Abruptly, in the middle of his afternoon nap, Satyavrat Karve – Joint Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, long retired, woke up to find himself sitting in a pool of his own urine. Immediately, he was so engulfed by panic that there was no room for embarrassment. He tried to push the blanket off but his movements were so disjointed and heavy that he staggered and almost fell back. Everything was soaked – the draw sheet, the coverlet on top and the blanket. He did not know how it had happened. One minute he was sleeping peacefully and then, the clammy wetness of his dhoti against his skin. He tried clumsily to roll the draw sheet into a ball and push it somewhere, out of sight, before his daughter-in-law came in. He also had to change his dhoti.

‘But Baba,’ he could hear her slightly plaintive voice, ‘Your susu pot is right there, on the window sill!’
He glared at the white bulbous monstrosity, sunning itself on the window sill like a fat cat. It had been of no help at all.
This was the first time it was happening in the daytime. Some weeks back it had happened at night. The next morning she had stripped his bed of the sheets more briskly than necessary and hauled the mattress off to the terrace to be sunned.

‘Lingi!’ she had shouted, though the girl was almost within arm’s reach, ‘Get the rubber sheet from the store trunk!’
When Kirtana had stopped wetting her bed – which was quite late, her rubber sheet had been put away, just like her nappies and bibs and clothes, presumably for the next child. There had not been another child. But those things had remained in the attic, waiting in hope.
Even now, when he got under the blanket, he flinched at the hateful coldness of the rubber sheet under the thin draw sheet. He usually lay huddled for some time, till the warmth crept in.
Such strange things were happening to him of late. A few weeks back he had been sitting at the table, eating his soup with a spoon as usual, when he had fallen sideways. He could not remember very clearly, except the sudden rush of panic and fear, the wild flailing of limbs and his deep churning shame because he was clinging to his daughter-in-law and his dhoti had fallen open.

After that his routine underwent a complete change. His meals were brought to his room. In fact he stayed in his room most of the time. Usually he walked down the road to the park in the evenings and sat on the bench there. Sometimes a few other men, dressed like him in a coat and muffler, shared his bench, but he didn’t talk to them of course. After some time Lingi would come and fetch him. He had employed a boy to take him walking everyday but the boy had become so irregular that he had had to dismiss him. He had given it all up now. He had tried walking in the yard but of late he was not so sure. Kirtana’s toys and her cycle were always lying about or his daughter-in-law would have watered the plants leaving the whole place wet, even the concrete block. Suppose he slipped or fell over something. At his age his bones would never mend, as she had told him over and over again. So he took to walking inside the house; from his room into the verandah, then into the drawing room, round the dining table, the show case in which his citations were prominently on view, including the President’s gold medal – no, his son had not been able to match his achievements, had come nowhere near, in fact, and would probably retire as a middle rung officer in his nationalised bank, once more round the sofas and the television – but only in the afternoons when there was no danger of getting in anyone’s way and there were no visitors.

One day there were ants crawling in his tea. Small black ants struggled in the brown pool groping for a foothold on the smooth white insides of the cup, only to fall back again. But she could not see them.

‘No Baba, there is nothing in your tea,’ her voice pained with patience. ‘Drink it up. Ask Lingi if you like.’
The servant girl had just giggled. ‘Black ants are good for the eyes,’ she had said. His daughter-in-law had scolded her and sent her off.
He was unsure of so many things these days. Even to come and sit in his own drawing room, especially when there were visitors. But there was no need to be so afraid. The board outside the house still read ‘Satyavrat Karve, B.A. (Hons), M.A., I.A.S. (Retd)’. But he himself did not feel like meeting anybody. People irritated him. They seemed to have such poor memories – they kept asking him the same questions again and again.

They looked after him well. He had no complaints as such. He only had to ring the bell by his bedside to summon someone. His son read the newspaper to him when he came home from the bank. He had bought him a transistor to listen to the news in his room. The child avoided him and he was glad of it. He had never liked children. No, he had no complaints against his daughter-in-law even. From time to time she would come in to ask whether he wanted anything to eat or drink, whether he wanted his susu pot.

To be fair to her, she respected him. From his room he could hear her talking to guests. ‘Oh those!’ she would explain as first time visitors admired the long, sharp spears tufted with colourful feathers, fixed to the wall. ‘They were gifted to my father-in-law when he was in Shillong – Under Secretary, Department of Rural Development. Posted in Shillong for quite some time.?Can you believe it, they were given to him by a real tribal chieftain, truly genuine… a head-hunting tribe!’ And she would proceed to tell his story of how he had been invited to the tribal chief’s hut for a meal and how he had eaten it in petrified haste, without asking what it was, trying not to look at the three shrunken heads that stared at him from the wall opposite. Sometimes she would make a digression in the story to weave in the President’s gold medal. She had a fund of stories about his experiences and she told them well keeping them specially for his son’s colleagues from the bank when they dropped in.

She could not help her voice or the way she looked. Not that she was bad looking but the expression she wore when she examined? the vessels after Lingi had finished washing them – touching a spot of grease here, exclaiming over a ladle with a sliver crust of dal still adhering to it – had settled permanently into the crevices of her face, as if set in plaster of Paris. She was beginning to remind him more and more of his wife, now dead. The same tight-lipped seething and selective deafness and disapproval at all things. His wife too had had the habit of ganging up with the doctor against him.
The bluff young man who visited him now would auscultate his chest, examine his tongue and eyelids, pat him on the shoulder and turn to his daughter-in-law.
‘Well now, how are we getting on? Appetite? Normal? Good…good…Motions?’
In the evening she would report the visit to his son, always in the same way, irrespective of whether he was present or not. ‘Yes, but the geriatrician says he is in good shape for his age. Occasional hallucinations are quite common he says. Nothing to worry about. If they get worse, he will prescribe a sedative. Yes, I’m happy with the doctor. Sympathetic but quite truthful…good bedside manner.’
He finished rolling the sheets into an awkward, lumpy ball. Then he stood in the middle of the room, hands by his side, wondering what to do next.

In the kitchen, the karahi sizzled. She jabbed at the potato pieces viciously. She still wore the morning’s sari with the imprint of a turmeric hand on the pleats. But she did not care. There was still time for her husband to come home.
Her sister-in-law’s letter had come by the morning’s post. She was sorry she could not take her father in this summer. She had her brother-in-law and family coming over. As it is, she was not keeping good health these days. Later, during Diwali, she would try. How was Baba, anyway? Regards to him and Dada. Love to Kirtana.
She had crumpled the letter and thrown it into the dustbin. It was still lying on the floor, next to the bin.
Kirtana sidled into the room in her spineless, ambling way and reached for the biscuit tin. She was scratching her scalp vigorously. Oh God! She had remembered to bring the medicated shampoo from the chemist’s but had no time to use it in the morning.
‘Stop scratching your head!’ she said.

The child looked at her unseeingly and as if in answer, put both her hands to her head and scratched all the more. She reached across and struck her on the head with her knuckles. A split second of uncomprehending pain and then the child broke into loud wails, running out of the room, calling for Lingi.
She sank down at the kitchen table and slumped over, her face resting on the cold aluminium top, its gravelly surface under her cheek oddly comforting. She wanted a glass of water but felt too tired to move.

She covered her face and cried a little. Then she wiped her eyes and blew her nose in her pallu, stepping out into the yard for a breath of air. The children were playing in the empty site next door. She spotted Kirtana, red hair band bobbing up and down and felt a pang of remorse. She had hit the child really hard. She would not raise her hand against her daughter ever again, she promised herself. She drifted to the tap, picked up the watering can and started watering the plants on the ledge outside the window. They were thriving, especially the succulents, which needed practically no care.

When she came back inside she looked at the clock. Already four. Time for Baba’s tea. When she was a bride she had often seen her mother-in-law come to with a shudder from her afternoon nap at Baba’s tea time. Her mother-in-law’s life had been a series of wifely duties performed at regular intervals. In between she had lived in a state of faint anxiety that she would fail the clock’s next command. Of course, Baba was now a far cry from the terror he used to be.

She would send Lingi to the bakery for some biscuits. She actually ought to be glad of the girl. Lingi was so obliging, ready to run an errand at any time. She bent down and picked up her sister-in-law’s letter, smoothening it out, carefully straightening out the creases.

She walked in with the cup, trying not to hold her breath in the dark room, pungent with the smell of ammonia. He was not in his bed but before calling out she drew the curtains aside and threw open one window. Then she saw him. She half caught his look as he crouched among the pile of clothes on the bathroom tiles, before it flicked away at a tangent. A little blob glittered at the edge of his mouth like a tiny pearl.

‘Why Baba! Have you fallen? What are you doing?’ She was down on the floor, crouching next to him.
‘Oh that! Let it be…I’ll take care of that later…come Baba,’ she held him by the elbow and helped him up, ‘Come, drink your tea.’

Fiction writer Usha K R’s story Sepia Tones won the Katha Award for creative writing in English in 1995. Her novels include Sojourn (1998), The Chosen (2003), and A Girl and a River (2007). The latter was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, 2008 and won the Vodafone Crossword Award, 2007.

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