Bonhomie

by Sneha Narayan

Sabar Kamble was a housewife. That’s what her family said. And, well, it was true: she was fifty-seven years old, wife to a sixty-five-year-old man, and she had spent all fifty-seven of her years within a house. Not this house, of course—they shifted homes many times. She used to leave the house to go to school when she was younger, and these days she walked to the vegetable market twice a week. On the way, she spoke to Rachna, who had a tiny retail store next door; she fed the stray dog; she stopped at the chappal store to stare longingly at the sandals and shoes. But mostly, she was at home.

This is why Sabar knew something that no one else seemed to have noticed. In the opposite house, whose window directly faced her own bedroom window, lived the mistress of a rich businessman.

The building that Sabar lived in was an old and crumbling three-storied building in Mumbai, where old-timers lived in close-knit homes. It was not unusual for the residents to leave their front doors open while they chatted from across the corridor. The Kambles used to be well-off, but losses in their business had forced them to shift here. Like Sabar, many other women in this building stayed at home, going about their lives as housewives.

The building opposite Sabar’s was further dilapidated. The concrete walls were chipped, and the many layers of paint made it look like it was out of an old sepia photograph. It had taken on many avatars in the years that Sabar had lived here: it was a tiny restaurant initially; later they attached a bar to it. When the restaurant and bar went bankrupt, the owners sold the building to a film-production company. When even the production company didn’t want it anymore, it turned into a motel-cum-living-quarters. On the second floor of this building lived the woman Sabar saw every day.

The first time was a year ago: Sabar was sitting by the window drinking terrible tea. It was early afternoon. Sabar looked out of her window to see a young woman with black hair that reached below her shoulder blades. The woman was patting her hair dry with a towel and looking into a mirror that hung on the wall opposite her window. She lay her hair to one side and slapped the water droplets out of the thin strands. The water splashed in all directions, clearly visible in the dusty air.

Sabar was drawn to the woman. She was especially taken by the expression on the woman’s face in the mirror. She did not look happy, but she definitely did not look sad. She showed no anger, no fear—the two emotions Sabar was very used to seeing on her own face every time she looked in the mirror. The woman, however, did not look calm or disturbed. She had a perfectly neutral expression.

At this point, Sabar had not known the woman was the businessman’s mistress. She figured this out two days later. Sabar was sitting on her bed, folding the last bit of laundry, when the businessman came to meet the woman. The man was significantly older and oddly familiar. Sabar squinted her eyes: Right, he is the owner of the vegetable market, she thought. She had seen him many times at the market. He always wore a gold watch that shone so unnaturally bright that Sabar believed it wasn’t real gold.

Sabar saw that there was a playfulness to the woman’s expression, a seductive grin with her eyebrow lifted. She had her hair open, the straight, dry strands falling neatly around her shoulders.

Sabar watched as the woman let the man into the house, made him sit on the bed, and caressed his hair. She began to undress. Sabar dropped the clothes she was folding and ran to the window. The woman bent at her waist till her face was in line with the man’s, and she winked at him.

In anger, Sabar slammed her window shut. She mumbled to herself: This is a decent neighborhood. This is not the kind of thing that should be allowed here; there are children downstairs, goodness! At least shut your window.

That night when Sabar opened the window to let in some cool air, she remembered what she had seen earlier. Her eyes bolted to the woman’s window. There she was, sitting on a chair with her legs up on another chair, scrolling through her phone. Her hair was pulled into a neat braid. She was back to that neutral expression of hers.

Sabar told herself that she was so disturbed because she knew that the businessman had a wife and three children. She had seen his wife around the market: a short woman who wore a red bindi larger than her eye. Several times, Sabar had walked past his three children playing cricket on the football field near the market.

Every morning when Sabar woke up, the woman’s window would be shut, and it wouldn’t open until nearly noon. Sabar began to wait for the afternoons, when, free from all household duties, she could sit at the window and look at what the woman was up to that day. At first, she told herself she was doing it out of spite—keeping track of the businessman and his mistress for his wife’s sake.

On some days, the woman would be abuzz, talking on the phone, dusting the house, folding her laundry, and rearranging her shelves. There were other men too—clients who would visit her at odd hours of the day—but if her doorbell rang in the afternoon, it was usually the businessman.

Each time someone did come to her place, Sabar would wait till she was certain that this was just another client. She would then stand up and shut her own window. She noticed that the woman got no other visitors, except the milkman, the odd repairperson, and, rarely, a house help. Other than when the woman was talking to someone, her face had no expression at all.

Isn’t she guilty about what she is doing, Sabar wondered often in those early days, getting in the way of a nice, decent family? She looked for guilt on the woman’s face and didn’t find it. Then she thought, Is she being coerced into this? She looked for sadness or a silent cry for help. It wasn’t there. She had better be in love with the businessman, Sabar thought but realized she didn’t know how to recognize whether she was in love. Is she taking revenge? Sabar looked for spite, resentment, anger. Although she realized that these things only happen in soap operas, she noted that those emotions, too, didn’t show on the woman’s face.

There was no story to her face at all. So Sabar tried to give her a backstory. She would change it many times in a single day. Her name is Aishwarya. She couldn’t be more than twenty-seven. She is from a village and she did not get any higher education because her parents did not believe in educating girls. She ran away from home and got into bad company. Sabar would erase the board and start again. Her name is Sana. She was from a middle-class family. She likes animals; she likes butterflies. No, she did karate as a child. Her name is Mariam.

The only thing Sabar knew with certainty was that the woman read a lot. Sabar’s favourite days were when the woman sat by her window and read a book. These were usually the days when she had no visitors. She read novels and magazines, newspapers and big hardcovers the size Sabar used to read in school.

Sabar memorized the visitor schedule. On the days she was sure no one would disturb her and her neighbour’s afternoon, she would make a quick cup of tea and sit down in time to see the woman drag a chair to the window with a book in hand.

The woman’s face showed no change even when she read books with battles on their front covers. But from time to time, she would look up from her book and peer at the children playing on the road below. She would look at them but not see them. It was as though she was letting the words seep into her mind. In those silent moments, Sabar wondered if she’d see a glimpse of…boredom, perhaps. She was out of luck there too.

Within a few months, Sabar began to go to the library on the way to the market. She would pick up a book thinking about her, wondering if she would read it. Sabar had seen her read nearly every genre. There must be a pattern to it somewhere, she would think. Sometimes she’d come across a book and immediately know that the woman would read it. And Sabar would take that book home with her. She would wait, at the edge of her seat, for her friend’s next free day, so that she, too, could bring a book to the window and read with her.

It was on one such afternoon when the woman’s doorbell rang unexpectedly. The woman seemed just as surprised as Sabar: she lightly scrunched her eyebrows and looked at her watch. Sabar saw her open the door and let someone in. She tried to recalculate the neighbour’s schedule. How it bummed her out that their read day was interrupted!

It was the businessman. He was fuming—that much was obvious. Sabar couldn’t hear what was being said but it did not look good. The man was flinging his arms in the air, his nostrils were flared, and there was spittle shooting out of his mouth as he yelled at the woman. The woman had her arms crossed in front of her. She spoke less. But whenever she did, she spoke in short, snipped sentences.

Sabar saw on her face an expression, a complex one. She didn’t know how to read it; she could only say what it didn’t look like. It didn’t look like anger; it didn’t look like sadness or helplessness; it was, for sure, not fear. It was a light kind of annoyance, she finally concluded.

The man turned and punched the table next to the woman. He pointed a finger at her and wagged it, while saying something with a nasty expression, and turned around. She said something. Short and snipped.

And then it happened. He pivoted on his heel, rotating his arm with him, and slapped the woman across her cheek. The force of the slap was so great that the woman’s entire body—the one that liked butterflies and did karate and the one that carried her books and dried her hair—spun and dropped to the floor. She lay there on her arm, her legs sprawled and limp.

Sabar gasped and stood up; she almost reached out to her friend through the window grills.

But she didn’t have to. Before Sabar could blink, the woman stood up, anger blaring on her face. Her neatly tied hair was falling open and her lip was split. Some strands of her hair stuck to her bloodied lip. She doubled over and screamed a furious scream that didn’t reach Sabar. When she stood back up, the woman’s eyes were wide open. She squeezed them shut for one second. And then she lifted her arm and with the force of her shoulder landed a slap on the man’s cheek.

There was a moment, a scratch in the record, when everything stood still: Sabar with her hands on the windowsill, the businessman turned to his side with his hand on his cheek, the woman with her hand stretched out after slapping him. This was the moment Sabar would keep going back to, days from now, when she had done what she had done.

The businessman straightened himself. The fuming expression had been replaced with surprise. Seconds ticked by. Nobody said anything. Sabar watched as the surprised expression changed to a stiff, cold expression of fanaticism. His face didn’t contort the way it had a few minutes ago when he was yelling at the woman. It looked, mostly, expressionless. Only his eyes gave it away: the thorough humiliation and rage. He glided to the window and shut it delicately.

Sabar stood at her window, completely paralyzed. In all the months she had watched this woman, not once had she seen her window shut in the daytime, not even when she had visitors. She only shut it when she was sleeping.

Sabar began to shake. This is not good, she thought. This is not good at all. She began to pace. Should I call someone? What if he is hurting her? I should call someone, right?

She reached out to her phone and was about to dial but realized she didn’t know whom to call. She had never told anyone about this woman, not even Rachna from the retail store. She wondered if she should call the police. Days after this, she would tell herself that she didn’t call the police because she was afraid that they might not help. What if they found out the woman was a sex worker? Would they help her? What would Sabar tell them anyway? That a man shut the window in a woman’s room? She had no proof that he was hurting her. But right now, she didn’t think this. Right now, she didn’t call the police and she didn’t give a second thought as to why.

Sabar continued to pace. I should go up there, just in case, she decided. She picked up her keys from near the door while rapidly draping a scarf over her nightie. She put on her sandals. Clutching her phone and keys in one hand, she shut her front door with the other and began to hobble down the stairs. And she walked straight into Rachna. Rachna, filled with all the world’s information, promptly began to rattle away about this and that.

Months later, when she had done what she had done, Sabar liked to tell herself that she had felt desperate to reach her friend in the opposite building and had been snappy and irritated at Rachna. But she knew that wasn’t true. She felt sudden relief at Rachna being there.

In the months to come, Sabar would console herself by saying that she would not have been able to help the woman anyway. Even if she had gone to the house, pressed the doorbell, and knocked a few times, would they have opened the door? And what if they had opened the door? What then? What if he wasn’t hurting her and they were just having a calm, private conversation? What if she had gravely misread the whole situation? And worse, what if he was actually hurting her? Would she have known what to do?

Even as she stood in the stairwell, talking to Rachna about the onion prices and the unbearable heat these days, Sabar knew that she would have to one day come to terms with what she did. She did nothing. And she knew it even then. This much she had to give herself credit for.

For the next five months, Sabar did not sit by the window at all. She took care to keep her face away from the window every time she passed it. She asked her husband to switch sides with her on the bed, in case she accidentally looked into the woman’s house again. She went back to drinking her horrible tea on the living-room table. She returned the library books and went back to looking at the shoes and sandals in the window displays of the chappal store.

Then, one day, her granddaughter pointed to the window and raised her arms so she could be lifted and shown the street below. Sabar carried the child and tried hard not to look, but her eyes flickered to the house. She was there. She was still there, sitting at the table, writing something. Sabar at once turned her face away, afraid they might lock eyes. She realized that in the past she had wanted the woman to see her, but not anymore. She forced herself not to think about her.

At least she is alive, her mind suggested, and she silently scolded herself for allowing this thought to pop up. She pointed out the colourful kites in the sky to her gaping granddaughter.

And so, time sped by. Her mother passed away, her granddaughter began to go to school, and her daughter-in-law got a promotion. For the most part, Sabar stopped thinking about her friend. But sometimes the house was silent: her children would be at work and her granddaughter at school, her husband would be dozing off on the sofa, and she would be done with all the household work. Then she would let herself remember that moment again. That scratch in the record. That moment when she realized that she was only just a housewife because she would never, could never, slap anyone. Not when someone was hurting her, not when someone was angry with her, not when they were threatening her, not when they slapped her. She was never taught how to and she had never tried to learn.

And now when Sabar looks at her face in the mirror, she sees it. The perfectly neutral expression.