During my time in Vejalpur, a small little corner of Ahmedabad, I cycled through three neighbors. One of them was a middle-aged couple — the man was working with Asian Paints at the time, and the woman was a home-maker. A very typical northern-hinterland family hailing from Madhya Pradesh. For the length of my stay there, I called him “Sir”, he called me “Shekhar ji”. And “aunty ji” was met with “bhaiyaji” even though i could have very well been the age of her first-born.
Sometime during their stay, their daughter came visiting. She was pregnant, although there was almost no clue that she was, given her thin frame. One day, I got a call from “aunty ji” and she said there was a book in their house that she wanted me to remove. I think it was one of those uttara-ramayan copies that people believe should not be kept in the house when something auspicious happens. I dont know if I asked her why or if she proffered the information voluntarily but that was when she informed me that her daughter had given birth to a baby boy.
A month or two passed. One day, both the mother and the daughter were busy doing chores around the house and they had laid down the baby in the second room of the 2-room apartment which doubled as the kitchen. As is wont to happen with babies, he started to cry seeking some human attention. The kitchen of both our apartments (both 2-room apartments) opened up to a common balcony that also led to the common bathrooms so as I stepped out of my kitchen, I could see and hear the baby cry. I asked if I could entertain him for a while and they were happy to let me so I got in and sat near the baby, playing with him for a while. That was my first proper interaction with the baby in all those months.
Some days, auntyji and I would sit on the verandah and talk. With the baby-and-mother in tow, these chats disappeared because I didnt want to impinge on mother-daughter time. Yet, there was this one rare occasion when I was also part of the verandah chai-pe-charcha and somehow ended up with the baby on my lap for a long time. I would like to think he was happy to lie there for all that time because he didn’t cry, and he was rather chirpy on that bright new morning. Eventually, as it happens with babies, he ended up peeing on me. Aunty-ji was apologetic for no reason and I had to pull out one of those old irrational beliefs of my people that “a baby relieving itself on you is a sign of bonding” to ease her mind.
Months before all this, there was this one late night when aunty-ji frantically called me. I found her husband sweaty, somewhat out of breath and complaining of a left-arm pain, queasiness and discomfort writ large on his face. He had a bike, fortunately (because I had only a bicycle), so I drove him to the nearest clinic late in the night. The doctor took a cardiogram and told me that the man had almost had a heart-attack and would need to be under observation and possibly shifted to a bigger hospital in the morning. During that week of hospitalization, I would chauffeur aunty-ji to and fro the hospital along with delivering home-cooked food to the recuperating man. Somehow, in the midst of all that solitude, it felt like I was a useful part of a family for the first time in my life.