My mother had to go to Grandma’s house for several days after that. “Maybe this week is the last,” she said for four weeks. “It’s good that you saw Grandma that day,” she said. “Now she does not recognize even me,” she said. But I did not have any sympathetic answers for that. Marlena was too willing to have me over, and I was just as willing to go over to her place. In fact, the three of us—my mother, Marlena and I—developed an unspoken routine. I would return from school and find my lunch and, at times, even dinner prepared by my mother waiting at Marlena’s house. I knew that my door would be locked, and so I would directly knock at her house. She would open the door each time with that warm smile of hers and receive me. When Grandma eventually passed away in December that year, I had spent close to a month at Marlena’s house, and each day she had received me like I was a first-time visitor to her place.
The first few days had been hard on mother. She would spend the whole day tending to her mother, but in the nights when she returned, she would ask me all sorts of questions about my stay at Marlena’s place.
“Did anyone visit her?” she would ask most of the time. But no one ever visited Marlena. Rarely did her doorbell ring, and even if it did, it was someone with the groceries or some or the other bill. I was her only privileged visitor.
“Does she behave normally with you?” she used to ask too. But why would she not behave normally?—I wondered. And what is normal really? My mother didn’t realize I was a grownup now.
I never answered such questions from mother. And most times those days, when mother came home, Dad used to come back from his work too, and then mother wouldn’t say anything. I never saw the two of them share a good word in all those years, and that was very surprising to me. People who marry out of love should not spend even a moment away from each other. But if anyone would have met my parents, they would have had a very different opinion of that generalization.
The first painting took an hour to make. I showed it to Marlena when it was done. I have that painting somewhere still, and now I am actually embarrassed to even look at it. But back then, I was proud of that creation. I showed it Marlena with the same pride. And full credit goes to her for not mowing it down.
“How wonderful!” she said. I had observed that Marlena usually spoke in exclamations. Her whole life was a large exclamation mark. Maybe it was the energy coupled with her beauty that made her such a lethal combination.
“Do you like it?” I asked, trying in vain to wipe the stupid grin off my face.
“I love it!” she said. “Can I keep it?”
“Of course!” I said.
“I’ll keep it very carefully. You can be sure of that.”
I’d later realize that that sentence was the only lie Marlena had ever told me. And even that wasn’t intentional. The painting—my first good portrait—was destined to come back to me in a manner most unexpected.
I could never guess Marlena’s age in all the time that I spent in close proximity with her. She looked like a 25 to me at times and sometimes she looked like a 45. She never spoke about any family and I never asked. Talking about family is boring, I felt, mostly taking a cue from my own family. But when I had to go to the bathroom, I had to go through her inner room, and on one of these occasions, I saw a photograph on her bedside table.
The bed itself had intrigued me. It was a large bed made of the softest material I had seen. It didn’t have the hard coir mattresses that I had back home. This was soft, maybe of that eiderdown thing that was in vogue back then, and it had soft silken sheets on it. There were two pillows on it too. I wondered why she needed two. And my hormonal mind imagined me on that other pillow with her. I was learning new things through my Dad’s medical books back home, and I had begun to understand why these ideas were entering my head.
