Vikram Kapur

In a moment of rage, I blow it. I lock eyes with Jiniya’s mother, my Bengali girlfriend’s very Bengali widowed mother. ‘Shut up, you Bengali bitch,’ I tell her.

No sooner have the words left me than I’m thinking what the hell have I done. Like someone committing suicide might right after swallowing the poison. The world has stopped at the lunch table where we are all sitting. Jiniya is looking stricken. Bhristee, Visha and Shibani, the unholy trinity of gossipy aunties from Delhi’s Little Kolkata aka Chittaranjan Park, have open mouths and rice-filled fingers poised in mid-air. Only Jiniya’s mother is contemplating me with an expression that borders on ecstasy.

My almost mother-in-law has been praying for such a moment right through the eleven months her daughter and I have been together. My almost mother-in-law, who insists on speaking to her daughter in Bengali and glares when an embarrassed Jiniya answers in Hindi or English to keep me in the conversation. She might have forgiven me for not being from Kolkata if I were Bengali—I am Punjabi—but simply can’t forgive the fact that I’m not Bengali and a shopkeeper. My shop may be a store selling Levi’s jeans in the DLF mall in Vasant Kunj, but all my almost mother-in-law sees is a shopkeeper who has descended from three generations of shopkeepers. A tribe she knows through the oily men with cloying smiles who buzz about her office—she is the principal of a girls’ convent school—and try to bribe her into admitting their daughters who can’t spell to save their lives. These men have no interest in educating their daughters. What they want is the stamp of a convent education that’ll give them an edge in the marriage market. This is what her darling daughter is falling for. Her darling daughter with the slim figure and the soulful eyes and the heart-shaped face. Not to mention the JNU PhD and the book on Yeats forthcoming from the Oxford University Press. Surely there would have been some nice Bengali boy on shaadi.com the night Jiniya went surfing and accepted my invite and agreed to that fateful first date after chatting for almost an hour. And who knows he might even have been good-looking.

This woman is looking at me as if I’ve just helped her fulfil a dream she’d given up on. At first, she thought it was only a matter of time before Jiniya came to her senses. When that didn’t happen, she got proactive. Prawn curry, to which I am allergic, and masoor dal, which I detest, never failed to make the table when I was over for a meal. The Trinity would be there as well, as would The Times of India with its daily report of crimes against women in Delhi. No matter where the conversation began, my almost mother-in-law would nudge it in the direction of beastly North Indian men bred on aggressive patriarchy. A few months of that and she’d ended up doing what my relatives and living in Delhi hadn’t managed in forty-two years. I, who grew up in Delhi and can only speak broken Punjabi, who’ve never listened to Daler Mehndi or AP Dhillon or anyone in between, who can’t do a bhangra step to save his life…I began to feel Punjabi.

Deep down I know there is no way back with Jiniya after calling her mother a bitch. I should simply hang my head and walk away. But I can’t. It’s only been eleven months. Yet I’ve never felt as strongly for a woman as I do for Jiniya. You know that’s special when you’re forty-two and can hear the tick-tock of the clock winding down on you.

So I start to grovel. I fold hands. I summon tears. I touch her mother’s feet. Then I touch the Trinity’s feet. Even Shibani’s; Shibani, who carries the smell of what she cooks in the morning wherever she goes and is smelling of black onion seeds. I say I’m sorry. I chant it like a mantra in front of all of them. I continue chanting in texts and on voicemail. (Jiniya is not picking up my calls.) When she blocks me, I chant in emails, even in an old-fashioned letter. When she doesn’t respond, I try flowers and poems professing undying love. I play the blame game to the hilt. I blame my grasping shopkeeper nature. I blame my mother for dying when I was eight; that is why I forgot how to behave round ladies. I blame my shopkeeper father for being too busy chasing the moolah to teach me anything. I blame Delhi’s choking air. I blame its in-your-face aggression. I blame its heat.

But nothing works. All Jiniya’s mother has to do to beat me back is look hurt and say, ‘But he called me a Bengali bitch.’ After which one of the Trinity follows up with, ‘If he can act that way before marriage think of what he’ll be like after.’ And I don’t even have age batting for me. If Jiniya was pushing forty, I might have had a chance. But Jiniya is thirty-one. The tick-tick of her clock is distant and indistinct. She has time to feel special again without being disowned by her mother for marrying a man who insulted her.

In a last-ditch effort, I go to JNU. I wait for Jiniya to finish her class. Then I wait for the students that cluster round her to scatter. Once they do, I go over. Jiniya’s eyes are red, her face wan. It pains and gladdens me to see her like that. I’m sorry to have brought her to this. But I’m also happy, because it shows she cares. I fantasize about her breaking down at the sight of me and falling into my arms. Like she would in a bad Bollywood movie. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for an impossibly feel-good Bollywood ending to my love story.

But we aren’t in a Bollywood movie, good or bad. We are in life and its writer is too taken with realism to script an impossibly happy ending. Jiniya doesn’t utter a word to me. She simply passes me with a toss of the head and a pair of averted eyes. A little later, I receive the last text I’m going to get from her in which she says she doesn’t want to see me again.

Shibani provides the coup de grace after two weeks. She fills my store with the smell of turmeric as she struts in through the doorway. Her eyes are gleaming as if she is the incarnation of Shiva himself dancing the Rudra Tandava.

‘Jiniya’s marriage is fixed,’ she smiles. ‘To a very nice boy from Presidency.’ In case I don’t know she adds, ‘In Kolkata.’

‘Forget about before marriage. You can’t even talk like that after you’ve got them in the harem,’ Daddy tells me after I get home.

‘I don’t have a harem.’

He fingers his round head that is bald except for a silvery patch of hair at the back. ‘Always focusing on the inconsequential. You know what I mean.’

Some things even death can’t change. What marked Daddy in all the years he was alive was his tunnel vision. Then his eyes were on the money. Case in point. He died in a car accident in the mountains near Shimla. The driver of the car he was in lost control and the car careened off the road to fall off the mountain. When they found Daddy, he was clutching a briefcase full of thousand-rupee notes to his chest. Even plunging down two thousand metres to certain death didn’t loosen his grip on the money. And this was two days after the thousand-rupee note was demonetized by the Prime Minister.

Now that he’s a ghost, he has no use for money. He doesn’t need food or drink. He doesn’t need aspirin for his migraines or swanky clothes for his body or hairpieces for his bald head. He appears in the plain salwar and pyjama he would wear in his teenage years. ‘Life is simple when you’re invisible,’ he says. (I see him but I don’t count.) ‘You don’t have to cater to people. You can focus on what you want.’

‘You’ve always focused on what you wanted,’ I tell him. ‘Dying hasn’t changed that.’

He pretends he hasn’t heard.

These days Daddy is focused on my marriage. He claims the only reason he is hanging about is to do his duty by me. He wants to see me settled. Once that’s done, he can get moksh from this life and take off into his next. When I remind him that moksh is all about being delivered from the cycle of birth and death, he scratches his head and says, ‘Always focusing on the inconsequential. You know what I mean.’

He did arrange a marriage for me in my thirties. That lasted all of six months. With candour he didn’t possess when he was alive, he admits that wasn’t about settling me; that was about merging his business with that of the girl’s father who owned Brooks Brothers stores in two Delhi malls. The girl went through with the marriage, but wouldn’t let me touch her after it. She said she found hairy men disgusting. That wouldn’t have stopped some hairy men. But I’m not one of them. I headed for the nearest Kaya clinic to get my chest, back, arms and legs waxed. In those days, Kaya was an all-female universe. The only men there were me and the security guard at the door. The women were pleasantly surprised to see me. One of them even chatted me up. ‘How come you’re here?’ she asked. I wanted to lie but I couldn’t think of any reason for being in Kaya other than the truth. Certainly I couldn’t say I was there to pick up my wife. After I told her, she sighed. ‘I wish my husband was more like you. He expects me to be perfect, but won’t lift a finger to do anything about himself.’

The waxing might have earned me some brownie points with the women at Kaya. It didn’t get me anywhere with my wife. Six months after we had taken our vows she left for her father’s house and never returned. Turned out she was in love with someone else all the time we were married.

‘That one was for me,’ Daddy says. ‘This time it’ll be for you.’

I want to tell him that this one too is for him. For his moksh. But I’m tired of being told that I focus on the inconsequential.

Instead, I say I need time before I can meet other women. I’m still not over Jiniya. He doesn’t look pleased about it. But he doesn’t quibble.

I dream of Jiniya walking out on Mr Presidency and badmouthing her mother for destroying her life and then sobbing on the phone to me, ‘I’m sorry, Varun, I’m really sorry, I made a terrible mistake.’ Sometimes the dream is so vivid that I check the phone to see if she’s called.

She doesn’t.

In the meanwhile, Daddy remains in my ear telling me it’s time to move on. When he’s not spouting that mantra, he is on the computer. When he was alive, the only use he had for the computer was to send emails. In death he’s discovered the wonder that is the internet. It started with shaadi.com. The sheer number of profiles blew his mind. Even ten newspapers couldn’t accommodate so many. Since I’m too busy moping to meet women, he exits shaadi.com and starts exploring the net fulltime. In the process, he discovers X. Hoping to reach out to kindred souls, he fires off a tweet outing himself as a ghost. The responses he gets disappoint him. He returns to shaadi.com with his urge for moksh intensified. Within days he claims to have lined up several promising profiles for me.

‘Not yet,’ I shake my head.

A tortuous month passes. It’s obvious that Jiniya isn’t coming back and views me as a mistake. The thought depresses me further. Delhi in November is hardly the city to get depressed in. Shorter days mean dusk gathers by five and the world outside looks exactly the way I feel inside for that much longer. The smoke filling the sky in the wake of Diwali clutches at the throat. Delhi’s fuse is short at the best of times. An itchy throat shortens it further. The daily jostle of traffic seems more chaotic than ever and abuse is hurled with abandon. One day I drive too close to a BMW and a spiky-haired youngster thrusts his head out of the window and yells, ‘Don’t you have eyes, Uncle?’ The ‘Uncle’ part rankles. With ‘Sir’ at least you feel elevated. As an uncle, you are simply old.

When you are depressed, the world conspires to depress you further. A blond-haired gora with blue eyes and skin burnt pink by the sun saunters into my store and starts asking after jeans in chaste Hindi. When I ask him where he learnt his Hindi, he says he fell in love with an Indian girl from Lucknow who was his classmate at Princeton and thought it incumbent to learn her language. I knew she was the one, he says with a big, goofy smile. I feel bad about not making the effort to learn Bengali. Not even looking up the meaning of Jiniya’s name on Google Translate. Something like that would have given me more traction with Jiniya and her mother.

If the weather and air aren’t enough, Delhi is bursting with lovesick couples. They pop up on my daily commute, in my store, even in my neighbourhood market. With the young ones I can console myself by attributing it all to puppy love with a big break-up waiting in the future. But some of them aren’t young. They are old and middle-aged and reeking of the kind of love that’s lasted a while and promises to last the rest of their lives. Furthermore, the wedding season has begun and the TV news channels are going overboard on weddings. When I switch over to the movie channels, I keep running into Romedy Now. More lovesick couples to make me sick in the stomach. On the Bollywood side of the movie fence, they are having a Karan Johar festival and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is everywhere. I flip over to Doordarshan and Rishi Kapoor’s fortyish face fills the screen in a movie called Honeymoon he made in the nineties.

Daddy, in the meanwhile, has decided he’s had enough of waiting. One night I come home to find him with a little wiry boy whose mop-top hair and thin face remind me of myself as a child. But it can’t be me. Surely there can’t be two versions of me in the same room.

‘This is your son,’ Daddy points at the boy.

‘My son?’

‘Yes, your son who’s waiting to be born.’

Did Daddy pull in someone off the street? I reach out to pat the boy on the cheek. I can’t. He is an apparition. But the eyes with which he stares at me feel real.

‘You won’t give your son a chance at life?’ Daddy says.

I don’t answer. But Daddy knows he’s got a winner on his hands. He repeats the mantra until it plays in my mind like a refrain even when I’m not home. The boy doesn’t utter a word. His eyes do the talking. They never leave me when I’m home and seem to stare at me even when I’m not. The more I see them the more pained I get.

An old friend from college settles the matter. He sends a text saying he has been blessed with a son. His second. Right after that, I tell Daddy I’m ready to get out there.

It’s a while before I can. I may have eschewed one typical behaviour of the depressed by not drinking. But I plunged headlong into another. I ate every meal like it was my last and gorged on snacks between meals. I have the belly of woman who is five months pregnant. I can’t meet prospective wives looking like that.

I hit the gym with a little too much vengeance for my own good. I end up overdoing the squats and sit about at home for days with knots in my legs. Daddy appears flustered. This is pushing moksh back. My son’s eyes become more accusing. Somehow, I heave myself to my feet and get going again. I change my diet, substituting the biryani, basen laddoos and cold coffee with ice cream for nuts, veggies, fruits and green tea. I take smaller portions of everything. I visit the gym every day. After seven weeks, my belly contracts enough for me to hide it by wearing my shirt outside my trousers. I’m ready to get out there.