Read The Private Life of Mrs Sharma Online
Authors: Ratika Kapur
The Private Life of Mrs Sharma (14 page)
I have brought up my son well, I know. But good manners can only control how you show your anger, they don't make the anger itself go away. Even though you will not raise your voice at grown ups, because your mother has taught you not to do that, it does not mean that you will not find some other way to show the anger that boils inside you. Today, my well-mannered son showed me his anger. Obviously he did say sorry afterwards, but politely and gently my son showed me his anger today. He had come back very late from the restaurant, even though he knows that he has to be back in the house by seven o'clock latest so that he has enough time for his studies. This was one of my conditions for allowing him to go. But still, he came back home at almost eight thirty today. So I was very angry, obviously, and obviously I scolded him just like any dutiful mother would scold her child. And then what happened? After I scolded him, Bobby looked straight into my eyes and very softly said, Ma, I wish
you were the one who had gone to Dubai. That is exactly what he said.
Even though I know that he is just a child, I felt such a lot of pain. He could have just stolen a knife from that stupid restaurant he goes to and stabbed his mother in the heart instead. Children don't understand how much they can hurt their mothers. Or maybe they do understand and that is why they do it.
But the truth is that from time to time I also wish the same. I also wish sometimes that I was the one who had gone to Dubai. It would have been so nice. Even if my husband says that it hardly feels like a foreign place and that it is only like a clean India, at least it is clean. And I would have taken evening walks on Jumeirah Beach and earned a lot of money of my own and only worried about my son from far, far away. It would have been so nice. I would have felt so free. And maybe being far, far away, my son would have understood the value of his mother.
It is an odd thing, this mother and child relationship. And so difficult. We are taught, we are taught by our fathers and mothers and textbooks and teachers, that every relationship is based on giving and taking. You give something to somebody and then you receive something from that person. You get something from somebody and then you quickly give back something. And if one side stops, then the relationship stops. Simple. That is how it is, that is how the world works. Every relationship in my life, and not just between my husband and me, or my parents and me, but even between Doctor Sahib and me, Rosie and me, even Vineet and me, has been like this,
giving and taking. The five or six people in my life who did not give me something back in return for what I gave them, like one nurse Mariam who used to work at the clinic, or my father's brother and his family, I just stopped talking to these people. My mother was an only child like me and the only relatives I had were my father's brother and his family, but even then, because my uncle and his horrible wife and children only took, took, took from me and never gave me anything, any love, even then, when I had nobody, I still just stopped talking to them, and today, in my mind, they are dead. All dead. Because Renuka Sharma is not a fool. She will not allow anybody to treat her badly. And, mark my words, if tomorrow my husband tried to do the same thing as those relatives, even he, my husband, would find himself in the same hole as them.
But what can I say? All these grand, grand words I speak like I am some grand, grand woman, these words mean nothing when I am face to face with my son. These words become dust.
I remember when Bobby was a baby. I would feed Bobby and bathe him and play with him and stay awake night after night looking after him, and, yes, my husband did try his level best to help, but how much can a man actually do? And what happened? The first word that came out of Bobby's baby mouth was Papa. Mummy did all the work, but Papa was the word. And then it was Papa, Papa, Papa, day in and day out. I did everything for that boy, I broke my back for him, but still, Papa. Always Papa. The boy gave his mother nothing. For a long time not even that one word Mummy. And it is not any different these days. What do I get from him now? Still nothing. And what do I want? All that I want is that he should eat properly,
sleep properly and study properly. That is all. But all that I get are painful words, words like knives.
There are one or two things that I would like to ask my son. There are one or two things that I want to know. Bobby, my dear son, you are, you know, a healthy, handsome, intelligent boy, and everybody says this. Now, tell me, do you think that this just happened by magic? Do you think that you are what you are today, the envy of every mother, just like that? Or do you understand that there is this person in your life, your mother, who has spent every second of her life from the day you were born trying to make you into this healthy, handsome, intelligent boy? Do you even know that your mother exists? Bobby, my dear and loving son, I also wish that I went to Dubai instead of your father because it seems that a child will only see his mother when she is not there.
So, the law of give and take is broken in a mother and child relationship. And then the most difficult part is that a mother cannot just say, Oh, I am being treated so badly that this relationship is finished now! How can she do that? She is a mother! A goddess! She will give, give and give. She will suffer quietly and live.
Maybe God created a special type of heart just for women, a mother heart that only needs to give to beat, a heart that needs nothing else, and that is why mothers don't run away. And maybe God also created a special type of mother mind that will always and only think about her child with love and forgiveness, and that is why now, at this very second, as I think again about what happened today, about what Bobby said to me, now, I am starting to forget those words, I am starting
to forget the pain, and the only thing that my mind is now remembering are the moments after he said those horrible things, the time when I refused to eat my food and I just sat on the divan and picked up
The Hindu
newspaper and tried to read it, and then my sweet Bobby came and sat down on the floor at my feet and started pressing my legs, and then he just looked up at me and said, Ma, if you don't eat, then I won't eat.
That is all that this mother mind remembers now, so that the giving can go on.
I have decided to change my life a little bit. I have decided that I am going to forget about all this disciplining business with Bobby and let his father do all that when he comes back. I am going to have fun, because sometimes it seems that I will forget what it feels like to have fun, and I am only thirty-seven years of age and I don't want to be like old people because for them everything good and fun and happy are just pictures in their minds, pictures from the past. No, I am going to have fun with my Bobby, and I will also go on having fun with Vineet until my husband comes back, because fun with Vineet is actually like a tonic for me, it is like taking Chyawanprash to keep fit and healthy, and then, when my husband comes back, which is in just twenty-eight days' time, I will also have a lot of fun with him.
Vineet has finally bought his flat. It is in a complex called Sunshine Boulevard in Greater Noida. It is the one that I liked best. He took me there to see it yesterday. He has bought unit number twenty-two, because two plus two adds up to four, and in numerology four is for people who are steady and patient and practical, people who want to achieve their goals. That is what a vaastu expert told him. The flat doesn't actually look much like the show flat that we had seen before, and the complex itself is not as fancy as the photos in the brochure, but they say that all builders and developers are big cheats and this is how it is. Still, I like the flat, and I think that his mother will also like it. There are two bedrooms with built-in cupboards, and one of them, the master bedroom, has an attached bathroom with tiles that have little purple and yellow butterflies that look so pretty. The kitchen is quite big. It is a modular kitchen, and it has all these nice cabinets and drawers that are painted red. There is also an exhaust fan above the window, which is
important. The hall is a little bit small, but they have installed a very beautiful ceiling fan there, the type that has crystal lights hanging from it. It almost looks like a chandelier.
There are six towers in the complex and each of them has fifteen floors. In the small area in the middle, surrounded by the towers, there is a nice children's park with swings, seesaws, a slide and a big jungle gym. It is good that the park is located here because mothers can watch their children play directly from their kitchen windows. On the ground floor of Tower One there is a recreation room with a table tennis table and some sofas for residents to sit and talk to their neighbours. There is also quite a lot of parking space, but only for residents. Visitors have to park their vehicles outside the gate. The complex is quite nice, actually.
So he took me to see his new flat, but just like the last two or three times that we have been together, something odd happened. To some extent I could even say that something funny happened. We were in the master bedroom and I was standing near the door to the bathroom, when suddenly he said, Tell me one thing, Renu. You love your child, no?
I kept quiet.
From the way that you talk about Bobby, it seems that you love children, he said.
I nodded my head in some vague type of way and still kept quiet.
Children are beautiful, he said. They are proof of their parents' love, and they make their parents' love stronger.
I almost wanted to laugh at all this Bollywood dialogue but I stopped myself.
And then he walked up to where I was standing and put one hand on my shoulder, and said, Renu, this is the room where we will start our family.
Now I could not stop myself and I burst out laughing.
This is not a joke, he said. You and I are going to get married. I think that you know me now and you know that I will never say or do anything without thinking about it carefully from all sides. Now, I am telling you, you and I should get married as soon as you get a divorce from your husband.
I tried to stop my laughing because I understood that he was actually being serious, and then I tried to find some words to answer him, but before I could find them he starting talking again.
And don't worry about Bobby, he said. I will look after him. And don't worry about my mother. She is actually quite broadminded. My cousin married a boy from the North East and my mother was the only person in the whole family who accepted the boy. It will probably take her some time, but I know my mother, and I know that in the end she will love you and respect you.
I did not want to spoil this time that we had together. We were together alone after such a long time and I still had to take off all my clothes and lie down on the nice new tiled floor and pull him down to me. So, even though I only felt like laughing at all his nonsense, and telling him that maybe he should try to be more broadminded and modern like he thinks his mother is, I did not do or say all that because I knew that he would feel very bad and then we would just leave and go home. Instead of all that, I told him, trying to make my voice sound as serious
as his voice, that just like he had thought about it so carefully, I also needed to do the same, I also needed time to think, and then I did what I had planned to do and took off my clothes and his clothes, and then we had a very nice time together.
When I came back home I decided that Bobby and I should have some fun and so I suggested to him that since his father was going to come back in just twenty-five days' time, we should at least visit the new airport one time so that we know exactly where to go and what to do on 31 August 2011. And my Bobby agreed.
What an airport it is! I remember when my husband and Bobby and I first saw the mall buildings in Saket. For a few seconds we could not speak. We almost could not breathe because we had only seen such beautiful buildings in foreign places on TV. It was hard to believe that such buildings could actually be standing just twenty minutes away from us by scooter. That is how Bobby and I felt today. This new airport is much more beautiful and modern than the old airport we saw when my husband left for Dubai in 2009. It is called Terminal 3 and I am sure that it is as good as any airport abroad. It seems to be built with only glass and steel. I don't remember seeing any cement at all! And it feels like you are in a foreign country. Actually, no, not a foreign country but some place more distant, some place in space. And then there is this other building, separate from the main airport building,
which is only for parking. A building with six or seven floors, only for parking!
There was a lot of security all around. Even one kilometre before you reached the building there were police check posts checking each and every vehicle that was going to the airport. And around the airport building itself, any side that you looked there were policemen, policewomen, commandos and what not. And I used to think that the malls have too much security! But it is fully understandable. Terminal 3 is well and truly something that our nation should be proud of, like the Taj Mahal or Rashtrapathi Bhavan or Select Citywalk. And it deserves the same type of protection from terrorists as those buildings, because what Doctor Sahib says is very true. Even though it happened far away from us, India has changed since those Muslim men crashed planes into those buildings in America.
It is eleven o'clock and the power has gone. It has been gone for almost two hours now. We have an inverter, my husband bought it for us before he left, but the battery has drained and so I can't switch on the fan. And even though it is August, there has been no rain for almost ten days. It is so hot. Every part of my body that is touching the bed is wet with sweat. It is so hot that I cannot get sleep.
But my Bobby sleeps peacefully here on his folding cot. He sleeps peacefully because his mother has been keeping quiet, his
mother has been good to him. But am I actually being good by keeping quiet and not guiding him back towards the straight road? Isn't it a crime to not stop a crime? Don't you become as much of a criminal as the criminal himself? I don't know, but whatever it is or whoever I have to become, and I would become a murderer if that was the only way, all that I want is to see my Bobby happy in the day and peaceful at night-time.