Free A Breath of Fresh Air by Amulya Malladi Page A

learn she was a widow. For a moment there I thought Gopi, Sarita, and I were making asses of ourselves.
    She made a face. “Why is it that everyone thinks that the only way a woman can get rid of her husband is when he dies?”
    I was not a chauvinist by a long shot, so for a moment what she said confused me a little. How else could she have been married? And yet . . . no, she wasn’t talking about divorce. No one divorced in this country. Divorces happened in movies and with film stars and rich people. Middle-class people didn’t divorce. They got married and lived . . . ever after— together.
    “You see my parents didn’t approve of the divorce,” she said almost conversationally. “So they’ve written me out of the family will.”
    Her voice, tone, and behavior indicated the divorce had been a simple and normal thing, almost as simple and normal as buying vegetables in the market. Her tone made me feel she was joking, but what she was saying was not a joking matter. So I wondered if she was putting me on.
    “You don’t believe me, do you?” she asked, noticing my confusion and disbelief.
    I was about to say something, probably something stupid because my mind had stopped working rationally, when Sarita came into the living room, flustered. She announced that dinner was ready.
    I asked Gopi about it later and he told me that Anjali had divorced her husband two years ago. Gopi didn’t know the reasons and he had never tried to find out. She had been distraught after she came back from Bhopal, where she and her husband had lived for less than a year. That was how long the marriage had lasted. Apparently, she didn’t have any place to go for the summer, so she stayed at the hostel.
    He didn’t give too many details, because he didn’t know much. For all her vivacity, Anjali seemed to keep to herself. In any case, I yelled at Gopi for pulling the “fix-up” stunt on me and made him promise to never put me in such a situation again. Gopi took it in good humor and so did Sarita. They both agreed, teasingly, that Anjali deserved better.
    I had wondered then if Gopi had made a slip of the tongue when he said Anjali had divorced her husband. Women didn’t go around divorcing their husbands. Although it was rare, if a divorce did take place it was almost always the man’s doing.
    I didn’t lose any sleep on trying to figure out who was responsible for Anjali and her husband’s divorce. I forgot about her for the rest of the summer.
    I visited my sister and her husband for a couple of weeks that summer and listened to Komal complain about not having any children. Komal and her husband had both taken fertility tests and the tests clearly rested the blame on Jaydev and his low sperm count. Of course, it had to be a big secret. Jaydev could hardly tell his family and friends that he was not a “real man,” as he put it.
    So after all the dowry I had given, Komal was not happy with the bank officer she’d had her heart set on marrying. I listened to her complain about her fate in life and I listened to Jaydev complain about his fate in life. They both felt free to complain to me and tell me their sad stories because I was the most “nontraditional” person in the family, as they put it. This meant that I wouldn’t be pointing fingers at them anytime soon, which would have been the case if anyone found out that Komal and Jaydev were having serious marital problems.
    Komal said her husband wasn’t addressing the situation and that everyone in his family was blaming her for not having children. Jaydev said that Komal emasculated him by always talking about his low sperm count. She would make one concoction after another—from recipes dug out of ancient books like the Kamasutra to recipes given away for ten rupees each by quack sadhus —to improve his sperm count. Jaydev was taking some medicines, but they weren’t working either. Much of the problem was that Jaydev just didn’t feel like having sex anymore