‘Then?’
‘I wasn’t bothered. I’d made enough bandobast to get through the exam, see. Foolproof. I’d hired a dozen volunteers—a greengrocer, a sweeper, the maharaj in our cook-house, the cowherd who took our cow out to graze, two farmhands, the kasba barber …’
‘To cram on your behalf?’ Pragya giggled.
‘Wrong.’
‘To smuggle in scraps for you to copy from?’
‘What bloody bukwas! This was all strictly lawful! No unfair means about it!’ He put the scissors down. ‘I hired them to pray for me. Their fee was high, but my faith in God was unshakeable. I said I’d pay them ten bucks apiece when the results were declared— and I flew kites all summer.’ He began measuring out the cane strips.
‘How long did your faith last?’
‘I didn’t blame divine grace; I blamed my useless volunteers. The results came out: failed with glorious distinction in all subjects! Hopping mad I was. Took the stick to some of my chumchas and chased them down the highway. Goes without saying that my father subsequently took the stick to me and chased me out of the house. I spent two months sulking at an uncle’s house in a nearby village.’
The strips of cane were now being tied into a neat square frame. Pragya watched, interested.
‘Funny,’ she said after an interval. ‘I’ve had a strange relationship with kites, too. Not half as innocent as yours.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘When we went to stay at my grandpa’s every autumn, I was the odd one out. Twelve years old and a stupid girl in a frilled skirt that had been lengthened twice and had discoloured hems. I wasn’t ever invited to fly kites on the terrace, so I spent hours watching my cousins through a peephole in the second terrace wall. One day this cousin of mine—he must’ve been twenty-five or so—he noticed me spying and said—Come on, no need to lurk around, I’ll teach you to fly a kite. I was thrilled. And you know what the chap did? He swung me up by the arms, clean off my feet, lifted me up just like that and swung me over the stone parapet—you know those carved stone railings in old houses? Dangled me over the edge …’
‘Arré baap ré!’
‘That’s it. I was shrieking with fright. Trying to get a foothold against the wall, clawing at the cornices. He just kept laughing. He said—Now you can feel you’ve turned into a kite. Shall I let go, Pupu?’
Buddhoo had stopped tying the cane frame together and was gaping at Pragya, appalled.
‘And d’you know, I go through that panic each time I look down from a high-rise building. Hanging in the air. Howling. My legs thrashing about. Screaming. And that beast cracking his sides … it all returns.’
‘He was a monster.’
‘Of course he was. He’s in the police force posted somewhere in Bihar. Every extended family has its resident monster. Hypersexed.’
‘Have I told you about my friend who got hypersexed from accidentally pissing on a live wire?’ asked Buddhoo.
‘Yes, you have.’
‘So how’d he let go?’
She spoke softly. ‘He made me promise I’d go into the bathroom with him every afternoon when everyone was sleeping.’
‘My God!’ said Buddhoo, just as low. ‘Did you?’
‘I had to. I was only twelve, and he was big. I had to keep going. That bathroom on the terrace was a secluded place. All through the autumn vacation.’
‘No one you could tell?’
‘No. I was ashamed. And the terror! He said—If you dare tell a soul, I’ll chuck you down next time. And the thought of being dangled over that railing again … So much for the caring, supporting extended family.’
She shivered.
‘Saala!’ swore Buddhoo softly. He picked up the cloth and began folding the edges round the cane frame.
That afternoon Sravan got a brief note from Malini, delivered by hand to the Centre. How low can you get? Have resolved to confess all to Pragya.
Curse her, the bitch! He might have expected this. Here was another problem in the offing. He was reasonably sure this wasn’t her idea; it was the brainchild of that bastard, none other. He’d now have to watch Pragya closely, gear up for an explosive scene, face recriminations, spitefulness, tears.
But the day passed without event. Pragya seemed undisturbed. The next thing Buddhoo invented for Pragya was a punkah made of one of her old handloom saris. He climbed on a stool and suspended it from a couple of hooks in the ceiling, originally put there to support a fancy swing. The punkah had a long, tasselled cord that sloped across the wall like a streamer and disappeared onto the balcony through the ventilator. Outside, craftily concealed behind a row of crotons, Buddhoo had fitted up a most original contraption: an engine run by sand. On a tin wheel fashioned out of tin cans and two buckets, fastened back to back, a steady downpour of sand emptied slowly through a couple of improvised nozzles, first on one flat spoke of the wheel, then on its opposite. The weight of the sand made the wheel swing in a vertical semicircle, first to the left, then to the right. Inside the room the punkah waved in wide swaths, generating a soft breeze.
Pragya stared at it, open-mouthed.
‘Genius!’ she exclaimed. ‘How long will it run?’
‘As long as it takes fifteen kilos of sand to seep down. Then all you have to do is pour the sand back through this funnel here— back into the buckets. Look, no mess. You can even regulate the speed by shifting the diameter of this nozzle a bit wider. See?’
Pragya gazed again at the punkah.
‘Needs an autograph of the designer,’ she remarked thoughtfully. ‘Since it’s one of a kind.’
‘Oh, bukwas!’ scoffed Buddhoo, slapping sand off his hands.
‘No, really. Get up on that stool there and sign your name.’
‘Nonsense. A real artist isn’t bothered with all that bundul.’
‘How d’you know what real artists are bothered about?’ she asked cynically.
‘Is the Taj Mahal signed? Ajanta? Ellora? Are the Puranas signed?’ Buddhoo discoursed, striking a pose. ‘The greatest works in the history of the world are often unsigned, sisterji.’ He began rolling down his sleeves, glowing with the satisfaction of a functioning invention.
At his desk next door, Sravan had a disconcerting vision—Buddhoo signing Pragya’s naked body. One of those impish, clandestine fancies that came to his imagination when his brain locked up. The fantasy gathered detail. A perverse little thought that he gently uncensored in his head to allow free play. It was one of his many little islands of escape when the book preyed on him. It was hard detaching himself from the accursed book—it fed on him all hours of the day and appeared, thinly disguised in inverse fantastications, at night. Yet he couldn’t set down a decent page! My God, he groaned, it’s like a boa constrictor, drawing me up in its entrails. Squeezing the life out of me. He felt like a run-down engine on a cold morning, revving and revving but not starting. He made compulsive attempts at the problem scenes and gave up.
Something had snapped. Overnight he’d lost the ability to see a face in words, hear a speaking voice in his head. Dialogue came out wooden, actions flat. It had something to do with his father, he suspected. Dynamo, menace, crisis, threat—that’s what he’d been, that impossible presence in the next room. Was this lassitude, creative withdrawal or genuine mental fatigue? It might not be a bad idea to say—To hell with it all, there’s more to living than writing, and as Buddhoo put it, it hasn’t been a life for me, only an account of a life. I haven’t known the wood for the trees; so much time lost. But when the writing goes—if it goes—what will take its place? An uncertain thought, yet not comfortable. Maybe we’re both burnt out, my father and I, each in our way. He on that pyre (that horrid highlighted, charred silhouette, that choking smoke) and me here, at this arid desk.
He had often said—When a writer begins jabbering about the theory and process of writing, beware. Yet here he was doing just that. Pragya had only to point out the handloom kite to him and he’d start off—Writing’s like flying a
kite, did you know? The thought tugs at you, takes off, becomes airborne. The words pour through your fingers like kite string unrolling from its spool. Until the kite is racing across the sky and you’re panting headlong after it. Down the steep gradients of experience … He stopped, uneasy. What was he nattering about now? Pragya had only to put a plate of mangoes before him at lunchtime and he’d be off—Fell off in last night’s storm? That’s just how a mature book should be written. None of the effort of plucking it from the branch: let it hang upon the bough, scenting the air. Grow from flower to fruit, realizing its inherent possibilities. Swell. Round itself and ripen. Then gently drop at the peak of its fulness.
He intercepted the look that passed between them. Pragya didn’t exactly say—are you all right?—but he read the question in her anxious face. Surely she hadn’t failed to notice that he wasn’t writing anything? He could see their faces signalling the problem that their words refused to frame. What’s wrong with him? Shell-shocked. He wished their conferring faces would shut up. He wanted to quarrel violently with someone. Anyone. To set his disconnected life in motion again, like slapping a defective torch to set it alight. He sometimes felt like Amalendu in his impotence—again that dismal novel of his! And Pragya still did not mention Malini’s name. The suspense was sinister.
Days before the outburst, he could sense the storm clouds gather. The big row, when it came, driving back from the Riverside Resort, released a drenching tide of relief in his head. But it wasn’t over Malini at all. It wasn’t what she said—he hardly remembered what it was—but the snide way she’d said it. Her soft lollipop-sucking way of whispering a jibe. He braked abruptly, his throat rigid. Just get out of the car, will you? She turned to look at him. Very slowly. With idle contempt. Her smile scorched his face with its challenge. His hands clenched the steering wheel. Then, with one of her sensational shrugs, she flung open the door and stepped out. Stood with a provoking swagger on the pavement. A faint spasm twitched in his face. He stepped on the accelerator, and as the car picked up speed Buddhoo hissed from the back seat—Are you mad? Sravan ignored him. The car sped down the long cantonment avenue. Buddhoo thumped his heavy hand down on Sravan’s shoulder and snarled—Stop, saala, stop, will you? Sravan braked with a teeth-grinding screech. Tell you what: why don’t you get out, too?—jeered Sravan. Give her company. Exactly what I had in mind! Their voices had risen. Buddhoo blustered out, slamming the door hard. Sravan drove on. His head seemed to have gone toxic with sour words. He’d always had this tendency to go into silent convulsions of black humour. Made him enjoy these situations, the nastier the better. His father gone, he was looking for someone to ignite his old angers again, someone to stub those angers on, some flint to strike sparks against.
He reached home, checked the time. Nine in the night. He wished them a happy six-kilometre walk—no public transport on that route. He locked up; Pragya had a key. The kids were subdued. He stretched out in his room, relishing visions of the two on their late-night hike. Imagining the two of them. Imagining … One day you’ll reawaken to your original book, he thought, as you rediscover your wife after an inconsequential fling. He felt like the director of a secret blue film, imagining the two of them. Sets, camera angles, special effects—a fascinating composition. Potent enough to overpower his malaise. Like a dose of creative Viagra. And those two going about in original innocence, not guessing a thing!
18
Looking back in later years, he never forgot the innocuous way the events began. He saw himself on the front steps. He saw, in his memory, the front door locked. He remembered thinking that Pragya had probably left the keys with the neighbours. He rang the Pawars’ doorbell. Subhash Pawar saw him and expressed a strange condolence.
‘Really sorry about this, Sravan. I just don’t know what to say. Terrible thing to happen.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘But don’t you know?’
‘No.’
Pawar’s jaw dropped. Then Sarita Pawar appeared, fat and concerned. ‘Now you come right in, Sravan, and drink a glass of water first.’ She steered him in, pulled a chair. They sat down in front of him, gazing at him in dumb sympathy. He felt like hitting them.
When they broke the news a shiver passed along his nerves and jammed against his brain in a grinding screech.
In the silence that followed Sravan looked from Pawar’s face to that of his wife. His mind rejected the information.
‘A lively kid, and so intelligent,’ Sarita said. ‘It’s usually these extra-bright ones that go off the rails.’
‘But wild, mind, wild,’ added Pawar. ‘Always had the wits of a whiz-kid. A little devil sometimes. I told Sarita here—that kid’s going to make his mark or end in jail.’
‘I read of a case in which five teenagers raped and murdered a lady doctor …’ put in Sarita Pawar.
‘The things he could think of! Such brains! Once he smashed the headlights of all the scooters parked in the scooter park. Said he needed something for a scientific discovery he’d thought of. Ingenious!’
‘And when I pulled him up for it, know what he did? He stole up to the terrace where my washing was drying and ripped all the clothes to shreds! With a blade!’
‘And the raffle-ticket business, Sarita. Tell Sravanji about the raffle-ticket business.’
‘Oh, yes. He came up with a handful of colony kids and sold me a ticket—five bucks—for a school raffle. He sold tickets to the entire building. It was later that Mrs Bajaj and the third number-wali suspected something was wrong, and they compared tickets and came over to my place. Know what? They were all photocopies from the same original! Very nicely photocopied, too. Now tell me if that isn’t the work of a genius!’
‘I cornered him on the stairs and got him to confess. He said the idea was his own—he’d made a nice little profit and given the other kids a cut. But of course the other parents in the colony didn’t like it one bit.’
There was a nerve shrilling in his temple, so painful that each thought hurt.
‘And don’t forget that business with the salt.’
‘Yes, Sravanji. That time when there was this wild rumour that after the onions, salt had gone out of the market. Ashu said—Auntie, I’ll go get you a pack from Gupta’s store. I gave him thirty bucks and he brought me a pack. Later Gupta swore he’d sold the pack for just six bucks. Gupta also said he’d caught the kid shoplifting, but since it was just stickers and things and you’re such old customers of his he was too embarrassed to complain.’
‘Look,’ gasped Sravan, managing to get a word in. ‘Why are you telling me all this now? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’
‘We told Pragya. She was very upset. She begged us not to mention it to you. Said it might disturb your work to get mixed up in these day-to-day jhams. She said she and Prabuddha would talk to the kid.’
‘Talk. Take him for counselling, eh? When all the time what the brat needs is a good old-fashioned hiding. Sorry, Sravanji. Didn’t mean to alarm you but I’m a blunt man.’
Sravan had the feeling he could still escape the situation. Tear the whole miserable chapter out, crumple it up and cast it into the wastebasket. Then the awful sensation of captivity overcame him. Trapped in this draft, assigned a character he didn’t feel comfortable in, an action he couldn’t relate to.
‘Where’s Pragya? Where’s the kid?’ He found to his loathing that his voice was unsteady.
‘Prabuddha and Pragya rushed to the school. I believe the school’s closed for the day after the incident. The headmaster is detaining your son. Obviously a police case, Sravanji, and we can’t tell you how sorry …’
All the way to the school the nausea followed him. He felt physically ill, stumbling through a situation he couldn’t grasp. A funny dizziness in his head and a shortness of breath in his cramped chest. By the time he reached he was calmer, with a desperate determination to work out the crisis to a satisfactory end. Once again, and quite absurdly at this inappropriate moment, he had that
feeling of blankness that came over him when he was stuck on a particularly ticklish point in a book and couldn’t see how it would work out. The thing to do then was to trust the script. Scripts acquired an initiative of their own and carried you along—you had to follow their volition, not your own. Which was what he was doing now.
19
‘It isn’t I who shall decide, Mr Kumar, but God. He and the Indian Penal Code.’
The Reverend Isidore D’Souza had sunken eyes. Pugnacious for a small man. He had bony, bat-like hands at the ends of wide cassock sleeves that conducted his rhythmic speech. A six-o’clock shade coated his face like mildew on a discoloured stone wall.
What confused Sravan was the range of judgements in the Reverend Isidore’s discourse. Almighty God’s, the Bishop’s, and the Indian Penal Code’s. The Reverend Isidore was given to citing the Bible and the IPC with equal readiness. He’d spent the last couple of hours in troubled perusal of both. Now he let Sravan have the full force of it, mixing chapter and verse and section of the IPC in a disconcerting mash.
Pragya was in the anteroom, with Buddhoo waiting outside. She had been crying. Her face was blotched. The strain had told on Buddhoo’s face as well.
When the kid was brought in by a peon, Sravan’s heart hurt. A small, hunted animal. Panic scurried about his eyes and he looked tinier than he was, his curling lashes fluttering in terror. Sravan looked mutely at his son and felt a physical contortion of pain in his chest. The beastliness of it! The kid looked stupefied. Sravan had a rash impulse to snatch up his son, to hide him, hit out. But all he said was, ‘Don’t be hard on him—he’s only a child, Father.’
The Reverend Isidore farted with his nose. ‘The boy he tried to murder was also only a child. Now you see him wroth and his countenance fallen.’
“Murder! He isn’t dead, so how can you use that word?’ cried Pragya.
Virtual Realities Page 19