Free The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay Page B

These sahariya types. They’ll stab you in the back the first chance they get. They don’t have any morals, just like your mother. Look at how she so unabashedly fornicated with your father. The only good thing she did was bring you into this world.” She says this when they’re lying together in the Masterji’s bed. Tarun is pressed against her, his head resting on the crook of her arm. She is always fully clothed during these hours of intimacy. Even when she gives him her breasts she doesn’t remove her bra or her blouse, only opens her clothing halfway so he can reach them. She takes off his clothes for him, usually commenting on how she never gets enough of looking at him, kissing him on the shoulder, on the neck, on his ears, and on his mouth. She leaves his underwear on because she likes looking at his bulge.
    Sometimes her hand stays down there, gently massaging. He knows that at any moment he’ll come in her hand. But she also stops massaging for a minute or so to elongatehis pleasure, and hers. There are days when she makes him come twice.
    “It’s as though God forced your mother to give birth to you as a gift for me,” she says. “For some reason you were not supposed to come out of my womb, although by all means you should have. Maybe God screwed up.” She laughs. “It doesn’t matter. By all accounts you’re my baby. You came from here.” She takes his hand and places it on her stomach. She covers his hand with her big hands and says, “This is where you came out of. I don’t care what that Apsara Thapa says, or your weakling of a father says, I don’t care what anyone says.” She says “anyone” with much venom. “You were in here for nine months, in the year between Amit and Sumit. I remember your kicks. I remember thinking then that once you were born people would be amazed that such a thing of beauty came out of such an ugly mother.”
    He touches her face, his own face still in the crook of her arm, and says, “I don’t care that you’re ugly.” Yes, she is big and round, but he likes her largeness.
    “You’re just being a good son,” she says, “saying nice things to your mother.” She pulls him tighter into her. “You’ll never abandon your mother, will you?” He shakes his head.
    Since the curtains are drawn, the light in the room is muted. Evening is approaching. Noise from the outside filters in—traffic sounds, shouts of children playing on the street, snippets of conversation, a laugh or an exclamation.Yet it feels as if he and Didi are in a cocoon that no one can penetrate. But soon it’ll be time for others to return home. He doesn’t know where she sends them to on these special Saturdays. It’s as though she banishes them with the injunction to not even come near the house until the specified time. These days she locks the front door from the outside and comes in through a back door next to the kitchen, so that any visitor would think the whole family had gone out.
    He wonders what goes through the minds of his father and Sumit. The Masterji knows what Didi does with Tarun, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Tarun has no idea whether that smiling half brother of his suspects anything, for when he returns Sumit says, “Dai,” with a pleasant face and talks to Tarun normally. The Masterji goes to his bed, pulls the blanket around him, shivering a bit even when it’s not that cold. He doesn’t meet Didi’s or Tarun’s eyes. He must smell their intimacy on the bed.
    Amit asks Tarun for money when he visits. “Just a couple of rupees, bhai,” he says. “You are the rich brother, I am the poor brother. What’s the harm in funneling a rupee here and there? In your Lazimpat mansion it grows on trees, and we hear your Mahesh Uncle is planting even more trees.” Tarun gets a weekly allowance of fifty rupees, so he doesn’t mind sharing some with Amit. Sumit tells Tarun that Amit not only smokes ganja but also takes tablets called speed and Calmpose.