Mango Chutney: An Anthology of Tasteful Short Fiction. (3 page)

The next night, he was ebullient, having decided to take her, into his life.
He walked, a new spring in his step. As he looked at her, her eyes shone,
large and lustrous, and her personality seemed to have blossomed out like
a flower under his care. She was his creation, he thought, his alone. No
one else had the right to possess her.

As he revealed his feelings to her, she almost toppled off her chair. Could
such a miracle take place? She listened, drunk on happiness, as he out-
lined the wonder that was to be their life together, and how she would
never be deprived of anything again as her past would never be allowed
to overtake her future.

Soon, the joy drained out of her face, followed by resignation. He was
still full of his own generosity, when she put a hand on his arm to stop
him. Never had he seen such desperation on a human face, as she stood
up, looked at him with her heart in her eyes, and then began to walk away.
He followed her, reiterating his feelings, but her face seemed carved out
of stone as she continued to walk without even looking at him.

Finally he lost his temper. His face reddened with the effort and he
screamed at her. “Why do you lead me on?” She did not look back at
him, as he continued to rant. “I picked you up when you were a waif,
when you had nothing to look forward to. I transformed you. Why are
you so heartless?”

She was silent, and as he tried to grasp her shoulder, she evaded him
deftly turning into a by lane that led to her hovel. There were sleeping
figures all over and he had to avoid stumbling over them. His eyes soon
got used to the darkness, as the moonbeams shone down on them, creat-
ing little niches of light on the walls.

He felt they would never reach their destination. Dogs howled in the
distance. Finally, she stopped in front of her tiny hut, pushed open the
creaking door and looked back at him. There was a look of utter despair
in her eyes, one that made him hesitate. She beckoned him inside.

He followed unwillingly, into a space that was bare. A lit kerosene lamp,
whose glass was rimmed with soot, made the room seem tinier than it
was. Their shadows danced on the walls. He looked around, wondering
how a human being could actually live like this. As his eyes grew accus-
tomed to the little light in the room, he looked at the pale oval of her face
that glowed in the near-darkness. She looked back at him, and then lifted
a slim finger and pointed to a corner of the room.

He could see the faint outlines of a cot in the corner, with a huddled
form lying on it. She held his hand and drew him closer. A gaunt man
lay on the cot, covered with a thin worn sheet that must have seen many
winters. The man was still, his face immobile, as spittle flecked the corner
of his mouth. He lay there, staring blankly at the mottled ceiling. She
went to him, and spoke gently, but there was no response.

“He was involved in a motor accident. A huge tanker struck him from
behind, and he was left lying on the road for over two hours. When some
kind stranger finally picked him up and took him to the hospital, he had
lost too much of blood.” She stopped, tears flowing down her cheeks,
which she flicked away impatiently. She continued, trembling, “His brain
was damaged beyond repair. The doctors tried their best, but the verdict
was that he had been left bleeding for too long.” She sighed, “He is just
a vegetable now.” As she moved closer to the bed, half her face disap-
peared into the shadows. The next question dragged itself out of him,
even as he dreaded the answer to it. “Who is he?”

Her only answer was to swivel, pick up the kerosene lamp, and walk to
the wall furthest away from him. The lamp cast its light on the grimy wall,
on which an old photograph was hanging askew from a rusty nail. As he
peered at it, crinkling his eyes, he could see the people in it clearly. She
was dressed in bridal finery with the red
kumkum
bold on her forehead.
The smiles were resplendent, and the man by her side was neither gaunt,
nor immobile; his large eyes sparkled with love and pride as he looked at
his brand new wife. And then he knew, even as she looked at him long-
ingly, that the chasm between them had widened beyond description.

“You’re cute,” chuckled Anusha over her third glass of brandy. “So are
you,” he quipped followed by a large, gregarious laughter that echoed
through the melancholic expanse of the Malhotra mansion.

The mansion, built with stone and gravel was a colonial bungalow that
the erstwhile British Empire had left behind with Mr. Malhotra’s grandfa-
ther, for being a loyal servant of the Raj. Mussoorie, the royal Himalayan
hill station, was dotted with many such old crumbling properties and
owners struggling to keep them afloat.

Like many broken things, the mansion too had its origins in glory. It was
home to a romance that often found itself sprawled on the stone floor
after drinking and loving the night away. A playground for young love,
it was.

Mr. Malhotra was a man who had walked his early youth desperate to
find a vocation that met his inner flight. He had an impeccable rhythm to
the things he did. A masterly eye, a trained hand. Unfortunately, in small
town Mussoorie, these skills were of little merit. The letters he wrote in
the bank, as part of his job, were so carefully crafted that the bank even-
tually had to let him go. Even a leisurely place like Mussoorie couldn’t
afford an employee who spent four of his eight hours writing one letter.

Mrs. Malhotra had been gone thirteen years now. On a perfectly innocu
-
ousMonday evening, the chandelier above their dining creaked, pulled a
part of the ceiling with it and draped her fragile body in shards of glass.
And just like that, a marriage of twenty years came crashing down.

Sometimes, life takes away the cadence of a heartbeat. Everything feels
the same and yet, nothing is.
Mr. Malhotra moved to Delhi after the accident. A friend was kind to
offer employment with the government to help him file his life away. But
Mussoorie’s mountains had been as forgiving as they were harsh. So, he
packed his life in three suitcases and walked up the winding Himalayan
slopes to his large but broken mansion. To build home again.

Anusha, his youngest niece, had been the light in his fireplace. All of
nineteen years, she was spending her winter holidays with him. She loved
the mountains and the tall, musty ceilings of his mansion and the walls
lined with dusty books. Her camera had found a magic his eyes never
could.

Tonight, the gramophone played
Pakeezah
. The fireplace cast looming
shadows of the two. A moon the size of two suns peeked in from the
large French windows in the south. It was an evening so cold it crawled
underneath the skin and ate on their bones.

Anusha leaned in to hold Mr. Malhotra’s trembling hands. The half-baked
fire now emanated a consoling warmth. Maybe it was the brandy, or the
haunting song, or the melancholy of the mansion but her touch moved
something old and lost inside him.

His eyes longed to hold her and weep into her bosom, but propriety held
him back. She rubbed her gentle palms against the back of his hand, try-
ing to keep him warm. The glow of the fireplace danced a slow rhythmic
waltz in the living room. Desires laced with ancient memories walked out
of the heart’s closet.

Skin is contagious. Approximately 38 degrees Celsius and a humidity of
77% should make you envy a one-year-old’s attire. Ruffle through pages
of antiquated photographs where sepia-tinted women bedecked in noble
and other metals have the fortune of not wearing a blouse. Their cotton
and silk sarees crumple in their soft, brown folds, trained to drink sweat
off the human skin. How they carefully chose their blues, reds and yel-
lows! Those bikini-clad people who have the luxury of being on the other
side of a television screen take the same degree of envy. You wish to roll
your sleeves up to the sky and let Skin infect you. Skin. Bare. Breathing.

In an era, a couple of hundred years ago, British foreign direct invest
-
ment was the norm here. It was then that a certain Morality boarded
ships, travelled on pickled food for months, and reached the warm coasts
of India. It unloaded from its trunks vaccines for Skin. Churned out by
kind-hearted machinery back home, these vaccines arrived in fashion cut,
sewed and sleeved to modesty. Morality was prompt in joining the other
officials in their mid-noon siestas, tucked away from the daily sun and
their summerly escapades to nearby hills for refrigeration.

And these vaccines seem to havesurvived to this day. If you walk through
the railway stations of certain South Indian cities, you shall confront its
significant cross-section. A cross-section that establishes the kind of at-
tire clad in which you may enter roads, parks, malls, subsidized eateries,
schools and colleges, such that a minimum even number of eyes turn
towards you. Stitched clothes are a must. You may choose the extent
though. Front-buttoned blouses; shirts and kurtas that drape you at a
respectable distance from your body; trousers that are free-size; and such.
Unstitched additions secure you in case-specific ways. If you are a man,
your shirt collar is protected from your neck’s precipitates by a layer of
napkin. A dhoti, a lungi, a veshti, a sarong or creatures of such variety
may substitute for a pair of trousers during occasions of cultural solidar-
ity. A towel, an uttareeyam or an angavastram on your shoulder comes

in handy either to establish your status or to wipe off different kinds of
socially acceptable body fluids. It may also adorn your head during mo-
ments when you toil your skull with heavy baggage or an undesirable
sunbath.

If you are a woman, you call it a saree or a duppatta. The functions of the
two are clearly delineated and their appropriate usage may save you from
sexual assault. Drape the saree only in the style that the Indian National
Congress chose for the nation’s women such that they may walk the long
anti-British marches pure, with no stains of caste, occupation, language or
region. One convenience of this style is that your blouse’s front buttons
are secured away from any man’s eye; it lets you walk upright. Running or
lifting heavy weights in case of an emergency might require significant
maneuver. The duppatta, occasionally elevated to a petite ‘stole’ or to
the thickness of a ‘shawl’, may be half as long as a saree. It nevertheless
performs a higher function. It either ruffles or straightens any medically
acceptable curves. It is mandatory to assure the onlooker of the kurtaclad woman’s moral status. “No, she is not a bra-burner, foreigner or an
alien. She shall be of no threat to the attire choices of the women of your
house or to the sexual composure of the men of your house.” Safety
pins, here, insure you against accidental infections of Skin.

A peculiar case in the typology of attire in certain South Indian cities is
my grandfather’s shirt. I first tried it when I was 6. It might have rained
heavily on my way back home from school. I might have gotten drenched.
I might have asked him or my grandmother for a quick change of clothes.
I might have run around the school, fallen and ripped my school uni-
form. I might have arrived back home torn, bruised, crying and eagerly
awaiting some steaming idli and buttermilk. I might have just liked the
shirt’s colour. I might have asked for it. The sure part of this history is
that I arrived at that shirt at five thirty, one cloudy April evening.

This shirt began to grow on me. For a long while, it was a matter of pride.
I walked around with a short skirt or a trouser pair that drowned in the
shirt’s length. It felt like a slice of adulthood was bestowed upon me.
I punctuated my conversations with ‘righto!’ like my grandfather did. I
rode my little bicycle straight-spined. I ran crisscrossing a row of fluores-
cent green, orange and blue pots that were queued beside the water lorry
that arrived five minutes late every morning. They seemed safe traffic-jam
to trickle through in a two-wheeler. An old basket for a helmet. I used
traffic-hand-signals as I walked through my school corridors.
Sixth standard B section was where I stopped. When I graduated into
that classroom, adulthood started to wear away. It was a norm to whisper
to your neighbours who became your best friends. You no longer wore a
pinafore or a pair of half-trousers. Your uniform was composed of attire
and accessories handpicked by your school authorities. A long kurta and a
salwar. All in cotton, neatly ironed and sturdy. Slack-sleeved and mounted
with a duppatta, to assure you are vaccinated against the skin. A pair of
socks and shoes to be prepared for an athletic sport at any moment of
life-threatening emergency. I was allowed a pen now. I sat in the girls’ row
of benches in the room and that was a foot away form the boys’. The
skirt, when I returned home, was no longer short. My grandfather’s shirt
could not drown it.

The peculiarity of this shirt is only for a tuned eye. Specially designed for
certain humid summers, I discovered that only certain tailors were ca-
pable of producing it. And these people were made invisible by their an-
tique, loyal pool of customers and a board at their shop that read ‘Gents
tailors’. I guess they might have denied copyrights to large manufactur-
ers; they refuse to talk about politically unsanitary issues to unwelcome
little girls. This shirt could take any shade of brown, black, khaki, serious
blue, maroon or grey. It was made of cotton, usually: very fine weave and
tough. It intensely contrasted my grandfather’s daily dose of laughter.
It was sleeved a little more than the usual slack’s. It had two mirroring
pockets on its left front-half, right beside the wearer’s heart – one outside
and one inside. It was buttoned left over right. It was huge.