That was another area where he had to be firm. Sex. His wife was constantly pleading with him, “Please, not tonight.” He didn’t mind that. She was, after all, a well-bred Indian girl.
She had good Indian values that he felt all Indian women should have. Her dreams in life were those of his mother’s. She wanted to marry, have children and live a contented life in a glorious home. She was conservative and an introvert. Not a woman who would cause him embarrassment in front of friends and family. Timid…someone who needed support and he believed that he was indeed the support she needed.
But her reluctance went beyond womanly modesty.
After dinner for instance, she would start on the most convoluted household projects, soaping down the floors, changing the liners in the cabinets. The night before she had disappeared she’d started cleaning the windows, taking out the Window cleaner and rags as soon as she’d put the boy to bed, even though he had mumbled, “Let’s go.”
Surely he couldn’t be blamed for raising his voice at those times (though never so much to wake his son) or for grabbing her by the elbow and pulling her to the bed, like he did the night before she disappeared. He was always careful not to hurt her, he prided himself on that. Not even a little slap. And he always told himself he’d stop if she really begged him, if she cried, After some time, though, she would quit struggling and let him do what he wanted.
But that was nothing new. That could have nothing to do with the disappearance…after all that was his right.
His grandfather had done the same with his wife, his father had treated his mother the same way too and she had turned out fine hadn’t she?
So, why should he have treated his wife differently? She too was an Indian woman and for generations Indian women had been afflicted upon. So what made her so special? Why couldn’t he behave the same way with his wife as his male ancestors had with theirs?
Two weeks passed and there was no news of Zeneve, even though the husband had put a notice in the local newspaper as well as a half-page ad in India West, which he’d photocopied and taped to all the neighbourhood lampposts. The ad had a photo of her, a close up taken in too bright sunlight where she gazed gravely at something beyond the camera.
WOMAN MISSING read the ad. REWARD £100,000.
“How on earth will you come up with that kind of money?” asked his friend’s. The husband confessed it would be difficult, but he’d manage somehow. His wife was more important to him, after all, than all the money in the world. And to prove it he went to the bank the very same day and brought home a sheaf of forms to fill in so that he could take out a second mortgage on the house.
He kept calling the police station, too, but the police weren’t much help. (They were working on it apparently.) They’d checked the local hospitals and morgues, the shelters…but there were no leads. It didn’t look very hopeful.
So finally he called India over a faulty long-distance connection that made his voice echo eerily in his ear. He told his mother what had happened.
“My poor boy!” she wailed. “Left all alone” (the word flickered unpleasantly across his brain, left, left.)
“How can you possibly cope with the household and a child as well?” she added. And when he admitted that yes, it was very difficult, could she perhaps come and help out for a while if wasn’t too much trouble, she replied “Of course! I’ll come right away and stay as long as you need me too and what was all this English nonsense about too much trouble? You’re my only son aren’t you?” She even said that she would contact the wife’s family too so he wouldn’t have to deal with that awkwardness.
He was relieved at his mother’s kind gesture. How could he possibly face his in-laws at a time like this? How would he tell them that there one and only daughter may never come back?
Within a week his mother had closed up the little flat she had lived in since her husband’s death, got hold of a special family emergency visa and was on her way. Almost as though she’d been waiting for something like this to happen, said some of the women spitefully. These were his wife’s friends, though in his opinion, acquitances would be a more accurate word. His wife had liked to keep to herself, which had been just fine with him. He was glad, he’d told her several times, that she didn’t spend hours chattering on the phone like the other Indian wives.
He was livid when this gossip reached him (perhaps because he had the same insidious thought for a moment, when at the airport, he noticed just how happy his mother looked.) “Really” he asserted to his friends, “some people see only what they want to see. Don’t you think it is a good thing she has come over?”
“Oh yes!” rejoined his friends. “Look how well the household is running now, the furniture dusted daily, laundry folded and put into drawers.” His mother, an ingenious woman, had figured out how to use the washing machine in no time at all.
She cooked all of his favourite dishes which his wife had never managed to learn quite right, and she took such good care of the little boy, walking him to the park each afternoon, bringing him into her bed when he woke up crying at night.
The husband had told his mother once or twice that Zeneve had never done that, she had this idea about the boy needing to be independent. “What nonsense!” boomed his mother.
“Lucky man,” a couple of his friends had remarked and he silently agreed, although later he thought it was ironic they would say that about a man whose wife had disappeared.
He sat on the bed one night, watching the storm outside. It was then that he remembered an incident that he would liked to have forgotten. It had been raining that night too when they had a serious argument.
It had been the most cataclysmic storm he had ever seen with rain lashing down as lighting flickered and flared in the inky sky. Wind swirled in the air as thunder reverberated, echoing in his ears.
It stood out because he had drove back home in that storm with Zeneve.
They were on their way back home from a wedding, Zeneve’s cousin had married into a wealthy family and the wedding had been talk of the town.
He had sworn at Zeneve all the way home in the car as she sobbed and spluttered.
“Bitch!” he had beseeched. “Who said you could dance? You did it on purpose didn’t you! I saw you! Flirting with other men!”
Zeneve had realised her crime. She had danced with a few close relatives…but had not asked for her husband’s permission.
She repeatedly begged for his forgiveness, the journey home was unbearable, as her husband’s foul language became more and more crude and vulgar by the second.
The night had ended with Zeneve being beaten and locked in the pantry. The husband had chased her around the house, then when he had finally got hold of her, he had grabbed hold of hair and repeatedly hit her face into the wall. As if that wasn’t enough, next he took a broomstick and hit her with it until it snapped in half, such was the force he had used.
He remembered that the next morning she had tried to run away but luckily he caught her and instead of asking for his forgiveness, he had demanded it.
But since then he had never hit her, and that had been six months ago…that could have nothing to do with the disappearance.
As the year went on, the husband stopped thinking as much about the wife. It wasn’t that he loved her any less, or that the shock of her disappearance was less acute. It was just that it wasn’t on his mind all the time. There would be stretches of time when he was on the phone with an important client, or when he was watching after-dinner TV or driving his son to kiddie gym class - when he would forget that his wife was gone, that he had a wife at all. And even when he remembered that he had forgotten, he would experience only a slight twinge, similar to what he felt when he drank something too cold too fast.
The boy, too didn’t ask as often about his mother. He was sleeping through the night’s again, he had put on a few pounds, “Because he’s finally being fed right!” his grandmother asserted,
He started calling her “Ma” just like his father did.
So it seemed quite natural for the husband to, one day, remove the photographs of his wife from the frames that sat on the mantelpiece and replace them with pictures of himself and his little boy that friends had taken on a recent trip to America and also one of the boy on his grandma’s lap holding a red balloon.
He put the old pictures into a manila envelope and slid them to the back of a drawer, intending to show them to his son when he grew up. The next time his mother queried (as she had ever since she had got there) “Shall I put all those saris and kameezes away, it’ll give you more space in the wardrobe?”
He responded by saying, “If you like.”
When she proclaimed, “It’s been a year since the tragedy, shouldn’t we have a prayer service at the temple?”
He said, “Ok.”
And when she exclaimed, “You really should think about getting married again, you’re still young and besides the boy needs a mother. Shall I contact your second aunt back home?” he remained silent, but didn’t disagree.
So on an inky, starlit night, he walked into his bedroom and sat on the bed. It still seemed to be as though his wife was still there.
The chandelier shimmered every colour of the rainbow; her perfumes were scattered here and there on the mahogany dressing table, tall like towers. The cream canopy hung above the bed, embossed with a floral pattern, blending in with the matching bed covers and curtains. The laminated flooring, still the golden colour of sand, gleamed as it took the weight of several plants in ceramic pots. And her scent still seemed to live amongst the smell of his deodorant and after-shave.
He ran his hands across the duvet, thick yards of silk ran in-between his fingers, the texture of his wife’s hair. The room was deadly silent but if he listened hard enough, he could still hear her steady breathing, still felt her moist lips.
Then he felt a lump underneath him…it was coming from the mattress.
Perplexed, he stood up and pulled up the mattress to see a bulky, blue book.
Pulling it out he saw the word diary written on it in a gold calligraphy style. Why hadn’t he found it before?
Well, he never did have any idea that his wife would keep a diary. After all, he always though of her as to a woman who didn’t have many thoughts and ideas…so even the thought of a diary seemed bizarre.
He opened it up and began reading; it was his wife’s. The diary started off on a nice tune but he discovered as he read further in, it became more intense, like a fire that is given petrol.
In the first extract, that somehow seemed rushed by the condition of his wife’s handwriting, she spoke about being very much content. How she was happy with how life had shaped itself, naturally, without her having to do anything. He looked at the date of the first extract…two months after they had been married and she seemed very much at peace.
The last account, six days before she had mysteriously disappeared worried him the most…
Dear Diary,
Today is another day, another moment in my dull life that seems ever existent of my husband’s never ending laws.
I yearn for more…. for something else.
Inside I am more than a housewife, more than a mother, a good daughter-in-law…I am a woman.
A woman with hopes dreams, aspirations waiting to be fulfilled. Didn’t he see those dreams when he came to see me?
If he did then why has he left them unfulfilled?
I wish to have a career, to dress up in English clothes, to go out once in a while. To have my husband take me out for a meal in the evening…my idea of a night out is not a trip to the local temple like he thinks.
He doesn’t understand me and what’s worse is, he doesn’t even want to try to understand me.
To him, I am his wife and that’s it. I am someone he can have sex with when he feels lustful, someone he cane beat up when he feels angry, someone to cook, clean and care for him. Someone to look after his child.
But I choose a different path now. I choose to find my own identity, to find my own personality…to find my true self.
And none of that is ever going to be possible as long as I am with him.
Inside, there are so many aspirations waiting to be unleashed…taming them is almost impossible.
For the first time I am following my heart, not my head…is that a bad thing?
I don’t know how much more I can take…how much longer I can act like a good Hindu wife. God give me strength.
Zeneve
Did this account have anything to do with his wife vanishing mysteriously?
If the answer was yes then why?
The husband had always thought of his wife to be content, after all he provided her with everything she could ever need…what else could she possibly have asked for?
Disorientated, he put the diary back from where he had found it and went downstairs.
Downstairs, his mother was cooking cauliflower curry, her speciality and had ran out of hing, which was, she insisted, essential to the recipe. The Indian grocery store was closed but the husband remembered that sometimes his wife used to keep extra spices on the top shelf. So he climbed on a chair to look. There were no extra spices, but he did find something he had forgotten about, an old tea tin in which he’d asked his wife to hide her jewellery in case the house ever got burgled. Nothing major was ever kept there. The expensive wedding items from his wife’s dowry, such as the twenty-four carat gold chokers, earrings and diamond bracelets were all stored in the bank. Still, the husband thought it would be a good idea to take them to the bank in the morning. But when he picked up the tin it felt suprisingly light and when he opened it, there were only empty pink nests of tissue inside.
He stood holding the tin for a moment, not breathing. Then he reminded himself that his wife had been a careless woman. The pieces could be anywhere – pushed to the back of her makeup drawer or forgotten under a pile of books in the spare room where she used to spend inordinate amounts of time reading. Nevertheless, he was not himself the rest of the evening so much so that his mother stated, “What’s happened? You’re awfully quiet. Are you all right? Your face looks peculiar.”
He told her he was fine, just a little pain in the chest area. Yes, he would make an appointment with the doctor tomorrow, no he wouldn’t forget. “Now could you please leave me alone?” he babbled. “I need some space for a while.”
As he could not concentrate at work, the next day, he took the afternoon off but he didn’t go to the doctor. He went to the bank.
In a small, stuffy cubicle that smelled faintly of mould, he opened his safety deposit box to find that all of his wife’s jewellery was gone. She hadn’t taken any of the other valuables.
The edges of the cubicle seemed to fade and darken at the same time, as though the husband had stared at a light bulb for too long. He ground his fists into his eyes and tried to imagine her on the last morning, putting the boy in his pushchair and walking the twenty minutes to the bank.
They only had one car, which he took to work: they could have afforded another, “But why?” he had questioned, “when you dont even know how to drive.”
Maybe she had sat in this very cubicle and lifted out the emerald earrings, the pearl choker, and the long gold chain. He imagined her wrapping the pieces carefully in plastic bags, then slipping them into her purse. Or did she just throw them in anyhow, the strands of the necklace tangling, the brilliant green stones clicking against each other in the darkness. The boy laughing and clapping his hands at this new game.
At home that night he couldn’t eat any dinner and before he went to bed he exercised for thirty minutes on the dusty exercise bike that sat isolated in the corner of the family room. When he finally lay down, the exhaustion did not put him to sleep as he had hoped. The unaccustomed strain made his calves ache and his head throbbed from the images that would not stop coming, and the bed sheets, when he pulled them up to his nose, smelled again of his wife’s hair.
Where was she now?
With whom?
Surely she couldn’t manage on her own. He’d always thought her to be as delicate as the purple passion-flowers vines that they’d put up on trellises along their back fence and once, early in the marriage he’d presented her with a poem about this.
He went over and over all the men she might have known, but they, mostly his Indian friend’s, were safely married and still at home, every one.
The bed felt hot and lumpy. He tossed his feverish body around like a caught animal, punched the pillow, threw the duvet to the floor. Even thought, for a wild moment, of shaking the boy awake and asking him “Who did your Mama see?” And as though he had an in-built antenna that picked up his father’s agitation, in the next room the boy started crying, which he hadn’t done for months. When his father and grandmother rushed to see what the problem was, he pushed them from him with all the strength in his small arms. “Go away!” he screeched. “Don’t want you, want Mama, want Mama!”
After the boy had been dosed with gripe water and settled in bed again, the husband sat alone in the family room with a glass of brandy.
Had his wife been having an affair?
Had she been seeing another man whilst she lived with him and his son?
Were her reasons for not having sex because someone else was fulfilling her sexual
needs?
Had she left him for another man? Abandoned her son for a stranger?
The thoughts made him shiver.
He knew that if the Asian community found out such things then wherever his wife was, she would be demeaned.
“Whore!” women would chant. “Fancy leaving her poor husband and son for another man!”
She would become a social outcast.
Good, thought the husband but suddenly he felt guilty.
He remembered the amount of times he had had affairs. Times when he had told his wife he was on a business trip but in reality was in a hotel, having sex with other women.
But that was ok, acceptable. After all he was a man and Indian men can do as they please…but the women can’t.
Nevertheless, he made his way to the dark bedroom, a trifle unsteady, the drink had made him light-headed. The unknown areas of his wife’s existence yawning blankly around him like chasms.
He groped in the bottom drawer beneath his underwear until he felt the coarse manila envelope with her photos. He drew it out, along with the diary from other the mattress. He tore them both into pieces. The he took them over to the kitchen, where the trash compactor was.
The roar of the trash compactor seemed to shake the entire house. He stiffened, afraid his mother would wake and ask what was going on but she didn’t. When the machine ground to a halt, he took a long breath. Finished, he thought. Finished.
Tomorrow he would contact a lawyer, find out the legal procedure for remarriage. Over dinner he would mention to his mother casually, that it was okay with him if she wanted to contact his second aunt. Only this time he didn’t want a college educated woman. Even good looks weren’t that important. A simple girl, maybe from their ancestral village. Someone whose family wasn’t well off, who would be suitably appreciative of the comforts, he could provide. Someone who would be a real mother to his boy.
He didn’t know then that it wasn’t finished.
That in years to come, as he would force his new wife, a plump, cheerful girl, good hearted, if slightly unimaginative woman to bed, or as he would beat her for spending too long on the phone he would wonder about her.
As he would help his daughters with their homework or discipline his increasingly rebellious son he would often wander, was she alive?
Was she happy?
With a sudden anger that he knew to be irrational, he would try to imagine her body tangled in swaying kelp at the bottom of the ocean where it had been flung. Bloated. Eaten by fish. But all he could conjure up was the intent look on her face when she rocked her son back and forth, singing a children’s rhyme in Hindi.
Years later, when he would be an old man living in a home for seniors, his second wife dead, his daughters married and moved away to distant towns, his son not on speaking terms with him, he would continue to be dazzled by that brief unguarded joy in her face. He would say to himself, again, how much she must have hated me to choose to give that up.
But that was all to come in the future and he had no inkling of any of it yet.
He found himself back in the kitchen as he switched the trash compactor off with a satisfied click, the sense of a job well done and after taking a shower, long and very hot, the way he liked it, went to bed and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Three years had past by now, three seemingly endless years of struggling for Zeneve.
As she sat in her loose jeans and mauve top in the oak rocking chair, she wore a serene look on her ever-glowing face.
Three years ago on this very day she had taken her son out for an early morning walk to the bank. He had complained all the way. “My feet are hurting Mama.”
She had consoled him with a chocolate bar and for the remaining ten minutes he didn’t mutter a word.
As she sat in her secure living room, she remembered how on that morning she had deposited all of her valuables out from the safety box at the bank and nervously, made the twenty minute journey back home. Her husband had been at work, unaware that she had gone out so early.
That evening, on the return of her husband she had quickly pulled on her walking shoes and a long coat, hiding the jewellery in the inside pocket. Giving her husband a half-hearted kiss as she always did before she left, she had looked him straight into the eyes…and realised that indeed, he did not love her. There was no warmth within him for her…none that she could see.
She had hugged her son for longer than usual that evening, her eyes filling up, as she knew she was saying a concealed farewell. She could not take him with her…how would she manage?
Yes, she was running away but where to?
She had no destination…where would she take a four-year-old on such a bitter evening?
At the time she had thought that it was best for her to leave her son with his father, after all he could provide for him…and as far as she knew, she couldn’t yet.
It was not that she didn’t lover him, but in years to come she didn’t want to be blamed for separating a father from his son.
As for her husband, she had lost all feeling for him within a year of their marriage.
No longer did she want to abide to his laws. No longer did she want to put on a false mask of happiness in front of relatives…because that was what she had done for as long as she could remember…put on an act.
So, her plans to run away had finally come into reality, although she hadn’t been sure at the time whether they were plans or not…looking back it had been a spare of the moment decision.
Not the actual running away…she had come to that conclusion months ago, but why she left that particular night, still remained a mystery to her three years later.
What had given her the impulse to leave that very evening?
To have travelled to the bank that morning and taken all of her jewellery?
She had no answers.
And so it was, she had walked through the front door and never looked back. Spending weeks in refuges for abused women, finally she managed to sell her jewellery and rent a small flat. Still in England, in the centre of Manchester.
She had worked endlessly for basic necessities…food, clothes, toiletries. Jobs in supermarkets, babysitting, cleaning…even temping…looking back she was amazed at how she had survived.
Yes, she had lived three years in fear too. Fear of being found by her husband. Fear of going back into that very world where she had just about escaped from.
However, she started a course at college for secretaries and within three years she had reached, what she thought to be her full potential.
Now, she worked for a small firm in Manchester as a secretary. With her husband still in London, she was confident he would never find her.
With a decent wage she had brought a small two bedroomed house and although not fully to her taste, it was satisfactory.
No more salwar kameezees or saris…jeans, two piece suits, trousers, blouses and even skirts. She had discovered her curvaceous body at last that had been hidden for years under baggie, unfitted Indian clothes.
But she often wondered that whether what she had done had maybe been a sin.
After all she had abandoned her child…who she still pined for.
Did her little boy remember her?
Had he forgotten her?
Did he have a new mother? Or had his father poisoned his mind against her?
She would never go back. Never. Even though on countless occasions she had thought about visiting her son she did not have the courage to see her husband.
However, her life had changed for the better.
Now, when Zeneve looked into the mirror she no longer saw the reflection of an abused, oppressed, domesticated Indian wife in gaudy saris.
Now, her reflection was that of an educated, sophisticated, independent, elegant woman…still Indian but westernised too, just how she liked it.
Zeneve had fulfilled her dreams now, all of them. She had found her personality, she had found her own identity and most importantly…she had the confidence to live her life, on her own terms.
As for her son, who would now be seven years old, she would never forget him. And maybe, just maybe, one day, she would get to see him…and if she didn’t, she would live the rest of her life with the precious and everlasting memories that she had of him…