The Space Between Us (7 page)

The sun was beating down on her face, making her sweat. From the balcony, she could hear Freddy Dubash’s music playing on the record player, could hear Polly squawking at the high notes. A loud growl from her stomach reminded her that she was hungry. Was she supposed to ask for her breakfast, or was she to return to her room and wait to be fed like some criminal in prison? she wondered, and the humiliation that she felt made her sweat even more. She decided to return to her room.

Banu was on the couch in the living room, a white mathubanu covering her head and a prayer book in her hand. “Kem na mazda,” she was praying as Sera walked past her, crossing the living room.

The next second, there was a deafening shriek. “Out, out,” Banu screamed. “Acchut. Unclean girl, dirtified the whole room while I was praying. All my prayers are ruined by your unclean presence. Didn’t your mummy-daddy teach you anything, you dirty girl?”

Sera stared at Banu dumbfounded. It took her a minute to realize that her mother-in-law was talking to her in this hysterical manner. The agitated woman before her was totally unlike the shy, eager-to-please woman who had encouraged her to marry her son, who had welcomed her into her home just a few weeks ago. “I…I,” she stammered.

Freddy Dubash came running in from the dining room. “What happened? Did someone fall?”

“Oh, Freddy, thank God you are here,” Banu said dramatically. “Help me, darling, help me.”

Freddy looked distraught. “Banu, what is it, will you speak? Is it your heart?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Just that this whole house will have to be purified now. Sera walked across the room while I was praying and she is having her monthly cycle, you see. Still, without any consideration, she interfered with my prayers.”

Sera blushed. Before she could speak, Freddy raised his voice. “You and your superstitious vhems and dhakharas. Crazy woman, you are. Harassing this poor child, scaring her for no good reason.” He grew even more angry. “And worst of all, you’ve ruined my enjoyment of my music. A new Mozart record I’d just bought, and now your hysterical faras has made me miss the best part.” He flung a sympathetic look at Sera and then stomped out of the room.

Banu narrowed her eyes and flashed Sera a look that made her heart stop. “See what you’ve done, getting my Freddy all upset?” she said, careful to lower her voice so that it didn’t carry into the next room. “Is that why you entered my house, to create friction between my husband and me?”

Sera felt dizzy, as if she had drunk four beers one after the other. She took a step toward Banu and reached out to touch her hand. “Banu mamma, I don’t know what happened—”

“She touched me,” Banu screamed. “Deliberately, on purpose, she touched me with her impure hands. Oh, God, what kind of daakan has entered my house, to make me miserable in my old age?”

This time, Gulab, the Dubashes’ servant, came into the living room. She took one look at the situation and pushed Sera toward her bedroom. “Baby, you go in your room for a while,” she said authoritatively. “Go on, I will calm Mummy down.”

In her room, Sera collapsed on the bed. If Banu had physically assaulted her she could not have hurt her more. Some part of her
kept thinking that the whole scene had been an elaborate joke, a cruel but harmless initiation ceremony into the family, devised by Feroz. That any minute now, Freddy and Banu would walk into her room, wide, sheepish smiles on their faces, and confess to their role in Feroz’s silly joke. But even as she waited, she remembered something her mother had said during her engagement period. “I ran into Miss Amy Smith today,” her mother had said with a slight frown. “You remember her, na, your sixth-standard teacher? Seems she lived in Feroz’s building until a few years back. I gave her the good news about you, and she was very happy you were finally getting married. But something she said disturbed me, beta. She said that Banu Dubash was a little strange. I got the feeling that Miss Smith didn’t like her very much.”

At the time, Sera had brushed off her mother’s words as casually as flicking an errant eyelash from her cheek. “All Parsis are strange and eccentric, Mummy.” She laughed. “Nothing new there.”

But her mother was not convinced. “Maybe we should make some discreet inquiries. You know Miss Smith is very fond of you. She wouldn’t have said anything unless there was a reason.”

“Mummy, please. Don’t embarrass me. It’s Feroz I’m marrying, not his mother. And Banu mummy has been so sweet to me. Just the other day she told me that from the first time she met me, she knew I was the one for Feroz.”

Jehroo Sethna smiled. “You will learn, deekra. You never marry just a person. You always marry a family.”

Now, as she sat shell-shocked by the scene that had occurred, her mother’s words came back to Sera with the force of a speeding train. Please let Feroz come home early today, she pleaded. Please let me not have made a mistake by marrying him.

An hour later, Freddy Dubash knocked on her door and came in with a plate of scrambled eggs. “Sorry breakfast is so late, my dear,” he said. But when she raised her teary eyes to him, he looked away.
“Sorry also about that—about what happened out there. And this menses business—I don’t know what to say, my mother was like that too. Made life miserable for Banu. And now, to think she is acting like this also. Best if you stay out of her way during this time, deekra.”

She nodded. She spent the rest of the day in her room, reading a novel and pacing. Time had never passed so slowly. At one point, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and was shocked at the trapped, animal-like desperation she saw in her eyes. A few months ago, I had a successful job, a good life, could come and go as I wished, she thought. And now I’m afraid to leave this room, all because of the idiotic beliefs of a superstitious old woman. She blinked her eyes, as if the gesture would somehow alter this strange reality that she found herself encased in.

Her best friend, Aban, had argued with her when she’d told her she was giving up her job at Bombay House. “No, yaar, in this day and age, a woman should be independent,” she’d advised. At that time, swept up in Feroz’s declaration that he was more than capable of supporting his wife, she had put Aban’s words down to a simple case of envy. But Aban was right, she now realized. Today, she missed the simple routine of deciding what outfit to wear to work, the grand feeling of being swept up in the tidal wave of office workers as they poured out of the morning trains, the camaraderie that came from participating in the jokes and gossip that circulated around the office like unofficial memos, the satisfaction of doing a job that earned her praise from Mr. Madan. Never in her life had she experienced the heavy, oppressive feeling that now weighed on her as she sat in her bedroom and waited for Feroz to come home.

Banu opened the door for Feroz that evening. “What’s wrong, Mamma? Where’s Sera?” Sera heard him ask.

His mother sighed. Then, in a loud voice, she replied, “Don’t ask. Just don’t ask. But if you wanted to kill your old mother, you should’ve just delivered me to the Tower of Silence on your wed
ding day. Then, I wouldn’t have to die this slow-slow death. Being pecked by the vultures is better than this.”

Sera waited for Feroz to burst out laughing at his mother’s melodrama. She wanted him to set the old woman right with a few choice words, much as he straightened out his subordinates at work. Or, failing that, she wanted him to walk into their bedroom, scoop her up in his arms, and waltz out the front door with her while Banu stared after them openmouthed.

“Let’s go in your room and talk, Mamma,” Feroz said. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

When he came into their room an hour later, his face was a mask. “Hi,” he said. “What did you do today?”

Sera looked incredulous. What did I do today? she wanted to say. I wrote a new chapter to the Ramayana. I composed a symphony while eating lunch. I invented a device to shoot interfering mothers-in-law straight to the moon. “Nothing,” she said.

He smiled weakly. “Mummy says there were some fireworks today. It’s my fault. I forgot to warn you about not going near her while she prays.”

It was his fake humility that set her tongue on fire. “Let’s see. I’m not allowed in the living room when your mother is praying. I’m not to go in the dining room to eat. Or in the kitchen to cook. So basically, I’m to be a prisoner in this room while I’m having my period?”

“There’s no need to be dramatic, Sera…”

She made a sound between a cough and a hiccup. “I am dramatic?
I
am? My dear Feroz, your mother would’ve won an acting award for her performance this morning.”

“Keep your voice down, woman.”

“Take me out.”

“What?”

“Take me for a drive—Chowpatty, somewhere. Let’s go eat some bhel. I need to get out of this house, get some fresh air.”

“Sera, be reasonable. Mamma’s cooked dinner for us. How do you think she will feel if—”

“You used to take me for bhel all the time, Feroz. Your mamma had dinner cooked then, too.”

“That was different.”

“Why? What was different?”

He stared at her speechlessly, and she saw the answer in his eyes: The difference was between wooing her, making sure that she chose him over every other man, and knowing that he had won her and there was no reason to impress her anymore. She turned away from him, afraid that he would see the disappointment in her eyes. Because she wasn’t disappointed
by
him as much as she was disappointed
in
him, by his banality, by how, how
common
he had turned out to be.

He took her chin in his hand and turned her face toward him. “Look at me,” he said. Then, urgently, “Sera, don’t be like this. I told you, I’m sorry. Think of my position, please. I don’t want Mamma to feel that I’ve turned against her just because I’m now married. I’ll tell you what. On Friday, I’ll come home from work a little early and we’ll go out, just the two of us. Now, please. Just control yourself a bit.”

Four days later she joined Banu in the kitchen after she had showered. “Okay, Mamma,” she said, forcing a lightness into her voice. “All clear now. Let me prepare lunch today.”

Banu looked at her and took one step back. “Did you wash your hair?” she said in a strangled voice.

Sera stared at her blankly. “My hair? No, I’m going to wash it tomorrow, so—”

“So you’re still dirty, then. You can’t be pure until you’ve
washed from top to bottom. And in this state, you’ve walked into my clean kitchen.”

Sera began to laugh. She laughed until tears were rolling down her cheeks. She heard sounds emerging from her mouth, sounds that she herself couldn’t tell whether they were sobs or laughter. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gulab, her hands covered in flour, staring at her, a worried expression on her face. The look made Sera laugh even more. She thinks I’m going mad, she thought. Oh my God, I
am
going mad. Somehow the thought made her laugh harder.

“Shameless.” Banu’s hand shot out and slapped her cheek. “Laughing at your old mother-in-law. What kind of home were you raised in that you have no shame at all?”

The slap did what it was intended to do. The hysterical laughter that had formed at Sera’s mouth turned into bile. “You slapped me,” she said in shock, rubbing her cheek with her index finger. “You actually hit me.” Disbelief made her voice louder than she intended it to be.

“Liar,” Banu said promptly. “I just shook you, to get you out of your hysteria.” She turned to the servant. “Gulab, you are my witness. Did I touch this girl?”

Gulab looked from one to the other and then shook her head. “I wasn’t looking, baiji,” she said. “I was busy making my chappatis.”

“See?” Banu said triumphantly. “Even Gulab says I’m innocent. Wicked girl, to accuse her mother-in-law of hitting her. We’re not slum people, that we’d do such foul-bad deeds.”

Sera backed away from Banu, afraid of what she was seeing in the older woman’s eyes. Banu’s eyes had grown big and shiny, and there was a mad look in them that chilled Sera. Then there was a smugness on Banu’s face that alerted the younger woman to the fact that, whatever she said or did, Banu would win. That resistance was
futile. Even while the outline of Banu’s fingers lingered on Sera’s burning cheek, she was convincing Sera that what she felt was a phantom pain, born from her imagination. Sera felt that she was up against something insidious; that Banu was assaulting both her body and her mind. So this is evil, she thought to herself. Before, she had always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas—wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now, she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure. A quick look at Gulab’s impassive face told her the servant had long ago learned what she was just learning.

“I’m sorry, Mamma,” she stammered. “I…I’ll go back to my room.”

When Gulab came in with her lunch that day, she sent her away. “Eat, na, baby,” Gulab said, stroking her back. “Why you’re hurting yourself unnecessarily like this? In a family, a little tension-fension is to be expected.”

Sera wanted to tell Gulab of the civil, gentle way in which she had been raised. I have never been struck even once by my parents, she wanted to say, and I have never had to sit locked up in my own house like I am now. But her pride rebelled against having to confide in a servant. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m just not hungry.”

At four o’clock, Banu left to go to the fire temple. “I may be long today, dear,” she called to Freddy from the door. “I have to talk to Dastur Homjee about consecrating the kitchen, now that it has been fouled up by unclean hair.”

A few minutes later, there was a knock on Sera’s door. “May I come in?” Freddy said. Polly was not on his shoulder.

Freddy stood at the door and took in her disheveled hair, her red-rimmed eyes. “Come on,” he said quietly. “Let’s go in the living room and play some music.”

His pleading face did not allow Sera to refuse. “Okay,” she said. “Let me just freshen up a bit.”

When she walked into the living room, the stereo was already on. “Moonlight Sonata,” he said, looking up. “I thought something pensive and beautiful would be appropriate. We can leave this room and pretend we’re in a place where moonlight dances on the water.”