When her mother called, Garima didn’t pick up the phone. It was Neil who gave her the news. ‘She says it’s an emergency. They are going to cut off her power supply.’
Garima took a flight to Goa the next morning, expecting to spend the day talking to municipal officers. She was led to the garden instead. ‘You always keep things to yourself,’ Leela began, her face streaked with mud as she planted a line of sunflowers, ‘but, luckily, Neil had the sense to tell me what has happened.’ She wondered if he had told her mother the same things – he had not meant to cheat. He got carried away with his friends.
‘Leave it, Ma. What’s the problem with the municipal board?’ Leela held Garima by the arm and led her to a rickety bench. ‘First, I want to talk about you. Neil told me you stay awake all night, barely eat. You can’t torture yourself like this. Have you tried speaking to someone, a professional?’
She had found a therapist. Her anxiety increasing as she sat on the faux-leather couch in the reception. Garima picked at one end of the couch as she waited, till she could see the orange sponge underneath. One material, pretending to be another and hiding a third. Pulling off her own layers in front of a stranger seemed beyond her capabilities. She left without informing the receptionist.
Her mother continued, ‘You know, these things happen.’ She had once seen her mother’s smile making things happen as well. It had been at an art gallery. Leela, in a printed sari, her silver earrings swinging with the motion, turned in Garima’s direction. It lit up her face – that two-vodkas-down, joyful grin. Garima followed its trajectory, like it was a beam shooting out from her mother’s gleaming teeth. She swivelled, looking behind her at a bespectacled man, the recipient, flushing in delight.
‘Maybe they do happen, Ma – to you. I don’t want to live like that. I stick by my commitments, and I expect the same in return.’
‘I agree, but people slip sometimes.’
‘Slipping hurts other people. Like Dad. Or, have you forgotten?’
‘Garima, there are things about him that I can’t discuss, especially not with you. But he wasn’t some perfect hero. For that matter, no one is, including Neil.’
‘That seems clear. And he didn’t even have the guts to tell me himself!’
‘What would that achieve aside from hurting you?’ her mother asked. ‘It’s like scarfing down a carton of ice cream which you then throw up on someone else. Leaving them to clean the mess.’
Leela stroked Garima’s hair and said, ‘I know you are hurt. But you can’t go through life without some amount of pain. There is a poem – by Jane Hitchfield or some field; I forget her last name – “So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.”’
Garima wrestled with an urge to bang her head on the bench. Repeatedly. Till her mother’s scraped- together philosophical drone ended. Then the entire family would hear about ‘poor Garima and her hysterical behaviour’. Stalling was the only sensible move.
‘Let’s talk later. I am exhausted.’
Leela nodded. ‘These early morning flights are a pain. It was not an emergency, though. I just lied to Neil.’
(Excerpted with permission from Juggernaut books from Welcome to Paradise by Twinkle Khanna)
