An Unrestored Woman (14 page)

“Shut up,” Mohan said.

“And as sweet as a rossogolla,” Basu added. Mohan glared at him.

“Use your head,” Basu said.

Mohan looked up.

“You don't have any land, obviously, all you have is your head. Use it.” Then he left out of the back kitchen door after preparing Mohan's dinner.

As night fell Mohan stared at his now cold plate of rice and goat curry. The chunks of goat had congealed in the gravy and looked like trapped canoes in a muddy river. The moonlight streaming through the window added an extra element of the sinister. This is the end, he thought. My Lalita is lost. He looked at the piles and piles of maps, papers, and figures at the edge of his desk and thought: my head. What's the use: there's nothing in my head. It's all in my heart. He gaped some more at the maps, his surveying work stacked up, waiting to be used to finalize the border between West Bengal and East Pakistan. The turn of the Mahananda near English Bazar, the flow of the river south through the village in which he was stationed, and then, still farther south, the lands owned by Lalita's father.

Mohan pushed the plate of food aside. He brought the sketches closer. Most of them were merely projections. The contours of the land, the river, and the general topography were all basically already bisected. All Mohan was sent here to do was to map it, and then to make recommendations as to slight variations, if necessary.
If necessary
, he repeated to himself. He looked at the map of Lalita's father's land; it ran right along the border, with both the village and the land in India. But what if his land ended up in East Pakistan, and his house remained in India? Out of necessity? The projection could be easily doctored, and then Lalita's father would lose the one thing that bound his daughter's engagement: the dowry of a thousand acres. He would have enough to live on, about twenty acres or so, but the rest would disappear. Then Mohan—the landless intellectual, the compassionate savior—could step in and volunteer, out of the goodness of his heart, to marry his daughter, the shamed, impoverished victim of a broken engagement. It was brilliant. It was using his head.

Mohan submitted the doctored maps; it took less than a month for them to be released. And it was then—the very next day—that Lalita's father committed suicide. When Basu told him, the first thing Mohan wondered was how a man without the use of his legs could hang himself. Had the servant lifted him to the noose, or had the noose been low enough for a seated man? As to that, how had he constructed the noose in the first place? How could he possibly have tied it to a high enough place, or even a low place that was high enough for a man to hang?

“Did he leave a note?” Mohan asked.

“It said he couldn't live anymore. Not as a landless man.”

“But he still had twenty acres!”

Basu looked at him with suspicion. “How do you know?”

“Because I've surveyed every inch of it, you moorkh.” Basu still eyed him warily. “How is Lalita?”

“She's in mourning.”

“And the engagement?”

“Off.”

Mohan smiled, despite himself. He knew what he would kiss first: her birthmark.

It was, of course, unfortunate that the old man had to die but otherwise things were going exactly as he had planned. He had only to be patient, and wait. But once the period of mourning was over, his second trouble set in: Basu nearly skipped through the door with this latest gossip: the groom-to-be, the one who had been promised the thousand acres as a dowry, had offered to marry Lalita without it.

“
What?
” Mohan started.

“What selflessness,” Basu said, taking on a somber tone. “Gandhiji would be proud.”

Mohan rolled his eyes. What a bastard. He would marry her anyway. What a show-off. What was he supposed to do now?

There was no need for him to have contemplated action because the answer, in the form of further gossip from Basu, reached him a few days later. “Now,” he said, “she's refusing to marry
him
.”

Mohan stared at him. “How is that possible?”

“She's called it off. Again.”

A jolt of hope passed through Mohan. “Has she said, I mean, have you heard who she wants to marry instead?”

“Apparently,” Basu said, “nobody.”

“But how? How will she live?”

“Maybe off the twenty acres you seem to know so much about,” he said, smiling.

This was too much. Mohan set off, practically running from his cottage toward Lalita's house. He passed the well with its flat wooden lid, ripped right through the center of the village with its one sundries shop and post office cum teahouse, and didn't even bother to offer a prayer at the tiny Durga temple at the edge of the fields. The villagers looked on in amazement. They had never seen their timid surveyor in such a state.

Lalita opened the door. She was even more intoxicating than in his memory. The birthmark on her face was a gathering gloom. A typhoon. A pier. It was shark-infested waters. It was all he had ever wanted. “Where are your servants?” he asked.

“I can't afford to keep them,” she said. Then she said, “Who are you?”

Mohan sighed. “I knew your father.” She looked at him for a moment before letting him inside. The house had taken on a sad, tragic air. The dais where he'd sat with her father looked forlorn, empty, as if it were a ruined schoolhouse where children had once played. Even Lalita's face had darkened since he'd last seen her, or no, he thought, not darkened, but grown older. He felt—in this moment—the first pangs of conscience, and guilt. Maybe he should not have divided the land, maybe he should have kept it intact, and let her marry that young man. Maybe he should have let them be young together.

“See here,” he said, “why don't you marry? Your father would've wanted—”

“How do you know?” she said.

“I told you, I knew him.”

She studied him. “Aren't you that man? The one walking around with all that equipment, snooping around the village.”

“Well, yes,” Mohan said.

They stood silently, not exactly facing each other, but more facing the dais, as if her father was still there.

“Like I was saying, you should marry.”

“Who?”

Mohan thought then of the boy he'd been. And of how, at the age of five, that boy had left him. He said, “Why not the young man you were engaged to?”

“Because without the dowry, I don't know whether he's marrying me out of love or pity.”

“
With
the dowry, you wouldn't have known whether it was for love or money.”

“Neither is as bad as pity,” she said.

Mohan looked at her. It came to him that he was in the presence of something he could not possibly understand. She was a minefield, and there he stood, unable to move. Her nose, her birthmark like the spill of blood, the memory of her damp hips, they were the waiting sorrows, no matter which way he turned. Mohan closed his eyes and thought of a map. Any map. All those lines, hiding all those lives: strung between us like hissing electric wire.

A few weeks after his meeting with Lalita is when his third and final trouble set in. A Muslim family, subsistence farmers living outside the village, had been killed. Father, mother, all four children, murdered. When Mohan heard the news he didn't have to ask, he knew: they were killed by a Hindu mob. Since the details of the border had been released—
his
details of the border—the village had undergone a transformation. It was no longer a quiet farming village; it was now an angry village. The Hindus were angry that their land (though truthfully, most of it had belonged to Lalita's father) had gone to East Pakistan, to the Muslims. They first looted the sundries shop, which belonged to a Muslim, and not satisfied with that, they resorted to slaughter.

Mohan was terrified. He was not Muslim, true, but he had been the one responsible for the
necessary
changes. Everyone in the village knew exactly who'd drawn the last line. He was afraid to go outside. He sent Basu to the post office one afternoon and he returned with a telegram from Mohan's boss, D6. His name was actually Mr. Debnath, but Mohan had always thought of him as D6. The telegram said he would arrive in a week's time for a “progress review,” but Mohan, squatting in his darkened room—he no longer lit the lantern in the evenings—knew the real reason.

He met D6 at the station in English Bazar. When he emerged from the train he was thinner than Mohan remembered. He was wearing a light blue shirt that showed rings of sweat stains under his arms, and though his shock of white hair was tousled from the train journey, his mustache was neatly combed. He did not smile when he spotted Mohan. And when he raised his hand to shake Mohan's, his sixth finger, the extra one D6 had been born with next to his pinky finger, pointed straight at Mohan like the barrel of a small gun.

By the time they returned to the village it was dinnertime. Basu had prepared a special meal of rice pulao, deep fried capsicum with chicken, and machher jhol. They both ate slowly, disinterestedly. Midway through the meal D6 looked at Mohan. “Why did you move the border?” he asked. Of course Mohan was prepared for this question. But in that moment his mind went blank, and he sat and thought about each of the words separately, as if they were the shattered pieces of a vase or a plate that he was trying to fit back together. “I don't recall, sir,” he finally said. D6 stared at him, and went back to mixing his chicken curry and rice. Since it had no joints, and so could not be bent, D6's sixth finger struck against the steel plate like the light tapping of a spoon. Mohan had never eaten with D6 before; he was fascinated by it. It had a certain rhythm: the tap, tap, tapping of mixing the rice, putting it in his mouth, gathering another bite. He had always respected D6 and D6 seemed to like him well enough, but he was a quiet man, and Mohan was never really sure what he was thinking. But the finger: the finger never tired of speaking to him.

The following day when Mohan woke up, D6 was already at the table, deep in study, maps and sketches spread across the table. The village was quiet. Unnaturally so, Mohan thought.

“We're going to the border,” D6 announced. They hired the same car as the previous day and drove a few miles in the direction of the border. The countryside in late September was dry and brown after the long summer. The Mahananda was as thin as a stream. It was still early, the sun barely over the horizon and rising slowly, like bread. A few hundred yards short of the border D6 asked the driver to stop alongside an open field. Mohan recognized the place though neither spoke as they trudged to the top of a low promontory. It faced east, and Mohan looked out across the fields and in that open air, that cool morning, he felt none of the guilt or dread or anxiety of the past few weeks. He felt only the Brahmaputra in front of him, and the Ganga behind him, and knew that somewhere in East Pakistan they met, well away from English Bazar and the thousand measly acres that had caused such madness. They emptied like lovers into the Bay of Bengal. He could almost hear the meeting of these two mighty rivers, the surge after surge of pure cold Himalayan runoff.

“Do you know why Manthara was the most evil of all, even more than Ravana?” D6 asked.

Manthara? Mohan had no idea who D6 was talking about. The only clue was Ravana. His thoughts raced. He strained to remember everything he could about the
Ramayana
: the story of Rama and Sita and the forest and Hanuman carrying the mountain was easy to recall, but Manthara? Who was she? His mind spun like a wheel and came up with nothing.

D6 was looking east again, deep into the fields. After a long silence he said, “She was Kaikeyi's servant, Mr. Mohan, the one who was aware that the queen had been promised two boons from the king. She was the one who convinced Kaikeyi to call them in: one was to place Bharata, her own son, on the throne rather than Rama, and the other was to banish Rama for fourteen years to the forest. The king, you see, had no choice, he had to abide by his promise.” He turned to Mohan. His blue-white hair whipped in the wind and against the dark brown of his skin looked like the meeting of earth and sky. “Do you see, Mr. Mohan?”

“No, sir, I don't.”

“She was a nobody. A servant. A humpbacked old crone. And yet she changed the course of a kingdom. Of the gods. If that is possible then we are powerless, aren't we, against the slightest little tick in our beds.”

Mohan looked at the ground. He raised his eyes just far enough to spy the sixth finger hanging from D6's right hand. The useless little finger that had perhaps determined D6's destiny, he thought. He wondered what it would be like to touch it, to snap it off his hand like a twig.

“The Government of India may try you for treason, Mr. Mohan,” D6 said, turning to walk down to the car.

A shot of ice water ran up Mohan's spine. Blood pooled in his feet. “Treason?”

“Maybe you should be tried for murder instead,” D6 said placidly. “But human life has always been worth less than land, hasn't it?”

Mohan had trouble raising his legs. He stumbled on a branch and kept walking, blindly. Then he started running after D6, who was taking long purposeful strides, though Mohan's were as formless and as jerky as a child's. “But, Mr. Debnath,” he called after him.

They were back at the car by the time D6 looked at Mohan. He smiled, a wistful look on his face. “Do you see that mist over there, Mr. Mohan,” he said. Mohan turned to look. In the distance, hovering over the fields, was a thin strip of gray mist, not yet touched by the sun, so still lingering, still low and lovely. He had not noticed it before. He hardly noticed it now. “Isn't it the saddest thing?” D6 said. “To be made of nothing? To know you'll just burn away in the end?”

Mohan stood, looking at the mist.

The driver emerged from a clump of trees where he'd been dozing and opened each of their doors. They didn't go to the border, as Mohan had expected, but turned back toward the village. The drive back felt far longer than the drive there. Mohan sat slumped in his seat, an expression of both shock and despair on his face. By the time they got to the village he was thinking of Lalita, of the first time he had seen her and how her arm had wrapped like an embrace around the clay earthen pot.