Anju Sharma
What’s the one thing you have ever felt the saddest about? my wife asked me out of the blue.
We were drinking coffee. She was drinking it in the dining room, at the table. I had brought my cup outside to the veranda. I wanted a smoke with my coffee. She came out and leaned against the veranda railing, looking out at the pink and yellow leaved plants that bordered our unpaved yard. Then she asked me.
What’s the one thing you have ever felt the saddest about?
Her expression was somber. I was a little apprehensive that she may be on to something, but I didn’t show it. All life was about not showing what went on inside of you. I was sitting on the yellow chair that had come to be known as my chair for the fact that I used it the most. Since that assumption was already made, I had gone ahead and placed the chair in the corner of the veranda I liked the best – parapet within reach for the ashtray and everything else just a bit out of reach.
Saddest about? I asked her back. I stared in the same direction as her, at the same row of pink and yellow leaved plants. They grew in four or five large cement pots in a row, and so it was likely that we were looking at the same but different plants. These plants didn’t bear flowers–the leaves were flowery enough. My wife planted them at the time we moved here. I remember the yard looked empty and somewhat poor at the start–this was a riot by comparison.
You tell me first, I said.
I know mine, but if I tell you first, you will sort of take off from there. You will say something similar.
I am not that unoriginal, I said.
She didn’t say anything, so I said more. It’s not a test or something, right?
Test of what? My wife looked at me.
I don’t know.
Come on, just say–it’s a simple thing to answer. Okay. Not so simple – but it can be answered. You need to first be quiet and think deeply.
So I became quiet and began to think deeply. Surprisingly, it came pretty quickly to me. In my mind ran the images of the time my sister was getting married. I was already married then–in fact only a few months before hers was my wedding. We were just settling into our new life, my wife and I.
We lived in a foreign country of sand dunes. My wife hated it–well, if not hated, she didn’t like it either. The whole city, our apartment, had the smell that clings to those who arrive from a long flight–these were her words. It made her feel permanently in transit and therefore didn’t help her settle–again her words.
We went dune bashing once. She found it a terrifying experience, but was struck by the landscape. We had gone with friends, and I remember when we relaxed in the camp in the evening, warming our hands on a cup of qahwa each, my wife couldn’t stop talking about it. She said things like–This shimmery world is so full of longing. She said–I would like to dream a bedouin’s dream.
My wife could be poetic. That is why she asked questions like the saddest thing. Who asked that after ten years of marriage?
That desert city was where we lived when my parents called to share the news about my sister’s wedding. It was a surprise. It shouldn’t have been–she was seeing someone, and yet, I don’t know why, the thought of my sister committing forever to another man and family felt heavy, especially in the first few hours of the news. Good News–as my mother put it.
I remember choking up. My wife saw a streak of red in my eyes–nothing went unnoticed back then. She knelt by the sofa I was sitting on, put her hand on my leg and kissed my knee. She may have been bewildered, I think now, by the fact that I was affected in this manner by the news of my sister’s wedding.
Well, if she was, she didn’t say anything. She knew that growing up I was very close to my sister. Our mother had left us for many years to work in the middle east–in another sand dune country. Sometimes I wonder if the choices we make have already been made for us and we simply follow a crumb trail. The choice had been made for my mother as well–if she didn’t go, we’d practically be on the streets.
My father’s job barely covered anything at all. From the money she sent, we were able to afford good food, good shoes, good education. It wasn’t without its pitfalls though. Over the years she was away–nine or so–my sister and I became more distanced from her than the miles in between. I feel embarrassed saying this now, but back then I looked forward to her annual visits for the gifts she got–Nike shoes and Bose speakers, that I could show off to my friends.
We loved our father. He was kind and indifferent. He worked as the laboratory head in a government hospital. He left for work early morning and returned only late evening, when he usually found us playing in the compound with the other society children.
An elderly lady we called Amma came every morning to clean the house, prepare our tiffin. For the rest, we were very much on our own–my sister and I. We helped each other. She put my belt in the back loop of my trousers and I put clips on the sides of her hair where she couldn’t reach properly.
We cycled to school–it was about a kilometer away. We went single file–I always made her ride ahead of me. Once when she braked suddenly, I banged into her so my face hit the cycle handle with such force that it chipped my front tooth. We returned home that day, both of us crying. Amma had left and slipped the key under the doormat as usual. I put some ice on the bleeding the way I had learnt in the NCC class.
We watched TV that whole day, only remembering to change into regular clothes before our father came in the evening. I told him about the tooth but we didn’t tell him that we spent the day at home. To date, my sister and I laugh about that. Of course, I have the chipped tooth laugh.
So yes, even at the risk of sounding a little sissy, I made up my mind to tell my wife that it had to be the idea of my sister sharing her life with someone that was perhaps the saddest thing for me. Not in the way of envy–I reasoned with my wife in my head–but simply in the way a path bisects and takes two people, who had walked together until now, on two separate journeys.
In the way of the diffused sorrow of growing up and leaving a whole hunk of time behind.
She was still waiting, my wife, leaning at the railing, staring at the plants. She was in the zone. She was like that often–in the zone. I looked at her, but it seemed she had forgotten about the question altogether. Perhaps it was just a rhetorical question in the end. Something like–How come it’s September already? So I kept quiet. Then suddenly she turned to me and said: Okay. I will go first.
I thought she will speak of her father. Her father’s death had happened quite suddenly only a couple of years into our marriage–soon after in fact we returned from the country of sand dunes. I was in another foreign country for work when it happened. She didn’t inform me. No phone call, no nothing. Instead, she took a taxi and reached her parents’ home, some five hundred kilometres away, alone. She called me from there to let me know, and when I insisted to fly for the cremation, to be there by her side, she said that neither she nor her family believed in such formalities. That I needn’t spend so much money and time.
Her father’s body when she entered the house, was on the floor. A sheet pulled tight on him. She had sat by his side and cried and asked over and over again why was her father made to lie on the floor–why not on the bed? The floor is too hard–she wept. It is his house, she said. He deserved respect. Someone came finally and took her gently by the shoulders. She had let them do that. She had let them move her away from her father who lay on the floor.
All this came to me second-hand. She thought nothing of sharing the details with me which I should have been there to see and hear for myself. I never asked her why is it she didn’t want me at her father’s funeral–I was too angry, too confused to. It wasn’t about money or time, it couldn’t be, but what was it about–she never explained. A big part of our marriage, I can safely say looking back, is made up of omissions. A funny thought that–one whole weighty structure resting on blankness, on omissions.
Actually, it’s not so easy to pick your saddest thing–I heard my wife say slowly, finally. Her voice sounded deflated. The certainty of a few minutes before had left her.
You said it!–I said. For by now I was thinking whether it was my sister’s wedding, or our mother packing to leave us year after year that was it for me. It’s not that I missed my mother much–I had grown used to her absence. In fact, like I said before–her arrivals were exciting for the gifts she bore, and her departures were a necessary precursor to that. But over and above and beyond that, something else was at work. Something that rose and swirled in me, when I saw her pack to leave. Like ink in water. Gloom.
It felt to me in that moment that all of us, in this house, in all the houses, on the streets and everywhere–all of us were walking talking cutouts of litmus paper and the barest touch with each other could colour us all blue.
I couldn’t stand the sight of the splayed empty suitcases on the bed and my mother staring into them. I felt hollow as those suitcases. The riches that they’d come back filled with, seemed, in that moment, a flimsy paving.
Those suitcases made for the truest picture of our lives. I’m saying it better now–back then there were no words for it. My mother dropped her clothes into the bags without looking, without bothering to fold them. She moved slowly as though that would stretch time. In the early days, when my sister and I were still small, she pulled us into hugs and covered us with kisses. But then we grew up. That may have made her lonelier.
There was something about her body towards the end of her visit–it lost its straightness.
So, anyhow, I think, more than my sister’s wedding, it was this that was probably the saddest thing for me. Or maybe they both take the top spot. How do you measure one sadness against the other–which ruler would do that?
My wife was saying something. Sorry I missed that–I looked at her. She had lit a cigarette and I wondered for a moment if she still smoked the way she did when we shared our smokes–she used to practically suck on a cigarette! She tried to blow a ring but it didn’t work.
I think I know–she looked at me.
Now I thought, if it has taken her this long, it couldn’t be her father. It had to be the Paris trip. The time we travelled to Paris after our wedding and I didn’t let her buy a painting at the Bastille market. I had cursed myself later on. It was a small painting, and sure it wasn’t inexpensive, but it was art! It’s what she wanted. She was my new wife.
It was the worst start. I remember on the walk back to the hotel, along the glimmering, wavering Seine, she was very quiet. She always had pride that way. With pride you just don’t know where to go, how much to give, what to say. So I kept quiet too. We both kept quiet. And now I had a strong feeling that after all this time she was going to make me talk about it.
There is a bird that comes every morning at the kitchen window–my wife was saying.
I looked at her.
The window above the sink. The window that remains half closed, my wife said. You are gone every morning when it’s her time. You don’t know.
Okay, I said. There were these atrocious reflective glass panels on some of our windows and it wasn’t unusual to hear the birds beaking at their own reflection. But yes, maybe I didn’t know this bird.
This bird has been coming to this window every single day for the last two months or more maybe–my wife was saying. She comes at exactly the same time and stays on for a long time, knocking at the glass all the while. Constantly. Relentlessly. Doesn’t she hurt? Has she lost someone? She goes up down left right. She dives and sinks. Flaps and flaps and flaps. Hangs upside down. And tak tak tak tak tak tak she goes. There are other birds that come and go. Those birds know. They understand quickly. But this one… this bird… who’s going to tell her…
My wife fell silent and looked away. At the yellow and pink plants again. They glowed faintly in the silvery dark of the yard. None of us had switched on the veranda lamp yet. After a few minutes, or was it just seconds, she turned to me. The agitation, the churning I just saw, had left her so completely that she could have been another person.
I don’t expect you to understand–she said.
She was right. I didn’t understand. But it wasn’t about that–I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to talk more. I wanted her to finish her sentence, the last line. Tell the bird what? How to tell the bird? I wanted to hear from her. I wanted to know.
She was already at the door, ready to go back in. You still have to tell me yours–she said.
Yes. I looked at her. Goodnight.
I was alone once again on my yellow chair in the corner of the veranda I liked the best. I lit another cigarette. The breeze had picked up and the smoke kept getting into my eyes.
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Anju Sharma is a writer from India. Her writing is published in The Maine Review, Witness, Nelle, The Forge, and The Bangalore Review, among other places. Her work has been placed for Bristol short story prize, Bridport short story prize,Witness literary awards and Desperate Literature short fiction prize. Find more at anjusharma.in