Milk Teeth

by Amrita Mahale

Ira had always enjoyed his inscrutable inwardness, even if she was also confounded by it.

Board exams were the Indian epidemic that afflicted entire families at once. Cable connections were disconnected, social lives were paralysed, and all big decisions were suspended till the end of the exam season.

You could put all the French or Italian you wanted in their names, but you couldn’t take Mumbai out of the buildings: the clothes drying outside the windows would remain, and so would the mud streaks from flowerpots on windowsills.

‘Separate service elevators,’ she continued, ‘so you can’t even see the lowly servants who run your houses and bring up your children.’

She had little interest in talking about the shifting sands of the new economy, or even about the attendant shifts in their own lives. She wanted to go back to the small and safe space of childhood, give in to the tug of nostalgia that his presence inspired.

Ira went back to reading her book. Train fights followed a template: a provocation, usually stemming from the endless struggle for space, the tension rising to a simmer that both parties were comfortable with, and the end of the fight when one of the parties got off the train, sometimes even before.

There was plenty of anger on offer in Mumbai and it was easy to look away. But every once in a while, someone with imagination crafted their fury like origami into something delightful.

Before long, she had figured out that her father’s account of his role at the bank was greatly exaggerated. Nor was he a powerful or feared man outside the house. This appearance of power was something he put on before he came home, like a pair of house slippers.

It was easy to believe that a mother’s love was unconditional, which made it alright to challenge her, correct her, laugh at her.

In short, there was life beyond nostalgia. But surely there was life beyond greed too, beyond sucking your city dry.

‘I mean, not only as a friend. I love you.’ Only the last three words in English. How could she have said that in Konkani—it was the language of everyday matters, of ordinary things; how could it capture the riot in her heart?

His withdrawal from their friendship was smooth and skilled. A surgery with no visible scars.

What Kartik had said about loneliness, about the need for a deep companionship, she knew all too well: the stillness, the stasis one carried within, untouched by the kinetic city and its seductions.

Does the share of words spoken on an early date reflect the balance of infatuation, Ira wondered, and thus the balance of power, set in stone for the length of the relationship? And what about the volume of words thought but not spoken, was the algebra reversed, for her mind had become a bicycle racing downhill.

he liked connecting the moles on her back to create constellations: Theseus, the ark, Vulpus Minor, the little fox, and her favourite, Amora Amora, the geometric heart. A temporary tattoo marking a temporary intimacy.

One evening, he was reading a book of poetry next to her, in his bed that was too narrow for two. They were curled up like two commas placed together, a typo in the story of the universe.

Tears come, like local trains, every couple of minutes. When she cries, people look, then look away; it’s the code of this city, to look away from someone in private distress, a code as solid as 022.

like a saw it cuts when it goes, and it cuts again when it returns. She did not remember what the it was. Had to be love, she told herself, it had to be love.

Imagination was the force that freed the mind, unchained it from reality. If you were poor, you had much to escape from, so you needed imagination. If you were rich, your reality needed little tending to, you could afford to dream away. But the ones in the middle, where was the room for it in their lives? It was action, not imagination, that was their best shot at a big step forward. For the middle classes, the mind and the body had to run along together, like railway tracks, to let them move forward.

Their worlds were too different. The brief overlap was enough, more joy than what most got in a lifetime.

He envied Ira. There was a clarity, a certainty of purpose behind everything she said and did; it could only come from knowing your place in the world. Take away his degrees, his mark sheets and medals, take away the jobs he’d held along with the decades of accolades, take away his sexuality too for good measure, and he was left with no conception of who he was. At the same time, it was entirely possible that Ira believed that he was a sorted man. She might even see herself as the confused one, the one in tatters.

What’s the difference between choosing your father’s name and my name? It’s a man’s name either way.’ ‘True, it’s a man’s name either way. It’s a choice between my father’s name and your father’s name. Right? In that case I’ll stick to mine.’

Why bring up such a relationship at all, why not comfort your future partner that your heart would belong to them like it had never belonged to anybody else before? Perhaps it was one of those truths that chopped you and tossed you, changed the recipe of your life. To deny it was to deny a part of yourself. To conceal it was like trying to hide your shadow in the day.