Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  Sravan drained his beer. ‘I don’t even know if I found what I set out for.’

  ‘Oh, you did, of course. An overdose of it. That’s the lesson: you get what you want. More than you ask. More than you bargain for. Until it becomes the element that drowns you. If you imagine you’re out to gratify yourself …’

  ‘Please, please.’

  ‘No, seriously …’

  ‘Cut out the preachifying, pundit.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I know. You’re like that guy in the limerick—the one who had a quarrel with every moral. But this is a law of reality we’re on.’

  ‘Oh, I forgot you’re playing Krishna to my Arjuna and it’s got to boil down to something like this. But don’t forget it was Krishna who sent Narada to fetch water in the first place, so what was Narada’s fault?’

  ‘That’s just the point I’m trying to make. Narada’s only fault was that he forgot who that water was for. Tell you what, yaar. We aren’t like Krishna and Arjuna on Kurukshetra. The roles don’t suit us. We’re more like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—ha! Can you imagine what would happen if Don Quixote found himself at Kurukshetra? Great! This is going to be my next project. A multicultural comic myth. On screen if possible. In an Indian idiom. Only you’d have to be called Don Kya-hota and I’d have to be Succha Punj. And we’d have to have a lady love called Dulhania-dil-Tabassum and a nag called Rosie Nanda. I can just see you attacking clouds of dust with your pen. And tilting at dish antennae …’

  Sravan began to laugh. ‘You know what? That’s just what I suspect I’ve been doing all along.’

  ‘So there’s nothing better to do at the moment than repeat the old cliché that something new shall come of this mess. Or something old and troublesome might renew,’ wisecracked Buddhoo.

  The phone rang and Sravan picked it up. ‘Oh, okay,’ he said to it. ‘I’ll come.’ He switched it off and grinned at Buddhoo. ‘You’re right, yaar. Something old and troublesome has just renewed.’

  ‘The little lady with the assets disproportionate to her intelligence?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. That was Ranjana Devi. She’s seventy-five if she’s a day.’

  ‘Outside your sixteen-to-sixty-five range, you mean.’

  ‘She’s asked me to drop in tomorrow, God knows why. She’s such a droning old crone, I think I’ll pick up Avasthi on the way just to divide the focus of her chatter.’

  23

  Ranjana Devi dragged out her sing-song welcomes, modelling the words with her mouth. She surprised Sravan with a birthday gift. But it isn’t my birthday, he protested. It’s mine, she announced. And I celebrate my birthdays differently.

  ‘Each birthday I give a gift to one of my friends. It’s your turn this year. And my gift always suits the person who gets it, though a minute before I fish it out of that old aluminium trunk, I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s going to be. Watch.’

  A large trunk stood alongside a wall in her room. Sravan had not noticed it before. ‘I keep it covered up to look like a divan,’ she explained. ‘That trunk is a metaphor, my dear. It’s ugly, I know, but I can’t wish it away. It’s like the management of grief. Since it won’t go away, you’ve got to make a place for it in your mind. Cover it up with a beautiful cloth, or compose your room around it or say, I defy this thing and shall build myself up positively in relation to it. Something like that.’ She knelt before the trunk and undid the clasp, then paused before lifting the lid.

  ‘Don’t gape like that.’ She smiled. ‘It isn’t a coffin. It’s a treasure trove.’

  It seemed to be packed with bric-a-brac.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of beautiful things here,’ she said. ‘Things I’ve been giving away. That’s the way it is. First you collect things, then you go about clearing them away. It’s a bit like a lucky dip. Put in your hand, Sravan, and pick up anything. It’s bound to be just the thing for you.’

  Sravan obeyed and lifted the small package wrapped in tissue paper. Ranjana Devi exclaimed in amazement. ‘Ah, didn’t I tell you? Just the thing for you. This is my husband’s mascot. His ivory Saraswati. Take it, Sravan, with my blessings. And wish me a happy birthday. I’m seventy-seven today.’

  He was out of his depth. He wished her, and gazed mutely at the exquisite figurine in his hand. Avasthi embraced the old lady, touched her feet. Ranjana Devi pronounced benediction, glowing with pleasure.

  ‘An old woman’s idiosyncrasy, no?’ She smiled sweetly. ‘But it gives me such joy. And there’s something more coming, Sravanji. Instead of serving you a slice of cake, I shall treat you to a slice of my life. It goes with the gift—a package deal. Do you understand? I’m distributing my things and my secrets equally among my friends. When I am dead and gone you can get together and pool the slices and get the whole cake before you. I promise you it’ll be different from anything you ever imagined.’

  ‘You chose the Saraswati so you get the Saraswati story. Why do you think he kept this image on his writing table? Because she’s the muse, you imagine? You’re wrong. This Saraswati stayed on his table as a gesture to Saraswati Shandilya. Yes, a flesh-andblood woman. Did you know her? She was a brash, brown-eyed, big-hipped woman, a social siren who paraded as a poet and a party singer. But my husband was besotted with her. You didn’t know this small detail, did you? Nobody did. Except me, of course. Oh, he played me false, he did. And he paid for it. Dearly. From the time that woman came into his life, his writing went downhill. Until he couldn’t write a page. It tortured him, made him rave, but there was nothing to be done. That is the way it happened—I’m not making it up. No biographer knows this. My husband did not write anything after he met that woman and after a while he grew desperate. So he invented that hoax called Antim Aadesh.’

  ‘That was the mega-novel he was working on for six years—his incomplete novel, wasn’t it?’ asked Avasthi in surprise.

  ‘There was no novel,’ she said. ‘Antim Aadesh is a rumour, no more. To save his reputation. To stop the press saying—he’s finished, the great Maheshwar Dayal. For years now scholars have been writing to me, asking for his papers and the remains of that so-called incomplete masterpiece, and what do I tell them? I say it was misplaced, lost when we changed houses. Then, when that woman left him, he had a heart attack and it took him off.’

  Sravan looked at her composed face. This one-poem, memory-counting, legend-immortalizing woman. He wondered why she was telling him all this. He asked.

  ‘Because,’ she answered, ‘you picked up the Saraswati and this secret was reserved for the person who picked up the Saraswati. No other reason.’

  ‘You don’t want to protect this … secret?’

  ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘For me there’s nothing left, nothing more to do. I want to go into the next century without any baggage. I’m joining the Gaudia Mutth on the first of January with a different name, in a different city. I’m leaving my things and my story behind with friends. You can do as you please with them—they don’t concern me any more.’

  To Avasthi she gave a framed poem by her husband beginning, ‘Bhool gaye thé ki ek aur bageecha hai seenchne ko.’

  They were both a little subdued when they left her.

  ‘Do you mind if we drop in at Farooqui’s? Since you’re here,’ suggested Avasthi. ‘He’s in a peculiar mood. Sold his library.’

  ‘He’s clearing away, too?’

  ‘Not the same way. You’ll see. He’s become very touchy. I’ve brought something for him here.’ He tapped the cloth bag slung across his shoulder. Sravan didn’t ask what it contained.

  They seemed to be enclosed in a bleached cage. The empty shelves of Farooqui’s whitewashed room looked like the picked ribs of a cadaver. Sravan was used to seeing it fleshed out with glossy books in several languages, but now it was a monk’s cell, a catacomb.

  He turned to Farooqui in silent query.

  ‘You could call if bibliophobia,’ was Farooqui’s explanation.

  ‘No, seriously …?’

  ‘They
’d begun oppressing me.’

  ‘Books?’

  ‘Yes. Every time I stepped into a library or a bookshop, I felt choked.’

  ‘I don’t understand this. You’ve spent your whole life reading and writing …’

  ‘Have you felt this heavy weight … of human experience … pressing down on you in a library? This roar of human thought? Janab, I felt deafened. Crushed. Ah, I know what you’re going to say, Avasthi, mere bhai. Once, long ago, how good books smelt. Like oxygen in a rain forest. It’s all over for me. Khatam! I feel tired, just looking at the kambakht things.’

  ‘Surfeit,’ murmured Avasthi.

  ‘No. My soul’s sickened of this whole wretched junoon. Seeing the books heaped upon pavements. The ones unsold are pulped down later. Some poor bewaqoof ’s work, written with the blood of his heart. The book fairs! Frightening! The stalls look like cars on a highway. Too many, too bright, too loud.’

  He gestured nervously.

  ‘Yet you add to the pile by writing more,’ smirked Sravan.

  Farooqui was revved up in self-defence. ‘Hasn’t Avasthi told you? Ask him.’ He turned to Avasthi. ‘Go on. Tell him,’ he said with obvious pride.

  ‘Not long ago Javed Mian completed a novel. Took him all of eight years. He used to sound me out over it. Read out bits. I found it very good. Suddenly he was seized with this madness. Went and sold it, along with his newspapers and old books, to the kabari! That’s how serious it is. Javed Mian needs to have his head examined.’

  ‘How much did you sell it for?’

  ‘The handsome sum of eight rupees! Waste paper by the kilo! A rupee a year, good bargain, no?’ Farooqui gave vent to a crazy, sobbing laugh. ‘Did any publisher ever buy a script for a sum as low as that? My kabari’s a deal better. Ha! I’ve set a world record!’ He brayed like a joyous lunatic.

  ‘Why did you bother to write it at all?’

  ‘Enlightenment came to me, my son, just after I completed it.’

  ‘Eight years!’

  ‘A little over that, actually. It was a kind of shelter, that book. Helped me across eight difficult years. A bad time. Kept me distracted from my troubles. I’m safely across that time and it’s served its purpose.’

  ‘That’s just what some of my books have been. But I didn’t get rid of them.’

  ‘There’s another reason. I couldn’t bear to read a single page of that book. Not a page. I don’t mind telling you this—many times during those eight years I touched rock bottom. There were times when life had battered all the literature out of me, and my so-called philosophy had drained away. Weeks when I wrote only a para a day, then only a line. But always a line, never less. I swore to myself that come what may, one line would be written. Defying my situation, you understand? Now when I read that book again, somehow I can’t concentrate on what’s there on the page. Instead, I’m reading a horrible undertext—all that happened to me the day I wrote that particular passage. Say I come across a fictional situation I’ve built, and my accursed memory gets active and I start saying to myself—That’s the part I couldn’t complete because my Ishrat vomited blood and it was a Sunday evening and I ran from pillar to post and couldn’t fetch a doctor. I read the next para and say to myself—This bit’s more poised—I wrote this a while later, when she was dead and buried and I could think in straight sentences again. I crossed out fifty-seven lines in between—they didn’t seem right—until fifty-seven days later I found this line. Simple, rounded and true. I go over the next chapter and I remember—this was written on the day my son abused me, threw a shoe at me, attacked his brother with the kitchen knife and my wife grabbed at it desperately and cut her hand instead. After a few more passages I read a page and recall how that day I received a legal notice from my younger brother, Kamran. And the next chapter, written on the day my son smuggled important title deeds across to Kamran and I received a threat to vacate the house, else our things would be thrown on the footpath—and someone hurled bricks into the courtyard at night. Allah knows, it wasn’t an easy time. I needed something to keep me sane. This book, all two-and-half kilos of it, was my asylum. But I can’t bear this embalmed text of pain. It’s like being forced to watch the happenings in the green room when you’d rather watch the stage. Each time I look at that book, it hurts my heart. I had to put it behind me. And yet I couldn’t bear to burn it …’

  Farooqui’s voice had sunk to a reedy musing, his face fallen slack in a myriad intersecting lines. He cleared his throat loudly, rose and drank some water out of the surahi in the corner, turned and offered them some. He carried the surahi to the verandah, splashed water on his face, and mopped it with his sleeve. He came back beaming, replaced the vessel and produced his malevolent laugh again.

  ‘So I’m doing humanity a great service, sparing it my talents as a hack writer. Sometimes I feel the whole of my life coming up in my throat like a ghastly vomit and I’d like to spew it all out, but that’s no reason to write, is it? I’ve started a campaign to discourage misguided idiots from unnecessarily burdening our shelves. Starting with you, young man. Now consider—all your life you’re like Pavlov’s dog, conditioned to record and reflect. Rushing up with each new experience. Encashing it for words. Until one day the account’s depleted and you’re bankrupt. All your life you’ve shut yourself up. Told people to clear out, not disturb you. Then one day you find your house gone ghastly still. Everyone’s gone. The old are dead, the young flown off. What do you have? Dead books, silent walls, rags.’

  Sravan felt himself shiver. It was hitting too close. But Farooqui’s acid voice wouldn’t leave off. ‘Know this,’ he persisted. ‘As you grow older and improve in your chosen work, a curious thing happens. That skill that was your greatest joy turns into your bitterest ache. It feeds on your lifeblood. Claims more and more of you. Thrills you. Punishes you. Drains you. Lashes you on from performance to greater performance. Loneliness to greater loneliness. It’s like a boa constrictor. And all the time a fellow doesn’t stop telling himself his own story. When the narrative stops, he dies. Even when he sleeps, oblique stories go on. A pseudo-order, janab, a completely fake thing! I tell you—all my life I’ve been possessed by this punishing demon that dragged words out of me in never-ending command. Books and more books. One day I awoke to find that a world had passed away under my nose. I’d known, I’d seen it going, but it hadn’t registered. But when the knowledge came, it struck at me so violently there was no writing it down, no.’

  He fixed his burning, broken eyes on Sravan. He looked much like a boa himself, tightening his mesmeric persuasion around Sravan, watching him like a predator. There was a moment of silence. Then Avasthi’s sane voice broke in.

  ‘Don’t let this old fool get the better of you. That’s not the whole truth, Sravan, just his side of it.’

  ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Mine? All right—it’s not pretty but I’ll let you have it. I’ve come to suspect that I’m surrounded by parasites. Yes, they’re my family, but what of that? Time-servers, every one of them—wife, daughters, sons. None of them worthwhile in my sense of it.’

  ‘Your standards of sincerity must be impossibly high,’ remarked Farooqui with a gruff laugh.

  ‘Think what you like. It is the harsh truth of years. There are only two things I can count on: my pension and my writing. The only two things tried and tested.’

  There was no trace of complaint in Avasthi’s mild voice. It seemed to rattle Farooqui’s querulous soul. He produced a scornful snort. ‘One day,’ he predicted, ‘one day they’ll let you down, too. The pension when you find you’re too old to go to the bank and collect it and have to live on the sufferance of insolent bank clerks; the writing when you find there’s no excellence there, either.’

  Avasthi abruptly lifted his dun-coloured cloth bag off the floor, laid it on the table and turned to face his friend sternly. ‘That will do for now, Javed Mian,’ he said summarily. ‘I know excellence when I see it, just as well as you. I picked up something
excellent yesterday afternoon. From Santosh, your kabari. I consider the three hours I spent on my gouty knees, rummaging in his bundles of waste paper, well spent.’

  Farooqui’s eyes recoiled. He looked from the bundle to his friend and his brow crumpled.

  Avasthi continued lightly, ‘Yes, all two-and-a-half kilos of it. And I must tell you, Javed Mian, your signing amount’s gone up by two rupees. The kabari paid you eight rupees—I paid him ten. Congratulations.’

  Back home that night, Sravan placed the Saraswati on his table beside his PC and thought by turns of the three old men. Writers all, they had depended on their work for sanity and sense and had come to fear and despise it. And none of them could ever break away.