Life Lines by Anu Kay

“No,” he said slowly, he spoke through gritted teeth and she understood he was in pain. “Everyone assumes that. I am not from India, but from Bangladesh. Earlier it was part of India, and then part of Pakistan. Bangla-desh.” He repeated slowly, though he wasn’t being rude, not then.

She didn’t want to tell him that his explanation had left her even more confused. Any sudden movement would hurt his bandaged forehead now, and she didn’t want to provoke him. The guys who had beaten him up, though, she knew about them. They could be rough, though many of them did much useful work. They drove the buses, and some of them were cab drivers too. She remembered the time Anjali and she had been on a night shift together and outside, the rain poured, unrelenting. A kindly Muslim driver had seen them home and waited outside till they were safe inside their apartment. She had always assumed he was Pakistani.

Shirish filled in a form before he left and that was how she learnt his name. When he didn’t come back for a check-up with the doctor the next day, she called him at the number he had left. No one answered and just a moment later, as she placed the receiver back, he had materialized at the door. She blushed. Maybe it was something to do with what she read at that time, and believed in. To think of a person so much, and with so much longing that he appeared right in front of you.

Weeks after meeting her at the clinic, when his bandages came off, Shirish had asked her out for coffee. A meeting to thank her for all her kindnesses, Shirish had emailed. She liked his stiff formality. At that time, he had asked Nina about her family. Her family was from the Dominican Republic, though her mother, a health worker, was originally from India. Then Shirish had politely asked to see her hand, Nina remembered how that had made her smile. He pressed her hand flat out on the table, her knuckles knocking against the wood, as he read the lines on her palm. He bent low, his hand gentle and gingery on her hand. Her fingers curled against his strangely warm breath, and she laughed, pretending to be scared.

“Do you see something bad?”

He looked up, smiled softly, and his hand on her relaxed. His small finger against her palm, absently stroking it made her stomach wobble funnily.

“You are a very loving person,” he said.

“Is that a bad thing?”

He shook his head, smiling broadly. “Not for the recipient. No. But love takes a lot out.”

Nina came back to the present. She had been wrong. She had somehow forgotten the time Shirish had held her hand and read her future. The way he had made her stomach flutter oddly for a few seconds.

“We mustn’t meet,” she told Shirish over phone soon after Anjali had left with her news. “You should have told me you were getting married.”

He didn’t speak for some moments. “Yes, it had to happen. She has the same background.”

“Yes, she did explain to me. The arranged marriage thing. Marriage is such a simple thing. It’s only love that is so complicated.”

For someone who could explain complicated things with such simplicity and ease, like the principles of quantum physics to the students he tutored or about the fundamentals of Hindu culture, the complexities of Buddhist thought to those who attended his lectures at the Eden Philips Foundation, Shirish was confusing when it came to his own life, and the decisions he took.

“Sometimes love is at best an add-on,” he said after a pause, his words slow with a hollow profundity. “It should not be the sole reason for anything.”

Nina laughed, throwing her head back, and being a bit too loud. She knew Shirish didn’t like women laughing that way, even on the phone.

Shirish spoke even more slowly, making Nina feel like a particularly dull student.

“Love can make things messy. In India, marriages are between families. Yes, even…” he cleared his throat, “when families are far away. Parents are reassured when the child, I mean their children have an arranged marriage, then continuity is assured. Like customs, food, ways of behaving, even values that are passed on.”

“So you don’t love Anjali.”

She could imagine how Shirish’s teeth clenched at her words, and the flush darkening his face even more.

“You can’t ask me that. If I hadn’t, if she hadn’t, these next steps, whatever we did…” he was blustering now, and she held the phone a bit away from her ear, “all this would never have happened. It’s that, in our culture, we don’t do things so brazenly. Like the hippies, or the shallow western people, or half and half people like you, Nina. Who don’t realize that tradition, the past, culture, everything has to be respected.”

She hung up on him then. A quiet click, not a slamming down. Nina had always wanted to be a good girl, especially when, she thought, other people were being mean and bad. She knew what Shirish had meant, why she would never marry right, or ever have a respectable arranged marriage. Even her mother, long separated from Nina’s father, had admitted wistfully that her fondest wish was to have Nina have an arranged marriage.

“Is that the best kind of marriage?”

“It is,” said her mother, “in old cultures, like in India. The land where I come from. When you have an arranged marriage, it means you are married in the presence of all those who love you and are present to bless you. It means you hold your parents, the older generation, in high esteem, more than your own feelings.”

Nina had tried to work things out for herself. She went for community events, the festivals, the langar or free kitchen that the Sikh gurudwara had on big occasions. Sometimes she volunteered as a nurse to the elderly, and there she learnt the stories of the early migrants from India. Those who had traveled by ship across the Pacific, their early experiences of discrimination, the days of rebellion against the British, the battle for citizenship, and their desperation to maintain links with their homeland despite the distance. They were people, Nina realized, who came with too much history. She was sometimes unnerved by the amount she needed to learn to fit in. And yet she longed to be part of it, to belong to a culture. It was her half and half status that unnerved her. Half Dominican and half Indian. It was like half and half milk.

Years passed. She wasn’t overawed by Shirish or his intelligence any longer. People who were too clever, too brainy, justified anything they did, with all their hypocritical explanations. But Nina was also thirty three, and the only one among all her friends, who hadn’t yet married. Or settled down, as Anjali said.

There was at least one occasion Nina had gotten close to getting married. Santosh was the driver at the rental agency attached to the hotel, but he was also a great many other things. Chennai was mildly hot, and it was December. It was the best time to be in the city, a fellow passenger on the plane told her, because it was the music season. Santosh was, as the hotel staff jokingly said, easy to spot. He looked like a popular film star. They had even told her whom he resembled, and she had nodded, knowingly, afraid to give her ignorance away, but she never remembered. It was only when Santosh sent her the link to one of the actor’s films, among the many hits of the superstar’s career, that she realized they were talking of Rajnikanth.

A swarthy belligerent-looking man, his shock of hair swept back in a bouffant. The crowds swooned over Rajnikanth. Those days his popularity raged sky-high for he had appeared in some Hindi films with some of Bollywood’s lead stars. For her part, Nina was soon swooning over Santosh.

He drove her around in a battered, white-domed ambassador car that broke down often, and whose air conditioner made a chugging sound making conversation impossible. After a while, she asked the air-conditioner to be turned off, and he switched on the fan instead. A round, netted object fixed to her side of the window. The breakdowns that usually happened when they were driving somewhere uphill, or at busy intersections, stopped but there was the occasion, Nina’s hair caught in the fan blades as she bent forward to speak to Santosh. His hands were gentle on her hair, and forehead, as he extricated her hair, strand by strand. She remembered how her mother had brushed her hair for her when she was younger, braiding it tightly every night, to help her sleep. “It helps the hair grow, thick and luscious,” her mother always said. She had tears in her eyes, as Santosh ran his fingers through the ends of her hair, untangling the knots, and he pretended not to see.

That one act of tenderness became the lens through which she would always see him. Not even when she was back in Edison and understood what a fool she had been over him, and that it could have been worse.

Later, when she hugged him in gratitude, he stepped back, laughing awkwardly. She apologized. “I know you don’t do that here,” she said, “I am just grateful. Thank you, thank you.”

He looked at her for a long time, then took a quick look around. They had halted right in the middle of the highway, with a black and white boundary wall to their left, beyond which stretched fields of paddy, copses of coconut trees, and a scooter making its way through a mud track. They heard its low grumbling, the stream of thin smoke it emitted.

“Madam, it’s okay.” She liked the way he said it, placing a y before the word, yokay. “My duty, madam.”

“Call me Nina.”

There was that intense look again. “Nee-nah,” she drawled, “my mother from here, long ago. Salem.”

A lorry came up the road, slowing down as it neared their car, and someone leaned out from the driver’s seat and whistled, loud and long. Santosh ran towards the truck as it sped away, yelling something in the language she had just begun to learn. “Sorry, Madam, Nina,” he said, as she raised her hand, “they are just…”

“I know,” she said smiling, “these things happen in India.”

She liked his protectiveness. The way he looked for a safe table for them at a wayside restaurant, and how he helped her bargain for sarees, and other fabrics at Nallis. Once on their way to Madurai, he told her more about himself, taking his time in his broken English, and she was understanding. “Are you not married?” she asked.

He blushed and toyed with his hands. He told her of having once loved a girl, but she was too rich.

“Rich?” And just to let him know that she had figured out India and its many complexities, she went on, “But was she of same caste? You are…”

“We are good caste,” he said, “once our ancestors ruled over this land.”

“Brahmins?” she asked. Her mother’s father had been one from Salem. “Narayan, my mother’s family.”

“No, we not brahmins, we…” and he did a series of quick feints with his hand, his other hand behind his back. She understood it was an imaginary sword he held. “We warriors, all this land around, once ours.”

In Mahabalipuram, he had stood her up the first time, not turning up one morning. She went down to the foyer three times to ask the receptionist. But no one had seen the ambassador car or Santosh. He was there last night, said the clerk, lazily. The staff everywhere made her self-conscious, with their appraising looks, the way they sized her up, trying in vain to be discreet, and the way – she was sure of this – they looked at each other, passing on a message with the eyes, the moment her back was turned. She had become used to having Santosh around.

He turned up at noon, looking disheveled, and apologetic. “Someone had to be taken to hospital. A driver with another foreign couple at the hotel. He had had a stomach upset, and things looked serious.” She missed the quick exchange of looks between the two hotel clerks. All she had thought then was to make herself useful, of making sure Santosh understood her concern.

“We must go and see him then.”

He looked startled at her offer. “No, no, he is yokay, it’s all fine.”

His insistence puzzled her. When they were in the car, she asked again, “Is he your friend? The man in hospital.”

He looked at her through the rearview mirror, and replied, “We, men of the road, with no home, are all friends.”

She laughed, remembering the drama of it all. She had certainly fallen for all his stories. He had wanted to leave some money for his friend in the hospital before they left, and she had lent him some. Of course, she didn’t want it back. The driver was poor, now he wouldn’t even get paid by his employers, and she was generous enough. She liked how Santosh’s eyes misted over, as he folded his hands before her, and said, too kind, you are too kind, madam.

She reached up and clasped his hands in her own. “I am a friend, always, Santosh, remember.” He bent his head towards her hands and touched his lips to them. She saw then the many notches cut into his palm, the lines indicating romantic attachments, but of course she didn’t believe any of this then. She didn’t want to remember anything Shirish had ever told her, especially about the sham thing palmistry was.

The next few days, she traveled with Santosh to the lovely hill stations of Coonoor, Ooty, and Kodaikanal. It was suddenly cold, and he was gone for hours to buy her a shawl. Of course, she never asked for receipts. He came back with a black heavy blanket and said this was all they had at the shop. He had pointed it out to her on the way up to the hotel. It cost more, he said apologetically, and this time he wouldn’t hear of her making up the amount to him. That evening, as they drove up to the high peak of Anai Mudi, she began shivering, and the shawl did little to calm her. He had found a place to park, climbed into the back seat, and held her, even crooning a song as she rested her head on his shoulder.

It was understood they would spend the night together. The next day onward, they traveled as a couple in the car, she seated in front, and he sometimes put an arm around her, as he drove with just one hand on the wheel. It alarmed her, and had her giggling too, when he broke out into a song. A Rajnikanth special, he said. He can drive with just one foot on the pedal. And place a cigarette on his lips using just that foot.

“A superstar, just like you,” she said. “No no,” she added giggling when he offered a demonstration.

When they were back in Chennai, and it was time for him to leave, she couldn’t bear the sadness in his eyes. He took out a neat, folded hanky from his pocket – she did notice that he had begun dressing better the last few days, and it flattered her to think it was because of her – and wiped his face. He was crying as he told her he had fallen in love. It was like his lost love. It was not in his destiny to marry the one he loved.

It was his mention of the word marriage that turned her head. No one had wanted to marry her, and here was this man, on the other end of the world, wanting to do so, without any thought of her background, her terrible half, and half status. This, and the fact that he was someone from her mother’s ancestral land, made it all, to her, something divinely ordained. Destiny had brought them together and nothing could go wrong.

“We can get married, you know, we can get married.” She held his hand, hugged him tight, and later, this memory of her desperation would always embarrass her. She would never tell anyone the details. She had wanted an arranged marriage, all fixed up in half the time it had taken Anjali and Shirish. Santosh wanted to marry her, the only man who really wanted to, and that was all that mattered. Later, other memories would resurface from some fuzzy places of her brain. How he had looked startled, how he had tried to take a step back, how his hands had trembled. She had attributed this to his nervousness, for giving into an impulsive thought. She had never suspected how coldly calculating it all was.

Getting a marriage license took time, he told her. Officials had to be bribed. She promptly held out a wad of notes. There wasn’t just one of them, he said, but three or four. Marriage required a series of permits. She insisted he pay them one at a time. We will take them on like the hero does the villain in your films, she told him.

A week later, he told her miserably about the proof required. That there’s no objection to the marriage, from your relatives, he said. You know, relatives could say I have kidnapped you, forced you into marriage against your will. She laughed at that. Coercion. But I am… And she stopped. She didn’t want to reveal her age to Santosh. I am twenty-eight, she said coyly. Being on either side of thirty was easy, it was a nondescript hard-to-pin age.

“Nina, you look so young, and beautiful.” The way he said it, his eyes tearing up again, his smile that made his mustache go all lopsided, had made her feel beautiful.

They began looking for an apartment to live in. He showed her around the area of Chrompet and Egmore, but she preferred the more spacious apartments in Anna Nagar and Adyar. Too expensive, he had stammered. We can afford it, she said blithely, happily. The ridiculous exchange rate that made the dollar so strong against the rupee seemed to favor her marriage to this man. “We can get you cars, you know, two or three cars, that you can lease out, and have your own agency.”

He shook his head, closed his eyes. The shimmer of tears never failed to move her, but it was the gleam of greed she caught onto only later. Weeks after she came home to New Jersey, a fortnight after he had absconded with her money. She had given him two thousand dollars that when converted, turned into some lakhs of rupees, all to book a flat. He never came back. It was at night, on one of her many trips to the reception desk – something that had become routine for her, where Santosh was concerned – that the clerk, an older bent man, looked at her over the top of his thick black glasses, and told her Santosh had called. “What did he say?”

“That his mother is sick and dying. He is not able to come back.”

“Did he leave a number?”

It had been no use. For of course he hadn’t. And he never called again. The manager called the police in the next day, but she knew they were all laughing at her, though they tried hard not to show it. “He’s a crook, madam. He took advantage of you.”

She felt the bile rise in her throat, and flushed, as she caught the inspector’s quick appraising look. “I helped him. He was a poor man.”

He smirked. “They are all poor, madam. All poor men.”

That night, she placed a trunk call to Shirish, and waited at the reception for the call to come through. The clerk, the one from the night before, looked at her a long time, before she snapped and asked him what the matter was. “I am sorry,” he said, slowly, as if he was thinking out all his thoughts carefully first, “I am sorry our country has treated you like this. Men take advantage all the time.”

This unexpected kindness made her blubber on the phone to Shirish. “I am in a bit of a mess,” she sniffed.

“Good heavens,” he said impatiently, “you sound like some teenager, sniffling away like that. What’s happened?”

“I just lost my money, for some reason. And now…”

“Well, just come home then. Come on,” he waited a bit, and then came up with a solution, pat like that. “Go to the consulate. They will help you come home.”

And Anjali, whom she spoke to, after the helpful consul official placed the call through said she was glad she had decided to come home. “That is some crazy adventure,” she laughed. “You must tell us about it. Come home first.” They were, for all that they quarreled with each other, quite alike in some ways. They knew how to make the best of any situation, and how to laugh in the face of disaster.

Once she reached, Nina decided, on her long flight back home – there was a stopover at Dubai – she would never see them again. Not Anjali, not Shirish.

“Come home,” Anjali had said at the end. “Don’t make your heart too small, Nina, just come home.”

It was something she had heard the Punjabis say in their native language. “What does it mean?” Nina had asked an elderly lady at a wedding once. The lady had gestured with her hands, looking for words in her attempt to translate. It just means be big-hearted. About things. Never feel bad about anything, especially – she touched her big chest, the shiny gold necklace that rested on it, and heaved with slow laughter – heart related things.

Pappu, the Pakistani cabby, came to pick her up at the airport. It had been a long flight, and she hadn’t had the appetite to eat anything or even sleep. Her heart had lit up unexpectedly the moment she had boarded the plane, a United Airlines craft, the blue-white globe that defined its logo clear on the plane’s wings and tail. She had breathed in the cold dampness once she had landed at Newark and heaved a sigh of relief.

But the thought of explaining matters to her friends, to her mother, was embarrassing. All thoughts of Santosh’s betrayal, how he was, at this very moment, laughing at her, at his own success in becoming a rich man overnight, the memory of those other men who judged, appraised, and reviled her constantly, simply for being nice, kind, and different, made her weep. She sniffled in self-pity, and at her own foolishness. She wept at the fact that he could have just as easily killed her, but he hadn’t. For as long as he could, he had milked her for all it was worth. A house, cars to rent, good clothes. Now he could fool some other women too.

She heard Pappu’s soft tapping and he gently extended the tissue box to her. “Are you okay?” he asked. She nodded, a tissue pressed to her nose. She wasn’t having it on any more with drivers. Drivers, men with cars, were downright dangerous. She wasn’t ever going to be made a fool of.

“Come on,” he said, smiling slightly. “Don’t make your heart too small.”

Anjali had told her that once. It was the same thing everyone said. No matter how much they hated each other, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, sometimes they spoke the same way.

“You were away for a bit, weren’t you?”

“To see my mother’s land, India,” she said loftily.

He nodded. “I haven’t been back to Pakistan in ages now. It’s nice to go back, isn’t it?”

“Nicer to be back,” she said, offhandedly.

As they waited at an intersection, he said she must be hungry. “Will there be anything in the apartment? Any supplies?”

It was ten, she realized then. Running errands to stock up her fridge seemed too much a chore now. And she hadn’t thought of these things. She intended to go to Anjali the next day and borrow some money from her. All her savings had dissipated with a few clicks of the finger. Pappu’s words broke into her thoughts. “If you don’t mind, I can take you to a place I know. Authentic Punjabi food. I haven’t eaten too.”

She looked at him warily. He placed his hand on his heart, smiled, and said, “Honest to god, no other motive.”

She smiled. Everyone knew Pappu, and where he lived. He would never run away like Santosh. Besides, she had hardly anything left any more.

The Punjabi restaurant in East Brunswick was done up like a village style inn. It had low stringed cots instead of chairs, low tables, lanterns strung on poles, and even a tube well at the corner to recreate an authentic scene from the Punjab. The owner, a heavy turbaned Sikh sat at the corner, and welcomed everyone with a hearty namaste.

She was hungry, but she didn’t want to appear unladylike in front of Pappu. He ate fast and quickly, and having worked his way through the stuffed parathas, the chicken butter masala, the cottage cheese mix and the lassi, he stood up to wash his hands at the tube well. That doesn’t work, said a waiter, also a turbaned Sikh. He added something in a language Nina didn’t understand, and Pappu had an instant retort. She had been tired, but barely had she lifted her head from the napkin when she saw that the two men had come to blows. They were circling each other, looking at each other menacingly, and then Pappu landed a quick blow on the other man’s arm. The old man at the corner table rose at once and rushed toward the two men, hands outstretched, his voice raised in a warning. No fighting here. No fighting. This isn’t the India-Pakistan border.

It took two other waiters to calm the men down, get them to shake hands. Pappu returned to her, looking sheepish. “It must be a poor welcome for you,” he said.

“You need to see about that hand,” for he had bruised it during his encounter, and a thin dark mark was slowly spreading on the back of his hand. “It could be a contusion,” she said.

“I don’t want to go to any hospital,” he said, wiping his injured hand on his kurta. “I have work tomorrow. Can’t take the day off.”

“Why are you smiling?” he asked a few minutes later. She stopped, almost stumbling on the step. “Nothing,” she said, but what she was thinking was: Home is a place where you understand everything, even the fights people have.

She remembered holding his hand in the cab then, just a friendly loose clasping of the fingers – she told herself, it’d come to nothing – for really, weren’t they so different from each other? It was the time she did not remember Shirish holding her hand once to read her lines, maybe she let herself forget it. Nor did she know then that one day far off in the future, she would hold Shirish’s hand again as life ebbed away from him, and that no matter all that had happened between them, she would want him to live, want this with a desperation, with a love that really didn’t matter. The heart after all could take a lot.