Mismatched | Sayani De

The white lights daze Nayan as she opens her eyes in the recovery room. ‘Ray of hope’, she reminds herself. The effervescent feeling induced by anaesthetics is slowly giving way to dull pain in her lower abdomen. Soon the doctor comes in to deliver the good news. Her eggs have been successfully extracted. They are on their way to being frozen for future use. 

“Eggs frozen by early thirties have a high success rate in fertilisation later. Plus, you are fit and healthy,” the doctor says in a congratulatory voice.

She sighs heavily with relief as she gathers herself to sit up. Finally, something she can count on, unlike the unreliable, fickle minds of people. All the pain of doctor visits, hormone injections, and mood swings seems worth it. It feels good to be in charge of her child-bearing future. Sahil would have said she has this constant need to control everything around her. But what does Sahil care about female fertility? When he broke up with her after three years of courtship saying that she was controlling him, Nayan couldn’t think of a better way to spend her yearly bonus from work than to freeze her eggs. It was six months after her mother’s death.

“Can I have wine today?” she sheepishly asks the doctor.

“You can next week, after the pain medications have stopped,” the doctor smiles.

For a moment Nayan considers bearing the cramping without the meds for some celebratory inebriation. Her pre-booked ride waits for her outside the clinic. As she ambles to the sidewalk to board the taxi, she wonders what her mother would have said. “For ordinary people like us, freezing eggs is for the over-ambitious, or hard-to-marry-off types. You won’t need it,” her mother once remarked with a hint of pride when Nayan showed her a tabloid headline about a celebrity who had a daughter from the frozen eggs.

Nayan is certain if her mother was around, she would have come around and been happy for her. She always came around; even when Nayan’s father had caught her at fifteen, kissing a boy in their backyard. Her father had locked her up in the attic. Her mother didn’t defend her at the time but when she came to drop dinner, she held Nayan’s hand without speaking. They sat on the terrace for a while. Nayan felt her mother’s heartbeat with the same young love as her own. Her mother’s eyes were unfocused, turned towards the starlit sky. That night, Nayan desired to have the same bond with her own child someday.

“How’s work?” Her father exhales perfect rings of smoke that form a boundary around him.

The cab reaches her flat complex. The driver requests her to leave a rating on the app. As she walks into her tidy little flat, she wishes she could rate her father on a public forum. Manohar Roy – father rating – 2.5 /5, husband rating – 2 / 5. Perhaps her mother’s heart wouldn’t have given up so soon if not for all those years of domestic strain. Memories flood her mind, from the time when she woke up in the middle of the night to her father’s howl. She had come home from college during summer break. Instinctively she had peeked out of her bedroom upstairs.

“You can leave my house if you can’t stand me enjoying with my friends,” her father slurred through his lopsided mouth as he moved towards his mother with an unstable gait. His broad frame overshadowed her delicate one. The wall clock said 2 AM. Whisky glasses, bottles and leftovers from the appetisers crisscrossed the centre table in a messy jumble but there wasn’t anyone else in sight. The air reeked of alcohol. Street dogs barked as her father’s friends turned on their car engines in the dead of the winter night.

Nayan’s lunch waits in her kitchen; diligently prepared by Kamala, her domestic helper cum cook of seven years. The masoor dal’s homely taste makes her feel secure. Soon after, she flips through a local train’s timetables for her upcoming visit to her father’s place. That is what she calls it. In many instances, her mother seemed like an imposter in that house. With her gone, Nayan is the only one to take care of her father’s needs and the house. The old man would never agree that he needs her though. Urging to share the news of her frozen eggs with her father tickles her mind. It might be fun to see his irked reaction. 

On the following Sunday morning, Nayan finds herself at the other end of the city, in front of her father’s residence. It is her second visit after her mother’s demise. She tentatively looks up at the terrace. The mango trees in the backyard partially shade it from the midday sun. Most of the flower pots adorning the ledge of the terrace bear dried leaves. “Dead, just like the one who had planted them”, Nayan thinks.  The iron-grilled gate groans in resistance to her entry.

She sits in the living room, scanning it for changes. She can’t find any. Her father’s awards and accolades from his former workplace are on garish display on the shelves. They show off his successful career from which he retired last year. Her father slumps into the far end of the three-seater sofa.  A grey pashmina shawl with a thin embroidered border hangs on his shoulders. Hari da, her father’s man Friday, comes back from running errands and hands over a pack of cigarettes. 

“How’s work?” Her father exhales perfect rings of smoke that form a boundary around him.

“Fine.” Nayan desperately tries to apply the breathing techniques she learned in yoga class. “We have your doctor’s visit next month. I’ll drive you.”

I can drive myself.” He shakes his head.

Later, she ambles to her mother’s yoga room downstairs and sits on the floor. She smells her mother’s yoga mat. The space stands draped in layers of quietness. Nayan misses the brief periods of the ecstatic void from their meditation sessions. When they started taking yoga classes a few years back, Nayan had no idea that Mother would go on to complete the yoga teacher’s training program and start a class in this room. 

Hari da pops her head through the door. “Lunch?”

Nayan follows him to the dining room. Towards the end of their lunch, her father clears his throat. Nayan braces herself.

“I’m thinking of renting out the front rooms downstairs to a travel agency.” 

“You mean Mother’s yoga room?”

“Yes.”

“Do you need the money?” Nayan snorts.

“Don’t be ridiculous. The agency owner is Joy’s relative.” Joy is her father’s friend.

“Can’t you leave one space that Ma had for herself?”

Father is quiet for a few moments. “Well, it’s just me now and I live upstairs.” He jerks his knees.

“Of course. Getting rid of her stuff makes sense, just like the dead plants in the garden.” Nayan slams her glass down.

“Gardening was your mother’s hobby, not mine. I never had the luxury of time.”

“When did you have time for her or her interests? Work is all you cared for.”

“How, do you think your expensive education or this house got paid for? I wasn’t born with a silver spoon.” Her father is yelling. It gives Nayan a strange satisfaction. He is still the same; gloating, egoic and insensitive.

“If you had the time to care for her, she would have been with us now.” Nayan blasts as she storms out of the room. After hearing her father go out of the creaky iron gate, she heads to her mother’s closet to pick out a few of her sarees. A new habit she has developed. 

The generally locked almirah holding her father’s documents is half open. Curiosity steers her to his shelves. Books and old diaries are stacked carelessly against each other. She pulls out one from the back. It looks like an old diary. The yellow pages are filled with old journal entries over several years. Nayan’s heartbeat quickens as she battles with herself. Hari da’s footsteps are approaching. She throws the diary into her bag and leaves the house. 

On her ride to her flat, she drinks the pleasure of her recent stealth. Those rooms downstairs hold her mother’s essence and dreams. How her father has moved on so fast after having spent thirty-five years together is beyond her. Nayan suspects he might have more attachment towards the stray cat which comes to eat fish bones after lunch.

A few days later, Nayan is finally ready to have the glass of wine she has been so eagerly waiting for. Two of her friends join her for the occasion and raise a toast to Nayan’s future. After the party is over, Nayan sits on the sofa, wrapped in a woolly blanket, floating into a cloud of comfortable numbness. Her eyes pause on the loaded sling bag that she had stowed away in the catch-all basket of her entryway. A tiny wave of inquisitiveness sparks through her as she remembers her father’s diary in it.  She grabs it and starts reading.

19th October, 1990

My daughter was born last week. She has a beautiful smile. I felt happy after a long time. Only till Subrata came in to see the baby at the hospital. He smiled in his artificial way and mockingly commented that the nursing home was ‘not bad’. I wonder who asked him to come. I wonder if it was Mridula’s mother. Mridula even smiled at him. 

Nayan is almost certain that the ‘Subrata’ her father was referring to was Subrata kaka^[1], a distant relative on her mother’s side who played with her whenever she met him at family functions. He had the type of personality that naturally drew people even without speaking. From what she can remember, Subrata kaka was a bachelor till he breathed his last, a few years ago. His absence of a wife was a favourite topic among the women in her family, except for her mother. Nayan flips ahead to another entry years later.

22nd March, 1998

I have been travelling non-stop for the last month to get the UTB account for the firm. It is just a matter of another round of approval on their end. Mridula doesn’t understand why I can’t be sitting at her parent’s place for her sister’s wedding. Anyway, I am sick of her mother and other relatives asking about my job and slyly suggesting that their precious Mridula could have done better.

Nayan feverishly traces another entry on the same page. Its letters are spilt in all directions, with an unsteady hand. Knowing her father, he could have written it while drunk.

29th March, 1998

Not going to the pre-wedding celebration was a mistake. I heard Subrata visited every day. Mridula must have had a gala time. When I reached my in-laws’ place on the morning of the wedding, Nayan was playing with Subrata in the garden. It was a strange sight. Prabir mama^[2] and Kabita mashi^[3] who snubbed my background, and job in the guise of showing concern for me, couldn’t stop praising Subrata for his charitable work at the hospital besides his flourishing practice at his private clinic. Everyone, including my mother-in-law, has forgotten that these two were the very same people who had forbidden Mridula’s marriage to Subrata based on mismatched horoscopes. All of them cheated me. I don’t deserve this.

Nayan sits up at this revelation. Pieces of memories start to string themselves with a thread previously unknown to her. She thought hard. Vague memories of her beautiful mother’s lit-up face and good mood during her aunt’s wedding flash in her mind.  Her mother always seemed happy but cautious around Subrata kaka. Every night when Subrata kaka left for his home, Nayan would remind him to come early the next day. Her mother would don a demure smile and stand at a distance from Nayan.

In the evenings leading up to the wedding, her mother entertained friends and relatives with her soulful rendering of Thumris and Rabindra sangeet with harmonium while Subrata kaka played the tabla^[4]. They would often nod their heads at the end of the teen taal or jhap taal ^[5]and signal each other for a change of pace in the songs. In those times, young Nayan yearned to take Subrata kaka home and make him stay with them. She said something to that effect to him one day which made her mother and Subrata kaka laugh.

Nayan keeps flipping forward to random entries. She is towards the of the journal. Her eyes feel groggy despite her perturbed state.

6th February, 1999

I got the promotion. My salary is going to increase by 12,000 rupees a month and they are going to give me a company car. All my hard work has paid off. Mridula acted happy when I gave her the news and asked if we could go for the Andaman trip. I had to say no, as we need to build the house.  It is for the security of her and Nayan’s future. With the curse of young deaths in my family, I don’t want them to suffer as my mother and I did after my father’s death. 

Mridula got mad and called me miser and materialistic. In the afternoon, I found her looking at photos of her family trips from her maiden days. Nothing is ever enough for her. I am tired of her perpetual dissatisfaction with me and the life we have. But when the house is done, sitting in the posh south neighbourhood, it would be hard for her not to be happy. It would have all the space for her gardening. She and her relatives would fail to make me feel any less than themselves.

27th January, 2000

Nayan was discharged from the hospital today. I was scared for the first time since her birth. Last week, lying in the hospital bed when she didn’t respond to her name, I thought I had lost her. I felt like hugging her today but when I leaned in, Mridula and Nayan looked at me with shock. It was awkward, so I left the room. 

Later, I went to visit my mother and took her to the Kali mandir for the pooja she had sworn to perform when Nayan got well. It was my first temple visit since I became an atheist.

Nayan shuts the diary and puts it away in her bag. A lump starts to rise up her throat as her eyes sting. She blames it on the wine after months of abstinence. Toying with the idea of calling her father, she can’t decide what to say to him. Besides, calling late in the night unless someone is sick or dead, is not something she or her father are used to. Instead, she sinks deeper into the cosy sofa and before she knows it, she drifts off to sleep.

She dreams of the black Maruti Esteem car that her father’s company granted him after his promotion. In her dream, the driver drives it and her father sits beside him. She and her mother sit in the passenger’s seat playing word games. A sea of green soothes their eyes as the car speeds through a Gulmohar lined road in the countryside. Suddenly, the metalled road ends and the car drives through muddy terrain. It screeches to a stop with a jerk. Her father and the driver are pushing the back of the car to get the vehicle out of the sticky mud that entraps the back wheels. The car refuses to move, despite their efforts. Her father’s temples drip with sweat. Her mother holds her hand and stands by the side of the car. She fusses over Nayan asking if she needs something to eat or wants to sit under a nearby tree. On the way to the tree, her mother comments that coming on the trip was a mistake. Her father hears it and starts hollering.

Nayan wakes up at the ringing of the calling bell. It is 7 AM. Kamala is at the door, to do the domestic chores. The dream has left a bitter aftertaste that Nayan feels at the back of her mouth. She craves some comfort food. Luchi and alur dum^[6] in her mother’s style comes to mind.

In a couple of hours, Nayan walks down the lane of her father’s house. The iron gate glides open when Nayan’s touch. Hari da must have greased it.  She looks up. The door of the dining hall opening to the terrace is left ajar. Instead of ringing the bell, Nayan takes the winding staircase to the terrace at the back of the house. She wants to try her luck to put the diary back in its place. 

As she quietly tiptoes up the stairs, she can’t help peeking through the dining room’s window. The faint morning light of winter enters the space to soften everything it touches. Her father’s seated silhouette draped in an old, brown shawl resembles the outline of a piece of furniture. Light reflects off his bald spot as he sits there with his head turned down. His dark-rimmed glasses lie upturned beside him on the table. He mumbles something. It sounds like her mother’s name.

She bites her lip. She retraces her steps and stomps her way up. The hummingbirds fly away from the nest they were building on a corner of the terrace. When she reaches the terrace, her father is at the door, looking surprised.

“I didn’t know you were coming today,” he said.

“Hmm..”

“Come in. I will call the sweet shop to deliver something for breakfast.”

“I felt like having luchi and alur dum this morning and made some,” she says with some awkwardness as she pulls out the casserole and tiffin box from her all-accommodating sling bag.

Her father looks shocked but composes his face in a second. Nayan sees him trying hard to suppress a smile that refuses to be admonished. She can’t remember the last time she had seen him smile. The resilient cat which comes every day despite her father’s reproval joins them below the table.

On her cab ride back to her flat, her phone screen lights up with a text from him. ‘ Let’s keep Mother’s room with us.’

She types with steady fingers,’ Thanks. Btw, I froze my eggs last week.’

1. Kaka- Uncle ?

2. Mama- Uncle ?

3. Mashi- Aunt ?

4. Table- an Indian drum instrument ?

5. Teen tall and Jhaap taal – Types of beats used in classical and semi-classical Indian songs ?

6. Luch and alur dum – Fried bread and potato curry, typical comfort food for Bengalis ?

Sayani is a bibliophile, compulsive traveler and
sustainability enthusiast. Her work has been featured on Muse India, Borderless Journal, Women’s Web and won a contest at Story mirror. One of her recent pieces has been selected by The Selkie for an upcoming issue.