LOADSHEDDING: A TEMPORARY PORTRAIT OF MARRIAGE

Our love was a dose of insulin; a constant reminder of how too sweet is fatal.

A loud call comes from outside. In insane rapidity, it begins to list vegetables and fruits with not only their prices but also their unique sources. Informing them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for two hours, beginning at seven pm. A line had gone down in the last hailstorm and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street. Tea and Rohan had lived for six years. “It’s good of them to warn us, ” Tea conceded. She let the strap of her Sarojini Nagar 200 rupees leather satchel, plump with files, pencils and cosmetics torn at edges, slip from her shoulders, and left it across the rocking chair as she walked into the kitchen. 

 She’d come from the grocery shopping. The outer reaches of her mouth, were lined by the thick mustard oil suggesting she voraciously nimbled Chandi Chowk's puffed rice and her Kamla Nagar market kohl had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She used to look this way sometimes, Rohan thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of vegetables on the table without a glance. “But they should do this sort of thing during the day.” 

 “When I’m here, you mean, ” Rohan said. He put a glass lid on a pressure cooker, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since June he’d been working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his dissertation of Hindi Literature,  “When do the repairs start?” 

 “It says December twelfth. Is today the twelfth?” Tea walked over to the framed cork board that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar. “Today then, ” Tea announced. “You have a optometrist appointment next Saturday, by the way.” 

Rohan hadn’t left the house at all that day, or the day before. The more Tea stayed out, the more she began putting in extra hours at work, to be able to afford sufficient metres of cotton to replenish her wardrobe at an inexpensive tailor and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the letters or to buy fruits. 

These days Tea was always gone by the time Rohan woke up. He would open his eyes and see the undergarments of hers, she removed and kept them at the foot of their bed rather than depositing in the laundry hamper and think of her, dressed, sipping her second cup of tea already, in her salon chamber, where she searched for errors in magazines and marked them. She would do the same for his dissertation, she promised, when it was ready. He envied her the specificity of her task, so unlike the elusive nature of his. Now he would lie in their bed until he grew bored, gazing at the fan blades which Tea hasn't cleaned in months . Nothing was pushing Rohan. Instead he thought of how he and Tea had become experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom house, spending as much time on separate floors as possible. He thought of how he no longer looked forward to weekends, when she sat for hours on the sofa with her colored pencils and her files, so that he feared that putting on a record in his own house might be rude. He thought of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled, or whispered his name on those rare occasions they still reached for each other’s bodies before sleeping.

 

Nicknamed after a nursery rhyme, she had yet to shed a childhood endearment. Tea, is a lady of few interests. Her life revolved around Rohan's earlier. She would wake up before dawn, even on the chilliest of winter mornings, take a bath and begin her daily routine. She’d prepare tea and breakfast for him, fetch his newspaper, organize his clothes, and stand at the doorway waving goodbye as he left for work. The rest of the day would be spent in anticipation of and preparation for his return.

Rohan is an intimidating man. He stands well over six feet, sports a well-groomed mustache, and is a assistant professor at a government funded college . He is a man of few words. He preferred gestures instead. Happiness would be expressed with a slight curve of the lips, sadness through a vacant stare, and anger through looming silence. Perhaps this was what led Tea to go elsewhere in pursuit of words. It led her to Shrey. 

Rohan, who had reserved Sundays for political discussions with other civil servants at Mitra’s tea shop, by Princep Ghat had no idea about his wife's secret. 

It was often nearly lunchtime when Rohan would finally pull himself out of bed and head downstairs. 

With the doorbell shrieking to tell him the milk man is here. He measured the snow-white milk and out it gushed into the

container that Rohan held. Rubbing his turmeric stained teeth hastily with his index finger, Rohan ran the water in the sink, soaking the knife and the cutting board, and rubbed a lemon half along his fingertips to get rid of the garlic smell, a trick he’d learned from Tea's mother. It was seven-thirty. Through the window he saw the sky, like soft black pitch. Uneven banks of dirty water still lined the sidewalks. Nearly three trees had fallen in the last storm. For a week that was Rohan’s excuse for not leaving the house. 

 “The ilish mach won’t be done by eight, ” Rohan said. “We may have to eat in the dark.”

"We can light candles or the lantern, ” Tea suggested. She unclipped her hair and pried the sneakers from her feet without untying them. “I’m going to shower before the lights go, ” she said, heading for the staircase. “I’ll be down.”

Tonight, with no lights, they would have to eat together. For months now they’d served themselves from the stove, and he’d taken his plate into his study, curating unfinished stories and unnarrated tales, letting the meal grow cold on his desk before shoving it into his mouth without pause, while Tea took her plate to the bedroom and watched Teen Wolves, or proofread files with her arsenal of colored pencils at hand. 

 

Rohan returned to the kitchen and began to open drawers. He tried to locate a candle among the scissors, the mortar and pestle she’d bought from Lodhi Garden Sunday market, and used to pound ginger, garlic cloves and cardamom pods, back when she used to cook. He found a flashlight, but no batteries, and a half-empty box of birthday candles.

It struck him as odd that there were no real candles in the house. That Tea hadn’t prepared for such an ordinary emergency. He looked now for something to put the birthday candles in and settled on the soil of a potted tulsi that normally sat on the windowsill over the sink. Even though the plant was inches from the tap, the soil was so dry that he had to water it first before the candles would stand straight. He pushed aside the things on the kitchen table, the piles of mail, the unread library books. He remembered their first meals there, when they were so thrilled to be married, to be living together in the same house at last, that they would just reach for 

each other foolishly, more eager to make love than to eat.

“What’s all this?” Tea said when she came downstairs.

“You made Ilish mach, ” Tea observed, looking through the glass lid at the bright stew. 

The microwave had just beeped when the lights went out, and the music disappeared. 

 “Perfect timing, ” Tea said. 

 “All I could find were birthday candles.” He lit up the potted plant keeping the rest of the candles and a book of matches by his plate. 

 “It doesn’t matter, ” she said, running a finger along the stem of her wine glass. “It looks lovely.” 

 In the dimness, he knew how she sat, a bit forward in her chair, ankles crossed against the lowest rung, left elbow on the table. They served themselves, stirring the rice with their hands, squinting as they extracted bay leaves and cloves from the stew. Every few minutes Rohan lit a few more birthday candles and drove them into the soil of the pot. 

 “It’s like our countryside” Tea said, watching him tend his makeshift candelabra. “Sometimes there's load shedding for hours at a stretch. I once had to attend an entire annaprashan in the dark. The baby just cried and cried. It 

must have been so hot.” 

They weren’t like this before. Now he had to struggle to say something that interested her, something that made her look up from her plate, or from her proofreading files. Eventually he gave up trying to amuse her. He learned not to mind the silences. 

 “I remember during power failures at my Nani’s house, we all had to say something, ” Tea continued. He could barely see her face, but from her tone he knew her eyes were narrowed, as if trying to focus on a distant object. It was a habit of hers. 

 “Like what?” 

 “I don’t know. A little rhyme. A joke. A fact about the world. For some reason my relatives always wanted me to tell them the names of my guy friends in school. I don’t know why the information was so interesting to them. 

“Let’s do that, ” she said suddenly. 

 “Do what?” 

 “Say something to each other in the dark.” 

 “Like what? I don’t know any jokes.” 

 “No, no jokes.” She thought for a minute. 

“How about telling each other something we’ve never told before.” 

 “I used to play this game in high school, ” Rohan recalled. “When I got drunk.” 

 “You’re thinking of truth or dare. This is different. Okay, I’ll start.” She munched on some rice . “The first time I was alone in your apartment, I looked in your notebook to see if you’d written some poems about / to me in. I think we’d known each other two weeks.” 

 “Where was I?” 

"You went to the bathroom to throw away the ashes. The cigarette butt still bobbed in the toilet bowl, but the tank was refilling, so you had to wait a moment before you could flush it again".

 

 “Had I?” 

 “No. But I didn’t give up on you. Now it’s your turn.” 

 He couldn’t think of anything, but Tea was waiting for him to speak. She hadn’t appeared so determined in months. What was there left to say to her? 

The birthday candles had burned out, but he pictured her face clearly in the dark, the wide tilting eyes and a dark mole on her chin. 

The next night Tea came home earlier than usual. There was ilish mach left over from the evening before, and Rohan heated it up so that they were able to eat by seven. He’d gone out that day, through the blinding rain and bought a packet of candles from the corner store, and batteries to fit the torchlight. He had the candles ready on the countertop, standing on china matir plates cracked at its sides, but they ate under the glow of the ceiling lamp that hung over the table. 

When they had finished eating, Rohan was surprised to see that Tea was stacking her plate on top of his, and then carrying them over to the sink. He had assumed she would retreat to the living room, behind her 

barricade of files. 

 “Don’t worry about the dishes, ” he said, taking them from her hands. 

 “It seems silly not to, ” she replied, pouring a drop of detergent onto a sponge. “It’s nearly eight o’clock.” 

 His heart quickened. All day Rohan had looked forward to the lights going out. He thought about what Tea had said the night before, about looking in his notebook. It felt good to remember her as she was then, how bold yet nervous she’d been when they first met, how hopeful. They stood side by side at the sink, their reflections fitting together in the frame of the window. It made him shy, the way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror. He couldn’t recall the last time they’d been photographed. They had stopped attending parties, went nowhere together. 

 After finishing the dishes, they leaned against the counter, drying their hands on either end of a towel. At seven o’clock the house went black. Rohan lit the wicks of the candles, impressed by their long, steady flames. 

 “Let’s sit on the terrace, ” Tea said. “I think it’s warm still.” 

 

They each took a candle and climbed on the steps. 

He wondered what Tea would tell him in the dark. The worst possibilities had already run through his head. That she’d had an affair. That she didn’t respect him for being thirty-five and still working on his dissertation. 

He began to feel cold as they strolled by the terrace. He felt that he needed her to talk first, in order to reciprocate.

"It's been a while since you wrote something", Tea said peering over his shoulders with curiosity. 

"Has it? I didn't realise". Looking up at the star lit sky.

" 7 months , 28 days and 4 hours to be precise", pride figuring over her face.

" You are synonymous with precision, Tea".

" So, who is the muse now? It's not me I'm certain about! " confidence shining in her voice.

" Now, how are you so sure? " I wonder out loud.

"Because you and I haven't spent much time together in the past seven months", softly spoken, layered with the emotion of anguish.

They sat together until ten o’clock, when the lights came on. They heard some people across the street clapping from their porch, and televisions being turned on. Then they stood up, his hand still in hers, and went inside. 

Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions — the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves. The following day Rohan thought for hours about what to say to her. 

Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The third night after supper they’d sat together on the sofa, and once it was dark he began kissing her awkwardly on her forehead and her face, and though it was dark he closed his eyes, and knew that she did, too. The fourth night they walked carefully upstairs, to bed, feeling together for the final step with their feet before the landing, and making love with a desperation they had forgotten. She wept without sound, and whispered a name, and traced his eyebrows with her finger in the dark. As he made love to her he wondered what he would say to her the next night, and what she would say, the thought of it exciting him. “Hold me, ” she said, “hold me in your arms, ” By the time the lights came back on downstairs, they’d fallen asleep. 

The morning of the fifth night Rohan found another notice from the electric company in the mailbox. The line had been repaired ahead of schedule, it said. He was disappointed. He had planned on making chingri macher malaikari for Tea, but when he arrived at the store he didn’t feel like cooking anymore. It wasn’t the same, he thought, knowing that the lights wouldn’t go out. In the store the shrimp looked gray and thin. The coconut milk tin was dusty and overpriced. Still, he bought them, along with a beeswax candle and yellow paper. 

She came home at seven-thirty. “I suppose this is the end of our game, ” he said when he saw her reading the notice. 

She looked at him. “You can still light candles if you want.” 

They simply ate in a darkened room, in the glow of a beeswax candle. They had survived a difficult time. They finished off the shrimp. They sat together until the candle had nearly burned away. She shifted in her chair, and Rohan thought that she was about to say something. But instead she blew out the candle, stood up, turned on the light switch, and sat down again. 

 " Shouldn’t we keep the lights off?” Rohan asked. She set her plate aside and clasped her hands on the table. “I want you to see my face when I tell you this, ” she said gently.

"We all have different ways of dealing with loneliness", Tea muttered out of nowhere, a half burnt cigarette in her mouth. " Some of us get cats, some get therapists. Some light up a cigarette every hour. And some, .... ".

There was a brief pause.

Rohan looked at her. Everytime, she spoke like this, she seemed so distant. She was there , right in front of him. Their chairs were less than ten metres apart. Yet, she seemed miles away. Her eyes were fixed on the chinamatir plate. The plate, for no reason, has miniature snowflakes and flowers painted on it. She was stirring the rice with a spoon. "It will get cold.", Rohan said softly. She shrugged , as if it hardly mattered.

They sat in utter silence for half and hour. By now , Rohan was used to it. Any attempt to talk to her meant spending more time in silence than in conversation. Finally, he mustered up the courage to ask her a question.

" So, ... what do you do to deal with loneliness? ".

Tea lifted her eyes, from the plate and glanced at him briefly. Then, very quickly, she began to look at the plate again.

"I sit there by parks , tree shades and talk to strangers", she said, with a hint of a smile.

"It has to be a new cafe, new park, and new place every week, though. Staying in one place for too long and it becomes a home".

And why are you afraid of places becoming homes?

" When places become homes, they make you feel lonely. You cannot lie to the walls. You cannot make up stories for your pillowcases. You cannot pretend running your fingers lovingly over the spines of the books arranged on the shelves; wiped with dust. All of them know you to well. And to be known too well - is the key to loneliness ".

Tea said, narrowing her eyes on something, " I was appalled when you told me, that a college mate of yours, someone

I had met once but didn't remember, would be staying with us for a week for some internship work".

" I have then conceived a child in the evening, on a storage room, by the roof of our building, littered with wet laundry, across the clothesline and over the pigeon droppings that plastered the parapets of our rooftops or scrubbed scales of fish; after your mate learned that a pharmaceutical company had hired him. I came downstairs after my shower . My hair was wrapped in a thick white towel. I undid the towel and draped it over a chair, allowing the hair, damp and dark, to fall across my back. As I walked absently toward the gas stove, taking out a few tangles with my fingers. I wore a clean pair of sweatpants and an undersized padded bralette. On that rainy April evening, I was in the kitchen, watching the tea leaves dance and swim in the pot of boiling hot water, until the colour of Sulaimani matches the henna I applied to that Durga Ashtomi. He, dropped some crushed elaichi into the pot, like a falling penny into the wishing well. When the pouring stopped, we climbed the rooftop, my fingers were entwined with his . While I watch him to smoke a cigarette leaving a trail of thick cloud streams from his nostrils. I made no protest when your friend touched the small of my back, kissed the mole on my chin, untied my unruly hair, streaked here and there with Garnier's colours, slipping his fingers down my waist gently yet hastily, tickling my cellulite shreds; crawled into me, nibbling my nipple off. As, I was about to serve him some tea, then pulled me against his crisp body, painted in driblets of perspiration. He made love to me passionately, swiftly, in silence. My moans quivered, as my limbs ached for being in a constant motion, for hours at a stretch; with an expertise I had never known". 

It sickened Rohan, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without him. This was what she’d been trying to tell him for the past four evenings. This was the point of her game. 

Now it was his turn to speak. There was something he’d sworn he would tell her, and for past few days, he had done his best to work on his creative block.

Peering at the yellow tinted paper 

folded in his lap, Tea studied his craft of transliteration,  

" सुनो

एक गली हैं,

जहां कुल्हड़ टूटने जाते हैं।

उस गली में मिलना मुझे

हाथ थाम कर खड़े होंगे हम

और पीएंगे किसी कुल्हड़ में चाय।

 क्यों?

क्योंकि जरूरी हैं।

जरूरी हैं याद रखना

की जो चीज़े टूट जाती हैं

वो भी कभी पूरी थी।

एक याद थी, एक मोहब्बत थी।

जैसी हमारी कहानी।

जो सदियों पुराने किसी दिसंबर में

शुरू हुई थी

एक कप चाय के साथ।।"

Tea looked at him now, her face contorted with sorrow. Rohan stood up and stacked his plate on top of hers. He carried the plates to the sink, but instead of running the tap he looked out the curtained entrance window without grille. Outside the evening, was still warm. Tea had turned the lights off. 

What do you see ? 

She asked Rohan, " What do you see outside this window ? " 

He turned to her , briefly.

He paused, as if to gauge whether he can trust her, then says : " It's not always about what you see. It is sometimes about the things you cannot ".

Tea smiled. Asking him, this time.

 What are the things you cannot see ? 

"The bills lying down in my study drawer.

My mother's phone calls, which I leave unanswered because I don't know how to give an honest answer to, "How are you?" Laundry. Oh, piles and piles of laundry stacked at the foot of the bed. Faces of friends which would lighten up my day. But are a hundred of miles away from me. Somewhere, there's also a warm winter sun, shining over the hills of my hometown. And somewhere, there is a girl

still wondering why I never replied to her letters ". " 

" Aah, I see", Tea told him. You gaze to forget. 

 " Don't we all? " Rohan mumbled under his breath. 

She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Rohan joined her. Tears welled behind their eyelids, for the things they now knew.