The Space Between Us (13 page)

Pooja turned her head slowly away from her dead husband and toward her mother, tears streaming down her cheeks. “My turn next,” she said softly.

They came for Raju’s body an hour later. Two men, who wordlessly wrapped the body, as brown and brittle as a clay pot, in a sheet and carried it down the hallway. Two men, doing their jobs in a brutally efficient manner. Bhima smelled the alcohol on their breath and was insulted by this. She wanted to protest this disrespect, but then she noticed that the relatives gathered around the hospital corridor barely moved out of the way or paused in their conversations as the men made their way with Raju’s shrunken corpse. Oh, they touched their foreheads in respect when the small procession reached them, but Bhima could tell that that rote gesture was more out of habit and superstition than out of any genuine mourning for the passing of another human being. And as soon as the pallbearers passed them by, the conversations in the hallway resumed again, as if Raju’s body was merely a small pebble in a pond that created a minor ripple before the calmness of the waters overcame it. It was as if this indifference to death was everywhere at this hospital. Or maybe it wasn’t indifference at all but the exhausted failure of the defeated; as if so much energy went into preserving the living that there was nothing left over to mourn for the dead.

It was 6:00
A.M
. by the time they got to the open field behind the hospital where a dozen funeral pyres were ablaze at the same
time. Black smoke the color of despair rose from those pyres. Occasionally the fires crackled as they fed on bones. Bhima watched as Raju’s body was lowered onto the carefully arranged wooden blocks. Hyder had left his dying friend and accompanied her to the site. The smoke from the other pyres made her eyes burn, but still she watched as Raju’s body caught the flames that leapt high toward the heavens and against the reddening eastern sky. A terrible smell, dull and musty, the smell of wet cotton and mothballs, rose up and made her gag. Still, she watched as Raju’s body turned into ash. Bhima concentrated on those leaping flames that licked Raju’s body like a fiery tongue. It is right, she told herself unconvincingly. This poor boy has suffered so. This death is a release, not a punishment. You must remember that.

But then she thought of Pooja and of the little girl, Maya, for whom she would soon be responsible, and her entire body rebelled against what was happening, so that she wanted to leap into the pyre and command the flames to stop devouring this body; to demand that Raju rise from this final house of wood and ash and assume his responsibilities; to march over to Pooja and order her to grow flesh on her bones and return to her rightful home beside her healthy husband and their child. She wanted to go back to Maya’s second birthday, when Pooja and Raju had invited her for dinner and she had bought a whole new outfit for her beautiful granddaughter—red and white shoes, a pink dress, and a matching pink bow for her hair. She wanted to revisit the conversation after dinner—when Raju had told her about his new job offer that would pay so much more and she had been so pleased for him until he told her that it would mean moving to Delhi. At that time, she had forced a smile on her face, had silenced her protesting heart and told Raju to do what was best for his family, had told a downcast Pooja that as a married woman her place was next to her husband and not next to her old
mother. But not now. Now, she wanted to go back to that day and make her displeasure known, now she wanted to tell Raju that family matters more than money, that she would work an extra job to make up the difference in salary he would give up by staying in Bombay. Now, she would be shameless, merciless: She would remind Pooja that she was all Bhima had; that to take her only grandchild away from her was tantamount to murder; that she was an old woman, and after her death, they could move anywhere—to Delhi, to Calcutta, to the moon—but not while she was alive.

She made a gurgling sound in her throat, and Hyder put a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Didi, be brave,” he said in a voice older than his years. “For your daughter’s sake, be brave.”

She wanted to say: For my daughter’s sake, I can be anything—brave, strong, fearless. For her sake, I can walk on crushed glass, lie down on hot coals, wade through ice-cold waters. But my daughter is here on earth for a few days, I know. Soon, there will be another funeral pyre like this one. Only this time, it will be the body of the baby I gave birth to; the infant who bit my nipple each time after I nursed her; the six-year-old girl who once vomited after eating six bananas at one time; the eleven-year-old who came home crying from her job at Benifer Sodabottleopenerwalla’s place because she had started her menses and thought she was bleeding to death; the sixteen-year-old who grew quiet and grave after her father left us behind like an abandoned pair of shoes. And after this second funeral, after Pooja turns into ashes before my cursed eyes, after I have witnessed the horror of my own child dying before me, I will want to melt like ice, I will want to crumble like sand, I will want to dissolve like sugar in a glass of water. I will want to stop existing, you understand? Because, Hyder, try and understand—once I had two children, and now I will have none. One dead, the other disappeared, vanished, stolen from me by my cockroach of a husband.
And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, then I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I cease to exist.

For a woman like me, Hyder, death would be a luxury. I would welcome it, as I once welcomed love. But the gods are cruel, Hyder. You are learning this lesson too, at such a young age. So this Bhima, this ugly, unfortunate, ignorant, illiterate Bhima, even now the gods will toy with her because they know she’s not smart enough to fight back. And so there is Maya. Flesh of my flesh. What will happen to her if I jump into Pooja’s funeral pyre like I want to? What becomes of an orphan girl on the streets of Delhi? You and I both know the answer, Hyder. A beggar child, or worse, a prostitute. Not an Indira Gandhi, that’s for sure. And so I have to live. Even though I’m already dead, I know I will have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, hai na, beta? Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. In and out, left and right. You must forgive me, beta, I know I’m confusing you. I feel confused myself…there is no breeze in this place, the fire has eaten up the breeze, it seems, so hot and so narrow, like the entrance to Ravan’s forest, and this smell, beta, the smell of dead flowers and cobwebs and mothballs and decay, this smell that is inside my head and it will never leave me, I know, this smell that will trail me the rest of my days, I can feel it entering my bones, settling like dust into my blood…

Hyder caught her as she fell.

Bhima brought Maya to the hospital with her the next day, and her reward was the weak smile on Pooja’s face. “Ae, chokri,” she said
gently to Maya, who was leaning into Bhima’s hip. “Come here. Forgotten your mother in a few weeks’ time, hah?”

Maya went up gingerly to her mother. “I made something for you in school,” she said, handing her mother a picture of a flower.

Pooja smiled weakly, barely looking at the picture. “Good you’re going to school,” she said. “You must be the bestest student in the school, achcha?”

Maya smiled shyly. “I already am.”

Pooja closed her eyes, exhausted. Maya turned to look at her grandmother. “She’s going to sleep,” she said accusingly. “I haven’t even told her what the teacher said to me.” She stared at her mother for a minute. “Ma-ma, why does Ma look so ugly?”

“Chup re, you bad girl,” Bhima hushed her. “Your ma is as beautiful as ever. You just have to look harder to see the beauty, that’s all.”

Maya took a step closer and stared at her mother’s sleeping face. “I’m looking hard-hard,” she said. “But she still looks ugly to me.” Then she began to cry.

Bhima closed the gap between them and held the sobbing child to her bosom. Just then, the sister of the woman who lay two beds away from Pooja began to wail, a high-pitched, hair-raising sound. “O Bhagwan, my sister is dead,” the woman screamed. “O big sister, answer me, talk to me. O God, take me also, why have you left me alone on this lonely earth?” Listening to the woman’s wails, Maya began to shake. “Ma-ma, I’m frightened,” she said. “I want to go home.”

Before she could control herself, Bhima turned on the bereaved woman. “Hush your mouth,” she yelled. “Scaring everybody like this. What do you think—you are the only one grieving here? That the rest of us are pillars made of stone?” Watching the woman’s cowering, openmouthed face only further ignited Bhima’s rage.
Her mouth tasted bitter, as if she had swallowed the ashes from Raju’s pyre, and the cruel words that dropped from her lips, like ashes, were tinged with that bitterness. “Shameless woman,” she went on, half aware that everyone around, patients and relatives alike, was watching her in horror. “Keep your tears to yourself. If you live to be a hundred and two years old you won’t know the griefs some of us have seen. Crying like this over your sister, while I will have to watch my only child—”

“Silence.” A loud male voice rang out, covering Bhima’s words. “Old woman, have you no shame?” It was the same doctor she had encountered in the hallway a few days earlier, but he gave no sign of recognizing her. “What are you people, animals? Have you no respect for death or another person’s grief? Fighting with each other like wild dogs.” He towered above Bhima, who pressed Maya’s head tightly against her bosom, as if she wanted the child not to hear the scolding she was getting. “This is a hospital, not one of your gutter homes,” the doctor raged. “If you cannot respect the rules of the hospital, then take your patient and go home.”

Bhima felt a single trickle of sweat start at the nape of her neck and run down her back. Her eyes filled with tears, and she glanced quickly at Pooja, to see if her daughter had witnessed her humiliation. But Pooja lay with her eyes closed. Slowly, Bhima raised her gaze so that she was staring at the collar of the doctor’s white coat. “Sorry, doctorsahib,” she murmured. “Maaf karo. Please to forgive me.”

The doctor looked as if he wanted to say more, but then he noticed Maya, who was now cowering behind her grandmother’s back, and stopped himself. He stared at Bhima for another minute and then turned away. “It’s a hopeless situation,” he said to himself but just loud enough that Bhima heard him. “This whole hospital—everything—it’s all hopeless. Should’ve gone to ’M’rica when I had a chance. At least they have respect for human life there.”

The doctor left a long silence in his wake. Some of the other relatives glared at Bhima in apparent satisfaction at the verbal trashing she had received; others looked away in discomfort at her embarrassment. The young woman two beds away began to sob softly to herself, resting her head on her dead sister’s legs. Maya whimpered and tugged at Bhima’s sari. “Let’s go, na,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“Wait, beta,” she replied. “Go sit by your mother for a minute.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Then wait here for me. I’ll come back right away.”

Bhima made her way to the dead woman’s cot. As she heard her footsteps, the bereaved woman lifted her head fearfully. Her wary expression made Bhima’s heart twist with guilt. “I’m sorry for your loss, girl,” she said. “And I beg your forgiveness for my harsh words. Please find it in your heart to forgive me. I don’t know what…Yesterday I cremated my son-in-law. And that’s my daughter over there. Anyway, my wicked words were—”

“No need to ask forgiveness,” the other woman said slowly. “There is no forgiveness in this place. And your words were true. Here, we have all hit the jackpot for grief.”

Maya had inched her way up to Bhima. “Ma-ma, let’s go,” she now cried. “I hate this room.”

Bhima made a wry face. “Time to take this one home,” she said. She lowered her voice. “She doesn’t understand, yet.” She stretched her right hand and placed it lightly over the sitting girl’s head. “God look after you, beti,” she said. “And remember, those who have no one, have God.”

Over the next two weeks, Bhima herself began to look like one of the patients in the hospital. Every morning she woke up early, got Maya dressed, and took her over to the neighbor’s home. And then
she left for the hospital. Most days, she ate a banana for lunch. Once in a while, as she leaned against the bus window, she would catch a reflection of herself in the glass and notice the dark circles that had sprung up around her eyes, would be aware of the fact that her face was beginning to look as gaunt and exhausted as Pooja’s. But she noticed these things idly, as if she didn’t quite recognize the face that looked back at her. She was distracted. There were too many competing thoughts, buzzing around like bees in her head. She knew she should let Gopal know that his daughter was dying. No matter how dissolute the alcohol had made him, she knew he would do whatever it took to get to Delhi in time to see Pooja. But how to contact Gopal? She had an address only for his older brother and that was buried somewhere in her hut in the old suitcase that Serabai had given her. Who could she ask to dig for that address? It was not feasible to ask Serabai to go to the slum to make that request of one of her neighbors. Besides, since coming to Delhi, she had not even had the time to find someone who could write Serabai a letter telling her what she had found here. She knew Serabai would be worried, but somehow, once she stepped into the time-stopping world of the hospital, the rest of her life melted away from her. It was as if it was only in this place of disease and death that she felt alive and vital. The rest of her life became a dim memory, a blurry shadow.

Maybe Pooja’s illness was her punishment for not having invited Gopal to the wedding. After all, hadn’t she known that it was bad luck to marry off a daughter without her father being present to give her away? No wonder this disease had come to prey on her daughter. It was the nature of disease to prey on the weak and vulnerable. She should not have listened to Pooja’s tirade against her absent father. Pooja was a silly young girl—what did she know about the trickery of the gods, about how vengeful fate could be? But she, Bhima, knew better. She remembered the case of Seema, the woman who had moved into the ground-floor apartment of the
building where Bhima lived with her parents. One Diwali festival, when Bhima was twelve years old, all the building residents were gathered in the courtyard of the building, setting off firecrackers, exchanging sweets. All except Seema and her husband. Between the sizzle and crackle of the fireworks, the other residents heard the two of them quarreling. Seema’s words shot out the window of her ground-floor flat, as hot as the rockets they were firing into the air: “Useless loafer…good-for-nothing…Lying around all day…. Better off if you were dead, as dead as that thing betweenyour legs.” On that day, some of the celebrants had knocked angrily on Seema’s door and asked her to keep her voice down. That had silenced her. But the real silencing came four months later, when Seema got home from work one evening, went straight to bed, and never woke up. All the neighbors, remembering the curses she had hurled on her husband that Diwali day, shook their heads at the wiliness of the gods. “They turned her own words upside down and fed them back to her,” Bhima’s mother had said.