Burnt Sugar Read online

  Later, over a bowl of sweet and milky rabri, my mother-in-law turned to Ma. ‘Tara-ji,’ she said, ‘the pandit wanted to discuss the wedding ceremony. He asked if you have any relatives, maybe a couple, who can sit inside the mandap and give the bride away in your place.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Ma said. ‘Cousins, maybe. But I can do it well enough myself.’

  Dilip’s mother opened and closed her mouth, sucking in and expelling air several times, before she spoke again. This was a tic of hers, as though the words needed resuscitation before she could send them out. ‘Usually when the mother is a widow, some other relatives perform that part of the ceremony.’

  ‘But I’m not a widow,’ Ma said.

  Dilip’s mother put down her spoon. Her mouth opened and closed again. Then she began blowing in and out loudly, as though something in front of her was on fire. We all looked at Dilip, who was helping himself to more dessert, leaving a trail of cream on the table.

  ‘It was less controversial,’ he said later, when we were alone. ‘Indians in America are conservative sometimes. I didn’t want to tell them your parents are divorced.’

  From the balcony of Ma’s flat, I used to watch the stray dogs when I came home from school. They were usually idle, with mangled paws and chewed ears, sprawled out with their packs, only moving to dodge cars and auto-rickshaws or to mount their mothers and sisters. I suppose that was the second time I saw sex, sitting in my navy-blue uniform, watching the scene below, but it was hard to differentiate between dogs fighting and fornicating. Sometimes there were battles when other pariah dogs entered their territory. A high-frequency snarl or a branch breaking underfoot would set them off and, late at night, when I was supposed to be asleep under my mosquito net, I would hear them and their war cries. I remember, one morning on the way to school I saw a puppy sitting near the gate, her stomach trembling with worms and fleas marching across the bridge of her nose. In place of her tail was a bloody hole.

  After I married Dilip, I inherited his family, his furniture and a new set of stray animals. The dogs near his house are calmer, overfed and neutered by a group of Pune housewives. They sniff the air and their tongues hang over their canines. Occasionally, they nip at each other’s genitals and mewl for food.

  I moved into Dilip’s apartment in June, during the wait for the monsoon. The rains were late. A bad sign. This would be a bad year. The papers reported that the farmers blamed the priests for not inspiring the gods, and the priests blamed the farmers for lacking in piety. In the city there was less of this sort of talk, more about climate change. The river that flows nearby rises and falls with some regularity, but the monsoon brings down a flood of roaring brown water.

  When Dilip goes down on me, he sweeps his nose against my labia and inhales.

  ‘It smells like nothing,’ he says. He is proud of this quality, says it’s unusual and might be one of the reasons he could imagine us being together. His life is filled with intense smells now, at the office and even taking a lift, and it’s a relief to him that I’m odourless after a workout and in high-stress situations. He grew up in Milwaukee, where his ears knew only soft Q-tips and suburban stillness. Pune, he says, is really loud, really pungent, but his senses can manage the onslaught as long as our home brings him back to neutral. He tells everyone there were no jarring changes when I moved into his flat, that my life merged with his seamlessly.

  Sensible of his fear of upheaval, I made changes cautiously, first removing any bed sheet or towel that could have been used by other women. Then books or items of clothing that they might have gifted him. The books usually took the form of lovelorn poetry and could be detected by a note written on the first page. I slowly purged any remnant of their existence: old photographs, letters, mugs, pens collected from hotel rooms, T-shirts with the names of cities they’d travelled to together, magnets in the shape of monuments, leaves preserved in paper, collections of pale shells in jars from beach holidays. These measures were extreme, but I wanted a home and marriage free of grey, fuzzy edges.

  My mother sets an eggplant alight on the stove, and we watch the flames feed on its purple skin. The beige flesh inside is smoking. She separates the seeds and throws them in the bin. It’s a marvel her fingers don’t burn. On a white plastic board, she chops chillies and young green onions. The board is stained with turmeric, and there is still a little earth stuck in the rounds of onion stalk, but she tells me not to nitpick about small things. She fries cumin seeds in oil and pours them on top of the steaming eggplant, followed by torn leaves of coriander. Oil splatters on the side of the stove. I cough while mixing the contents of the bowl. My maid, Ila, straightens her sari and sighs. She begins the work of cleaning our mess while we bring out the dishes to where Dilip sits at the dining table.

  Ma doesn’t come to our house often. She says the main hall disturbs her, especially the mirrors that cover each wall, reflecting everything in multiple directions. For Dilip, the mirrors were a selling point when he was house hunting, a sign that he’d made it, and the culmination of every fantasy he had about mirrors and pornographic films. For my mother, the room is too alive, with each object and body replicated four times, with each replication repeated further in reflection. She sits down at the table and her feet jump nervously, climbing on one another like mice escaping the midday heat. For myself, I’ve got used to the mirrors, have even started relying on them when Dilip and I fight because seeing a reflection shout is similar to watching television.

  ‘So, Mom,’ Dilip says, ‘how are you feeling?’

  He calls my mother Mom like he calls his own. I struggled in the beginning, but it was easy for him, calling two women Mom and calling two places home.

  My mother tries to speak in an American accent when Dilip is around. She thinks he won’t understand her otherwise, and if he tries to speak in Hindi, she replies in English. Ma attempts his Midwestern vowels and confident pauses which assume the rest of the world will wait for him to finish a sentence.

  ‘Honestly, beta, when the doctor gave me the news, I started to fear the worst. I even started making plans to take my own life – you can ask her, isn’t it true? Sorry, I’m not trying to upset your meal, eat first, eat first, we will talk later. How is the aamti? Not too spicy, I hope? Yes, to answer your question, I was scared at first but now I don’t think I’m really sick. I feel very fine.’

  Dilip nods and looks into the mirror ahead of him. ‘I’m so happy to hear that.’

  ‘Ma, the doctor says you’re forgetting.’

  ‘My scans were normal.’

  ‘Yes, scans can be normal even though –’

  ‘Why are you going on insisting I’m ill?’ She is holding a slice of raw onion in her hand. It drops back to her plate as she speaks.

  ‘You’re forgetting things. You’re forgetting how to do things, basic things, like using your mobile phone and paying the electricity bill.’

  ‘Oh, I never really knew how to pay the bill. These online things are too confusing.’

  I put my hands down. She hadn’t said this to the doctor.

  ‘And what about calling Kali Mata? You asked me to dial the number of a person who’s been dead for ten years.’

  ‘Seven years,’ Ma says, and turns to Dilip. ‘See how she lies?’

  Dilip looks between us. When he frowns, a scar from an old lacrosse injury glimmers on his temple.

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘You are. That’s what you do. You’re a professional liar.’

  We drop Ma home after dinner and Dilip hums to himself quietly. I can’t make out the tune, so I interrupt him.

  ‘Can you believe what she was saying?’

  He pauses and then answers. ‘Maybe she doesn’t believe she’s sick.’

  ‘She has to believe it.’

  ‘You aren’t an authority.’

  It stings that my lack is so visible. ‘I didn’t say I was an authority. The doctor said she’s sick.’

  ‘I thought the doctor said she h
as the brain of a young woman.’

  ‘But she’s forgetting things – important things.’

  ‘Important to whom? She may want to forget – maybe she doesn’t want to remember her friend is dead.’

  ‘Either way, she’s forgetting.’ I hear my tone has turned shrill.

  ‘Voluntarily forgetting is not the same as dementia, Antara.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she want to forget me?’

  Dilip takes a breath and shakes his head. ‘You’re the artist, be open to possibilities.’

  ‘She called me a liar.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that what you make art about? About how people can’t be trusted?’

  His face has dropped. He looks disappointed. I try to match his look but don’t feel it, so I bite the nail on my middle finger or, more accurately, the cuticle area. Dilip reaches out his hand and brings my arm down.

  My art is not about lying. It’s about collecting data, information, finding irregularities. My art is about looking at where patterns cease to exist.

  Before I got married, my grandmother let me use a room in her house as a studio. It was cosy, dark and bright in good proportion, a place where my interest in collecting had begun as a child, among the objects left behind by the deceased inhabitants of the bungalow Nana and Nani lived in. Tungsten bulbs, batteries, cords, pens, stamps, coins. I began by looking up the dates and designs of these objects, losing myself in encyclopaedias of energy and patents in the library, always ending up far from the place where I began. To avoid these tangents, I started to draw the objects myself, mapping them out as I saw them, copying as closely as I could. My handwriting may be bad, too mechanical, lacking in flourish, but my hand is steady and precise. I started to collect dead insects, which are surprisingly difficult to find whole and uncorrupted. One of my prized possessions is a number of moths fossilized in wax that I keep in a glass jar.

  Museums collect milestone objects – the first cellular phone, the first computer – presumably to display one day to the future (presuming that museums will have a place in the future). I grew up in a time of landlines and Swatch watches and have my own collections stored away: glass bottles that read Thums Up and Gold Spot for when these brands no longer exist, but also antique tongue-cleaners and pastel autograph books that I asked strangers on the street to sign when I was a child.

  Dilip says if volcanoes all over the planet started erupting, covering the Earth’s crust in miles of debris, and our flat was the only thing ever dug up in the future, archaeologists would wonder at the strange preoccupations of their ancestors. I tell him Americans invented hoarding and have made an art form of it.

  Dilip once told me that, in America, no one uses tongue-cleaners because they use their toothbrushes to clean away the white scum. He says that I should try it, that it’s easier to have one tool for your mouth rather than two. The idea doesn’t sit well with me and I ask him about cross-contamination. He shrugs. The mouth is one hole, one room, one city. Something that’s happening on one side is going to appear on the other. I tell him if that is the case, he won’t mind my emptying the contents of my glass of water on his lap.

  When I moved in, Dilip said I should use the guest room as a studio. He rarely had guests anyway. ‘Besides, I like the idea of you being at home all day,’ he said.

  The room is spare, sunny, not what one would expect from a place where art is made. The cupboard has been transformed into my cabinet of curiosities, where my objects are stored and locked away, some in boxes, some in sterile plastic containers. Images fill binders, divided by subject, category and date of collection. The room itself contains a wooden desk and a chair that Dilip brought home from his office. On the wall is a calendar where I mark off the day’s work once it has been completed.

  I have been working on a project for the past three years, and I have no idea how long it will go on. It began by accident, after I drew the face of a man from a picture I found, but the next day, when I went to compare my work to the original, the picture was nowhere to be seen. I searched all day without any luck. By the evening, I had given up. I took another piece of paper – the only paper I work on, nothing fancy, made in China, but it holds graphite well – and drew the face from my own drawing, copying my own work as faithfully as I could, the careful shading, the exact thickness of line. This has become a daily practice. I take the drawing from the day before and copy it to the best of my ability, date it, return both to the drawer and cross a square off on the calendar. There are days it takes me an hour, and there are days it takes me several.

  A year into the project, I was invited to show the works at a small gallery in Bombay. The curator, who is also a friend, compared the dynamics of time and duration in my work to On Kawara, and said that this was the diary of an artist, a phrase she used for the title. I thought the connection to On Kawara was erroneous. His work is mechanical, without any implication of the human hand. My work celebrates human fallibility. If On Kawara is about counting, I am about losing count. The curator didn’t want to go into this – the essay for the catalogue had already been spellchecked, and she said complicating the issue wouldn’t help me sell in this climate. A collector showed interest before the show opened – this sort of slowly built work was so important right now, he said.

  The series didn’t sell.

  I blame the title. A diary. What does that even mean? A diary sounds so trifling, so ridiculously childlike. Who wants to spend money on a diary, really? I never even saw the work as a diary. I confess I was only thinking about how impossible it is for the human hand and eye to maintain any sort of objectivity. But isn’t that how it always is? Intention and reception almost never find each other.

  I dressed carefully for the opening, tried to look alluring without showing any skin, and felt completely unprepared while knowing this was the most important day of my adult life. I didn’t tell anyone about the show, but Ma found out. She came to the opening, walked through every room and stood in front of all 365 faces. The first and the last picture met each other at the front of the gallery, hanging on either side of the entrance, creating a dialogue of difference. They could have been the images of two different men, two different faces, done by the hands of different artists. My project to copy perfectly had been a failure, and because it was – had to be – a failure, the local art scene deemed it a tremendous success. A few newspapers carried short reviews, calling my work exciting and compulsive, remarking that it was as disturbing as it was fascinating, wondering how long I could go on.

  Ma called it my game of Chinese Whispers.

  When I got back to Pune almost a week later, Ma cried and came at me with a rolling pin. Weeping, she said I was a traitor and a liar. She wanted to know why I would do a show like this.

  Holding the rolling pin I had forcefully prised away from her, I perched myself at the edge of the dining table, trying to catch my breath. What was the problem, I asked her. Why couldn’t I make the kind of art I wanted?

  She told me to move out of her house that day, and did not see me again until I came one afternoon with Dilip by my side to tell her I was engaged.

  I decide to see my father, to tell him about Ma’s diagnosis. Trees and pesky chipmunks surround his bungalow in Aundh, on the other side of Pune, and the sound of air-force drills overhead rattle the windows. In the sitting room, a large grandfather clock spits out a bird and a German nursery rhyme on the hour.

  My father’s eyebrows are stitched in thick dark thread across his forehead. ‘I called five or six times yesterday.’

  I nod. It is the sort of reprimand I am accustomed to from him, and five or six is an approximation for any number. I don’t listen carefully to the details of what he says. I am used to compartmentalizing him to these brief visits, and relegating his face to a corner of my psyche.

  No question is explicitly asked. I answer the reproach in his voice: ‘I was at the doctor’s with Ma.’

  The sofas in the hall are arranged like a
railway waiting room, and we sit across from each other. He taps his hands together, waiting for me to say more, and I lean forward and hand him the doctor’s report. He opens it slowly, taking an unnecessarily long time with the outer plastic file, carefully separating the glued sides of the envelope. When the envelope tears slightly, he gasps as though he’s cut himself and examines the tear with some pain. Then he reads the pages inside, holding the paper away from himself and mouthing the words.

  ‘Sad, very sad,’ he says when he’s finished. ‘You must let me know what I can do, or if there are any calls I can make.’

  He tosses the papers on to the table by his side and asks if I will have some more tea. I shake my head and break the caramel-coloured skin forming in my cup with a spoon.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ he continues. ‘I would like to be involved. But none of this was my idea.’

  This is usual, and always accompanies a reproach from him – he divests himself of responsibility or choice in all past, current or future situations at the beginning of any conversation we might have. He means to head off any blame I might be ready with. He doesn’t know I always empty my pockets of that stuff before I pass the threshold of his house, that even once I am inside, I know a different kind of door remains closed in front of me.

  I wonder if he truly believes in his state of choicelessness, if there is a decision in his life for which he will accept accountability. The one-sided narrative has always been painful and interesting for me, the singularity of the voice that he speaks to me with. I wonder which voice speaks in his head.

  My father’s wife comes into the room at this moment, and he stops talking. She hugs me and pats my back. Their son also joins us, sitting down across from me.

  The woman’s arms hang by her sides like pins. The boy is no longer the baby I always think of him as, but a teenager of an age where it’s difficult to be sure of how old he is. We don’t resemble each other, except perhaps in our colouring. I’ve always thought my father and his new wife look alike, thin and woolly like finely woven sweaters. I smile at the three interchangeable faces.