Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  The silence thickened around them like a fog. The clock ticked. A runnel of terror cut across Sravan’s thoughts. He didn’t know why he wanted to pry into his father’s sleep, what he hoped to tease out. Some guarded secret of that mean mind. Some redeeming vulnerability. A trace of mutuality. He was a timid thief. Hell, he thought, one day I’ll probably look like that. Face scraped of flesh into a fretful mask. Scrawny cheeks sucked in, skin worn thin. Tangled veins trapped in a web beneath the sheer membrane. And that piqued look of insatiable discontent—a child that’s howled itself to sleep. I won’t be as pitiable as that!—he swore. I must write. But he also knew what became of the written word.

  He remembered the unaddressed sheet of paper he had found in his mother’s trunk long after her death—the trunk in which she kept her wedding saris, her bits and pieces of jewellery, her parents’ letters, her small leather wallet of saved pocket money … The sheet was a detailed catalogue of every wrong and injury. It wasn’t a diary, more of an inventory, a small testament to suffering. She too had needed words to ensure that her suffering wasn’t lost. And when he had chanced upon it, he’d been relieved—it had muted his own guilt.

  At the age of eleven he’d begun to resent his mother’s disappearances behind the closed doors of her room, sometimes with his father and sometimes alone. He’d been vindictive—had rummaged in her cupboard and found a notebook of small poems. He’d carried it out, like the corpse of a deadly enemy, and flung it into the well in the yard. He still remembered this vividly. The fragment of his face telescoped in the sleek lens of the water. Sparks of light slithering along the surface. The little notebook had been sucked into the well’s cold, black maw. And all his life he’d spent expiating, recovering those drowned words. She’d had nothing to fall back on except those. Discovering their loss, she’d flown about the house, her grieving face aflame, searching. Her doors were seldom bolted on the family again. And Pragya had done the same to him. He marvelled at the neatness of it.

  The mind clacks away. Real stories and imagined ones are equal, see? There isn’t a life, only a narrative. Goblins in the head. To be swept away, if one only knew how. Hard to exorcise a father’s voice.

  That voice—he knew each note in its scale, each octave of wrath, each tone and semitone of guile and strategy. Each juicy squeeze of malice on the syllables. Nawab Sahib is sleeping. Ah, lucky are they that can sleep in sloth. Sahib Bahadur is too busy writing—too busy for mean jobs. Do spare this garden your attentions, Nawab Sahib, and do something worthwhile with your time. By law, it’s my house, Sahib Bahadur, not yours.

  Those great knotted, knobbly hands. And the frozen shoulder Sravan had had to massage every evening for three months. Almost as soon as it was cured, the arm had dealt him a violent blow.

  The eve of his Class Ten exam—summoned imperiously from his room, sent on a complicated errand. The plight to which that voice could reduce him by a single word, a look or a jibe. Wave on wave of bitter mortification, till, exhausted, he would fall asleep. Sometimes the voice chased him far into the interiors of sleep, calling him by name. Making him explode awake, strangled by his haste to rush. Still, after thirty years of conflict, so much residual poison.

  Not just goblin voices in the head but impish optics in the archives of memory. His father at forty-five, in filthy pyjamas and a singlet. Scratching his armpits, planted on a divan in their small sitting room. Please, Babuji, my friends are coming. Well, what if they are? We’d like to sit here. Who stops you, laat sahib? If you would … What? Ordered out of my own sitting room? Are they coming to mark my examination scripts, eh? If you’d change your clothes … Listen here, laat sahib, I’ve every right to be as I wish and by law it’s my house to live in as I please and no saala English-chewing lads can order the pants on to my backside if I settle against it. Sravan had kept his friends chatting at the gate for two hours.

  Afterwards he’d rushed off to take part in a friendly four-letter-word–slinging contest between two hostels. It hadn’t vented his rage. When he returned he found the house spick and span. His mother had cleaned it till it shone—that was her way of working off her rage. In time, every surface in the house gleamed. The neighbours exclaimed over its artistic care. His father finally gave his mother the attack that killed her. After stormy, head-bashing drama in which the old brute pounded his head with both fists, she’d fled into the bathroom. Her shits!—his father had always scoffed when she’d taken shelter there. When she emerged, she’d gone vague. Her eyes didn’t move together. She went limp on the floor. When she died it was vengeance, not grief, that claimed Sravan. He sat for hours with his head on his desk, struggling with high-voltage bolts of rage that erupted in his head, tore down his throat. There was a sore, inflamed spot within him. His teeth gritted on muttered words. A muscle in his throat strained to its ultimate tearing screech until, unable to contain its ache, it pelted out its rage in a splurge of fierce, shamed tears. Another spasm seized him, and another, and another. Sometime in the small hours his hands, clawing the sides of his forearms, went limp and he lifted his head to find his notepad splattered.

  And he remembered his mother’s anxiety just after her operation. She was worried about the anaesthesia. Did I talk?—she kept asking. What did I say in my swoon? Did anyone hear me? He’d felt like telling her—Go on. Abuse all you like. It’ll do your worn old heart a world of good. More than this bypass surgery. You can’t surgically remove forty years. But he’d only reassured her—The nurses are lying, Ma. You were silent as the grave.

  His father had deprived her of every moment of her spare time. All her life. She had only to sit down, savouring a quiet moment, and he sprang some fresh job on her. He was the poor, suffering patient, the perennial convalescent. Only by dying did she get away, bypass him in her own way. The old man created a weird physiology of his own, divorced from any known medical science. Days started with lengthy narrations—everyone compulsorily entertained with (a) an account of the previous night’s dream, (b) possible meaning of the dream, (c) the recent misbehaviour of his kidney, heart, stomach and liver, (d) possible meaning of this misbehaviour. At the smallest sign of disbelief, the old man turned peevish, with the authority of one who had all the impunity of tragedy on his side. He spoke of each sickness with triumph. Was terrified at each symptom of recovery, relieved at each portent of illness. As if he confronted the world with a decrepit gloat—you can’t hope to win against me. I shall extort your concern by the sheer force of my suffering. Even his self-engrossed silence was shrill with resentful charges.

  Sravan forced himself to return to his study, direct his mind to the speech he had to draft.

  I wrote because it fulfils a power motive, he admitted. But you didn’t have to say that in a speech. He scribbled a few more trite lines. This is how the author reaches his public. The utility of these awards is publicity. They help to direct public choice, instruct the public in discernment of quality. Then abruptly he came face-to-face with an unexpected truth: he’d come up against the limits of his own personality. He had either to grow beyond them or stop what he was doing for good. And growth of this kind wasn’t a simple vegetative thing. It wasn’t to be simulated or chosen or commanded. It was to be purchased through error, adversity. He wondered what price he’d be called upon to pay, whether the terms of the deal would be worthwhile. He strolled unconsciously back to his father’s sickroom. Caught himself toying with a guilty death fantasy. Doubtful if the two of us will ever fight to a finish; one of these days he’ll die, and have the advantage of moral victory. Maybe it’ll be a relief—but I’ll probably never be free. He’ll go on haunting me, all the burden of self-reproach my inheritance. Will I suffer some kind of creative inertia—seeing that his disturbing presence was the provocation I worked against—to spell myself out? Maybe his death shall enforce a new self-definition.

  Sravan caught himself in the middle of his cold calculations and was shocked. And quite suddenly, as if jarred by the vibrations of destructive
thoughts, the old man awoke. For a while his eyes didn’t focus. They rested on Sravan, unblinking. Impenetrable. Then they began burning with their old animosity.

  ‘It’s you, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’re you doing here?’

  The blood rushed to Sravan’s face, drained away in recoil. He shrugged.

  ‘Any problem?’

  The old man lay seething in his bed and said nothing. Sravan, striding away, became sensible of the air, charged with captive rage. The nerves in his jangling head twanged like high-tension wires.

  There was just one antechamber of self to seek asylum in—the empty page. That’s where he could lock himself in and sit, snowbound in an enclosed white space, rigorous lest any phrase or thought betray him, leaving no breach in the fortress wall. A world he fathered and dictated. Controlled, altered, rearranged.

  He wrote—As for accountability, I’ve felt answerable only to one thing: the page. To rise above awards poses a major challenge to the artist. Some precious inwardness is always threatened. But I’ve tried to preserve the independence of my concerns and the privacy of my experience in defiance of every glaring exposure, mindful that it might destabilize my future work …

  He stopped. Something had happened. A sound. A stir. It happened again. A feeble moan, then a quavering cry for help. It wasn’t his old delusion—this was real. He sprang to his feet. Rushed to the door. Into the corridor. Was stopped by an intangible barrier. With his father awake, the consistency of the air between the two rooms changed. A stubborn reluctance had to be conquered. The old man’s voice seemed to be coming from the loo.

  ‘Arré bhai, Prabuddha! Kaun hai? Koi hai? Arré Pragya! Ashu? Rina-beti? Arré bhai, Shoma? Koi hai?’

  With a pang Sravan noticed that his own name was missing.

  The old man sat on the pot. Locked, knobbly knees, naked shanks, bamboo-pale thighs. Between them, like old clothes on a peg, his withered, shrivelled penis lapsed over the crumpled bag of his balls. He couldn’t rise to his feet. He stretched out an imploring, hand, then drew back on seeing Sravan. Senile indignation suffused his mottled face.

  He continued quavering in his high-strung voice. ‘Arre bhai, is everyone dead?’ Slighted, Sravan moved to help him, but there was agitation enough in the old hand to shrug him off. A second later Buddhoo came bounding in, followed by Pragya. Together they heaved the old man to his feet, his knees cracking noisily, and Shoma fetched the walker.

  ‘I told you never to move around without the walker!’ scolded Pragya. ‘Suppose you fell and fractured a hip? You might have called us!’

  ‘A curse upon all you swine-born saalas!’ the old man grumbled. ‘To think I shouted and shouted and every haramzada in the house had turned deaf!’

  Even the old man’s unashamed nakedness was like an autocratic assumption of senile privilege.

  ‘But was no one around?’ asked Buddhoo, lifting the fretful old man on to the bed while Pragya dried his feet with a towel and wrapped a clean lungi round his waist.

  ‘Not one haramzada beggar here!’ Sravan turned grimly and strode back to the study.

  And he found the right tone most amazingly. Those just-right words for a letter. No preamble, just—There’s a Mukteshwar Barat film on at the Odeon. Saturday. You might be interested. Haven’t seen you in a while. Ah, that was right. Staccato, telegraphic, sufficient. But there was still that unfinished speech. That’s when he began to grasp why he stole into his sleeping father’s room in times of retarded expression. It was the beleaguered feeling he sought, the anger. His natural element? No, he didn’t enjoy it. More than anything, he wanted to rid himself of those goblins. Still, they fuelled his writing—creativity was conditional, for God’s sake. I need my rage, he thought. Every moment of shored-up pain and the choice is suddenly stark before me: either peace or art, never both, mind, one or the other, no simple happiness for me. Or those around me, he realized with a shock. Can it be that I need to make them suffer, make myself suffer, to tune my mind to its accustomed pitch for speech?

  12

  No simple happiness for me, he thought. Doesn’t agree with the constitution of my creativity. Now I understand why my best books emerged when my head was jammed with stress. Stretched to snapping under emotional duress. A humming bowstring. And when I was content, what came? Limp, non-functional pieces.

  I understand why I scrubbed away at each syllable, my dead mother and I, straining from each an invoked, awaited glow. Had that killjoy, my father, not hounded us to it, nothing would have gleamed in my house, no sword would have flashed, no words ignited.

  Which only makes Buddhoo’s stupid stories more intriguing. An entirely different element at work there.

  Let me watch the way my mind perversely prompts my relationships to flounder, until they turn into what? Potential reserves of unrest. And if I quit this writing, I might actually turn into a slack, peaceable being, free from this taxing pressure, this aching traction, which may well be, by default, happiness.

  But, seriously, let me be clear about what I’ve opted for. Do I want that kind of happiness? If I discuss this thing with Buddhoo, he’ll probably fish out of the cold storage of his undergraduate memory some perverted misquote like ‘I’d rather be a pig satisfied than Socrates dissatisfied!’ And tell me his pet tale of the Hindicomprehension exam in which he was required to supply a title for the précis about Socrates drinking the hemlock and his thoughtful appellation for the piece, founded on sound and considered examination, was Bewaqoof Sukrat—Stupid Socrates.

  Still, simple exuberance attracts me. Buddhoo’s kind. Naïve, unsavvy. What I’m going to try doing is seriously study the stupid. Analysis and Systematic Study of Spontaneous Stories! Sounded like one of Buddhoo’s projects—ASSSS! A humbling crash course in narrative.

  Malini came, but not to the Odeon. She met him at a small café next door, one of their earlier joints. She came in carrying an issue of The Script. She pulled a chair and placed her bag and the magazine before her. Her eyes were jittery, unsettled.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Where’d you pick that up?’

  ‘At a newsstand, naturally. I wanted an autograph of the celebrity. A souvenir.’

  Uptight, he thought. He essayed a jest: ‘The lovers’ gallery, right?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ she answered. ‘Historic documentary evidence of my place in literature.’ She had a braided, multi-skeined voice. In anger it acquired a brassy clang.

  ‘If you keep looking at me like that, with the cutlery so easily within reach, it might turn into a souvenir of the dead.’

  She flipped the magazine open. Oh hell, a story of his! Translated. He was suddenly wary. There was something awkward coming.

  She jabbed at the page. ‘Autograph,’ she insisted, threatening.

  ‘Sure. Shall I sign in blood and chilli sauce?’

  ‘Not here. Here.’ She pointed to a paragraph. A few words caught his eye. In a flash he fathomed the mystery, and groaned inwardly. She saw him glance at the words. Her eyes narrowed to dark slits.

  ‘Shall we have a little reading? Or, better, shall I read one of his choice passages to the maestro?’

  She stood the magazine aslant against her leather bag and read:

  I’m a cultured sort of person. I believe in looking after myself. And my home is my first priority. When I go visiting, I take in everything—the dust, the remains of cobwebs, the electric switches left grimy. I lift the carpet with my foot to see how much dust lies underneath. I examine cups and saucers closely, flowerpots left unpainted, dirt stains behind doors. I notice the rows of medicine bottles and jars, the torn silver foil of pill covers, the sticky outline of cough syrup on the tabletop. Yes, the soiled pillowcases, crumpled sheets. Her unwashed grey hair, telltale beneath the faded dye, parched hands. I say to her—You mustn’t worry. If it’s diagnosed early enough, it’s curable. Everyone knows that. And yours is only in the second stage. But why haven’t you put cold cream on your hands? They’r
e looking so coarse. And your salwar isn’t going with your kurta—what made you wear it?

  When she was mad, she snapped off the ends of her sentences, as a seamstress might bite off the last bit of thread.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  ‘You’re wrong—that’s not you.’

  ‘It is. You know that. So do I. Shall I tell you what I think? I think it’s cheap to use your friends. To exploit everyone, anyone, anything for your rotten writing! You’re faithful to nothing! Nobody! Nothing’s personal. Nothing’s precious. You’re watching everyone like a hawk! How can one ever relax with you?’

  She sprang to her feet. ‘No, that film doesn’t interest me.’ She slapped the magazine down in front of him. Here, you can keep this! And by the way, it might interest you to know that I no longer need your patronizing promises. I’ve found a publisher.’

  ‘That explains your present mood.’

  She made her rebuttal a desperate retaliation. ‘You’ve kept me waiting. I should never have believed any of your precious assurances.’

  ‘Writing a novel isn’t like having a quickie.’ He spoke with deliberate offence in his tone. ‘Besides, I give my support only to what I consider standard.’

  He could see that this stung her. ‘And who’s the new broker that’s agreed to go pimping?’

  She was trembling with fury. She looked ready to hit him. But she controlled herself. Spoke with effort. ‘That isn’t your business any more.’

  His curiosity had got the better of his pretence at defiant apathy. ‘And how, if I may ask, did you solicit him?’

  Another two minutes of this and there’d be a disgusting scene. He half wished to avoid it and simultaneously itched to inflame it. Decided not to risk another affront.

  ‘At Ranjana’s—if you want to know.’

  ‘You went over without telling me?’

  ‘Do I understand that I have to seek your permission? I rang her up and asked for a copy of her poem. She invited me over. I told her of my book. She put me through to someone.’ She clamped up, viciously enjoying his perturbation. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Sravan, but I can’t discuss it until the deal’s through. And after today …’ Her voice trailed off. She rose abruptly, collected her bag and the magazine and stalked out with the air of someone who couldn’t trust herself to remain composed any longer, her high heels clicking imperiously on the marble floor.