The Space Between Us (27 page)

“Rubbish? Why is it rubbish? With all respect, Sera mummy, are you even going to let Bhima deny it or are you going to deny it for her? I mean, she’s standing here looking guilty as a thief while you’re rushing to her defense.”

The world goes black for a minute and then turns startlingly, blindingly white. Bhima laughs into that white void. Out of the white—which now has a red border, red as blood, red as fury—she sees Sera’s upturned, questioning face, sees Viraf’s devious, conniving countenance. The boy has set a trap for her, she realizes. He must have planned it for weeks. Even as he refused to look her in the eye each time she glared at him, even as he acted humble each time she was rude to him, even as he ate those fried eggs that she once spat in before she served them to him, he was laying his trap. All this time, his mind was working, planning his revenge, arranging the pieces, laying the bricks in the wall that would fence her in.

Bhima laughs again. She laughs at her foolish innocence, which has turned out to be as dangerous as Maya’s. She laughs at her arrogance, which had led her to believe that she could mistreat an educated, powerful man like Viraf and not pay the price. Above all, she laughs at her foolish notion that Viraf regretted what he had done to Maya, that he was truly ashamed of his moment of weakness. Despite the fact that this boy acted like a wild beast, she had not seen him as such. She had preferred to believe that he would never strike her family again, that the knowledge that she knew about his guilt was enough to defang him.

And now he has brought her down to this moment. Even Feroz seth, with his explosive temper and arrogant ways, would never have doubted her honesty, the doglike faithfulness with which she had served this family. She remembers Maya’s bitter
words about how she has treated the Dubash family better than her own. The girl was right—she has slaved and worked for, protected and defended this family as if it were her own. And now this snake, this devil with a handsome face, is accusing her of stealing from Serabai.

“See what a naffat she is?” Viraf is saying. “Can you imagine, laughing when someone accuses you of committing a serious crime? One more minute and I’ll call the police, I swear.”

The word
police
brings Bhima to her senses. She feels the blood pounding in her head, and her words pour out of her as thick and salty as blood. “Go call the police,” she says. “You tell them your story, and then I’ll tell them the story about your evil. How you ruined my family’s reputation, how you stained my family’s honor. Just open your mouth to the police, and I’ll show you what I’m made of, you dirty dog—”

“Bhima,” Sera hisses, her face white with fury. “Control yourself. Have you gone mad, talking in this low-class way? Don’t forget who you’re talking to.”

Bhima swings to Sera, her face ugly with rage. She knows she must speak fast now, before the tears begin to fall and bury her words. “I know exactly who I’m talking to, bai. It’s you who doesn’t know who this man is. For months, I have kept my mouth shut, out of respect for you. But now I must expose him, show you the blackness of his heart—”

“Do you see what you have created, Sera mummy?” Viraf bellows. “This is your reward for treating a servant like a family member. This shameless woman will not stop at anything to hide the fact that she is a thief. God knows how long she has been stealing from you and you didn’t even—”

“May God strike me down if I’ve stolen a paisa from this family,” Bhima says, her voice trembling with unshed tears. “And may
God strike you down if you’re unjustly accusing a poor woman like me just so you can cover up your foulness with my dishonor.”

“You ingrate,” Viraf says. “You eat this family’s salt for all these years and now you curse us.” He turns toward Sera. “What everyone has been telling you, you should’ve listened to, Mummy. This is my fault, for letting this woman sit on your head. This is what happens when you try turning a stray dog into a family pet. Sooner or later, that dog is going to bite you.”

Sera sits on the sofa, a stricken look on her face. Bhima feels Sera receding from her, like a moon that climbs higher and higher into the night sky. “Serabai, maaf karo. Forgive my harsh words, bai. But you don’t know what evil this man is hiding. He’s the mad dog, bai, not me. I beg you to—”

Viraf lifts his hand in a threatening manner above Bhima’s head. “Listen, you motherfucking woman. You say one more thing against this family and I will drag you naked to the police chowki, understand? Now get your things and get out.”

As Viraf chops the air with his hand, Sera flinches. “We must all control ourselves,” she says loudly. “Everything is getting out of hand much too fast.” She looks at Bhima with tears in her eyes. “Bhima, tell the truth. If you needed the money, I will understand. But tell me the truth.”

The plea lingers in the air for a moment, like a drop of water from a leaky roof. Then Bhima, crazed with outrage and fury, decides to make the roof come crashing down. “The truth? Ask him what he did to my Maya if you want the truth,” she says bitterly. “Ask him what guilt he is trying to hide. He thinks he can buy my silence with his seven hundred rupees? If he builds me a house of gold I won’t forgive him for what he has done to my—”

Sera lets out a strangled cry. For a stricken moment she turns toward Viraf in a questioning gesture, her eyes wide and apprehensive as they search his stony face. But the next second denial falls on
her face like a white veil. “Enough,” she says, covering her ears with her hands, the way Pooja used to do whenever Bhima and Gopal had a fight. “I’ve heard enough of your crazy talk, Bhima. Thank God my Dinu isn’t home to hear the filth coming out of your mouth. You’d better get out of here before I say something that I will regret later. I can excuse you stealing from me, but to challenge my son-in-law’s honor, that I can never forgive you for.”

“Listen to me, Serabai,” Bhima cries. “I’m trying to tell you—”

“What your Maya did is her business,” Sera screams. “She can be a whore with fifty men for all I care. Just don’t involve my family in her sickness. I’ve done all I could for that girl. Now I wash my hands of the whole family. Get out,” she says again, her teeth biting nervously on her upper lip. “Get out of my sight.”

Bhima hears the final brick click into place. She sees the film of sweat on Viraf’s face and his faint, almost invisible look of satisfaction. His eyes are bright and piercing. See? They seem to taunt her. I knew I’d get you in the end.

Sobs form like bubbles inside Bhima’s throat and rock her frail body. “Serabai, don’t turn me away,” she begs. “After all these years, where will I go?”

But Sera’s face is as stony as a wall. She looks at Bhima as if they are meeting for the first time. “Get your things and go,” she says softly. “Please. Don’t say anything else. Just go. Whatever money I owe you, I will send to your home.”

Bhima walks the long passageway leading to the kitchen on legs that seem unable to hold her up. Viraf and Sera follow her, so that Bhima feels like they are her jailers, leading a condemned prisoner to her cell. She looks desultorily at the meager possessions she keeps in a cardboard box in a corner of the kitchen—a soap dish, Pond’s talcum powder, a blue comb with a tooth missing, her metal glass, her tobacco tin. As she lifts the box, the tears fall fast and hot. She looks around at the kitchen, every inch of which she has
swept and cleaned so many times. So many evenings she has entered this room without bothering to turn on the lights and still she has known where to find every fork, every dish, every pan. She takes in the cobweb that is forming in the corner near the window—she had meant to clean that web off yesterday. She feels a second’s pride as she notices the shine on the pressure cooker, which she washed earlier today. She sighs as she looks at the high ceiling, such a welcome change from the oppressive weight of the low roof of her hut, which she has to bend to enter.

She is walking out of the kitchen when a thought strikes her and she turns toward Sera, who has the white, dazed look of a sleepwalker. “Dinaz baby,” she says, her voice cracking. “I won’t get to say good-bye to Dinaz baby.”

Sera’s eyes flicker with warmth for a second before they turn into ice chips. “Just as well,” she says, her voice hardening as she speaks. “After the ugly things you’ve said, I’m glad you’ll never see my daughter again.”

The lump in Bhima’s throat tastes like blood. “Serabai, it was never my desire to hurt you or baby,” she says. “That girl is like my own—”

“Achcha, bas, enough of this drama-frama,” Viraf says. “Come on, chalo, get out of here.”

Viraf opens the front door and holds it for Bhima to pass through. The devil at the gates of hell, Bhima thinks. But then another thought assaults her: Hell is on the other side of this door, she thinks. Hell is trying to get another job at my age, to learn the ways of another family, to sweep and clean and cook for strangers. Hell is working for less money for a strange family and watching Maya throw her future away like rotten fruit. Hell is knowing there will never be another Serabai, no one who will take an interest in Maya’s education, no one who will care if she, Bhima, lives or dies.

Gratitude tears at her throat and makes her take Sera’s stiff hand and hold it up to her eyes. “Serabai, if I am doomed to take a million rebirths in this world, I will never be able to repay you…” Even in the dim light of the evening, she notices the teardrop that glistens on Sera’s fair-skinned wrist.

Viraf slams the front door on her before she can finish the sentence. Bhima leans against the wall for a minute with her eyes closed and then walks slowly toward the elevator. But ashamed at the thought of the liftboy seeing her in her exiled state, she decides to take the stairs. She begins her slow, tortured descent into the lower levels.

I
t is dusk when Bhima emerges from the apartment building. The sky is a dusty orange, the kind of sky that falls on the faces of the people walking below it, so that each brown, sallow face glows as if it is powered by the light of a million suns. The people on the street look golden, as if kissed by a kind, benevolent god. It is a windy evening, and the wind tongues Bhima’s hair, pulling strands of it out of her bun. Cradling her cardboard box in her right hand, she tries to push her hair back with her left but gives up after a few futile attempts. Instead, she uses her free hand to hold down her sari, which is billowing in the wind. Normally, she would’ve been irritated by this incessant breeze, but today she is thankful for it. The cool evening air dances on her face, freezing her tears on the tracks they have made on her cheeks. Somehow, the wind makes her feel free and anonymous, as if it guards her from the inquisitive eyes of the hundreds of other people walking down the same street.

Her feet scrape against the stone pavement, knowing their way as well as those of a blind dog. She doesn’t have to pay attention to where she is going; her feet will lead her home. Instead she can use her mind to sort out the bodies, to identify the charred remains, to assemble the missing limbs in the aftermath of the bomb that has just gone off in her life. Because it is more than her and Maya’s lives that has been affected. She is sure of this.

The look on Serabai’s face when she told her the truth. Will Serabai ever be able to forget those words, to bury them under the protective layers of forgetfulness and denial? Or will those words caw in her ears like black crows, will they peck at her fair skin like vultures, will they torment her in the middle of sweaty, sleepless nights? Will she ever be able to look at Dinaz’s innocent, laughing face again and not think of her son-in-law’s deceit? Will Bhima’s inopportune words build a glass wall between Serabai and Viraf, a wall that no one except the two of them will be able to see, a wall that neither one of them will be able to scale, that will keep them locked up in their own frozen, guarded worlds? And the baby. The new baby whom she, Bhima, will never get to see. The baby will be beautiful, she knows, with Viraf’s dark, intense eyes and Dinaz’s sweet mouth. But will Serabai ever be able to see the baby’s fair, unblemished face without remembering the darker half brother whose death Maya had made her witness?

Do the rich think like this? Bhima wonders. Or, along with their ABCs and 1, 2, 3s, do they also learn how not to be hounded and tormented by the truth? She doesn’t know. In some ways, she knows Serabai better than she knows most of her relatives, but still, how much does she understand about this proud, dignified woman who has been a presence as powerful as God in her life all these years? She is acquainted with Serabai mostly through her actions and routines, Bhima now realizes. She knows that her mistress likes her tea light and milky, that she doesn’t like starch on her laundered clothes, that she is generous, and that she believes in the value of education. She also knows Serabai through her silences—the sudden, clamped-down silence when she disapproves of something; the dignified, stony silence when she does not want to expose her wounds to the world; the shy, awkward silence when she is among a group of chattering women and has nothing to say.

But after all these years of working in Serabai’s home, Bhima has no idea what she thinks, she realizes. And why should you? she chastises herself. You, an ignorant, uninformed woman. And Serabai, educated and foreign-traveled. A woman who reads the newspaper every day while you grovel for the tidbits of information that fall your way like bread crumbs. What in the world would she talk to you about? Bhima flushes as she remembers how many times Serabai has had to unshackle her mind about things. Like her fear of Muslims, for instance. She had grown up like so many others, believing that the Muslims were about to overrun India, that it was their intention to acquire gold-silver until they owned the country and chased all the Hindus out. That was the reason they had many-many children, and the government was on their side, targeting only the Hindus with its family planning messages. Serabai had laughed the first time Bhima informed her of all this. But then her face grew serious and her eyes uneasy. She had gone into the other room and come back with a thick book. At first Bhima couldn’t believe what Serabai read—that most Muslims in India were dirt poor and that they were vastly fewer in numbers than Hindus. “Even if some of them have any intentions of—how do you put it?—taking over India, at this rate it would take them more than a hundred years, Bhima,” Serabai had said. Still, Bhima was not convinced. But then Serabai took it upon herself to translate parts of the newspaper for her, and Bhima learned about the burning of Muslim villages by Hindu mobs and how the politicians played each group against the other. Most important, Serabai told her of how both communities had lived side by side in peace for hundreds of years, until the white sahibs had come and done their badmaashi and made each group fear the other. Then, Bhima stopped hating the Muslims and started hating the politicians instead.

But now Bhima wishes that, instead of sharing history with her,
Serabai had shared some of her own thoughts. Thoughts that she had kept locked up in her head like medicine in a cabinet, like money in a cupboard. Money in a cupboard. Seven hundred rupees. Bhima knew that when Viraf threw one of his parties for his friends, he spent more than that sum on beer and soft drinks alone. The amount was too little for him to have cared about at any other time.

But who says the money is even missing? she thinks savagely. The money is probably in his pants pocket right now. The brown envelope was that final brick, you see, with which he blocked you in. You thought that that accountant from Gopal’s workplace had tricked you. But he only thought of you as an ignorant fool, which was no lie. But this boy. This boy called you a thief to your face and there was nothing for you to do. Like a hunter setting a trap for a wild animal, he laid a trap for you. Probably chose a day when he knew Dinaz baby wouldn’t be home. For days, weeks, he must’ve planned this. Every time you scowled at him, every time you didn’t go as soon as he called, every time you humiliated him in front of his wife, he was thinking, calculating, planning. And how much planning did it take, after all? How scared could he have been, knowing that an old, uneducated woman was his opponent? He was probably not even biding his time. He was probably just toying with you, just batting you around, waiting for you to think you were more powerful than you were. And then, with the flick of his index finger, he made you tumble down from your perch of power. That’s how much he bought and sold you for, seven hundred rupees. That’s your worth—less than a party’s supply of beer.

Bhima’s throat burns with the salt of injustice. She swallows the lump in her throat, but it burns a pathway down her chest until it finally settles like a smoldering fire in her stomach. Should I try to contact Serabai while Viraf is at work? she wonders. And she cries out loud as the answer forms in her head: I can’t. If it had been only
the matter of the stolen money, she could’ve approached Serabai, could’ve convinced her of the wrongness of the accusation. In fact, she wouldn’t have needed to say a word—Serabai herself had defended her, hadn’t she? In this, Viraf had miscalculated his mother-in-law’s sense of fair play. If that boy had thought that Serabai would have terminated her on the basis of his pointed finger and vile accusation, he was wrong. But if Viraf had been unable to light her funeral pyre, she had done it for him. She had climbed on top of the neatly arranged pile of wood and lay down; she had lit the match that brought alive the flames that had devoured her. With her words she had birthed a fire that had scorched all of them. The fire had consumed her, turning her future and her dreams to ash; she would never know how severely it had injured the other two—whether its flames had merely licked their bodies and then been extinguished by the gusts of their denial or whether the flames had scarred them permanently.

And despite her grief and outrage, Bhima prays for denial for Serabai. She has no desire to hurt this woman who has already been through so much. “Ae Bhagwan, forgive me,” she prays. “You should’ve cut off my tongue before allowing me to say those ugly words.” She closes her eyes for a second to block off the sight of Sera’s bewildered, stricken face and brushes up against a youth riding his bicycle on the wrong side of the street. “Ae, mausi, watch where you’re going,” he yells over his shoulder as he zigzags through the crowd. “Almost knocked me off my bike, yaar.”

Embarrassed, Bhima mumbles an apology and quickens her pace. Suddenly, she remembers the evening that Feroz seth died. Something about this sky, inflamed with orange and purple, is reminding her of that evening. She remembers standing at the door and looking at his still, stiff body and thinking how strange it was that once the ambulance people took him away she would never see
Feroz seth again. Only Parsis were allowed in the Tower of Silence, she knew. Standing at the door, she tried to study the features on Feroz’s face, tried to conjure up the sound of his voice, his short, abrupt laugh. And found that she couldn’t. Dead for a few minutes and already he was gone.

That’s what this break with Serabai feels like, she thinks. A rupture as sudden as death. But worse, because she will have to live with the knowledge that Serabai is alive in the city at the same time she is, that in a few weeks she will be leaning over the baby’s cradle and singing to him while some other woman is washing her clothes and her pots and pans.

The thought of another woman working in Sera’s house makes a jolt of anger run through Bhima, and like electricity, the anger changes paths and turns inward. Oh, you stupid woman, she chides herself. What for you care about who works in their house? Even when your husband left you didn’t grieve so much as you’re grieving now. What do these people mean to you, after all? Discarded you like an old, stale slice of bread when the time came, didn’t they? Didn’t Serabai choose her son-in-law’s obvious lie over your obvious truth? Didn’t she hide behind the folds of family when she had to choose? And did she slap his face when he called you a thief? Did she ask him to get out of her house when you told her what he had done? No, instead she asked you to leave. What Ma always used to say is true—blood is thicker than water. So what if Serabai had not actually birthed Viraf? He is her son, just the same—the same fair skin, the same confidence when talking to strangers, the same educated way of speaking.

Bhima is not surprised to find that, on this day of deceit and trickery, even her feet have fooled her. Instead of leading her home, as she had assumed, they have turned a sharp corner so that she finds herself across the street from the sea. The sky above the
water is even more violent and bruised, slashed red and purple by the razor blade of a madman. Suddenly she has a yearning to be close to the water, to hear in its wild but controlled thrashing the violent turmoil of her own soul. The wind propels her forward, through the six lanes of traffic she must cross to get to the other side. She feels a moment’s twinge at the thought of Maya waiting worriedly for her at home, but the wind plucks at her guilt and carries it away.

She sets her cardboard box down on the cement wall that runs along the shore and sits next to it. She will not take it home with her when she leaves here, she decides. The box is just a mocking reminder of days that will not come again. Someone else can pick through its contents. She imagines a young boy’s delight at finding her blue comb; a poor beggar woman walking away with her soap dish; a teenage girl using her Pond’s talcum powder after her bath the next morning. She sits on the cement wall along with hundreds of other sea gazers and stares at the gray water as it pounds its fists against the large boulders that separate the sea from the wall. She wills the sea to send a large wave her way, a wave that will rise majestically above the protective wall and wash over everything—the wealthy ladies who are walking their dogs, the yellow-haired foreigners with their long strides and large backpacks, the couples who sit facing the sea with their hands in each other’s laps, the channawalla with his nasal whine who is trying to get her to buy some peanuts. Above all, she wants the wave to rise and wash over her thin, tired body and carry it back into the sea as if it were a twig; she wants to bob in the water as if she were a dried coconut thrown into the sea to appease the gods; she prays for the water to cleanse her sins, to wash away each burning thought in her head, and to quench the fire in her throat.

“Bai, bai.” The channawalla is still at her side, nagging her to buy some of his wares. She shakes her head no, but this sign of
recognition seems to only encourage him more. “Please, bai,” he says, with an ingratiating smile. “Business very slow-slow today. I’m having wife and five children at home.”

She looks at him with contempt, remembering the old Pathani balloonwalla and his quiet dignity. The balloonwalla would never have begged a customer to buy his wares, she thinks. He would’ve gone hungry, would’ve returned empty-handed to his lonely corner of the world at the end of the day, but he would not have lowered himself into beggary. The channawalla watches the contempt gather like sea foam on her face and flinches. He walks away hurriedly, muttering to himself about the heartlessness of city people.

Remembering the Afghani balloonwalla’s handsome, quietly pensive face calms Bhima so that for a moment she believes the sea has actually listened to her request. It’s strange, she thinks, how she can barely remember what Feroz seth looked like. And God forgive her, she is also beginning to forget Amit’s face. That is, she can conjure him up in parts—the white spots on his fingernails, the green snot that often dripped out of his nose, the texture of his thick, dark hair, the cleft on his chin. But these days, she is having trouble seeing his face in its totality. Her clearest memory of him is from about two years before he left her. And that’s only because of a photograph of him from that time, a photograph that is yellow with age and smudged from the number of times she has held it, kissed it, fondled it.