Come to the Window
The tea shop across the road was very fascinating. Every morning when I awoke I looked out of the window of my first-floor flat and saw new people. Those who got off the trains at the station, or before, usually sat down here to begin the day. I loved it because this was my window into the outside world. Papa didn’t like my going out of the flat, alone and he never had the time to take me out of this virtual prison. I therefore hardly ever managed to leave home, except when I went to the university. But the university remained closed for almost six months in the year. The tea shop sort of connected me with life. How I gazed and gazed. New faces every morning, evening, and afternoon was what I saw whenever I looked out. You may think that I dislike my father for the way he has kept me. But that is not the truth. In fact I love him dearly. I have to, since I am the only one he has, after mother went away with that horrible man. He had been so heart broken once, he had to ensure no one walked away with me too.
Yes, as I said earlier, I enjoyed looking out of my window. I sat almost unseen from the road, and watched the people. How they argued and quarrelled, sipped and slurped, appeared and disappeared. What a strange world it was; almost entirely male. I wondered why women never sat down on the blue benches to partake of the tea or the pakoras. Perhaps men preferred to eat and drink alone; when women accompanied them men preferred not to stop for tea. Women were made to feed their husbands and other men. Was it infra dig for the shop keeper, or for any other man, to make tea and serve to women? This seemed to be true at least of places like Allahabad where most women had yet to develop the way they had been doing in some other places. I saw some interesting faces from the window. There were ugly faces, there were simple faces, there were nasty faces, there were ignorant faces. There were turbaned men, there were ascetics; there were policemen there were lunatics. So I saw men of every hue and shade as they went across my view like images out of a kaleidoscope. But they were they and I was I. There never was any real meeting point between us. I never identified with these people. Did I belong to a different class? Perhaps. However, Father and I had little leisure. The last week of every month took ages to pass because Papa’s salary got exhausted by then. Sometimes I longed to eat the jalebies that were made in the shop. But it was not proper for a girl of my upbringing to go down to the shop and buy them. There was always the risk of getting the odd comment from the people who sat there. There was of-course the more dangerous risk as well; the risk which no girl of my age can entirely escape in this world of men.
Summer, autumn, winter and spring I stood at the window looking at the shop and sometimes looking quite through it. Nothing really seemed to change either in the shop or in my life. It was as though we had been pasted onto a page which would never turn. Some one was needed to come and turn the page but he never came. The little excitement that ever visited me came from this shop in front of my window. This was, after all, the place to which I belonged.. The movements in the shop, its little excitements filled up my time. An unpleasant part of the viewing was that men would sit down, unclothe themselves and add to the filth of the drain in front. Our wall had got an extra coating from the deposits that urine had left behind. We had, in desperation, got painted the message -- “ONLY DONKEYS URINATE ON THIS WALL” -- and yet it made little difference to the urinaters. They came, they did, and they left. We survived all this with the help of philosophy. My father would say that we must have done something in our past births to have deserved living so close to the filth. There wasn’t a way of escaping. We would have to suffer, and only then would escape be possible. So I didn’t really get affected by every unpleasant sight, sound and smell. It was the fate that life had attached to me. Besides, all this could sometimes become funny. Once Lallu the shop keeper found a truck standing on our side of the road, quite usurping the space on the wall he has earmarked for making water He decided to use the truck as a screen for urinating. The truck between him and my window, however decided to expose him by moving off while he was midstream and made him look stupid indeed. These were moments that I had to take in my stride, trying to discover in them the comic relief of it all.
It was soon after my eighteenth birthday that Papa received an order from his office. He had to proceed to Varanasi for a week. He was asked to conduct an inquiry in the Varanasi branch. That evening he looked quite worried.
“Ira”, he said, “Beta, I don’t know what to do. I’ve been asked to go to Varanasi for a week and I can’t take you with me. How will you manage on your own?”
“Come off it Papa! I’m no longer a kid. I’ll have no problems without you,” I argued. But Papa was very concerned.
“In other localities, people in neighbourhoods are helpful. But here, we are sandwiched between people of an awful caste. They’ll never lift their little finger to help you.”
“I don’t need their help, Papa. They might need mine instead”, I tried to convince him. He wasn’t quite convinced. But he didn’t have an option. He simply had to leave the very next morning. I’d pass the week on my own, and I’d surely be able to do that without much trouble. Or at least that is what I felt initially. Who could have thought that the man who could have turned that page in my life could arrive in that very week. As soon as my father left for the station in a rickshaw, I went straight to my window. I was in no hurry to cook, clean up, or comb my hair that morning. The entire day was mine. I noticed that among all the customers at the tea shop, one was different. Unlike the others who seemed anxious to leave the shop after a quick cup of tea, this young man was entirely casual. He was there sitting on a blue bench glittering like a pearl. I looked at him and then looked again at him. For some strange reason, it was difficult for me to lift my eyes off him. “My God!”, I thought , “I’ve never seen anyone quite like this before.” He wore a white cotton shirt and blue jeans. The shirt was not tucked in. It was a tight fit and clung to his V-shaped body and fell just an inch below his waist. It wasn’t exactly his size, nor were the jeans any better. Both clung to his body so tightly that they revealed its shape rather distinctly. There was a strange desire in me to observe this man closely. It was as though my eyes were looking at the man’s nude body. I had never felt like scrutinising anyone like that before. It was an odd desire. I wanted to know what he would have thought of me if he got to know that I was looking at him.
His first cup of tea was followed by a second. He would look down, his legs astride the bench, his long somewhat curly hair falling shabbily on his face. His middle parting allowed his hair to come down equally on both sides and each time he looked up his hair made a springy motion, making it rise and fall back so elegantly. I looked at my own hair which was deficient compared to his.
After the second cup, he decided to stretch out on the bench. Perhaps he had not slept well in the train, i.e., if he had got off a train, of-course. He looked up at the sky and seemed to be so much a part of it. His shirt buttons ripped open as he stretched out and revealed his chest. My! This was a man!
Lallu, the tea-shop wallah, got a little worried with the casual way in which this man was using his shop.
“Where are you from?”
“I really don’t know!” he replied in a voice that seemed to emanate from an organ. The reply put Lallu off. He thought, perhaps, as I did not, that this man was being sarcastic. But the quality of the stranger’s voice seemed to cow down Lallu. The man continued to rest on the bench. I was amused to see that though the bench must have been barely a foot wide, and it had no back-rest, this man lay comfortably on it. You would think he was lying on a bed, without the slightest risk of falling off.
I must have observed this man for about half an hour now. He suddenly turned his face towards my window and before I could move out of his view, he spied me. He got up with a jerk, suddenly becoming conscious of his open buttons and trying to put his hair back into a place that did not accept it. I hid behind my curtains for a few seconds. But soon I found myself looking at him and it seemed as though he had been waiting for me to look at him again. He saw my face carefully and smiled. I seemed to be swept off. It was as though I was swallowing my breath. He shifted towards the shop on the left. This was a grocer’s shop. He had moved because he thought he would get a better view into my window from there. He was a gentleman of sorts because he gave the others the impression that he had moved to get himself a packet of cigarettes. He bought a packet, lit a cigarette, and then leaned on the counter of the grocer’s as he looked towards me. It was difficult for me to look into his face, so I looked at his chest, and his trousers, and at his general being.
I was seized by the desire to know him. A sudden fear began to grip me. Would I not get a chance to meet this man? Surely I would, if he just went away like the others always did from there. No. I had to stop him. In the next minute I left my flat, ran across the road, to the grocer’s, and was standing at his side. He was still smoking the same cigarette. The cigarette was gradually burning and he seemed to have forgotten that he was supposed to puff at it. Even though he had not turned towards me, his ears were itching to hear me ask for something. As for me, I forgot what I had gone to the grocer’s for.
“Yes?” said the kind old grocer.
I had to ask him for something that he didn’t have, so that I didn’t actually have to pay for purchasing something. I thought for some time and decided upon the object I would enquire after.
“Do you have some shikakai?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Why don’t you keep some in your shop? I have to go all the way to the market for these little things,” I said with a straight face trying not to belie my true feelings.
I don’t know why I spoke as much as I did to the grocer that morning. Perhaps because there was something compelling me to stay on there next to this presence-extra-ordinary. I looked sideways to see if I was still being observed. He had been listening, but he looked away as if he was listening to someone in Lallu’s shop. I didn’t like his turning away. But I thought that there had been a meeting of our minds. I had no other option but to return home. He must’ve followed me with his eyes. I was back at my window; feeling again like a figure that was peeping out of a picture. How was I to get this man to talk to me, I wondered.
The shop had been deserted by customers and this man’s persistence in staying on made me more and more certain that he was interested in me. A polite looking dog came and sat near my man. It wagged its tail as its ears went down backwards. He gently patted the animal and soon befriended the creature. The dog was as much his as I was. With such men everyone wanted a relationship. They seemed to have so much for each and all. Yet, he seemed to have no power, position, or riches to boast of. His strength came from within him. It was a natural part of his being.
The grocer and the tailor next to Lallu had the habit of crossing the road and coming over to our side. They would put their bench under that part of our tree which shaded half the road. They’d sit here and discuss the world or else sit and brood over their failures. The man had started a conversation with the tailor, and seemed to have gripped the latter so much that he was being persuaded to cross the road, sit on the bench under the shade and then talk at leisure. Lallu’s benches could not be used for such chats, unless of-course you spoke over the tea that Lallu provided.
Harish, the tailor, wanted to know about something and the man had condescended to speak to him. I could hear their voices quite clearly; the tailor’s resembling a rattler’s compared to his. The tailor’s desire to converse was put to a nought by a lady who came to the tailor’s shop to give some clothes. So we were left to ourselves, each in isolation, to think of the other. For the lack of anything better to do, he began to hum a tune. It flowed into my window like a perfume. I had never quite liked a man’s voice before, but this one was lovely. I couldn’t sing two notes at a stretch in tune. Why did I not learn to sing? I could have impressed him if I had done that. I did like listening to music.
Now that he was so close to my window, sitting all by himself, I found it more and more difficult to resist him. He looked at me and without really knowing it, so many feelings were exchanged between us. Surely, he too had found something worthwhile in me. My eyes must have invited him unconsciously. He arose, opened the gate and walked towards the staircase. His steady gait was so indicative. He was, a man of some substance. Even before he could knock at the door, I had opened it. He stepped in, looked at me and smiled a half smile. I was dumb and shivering.
“Won’t you ask me to sit?”
“Yes, please sit down.”
Pause . . .
“I’m Bharat.”
“I’m Ira.”
Pause. . .
We didn’t know what to say to each other. I found myself saying things I would never have said to another man. I didn’t make the effort. It was as though some one had pressed a button and I was put on.
“You have a beautiful voice.!”
“You are beautiful, yourself!”
This was a piece of news to me.
Pause. . .
“You’ve got to be joking”, I said. But his look told me that he had meant what he said. I suddenly got conscious of myself. Why didn’t I bathe and dress well this morning?”
“Will you teach me how to sing?” I heard myself enquire.
“What makes you think I can sing?”
“I heard you humming and I’ve heard each syllable that you’ve uttered at the tea shop. There’s music in your breath, there’s rhythm in your movement, even your stretching out resembles the tuning and tightening of a string instrument.”
He did not believe in talking much. His looks made it clear that he didn’t have to go into the tedium of well worded sentences to express his sentiments.
“I’ve come to Allahabad only for a few days, I don’t belong here.”
“Where do you belong?”
“Forget that. I don’t want to think of the wretched place.”
He seemed to have touched a sore point when he thought of the place to which he belonged. I didn’t want to agitate him any further so I changed the topic.
“Where will you be putting up in Allahabad?”
“I don’t have any place in mind. I had thought Id spend tonight at the Bhardwaj Ashram.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t really ask you to spend it here!” I couldn’t help saying. He changed the topic.
“What are you studying?”
“I am in BA First Year.”
He must have been about seven or eight years older than myself. His poised manner of speaking gave him out to be a balanced and mature person.
“How many brothers and sisters are you?” he enquired.
“I have none. I live here with my father, the only other member of the family.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s gone to Varanasi for some days.”
Pause. . .
“Why did you want me to come upstairs?”
“I don’t know. Did I ask you to?”
“I thought you did.”
“I don’t know what’s happening to me ever since I’ve seen you; I’m getting swept away.”
“You mustn’t trust every stranger you see on the roadside.”
“You are not like any one else I’ve seen. You’re so different!”
“Look, please don’t . . .”
Someone knocked at the door. Harish was standing there when I opened the door. He had probably wondered where his friend had disappeared. Harish had always eyed me mischievously, and here was his opportunity to come and speak with me. Bharat arose and instinctively left along with the tailor. Men have a secret connecting- system about them. Two strangers meet and get connected. They don’t need briefing or introduction. Why did the tailor have to come at this very moment? The swine that he was! Bharat had left me but he had left behind a part of himself. Back on the road, the other part of him seemed to turn towards my window.
Harish spoke to him through meaningful smiles. His mischievous smile revealed his black teeth. The teeth seemed to merge with the colour of his skin. But even the teeth had a silver lining that gave out his wicked smiles.
It must have been pretty difficult for Bharat to face Harish. He had to pretend to be with him and yet not be untrue to me. He managed it. He must have told the tailor something which put an end to all the wicked smiles. I kept coming back to the window and he was able to look at it from an angle which confused Harish. The rest of the next few hours were all eyes his and mine, and ours together. Wasn’t he decent? Another man wouldn’t have hesitated coming up and spending his time with me. But he seemed concerned about me and the gossip of my neighbourhood. He didn’t even stare openly. He did look at me now and again, but the continuity of his gaze was kept up with his mind’s eyes.
I ran to the kitchen. I had to cook for this man. I made halwa and purees. Luckily the kitchen was in the same line. The kitchen window also gave me a glimpse of him, though this was not my concept of a hearty view. The problem here was that the others who shared his bench were constantly jeopardising my view. Bharat was getting eclipsed every time someone leant forwards or backwards.
Before long I heard someone knock at the door and rushed to see who it was. Had he come up again? If that was the case, I’d be fortunate indeed. Could life offer me such an opportunity? It normally did not, but today had been a different day for me altogether.
When I opened the door, I was so disappointed to see that horrid tailor instead of Bharat. The tailor must have seen the disappointment on my face when he saw me. His response made me get a little conscious.
“What’s the matter?” he asked me.
“What’s the matter??” I replied echoing him.
“I mean why are you looking at us since morning? Is your guest troubling you in any way?”
“My guest?”
“Yes, he just told me that he has come to take care of you while your father is away. He’s straightening his limbs out and will soon be with you. Is anything the matter? I hope you are satisfied with the arrangement.”
How these people interfered with your life! There was, you might say, no privacy in your life if you got connected with anyone outside the house. These people had all the time in the world to think of what you were doing, irrespective of the fact that you never tried to find out anything about their personal lives.
“No, Harishji, I’m absolutely all right. Please tell my guest that his meal is ready and that I’m waiting for him.”
Harish left, though he wasn’t exactly happy with this sudden change of events. He was still trying to figure out what the truth was. With a heavy heart he went down my staircase to tell his friend to return to me for the meal. He came. We ate in delicious silence. My food never tasted that good. My flat never gave me so much bliss. I was swallowing wintry sun showers that seemed to be oozing out of every finger, every toe. I was all sensation. I was eating joy and drinking ecstasy. After a good fifteen minutes he spoke out in that beautiful voice.
“Why did you cook for me?”
“Because I had to. And, you had told the tailor that you had come to take care of me.”
“Was it a mistake? I didn’t quite know how to handle the situation.” I don’t know how I began to offer everything to this stranger -- the food, the facilities and myself. How did I ever allow it? He wasn’t asking for anything. He only agreed to everything I offered. Perhaps it is rude for men to say no. I was solely in the wrong if any one was.
He was so beautiful. I had never seen such beauty before. He was my male-beautiful. I saw him in detail -- bit by bit. I had to. There was no way I wouldn’t.
We cooked and talked, and slept and bathed and talked and ate and slept and talked and clung and sang and talked and gazed. His story rolled out gradually during the week:
He was a gentleman at large, as unemployed as a pumpkin. He had escaped from his wife and children for a few days. His needed to that every now and again for the sake of domestic harmony. He had to go somewhere after all, so he had decided to come here. Now he had to return. I felt myself cracking up. What had I done? Wasn’t even Harish better than this ugly man after all? Bharat left before Papa’s arrival leaving me with nothing but my window to gaze through.
