A bend in the river

Quite suddenly, Shoba left us to go and visit her family in the east. Her father had died. She had gone for the cremation. I was surprised when Mahesh told me. Not by the death, but by the fact that Shoba could go back to her family. That wasn't at all what I had been led to believe. Shoba had presented herself as a runaway, someone who had gone against the rules of her community by marrying Mahesh, and was living in this remote place to hide from her family's vengeance. When she had first told me her story--it had been at lunch on a still, silent day during the rebellion--she had said that she had to be cautious with strangers. It had occurred to her that her family might hire someone, of any race, to do what they had threatened: to disfigure her or to kill Mahesh. Acid on the face of the woman, the killing of the man--they were the standard family threats on these occasions, and Shoba, conventional in so many ways, wasn't too displeased to let me know that the threats had been made in her case. Usually these threats were meaningless, and made only to satisfy convention; but sometimes they could be carried out to the letter. However, as time passed, and Shoba appeared to be forgetting some of the details of her first story, I stopped believing in that drama of the hired stranger. But I took it as settled that Shoba had been disowned by her family. In my own predicament I had always been conscious of Shoba's example, and it was a letdown to discover that she had kept her lines of communication open. As for Mahesh, he began to behave like the mourning son-in-law. It might have been his way of making a public drama out of the business, taking expensive orders for coffee and beer and Bigburgers (the prices these days!) with an air of tenderness and sorrow. It might have been his way of showing sympathy for Shoba and respect for the dead. But it was also a little bit like the behaviour of a man who felt he had at last earned his place. Well! But then the joke turned sour. Shoba was to have been away for two months. She returned after three weeks, and then she seemed to go into hiding. There were no invitations to me to lunch; that arrangement--almost that tradition now--at last came to an end. She had hated the political situation in the east, Mahesh said. She had never liked Africans and had come back raging about thieving and boastful politicians, the incessant lies and hate on the radio and in the newspapers, the bag-snatchings in daylight, the nightly violence. She was appalled by the position of her family, whom she had grown up thinking of as solid and secure. All this, combined with her grief for her father, had made her strange. It was better for the time being, Mahesh said, for me to stay away. But that hardly seemed explanation enough. Was there something more than political and racial rage, and grief for the father whom at one time she had shamed? Was there perhaps a new vision of the man she had chosen and the life she had been living? Some regret for the family life she now saw she had missed, some greater grief for the things she had betrayed? The air of mourning that Mahesh, in Shoba's absence, had been so glad to put on became a deep and real gloom after Shoba's return; and then this gloom became shot through with irritations. He began to show his age. The confidence, which had irritated me, left him. I grieved for it, grieved that he should have enjoyed it for so short a time. And he, who had spoken so sharply about Noimon, and spoken with such pride about the way he lived here, now said, "It's junk, Salim. It's all turning to junk again." No longer able to lunch with them or visit their flat, I took to dropping in at Bigburger on some evenings to exchange a few words with Mahesh. One evening I saw Shoba there. She was sitting at the counter, against the wall, and Mahesh was sitting on the stool next to hers. They were like customers in their own place. I greeted Shoba, but there was no warmth in her acknowledgment. I might have been a stranger or someone she barely knew. And even when I sat down next to Mahesh she continued to be distant. She seemed not to be seeing me. And Mahesh appeared not to notice. Was she rebuking me for those things she had grown to condemn in herself? I had known them both for so long. They were part of my life, however much my feelings about them shifted about. I could see the tightness and pain and something like illness in Shoba's eyes. I could also see she was acting a little. Still, I was hurt. And when I left them--no cry of "Stay!" from either of them--I felt cast out and slightly dazed. And every familiar detail of street life at night--the cooking fires gilding the thin, exhausted-looking faces of the people who sat around them, the groups in the shadows below the shop awnings, the sleepers and their boundary markers, the ragged lost lunatics, the lights of a bar fanning out over a wooden walkway--everything had a different quality.