8 pm

Mohan is humming softly and chopping tomatoes and black olives for a salad. Keya’s watching the news on TV, watching it without obligation, feeling that none of it – the
stock-market ticker, the prime minister’s speech, the bus accident – is anything to her. Everything is rendered remote by that excited party feeling that comes over Keya whenever Mohan instructs her to sit back and do absolutely nothing.

Firecrackers explode outside. She puts down her glass and goes to the balcony, peering down from three floors up. On the other side of their apartment, the side they can’t see but definitely hear, is the little cemented patch where kids come out to play with frisbees and footballs in the evening. And beyond the gates, the traffic on the main road.

Keya doesn’t know why they’re letting off crackers tonight. She cannot keep track of the festivals that necessitate fireworks. Or it could be an obscure cricket match won if there is such a thing. They are lucky to be facing the quiet side but Keya often has to suppress the feeling that there’s something happening out in front, watched by the children and the guards, or on the main street, or even in the whole city, that she has been left out of.

There’s always something going on. If she gets up in the night to pee, there come to her in waves the faintest sounds of what could be either communal weeping or group singing, and at the crack of dawn she can sometimes hear the piercing azaan from a mosque though on none of her walks in the neighbourhood has she seen such a thing. She’s lived in Bangalore for five years and still it eludes her.

Mohan doesn’t know. He works on his graphic design job from the house, going out when he feels like it, to take a walk in the neighbourhood, buy a cigarette, chat, as he eats his lunch, with the plump, cheerful, heavily beringed owner of the darshini that dispenses execrable idlis and blood-red sambar. Mohan is from Bangalore and feels an affectionate boredom for it. He does not wake up in the night and puzzle over voices.

“Brown as in almost burnt or brown as in dark pink?” he shouts into the mobile balanced on his shoulder as he keeps the chopping going. In order to cook anything ambitious – a chicken biryani, a prawn curry – he has to call his sister, who lives at the other end of town, and get instructions down the phone, instructions which he always tries to contradict. It used to irritate Keya that he called her even though he seemed to know better, and it used to irritate her that he didn’t just write the recipes down, but not any more. There are ways and ways of expressing familial bonds.

She retrieves her drink and drifts towards the kitchen, pulled on by his voice as if whatever it is he’s saying he’s actually only calling to her. The kitchen is filled with the beautiful smell of frying onions and Keya stands in the doorway, watching the mess on the counter from a respectful distance.

“I don’t like this oil-floating-on-the-top concept. All it says to me is heart attack,” Mohan says into his phone, while Keya thinks of the suitcase she has packed for her trip the following day, and tries for the hundredth time to ascertain if she could have forgotten anything. She has checked her tickets and travel insurance so many times and then forgotten, in the flurry of her preparation, whether she has, that she is on the point of crossing the thin line that separates ordinary worriers from victims of paranoia.

“The science of unscientific cooking,” says Mohan happily, putting away his phone.

When Keya comes to him, he whispers into her ear, “Baby night.”

She makes a correspondingly happy but inarticulate sound.

They have been married for a year today. They made their plans in the very first weeks of their marriage. Saving plans. Travel dreams. What fixtures could be added to the house and when. And so on in an organized fashion till they came to the subject of babies and even though Mohan wanted them, Keya said, Not now. Give me a year. Perhaps it was the precision of the other dates they were attaching to their plans – their five-year mutual fund schemes and their six-month saving-up-for-a-flat-screen-TV idea – that made Keya bring up that figure. Over the course of the past year, she wishes she had been vaguer for Mohan doesn’t let things slip.

He is strangely attached to the idea of babies while Keya wants to postpone them to some indefinite future when she will be more… But she doesn’t exactly know more what except, inevitably, older.

She pulls away from him and pours herself another drink. Mohan squirts dressing over his salad and mixes it with two wooden spoons and an elaborate dance of his elbows.

“You’re not sure,” he says.

“What I’m not sure about is what it would mean to be sure. Maybe I am sure, I just haven’t learnt to recognize the feeling…”

“You break things down too much. You take a simple thing and make it into a twenty-chapter novel.”

“This is a simple thing? Having a child?”

“We’ve talked about it. It’s planned. Nothing about this is supposed to surprise us anymore.”

“Are we going to fight over this now?” asks Keya anxiously, as if a fight is a unique occasion requiring preparations she hasn’t made.

“Go sit down. Close your eyes for ten minutes and ask yourself what you want. Whatever you tell me at the end of those ten minutes is going to be your word on this. Okay?”

9 pm

For the first time in her twenty-six-year-old life she has burnt a chapatti. “Bhagvan,” she groans, switching off the gas and pushing the pedal of the dustbin with her bare foot to fling the thing away. Then she stands in the middle of the kitchen and wonders what else to chuck in after it so that her employers won’t notice.

She can hear the baby crying and says to herself, “Cry. Cry till you’re tired of crying. And then cry some more.”

She looks at the plastic chopping board with the black lines of countless knife marks embedded in it and decides it’s ugly. She shoves it into the dustbin. Then she goes and grabs the iron that short-circuited while she was ironing the previous week, and throws that in as well.

“Who’s going to eat all this?” she asks herself loudly. “Who eats anything at all in this house?”‘ She takes the remaining dough for the chapattis and, shaping it into a large ball, aims it at the nose of the iron, which is sticking out of the bin. It hangs there for a moment then falls, heavily, to the floor.

Savita talks to herself because there’s usually no one to talk to except the baby. It’s true that the baby is beginning to understand her, that at eighteen months he has picked up several Kannada words. He was a red-cheeked, overfed six-month-old, always crying for his mother, when Savita first came to the house and now he is a red-cheeked, overfed toddler who is largely content with Savita. He puts his small arms around her neck and pulls at her earrings and spits in unexpected places, calling out to her to show her what he has done.

Her employers have left their son in Savita’s care. They are out working all day and in the weekends there are parties they must go to from which they will always return late, sometimes without having eaten. Savita keeps hot food ready in case they are hungry. They don’t have to ask her. She knows. They’ve let her take over. She does the laundry in the huge washing machine and orders groceries on the phone and cooks all the meals and takes the baby out in the stroller. She keeps the knives sharpened and signs for couriers and bosses over the gardener who comes in twice a week to pet the mini-lawn and trim the rose bushes.

Savita is the queen of number 43 and she doesn’t make a thing out of it. She still kicks off her slippers when she enters the house. She still wears a bright nylon sari hitched high above her ankles, oil in her hair and an elongated maroon bindi with a silver outline. She still has calloused heels and uneven fingernails. Sometimes, just for fun, she looks through Mandana’s salwar kameezes and jeans but they are all gigantic. The two women are the same age and yet the clothes of one are several sizes too big for the small, bony frame of the other.

Savita usually enjoys it when her employers are out in the evenings. She never feels as much at one with the house and all the many things in it as on these evenings when she can lie back on the sofa after finishing work. She is too much of a realist to think of the future. She concentrates on the present – the smooth faces on the TV and the stories about wealth, beauty and fashionable clothes that their bodies tell.

But tonight she cannot sit, she cannot go to the baby, she cannot eat her dinner. She would like to deliver a slap on the face of her boss, Kiran, whom she calls ‘Sir’ and whose shoes she doesn’t polish – because there are some things she just won’t do – but whose racks full of CDs she dusts and whose clothes she launders. She has worked in two homes before this and always the men of the house have ignored her. That’s the natural thing – to be ignored by the men, to be part of the women’s department.

But Kiran doesn’t seem to care. He often seeks her out, asking her to do small chores, things she considers her responsibility anyway. She has had to mumble and look away, embarrassed. Why should he say, “Savita, the child’s toys are all over the carpet and my friends are here in ten minutes.” She knows.

Tonight is the last straw. Earlier in the evening he announced to her, “We’ll be back late.” She was washing up and had her back to him. When she turned around a minute later he was still standing there looking at her. She stared at him in surprise.

“Why don’t you listen to me when I’m talking to you?” he said in a neutral tone. Savita didn’t know whether he was scolding her or making a pass at her. Either way, she hated him.

“I heard,” she said proudly, turning her back to him again.

He’d actually come up to her, twisted her elbow and said to her, “Look at me. Like this. Look at me in the face when I talk to you.”

Savita is furious. How dare this man do this? Why did Mandana pretend not to notice? She burnt the chapatti with her angry questions.

Now she paces about the house and decides to phone her brother. Krishnappa calls his sister ‘muttidare muni’, touch-me-not, and makes jokes about her temper. But he’s the one who encouraged her to leave both her previous employments because he felt she was cut out for better. Krishnappa will know what to do.

11 pm

Keya is in bed and the house smells of prawn curry even though there is no prawn curry left. Strange, thinks Keya. That the aroma can remain even after the thing is gone. She only had two drinks and is focused; Mohan graduated to gin and lime juice after the wine had been drunk. He is out on the balcony, smoking a cigarette.

Sitting on the sofa with her eyes closed under orders from Mohan, she saw how failing one plan would cast doubt on all the others. What is a plan but an expression of faith in a future self? She did not trust her future self – she was too unsure of how she would feel about things from moment to moment – but Mohan was not to know. She was not to reveal this faint-heartedness to her husband. Therefore, have a baby.

Mohan comes in and sits by her, stroking her hair. “The poor darling is stressed about travelling. Stupid workshop.”

“Stupid Amsterdam,” she says.

They snuggle together and slowly their breathing acquires a common rhythm. What Keya likes best about sex is the part before sex. The anticipation. The foreknowledge that they can touch each other and the deliciousness, therefore, of holding out for a minute longer. For two minutes more.

“I shouldn’t but I have to,” says Keya.

“What, get drunk?”

“Check that I’ve packed the presentation CD.“

“Check it in the morning.”

“I’ll forget.”
“Make a note.”

“I’ll have to get up anyway to find my phone.”

Mohan groans and Keya runs into the living room barefoot, flips on a table lamp and starts pulling things out of her shoulder bag. The CD is exactly where she put it. Then just to be sure, she checks her ticket one more time. She glances at it and is about to put it back when something stops her. She slowly unfolds the printout again and looks at the date and time. 22 March, 1:45 hours. She looks up at the digital clock on the bookshelf whose figures glow in the half-light. 23:40.

“One o’clock in the morning!” she shouts and Mohan answers from the bedroom, “No, it’s just getting to be twelve.”

“Mohan, get up. The flight’s not tomorrow afternoon. It’s two hours from now,” she says as she rushes in and starts dragging her suitcase out.

“Check your ticket, for God’s sake.”

“I just did, for God’s sake.”

“But you’ve checked it a hundred times before.”

“I didn’t notice. I was looking so hard I didn’t see. I thought one is always one in the afternoon.” She’s crying now. “If I miss this workshop…”

She can tell from Mohan’s face that he wants to suggest his usual remedy. Calm down, take a deep breath, focus, reflect. But he can’t do that now. She has already pulled her pyjamas off and is hopping around on one foot trying to get her jeans on. There is no time to fucking calm down.

Yet he’s still standing there, rubbing his eyes.

“But how can you go tonight of all nights…?”

“Mohan, this is my work. This is what I do.”
Mohan says grimly, “I’ll get the car out.”

She’s already in the bathroom, splashing cold water on her face. Everything is packed and ready to go. She left nothing for the last minute. She checks her watch. 11:48. They’ll make it. She’ll be horribly late but they’ll make it. They live more than an hour from the airport but that’s in daytime traffic. There can’t be much this late.

Mohan has put her suitcase in and the engine is running. He’s still in his pyjamas. In the front seat, they look at each other for one shocked moment.

Then Mohan says, “Mints.”

“What?”

“It’s Saturday night. What if the cops are checking?”

“I don’t have mints.”

“I’ll just go brush my teeth once more.”

“No!” says Keya and it emerges almost as a scream. She runs into the house and returns in seconds with a toothbrush capped with a squiggle of translucent red paste. Mohan takes it wordlessly from her, sticks it angrily into his mouth, backs out into the lane and drives off with a roar.

11 pm

Krishnappa’s advice to Savita was – leave that low-down house at once, but don’t steal anything. Savita wanted to talk for longer, describe the last few months in detail and not just the fact that her employer bullied her tonight. She wanted to tell Krishnappa how little they eat of the food she cooks and how much they neglect their son and how madam Mandana is so polite to Savita because she’s guilty about not even lifting a needle and stitching a button when it falls off a shirt.

“If this hadn’t happened, I’d have asked for a raise and they would have given me one simply because these people are useless. What’s the point of buying flowers and mopping the floors when they can’t see?”

“Fine,” Krishnappa had said. “Just leave that place. Walk out now.” He was at a wedding and had to shout. He ran an enterprise that rented out folding chairs, trestle tables, electric lights, microphones and tents for weddings, funerals and everything in between. Tonight he was distracted on the phone, perhaps by the food. He always made sure to eat for two people at weddings, as if he were putting it away for future use.

Savita has been waiting for the brat to fall asleep so she can leave. She is going to forgo a week of her salary but it doesn’t bother her. She is angry and clear. They’ll never see her again. She’ll go to her brother’s house and wait by the door till he returns. And before the week is out, Savita will start looking for another job.

She has tidied the kitchen, put out the garbage, eaten, and packed her belongings into a red canvas bag discarded by Mandana. The baby is cranky tonight; he fell asleep, then woke up. She lifts him up and coos into his ear. She cannot leave a crying baby in the house. The Dollars Colony neighbours are probably too far to hear but sometimes the boy can scream so hard, Savita has to briefly hold a hand to his mouth.

As she walks around the house with him tearing at her hair, she looks at all the things of which she was, for a whole year, the keeper; her brother’s words start to play on her mind. Why did he say “Don’t steal anything”? Where did he get that idea from? I am a thief, she asks herself. Have I ever touched anything? The more she thinks about it, the angrier she gets. After twenty minutes, it starts to seem logical to Savita that she should steal something – to teach her brother not to underestimate her as well as to upset her employers. She feels that her going away will not make a jot of difference to them. They will get another one and she’ll be shoddy and not know how to manage the baby but they won’t kill themselves over it. They have their jobs and their friends and their parties. They’ll soon put the kid in a playschool.

She goes into the spare bedroom with the now-groggy baby on her shoulder and comes out again into the living room, then goes upstairs to the master bedroom, but there is nothing she can find to take away whose absence will shock her employers. If she takes Kiran’s second mobile phone, he’ll buy a new one. She doesn’t know where Mandana puts the key to her cupboard locker but she anyway doesn’t want to steal gold rings and bracelets. I’m not that kind of thief, she thinks. It’s a stupid idea. I don’t want anything from this stupid house.

It’s coming on midnight; Mandana and Kiran are never back before 1 am but it’s time to leave. She gently lowers the baby into his cot and he starts whimpering again at the feel of leaving her warm body.

Him, thinks Savita with surprise. I could steal him. And before she has time to reflect on this brazen thought, she is outside the front door and clicking it shut.

Midnight

Mohan is in control despite the toothbrush still hanging from his mouth. They have been driving for ten minutes. Traffic is thin; there is still a full hour and a half to the flight. Keya thinks of how when she returns to the office there will be around her for a day or two that aura always attached to people who return from their stints abroad. Everyone will want to know how it went.

At home, she will sit down on the sofa and have a think again. Does she really want that elevated thing – motherhood? Can’t she allow herself uncertainty the way other women allow themselves a dozen pairs of shoes or an expensive facial?

She puts her arm around Mohan’s shoulders and says, “Genius.”

Mohan is concentrating on the road and says something through the bristles that sounds like “Shit.”

They are on St Marks Road and it’s a melee. Mohan draws up behind a line of stalled cars. Up ahead, the cops in their white cowboy hats have put a couple of barriers in place and are summoning each car forward, then ducking the breathalyser into every driver’s mouth. Most people are sozzled, judging by how few are waved on and how many motioned to draw up and get their wallets out. These men don’t waste words. The pair of cops receiving the fines doesn’t even bother to talk to the offenders. They’re just writing out receipt after receipt, tearing them out and waving them in the faces of the drunken car drivers with a silent finality.

“Welcome to Bourbon Avenue,” says Mohan in his garbled accent, then opens his door and spits out toothpaste. This is that special neck of the street where people gather to drink, buying bottles of booze from Dewars. Couples sit inside their cars mixing coke with rum; groups of men stand talking outside, balancing pegs of whisky in plastic glasses on the roofs of their Esteems and Land Rovers. Keya does not understand how they think they can evade the cops; perhaps the cops are erratic, swooping down on them only now and then. But why would they do that when they know they can make a killing each and every weekend? It’s a mystery to Keya, one more mystery about the city.

“Go!” says Keya, when the blue Swift ahead of them moves a couple of feet forward. “Go.”

Mohan looks at Keya and explains. “Baby, there’s nowhere to go.” He calmly brushes his teeth with his foot on the accelerator and the door open a crack. The March heat slips in and diffuses the air conditioning. From time to time he pushes open the door and spits noisily, while Keya keeps shouting, “Go, Mohan, go!” Then she’s quiet; she starts to feel that to utter a single word would be to tempt fate. She alternates between silent swearing and silent praying, while Mohan inches forward.

They don’t have enough money. Mohan didn’t bring his wallet and Keya has only a couple of hundred rupees at the bottom of her purse; she has Euros instead. She also has her cards but if they have to stop at an ATMthat will mean more precious minutes lost. For now she focuses on mentally urging the cars ahead of them to move, move, move.

When they are finally at the barricades and Mohan exhales into the contraption, the cop looks at it for a moment and asks him sternly to breathe again; he does. After which they are, miraculously, wonderfully, beautifully, waved through. Within seconds they are on MG Road and Mohan is saying, “See. A gap of two hours and lots of toothpaste makes all the difference.”

Keya has unstrapped her watch and is holding it before her nose. 12:20. Not talking will make Mohan drive faster. It seems to. At 12:30 they are in Mekhri Circle and now it is possible to believe that the airport exists, that it is not the figment of a desperate imagination.

“You do know that boarding closes half an hour before the time printed on the ticket,” says Mohan. He’s said this before but Keya can’t hear any more. She is mesmerized by the seconds hand on her watch. It seems to move to a rhythm both magical and cruel.

Midnight

Savita doesn’t know for long she’s been walking. The baby is too heavy; she feels she’s lugging a grown man along with her shoulder bag. The blanket, in this heat, was a bad idea. And Krishnappa is not answering his phone.

To visit him, she takes two buses from Dollars Colony to his two-room house in Devanahalli but tonight she’s counting on finding a rickshaw on the main road. There’s no break in the traffic. It’s because of the new airport, she thinks. Everyone’s going to the airport. One evening she flagged down one of those huge red airport coaches, certain it wouldn’t stop, but it did. Instead of paying the exorbitant fare, she had given the conductor one of the two Baskin-Robbins ice-cream cartons crammed with hot puliyogare that she was taking for Krishnappa. He was fine with that. The second time she flagged down a coach it turned out to have the same conductor; she had no puliyogare that time so she chatted with him instead. She cursed her employers and made them out to be more vicious and tight-fisted than they were; he told her about the number of people from the once-village of Devanahalli who had died on that road since the airport came up. “They still run like chickens on to the road, straight into the traffic” he said and she replied, “How will they get to the other side if they don’t run? It’s your fault. You and your rakshasa buses.” And he had smiled at that in a way that made Savita turn her face away and hide her own smile.

But tonight none of the coaches she tries to wave down stop for her, there are hardly any rickshaws, and the taxis swerve and honk impatiently, passing so close to Savita she can feel the heat from them as if from running, breathing animals. She tries to think of stories of mistreatment with which to justify her theft of the baby but already she can hear her brother’s voice in her ear. “You she-goat whose brains the devil stole! What do we need other people’s babies for? What is this house, an ashram for the brats of rich people?” And he will insist that she turn back and return the baby and she will shout at him and spend the night outside the door crying.

She tries calling him again but again all she gets is “Naavaduva nudiye Kannada nudi…”, a song he loves only because it’s from a movie that was released the year he was born. She wants to recall her anger with him, which is what made her steal the baby in the first place, but all she feels now is hot, anxious and sleepy. She wants her brother to come and pick her up in his tempo truck. Tomorrow everything might look different but tonight she cannot turn back. She stops and looks at her phone and asks of it out loud: what am I to do? Then, as she scans the road again, noting the sleek private cars which are trying to outdo even the taxis, an idea comes to her.

12:30 am

Keya is talking now but Mohan is quiet. He doesn’t answer when she says, “If I hadn’t got up to check that ticket one last time, I would be at home right now, crying.” I thought you ran out of bed to check your notes, he thinks. Keya did not go so far as to deliberately sabotage things tonight but Mohan is sure that somewhere in this mess is concealed her indifference towards babies.

He wants to tell her that he’ll handle it. He wants to stop the car and tell her that she shouldn’t worry about not being sure, because babies come with an inbuilt logic of necessity. He doesn’t know how he knows this though he’s quite sure about it. But this is not the time to have that conversation so he takes a deep breath and looks at the shop signs that still glow on Bellary Road even though all the shutters are down. G. Gheewala and Dr Raj Pork Shop.

A little after the National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Insects there is a woman with a sleeping child bundled in one arm, trying to wave down the car. Mohan steps harder on the accelerator in response and soon she has been left behind.

Five seconds go by before Keya exclaims, “She was crying.”

This is Keya, thinks Mohan. Everything she sees when they’re out driving either baffles her or makes her guilty.

He puts his hand on her knee.

“Wait,” she says.

“Keya?” asks Mohan politely.

“Stop the car.”

“Are you sick?”

“Mohan, stop the car.”

He pulls up.

She gets out, shielding her eyes from the glare of the oncoming headlights. The woman is still out there, trying to get someone to stop for her.

“Hello!” she shouts awkwardly. “Hello.”

“Twelve thirty-six,” says Mohan.

The woman hurries towards Keya who holds the back door open for her. They don’t speak but as soon as Keya is back in her seat and they are off again, Savita says, “Are you going to the airport? I’m going that way too. My baby is very sick. He’s been crying for the last two hours. Please drop me off just before the diversion for the airport.”

Keya murmurs, “Are you taking him to hospital?”

“My brother lives nearby. He’ll drive me there in his tempo. He couldn’t come and pick me up because he’s at a wedding. I mean, he’s not getting married himself but he’s organizing things. Lights and tents and things like that. If you hadn’t picked me up I don’t know what would have happened.”

Savita can feel Mohan’s eyes on her in the rear-view mirror and she avoids looking at him. She can sense that he doesn’t trust her. The woman trusts her but not him.

“He’s quiet now,” says Keya.

“High fever he has. He sleeps for a little time when it breaks and then he starts crying again.”

Fifteen minutes of high-speed driving later, they are at the diversion and Savita gets off.

“Thank you, madam,” she says, making it a point to ignore Mohan. She closes the door gently and Mohan looks back to see her walking away with the shapeless bundle in the blanket.

At the airport, Mohan says, “Run now.”

Keya is standing with her suitcase on a trolley, the lights of the departure terminal blazing behind her. She hugs her husband and says, “The best thing about tonight was giving that woman a lift.”

He stands there watching her jog off, wanting to say something in response to that last remark but not knowing what. He wants to call out to her and say she’s mistaken; he knows she is. Whenever they disagree about the facts of the world, it’s usually she who’s wrong and he who’s right. But he cannot quite put his finger on what was shifty about the woman they picked up.

Mohan pulls away from the terminal, already missing his wife, and then hears very close to him the small wail of a baby.

His heart leaps up in his chest. He checks if the car stereo has come on by itself and if there’s been some kind of terrible mistake on late-night FM.Again that cry. He brakes abruptly and, killing the engine right there in the middle of the lane, twists himself to peer at the back seat. Lying there in the far corner behind him, without its blanket, is a baby with his eyes half-opened and his mouth shaped into a grimace.

For a moment he stops writhing and looks straight into Mohan’s eyes.