Small Days and Nights Read online

  She doesn’t let me change. ‘Fast, fast,’ she keeps shouting, so I pull on a robe and find slippers for my feet. Downstairs, Mallika looks sullen, wearing one of my old cardigans over her sari, arms wrapped tightly across her tummy.

  We set off down the driveway – Mallika and Lucia ahead of me, marching. Lucy’s thighs rub-squeaking against each other in pyjamas.

  I take note of how many holes there are in the brick compound wall. That’s where the goats come through – there and there. I marvel at how nicely the bougainvillea is coming along – huge, heaving hedges of magenta and orange sprawling over the brickwork. A speckled woodpecker sits in the middle of the path, making his noise, then disappears into a gulmohar.

  The dogs are arranged like a question mark on the ground by the gate. Kat, Preity, the three mothers – Hunter, Thompson and Flopsy – ungainly and heavy-titted. By the gate on the ground there’s a package of newspaper with rice and meat. At first I cannot comprehend the scene, but then I see smears of vomit and blood around the mouths of the dogs and understand they’ve been poisoned.

  ‘Get that out of here,’ I say to Mallika. ‘Anyone could pick that up and eat it.’

  We come back with gloves and shovels. The poor, sad, dead dogs. Their black bodies are hardening in the sun and beginning to stink. Mallika asks if she should call for help. ‘A man would be useful,’ she says.

  ‘No, I don’t want anyone in here,’ I say.

  It takes hours to dig the holes. The sun is strong and a scratch of pain starts from my lower back and spreads into my shoulders. I plug on obstinately until the work is done. We wrap the dogs in plastic first, then sheets, and lay them in the ground. Lucia wants to say a prayer for each of them. ‘Oh Father,’ she starts, the rest of her words nonsensical, flowing out of her in some kind of litany.

  ‘Tell Valluvan I want to see him,’ I say to Mallika, and then I go back to the house to wash the death off me, leaving Lucia on a pile of mud in her pyjamas, rocking and singing.

  Valluvan’s wife, Nila, offers me hot, ghee-soaked pongal on a steel plate and a tumbler of tea. Valluvan himself looks luminous in a shiny white new lungi and veshti. He’s fussing with the cows in the courtyard, whose horns have been painted red and black – the household’s political colours – in preparation for New Year. The daughters dart about like parakeets in bright green pavadas with heavy gold borders, saying, ‘Hi auntie,’ while the boy, Lenin, just nods shyly.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve brought nothing.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Valluvan says. ‘Come, sit.’

  The jute stools have been moved so I sit on the floor, crossing my legs awkwardly, the blood at the top of my thighs choked and dizzy.

  ‘Someone has put poisoned food outside my house. Five of my dogs are dead.’

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘That man who came to see me about selling the land recently, do you think it could have been him? I’ve phoned my friend at the Blue Cross, you know? He says I can file a police complaint.’

  ‘There are so many bad elements in the village these days,’ Valluvan says. ‘They all want to become millionaires overnight. Not happy to be fishermen or farmers, no? They are only interested in this new gold, and we are sitting on it. I didn’t think they’d try anything with you, though.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘If I ask here, they will say that your dogs are eating their chickens at night, which is the truth. Here, if someone kills your animals you kill theirs. But if it’s that broker you’re talking about, then it’s hard to say.’

  ‘But shouldn’t they lock up their chickens? There are so many packs of hungry dogs around here. It could have been any dog! What kind of person puts poisoned food by the gate? What if someone’s child picked it up?’

  ‘You don’t know these rowdies. They go around with axes and knives. They want to sell all this land and make resorts and coal factories. You are too educated, so they can’t fool you. But so many others have already lost their land. Illiterate people who just put their thumbprint on any document. And the police – they are involved in all this. Don’t think they’re going to help you.’

  ‘So, then?’ I say. ‘I should just do nothing, is it?’

  ‘If you want your dogs to live, tie them up at night, simple.’

  A mood settles over us all. Raja and Bagheera stretch out on the patio – morose and listless. The puppies are frantic for food. With the three mothers dead I don’t know what to do. I take mashed-up dog food over to where they’ve been hiding in the neem bushes, and they rush out, a flurry of black and white, setting upon the bowls with blind hunger.

  ‘Do you think they’ll make it?’ I ask Mallika.

  ‘We’ll have to see.’

  Lucia doesn’t want to go on our evening walk. It’s the time of day we love best. To set out on the beach with the big dogs, to chase crabs and howl. All week we’ve been watching David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series, and I’ve been putting on my Attenborough voice to entertain Lucia.

  But there’s going to be no walk today, or David Attenborough. At five in the evening, Lucia is still in her muddy pyjamas.

  ‘Get up, Lucy. It’s bath time, come on now, you can’t sit like this forever.’

  She doesn’t look at me. She says nothing.

  I go upstairs to run the water. ‘Lucy,’ I shout. ‘Come for your bath.’

  Ten minutes later I have to come downstairs again. ‘Why aren’t you talking to me? Lucia! Lucia! I said speak to me. Look at me.’ I start pushing her shoulders, but she’s staring away from me obstinately.

  Finally, I have to call Mallika to help. ‘Catch hold of her arms and I’ll get her legs.’

  ‘No, no,’ Lucia shouts, lying down like a sack of stones.

  ‘You have to, Lucia! You stink of dog, and you’re dirty and you’re not eating dinner in your pyjamas.’

  But there’s no reasoning with her. So I pinch her ankles and catch hold of them, while Mallika grabs her underneath the arms. She’s kicking and screaming as we take her up the stairs, jerking her torso up and down to make it more difficult for us. We haul her onto the bed – the solid weight of her, and she’s still shouting, no no no.

  ‘Stop it, Lucy, stop it. Just get up,’ I say, smacking her hard on the back. ‘Why aren’t you listening to me? Grab her, Mallika. You are going to have a bath whether you like it or not. It’s not my fault the dogs are dead.’

  We manage to get her into the bathroom, standing. I drag the shirt over her head while Mallika holds on to her waist. I’m about to pull the elasticated pyjama bottoms down her legs when she starts to urinate. A thick stream of piss. Standing there, just a few inches from the toilet. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t shout. She just stands there and allows the piss to run between her legs, onto our arms and the bathroom floor. ‘Lucia!’ I shriek. ‘Lucia!’ And then I pin her shoulders to the bathroom wall, and beat her and beat her, while Mallika stands back to watch.

  19

  There are moments, even in the most intimate of relationships, when you’re making love with someone and you feel nothing. It happened with Blake three years into our marriage. We were never an overly amorous couple, but in the early days we groped and had sex on stairways and believed in the unity of our bodies. Relationships tarnish, though, and for some, the erosions make them want to return to the body they’ve just hated, to claim it into being theirs again. I was never one for erosions. Once I began to see the dried skin around the elbows and the small hairs sprouting from earlobes, once I began to hold the body’s smell – its own particular reek of dying – the day after day became untenable. With Vik, it had been golden. A giving over. I put my mouth to his and drank.

  Now he’s sitting across from me, I feel none of that. I see only a stranger. A boy – short and hairy. Full of ego with nothing to give.

  We are in a hotel bar where a glass of wine costs an eighth of Mallika’s monthly salary. It’s a voluble gathering – Praveen, Rohini, Samir, Vik. Praveen is
telling us how he’s ready for monogamy. ‘When you’re single it becomes a case of carnality, you know? Like when’s the next one?’

  ‘You got to keep your shit quiet in this city, dude, otherwise you get fucked.’ This is Vik talking. My young Vik. ‘You need to have your hangouts, your underground places where you do your thing, you got to have your pad.’

  ‘I don’t want a wife or anything,’ Praveen says. ‘I’m just ready to be in a committed relationship. I’m forty-five, you know? I’m ready.’

  ‘You’re forty-five!’ Rohini says. ‘I’m impressed, Praveen. I’d have pegged you for younger.’

  Rohini is obsessed with age. She tells me about all the women in the city who’ve had face fillers and boob jobs. Twice already, at the end of long nights, she’s asked me what it was like to be with a man so much younger than myself. ‘Divine,’ I said. ‘But really,’ she asked, ‘don’t you worry?’

  I sneer at her, but I know exactly what she’s talking about because of course I fucking worry. I worry about Ms Bushy Brows and the bandage-dress women who are trying to make themselves so perfectly bland, how this has come to define what we call beautiful and this is what makes men raise their cocks up in the air, and so this is what women will do to themselves. ‘It’s only a thing of the moment,’ I tell her.

  ‘But get this,’ Samir interjects. ‘He’s learned about commitment from his dog.’

  Praveen blushes and Rohini is shrieking now, ‘Bestiality, bestiality!’

  ‘Seriously,’ Praveen says. ‘I’ve been learning loyalty from Sphinx. He’s the only one who waits for me every day, you know? I never used to pay him much attention but now I’m like, Hey buddy, how’s it going? It’s an alien feeling for me. I’m trying to master it. I’ve been a bitch, a bastard.’

  No one has asked how I’m coping with my recent dog tragedy because they’re not furry house animals. Because they’re a pack of wild things, the expectation is that wild things might happen to them, such as being poisoned en masse. Vik had said something to the effect of the numbers being under control now. Even Rohini, who proclaimed to be a canine freak, was only really interested in her two Poms. It feels silly to talk about grief, but I haven’t been able to sleep, and when I drove down here I cried most of the way. I am angry too, because there is such easy acceptance of death. The cheapness of it. Those beautiful animals gone. And we chatter here about things I don’t comprehend but am somehow part of.

  ‘You’ve got such a pretty face,’ Rohini says, turning to me all of a sudden. ‘You should marry her, Vik. Why don’t you just grow a pair of balls and marry her?’

  I want to say that I’m already married and that it hadn’t worked out so well the first time. That I didn’t think monogamy was such a great idea. But I wanted to see how Vik would react.

  ‘She won’t have me,’ Vik says, taking my hand. ‘She keeps telling me it’s over, so what can a man do? Just keep trying, right?’

  The waiter circles around us with a bottle of wine, pours into our glasses.

  ‘Boss,’ Praveen says, looking at the waiter kindly, ‘you need to take care of your body odour.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I say, laughing, ‘that’s rude.’

  ‘Please, Miss G, it’s not rude. I’m honest. I’m paying top dollar here. I’m not at the fucking Udipi Mathsya hotel.’

  ‘Hygiene is super-important for Praveen,’ Rohini says.

  ‘Yeah, man, people in Madras don’t have the concept of deodorant. It’s a minefield out there. You got to be careful.’

  ‘Want to get out of here?’ Vik asks. A month ago I would have said hell yes. He would have taken me to one of his underground places. We would have leaned against enamel or wall, hands working quickly to unfasten buttons and flies, but now I want to keep his body at a distance from mine.

  At one in the morning Rohini complains she’s drunk and wants to go home. We signal for the bill. A man and woman saunter in. He’s dressed all in black – shirt strained over stomach, legs like pencils, feet stuffed into old-fashioned leather moccasins. The girl is blobby in all the right bits. Teetering on heels, thrusting her chest out and pointing to the table she wants.

  ‘Sheesh,’ Praveen says. ‘You have to wonder about these girls. Wearing runway clothes but going mewh mewh.’

  ‘What’s that? What’s that fucking sound, mewh mewh?’

  ‘Their personalities are so meek. They’re servants, all of them.’

  ‘They come from small towns,’ Rohini says. ‘That’s what he means. Have you seen that Prashant’s wife? She’s like bus-conductor material.’

  ‘I sure am glad you guys are my friends,’ I say.

  Praveen laughs. ‘You’re one demented bitch. That’s why we love you.’

  It becomes harder and harder to return to the beach. I set off Monday morning, hung-over, stop at the supermarket for supplies, mindlessly reach for bottles of pasta sauce, bags of rice, dog treats. There’s always the feel of dirt after these weekends. I walk up and down the narrow aisles, pushing the trolley, dragging my slippers. The women at the cash register chatter like sewing machines and I wonder how they sustain such robust conversations. What do they find to speak about all day? The one who serves me has a face dented with acne. She coughs over my vegetables and then extends her hand for my credit card.

  There are moments when I feel I have nothing to do with any of the life around me. I have no idea what most people find delectable, what pushes them to betray or lift up another person. Yesterday at brunch, someone asked what I thought about Aamir Khan’s acting in PK. ‘I don’t watch Hindi movies,’ I said. This woman was a former Ms Madras – a fetching thing with somewhat overexaggerated eyes and a stage-one zit marring her forehead. ‘You don’t watch Hindi movies,’ she repeated. ‘At all?’ I told her I lived in a place far from cinemas, that mostly I watched cartoons and nature documentaries, but my interest in movies in any language had just died, and I hadn’t bothered to question it. ‘But don’t you feel left out?’ she asked. And it went like this, the former Ms Madras quizzing me about my village life, her hands getting increasingly hysterical as I told her about mouse killings and dog poisonings. I wanted to ask, Isn’t it tiring to be a former? Doesn’t that define the quality of your life to such an extent that you are always looking backwards? Former Ms Madras, former finance minister, former wife.

  ‘You should hire a security team,’ she said.

  ‘So tell me,’ I said, ‘how did you meet your husband?’

  The man she was married to sat across from her. He had flexible fingers that he bent backwards vigorously while listening, a delicate face, a carving knife for a mouth. ‘She used to play tennikoit in school,’ he answered. ‘I met her at a party where I was flying my fucking balls off, went down on one knee and proposed. She said no, but I persisted. You married?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m having an affair.’

  Everyone but the former Ms Madras and her husband looked shocked. ‘I like this girl,’ the beauty queen said. ‘Come and visit us when you’re in town next. We’ll force you to watch a movie. We have the most fabulous home-entertainment system. Now listen, be a sweetie and text me about putting pimple cream on my face when I get home, will you?’

  Blake had written several emails proposing reconciliation. I had replied saying I’d met someone, that I was happy and was sorry he couldn’t move on. Perhaps we should get divorced? He wrote back, a perturbed ramble about infidelity, which I thought quite unfair, because while we’d been together, I’d held steadfastly to him.

  I’d always understood the nature of infidelity as something that stemmed from boredom or inadequacy. That the body sought out another body because we are primates, driven by primal intuitions. But with Blake my desires had shrivelled. Nothing in me wanted to be filled by another person. I had been told by my mother, when she still deigned to talk about bodily matters, that sex and love had nothing to do with one another, that a marriage could survive any kind of desert. Later, of course, Auntie Kavitha confirmed th
at Mother had been an unfaithful wife.

  ‘There was that whole mess with Sundar,’ she said. ‘Although your mother was never really that keen on him.’

  ‘Wait. I thought Uncle Sundar was gay?’

  ‘No, no. And then there was that doctor in Madras who indulged your mother’s tragic side. That was the more serious affair. It gave her a sense of controlling her life, because you know, your father was unrelenting about Lucy. He would not go see her. This broke your mother’s heart.’

  You never think your parents lead more deceitful lives than you, but of course they do. I remember the closed shutters of Mahalakshmi, the many weekend afternoons we spent in our private corners pretending to sleep or read, just to be away from each other for a few hours so that when we reconvened we’d be able to bear each other’s presence again.

  I’ve been thinking of taking Lucia up to Kodai for a few weeks even though the house is a ruin now. I heard the family fell out after the old man who owned the property died. Still, we could climb over the wall. I could show Lucia the view of the plains. We could stay at the club and take walks around the lake. We need a change, after all. The days are getting so warm, the sea so anxious.

  20

  The last days of March. All the puppies are dead. For three weeks I’ve lain in bed – fevered and sore as if fire ants had orgied in the bones of my tibia and humerus, the needles of my spine. In the rare moments of lucidity I had thought only of Lucia. What will happen to her if something happens to me?

  This virus is spread by the female mosquito. It makes gulags of your joints. When it first hit me I woke disoriented, bladder full. I tried to lift myself from bed but it was as if my palms were made of sponge. I sank down immediately. I tried to shout but the noise coming from me was soft and rippled out into nothing. At ten, Lucia stormed in saying, ‘Gimme breakfast.’

  ‘Call Mallika,’ I told her. ‘Go get her.’ Lucia started shoving me in the small of my back, as if to push me out of bed. ‘Cornflakes, cornflakes,’ she shouted, agitated that I wasn’t moving. An hour later Mallika finally came upstairs. She stood at the doorway, hand at hip. ‘What happened? You didn’t come down to eat?’