A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 10

IN THE MORNING, MA TOUCHED dadu’s shoulder and said, “It’s seven. Don’t you want to get up?”

It was true that the rooms were dim, the hillocks of furniture positioned before the windows blocking the sunlight, which futilely asked admittance. The arrangement allowed an environment of drowsiness. Mishti was asleep too. But Dadu did not move at all. He lay stiff on the bed, arms at his sides, mouth slightly open. His skin was cool, and his white hair shivered in the breeze from the air conditioner.

When she understood, Ma sat at the edge of the bed, next to him, and held his cold hand. She sat unmoving for what felt like hours. Mishti scrambled up from her own bed, pulling Ma’s arm and then Dadu’s—“Dadu is sleeping in the daytime! We don’t sleep in the daytime! He is silly!”—and then Ma’s again, before giving up and smashing her crayons into the floor, a twinkle in her eye when the crayons left forbidden streaks. Every now and then Mishti looked at her mother to see if a scolding was imminent, but this appeared to be a special morning. Ma allowed every kind of prohibited play.

Ma said nothing, in fact. She offered neither rebuke nor praise. Each time Mishti glanced at her, she sat still as a stone. There was nowhere she needed to be that was not beside her father.

Only now that the clock was in its twenty-fifth hour did Ma wonder: Had she ever told him that she loved him? She watched the patch of wall directly in front of her, memorizing its texture, a pencil line running through it like a fissure between continental plates, and knew that she would live with the answer for the rest of her days.

WHEN DADU’S EYES CLOSED, HE recalled the home of his childhood, this very house, where on Sunday afternoons the rooms would fill with the fragrance of ilish fish being cooked in a mustard sauce, but then, in childhood, every day felt festive, as Dadu’s morning commute to school took him through the city’s lanes and markets, past rickshaw pullers who drew vehicles ablaze with paint, dripping tassels like jewels, and past the shingara sellers who dropped what they prepared in vessels of animate oil. When Dadu, then a boy, walked home from school in the afternoons, his identity card safety-pinned to his shirt, a water bottle hanging from his neck and bouncing on his tummy, he looked up when the house became visible at last through the cries and shouts of the road, the bleating of herded goats, his mind suffused by peace when he saw that chair in the garden where his mother sat, stroking coconut oil into her hip-length hair after a bath, covered in her indoor sari, a rag whose cotton, never starched, drew in the kitchen’s steam and lay against the skin pale as a receipt, and only by wrapping it several times around the body did it become a dress. During the holidays in October, his father took Dadu out, while his mother hunched in the kitchen sorting the day’s vegetables and fish, making a menu for the two meals remaining, as well as evening tea. Beside her stood a clay jug of well-drawn water with a narrow neck and mouth, an upturned brass cup of water serving as a lid. The woman drank in great glugs the water scented with clay, like a pour of first rain on earth. This was her only pleasure. Dadu turned around as he followed his father out the door, observing his mother left behind, and now, again, he saw his mother as the door closed.

Dadu knew that he was not there, not anymore; he was an old man now, and still in this bed he felt himself wearing a new shirt and new trousers that he had received for the festival, recalled the grown-up earnestness of that first year that his mother allowed him to wear a tie, and how he climbed into the slightly sloping seat of a rickshaw and watched the puller as he pumped his legs and drew them far from the familiar lanes, past houses with green-shuttered windows on both sides, hoping a passerby would appreciate his tie. From the perch of the rickshaw Dadu watched a crab peddler toddling under the weight of buckets that hung from each shoulder. Dadu’s mouth opened at what he saw when one of the bucket lids slipped to the road. While the peddler retrieved it, a mass of gray-armored, orange-legged crabs struggled to climb the bucket’s muddy sides.

“Are they alive?” he asked his father in astonishment.

Dadu’s father was a portly man with a mustache and gold-rimmed glasses, and he hitched his dhuti loose from his knees and said, “Yes, my dear. If they were not alive they would smell horrible, and then what would happen? Nobody would buy them.”

“Do we buy them?”

“What’s this?” his father said in surprise. “You forgot? We had crab curry with coconut when your mother’s aunts visited. You said you liked it.”

“But that was not crab!” Dadu protested. “That was… river crocodile!”

“Did your cousin tell you that? She was joking, my dear,” and his father patted Dadu’s head, stern-faced, not laughing even a bit because he knew how that would hurt. The beliefs of children were a serious matter. “We eat crabs and prawns, but not crocodiles,” he clarified.

The little boy who would become Dadu said nothing, furious at that cousin of his. Wait till she came for another visit from that swampland village. To think that he pitied her village tales: She was routinely bitten by mosquitoes big as bats! She spent whole nights scaring snakes away from chicks! To think that in his wonderment and in a moment of generosity, Dadu had given this cousin one of his favorite toy cars, with headlights that flashed and a horn that beeped. Dadu felt himself now in that rickshaw seat with his father, on a ride that would never end, the road going where his father willed it, while he gripped the edge of the seat and his father laid an arm across his lap to guard against the sudden jolt from a pothole. Dadu’s father was long gone, and not long after it was his mother’s turn, his mother who worried the night before he was to begin college, who asked, for the tenth time, “Do you have change in your pocket?” as they lay on another bed, with a tough mattress, a lantern turned low beside them, and continued, “It’s not right, going to a college so far away, a boy like you. What if something happens?”

“What will happen?” said Dadu.

“Oh, don’t make me think of that. This city is full of pickpockets, and the way the buses speed.”

Dadu recalled the feeling of his nighttime pajamas stuck to his legs, the height of summer, the nights so still one could hear arguments in the house across the lane.

“You are always too afraid,” Dadu accused his mother then. “Afraid of buses, afraid of college. What have you done your whole life?”

His mother looked at him, this child of hers with long hair ponytailed for college, arms plump from the meals she had cooked, her eyes full of feeling. If his mother had voice left in her, she would have said that she had kept a home and raised a son whose words, now punishing, were, after all, fulfillment. Here was her son, capable of battling his mother—and so capable of fighting his way in the world all alone, as he would have to do one day. This was the destructive attainment of a mother’s life’s work.

In bed, as his eyes closed, Dadu returned to the day his wife first touched him, two weeks after their wedding, and then only after she had asked, “Have you eaten well?”

Encouraged, audacious, he drew her to their bed and kissed her chastely on the cheek, asking after domestic matters. Did she like the furniture? Was she getting along with the neighbors? He knew one of them, Mrs. Sen’s mother, could be petty as a schoolgirl. At this Dadu’s wife laughed, and removed the handsewn bed cloth her mother had gifted them to lie on the plain sheets of the sleeping hours.

In Dadu’s mind, it was late afternoon when he found an owl perched at the foot of the bed, a beautiful white owl whose fear in the daylight he sensed with animal compassion. He turned to his wife and saw that she was asleep on her belly, mouth open and a patch of saliva on the pillowcase. A new affection for her had risen in him, and he let her be. Lightly he slipped off the bed, bare feet landing on the flecked tile, and stood wondering what to do. The owl must have flown in through the open balcony door, maybe chasing a mouse, and as day grew brighter, crows had gathered on the ledges opposite, hungry to peck at the bewildered bird. Dadu no longer had a mother to wake, nobody to take charge of the situation but him. He gathered a soft broom from under the bed, and tiptoed behind the bird, raising the broom so it brushed the owl’s back. Immediately the bird spread its wings, like the slopes of some mountain he had never seen, and crashing into the dresser and upturning a bowl of cut marigolds on the way, it eventually made its way to the balcony. There it settled on the railing, and Dadu closed the door behind it, feeling that he had betrayed the bird, and carried out his wife’s wishes. She would not want an owl in the house.

There came a day when his baby daughter looked gleefully around when he hauled her up in his arms, having taken off his wristwatch so the buckle wouldn’t prick her. There came a day when he took her on walks down the lane, to the corner shop for milk and bread. Dadu showed his baby the custard apple tree bending to the window from the neighbor’s garden, and the girls who played under it, drawing twigs in the soil to make grids in which they jumped. One day, he imagined, his baby would be a girl like that, in school uniform, toothy grin, gym shoes rubbed white with chalk, and miraculously, she was, and Dadu’s mornings circled around depositing the child at school, handkerchief pinned to her tunic, hair wet and parted after a bath, and taking the bus home, alone. Now, on the bed, Dadu felt he was on that bus once more, freed of all his selves—no longer father, no longer husband, no longer son or grandfather, only a stranger on a bus in the city, his face to the window.

MA PICKED UP DADU’S PHONE and called a hospital.

“My father,” she began. “He is not waking up.”

“Check the patient’s pulse,” said a curt man on the other end. Behind his voice were the sounds of a hectic hospital reception— phones ringing, an adult crying, the bell of an arriving elevator.

Ma gripped Dadu’s wrist, where there was no beating. She let his hand return to rest upon the bed.

“Yes, hello?” said the man on the other end. “What’s the pulse, then?”

Ma touched Dadu’s neck, and his cheek. “I can’t find a pulse.”

“Do you need an ambulance?” said the man on the phone.

“I think—I think he is not here, anymore.”

“There are no hearses right now. I can only send an ambulance. What’s the address?”

Ma sat, holding the phone, unable to remember the address of the house.

NOON CAME. MA LOOKED AT the dead phone in her hand and got up to look for the charger. She turned the air-conditioning to its coldest number. She checked on Mishti, who, having been ignored much of the morning, was playing with an empty cardboard box in the living room, on its sides tasteful photos of a pressure cooker and a pleased cook, whom she was coloring over.

When Ma returned to the bedroom, in lieu of reciting prayers she could not recall, she simply said, “Go where you need to go.”

Dadu said nothing. Ma’s tears hid the transformation of his skin, the pull of gravity upon his blood, his lips turning to slate. A long time later, an ambulance driver came to take Dadu away, and Ma followed, with Mishti, to the crematorium.

AT THE CREMATORIUM, WITH CHARLATANS demanding money to ritually free the soul, and an indifferent attendant working at the oven, Ma heard her own voice as if issued from an automaton. “No, I don’t want it,” said her voice.

She could barely speak, and her eyes could barely see. She was dimly aware of a woman pacing near her in a nightdress, her arms wrapped about herself. She was aware, too, of a man who leaned against a tree with a cigarette, blowing smoke up at the leaves. Next to her, Mishti gathered twigs from the ground and knocked them against a tree trunk.

“I’m a woodpecker, Mama!” she said. “Look!”

But Ma’s faculties had surrendered their duties of facing the world and instead turned inward, observing the wreckage of her own self. It was her fault. She had left the window open, enabling Boomba’s first intrusion, and she had failed to take Dadu’s injury seriously. What if she had insisted on taking him to a hospital? But this thought, allowed to rise, revealed itself to be a bandit, robbing her of everything she had left.

Afternoon turned to evening. Birds returned to roost. Their cries filled the air, and fresh white splatters fell on the ground. The attendant at the oven prodded the interior with a rod, making sure all was turned to ash. Ma must not receive an intact finger, or singed eyelashes.

“Where is Dadu?” complained Mishti. “I want Dadu play with me.”

Throughout the crematorium grounds, dogs roamed, tongues hanging, ribs sticking to skin, seeking food in the flesh of those who were gone, and it was only when the loved ones of the dead yelled “Hut! Hut!” that they retreated.

A NEW EVENING, WITHOUT DADU . In the garden, ma, with head aching and ears stuffed with cotton, a seizing in her chest, walked as slowly as possible, feet traveling inch by inch the disordered soil, among the neglected vines and ripped stems, pulled by hungry hands, prowlers having come through the gate and tugged at anything green to boil and eat. She inspected the garden. The only plants that still stood, defiantly green, were the hibiscus and the marigolds. Gone were Dadu’s beautiful bougainvillea, his cashew tree, his walnut tree, his tomato plants. Perhaps they had been gone for a long time. Ma wasn’t sure which period of time she was recalling—the recent or far past—and she couldn’t tell what she was achieving in this act of remembering. Did recollection make the garden present, or more sorrowfully absent?

Dadu had planted them in days that now had the quality of myth, Ma seated upon a chair brought out to the garden, her legs not quite reaching the ground, a cup of milk tea and a handful of Marie biscuits on a saucer in her lap, the scent of wet earth rising from where Dadu knelt, seed and sapling before him, a secateur at his side, which he gripped when he rose to prune a branch. Ma looked now and then at the closed windows of the house, behind which, at one time, Dadu would have been watching TV while doing something busy with his hands—writing in his notebook, or wiping washed glasses, or weighing the suitcases one more time. Over and over she thought he was still there, and then remembered that he wasn’t.

She recalled the oven before which she had knelt, having waited hours for a turn—was it his turn, or hers? Who was the one diminished to ashes?—Mishti not only gathering twigs and playing woodpecker, though that was what she wished to remember, but also, at other moments, draped over her shoulder and crying, unnerved by the severe-faced men who asked for gifts of rice and money, and unnerved by Ma’s face, which had, it seemed that afternoon, never borne a smile.

WHEN A SPARROW LANDED BEFORE her, ma thought: there you are.

THEN THE GATE RATTLED. MA looked up. Was it an apparition? No, it was the ambulance driver from that afternoon, rattling the gate with his hand again, a cloth bag slung across his torso, in an open palm something that caught the sun.

At the gate, the ambulance driver’s palm was warm and soft as cake. “Take these for your child.”

He held packages of protein paste with a cartoon chickpea smiling fiendishly on the plastic.

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

“Who are you?”

He smiled at the blunt question. The ambulance driver had not slept the previous few nights, or days. His own father was ill, and needed a medicine given to him every three hours. But he had emerged at his usual time to begin his shift. Who else would transport the people who needed him? He was a conscientious man.

“I couldn’t forget your child. Crying so hard for something to eat. The nurses give these to children at the hospital.”

Ma was taken aback. Then angry. Who was this strange man to tell her that her child had been crying for something to eat? How dare he? But as the ambulance driver returned, unthanked, the soles of his shoes resisting the melting tar of the street, to his vehicle parked up the lane, Ma wondered: Had Mishti been crying for something to eat? Had Ma been so submerged in her grief that she had failed to notice Mishti’s hunger?

After the ambulance driver was gone, Ma turned around to see where the sparrow was. But now, though she looked about for some sparkle of light, some odd shadow, a winged insect’s landing, which would offer the possibility of Dadu’s presence, she understood that she would have to overthrow grief’s reign and become once more the mother Mishti needed. That would have been Dadu’s wish. Perhaps that was why Dadu had not asked for medical attention—so that Ma could, in this week of turmoil, shed the responsibilities of a daughter and be solely and primarily a mother.

AT NIGHT, MA TOOK MISHTI’S hand and made her way to the rickshaw stand, where the driver she trusted let them climb on. She told him to take them to the photocopy shop.

“Dadu resting at home?” he said.

AT THE LAST TRAFFIC LIGHT before the photocopy shop, where Ma would collect the passports, a stooped beggar approached, his body folded from the hip, a paper coffee cup held in one hand, which he shook like a maraca with each step. The stench of his clothes was sharp in the air. His feet were bare and his toenails blackened. “Rice,” he said, slowly looking up at Ma. “Didibhai, do you have any rice?”

Ma looked at his body, refusing to meet his eyes, but something about his lean torso made her think: In another world, this might have been Dadu. Her gold bangles, which she had already given to the forger. What if she had given them to him? She imagined the old man falling to his feet in gratitude, then buying something to eat at a market where he would, for once, not be shooed. Perhaps there was a family, waiting for his return. She imagined children, much like Mishti, who spoke in their high toddler voices their effortful and invented words, their knees scabbed from falls, their noses dripping. They would sit on the sidewalk and eat rice, and they would sleep the peaceful sleep of the well-fed. What value could she place on all of it? Did it mean more or less than Mishti’s documents for safe passage?

There was an answer supplied by the grand equation of the world, if there was one written by a mathematician in the sky. And there was an answer supplied by Ma’s own mind, which was growing worried about missing the hours of the photocopy shop.

The rickshaw driver watched to see what she would do.

And Ma looked away from the beggar, toward Mishti, more human than the human before her.

AT THE PHOTOCOPY SHOP, THE three passports waited for Ma, with pristine visa stamps inside. The forger’s mother, who was now watching Three’s Company, shuffled off the safe once more, and within a few minutes Ma held the passports in her hands, the texture correct, the pages correct, the photos correct, though passport photos made them all appear to be diorama replicas of themselves. If she tried, Ma could convince herself that these were the originals, returned to them by the city.

The man with the tricolor pen was saying, “Happy, then?”

He saw them to the exit, where he leaned on one of the photocopy machines and gazed upon the road. “I might leave myself one of these days, you know,” he mused. “But I have the strangest fear that the forger cannot forge his own papers.”

Ma moved her head to show she had heard him. What was there to say to that? Before the forger, within the demarcations of the small businesses that faced his, within the ropes upon which were once slung Aam Pachak and Hajmola, within the swinging table fans and the products and people they cooled, was the city he knew. This life was all life. Transported elsewhere, it would cease to be itself, like a deep-sea creature caught in a fisherman’s net. Ma felt, fleetingly, sorry for him.