Yadav’s bed, testing the air. His room is full of smells, smells she has never noticed before. None of them are
that
smell, but the tugging sensation is still there. It has moved off her chest. Now it’s squeezing her stomach, stirring the acids there. She sits up, breathing the fit away.
The morning after, waking in her husband’s bed, she pulls herself from the bed and runs, dry-heaving, to the toilet.
A couple of weeks later and Roopa is standing in Yash Yadav’s bathroom, holding a plastic wand to the light.
Within seconds – faster and more surely than any Polaroid – two blue lines appear across the white of the window. Roopa feels the walls and floor of the bathroom slide away as the bars set a new vertical for her: a new, tilted reality. How many periods has her silly, sprinter’s body missed? They’re so irregular she finds it hard to count them.
She wraps the test in a fistful of toilet paper, opens her handbag and tucks the expensive white wand inside, losing it in a mulch of tissues, tickets and receipts.
Yash will be here in the couple of hours. She dresses in the bedroom. The walls are smothered in movie posters. Action classics.
Line of Control
.
Sholay
. A teenager might have collected them, she thought, the first time Yash brought her here, months ago. His hands, his bulk, the taste of his penis, the feel of him splashing her breasts, dear God, months ago! How far along is she?
She sweeps a hand across her midriff. She can’t feel a thing. What an infuriating machine her body is! What’s the use of a body that will not take you into its confidence? She imagines the changes a baby will wreak on it. How the stomach wall splits like a peach, how the ribcage bells out.
She forces herself to breathe. Could the test be wrong? What if it’s too late to terminate? What if it will not die? What if she only succeeds in, well,
damaging
it?
She searches in her handbag for her mobile. Her husband Hardik has a meeting tonight, a
shakha
, so there is no need for her to hurry home (if you can call that love-abandoned shell a home: a breeze-block box tossed about on a sea of mud). She will get Yash to take her out tonight, somewhere they will not be recognized. There is a hotel in Agra with a good restaurant, far beyond her means but well within his. She will get him drunk on his own generosity (it is important for her to play to his vanity) and she will tell him about the baby.
She dials and is put through to Yash’s voicemail. She risks a call to his office, but he is not there. She opens the door of the apartment and breathes in the communal smell of rose carpet shampoo and cigarettes. She wants to leave but she has nowhere to go. She aches in Yash Yadav’s absence. Yash has become a physical need. Strange how these things happen. Yash, veteran of a dozen legal kills – and yet the violence attaching to him, which so excited her at first, does nothing for her now. The attraction she feels for him, now that she knows him, is simpler and oh, so much more corrupt. Yash’s home, his tastes, his childish comforts. His film posters. His DVD collection. His simple, strenuous appetites in bed. She fucks the boy, not the man. If it wasn’t Yash, it would have been someone equally adolescent. Why should she always be drawn to boys? Hardik and Yash: both are vulnerable men. What’s in this to trigger her desire?
She puts her phone away. Yash will greet her news with horror. The scandal of her pregnancy is enough to ruin his standing as Firozabad’s counter-terror tsar. The affair – the madness of it, and the pleasure – is done.
Away from the Anti-Corruption Bureau and its levelling realities she has been dreaming up a heroic role for herself. A female detective, alone against the system! A city cop hacking her way through rural corruption! What, in the end, has she uncovered? Some argument at the Chhaphandi brickworks between Yash’s cousin Vinod and a Dalit labourer. This was how she planned to
that
smell, but the tugging sensation is still there. It has moved off her chest. Now it’s squeezing her stomach, stirring the acids there. She sits up, breathing the fit away.
The morning after, waking in her husband’s bed, she pulls herself from the bed and runs, dry-heaving, to the toilet.
A couple of weeks later and Roopa is standing in Yash Yadav’s bathroom, holding a plastic wand to the light.
Within seconds – faster and more surely than any Polaroid – two blue lines appear across the white of the window. Roopa feels the walls and floor of the bathroom slide away as the bars set a new vertical for her: a new, tilted reality. How many periods has her silly, sprinter’s body missed? They’re so irregular she finds it hard to count them.
She wraps the test in a fistful of toilet paper, opens her handbag and tucks the expensive white wand inside, losing it in a mulch of tissues, tickets and receipts.
Yash will be here in the couple of hours. She dresses in the bedroom. The walls are smothered in movie posters. Action classics.
Line of Control
.
Sholay
. A teenager might have collected them, she thought, the first time Yash brought her here, months ago. His hands, his bulk, the taste of his penis, the feel of him splashing her breasts, dear God, months ago! How far along is she?
She sweeps a hand across her midriff. She can’t feel a thing. What an infuriating machine her body is! What’s the use of a body that will not take you into its confidence? She imagines the changes a baby will wreak on it. How the stomach wall splits like a peach, how the ribcage bells out.
She forces herself to breathe. Could the test be wrong? What if it’s too late to terminate? What if it will not die? What if she only succeeds in, well,
damaging
it?
She searches in her handbag for her mobile. Her husband Hardik has a meeting tonight, a
shakha
, so there is no need for her to hurry home (if you can call that love-abandoned shell a home: a breeze-block box tossed about on a sea of mud). She will get Yash to take her out tonight, somewhere they will not be recognized. There is a hotel in Agra with a good restaurant, far beyond her means but well within his. She will get him drunk on his own generosity (it is important for her to play to his vanity) and she will tell him about the baby.
She dials and is put through to Yash’s voicemail. She risks a call to his office, but he is not there. She opens the door of the apartment and breathes in the communal smell of rose carpet shampoo and cigarettes. She wants to leave but she has nowhere to go. She aches in Yash Yadav’s absence. Yash has become a physical need. Strange how these things happen. Yash, veteran of a dozen legal kills – and yet the violence attaching to him, which so excited her at first, does nothing for her now. The attraction she feels for him, now that she knows him, is simpler and oh, so much more corrupt. Yash’s home, his tastes, his childish comforts. His film posters. His DVD collection. His simple, strenuous appetites in bed. She fucks the boy, not the man. If it wasn’t Yash, it would have been someone equally adolescent. Why should she always be drawn to boys? Hardik and Yash: both are vulnerable men. What’s in this to trigger her desire?
She puts her phone away. Yash will greet her news with horror. The scandal of her pregnancy is enough to ruin his standing as Firozabad’s counter-terror tsar. The affair – the madness of it, and the pleasure – is done.
Away from the Anti-Corruption Bureau and its levelling realities she has been dreaming up a heroic role for herself. A female detective, alone against the system! A city cop hacking her way through rural corruption! What, in the end, has she uncovered? Some argument at the Chhaphandi brickworks between Yash’s cousin Vinod and a Dalit labourer. This was how she planned to
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