DECAY

He lost the cook on arriving at the park, who went scouting on the sandy riverbank for a place to light his woodfire oven. He was glad to be alone. He decided on a spot next to the white honeycombed fence, spread out his handspun rug on the wet grass and settled down with a movie magazine he had brought the previous day.

From where he sat, he could see the swirling river to his right, sparkling like polished silverware. A chain of artificial meadows rose and fell towards the left, interrupted by a winding canal crossed by a wooden bridge. Pebbled streets snaked around the meadows, mostly empty at that hour. 

Ambika Prasad looked at the cover of the magazine. A young woman in a swimsuit, with a somewhat overwhelmed look, looked back. The palms of her hands rested at the back of her head, as if she was looking at a wardrobe, wondering what clothes to wear. If it became the talking point, as he expected, the pretty penny he spent would be worth it.

The rest of the picnickers were trooping in, chattering like happy birds at sunrise. The meadows turned into a painter's palette, dotted with the bright colours of discarded shawls and pullovers. Ambika Prasad laboured over the rumoured infidelities of Bombay's movie stars. He had to duck his head every now and then, to avoid the orbit of free-spinning frisbees.

Colleagues came and sat with him. On the weather, Ambika Prasad agreed it had been a somewhat arid year. From afar, he could hear the voice of the overweight cook, clearly vexed, losing an argument to a bevy of women.

Payal Mukherjee brought Ambika Prasad his breakfast. Her father was his colleague, an overseer of projects at the office.

"Here now, eat," she said. She held two plastic bowls heaped with puffed rice. Eggplant fritters, fried golden brown in chickpea batter, were embedded on them, like flags on a mountain top.

 Ambika Prasad thought about his irate stomach. "I'm too old for this," he said.

"Then just talk to me," Payal replied. Her faltering marriage had made her a source of discomfort for the other wives. She had been playing badminton with the children since she came and looked alone.

"Do you think, Ambika-ji, that I'm a terrible person?" she asked, munching on a mouthful of food.

"I still think of you as a baby," Ambika Prasad replied. "I saw more of your baby days and childhood than my own Shivnath."

"My husband visited twice, you know. Sat on the sofa, sobbed away," she said, looking towards the haze at the far bank of the river, dense and green. "It looks so odd, a grown man crying."

Ambika Prasad found it hard to respond to such domestic turmoil. He flipped through the magazine, from whose pages well-endowed women, dressed inadequately, beckoned with all their might. Payal yelled at someone to get Ambika-ji some decent breakfast.

"No one noticed me there," she continued. "His mother has gout. She is crying buckets. They don't miss me. They missed the work I did."

"The point is, where do you go from here," Ambika Prasad finally managed a reply. "And your boys, where do they go."

Payal sat lost in thought, chewing on a blade of dry grass. Her breakfast bowl was empty. A little boy appeared, carefully carrying a paper plate. It had buttered toast, a slice of fruit cake and an orange. 

Ambika Prasad reflected that he could have sat with a bunch of red roses on his lap, and no one would have bothered.