Mrs Nischol: A short story on love, memory — and a tomato that refused to ripen

The years 2020 and 2021 have been witness to the slow-but-inevitable coming-apart of our lives due to the coronavirus pandemic. Amid moments of turmoil and pain, what made life bearable — and perhaps even worth it for many of us — were the pockets of leisure and loiter we carved out for ourselves.

Firstpost’s new series ‘Leisure & Loiter’ explores the value that these acts — and the many things that encompass them such as rest, love, pleasure, hobbies, travel, day-dreaming, food, conversation — add to our everyday existence.

In Part 2, Meera Ganapathi tells a story about memory, love — and a tomato that refused to ripen. Read more from this series here .

***

The day Navin Nischol died, a tomato sprang up in her garden. A luminous green jewel that sprouted shyly from a plant that hadn’t blossomed in two years. She named the tomato Navin in memory of the actor who had once meant so much to her. A breeze swayed the tomato and as it bobbed gently, she imagined that it was nodding in approval of its name.

“How did he die?” her husband asked her when she told him the news over lunch.

“Heart attack.”

As they ate in silence, she switched on the news, wanting to know more about the actor’s sudden demise.

“He wasn’t that famous or important,” Ajay offered in way of explanation when the various news channels she switched barely touched upon the subject. Sensing her husband’s lack of interest in the matter, she decided to mourn privately, and felt a very deliberate loneliness for three whole days.

In those three days, the tomato stayed stubbornly green, showing not a hint of plumpness or health.

The tomato was mildly yellow on the fourth day.

“Mar jaayega yeh bhi…” cackled her husband from across the lawn, watching her kneeling beside her plant in the dirt. She frowned at him — his posture made his laughter seem obnoxious — as he sat splayed across two chairs, with his feet on one and his body pouring out of the other, with a newspaper sliding off his knees.

His words stung because she couldn’t manage to grow a single plant without it dying on her. Around her home in the senior citizen’s colony they lived in, gardens gushed in praise of their nurturers, gifting them exotic flowers and canopies, where a neat hedge and a few manicured roses should’ve done. Seeds were scattered optimistically, produce was grown and cooked, composting stories were giddily exchanged on WhatsApp groups, cuttings were gifted and sometimes stolen, eventually becoming tales of bravado narrated over cups of tea at the club. Gardening was the center of life in the colony, and she, with her wilting excuse of a garden, never seemed to fit in.

She looked around her at the lawn grass that rose up like it was doing her a favour — emerald in some patches but yellowing in others. Her roses were covered in mealybugs, a bird of paradise drooped in some inexplicable sorrow, ambitiously planted orchids refused to bloom. Every plant — infested, dry and brittle — seemed like an accusation.

“Don’t get upset, Sujatha,” her husband continued from his perch, “do you remember what Manoj told us? That our plot is probably built on barren land?”

Manoj the contractor had apparently shared this piece of information one afternoon when her husband had bumped into him. But how was it possible to have a few square feet of barrenness in the midst of this aggressive greenery? As usual, her husband was attempting to pacify her about her drawbacks with simplistic lies, and this was one of the things she couldn’t stand about him. Each time his omelette was overdone, he offered to buy her a new pan, unwilling to blame her for not flipping it on time.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have named it Navin,” she muttered. A dead man’s name for a new life could only be a bad omen. She felt responsible, as though she’d wished death upon it.

“What’s that? Navin?”

“Nothing,” she huffed and walked away, her mind full of guilt and sorrow.

Sujatha Nischol

Sujatha Pratiman Nischol

Sujatha. N

Sujatha weds Navin

Mrs Sujatha Nischol

Mrs Nischol

Natasha Nischol, Arjun Nischol

The last page of her exercise notebook in college teemed with possibilities for her future. Within the confines of that page she blossomed from a timid Arts student into a glamourous married woman — the wife of a famous film star. Each name promised evolving identities; some days, on the page, she chose to hold onto her maiden name, tucking it snug and safe within her new husband’s surname; sometimes she became the mother of two children — a girl and a boy; and on other days, she was simply an anonymous missus whose title carried weight.

She thought of her old friend Meenakshi, whose notebook had an identical last page. Despite the similarity of their desires, their dreams were so vague that they’d never considered the possibility of fighting over the actor. Instead, she’d passionately watched each of Navin Nischol’s films with Meenakshi in Regal, beginning with Savan Badhon.

In the dark of that theatre, each girl imagined herself as Rekha with her ample hips, soft, round cheeks and big eyes, being tenderly embraced by the tall and gawky Nischol. Soon after the film, their flat, long braids rose to mid-sized bouffants, and each girl truly believed in her remarkable beauty and the very real possibility of a long-limbed man whisking them away from their ordinary lives. They began to scour film magazines for stories of him, they tore his pictures out and pressed them deep into the hearts of their books, adding an occasional homage of dried flowers to keep him company.

She wondered if Meenakshi had been sad to hear the news of the actor’s demise. They had bonded over their affection for the actor at a time when their classmates had worshipped Rajesh Khanna.

“Do you remember when Rajesh Khanna got married?” she asked Ajay that evening. They were walking back from the market, their bags brimming with gourds, beans, potatoes and onions. She didn’t wait for him to answer, eager to share a memory. “You know a girl in my class heard the news, sat down on her bench and wept for a whole hour. She was heartbroken because Dimple was around our age… ‘It could have been me!’ she kept saying.”

She couldn’t remember the girl’s name, not even her face — only that her shoulders shook violently as she rested her head on the desk and wept noisily between her elbows. Some girls tried to console her, rubbing her back and offering sympathies because many of them were equally disappointed, but most just laughed. Who was silly enough to believe they’d actually marry a film star? But Sujatha felt deeply for the weeping girl; even fantasies are built on a measure of hope.

When Sujatha met Ajay for the first time, he had stared at a spot between her neck and shoulder, unwilling to meet her eyes. “You’re a bit darker in person,” he’d said to her, before he could check himself. But he took too-quick a sip of his tea and added, “these photographers whiten everyone and no one looks like themselves.” He finally looked up at her face, and looked away immediately, as though to gaze at her so intimately would be an intrusion.

Ajay was fairly tall, with thick bushy eyebrows and a handlebar mustache that hid most of his face. She wondered how he’d look if he smiled. She couldn’t be sure if she found him attractive, he was too fidgety for her to take him seriously. But these things hardly mattered because she’d resigned herself to marrying him long before she’d met him. Her father had mentioned quite a number of times his many virtues, including his good family, his stable government job and his ability to care for her in the future. It was as though these repetitions were meant to warn her that a refusal of his proposal would be a dismissal of their good intentions.

As they lingered in the balcony sipping tea at a permissible distance from their families inside, she wondered if her darker skin tone would dissuade him from marrying her. For a brief moment the thought of rejection made her want to fight for his favour. She straightened her back, lifted her downcast eyes, and gave him the full benefit of her every practiced gesture. With a smile stolen from Rekha, a gentle toss of a long, thick braid borrowed from Jaya Badhuri, and the skillful adjustment of her printed silk sari courtesy of Sharmila Tagore, Sujatha was momentarily dazzling.

They were married soon after, but she continued to live at her parents’ home in Bombay, as Ajay was transferred to a remote corner of Assam for the first year of their marriage. He wrote elegant letters to her in Hindi, addressing her quite formally as ‘Sujatha ji’ but she rarely replied, never having much to say. On a trunk call every Friday, each person would scream at the other, “All OK?” and respond “Yes, all OK here.”

Sujatha took up a temporary job as the receptionist at an office in Marine Lines, taking an early bus to work and returning home in time for tea. The tedium of her routine was sometimes broken when she met her old friend Meenakshi at an Irani café across the street from her office. Meenakshi was soon to marry an engineer, and they were meant to move to Canada. This move, more than her impending wedding, occupied every minute of Meenakshi’s existence. Sujatha sometimes envied the ease with which Meenakshi had adapted to another part of her life while she still struggled to accept that she was married.

One afternoon, Meenakshi rushed into Sujatha’s workplace, almost quivering with excitement. She was dressed in her favourite sari, a turquoise silk printed with a pattern of paisleys. Sujatha admired her friend, wondering if Meenakshi was planning to meet her fiancé.

“You look nice, where are you off to today?” Sujatha asked her friend who had just reached her desk.

“Come, come we have to leave right away!” she gasped breathlessly.

“Where to? I can come after four when my shift ends…” Sujatha smiled at her indulgently, amused at her Meenakshi’s excitement.

“Tell them it’s an emergency, Suj, I have the most wonderful surprise for you — we’re going to the Taj for tea. Right now!” she insisted.

Sujatha did as she was told, but as they boarded the bus to Gateway she wasn’t sure if she’d have enough money for this rather extravagant date. Just this once perhaps, she told herself. She decided she would have only one coffee and sip it slowly so they’d have an excuse to linger if they wished to.

But these concerns flew out of her mind when Meenakshi told her that Navin Nischol was at the Taj, promoting his latest film. Sujatha clapped her hands over her mouth in disbelief, suddenly concerned about her appearance – her sari was too plain, her hair too frizzy. But she was undeniably excited; she was about to see her one true love in the flesh.

Would he look at her? Should she say something to him? For a moment, she imagined pretending to not know him. She’d ignore him so pointedly that the actor himself would be curious about this one person who was unaffected by him.

“We’re here…stop dreaming!” teased Meenakshi, as though she knew exactly what Sujatha was thinking. Both women laughed, overwhelmed by their unexpected adventure.

At the hotel, they lingered in the ladies’ room, fixing their hair, adjusting their saris, reapplying lipstick and needlessly sticking on fresh bindis. Meenakshi dug into her handbag and pulled out a foreign perfume, muttering, “Canada…” as an explanation. She liberally sprayed Sujatha with its rather overpowering scent and then added a dab to her own wrists with exaggerated sophistication. Sujatha found this impossibly funny and hugged her friend, both of them reeking of perfume and shaking with giddy, uncontained laughter.

At the glamourous Shamiana restaurant they grew quieter, self-conscious in a place full of wealthy businessmen and sophisticated ladies. They spoke in hushed whispers, unwilling to draw attention to themselves, Sujatha’s voice growing even more muffled as she primly dabbed her lips with her handkerchief after every sip of coffee. For the better part of two hours they scanned their surroundings carefully, but were unable to spot a single Navin Nischol-like figure. A third of their coffees lingered at the bottom of their cups, untouched so they’d have an excuse to stay on. However, Meenakshi was impatient now; she gestured to a waiter and asked him if the actor was on the premises. “He left after lunch,” said the waiter in a slow, unbothered drawl, making the most of this moment where he was privy to important information.

“When is he back?” Meenakshi asked him, exasperated.

The waiter paused grandly and said, “Any time now… but he doesn’t come to the restaurant, he goes straight up to his room.”

They paid for their coffees and rushed to the lobby, holding hands and walking fast, their faces feigning a self-control they didn’t feel. Meenakshi, who had been to the Taj about four times now, with her fiancé, guided Sujatha to a large, comfortable couch that had a direct view of the entrance. They sat there patiently, watching foreign tourists and hotel staff pour in and out of the revolving doors. When a tall, elegant-looking man walked in, they clutched each other’s hands in anticipation, but it wasn’t Nischol.

“It’s 5:30 now, should we leave?” Sujatha asked her finally.

“I suppose so… don’t want you to miss your bus.”

“But I’ve already missed it,” Sujatha said glancing at her watch. Some part of her wanted Meenakshi to insist that they stay back.

“Let’s go, I don’t think he’s coming.”

They got up and as Meenakshi adjusted her sari, Sujatha looked back at the hollows their bodies had left in the couch — some part of her was still here, she wasn’t ready to leave.

They began to walk towards the entrance, dejected. Sujatha took in the scent of fresh roses placed in an ostentatious bouquet in the center of the lobby. She felt the urge to pluck a rose and place it in her hair; she wanted to remember this day somehow. Meenakshi nudged her roughly, interrupting her thoughts, and when Sujatha looked up, she finally saw Navin Nischol saunter in through the revolving doors.

Was that really him? Sheltered within two panes of the door, he was visible but still quite unreachable.

They stopped to make sure it was him, unable to believe their good fortune, certain it was a trick, an illusion. But it was him — just as tall and lanky as they’d always imagined, and in real life, his cheeks were an almost unnatural pink. When he entered, he seemed to carry a hushed silence with him, so much so that the busy hotel had paused to watch the star. Everything had slowed down to accommodate his presence, and to swallow every minute of his walk from the door to the elevator so that nothing would be forgotten when anecdotes were repeated and regurgitated for ages to come. The air seemed heavy with an unspoken whisper that seemed to say, “Is that really him?”

Sujatha felt tremulous, like her body was vapour and she would have to center herself somehow to feel solid again. She briefly held Meenakshi’s hand to find a connection to reality, but her hand was moist and uncomfortable to touch. Sujatha’s eyes followed the actor as she stood rooted to a spot in the middle of the lobby, soft fragmented light from the chandelier fell pleasantly on her skin, her large, brown eyes were bright with anticipation. Perhaps in that moment she was more beautiful than she had ever been or would ever be again.

She felt pinned to her spot when the actor’s gaze fell on her, and whether time had slowed down or he looked at her for a significant moment, she couldn’t tell. But in that rushed minute or stretched second, the man she had imagined a whole life with, had finally seen her. She attempted to smile but found her mouth stiff and immovable. His gaze seemed to acknowledge something but the elevator doors opened and he left her frozen in the lobby.

A good five minutes after he’d left, Meenakshi and Sujatha walked in a trance to the door, chiding each other for not having spoken to him. But on the bus ride home, Sujatha could only think of one thing: Navin Nischol had wanted to look at her, for just a little longer. As the years passed, his gaze was embroidered in her memory into a long lingering look, the look eventually became a smile. And with each reminiscence, the last page of her notebook was no longer a childish dream, but a reminder of what could have been.

She plucked freshly laundered clothes from the line in the backyard. Crisp with sunlight, they folded with an almost audible crunch. She had left them out too long perhaps, a kurta was now a lighter maroon on one side than the other. These days were full of memories of the past and forgetfulness for the present, perhaps this was what getting older meant — you chose to remember what you wished to remember.

Her daughter had called that morning, with questions about Ajay and his diet and if his diabetes was under control. However, when she spoke to Ajay, she hadn’t pressed him for details about her mother. One hot afternoon in Meerut, as Sujatha made a hurried lunch in their dingy kitchen, her daughter had walked in and asked her if she loved her husband at all. “You never smile at him,” she’d said worriedly. Sujatha, preoccupied and startled, had not known what to say and scolded her daughter for being silly. But she supposed that old suspicion had never left.

She hadn’t dedicated a life to pining for a film star, that was not the case. Sometimes when she remembered him in the lobby, looking at her, she felt cheated. But cheated out of what, she couldn’t tell.

In the 80s and early 90s, Nischol had stopped appearing in the news, but she had continued to buy film magazines and occasionally lost herself in gossip about some film star or the other, but rarely was it him. Except for the time she’d read that Nischol had left his wife after an affair with an actress. The gossip columns had viciously noted that even his mistress had chosen not to stay with him. Sujatha felt let down, she’d expected so much more from him, besides there were whispers about his alcoholism…

“Just imagine this is what he did, what if we’d married him?” she’d wanted to tell Meenakshi when she’d read the news. But Meenakshi was in Canada and their letters had dwindled until there were none at all.

That afternoon, she found a packet of manure on the table; it appeared that Ajay was trying to aid her attempts at gardening. The packet made her think about an old birthday when he had bought her a pressure cooker. What she’d really wanted was a Garden Vareli sari — a coral pink dusted with summer flowers. She supposed she should’ve been grateful for getting what she needed, even if it wasn’t what she had wanted. She dug the manure into the hard soil around the tomato plant and watched Navin again, did he look riper? Was there hope yet?

[imgcenter> [/imgcenter>​

Artwork © Divya/ @divcookie for Firstpost

“I knew him, you know,” she’d told her eight-year-old daughter when Nischol had appeared on Dekh Bhai Dekh, a popular TV show on Doordarshan. That was the last time she’d claimed any kind of allegiance to him. ‘Knew him’, was a stretch, but by then their encounter in the lobby had been dissected and embroidered into an anti-climactic meeting that had divided her life into two halves. Before the meeting she was resigned to her fate, after the meeting there was a tiny glimmer of hope — she could have been someone else.

In the TV show, Nischol, now in his 40s, had aged visibly. His hair was thinning and his gentle smile seemed like an effort. Even though she waited for his appearance on the show, she did so out of an old loyalty rather than a renewed interest. He played a forgetful, middle-aged businessman in a family full of adorable misfits – while everyone around him was exaggeratedly strange, he was a vague but solitary voice of reason. Many years later ,Navin Nischol was in the news again, this time he was accused of abusing his wife who had died by suicide. This disturbed her deeply, she didn’t dwell on it and put the article away without reading it. She preferred to preserve her memories in a form that gave her solace. And that was her last association with Nischol. He was no longer even a fleeting interest — life had overwhelmed her by then.

She thought about these things as searched for Meenakshi Menon on Facebook. Perhaps she was a Meenakshi Nair now, she thought, hurriedly changing her search words. But Facebook threw up more than five hundred Meenakshi Nairs, she’d have to spend a whole day figuring out which one was her friend, if at all. She gave up soon enough, what would they have to talk about anyway?

A week or so later, a message appeared on Facebook from a Meenu S Nair.

“Suj. I thought of u recently when our beloved hero breathed his last,” the message read.

Sujatha clicked on Meenakshi’s profile and found that she was a grandmother now, and her timeline was littered with achievements at a virtual restaurant game, as well as photos with her granddaughter. Now that she’d seen her current photograph in a grey bobbed haircut, her large, dark eyes hidden behind spectacles, she barely remembered how Meenakshi had looked all those years ago.

“I thght of u 2 Meenu. How’re u? It has been so long. Where r u these days?” she replied.

They kept in touch regularly after that, and Sujatha learnt that Meenakshi had two daughters, one of whom was married with a daughter of her own. She now lived in Kochi, close to her husband’s family. They exchanged phone numbers and promised to call one another.

Soon enough there was a call, where Meenakshi spoke with a measured calm; all her old breathlessness seemed to have leaked out of her with age. They spoke about their children, their husbands and their aches and pains at great length. They recalled old classmates they still knew something about. Meenakshi had hated Canada and eventually she’d shifted back to India, choosing to live in the warm south far away from memories of sleet and snow.

“Remember when he looked at us in the lobby?” she said, when Navin Nischol finally came up in the conversation.

“At us?” said Sujatha, mildly taken aback.

“He looked at us and smiled! How could you forget, I had shouted ‘Navin’ but he’d entered the lift by then…” Meenakshi went on.

“He looked at you?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Yes, you and me. Both of us, because we were staring so openly at him, we hadn’t moved! And then I called out his name…but the lift doors opened. Imagine if they hadn’t opened just then…”

Meenakshi laughed, completely missing her friend’s agitation. She continued to patter on about that day with such ease that Sujatha realised the encounter hadn’t meant as much to Meenakshi.

After the phone call, she felt irrationally angry and wished she hadn’t spoken to Meenakshi at all. But a more reasonable part of her mind reminded her that nearly all memory is fiction, contorted to form a shape that seems real to some, and unrecognisable to others.

A few days later, the tomato ripened into a rich, glossy red, and sprouts popped up alongside it, like smooth green buttons. She could hardly believe her luck. She brimmed with pride as she made them both breakfast, taking care to flip the omelette on time, so it would be just right. She felt inclined to prolong the niceness of the morning and hummed while she cooked, smiling at Ajay when he joined her for breakfast.

“You saw the tomatoes?” he asked her. He seemed equally proud, and she felt suddenly, sharply fond of him. She nodded, placing a hot toast beside his omelette and smearing her own with thick, yellow butter. As they ate, Ajay spread out the newspaper and read out loud from it, “His last words were: Turn down the AC.”

“Huh?”

“Navin Nischol’s last words, since you were a fan, I thought you’d be interested to know. ‘Turn down the AC,’” he repeated, without looking up from the paper.

“I was better off not knowing this,” she said, immediately annoyed. She had attempted to detach herself from those memories. She hadn’t answered any of Meenakshi’s calls after that day.

Such mundane and disappointing last words, she thought bitterly. All she had wanted was an encouraging memory. She thought of those hot, brown days in Bombay filled with hope and uncomplicated joy — she didn’t want that feeling to be tainted by the ordinariness of life. She didn’t wish to think of his last words, but she couldn’t help but think of that day at the Taj Mahal hotel, again. She had stared unblinkingly at the actor, and he had turned back to look in her direction.

Perhaps there was no way of knowing if his eyes had fallen on her alone. Because who can measure where a gaze falls, who can gauge what someone’s eyes choose to see? Only when your eyes meet can you be certain that another pair of eyes have found yours. And that evening, Navin Nischol’s eyes met hers, she was sure of it.

Later that day, she plucked the first tomato, and as it sat in her palm — smooth, round and ripe — she felt reassured by its warmth.

Meera Ganapathi is a writer and the founder of the independent digital publication, The Soup , an archive of Indian arts and culture. She is based in Mumbai and writes books for children and short stories for grown-ups. Meera is @onemeerkat on Instagram.