By Shabnam Nadiya

MITUL’S house was the best-kept secret in our campus-town. Usually, ours being a small community and one that took neighbourliness to wicked extremes, everyone knew what was cooking in everyone else’s pot. When the whole thing finally came out, it absolutely astonished the campus aunties – how they could not have known what was going on. Or so they said.
   We had known of course, kids always did. Some of us had guessed, but some of us had knowledge. Mitul had told Pamela and me about her father. We knew her grandparents lived with them, and Pamela had asked the obvious: ‘Don’t they say anything to your father? Don’t they stop him?’
   Mitul had looked steadily at the mangled blade of grass she held in her hand; she had been chewing it for sometime. ‘My Dada sometimes hits my Dadi as well.’
   If we had been older, perhaps we would have understood it better. We would have known enough to surmise that Sharif uncle, Mitul’s father, was probably copying behaviour that had been deeply imprinted on his brain: he must have witnessed his father bashing his mother’s brains out since babyhood. We might have wondered why Mitul’s mom took it, why she didn’t just leave. But then, if we had been old enough, we would have known: women in her situation rarely did.
   From then on Mitul would often report the goings-on at her house to us. We listened to Mitul’s revelations with a mingling of awed wonder and bewilderment. Usually, she would vouchsafe these incidents when the three of us were alone in one of our favourite places: the dam, the concrete jetty by the lake, the broad tree-shaded field between the Library Building and the Ladies Hall. She would deliver her news in a matter-of-fact voice, almost in a monotone. As if the triteness of the violence occurring every other day had robbed her of the minimum interest needed to add colour and tone. We were too young then to comprehend the truly mundane quality of her recital – her mother was just another wife to have been slammed against a bedroom wall, to have a chair pushed into her ribs, an iron or a hot bowl of daal thrown at her face. The boring everydayness of the reasons that Mitul reported with such journalistic fervour only puzzled us even further and left me uneasily mute: sometimes the daal lacked salt in our house as well, and the beds remained unmade even after breakfast was over and done with.
   Mitul’s Dada had once slapped Putul in front of her. This didn’t seem too bad to us – we received slaps on a more or less regular basis from our parents anyway. But it did jar – in our experience grandparents never disciplined you, not ever. And the younger ones, the babies of the family were especially precious to the old people. I shied away from asking too many questions. I didn’t want to know. But Pamela was always curious about everything. Why did he slap Putul? She must’ve done something really bad to make their Dada slap her. The reply, that she had done nothing, not really, she’d just left her books lying around after finishing her homework, made no sense to us.
   We were too young still to have learnt that it was in the nature of campus-secrets that everyone knew it. Ignorance was not why a secret was a secret. I remember Pamela’s mother and their next-door aunty exchanging swift glances when Pamela blurted out Mitul’s secret. I pinched Pamela’s upper arm, but, as usual, where Pamela and her big mouth was concerned, was too late. Her mother took a careful sip of tea and asked softly, ‘Where did you hear that, dear? I’m sure it’s not true.’
   There was a sweetish tang to the air we inhaled, as if decaying roses were bunched somewhere just out of sight. My fingertips tingled, yet Pamela went on: ‘She told us, ammu! Mitul told us.’
   ‘Oh, really,’ her mother tinkled. ‘I’m sure you misheard her.’
   ‘But she did,’ insisted Pamela desperately. ‘You were there, you tell them,’ Pamela turned to me. ‘She did say so.’
   I looked at the lace border of the tray cloth on which the gold-trimmed cups rested. It was no use, I knew. Why Pamela couldn’t figure it out I didn’t know. I waited silently, trying to follow the intricate mesh of white cotton thread, as if unravelling it with my eyes. I knew it was a crocheted lace, I had seen my grandma crochet. I imagined a pair of blue-veined old hands busy, busy, busy with a sharp needle pushing and pulling its way through this white stuff. I heard the other aunty say in her sharp voice, ‘Mitul was joking, Pamela. Maybe she was angry at her father for punishing her for something. And I don’t wonder, making up such stories! Such things don’t happen here, for goodness sake!’
   Pamela obstinately opened her mouth again, her fat lips parting like those of a blowfish ready to gulp some more air. I pulled at her arm. ‘Come on,’ I said insistently. ‘You said you would show me your new dress, come on.’ Pamela was my best friend, she was, but sometimes I could just murder her.
   
   THEN Mitul’s mother became our geography teacher. Mitul told us that they had had a visit from three of the uncles who sat on the school committee. They had proposed that Mitul’s mother was being wasted sitting at home with her M.Sc. degree. Her father was none too happy about it, but for the moment the school’s need seemed to be greater than his.
   I had heard my father grumbling about how they were ruining the school through short-term policies. Apparently the housing shortage had led the university authorities to encourage the school to employ the wives of teachers or officers. That way they wouldn’t have to provide the schoolteachers with separate accommodation as they were already living on campus. My parents were worried that the housing shortage was receiving higher priority than the qualified teacher shortage – they weren’t sure that anyone was making sure that the wives who were being engaged were good teachers. But I didn’t care. Sharif Auntie was nice and she was a good teacher. Some kids made snide remarks about Mitul having her own mom teaching her class, but we ignored them.
   And one summer’s day Mitul’s mom turned up at the campus health centre with a sprained wrist. She said she had slipped and fallen in the bathroom, but the banged wrist had been accompanied by a blackish bruise almost the same shape of an iron. Sister Onima of the eagle eye spotted the upside down iron shape on her lower back as she was winding a crepe bandage around her wrist. Sharif Auntie had pulled the anchal of her sari around herself, covering herself from curious eyes but the flimsy material of the sari had not concealed her secret for too long.
   Sister Onima came to visit my mother in the late afternoon. I was at the dining table having my afternoon snack. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ I heard her say, ‘Absolutely indecent. Someone should put a stop to it.’ My mother wound the corner of her sari anchal around her finger as she listened. It took me almost an hour to finish my glass of milk that day. As I nibbled at a forkful of noodles as slowly as I dared, I heard my mother say in a tight little voice, ‘Well, I don’t know, I know that I wouldn’t stand for it. The first time he raises his hand to me, it’s bye-bye mister sahib. I’ll just pack my bags, take my child and leave for my father’s house. There’s a limit to everything.’ Sister Onima had a cup of tea and left sighing.
   That evening my mother was tight-lipped and her eyes had a curiously cold shine to them as if the water in there was gradually turning into ice. ‘Have you heard?’ she asked as soon as father walked into the house.
   ‘Err, what?’ he replied cautiously. He knew her moods; he could tell at one glance that she was bare moments away from a full-blown explosion.
   ‘Well, Sharif bhabi’s an employee of the school now, you’re on the committee! Aren’t you going to do anything about this? We all know what happens, it’s been going on long enough,’ my mother demanded.
   There was an uncomfortable silence as my father squirmed in his chair. He was mostly a mild-mannered man, rarely roused to anger. I couldn’t remember the last time he had raised his hand to me, and if mother and he had their occasional squabbles, they never seemed any more serious than the spats I would have with Pamela. I was still at the dining table: this time it was my homework I was lingering over, awaiting the blessed relief of dinnertime.
   Ma would light into my father occasionally on his various shortcomings and I could always tell when he was halfway between being scared of ma and angry at her. A muscle just above his left cheekbone would twitch. From there it could go either way. On this occasion, he pressed down for a while on the twitching muscle on his cheek. In a low voice, hoping perhaps that it would escape my eager ears while at the same time deflecting mother from the warpath, he said, ‘It’s so easy to judge from the outside, isn’t it. I mean do we really know what goes on in that house? After all, it’s between the husband and the wife, right? What business do we have there?’
   My mother sat speechless, her lower lip hanging open for a few seconds until she suddenly snapped it shut. I knew that speechlessness of her well: I was often on the receiving end of it due to unsatisfactory report cards, appearance, and behaviour. I knew that this state of hers never lasted too long.
   ‘That woman,’ she enunciated slowly as if speaking to the wizened old beggar woman who came every week and would only smile and nod whatever was said to her, ‘is abused.’
   He sighed. ‘Look, she hasn’t made any complaints, has she?’
   ‘What has that got to do with anything? And what about the children?’
   My father sighed again and remained silent. I had my head down almost flat against the tabletop, furiously outlining random numbers in the semblance of the problems set out in my book. He must have gestured towards me or something for I heard my mother’s ice voice call to me, ‘Why don’t you go upstairs and watch some television?’
   Before dinnertime? Unprecedented in our house. I looked up to say something to her but thought better of it. I began to tidy up my school stuff as the odour of frying fish wafted in from the kitchen. I climbed the stairs to the accompaniment of the low excited voices of my parents punctuated by the crackle and sizzle of spiced fish being dropped into hot oil.
   The next morning there were the usual ruti, potato bhaji and omelette at the breakfast table and the usual class with Sharif aunty at school. My parents went out that evening to attend a dinner party at the house of one of the new arrivals.
   
   IT WASN’T too long after that evening that Mitul’s grandmother died. I remember going with my mother to their house after the maid from next door had come to tell us the news. They had just brought the dead body back home from the useless trip to the hospital.
   The old lady we used to steal pickles from had been laid out in the porch for mourners to visit. She would be taken away to her husband’s ancestral village for burial, which was three or four hours by bus from our campus. When we reached there, her face was covered. I felt curiosity. This was not the first dead body I had seen, but this was the first old one. The whiteness of the fabric that lay beside her was dazzling. It gleamed as eager hands unfolded it and held it spread out over Mitul’s grandma, as if they were trying to shelter her from the morning sun. My mother had covered her head with the anchal of her sari like all the other women. She walked towards them and asked, ‘Has she been bathed yet?’
   ‘Oh, don’t even ask.’ Pamela’s mother flung her hands in the air in exasperation. She was standing to one side glaring at Mitul’s grandmother’s dead body, the white cloth, the people surrounding her in quick succession. ‘What are we supposed to do with the murda once we bathe her? The cloth they’ve brought isn’t enough to cover her. What irresponsible…’
   Mitul’s next-door auntie broke in firmly, ‘We don’t know that yet bhabi, do we?’ She turned to my mother and said, ‘That’s why we’ve unfolded it, you know, we’re trying to figure out if this’ll do or whether we have to send someone to get a new shroud.’
   Mother moved nearer as other aunties began commenting, commending and protesting and it seemed as if their voices all merged to make a deepening chant – holy yet unsatisfying.
   It was only later, when I went and stood beside Mitul and Putul who were sitting together weeping silently that sorrow overwhelmed the distant curiosity that I had felt. ‘They’re taking the murda away,’ the murmur reached the second floor and passed me by. ‘Bring the women down, they’re taking her away.’
   ‘Bhabi,’ someone called to Sharif auntie who sat silently in a straight-backed chair in the master bedroom, ‘Come down for the last look, they’ll take her away now.’
   Neither the two sisters nor their mother was to accompany the old woman on her journey; the presence of women in a graveyard was frowned upon. Mitul’s father and grandfather would ease her to her final rest as was fitting.
   Hitherto silent, Sharif aunty took one look at her mother-in-law’s face and began screaming, ‘Oh amma, oh amma, how can I live here now? Who will look after me? Who will look after me? Oh amma, don’t leave me amma…’ and she flopped down, her limbs askew like those rag dolls my grandma had made for me when I was younger. The aunties surrounding her caught her and held her up and somehow she was gradually borne back to the house.
   The sickening sweetish smell of the slow-burn of agarbati filled the air. It fused with the sounds of the Qalema Shahadat as myriad voices called out ‘Ashhadu alla ilaha illallahu…’
   The dead body, bathed and sewed up in the shroud, was covered with a bed sheet as Mitul’s father and other uncles hoisted the cheap wooden khatia onto their shoulders. They carried the khatia to the truck waiting outside, and got into the back with it. Other men squeezed in, Mitul’s grandfather got in at the front, while others began drifting back to their regular haunts. The women would remain for a while.
   ‘Well, I’ve never seen anyone cry like that for a mother-in-law!’ Pamela’s mother’s wonderment could have easily been appeased by me. But typically, I remained silent by the side of my mother. Thankfully, Pamela was nowhere to be seen.
   
   MITUL rarely came to sit with Pamela and me after her Dadi died. We didn’t really notice; childhood can be very self-absorbing. Mitul had also begun missing classes. But that somehow went unnoticed as well. Sharif auntie had been taking the classes she was supposed to, but she went around in a kind of daze, unseeing, unhearing. Her full-sleeved blouses seemed odd in summer, but who would ask her about it? It was no one’s business what a woman chose to wear to her workplace.
   We were dawdling by the side of the road one day when we spied Putul coming towards us. Three years younger than us, in the past she would desperately try to hang around us, but Mitul had never allowed her sister to tag along. The past year or so Putul had stopped dogging our footsteps. Another thing that we had not noticed.
   When we saw her we went back to our old trick of teasing her:
   Mitul Putul Mitul Putul
   Putul is a huge futul
   Futul means big bang
   Putul has no gang!
   None of us had any idea what on earth that was supposed to mean, but reciting it at the top of our voices five or six times always had the satisfactory effect of making Putul cry and run off home so she stopped pestering us. But not that day.
   Pamela and I screamed our litany at the top of our voices, but our voices faltered once or twice. Perhaps it was because that nonsense rhyme was used to having three voices in chorus, that the rhythms wavered unbalanced at our unfamiliar duet. Instead of breaking down in tears, Putul moved towards us inexorably. She dropped her schoolbag on the ground. As she came to a stop in front of us, we shut up finally, cowed by the solemn determination in the little girl’s face.
   ‘Why do you always do that to me?’ she asked in her quiet manner.
   ‘We...it’s just a rhyme.’ I answered lamely.
   ‘But you make me cry.’ She said. She paused for a while and repeated, ‘You always make me cry.’
   I had no answer to that, but Pamela piped up, ‘Well, your sister does it too. Why don’t you go yell at her?’
   Putul looked at Pamela for a while, then began walking away. I suddenly called her back, ‘Putli, listen.’ She stopped and turned toward us, but stood where she was, not venturing any nearer. I walked to her and tried to take her hand. She was stiff, but she let me. I held her hand; she did not hold mine.
   ‘Putul, why doesn’t Mitul come to play with us anymore? She hasn’t come in ages.’
   Putul looked at me steadily as she replied, ‘Mitul? She’s my sister, why don’t you go ask her?’
   I could feel the anger within her make her tremble slightly, a muted quivering like the unheard hum of taut bowstrings or a just strung sitar.
   ‘Please don’t be like that Putul, just tell me, is she angry with us?’
   Pamela called to me from behind, ‘There’s no need to butter her up, if she doesn’t wanna talk, fine. Let’s just go.’
   But for some reason I couldn’t leave. I held onto her hand as if so much that was unsaid depended on it and pleaded, ‘I didn’t realise, Putul, I’m sorry. I thought…’
   Putul interrupted me, ‘It’s okay, apu.’ I felt her hand relax in mine. ‘We just need to be home more now. Now that mother is alone.’
   I didn’t understand what she meant: why was her mother alone? Mothers were never alone, mother were just, well, mothers.
   She gripped my hand now, the calm sweat of her palms rubbed off onto mine. ‘I’ll tell Mitul apu you asked about her.’ She hesitated and added, ‘It’s okay to visit our house you know. You can come to see Mitul apu.’
   I opened my mouth to tell her that I most certainly would, but I heard Pamela’s voice grate in my ears, ‘Well, yeah, but only when your father’s not home, right?’
   Putul stared at her for a while, then blinked at me once. She gently disengaged her hand which I still held and picked up her schoolbag. She walked away holding her bag up with one hand and dusting it off with the other. I looked at the bit of earth where the bag had lain, noting the vibrant green of the grass, offset by slightly yellowing fallen leaves, a discoloured candy wrapper.
   Pamela moved impatiently behind me and tugged at my arm, ‘That little bitch. C’mon let’s go home.’ We were supposed to go over to her house and paint our nails silver. Pamela’s aunt who lived in the US had sent her six bottles of nail polish. Our mothers would have cheerfully killed us if we had asked either of them to buy us nail polish, but I guess since it was a gift from abroad it didn’t really count as make-up and we weren’t losing our little girlishness too soon if we used it.
   Pamela put her arm around my waist with her other arm behind her back waiting for mine to conjoin and complete the twisted chain. We would occasionally skip this way, our bodies close together in time, in rhythm. But this only worked for two friends; we never did it when Mitul was with us.
   I shook my head and begun walking homewards. I took little comfort from Pamela’s bewildered and hurt face. Nail painting would have to wait for another day.
   
   WAS having breakfast, as my mother sipped her tea grumbling about how I got through school uniforms like a demon. Everyone else needed one set a year. Mine had to be replaced twice. It was Friday, no school allowed me to dawdle over my food to the familiarly comfortable accompaniment of my mother’s twice-yearly moaning. Father had almost finished his tea and was rustling through the newspaper in silence. The doorbell rang. I heard Firoza, our maid, open the door.
   There was some talk, I heard a woman’s voice. Firoza came to mother and said, ‘It’s Mitul’s mother. She wants to see you, Khalamma.’ There was something in her voice that made both of us look at her. ‘She wants to see you.’ Firoza repeated.
   The cup clattered into the saucer as Ma hurried to the door. I heard an “Oh Allah!’ Silence for a few seconds and then, ‘Come in Bhabi, come in. Tell me what happened.’
   Her head hung low, Sharif auntie walked in with my mother’s arm encircling her. They were followed by Mitul and Putul. I knew that the dresses they were wearing were the ones they slept in. Mitul’s dress had ripped under the collar. Her mom didn’t know about it, or she would have darned it. Mitul used to stick her finger in the rip and worry it on nights she couldn’t fall asleep.
   Mother helped her to a chair where she flopped down with the unboned grace of a doll. When Sharif auntie raised her head I had a quick glimpse of a purplish stain across the right side of her face like a map indicating the boundaries of a separate country within a larger whole. Father made a gurgling sound in his throat and stood up. ‘Bhabi, have some tea, won’t you? Ei, I’m leaving.’ There was a quick exchange of looks between my parents as my father folded the newspaper and rushed out as if he were late for class.
   ‘This is too much, something must be done about this.’ My mother touched the purple on Sharif auntie’s cheek and repeated, ‘This cannot go on.’
   ‘No,’ came the soft response, ‘no, not anymore.’ She was silent for a moment as our curiosity dangled in the air. ‘I’m leaving him.’
   The enormity of her words took hold of my heart and shook it. My mother heaved a sigh and began, ‘Well, that is news! And…’
   ‘If you could just let us stay for a few days.’ Sharif auntie cut into mother’s relief. The words sounded hollow, as if emerging from cavernous depths. ‘Just for a few days. I’m a teacher at the school now; they’ll give me my own quarters for sure.’
   Her movements were taut as Ma handed me my glass of milk. She didn’t look at Sharif auntie as she buttered another slice of bread. Mitul and Putul were sitting at our table looking at the plates Firoza had silently placed in front of them. They each held a duplicate of my own breakfast: an orange-yolked poached egg, two slices of toasted bread, a banana and a slice of papaya. My mother slid the bread she had buttered onto my plate. But –although I had had only one slice – I no longer felt like breakfast.
   ‘Why don’t you take Mitul and Putul up to your room and play?’ Ma asked. I had never obeyed my mother as promptly as I did at that moment, pushing back my chair and standing up before she had even finished suggesting that we leave.
   But Sharif auntie’s hard voice sucked the movement from my feet. ‘What is it that you want to hide from them?’ She looked at me and then at my mother. She smiled at her daughters. ‘They know all there is to know. What is it that we can hide from them?’
   But I knew what it was that my mother had wanted to hide. I knew from the tightly coiled strength of her skin. I knew from the way she gripped the butter knife, the slight silent rhythm of her foot under the table, the way she had pulled her sari end around her to hide her shoulders. I knew that a few days wasn’t enough, that despite being a teacher Sharif auntie would never be allotted the living quarters, that Mitul and Putul would follow their mother down whatever narrowing path they had left.
   ‘What about your brothers?’ asked my mother.
   Sharif auntie’s parents were both dead I knew. But she had three brothers – all quite well-to-do. Mitul and Putul always got three sets of new clothes during Eid in addition to the obligatory dresses that parents were supposed to give. They had been the envy of our childhood, for none of us had ever been able to match their prosperity when the Eid festival came around each year.
   ‘My brothers.’ Sharif auntie enunciated the words without vagueness or emphasis as if she were parroting a lesson. As if the words were not an answer to a question, or a statement of fact or relationship, but as if they were the conclusion of some certainty, an unerring closing of a door. ‘No, I don’t really think they would take me in.’
   My mother did not respond, remained silent. We all remained sitting there, as still as we could be, as if the slightest careless movement would destroy something precious, invite some under-the-bed monster into light. The table divided us, the surface all cluttered up with the debris of our breakfast, the plates in front of our unbidden guests as full as they were without hope. No words were spoken for a while, none needed to be said.
   My mother finally could take the silence no longer. ‘You do understand, don’t you?’ I hated myself for allowing myself to hear the abjectness in those words, the pleading in the tone. This supplication: I had never heard my mother speak like this.
   Sharif auntie smiled. She reached out and touched my mother’s hand, “I’ll find someplace, Bhabi. It’ll be alright. From now on. Everything will be fine.’ She got up, walked to me andv touched my head, ‘I’ll contact you from wherever I end up. Mitul won’t want to lose touch with her friends.’
   She walked out of our door. Mitul and Putul followed her without once looking back, without once looking at me. I followed them to the door watching the awkward grace of the three as they took the small footpath that led away from our house. I heard some movement and looked back to see my mother swiftly disappearing up the stairs. I walked to the table and sat down to finish my breakfast. Somewhere upstairs a door slammed shut and then all was silent except my squidgy noises as I chewed and chewed on the bread meant for Mitul and Putul. It seemed important at that moment that the food be consumed, that it not go to waste.
   They were gone. They were never heard from again. Oh, there was talk, of course. There was always talk. Some of it we heard in whispers and sniggers at school. Some seeped through the guarded and cryptic conversations that the adults had when we kids were around but they just couldn’t hold themselves back. The music teacher was suggested as a possible suspect. After all, how many males – apart from her husband and father-in-law – did this woman encounter in her daily life? And the man – who also gave lessons in a number of houses in the campus – had stopped coming without any prior notice.
   But then three weeks after the disappearance, he appeared just as suddenly with a tedious explanation of how his mother had suddenly died. Various other possible suspects were thought of and discarded. But no one knew for sure. Certainly Mitul’s father searched high and low – as low as could be searched. A police car was seen to be standing outside their house one morning – the only other time that police had entered the residential area of the campus had been when a maid had committed suicide for reasons unknown.
   The next year Mitul’s father married again. By then his father had become bedridden and they needed someone to take care of him. After all, the way Sharif uncle was living, that was no life for a man. Although Sharif uncle had invited quite a number of people at his second wedding, my parents had not been among them. I don’t know what happened to the new wife. I saw her only once after the wedding. She was dark and short, with her hair tightly coiled at the base of her neck. Soon after the marriage Sharif uncle took a job somewhere else and moved away.
   Pamela and I missed Mitul of course. But not as much as one would think. We had grown used to her absence even before she left, so her departure was not some sudden sweet sadness of riven teenage hearts. We would occasionally wonder aloud where they were, what they were doing, what had happened to Mitul. Pamela was sure (as was her mother) that there must have been some man somewhere, or how could Sharif auntie have disappeared so quickly and so effectively?
   Our lazy waterside afternoons were not weighted down with these surmises though. We had other things to do. For one thing, it was easier doing our joined skipping now. There were just the two of us so there was no one to be left out when we latched on to each other – hands, arms, sides linked. Pamela had borrowed two books and a purple barrette with white embossed flowers from Mitul in summer, which she had never had the chance to return. Pamela often worried about them though – the barrette had been a favourite of Mitul’s and Pamela was very conscientious about returning things. But that too passed.
   I never told Pamela of the last time I had seen Mitul.
   Shabnam Nadiya is a short story writer, poet and translator.