A Life Apart Read online

  All those fears of his mother dying and leaving him alone were really his fears of a parent in hospital with no money to pay for medical bills, doctors, nurses, medicines, tests. But for now his pockets were heavy with borrowed and given money. He had been sharp enough to grab the bulging wallet which his mother had held so close to her in her week of mourning, a wallet filled with money from relatives, his own friends, Aritra’s friends and their parents, people who instinctively knew that that would be the greatest necessity now that her husband, the family’s sole earner, was dead. Soumik’s mother, Uncle Adip, Mrinal, all had come forward with generous wads of cash, which they had embarrassedly pushed into her hands, or had bypassed her altogether and had given Ritwik and Aritra instead. Taking possession of his mother’s wallet had come naturally; as soon as the taxi had arrived outside the front door, he had picked it up from beside the bed. If he had been less alert, it would almost certainly have been stolen by one of his uncles and, when asked, they would have denied ever having set their eyes upon it. It was the story of their lives in Grange Road. It had been clever of him to get in there first and prevent the money from going missing. That opportune seizing brought temporary redemption from more begging, more debts (he knew the money would be spent in a matter of days) and more shame. At least for now, he wouldn’t have to call on Mrinal for a handout for the first things – the doctor’s home visit, the taxi fare to the hospital, the admission charges.

  The hospital was new, swanky, and built and run with the dirty money of Marwaris. Everything seemed to happen swiftly and efficiently here, to Ritwik’s amazement. He had grown up with news coverage of innumerable hospitals in Calcutta where cats roamed and pissed in the wards, dogs came in and walked away with newborns or wandered around licking the wounds and sores of people lying there with no hope of escape. But here there were silent lifts and the white noise of functioning state-of-the-art medical appliances. The insistent air-conditioning goosepimpled his thin arms, the floors shone with the zing and ardour of the new. Money changed hands as he signed the requisite forms – he noticed there was a clause absolving the hospital of all responsibility should the worst happen and wondered if it was true of hospitals everywhere – and his mother was wheeled away by uniformed nurses and attendants to an intensive care unit on a floor high up in the building.

  Tabbu’s obtrusive altruism now took the form of an iterative chanting of, ‘Nothing’s happened, everything’s all right, everything will be OK’, and Ritwik started counting on the digits of his fingers how many times he repeated the saving formula. Both he and Tabbu were chain-smoking in the car park just inside the entrance of the hospital, as if what had happened had released them into a new permissiveness. For Ritwik, the act of smoking in front of his uncles still carried a minor charge of flouting accepted codes of behaviour: it was almost a dare on his part, a gauntlet thrown down to his uncles. He had already begun to show them that, just because his father was dead and his mother in a perhaps terminal coma in hospital, he wasn’t going to be bossed around by them. It was best to make things clear from the very beginning. But the cleanly triumphant feeling he had been hoping to be rewarded with didn’t quite arrive. Instead, it was clouded by tiny motes of betrayal: his mother had worked so hard to ensure that the boys didn’t fall prey to the bad habits that so characterised her brothers and here he was, indulging in the very thing she had tried to protect him from, to score cheap points. The cigarettes left a woolly burn along his throat and lungs. He had a taste of the futility of her life and his heart turned over.

  Ritwik carefully folded away the very short encounter with the doctor the next morning in the hope of deliberately expunging it some day in the future. Everyone assembled at the hospital awaited the doctor’s arrival with varying degrees of apprehension. They had all been told who the doctor was and their irritatingly frequent questions – when will he come down? when will he let us know? will he be long? – had been answered with exemplary patience.

  When the self-possessed doctor did arrive, everyone rushed to him like pigs to the feeding farmer. Ritwik composed his face into an expressionless nothing as the doctor said, ‘We can’t say anything with absolute certainty at the moment except that we have to keep her under observation for seventy-two hours. She’s in a coma and we can’t say when she will come around. Obviously, the cerebral stroke she has suffered is huge and extremely serious. Both sides of her body are completely paralysed and even if she does recover, she will remain paralysed, in all probability, for the rest of her life. Of course, that might well change . . . We need to conduct a few more tests – an MRI scan of the brain, a CAT scan . . .’ Fluent, articulate, utterly detached.

  Ritwik nodded impassively as the onslaught of information battered through his insides. He recalled Dida, his grandmother, another semi-paralysed stroke survivor who had hobbled her bitter way around the flat, skulking in corners and shadows, occasionally beaten up by her own sons, a twisted and hating figure, till her second cerebral stroke had sent her into a two-month coma from which she ultimately never recovered. The doctor’s words burnt out a clearing in his head: like all clearings, it contained both ash and space.

  The next day, during visiting hours, he took the lift high up to his mother’s room. She seemed conscious, her eyes opening wide as if she had just woken up from a long sleep and was having considerable trouble easing herself into the unfamiliarity surrounding her; the world of her sleep still inflected the hospital room. She struggled to get up, looked at her son, and said, ‘Home, I want to go home. Why am I here? What is this place?’

  Ritwik answered, ‘Yes, of course, you’ll go home, but you’re not very well at the moment, Ma. As soon as you’re better, we’re going to take you home.’ He spoke very slowly, articulating each word separately and distinctly, as if he was simplifying something complex to an inquisitive child.

  Buffeted by some barely articulable unease, she tried to raise her head against the pillows again. She looked like a strung-up marionette that hadn’t quite come to fluid and easy life because the puppeteer had only just begun and was going through his hand and finger warming-up exercises. One of the monitors attached to her showed a jagged green graph, like a curious, moving snake, forming and reforming, arcanely measuring out her life in electronic signals.

  Ritwik, remembering what the doctor had said about extensive damage to the brain, asked her, ‘Can you recognize me? Who am I?’

  She answered him correctly, an emptiness in her face, perhaps trying to work out if it was a trick question, but the look of blank confusion could equally have been the effect of the stroke.

  She tried to lift her hands, in an eerily lost movement, as if they had acquired an unmoored yet independent life, no longer governed by the directing brain. The words came out truncated and random, ‘Pain, headache. Here, here, no here’ – her hands, nowhere near her head, flailed about, unsuccessfully trying to locate the exact spot – ‘please massage my head, it’ll go away. Just a headache. And then you’ll take me home.’

  Her eyes were wide and unfocused; they didn’t seem to be registering anything.

  Ritwik had to find out if her ability to perceive and recognize objects had been impaired as well. From his sidebag, he took out the book he was currently reading – The Complete Illustrated Nonsense of Edward Lear – held it in front of him and asked, ‘Ma, can you tell me what I’m holding in my hands?’

  She rolled her eyes towards him but didn’t manage to fix them either on him or on the book. ‘Book, a book’, the words tumbled out like an erratic spill of oranges from a paper bag. ‘Why are you asking me these questions? If you press your hands on my head, head, here, here’ – this time she didn’t even manage to raise her arms – ‘it’ll go, really, it will.’

  He said, ‘The doctor will make it go away. You’re in good hands.’ The lie jangled so shrilly in his ears he looked up to see if she had heard it.

  She had shut her eyes and was mumbling, ‘Like you used to massage my temples,
forehead, with Amrutanjan when I had headaches, like that, it’ll go away. When you were young. It’s a very severe headache, you know?’

  He felt as if something had gone through the centre of his torso, entering through his navel and boring its way out back through the spine. The duty nurse came in and saved him. ‘All right, that’s enough. You mustn’t tire her out.’

  Ritwik stood up to leave with his back turned to the bed. He couldn’t bear to look at the bloodless face of his mother already asleep – or was it comatose? – on the regulation pillows but the need to twist the knife proved too strong. He turned around and a careless calculation, done god knows when, hiding and waiting until this moment for the ruthless ambush, tripped up his entire being: she had been four years older than he was now when she had given birth to him. He gripped the metal rail at the end of her bed and swallowed. When had his own span of life, one he had thought so small that it could be counted, almost totally, on the digits of one outstretched hand, become so large that half his mother’s could be circumscribed within it? Half a lifetime, a midpoint reached with his birth: how could time be calibrated with such erratic abandon?

  That night he slept in the flat of Aritra’s college friend, Sujoy. It was a convenient distance from the hospital and near-strangers offered both anonymity and a hiatus from the pinning focus of searchers looking for information, signs of grief, points of breakage. He was tired but did not want to be subjected to the ruthless time between switching off the light and the tricky oblivion of sleep, so he forced his attention on his Edward Lear.

  He didn’t know what woke him up in the middle of the night. His mouth was dry, his throat a sore, raspy burn. Did she wake up as well, in an alien, clinical bed, her mind alert and ranging over things with the dreamlike clarity that colours such hours? Was she afraid? Did she think she was going to die? What did it feel like? Did she call out for him, her strangled cry bounding and rebounding off the insulated dark walls, or faintly leaking and petering out in the lowly lit corridors? Did she think of his father’s death or her own?

  The next morning, the inevitability of going to the hospital gave him a sense of doom that seemed to drag and dredge inside him. There were people there already, his friends from college, and Aritra’s, who had offered to do the early morning shift. It was like a vigil, he thought, as he went to shoulder his time. Something in the shadows of Arpit’s face while he crossed the main hall already told him. Certain floating pieces of signs and sense, unconnected until now, suddenly came together in a confirmed design, a design he had always known would be, must be, as Arpit said in his infinitely rehearsed ‘thus you break the bad news’ voice that his mother had ‘expired’ in the early hours of the morning.

  ‘Expired,’ Ritwik thought, ‘what an improbable word to use.’ He nodded almost imperceptibly, acknowledging the news. Inside him was a breathless hollow, at once spiky and porous, awl-and-threaded through with the fibres of his very soul it seemed; it could have accommodated entire other worlds, other times.

  Giving Arpit and others the slip, he went up to his mother’s hospital eyrie, perched so safe and high above the torrent of the city, to see what she looked like in death. He wanted to be alone, at least for this first view of his dead mother. A pale face in all its waxy coldness, lips with the pallor of ash, eyes shut: it could have been a deeply sleeping face that rested against the pillows. How could they be so sure that all the beating, breathing, painful life had left that face? He thought he was going to reach out his hand and touch it but couldn’t bring himself to move even an inch.

  And here the gratuitous tyranny of memory seized him by the balls and no place, no time was safe, and he was a mere nothing to that event he had never, never thought about, never remembered, till now it was everything. He is four years old, and he and his mother board a hand-pulled rickshaw in Park Circus, on a road adjacent to the west side of the big circus green. Even now he feels that momentary precariousness of his position in the slightly scary rickshaw, as if he is about to fall backwards as the puller lifts up the front of the vehicle and the world tilts around him. Suddenly in front of them, in the middle air, there is a whole colony of blue and water-green dragonflies, circling and hovering in their staccato way, sometimes still in the air with just a vibration of wings, a static thrumming, and then off again with a jerky move. Ma, Ma, look, look, dragonflies! What a lot of them! What are they doing there? Why aren’t they landing on something? That suspension of a large swarm a cause of wonder and his mother with an explanation for a small child: They have just been born, up in the heavens, and have been sent down to earth right now, as if heaven were up above behind the canopy of the blue sky, the dragonflies shimmering their papery net-wings, a dazzling whirr in the clear light, having just pierced the blue screen above in their birth and descent. The little boy is delighted at the miracle and his eyes widen with wonder and happiness as his mother smiles and smiles at this benediction of air.

  At Kalighat, he was struck by the place’s newly found familiarity; it was becoming a dangerously regular haunt, almost known, almost comfortable. There were three or four tea shacks with corrugated tin sheds opposite the main entrance to the crematorium. They looked so fragile, with their rows of smudged glass jars which contained gaudily coloured biscuits, the open coal fire with the huge kettle for boiling tea, milk and sugar together, and the long, leaning columns of terracotta drinking cups. The bit of the road along the shanties was a little drain of these discarded and broken cups, of muddy washing-up water and the red stains of paan spittle.

  Eleven days ago he had been here for his father’s cremation. It appeared to be a type of puerile radicalism now, the way he thought he had scored points in refusing to perform the last rites for his father. In denying the honourable duties that bound the male firstborn in a Hindu family – although his family was that only in a diluted, anodyne way – he thought he had taken a socially meaningful step. This was compounded, although Ritwik could take no credit for it, by his mother’s decision to do the necessary rituals. Untraditionally so, because Hindu tradition gave no place to women to atone for the sins of the deceased and see off his soul. If anyone had thought it odd or deviatory, this business of the last rites being performed by the dead man’s widow instead of his surviving sons, they had not said so. On top of that, both he and Aritra had refused to go through ashauch, the ritual eleven-day mourning, a period of defilement, culminating in the sraddha ceremony, where the soul of the dead was finally unmoored from all its earthly ties and sent on its way to purgatory or another birth or whatever.

  Just recalling what his uncles had gone through when their mother had died made him furious with the punishing nature of it all: sleeping on hay and straw with bricks for headrests, no shaving or cutting of hair, no meals after sundown, a mind-boggling assortment of dietary rules . . . And then there was the final ceremony that ended it all: all hair was shorn off and shaved, including chest and armpit hair (although not pubic hair), the endless abracadabra with the phoney priest, pour this on fire pour that on fire, make seven or nine or three portions of that sickly mess of rice and bananas and ghee and place it there and there and there while chanting the names of your male ancestors (no one could go beyond a generation, or two at the most), the obligatory mass-feeding of relatives, neighbours, friends, the poor . . . Cock cock cock he’d spat out I’m damned if I’m doing any of this when my time comes. But this death was different. This time Ritwik was going to do what was expected of him. If there really was a soul after all, which needed to be released, he didn’t want to take any chances with his mother’s.

  There was no question of opting for the traditional open wooden pyre, so uninsulated, so barbaric to Ritwik’s mind. In those blank hours between registering the corpse for cremation in an electric furnace and the little ritual before it actually happened, Ritwik noticed disparate patches of people strewn around the crematorium. Death sometimes made survivors gregarious. He was surprised that there were so few inconsolable people; he ha
d expected far more than the occasional ones, from whom he glanced away. Every haggard face there looked dry, as if deprived of some essential sap which loss had wrung out of them drop by drop, leaving only dark shadows and a desiccation around the mouth, the unkemptness of dusty hair, the crushed, limp dullness of the stale clothes; Ritwik wondered if he looked like them as well.

  The billow and swell of support and advice around Ritwik and Aritra grew. It seemed that virtually half of Aritra’s college had come over to stand by him in this hour of need. Information rained down on him, thick and merciless, like a choking Old Testament plague – the time it would take for the corpse to be completely burnt once it entered the furnace; how the ramp automatically rose to advance and lower the ‘body’ inside; how the gates of the furnace came down to cover the process from human view; the list of things he had to do before and after the cremation. Now that he had to perform all these himself, he was fascinated by the structures and codes of this little world of the business and commerce and rituals of death. It was an alternative world, so inescapably under his own yet so unknown until he had to educate himself in its rules. Who would have thought that such knowledge had to be bought with so much fire, fire that would send his mother somewhere upwards and ascending still, in dispersing, intermittent clouds of elementary particles, so that if he breathed in he could fill his chest with tiny fragments of her being and hold this transubstantiation locked inside his distending lungs.