Custody Read online

  ‘Mummy! When has any proposal ever worked? Don’t you get tired?’

  Ishita got up to suffer in her bedroom. Would the search for a husband continue into the adoption process and after? Her father’s attitude was infinitely preferable, whatever has to happen will happen. It led the believer to a comfortable burial behind reams of newspaper and it led to tranquillity in the house.

  Mr Rajora meantime discovered his wife in the little veranda, shivering slightly in the growing chilliness of the evening. He sighed. It had to be Ishita. Nothing else could reduce his wife to this state.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, his exasperation showing despite the festival day.

  ‘You know what it is.’

  What he had really meant was why does it have to be what it is? ‘Leave her alone. She will find her own way.’

  He often asked his wife to leave Ishita alone. But how could she? She was her daughter, they had to do what they could. Sometimes she suspected her husband’s attitude came from a disinclination to be bothered.

  Now she gave him the news that should have been so cheering, Raman Kaushik’s divorce.

  So this was the information that had sent Ishita flouncing into her room, while the mother sat sadly looking at the winking Diwali lights.

  ‘Can we have a little halwa-puri now?’ he asked longingly after a while. His wife hurried into the kitchen.

  Twenty minutes later Ishita, chomping on her mother’s crisp dal-stuffed puris, could bring herself to mumble, ‘Sorry, Mummy, I shouldn’t have shouted at you. I know you worry about me, but please don’t.’

  It was a wonder what communal eating could do.

  Even if Ishita refused to take the news of Raman’s divorce in the proper spirit, it continued to be a source of great consolation to Mrs Rajora. Shame and humiliation would touch the Kaushiks; the Rajoras could count on the companionship of similar miseries. Mrs Kaushik, in her turn, was relieved to find someone at her very doorstop who understood her situation. With renewed intensity they rehashed their children’s histories, trying to come to terms with offspring whose lives had fallen against the grain.

  ‘The boy is too idealistic. We said, why give a divorce?, you have not turned her away, but he didn’t listen.’

  ‘My girl was like that also. Arre, she was such a good wife, devoted, caring. For her marriage was for life. Life. But the man lost interest, and she refused to stay where she was not wanted. Are there any such nowadays?’

  If there were any such, she had not had the pleasure of their acquaintance, thought Mrs Kaushik bitterly. In her son’s ex-wife’s case it was the opposite. More new-fashioned than the latest fashion. Changing husbands with the breeze.

  ‘To top it all, that boy is now married with two sons, while my daughter refuses to look at a man. And what she does for those street children, bap re. Her heart is as big as the sky.’

  ‘Has she started her studies yet?’

  ‘Still applying,’ said Mrs Rajora, suppressing all information about prospective adoption.

  Mrs Kaushik looked thoughtful. She hadn’t seen Ishita in a long time, why didn’t Mrs Rajora bring her over? ‘Maybe she can help Raman. All the time he is brooding.’

  ‘She is too, too shy. When you are divorced, people talk.’

  ‘These days people get divorced, what is there? Anything can happen to anyone.’

  ‘I know, but there is no point my saying anything. She doesn’t listen.’

  ‘Tell her Auntie is calling her. This Sunday. That is when he comes with Roohi. He wants to give the child a sense of family. He has friends of course, but Roo loves Nandan’s twins.’

  That Sunday Mrs Rajora told her daughter of the invitation to tea. If she didn’t accept, Mrs Kaushik would personally come and get her.

  Ishita took exception to this. ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Auntie only said she would come out of concern. Do you hear? If you go on like this, no one will care about you. And it will be your own fault.’

  Ishita had heard these dire predictions often. Her mother only wished her to marry so that she could have an old-age companion. Suppose they had dissimilar values? All the intervening years would be hell. She wished she could explain this to her mother, but here was another whose values were not the same.

  ‘At least go and meet the boy. He is suffering. Auntie is so afraid he will die of another heart attack, then his ex-wife will get everything, children plus CEO husband – it is too, too bad. And she has sent the boy away to Dehradun, behind his back – all to spite him.’

  ‘So you see there is nothing common between me and him,’ retorted her daughter.

  ‘Of course there isn’t. But if you could just buck him up,’ pleaded Mrs Rajora.

  Come Sunday, Ishita lounged around provocatively messy all morning, all lunchtime, all afternoon. Evening drew nigh, and the child had still not had a bath, was she going to go to Mrs Kaushik’s in her nightclothes? It was almost five o’clock and time to leave when Ishita disappeared into the bathroom to emerge ten minutes later with defiant wet hair, dressed in a plain black salwar kameez, with a red and black mirror-work shawl thrown over her shoulder, her only concession to make-up a little kaajal in her eyes. She looked half her age.

  ‘Come,’ said the mother, her own silk sari rustling along the corridor towards the elevator.

  The daughter followed. If it was her social duty to be treated as Exhibit A she hoped the sight of her would make the Kaushik son feel better.

  As they made their way to the fifth floor, Mrs Rajora was grateful for Ishita’s comparatively thoughtful demeanour. Her sterling qualities were more obvious when she was calm.

  ‘Yes?’ asked the man as he opened the door.

  Oh great, thought Ishita, we are not even expected.

  Mrs Kaushik bustled into view, allowing Mrs Rajora to seem less monumental. ‘Come, come. Beta, you remember Ishita and Auntie?’

  Mother and daughter were herded into the drawing room, where a small girl was watching TV.

  ‘Hello, baby,’ said Ishita.

  ‘Roo, say namaste,’ admonished Raman.

  The girl clung to her father and looked down.

  ‘Never mind, let it be,’ said Ishita. ‘Children don’t really like to perform.’

  Raman looked at her. ‘Do you also have kids?’

  ‘No.’

  Mrs Rajora began to feel annoyed. Leela might have done a little preparatory explaining. ‘She works in an NGO for slum children,’ she offered.

  Raman then had to ask about her NGO. It was nice to hear of people doing such good work. Yes, said Ishita, she supposed it was, but in fact she objected to such statements, not from him, but in general.

  And why was that? asked Raman, looking at her with more interest.

  Because people felt they had performed a social duty if they asked about NGO work, satisfied that it was taking place, but refusing to actually help in some meaningful way.

  Was it troublesome, getting helpers?

  If only he knew how much.

  Mrs Rajora meanwhile disappeared into the kitchen to help with the tea. ‘I never know what the girl will eat, she is so fussy,’ Ishita could hear the grandmother complaining. ‘You can see how thin she is.’

  Father hauled his daughter back onto his lap, his face in miniature beneath his own. The girl did look thin, true, but not sick.

  ‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

  ‘Roohi.’

  ‘Pretty.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ishita sat next to the girl. To catch her attention she put the TV off. Roohi protested, ‘I was watching it.’

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ asked Ishita, making her hands into a fish.

  Roohi simply stared.

  ‘She is shy,’ offered the father, thus ensuring the child’s non-reaction.

  Ishita looked around for inspiration. She could feel Raman observing her and that made her nervous.

  ‘You know I teach in a school for poor children? And when they
come for the first time, often they don’t say anything. Not for days and days. They are scared also. Do you know why?’

  The child slowly shook her head.

  ‘They come from poor homes. Never been to school. Play in the streets, beg, work in their villages. Then you know what we do?’

  Big brown eyes blinked solemnly at her.

  ‘We take them on our laps like this’ – she dragged Roohi onto her lap – ‘and then we show them birds and fishes like this. They sometimes don’t know what they are. Do you?’ Again Ishita made her hands into a fish.

  ‘A fish.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘A bird.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘Very good. And this?’

  ‘I don’t know. What?’

  ‘A dog about to eat you up’ – Ishita snapped her fingers over Roohi’s nose. Roohi giggled. ‘Now I am going to draw that dog so he can eat you up better.’

  ‘No, not eat me up.’

  ‘OK – it will eat me up – and then, let’s see, what will I do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll just show you.’

  Raman handed her a sheet of paper and a pen from his shirt pocket. Ishita sketched a figure, dupatta flapping, lost chappal, climbing up a tree, with a dog barking beneath. Thank God she could draw – in Jeevan sometimes she thought this her most important asset.

  ‘Should I teach you? Or do you want to show me what you can do?’

  A small hand was put out. Raman stared at his daughter’s inept squiggles and fresh anger towards Shagun overcame him. He was dependent on strangers for a motherly touch – that was what she had reduced them to.

  Roohi sat on Ishita’s lap and drank her milk to the telling of a long and complicated tale. Then Ishita took her up the elevator to show her where she lived. Half an hour later she was returned to the fifth floor with a bindi and pink clips in hair freshly plaited.

  Raman got ready to leave. ‘Beta, thank Auntie,’ instructed the father.

  ‘Oh don’t bother, she’s just a child,’ said Ishita.

  ‘She has to learn her manners. Beta, thank Auntie, otherwise Auntie will not take you to her house again.’

  ‘Thank you,’ mumbled the girl into her father’s shoulder.

  And half asleep, she was taken away.

  ‘Sit, sit, have another cup of tea,’ pressed Mrs Kaushik.

  Over tea, gossip began. The wife, the affair, the heart attack, the lawyer cousin, the court cases, visitation rights, the divorce, custody, the Dehradun Public Academy, Roohi, Arjun. There was a lot to tell. All the early promise of happiness in the son’s life, the good job, the lovely wife, the son, the daughter, all wantonly destroyed.

  The person Ishita had felt most sorry for was the little girl. She could still feel the childish fingers laced through her own.

  *

  Next time Raman visited his mother he asked, ‘Why did she divorce?’

  ‘Arre, why do people divorce these days? Shanti – her mother – was upset for so long. Apparently they were crude business types who found someone else with more dowry. Then they divorced her just like that. Ruined her life.’

  ‘Arranged marriage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound quite right to me.’

  ‘Well, you never know who is lying and who is not.’

  ‘Why didn’t she have children?’

  ‘There was some trouble,’ said Mrs Kaushik cautiously. ‘I sent them to my astrologer. Things happened so quickly, I don’t know . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  No matter what, thought Raman in a rush of emotion, at least he had his children, no one could take them away from him, they were blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh. This girl – woman – had nothing.

  To this extent, Exhibit A was successful.

  But he didn’t actually pick up the phone and contact her. Neither on this visit nor the next, which was when his mother decided to push things a little.

  ‘What do you think of Ishita?’

  ‘What should I think?’

  ‘Roohi liked her.’

  ‘Roohi likes everybody. She is an affectionate child,’ said Raman mournfully.

  ‘I thought she was very good with her. She works with children, you know.’

  ‘She seemed very ordinary,’ said the son, ‘and Mummy, you can stop thinking whatever it is you are thinking. I have just done with one marriage, don’t try and push me into another. I intend to devote my life to my children.’

  ‘Of course, beta, of course. The children are the most important thing. But it is hard to be alone. A home needs a woman.’

  ‘This is one home that will have to do without.’

  But how long can a lonely, jilted man resist a woman so totally opposite from his wife? A woman who has entertained his child and done her hair? And fed her when she fussed, and seemed to enjoy it? A woman who has been divorced, who has known rejection, misery and unhappiness? A woman who is casually thrown across his path by mothers who are working in tandem without a word exchanged.

  Raman was essentially the giving sort. He could be friends with such a woman – they could compare notes, he thought dourly, their abandonment common ground between them.

  Meanwhile Mrs Rajora was busy praying to her gods. She wanted to be first in line for any match that came for Raman. But she did not want to seem too pushy either.

  ‘A man with two children, just divorced, it is not as though he is such a big catch,’ said Ishita’s father. ‘They should be the ones asking us.’

  ‘On what planet are you living? What kind of catch is your daughter?’ The reality of the world was that all men were catches and only some women. That made the marriageable male–female ratio fragile, and the mother of a daughter constantly watchful.

  ‘I am not going to agree to a match in which she will not be happy. We have had enough of that.’

  Mrs Rajora let him talk. It was all nonsense what he was saying. Let the match first materialise, then they could worry about the happiness.

  It was just as well she had retired, she could drop in on Mrs Kaushik more often. It was time to be more social in the building, participate in kitty parties, start playing housie and teen patti, move in the same female circles as her neighbour.

  After Raman’s divorce Mrs Kaushik’s main desire was for a simple, home-loving girl to heal the wounds in her son’s life.

  To make sure Ishita justified the seal of her approval, she took the precaution of volunteering a few mornings at Jeevan. Seeing a person at work can reveal much.

  She found it easy to teach slum kids elementary English. All the skills required were endless repetition, patience, and good-natured shouting. In between, her eye was firmly trained on Ishita, whose own opinion of Leela Kaushik was vastly improved by this one act of social kindness.

  Mrs Kaushik found her previous impression strengthened. Capable, patient, even tender with the children, reliable and deferential around Mrs Hingorani, Ishita had the attractiveness of the sincere, the casual appearance of one who looked at the world rather than expecting the world to look at her. These are good qualities in a wife. And what was good in a wife was good for the family.

  An added advantage to a building girl was that family bonds did not have to transplant themselves far. She could at last admit her envy of her brother-in-law, as the possibility increased of having a daughter-in-law like Rajni.

  If something good could come out of the mutual battering she and Shanti had experienced through their children, that would be the silver lining she had heard much about but had yet to see.

  Mr Kaushik figured out the lay of the land.

  ‘I don’t know why you encourage her to keep coming here,’ he said, ‘we are hardly in a position to matchmake. Raman is an adult, he can choose his own wife.’

  ‘Right. You want to wait until another girl puts his claws into him, another faithless whore, who will charm you along with everyone else.’


  ‘When will you learn to stop talking?’ asked Mr Kaushik angrily.

  Mrs Kaushik looked weepy; she couldn’t bear it when her husband was harsh with her. In disgust Mr Kaushik got up, saying he had to buy milk and vegetables. There was always something to get in times of crisis.

  Since all this started nothing had been the same, thought Mrs Kaushik mournfully as she heard the front door slam. Raman, Shagun, heart attack, hospitals, children, was there never going to be any hope of a normal life for them? Mr Kaushik moodily loaded potatoes and onions into his basket at the Mother Dairy kiosk. He added a bunch of spinach, then half a kilo of tomatoes. They were somewhat squishy, his wife would go on about that, but he loved tomato pakoras. Crisp on the outside, soft and slightly sour on the inside. Along with the green coriander chutney that was still in the fridge.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ishita get down from a scooter. She hauled out a plastic packet from her large cloth shoulder bag and began purposefully poking at the apples.

  ‘Hello, beti,’ he said, approaching her.

  Ishita looked up, allowing Mr Kaushik to regretfully survey her features. She had a wheatish complexion, a few scattered pimples, unremarkable black hair pulled into a bun low on her neck, eyes that were large enough, height average urban Indian five feet three inches. Her strongest points were her white even teeth and unselfconscious smile.

  ‘How are you, Uncle?’ she now said.

  ‘I am buying vegetables for pakoras,’ said Mr Kaushik, showing her his basket.

  ‘And I apples. Papa is not allowed much sugar, but he is like a child, he has to eat sweets, no matter what the doctor says. That is why I make fruit bakes with just a little honey. Something for after dinner.’ She smiled indulgently.

  The girl had the heart of a homemaker. It was touching how she was looking after her parents. Dimly he remembered, somewhere in all the volumes of his wife’s chatter, how much trouble there had been in this girl’s personal life. Well, he could no longer be judgemental about divorce.

  XXIV

  In December that year a cyclone hit the eastern coast of India.

  The media was full of stories of starving villagers, of flooded homes, of cholera in camps, of the irreparable damage done to the soil by sea water, of the destruction of agriculture. Charity drives were organised for clothes, medicines, money, food, anything, everything.