Familiarity

Her eyes follow the boy's movements closely as he rolls around the ball, hitherto lying discarded in a heap of other castoffs in the shed that used to be the garage. Jealous is too strong a word to use here; there is a modicum of care involved. Wistful fits. She had known a time like that many, many moons ago.

“He wanders off,” warns a voice bearing the hallmark of a parent well accustomed to the oddities of her child.

The speaker—her sister—descends the creaky stairs leading down to the garden. Her broad sunglasses leak shadow down her rouged cheeks, screaming look at me. She throws a careless look around, first at the mildewed floorboards, misshapen, yawning open in places like fat-lipped pinch pots revealing the gravel underneath, then, with a resigned shake of the head, at her sister occupying the only sturdy thing on that porch—the wingback chair their father had bought, it’s velvet lovingly frayed by their mother’s generous thighs. Neither of them survived. Just the chair and her own featherweight.

She can tell her sister's aching to say something but she won't be direct. That's not her sister. She’s a cat, going round and round in dizzying circles before settling on the same spot to sleep on. Maybe that's why she chose law.

“The shingles on the roof,” her sister begins, a tad arrogantly, “didn’t I send money to get them repaired?”

Her eyes never waver from the boy. “You sent me a quarter of what was needed. I used it where a quarter could be used.” In contrast, her own voice is a study in monotone. A drone—rough around the edges, frayed in the centre—tough and taut. This isn't how she had always sounded, but then there are many things about her now that aren’t how they used to be.

Her sister casts a furtive glance about her. “Where? Where?! It's falling apart everywhere. Look at those floorboards! What if he trips over them?”

Mothers! They think all calamities would befall only their child. But this isn't just a mother's concern.

“No one ever tripped on those. Not you, not me, and I should know better than anyone, yes? You grew up here before you moved to Mumbai. Never complained about tripping and all. But don't you worry, I'll keep him safe.”

How? She knows that is exactly what her sister wants to say but clamps down instead. Interesting, she notes. No acerbic comebacks. Must be something she picked up in her line of work. Didn’t she say the meeting was at four? She peeks at her wristwatch—three-thirty—and sighs.

“Well, then...” her sister glances at her; she does not. Goodbyes are not their thing. They are not that kind of sisters. And she would be gone only till late evening.

“Well, then.” Heaving the strap of her bag over her shoulder, her sister creeps along the overgrown hedge in the garden and runs to the waiting taxi. If he saw her leave, he does not whine about being left behind.

She lets her shoulders drop and follows the child's spindly legs as they dip into the knee-high grass and tumble the ball around awkwardly before making a feeble attempt at kicking it into an imaginary goalpost. The ball moves only a couple of feet, but he dances each time, gesticulates and throws punches in the air, all for the imaginary crowd gawking at him.

Her mind oscillates between then and now—a slow dance with a boyfriend, football games in this very garden, mehendi and gold on her feet, the thrill of grinding her foot on an accelerator.

A sharp cry forces her attention back on the boy. He must've fallen down and skinned his knees; he’s clutching them. Alarmed, she moves, as if to get up, then hesitates. What could she do? “Can’t you be careful, boy? Watch where you're going,” she bristles.

The boy lets go of his knees at once and stands up, grimacing a little. Her gaze travels down to his knees—one trickle of blood. He’ll live but where is her helper? She looks around but he has since dusted off his shorts and resumed his game, albeit slowly. He’ll live, she repeats to herself, sinking back into the familiar groove in the backrest.

Not long after, he starts chasing a firefly, the hurt seemingly forgotten and laughs when he catches it. His laughter assails her ears, prompting another pinprick of memory and her fiancé’s face flashes before her eyes.

“Scaredy cat.”

His gilded laughter floats up in her memories and she is transported to that day, years ago, when they had been a thing, giddy with love and adrenaline. They had been hiking and he had suggested cliff diving over a rocky outcrop just near the waterfall. Of course, she was scared, but she was equally eager to please and only twenty-three. They were both decent swimmers and the fall didn’t look too steep. When his raven head broke the surface of the water and he smiled up at her, eyes promising more than just the thrill of the dive, she knew what she had to do. But one missed step sent her hurtling down the steep fall over the rocks and when her back hit the rocks, she felt everything all at once, like her nerves had been electrocuted all at once and then nothing at all. And then weightlessness.

“Masi?” The strangeness of the word brings her back. Ma-si—like a mother. Of all the things people have called her since, Ma-si isn't one of them. The word snags in her breast. Her breath hitches.

He is standing a step below her, bringing him at arm’s length—the closest he has been since he arrived here; since he was born in fact. Her sister only ever sent a few pictures. She inspects his face, beginning with the irises. They have acquired the black of his mother’s side, her own side—a fragment of familiarity in the otherwise alienness of him. Unlike their chiseled faces, cut from alabaster, he has received the doughy paleness of his father’s side—soft, dimpled. There are no bones on his face save the button in the centre wherefrom the shallow dark of his nostrils flares out. So unlike her crusty shell.

When her sister had called a few days back to inform her that she would be visiting with the child, she panicked. With her childless helper, she had done as much as she could to make the house appear clean, but welcoming? That is another story.

Bitterness coats her tongue, consumes her raw. They are everything she can never be, yet here they are, rubbing it in her face—their smug domesticity. It sits uneasily in her gullet, this feeling of wanting to be cross at them yet not wishing ill upon one’s family.

And then there is the unceasing chatter. Months after the incident when the anger had abated into sullen withdrawal, she had almost lost her voice. But buoyed by a zealous psychiatrist (who egged her on more because her case was fodder for an upcoming publication) she had tried to befriend whoever showed care. But her jaunty behaviour seemed forced at best; at worst she was constantly jealous, angry, hurt, hence mean, making it awkward for those around her. Each hastily forged acquaintance born out of the pity of another culminated in silence and solitude—her friends and foes for life. Removed from the tiresome civilities of society, she has grown brusque, taciturn to the point that the village believes she can’t speak anymore and she has no desire to change their beliefs. Her own helper never talks much beyond monosyllables. But this is family and childspeak is a different language altogether. How would she handle the child while his mother is away for that meeting, the sole reason why she is even visiting after eight years?

He, in contrast, could talk to a wall. Hitherto his mother had been an effective buffer. Each time he says Masi, like right now, his voice grates on her ears that have long acclimated to the silence of this sepulchral house.

She forces speech for his sake. “Yes?” Disuse warps it into a whisper.

“I’m bored. Why don't you come play with me?”

When it goes unnoticed, it is both the worst yet the best thing to have happened to you. You expect to be noticed, if only for the wrong reasons; you want attention, acknowledgment, if only through pity. And for a very short period of time, a mistake makes you whole again.

“C’mon,” he whines.

“Go away!” she lashes back, hoping he scares away but he does not relent, grabbing instead the shawl spread over her legs, trying to wring it away from her hands. For a few ungainly seconds, both nephew and aunt are engaged in a game of tug of war, wherein she contemplates slapping him for his insolence. But there they are again, those black irises. Familiar.

She lets go and tries explaining instead, “I cannot get up.”

“Why?”

“Because…” frustration is a needle prick. How callous of her sister to never explain to him! “Because my legs are broken.”

She throws the shawl away and his confused eyes dart to her legs, one leaning over the other, set to the right like stacked cardboard—sickly, stick-like things that dangle uselessly beneath her like tentacles.

She waits for his pity.

“How did it happen?”

“An accident.”

“Did anyone die?”

God, children! “No.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No. Not there anyway.”

His nose scrunches up and he resembles a pug now. “Pah! Then it doesn’t matter.”

Her eyes bulge out. He is six, old enough to understand that decency dictates even children should be kind to cripples.

He thrusts a tiny hand in her face and demands, “See?”

“See what?”

“My thumb?”

She does now. The nail bed is blue; there is no nail, just scarred skin. Scar tissue runs along the length of his thumb making a mound of pinkish flesh that looks inflamed even though it’s not, lending the finger a visible bend. Has this tiny hand known so much violence already?

Reverently, she pulls the hand down to her lap and he goes to his knees before her, still babbling, “An accident with the door. They sewed it back on. So much blood Masi and I cried and cried for years.” She grunts at the exaggeration but his head shakes with the sincerity of a priest at an altar. “I couldn’t hold anything for days and Mumma would hold me tight and feed me ice cream. I love that—ice cream. The doctor promised the nail will grow back, but it still hasn’t. See? Mumma says it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t change anything about me. But it looks so ugly now, doesn’t it?” His face, like his voice, droops.

Apart from looking odd and being a little crooked, his thumb looks just fine. With time, he may even regain strength in that thumb. This can’t be compared to what she lost but that doesn’t mean it’s not a loss. It doesn’t mean it didn't pain and it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel like there is something amiss.

“Everyone at school makes fun of me. ‘Ae, tedhe, ae tedhe’, they mock. I hate it.” He gasps, slapping his free hand over his mouth. “Mumma says hate is a strong word. She says one must only say I don’t like.”

Her chest tightens. “They call me langdi, buddhi. Khandahar ki churail.”

He giggles. “That’s funny. Sorry, that’s not funny. That’s bad, Masi. People are so mean. But don’t be sad. Mumma says it makes you stronger. Like Hulk. He’s strong because he doesn’t cry when it hurts him.”

"Khandahar ki churail," he grins up at her—a wide arc of pink that sparks a slow thaw in her. Artlessly beguiling, so entirely unaware of his own cruelty. She can’t help but laugh and he does too till the sound echoes in the hollows of the house and nothing else matters but their laughter and this—familiarity.

“Tell me how it happened.” He probes again but this time she hauls him over her broken legs.

“Only if you get my wheelchair and wheel me around really, really fast. And only if you tell me how yours happened.”

He beams at her again.

“Done.”