Chapter 3: Achha Aadmi (A Good Man)

Farhan Siddiqui was seventy-three and he had been alone for four years and the aloneness had produced in him the particular condition that Indian men of his generation developed when their wives died: domestic incompetence. Not the incompetence of inability — Farhan was a retired professor of English literature at Fergusson College and his intellect was beyond question. The incompetence of domesticity. The wife had cooked. The wife had cleaned. The wife had managed the house. The husband had read books and gone to college and come home and eaten the food and slept in the clean bed and had not, at any point in fifty years of marriage, learned how the food arrived or the bed became clean. Nasreen's death had revoked the arrangement. The food did not arrive. The bed did not clean itself. And the man who had never learned was required to learn at seventy-three, the learning being the particular indignity that widowhood imposed on men who had been waited on their entire lives.

His bungalow was three doors down from Ananya's building. One of the old Kothrud bungalows that had survived the apartment epidemic — the epidemic that had transformed the neighbourhood from bungalows-with-gardens to towers-with-parking-problems. Farhan's place had survived because of legal complexity: a property held since 1952, family heirs distributed across Pune, Mumbai, Dubai, and Toronto, none of whom could agree on selling. Indian family disagreement as accidental heritage conservation.

The bungalow smelled of books and mild decay. The books being Farhan's life's accumulation — floor-to-ceiling in the drawing room, stacked on every horizontal surface, spilling from the bedroom into the corridor. The decay being the four years of bachelor-maintenance: the kitchen where Farhan made tea and Maggi and occasionally attempted rice (the rice being the particular battleground, the battleground where Farhan's incompetence was most pronounced — the ratio of water to rice being the secret that Nasreen had taken to her grave and that Farhan, despite four years of experimentation, had not recovered, the recovery being impossible because the secret was not a ratio but a feeling, and Nasreen's feeling was not transferable).

Ananya met Farhan at the park. The park her balcony overlooked — the one where morning walkers walked and Farhan walked every day at 6:30 AM with the gait of a man whose knees had been instructed by a doctor to stop and whose knees had instructed the doctor to mind his own business. The walking was the morning's non-negotiable. Nasreen had established it thirty years ago and Farhan maintained it in her absence — the maintaining being the tribute, the tribute being: the body remembers what the mind cannot release.

He was on a bench. His bench — claimed through four years of daily occupation, the Indian mechanism of territorial acquisition that required no paperwork, only consistency.

"Aap naye hain yahan?" he asked. The question delivered with the formal aap, the formality being the elderly Indian man's default with unknown women.

"Nahi, twenty-two saal se hoon. Bas kabhi subah nahi aayi." Ananya sat at the other end of the bench, the gap between them being the particular distance that Indian strangers maintained: close enough for conversation, far enough for propriety.

"Retire ho gayi?"

"Kuch aisa hi." Something like that.

Farhan nodded. The nod of a man who understood that "something like that" was a door marked PRIVATE and who would not try the handle. He waited. The waiting being the courtesy of the educated elderly Indian man — one question, then silence, the silence being the invitation that did not insist.

They did not discuss the redundancy. They discussed books. Farhan being Fergusson College's literature department (retired) and Ananya being a woman who had read voraciously in her twenties and then not at all for twenty years — the Indian corporate career having eaten the reading, the reading being the first sacrifice when the hours expanded and the hours always expanded.

"Premchand padha hai?" he asked, three mornings in. Three mornings being the duration after which park-bench acquaintances in Kothrud could advance from weather and politics to personal recommendations.

"School mein. Bahut pehle."

"Phir se padho. Godaan." He pulled his shawl tighter — the November morning was sharpening, the particular Pune November that arrived like a polite guest and then, over three weeks, turned the mornings into something that required woolens. "Fifty ke baad Premchand alag lagta hai. Twenty mein padho toh kahani hai. Fifty mein padho toh zindagi hai."

Read it at twenty and it's a story. Read it at fifty and it's life.

The sentence landed in Ananya the way good sentences do — not with impact but with recognition. The recognition that someone had said the thing you didn't know you needed to hear until you heard it.

She went to the library. The Kothrud branch of the Pune Municipal Corporation — housed in a building that had been a community hall before becoming a library through the addition of steel shelves and the subtraction of adequate lighting. The particular Indian public library ambiance: dim, quiet, the smell of old pages and Fevicol and the tropical mustiness that accumulated when you stored books without air conditioning in a city where the humidity had opinions.

The Godaan copy was old. Borrowed and returned so many times the stamp page was full and someone had taped in an additional page and that page was also full. The fullness was evidence: this book had been needed. This book was the one Pune's readers returned to.

She read it on the balcony. October evening. The Pune October that was still warm but the warmth was departing, and the departing was pleasure — the knowledge that winter was approaching and winter was Pune's best season and the best season was the hope.

Hori. The farmer who wanted a cow and couldn't afford one. At twenty, Hori had been a character in a book. At fifty, Hori was every person who had wanted what they couldn't have and whose wanting was the life and the life was the wanting.

Ananya was Hori. She wanted the family she'd lost. The cost of the family had been Karan's control — Karan's daily diminishment, the marital economy that said: you can have the family but the family costs your self. The cost had been paid for twenty years and the paying had depleted everything and the depletion was the divorce and the divorce was the loss and the loss was the wanting.

She closed the book at the chapter where Hori borrows money he cannot repay. She would finish tomorrow. She had time now. She had all the time that the career and the marriage had consumed and the consuming had ended and the ending had returned the time and the time was — the time was terrifying. The terrifying abundance of time that the unemployed-divorced woman possessed and that the possessing was not freedom but exposure, the exposure being: when you had no schedule, you had no armour, and without armour, the grief got through.

But the book helped. The book was a shield — smaller than armour, but portable, and the portability was the thing. You could carry a book to the park bench and the park bench became bearable and the bearable was, for now, enough.

Tomorrow she would tell Farhan she'd started reading it.

Tomorrow. Not today. Today she needed to sit with Hori's wanting and her own wanting and the November evening and the chai that she'd made — ginger-elaichi, the elaichi crushed with the back of a spoon the way Aai had taught her, the crushing releasing the scent that was the scent of every kitchen Ananya had ever stood in, the scent that was the autobiography of the Indian woman written in spice.