Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  Sitting at his desk in the adjoining room, with the door slightly ajar and every sound clearly carried by some accident of acoustics, Sravan found his attention ensnared. His father, he reflected wryly, always spoke of himself and his history in a stilted narrative mode as though he were reading passages from a future autobiography.

  ‘There used to be mangoes in season, piled roof-high in our house, mangoes from our groves in the village. My mother owned a huge, iron chopper blade hinged on to a dark wooden block. Like a hand-operated guillotine—I remember her putting a mango on the block and hacking it precisely in half. There used to be loads of jaggery and earthen pots of cool cane juice. Outside was a little mud-plastered hearth backed by a sooty wall. A narrow staircase led to a larger room above, which held a massive carved bed. A Moradabad brass bed. My grandfather’s. There were balconies on either side of the room, with ancient, rusted cast-iron grilles. Above was another unrailed terrace where we flew kites or watched swarms of homing pigeons. D’you know what old houses turn into? When father and mother are dead, what do old homesteads become? I’ve discovered that old houses take on parental identity. I don’t think you understand this.’

  ‘I do,’ said Buddhoo.

  ‘Now I look around the room in my dreams. And there, on a peg, hangs the same small coat. Ah, the sight of it! The weave of that faded black serge! I seem to have journeyed across all that time and distance … only for a heart-wounding glimpse of that coat.’

  The voice was now scaly with emotion. ‘Listen to this. I had a brother. Two years younger. He was three. A pale, snivelling child with a runny nose. Thin legs and a whine. I hated him with all the intensity of my five years. I fought him over food, over kites, over the pup in the yard, over my mother’s quilt … I thrashed him black and blue. He cowered from my blows, pale and whimpering, and when my father returned, he’d sidle up to him and say, hiccupping with tears: ‘Bhai Sahib thrashed me again. Take me with you tomorrow.’ My father’d grab me, cuff me, deal me a rain of blows, send me flying. So the next day I thrashed harder. He’d piss in his pants when I thrashed him good and hard. He was in mortal dread of me.’

  An uncertain, numb silence. What sounded like a sniff turned into a haaaakkkhhh and a resounding rattle and split.

  ‘Then there was a cholera epidemic. My brother looked so small, laid out like that, with joss sticks burning round him. I ran into the upstairs room, didn’t go to the ghat, didn’t come near the bamboo ladder they’d tied him on. I hid myself away with this coat, babbling into its folds. All night I buried my head in its lightless cave … Hell cannot be darker, son.’

  Another long pause.

  ‘My father is dead. My mother is dead. That boy, my brother, is done for as well. Much after his death, my third brother was born. Then my two sisters. None of them ever saw that boy. His name means nothing to them. There’s no photograph. He’s lost. Wiped out. But to me he has a name. It brings up a face. It’s like a face you see in water—it floats away from itself, comes together, floats off, joins up again and suddenly you see it whole. I can’t bring myself to speak his name. Ever. To a single soul.’

  A charged silence. Then Buddhoo spoke in a dilute sort of voice. ‘You have to get that coat off your back, I guess. Maybe you can just write it all off.’

  ‘Write it off? I wrote off that house years ago. Sold it. Signed it off. Like that. Court fee. Stamps. Signature. A dismal ritual. I sold it off and visited a temple in expiation to my grandfather who’d laid each brick.

  ‘I don’t mean that way,’ said Buddhoo when he managed to break in. ‘I mean write … of that experience. WRITE … like Ravan does.’

  ‘WRITE!’ He sniffed at the word like a dog at a scrap of garbage. ‘That kind of saala four-twenty thing! No thank you. We’ve had more than our share of writers in our family. It’s an evil karma.’ He munched on his anger. His next words were chilli-hot.

  ‘I’ll tell you about a couple of old-timers in my family. My maternal grandfather, poor fool, came jolting and juddering down from Mathura—must’ve been the late nineteenth century. He had prime land outside Mathura and custody of a temple or two. He came with his family, fleeing a riot, the Muslims on the rampage in one of those periodic bloodbaths. So along came my ancestor on the run, with chadar-draped wife and a gaggle of daughters, among which number my lady mother, and never a brass pot or a gold belt picked up in his haste! Well, he’d all but reached Etawah when the demented fool remembers something he’s left behind. He sends on his wife and daughters, all protesting, holding him back, appealing shrilly, but did he listen? Nahin, Sahib. So the fool goes scuttling back to pick up something so precious that he’s willing to risk his life for it. He goes all the way back to his burning village … And he never got away alive, hah! They hacked off his turbaned head. Probably his penis as well! Threw him to rot in the dust. And you’ll be wondering, my lad, what the fool went back to fetch?’

  A long pregnant pause.

  ‘What?’ breathed Buddhoo, timorous.

  ‘Not a pot of gold mohurs buried in an orchard, nor the family jewels in a hollow in the wall. No, not title deeds to groves or acres of land. No, huzoor. He went back to fetch—if you please— the manuscript of a wretched book he was writing! Ghazals, it is said. Ach! Ghazals! Dripping, drooling lyrics on springtime and monsoons and grief and women, hah! Women he had aplenty on his hands—he’d fathered eight daughters—and he came to grief right well with his folly.’

  ‘Bud did he manage to recover his book?’ asked Buddhoo weakly. ‘I mean, it’d be some consolation to think he …’

  ‘Book?’ The old man laughed in sharp-toothed malice. ‘Who cares for saala books when men are letting blood! And that was only one idiot in our family. A writer, mind you. The second idiot …’ He stopped for rhetoric effect.

  ‘Yes?’ prompted Buddhoo.

  ‘The second was an uncle on my father’s side. Went mad. Stark, staring mad. Said to be uncannily bright once, with a photographic memory. Went to mushairas and came back with every poem recorded in his mind. Went to kirtans and made up hymns on the spot. Complicated rhymes. He was a legend in his time. Invitations came from distant towns. There were no tape recorders then, so men learnt his stanzas by heart and taught them to their mates and went home and wrote them down. Well, this uncle wrote a Sanskrit book. It was whispered that he took dictation from some yaksha or gandharva. He used to be seized by paroxysms when his head was engorged with lyric and melody and he’d be singing away like crazy. Hours and hours. What came of it, eh? Fellow completed his Sanskrit book and went barmy! The gandharva’s parting gift, see? Too much truth and beauty aren’t good for the human brain, see?’ He took a razor swipe with his wickedly joyous voice.

  ‘And the third writer in my family …’ he resumed with a grandiloquent flourish.

  ‘Ravan?’ anticipated Buddhoo.

  There was an uneasy break in the flow. When the old man spoke again it was in gruff, injured tones. ‘You’re wrong, Prabuddha beta. The third writer in my family—though few people know it now—was myself.’

  ‘You!’ cried Buddhoo.

  ‘Yes,’ admitted the dusty voice, as though it were unearthing an old, shameful misdeed. Sravan knew what was coming. His father always spoke about his erstwhile writing first with fake condemnation, then in solemn and vengeful tones, as though by not allowing it to see the light of print he was denying the world a treat as a penance for its sins. When Sravan had dedicated his first novel to his father, there’d been a peculiar scene at home. I’ve dedicated it to you, Babuji. Why? Silence. Sravan had waited for what he’d craved all his days, a word of approval. But his father, lips pursed, had turned the pages with a look of long-suffering scorn on his face, then said acidly—Well, I suppose I have to be grateful for the honour, thank you very much, I am much obliged to you. Every word a whiplash. With his first royalties he’d bought his father a pair of leather slippers. Not to be embarrassed into approval, his father had said—What an abnormal colour. Coul
dn’t you get me something in black? The black ones were very expensive—the sari for Ma cost quite a bit—I didn’t get all that much. Pat came the observation with a thorny laugh—I’m sure I earned more from my honest desk job than you’ll ever do as a writer then, Badshah-salamat! Sravan had been stung. Hurt. Inveigled into losing his temper. He’d begun shouting. His father, triumphant, had shrugged and said—Why are you shouting? Who asked you to give me anything? Did I ask you? I’m doing very well for myself, thank you. Doing very well for himself, thank you, and lashing out with fangs bared and nostrils flaring at all those others who presumed to write. Once, when he was small, Sravan’s mother had called him aside. From the interiors of her bodice, where she kept her coin purse, she had fished out a folded sheet of paper. It was moist and had a faintly sour whiff of sweat. She had unfolded it with an expression of bashful pride as though she was revealing a love note or an advance draft of her last will and testament and leaving incalculable riches to him. She had held it out to him. It was a naïve, stumbling poem. He had tried to pull her leg and chant it aloud but she snatched it back and stuffed it into her bosom, hissing, “Chup! Your father will hear.” And considering how often his father loudly pronounced his mother a damned fool, a blathering idiot, a dumb poop, he could understand her anxiety to keep her little scribbles a secret. Her only guilty extramarital flings, poor thing, all lost. Destroyed like secret love notes. Sravan wondered if his own writing was an act of lifelong vengeance on her behalf. It was that—and also its pathetic opposite, a desperate, lifelong campaign for his father’s approval. A way of prising open that closed, mean heart.

  ‘I’m not saying I’m great, but …’ The old man brought out an old refrain. ‘I’m not saying I’m great, but … This is how it all came about. I used to do some voluntary teaching and accounting work in a few local charity schools. That’s when I began drafting letters for people. I’m not making any tall claims for myself but so effective was my writing style that I thought of writing a book. You could say I was talked into this fool enterprise by some of my regulars. Personally I wouldn’t ever have contemplated the idea. Saala waste of time! No pursuit for a man of sense. But you know how it goes—start a job and you’ve got to carry it through. I worked at it for three years. Fitfully. Tough work. Not the writing itself—that’s fool’s stuff—but the making time for it. Each time I’d start, something’d crop up. Get me some green chillis from the bazaar, eh-ji, the wife’d call out. Work out this square root for me, Babuji, the son would whimper. Can you make time for a letter to the Pension Section of the AG’s Office, Madanlalji? A neighbour would descend. A bit of tax calculation for the Principal sahib, Madanlalji, a phone call for you—from the house next door. Sometimes I’d just taken off and was doing just fine, spinning the sentences along like a Nobel Laureate with an oiled and battery-operated pen, when along comes the kid and pleads—Talk to me. Tell me a story.

  ‘So the wretched thing took three years to write and I was fed up to the teeth with it, I can tell you. Then came the business of finding a publisher—a most unlovely job. It came bouncing back to me once, twice, thrice, yes, it came back to me twenty times in all, janab!’

  ‘Shame,’ muttered Buddhoo politely.

  ‘These callow new writers—like my nawab sahib in the next room—what do they know of struggle and setback? I tell you, setback hones your spirit if the struggle is at all worthwhile. In my case it wasn’t. I got the politest of apologies from publishers. All the virtues of my book were listed and applauded. My wit complimented. My scholarship extolled. My humanity commended. My wisdom exalted. The haramzadas couldn’t say enough! Still, they regretted they couldn’t fit it into their slots. Agh! They could stuff it up their slots for all I cared! I tried and tried—it became an obsession. By the twentieth time I’d decided—just one more try and never again. So I cycled off to the GPO with my bulky manuscript on the carrier. It was the end of the month and I was flat broke. Not a fake cowrie for the milkman or the vegetable vendors—living on credit and goodwill till salary day—just enough wangled out of the wife’s emergency kitty for the postage. Then? What d’you think happened?

  ‘I’d just reached the side gate of the GPO and was lifting my bike over the gate when who should come along but my friend Badrinath Gupta. What’s up? I say. And he tells me—Shivcharan Shukla’s daughter’s dead. Electric shock, poor girl. Come along with me right away. D’you have any cash on you? Good—it’s needed desperately. You know what a boozer he is—his wife’s fainted from the horror of it—no money for the funeral—the bastard’s sold all her jewellery down to her last kangan. Okay, I considered the situation. Here I was, sending my useless book off for the twenty-first time, taking my last shot at the Nobel Laureate racket, and here was this saala turning up at the gate of the GPO itself with an appeal that couldn’t be ignored. Okay, I’m not saying I’m great, but one chance less or more at this blasted business isn’t going to make much difference, I argue. Here I am sending off a book and there’s that poor devil who hasn’t got the stuff to send off his daughter to the ghat! And there’s this thing you’ll have to grant me—I’ve always been the first to arrive at a house where there’s been a death. The first to help with the funeral shopping, the preparation of the body, the wood-buying at the ghat, the food-sending, the telegram-despatching, the obituary-drafting, the shraadha-arranging. If anybody tries to thank me, I say—It’s a principle with me. Absent yourself from tilaks and thread ceremonies and birthdays and marriages, but never, never neglect a house of mourning. I know of a poor widow who arranged a massive thirteenth-day feast for the peace of her dead husband and nobody, nobody had the decency to turn up. There’re folks that won’t eat in a house of mourning, as if death’s a viral infection. But I’m glad to say I’m not one of those. For me funerals and obsequial feasts command compulsory attendance—else no one’ll come to yours.’

  ‘Sound reasoning,’ smirked Buddhoo.

  ‘Now, was there any question of my refusing? Could I stand there and say to Badrinath Gupta—Forgive me, Guptaji, I’ve an important job to complete, I’ve got to send my trashy novel to the twenty-first publisher so that he can stuff it up his arse and write me a love note afterwards saying what a joy that was? The sisterfucker novel would have to be shelved, that’s all there was to it. That’s how the twenty-first attempt was foiled by fate—what was that thing we recited—the moving finger writes and having writ, flushes it all down with the shit!’

  ‘Haw, haw haw!’ Buddhoo guffawed.

  ‘I then understood too clearly that this writing nonsense wasn’t for me. It wasn’t what I was destined to do in life. Destiny had other important things for me. There’d been divine interference working all the way, retarding me. Because I was doing the wrong thing. Because I was going against destiny’s current. I’d successfully learnt to read Fate’s blueprint—my success had come of age! Haaaakkkhhh!’

  ‘Wah!’ cried Buddhoo in admiration.

  ‘So what did I do, ask me? I had a way with words, didn’t I tell you first thing? So I went back to drafting letters for people. What’s the use of writing massive tomes on people who’ve never existed? Wretched things happening in your miserable little head, huh? Who’s interested? You should see the letters I wrote. To governors of states, appealing for redressal of grave wrongs. To directors of education requesting transfers of poor teachers so that the poor blighters could go eat decent dal-roti with their families instead of rotting out their innards eating crap at the Hira-Moti Vaishnav Bhojnalay! To ministers, joint secretaries, even to the president of India once. I knew how to whittle away at each sentence. How to give a line the proper ring. How to tease a man’s special bogey. How to graze a guilty conscience. I say with pride, Prabuddha beta, that every one of my letters gained its object. So many people actually helped! Each one of my petitions did more in its way than all your Pulitzers and Bookers and my nawab sahib’s precious awards. I am a man content.’ He waited. There was more. Sravan grinned to himself, wonderi
ng if Buddhoo imagined the tirade had wound to a close.

  ‘Consider your books of literature,’ his father resumed. ‘What’ve they actually done to help the world, kyon? You sit in your armchair, you read, you’re stirred by greatness, suffering, emotion, whathaveyou, your slumped conscience like a long fallen dick gets tantalized. And, huzoor, you get a tiny spiritual shiver, a saala moral erection. You feel like doing good and fucking evil but d’you actually do a thing? Never. But my petitions were the real thing. The genuine article. They changed things … for real folk. And it took me twenty-one failures to achieve this.’

  ‘Still, there’s that little matter of the coat,’ said Buddhoo. ‘And if you were to consider writing about it, I mean now that the petition days are nicely over and you have all the time in the world and yours truly to take dictation …’

  ‘Now?’ snorted the old man.

  ‘Why not now?’ persisted Buddhoo.

  ‘I’m not going to last,’ huffed the old man.

  ‘Oh, come on. You’ll live long enough.’

  ‘No.’ The old man sulked.

  ‘Yes,’ pursued Buddhoo.

  This was going too far, but how was the fool to know you don’t push Babuji beyond his patience? An explosion was brewing in the next room. Sravan enjoyed the prospect of his father ticking off his fool of a friend. But to his surprise, his father’s voice sank to a low musing. ‘How can I make you understand? Who should I write for now? Madhuri’s dead. Balwant is dead. Raghupati, Dr Jacobs, Vishveshwar, Jagdish Prasad, Brahmadev Pundit, Moinuddin. All gone. I could count them on my ten fingers. When I wrote it was for them—people who understood the things I had done. One always writes for a handful of people. Why should I write for strangers, han? Smart-arsed bastards who don’t believe or respect what we of my time believed or respected. They aren’t worth the strain; buss!’

  Sravan remembered old Moinuddin, the ophthalmologist. As a shortsighted kid, he’d shrieked with fright seeing Moinuddin’s enlarged Paleolithic eye draw menacingly towards him in the lens of the slit lamp in an eerie dark room. His first spectacles. And his delighted cry when he put them on—Ma, do you really see such a lot? Then Moinuddin had patted his head, his trim, combed beard fragrantly close to his nose, and said—May these eyes always know how to see clearly. Moinuddin was twenty years dead now, and as for seeing clearly, it wasn’t myopia that made it increasingly difficult. Sitting at his desk in the next room, Sravan felt a nebulous fear surround him. The threat of a future negation.