I Can’t Complain Jaan
Anushka Chatterjee
On lazy afternoons, as I mash rice and daal alone, I picture you seated on a plastic stool, slashing bellies of slithery fish in the market. That you don’t flinch when blood spurts onto your bare legs seems improbable, for the way you cup squirrels in your palm, and keep me from swatting cockroaches implies you could be anything but cruel. In the evening, I frown at the sight of your shirt; blood-spattered, scale-sequinned. Neither will you realise how strenuous it is to thrash fabric on stone, my back hunched from stooping over stains, nor will I ever account to you the money I spend on buying extra detergent every month.
But how do I complain, Jaan?
Didn’t I slap you into fish-vending when you thought of gambling for a living after our marriage? Didn’t I beat my chest, prostrated at the feet of the local counsellor for access to fish from his private pond? Didn’t I want you to have something of your own? You’re smashing heads of God’s voiceless children because of me, a wretched woman who believes in sustaining at the cost of kindness.
When you open up the shopper stuffed with remnants of the day’s fishes, their lanky skeletons and fragile fins, your sweaty face glows like you’ve got me ilish, the queen of the seven seas. I twirl the fish in its own fat with diced potatoes for dinner. It isn’t heavy on your pocket as it spares oil from being recklessly poured into the pan. Before taking a mouthful of rice and curry, I thank God for such a culinary miracle. The more I crush the bones under my molars the more fluid they exude. I beseech some praise from you, a faint hint that you, too, have noticed how seamlessly the masalas have seeped into the cavities, how crisply fried the gills are, how, with every meal, I’m honing my expertise in cooking. “Just smile for me,” I want to say, but you never lift your drowsy eyes from the plate. Not even when a nasty spine pricks my gum and I fail to swallow a yelp. As I circle my tongue in my mouth, coating the wound, I’m reminded once again of how unforgiving the bones are; residues the rich cleverly discard, a delicacy you and I foolishly cherish.
But how do I complain, Jaan?
At the Sunday mela, I demand that the man at the chaat counter loads our samosas with chilli chutney. It’s a break from all the fish waste scraping our gums through the week. ‘Bhaiya, thoda aur daalo,’ you request him as I keep insisting. It’s so innocent of you to think I love the spicy gravy, but it’s also a sweet-sly trick: as we quickly give in to the gravy’s temptation, our running noses turn to baby tomatoes, the heat singes our ears. In no time we find ourselves slurping mango ice-cream. To see you chortle at the cream trickling down your wrist and into the sleeve of your shirt, I will eat all the chilli chutney in the world.
You’re already snoring with your mouth agape when I’m done scrubbing the kitchen. I tiptoe into our room and slip into our bed. I shrink the distance between the two of us until your breath warms the nape of neck. You’re hypnotised, too weary to feel me turn towards you and lift your thumb to the bridge of my nose, and then, very gently, dip it down to my chin. You’ll never sense how your sleepy fingers outline my cheek, trace my lips, carve new dimensions out of my face. A closer glance at our braided fingers reveals dark grey crescents under your nails: grime from fish intestines, perpetually trapped.
But how do I complain, Jaan?
I fled home in the middle of night holding this hand of yours. You didn’t force me to. I did. The world doesn’t believe I did, for rebellion in love is too brazen to stem from a woman’s mind. When I stood at your door, defiant and determined, the bag under my arm bursting with clothes, the creases on your temple had deepened. Your damp hands trembled as you gripped mine, simply because our love was young, too young to mould our future with. You weren’t ready to forsake the warmth of family for my impulse. But you did.
Sometimes, I shut all the windows and draw the curtains to seal myself in. In front of the mirror, I crumple the bed sheet into a giant round ball and tuck it clumsily under my petticoat. Gazing at the ballooned belly, I wonder how many inches I shall need to unfurl my kameez to have room for a baby to fit snugly. Deep within, my heart flutters at the thought of undivided attention from you, a little respite from unforgiving chores, and unquestioned access to jars of imli aachaar. Wrapping my arms around the globe, I inhale deeply. I don’t know what moistens my eyes. I’m thirty, pretending to be the mother I’m soon not going to be.
But how do I complain, Jaan?
I know how badly you want a daughter. I’ve seen you peering like a child at dolls in glass-walled shops. You haven’t seen me seeing you. I know what makes you delay at desolate bus stops and play games of claps with little girls you’ve never met, filling their pockets with lozenges. When their parents turn up late, sweaty from concern, they grimace at you, snatching their daughters away. Had your hair been shampooed well or your shirt perfumed, Jaan, they would’ve thanked you, invited you for dinner at fancy restaurants.
The alphabets of your signature continue to wobble shamelessly. You haven’t yet mastered aligning them because the comfort of pinning an inky thumb on documents remains ingrained in you. The last time I demanded that you start afresh, you laughed. A loud, sarcastic laugh that keeps ringing in my ears. You’d taunted me for being born with a silver spoon in my mouth while your father had to sell beedis for a spoonful of rice. I should’ve revolted and taught you how learning isn’t confined to the school you could never afford or the books I left behind. To learn something, Jaan, you need to unlearn first. At times, I feel you’ve come to terms with the ordinariness of this life.
But how do I complain, Jaan?
You haven’t bought anything for yourself in years. A roof above your head and a filled stomach is all you need, you keep repeating. On one stealthy attempt at peeking into your notebook—the one with an eagle grabbing a fish on its cover— where you try to catalogue your expenditure, I discovered how you’re saving each penny to enrol me in the computer course I’m pressing on. The neon board dangling outside New Age Cyber Cafe flashes a “100% Job Guaranteed!” for women registered in the same. I’ll soon go to an office, bury my face into a screen, and eat from a lunch box every day. Someday, we’ll see snowy mountains and eat no more fish remains. Jaan, you have keen foresight, like that eagle on your notebook.
Each leg of our almirah stands on four thick bricks all year round. There is water, knee-deep, in the room every monsoon. I need to lift my maxi to the thighs and knot it around my waist. As I cook, water from the overflowing gutter lashes at my calves. Days later, when the rain god pities, the water subsides, brick by brick, and renders the floor grey with smut, dotted with lifeless white lizards and earthworms. I stand at the door, scanning the room with a boulder pounding in my ribcage. It seems like the end of the world, like a tsunami has washed off life from the land but forgotten to swash me along. Moments like these thrust me with memories of the village my father was the Sarpanch of, the plumpness of my mother’s palm, the ease of a life I’ve so unceremoniously blotted out. I condemn myself, splashing buckets of water under the bed. Look what you have done to yourself.
But how do I complain, Jaan?
The Sarpanch had deployed his men with knives to slit your throat. We ran and ran, kept running till our soles blistered, till we fetched up in this city, a maze where they’d endlessly hunt for us, jostle, and pant, only to forget what they were here for. When I narrate this story to our neighbours, they dismiss it as the course of most Bollywood films; stories they never believed yet paid to gawk at on giant screens. We are now the tenants of a house owned by an uncle who lately wants to shift to an old-age home. In few years, Jaan, we’ll have to abscond to save ourselves from being crushed, like the bricks of this house, by towering, yellow excavators. I pray we save enough to seek for a flat in that part of the city where an hour’s rain doesn’t create rivers out of lanes. You’ve never wanted a life in cities. But here you are, spraining your neck as you count how many floors culminate in the peak of buildings, your eyes round like marbles, brimming with wonder. You don’t pardon the man ogling at your wife in a bus anymore, or gulp abuses without spurting them back. You’re slowly befriending the ways of this stifling city, not for yourself but for me.
I will never complain, Jaan.
The day I die, tell my parents what I’ve never told them. Tell my father he was wrong if he thought I’d slip into the bubble of my early life complaining, conforming to his whim of wedding me to some filthy rich loafer. Tell him, a cage made of gold is still a cage, and once a bird has tasted freedom, it never returns. Tell my mother she was more unreasonable than my father, for letting her daughter go seemed easier than mustering courage to disagree with her husband. If they wail over my frozen body, tell them the curses they inflicted on us must’ve recoiled. Show them how we’ve lived. Let them realise what their daughter ever needed was just a room and a kitchen, but with the liberty to choose whom to love.
Before you set my ashes off in the river, let them know their daughter has never complained in her life because she made the right choice – she left them for a man who had nothing but a backbone.
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Nicely written! The emotions of a person who has acheived true freedom and the sacrifices that she had to make in order to do so expressed in a simple, yet captivating fashion!
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