Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  ‘Twenty-five thousand! Where does that come from?’ asked Farooqui, suspicious.

  ‘You sign a cheque from your own account. I’ll return the amount to you in cheque or cash, whichever you prefer.’

  ‘My begum will start getting ideas. She’ll imagine I’m still supporting Rasoolan-bai …’ murmured Farooqui, squeamish.

  ‘Oh, come on, Farooqui Sahib. It’s just for a day or two. You pass him one cheque, I pass you another—immediately afterwards, if you like. Or will your begum imagine you’re being supported by Rasoolan-bai?

  A soft gleam of a smile appeared on Farooqui’s face. ‘And now that I think of it, what harm will it do? Give the begum cause to think better of me. Which, I sorrow to confess, Sravan bhai-jaan, she has failed to do in recent years. Rasoolan’s ghost shall exalt my worth, and no names need be spoken, no?’

  It went off flawlessly. Sravan complimented Farooqui on his performance, thanked him profusely. Farooqui brushed it aside.

  ‘It’s easy to act out one’s own vahiyaat dreams, Sravan bhaijaan,’ he said as he left.

  His father could now sit up, propped on pillows. He had met Farooqui with majestic aplomb. Taken the news with dignity. He made a courteous, halting speech. He signed the contract with the same smart flourish that he used on his own dud cheques. Dud cheque for dud cheque, marvelled Sravan in the next room.

  When it was all over, the sickroom was ominously silent. Despite his suave performance in Farooqui’s presence, the old man seemed dazed by the developments. When Sravan ventured into his father’s room that afternoon, a volley of crisp oaths greeted him.

  ‘Who asked you to pry into my affairs, laat sahib?’ Sravan caught the clink of battle in his father’s voice. The sunken old eyes seemed to spit heat at him.

  He found himself speaking in a high, persistent, defensive tone.

  ‘Why, you did. You kept saying, “Neela jhola”. So we had to ferret it out. I went down to Khusrubagh and discovered your manuscripts. Pretty good, some of them. I sent down a story to Swadeshi …’

  ‘Keep your patronage to yourself!’ slashed the old man. ‘And even if I did mutter something in my sleep, what business had you to misappropriate my work? Publish my story in that useless rag? Without my knowledge? Without my consent?’

  All of a sudden, and at the same moment, they both realized that the old man’s voice had recovered its former strength. Sravan looked into the flushed face and noticed that his father was sitting bolt upright, unsupported by the pillows on which he had been slumping. Erect for the first time since his fall, his eyes burning with a furious jubilant flare. A shine of malicious rejoicing transformed the collapsed flesh of his face. An expression of demoniacal satisfaction. He decided to play his own role at least half as well as those two old men had done.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way. I sent that story to the press because I liked it. I didn’t realize it was private. And in case you resent the cheap exposure, as you used to call it, I can always ring up your new publisher and say you’ve changed your mind and regret signing the deal. I’m sure he’ll appreciate your modesty and tear up the deal if you return the cheque …’

  ‘That will not be necessary, Sahib Bahadur.’ Snap and crackle. ‘You keep out of my affairs—enough mischief ’s been done, thanks to your interference. What’s done is done; there’s no help for it.’

  Sravan grinned to himself. Status quo. For all intents and purposes, his father looked completely restored. Smugly exultant. Checkmated at last in this game, and that gave Sravan the deepest pleasure. One last job: retrieve that dud cheque. The old man had hung on to it. That night Sravan stole into his father’s room and cautiously switched on his torch. Buddhoo lay on the mattress, spread-eagled in sleep. The old man slept heavily thanks to his sedatives. He must have put the cheque beneath his pillow. If Sravan could just ease his hand in ever so lightly, he might be able to draw it out. He slipped his hand in and found what he sought—only to feel his father’s knotty talon clap upon it. As though it was a lifeline.

  No good. The old man wasn’t going to let go, not even in sleep. He’d have to try some other time.

  16

  The parcel turned out to be a book. Good cover design, glossy paper, fancy font and on the back cover a known face, dimpling at the camera. It took time to register. Reflections in a Lake, by Malini Mishra. The title page autographed in green ink. And a slip of handmade notepaper with the words: With best compliments to Sravan. Unsigned.

  He looked quickly at the name of the publisher. Eagle Books. Never heard of them. Probably a pay-and-publish concern. Vanity publisher. What hit him was that other handwriting, its letters so different from Malini’s curlicued hand. With best compliments to Sravan. A known hand. The same spidery hand that had penned that biannual hate mail for years!

  His first reaction was disbelief. His second, contempt. But the feeling that eventually prevailed was agitation. That handwriting had the sinister power to unsettle him completely. In the old days, he would keep going back to feast his eyes on it, masochistically teasing his flinching heart with the mere sight of it. Now, after a span of months, its effect was scarcely less potent. He marvelled at the neurotic dread that mere handwriting could evoke. He shoved the book away in the right-hand drawer, meaning to ignore it, but four times that morning he found himself taking it out and staring at those five innocuous words. With best compliments to Sravan.

  He tried to dial Malini’s mobile but it was switched off. He tried her flat. A servant received the call: Memsahib had been out since morning. He chafed, restless. A good, heated reckoning with her might have released his pent-up fretfulness, but she denied him even that.

  Maybe he could write a damning review. His name alone would see it through—any journal, any tabloid. There was no need to read the wretched thing; he’d endured the torment of so many protracted readings by the authoress herself. He relieved his smarting heart by writing the review immediately, loading each phrase with venom. Eminently forgettable. Altogether avoidable. Pretentious and clumsy pun in the title itself. Pseudo-reflection parading as profundity. Four hundred pages of tedious posturing. When writing turned as casual as a random fling, when the writing of a book was just a piquant novelty to a bored and jaded palate, one could only regret the irresponsibility of quality-waiving publishers who churned out any bilgewater as long as they were paid. And as he disgorged his resentfulness, his complex infatuation for Malini suddenly resolved itself in simple loathing. One of those swift shifts in feeling that readjust one’s troubled ambiguities in an endurable compromise. He sent the piece off to The Letter and the Spirit, the journal she set great store by, and, somewhat uplifted by this exercise of therapeutic malice, began to pack for his trip to Delhi the next day.

  ‘You might like to tune to the national network at 9.30 tomorrow night—they’ll be covering the Lotus Award festival,’ he told Pragya before leaving for the station. She expressed no enthusiasm.

  There was to be a glittering ceremony followed by a book launch afterwards. He didn’t know this young writer whose first novel he was to launch; he’d have to snatch a copy at the reception and read bits to form an idea. It pleased these self-important little pen-pushers enormously when a well-known writer showed familiarity with their work. It was a woman writer. He hoped she was presentable. Lunch with her, so what a bore if she turned out to be a dowd! Then the afternoon at a book fair, signing books. Smiling blandly into faces. Mouthing pithy one-liners. At five, a recording for a talk show. He hoped they’d got his return ticket ready.

  The receptionist at the Samudragupt Intercontinental gave him the message as soon as he stepped up to the counter.

  ‘Mr Sravan Kumar?’ (How he abhorred that Mister bit. Made him feel like the hero of a ridiculous sixties film.) The girl looked searchingly into his face.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Room 259, Lotus Foundation delegate?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Urgent message for you, sir. It came
from the foundation office this morning.’

  ‘E-mail?’

  ‘Telephone.’ She passed the note across the counter.

  He read it over twice before it made any sense to him. Then, in scattered segments of meaning, single words detached themselves from the brief paragraph. It took him a few seconds to speak.

  ‘I’d like to use your phone, please. No time to go up to the room.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He got through to the foundation and spoke to Samarendra Dutta.

  ‘Sorry about this, Dutta. I’ve just arrived and have to rush back right away. You’ll have to do without me. My father had a massive stroke last night. If you could manage a flight ticket for me up to Lucknow, I could hire a taxi from there …’

  ‘The flight doesn’t leave till evening, Sravan-da. We could deliver your cheque to you at the airport.’

  He was suddenly angry. Goddamn your garlands and your cheque and your silk shawl and your copper plate and your fucking citation! But he simply said, ‘That’ll be fine. But please arrange for the ticket first and get back to me. I’ll be in my room.’

  ‘No problem.’

  In the lift, on his way to his room, a vicious thought swam into his numb head—He managed to cheat me again.

  The five-hour taxi ride was an agony. His head drummed up a squeezing ache. By the time he’d dumped his suitcase at the flat and rushed to the hospital, his father had slipped into coma.

  For days afterwards it all kept coming back to him. The frozen sky, the grey river, the burning ghat stretched along the sand to a hump of hillock on the fag end of a dusty road.

  The pyre had been built at the extreme edge. Nine mounds of wood carefully axed to slender faggots. The body—it was hard thinking of his father as a body—laid alongside. The garlands ceremonially removed. The cording snapped, the flowers cast into the grey stream, the shroud, the Gita on the chest.

  Massaging ghee on the shrivelled body was like applying a lifetime’s appeasing unction. Large dollops on the chest—the chest burns longest, he was told—and he had obeyed, smoothing the ghee in like a guilty caress, like an emollient to grease a rusty love.

  Seven times round the pyre, then he thrust the bundle of joss sticks into the straw-filled hollow beneath the body and spoke the words of final offering—To you I offer the fruit of my good karma, I, lighter of your pyre. Your evil karma take I on myself. That you may go onward in peace.

  The straw caught, a scarf of flame blew out of the body, and Sravan stepped back, recognizing the moment for what it was.

  The body lit up slowly from within, a blood-red glimmer beneath a charcoal crust, its lines suddenly highlighted. And then those unmentionable sounds of incineration—the splutter of nameless organs, the snap of a muttering flame, the blast of the skull bursting, which no mantra could quieten as his father turned into a bulk of organic waste, a biodegradable thing.

  Later Sravan took his dip in the river and came away, not looking back, carrying pot and knife as ritual prescribed. The lamp was lit in the sickroom. As igniter of the pyre he was to spend his days and nights in that room. Babuji wasn’t much of a believer, he’d told the priests, insisting on a simplified ceremony and a shortened period of mourning. He knew the future would be one long ceremony of decoding his father and measuring himself against his father’s lengthening shadow.

  Sleeping in his father’s room was difficult, even with Buddhoo on the floor. The queerest dreams narrowed into one another as his brain paraphrased the event in various allegories. In one dream he dithered about in an unsteady game of musical chairs; it wasn’t a chair that disappeared with each round but a player. There were more chairs left than players. On the bolt of a window frame hung a small boy’s coat. Sravan awoke with an inchoate trouble heavy upon him. The oil lamp filled the room with a rusty light. Could he be dreaming the dreams of a dead man?

  He drifted into torpor. Couldn’t move or turn with the weight of a massive book on his ribs. His lungs would not lift. He shook the book off his chest with a powerful heave. It crashed, pages crumpled, upon its belly on the floor. He awoke once again to hear Buddhoo’s thin snore and see the ritual flame extinguished in its bowl.

  They still looked at the empty bed when they spoke of the old man.

  ‘I found that dud cheque for twenty-five thousand under his pillow. Pretty crumpled it was. And a long grey hair,’ said Buddhoo.

  ‘Remember that grand spluttering speech he made when he signed that fake contract? His bombastic air—I had a script to show the world what I thought of it. Twenty years it’s lain in a bank locker, biding its time. I knew its time would come. Its time has come now. I knew it. What a sinister speech, Buddhoo. To think that he didn’t know that his own time had come …’

  ‘Don’t think about it.’

  ‘Can’t help thinking. There’s a sort of backwash. D’you think the satisfaction hastened his end? I mean, such things do happen. He might have dragged on. And how d’you know he was waiting for me?’

  ‘He kept turning his head to look at the door, that night he came out of coma just before the end.’

  ‘I wish I could be sure. But he didn’t actually ask for me?’ His voice was beginning to sound shrewish.

  ‘He couldn’t speak, Ravan,’ said Buddhoo patiently.

  ‘All the same, I wish I could be absolutely sure it was me he was waiting for.’

  ‘You’ve said that a dozen times.’

  ‘Something was unresolved between us,’ Sravan tried to explain. His eyes were smarting. ‘I tried to win him over—my way. He didn’t want to be obliged to me. D’you think right at the end he was? Obliged to me? And when he was ill, the way he went feeble. Lost his fire. Hung his head and heard me scold. Went limp. To tell you the truth, Buddhoo, I couldn’t bear that. I had to put the roar back in him. And I did.’ He savoured the memory. Another thought struck him. ‘He went away carrying this feeling, too. This unfinished business between us.’ Buddhoo heard him out in silence. The final question surprised him even as he uttered it. ‘Did I disarm him? Or merely defeat him? What d’you think, Buddhoo?’

  ‘What would you like to think now? It was you he waited for.’

  ‘Like that old woman in my book?’ Sravan said ruefully. ‘Why the hell did I write that scene months back?’

  He was left with the manuscript for his father’s novel. A strange sort of inheritance. Much of it dovetailed peacefully with his own. It inspired a mixture of infatuation and violent exasperation. He dreaded the handwriting that fleshed out his father’s voice in an eerie posthumous persistence. He’d never be able to complete it, he feared. His own writing would be a superimposition, an afterthought, an insurgent editing. But in an invulnerable way that script would stay the same. It would drag his small rancorous dissents into its authoritative current and sweep on, neutralizing his voice. Like a father’s genes active in his own, or a father’s karma in his fate. That’s all a man amounted to: some cells in his children’s bodies. Some residual attitudes in his grandchildren’s minds. But Sravan couldn’t shake off a sense of guilty intrusion.

  17

  That voice on the phone again. Sober this time, with a smug note of self-righteousness.

  ‘Just rang up to say that it doesn’t become a writer of your eminence and seniority to belittle a starter. Even if she does happen to be an ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘Did you pimp it through? How did you get acquainted with her?’ Sravan said. He heard the other laugh in quiet triumph. ‘You’ve been keeping tabs on me. Watching every move like a hawk. Hot on my trail for years. Haven’t you found anything better to do? Silent phone calls to her flat—I might have known it was you all the time. Then at that party … what a good actor you’ve become!’

  ‘All this is besides the point. I called to say that your review was highly unseemly. Haven’t you learnt new ways of professional victimization? Your style is getting too repetitive. Some of it was in obnoxious taste. Hitting below the belt …’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m not bothered with below her belt or above. I leave her to you!’

  ‘I’ve known you to be a perfect bastard, Sravan, but I didn’t know you could get this crude.’

  Sravan uttered an obscenity. Gave him a semblance of composure.

  ‘I warn you, Sravan, one of these days you’ll learn this isn’t a safe world for you …’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘I’m only saying you’re not out of the press’s firing range. Nobody’s so important that he’s invulnerable …’

  ‘Fuck-all to you and fuck-all to the press!’ Sravan banged down the receiver and found, to his dismay, that he was hot all over, perspiring a little.

  When Buddhoo proposed moving on, now that his job as nurseentertainer was over, Sravan insisted he stay just a few days more. By now he had busied himself with outlandish handiworks. He settled down on the floor, surrounded by his gear. Strips of cane from a broken rattan chair. A discarded handloom sari, scissors, cellotape, fevicol, pencil, tape measure, needle, reels of multicoloured thread. Even a borrowed sewing machine. Pragya, just back from a shopping spree, flopped down beside him and watched. Buddhoo measured out the cloth.

  ‘Kite?’ asked Pragya.

  ‘Wall kite.’ Buddhoo gobbled on his words, his mouth full of pins. He took a pencil from behind his ear and marked the cloth, then pinned a hem round its length. ‘I have an interesting relationship with kites,’ he told her. ‘Once while striding across the countryside I fell into a ditch and broke an ankle. My eyes had been following a kite in the sky. We’ll need an empty wall to put this up when it’s done. Mind if I remove those ghastly paintings?’

  ‘They’re lost on you, but don’t call them names. Yes, we can move them elsewhere.’

  ‘One hot summer, kites proved my downfall. Class seven or eight. Exams round the corner … Achha, three feet square, couple of inches for the tuck.’ He began cutting, frowning, mouth pursed.