6
It was this thought Krishan kept returning to as he sat opposite Anjum that evening on the train to Bombay, he pretending to read while all the time stealing glances at her, hoping she would glance up from her book and give him a sign, that she would reach out with her hand to touch him or raise her head up to look at him at least. He was able, usually, to suppress such anxieties when next to Anjum, not wanting to let them affect their time together, but having not seen her in three weeks and having hardly heard from her at all, unable now, even in her presence, to obtain the instant reassurance that her touch always gave, Krishan couldn’t help worrying that something had changed during her time in Jharkhand, that the urgency for union he’d always sensed when they met in person was no longer present, as if the distance she so often tried to maintain when they were physically apart had crystallized now into something more definite. Dinner was beginning to be served in their carriage, the staff moving quickly from berth to berth with trays marked vegetarian and nonvegetarian, and becoming aware of the commotion around them Anjum had closed her book finally and looked up. She asked him how his novel was going, and looking down at the book still open in his hands he replied that it was going okay, that he’d read a little too much for the day and wasn’t really in the mood to keep reading. She too was a little distracted, she told him, a little too upset to read. He looked at her inquiringly, surprised at this admission, and after hesitating for a moment she told him she’d been fighting with her mother, that no matter how much she tried to put the matter aside it had kept returning to her thoughts. Krishan waited for her to continue, but she seemed unsure about whether to share more, and it was only when he prodded her a little, asking what had happened, what was the reason for the fight, that Anjum sighed and began to explain. It had started with an accusatory comment her mother had made on the phone three weeks ago, chastising her for having not returned to Bangalore in so long. She’d gone twice the year before but hadn’t been back in the previous year, and her mother had been pestering her continuously about her next visit. She’d told her mother it wasn’t her fault, that her work had been overwhelming and that she simply hadn’t had time to visit, but her mother, who’d been irritable from the start of their conversation, had insinuated that there must have been some other reason. What did she mean, she’d asked, what other reason, and her mother, without skipping a beat, had told her that her ex-girlfriend must have been the reason, that either she’d gotten back with her ex or that she was wasting her life away in some other infantile way. Anjum had been silent at first, not having expected this accusation, then remembering all the things her mother had said in the past concerning Divya she’d suddenly become furious, had shouted and hung up the phone. On both occasions her mother had tried calling since then, ostensibly to patch things up, the subject had come up again, neither of them backing down, and on both occasions the line had been cut amid shouting and recriminations.
Krishan had heard a little about how Anjum had fallen out with her parents over Divya, but it was something she’d never seemed to want to dwell on at length, despite his attempts at inquiry whenever the subject came up, and he was a little taken aback now by how patiently she began to relate the story behind the recent fight, a story that was, she made a point of telling him, nothing particularly surprising or remarkable. She’d been together with Divya for almost two years at the time, she told him, had been living together in the same flat with her for several months, and because she’d felt certain the relationship was going to last she’d decided that she should finally let her parents know. It was a matter she’d known they wouldn’t respond to well, especially not her mother, but her parents were relatively permissive and understanding so far as parents went, had always supported or at least sympathized with whatever she and her sister wanted. She’d assumed that eventually they would come to accept the relationship, even if they had to go through a long period of adjustment before that could happen, even if they never made any effort to meet Divya or bring her into their lives, which wasn’t, in any case, something she particularly cared for. She’d fully expected the fury of her mother’s initial response, had fully expected the long campaign of manipulation that came afterward, the tears her mother frequently shed in an attempt to make her feel guilty, her claims that Anjum’s father was becoming ill in response to what she’d told them. She’d expected the vicious remarks, calculated to induce shame, had expected the quietly poisonous words that sank in and took root long after they’d been spoken and heard, but what she hadn’t quite expected, what she hadn’t quite prepared herself for, was that she herself would be so affected by everything her mother said. She’d been close to her mother during childhood, almost inseparable, but their relationship had become troubled when she was a teenager, and she’d made a concerted effort when she left to Delhi for university to distance herself from her parents and her home. Her mother would still make disparaging comments every so often about the way she dressed or the way she looked, would chastise her if she didn’t want to spend time with relatives when she returned home, but by the time she’d graduated and begun to work her mother had become less controlling, sensing perhaps that she had less power over her daughter now that she was making her own way in the world.
She’d assumed, when she told her parents about Divya, that no matter what her mother said she would be able to stay patient and composed, remain unaffected by the attempts her mother made to bring the relationship to an end, but the truth, she’d realized, stunningly obvious in retrospect, was that her mother was still after all those years capable of piercing her, of making her doubt not only her convictions but her sense of self. She’d borne her violent words as long as she could, hoping they would eventually come to an end, but the fighting had continued for months, leading to deeper and deeper resentment, till finally, no longer able to hear her mother’s voice without feeling her chest constrict in anger, she’d been forced to break off ties. They didn’t talk for a year and a half, not till several months after the relationship with Divya ended, and even then she didn’t tell them about the breakup immediately, not wanting to give her mother the satisfaction of knowing it was over. When she finally learned what happened her mother took care not to seem overjoyed, persuading her to come home for a week, making her special curries and desserts almost every meal, never once making reference to the relationship. She’d known that nothing had really been resolved, that her mother would continue pretending she was straight, but she’d accepted the conciliatory gestures nevertheless, the reassurance and security of being in touch with her parents convincing her to let the matter go. As time passed and things became more normal she gradually forgot what happened, which felt increasingly in the past and increasingly insignificant, especially since things with Divya had ended for other reasons. It was only now that she was realizing how resentful she must have remained, for how else, when her mother brought Divya up on the phone, could all that rage have resurfaced, so suddenly and forcefully that it surprised even her? In a way her mother’s intuition had been right—the fact she hadn’t returned home in so long testified, no matter how she tried to rationalize it, to a smoldering anger about all the things her mother had said, an anger she’d suppressed for a long time and which, when her mother provoked her that day on the phone, had finally exploded into the open.
Anjum fell silent as their trays were brought to them, each of them moving to the edge of the berth and resting the trays on their laps. They opened the little plastic containers to examine what was inside, nothing but a few small, slightly soggy chapattis and a yellow-colored fish curry, and leaning forward to avoid spilling they began to eat. When the two uniformed men had served the opposite berths and moved beyond earshot, Krishan turned again toward Anjum and spoke in a low voice. Was she sure that her mother’s pressure hadn’t been partly responsible for her decision to break up with Divya, that her mother’s role in the breakup wasn’t the source of her unexpected anger? Anjum thought for a moment
, looking at him as she finished swallowing what was in her mouth, then shook her head. No, she said. If anything her mother’s response had made her even more determined to be with Divya, if anything it had made her stay with Divya even longer than she would have otherwise. She wouldn’t have let her mother or any of her family members affect her choices, she’d been with other women too since Divya, and wouldn’t hesitate to be with a woman again in the future, if that was what she wanted. She paused for a second, then smiling at him as if making a joke added that if she was spending time with him now, it was because she liked him, not because he helped her satisfy some subconscious desire to please her mother. Krishan listened as she began to speak about her previous relationship openly and at length for the first time, as she described Divya’s possessiveness and the various other problems that had led to the end of their time together. Her voice was less grave now, more earnest, as if in talking about her mother and Divya she was getting something off her chest, and Krishan felt the anxiety he’d felt all afternoon melting away. He understood now why Anjum had been so out of touch these last three weeks, why she’d seemed distant for most of the day, and he could sense, in the way she was talking about Divya, that she was trying in part to reassure him, to convey that she hadn’t ignored him on purpose and that there was nothing he needed to worry about. She was focusing on him fully, her eyes fully on his, and he couldn’t help feeling grateful that she was telling him all these private, intimate details, she who was usually so reserved about what she shared, as if this person who’d maintained till then such a smooth façade of invulnerability was willing at last to open herself up to him. Sure that nothing had changed between them, that they had, in fact, somehow grown closer over the past three weeks, Krishan felt silly for all the anxiety he’d been feeling, anxiety that now felt misplaced and childish. He should have guessed that something else was happening, they were after all going on this trip to Bombay together, were going to spend three weeks with each other in a kind of semi-domesticity, something they’d never done before and that Anjum wouldn’t have suggested if she wasn’t in some way serious about him. She could have told him of course that she was fighting with her mother, in which case he would have tried to comfort her instead of getting worked up on his own, but that was just how Anjum was, she was secretive with her thoughts and liked to deal with things on her own, a quality that made her confidences all the more precious when she shared them. They stayed up talking as the passengers in the carriage around them began going to bed, turning off their compartment lights and drawing the curtains over their berths, their conversation moving from Anjum’s mother and Divya to parent-child relationships, to the question of financial independence and other more far afield topics, Krishan becoming more and more cheerful as they talked, as if only now were things between them becoming normal again, making jokes, reaching out and touching Anjum on the knee or forearm, causing her to laugh and touch him back. When, around nine or nine-thirty, the main lights in the carriage were turned off and Anjum yawned, told him she was sleepy, he couldn’t help feeling slightly let down, not because he’d thought any other end to the night was possible but because he’d only just begun feeling connected to her, and wanted to remain in that feeling. He watched as she stood up and pulled down her bag from the upper berth, began to spread out the sheets and cover, then getting up with some reluctance he began clearing the lower berth, dusting off the crumbs from their meal and spreading out his own sheets. When Anjum was done setting up her bed she came up from behind and touched his left elbow, squeezing it lightly as she leaned in close and whispered good night. Climbing nimbly up the small iron ladder, she made some last adjustments to her berth, then drew her curtain and disappeared from view.
Krishan finished making his bed and sat down at the edge of his berth, looked to his left and right and wondered what to do. There were no signs of life or movement in the carriage, the curtains had been drawn across all the berths but his, the bright fluorescent ceiling lights turned off and replaced by two small bulbs in the corners of the carriage that gave the darkness a dull amber hue. There was a reading light that he could turn on in the upper corner of his berth, he knew, but he didn’t really feel like reading, especially not after having read or tried to read for so many hours that afternoon. The sudden and intense fluctuations in his mood that day had left him exhausted, in a quiet, ruminative mood, and what he wanted above all was to be with himself for a while. Deciding to lie down and watch what could be made of the passing night, he took off his sandals, brought his legs up onto the bed, and drew the curtain so he was enclosed in the darkness of the berth’s womb-like space. Through the scratched horizontal pane of the window the countryside outside was flitting by quickly, shrouded ghostlike in the blue-black dark. He brought his face to the glass and tried to discern what kind of landscape they were passing, but couldn’t make out anything except for very occasional lights in the distance and trees here and there, as though everything passing by was anonymous, only the continuous pounding of the train’s wheels below to mark their progress against the immensity of the night. Raising his hand, Krishan caressed the soft leather underside of Anjum’s berth. He could sense her presence above him, in her own separate enclosure, and the thought of being so close to her and yet so sealed off magnified his feeling of being alone, not in a way that caused anxiety or distress but in a peaceful, almost pleasant way. It had been a while since he’d last felt this kind of solitude, this sense of calm self-containment or self-sufficiency so different from the loneliness that had been taking hold of him in the past few months. Unlike that loneliness, which was full of a desperate, almost helpless desire to be in Anjum’s presence, a constant anxiety about whether Anjum really wanted to be with him, what he felt now oddly was a sense of needing nothing outside himself, not even Anjum, a sense of being able to relinquish the world and everything it offered, to accept instead the person he was, incomplete though he was and so full of voids.
He’d never thought of himself as being needy—even now, in his state of calm, he found the word difficult to use—but the truth was that he’d become, in the last few months, so dependent on the signs of interest and affection that Anjum gave him, his moods so responsive to everything she said or failed to say, did or failed to do, that sometimes he seemed pathetic even to himself. He’d found himself becoming envious and even possessive on occasion, resentful of the fact that the time he spent with Anjum was determined solely by reference to her availability, and even if Anjum’s own nature was partly responsible for these feelings—it was no coincidence, he felt, that Divya too had been possessive while she was with Anjum—he still couldn’t help detesting himself for the pettiness of the thoughts he sometimes had. When his desperation was at its peak he often felt his only recourse was to pull back completely, to attempt to psychologically extricate himself from Anjum altogether, partly out of frustration or indignation or even perhaps a desire to wound, but above all to save himself from the pain of feeling desire too strongly. He would listen, at such moments, to a recording of the Sivapurānam he’d bought a few years before, not long after having heard it for the first time at a funeral in Colombo for some distant relative. A singer had been hired for the funeral, and listening to the man as he stood singing beside the corpse for the small audience, he’d been moved, despite having hardly known the deceased, to the point of shedding tears, entranced by the singer’s rich, unornamented voice, by the slowly building, incantatory rhythm of the song, written in a Tamil from several hundred years before that he could hardly understand but which, he knew, was about the pain of being embodied, of having to live many different lives, as a blade of grass, a worm, and a human, of having to endure countless existences dominated by earthly desires while all the time yearning to give up earthly life, to be shorn of attachment and the weight of the body and joined to the feet of Siva. Listening to the song or singing the lyrics to himself in those moments of desperation he was able to more easily bear the uncertainty of being
with Anjum, would feel consoled by these visions of total removal from the world, by the possibility of cutting off all ties with Anjum and leaving her completely, a severance that was at that point only a fantasy but nevertheless one that comforted him. There was probably something unhealthy, he suspected, about this need to either identify completely with Anjum or completely withdraw from her, about his difficulty finding a reasonable middle ground, and he wondered in less impassioned moments whether it was possible to relate to her differently, to accommodate himself better to this person who clearly wanted to be with him but seemingly only in a temporary or provisional way. He wondered whether he could simply be grateful for her presence when it was available and content by himself when it was not, whether he could take pleasure in her company when he could but remain unworried and unconcerned at other times, to avoid in this way the debilitating anxiety he so often felt when she was out of touch or vague about plans or withdrawn. He would think, listening to the Sivapurānam, of the sea in Sri Lanka as it was during the calmer months, specifically of the sea in Trincomalee as he’d seen it once on a warm, late June evening, the water a calm, waveless sheet of glimmering, glistening blue that stretched out silently toward the sky. He would think of how the water unfurled itself so softly across the gentle slope of the beach, how it swept over the smooth, polished sand with such tenderness and how reaching its full extension, just as it was losing all its momentum, it would pause as if taking a breath in a last brief embrace of the earth, clasping the land for as long as it could before being drawn back with a sigh into the sea. He would think of the sea, rolling and unrolling itself softly and placidly across the edges of the earth in this way, coming into contact with the shore so lovingly and gratefully and then, when it was time, withdrawing so gracefully, and he would wonder whether it was possible for him too to be in Anjum’s presence and then return to himself with such grace and equanimity, to attach himself to the thing he loved and then detach himself without each time ripping apart his soul, though the truth, he knew, was that such a stance was only possible at certain moments, at least for him, moments in which he was, for whatever reason, briefly in possession of himself, for it was difficult to be philosophical in the midst of desire, it was difficult to be as removed from the world as religious devotees claimed to be when you were caught up in the bliss of union or in the desperation of being parted.
A Passage North Page 13