The Homing Pigeons... (22 page)

Aditya

I was now the proud owner of a cell phone. I dialled a number from the contacts list and waited as I heard the familiar voice of my mother answer the phone. “How are you?” she asked.

“Fine. Just came back home,” I said.

“Did you have dinner?” she asked.

This conversation was our ritual every evening and this last question could never be missed.

“Yes, just finished. The
dal
was horrible today, though” I said.

“
Why don’t you get married? At least you’ll get good food,” she said.

I didn’t know if good food was a good enough reason to get married. I was just a shade under twenty-four and marriage could wait. Of course, if the marriage were to be with Radhika, then I was ready. But she wasn’t. Her divorce was still not completed, though they had had a conversation.

“I will, Mom. I just need a little more time,” I said.

We exchanged news about Dad; how he was getting frustrated because another shipment of garments that he had
sent had been returned because of a quality issue. He was nearing fifty-three and I wished I could send some money home to ease the pressure. My financial situation was a lot better but I still didn’t have any savings. My near impossible fetish for food meant an empty bank account at the end of the month. She hung up and I stepped out into the balcony for a smoke. I hated the habit; maybe if I quit it and saved the money that I blew up in smoke rings, I would be able to send money back to my parents. They had done so much for me and even after being in a job for a year and a half, I was still struggling to be a good son.

The more I thought about it, the more frustrated I became. I needed money, more money than what I earned today. More money to be able to be a good son, more money to be an able suitor and more money to drive a car better than the flimsy four wheeler I was driving today.

The more important part was to be the able suitor, and how could I be an able suitor to a woman who was already married. It wasn’t long after she had met me on the terrace and asked for forgiveness that I had agreed to marry her.

I went back to work on Monday, after the amorous weekend on the terrace and looked at the sales figures on my desk. They were less than promising. My next promotion depended on the numbers being miles ahead of where they were. I had to secure a promotion in April, eight months away. I knew I was being overambitious to expect a promotion within a year, but I was committed.

I saw the promotion as a means to an end – more money, able suitor, marry Radhika. I didn’t realize when I changed, but money was beginning to be a priority. I was finding ways to save a little money. I was certain that I wouldn’t ask my parents to support my wedding. I would do it on my own.

Now, when the time was nearing, I realized that I wouldn’t even have money to take her for a honeymoon. It gave me a sense of urgency that had made me question Robin about the kitchen expenses last week. He had looked at me strangely,
wondering what had prompted that question.  I had even cut down on going to Barista, choosing the Nescafe counter downstairs. It was cheaper. There was always something to talk about and really, the ambience didn’t matter.

April was going to be an important month. If I did get the promotion, then I would speak to my parents about her. Maybe, it would put an end to my
mother’s concern regarding my marriage.

Radhika

A
t  Shipra’s  party,  I  try  to  make  myself  unobtrusive  by supervising the caterers. I think Shipra is able to see my discomfort and maybe that is the reason why she introduces me to another lady who feels almost as out of place as I am feeling.

The conversation veers towards what I do for a living and I have nothing to say. I am just a very bored widow who lives alone in Delhi. I could’ve chosen to tell her that I run a make shift school but I don’t. I don’t think she is the sorts who will appreciate it. I ask her the same and she says, “I work for an advertising agency”. I learn that she is a divorcee.

I think that she is another one of those people who will come and go from my life. When I meet her at Shipra’s party, I find her a little pushy and demanding. I don’t like her enough to exchange phone numbers but she is insistent. I don’t see too much harm in it, so I give her my number hoping that she will not call. I type the phone number first into the phone and then reach the field where I have to type in her name. Slowly, I type in the letters D-I-V-Y-A.

Divya starts calling often and then we start meeting often. It isn’t my company of choice but at least she is here. So often,
during our conversations, she excuses herself and makes phone calls. I wonder if they are all really related to her work at the advertising company because she speaks in such a hushed voice.

My school is beginning to do very well. When the results came out in April, almost all my students scored better than their previous result. I am overwhelmed when their parents come to see me. They thank me profusely for helping their children. Even more overwhelming are the sweets that they have brought. It has taken me a week to finish off the sweets and will take months to lose the extra weight that it has left me with.

My days are passing faster than they used to. I am not the same whining woman that had moved to Delhi six months ago. Maybe, it’s because the winter is behind me. I have been able to make my life a little more useful. I know that the pigeons are feeling neglected, but even then. Sometimes, I think that it is about time that I can have a partner. I am just readier for a relationship now than when I had come from Lucknow.

I call out to Laxman to pull out the car. I am going over to meet Shipra today. Ever since I have been introduced to Divya, my trips to her house have become a little less frequent. I feel guilty that I am not being such a good friend. I feel that I have been using her when I didn’t have company; but ever since I have met Divya, I have shirked away.

When I reach Shipra’s house, I realize that I am not wrong in thinking this way. Shipra’s house is half packed when I get there.

“Where are you going?” I ask her.

“Sidhu’s being transferred again,” she says.

I am hit by anxiety. I know that people in the Army get transferred very often but I have taken Shipra’s presence in
Delhi for granted. I can’t fathom myself being without her support.

“Where is he getting transferred?” I ask her.

“We’re moving to Ranikhet,” she says.

I don’t know why but I break down. I don’t want her to leave. She isn’t just another friend. She is the only family that I have, now that my parents are estranged and I have no other family to speak of.

“Don’t cry, Radhika. Look at it this way: it’s only an eight hour drive out of here,” she says.

“I know but I just can’t drive over there like I did today,” I
say through my sobbing.

“Let me just get settled there and then you can come and stay with us for a few days,” she says.

I am halfway back home when Divya calls to ask me if I am interested in watching a movie.

I look at the watch, it is only seven-thirty and I agree. It has to be Shipra’s going away that has made me agree so suddenly. I am now left with only one friend and I can’t afford to lose her.
Even if she is not someone who I really like.

I ask Laxman to take a detour to Vasant Vihar. Divya said that she was already at Priya, the cinema hall at Vasant Vihar, and would arrange the tickets. Surprisingly, the place isn’t bustling with activity as it used to. The restaurants are empty. The crowds at the movie halls are thin. The recession isn’t leaving anyone. I wonder what those jobless people do. It is quite a dichotomy that when they had work, they would go out for entertainment and now, when they don’t have work they choose to stay at home.
I find Divya in line, still waiting for the ticket counter to open up.

“Hey, you didn’t take very long to get here,” she says.

“I was on my way back from Shipra’s when you called,” I say

“It’s sad that she’s leaving,” Divya says.

Divya is quite a social butterfly. Sometimes, I envy her for her social skills. She always knows what everyone is up to. She already knows that Shipra is leaving, when I have only found out today. I am about to ask her how she manages to do this when her cell phone rings. She fishes into her large purse and excuses herself. I take her place in the queue while she goes out of earshot and has an animated discussion with someone on the phone. One of these days, I am going to ask her who she speaks to, I say to myself.

The movie is a disaster and we walk out even before the intermission
; it was unbearable.  I wonder if the recession has anything to do with that. Maybe film makers also don’t have the budgets that they used to have. We have dinner at a restaurant and somehow, I gather the courage to ask her about her phone calls.

“Who do you keep talking to on the phone?” I ask her.

“Clients,” she says.

“Do they have no respect for personal time?” I ask her. Her last phone call had been well past eight.

“Well, these clients are different,” she says without explaining much further.

I want to probe further, but I don’t do it. I don’t want to seem like I am trying to pry into her life.

“I was thinking about visiting Shipra once she’s settled in,” I say.

“Count me in. I have wanted a change for some time now,”
she says.

We walk to the car park and just before we are going to part and go our separate ways, she asks me, “Do you ever feel the need to have sex?”

I am not sure that I have heard correctly.

“What?” I ask. I am a little surprised and maybe even a little offended.
Divya isn’t close enough to be asking that personal a question.

“I mean, you’re pretty much in my situation. We don’t have partners so just thought I’d ask.”

I shrug my shoulders. I don’t know the answer and I think it is best not to answer that question until I know for sure.

Aditya

It   wasn’t   smooth.   It   wasn’t   rhythmic.   It   wasn’t   even passionate. It wasn’t even innocent. It was everything that I had thought it would never be. We made love but there were strange thoughts that ran through my mind. Did he give her more pleasure? Was my performance good enough? Did he have an organ larger than mine?

Maybe, the questions were natural but in the labyrinth of those questions was the answer that it could never be the same again. Yes, we were together as we had intended it to be for an eternity and now that we were together, there was the burden of the past that we carried. I didn’t ejaculate and I wondered if she had come. I didn’t ask, instead just turned over and slept hoping that sleep would give me some answers.

Her divorce had happened a few months ago, giving us the moral high ground to be able to make love. We lay in my apartment on the same bed that we had lost our virginity on and yet, we were unable to have satisfying, gratifying sex. She put her arm around me and slept, completely ignoring my underperformance.

I woke up first and saw her form under the sheets. My hand was under the covers as my finger created imaginary
images on her thigh. It was enough to wake her up. She turned her head, until I could kiss her. I kissed passionately and ran my hand up to her breast and cupped it. She let out a sigh as I gently plucked her nipple. She turned around a little more. My hand ran down her stomach, stopping momentarily on her navel. My index finger probed the depression and then the hand went on downwards until the stubble of recently shaved hair stopped the smooth slide. She opened her legs a little farther apart. My middle finger found another depression to explore, a moist depression this time. I felt my lower back stiffen as her hand moved down my back. It only took a few minutes before I was inside her, the gyrations started, a little better than before, the rhythm a little more harmonious until it finally ended on a high note.

Wasn’t this Nirvana? To be in the arms of the one that you love – sweaty, tired and spent, yet happy. The human need was to copulate before social structures had denigrated it with marriage. Even now, when we weren’t married, we were so together. We just lay there immersed in our thoughts searching for answers in the whirring of the ceiling fan.

I turned around and whispered into her ear, “I love you”.

She whispered back, “I love you too”.

I had been the industrious ant all winter and now, when spring burst  through,  my  hard  work  was  beginning  to  be recognized. My conversation with my boss had been fantastic for he had committed to promote me in April. Life was on a high. As things looked, I would be the only person amongst my peer group that would get promoted as a manager. Rightly so, given that they weren’t a patch on me. I had done it; I was king – God’s gift to mankind. If not, for Citibank India, I certainly was.

There was just one more thing that was pending on my plate – to marry Radhika and make her my own. That’s when I
made a trip back to Chandigarh to broach the subject with my parents. I didn’t expect resistance, especially when they had been more eager to see me married than I was. It would just be a formality.

I entered my house through the narrow winding stairs that took me to the two bedroom house on the second floor. I couldn’t but notice that the paint on the walls needed to be redone. The house needed urgent repairs. Had I been ignoring my parents while I blissfully carried on my life in Delhi with Radhika?

My father was out, but mother had been expecting me. I hugged her and touched her feet like any good son does. My father returned in the afternoon, looking harried and frustrated. His turban was soaked in sweat, even though the weather was at its best in February. I thought about bringing up her topic now, but maybe it would be better to wait until he was in a better state of mind.

“How’s the job coming along?” my father asked.

“Very good, dad, spoke to my manager last week. He’s promoting me in April.”

“Congratulations! 
Good thing that you chose to work a job instead of a business. It’s so much easier,” he said and then embarked on telling me a tale of the woes that he was up against. The shortage of labour, the shortage of raw material, the poor quality of labour and the inspectors of the government who would constantly demand bribes on one pretext or the other.

I  caught  up  on  some  sleep  in  the  afternoon, a  luxury that I could hardly afford on the short trip back home, but I was exhausted. My mother had attempted to make some of my favourite dishes and they were horrendous. I wondered how she could mess up something as simple as a salad. Her
affection for salt had smothered the salad into bitterness. And yes, there was the infamous pineapple jelly that wiggles. I don’t know how she managed it but Robin was a godsend. I stopped myself from critiquing her culinary skills. It would certainly spoil the mood and I didn’t want anyone upset when I brought up Radhika’s topic.

I didn’t even know how to get to the topic but I gathered all my courage and said, “Mom, I want to marry this year.”

I directed my statement towards Mom, knowing that I would find an ally in her. She had been after my life for over a year now.

“Finally, I hear you saying it. Just last week my friend was talking to me about her girl,” she was so visibly elated.

Oh, no! I wanted to make it amply clear that I had found my girl. I didn’t want her to find me one.

“That won’t be necessary; I’ve found the one for me,” I said

“Good going” Dad said, participating in the conversation for the first time.

“Who is she?” my mother asked.

“Radhika. Works with me in Citibank Delhi,” I said.

“Hindu?”
They asked in unison. I saw the expressions on their face change. Just moments ago, there had been elation and that was quickly changing into something else, something indescribable.

“Yes, but you’ll love her,” I replied, suddenly aware that this conversation may not be the breeze that I was expecting it to be.

“Where is she from?” my father asked.

“Chandigarh. She was with me in school too,” I replied. “What does her father do?” he asked.

Why was this important? What if she had been an orphan? Would they still care to ask?

“I think he’s retired. He used to work in the gulf as a mechanic before that.”

They exchanged glances and then looked at me.

“Anything else?” he asked.

I wondered if there was merit in telling them that she was a divorcee. Somehow, your parents always know who you are and there was only one reason that the last question had been posed. They knew that I hadn’t told them the whole truth. In some uncanny, strange way, they were able to decipher that I was withholding something.

“Yes, she’s a divorcee,” I said.

“Are you crazy?” my mother asked me.

She was holding her head in her hands, as if someone had just died. I ignored her posture.

“Why? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“My son is telling me that he wants to marry a Hindu, a daughter of a mechanic, who was once married, now divorced,” she asked me to reconfirm that she wasn’t hallucinating and that she had heard what I had told her.

“Yes, Mom. I love her,” I implored.

“You’re too naïve. What has she done to you for you to lose your sanity?” she had tears in her eyes.

This was absurd; why would she do anything? Maybe I wasn’t making my love of her clear for them to look beyond their prejudices.

“Mom! I’ve loved her since school,” I said.

The voices were a little louder than normal, “And she loved you in return? Then, why did she marry someone else?”

They won’t understand, I told myself, but still attempted it, “Because, I wasn’t settled”.

“So, she leaves you when you’re unsettled and comes back to you when you’re settled? She’s using you! Can’t you make out?” my father pitched in.

In a realistic, normal world, this was the truth; but they didn’t know her
the way I did. They didn’t know our love. They wouldn’t understand the depth if they continued to look at the surface.

“I don’t think she is, and I am going to marry her,” I replied back.

Uncharacteristically, my father, the usually boisterous Sikh, lowered his voice and said, “Now, you listen to me. You want to marry her, go ahead. But don’t expect us to approve. I don’t care if you love her or if she married someone else or she divorced or she is the daughter of a mechanic. Above all, she is a Hindu and I will never have a Hindu girl be married to you. They killed my father.”

I walked out in a huff. The next morning, I boarded the bus back from the ISBT in Chandigarh, confused and stressed. What I had thought to be a cake walk wasn’t turning out to be one.

I was a smoker; I hadn’t seen the insides of a Gurudwara in over five years; I had had my hair cut when I was seven and I was referred to as Aditya Sharma. And yet, I was to believe that I was a Sikh? I was doing everything that the Sikh religion forbids and still I could not marry the girl of my dreams because my grandfather had been murdered by some fanatics posing as Hindus? This situation was ridiculous and so was my father. I wished to rebel and tell them that I would do as I pleased. Only the gratitude of having been brought up by them stopped me. If I didn’t remember the sacrifices that they had made to bring me up, I would’ve definitely revolted. I remembered, so I chose to linger on.

I returned back to Delhi on Sunday, confused, irritated and unhappy. Had I underestimated the depth of the conversation? Had the wounds of the riots been so deep, that nearly two
decades of peace hadn’t been able to heal them? Just when everything was falling into place, why did this have to come up? My father was well educated, had travelled the world and was broad minded. Yes, if he had raised an objection on her being divorced and all, I would have been able to counter it. But religion? How do you counter that? I didn’t have a solution and that was worse than the problem.

I was stressed – not only because of the conversation of the weekend, but also because I was committed. If I hadn’t said yes to her proposal on that night on the terrace, maybe, it would have been better. Why had I not brought this subject up with my parents before I had said yes? And now, when they were against the marriage, why didn’t I have the courage to stand up and rebel. Did I even love her? If I did, why were these thoughts crossing my mind?

At work, my boss had promised me a promotion but thought he had enslaved me. I was expected to be present in office at the weirdest hours – on weekends, on late night calls and early morning conversations. I toed his line; I would have to do it at least until I got the promotion letter in hand. The pain was self-inflicted. I could have easily waited another year for the promotion and the money that came with it, but I wanted it now. I wanted to be at twenty-four what others become at twenty eight. Unknowingly, the promotion, career and money that had been a means to an end were beginning to become an end. I was obsessed with money, trying to learn to earn more. Hell, I even financed Robin to open a cigarette shop by night for a share in profits. I had changed, but I was still unaware. I was selling my soul for money. Much later in life, I have realised that selling your body is better than selling your soul.

Radhika

W
hen I get back home from the movie, I think about what Divya had asked me. I’ll be honest; sometimes I do want to make love but I don’t want to have sex, like she had so cruelly put it. Every time, I speak about making love, I remember Aditya. Wasn’t it sometime after my divorce had been completed that he became such an animal. Initially, Aditya was hesitant and stressed when we made love but he was beginning to find his bearings and bringing me throes of pleasure. There was just one thing that we couldn’t agree on – he hated contraceptives. He thought that it spoilt the spontaneity of the moment. I wish I could tell him the repercussions of not using them. Hell, even if we did conceive, we would just marry and have the child. We’d tell the child that it was a premature kid, if the dates of the marriage and his birthday ever made him suspicious.

Yes, it was just after my divorce when I had broken the shackles that I had so stupidly put around my ankles. Abhinav had met me a day before we were to meet our lawyers. He was his usual self – defiant, arrogant and uncompromising. He wanted to create a fuss about the alimony and the belongings. I was expecting a long, protracted legal battle of the lawyers
to solemnize a separation but things changed, probably at the advice of his lawyers.

The Indian judicial system was slow and inefficient. Add to that cauldron the new dowry laws and the powers it bestowed on women and you have the recipe for trouble. I think Abhinav realized that he could be in more trouble than this. When he came back the next day, he was as meek as a lamb. He was back in the United States within the week of filing the decree and we were both free to marry and lead independent lives. Whoever said that two wrongs can’t make a right was mistaken.

Life was near perfect again, even though Aditya was obsessed with work and money.

For the first time in my life, I was leading an independent life and making my own decisions. My trips to Chandigarh had nearly dried up. Earlier, I would visit once a month, but it had been three months now that I hadn’t made a visit. Worse still, I wasn’t missing it. At first, my parents had continued to pester me about going back to the States but now they had resigned. They still believed that I was ruining my life.