Boundary Lines

She sprang out suddenly from behind the door. A migratory bird from a faraway elsewhere.

“Don’t mind if I don’t recognise you,” she said as soon as she saw me.

I was at a white door—so dirt-laden it was no longer white. On that white door-that-was-no longer-white was a big red circle, still vivid. As Munni shut the door, the two halves of the red circle joined up. I remembered that circle very well. These past forty years had failed to dull its colour. The white-door-with-the big-red-circle was the main door to the front room. Two smaller doors stood to either side of it, each with their own small dot of red. Just outside the door was the dusty cement veranda where Munni’s mother would sit and massage malai—the thick cream collecting atop milk—into Munni’s face in the hopes of turning her skin fair. Her dark colour was true, however, and held fast.

Munni’s vacant eyes came to rest upon my face. They seemed to be calculating some enormous distance they’d had to travel to reach me. Her yellow incisors were stained; the bottom row missing two teeth. A black absence, a dark, tooth-shaped cave. Her discoloured lips, still faintly pink in the middle, converged into a tiny beak. I was reminded of a migratory bird once again, but unable to remember its name in the moment. Her body, already small in my memory, seemed to have shrunk some more.

“Please forgive me. My memory has all gone to pieces.”

She came and linked her arm with mine, barely reaching my shoulder.

“But I know you!” she said, happy. “I remember the old times, even if I forget what happened yesterday or an hour ago. I am under treatment currently.”

My gaze was repeatedly drawn to her missing teeth.

When we’d met the last time, she had told me the exact same thing.

“I remember the old times, even if I forget what happened yesterday or an hour ago. I am under treatment currently.”

#

“Don’t mind if I don’t recognise you. My memory has all gone to pieces. But I know you!”

This was twenty years ago. She alighted from a rickshaw in front of her house: a yellowing structure, its walls pockmarked with damp green-black patches of moss. Stone lions sat atop the pillars on either side of the main gate, their fangs bared in a vain threat. Ventilator windows were tucked into the walls at a great height, almost near the roof. The years had yellowed the glass to the point of opacity; it was difficult to imagine much light penetrating inside. Once upon a time, this house had played host to the Prince of Junagarh, who had arrived in the city to study at the University of Allahabad. After finishing his B.A., the Prince left the house to return to his native state, and appointed Munni’s father as caretaker of the house. He did not relinquish his claim to the house after the Prince’s departure but the standards of care and cleanliness fell sharply. The impact of his neglect was visible in those days itself. Since then, the house had fallen ever more into disrepair.

“Don’t mind if I don’t recognise you. My memory has all gone to pieces. But I know you!” Munni had said while descending from the rickshaw.

Nothing much had changed.

A few more tiles had slipped and fallen from the roof. The gravel path to the house was still lined with the dwarf pillars that had always appeared purposeless to us. We used to stroll along that path from pillar to pillar, back and forth, bordered by boundary walls velveted with moss. The intoxicating odour of ferment from spoilt guavas would nestle comfortably inside our nostrils. Ripe yellow fruit would carpet the ground beneath the trees, a feast laid out for swarms of bottle-green flies and dull brown fruit flies. We would continue along, discussing matters of school.

Half a century later, those two-foot-tall pillars – topped by football-like spheres of stone – looked exactly the same, enveloped in the timeless stillness of a curse. A witch’s jinx that had rebounded on itself.

#

Munni was not only a classmate of mine, but also a neighbour. Her formal name was Sangeeta but everywhere she was known as Munni. She was tiny. Diminutive, just like her name. We attended a missionary school in Allahabad where most classes were taken by Catholic nuns usually from Germany or Kerala, in white habit. Our male siblings – Munni’s brother was called Ashok – studied in a “brother” school to ours. We addressed our teachers either as “Sister” or “Mother”, depending on their station. Munni frequently recited their stories to us while helplessly doubled over with laughter. Her words often went missing as she succumbed to the hilarity.

Once, Munni saw an enormous bra hanging out to dry on a railing outside the nuns’ quarters. When she told us about it, our minds inevitably went to those parts of the body usually accommodated inside that garment. We marvelled at the fact that even nuns possessed these. I don’t know why the idea astounded us so much; but it tickled us a lot. A lot tickled us in those days. When Munni laughed, her button nose crinkled and her eyes shone. Two skinny pigtails, tied off with a length of black ribbon, swung back and forth on her shoulders as if in hearty agreement. As soon as our PT class ended, still in our white canvas shoes we would go forth to the medlar tree and— using each other’s feet as stepladders— climb up to play our game. In no time at all, our white shoes would turn brown. Everyone at the school, for some idiosyncratic reason, referred to the medlar as “choki plum”.

The road outside Munni’s house was busier now. A branch of SBI had opened on the other side. Cars and scooters outnumbered rickshaws. I noticed a strip of grass, near the right side of the gate where a badminton court used to be. Back in those days, I would sometimes be so mad to play that I would hurry there after school without even changing my uniform. When the shuttlecock made contact with the racket, it appeared to take flight like a white bird headed to the other side of the court. It often seemed to me that when the birdie was in mid-air, it wouldn’t fall towards the earth but simply fly away.

Now there was also a hospital opposite Munni’s house, on the other side of the road. Patients would begin queueing up from early morning. Stretchers bearing bodies covered in white sheets were sometimes transferred to the ambulance idling outside; sometimes they were extracted from within and brought into the hospital. It felt like Death itself gazed upon Munni from a distance.

We would cycle through this road on our way to school, passing Purushottam’s bungalow with its thick green cover. Cows sometimes entered through the front gate left ajar, and chew up the gardens. The elderly Purushottam would hobble out to shoo them away. The bungalow looked abandoned and neglected in those days and the road too seemed deserted. A little ahead, wood apple trees would appear. On our way back, we would dismount from our cycles and throw stones at the trees, aiming to dislodge ripe white fruit into our waiting laps. When they passed by the house in the morning, all three of my brothers would slow down their bicycles and set up a cry for Ashok, beckoning him to join them. And when he did, their four bicycles would spread out over the width of the road, four uniform sky-blue balloons let loose, hair mussed up in the wind.

Munni’s house–now sliding into ruin–used to have a backyard that abutted the front garden and internal path of our house. Our house had a huge backyard as well. The bungalows that the British built in Allahabad at the time enclosed large portions of land. There was no wall between the two houses. Only a line of thorny carandas bushes indicated a boundary. Constant back-and-forth between the houses through these bushes had resulted in a green tunnel of sorts. I would crawl through it on my belly, emerging into the backyard of Munni’s house, scraped to my skin. But she rarely visited mine. They were Agrawals—Jains who didn’t eat garlic or onion. Perhaps her father feared that she would get into the habit of eating fowl and fish if she mingled too much with us. Although nobody ever said as much, it’s possible that he forbade her from coming to our place. Munni called her father “babuji” but referred to him behind his back as “dad”. His face, even at rest, seemed angry. I can’t really say what sort of a person he was, though.

Since their backyard was at the rear of the house, it was already seriously neglected. Crawling out of the bushes, I would find myself confronting a tangled jungle of castor plants. The plants weren’t tall, but they were extremely dense. At dusk, I had seen rabbits, jackals, and even a fox once in that growth. I’d also caught a brief glimpse of a badger, as it descended from a dust-covered mango tree. Its furry tail, like a branch of tamarisk tree, had stood on end. The castor leaves resembled handheld fans. The slightest movement of wind would set them whispering and groaning. “Look how the wind fans itself,” I would think. People would often come to ask for castor leaves, their medicinal properties were common knowledge.

When I made my way to the front of the house, Munni wasn’t there. Her father, clad in a white vest and loose-fitting pyjamas, their drawstrings hanging limp, was inspecting his motorcycle. Against the stark white of the vest, his dark colour appeared to take on an even deeper hue. I had always found him an unsettling presence. I briefly considered turning around—but he had already seen me. Thick hair carpeted his arms and chest, and a stainless steel kada encircled his wrist. His face was flushed from the sun.

“Namaste. Is Munni here?”

He was a man of few words. In response, he gave me a nod, tilting his head in the direction of the house.

I stepped into the cool darkness of the circular room at the front of the house. Huge pale sofas with wide armrests appeared, their ghostly outlines dimly glinting. As I passed, I noticed their two canines—Tiger and Lily, the Alsatians – sprawled on the sofa in a deep snooze. Lily’s tail gently acknowledged my presence with a twitch. But Tiger slept on undisturbed.

Through the circular room was a small niche that served as a prayer room for Munni’s mother — Maiyya to us. Over a spread of red cloth with a golden brocade border were arranged several idols. Sri Ramacharit Manas and a few other religious tomes sat on a small table below. It was Maiyya’s daily routine, for an hour and a half or two, to recite prayers from these. Munni was responsible for dusting the gods and goddesses every day. Only once I had seen her sitting at prayer with Maiyya. She’d sat cross-legged on the floor, her frock carefully arranged over her knees. The room was choked with incense. Underneath its smoky fragrance, permeating the house, was the odour of spoilt milk.

Every stone idol I have encountered since then has evoked the rancid smell of that memory.

Once inside, I didn’t see Munni anywhere. Maiyya was in the room behind the prayer niche, sewing something out of scrap fabric. A toy perhaps—the furry length of a rabbit ear or perhaps a squirrel.

“What are you stitching, Maiyya?”

I called her Maiyya too, for she treated me like her own beloved child. Each Diwali she would make kohl, rubbing ghee into soot collected from spent diyas, and save a small tin for me. Her thin anaemic face appeared paler and paler each day.

“Helicopter!” she was quick to respond, though it looked like no such thing.

Munni was perched on the cement parapet in the veranda at the very back, eyes fixed on the thick tangle of castor plants. I had passed by the spot before, but hadn’t noticed her—a huge neem tree had obstructed my view. The tree was in a chokehold of amarbel—parasitic vines that grew a curtain of long ropes around it. Beside it was a wall, some four or five feet high, with a tap jutting out of it. The tap was eternally dry, expelling only a susurration when turned on.

As children, we would often swing high into the air on the amarbel. But Munni didn’t seem to be in the mood for play just then.

“I am sick. All my blood is leaking away,” she croaked at me, her face wan. I put my palm to her forehead. There might have been a slight fever but nothing that seemed too worrisome to me.

“Where is the blood?” I inquired.

Thinking that I disbelieved her, she dragged her lower body leftward on the parapet.

A dark brown stain appeared on the rough cement where she’d been sitting moments ago.

“How did this happen? Are you hurt? Show me.”

Munni scooted back, almost lying down so she could hike up her frock and show me. She wore blue underwear beneath the frock, printed with a floral motif and fastened with white strings. A blood stain camouflaged itself among the tiny flowers.

“Maiyya is sewing a napkin to stanch the blood. She tells me this will be a monthly occurrence now,” Munni said, heavy with despair.

“Napkins? But she told me it’s a helicopter!”

She turned scornful eyes on me, amazed at my foolishness.

“This happens to all girls. You’ll contract it too if I touch you.”

“Don’t touch me then,” I backed away slightly.

“I won’t.”

“Tiger! Tiger!” Ashok arrived, whistling loudly. This was usually enough to summon Tiger in an instant. But not this time. Tiger was Ashok’s darling, playing fetch with balls lobbed into the jungle. Ashok didn’t feel as much affection for Lily, who had now grown old. In tribute to his love for Tiger and his frequent whistling, Munni had taken to calling Ashok “Tiyu”. “Tiyu-tiyu” went his whistle, until everyone started calling him that. It was a strange nickname, but it stuck.

“Tiyu, Tiger’s sleeping inside in the round room. I saw him on my way in,” I said. Ashok left, going past the side of the building and towards the front of the house.

Munni’s restless eyes returned to me.

“If I tell you something, you won’t repeat it to anyone, will you?”

“Who would I repeat it to?”

“Maiyya.”

“No, I won’t.”

She hesitated for a beat. “I snuck into the prayer room. I even touched the idols.”

“So?”

“Maiyya told me it will be disastrous if I enter the prayer room. She’s also forbidden me from going into the kitchen.”

“Why?”

“She said I can’t cross the line into either space till the blood is flowing.”

“But why?” All of this felt extremely shameful to me. Would this really happen to me too? No, Munni must have some disease. There was no chance I would get it too.

Munni was unable to answer my question.

“I’m going to go ask Maiyya.”

“No, no! You promised you wouldn’t tell! You can never tell Maiyya. She’ll be very hurt if she knows I went into the prayer room. She’ll tell dad, and I don’t know what he might do.” Munni was terrified of her father.

Worry began clouding her face, thinking that I might blab to Maiyya. I didn’t.

Maiyya took religion very seriously. Students were sometimes taken to visit the small chapel at our missionary school. We would kneel on the low benches and mutter the prayers we were made to memorise in class. We would make the sign of the cross, bringing our fingers up to our foreheads and then to our chests, finishing with an “Amen”. Outside the chapel was a basin in the wall, from where we would take holy water and touch it to our foreheads. We all thrilled to the high romance of the ritual. When Maiyya found out, she was outraged. She feared that her daughter was on her way to becoming a convert. She sent Munni’s father to the school to protest. But we continued to visit the chapel. We liked going there. It was a stone structure, always cool inside. There was a statue of Jesus Christ hanging high up in the distance, a crown of thorns on his head.

Munni and I went our separate ways once we reached tenth grade—she to the high school section and I to Senior Cambridge. As my study load increased, I visited her house less often. After finishing Senior Cambridge, I left for Delhi for higher studies, while she stayed back in Allahabad.

When I would return on holiday, I would hear snippets of news about her. She had become a journalist at the local newspaper. Or she had started teaching at the same missionary school we attended as kids. Even that she had established a newspaper of her own. The years passed. Then I came to know that she had become sick and left work. Perhaps that’s when her memory-related illness began. I didn’t go to visit her at home—all that had stopped years ago. The thorny carandas bushes between our two houses had been cleared away. A wall hadn’t yet been erected in its place—but only because it wasn’t clear where the boundary-line was. At an approximate location, a row of henna – thornless trees – had been planted instead. The castor plant jungle had been cleared out and in that suddenly open expanse of land, you could now see Bindadeen’s small shack beneath the old elm. The path that led to her house seemed more difficult to cover now, however; and crossing the line had never even occurred to me. I found out then that she had gotten married all of a sudden, and gone away somewhere. Karnal. Or Karnataka. One of those. Badki, who worked in their house, told me.

I didn’t see Munni for years. My world had changed. And so had hers. She had been erased from my map, which took me from Allahabad to Delhi and then to cities around the world, consuming half my life. Age was overtaking me. And her too, I suppose, since she was my contemporary. I never gave her a thought. I knew she was alive only because the news of her death hadn’t come to me. Neither of us were quite near the finish line. Nonetheless, if there had been such news, I would have remembered her. I was to meet her soon, anyway.

It was Badki who informed me of Ashok’s death. An image of Tiyu came to me, whistling for Tiger. Tiger and Lily had been dead for so long now. They were succeeded by a gaggle of stray dogs that Tiyu fed chapatis to. He was very fond of dogs. The dogs he nurtured would wander into our house at night, creating a ruckus.

The Agrawal family remained our neighbours all our life. They hardly ever paid us a visit, except for the rare occasion of mourning or celebration. Nobody from my house went there much either. Information, however, maintained a constant flow across that boundary-line. Even if Badki hadn’t told me anything, I’d have known about a death in the house. Late at night, I had heard crying and then silence. There were no castor bushes between our houses anymore. But still it seemed to me that a wind blew and the jungle groaned.

I paid them a visit before the third day’s shanti paath, prayers for the departed soul’s peace. I had seldom entered the house through that lion-guarded front gate. It bore the names of Munni’s late father and her two brothers. Munni’s name was absent. I asked after her, and found out that she was there. In fact, she came home every day from the Chowk, where her husband’s house was.

So she had never left the city…?

“I know you!” she said as soon as she saw me, “But where do you live?”

“I’m right where I was, next to you. But where have you been? I heard you had gone somewhere far away?”

“No, I live in the Chowk. My husband is there. I got married. We’re looking for a house in this area.”

“What about this house? Isn’t it empty now?”

Munni didn’t respond.

“My husband looks after me. I got married very suddenly,” she said.

“I heard. When did it happen?”

“I don’t remember very well. I was in the hospital. Then I got married. I kept saying no, but they didn’t listen.”

“Who didn’t listen?”

“Ashok bhaiyya and my husband.” When had she started calling Tiyu “Ashok bhaiyya”?

“You got married in the hospital?”

“I don’t remember very well. Someone had covered my head with a saree and pulled the hem all the way down my face. I couldn’t see. It was hot inside, so I peeked out. Ashok bhaiyya was standing there, holding a huge slab of Cadbury chocolate. He handed the chocolate to me, and I laughed. He was always making people laugh.”

“We did, didn’t we? Laugh a lot? Will you go back to the Chowk in the evening?”

“No. I’ll go after the shanti paath. Please come.”

“I’ll definitely come.”

“Let me take you to Maiyya. She’ll be so happy to see you.”

I was surprised to hear that Maiyya was still alive. How old must she be; when we, who had once been children, were so old ourselves now?

She linked her arm with mine once again and led me inside through the main door of the round room. The huge sofas were still there; their fabric no longer a ghostly white but striped and brown. They were also no longer in the middle of the room but shunted off to the side. Some members of the family sat there, murmuring amongst themselves. A woman, probably Munni’s sister-in-law, had been speaking to another in a low voice but fell silent upon seeing me.

Everyone stood up. There was little light in the room.

Munni crossed the curved length of the room and led me to the one inside. Suddenly, she grabbed my hand and stopped me. I looked at her. Her face was lost in the shadows. “Don’t repeat it to Maiyya,” she told me in a frantic whisper.

The fifty long years that had passed since that day, crumbled into dust in an instant. That day hadn’t passed. It was still there, between us; whole, suspended indestructible in its stillness, each detail intact. Fifty years had been unable to touch it. And she, who no longer remembered anything, remembered it.

Maiyya was huddled under a thick quilt in the bitter winter. She didn’t recognize me. She looked at me out of sunken eyes perched over a pair of protruding cheekbones..

“Maiyya, Anita has come,” Munni said, “Annie! From the house next door.”

Tears welled up in the depths of Maiyya’s eyes. Her lips began to tremble. Ashok had been her first child. Just the sight of him would bring a smile to her face. She would take great delight in cooking him his favourite things. His must have been the first infant body to warm her own. She drew a bony, wasted hand from under the quilt to hold mine. It felt like a cluster of cold metal keys, long and slim, had been deposited on my skin.

“It wasn’t a helicopter,” she said, suddenly after a long beat of silence.

“I know it wasn’t,” I told her.

“Come on, let’s go outside now that you have seen her.” Munni dragged my hand. Perhaps her fear had returned that I would tell Maiyya she had touched the idols of the gods when she was “impure.” Half a century had passed, but she was still trapped in that web of “impure” and “pure.” Maybe some maggot ideas never leave your brain once they have burrowed a home there.

It was a relief to step outside into the sun. Seasonal flowers were in bloom in their beds beside a strip of green near the front gate of the house.

“Where do you live now?” She probably didn’t understand that I was still in that same house I had always been, right next to hers.

“How will we meet again? Give me your mobile number,” she said, without waiting for my reply.

“Yes, I’ll give it to you. I’ll message you.”

She didn’t ask what number I would message her on.

“Do remember to give me your mobile number,” she repeated.

“Yes, I’ll message you,” I said again. I walked out through the gate with its stone lions and returned home.

#

I did not go to Ashok’s shanti paath.