How about starting from the end? What if, in life, we could be taught to run a sprint, check out the ending, run back and be wise? Would it make life one dreary dull time? No surprises, no scary moments. What if your parents are sitting on a sofa under which a timebomb ticks? In that case, would it be such a bad idea to know? To know how it is all going to end?
Here’s a fact: we don’t choose our parents. We don’t choose what becomes of them either.
Sometimes I wonder: could I, Vera Narois, ten-yearold pianist with a friend problem, only child of Imon and Danish – two pixelated, hazy shadows who belong nowhere, not even to themselves – possibly have known the true meaning of sadness?
First, I ask, do we really know what we know? Second, is meaning essential to know what we do know?
Sadness is not a bicycle that you learn to ride, and once you have learnt it, you cross over to the other side and become a sadcyclist.
Sadness is a smell, a colour, a person. It is singular, plural, common and proper. Onion rings in your gravy may make you sad one day and then not. So too: a pigeon at the window, peppermint fumes, the sad tale of what happens to hair, the prime minister whose face you cannot bear to look at. Friends may make you sad, friends who betray. You may in turn betray your friends and that can make you sadder. It is possible to be sad no matter whose team you are on. Sadness is what makes you wonder what comes at the end and what comes after.
It made Mama-mon sad that Daddy was living two lives. When she said it, accusing him of it, with her slim finger pointing and prodding his chest, whisky fumes lacing her rising voice, Daddy seemed sadder. He hung his head or looked far away, the irises of his eyes glowing like coals. Yes, I do know how coal burns. While Daddy lived his other life, Mama-mon taught me and Kiran about the world.
Kiran – my first best friend, my parabatai, the one I was bound to love and protect, the one for whom I could have laid down my life, lived next door. In the house with a pine tree and chandeliers. If you ever decided to make a Kiran doll, plastic googly eyes from the craft shop or shiny black buttons wouldn’t do the trick. You would need black onyx from ancient Egypt.
For her hair – the thick braid that snaked down her thin back – what could recreate that kind of hair, I am yet to discover. For her snowy white teeth, I have decided marble from the Leaning Tower of Pisa might work. Kiran was skinny and her bones, well, they could break in a breeze. But not her eyes that shone like a tiger’s. You could grow afraid of the deep end of her eyes.
For Mama-mon, she was the “other daughter”. Perhaps the truer daughter, because Kiran always had the best stories to tell her – about the autowallah with a beard coiled like springs, or the green-eyed policeman at Kabutar Chowk, or a cloud shaped like a unicorn appearing every day at noon, or a geography teacher who kept an empty Coke bottle inside her bag into which she shed tears. How she laughed and cried over Kiran’s stories. All I ever saw was traffic, grey cars, people rushing to work, flame of the forest flowers falling all the way down with a whisper. I did, however, see what Kiran or Mama-mon couldn’t – but that didn’t count. I saw the sound of it all, rising like a flock of multicoloured birds, a rainbow of traffic sounds, Principal Ma’am’s brown voice, Arijit Singh’s teal voice, Daddy’s golden voice, Kiran’s voice a colour from space, a colour I no longer remember.
I can’t pinpoint exactly how and when Mama-mon’s going away on Mondays began to affect me. I got headaches and my feet were always cold, even if I wore two socks. One thing I do know definitely – it was around this time that I stopped eating apples and went off Harry Potter. I was done with all the wizarding and “I am the Chosen One” fawning and swooning. I needed new things in life to replace old things that weren’t working for me anymore.
To cope with Mondays, Mama-mon taught me how geological time worked. She told me of drifting continents, the Devonian period, the eternality of everything. We no longer spoke of time in days and weeks. We became creatures of mega-annums and giga-annums and of the year when the world was full of fish. Of everything else that came before and will come after.
“So you see, Narois, it’s all relative. And we are nothing. We are here … but not here really.”
In the orange light of afternoon, before the Age of Mondays dawned on us, Mama-mon would pour herself whisky-in-a-cup.
“Just a splash in my coffee. Not a peg. No need to judge,” she would say to Daddy if he was around. To me she would just nod and wink.
Daddy didn’t look like someone who had another life. He was solid – always present, loyally stuck to:
His side of the bed
His scratchy old turntable
His alcove of homeless and abandoned gods
His olive-oil-garlic-lemon marinade for beef
His weekly trips to the market where he could tell riverfish from pondfish
Daddy paying the school fees.
Daddy arguing with Granny Dorabjee about who is a non-Parsi, and why such definitions should be banned, even if such arguments meant never visiting the Dorabjee house in Colaba.
Daddy’s heavy shoes thudding at the doorway when he left for the harbours and islands on which there were lighthouses …
Daddy’s boring life, comforting and warm like a hug.
Which became, in Mama-mon’s eyes, Daddy’s double life.
Excerpted with permission from Age of Mondays, Lopa Ghosh, HarperCollins India.
