Mistress: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. Just wondering why one needs a dog when you have a bird as vicious as her.’

  ‘But I did tell you that she is very bad-tempered. Why did you have to thrust your finger into her cage?’

  ‘I usually have a way with animals.’ Shyam scowled. ‘But this isn’t a bird. This is a bloodthirsty ghoul.’

  But Malini, like everyone else, seemed to have succumbed to Chris.

  Chris looked pleased. ‘She is such a feisty thing,’ he said and continued to scratch Malini’s head as she shut her eyes in enjoyment.

  Chris and I would sit on the steps to the river for a while till night descended. We didn’t talk much. It was enough to sit there soaking in the night sounds, wrapped by the darkness. It was an intimacy with a million nerve ends. And then I would go home with a want in me that threatened to take my life over.

  ‘How long is this storytelling going to last?’ Shyam demanded one day.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was the truth. I wished it would never end. For as long as Uncle told his story, Chris was his captive.

  ‘What is this? The Mahabharata? Why is he stretching it like one of those serials on television?’ Shyam muttered.

  Shyam was worried that he was losing money on Cottage No. 12. ‘You realize that I thought it would be off season when I offered the cottage, don’t you? But the season has been better than ever,’ he said. ‘We are having to refuse some bookings and turn people away. I don’t like doing that.’

  I shrugged. ‘You know Uncle. He never says why he does what he does. He has his reasons, I suppose.’

  It was not like Uncle to be difficult. I could see that this was hard for him. All his life Uncle had played characters whose actions were defined for him. Here he had to be both the creator and the actor, and it was his own history, his life, he was laying bare.

  ‘What is wrong?’ I ask Chris.

  He scratches his chin. ‘I was listening to the recordings of the past few days. I am not sure how much is true and how much he is making up.’

  I see my printouts on the table. Every evening I take home the tape and bring it back the next evening with the transcript printed out.

  ‘For one,’ Chris says, picking up a page, ‘there is the cycle ride. The burial urns, the brahmin villagers who eat pork. What is their relevance?’

  I am not surprised by his bewilderment. I had listened to that episode and wondered too. What did it have to do with Uncle?

  Later that night, it had occurred to me. Then everything fell into place.

  Once again Uncle was creating an atmosphere where the real tussled with the unreal. If Sethu had met Saadiya after an insipid and boring cycle ride, the impact of that meeting would not have been so forceful or even poignant. Arabipatnam would have been just another Muslim settlement to him. But the unreality of the real world he passed through gave Arabipatnam a magic edge. It was an enchanted place, and Saadiya was the princess trapped there. I explain this to Chris. ‘Do you see it?’ I ask.

  Chris crinkles his eyes. He has acquired a tan in a week’s time and the ruddiness of his skin makes his eyes a deeper green. ‘You have beautiful eyes,’ I say.

  He grins. ‘I thought I was supposed to say that.’

  I flush and look away, then take a deep breath and say, ‘Do you understand what I am saying?’

  ‘Not really. Why would he do it?’

  ‘Actually, he’s again using a technique from his art,’ I say. ‘Do you want me to explain it to you?’ I hesitate to volunteer information. I worry that I am beginning to sound like I am lecturing him.

  ‘Do you mind if I record this as well?’ He inserts a new tape into the machine.

  ‘There is a smallish episode in the Mahabharata. It is rather insignificant in the scope of the whole epic, but it is very popular in kathakali. It’s called Baka Vadham. Which means the killing of Baka.

  ‘Baka was this evil demon who was terrorizing a brahmin village. The villagers, who were incapable of defending themselves, pleaded with him to leave them alone. Baka agreed on one condition: every day a family would send him a cartload of food and the cart driver and the bullocks that pulled the cart as his dinner.

  ‘Now, the Pandavas, who were in exile then, arrived at this village and were offered shelter. One evening, they came home from their wanderings to discover the host family in mourning. It was their turn to send the food and a member of their family to Baka. The family wept as each one of the male members offered to go. Bheema then stepped forward and said he would be the cart driver. Bheema, if you remember, was the strongest of the Pandavas, with a great love for food and battle.

  ‘Now the libretto has a description of Bheema’s journey into the forest that Baka lived in.

  ‘Bheema hears the howling of jackals and the screeching of vultures. When he hears these ugly and terrifying sounds, he feels as if the animals are worshipping the demon. Bheema walks on and hears maniacal laughter and the blood-chilling shrieks of ghouls and other evil creatures. A breeze blows and it bears the stench of death, of putrefied human remains. Then Bheema sees shreds of the sacred thread that brahmin men wear and is even more furious.

  ‘My point is, if the libretto didn’t include such a lead up, then the Bheema–Baka battle would be an anticlimax.’

  Chris whistles softly. ‘All right. I buy that. But there is something else you must listen to …’

  My heart skips a beat. I think of what he had said one night as we sat by the river. ‘Sometimes I abandon a trail halfway through. Either the subject fails to hold me, or I discover that I have made a mistake and my subject is a load of bull.’

  I worry now. Will he think Uncle is not worth the effort?

  It is a warm evening. I lift my hair away from my face. I see his eyes cup my breasts and I straighten abruptly.

  ‘May I use your bathroom?’ I ask to break the mood.

  ‘Here, put these flip-flops on,’ he says, kicking his rubber sandals off. ‘I just had a shower and the whole floor is wet.’

  I step into them. My feet draw in the warmth of his. I examine the shelf in the bathroom. I sniff his cologne and touch his toothbrush. I bury my face in his towel and breathe in his scent. Then I see myself in the mirror. What am I doing?

  The tape comes alive: ‘Saadiya loved that phrase. It represented all that she felt was true of life. Life demands of us that we have a Plank of Avidity. How can we have more if we don’t raise our expectations? How can we be content with just what we have and know?’

  I feel a question gather on my brow. ‘So what about it?’ I ask.

  Chris runs a hand over his face. He looks at me and asks, ‘Has he travelled much?’

  I nod.

  ‘What does that mean? A yes or a no?’

  Before I can react, he suddenly leans forward and touches my hand. ‘Hey, I didn’t mean to snap. I really don’t know what’s got into me …’ He drops his head in his hands.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. I am willing to forgive him his surliness. What is this magic he is weaving around me?

  He looks up. ‘That phrase …Plank of Avidity. Do you know where I came across it first? At the Viking Museum in Roskilde in Denmark.’ His voice is quiet.

  I don’t know what to say. ‘He’s travelled a great deal,’ I say.

  Chris smiles. ‘You think I am being impatient, don’t you? It is his story. I should let him tell it the way he chooses to. Besides …’ He pauses.

  ‘Besides, what?’

  ‘Besides, I get to spend time with you.’

  I look away. I feel him near me. How did he get here?

  I step back. He watches me.

  ‘Uncle wanted to know if you would like to go to a performance tomorrow,’ I say. ‘He will resume his story the day after tomorrow,’ I add.

  He is amused by my embarrassment. He leans forward and with his finger gently caresses my cheek. ‘What are you scared of? I will go, but only if you go too.’
/>   I know I should object. Say something to disabuse any notion he may have of our relationship developing into something else. Instead, I ask, ‘Is it the dance or me you want to see?’

  He gazes at me with his green eyes and says, ‘What do you think?’

  It is a little past seven when I walk towards Chris’s cottage. The moon in the night sky is bright enough, despite its blurred edges. I look at myself.

  For the hundredth time this evening, I wonder if I should have worn something else.

  I had looked at myself in the mirror. I had told myself that I was going for a performance and it would be insulting to the art and the artist if I were to appear in casual clothes. As if his performance was not worth the effort. But I also knew that I was dressing up for him. The kohl in my eyes, the flowers in my hair, the varnish on my nails, the perfume at my pulse points, the sari draped low to reveal the curve of my waist …I wanted him to look at me.

  As I near his cottage, I hear music. What is he listening to, I wonder. The music pauses and begins again.

  It is Chris playing.

  I hurry. I climb the steps to his cottage carefully, quietly, so he will not know I am there. Then I sit on the veranda, listening.

  I know nothing about western classical music, but I know when I respond to a piece of music. I feel that stirring now. As if all that lies buried in me is aching to be drawn out.

  I close my eyes and let the music wash over me. I think of what Chris said on his first night here. ‘Baggage! None of us is free of it.’

  I have my baggage too.

  How old was I? Twenty-two. So young, so full of adult possibilities, and so determined to live my way. I was ripe and ready to fall in love; he was a much older man, married and a senior manager in the company where I worked. Normally, we would never have met. I was a trainee in the HR department and he a senior technical expert. But there was a seminar organized by the HR department and then, in the evening, a cocktail party. He was there and I had lots to drink and as banter moved to innuendoes, I saw that he was an attractive man. I was flattered by his attention and charmed by his conversation. I let myself yield.

  Is that what falling in love is? To concede, to relinquish, to be pliant, to comply, to give way. I did all that, knowing that he was a married man and that ‘my wife and I have a marriage only in name’ was the oldest and most banal cliché ever used.

  I was too young and too yielding to realize that I made a perfect playmate and would never be more. For two years, he and I were lovers. ‘As soon as my son leaves home, I’ll get a divorce,’ he said, and I believed him. My whole life stretched ahead of me. What was a year or two, I asked myself.

  I believed him because he seemed to be as much in love with me as I was with him. So much so that he wanted to flaunt it. There was nothing hole-in-the-corner or clandestine about our relationship. We did everything that other couples did.

  We went to pubs and restaurants. It didn’t matter that we might meet people we knew. He would fork morsels from his plate into my mouth and sip from my glass and he did it as if he had every right to do so. I revelled in it. He took me to meet his friends and in their homes he would slip his hand into mine and sometimes absently twirl a lock of my hair around his finger. When we went to open-air concerts, he would lean against the car and hold me cradled to his chest. He kissed me in the lift and pushed the car seat back and made love to me in his car.

  And always I knew that rush, the exhilaration that came of defiance. I was doing in adult terms what I had done as an adolescent: sneaking out of the all-girls’ boarding school for a wind-in-the-hair bike ride with a boy I had met. Smoking grass and necking in movie theatres. But this is the man I love, I told myself and yielded even more.

  We held nothing back. He told me his fantasies and I complied. Perhaps the compliance was what made it so exciting. He had my body fine-tuned to a fever of sexual energy and he evoked an appetite that seemed insatiable. He knew how to make love in so many different ways, masterful and tender at the same time. And since he knew that it wouldn’t be for ever, he crammed a lifetime’s loving into as many stolen moments as possible.

  Then his wife came to see me. Perhaps she had done this before. At first she was very brisk and matter-of-fact about it, as if she were dealing with a broken sewer pipe: there would be some stench and mess involved, but it could be fixed. ‘You don’t think this is the first time, do you?’

  I couldn’t meet her eyes. She was so elegant, and I felt like a gauche teenager. ‘He loves me. And I him.’ I dared her to defy me.

  She bit her lip. I glanced at her. She wasn’t angry, not even unhappy, only utterly, desperately hopeless. ‘He seems to choose younger and younger girls. What do you see in him? Don’t ruin your life for him. What did he say—as soon as my son leaves home, I’ll get a divorce?’

  I flushed.

  ‘I thought as much. Ask him, which son? The fifteen-year-old, the eleven-year-old, or the five-year-old?’

  I felt a sob grow in me. I hadn’t known about the younger children.

  ‘I know he hasn’t mentioned the younger boys to you. That, too, is part of the pattern. I pity him. It is as if he needs to redeem himself after each child is born. Steal back his youth, perhaps. I don’t know. He is not a bad man, only weak, and he will never leave me. He needs me …and I him. He is the father of my children, you see.’

  I did not hear what she was saying. All I knew was that I wanted to go home. I wanted to hide myself in a place where there was none of this deceit or compromise. I felt betrayed. I felt used. I felt foolish. More than anything else, I knew that if I stayed I would find a way to excuse his lies and continue to be his playmate. That was the measure of how much I had yielded to him.

  For days, I lay in bed. Even getting up seemed an effort. I sank into lethargy—or was it hopelessness? What was there for me to wake up to? Even thinking was an effort. Then I discovered that I was pregnant. I didn’t really have an option. I would have to have an abortion. There was nothing else to be done. I slipped a gold band around my ring finger and a black-bead-and-gold chain around my neck and smeared the parting in my hair with the redness of sindoor. I met the eyes of the doctor as fearlessly as I could, and said, ‘I cannot have this baby; my husband and I are separated.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘It is a first pregnancy, and I would advise against termination. Have you asked yourself if this baby might help you reconcile with your husband?’

  ‘No, that will not happen,’ I said. ‘He is with another woman now.’

  ‘In that case …’

  So I wiped out all traces of a love that was not meant to be, and went home.

  When Shyam was brought forth as husband material, I hesitated. Then my father said, ‘I have heard some rather disconcerting things about you. Are you determined to ruin my good name?’

  I wondered what he had heard. I didn’t care. It wasn’t as if my father was of unimpeachable character. But I knew that if I didn’t tie myself to Shyam, I would in a weak moment go back to my lover. I agreed.

  I had saved my pride and kept my integrity. I could sleep again without seeing the image of his wife, with her hopeless eyes and the resignation in her voice. Three months later, I knew I had made a mistake, but I buried the thought in my mind. There it lay and turned into a kernel of dissatisfaction, corroding and sucking the marrow out of my life. Why had I said yes to this marriage? To living with a man merely because I longed to flee from my own conscience?

  Again I sank into apathy. Days dragged into years and I was ensconced in my lethargy. What was there to look forward to?

  ‘Isn’t it time you had a child?’ Rani Oppol asked in our second year of marriage.

  I shrugged. ‘We will have one when we are ready,’ I said.

  ‘There is no saying with these things. You don’t know if you can get pregnant unless you get pregnant.’

  I wondered if I should tell her. But I bit back my retort.

  ‘Isn’t it time w
e had a child?’ Shyam said a couple of years later.

  I thought a child might bridge the distance between us. It would fill our lives. I would welcome a child, I thought.

  But I wouldn’t get pregnant.

  So we went to doctors. For some months it was another routine. ‘Don’t think about it and it will happen,’ the doctors said.

  So I didn’t think about it. But I didn’t get pregnant.

  Then, one day, we went to visit Rani Oppol. Their neighbours, a brahmin family from Palakkad, were conducting a seemantham for their daughter. I would be expected to go along, I thought, so I wore a silk sari and put some jewellery on. It was a festive occasion, after all: the celebration of a pregnancy coming close to full term.

  Then Rani Oppol said, ‘I don’t think you should come with us. You know how people are; they think a married woman who hasn’t had children for so long is a macchi. They won’t like it. It is inauspicious to have a barren woman at such functions …the evil eye, etc.’

  I didn’t say anything. All I knew was a freezing within.

  Now, as I hear Chris’s music, I feel a thawing. I cannot bear to bury the thought again. I wish to be free of it. I do not wish to wake up one morning twenty years from now and ask myself: how could you have thrown your chance of happiness away?

  The notes fill my ears as I walk through the carefully preserved fence of propriety. If there is a thought that goes with me, it is only sorrow for what could have been.

  I stand at the door. Chris sees me but does not stop. I watch him as he coaxes the instrument to be his.

  He is sitting on a chair. The instrument is wedged ever so gently between his knees; its neck rests against his shoulder. His hands move, his left hand searching, the right hand gleaning. They have become one, the instrument yielding to his body, his touch.

  I see myself in his arms. I am the cello. It is me he is caressing. It is I who am responding.

  The intensity of my desire shocks me. I close my eyes to shut out the image.