Impulsively, he decided to buy her a gift. Just a small something for her wretched commemoration of some miserable memory. He walked along a row of shops, looking in at the windows.
When he returned to the Piazza, his gift in his pocket, she was standing in a huff. ‘Another ten minutes and I’d have gone home,’ she said drily. ‘I’ve been standing here like an idiot for half an hour. The doorman kept wondering what my story was.’
‘Oh, come on, you could’ve waited for me indoors. And anyway, you look too old to be a tart.’ Sravan recognized his own habitually hurtful voice. He had to be on his guard; at the slightest sign of softening in his tone, she usually overpowered the situation.
By the time they had made their way into the restaurant and found a table, a nasty strain had lodged itself in the air. Troubling and potentially explosive. That rash, black humour throwing up tiny acid gibes in his head, each a finely crafted insult. ‘Sometimes I think you practise offensive dialogue with me,’ Pragya had once said.
This was hardly a suitable time to produce his gift. The thing would seem off-key. Thaw the dignity of his constraint and inflate her self-righteousness.
Look at her, the little dart fluttered in his head. Someone ought to put a label on her—Combustible. Handle with care. Store away from heat and light.
He sometimes felt that some powerful negative expectancy of hers had urged his life away from her. Now he caught the glitter of furious tears in her eyes and groaned inwardly. Pragya often worked herself up to a pitch of exhibitionistic emotion in public places.
‘What’s up now?’ he hissed. ‘What’re you turning on the water works for?’
‘I’m not!’ she spat out in a savage whisper. ‘No, don’t look at me—please.’
‘Everyone here soon will,’ he said wryly.
‘No, it’s only you who notices these things—you’re that critical of me!’
‘What’ve I done now?’ he sighed in exaggerated injury.
‘If you don’t know, you don’t know. Just don’t scrutinize me that way. Give me a minute. I’m just … throwing this misery off. It’s got to spend itself … like vomit …’
What a lovely word to kill your appetite, he reflected wearily.
She bowed her head. Her voice was misshapen, but her words were always precise. Pragya had perfected this bitter poise, and she used it in the most stagily awkward moments.
He hazarded a remark to restore peace, but at the first false note she drew herself up in her chair and mocked him.
‘Is it possible that you’re taking a romantic interest in me tonight?’ she asked.
‘Am I wasting my time?’
‘Absolutely.’ She waved her hand upon a non-existent swirl of smoke. Really, he thought, we’re the most abnormal couple in this place tonight. He decided to try again.
‘But aren’t we celebrating something? A romantic memory, right? So for old times’ sake …’ Now, what the hell was the memory?
At that she suddenly relaxed, essayed a watery smile. Took out a book from her bag. One of his earliest novels. She opened to the title page and turned it round for him to see. Suddenly he remembered what it was. That first drive.
An overcast August evening. The sky had sparked, blown a fuse. The windscreen of the old Ambassador had prickled with sudden rain. In a moment the street had been crêped in silver foil. Gathering and dissolving under the swathes of the wiper. Rain had lanced down on the bonnet, made an uproar on the hood. When she’d offered him his book, it had seemed a simple thing to scribble those words on the title page. He now reconsidered his spare handwriting, the faded ink, with some surprise. Wondered if the coldness lodged in him was just the complication of some of those initial simplicities.
To Pragya, my ultimate reader. He’d meant it, too. She was then that just-right being, the ideal receptivity. To Pragya, my ultimate reader, for whom I put in my finest shades, sure that they’ll be noticed and treasured, the way I want them to be. In whom my words might grow to touch their richest bounty of meaning.
I didn’t know you but I identified you—instantly, he’d told her that day in the car, in the rain. I’m grateful and relieved that you are. Believe me, you do me a favour by just existing in the same world and time as me. It might so easily have been my bad luck to miss you by a century or a city.
They’d met at a music conference two months before. He and Pragya had both dabbled in Indian classical music in those days.
It’s the first time I’ve actually met a writer, she’d said. Oh, I’m quite normal, really, he’d laughed. He was young, already famous. Sure of himself. Shall I tell you what I do to young women who pay me fake compliments?—he’d flirted. No, what? She was simply and expensively dressed in pearly silk. I pick up my pen—like this—and I autograph their beautiful silk saris. Like this. I’d love that she’d said, cool and exotic. Graciously she’d turned round on her high-heeled sandals and presented him, with a dancer’s flourish, a shapely, silk-draped shoulder. He’d taken his autograph Mont Blanc and signed his name on the splendid silk. She had then rearranged the drape of the palloo, carefully varying its fluid fall so that the signature sloped across her left forearm, or clung to her neck, or rested like a luscious stroke across her breast. She didn’t care what people thought. She’d flaunted it all evening and he had caught each one of its several signals. Subtle and sensuous. It was that quality of indecipherability about her—he had found her psychologically challenging. Once they were married, he had, on her insistence, autographed her naked body scores of times in one of their early bedroom games. Best signing spree of my life, he’d told her. Nothing like signing your name on a woman’s body. As though I have authored you. That’s why you’re just so—exactly the way I want. But he had also vaguely resented the fact that it was probably for his signature that she treasured him.
What annoyed him now was Pragya’s insistence on his total regard. Like an imposition of will it had irked him into permanent rebellion. She had no right to claim this exacting lifelong devotion. There were days when he found it hard even to be polite to her. He found her loud-voiced, didactic, cocksure, mawkish, unpleasantly insinuating. And every word or gesture was an implicit appeal or command for his admiration, which he honestly did not feel. He felt no connection with the man who, years back, had found her overpoweringly attractive.
During the first few weeks of their marriage she used to sit sentinel over his sleep. After hectic sex he’d plunge into mindless slumber, only to wake up with a start in the middle of the night and find her propped up on an elbow, gazing fixedly at him. It was uncanny. When they slept and he, always self-enclosed, appeared to take leave of her and turn away to the wall, she protested, insisted that even in sleep he should lie facing her. Nothing should take him away from her, not even sleep. But his side ached. She kept watch over his sleep, and the softness that filled him turned slowly to unease. She wouldn’t let him get away; she cherished him too much. Over the years, he was to realize the horror of this exacting love and the stress of being an overvalued person.
He’d tried telling her. That there was a last lap of self that jealously guarded its privacy. That after every spell of intense contact, he wanted her to move away discreetly, allowing him his space. But she felt threatened by a mysterious peril. She wanted to speak, share, question, confide, explain until she choked him under the weight of a constant and unremitting invasion. And the closer she drew, the more uncertain and resentful she turned, the more frantic her gropings—as though she sensed his determined refusal to cede himself exclusively to her. Honestly, he reflected, she’d always been a borderline case but now she acted plain crazy. There seemed no way out except to keep her at bay. By not answering her questions. By not acknowledging her presence. By curt, monosyllabic replies. And when necessary, by rebuffs. It had become second nature to him. Between the two of them, his father and Pragya, they’d managed to foist on him a whole new personality.
Now she shrank from the glint in his eye, the u
nrelaxing immobility of his jaw. His unpleasantness had gone up as his desire for her had declined, until it was replaced by another desire—to lash, to make her cringe. He deplored her emotional grovelling and gushing, her cloying pride in him, her reeling chatter. He’d learnt the useful skill of slamming shut his mind and going reckless with his speech, but Pragya, with the door slammed in her face, wouldn’t accept this. She insisted on knocking, scraping, hammering, seeking admittance, and it drove him up the wall.
And here she was at it again.
‘Okay,’ she was saying. ‘Granted, this isn’t your idea of a relationship. Point taken. We’re that much older. Every decade of life’s got its own definitions. But let me tell you mine. Sometimes I try to guess why I’m feeling seedy. Is it my BP? Indigestion? A pain in my joints? Low blood sugar? Nervous irritability? Menopause? Then you return—and I snap back to normal. Then I know it’s just your absence.’
She looked at him hopefully. Sravan listened, his face impassive. She went on: ‘When I’m alone, watching TV, and there’s a good film, I want to share it with you. Instantly. A good sentence in a book. Or a snatch of music. I … I feel defrauded of the completeness of my own pleasure … when you’re not around.’
He still chose not to react.
‘But you haven’t been around for years, Sravan. D’you know? There’s a man I’m missing deeply—for fifteen years now.’ She paused dramatically. ‘He doesn’t exist anywhere … you’re the nearest approximation, and yet so different from him.’
Her eyes grew compulsive. Got to say something, he thought. Anything except the real thing. Anything but that old question between them. Why did you do it? He considered her in silence. He knew the thought was in her mind as well. They’d gone through that matter so often, there was nothing left to charge or to defend. The destroyed book blocked the space between them for good.
‘Bit involved, that,’ he observed cautiously. Listening to her, his instinctive reaction was—Bullshit! Why’s she always trying to compose this relationship, as she’s so fond of calling it? Like she’s writing an interior novel about us. I feel as though I’m being made to act out an unnatural part, dressed in a ridiculous costume? Why does she want to organize us round ideal lines of her own fantasy? But was she reading his mind? They did seem to read one another’s thoughts sometimes.
‘I wonder,’ Pragya mused, ‘if all my fantasies are someone else’s reality.’
‘You’ve not shared your fantasies with me. Not lately.’
‘Oh, they aren’t much. Nothing original or special. Rather gross, actually.’
‘I’m always interested in the gross,’ he assured her, smiling crookedly.
‘But I’m not too ambitious, Sravan. There’s this silly romantic dream—a tryst—wine—confidences to share—moods, terrors, childhoods. So commonplace, no?’
‘How boring. Is that all your grossness consists of?’ he pulled her leg.
She flushed. ‘No. Much more, actually. But let me get the atmosphere right. Okay, where should all this be?’
‘A shikara on Dal Lake? Or the Udaipur palace?’ he laughed.
‘No, an ordinary room’d suit me fine.’
‘Indoor location? I begin to see.’
‘Exactly.’ She produced her old, sudden smile. It took him by surprise, stirred him with an unforeseen pain.
‘Actually, it’s all hopeless, Sravan, so far as I’m concerned. I’m so disappointed—as you must be.’
‘Hold it. What’s this?’
‘Let me spell it out. Things aren’t right with me. No, really. I hurt inside. My mind wanders. My muscles strain towards a peak I can’t climb any more. It must be bad for you, too.’ She looked at him intensely.
‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘You’re pretty reliably orgasmic—assuming you’re not acting.’
‘But I’ve got to work hard—with my mind—see? I’ve got to concentrate on a bunch of powerful turn-on images. Words.’
He was genuinely intrigued.
‘What I’m trying to tell you, Sravan, is that it isn’t a nervous or muscular matter. I’ve been waiting for a master fantasy that’ll set me off—launch me, sort of—but there isn’t one. I’ve been waiting for a real person and there isn’t one. And there’s this tiredness that won’t go.’
She’d put it well in her fumbling way.
‘You could write a poem on this sort of thing,’ he teased her. ‘Call it “Mid-life Blues”.’
She was incensed. ‘Write? Why should I?’
‘But you do write poems. This’d be better than the whatzit one with the silken eyes …’
She eyed him, suspicious. ‘Are you making fun of me?’
‘No, but don’t you often scribble things?’
‘Yes,’ she conceded grudgingly. ‘All that’s part of my emotional management. When I’m miserable I make something out of it—so it’s not wasted. Like using yesterday’s mashed potatoes for today’s cutlets. Never liked throwing used feelings away.’ She was laughing now. So was he.
‘Always a good housewife. So you could use today’s confessions for tomorrow’s custard.’
‘Oh, you! Everything needn’t be usable and marketable that way. I’m not like you,’ she retorted. ‘You look at everything so bloody … managerially.’ He was glad the evening was going to be a success after all.
‘But coming back to my ideal fantasy, I happen to know yours.’ She smiled. He shrugged. ‘I know you need to think of her. You-know-who. Even when we’re at it. Especially when we’re at it. I know that’s all there is to it. Nothing more. You only think of her. But I don’t even have that. Well, there is something. A tiny leftover bit. Sravan …’ She looked solemnly at him. He was still reeling with the shock that Pragya really did not know! ‘I must tell you—I’ve been unfaithful to you rather often.’
Shock upon shock. He almost spluttered over his food. He put down his spoon and stared. She was smiling blandly. Enjoying herself. Could all this be one of her subtle acts?
‘Why don’t you believe me?’ she giggled. ‘I’m insulted, Sravan. Do I look so chronically moral that I might as well be dead? It’s true. There’s something I’ve never told you, and I might as well now.’
‘I’m pining to hear,’ he said in affected amusement but his voice had a false note he couldn’t conceal.
She took her time spooning up her biryani, daintily sopping her gravy as though her plate were a canvas she was thoughtfully painting. He was surer now that she was playing one of her games again.
‘When I was in college, Sravan,’ she began speaking meditatively, ‘a stranger wrote hundreds of letters to me. In Bengali, alas, which I couldn’t read. He wrote reams. I still don’t know which guy it was. Someone in the boys’ hostel opposite ours. I kept all the letters, and one day I got one of my friends to translate some. Oh God, Sravan, those letters! They were bombshells! He’d poured out his poetry, his misery, his erotic longings for me—they were just too much!’
‘And you never actually saw the person who wrote them?’
‘No, honest. He was under the mistaken belief that I knew him by sight and that I knew Bengali. I don’t know what gave him the idea. He probably felt more comfortable writing in his own language. We passed out of college and I burnt up those letters. Sometimes now, Sravan, when I’m getting on in years, I think of those words and they’re a real turn-on. I let those words loose in my head when you and I …’
‘Pornography, in other words.’
‘No, charged with quality feelings. Literature,’ she insisted. ‘That’s what old, faded words can do.’
‘Now I know why you’re partial to writers,’ he said. ‘So what would you like me to do? Recite my steamiest passages for you?’
She laughed heartily. ‘You could try. Words have greater variety than the stupid body, you know.’
When Pragya discovered the little felt purse with the Hyderabad pearls in the pocket of his trousers, crumpled away in the laundry bag, there was a big scene
. Pragya jumped to her own conclusions. Classically comic. Iago’s handkerchief! Why didn’t you give it to me first thing last evening, then? And I really opened out with you! After so long! Oh, Sravan. He gritted his teeth. Oh, Sravan!
If you’d really got them for me, you’d have given them to me then … when I opened my heart to you! Opened her heart, fuck-all! Just open that window first, he said. She did. Striding up to it, he hurled the pearls out. They landed in a slushy flowerbed in the park. And Pragya let out a shriek. She rushed out of the study and Sravan heard her race down the stairs. In a couple of minutes she was back, her face blotched with tears and mud. Like the pearls she carried in her hand. Every bead caked in wet earth. She came up to him, sniffling, and handed them to him. Put them on me, she sobbed. They’re filthy. Wash them, he said. No, just as they are. Now. He shrugged. She turned and he unfastened the clasp, mucking up his fingertips, and gingerly put the string round her neck. She turned round to look at him and she looked a fright. Her face and neck were streaked with dirt, and the muddy pearls looked weird—like nicotined teeth closed round her neck, he thought with a shudder. And that pearl necklace was called a choker! Oh, God! She came closer and whispered—Thank you, Sravan. And he started with sorrow and aversion at the sight of those filthied pearls. They looked as though they’d lain for months in the depths of a well.
She was picking up his thoughts again in that sinister way she had. All’s well now, Sravan, isn’t it?—she whispered, moist-eyed. It’s all ended well, hasn’t it? Say it’s all ended well, please. Until he gritted his teeth and hissed, ‘Yes.’
14
The chapter sped across the page with Sravan panting after.
Mondira calls out, hammers on the door with both her fists, but no sound comes from within. She goes round the back, tries the windows and the rear door to the courtyard but finds them barred from within. She comes back, strikes at the door with all her strength. The heavy black door groans at its iron chain but will not give. A queer look comes on to her face. Fear and fascination at an unuttered possibility. A forbidden hope, unseemly in her face. If he were lying dead within …
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