The radio was now playing her favourite song. He slapped it shut but like a bad memory it spoke again. This time it was her favourite stanza, the one about winning back love and about second chances. Sandeep yanked the cord out. Just the way he had pulled his wife by her hair while she was making paneer-parathas. The ones she liked with caraway seeds in the dough and some mint chutney to go with them. Winters in New Jersey bit into the flesh. Januarys were too cold for mint chutney. But she wouldn’t listen, she never did. He didn’t want parathas. He had volunteered to make pancakes for her. He wanted to see the maple syrup enter every pore of the crepe in an embrace that was sweet. But Seema insisted on parathas.
And now she was on the floor of the kitchen, on her back, hands splayed. The rolling pin had dented the washing machine as it had gone careening from her right palm when she landed on the floor. He had smothered her with the cling-film and there she was, on the tiled floor, motionless. He blinked for a moment. Brought over her favourite tea cosy and rested her head on it. The floor was ice-cold. He pulled the rug out from below the Futon and with one lunge, freed it from its place and laid it under her back. The cardigan she wore and the Aztec design on the rug looked good together.
He stared at Seema, she looked different when she was quiet. Almost like when he had seen her through his binoculars from his terrace, for this first time. India had lost a Prime Minister to an assassination. Her own security guards had shot down Indira Gandhi. Punjab was burning. Schools had been shut, he was grounded but he spent time flying kites on the terrace and Seema caught his eye. She was tiny but lugged a big dhol to a truck and kept it among the household goods. Like many, her family was shifting to a ‘safer’ neighbourhood. Sandeep had been all of six and Seema was older and smarter. He didn’t know he would elope with her one day.
As he looked at her lifeless body he marvelled that here was one time she wasn’t telling him the right way to do something. The electric kettle seemed to have overheard his thoughts. He found it hissing.
Sandeep Singh didn’t stand tall in spite of his five feet eleven inches. She wore her height well at five feet nothing. She didn’t wear white and he still wore white shirts. Even the ones that Seema had bought on his twenty-ninth birthday, ten winters back. He liked his old shirts, liked it when the third button from the collar came loose. Once he had mumbled something about the button coming off and she had asked him to take his shirt off. He had worn a hoodie over a tee that morning. She had sewn the button back over the weekend. He had expected the button to be sewn back on his shirt, right then, like in Bollywood movies of his Punjab years. But life often isn’t like in the movies. Instead of being happier in New Jersey than in their pigeonhole in Brooklyn, Seema complained about less sunlight. She complained about the spotted deer that came to their backyard. She complained about the oak tree that the wind whistled through all night.
As to what she had been feeling lately, he couldn’t recollect. Maybe love can seal frayed edges but she had fallen in lust with him. She chose him. He liked the way she spoke her mind, sang Heer with her eyes closed and wanted many children. Except for the music and the babies, the promise was uncompromised. Now when she spoke her mind, it was about toilet cleaners, garage sales and the menu for the following day. Mood swings was all he got to play with and Seema complained that he spoke too little.
Recently, he had begun to wake up with the Jersey sun and escape to the bakery. He waited to get to his station, work on the dough, and toss it, to wrap air. He liked the way the mounds of white and the milk wore each other with a promise of a union, with the promise of lifting up together in the presence of fire. Sandeep was a fine baker now. He kneaded stories into the dough. Onion seeds, butter, castor sugar, yeast and a story about how he would some day stand up to his wife. How he would gently hold her supple body, so they would mark fingerprints on each other’s destiny. The foreplay would always crescendo just when he would toss and twirl the dough with a firmness he didn’t know he was capable of.
The beads of sweat on his head and heavy breathing was something the gentle Alex admired when he swung by the bakery for his staple delivery of nine baguettes, three dozen croissants, twenty bagels and waited for the marmalade which Sandeep packed for him, without his boss finding out. The gratitude in Alex’s eyes made that theft, worth it.
Mornings at the bakery were special as Alex waited for his girlfriend Martha with an Americano and the local newspaper. She always kissed Alex on the mouth as she arrived, he held her longer than expected and Sandeep stopped work to see the two trudge with their baskets full, to the tiny café by the cherry-lined lane, three blocks away. They were both students and waited tables in the morning and attended theatre workshops in the evening. Sandeep had taken weeks to figure this out. Alex spoke in French and Sandeep spoke in chaste Punjabi. What, however, didn’t need explaining were food, coffee and kissing.
Sandeep increasingly said very little. He only spoke to the sugar about kneading its way into cakes and cookies, swimming in coffees. He spoke to the oven about his first grey chest hair and that migraine his mother complained about. He spoke to the tiled pathway about the hopscotch that he had first seen Seema play when she was a student in Pathankot. She once told him that she wanted to be pilot and he promptly agreed to stay at home, cook and look after their babies. Last Christmas, he began making paper planes from the tissues that regulars at the bakery discarded even before they had used them. The planes had messages for Seema. He had awkwardly kept them next to her, but she had missed them. Then he had put them away. She had tossed them in the fireplace while cleaning his bedside drawer. She had also thrown away a pack of condoms. They had crossed the expiry date last year, she enunciated.
At home, Sandeep had learnt to grow completely silent. Seema didn’t ask him to, but he found her words terrified him. Her tense chords and the sharp pitch and the facts that at times rolled out of her like stone chips from a dumper. The noise got louder than her snores. He wasn’t telling the world this, no. He listened occasionally to the voices in his head but he was sure they too would soon be silent. He stayed awake all night trying to hush them. He stayed awake even though there were no babies to keep him awake. There was nothing between them except for the pillows. She had invented this to dam their marriage.
Apart from his phone calls for deliveries he wasn’t sure he existed and nothing seem to perturb her. She even seemed okay when he stared a tad longer than normal at the newsreader and smiled when she did. Earlier, Seema would switch channels when he watched tennis. She asked him why that was his favourite game. He said his favourite was kabaddi but he had grown to like tennis. She had smirked about the length of the skirts. He hadn’t been able to tell her that it was the way they kept score. In tennis, it was ‘love all’ till someone scored a point. But he had said nothing. Today would have been thirteen years, nine days and fourteen hours of taking notes in a marriage. That was easy to remember. He had run away with her from that home which she had said belonged to her father but the man who had nearly killed them with hockey sticks, was her uncle who owned six red tractors.
He and Seema hid at a cemetery that night. In half dug graves. They had missed their train that night but clutched onto a much dented, green and white bus of the Himachal Pradesh State Transport, climbed to the top of the bus and hid with the luggage. The winter rain was particularly cruel but the young lovers, now married, had found their paradise atop the bus. They had pitched the tarpaulin like a tent and made love like bandits on a horse, as the bus swayed itself to Chandigarh.
Next evening they were on the train, just a day late. They had wedded again, this time at a temple. She liked the fact that he could cook, they way her name felt safe in his mouth and that his beard didn’t smell of garlic. Yet Sandeep didn’t remember a day when she was happy after they moved to the US.
As he looked down at what was his wife moments ago, he saw Seema finally look peaceful on the rug. He almost felt proud that her face instead of being contorted, seemed to wear a smile. A smile that couldn’t reach her eyes, but a curve of the lips nonetheless. Her lips looked chapped. He got some butter from the fridge with his forefinger and smeared it carefully along them. The electric kettle hissed again, but it still hadn’t started to sing. Seema looked nice with the butter on her lips. He looked at her again, this time close enough to notice that her eyes had a grey green tinge and not just green. He drew her close and kissed his wife’s dead body. He inhaled the fragrance of her shampoo. He wanted to smell her hair again, this time untangled.
There was something burning.
The paneer-paratha had fumes raging out of it. He shut the stove off. Then he made that pancake batter, after he checked the date of manufacturing. He remembered overhearing a food show anchor on TV sharing a tip, ‘for the right lift, beat it like you mean it’. The best hack for the right pancake. He swore at the paratha which had killed his wife and tossed it in the trash.
A phone rang somewhere, he let it ring. It rang again, this time persistent.
It was a call from a clinic, the voice said something about an appointment. He fell silent. When he was asked again, he confirmed this was Seema’s number and he was her husband. The voice gurgled with joy, ‘Congratulations, your wife will have a baby this summer.’
*
Barnali Ray Shukla is a writer and filmmaker. Apart from story and scriptwriting, she writes fiction and poetry. Her writing has featured in literary journals and anthologies including Out of Print, Indian Ruminations, The Sunflower Collective, Kitaab, teksto, Madras Mag, Vayavya, Outcast, Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry II and 'A Portrait in Blues' (Platypus Press, UK)
Barnali is the India-winner of the RL Poetry Award 2016 and her first book of poetry, Apostrophe, was published earlier this year.
Her debut feature-film as a writer-director, Kucch Luv Jaisaa, was released in May 2011. Her documentary, Liquid Borders, was invited to film-festivals across North America and Europe and has been screened at fourteen film-festivals in India. She is currently working on her second book and scripting her next feature-film. She lives in Bombay with her plants, her books and a husband. When she is not doing any of the above she goes trekking in the Himalayas.