Unravelling, page 14
“Maybe I could write down the model number in case you don’t find another one you like?” Deep suggested. Hiten was eager to leave.
“Please let him,” I urged.
On a piece of paper, Deep wrote down his number and I quickly took it.
My husband took my hand and led me out of the store. I couldn’t bring myself to look back at Deep’s face.
“It wasn’t bad but I wasn’t going to buy a bed from him,” my husband stated. “Fresh off the boat. You can tell: no class, uneducated, over-familiar. Trying that ‘you remind me of my friend’ routine. They see us and they think we are all family. Next he’ll be asking if he can move in with us and bring his entire family. I’ve seen his type a thousand times before.”
Deep was nothing like that. He would do anything he could to help you, I thought. I contained my emotions and held the number tightly in my hand, planning the moment that I could call.
“I will do whatever it takes to come to you,” Deep had said that night as he clung to me, not letting me go. “Just promise you will wait for me.”
“Of course I will wait for you.”
But then he got married, didn’t he? It didn’t make any sense.
As soon as we got home, I told Hiten that I needed to get some groceries. It started to rain and he grabbed the car keys to take me. I insisted that I needed to walk as we had been in the car most of the day. He looked out at the rain and said he would walk with me. I couldn’t think of what else to say, so we walked together in the rain. He held up an umbrella for me. All I could think of was Deep.
We walked back home having purchased groceries that we didn’t need and as soon as we got to the front door, I told him that I had forgotten garlic and said I would only be a few minutes and before he had time to say anything, I left him on the doorstep, running off in the rain, heading for a phone box. My heart was pounding. There was somebody in there and as I waited, the rain seemed to get heavier and heavier.
Seeing me soaking wet in my tent, the lady took pity on me, hurried her call and got out of the phone box. I took out the piece of paper Deep had given me and dialled the number.
“Not one explanation,” I shouted.
“Why did you get married? You said you would wait for me,” he interrupted.
“What? What do you mean? Why did you get married?”
“I didn’t. I came looking for you. Three hundred and seventy-eight days, I have been looking for you. You didn’t write.”
“I did, I did. My sister said you married a dentist.”
“Tara, Tara, listen to me. I am not married.”
The pips went. I searched for more coins. Of course he was married. She told me he’d got married. No more coins.
“Tara,” he said, “I came to find you. I promised you that—”
The money ran out. I let go of the receiver and began to scream and scream. A man opened the telephone box and asked if I was okay. Tears streamed down my face as I nodded. I placed the receiver down correctly and went to buy garlic.
My husband was there, waiting outside the shop in his car. I dried my tears quickly.
“What is it, Bhanu? Can I do something for you? Tell me.”
How could I even begin to explain that I loved another man and if I could, I would go back to him?
“It’s just sickness. I was feeling sick and I needed some air.”
“Look at you, you are all wet. You need to take care of yourself and of the baby.”
Unable to sleep, I spent all night not wanting to believe that Gauri would have lied to me; she wouldn’t have written a letter pretending to be her friend. She had picked me up off the floor and comforted me, slept next to me for nights on end making sure that I was okay. She gave me the money she had saved up so I could go out. She was the first person I confided in when I found out I was pregnant. As I looked back, perhaps it was guilt that made her pick me up off the floor, guilt that motivated her many actions; or perhaps, and this was harder for me to accept, some people are just cruel, they have a malicious poison in them that festers and the only way to express it is to passive-aggressively attack.
The slow loris is a cute teddy bear-like animal with large, beautiful eyes, a round head and small ears. It remains in a ball for most of the day, resting. If you see one, your instinct is to pick it up and rescue it. It is, however, a vicious, venomous animal and if it feels threatened, it can mix toxins into its saliva and fur and cause irreparable damage.
My sister had caused irreparable damage.
My mother and father were in the shop and my sister was upstairs trying on clothes she had just bought. She would buy them, try them all and return them, having worn one or two of the items. She didn’t need to do this as my parents gave her money but it was more the thrill of seeing what she could get away with.
“What do you think of this one?” she said, trying on a fuchsia blouse with enormous shoulder pads.
“Does it matter what I think? You’re going to return it anyway.”
She threw me a look, knowing that something was wrong, that I had crossed the line of our deal by not putting up with her shit or pandering to her.
“Deep is not married.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact so she would be caught off guard. She looked unfazed but I caught the flicker in her eye; she knew exactly what I meant.
I wanted to scream at her but dug my fingernail into my thumb so I could remain calm. “You read out a letter from your friend Shoba saying that he got married.”
“Really? He’s not married? But that’s what she wrote, Didi. You saw it. I don’t know why she would write that if he wasn’t married?”
“The letters I wrote and gave to you to send never reached him and he never sent that telegram.”
She adjusted the collar on her blouse and I could see her perspiring. “I don’t know what you are talking about.” She couldn’t bring herself to turn and look at me properly.
“Did you write that letter?”
“I did not.”
“I’m going to give you one last chance to tell me the truth, Gauri, and God help me if you don’t.”
“Didi, I don’t know what you are talking about. Whatever it is, you need to calm down. Think of the baby.”
“Tell me,” I screamed.
Gauri did not forward the letters I had given to her to send to Deep. She had faked sending the telegrams and the letter from her friend. Why? Because she thought I could do better. No, tell the bloody truth. “You were jealous. You have always been jealous of me. Ever since I came into the house, you really didn’t want me there.”
“No, Didi, it wasn’t like that. I was looking after you.”
“Looking after me? You watched me wait, you watched me starve myself, you watched me cut my hair off.”
“I encouraged you to go to the party and I gave you money for it and look how well you married.”
“Well?”
“Yes, you married well,” she shouted. “You came from nothing. I did that for you. I encouraged you to marry Hiten. That’s the thing with you, you never appreciate the things people do for you. You always make out that you are some kind of saint. Well, let me tell you, Mama and Bapa did not have to take you in and my life would have been different if they hadn’t. You think it was easy always being compared to you? And anyway, I saw him first and you had to take him too.”
And there it was. I wanted to tell her what she had done to me, that she had changed the course of my life but I took a deep breath and headed towards the door.
“That’s right, you walk away. Never face the things that you have done to other people. You made us leave the farm; it’s your fault we came to this miserable shithole. You could have kept your mouth shut but no, you had to interfere and open that mouth of yours. Don’t you look so innocent and surprised. Why do you think we got thrown out of the farm? It was because of you. Bapa had to start again because of you and not even a sorry. Your mother-in-law is right, you play the victim really well.”
I wanted to run towards her and beat her but I stopped myself. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that she had broken my heart.
I have replayed and forensically dissected this conversation over the years. Events happen, and then there are our versions of events – stories we tell ourselves that shape the narrative of our lives, sometimes true, but some re-remembered incorrectly. It has only occurred to me recently that it is all a question of perspective, that we might be the villain in someone else’s story and that someone is sitting on a therapist’s couch somewhere because of us.
Deep and I arranged to meet at the other side of London at the Croydon multiplex. I asked him if we could pretend just for that afternoon that we had found each other and had moved to York and were visiting the cinema there for the first time. It took me half the morning deciding what to wear and I chose a purple dress with a yellow belt. He liked it when my hair was untied and so I left it out.
On the way there my stomach was churning and I felt sick. I had told my husband that morning that I was going shopping with my sister. I was certain that she wouldn’t call or come to the house as we hadn’t spoken. Hiten gave me some money for the “shopping trip”. I felt hugely guilty but I needed this one last day with Deep, a day when I could find an ending to our story.
“Spend it all,” he urged me. “I know what you are like; you will come back with what I gave you.”
Before he left to go to work, I had this fleeting thought that perhaps I would not return home to cook his dinner, that I would risk it all and be pulled by my heart.
I looked at my husband. “I want to thank you for—”
“Bhanu, what is this thanking business. It’s not even that much. Imagine if I bought you a car; straight to the bedroom then.” He laughed. He could make things sound vulgar without meaning to. “Thank me later,” he replied, “you know exactly how.” He made a gesture with his hand and laughed. He killed any guilt or heartfelt goodbye because at that moment, I imagined him as a pervert popping out of a garden bush.
After I got dressed, I took one last look at the kitchen; it was spotless and then I left. On the Tube journey, I saw a couple holding hands and I imagined how long they had been together. I glanced at my wedding ring. My fingers felt slightly swollen so I took it off and tied it to the thin gold chain around my neck. I pretended that this day was day one of my imaginary life with Deep and we were just like them, out on a sunny Thursday afternoon. He had taken the day off work for our anniversary and shortly, I would tell him that I was expecting a baby. I imagined him lifting me in the air and then not knowing what to do next as he would be filled with such excitement.
As soon as Deep saw me, he ran towards me and hugged me, lifting me off the ground. He wouldn’t let go. When he finally put me down, he said, “You look even more beautiful than I remember and believe me, I have remembered you almost every minute of every day for the last year and a half.”
I studied his face. His beautiful lips that I was desperate to kiss, his eyes. I could not look directly into them, so I had to look away.
He broke the intensity, pointing to my dress. “No tent today then?”
I laughed. “Don’t make fun of it. It’s the summer of my discount tent.”
“Made glorious by this sun of York,” he replied.
Of course he would have understood the reference.
“And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house,” I continued.
“Tara, I don’t know the next line.”
I smiled. “I have been studying, you know, while you have been away.”
“I knew one day you would beat me at this game. I hope you are still studying to be a word doctor?”
I didn’t want to tell him that currently, I had given up on that particular dream. “I’m still working on it, reading when I can.”
“And what do you think of the magnificent York cathedral here?” He pointed to the roof of the shopping centre.
“It is majestic,” I replied. “Deep,” I began.
“Not now, Tara. Let’s do what we said we would do; I have bought us tickets.”
As soon as Deep’s father was better, he left Tanzania. He didn’t get to complete his exams. He was worried; my letters had stopped so abruptly that he borrowed money from a friend to come looking for me. At first, he went to the address on one of the letters and met the old woman there, who said she had never heard of us. Then he went to the post office; they had no forwarding address. He stayed near the post office, asking in every shop where we might have moved to, but nobody seemed to know. He lived just four miles away from the sweet shop, working three different jobs so he could send money home and stay and find me. We could have bumped into each other on any number of occasions, but we didn’t. If he had come just a month earlier, we would still have been at the address he had gone to and our story would have turned out differently.
“I didn’t expect England to be so cold and unwelcoming and I thought that…”
“There would be rolling hills and people dressed immaculately, drinking tea and discussing poetry,” I continued.
“Yes.” He laughed. “Well, here in York there are rolling hills.” He pointed at the escalators.
“I miss the wildlife and nature, Deep. I sit for hours watching nature programmes just to touch that corner of the world. I miss the smell of cloves, cardamom, jasmine and eucalyptus, even humble ugali. I miss sunsets and sunrises, the blue skies and rustling. Who would have thought that I would miss the sound of animals rustling in the bushes?”
“We can go back,” he replied.
“The place that we want to go back to doesn’t exist any more, Deep.”
“Come, Tara.” He took my hand. We ran into the cinema.
The film we had chosen was Kabhi Kabhie; it had already started, and people were annoyed that we had arrived late and were disturbing them to get to our seats. He held down my seat so I could sit down first, he then sat down and we continued holding hands like it was the most normal thing in the world.
I cried throughout that film, remembering the first time we had watched it in Tanzania, remembering his words that we would watch the film together in another time and place and I would laugh at the absurdity of my tears.
Why didn’t I believe in him? In us?
I began to sob uncontrollably, not caring that I was disturbing other people.
He held me. The film ended. Some cinema-goers glared at us, some muttered obscenities, but we remained in our own world, unable to leave.
We sat there until the cinema was empty and all that was left were discarded popcorn packets and cans. We sat there still holding hands, watching a blank screen. One of us knowing that this was one last moment for us and neither of us wanting it to end. He reached over to kiss me and every part of me wanted to kiss him back, but I couldn’t. If I kissed him, I would leave with him and so I turned my cheek and couldn’t stop crying.
He held my face in his hands.
“I’m so sorry, Deep. I’m sorry I didn’t believe in us.”
He put his fingers on my lips as if to savour that moment, as if he knew that he was creating a memory that would last a lifetime. My tears would not stop falling. He wiped them away.
“Remember, Tara, I said we would watch the film again. We can still change the story and watch it again and again until we are old. Come with me.”
And for one moment, just one moment it was a possibility.
I turned to look away from him.
“I’m pregnant.”
He paused and I knew exactly what he would say.
“It doesn’t matter. I will look after you, and after the baby like it was mine.”
“Of course it matters. I can’t do that to my family, not after all they have done for me, to my husband. What would the community say?”
“I don’t care about what other people think.”
“I care, Deep. I can’t do it. My husband, he’s a good man.”
“He is rude, Tara. Does he understand you? Does he see all the possibilities that lie within you? Because it is not about duty and responsibility, or repaying a debt to your family.”
I imagined never returning to the spotless kitchen and felt a flicker of joy. I immediately squashed it by thinking of my unborn child; I couldn’t deny the baby a home with its real father. I thought about the shame I would bring upon my family, the community gossiping and ostracising them, Hiten asking for his debt to be repaid and my father with no means to repay him. I couldn’t do that to them.
“I love my husband,” I whispered. “I do.”
“Why did you come? Why?”
“To say goodbye. I wanted to see you properly and say goodbye and to say that I am sorry.” I began to cry again. “Sorry for not waiting, for not truly believing that I was worthy of you.”
I got up and began walking away. He followed after me.
“Please, Deep. Don’t.”
“Tara,” he said. “‘Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along’.” He paused. “It’s Rumi,” he said. “I am reading Rumi.”
I turned and continued walking. Unable to dry my tears, I did not look back.
My sister was waiting back at the house. Had she told Hiten? I felt a surge of relief. There was no more hiding. Perhaps Hiten would understand; perhaps he would let me go. My husband looked anxious. “Bhanu, please try to stay calm.” It was then I saw Gauri’s tears.
“You need to come, Bhanu. Mummy is in the hospital; she has had another heart attack.”
Bapa clung to me when he saw me and then when I held him, he sobbed in my arms. She had passed away. Gauri began screaming. Mama was lying in bed and as I walked towards her, I did not recognise her; her soul had already left her body and she looked vacant. I went to touch her feet and held my body straight so I would not collapse with the grief that I felt at that moment. I took a very deep breath and recited a prayer.
As I knew with Ba, normally it is the men in the family that conduct the last rites. But my father asked me to do this for her and so my sister and I washed my mother’s body, dressed her and prepared her for her final journey. Gauri chose the journeying sari; it was a red crepe silk with twelve blossoms in the most vibrant colours. Bapa had bought it for her when he found out she was expecting Gauri. They had waited a long time for her.
