To Premi this conversation conveys a message—not so much ‘we’re not going to talk about it now’ as ‘I’m not going to talk to you about it.’ She finds it impossible after this to say the things she had wanted to say, to ask the questions that have been thronging her mind since Aru spoke to her.
The questions come only after Sumi has gone to bed. Sumi has moved out of the room she shared with her daughters into a bedroom in the other wing. With the large hall between them, it is almost impossible for her to hear them; nevertheless they speak in low tones. The conversation centres around: where is he? Has no one any idea? Only when they have exhausted all the possibilities of this do they go on to the ‘why’.
And now Premi, practical and matter-of-fact as she had decided she would be, brings out the list she has ready. Quarrels? Money? Is it because of what happened in the Department? His resignation was a hint that Gopal was not in a very normal frame of mind. No man gives up a University teaching job just like that! Perhaps the attack on him by his students threw him—here Premi hesitates, for these are Gopal’s daughters—off balance?
But the girls have nothing to offer her, no answers to any of these questions, only an acceptance of the fact of his having gone away as opposed to her disbelief.
Premi ventures on her next question with even more hesitation, and this time not because she is speaking to Gopal’s daughters but because she is talking of Gopal and Sumi. (And this is the thought that has been beating in her mind since last night—Gopal walking out on Sumi? I can’t, I never will believe it.) Is there any other woman? she asks.
She is astonished that there is a pause, a kind of jerk before a reply. The two sisters give an impression of having spoken about this, of having argued about it.
‘There was an anonymous letter to Sumi a year back.’
‘Don’t be silly, Charu. Nobody believed that. Sumi laughed, you know that. Kantamani and Papa! She was such a—so pathetic! And anyway, Premi-mavshi, she isn’t here any more, she’s gone abroad.’
‘What does Sumi say?’
‘Nothing.’
Premi shouldn’t be surprised, not if she remembers Sumi’s response to Gopal’s resigning. ‘For Heaven’s sake, does it matter why he’s doing it! He doesn’t want to go on and that’s that!’
‘But, Sumi, what about money? I mean, how will you live?’
‘He’ll get a job—he told me someone has already approached him, they want him to write some articles, maybe even work for them. Oh, I’m not worried!’
But, for God’s sake, this is her husband and her marriage of twenty years, Premi thinks ....
Their talk becomes rambling and inconsequential after this. They keep pulling things out of the past, each memory like a grappling hook bringing up a question—was it because of this? At times the talk gets snagged on the unsaid things that lie between them: They must have quarrelled, I heard them once, late at night ....
Perhaps it’s because of me, the things I said to Papa when he decided to resign ....
Sumi took Gopal and her marriage too casually, she never cared as much as she should have ....
‘Fate.’
The word, thrown into their midst by Kalyani, startles them. Premi had been both anxious and apprehensive about her mother’s reaction. How has she taken it? Will she create a scene? But Kalyani has been surprisingly silent, especially this last hour, and entirely still, except for the ceaseless movement of her hands stroking her tiny feet as if they hurt her. She has made her presence felt only by her loud yawns at regular intervals. And now suddenly she says ‘Fate’. And just as abruptly walks out, leaving the word lingering among them. None of them is inclined to pick it up. In fact, no more is said.
Lying in bed, listening to the easy breathing of her two nieces on the floor, Premi is thinking of how they are always on the same side of the invisible dotted lines that mark out alliances and divides in families. The relationship between them arouses a sense of deprivation in her. Sumi and I, we were never like this. She was ahead of me and I was forever trailing behind, never able to catch up with her. And it makes no difference that I am now a successful professional, mother of a seven-year-old son, wife of a prosperous lawyer. The moment I come home, all this dwindles into nothing and I can feel myself sliding back into adolescence, getting once again under the skin of that frightened child Premi who’s always waiting here for me.
‘Why are you here?’
At the question, all Premi’s sense of being needed, of being able to offer solace and help, had seeped away from her, leaving her again the child who, heart thudding in fear, had climbed up the forbidden stairs, opened the door and met the blank stare, the question: Why are you here?
‘My father never spoke to me until I was ten,’ she had told Anil after their marriage and he had not believed her. Just as she wouldn’t have believed, if she had not seen it herself, that there could be families like Anil’s. At first it had been like watching a movie—it was pleasing, interesting, pretty, but it could not possibly be true. People did not really talk to each other so easily, they did not hug and touch and use words of endearment so casually. No, it was a false picture. The truth was a father who stayed in his room, who never came out, never spoke to you, a mother who put her hand on your mouth so that you did not cry out ....
‘My father did not speak to me until I was ten.’
But that’s not true. ‘Why are you here?’—those four words he had said then had meant nothing. He had scarcely looked at her when he spoke. The first time he really talked to her was when she had completed her medical finals; he had called her up to his room then, summoned her actually, to tell her she would be marrying Anil.
Since then, going to his room has been a formality she has scrupulously observed on every visit home. And he speaks to her—no, not as if she is his daughter, she has seen Gopal with his daughters and she knows that this is not how fathers speak to their daughters—but as if she is an acquaintance. But even this is an ordeal for her; the early years have so marked their relationship that she finds it difficult to speak to him. She is stiff, uneasy, often, like a stupid child, repeating his words as if bereft of her own. It will be the same this time too, she thinks, climbing the stairs slowly, reluctantly, as if there is still the possibility of being dragged down, of her fingers being prised away from the railings.
And it is—exactly the same. He asks her about Nikhil, speaks of Anil and of Anil’s father, who had been his colleague at one time. Nothing is said about Gopal and Sumi.
Of course, he cannot speak of Gopal. To mention Gopal, to speak of what he has done, is to let down the drawbridge into his own past. Nothing has changed, nothing ever changes here. I was a fool to imagine I could do something, that I could be of any use.
‘I think I’d better go,’ she tells Aru apologetically. ‘I’d stay if I thought I could help, but there’s nothing I can do. If we knew where Gopal was, perhaps, but ... You’ll call me, Aru, won’t you, when you find out where he is?’
‘That may never happen.’
‘Don’t be silly. Any time you need me, for anything, even if it’s not important, just ring me up and I’ll come right away.’
PREMI’S VISIT, IF nothing else, has opened a door through which the family enters, converging on Sumi and her daughters to perform its role. They congregate like mourners after a death in the family—but a death in a distant land, a death without a body. There is a blank space where the body should have been. None of the stock phrases, none of the comforting formulas, fit. Even to speak of what has happened as a tragedy is to make it one, for it is like affirming that Gopal will never