu's house to borrow her textbooks. She had missed school that day—she had a fever that was still running. Seeing her watery eyes, her flushed cheeks and polite manner, Bhanu's mother welcomed her into their house, and their lives. Over the next few days, Bhanu's family worried about Genevive's health and her mother's absence, making Bhanu carry bajra khichdi for her to school. By the end of that week, they were encouraging Bhanu to do homework with Genevive, on the condition that Bhanu didn't ever visit ‘that Anglo-Indian house'.

So the girls became friends, and their friendship, like sea glass, grew more attractive with the sands of time, smooth with a happy sheen. They'd walk back from school together, go to Bhanu's house, eat snacks served by Shardabai, do homework, and play till dinnertime—at which point Genevive would quickly pack her things and leave, saying, ‘Carla will be home soon.'

Through all of this, Bhanu found it easy to keep her promise of not visiting Genevive's house, since her friend never invited her home anyway.

The first time Bhanu broke the rule was eleven years later—only six years ago—when, without prelude, Genevive didn't visit Bhanu or answer her calls for four days (the longest they'd gone without talking). Bhanu had no choice. Both the girls were working: Genevive as an assistant to an ad-film director and Bhanu as an interior designer. Despite clashing schedules, they met every other evening at Bhanu's house (which was now vertically split in half as Bhanu's father and his brother battled in court over property). So Bhanu lied to her family about having to meet a client and took the lift to the ground floor, below which lay Genevive's apartment. Slowly she walked down to the dreaded underground level, one rickety step at a time, her feet heavy on the creaking wood, the invisible crawl of cobwebs over her skin. On reaching the only door in the unlit passage, she rang a dusty bell.
My Favourite Things
played, twice, three times, after which Genevive opened the door. Her face was bloated with crying. She hugged Bhanu tightly and ushered her in.

Genevive's apartment was smaller than Bhanu's bedroom.

Bhanu followed her past a multicoloured bead curtain into a cluttered room, where Agatha Christie and Mills & Boon novels lay strewn around a three-legged wooden chair. Next to that stood a plastic Christmas tree decorated with sad-looking baubles and drooping angels. In a small corner on a tiny bed, Genevive's mother lay under a cascade of blankets, her feet sticking out from beneath them. Her fine hair, which she kept in a 1940s'-style wave, was thin and unkempt. Her rose lips had turned purple. Underneath the bed was a bedpan filled with brownish liquid that one of the cats was sniffing. Carla was whiter than the cuticles on her nails, her eyes firmly shut, deep hollows in her cheeks—she looked completely dead.

‘She is sleeping,' Genevive said, and led Bhanu by the hand to a small enclosure that looked like a bathroom, but which turned out to be a kitchen with a single stove and a few utensils. Genevive sat down on the edge of a stool, beaten down, weary, and said, ‘Carla has breast cancer. She didn't tell me because she says we don't have money for the treatment. I told her I'd get the money from somewhere, somehow, but Doctor Uncle came home a few days ago and told me … he said that it's too late for her now.'

Bhanu had run into Carla a few times in the lobby of the building. She was a pale-skinned woman with a tired face, reedy arms and a pointy chin, dressed in paisleypatterned dresses, red lipstick and high heels. She'd pat Bhanu lightly on the head, as if she was one of her adopted stray cats, before vanishing into the passage or the street. If she knew of Genevive's deep friendship with Bhanu, or that her daughter spent half the day in Bhanu's house, she didn't let on. She neither came to Bhanu's house—even on the rare days when Genevive stayed late—nor thanked Bhanu's family for taking care of her daughter while she was away.

And over time, while most of the neighbours became friendly with Genevive, Carla continued to arouse wariness. When asked about Genevive's father, she'd announce that he was dead without the slightest inflection of sorrow or helplessness, smoking in her décolleté dresses.. What the neighbours disliked even more was that Carla never knocked on their door to borrow curd or sugar, nor did she ever give the building watchman a little something for Diwali. And she
never
enquired after their health or children.

It was sinful for a woman in her situation to behave so unrepentantly.

So the neighbours gossiped about the men who came to Carla's house. Someone saw Carla kissing a bald man in a taxi; someone else saw her holding hands with a hairy man in a movie hall, while she was also spotted outside an infamous ‘clinic' with a fat man.

Carla, on her part, appeared unaffected by her infamy, which only worsened it.

Bhanu had never found the courage to ask Genevive about her father. But one evening, after school, Shardabai did. Genevive stuttered in her broken Hindi, ‘My Papa is a big banker in London. He really loves me. And he is coming very soon to take me away with him. Very soon.' Then she burst into tears. It was the only time Bhanu remembered scolding Shardabai.

~

Three months after Carla's death, Bhanu shifted Genevive into her house, moving her bed next to her own. Bhanu's family was pleased to have Genevive around, especially once Bhanu's marriage was fixed with a young Marwari man, Mohan. A helping hand in a wedding household was always welcome. Bhanu's marriage didn't stop the two friends from meeting; since Mohan lived just four buildings away, Bhanu would often visit Genevive—who had moved back to her own house—bringing her food, praying with her for her mother's soul.

Soon after, Genevive met an Iranian man, Afshin, a model in one of the shampoo ads that she was helping direct. He moved in with her and within a few months they got married.

But it was not to be. Afshin was a gold smuggler, Genevive learnt, when the police came to her house to arrest him. She was not spared either; they hounded her and harassed her until they were convinced that she was not an accomplice to her husband. Genevive didn't see Afshin again, despite her repeated visits to Arthur Road Jail, where he was imprisoned. It was the police who informed her that Afshin had been deported back to his country and that she'd probably never hear from him again.

Genevive was broken.

Once again Bhanu came to her best friend's rescue, helping her weather a meltdown, alcohol binges, visiting her at all times, throwing out her liquor. Eventually, Genevive healed, and with a new job as an ad-film director, she was back to her old self.

~

Genevive is still watching her. She says, ‘Your tea is getting cold.'

‘I don't want tea,' Bhanu snaps. ‘Why don't you have it?'

‘I'm not allowed to drink tea, remember,' Genevive replies. Of course Bhanu remembers, for despite herself she had taped a list of dos and don'ts on Genevive's fridge so she wouldn't brush aside her pregnancy, like she did all serious things. Yet, apart from her bulging stomach, it's difficult to tell that Genevive is eight months pregnant. She's lost weight, though her neck seems bloated and her hair has thinned from frizzy to straight.

Bhanu looks at her own stomach, ghastly in its flatness. After having to abort her first baby due to a positive CVS test, she had gone to three specialists and they'd all told her that her uterus wasn't strong enough to carry a fullterm pregnancy. She couldn't try again and if she did, as she'd insisted she would, then the chances of her bleeding to death were high. Why, even her Mohan sided with the doctors and refused to give it another go.

Bhanu can never be a mother.

And then there is Genevive.

Bhanu had asked her a few years ago: how do you feel about having children? And Genevive had said that since her apartment was located directly below the lift shaft, she heard the lift make all sorts of unearthly sounds, day and night. She lived in fear that at any moment its creaky chains would snap and the lift would come crashing down, crushing her house, and the life out of her. This, she had said, was how she felt about children.

In the seventeen years that she's lived in the building, Genevive has never used the lift.

Now Genevive gives a weak smile and says, ‘The baby, she is so heavy that I can't walk up the stairs any more. I have to take the lift to get here.' She hugs her elbows as if a tremor has run through her.

Bhanu almost admires her tenacity.

‘Bhanu, I came here to talk to you about something important,' Genevive continues. She looks down at the floor purposefully, as if about to do something foolishly heroic, like jump in front of a bus to save a kitten. ‘I don't know how to start this conversation so I'll say it right out. Bhanu, I want you to take my baby and raise her as your own.'

‘What?' Bhanu says. Her heart starts beating so loudly that she wonders if there's nothing else inside her. ‘
What
?' she says again at the top of her voice, so she doesn't have to listen to her heart.

‘Please, let me finish or I'll lose my nerve. I've thought about this a lot. You want a child more than I ever have. You'll be a better mother than I will. Bhanu, we are dearer to each other than sisters, so I know that you will treat my daughter as your own. All these are good reasons, I think, for you to keep my baby.'

Bhanu is so angry that she starts laughing.

‘I cannot believe what you're saying,' she says, her hands mimicking her feelings in furious gestures. ‘It never fails to amaze me how you take it for granted that I'll solve all your problems. You get yourself knocked up by god knows who, you decide to keep this child against my advice, and now that you're scared you come running to me to cover up for your mistakes!'

On becoming pregnant, Genevive had refused to tell Bhanu who the father was. This hurt Bhanu, who'd never kept anything from Genevive, and the sting of the betrayal grew as the baby did.

‘You're misunderstanding me.'

‘I am not misunderstanding you. I know you for exactly what you are: irresponsible, selfish and weak.'

‘Bhanu!'

‘Fine, if you want me to raise your child, then at least tell me who the father is? How do I know that it's not another smuggler? Do you want me to bring bad blood into my family?'

‘I can explain … the doctor—'

Bhanu notices that Genevive's round eyes are drooping and she has dark circles the size of horseshoes. Is she not taking care of herself because she is pregnant, like the last time? This infuriates Bhanu further and she interrupts Genevive, ‘I don't care for your excuses, Genevive. I am not going to look after your unwanted child again.'