by Vani Viswanathan
Eshwari clutched the edges of the sink and retched for the third time. Nothing came out this time, though. Masochistically, she looked into the toilet bowl, muttered a guttural ‘ugh’ in disgust and retched once more.
Eshwari rinsed her mouth a few times and left the bathroom. The silence of their cramped apartment stifled her. It had been five weeks since she’d moved to this tiny town in the outskirts of Philadelphia, where her husband taught in the Chemistry department in a university. She was still unused to the coldness around her – both due to the temperature and the lack of people around. This twenty four-year-old had been plucked straight out of the buzzing locality of Mylapore in Madras and thrown into a sterile suburb of Philadelphia.
Eshwari remembered the first time she met Shankar. He was ten years older, and handsome: jet black, shining hair that swirled over his forehead; kind, large eyes, and a slender moustache. The alliance had come through a neighbour and when Shankar visited India, it got fixed within days. Shankar’s half-an-hour-long visit to Eshwari’s house convinced him – after all, she was called Mylapore’s Jaya Bhaduri (although she was a good five inches taller and more ‘filled out’, as her mother called it), and besides, she had passed her B.Sc. in Botany with distinction.
‘What will you do there?’ he’d asked her, in front of the seventeen relatives and neighbours who’d assembled in her house that evening. The question stumped Eshwari, as she hadn’t expected to be asked this. She quickly recovered, though, and replied ‘I’ll take tuitions for children. I can speak good English!’ Her family members weren’t sure of how to react, but when Shankar smiled with pride, they were relieved. The shy, introverted woman had gathered the courage to talk and had said the right thing.
Shankar’s quiet smile and respectful conversations with her family members won her over, as did the promise of moving to the glorious land of America with a posh professor for a husband. Eshwari was lucky, indeed; when her friends moved from Madras to Tiruchy or Mayiladuthurai, here she was, crossing the seas! How many women in the 70s could have this?
Shankar was considerate throughout the duration of her move to the States as a new bride. She was on a plane for the first time in her life, so he took her to the cockpit (‘Look at all the radio communication that helps us fly this high!’ he’d told her) and stroked her hand gently when her stomach churned during the descent and the noise rattled her. Upon arriving, he’d taken her around, shown her where to go to buy groceries and how to get around by train. He made her practice transacting in dollars and cents and laughed good-naturedly as she multiplied everything in dollars by nine to get an approximate Indian rupee equivalent.
Life was blissful; their lovemaking gentle; their relationship blossomed between long walks, cooking, learning to deal with the cold, shopping, movies and meeting his friends. She enjoyed watching Shankar get ready every weekday morning: he would apply cream on his hair, keep his pocket comb in his right pant pocket, pick from and wear one of his ten checked ties, spray a bit of cologne that got her heart racing, and leave after giving her a slight peck on her cheek. She felt every bit like a heroine in English movies.
Shankar even cooked from time to time, although he made eggs or had bread with a variety of meats that Eshwari couldn’t fathom, much less eat. She silently prayed to Kabalishwarar whenever Shankar had meat, not brave enough to ask him to stop doing so. Meat was everywhere in the country, it seemed, and Eshwari was surprised that people would ignore wholesome – and cheaper – vegetables and grains in favour of meat. With few vegetarian options available if one wanted to eat outside, she could forgive Shankar for having taken this easy route – after all, until she came into his life, his cooking must have been this basic! She would patiently wait for Shankar to leave or go to bed, and scrub the dishes and vessels he used, with a long-handled scrubber that she kept exclusively for this purpose.
A few weeks into living in the country, though, she realised that much of what she did during the day involved cleaning. Things didn’t get as dusty or dirty in her new house in the States as much as they did in India, but she needed something to do after she had finished cooking and brushed up on Biology to announce tuitions. Used to having a thaai sweep, mop and wash vessels every day back in Madras, Eshwari realised she never knew what backbreaking work this was. Her house in Mylapore had been spotless, and even if she shared the bathroom with seven other people, it was only usually wet, never dirty. Here, though, it was all different. The kitchen sink was low and too small, and her back ached for many minutes after she was done washing the dishes. The wretched carpeted floors in her new house meant she had to learn to use a vacuum cleaner, and the noise irritated her to no end.
But the bathroom – which was also carpeted – was her nightmare. Three days after arriving, she put a bucket and a sombu in the bathtub to take her baths, stating ‘I can’t handle this shower business’ to a much-amused Shankar. She wondered which imbeciles decided that it was a good idea to carpet a bathroom. It was forever damp, and she’d often pull out hair – hers and his – and other unidentifiable objects that were brown or black, recoiling with disgust. How these got there, she never knew – and didn’t want to know. Every day, she had to strongly resist the urge to pull the carpet off its floor.
‘You shall do no such thing,’ growled Shankar when she casually brought it up one evening. ‘This is a rented apartment and the rules are very strict here.’ She laughed off her question, but noted that this was the first time he had changed his tone towards her.
Between cleaning loaded bookshelves and scrubbing the stove, Eshwari’s mind often wandered to the bathroom. The bathroom that didn’t have a proper washing area but had a carpet. The bathroom where one had to use paper to wipe their bottom, resulting in strange streaks in her husband’s underwear that she would take for washing with a strange mixture of revulsion and embarrassment. Whenever her feet sank into the slightest bit of dampness in the carpet, she wondered if it was only water – and prayed that it was. The western commode was rather unsuited to the way men needed to do the number one, and she could only hope that her husband with his stylish mannerisms wasn’t that kind.
However, her irritation around cleaning, and the disgust she felt about the bathroom and her boredom usually vanished when Shankar came home in the evening and put on a record of English music that she didn’t know but was growing to like. When Shankar asked her about her day, she would dutifully list whatever she did – leaving out the cleaning or scrubbing that had worn her mind and body; she would only talk about the magazine she read, the letters she wrote, her Biology revisions, or the shows she watched on TV. Did her husband need to listen to her drab tales about cleaning at the end of a long day? ‘These are not things men want to hear,’ her mother had always told her. ‘Men have other things to worry about than women’s silly ministrations.’ And so Eshwari would sit next to him on the sofa every evening, gently stroking his long fingers or running her hand through his wavy hair, admiration brimming on her face as he talked about some lecture or assessment.
And so it was that six months after their wedding, five weeks after she’d moved to the States, she found herself retching in the bathroom one morning. She couldn’t believe that she’d seen Shankar off just a few minutes ago; he would have sympathetically held her head while she threw up and tried to ease the pain. The sink clogged up with her vomit, and she whimpered as she tried to flush it down to make it clear. She knew that throwing up in the commode would have been a better idea, but she couldn’t bring herself to. Despite her mind telling her not to – even though she would retch – she couldn’t help but look into the commode again. For floating inside was a fully intact piece of corn with some shit stuck to it, a vestige of her husband’s breakfast.
Picture from https://www.flickr.com/photos/spine/ under CC license
