FIFTEEN DAYS
by Eugene Datta
​
For fifteen days in a row, Zoya hasn’t said a word about death or dying. This is the longest lull since the problem started five months ago. There have been periods of quiet before, the longer ones usually stretching to five or six days. A week at the most, not more than that. Now fifteen days! It’s a miracle, although we’re not sure how long it will last.
Zoya is my only child. She’s almost six, and like any single child of a single mother, thinks her mother—this five-foot-seven, sixty-one kilo shapeless center of her tiny universe—can solve all the riddles of life. And answer all her questions: Why did Daddy leave us? Will you also die like Nani (my mother)? Why do Ramu and Laxmi and their mother sleep on the road? Where will they go if it starts to rain?
“Daddy” is my ex-husband Zubin. A man with a heart of gold, and with so much patience and such incredible tolerance for nonsense, that even Mr. Singh’s noisy, foul-mouthed parrot couldn’t get him angry when we were living in his Moira Street flat. Mr. Singh lived next door. He was a retired music teacher, and the bird was his only companion. It sat in a cage just outside our bedroom window and screamed Who the fuck is that? every time it heard something. Shut up, you junglee bastard! And then it sang Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. It did that all day long. The weekdays were fine, because we were not at home the whole day, but the weekends were a nightmare. Zubin laughed every time he heard the bird, and begged me not to say anything to Mr. Singh. “The bird is all he has, the poor man,” he’d say.
There were countless other proofs of his kindness, but as a husband…well, a disaster would be putting it mildly. He didn’t have the slightest clue about the role, about what it meant to be a husband. The whole time we were together, he behaved like, so what he was married? he could carry on minding his own business the way he always had. He didn’t know how to inhabit the space next to the woman he was living with, make it at least halfway full, as a partner. As a married man. He had no intuition or drive for that. I still wonder how I could’ve overlooked this gaping hole in him when we were seeing each other. How could it take me so long to realize that Zubin was a top-notch corporate professional, a good neighbor, a caring friend, but not a family man. Not even a good father!
​
Zoya is obsessed with death. Not just with the idea and the fact of it—that every living thing dies, and everyone she knows, including herself, will die one day—but also with the ways in which it can happen. Violent, painful, gruesome ways. Like accidents—people getting run over by buses and trucks, or falling from tall buildings. Limbs getting cut off. I have no idea what triggered all this in her. Zubin thinks it’s something she watched on TV. He blames it on Cartoon Network.
​
It all started just before Christmas last year. She came home from school one day and started talking about Jesus. Miss Sen, their English teacher, had told them stories about Christmas, stories she’d heard countless times before. “Mama, did Jesus cry when they put him on the cross?” she asked. “Those nails?” She held up her left hand, the right forefinger in the middle of the palm.
“Zoya, Christmas is about his birth,” I said. “Why are we talking about the cross? Did Miss Sen say anything about it?”
“No.” She shook her head.
“Then?”
She walked away, distracted, saying she needed to go to the toilet.
The next day, I was tucking her into bed when she started to cry. Suddenly! Lips pressed tight, face twisted and her body jerking like she wasn’t a child but a woman in labor. It reminded me of when I was giving birth to her. “What happened?” I asked, scared that something terrible must have happened inside this small fragile body of hers. “Is your belly hurting? Did you hurt yourself in school today? Do you want me to call the doctor?”
She shook her head. “The nails,” she said through her racking sobs.
That’s how it started. At least that’s when I noticed it for the first time. Jesus and his crucifixion kept coming up. Which is odd because we’re not even Christian, like most families who send their kids to Carmel Primary School. The subject carries no additional meaning for us.
I was convinced that it was all the crosses and the pictures of Jesus she sees in school that had started this nightmare. Then this happens: Zoya and I are lying on the sofa on a Sunday morning after breakfast. Now that Christmas is behind us, we’re talking about what we’ll do on New Year’s Eve, which is only a day away. We’re invited to two of my colleagues—Malavika (she and I have been grinding away together as ticket agents for years), and Vikram, our head of sales at the city office. Both have children who are roughly Zoya’s age, and we cannot decide whether to go to both places or choose one.
​
“Look,” I say, “we’ll have to be back home by nine because JD will wait for us.” JD is short for Jogen Das, a former colleague who’s fast becoming the second light of my life, after Zoya. He spends three or four days a week in our flat, and is now thinking of moving in permanently. “So maybe we should only visit Malavika Auntie?” I suggest. “So that we don’t get late?”
Zoya is holding my right hand in both of hers, her head resting against my right shoulder. “Mama?” she says.
“Yes?”
“Mama?”
“Go on, Zoya, I’m listening. What is it?”
“If your hand….”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“If it gets cut off…,” she pauses.
“What?”
“If your hand gets cut off…will it die…alone? Before you do?”
​
*
We wound up staying at home on New Year’s Eve. I texted Malavika and Vikram saying I couldn’t come because I was a bit unwell. I was, in fact, far worse.
​
“Oh, Seema…Seema,” JD sighed, putting the takeaway boxes from Mocambo on the table—matar paneer, chana masala, dal makhani, stuffed tandoori chicken, peas pulao and naan—my favorite dishes all, but today I had no appetite for any of them. He put the plastic bag in the bin and washed his hands in the kitchen sink. “There’s no reason for you to be so worked up about it just yet.” He shook his head reassuringly, looking me in the eye, drying his hands. “Let Ghoshal Uncle talk to her and tell us what he thinks. He’s the best child psychologist we have here, believe me. And I’m not saying this because he’s a family friend. The guy’s good.” Stepping closer, JD put his arms around my shoulders, the kitchen towel still in his hand. “Seema,” he said. The smell of food made my stomach turn. He pressed his lips to mine.
​
“You smell of beer,” I said, stepping back.
“Had one while waiting for the food,” he said half apologetically. “Do you want one?”
“Maybe a gin.”
He made me one with tonic water, a slice of lime and a lot of ice. I like it with a lot of ice. I finished it in three or four gulps. It was a few minutes past eight, still too early for Zoya to be ready for bed. Plus, it was the New Year’s Eve. If we’d gone to either Malavika’s or Vikram’s, we wouldn’t be back yet. She was watching Dora, The Explorer on DVD.
After the second drink, which I had more slowly, I fed Zoya—she ate a bit of peas pulao and a few pieces of paneer—and got her ready for bed. “Good night, my angel,” I whispered, pulling the duvet up to her chin and smoothing it down with both hands. Switching off her bedside lamp, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. “Happy New Year, Zoya,” I said.
“Happy New Year, Mama,” she cooed. Then, as I was walking away from her bed, she said, “Mama?”
“Yes?” I paused at the door, glad she couldn’t see my face. Her room was dark and the light from the living room was behind me.
“Big girls don’t cry.”
“No, they don’t,” I said, somehow suppressing a howl. “You’re right. Sleep tight, baby!”
JD had laid the table for the two of us—the food out of the takeaway boxes and into appropriate bowls, each with a serving spoon in it, plates and glasses, forks, knives and spoons, and paper napkins. A half-finished bottle of Bombay Sapphire, a plate of sliced lime. And between our two plates, in the middle of the table, a candle. I couldn’t help thinking that my ex had never done anything like that.
“What we’re doing here…,” he paused, twisting the ice tray to get a few more cubes into my glass.
I waited as he finished getting my gin ready. He was drinking beer.
“What’s happening….” He handed me the drink and sat down. “Is that…I’m not sure, of course…not an expert…but it seems to me that…that this is what Ghoshal Uncle would call catastrophizing.”
I was looking at his face. He’s so good-looking it’s scary. When his eyes moved to the food on his plate, or when he reached for his glass of beer, I kept looking. It felt a little strange—looking at him when he wasn’t looking at me. Like I was overstepping some boundary, intruding into a space I hadn’t been granted access to. I thought about how all the female members on the staff had fallen for JD when he joined the company. There wasn’t a single woman who didn’t have a crush on him. Except me, of course. And that was not only because I was still married to Zubin, but also because I was too busy looking for a way out of the suffocating cage my relationship with Zubin had become. And being interested in another man didn’t seem like the right way out. Even when the man was someone like JD, who, besides being so insanely attractive, was also quite approachable. I wasn’t interested in anything that could lead to another emotional incarceration.
“Maybe you’ve never heard a child say what Zoya does—”
“Have you?” I asked without letting him finish.
“I can’t tell you if I have or not. Maybe I haven’t. But the point is…that doesn’t mean anything. I mean, it doesn’t necessarily mean that…it’s a problem. The fact that she says what she does sometimes.” He took a gulp of beer. “All I’m saying is let’s not jump to conclusions. Let’s wait until the expert tells us what it is. And meanwhile….” JD paused.
I remembered what Malavika used to say about him. Take the face of Omar Sharif, she’d say, gesturing as if she was holding it in her right hand, the Omar Sharif of Dr. Zhivago, minus the mustache, and plop it onto Robert Redford’s. She’d put the right hand on top of her left with a clapping sound. Darken the mix a bit and what you get is Jogen Das. She was dead right. And she had a thing for him, too. “And meanwhile what?” I asked.
He lowered his head to put some food in his mouth. The candle’s flame shone like a third eye in the middle of his forehead. Then he turned to pick up his glass of beer, the tip of the flame dancing menacingly below the lower lid of his right eye. As if it was aiming for the eye and would reach it any moment. A chill ran down my spine. I moved my chair to the right so that the candle was no longer in the middle.
“How about eating?” He caught me staring at him. “You haven’t touched your food.”
“Not hungry yet.” I smiled.
“You shouldn’t be drinking on an empty stomach.”
I ate a few scraps of naan with I forget what, and had a few more drinks. By the time it was midnight, my head was like a whirlpool with a constantly changing center of gravity.
JD came around to my side of the table. Holding my face in both hands, he kissed me. “Happy New Year,” he whispered, a riot of tandoori chicken, onion and beer on his breath.
“Happy New Year.” I smiled as tears rolled down my face.
The sound of the fireworks outside was a continuous rumble punctuated every now and then by a deafening blast close to the house. I feared Zoya might wake up, but she didn’t. JD took me by the hand and led me to the window overlooking the street. He pulled the curtain to one side. The sky looked like an animated burst bouquet. Like it had on that Diwali night five years ago. I’d come here to visit Ammi. She’d gone downstairs for a Diwali get-together, so I was alone at home with Zoya, who was not yet a year old. I’d stood exactly where I was standing now, holding her in my arms, the back of my right hand touching the cold marble ledge. The window was closed but the sight of the street below through the clear glass had sent a violent shiver down my spine. The height—the distance between where I was and the ground! What if I…?
I’d slumped down on the floor, holding Zoya tightly, paralyzed by the worst possible fear. I’d stayed that way for a long time, my back to the window, not daring to stand up, until Ammi rang the bell. After that, I’d never stood here with Zoya in my arms.
“I want to go to bed,” I said to JD.
​
*
​
Although the thought of divorce had been in my mind for a while, getting more and more well-defined as the days, weeks and months went by, letting it out, letting Zubin know that, wasn’t easy. You know, Zubin, I think it’s best if…I think, um…we tried our best, but… for our own sake…and for the sake of Zoya… I kept rehearsing the lines in my head, speaking them out loud when I was alone. But no matter how I arranged the words, each string of them had this awful ring to it, stoking nothing but guilt in me. Plus, when was the right time to bring up the subject? When could I possibly say these things to him? Our marriage was bland, lackluster, boring, but that also meant that you couldn’t really find moments in it that were truly unpleasant. Moments that could give you the excuse, make you angry enough to say, That’s it, enough!
​
Then there were the worries about Zoya, who was besotted with her father. Although he hardly spent any time with her, she always pretended to be playing with him if he was around. It didn’t matter that he rarely responded to what she said or did. He just had to be there for her to come up with these elaborate make-believe games, which were so one-sided it was heartbreaking to watch them. But she was fine. She was happy! So I worried how our divorce might affect her.
Ammi was still around when I’d started to have these thoughts, which worried her. “No, Seema, no!” she said to me. “Don’t do that. For her sake. No one is perfect. At least he’s a good man!”
I didn’t want to argue with her, but it didn’t mean much to me—that he was a good man. Not anymore. If anything, I felt suffocated by that sterile, unmoving I’m-such-a-good-guy air about him. Even when he sensed that I was drifting away, his behavior didn’t change.
It was around this time that Mr. Singh had lost his parrot. Zubin paid him several visits, and at home talked about how sad he was that the bird had died. And I thought, So the death of your neighbor’s pet is more important to you than the death of your own marriage? I didn’t tell him that, of course, but that’s how I felt. He behaved like his feelings for me and Zoya weren’t any different from what he felt for Mr. Singh. Or even that stupid bird! And the irony was that it was exactly this side of his personality that had attracted me to him—that he was equally good to everyone.
Funny how things change. Or don’t. Zubin remained the man he’d been when we were still dating. He treated domestic life, which for him now included a wife and a child, as though its demands weren’t any different from those of a candlelight dinner at a fine restaurant. As though all were good as long as he was courteous, had a good time himself, picked up the check at the end and left a generous tip. It was not up to him to worry about how the table had been laid or the food cooked. He was the guest. Never mind that it was his own flat that we were living in.
“I haven’t been the mother I can be,” I’d said to Ammi. “I’m too unhappy. I have to leave him someday. Before it’s too late. I have to do that for Zoya’s sake!”
Zubin had moved back to Bombay. He hadn’t seen his daughter since last August. And I wasn’t so keen on calling him about the stuff she’d been talking about, but JD said, “No matter what it is, he needs to know.”
It was the beginning of the second week of January. Zoya’s school had reopened. My anxieties about her had worsened over the past couple of weeks, making my start into the new year the shakiest, the most uncertain I’d ever had.
Zubin answered promptly even though he was at work. “Seema, what a surprise!” he said cheerfully. “Happy New Year once again!” He’d sent a message on the 31st with his good wishes and an ecard for me and Zoya. “What’s up?”
“Do you have a few minutes?” I said.
I told him everything in as much detail as my memory permitted. Pointing out somewhere in the middle that I didn’t expect him to do anything about it, but thought it was important that he knew. He needed to know the phase his daughter was in.
When I was done, he said, “Look, I think you’re reading too much into it. Kids her age have all kinds of thoughts and ideas. They’re finding out about things—life, death, dying—all kinds of things. Right? And it’s not easy. And then they watch stuff on the TV. Who knows what that does to their young minds? I mean the stuff they see in newspapers and magazines or on the screen—it can definitely color their imagination. Make them think and imagine in ways you and I didn’t when we were kids. Because all we had back then were books, right? Comic books, yes, but books! None of this audiovisual stuff.”
“Well, comic books can also color your imagination, can’t they?” I said meekly.
“Sure. But not like today’s audiovisual media. Have you seen how violent some of these animation films are? They should stop airing them on channels like Cartoon Network.”
“But…disembodied hands…on Cartoon Network?”
“Ah, that!” Zubin laughed. “But that was a good question, wasn’t it? Will the hand die alone? Wow! Quite philosophical, if you ask me. I’d be impressed by the question…coming from a six-year-old. Not alarmed.”
*
​
Two weeks later, we got our first appointment with Dr. Ghoshal. Zoya wanted to know why we were going to see a doctor. And why all three of us were going.
“He’s a childhood friend of JD’s father,” I told her. “JD calls him Ghoshal Uncle. He wants to meet us.”
“Then why don’t we invite him to our house?”
“Yes—”
“Are we going to his house?”
“We’re going to his office. And yes, of course, we’ll invite him once we get to know him. We’ll do that for sure. And also…he wants to talk to you.”
“Me? About what?”
“The things you talk to me about. You know, like…Jesus.”
Zoya shrugged her dainty shoulders and instantly resumed her conversation with the stuffed toys propped against the armrest of the sofa.
It was a cold, gloomy day when we went to see Dr. Ghoshal. Both the light and the temperature seemed somewhat unusual for a late-January day in Calcutta. Almost matching the unusual nature of what we were doing—taking Zoya to a child psychologist.
After JD introduced me and Zoya to Dr. Ghoshal, he continued talking to us as if we’d really just dropped in to say hello. He talked about how JD’s father and he had been best friends since they were in primary school. “No one in the world was as close to me as his father,” he said. “Not even any of my siblings.” He talked about their boyhood dreams and how they changed every two years or so. He asked me if my job was a dream-come-true for me.
“I wanted to be a lawyer,” I told him.
“And I wanted to be a pilot,” he laughed. “I mean, I wanted to be many things, but being a pilot was a wish that stayed with me the longest. And I don’t know if you know…you may not,” he glanced at JD, “but Jogen wanted to be a psychologist.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, looking at JD.
“I just wanted to copy my hero,” he laughed, pointing at Dr. Ghoshal.
Zoya had got up from her chair in the meantime and walked over to a sideboard on the other side of the room. There were a few toys lying on the sideboard. She stood there looking at them.
“Zoya, do you like them?” Dr. Ghoshal said.
She nodded.
“Oh, then you’ll like what’s in the next room. Go take a look.”
After she’d walked in to the other room, Dr. Ghoshal stood up. “About twenty minutes, I’d say,” he said softly. He picked up one of the toys from the sideboard, entered the room and gently closed the door behind him.
My heart started to race. It was as if my life itself was hanging in the balance. Everything seemed to depend on what this man was going to say about my daughter. Maybe it’s all because of our divorce! I hadn’t grown up believing in prayers and didn’t know any. But, in my mind, I kept saying, Please, please, please, please don’t let this happen to her. I had no idea who I was saying this to. Maybe to Ammi and Appu, my only gods, who were dead. As if being dead had given them the power to protect Zoya in a way I couldn’t. He’d gone before I started to work. I’d just finished college and the life ahead seemed to shimmer with possibilities, when he suddenly died. And Ammi died when Zoya turned four—two and a half months after her fourth birthday. I remembered Ammi’s face every time she held Zoya in her arms. “My little Zoya Jeejee,” she’d coo. She loved calling her that, dropping the last bit of Zubin’s family name Jeejeebhoy. I’d never seen her face shine the way it did when she was near her granddaughter. Please, Ammi, don’t let this happen to your Zoya Jeejee, I heard myself saying under my breath. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. My fault. My fault!
On the wall behind us a clock ticked loudly. My right hand felt clammy. I realized JD was holding it with both of his. He gave it a squeeze and let go of it as Dr. Ghoshal walked in.
Dr. Ghoshal told Zoya she could stay in the room and continue playing. He left the door open and came and sat in his chair. “So,” he said. He threw quick glances at both of us and smiled. When neither of us said anything—I was too full of anxiety to ask any question, and maybe JD just wanted to hear the doctor talk—he began, “Okay, so…it seems to me that she doesn’t have any deficits in terms of…empathy, the ability to bond with others, the ability to experience feelings adequately and express them, etc. These are some of the basic things you’d look at when you’re trying to understand a child’s behavior…and see if there’s any problem there.” He paused. “And there doesn’t seem to be any as far as I could see. As for the thoughts…,” he paused again. “Well, she mentioned Jesus. And the cross, the nails, etc. These thoughts seem to recur from time to time. And she doesn’t like them.”
“Did she say anything about…someone’s hand getting cut off?” I asked.
“No, she didn’t.” Dr. Ghoshal shook his head. Then he said, “We all have thoughts popping into our heads now and then that we don’t like. Unpleasant thoughts. Scary thoughts. They’re products of our alarm system. One of the brain’s many ways of keeping us safe. So that we stay away from harmful things, sharp objects. Knives, nails, etc. So, having these thoughts is hardly unusual. What we have to see is how frequently she’s having them. And are they so intrusive that her normal life is affected? That’s the key question.”
Zoya walked back into the room looking like she had a good time doing whatever she’d been doing.
“So, Zoya,” Dr. Ghoshal said, turning to her. “Do you want to play that fun game again?”
Zoya nodded with a shy smile.
“Brilliant! Let’s do it next week, then. Okay?” He turned back to us and smiled. “Same time next week?”
JD and I looked at each other and nodded. “Yes,” I said.
As he walked us to the door, he said, “Bring her next week, and maybe one more time. That should be enough.”
*
Apart from the roughly three and a half years of my married life with Zubin, which I spent in his flat on Moira Street, I’d never left this old apartment of ours in Ballygunge Park. I was Zoya’s age when we moved here. This 1800-square-foot, three-bedroom unit on the 5th floor of an apartment house that had just been built. It was our own place—the only place we’d ever owned—and we were proud of it. We’d spent the happiest years of our lives here. And in the unhappy times—when Ammi and I lost Appu, and when Zoya and I lost Ammi—being here had given us solace. It was as if, as long as we were here, we weren’t cut off from the part of life in which Appu and Ammi were alive. They’d occupied this exact same space, and being here gave us a tangible sense of continuity. A sense that what we’d lost wasn’t entirely lost after all.
Zubin had continued to visit Zoya here until he moved back to Bombay last August. And JD started spending more time with us almost as soon as Zubin left Calcutta. It was obviously because of Zoya, although he never said so. He’d been worrying about how she might react to not seeing her father for months at a time. And the possible psychological effect of such a prolonged absence of one parent. He started going to ridiculous lengths to entertain Zoya. He’d spend hours doing up the dollhouse with her, play with her stuffed toys and pretend he was one of them. He’d ask her about her school, her friends (the names of whom he’d learned by heart) and listen to her attentively. He’d read her stories, play hide and seek with her, do silly dances on the floor, sing silly songs—none of which Zubin had ever done. None of which I’d ever expected JD to do. But there he was, he’d created a role for himself almost overnight, and completely voluntarily, without the slightest hint or suggestion from me or anyone else. And he fit it to a T.
Now he’s showing signs that my worries about Zoya might have spread to his mind too. How does that make me feel? Relieved, of course—at least to an extent. A sudden lightening of the emotional load, now that there’s another soul willing to carry some of it. But it hasn’t come without a price tag of guilt. I feel like I’ve put on his shoulders a burden that wasn’t his, was never meant to be. And I haven’t done it out of anything more glorious than just a selfish need of emotional relief.
His thoughts about what needs to be done about her have changed since our second appointment with Dr. Ghoshal. Which I thought had gone as well as the first, but somehow JD wasn’t quite satisfied.
“Shouldn’t we consider talk therapy?” he’d asked the doctor. “Maybe five or six formal sessions?” But Dr. Ghoshal didn’t agree, saying there wasn’t any clear goal to set for such a process with Zoya. “What she has is not really a problem,” he said. “But she hasn’t stopped having those thoughts,” JD said, and Dr. Ghoshal said there was no need to worry about that. “Thinking isn’t doing, Jogen,” he said. “We’re not our thoughts.” He said the important thing was to make sure we weren’t missing any cues. And he thought we hadn’t. He said we could all help her realize that a bad thought was just that—a bad thought. Just a thought, nothing more than that. Nothing that could do us any harm. So there was no need for her to be scared of an unpleasant thought even when it was about death. And no need for us to be scared of Zoya talking about death. “The mind is growing,” he said. “It’s exploring new terrains of experience. There will be questions, often difficult ones. We have to be careful that we don’t end up pathologizing normal behavior.” He insisted we didn’t need more than one more session with him.
Our final appointment with Dr. Ghoshal was in early March, a good three weeks after the second session. And it was during these three weeks that I’d seen the first signs of hope. The gap between Zoya’s questions about pain, old age and death had started to increase. It was between three and six days now, which was a huge improvement. What happens to the body if someone dies? she asked one day. It rots, I told her. Dr. Ghoshal had said we needed to be honest in our answers. And I told her about the customs through which different communities deal with their dead. Which was the hard part. She couldn’t believe birds would eat the body of her father, and JD’s would be burned. Somehow, burial seemed more acceptable. But the weight of so much earth? That bothered her.
*
Under the white cotton sheet, our naked bodies touched one another along the flanks. The sweat that had covered them moments ago fast evaporating, our breathing back to its normal rhythm. We lay staring at the ceiling as the AC whirred softly. The light on the night table on JD’s side of the bed was on.
“I’m almost scared to confess it,” I said.
“What?” JD turned on his side and propped his head on his left hand.
“That I’m not scared anymore.”
He smiled.
“For the first time since December, I can see the nightmare fading. I can see light at the end of the tunnel. Dr. Ghoshal was so right. Didn’t he say…whatever the trigger was, it was going to lose its effect soon? It’s been a month since we saw him last and look how things have changed. It doesn’t happen more than once a week these days. It’s almost unbelievable.”
“You’re right.”
“So, maybe there’s no need for us to see any other doctor? Maybe you should stop trying to get in touch with this young psychiatrist?”
“I forgot to tell you that I just heard from her. She’ll be back in May and will let me know when she is. But if you think there’s no need to see her—”
“Do you think there’s any?”
“Well, I just thought…why not get a second opinion? You know? From a younger professional. Just to make sure everything is really okay. You know what I mean?” He stroked my hair. “It’s not as if…I don’t have enough faith in Ghoshal Uncle. As I’ve said many times before, I think he’s very, very good.” He paused. “I just wanted to make sure we’ve looked at everything there is to look at. You know? Make sure we aren’t missing anything.”
“Are we missing anything?”
“I hope not,” he said.
*
​
The heat has been unbearable since the middle of March. It’s the beginning of May and the temperature has already reached the upper 30s. The forecast for next week is worse; it will be 45 degrees or more in some parts of West Bengal. There will be reports of heat-related deaths from across the state, maybe many more this year than before. Over the last few days, all I’ve heard people talk about—at work, in shops, on the street—is the nor’wester, the Kalboishakhi. For all the damage it does, it also brings relief from the heat ahead of the monsoon. And right now, that’s the one thing that seems to be on everyone’s mind—relief from the heat.
Zoya is worried about Ramu and his mother and sister. The heat is one thing, but how will they cope with a storm? What will happen to the few things they have? The pots and the pans, the pieces of rags they’ve gathered together to soften the concrete on which they sleep, their pile of bags and the blue sheet of plastic, their roof—it’ll be the first thing to go if a storm breaks out. Since they came and settled on that spot on the pavement in mid-February, there’s been a couple of rain showers, but no storm. And Zoya doesn’t want any. No matter how awful the heat is, she doesn’t want the rains to come until Ramu and his family have found a home.
“It’s a good thing Zoya worries about Ramu and his family,” Dr. Ghoshal had said to us. “It shows she has an empathetic mind.”
The boy must be fifteen or sixteen, and his sister four or five years younger, although she looks much smaller than a girl that age. She’s as skinny as their mother, who looks years older than she is. I’ve had to ask the boy his name, and his sister’s—Zoya wanted to know. And once she got to know their names, she started insisting we send them food every day. “No, not every day, Zoya,” I’d say to her, annoyed by her doggedness. Although, since then, we’ve been doing it fairly regularly, dropping off small bags of leftovers, or packets of uncooked rice, lentils, and potatoes every few days. Along with a bit of money, usually about ten rupees; sometimes a bit more, sometimes less. And every day, several times a day, Zoya stands at the living-room window looking down at the blue plastic-covered corner of the pavement. Sometimes, on her way back from school, she’d linger a few moments at the entrance to our building to wave at them.
“Where is Ramu and Laxmi’s father?” Zoya asks.
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
“I cannot. It’s inappropriate to ask such questions.”
“What is ini…propiate?”
“Not polite.”
“Are they poor because their father is not there?”
I’m trying to come up with an answer when JD walks in. Every time he walks into a room, he displaces a volume of space in the minds of the people there. A bit like that story of Archimedes getting into his bathtub. Except, in this case, the displaced space is far more than the volume of his body. At least that’s how I feel. That’s the kind of hopeless bathtub my mind is when it comes to this man.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” he says. “Just wanted to find out what you wanted for dinner. There’s a cloud buildup, so we should hurry up.”
Fifteenth day today. And JD can barely hide his excitement. He’s perky like a little boy. He’s been that way all day long.
“Don’t we do Mocambo every time we’re happy?” I smile.
“Mocambo it will be then.” JD takes a mock bow, making Zoya giggle. “And the same dishes, of course?”
I nod, throwing him a kiss. Zoya does the same.
After dinner, I get Zoya ready for bed. She doesn’t like the AC, so we always leave at least one of her widows open during the summer months. Unless it rains. And today it hasn’t, despite the cloud buildup. I tuck her into bed and kiss her goodnight. I turn out the lights in her room and, walking out, close the door behind me.
Walking to the living room, I feel the pull of an eagerness I haven’t felt in a very long time. I cannot wait to join JD. I cannot wait for us to start celebrating what feels almost like the resumption of life itself.
He hands me my glass. “Fifteen days,” he says.
“Fifteen days,” I say, tears starting to roll down my face.
He puts down his glass and steps closer to hold me in his arms.
We stand like that for a while, not saying a word. Just being close, both to each other and to the moment. And feeling grateful. And yes, happy, too. Then I hear it—from within the folds of JD’s arms and the wheeze of his alcohol-quickened breath. It takes me a moment to realize it’s a human scream. And then I recognize Zoya’s voice in it. My heart misses a beat. A chill runs down my spine. I drop my glass to the floor and tear myself out of JD’s arms, and rush to her room.
Zoya’s body is bunched up against the corner of her headboard, her shriek piercing every living cell in mine. I see something dark lying close to where her head was on the bed. It’s a bat. Lying in a pool of blood on the pink linen sheet. Its wings twitching a few times and then falling perfectly still. The poor creature must have strayed into the room through the open window and flown into the ceiling fan.
I pick Zoya up and carry her out of the room as JD walks in. He steps aside to let us pass.
“Is the bat dead?” she asks.
I pretend not to hear her as I push open the door to my room.
“Mama, is the bat dead?”
“Yes, it is,” I say, my body beginning to shake as violently as hers.
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from The Color of Noon Copyright © 2024 by Eugene Datta.
Reprinted with the permission of Serving House Books.
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Eugene Datta is the author of the poetry collection Water & Wave (Redhawk, 2024) and the story collection The Color of Noon (Serving House Books, 2024). His work has appeared in publications such as The Dalhousie Review, Main Street Rag, Mantis, Common Ground Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Dialogist, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Stiftung Laurenz-Haus fellowship, he has held residencies at Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, and Fundación Valparaíso. A native of Calcutta, he lives with his wife and two children in Aachen, Germany.