The Inherited Custody

CHAPTER XIII

"Oh, do come!"

With those words, the woman walked towards her door, holding bags full of vegetables and vanished behind the open entrance of a building. She stood at the Wednesday Bazaar, bags full of vegetables and fruits, a packet of cigarettes swiftly creeping under her loose blouse, looking in a direction in which her saheli (girlfriend) just walked through.

They stumbled into each other, in the streets of Old Bombay, after years of going together to school, walking with long plaid skirts and full-sleeved shirts from the society of chawls they lived in. Rani, now a wife, a mother, an old, lost friend, invited her to come to a gathering at the place they grew up.

"We will have some warm samosas, just like the old days!"

She wasn't thrilled by it, not willing to walk down old lanes, old memories that had done no harm, yet somewhat lingered for nothing, as if something left behind was meant to be behind. She didn't intend to go to the graveyard— a carnival of the dead, where they spent time as children in late noons, not wanting to return into the safe-haven called homes, to feel a little lost. Once they were there, smoking cigarettes, sharing lunches and jokes, smiling and peace became a ritual.

But those moments were long gone. The memories of those moments were left to bury itself in the very graveyard, where the life felt peaceful but left behind after the girls were married off pretty young. There was no way of looking back. Or so she thought.

Never did the idea of returning to those lanes, those graves, those tiring innocence occur to her. Her life had so little clamoured even now. What could the past possibly give one? Nothing new.

If she went, she'd be invited to Rani's house, meet the husband, the children who'd call her aunty, be fed forcefully, forced to speak about things she didn't want to talk about at all, to look and soak in an image of Rani's happily married life. One that she didn't have. She remembered the one time she went to Rani's, then a young girl's house, with a potluck meal, and the mother broke only one bhakri into two with Rani, and she was left to eat what she had brought herself, her mother's stew of vegetables.

She sighed walking down the lanes of the market, the anxiety of the visit kicking in already. The entire market stank of sweat due to the crowd, the sun high and mighty— so warm that even fleas on fruits fell to the grounds with their sweaty wings; the city erupting carbon into the air, rising higher than birds, touching the ozone and telling them to fuck off. There were no clouds. That magic was gone.

•~•~•~•

In the evening, she left a note for Rustom and left the house before he could return from the Cafe.

She walked down the sealine, then entered the ragged, guttural lanes where underwears and thinly embroidered towels hung out of windows on fine ropes. And then, every turn, like the veins in a body, flushed with recognition. Each house, a wash of memories, young. The area— a theatre of stories of love and loss and innocent joy. She walked sadly though, tramped by the tiny stalls of paan wallas, schoolgirls in uniforms clapping hands and playing, the irritable scent of dead fish meat, older women sitting on the stairs of their doorways, bicycles parked outside blue and brown doors. There in a corner, with a peep, she saw where men scraped metal sheets, sparks flowing like the scrubbing of fire, the heat of dust, alone, separate from the rest. Art had a solitary world of its own.

She came by a tiny puddle, and for reasons unknown and left, she lifted the bottom of her skirt and hopped over it, her slippers being poked by wet stones, deep brown droplets sticking to her heels, the jingle of her left anklet echoing ever so slightly. The childhood image of such stupid happiness crept across her lips like the blossoming of flowers. People around her watched, frowned, hooded eyes loomed around her figure in the broad evening daylight.