The City Son (9 page)

Later, as he’s cleaning himself in the bathroom, he hears Sumit and his father enter. “The doctor said that it’s mild bronchitis, but that it could become severe,” Sumit explains. The Masterji coughs violently. When Tarun emerges from the bathroom, he has his shirt out, covering the wet patch on his crotch. Didi hasn’t yet wiped off her lipstick. As Sumit leads his father to the bed, the Masterji repeatedly glances at Didi’s face, then he studies Tarun, and something
shifts in his eyes. His nose gives an involuntary twitch: the smell in the room has hit his nostrils. The Masterji crawls into bed. Didi stands over him next to the bed and says, “Poor soul. I’ll make some soup for you. You’ll feel better.”

One day Apsara happens to be in Naxal, on the street where she grew up. It’s hard to tell whether she’s cognizant of her old neighborhood, for her face is devoid of any expression. Her mother, Tarun’s grandmother, spots her from the window. With uncharacteristic compassion, her mother rushes down and goes to her. Caressing her daughter’s cheek in the middle of the street—neighbors are watching; they know who Apsara is, her history—Tarun’s grandmother says, “Look what has become of you.” But one gets the feeling that it’s mostly for show, for she’s aware that some could criticize her for being a heartless mother. “Won’t you come inside?” she says. “Won’t you stay for a while with your old mother? Look how my heart has been torn to pieces seeing you like this.” Tarun’s uncle has already married and moved to a new place. Apsara hasn’t set foot inside this house since that fateful day when she took Tarun with her to Kupondole. The kitchen has been remodeled, so there is a shiny new counter and an island in the middle, a place “where I can chop carrots and cauliflower with ease,” Apsara’s mother informs her daughter. Apsara takes everything in. Nothing about her childhood home evokes anything anymore. There are old photographs on the wall of the living room. She with her brother taken at a portrait studio, she
in cowboy attire, and her brother dressed as an American Indian. A photo of her during her college days. She is alone in that photograph, her eager face thrust at the camera. Her mother catches her observing her photo and weeps. “
Chhori, chhori
, what happened? Look at you in that photo! And look at you now.” She runs her hand through her daughter’s stringy hair; she fingers her daughter’s worn-out dhoti. But in the end, nothing comes out of this visit. Apsara doesn’t return to her maternal home, and her mother doesn’t make overtures to bring her daughter and her grandson back into her life.

Didi allows him to pet her breasts now. She opens her blouse and her bra, and he rubs and fondles her nipples. Her nipples are dark, resembling the black spots on her face. He also clumsily sucks on them, but they give off an odor, like the smell of damp clothes. Yet he thinks they are beautiful. She strokes the back of his head and encourages him as he sucks on them. She doesn’t appear aroused, merely pleased, and sometimes overwhelmed with emotion. When he looks up from her breasts, she says, “You have to promise you won’t ever leave me.”

He, too, is affected by her emotions, and he can barely get his words out. “I’ll never leave you, Didi.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.” And he moves up to her face and kisses her deeply and passionately on the mouth. He feels like a man kissing a woman. “I’ll take care of you, don’t worry,” he
says. Even his voice becomes rougher, like Amit’s, and he kisses her a bit forcefully. She’s pleasantly surprised, for she says, “How strong you’re becoming.” He feels powerful and kisses her more. It occurs to him that no boy his age, not even Amit, has access to a full-grown woman like this. The other boys are only talk and no action, and here he is, sucking on a real woman’s breasts.

He is hard, and Didi’s fingers are inside his underwear, stroking. “My son has become really big now.” At her words he spurts all over her hand.

“It’s so nice, just you and me,” Didi says. “No one in this world has a clue about the deep love you and I have for each other. Your father, well, I’m sure he’s dying of jealousy.” She laughs softly. “This jealous world will try to tear us apart, Tarun, do you understand? You won’t let it happen, will you, Son? Will you let anyone come between us?”

“I won’t let anyone come between us.”

“I knew it,” she says, and kisses him with much feeling.

It’s true: he can’t imagine not being with Didi. What would he do? Where would he go? He’d be so alone in this world.

He hasn’t told Didi about his struggle with pretty girls. Not too long after Amit used the fornicating gesture at the girl, Tarun passed by her house and saw her at her window. His heart hammering, he lifted his arms and performed the obscene gesture. She stared, then—her face contorted—spat at him. Her spit missed him, but he got some sprinkles. Her
response devastated him, depleted him. It was a confirmation that pretty girls—this one isn’t even that pretty, more “sexy,” as Amit informed the boys—sense that something is wrong with him, that he is weak and vulgar. Maybe this girl knows about him and Didi? But how is that possible? How can this girl who lives fifteen houses away have the knowledge of what goes on behind the white curtains in the Bangemudha house?

But whenever he tells Didi about his thoughts on girls, she says, “All these girls are not worth your time. These
sahariya
types. They’ll stab you in the back the first chance they get. They don’t have any morals, just like your mother. Look at how she so unabashedly fornicated with your father. The only good thing she did was bring you into this world.” She says this when they’re lying together in the Masterji’s bed. Tarun is pressed against her, his head resting on the crook of her arm. She is always fully clothed during these hours of intimacy. Even when she gives him her breasts she doesn’t remove her bra or her blouse, only opens her clothing halfway so he can reach them. She takes off his clothes for him, usually commenting on how she never gets enough of looking at him, kissing him on the shoulder, on the neck, on his ears, and on his mouth. She leaves his underwear on because she likes looking at his bulge.

Sometimes her hand stays down there, gently massaging. He knows that at any moment he’ll come in her hand. But she also stops massaging for a minute or so to elongate
his pleasure, and hers. There are days when she makes him come twice.

“It’s as though God forced your mother to give birth to you as a gift for me,” she says. “For some reason you were not supposed to come out of my womb, although by all means you should have. Maybe God screwed up.” She laughs. “It doesn’t matter. By all accounts you’re my baby. You came from here.” She takes his hand and places it on her stomach. She covers his hand with her big hands and says, “This is where you came out of. I don’t care what that Apsara Thapa says, or your weakling of a father says, I don’t care what
anyone
says.” She says “anyone” with much venom. “You were in here for nine months, in the year between Amit and Sumit. I remember your kicks. I remember thinking then that once you were born people would be amazed that such a thing of beauty came out of such an ugly mother.”

He touches her face, his own face still in the crook of her arm, and says, “I don’t care that you’re ugly.” Yes, she is big and round, but he likes her largeness.

“You’re just being a good son,” she says, “saying nice things to your mother.” She pulls him tighter into her. “You’ll never abandon your mother, will you?” He shakes his head.

Since the curtains are drawn, the light in the room is muted. Evening is approaching. Noise from the outside filters in—traffic sounds, shouts of children playing on the street, snippets of conversation, a laugh or an exclamation.
Yet it feels as if he and Didi are in a cocoon that no one can penetrate. But soon it’ll be time for others to return home. He doesn’t know where she sends them to on these special Saturdays. It’s as though she banishes them with the injunction to not even come near the house until the specified time. These days she locks the front door from the outside and comes in through a back door next to the kitchen, so that any visitor would think the whole family had gone out.

He wonders what goes through the minds of his father and Sumit. The Masterji knows what Didi does with Tarun, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Tarun has no idea whether that smiling half brother of his suspects anything, for when he returns Sumit says,
“Dai,”
with a pleasant face and talks to Tarun normally. The Masterji goes to his bed, pulls the blanket around him, shivering a bit even when it’s not that cold. He doesn’t meet Didi’s or Tarun’s eyes. He must smell their intimacy on the bed.

Amit asks Tarun for money when he visits. “Just a couple of rupees, bhai,” he says. “You are the rich brother, I am the poor brother. What’s the harm in funneling a rupee here and there? In your Lazimpat mansion it grows on trees, and we hear your Mahesh Uncle is planting even more trees.” Tarun gets a weekly allowance of fifty rupees, so he doesn’t mind sharing some with Amit. Sumit tells Tarun that Amit not only smokes ganja but also takes tablets called speed and Calmpose. In the last few months, Amit’s aggression toward Tarun has stopped altogether. He’s more ingratiating now, sometimes timing his appearance at Bangemudha
on Saturdays to coincide with Tarun’s visits. Then as soon as he gets some money from Tarun, he vanishes. Sometimes he winks at Tarun and tilts his head toward Didi.

After she visited her maternal home, Apsara stopped her walks into the city, as though that was the final straw. Tarun finds it hard to look at her. He’s repulsed by her appearance. She looks like an emaciated street beggar. She’s lost so much weight her cheeks have no flesh, only two bones jutting out like rocks. Her eye sockets have retreated into her skull, so her eyes look like they’re floating in black space. She has lost control over her lower lip because it hangs down in a perpetual pout. She sits on a rocking chair, softly rocking back and forth, staring at a place in her mind. Sanmaya takes care of her, delivers her food, helps her with a change of clothes, makes sure she goes to the bathroom.

When Tarun returns home from his private time with Didi, his mother recoils from him, as though she knows what he’s been up to. This makes him avoid her room for days. At times he even wishes that she were dead, then feels guilty that he does. When he thinks of Didi, he feels a gradual, warm arousal, and he closes his eyes and remembers her kisses, so succulent and loving, and he compares her lips with his mother’s dry lips. Slowly he starts playing with his penis, and soon his palm is covered with his discharge. He has a tattered vest under his mattress he uses to wipe himself.

Mahesh Uncle doesn’t understand why he is neglecting
his mother, and confusion shows on his face. He suspects that it’s got to do with his complex relationship with Bangemudha. Tarun is reticent and vague about what he does in Bangemudha when he visits on Saturdays. Didi adores him, this much Mahesh Uncle has gathered, but whenever Mahesh Uncle asks Tarun to invite his Bangemudha family to lunch in Lazimpat, Tarun demurs. One time Tarun said, “It’s probably best if we let the two sides remain separate.” When Mahesh Uncle said that he found it incredible that he’s yet to meet the Masterji and Didi, Tarun said, “I don’t know what good that will do. Why make things further complicated?”

So Mahesh Uncle stops asking Tarun about Bangemudha. He reaches the conclusion that it’s too burdensome for a young teenager to be constantly thinking about his strange family dynamics and his mentally ill mother. The boy needs a life, too, doesn’t he? But it worries Mahesh Uncle that Tarun has a tendency toward being a recluse. He does all right in school, brings home good reports, yet he spends long hours inside his room.

On some days Mahesh Uncle takes Tarun with him to the Mahesh Enterprises office in Putalisadak. He teaches the boy to duplicate documents on the mimeograph machine, write brief reports on the typewriter, and on occasion he also sends him out to run errands, like fetching a file from a nearby business concern or making purchases from the stationery shop up the hill. Sometimes Mahesh Uncle takes Tarun with him to the guesthouse in
Thamel and lets him check in guests. The boy does well. He doesn’t smile much, but he has a serious professionalism about him that belies his age.

One Saturday a year later, after she’s wiped him, Didi brings up the topic of the girls who might be after him. Lately she’s been commenting more on what a handsome boy he’s turned into and how girls must be eyeing him. Her tone suggests that these girls are up to no good. Today she says that the SLC exams are approaching and that he must study hard and not be distracted. She’s observing his face as she says this. “You’re such a smart boy. It’d be a pity if you let one of these seductresses distract you from your studies. You don’t want to end up like Amit. Look at him. He failed the SLC with such low marks last year. He barely comes home. When he does, he glowers at me, wheedles some money off his father, and leaves. What a complete waste.”

For a moment she’s silent. In his underwear, he’s lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. His time with Didi was especially pleasurable today; it has been a few weeks since they’ve been alone, and he’s been obsessively thinking about her—her hands, her tongue, her breasts—even as he was trying to study for the exams.

“You won’t let any of these princesses distract you, will you?”

“Didi, I told you—”

“You don’t have to lie to me.” Her tone is prickly and accusatory.

“But I’m not lying. I don’t like any of them. They’re so immature. Silly. They’re always chattering and giggling.”

“They’re good for nothing.”

“I have no interest in them.” He nuzzles against her.

“I know there’s someone you like.”

“Who?”

“I know.”

“Who?” He turns over, props himself up on his elbows. His heart is thumping. There’s this girl at the bus stop. He hasn’t told anyone about her. Whom would he tell? This girl is thin, with bob-cut hair. She’s usually standing across the street with other girls, waiting for her bus. He stands a bit apart from the boys at his bus stop. He secretly watches her, averting his gaze if she happens to look his way. One time she caught him looking at her, and he half expected her to march angrily across the street. Luna, she’s called by her friends. He has repeated the name to himself at night. It’s a strange name, but it seems to fit her, her angular body, her short hair and sharp features. He wonders what it would be like to have her as a girlfriend, and he knows that it will never happen. She’ll recognize immediately what a depraved, sick boy he is, and she’ll want nothing to do with him. Still, he enjoys small fantasies about being with her, nothing big: holding hands, talking about school.