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Within those Four Walls

August 1975

That year, the Southwest Monsoons, bang on time, had galloped west over the Arabian Sea to Kerala in June, then charged north towards Mumbai in July. Leaping the Sahyadri ranges, the torrential rains finally stalled above my home city of Pune in Western India, drenching our suburban colony nestled in the hills surrounding the city.

Our home was a two-bedroom, two-family bungalow with a verandah at the front and a courtyard in the back. Leading away from the verandah, guava, chikoo, mango, custard apple, tamarind, fig trees and grape vines lined both sides of our brick driveway. Tomatoes, cucumbers, brinjals, onions, potatoes and carrots bordered the side and back of the house. Everything was in full bloom, soaked and glistening, when I returned home in the early evening after an intense field hockey game with friends.

I was twelve then, shy and thin to my bones, and in love with sixth-grade geography. This one evening, I watched dusk dim the crests of the hills past the lemon tree outside my bedroom window, and heard a solitary truck rumbling along the narrow road to the stone quarry at the top of the hill. I drew my geography textbook from my cloth schoolbag, hugged it, and imagined myself above, in that reddening sky. I soared over the mountain ranges around my home, skirted Mumbai, crossed the dry Deccan Plateau and the Bay of Bengal to the east and slowed only at the edge of the vast Indian Ocean. Suddenly, my father’s angry voice pulled me back down to my room.

“Why are you putting so much oil on the chapati, Vashe?” he yelled. ‘Vashe’ was his nickname for Vasanti, my dear mother.

At first, I cringed on the metal chair, straining to hear what would follow. But then I hurried into the passageway to see.

My mother wouldn’t answer him. She just banged the rolling pin on the wooden board and bit hard on the pieces of betel nut that she always placed in the angles of her mouth. Then my father actually screamed, “The ghee. You took the entire bottle of ghee for yourself. That was for all of us.” Now he was pointing at her, his finger shaking in the air. “You used up all the groundnut oil as well, in one week. That should have lasted an entire month.”

This made my mother mad and she stomped out of the kitchen, muttering unintelligible words and pulling at her hair. My father ran after her, but she flopped onto a circular armchair in the living room. Her brown sari looked faded, the edges threadbare, and her blouse was wrinkled with sweat.

Even the red sindoor on her forehead had deformed, oozing down between her eyes like a gash. My father pulled her up and pushed her back towards our sad kitchen. It had only one window with vertical metal bars, and it felt suffocating in there. The grey-green walls were oil stained and the aluminium containers on the shelves were usually empty. A rickety gas stove connected to an Esso gas cylinder stood in the far corner. As she prepared our dinner, he hovered over her, micromanaging, too busy to notice my presence. Her chapatis weren’t round or big enough. She was too slow, not watching the ones roasting carefully. “You’re burning them,” he hollered.

And that was too much for her. “Stop bothering me, you nasty man,” she shouted.

I could see him clench his jaw, and he slapped her, once, hard enough she staggered back against the counter. Then he pulled on her hair and hissed, “Shut up,” into her face.

At this, she dug her fingernails into his neck, and the flour on her wet hands smeared his shirt. He moved one hand to his neck, and seeing blood, yelled, “Okay, you bitch! You want to do this, you lazy, greedy bitch?” He pulled her down to the floor and pinned her neck with one arm. She thrashed, trying to scream, and he pushed down harder. She was squirming to breathe, kicking at him, and he began dragging her towards the passageway, where I was, so I ran back to my room.

Now I could only hear them. He had dragged her into the bathroom and slammed the door. My mother was whimpering, but not loud enough to cover my father’s laboured breathing.

I heard a snap, and then my mother cried out in pain, and I knew what he was doing—whipping her on her legs and back with his belt, again and again. For a few seconds, her cries got louder, and I felt my own breath tightening in my chest. After an endless time, the belt-cracks slowed, and her cries morphed into one long moan of despair.

I stepped into the passageway just as he rushed out of the bathroom, his eyes blazing still, blood leaking from the hand he held to his neck. “What happened?” I asked. My father was short—at twelve, I was almost as tall—but he was muscled and wiry, with a vicious temper, and I was afraid he would go for me right then. But he pulled his hand away to show me his blood, and started to rant: “You see? This is how she attacks me.

And she eats all the butter in the house. Did you get any? She wastes our groundnut oil. She drinks too much tea with heaps of sugar. I work so hard, and this is what she does!”

Groceries weren’t that expensive. Even I knew that. My father just hated spending money on anyone but himself. He put almost all his salary into a provident fund, giving too little to my mother for monthly expenses, and then blamed her for every tiny thing. As he went to the kitchen to clean his wounds, I hurried into the bathroom to help my mother. It was dark, with only one bulb in the corner, and there she was, curled into a C-shape, her sari half torn, her hair wet and loose and strung across her face, her sindoor smudged into a ragged birthmark, and her naked legs slashed and bloody. This was the person who dressed me smartly, combed my hair, pampered me, loved me, and I stood there, not knowing what to do, just as I had stood before, in the passageway outside the kitchen, watching. When I knelt to touch her, she yelped and tightened away from me. I then went back to my room and lost myself in my geography homework.

The next morning when I woke up, I knew my father had already been up since five and would be busy dragging a rubber hose from one end of the garden to the other, intently watering his vegetable plots, removing weeds between the flourishing chili plants, working manure into the rocky soil, and not saying a word to my mother. I took a quick bath and stood there, still dripping, reminding myself that I would put on my school uniform—the cream-coloured shirt with my school’s ‘I’ logo stitched on the pocket, the brown shorts, the brown socks and brown shoes—and I would run to the lane in front of my house, join my friends, and walk to a happy day at school. And I knew I would say nothing about my parents to any of them.