Loss
13:19 - Posted by Shilpa K - 3 comments

Everyone thought our marriage to be some kind of a joke. “It was so surreal,” they explained later. “You Sarvanan Balasubramanian weds Riya Jaiswal. The Riya Jaiswal!” I listened in silence as they poured jokes at the bar and the bartender poured some whiskey into my glass. There had to be a better explanation why of all the 256 invitees only 40 turned up at the wedding. That we tied the knot on the 1st of April just added insult to injury. Riya was in that thing they call “Love” which I could never fathom. Our marriage made complete sense to her by what she termed as ‘The law of attraction.’ She always believed opposites attract. For me it was equivalent to no more than the same law of attraction that attracts the north pole of a magnet to its south pole. That is how we were – complete opposites hailing from cultures that were longitudinally estranged. She seemed some kind of God’s craft, her looks chiseled to perfection, be it her long flowing tresses like the Kaveri in peak monsoons, be it her lips the color of blush and perfect like the buds of the roses in Amma’s garden in the backyard, or her eyes that were the shape of almonds. Her eyes matched the color of her hair – the darkest shade of black – some of it attributed by the kohl she smeared so liberally on them every morning. She had a peculiar laugh like that of a little kid who chuckles at the thought of candies. Her dresses were vibrant and her wardrobe resembled a pack of wax crayons arranged in increasing order of intensity of the hues. She loved shoes and bags and for every dress she possessed she had at least three matching combos of bags and shoes. She rarely every accessorized or wore makeup or even perfumes. But she always smelled exotic and looked stunning. Just before marriage she had went ahead and pierced her nose out of fascination. It was one of the things she had to check on her bucket list before we were bond in holy matrimony. The only other thing on that list that I am aware of is an intricate tattoo the size of carom striker on her lower back. It had some Arabic script written in convoluting fashion spiraling inside out. She told me it reads “Love conquers all things”. I believed her. Amma had let out a sudden shriek when she spotted it on Riya’s back as she tried out a low-waist lehenga during the wedding shopping. Her eyes popped wide and gleamed in astonishment as she noticed this creepy work of art on Riya’s back. They glistened as if to match the pea-sized solitaires she wore in her slightly elongated ears since as far as I can remember and the nose studs one on each side of her chunky nose. She didn’t say a word though. She never did. But she was vigilant and her eyes expressed and conveyed what she didn’t by the spoken word, both in a moment of grief like when Appa passed away after fighting cancer for three years and also in busts of happiness like when I gifted her her favorite Kanjivaram with my first pay. She wore it on all occasions for the next one year – on poojas, on weddings, on thread ceremonies – until that ill-fated day when the dhobi burnt a hole in its pallu. From that day, Amma ironed all her clothes at home. She even wore un-ironed cotton sarees to the vegetable market when she didn’t find the time, but refused to trust any other man in the neighborhood with ironing them. She had cursed the dhobi who had seared her priced possession. A few weeks later it was learnt that his shop was reduced to ashes in arson and he had fled to his native place never to return. That day Amma offered a litre of whole milk at the temple and walked around with a bounce in her steps as if announcing some kind of a secret victory. She cooked the best stew that night for dinner.

Amma always wanted a South-Indian daughter-in-law, someone who understood classical music, wore a braid and adorned it with flowers, smelled of coconut oil every morning and cooked awesome rassam. Riya did nothing of that. Instead she loved jazz and her cooking was limited to exactly five dishes she had learnt at a cooking workshop in college. All of which were Continental. Yet there was some kind of an unspoken bond among them which only strengthened with time. This bond manifested itself in the most unexpected ways, like when Aloo parathas with sambar became a ritual every Monday at the breakfast table. The only reason why Amma accepted Riya, however reluctantly at the beginning, was because of the way she looked. She was easily the prettiest bahu in the neighborhood and that brought Amma some kind of pride. I felt I had brought home a silver plate after winning an athletic event in school rather than a wife after being legally married.

I had a close knit circle of friends who, by the time we were a couple, had migrated to foreign lands in search of greener pastures. I don’t know what made me stay back here in India at a time when job opportunities mushroomed abroad like the flamboyant Gulmohar in summer. Maybe it was because of Amma who refused to move out of our locality, let alone moving to another country. She couldn’t tell how long she had lived here in years. She had a strong photographic memory though. She remembered the color of the walls when they had moved in – it was pale ochre – she once told me on Appa’s birthday long after he was gone, tears swelling up in her eyes. She dabbed them with the end of her soft un-ironed cotton saree. She remembered spending a whole day cleaning up the place and when she was done Appa had teasingly addressed her “Kari”, short for Kariappa, the guy who worked at the flour mill down the road and who always looked like a baby puffed with too much of talc. I was a social misfit in Riya’s circle of friends. They were loud, boisterous, gossip mongers who partied too much and too hard for my comfort. I used to get this nagging feeling that they would be biting us behind our backs. I expressed this to Riya more than once, but she thought I was just being paranoid and suggested I loosen up a bit. That was the last time I mentioned her friends in any of our conversations. I distanced myself from them like how the soul would separate itself from the body when the body burns on the pyre. Riya failed to see through my excuses initially, but then a pattern developed so distinct and so obvious that it required little thought to arouse a feeling of betrayal. I could sense it in her increasing frigidity towards me. She took solace in silence and I took refuge under heap loads of work that I carried home from office every evening. She seemed to slip away like an unanchored boat along the lake-side, slowly drifting away aimlessly into the vastness that spread far and wide before her. I did little to stop her from crumbling into tiny fragments of despair and loneliness. I guess I was just tired myself in trying to keep pace with her, with her crazy ideas to spend the weekend, her zealous attempts to live the life of yester years of indulgence and intoxication, and a continuous effort to live up to her expectations - of dressing right in denims and corduroys even when I felt in my own skin only when I wore pleated pants that ballooned around my short stout thighs, of making use of the silver at the restaurants when all I wanted was to slurp rice and curds with my hands, when I had to settle for wine when all I wanted was some cheap beer, when all she worried about was the color of her lipstick when we had to rush to the funeral of our neighbor.

Amma seemed oblivious to all of this. She spent most of the day knitting in her room, odd little sweaters that were too small to fit any of us and too big to give away to the toddlers next door for their dolls. “For your kids!”, she remarked. “I’ll be done with 3 identical sets by the time you become a daddy!” For the first time in many years I saw her being passionately engaged in something. I sensed some unseen force had taken over her. I didn’t know how to react. I just hugged her and went back to my room. Riya was sorting her chiffons from her linens; she looked twice as old and half as pretty for her age. She hid her freckles and blemishes under layers of makeup now every time she stepped out of the house. Her hair now resembled her lackluster eyes that were deprived of the kohl for a few weeks now. Instead pink swollen crescents laced both her eyelids. I was astonished by the heartlessness that the bitterness in our relationship had rendered to her; that she kept it a secret only to be revealed in the most nonchalant of manner, placing me in the middle of a predicament I had never imagined she would be capable of. That night I wept in my bed like a little boy feeling empty and devastated being deprived of the little joys in life that most people take for granted. It hurt. The next morning, while she lay next to me lost in her thoughts, I gently placed my hand on hers. She winced at the touch of skin against skin after a month, 2 weeks and 4 nights. She was cold and her skin was pallid. I drew her closer; my eyes a scarlet red from the night, and hugged her tight. We both wept without saying a word for hours until Amma came knocking at our door in the wee hours of the morning to show us the first of the dozen sweaters she had sworn to weave before Riya delivered. It was pear-shaped and was woven in the same hues as that of her burnt Kanjivaram. Peacock green and sapphire blue. She had even torn apart a zari border and made some sort of a superfluous patch work on the back of the sweater. It was quite hard to imagine a new-born donning that tacky outfit. She seemed to have accomplished an unwritten agenda by weaving it. Those colors, that zari border meant something to her I couldn’t comprehend by the way she looked at us while we lent her a smile admiring the work of art. Since that morning, life assumed a bit of normalcy and silence gave way to words albeit very scarce and few.

For Riya, our marriage had turned out to be like a poor investment scheme. She had slowly relinquished her lavish way of living and had adopted simplicity as much as she could, yet all she got was a mom-in-law who relentlessly stitched sweaters and a husband who had detached himself from her, was always drowned in a sea of papers from work and spoke lies with so much ease. It was his way of running away from the differences that surfaced between them as individuals and differences that were so stark that he couldn’t dismiss it as a mistake of fate. Riya couldn’t make any new friends in this part of the country where people tend to be gregarious like birds of the same feather. She had no one to visit, not even her own family as they had disowned her the day she displayed her interest in marrying me. She sat days on end looking outside the stained glass windows of our bedroom, her head rested against its wooden frame and her eyes fixed on a random spot on the road below where hawkers cried their wares creating a cacophony.
That night when she was rushed to the hospital it rained like all hell had broken loose. The thunderstorms and the lighting Amma kept saying was a precursor of something evil that was about to occur. I ignored her even as she prayed, chanted, recited her entire verse book and completed innumerable laps on her foot long string of rosary beads. On the eve of the birth of my children, I was taken aback by my own apathy to the situation. I felt numb. My face had lost the power of expression, my mind was unable to construe circumstances, and my heart had become immune to feelings and emotions. I felt I only existed in body and my soul had long departed it leaving it destitute. It was 3 am in the morning when the nurse approached us. Amma was still counting her rosary beads and reciting some verses under her breath that no one could decipher. The nurse bore a grim look on her face. “Sorry to inform you Sir, one of your babies passed away minutes after she was born. The other two are perfectly fine and are with their mom.” Amma wailed like a hungry mongrel on the street when the nurse broke the news. Grief always inflicted her more quickly and strongly than happiness could encompass her. She held on to me by one hand as we plodded through the corridors that smelled of strong medicines. In the other she grasped tightly her tatty cloth bag that had an assortment of weaving needles, woolen threads rolled into a mesh, her rosary string, the verse book and some other things that tinkled every time we took a step. Riya was on the bed, looking at the ceiling above her when we arrived in the room. Amma rushed and hugged her and then cried with her head dug into Riya’s bosom, wetting the light blue gown the nurse had dressed her in. Riya didn’t hold her close; she lay there motionless, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes though could not hold back the tears. They tricked like rivulets from the sides of her cheeks. I stepped forward to look at the large cradle they had arranged next to the bed. It was designed especially for triplets. One of the three distinct spaces looked ghastly empty, the creases and folds on the soft bedding still fresh from the last movement on it. The other two had babies wrapped up in sky blue to indicate they were boys. They were a set of unidentical triplets; it wasn’t hard to tell at all. They looked like the color palette of face powders Riya referred to when we used to go shopping on the weekends. If the third one was still alive, she would have been the fairest of them all I guessed. Looking at them I felt like I was playing the “Spot the difference game” that featured in the cheap tabloids. Riya loved reading them. “You never read those. You can only watch them,” I had once commented when I saw her engrossed in one of the copies. One of them had fusilli dark hair; the other had them like brunette spaghetti. The one with the wheat complexion had predominantly inherited the features of his mom, long lashes, the shape of the brows, the bridge of the nose, even the lips. The other one I guess was unfortunate to be painted by the same stroke that colored his father, and with the same bluntness and lack of dexterity of the chisel that sculpted his facial anomalies. It reminded me of our differences once again! I felt something choke inside of me and I ran out of the room like a mad man, I ran through the corridors that smelled of medicines, that housed people grieving over reasons unknown, of walls that carried horrid posters of human organs to the last detail, across operation theaters with glowing red bulbs warning others that a life was being worked upon, like they stick up those red tattered flags when the roads are dug open for repairs. I ran till I reached the portico and fresh air gushed into my lungs so hard that it ached. The noise around me, of the siren of the ambulances, the honking on the road, of petty fights at the corners, of hawkers all faded and my head felt numb again.

That night, it was just me and Amma at home. I did little to comfort her and she kept crying incessantly. The next morning when I went to her room she had already passed away. Her pillow was still wet from her crying. Next to her cadaver was the peacock green and sapphire blue sweater with the zari patchwork on the back. She had dumped exactly four of the dozen sweaters in the trash can stuffed in polythene. I spent the day with her remains and in the evening with the help of a local priest performed the last rites alone. There were no onlookers. Only the setting sun that cast a shadow of darkness all around while she blazed with the brilliance only equal to that of her solitaires. The wood crackled and burnt along with her for an hour. Then the rain came and swept all of what was left and returned her ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I did not visit the hospital that day or even that night. I lay awake on the bed in my room feeling uneasy. I had failed as a husband and then as a son. I had let Amma slip away. That night, I vowed to be a good father. It was hard to redeem the past with a future that had already arrived. Yet, life is strange in certain ways and it renders you courage in the toughest of circumstances. The next morning I dressed up in denims and checkered shirt, picked up a dozen white lilies, placed them on the back seat for a surprise and arrived at the hospital to bring Riya home along with our new-borns. I had even stickered our names on the tinted glass on the back of my Maruti 800 – Riya, Sarv, Rishabh and Santha, aesthetically at the four corners and had placed a big heart with an arrow cutting right across it in the centre. I realized how Amma had departed silently without making her absence felt. That there was no room for a fifth name made me feel less sorrowed of her absence.

By the time I reached the hospital Riya was all set to go. She didn’t seem to notice my denims or my checkered shirt. She wasn’t surprised not to see Amma. I decided not to mention about it until we were home. Riya held on to Rishabh, her miniature replica. The nurse handed over Santha to me. As we climbed down the stairs she started walking towards a white chauffer driven car without speaking a word. Her mom sat in the back seat. I could make out she had widowed by then. I grew weak in my knees as I followed her right till the car by instinct, drawn by some unknown force. Her driver ushered her into the car. She refused to meet me in the eye. As she was about to enter the car, incoherent with grief, words blurted out of my mouth, “Amma passed away yesterday.” “I know,” she replied with a coldness I had last sensed on the touch of her skin that night when we had wept. She shut the door close; dark tinted windows rolled up and signaled the driver. They drove past me almost as if a part of my life glided in front of eyes and then disappeared at the turn around the corner. She had hand-picked her life ahead carefully, like how Amma used to pick ripe red luscious tomatoes in the market wearing un-ironed sarees. She disowned me and had left behind everything that would have reminded her of me, including the little life in my arms.