Monday, March 5, 2012

An excerpt from my novel in progress

I am attempting to pen a novel. The following is an excerpt from one of the chapters. This is draft#1:


Dombivali railway station on the outskirts of Mumbai is slowly shaking off its slumber. I reckon the time is past 5 on a cold winter morning. The date I don’t know, I am past caring about such trivialities. I hear my husband’s wracking cough by my side. I fumble as I wrap his torn blanket closer to his shivering body. I am not used to staring only at darkness all the time. We were too poor to be able to afford any treatment for my eyes for all those years and a few months ago the light went out of them completely. Pain courses through my hands as they protest my feeble efforts of adjusting the blanket. Arthritis has claimed most of me, now I cannot stand without assistance.

My husband has been by my side for the past 60 years, right from the day he first saw me, Parinita, a 16 year old chit of a girl sitting demurely at our marriage “mandap” by a holy fire. An ancient Hindu ritual had both of us walking around the fire and the same ritual put a very scared underage girl to service the sexual needs of a man fifteen years her elder that very night. It was when I felt the sharp pain of him inside me late that night did I realize that this was what marriage was all about – pain. What love there was in me for this man decreed by society to be my lord and master died with that pain. His lustful face, which cared only for his own pleasure, strangled all the happiness and joy which had been alive in me till that night. In a few hours I grew up from a giggling girl playing with Maths and Literature into a weary old woman wrapped in yards and yards of blood spotted Benarasi saree. My father had paid a fat dowry to this son of a tailor so that he could get rid of this ugly daughter of his who only cared about useless things like “education”. My lord and master cared little for my pleasures, whether mental or emotional. He considered his duty fulfilled by living with me in a one room tenement in a poor part of Dombivali. His earnings were meager and we eked out a living. He would not hear of me taking up some work to supplement our income, for in his opinion women were best left in the kitchen and used in bed.

I feel the begging bowl by my husband’s side. Some kind soul has dropped a coin in it in the night. Hopefully we will be able to buy some bread and tea from the station food stall. If his cough allows him my husband will sing bhajans and beg by my side till afternoon. When my pain allows me I will raise my palm mutely and hope to get a few coins from people on that railway platform. A year ago when we first came to live there after being thrown out of our house, my husband would say that we would soon move into an old age home, as the months wore on that hope died in him. I hoped my end would come before him. Many, many years ago, in another life it seems now, I had spotted an injured crow on the road. It was simply sitting there with its eyes closed. It would not move even when I picked it up to nurse it between my palms. I felt I was in the presence of Death that day; this bird was calling Death to come and carry it away in its black embrace. I was too young; I could not understand then how any living being could give itself up so completely to Death. That day, all those years ago, the crow died in my hands without a struggle. I completely understand that crow’s actions now. I, too, await my appointment with Death. The alms I get every day will help my husband stay alive after I am carried away in Death’s lap. I understand now that I had been preparing for this day, this realization, from the moment when I was told that my Swapnil was snatched away from my bosom forever.

Of all the things that my husband has given me in my life, Swapnil is the only thing I am thankful for. I was seventeen when he pushed his way out of my emaciated body. The delivery was very painful and the midwife did all she could. Later, I was told that Swapnil was to be the first and last gift for my lord and master – my young body was broken, it could no longer perform its wifely duties. My husband was very angry; he had wanted to rip more gifts out of me. All I managed to give him was a thin, dark-skinned, wailing mite. I had failed in my duties as his slave. He would still have his way with me on the bed every night, but he would do so with curses. He used his hands on me regularly, but that was later when he started to drink every day.

To all the world Swapnil was an ugly toddler. His father would barely look at him, preferring to relinquish his patriarchal duties to me. Swapnil was my pride and joy. I would never let him out of my site as a toddler. Swapnil’s sensitive soul would get traumatized every time he would see his father beat his mother. I would try to hold back my screams and tears, for his sake and mine. Swapnil would be forced to see what no child should ever have to – his father raping his mother every night. This went on, night after night, for years and years. I taught him how to speak in English when he was three, and would narrate works of Literature I had read in another life. Swapnil was reading Dickens when most children of his age and social background were lost in cheap comic books. I would teach him whatever the municipal school could never. Swapnil won first prize in a poetry recitation contest when he was twelve. The prize was just a small plastic pencil box cracking at the corners, but to mother and son it was as if the emperor had presented his most precious possession. Already Swapnil was showing signs of getting impatient with the levels of intellect of the neighborhood children of his age. Our life was hard and our neighborhood rough. I wanted my Swapnil to go to a good school in Mumbai and onwards to a college. I wanted him to move out of the influence of his drunkard father. I wanted to nurture Swapnil as only a mother can. I wanted to cushion my precious from every hard knock that Life would inevitably deal on him. I wanted him to live my dream which I could never. In his teens, every afternoon mother and son would sit on the kitchen floor bent over books on Algebra and Science. I taught him to love the literary masters of Marathi, Hindi and English. With some scrounging and saving by me I managed to get him to be a member of a library in Kalyan, not far from where we lived. I instilled in Swapnil that if we had some spare money we would always spend on books. The “ugly toddler” was growing up to be a thoughtful and intelligent teen right in front of his fond and proud mother. I would forget all pain and hurt of my marriage when I would hear my Swapnil reciting his poetry and prose compositions to me every evening. That, I decided, was the true purpose of a woman’s life – to nurture.

In my marriage, sex was synonymous with torture. Sex was an act of violation performed on my person. Sex was a degradation of my body and soul. My Swapnil would sometimes have queries about the biological aspects of sex as all teens do. The discussion of these sensitive areas of life was never a taboo between mother and son. However, Swapnil seemed to push his sexual feelings deep within himself as he coursed through his teenage years. It was common knowledge in the neighbourhood that my husband would drink and have his way with me night after night. If people would talk about it in Swapnil’s presence he would get up and leave without a word. He was ashamed of his father, I knew. He loved me more than anything else in the world.