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At the far end, the doctor had arranged slabs of flat rock. On one she began arranging pakoras and quartering fruit. In her estimate, they’d arrive within five minutes. Waiting, she spread the guipure bedcover around her again, carefully avoiding the wet floor. Whatever she’d lost in childbearing floriferousness when her ovaries were removed, she made up in that luscious fabric for her son. It rippled around her like a second sea. As before, the design came unexpectedly. Only she could see beneath it. Let them use snorkels and masks; she had eyes.
At precisely the time anticipated, Daanish’s voice was heard. Her cheeks glowed with the warmth reserved for him. But then she heard his father’s booming laugh. For a fleeting second, her brow furrowed. This was her time, her place. Then, just as rapidly, her irritation drained away. The world was normal again. Her family was safe. They were hungry. She was their marker. It was time to be theirs.
Over tea, Daanish examined the bedcover. He insisted the figures were sea urchins, fan coral, jellyfish, and sea snakes. Names his father had taught him. Names his father would never share with her. ‘Just like you’d been there too, Anu,’ Daanish said. He was so innocent. But there was a new light in his eye. Something forming. A dream or ambition. When it blossomed, he would lose his innocence, and she would lose him.
The doctor asked where her shawl was. She looked about in distress. He laughed, saying it had blown off just as they rounded the boulder, and from the water he’d seen the sun filter straight through her kurta, so she might as well have worn a two-piece and jumped into the sea to get good and wet.
‘Please,’ she tsked, ‘not in front of him.’ Daanish was digging for shells at the cave’s entrance, listening. Smirking, almost. Growing older by the minute.
The doctor held the lace up to her face and grinned, ‘You might as well have worn this.’
Again she yearned, like a shooting pain, to be alone in her world with her dreams.
And again, when it passed, normalcy.
Fourteen years had gone by. Downstairs, the doctor writhed in bed. He was still calling. Once she would have gone to him, believing it would lead him back to her – to the way he’d been when Daanish was born. She would have sat quietly beside him, listened, and consoled. It would have been part of the patient waiting. But she had stopped waiting. She had realized that to wait is to watch yourself grow old. Her future rested not with her husband but with her son.
She rose from his bed, clasping the boxes and the guipure bedcover. It flowed all the way down to her feet like a net with which to get her boy back.
2 Argonaut (#ulink_7ee5368a-29e4-5098-8ef2-3545a821d43b)
Hours after the doctor stopped calling, Anu found him in a cold heap on the floor.
At the hospital, she sat outside Intensive Care while his family arrived, weeping. The nurses would not allow her inside. What did they know about intensive care?
‘Why didn’t you call us?’ the sisters charged, as if she had eight different sets of hands with which to dial the phone. She’d made one call, and that to her brother, which was how the doctor made it here at all. The sisters hugged her, piling on accusations, demanding to be comforted. ‘Why didn’t you bring him earlier?’ another insisted. ‘How long had Bhai been unconscious?’
Anu went through the motions: she’d been upstairs cleaning, how could she have known? She’d heard nothing. One minute he was watching Hindi films, the next he was on the floor. Who can say what the future holds? The Almighty decides.
Privately, she prayed the Almighty would decide in her favor, forgiving her for ignoring her husband’s last call, and for lying about it now.
The walls of the corridor were pasted with gray fingerprints and red paan stains. Two feet away, a man was hawking in a toilet. She could hear the unbuckling of a belt, the pants fall, shit drop. The air was pungent and stale. Not a window in sight.
Before they shut the door on her, she’d seen the sheets on his bed were stained before he even lay down. Clumps of hair and dust tumbled on the floor like weed. The ceiling fan rattled loud enough to wake the dead – but not the comatose. The nurses had long, black nails. She looked with horror at the unpacked needles and gloves. Bottles of antiseptic lay uncovered.
Anu walked down the corridor. The lights went out. A generator came on. She braced herself for a long wait. To wait is to watch yourself grow old. Earlier today, she’d told herself this. Now here she was, no longer waiting for the doctor to adore her, but waiting, instead, for him to merely live.
Still, there was no harm in remembering those first few weeks after Daanish’s birth, when he’d cherished her.
The delivery had been arduous and she returned from the hospital too weak to cook. Her husband advised complete bed rest. He refused hired help, taking extended leave from the clinic to nurse and feed her himself.
The fare was one month-long meal for he knew only two dishes: khichri and mutton korma. He even thought to prepare the meals in their bedroom, carrying the materials to her dressing table, where, for the first and last time in his life, he allowed her to watch over him. He said it was this opportunity to supervise and not the bed rest that would revive her.
She smiled indulgently at his disorder, as Daanish lay tight in her arms. So complete was the baby’s need that she was washed clean of any desire to direct the doctor. She choked down the coarsely chopped, slippery globs of onion that littered the gravy, the rubbery meat, and glutinous rice that was saltier than the sea. She knew the reasons for all three: he should let the onions char; the butcher was cheating him; when he washed and sifted the lentils and rice, he cleaned with such vigor he removed most of the good grains too, but then forgot to adjust the spices and reduce the cooking time. At times, she worried for the child: how did the milk taste and would it affect his temperament? But the doctor was so earnest in his care his mistakes made him more endearing to her than he’d ever been, or ever would be again. It was while he sifted the lentils that she loved him most. Something in the way he churned the grains with a metal spoon as they soaked, for not long enough, in a large plastic bowl. The chink of wet seed against steel. The snaking drift of liquid as it ebbed and trailed after the spoon. The black specks that surfaced. Him flicking them out, clumsily taking shiny golden ones too. She understood him then, for as a girl, she’d done the same. It was sharing, with him, and the baby, each differently but at once, that eventually revived her, though neither father nor son would ever know.
Many times thereafter, she recalled the happiness of those bed-ridden days. At first, the memory brought intense, private hope, for the fulfillment of which she was determined to wait. But gradually, it filled her with something else. Hope obstructed the passage of the strength she needed to accept the direction her life was taking. She had to make room instead for endurance and God’s will. At what point in her life did this process begin?
Strolling down the grubby halls of the hospital, she paused at one of the dust-opaque windows and smelled smoke. Outside, somebody burned litter. She stood, wondering whether to return to her in-laws or breathe the noxious fumes. She decided to stay here awhile.
If she tried, it was possible to put a date to the day hope left her. In effect, three dates – on the first, almost leaving; then burning brighter than ever before; and at last extinguishing entirely.
The first was during a grand luncheon at an old British-established club. Seated around a table at the center of the dining room were ten intellectuals and their highly clipped, coifed and choreographed spouses. While all the other wives were shown a menu, the doctor ordered for her. It was a western dish she’d had once before and disliked. He knew this. She said nothing.
The club was frozen in time. On the walls hung portraits of Winston Churchill. The billiard room forbade entry to ladies and dogs. Waiters were called ‘bera’ from the British word bearer. They wore the same starched white turban, shirt and trousers as they had under the colonizers. Some of the uniforms were so stained and tattered the doctor would say that one day a delegation of nostalgic British historians would snatch and turn them into antiques in one of their museums. The waiters would never get a penny and they’d be naked.
Six years had passed since the nation’s first polls, which had coincided with the year of Daanish’s birth. The election results had not been honored. The country had lapsed into a civil war and lost half its territory and population. One of the men present at the lunch was a third generation Iranian who still mourned the loss of his tea plantation. He lit a cigar and reminisced.
Anu looked around the table, remarking the pedigree of each. Some had two drops Persian, others half a drop Turk. There was one who claimed his ancestors had sprung from Alexander the Great, and another had roughly one teaspoon Arab. But none had descended from Mahmud of Ghazni, as she had. She bore the stamp of the tribe with pride: the clear, fair complexion and the bloom on her cheeks.
She was momentarily taken aback when the Iranian began bemoaning the very activity that consumed her, and one which the doctor often resented her for. The cigar-puffing gentleman said, ‘We will always be divided. We’ll always be Punjabi, Pathan, Pukhtoon, Muhajir, Sindhi, or what have you. But we will never be united. The Quaid’s dream is slipping from our fingers. Our children won’t even know he had a dream. They won’t know why they’re here. They will be rootless.’ He peeled open a napkin and arranged it over a heavy heart.
‘It’s your weak morale that will tear us apart, Ghulam,’ said another, a Hyderabadi with dark, pockmarked cheeks. ‘You mustn’t let your sons see you this way.’
‘But Ghulam is right,’ said a third, from UP. ‘Things are only getting worse. At least once we had a great university in Aligarh. Now what is there? Will we be forced to send our children away from us?’
‘We have nothing to fear,’ declared a Punjabi. ‘Islam unites us.’
‘That’s exactly what the Prime Minister wants us to believe,’ cautioned the doctor. ‘Why else is he suddenly supporting the Islamic groups? Why else are all the liberals in exile or in jail?’ He pointed to the waiter circling them with a tray of drinks and demanded, ‘Is this to be my last public beer?’ While the waiter poured, an argument erupted.
Amongst the women, the topic ranged from births to beauty parlors to who had been seen at the last grand luncheon where exactly the same three subjects were discussed with equal zeal.
‘You should try Nicky’s instead of Moon Palace, darling,’ said the Hyderabadi wife to the Iranian wife. ‘She gets the curls just right.’ Looking disdainfully at Anu, who wore her hair in a frizzy bun, she sniffed, ‘That is, if you want to stay in touch with things.’
‘Mah Beauty Parlor is far superior,’ said the wife of the Punjabi. She was from Bangalore, and in the past, had confessed her husband couldn’t stand her for it. She was pregnant with their third child. ‘I had my hair set there just yesterday. And you won’t believe who was having hers done beside me!’ She looked around expectantly. ‘Barbara!’ While gasps and exclamations issued, the woman continued, ‘And I found out that her grandmother was my grandmother’s neighbor’s khala’s mother-in-law’s best friend’s sister!’ More gasps and exclamations.
The wife from Delhi, whose husband had taken the doctor’s warning to heart and was on his third beer, piped, ‘I believe it’s her daughter who recently had twins.’ She was not a popular woman. In her absence, the others declared she always overdid it. Anu had to concede they had a point. Today her hair had taken coils to new limits.
But Anu remained silent. Wanting in names to drop, she was fundamentally awkward in high society. She had not been born into it. Nor had the doctor for that matter, nor many of those present, but somehow she alone showed it. She was twenty-three, married at sixteen, educated only till class nine, clever enough to understand English but could speak it with an accent that was hateful to her in English-speaking company. Besides, she would only ever have one child. Soon after Daanish’s birth, her ovaries had had to be removed. It seemed that in her presence, the women always took particular pleasure in repeating the names of those who’d better proven their reproductive worth. But they would never have the pink bloom on her cheeks that her pure blood gifted her.
Across the table, the increasingly incensed doctor was saying, ‘What is the point of banning horse racing? I tell you, people will continue to do as they please but under the table. The Prime Minister is sowing the seeds of corruption with one hand and buying off Islamists with the other.’
‘We’re heading for another military coup,’ sighed the Iranian. ‘Another US-backed martial regime.’
The meal arrived. Hers was placed before her: stuffed shellfish. She disliked eating fish. She preferred them drifting between her ankles, at the mouth of the cave. They were silver and gold then, but cooked they simply stank.
‘Don’t use the fork,’ the doctor leaned across and whispered.
What was she to do, eat with her fingers, here? She flushed. Some of the others heard and laughed – at her.
‘The spoon,’ he urged.
She glanced nervously around the table, and her worst fears were realized: all eyes rested on her plate. She broke the cheese crust with the end of a spoon. It was surprisingly cold. Scooping up a small morsel she began nibbling miserably. Then she noticed something like a bullet where the fish’s belly must have been. She did not want any more.
The doctor boomed loudly, ‘Don’t you like it?’ Laughter.
‘Not hungry,’ she muttered.
‘Just two more bites,’ he urged.
She picked up the spoon again and probed around the bullet. There was another one. And another. Her face would explode with the blood rushing into it. Giving her husband a last, desperate look, she plucked out the first lump with her fingers. Seven more rose with it. The crowd gasped: she held a string of gray pearls.
He helped her wipe them, then fell into a lengthy description of the rarity and size of Tahitian pearls. ‘I’m afraid the meal is uncooked,’ he said more to them than her. ‘I couldn’t possibly have had them bake it!’ Uproar. Applause. Her hands and clothes a sticky mess, smelling putrid. Her insides as hard and lifeless as the gems. He couldn’t afford this. She’d tried to tell him as much each time he gave her gifts. So now he performed in public.
‘How eccentric!’ a sophisticated wife shrieked, eyeing the doctor with a mixture of fascination and horror.
‘How lucky,’ the one who overdid it whooped.
And the one who met the film star at the parlor declared, ‘What an entertaining husband he must be!’
As their enthusiasm grew, she understood they expected her to wear the necklace. She left for the toilet, returning with the polished stones around her neck. Even when dessert arrived no one noticed she had not eaten a thing, though her neck was the object of the ladies’ minute, chilling study, and the doctor of their coquetry and awe.
But then the following morning, optimism returned.
The six-year-old Daanish was in the television lounge with the doctor. She worked in the kitchen, preparing a picnic for the cove. Woozy with the heat, she decided to carry the small tub of lentils she was washing to the breezy lounge. On the television appeared a dusty old white man. His fingers and face were chafed beyond any others she’d seen in his race. Nor did his voice carry the smooth, metallic timbre typical of goras. Most amazing of all was what he did with his hands: exactly what she did! He dipped a crewel-like pan into a river, brought up sand, and sifted – but for what?
‘Gold,’ the doctor explained to Daanish. ‘He’s content to live a life waiting for the odd nugget to fill his cup. Though he’s spent over half a century doing it, he’s still as poor as the dirt that hides his fortune. Some men won’t give up.’
Well! thought Anu, her fingers pausing in the yellow-tinted water. She studied the prospector’s sturdy, startling blue eyes and ropy physique. She followed the cracked gray mouth as it spewed strange, chewy sounds. Her fingers idled pensively. She smiled. For a brief, exciting moment she connected with a man. Not the one stretched across most of the couch (who’d still not noticed her bunched at the end) but the one from a different world. The one who understood that it was the spirit with which she waited that made the effort worthwhile. That commitment itself was reward.
A commercial break. A cheerful Anu packed the lunch and tea. The prospector was a sign of better things to come.
It was time to go to the beach. On the way out, the doctor asked her to wear the pearls. Her face fell. The shame of yesterday threatened to rekindle. Should she ignore him? Deciding against it, Anu hurriedly clasped the string around her neck.
At the cove, the doctor and Daanish cleaned their masks, adjusted their snorkels and were gone. She settled in the cave with her lace, working today on a tablecloth. Once again, she wondered what they would see. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine it. But something was wrong. Her sewing was uninspired. The cave, instead of being the respite she’d known it to be, felt alien. The giant’s foot pressed even closer to her head. She knew what it was. She was feeling the weight of the pearls. They circled her collarbone like lead pellets, each to her what it must have been to the crustacean itself: a blemish, a pustulate growth. Sand in her rediscovered joy. Cysts on her ovaries. She tried focusing on the salt blowing on her lips that was always strangely healing, and on the guipure in her hands, but neither offered any comfort. She thought of the prospector with hands like hers, always sifting, searching. But even he eluded her now. She put away the cloth and began laying out the sandwiches.
Daanish returned, shivering, shrieking, ‘The water’s getting cold!’ She warmed him with a towel. At the mouth of the cave, the doctor dried himself in the sun. Daanish joined him.
‘Come and drink your milk,’ she summoned Daanish. To the doctor, she announced the tea.
He stayed outside. So did Daanish, who began lifting stones, peering into tide pools, digging.
‘You don’t want sand to dirty your milk, do you?’ she called.
He looked at his father, awaiting his direction. The man gazed moodily away.
She repeated, ‘The tea will get cold.’
For a moment, nothing. Then an impatient, ‘Can’t you see I’m not ready yet?’
She waited.
In amongst the neritic clutter around the doctor’s hairy legs the boy declared he’d found a prize. He presented it to his father, who held it up. From inside the cave Anu could see the shell was thin and petal-shaped. The sun filtered right through. It shimmered like a translucent slice of skin.
‘A paper nautilus,’ said the doctor. ‘Aristotle called it an argonaut. I’m uncertain why. Perhaps it had something to do with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Do you know the story?’
Of course not, thought Anu. When it came to questions, the doctor heavily favored the rhetorical kind. Daanish blinked at him lovingly. The child had buried himself in the sand. A hint of his red swimming trunks poked through. He’d washed the nautilus clean with the water in his pail. It glistened like a ribbed eggshell. He took it back from his father gingerly, as if afraid it would slip from his fingers like sea foam. ‘No,’ he whispered, afraid his breath might blow it all away.
‘The Argo was the name of the ship that carried Jason. Those who went with him were called Argonauts – sailors of the Argo.’
Explain, explain. That’s what the doctor loved to do. But only she knew the things he could not explain.
‘And if you look at it this way,’ he plucked it again from his son, who licked his sandy lips nervously, ‘with the narrow end down, then, it looks like a billowing sail, doesn’t it?’ Daanish winked, trying hard to see it. ‘The animal that makes it is an octopus. Riding along with it in her arms she must look like a sailor. What do you say?’
Daanish clapped his hands with delight. ‘Yes! She’d have her own boat!’
The doctor laughed, thumping him lightly on the back.
In the cave, Anu poured out the tea. The pearls around her neck were cold and ravishing. Tears, as large as each stone, welled in her eyes.
He continued explaining. ‘Strictly speaking, this is not a shell. It’s a nest made by the octopus, and it’s at this tapering end that she pockets the eggs and carries the whole thing with her – a purse, cradle and ship all in one.’
‘What happens when the babies are born?’ Daanish asked, his eyes wide with anticipation.
‘Good question. When the thousand little baby argonauts hatch, she rejects the cradle, so children like you can have them. It’s a miracle, isn’t it, that something as flimsy as this can survive the thrust of the sea and surface unharmed?’
The child nodded fervently. Behind her tears, Anu’s guipure blurred into spray.
‘Argonaut,’ the doctor continued, ‘was also the name of those Americans who went West in search of gold. That fellow we saw on TV just this morning could be a descendant.’
Ah, thought Anu, here he was again: the prospector. He’d appeared like a sign to give her hope, but how naïve she’d been! Well then, she would no longer count on signs. If she continued waiting for the doctor, she’d be left behind both him and Daanish.
When they got home later that evening, she took off the necklace and left it carelessly in the hall. He carried it to her saying she did not appreciate the shape of his love. He was suddenly and inexplicably enraged. ‘It may not appear as you want to see it,’ he shouted, ‘but if you weren’t so blind, you’d see it exists!’
Curiously placid, she wondered where. In the trips to the South Seas and places she couldn’t even name?
Where? In his study? Anyone could become an expert just by reading. But she didn’t need a single page to tell her why he never discussed anything he read with her. It would thin his expertise. It would fatten hers. It would mean that she too could explain things to Daanish.
Where was his love? In all those high-society parties he dragged her to, just to embarrass her?
In the food he never liked?
The conversation he never made?
Her lineage? His want of it?
Or in her only child, whom she knew even then would be sent far away, for, pah! education.
Coolly, she fingered the pearls strangling his strong, healer’s fingers and brushed his large pink nails with her own. ‘Give it to the one who sees where. Tell her I send my love. I’m sure she’ll understand the shape of it.’
His mouth opened in momentary shock, snapped shut, and then he was off on an unconvincing tirade. He stumbled and once even stuttered, not having had the chance to look up counter-arguments in a book.
She turned, delighted with the audacity she’d never known herself capable of. She was riding the roiling sea, a panner of gold, a sailor with eight long silvery arms and a purse with Daanish kicking inside.
She had learned how to swim.
Anu walked back to Intensive Care. Still no news. The doctor’s brothers too had arrived. His sisters continued to sob and exchange stories from their childhood, all of which proved how they knew him better than she did – the woman he’d wedded, by their own arrangement, twenty-three years ago. She shed no tears. She pictured her son bending over his books in America, his thick brows slightly furrowed, turning page after page, getting excellent marks on every test. He was so bright. He must have put on weight in that land of plenty. She’d memorized every photograph he’d sent, but he’d been clad in so many layers it was impossible to detect any changes. He looked just as sweet and loving as ever. He was going to be a great man.
Suddenly there was a frenzy. Nurses were in and out of the room. She asked why and demanded to see her husband but they brushed by her. She peeped inside the door but was swiftly ushered back. She saw him briefly on the bed beneath a forest of tubes: silver hair, ashen cheeks, thin, wrinkled eyelids. He’d been unconscious now for over nine hours.
