Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  They looked at one another in strained silence. The waiter brought the bill, a welcome distraction. Sravan prolonged the process of taking out his wallet and counting out the cash to allow his head to quieten. They left the restaurant, the strain between them mounting.

  He normally left her later, around midnight. When Mridul was out on tour and the kids asleep in their room, there would be time to slake the uneasiness disturbing his limbs. In the lift there would be time for a brush of the lips and a quick, snatched fumble or squeeze, which would give him a sharp and sordid thrill. He had come to associate the lift with the quickening drumbeat of desire by which he waited impatiently to taste the peppermint flavour of her skin and submerge himself in her moist warmth.

  But today she slammed the car door and strode up the stairs to her building without a word.

  6

  ‘Atreya was a student at the Centre for Creative Arts, where I teach a creative-writing course,’ Sravan told Buddhoo on one of their evening walks. ‘Around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, slightly older than the rest of the class. She’d done well in the entrance exam. At the interview I discovered she’d opted for the evening batch because she worked in a bank. I asked her why she had joined. Wasn’t she fagged out at the end of the day? Didn’t she want to rush home?’

  “I want to write just one book,” she said.

  “Many of us do,” I pointed out. “Maybe all we full-time writers do is write one book, cunningly chopped up into a dozen.”

  “No, but this is different,” she said. “I don’t want to write for the sake of art or creative expression or recognition or anything like that. It’s to save my mind. My marriage …”

  ‘That intrigued me. “What?”

  “I want to write a book to put everything right.”

  “Ah, a confessional work,” I observed, wondering what horrific thing haunted this attractive young woman’s consciousness.

  “No.” She jerked impatiently, lifted her arms in a restless gesture and slapped the loose bun at the nape of her neck. Even on that first day she struck me as vaguely familiar. I was sure I’d met her somewhere, seen that quick movement of the brown arms slapping her bun in place. But I couldn’t place where. “Not that way,” she asserted.

  “Then?”

  “It sounds a personal thing, but it’s bound up with my joining this course,” she confessed awkwardly.

  “You can absolutely depend upon my professional discretion, madam,” I recited in Sherlock Holmesian mimicry, and she laughed. That broke the ice.

  “For some time, Mr Holmes,” she recounted, “I have had the eerie feeling that everything is wrong in my life. Has been wrong from the start. But it just might have gone right—missed being right by a hair’s breadth. See, I was born a fourth daughter. I had the wrong sort of home. The wrong sort of parents. I went to the wrong school. Had the wrong teachers. Read the wrong subjects in college, and naturally all my choices went wrong. Finally, I thought I married the right man, but things just went wrong between us. It’s a spell I’ve got to break.”

  “This course doesn’t undertake to provide the frog prince,” I said seriously.

  “No, I wouldn’t risk calling you that,” she said demurely, and it was my turn to laugh. I tell you, yaar, we got along like a house on fire. I really enjoyed that girl’s company.

  “Carry on,” I prompted.

  “It’s a grim story,” she said.

  “In that case you and I’ll be the Brothers Grim,” I retorted.

  ‘She flashed me a quick smile. “I’ve been telling myself—maybe I’m seeing things wrong. But I’ve been seeing them this way a long, long while. So I hit upon this: If I were to rewrite my life, making every wrong thing right, changing every situation and every character, then maybe it’ll all cancel out in my head. Work out right.” Her voice trailed away. There was an eccentric urgency about this girl. I took an instant liking to her. And damnit, that’s the strangest and most striking reason for wanting to write a book that anyone’s ever given me.

  “I get it,” I said. “It’s creative correction, is it? But you don’t necessarily have to enroll for a course to be able to do that. Much of the time I drill my students in routine stuff.”

  ‘But she was firm. “I want to learn. Just one book, no more.”

  ‘Of course I selected her. After a few lectures I made an astounding discovery: I placed her. You’ll never believe me, but she was exactly like my character Mondira. And I’d framed Mondira long, long before I’d even set eyes on this woman. I’ve heard a Swiss painter say that he’d chance upon exact copies in nature of landscapes he’d painted years ago. She even had a tall, lanky husband called Amresh! In my book I’d named him Amalendu. Such an uncanny coincidence. I almost smelt disaster, wondering if she’d take the hatchet to him as Mondira does in my book. Now I’m going to tell you something very strange. I had the whimsical idea that if I hurried up and let my fictional Mondira expend her rage on her fictional husband, then some resource of psychic fury in the universe might be used up and this real girl and her husband spared. Or, better, if I changed the plot of my novel and let Amalendu be killed by someone else, I might help avert tragedy in this girl’s life. So I did that—changed my book. Call it writerly superstition. And all these problems I’m having with my novel spring from that change. I haven’t solved half of them, but at least I have the satisfaction of feeling I’ve helped avert some catastrophe … It’s ridiculous! No one will ever understand why I did it.’

  ‘I do,’ said Buddhoo. ‘It’s the most gallant thing you ever did in your mean little life, Ravan. Maybe it’s the only kind of chivalry you’re capable of. Did she appreciate it?’

  ‘She never knew. Will you be surprised if I tell you that the only time we spoke to one another was that first interview? We didn’t exchange a word after that. The communication was different.’

  ‘ESP?’

  ‘Better still. As her first assignment she wrote a one-act play called As You Loathe It, or What You Won’t. A perverse little spoof, all wisecracks and black humour. I gave her a B for it. Later, to my amusement, she vented her protest in pithy retorts in her notebooks, which I enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed going through the assignments themselves.

  ‘The second week she submitted a poem written entirely in the jargon of business management. My comment was: “Excellent. I’m impressed. But to be impressed by dazzling virtuosity is not to be humanly moved. Therefore another B. Don’t strike poses on the page.” Her handwriting dashed its spitfire script across the margin: “I’m not striking a pose. This thing I’m trying to say bloody well matters to me!” Mondira to the core!

  ‘Then she applied herself to the challenge of leaving me humanly moved. Her story was a heart-twisting narrative set in First World War Alsace. A German soldier wanders into an abandoned cottage and is met by a starving old dog who fiercely guards a broken door. The soldier manages to enter the cottage and finds himself menaced by the dog, who has obviously hidden something in the coal scuttle. He is bitten in the calf and shoots the dog dead. Then he explores the coal scuttle and finds broken toys, left by a child when the city was evacuated. It was crisply written, quite overwhelming in patches, and for once I had to concede her an A+. The grade spoke for itself. I made no observations and neither did she.

  ‘But the next piece was a disappointment. I gave her a C and wrote in the margin: “A whole tedious menstruation theme! What’s this? A shout? A statement? A gyno-visceral banner? Too bloody uterine.”

  ‘She scrawled back, “Bloody is about right! Such a thing as Discriminatory Downgrading by Supercilious Male Examiner!”

  ‘What was funny was that we communicated exclusively through these marginal exchanges. I was half beginning to think of it as a marginal romance.

  ‘I’ve noticed while working with students that creative growth is a cyclical thing. There’s an ascent of the graph, then after a few excellent entries there comes a slump. Like Atreya’s next exercise. The idea was
original enough. A man caught between two realities, the psychic world “behind the veil” and the cyber world behind the screen. Trapped, he ricochets from one to the other and can’t find a foothold in physical reality. I was struck by the theme. But as an idea it was too advanced for the technical capacity of this unusual girl. The execution was shoddy. Reluctantly, I gave her a B and asked if anything was wrong.

  ‘Next day she handed the notebook back without looking at me. After she’d left, I flipped it open and read: “I can’t seem to get it right. I don’t like my way of writing. Sick of it now. I’ve tried to change it, but I’ve nothing to replace it with. Any good waiting???”

  ‘When students reach this psychic point I usually make each one write a personal story containing at least one actual character in their life. List the characters that are promising and write a story including all of them. Literature isn’t your story or mine, but our common story, etc. I assigned her a narrative essay: How It Feels to Write. She turned in a twenty-page manuscript starting with the axiom: “Self-consciousness involves a tale in time but a writer’s plots are artificial symmetries.” Then she wrote: “It began as a sort of self-indulgence. I was trying to use words to study existence, to render its sense or lack of sense.”

  ‘I read on and on. Made an asterisk against one phrase: “ideas like plants, thrusting themselves from the dry soil, obeying a natural law, ready to boil over, overflow.” I told her not to mix metaphors.

  ‘She ended, “I love the magic moment when a work begins managing itself, wakes up to itself, and before my eyes, a finished piece lifts out of the pages.” I had the distinct vision of a gull, rising in a curve out of an indigo sea.

  ‘Now, I still can’t explain why I took this risk. I was seduced by what I’d just read, I guess. In the margin of the essay I wrote not a grade but something foolish, halfway between a proposal and a proposition. I wish I hadn’t done it. Under the circumstances it wasn’t in the game.’

  ‘So what did she say?’ asked Buddhoo, curious.

  Sravan just sighed. ‘Tell me, yaar. Why are all my relationships such a disaster? Every one of them?’

  ‘Write a book setting the wrong things right,’ quipped Buddhoo. ‘You haven’t answered my question. What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing. She handed in her notebook as usual. I received it with, well, staged apathy. When she left, I grabbed it and flung it open and see what I found: she’d graded my proposal a C–. Worse, she stopped coming to class. So that was it. One false step and I lost her. I have her notebook still.’

  ‘Meanwhile, the novel stays changed to suit her future?’ asked Buddhoo.

  ‘A kind of gift, you understand. Or do you?’ said Sravan. ‘I tried to reassess that brief relationship in another book based on that experience. It was called Such As I Am. I believe it would have been something substantial …’

  ‘But …?’ Buddhoo was alert to the hint.

  ‘I couldn’t finish it. I was on the last chapter when Pragya destroyed it.’ His voice was expressionless, but Buddhoo looked up swiftly and searched his face. ‘You’ve heard of romantic murders? Sounds like the headline of a tenth-rate tabloid. “Writer’s Wife Murders Book in Jealous Fit”. But that was it. Those were the typewriter days.’

  ‘What did she do to it?’ Buddhoo asked, hesitantly.

  ‘She burnt it. That last chapter was never written. Nor, between Pragya and me, written off.’

  7

  Sravan often felt that the book he was writing was something pre-existent. All he was doing was intuiting its outlines, as one would unveil a statue. He wasn’t inventing Devyani—he believed that Devyani existed, an entelechy summoned out of the past or the possible. She had probably existed exactly as he conceived her, in an earlier time. Equally possible, she lived somewhere in the spacious present, in silent accord with his imaginings. And in another time and place, he himself might speak in the fictional script of another.

  He found Devyani so easy to visualize. She was pliant, unformed, a non-person who achieves personality in two rapid strides—the moment she discovers her adored elder sister, Mondira, in her husband Mihir’s arms, and the moment she decides to jump into the well. She might be fifteen or seventeen.

  Her face round, her nose and chin small and moulded, her eyes unsure and shrinking. She smiles in little flutters, with tiny darting glances for signs of disapproval or offence. She flushes easily and is apt to grow speechless for long spells. Her figure is slight to the point of being emaciated. She is good with her hands and when she is all by herself, she hums. The humming ceases abruptly upon a little tremor at the first sign of an intruder. And she likes sitting facing the door, as though she fears that an assailant might steal up from behind and strike her unawares.

  It was funny, thought Sravan, this inverse relation—simplicity expressed in complex ways and complexity in the simplest. In the total sweep of his book, Devyani was a minor character, part of the scaffolding, but she seemed the most readily invoked, the most accessible.

  Sravan still chose to do initial drafts in pen. For the first draft, he preferred the legato glide of the pen to the staccato notes of the keyboard. (He compared the two to the sitar and the piano.) The second draft he fed into his computer, transforming, amplifying, shading, enjoying the float of words beneath his fingers. Pen and computer together created this delicate illusion: paper and pen for anchorage, the monitor screen for flight.

  The present chapter described, in her child’s voice, Devyani’s shubh-drishti, the viewing of bride by groom and groom by bride beneath a cloth canopy. Sravan had chosen Bengal as the suitable setting, largely in view of the Partition sequences, the necessity of keeping the action in the Calcutta hinterland. Still, he was determined not to let the story get culture-specific.

  Devyani is charmed and awed by the devastatingly good-looking young man her sister has thought fit to choose for her. She has never met him, but she has always put complete trust in her sister. Didi accompanies the bridal entourage back to the groom’s village, a protective presence for the nervous little bride. And Didi brings the glass of milk and the sweets to the bridal chamber on the wedding night. The next morning, when Devyani emerges, tired and bashful, she finds Didi already waiting on the veranda, and wonders why she looks strange. She weeps more bitterly than the little bride has ever known her to. Devyani is overwhelmed that her sister should feel so deeply for her.

  There were times when Sravan felt oppressed by his artistic scruples. His taste in language had grown impossibly refined. No phrase pleased him. Everything seemed excessive or inaccurate, rough-edged or improperly turned. He took too long to limber up each sentence, file its edges and buff it into shape. He suffered and fretted and envied young writers whose headlong prose came bounding out, indiscreet and awkward and scalding to the touch.

  Did Devyani never suspect?

  Did she never look closely at her sister and notice, behind the smiling gentleness, the spectre of vicious enmity? How is it possible to stay unaffected in the presence of someone who violently wishes one ill? But Devyani never sensed the waves of hostility crossing the narrow space between them.

  The big scene in which Devyani sees Mondira astride Mihir could not possibly be narrated in Devyani’s voice. Devyani had few words to begin with and was left with none at the end of her brief life. No, her big declaration was her death.

  She looked on them, her sister and her husband, her face charred with horror. Her eyes unblinking, pupils pulsing with shock. In the shaded summer afternoon, the cowshed was dark as a well.

  So Devyani grows great with both child and secret. She fears that she will confess her discovery; there are times when she is on the verge of telling someone. Suitably, she chooses to die in a well in an orchard.

  Sravan stopped to indulge in one of his mid-script reveries. Devyani was terrified that she would spell things out, so she died in full understanding, while he was anxious to spell out everything, afraid of dying without having said it all.
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  He wished Pragya wouldn’t barge in with his eleven o’clock cup of tea the way she always did, brisk and bursting with news. She usually apologized loudly for disturbing him and then stayed on to chatter inconsequentially, wasting a whole precious hour.

  ‘Uf, these Sundays! Should be banned, if you ask me. I’ve had an absolutely mad morning. MAD!’ She fanned her face. She put down two mugs of tea on blue mica coasters and pulled herself a chair. He sipped, wary. She waited for him to ask after her mad morning. He decided to vex her by not asking. She waited, then gave him the full account.

  ‘I gave that dratted kid a tight slap. You know what he and Haider have been doing? Putting a dead lizard on a sheet of paper and shoving it under Banwari Lal’s front door. Banwari Lal’s wife complained. She also told me of this other atrocious prank they’ve been playing, shouting, “Chamar! Chamar! Chamar!” behind her when she goes out shopping in the bazaar. I called them and gave them a shout in her presence and our Ashu a good, hard smack. He’s been fighting with me all morning after that. The only place where there’s a bit of peace and quiet is this study.’

  There won’t be much left of either if she stays long, thought Sravan wryly.

  ‘Have you noticed how clannish kids have become? It’s a recent thing. In school and on playgrounds they divide themselves into teams based on caste or religion. I don’t like it. It’s bad for them. Oh, I must share this funny thing with you. The other day Ashu and Haider were playing in the sitting room. I’ve warned them dozens of times not to play ball indoors, but do they listen? Something had to break—I knew it all along. So of all the ironic things to happen, Haider’s ball went and hit that little glass Shivlinga on the sideboard. Knocked it over and left it in a hundred pieces on the floor.

  ‘Later Ashu comes running to me and says, “Hey, Ma, something’s gone wrong with Haider. He’s hiding under the bed and won’t come out.” I thought it was a kids’ game and I went down on all fours and called, “Haider, come out.” And you’ll never believe this, Sravan, the kid began to shake. He was huddled up like a tiny dog under the bed, and when he saw me he started crying. I just couldn’t understand it. I called him out, coaxed, tempted, said okay, I’ll send for some Vadilal’s ice cream—why don’t you and Ashu bring home a brick? Then, the kid says—just hear this, Sravan—the kid says: “I didn’t know it would break, Auntie.” I asked Ashu, “What’s he mean?” Ashu shrugged and went on chomping at his gum. “What’s broken, Haider?” I asked. “Your god,” said the little mite. Hell, Sravan! The kid thought I’d bash him up or something. I persuaded him to come out, asked him what had given him the idea that the glass toy on the sideboard was my god, he said his ammee had told him the stone bull near our front door was our god and also the lady monster on our wall with her tongue out and also the long cylinder-like thing made of glass. I hugged him and told him they were only toys to decorate my rooms with, that he shouldn’t worry, that Ashu himself could have smashed one of them. Guess what he said? “But I’m a Muslim, Auntie.”