No flowers. That’s all I had asked for when Seema insisted I accompany them on this holiday.
This room has no real flowers, sure, but it has all things floral. The wallpaper is a burst of what could be cherry blossom. No doubt this is a stately home in decline, handed over to a hotel franchise as a last-ditch attempt to save it. The shower curtain is kitschy with monstrous daisy flowers. There are three paintings of a single red tulip, differentiated only by the angle of light and shadow. Then, to top it all, there is also a floral room freshener. This I hate most, cloying, bad as the real thing. But there are no real flowers.
‘You have the sea view, Madam,’ says the porter. ‘Your daughter, Seema, and your son-in-law, Juh-nuk—have I pronounced that correctly?’
‘Nice job!’ says Janak, lifting and putting the phone down, checking if everything is in working order. Restless soul. ‘And what’s your name?’
‘Fatih, sir.’
‘Thank you, Fatih.’
‘As I was saying, madam, Seema and Janak have the Blue Mosque view,’ says Fatih. ‘If you don’t like the sea view, we can move you to their floor, but the lift doesn’t go up till there. So, it could be difficult. We can always help carry you up in your wheelchair. It’s up to you.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Janak is the loo now, checking all the taps. ‘It’s too much of a hassle. Ma, you’ll be most uncomfortable.’
Fatih waits for me. ‘The sea is beautiful too. Your choice really. Also, you don’t have to worry about water. Janak said you need hot water to drink in the mornings. We usually give two bottles, but we’ve put four for you. Here’s the electric kettle. If you need anything, you can dial nine for reception.’
If my granddaughter, Pritha, was here, and I wish she was, she’d grow stiff at the mention of plastic bottles and would touch my arm, lightly, asking if it was necessary. She never gives up. She checks me when I discard a towel after one use, or if I tell her that women must have children. Her big project is to save the environment—no, save everything. When she was little, the poor thing would sit on her knees and rub Nivea cream on autumn leaves. She rubbed lotion on everything that needed help—the broken fridge, scratch tapes, crockery and god only knows what else. Too bad her parents’ marriage couldn’t benefit from her massage therapy. She tries to fix the unfixable, and tiring as it sounds, her sheer, wide-eyed hopefulness makes me envious.
‘Madam? This room—okay for you?’ asks Fatih.
‘Yes, it’s fine.’
A draught sweeps the room. It’s Janak opening and closing the window. What is he up to? Testing the hinges?
‘The view is truly amazing! This is the best room,’ he says.
‘Anything you need, dial 9.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Just one more thing, Madam,’ Fatih turns back to say. ‘Beware of seagulls. They are— And please don’t mind, there was a documentary about the monkey menace in India, consider seagulls Turkish monkeys. Sweet, but destructive.’ He laughs. ‘Don’t leave the window open too long.’
Janak hands Fatih a tip.
‘Thank you. sir.’ Fatih leaves.
‘Everything seems to be in working order, and no flowers, we made sure.’ Janak smiles.
I point to the paintings and wallpaper.
‘Oh, come on, they aren’t real flowers!’ He digs his hands into his pocket. ‘Anyway, I hope this helps.’ Pulls out a box of cigarettes and hands it to me. ‘We have an hour before breakfast.’ He smiles and shuts the door behind him.
I step out of the wheelchair, feels nice to stretch my legs. I walk over to the bay window, push it open and light a cigarette. A seagull perches on the next windowsill. It meets me with a dull stare, as I take a long drag and exhale over the red-tiled rooftops. I hate holidays. I especially hate holidays without Pritha. Annoying as she is, she is the only one who treats me like an equal, like a friend. She stands on my head and nags on and on. Nani, you’re so negative. Nani, stop judging them, we’re all struggling. Without her constant yap yap—asking me for stories from my childhood, my opinions on current affairs, arguing with me, prodding me to be better—without all that I have too much time for nothing…too much time to think. At home, by this time, I would’ve showered, said my prayers and set the milk to boil. With all my aches and pains, I go through everything much slower than I used to, but my little tasks fill up my day nicely. They keep my mind off my mind. There’s rice to clean, clothes to iron, I call my sister, hear her cry about her life for an hour, go for a walk around the building, bump into Subohi ji and Sudha ji, hear about their children abroad, and then there’s always this or that to watch on TV. This room doesn’t even have a television. When I was growing up, hotel advertisements would especially mention air conditioning and TVs in every room. Now, hotels are helping tourists be more ‘present’. Didn’t we come here to escape in the first place?
The seagull is still here. It reminds me of my husband, Alok, his hooked nose, and how it stared down at me when he wanted something but wouldn’t say. Its presence is unnerving. There are more perched on other roofs. There’s a family eating breakfast on the terrace. The spread is lavish. I see juice and fruit and what looks like cold cuts and possibly dips and sauces. The sea shimmers beyond. There are domes and minarets across the strait. I read a bit about Istanbul to try and make myself excited about the trip. Somewhat like Delhi, an old city burdened by layers of history. Now modern, secular, Ottoman before, Christian even before that and God only knows how far back the history stretches, peopling people of all sorts. The architecture is preserved and repurposed to suit the times, a key to its survival. A constant renaming and reclaiming.
Reclaiming.
Pritha loves to use this word. It was a fad around the time she was in college. If she were here, she would sit on my bed and ask me why I hate flowers. I would give her a non-answer like I just hate them, an impenetrable rock to bat her off. She, with the curiosity of a five-year-old, would badger me with question after another, try to therapise me, unearth my real aversion to flowers. She would then into a guru, dispensing aphorisms—only by acknowledging our past can we reclaim our present. And somehow, if she were here, she would conclude that why I hate flowers is a symptom of something deeper, something I needed to reckon with, because nothing in her world is random, or lacking a causal relationship with something else. All she needs to know is its various parts and connections: tighten a nut here, change the bolt there, this needs greasing, this needs a fresh coat of paint, and voila! you have a fix.
My mind is interesting to my granddaughter, and I wonder why. I am carbon copy of everyone else of my generation, and my daughter, I can see, is turning out to be more and more like her father. She dismisses my complaints saying I’m just trying to be difficult. ‘Flowers? Honestly? You picked a thing to hate on a whim to make my life hard.’ Pritha, though, is different, nothing like me or her mother or her father. She is sensitive like my son. I see how she is so alert to the world, how everything has meaning. She is always attentive, always ready to engage, and always so affected. I worry for her. I worry she absorbs the world like my son, lets it wash through her, and that one day she might lose hope. She has nothing to root her—she gave up her prayers like my son, and is utterly guided by her moral centre, it’s dizzying. She is all alone, relying on an amorphous sense of who she is as she treads through life trying to make it better for everyone.
She is usually so talkative and jovial that I forget how raw she really is—still a girl. And I wonder if I push her too far sometimes. The other day, while I was frying pudis for her in the kitchen, she asked me why I won’t move closer to her mother. After Alok passed away, Seema insisted I buy the apartment next to hers. ‘Your son is never around and is unreliable,’ Seema said. ‘Your. Son. Will. Not. Take. Care. Of. You. Why can’t you understand that?’ Her voice was shrill. At such a point, there is usually nothing better to do than put the phone down. She has Alok’s temper that dribbles and scatters across the room like marbles, clacking away in your bones. It yanks compliance from you. You are made to collect the pieces.
And that’s why I don’t move closer to her.
I thought Pritha would accept this, no questions. She herself had braved storms. I remember her little body stiff with shivers, eyes liquid, as her mother flew through the house, banging doors, smashing plates, threatening to leave, to die. I pitied her, how she spent so much of her childhood reassuring her mother she was loved, that she would take care of her. Such a large burden for such a small being.
Over the years, I have created a space for Pritha to talk to me about her problems with her mother. Where else would she go? Not Janak, I don’t want to isolate Seema. She’d come to me after her university classes, beers and peanuts late into the night. She always tries to find explanations for her mother, maybe it was her boarding school, maybe Janak, maybe patriarchy, the system, maybe her childhood. I tell her it’s easy to pin everything down to childhood because then you never have to be accountable for anything. And a lot of times, to be honest, it’s nature over nurture. Your children turn out to be serial killers—surely, you didn’t hold their hands to help them turn people into pies. She’d laugh, call me incorrigible. Pritha says despite all her mother’s flaws, she feels that her mother has more insight than her father. She says she really understands people, even if with all her yelling and shouting it doesn’t seem like it. Seema is aware of her own situation but doesn’t know how to get out of it. I wonder if she has similar evenings with her mother, talking about people, talking about me. But all in all, I always thought Pritha and I understood each other, that we were in this together.
‘So has mama’, my granddaughter said. She was standing by me in the kitchen, too close to the spluttering oil. It took me a while to realise she wasn’t talking about her mother anymore, she was talking about my son. ‘He has also inherited his father’s temper—nana’s temper, I mean.’ It was matter of fact. I was blindsided. She was talking about my son. What was she insinuating? Who was she? The way she pulled the kitchen roll, tore the napkin and placed it on the plates. The placidity in her movements. I wanted to destroy her, rob her of the comfort she took for granted. Her face was plain like she had said nothing of consequence, as if she was waiting for my response, like it was only a conversation. She knew nothing. What was she, twenty? Twenty-one? Brought up to become a career woman. Follow your heart, beta. Do what feels best for you, beta. Beta, this. Beta, that. What did she know about being rudely shoved out of this everlasting betahood of hers to wear the skin of an adult all too soon? How casually she made this accusation! Blaming me for loving my son more. Did she know how much I had prayed for him? How much I had to do to get him into this world? How much humiliation I suffered, from Alok, his family? What it felt like losing two children, two girls I had to kill, destroy, obliterate all trace of because there was no boy yet?
She stumbled away from me. I saw hurt, but also, something else. Sympathy. She recognised something in me. Something primitive.
I stub my cigarette in the ash tray, reach out for my bag on the bed. I want to talk to her. Hear her voice, see if everything is okay. She’s leaving for her postgrad soon—Environmental Studies in Germany—and I can’t help but feel she’s leaving me forever. I scroll down the names. They are all still as Alok had saved them. D, for daughter. S, for son. SIL, for my sister. GD, for granddaughter. It won’t connect. There’s no signal. I need to pay more for this call or something. Janak can help get the Wi-Fi. I walk to the other side of the bed for the intercom. He’s left a note with their room number.
‘Ji, nani ji,’ says Janak. ‘All okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Having fun?’
‘Janak, who is it?’ I hear Seema asking. She’s probably in the loo.
‘It’s nani ji,’ he says.
‘Is she okay? Everything okay?’ Frantic.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I just forgot what time breakfast is,’ I say.
‘We come to take you up at 9. Why? Are you hungry?’
‘No, no, no fuss. I was just wondering.’
‘Is she hungry?’ Seema asks.
‘She just called for the time for breakfast.’ Janak says.
‘Tell her we can be down earlier if she wants,’ Seema says.
‘We can come get you now if you want.’
‘No, I was only asking. Anyway, I’ll let you get on.’
‘Everything okay?’ Seema calls out again.
‘Yeah, she’s fine.’
‘Bye,’ I say.
A cool breeze blows in. The seagull is now on my windowsill looking at me. It’s too late to close the window. It may see it as an attack. I sit back down in the wheelchair by the window, hoping just my presence will shoo it away. But it meets me with the same unwavering gaze of my husband’s, judging me, as if I haven’t finished a task at hand. Well, I can’t complete it! Seema and Janak will think something is wrong if I try get them to do the Wi-Fi for me. Or Seema will be suspicious, might accuse me of wanting to call my son. Not even settled in, and she wants to dial her precious son. Is everything okay, my 50-year-old thumb sucking baby? I wish I could do it myself. I don’t know which button to press, or even what Wi-Fi is and how it is different from the other internet and why we need both. I don’t want to seem stupid to the people at reception either. It’s best to wait.
It was Alok who kept up with technology and did things for me. Not without first asking me a hundred questions. Why do you need it? Who told you about it? It’s bad for your health—these new things, the rays will kill you. I don’t trust it. Your son should be here doing this instead of me! Useless lout! Who will take care of us when I can no longer? What will you do once you’re connected anyway? He’d laugh. Write some urgent emails? Log your accounts? File your taxes? He would go on and on but fix it all the same. When Pritha was around, she would stop him. Even when she was little. No mean to nani, she would say in her baby voice. It took Alok by surprise too. I’m just playing, my jaan, he would lift her out of her chair and wink at me.
The seagull takes a step towards me. It winks. It winks? I wait to see if it’ll do it again. It looks back at me, a statue. I must get someone to shut the window for me. I get up to reach the phone, it takes another step in. A warning. The terrace with the family has more people now. The clatter of plates and laughter reaches me. Other seagulls have changed their positions. This seagull seems to take pleasure in the world’s disinterest in what’s happening here. Smug, oppressive.
‘Are you him?’ My voice, as if released from a crack, sounds weak and stupid. I’m flooded with embarrassment.
The phone rings, snaps me out of whatever hole I was sinking into. Startled, the seagull hops back. It takes me a while to get to it, my legs are stiff and my knees foggy with ache. I sit on the bed, my back to the seagull. Janak tells me he will come downstairs to collect me in half an hour. I keep the phone down. I’m overcome with fatigue. Half an hour still? This is why I didn’t want to come out with them. All this endless waiting, where I could’ve been doing something of my own. She insisted I come—what do you have to do anyway? We’ll put you in a wheelchair and the rest of the work is ours!—and after all this, and everything else, if I refused too hard, it would only confirm her fears, that I’ve never loved her. When I finally said yes, she said it would be good for me. My world is too small, limited to my building society. The holiday would help broaden my horizons.
After breakfast, we get to roam the neighbourhood or rest, my choice I was told. They have booked a cruise for the evening. We will first sail away from the setting sun, and then turn around to chase it as it starts to descend into the sea. The only thing I can think about is how I will board the boat. I don’t know what it is about cruises that Seema and Janak love so much. They book one in every city they visit. We did a similar thing in Goa. One person lifted me from the back, and one held me by the underarms in front. I felt like a child. The plastic seat made my body sore.
Tomorrow we’ll visit a couple of mosques, and a church, I can’t remember. I can already imagine what the day will look like. They’ll take turns wheeling me through the market. One of them will chaperon me as the other enters shops to look around. Seema might ask me to choose between two bags, holding them up across the glass door. She used to value my opinion, she liked to dress like me growing up. But in the end, she will buy a different third one because it’ll have more pockets or might suit a particular dress she will wear at some point in the long, long ten days that we’ll spend here.
I walk back to the window. I see the seagull flinch at my movement, then become still again. My knees burn. I set the remainder of my cigarette aside and drop the rest of the ash in a glass of water. An old habit to hide my smoking from Alok, when he was alive, now Seema, who nags me to show me she cares selflessly despite always being overlooked. I must ration my consumption, or I’ll have to conspire with Janak to fetch me more, and I don’t want to do that. I think of spraying deodorant for the smell but it’s unnecessary, the window is open after all.
I sit back in the wheelchair, feeling comfortable now with the seagull at the window. What’s the most it could do? It can’t want anything I have. There’s a notepad and pen on the side table. I will write something. The seagull continues to watch me, eyes glinting like it’s amused, like Alok would’ve been if he ever saw me sitting with notepad and pen, gazing into the distance. He would’ve made a joke about me writing a book and might’ve even suggested a name for it—‘The Genius of My Husband,’ something he made me repeat after him when he fixed something around the house. The pen and notepad feel alien in my hands and if the seagull is truly my husband and can read my thoughts, it will be quite pleased with itself.
Pritha recommends journaling to everyone. Especially her father. She thinks he needs a good, long cry. No one has ever seen him cry. No one. Not even his mother, apparently. Janak shrugs and says he has nothing to be sad about. There’s so much to be grateful for. God has given us everything. In a country like ours, being our kind of people, we can’t afford to complain. This is his staple dialogue. Pritha says his speeches make her queasy. She picks up the front of her kurta and pretends to vomit in it.
My husband was a lot like Janak. Their similarities aren’t apparent because Alok was a person of his time. Sometimes, Alok was spiteful. Once, early in our marriage, the pressure cooker gasket broke. I had to boil the chickpeas in an open saucer. It took hours. Alok waited at the dining table till the food was laid. I overcompensated for my lateness with salad, raita, chole, pudis, achaar and some halwa. He served himself everything. Then left his full plate on the table, collected the car keys from under the divan mattress and drove off. The next morning, a box of chocolates and flowers, I grew with my own hands, were left on my bedside table. This was how it always was. He’d get angry, then leave me a little gift and flowers in the morning and return to his jovial self as if everything was resolved.
Janak is subtler, more refined, and when I talk to my sister about him, she accuses me of nitpicking. And I guess it is nitpicking of a sort. So many of us have had it worse, no doubt. But that’s the thing about Janak—he leaves just enough room for people to wonder if they are reading too much into things. He always praises Seema’s cooking, and the truth is, whatever her flaws, Seema is truly a great cook. I enjoyed her cooking more than my own. Only, she doesn’t cook as much now. When Pritha was very young, Janak would do this funny thing. Seema made dal, sabzi, roti—all things that any good mother might feed her child, even if they don’t yet have a taste for it. After the food was laid on the table, Janak—and I saw how it all transpired—he would wait for Pritha to take a couple of bites, because the rule was she must taste everything once before rejecting it, a rule instated by Janak himself, seemingly a compromise recommended by a neutral party, but, really, which child would take a few bites and say they want to continue eating dal and chawal where the alternative is pizza, or burger or butter chicken? So, she would take a couple of bites and as expected, Pritha, didn’t want anymore. She was too kind to actually push her plate away like other bratty children do, but Janak would wait till Seema had seen Pritha had tried the food and didn’t want it anymore. Pritha made zigzags in her dal, the patta-ghobi decorated the sides of the plate. Seema stood by the dining table, her forehead soaked in sweat, chimta in hands dusted with flour, watching Pritha. They had already had so many arguments about this, and I would see Seema holding back another outburst because of my presence. She went back to the kitchen and dumped everything in the bin with a pronounced thwack. ‘I love it,’ Janak would say, loud enough for Seema to hear over the sound of the exhaust fan, ‘but we can’t keep forcing her to eat this.’ Eventually, the kitchen became a container for packaged food, and the microwave was the only functioning appliance.
The phone rings again. Walking back and forth is getting more painful. It’s probably fatigue from the travel. The seagull looks on unsympathetically. It’s all a big fat joke to it.
‘I’ll carry your medicine drops to the terrace. You need to have them just before breakfast. I hope you haven’t eaten anything from the mini fridge.’ It’s Janak.
‘I haven’t.’
‘Not the baklava either?’
‘What is baklava?’
‘The sweet on the welcome tray above the fridge.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know there were sweets in that box.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t check. Anyway, I’ll come get you in a bit.’
It’s hard to hold anything against Janak for too long. Everyone needs him. He makes himself indispensable. He is like a garlic press or an apple corer. You don’t know what it’s for, then you start using it and then you can’t do without it. When Janak got richer, he had more time on his hands. He started helping around the house and always did it with ease. Seema retreated, surrendering one task after another to him. He fulfils all the needs of the family. Even gives Pritha the stability and affection for two parents.
It’s not that Seema didn’t try to resist its creeping, seductive quality: to give up and leave everything for Janak to handle. She fought, she complained, she brought it to everyone’s notice she wanted to be valued, she wanted to have worth, she wanted to be loved and remembered. She even ran away from home to us. In theory, she had all of those things. Janak loved her and gave her what he could. Having just about everything you want is impossible. But Seema accused me of never understanding her, of lying to her that she would find peace in motherhood, that marriage is a compromise and teaches us patience, that god helps those who help themselves. What else was I to say to her? This was life, and there is no explanation for it. All we can do is make it up.
I don’t know what it was, the sobriety of age, or the influence of Janak, or the fact that he had now given up on our son and was only left with a daughter: Alok chose this as his big moment of patience, he sat and listened to her in her childhood bedroom. They were in there for hours, and I don’t know how much he really understood, but he came out, touched my shoulder, and said to me, you did always love your son more, didn’t you?
My eyes sting. The flowers on the wall seem to animate in swirls, they imprint on the bed, the desk, the fridge, the door, I look back, even the seagull is standing stiff in this projection of flowers. Tiny flowers dancing in the sky, on the roofs, in the voices of the indifferent families, the sounds of the thud and creaking on the hotel floor, it imprints on my skin, my hands. I jerk my hands. I want it off. I stand up. My legs revolt, I fall, the flowers dance on the floor. I look up, the seagull looms large on the windowsill, sneering at me. It walks backward, the flowers still tattooing its feathers. It turns around and takes flight. Up and up. It’s powerful wings propelling it forward, over the roofs, the sea, the bridge, the domes, the minaret, a white dot in the blue sky, still visible. The dot gets bigger. It’s on its way back. It swoops through the room. Flap, flap, flap, it pokes holes into the tulip petals. Flap, flap, flap, slashes the wallpaper. I feel a sound, full and large, leave my body. It’s continuous and doesn’t want to stop. It carries with it all my days, months, centuries. Footsteps hurry down the stairs. The seagull is perched on the fridge, its face blank.
‘Ma? Are you okay? Ma?’ Knock. Knock. Knock. ‘I’m coming in.’
The seagull tears through the box of baklava, picks one up and flies away.
