Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

How long it had been going on I don't know but it was towards the end of winter that I noticed the car was using up a lot more gas than it should.  So I took it into Bernie’s Service Centre, the place I’d patronized all the ten years I’ve been here. He asked me how many miles a gallon it was giving now and, of course, I had no answer. I am not the type that enters figures in log books kept neatly in the glove compartment or pinned back of the sun visor. I never used credit cards either. And the only time I looked at the odometer was when the numbers were about to move to the next hundred, or better still to the next thousand. There is something magical about the way thenumbers change all at the same time.

   I didn’t have an answer. But I knew I wasn’t getting the usual mileage. Instead of filling up once in ten days as I used to, I knew I was filling up more often, certainly once every six or so days. In a tone of long-suffering patience one hears said of husbands, he suggested that I keep tab of the mileage for at least a week. As I was about to drive away, he asked me if I had taken the car to any other service station since the fall lube and tire change. I wouldn’t do
that, I said, any more than I’d drive any car but a Volvo.

   But thinking about it on the way home, I remembered I had left the car overnight at a place off Maryland some two months back. It was the day we had a glorious frost. I had been on one of my favourite drives, in and out of the Wellington Crescent area looking at the frost on the giant trees, gables and eaves of the elegant houses. As I
turned onto the Bridge towards my destination - the spice store around the corner - the car had made a racket. Clackety clack, something was knocking somewhere at the rear. The noise increased in loudness and frequency when I accelerated. So I looked around for a service station. There is a large one just near the bridge but getting to it isn’t simple on a one-way street. Rather than go all the way to Wolseley and back, I inched along Sherbrook thinking I would park it at the store and take a bus home. But there was a little gas station a block away, not exactly a gas station , just a couple of old-fashioned pumps. I drove in. There was nobody around. I was about to clacketyclack my way out when a pleasant-faced teenager appeared from out of nowhere. I explained the problem, left the car there, did my shopping and took a bus home.

   When I told Sivaram about it, he shook his head and laughed. It is the hubcap, he said, you should just have thumped it back tight.

   When I went out the next day, the car was just where I had left it. Nobody was around. I left a note on the pump with my phone number and name and drove away. The noise was not there any more.

   I hadn’t heard from there since, I remembered, as I returned from Bernie’s.

   Next week, when I was out spice-shopping, I looked for the gas place. It wasn’t there. I wove in and out East Gate, West Gate, Westminster, Wolseley. There was no gas station anywhere, except of course the one on Maryland near the bridge. I couldn’t even imagine where it could have been for every corner was accounted for, with houses or stores that had obviously been there a long time.
Puzzled, I drove back. But all mysteries have a rational solution, if one cares to figure it out. Things move fast in this country. Take the Gulf station at the corner of Pembina and University Crescent. I’d been driving past it at least twice a week. Had not noticed any signs of wrecking; yet practically overnight it had disappeared, razed flat to the ground, and the Salisbury House all boarded up and sealed.
Just the Gulf pole and Your Breakfast is Always Ready sign were left. That’s the way things are in this country, I thought, as I turned into University Crescent..

   A month after my first complaint, when I took the car into Bernie’s again, still without any figures to report, they tinkered with the carburettor, came up with several “necessary” replacements, drove it down the highway and returned it with an A-OK. Twenty two miles to the gallon, they guessed, just right for a five-year-old Volvo.

   But there was no doubt about it. After the spring oillube-filter job, it ran more smoothly, but it was simply soaking in gas. Twice a week seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. It was no use asking Sivaram. By now he was immersed in his summer project. Every year he applies for some preposterously huge grant for some
preposterously ambitious project and he gets it. Then he works himself, and his assistants, to death, fourteen hours a day, weekends and all. Moreover, ever since we sold the old Volvo a year and a half ago, we had become a one-car family. With the girls gone, we had put off buying another one. Sivaram never used the car except to go to the university after dinner during the winter months so he need not walk back at midnight. The car was all mine, and the headaches as well.

   Twice a week and it wasn’t as though I was driving more than usual. It was time Bernie and his men did something worthwhile. He still smiled when I told him I had not kept a log, but by now I knew him well enough to realize it was an impatient grimace. Nothing is wrong, Ma’am, he said, not with the car.

   That comes of sticking to him these ten years, I told Linda, my neighbour, on my return home. Lube and tire change twice a year for two cars, and all the ills motors are heir to, had brought our relationship through all the phases of formality, friendliness and taken-for-grantedness to this fedupness, I said. It isn’t just in husband and children that familiarity breeds etc. I said; one cannot change one’s husband or children, but by jiminy I wasn’t going to be a doormat to a service station man, I said. Linda clucked sympathy as she poured herself another cup of coffee. There’s nothing like having a Linda to cluck over you and a cup of coffee. We, women, knew what was what and how to help out.

   As one of my favourite poems goes:

Sometimes you want to talk
about love and despair
and the ungratefulness of children.
A man is no use whatever then.
You want then your mother
or sister
or the girl with whom you went to school,
and your first love, and her
first child - a girl -
and your second.
You sit with them and talk.
She sews and you sit and sip
and speak of the rate of rice
and the price of tea
and the scarcity of cheese.
You know both that you’ve spoken
of love and despair and ungrateful children.
                             —Shashi Deshpande

   The way gas prices have been skyrocketing, she said, you just feel the car is swilling gas, like an optical illusion, she said. But I pointed out the fallacy in her logic. Twice a week, I said, never mind the price. She mulled over that for a minute. You must be driving a lot more, she said. With the girls away, I guess you are killing time, hopping from plaza to plaza. Unicity maybe new and a treat but it is
twenty miles away, she said, maybe you don’t realize it.

   Maybe she had a point there. Ever since I had returned from India, leaving Manda and Brinda with my parents, I had felt quite lost. Maybe I had been more disorganized than usual with my housekeeping. Maybe going to the Co-op twice or three times a week didn’t help any. There was always a forgotten soup can or bread loaf or butter to pick up, and driving three miles and back from the Co-op on a matter of principle had its price. It was Linda who had talked me into joining the Co-op, telling me how morally
necessary it was for consumers to band together to beat nefarious profiteers responsible for this runaway inflation etc. Duly impressed, I had taken to doing all my shopping at the Co-op south of the perimeter. I liked it, especially because the floodway had been a recent discovery for me. The newspapers and Uncle Bob on Channel 7 had talked about the floodway every spring of my stay here but I had discovered it myself only last Fall and I can spend hours watching any expanse or non-expanse of water.

   But floodway or not, six or seven miles even twice a week couldn’t possibly call for so much gas. No, I was positive I hadn’t been driving any more than usual. If anything, much less. With the girls away, I had little to do, and because there was so little to do, I did even less. I spent my time worrying.

   I worried a lot, about the girls, naturally. Whatever had made me do it, I asked myself a hundred times each day. I knew the answer of course, but it didn’t seem right any more. For years I’d been saying I wanted my children to know their rich Hindu heritage firsthand. Our own, our native land, I said, the land where the Ganga flows, where Siva dances with Uma on every mountaintop and Krishna with the gopis in every garden and meadow. Over the years, with bedtime stories from the epics, and with recorded music, with family anecdotes and with fading photo albums, I had crammed our heritage into them but I knew it would not come alive unless they actually lived in India. And so I had extended my dreams to include a year or two of schooling in India. One had to live in a large extended family where all the festivals were observed, the daily puja
conducted with discipline and knowledge; one had to enjoy at first hand live music and dance performances, not the taped music and half-baked artistes who came on lightning circuits; one had to speak and think in the language of one’s culture.My views on this were quite clear, strengthened over the years as Manda and Brinda grew from diapers to blue jeans. So, last June I took all three to my parents’ home. I enrolled the girls in the local school which their
cousins attended, ready to pack them up and leave if they didn’t fit in. But they fitted into life there as neatly as into custommade clothes. That sent me into a frenzy of guilt for having deprived them of life in Madras all these years. I thought, maybe being born in the shade of the maple leaf wasn’t enough to shut away the shadow of a different
sun that had hung over us wily-nilly all these years. Maybe this was where they belonged, I thought, here by the sands of the tropical sea, not in the snowbound prairies. All the time, though, were the nagging facts that my nieces sported the same faded-denim jeans and favoured the same popmusic and movies, and spoke the same chewing-gum slang that I’d known in the prairies all these years. But I shelved away these hesitations. Early September, I returned home
with Balaram, leaving the girls with the family. Their eagerness to stay on upset me no end, needless to say. How could they be so callous?

   Their first few letters, tearful and incoherent, sent me into another kind of heartache, but I couldn’t possibly leave Balaram and rush back. So I stayed put and worried. Soon their tears stopped, and their letters became shorter and less frequent. They were having a ball, every letter made that clear. I worried much more, naturally. There were fleeting one-line references to beach parties and picnics,
group movies and birthday bashes that set me frantic. Who? How many? Where?

   To get away from this brooding, I pinned Balaram but at twelve a boy probably can’t take much mother-love anyway, and he certainly wasn’t one who wallows in formaldehyde. Besides, soon it was spring and he took wings.

   Sivaram was submerged in his end-of-term work, Balaram was into his games and school. I took to watching afternoon and late-night television shows and regretted all the years I had deprived myself of them.

   I also took to keeping a log. Now that I had walked out in a huff from Bernie’s, I had to find another service station, and I knew better than to go without any data. Which is how I discovered the car was giving the usual twenty-two miles per gallon it should. Nothing was wrong with the car. Except that it was being driven long distances by someone other than myself.

   Recently Sivaram had been working later than usual. Up at seven in the morning, out by eight, back at five for dinner and out again, to return long after midnight. It had been the same every summer.

   Except that this summer the car was guzzling gas. Or rather, it wasn’t.

   For three days I worked out all kinds of sums with the figures in the little blue book, took the average for the month past, for each week, for each fill-up, each dollar. No matter which way I worked it, the mileage was always around twentytwo, which is as it should be for a five-year-old Volvo. On the fourth morning the odometer had jumped thirty miles instead of the three that it takes for a trip to and from the university.

   It was the fifteenth of May when the thirty-mile jump showed I couldn’t but accept what was happening. I sat at the living room window all morning. The lawn was a lush unkempt green with a few bald spots where I’d let the snowmoulds lie too long. All my neighbours had raked and mowed at least once. There were tulips along the walls of the house across the street. On my yard, the last of the crabapples from the fall were being eaten by robins. The lilac was showing green heads. The beautifully curving poplar tree outside the bedroom window was still bare. It had lost its leaves very early last Fall. Perhaps it was dead. The mock-orange cutting gifted and planted by friends two summers ago was sprouting leaves. But the friends were far away though they lived just a mile down the road. I brooded a while on when and where we had taken the fork in the road that we were now so distant though living where we had always lived. I was never more conscious of my inability to read the writing on the wall, my inability to realize facts until I had been hit over the head with them.

   The Volvo had hit me over the head all right.

   Balaram would soon be home for lunch. But he could make do with a cheese sandwich and milkshake. Were there any social engagements for the weekend? Friday and Sunday. Damn. What had been the menu the last time we had them over?

   Anything to avoid facing the issue.

   But one had to face it. Not one. I had to face it. Sivaram was having an affair. What a word, affair. Relationship? Liaison? Adultery? Fornication? Was there a difference between any of them? Was the last just Biblical lingo for the others? I looked them up the dictionary. Just another hair-splitting activity to avoid the issue. Which was that my husband was having an affair. All those words seemed obsolete anyway. Nobody was a harlot or adulterer. Or everyone was. Everything had to be redefined.

   Balaram ran in. Amma, I’m having lunch with Doug and Eric today. May I take three bottles of Coke? He ran out with three bottles.

   Lord, how silent the house was. I switched on the television. These soap operas along with which I had laughed and cried these few months knew all the problems. They just had to take their cues from real life. Or maybe I was taking my cues from them, sitting by the window looking at the lush unkempt lawn with its snowmould patches. I ran over all the usual reactions to my situation. But I couldn’t decide what my basic problem was, and what my basic reaction should be. Was I angry? Bitter? Disillusioned? Ashamed? Amused?

   Yes, laughter had always been my immediate response to falls and minor mishaps. When I’d dropped in on Jaya last Friday, for example, and she greeted me with her head at right angles to her body, saying the car behind them had bumped into them at the red light, I had burst out laughing. Or, last month, when Meena had told me in shocked tones that poor Satya (who had been carrying on with a graduate student) had left her parents’ house and gone to her lover’s apartment only to be thrown out in no uncertain way by
him after a weekend trip, I had laughed. There is no denying the comicality of such situations. “Immaturity” was the word Sivaram used for me. But as long as one is in good health and alive, I’ve always said, what is there to cry about?

   Of course, it was comical, here I had been a happy hen clucking over her brood, worrying about little grains while the roost was on fire.

   Around half past three I went into the kitchen, poured all the leftovers in a casserole, crammed it with cheese and shoved it into the oven. I had become a sloppy cook since the girls had gone for I couldn’t get used to cooking for three instead of for five plus, as it had been with their friends. I chopped a salad and made some lentil soup.Balaram dashed in, devoured his milk and apple and ran out with a whole bag of potato chips.

   When Sivaram came back, I served him masala tea as usual and took a long careful look to see in what way the man I had married had changed. Stooping tall, Adam’s apple working up and down as he sipped his tea over Newsweek exactly as he had over his thesis notes eighteen years ago, he was just the same. His hairline was receding and thinning at the top as it had been for years. Would he
gray first or would he bald? His face was a little fuller but his eyes were still too large for his face and had the same charming trace of a squint he had always had. But he looked very distinguished now. I wanted him to laugh to see if the small crooked teeth were still too crowded on his jaws and the lines around his mouth still mounted up to his eyes and gave him that irresistible attractiveness. I realized with dismay that I couldn’t recall when he had last laughed. When the girls were here there was always a lot of laughter at the dining table where all of us spent most of our holidays and evenings. I shouldn’t have sent them away. That was a blunder.

   Or maybe the best thing in these circumstances.

   Sivaram left as usual after dinner. I walked with him to the end of the block and came back in time for the evening movie on television. Balaram had gone to bed. I turned in around eleven after hearing the headlines of the National but I couldn’t sleep. Lord, lord, to have lived thirty-six years and yet not know the ABC of how one should react to some situations. I heard the car being revved up. The Volvo was being reversed out of the garage, without headlights on, and then it was driven away. The garage door had not been closed for six months. Someday someone would get around to replacing the broken roller.

   But Sivaram was back home before one o’clock. I heard him come in by the front door. Sneaky, I thought, and took my sleeping fetal position. He had probably just dropped her home. All the hanky panky probably went on in the lab itself.

   That weekend, as we were driving for our dinner party, Sivaram pumped the accelerator several times before easing out of the driveway. Something’s wrong with the choke, he said, keeps racing too much. Needs to be checked out. Tell him it doesn’t come down to idling speed the way it should. He assumed, as usual, that I had to take care of that and that Bernie was the man I would take it to. How could anyone stand him, I thought, his precision, his assumptions.

   Early next week, on my way back from Safeway while passing by Bernie’s, I drove in. Bernie came out in his workapron as usual, and greeted me in his thick Scottish accent as usual. I told him the problem and he said, Shoor, Ma’am, no problem at a’ the ladsll fix it in no time. He also said, running his apron along a scratch I had not noticed, that the professor had been a bit careless eh, absentminded
and all wasn’t he, always thinking about his work, but they would fix that too, just a tube of paint is all.

   After a week of first daze, I set about finding out her identity. I went to the university one afternoon. The staff hadn’t changed but it had been so long since I’d stepped in there that everything and everyone looked unfamiliar. None of the secretaries was a sensationally seductive brunette or a buxom blonde, but dammit all of them were trimly contoured and outfitted. I wished the female lab assistants and associates were nearer stereotyped super-intellects -
masculine beings, heavy and moustached, but they were not. They weren’t as goodlooking or painted up as the secretaries, but dammit, they had the poise of competence and the good looks of intelligence. That was a phrase Sivaram had used for me years ago when I had asked why he had chosen to marry one who had neither good looks
nor university degrees. It had become a private phrase between us, to be used as a joke, a reprimand or a comfort any time I brooded over my growing rolls of fat or my lack of conversational tact or whatever.

   When I looked at each woman in the lab, I felt she was not the likely candidate and yet back home I knew it could be any one of them.

   I took to phoning Sivaram in the evenings. If he was not in the lab, I called him at his office. If no one answered, I imagined what he was doing with that faceless female. One day a young male voice answered his office phone, and I spent several days brooding over this new relationship. One evening a female voice called to say Sivaram wouldn’t be in for dinner because he was with some visiting
professors. What gall, I fumed, what gall on her part, and what inconsideration on his.

   But most of the time they drove, miles out to some obscure motel, probably.

   I came to resent the Volvo. If it hadn’t been guzzling gas I wouldn’t even have known about the affair, and would have continued as I had all these years in my scatterbrained world of ignorant contentment. For obviously this had been going on for years.

   Yet I couldn’t really hate the Volvo for it was in a Volvo that we had spent our honeymoon and reached for the stars and learned to hit bull’s eye.

   Eighteen years ago, exactly half my lifetime ago, I had been whisked out of college, married off and sent halfway around the world to “keep house for an irresponsible impoverished madman” as my great-aunt so pithily put it in her parting benediction; she was terribly miffed about the unseemly haste with which the whole match had been arranged, and the positively shameless insistence on Sivaram’s mother’s part that I accompany him rightaway. Sivaram’s mother was frantically eager to deposit him into young and dutiful hands. He was thin as a bamboo at the time, his eyes popping out of his sallow face. But the good looks of intelligence, and ah, his laugh that made even those huge eyes disappear in lines of infectious mirth,
I rose towards him like a flower at dawn and followed him halfway around the world to his attic suite in the student slum fringes of the megavarsity campus.

   Sivaram had just started writing his Master’s thesis. The one and a half room suite was ceiling high with books, journals and notes. And unwashed dishes left a month in the sink. My great-aunt was right about him. Sivaram was as irresponsible as an intoxicated beaver that has dammed itself into a dry well before a rainstorm and as impoverished as a bankrobber who has locked himself in the cash vault. I thought he was only as mad as most graduate students
working on their thesis until I discovered that he was pursuing a project that did not have his advisor’s approval.

   Weekdays he was at the university all day. We were besieged by his friends every evening, and though there were endless jokes about our bridal state, they never left till past midnight, and Sivaram had to teach at 8:30 four times a week. All in all, with papers on the bed that could not be disarranged, and a carpet that smelt of dog’s urine, and a hide-a-bed that had springs sticking through the middle, and our own inexperience, we never got beyond bumbling fumbling basics that semester. Come May, the disagreement between him and his professor reached a new high. The prof said he would approve the thesis but couldn’t possibly extend the assistantship. Sivaram had his good wishes, in short, but would have to go elsewhere for his Ph.D.

   We had four hundred and seventy four dollars, eighty cents, saved over the two and a half years that Sivaram had been there. That week we gave notice to the landlord that we were quitting in two weeks. I hadn’t the foggiest idea where we’d go or how we’d manage. Friday night, Sivaram came home jubilant. Outside our block stood a purple Volvo with one pink fender. We are off on our honeymoon, he said.

   Your thesis, I said.

   It is all in here, he said, tapping his head. I’ll get it done when we come back.

   So we dumped fifteen cartons of books and paper and two cartons of kitchenware at a friend’s, and took to the road.

   The great thing about a Volvo is, the front seat can be tilted all the way back to make a cosy bed. Which is what it was most of the time those two months. I don’t know how we could have been so rabbit-brained but we sure were. Sex was the great adventure and we marched on to push back frontiers and discover new territory. We went through the Kama Sutra and brought off all the most incredible postures though Vatsyayana did not have a Volvo in mind when he listed his gymnastics. We laughed all the time, and Vatsyayana does not allow for that either. Once we had the Volvo standing in a lake that turned out to be private property. The man must have waited till we were through; he came up shaking his head. Why with the wheels in water, he asked, some fetish in your culture about it? I was started when my parents were on board ship, Sivaram said with a straight face, and I’d like history to repeat itself.
It wasn’t true, of course, his grandfather would never have allowed her to cross the black waters though his father had studied in England.

   Like a boy toting up the number of guttas won at marbles, Sivaram made a memo of the number of times, place and hour, on the bed sheet itself, I forget what the record was but I remember the growing smell in the car and remember washing the bedsheet in a stream in South Dakota before the week was over. Experimental scientist that he was, Sivaram never gave up trying various permutations and combinations.

   Our money ran out soon after we reached the west coast even though we lived in the Volvo and on bare cheese sandwiches, lettuce and apples. We had the choice of either using our address book and returning to the world, courtesym of friends, or starving in our paradise while we looked for a job. Glory be to the Howard Johnson line of highway coffee shops; Sivaram got a job as a waiter. While he went about his work, I sat marvelling from where he got that grace I had never seen in evidence so far. And it wasn’t only the little old ladies who gave him handsome tips. I wondered why anyone would slave for fifteen hundred dollars a year teaching freshmen when one could make that amount in a third of the time here.

   After three weeks of this, he quit and we set out for Mexico. But one night Sivaram woke up and said, it is time to head back. Every time I clicked on the switch my thesis would flash onscreen automatically but the circuits are getting shorted of late; better get back before the fuse blows.

   So we returned, to another attic room, and Sivaram started writing his thesis. We tried very hard not to sell the Volvo. We pawned it for a while, and I even sold some of my Conjeevaram silks to redeem it but then we had to sell it.

   Which is why we have always had a Volvo. Of course it isn’t the same one in which we reached for the stars and learnt to hit bull’s eye each time. But nor are we the same. Or, the other way round, our Volvos are as much the same as we have been. And we have always been us.

   I couldn’t really resent the Volvo but I had to resent someone or something.

   Several times over the next few days I saw Sivaram walk to the university after dinner and walk in by the front door after midnight, but in between he’d return for the car, thinking I didn’t know. I took comfort in the thought that they went to some motel because that meant they were being discreet about it and not boastful as some are
about affairs. Also, it meant the Volvo seat wasn’t being tilted back. It is one thing to have one’s husband making love to another woman but quite another to have him do so on one’s own bed. This particular Volvo had never been used by us for that purpose but it was our Volvo as much as we were what we had been eighteen years ago.

   Just when the next phase started I couldn’t say but one day I realized that I didn’t really resent this other woman, that in fact I envied Sivaram for being able to make such a commitment. If an essentially moral person did something that was conventionally held immoral, the only way we could view it was that there was a real thing going on. Sivaram wasn’t one to have an affair just for kicks. If
he had another woman it was because he felt drawn to something other than a flesh and skin attraction. And if it was a real thing, why I should I be jealous of her? I did envy him, though, for being so deeply in love as to make such a commitment.

   I knew exactly how I felt but when I sounded others on it, I got nowhere. I was known to be an addict to hypothetical arguments on every subject under the sun and so it was not difficult to bounce my theory on others. But I got nowhere. Purna thought I was bats and urged me to wake up and smell the coffee. The feminist revolution was on, I should be ashamed of letting the side down, even in argument. Rita was a little more practical; certainly, she said, it makes sense for women to tolerate infidelities if that got their men off their backs, god it was no fun pretending to enjoy the stuff night after night. And some of the kinky things these guys thought up, said Zarina, yuk. I almost lost Linda’s friendship on this count. I was
surprised how unexpectedly negative she was. She couldn’t see how any woman could tolerate infidelity unless it suited her too. She really crossed the line that time. She said Hindu males had always been bigamous and so I was racially culturally indoctrinated to the idea of male infidelity, but would a Hindu man tolerate it from his wife? she asked as she poured herself her fourth cup of coffee.

   For several weeks I brooded on whether or not I was a freak for not being jealous of her or resentful of him, but there it was. Sivaram was, if anything, more considerate and demonstrative. My phone calls in the evening had probably warned him, or may be my loneliness had come through over the wire, but he had been very
gentle for some time now. I couldn’t quite sort out how I should interpret his new affection, whether he was being hypocritical, extra-careful or natural, considering he had been at this or other affairs for years. Or had he? No of course not. He wasn’t the type to have irresponsible flings. It was the real thing. I knew too that he was now a better person to live with. Love makes people so humane, so considerate of others.

   Then came a period that almost outdid our honeymoon. It started one night when I lay half-asleep on the television couch watching a late night movie. He came in the front door and whistled softly on seeing me on the couch. My poor broodless hen, he said, and took my head on his lap and stroked me. Once, long ago, when the girls
were babies and he a post-doc, he would come back from the university around ten, and we would sit on the sofa bed in the living room and go through a long-drawn foreplay that we enjoyed even more than the actual act because at the time we were sure we didn’t want another child for a while but weren’t sure I should be on the pill
and the other kind was such a drag we usually ended up laughing ourselves out of desire. I was a terrible coward about drugs of any kind; I never broadcast my fears, of course, but I was sure I’d drop dead of cancer or blood clot or whatever if I took the pill.

   Now, when he sat by me on the television couch, cupping my breasts, I think I fell in love with him all over again. Then started a period of orgy, exhilarating because it was so unexpected. At our age, after eighteen years of sharing a bed, it just seemed so unreal that we could go through all the groaning moaning ecstasies of sex.
Sometimes I wondered if it was a put-up thing; sometimes I wondered if it was an insane bout of possessiveness that made me go to such openly shameless lengths of abandon. But there is no mistaking the real thing. That July was as dizzy a month as ever I’ve lived.

   It ended as suddenly as it had begun. Or so it seemed to me. One night I noticed there was no go for Sivaram. As always with minor mishaps, I laughed. That was a fizz, Siv, I said and laughed again but knew at once that was a boo boo. For the first time in umpteen years, I said, thinking I’d make up for my slip. I meant it, and yet when the words came out, something was wrong somewhere. I could feel it. Sivaram turned on his back, straight, rigid. You don’t
have to be kind about it, he said bitterly, you damn well know it isn’t the first time.

   Had there been other times? A kind of panic seized me. The moment of panic, I recalled, that overcame me during exam days, as I tried to remember half way to school whether or not I had filled ink in the fountain pen in preparation for the hours of writing ahead of me; everything blurs for a moment as memory vainly tried to joggle itself into remembering. Sometimes it came just as the teacher wrote the questions on the blackboard, sometimes it came as I uncapped the fountain pen, sometimes it came as a nightmare the previous night that I had slept through the day and gone on the wrong day. A moment of panic as memory fogged over before defrosting into a clear screen; the Volvo had that quirk about its ventilation system. I recalled the nightmare as we lay on our backs, silent, stiff. And then my mind raced again into vague wondering. Why had I recalled the fountain pen of twenty odd years ago instead of the umpteen parallel
occasions I had stumbled over since then - the recurring moments of panic wondering whether the key was in or out even as I slammed shut the car door, whether I had already put salt in even as the spoonful tilted into the saucepan.

   Why the pen? Freud, of course, replied some other part of my mind, while a third part wondered that I could analyze and speculate on Freud when the roost was on fire, or the fire was totally out. There I go again, I thought, probing into inconsequentialities, what an atrocious pun, instead of facing the issue. Delay tactics. Lord, lord, when will I ever stop arguing with myself. “And by the pleased look on his face, it was clear he was winning the game of poker he was playing against himself.” Wodehouse? Any digression to delay. But it had to be faced; he said there had been other times. Lord, lord, to have lived thirty six years and not to know the first thing about anything, and each time having to be be hit over the head. How could I have been so ignorant? Not to have guessed about the other
woman was one thing but not to have realized the difference between a ramrod and a pipecleaner, Lord, lord when will I ever learn? How had I missed it? Granted I had been in a state of euphoria ever since that night he had cupped my breasts on the television couch, but not to have known there had been other times. There was no use protesting my ignorance or affriming my total satisfaction. A wall had already reared between us and I knew my words wouldn’t sound genuine. I turned and laid my hand on his shoulder but withdrew it at once in case he thought it was pity.

   Next morning, as I was at my perfunctory make-up in front of the mirror, the full meaning of it came over me. There were wrinkles on my neck, my skin was beginning to sag, there was no doubt about it, I was getting old. I who had scornfully laughed at the fallen breasts of women hardly out of their teens as they walked about the change
rooms at the swimming pool, I who had pitied my white neighbours who came back from Bermuda and Hawaii with tanned skins that were duly praised by envious friends but seen by me as wrinkled and pathetic, I who year after year had brought skin-softening turmeric and sandalpaste hand pound from homegrown herbs back in India, I was growing old. My husband couldn’t get turned on by me any more. It was as simple as that. For this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

   So what happened, you ask. That’s what I’ve been asking for years now. Where does the story end? I know what you are thinking. Thinking now you know the answer to why Sivaram is away so much, why not one of my children lives in this city etc. etc.

   The reason I don’t have an ending for my story is that I do, but it is so simple, so mind-boggling that you won’t believe it. You’ll think I am copping out.

   That summer, we decided we’d fly down to Acapulco for a holiday, especially since Sivaram had a convention in Mexico City. We returned on a Sunday afternoon. As always, Sivaram had to go to his department, it is an obsession with him, to run to his department the moment he returns from anywhere. This time, he came right back from the garage, with a very strange look on his face, totally at a loss and yet totally relaxed. As though a chiropractor had broken his spine, and suddenly he felt great. You know the feeling.

   My God, he said, someone’s been driving our Volvo. The odometer has chalked up a thousand kilometres in our absence.

   And then it hit me. Just think, consider what had been going on in his mind all these months that I’d been imagining curvaceous blondes and blackhaired young men in his office.!