THE IMMIGRANT (2 page)

Her self-respect finally forced her to choose loneliness over compromise. Silently she grieved, the only men in her life long dead authors.

The mother knew nothing of the anguish, nothing of the joy. In her eyes Nina was a sweet, innocent virgin. Some traditional women would rather not see the things their children go through, those experiences sit so ill with their values. Now she was in the process of trying to convince Nina that astrology was a science too hastily discarded from their lives. Her daughter did not approve of this apostasy. Her turning thirty was no reason to fall for charlatans, even if she was going to suffer a fate worse than death.

‘You look so young and beautiful,’ pleaded the mother.

This was neither true nor relevant, but in the end the mother’s persistence wearied the daughter. Though it was dishonest to provide fuel for irrational expectations, it was still harder to deal with her mother’s monumental depression on her birthdays. It even overshadowed her own.

Next morning.

Birthday girl.

Nina lay in bed, eyes firmly shut. She wanted nothing of this day.

Her pillow was disturbed, the sheet pulled, paper rustled. Alas, to share a room with one’s mother demanded open eyes. She got up to greet her present joyously.

‘Happy birthday to my darling,’ said her mother, holding a parcel carefully wrapped in faintly creased, leftover gift paper. The daughter smiled as she undid the sticky tape to reveal a red and black woven Orissa sari, bought during the Diwali sales of the year before.

‘How pretty Ma.’

‘Your colleagues will like it?’

Nina nodded. When she came home she would exaggerate each response to replenish her mother’s meagre store of pleasure. Her acquaintances peopled her mother’s landscape; she was intimate with their personal lives, their vagaries, likes and dislikes. Now at the thought of their admiration she smiled as she carefully folded the wrapping paper, putting it away for the next present.

The birthday girl noticed the smile and was overcome by self-pity. Both of them were fated to lead lives devoid of men. The mother had fallen through the bad karma of marrying a prince who would die young. The only thing she had to look forward to was her daughter’s marriage, after which she would suffer more loneliness. At least the mother had hope. She had nothing.

As Nina crossed the angan for the toilet, Mr Singh shouted, ‘Happy birthday, ji. When are we going to hear some good news?’

Nina stretched her lips into a grimace.

‘This year, lucky year,’ beamed the landlady, pressing her hands to her bosom. ‘I feel it here.’

Regrettably these cultured times did not allow Nina to strike the voyeuristic lump in front of her. Instead she vented on her mother. ‘How come she keeps such good track of my birthdays?’

‘She has your interests at heart,’ placated the mother, looking old and slightly guilty. The familiar expression added to the daughter’s rage.

‘I hate the way she goes on about good news. Every marriage is good news, is it? Stupid cow. What about her marriage? Husband can’t even keep the roof over their heads.’

The mother let her rattle on. Poor thing, she had to take out her frustration somehow.

‘Don’t forget the astrologer’s appointment, beta,’ she said as Nina left.

As though there was any chance of that. Her treat to all concerned, her husband, her mother, herself.

College. Coffee break, birthday wishes, a few presents. Zenobia, special friend, gave Nina a small bottle of perfume, with
Balmain
written in tiny letters around its rotund middle, suggestive of desire and sex.

Zenobia. Abandoned by marriage after six years, but with parental money and an independent flat. Been there, done that was her attitude to matrimony. Her life was now filled with nephews, nieces, good friends (Nina the chief one), supportive family, occasional sexual encounters and a passion for teaching. She frequently urged Nina to go abroad for higher studies, that being her only chance of finding a decent guy, for Indian men were mother-obsessed, infantile, chauvinist bastards. But all the desperation in the world could not make Nina apply for a PhD.

The friends left college at one thirty in the moist intense heat. As they walked to the bus stand, dampness seeped from their pores, covering both with a sweaty sheen. Nina mopped her face and pulled her sari palla over her head, paltry protection against the solar onslaught. Why did she have to be born in the worst month of the year, she complained. Zenobia agreed. When the monsoon misbehaves, July is a month to hate.

They parted, and Nina pushed her way into a crowded 212. She hung onto the back of a seat, trying to breathe shallowly against the odour freely dispensed from perspiring armpits. Male bodies pushed themselves against her, and she leant firmly into the woman on the seat to her right, hoping she would not have to stand too long.

The bus shook its way through the streets of Delhi. The smells around her were making Nina nauseous. Grimly she put her handkerchief across her nose and glared at the dirty glass windows jammed shut. This same journey was such a pleasure in the mornings, with a seat assured, an hour to go through her lecture notes, suspended between home and college, combining purpose with mindlessness.

She had to change at ITO, struggling unpleasantly against more bodies trying to squeeze into buses. If only she could occasionally treat herself to an auto as Zenobia did, but the habits of frugality ingrained during years of perpetual worry about money, and daily, hourly, weighing of cost and benefit, meant she could never take an auto, not on her birthday, not ever.

So immersed in the world of push, shove, jab and poke, she hung onto another bus strap before being dropped off at the main road next to Jangpura.

The evening found mother and daughter at the same Jangpura bus stop, laden with fruit. ‘I hope he likes mangoes,’ said Nina’s mother, looking uneasily at the three kilos of langra and chausa she had bought from the fruit seller that morning, ‘These are practically the last of the season and cost five rupees a kilo, five! I think one or two are slightly overripe, I hope he doesn’t mind, I thought of leaving them, but then it would look too little… ’

‘He will understand that it is the end of the season, and be very grateful,’ broke in Nina impatiently, her arms aching with the load. The bus came and twenty minutes later they got off at Shahjahan Road, and walked over to 43 Meena Bagh.

‘Please wait, ji,’ said the tall grey haired lady ushering them into the glassed in verandah. ‘He phoned to say he might be a bit late, he was called for a meeting at the last minute. He had to go, you know what it is like these days.’

Everybody knew what it was like these days. Indira is India, India Indira, we need no one else, certainly not an opposition, D K Barooah, the Congress president, had declared as opposition was jailed, the press censored, demonstrations banned, activists tortured. The most startling objector to be thrown into prison was the venerable freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan. Old and frail, incarceration would destroy his health and succeed in killing integrity and conscience.

On the wall opposite the front door was a black and white portrait of Indira Gandhi. Around her was a garland of sandalwood roses. They were in the house of a sycophant, or to interpret it more kindly, a man too scared to be seen as anything but a Believer. Slowly but surely Madam’s probing eye delved, knife-like, into every house, every heart.

How feared she was. And how useless. Of her Twenty Point Programme the drive to produce sterile men was the only one that proved responsive to force. Poverty, alas, was resistant. Garibi Hatao. Almost thirty years after Independence that day was further away than ever, though government employees kept long hours in office, too scared to be absent or go home early. This man was obviously an example.

‘Papa didn’t need this kind of fear to make him work,’ burst out Nina. Her tall, vital, handsome father, hair greying at the temples, black framed glasses, clean-shaven face, slightly yellowing teeth, whose laughter was a series of snorts, who could charm with every word he spoke. Were he alive their lives would have been completely different. She tried never to think such thoughts for they led nowhere, but today, on her birthday, circumstances demanded them.

‘Your papa was a different breed of man,’ sighed the widow. For her every celebration was tinged with sorrow.

‘If papa were alive, we would not be here. Nice way to spend my birthday.’

‘That is why I say you should settle down. If you married an NRI or someone in the foreign services you could live abroad nicely.’

‘I don’t see NRIs or foreign service officers lining up to marry me. Get real Ma.’

‘Hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t. Everything is possible.’

Even marriage? Even happiness? Even escape?

If a husband could protect her from life in a brutal autocratic state she would marry him tomorrow. All around them countries like Burma, Pakistan, North Korea, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, were showing the way to totalitarian regimes, with their repressive measures and violation of human rights. What was so special about this country that would enable them to escape the fate reserved for so many of their neighbours?

Coming, we are coming, wait for us, our millions will soon join you.

Forty five minutes later, as Nina was urging her mother to get up and leave, they heard the sound of a car drawing up next to the house, seconds later its door slamming. ‘Namaste, namaste,’ twittered a thin, grey-moustached, bespectacled man, deputy secretary, Ministry of Education. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, unexpected meeting. Sit, sit, I have heard so much about your husband.’

The government servant cum astrologer quickly settled down to business. He asked the date of birth, name, added numbers, calculated the planet configuration at the moment Nina was born. He divined enough details of their past to establish even Nina’s unwilling confidence.

Now, he claimed, the fifteen year bad period in their lives was coming to an end. The unfortunate arrangement of stars that had governed their destinies was slowly giving over to a more favourable combination. Things were going to change, change quite drastically, he added frowning.

‘Marriage?’ suggested the mother.

The civil servant peered at the charts. ‘Late,’ he declared.

It didn’t take a genius to predict that, thought Nina. At thirty it was late by anyone’s standards.

Marriage would take place this year or the next, went on the astrologer. Journeys were involved, the signs were good for prosperity and happiness. And till where had Nina studied?

‘MA,’ said the mother.

‘Things are not easy if you are educated, the mind needs companionship, the search becomes longer.’

Nina scowled. The man should stick to his stars instead of making ridiculous pronouncements.

‘And Miranda House you said? Good, very good.’

By now the mother was in a state of deep excitement and Nina in a state of deep suspicion.

Well, at least she has been given enough sustenance to make this birthday less traumatic, thought Nina while the mother clutched her hand on the way back, as though she were already leaving for a new home.

ii

Far away, on the eastern seaboard of Canada, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a young man stood at the window of his clinic and gazed at the trees lining the sidewalk. It was summer; the air was mild, the sun shining for a change. His long time friend and partner had just walked home to his wife, child and lunch.

Eight years earlier, Ananda had been a practising dentist in small town Dehradun. Unlike many of his friends he had never dreamt of leaving India. His ambitions were simple. He wanted to make enough money to look after his parents and repay them for the time, love and hope they had invested in him.

But these exemplary aspirations were not destined to be realised.

His parents had been middle class professionals, on the lower scale of things. His mother taught at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, his father was a minor functionary at the Forest Institute. They had two children. The daughter studied at her mother’s school, and for her BA went to Miranda House, Delhi University. Her lack of academic brilliance was compensated by the genius she exhibited in choosing her partner. The boy had actually been to Doon School with Sanjay Gandhi! Now he was in the IAS, UP cadre. Success was bound to crown your career when you could claim some connection with The Family.

The umbrella of this marriage would cast its shade over the young brother as well. At all times the parents were keenly aware of the potential calamities that could befall their children and a son-in-law added to their sense of security.

Ananda was going to be a doctor. The father spent hours going over the child’s lessons with him, making sure there was no question he could not answer, and the son justified this attention by winning scholarships every year. He had to be something responsible, respectable, solvent and being a doctor fit the bill. In class XII he had school in the morning, coaching classes for medical entrance exams in the afternoon and homework at night. But though he was a position holder in the science stream in the boards, he didn’t score high enough in those other exams to make it to medical college. It was the first disappointment he had known in anything that had to do with reproducing large amounts of memorised material.

Dentistry was the alternate option. The medical exam entrance forms had demanded he fill in a second choice and now he was forced to see the bright side of things. He would not have to do night shifts. He would get the same—almost the same—respect as doctors did, the same—almost the same—money, but without the insane hours. With more economy and a bank loan, he could set up private practice in Dehradun. The career of a dentist uncle in Canada was painted in glowing colours. Who knew, his future too might convey him across the globe. But for the moment, a stretchable moment, he belonged to his parents.

Dental courses ran on quotas. Ananda was from UP, so for him the obvious choice was the dental wing of King George’s Hospital in Lucknow. He passed the interview, and for the five years it would take to qualify he shuttled between Dehradun and Lucknow.