[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 54: The Hearing

The family court in Alipore is a red-brick building from the British time with ceiling fans that turn too slowly and a corridor outside the courtrooms where people sit on long wooden benches for hours, waiting for their names to be called. Couples sitting at opposite ends of the same bench, not looking at each other. Grandmothers holding sleeping babies. Lawyers in black coats walking up and down with files under their arms, talking into their phones.

Our case was listed for the twenty-third of February. I arrived at ten with Fatima. Poroma was already there.

She was sitting at the far end of the bench between her mother and father. She was wearing the white saree with the red border again. Her father sat bolt upright beside her in his navy blazer with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead. Her mother was reading a medical journal. When I came in, Dr. Mukherjee looked up and nodded to me, once, politely, the way you nod to a colleague. The Commander did not look at me at all.

Poroma looked up. She met my eyes for a second across the corridor. Then she looked down again.

We had not seen each other since the night in Rahul's flat. Six weeks.

So much had happened in those six weeks that I had trouble keeping it in order.

Rahul had been charge-sheeted. The cyber cell had identified forty-one of the sixty-eight women on his laptop. Nine of them had come forward to give statements, including Nandini from Delhi, whose husband had flown down with her. Sutapa had given hers on the second of February, with me sitting outside Banerjee's office. She came out an hour later with her face washed clean and white, and took my hand in the corridor without saying anything. The magistrate had refused Rahul bail. Banerjee said the trial would take two years at least. He said it with satisfaction.

Head office had restored my contracts to my record, formally, in writing. Mr. Gupta had asked that his account be transferred back to me. Last week the MD from Mumbai had called me personally, a man I had never spoken to in ten years, to say that the company owed me "an apology and a conversation about my future". I had not decided yet what I wanted that conversation to be about.

Rashmi was in Bangalore. She sent me photos sometimes: Tuktuki on a swing, the view from her new office, a dosa the size of a cricket bat. I sent her a video of Nupur doing the cobra's voice for Sutapa on a Sunday evening. Nupur hissing Nag! Nag! while Sutapa pretended to be terrified and hid behind a cushion. Rashmi replied with a single line: I've watched it twelve times.

And Poroma's lawyer, a quiet elderly man from a firm on Old Post Office Street, had written to Fatima on the tenth of January. His client wished to convert the contested petition into a petition for divorce by mutual consent. His client would not contest the custody application. His client requested reasonable visitation rights, and would accept whatever terms the court and the children's father considered appropriate. His client waived all claim to alimony and maintenance.

Fatima had read it to me in her chamber twice. Then she had taken her glasses off and looked at me for a long time.

"I've never had a letter like this," she said. "Not in fourteen years. Not once."

Our names were called at a quarter to twelve.

Mrs. Chakraborty's courtroom was small and shabby, with green walls and a portrait of Gandhiji above her chair, and the fan overhead creaking in a slow circle. She was a small grey-haired woman with reading glasses on a chain and a face that had heard every lie human beings could tell each other about marriage. She looked at the file. Then she looked over her glasses at the two of us, standing on either side of the narrow room with our lawyers.

"Mr. Sen. Mrs. Sen." She turned a page. "I see the petition has been converted to mutual consent. I see Mrs. Sen is not contesting custody." She looked up at Poroma. "Mrs. Sen, I want to hear this from you, not your lawyer. Do you understand what you are agreeing to?"

Poroma stepped forward.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You understand that the children will live with their father. That you will have the visitation agreed in these terms. Every Saturday from ten until six, every Wednesday evening from four until eight, and alternate festivals. Unsupervised, with effect from today. That if you wish these terms changed in future, you will have to come back to this court and ask."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You understand you are waiving maintenance. You are a woman with no current income. Your lawyer has advised you of what that means?"

"He has, ma'am." Poroma's voice was low and steady. "I have a degree in English literature from Presidency College that I've never used. I've started applying for teaching posts. My mother is helping me with rent for a small flat in Jodhpur Park until I find something." She paused. "I don't want my husband's money, ma'am. I've taken enough from him."

Mrs. Chakraborty looked at her for a long moment over her glasses.

"The court has received the report of the social worker from your supervised visits," she said. "And a letter from a Dr. Sharmila Mukherjee, who I understand is your mother, stating that you have been attending counselling with a psychologist at Woodlands twice a week since the twelfth of January." She turned another page. "And I have received, through Ms. Ahmed, a copy of a security officer report from the cyber cell at Lalbazar, describing your conduct on the night of the eleventh of January." She took off her glasses and let them hang on their chain. "Is there anything you would like to say to the court, Mrs. Sen, before I record your consent?"

Poroma was silent for a moment.

Behind her on the bench, her father had not moved. But I saw his hand, on his knee, close into a fist.

"Only one thing, ma'am," Poroma said. "If I may."

"Go on."

"The interim order you made in December. Giving my children to their father." Poroma's voice did not waver. "I want to say that you were right. I watched the same footage you watched. I didn't deserve them. I'm trying to become someone who does. But I didn't then." She took a breath. "That's all."

The fan creaked overhead. Somewhere in the corridor a baby was crying.

Mrs. Chakraborty looked at Poroma for a long time. Then she put her glasses back on and picked up her pen.

"I have been sitting in this chair for nineteen years," she said, writing, not looking up. "I have heard a great many mothers tell me they were wrong. They usually say it after I have ruled against them." She signed something. "Consent recorded. In light of the parties having lived separately and the circumstances placed before the court, the cooling-off period is waived under the Supreme Court's guidance in Shilpa Sailesh. Decree of divorce by mutual consent is granted. Custody of the minor children Nupur and Rajiv to the father. Visitation to the mother as per the agreed terms." She looked up. "Next matter."

And that was it. Ten years of love and eight years of marriage, Presidency College and a wedding in Behala and two children and a Holi party and Mandarmoni and nine months of lies, and a camera on top of a wardrobe. Ended in eleven minutes, under a creaking fan, in a small green room.

Outside in the corridor the Commander was waiting for me.

He stepped in front of me as I came out with Fatima. Poroma was a few steps behind, with her mother. He did not look at his daughter. He looked at me.

"Sen," he said. "A word."

Fatima glanced at me. I nodded, and she moved away down the corridor.

The Commander stood there in his navy blazer for a moment, looking at a point somewhere past my left shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.

"When she told me she was marrying you," he said, "I said you weren't good enough for her. I said a sales clerk from Behala with no family name would never be able to give her the life she deserved. I said it to her face. I said it at your wedding." He paused. "I've thought about that a great deal these last six weeks."

I waited.

"I was wrong," he said. "About which of you wasn't good enough." He finally looked at me. His eyes were exactly the same ice-blue as hers, and wet. "I'm not saying that to hurt her. She knows. She's heard it from me already. I'm saying it because you deserve to hear it, and I owe it to you, and I'm an old man and I don't want to die still owing it."

He held out his hand.

I looked at it for a moment. The hand of a man who had commanded ships. Who had never once in her whole life raised it to his daughter.

I shook it.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

He nodded once, curtly, as if something had been entered in a log. Then he turned and walked away down the corridor, very straight. As he passed his daughter he put one hand briefly on her shoulder without stopping. She closed her eyes.

Poroma came over to me after her parents had gone out to the car.

We stood by a dusty window looking down at the court compound. Lawyers' scooters were parked in rows, and a man was selling cut guava with chilli salt from a basket, and a goat was grazing on a patch of grass by the gate, with no apparent owner, completely unbothered.

"Saturday," she said. "Ten o'clock."

"Ten o'clock. Didi will have them ready."

"Can I take them to the Victoria Memorial?" She said it carefully. "Nupur's never been inside. I thought, the gardens, the museum, the paintings of the old ships." A tiny pause. "I'd like to go back there and have it be a place for something good."

I thought about the Victoria Memorial gate at night. A parked car. The lights blurring through a windscreen.

"Yes," I said. "She'd love that. Take Rajiv's hat. He burns."

"I know he burns." Almost a smile. "I'm still his mother."

"I know you are."

She looked at me sideways, then down at the guava seller and the goat.

"Ranjeet," she said. "I have one wish left."

I turned and looked at her.

"From the bet," she said. "In March. When I won and you lost and you gave me three wishes. I used two. The first, and the second." She did not need to say what they were. "I never used the third."

"Poroma."

"I'm not going to use it now," she said quickly. "Not today. It's not the right day. I just wanted you to know I remember. That I'm not going to pretend I don't." She turned to face me properly. "When I use it, it won't be for me. I promise you that. I just wanted you to know I haven't forgotten I have it."

I looked at her for a long time. The plain white saree. The empty parting in her hair where the sindoor had been, every day for eight years. The thin, tired, stubborn face.

"All right," I said.

She nodded. Then she turned and walked away down the long corridor, past the wooden benches full of other people's broken marriages. She did not look back.