‘That means a lot to me.’
‘Follow me.’
She led him up a narrow, steep stairwell that opened on to the terrace. Bougainvillea, a profligate purple, was trellised over rungs of decaying bamboo; red palms, sunburnt at the ends, swayed in circular terracotta pots. Two small rooms, divided by a common wall, stood on one side of the terrace. Both the rooms had large glass-panelled doors so one could look out at the sea in the distance.
‘Come into my studio.’ She led him in by the hand, a gesture that had a slightly ceremonial, illicit air.
‘It’s like a temple,’ he marvelled.
The inlay of Venetian tiles on the floor caught slabs of light filtering through the glass; a clutter of half-finished vases and sculptures added to the heavy, ruminating air of an artist’s lair. Someone wounded might come here to be repaired, he thought.
‘The other room,’ she said, opening the wooden door in the wall dividing the two rooms, ‘is Adi’s library.’
Wide wooden shelves of innumerable books attested to scary scholarship. Tracing the gilded spines of all the books he would never read, Karan tried to conceal a quiver of envy so palpable he feared she might notice it. It was only inevitable, then, for him to ask about Adi Dalal.
As Rhea unspooled his story, and theirs, her face shimmered with a big and glorious feeling.
Anamika Pandit had been Adi’s first girlfriend. They had started to date at the age of thirteen. Tall, curvaceous, with moss-green eyes, Anamika was also Rhea’s closest friend. Anamika and Adi went out for two years, splitting up rather abruptly after a silly row at the Bombay Gymkhana. In truth, Adi had been desperate to slip out of the clutches of the bossy, selfish south Bombay girl, who would invariably grow up to be the sort of woman who slaps her maids when no one’s looking. It was only a matter of days before Adi’s rejection transformed Anamika into a talented insidious little shrew. Unwilling to put up with the disgrace of being dumped, she made it seem to their friends and peers that Rhea had masterminded the split.
A year later, when Adi actually started seeing Rhea, Anamika’s insinuations seemed to be confirmed. Overnight, Rhea turned into the girl who had ‘stolen her best friend’s boyfriend’. Gentle and private, with heavy, inscrutable eyes, Rhea was easily vilified in the clumsy narrative of their youth, but in truth this cluster of friends had to count on such fiction to shatter the chimaera of ‘childhood innocence’. Rhea’s purported deception thrust them into a temporary, tentative adulthood, replete with its air of ruinous betrayals and romantic havoc.
Crushed by the avalanche of Anamika’s lies, Rhea withdrew from their common circle of friends, and Adi reached out to her in her seclusion, drawing her out of her shell. Rhea was elated to discover that she could tell Adi everything—her scuffles with her mother, her erratic periods, her slowly emerging interest in pottery—and amazed by how intently he listened to her, offering the balm of sensible, comforting words and respecting all the spaces that ought to remain unvandalized by language.
One night, a few weeks before Rhea’s board exams, Adi showed up at her door with a present in his hands, the monsoon in his hair.
‘For you,’ he said, as he extended a jar of fireflies toward her.
She peered into the glass: there were insects in it, small and plump, with translucent wings and downy bellies; they were terribly unattractive.
He had picked them, he said, from the forests of the national park, hazarding physical safety as he climbed the trees where they hid underneath thick, dusty leaves.
‘Why do they give off those strange bursts of light?’
He lied confidently: ‘Mating ritual.’
For two nights in a row she gazed fixedly at the sublime flickers of luminosity. On the third day the fireflies died. Staring at their fat, upended, diaphanous bodies at the base of the jam jar, she called him, panic swirling in her voice. Later that evening, after burying the fireflies on the seashore in a matchbox casket, she suspected that his theft from the forest was as close as he could come to telling her he loved her.
‘Why did he give you fireflies?’ Karan spoke as softly as possible, reluctant to shatter her reverie, fragile and powerful like a tarantula’s web.
‘I had told him I dreamt of fireflies; oddly enough, I could never sleep peacefully once I woke from those dreams. My father, who was an expert dream analyst, helped me grasp the significance of their appearance in my sleep and Adi felt left out in the volley of metaphors between father and daughter,’ she said with a smile. ‘The next best thing was to get me a few fireflies and see what I thought of them in real time.’
‘And?’
‘His gesture served two purposes: I stopped dreaming about fireflies, and slept soundly as a result. It brought me closer to Adi; not as close as I was to my father at the time, but a door opened between us…’
‘Did Adi inherit this romantic streak from his father?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘What did his father do?’ He picked up a yellow vase from the shelf above him and studied it with admiration.
For generations, she said, the Dalals had owned mills in Parel. When the recurrent labour union strikes grew to be too much of a hassle, the senior Mr Dalal sold off his stakes and pursued his lifelong passion for collecting and exhibiting vintage cars. Adi’s mother, a former society columnist for the Indian Express, had abruptly left her husband and son when Adi was all of fifteen. Adi had broken up with Anamika the same year but his friendship with Rhea continued to blossom. A few months later he found that Rhea’s companionship significantly defused the gloom sponsored by his parents’ divorce. Rhea’s robust, enterprising company consoled Adi greatly; although she refused to allow him to sentimentalize his parents’ parting of ways, she heard him out patiently as he recounted their tempestuous courtship, their remarkable infidelities, their wild fights. When Adi claimed he would not repeat the mistakes his parents had made, she reminded him that the strength of a marriage was measured not only by how it was upheld but also by how people responded to its betrayal. Rhea firmly believed that love between two people was frequently betrayed because it was inherently imperfect; however, an acceptance of its imperfection could go a long way in securing its future, its vitality, perhaps even its permanence.
Karan leaned against the wall, dazzled not only by her love story but her insight into life. ‘And what were your parents like?’
‘I loved my father more than any man.’ There was blistering conviction in her voice; her eyes followed Karan’s hand as it returned the yellow vase to the shelf from which it had been moved.
Rhea’s mother worked for Bank of India and her father, Dr Thacker, had been the head of the department of philosophy at Banaras Hindu University. A book he had written, enquiring into the idea of life as a series of interconnected illusions, had come to be considered a classic.
‘May I see a copy of your father’s book?’ Karan asked.
Rhea played with her ear lobe. ‘Give me a minute.’
Sprinting down to her bedroom, she returned with a badly bound edition of Divine Sport: Deconstructing Maya, its pages yellowed with time. Karan gingerly admitted he knew precious little about maya, certainly not as much as he would have liked. As he read the synopsis on the back cover and turned the pages, he wondered: if life were a tapestry of interwoven illusions, then did his photographs merely add to the bulk of cosmic invention? More crucially, was life, in its illusory context, exempt from moral stipulations?
‘Did your father like Adi?’
‘They never had a chance to get to know each other better,’ she said.
After his eighteenth birthday, Adi had left for New York to pursue a degree in finance. Rhea enrolled at Sophia College, where many of her peers had boyfriends who were artists or musicians and she would hear the women complain about their dirty rows, their passionate reconciliations, their unpredictable, fragile moods. Increasingly convinced that one artist’s union with another artist, for all its tumult and tenderness, wa
s not worth the upheaval, she felt lucky for Adi, who harboured no artistic ambitions.
Study hard, she wrote to Adi in one of her innumerable letters. I pray for you.
Manhattan was only Bombay’s long-lost twin, Adi wrote back—it had that same slyness and bad comic timing. From a café on Spring Street, he wrote, You remind me of jazz; you are the echo of my solitude.
Rhea had fallen silent.
Karan gave her a few moments to gather her thoughts, but it appeared her nostalgic recollection was about to take a severe, disconsolate turn.
‘In my last year at college I won a scholarship to study pottery in Berlin; I was raring to go to Germany. Besides, my graduation project, “Sight, Unseen”, had got the attention of two important gallerists. They wanted to acquire the work, show it.’
‘I don’t know much about pottery but the stuff in your studio is pretty spectacular.’
She blushed. She never displayed on her walls the certificates of excellence she had won as a student. Rhea Thacker would, one tutor had written, elevate Indian pottery from the medium of craft it was conventionally considered to be an art form, as it was accepted in the West. Rhea was lauded for her playfulness with form. One creation was a simple blue pot, thrown on the wheel with immense verve, then matt glazed rough; when turned, it revealed the great head of Shiva. Her innovation and skill with glazing added to the feverish interest in her future as a ceramic sculptor; her name came to be whispered with awe in Bombay’s art circles; everyone wanted to know how her life would unfold.
‘In those days, I had a lot of ambition.’ Her expression betrayed the awkwardness she felt in disclosing her past. ‘But, as with everything, that too fades.’
‘Does drive have to fade?’ Karan thought of Samar, who had walked away, mid-recital, from his scintillating life as a pianist.
‘No. It doesn’t have to. But we all make trade-offs. I knew my life could take off, but for that I’d have to keep my relationship with Adi on hold.’
‘So you chose to give up on the possibility of a fantastic career.’
‘Let’s not assume I’d have made good on my initial promise, for what that had been worth.’
Karan grimaced; she was being perfunctorily modest.
‘Was it worth it, sacrificing your career for your marriage?’
She sighed. ‘Adi’s love is a kind of personal oxygen; it can lift you, and once it’s in you it becomes vital to you. I could wrap it around me like a shawl or use it like a sword against the world; I could hide with it, run with it, play with it, show it off like a badge of honour or curl up with it like a cat. It’s moist and huge, pliant and energizing.’ She paused, breathless. ‘Around Adi, I feel lit up from some place deep inside; I feel invincible, extravagant.’
He nodded, unsure why she was extolling her husband; such rampant, exasperating praise made it hard for him to hide the frown gathering at his mouth. ‘Right.’
As if reading his thoughts she said, ‘I should stop…’
‘No,’ he urged. ‘Please go on.’ He was terrified his face had disclosed his true feelings about Amazing Adi but he did not want his envy to interrupt a full account of her marriage. ‘Adi sounds like, well, quite a man.’
‘He is, although he doesn’t allow for a lot to come in the way of him and me.’
‘I see.’ The word possessive flared in front of Karan’s eyes. ‘So his love comes at a price.’ He was relieved to learn her utopia had a secret fretwork of landmines.
‘Yes—and it was a price I was prepared to pay. I chose marriage. And I chose Adi.’ She shut her eyes. When she opened them a few seconds later, Karan could not decipher if she had been fighting to hold back tears. ‘At times, art can come in the way of being human and you wonder if it’s worth it…’ Rhea trailed off. She knew she was telling Karan more than her discretion normally permitted; she hardly knew him, but perhaps his unfamiliarity was fostering their intimacy.
‘You chose Adi, you chose marriage, and gave up your career in the process…’
Pain seized her face. ‘Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I had pursued pottery professionally. If Adi had not minded me staying with pottery masters and studying in their ateliers, my work would have had an entirely different level of finesse. There would have been exhibitions. There would have been reviews of the work. But I will never know all that.’ Rhea looked out through the glass doors; the afternoon was slipping away. She knew he had come here to talk about his photographs but she was swept away into the turbulent currents of her past. She realized that part of the fascination of telling a story was to hear it for oneself. ‘When I met you in Chor Bazaar and you were out hunting for an absurdly named plantation chair I saw in your eyes the rush and rapture that had one day been mine.’ Her voice roiled with sullen contempt. ‘I know what you feel when you step out on the streets with your camera; I know what it is to be in your mood, and live under its compulsion. I know what it is to be an artist at the threshold, with possibilities that remind you only of a blue sky, its boundlessness.’
‘And you know that mood because you had to give it up?’
‘I chose to give it up; it’s not difficult to travel through life without a ticket.’
‘But what about your tutors who believed in your work?’
‘You can’t please everyone, Karan.’
‘And the gallerists would have thought you just fell off the radar.’
‘If folks mistake your silence for muteness that’s their problem.’ She swirled the wheel before her; it started up with a crank, then rotated to a slow halt. ‘Why should I tell a gallerist or a tutor I lost my nerve for an altogether unexpected reason?’ Her face clouded over. ‘A few days after my finals at university, my parents left for an ashram near Aranangaon.’
‘Is that the village near Ahmednagar?’ He put his hands on the wheel between them.
‘Yes it is. And my parents never returned from the pilgrimage.’
Rhea had received a call in the middle of the afternoon from the Ahmednagar police station informing her of the accident. Just when she felt she would slip into a place where there was no light and where she could hear no sound, Adi returned from America, a brief but direly needed appearance. In the arbour of his arms, she cried with demonic strength, soundless sobs that shot up from the well of an inconsolable sorrow.
‘My father often said “everything is just right”. That became my mantra. Accept things. Just be.’
Before Adi left again for New York, they were engaged; a year later, they married on a barge off the Gateway of India, under the silver bangle of a December moon. ‘I have no photographs of my wedding day.’ A cloud of sadness obscured her voice. ‘It’s as if that day never happened.’
The suddenness of her parents’ death and the swiftness of her marriage to Adi had resulted in Rhea’s lifelong engagement with solitude. As her seclusion gradually gathered the intensity of a cyclone, it forbade friends; women, in particular, she continued to distrust, scarred as she had been by Anamika’s lies. In any event, Bombay famously discouraged friendships; there was neither the time to forge meaningful affinities nor to foster a steadfast intimacy.
On their second wedding anniversary, Adi gifted her the pottery studio on their terrace.
She rose and walked toward the kiln, and opened its door. ‘It’s one of the first electric kilns in Bombay. Adi had it shipped in from Germany.’
‘Where you had gone for further studies?’
‘Oh, the scholarship?’ Rhea said, her voice caressing an afterthought. ‘I never followed through with it. Adi was not keen for me to give up this city and shack up with a bunch of hippie potters.’
She looked around her studio. In its dim, flattering light it was easy to forget that she had lost her parents or that she had so cruelly abandoned her friends; here, it was possible to focus so clearly on her art that she could successfully exclude the rest of the world, its rancour and flaws, its expectations and its regrets. She devoted all her spare
time to transforming mounds into a certain shape of clay with her bare hands, baking it to perfection in her kiln, glazing it with the colours she had seen in her dreams. What little time she had left for herself she spent volunteering at the animal shelter in Parel.
‘You must really like animals.’
‘They accept pain with tremendous dignity; their suffering is plain, sincere, without noise. I admire this quality above all things.’ She latched the kiln door, her mind recalling the day it had arrived from Hamburg, Adi’s excited face as it had been fitted in the studio.
‘Is it difficult to spend so much time away from Adi?’
‘Not at all.’
When Adi was in Singapore Rhea missed his habit of playing jazz in the evenings; her ears were famished for the crumbs of an Ellington ditty. She knew that Adi thought of her with ruinous ache, relentlessly; he sometimes said that he missed the tinkle of the bangles on her wrists. But their time apart taught them to count on each other’s absences, to journal the wisdom of separation. The dreamy look on Rhea’s face was now slowly replaced by august composure, making Karan feel that the winding road of her reminiscence had ended at a cul-de-sac.
‘That’s a beautiful story; your husband sounds like a gem.’ He decided to never bring Adi Dalal into their conversation again.
She did not respond.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I was thinking of the talisman I left behind in Chor Bazaar.’ She twirled an errant curl of hair between her fingers.
‘What talisman?’
‘It was a little brass monkey. I’d been looking for one forever.’ The store owner had told Rhea the talisman was used to protect someone you loved. ‘I’d put it down somewhere in the shop when I met you…I forgot it there.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault.’ Her mood had shifted; she was suddenly aware she had spoken too much, that she could not take back her words. Moreover, the vital, trembling attraction between them made her resent herself. ‘Anyway, I had better go and look at the cake in the oven—’
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 7