Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“But she would tell Dhruv, ‘You don’t know what she is plotting, I heard her talking on the phone, she is evil.’ Which was ridiculous. I never made phone calls when I was in the house because I knew what it would lead to afterwards.

“I used to tell Dhruv: ‘She doesn’t believe in herself or the values that she’s given you. Or the man she’s made you into. Otherwise why would she be so insecure? You take care of her. She knows you care about her. What is she scared about? One mere girl walking into your house? I’m not here to break up your family.’

“I was supposed to get up in the morning, cook, pack everyone’s lunch, drive an hour to work, run the factory and get out of there in time to buy vegetables for the evening meal and be home by 7 p.m. to cook the dinner. Initially I didn’t know how to cook and she taught me, which I still thank her for. But if I got back at 7.01 she’d have taken her place in the kitchen and she wouldn’t let me enter, and then there would be a huge scene. I had to be in the kitchen by 7 p.m. so that Dhruv would not face some almighty scene when he came home. Nobody wants to walk into a house after work where there’s already bickering happening, and I realised the only way I could help Dhruv was if I turned up on time. There were days when I left the office at 4.30 p.m. I mean, when it’s your own business, you can take certain liberties. But it became a big problem: you can’t go too far.

“Then there came a time when he told me that his mother had a problem with me working. I said to him, ‘I told you before I’m not going to give up working.’ But then it was ruining everything that I’d worked on so much that for a month I didn’t go to work at all.

“I was not allowed to have any social life. The only time I socialised was when I sometimes spent two days at my parents’ house or in the car on the way home from work, when I used to call my friends. At home they hated any calls on my number. Sometimes a machine was being dispatched somewhere and got held up, and since I was in charge I couldn’t just say, ‘I’m not allowed to take calls at home.’ So I would take the call, deal with the issue, and my mother-in-law would say, ‘She’s just trying to show that she works more than my sons. Just because she has so many people under her supervision doesn’t mean my sons are no good.’ Things like that caused glitches in Dhruv’s mind. I don’t think he had really thought about it like that until she said it.

“I couldn’t hug boys even if they were my brothers. I just couldn’t hug anybody. In my family we’re very physically expressive. If my father was going out of town, we’d hug and kiss you, know? There was this time when Dhruv was leaving for work, so I hugged him. And he was like, ‘Don’t do that, Mummy’s standing right there!’ I was like, ‘Goddammit, I’m married to you, okay?’ Then he was like, ‘No she’ll talk to me later and say you shouldn’t do those things standing outside.’

“It was a totally different school of thought. Like there was this time when I came back from work, and I parked my car outside the house and there were kids playing badminton in the street. So I picked up a racquet and joined in. She opened the door and started shouting at me right there. ‘Get inside the house!’ I came in and there was a huge argument. ‘The daughter-in-law of the house doesn’t do such things! I don’t know what your parents have taught you.’

“Sex was another issue. Actually he was pretty comfortable about sex. More than I was. Not that I was a virgin when I got married, though that was the picture I had to portray, knowing the kind of family I was getting into. But in the beginning his mother wouldn’t ever let us close the door of our bedroom. From day one she wanted us to have a kid — that’s what Punjabi families are all about — and I used to tell her, ‘You won’t even allow us to close the door: how am I gonna give you a kid?’ If we did shut the door, she would start banging on it. ‘Knock’ is too polite for what she used to do.

“She would say, ‘What has happened that you have to close the door? If nothing bad is happening you shouldn’t have to close the door.’ We would just be sleeping or chatting inside — on those rare occasions when we actually chatted — and she would come and shout ‘Please put the light on in there. I don’t like you being in there with the light off.’

“Dhruv was totally casual about it. ‘What’s the problem?’ he would say. ‘We’ll just open the door.’ Several times I used to tell him, ‘You tell your mother everything; why don’t you tell her the sexual positions you’ve tried with me?’ I used to make fun of him about it.”

During her speech a man has come to our table and, without a word, sat down next to her. She has taken no notice of this man, so I assume she was expecting him, but I am slightly taken aback at the lack of reaction on anyone’s part. Sukhvinder has not touched her phone since we made the decision to come to this café, so she cannot have informed him where she was. And yet he has found her and sat down beside her without any remark. I enjoy the aloofness they both display to locational issues. I have no idea who the man might be. He must be someone she knows well, since she continues to talk about intimate things in front of him.

“Dhruv’s family were not Sikhs. They were Hindu Brahmins from West Punjab, and they surrounded themselves with priests and astrologers. After about four months of our marriage my mother-in-law started to tell Dhruv that her priest thought I was an evil force and things were going to go wrong. I was the reason his business was failing and all of that.

“She began to tell him I was doing black magic. I just laughed because I don’t even believe in all that. But they started all these rituals to protect their home. There would constantly be weird things in the doorway when I arrived to stop the evil coming in, and since I came from a Sikh family, I had no idea what they were, so I would pick them up and throw them away, which only made them believe it more. My mother-in-law was terrified about bad stuff coming in from outside. She never ever left the house except to buy vegetables from a street vendor, and when she went out she had three pairs of shoes and she would change from one into the next and then into the next, to make sure there was no contact between the inside and the outside.

“One day she went through my things and she found this amulet that I’d been given by a Muslim friend. It was some Islamic symbol and I liked it, I found it interesting, you know? She took it away and showed it to her priest and he said, ‘This is where all your problems are coming from.’ And they did rituals to purify the amulet. And she told everyone in the house and they all started avoiding me. The entire family would look down on me. They were a Partition family and this was like Partition. And I was Pakistan. What hurt me was not that everyone else believed these crazy things but that Dhruv did. He couldn’t question anything his mother said.

“I really did not want to fail at my marriage and I tried everything I could. I thought I could change everything and make everyone happy. My mother-in-law had been mourning ever since her husband died fifteen years before. You won’t believe it: when I moved into that house I realised that in the entire house there was not one photograph of Dhruv’s father. Which made me feel they had not yet accepted that he was no longer in their lives, and I thought that was why they were so insane. So one day we were out shopping and I bought a beautiful frame, and I got a photograph blown up and I put it in the drawing room. When she saw it, she was hysterical. ‘Get rid of that!’ she screamed. I said, ‘Look it’s a beautiful frame and it’s a beautiful picture of him. I thought it would make you happy.’ And she screamed at Dhruv, ‘This girl just wants to make sure I am crying all the time.’