My Mother's Lover and Other Stories by Sumana Roy

Author:Sumana Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Sitting on the bed next to him, still thinking about food, about the eatery which wouldn’t open for us, I also noticed the map of approaching baldness on his head, like one can predict the rains from sooty clouds. I’d tell him about the abortion I’d had to have, I thought. I arranged the words carefully in my head. It wasn’t his fault that I’d got pregnant, but that he’d left without thinking that he might have left something behind… How could he have? I would tell him at last, though I hadn’t come here to tell him this.

My fingers were suddenly in his hand. He was playing with my forefinger. It made us young again – an old habit returning at an older age.

‘Ah, you voted,’ he said, smiling at the ink mark on my finger. Who did you vote for, Jyotsna?’

‘You?’ I asked.

‘The BJP, who else?’ he said, still rubbing his thumb on my index finger. When we were students, I used to call this action ‘genie’, as if rubbing my finger would make a genie appear.

‘What!’ I said, unable to say anything more. This staunch leftist, the young boy leading all marches and protests with a red Students’ Federation of India flag in his hand – those eyes, broad forehead and beard about which friends teased him, for their supposed resemblance to Marx – had voted for the BJP.

‘And you?’ he asked, not noticing my incredulity.

Before I fell asleep, I remember thinking of all the slogans we’d written together before student elections in our university – the red ink on our clothes and bodies, where we became extensions of the office of the SFI. I heard him laughing in his sleep after midnight. When he went to the toilet, I was still awake, reclined against the headrest.

‘You didn’t say who you voted for?’ he said.

I saw his teeth in the dark. The beard of his early adult life was gone – it was as if every part of his face had suddenly become visible to me after all these years.

‘Huh?’ he said, touching the dark bluish mark on my index finger again.

I didn’t say anything. We’d left a day after voting. Election results would be out three days after we’d reach home – on Thursday.

I felt myself being gradually – and noiselessly – pulled towards a pond of sleep, a pond after a day of swollen heat.

The road hits the sky as if it were a wall. Only softer, so that if it actually hit it, it’d pass through it as water does through a sponge, not be rejected as a ball is by a wall. The word ‘rejects’ stirs anxiety in me. I wonder how I’ll say it. All through these years, I’ve imagined the moment when I’d say yes if he’d ask me the question. But now, as I sit beside him as he drives us to Venice, I am thinking of the opposite. How do I say no?

The car brakes. I’m woken, as if from a lost life.

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