Lock and Key

I’m standing, key in hand, at the office door. It’s Monday. Or is it Wednesday? Who knows? When life is a series of Mondays, the best you can hope for is to start on top of the ticker tape of the to-do list and notch your way to the bottom before this mid-week Monday is done. Tomorrow, it will be Monday again. 

It’s been blurring for a while now. But it’s the first time, I’ve managed getting up, bathing, coffee, breakfast, kid, the perfunctory peck on the lips of the perfunctory husband, and even the customary expletives at some lane-swapping bastard without having woken up completely. Or at all. 

I know I did everything I just listed, like I know I breathed in and out through the night. I don’t have to remember having done it to know it got done. But shouldn’t I remember having left home? Or what my son’s face looked like this morning? Was it still tear-stained from accidentally locking himself in the loo last night? How did I get him out?

The last thing I remember is walking upstairs after dinner and hearing his wail from inside the bathroom. The thump of his little fists against the door. Me screaming from outside, trying to get him to unlock it from within. Hearing him whimpering and uncomprehending on the other side, I knew that he would not be able to coax the lock open. 

At this point, Amar, the husband, entered the scene and proceeded to don the ‘one sane male’ mantle.

“Calm down, Tarini, don’t get hysterical. It’s not helping.”

“I need you to step back,” I said, shoving him aside.

I think he did a literal double-take. His Taru, soft, docile, sweet, cow Taru, pushing him? 

“Let me take care of this for you.”

At this point, I lifted a chair and slammed it against the lock. Amar raised his hands as if I was holding him at gunpoint. I slammed the door until it cracked, and I saw my little boy, my precious Appu, cowering against the bathroom wall. Everything after that is a blank. Last night, I think, I cracked something inside me. 

It seems to have done something to me. I’m frozen, unable to open a door I’ve opened every morning for a decade of grey Mondays. I desperately want to remember a moment in vivid colour before I unlock it. A greyness, like clotted cotton wool in my lungs, is wetly suffocating me from within. A cold sweat springs up, beading my upper lip. I’m afraid that if I open this door again without remembering a Sunday afternoon moment, I will doom myself to Mondays till I keel over at my desk.  My mind tries, finds no purchase and slips.

I hear a car arrive behind me and instantly know it’s Rumi.  I can see her vintage yellow Beetle in my mind without turning. She slams the door and walks towards me. I wish it weren’t her right now. I’ve spent so many years being flawless in front of her, never letting on how much I want to taste her beautiful mouth. I’m the good mentor, harmless, dependable Tarini. Not this paralysed, batshit crazy Tarini.

“Heya Tarini, this is legend! You’re not already in the office? I thought you crept out of the filing cabinets in the morning before we got here.” Her cheery tone falters as I stand there, catatonic.

And still, I cannot remember. If I died right now, would a series of obligations flash before my eyes? I know, if I open the door and let her in, I will simply walk through another numb and blind day, before ending up opening the door on another Monday. 

It’s then that I notice the new key dangling on my keychain. Like something out of a child’s imagination. A familiar key, three-lobed, thick filigreed brass. A key to unlock treasure chests, secret gardens and women locked away for life for the privilege of being rescued by self-righteous men they’ve never met. A key to unlock chastity belts or Pandora’s box loaded with a god’s vengeance and blame. Or even Blackbeard’s lair with piles of murdered wives within. This key, it thaws me.

When Rumi sashays over to me, I hide it and open the door with my regular key. I must get in before her frangipani scent envelopes me. She must not see the key. It’s mine. It will save me.

I get through the day somehow. I’ve always been a wind-up doll for people’s expectations. All my life, my mother held the key to me. Till four, I would feel her fury only through her hands, like vices on my arms. She wouldn’t hit me. That’s not what women from good families do. She would crush my arms and speak softly right into my face, leaving red imprints of her fingers and bloody crescents from her manicured nails on my arms. I learned the lifecycle of a bruise – blue, then purple, then yellow. You could count how often I had angered her by the different colours pressed into my skin. 

She was Mamaaa, never Amma. Nothing as ordinary as Amma. The last descendant of the distinguished Tomars. With a mind like a steam engine, put to service the humble pressure cooker. Tomar women were brilliant at business. Tomar women were impeccable wives. Tomar women had wasp waists, expensive tastes, and husbands that sat squarely on the asset column of the ledger, all in service of clan and dynasty. Except she didn’t. She married a failure against her father’s judgment, thinking Daddy would take care of it. Daddy disowned her instead. Then, she had the temerity to birth a daughter. 

And to add insult to injury, the failure who got her exiled from paradise died. She was alone, and nothing was how it should’ve been. It was my job to fix that.  To bring back an army of domestic servants to this echoing house. To give her a toehold again into the world where she was once a rising star. To become the perfect Tomar debutante. She would make sure I did, even if she had to trim me like the impeccable topiary in my grandfather’s gardens. 

When the bruises didn’t achieve the desired shape, my mother decided to up the ante. She was locked out, so I would be locked in until I complied. One day, I sat with my legs apart when we visited Grandpa and gave his drawing-room crowd a view of my raggedy knickers. 

“Madhu, fix your daughter and bring her back when she is fit to grace this drawing room.” 

When we reached home, I waited for the bruises. But she simply walked me to a cupboard, made me step inside and locked it. After that day, every time I walked through a prohibited door, my mother, gentle and ever smiling, would lead me or drag me to the cupboard and lock me in. An hour, a day, I never knew for how long. I learned then that tears, blood and love could not be shaped into keys.

A year of that, and by eight, I learned to see the lock in her smile. I’d see it and lock myself before she could. No one had to tell me that little girls were quiet or that good grades were the key to success. Or that girls don’t get racing heartbeats at the sight of other girls. 

Once, when I was fifteen, she caught me touching myself to my dead father’s girlie mags from an old trunk in the garage. Strange for her to have kept them, I remember thinking with a thrill before hiding them under my shirt and taking them to my room. The door to my room had no lock. She walked in as I lay under the bed with one hand between the centrefold’s legs and the other between my own. For this, she locked me in the closet for two days. Letting me stew in my filth, misery, and hunger. I was big by this time, so she had to use more force, a thick rolling pin to prod me inwards like wayward dough. I had the briefest moment of satisfaction in seeing her smile falter when I pushed back. But I had not yet learnt viciousness enough to fight her. And she was unafraid to draw blood. When the door unlocked two days later, the smile was back.

No one ever had to say that I shouldn’t talk about the hot, heady bliss of a lithe, sweaty woman arched boneless beneath me. No one needed to tell me that I should wear Chanel and a chiffon sari, and sway my hips in heels instead of wearing crisp, white cotton shirts, starched cuffs folded up to my forearms and thick brogues to plant my feet in. 

Dyke, I think. Delicious, I think, before I wind myself up again.  

Then there was the year she met a man, a second, seedy son with a middling estate, pan-masala teeth and a fondness for bourbon. She forgot about me. He was an old-money divorcé with the right pedigree who briefly promised a cheat code back into my grandparents’ graces. 

That year, Ms. Kiran, the new counsellor at school, looked at my haunted face and handed me paints and a piece of paper when she couldn’t get me to talk. She stood me in front of a mirror and handed me a poster of Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’. I saw her point. Then she showed me, Gluck. She could see what my mother refused to. Once I started painting, I could not stop. I bought tubes of thick, creamy paint with lunch money stockpiled like medicine at a psych ward. I’d smear the paint on page after creamy page and feel myself fill with colour. I felt unlocked. Uncontrollable. 

Almost sixteen months of being invisible to Mama and becoming more and more visible to myself. I even managed a furtive kiss behind the school with a slender fan-type who warmed up to my trapped butch. I came home still carrying the intense lusciousness of her tiny waist in my arms.  The feel of me, bending to frame her arched body. I could feel the edges of me solidifying. I spent the day in a frenzy of sweat and heat, letting this feeling of seeing myself wrapped around her onto the canvas. I felt high, unhinged, blissed out. I didn’t hear Mama enter. Not even when she stood behind me for who knows how long. Not until she began smearing the paint on me. Emptying tube after tube of oil paints onto the canvas and me as I just stood there gaping at her silent, studied destruction. The man had dumped her; I found out later. This was her revenge. Organza silk saree, pearl earrings and her French-manicured hand crushing the tubes of paint.

“Surely, Tarini, you know I can’t allow this nonsense. Your grandfather pays for this fancy school you go to. If you keep your grades up, he’ll send you to Cambridge or Harvard for further studies.”

“I’m happy to study in India, Ma, I just want…”

“Mamaaa, not Ma. And you will get into Harvard or Cambridge.”

She squeezed each tube and continued to smear them across my paintings, looking pointedly at me. I put up my arms in surrender. 

I locked away the art books, the heady bottles of turpentine, and the fistfuls of burnt umber and ochre in a trunk before she could lock me into the cupboard.

There was maybe an instance or two after that where I feebly tried to walk off the path she had decreed for me. She’d smile that locked smile, and I’d feel my breath seize. And I’d willingly walk into every cupboard she chose for me. 

I went to Harvard, slogged to survive in a world I was clearly not meant for, finished somewhere in the middle of class and joined the family business. I married the stamp-paper groom my grandfather chose. I even birthed a boy. By then, no one had needed to tell Tarini how to own a Monday. I could do it in my sleep. After all that, my grandfather still did not let my mother back in. He simply skipped her in favour of me.

This day whirs, and clicks turn by wind-up turn to an end.

By seven, they all leave. Even the brown-nosers and stragglers with no life. Amar calls. I tell him I’ll be late. I see Appu in my head. The thought of my little boy makes me want to scream and scream. He is beautiful, and he exists on the outside because I’m locked inside. 

“Give Appu the phone, please.”

“Amma, I did a beautiful drawing today.”

“Of course you did, Appu baba. You listen to daddy and go to bed. Amma will be late.”

“How late, Amma?”

“Never too late for you, my baba. I’ll be there before you wake up.”

I cut the call and think, where did I get this key from? I begin to look for the door that the brass key opens. My Sunday key, I think. Cabinets, closets, storerooms, boxes – I try them and try them. I look at an electrical socket and imagine plugging it in. It fits nothing. I feel the greyness inching back. 

Then I remember the trunk of paints. Could it still be underneath the bed? I drive to my mother’s home in a daze.  When did I come here last? The decaying splendour of Chhoti Haveli exerts a strange gravitational pull on me as I skid into the driveway. I know she will take time after she is roused, not just because she is old, but because my mother never hurried anywhere. I ring the bell and then bang on the door, frantic. When she doesn’t open the door, I fit the key to it. It should not, but it fits perfectly. I walk into my former prison. It is all quiet. I walk up to my room. Where is she? 

The room is the same. There is still no lock on the door. The trunk, duck egg blue, dented metal, sits beneath the bed. I fit the key to the lock on it. Again, it unlocks the box, though it should not. Inside is a thick sheaf of paintings I don’t remember painting. Vermillion breasts, blue pudenda, ripe green buttocks. A forest of women, with keyholes for mouths, keyholes for navels, keyholes between their legs. And on the bottom, a painting of my mother with keyholes for eyes.

I sit down and try to remember last night, but I can’t breathe.

Suddenly, I’m locked into the cupboard again, banging on the thick oak door. I feel it envelop me, the grey leaching to black. 

I knew it so well with my fingertips in the dark. My five by three by six wooden prison. The resinous grain of the wood, slick with sweat and blood, reassuring solidity against my raw, scraped fingers. Every knot, every ridge, every nail, an intimate landmark against oblivion. And the keyhole, a pinprick of brass-edged light. To see snatches of her smiling and humming to herself, the elegant leading lady, playing to an invisible audience. Gliding through the room.

I remember, then, a glimpse of the night. The moment after, my son escaped the bathroom. The unlocking inside me as I held him. The drive to Chhoti Haveli.

I see it now. She opens the door after keeping me waiting for a good ten minutes; I grab the silvered bunch of keys from her, shove her aside and glimpse thin legs flashing comically at me from beneath the petticoat. I am overcome with giggling as I race up the stairs, flinging key after key down from the silver hoop until I find the right one. 

There, like a portal to something sacred and profane at once, tall and unbudging, is my cupboard. I stand before it, key raised. My flesh prickles because I can hear tiny fists banging frantically from within. My hands are all thumbs as I try to insert the key. I can hear the hiccupping sobs of a child too far gone to be able to control herself. The key turns, and with a click, the door opens. Five-year-old Tarini sits there, hot and hurt and all, big, swollen eyes. My heart breaks as I pull her out, soiled and crumpled. I cradle her in my arms and feel the tiny, satisfying solidity of her, and I can suddenly remember the moment I got that door open for my son. The vital whoomp of him running out and slamming into my belly in relief.

I hear my mother doddering behind me, her fury palpable. Her eyes widen as I advance towards her with a gentle smile. I shove her into the cupboard firmly, her mouth an open ‘O’, her eyes pleading. I lock it with my Sunday key.

I remember now. She’s in there. It’s been a day. It’s time I lost a key.