Lunch Hour
BY HIYA CHOWDHURY
I
Sometimes, Ila worries she is getting too old, too weary, too soon. The sun floats in through the kitchen window at six and she watches it happen, fingers laced around the gas knob on the stove. She switches the heat from high to low to the rhythm of the new detergent ad jingle on TV. The little melody traipses through her, the tambourine rankles in her ears. The hiss from the pressure cooker goes mute when the flame burns low and reappears when it grows back. The actress in the soap her neighbours watch across the street is only twenty-two, and she shimmers through the screen with an alabaster belly and a straight back. Ila, in comparison, is twenty-five. Her hands are always flaky under the light of the gas flame. She makes lunch for her son with what she has left and wills him home every day. She also hopes sometimes that all the actresses become her when they get to twenty-five, wrinkled and wrung out. She dreams them into revolting faces, melting bodies. She knows this is cruel. Still, she thinks it daily: like a prayer, only worse.
Ila’s street, like a small vein in the city, is made narrower by their intent to move. Everything is taped into boxes, covered up in old curtain fabrics and shoved onto the pavement. Inside, the kitchen is bright but bare. The rust on the taps is blooming through the metal, the grimy inner corners of the shelves are sitting brashly naked, and the flaky, purpling onion peels are collected into a corner. Spread out over the kitchen counter are the things she has insisted on packing last: her pressure cooker, glinting grey on the stovetop as the day breaks, a saucepan, a bowlful of rice grains, ladies’ fingers. She starts lunch.
It would be nice if her son was to come home on the very day they were leaving, like when people die on the same day they were born. The missing posters would come down from the telephone poles. Ila would no longer be a bad mother. And it could still happen: he could saunter in, a little off-balance, doughy and grimy from the city, just tall enough to reach her waist. He could speak. He could be old enough to eat his own lunch. He could be. She tries not to imagine it too vividly. She reminds herself that she knows nothing for certain. That she hasn’t known, all these months that she has spent the mornings cooking him lunch, expecting him to be home by sundown. But she says the words to herself enough times for them to be true. Once in bed, drenched in sweat. Once again in the bathroom mirror. Once more in the pane of the kitchen cabinet, her face dusty.
Ila unearths a knife and splits a ladyfinger open, spilling seed and gut and syrup all over her plastic cutting board. She closes her eyes and the vegetables fall open with a dull crunch under her palms. Upon the inside of her eyes, in a switch she has crafted closely over the years, the world shifts a little. Ila is no longer in the kitchen. Instead, she is streaking through the sky, the wind circling her armpits and blowing through her cheap chiffon saree in a way that makes her feel luxurious, soft. A smile melts through her face, like yolk through white, when she imagines how she might come unscrewed in flight. How she might fall through the air in bits and pieces—bony shoulders to the west, scraped knees to the east—like rubble from a plane crash. And then the pressure cooker screeches her out of her daydream and blows puffs of rice smoke into the kitchen, curling its lip. Ila grunts low, almost silent. Had it not been for its scorching metal body, she might have smacked the vessel slightly, lovingly, in a way that said I love you, but don’t do that again. It pains her to know she still has it in her, this kind of casual motherhood. Something that just slips into her fingers without caution, without warning.
II
Ila’s husband brings her here in a small, battered rickshaw the day before they are to be married, legs dangling in the air. They creak into his street and Ila thinks it will burst with their addition. It is already bulging, a mass of greying six-floor walkups clambering into place above the roadside markets, all spilling into each other. The fish hawkers spill their morning catch on to crinkly green tarpaulin sheets by the side of the pavement, the fish scales shimmering in the sun. The vegetable vendors spread their crops out on the gravel, dangling buckets of water on their wrists to keep the produce from drying out. The butchers sit next to them, their chickens rattling inside metal cages, their eyes so beady and skittish that Ila can tell that they know what’s going to happen to them. She tries not to feel such a kinship with the birds marked for death. That feels like it should be a bad omen.
He points to his house, one outstretched finger inches from her nose, and she is suddenly aware of how their elbows are forced into a knot in the backseat of their ride. She inspects the house closely: the rusted metal gate, the chipped yellow walls, the hurried welding on the windows, the laundry line halving the square courtyard, everything trussed up in a garish maroon for their wedding.
There, he says, his chest bloating into something bigger than himself. You are to be the bride of that house.
Ila lets herself feel mildly grand in the way he says it. Bride. There is a childlike pride in how he mulls her over on his tongue; a mischief in his voice that makes her feel bare, undressed. Bride. The word lingers in the air between them all the way back, becoming bigger and bigger till it follows Ila home. Bride, she repeats to herself under her breath at the dinner table, over the bathroom sink, toothpaste frothy on her lips. Night falls and Ila thinks of his house and his battered rickshaw. She tries to enjoy the smallness of it all.
III
The first time Ila lets a pot of milk spill over the stove, spoiled and overdone, it is the morning after the wedding. In her defense, she is freshly disoriented. She wakes to an unfamiliar ache from her new mattress and her new husband, and she rubs it to a dull hum before walking out of the bedroom to find the kitchen. That’s what their mother always said to do after they got married, and Ila has learnt her lessons well. She finds the decorations from the wedding strewn across the floor of the house, red and still fresh, and she is careful not to tread on any of it. It is like walking down the metro platform, always stepping on the black tiles and never on the white. Now you’ll get a bad grade, Ila would tell herself if her foot ever slipped. Now you’ll land up with a bad husband. Now a bad child.
She is a similar sort of careful today, and she wakes with the happiness from the night before slightly adulterated. There, sitting up in bed, she thinks it an inheritance from being the youngest in a house of five—her mother, three sisters. This constant fear of stepping off the right tile. She always takes the last piece of mutton at the dinner table, which inevitably crinkles into bone under her tongue. She squeezes the dregs out of the last tube of toothpaste and doesn’t complain. She pulls out of art college with the least fuss about the matter when her mother decides it is time for them all to get married. She takes the last of the four men her mother parades into the living room on a January morning—all upstanding men, so much like their father before the dementia, her mother insists—and she marries him in a field of red. Her sisters make it all seem like a wonderful choice and she nods along because they don’t get a choice either, really. Her father does not come to the wedding. It is life.
When she finds the kitchen, it is preened and plucked but not empty. The walls smell of fresh paint behind her mother-in-law, and her dark, sinewy body almost fades into the room. She stands with her back to the door and turns to face Ila before she can announce herself.
Good morning, she says, with a smile that pulls her lips taut but never quite reaches her eyes. When she looks at her, Ila knows that she has been on the other side of the kitchen once. Maybe a long time ago. She thinks of the wedding, where her mother-in-law had pulled her close for a picture and whispered, you call me Ma, alright pet?
Here’s the list, Ma says then, of the things that need to be done around the house today. She points to a telephone paper the size of Ila’s palm idling under a magnet on the refrigerator, shuddering against the metal. This is some kind of love, Ila tells herself, snapping the list off the fridge as Ma walks out. She sets a pot of milk on the stove to boil.
The milk boils over by the time Ila wraps her head around the last item on the list. She singes her fingers in cleaning it up and doesn’t look behind herself when she thinks she hears Ma shuffling in the background. She remembers Ma’s nails, glossy and sharp, digging into her shoulders as they pose for their picture. Maybe she imagines it.
IV
A week after the wedding, Ma invites all the women who live on their street to come see Ila.
Ila enters the living room and they run their eyes over her like she is lunch meat on sale. But these women understand the importance of good produce, and so their eyes are soft, full of possibility. A rowdy titter blows through the room. Beautiful, beautiful, they croon and caw as they move away the coffee table and pull Ila to the floor, inside their tight circle. She squats, a sea of blanching, paling hair becoming a canopy over her head.
Only a week, no wonder she’s still so perfect, someone says. They all talk as though she isn’t here. Does she cook? someone pipes up. How’s her hand with salt? You know, my daughter-in-law—the voice delves into a story about a frivolous girl, too heavy-handed with her spices. You don’t want to be like her, the story ends. More stories fall over this one, and they all swivel around the room like an angry draft. Remember the one who ran away? The one who got that job and never cleaned the house anymore? The one who chased her Ma off and took half the house for herself? The one who never had a child? They all sound the same, till someone says: Ila should have a child, there really is nothing like it.
That story is for Ila alone. And they all crouch down to look at her. Ila pulls her knees closer to herself and meets nobody’s eyes. When another cheer spreads across the room, she understands this to be the correct answer.
Her husband comes home when the women have disassembled into the night. He rustles in through the bedroom door, a hand lacing his hair in a way that tells Ila it has been a long day. The boys want to meet you, he says, dropping into a familiar dent in the bed next to her. They don’t believe me when I say I’ve got a wife now. My own wife!
Wife. Wife. He says it differently.
V
Six months after Ila becomes a wife she is on her way to becoming a mother, and she has little memory of how it had happened. Her husband puts his own demands down on the kitchen list each night and she crumples under him dutifully, like she has been taught. He huffs into the side of her neck till she scabs over from the heat in his breath. Ila wants it to feel more purposeless, she thinks, when he rolls over from the effort, brows furrowed and body tense, as though he has been digging for something valuable inside her. She does not complain, but she wonders sometimes if that is because she lacks the stomach for it or the vocabulary. He is stronger than she is: he sinks his nails into the bed frame and leaves small crescents on the wood. Ila can barely fist a wrinkle into the sheets; any protest from her would likely be amusing to him. When he leaves for work early the next morning, no longer under any obligation to be loving when he thinks she is asleep, she feels both crucial and oddly forgettable in his bed. Like wax on a candle. Soon the bathroom mirror becomes a reflection of somebody else. Ma says this is good, it is good that she cannot recognize herself anymore. She is growing so quickly, so beautifully.
Her husband picks up a night shift at the pharmacy on the main road, a hairpin turn away from their street, and no longer sleeps in their bed. He comes back at breakfast for a fresh set of clothes and kisses her belly, but the scabs on Ila’s neck remain dry, untouched. Strangely, this stings Ila the most when she bends over herself to wash his empty lunch dabbas, to wring out his wet undershirts, to polish away the scars he leaves on their bed frame, elbows digging into her belly. When he touches her now, she knows somehow that he is only touching his child. He talks to his mother on occasion about the best way to raise a child—she insists that he needs only to look at himself to know what is right. Then she peels the skin off an orange in one long wilting motion and says: like this, son, everything is meant to happen in an easy stripe, like the flow of a river, like the smear of a paintbrush. There is nothing more to think about. Soon Ila wakes up alone every morning and curses aloud when her feet feel the weight of her and her stomach stretches into searing pain. The obscenities steady her for the moment, and she is surprised at who she is becoming.
Still, she is the wife of the house. Ma puts her feet up on the coffee table when Ila cleans the living room floor under her, but she brings the women on their street to see Ila every day, a hand latched so tight to her stomach that it almost looks kind. The women whisper about the gassiness, the puffy ankles, the blood on the rim of the toilet, the little moments where the kitchen knife looks better suited to other tasks. All the things they can never say to the men they say here, prodding Ila’s stomach till she twists her face into a smile. They all guess she is having a boy by the way she carries herself, and Ma seems overjoyed at the thought. She gives Ila an old, stained cotton blanket. I swaddled my own son in this, now you will use it for my son’s son, she says, and everyone seems impressed at how swiftly the air in their house turns fiction to fact.
Her husband walks into the bedroom one morning, home earlier than usual, just as Ila clambers out of bed and grunts her daily profanity, louder every day.
Watch your tongue, he barks, unbuttoning his shirt. You’re about to be a mother.
Mother. He says it differently. The bark follows Ila to the drawer under their bed, shiny with bottles of her husband’s beer, hidden away from Ma and the prying eyes of the street. She puts a bottle to her lips and feels the liquid pool at the pit of her stomach, dark and bitter. That night, she dreams of a demon child, peeled raw and poisoned by his demon mother.
VI
It does not work. In a few months, Ila’s mother comes to the hospital when the baby spills out of her, and she says later how much it all looks like cutting a ladyfinger open. The same burst and ooze. She sits near Ila’s head and sings a lullaby to her in a whisper that sounds like a secret. Ma stands at the other end of Ila’s body, grim till Ila begins to howl. When it begins, Ila feels her body turn into a heartbeat on the sheets, suddenly afraid that she is dirtying the cleanest room she has ever been in.
By sheer force of will, Ila screams the baby out of herself and it slides, slippery and mucky, into the doctor’s arms. Ila cries and her mother holds her head in place so that she can see the baby, the beautiful little baby. It is the size of Ila’s torso, rubbed into the colour of mustard seeds on a hot day. Strong, so human. Ila feels her shrieks float out of the delivery room and retire to the hallway. They swaddle the baby into thick white blankets and it cries so hard, so furiously, that Ila’s fears nearly cease; she almost thinks it understands her. That all these months in her body have made it more hers than anybody else’s. She wants to look down at her own body, ripped from bow to stern, but she can only look at the baby. It is a boy.
Her eyes begin to simmer to a close. The doctor, tufts of white hair peeking through his cap, hands the baby to her husband, who has just rushed in through the door. They stand opposite each other and the spit from their laughter collects in the air above Ila’s open body. The drugs seal her eyes shut, and Ila thinks perhaps she has lost the boy before she has even touched him.
When she wakes up again, he is two. And he is marvelous: he grows into his house so much quicker than Ila has ever been able to. Ma uses the mornings to show him off to the women on the street, and Ila’s husband leaves the night shift to watch Ila cradle the baby to sleep. Things seem to come back to normal: Ila shares a bed with her husband, a comforting distance between them, and he loves his son so much that Ila thinks some of it must spill over to her too. In the afternoons, when Ma sleeps and her husband stays out, Ila holds the child close to her chest and lets herself feel safe for a dangerous, fleeting second. This boy, who has hurt her so much even before he has become a person; who still clings to her like she is important. She puts him in the bassinet at sundown, something like courage flickering in her chest.
How she would have loved to feel this way forever, she thinks, when in the dark his face morphs into his father’s. Ila presses her fingers against his cheek; she closes her eyes and the world shifts a little. Suddenly, he is no longer a child. He is a list on the fridge, a basket of soiled wedding decorations, a pot of milk burning a hole through the stove. Suddenly he is not two. He is grown, he has a bride, then he brings her home. Ila becomes Ma, skin stretched tight across her brittle bones. He has a child. A boy, a successor. His wife disappears, deflates into the kitchen floor. And it never stops. Suddenly he is a mass of Ila’s organs, and Ila is lying beside him—only skin, unzipped from the remainder of her body. Ila opens her eyes and backs away from the baby. She screams and screams, nails scraping cement from the wall behind her, but she must have been too quiet, still. Nobody comes for her.
Her husband finds her in the night, nailed to the floor. You are tired, he says, briefcase still in hand. I’ll chip in some. And it gets easier with the second one, you’ll see. He strokes her hair so warmly that Ila wants to chew his hand to bone.
Groom, husband, father. His briefcase disappears by her side, and he kneels to the floor next to his son. For once, Ila knows what she will do next.
VII
Ila sets the final meal out on the counter, minutes before the moving van is scheduled to arrive. Outside, the fish hawkers glance curtly at her through her kitchen window, lugging sacks of catch over their shoulders and throwing it over tarpaulin sheets on the street-side. The street cat climbs onto the parapet above them, ready to pounce on the squirming fish below. She looks at Ila for a moment—focused, feral—and Ila tells no one. They hold the secret well. Ila thinks that if the cat fails to find her fill, it will be a failure for them both.
She digs her fingers into her son’s food like she has every day for the last seven months. Everybody has given up. It is an impossible case: a two-year-old disappearing from this part of town a little past lunch hour. Nobody in the house has lunch together again. Ila’s husband crouches into their bed and never leaves. He only looks at Ila when she brings him tea in the evenings, and he looks once more when she takes away the cup from their bedside table at night, cold and still wobbling at the brim. Ma makes Ila’s cheeks bloody regularly, and promises whoever will listen that this would never have happened had Ma herself been awake at the time. Ila lets her say these things, and she takes the pain. Both of them know that after holding and birthing her grandson, no other pain feels noticeable at all. After a month, Ma leaves to live with her brother and his son, who they hear is about to have his first child, all the way across town. And then her husband wants to leave too.
For some time, the police think it is a hawker. All the women stop shopping for fish on their street in solidarity, but they come back in two months when summer hits and the way to the main road becomes too laborious. Too much sand, it ruins their rubber sandals. Ila understands this, and so then it isn’t a hawker anymore. Then it is nobody; fate, someone says. Maybe the marriage was destined to fail. Someone else whispers that they had smelled cigarette smoke on Ila’s breath the day of the wedding. What else did they expect would happen, they say, bringing a girl like that to the family? Now Ila is a story. She thinks of the cat again and empties out the rest of the lunch onto the window sill. Then she washes the oil off the pressure cooker, the saucepan; carefully scrubs them clean.
The moving van somehow squeezes itself through the street to their front gate, and her husband emerges from the bedroom.
Ready? he asks, something still hoarse in his voice.
Ila nods and walks behind him, careful not to disturb the house in its deep, dusty grief. She blinks her eyes dry, harder with every step towards the door. Each time she closes them, for a split second, the world shifts a little. The hallway is bare, and then it is a sea of red wedding decorations. The living room is empty, and then it is a circle of chanting, laughing, wailing women. The metal gate is still and then it is creaking, her baby standing on the darker side of the rusty bars. It is morning, and then it is lunch hour. She is on their street, and then she is on the main road, taxi cabs blurring into the gravel. Ila’s hands are holding him, and then she is discarding him on the pavement, her head sheathed in her saree. His face is spotless, blurring into all the other faces Ila has ever belonged to, and then it is cracking into a howl and Ila is walking away. Ila is small and forgettable, and then she is ruinous but brave. She is a good woman, and then she is not. And then she never is again.
