Free The Temple-goers by Aatish Taseer Page B

in a bath that had gone cold? She could see that all wasn’t well with me, but she was happy to get in the bath anyway, happy just to add some hot water and bear it for my sake, happy just to be in the bath with me. But as soon as she put one foot in and then the other, letting her large, smooth body sink into the few feet of soapy water, I got out of the bath and left the room without a word.
    I saw her face as I left the bathroom, the smile, the confusion and at last the hurt.
    When Sanyogita came out of the bathroom a few moments later, she was crying. She always cried silently, but her face was wet with tears, a different wetness from the glisten of her body. She lay down on the bed, just as she was, and wept.
    I lay down next to her, noticing the things I found beautiful about her: the straight, strong bones of her shoulders and the paleness of the skin that collected over them now that her arms were raised; her smooth shiny black hair that dropped in steps down her back; the single skin-covered mole on her back which, if I ever touched, she asked me to be kind to as it was the only one.
    Sanyogita, as if acknowledging the seriousness of the fight, didn’t push me away when I lay down next to her. She seemed to be considering what the real problem might be. With the side of her face pressed against the bed, she said, ‘Baby, is it necessary that you revise your novel here?’
    ‘In Delhi or India?’ I asked.
    ‘Both,’ she said, the conversation calming her down.
    ‘No, I suppose not.’
    ‘Because I’d like to go away for a while. And I want you to come with me.’
    She seemed at once to warn me and to bring me in. The fact that she had already read into the deeper vibrations of our fight, and felt no need to state them but had moved on to a solution, gave her an authority over me.
    ‘How long?’ I asked.
    ‘The summer.’
    ‘Where do you want to go?’
    ‘Europe, America, anywhere. This place gets to me after a while, that’s all. I need to be reminded that there’s another world out there, a world where I feel better about myself.’
    I didn’t want to, but I gave in. I felt paralysed by the onset of the heat. I wanted to drink lime waters all summer, wear white salwar kameez and finish my revisions in my new study. My life in Delhi had acquired a serenity beyond all my expectations. The revised version of the novel was seeming much better to me. I wrote early in the mornings. Vatsala had learned to make coffee in the Italian percolator. It spat out a thick dark liquid. She mixed it with hot milk and brought me two mugs a morning. The effect of the coffee and the quiet work made me restless for Junglee. I’d spend an hour there and come back to a light vegetarian lunch with Sanyogita. Zafar came every afternoon. After he was gone, I’d walk three rounds of Lodhi Gardens. The park at that hour was filled with overweight women in salwar kameez and sneakers, slim-bodied young men hanging on each other, couples canoodling and old men in white shorts. There were also faces from the area: the Sikh gentleman who owned a bookshop called The Bookshop; the feuding brothers who owned The Music Shop in Khan Market; and an Australian woman who wore pink turbans and flowery dresses and bred beagles. After the walk, I’d read over my writing, drink a glass of wine and resist efforts to make me go out. I didn’t want the slog of life in the West; I didn’t want cosmopolitan life. I was tired of subtitled movies and Sunday supplements.
    But almost as soon as I agreed to the time abroad, our relationship revived. The days that had seemed to run into each other now led up to a final date of departure. The heat that had seemed like a preparation for June’s deathly white skies was now only enervating, somebody else’s problem: Zafar’s, who struggled under it every day, his elegant white umbrella providing hardly any protection from its exquisite blaze. It had made his dark red sores bloom and brighten so that he