“Just come home,” Ma cried into his ear every evening. “I don’t care how you do it, just come back from that godless, disease-ridden place.”
“How can I, Ma?” Chetan would try to reason with her, whispering even though he knew his voice wouldn’t carry to the old man. “No trains are running. No buses are, either. Do you want me to walk like those poor labourers who have lost everything?”
“What lost everything?” she would shoot back. “They’re returning to their families, to their home. We are your family, not that old man you work for day and night.”
“You don’t know what you are saying, Ma. Those people didn’t have a choice.” He paused, taking care to speak calmly. “Their employers stopped feeding them. They had nothing; no food to give their families, no way to survive … Even now, as they walk thousands of kilometres in this heat, they have to rely on the charity of strangers to live. Maybe a chai-wallah will give them a few biscuits or a passing car will give them some water, but it’s a miserable situation.”
“I don’t know, I just want you home.”
“Think, Ma, please,” he said. “The old man treats me well and he pays me well. It is his money that keeps the household running back home.”
“It’s your hard-earned money,” she shot back, but he heard her waver.
“The work here is simple, and I only have one person to run after. I have a roof over my head, I eat well – the same food the old man does – chicken, mutton … you name it. And you’re asking me to come home at this uncertain time? Who knows how much worse the situation could get.”
She didn’t argue then, and Chetan breathed a sigh of relief. It was true, what he said to her, but what he hadn’t told her was that there was another reason to stay on in Delhi. Saloni had finally agreed to talk to him after months of trying. She was standoffish as a rule, taking on the airs of her mistress, who appeared on a TV show once a week. He had memorised her patterns – when she left her rooftop room to go down into the house for her duties, when she went out to the market, and even when she went into the little lean-to bathroom next to her room to do her business. He especially waited for the days she washed her hair. Before she would coil the still-damp strands into a bun, he would catch a glimpse of her hair falling thick and soft on her kurta with all the promise of the night.
He thought she hadn’t noticed him observing her from his own rooftop opposite hers, but one day, as he stood waiting behind her at the line outside Mother Dairy, she whipped around and looked him straight in the eye. Chetan was too taken aback but he nodded as she asked him to stop watching her. “Stalking,” she said. “Stock-king.” The word was unfamiliar to Chetan, but Mahesh from across the street later told him that it meant he was troubling her.
“Troubling her?” he asked. “I’ve never even spoken to her.”
“Arre, so what? Just google it and you’ll see,” Mahesh said, shaking his head knowledgeably.
Google told Chetan the word meant he was following her, but here too he frowned. He hadn’t once done that. He had changed his hour for going to the market to chime with hers, but at every point he’d kept a respectful distance, not looking in her direction, trying not to casually brush past her. And he had varied his routine, arriving before her one day and leaving after her on another to avoid making her uncomfortable. And for her to have accused him of stalking!
Chetan stopped keeping time with Saloni. He purchased all his supplies in the mornings, going to the market after serving sir his morning tea and biscuits, and if they ran out of an ingredient, it got added to the following morning’s shopping list. Shami sir was easy-going, thank heavens, and didn’t complain if there were no green chillies with his lunch or if the tadka in the daal was less tangy than he was used to.
He didn’t see Saloni for a month or more. The boys he met on his rounds to the market – Mahesh, Bahadur and Veer – found him surly and uncommunicative and teased that he was wasting away for the love of Saloni, but he insisted that he had forgotten all about her.
But then, one morning six or seven weeks after he had stopped syncing his plans with hers, he stepped out of the house to find her waiting. He checked his watch. It was still before eight in the morning, the time for her to have her shower. It was Tuesday too, when she normally washed her hair, and as he looked at her, he thought he glimpsed a dewy dampness at the base of her throat.
He turned from her, walking swiftly towards the market.
“Today,” she said, so softly that he slowed down. “Today I am stalking you.”
“Where did you learn such a heavyweight English word?”
He expected her to say she had been educated at school to a level that took her even further out of his reach, but she smiled sheepishly. “My madam, you know. She had some trouble with a man who wouldn’t leave her alone and I would hear her say that word when she spoke to her friends or the police.”
“Hai bhagwan,” he said, tugging at his earlobes. “Are you going to call the police to arrest me now?”
“No,” she replied in a coy voice, “and I hope you don’t call the police to arrest me.”
Excerpted with permission from The New New Delhi Book Club, Radhika Swarup, Westland.
