At home in Mayur Palli, in the bottom drawer of her husband’s desk, Mrs. Jha found Rupak’s birth certificate. She put it on the pile of papers on the floor beside her and took a sip of her tea. Dust particles floated in the late-afternoon sunlight that was coming in through the window.
She ran her finger over the back edge of Mr. Jha’s desk and looked at the light gray and black dust that collected on her fingertip. Was it possible that one of the particles was from Rupak’s tenth birthday? Could there be one from the day he had come home in the evening with his lip cut open from a playground brawl? Perhaps one of the dust particles was from the afternoon when Rupak, seven, maybe eight years old, had fallen asleep on the school bus and not come home at the usual time. The maid had called her at the office to tell her that Rupak was gone and Mrs. Jha had rushed home in a taxi, crying and scared, only to find Rupak coming in the front gate, holding the bus driver’s hand, an hour after he should have returned. Mrs. Jha blew the dust off her finger, wiped it on the rag that she was using to clean up, and picked up the birth certificate again.
She was so scared when Rupak was born. Mr. Jha’s mother, Janaki, had died just eight days before Mrs. Jha went into labor, and the entire time she was giving birth, she prayed it would be a boy so she would not have to name the child Janaki. If it had been a girl, Mr. Jha would have insisted on naming her in his mother’s memory, and nobody named for her mother-in-law could be a happy person. Of that much Mrs. Jha was certain.
Janaki wasn’t so bad at first. She wore the most beautiful white widow’s saris. For many years, even after everything was arranged and they were married, Mrs. Jha always remembered that boy from Goa that she had kissed once on holiday with her friends from college and never saw again. That was part of why she agreed to marry Mr. Jha in the first place—to undo the guilt of having kissed a strange boy in Goa. Her parents never said anything about what happened in Goa, but she knew she had returned to Delhi slightly altered. Her parents must have also noticed, because the next week they set up the first meeting with a boy and his family. The first one—she didn’t remember his name now—sat in between his parents on the sofa, and she knew immediately that he wouldn’t work for her. To test him, she had said that she’d like to meet him alone before deciding anything. His father had said that wouldn’t be possible and he had simply stared down at his feet. Mr. Jha was different—even though the families discouraged them from meeting alone, he agreed with her and made it happen. They went out to the Nirulas in Connaught Place for ice cream sundaes and Mr. Jha offered her a taste of his sundae, and it reminded her of the boy in Goa who offered her a taste of his bibimca, saying it was a sin to not have ever tried the Goan dessert. That was when she knew she would marry Mr. Jha. At first, every time Mr. Jha would touch her at night, she would shut her eyes tightly and think about that boy and her body would relax.
Mrs. Jha put Rupak’s birth certificate carefully back in a folder and placed the folder in the box. It had been so easy to conceive Rupak. The first two years of their marriage, they were not financially comfortable enough to have a child, so they had always timed their intercourse. When, however, it started becoming clear that computers were not going to vanish anytime soon, within a month, Mrs. Jha was pregnant. She always wanted another child but no matter how hard they tried, she never again managed to get pregnant. And Mr. Jha always refused to go to a doctor about it. “That’s too indulgent,” he would say if she ever brought it up. “These things should happen naturally.”
Every year, even now, Rupak’s birthday celebration was always muted because Mr. Jha was still mourning his mother. The night before she died, Mr. and Mrs. Jha had just come home from dinner and Mrs. Jha was heavily pregnant. She had dressed up that night because, in one of his few romantic moments, Mr. Jha had suggested they go out for dinner, since they would never be just the two of them again. When they came home, Janaki looked at the sari Mrs. Jha was wearing and said, “Are the rest of your clothes with the washerwoman?” The next morning when they woke up, Janaki was dead; those were the last words she ever said to Mrs. Jha. Now that she was long dead, Mrs. Jha could be more generous. It must have been difficult for her mother-in-law to have spent a much larger part of her life as a widow than as a wife.
What would Mrs. Jha do, she wondered, if Mr. Jha died? Would she focus all her love and attention on poor Rupak and make life miserable for his wife? Mrs. Jha worried that Rupak had figured out that an American girlfriend would be a good way for him to avoid responsibility. She watched enough American television shows to understand that it would not be an easy choice for Rupak to return to India. Everyone in India was going on and on about the country changing and, yes, there were malls with high ceilings and better roads and more freedom for young people, but India was not America.
Of course, more and more Americans were coming to India for holidays, but within a few months, once they had done yoga and tried halfheartedly to teach English to prostitutes’ children, they got on planes back to their homes in Michigan or Texas. Mrs. Jha saw these young white people in Connaught Place and Janpath with their Fabindia kurtas, looking like they were the latest Mother Teresa. They laughed with the slum children and pretended not to mind touching their filthy hands. Of course they didn’t mind. It would be easy to touch those children if you knew you were leaving and next week you would be back at home, drinking tea in your nice big kitchen telling people how those children laugh and smile even though their lives are so difficult.
“Are shoe polishers silly?” Mr. Jha came into the room where Mrs. Jha was packing.
“Like the cobbler downstairs? Why would he be silly?” Mrs. Jha said.
“No, no. Not like the cobbler. Shoe-polishing machines. Like they have in hotels. You know—where you put your foot in and the shoe gets polished.”
“I don’t know if silly is the right word. Where have you been all day?”
“Why are you sitting on the ground packing things so slowly?” Mr. Jha said. “I told you, you don’t need to do that. The movers will take care of everything.”
“I don’t want the movers touching your papers. They smoke bidis all day. I’d rather put the important things in boxes myself so they don’t touch anything,” Mrs. Jha said. “But I was thinking—why don’t we go out for dinner tonight? Just the two of us.”
“Bindu, do you know how much this move is costing me? We can’t go out for dinners all the time. Can you just make something quick? And where is Rupak? He hasn’t called in almost a week. Frankly I am getting a bit worried about how useless he is. It will be embarrassing if he has to come back and find some midlevel job here.”