Read Online Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar - Free Book Online

admired him for it even, and how she’d hated herself for loving him still. How it killed her, even today, to hear of her sisters’ accomplishments and how she hated herself for resenting the very people she loved. How she had been scared of having children at a young age, how she had hated Sorab because she was terrified of his power to make her pregnant. How she’d seen him as the embodiment of the trick fate had played on her, how she’d vowed to make him pay for her father’s mistake. How she had tried to continue hating Sorab and how she had failed. How his kindness, his mild temper had won her over. How lonely she felt when he was at work and how she looked forward to his footsteps each evening. How her terror of having children had dissipated, now that she was older, and how her heart warmed at the thought of having an infant to love. How she was tired of fixing everybody else’s problems when her own marriage was a lie. How she, yes, how she wanted love, needed it, needed to be able to give it and receive it. How she was terrified that she was too late, that she had chased love out of Sorab’s heart, just as she had chased him into the arms of strange women. How wrong she had been to punish him for another’s mistake, how terribly, horribly wrong, and how she regretted it now.
    He looked at her with incredulity, afraid of trusting what he was hearing. Some ancient instinct told him that this was not the time for words, and so he took her in his arms. For a moment, she stiffened, as if by habit, and then he could feel the slow thawing of her frozen heart. After years of sleeping with women he did not care to hold a second longer than necessary, Sorab Popat held on to his tiny, fierce, willful wife like a man clinging to a lifeline.
    Zubin was born a year later. He was a cheerful boy with his father’s easy, mild temperament and his mother’s intelligence. Dosa was a zealous mother and doted over her only child with a ferocity and protectiveness that amazed and exasperated her husband. Zubin was not allowed to join the other neighborhood kids when they played on the sidewalk, because Dosa was terrified that her little boy would get struck by a car or, at the very least, stumble and bruise his knee. She took every cut or bruise or fever the boy ever suffered as a reflection of her poor mothering. When Zubin came down with the inevitable illnesses of childhood, Dosa would sit up with her ailing child all night long, covering him with blankets, opening and closing windows, putting cold rags dipped in Tata’s eau de cologne on his fevered brow. It was as if the dark-haired boy with the ready smile had unlocked all the love that Dosa had kept hidden in her heart for seven long years. And strangely, there was enough love left over to include Sorab, so that some days, Sorab found it hard to remember the drought years. As the years rolled by, he thought of the time spent visiting prostitutes while his young wife slept virginlike in their bed, with the unreal air of a man struggling hard to remember a long-forgotten dream.
    Once, on one of the rare evenings that they went to dinner without Zubin, Sorab decided to take a shortcut through the red-light district. As they rode down the street where Sorab used to visit his favorite prostitute, he slowed down his scooter ever so slightly to glance at the third-floor apartment he had visited for so many years. He thought he’d barely turned his head to sneak a look, but Dosa, eagle-eyed as ever, noticed.
    “Someone you are knowing lives here?”
    “Oh no, nobody. I mean, just someone from, you know …”
    “I see.”
    Later that night in bed, Sorab opened his eyes to find Dosa peering closely at his face.
    “So, do you ever miss them, miss her?”
    It took him a minute to understand who she was referring to. “Miss them? Not for an hour, not for a minute. Why should I? My whole world is right here, under this very roof.”
    “Sure?”
    He had never seen her like this,