Colors of ownership, and other approximations of happiness

Reena Kapoor

She came daily to sit silently by his bed for an hour. There was rarely any exchange. But today, as soon as she sat down, he whispered, “Sumitra, I have to go…” Her head whipped up. Did she imagine it? He was looking at her. He rasped again, “Sumitra... I must go!” An unfamiliar hope bubbled up in her, but fear rose faster.

Five years ago, a devastating stroke left him bedridden, barely able to talk. Sumitra had rushed home from a funeral in New York to a life where she suddenly found herself in charge. Even then, she followed his instructions from the IMPORTANT: Do this in case of emergency list he had meticulously created for her years before the stroke. The list mandated strict instructions and a specific order of operations. Also included: a list of approved care facilities.

Within a month of the stroke, Sumitra had moved him to one of his “approved facilities.” Now, she visited him daily, in this spacious room with a window over the Santa Cruz mountains and a TV large enough to swallow the remains of his attention. Early on, caregivers at the facility urged Sumitra to decorate the walls, bring family photos, adorn the room with objects of his affection. She would smile but return, as always, bare-handed.

When friends wanted to visit him, she refused. Visits agitate him, she lied without compunction. Now when she came, often the same nurse would stop by to clean him and change his clothes. The nurse was a garrulous woman, seemingly in her early forties, portly and pink. “Handsome dude,” she would wink at Sumitra before adding: “No wonder he went for a tan hottie like you!”

Sumitra would smile without comment. Stupid nurse didn’t understand that someone like him would never choose a woman of Sumitra’s dark hue without a price.

Sumitra’s daily visits maintained the familiarity of their inert arrangement. In their thirty-year marriage, he rarely noticed her, including the three times he had fucked her. She learned to abide by his pronouncements, directions, even displeasures that were expressed with only the barest acknowledgement of her existence. She was free to live as she chose, as long as she didn’t get in his way.

And if she did, his disapproval came fast, without threat or drama. She wondered if this was how those patronized by royalty lived.

Within a year of getting married, in foolish bewilderment she had returned to her parents to protest her invisibility. She wanted more from marriage. But they’d looked at her with incomprehension. Didn’t she understand her place? Then, when she found herself pregnant, she stopped thrashing and went back, finally settling into her dark-skinned fate. Even bodies filled with so much loathing still made room for babies, she marveled. Maybe the arrival of new life would change things. But their daughter arrived into the world having inherited her father’s qualities: beautiful, self-absorbed, incapable of tenderness or contrition. Sumitra’s invisibility only deepened.

Sumitra’s earliest memory was from her own childhood. Age three. Her grandmother scolding her to scrub hard as she bathed. Wash it off! Rub turmeric. Fair & Lovely cream. Nothing worked. That half-millimeter of darkness pervaded every square inch of her life. “Family legacy from your father…” her fair-skinned mother would scoff. Luckily her father was rich. As soon as she turned twenty-one, he arranged her marriage to “the catch of the decade”:  Well-qualified, an American job and, as a bonus—good looks!

The wedding was suitably accessorized. Arriving on an elephant, the groom was awarded a car, a posh south Delhi flat, a sizeable check. No one used crude words like dowry. By then, Sumitra had learned acquiescence. She didn’t ask what measure of guilt, expedience and ambition were exchanged in this bargain, or whether her parents might have been aiming for some measure of happiness for her, even if only an approximation.

Now, thirty years later, she was standing over her husband’s helpless body, shaking, because he had called her by her name. Probably a random neuron misfiring in his disintegrating brain, she thought, quashing hope as he fell back asleep. The next day when she arrived, he was restless again. She was about to sit down when he called her, pleading, “Sumitra! Take me to Monica. Don’t tell your father. He won’t let me.”

His eyes were spilling tears on to his pillow. Sumitra went up to him. “Monica? Which Monica?” The only Monica she knew was her cousin, her uncle’s daughter. Younger than Sumitra by a couple of years, with the same dark inheritance. But Monica was no invisible creature. She had earned the family’s disapproval for her brashness, even refusing marriage. A foolish bargain considering she was even darker than Sumitra. As if they would have lined up for her! An unrepentant black sheep, Monica had eventually moved to New York to study, and built her life there. But five years ago, she had died in a freak accident breaking her neck in an awkward fall from the chair she had climbed trying to change a bulb in her apartment. Her death had occurred about the same time that Sumitra’s husband suffered his stroke.

“Monica?” Sumitra hesitated as the skin on her neck started to heat.

Her husband continued pleading, “Take me to Monica. Your father…paid off the house and won’t let me go to Monica.”

Sumitra felt bile rising. “My father is dead…so is Monica, you fool!” She found herself shouting. He looked at her as if he'd never seen her before. Then he started to whimper, “I love you, Monica. I’m sorry.” People like him never worried about their precariousness. Sumitra’s hand rose and slapped him hard across the face. She looked at her hand, and then at him. Then her hand rose again. And again. He was sobbing. She walked back to the chair to pick up her things. He was still crying when she walked out.

Sumitra was panting when she reached her car. She was suddenly accounting for the last several years. Her husband’s stroke had arrived exactly five days after Monica’s death. Sumitra had flown to New York to console Monica’s parents. Those five days in New York were the only time in their marriage that he had called her daily. She had almost let herself believe that maybe her penance was paying off. But when she didn’t hear from him on the fifth day, she called their neighbor to check on him. She had rushed home as soon as she learned of his stroke. 

And here he was immobile, paralyzed, and recklessly drooling all over the one spark of hope she had dared.

Now when she reached home, she went straight into his office. A place she had not been allowed into when he ruled. She rummaged around, unlocking cabinets, shuffling old files, tapping for hidden drawers. She pulled house papers from a folder and noticed her own father’s signatures everywhere. A neat sum had indeed paid off the house signed over by her father, forever sealing her future. Another approximation of happiness, or just ownership changing hands? At least payoff to preserve a marriage was, strictly speaking, not a dowry.

Sumitra couldn’t sleep that night. An old nightmare returned. The house was on fire. In her dream, she stood at the window looking out at her father, who simply watched. Her mother was nowhere. The soot from the fire was settling on her skin and she tried in vain to scrape it off.

She woke up sweating and returned to her husband’s office. This time she opened the top drawer of his desk. There, in plain sight, was Monica, standing in the middle of what seemed to be at least a decade-old family photo, her head thrown back. Sumitra was not in the photo. Taken in her grandmother’s garden, the photo included various family members including Sumitra and Monica’s parents – two dark brothers with their fair-skinned wives – along with Monica, and Sumitra’s daughter and husband. Sumitra was not in the photo. Sumitra’s husband was standing next to Monica, and she was leaning towards him. His hand may have been resting on the small of Monica’s back. It was hard to know for sure. But Sumitra knew. For sure. She turned the photo over. In his handwriting were two dates - Monica’s birth and death.

Sumitra noticed his face bore an expression she had never once seen: gratitude. For a fleeting moment, Sumitra felt a twinge of pleasure at Monica’s darker skin. Then a fury curled her lip. Monica was laughing straight into the camera, her chin raised. Refusing to apologize.

Sumitra did not go in to see him the next day. Or the next, or the next. A week later her phone rang. She picked it up. It was the pink nurse talking very fast, “Mrs. Sumitra, I’m so very sorry. I found your husband this morning…”

Sumitra stopped listening. She was staring at the walls of her home, covered in soot. How was she ever going to scrape it all off?

Reena Kapoor is an “army brat” who grew up all over India, attending eight schools. Her poetry collection Arrivals & Departures reflects this wandering sensibility. Her work has appeared in Tiny Seed Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Visible and India Currents. EnActe Arts produced four of her plays. Visit Reena at arrivalsanddepartures.substack.com/.