Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel
Glaring
Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel
BS Murthy
ISBN
81-901911-2-8
Copyright
© 2014 BS Murthy
Cover
design of Gopi’s water color painting by Lattice Advertisers, Hyderabad.
F-9, Nandini Mansion,
1-10-234,Ashok Nagar,
Hyderabad – 500 020
Benign Flame – Saga of
Love
Jewel-less Crown - Saga of
Life
Crossing the Mirage –
Passing through youth
Prey on the Prowl (A Crime
Novel)
Stories Varied – A Book of
Short Stories
Onto the Stage – Slighted
Souls and other stage and radio plays
Puppets of Faith: Theory of
Communal Strife
Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of
self – help (A translation in verse)
Sundara Kãnda - Hanuman’s
Odyssey (A
translation in verse)
Blurb
In a stream of consciousness mode, Glaring
Shadow is the self-account of the life and times of a man, who liquidates his
immense wealth only to consign it to the flames.
The agony and ecstasy of his life as he makes
it big in our materialistic world and the way he loses his soul in the bargain,
only to regain it when tragedy strikes him makes one ponder over the meaning of
success in life.
This philosophical ‘novel of a memoir’ is a compelling read that is conducive to contemplate about the nature and scope of human relationships.
Chapter Titles
Chapter 1: Glaring Shadow
Chapter 2: Pains of Regret
Chapter 3: Cradle of Life
Chapter 4: Outlook for Re-look
Chapter 5: Humbling Reality
Chapter 6: Orgies of
Love
Chapter 7: Pangs of Remorse
Chapter 8: Villainy
of Innocence
Chapter 9: Couple
of a Kind
Chapter 10: A
Character of Sorts
Chapter 11:
Moments of Poignance
Chapter 12: Enigma of Being
Chapter 13: Vignettes
of a Village
Chapter 14: A Teacher of
Note
Chapter 15: Brink of
Incest
Chapter 16: Love-less
Love
Chapter 17: Flights of
Heart
Chapter 18: Gaffes of Youth
Chapter 19: Pats and
Slights
Chapter 20: An Emotional Affair
Chapter 21: The Harlot Zone
Chapter 22: A Lingering Longing
Chapter23: Smallness of Bigness
Chapter24:
Disown to Own
Chapter 25:
Sentiment of Ruin
Chapter 26: Enigma of Attraction
Chapter 27: Veneer of the Vile
Chapter 28: Swap for Nope
Chapter 29: Goring Syndrome
Chapter 30: Back to the Basics
Glaring Shadow
He had the soul of our times, and is the namesake of many. He tamed
success by the scruff of its neck, only to fuel envy in our neighborhood. When
it seemed there was no stopping him, fate dealt him a deadly blow in his early
sixties. Besides losing his wife, son and daughter-in-law with their children
in that fatal road mishap, he found his leg mangled in the debris of that
Ferrari. The intensity of the pity all felt for him seemed to match the
magnitude of his loss, but as he became a recluse, his thought eluded all, and
in due course, his tragedy became a thing of the past. But, in time, his
intriguing behavior brought him back to the top of the page three in the local
media – why he had disposed off his lucrative real estate for a song that left
the realtors in the lurch. And as if to create a newsflash in the business
world, he had off-loaded his considerable stockholding, which sent the bulls
running for cover in the country’s bourses. Soon, even as the scrip was still
crunching in the bear hug, the closure of his umpteen bank accounts earned him
the national headlines, as it heralded a first rate liquidity crisis in the
country’s banking system. But even in that gloomy setting, it cost me a fortune
to acquire his palatial bungalow the outhouse of which he had retained.
When I called on him for chitchat that morning, I was shocked to see
him shredding mounds of money lying beside him. Unmindful of my protests, as he
picked up another wad of notes, I snatched it from him as if it were the money
I paid through my nose. However, getting hold of another set, when he resumed
his destructive regimen, I said it was absurd that the toil of a lifetime
should be laid waste thus. Maybe, to clear my vision as well as to set his mind
at rest, he unwound himself, which I would rewind for man to readjust his clock
of life. But then why not reveal his name when he is worth writing about? It’s
because, the value of this tale lies not in his name, hallowed though, but in
the hollowness of life he had led that is even as his name became a synonym for
fame. However, if someone were to guess who it is, so be it.
“My tragedy brought to the fore the falsities of life,” he began
melancholically. “How sickening it was to sense the anxiety of those to step
into the shoes of my lost heirs. If only they stopped at that, and not stooped
further, wouldn’t I have taken them as the necessary evils of my aimless life!
But they began to believe that they had a case for cause of action to file a
suit in the court for their share in the spoils of my life. Let them go in for
a writ if they want to, how I care now. What is the injunction they are going
to get from the court but to maintain the status quo. Better still if the court
were to grant them this shredded stuff; won’t that save me the bother of
scavenging it. But then, why blame them? How I failed to see that the
self-worthy will not ingratiate themselves, and that it is the self-serving
that cater to the egos of the egotists. Won’t the upright seem arrogant to the
egotistic, served by the servility of the spongers. Oh, by letting success go
to my head, how I began to condescend to descend to the principled folks, who
tend to occupy the middle order. Didn’t Napoleon say, ‘The surest way to remain
poor is to be an honest man” and, anyway, they are few and far between as
Shakespeare had averred “Ay, sir; to
be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.”
“Maybe in our age of the billionaires, the
ratio could as well be one in a million.”
“You may not be off the mark after all,” he said. “Aren’t more and more
people getting exposed to the temptations of money these days, and don’t I know
how difficult it is to resist the temptation of the moolah. More so, as it
appears, Mammon and Bacchus have pushed Venus to the backbench of life. Well,
warming up to the dubious, didn’t I make it appear that only those who courted
me counted? But why would sane minds court the empty heads any way? But still,
I didn’t care that my attitude distanced the discerning, even Anand my nephew I
was fond of, and he was the last to know of my tragedy. Why not, won’t it take
time for news to trickle down to the distant relations? When he came to offer
his condolences, how my troubled conscience was solaced by the empathy I saw in
his eyes! What a contrast it was with the put-ons of others underscored with
their eyes-on-my-heirless-wealth! It was as if his ethos had placed my derailed
life back on its ethical tracks. How I pleaded with him to become the prince of
my domain and the inheritor of my fortune, and it was only when he declined my
offer, did I realize what a pauper I was in spite of my riches.”
“Don’t tell me he’s a saint not wanting to be one of the richest on
earth. Maybe, it’s his weird way of getting even with you.”
“You may know that he values love above all else, and that’s saintly,
isn’t it?” he said. “He’s skeptical about the senseless wealth for its malefic
affects on the ethos of his life, and what’s worse, the questionable quality of
those that it ushers into one’s life. While his modest station in life keeps
off the axe-grinders and the gold-diggers from trespassing into his life to his
hurt, he’s afraid that the halo of my bequeathal would change all that for it
might make him a false deity flocked by the dubious gang. That used to be my
philosophy of life as well. I always wanted a woman to enter into my life,
pulled by my persona and not seduced by my wealth for I know women have a
weakness for successful men. Well for my part, I always had a weakness for
desirable women. When Ruma wanted me to own her and her riches as well, for
good or for bad, it all changed forever, but now, how I wish I had his
pragmatism to love and to life. Whatever, that monetary rise was the beginning
of my moral fall.”
“But money can bring the best out of man and I’ve a cousin to name for
that,” I said.
“When he was a man of modest means, he pestered me no end for a paltry sum he
lent me but now he’s a silent donor of millions. I guess that it was his
insecurity then that made him petty in spite of his being large-hearted. Why,
it’s the hand that holds the money that shapes its character and not the other
way round.”
“And sadly for my money it fell into my frivolous hands,” he said
staring at the heap. “When I said at his
refusal what I was to do with all the money, Anand said in jest that I might as
well hang myself with it. Oh, if only he had told me how to go about it; can
one make a rope out of a wad of a trillion? Why money is paper and rope is
coir; money can buy rope but can’t make one on its own; which is stronger then,
money that buys rope or the rope that gets sold for money? Yet all the money in
the world cannot tie a monkey? But strangely it can bind man, even the
Herculean one! Or is it that man himself submits to money, thinking that he
would be weak without it. Oh, how I acquired wealth to feel strong and appear
so to Ruma. But what money did to me than making me a weakling? What of this
impulse to destroy that, which I had accumulated all my life. Can I become
strong by shredding the stuff? Maybe, am I not rooting out the cause of my
bane? How my hands have begun to ache already, and I’ve so much more to shred
still! Wonder why didn’t I feel any strain at all accumulating all that wealth;
what a heady feeling, the sense of success is! Why did I let the glaring shadow
of success eclipse my soul? Maybe I would never know. But now, wiser for the
myth of wealth don’t I see the falsity of fame in which I had been gloating
over.”
“You seem to be shaken really.”
“I was in a slumber till Anand stirred my soul in showing me the
reality of life,” he said reflectively. “And what a shock it was.”
“Maybe it paves the way to unburden yourself.”
“Isn’t it strange that unburdening itself is a burden for me,” he
bemoaned. “How tiring it is to destroy all that I had built, so to say, over my
dead soul. Whatever, can one either build much or destroy enough with bare
hands. Maybe as business machines generate wealth, we need money munches to
devour it. But all I’ve is a pair of scissors.”
“If ever you get to invent one, I don’t see any takers for it and that
saves the bother of patenting it.”
“Surely sense of humor helps,” he said trying to get up from his chair
to reach the bureau. “How I forgot I needed crutches, don’t I have the ghost
leg still? Even after exorcizing the devil of wealth, I may have to put up with
it for long. And that speaks about the power of habit that is the bane of man.
Didn’t I develop the habit of making money to impress Ruma, only to go down on
the road of doom? Wasn’t my sense of insecurity to retain her love that was
behind all that? But then, how admirably did Anand lead his wife Anitha through
the travails of life.”
“If you don’t mind my being frank with you,” I said involuntarily,
“your tone betrays your jealousy couched by the admiration of him. It’s also
clear that you wished Ruma was cast in Anitha’s mold.”
“I like your perceptivity, the acme of sensitive writing,” he said and
added reflectively. “Don’t I know you aspire to be a writer? Your muse willing,
maybe my life can inspire you to make a memoir of it. If so, pray not give away
those who came into my life and I too, but for a slip of the tongue, won’t name
any save those you are already in the know. Name them as your fancy suggests,
and what’s in a name as Shakespeare had said.”
“Why it’s an idea, and as Abhishek Bachchan says, it can change one’s
life,” I said enthusiastically. “Let me take notes,”
“Why not you give it a try as I glean through the glaring show of my
life in all its myriad shades,” he said handing me a writing pad.
Pains
of Regret
“Not to speak ill of the dead,” he began as I readied myself to take
notes, and continued after a pause, “what to make out of this social nicety
when man is so much prone to speak nothing but ill of his fellow-men. Does it
imply that since one should not speak ill of the dead, he should go the whole
hog about it when the other is still alive and kicking! Maybe, that’s what man
thinks; why he wouldn’t let go an opportunity, so to say creates one, to pour
out his venom on his fellow beings. If I were to subscribe to the perverse
proposition, you would never come to write my memoir for I should keep mum as
most of those who came into my life are dead and gone. Whatever, didn’t
Shakespeare put the final word in Antony’s mouth – ‘The
evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones’.
Well, gloating about her ‘woman behind the successful man image’, it was
Ruma, who goaded me all the way to my doom. Now that I’m failing our common
cause, won’t her soul feel let down over there? What of my mother who kept
herself away from my running shadow all along? Won’t she welcome the return of
her prodigal son to her pragmatic bosom? But even if she does, how am I to bear
her kindness having got used to her indifference for so long. Oh, if only my father
were alive! What a character he was really; when did I last think of him
anyway? Wonder how, shorn of a few bucks, I’m inclined to think about them!
When I’m finished with the lot, what if it’s a deluge of human compassion? How
nice the prospect of its happening feels!”
“I can feel your pain in the pangs of regret.”
“I’m glad that your feel of my remorse might help you to capture the
pathos of my life,” he said stoically. “How my life mirrors the stupidity of
man in spite of a wise upbringing. What idiocy it was that I toiled to destroy
the toil of my parents in tending my life in a meaningful way. Why not make it
easy for myself by making a bonfire if it. (He started throwing those wads of
money into the fireplace) What if I choke myself to death and suffocate you as
well? It’s not the relief by death but the reality of life that I seek to
picture for you to hold it as a mirror for man.”
“I find your passion infectious and feel your story could be
illuminating,” I said as his eyes lit up watching his wealth beginning to go up
in flames.
“Of what avail is a passionless writing, and the feeling-less reading,”
he said turning enthusiastic. “Hope your empathy provides the cutting edge to
my memoir. Well to give the devil its due, what warmth money used to provide
me! But in the hindsight don’t I see the falsity of it all; why it was the
warmth in the company of the inanimate. Wonder how I had endured it all myself
being passionate about love! More so, what a paradox it was as it was love that
motivated me to covet money? Is love a false notion then? Isn’t love a mental
affliction to which sex affords physical gratification without which it becomes
a by-gone emotion? But does sex fare any better in fruition? No denying
possession tends to dampen passion but won’t sex beget love in cohabitation and
so while love owes to sex in the beginning, it is the love that serves sex in
the long run, and that’s the grammar of the sexual relations.”
“In the biological tense,” I said. “What with one’s waning ability to
attract a new mate what else can one do than to stick to the spouse for sex?
Why make a virtue of a necessity?”
“There you are, but nothing in life is black and white as money too
imparts its own hues,” he said. “If the rein of passion is on the groin, the lure
of money sways the head, and the craze to possess it matches the urge to retain
it.”
“Why not dole out your moolah instead of destroying it?”
“Not that I haven’t thought about it,” he said. “It makes news for a
day but leaves no lasting message.”
“What better message than philanthropy?”
“Man might be rich without wealth and could be poor in spite of it,” he
said continuing to throw the piles of notes into the fireplace. “It’s not the
needs of the poor that I want to address but it is man’s craze for riches that
I wish to dispel. The story behind my insane destruction of my mindless
acquisition might picture the character of money in all its ugliness. Don’t you
see what a sight it makes, the burning money! How its flames seem to clear my
view of life from the smokescreen of wealth! Why did I allow my life to be
ruined by money and its minions? What else are pride, greed and such but
money’s minions? If I let the money go, won’t it take its minions along with
it? By shedding the blinkers of the moolah, won’t I be able to pull my life out
of the glaring shadow of wealth? It’s so long ago but what a life I lived!”
“I’m all eager for its recap.”
“I deem it a favor for I need to pour out now,” he said. “But should
you find it boring, say so by yawning.”
“How can the lessons of life ever sound dull that too of one who lived
it and suffered through it?” I said having been affected by what I had seen and
heard by then.
“If youth is the cream of life childhood is the cake of it,” he began
rewinding the reel of his life. “But where were the birthday bashes with cakes
and all in those days. Still, childhood was no poorer in our times either. What
did my son Satish gain out of all that gaiety I afforded him as a child? Won’t
the kids either sleep or weep as parents grandstand at their birthday bashes?
With more money in more hands and fewer children in the parental laps, even the
toddlers’ cradle ceremonies are being hosted in the five-star settings. What it
is but to announce the couples’ arrival on the grand social stage. How money
aids vanity, which in turn sustains variety. But then sans variety, won’t be
life ever boring? What a pity, it is man’s lot to take his pick, the vanity of
imbalance or the boredom of balance. But as life spares the child its choices,
the parents seem to impose their ways on the kids. Well what a childhood I have
had!’
“But of late the parents are tending to deprive the children of their
childhood by mindless discipline or by over indigence?”
“Sadly so for freedom to act and express is the essence of childhood,”
he said throwing more of his money into the fireplace. “Nowadays, while some
mold their kids in the crucibles of manners to showcase them as ‘gentlemen
prodigies’, most of the rest just give in to every whim and fancy of their kids
so as to exhibit them as brilliant models of ‘unbridled originality’. What with
the world is in the materialistic fetters, love has come to acquire monitory
color, and the parents too have come to believe that by pampering children with
what money can buy, they are showering the kids with parental love. Haven’t you
heard them say that they didn’t have all those goodies when they were kids,
jolly well forgetting that they had childhood for company as they grew up?”
“Sadly for the stupidity of man the kids pay the price of their
childhood.”
“If the childhood curiosity is
the foundation of life, its façade is designed by the youthful exuberance, but
sadly as man, he lets his vanity to transform the edifice into an abode of
woes,” he continued. “I think it’s in the village soil that the childhood can
be soundly grounded as villages are nearer to nature while the child is a
stranger to vanity. But as I left the village at ten into a small town, it was
as if I part-distanced myself from nature, and entering adulthood in a big
town, I lost the innocence of childhood. Worse still was being wealthy in the
middle of my life; why, the later-day success induces man to uproot himself
from his past reality and to implant himself in the make-believe terrain of the
surreal. How small doth the sense of outgrowing make man really? Yet, the world
is crazy to make it big, larger than life itself. It seems that man tends to
downsize the things past to make his current holdings seem bigger. What a
fallacy! The beauty of life lies in its fulsomeness, well to illustrate it in a
weird way, aren’t the skinny things on the ramp an apology to womanliness. And
pitiable still are the filthy rich on the corrupt stage of life. What a pity
that life robs the rich of its beauty, and what’s worse, entices them with its
ugliness.”
“As one’s sense of being can’t be stagnant, maybe, man thinks in terms
of outgrowing others.”
“That is by chanting the ‘dream big’ mantra, never mind one’s lack of
abilities for the fulfillment of those dreams, baneful any way,” he said, as
much of what he had was burnt by then. “But stepping out of my illusion now, as
I enter into the realms of reality, don’t I see the need for money to see me
through the rest of my life. What a paradox that my money turned into ashes should
provide a new monetary vision to me! How much money would you take along on a
holiday or an errand? Would any carry a suitcase of currency that he wouldn’t
ever open during the trip and how many make it back with the wallet still
bulging. Why not apply the same analogy to life given that it’s no more than a
sojourn? How nice it feels that I’m left with just enough to start life afresh.
Or is it a little too much even for the proverbial rainy day? How my obsession
for wealth blinded my vision of happiness, or was it insecurity. Wonder even
the moneyed feel insecure on the monetary front! Won’t that prove financial
insecurity is not an index of the bank balance but is the proclivity of one’s
mind? Can’t I see that it’s the small things that make the big picture of life?
Whatever, having shed the overburden of wealth, how light do I feel!”
“You should be wary in your situation for the lightness of being could
as well suck you into the vortex of regret,” I said in spite of myself.
“Thanks for cautioning me,” he said sounding formal in his state of
ecstasy. “Don’t I see the memories of yore surfacing as if out of the wraps? I
don’t know really where to begin and how to end as my mind is being swarmed
with so many episodes.”
“Well, you’ve to begin somewhere and it has got to end sometime,” I
said prompting him, “Why not pick up the threads from the roots of your life.”
Cradle
of Life
While I was still in the cradle life had signaled that it wouldn’t be a
case of the run-of- the-mill for me,” he began delving into his extraordinary
life. “You know that kids don’t mind the change of guard at their cradle as
long as it was kept rocking. But I was insistent that the one who began should
hold on to it till I slept off. I was not even two then and I’ve a vague memory
of it. That’s not all, in those days, women invariably used to wear silk saris
while performing their daily puja
only to change into cotton saris after it was over, and were I to be hungry
during her puja time, I was insistent
that my mother breastfed me in her auspicious attire without changing into her
mundane dress, well I’ve her word for that. The first time my parents took me
to the movies is so vivid in my memory. As I was drawn to the heroine, holding
sleep at bay, I glued my eyes on her whenever she appeared in a scene. When she
failed to grace the silver screen for long to engage my eyes, I sank into my
mother’s lap that was after instructing her to wake me up as and when she
reappeared. Well, my mother ignored my diktat, and when I woke up on my own, I
saw her on the screen. What a fuss I made that my mother let me miss her
earlier appearances! All my mom’s assurances that the heroine had reappeared
only then and that she was about to wake me up didn’t cut ice with me. I was
not even five then.”
“How remarkable it was all that is apart from your photographic
memory!”
“Without a solid memory to back it, wherefrom would a sound memoir
emerge?” he said with a glint in his eyes. “Maybe we tend to have a grasp of
the sensuality of the opposite sex well before we develop a sense of our own
sexuality, and it was a teenage girl’s enamored look that ushered me into the
turbulence of adolescence. That day, as I was crossing a house in a side-road,
it is still vivid in my eyes, as though on cue I turned my head, (he had turned
his head sideways as if he was reliving that moment) and found a teenaged
beauty with her eyes lost for me. Oh as the fuse of her gaze lighted the bulb
of my sexuality, the sensations I had experienced then are beyond my ability to
picture in words for you. Though the nascent beats of my infatuated heart made
me loiter around her place ever after, I could not see her again. But the
memory of the manifestations of the sexual attraction I induced in her never
waned, and so, I came to regard that house as a shrine of my life. Maybe, she
was a visitor at the house who might have come to wake me up sexually and not
to fulfill my life in her possession. Whatever it was, are not small pleasures
the lasting ecstasies of life?”
“I’m getting a feeling that your life may not be just sound and fury
and certainly not a twice told tale.”
“Coming to storytelling,” he said, “there is none to better my
grandmother at that. It’s true, all grannies of yore were storytellers of note,
and what cradles of tales they made to stir the curiosity in children! But now,
which child has a grandma for company and which mother is fit to play that role
when it’s her turn? Whenever I said that she was repeating herself, my grandma
used to challenge me to recap it; that I remember every tale she told me has as
much to do with her narrative ability as my uncanny memory. You know, I didn’t
read any of our epics in the later days, and yet, I’m a sort of mini authority
on those. But the icing on my childhood cake was the absence of school regimen
till I was nine. You can gauge my fortune if only you contrast it with the kids
these days who are bundled out to nursery schools with donkey loads of books
that they could hardly grasp. How sad, times have robbed childhood from kids in
other ways too.”
“Oh, how I wish I grew up in your times,” I said. “Though I’m half your
age, still I didn’t have a quarter of your leeway when it came to going to
school. I was packed off to a nursery school before I could unzip my knickers.
Maybe, the rural-urban divide persists in some ways even these days.”
“How mirthful that childhood period was though we didn’t have a tenth
of the exposure the kids these days have to the ways of world,” he said with a
glow in his visage. “But it was different with girls even in our days, why they
tend to get exposed to their sexuality well before boys can grasp a thing about
their thing. Wonder how they used to conceive those man-wife and doctor-patient
games. Once, when a girl had chosen me as her doctor, and as others wrapped us
up in a makeshift tent, she exposed her private parts for my physical
examination and it was then that I realized that she was made differently over
there. Thanks to the movies and the media, now all know all there is to know
about sex, but it was only when I was fifteen or so that I got an idea of it
from a married woman. Later with her sister, I had a mini affair; oh how we
were always at necking and petting though I didn’t press further for fear of
making her pregnant. Whoever knew about condom those days and by the time I
came to know of it, my rival for her affection had penetrated into her life without
it. Sadly for me, ignorance was no bliss for once.’
“Won’t lost opportunities leave haunting memories?”
“But don’t they last ever longer to our hurt,” he said with apparent
disappointment. “Maybe it’s my software of love that could have activated her sexual
passions to seek the hardcore gratification with my rival. Or who knows, she
might’ve been a flirt to start with, but for me the fact of inactivity was a
lost opportunity; well, the ethos of the times and the sensitivity of my soul
together contrived to handicap my youth for I won the hearts of women and yet I
failed to gain their final favor. Whatever, how frustrating it was failing to
have all those fair things that fancied me. But in these sexy times served by
pills, isn’t it fun all around what with girls willing to open up other ways
too for detours. Who had heard of anal sex those days, and if only I had a
scent of it, my story of youth would have been composed in stanzas of
fulfillment. Well, I could never cease mulling over those missed chances;
especially the loss of her favor even though in the later years I had more than
made up for all those misses. Why each woman is unique by herself and every
encounter is apart in itself.”
“That way, youngsters these days have plenty of ways for their sexual
fun. But on the flip side, the premarital sex deprives lovers the joy that is
the longing of love.”
“But then, you can’t have the cake and eat it too,” he said. “Whatever
every fool of an ass has a girlfriend these days while in our time even the smartest
had to rest content with the yearning looks of the enamored dames. Why it’s the
longing for love that shapes the nature of one’s love life and in adulthood
it’s the childhood anecdotes that serve as antidotes to its vagaries. But the
beauty of childhood has an ugly facet to it. How many lament that they were not
of the Birla household as their later-day Amabani-like riches fail to offset
their sense of childhood deprivation! Let us put it differently, being a
Rockefeller is not good enough if you are not a Rockefeller’s son as well. It
was as if my miserly grandfather chose thrift to catapult my father into the
zone, but that didn’t help my father’s vision to expand the fifteen-acre family
holding to make the grade. In a way, my grandfather was a colorless man and
none seemed to have missed him in his life or death, not even my grandmother.
Being a miser to the core, he was not even superficially warm.”
“I for one believe that of all the infirmities of man, miserliness is
the most debilitating,” I said. “Why, don’t we have the true life story of the
miserly millionaire woman that made it to the Guinness Book of World Records?
You might know that she was in search of a public hospital that too in the U.S
to cure her son’s aliment in a leg, which sadly for him, led to the amputation
of his limb. Oh, what would have been his feelings when in the end; her
millions fell into half-a-lap of his? That’s why I find the regulations of the
state like banning smoking for the so-called public good so meaningless.”
“The prohibition and other such symbolize the personal proclivities or
much worse the political agendas of the powers that be and no more,” he said.
“Coming back to my miserly grandfather, he bestowed all his affection upon me
and used to maintain that he would bequeath that landholding to me and not to
my father. While my father’s prudent spending was an anathema to him, I didn’t
show any inclination to spend a farthing then. I was just a kid anyway, and I
found nothing around that induced want in me. But as I grew up, I had realized
that there was sex for sale but by then my grandfather was dead and gone. Even
then, an inexplicable sentiment delayed my tryst with the sex workers for that
long; what layers within the layers and circles within the circles that make
life, so seemingly seamless from birth to death? Won’t that make life
intriguing to live, engaging to observe and exciting to recall? Looks like I
won’t be able to make it linear for you.”
“I think it is as it should be for life tends to stray laterally on its
linear course.”
“Well you seem to have a way with words,” he said sounding
appreciative, “and that would come in handy in your endeavor to be a writer.”
Outlook
for Re-look
“If not ingrained in concern, love is a flippant emotion, which is of
no avail to the loved ones,” he began proroguing as a prelude to his recall of
his life and times. “More than the outer manifestations of love, it is one’s
inner feelings that further the cause of the loved ones. But we tend to take
the spendthrift spouse as a personification of love and the prudence of a
caring parent as an indication of its absence. Don’t we also see families
better off for the premature death of their profligate heads? Yet, wonder how
man comes to perceive that without him, his family would be vulnerable in the
rough and tough of life! It’s nothing
but man’s vanity, which won’t allow him to either live or die in peace.”
“How unfair it is for the fair sex that man associates vanity with
women.”
“But then isn’t it a man’s world?” he said. “Well, my grandfather for
all his love for us lacked the wisdom of care to match it. Maybe impelled by
his love to make us richer or goaded by his greed to accumulate wealth, he took
to the perilous course of usury, unsuited though for the calling he being a
weakling. Lo, he sold all the landholding to raise capital for his high
interest lending. While he lived chasing the mirages of usurious returns, after
he died, my father was left staring at the principal amount as bad debt. Well,
it was like he had pulled the rug that carried the weight of his unsettled
family from under my father’s feet. Perhaps my father would have better
reconciled with his ruin had the old man gambled away the money or womanized
with it; maybe that would have been a source of perverted pride for us in our
diminished position.”
“Deprivation for a cause is a gain by itself while purposeless loss is
a double jeopardy of life.”
“Anyway, my dad didn’t give a damn but tried to be on his own as
Lipton’s salesman,” he continued. “How he lifted our family from the ruins
makes a saga of its own; well he was a capable man by any measure. When he was
all set to start a loose tea business after his retirement from the service, he
was undone by the cancer in his food pipe. What with death staring at him in
the face and the terminal pains making life unbearable for him, he wailed not
over his fate but that his father spoiled it for his progeny. That the future
well-being of his family bothered him more than his impending death moved me no
end, and I told him it made no sense worrying over something that he did not
bother about all along. Oh, how he suffered those terminal pains?”
His eyes turned moist to start with only to turn into a deluge in due
course, which prompted me to offer him my handkerchief.
“These days,” he continued regaining control over his emotions, “as I
see myself in the mirror, I feel I am very much like him, and so he on his
deathbed looked like a replica of his father. Why, there was no seeming
resemblance between them until then. Maybe, towards the end, man goes back to
his roots in other ways too. Well if only Satish was born by then, maybe my
father’s love for his grandson would have enabled him to keep death at bay for
that much longer. Why it was his love for me that let my grandfather recover
from a paralytic stroke to stand erect all again. When he suffered the stroke,
I was away studying engineering in B.I.T, Mesra, and by the time I reached home
and rushed to him, he had been in the hospital for a week. As I approached the
entrance of that general ward, I met his stare from within, and how his eyes
glowed as they espied me! Maybe, the glint in my eyes catalyzed the spark in his
eyes, ensuring the miracle, whereby he walked out of the hospital in a week! If
the miracles of the Christ were to be true, I think that they owed more to his
empathy for man than to his being the Son of God. But then his grandson’s
perceived depravation might’ve pained my father no end adding to his misery,
and besides of what avail enduring those cancerous pains. Well whenever I think
of my grandfather, I recall the nurse who never took off her eyes from me.”
“What has life come to as kids grow up without grandma’s tales and
grandpas live without grandchildren’s love?”
“The saving grace of our life was that Satish and his family stayed
with us,” he said. “Maybe it’s the birth that shapes life for fate to guide us
into the grave, or is it fate that governs the birth for life to follow the set
course, we would never know. Whatever the package of life is such that one has
fulfillments to cherish and disappointments to live with that is from the
childhood itself. But it’s the balance of mind that makes it even for man at
every stage of life that is hard to achieve any way. Why as a poor man’s child,
you have nothing, and as a rich man’s brat, you have more than plenty, and
either way it’s no cradle of balance. Maybe middle-class birth is more
conducive for equivalence as it enables one to learn the lessons of life early
on for one to have a better perspective of it later on. When I was fourteen,
‘Liberty’ introduced ready-made apparels in India and my father wanted to buy a
pair or two for me, though he himself wore that ill-tailored stuff; why, those
days, unlike in the North, the tailoring standards were ever so appalling in
the South. But my mother thought it was unwise to habituate me to such costly
things not knowing what the future held for me. What a pragmatic approach it
was! But as I climbed up the ladder of wealth, I lost sight of all the values
of life that she imbibed in us all. By the way, as man has come to barter his
liberty for servitude for mundane gains, the hallowed brand, like many old values,
had lost its appeal to the crassness of the masses, especially the political
class. It’s high time that we pay heed to the prophetic words of the American
Judge Leonard Hand, who said that “Liberty lives in the hearts of men and
women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no
constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
“Maybe but sadly nowadays parents expose their kids to riches even
before they barely open their eyes.”
“I say out of misplaced love?”
he said, and continued with his recap. “It was seldom that any visited us, as
reaching our village involved crossing the Godavari by boat, the prospect of
which scared our relatives from the uplands. As if to let me develop some
foresight in our remote village, my father bought me binoculars that summer, oh
how thrilling it was seeing the far off things so close-by. It was my wont to
go to sleep keeping it by my side, but as I woke up that afternoon, I found a
stranger of my age fiddling with it, and like a champion long jumper, I leaped
up to the trespasser to lap up my treasure. Caught unawares by the assault, he
floored the thing in confusion, and aghast at seeing it broken, I went into
frenzy even as he fumbled apologies. Catching him by the hair, I made a punch
bag out of his lean frame; and having gathered his wits, he returned the
compliment with suitable indignation. Our fight for nothing brought the elders
to intervene to affect a cease-fire and to begin the introductions (he was Raju
my third cousin). Seeing me unremitting in my lament, his father promised me a
replacement, and gave him a befitting thrashing. As I ceased crying at that
prospect, he bemoaned in humiliation. But when my father admonished his father
and took him into his fold, feeling soothed, he extended his hand to me. Like
my father and his cousin before us, we too became great chums, well that was
before my false sense of outgrowing made me snub him later on in life. Oh, how
callous I became even towards his death.”
With his eyed welled up, he paused as though he was observing silence
in the memory of the lost one.
Humbling
Reality
“Relatives are a bother any day, more so when they die. Oh how the
goddamn sentiment robs man the freedom to abstain from the obsequies,” he began
having wiped the tears that continued to roll down his cheeks in torrents.
“That’s how I viewed Raju’s death getting into my car, that sultry afternoon.
(He paused for a while as if in repentance). What an untimely death it was for
him; well, as if there is an agreeable time for it, saving the ripe old age.
Once into the thick of life, how we got estranged; did I shun him or did he
avoid me, maybe, as I shunned him, he avoided me. It’s as if the flood of time
contours the banks of life in inscrutable ways. If not for my mother’s
insistence and Rathi’s pestering there was no way I would have bothered to make
that condolence trip. Well Rathi had been my wife before Ruma took over her
place; and what a fine woman she was.”
“Maybe man as a creature is callous at the core.”
“Could be,” he continued after pausing for a while as if he was ashamed
of his the then attitude. “Entering the house, I was shocked at seeing Devi as
the widow; why she had earlier declined to marry me though I was mad of her.
When she introduced her teenage children, I realized how much water had flowed
down the bridge that separated Raju and me. When their family friends said that
he had shaped up his children admirably, I could sense my own failing on that
score. They all said in one voice that he had seen life as a source of
fulfillment and an opportunity for enlightenment and the prospect of death
never bothered him for he felt that it was but a challenge to the survivors.
Well he was wont to say it seems that life sees to it that they address its
altered realities rather admirably. Won’t the feeling of deprivation give way
to the ray of hope in due course? That’s how time becomes the great healer,
blunting the sorrows of life on the anvil of habit.”
“The one who snubbed you came to value the man you shunned, how
interesting!”
“Why that made me realize what I lost by keeping away from him,” he
continued. “As if to stress upon my loss, another said that the beauty of his
life was such that he made a huge difference to the lives of others. It was an
article of faith with him that service to humanity lies in inculcating
self-belief in people. Were Raju to be a celebrity, added another admirer, his
biography would’ve been a Bible for humanity. Moved myself, when I told Devi
how sad it was to have lost a soul like that, she said that she was fortunate
to be his wife for so long, and would’ve still felt fulfilled all her life even
if their association was far too shorter. What was more, she said that he had
given her enough guidance to go about life that she was confident of seeing it
through on her own. You may know that she had rejected my hand saying that she
could sense that I might get swayed away by women instead of guiding them.”
“But then is it true?”
“Before I come to that,” he said, “let’s see what’s this sense of
outgrowing is all about. Is it not a false perception of being better placed in
life than those we had grown up with? It’s as if they are not worth our
thought, and should they come across, we would only condescend to descend while
dealing with them. Maybe, the inability to jell for the lack of intellectual
parity is still understandable, but then, how many strive to grow
intellectually any way? Whatever, it was my perceived outgrowing that kept me
aloof from Raju when I needed him the most. Had I not shunned him, maybe, he
would have probably helped me steer clear of the perilous path that led me to
my doom. Don’t I see now that by cold-shouldering him, I lost my way in life?”
“I see it differently though,” I said. “Your mistake was that you
removed yourself from the reality of life. Even if you continued to value his
friendship, still you would have dismissed his approach to life as an apology
for failure. Maybe there was no way you could have emulated him given your
state of mind then.”
“Probably true,” he continued after a little contemplation, “but still
his association could have made some difference to my life if not my way of
thinking. Well that’s all about ifs and buts of life. Why, it would have been
the end of me as a six-year old, had not life preserved me to see more of it.
It was one of those auspicious days, and my auntie took me along with her to
the temple on the banks of the village tank. Wanting me to stay put at the
bathing ghat, she herself got into
the waters for a bath, but as I followed her on the sly, I was nearly drowned.
She thanked god for having kept me alive and thus averting a life-long guilt
for her, but I believe that it was my destiny that ensured that I escaped.
Maybe, it didn’t want to end it so soon without allowing me to enjoy the fruits
of love and suffer the pains of loss. It’s as if my life has an inextricable
link with death, didn’t Rajan’s end in that road mishap along with my wife pave
the way for me to taste the joys of his wife.”
“But there was that talk of the ‘accident of accommodation’.”
“It’s the malady of man to see the sinister in all,” he said apparently
hurt. “Why not give some credit to my grey matter if not to my soul matter?
Which fool would think of stage-managing the head-on crash of a vehicle in
which he was a co-traveler? What motives can one’s malice attribute to me for
the recent accident, which besides robbing me off my leg wiped out my entire
family?”
“I’m sorry for hurting you with my thoughtless remark.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said after a pause. “Why, you’ve only lent
your voice to the rumor that’s thick in the air. Well to satisfy your curiosity
about whether or not I get swayed away by women, you may know that it was my
weakness for Ruma that imbalanced my life. When we first met, she was somebody’s
wife and Rathi was my one-year old spouse, so the seven-year itch was nowhere
near. Though I was mad about Rathi, still I had a roving eye to which,
thankfully, she paid a blind eye, and that evening I was bowled by Ruma at the sabzi mandi. Oh! Ruma had a face to pull and the figure to
hold, why, as a beauty she could be a rarity, pleasant to espy and gripping
while ogling. Having seen me drawing Rathi’s attention to her, Ruma took the
initiative to interact with us, and had they not taken to each other readily,
well; my passion for the stranger would have taken the path of dissipation. If
not for Rathi’s premature death, maybe, there might not have been a tale worth
telling, surely, her steadying influence on my life would have ensured its
smooth sailing in the vortex of time. What a made-for-each-other couple we
made! And to be fair to Ruma, it was she who made life exciting for me in so
many ways.”
“Don’t they say that men and women make unique combinations in
different permutations?”
“That’s the way it is,” he continued. “When Rathi invited Ruma for
dinner, the very next day she brought some fine Spanish wine along with her, to
cut the ice, so she said. She told us that she crossed the caste barriers with
Rajan to marry for love; however, stuck up with the old values, their families
tried their best to bust their union and so they left for Oman, where he made a
name for himself as a civil engineer. When they felt financially secure, as
homesickness began to unsettle them on the foreign shores, they made up their
minds to windup their show there. So she came ahead of Rajan to put things in
order here before he packed up there to join her. What a time we had that
evening! I couldn’t hide my fascination for Ruma, and she never ceased being
coy at my compliments, which prompted Rathi to say that she found our flirting
rather thrilling. When Ruma blushed to the roots, Rathi hugged her like an
elder sister, and as it occurred to us that it was time to call it a day; we
realized that it was too late for Ruma to return home. So as Ruma stayed back
for the night, having made her feel at home in the guest room, Rathi teased me
no end that I had lost my eyes to the guest. When I said in jest why not I plan
a perfect murder for her widowhood to make her my other woman, Rathi said in
half-jest that she would join Rajan above for a heavenly time. Won’t that leave
Ruma and me to have a raging time on earth? How I were to know that my jest and
her half-jest were prompted by our fate!” “Call it superstition if you please but
they say tadhaastu devatalu hover
around to vet our ill-utterances.” What
with the recollections of that love tragedy haunting him, he turned morose for
long.
Orgies
of Love
“When Rajan joined Ruma, so to say, we became an extended family,” he
continued his narrative. “I admired his sense of humor and he my sense of
purpose. I always tried to excel at work though my fate laid my career low, and
so I became adept at all that I dabbled with. If not, instead of becoming a
project consultant, at best I would have been a frustrated worker, or at worst,
booted out for being sluggish. I realized that in life, as in Derby, the colt
that bolts last need not be the last one at the finish. When Rajan wanted to
venture into the real-estate business, he wanted me to become his partner, but
by then, I had seen how greed sets to break up such ventures; started in
bonhomie to share, once it breaks even, sharing becomes a snare for the better
placed partner. Why it’s only time before he eases out the other, and pushed
into the doghouse what else the loser can do than to cry foul. But then the
fact of life is that the winner takes it all.”
“Maybe but one cannot really prosper alone in the long run.”
“Call it selfish wisdom, but man is seldom wisely selfish,” he said
managing a chuckle. “Once my father told me that he was ditched by his business
partner, I don’t know why, for I didn’t seek the details from him; maybe I
should have. So, I preferred to be Rajan’s employee but he offered me a share
in the profits as a bonus for my services. Thus was born ‘Rajan Builders’ that
majored into ‘Imperial Infrastructures’ later on. With both the women putting
their heart and soul into it, how exciting were those budding days; operating
from Rajan’s office-cum-residence, we stuck together, be it for work or for
recreation, well; it was only in the act of procreation that we went our
separate ways. Matching with her man’s business concepts that began to bear
fruits, nature enabled Ruma to conceive, which thrilled Rathi no end; it was as
if she felt that she herself was carrying. When I wanted Rathi to consult a
gynecologist, she said naughtily that she was sure that sooner than later we
would make it happen. When Ruma delivered a girl child how delighted we all
were, and as Rathi missed her periods, coinciding with the little girl’s false
steps, we were thrilled no end. Ruma hoped that it would be a boy in the
offing, and said in jest that had she not jumped the gun with a girl, maybe we
would have the pleasure of espying the lovers in the making.”
“Wonder how could you have managed to hide your enamored eye for Ruma
from her man’s vision from such a close range?”
“Well I never ceased coveting her and if anything my passion to possess
her only grew with each passing moment but then as I developed friendly
feelings towards Rajan, I was thrown into a dilemma of dharma. So I kept
desisting from my urge to seduce her wondering all the while if I were destined
to have her at all. Oh, what a sweet anticipation it was.”
“It reminds me of Sathyam’s words in Benign Flame, ‘my dear fellow, money and looks are okay to an
extent to lure women, but better realize that it’s the luck that enables one to
lay them. Why, you can’t even screw a whore if you’re not destined to have her;
your visit to the brothel would have coincided with her periods, and the next
time you’re eager, she could have shifted out of the town itself’.”
“How true it is given my insatiate passions,” he said as his demeanor
acquired a disappointed look. “Well, as Rathi was in the family way, Ruma
proposed a trip to Ooty for all of us; she wanted us to relive our honeymoon
with them as witnesses. I told her that she should have known that her friend
made our marriage an unceasing honeymoon, and she said that it was plain greedy
for in the relay race that is married love, Rathi should have passed on the
baton of bliss to the newlyweds, who followed us in the tracks of love. Maybe
for that foul, fate had contrived to pull out Rathi from the course of love
with a head-on crash, which ripped the right side of the Fiat apart that was as
we were returning from Ooty. While Rajan was at the wheel, Rathi, with his girl
in her lap, was in the back seat right behind him, and as if to make her jest
come true, fate had taken them together for a heavenly time leaving Ruma and me
to continue our mundane sojourn.”
“Won’t her lighthearted remark about your raging time with Ruma make
the tragedy all the more poignant?”
“Maybe it was a prophetic jest at its prognostic best to portend the
worst for me,” he said. “Whatever, I felt that even as Rajan’s soul deserved the
rituals of death, Ruma too needed the solace of her family but all had ignored
my invite. Now I wonder why it does not occur to any that life is too short for
one to waste it nursing grudges even against those who might have slighted us.
However, Raju had prevailed upon my family to retain a hesitant Ruma to be a
part of it all, and as he stood by me, I went through the motions for the
salvation of the departed. But after the obsequies, as Ruma had shifted to her
place and Raju and the others too had left, fending for myself in the voidness
of bereavement, I had realized that women are more complete in themselves than
men.”
“Maybe their completeness is manifested in their biology itself.”
“Could be,” he said and continued,” and as if Ruma learned about my
predicament telepathically, she came back to my place to light the stove the
next morning before sunrise that is. Well in the privacy of our tragedy, we
began to console each other as we only could, but finding our outpourings were
unequal to our feelings, we came to cling on to each other to let our mutual
empathy seep through our skins. What with that physical proximity in our
emotional upsurge infusing a sense of oneness in us, we insensibly felt closer
to each other and, maybe, moved by the effusion of affection our minds nurtured
for each other, our hearts goaded us to unite our bodies for our mutual solace.
So, we came to ‘live-in’ so soon after losing our spouses.”
“That’s why it’s said that fact is stranger than fiction.”
“Why not,” he said. “Fiction is but the product of an author’s
imagination about the possibilities of life, but the course of life is shaped
by human proclivities that are beyond anyone’s grasp. In her emotional upsurge
in our coition, Ruma told me that she always felt attracted to me in spite of
herself, and how hard it had been for her to restrain her desire for me to
retain her chastity. When I confessed about my own weakness for her, she told
me that she could nuance it from my awkwardness in her presence; and about her gripping
sex appeal on me, she said coyly that she had a full measure of it in her
fantasies. I told her that I had even conceived a perfect murder to make her
mine that was before I became friendly with Rajan, and she saw the hand of our
love in the coupe d’etat of life.
While the ecstasy of sex kept our sadness at bay, we clung to one another to be
solaced by each other, oh, what an unceasing sexual indulgence it was, nursed
by my craze for her body and fuelled by her craving for my lovemaking. Oh, how
during our live-in, we became oblivious of everything other than our
post-mourning wedding, and in an ironic symbolism of mourning, she handed over
Rajan Builders to me as dowry-in-advance.”
“It reminds me of Sugreeva’s mourning-period orgies with Ruma, his brother
Vali’s widow in the Ramayana? What a
coincidence that your mate is a namesake of that woman, and you, like him,
sidelined your obligations in the pursuit of carnal pleasures.”
“Your analogy is appropriate but you got the name wrong. Sugreeva’s
wife was Ruma and Vali’s widow was Tara.”
“Maybe losing our cultural moorings is a side-effect of the
westernization of our education,”
“You lose something to gain some other thing don’t you?” he said. “But
the poetic imagination in the epics is hard to find even in the fictional
aspects of the best of novels; maybe the social restraints of our times wrap up
novelistic ideas in our cultural folds. When we thought that it was time to get
married for form’s sake, we broke the news. While her folk felt it was redeeming for her as we
happened to be of the same caste, my people had no hesitation in blessing our
union for the same reason; seems caste rules our heads and hearts alike. Our
well-attended wedding gave her a sense of spiritual union that our liaison failed
to afford her, and again, it was Raju who took charge of the arrangements
though I failed to attend his marriage that Rathi had insisted we should.”
“If I got it right, you made it seem that she had a great influence on
you.”
“I’m glad you are observant and that portends well for my memoir,” he
said in some excitement. “You may know that in any relationship, it is the
stronger willed that calls the shots. Won’t in some ways it explains why some
men are henpecked, well, some women too are cock-pecked, a rarer phenomenon at
any rate. Whatever, how marriage gives a new dimension to man woman
cohabitation; I felt a new sense of belonging for the woman whom I made my own
for so long by then. Maybe for want of the cultural connect of marriage our
live-in was bereft of a sense of spiritual union, which deprived us of the true
sense of belonging in lovemaking without our knowing it. However, as we made
conjugal love in our nuptial bed, from her spasms I could sense that she had
experienced a rare kind of orgasm. Why, as I divined her visage in her ecstasy,
her spiritual beauty that I espied gave me a premonition of her conception,
that of a son. Never before or after that, with her or another, was it a like
feeling.”
“Don’t they say one is happiest
in the newest love?”
“No denying that but I loved to retain Rathi’s affectionate memories
even as I was obsessed at not losing Ruma’s passionate love, and that should
give you a measure of my weakness for Ruma, and the hold she came to have on my
life.”
“You loved both of them and it’s no dichotomy. Why, a man can love more
than one woman at the same time, and it’s no less a psychological possibility
with women either.”
“Is it not against the ‘one life one love’ poetic grain but life as you
know is more prosaic that poetic,” he said. “That day, as I returned home
chastened from Raju’s place, I could clearly discern the falsity of my life!
Who outgrew whom, after all? What were the yardsticks by the way, if not
material possessions then it must be mundane positions; but could they be
life’s quality indices in any way? Why without them, didn’t Raju outgrow all?
More so, he helped others to grow as well, though on a different plane. It was
as if we were dwelling on two different planets, he, on the artistic, and I, on
the counterfeit. How self-limiting are all the worldly attributes; can one
grow, leave alone outgrow, with a narrow vision. Oh, the naivety of my vanity!
Damn my inability to see beyond the self-built façade of opacity. Even now I
couldn’t help but wonder what my life would’ve been like had Rathi not left me
mid-course. It was as if such a thought process, after crossing the Rubicon
would be inimical, the exigencies of office then put me on the beaten track of
life. And that’s life.”
Pangs
of Remorse
“Every life is unique but rarely one is exceptional,” he continued
after a long pause as if he was reminiscing about his own life, “and mine was
rather unusual; oh, I had my first brush with intrigue when I was in class
seven, then aged ten. Chandu and I were classmates besides being neighbors for
our families were co-tenants. All children in our neighborhood used to flock to
his place to play caroms on holidays and his mother was wont to serve us some
snack or the other. Well I used to avoid those for they were invariably
prepared with garlic that I had always found repugnant.”
“Isn’t it said that one either loves garlic or hates it?”
“There was a king in the Roman era who hated garlic so much so that he
had banned it in his land. He could as well be the progenitor of our
present-day rulers who ban smoking in all and sundry areas dubbed public
places,” he said. “Can you imagine us smoking in the cinema halls in our youth,
why, the norm in those days was ‘smoking is no disrespect’, and now the coinage is ‘desist passive smoking’,
my foot, as if the air we breathe is pristine pure. That the addicts no longer
smoke in the railway coaches is because of the changed social mores and not
owing to a newfound urge to obey the railway rules. Oh, how the poor smokers
quarantine themselves in the toilets for a puff or two while the police on
scent wait on the sly to harass them for bribe. Before I gave up smoking, what
a pain it was in the smokeless pangs on the flights and in the trains
alike.”
“The fate of a nation is the plight of its politics and the petty
politician is the bane of the polity.”
“Beautifully put, for the fate of the peoples is governed by the whims
of the powerful,” he said, and resumed the saga of his childhood. “One Sunday
afternoon, as was her wont, Chandu’s mother served us all with some pakodas, and Shankar, younger brother of
my friend Murali, wanted more of them. I felt that it was inappropriate and
said so to him; looking back, it was an unsolicited advice, all childish, but
then a child would only think like a child.”
“Don’t we see even the grown-ups rendering unsolicited advice till the
end, and more so towards their end? Maybe fate maps the course of life through
an intellectual short-route from the cradle to the grave.”
“How do you like the Aviva ads of Rahul Dravid receiving cricketing
advice from all and sundry,” he said heartily. “Well with his captaincy gone,
the ads were withdrawn and that’s the way with the frills of life with which we
tend to shroud its ethical core. But now, shorn of my aura, I see my life in
the glaring shadow of its falsehood, and what I see but the derivatives of life
within its voidness.”
“Won’t that better the Shakespearean ‘sound and fury, signifying
nothing’?”
“It’s only proper that we remain humble before the master, who as Alexandre
Dumas said, ‘after God, he had created the most,” he paused as if in reverence
to his idol before he continued. “Back to my story, that very night, Chandu
called me out and asked me to taste some garlic-less preparation that his
mother made for me. As I had my dinner by then, I excused myself, but he virtually
forced me to have a bite at least, and even before I had a spoonful of it,
Murali and Shankar came out from their hiding to accuse me of double standards.
While I protested that there was no parallel, a perplexed Chandu apologized
that he was tricked into the act by them; the brothers had induced him to offer
me their home-made stuff as if it was prepared by his mother. Well it was the
first and the last time that I ever gave an unsolicited advice.”
“What cussedness even in childhood?”
“What’s so surprising about it; won’t the plant of a kind grow into a
tree of that kind,” he said. “Any way, during the month of karthik, our family was privileged to cater to the sky-lamp of
Brahmeswara temple of our village; and at dusk, it was my wont to carry from
home the needed sesame oil there. How fascinating it was watching the pulley
and rope in motion as the pujari
pulled it down from atop the mast and put the lighted one back in its post.
Once, lost in some sport, I didn’t reach home in time, so my grandfather had
substituted for me and what hell I raised for having been denied my due and how
they tried to convince me that there was no way they could’ve waited for me as
the lamp had to be lit up in time? But I had none of that, and insisted that
the procedure be repeated, and as I stuck to my guns, my grandfather had to
prevail upon the pujari to set a new
precedent. I was still a kid when this happened.”
“Don’t worry I am not going to give a superstitious twist to that
childhood sacrilege for your latter-day travails.”
“It’s sad that man has not benefited from the Shakespearean wisdom that
superstition is the religion of the weak minds,” he said. “Shortly after that
episode of an ill-fated advice, I found myself in a much more awkward
situation. I was friendly with a neighborhood girl who happened to be my
classmate as well. I used to go to her place for the so-called combined
studies, but that day, as I returned home, she came running after me to check
up if I took her fountain pen, and I let her search my rack and she left
finding none, only to return saying that her parents weren’t convinced about
that. And it was no Mont Blanc either, for it was a cheap Chinese ‘Hero’,
whatever, is there a kid now, who experiences the joys of refilling a fountain
pen. It’s another story that when my father-in-law presented me a Mont Blanc,
Rathi buggered it fiddling with its complex refilling mechanism. Well I went
with that girl to her house to clear my name, and asserting my innocence, I
goaded them to search for it in their own place. Oh, how fervently I prayed to
Lord Chandramouli to help me locate it, and lo I found it, of all the places,
beneath a jar of pickles? Maybe for that childhood devotion during the karthik to Him, notwithstanding the
sacrilege as you put it that God had saved me from the ignominy through that
miracle of miracles. How ecstatically I ran to the temple for thanksgiving.’
“Instead of running to the God had you been right up your street, maybe
you would have ended up being a godman.”
“Why given the credulity of man, one can’t rule out the possibility,”
he said. “But when I prayed for god’s help then, I was blissfully unaware that
Brahmeswara of our village and the Chandramouliswara of that town were
different deities at all. But when I realized that it’s the faith that makes
man blind, I began to distance myself from the religion itself; why when one
begins to believe that his religion is the best of all, I see the worst of
ignorance in man.’
“Some time in future, when science would have scanned the entire universe
only to find that there is no abode of the God, much less heaven and hell,
maybe then, man might turn his back on his religion.”
“I doubt still, for man might believe that God keeps himself away from
the intruding man,” he said wryly before getting back to his recap, “The
obduracy in a child could be the perseverance in its nascence or who knows
pigheadedness in the making. Once, a relative, who was a school teacher, came
to our place, and as is the wont of those in the teaching line, he tried to gauge
my depth in depth. How his verdict that besides native intelligence I was
blessed with innate logical abilities gladdened my grandfather I still recall;
well I was not even school going then. It was another thing that the
distractions of youth ruined my potential to excel at studies, and by the time
I had that low-grade engineering degree on hand, my grandfather was no more.
But the pain my poor scores caused my father hurts me still; oh how his tone
conveyed his agony as he said, ‘so with these marks you expect a job’. After
all, he had endured so much hardship to make me an engineer as by then my
grandfather had turned our lands into promissory notes without any noteworthy
promise to note. But later, when my brother passed out with distinction, I felt
lighter, and thanked him for reengineering our father’s dreams. But still, as
his words haunt me, I could never forgive myself for having let him down so
badly. How I used to feel that if only I could go back in time and come out
with flying colors! It could be this subconscious guilt that was behind that
dream that too in my early fifties in which I was at the B.I.T all again. As if
to prove that dreams don’t reflect the realities of life, how confused I looked
in my Alma Mater in that familiar dream setting. Maybe, it was this psyche of
failure that subconsciously fuelled my later-day urge for success.”
“Luckily for you, your guilt didn’t bog you down.”
“All the same, the glow of youth failed to illuminate the perilous path
of my adult life,” he said ruefully. “You know, my life began in the dimness of
the kerosene lamp by which I lived the first ten years of it till my father’s
love for me gave him the vision of my education in a town. I can say with
hindsight that it was the kerosene lamp that illuminated my path to adulthood,
whose fluorescent bulb had cast a shadow on the way to my manhood when I began
lusting for wealth to my hurt. Well that was after the quirk of fate had placed
the wheel of fortune in my hands as till then I craved for love to the neglect
of my studies and at the cost of my career. While the ennobling love of my
youth seemed a hackneyed expression not backed by money, all my mid-life wealth
was of no avail for its fulfillment as by then lusting for sex, I lost the
capacity to love. Maybe the singular focus on one aspect of life makes man lose
sight of the other possibilities of it to his detriment.”
“It’s the human frailties that make a saga of life and but for them
your story would have been a mere statistic of success.”
“Why you make me think all again,” he said and closed his eyes as if to
shut out any present influences from interfering with his contemplation.
Villainy
of Innocence
“Wonder how social mores affect the course of life,” he had resumed his
discourse at length “Won’t the American way of life that lets the teens to be
on their own serve as an example? While the economy is structured for their
economic independence, the society is not shaped to cope up with their youthful
distractions that hamper their academic progress. That’s why the U.S has been
perennially short of professionals and so looks eastwards to make up for the
shortfall; but what if Parkinson’s theory about the alternate ascendancy of the
East and the West comes true? What charms the sheen-less new world could hold
then to the youth of the old world for their immigration? Maybe then as a
Confucius and an Aryabhata gave way to a Socrates and a Plato in times of yore,
the Newtons and the Edisons of our times might give way to some Mengs and
Mathurs in the eras to come. But for that to happen, maybe it’s an idea that we
have a five year teenage study break for the adolescents to grapple with their
youth before they could pursue their studies without distraction, and I can
tell you, then the toppers would not be the bookworms. But on the flip side,
the U.S practice frees parents from the burden of their children’s upbringing
allowing them in time to wine and dine; but the Asian penchant for supporting
their progeny to the hilt puts paid to the recreational activities of the
parents. A via media like requiring the children to work part-time to
part-finance their higher studies may be an ideal model for the world at large but
man either remains slavish to his habitual ways or disowns them altogether;
seldom has he updated them in tune with the changing times.”
“Why didn’t the hippies of the last sixties give a jolt the cultures of
the time?”
“Cultures my foot,” he scowled. “At their core all cultures are
cultureless and our age-old one bear witness to it. If someone were to breathe
his last at home, it’s deemed inauspicious to live in there, at least for a
year; and what was the norm to avert such a thing from ever happening? The
dying was laid by the roadside for him to seek his salvation unmindful of the
humiliation, and if the sick were to show signs of recovery, they were taken in
only to be dragged out at the slightest hint of a relapse. What can be worse
for any to be abandoned by the very family by which he or she might have sworn
all life; but the dying were unmindful of the ill-treatment for they were
conditioned by the culture into believing it was better that way for their
loved ones. Well, it’s the altered lifestyle that forced us to abandon that
abominable practice but still wasn’t Goebbels justified in saying that he would
reach for the gun whenever he heard the word culture.”
“Whatever, all tend to swear by their respective cultures.”
“The notion that culture was shaped by the wisdom of yore is rooted in
the cerebral puniness of the day,” he said. “It’s this self diminution of the
men of our clan that proved to be a double jeopardy for the widows for so long;
were a woman to lose her man, won’t she be needing succor from her kith and
kin; but our custom used to quarantine her for full three days, and what’s
worse, subjected her to many a humiliating ritual thereafter. Well, as I was
away when my grandfathers died, I was not aware of what my grandmothers had
endured, and so I had no idea of what was in the offing for my mother when my
father died; and being unprepared, I failed to prevent all those travails
forced upon her in the name of our tradition. Oh, how I wish I had put my foot
down on all that humiliating crap, and why this gloating over cultures that are
connotations of insensitivities.”
“That they’ve stopped tonsuring widows; won’t it show the change in
attitudes?”
“That is owing to the vanity of the children, more so sons, than out of
any concern for the woman,” he said. “Which son would like to flaunt his
tonsured mother to his embarrassment; well only when it hurts men collectively
that they turn against the self-embarrassing customs. But why anyone should
bother about, say, the farce of a sakunam
as it is inimical to only a few, who are supposed to bring bad omens. There was
a guy in our village considered a bad sakunam
by one and all, and setting out on an errand, all used to pray that the fellow
shouldn’t cross their paths. If only they happened to come across him, its
mission abandoned for the day that is not before venting their ire on the
hapless chap with abuses galore. Where in all this was the thought of the hurt
to his self-worth; the problem with the half-wits is that they validate from
small samples; well, any writing on the absurdities in cultures would make a
couple of volumes or more for each of them, and yet all lament about our
cultural decline. Is there any custom that is even remotely rational in its
conception; it’s the small minds that lay great store on these for they can’t
think out of the box into which their upbringing pushes them.”
“But then counter-cultures fared no better and more over won’t a
culture-less society bring in anarchy?”
“It’s a case of switching over from one defective gear to another,” he
said. “Why life is bound to be imperfect in any conceivable social arrangement
but the peril lies in abandoning what is natural to the upbringing. It’s sad to
see urban parents putting the fear of a cat or a mouse into their kids’
impressionable heads in our land named after Bharat, who as toddler, touted to
have tamed lions in their dens. But in our days there was no escaping from
scorpions, so children were taught how to handle them; and caught by us
unawares, even as they tried to escape, we used to shout kodi, kodi and wonder why
they stayed put at that. Well, the rest was child’s play with a chappal found nearby; but then, whoever
escaped a scorpion sting or two in any village, one fell straight on my thigh
from the high ceiling when I was fast asleep, and what a hell it was with my
fingers swollen like cucumbers. But how many of them I had battered to death
later I lost count, and there is no way I can comprehend if it was out of
vengeance. Whatever, it’s also a common knowledge to the village kids that
leeches were better dealt with by salt water; how we used to play with their
lives with fistfuls of salt smuggled out of the kitchens; wonder why we didn’t
suffer any qualms seeing them disintegrate to death. Maybe because we were
hateful of them, or was it a case of villainy of innocence, I would never know,
but my playful hurting of a green hopper was on a different footing altogether;
while it was seized by pangs of death, I put some sugar on it like our elders
did when we hurt ourselves. But then I was too tender to know about life and
death and all that I was capable of experiencing were the emotions of pleasures
and pains.”
“Wonder how cruelty and care form the obverse and the reverse of the
human instinct.”
“That may remain in the realms of mystery but how are we to explain
man’s propensity to self-destruct,” he said. “Really it’s not the hurt that
others cause to us that counts, but our response to it that matters; if a
positive outlook helps us gloss over the mishaps of life, the negative feelings
harm our psyche to hurt our lives. We have had a botany lecturer for a
neighbor, who nurtured a grand garden in his backyard, and as Chandu and I
helped him tend his crotons, coleuses and others, he encouraged us to nurse our
own little gardens. What a joy it was to have a garden of my own; so to say,
every morning, still in half-sleep, I used to rush to the stretch of green in
the side yard. Oh, how the sight of the blooming buds and the sprouting leaves
used to thrill me; why, of all the joys of life, espying the garden that you
nurse has no parallel to it. Maybe the nearest I can think of is the fun of
flicking fruits and eating them sitting on the tree branches.”
“More so if you manage to do so from the neighbor’s groove.”
“That’s not true, for all kids love to flick a fruit or two but not
every parent owns plantations, and so it’s a necessary evil for children to
trespass on the sly,” he said before he picked up the threads of his tale.
“But, for want of care, Chandu’s garden, spread over a larger area, didn’t
measure up to mine in a tiny space, and I suspect that he turned green seeing
my garden ever so green. That’s what might’ve driven him to ravage my prized
plot when our family was away for a
day; how shocking was that sight, like seeing my near and dear ones perish on
the road, not once but twice. But unlike life and death that lie in the hands
of fate, to relay the garden or not was in the realms of my choice, and I
decided to forego the pleasure of gardening not wanting to undergo the possible
trauma of Chandu’s future mischief. So I took to collecting the cinema
handbills heralding the release of new movies, how the distributor used to shoo
us away as we ran after the jatka for
more of the same, and the way that hobby too ended would only illustrate how
fate can deny one even the innocent pleasures of life. Before I tell you about
it, I better talk about my parents, why for you to have a better feel of my
fate, you need to have an idea about their life as well. Better I show you
their photograph to let you correlate their persona with their philosophy.”
Couple
of a Kind
“Don’t they look made for each other,” he said handing me a framed
photograph of a handsome pair. “When Nehru was preparing the draft of his
‘tryst with destiny’, my father would’ve been penning his odes to my mother,
whom he was courting then; and well before Nehru came to deliver his famous
lines; my dad led his lady love to the altar. Yet it was no less a struggle for
him to wed her as it was for Gandhi to wrest our country from the British yoke;
while his dad had fixed a match for him with much dowry, the father of the
bride didn’t think too much of the suitor any way. Why not, he was only
nineteen and was some way into becoming a Fellow of Arts, F.A in short; but the
way the ‘man in the teen’ could cross all the hurdles in his way was the first
sign of his ‘gung ho’ nature and ‘go-getter’ guts. While still in school, he
led his classmates in the Quit India movement in disrupting the telephone
network by cutting its cabling, and that a benign policeman of the British Raj
did not execute the arrest warrant against my father was another story. Well,
in the independent India, though he was eligible for freedom fighter’s pension,
he did not opt for it believing that the state remuneration might sullen his
sense of achievement.”
“What a fall that the well-off of the day subterfuge for the doles
meant for the have-nots?”
“While self-sacrifice ruled the yearning hearts of a generation of our
freedom fighters, self-interest came to govern the greedy minds of the powers
that be in our free country,” he said. “As for my father, proving it right that
vivahe vidya naasaaya, his marriage
brought his studies to a premature end as he took his bride to his village to
live with his parents and that put paid to whatever his career ambitions were.’
“You did better than your dad on either count didn’t you?”
“We were poles apart in every way and so our lives won’t lend
themselves for comparison,” he said. “A year after the colonial air was cleared
over our subcontinent, I was born, and I have my mother’s word that he loved me
the most of all his children; but, sadly as life has it, our adult faculties
fail to recall the pristine parental affection in its nascency. And why doubt that for he died worrying more
about my future than any other sibling of mine though the last two were yet to
settle down in life. Maybe, soon after I was born that he entered into that
aborted business partnership whereby he swore never to believe anyone save my
mother and his brother-in-law, whose wife saved me from drowning into the tank.
True to his character, he kept his word till the very end, and sadly so, for he
lived and died without a friend. Well, I fared no better as in later years I
distanced myself from all my childhood buddies including Raju.”
“The impulse of love could be the embodiment of nature but its
sustenance is conditioned by the ways of life. Maybe as a recompense for that
we tend to love our children,”
“So it seems,” he said and continued with his tale. “As I grew up, I
turned into a rebel; can you imagine my smoking at home at fifteen? Why, my
father too was a smoker, and strangely, it was my grandfather who had sustained
his habit; when he got wind of my dad’s smoking ways, he had loosened his purse
strings for once, to enable him to smoke Berkeley instead of the cheap
Charminar. They say the common refrain in our village then about my grandfather
was, ‘the miser is wiser too’. Much later, my dad was forced to give up smoking
on doctor’s advice, but before he could get the better of his urge, my mother
was wont to confiscate the contraband, which she used to pass on to me in place
of pocket money; some repeat of history. But down the times, compared to the
Berkley of yore, the India Kings of the day are no more than nothing or is it
that my taste buds were blunted by years of smoking, I don’t know.”
“Blame the hybrids of the day, high on yield and low on quality.”
“Maybe hybrids are the necessary evils of our populous times; but for
their bounteousness, can our teeming billions ever have a mouthful. That’s the
price man pays for the population growth,” he said. “Any way, following in my
father’s footsteps, I too gave up the habit not long ago, so to say on doctor’s
advice; but when an old flame pleaded with me to stop smoking for her sake, it
was the self same me that told her, ‘I’ll give up the world for you, but not my
smoking’.”
“The scare of a doctor is more potent than the concern of a loved one
and that’s the reality of life.”
“True,” he said and continued from where he had left, “My dad and I had
never seen eye to eye, but we came to respect each others’ abilities; he used
to take my advice and often acted upon it. Being in a dilemma whether or not to
bring upfront a minor health problem of one of my sisters to the prospective
groom, he wanted to have my take on that; well, I told him that it would be a
fair disclosure only after she had her way with the boy with her persona. As a
man he was brash to begin with, but as he mellowed down in time and as I matured
at length, we became friends towards the end of his innings that was after
being at loggerheads for the best part of our lives. Whatever, how sweet it
felt in those last years of his life and how empathic we felt for each other,
what an enduring satisfaction we both derived in our closeness! I’ll cherish
that till the end, as he did until he died.’
“I’m sure his soul in heaven grasps your pathos on earth?”
“If anything, I’m proud to be his son and blessed to be born to my
mother,” he said as his eyes moistened and his voice choked, “I tell you, he
lived only for his wife and children and if there ever was a homebody it was
he; not the kind of homebody once pictured in the Reader’s Digest; when a
philanderer boasted himself as a homebody, his wife punned humorously, ‘any
home anybody’. Well my father was so possessive of my mother that he wouldn’t
let her go out even with her own cousin sisters, but to be fair to him, he gave
her his undivided love, and my mother too didn’t seem to mind about her loss of
freedom. Moreover, he never ignored her word because of her self-less
disposition towards worldly affairs; but for all his love for her, sadly, he
was a wife-beater until he softened in his forties. If anything can be said in
his favor in this regard, that it was more of a norm than an exception with our
men in those days; don’t we hear that there is no stopping it in the advanced
West even these days? Whatever, after his death, my mother never uttered a word
without reference to him and that was for over four years, at least I had never
known about a widow who was so devoted to her man’s memory. But my father being
a family man proved to be a boon as well as the bane for us his children, he
was wont to ration our playtime, which was at odds with my sense of freedom
from the beginning; though he didn’t have his way with me, he prevailed over my
siblings all the while.”
“Well, disciplining children is a necessary evil but nowadays parents
don’t seem to lay store in ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ upbringing.”
“Sadly so for the going-to-be-adult kids that is and if anything the
failure, like in the U.S, to distinguish ‘child discipline’ from ‘child abuse’
has come to breed retrograde children in its advanced midst,’ he said and
continued. ‘When I was six, supervising some furniture being made at home, my
dad was not to move out for days on, and that curtailed my freedom more than
ever. As I was not even going to school then, it was like being jailed at home
and soon, I asked the carpenter how long it would take for him to complete the
assignment. When he said that it would take a fortnight more, I told him that I
would give him an ana if he completed
the work in a week; amused, he asked me what the urgency was, and I told him
that once the work was over, my father would go out as usual and that would let
me be on my own. When he told my people about it, all had a hearty laugh, and
years later, when my father chanced to meet him in another town, well he became
a prosperous hotelier there, recalling that incident, he expressed his keenness
to see me; and when we met, serving me personally in his restaurant, he
narrated the incident to the amusement of all those present. Well, as I fondly
relived that moment, my father was joyously embarrassed about it.”
“Moments like those bring charm to one’s life but I don’t have any to
recall; maybe current day life doesn’t lend scope for any.”
“Why doubt that,” he said, “but there are moments in life that are
bitter to experience and sweeter to recall. While the first of my sisters
obediently sat at home, the second one always joined me at playtime. I wonder
how in the thick of things her sixth sense would warn her about our father’s
impending home-coming; well she used to alert me before leaving the field, but
lost in the game, I was always caught on the wrong foot and faced his ire for
late-coming. Oh how his intemperance turned demonic once; why he nearly split
my head with a pounding staff. It happened in the small hours of that atlataddi when I pestered him to let me
join my friends at the annual fete; even my grandmother’s pleadings didn’t
deter him from bashing me up for my insistence. I shudder to think how a mishap
then would’ve affected him forever; maybe, my skull is made of sterner stuff
for I can take any beating at the champi
that I came to love in later years.”
“It was child abuse and no less.”
“Being human, parents too can lose their temper on occasion and a
little bashing that ensues can’t be deemed as child abuse,” he said. “Once when
my son disturbed my sleep, having bashed him up in indignation, I realized that
my nagging that atlataddi night
would’ve been no less irritating to my father. But think of tel-maalish, and I recall a naayi of my
hostel days; he was barely sixteen, and like most Biharis in those days, he was
married for a year or more by then. Goading the students to get married early,
he used to assert that the real ecstasy of tel-maalish
lies in the crackling sound of the bangles as one’s woman was at it. How he
used to pity us, the prospective engineers, for we would have a bride in her
early twenties that is in our late twenties; of what avail are the girls out of
their teens for they would have past their prime by then. But then, Gen. Yahya
Khan of Pakistan never had anything to do with women below forty for he felt
such wouldn’t be randy enough in bed; how perceptions about sexual pleasures
vary really! Doesn’t that remind us of what Shakespeare said of Cleopatra –
“Age cannot wither her / nor custom stale / her infinite variety. Other women cloy
/ the appetites they feed / but she makes hungry / where most she satisfies.”
“How intriguing sexual preferences are? I’ve read about a survey that
revealed the inexplicable preference some of the beautiful women have for ugly
looking males!”
“Isn’t it appetizing news for the ungainly men? But the problem is that
a hopeful wrong pass could invite a ‘beauteous’ ridicule,” he said mirthfully.
“Why all is not lost for ugly women either for there are men who get attracted
only by such, why there was a king or was it a sultan, I don’t recall, who had
in his harem only mustachioed women rotund to boot. As for me, Yahya like, I
find the thirty-ish randiness swaying as by then they would’ve gained much in
bed without losing too much of their figure. Noticing my roving eye, once when
Rathi wondered what if all men were to be covetous of women, I told her that in
its balancing act nature makes men covet different things – money, power,
position, fame etc. apart from fair sex that is. You know at the end of the
World War II, when the Russian army entered Berlin, while most soldiers raped
every female in sight, a few of them spared their honor but not their bicycles.
Why Khushwant Singh’s sardarji joke
underscores this; a pretty thing offers lift to a sardar in her limousine and drives him deep into the woods, and
after taking off her clothes, when she asks him to take whatever he wanted, he
drives away in her car. Jokes apart, sex is not all that fair to the female if
her mate were to be a ‘premature’ kind; and won’t that validate the woman’s
right to ‘mate and marry’ and not the other way round.”
“I think we’ve strayed away enough, now we may as well be back onto the
track.”
A
Character of Sorts
“Now back to my dad,” he
continued his extraordinary reminiscences. “When he made me board a train to
Ranchi, what a pleasant surprise it was to discover the softer side of his! Why
his tears of farewell that brought to the fore the love he bore for me readily
washed off my bitterness for him. Moreover, as I exchanged the domestic notes
with my hostel mates, I realized that no dad did spare the rod to spoil the
child, and that made me see childhood in a joint family in a fresh light; the
grandparental indulgence countervails the inhibiting parental discipline to
condition children to the ayes and nays of life from its very nascence. But as
life would have it, the joint family makes everyone, save the head, irrelevant
in its setting when it came to the household affairs, and on the other hand,
the nuclear family that affords self-realization for the couples, fails to
cater to the children’s need for a disciplined upbringing. What a sad spectacle
it is these days seeing the single-child parents vying with each other in
pampering their kids or treating them as their ‘toys of joy’, but tell them
that is not the way of rearing kids if only you are prepared to put your
relationship with them on the line. Well time only would tell what affect this
mindless upbringing brings to bear upon the adulthood of these unfortunate
kids.”
“That is in spite of the advanced human psychology on hand!”
“Who’s making use of it anyway?” he said in consternation. “All seem to
hustle themselves with their kids into
the blissful Shakespearean mould of, ‘he that is robbed, not wanting what is
stolen, let him not know it, and he’s not robbed at all’. So be it, but who
said one cannot have the cake and eat it too for my dad managed to do so all
his life. Level headed though, he tended to be reckless at times; that diwali, when I turned five, he didn’t
have a second thought about teaching me how to handle the fire-crackers in the mandua, which opened to the sky in the
middle of our house. But how my father failed to foresee the possibility of an
odd cracker setting our dwelling on fire I would never know. Why as if guided
by the Murphy’s Law, a cracker of a missile made its way to the attic full of
dry coconuts and how that made all miss a heartbeat or two. Well chastised by
my grandfather as my dad sheepishly went up the attic with a bucketful of
water, driven by curiosity I too had ascended the ladder behind him. Possibly
the missile had expended itself before its landing in the midst of the coconuts
but keeping an eye on the attic to nip the possible flare-up in the bud, none
had a wink that night, why the excitement of it kept me too awake for long.”
“What a change! Those days, if parents threw caution to the winds to
expose their children to the ways of the world, parents these days are proving
to be more timid than their kids.”
“How true, when I was eleven year-old, my mother had been to her
parental home for her fourth confinement,” he continued. “Even as she delivered
my third sister, the Godavari was in spate like never before, and the steamer
service too was put on hold for want of safety. But underscoring the fact of
life that someone would be around always to aid and abet the lawbreaking, there
were boats in wait to ferry the willing on the sly, of course, for a premium.
Though my father was law abiding otherwise, maybe driven by the impulse of
espying the new arrival, risking our lives he ventured across the unruly river
with me; why we were not even some way into that hazardous voyage, giving me
scares the boat began to rock but my father’s imposing presence and his
assurance that there were expert swimmers on board, just in case, turned my
sense of scariness into a feeling of daring. But later in life, I always felt
that he shouldn’t have ventured on that voyage putting our lives at risk; after
all, he could’ve waited to espy the new arrival, but then that’s what he was, a
fearless man till the very end. Well the way he faced premature death was
bravado no less.”
“Isn’t it illustrative that the dividing line between daring and
risking is wafer-thin?”
“Well, my father was innately bold,” he continued. “Oh, the way he
ventured out whenever there was a burglary alert in the neighborhood! Why with
a stick in my hand, I too wasn’t afraid to follow suit; it was his daring that
might’ve percolated down into my childhood subconscious, enabling me to imbibe
his credo in good measure. Although, he softened with age, he remained bold,
and how tough he was with the in-laws of one of my sisters when they came up
with their ludicrous post-wedding demands. As a matter of principle he didn’t
want to yield and when they hinted at abandoning the bride then and there, he told
them that he would ensure they took her along with them, and after that, it was
left for them to harm her at their own peril. If anything, his stance then
summed up the man in him, a la Alec Guinness in the Bridge on the
River Kwai, and that called their bluff, and all was well in the end. If only
the fathers of the afflicted brides can muster half of my dad’s courage, I’m
sure dowry-deaths, like sati, would be a thing of the past.”
“If only the media has a way of knowing such incidents.”
“Don’t you think the media is manned by morons?” he said. “Oh, how they
carpet-covered the newlywed Bachchans’ temple trysts to save their marriage
from the mangalik affect! What
message did the media carry to our folks, bogged down by superstitions? Maybe,
man was better off without the media and now worse off for the 24 x 7 non-stop
humbugs; and what an opportunity the senior Bachchan lost to make a difference
to the prejudiced heads by making a statement against the nonsense. Oh how
small really the Big B is, and how big the media made Diana the small. It’s
incredible how her quest for lust was portrayed as her search for love! No
faulting her taking a lover on the rebound as her man thrust a rival into her
marital life but for the media to picture her bed hopping as her craving for
love is galling indeed. Why in picturing Diana as the icon of love the media
made lust a synonym of love and what’s worse, it made a villain out of her man
who embodies the best of love that is constancy.”
“Why hadn’t anyone seen it that way?”
“Can one grasp the realities of life in the glare of glamour?” he said.
“What is media if it doesn’t feed itself on sleaze and scandal with trivia
thrown in between; why blame those who man it as all crave for such to gloss
over the humdrum that is life of most. Even if you ever make the media privy to
what all transpired between us, the meaningful part of it is bound to be
blue-penciled. Whatever that’s the enigma of the media, like it or not, there
is no escaping from it but were you to novelize it, maybe, there could be a few
takers for your endeavor.”
“Maybe so but as Hitler had discovered, most of us take the media’s
word as a Gospel truth.”
“Wasn’t it the basis for Goebbels concept of propaganda?” he
interjected. “Back to my dad; he was more like a mullah when it came to the segregation of sexes though it had
nothing to do with his upbringing either for my grandfather didn’t have a
jaundiced eye on that count. I heard that my dad was opposed to his mother and
sister resting for a while on the roadside verandah even when he was just
twelve or so and that speaks for it. That’s why it was no wonder that he turned
out to be a possessive husband and a guard of a father, especially of his
daughters. How I wish he had read a book or two on the psychology of sex,
especially that of Havelock Ellis, well that could have spared me of that shock
and one of my sisters of her bitterness.”
He paused for a while as though to recover from the shock of his
recollection.
“I told you that after the grief of the garden, for a hobby, I turned
to the collection of cinema handbills distributed to announce new releases,” he
continued. “What a pleasure it was to gather more of the same on the sly and
how we used to prize the booty though it was of poor quality with an occasional
color pamphlet being a bonus; but that Bhookailash
one on a craft paper was a dream come true. That Sunday, as my father was in
siesta, I was at rejoicing my collection before I lost myself to the Bhookailash thing. Can you imagine what
followed? I was rudely jolted when my father snatched it from me accusing me of
a premature interest in the female form for he mistook that I was fantasizing
about the heroine. Sharing his discovery with my mother, he tore it into pieces
and began thrashing me as if to drive the devil of sex out of my head; well I
was not even twelve then and apparently he had seen it all through his adult
eyes. Whatever, I cried more for the pain of its ruin than the plight of my
back that bore the brunt of his beatings; and with that loss, I lost interest
in the rest, and gave up the hobby itself.”
“Some psychology of sex should help today’s boys who become tomorrow’s
fathers.”
“You have a point there,” he said. “Maybe sensing the propensity of my
destiny, disappointment chose me to be its abiding partner. As life would have
it, in time, one of my uncles came close to marrying the Bhookailash heroine, whom my dad thought I had been ogling that
noon; could he have ever imagined such a turn of events then? It’s another
matter that my maternal grandfather’s view that ‘once an actress always an
actress’ made my uncle give up on her. Maybe, he was right that with an actress
wife, as he felt, one would never know when she was genuinely affectionate or
righteously indignant for she can affect either emotion with consummate ease.
Better it’s left for men who marry actresses, nay actors as is the norm, though
without casting aspersions on their sexual straightness, to say whether life
for them becomes make-believe or not.”
“If all carry their character to the office, may be the actors bring
home their professional skills.”
“I would’ve known about it had not my uncle backtracked but to my dad’s
jaundiced eye, the genuineness of one my sisters seemed to him as a put on one
occasion.”
Moments
of Poignance
“Oh, how it hurts to think that my dad could’ve behaved so badly with
my sister I was rather fond of!” he resumed after a long pause. “I was away in
Ranchi then and what I had heard of it hurts me to this day. One late evening
she was lost in her thoughts, whatever they were, on the verandah, oblivious of
the ogling ways of a roadside Romeo. My dad who happened to return home then
got it all wrong, and paying a deaf ear to her professed innocence, like a man
possessed he had beaten her black and blue, the poor thing. Well, she never
forgave him for that, even after his death, and I don’t fault her for that. But
what an irony that it was on her account he once ventured across the Godavari
in spate risking his and my life as well. Sure he came to soften up his stance
on other issues but somehow he failed to shed his blinkers in sexual matters;
and he was lucky that the inclinations of my sisters and the impediments of the
times gave him no hiccups on their pre-marital front.”
“What a tragedy it is to hurt the loved ones owing to the debility of
belief.”
“Well said, more so the religious belief; maybe towards the end one
might be able to shelve self-indulgent biases but the faith-induced bigotry
tends to grip one all the more.” he said thoughtfully. “Saying ‘sorry’ would’ve
helped, but he believed what he wanted to believe, and her denials seemed but
self-serving arguments to his closed mind-set. Well he was rude with me too in
my childhood that is; but in his deathbed gesture I came to see his way of
saying sorry for his intemperate past. He gave me, and not my brother, his
wrist-watch with his name embossed on it, which was a long service award from
Lipton. It was another matter that my brother loved him more than I ever did,
and it appeared as if he bestowed it upon his first born, but I suppose it was
not as simple as that. When I was ten, toying with his wrist-watch, I dropped
it down to its doom inviting his wrath. Frustrated with the loss of his first
acquisition, he roundly thrashed me even as my mother tried her best to put
sense into his agitated head that it was after all an accident. Though
resentful then, it was much later that I could understand his sense of loss;
money being scarce, it was no easy task to replace it. Maybe laying on his
deathbed, he recalled the episode while he recapped his life; he surely
would’ve, for one of my uncles once told me that he would project the celluloid
of his life on his mind-screen thrice a day. Why not, if youth is daydreaming
about the future and the middle age the dilemma of the present, then old age
makes a memoir of the past. Well, it could have been my father’s sense of
remorse that might’ve prompted him to make a present of that wrist-watch to me
by way of his redemption. But by the time the possibility of that occurred to
me, he was no more. If only I could’ve told him that I understood his
constraints and never bore a grudge against him on that or any other count; oh,
how that would’ve helped ease our consciences!”
“What a poignant moment it could have been?”
“Sadly it was not to be,” he said. “I believe the hallmark of his life
was his boldness in the face of death.
The moment we stepped into that cancer hospital, seeing some patients
carrying their urine bags, he said he would rather die than live with one such.
Seeing scores of patients there prolonging their senseless life in a pitiable
manner, I realized that there was also this greed to be alive that my father
was not afflicted with. But awaiting his inevitable death in his home that he
made the centre of his life, when he sent word for me, all knew that he
believed his end was at hand. As I reached him, he lost no time in wanting a
private chat with my mother and me; he took both our hands into his, and asked
me to take care of her, adding, ‘I scolded her, I did even beat her up but I
always respected her’. We his children always knew how much he loved our mother
but at that juncture I realized that he chose to be a one-woman man all his
life out of respect for her. I always wondered why he wanted to confess to my
mother in my presence; maybe, he might’ve felt that being the firstborn, I was
the first witness of his love for her in all its intimacy. But sadly for me, I
failed to keep the word I gave him to take care of her; it’s true she is not in want of any, thanks
to my brother, and no less to my sister-in-law, who doesn’t grumble on that
score. How I hope that life gives me the chance to redeem myself!”
“Your brother seems to be your conscience saver.”
“In a way he is,” he said. “But I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me
to thank my dad for what all he had done for me for all my infirmities that
bothered him no end. If only I had said sorry, wouldn’t have the troubles he
had taken for me seem pastime for him then? But it was not to be as I left him
after the memorable meeting to fend for myself in the city I lived. But even
when his final call came, I was nowhere near him; oh, had I reached him in time
as he breathed his last, maybe I would’ve been inspired to make a clean breast
of myself. But as luck would have it, some jamboree came to a close the
previous day in the city and the revelers blocked all entrances of the trains
that day, making it no entry for others. Oh how I begged to be let in, but none
had obliged.”
“What to make out of the muteness of the masses?”
“As individuals most of them would have obliged but collectively all
became callous,” he said. “Even sensible people lose their sensitivity in
collectivity, which I call the camaraderie syndrome; won’t a group of six, in a
train compartment of eight, collude to shoo away whoever nears them. Showcasing
the insensitivity of another kind are those who never let others occupy the next
seat in the long-distance buses, supposedly reserved by their never-to-arrive
friends. See how their attitude unfairly affects the fellow travelers; while
the early birds bear the back seats, the latecomers become the frontbenchers.
Well, when I finally reached home, I was late by an hour to have a word with
him; maybe he breathed his last lighter for his confessions but I’m left to
live carrying the cross of my omissions.”
As his demeanor suggested that burdened by his guilt he was sinking
into a state of depression; alarmed, I goaded him to tell more about his
father.
“What a connoisseur of food he was!” he began enthusiastically. “Be it
grains, cereals or vegetables, he bought the choicest, which were transformed
into the best of meals by my mother’s recipes. When it came to fruits, he was a
man of all seasons, and I wonder if there ever was a more ardent lover of
mangos than him. Why he was wont to partake three apiece with each meal and
that counted up to six a day in summer days, and what were they, not the
grossly overrated alphonso but the peerless kothapalli kobbari besides
panchdara kalisa, peddarasam, chinnarasam, cherukurasam, juice fruits all
available only in the coastal Andhra. I can’t help but pity those who pay a
ridiculously high price for alphonsos, just a notch up the much cheaper
bangenapallis. Whatever, it was as if the flavors of ‘fruits of the season’
vied with the aroma of my mother’s exquisite preparations to satiate our
palates but then don’t mistake us for a family of gluttons for we were frugal
eaters all. But as people are taking to junk food these days it won’t be long
before we may lose the cooking skills developed over generations; sadly that
takes man back to his roots literally that is.”
“By the way, what were his last words for you?”
“Be careful with your money for none would spare you a penny in your
hour of need, that’s what he said,” he said and then added, “and I may say, why
should any for all that; should you become the subject of charity would you
remain an object of equality?”
Enigma
of Being
“What would’ve been my life like
had my dad succumbed to that heart attack when he was barely forty-two,” he
resumed his tale. “My third-rate degree was just on hand then and there was
nothing else for us to fall back upon in such an eventuality; maybe, it was his
will-power to avert our downslide that kept him alive. Or it could be the
destiny of my own siblings that intervened with his fate to keep him going as
their interests wouldn’t have been as well served by my life, and I too
couldn’t have been as carefree as I was in my youth, which had been the crux of
my life. But before that when my grandfather passed away, given our attachment,
my father was worried to death that it would upset me no end, and so he asked
his cousin to break the news only after preparing me for that. Oh, how my poor
grandfather used to insist on knowing my exam schedule for him to do the Sundara Kãnda parayanam for good tidings at my exam time, and it takes some eight
hours or more to recite the epic even for a regular that he was; if only I had
put in my studies half of his efforts to invoke the divine grace upon me; how
some of the experiences of life seem sweeter in recollection!”
“Don’t they say man loves his grandchildren more than he ever loved his
own offspring?”
“Surely, you would have a grasp of it when you reach that station of
life,” he said as his eyes turned moist. “How I regret that I’d never paid heed
to his letters for they were all carbon copies; what was worse, I never wrote
home, aware though I was how eagerly my grandfather - not to speak of my father
– looked forward to my missives; the errand boy at my father’s office once told
me that it was his daily chore to check up for my letters at the head post
office. Well that was the eagerness with which my father awaited my letters
that shamefully I never wrote; but still, I didn’t mend my ways for I was lost
in my own wayward ways. It was another story that my grandmother’s villainy saw
my father’s hand behind my indifference to my grandpa’s missives to grind her
inheritance axe, whatever, as and when I was short of money, the requisition
and the compliance were both telegraphed. I learnt from my mother much later,
how anxious my dad was to see that I was not inconvenienced even for a day, and
if only I knew what a hassle it was for him to arrange the money for me, I
wouldn’t have been the spendthrift I turned out to be. Oh, why didn’t he tell
me how hard up he was; would I have been so insensitive as not to have
tightened my belt? When my father wrote to me that his errand boy died in a
road mishap not on his routine postal trip but on some official duty, as if to
spare him the pangs of guilt, I could picture the sentimental side of him that
I had never seen till then; but as my eyes welled up with tears, it struck me
that I wasn’t in tears when I learnt about my grandfather’s death in spite of
our attachment. Maybe it had all to do with the fact that he died at a ripe old
age or it could be that I was subconsciously reconciled to his end.”
“However close you might be to one, you’ll never really know about
one.”
“That’s true but still we appraise others without getting into their
shoes that we won’t be able to do any way,’ he said. ‘God knows why, but my
grandmother became inimical to my father, not to speak of my mother. When she
couldn’t bear it any longer, my mother told my father that she would have no
more of the old tyrant and he might set her up separately for she knew he owed
it to his mother to take care of her and that she was prepared to manage the
house with the rest of his salary; well fairness to all has been the hallmark
of my mother’s character. But my grandmother any way preferred to stay with her
daughter.”
“Isn’t it strange that women tend to be partial towards their daughters
all the while craving for a son, while men, who seem to think that daughters
don’t confer parentage, and yet cling on to them?”
“Looks like women always feel vulnerable in this man’s world,” he said.
“Didn’t the psychologists theorize that woman sees her son as her proxy to get
even with it, but when he gets married, she perceives his wife as the usurper
of her assumed power to dare the world? Maybe the feeling of being back to
square one tends her closer to her daughters with the accompanying sense of
alienation towards her daughter-in-law; but for man, while his proclivity is to
beget a female, his craving for a male in the lineage could be owing to our
culture conditioned by religion, and that’s the irony of the sexes. Shortly
before my grandmother was gravely ill, I gave her a piece of my mind as to how
inimical she had been towards her own son and his family, and when her health
deteriorated, she insisted on living her last days at her son’s place; maybe in
the course of life our sensibilities are blunted while the scent of death stirs
our sensitivities to its subtleties. Well, she did breathe her last in my
father’s arms and who said death separates; but sadly as if history tends to
repeat itself, even in the family setting, my mother, when widowed, became
inimical to the idea of my brother’s marriage so as to sponge on his
bachelorhood earnings till her end. It’s the tragedy of my life that I had to
be equally harsh with her, and I only know how painful it was; ironically it
was no less satisfying for me that my grandmother’s change of heart let her die
in peace and my mother’s change of mind enabled her to rein in her vested
interest before it was too late for my brother; oh, gripped by the devil of
insecurity how wretched she used to be, and when exorcized of it, how joyous
she became after my brother’s marriage.”
“It’s not mere conviction but the courage to act upon it that
characterizes men.”
“But it requires the strength of character for that,’ he said, and
began recapping his childhood. “There was hardly any schooling worth naming in
the village setting in those days but one could still get into the first-form
in a nearby high school through a written test. When I was nine, my father made
me seem ten the cut-off age for admission, and took me to a nearby town for the
test; even as I sat nervously in the exam hall, the invigilator, who was brash,
made it worse for me and so I refused to take the test; but the offender’s
apology that my father extracted as a sop made me relent in the end, and lo I
was into the first-form that you call class six now. We were no more than a
handful that made it to that school from our village then and my seniors used
to vie with each other to take charge of me, each claiming that my grandfather
had entrusted me to his care. But as it all tended to turn farcical, I asked
them to let me be on my own; what a joy it was walking all those five miles
both ways, well, sans the backbreaking schoolbags of these days. But, when my
grandfather took me back to school to retrieve the umbrella I forgot there, it
was no fun to my weary legs, more so as he lectured about the pitfalls of
forgetfulness all the way; maybe my subconscious absorbed it all for I
consciously avoid being forgetful.”
“Did you find it?” I asked rather instinctively.
“The odds were one to ten as you know and it was no odd case any way,”
he said. “But the thought of umbrella brings my grandfather’s fondness for
rainy season that I share. It was his wont to have his siesta lying in the easy
chair in the verandah, and in the monsoon time, whenever he woke up to a
deafening thunder, he would declare that ‘it portends downpour,’ of course
gluing his eyes to the pitch-dark clouds in the sky. Like all landlords, he too
used to rivet his eyes onto the sky, worried about the kharif crop, and
how as children we loved when it rained and used to dance in the downpour
wetting ourselves to the roots. But for my mother it was always ‘oh, enough is
enough’ but my grandfather would say, ‘why not let them enjoy now for they
might give up all this as grownups’. How true, but then the phases of life are
varied, each with different possibilities of fulfillment; when it ceased raining
all kids used to place indents on the elders for paper boats for playing with
them in the roadside water pools or backyard water bodies. Why the rainy season
afforded the elders their small pleasures as well; as I see in hindsight, all
used to ogle at women’s legs as they hitched up their saris as though to save their hems from getting soiled on the
muddy roads. I wish I lived a little longer in my village to cherish more of my
life but then maybe I shouldn’t be greedy for I had enough and more of the village
life.”
Vignettes
of a Village
“If city life is characterized by chaos, village life was all about
orderliness,” he continued. “Unlike the present-day multi-class urban
societies, in the villages of yore, while the Brahmins held the high ground in agraharams and the intermediate castes occupied
the middle ground, the peasants, and the artisans lived on the peripheries. So there was hardly any intra-class
social interaction to speak about and that’s why I had no idea about the lives
of the marginalized, but from the way they dressed and behaved, it was clear
that their life was sustained on the economic crumbs thrown at them by the
landed classes. The well-heeled among the privileged classes were wont to play
rummy if not baestu, also a card game in which the loser becomes
a lose-all kudael; oh, how women
dreaded at the prospect of their men taking to cards, more so baestu, lest they should become kudael. That my mother prevailed upon my
dad to give up cards he was fond of, I came to know much later; as she was wont
to play a round or two of rummy with me and my friends, my dad used to
grudgingly remind her how she had coerced him to give up his favorite pastime.”
“Well, but what puzzles me is the attitude of a friend’s wife, who
having had drinks in her college days was averse to her newlywed husband having
a drink or two.”
“That’s the illogic of women’s logic,” he said with a wink, and
continued “Those were the prohibition times, so, sans the so-called Indian Made
Foreign Liquors and with toddy being a taboo for the gentry, the potion of the
peasants, the well-heeled went without a drink. Thus, blessed with one of the
three W’s but self-denying the other, the ardent were wont to womanize; well
the nature’s calls in the open opened up the opportunities alike for the
promiscuous and the sex-starved men and women to indulge on the sly what with
the bushes yonder providing secretive cover for illicit sex. By the way what’s
this pride in one’s caste and the prejudice against the others’ after all that
covert sexual inter-mingling for generations; and what about the bane of the
home toilets that give with one hand and take away with the other; why while
affording privacy to the personas, don’t they deprive safe ways for the
straying folks; well, man seems to rob himself of the freedoms that nature granted
him.”
“It may be the case with the middle-classes, but don’t celebrity
affairs give a fillip to promiscuity?
“The current page three liaisons seem a passing show while the liaisons
of the wealthy with the nautch girls remained enduring news for a couple of
generations,” he said. “Maybe being few and far between, the affairs of yore
had a charm of their own but in their current day profusion, they seems to have
taken away much of the naughty sheen out of them; whether in life or in sport,
rarer the fare, all the more it’s memorable; oh what aura cricket’s ‘3Ws’
- the West Indies’ Weeks, Worrell and
Walcott – had, and all of them put together didn’t play in as many test matches
as the Tendulkars of these days.’
“Maybe Bradman, Dhyan Chand, Pele, and even Laver, in spite of Federer,
prove your theory of aura.”
“Well, the lesser gentry were left content to gossip about the
card-playing and the cunt-craving sort, pardon the turn of phrase,” he said.
“Once a troupe of nautch-girls performed at our village temple, and as the show
was on, our neighbor’s servant went up to the lead dancer, and having drawn her
attention to his master, he handed her a hundred Rupee note that she took
nodding her head; though I couldn’t grasp the import of it all then, her naughty
smile as she coyly tilted head is still fresh in my mind. Soon after, when I
happened to witness a Bharatanatyam
performance by our neighbor’s granddaughter from Bombay, the sensuous nuances
in her classical movements insensibly shaped my sense of the feminine
sensuality; how I find repellent the bawdy gestures of those gaudy
women-in-trade. Well, whatever be the proclivities of the folks, the kids were
left alone for the most part as the rat race for private schools had not yet
begun then; and to be fair to my father, he was never behind us to come out
with flying colors at school; but these days how parents have come to push
their kids to excel at studies. It’s as if kids have become the parental means
of fulfilling their unfulfilled dreams;
what funny times we’ve come to live in; how sad that parents are averse to
accept less than A+ grade for their kids; if only the progeny starts demanding
to know about the parental scores!”
“Who knows, that day may not be far off.”
“Maybe that’s the only cure for this parental paranoia, why I know a
mother, who forced her second daughter to study medicine simply because the
elder one was already pursuing a course in engineering,” he said, and continued
with his childhood saga. “Summer times were made memorable by the annual visits
of my paternal aunt, the one who saved me from drowning in our village tank,
and her husband, who was a lecturer in a college of physical education, and so
he had a long summer vacation. Being childless, they used to love me and my siblings
like their own children; how all of us used to cling to him all day; he being a
jovial person, it was a great fun to be with him. And where do you think we
used to spend the summer times, well, on foldable cots right under the neem
tree shade in the side yard. That was the only time when I used to leave my
grandma’s bedside, why, I never heeded my mother’s call to sleep in their
bedroom, not that I loved my mother any less but my affinity with my grandma
was compelling, maybe it was in part due to her story telling. One of my
uncle’s favorite taunts was that, being the namesake grandson, he hoped that at
my marriage, I would present him the wedding suit promised by my granddad. When
I was five, he taught me how to make the opening moves on the chessboard but in
spite of my later-day penchant for the middle game, I’m clueless about the
endgame till today; well, neither could he master the art of partaking the palm
fruit directly from its socket that I tried to teach him; how our kapu, who plucked the fruits from the
tree, used to tease him saying that the village kids were smarter than the
townsmen.”
He paused as if to relive his childhood in the nostalgia of his old
times.
“But the icing on the cake of their long stays was provided by the
snacks that my grandma was wont to serve in the afternoons, which she never
prepared in the normal course; wasn’t her son-in-law a privileged person being
her daughter’s husband?” he said on resumption. “Well it was my dad who
introduced me to carom in later days and I followed him with the so-called
scissors strike, which might puzzle your opponent when you are in form but
could frustrate your partner when you are off color. When I took to cricket in
my school final and bowled for the first time, the batsman realized I was a
born leg spinner and that the googly could be a few false steps away. Didn’t
Bradman opine that leg spin is the most difficult to master for any bowler, and
when done, it would turn out to be the most difficult ball for any batsman to
handle? Whatever, thanks to my youthful distractions, I didn’t work to build on
my natural ability to make a mark in the cricket world, and if not, who knows
my name would’ve been taken in the same breath as Warne and Chandrasekhar; but
being born in the latter’s era, when cricket was not a fetching proposition, it
could have been a hand-to-mouth existence for me as well. But Muralitharan the
smiling off spin assassin has been my eternal favorite, how anxiously I got
glued to the TV set for his 800th wicket; it was another matter that
a wicket more or a wicket less wouldn’t have made any difference to his
stature, but then on the badge of honor, statistics have their own corner.”
“Isn’t it silly that cricket has become a religion with Sachin as its
Godhead?”
“Maybe for those ‘score kya hai’
guys, whose knowledge of the game borders on zero while their interest in the
game is limited to India’s win, and that reminds me of a cricketing joke of our
days,” he said turning mirthful. “The naughty answer to a novice enquiry about
the field position in a cricket match was that there was ‘no cover, no extra
cover, there is just a deep gully between two fine legs’, and my uncle couldn’t
cal it foul when I told him about it. Why, in later years, I used to drag him
to our stag parties though he was a teetotaler, and whenever the party jokes
turned bawdy he was wont to cry foul; how charming he was in that ‘naughty
umpire’ role. But he was not all that charming when it came to my auntie’s
socializing, why he had indeed confined her all through to the four walls of
their house. But when he began grumbling in the later years that she was good
for nothing, I told him he was committing a foul; not having let her out in her
prime time lest someone should ogle at her, that he felt secure for her lost
appeal, how could he expect her to change the tack; well he allowed me to take
such liberties with him.”
“Maybe donning all the roles of life perfectly is possible for none.”
“Don’t they say perfection is in the realms of heaven, a myth any way, and
not to be found on earth,” he continued. “Well, those joys ended as my dad
shifted to a small town, where I joined Chandu in the second form, and when he
suggested that being co-tenants, we better be in the same section, I sought the
help of my father’s uncle, who was a teacher in the same school. I don’t know
why, but he didn’t favor the move and to discourage me, he told me that with
girls around, it would be embarrassing if I were to be unequal to the teachers’
queries in the co-ed section. So I had to wait till I got into a college to
have a girl for a classmate, and as if to make good the school-time loss, I
promptly fell in love with her; that’s another story any way. But what an irony
it was that while the father denied me an administrative favor, his son granted
me an astrological boon; I was too raw to appreciate the variety that is
bigamy, and what a fuss I made at that like prediction! Maybe it was more a
reflection of the times than my own naivety at that age; earlier, whenever the
topic turned to her marriage, mockingly holding my hand, our village
postmaster’s over-the-hill daughter used to say that she was waiting for me to
attain the marriageable age; well there was no adolescent twist to it for, as
you know, our family moved out of the village when I crossed ten.”
“Maybe I need a break before you move on,” I said lighting a Gold Flake
King.
A Teacher of
Note
“Landing in that town was no earthshaking moment for me as the urban
life then retained its rural character though not its ethos,” he began as I was
ready with my pen and papers. “But still I missed my time in the green fields
where I used to pluck the tender cereals from plants and pick up the ripened
palm nuts from the ground. Moreover, as my grandparents stayed back in the
village, my grandma’s tales were a thing of the past, literally that was, for I
had no more of her clock sense; oh, how many times in the daytime she used to
ask me to go out to note the position of the shadow in the side yard by which
she reckoned the hour to the quarter. Well, we had a wall clock that got stuck
at 4 shortly after my grandfather tried to teach me how to read the time, and
maybe her foresight made her develop a mind clock driven by those shadow
lines.”
“Don’t you think there is a mental drag to our scientific advancement;
while researchers strive to expand the frontiers of human faculties, the
products of their endeavors tend to dull the creative urge of mankind at
large?”
“Good
observation; getting glued to Pogo and playing video games these days, wonder
how that helps the kids to explore and experiment, but without any gadgets to
name, we used to make playthings on our own, well with the parental know-how;
didn’t I tell you about paper boats, but there were a host of others, whistles
from coconut leaves, blowers from jute stems, telephone handsets out of
matchboxes with sewing thread for a cable, just to name a few. Moreover, how
fascinating it was for the kids to watch the womenfolk at play in assorted
games, especially the skill on exhibition in chintapikkalu played with tamarind seeds spread on the floor.
Whatever, the cinema was a sort of consolation in the town; oh how tempting it
was for the kids, which remained a taboo with the parents? I suspect that as
most could ill-afford the movie going, maybe it was an excuse for them to sneer
at the stuff that the silver screen presented. But aided by the tax sops when
theatres arranged special shows of Navrang
and Do Ankhein Baara Haath for
school going kids at confessional fare, it was a bonus for us to watch them from
the chair-class; I still remember the festive atmosphere when we went to see
those Shantaram’s movies, and since Hindi was as alien as Latin in the South
those days, there used to be a translator, who gave a running commentary in our
mother tongue. But for such a fare that was rare, parents kept the curtains
down on the movies, but the allure of the forbidden stuff, made some of us to
cheat them for an ana to make it to
the matinee to watch the fare squatting on the floor right in front of the
screen.”
“What a transformation with kids having pocket monies these days!”
“Well before that, when my brother, hardly ten then, gave up the movie
for the day for want of a seat in the balcony, I realized how times change even
in the family setting,” he said. “But in contrast, in the excitement of it all,
we never bothered about how uncomfortable it was to watch from such a close
range, though it was not the case for once as I was caught in the act when I
took an ana from my mother on the
pretext of buying a notebook to make it to the matinee show. Before I could
reach home after the movie, my mother smelled a rat as she had come to know
that I had bunked the post-lunch session; and so she wanted me to show the notebook
that I bought. Well, I had the presence of mind to show her a fresh-looking one
for the rest were anyway worn and torn, but she proved to be more than a match
for me by catching me on the wrong foot; why she pointed out our teacher’s
remarks of the day before, and I owned up my backdated bluff at the very first
blow on my back; and wiser for that slip, I coached my classmates to portray my
future absences as playground holdups.”
“It makes me recall how a classmate of mine got away for claiming that
the Chambers Dictionary cost five times its price as his illiterate parents
were taken in by its bulkiness.”
“That’s about the blissful ignorance,” he said, and continued. “Right
outside our school gate there used to be two ice lolly vendors, Janakiramaiah
the old man and Ratnam the young guy, who somehow liked me; once he took me to
a matinee when I was nearly crushed in a stampede at the ticket counter, maybe,
fate had preserved me, for the second time that is, to inflict bigger blows
later; I’ve told you how I’d escaped from being drowned in our village tank
before that. You may know what his gesture might’ve meant for me but you can’t
guess what a burden it was for him to spend that extra ana on me; not that every one of us bought ice lolly to improve the
duos’ bottom lines. Why, many parents were unable to spare one Rupee for the
section-wise group photograph at the end of the academic year, and you can
figure out the disappointment of those who lost out and the haplessness of
their parents on that count. But thankfully, there is more money in more hands
these days, and I can tell you that today’s poor have more to spare than the
middleclass of yore. When the high-end express buses were first introduced, I
knew how scary were the village folks to travel in those, why even in the
ordinary buses, they could pay the fare only by digging deep into their
pockets.”
“Wonder how the rural Indian poverty line came to be drawn at
thirty-five rupees when these days the village folk flaunt five-hundred notes
for a bus fare of fifty?”
“Well aren’t statistics the damned lies,” he said. “Instead of gloating
over the blessings of life, man these days laments about the vicissitudes of
fate, but in the days of yore thanks to the karma siddhanta, even the have-nots were happy for they didn’t suffer
from the pangs of jealousy; what an idea karma is, attribute others’ fortune to
their goodness in the previous birth and try being more humane in this one for
a better time in the next round. But the ‘dream big’, ‘why not me’ and the ‘me
too’ ethos of the day has become man’s bane as his insane pursuit of the moolah
makes his life inane, and who can vouch for that better than me? Given my
innate nature coupled with the ethos of the times and the philosophy of my
upbringing, I shouldn’t have been left holding the wrong end of the get-rich
stick.”
“It is the mistakes that give substance to life, don’t they?”
“It looks like the beauty of life lies more in its memory than in its
living,” he said. “While the cow dung cakes were used for cooking food, kachika, its ash served as the family
tooth powder; it was left for one to pick up the smoothest portion of it from
the hearth, and all you needed for a clean tongue was a piece of palm leaf;
why, they were as good for a head start for the day as the present day
toothpaste and the metallic tongue-cleaner, but in recall, they acquire a
beauty of their own. And in our town days, when tooth powder was all that my
dad could afford for us, I didn’t feel wanting to have the merit-cum-means
scholarship that was up for grabs; well I was only eleven then, but I could see
that many of my classmates needed the dole more than I did though my miserly
grandfather thought otherwise, but my dad, who, as I told you, didn’t deem it
fit to claim the freedom fighter’s pension, was proud of my decision.”
“How contrasting it was, pardon my saying, from your latter-day ‘grab
by all means’ credo.”
“Why didn’t that occur to me all these days?” he said and paused for
long before he resumed. “In the hindsight I may say it was all owing to the
gradual dissipation of the patriotic fervor in our free India, sadly, as
Kamaraj put it, none thinks as an Indian but as an Andhraite, a Bengali, and a
Bihari et al. And going back to the pre-independence days, it was my dad’s
rashness that might’ve prompted his father to hasten his marriage; it was
another matter that his one-upmanship in finalizing a match behind his son’s
back left him with the egg on his face. But as if life has its own way of
compensating, the beauty of the bride and the aura associated with the
love-match made our surname a household name in the whole Taluka. Whatever, my grandfather was adept at the soft-sell of the
irrelevant while missing out on the big picture of opportunities; how his
double-speak used to amuse me in the matters of matchmaking. If his protagonist
were to be the groom, he used to proclaim that dowries were on the raise, and
should it be the other way round, then dowries had no other go than to
nosedive; and how eager he was to know the ‘income’ as well as the ‘other
income’ of whomever he met! Nothing odd about his enquiries as everyone was at
it in those days, but then he tended to be more than just curious that was in
spite of the rebuff he got from the first dalit government official from our village, who said that he was
paid enough to live well-enough. Why when it came to job choices for boys and
groom preferences for girls, the under-the-table-earning came into in the
reckoning; well where were the taxmen peeping over your shoulder those days? Don’t
ever buy the argument that old is gold for Kautilya wrote about bribery in his Arthasastra of yore; but it’s one thing
to satiate the corrupt and another to entice the decent; oh how we businessmen
came to corrupt our country’s ethical core by inducing one and all onto the
corrupt path of easy money! ”
“Regretting might increase one’s guilt but it won’t undo the wrong
anyway.”
“Maybe life was not designed to be that way and even otherwise, how
many come to reflect upon their lives before their end?” he said. “The fact of
life is that you’re the only constant of your life and all those who enter into
it through its revolving door are its uncertain variables. While the warmth of
a given relationship could be cherished as a lived-feeling even after the relationship
itself ends; how stupid it is to expect eternal love, eternal friendship et al
and feel bitter when confronted by the reality of life, sadly we tend to defuse
the past feelings with the change of personal equations thereby making our life
a zero-sum game. So as our false sense of superiority brings our tryst with
warmth to an avoidable end, still we wouldn’t be able to feel our loss in the
euphoria of success and if ever, one realizes the folly, as I do now, one feels
lost.”
“Either way, it amounts to the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Needn’t be, as your genuine repentance helps you to discover the
limitations of life,” he said. “But before I lost out on life in the middle, I
had so much of it in youth; it was as if to provide me a larger canvas to picture
my adolescence that my father moved to a bigger town, where my cousin Raju’s
parents lived. How elated were our elders at the prospect of a prospering
friendship between us; Raju’s father pulled all the stops to see that I was
admitted into that school Raju was in but to no avail as by then there was no
scope for further admissions. But still, Raju took me to the headmaster who
said that though he had earlier turned away the parents, he had no heart to
refuse his pupil’s plea to further his cousin’s education. Why not put down his
name to posterity as Devanandam.”
“By what you said of Raju, it’s possible that his persona was at work
as much as Devanandam’s love for his pupils.”
“Why it didn’t occur to me, surely it could’ve been the case,” he said
a little embarrassed. “But then, to start with, I was not interested in joining
that school for its regimen began with the Christian prayers and the very
thought of participation in those made me uncomfortable; why I was equally
averse to the idea of joining any RSS
sakha in the town that I just then left; maybe I was born with a secular
mind; it was only after Raju assured me that the prayer was a voluntary affair
that I had relented and if not, I wouldn’t have had such an Alma Matter headed
by Devanandam, a venerable product of the times when teaching was a noble
profession and not the commercial proposition that it had become; why won’t
this apply to the medical practitioners in equal measure.”
Brink of
Incest
“Once Raju and I had become
classmates, what a lovely time we have had!” he continued the recap of his
times with his cousin. “His boisterousness proved to be the perfect foil for my
adventurism, he had his finger in every pie and I too poked my nose everywhere.
Though we got into trouble often in and out of school, if not his bluster, it
was my wits that used to save the day for us. Whatever, to the delight of all,
we were on target when it came to studies; but once we made it to the college,
we began to drift apart; he focused to excel at studies and I meandered on the
path of adolescence, I say the defining phase of life; while the hard-nosed and
the dull-headed escape its snares, the romantics sucked in by its charms make
the bottom rungs of the merit ladders. Didn’t I say, if only there were to be a
five year adolescent recess between the high school and the college, the
toppers’ list in higher studies would be topsy-turvy. Still to begin with, like
me, Raju too struggled to get a breakthrough but unlike me, his career graph
had plateaued well below the half-way mark, maybe for want of the proverbial
ounce of luck. But, as I came to realize later, life made it even for him all
through before death snatched him away in his mid-course, and on the contrary,
fate led me to the highs of life before pushing me into its lows; well making
it meaningless in the end. Maybe it’s the way of life that the flood of it gets
balanced by the ebb of fate; wonder what’s the so-called ‘gaining the upper
hand mean?”
“That reminds me of Raja Rao’s observation in Benign Flame - it’s a peculiar feature of human nature in that we
love to see those close to us climb up the staircase of success, but, behind
us; if they happen to catch up with us, needing to share the space with them,
we feel choked, and were they to overtake us, we feel morose, though they might
remain friendly. It is because, used as we were to condescend to descend in our
affections, we lose countenance, not counting our jealousy, that they too might
seem patronizing from the altered stations.”
“How can I differ with that after what life had taught me,” he said,
and continued after a long pause. “There are things in life that are better
pictured through symbolisms; in those days of thrift, it was a case of loose
dresses for the kids to serve them well into adolescence. The college going
boys though were allowed to kick the bulky knickers to wear narrow-cut pants
that were in vogue then, but for the girls, their ‘menstruation to nuptial’
long skirts had longevity of their own, shortened though by early marriage.
However, in time, the so-called bell-bottoms came to shape man’s trouser; it’s
as if all vied with each other to ever widen its bottoms; but then, after those
stints with the narrow-cuts and the bell-bottoms, as if men realized the
futility of triviality in their own world, they had been sticking to the formal
wear of the normal trouser. When it was
time for me to make it to college, it was time to learn cycling, which is like
learning to walk, and both involve false steps but with a difference; while a
kid’s missteps won’t break its bones, a cyclist’s learning curve is generally
drawn in his own and others’ blood as well. Whatever, soon I began pedaling my
Raleigh into the arena of youth only to break my heart.”
“Isn’t it said devoid of calf love, of what avail is youth.”
“Maybe all are not made for romance, and youth was still some way from
me then,” he said and continued. “Before I could acquire my sense of
adolescence, I would’ve probably begun my sex life in incest; some six months
shy of being fifteen, I became friendly with a newly married cousin on a family
visit, who made me privy to her dull married life, and one evening, tired for
her window-shopping, she asked me to massage her legs to relieve her fatigue,
and when I expressed my surprise at the softness of her being, she told me that
is the way women are made. After a couple of days, she moved to an old couple’s
house to be with them for a week or more, and that evening when I went to see
her, she asked me to stay back for the night as she was bored to death with the
oldies. After dinner, when we were alone, complaining of shoulder pain, she
asked me to massage her nape; as I was tentative in my reach, she slid the pallu off her low-neck blouse to unveil
her fabulous boobs and the fascinating valley as if to afford me the first
flesh feast of my life, oh how tempted I was to lay my hands on her heaving
bosom! Well, I was too young and inexperienced to advance farther down and she
too might’ve felt it delicate to goad me to be geared up for her final favor.
Maybe to pick up the sexual threads that we both had half-heartedly left that
night, she sought my company the next night as well but my father didn’t
approve of that for he could’ve smelled incest in the air from her demeanor; if
not, who knows, the next time, I would’ve dared to advance deep into her valley
or she might’ve been forthright with her eagerness for sex. Then I was too raw
to know what I had lost but when I came of age, I was wont to wonder whether
that bout of massage would’ve led us to the bed of incest that is had I crossed
the threshold of her bulging boobs. Whatever, I could never figure out whether
I should thank my father for saving me from committing a possible incest, or
curse him for having robbed me of sex with a voluptuous woman at her youthful
best.”
“Oh, it was your dad again.”
“But then he was wont to make life sweeter for all of us individually
that was; there might be many who would fetch sweets for the family but I would
be surprised if you ever heard of a man who brought home each one’s favorite
pudding?’ he said in an apparent admiration for his dad. “And yet how he made
it sour for me as I was on the verge of sharing the forbidden fruit of sex with
that cousin; but why blaming him for that as shortly thereafter I failed on my
own to build upon the affections of another just wed relative, a couple of
years older to me; oh, how inviting she was and how hesitant I had been, well,
she was one of her kind, beautiful and vivacious. While I clung to her
fascinated by her poise, she was drawn to me charmed by my youth, and in no
time we became soul mates. Maybe in time I would have roped her into my embrace
but well before that she left the town with her husband, who was on transfer;
how excited I was when I received her letter, which heralded an unceasing
correspondence between us in which we poured out our affections to each other.
Oh how she used to remonstrate if an odd reply of mine was not on the dot!”
“How we both came to cherish that indescribable relationship we only
knew,” he said after pausing for a while, “of course, apart from her husband,
who too was friendly with me. Later, when I was still in college, I failed yet
again to savor what was on offer from that woman; she wrote to me that she was
devastated to know that her husband was cheating on her and that she was
desperate for my company; oh, how she had couched her invitation for a liaison
by stating that while I uplift her sagging morale, she won’t withhold anything
from me. Why it was clear that she was on the rebound but I was not my own man
then to rush to her to catch her on it; well, as the crisis blew over in her
life, she turned cold towards me, may she was hurt that I didn’t turn up when
she need me the most or it could be because she was wary of what all she wrote
to me in her moment of weakness. Whatever, I am never tired of fantasizing
about our possible mating in her the then disturbed bed.”
“What a painfully sweet fantasy it is?”
“And it was no different with another cousin of my age when we met at
sweet sixteen that is before it turned into a platonic love. She was all eyes
and ears for me, but, so to say, still I didn’t make the grade by then,” he
continued. “But first things first, and that’s about my first love, whom Raju
named No.1; it started with my fascination for her mesmeric gait only to end up
in the memory of her misstep; am I being poetic, why not, after all, it’s about
my first love. When the admission list was out, I was thrilled that at last I
would have a girl for a classmate; I told you how my co-ed idea was put paid at
school. Well, at the time of admission, what an anticipation it was awaiting
the arrival of an unknown dame; when I sighted a dusky lass in a light brown
long skirt with a black blouse, I wished she were the one that I was waiting
for; and as she neared in a swing-and-roll gait that was exciting as well as
enticing, her dark brown oni
fluttered in the gushing air as if to herald her arrival. When she stepped into
the corridor, it seemed as if her gait carried the core of her femininity even
as her glance aroused the essence of my masculinity. Why as her bewildered eyes
imparted innocence to her face, her inquisitive look greeted my impulsive
stare; how charming was her manner and how tantalizing were her movements to my
enamored eyes. So to say, her expressive eyes seized my heart!”
“Often it’s the first look that paves the path of love, isn’t it?”
“How nicely put,” he said. “What with her persona planting the seeds of
love in my expectant heart, the wait for the college reopening seemed a
semester away; so on the D-day, making it early to the class, I sat in the
front row, and waited for her to take her place across the aisle. When she
entered in time and posited herself as expected, I didn’t take my eyes off her
engaging face; well, I started as a face man before I became a figure man and
you would agree, women don’t mind my being a turncoat on that count. Her
mirthful laughter at some funny remark of the lecturer revealed the dimple in
the very middle of her left cheek that lent charm to her face; wonder how a
biological imperfection came to personify woman’s beauty in man’s perception.
Soon enough when she caught me at my ogling ways, she seemed to have been
pleased at being the object of my fascination, and the lecturer too didn’t fail
to notice my distraction, so he thought it fit to draw my attention to his
exhortation. Tackling him appropriately, as I turned to her triumphantly, I
could discern her look of admiration.”
“How vividly you remember it all!”
“Who said that first love is neither fully remembered nor completely
forgotten?” he said apparently relishing the quote. “As that look fuelled my
infatuation, my manner seemed to have enticed the woman in her, and our eyes began
to caress each other; while her gaze nourished love in my heart, my stare
seemed to have seized her mind. When she smiled at me as if to take my heart
into the depths of her dimple for safekeeping and then closed her eyes as
though to lock my persona in her retina, I was benumbed with ecstasy. Soon as
if enthused by her own eagerness as she opened her eyes to espy me endearingly
for affording me an ennobling feeling, my fond eyes began to caress her
unceasingly. But then, maybe prompted by her coyness, though she turned her
attention away from me and tried to focus on the topic of discussion, yet I
continued to savor her sweet demeanor, the object of my surging affection. But
soon, as she glanced at me, maybe to gauge the impact of her responsiveness from
my response, her face had acquired an aura of love, and thus enamored of each
other, we found ourselves espying one another, at every turn that is.’
“What a poetic reminiscence of a first love!”
Love-less Love
“My life, so to say, became a stanza of the poem of first love, it’s
not that my other affections were any prosaic for they were all penned in
passion,” he continued. “Won’t the manifestations of first love and the
embodiments of first sex stand apart from the
pulsations of heart and the spasms of the body that one might experience
in later affairs? And that’s why one should be choosy about the body for the
first lay as anyway the reins of love are in the hands of heart. Whatever, with
the newfound vision to envision women, I got bogged down by the second sex; the
more femininity fascinated me for the contours of womanish curves seemed to
outclass the symmetry of geometry, all the more I had a measure of my
masculinity. My infatuation for women was such that the inflections of their
nuances came to be worth pondering over than the intriguing riders of
mathematical theorems. When compared to the feminist ways, which seemed
puzzling to my inquisitive mind, the laws of physics appeared commonplace; and
so, as I began to grapple with the dynamics of man-women chemistry, the
inorganic reactions in the college lab seemed boring. Either compelled by my ardent manner or
affected by my sex appeal and/or both, I’m not sure, women tended to respond to
my eagerness in their sensual ways, and insensibly, the coyness of feminine
demeanor seemed to shape the manliness of my persona. While the desire I
discerned in the female espials made me feel desired as a male, their diffident
demeanor in my presence afforded me a sense of conquest. Soon women made me
realize that I am a ladies’ man.”
“Self-actualization in the arena of attraction, surely it was.”
“Writer-like again,” he said, and continued, “but as luck would’ve it,
for all its promise, my first love ended up as a damp squib; it’s another
matter that even as duds have girlfriends these days, in our time, the dashing
too had to be content with daydreams. Though No.1 and I didn’t take our eyes
off each other for the rest of the year, there was no way I could’ve made advances
on her without causing a scandal in the college. Moreover, I loved her enough
not to have caused any hurt to her orderly life; maybe had not I left for
Ranchi to pursue that futile course in engineering, we would’ve come closer the
next year. Whatever, the day before I left the town, I waited for her in the
college corridor, hoping to bid her adieu; as she neared me, she stopped
instinctively and I paced up to her intuitively. How disappointed she seemed at
my impending departure and how elated I was when she Okayed my idea that we
stayed in touch through correspondence. But in that moment of ecstasy, I failed
to shake her hand, and maybe that lack of courtesy to love didn’t go down well
with it, and so it seems, it never gave me another chance to embellish my first
love with the touch of my beloved. Yet oblivious of my fate but with the
accrued empathy of my father’s farewell tears I told you about, the next
morning, I boarded the Howrah Mail with bountiful hope. Though she failed to
keep her promise to correspond, yet I wrote to her unceasingly, picturing the
love my heart bore for her but to no avail; but her indifference to my missives
made no difference to my longing for her that began to wane my interest in
studies.”
“And that fetched you a scrape through degree.”
“It feels nice that you have a feel for my plight,” he said reaching
out for my hand. “When I returned home for summer recess, there was no way of
seeing her as she was wont to homebound, and so dying for a glimpse of her, I
spent the best part of my holidays in the mango grove opposite her house; towns
were yet to turn into concrete jungles by then, and needless to say, Raju kept
me company in my wild goose chase. Next year though, I fared better “not at
studies but at her hands’ for she wrote a couple of noncommittal letters, one
of which was virtually a thesis on spirituality. Whatever, the following
summer, I barged into her house and forced the issue by proposing to her; don’t
imagine that I tried to emulate my father, for I didn’t hear about his exploits
by then; but how my failure to win her over contrasts with his teenage ability
to wed his beloved is another matter. When she said that we could think about
crossing the bridge when we come to it, her eavesdropping mother, who was averse
to me, I know not why, asked her to clarify her stance, and at that she said
that she was confused about the whole thing. Why, it was apparent that while
her enamored heart pushed her towards me, her constrained mind tended her to
hold on to her widowed mother; and if anything, the tragic death of both her
younger brothers later in a road mishap made her more incapable than ever to
displease her parent. Oh, how the deaths on the road came to shape the course
of my life; when I called on her to console her, as she seemed solaced by the
empathy of my soul, I knew that she needed me more than anyone else, and hoped
she would realize that in time. That was why, without ever having touched her
little finger, I was lovelorn for long; but, when I went to see her as she was
moving out of the town to take up a job, she wanted me to return the letters
she wrote, of course, at her mother’s bidding. How silly of her for I loved her
in spite of her indifference, and how sheepish she looked as I assured her that
I was going to shred them anyway; I kept my word but failed to forget her. Of
what avail was my unrequited love that only earned me a scrape through degree,
I would never know”
“Didn’t Ghalib say, if not undone by love, I would’ve been second to
none.”
“What a heady mix sher-shairi
and unrequited love make,” he said. “I’ve had its brew to the brim to savor to
its dregs but in the end it was this celebration of self-deprecation that had
put me off from that. But by then much water had flowed to waste under the bridge
of my love-less love and my career course too had headed towards the deserts of
failure; so sometime later I sent her, so to say, my letter of resignation, in
which I wrote that when I sought her hand, I hoped to be her lover at home and
a peer at the workplace, but with my fledgling career leading me nowhere, there
was no way I could aspire to lead her to the altar. How I beseeched her to hold
my hand of friendship as I had burnt the desires of love in the groins of
failures; why not she let my boundless affection for her be the balm of her
life.”
“Isn’t it an idealistic proposition impracticable in practice?”
“You would know when I tell you about my platonic relationship with
that sweet sixteen cousin of mine,” he continued. “But sadly, my first love’s
reply was a backdated letter she herself penned in her mother’s name, warning
me to leave her daughter alone; what a merciless blow upon a hapless surrender
that I couldn’t even gasp ‘Et tu, Brute’; how could I have for she never showed
any signs of like devotion towards me to warrant such a lament. But whither
went her innocence; or was it merely a figment of mine own imagination; how I
came to value her with a skimpy acquaintance; what was left of it, after all
that; didn’t someone say that women’s looks were his only books, and what
pretty follies they taught him; why it was her loaded looks that goaded me to
plunge into the voidness of love-less love. As I turned despondent, I felt that
I might forget her in time but I would never forgive her meanness, and that’s
what I wrote to her; well, in remorse, she asked our common friend to tell me
that some devil might’ve possessed her when she penned that impersonated
letter, that she was at a loss as to why she failed to tell me that she felt
one of her colleagues was better suited than me to be her man, and that she
would pray for a better spouse for me.”
“What to make out of her character?”
“I didn’t know about it then and it doesn’t matter now,” he continued.
“Some time later, our common friend telephoned me to inform that she was on an
official visit to his branch, and that I may like to see her for the old times’
sake that is one last time before her impending marriage. How I vacillated
before boarding the train, and when he told at the railway station that she
came with her fiancé, I asked him what was his idea in inviting me to see the
one to whom I’ve lost in the battle of affection, and he said that one’s
balance sheet of life is prepared only near one’s end. Next day, as I crossed
her walking in step with her beau, having sighted me from a distance even as
her eyes caressed me in wonderment, her feet induced her to fall behind the man
she had preferred over me; I thought her misstep had conveyed to me what I
wanted her to admit all along. Yet, the irony of the encounter was that,
absorbed as I was in espying her, I had no eyes for my rival, and so, I have no
idea of the persona of the man who won her favor; whatever, the memory of that
misstep lingered on in my mind until that mishap of a recent meeting with
her.”
“It’s as well that she didn’t make a misogynist out of you.”
“Thank god for that,” he said and continued with the intriguing
character of his No.1. “I heard that all along she and her man were spiritually
inclined, and midway their career, they even gave up their jobs and joined some
institution devoted to social service. When I came to know that sometime back
she was widowed as I called on her, what a cold reception she gave me; how
stony she seemed when I announced myself and how that left me clueless about
the soul of the woman who made a name as a savior for the needy. Maybe she’s a
complex character without a basic character; how else can one explain her
behavior towards a man whom she had confused if not wronged; whatever, the
moral of the lesson is that it’s futile seeking an update on the past memories
for the fear of fouling with them.”
“If you think it’s not inappropriate, why not we review the reality of
life over a couple of drinks.”
“Inappropriate my foot,” he said, “it’s just a matter of culture and
convention, and they differ; who could decide which culture is right and which
convention is wrong? If something is okay with you, it should be appropriate
for you, provided you won’t tread on others sensibilities. I too need some
drink for I wish to kiss and tell; well, the less inhibited one is, the more
forthcoming he would be. Don’t mind picking up that Laphroaic for us.”
Flights of
Heart,
“Though I was pained by her indifference, my psyche didn’t suffer for
her rejection, and I owe that to the girls who buttressed my self-worth with
their sensual attentions,” he began reviewing his life and times over our
drinks. “Back home during holidays, I used to hang around a lot at a friend’s
place; though I didn’t develop any romantic designs on his sisters, I was a hit
with his cousins who were wont to visit them often; one girl was so enamored of
me that she rarely let me be alone; her praises of me still hum in my ears
after all these years and after what had happened. When it was time for me to
go back to college, the Vizag Steel agitation took an ugly turn disrupting the
train services, but my dad wanted to dispatch me to Berhampur in a goods lorry
for my onward train journey to Ranchi. Oh how she begged me to stay back till
the train services were resumed and I also wanted to enjoy her attentions that
much longer but there was no way I could’ve negated my dad’s idea though it was
‘neither here nor there’ for me, as my heart was not in studies anyway; and it
turned out to be a double jeopardy for me as she came to shun me whenever we
met later. Wonder how she could feel so slighted!”
“Maybe that’s why it’s called calf-love.”
“But I was the object of a durable calf love as well,” he continued. “I
happened to meet a charming visitor to another friend’s place, who was no less
charmed by my charms; but the thrill of it was when we met again as she
revisited them after three years; the first thing that she did after she landed
there was to ask my friend to fetch me forthwith, but then maybe as she was
older than me, she didn’t deem it fit to build upon our mutual attraction, well
that was the last time we ever met. Barring a couple of more adolescent
infatuations, what Cheiro said about No. 9 people, didn’t he aver that they
tend to love the wrong ones and end up without the final favor, sadly for me
proved right, oh, how stars foretell?”
He paused for a while, apparently lost in the loss of his lost loves,
and then had a couple of sips of his drink as if to uplift his spirits.
“While the flood of my obsession for my first love began to ebb, the
tide of my fascination for my cousin turned into a hurricane,” he resumed his
narrative. “When we first met, she fell head over heels for my boyish looks,
and the next time, it was my turn to lose my heart in her womanish curves. What
with my accentuated feelings for her, her attentions made me feel a special
being; but then leaving me alone, as she went to a movie with another relative,
I couldn’t bear her neglect; but when she returned home at the interval as my
sulking face haunted her, as she put it, and seeing me delighted at her return,
she told me that as she left the theatre, she knew that seeing me happy would
be far more satisfying to her than watching the rest of the movie. Well, that
set the emotional bond of our unbound affection, cemented by the small
pleasures we began to steal; but the improbability of our marriage made her
resist my desperate attempts for our sexual closeness; but once in frustration,
as I tried to break up with her, she cajoled me back into her loving fold
without conceding the favors of sex. When I was still in college, she got
married and since I came to respect her sensitivity to her chastity, I gave a
platonic turn to my passionate love; and as she became a proud mother, believe
me, she swore, by placing her hand on her boy’s head, that she loves me more
than she loves her son, and as if to prove the sincerity of her love, she was
wont to grant me the motherly warmth of it.”
He stopped for a while savoring some more of Laphroaic seemingly
cherishing the recollections of those past moments.
“What a solace it was for me to sink into her lap to feel the depth of
her love for me,” he said on resumption, “how fulfilling those small pleasures
had been for both of us, it’s as if the mother in her that granted me what the
lover in her had denied me. Oh, in those moments of pure love, how we used to
feel the fusion of our souls; who knows an illicit affair would have fouled our
platonic union; anyway true to the oneness of our being, while on her deathbed
she had communicated her longing for our togetherness, and given that she had
conveyed it telepathically, you could imagine the intensity of her feeling; she
fell ill suddenly and being in Cal at that time, I wasn’t in the know of it,
but that midnight I woke up to her thoughts from my deep sleep, and stayed
awake disturbed for long; the next day when the telegram carried the news of
her midnight end, I knew that she lived her last moments thinking about me; oh
how she kept her vow even as death snatched her away from my thoughts.”
“What a poignant end to a platonic love; maybe had your No.1 remained
in touch, surely your first love wouldn’t have seen such a cold end.”
“It’s one of those ifs and buts of life,” he said. “But when alive, how
my soul-mate looked forward for my marriage; why she wanted to stay with me for
a couple of months as and when I settled down with my wife; how she developed
ideas of her own about my wife; well, for her I was the perfect man there ever
was, and no prospective match ever satisfied her. Sadly she was not around when
Rama came into my life, but surely they would’ve loved each other for their
natures matched; what an unusual love triangle it would’ve been; maybe, we can
divine the limitations of relationships through unfulfilled expectations but
it’s the incompleteness of life that gives us the complete understanding of
it.”
“What a poetic idea it is.”
“But as the women I loved afforded me only emotional satisfaction, the
physical fulfillment of love was still a far cry,” he continued. “It was then
that a girl in her pre-puberty was enamored of me, and I used her body as it
could afford, to satiate my newfound urges; you can’t brand me a pedophile for
both of us were juveniles then; well it was possible that the innocence of her
infatuation combined with the curiosity of her sexuality made her a willing
mate in our incomplete unions. But when she matured, I took stock of our
affair; even as I visualized the hazards of our continued escapades, it was
clear that I had no emotional urge to make her my woman; so I told her not to
give in, even if I persisted because our marriage was not on the cards. Oh, how
shocked she was at that the poor thing; she was too young to accuse me of
betrayal and I was not old enough to grasp my folly; whatever, there was no bad
blood between us. Why, she continued to adore me but I kept a healthy distance
from her, and even after marrying a worthy though she remained fond of me; I
never thought of exploiting her weakness for me to curry her favors with
sentimental trespasses. Maybe, I loved her more than I had lusted for her.”
“Sorry to say, your saga seems to blur the line between love and
philandering. Surely I need an explanation for the sake of the prospective
readers of your memoir.”
“I see that ‘one life, one love’ is a canard spread by the lunatic
poets,” he said a little hurt. “Haven’t psychologists testified to the fact
that one can love more than one at the same time, and that applies no less to
the second sex; well, love, like friendship, is a feeling and to say ‘one love
only’ is like averring ‘one friend only’. If any of your readers feels that all
his friends save the first one are mere acquaintances, then I have no problem
even if he takes me as a philanderer. Moreover, an eternal love is an absurd
proposition that is if you mean sexual love, for it’s in the nature of desire
that it wanes with continued fulfillment and dissipates through prolonged
longing.”
“Be assured that I would solicit my readers’ understanding on your
behalf.”
‘Thanks for that,’ he said and continued with the remarkable saga of
his life. “But as her man’s career graph rose and mine never took-off, her
interest in me began to wane; why not, as the promise of my life that induced
love in her was belied, her love for me would have lost its force; but then,
why blame her for that’s the reality of love in the realms of life; and falling
in and out of love, I too had learned not to let my unrequited loves affect my
life. But whenever I recall my journey through the deserts of disappointment,
my tryst with a rare stunner in the oasis of sex stands apart; while I was
cooling my heels with that scrape-through degree as you called it, I saw her in
a mall; I was so overawed by her womanliness that I lost my eyes to her, and as
if she appreciated my eye for feminine charms, she conveyed her compliments
through her body language. But even before I had a full grasp of her enticing
poise as she left the place in her majestic gait, I followed her in a trance,
but even after she left in a rickshaw, I stood transfixed as if she fixed me in
a state of pure joy that was until a friend woke me up to the reality of her,
Sumitra the common girl; but then the devastating revelation didn’t dampen the
pristine feelings her angelic persona induced in my enamored heart.”
“Love seems to be obstinate in holding on to the first impression,
won’t Napoleon’s love for the unfaithful Joséphine illustrate that.”
“But then his divorcing her to sire an heir of royal blood to usher in
his dynasty underscores the power of the ambitions of life over the
fulfillments of love, well it all depends as Edward VIII renounced his throne
to wed the woman he loved,” he said (though he didn’t name the beloved, his
infectious memoir of love and loss impelled me to record her here as Wallis
Simpson). “Marking her movements from then on, I began shadowing her during the
day, and for my apparent adoration for her, she was wont to bestow me with her
coy smiles as and when we crossed our paths. Once, when I followed her right up
to her gate to mark her place, her young sibling told me that her sister was
expecting me, but then while Cheiro’s theory of numbers denied me the favors of
those who fancied me; it was my principle not to buy sex with the paternal
bucks that distanced me from her sensuous embrace. But in hindsight, I feel
that it was nothing but sentimental nonsense for, all along, I wasted my dad’s
money like nobody’s business; any way, my dilemma ended as I left home on a
six-month assignment as a graduate trainee, and though I was a spendthrift, I had
strived to save enough to savor her in a couple of flings or more. But when I
returned home, I learned that she was out of bounds as she became someone’s
keep; oh what a KLPD it was as they say in the North, and how the development
depressed me for days on.”
“How life changeth one; the one who was averse to buying sex with his
dad’s bucks came to build his business empire with his wife’s doles! Be gone
all principles.”
“Why fault life for our own lack of comprehension,” he said seemingly
taken back. “Try seeing it through the prism of pragmatism and you will find
its fault lines blurring in your vision, any way, what about having one large
for both of us.”
Gaffes of Youth
“Perhaps principles are the variable features of life,” he continued
reflectively as we began sipping the drink. “Back to Sumitra, as she rarely stepped
out, I had no means of wooing her, but as hope didn’t desert me, it was my wont
to obtain an update on her whenever I was in town. The fact that I have had a
couple of women by then only increased my desire to possess her; though she
continued to deny her body for all and sundry; but taking my fate into my
hands, once I trespassed into her domain and found her alone with her mom. The
oldie tried to pimp for her younger one, the same girl I told you about, well,
she matured in the meantime; but I insisted at having none other than my old
flame; maybe divining my want from a close range, she seemed to have recalled
my enamor of yore; and as I reminded her about my futile courtship, her face
was aglow with the joys reminiscence. When I told her that I was still burning
in my ardor, she turned coy and yet demurred at my advances for she wasn’t
inclined to betray the man who kept her; but with my passion gripping my soul,
I told her how desperate I had been for her possession and said that her denial
would be a travesty of love itself. What with our interaction enhancing my
passion for her possession, possibly affected by my body language, she began to
waver in her manner all the while pleading for my understanding of her
position; oh how pitiable she looked in her pleading. Well, not wanting her to
suffer any qualms even for love’s sake, I felt like withdrawing, but as my urge
dulled my conscience, I remained adamant to have her regardless; when she
softened her stance for a one-night stand; oh how I jumped for joy, but as she
sought my word that I would not press for an encore, I was constrained to
assure her that I wouldn’t turn up again, and then she fixed the muhurat for the tryst of my life.
Whether it was the charm of my persona or the intensity of my longing for her
that swayed her mind in the end I don’t know; maybe she too might’ve nursed a
liking for me in the recess of her heart that came to the fore at the threshold
of my fate.”
“Of all the joys of life, there’s nothing like possessing the coveted one,
isn’t it?”
“Say fulfillment,” he said in apparent delight, “and it was dream come
true when I took her into my arms, and it was as if we both indulged in the
coitals of our lives all through that night, and each time, lying in her
satiated embrace, I felt that I wouldn’t mind dropping dead in her lap. But
still, I kept away from her, and a year later, as my passion for her began to
sway my mind, I went to see her regardless; but sadly I was late by six months,
how distressed I was on learning that she died depressed, deserted by the man
she had come to repose her trust in. If only I broke my word in time, maybe, I
could’ve mended her broken heart with my affectionate manoeuvres, but wouldn’t have my adoration for her acted as an
antidote for her depression; well, whether I could’ve given her hope to live I
would never know.’
“Possibly, buttressed with self-worth, distress makes way to hope; but
what an irony your noble sentiment worked against a sensitive soul.”
“It was one of many in a seamless chain of my disjointed love life,” he
said seemingly depressed. “When I realized that the charm of life lies in the
company of women, I could visualize that the medical profession facilitated it
the most, in those days at least. But as the sight of blood always made me
giddy, I had to give up my idea of being a doctor, but lo, I had to endure the
trauma of, not one, but two, head-on crashes on the highways, and you know how
they had changed my life in turns. And ironically I had the first taste of
romance in a hospital that was after having desisted from being a doctor, in
spite of the romantic possibilities the medical profession held for the
enterprising! As I told you, once my paternal grandfather lay paralyzed in the
hospital, and by then I began to focus on the female form as my eyes came to
grasp the nuances of its sexual appeals. But as my sensuality began to
visualize the imagery of the erotic best in women, it was the dusky dames with
accentuated curves that began swaying my head; oh how my eyes started scanning
their sensuous forms for sexual programming. While I spent the days with my
grandfather, the nurse on duty happened to be Deenamani, who I thought was the
personification of femininity; how we used to dote upon each other even as my
grandfather remained skeptical about our closeness. When it was time for him to
be discharged, she was downcast at the prospect of our separation, and as if to
tie our relationship beforehand, she invited me to her hostel; but sadly for
both of us, I failed to oblige her as I was still a novice for an affair, and
going by the saying that any fool can start an affair but it takes a wise man
to get out of it, who knows, maybe I would’ve stuck to her and possibly without
any regrets at that; why the sweetness of her affection and the poise of her
persona, ever made me rue that missed opportunity.”
“If only the clock could be turned back at every turn in life.”
“If it were the case, would man ever move forward in life?” he said
before taking his memoir forward. “While I was single-minded in pursuing the
passions of my heart, so to say, I was wont to let bygones be bygones, and all
my life that helped me to pursue my attractions with gusto regardless of the
debilitating heartburns. When I was laid low by my first love, I met a lovely
girl, who set upon her heart on a fictional hero of the time; I told her that
as men in flesh and blood bear warts and all, maybe she was distained to be a
spinster, and how perplexed she looked at that. But as I began to address her
innate romanticism with sher shairies, she
insensibly fell in love with me, making me the object of her sensual adoration,
well, but for the sectarian difference, our caste being the same, we would have
become man and wife; and when she became a mother, she hoped the sectarian bar
that barred our wedding wouldn’t be a hurdle for the marriage of her son and my
yet-to-arrive daughter. But sadly, like my soul mate of a cousin, she too died
rather very early in life.”
“Wonder whether their spouses would have nursed fond memories of these
as you did?”
“Won’t the fresh nuptial require the surviving spouse to dissipate the
affections of the departed soul, and sadly for the toddlers, it brings about
their emotional disconnect with the deceased parent,” he said and continued
with his saga of life. “While in my childhood, I was close to my paternal
grandfather for his affection, in my youth, I was drawn more to my
intellectually endowed maternal grandfather, who, as I told you, was reluctant
to have my dad as his son-in-law; it was another matter though that he came to
realize later what a capable man and devoted husband my dad was. Well as his
fancied first son-in-law was found wanting in ways many, his esteem for the
slighted groom only grew; he even came to depend on my father whom he began
treating like a son, and my dad too started looking up to him as a father
figure; what an amiable relationship they had developed and how that sustained
till the very end!”
“Maybe, liking is a product of presumptions and respect an outcome of
analysis; that’s why, liking wanes when perceptions are belied but respect
grows when the character shows.’
“Good observation,” he said and continued, “Once, citing Kalidasa’s
astrological averments, my maternal grandfather predicted that I would be a
rich man but cautioned me not to be complacent, how I rue failing to follow his
warning! Whatever, sadly, when ripe old, he broke his hip, necessitating his
hospitalization; he was put in a special ward at the government hospital, now a
taboo even for the lower middle classes. ‘S’ the nurse on the night duty was
wont to be playful with me but being fair and plump, she failed to enter into
my zone of sexual attraction; but I was taken to ‘V’ her younger sibling who
kept her company in the staffroom;
though raw she was nearer to my ideal female. What a time we have had in the
staffroom late into the nights as ‘V’ too unwound herself in S’s infectious
company; the euphoria of their animation seemed to draw me closer to both of
them; oh, how they vied with each other to shower praises upon me, all the
while caressing me with their enamored looks! Though the vivacity of ‘S’ began
to dent my entrenched sense of beauty; it was V’s romanticism that catalyzed
the chemistry of our attraction; how lovingly she symbolized the imagery of our
attraction in that sketch of two flowers, marked ‘S’ and ‘V’ with the leaf ‘M’ in between them!
Soon ‘S’ proposed that we three should celebrate her birthday, a week away, at
a nearby tourist resort, and to my delight ‘V’ seconded the proposed outing.”
“It’s as if your maternal grandfather took over where your paternal one
left to facilitate another hospital romance in your life.”
“Maybe unwittingly,” he continued, “but the next night, carried away by
my sense of conquest, I jumped the gun; well, I had grabbed ‘S’, coyly watched
by ‘V’ from whom I had stolen a few kisses by then. When I began deep kissing
‘S’, hugging me though, as she was in tears, I withdrew from her nonplussed,
and seeing her cry in silence I was dismayed at the turn of events; I couldn’t
figure out how it might’ve been a transgression when we were anyway leading
ourselves to get drawn into an threesome orgy. So, having apologized to the
sulking ‘S’ watched by a perplexed ‘V’, disarrayed myself I left them for the
night, but as ‘S’ remained indifferent to my attempts at reconciliation, my
sense of decency precluded my courting ‘V’ though she was all eager. Well as if
to remove us from the untenable situation, the attending doctor discharged my
grandfather soon enough but it took me time to realize that for any it was one
thing to fantasize about an orgy and another to indulge in it; if only I was
privy to this feature of human nature, I would’ve as well had each of them
behind the curtain, but in turns; and who knew, in due course, even we would’ve
had our envisaged threesome; but as life would have it, my son did better on
that count, but we will come to that later.”
Pats
and Slights
“If love denied me the ecstasies of sex, it was sex that gave me the
joys of love,’ he continued the intriguing account of his life. “Maybe vexed
with the propensity of love to fail me at the threshold of possession, sex
might’ve thought ‘enough is enough’; so, it seems to have induced fate to let
Raju play his part in bestowing its final favor on me; we were in the same
place then and didn’t drift fully apart still. There lived a desirable girl, a
block away from his; when I told him that I would like to try my luck with her,
he felt that it would be a wild goose chase as she was already betrothed. Yet,
as I pressed my suit, she resigned into agreeing; is it not said that there is
no woman chaste enough to resist man’s seductive talk; that night, my long
awaited first night in which baring our bodies and souls to each other when we
sought to discover each other in the candlelight; she surrendered in ardor as I
possessed her with passion; urged by her surge, as I entered into her with all
my longing for a female, she took me in with all her wanting for a male; in
that lovemaking, so to say, as she had a measure of her femininity, I had the
grasp of my manhood; while the ecstasy of sex gripped us all night, the
fulfillment of it eased my body for days; well, reminiscing about the nuances
of our coition, I realized that the essence of sex lies, not in the physical
release it affords the mates, but in the gratification of their union that it
entails them. But it was my contentment—I wonder how I became insatiable in
later years—coupled with the dangers of our liaison that kept me away from her
until she turned into a gatecrasher. When she said that she desperately wanted
to have me again, I felt that I owed it to her to satiate her urge, never mind
the risk I might be running in obliging her for I came to know that her father
was a ferocious character. When I made it to the rendezvous, she said that she
wanted more of me before her beau got the better of her; about her liaison on
the verge of her nuptial, she said that she was only following the dictates of
her heart amidst the realities of life. Maybe, you may say that she was
romanticizing her lust, but I believe she had only rationalized the leanings of
her heart.”
“Maybe lust features on the reverse side of love’s coin.”
“Beautifully put, but I may add that lust is the abettor of love for
without it, there can be no lovemaking,” he said. “Well, I imbibed her
philosophy of love, and all was okay till I wavered from it to impress Ruma,
which was much later. As if sex gave me my due, it forthwith put a price for
its favors, and I too was willing to pay for it as I had been on my own by
then; and maybe, it was prognostic of my sex life that the first buy in a way
was a rare buy; it’s a rickshaw-wallah doubling
up as a pimp, who took me into a dimly lit middle-class brothel; how odd I felt
as I came face to face with the madam! Though the way she received me was
promising, to my disappointment the girls she fetched were no seductresses; so
as I tried to excuse myself, a stunning dame stepped out of the shadow near the
entrance; well, I failed to notice her as I made it there in the fashion of
those who enter brothels, focused on avoiding the focus of the passerby. When
she wondered how none of the girls impressed me, I told her it was possible
that none of them might’ve liked me; saying she was bowled, she led me into her
chamber.”
“Looks like you’re lucky with those.”
“Maybe, my innate love for women tended them to be affectionate towards
me,” he said. “From then on, I sought her at every turn and she gave me the
time of my life for long; but as she began to bloat, she said she was sad that
her body could no more provide what her love craved to give me; how moved I was
for her sensual concern for me, but when she offered to turn into a procuress
for me, I told her that I wanted to remember her as a mate and not as a madam.
How sad that the charms of these women are so short-lived; it’s as if by giving
in to all, they lose all they have. Whatever, I always cherished the romantic
times we have had.”
“Won’t it make an interesting contrast, your romantic negation of
favors on offer with that of Devdas’s sexual abnegation of an alluring
Chandramukhi?”
“More so to the sophists, who celebrate sentimentality,” he said. “Well,
as in all walks of life, these women too present a mixed bag, and it’s not that
brothels are the only slime-spots of society as there is a moral decay in every
walk of life; if anything the world is in need of a moral revolution than ever
before. So, before casting the proverbial first stone at them, it’s as well
that we may count our own warts; whatever, after failing me in love and
fulfilling me through sex, maybe life wanted to show me more of its variety in
some of its mundane dimensions that was shortly after that rendezvous with
Raju’s neighbor.”
“More conquests to follow, I suppose.”
“Oh, no, but there were encounters of another kind to recount,” he
said, “Landing in a metropolis, I joined a small subsidiary of a big company,
supervised by diploma holders and bossed over by a graduate engineer. It was as
if to prevent any possible threat to his engineering preeminence, the boss
dumped me in the inspection department, where I languished till I left the
firm; oh, how smaller can small men in big chairs become! I might as well have
died of ennui but for the hope induced in me by a cousin’s husband; he was wont
to say that there was bound to be light at the end of the tunnel for a graduate
engineer. I don’t know why, but he took a liking for me from the beginning, and
when he asked me for a game of chess, I saw in it the chance of my life to
prove that my scrape through degree was not the denominator of my gray matter.
So, even before we began, I wanted to win, let Fischer be the opponent, but I
found out soon enough that he was no mean a player either; from the see-saw
struggle in that five-hour long tussle, it was apparent that he didn’t want to
lose and I was determined to win; and at last, as he resigned, I felt
vindicated. It was a different matter though that being an engineer in top
gear, he was unable to tow my career wheel spiked by my pitiable score-card.”
“After all, it’s one’s limitations that set one’s course of life.”
“But life can be cruel even in our moments of triumph,” he continued.
“As I won his admiration in addition to his affection, it was galling to my
cousin who wasn’t enthused about me from the beginning; and to be fair to her,
she made her position clear; it was an article of faith with her that relatives
were suckers to be banished and friends were sweeteners to be added, and
needless to say, she misconstrued my bonhomie with her man as my endeavor to
buttress my hopeless position. Caught thus between her apathy and his empathy,
how I had to put up with all those embarrassing moments in their scores! And it
was their conflicting outlook about me, which led to that humiliating
experience.”
“Aren’t likes and dislikes the nuances of our nature?”
“Maybe so, but surely they are the lamp posts of life that either aid
or hinder your journey through it,” he said. “It was a five-day week for us at
the workplace and on Saturdays it was my wont to go to their place for his
sake; well at lunch time, as my cousin’s invitation to join them at the dining
table used to personify formality, though inevitably famished by then, I
invariably excused myself. On a weekend, he wanted me to accompany their
daughter to a sporting event that evening; but my cousin, in an apparent
abhorrence towards its possibility, began scouting for an appropriate candidate
for the occasion; oh how frantic she had been in ringing up their friends and
acquaintances in her frenetic search for the eluding character! Possibly in her
view, apart from her weird perception of relatives, it was the lack of social
status coupled with a bleak future that rendered me unfit for their daughter’s
company. Sadly as both didn’t renege on their respective positions, it was indeed
a double squeeze for me in that embarrassing position, and I only knew how I
had endured that humiliation until I was relieved by another cousin, who rang
up for me to run an urgent errand for her. So, I left my tormentors taking my
humiliation stoically and I’m sure that the ceasefire my exit would’ve
occasioned could’ve relieved them as well; and thanks to my obsession with the
charms of the fair sex, I was not on the rebound to settle scores over that
slight. Whatever, I told her later that what matters is personal character and
it’s unwise to discount relatives as if friends are infallible, after all,
one’s friends are someone’s relatives; didn’t Raju proved it in my case; in the
end though, I derived a sense of satisfaction as she began to see the value in
my averment, and she was all the happier for her altered mind-set. Why her
calls for lunch began to spell affection, and what sumptuous meals I have had
with them.”
“It’s the proclivity of bigotry to be insensitive to others’
sensibilities.”
“But with her, it was not the falsity of the person as it was of
perception,” he said having asked for one more drink, “nevertheless, much
before she had a change of heart, her stilted attitude had induced a false
sense of superiority in her daughter, who didn’t deem it fit to introduce me to
her husband though I took the trouble of attending their wedding as I was a
small fry then with no promise either.”
When I handed over his drink to him, as if still rankled by her slight,
he raised his glass and said in pique, “Cheers to her falsity.”
An
Emotional Affair
“If that cousin of mine
exemplified the falsity of perception, the one who used to ingratiate himself
with her spouse was the personification of falsity itself,” he began the
remarkable recap of his life. “But as the world reckons, he was an eligible
bachelor as far as eligibility could take a middleclass guy; well he was an
I.I.Tan with a MNC career and a four-wheeler to convey his corporate
eminence-in-the-making. As my position, rather lack of it, failed to impress
him, he was won’t not to reciprocate my greetings, and soon to avoid being
slighted by him I was not taking cognizance of his presence, in other words I
used to ignore the would-be ignorer. Surely, it is stupid to expect hosannas
from any, leave alone all, and so I would’ve still respected him had he
remained indifferent to me as ever for all have their own likes and dislikes.
But when he sensed that his own mentor, husband of my indifferent cousin, held
me dear, he tried to warm up to me, but by then I had learned how to judge
people and so I wasn’t moved by his attempts to befriend me. Another relative
though, impressed by his status and all made up her mind to marry her daughter
to him and that put paid to our voicing the objections we all have had about
him. It’s another matter that I had a crush on the girl.”
“Well I too see the big picture of man’s character in his small
gestures; but you and your crushes, don’t they seem unceasing?”
“Didn’t Stendhal opine that for a woman to love a man at first sight,
he should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in
his face,” he continued. “Maybe in my youth, my visage had that dual character,
which, as I told you, endeared me to many a woman, and that was why without the
fear of rejection, I could make a pass at every woman I had ever fancied; well,
my weakness had always been the lightly darkish women with a tinge of sadness
on their faces, and I was all too brotherly to those who failed to connect with
my roving eye. Once, such a one told me that she was enamored of me for my
romanticism and as her persona didn’t trigger my passion, I realized that its
woman’s sex appeal that brings man’s innate romanticism into play to provide
the cutting edge for lovemaking, and unless combined by male passion and female
amorousness, coition is mere sexual motion.”
He had yet another sip of Laphroaic from his glass before he continued.
“Coming back to the ill-fated girl, the cousin who rescued me from the
embarrassment of my life I told you about, abhorred the eligible bachelor in
equal measure for his conceited ways, was not prepared to voice her
apprehension lest her dissent should be construed as an envy for the girl’s
glorious fortune-in-the-making; well I too kept mum for I knew that I wouldn’t
have been deemed as a viable alternative by the mother of the bride and so,
sadly for others’ decency of silence and her mother’s blinkers of falsity, the
daughter had to suffer him as her man to her lifelong dismay. But when it came
to my relationship with Raju, my faculty of judgment deserted me; it was like
the accursed Karna losing his fighting prowess in the combat with Arjuna that
had cost his life; but though I lost my soul, my fate had to wait to undo me as
my destiny had other ideas for my life. At that time, I lived in a rented
portion of a house owned by an eminent family that fell afoul of fate; while
the girl was reduced as a makeup woman of a B - grade film heroine; her
brothers were compelled to run odd errands to sustain the joint family. As love
would have it, she had taken to a man who was not of her ilk and as his parents
were not so helpless or as progressive as these days, their inter-caste affair
was a non-starter in every way; the social space too was constricted for them
to find a place for indulging in premarital sex; if only Cupid had reckoned
with that when he kindled love in their hearts; whatever, they remained
lovelorn till she prevailed upon him to marry a girl from his caste. But the
rumor of her liaison that never was, put paid to her parental quest to find a
suitable boy for her from their own caste and it was at that juncture that I
entered into her life.”
“If only Cupid were not blind, love may have a better vision.”
“Well, I was sure at the very first sight that she was not my kind of girl,”
he said seemingly contemplating what I had said before he continued his story.
“So with no romantic leanings on her, I was free in my manner, and she too was
open with me without being flirty. Slowly but steadily, we had struck a
beautiful relationship, and, so to say, she took charge of my life; by the time
I returned from work, she used to wash and press my clothes besides setting my
bed right; how her brothers used to protest in jest that she washed my
undergarments even as she refused to touch theirs; well she was wont to aver
that I was her very special one, and once, when I was down with typhoid, my
benevolent cousin came to take me along with her, but as my caretaker would
have none of that, I had no heart to go against her wish; oh, how she rolled
the roles of a mother, sister and wife into that womanly care! But later, when
I decided to leave the place in search of better pastures, how upset she was;
she seemed as if she were bereaved but she was reconciled to the dictates of
fate as she put it. You may know that she didn’t let me carry much of my meager
possessions as she wanted to have them as keepsakes! When her promised memento
was not forthcoming even as I was all set to go, I went on reminding her about
it and she kept on telling me that I hadn’t gone still; and as I was about to
board the city-bus at their gate to reach the railway station, she took my hand
and planted a kiss on it; as our moist eyes blurred our vision, I waved at her
as much in sorrow as in joy but she was seemingly immobilized for any
reciprocation.”
“I know how uplifting affection could be, won’t that kiss last a
lifetime?”
“And possibly into the eternity for platonic love, unlike its sexual
cousin, could never wane,” he said as his eyes turned moist. “Maybe, that’s the
character of motherly love and sisterly affection; yet it would seem that it’s
in the lovemaking that the divinity of love manifests itself in its truest
mode. But then sexual liking, with or without love, too could hold on its own;
I used to see a ravishing woman in the bus stop, and once we chanced to stand
together in a jam-packed city bus; as I tentatively pressed myself against her
back, she deliberately pushed herself closer to me; and seemingly unconcerned
of each other, we let our declivities rub against each other until male biology
brought our delight to a close. Maybe, attractive women tend to celebrate their
femininity in the small pleasures that male eagerness ensures, but what a scene
the plain things create from a shake-hand distance in crowded places; why, it’s
as if they want to attract attention to themselves by insinuating that man’s
forced proximity to her was but his indecent approach. Whatever, if not for the
love of that girl and the warmth of my cousin, there was no way I could’ve continued
with the drudgery of my job, and years later, when all were critical of my
brother for having given up a job that didn’t suit his aptitude, I wanted to
know how many had had to endure the like hardships at the start of their
careers; the problem with us is that we tend to judge others without an iota of
an idea of their compelling circumstances; well, my brother made the grade in a
job that went well with his genius. But given the changeability of man, my once
inimical cousin’s spouse, who had professed his support for me, failed to
further my career when he was in a position to do so. But as I see it now, his
relevance to my life was his support for me when I was laid low by fate but not
in his disregard for me when I learned to be on my own; that’s why; I made it a
point to pay my last respects to him, though by then I was out of his mind for
long.”
“How contrasting it is compared to your reaction to Raju’s death?”
“Don’t you see that it symbolizes the contrasting phases of my life?”
he said in remorse. “Maybe, adoration is borne out one’s perception of his
being the object of appreciation, which the sense of deprivation of the same
results in a state of disaffection, but censure is an inimical product of one’s
sense of superiority over the other that is afflicting, oh how these things
come to shape the fates of men; though I let censure steel my nerve, I let
applause weaken my will, but that was much later.”
He paused as if to pick up the reins of his scattered thoughts.
The
Harlot Zone
“As if to show me the darker side of the flesh-trade, life took me into
a harlot zone of the city I had reached,” he said as I refilled our glasses
with the drink. “It was so unlike the pleasure streets of our town dotted with
decent joints that I frequented; the crowded lanes of that red-light district,
lined with girls in garish make-up and the dungeon of a brothel that I landed
in were clear put-offs; so when the madam wanted to know about my kind of maal, I was all set to take to my heels,
but as the girls trooped into the parade hall, as if on cue, I was tempted to
opt for one. When she had led me into in a dungeon of a cubicle to my dismay, a
brawl in the corridor made it worse for my mood but she insisted that I should
have her for it was seldom that a decent man came her way; even as my empathy
for her threw me into a dilemma, she had oralled my passion for her ready
possession.”
“Who said they are all suckers, in the negative sense.”
“Your interjections do inspire,” he said. “It’s the paradox of
prostitution that man lets some women have a free reign on sex so as to rein in
the promiscuity in the rest of them. So, won’t the least sought-after of the
whores outscore all the Casanovas of the world put together; well, that’s in
the lighter vein, but it was that experience which made me realize that it was
stupid to generalize the sex-workers; the harlots in the hell-holes of cities’
red-light districts are a pitiable lot of gullible girls and hapless women
forced to cater to the ever growing demand for paid sex there. But thanks to
the limited clientele in towns, the whores there can stave off the debilitating
sexual burden their ilk in the cities have to bear, yet it’s the so-called call-girls that call the shots,
more so, in metros; so all of them, being in the same calling are not on the
same footing. If the vicissitudes of life push women into the vice-like grip of
madam-pimp-police nexus of the flesh trade, then it’s the outcries of the
moralists against legalizing prostitution that ensure their sexual slavery in
abominable conditions; maybe, if only paid sex were to have a legal tag, then
surely it would entail as fair deal as possible for these hapless women.”
“I hear it’s much worse in the U.S, where the pimps treat the
prostitutes as vassals and abuse them in unimaginable ways.”
“Won’t that prove the more materialistic a society is, the less
sensitive it is to the plight of the deprived?” he said, “What does one say
about the out-dated ideas of the so-called idealists; it seems in matters
moral, insensitivity is well ingrained in its sensitivity. Save a Gandhi, even
the best of the rest of yore were not averse to their fellow-beings scavenging
their latrines; now I wonder why I never thought of it before, maybe, we put up
with what we come to grow up with; if not, why don’t the Sikh males find the
turban burdensome and the Muslim dames put up with the inhibiting burka?
Whatever, the world seems to care two hoots for the plight of the sex-workers
as it had been to that of the scavengers, and God knows when it would be wiser
to the ills of the unlicensed prostitution, if not AIDS, it’s the VD that’s the
return on investment for these pleasure-givers; why, the malady of the
flesh-trade is the bane of those who bring in the wares. How sad it is!”
“What an irony that they are undone being the sexual scavengers of the
male world?”
“Isn’t it a novel lament,” he said. “But, let the willing sell sex on
their own, and see how it works for the sellers and the buyers alike, why it’s
bound to benefit all, like in the rythubazars
sans middlemen. But the farmers’ suicides make another story; it’s the marginal
guys, who gamble on the cash crops that come a cropper; why not, lurking behind
the probable windfall is the possible failure to devour; have you heard of a
paddy farmer or a wheat grower committing suicide as the cash crop losers do?
Yet with their eye on the rural vote-bank, how the parties in opposition tirade
against the government of the day over these avoidable calamities; maybe the
political power changes hands over their dead bodies but the destitute continue
to consume pesticides as a way out of their debt traps. Won’t the callous
politicians know that it’s in chasing the quick buck that these greedy guys
bungle with their lives; why don’t they exhort farmers to part-opt for the cash
crops to meet both ends? Moreover, it’s not as if the bankrupt traders and the
insolvent others are not known to commit suicide but then, there is no
political axe to grind over their deaths; it all boils down to lobbying, in the
open as in the U.S or behind the closed doors in our country; but can sex
workers ever muster the sort of clout that the farmers’ lobby has?”
“Are they not making the right noises these days?”
“God bless them,” he continued. “What a good turn one of them gave to
my life; I was so put off with that metro jaunt that it was quite a while
before I ventured into a brothel, where I chanced upon an angelic whore, who
later became my Good Samaritan. Since she struck my romantic chord straight away,
I stuck to her for it’s not the sexual variety that I sought even in the paid
sex. After a hiatus, when I returned into her ardent arms, she told me that in
the meantime she had conceived my child but was constrained to get it aborted.
While I felt that something in me snapped, she said it was time that I got
married and became a father, when she told me to court a suitable dame, I said
that I was unlucky in love; she said that she knew a girl, who would be an
ideal wife for me, and as if to goad me to her candidate, she said the dame had
a rare sex appeal to eroticize the romantic in me; she said that the girl was
not privy to her double life and even if she came to know about it, she was
sure she would be sympathetic towards her. It was all too tempting not to
follow the lead, more so as I was just then shunned by Devi, who opted to marry
Raju, a bank clerk then; now I realize in hindsight that if only his father was
half as resourceful as my dad had been, he might’ve been no less an engineer
than me.”
“Isn’t it interesting that one woman should lead you to another woman?”
“Didn’t I tell you that my life is rather unusually unusual,” he said
joyously. “Her lead led me to Rathi and I fell for her, so to say,
head-over-heels, and her parents too were for hastening our wedding. With the
wedding a week away, I went to thank her, you can guess who, and she offered
herself as her wedding present; well I couldn’t say no to her and she dragged
me into her bed, as she put it, to refresh my memory of an amorous woman’s
lovemaking. Oh, what a time she gave me for one last time, but the day before
the marriage party was to board the Circar Express to reach Rathi’s place, it
occurred to me to take a VDRL test, just in case; and to my dismay, I tested
positive. Nonplussed though, I rushed to a specialist, who said the tests could
go awry at times, and how I wished that was the case in my case; anyway,
putting my fears at rest, he said that even otherwise, he would treat me in
time to make it harmless for my bride. What a nervous time it was waiting for
the fresh report, oh, it was the anxiety of a lifetime; but how relieved I was
as the second test negated the first result is beyond words.”
“It’s as if your life never ceases to surprise.”
“It looks like that as I review it,” he said. “How my Rathi gloated
over me for being better than the he-man of her dreams; as she lived by her
devotion for me, I was lost in my adoration for her. How I used to savor every
nuance of her enchanting persona to her heart’s content; as she made me feel
wanted like never before, what a wondrous feeling it was, but still, in those
fulfilling moments of our life, I opened the book of my unrequited love that
she read with empathetic feeling. Yet, I know not why, I wanted to check up
whether or not I would feel guilty being unfaithful to her, and seized by an
urge to experiment, I took the test through paid sex, the result of which was
neither ‘positive’ on the VDRL count nor ‘negative’ on my love count. So shorn
of its moral shackles to confine it, my love soared to new highs, taking
Rathi’s soul along to the zenith of our emotional union; oh what a life it was
and how we both wished it lasted a lifetime; well, it had ended all too soon,
but it was a lived life as long as it lasted.”
“Won’t it remind one of Gandhi’s experiments with truth?”
“I have no quarrel with Gandhi the man but I have problem with the
Mahatma of his,” he said and as if to remonstrate his apathy for the Gandhian
values, he had an extended sip of that Laphroaic.
A Lingering
Longing
“I’m no Gandhian and I don’t intend to be one,” he continued from where
he had left. “But as is being done, I see it’s a disservice to his legacy to
deify him; it’s when I approach him as man that I value him as a human being,
but in his picture of mahatma, I see
many a wart in his atma. Credit him
for cleaning up the public toilets but why not condemn him for having forced
his spouse to do the same; why laud him for his quixotic abstinence unmindful
of his wife’s conjugal plight; was he not an inveterate autocrat in the
democratic garb; what about his falling afoul of Prakasam, and how he played
favorites with Nehru. Why bother about him as he’d been reduced for long as a
political mascot of the slavish-minded of the self-serving Nehru family that
hijacked his name to grind its dynastic axe! What an irony it is that his party
that sundered the British yoke should have rendered the political reins into
Italian hands? Bemoan the congress party.”
“I’m no apologist of the dynastic congress but what about the duplicity
of N.T.R on the political stage,” I had interjected. “When he needed to fill
A.P’s coffers, he advocated drink all over; prompting the IT tycoons and the
corporate honchos to shun his dry land at the time of our early reform. But
when voters pulled him out of the kursi for
his eccentric governance, he made prohibition his political plank to regain
power; that’s about the immorality of our politicians as the public memory
being short; that’s how A.P missed out the early openings even as P.V’s vision
helped shore up the country’s economy.”
“What to say when Rajiv Gandhi’s ignoble reign is celebrated and
Narasimha Rao’s path-breaking role is sought to be sidelined,” he said “We are
a naïve people to figure out our country’s heroes, say Nehru vs. Patel or Rajiv
vs. Rao and zeroing on our national interests; maybe owing to our feudal roots
and slavish moorings, we suffer from the approval syndrome, which is a
compulsive need of one to be seen by the others as an egalitarian to a fault.
But then, the world doesn’t seem to appreciate our quixotic mindset as the
foreign press tends to picture Sonia Gandhi as the most successful Italian
politician.”
He paused as if he was unable to digest the indignity of it all.
“While Ruma ruled my heart, Rathi became the heart of our family,” he
resumed his tale. “The inclusive
camaraderie that extended to third cousins in our family appealed to her
friendly nature, and so she took to my people as duck would to water; well what
a knack she had in letting all feel at home in our 2BHK flat. But when a
well-heeled visitor said if only we had a more spacious dwelling, he would’ve
loved to put up with us whenever he was in town, she told him that we don’t
bite more than we could chew; but how my poor dad used to go out of his way to
please all and sundry; it’s as if man massages his own ego by playing host to
those who profess closeness.”
“It’s stupid, really.”
“What else it is, but when the chips were down after he was stricken
with cancer, none came forward to stand by him,” he continued. “My brother told
me that once in need of a paltry sum, my dad sought it from an ex-colleague
whom he had helped all along; but that man excused himself, prompting my father
to give me that parting advice to be careful with my money. But by not parting
a farthing with a dying friend, how that man had denied himself the
satisfaction of discharging a bit of his debt of gratitude; while I felt sorry
for him, it pained me that my father had to die after losing the little faith
he had had in the virtue of friendship.”
“More than the lack of concern for the dying, it could be the fear of
foregoing the money that was behind his insensitivity. Why, I know of an
incident when the bride was pestered by her in-laws to fetch her jewels even
though her father was battling for his life that was the day after her
marriage.”
“I suppose your reading is right,” he said and continued. “But much
before my dad’s heart was broken for a few bucks; he dropped in at our place
and wanted to know whether I could spare him hundred rupees. How dumbstruck I
was that he should’ve been as hard up as that; why even after I had started
earning, he used to book my return tickets on my home visits and had declined
my offer of twenty-thousand to facilitate my brother’s engineering education.
While I was trying to figure out the import of his financial downturn on his
psyche, Rathi fetched him five-hundred rupees that touched his heart no end;
oh, even as I gloated over my fortune for having been blessed with such a wife,
how his eyes glistened grasping the sense of her concern for him. While I owe
it to Rathi for letting my dad feel wanted when he was down, it was his
dismissive smile at my twenty-thousand-offer and the cared-for feeling these
five-hundred gave him made me realize that it’s the small things that make the
big moments of life.”
As those poignant memories seemingly impinged upon his heart, his eyes
began to swell with tears in profusion.
“What was more, Rathi was the neighbor’s neighbor,” he continued after
composing himself. “How she was at ease with her life and made it easy for
others; it was like seeing the simple
living and high thinking in action. Wonder why life had let fate withdraw its
model brand well before its expiry time; but the lament in the obituaries about
the loss to the society on account of those, who had long ceased to contribute
amuses me; would the lack of meaningless hyperboles in them mean any disrespect
to the departed? What about the living legends; the psyche of these spent
forces makes an interesting reading; used as they were to adulations in their
heydays, they tend to bemuse themselves at sundry events as the organizers
eulogize them to add value to their own endeavors, and as if they came out of
their oblivion, they head home to savor a peg or two to buttress their fantasy
of falsity.”
“Sorry for the digression,” he continued as we savored the Laphroaic
that I replenished meanwhile. “the spiritual beauty of Rathi’s love lay in
ignoring my roving eyes; it was not that she was any less sexy or I loved her
any less, but I was too romantic to remain unmoved by the desirable women
though she was more ardent than the best I’d ever laid. Soon after our
marriage, we had set up in the first floor of a house. As the widowed house
owner lived in the ground floor, her daughter came to spend the summer holydays
with her two kids; about Rathi’s age, she was her namesake as well. Oh, what a
sexy dame she was, possibly the sexiest I had ever seen and the one I most
wanted to have in all my life; as my passion for her namesake was ever on the
raise, my Rathi said she wasn’t losing sleep as her rival’s hairy legs were
sure to leave me cold that was if push
comes to shove; but as I chanced to divine the dame’s satin legs, Rathi said
she was only jesting to pour water over my raging ardency in those summer
times.”
“Oh, how unlike your Rathi, women clip the romantic wings of their men
and still blame them for being cold to them.”
“Women tend to imagine man’s romanticism as an on-off switch within
their reach,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you about a plain girl, who was enamored
of me; much later, another I knew nursed the idea of marrying a romantic guy
but was aghast as her father intended to get her married to a dull character;
when she told me about her predicament, I said that though she was beautiful,
yet she was not vivacious, and that it’ sex appeal that triggers romantics; I
told her in half-jest that if she were sexy, I would’ve seduced her; that made
her comprehend the sexual realities of her life.”
“Are you a lover or a seducer? I’m unable to figure that out.”
“What is a lover if he is not a seducer?” he said and continued.
“Coming back to our sexy neighbor, as I told you, I had lost my eyes to her and
she too didn’t seem to mind that; Rathi and I used to sleep on the terrace
while that dame slept in the open compound with her mother and the kids; she
could soon sense that standing by the parapet wall, I was forever ogling at her.
That full moon night, I found her with her sari askance as she lay on her belly
dangling her bare legs up in the air; oh how voluptuous she was in that
moonlight then; sensing my anticipated presence, as she turned all the more
inviting, so I got down and sauntered nearby to let her make the next move but
she stayed put in her bed though I could discern her desire in her manner. Why
she had failed to cross the threshold of our adulterous zone to address our
wants I would never know; in spite of my surging urge, with her mother nearby,
I too didn’t dare to press farther. So our passions were locked in a painful
stalemate that night; her man’s arrival the next day barred my further moves to
checkmate her on our love-board of attrition. I always had the feeling that she
was craving to be grabbed by me that night and had I dared to hustle her into
agreeing, she would’ve been mine that night, and possibly that would’ve ushered
us into a liaison of our lifetime; but destiny packed me off to this place
shortly thereafter; oh how she remains the most insatiate passion of my life
with a lingering longing; and had I not made it with that remarkable Sumitra,
what a memorable contest it would’ve been between them for the ‘most wanted’
woman that I didn’t have?”
As he closed his eyes seemingly savoring the persona of the woman he
had failed to possess as well as to reminisce about the flavors of the one he
was able to savor, I went out into the open to have a smoke in the fresh air.
Smallness
of Bigness
“But as my child grew in Ruma’s womb, the devil gained ground in my
head for the second time; earlier to possess her I even thought of killing
Rajan,” he continued as I returned. “Maybe I wouldn’t have brought myself to
that, but the fact that I went to lengths to perfect the plan means Devi was
right about my getting swayed by women. Had not death pulled him out of the
scene, my ever-on-the-raise passion for Ruma might have tripped me at the
threshold; let me tell you my plan for that perfect murder.”
“I suppose it takes moral courage to own up our degradations.”
“The idea was to sow the seed of doubt in Ruma’s mind about a
Rajan-Rathi affair and to let that grow into a tree of misgivings,” he began to
unravel the murder plan. “You know in the human mind, doubt has a faster rate
of growth than even hope, and we know what that meant for poor Desdemona. Even
if Ruma were not to fall into my arms on the rebound, she was bound to offer
her shoulder to me to cry over, come to think of it, how cuckolding could facilitate
seduction by way of compensation. So, by worming my way into her heart by
egging on her fears that Rajan was about to desert her, I would be able to
unravel my plan for a perfect murder; at a time when Rathi goes to her parents’
place, we would drive Rajan to a less-frequented lake to drug him before I push
him into it; as I jump after him to pin him down, she would yell for help, well
at the top of her tone, and by the time someone would have come to bear witness
to my fake rescue act, Rajan would have been dead and gone. Rathi could be told
that Rajan, suspecting that I was carrying on with Ruma, had died in the
process of drowning me; in the traumatic aftermath, we were bound to find
solace in each other’s arms, and given her nature, Rathi was sure to sympathize
with Ruma to bring about our ménage a
trois.”
“Maybe you could’ve made a name for yourself in crime fiction.”
“How I craved to hear that from Ruma but fearing that she might take me
as a callous character, I didn’t disclose my diabolical plan to her though she
pestered me no end,” he said remorsefully. “Wonder how I could think in terms
of snuffing out a life, more so of someone with full of life; by the way, what
about soldiering, apart from the sense of valor, don’t the poor youth opt for
it for a livelihood. But who cares for their lives bar in the West, more so in
the U.S; ironically, in long drawn-out ground wars, it’s this sensitivity to
life that’s the Achilles’ heel of the American military might. Why not, as is
the case with the possibilities of life, so is with the power of the nations,
it’s all about limitations.”
“When it’s about not wanting to die young, how poor Desdemona pleaded
with the Moor to let her live for at least that night.”
“More than life’s beauty, it’s the lure of it that’s at work,” he
continued. “Under the shadows of the past mishaps, as the fear of the unknown
had a domino effect in my mind, I turned gloomy when Ruma’s delivery neared; I
don’t know why, I started worrying about
our own offspring not measuring up to Rajan’s lost one; if it were to
fail me, won’t she cherish her lost kid, relishing Rajan’s memory being my
wife. Moreover as ‘Rajan Builders’ was in doldrums by then; won’t a dull child
pull my stock further down; worse still, what if she were to suspect that I let
it sink out of jealousy because it was Rajan’s venture; but then was it not my
obsession with her mind, body and soul that made me forget about my own self;
well, of what avail was my love for her if it were to lead her into a rough
weather? Even if our child was to be better than her lost one, won’t that still
leave it poor and deprived; why blame her if were she to wish that Rajan was
alive; but what a calamity it would be for both of us then.”
“Is it not said that love is a hackneyed expression unless it’s backed
by money.”
“True but it’s the tragedy of life that it seldom finds the right mix
for man in love; if love belittles man for lack of money, it lets gold-diggers
fool the wealthy,” he continued. “It was to avert the fate of losing Ruma’s
love that I had taken moneymaking; but sadly for me, she mistook my long hours
at work as my waning interest in her, and even as she started wooing me back, I
stood wedded to my newfound obsession, ironically, not wanting to lose her
love. But she mistook that as the
shadow of Rathi on the horizon of our love and maybe to dispel that she became
more devoted to me than ever, making me work harder than ever to retain her
adoration. With the birth of Satish, as her devotion to me deepened, I began to
see the futility of a rat race for I realized that hard work alone wouldn’t
take one onto the business heights, and that gave us time to gloat over each
other and over Satish as well; when she joined me at the workplace leaving
Satish to an ayah’s care, well, we had the best of both the worlds.”
He closed his eyes as if to reminisce those times in his mind’s eye.
“Then Anand’s arrival for higher studies enlivened our lives even
more,” he continued. “As he reminded me of my own youth, I became attached to
him, and perceiving that he would grow up to be my replica, Ruma too had
developed affection for him; so as he began to stay more with us than in the
hostel, I began to confide my inner-most thoughts to him, and so did she,
maintaining that she loved him most, of course, next to me, her man. Won’t that
remind you of the woman on rebound whom I might have had in my youth. Well,
while the infectiousness of his youthful zest lifted our spirits, his
affectionate manner buoyed our self-worth that freed our union from the
self-imposed strain of yore. That Satish and he took to each other had only
enhanced our fulfillment.”
“Isn’t it interesting that a happy story needn’t be an interesting
copy?”
“I appreciate that you care for your prospective readers and they too
need not turn the pages,” he said smiling wryly. “After Anand’s graduation,
though Ruma wanted him to join our firm, I didn’t want to stifle his career in
our small outfit; so he moved out to begin his career in some other place. I
knew all good times would come to an end, but how were I to know that they
would lead me up to one bad phase after another; why can’t life make it neutral
in between its highs and lows?”
“Given its penchant for variety, isn’t it a boring proposition?”
“How nicely you’ve put it; I’m glad you have it in you to make my
memoir as memorable as possible,’ he said, and continued with his tale. “Soon,
we started missing Anand, and once when I said that if only ‘Rajan Builders’
were to be some ‘Imperial Infrastructures’, it would have been a fitting launch
pad for his career, her repartee was that it was ironical that what served the
uncle’s mid-career should be unworthy of his nephew’s apprenticeship; maybe
what she said in jest was about the changed times, but I felt she was reviewing
my progress card, and that brought the limitations of love not backed by money
back to the fore. But the next day, when she said in earnest how ‘Rajan
Builders’ would stunt Satish’s future, my apprehensions of yore came to the
fore making me worry about my smallness in her vision; so when she began a
correspondence with Anand, which she came to relish, I started suspecting that
she had transferred her affections to his personal account; oh, how miserable
was the thought of having lost her love and esteem. Maybe, her affection for
him was innocent and my worries about her state of mind were misplaced, but as
I came to be obsessed with success all again to regain my supposedly lost
position in her heart, the devil took hold of me in its second attempt, so to
say, squarely and firmly.”
Disown to Own
“How the glaring shadow of my life came to distort my vision!” he
continued in lament. “The grandiose ‘Imperial Infrastructures’ was the stilted
idea of my fucked-up psyche, and as if man’s fate factors the times he lives in
to shape his life, Harshad Mehta came onto the scene; can one ever fail to
recall the euphoria he had helped generate in the bourses? Hadn’t business
magazines, all and sundry that is, goaded the public to sell the family silver
to invest in stocks? Oh, how the public issues of never-heard-of-entities
without a factory shed to name came to be oversubscribed many times over; and
when the bubble has burst as Mehta was caught stealing, how many became broke
no one knows. Why, I too was guilty of laying the superstructure of ‘Imperial
Infrastructures’ over the tenuous foundations of Rajan Builders; wonder how I
suffered no qualms in gambling with the public monies to raise my domestic
stock; but my love for my woman and the luck of the investors might have helped
me succeed in my unethical venture; whatever, it was then that I lost my soul
and became a devil’s slave, though I didn’t realize it then.’
“Once man crosses the moral threshold, he’s likely to lose the reins of
his life.”
“True, but I met a woman who had been astray for a while and yet
regained her moral ground just in time,” he said with apparent admiration. “She
was the wife of a man of meager means who had big dreams for their twins, a boy
and a girl; so he strived to improve his net worth through hard work to uplift
their future. But when he realized that his hard work alone was not enough to
ensure their rosy future, he had pleaded with her to prostitute herself to
fashion their future. Well, like any other woman, she was averse to the idea,
but in time, as his obsession for her kids’ future dented her resolve to remain
chaste, she started making other men feel at home when her man and her kids
were away from it. What with the referrals from those philanderers helped her
to develop a fetching clientele, her earnings far exceeded her man’s
expectations, but as he worked harder than ever to augment their fund, she
moved ever emotionally closer to him, and ironically, as if to lighten his
burden, she endeared herself more than ever to other men. When I came to know
of her, I approached her with great expectations but how disappointed I was is
still fresh in my memory; as I knocked at her door that morning, I found her
readying her kids to school; fascinated by her beauty, I was all eager to have
her but she told me that she had drawn the curtains down as she didn’t want her
growing up kids to smell the rat. Bowled by her sensitivity (I hadn’t become
insensitive yet), I pressed my suit to the hilt but finding her unyielding, I
even begged her not to disappoint me, but with a charming firmness, she asked me to update my
informer about the change in her posture. So, I left her as much in
disappointment as in admiration, only to meet her on a different footing later
on; how small the world can become.”
“It calls for a rare character in them both.”
“That’s true as I found it out later and about it later,” he continued.
“You know my firm became a force to reckon with and that took me back to square
one to win over Ruma’s mind to
retain her love. But soon, I had realized that it was success that began to
rule our heads; hers to begin with, inducing us to acquire the trappings of
wealth for the sake of those who looked up to us, so we thought. How man tends
to imagine himself as the tracking object on others’ radars to justify his
extravagance as but the dictates of his life’s circumstances! But then man
fails to realize that but for a sleaze or a scandal, the world at large never
bothers about him, whatever be his station, and so fails to fashion a
purse-supportive lifestyle and allows himself to dabble with the delusions of
grandeur. Adding to that, success distances man from the genuine, and what’s
worse, it brings the shady and the shallow closer to him; it was this script of
fate that had moved us into this posh place, far from the simple folks.’
“Maybe it’s the spiritual price life has to pays for its material
success.”
“Well said,” he said with apparent sadness. “As if life doesn’t believe
in half-measures, to make it worse for both of us, the devil possessed Ruma no
less; bitten by the status bug, as her mind began to foul her soul, she turned
cozy to the rich that she wouldn’t have otherwise touched with a barge pole;
what was worse, she began to condescend to descend to the genuine, making them
feel constrained in our palatial bungalow that is yours now. But obsessed as I
was to keep Rajan’s memory out of her mind, I kept her in good humor
regardless; and having brought her to that pass, I too fell into the trap of
conceit. Why, I began to feel embarrassed to have Raju any more around my circle
of the wealthy, and entrapped in that snobbish trap, there was no way I
could’ve pulled Ruma out of its inimical grip.”
“What a Catch 22 it is, don’t mind it’s a catch-phrase.”
“Why not give Joseph Heller his due for the catchy title,” he said. “Well,
Raju was not dumb to read my mind and so he steered clear of my course; but
what if he had chosen to embarrass me by sticking to me on purpose? Won’t it
make a strategy to hurt the jealous and the conceited by imposing ourselves
upon them, never mind they cold-shoulder us? Well, he was too good a soul to
resort to such a foul; but shortly after Anand came back on transfer, when Ruma
advised him to keep away from his poor friend with no future to name, I had a
full grasp of the complexities of the trap into which I willy-nilly pushed her
into; and so I began to worry about the possible fallout of her changed ethos
on my life as well.”
“Wonder how success eclipses one’s innate goodness?”
“What if she weighed me light in comparison with someone more
successful?” he continued. “As I was bogged down with that thought, the
negativity of it began to bother me; I was alive to the fact that the seeds of
liaisons sprout in the stilted minds of the disaffected spouses, and if Ruma
were to take a lover, the slight apart, won’t the scandal be scary. What if she
chose to seduce Anand to score over me and still keep it in the family; but
soon as if to relieve me of my worry, like I distanced myself from Raju before,
she came to cold-shoulder Anand, but for a different reason; while I avoided
Raju imagining that I had outgrown him, I suspect that she began to shun Anand
to disown her humble past. How ironical it was that her moral decline should’ve
assuaged my fears about her feared sexual fall; whatever, as if they served
their purpose, my unfounded fears about her affection for him were put to rest
in my mind.”
“Wasn’t it rank depravity that you should have felt relieved even
though your wife had lost her soul? What a fall though it’s a folly to judge
others.”
“Whatever, I toyed with the idea of roping him into my venture for I
began to feel the need for someone capable that I could trust as well,” he
continued. “What a value addition he had been at the office, and ironically
that hastened my moral decline even more; as he refused to soil his hands with
our murky deals, I had to handle the underbelly of business that heralded my
nose-dive into a moral abyss; and equally worse, Imperial’s vertical take-off into the galaxy of infrastructure only
pushed Ruma’s moral ethos further down the ladder of materialistic callousness.
So, in the process of his growing up, Satish’s psyche had to bear the brunt of
our moral fall; well, who to blame but me for denying him what was left of the
childhood for the kids of his generation?”
“Why blame yourself when it was and is the order of the day?”
“Do you think so?” he said looking at me vacantly.
Sentiment
of Ruin
“It was my wining and dining with the rich and the powerful that had
hastened my moral fall,” he said wryly after a while. “Didn’t Rousseau observe
that ruthlessness is the common characteristic of the successful; maybe I
insensibly turned insensitive in their infectious company. Whatever may be the
rationale for my twisted vision of love, the reality of my life was that I
allowed myself to slide into the abyss of immorality. What with the
materialistic veil shrouding our love life, I tried to fill my emotional void
in an extramarital affair without knowing that I became incapable of inspiring
love. How shameful, but I’m not going to hide my ugly side to let you have a
true picture of me and of those who came into my life.”
“Vices are the price that one pays for his virtues.”
“But it was as if I had sacrificed my virtues to propitiate the goddess
of vices,” he continued. “I used to know an upright officer and that amounts to
much in today’s world; maybe honesty had never been the dominant character of
man, didn’t Shakespeare aver that to be honest is to be counted among one in a
thousand; but these days the odds seem to be one in a hundred thousand. The
good fellow had always been helpful to me within the rules that is but without
any favors to return; once I told him to count on me just in case and he said
that he hoped it would never be the case. When I came to know that he was
caught red-handed, I knew it could be the handiwork of those who were irked by
his honesty, and yet I was glad that the one who replaced him was corrupt to
the core.”
“Often, it’s the marginal operators and not the hardcore corrupt that
get caught and the big fish, if ever trapped, find their way out as they
would’ve made enough dough to feed the small fish who net them.”
“It’s ironical but real, and that’s sad,” he said. “To go back to the
tale of that small fish, given his thin resume and modest means, he had a
windfall of a wife, who came to me to picture her helplessness. Qualified
though and talented as well, she opted to remain a housewife to take care of
his home, where his mother too felt at home; as that earned her his gratitude,
she remained a fulfilled spouse. I think it was Bernard Shaw who said that any
good natured fool would make a better husband than a Caesar, Shakespeare and
Napoleon for great men are ill-equipped for domestic purposes, and as for me, I
fell between two stools ending up an intellectual fool. As they were gloating
over the flowering of their toddler son, throwing them into dilemma, the old
woman’s kidneys had failed. While common sense suggested it was as well to let
her ripe-old life end its course in the crematorium, the son’s sense of filial
duty was for keeping his mother on dialysis as long as he could afford. But his
wife thought it was an absurd proposition as she believed that the idea of
medical science was to cure the curable, and not to cater to a gone case;
remember that my father too saw it that way.”
“Maybe those who love the spirit of life than life per se perceive it that way.”
‘Looks like that,” he continued after a pause. “She tried to impress
upon him that it was wise to spare the meager monies for the survival of the
survivors but just the same he put the old woman on a ruinous dialysis course,
making his young wife bear the brunt of his sentimental treatment. When the
inevitable end came that ended his moral predicament, seeing his wife’s plight
in the debt trap, he was caught in the pangs of guilt; so to pull her out of
the financial mess he had pushed her into, he took to bribe-taking; well, she
was quick to caution him about the pitfalls on the road ahead, but he continued
with the practice regardless that was till he was caught in the act and brought
to book to account for a three-year jail term.”
“Maybe a course correction in sentimental ruin would have been in order
for those who cannot afford to buy justice.”
“Hope it won’t make a case for contempt of court,” he said in jest.
“Her life seemed to be a drama enacted in the theatre of the absurd wherein the
plot of fate pushed her onto the stage of climactic tragedy. Her nine year son
had to undergo an open-heart surgery but there was none in the family she could
turn to for succor and support; she knew that though helpless as mother, being
desirable, she could be resourceful as woman, but there was no way she would
prostitute herself even to save her only child. She said that as she kept her
fingers crossed, and prayed for a miracle, her husband suggested that she might
seek my help for he thought I had a helping hand, and she was prepared to work
for me for half of her take home pay till the loan amount was adjusted.”
“I’ve read in Benign Flame that
the boasts of men about their conquests would sound hollow for it’s the
vulnerability of women that fetches them their favors.”
“Oh, how true it is,” he said. “I had seen it as godsend and offered to
take care of her son if she was prepared to be my mistress, but as she
protested saying that she was a married woman, I reminded her that he was
jailed and promised to let her go as and when he would come out of it. She said
that’s not what her husband would’ve bargained for when he sent her to seek my
help, and I told her that I couldn’t help as her charms corrupted my soul; when
she retorted that she was not obliged to cater to my craving for her, I asked
her, what if I helped her out only to woo her later? Won’t her sense of
gratitude tend her emotionally towards me? As she would be my P.A anyway, she
being sex-starved and I being lovelorn, won’t our physical proximity threaten
her chastity; some catalyst can be expected to bring about our union, sooner
than later that is. Calling me callous, she caved in nevertheless.”
“Why, it’s a refinement of the Casanova logic you had talked about; how
sad it was given that you were such a sensitive lover.”
“I really don’t know if callousness was a streak of my character
shrouded by my capacity to love,” he said remorsefully. “Whatever, I kept my
word and let her join her man on his release, but in the meantime to my dismay,
being physically close, yet she was emotionally distanced from me; but it was her parting
words – ‘glad you’ve given up your reign on my body’ - that wounded my pride of
being a ladies’ man. It was from then on that I took to one-night stands as a
guarantee against emotional failures;
what an end it was to the lover in me.”
“It’s the tragedy of my life so to say,” he continued pausing as if to
mourn the death of the lover in him. “If in spite of my means, I failed to
inspire her, then for the lack of youth, I lost a woman on the verge of
conquest. I met Mallika on the train, and it was a case of mutual attraction
with the momentum to fast track affection. When she was all eager for a date,
it was either my naivety for being truthful or vanity of not looking my age,
damn them both, that put paid to it; unasked, as I revealed my age, she
exclaimed, ‘oh, you’re my dad’s age’, and that was that. A la Ghalib, ‘of what
avail is my beckoning her / wish she gives up self-restraint’, I hoped for long
that the force of attraction would prevail upon her forcing her to seek me;
well, she took my phone number before the fiasco of that seduction. When hope
tired me, her enchanting persona was blurred in my mind but the beauty of that
brief encounter ever remains fresh in my memory; even now, as I ponder over her
inexplicable behavior, I wonder whether it was her vanity to desist from an
affair with an older man that blinded her attraction; would’ve my disclosure in
the midst of our lovemaking made her recoil from my arms? What if she were to
know about my age after we were true and thick into an affair, wouldn’t she
have still carried on with me? I know that I would never know.”
“Maybe she would have carried on for it is said that any fool can get
into an affair but it takes a wise head to get out of it.”
While he laughed heartily, I felt heartened for having lightened him,
be it for a while.
Enigma
of Attraction
“The beginning of my end was when Anand parted ways with me,” he said
resuming his remarkable tale. “But much before that, his destiny brought
Anitha, a peach of a woman into his life. When he wanted to marry her, he made
me privy to her poignant past that she had revealed to him, that is to let him
decide whether it mattered to him; here’s her tale of betrayal and retrieval.”
He paused for a while as if he needed time to retrieve himself from the
sense of her betrayal.
“As is the case with all love, the source of hers too was physical
attraction,” he said on resumption. “After her graduation, she dated with a
man, who pressed her for sex that she had reserved for her nuptial bed;
betraying her trust, as he tried to molest her, she broke with him, and
treating it as a bad dream, she had opted for an arranged match. But when the
just-weds returned home from their honeymoon, the lost suitor chose to
prejudice her man’s mind through an anonymous letter. The rouge wrote that she
wants a lover to satiate her lust, the wherewithal of whom she had ditched
could be heard from the horse’s mouth, besides a husband to cater to her
monetary greed. As her man was distraught at the development, she tried to
assure him about her innocence, but sadly, he couldn’t digest the fact that if
not by body, at least in her mind, she was one with another man before him. So,
even as his heart responded to her love, as his mind remained cold to her
ardency, he failed to warm up to her; how the inhibitions of cultures come to
influence our lives, and what a double jeopardy it was for her as she had to
contend with her wretched fate as well as her man’s predicament for which she
was the unwitting cause. Seeing the futility of their purposeless cohabitation,
she had set him free through divorce, and maybe to atone for its mistake, her
fate led her to Anand, the man made for her.”
“What villainy it was!”
“Villainy of a spoiler,” he said. “Anand dismissed her past with the
sympathy it evoked and vowed to give her due as his better half; and to seek
her hand in marriage, he took me along to her parents. And lo, who was her mother?
I told about the woman who once prostituted herself for her children’s
betterment; what a piquant situation it was for both of us as we recognized
each other, maybe owing to her conviction of her compulsion, she didn’t lose
her poise, and my appreciation of her character enabled me to retain my
composure. When I instinctively turned my attention on her man, I could discern
in his demeanor, the anxiety of parental love and the strength born out of a
sense of purpose. What was more, in his interaction with his wife, I could see
his adoration for her, though my presence seemingly stifled her effusiveness;
but as my own behavior towards her didn’t show any hangovers of our past
encounter, soon she had shed her inhibitions and turned lively towards the end.
Later, when Anand told me that her son married a girl from an orphanage, it was
clear to me that the ethos of the couple could have shaped the spirit of their
children.”
“Maybe it is such who mitigate some of the vileness of the world.”
“But we need battalions of them,” he continued, “As proclaimed in the
banner at the function hall, Anitha wed Anand; it was a simple ceremony though
I wished it were a grand show. While I
was impressed with her sensibility, Ruma was wary about her simplicity; by
then, busy with a doting circle of lazy women, she started living in a
make-believe world. It didn’t take long for Anitha to realize that Ruma only
condescended to descend to her, and so she chose to keep her dignity from a
healthy distance. That puzzled my queen who deemed it was her royal right to be
courted by her; how delusions of grandeur makes one weary at the thought of
being ignored by others. So, Ruma set out to snare the prey into her web of
adoration but to no avail, and slighted, she began to pass snide remarks about
her to Anand. Maybe, I too had taken Anand for granted as I didn’t think
overmuch about an equitable raise for his value addition to my ever expanding
business; but it was Anitha’s equanimity in dealing with Ruma that showed me
the reality of life; it’s one that lowers oneself but not others.”
“When Anand wanted to quit,” he continued, having seemingly reflected
over his averment, “I apologized on Ruma’s behalf and offered to give him his
due, but he would have none of it; however, as Anitha impressed upon him not to
mix up the professional with the personal, he came to stay. Soon there was an
income tax raid tumbling the skeletons from our cupboards, and it was more than
Anand could bear; so he called it quits and moved out of town. I didn’t miss
him for long as I could hire someone no less talented but with fewer business
scruples and he too set up a small-scale industry as if to show me that
business can be clean as well. I didn’t know how he fared as we lost touch that
was till he came along with his wife and children to condole with me for the
loss of my family. While their weeklong
stay brought to the fore the memories of my life and times with Rathi, I
realized that the equilibrium of life hinges upon the spouse’s sensibility.”
“No less on sensitivity.”
“That makes me recall this embarrassing episode,” he resumed after a
pause. “As I touched sixty, I happened to meet a childhood mate and his
attractive second wife, who was on the wrong side of forties; when she turned
flirtatious to my excitement, to her delight, I made a few passes at her, but
when I became a little forthright, she turned cranky and showed me in poor
light to my friend, and that was that. Leave aside my loss of face, what about
the hurt she would’ve caused to her husband when a ‘shut up’ or ‘no thanks’
would’ve kept things clean for the three of us. Well, I’ve no clue why she
tripped on the line of sensitivity!”
“Maybe, we have it in Benign
Flame,” I said, and quoted from it. “It’s the character of man woman
chemistry in that feminine tendencies catalyze male proclivities. Carried away
by the euphoria of her coquetry, man begins to woo woman with hope. With her
vanity thus addressed by his advances, she turns flirtatious, furthering his
passion for her possession. In the excitement of the moment, should he
transgress the threshold of her sensitivity, fearing she had compromised her
honor, she sinks in shame. Thereafter, she withdraws from him to brood over her
infirmity, and in the end, as though to atone for her moment of weakness, she
cold-shoulders him altogether, making him wonder what went wrong in the midst
of his conquest.”
“If only I had heard about it,” he said seemingly convinced, “maybe I
would have handled our mutual attraction more languidly saving my friend from
such a predicament. But all said and done, his hurt owed to his wife’s lack of
sensibility; maybe it’s the maturity of a spouse that shapes the course of the
other’s life where it really matters.”
Veneer of the
Vile
“Don’t we find women carrying their paternal baggage into their married
life!” he continued. “By and large, they tend to stick to their parental roots
than sowing fresh family seeds in their matrimonial soil; it could be the
natural weakness for one’s kith and kin or it may be individual inhibitions for
integration; whether or not the environment at the in-laws’ place is conducive
for camaraderie. Ruma opened her heart and home to her people who had
shunned her when she needed them the most and as they wormed their way into her
affections, she lost her sense of proportion; given her snobbishness as my
people paid no more than courtesy calls, I too developed a distorted vision of
relationships in the ingratiating company of her relatives. So, as her flock became
hangers on, my folks ceased visiting us altogether; why should they for we
seldom reciprocated their visits, and even when we went to them on occasion, we never gave them the
feeling of our being at home in their homes. What with a false sense of being
apart from them, we came to live in our ivory tower, flocked by those who came
to grind their axes.”
“How did all that affect your son?”
“As I see it in hindsight, Satish was born to a right couple gripped by
a wrong psyche,” he said with apparent sadness. “Having survived that road
accident, Ruma and I live in guilt, I for the death of her daughter in Rathi’s
lap, and she for the demise of her friend with my child in her womb. So, we
began pampering Satish as if the atonement of our sin lay in catering to his
every whim and fulfilling his every fancy; even when our purse was lean and our
mind subdued, we spent a fortune on his birthday bash; how silly that we come
to celebrate our kids’ birthdays as if they have become national heroes. If not
for 02 October being the national holiday, would any notice Gandhi’s birthday
coming and going; I bet none remembers in which year he was born, save those
readying themselves for the quiz competitions; yet, we come to lay store on our
children’s birthdays when they wouldn’t be knowing what was going on around
them.”
“Showiness has become the malady of our times; haven’t wedding cards
come to resemble wall posters. None seems to mind that the card and the copy
don’t jell at all; maybe, it’s all prognostic, who knows?”
“If one has money to spare, maybe it’s an excuse to spend,” he
continued. “But thanks to the peer pressure, even with a shoestring budget, it
has become the in thing for all. Maybe,
one cannot expect forbearance from our people in the face of the newfound
prosperity that too as our nation remained poor for centuries on. But still,
how the poor were to tackle this financial burden imposed upon them by the
profligacy of the rich is anybody’s guess; perhaps the ever growing size of the
bribable provides the clue. Why blame the lesser mortals for their corrupt
ways; if they were to remain upright and teach philosophy at home, won’t the
children of the nouveau-riche teach their kids some lesson in inferiority complex;
so the rich man’s vulgarity has become the poor man’s alibi to be corrupt. Somehow,
we have contrived to pervert our thought process even; take the case of the
school curriculum; the grind is the same regardless of the mind involved. What
the sluggard could do than to mug-up, ending up as an also ran. Why not make
the courses for the horses instead of flogging the lagging but to no avail;
it’s only in the sports that the differing capabilities are appreciated to
devise ways and means for all to have their place under the sun; won’t the
bantam and heavy weight classification in boxing, wrestling and weightlifting
suggest that; the perils of pitting a lightweight champion even against a
heavyweight trainee are not beyond anybody’s imagination.”
‘The dilemma is real and when synthesized, maybe your saga could help.”
“So I take it that you’re inclined to pen it,” he said in excitement.
“Spoiled though my son was in every way, yet he was no snob. But the aberration
in his character was his inability to take ‘no’ for an answer, and that was bad
enough; so to say, it became a case of, ‘as is father so is son’, but with a
difference. Like me, he too managed a scrape-through degree, but unlike me, the
girl he loved was all eager to become his better half. When he introduced Uma
to us as his future wife, Ruma and I were dumbfounded; I couldn’t figure out my
son’s poor taste to fall for a plain girl and Ruma felt her upbringing of him
had no meaning if he were to choose someone so plebeian for a wife. When we
tried to make him understand about her unsuitability, he said we wouldn’t be
saying so if only we could’ve divined her inner beauty; as we gave in, despite
our better judgment, he led his first love to the altar of marriage amidst
great fanfare.”
“It was as well; otherwise it would’ve been a shame to have induced him
to desert her.”
“Oh, won’t that prove there’s always a need to look at things from the
others’ perspective as well,” he continued. “But as it happened, she turned out
to be a gold-digger; what was worse, she was immoral to the core of her heart;
as she gave him hell from the day one, he realized what a third-rate bitch his
wife was. Maybe man can understand another man if he were to be his boss and a
woman when he takes her as his wife. With the imagined inner beauty becoming
the mirage of his married life, as Satish became an emotional wreck, I felt
guilty for not having taught him the virtue of judging people for their small
gestures; if only I had parented him properly, maybe he wouldn’t have had to
undergo that trauma. Oh, what it had taken us to rescue the poor fellow from
her clutches only we knew; ultimately it was my threat to get her killed by
hired hands, even at the risk of myself ending up on the gallows that made her
agree to divorce him for a royal sum.”
‘Don’t I see your son has complexity for heredity?”
“Not only that,” he continued, “as if history repeats itself, it was a
whore who played a part in his second marriage, that I came to know that from
the man who had lost his wife to him.”
“Strange it is!”
“Better save your double exclamation mark to do justice to that mother
of all tales, a verbatim account of the whore who had played a part in it.”
Swap
for Nope
“Here is that fact beyond fiction,” he began to narrate with a parental
pride that didn’t escape my attention. “What a handicap it was to be divorced,
thought my son; self-service at home and harlot-solace in a brothel; what
service and how much solace! Women were ever scary of even wealthy divorcees as
if divorce underscores one’s incompatibility once and for all, and a whore was
no answer for a wife. Surely some featureless young thing could be willing and
that’s no choice of a wife any way; but a lucky guy could bump into a desirable
dame in the blind alleys of the Cupid and that’s a rarity anyway; as for
affairs, they were seldom, even for the well-heeled in their prime, but as life
is meant to be lived, he resolved, one had to go about it regardless and how to
make the best of time was the essence of existence.”
“Envisioning liaisons through friendship magazines seemed to him no
more than chasing the mirages of lust,” he continued with the account of his
son’s life. “But for an ad here and there from a genuine dame, the rest were
all from the cravers of female flesh, and given the lack of proper response,
one might wonder whether the ‘willing women’ were indeed real beings or merely
fictitious characters meant to buttress the publishers’ bottom lines; even
otherwise, with the exhibitionist tone of the machismo ads, going through the
pages left one with a sickening feeling; pity the dames who fell for such guys.
Maybe the saving grace was the insertions for wife-swapping that seemed genuine
for they were all about give and take; but then, wasn’t he rendered a hors de combat for he lacked the means
for a quid pro quo? What about Vimala, he thought as he recalled that evening
when he was led into a lounge of a mansion where he found a score of whores in
awkward postures, and as he turned his back on the gaudy dames in disgust, one
lissome lass in a Turkish towel walked in. Enticed, as he followed her in a
trance, she sauntered along endearingly in her semi-nude, and that ushered in
an unusual romance between them.”
“It’s as if your son had stolen your address-book of those places.”
“Well,” he said after a hearty laugh, “it occurred to him that Vimala
could carry herself to pass off for his wife; what’s more she was bound to
tempt any hesitant husband to jump into the swap trap. What an idea to pay her
for the favors of a MILF or two in the wife swaps though not all of them were
honeys? So roping in Vimala, he went on a hunt for the promising, and soon
succeeded in roping in the willing – an educated and sophisticated couple in
their mid-twenties, who were married for some years by then; he was handsome
and successful, and she was sexy and charming. While they led an active sexy
life, their family cradle remained empty, and that let the ennui set into their
otherwise wondrous life. So, they tried to enliven their life by seeking
pleasures as their fancies suggested, but as the novelty of those diversions
wore off, their cumulative exasperation increased reducing the span of their
thrill; and back to square one, they realized that they had lost the capacity
to enthuse each other, so bored to death but committed to each other, they
dragged their feet on their drab marital course. But when their love for
adventure made them think in terms of venturing into the forbidden avenues of
human joys, they began searching for a suitable couple to make it a foursome
for a fulsome life.”
“Cynically brilliant, and surely it’s a notch above your threesome idea
in the hospital.”
“Didn’t I tell you that my son did far better than that,” he continued.
“The orgies that followed brought them all closer and that made them feel
blessed in their blissful state. Soon the lover in my son cherished the woman
of that wife and began to wish that she were his spouse, and she, used to sex
as a marital obligation, found his lovemaking emotionally fulfilling. When she
was in the family way, she instinctively knew that Satish was the father of the
child; and as the issue in the offing began to draw her towards him, she
thought about the ethics of its upbringing in the existing setting; as her
maternal instinct got the better of her feminine infirmities, her husband’s
position in her life seemed untenable in her perception, and it took little
time for her to resolve that my son was the man of her destiny. Much before the
expected delivery, she deserted her man to begin her life afresh with Satish;
and to avoid a first rate scandal, we got them married in secrecy. Didn’t you
hear the talk on the grapevine about the simple wedding of Satish and Sarala?’
“Yes, but….”
“It was not the end of it,” he continued. “Let down and lonely for his
misadventure, the lost soul was left to rue his folly; but as time started
clearing the debris of his fate, he began to pick up the threads of life. As
woman could only heal the wounds caused by woman, he went to a brothel for
solace, only to be doubly wounded; he found Vimala among the girls and was
dumbfounded to learn that she was picked up by Satish to act as a dupe to
deceive him. When he threatened to sue Satish for the breach of trust and other
criminal offenses, I had to cough up much to keep him off; legal case or not,
surely he had a damaging story to sell to our hurt.”
“Isn’t it like making the best of a bad bargain? But not everyone would
resort to that I suppose.”
“That’s about the inscrutability of human behavior,” he said. “So,
hardly had we come to terms with the fiasco of Satish’s divorce than we had to
contend with his scandalous alliance with Sarala. It was one thing to avert a
scandal and another to reconcile to the oddity; while it brought to the fore
our own liaison in the wake of our spouses’ demise, yet their offence offended
even our blunted sense of righteousness. As we sought to punish them through
our indifference, we all became strangers in our own house; and it pained me to
realize that I had failed as a father to weave a right moral fabric for my son;
well what can a fallen father do than to see the fall of his son? In those
stressful times, I thought of Anand, and regardless of my past indifference, he
came to see me; when I began my lament, he cut me short to aver that parents
want their children to be happy the way they want them to be happy and not
happy per se; and if their complying
children were to be unhappy, they only turn philosophical to unburden
themselves. It was this eye-opener that set our family ball rolling all again.”
Goring
Syndrome
“Once we could remove our indignant blinkers,” he continued, “we had
seen what a wonderful woman Sarala was. As our son and his spouse doted upon
each other, Ruma and I reminisced over our own times, and soon as Sarala
delivered Ramesh, we gloated over our grandson, and well before his second birthday
as he had Ramya for his sibling, our cup of joy was seemingly filled to the
brim; as if to meet the future needs of the growing family, our ventures too
began yielding in their bountiful. After all those inimical twists and ironical
turns as life went on for long without any hiccups, it appeared as if life had
left with nothing up its sleeve to surprise us; so it never occurred to me that
it could be a lull before the storm that was about to be unleashed on us by the
inimical fate; like all of Gen-Next, Satish too was fond of fast cars; how
often I used to tell him, ‘go west my boy for the roads here are deathtraps’,
but he would rather prefer the comforts of the eastern life to the mundane
luxuries of the west. Maybe at the dictates of fate, as he began pushing us to
make it to the Mount Abu in his Ferrari, I relented only when he promised never
to cross eighty; well, he kept his word but that truck driver was too drunk to
have kept his course. What an irony of life is that it often tends one to be the
victim of others’ follies.’
“Sad though, it’s the reality of life.”
“Man’s folly at times might give a weird twist to the history of his
land,” he said. “You might have seen the movie Dunkirk; in the World War II,
the Wehrmacht cornered the British in and around the port town of Dunkirk, and
all that was left for it was to push and prod the enemy into the sea. But
Goring, the head of Luftwaffe in the Third Reich put it into Hitler’s head that
Wehrmacht’s victory would be perceived by the Germans as the victory of their
armed forces, but if Luftwaffe were to annihilate the entrapped that would be
to the Fuehrer’s account as the air force was his creation whereas the army was
as old as the nation. Luckily for British forces, the Fuehrer fell for it, and
as Goring bit more than he could chew, Churchill had enough time to affect
their rescue across the English Channel. But sadly for Germany and arguably for
the good of the world, while it was his grandeur of delusion and not the
well-being of his country that made Goring envisage that absurdity, it was
Fuehrer’s false sense of invincibility that made him overlook the danger the
move had portended. If not for Goring’s self-serving advice the flower of the
British youth might’ve perished on the sands of Dunkirk and the Nazis would
have been the masters of the World sans the Goring Syndrome – the self-serving
ways of one that imperil others’ course would serve the unintended in
unexpected ways.”
“I’ve never heard of this Goring Syndrome.”
“It did occur to me only now,” he said, “and you might as well give me
the credit for that, unless, unknown to us, someone, somewhere, had already
come up with it; you know such are known to happen more often than one might
think it could be the case.”
“That’s true.”
“Maybe the corporate health
sector symbolizes the Goring Syndrome like nothing else; the assorted
diagnostic reports sought by the self-serving doctors that rob their patients’
savings would only serve the auxiliary health services; even conceding that the
capital involved in setting up a corporate hospital is mind-boggling, begging
for returns on investment, that the doctors there allow themselves to turn into
con men to trick the sick is indeed sickening; I wonder how these are better
than the pimps fleecing the whores; in spite of their daytime black deeds, the
fact that they are able to sleep at nights shows that they have
self-anesthetized their collective consciences; even as Hippocrates could be
turning in his grave, wonder how these fare in hell as and when they reach
there. Maybe death is no better than these supposed to be life-saving guys for
while devouring your near and dear; it lets you go as if to derive a vicarious
pleasure in seeing you thanking life in spite of it all. It was in that
confused state of mind that I dusted the much vaunted Bhagvad-Gita for an understanding of life and death in
philosophical terms.”
“I began to see death in its true perspective through verses such as
these,” he began reading from the Gita that lay beside him. “You and Me / As
well these / Have had past / Future as well; Clear are learned in their minds /
Embodies selfsame spirit all one / From birth to death, in every birth; Spirit
as entity hath no birth / How can thou kill what’s not born; What’s not real,
it’s never been / And that’s true, it’s ever there / That’s how wise all came
to see; Prima facie if thou feel / Subject Spirit is to rebirths / Why grieve
over end of frame; Dies as one / For like rebirth / Why feel sad / Of what’s
cyclic; Isn’t thy lament over that / Un-manifested to start with / Gets
manifested just as guest / And bids adieu in due course, and, Dies not Spirit
as die beings / What for then man tends to grieve. And that helped. Even
otherwise maybe time would have healed the wounds of my grief but where else I
would’ve acquired the depth for contemplation.”
“How mean is man that he turns to the scriptures only when he’s down
and out.”
“Yet they are magnanimous to him,” he said. “It’s not their fault that
we don’t derive benefit from them. But what eye-openers the end chapters of the
Gita were to me; what a vile creature I was, I came to realize from these
verses - Make all vile, rude guys all / Vainglorious ’n haughty too / Besides
being indignant / No less are they indulgent; Gives as virtue man freedom /
Keeps him vileness in bondage; Pride ’n lust, long wish list / Vile in conceit
live impure; Seeing life as one to gloat / Vile by impulse go to lengths; Seek
vile creatures ever shortcuts / On way to wants, they ill-get wealth; Think all
vile, in like terms- / This is mine so let me keep / Why not have I more of it,
Foe this mine I’ve truly floored / Won’t I tackle the rest of them / Sure I’m
Lord of mine own world; Note all vile, gloat as such – / Besides wealthy, I’m
well-born / Won’t I give and enjoy too, To their hurt in illusion vile / End up
slaves of joys of flesh.”
“Why I never heard that before though I did attend some discourses on
the Gita here and there.”
“Sadly, the stress is on the beginning and the middle chapters and even
if you were to read some commentary on your own, you always tend to begin
afresh, never to reach these gems of the last three chapters,” he lamented. “
But, it is from these that I came to see the affects of unruly passion on man -
Ensures nature gets one tied / By Virtue, passion, or by delusion; It’s in
pretension passionate live / Eye they have on name ’n fame; Deed passionate is
quid pro quo/ Ever done with some end in mind; In want passionate come to live
/ Bogged down by, what they eye; Mind as covetous ’n thought impure / Crave
passionate all things mundane/ Which them excite as well pull down; Perspective
lack passionate right/ In weird ways they tend their lives; Things that seem to
bring joys/ Ever passionate with zeal pursue, and, It’s the way with thy passion
/ To jump at all that what might tempt / That which turns sour in due course.’
“Oh, how true it is.”
“And what symbolizes virtue in man is made amply clear in the
masterpiece,” he continued quoting from the Gita. “Indulge virtuous in their
work / With no relevance to outlook; With no illusion but diligence / Carries
renunciant his duties / Agreeable or otherwise too; Needs one work to sustain life / Relinquients
avoid, overloads all; Virtuous ever in
self-control / Steady they wavering mind of theirs; What fail sprint ’n serve long run / Virtuous
know keep woes at bay; Taking well and
ill at ease / Senses honed ’n ego evened / Detached virtuous ever engage; Deal
virtuous in measures equal / Weigh they fine all deeds their fair. But what
bowled me in the end are these from the Bhakti
Yoga - Scores thought over mere rotting / Betters meditation awareness too
/ What helps man to find moorings / Are acts his with no axe to grind;
Kind-hearted ’n considerate / Friendly natured, forgiving too / Lays no store
on highs and lows / Suffers no pride ’n possessive not; Who's patient ’n
cheerful / Self-willed as well persevering / Who's hearty ever at work / Makes
he devout My beloved; Who’s simple,
never in want / Covets he not in vantage post / Shakes him none, he keeps his
nerve / It’s such who Me please the most;
He’s My darling who craves not / Yet won’t shun the pleasures of life /
Takes but things all as they come; Treats he equal friends ’n foes / Scorn or
honour minds he not / Keeps he cool in grief and joy / Nurses for none soft
centre, and above all, Pats ’n slights
all in the score / Treats as equal score My man / Takes he lot of his in
stride/ But won’t put the blame on Me.”
“Oh, if only we can imbibe that philosophy.”
“Well, when I was trying to grasp the import of the Gita to retrieve my
lost soul and repair my ruined life,” he said stoically “Ruma’s relatives
turned out to be the impediments; if not, you would have
a different story to tell or maybe there would have been no memoir to write
after all.”
Back to the
Basics
“When Anand came to console me, Ruma’s relatives had a scare,” he
continued with apparent sadness. “Afraid of my passing on the Imperial crown to
him, they even moved the courts, but when he turned down my offer, and even as
they withdrew their plaint, I began to brood over their greed; and as a couple
of Rajan’s relatives too called on me with their lawyers, I felt as if I was
face to face with the ugliness of wealth. Ruma’s people at least had the good
sense to take her back into their fold, rather made their way into hers, but
none of Rajan’s relatives had the grace to pay their last respects to him; well
it was then that I made up my mind to deny them all.”
He paused for a while with a smirk on his face apparently relishing his
idea.
“But still I had no idea as to what to do with all that liquid cash and
for a cue, I began mingling with the common folk,” he said on resumption. “Once
in a city bus, the man in the front seat gave me his place, and inexplicably it
occurred to me that given a chance, the same man may be no less greedy to grab
all my money. As I began brooding over my supposition, I could divine that
innate goodness and inherent greed are the obverse and reverse of the human
nature and that wealth tends to abet the latter at least in the weak minds. Why
for that matter, poverty, the product of social debilities and human
constraints, is no less an evil that affects man’s ethos as money does; and as
for nouveau riche, they tend to imagine
that since they have the reins of wealth, they have a reign over the world of
wisdom. Now as I speak to you, my irrationality, first in the accumulation of
wealth and then in the destruction of it is seemingly coming to the fore; if
only I had not lost my sense of balance in either case.”
“What to make out of your state of mind.”
“If only man has the hindsight of a Spanish bull, his life would’ve
been a lot better,” he said. “You know, after its tussle with the matador, if
let out, the mauled beast becomes wiser to his ways with the green herring,
should they find themselves in the ring again, they wouldn’t be fooled any
longer, and so as to avert the threat these creatures pose to the matadors they
are slaughtered after the spectacle is over. Life is not as unkind to the
self-introspecting man as it is to a self-reflecting bull for it lends him the
scope to contain the damages the vagaries of his habit occasions; but still,
save a Gary Sobers, who said he never committed the same mistake twice, man
fails to benefit from the let-offs of fate, and that only proves that man is
more adept at thwarting the perils without but not at averting the banes
within.”
“Now that you’ve the makings of a swami…”
“You want me to acquire the trappings of an asharam to make it big in the global business of pseudo
spiritualism,” he interjected with a
smile. “Well I’ll be going to the village where swamis of the day wouldn’t
ever venture though the yogis of yore all lived in the jungles.
I shall try to help the peasants to
educate their kids; by the way what else serves the mankind better than
educating the children of the underprivileged? It’s the educated children that
make aware fathers to perpetuate cultured generations, and the more they are,
the better it is for the world. Oh, why it didn’t occur to me before I
destroyed all that money? If only we learn from nature; won’t all trees brave
the vagaries of weather to bear their fruits to serve the species? But ravaged
by the vicissitudes of life, how I had lost the opportunity to bestow the
bounty to the needy; even otherwise, man is inexorably distancing himself more
and more from the nature by dwelling in excuse me for the well-worn phrase, the
concrete jungles.”
“I too have to share the blame for I only talked about charity and not
empowerment.”
“Why worry over the spilt milk any way,” he said. “I’ll play my part in
my village with what is left of my money; besides as life there is vitiated by
caste prejudices and beset by religious superstitions, I shall try to open the
village minds to rational thinking. But as a novelist, I see a bigger role for
you on the rural stage for I feel there is a need for novels that enable the
villagers to contemplate about their human condition. While the current fiction
in the urban setting would seem another world for them to identify with, the
novels set in the rural background don’t help them either for they are meant to
showcase the village life for the urban world. If only you come and stay in my
village for a while, you might conceive a novel or two that might make a
difference to scores of village folks.”
“Why not, won’t I have your insights for inputs?”
“Before that, if you think it’s worth the trouble and helps the urban
public, you may as well write about my life and times,” he said. “If what I
hear about the publishing world is true, then all your effort might come to
naught, but still, if you’re passionate about it, and are prepared to face the
ordeal that getting published is, then go ahead forthwith for why deny the benefits of contemplating over my misled
life for those who might die before I cease? If ever my memoir makes a
difference to one person, then I can see some purpose in my meaningless life
and should it find a place in the
best-seller charts, well, who knows which books get there, all the better it is
for you. But were you to fail to find a backer, let not frustration rule your
head for strange are the ways of the publishing world, indeed the course of
life in the world at large. That there could be many facets of life which defy
its normality of character I had only realized from that Satish-Sarala episode;
how strange that men and women should visualize a comfort zone for the
fulfillment of their sexual fantasies with total strangers rather than with
their intimate friends, and that’s one of the many imponderables of life.
Maybe, had the poor guy swapped his spouse with one of his friend’s wife, it
wouldn’t have been a swap for nope as it turned out to be for him, but then its
nature that prevails. Well, now that I have left my past to you for its future
care, let me nurse what is left of its future as best as I can.”
When I began to pen his plight in the plot of his life, he went with
his mother to live in the village where it all began, and as I scripted his
tale, having read it, he expressed the hope that in the glaring shadow of his
life others would have a proper perspective of theirs.
Labels: Family saga, General fiction, Indian novel, Love and loss, Man-woman chemistry, Materialism, Memoir, Spirituality, Stream of consciousness novel, Tragedy, Women’s dilemma
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