The Price of Time. A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma Chapter 3
Chapter 3: The
Society Watches
Shivaji Park,
Dadar — October 2019
The building where Meera Iyer lived was a seven-storey
cooperative housing society in Shivaji Park, Dadar, the kind of building that
had been there since 1974 and intended to be there forever: solid concrete,
slow lift, balconies hung with drying clothes, and a ground-floor noticeboard
that served as the society's unofficial newspaper.
Annapurna Bhen lived on the third floor and functioned
as the society's Memory. She knew who visited whom, when, and for how long. She
knew whose daughter was pregnant before the daughter knew. She had opinions
about all of it, and she delivered them from the strategic position of her
balcony, which overlooked the main entrance.
She first noticed Arjun in October, when he began coming
on Saturday afternoons.
He came because Meera had asked him to help carry some
heavy reference books she had ordered — they arrived in a large package and she
was alone and the lift was broken again. He came and carried the books and
stayed, because she offered tea, and the tea turned into a conversation about
the books, and the conversation lasted two hours.
Annapurna Bhen saw him arrive.
Annapurna Bhen saw him leave two hours later.
Annapurna Bhen said nothing that first time, because she
was gathering data.
~ ~ ~
By November, Arjun was coming twice a week. Not always
inside — sometimes they sat in the small garden behind the building with tea,
or he was simply dropping things off for a project his father's firm was doing
with hers, legitimate business, the kind that had clean edges. But Annapurna Bhen
did not concern herself with clean edges. She concerned herself with patterns.
She began mentioning it to the other ladies of the
building.
Annapurna Bhen: "Woh ladka phir aaya. Iyer Madam ka. That boy came
again. Young-young, twenty-twenty-one saal ka hoga."
Mrs. Kulkarni, Fifth Floor: "Koi project ka kaam hoga. Architecture
firm hai na unka."
Annapurna Bhen: "Project ke liye aate hain toh project ke samay aate
hain. Shaam ko nahi aate. Shaam ko chai peene aate hain. (For project they come
at project time. Not in the evening. In the evening they come for tea.)"
The ladies considered this.
Annapurna Bhen: "Main kuch nahi bol rahi. Main toh sirf dekh rahi
hoon. (I'm saying nothing. I'm only watching.)"
Annapurna Bhen saying 'I'm only watching' was equivalent
to a newspaper putting something in large bold font with three exclamation
points.
~ ~ ~
Meera knew, as women in Indian buildings always know,
that she was being watched. She had been watched since Krishnan died — first
with sympathy, then with curiosity, then with the particular scrutiny reserved
for widows who did not behave as widows were expected to. She had made her
peace with the watching. She had learned to move through it like a current
through water: without fighting it, without yielding to it, simply present in
her own life.
What she had not expected was Arjun.
She had not expected to find herself, at fifty, looking
forward to someone's arrival. She had not expected the Saturdays to have begun
to feel like a shape she didn't want disturbed. She had not expected to stay up
an extra forty minutes at night because the conversation was not finished and
she wanted to finish it.
She was not, she told herself, a foolish woman. She had
not been foolish in thirty years, possibly longer. She could see what was
happening with the clarity that only comes from being fifty and having been
through everything that being fifty entails: she was becoming attached to a
twenty-year-old boy, and she should stop, and she knew she should stop, and she
was not stopping.
One evening she called her daughter Devika in Pune.
Meera: "How are you,
kanna?"
Devika: "Fine, Amma. You
okay? You sound weird."
Meera: "I don't sound
weird."
Devika: "You called on a
Tuesday. You only call on Sundays."
Meera: "I can call on
Tuesdays."
Devika: "Amma."
A pause.
Meera: "I met
someone."
Silence from Pune.
Devika: "What kind of
someone?"
Meera: "A young man.
He's a client's son. He's— he reads, Devika. He thinks."
Devika: "How young?"
Meera: "Twenty."
The silence from Pune became a different kind of
silence.
Devika: "Amma. You're
fifty."
Meera: "I'm aware."
Devika: "Nothing has
happened?"
Meera: "Nothing has
happened. I'm telling you because I trust you. And because I needed to say it
to someone real."
Devika: "I don't know
what to say."
Meera: "Say what you
actually think."
Devika: "I think— I
think you are a good woman who has been alone for seven years and sometimes
good women make decisions from loneliness that they call something else. That's
what I think."
It was not unkind. It was not wrong, entirely. It was
also not the whole truth, and Meera knew the difference between someone giving
her the truth and someone giving her the safe version of the truth.
She said goodnight to her daughter and sat with her tea
and the Shivaji Park street sounds coming through the window and thought for a
long time about the difference.
To be Continued .......................
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