If I had been the old Reyna Basu, I would have thrown myself at my mother’s feet and asked for her forgiveness for what I had done. I would have loathed my irredeemable action for days. Strangely, I felt utterly unapologetic for what I had done. I hated this new version of me who could actually violently pull her mother’s hair and feel nothing about it. She had been spewing venom with her words since Anish Banerjee reappeared in my life, with his seven-year-old daughter Alvira in tow, and a marriage in the courts. I could have countered her words with mine but this? What had I become?
As always, Anish was instrumental in accelerating my downfall. Thirteen years back when he had vanished without a trace, I spiralled into a world of late nights, psychedelic dance floors, alcohol and self-pity. It had taken a lost promotion and a threat of sacking to come back to my senses. So, my mother did have a reason to despise the return of the prodigal boyfriend.
Again, it was not just him that she hated, she wanted men to stay miles away from me. Till I came back from Singapore, I presumed it was her protective instinct, but now, at 37, I could say this without missing a heartbeat that she wanted me to be her eternal wind-up doll whom she decked up with frilly frocks and cute clips.
After I flew off my handle yesterday afternoon, I had been more worried about the impact of my monstrous behaviour on Alvira than the physical or mental scar my action had left on my 75-year-old mother. How much I had changed.
I had to make amends. Like the abusive-narcissistic husband who always behaved like everything was hunky-dory after beating up the wife the night before, I entered my parents’ room.
“So, which friend of yours is going for a trip abroad now? What’s the update on Facebook?” I asked jovially.
My mother was sitting by the window, on the same chair, going through the mobile and her expression remained unchanged. My father was lying on the bed but at the sound of my voice his eyes flew open. Did I see a kind of dread there?
“You must apologise to your mother Reyna! I cannot believe you are the daughter I brought up. Did we ever beat you up? I don’t remember a single slap, not even boxing your ears and you…”
He was right. They were gentle parents; my childhood was good if I discount their incessant fighting. It was only in the last one year, things started unravelling, or rather I started understanding that below that affectionate veneer there was always a need for control — of each other, of me!
“Yes, sure I will apologise, but will she? She called me Anish’s mistress yesterday. Is that something a mother calls a daughter? That too in front of Alvira. The little girl asked Anish the meaning of the word yesterday.”
Was I angry? No! I was laughing. Really, I was laughing at the ignominy that my life stood for. I had wrapped up my thriving career and returned to India from Singapore because I loved my parents. Because I believed I should be there for them in their old age.
Now, all I had was disrespect. No one in my life had humiliated me in the way my mother did yesterday. Getting physical was shameful, I will not deny it. But you get the drift of my mental state, right?
My father got up from the bed, put on his glasses and looked at me, as if he was seeing me after a long time. My mother put up the volume of a Bangladeshi reel she was watching, her way of ending the conversation.
“Lower the volume,” I demanded.
The volume went to zero in one swipe. She didn’t want to risk another showdown.
“Listen, just get one thing clear. If you are thinking I am getting married to Anish and moving out, then you are wrong,” I said.
“I thought you wanted to be a mom to Alvira?” my mother blurted out.
“You can say I am her glorified babysitter for now. Nothing more.”
My mother rolled her eyes in the way she always did when she thought I was being foolish.
For once, she was right. My attachment to Alvira could be detrimental to the dissociation I was adamantly trying to achieve with her father. I was trying to dim the flutter that still happened in my stomach when I saw him. What a dichotomy my life had become.
Anish and I were the quintessential Romeo and Juliet in college. Although I knew him from school, the love story only took off in college. Fair to a fault, tall and well-built, Anish was every girl’s dream boy. My dusky complexion did not give me the confidence to look at fair men. I always thought Anish was way beyond my league, although we used to hang out in the same group since school. Things started sliding in Cupid’s direction when he wanted me to look for a PG accommodation for him in my locality. Since he was from Durgapur, he stayed in a relative’s home from where he had moved to a mess in Bhowanipore. The damp walls of the old building were making his asthma worse, and the watery dal and aloo bhaja served every day wasn’t helping matters.
I requested an elderly kaku-kakima living in our locality to rent out a small, airy room with a single bed on their ground floor and kakima agreed to feed her tenant home-cooked meals. They agreed because parar bhalo meye Reyna (the good girl of the locality) gave an impeccable character certificate for Anish.
Since he lived two houses away now, we went to college together, studied together before exams, spent Sundays together and kaku-kakima had no qualms if Reyna came home; no other girl was allowed though. The other person who joined in this adda often was Rishit Sarkar, our classmate and bosom buddy.
Between studying together and watching movies, I do not know when Anish and I became a couple. No one proposed, no cards were exchanged, our love became a given, like the throbbing of the hearts.
College got over and we landed jobs. Anish joined a travel agency, I joined an advertising agency but my salary was ₹3,000 more than his. That quickly became a bone of contention.
He did not spell it out in as many words but the contorted jibes, the sudden sulking told me that his unhappiness was linked to my status becoming more exalted in his eyes.
His sojourns to his hometown Durgapur, to see his parents, became frequent. Sometimes he would take unpaid leave for days and would not return. Once I found out through social media that he had gone off for a solo trip to Arunachal Pradesh.
Then one day, he did not return from Durgapur. He deactivated his phone number, his social media accounts, his email. Rishit and I went to Durgapur looking for him only to find out that his parents had left their rented house and moved somewhere else, no one knew where.
As we understood that this was something he had done deliberately — although we kept frantically searching for answers to ‘why’ — we decided against approaching the police. It was not only us, not a single friend in our circle had any clue about him. For the first time the word ‘ghosted’ jumped out from newspaper articles and got lodged in my life. I kept puzzling over the meaning of the word.
It suddenly felt that Anish had never existed. For years, every tall-fair man I saw on the street, I took a second look, what if…
A familiar scent of a cologne, a birthday card used as a bookmark, photos coming back as memory on Facebook, gifts left untouched to preserve those moments, attained an unsettling frequency in my daily existence.
Not getting closure was the worst thing that happened to me. I kept hanging in a vacuum of ifs and buts. Moving to Singapore helped, I didn’t have to walk on the streets that Anish once walked with me.
And then, just like he had left, he came back, without any prior notice. Made an appearance at Rishit’s wedding, telling me he was still in love with me.
Was I still in love with him? Perhaps.
But in all those years I had spent in a foreign land, living alone, building a life painstakingly, I had time to think, to dissect to understand what happened to me. I had gained a different perspective.
I called up a detective agency the next day.
Amrita Mukherjee is the author of the novel Exit Interview, short-story collection Museum of Memories and the crime non-fiction book The Secret Diary of a Criminal Lawyer. She blogs at www.amritspeaks.in