The day was gray, warm and dust dry in anticipation. The monsoon rains were late this year. He looked up at the pregnant clouds in the sky from the flat stone rooftop – the lowering sun cast a red glow behind the grayness. The water would soon pour down, as if a bucket had been tipped over. Children would appear on rooftops – playing and dancing. The steamy rain would come down so fast there would be no time for run off. The dust would churn into mud. The drains and gutters would be flooded within moments. The streets would pool to waist level within minutes. And, just as suddenly as it had started, it would be over. The water would eventually drain away… leaving a mess behind. He had loved the monsoon rains since he was a child himself, and wanted to live to see more.
****
He slipped into the first room of the house. He sat down in his mother’s old chair. God. This is where she wanted me to live out my life? Sitting on the floor all day until my back and knees ached, rubber cementing leather soles to uppers, painting designs and stitching toe loops for women’s sandals. God, the monotony. It makes me sick.
The room was almost empty now. There was only a chair, a cot and two carefully tended picture frames above the opposite doorway – one of his dead father with a rotting garland of jasmine draped across it, and one of a painting of the God Shiva, the destroyer, with fresh sandalwood paste rubbed on the glass over the forehead. At times, Nitin did feel guilty for not caring more about his father who died when he was a baby.
Nitin unwrapped a triangle of silver foil he pulled from his shirt pocket. He loved the taste of paan; the pungent leaf wrapping equally pungent spices. He slipped it into his mouth to chew – a meditative ritual like taking tea; it must be enjoyed at a leisurely pace. The red juice spread its stain in his mouth.
He looked around the room. The workstations were gone. The shoe materials were gone. The calendars were gone. Every inch of peeling sky blue paint, and beneath the ragged gaps, peeling old pasted flyers and movie posters were visible. No need to track distribution now. He had sold the business piece by piece, as he needed the money for gambling, for cigarettes and for treating his friends to paan at the nearby stand. All he had left was the house, his wife, and his life.
“Nitin?” Sushma was calling from the kitchen. He smiled just hearing her voice but wanted to relax a while longer.“Nitin? Are you coming? Food is ready.”“Nitin!” Sushma called with annoyance.
A fire blazed in his eyes as he stood up. He walked across the stone floor, through the doorway, under the picture of his father and Lord Shiva – his left hand deftly taking the belt hanging from a nail just inside the next room. He looped the leather end around his fist as he strode through the bedroom in the middle, and into the last room of the house in a straight line. Sushma was squatting on her haunches on the floor in front of the propane stove, her simple printed cotton sari gathered between her legs. He entered, still chewing, arm rising back, just as the last chapatti finished cooking. She had a stainless steel platter with food already set out for him. She had just switched off the gas and put the last chapatti, still warm, on his plate when the buckle end of the belt caught the back of her head.
He was whipping her with the buckle on her back, on her waist, on her legs. Sushma stood up trying to avoid the blows by instinct. He toppled over his plate and his food and lashed at her a few more times.
“YOU…”“Mother is coming! Mother is coming soon! Please…”“SHOULD NEVER…”“You need to eat early…”“TAKE THAT TONE…”“You’ll eat again when mother comes, with mother!…”“WITH ME”“Please…”“WHEN?“Please…”“WHEN IS SHE COMING?”
Still he continued to hit her, and still she pleaded, “Mother is coming… Nitin… It’s okay. She will help.”
He stopped for a moment, chewing his paan as his rage ebbed. When the red faded from his sight, he knew she was right. Still, she needed to learn it was never acceptable for her to use such a tone with him, her husband. He stood and waited, dropped the belt wrapped around his fist, chewing, as she bent down to clean the splattered food.
Eventually she wiped out his plate and pulled out the covered vessels of food from under the stone shelter to serve his food again. He sat down, finishing his paan and began to eat. He leaned over to caress her tear-streaked face.
“Mother is coming soon. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.” She moved closer to him and held his head to her chest as he cried.
****
It was 2:15am when the rickshaw motor sputtered in the courtyard. Sushma was up first. She went to unlock the door and help bring her mother-in-law’s suitcases into the house. Nitin came in as she dragged the last one into the empty room next to the cot and chair. His eyes were still burning with hot, dry sleep. He sat on the cot and waited for his mother to pay the rickshaw. He watched her in the light as she approached the door wondering what changes America had made on her in the past year.
At 83, she still wore the white cotton sari of a widow. Her white hair was pulled severely into a bun at the back of her head – not tight enough to pull the folds of sagging and wrinkled skin smooth. She looked as she always had, as if she was melting back into the earth; the skin and fat on the underside of her arm, her face, the fold of her stomach showing from the drape of the sari – all dripping toward the ground. Her eyes that used to be brown were now grey blue with the weariness and heaviness of the trials of her life, magnified many times by her glasses. Looking into them, he questioned her right to be head of the household and family when his father died. If his father had lived longer, maybe his life would have been different.
Nitin doubted very much that she ever stopped chewing her toothless gums, her mouth constantly working at nothing in it. As she stepped over the threshold, Sushma rushed to touch her feet for a blessing and to show respect, then went into the kitchen to heat some food and to make some chai for her mother-in-law and Nitin. In uncomfortable silence they sat together on the floor and ate, mother and son. He was losing patience.
Later, they came into the sitting room again. She arranged herself on the cot directly, pulling one knee up to her chest, her foot on the cushion, holding her ankle… her mouth still working. Sushma stood in the doorway below the pictures of her dead father in law and Shiva as Nitin sat down across from his mother in the low easy chair. He couldn’t wait anymore.
“Did you bring the money?”She chewed a couple of times, paused and lisped, “No. I told them, no. They work hard for their money and they need it. What have you done?”
He felt the burning fear rising in his body. His heart was beating in his ears.
“Ma, you don’t underst-”“I do understand…” She glanced over at her daughter-in-law who was cradling the side of her head and trying to wipe away traces of blood as she left the room.“It’s enough.” She declared.
Nitin saw the bulge of her keys tucked into her blouse. She no longer lived here yet she still held the keys to her trunks on the loft. They should have been given to Sushma. He sensed she had some business with the trunks. Whatever it was, he decided right then, he would have it.
He let the burning fear, shame and guilt guide him across the room. She looked up into his face as he came closer. That she had no fear further angered him.
Nitin grabbed at her blouse and ripped the keys out. She followed him, pleading into the bedroom. He vaguely heard her through the rush in his ears. Sushma hearing the commotion entered the room to see Nitin climbing up the ladder to the loft. In his determination, he shook his mother’s grasp, inadvertently shoving her and making her tumble.
The trunks were coated in dust. His mother’s trunk with the steel bands was kept separate from the others, so he knew exactly where to go. Nitin fumbled with the key in the lock and finally heard it click open.
The contents were wrapped in pieces of bed sheet. Nitin tossed the ends of the sheet aside and saw bank deeds and a largish framed picture of a strange man. He put these aside and rifled through the rest, finding his mother’s gold wedding jewelry – heirlooms passed down to her by both her own mother and mother-in-law. He found ancient, heavy brocade silks embroidered with 22k gold, enough to cover his debts once sold. He found the papers of ownership for the mansion and land in Pakistan, abandoned in the 1947 Partition. He had only heard stories of the respect and wealth his family had had before they left it behind. They had been respected; they had been WEALTHY. Yet, these papers were worthless to him now; the land was forever lost to him and the family now. As the rushing noise in his ears ebbed, he could hear his mother gasping for breath below.
“Bring me the papers… Nitin… the papers.” Still, his mother’s raspy voice didn’t register.
His mother had collapsed on the floor and was trying to breathe. Sushma stood by, scared to move. Nitin sat beside his mother and cradled her fragile head in his lap, the papers on the floor beside him. He tenderly removed her glasses. He motioned to his wife to bring him his pen as he stroked his mother's forehead. Methodically, he broke the pen. He rubbed and smeared the blue ink on his mother's thumb before he pressed it to the paper–her signature.
"You have taken what I came to give you," she whispered.
Thunder and lightning cracked the dark sky as a tear slowly stained a wet path from the corner of her eye, across her temple and into her hair. She exhaled–her son's hand covering her mouth and nose to be sure it was her last breath.
****
The clouds spilled the monsoon rain but there was no joy this time. The dust churned into mud. The drains and gutters flooded. The streets pooled to waist level within minutes. And, just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended. The water would eventually drain away… leaving a mess behind. He had loved the monsoon rains since he was a child…
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