Tony's House

A skeleton rises in the distance, a half-finished skyscraper, blocking the light of a dying, setting sun. The blood-red light of sunset drips down steel casings and pipes, pooling in grimy, glass windows. In the shadows, the grey rags of construction workers flutter, as they scurry across like maggots, figures black against the red and gold sky.
This city, once so familiar, has become a stranger. There are people here, breathing, sweating, stinking multitudes of people - engineers, doctors, housewives, children. But they move like zombies through the grey fog that clogs the air. They are surly when spoken to, wary when accosted by strangers.
At night I dream of ghosts. There is Tony, with his slow, shy smile, his large, ungainly hands, those pale knees that protruded from his shorts. There is my mother, her brows creased in a perpetual frown, her eyes bitter and unhappy. I see Ms D'Souza, with her watery smile. They do not speak, they are mute, but it's as if their hands are over my mouth, over my throat, stifling me. I wake up, I toss off the sheets, and my breath is still trapped in my chest. I struggle to breathe, and hte memories come, memories I have locked away, that I have tried to forget. And when morning comes, I still feel the clammy touch of their cold, dead hands.
In the afternoon, I find myself driving past the site of Tony's house. The beautiful, old villa has gone; rubble spills onto the street. A half-finished, empty shell of apartment complex rises up, where the house once stood. Construction workers, as small as ants, lean out of the top stories, trying to secure the pale, blue plastic sheeting that flaps in the wind.
Our house is still there, the solid, one-storey house I grew up in. An accountant and his family live there now - I see the accountant, in his vest and dhoti leaning against the gate as I walk past, a cigarette in hand. His wife hangs clothes on the terrace, and I can hear the shrieks of their children, as they race around the tiny front yard. They've repainted the gate a garish pink. There are other changes - a satellite dish poking out of the roof, the enclosed veranda. The coconut tree has been cut down.

It was different, twenty years ago. There were only a few families in this street. I remember walking to school, for the first time after we moved into the house across the street, with my mother. I saw Tony then, for the first time, sitting in a wicker chair by the ancient house with the sloping, red-tiled roof. Even then, I knew there was something strange about him - it was visible in the way he cocked his head, the way his mouth hung open. He watched me as I walked past, I felt his eyes follow me as I headed down the street, and I held my mother's hand tighter, clinging to her pallu. She pushed me away, impatient.
"What is it now?" She asked, frowning. I could tell her mind was somewhere else, as it often was, thinking of money and prices and doing sums. I shook my head then, I knew she wouldn't take kindly to my fears. She wasn't like other mothers - the mothers in books and movies - the ones who wiped your tears when you cried with the edge of their sari pallu, and held you close. She was the kind of mother who pinched you when you made a mistake or said something wrong, or trod on your foot, if at dinner, you reached across for an extra helping. She loved me - of course - but it was a harsh, unrelenting, punishing love - a love that revealed itself in pinches, frowns and slaps.
She pinched me, the next day, when I refused to meet the neighbours with her. When I cried, she slapped me. I was forced into my 'good' dress - a gold-bordered red skirt and blouse - and marched across the street. There we waited on our neighbours, the D'souzas. He was there, of course, as Mrs D'Souza, a pale, tired-looking woman, ushered us into their faded, dilapidated drawing room. I remember being fascinated by their house - it was so different from my own. There were china figures of yellow-haired, blue-eyed shepheredesses and milkmaids on the side tables, Pictures of girls, with intricate hairstyles, in ankle-length dresses, on the walls, next to other photographs of young men, in three-piece suits.
Mrs D'Souza saw me looking at the photographs and smiled her vague, careless smile. "That's me" she said, in her tired voice, pointing at a black-and-white potrait of a young woman in a high-waisted dress, a veil falling around her face, a bouquet of flowers held in gloved hands. "On my wedding day," she added.
I looked closely at Mrs D'Souza then - it seemed to me that she must have always been old and tired - I couldn't ever imagine her young, and pretty. She was wearing a blue, polka-dotted dress that reached to her knees, and I could see her legs. I remember staring at her legs - it seemed like such a bizarre thing. My own mother's legs - and those of the women in our family - were always covered in cotton saris, and the sight of Mrs D'Souza's pale, slack flesh was a novelty.
Tony came forward, clutching a piece of paper. I shrank back, holding my mother's hand tightly. I was scared of him, and my fear must have showed because Mrs D'Souza said - "Go on, he won't hurt you, I promise." My mother pushed me forward then, a sharp prod in the back. I looked up at him, then, he was so much older than me - I think then he would have been in his early twenties. He smiled at me, a stupid, idiot smile, and pushed the sheet of paper at me.
It was drawing - a sketch, a few, scraggly lines - of a small girl, in a skirt and blouse, holding the hand of a woman in a bun. I stared at the paper for a few bewildered minutes, before I heard my mother, her tone rising say - "Tara..."
"Thank you," I burst out, before she could go on. "Thank you." As I spoke, the smile on his face melted, and for a moment - he looked terrified, before he turned and broke into a run.
Mrs. D'Souza sighed. "Don't worry, he's like that." She bent down and peered at the sheet of paper in my hands. "He likes you," she said kindly, smiling a little. "Look, that's you and your mother."
That evening, when we returned home, I looked closely at the picture he had given me. I saw that he had drawn my mouth in a thin, straight, unsmiling line - and that my mother's eyebrows slanted down and close, drawn together in a frown.

For years, he and I played together. I was always conscious that we were watched - the fat Bengali woman in the opposite house, would watch us from her balcony. Passers-by would turn, curiously, to watch the spectacle of a grown man, in his early twenties, play with a young girl less than half his age.
We would sprint across his front lawn, unmown grass growing high, playing tag. We would play hide and seek in the garden at the side of the house, with it's wild, overgrown trees with gnarled roots, provided innumerable hiding places for a girl my age.
And then - suddenly, puberty struck. It was the era of Michael Jackson and Madonna, and being fashionable had suddenly assumed an important place in my life. I became awkward and gawky, I hunched my back and let my hair fall over my face, to cover the rashes of acne that now sprouted across my cheeks. I slurred my speech, and answered in mono-syllables. And I refused to play with him.
My mother was upset, of course. She constantly admonished me to sit straight, and push the hair back from my face. She despaired of my clothes, my taste, my music and my friends. She told me that I was going 'bad.'
But I was past the age for pinching. When she slapped me, I mumbled words like 'child abuse' and 'harassment.'
"All of that rubbish doesn't work here," she scoffed at me. But something changed. She nagged me, almost always, but she never touched me.
Amidst all of this, my playmate was forgotten. He came by once, a picture in his hands - a drawing of two stick-children playing jump-rope. It must have been after a fight with my mother, for I took one look at the picture, and turned away.
"Go find some friends your age," I told him. I don't know if he understood my words, but he caught the malice in my tone, and a tear trickled down his face. My mother came out at that moment - saw him wipe the tear, and she turned to me.
"There was no need to-"
"Go to hell," I told her. "Why don't you play with him? I'm too old to play - I'm fourteen!"
"Don't talk to your mother like that."
"I can bloody well talk whatever way I like."
Neither of us noticed that he had already left. He never came back again.

Fourteen turned into fifteen and then sixteen. The acne diminished, and I stopped slouching forward. I had secreted supplies of eyeliner and lipstick into the house, and while my parents slept, I would experiment with these in the bathroom. In school, during lunch-breaks, my girldfriends and I would gawk over pictures of film stars in the school bathrooms, noting enviously the shortness of their skirts, their high-heeled shoes. We would save up pocket money to buy a pair of jeans.
That same year, Mrs D'Souza died. I think it must have been cancer - now that I think back, I must have been terribly callous not to notice. Mrs D'Souza's elder son, Lewis, living in America, came down for the funeral. Rumour had it that he had an american wife and children. But he came alone.
I came home from school one day to find him sitting, at the dining table. My mother was laughing - it was the first time in years that I had heard her laugh. She was smiling; the perpetual frown had vanished and she seemed like someone else. I watched her, stunned - it was a revelation. Then the laughter stopped - my mother caught my gaze, and the frown re-appeared. But for a moment - she had been transformed and I saw her as she must have been before she married my father - a pretty, laughing woman, with dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.
And I wonder what Lewis had said to make her laugh. It made me uncomfortable - that laugh - not only because it showed my mother in a different light, but that very act of transformation made me suspicious. There was something in that laugh and what had preceded it, that was not quite right. I couldn't help but notice the way she looked at him, and how he looked at her.

Maybe if I had said something to my mother - cutting and mean - it would have nipped it in the bud. She would have raged back at me - we would fought, things would have gone back to normal, and the future wouldn't have unfolded as it did. But I didn't say anything. I was silent - what could I say? My father strangely, didn't notice anything, even though my mother smiled more often, and fought less. These were things, selfishly, that I was grateful for. Was that wrong?
In my dreams, my mother blames me. She points a stiff finger at me.
"It was your fault. Everything was your fault. One word, one gesture, a hint, a fight - you could have prevented it. But you didn't."
I glare back at her, and I open my mouth, but in this dream I have no voice.
She smiles, triumphantly. "See, you can't talk back? Not here."
I wake up then, the sound of her words ringing in my ears. I have a thousand answers, a thousand explanations - but there is no one to hear me.

I remember on one day hearing my mother and Lewis whispering in the kitchen.
My mother spoke first - "What about your wife and family?"
"My wife's filed for divorce." Lewis turned away. "She wants the children, and alimony too."
My mother didn't say anything. The silence grew. I fidgeted outside the kitchen door, feeling like an intruder, scared that they would catch me, but compelled to listen.
Lewis finally broke the silence. "I lost my job, two months ago. I haven't told her. The house is mortgaged. Where's the money going to come from?"
I remember being suprised. I had imagined everyone abroad was rich and living well. Our NRI relatives, would return for holidays with suitcases filled with presents and chocolates. They would talk about the comfort and ease of life abroad, in their shiny, new accents and our cousins would talk familiarly, almost contemptously of the thing we lusted after - walkmans, jeans, NIKE trainers. But this new talk of mortgages and jobs and money was unsettling. It was the first time that I heard something against the 'foreign' dream.
My mother spoke, suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. "What about the house?" I was startled by her tone - there was something desperate in her voice, in her face - as if his house would be solution to her problems. Intrigued, curious, I peered at them through a hole in the lock.
Lewis shook his head. "My mother left it to my brother." He put a finger to his lips. "Don't tell anyone."
My mother's eyebrows arched in surprise. "But what can he do with it? What's going to happen to him? Are you going to take him back?" She added, as an after-thought.
"I can't. If I-" he stopped. "it's not easy. It's expensive - there so many laws. He would be happier here," he said the last pleadingly.
My mother nodded, slowly, encouragingly.
It was later that evening, that I asked my mother about what would happen to Tony. She had been humming a song - a strange thing for her to do. She stopped and the frown returned. "I don't know," she said at last, pondering over it. "I don't know."
My father looked up from his papers at that point - "I imagine he'll be put into an institution." He noticed my perturbed look. "It will be good for him," my father added, "don't worry. They'll be able to put him in a first-class, good place."
I lay wake that night. Thinking about him, and the kind of life he would lead now. I hadn't seen him from the day of the funeral, when he screamed as they pushed the coffin into the ground, and tried to jump in after it. His brother had held him back, but Tony's screams had rung through the air. He threw his head back and cried, mouth open, horrible, wrenching sobs. I had wondered earlier whether he understood what death was, and watching his sorrow, I felt guilty for even thinking he couldn't.
The next day, after school, I ventured across the street. It had been a long while since I had come to the house - and it was strange to think of Mrs D'Souza not being there, strange to think that I would never hear her tired voice again, to imagine that a new family would come and occupy this old house. As I ran up the stairs to the house, rain started to fall, and I was on the verge of pressing the doorbell when I heard a laugh.
I stopped.
It was an oddly familiar laugh - one that I heard before, and it came from the back of the house.
Softly, quietly, I stepped onto into the rain, and crept to the back of the house. The laughter sounded, louder and louder - and another voice joined it - a man's voice, warm, with a slight accent. The ground around the house had turned to mud, and crept into my shoes and stained my socks, but I hurried on regardless.
I should have turned back. But I persisted. Why? Why didn't I turn back?
Suddenly, the laughter stopped, and there was silence.
I reached a window. I looked in - and there was my mother, her mouth pressed against Lewis's mouth, his arms around her body
I was stunned, but not surprised. I was angry, and terrified of knowing what I knew. I think I must have guessed already - where this would lead to. But I hadn't wanted to know. And as I turned away, I was suddenly aware that there was someone else watching.
Tony.
I ran away, to the gate, crying, my tears mingling with the rain, my shirt drenched, mud squelching in my shoes. I was cold and shivering.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, and Tony was there - pressing me against the gate, his hand on my face, pushing his mouth towards mine.
I pushed him away. Without looking back I ran across the street. I was angry, so angry - with him, my mother, his brother. I didn't look back.
I didn't see him running after me. I didn't see the car, that tried to brake, in the rain, but skidded.

When I did look back, a moment later - I couldn't imagine that it had happened so fast. I saw blood, blood staining the rain water, running into the gutters, I saw his body, lying in a impossible angle. I heard horns blare - I saw the driver of the car get out - his face schocked and ashen.
I saw my mother and Lewis come running to the gate.
And they saw me.

Lewis sold the house and returned to America, to the arms of his estranged wife. Money makes a difference, I discovered, it returns a father to his children, patches up a broken marriage, makes a wife realize the depth of her love for her erring spouse. We never saw him again, and my mother died last year, after a long struggle with cancer. In the intervening decade the house has changed many hands - for many times the original sum that Lewis sold it for.

I try to stop it, but I can't. I see that last moment over and over in my dreams and waking moments.
Tony is there, broken on the ground, and Lewis is leaning over him. My mother stares at me from across the street. There is shock, guilt and accusation in her stare. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. I wish...I wish... I know I shouldn't have been angry with him. He was only doing what he saw others do. What did he know?
I clench my hands into fists. I want to scream, I want to her scratch her face. This is your fault, I want to shout at my mother and Lewis. But I don't. I just stand there, in the rain, blood-stained water pooling around my feet, staining my clothes.

The accountant's wife sees me gazing up at the site of Tony's old house. She is a chatty woman and leans over the gate to tell me that cricketeers and local film producers have bought flats in the complex - it's going to be a block of luxury, high-end apartments. She points to a circular contraption emerging from the roof of a structure - "See, there's even going to be a helipad," she exclaims. Her seven year old son, peering shyly from her skirts, asks what use a helipad will be. She tells him that the sort of people who will live there will be rich, and that time means money to them.
He screws up his face - "So how much will a minute be worth? Or an hour?" She pushes him away, goodnaturedly, but he continues to pester her. "How much would a second be worth?"
I can imagine the new inhabitants of the building. The women will clutch designer-name handbags, and the men will drive foreign cars with silver-tinted screens. Will they ever pause to think about those who lived before them here? Will their children, rooting through the landscaped garden, find the little things Tony and I carefully buried, so many years ago - the faded picture of Tony's christening, the broken fragments of a china milkmaid from Ms D'Souza's collection?

I wish I could forget all those things. I wish I wouldn't remember. I wish the dead would stop haunting my dreams. But in my dreams,
my mother laughs, as she so rarely did. "But you can't forget us," she says. "Don't you see? Someone has to remember us."