Shailaja watched the undulating progress of her blue second-hand refrigerator astride two glistening shoulders. Perspiration was running down her face as well. The top floor was going to be a scorcher. Setting up home in a third-floor apartment of a building that didn’t have a lift wasn’t going to be easy.
Her ‘pocket’ had fifty blocks of four four-storeyed buildings each. These buildings were built around a small square. Each block, thus, had sixteen flats that diminished in area and price from bottom to top. Viewing the block the first time through the window of her newly rented top-floor flat, she had at once designated it as the dry step-well or baoli.
A small, fat boy riding a tricycle wheeled around her feet as she stood her ground at the bottom of the step-well. The boy sounded the hooter on his tricycle; Shailaja flinched. It was a loud report and a sputter, something suggesting cosmic diarrhoea. The boy was delighted. Every time he caused the upset, he grinned.
‘You like children?’ a woman asked. She was evidently the noise-polluter’s mother and had emerged from the groundfloor flat of the building opposite hers.
‘Ah, yes! How did you guess?’
‘All women like children. You are moving to the top floor?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does your husband do?’
‘I am not married.’
‘Oh!’ said the woman.
There was silence.
‘Divorced?’ she asked.
‘No—yes,’ hazarded Shailaja.
‘You alone?’
‘Yes.’
The woman tut-tutted. ‘It’s so sad! I could make out from the way you were looking at Ganesh.’
The tricycle came dangerously close to the two women and one of the rear wheels grazed Shailaja’s big toe.
‘Ouch!’ she squealed, more in surprise than pain.
‘Ganesh, come here, I will break your cycle,’ roared the tricyclist’s mother. ‘Are you hurt?’ she asked.
‘Not much,’ Shailaja insisted on replying, even though the woman was no longer looking at her.
Ganesh hooted from the other end of the square.
Shailaja rubbed her toe vigorously. The woman bent almost double to take a look at her feet.
‘Nothing happened. Thank God. Boys of this age are devils, no? Come in and have a cup of tea. We are all like family here.’
‘No, no, I should keep an eye on things,’ Shailaja replied, somewhat disappointed that retribution was not going to strike. She had already started rehearsing for the role of the beloved ‘aunty’ of the neighbourhood children in her head: No, no, please don’t hit him. One shouldn’t hit children; it creates psychological complications. But the opportunity had been denied to her. The mother–son duo claimed centre stage again.
‘Yes, that’s right, you must. Just as well you don’t have too much stuff. Now when we moved in, I told Ganesh’s father to get his office staff to help, but we still lost so many things,’ the woman was saying rather pointedly.
Shailaja had resolved that she would cultivate a pleasant working relationship with her neighbours in Vasant Kunj, but her unfamiliarity with the social codes of this colony was becoming obvious to her.
For thirteen years, she had shared a barsati with her boyfriend Ranjan in upmarket Defence Colony. Sitting atop a huge terrace, the two-room apartment gave a sense of transience. Usually, the residents of barsatis would be foreigners on shortterm assignments, single people who travelled frequently, etc. Ranjan had told her that barsatis were afterthoughts in architectural conception, constructed years after the two- or three-storeyed main houses had been built. The word ‘barsati’ is intended to make one think of torrential rains. Indeed, they were built as temporary structures where the occupants of the main house could enjoy the showers and the cool breeze that followed. But economic considerations, born out of spiralling property prices, had made house-owners rent them out, and sometimes even sell them.
The concept of living in the temporary barsati had seemed very romantic at that time. In her imagination, it would always rain in Defence Colony. She had visualized herself on a merrily creaking wrought-iron swing, humming, while Ranjan made adrak wali chai in the makeshift kitchen. ‘Our relationship is abiding, home can be anywhere,’ she and Ranjan used to say whenever anyone asked them about the future and whether they intended setting up a permanent home. But when Ranjan fell in love with a starlet (‘A whirlwind, Shailaja’), it was their relationship that had revealed itself to be ephemeral at the first gust.
So here she was, adrift in a Ranjan-less place, an alien place where this quintessential neighbourhood aunty dared to be uppity with her. It suddenly occurred to her that if she hadn’t taken what her father had deemed the ‘wildly unconventional step’ of moving in with her boyfriend and instead agreed to an arranged marriage, this is the kind of place she would have been occupying for the last thirteen years. She could have even become this loud, plump woman, with her champion-tricyclist son, boasting about her microwave. In fact, didn’t some of the other lecturers in her college go on about their homes in the same way? Shailaja regarded her unsolicited companion with something akin to fascinated horror.
‘—and six dinner sets,’ the woman was saying. ‘I still have boxes that I haven’t opened, and we’ve been here ten years. Teenu and Ganesh were born here; Neeru, my oldest, was born when we were still in our family home in Old Delhi. Divorce affects children the most. Grown-ups can always begin their lives again. It’s good you don’t have children. But you know, it is bad to let the childbearing years go fallow. This is why so many women need to go to hospitals in order to conceive.’
Shailaja bridled at the phrase ‘childbearing years go fallow’, spoken in Hindi with the certainty of self-evident truth.
‘You know, there is another way of looking at it. All women don’t want children,’ Shailaja said.
‘Ultra-modern women, must be! But ninety-nine out of hundred—’
‘No, not only these days! Long ago—in the Mughal period, for instance—the concubines of the emperor practised a way of family planning. There are documents. It was also believed that having children ruined the woman’s figure. Actually it does, doesn’t it?’ Shailaja hit back.
There was silence as the new adversaries took stock of each other. ‘Must be so for concubines, not for ordinary women. For wives, it is different. Men want women to be young and pretty forever. But ageing takes place, no? If there is a child to hold the men, they stay put. Otherwise they begin straying.’