A family brushes past me with the woman dragging along a teenage girl in a ridiculous pair of yellow stilettoes. I shove the woman with my elbow which invites a poisonous look as she steams ahead. The security waves me to the left of the aisles, his belly thrust out like a sandbag. At the mouth of the conveyor, a group of youngsters in military greens are making merry. When I reach out for the tray, one of them lifts it off without an apology and my mohair stole briefly snags on the star on his lapel. I resist the impulse to call after him. I don’t dare to.
How on earth will I hold out in a new city, if getting past the security gates is so daunting?
The woman two places ahead of me in the queue is undaunted and wrestles her way through. All this flailing to reach a man to help him remove his tweed coat, belt, shoes, and place them on separate plastic trays. She rejoins the ladies’ queue but in the next moment, she is back at the belt to pull out a cell phone from his coat pocket and place it separately, while the man shuffles and points accusingly to a brown leather wallet lying carelessly on the tray. My eyes follow her. She is unruffled, with a feisty devotion. Looks in her late thirties and doesn’t appear to be from here, Bengaluru that is. As for the man, his blue turban rises above the rest in the queue. For all that fuss, he must be old. After he goes past the metal detector, he picks up the trolley from the conveyor with an effortless swoosh and with his free hand, lifts the tray with loose items. And looks back, peering through the security gate, which is when he comes up in view.
I freeze. Him of all those people, the witnesses to my ledger of losses. A history that I wish I could erase. But have I? He appears warthier than I remember of him but it is those mean furrows in his brow that stir up from the hazy memories. The eyebrows bushy and glistening with sweat. That posture should have been a giveaway. He, the bearer of a body that wouldn’t cut itself such slack as a slouch. Ramrod straight and with economy in every movement. But his name, why can’t I recall?
It is only after he walks away with the grey trolley and without waiting for the woman to catch up, does it strike me that the metal detectors hadn’t beeped when he passed through, as we had once joked they would. Cheema, it’s him. Cheema. So strong is my urge to catch up with him that I attempt to skip the queue, unsuccessfully, and find myself pushed back to await my turn at the metal detector.
That was the most salient description of Cheema, the one that got the most laughs. The man who couldn’t take a flight because that would set the metal detectors hooting.
What seems mandatory now—an introduction to the team on joining a new place of work—wasn’t considered necessary then. By and by, you were expected to get to know people through their work. So, I met him for the first time at an office party. A celebration with my team, all nineteen of them—my husband had spotted the connection and we had laughed, 19th September being his birthday. The occasion was a staff member’s son having landed a job in London.
Cheema was the last to join. From the file of chairs arranged along the wall, he had pulled out an empty one, dragging it to the far end of the room to set himself separate. After spreading a white handkerchief on the seat, he sat down. In slow, methodical steps while we waited for him to settle. Unconcerned that he was bringing every aspect of him up for clear view. A thickly waxed black beard, wavy in places like wet coils, lined his square jaw. And a blue turban, heavily starched and pointed, held tightly with pins.
The joke about the metal detectors came to be shared sometime later. He had met with a road accident, a fatal one for his wife, and his left leg had to be put back together with screws and metal plates. That was the leg he wouldn’t fold when he sat, extending it out as if in a pistol squat.
At every meeting that followed, Cheema’s inability to make it on time, irked me. Although I had by then come to accept that a man so encumbered as Cheema— a widower with three children—could be excused for being late, I imagined that such liberty was granted only on the merit of his work. At the end of every audit assignment, he would submit his report written in a neat cursive in perfect straight lines on sheets of unruled, bleached paper. Which I would then gather in my hands with concealed reverence.
Not wishing to appear callow, I didn’t flinch from questioning, occasionally challenging him, in the manner of my own bosses. That would not fluster him in the least. He wet the tip of his index finger with his tongue to riffle through his copy, one of the triplicate made by placing two carbon papers in between, as the office procedures demanded. Then he would reel out the facts and figures. Such as, “the capacity of the intake channel was inna-inna-inna MLD disproportionately higher than the outlet channels which led to waste of inna-inna-inna rupees in the cost of excess installation…”
The woman at the security pats me down but my mind has settled into a welcome ease with amusement at Cheema of yore. Back then, discussions at office served as offerings for our visiting friends and my husband would prod me to mimic Cheema. His young bride whom he barely knew, who could at once be awkward, prickly and boisterous. We were on our own, not stuck in a joint family like the rest, and that alone had apparently granted his friends an open invitation every Friday. I resented their ease as much as I invented new ways to amuse them. My entrée that weekend was, “Plizzed to be that we are here at inna-inna-inna address at inna-inna time with inna-inna-inna-inna beers in the chiller” (never mind that Cheema would never say ‘Plizzed to be’).
Being trained in the prescribed abject mode in the tight hierarchies of our government office, Cheema would sign off ‘With The Highest Personal Regards’ iin mundane letters of request for leave from work. We were quick to adopt these in rummy parties at our home, “May Your Goodself play your Honourable turn, Sir, with your Lotus Hands?”
Such performative grace was absent in his dealings with his peers. Particularly with one, a cherubic Sardar who had ingratiated himself a few years ago to a coveted posting (euphemistically called a ‘wet’ posting for the “opportunities” it offered) and had hose-piped that wetness onto a business of chartered bus services. Wasn’t he called Dhillon? I am not quite sure. Much admired for this clever investment and his generous celebrations, Dhillon had worked the system well, which in turn, demanded no real work from him. He was also our go-to man, the one who could breach all bureaucratic hurdles, be they on personal or official matters. It was soon evident to me that the office was a landmine of male egos. Cheema, I gathered, mentally followed Dhillon like a metal detector ready to hoot at the first chance. With his focus so lasered, it would not have registered on him that he was, in fact, the butt of office jokes. Like the joke about the metal detectors. The other joke was that Cheema was at his best in summers. When the metal nuts and bolts in his body expanded to fit just right into the sockets they were screwed into. Not just the screws in his leg but on his head too. Such jokes were not viewed as inappropriate then, and in fact, it would be considered bad manners to take offense at them.
Not that Cheema would feel sullied by such talk. He had successfully curated, especially among the women, an image of a suffering widower, who single-handedly looked after his three children. No one questioned this tag of ‘single-handedly’, which to my mind, was a dubious claim. He was the only brother to seven sisters and had cousins—one of whom worked as my Personal Assistant. He was a man, I thought, and he would never be short of help, even from neigbours and acquaintances.
Cheema’s eccentricities as if his misfortune hadn’t already isolated him—took the shape of crown jewels on his turban. His stubborn silence in meetings. His refusal to shake hands. The golden and outlandish cufflinks. Or how he would use only ink pens and must have been the last in the generation to use blotting paper.
Just the kind of man, the women wanted to hold to their bosoms. Gossip about Cheema found its way into the ladies' room too. (The one attached to my room had a dripping roof which awaited Dhillon’s attention).
“Itna kasht”, I heard a woman moan, “But, he has to work for his children”.
Inside the toilet cubicle, I wondered, if that were so, why were the rest of us without kids working?
It hurt the women to see him single. “Wahi to. He should marry.”
“Which souteli ma will consider his kids as her own, haina?”
In the more elite group of civil servants that I lunched with, marriage was no self-indulgence. Courtship was a different matter but it rapidly lost its appeal once the deed was done. Two women who were well past youth but had remained single held much of the sway. Particularly the older one, in her forties, whose name I do not remember. What is vivid in my mind is the lunch room which was painted pink in deference to her taste. The polyester curtains might have had pink flowers. The room was otherwise bare, with an echo of empty laughter and our strenuous bonhomie. Conversations never turned bawdy. Nothing upsetting could be spoken in her presence. Like the suicide of a staffer’s son. “Shush!” motioned a male colleague, eyes darting in her direction. She let herself be caricatured and frozen in loveliness in what seemed to me, a trap the men had set for her. The collective attention, the soft glow that radiated from her, made such frozenness worthwhile. I wanted it so bad.
Sitting in the pink room, I felt as if I had been misled and conned into a cheap trick by marrying. But for my marriage, it seemed to me, I would have been at liberty to choose a self that set me apart, and I could lavish on that self, time and effort to shape it to perfection. Now that opportunity was lost. I was condemned to remain a bumpkin. “It isn’t ‘ohfer’, Prita,” I was corrected once, “it’s offer, au-fer” my colleague’s mouth rolled on the O. “Cho chweet, ohfer!” I didn’t stand a chance. No amount of reading could correct such a fatal flaw in ancestry.
My older colleague, the one who had kept herself single, wouldn’t do that. She was free of the meanness of married women, their smug surrender to domesticity, their run-ins with their maids and mothers-in-law. Blouses falling off sloppy shoulders. Haldi stains on fingernails, the smell of fish.
When this woman spoke of food, it seemed like sex itself and tantalising with possibilities. Flavours that exploded in our mouths.
Sex for women seemed to turn stale by its contamination with marriage. Once my infertility treatment started, sex became all about the womb heating up to nurse the egg. I kept meticulous notes on ovulation to slot sex as a scheduled activity. My husband would fetch me from office for the tests every month, dates we would have liked to ignore but couldn’t, now that we had fallen into their mindless rhythm. Should Cheema be in my room, he would rise deferentially to greet my husband, who would make an elaborate charade of apology, “Sorry ji, I will whisk away my Mrs. for an hour.” When we prepared to leave, my husband would place his arm on my shoulder and turn to wave at Cheema, who bowed with a smile. Cheema, I could see, was a sucker for family. What about me? I would have found in that wrapping and possessing arm, the safety of marriage and thus beyond some imaginary reproach.
Was it these glimpses of my family life and my very personable role in it that invited Cheema to broach his rather delicate affair with me? Now as I watch him walking away with his briefcase at the airport security, I imagine that I would have been thrown off by his request, such being the barriers established by the hierarchy at work. That this barrier was breached would have made it appear as though I had been set apart, flatteringly, for my personal qualities. I would have made some noises of protest—what do I know? After all, mine was a marriage arranged by my parents—but they would have been half-hearted. He was inviting me to be a part of a momentous decision, one which I would have believed would change his life. Just as motherhood would, in my case. When all else that was unimportant but weighing upon me, would fall by the wayside.
How Cheema approached me is a vaporous blur in my mind, but not what followed.
We reached the India Coffee House—Cheema and I—earlier than the appointed hour to meet the lady. As I climbed the stairs to Mohan Singh Place, with Cheema behind me, his choice of this venue with its laboured access seemed odd. That he had chosen a coffee house that was a relic of an era of musty upholstery and mustier ideas while swankier joints were on offer close-by, confirmed that an oddball like Cheema could never surrender the calculations of money even if it was to meet a prospective partner. The Madurai Coffee House was even more run-down than I had imagined. Its mismatched furniture with foam puffing out of the rexine seats. Hand-painted signages led to nowhere. The liveried waiters appeared to have been picked up from a period drama, languorously waiting to be called to action for their scene. The only solace was the sun which shone bright on the terrace on that wintery afternoon.
She was already there with her back to the steps. Hennaed hair in a long plait.
We walked up to her, a tad unsure if she was the woman we were to meet.
Her cheeks which fell on both sides like fermented dosa batter, lifted into a welcome smile. She was middle-aged and with pores on her skin like bubbles breaking the surface of the batter.
While they talked—she talked—I wolfed down the dosa between quick sips of the coffee because only food could push down the swell in my chest. I was always hungry and in discomfort, as if there was already a baby growing inside me. And also, because there was nothing else to do when she held forth. Her dead husband was a Corporal and, in the air force station, “you get to learn foreign preparations.” He liked khow suey best, she added. The red lipstick mark on her teacup seemed to remonstrate my eating, so I turned her cup around while rearranging the plates of food on the square table.
“Tell me about your work,” she asked Cheema finally.
There was a long pause before he made an attempt. “Touring. Many days—”
She smiled, her eyes moist with pity, “No worries now. You can leave the kids to me.”
After a formal good-bye, Cheema took a deep sigh and shook his head. I was glad to be freed from any further discussion. That would have been embarrassing and would have implicated me in his personal and unsavoury decision—one that involved a rejection. Not that I cared; nor did he, it seemed. We had walked off as if we had been on an errand. A fatal innocence, the memory of which coils tight in the pit of my stomach. I wrap my mohair stole on my shoulders, ineffective as it seems in the freezing cold in the airport.
Our return to office was in an autorickshaw enveloped in fumes of black smoke. I remember now that I stirred a conversation on the upcoming elections to the Employee Association, shouting to be heard over the din of the autorickshaw.
“Why don’t good people like you stand for elections?” I asked.
He bowed his head just a little and said, “Politics is for the scoundrels and aren’t there enough in our office?” We laughed.
The tryst at the coffee house couldn’t have turned any other way. Had his cousin and my Personal Assistant been kept in the loop, she would have indicted Cheema “You can only take a thirsty donkey to the river”, she would have said, “But what if all it does is admire its own reflection?”
I didn’t tell my husband about this rendezvous either. I would have told him some other story, though, now that I was getting better at curating them for his amusement. My target being my Personal Assistant and he loved my imitation of her.
“Kitna pyaar karte hain,” she would tease me, counting my husband’s daily calls on the office landline (it fell to her to pass the call to me). This flattery served her well to escape any reproach for her poor typing skills, my husband would then insinuate to his friends on Fridays. Now we both looked forward to these impromptu gatherings to escape seeking anything else from our marriage except act (“get your act together,” our friends ribbed us). By then, my ovaries seemed just as frayed as our marriage and staying on the conveyor belt to the fertility clinic, was our only hope.
My eyes follow Cheema’s retreating figure instead of my bag on the conveyor belt, which, I belatedly realise, the security attendant has pulled off the belt with a demand that it be opened. It is an old cloth bag from my childhood days, henna green with a red rose embroidered in its centre. Inside the bag are items of food my mother has packed in air-tight plastic packets and wound with a rubber band.
“No, no,” the attendant says pointing to a small red bottle, “that one.”
I smile and gesture dramatically, “Oh, that’s Amma’s most-famous inji curry.” This inji curry is to be, among other things, my source of reassurance in the new city and work—the first job after a hiatus of four years. With one packet at a time, my mother would have hoped, I will put together my life.
He isn’t amused. “That liquid, it can’t go,” he says sternly.
“Why?” I am indignant, “Let me see who stops me.”
“Madam, please step aside.”
“Call the manager. Now!”, I shout
“Madam, please step aside.”
The manager motions me to a chair placed by the wall, segregated from the rest, and whispers into my ear, “Please wait here, madam. This could have been avoided if you listened to the security in the first place.” I am not willing to sit down. This isn’t a battle that I can lose, its significance rising with each moment. This is happening all too often. They always win. What I can’t bear is the pity when they do. It is a smell I carry in the pit of my womb.
For over four months when I was on medical leave, Cheema would not have visited me at the hospital or later at home. Though I am not quite sure. Dhillon remained steadfast and in contact until one day, I stopped answering his calls.
Dhillon was the one my Personal Assistant drafted for help. I had heard her speak of men—“he whimpers like a baby for a common cold” she once said of her husband—and she would have summoned Dhillon without being asked. A routine check in a hitherto uneventful pregnancy had detected that the seven-month-old foetus, had, unknown to me, suffered an intra-uterine death. No bleeding. No discomfort. A quiet snuffing in the amniotic waters. The doctor detailed the next steps. She would induce the labour which, she warned, would be drawn out, since the baby was too dead to push through.
Over the fourteen hours of labour, I lay in a corner dripping in sweat. Gulping air through my teeth, my lips dry, as I waited for each spasm to pass over. It didn’t seem right that I too should scream. The other women had live flesh and blood to expel at the end of the labour, and unlike me, had earned the right to holler or blow their fuse at the mid-wives.
What I wasn’t ready for was when, after the delivery, the midwife brought the dead foetus close to my face and demanded that I pay up for its disposal. That was when I screamed, and from then on, nothing would stop my screams. Until Dhillon was called in, who settled the matter and it was taken care of.
Of the many things we couldn’t speak about was why my husband couldn’t handle the situation himself and Dhillon was called instead. Why what had already been snuffed, was let out for display to draw their collective pity. There was no one to blame when the marriage collapsed. It could be true that I was looking for a reason and had latched on to this one, to finally put down the weight of the charade. I also quit work and shifted in with my mother in Bengaluru.
Having chastised me, the manager has left and through the gaps between my fingers, my eyes register the military boots of a soldier who has paused before me. With a kick on the chair, I rise with a weak attempt to smile at the soldier before walking away quietly, the cloth bag slung diagonally across my chest, now lighter of the divested bottle of inji curry. When it appears that the soldier is no longer behind me, I run towards the closest washroom. With my palms pressed tight on the wall tiles behind me, I catch my breath. Only to find myself face-to-face with Cheema’s attendant. This proximity startles me, but I manage to force a smile. She doesn’t reciprocate, perhaps because she has recognised me as the hysterical woman at the security gates.
“Excuse me,” I say, “The man you were with. Mr. Cheema, isn’t he? We have worked together.” Her thin lips part as she watches me blabber. “That was sometime back, of course, around four years ago,” I add.
“Oh, before we got married.” She looks too young to be his wife but who is to know about age?
“He was a very good worker. And his leg seems better.”
“Yes, yes, we got it operated. Knee replacement surgery.”
“Knee, is it?”
She scarfs the blue gauze dupatta around her neck, “Yes, the accident broke his calf but the knees took a hit in the process. I have heard that life before that was difficult, but now it is manageable—”
“Yes, despite that, he managed work and his kids.”
“Oh, yes, yes. It is for his son that we came to Bengaluru. He got admission into Engineering.” Touching the top of her head, she says, “Touch wood. I am blessed.”
“Do give my hello to Mr. Cheema. It’s very nice meeting you,” I say and begin to walk away, but she calls after me , “Wait. You can meet my husband.”
Drawing up my left hand from behind my sling bag as if to read a wristwatch that I don’t have, I tell her, “I am running late. Maybe next time.”
I make a dash for the gates. But the boarding will take a while and I choose a chair on the far end, my gaze resolutely outward and flipping the boarding card between my fingers. Back home, my mother would be in the living room with a cup of tea. There is a time in the evening just before dusk when the golden light filters into the living room and ribbons through its elements to magnify those parts that are otherwise hidden from view. The very parts that until, now, had held me together.
The encounter with Cheema has fragmented this delicately held composition. The expensive knee replacement, how did he fund that? There was no reason for me to dwell upon him. Why should he matter? But for that extinguishing of light—had I not joined in to blow it out?—Cheema would have been erased from my memory like much else from that time of my life.
There must have been some talk of a connection in our house. My mother is the sort of person who pins down events to their causes, a neat reordering of upheavals which makes life predictable and less scary. Such are her views. Everyone must be held accountable. Even if all you did was witness, it made you complicit and was as bad as dirtying your own hands. “The scales of justice tip ever so fine under the watchful eyes from heaven.” Her voice would quiver as she recanted, this faith.
I remember that my mother had stoutly defended the family line. There was no taint there. Each child delivered along the sturdy line, was healthy and lived a full life. “Why was my Prita singled out?” she wailed when the mourners streamed in after what she had begun to call “the miscarriage”. Why? That was a question that begged an answer.
Although a regular presence in our house after the miscarriage, Dhillon wouldn’t have told me about Cheema right away. When he did, it was in the same peremptory tone of the manager at the security gates at the airport a while back. “I told Inderjeet, this could have been avoided if she had listened in the first place.” My Personal Assistant was to blame, in his view.
“Eh?”
“Oh, madam. Most unfortunate. This Inderjeet and other jananiyan, they were trying to get Cheema hooked. And then the lafda happened.” He paused to sip the tea before placing the cup back on the side table. “Cheema met this girl. Not a girl, of course, a middle-aged woman. It seemed a good match to everyone. A poor widow whose husband, was in army-sharmy and had died of a heart attack. No issue, no baby-shaby and other complications.”
Dhillon took out his handkerchief and wiped the spit from the edges of his mouth, “Phir, Cheema rejected her. Socho, how she would have felt, even if it is a cripple refusing? Then we got the news that this woman, bas, thak” he gestured as if slitting his throat, “she hanged herself. Imagine, madam. That’s when the cat spilled out of the bag.”
“And Cheema?” I asked weakly.
“Madam, whether the tarbooz falls on the churi, or it is the knife that falls on the melon, what goes of the knife? His is as sharp as ever. You didn’t hear it? Kaljug only. A-1 posting, he got.” Dhillon made a loop of his thumb and index finger. “When you return, he won’t be there in our group” he chuckled, “Good only. One less problem to handle.”
As I slid down under the bedcover, my head flopped back and an image whirred on the ceiling— the woman at the Madurai Coffee House, her lips bloated with the red lipstick smeared on her bared teeth and limbs splayed along the blades of the spinning fan. While Cheema and I sat on chairs under the fan, wiping the oil off our lips with a napkin.
Dhillon cried out “Arre madam”. He called out to the house help and lunged for the bottle to sprinkle water on me.
“Jaldi, jaldi”, he hurried the help in panic, “Oy hoy, madam, you don’t worry about Cheema. Please. Oho, I pray Wahe Guru gives you housla.”
Later in the evening, my mother said, “This isn’t a big deal. Scores of women have miscarriages.” Being hard-nosed— hadn’t she seen enough as young widow?— she wanted to put an end to the misery and to the stream of mourners, which had begun to grate on my husband too. She would have assumed that the collapse in the morning was out of exhaustion.
“Think that something very big was to happen, which got dealt with this”, my mother paused, having decided to omit, “the miscarriage”.
“What harm has it caused?”, she continued, “You are healthy. And young.” She didn’t want any more fuss and in any case, it was time to shift to her home, my home, in Bengaluru. But that didn’t get me off the hook or keep at bay the demons that crept out in the silent, sleepless nights.
Outside the giant glass panels at the airport, dusk is about to fall and the lights come on. A mother consoles her crying infant by pointing to the aircrafts lined up outside. The father steps forward with his palms outstretched but the kid turns away, bawling louder this time.
“Good evening, madam,” I hear a familiar voice and look up to find Cheema, “My Mrs., Veena” he says introducing his wife, “Very pleased to meet you.”
I stand up to greet him, “It’s been a long time.”
“Please convey my respectful regards to Sir. Any issues, madam?”
I shake my head.
“I pray to Wahe guru that he fills your jholi, madam”, says Cheema. He hasn’t heard about us.
Veena takes the bag off his shoulders and flicks her fingers on the tweed coat, as if it to straighten an ungainly crease. He smiles at her, a tiny twitch on the lips and that’s all, relieved that the weight is off him for now. We talk about work and I ask of Dhillon.
“What about him, madam? Have you heard a dog’s tail ever straighten? Never, even if you were to leave the dog in a pipe” Cheema laughs, at first gently, but he is unable to hold back and laughs so loud that his body shakes. Only Dhillon could make Cheema laugh like that. His wife is amused too and places her hand on his sleeve as if to temper him down. Having never seen him laugh, I am taken aback. It seems as if I never knew Cheema at all.
The woman at the gate repeats, “Boarding for seat numbers 14-28.”
A man’s voice announces, “Last call for boarding AI 627 to Mumbai.” I pull the stole tight on my shoulders and rub my eyes. The exhaustion of the day wearing me down. The flight ahead of me is short, but I would have to stay squeezed in. A young woman takes my boarding pass and flashes a smile of satisfaction now that the boarding is complete and she can close the gate. The jet bridge opens out before me. Like Cheema’s open, laughing mouth. As if it were a tunnel that fell through time to a pink room which was no longer pink. It was perhaps never pink.
The airhostess demonstrates the instructions. The belt, oxygen mask, safety jackets, the seats that become floating rafts. I count the deep breaths, “inna, inna, inna...” to welcome the sleep that descends on my eyes.
Rebecca Mathai is a civil servant based in Delhi. She is currently editing her novel, the concept of which was a winning entry in the iWrite contest at the Jaipur Litfest 2020. Her work has appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Commonwealth adda, The Bangalore Review, Usawa, Kitaab, Wise Owl and in an anthology of the Written Circle.