The Blue Bedspread (12 page)

‘Get me another drink,’ he says. ‘That’s the least you can do.’

‘Yes,’ she says and she turns.

How should we end this story? We could have her go down to get him the second drink, hear the crackle as it hits the ice in the steel glass, climb the stairs again and listen to him talk about the school, the child she couldn’t give him.

Or we could end it like this:

She returns with the drink, he doesn’t even hear her footsteps, he’s looking out, far away, at the lights on Park Street and she walks closer towards him, the glass in her hand. She bends down, puts the glass on the terrace, she will need both hands, his back is turned, the first drink must have blunted his senses since he can’t hear or feel that she is only two feet away.

Suddenly there is a scream which no one will hear, a body, dressed in a white shirt and grey trousers, white socks and black shoes, falls into the lane which not many people use since it’s more like a dumping ground, choked with garbage from the buildings nearby.

Dry garbage, the kind which doesn’t begin to smell and, therefore, need not be cleared in a hurry: old newspapers, scraps of iron and broken furniture. So no one hears the body fall except for a cat which scurries away in fright.

After a while, even the cat returns, the blood congeals around the head, nothing moves as the night grows heavier and floods the lane with darkness washing away whatever chance there is for a stranger to discover the body.

A little later, a red handkerchief, folded neatly, falls from the terrace and halfway down a bit of it opens out, continues to fall, veering just a few inches from its path because of a light wind.

It comes to rest on the body, on his leg, inches above the knee and my sister walks down, free at last. There’s a taxi waiting and she tells the driver to take her to what was once her home, in the neighbourhood where the pigeons lie sleeping in their cage.

‘You should have seen their faces,’ she says.

‘What about their faces?’ I ask.

She begins to laugh.

It’s an April afternoon, so hot that it’s not yet four, and from the balcony I have already seen two people whose slippers stuck to the tar on the street making them trip.

The nor’westers are late. The rain must have lost its way in the hills, deliberately, she says. The winds must have got bored stiff travelling the same route, the same sky, the same sea, year after year, and that’s why this time they have decided to take a break.

We have closed the windows, she has wet two towels, draped one on each of the curtains. The ceiling fan is on, we have also set up a table fan which keeps moving from right to left, from left to right.

‘Why do you need two fans?’ I ask.

‘Water evaporates, you idiot,’ she says. ‘It makes the room cool.’

She laughs, she laughs so hard that her eyes close, I can see her chest rise and fall, she throws back her head, I can see her neck, her hair, her teeth. The laugh crinkles her face, makes her cheeks almost touch her eyes. If I shut off the sound, it would seem she’s crying, because I can even see the water collecting in her eyes.

I have never seen her laugh like this before, she now bends over, from the waist, holding on to the armrests of the cane chair, her hair falling over her face, I can see her eyes again, through the black strands, closed.

‘You should have seen their faces,’ she says.

‘Stop laughing and tell me the story,’ I say, mock angry, mock irritated.

And she purses her lips, makes a face, gets up from the chair and says she needs to take a break. She walks out of the room.

‘Where are you going?’ I ask.

She doesn’t answer, just flings the drapes aside. I can hear her cough in the next room.

‘Are you OK?’ I ask, a bit worried at the sudden silence of her laughter.

And at that moment, she walks in. ‘I have wiped the laugh off my face,’ she says and she smiles. ‘Now I can tell you the story.’

‘How did you do that?’ I ask.

‘I remembered,’ she says. ‘But first, let me tell you what I told them.’ And she begins.

* * *

There are four of us at the office. One, Two, Three, and myself, all pregnant, and every day, from Monday to Saturday, at one thirty in the afternoon, we sit down in the lunch room, at the same table, unpack our steel tiffin boxes, have lunch, and tell stories of our mothers-in-law. All of us, except me. I keep quiet. Because I have no problems with my mother-in-law. They want to know the secret but I evade the question.

One says her mother-in-law sleeps until 10 a.m. while she has to get up at five in the morning, do the dishes from the previous night, boil the water, make tea, knead the flour, make chapattis for her husband’s tiffin, his father’s breakfast, then serve bed tea, take her bath, wash her husband’s dirty socks, iron his office clothes, supervise the maid as she sweeps and scrubs the floors, ensure that the scrubwater has a few drops of Dettol, then dress up, run downstairs so that she can get the chartered bus to the office. And the moment One enters home at around 5.30 p.m., it starts again: cooking dinner, washing up, serving the food, wiping the dining table while the mother-in-law watches TV, father-in-law belches trying to read the day’s newspaper, husband is asleep or with friends from office at some club, drunk, while she throws up at night, the baby moving inside. It better be a son, says One’s mother-in-law.

Two says her mother-in-law isn’t a slob, she cooks too, she washes the dishes and the clothes but only for her son, Two’s husband. No more and no less. She will pack lunch for her son while Two has to cook hers, she will iron her son’s clothes while Two will have to wait for the iron to be free and then hurriedly do hers. She will cook dinner in measured portions, precise, so that when her son has eaten, there’s nothing left except the leftovers and Two will then have to boil an egg late at night when everyone is asleep, over the lowest flame so that the noise of the gas doesn’t wake anyone up. Her baby needs its proteins and she buys an egg every day from the market near the office, hides it in her bag, along with the napkins, salt and pepper wrapped in paper which the mother-in-law never checks. All Two’s mother-in-law wants is a boy.

Three says her husband beats her up and mother-in-law watches. Not real bad as in documentaries, just pulls at her hair or slaps her hard on the cheek. One day, her husband had come home from work and couldn’t find the TV remote, told Three to look for it and while she was bending down on the floor, looking under the bed to see if the remote was there, he kicked her saying, ‘Why don’t you know where the remote is?’ She fell, chipped her tooth, tasted her own blood and could hear mother-in-law sitting on the bed laughing, saying, ‘Young women don’t take care of their husbands any more.’ He joins in saying he was a good football player when he was in school, doesn’t mother remember that and mother says yes, that’s why he can kick so hard. Sometimes, he beats her up just like that. Like when his friends had come and he told her to get the ice for the drinks and she said there had been a power cut and the icetray hadn’t been refilled. And he got up from the living-room sofa, ran to her and hit her, she came crashing against the fridge and his friends were embarrassed and said they had to leave while mother-in-law looked straight into her eyes. Take care of his son inside you,’ she said, ‘get the ice from the market.’

Imagine my state. These are the three stories that get repeated every day with some frills added one day, something subtracted the next. Maybe they exaggerate but one thing is sure, these stories are the pillars on which they build, One, Two and Three, their dream house where for an hour every day, to the sound of lunch boxes being opened and closed, they live in peace, away from their mothers-in-law.

Surely, there are other things happening in our lives, like favourite TV shows, our bosses’ philanderings, the other women in the office, the telephone receptionist who is having a love affair on the phone. And we do talk about these things, once I even told them about the old man and the pigeons, but the mothers-in-law sit, invisible, like three elephants in a tiny room and although you can turn your face away, forget that they are there, try to change the subject, whenever we look up, their huge shadows fall across the floor and you know that there’s no escaping since the three elephants are all stacked up against the door.

At first, they asked me about my mother-in-law and I said things were OK, not so bad. ‘What do you mean, Four? Tell us, Four, about her? Is she nice to you? What do you have to do to keep her happy? Doesn’t she take sides when you fight with your husband? How is your husband, Four?’

The first few weeks, these questions kept buzzing round and round the table, like items from a women’s magazine, and I kept flicking them away with smiles. And before these questions could start testing my patience, ironically, it was One, Two and Three who came to my rescue. They stopped asking me these questions.

Perhaps they realized I’m not the type who opens up, maybe they thought I’m going through worse, a hell so bad I can’t even talk about it, and that I have a remarkable indifference to pain, I don’t know. Or they thought, secretly, that I lived in that dream world where the daughter-in-law doesn’t have to do a thing, she just adorns the house. Either way, they used me as a sounding-board, someone their age but at the same time some kind of elderly figure who’s part counsellor, part friend, part sister, who has seen everything and, therefore, is above and beyond this daily cycle of anger and hate.

Until one afternoon, I decide that I have to do my bit too. When it’s time, we all gather in the lunch room and I tell them to come close, and like little girls they follow my instructions and I tell them that what I’m about to say may shock them but they shouldn’t shout or anything. They should only listen and they say, ‘Yes, Four, we will do exactly as you say, we have been waiting for a long time to listen to your story and today is a very special day.’

I take a deep breath and I tell them that every night while they iron clothes, do dishes, chop vegetables, bend down to look for the remote under the bed, endure the insults and the jeers, I am away, far away in my bedroom, lying alongside my mother-in-law, our bodies wrapped around each other, she between my legs wiping away, with her lips and her tongue, whatever traces lie of the intruder: her son, my husband.

* * *

I tell her to lower her voice, what will the neighbours say.

But she laughs once again, it’s all girl talk, she says, drawing me into it and we laugh and we laugh, the two of us together, until the sun begins to set, the towels on the windows dry, one falls off, the April afternoon slips into an April evening which then becomes an April night, the nor’westers knock at our window, waiting to be let in, but we have to keep them waiting since the lampshade may topple, break the stars moving on the blue bedspread which now flaps in the wind of two fans, one on the ceiling, one on the floor.

There’s the white washbasin, there’s the black iron hook and there’s the brown hinge of the bedroom door. If you stand in the veranda, a couple of feet away from the wall, and look at these three things, you will discover that all three are in a straight line. Absolutely straight.

How important is this fact, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, like the hundreds of other coincidences that need to happen to give this city its symmetry, its order. Or maybe it’s nothing, just a storyteller’s little twist to facts that are, to the rest of the world, of no consequence at all.

But I cannot let it pass.

Because it’s the straight line, exact, mathematically precise, that strings the three scenes together. These are scenes from your mother’s life and perhaps, in all the swirls and loops, the arcs and triangles of events and thoughts that make up my past, these three scenes are held together by that straight line. Fixed, unable to bend or curl along with the others, unable to slip from memory to forgetting.

That’s why when you begin to walk on your own, when you are tall enough to stand on the floor and reach the washbasin, I will bring you here. I will ask you to raise your arm, and keeping your fingers pressed to the wall, I will tell you to walk slowly, feel this straight line, the white chalk, the roughness of the wall, until you reach the end. So that in that one sweep of your little hand, your fingers would have touched the washbasin, the iron hook and the hinge on the bedroom door, the three points where three things happened to your mother and I.