LADY IN WAITING | Divya Manikandan
The office was on the third floor of the Chinmaya Reddy Commercial Complex, which Lalitha only knew about because it was in the same alley as the paanwala who lit betel leaves on fire before putting them in your mouth. She had heard about someone – Sheetal Bua’s neighbor in Himachal – who could no longer visit the doctor’s office because years ago, something terrible had happened to her there. Each time she stepped off the bus nowadays, there was a brassy ringing in her ears, she had divulged last winter, like her body was singing danger, danger, danger. Maybe it would happen this way for Lalitha too. Maybe today would be the last time she could enter the Chinmaya Reddy Commercial Complex because as early as tomorrow, her body might start singing and she would have to find somewhere else to take guests after dinner when they visited from out of town.
Lalitha normally loathed those girls. The ones from college who seemed always to wear white Goan skirts with thin spaghetti tops and had degrees in calling such a thing post-traumatic stress disorder. But Lalitha felt that feelings were simply feelings. They were in an epidemic of paying too much attention to the empty spaces between tasks of true value, which then produced the urge to give these empty spaces a name. It was not the fault of the skirts, she thought. Their obsession with psychology was simply a sign of the times. But then again, if she had paid more attention to her own empty spaces, she might have felt the gentle tugging in her armpit before it became a pulling. Before it pulled her all the way to this building where they lit people’s mouths on fire for fun.
The path to the office ran by way of the concrete stairs, around the elevator which was OUT OF ORDER and in front of the watchman who lay dormant on the stool that only had three legs. They negotiated the steps at a pace respectable for the age they had reached. An age, it seemed, where one visited the doctor not because the time for it had arrived, but because the next time would be too long to wait. Lalitha used the railing and Manoj walked without it. The walls around them bore the faint sweetness of urine and terracotta ghutka spit and it reminded Lalitha of the unusual boldness with which she had tried stuff once in junior college. It had looked like crushed wood chips in her palm and tasted of fibrous paraffin wax, but she’d enjoyed the way it sucked the water right out of her. Perhaps it was the reason for all this, she thought now. If one time was enough, then it must be the reason.
It was an unusually warm evening, and the stairs to the office were steep. They felt the climb in their bones. It was on the second flight that Manoj bent over the railing and drooled into the air below them. He had asthma, which he had always sworn was severe. He had been diagnosed as a baby by a distinguished pulmonologist at AIIMS, because it was a very special form of asthma. Very rare. He looked to her then like a hunk of mammalian meat, flaccid off an S-hook at the meat shop. A wetness crept into the curve of his breasts, and she watched them rise and fall against his blue-collared shirt; the only one he wore, in different shades and percentages of cotton for the weather.
Early in their marriage, he had liked, when in public, to walk several paces in front of her. It was his natural tempo, he said. It was an awkward and forced way of being to match a different pace than one’s own. It would be as silly as asking her to speed up and turn something as rudimentary as walking into an irritating cognitive effort – like driving a car with one foot on the brake. He panted beside her now, and she thought how seamless it had been, the manner in which she had made peace with the destiny that he might sweat next to her for as long as she lived. One could scarcely remember when it all happened.
The stairs ended in a sea-glass door and a white chart paper with the words Dr. Jayashree Sriram M.B.B.S, M.S. Breast Surgeon printed in purple sketch pen. In the end, it was not the writing but the four pieces of cello tape hugging the corners of the document that bothered Lalitha most. From the way it lifted at the corners, the adhesive looked flat and gray and inexpensive. She wondered about the quality of a physician who would purchase such cheap tape. But when Manoj opened the door and the tape disappeared from view, she quickly decided that rather than lack of success, it must be efficiency and pragmaticism that the tape represented. One that made Lady Doctor Sriram – it had been Manoj, and to a fair degree his mother, who had insisted on the sex of the doctor – the perfect fit. If she wasn’t interested in earning money off Lalitha’s breast, perhaps she would just let her be. Give her the low-rate, diluted-with-tap-water version of whatever it took to keep her alive long enough for her to die in her sleep.
They took up the two empty chairs in the white waiting room, and it happened that they were on opposite sides of it. The woman beside Manoj twisted her dupatta round and round her dainty finger till the beds turned purple and the husband played the candy game on his mobile phone at top volume. The woman next to Lalitha wore a fuchsia sari and sat closely with an adolescent. Which one of them had the breast in need of saving was unclear. Ultimately, Lalitha concluded it would be better if it were the adolescent. She seemed to be the age where even death was scared to approach you. For the first time, she considered that the pulling rock in her own chest might be nothing.
The scan – the thing that flattened the breasts the way one used to make mud pies as a child, followed by ultrasound, followed by MRI – had called it a mass. A three-centimeter, spiculated mass. Lalitha didn’t recognize the term and assumed that the technologist who wrote the report had intended to say speculated, which she knew meant something that was likely to be true, though one couldn’t know for sure. It reminded her of that cat in the box. The one that, until you opened the box, was in equal measure alive and dead. It’s how she imagined her own speculated mass. Simultaneously hanging and not in her breast. At once eating her and starving itself.
For a time, she had been intrigued by it. Excited, maybe, that it had chosen her body in which to nest. It made one feel something, undoubtedly. At first, it was that her life now took up three more centimeters of their insular two-bed, two-bath Borivali flat. And then, of course, there was the fact that it was made of her. It was her own cells that had gone rogue. Gone mad, she thought, like grandmothers dancing cloth-less under the influence of temple drugs. She wondered if Dr. Jayashree Sriram M.B.B.S. M.S. had to remove it, she would let her take the brilliant little thing home. She would like to put it in a coin purse that could dangle from her waist and slap her legs happily each time she walked as if to say I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
To call her infertile would no longer be correct, she thought suddenly. Because now there was this mass, and it was made of her, and if you looked carefully, you might speculate that it was sucking from her breast.
Across the room, Manoj swept his tongue along the door of his mouth. Lalitha felt glad as she watched his lips engorge then deflate over the muscle that she didn’t share her mass with him, the way one would a baby. She wondered if perhaps it was life with him that had placed the mass there. If she had been with someone else, maybe it would not have come. Or maybe it would have come, only somewhere else. She thought about the best place to have a mass and decided on the toes. She would barely notice if she was missing one or two of those. She crossed her legs at the ankles and opened the photos on her phone. She had turned the stove off. She put the phone down and looked back at her husband. He was chewing something now. His face crept into a parenthesis that made her feel abruptly like the room was spinning and taking her away with it. She opened her phone again, just to make sure.
The office door opened, and a somber sort of woman emerged with a white folder and a black film page peeping out. Lalitha examined her for signs of having lost or gained a breast. Did people often cry in Jayashree Sriram’s room? If masses of the breast were masses that could kill – surely, they were, sometimes – would the white folder woman die? Lalitha studied the way she gave her ticket to the attendant and the way she dropped some five-hundred-rupee notes on the table; the way she opened the door, the way she walked through it. The watch on Lalitha’s wrist showed that it was a quarter past seven and when she saw that, she felt sure the woman would not die. Her mass would disappear within the week.
A mechanical voice in the corner summoned the fuchsia sari and adolescent. They rose with a rehearsed urgency and held hands at the top. The older one said the name of three Gods in speedy succession, then the younger one took the folder into her hands and led them into the deeper room. Manoj watched their movement and the two gaps that blossomed beside his wife in their departure. He regarded her for a moment and decided to stay where he was. He put his nose back into the phone and she was grateful for it. It was the thing she liked most about him, after all. He preferred being a few paces away. She preferred it too.
It was in the absence of the women’s smells beside her that Lalitha realized the floors of the waiting room had been washed in bleach, not that other ammonia water hospitals typically used. It made the floor smell like a bathroom. Her own bathroom at home which was her favorite place within it. Not this house where she lived now, but the home before that. The one with parents and grandparents and aunts and cousins, where strangers in need of advice and something to fill their stomachs flowed like waves on a sandy shore. “Lali,” her grandfather used to say from the old swing in the terrace, “Tell this uncle here to worry less, uh? There is life, and there is death. Everything in between is just applesauce.”
She thought about her mass and imagined that if she could hold it in her hands, she would like to feed it applesauce. To place it on her lap, so they could swing together in a hammock – suspended between trees in an arboretum somewhere or between palms on the beach. As for Manoj, Lalitha hoped that if she died, he’d simply remarry and be done with it. He was watching the cricket match on his phone now. India played Australia today. His was the sort of existence that needed watching in order to matter and wives were good at that. They were good at watching and noticing. Even bad ones like Lalitha.
The new girl would be young, of course. Unmarried yet. She would have no more than one degree, but no less either. It would be in a vocational science, nothing useless like English Literature or a third language. And she would be decorated in it with a special announcement at her graduation, but would, of her own volition, have decided not to pursue it further. She would resemble Lalitha in height, material of clothing, and hair length, which mattered because they made up the texture of a person, which was important if you were sleeping beside them forever. Their wedding would be small, between the families. The priest would be the same one they had used, and the new marriage would be identical to this one, which was now on its twelfth year. Newness would exhaust Manoj. He would find it audacious and irritating. But surely, she felt now, he would remarry.
A curtain rolled swiftly on a semilunar metal roller and Lalitha sensed that behind the door, the time had come for the adolescent to undress. Maybe there would be a gown, maybe there wouldn’t. It was hard to say what the lady doctor might choose. She wondered if the older woman would wish to see the breast, or if she would wait outside the curtain. It was unclear to Lalitha if Manoj would join her when it was her chance. She would have to expose herself like the adolescent. That part was no problem, but she wondered if that would be his reason for not coming in.
She had worn her nicest brassiere that day. The one purchased at the lingerie stall on M.G. Road, where they hung bras from tarpaulin in open daylight. She liked that. Not like the places that hid the garments in the back like contraband. It was the only clothing she owned that had wire and lace and satin along the straps. It was her girlfriends who had encouraged her to buy it when the marriage had been arranged for December, which was a most auspicious time. Ultimately, she had barely worn it. Not for him at least. Sometimes when she was behind on her own washing, it emerged. Those days and today, of course. It was silly, because her only job would be to remove it, but it seemed important how she looked. It mattered more when a beautiful thing broke. If it was the end, she had felt while dressing in the morning, there should, at the very least, be something beautiful.
She remembered it now. The name of the man who owned the cat that was neither here nor there. Schrödinger. She had Schrödinger’s sickness. The sound of the curtain played again, and then the hum of indiscernible conversation once the doctor’s eyes had lain on the breast. Manoj plugged white earbuds into his head so he could focus on the commentary. Perhaps India had hit a six. Lalitha opened her camera roll one more time to look at the picture of the stove. It was still off, and she felt an immediate kind of relief that that was true.