A Breath of Fresh Air (13 page)

EIGHTEEN

SANDEEP

I didn’t want to discuss my wife’s ex-husband any longer, but Anjali’s parents wouldn’t let it go.

“He is a nice man, Sandeep,” Anjali’s mother told me. “He has his flaws, no doubt, but a wife has to make the marriage work. It is her duty.”

They were here for just one more day and I didn’t want to tell them to their faces that they were wrong, that it was not Anjali’s duty to keep a bad marriage alive. Anjali had done the only thing she could do and I for one had no complaints about that.

“Yes, it is a wife’s duty,” Komal interjected primly. She had found out about the divorce. Anjali’s mother was not discreet and after Prakash left, she had cried and wept and Komal would have had to be dead to have not figured it out.

“I can’t believe you married her after knowing all this,” Komal said, looking at me in disgust. “I don’t know how I am going to stay here any longer.”

I had had enough. “Then you can leave, Komal,” I said. “Anjali did the right thing by divorcing a man who abused her and their marriage,” I told her parents. “You should be proud of her.”

“Proud of a daughter who cut our noses off in society?” Anjali’s father demanded. “She ruined us. Our reputation will never . . . she just ruined us.”

“But she saved herself,” I pointed out sharply.

Anjali’s mother shook her head. “Look at your own sister. Her husband couldn’t give her children, but she didn’t run away. She stayed with him and tried to make it work.”

Komal flushed. “It was not easy, but I knew my duties as a wife. A divorced woman!” She shook her head disparagingly. “Sandeep, you should have told me. I would never have let you marry her.”

“I am going to Gopi’s house,” I said, and left to join Anjali. She had gone there earlier with Amar when Komal and her parents had dug up the old dirt.

When Amar told me that Prakash was in the house, I had been tempted to leave the garden work and go inside to meet him. How would we greet each other? Would we shake hands? The curiosity had been there, but there had been reluctance, too. Part of me didn’t want to know this man who had been my wife’s husband.

Anjali hadn’t spoken to me about his visit, she just left with Amar. Amar didn’t know about Anjali’s first marriage. He knew that she was in Bhopal the night of the gas tragedy and that was why he was sick. Anjali and I had discussed the matter for months: should we or shouldn’t we tell Amar why he was sick? Finally we knew we had to. He was ill and he needed to know why. We didn’t tell him that Anjali had been married to another man and he was satisfied with our explanation: Anjali was visiting a friend, Harjot Dhaliwal.

Amar knew Harjot, since she visited us often with her husband and children. She had two adorable daughters who Anjali and I had come to treat as our own and she and her husband treated Amar like their own son. Harjot was special to me because of what she had done for Anjali after the Bhopal gas tragedy. I didn’t know Anjali then, yet I wished I could’ve done something for her. The helplessness grated on me. I loved her today but when she needed me the most I hadn’t even known her.

Anjali and Harjot were still as close as they had been over a decade ago. They met during difficult circumstances. First Harjot had lost her uncles in the Indira Gandhi assassination riots and then Anjali had almost lost her life in the gas tragedy. Maybe it was helping each other through the tragedies that made their bonds stronger. After Anjali’s divorce, Harjot had helped Anjali make a life for herself. She had helped Anjali sell her jewelry, write the entrance exams, and get a new education, which she could use to support herself.

When Amar was born, Harjot had been there in the hospital room, holding Anjali’s hand and mine. She had stayed with us, talked to the doctors, and helped us come to terms with the pointless question: “Why our son?”

I wondered what Harjot would do if she knew Prakash had managed to enter Anjali’s life again.

Prakash was making me lose my balance and my serenity by throwing my wife into emotional chaos. Anjali seemed to be slipping away into a void. I felt like she was being torn between her hate for Prakash and her reluctance to admit that what she was feeling might not be hate. Maybe she had forgiven him for his past sins and maybe in some odd Indian woman way she still loved him because he had been the first man in her life.

But I could hardly tell Anjali how I felt. I was trapped within my own reflections. She saw me as an infallible man, as someone who never lost his perspective, someone who could stay calm and be stable through a threatening storm. And I wanted to be the man she thought I was. But I was fallible enough to wonder if my wife didn’t love me as much as she loved her first husband.

I couldn’t reconcile my insecurities with what I knew was true. I knew she loved me. I knew she would always be by my side. I knew I made her happy. But I was still insecure and I wondered if she loved me as much as it took to stay by my side, and keep her genuinely happy.

Anjali was a good wife, a great friend and partner. She was a strong woman. I didn’t know many women who had the courage to rip apart a marriage because the man was in the wrong. She had, and I respected her for that. But I couldn’t help thinking that a part of her regretted the decision. It didn’t have to be because of who I was, it probably was because of who Prakash was.

I came across as the confident husband, as a man who was sure of where he stood with his wife, and I didn’t want her to know that I was not confident enough, that I didn’t know for sure where I stood. I had my doubts and my fears. I was afraid, too, of a lot of things. I needed her by my side to be strong, to face every day. I needed her with me to see things straight and help me deal with our son’s sickness. I needed her to make me smile even though I knew that Amar could soon die.

I wouldn’t know how to live without her. I smiled, I ate, I slept, I breathed because Anjali was there with me. Because I was sure that when I woke up, she would be sleeping beside me. Because I was sure that when I came home from work, she would be waiting for me in the kitchen with a cup of
chai
.

I loved her very much and I was afraid she didn’t love me as much. I had never thought that I was the kind of man who measured love.

When I got to Sarita and Gopi’s house, Amar was sleeping in the spare room, while Sarita, Gopi, and Anjali talked in the drawing room.

“It is chaos at home,” I muttered.

“Maybe you should stay the night here,” Sarita suggested.

“No, we’ll have to go home,” I said with a smile, trying to diffuse the tense situation. “They are still our guests and I wouldn’t want to leave anyone alone with Komal for too long.”

Everyone laughed a little, and then silence fell like an ominous thundercloud.

“I can’t believe he did this,” Anjali said, as if the shock of it was finally sinking in. “Now Komal will tell everyone. I might lose my job if they know that I am not only divorced but I am still talking to my ex-husband under banyan trees.”

I took her hand in mine. “She won’t tell anyone.”

“She will tell Mala and Mala will tell everyone else.”

That could happen. Mala was our neighbor and Komal’s gossiping friend. But I would make sure it wouldn’t happen. Komal depended on me to take care of her and she would have to find her own home if she caused any big problems for my wife.

“Trust me,” I soothed, and she bit her lower lip.

“My parents don’t believe me. They still think he is a saint.”

“They believe you,” I said. “They just don’t believe that you should have gotten a divorce.”

“And stayed with that two-timing son of a bitch?” Sarita cried out. “To hell with your parents. If they are going to be so stupid about this, let them be.”

Anjali laughed despite her misery.

Gopi and Sarita were looking at us with sympathy and I disliked that. Anjali’s parents were being unreasonable, but we were being even more unreasonable by letting them get to us.

“Your parents leave tomorrow?” Gopi asked.

“Thank god,” Anjali said, and grinned. “I want to see them when I don’t and, when I do, I can’t wait for them to leave. And this time . . . how dare Prakash come inside my house?”

“You should’ve thrown him out,” Sarita grumbled.

“How could I?” Anjali said. “I have never thrown anyone out of the house. If I knew how, I would have thrown Komal out by now.”

We all laughed at her weak attempt at a joke and started talking about other things, though Prakash’s visit stayed on everyone’s mind.

Why had he come? Was it to make his peace or to create trouble for Anjali?

Whatever his motives, Prakash had told the truth. He had bared himself in front of her parents, even though they had chosen to continue blaming Anjali. How could any parents want their daughter to be married to an adulterer? How could they not want their daughter to be married to a better man?

I knew Anjali’s parents couldn’t fully accept me because they had not married their daughter to me, they had married their daughter to Prakash. I didn’t think they blamed me for marrying Anjali, but they did blame her. It was because of her rash decision that she now had an ex-husband who they didn’t know how to deal with.

It had been difficult for me as well, to deal with the concept of an ex-husband. But I had come to terms with it. It never bothered me that my wife was not a virgin when we married. It didn’t seem important.

I couldn’t reconcile the Anjali who was my wife with the Anjali who was Prakash’s wife. They seemed like two different people.

She had lost her innocence and that angered me, not because I didn’t get an innocent wife, but because something so bad had happened that Anjali’s innocence was replaced with cynicism. I wish she hadn’t lost so much.

NINETEEN

ANJALI

I was furious with Prakash. He had come to tell the truth without caring about the consequences. He had given me enough trouble in my life. Did he have to add to it now?

My parents continued their nonsense until they left. How could they talk about my ex-husband while my present husband was around? I knew my parents didn’t respect Sandeep. A respectable man didn’t marry a divorcée. But I was happy with him. Happier than I had ever been before. How couldn’t they see and appreciate my happiness?

Prakash had come to relieve his guilt and had expanded my problems. Komal followed my parents’ behavior and continued to bring up my divorce. Since we couldn’t have a conversation without Komal mentioning what a terrible Hindu woman I was, I stopped speaking with her.

Amar I am sure sensed something was amiss, but he didn’t ask what it was. We had always been honest with him and he knew that if it was something he needed to know, we would tell him.

At school I kept waiting for someone to talk about the divorce. But so far it looked like Sandeep had managed to keep his word. Komal had kept the juicy gossip to herself and no one was asking me questions about my ex-husband.

I wondered why Sandeep had not come inside the house to meet Prakash. Amar had told him that someone named Prakash was in the house. Sandeep hadn’t even looked up from his shoveling in the backyard. He had asked Amar to help him pick out weeds and they had had a wonderful, though tiring, afternoon, according to Amar.

It had been bad enough dealing with Prakash when my parents had come to Bhopal and I had been demanding a divorce. It was worse now, because my parents could see the “what if’s.” My mother complained that I was not a brigadier’s wife. If only I had kept my head and made no rash decision, I would have been married to a brigadier.

“It would have been a matter of such pride,” my father had said. “Your being a brigadier’s wife would have given us so much prestige.”

Pride? Prestige? Sometimes I was convinced my parents were naïve and other times I was convinced that they hated me so much they wished me the worst in life.

I saw Prakash’s wife again in the market. Since the first time I had seen Prakash and his wife there, it had become a habit to look around. It was a perverse kind of longing to see her and there she was again. This time wearing a dark maroon
salwar
kameez
, her face made up, and glittering gold hanging from her ears, neck, and wrists. She was buying tomatoes and examing them in her perfectly manicured fingers.

Was she living my life? I wondered.

If I hadn’t been caught up at the railway station that night I am not sure I would’ve pushed for a divorce. But I had seen people die around me that night. I had seen the city of Bhopal turn into a cemetery for months to come after the incident. Mass burials had taken place and I couldn’t shrug the thought that I could’ve been one of those bodies piled up against one another, buried anonymously, or burnt to a cinder without any last rites.

It hadn’t taken long for me to realize how precious life was and that I didn’t want to live the rest of mine with Prakash. It was the well-known cliché: a brush with death brought everything into perspective. After seeing what I had seen the night of the gas tragedy, I knew what I had to do and I knew that every breath I took was leading me to death, untimely or otherwise. Time was limited, and I couldn’t count on Prakash changing while I wasted my life putting up with his abuse and adultery.

But his second marriage seemed to have survived. His wife didn’t look like a young woman and the girl at the parade grounds with Prakash was around seven or eight years old. Indu had stayed married to him and I had run. Was everyone right? If I hadn’t given up on our marriage, would things have finally worked out? Would I be wearing expensive clothes and jewelry, instead of an old cotton sari and no jewelry?

I stared at her through the crowd and suddenly, as if pulled like the sea to the moon, her eyes met mine. There was a moment of recognition in her eyes and then we stood still. I wanted to walk up to her and ask her if she was happy with Prakash. I wished she was unhappy so that my decision of leaving him could be justified. I wished that their marriage was as bad as ours had been. I wished that he was callous, rude, and insensitive, and I wished that he cheated on her as he had on me so that I didn’t have to wonder about my choices.

She walked up to me and I wanted to run, disappear into the people and the bazaar. But I stood, rooted to the ground.

“Namaste.”
She smiled and I nodded. “How are you doing?” she asked.

“Fine,” I replied. The ex-wife and the wife were having a polite conversation—I had never heard of anything so ludicrous.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine.”

We stood there like comrades who had been enemies in some previous battle. Now the wars were over and we could shake hands across the border without hating each other or the thought of each other. She had hated me—she must have, because I had hated the idea of her. Now we didn’t have to hate because the curiosity had been satisfied. I knew her and she knew me, we had seen each other. We were not afraid.

“Did your parents have a nice visit?” she asked, and my eyebrows went up. He had told her?

“Yes, it was nice.” Until your husband came by, I thought silently.

“I hope Prakash . . . didn’t cause any trouble,” she said, and I had to admit that she was a whole lot more perceptive than her husband. On the other hand, she was a woman and she understood the niceties of society better than an army officer who had gotten his way most of his life.

“Some . . . he caused some trouble,” I said emotionlessly.

She looked down at her feet and then raised her face. “He is very sorry for what he did. All of it.”

I looked around trying to breathe because it was getting very suffocating.

“Why are you talking to me?” I finally asked.

“Because I am sorry that he did what he did and . . . I don’t really know why I am talking to you,” she admitted with a faint smile. “This is very awkward.”

“Yes,” I said.

We stood in silence for another minute or so.

“It was . . . nice meeting you,” she said.

I nodded and watched her go back to the vegetable stall where she had been standing.

And just like that, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. No, I didn’t want her life. I hadn’t wanted her life even when I had had it. I didn’t want to be with a man I needed to apologize for.

Her apology had cleared me of any blame. I stood in the middle of the market, smiling like a fool.

Komal refused to eat dinner. She had thrown some tantrum about the cauliflower curry not being to her liking and had excused herself from the table.

Amar could barely sit up these days, but he insisted on eating with us. He had trouble breathing all day and his medication was not helping. It happened once in a while and threw us into a state of panic. Sometimes his breathlessness escalated and he needed to be hospitalized. The last time this had happened was two months ago. I had been keeping count and the frequency of how many times we had been to the hospital in the past year because he couldn’t breathe had increased. Earlier it used to be once in six or seven months, but for the past year it had become more regular. Almost every two months and sometimes every month, Amar needed to be hospitalized for a day or two, sometimes longer.

I was folding the laundry before going to bed and Sandeep was as usual reading the newspaper, when I broached the subject we didn’t want to ruminate over. Amar was getting worse every day; neither of us wanted to face that.

“I hope he doesn’t have to be taken to the hospital,” I said with equal amounts of fear and concern.

Sandeep put the newspaper aside and patted the bed. “I’ll fold them tomorrow, come here.”

I left the laundry and crawled into bed to sit beside him, my legs crossed.

“It is temporary, he’ll be fine soon. He always gets better.” Sandeep didn’t believe it himself and I could see it in his face, his eyes.

Amar had been failing with every passing day. He had been failing ever since he was born. Every day I kept my fingers crossed as I heard with sinking hope the small wheezing sounds he made as he breathed. And a question inundated my every conscious and subconscious thought: would there be time for a miracle for my son?

“I met his wife today,” I said, not looking at Sandeep. “She actually came to speak with me.”

“What did she say?” There was no surprise in his voice.

“Hello and that . . . he is sorry for everything.”

“So she knows,” he said.

“I think so.”

I then raised my eyes to meet his. “I am glad that I divorced him.”

“You say that like you just got glad about it and weren’t earlier?”

“I was glad about it; I am still glad about it. It is just sometimes when my parents keep hounding me, I wonder . . . that’s all,” I said, trying to explain what I had realized in the bazaar.

“What do you wonder?” Sandeep asked, his voice dropped to a whisper.

“That maybe I was hasty, that the gas tragedy made me look at things . . . in a . . . skewed light,” I said, struggling with the words.

His eyes widened. “Have you been unhappy all these years with me?”

“No!”
I exclaimed. “This is not about us. I have never been happier, more content. Even though Amar is sick, this is the happiest I have ever been.”

He got out of bed and paced the floor. I had never seen him this agitated before. A part of me was thrilled that I had managed to finally break him down to the extent he was losing the calm veneer that covered him from head to toe. Another part of me felt guilty for making him feel this way.

“I haven’t given you a good life,” he finally said, revealing his insecurities. Insecurities I never associated with him.

“What makes you think that?” I asked, shocked.

“You have . . . very little.” He shrugged.

“I have a whole lot more than I ever did,” I countered. “How I feel about my choices has nothing to do with my marrying you. They were . . . frozen—part of that time when I divorced Prakash. My parents, Prakash, the officers’ wives, everyone seemed to believe that I was a bad wife because I didn’t want to be his wife anymore.”

“You’ve been a great wife to me.”

I smiled. “I hope so. I love you, Sandeep.”

“But you loved him, too,” he pointed out.

“I am not sure anymore what I loved, the army officer or the man beneath that olive green uniform,” I confessed. “I was young and I thought that marrying Prakash was what I wanted. I regretted the marriage and I got out of it. I am glad I did. It was the right decision—it was a brave decision. I don’t know where I found the courage.

“Today when his wife apologized to me, I knew that what I remembered was not a jaded, one-sided picture. He did hit me, he did cheat on me, and he did not hold up his end of the marriage bargain of being a good husband.

“Which is well and good for many women and it probably would have been for me, too. I’d be a brigadier’s wife apologizing to the women Prakash mistreated. But I came too close to death and . . .” I didn’t know what to say anymore.

I had said it all before and I didn’t know if he could see the enlightenment that had been bestowed upon me. I was seeing the past like I had never been able to see it before. I always blamed Prakash for what had happened to our marriage and to me, but I had also blamed myself, wondering if the people around me were right. If only I had persevered and stayed, my marriage with Prakash would have worked.

“Do you know
now
that you made the right decision by divorcing him?” Sandeep’s voice was forceful and demanding.

I shook my head. “I always knew it was the right thing, but . . . people don’t make it easy for a divorcée, Sandeep. Komal thinks I am to blame and I have had to listen to that ever since I divorced Prakash, from many people. I had doubts and . . . damn it, they were justifiable.”

“So when you married me you were not sure if divorcing Prakash was the right thing to do?”

Why was he was being so obtuse? Why couldn’t I make him understand that now I didn’t feel like I was to blame for the failure of my first marriage? What did that have to do with my marriage with Sandeep? I felt helpless, unable to make him see how I felt.

“No, I was not sure . . . not entirely,” I snapped. “Happy? Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“No, what I wanted to hear was that you love me so much that it doesn’t matter whether divorcing Prakash was the right thing or not,” he said, his eyes bleak. “You have always been fascinated with him and ever since you saw him again . . . I feel like you have been wondering if maybe life with him would have been better than what you have with me.”

“That is not true!”

“Why do you want me to hate him, Anjali?”

“Because I hate him. Because of what he did to me . . . to Amar.”

He laughed without humor and shrugged. “I don’t think you hate him. I think you are obsessed with him. You want me to hate him in your place, because you can’t.”

“Is that how you really think I feel?” I demanded.

“You don’t hate Prakash. You’ve never hated him. He is the man who shattered your dreams, but he is also the man who was there first,” Sandeep said with passion. “And maybe somewhere in that soul of yours you feel that he was the right choice, I was the wrong one.”

I was speechless for a few seconds.

“I can understand your regret at marrying me—” he continued, when I jumped out of bed and interrupted him.

“I never regret marrying you,” I cried out. “I just wasn’t sure if the divorce was . . . the right . . . the only thing to do.”

“It is the same thing, Anjali.”

He had never been this difficult before. We had lived a comfortable life with little thought of the past, until Prakash showed up in Ooty.

“It is not the same thing,” I said weakly.

“Are you telling me you’ve never looked at his wife and thought that she is living your life?” Sandeep demanded.