Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  As usual, a scrap like that stimulated him. He went home and settled down to a nice spell of writing. His head unlocked, sped. He wrote late into the night.

  A man given to cleaning things thoroughly—the yard, the old bedstead, the chest of drawers, the cook-house. Until his house is mirror-bright in its order and perfection. If there are buckets to be lined up, he lines them up along the bath-house wall with mathematical precision. If clothes hang upon the clothesline behind the house, he doesn’t rest till he has arranged them in order of size, aligning corner to corner and sleeve to sleeve. He scrubs the old china cupboard, polishes the panes. Doors, tins of talcum and bottles of hair oil on the chest of drawers. Brass and silver dishes, the headboards and footboards of the canopied four-poster bed. Not a bedspread creased, not a chair out of position. People laugh at him. Is this a fitting occupation for the son of a landed gentleman?—they snicker. The second son of one of the first families in the pargana? The ferocity of Amalendu’s cleaning increases as his marriage worsens. Until his little fling with the maid distracts him. She is fourteen years old. One day, as she sweeps the floor, he lifts her up and sets her on his knee, saying: Ah, you’re as a little daughter to me, my child. She giggles, ticklish, as he presses her small breasts beneath the thin cotton of her dress, as he feels her up beneath her torn faded skirt, murmuring: You are my child. My own little girl!

  Amalendu never achieves release from the strangling attraction–repulsion he feels for his wife. He soon loses interest in the little servant girl. It is only that devastating virago, his wife, Mondira, whom he desires—and with a murderous infatuation that slays her in his fantasies many times a day. On to the scene with Mihir.

  Amalendu cannot reckon up the expenses as he sits brooding beside the pond, absorbed in self-debate. A crucial financial dilemma. If he spends his savings on getting his wife treated, and if she happens to die, it will be a total loss for him. His savings are all he has. Conversely, if he invests in her recovery, will that improve things between them? That’s when Mihir turns up, riding his bike down the road that curves like a sickle. One look at his wife’s sister and Mihir is appalled. Do you want her to die?—he shouts in rage. And Amalendu wags his large, slow head and says—It will cost money, the hospital, the medicines, brother-in-law. Mihir’s lip curls in derision. Then calculate the outlay, big-brother-in-law. The doctor, the medicines, the hospital, the bus fare. And if she dies?—asks Amalendu in a fascinated whisper. Then, don’t forget the cost of the wood for the fire, the shroud, the gifts for the priest. His voice has softened to a low, menacing snarl. Consider both, big brother. Maybe the hospital shall prove cheap for you. Not waiting for Amalendu’s answer, he turns and strides back into Mondira’s room. She lies, wan and listless. Her eyes snatch at Mihir’s bronzed face, flushed with princely rage. Come on, Baudi, he announces. You shall go to the Panduba Civil Hospital. Damn your skinflint husband, I say! It is then that he grows conscious of her strange, searing eyes upon his face …

  And so one thing leads to another, and a month later they come to toy with one another in the cowshed. To know her, to grow bolder, to steal into her courtyard at night, to ease open the door of the cowshed in the small hours. There is nothing he regrets, nothing he wouldn’t lie about ten times over. To Devyani, who never dreams; to Amalendu, whom he despises. He lives in a frenzy of arousal every hour of the day. Ah, Mondira! His tongue traces the salt taste of her again against his teeth. The bounce of her breasts redolent with some intense fleshly juice, and their tightly pliant persistence against his palms. He remembers the delicate dimple at the side of her buttock, the petals of her dainty vulva. This was obsession—to remember a woman and find his tongue irresistibly exploring her remembered hollows, to find his nerves preserving the texture of her physical impress, his skin miming her touch, his nostrils full of the musk of her armpits. To find his mind returning in secret relish to the theme of her, appeasing itself with thoughts of her. To turn over in his mind some whispered quip of hers, and, smiling to himself, imagine what he might have answered but didn’t. To put away his own thoughts because her voice keeps breaking in …

  Sravan stopped writing. Rose from his desk and lit a cigarette before the open window overlooking the park. He found himself quietened with a vast, achieved blessedness. Buoyed up in a soft elation. As though he’d vented an unrealized lust of his own upon the page. As though he’d actually written that letter to Malini (and to all the others before her). So much that he wanted to tell others was in his books—oblique, no more his own. Surrendered to the pages that dumbly received the letters he never wrote, the confessions he was too proud to make, the apologies he was ashamed to utter. He shook them off his life, renouncing his claim, consigning them to literature’s common reserve for anyone who cared to pick them up.

  He returned to his chair and sat, thinking. The mellow contralto of Malini’s voice declaring—My liberation is tempered with deliberation, Sravan. Or—When I buy shoes, they’ve got to be car-specific, brake-sensitive, clutch-friendly and stride-effective. Or—While my husband’s drawing up the balance sheets in his office, I’m drawing up the balance sheets of my life. Or—at my age I’ve crow’s feet, laugh lines, a philosopher’s frown and five strands of grey eminence. And I’m enjoying it all. Why?—he’d asked. It’s the receipt life’s given me—for all the years I’ve invested—this positive feeling about myself. Her voice, starting in a slow drip and gathering force until the words fall in a rich downpour. Her laughter, built of gleaming soap bubbles …

  He’d never courted her with words. He’d sent her, soon after they first met, a card he’d personally designed and photographed. An open book of erotic verse, with the print faintly legible. A rose against the edge and a feathered stylus. It’d caught her fancy. In those days they hadn’t quarrelled over trifles.

  He looked at his watch. Almost one a.m. He heard low voices in the sickroom next door. Movements. The light was switched on. In the stillness of the night the words carried easily. His father’s apologetic mutter—I’m very sorry about this, beta, I can’t hold it back. The tinny knock of the bedpan in the bathroom and a tap running. Buddhoo’s voice—No problem. His father’s—That’s the fourth time tonight. I’m keeping you from your sleep. And Buddhoo—Arré, Babuji, not to worry. I sleep and dream serially. You’re like the ad in the middle of the episode. No problem. He mimicked the Japanese voice, laughed. The bedpan clanged against the bathroom floor again. The tap stopped running. The lights went out. A long silence tucked itself about the house.

  13

  Pragya, like Sravan’s mother, wrote poetry. For her own satisfaction, as she laughingly claimed. Your writing’s part of your public existence, she’d quip, but mine is strictly private. In Buddhoo she seemed to have found a sympathetic audience and, wonder of wonders, was now reading aloud. Some of the words wafted over to the study. This one appeared to be written in ghazal form. Urdu-Hindi, which Sravan contemptuously dismissed as a mongrel mode.

  Pragya’s perennial subject—love:

  Of the black-haired one with the silken eyes

  Give me the truth, beloved.

  I would not be gulled, give me no lies,

  The truth want I.

  I could not bear a lie.

  She paused for appreciation, which Buddhoo noisily provided.

  Of the white-cheeked one with the eyes of fire,

  Tell me no truth, its lies I desire.

  No, give me but lies, beguiling and fair,

  Give me no truth,

  Just lies that may soothe,

  Lies need I, the truth I cannot bear.

  ‘Great!’ cried Buddhoo. ‘But is this a single poem? Two opposite ideas?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Pragya. ‘They’re two sides of one feeling, I guess.’

  Pragya no longer showed Sravan what she wrote. Sometimes, tucked into a bunch of laundry or shopping lists, he came upon a strange paragraph. A sketchy diagram of her mood in a clutch of garbled lines. Something like:


  1 double bedcover

  3 towels

  6 pillowcases

  2 nighties

  And then:

  1 Vim

  1 kitchen scrubber

  1 Surf Excel

  1 Nescafe – 100 gms

  Pears Face Wash

  1 carton Nutrinuggets

  4 packets chow

  1 Carefree

  Chericof cough syrup

  2 kgs, Rajma

  And quite suddenly, out of the blue:

  Oh, give me such love for a day, beloved,

  That years to come my days be filled.

  No, give me no love if it’s but for a day

  If the rest of my days bereft I shall stay.

  A typical Pragya verse, that. Ambiguity, contradiction, neither this nor that, both or none, and everything cancelled out to its present nullity. Maybe we’ve cancelled one another out by now, he thought, and we stay together because it’s too much of an effort to actually break away and rebuild elsewhere. Especially without knowing whether the other options won’t be just as barren, or worse than the present one. Ha, the enduring Indian marriage, that muchtouted institution. This boredom with Pragya may well be boredom with myself.

  Once, when he was away on a research trip to Shimla she sent him by post a long thread of silver hair.

  My first grey hair, she wrote. May I dedicate it to you?

  She played a lot of psychological games, this Pragya. Poetic and desperate gestures, reminding him continually of her claim on him. Just after their wedding, when she had come home to his parents’ house and relatives sat them down to play the ceremonial game of ‘hunt the silver rupee’ in the large brass platter of water, Pragya refused to win. She let him grab the silver rupee each time, and told him later—See, I’ve chosen to lose each game to you. It left him a little bit ashamed of having grabbed the coin without noticing her gesture. Oh, she knew how to weigh down a man with shame. Now they played complicated, hurtful games all the time, Pragya often winning hands down.

  Her poignant, stinging letters. Copious communications in a steady barrage. I congratulate you, Sravan. You’ve found love many times in life. But I lost it the only time I found it. He found this sort of thing immensely irritating, particularly that favourite word—love! Overworked to death in her head. Some years back he’d written serious replies, poetry for poetry, tragedy for tragedy. Two could play that game. Things like: You’re the lucky one, Pragya. You were privileged to experience life and love. I only got to write about them. But he had no time for that sort of correspondence now. He only felt like shouting—Come off it. Climb down, and none of your heroics!

  He shrugged Pragya and her poem off his mind and considered the scene at hand. The sequence in which Devyani kills herself wasn’t the next one serially, but it was pressing so hard on his mind that it was better to have it off his chest. Clear a space for other scenes. Might even unlock his brain on the journalist and inspector sequences.

  Devyani is slow, and large with child. She speaks even less than she did before. Eats little. While she knows the ravenous hunger pangs of the pregnant woman, she tells no one. In the afternoons she sleeps, listless, on a mat on the stone floor. As though God put her to sleep while He worked on her.

  She is roused from her sleep by confused cries in the courtyard. The groan of cartwheels. Shouts. Battering on a door. A woman’s piercing shriek. A platter clanging to the floor. And then a man’s guttural oath. The sound of racing feet on the stone cobbles of the yard. Through the half-open door Devyani sees Mondira and Mihir clamber up the stairs in a frantic rush. Amalendu follows. In a matter of seconds, she sees her sister turn and deal Amalendu a swift, expert push, sees Amalendu lose his balance, stagger, take a backward sprawl. Sees her sister thrust her own husband into the room, then herself, and bar the door. Leaving Amalendu at the mercy of the killers.

  By the time Devyani can haul herself to her feet and reach the window, Amalendu lies in a pool of blood and a horde of bearded men in checked lungis and singlets tower above him with hatchets and butcher knives clenched in their fists. Cowering against the wall, incoherent with panic, are Mondira and Mihir. Outside, kneeling in tearful supplication, are their old servants, Qadir and Hasina.

  ‘Spare our masters, men of the faith, spare our masters. They have been good to us, they and their fathers. They mean no ill. Be merciful, O men of faith!’

  The killers’ eyes are narrowed slits of impersonal venom. Amalendu is bleeding to death on the ground. The blood snakes across the courtyard towards the cookhouse drain. Mondira staggers, hugging the wall behind her with a stifled sob. The stream of blood courses, sinuous, across the yard.

  ‘We shall be here again tomorrow,’ threaten the bearded men.

  Flight. Is there time to cremate Amalendu? Not likely. Mondira stands above her husband’s corpse with an impenetrable face, then glances across at Mihir, who stands, face working in spasms.

  It is their old Muslim servants who arrange the cart. Who load the scanty bundles, the few pots and pans, and lift Devyani across the rear.

  ‘Come, Bau-ma. Lie down so.’ Hasina gives her a bag of gram and a cone of fluffed rice, a lump of jaggery.

  The cart has to be abandoned. I’ve got to arrange events that way, thought Sravan. Easily done. An axle broken. A dead horse. Or, better, a stampede. The downrush of a manic mob. A frenzied race for life, leaving cart and horse behind.

  Devyani stumbles off the cart, into an orchard and down a ditch, then sinks in a tired heap among the rotting leaves. The child kicks in her belly. She is alone. She crouches in the ditch till darkness falls, then creeps out and makes her way to a well. She remembers her sister’s words: ‘If we’re forced to flee, if we’re all separated, go to the nearest village well at night. We’ll return to it. We’ll come looking for you.’

  The hours pass. A sinister, congested monsoon night, the air swollen with damp and dread. Far away, on the highway, vultures gather in small groups, fluttering wide, funereal wings. On every gust of wind is the stench of what they devour. The hours of the night pass. Then the entire day. The village abandoned. Weak with hunger, Devyani crouches on the ground against the brick wall of the well. No one comes for her. She wonders if they’re alive. She wonders if they’ve managed to get away. Then she asks herself whether they got away singly or together.

  Before she plunges into the well, she glimpses a fragment of her face telescoped in the sleek lens of the water. Featureless, too far away. Sparks of light slither across the surface. She takes a deep breath, plummets headlong in, slams into her own palpitating image. A crash, and the black mirror smashes around her, the shards fly, the spitfire brew bounds mountain-high around her, seizes her, sucks her down. She gasps for air. A faded cry. She fights it, clutches at it, spews it out, but it slips out of her grasp, it drains into her lungs, floods her brain. She rises once to the surface, coughing, to claw at the slimy wall. Thrashing in panic, the deafening hoofs of water drumming in her ears, she is dragged into its cold, black, snaky maw.

  Sravan collapsed into himself, drained. That scene had lain dense and heavy on his heart for weeks, like a threat commanding a reckoning. He had given it all he was capable of, and now an unearthly fatigue gripped him. A dehydration of soul. Devyani’s death was enough to squeeze his throat to aching. And he was hungry. Ravenous. The frantic hunger of a man who’s just past his ordeal.

  He walked into the dining room to raid the fridge. Found Pragya whipping batter in a bowl. She looked up, enquiring.

  ‘Famished,’ he explained.

  She rose, opened a cupboard, produced a tin of something and put it on the table. ‘There’re some dhoklas left over, too.’

  ‘Why don’t I take you out for dinner tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not?’ She caught his eye and laughed aloud.

  At its best, Sravan’s marriage was a careful matter of small charities and big diplomacies.

  ‘But I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ she went on. ‘
I’ve got to do some shopping and visit Chand Mian, my tailor. Some new designs I’ve sent him for the next exhibition. I want to see how they’ve turned out.’

  ‘So? Do your shopping and the rest, and dine with me later. I’ve got to see Farooqui about something, but I should be free at eight.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ she suggested. ‘I’ll drive down and finish my work and come down straight to the Piazza. You can come down separately.’ Then she added, flushing, ‘Thanks, Sravan. I didn’t think you’d remember it.’

  Hell, it must be one of her endless symbolic anniversaries. She had so many of those—first date, first award, first present, first tiff. He wondered what this one was, and kept his face suitably enthused.

  He was at the Piazza at a quarter to eight. No sign of her. He consulted his watch, felt curiously uneasy. For some incomprehensible reason he was morbidly worried about Pragya. The market was closing, so what the fuck was she up to? Pragya was a lousy driver. A traffic hazard, he called her. A lurch here, a lunge there, a reckless swerving overtake. Anything was possible with her at the wheel. And when she went lane-surfing, the bitch, and when she braked as though she was giving a mobike a kick, and when he tried telling her, it was—Now who’s doing the back-seat driving, dear Sravan? Shall I quote you to yourself, dear Sravan? He cursed her, more anxious and incensed than he understood. If she turned up now, the evening would probably start with a quarrel. There must be something seriously wrong with me, with us both, he thought bitterly. Things inevitably go wrong, even when I try to make them right on the page.