Someone Else's Garden (43 page)

‘Don’t forget under the bed. Strange man, didn’t want a private room. But it’ll fill up soon enough, they don’t lie empty for long. Here, take this.’ The nurse stands out as clearly as one of Mrs D’Souza’s Christian calendar angels in her crisp white uniform and funny crown cap, her hair pulled back into a severe bun beneath it. She tosses her a green sheet and bobs her capped head at her. ‘You’re new?’

Of course. She’s been mistaken for an employee, she has that air of service. Mamta nods, noticing the nurse’s skin, glowing black in contrast to her uniform.

The nurse can tell the cleaning woman is tired, but her day must go on. She has three more hours to her shift, might as well talk to keep her awake. ‘He came in with a stab wound this morning. Some kind of politician. I had to chase his watchdogs out of here. That woman just refused to leave. Said she’d alert her father – someone high up, said she’d call the police . . . sat right in the doorway . . .’ The nurse struggles with the language. She’d railed against being posted up north, the place of spoken Hindi and chapattis. ‘’Till I told her. I told her, “Madam, if he dies it will be your fault for obstructing the door to his bed.”’ She wrinkles her nose slightly.

Mamta nods, she isn’t sure she’s heard right . . .
if he dies, if . . . if . . . IF!
‘So where is . . .’

‘In the next ward, Ward A. Lucky for him, Dr Pande did the operation. He’s the best.’

Mamta holds her muscles in place until the nurse leaves, then squats beside the tin chair, the one that was used by Mrs Sahai, arms held straight-elbowed in front of her for balance.

She quickly walks to Ward A. This time no one tells her to stop. There are so many others like her in the hospital, also stinking, having spent the night somewhere without shelter. She flattens her hair and walks on.

Mrs Sahai is standing right up close to his metal bed, giving him the election news. Lokend’s eyes are closed, he looks wan, it is the first time one can see something of his father in him. Mamta watches from the door, shaking from her own trembling and the shoves of passing shoulders.

She can see the curve of his forehead, almost count every laughter line, follow his profile up to his neck, and after that the hospital green sheet all the way to his toes, the same toes, once encased in leather slippers.
Help me, Devi.

Mrs Sahai looks up. ‘Let him rest,’ she whispers, gathering command. ‘Don’t disturb him. If he could, he would make it his business to take on the ills of the whole world,’ she says, trivialising their meeting. ‘You’d better go back.’

Go back to where? Where she came from? Mrs D’Souza’s? Gopalpur? To her former life? She daren’t ask. She daren’t think. The hospital is the only place for her now.
What if Lokend Bhai dies?

Lokend opens his eyes. ‘I . . . know you.’

Somehow she finds herself close to the green sheet. She touches the sheet, feeling the toes through the cloth. A deep sense of being alive pours through her fingers.
Yes.
She is by his side.

‘I . . . know you.’ He only wants her. They are in their own circle of light, all the others are forced to step back. They are the only two people in the room, Mamta and Lokend. The rest have swirled off into nowhere, water down a drain, leaves in a hurricane, sparks in smoke.

‘Yes, I am from Gopalpur. Prem, my brother, Sneha, my sister, you brought them here.’ She holds her hands out to him, soiled from her night under the stars, palms folded in prayer, Namaste, what a wonderful greeting, acknowledging the divinity in the other’s soul. ‘The box of sweets,’ she tries to explain again, ‘at my wedding. You came. You gave me a box of sweets with a picture of Devi on it. I remember it was cashew barfi’ – she can recall everything in fine detail – ‘and buttered chapattis.’

‘No . . .’ he grasps her hands tightly. Mrs Sahai visibly twitches with revulsion at the filthiness of Mamta and the stale odour of her skin. The painkillers have made him groggy. ‘Not Gopalpur.’ And that is all his body can manage for the day. He has lost much blood, and though stable for the time being, the situation could turn in an instant.

Their fingers entwine. She closes her eyes, out of his line of sight.
Oh, Devi, let me rest in this moment.

Mamta has been taken, used, reused, discarded and defiled, in so many ways, that this sensation of holding a man’s hand, purely and simply, without thought or panic is utterly new to her. It is the one action capable of erasing her husband’s face, the template of cruelty, from her mind.

Chapter 15

M
RS
S
AHAI CONCLUDED THAT HE WAS
a hopeless case. All month long she tried to convince him to take up the political baton again. That damn village girl showed up to kill her plans. She saw the election zeal, if she could call it that, seep out of Lokend’s pores. He would never become a politician. There was no reason for her to waste her time on him.

Once Mrs Sahai left, the others deserted him too, starting with the Party members, then those who had to return to Gopalpur, and finally the stragglers who had once been mesmerised by his charisma. At Eyebrows’ urging, even Prem deferred his hospital visits, bequeathing a long tender healing time to Mamta.

At first she was just content to stand in the doorway and look at him. Then, when Mrs Sahai left, she moved to his bedside, arriving before every other visitor and staying till the close of visiting hours. Each time he woke, she was to there to meet his needs: rearrange his pillow, feed him, wash the night clean off his face. The nurses rewarded her diligence and consistency with their trust, and every now and then they let her bathe him, change his bedpan, help dress his wound. They didn’t know what to make of the village woman, obviously decades younger than the patient. First they conjectured that she was a Party supporter; then that she was family; and now they are confused, because her attention is so close to that special kind of service – both greatly loving and impersonal.

There were nights of terrible pain for Lokend, who struggled for a long time with death. His dreams suddenly turned into nightmares of deep, drowning red. At such times his arms would rise involuntarily out of the sheets aching to hold on to something real. And Mamta was that reality, standing steadfast as a lighthouse, her shoulders an impersonal crutch for his flailing arms. Night after night.

One night on its way back down to his side, his left hand had brushed her skin at the dip in her neck, and continued its intimate journey down her breast. That touch, unknowing in Lokend, had left her in a heady panic from something akin to ecstasy, and she was only able to set her world right side up again by taking his limp hand in her own.

Only a life-threatening trauma could have pushed those two from their separate and unfelt lonely spaces into each other’s lives. Was it he who took her hand, or was it she who offered it? It couldn’t really have been that she made the first move. The times wouldn’t have allowed it, such public intimacy with a man; her caste wouldn’t have allowed it, touching someone so far above her; her being wouldn’t have allowed it, this much pain for someone she hardly knew. But the times did allow it, her caste did allow it, her being did allow it. All that stolen, perhaps wrested, possibly sanctioned, and now here she is, grasping his hand.

She realises she is ready to accept the companionship of another man. In fact she is ready for more than just companionship; she is prepared to love him, having already loved him for so long. But the thought of a relationship with even one such as Lokend who she
knows
will never betray her, remains a looming abyss. She has no idea how deep the darkness is or might become.

But the long and lonely hospital visits and Lokend’s endless pain have made a friend of that abyss, and she finds herself whispering stories into his unconscious ear, purging herself of the poison of history. She shares her most intimate thoughts with him, tells him of her loveless marriage, of her stepdaughter, of her father, of her benign dreams in a world of dread. She believes he hears her, perhaps not with his ears, but with something deeper. And as she speaks, her fear evaporates.

How does one go from loving to declaring; from declaring to hoping for love in return?

She is happy just to love. It is an intensely familiar emotion. It has been her enemy and her most faithful friend.
Oh, Devi, let me love him. Just love him.
He has been with her through her life, she let her thoughts stray back to that quiet look each time destiny knocked her in the dust and it was to him that she returned with every piece of good news.

And what of Lokend? Why does he love her? Perhaps because the moment they touched, he felt that Mamta needed him far more than any creature ever had before. For Lokend, all female kind, indeed the world, had coalesced into her being. In that instant, she became Devi, universal female energy, absolute divinity. That could be one explanation. Perhaps there are other, more mundane ones. Perhaps he is committed for planting those sweets in her trembling hands at her wedding, or for seeing her at her most vulnerable – beaten by her husband, the under-the-banyan-tree rules, and by social mores. It could be for anything. Who is to know why two souls come together?

Still holding her hands in his and tracing ever so softly, he asks, ‘Why do you come every day?’

‘People would die for you, Sahibji. You know that.’
Don’t tease me.
Her throat can hardly move, the words sound as if they are coming from far away. ‘I . . . I, I am just a small person, nothing . . .’

‘Let no one tell you who you are or must be.’ He offers these words to her with gratitude. For the first time in his life, he feels that he might be of this world. If she lets go, she will be able to fill the room with her tears.

‘Lokend Bhai, Lokend Bhai.’ Prem dashes into the ward. He whips the sheet off Raja’s cage as he approaches. ‘Raja missed you more than all of us put together, I think,’ says Prem, assured, mature and comfortable in Lokend’s presence.

Raja pokes his nose out of the cage; the bars allow him to get as far as his whiskers. He leans forward, bringing all his weight to push him through, till his flesh is doubled back on itself. Lokend puts two fingers into the cage, giving the struggling animal some respite. Mamta looks on, she looks at the fingers, Raja’s cheek against them, and she is happy for them both. She herself has been found. She too has stopped straining against her bars.

Chapter 16

O
N THE DAY HE WAS DISCHARGED
, she packed his things in a small cloth bag and they left just like any other couple. Without hesitation, she took him to Eyebrows’ dispensary. There Prem had knotted a sheet between two nails on opposite walls to give Lokend his own room. The brother said nothing when he saw his elder sister help Lokend on to the cot and place his clothes and her own, some side by side, and some – one on top of the other – in the cardboard box he’d set aside for Lokend’s cupboard.

But companionship is easier to share than intimacy.

Mamta made sure she was never exclusively alone with Lokend, she would pull back the sheet and tie it to one side during the day, and would find some reason to ask Prem to share their evenings. It cost her to set up her life so precisely, she was constantly in turmoil, much as she had been in her husband’s hut, this time for not wanting to accept love too eagerly, wanting to delay its guaranteed caprice a little longer.

And so the weeks passed, with Mamta and Lokend living side by side, but not together, and helping Eyebrows in the dispensary. While bandaging arms and legs and cleaning wounds, Mamta often allowed Lokend to look into her eyes and smile with the knowingness of lifetimes. It pleased her when his arm accidentally touched her own, without eliciting a hint of acknowledgement or a tremor of a response. He simply asked nothing of her, bringing a normality to her life that was extraordinary.

Their roles are precisely defined. Mamta does the cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending: all those things she learned in the village, leaving the purchase of medicines to Eyebrows and Lokend. The regulars remark at how the dispensary smells more of impatient spices than disinfectant, most definitely a change for the better. And so, Mamta starts preparing two sets of meals, one bland for Lokend and the other, village-style, for herself and Eyebrows and all the other hungry patients who come to their door at two in the afternoon hoping to share a bit of the trio’s lunch. Once again she is excellent with clothes just as she was as Mrs D’Souza’s unofficial dhobi.

She works every waking moment, even harder, if that is possible, than she did in Mrs D’Souza’s house, because she tells herself that the dispensary is her own place. But really it is because she wishes to stay busy, distracted, much too busy to think about him and her, the one thing that occupies her every waking moment.

But life wins in the end, as it always does: wins over death, over hurt, over anguish and, most importantly, over fear.

It happened the night a baby was born at the dispensary. A pregnant girl, still in her teens, had knocked on the door hours past closing. She was gasping, as if she had run a long distance. Sickly thin, she looked hardly five months pregnant, though she was close to delivering. She must have known she would die without help, so she’d rushed to Eyebrows’ door, the place she’d heard about from her battered sister.

The banging had woken Mamta first. She always slept the sleep of a new mother, able to rise at a moment’s notice and able to fall asleep equally quickly. Mamta reacted instantly; she’d seen many babies born casually in her village.

She let Lokend sleep, she knew night time was his only relief from constant pain. Instead she woke up Eyebrows and together they prepared the girl for her difficult birth. The birth canal was too small, the girl too weak, her will too vitiated. Whatever the reason, the baby was stillborn. By then it was morning and Eyebrows had to attend to other patients, so Mamta was the one responsible for sending the girl home.