The Age of Shiva (35 page)

You sat rapt through everything—even the shows in Marathi and Gujarati, which you didn't understand. The TV remained on from the wailing sign-on tune at six-thirty until ten o'clock, when, with a final flash of the snail-like Doordarshan logo, the transmission went off the air. The most popular show was the Hindi movie on Sunday evening—when shops closed early and even public buses mysteriously vanished from the streets. Wild rumors circulated all week about the next telecast being a recent hit like
Guddi
, or
Amar Prem
—the films actually shown had either flopped or were quite old.

It hardly mattered. Viewers streamed into our living room on Sundays—Zaida and Pinky and Mrs. Dugal and Mrs. Hussain—even the ganga, who squatted on her favorite spot by the door. I found myself transported back to my youth, when movies formed such a big part of my life—the familiar tales of doomed love, of twins separated at birth, of prostitutes with hearts of gold.

One Sunday, they showed the classic
Mother India.
The heroine, Nargis, had caused quite a scandal by falling in love during the filming with Sunil Dutt, the actor playing her son. In the movie, Nargis shoots her son for bringing dishonor to her family—the mother goddess Kali killing off her offspring, a reviewer said. In real life, much to everyone's shock, Nargis had married him. The fact that he was a Hindu and she a Muslim only fanned the controversy.

I felt a strangely familiar, yet almost forgotten pressure behind my eyes when Nargis's husband died, leaving her alone with two young sons and a mound of debt threatening their very lives. “Go ahead,” Zaida said. “What's the use of watching a movie if you don't let it out?” So when Nargis tied herself to a plow to till the land and feed her children, I let the tears wet my cheeks. And when Sunil Dutt lay bleeding in her arms and called her “Mother” for the last time, I allowed the deluge to come.

After that, I let myself cry every Sunday—a weekly amnesty of sorts from my pledge of so long ago. When Madhubala sang “When One Has Loved, Why Should One Be Afraid?” before being bricked up in a wall; when Meena Kumari was murdered and buried under the floor by her drunkard husband's family in
Sahib, Bibi, aur Ghulam
. Tragedies revolving around maternal love made me weep the most. Movies like
Aurat
, where the mother, like another Kali incarnation, is also forced to kill her criminal son after a lifetime of sacrifices for him. Or
Aradhana
, where she confesses to the murder committed by her boy and emerges from jail to find he has grown to look exactly like the father she loved.

Even though I knew how overheated these stories were, I couldn't help falling under their spell. A part of me wanted to suffer like the heroines, to be tempered by the same fiery tests of motherhood they underwent. What would it feel like to yoke myself to a plow and fight the unyielding earth for food to put in your mouth? The dirt mingling with my sweat, the muscles straining in my neck, the rope marks burning proudly on my chest? I watched Nargis and Sharmila Tagore and lost myself in fantasy—of hardship and survival, of tribulation and self-denial. Opportunities for sacrifice burst forth to rise like mountains around me, waiting to be scaled, step by arduous step, as proof of my love for you, my devotion, my all-encompassing passion.

WHAT ELSE CAN I SAY
about those first few years after I was left alone with you? The section they inaugurated in my album of memories was the happiest I had ever known. It was like the first chapter of a book I couldn't wait to read, the trailer of a movie starring the two of us destined to be a masterpiece. I held on to your hand as you let me accompany you through the landscape of your childhood.

It became my second childhood as well—or perhaps my first, since I was always discontented with the one I had lived before. All the toys Roopa got to choose and play with first, all the comics of which Paji disapproved. All the foods Biji deemed too arousing—the sour candy drops and the jamun berries—even the coffee. I now had the power to indulge you with everything (and myself, simultaneously). To concentrate all my attention on you and have it all reflect back only on me.

Perhaps this had been my deepest unfulfilled craving—to have more attention lavished on me. Now I felt this need being slaked, through all the things you did for me. You peppered my egg every morning, sprinkling enough to completely cover the yolk the way I liked. At night, you checked that I had taken my vitamins, and filled a glass with cold water for my bedside. Each time I wore a salwar kameez, you found the right dupatta from the cupboard; for saris, you laid out the matching blouse. You always made sure I kept enough for myself when I tried to heap your plate with the last of the kheer.

Do all mothers get to be such close friends with their sons, or was this a blessing only for me? The way our family album brimmed with so many images of shared activity? The time after I had taught you to ride a bicycle and the shopkeeper suggested I also rent one for myself. It felt a little low, but I managed to remain astride, taking care to wrap my dupatta several times around my neck so that it did not get entangled in the spokes. We rode up and down the side streets, going by the back way almost as far as Gowallia Tank. Then we spotted Mrs. Dugal emerging from the Sai Baba temple, aimed our bikes at her, and pedaled furiously. She screamed not once, but twice—first when you buzzed her, then when she was buzzed by me.

Or the visit to Hanging Gardens when you discovered your first keri, nestling in the shrubs under a mango tree. “Is it a real mango?” you asked, holding it in your palms like something newly hatched, the sap still oozing out of its navel.

“Yes,” I replied. “It just fell before it was ripe. It's sour, but taste it, go ahead.”

You took a tentative bite, and I saw the stars in your eyes—suddenly I wanted some myself. “Come, let's gather a few more. Mummy will show you what she used to do with them in Rawalpindi.”

At home, I found an empty jam jar into which I chopped the keris. By now the pungent raw mango aroma had intoxicated you as well, so I let you mix in the salt. “It takes a few days for the skin to turn dark,” I warned, and you shook the jar to hurry things along.

By the next evening, you had agitated the jar so frequently that the keris were suspended in a thick white froth. I knew you wouldn't be able to last another day, so I let you open it. “They're maha-tastic,” you pronounced, your highest compliment, and I nodded in agreement as I felt the tickle in my throat. We sat at the table and fed the pieces to each other until the acid turned our teeth numb.

That week, you seemed to notice the boughs of the old mango tree in your school grounds for the first time. They carried so much fruit that parrots fluttered around constantly, trying to peck at it with their red beaks. You started spending both your short and long recess rooting for keris in the plant beds underneath.

On Friday, I found you moping when I came to pick you up after your cub scout meeting. Too many other boys had heard about the treasure hunt and the day had gone by without finding a single keri. I remembered the guava tree that grew in the compound of our Darya Ganj house—the ripest, most tantalizing pieces always seemed to be out of reach. I had often been tempted to lob stones at one of the clusters, but the time Roopa tried it, she ended up hitting a neighbor, and Biji gave us both a beating. The guavas had mocked me all through adolescence, until one year the tree was cut down.

I'm not sure what prompted this nostalgia to translate itself into action, but suddenly I found myself taking aim at a mango with a stone in my hand. Before I could sober myself with responsibility or consequences, I felt a satisfying ripple in my arm muscles, saw the stone arcing through the air. A lime green parrot flew squawking out of the tree, and a mango, plump and heavy, dropped to the ground. “Did you see that?” I shouted as you ran to retrieve it. “If the wind doesn't knock them down, your mummy can.”

Within a few minutes, there was a fusillade of stones bombarding the tree. The boys who were your rivals, the servants who had come to pick them up, even some of the hawkers selling candy in the compound, all joined in. Keris started raining down one after the other, turning the shrubs underneath into a free-for-all. Then the inevitable happened—a rock strayed far from its course and crashed through a window in the rectory behind, where the principal and the other fathers lived.

I ran with you, as my instincts urged—not pausing to worry about principles or propriety. By the time the vice principal, Father Bernard, charged down looking for someone to cane, we were crouched safely behind the wall at the edge of the grounds. “I can see everything from up there,” he yelled, wielding his stick, his white robes billowing around his shoes. You giggled together with the boys hiding next to you, and I began to giggle as well. On the bus home, you reached into your pockets and laid six keris, fat and fragrant, in my lap.

Afterwards, I felt uneasy. Why I had been so quick to set a bad example, so reckless in my determination to be your friend? Could this have been something I imagined fathers would do—something, perhaps, to make a bolder man out of you? You had come a long way in the past three years, but there was still something amiss. The way you took out the box under the bed on Sundays to touch each implement in your father's shaving kit. The long silent prayers in front of the pantheon, the continuing pilgrimages to Chowpatty to immerse pooja flowers. There was a gap in your life, I could see, a hole I knew I would never feel adequate enough to fill. Did Dev make me launch my stone, his absence for which I had tried to compensate?

I even gave wrestling another shot—this time, better prepared, I managed to keep awkwardness at bay. But I was too apprehensive of causing you hurt. You wore the disappointment plainly on your face—the bout hadn't matched up to your encounters with Dev.

So we replaced the wrestling with games of tickling. You lay down first, pretending to be asleep, as I started on your sides, just above the hips. I moved gradually, teasing you with bare hints of pressure, until my fingers had inched up and were poised at your armpits. There I let them linger, grazing occasionally against your skin, until your eyelids began trembling and the suspense fluttered across your face. Just as your eyes popped open, I lunged in—tickling you until you bucked and flailed on the bed and the room filled with your shrieks. We switched roles once you were spent—it didn't take long for you to learn that my ears were the most sensitive, not my armpits.

One May afternoon before your ninth birthday, I took you to Chowpatty to fling your final milk tooth into the sea. On the way back, we ran into a giant procession at Nana Chowk. At first, I thought it was a demonstration by railway workers. Over a million of them had gone on a national strike, paralyzing transport for a fortnight, spreading food shortages everywhere, bringing the country to a standstill. But then I saw people dancing, flashes of firecracker bursts, plumes of colored powder rising into the air. It was a celebration, not a protest—India had just tested an underground atomic bomb in Rajasthan. We watched the national flag being waved, large tricolors with the central wheel replaced by the prime minister's face. From the chaos of all the domestic problems confronting her, Indira had managed to give rebirth to herself as Durga again.

All that evening, one could feel an elation, as galvanizing as electricity, crackling through the air. We would be rubbing shoulders with superpowers now—no longer would Pakistan dare make its territorial forays. Zaida, the Dugals, the Hussains, even the ganga came to crowd around the TV set—it could have been Sunday movie time again. The blast came on, the ground shook in Rajasthan, and a cheer went up in the room. “Boom!” Pinky went, “Maha-boom!” you shouted. You threw your arms up together, and jumped in unison off the bed.

E
VERY ONCE IN A WHILE, SOMETHING HAPPENED TO PULL ME OUT OF THE
idyllic routine into which we had settled. To remind me there existed a far crueler world outside our front door. Most disquieting was Zaida's news, the afternoon you kept trying to coax her into dancing. “It's Anwar,” she finally said. “He's announced he's going to take a second wife. At age sixty-nine.”

Unbeknownst to her, he had been seeing a woman every Saturday for all these years—each time, in fact, that he had claimed to go visit his brother in Sewri. “And here I was, thinking he was in such poor health, trying to tiptoe around him while he rested in the afternoons. Now I know why he took all those naps—it was to build up his energy for the end of the week.”

At first, it had seemed so unbelievable as to be almost amusing. “Suddenly the mouse who's not even peeked once down the mousehole for all these years decides he's a tiger after all.” But she had soon realized the seriousness of her situation. “It's his right, he tells me, to marry again. Not just once, but three more times if he wants. He says he's going to bring her here, that he wants me to take all my things and move into a corner of the living room. And if I make any trouble, he can throw me out—he says the law is clear.”

The law was, indeed, clear. For Hindus, it was so difficult to get a divorce once married that people had been known to change their religion to prove the clear grounds they needed for dissolution. Zaida, though, had been wed under Muslim personal law, for which the rules were different. Not only was Anwar legally allowed four wives, but he could divorce Zaida for any reason, simply by repeating the word “talaq” three times. “Everywhere, even in Pakistan, they're getting rid of this instant talaq divorce, but here the mullahs just won't let it go. Even Indira, can you believe it, is too scared of them to touch the issue.”

In fact, all Anwar had to do to be free was to support Zaida for three months in return for the twenty-five years she had spent with him. “Not even three months, mind you, but three menstrual cycles, the way the rule is framed. I told him if he was so worried about the money, he could keep track of what I did in the toilet to make sure he didn't overpay.”

In the coming weeks, Zaida became more hopeful, and even started dancing with you in the afternoons. Though it was legal, many Muslim communities, including her own, strongly discouraged the practice of three-talaq divorce. “He's just using it as a threat—let's see the mouse actually say the words to my face. He's wrong if he thinks I'm going to fall for his bluff and agree to share this house with that whore of his.” She actually sat down face to face with Aneez, the woman in question, at a meeting arranged by her father to try and smooth things out. “A fifty-five-year-old widow, no less. With two grown children, imagine! My own father telling me that I should accommodate her, that I shouldn't put this to the test.”

“Don't listen to them—they're just trying to break your will,” I responded. “A woman that age who knows she's not welcome won't come rushing in.”

For a few days, it looked like Zaida's strategy of holding firm was going to work. Then, late one afternoon, she burst in. “Anwar's given me an ultimatum. Either I agree to all his conditions to make this widow of his welcome, or he's going to utter the words this Saturday. Right after his bath—he says one has to purify oneself first—he'll probably go see her afterwards.” She paused to catch her breath. “What he doesn't know is that I'm going to make it more difficult than that. I want you to come and be a witness—let's see him open his mouth then.”

“Of course,” I nodded. “But why just me? Why not summon the rest of the building as well?”

When Anwar emerged from the bathroom, he was confronted not only by Mrs. Dugal and myself, but also by Mrs. Hamid, Mrs. Kagalwalla, both the Hussains, and even Mrs. Karmali, who rarely ventured out of her flat anymore. I noticed Pinky had slipped in as well and was watching from behind the kitchen door. “What kind of foolishness is this?” Anwar shouted. “This is not some circus, but a private affair.”

“Why? Are you ashamed? Don't you want your neighbors to know? If you're prepared to say them to me, you can say the words in front of them.” Zaida turned towards us. “Look, he's even taken the bath that's prescribed. This should only take a minute—do stay for tea afterwards.”

For a moment we all looked on silently. Then Mrs. Hussain prodded her husband to speak. “I'm sorry, Mr. Azmi,” he said. “We weren't going to come, but your wife requested us to—she's like a sister to us. A man your age—perhaps you could give it some more thought?”

In response, Anwar pushed roughly past Mr. Hussain into the bedroom, and slammed the door. “What's the matter?” Zaida called out. “Are you going to disappoint all your fans? They've come to hear you teach them the word, have you forgotten how it's pronounced?”

Zaida's strategy produced the desired result. Aneez withdrew her acceptance within a week—there was too much gossip in the community, making the prospect of marriage too humiliating. “She sent me a note—on perfumed paper, no less, our Aneez memsahib did. That she's asked Anwar not to get a talaq—can you imagine the gall? Perhaps she's expecting me to go pledge my eternal gratitude to her, waiting with a martyr's look inside her cave.”

The matter didn't end there. Anwar was so enraged that he refused to speak to his wife, and would not even look at her when they were in the same room. One afternoon, as Zaida and I were sipping tea, he appeared at my door. His eyes were bloodshot and his kurta pajama stained. “I've come to say something to my wife, and I want you to be a witness.” I had no choice but to let him in.

He spoke to Zaida in chaste Urdu, using the formal honorific to address her. Things had been poisoned between them, he said, due to her selfishness and her unwillingness to obey the law of God as set down in the Koran. She had made a mockery of him and herself in public. Instead of trying to preserve the sacredness of the marriage between them, a marriage which clearly allowed him to take another wife if he desired, she had defiled it to a point where it could not be saved. There was no point any longer in showing pity or consideration to such a she-devil, such a churail—it was time to do what he should have from the start. “Talaq,” he said, the
q
sharp and reverberant as it cut through the air. “I promise that the remaining two pronouncements will be forthcoming soon, at a time of my choosing.”

“If you're man enough, just spit them out now and be done with it,” Zaida responded, but Anwar ignored her. “I'll divorce you myself, if you don't,” she called after him as he calmly walked out of my living room.

For a while, Zaida looked into getting a khula, the kind of divorce that could be initiated by the wife. In addition to the conditions being much more onerous, however, it also meant that the amount of money promised to her as meher in the marriage contract would be lost. “Besides, it's probably what he's hoping to provoke me into. If I'm the one to ask for a divorce, then I'm the guilty one. Nobody can point a finger at him, can they then, for going and pursuing his fifty-five-year-old?”

Her father made it clear that whether it was talaq or khula, he would not accept her back. “Get these extravagant ideas out of your head,” he said. “You've already dug yourself into a hole with your obstinacy—think very carefully whether you can afford to continue this behavior.”

“I'd rather be dead,” Zaida told me, and I tried to think of advice to give, tried to imagine what I might do in her place. I felt terrible at having little more than sympathy to offer after all the difficult periods she had seen me through. I started keeping her with me as long as I could each afternoon, filling her up with the bonbon biscuits she liked so much to cheer her up. When she looked tired, I insisted she lie on the sofa while I massaged her head. You got into the act as well, trying to distract her with solos danced to Beatles records. But our efforts were over-whelmed by the direness of her situation. “I can't live like this—live under this sword hanging over my head.”

Except she had few other options left. She was too proud to move in with anyone, declining each time I proposed she share our flat. Her husband knew she didn't have a penny to her name with which to fend for herself. “You've disgraced yourself too much to continue as my wife,” he announced. “What you need is to learn some humility first.” He would take her back, he said, provided she agreed to obey all his demands, like a servant would. Any rebelliousness, and he would not hesitate to utter the two words that separated her from the street. “Think of it as training. A mare who's become too used to running around, being reminded of the leash for her own good.”

Anwar started Zaida's “training” slowly, doing things to irritate her more than anything else. He complained no matter what she presented him for dinner, railing against cauliflower one day and specifically asking for it the next, sending her back into the kitchen to bring him rice if there were chappatis, and chappatis if she had cooked rice. He critiqued her cleaning and washing and ironing like a finicky house mistress—his goal to identify at least three tasks every day for her to do over again. Some of his tactics were impish—setting her bath soap to dissolve under the tap, hiding her glasses so she couldn't read, secretly drinking up all the milk so that there would be none left for her early morning tea. “If that's the worst of it,” Zaida told me one afternoon, “then fine, I'll tolerate it with a smile, until his dander subsides.”

Unfortunately, she miscalculated—in the face of her equanimity, Anwar just became meaner, more humiliating. He forbade her from visiting any of the neighbors or even chatting with them, like his mother had done when she was alive. Zaida would steal in for a few minutes while he was asleep to tell me what new indignities he had dreamt up. I tried again on these visits to convince her to move in with us. “Not just myself, but think of how overjoyed Ashvin would be,” I said.

But she again refused. “I can't give in now. I have to see this to the end.”

Anwar started haranguing Zaida about money, accusing her of theft if she couldn't account for every paisa he doled out for groceries. Each time she returned from her shopping, he patted down the clothes she was wearing to check for hidden coins and rupees. He dismissed the jamadarni and ordered Zaida to clean the toilet every morning herself—“I can't afford to have two servants in my employ,” he said. Always a fastidious man, he suddenly started coming back from his walks with his shoes smeared with mud and cow feces—he took them off at the door, where he made her sit and polish them. He let her cook only enough mutton or chicken for himself—when he was done with dinner, he scraped the dregs of the gravy into the remainder of the custard they had for dessert every night, and left that mixed up in a bowl for her to eat.

It was only the exchange of Eid greetings that gave us a pretext for a proper visit to Zaida in her flat. The Hussains were already there, sipping glasses of almond milk. Zaida was just about to pour you a glass when Anwar complained the milk had too much sugar in it. “Go back to the kitchen and make it again,” he ordered.

Zaida laughed nervously as if he had just made a joke. “I think the sweetness is just right. I'll give some to Ashvin—perhaps he can be the one to decide.”

“Didn't you hear what I asked you to do?” Anwar said. “Go prepare another batch. Right now.” When Zaida made no move to obey, he raised his hand to strike her in front of us all.

It happened so fast there was little time to react. One instant, I watched in shock as Anwar's hand began its downward descent. The next, Zaida's fingers shot around his wrist to arrest his slap. “It was a divine moment, a revelation,” she said afterwards. “My arm propelled forward by Allah himself. After you all had left—everyone, incidentally, making sure to finish their milk in my support—I told Anwar it might indeed be his right to divorce me or not. But it would be a sin to allow my mistreatment to continue any longer—not only for me, but also for himself.”

Anwar's response was to throw his almond milk at her face. It was not too hard to avoid, she told me—a little fell on her dupatta, but most of it splashed harmlessly off the wall. He then hurled the empty glass towards her, which she also managed to dodge. The glass bounced off a lamp and fell intact to the floor—for some reason, the fact that it didn't break seemed to infuriate him. “Pick it up,” he shouted, stomping his foot on the ground like a child trying to intimidate a pigeon or cat. Zaida stayed where she was. “Pick it up,” he shouted again, “or I'll speak the words that are waiting to leap off my tongue.”

“I felt nothing. Perhaps it was God's presence still inside me that made me so tranquil. I was prepared for any eventuality—I knew that if I stood my ground, He would take care of me no matter what happened. Anwar kept repeating his threat, but the more he reiterated it, the more it became clear to both of us that it was empty, that he wouldn't be able to bring even one of the two remaining ‘talaqs' to his lips. By now, I was feeling so strong, so righteous, that I could almost feel the light shining from within me and radiating through my skin—like one of those pictures of Christian angels, or Jesus or Mary with their hearts aflame. Perhaps Anwar saw this glow within me as well, because his words began to falter, his eyes became large and fearful. He emitted an anguished cry—of terror, almost—and went running into the bedroom.”