Sravan was at once amused and irritated. What a bad imitation of his own style. Wannabe women writers who attached themselves to him inevitably began producing poor copies of his manner. Affected, amateurish. But to her he said, ‘Seems to be coming along fine.’
‘Shall I read more? Are you interested?’
He lowered his voice significantly. ‘I’m always interested.’
She flushed. Read some more in the same strain. Suddenly she stopped and said, ‘This is the penultimate chapter. I wonder if you’re serious about getting it through to a suitable publisher.’
‘Dead serious.’
She was anxious, unsure. ‘So can I send the manuscript across to you next week?’
‘Better if you bring it personally,’ he said.
She persisted. ‘I mean, it’ll be a surer thing if you discuss the deal.’
He was cautious. ‘What’s the hurry? Let it stand a while. Settle down. A novel’s got to resolve itself through a bit of necessary separation from its author, you know. Like a growing child. You might want to write a second draft. Polish it up …’
She studied him closely, suspicious. ‘I’m desperate that Papa should see my name in print soon. He’s terribly excited about it. I used to get full marks in English composition in school. He says he always knew I had it in me. And he’s eighty now.’
‘Ah, I wish my father felt that way about me,’ Sravan said, laughing, and he stood up to leave. ‘Bye for now. One of these days I’ll see what can be done about it.’
She looked far from reassured, but nodded. He rose to go.
‘Bye, then,’ she called at the door. ‘Tell Pragya I’ll stop by tomorrow.’
Out in the lane, Buddhoo cleared his throat. ‘And the message, dear Ravan?’ he taunted.
‘What message?’ barked Sravan.
‘The urgent message you had to send—through that china memsahib? The message you came to deliver, ha?’
Too late Sravan realized his error. Buddhoo chafed on: ‘You won the Golden Lotus, eh? Congratulations, yaar. When I die, a happy business maharaja, I shall bequeath my fortune to a trust that shall annually award a prize, too. I shall call it the Golden Phallus! Not that you aren’t a worthy candidate for it; I promise to take your merits into account. By the way, does she wear falsies, or are they real?’
Sravan smarted.
‘The point is, yaar,’ went on Buddhoo, ‘whether you still own that something that’s mightier than sword or pen?’
Sravan preserved a dignified silence. Buddhoo wouldn’t let him alone.
‘Quite a lady-killer, wah!’ applauded Buddhoo, as they walked back. Then an idea seemed to strike him. ‘Is she the only one, yaar?’
Sravan began to enjoy himself. Buddhoo’s question had suddenly ignited a range of inventive possibilities. A brave new image of himself began inflating tantalizingly in his brain.
‘No,’ he answered soberly. ‘Not counting my lady wife there are—let me see—I sometimes forget names—yes, six. Malini, Menaka, Atreya, Devyani, Purabi and Mondira.’ He struck off each name on his palm, his forehead crumpling with the exertion of recollecting. ‘This year, that is.’
Buddhoo grunted in disbelief. ‘This year!’ he exclaimed. ‘One for each day of the week! And what d’you do on the seventh day, may one know?’
Sravan guffawed. ‘Like the Lord, I rest.’
‘All your women have uniformly beautiful names. As though you named them yourself. Like the names of apsaras round a lecherous sage.’
‘Yes. A mere accident. Maybe I go for women with lyrical names. But some of them came to a lousy end.’
‘How?’
‘Most unfortunate. One died a natural death—but unfortunate all the same. Another killed herself.’
‘You must be joking.’
‘I’m perfectly serious. She jumped into a well. One was an online relationship and one a classroom affair. Both ended badly. That’s what my love life is—messy. I’m now alarmed when a woman starts taking an interest in me. I warn her to keep away for her own good, but nothing helps.’
He had Buddhoo agog, he noted with sly satisfaction. ‘Which one shall I start with?’ he asked sadly.
Buddhoo considered. ‘Menaka.’
Sravan groaned. ‘You’ve selected the most disastrous one, yaar. Okay, let’s take another turn round the park. This was the online one.’
‘An affair over the Internet?’ gasped Buddhoo in awe.
‘Right you are.’
‘I’ve only heard of Internet affairs,’ said Buddhoo. ‘Did you get to know what she looked like?’
‘Now you must understand one thing. I’m extremely intolerant of crappy moral judgements,’ he declared sternly. ‘Also understand that in the recent past I’ve been a serious and dedicated womanizer. I’ve needed it to fuel my creativity. This woman, Menaka, liked older men. All her men had been twice her age, she informed me the first time we met at the chat site. She was twenty-something, five-three, on the slender side, long black hair and wheatish skin.’
‘All that’s left is the “convented” tag and the “decent marriage” assurance,’ muttered Buddhoo.
Sravan ignored him. ‘Over the first few days, I learnt to use words that brought out electric leaps in a million ganglia. I let my fantasies loose. Those words were like magic mantras. Of course, I realized soon enough that they gave the whole thing a tremendous build-up and finally let you down. But imagine playing footsie on a woman’s boobs, yaar? All through words. Imagine plugging your engorged nozzle into her, snuggling there, guzzling on her virtual body. All through words. For a while I was convinced that the virtual was a great improvement on the actual. There are things you can do better with your mind than you ever can with your clumsy, lumbering beast of a body. The subtle physicality of words— get it?’
Buddhoo nodded.
‘I told her I liked wine, women and words, not necessarily in that order. She said she liked wine and words, too, but naturally, no women. Older men for her, but of late she’d been having problems. Her boyfriend had left her. She was dejected, ill. I tried cheering her up with one of my favourite fantasies. “Welcome,” I typed. “You’ve come calling. I’m opening the door for you.” She typed, “Thanks.” I continued: “You’re dressed in a Gujarati choli. Red, encrusted with mirrors and lots of embroidery.” She typed, “Oh, great!” So I developed the picture further. “You’re wearing a chunky silver choker. Long dangling earrings. Full makeup. Red lipstick, mascara …” She typed, “Lovely. You’re making me feel glamorous.” Then I sprang my well-timed surprise: “And you’re nude beneath the waist.” She typed six exclamation marks. I could see she was loving it.’
Buddhoo stared, open-mouthed.
‘ “You have a silver chain round your waist. A pendant suspended on your crotch.” Et cetera, et cetera.’
He cut short Buddhoo’s awe with a brusque wave of the hand, laughing secretly to himself.
‘Did you manage to cheer her up?’ asked Buddhoo eagerly.
‘Bless you, no. You’ll hardly believe it, yaar, but I learnt soon enough that my images left the lady cold. She was turned on by— of all the bally things—philosophy! Ever heard of philosophy as an aphrodisiac? Well, hear this one, and never fuck a philosopher, my friend, virtually or actually. It can’t be done. Our exchanges grew pretty bizarre in course of time. A most arduous and unrewarding exercise. I’d express a particularly juicy thought like: “How about the corridor of a speeding train in the dead of night? You’re a total stranger and we run into one another outside the loo?” but she’d come out with something like: “I’ve only just gotten round to defining peace. Peace is what’s consistent with our complexes and doesn’t provoke them.” I’d be gruff: “Too abstract.” She’d persist: “Nobody wants the active disturbance of misery. But I’ve just discovered I don’t much care for the stress of active happiness.” Or she’d turn critical and say, “Do you know what’s wrong with you? You have no real interest in people. Armchair empa
thy, practical apathy. You’re supposed to be a writer, but why can’t you connect?” Anyone could see that connecting was what I was trying to do all the time. But if I said that, it’d be: “There’s this kernel of self in you which can’t dissolve.” ’
There were times when she didn’t give me the chance to begin. She’d toss the first question: “You worked out this God thing?” Startled, I’d answer, “A bit.” She’d type, “I’m bothered about this. I’ve got a vital stake in the matter.” Then, very fast, the words would pour across the screen like a palpitating soliloquy: “I often drop that vowel ‘o’ in ‘God’. Turn it into GD. Suitably abstract. A blueprint encoding the universe in a micro-thought. At other times I feel the need to humanize the abstract, and I replace that ‘o’. You ever looked for God, S.?” I’d quip, “Not God but his initial draft certainly.” I’d been about to propose a “Me Maratha chief, you Portuguese hostage” brand of fantasy, but she went right ahead and swung at me her next: “I haven’t got this good–evil thing sorted out properly. It’s become a personal question.” I felt like roaring: “Goddamn it, what’s this, a nonstop seminar?” But I just said, “Haven’t worked that one out, sorry.” To which she urged, “Well, work it out now and tell me.” A bloody great meeting of minds, this tamasha, but on the screen I offered the random thought: “I guess you can’t supplant evil by good, only supplement it.” She replied, “Fantastic. I absolutely agree. The hurting motive is so strong in nature, the best that we can do is increase the healing motive—to counter it. Keep the balance.” ’
I wrote lamely, “You’re wise for twenty-five, I must say. What are you? A Holy Master? Koot Homi?” She retorted, “Holy Mistress is more like it.” ’
Finally, one day she typed, “Suppose I tell you something today, S. I won’t be logging on again.” I typed an exclamation mark and three question marks. The words strung themselves together on the screen in uncanny finality. “Going into hospital. Desperately ill.” I admit I was dashed. I asked the devious: “What’s up with you?” She said it was broncho-pneumonia. She’d been running high fever for days and now going into hospital was the only thing. “So, you’ll be back soon?” I urged. Then screen stayed empty a longish moment. Then the words crept across it, as though blown in by an unearthly draught: “I don’t think I will.” For some peculiar emotional reason I was indignant, and thumped down in outrage, “Nobody conks off with broncho-pneumonia.” The draught blew more words across my screen: “People like me do.” All of a sudden ribbons of words began appearing, reaching across to me: “There isn’t anything like virtual pain or virtual death. I mean, you just can’t switch it all off, yourself, your pain, your death. I’ve been turning over the idea of suicide in my mind but I can’t really believe that it’s a switching off. And medical science in a case like mine is like a bit of extra power from your UPS—a little more time, that’s all. So, I get out of this web now, S. In more senses than one! Interesting. I often think of it as the Indra jaal, the net of Indra, the mesh of maya, call it whatever you like. I must tell you—I’m 61. Male. Gay. Have AIDS, desperately ill. Ex–professor of philosophy. Wanted to get out of this miserable body, become someone else, interact with a stranger. Didn’t work out too well, did it? Sorry for being such a clumsy actor. In my state and at my time of life I couldn’t rid myself of the things that dog me. Thanks for everything.”
‘It didn’t register for a while. Dying of AIDS. Gay and sixty-one years old! This was a real being out there somewhere. Not a trick of the machine, not a figment of my imagination. And hell! All the time I thought we were interlocked in a common story, the storylines were so far apart. To each his own fiction. It might be fun till it wears off …’
Sravan heaved a deep sigh and said in a world-weary voice, ‘So there you have it. That was Menaka for you.’ He watched Buddhoo out of the corner of his eye.
Buddhoo finished chewing his areca nut in slow deliberation. Then he offered his comment: ‘Okay story. Middling. Except for one or two little things. A sick man—I mean—that sick—probably isn’t up to all these discussions. And at sixty-one, you can’t like men twice your age. It’s like those wisecracks they put up in grocery shops: “Credit will be given to all customers eighty-five years of age or older, if accompanied by both parents!” ’
4
‘I’m working on this new book. A tentative first draft so far. It’s all in a state of subconscious gestation. Posing quite a management problem for me—these six characters I’m obsessing over. I’m doing what I call creative waiting. A book’s got to stand a while before it starts flowing. There is an estranged married couple, Mondira and Amalendu. Two other characters, Mihir and Devyani. A child, and a senile and malicious old woman.
‘What I’m uncertain about is this pentagon of context–personality–event–consequence–law that I’ve sketched. I’ve never been convinced that life can be made to fall into facile plots and counterplots and subplots and a whole ladder of atomized minor plots on a reducing scale. Still, there’s an apparent order but it isn’t easily detected. And everything’s got its built-in symmetries and anarchies. My brain and its fantastications do seem to be extensions of the concrete physical universe and therefore real and continuous with it. There’s no parallel reality but the same reality with a different consistency …’
Buddhoo’s flat voice broke into Sravan’s monologue: ‘So in this novel of yours, who sleeps with whom and who kills whom?’
Sravan frowned, aggravated. He spelt out his idea in a voice of strained patience. ‘What’s important is who learns what and reaches where. There’s an old fantasy of mine that I’m trying to realize. Suppose a dead man, someone I’ve never known, were to leave his incomplete storyline as … a subtle presence in the air. A sort of psychic code. And I were to pick it up without knowing. Suppose I were to carry on, adding my own private story to it. Like … recording my voice on a pre-recorded tape. And suppose, when I die, this double-decker plot were left as a sort of vibration in the air and a third person were to pick it up and add to it his own story, without erasing all of mine …’
‘Does it have an end?’ asked Buddhoo.
‘How can it? The circle is beginningless and endless.’
‘The reader’s patience isn’t.’
Sravan clicked in exasperation. ‘Go to hell—it’s all lost on a joker like you. But if you just hear me out, you’ll see what I’m driving at. It isn’t critical theory I’m obsessing about—it’s a vital life issue. Is there a pattern or not? What was that thing Wittgenstein said, about philosophy being a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language? It’s roughly like Sankara’s maya. Language does both the things Sankara stated—avarana, camouflage, and viksepa, distortion. But the opposite is equally true. If you study bio-genesis or particle physics, there’s no denying the existence of fundamental patterns. Plots. Purposes. So Indian philosophy talks of the word with a capital W—calls it aksara lakshmi and vakya devi. Talks of the mantra calling truth out of the void … where are you off to?’
‘Sorry. This is nature calling truth out of the void.’ Buddhoo made for the loo.
‘Funny that nature should call truth each time I start discoursing, no?’
‘Funny,’ agreed Buddhoo with a grin.
The right tone wouldn’t come just yet. The first draft was often like a lump of clay, laboured over and left, into which God breathed life in the second draft. And he was not ashamed to bring in God, so long as God stayed off the record and didn’t embarrass or compromise his own public poise. He went back to his immediate problem: Purabi. He’d only just begun to apprehend her visually. Short, slightly bent, a puckered parchment face intricately lined. The shaded eyes of a cow, large and drowsing beneath deeply folded eyelids. And a big-toothed, too-broad sudden smile. Big, crumpled knuckles on puffy paws. What he still couldn’t invoke was her voice. Probably rusty. Something of an off-key strum. When she spoke at length it was like a tuneless harangue and a lament in one. He wondered
if he’d seen Purabi somewhere. The characters of the present might well be like much of adult life—an unconscious working-out of the encoded cryptograms of childhood. He sat and breathed in her presence. Slowly his head filled with uncooked images, the shredded parings of future sentences.
The little boy dogged Mondira’s footsteps. Straggling across the paved courtyard and into the kitchen, then up the rough stone stairs to the threshold of the cavernous prayer room. To the terrace, where the jars of pickles were stacked and the dal nuggets sunned on faded sheets.
He persists: ‘Then why did she jump into the well?’
‘Who?’
‘She.’ The boy’s eyes are hot little rapids of baleful black. He draws nearer. ‘Did you push her in?’ he asks.
Mondira feels a prickle of panic. Shrill, she swings round and snaps: ‘I’ll smack your face and skin your buttocks for you, you little burnt-face, you! Someone’s been telling you a pack of lies.’
The kid backs away against the wall. She realizes her mistake, flushes, quickly dabs her perspiring face with her sari and steps forward. ‘Believe me, son, don’t doubt my word.’
The shabby note of wheedlesome appeal empowers the child with impetuous confidence. ‘You are not my mother!’ the child shouts, pale with loathing. ‘You stole me!’
‘I am your mother, child, as God’s my witness. I am your mother.’ She begins to tremble. Her brittle voice cracks with pain.
Virtual Realities Page 5