Deepak Maini

A Thought, A Duty, A Tear

Deepak Maini

The doctor had told him in the morning, she might live for a few more days. He had looked at the doctor’s face, without saying a word. You want me to take her off the expensive medicines? Still no answer. It’s up to you. My advice is to keep her on pain killers and wean her off the expensive medicines in a day or two. If you want that….

“Sahib, give me five rupees? I haven’t eaten in two days.”

“You know your grandma is dying.” She would whisper. “Tell her you have to study if she calls for you. You have to focus on your future. People die … life goes on. How many people die in this country daily? We will take care of her. Don’t let this trouble you. We don’t want her illness to distract you from your studies.”

Shakti stood in front of his mother’s house in East Delhi, with two suitcases and a backpack. His face was expressionless. Globs of sweat were forming on his forehead, fueled by the baking heat. Loo, the notorious hot summer wind, was lashing against his out-of-place, American, clothes. He had pressed the doorbell once, gently, as if still not believing his presence in India, mistaking it for a dream. And before the door opened, he grabbed hold of the luggage and stood there in sage-like, divine expectation.

Tina, his wife, stood to his right, her arms crossed across her chest. She was wearing clothes somewhat tighter than traditional Indian clothing. Her bosom wasn’t covered with a dupatta. He had told her how risky it was in India to wear short clothes, especially in Delhi, where short clothes were an invitation to improper behavior. But she had snubbed him.

She was looking to the right, toward a beggar limping his way through the streets of East Delhi, streets that were bereft of any living soul.

The beggar looked at Shakti and Tina, changed his path, and came hurrying to them, asking for any change they might have.

It was a hot summer day when Shakti and Tina returned to India for good, standing side by side wiping off their sweaty foreheads; Shakti on his sleeves, Tina on her kerchief. They had not suffered this heat in a decade, living in the moderate weather of California where they had settled in their mid-twenties. They were unprepared for the heat and everything else they took for granted in California.

But for people living in India, it was part of what constituted a normal unregretful life. “Food, clothes, and roof, if you have all of the three, you’re blessed,” Shakti’s father had told him when he was a kid.

Temperatures soared to one hundred and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there for a period of more than three months during each summer. In this heat, only people in search of a living ventured out. The rest—housewives, kids, and the elderly— preferred to stay inside among flies and ants, under creaky ceiling fans. The earth cracked open, without sufficient water to hold it, trees dried up, standing like carcasses. But human beings still went on, in search of food, in search of life.

“How can people live with beggars? Did you look at his face? I hope he didn’t have dengue or something … I didn’t inhale when he was near us … I just wanted to kick him … right in his face,” Tina said.

“Have you unpacked your bags?”

“I don’t feel like it … I’m tired. What are we doing? What have you done? It’s just--why didn’t we think about it over and over again? Now what? What are we going to do? I hate this country. Just hate it.” Her hands were holding her chin.

“Can we not have this discussion … please? It will be all right.”

Shakti had been a successful business consultant in California, with hopes of becoming vice president one day. With his analytical skills and keen mind he could scale anything. With his MIT degree he could impress anybody. With his four-point-zero GPA he could intimidate every soul. But something always troubled him, gnawed at his heart: His life was always stricken with some ailment. First was a desire from the backdoors of his MIT days, and then was his mother’s failing health. Somewhere in between was the craving to be part of what nourished him, made him what he was. He wanted to call where he lived home.

He had a group of people he managed on his last project at his job. One of them was a girl named Meredith. She had recently graduated and joined the company, for her first job, as an associate. “You’ve so much to learn,” Shakti told her several times during their after-lunch meetings. She had a tiny, square face, with prominent jawbones and a fringe. At first she was shy, not sure of what to make of what was happening between them, but with time she took to spending time with him. Shakti had never touched the legs of a girl wearing a cheerleader dress, and when he told her about it, she offered herself with a smile. He bought one dress and then another, and soon she had ten different dresses, in different styles, all cut six inches above her knees. White with diagonal stripes, plain dark-blue with red frills, emerald, sapphire, maroon, some one-piece and some two. It took him ten months of after-hour work at the Sleep Inns and Ramada Inns before he realized he hadn’t been himself all this while, that he couldn’t stand himself in the mirror, at dinner table with Tina, in bed trying to maintain his dying erection. He always blamed it on his tense work life. The news of his mother’s falling health came as a respite. It was a way to efface the stain on him, a way to reclaim his life. There was no better time to go back to India, he argued with Tina; India’s economy had been growing aggressively. It was now or never that they could do something for themselves and for the nation that brought them up to see the world the way only few people could … And the only way to avoid his marriage from failing.

Soon he settled into his new job. Tina got over the initial shock of moving back to India. She had always wanted to work at The Times of India, because of her experience in journalism and through Shakti’s contacts, she landed an interview with them. With things falling in place, he went about his work, setting up his life in India, without anyone to bother him. Other than his mother, who was seventy years old and had several health issues, there wasn’t anyone whom he called family. She had lived in the same house all her life, the house where Shakti sojourned after arriving from the US, with her husband; then, without her husband, who died of cardiovascular complications. Shakti had found a new place as soon as he settled into his new job, and his mother hadn’t complained. Neither had she complained when he left her to make a life in the US, nor when her husband died and Shakti couldn’t arrive on time to perform his father’s last rites, to touch the flame to his father’s temple before cremating him.

“How about our sex life? Have you thought about it? Your mother under the same roof while we’re--” Tina had said.

“Mother needs me to take care of her.”

“I know. But you can take care of her without staying in the same house. Old people, anyway, like to spend time by themselves, doing whatever they do. You shouldn’t worry about her. She’ll be fine. Look at Mr. Anshuman, he doesn’t stay with his mother.”

“His wife is a bitch.”

“What?”

Tina’s voice was always convincing; it could change in tone and pitch within seconds. She could be mad at one moment and unctuously compassionate at the next. She’d used the same verbal prowess when she met him for the first time at her friend’s party, where she couldn’t keep her hands off him, off his Greek face. She slept with him the same night.

Six months went by in India. One day, he was standing outside his office, puffing out clouds of smoke, thinking about talking to his mother’s doctor when he saw a police officer beat a child beggar, not older than seven, and take away his earnings.

He had heard on the radio that begging had become a blemish in the crown of India. A crown that had been despoiled and trampled under the boots of the British until sixty years back, and under the sole of venal politicians since then. The politicians ran the country at their convenience, sometimes to this scandal, or to that massacre, here to this communal riot, there to corruption. “The country, India, the motherland, Swades. Swades, yes, this was Swades. And he was her son.” He thought.

Summer had not loosed its thorny grip yet. He’d started to feel queasy. The heat waves had been beating hard against his face, his clothes clinging inexorably to his olive-colored skin, the skin that had charmed Meredith to their after-work excursions.

He shouldn’t have stepped outside his office, he thought, his eyes fixed on the beating the beggar was getting from the policeman.

He remembered having seen on TV that with the 2010 Commonwealth Games fast approaching the new government had taken on the difficult task of wiping out begging. Beggars were tried in special courts and sentenced to anywhere from six months to two years in prison.

He remembered what he had seen yesterday, remembered a van full of beggars being hustled from the front of his office building in Nehru Place. He realized he’d seen beggars everywhere he’d been in India but had never paid any heed to them, on the street, dressed in tatters, sullied to the extent that everybody seemed to be wearing similar-looking rags, a dark variant of slate-gray, like the nub of a recently used eraser. He had never thought about them, had never consciously felt their presence in the country that was theirs as much as it was his. Why were they so poor, so impoverished, and so uninspired?

His gaze didn’t move an inch from the beggar’s face. He continued pondering and realized that many beggars didn’t have all four limbs, many were lame like the one he had seen at New Delhi Railway Station last week when he’d gone to drop off Tina. The faces of all the lame beggars he had seen in last six months started to fill up his mind. Most of the time one leg was missing, with a dirty swab of gauze covering the stump. Thinking about poverty that had stricken India for so long, Shakti gripped his forehead with the right hand, between his thumb and his palm, and preventing himself from falling down, bent down to sit on the curb.

He remembered what had happened at Rajinder Nagar Chowk the day he had taken Tina for a movie and dinner. A car had run over a family of beggars sleeping outside a closed shop. He thought of the day Tina had pushed away a beggar at the South Delhi traffic light fearing that he might snatch her gold chain. The beggar had fallen down, breaking his nose, had invited unlimited honks from agitated Delhi commuters. He thought of the day he hadn’t had any change to give to a child beggar. The beggar had trailed him all the way from his office building to the nearby Sheraton. The beggar’s nose was running, his arms were gaunt; his eyes were flared up.

“We need money for our kids, for their schooling, and for their degrees from Harvard and MIT,” Tina had said.

Jolted from his musings by a waft of hot summer wind, he focused his eyes on the face of the beggar again and saw tiny tears sprout up in his eyes, a whimper on his lips, and blood on his stained shirt, which was riddled with burn holes. The burly policeman, with a curly mustache, would have asked him to pay ten rupees in exchange for not arresting him. When the beggar teased him by sticking out his tongue and fluttering his fingers with the thumbs plastered to his temples, instead of doing what he was told, the policeman had no choice but to beat him.

The beggar didn’t turn around once to look into Shakti’s eyes. Sobbing, wiping his snot on his threadbare half-sleeved shirt, he kept on muttering something in Hindi. He told Shakti about his mother, about her being ill, about her rotting in one corner at a public hospital, and about her imminent death. Having not been given a bed, she was rotting by the water cooler, where passersby spat and blew their noses.

“Sahib, now my mom will die. That money was all I had. The babu at the hospital was saying bring two thousand. I’m not a beggar. I work at the construction site, there.” The child said in Hindi.

Shakti fought hard to overcome his desire to rub the beggar’s back, ease his pain a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch someone as grimy as him. He stayed by his side, listening to him, scribbling something in the loose earth with a twig.

Minutes passed along; the silence mounted. Shakti asked the child about his father’s whereabouts, about his job, if he too was working to gather the money.

To answer Shakti’s long string of questions, the child shook his head and seemed to have not understood the question, staying quiet for a long time, but then speaking broke the monotony of silence.

“My father matherchod is a drunkard. He doesn’t work, doesn’t work, just drinks every day. And when I refuse to hand over the money I’m saving for my mother’s treatment, saala, he beats me.”

Tina was already home when he got back. Wearing a plain-white cotton saree, without any make-up and jewelry, she was pacing the living room, chewing on the back of a pencil. She didn’t say anything when Shakti dropped down on the sofa like an anchor, and sighed. His face was red from Delhi’s heat.

“I talked to a beggar today.”

Tina looked at him, trying to understand what he had said. “Go wash yourself. I don’t know what has gotten into you. This is not America Mr. Shakti. These homeless beggars have deadly diseases. Mr. Desai got sick with pneumonia sitting down with a homeless guy in Boston. If that can happen in Boston, anything can happen in India.”

Shakti looked at her, blankly.

“I don’t care if you want to have these diseases. But I don’t. If you don’t want to wash yourself first, please don’t sit on the sofa,” Tina said, and stood in front of him, staring down at him.

“Why are you wearing this?”

“First go wash yourself. Didn’t you hear me?”

Shakti did as he was told: He scrubbed himself with a pumice stone and rubbed himself with soap several times. After spending thirty minutes in the bathroom, where he would usually have spent ten, he came into the living room and found Tina struggling with long pieces of straws. When he asked her again what she was up to, she said, “I’m trying to make a gift for all the women we’re going to meet in the coming weeks—straw hats. We’re doing a case study on women. Far too many women in India don’t study after primary school. All this dowry, bride burning, suppression, muffled cries of the abused women cooped up within four walls, all that. It might bring us fame, you just watch.”

“Is that the reason you’re wearing a saree?”

“Do you think I’ll go amid crying women without looking like them?” She said and added, “There is a package for you in the store room.”

He had forgotten all about the package. And only when did he lift it and shook it, he understood what was inside it making the gurgling noise. It was something he had ordered after learning its significance from his friend’s parents. In India, he had learned, right before people died they were given a few drops of gangajal –water from the River Ganges— to ease their rendezvous with the messenger of death Yama and cleanse the dying’s soul of all sins and purge all illnesses, preparing it for the new life. He didn’t believe in any superstitions, but this – to help someone pass—seemed reasonable to him. Without any immediate need for it, one day, he ordered a pint of the supposedly pious water online.

The Monsoon arrived early that year. The dark-gray sky loomed overhead, pouring bucket after bucket of rain into the loose, burnt earth. The strong winds accompanying the rains uprooted gigantic trees. Neem, Indian Willow, Ashok, Babool, some lay on the ground, heaved up, and others hanging on overhead electric wires, causing eternal blackouts. The low-lying areas, without any water disposal system, were flooded enough for someone to operate a rowboat.

Shakti’s mother suffered a heart attack for the first time then. He hadn’t expected her health to fail so fast, he hadn’t planned for it. He’d gone to see her on his customary biweekly visit. Tina had asked him to take along the papers of the family house, for his mother to sign, in case anything untoward happened in the future and she forgot to bequeath it to them. Unconscious, his mother was sprawled on the kitchen floor. Shakti, mistaking her passing out for death, didn’t move an inch from where he saw her first. His arms crisscrossed his chest. His hands dug into his arms. He was shivering.

Tina went to see her in the hospital only the first time. She stood at one corner by the door, mute, lips pressed together, eyes fixed on Shakti. Later, she was always busy. Shakti never asked Tina again. He went in to see his mother regularly for the first few days, but with new projects lining up on his desk at a breakneck pace, he showed up at the hospital only when the doctor had something to say.

Shakti’s paternal grandmother, Bizi, which was her affectionate nickname, had died while he was still in school. He was in the eighth grade. She had been suffering from something they called “melting of bones.” She might have had bone cancer, but nobody knew about it, or nobody wanted to know about it. She was seventy-five years old. Shakti remembered her vividly. He often saw her in his dreams. He remembered her calling his name whenever his mother allowed him to visit her in the basement, where she spent the last two years of her life.

“What did you learn at school?”

“Nothing. I don’t like school.”

“Don’t want to become a big man like your father? Tell me? Your father was just like you. The same eyes, the same nose. I used to walk him to school every day. I used to give him extra pocket money, behind his father’s back. He was the perfect child. You should study hard just like your father.”

She used to give money to Shakti too, whenever she received her husband’s pension check, which she had been receiving since his death. But since she became bedridden she had stopped giving money to him. Shakti’s mother never handed over the pension check.

Everyday Shakti’s mother would sit with her dying mother-in-law for ten minutes, half-smiling, half-grimacing, and leave her mother-in-law before she could finish the conversation. His mother would always find some reason to go upstairs, to his room, always claiming that he might be scared with nobody to talk to him.

Shakti’s grandmother passed away on the first day of Monsoon in 1983, the year India won the Cricket World Cup, Kapil Dev’s one hundred and seventy-five runs against Zimbabwe being the hallmark. There was no one home except Shakti, who didn’t want to go to the wedding reception his parents had gone to. Shakti heard her call out his name several times, but he was afraid of going downstairs with no one at home. He heard her labored, breathless, intermittent cries. He plugged his ears every time she called out his name, even making a hissing, buzzing, sound he made at school to drown out someone’s bullying, to block her voice from entering his ears.

After an hour of not hearing anything from the basement, he decided to check on her, but again couldn’t cross the threshold to the stairs.

Instead he changed into his new blue jeans and ran outside, into the bustle of the nearby market, where peddlers raised decibels to attract buyers, cars honked in unison to produce a life-threatening jangle, bare bulbs hung atop vegetable-carrying carts, stray cows poked their heads into trashcans, stray dogs ran in packs, trying to find something to chew.

He wandered into the streets he had never been to, where rainwater formed puddles and mud licked the flooded streets. He saw kids playing in the dirty, gray water. Nobody took notice of him. He passed from street to street, not heeding where he was and for how long he had been out. Rambling about, he got to his favorite candy shop and dug into his pockets to find the money Bizi had given him two months back.

When he reached home, walking through potholes and jumping over branches of uprooted trees, he saw a van standing outside his house with “Ambulance” written in big red letters. It was written, as one would see it reflected in a mirror. Upon reaching the front of his house, he peered inside and saw Bizi lying on the ground, swaddled in a clean white cloth, lying still, with a couple of marigolds and rosebuds on her chest and incense burning a few inches behind her head. He saw his parents whispering to each other, standing near her head.

On his way to Ashok hospital, having parked his car across the street, he walked through puddles as big as his feet, filled with muddy water; he felt someone pull at the hem of his pants.

He stood there, trying to wriggle free his pants, not thinking about who this child was. Just like many other beggars, this child was lame. The right half-leg, more of a stump, was covered with a shiny blackened, sooty paste. The child’s face was smeared with black spots, his hair, with a central cowlick, standing straight up, was clumped into knots, dry and dirty, tied into dreadlocks.

Writhing himself free of the beggar, Shakti went into the hospital. He walked through the front hallway reeking of antiseptics, blood, and a freshly mopped floor. He walked along a general ward, where at least fifty gurneys were lined up within a few feet of one another, each with a human being either swaddled in gauze, or riddled with IV needles, or some form of medical implement working to restore the human life, a little at a time.

He walked past nurse’s stations, other general and twin-bed wards, and wards for the rich, and finally arrived at the end of the long hallway where his mother was lying, in the intensive care unit.

Though the thought of finding his mother dead when he opened the second of the double-door entrance to the ICU had flashed through his mind, it had vanished as soon as he smelt the stench of disintegrating human lives.

He opened the first door and looked at the nurse behind the counter. The nurse asked for his details and motioned to the right where a few aquamarine ICU-gowns were hanging from a row of spikes. He waited to enter the main entrance. Time raced on, but he waited outside. He waited just as he had waited to return to India to care of her.

He couldn’t spend any more time than required to catch a glimpse of her. He couldn’t stand the look of tubes swarming her body, as if like a spider’s web, with her being the fly stuck in it. Her eyes were closed, her fists were clenched. She was waiting, reluctantly. She didn’t want to leave, not just yet.

Outside, the child spotted him again, and started shouting, looking toward him. This time he remembered. He was the same child he had talked to outside his office. He walked to the child and bent down on his knees.

The child appeared to have undergone a change. He wasn’t the same child who had cried before. He didn’t look like someone who would ever cry. His face had no expression. He was lame now. He was sitting under a wind-blasted tree.

“Sahib, give me five rupees? I haven’t eaten in two days.”

“How is your mother?”

“Give me two rupees?”

Shakti inched a little closer; his eyes fixed on the child’s smudged face, on his little blue eyes. He placed his hand on the child’s dirty head, ruffled his hair.

“God will bless you. Give me two … one rupee. Give me.”

Shakti had never given any alms. Never in his life had he felt the compassion to give out his hard-earned money to someone, be it a beggar or homeless person. Today he thrust his hands into his pockets, without taking his eyes off the child, and slid out a hundred-rupee note. He didn’t know what overcame him, but if he had more cash in his credit-card-laden wallet, he would have happily emptied it in this child’s cheap-steel bowl.

Shakti walked up the stoop of his rented East Delhi house, the picture of his mother still fresh in his head. The doctor had told him in the morning, she might live for a few more days. He had looked at the doctor’s face, without saying a word. You want me to take her off the expensive medicines? Still no answer. It’s up to you. My advice is to keep her on pain killers and wean her off the expensive medicines in a day or two. If you want that….

At home, Tina was waiting for him. She was sitting on the couch, her shoulders flopping forward, and her head bent to the right. She was leafing through Lifestyle magazine.

She raised her face to Shakti’s light footsteps.

“Why you look so sad?”

“Nothing.”

“Listen, I want to tell you something. Have to understand where I’m coming from. Don’t assume anything,” Tina said, got up, and walked right to him, to stand next to him. And when he wasn’t expecting it, hugged him.

“Promise me you won’t get mad.”

He looked at her, about to say something, but decided against it, and waited for her to speak.

“I’m pregnant.”

Tina had talked about taking his mother off the expensive medicines before. He hadn’t responded to her either.

“I don’t think I’m ready to have a child. You know, it will change our lives. I mean … we didn’t plan for it in the first place. So why hurry? You know what I mean? I haven’t achieved much in my life yet and to have a child at this point … Shakti, are you listening to me? I want you to come with me to the gynecologist. I’ve talked to her about an abortion.”

Tina had gone to the kitchen. Shakti was left alone. There was a tickling in his head, his mother’s whispers from the night of bizi’s death in his ears. He switched on the TV where a big scandal was unfolding on news channels. Some government employed surgeons were jostled out of Ashok Hospital, where his mother was held captive by IV needles and measuring devices, by a caboodle of police officers, journalists, and medical staff. There was pandemonium. People were being carried away by a wave of commotion; the flurry shown on the tube seemed to be happening in a world where earth was shaking violently.

“It’s a selfless act to mother a child; the nine-month period when you hold the baby in your womb and nourish it with your own life; day after day it grows into the human form, from a sea-horse to a baby; you feel the pressure of life stretching in your womb, pulling your skin apart; you buy new clothes to nestle the universe of a new life in you; you endure the weight of it; you sacrifice; you waddle like a duck, with hands on your back, supporting your frame, stopping you from falling down; then your water breaks and you go into labor and experience the divine force of nature –the reason the human race exists is to beget. The only reason.” Shakti had heard his mother tell her neighbors at a tea party. It was a few weeks after Bizi’s death.

These surgeons at Ashok Hospital were arrested for performing deliberate imputative surgery on beggars, especially on children, Shakti heard. They were apprehended for misusing their medical licenses. The price of amputating one limb was set at ten thousand rupees. A mad crowd besieged the doctors. And perhaps one in the crowd was the child beggar Shakti knew.

“These doctors amputate beggars so that beggars can generate more sympathy and make more money. How can these doctors, whom we see as purveyors of life, put them in the same spot as God, despicably murder the public trust? More on this, after the break.”

“Why should we slow down our lives with a child? We have so much left to live and experience. Look at me …. Will you come with me?”

Suddenly, the phone in a secluded corner in the living room rang urgently. It started raining. The power went off. And in the sea of darkness, Shakti moved about in slow mincing steps. Heavy-sounding steps accentuated in the absence of the electrical hissing, propelled by the buzzing of the mosquitoes, inched toward the monophonic sound. The click. Then the lift.

“Hello?”

The eternal question lingered, hung in the air in the passing seconds, about making the right choices. As life comes to an end a weight is lifted off the heart, a wound is healed, and blame is wiped.

Questions started forming in his head, and with it a voice, a din, took birth. Whether a single flip, a single cut of the surgeon’s scalpel can liberate a life, regardless of where it is, at the starting of the karma or the end of it? The thought loomed in the heart of this man. With that a throb, a gentle racing of the heart: what can he do and what can’t he? A single tear trickled down to mourn a life, a mother, a child, a son, a beggar, a thought, a duty.