Monidipa Mondal pens a psychological tale exploring the underlying fissures of a family ..
The boy always writes about his mother.
It eats away at Rudrani’s heart as she fidgets around the house, counting the hours for Anjan to come home. A year and a half has gone since the boy’s mother passed away; a year since Rudrani was introduced to Anjan, surrounded by both their families, at her parent’s house in Calcutta; six months since their wedding; nearly two weeks since Rudrani finally arrived at her husband’s house in Glasgow, excited to take charge of her new family… and the boy still writes about his mother.
Rudrani had spent a whole year hearing about nothing but the boy. She had recently turned twenty, too young she thought to play mother to another woman’s child, but her family found no other suitor that could be compared to Anjan. He was more than a decade older than Rudrani and somewhat distant, but also sophisticated and courteous in a way that made her heart leap. He had told her outright that he wouldn’t have thought of remarrying if not for the boy.. But he would keep her in comfort and the lure of living abroad was not to be thrown away.
And Anjan had promised that the boy would be no trouble.. He was unlike other children; he never cried or threw tantrums or demanded to be taken anywhere, preferring to stay at home and write stories in his notebook. He would grow up to be a great intellectual, his father had mused fondly. Rudrani was going to love him.
So she had come prepared to love him, but on the day she arrived, the boy had taken one look at her and turned away to his notebook and pencils. Anjan was too busy unloading their many suitcases from the taxi and carrying then indoors. So despite her jetlag and blossoming headache, Rudrani had summoned the last dregs of cheerfulness in her voice to greet the boy.
“Hello, Monku! Won’t you talk to me? I am your new mother.”
He had stared hard at her face. Then he had informed her, in no uncertain words, “My mummy doesn’t like you”’
Anjan is never at home. His office hours are long and strenuous, often bleeding into the weekends. He encourages her to go out on her own, but Rudrani has nowhere to go. She knows no one in this city, in this country – so far away from the familiar faces and warm, sprawling days of home. There is no maid to help with her housework, no gossipy neighbour to fill her lonely afternoons with chatter. Everything in Glasgow seems too cramped, too impersonal, and oppressive in their clockwork exactitude. The sky hangs ominously low, with rarely a break of sunshine. An obstinate sogginess follows Rudrani everywhere – it feels like her clothes, her socks, the carpeted floor of the house, even her marital bed will never be completely dry again.
Anjan has left her in charge of the house. Rudrani falls vehemently into the task of redecorating it, for everything – the furniture, the curtains, the accent in each room – is exactly the way it had been at the time of his first wife. And what an odd taste the dead woman had! She does not understand the fascination for grotesque things, such as the wooden African mask that hangs over the dining table or the large framed painting of a sour-faced, uni-browed woman, flanked by a black monkey and kitten, adorning the living room. Rudrani climbs on to the living-room sofa and dislodges the painting; puts it into the storeroom under the stairs.
She expects a reaction from Anjan, but he does not seem to have an opinion on the matter.
”I took down the ugly painting from the living room,” she tells him during dinner.
“Mhm,” responds Anjan, his jaws working their way through home-cooked food after more than a year of surviving on takeaway.
“Do you think we put up the picture of a tropical sunrise there? It will add some colour to the room,” says Rudrani.
”Sure,” says Anjan, between mouthfuls. “It’s your house now. Decorate it in any way that makes you happy.”
Rudrani beams at him and asks, “Do you like the fish? Let me give you some more?”
Anjan nods. She turns to the boy, “Some more, Monku?”
The boy accepts the helping and thanks her.
As she watches them eat, something sinks inside Rudrani again. The boy is always polite with her but never friendly. He eats whatever she cooks, lets her drop him off to the school bus and never gives her a reason to complain. But he makes no effort to talk to her through the long hours the two of them spend alone at home. All he wants is to be left alone with his notebook and pencils.
She almost wishes he was like other children, easily pacified by chocolates or toys or visits to the mall. She even wishes that he would cry or scream, somehow object to her presence in his life. Anything is better than that obstinate silence.
There is also something else that Rudrani cannot quite put her finger on. The boy seems to be playing a slow, subterranean trick with her. A small shrine to Goddess Lakshmi that she had placed on the mantelpiece goes missing. Her toiletries in the bathroom are replaced with other products. A framed photograph of the old family – father, dead mother and child – that Rudrani had removed from the bedside table and put away in a cupboard is no longer there. Even her cooking tastes subtly different, as if someone had put in unfamiliar ingredients when she was not looking.
But she can never catch the boy at any of these things. Each time she finds something disconcerting and comes looking for the miscreant, she finds him sprawled on the living-room floor, absorbed in his writing.
The stories also make Rudrani uncomfortable. The boy is always writing them, but she is never allowed to see. Why doesn’t he want her to read his stories, she had asked him one day. “Because mummy doesn’t care for me to show you,” the boy had said.
And the stories are always about his mother.
“I don’t like these stories Monku writes,” she tells her husband in bed. “He keeps writing about his mother. It feels like a portent.”
“He will grow out of it,” says Anjan dismissively. “He’s only recently lost his mother–”
“More than a year ago” she wails. “And he talks about her as if she is still alive.”
“A year ago is not a very long time for someone who’s only six years old, Rudrani,” Anjan snaps at her. “I stay at the office all day. Ever since Monku’s mother died, he has been living with a different babysitter each week! Is it so surprising that he is obsessed with his mother? He will ease out of it, now that you are here. You cannot be so impatient with a child.”
“Beginning to call me mummy instead could be a start,” she petulantly says. “Can’t you order him to do it? He would listen to you.”
“I don’t think its right for me to force him into anything like that. He’s been through enough pain already,” sighs Anjan. “Now if you’ll forgive me, I’ve had a very long week at work. Good night.”
The next afternoon, when Rudrani comes home after picking up the boy from his school bus, the painting is back on the living-room wall. The ugly woman with her unshaven lip seems to be smirking at her.
“How did that painting get back there?!” She lets out an angry screech and turns to the boy. “You’ve done this, haven’t you? Horrible child! You’ve put it back! How dare you…?”
“The Frida is mummy’s favourite painting,” he tells her. “She likes it to be there.”
“Your mummy is dead, Monku,” she says to the boy, trying hard to hold back the urge to slap him, wanting to break down and cry instead. “I am your new mummy. You have to get used to it.”
He turns away from her, drops his schoolbag on the floor, opens it and takes out his notebook and pencils.
“Mummy hates it most when you say these things,” he pronounces, not even deigning to look at her. “You intrude on her space and change her things. She does not like it. She would like you to leave.”
The words strike her like shrapnel and in the instant Rudrani loses it – she drags the boy up by the scruff of his shoulders and smacks him across his insolent face. He staggers. Notebook and pencils scatter on the floor.
An old photograph escapes the pages of the notebook and flutters under the sofa – for a second Rudrani has a glimpse of father, dead mother and child.
The boy starts whimpering softly.
“Iam your new mother!” Rudrani wags a finger, now panting, panic rising into her mind. Anjan would not like to learn that she hit the boy.
‘“ I am your father’s new wife! This house, this space is mine! You better get used to it, or I’ll talk to your father about sending you away to boarding school!”
Later, alone among her things, Rudrani regrets letting out her frustration on the boy. It is unlikely that Monku – hardly four feet tall and with those skinny arms and legs – could mount such a large painting back on the living-room wall, even if he did somehow manage to sneak it out of the storeroom. She wonders if she should go in and apologise to him, cook him his favourite meal as a conciliation, offer to watch cartoons together.
She decides against it. She doesn’t even know what the boy likes to eat. She tries her best to become a mother to him, and he hardly even speaks to her properly. For that bad attitude, if nothing else, he deserves a slap or two. It was not for her to feel guilty about this. The boy was the one who should be apologising.
Alone in her bedroom, surrounded by her things, Rudrani splutters and seethes like the evil stepmother.
The scar appears that night.
Monku says nothing about the afternoon’s violence to his father; but when Rudrani pulls off her nightshirt in bed, Anjan gasps in surprise. “What is that wound on your back?”
Running across her back is a long, red, angry welt.
Gingerly, he touches it. “Does it hurt?”
His touch rankles like an electric shock through her body. Rudrani winces. “Yes! Yes, it does.”
“Well, how did it come to be there?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“You must have fallen down somewhere. Or hit something. How could you be so careless?” Anjan gets irritated. “How can I rely on you to run the household if you can’t even take care of yourself?”
“I’m sorry. I really don’t–”
“For God’s sake.”
Wearily, he rubs antiseptic ointment over the welt before they retire to sleep. He had lost all urge to make love.
Rudrani sleeps fitfully at night, driven by nightmares. She wakes up in a sea of pain. The welt on her back shines an iridescent red in the daylight.
Anjan finds her a strong sedative from the medicine closet.
“I cannot imagine how you hurt yourself like this.” The severe expression on his face finally gives off a sign of worry. “But if it doesn’t improve by the evening, I will take you to the doctor tomorrow.”
He adds, “I will drop Monku off to his school myself. You don’t have to worry about bringing him back either – I’ll ask Mrs Mackenzie next door to give him a lift back. Now try to get some rest.”
So Rudrani sees husband and child off to the door, swallows a dose of the sedative and goes back to bed. She curls up in her blanket, switches on the television. In some nameless film that is showing, a semi-familiar woman wanders from room to room, picking up things.
Rudrani waits for the pain to ebb away.
The woman has her arms full of things. She walks into the bedroom, throws open the window and flings them one by one into the chill air outside. She is dressed a bright yellow sweater and wears her hair in a loose plait, like Rudrani has seen in so many photographs.
Mesmerised, she watches the things fly off the window, each in its own unique arc – her clothes from the closet; her small but precious collection of jewellery; the bone china tea-set she had received at her wedding; the DVDs of Bollywood films she had brought all the way from home. One after the other they disappear, and with each handful thrown away Rudrani feels lighter, somehow unmoored.
When everything is gone, the woman finally turns to her. “Now you toogo away. This interruption has been long enough.”
“Where will I go?” asks Rudrani, surprised at the sound of her own voice. “This is my home.”
“No longer,” replies the other woman, the one in her dream. “I have cleansed this place of every trace of you.”
“But you are dead!” Rudrani objects. “How–?”
“We came to this country together, Anjan and I,” says the woman; she sighs, absently smiles, as if she is dreaming too. “We worked hard – spent all our youth working, being pushed around, learning, adapting. We saved for so many years to buy this house; build this life. By the time we could afford to have a child, we were both in our thirties, exhausted. I had developed coronary heart disease, but I went ahead and conceived – gave birth to our son. And after he was born, I told him our story, re-told it every day and night, knowing that my days were numbered, knowing that this was all I could give him, knowing that it was the only way he could preserve us in his heart.”
“And now he is telling the story back to you,” says Rudrani. The thought doesn’t ring as terrifying as it should. It floats away vaguely from her, as does everything else.
The woman nods. “And there is no place for you in that story.” Her face breaks into a familiar, crinkled smile; Rudrani can trace no unkindness in her voice when she adds, “I am sorry.”
Somewhere very far away, a doorbell rings. The mother leaves her bedside, goes off to open the door. The boy leaps into her arms, crying “Mummy!”, and starts telling her excitedly about his day at school. His mother chides him for walking alone from the bus stop, asks him if he ate all of his lunch, promises to make him Mac and cheese – which he loves – for dinner.
Rudrani watches the two of them in a soporific haze. It makes her smile – the blissful glow that envelops the scene; the aesthetic blur that merges mother and child into one joyous organism; the soft, cheerful music that suggests that everything is finally in place. Rudrani has always been a sucker for films with happy endings. But the sedative must have dulled her senses; she can hardly stay awake for the credits to roll.
She gives up trying, lets the static engulf her.
The boy wrenches himself free from his mother’s grasp, drops his schoolbag on to the floor and fishes out his notebook and pencils. He flips to the last page and writes down the final lines of his story:
Then the evil stepmother went to sleep, and never woke up.
