Independent Goa Observer

CROSSROADS-IV

In this final part of KEKI N. DARUWALLA'S "Crossroads", Nasreen plays the game of love to its natural conclusion.

Nasreen

PASSENGERS, PORTERS, parents. I am crowded with questions which I deflect, as best I can. Abba looks well, despite his salt‑and‑pepper stubble and his eyes a little pinched with anxiety. Amma asks me nothing and engages in small talk in the car. The rain is cold and the tyres hiss, especially when we negotiate the roundabouts. As we circle round the turquoise‑domed Sabz Burj at the very threshold of Nizamuddin, father asks for possibly the sixth time, ‘Things are all right?’ ‘Not so good’, I answer.

There is no point going over all this again. Parents have to be shocked when their daughters are divorced, or they wouldn’t be parents. There will be exclamations (from the mother) and much gasping (also from the mother). Lower down the social scale there would be breast‑beating. This happens when there is more than one woman in the house. (Fortunately my Mausi isn’t around. just wait till the two sisters meet. There’s going to be much surreptitious weeping, I know.) And still further down in the slums, cooking fires would not have been lit in the whole lane, obscenities galore would have been exchanged, and people may have reached for their staves and their axes.

Fortunately our choola is lit, for I’m feeling hungry within an hour. Mother is a shade disappointed by my undiscriminating appetite. To feel hungry at such a catastrophic moment is nothing but vulgar, her look seems to suggest. Mother’s chunni is already wet, what with wiping her eyes.

Recriminations, of course, there are in plenty as time goes by. Why didn’t I tell them earlier? Why could I not drop a line secretly? (There was no need of secrecy, Abba, I could have moved wherever I wanted. I could have written in their presence and they would have posted the letter. They are not that kind of people.) Then what kind of people are they? Parents can get difficult. Of course they could have sorted the whole thing out. Ammi, what could you have done, cajoled, begged, grovelled? just as well you didn’t come!

But she keeps rummaging in my past. Her questions are insistent, extending even to my sex life with Jamal. I am short and laconic in my answers. A bit unfair, I agree. I still don’t know whether Ammi was ever able to get what she wanted to ferret out the kernel of meaning from the husk of event.

At dusk, the familiar smells of Delhi drift into the room, that amalgam of diesel fume and smoke from burnt leaves which the cold keeps at eye level. The mist cowers in the wings. In the morning it will turn into a ground‑fog. I am home.

It takes Mother two days to notice that slight bulge in the belly. A number of questions circle round me like anxious crones. ‘There’s nothing Ammi, lay off!’

The first bout of nausea strikes within a week, a restless feeling that rises to the throat and slowly subsides, but never completely. Each upsurge is stronger than the previous one, forcing the belly, as it were, to move towards the gullet, till after hours of ebb and flow I finally throw up through both mouth and nostril. Later I recline against the bed‑rest. Father comes and just sits there, without saying a word, just sits there watching, perhaps hoping to catch some fleeting reflection drifting across the mirror of my mind.

Ammi can’t believe. I have no regrets. Sometimes I can’t believe that either. They think my life is in shambles. I don’t. Logic and notion must take a backseat sometimes. In four years one found love and one lost it. Love was a frontier and one had crossed it. Just once perhaps, but, so what? That was enough. And the final break was clean. Thank God I have been spared those endless quarrels ‑ the re‑enacted, recurrent ending of love.

Terrors, of course, are always around. But the moment they show up on your face, you’ve had it. They will swarm all around you and you will be lost in the whirlpool. Saqina was frank enough. Even the two nights she stayed with me she thought something would snap within me, perhaps I would start crying and thrashing around in my dreams. She expected the ice to mumble and moan, as it cracked beneath the shroud of sleep. In fact, it was she who started babbling away, and I had to shake her up to bring her out of that rapid‑fire burst of incoherences.

I think of her often. I even wrote a short letter, a one‑page affair, rather awkward and parchment‑stiff. Ammi tore it up the moment she scanned through it. ‘Divorcees shouldn’t write thank you notes to the other woman’, she said disapprovingly.

My terrors remain voiceless. They are centred around Jamal. Suppose he wants me back! Suppose he walks in and falls on his knees, or does whatever errant husbands do when they want their just‑booted‑out wives back in the house?

The nuances of the season change. The late evening sun now pours through the window, the light stippled as it floods in through the grille.

The child in the belly has already started speaking to me. His is the language of touch, and he tongues me with it. He has been there for over three months now, being baked the oven‑heat of my belly.

His face is downturned, and his face is upturned as he floats, gathering himself into himself in the waters of my womb. The seed rehearses its destiny all the time, every moment.

He is big. He is all over my belly; growing bigger by the hour. He isn’t a seed any longer. He is vegetation now, the lotus‑vine in the pond, reaching to all the comers of my being.

I hear a car stop and the wrought‑iron gate open. Abba and Ammi have both gone out, leaving Amina to care for me. She has lost some of her bluntness, or maybe she’s‑being extra careful with me. I need care, they all think, and I don’t want to disabuse them of any such notion, not till the baby comes, anyway.

I hear a car stop and the wrought‑iron gate clang open. I know who it is. Amina goes out to investigate. It is Jamal, she tells me, her face a little flushed.

‘I know. Send him in.’

She is surprised at my lack of surprise. Such reactions always amuse me. Jamal looks just the same. Eight months don’t always alter your physique. Amina leaves us together. Jamal is civility itself, but he rambles, like a book slow to announce its theme. All the while his fingers play a tattoo on his kneecap.

‘What brings you here, Jamal?’

‘Must something bring me here? Can’t I come just like that?’

‘You can’t. You are visiting your ex‑wife, remember? Something must have brought you.’

I speak very gently, the way one does when teaching mathematics to a favourite but uncomprehending nephew.

‘Ex‑wife, eh? Ex!’

‘Yes, Jamal.’

He again starts asking about my health and the baby’s. We’ve been over all this already, I tell him.

‘Whose is it?’

I laugh loudly, cruelly. I can’t help watch the tension crawl all over his face.

‘Does paternity matter that much to you, Jamal?’

‘Yes, damn it, it does. And you don’t have to laugh your silly head off. You’ve no idea what a son means to . . ,

‘A son? Whoever talked about a son? It could be a daughter. How would I know?

‘You didn’t even tell me about the Pregnancy! This ... this is almost theft!’

I’m suddenly enjoying this. I would like to keep him in suspense, like the long month I lived through after the articulation of the first talaq.

‘It is the Passi’s, I think.’

He does not absorb that too well. The ear‑drums take in the words, but don’t translate them to the brain, perhaps. I nod, looking him in the eye, but with sympathy rather than defiance. The eye takes in what the ear could not.

‘It is the Passi’s, I think’, I find myself telling his back, for he has already turned round to leave.

Courtesy: “The Minister for Permanent Unrest and other Stories” by Keki N. Daruwalla

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