Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  Then come the farmhands with ladders and logs. Battering at the door is no good. A boy hoists himself up the notched courtyard wall and edges across the narrow ledge to the upper terrace. Disappears into the chamber and appears, the next moment, on the trellised balcony.

  ‘In here, Bau-ma!’ he calls.

  The question shapes itself on her ashen face. ‘Alive?’

  ‘Sleeping the poppy slumber,’ calls the boy timidly. A riot of farmhands’ throaty laughter.

  Mondira’s face is aflame. With a deep oath, she turns on her heel and strides away, squelching across paddy field and palm clump and banana thicket and bamboo forest. Striding across the rotting bridge between the twin ponds and into Mihir’s estate … She returns home after a month. She is with child. The pangs of hunger knife at her, but she does not touch the handful of rice and lump of jaggery that her skinflint husband leaves for her on the mat. He keeps the keys now and lives on rice and jaggery, too. They feed their hate, grow thin and starve their bellies, spitting and hissing at one another across the stone floor.

  The farmhands’ wives bring her food in secret. Rice paste in milk and sugar, chillied gram and pieces of fish in mustard. She accepts it with the humility of hunger. The child is fed and is born. The old maidservant hears the baby wail, rushes to the prayer room and blows three nasal blasts on the conch in the small hours of the night. Amalendu staggers out of his opium stupor in a storming rage. He knocks the conch out of the old crone’s hand and it rolls away on the stone paved floor.

  A child despised by all save his mother. A toyless child of rags and frights. His mother is good with her hands; she makes him toys with garden clay and flour. Elephants and horses and camels. She bakes them in the hearth and paints them. His rhymes are the names of river fish and country flowers. His playmates are the farmhands, sorry at his plight. Once Amalendu charges across the plantation, whiplash in hand, to find his wife. Now, when she returns from her daily visits to her sister, she finds him sitting on the stone flags of the courtyard. He lifts his tousled head and hate-sodden eyes to gaze at her. The little one drools in the inner room, thumb in mouth, beside his farm-maid nurse.

  Mondira visits her sister’s house across the twin ponds every afternoon. It isn’t simple desire any more. When her head hurts with the misery of it all and her breath comes short, when her cramped limbs ache and a listlessness comes over her, she knows it is his absence. A snatch of a folk song or a line of verse in a travelling play and she feels defrauded of the completeness of her pleasure if he is not there. One day he will stop caring and prefer his wife again. So she wishes she could give him something in memory of this time. When the sky had gone dark as night and a chill had stolen over the earth, when birds had made a nervous clamour in the air, and he had shuddered and achieved the summit and lain spent, she had looked up through the arch of the cowshed roof and seen the magic ring in the sky. So marvellous, so perfect, that to look on it long would have been to wreck the sight. She had known then that she’d been gifted that moment, a priceless inauspicious gift. A solar eclipse doesn’t happen every day.

  He stopped writing and considered the page for a while. All the scraps had been thrown his way, almost by clever predesign. As though the pieces were part of a bigger, anterior composition. His novel had pillaged all it had found and gorged itself on loose details. True, he’d drawn upon the accounts of others, but it seemed to him that the disjointed fragments, scattered over a dozen separate narratives, belonged together, gravitating irresistibly towards unexpected unities like far-flung parts of a dismantled continent. I’m only a speller of maps, he thought, a geographer of life texts. Observer and commentator. This was the sort of writing he loved, each sentence finding the next without effort.

  But what of the things he left out? The situations that resisted representation? Someday, he thought, I’ll write a book made up entirely of my deletions. All the things crossed out, the bits found unsuitable. The bits that couldn’t be forced into moulds. The people edited away. Who knows? What’s left out might be more important than what’s retained. What’s not the point may be the real point. I know how to sift and patch and cobble and pare and varnish. I know what I want. Like a diligent rag-picker rummaging in a potentially rich jumble heap.

  Yet perhaps not so rich. The same few hundred patterns of life have been written about many times over. What gives each book life is the breath of the particular. The perishable immediate. And after it’s been pulped and forgotten, a few dozen or score or even hundred years hence, someone will come along and write another book exactly like this one. What disturbed him was this exasperating tendency to lapse into distracting reverie when he sat down to write. Idle questions popped up and his mind went chasing after them. Like—Had nature realized all the variations possible in situation and character and event? No, because none of these were historically fixed and static things. Why am I writing at all? Being a writer is an item in my narrative about myself. He sank deeper into the quicksands of idle reflection. A small paragraph in nature’s narrative, he thought, that’s me. To be eventually edited as one who does not matter. But might there not be a super-narrative, encoded in the blueprint of the world, in which nothing is deleted?

  A flurry outside. Buddhoo burst in.

  ‘The secret of my friend Vinod’s virility? Mutlub, how come the man was such a super-screwer? What happened now? One day he happened to go piss against an abandoned factory wall. A live wire had broken and fallen in the undergrowth. His dick got electrocuted. Energized, if you get what I mean. That’s how he …’

  ‘D’you mind allowing me an hour’s work? I’m busy finishing a chapter,’ said Sravan irritably.

  Buddhoo backed out of the study. ‘Oh, sorry, yaar. Okay, I’m off to the market for a bidi—back futafut.’

  Sravan had problems refocusing. Every step of the way he faced the same question—whether life was one long contemplation into which events broke, or a long sequence of events into which thoughts broke. When he wrote he tried to yoke events with rhythms of thought. Unless thought and event were the same and the writer could find some way of fusing the two integrally … He forced his mind back to the page. Lit a fag.

  So when the little toddler sidles up to Amalendu, whimpering ‘Baba!’ Amalendu deals him a push and the tiny creature falls. But as he lies on his belly, squealing on the stone flags, his small face contorted with grief, Amalendu feels something clench up in his innards. He looks around, sees no one. He stoops in haste, gathers the child to his breast, crows, ‘Eh, eh, my brat, eh, my mynah bird, eh, my child, my golden child!’

  But Mihir has sworn vengeance. His rancour festers within him. He is more self-righteous, more punishing than the most sanctimonious husband. When he breaks the news to Mondira that his wife, Devyani, is at last with child, he does it in cold revenge. It pierces Mondira to the hilt. She goes mindless with rage. She’d destroy child and mother both if she could—only the wife happens to be her trusting younger sister. Hurtful images swell in her head. Excruciating pictures of contact and furtive exploration. Each breath and whisper and rustle and creak, until she could tear her throat with hoarse screaming. Instead she sits, turned to stone.

  Suddenly he stopped writing. A dead clump in the next room. An avalanche of thuds, wood clattering against floor. Tumbling human stuff—bone, flesh, cotton cloth, iron walker, steel spectacle frame. Then a blank silence. Not a murmur or a call. He knew even before he sprang to his feet. This time his father hadn’t had time to call out.

  The old man lay bunched in a sinister huddle on the ground, stunned, the walker turned on its side. His eyes were misty with stupor. An elbow had twisted beneath him in frightening asymmetry. Sravan flew to the collapsed heap of body and garment, crouched beside it, lifted and cradled the bruised, eyeless head, felt the pulse, cried out, frantic—Beta! Beta! What happened, my child? Then he bit his lip, startled by the clamour of buried echoes loosed in the air. He put his head against his father’s chest. A deathly stillness.
He held his breath as the terror mounted. Then something happened in there. The ghost of a movement. A thread of air slid down a micro tunnel of lung-stuff and stole back again. A dim drumbeat sounded, tentative, in the innermost reaches of bodyspace. An assent floated up and a catch quivered in the old man’s throat. His Adam’s apple shook and he coughed softly. The glazed eyes opened, rested on Sravan. They seemed to consider him for a remote and final testimony.

  15

  Even after being pronounced temporarily out of danger, with his hypoglycaemia under control and his blood pressure stabilized, the old man lay still, withdrawn into a drowse. Then he appeared to regress into delirium. He looked shrunken, and he gave off an unidentifiable smell. Keeping vigil beside him, Sravan thought of praying. Always a difficult thing for him—he wasn’t the praying type, and the words came out all wrong. A broken, internal monologue addressed to his father. He seemed to be trying to transmit urgent thoughts to his father’s brain, into that part of him that was unsmall and unsleeping. He seemed driven by an unspelt haste, lest the chance of the transmission be lost forever. Of what use then would be all those reams of words he’d written? The clock ticked noisily on the wall. A row of ants on the floor made Sravan superstitious. Sometimes a branch of the gulmohur knocked on the glass pane with swift, significant taps. When Pragya held the medicine to the old man’s mouth, his slack old jaw stayed open on the spoon, like an infant bird’s, and a fermenting smell foamed up from beneath the coated gums. ‘Close your mouth, Babuji.’ He did not hear. ‘Close your mouth, Babuji.’ The mouth lapsed slowly shut. He’d lost track of time. ‘Is it evening?’ he mumbled in the morning. And Sravan realized, in a moment of swift insight, that he was living a page from one of his early novels. Long ago, by directing thoughts upon a page, he had accidentally issued instructions to his own fate. The engines had started moving, and the instructions were now being followed.

  Mid-snore, fragments of chopped words slipped out of the old man’s lips like runaway morsels. Sravan strained his ears to catch them, but they were mostly disconnected. Agitated exclamations that wound down to a troubled grunt. There were times when the old man opened his eyes but didn’t seem to be looking at anything. Yet off and on, between the grinding snores, there came two words, buzzed over with slippery tongue. Buddhoo noticed them too, and when they came slurring several times in a day, the two of them discussed it, puzzled. Late one evening Buddhoo came to Sravan’s study.

  ‘Got it. It’s neela jhola—blue bag!’

  Sravan started.

  Several hours later they managed to identify the ancient travelling box. When the lock was prised open and the lid wrenched off, Buddhoo drew out a folded navy-blue cloth bag. Tucked away in it was a nondescript key with a number, and a tag with the name of a bank.

  ‘Bank of Madura. Khusrubagh Branch,’ Sravan read. ‘Funny; I didn’t know he had a locker there. It’s at the other end of town.’

  ‘Maybe he has a secret fortune stashed away,’ Buddhoo joked. ‘Bit like finding a bottle washed ashore by the tide, isn’t it?’

  But Sravan was past joking. ‘He must be preserving something private. Something he didn’t want anyone to know about. Something important and secret enough to make a longer trip for. I’ll have to go to the bank and find out.’

  ‘You’ll need a letter of authority,’ pointed out Pragya-thepractical. ‘He’s not in a position to sign. But maybe, if he’s this bothered about whatever he’s got hidden there, he’ll be able to muster up the energy in a day or two … How exciting. Maybe its your mother’s misplaced jewellery—the pieces she said she’d pawned and lost.’

  Getting the old man’s signature to the letter of authority was less of a problem than they had thought. Pragya had only to put her lips close to his ear and say, ‘Babuji, we’re going to open your bank locker in Khusrubagh. Will you sign this letter authorizing us?’ and the old man lifted his creased eyelids and trained his foggy eyes on them. He had trouble holding the pen, but Pragya guided his hand.

  It took Sravan more than a day to get over the shock of the discovery. As the bulky wads appeared from the locker and lay in close-fastened, dog-eared batches upon the branch manager’s table, Sravan’s jaw dropped. Buddhoo gasped. Comprehension dawned in their eyes.

  ‘There it is, yaar.’ Buddhoo recovered his wits first. ‘Your father’s secret fortune. How long d’you think that pile took to amass?’

  Sravan was in no condition to make light conversation. The private wealth of a secret life lay stacked in four polythene packets. He had never had the slightest idea.

  There seemed to be more than a dozen manuscripts and the records of a meagre savings account, fed pathetically tiny sums at irregular intervals and abandoned about four years ago—roughly the time the old man became housebound.

  Now the discoloured sheafs lay on Sravan’s desk. Through the open door he could see the feeble form on the sickbed, motionless but for the faint rise and fall of the frail ribcage.

  ‘And to think he abused me all my life for being a writer,’ said Sravan.

  ‘From the look of it, he’s been at it hammer and tongs, yaar. Years and years. If my hunch is right, that savings account was kept to publish this stuff at his own expense. And remember the story he told me? The book rejected twenty-one times? He didn’t give up hope, poor man. All that disgust he aired—eyewash!’

  Novels, plays, collections of essays, poetry. The titles sprang into view, neatly printed in faded blue-black ink on yellowing paper. Kshamta. Astitva Ka Ek Adhyay. Satya Ke Chhutte Sikke. Yeh Nalanda Nivasi. There were twin collections of poems called Nirarthak Naad and Antardhvani.

  This was the man who’d poured scorn on all literary exercise. (‘Self-expression? Give me one kambakht reason why the self must be expressed. All this self-expression is only psychological defecation. A purely laxative function, hah!’)

  There wasn’t time to go through all the writings. Sravan felt the same reluctance before turning each page that he felt before stepping into the old man’s room—as though he had to ask permission and wasn’t sure it would be granted. There was a strong sense of trespassing, with the powerful possibility of discovery and chastisement.

  Astitva Ka Ek Adhyay took him by surprise. It seemed an astonishing replay of his own current novel. An alternate view of the same situation. Why had his father’s novel arrived at the same stalemate as his own? Yeh Nalanda Nivasi was a historical play set in the Middle Ages, at the time of the burning down of Nalanda University. About a man who manages to salvage sacred scrolls from the mammoth library—so similar to one of his own plays. The discovery filled Sravan with puzzled sadness—that the two of them should have experimented with the same thoughts but that he should have been the one to achieve results and not his irate, overbearing father. It also perplexed him that most of the manuscripts he skimmed through had a character whose name was Vanshi Dhar. His father seemed obsessed with the name. He’d given his fictional Vanshi Dhar a life multiplied by the number of times he’d plotted out a tale. Would he say why, if asked? Would he choose to tell? Better not to ask, to let some secrets be. Sravan regarded the sheafs of yellowed paper strewn upon his desk. He thought of the meagre savings account. Years back his father had divided his capital between his three sons, leaving a fourth for himself, and this account was his pathetic little clandestine wealth on the side, something he was not obliged to explain. He remembered his father’s vicious jibes. An idea began to take shape in his brain, extravagant but well worth developing. He put down the script and crossed the corridor to the sickroom. As he entered, the branch of the gulmohur delivered two abrupt knocks upon the pane, and Sravan knew that things had to happen fast.

  ‘Amazing!’ was Farooqui’s reaction. ‘All my life I’ve had this zalim fantasy tormenting my head like a djinn from the Aliph Laila. Imagine the scene, Sravan bhai-jaan: There I am, lying in my deathbed, the wick of my earthly existence burning low. Ah, the ache of it! I am a genius forsaken by the world of men. Then Allah-meherba
an takes pity on me. The impossible happens. I’m discovered at last! Visited by a farishta—an important publisher! He makes me sign a deal. He hails me as a lost icon. Is it a man or the angel Jabreel? The miracle is that it’s a man and he takes on all my work, he pays me for every instant of labour in my long, despairing writing life. And what then? I am reconciled to God and man, all set to die content, praising Allah in whose world justice may be delayed but not denied, wondering if I’m already dead and the day of Kayamat is come and gone. That, Sravan bhai-jaan, has been my dream. And now here you come, asking me to act it out. That is what you want, no?’

  ‘That’s it. All you do is pose as a publisher. Tell him you came across a story by him in a journal. Tell him you were bowled over. That you see him as a major artist who was somehow passed over and ignored. That now it has become your mission to reveal him to the world of letters …’

  ‘Has he published any stories?’

  ‘I’ve just rushed one to press in the current number of Swadeshi. I’ll let you have a copy. You must do your homework, Farooqui Sahib. Discuss it closely with him. Question the details. Mention how excited, how overwhelmed you were when you read it. How you showed it around. Tell him how you got in touch with the magazine and how you managed to trace him. Then, when he’s primed with praise, spring it on him. Gently. The big offer. Say that for the time being you can’t pay more than twenty-five thousand. You know it’s too low for such a major talent, but for an Indian publisher and a first book, it’s a proper signing amount. Show him the contract. I’ve got it ready here—you can familiarize yourself with the terms and conditions I’ve fabricated to his advantage.’