Happy Birthday!: And Other Stories by Meghna Pant

Author:Meghna Pant [Pant, Meghna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184004526
Publisher: Vintage Classics/Random House India
Published: 2013-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

CLIP AND CANE

Gyan hears the payal on Parvati’s right ankle tinkle as she climbs the steps to the chawl’s third floor, walks past his kholi and stops outside her door. A plastic bag rustles as she sets it down on the hard cement floor. The wooden chair creaks when she lifts it up.

After a long pause she enquires, ‘Who tried to fix my chair?’

Why is her voice not pleased?

There can be no one else in the veranda at this time of the hot day, so she’s obviously asking Dhoopwali Mai, who must be sitting in her usual spot next to the clothesline, under the sun.

But Dhoopwali Mai doesn’t reply. Gyan imagines her hand running through her hair, white and serpentine owing to her age, and drenched in coconut oil that the chawl women complain stains their drying clothes.

‘Chaa!’ Parvati continues. ‘It looks worse than before. Such shoddy work.’

‘Andha kya jaane aurat ka swaad,’ Dhoopwali Mai says in a sly, slithering voice.

Gyan stands up in surprise. How could he have not sensed Dhoopwali Mai watching him—motionless and soundless—as he mended the broken chair?

‘The one who’s always in or always out?’ Parvati asks.

Gyan wills the Mai to silence, but—‘Gyan na jaane aangan tedha’—it’s too late.

He hears Parvati’s footsteps cross the veranda, and moves to the back of his kholi, which he imagines is dark and an ideal hideout. The curtain at his doorway swishes. Parvati is standing inside his kholi, for the very first time. He has nothing to welcome her with.

She stops, as if taken aback. ‘Is this a house or a factory?’

He doesn’t know. This room is filled with cane chairs and his precious tools: needles, chisel, pegs, glue and nails. The only thing he calls his own is the straw mat that he sits on, a thin mattress that he sleeps on, and some hand-me-down clothes from his roommate Sunder. And though Gyan likes the lingering smell of bachelorhood in his house-cum-factory, now he wishes that he’d made this place more homely, hung up a poster or two, if only of those busty women liked by other men.

‘There isn’t even a statue of Ganeshji here. Don’t you believe in God?’ Parvati continues.

Gyan has never understood the intense faith of damaged people. But his first meeting with Parvati must go well, so he replies, ‘I find it difficult to believe in something that I can’t see.’

‘Then you don’t believe in anything,’ Parvati says, her voice strong and insistent.

Gyan’s throat clamps down on his speech. He swallows and draws a deep breath to stop the shakes that are starting in his body.

‘How did you know that my chair was broken?’ she persists.

Can he tell her how he knows? How he hears everything? No, it would cheat her out of thinking that the walls keep her secrets safe. But the little bells lining her dupatta jingle as she waits for his answer; she’s probably twisting them around her finger. She is nervous. Is he wrong in not owning up to the truth?

Closing

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