Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  He’d never thought of himself as superstitious or suggestible, but he studied the ivory Saraswati on his desk with foreboding. The carving was exquisite, the eyes slumberous with thought. She was curved in a danseuse’s slender droop over her veena, one hand lapsed in mid-lilt upon its strings, the other flowering upwards in blessing. A delicate leg folded in feathery drapes upon her swan, the other melted into the snowy froth of its down. He marvelled at the craftsmanship that had created her creamy sheen. Looking at her long enough in silence was enough to stir a silver spray of strings in one’s pulse and sprigs of verse in one’s head. There was no doubt about it—Ranjana Devi had given him a valuable piece. But not even Saraswati could give Maheshwar Dayal that last book he hankered for. Antim Aadesh, the last command, ever to remain unfulfilled.

  Sravan had never been religious but he needed a rite, however foggy. He lit a single mogra joss stick. He piled up on the table his files and his floppies, his handwritten notes, his diaries and jottings, his albums of cuttings and citations and all his published works. Saraswati’s hand lay upon her veena, frozen in mid-strum.

  He counted the things he had to be grateful for. The instant when a book found its truth. Or when neutral words acquired a miraculous personal sound and it felt as though living sap had risen in a dry shoot. Or when a spell of aridity broke and a reward came, a brand-new idea, complete and searching like a laser beam. There were things he’d miss. The scuff and scrabble of small sounds—pen on paper, the stutter of typewriter keys, and, lately, the milky moonlight of the computer screen, the still-life calm and coherence of this room. The west window, framing a large day like a dusty windscreen, the road in the park outside sparking hot light. And the articulate space beneath the lamp as he wrote. The shavings of light sprayed in through jacaranda branches, lying in thin glass slides upon his worktable. All the writing accessories that somehow went into what he wrote.

  He watched the joss stick burn down. His eyes felt studded with shards. He put everything away, out of sight, locked it all up in his cupboard. Dusted away the ash from the joss stick and unlocked the door of the study. He stepped out, feeling unsteady.

  He was tempted to share the experience with Buddhoo. But Buddhoo was wildly excited over a new project.

  ‘A TV serial, no less!’ he proclaimed. ‘I must get someone to buy the idea. A spicy, slapstick side-splitter! Called—guess what?—Income Tax! Have you time to hear the story?’

  ‘All the time in the world.’

  ‘Sit. This idea came to me like a thunderbolt. Must be your new Saraswati in the house. It’s crazy, yaar, but a delight. There’s a couple—married—stinking rich. Rolling in the stuff. The first few episodes devoted to the stinking-rich syndrome—no moral attached except that it’s moral to be rich and if you aren’t, too bad for you. All descriptive, nothing prescriptive. Okay, they have just one misery in life, this couple: the income tax they have to pay. Get it so far?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘One day their chartered accountant comes with a great proposal—that they go through the motions of a legal divorce. No hard feelings, everything perfectly hotsy-totsy between the two of them, but just as a legal necessity to cut down tax. They jump at the idea, and a few hilarious episodes revolve round the divorce case, etc., etc. At length they’re pronounced ex-man and ex-wife, sorry, ex-husband …’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘The capital’s nicely split up in two, get the idea?’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then, hey presto!—she ups and marries the chartered accountant! D’you like the storyline? Maybe with Satish Shah or Raghubir Yadav in the lead, it’ll be a small hit. All I need to do is find a sponsor—and why not the income-tax department? I mean, the underlying moral is, pay tax like all law-abiding citizens and don’t try monkey tricks else you’ll come a cropper. Hullo? You look cheesed off, Ravan. Is it this income-tax reference? Touched a sore nerve, have I? The lady with the assets disproportionate to her intelligence?’

  ‘It’s off,’ said Sravan curtly.

  ‘How d’you mean, off?’

  ‘I mean off, finished. I’m not going to see her any more.’

  ‘End of an affair?’ prodded Buddhoo. ‘How? Suddenly?’

  ‘Not in the mood.’

  ‘Oho, Ravan. The biwi walks out and you’re called to heel.’

  Sravan refused to be provoked. Instead he asked: ‘It’s Delhi now?’

  ‘Looks like it, yaar. I’m getting restless here without an audience to hear my buk-buk. And Pragya wants me to go up to Mussoorie and help her set up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘After this serial, I’ve other great ideas for the small screen. A second serial is about the elderly chairman of an insurance company who secretly goes around scribbling dirty graffiti in bathrooms.’

  ‘You’ll have to reckon with the censor boards. And maybe an insurance company or two.’

  ‘I’ll burn my bridges when I come to them, ha ha! I have two other projects. There’s an inspiration boom in my head. A variation of my cassette venture: “Quit Smoking” cassettes. Electronic nagging for the woman of today. Good, strident, nagging voices that put the shits into a smoker-husband. You play it last thing at night and first thing in the morning …’

  ‘Except that most married smokers won’t need electronic nagging. And you’re being dangerously sexist, man. What happens to smoker wives?’

  ‘This is a—whatd’youcallit?—a culture-specific product. We can later introduce variety. There’s another idea on my mind. Two, to be exact. I’ve a hunch I’ve hit upon a new energy resource. I mean to exploit the anger reserves of a dozen people and make a bicycle run. I’ve even worked out the formula: energy=pulse rate by bionic milliwatts upon microsecond by square root of brain-wave frequency whole upon force of stimulus upon surface area of brain! I call it the Buddhasen Effect. The other idea is that fantastic thing that came up the other day—what would happen if Don Quixote and Sancho Panza found themselves on the plains of Kurukshetra? All in all, I’m facing a creative bonanza. Got my hands full and it’s time to move, get some change of air …’

  ‘How about me here, stranded? Krishna abandoning Arjuna, what?’

  Buddhoo guffawed. ‘Oh, come on, yaar! You’ve got enough to do. I’ve been Yudhishthira’s dog to you long enough. You just go ahead and climb your mountain alone, as they say in books. I’ll look in from time to time.’

  The evening Buddhoo left, Sravan decided to experiment. For the next four days he spent all his waking hours sitting in a chair, the TV gibbering to fill the emptiness. Scribbling was a behavioural addiction, he told himself. If it can’t be replaced, it can be defied. It was disorienting to arrest this runaway narrative, but he tried to avoid all thoughts of himself or his book. He assigned himself thoughts to think, timed them.

  He wasn’t sure what he was trying to do. Corner the obstructions? See what his first impulse would be once the grit of habit was washed away? When he was stuck while writing he stopped and waited and was never disappointed. Some miraculous form of help inevitably surfaced. Now, stuck in a psychological groove, he tried the same thing. Put his trust in the waiting. Sat still.

  What I have to practise, he thought, is containment. Like holding a glass of booze against the light, teasing myself as long as I can. Lengthening the span. Like keeping an unread book beside my pillow, allowing its aura to spill into my dreams.

  But he worried; an anxious reflex ticked in. He had ideas for future books—what would happen to those?

  I’m also worried about this death thing, he thought. Who knows, I may be let loose in a hell of my own uncompleted thoughts. All the swarming bogeys that I never incarnated in words and am denying expression.

  He quelled his fear. So what if they stay unexpressed? Someone else’ll come along in the future and do justice to them. Maybe I wrote out someone’s unfinished work.

  He soon faced the withdrawal symptoms of creative compulsion. Just keep still, he told himself. No matter what ha
ppens, keep still. His unripened book tempted him from the study, but he pushed it out of his mind. He put himself in limbo, made his mind drop its schemes. Its recurring themes. He scrapped his plots, plans, continuities.

  Sit still, do nothing. Hold remote control in one hand, glass of whiskey in the other, keep eyes fixed on TV screen. Until stoned. It takes one addiction to defeat another. Above all do not regard the calendar.

  If he could just manage to keep sitting still, evening after evening …

  After the first few weeks his mind ran round, flexing and unflexing. Exciting imps of thought. His head began buzzing insistently. Threw up stray phrases, fluttering like leaves before a breeze. Little twinges of ideas awoke, twitched in tiresome repetition. He worked hard to ignore them. An hour of this onslaught and he’d be ready to rush to his study to jot it all down.

  He kept it up for a month. Did nothing, just sat the evenings out alone. Rose only to eat or go to the loo or answer the phone or sleep. And honour his stints at the Centre and the Swadeshi.

  Then acute depression gripped him. Slump in mental metabolism, he told himself. His brain began to regurgitate, with a palpable retch, a mess of bilious emotion. Forgotten aches swam up, burning old angers, stubs of injury in an uncontrollable outpour. For minutes at a stretch there was a constant shudder in his head, as though his mind was loosening its stern hold, discharging itself in long, subliminal quakes. What’s this now? Cerebral ejaculation? He felt he was waiting for a sign.

  Then, one morning, he awoke in a completely silent head. It was so still—he could hear his mind knocking about far away. He inhaled its spaciousness. Gave himself one more day of sitting still. He no longer needed that TV screen or the remote control to calm his jittery hand. He shut his eyes, sitting in his chair. The wet lap and wash of this coolness! His heart drank at it, felt it sluice down and pool up in the dry depths within him.

  He dropped off to sleep again, a sleep so deep that he was absolutely awake to himself. For a long time he stayed that way. Asleep, awash. A soft shirr of water in his ears: he heard its chill, sheer, regular plash. Strings of water spilled along his nerves. His brain seemed a hollow through which a healing river ran. He wondered if this was the sound of sleep, whether sleep had a sound. Or whether it was the flow of his own blood in the silence of his body. He felt himself slicked, drenched, sogged into soft fleece. Dissolved and resolved under a pleasing, soothing solvent, every nerve in his head moisturized, a cool flow pouring down the middle of his skull. He felt himself moving, marvelled that sleep was a movement, felt himself carried across large areas of sleep, marvelled that coolness could have different shades and textures, that he could see and smell its transparencies. This was the flip side of involvement, the relief the mind experienced in letting go of its precious compulsions. He was cast gently on a bank with a thump he heard clearly. He awoke.

  The venture had taken exactly seven weeks. He had no wish to speak. He dreaded breaking the spell. He was still not sure what he had been trying to do, what this abstinence was supposed to generate, why he’d felt it necessary or what he believed he had found. But the phone call had to be made.

  He found the number easily enough, scrawled obliquely across the last page of the directory. It had bided its time, else why had he jotted it down?

  He dialled. The phone rang, twenty-five rings before the engaged beep took over. The owner wasn’t in. He tried throughout the evening with no luck, and all through the next day. He was nervous. Grateful each time nobody received the call. Finally, on the fifth morning, he had better luck.

  ‘Hullo?’ said Vyas, sleepy or drunk.

  24

  Vyas turned up the next morning. He displayed no surprise at Sravan’s invitation.

  Sravan studied him closely. Looked at Vyas as he had not been able to do in years. A tall man with a stoop, hair like a mop and a discoloured smile.

  ‘Anything special?’ asked Vyas. The muscles of his narrow face held in place an expression of frayed politeness.

  ‘Yes and no,’ answered Sravan. ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for some time.’

  ‘It’s too late for that interview.’

  ‘This isn’t about that. Your phone went on ringing.’

  ‘I’d gone home—to Faizabad,’ said Vyas. For an instant his face slackened, allowing itself to lapse into a fleeting expression of apology. ‘So what’s all this about?’

  ‘I’ve been wondering what you’re up to,’ said Sravan cautiously. ‘What’re you working on now?’ He unfolded his subtle, friendly smile and placed it, carefully poised, upon his face. It wasn’t easy. It was ready to overshoot the mark any minute.

  ‘Why?’ Vyas’s eyes engaged his in squeamish trial, testing his face in quick scrutiny before detaching themselves warily from the contact.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Sravan lied. ‘I was at a loose end. Thinking of the old times at the Samiti. You know the sort of low you go into just after you’re through with a demanding book. Post-compositional sadness.’ He laughed. His laugh sounded phoney to his ears.

  ‘I haven’t composed anything for some time now, so I wouldn’t know,’ said Vyas non-committally. That too sounded wrong to Sravan’s lie-detector ears. They were lying to one another. And why shouldn’t they?

  ‘Pity.’ He tried guarding his face with a show of graceful concern. ‘Strange, the way things turn out.’ He mused to fill the uncomfortable pauses. ‘Sometimes life’s developments read like bad literature, no? One’s surprised it could be so clumsily put together. I’ve been thinking of the way you just gave up. Stopped writing. You needn’t have taken the remarks of a few vicious critics to heart. No good talent is ever killed off by bad press.’

  ‘That’s what you said to me then.’ For once Vyas looked directly at him. A searching look that asserted its enquiry right past the civilized formality of his social face and into the unprotected preserves of his guilt.

  ‘Did I? What else did I say?’

  ‘Plenty.’ The flicker of a smile. ‘You were a great consoler of failed men, Sravanji.’

  Sravan couldn’t tell whether Vyas was being ironical, but picked up the conversational thread quickly. Perhaps too quickly to be convincing, he felt.

  ‘Oh, I’ve always been much more interested in the complexities of failure than the predictable machinery of success. The guys who don’t make it are more intriguing than the guys who do. Haven’t you noticed that I always write about anti-heroes? But about that time. What else did I say to you then?’

  Vyas usually spoke in a rush, with a little confused frown. As though he were constantly quelling hurdles of speech. The result was a vaguely troubling timbre.

  ‘You were full of historic precedents. Parading them for my comfort. You said to me, Remember what Sibelius said? He said never pay attention to critics—don’t forget that there hasn’t ever been a statue in honour of a critic. You quoted Samuel Johnson about someone called Foote, someone who was kicked around by the critics and Dr Johnson said Good for him, he’s rising in the world, or some such thing, because earlier no one thought it worthwhile to kick him. High-brow, that’s what you were. You spoke of Boyer, Donatello …’ Vyas’s voice slowed. ‘And when you were editing my book for the Mayur Vriksha people, hacking and slashing the parts I considered my best work, then you lectured me on Rodin.’ His eyes stopped on Sravan.

  There was a catch in Sravan’s throat. He uttered an uneasy laugh and said, ‘You remember.’

  ‘Can I forget?’ Vyas whispered. ‘You said Rodin hacked off the hands he’d carved on the statue of Balzac because everyone who saw it exclaimed over the hands. They seemed alive. So Rodin destroyed them. No part is more important than the whole, he said. Nothing should attract too much attention to itself. That’s why you slashed the best portions of my book and wrote, ‘Recast’ in the margins. Only I couldn’t ever rephrase those things. That’s the way the book came to me—no other.’

  Someone had told Sravan that Vyas had sat over his script fo
r days, phrasing and rephrasing until he’d almost had a nervous breakdown, but that was literati gossip, no doubt. Finally the editor’s opinion had prevailed, and a much truncated version of the original script had appeared. Even Sravan had had to admit that it did not read well. The gaps had showed. The press had trashed it up brutally.

  ‘I told you then,’ said Sravan in an unnaturally thin voice, ‘and I tell you now, it’s a mistake to be so unstrung by a dozen vicious reviews. Let me tell you of my own experience. When I was a new author, I had an upstartish critic named Ranjit Rawat. Fellow whose only source of publicity was his annual shit-spewing reviews of my novels. Sheets of invective—you should’ve seen them. He’d pound on each book and grind it to dust. It happened four times. The same words—my characters not properly realized, my plots incoherent, an underlying sentimentality. A review tells you more about the critic than the book under review, you know. There had to be a strong personal reason. It showed in that carping style of his. So I decided to play a trick on him. I selected an obscure story by Chekhov, and changed the proper nouns to Indian names for places and people. I gave it an Indian tone and sent it to Pen and Parchment. Prompt came the damaging review in the pages of another journal! Rawat was at his vicious worst, tearing the story limb for limb. Lambasting the author who hadn’t the foggiest idea how a story should be written. Whose raw callowness showed in every line. I laughed my guts out. I wrote to my editor friend and he was appalled when he learnt of the trick. I wanted him to print a detailed letter from me, confessing the borrowing and stating my reasons, taking a few pretty digs at Rawat in the bargain. But my editor friend was upset. He said—Are you mad? What about the prestige of my paper? Is the “Readers Write” column a boxing ring? Reserved for personal scuffles? Just keep shut, will you? So I did. But I couldn’t resist having the last laugh: I sent the tearsheets of that story to Rawat with a copy of the original, and congratulated him on his acuity as a Chekhov critic.’