‘For how long?’
Sumi does not know; in fact, she makes it clear she does not care about it either way. She seems, in a strange way, relieved at having the burden of decision taken off her. The girls cannot argue with such indifference; they cannot speak with their grandfather, either. His authority has been too long established for them to think of questioning it.
Yet, Aru lingers. ‘You go on,’ she says. ‘I’ll follow you later on my moped.’
What had she hoped to achieve by staying on? There is nothing in the house to hold her there. The momentary desire to rebel, to be by herself, not to follow her grandfather meekly at his beckoning, leaves her. It seems pointless. She has to be with her mother and sisters. And there is her grandmother, Kalyani.
But Kalyani does not know what has happened, she has not been told that they are coming. Her surprise at seeing them, her open-mouthed stupefaction when she realizes they are staying, speak of her ignorance.
‘But what’s the matter?’
‘We’ll speak of it tomorrow. Right now, we need to sleep.’
Suddenly abandoning her questions, Kalyani throws herself with a frenzy into making arrangements for them to sleep. She pulls out sheets, old saris, pillows, cushions, and flings them about, speaking ceaselessly all the while.
‘Sumi, you take my bed, I’ll sleep here on the floor. Aru, this is for you ....’
And then Seema tells her. Throwing off the blanket Kalyani has covered her with, she sits up and announces the fact. Bluntly, matter-of-factly. And bursts into tears. The exaggerated, purposeful tears of a child, who, seeing her mother, dredges up her sorrow over an old hurt. Kalyani looks at Sumi’s face for confirmation and finds it there.
Kalyani’s reaction astounds her granddaughters. ‘No,’ she cries out, ‘no, my God, not again.’ She begins to cry, sounding so much like an animal in pain that Aru covers her ears against the sound. Suddenly, the dam that Sumi had built with her silence gives way and they are submerged in the awareness of loss. Aru is overcome by a sense of unreality; she finds herself unable to connect herself to her surroundings, to these people around her and their distress. My God, what’s happening to us and what am I doing, lying here on the floor like a refugee?
‘We’re staying the night,’ Sumi had said, but it is obviously going to be a much longer stay. The girls who have brought nothing with them but a nightdress and a toothbrush apiece have to keep moving up and down between the two houses, getting the things they need for each day, living, not out of suitcases, but out of plastic bags. Aru, with her innate sense of order has to work hard at not becoming part of the house, putting things in a kind of temporary order, so that the mattresses, rolled up each morning, are left on the floor and the clothes, folded as soon as they are dry, are not put away but piled on the table. The room is like a guest’s, who, having to catch a train in the evening, is almost packed and ready to leave. Kalyani enters the game, too; the extra cups, plates and glasses go back into storage after every meal, from where they have to be retrieved each time they are needed.
‘How long do we go on like this?’
Aru has just returned from her third trip of the day, getting some books, and her face is hollow with exhaustion. ‘Do you think, Charu, he’s dead?’
‘Don’t you think Sumi would have known if he was? No, I don’t think he’s dead.’
‘But then what? My God, we’ve got to do something.’
‘What do we do? Put an ad in the paper saying—“Come home, Papa, Sumi ill, all forgiven”. Or do we stick him among the missing persons on TV?’
My father a missing person? Do we put him among the juvenile delinquents, the retarded children and adults? And what do we say? Missing, a man of—forty-six? No, forty-seven. And—but how tall is he? He’s thin—so thin you can count his ribs. So we say ‘of slender build’. And a wheat complexion—that’s how it’s put, isn’t it? He has a scar over his left eyebrow. Wears glasses. Speaks English, Kannada, some Marathi, and a kind of Hindi we all laugh at. Fingers like mine—knobbly, large-knuckled, tapering at the tips. Feet like Seema’s—long and narrow. When he’s pleased with you, he says ‘Shabaash’ and when he speaks English, he begins almost every third sentence with a ‘You see’, pausing after that. And I said to him once, ‘But what is it we have to see, Papa?’ and he laughed.
Suddenly, Aru stops. But I don’t know him, I don’t know him at all, she thinks despairingly. All these things mean nothing, they don’t add up to anything, certainly not to a reason for walking out on us. Even Sumi says she doesn’t know why he did it and I have to believe her, she doesn’t lie, but ....
‘You see,’ Charu says in reply to Aru’s long silence, ‘there is really nothing we can do.’
Aru is soon to realize something else: they are trapped into inactivity by that greatest fear of all—the fear of losing face. Gopal’s desertion is not just a tragedy, it is both a shame and a disgrace. There was a time when a man could have walked out of his home and the seamless whole of the joint family would have enclosed his wife and children, covered his absence. Now the rent in the fabric, gaping wide, is there for all to see. Nevertheless it has to be concealed, an attempt made to turn people’s eyes away from it. Aru realizes that none of the family have visited them, not Goda, sharer of all Kalyani’s joys and sorrows, or her daughter Devaki, Sumi’s special ally, or even Ramesh, so close to Gopal, and such a constant visitor to their house. Their staying away is deliberate; they know, but they don’t want to come to us with the knowledge. Only Nagi, after ten years of working with Kalyani, has no such scruples. She knows—has Kalyani told her? Or is she guessing?—and makes this clear to them by her repeated ‘poor things’, her clucks of sympathy.
‘Stop staring, Nagi,’ Aru exclaims angrily. ‘Have I suddenly grown an extra nose?’
‘What’s the use of getting angry with me? It’s all our luck, it’s written here, we can’t escape it. Look at my poor Lakshmi, we thought he was such a good man and he left her for that other woman ....’
‘Oh God!’
‘What’s wrong with your sister?’ Nagi asks Charu when Aru stalks out.
‘Nothing, you know how she is. And for God’s sake, Nagi,’ Charu tries to change the subject, ‘what is that you’re wiping the floor with?’
‘It’s Amma’s petticoat. What can I do? I don’t want to ask Amma to get me a mopping cloth, not at such a time, I know she has troubles, and you—don’t you waste your time talking to me, you go on with your reading. Yes, you study and get a job soon so that you can help your poor mother.’
Aru hears her and thinks—maybe Nagi’s way of saying it straight out is better, after all. Anything is better than this deviousness, this circling round the truth.
But the truth is that there is no moment when tragedy is certain. Each moment they are balanced on the edge of hope; every time the gate creaks, it could be Gopal, each time the phone rings there is the possibility that they will hear Gopal’s voice saying ‘Gopal here’. Even Sumi, despite her apparent stoicism, is not immune from this hope. Aru realizes it the day she comes home with Gopal’s scooter and Sumi, alerted by the sound, rushes out. Aru, getting off the scooter, sees the eagerness on her mother’s face, watches the hope dying out. For a moment they stare at each other wordlessly. Then Sumi goes back in and Aru thinks, I’ve got to do something.
That same night she rings up Premi.
Premi’s arrival is like the acknowledgement of a crisis. For the first time something is spelled out that none of them has admitted so far. Perhaps it is this that makes Sumi say abruptly to her sister, ‘Why have you come?’
She recovers and corrects herself almost immediately. ‘That’s a stupid