A Family Portrait
Alina Gufran
Illustrated by Nirvair S Nath
Ever since she was a little kid, Ridhi doesn’t remember seeing much of her parents. All she remembers is a slew of live-in help from one family with five daughters in Kanpur. Babita, Savita, Sarita, Lalita and Pooja. Ridhi often wondered if their parents ran out of rhymes by the time Pooja was born or if they’d gotten bored of rhyming. She likes Pooja the least. Pooja doesn’t cook well and only ever offers dal-chawal as a way to satiate Ridhi’s post-school, lunch-time hunger. Pooja can whip up dal-chawal at any time of the day and never quite notice Ridhi’s irritation. Ridhi is sick of it. She makes up tales about Pooja sifting through her mother’s expensive silk saris tucked away neatly in her cupboard and trying on her expensive pearl earrings. She lies about Pooja not feeding her on time or drinking the tall glass of hot milk and Bournvita meant for Ridhi.
In school, her best friend, Niyati, who was only talking to Ridhi because her best friend, Vidushi, had moved to Canada, teaches her the meaning of the word affair. When a man and a woman got together in secret and did things to each other’s bodies is when they are having an affair. Ridhi listens with rapt attention and believes every word Niyati says. Niyati is thirteen years old, is crushing on a fourteen year old boy and is extremely pretty. With fair skin, translucent like her mother’s pearl earrings, big, oval eyes and full lips, Niyati’s beauty strikes Ridhi in a way she struggles to articulate. All she knows is that she’s thrilled to be her best friend.
*
One evening at the park, Ridhi sees Pooja chatting with the boy from the grocery store. The one with the bags under his eyes and spiky hair, who strolls around the colony on his bicycle, delivering fresh milk and bags of spinach, whistling louder every time he passes the servants hanging out in groups. Ridhi grips the swing tightly and watches them as Pooja giggles loudly, tucking her coal black hair behind her ear. The boy holds the edge of her kurta and they lean further behind the Banyan tree until they vanish out of sight.
Ridhi leans further and further to catch a glimpse until she falls from the swing, eliciting a gaggle of cruel laughter from the kids playing next to her. Humiliated, as her mother brushes her long hair at night and twirls it into neat plaits, Ridhi recounts the incident. Pooja and the boy from the grocery store touched lips and bad-touched each other. Nandita is appalled and after tucking Ridhi into bed, hurries to her bedroom. Subodh is in bed, going over some medical research papers. Nandita slips out of her kurta and pants and into her frayed nightie. She sits at the edge of the bed and sighs dramatically until Subodh finally looks up.
“We need to let Pooja go.”
Subodh groans— a gratuitous sound that aggravates her. She ignores it like she ignores Subodh spitting on sidewalks on their post-dinner walks or the when he talks down to waiters at cheap restaurants but speaks with deference to people whose diction is chiselled and evokes the enviable contours of an English-medium education.
“She might run away with the boy from the grocery store and we don’t want that kind of hassle.”
“I told you we should have hired that Nepali servant— what was his name? Bitul? Batsal? He didn’t eat eggs or meat. He had a family to look after. These young girls are always trouble,” Subodh's face hardens.
Nandita scoffs— a half-cry, half-laugh laced with derision and acerbity perfected over thirteen years of marriage that she knows drives Subodh up the wall. She isn’t sure when this chat became a power game, but as it was the case with several other chats in their marriage, it was of utmost importance to win.
“How can you trust any strange man alone at home with Ridhi?”
“You can be so backward sometimes. Just because he’s poor, he’s a rapist, is it?”
“Oh, I’m backward? You’re the one who won’t even let eggs into the house,” Nandita hisses.
Subodh stands up and squares Nandita defiantly, his bravado as brittle and precious as his anger.
“I didn’t see your parents complaining about that when you were getting married. I remember them being thankful that somebody like me was willing to take you in.”
Nandita’s eyes flash with anger and then a deadly calm seeps into them. She realises the potency of his words, and they crawl and settle into her bones, regurgitating memories residing in the various crevices of her body. The shame sits squarely on the width of her hips, the guilt in the hunch of her back, the resignation in the thick coils of her black hair and her ego in the arches of her brows. She bends until she seems to cave into herself and whispers something incomprehensible.
“Speak up! You know I can’t hear you when you get like that.” Subodh thunders, emboldened by her silence, performative in his authority.
“We have to let Pooja go.”
Ridhi stands by the door and watches her father towering above his mother. She looks triumphantly at Pooja, who stands in the doorway, listening to the conversation.
“Look, they’re fighting because you went and had an affair with the grocery boy.”
“What did I ever do to you?” Pooja’s eyes glisten with tears.
Ridhi's mocking smile doesn’t falter as she registers Pooja’s despair like one might regard an insect never spotted before— with equal parts curiosity and disdain.
“You’re ugly and dumb,” Ridhi announces triumphantly, and runs to her room. Nandita comes out of the bedroom, casting a shadow in her flannel slippers and nightie. Pooja returns to her room and lies still on the stiff bed, trying not to breathe too loudly. Finally, the corridor light switches off and she is doused in darkness.
*
Next morning, Pooja stands at the gate with her suitcase barely-held together with fraying straps and a fat buckle as Nandita flags down a rickshaw to take her to the nearest bus stop. Nandita slips a few hundreds into her palm— for the rickshaw. Subodh stands by the door, holding Ridhi’s hand, clearing his throat intermittently. Pooja meets Ridhi’s eyes and Ridhi smiles. She skips to Pooja and puts some fifties into her hand— I broke my piggy bank for you. Nandita smiles uncomfortably and Pooja feels like she could howl from frustration. She tucks the fifties into a drawstring pouch fastened around her waist and gets into the rickshaw.
That night, Ridhi calls Niyati to inform her of this exciting development.
“Anyway, so now she’s gone.”
“You don’t think your father was having an affair with her, do you?”
Ridhi bites her lip. She hasn’t considered this possibility. She resolves to observe her parents with unbroken attention. Nandita has other plans for her.
With Subodh’s night shifts and Nandita’s gruelling schedule, Ridhi is rushed from one family friend’s home to another. At Nandita’s DCP uncle’s house, until he politely complains to Nandita about Ridhi’s late night phone calls using their landline. Then, to the cousins in Dwarka, whose daughter has cerebral palsy. Ridhi insists on inquiring why she walks funny. She is carted off to a distant aunt’s home who insists Ridhi do the dishes every time she eats. One particularly nasty evening, when her strict aunt relegates her to peeling peas as punishment for talking back to her uncle, Ridhi is finally fetched by her mother.
Nandita, smelling profusely of perfume and iodex, stands in the doorway with a box of black forest chocolate pastries and envelops Ridhi into a desperate hug. Ridhi coalesces into her arms and clings to her while Nandita apologises profusely to the aunty for Ridhi’s “shameful behaviour.”
In the car ride back home, Nandita disses the aunt by claiming that she is this way because her husband died when she was young and that she is ‘sexually frustrated.’
“What does that mean?”
“Never mind what that means. I’ve had it with you. If I work, I’m a bad mother, if I stop working, we don’t have enough money for you. Nothing’s ever enough.”
Ridhi cowers in her seat. She doesn’t know how to respond to her mother’s enraged monologue. She suspects it’s her fault. The car rolls in through the colony gate and as it comes to a stop, Ridhi jumps out and runs into the kurta-clad arms of Subodh who’s at the doorway, ready to receive her. She doesn’t know why but she feels like crying. Complaining about the aunty who smells like naphthalene balls, they go back inside, leaving Nandita with the grocery bags and Ridhi’s suitcase.
*
The Chowdharys have new help. A sweet, thin-boned, Muslim girl called Meher with high cheekbones and light eyes. She has a striking face and her voice is strong and low-pitched, belying her diminutive appearance. Nandita is relieved she can finally go back to work. After some feeble protests against how expensive Meher is because she speaks English and knows Math, Subodh falls silent.
Apart from cooking three meals a day, dusting down the nooks and corners of Nandita’s large, ornate home, washing the car on alternate mornings, accompanying Ridhi to the park, Meher also helps her with her homework. Nandita stops dealing with multiple tuition teachers, some practically extortionists. Not like paying an extra five thousand pricks, given Subodh’s salary, but he’s been trying to shift to a private hospital, due to the sordid state of affairs at the Government one he works for. He often receives calls at odd times to cover a colleague’s shifts in the ICU or from desperate patients who hunt his number down via the Internet and seek him out for last-minute advice. His colleagues are beleaguered from the pressures of a non-existent public healthcare system and little to no benefits. And yet, he is always ready to provide his family with everything, even before they know they need it. When Ridhi was a child and Benetton had just entered the Indian market, he returned home with three, sometimes four, fluffy dresses in various shades of yellow, green or pink, and Ridhi toppled around in glitzy, velvety fabrics. Every summer vacation, when they went to Shimla or Mussoorie, Ridhi jumped up and down until Subodh agreed to pay for a ride. Saddled atop the horse, her tiny legs poking out from either side, she rode with a huge grin on her face, breaking into rhythmic haiyas, convinced she was the one propelling the horse forward and not the amused jockey. Subodh remembered the time he stood outside the tungsten-lit delivery ward while Nandita screamed inside. The nurse stepped out with streaks of blood across her scrubs and Subodh’s heart sank before she beamed; it’s a girl.
He wasn’t sure when Ridhi grew up; wearing dresses that made her look well beyond her years, staring at the neighbour’s boy, a gangly, toothy one— polite with the elders, abrasive with his friends. Sometimes, if he looked close enough, Ridhi’s features hardened into the maturity and jadedness of her mother’s.
Subodh spots Ridhi on the carpet, watching some vapid teen drama on Netflix with her mouth half-open, while Meher potters in the kitchen. From a slant in the kitchen doorway, he notices the curve of her hips, before he looks away.
*
Things are particularly bad the semester before the finals. Nobody in Nandita’s class of fifteen is interested in Indian history— their passions are far more exciting, foreign occurrences like the Third Reich, the Cold War, the current racial-political climate of America. The Independence struggle, Gandhian legacy, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre are incidents the students regard with a perfect indifference. Why would they pay attention to her when they could find the Cliff Notes online? She doesn’t want to encourage rote learning but it is exhausting to try and keep their attention. Since the admission cut-off for the course was low, it attracted vagabonds, miscreants and generally, ones who lacked drive.
In the middle of a particularly boring film, Bharat: Ek Khoj, about the socio-political and historical beginnings of India as a nation, Nandita wonders how she ended up here, how her entry to Stanford was halted due to her pregnancy despite the full scholarship. She thinks of the shotgun wedding and Subodh’s mother’s demands. Subodh’s family were pure-blood Pandits and balked at the idea of a woman eating eggs or meat or simply not being Brahmin. They believed abortion was against God’s will. It was difficult for her to conjure the first flush of their courtship— the evening walks at India Gate, sharing an ice-cream cone, sneaking into the theatre at Satyam Complex, boating at Purana Qila at sunset, stealing kisses behind the Sunderwala Mahal, swinging on tyres fastened to sturdy tree branches. She remembers moving to Kanpur when Subodh was undergoing his two year residency at a Government hospital. She remembers the slowness of the hot summer days, the patronising compassion of her neighbours when she was left alone with Ridhi for hours while Subodh drank whiskey with his fellow residents. She remembers the cocktail of sleeping pills she could obtain without a prescription and how often she’d wake up to find Ridhi unfed for several hours. A memory slices through her musings, sharp like the edge of a knife when Ridhi, all of four years old, insisted that her toast wasn’t hot enough. Nandita left it on the pan for a minute longer but Ridhi circled her, with her high-pitched whine, mouth puckering like she was at the precipice of a full-blown tantrum and Nandita took her finger and touched it to the red-hot steel. “Is it hot enough now?” Ridhi sprang back in pain, her annoying whimpers turned to a blank state of shock, her brown eyes wide. She nursed her finger with the other hand while Nandita pulled Ridhi into a tight, suffocating hug. She soothed her hair compulsively, whispering apologies. Ridhi didn’t cry and ate her breakfast in a kind of disturbed silence.
The movie ends with the signature title track and the lights come back on, flooding the students who are half asleep.
*
Ridhi has decided she really likes Meher. She loves the delicious omelettes Meher makes in the pan she bought separately for Ridhi when she felt poha wasn’t enough sustenance for a growing girl. She likes to pay attention when Meher reads passages from Wordworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” Meher tells her the poem is about grief over losing his lover and Ridhi asks Meher if she’s ever been in love. Meher laughs in a manner that feels safe and Ridhi hugs her, inhaling the dewy scent of jasmine. The days Subodh stays back at work and Nandita visits her friend, Meher lets Ridhi watch after-hours romance films on HBO. Ridhi’s introduced to the world of young actresses, wet in the rain, nipples poking through their shirts. Later, Ridhi lifts her shirt above her head and asks, straight-faced, why her breasts looked like mosquito bites, sending Meher into peals of laughter. Meher doesn’t insist that Ridhi play tag with the kids who make fun of her, and instead takes her on long walks to a dilapidated park where the greenery runs wild. They look at butterflies, climb giant Banyan trees and investigate rare shrubs. Ridhi has long been forbidden from visiting the park since it attracts the shadiest of people around town but there is something exciting to be breaking the rules with Meher; she makes it look easy. When she notices that Ridhi has a soft spot for the Sharma boy, she encourages her to speak with him. The Sharma boy likes to cycle so Meher takes it upon herself to convince Subodh to buy one for Ridhi.
Meher’s presence is pleasing to Nandita. Ever since she’s arrived, the meals are cooked and served on time, the house sparkles and Ridhi’s temper tantrums have decreased significantly. She doesn’t need to spend as much time after work on Ridhi’s homework and can take the evenings off— to visit Rima and her two year old son who she fawned over, to rejoin her yoga classes, to go on long drives in the rain.
For a brief moment, Nandita hopes that the free time and the relative peace would bring Subodh closer to her but even when he is physically around, he is absent. She suspects he’s lying to her about the number of shifts at work. The eighteen-something Nandita would make an effort; shave her legs and arms, go on daily runs to keep the stomach flab at bay, wear perfume and a dash of make-up to bed so he could wake up to her ethereal beauty. But something about having a child was proof that she’d kept her end of the promise— wife, mother, caretaker, homemaker. She harbours a baseline revulsion for the various trappings of modern life she’s worked so hard to secure instead of pandering to his long disappearances, she too recedes into herself and allows herself the risky pleasures of leisure, of free time, of doing nothing and caring about nothing. Through this, the quiet but reassuring presence of Meher is a constant reminder that she isn’t failing at motherhood; just taking a short break from it.
*
Subodh is irritatingly aware of Meher’s presence in the house. He is, perhaps, the only one who hasn’t warmed up to her like the rest of the Chowdhary family. For one, he doesn’t trust Muslims. Secularism and education was all well and good, but letting a Muslim into his house— making his meals, his bed, watering his plants, kissing his child with a mouth that eats meat— it was all too much to bear. Naturally, he can’t express this to Nandita. True to her left liberal roots, she would rather eat shit than admit that she is biased in her own ways, but we all have our conditioning, he argues with himself while shaving his beard and staring at his frown lines in the bathroom mirror. He’s been feeling the urge to spend recklessly— on expensive whiskeys he has no business drinking, on exotic lilies and orchids for the young intern at work whose attention he revels in, even though he is unsure of how to make any moves. He’s simply been out of the game for too long.
For him, Nandita has disappeared from view. They are merely two puppets carrying out the various mechanics of a marriage. Every morning before work, after he plants a distracted kiss on Ridhi’s forehead, Nandita and him engage in a wooden hug, mostly for Ridhi’s benefit. He read somewhere that it’s good for children to see their parents engage in physical touch and affection. The idea of holding, kissing, even making love to his own wife is foreign to him, the memories from before fading into a kind of abstraction. Their conversations, when not staid, are marred with personal attacks and years of built-up resentment. Sometimes in her company, he feels like a ten year old again, back in his cold childhood home, struggling with his mathematical equations, avoiding his father’s stern gaze, exacting revenge on his angry Chacha by puncturing his cycle’s tyres after a particularly cruel beating. He’s not sure when he started fearing the same girl whose hostel he sneaked into and who he took impromptu trips to Shimla with. He believes he is too old to try and face that fear. Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, his dead mother’s disappointed face floats to him from the sky above. He fought with the world to be with Nandita. How could he, then, admit that their marriage had asphyxiated and died without so much as a whimper?
It is easy to direct that dislike towards Meher. Ridhi insists that Meher tuck her into bed instead of them. That usually leaves Nandita and Subodh hovering like ghosts around one another. The nights he can’t rig any shifts at the hospital, he devotes himself to fixing things around the house— the leaky kitchen pipe that forces leftovers to rise up in the sink in a brownish pool, the humble hatchback’s grimy windows, the wooden doors swollen from the torrential rains.
*
Today, while he fixes another jammed window, he ignores Nandita’s muttering to herself as she grades exam papers due the next day. Subodh oils down the window’s edges while watching Meher tend to the garden outside. He can tell she isn’t doing a great job uprooting the weeds, sniping them from the surface and not using a trowel that would allow her to reach their roots. He can’t trust Nandita to make any correct decisions. He takes in Nandita’s appearance; oiled hair in a thick braid, loose t-shirt and pyjamas that are threadbare and discoloured, oily skin and her growing paunch, visible even through the loose t-shirt. She’d really let herself go.
Meher sprays water on the yellow hibiscus below the window’s ledge and Subodh watches her with contempt. The neckline of her kurta plunges as she crouches and his eyes travel across her deep cleavage. Disconcerted, he can’t look away as she bends lower, the curve of her breasts clearly visible to him. He stiffens and a wave of humiliation washes over him. Later, he masturbates violently in the privacy of the washroom he shares with Nandita.
*
Meher’s instructed by Nandita to take Ridhi to the park where all the other kids play. At Ridhi’s parent teacher meeting, the teacher calls her behaviour increasingly antisocial— from calling another girl a ‘slut’ to deliberately turning in her assignments late. Nandita is defensive but later, orders a book on ‘Parenting In The Age of Anxiety’ from Amazon while signing Ridhi up for singing, dance and handicraft classes. Ridhi hates the singing class— she is the oldest there, the house smells like fish and the teacher stares at her angrily every time she gets a note wrong. The only nice thing about the dance class is the three month old puppy she finds abandoned behind the teacher’s house. She skips the class and plays with the puppy for an hour before Meher finds her covered in paw marks and mud. She washes her off before anybody in the house can see. In the handicrafts class, a girl who smells nice offers Ridhi her pencils so she suffers through it with a dignified smile.
*
The park is empty as all the kids are out cycling. Ridhi returns home with a kind of bitter loneliness. Meher goes straight to Subodh to discuss the matter of buying Ridhi a bicycle. Subodh’s engaged in some kind of online petition for banning Halal products on Twitter. After Meher apologises for disturbing him, she tells him about the benefits of Ridhi owning a cycle, how it can help her forge stronger friendships and improve her grades. Subodh scarcely listens and at some point, takes Meher’s hand and places it on his hardened crotch. Meher’s eyes widen and her hand rests there until she draws it back to her body like she’s testing out a prosthetic arm and leaves without a word.
Later, he wakes up from a dream where Meher sits atop a red chair, held in place by metal, her legs apart like at the gynaecologist’s, Subodh’s head bobbing between her thighs, like a cat licking its paw. Her hands are tied and her neck is in a metal brace. The hold of the brace tightens.
Drenched in sweat, he is careful not to wake Nandita up as he slips out of bed and opens his laptop. He logs onto an online forum and types his dream out, hoping for some clarity from his brothers in arms.
*
Meher announced she’s leaving. Her bags are packed and to the door. Her sister’s coming to pick her up. Nandita is surprised and relieved— Meher’s sturdy but pervasive presence was interfering with the energy of the house. Nandita feels like she’s ready to be a mother again. She’s applied for a three month sabbatical from work and has been granted one without pay.
She knows that won’t go down well with Subodh but she doesn’t care. She thinks she saw a flicker of surprise on Meher’s face when she didn't try to persuade her to stay back but overall, Meher has been stoic and unmoved by the whole thing. Nandita is glad; she doesn’t have the emotional energy for fussy farewells. Ridhi is wrecked with too many feelings her twelve year old body doesn’t know how to hold. She grabs Meher by the waist as she is packing.
“Is it because of Ma?”
“No betu, my family needs me.”
“What about me?”
Ridhi is inconsolable. She stamps her foot hard on the floor and misses Meher’s pinky nail by a hair.
Meher leaves without much fanfare. The house wears a forlorn look only to Ridhi. Nandita is relieved and sets about making lunch which Ridhi promptly refuses to eat. She boards herself in her room and refuses to emerge. Nandita ropes in Subodh but Ridhi doesn’t open the door.
Over plates of food that have gone cold, Subodh and Nandita have a yelling match where Subodh insists Ridhi needs to be sent to boarding school, that they’ve slipped up as parents and it is beyond their control now. Nandita is furious.
“That’s so typical of you.”
“What do you mean?”
‘Pawn off responsibility for everything— for the marriage, for your roving eyes and now your own child.”
“Nandita, she’s going and that’s final.”
Everything moves really quickly post that. Ridhi’s hunger strike lasts for a few days. She loses colour in her cheeks, her skin seems tighter across her awkward limbs and the skin under her eyes darkens. Nandita briefly debates meeting with a counsellor but there is so much to be done— socks, skirts, shoes, woollens to be assembled and packed, textbooks to be bought, extra soap and shampoo to be sealed, trail mixes of nuts and seeds to be placed in neat containers. When Ridhi learns about the name of the boarding school, she doesn’t Google it, nor does she call Niyati. Nandita waits for her to cry or throw a tantrum, or do something more insidious perhaps, but Ridhi doesn’t react at all.
While Nandita takes the train to drop Ridhi off at school, Subodh’s laptop lights up with replies from the subreddit. His brothers absolve him of his guilt, assure him that Muslim women cast spells with their sensuality, and they are meant to be conquered, Jai Shri Ram.
On the train, Ridhi eats the soggy cutlets and drinks the milky tea. Nandita’s relieved but also feels growing resentment towards her. She tries to ask the kind of questions a mother would, like are you looking forward to making new friends, then tries to reassure Ridhi and herself with vague statements like, I’ve heard they have an amazing library, you could pick up a sport or a musical instrument, Papa and I will write to you every month.
“Different letters?” Ridhi asks, pouting.
Nandita nods and her voice trails off as Ridhi looks back at the expanse of fields and electric poles whizzing past outside.
As they get off at the station, Ridhi slips her hand into Nandita’s as she instructs the coolie to gather their numerous bags.
“Ma, have you spoken to Meher didi?”
Nandita walks behind the coolie, hunched over with the weight of the luggage, gliding through the crowd like a fish through water.
“Who?” She asks distractedly, watching the driver store the luggage in the trunk of their taxi.
The gates of the school are tall and imposing and several girls line up, hands slipped into their mothers’. Nandita and Ridhi stand in the line and watch daughters and mothers crying. Nandita allows herself one tear as a show of camaraderie. Ridhi slips out of her grip and walks in. Nandita waits but she doesn’t look around. Soon, Ridhi is just another head bobbing amongst a sea of young girls.
***
About the Author:
Alina Gufran is a writer and editor, and is also the co-founder and host of the original podcast, Bitches Brew. She earned her MA in film-making from Prague Film School (2017) and is an alumna of the Dum Pukht Writing Workshop (2019) and The Berlin Writer's Workshop (2022). Her debut novel is being represented by A Suitable Agency.
Her short stories and essays have appeared in Livemint, Himal Southasian, The Swaddle, Out Of Print Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Helter Skelter, Jamhoor Magazine and various other publications. You can find her newsletter here.