Blood and Water

Gangaram had been working in our house long before I had come here as a young woman with dark mehendi staining my dainty white hands; and a wish load of dreams in infancy.

The color of the mehendi faded and some of those dreams went on to become hardened adults. Some dreams died while others languished in a darkened corner of my mind; often visited, but never to be realized. All through this, Gangaram hovered around us like a mother hen; tending to our needs with an obsessive efficiency that bordered reverence.

Gangaram was a simple man. He had wizened before his years and he wore the look of a man who had decided to surrender to life that to fight it, any longer. He belonged to the ilk of those who carve their niche in subservience and plod through life like hardened oxen who’d only known one way in life; sweating it out.

His wife was a frail woman ten years his junior. She had some coronary defect since child birth and had therefore carried a heavy dowry. She had been married to a thirty year old Gangaram when he had visited his village after a span of seven years. He had returned from his native village with his dowry loaded on a rickshaw and a young brown wife following him limply; her footsteps unsure and unsteady.

We (my husband and I) had welcome Shanta in our lives like she was a natural extension of what had become family to us; the presence of Gangaram in our lives. Shanta had joined our household, only few months after my marriage. Needless to say, she was of the same age as me.

We settled into the monotony of our respective lives and grew from hapless young spirits into complacent old timers who though who’s been there, more or less, and done that too.

Into the third year of my marriage, I was blest with a son who was a carbon likeness of his father. He had dull black hair and a sharp nose. His wide forehead was bejeweled with small brown eyes which were the only reflection of me on my son’s face. The rest of him belonged unquestioningly to his father.

When Nitin was born, our lives changed. From a complacent, bored household, we turned into a frantic, hapless one, once again. It all felt like coming home; a chakra of hapless-complacency that ended in cryptic destinies.

Nitin was the light of our life. He was a wild child who loved to tease us with his notoriety that we never could have enough of. Nitin was loved, by us all.

There were times when I would sense a rippling tension between Shanta and Gangaram; they were mostly the times when they tended to my one year old son. I could sense a vague longing cloud Shanta’s eyes when she fed little Nitin, gobs of mashed banana with milk while her husband stopped from doing his chores and looked on with open nostalgia writhing in his eyes.

It was plain to see, they were pining for a child of their own.

I called Shanta then and asked her what was it that was stopping her from filling her little cottage with the gurgles of a little infant of her own. It was then I came to know of her debilitating heart defect. She told me how her frail body could not bear the strain of child birth and would succumb to it; she didn’t know for sure if she would be able to deliver the child safely or not.

I listened to the poor brown woman’s angst and my eyes grew from little to wide when she told me how Gangaram had started treating her poorly on account for her not being able to give him a child. He had become odious and wild; he had begun visiting other women she said.

I looked on at her frail brown face with dull gray eyes; her eyes, they looked like a mucky gray pond that had a gray shallowness for irises. Strange eyes, I wondered as I listened to her plight and her sorrow. I nodded my head in her affirmation of her pain.

There was nothing else I could have done.

Shanta never came to me again with her tale of tragedy; nay, she didn’t have to. When Nitin was two years old, Shanta gave birth to Nakul, her son. It was but natural that her health started deteriorating.

First she began panting while doing the smallest of chores; it grew worse from that to heaving violently and then she stopped breathing altogether. When Nakul was four months old, Shanta died.

Gangaram gave us the news stoically. He stood stiffly while he told us that his wife lay dead in his house; his eyes traveled from my husband’s to mine, and stayed there. It was fear in his eyes that stared back at me, when he read the recrimination in mine. He knew that I knew. And he knew that he couldn’t undo what I knew.

So he lived like a ghost in purgatory. He tended to us and his little infant and at nights if you passed by his tiny cottage in the backyard, you could hear wracked sobs vibrating through the thin walls his cottage.

Meanwhile, vile winds of fate had struck our lives too. I miscarried my second child and then the third. My husband was a good man who held my hands each time I lost a part of me to indefatigable death but then that was all he could do. When I lost my fourth child, the doctor told me that it was all over for me.

It was hard for me to accept the cruel twists of destiny but then I had Nitin to salvage my love from the stink pit of depression. I showered all my love and tenderness on my son who was growing into an incorrigibly naughty lad with a penchant for destruction!

In the fringes of my periphery, there was another little lad who was but an opposite of my volatile Nitin.

Nakul reminded me more of Shanta than anything. Just like her, he was water. If you looked too keenly at his face, you would notice tiny rivulets of water course down the lines of his brown face, or were they tears? If you looked hard enough, his bulbous eyes were a gray pool of churning water that hid a million secret desires within their rippling layers that lapped softly within the fold of his eyelashes. His sinews were like water, flexible and they took form of whatever they were contained in.

Nakul reminded me of water.

I would often call out to him while I fed Nitin with my hands; he would walk up to me lithely and would sit by my feet, without expectation, with out reminder. It was as if his innocence had dictated him the rules he could never break. I would be pleased watching the two boys sit next to me and talk amongst themselves of things that made sense to them alone; and I fed Nitin with my hands while I gave Nakul morsels that he fed himself with his little lithe watery brown fingers.

Once more, when Nitin was seven and Nakul five, tragedy hit out household with a force that shook us all. Gangaram died in his sleep. Peacefully or not, that was for his soul to know.

We were heartbroken at our loss. He was more than a servant to us. He was a part of our family. The brooding silence that ensued after his cremation was a reminder that everything was as transient as a fleeting thought; as a flicker of snow dust that shone across the spaces and showed us a vision of paradise.

While all was silent and ominous and I tried hard to settle myself doing the extra chores that fell upon my shoulders till new help came; I saw him standing half hidden behind the kitchen door that led to the backyard.

Was it pain in his eyes or was it fear? Resignation or a dead loneliness that cried tearless tears that were frozen under the calm of his watery eyes; I stood there looking at that five year old child, the chasm of rules made by merciless society separating the mother in me and the child in him… a mistress and a servant child…

I waited; for the waves of fear and trepidation to subside; for the love to overcome disdain; for rebellion to over come rules.

Then, I rushed to him while fear filled his eyes and then changed to awe; and I hugged him, tighter than I ever could; or would. I kissed his blank dry face and I kissed his watery gray eyes and his brown cheeks and his clenched fists. I kissed him till my pain subsided and maybe, his too.

‘Memsaab,’ he quacked like a scared, petrified duck.

‘Hush, no Memsaab… Mother…’

Nitin came home this year for Diwali. In tow were his American wife and his three beautiful children. A son who comes home to meet his widowed mother after six years brings a lot of gifts for sure; Nitin did too. But something was missing.

I can’t seem put my finger on it. Was it the faked accent or was it the appearance of trying too hard; to do what? I don’t know. Or was it his American wife who looked at my house and my relatives like they were inmates of circus she was enjoying heartily… or was it just an ache that didn’t fill… was it me pining for my son to hug me just once than try to smother me with Americanized flying kisses…

Blood and Water…

Nakul stays in the background but his presence comforts me. He’s a software engineer now; he had been getting plenty of offers to go abroad but he just doesn’t want to leave. Says that he likes it right here with me, won’t trade this for anything.

He thirty now and I was wondering if he should get married. I asked him if he had any girl in mind. He looked up at me and simply said that he would marry any girl I would choose for him.

I smiled.

Blood and water…

Nitin is good to his younger brother. If he has any grievances, he doesn’t let on. He says that Nakul is his blood brother, well almost.

I smile.

I look at the blood and then I stare at the water and even when I don’t want to, don’t have to, I smile, once again.






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