Page 28 of All Our Evenings

Finally, Ruhee came. She looked upset. I said I was sorry I came without telling her.

“I just need to know if you are okay,” I said. “With things happening. You seem … you seem like you don’t want this.”

“Oh,” Ruhee said. She sat down next to me and looked into my face as though seeing it for the first time. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m making you marry me.”

How could she make me? It is what I’d wanted my whole life. But I didn’t say so.

“Ruhee, I love you,” I said.

She looked away. She bit down on her lip, but she couldn’t stop herself from crying. She wiped her cheeks, tried to act like she wasn’t.

“None of this is your fault, Arjun,” she said.

“Is this about Ganesh?” I wanted to say.

“You wanted to marry him, but instead you are marrying me,” I wanted to say.

“I know where he is,” I wanted to say.

“Not ten kilometers from here. I can take you, Ruhee. You will see that being dead would be better than what he is now. He can open his eyes. He can blink. Sometimes he looks at me, I think. But no more. You see he is like an old man, a baby. All shriveled. All gray hair, skin sliding over bird-bones, gums missing teeth. He is nothing. He is some living thing.

“Every Sunday, I go and shave his cheeks. I do it with the window open and the curtain drawn back, the sunlight skimming across his skin. I don’t suffer the way you suffer, Ruhee, because I do not care about him. I suffer differently. I suffer because he refuses to die.”

For now, I said nothing. I let her apologize to me. Reassure me that she wanted to marry me.

Ruhee became my wife.

We rented an apartment close to her hospital, close to her friends who worked at the hospital. I bought a car, stopped taking the bus. On Sundays, we went to the flower market and got fresh-cut roses and lilies that we put into vases all around the apartment. Sometimes we had sex on the floor, the roses and lilies littered all around us. I love you, I told Ruhee. And sometimes it was possible she could almost say it back.

After these sudden, frenetic encounters, I tried not to ask any questions. Why would I? I was willing to take whatever she gave me, I didn’t deserve her whole. I’d get dressed and go into the kitchen and fill the vases with water. But once, we were so loud that the neighbors turned on their television. We did not stop, the bass from the music channel was radiating from underneath us. I crumpled a rose in my hand and said, “Do you, Ruhee? Do you love me?”

Five seconds passed. Ten seconds passed. Then she pulled away.

Ruhee knelt and pushed her hair behind her ears, her bare knees touching mine.

I don’t know what was on my face, but she put her thumb on my bottom lip, brushed her fingers through my hair and said, “That first time, Arjun, in your room?” she said.

I nodded.

“I wanted that part over. Before anything. I was afraid that was only thing you wanted from me.”

“The way Ganesh wanted,” I wanted to say.

Who else was she going to talk to about Ganesh? I was the one who brought him into her life, ruined her.

This what she thought happened: Ganesh had gotten what he wanted from her and simply vanished from her life. He didn’t wait for her outside her house anymore, didn’t bring around the Lancer to take her to a movie, didn’t meet her at the Red House, didn’t even come to the gymkhana anymore. And her going to the gymkhana asking after him was a terrible mistake, the boys weren’t nice boys. They came up to her with angry, hateful faces, seemed to think that Ganesh committed love suicide because she rejected him―it was beyond ridiculous, a rumor like that. Why would she reject him? She didn’t. She loved him. Why would he abandon her?

So she didn’t go back to the gymkhana, didn’t like being attacked as if she were the monster; the injustice of it. Instead she came to my house.

Hello Uncle, is Arjun home?

He’s sick beta, he has chicken pox, we’re keeping him home from school.

Uncle, can I see him?

No beta, he can’t see you.

Even months after school started, and I was still being kept in my room, Ruhee came around to my house again and again, never allowed inside. One day my mother answered the door.