When A Tree Falls

“You will get married in Malabar Hill only,” Sangita was fond of saying to her daughter, as she brushed Anamika’s hair a hundred times each night. “The peacocks from Parla fly south to Malabar Hill, and the buffaloes from Malabar Hill end up in Parla.”

Anamika agreed in private. Every morning before college, she rimmed her eyes with kajal and dabbed Pond’s cold cream on her cheeks, which made them glisten when they caught the sun. The glassy look earned her stares of admiration that flooded her brain with dopamine. Some of her admirers were handsome, like what she imagined the men in the Mills & Boon novels she snuck under her bedcovers looked like. She studied their faces in secret while doodling in class to conjure up their images at will, and as she read deep into the night by torchlight, her mind grafted their faces and bodies onto the actions of her romance heroes till she could no longer ignore the swollen feeling in her groin. That’s when the torch would drop to the floor—carefully, so as not to wake her sister sleeping next to her—and her head would hit the hard bed as her pillow found its way to her legs, burrowing deep into the valley between them to send seismic shocks of sweet sharp pain into her core.

At twenty-two, she was the first of her friend circle to be snapped up by a family, as her girlfriends knew she would be. With long wavy ribbons of hair cascading down her back and almond eyes slanted toward the temples, she looked like Disney’s caricature of Jasmine, down to her heart-shaped face and caved-in waist.

Like all beautiful people, she had imagined that in the South Bombay suitor she was destined for, she would meet her match. They would look good together, like the artists’ sketches on the M&B covers, as pleasurable to look at as a painting. When Mihir came along, with a snub nose and wide earlobes like clay flattened with a thumb, and turned-down eyes sad as a puppy’s in distress, he inspired no swollen feeling in her groin, no anticipation of seismic shocks to her core. She felt infuriated at being belittled; were her looks only worth that much?

But it turned out that they were worth much more than she had bargained for, just in a different currency. 

“It’s a good family,” said her mother. By “good,” she meant rich—the kind of rich that comes with an overseas diamond business worth hundreds of crores and a South Bombay address. Her mother’s own prettiness had earned her a home in Mumbai, in the suburb of Vile Parle, far away from the small-town oppression of Surat, where her parents still lived in the large joint family homestead of her childhood, then overrun with all her cousins and now with her cousins’ children. She would return exhausted from every vacation at her parents’ home, emboldened by her escape from that past and determined to trade up again using her current trump card—her one beautiful daughter. When Mihir’s biodata came her way through the marriage broker, she wasted no time in nosing out common connections and orchestrating a social introduction strategically timed with the broker’s efforts. 

“I know he’s only so-so,” she said, pinching her daughter’s cheeks when Mihir’s family finally sent a proposal after months of targeted tailing, “But you’re pretty enough for both of you.” 

Sangita’s eggshell complexion and high-density locks that looked as glossy and viscous as honey dominated in her offspring, not Anamika’s father’s hawk nose and sallow skin. In her mother’s bold pronouncement was a hope, fervently held, that the beauty gene would survive the blends of another generation. After all, the trade she was brokering rested on a major promise—that of beautiful children. That’s when Anamika learnt from her mother that the fate of the beautiful was to belong to the rich, to help upgrade their genetic pool till an army of their rich and beautiful offspring ruled the world. Natural selection by devious design. Darwinism at its most twisted.

“Khata-peeta ghar ni che,” said Sangita in admiration of Anamika’s mother-in-law, Rita, a fat, imperious woman whose body, once lithe and graceful as seen in her younger photos, was now enlarged by plenty to eat and no exercise—perks afforded by the material comforts of a smart marriage. This officious mother-in-law gifted Anamika a diamond set to wear at their wedding reception, with earrings that dragged on her lobes till they felt separated from the rest of her ears. Halfway through the relentless photo sessions, she smelled metal and felt the wetness of her period, but in the wrong place. Rita saw, at the same time she did, the maroon beads dotting her collarbone. She was taken backstage where a wad of cotton was urgently procured and glued with spit to the wound in her earlobe. Several minutes passed, the crowd shuffled and murmured, then the bride, resplendent in every way except for her bloody ears, was marched back out to stand beside her new family, with Rita’s fingers perennially pinching her tricep every time she winced in pain.

That’s when Anamika learned from her mother-in-law that her own desires should always be subservient to others.

***

Anamika had heard of mothers feeling the urge to eat their babies, a biological response to being overstimulated by their cuteness, and she wondered—would she feel that way if their child looked like her husband? She studied him on their wedding night as he undressed down to his briefs. His stomach was still firm, his hair only thinning at the crown, which she would never see during the act, and she could always close her eyes, transplant another’s face onto his. Like all new husbands, he would be excessively amorous, ever eager to please, to barter pleasure for pleasure—even more so in a setting as aphrodisiacal as Santorini, where they would soon embark on their honeymoon. I can make this work, she decided, and her body twitched in anticipation. He tugged at her sari, yards of it; she felt like Draupadi, the garment unfurling without end. But end it did, silk swirling at her feet like liquid, the words of her romance novels unspooling in her head, groaning and trembling as they sequenced the act to come, manifesting body parts that shimmered salaciously. 

But what she remembered of that night was not worth remembering. He fumbled around like a man without a map, tried to rouse himself out of duty and failed, once, twice, then disappeared with his laptop into the bathroom from which resounded a chorus of dramatic moans that sounded like a harem, punctured with words, breathless, shrill, in Hindi or Gujarati—did she hear that right?—and emerged fully charged to ram into her with a lack of finesse that left her with no sweet shocks, no high notes, just a dull throb between her legs and pinpricks of blood on the sheets when she woke the next morning. 

***

They have lots of help, you’ll live like a maharani, Sangita had said to cajole her daughter, but as soon as they returned from Greece, the new bride found herself in charge of the evening meal. “Mihir and Papaji would love to taste your cooking,” said Rita, handing Anamika her old cookbooks. The pages were brittle, with creases like lightning bolts from careless handling, and pencilled notes in the margins. Mihir’s first birthday was scrawled next to a recipe for pressure cooker chocolate cake, and Haresh hates this above one for oily baingan bharta. She was too nervous to pester Rita for the recipe adjustments she couldn’t decipher, so she used her own undeveloped palate and judgment, peering into the cloud of steam rising from the pan as sweat bloomed in half-moons in the armpits of her kurtas, and tipping the gravies into her mouth without touching the spoon so their help wouldn’t grumble about washing extra utensils.

The vegetables should be julienned, Rita said once for a recipe for vegetable jalfrezi. Anamika nodded, then excused herself for the bathroom where she frantically googled what that meant. She spelled it wrong, but her phone’s search engine roared to life, picking up on her faux pas and spitting out the right spelling. She clicked on the first YouTube video that popped up and learned that her mother-in-law had pronounced it wrong. The video was a how-to, demonstrated by a handsome Caucasian chef with gimlet blue eyes so unlike her husband’s droopy brown ones. He sliced capsicum—green pepper, he called it—into slivers so fine they could melt on her tongue, his fingers flying over his counter with muscle memory to play sleight-of-hand tricks with the knife, all the while never taking his eyes off her. His gaze was so intense that something clotted in the pit of her stomach. This is what milk feels like when it curdles, she thought. After that, whenever Rita threw out special requests to see her flounder, she searched for how-to videos, not in the abyss of the Internet but on his channel, just so she could feel his gaze penetrating into her, deep down into the places her husband had yet to reach.

Every night, she waited for the family to gather, sitting on her fingers to still their tremble. Who would cast the first word of judgment that day? Invariably, it was her father-in-law, whose much-admired and travelled palate was the benchmark for their tastes. Joyful was the day when he said “Good,” for Rita would visibly soften her drawstringed lips into a flicker of a smile, but on most days, he would say nothing. Rita, who had appointed herself the interpreter of his silences, would say—“Papaji didn’t like it”—then take a bite, rolling it in her mouth like cud before shaking her head and kissing her teeth. “What’s wrong with it,” Anamika would ask, her heart lunging and tripping, but no answer came to help it up and analyse what went wrong in the kitchen that day. With no one to acknowledge them, her words might as well not have existed, like the crash of a tree falling in a forest, soundless in the void.

***

One evening, Papaji, who had just returned from the Las Vegas Trade Show after selling a crore worth of diamonds, was so buoyed by the high that only hard cash can trigger that he was effusive in his compliments on the food. In the general atmosphere of jubilance, Mihir smiled and talked more than usual. Even Rita’s normally dour expression was tempered by the ripple effect of the unequivocal happiness generated by newly wrought prosperity. 

When her in-laws retired for the night and Anamika entered her bedroom, she found her husband sprawled on their bed in his briefs, already charged up and lying in wait. This is new, she thought, as she submitted to him, this husband for whom she still felt nothing after a tepid honeymoon, three months of marriage, and many nights like their first, with arousal achieved by artificial means, and the act without foreplay reduced to its basest form—a violent break-in, a breach of impenetrable walls unsoftened by touch. Feeling his gold chain whack her neck with each thrust, it dawned on her that Mihir’s libido ebbed and flowed with Papaji’s moods. This was not surprising, for in the few months they had been together, Anamika had never seen her validation-seeking husband take a decision without his father’s approval

But Papaji’s moods were calibrated to only two things—his business and his tastebuds. That’s when Anamika, who could do nothing to influence the business, decided that it was in her best interest to become a better cook. She developed an affinity for the foreign chef’s videos that felt as stubborn as her husband’s addiction to porn. She snuck in stolen afternoons with the gravelly voice and piercing gaze of the man she had begun to call “my chef,” listening to him describe food they would never eat in this house while subliminally absorbing his lessons on knife techniques and kitchen hacks. It never took long for her groin to thrum like a plucked guitar and her kurta to be hitched to her sides to create room for her trusty pillow, which she pummelled hard and squeezed between her thighs to shock her pelvis till it sang pure and high like a tuning fork at its perfect resonance. 

She wondered what it would feel like if she slipped her fingers inside her waistband but she did not dare actually do it. How high could the notes go? She had heard and read of such vibrations, and imagined how rooted and visceral they must feel, as if emanating from deep inside the body. But the prospect of such potency frightened her. It seemed too forward somehow, and stripped of innocence, more whore than bride. The pillow preserved for her a veneer of dignity, and the purity of her own self-image. The shocks didn’t count if they were muffled through thick cloth and plump pillow, which muted both the sensations and the shame of experiencing them, and her cries didn’t exist if they weren’t heard, like the mythical sound of that tree falling with no witness in the silence of its forest home.

Not that Rita noticed the length of her afternoon siestas. That’s because Rita spent her afternoons with her pride and obsession—her personal collection of showpieces that she displayed in locked cabinets in their living room. Graceful statuettes of porcelain that were both gifts and travel souvenirs—a nubile young girl reading a book under a tree, indecently sprawled in diaphanous garb like in European paintings of yore; a young boy reclining in a rowboat, fishing rod protruding suggestively from between his legs. Cleaning them was her daily ritual, a task relegated to no one. She would free her figurines from their glass cages and rub their crevices with a malmal cloth to loosen the fine powder of dust that settled on everything in Mumbai. The cloth would stroke the fishing rod, up and down, first lazy then swift as if polishing it to a shine, and slide silkily between the girl’s breasts, their nubs convex against her roving fingers, and slip between her legs and those of other figures in similarly spreadeagled positions of repose till the cloth, pressing tight in all the wrong places, seemed to Anamika like the pillow she had just punched back into shape.

She had chanced upon her mother-in-law’s curious ritual accidentally one afternoon on her way to the kitchen after a session with her chef, and couldn’t tear her eyes away. She noted the time of it, its clockwork regularity, and watched in stealth for a few minutes from inside her door every day before jiggling the door handle to announce her entry, a sound that always made Rita startle. She watched because it unearthed in her a girlhood memory, of playing with a cousin’s hand-me-down dollhouse with a Barbie and Ken she liked to bathe daily, together in the same tub. She would rub their crevices with a wispy washcloth, her fingers feeling their jellied plastic skin, and lay them out to dry next to each other in the same room of their dollhouse in various states of undress, skin touching skin, because that’s what they liked to do, in the story she told herself.

***

Papaji took long foreign tours alone, with detours through cities where they had no offices, but no one wondered— at least out loud—about the nature of his visits. Exploring new business, he would say when he announced his plans, clearing his throat as if dislocating a stuck hairball, an action Anamika soon ascertained was a demand in disguise—for blind trust, unquestioning and undeserved. 

He had long-term multiple entry foreign visas, and he exhausted their limits. Berlin, Bruges, Amsterdam, always Amsterdam, more stamps to Amsterdam on his passport than to any other city. Those days, a gloom would descend on the house like a storm cloud pregnant with rain. Rita would fuss and snap and retort, old wounds would resurface and fester, she would prickle at the slightest provocation, and Mihir—well, Mihir’s energies, sexual or otherwise, dipped like the tide in the absence of his moon, whose gravitational pull and radiance collapsed when he was gone, plunging their world into darkness.

The longer Papaji was away, the more time Mihir spent on sites that revved him up like a sports car. Not for him the steady ramp up of a family sedan, the slow low purr of a well-oiled engine; no, what he craved was zoom and vroom—outsized reactions from undersized women who looked like primped and plasticked blow-up dolls rather than real people with breath and life, hopes and dreams, soft strong pliable stubborn contradictory people who moved through the world with a mind of their own. It was as if his father’s exploits in foreign lands gave him permission—carte blanche—for shenanigans of his own, pursued with single-minded focus that one might grudgingly say was admirable except for its complete disregard of the impact on his wife. But one could not blame him for that was all he had known growing up: a father who traded foreign women the way he did diamonds, and a mother whose stoicism about her fate was legendary, like bedrock moulded by pressure, except for the times she folded like the earth suffering an earthquake.

The first time Anamika witnessed a tectonic disruption was when Rita tried to call Papaji at his hotel in Amsterdam, and a woman answered the line. It was almost 2:00 a.m. in Amsterdam, Papaji hadn’t answered his cellphone for hours, and Rita, like any married woman armchair-trailing her husband’s route through foreign lands, was dogged in her pursuit. “Where is my husband,” she demanded in a peremptory tone, and then “Who the hell are you?” The shouting that erupted when Papaji got on the line made Anamika jolt awake and scuttle to Rita’s room in alarm. All she could catch from the free-flowing stream of Gujarati that skipped like rocks between accusations were a few odd words that leapfrogged over others to spring into her brain, but they were enough to stitch together images that flushed her cheeks. She looked at her mother-in-law, whom loss of control had rendered helpless, who in that moment had no more power than a small feisty dog backed into a corner, barking at one twice its size, and felt for the first time a flicker of commiseration and pity that endeared Rita to her. But the feeling was fleeting. It cowed and shriveled like an ant fried by magnified sunlight when Rita, after depleting her battery of shots and realizing Anamika had come in, ceased the rapid-fire on her husband and turned a searing gaze onto her. 

“It was the room-service lady,” she said as she hung up. Her voice sounded mechanical, like it was pre-recorded. It was not alive, that voice; it invited no questions, no gentle probes that could let tears fall unbidden. Anamika accepted the cover-up, as she had accepted every oddity in her adoptive family, in which everything felt out of place and nothing was as it seemed from the outside. It occurred to her in that moment that she fit right in. She too was like this, one way to the world and another with herself, with a public persona and private self that could have been two different people. 

From that moment on, her secret afternoons lost their self-importance and stopped terrorizing her. In this family, her secret was not alone, it was one secret among many that floated like ghosts in their midst, friendlier now that she knew they were there. 

***

She became bolder, or more careless, she did not know which. She feared Mihir becoming Papaji, and believed with all her might that she could stop the inevitable metamorphosis if she found a way to break the chain at its weakest link. Perhaps there was still hope for them, if she could reveal her most private self to the person with whom she was to share private moments for the rest of her life.

So she conscripted her novels to advocate for her needs. She found the choicest passages that made her groan just by reading them, that described the things she craved to have done to her, and left the books open to those pages in strategic places where he would find them—as a placemat for his laptop, wrapped in his towel, as a coaster for a bottle of whisky hidden in his closet—and hoped that a night would soon come that was different, that began the way those scenes did, and followed their trajectory. 

But Mihir was wedded to his own curation of bliss and not to her. “Is this yours,” he asked one day, holding one of the books between his thumb and index finger. When she nodded in shivery anticipation, he dropped it in the dustbin. “Good girls don’t read this shit,” he said with a disdainful scowl that raised her hackles. She wanted to retort, good boys don’t watch the shit you do, but she didn’t dare—either to say it or to fish her book out of the trash. 

When she came back to retrieve it the next day, it was gone. Despite her slow easing into the absurdity of the family she had landed, this development filled her with abject terror. Who had found it, and read its pages? Who could now picture the images that bloomed lifelike in her head; who had their pulse on her innermost desires? Most likely, it was their help Mahesh who had thrown it out, which would be a relief; the cover was provocative enough to pique his interest, but he didn’t know English, or how to read. But what if it wasn’t Mahesh? What if it was Papaji, lured by its sauciness, or worse—Rita snooping for ammunition? 

***

It was a while before she realized that more of her romance novels had disappeared from their hiding places. These days, she relied more on her chef’s prolific videos—a new one every alternate day—that she watched from the privacy of her bedroom. This was the main perk of marriage, a room of her own in the afternoons when her husband was at work. It was only when the Internet crashed unceremoniously during a particularly vulnerable moment that she reached for the book in her drawer to finish what she had started—and found it missing. One was gone, mysteriously plucked from the trash, but now this one too—and what about the stash at the back of her almirah? Her search was as frantic as the theories scrambling in her brain, and she discovered they too had vanished, like they were never there. This was a new curiosity to contemplate—the case of the missing books. Someone was rifling through her stuff, confiscating her pleasures, but she hadn’t been punished, or even confronted. Who was the thief, and what did they want?

The case resolved itself in the most unexpected of ways, during the one time of day Anamika and Rita sat together, for evening chai. That day, the presence of handymen repairing malfunctioning lights in the living room forced their chai ritual into Rita’s bedroom. They sat on both sides of the bed, the space between them divided by a bed tray with small bowls of nashta orbiting the teacups like baby moons—chakri, peanuts, khari biscuits. Anamika was on her phone, so absorbed that she did not, at first, realize that Rita, who would normally also be glued to her phone, was holding a book. Her book. The first novel that she had lost, the one exhumed from the trash. She coloured, her face warming steadily, irrevocably, like water on the boil. Was this a test—of her honesty, or her innocence? How could she puzzle out the reasons for the seizures, and better still, extricate her property from her mother-in-law’s clutches without ever claiming ownership?

“I didn’t know you liked reading,” she said finally, with studied nonchalance. 

“I didn’t know you did either,” said Rita evenly. “Especially these kinds of books.” She flipped the book open to a dog-eared page, to the start of a raunchy scene long part of Anamika’s repertoire of fantasies, and began reading haltingly, her voice stumbling over stiffened words that played dead in her mouth and sounded wrong when they escaped, bashful words, caught naked, trembling with sudden exposure…

“It’s not my book!” Anamika lied, saying the first thing she could think of to make it stop. “It’s borrowed. Lent, I mean. By a friend. She couldn’t keep them at home—”

“With good reason,” said Rita. “And obviously you don’t agree with her habits. Throwing this in the dustbin—what a way to teach her a lesson!”

“I didn’t—I mean, I thought about it—but Mihir did, actually.” The teacup wobbled in her hands. She set it down, fighting the urge to sit on her fingers to still them.

“Would have been better if he had read it, might have learned a thing or two,” said Rita drily, setting down her cup. “What,” she said, facing Anamika who had glanced up in astonishment, “you think I don’t know the rubbish he watches? That’s why I got him married. To make it stop.”

“But it hasn’t stopped,” said Anamika. She put the biscuit she had been holding back into the bowl, her movements calm and deliberate and no longer shaky, weighed down by the sadness that had settled in suddenly like fog, obscuring everything. 

“Marriage changes everything. Usually for the worse. But sometimes, bad habits reverse if replaced with something better. I thought that you, of all girls, with how pretty you look…” She shook her head and looked away. “Like father, like son.”

“What do you mean?” Anamika stared at her mother-in-law, her mouth open, her chai cold and forgotten.

“That’s why they got me married, you know. Chokro seedhe thashe, they said, because that’s what girls do for boys, help them settle down. And it seemed to work—for a while. He left all those other girls, he was crazy about me. It went to my head. Even before we got married, we…” The flush that had begun in her cheeks sank to her jowls. “Those days it wasn’t easy. We lived in joint families. There were no rooms of your own. But that made it even more exciting.” She chuckled to herself. “One time, it was his friend’s house. Haresh had the spare keys. Or his car late at night. Once even a hotel room.” Her eyes were wistful, and no longer on Anamika; she was traversing the past, flung back with the force of memory, flitting from room to room, revisiting the witnesses to her sins. “Sneaking around—that was the high. The only high. And now he gets it in other ways. With other people.”

She chuckled again, but this time it was softer, with an underbite of bitterness. Anamika took her in, this woman who grabbed a fistful of peanuts and crunched in the silence, took in all of her, from her ears that had once sagged and bled with the weight of the diamond earrings that were hers before they were Anamika’s, to the curve of the belly grown rotund with nashta eaten in secret despair to spike the highs she never got from marriage, to the hands that caressed the private parts of inanimate statues with yearning, and the fat packed like bubble wrap around legs that hadn’t parted in years. This castle ran deeper underground than she had imagined, tunnelled with secret passages, the stench of dead dreams rotting its insides. A crumbling, old, once-majestic castle, locked and chained for years, caving in on itself, the doors finally swinging open for her to peek inside.

“It’s been more than twenty years,” said Rita. “Since before you were born. Can you imagine what it’s like to not be touched for twenty years?”

“No,” whispered Anamika. “No, I cannot. But it doesn’t have to be another twenty.” She reached over her shoulder and locked the door before she could change her mind, then lifted her quivering finger and pointed to the book. “Read to me,” she commanded, and closed her eyes. She closed her eyes so she could focus on the words and not her mother-in-law’s face, so that she wouldn’t lose her nerve, so that she could feel the sensations rattle her organs, unmitigated by the distractions of sight. A hitched kurta and a fat pillow and courage were all she needed, and those words voiced out loud—freer than before, as if given permission to be alive, to wriggle and writhe and dance her up mountain peaks where they summitted triumphal, to the sounds of shallow breaths and guttural cries.

Anamika opened her eyes to her silent spectators. The room, one of many to bear witness to the private liberation of women, to the birth of their ugliest desires unfit for public revelation, and the woman who was neither mother nor friend, but a trustee, newly appointed, of Anamika’s most private self, and who in that moment, as she took the pillow that Anamika’s pressed thighs had shaped into a bowtie, was nothing but a woman with the same emotions and organs and desires and repressions that Anamika had, for so long, tended to in secret.

“Now you read to me,” commanded Rita, and Anamika, who felt more valued and useful than she ever had in her twenty-two years, read from her novel to the woman sitting beside her with eyes closed and pillow clenched, in a voice that was clear and high and true and no longer afraid.