The Blue Bedspread (5 page)

But Father is so angry and I am so scared that I can’t tell him all this now. Not once does Sister tell him that it was I who got the change from the conductor today. She remembers everything by heart, she doesn’t remember I could have made a mistake.

My sister goes to sleep without eating dinner, she always does that when she’s angry and hurt. There are marks on her face where Father hit her. She will now have to stay home for a few days until the marks disappear. I also don’t eat dinner, I say my stomach hurts, that’s the least I can do.

We are lying in bed, Bhabani has switched off the lights, from the drawing room, we can hear the clock ticking. And when she is alone with me, Sister begins to cry, her face turned towards the wall. Through her tears, she asks me, ‘What happened to the one-rupee coin?’

I don’t know what to do, I don’t say anything.

‘Do you remember how much you gave me?’ she asks. I don’t say anything.

The night closes in on me, I close my eyes tight, I lie awake as she cries to sleep, hurt and hungry. I keep looking at the wall on which I can see big, scary patterns from the headlights of the trucks outside.

The next morning came and the next and the next, winter came, my sister never once talked about that evening, that one-rupee coin, the English team arrived, led by Tony Greig, who was so tall his bat didn’t touch the ground, our bowlers dropped several catches, it was the year they had begun showing the matches on TV.

Geeti began wearing a bra, letting one strap peek from under her top across her shoulder.

Milestones, landmarks, passed us by.

Today, almost everything inside me has stopped growing except the guilt of that afternoon. Like a monster which gets its endless supply of food and water from some place we shall never know, it keeps growing and growing inside me every day and all I can do is to wait for it to swallow me whole.

At a different time, maybe at a different place, I would have told you other stories. Of the two Alsatian dogs in the neighbourhood who bit into our cricket balls until we poisoned them one night. Of the different ways in which our neighbourhood has changed, so many you can’t count them on your fingers: how the road, on either side of the tram tracks, has widened, a twenty-four-hour telephone booth, with glass cubicles, has sprouted at the street corner. How Bhar And Sons, the shop which once sold iron rods, is now the local cable centre, satellite dishes sit atop its asbestos roof, cable wires sag across its sky.

Plus a lot more, I would have twisted fact, fleshed out fiction, but tonight, looking at the darkness looking at me through the window, there’s only one image that emerges, like a photograph half-processed, in the yellow light of the table lamp in my room.

It’s the image of a child lying, on his stomach, in a tiny garden, his elbows making two hollows in the damp earth, his fingers pressed like sepals against his face. There’s no one beside him, just a parallelogram of light that falls on the grass from a large window.

Who is this child, it’s not clear, all I know is that this story will have a happy ending.

I close my eyes and concentrate; so hard they prise free from the sockets and I let them fly across the room. Dodging below the fan, in between the bookshelves, through the green window, past the red curtains, down into the street. In and out of the traffic, inside a tram, around the passengers, some sitting some standing.

Across Esplanade, past the beauty salon on Park Street where two Chinese women in black jeans wait for customers; across the Maidan, carried on by the breeze, through the trees cold and quivering.

I concentrate harder; let the eyes glide over the Hooghly, briskly skim its black surface, barely touching the buffaloes that wallow, their snouts above the water. Below the bridge, into the railway station, over the crowd, the vendors running with their trolleys, into the train that’s pulling out of the platform. They flit from one coach to the next, up and down the berths, left and right of the aisle, watching and looking until the eyes see the child, one hand across his face, trying to sleep.

His mother sleeps on the berth below, his father sits at her feet reading a newspaper. Maybe it’s the light in the coach, the two green lamps directly overhead that stare at him through their wire cages and keep him from falling asleep. The child turns over so that his back faces the lamps, his legs are curled up, his bare feet pressed against each other. The train gathers speed, rattles and whines, crosses the suburbs, the railway quarters rush by in streaks of red, yellow and blue light.

A lone vendor totters down the aisle, hawking ballpoint pens, red, black and blue.

My eyes cross over the child to that two-inch gap between him and the wall and there I can see a large window with the wind billowing the curtains.

It’s late at night and the child is lying, on his stomach, in the tiny garden, his elbows making two hollows in the damp earth, his fingers pressed like sepals against his face. He is looking at the window and when the curtain rises, in that fleeting moment before it falls with the wind, he sees his mother standing in the centre of the room, father sitting in a black chair, his legs raised on the black table, reading a book.

He cannot make out what his parents are saying, Father’s head is lowered, perhaps he is reading aloud. Mother interjects with a laugh but Father goes on. Words, weighed down by his heavy voice, float down, disjointed, from the window.

Mother laughs again; the darkness around the child seems to melt and from far away he can faintly hear the No. 12 tram trundling towards the Galiff Street terminus. It must be around midnight. Two hours past his bedtime but there’s no sleep tonight as he keeps looking at the window, watching Father read to Mother, listening to the hiss of crickets, a distant car horn.

Behind him roll the plots of empty West Bengal Housing Board land, several dug up, some covered with barbed wire wrapped around sheets of corrugated tin, others with tiny hills of black stone chips, iron rods and bags of cement.

Something brushes the nape of his neck, he brushes it off. It is a black ant, now wriggling in his palm trying to flip over and crawl through the gap between his fingers. He raises his palm to his face, blows the ant away, watches it sail across the night to land on a leaf, unharmed. And it’s during this moment of distraction, lasting barely fifteen seconds, when his eyes are off the window, when the ant is in flight, that the scene shifts as if in a movie.

Father beats Mother.

The curtains continue to rise and fall, the wind still blows in a steady breath but now Father is standing close to Mother, the book still in his hand. The child watches the hand rise, Mother not move, the book come crashing against her head. She lurches back, half stumbles, balances herself. Father steps back, doesn’t throw the book at the wall, just lets it fall. His hand now free, he moves closer, pulls Mother up by her hair.

In the garden now there are several sounds: the chair being pushed and then toppling over, the screech of the table’s legs against the floor, Mother’s bangles cracking and both Father and Mother crashing against the table lamp, their shadows flitting across the wall and then flowing into the ceiling.

And then, as suddenly as it began, it’s all over. Silence rushes in to fill the cracks in the night.

Father is gone and Mother, perhaps, is still there lying on the floor. The curtains, as always, rise and fall and the child continues to look at the window, this time bent and curved, through the water in his eyes.

I could tell you more about the child, more about that night, what happened when the child returned to his room. How long it took for him to fall asleep and when he did, what dreams did he dream. But those are frills, details needed merely to fill the blanks of my memory.

As of now, however, let’s not waste time, let us look forward, perhaps a few months later, at the child as he lies on the upper berth of an express train speeding through the night, knowing full well that this is one night his mother is safe.

For, although Father still looks menacing, the newspaper in his hand, his elbows inches away from Mother’s feet, he cannot touch her. There are other passengers in the coach, many still awake; there’s the vendor with his ballpoint pens walking up and down the aisle and it’s this heavenly comfort of strangers which the child covers himself with. Like a soft, warm quilt in January.

Someone switches off the overhead lights but that doesn’t seem to matter. He can hear the shuffle of feet as someone walks to the lavatory. He turns over to look at the hollow of darkness below, between the two rows of berths.

When his eyes adjust, he can see, in the pale shadows cast by the suitcases and the trunks stacked below, shreds of newsprint, soft-drink straws, groundnut shells and smudges of water on the floor. Across the aisle, a middle-aged man is looking through the-window, eating something out of a paper plate, his white plastic water-bottle with the blue cap swaying in gentle arcs from the hook above.

Outside, night rushes by broken only by the silhouettes of trees, near and far, fast and slow.

I could end the story here but that would leave it for ever trapped in the past, incomplete and purposeless.

So let’s imagine that the child grows up, leaves this city, travels to faraway places, meets people, falls in love, gets married and returns to live perhaps in that same house with the tiny garden in front.

Let’s make the house older, but not sadder, although large chunks of it have cracked, marked by long jagged lines, green and brown, caused by the rains in July and August. Across the street, the plots of land are in full bloom, rows and rows of apartment buildings, each with its little window, little balcony and a fat black water tank.

And in the evenings when they switch the lights on in these apartments, when these countless rectangles of light overpower the gathering darkness of twilight, let him sit in the same black chair, his legs raised on the same black table.

He reads aloud to his wife; outside, their child lies on his stomach, in the garden, staring at the window, his elbows making two hollows in the damp earth, his fingers pressed like sepals against his face. The curtains billow in the wind, Mother laughs and interjects, while in the other room, the television keeps talking to no one in particular.

They have an argument, their voices rise. And this time, Father gets up, puts the book on the table, his shadow on the wall, walks first to his wife, kisses her on the nose, she makes a face, smiles, and then he walks to the window, calls out to the child, pulling his little family into a world he has only now begun to explore.

The bedspread was ten feet by nine feet, dark blue, almost purple, but over the years it had faded until it was bluish-white, like our breakfast of milk and cornflakes. When we returned from school in the afternoon, we would lie on the bed, Sister and I, our cheeks pressed against the thick fabric, our eyes fixed along the surface, imagining we were looking at the sky. And that the discoloured patches were clouds.

At night we turned off the lights and before our eyes could adjust to the darkness all around my sister would switch on the bedside lamp. Its shade was made of cane and through its slats the light fell in a hundred specks on the bedspread making our black sky shimmer with stars. Sister would then lean over and spin the shade, making it revolve slowly around the light bulb so that the stars would begin to move in huge orbits across the bed.

We did this every night except when the bedspread was due for washing, once every ten days. Then it would lie in the red plastic bucket in the bathroom, drowned in mugs and mugs of water and soap. My sister and I took turns visiting the bathroom to look at our sky, crumpled and wet, jammed into the bucket so hard we were afraid the clouds would crack.

In the morning the soap suds would have disappeared leaving the water a dirty brown and Bhabani, the maid, would hitch her sari above her knees and begin pounding the bedspread with the wooden mallet I often used as a cricket bat. That booming sound, reflected off the walls of the bathroom, was our morning music to which we waltzed through the arduous rituals of preparing for school. When she was done, we would help her carry it up to the terrace, the bedspread all wet and gleaming like the velvet curtain of a cinema hall, and we left for school safe in the realization that when we would return, our sky would be back, fresh and clean.

I don’t remember how long my sister and I went on with this little secret game. She was fourteen, I was ten, and it was on our ninety square feet of fabric sky that we first kissed and, later, touched each other in what then we thought were the wrong places. And it was this daily theatre of pleasure and fear, played out on our blue bedspread, that carried us as if on a wave from one night to the next.

For a moment, after we had bolted the door, nothing seemed to matter. Neither Father sleeping in the adjacent room nor Mother staring at us from a giant photograph behind the lamp, two dead cockroaches trapped in its glass frame. Just the stars caressing our bodies, lying still in the darkness, the only sound our two hearts, and sometimes a Bengal-Bihar cargo truck rumbling by.

And then one July evening, when it had rained right through the day, our secret was laid bare.