In the car, on our way home, the tension was palpable. While Dada felt choked at the grief Maa would feel parading Boudi in front of her friends in all her glory, the little crinkle on Boudi’s forehead told me about her consternation at her new family worshipping a statue with eight extra arms and another with an elephant head sitting quite unbelievably on a mouse.
Maa welcomed Boudi with open arms. Not a frown, not a wayward grimace.
The Ganguly house wasn’t quiet in the two hours Boudi spent there smiling at everyone, bending down and touching people’s feet, talking about their kids, her parents, her job and the little kid who was about to come. She talked with poise and grace, shifting from Hindi to broken Bengali to English with unmatched ease, a spitting image of Maa. She’s beautiful, everyone said, some with love-laced malice. In a room full of jealous Hindu women who worshipped Surya, it was a Musalman woman who glowed like the sun itself. In hushed tones, they discussed the merits of the burqa. ‘It blocks out the sun and gives these Musalman women a nice complexion and skin,’ one said. ‘They all come from Afghanistan, that’s why,’ another argued. ‘But dark skin is more beautiful,’ a third had her final say.
Baba scowled the entire evening. Maa steadfastly kept herself busy, laughing too loud, frowning too much, as if she were made of nerve endings, capable of feeling everything.
When the puja started, Maa chanted the mantras louder to compensate for Boudi’s Muslim-ness. She chanted over the pundit’s muted, indecipherable Sanskrit words. The blood red of her sindur, of her bindi, of thealtasmeared on her ankles glowed through the loud chanting. It seeped out of her and into the women who too glowed with Hindu pride, with the fury and unpredictability of their gods, as if to overshadow the blackness of Boudi’s burqa. Maa’s half-closed eyes brimmed with anger and compassion and hate and love.
Arundhati and I sat together. She wore a red suit, in tune with the theme today, and looked to rush out the entire time she was here, waiting for Rishab.
After the pooja ended, women kissed their bunched-up fingers and then transferred their love to Boudi by touching her on the chin or her hands—osmosis?
Later we went to the temple and fed the hundred-odd beggars with watered-down potato curry and deep-fried puris. Maa must have kissed Dada at least a thousand times in the evening, trying to wheedle out of him compliments on how such a celebration was apt and also humanitarian. After Dada and Boudi left, I asked if my birthday would be celebrated like this.
‘No. Dada had to be reminded this time. We don’t want the child under her influence. He will grow up a Hindu,’ said Maa and went back to cleaning the house.
A little later, she handed the garbage bag for me to put out.
3 December 1999
Fourteen days. That’s how long it had been.
When I saw her today, I thought I was imagining her. But it was no mistake. She was blaring the screechy horn of her Tauji’s Bajaj scooter. It was then that it struck me that I hadn’t seen it parked below her house. She had taken it with her.
‘Hi,’ I said when she stopped near me.
We forgot how we used to greet each other so we shook hands like we were in business together.
‘I don’t have a phone,’ she said, looking at me.
‘I didn’t ask if you had one.’
‘Do you want to go somewhere?’ she asked.
I climbed up, and sat as far back as possible. She drove us to Wimpy’s.
‘Will you not talk at all?’ she asked.
‘I have nothing to say. You’re the one with a new life.’
‘Fine, I will speak.’
She told me her employers were teaching her to talk in an American accent, and that once she finishes that, she would no longer be Brahmi but Becky. She talked in her accent which sounded like a parody of how they talk in English movies.
‘I’m getting better,’ she explained. ‘You should see how good my colleagues are at this. The company knows we are lying about our certificates but no one cares,’ she added in the same breath.
It was disconcerting as to how she had bunched herself up in ‘we’, how she had decided on the course of who she would be like. For the next hour or so, she said how lucky she was to have Vedant as a brother who was showing her the world and how we, Arundhati and I, were depriving ourselves of the wonders that the life beyond Pitampura, beyond Rohini, beyond Dhaula Kuan and South Extension held. Her eyes glinted, as did mine, hers with hope and mine with mad envy.
‘Vedant spends lavishly,’ she said. ‘You two should come home sometime.’
‘What’s the point? It’s not as if you’re missing out on anything.’
‘C’mon, Raghu.’
‘Fine, fine, I’m sorry. But you can’t expect me not to be grumpy.’
‘I had to leave the way I did. You know that,’ she said.
