Zaira’s heart spun with pain. ‘Karan…’ She went to his side, put her arm around him. ‘What an awful thing to live through…’
He wiped his face. ‘The funny thing is, I don’t blame my mother; she was bored, dissatisfied, tortured. She did what she had to although she had no right to do it.’
‘You don’t blame her for what she did?’
‘Not any more; I try and understand her more. I left Shimla shortly after my eighteenth birthday. I decided to train as a teacher; instead, I got waylaid. I got drawn to photography. I always tell people I like photography because it’s about ways of looking, but deep down, Zaira, it’s about my perception of the relationship between self and surface. When I look out, I look in. But I never ever look back.’
Looking at his face, streaked with tears, a summary of private violations, she was overcome. How bravely he had fled home, how defiantly he refused to return, how fiercely he had given himself to his craft. It struck Zaira that Karan’s fascination with Bombay and his desire to document its details was not merely an aesthetic decision but also an emotional obligation: Bombay had filled the bullet wound made in Shimla.
‘I cannot forgive what my mother did,’ he went on, armoured by her attention, ‘but I can try and forget it.’ Then he laughed. ‘Who the fuck am I kidding? I guess what keeps me going is what she wrote to me in a letter only a few weeks before she died. I was in my last year of college; she was bed-bound after a stroke.’
‘What did she write, Karan?’
‘People love people in such strange ways that you will need more than one lifetime to figure that one out.’
‘Amen.’ Zaira’s mind reached to comprehend the ugly, unbearable loneliness and sexual discontent that had forced Karan’s mother to commit such a heinous infringement. She felt Karan’s mother had been a weak person, but honest to her weakness; this did not make her actions forgivable, but perhaps in her last days the consequence of her contravention—Karan’s defection—had been transformative for her.
‘The closer I get to Rhea the more I discover the truth of my mother’s words.’ Karan’s voice was calmer; he seemed to have moved on from the heart-halting recollection of his desecrated childhood.
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘I think it means I have to learn why Rhea is drawn to me although she is so obviously and madly in love with her husband. Although,’ he added, tilting his head, ‘I’m not so sure about her feelings for me any longer.’
Zaira suspected a romantic fracas. Karan’s face had fallen; there were dark circles under his eyes. He was a textbook image of romantic disrepair. ‘Has she chucked you?’
‘I came here to tell you about our fight and that it’s gutted me but I ended up telling you about Shimla…’ He shook his head. ‘I’m a fool, Zaira.’
She returned to her chair and resumed eating. ‘Why did you fall out with Rhea?’ Her brow crinkled with curiosity.
‘She got mad at me and quit on me.’ He shook his head. ‘Been a few weeks now.’
‘Why on earth, Karan? She was hung up on you so bad, and the last time I checked you were doing pretty neat.’ Zaira was glad that he was talking about Rhea; the confession about his childhood had shaken her, although her training as an actor easily allowed her to conceal the depth of her shock.
Karan’s face was overcast. ‘Can’t you see how cut up I am now?’
‘You’re bleeding,’ she said, immediately acting on his plea for sympathy. ‘Broken bones and all. I should call paramedics, but before I do, tell me: why would she leave a lovely lad like you out in the rain?’
‘Argument, et al. She was trying to be helpful; I was being pig-headed.’
He was not going to make the mistake of telling Zaira that Rhea suspected he was not cool with Samar’s private life. Rhea might still get around to forgiving him, but Zaira, a Samar loyalist, would grill him on a skewer.
‘She has no dil in her, Karan.’ Zaira left the dinner table and Karan followed her to the living room.
A line drawing of a nude man dominated the square, cosy room: the man had thin, ungainly legs and an attractive torso; his hair came down to his neckline, and he was looking into the distance. On a couch was a fuchsia paper bag with the label, Good Earth. There was a mess of CDs on a small table between the couch and two batwing chairs.
‘Well, maybe she had a good reason to vanish,’ he said in Rhea’s defence. ‘I was too hung up on my point of view.’
‘You’re not sharing the small print here.’
‘It’s petty stuff,’ he said evasively.
‘It generally is; but small things add up to a ghotala so big you wouldn’t believe.’ Opening the window, she stood with her hands on the balcony railing, her face against the currents of a warm, sweet breeze unleashed from the seashore. She knew Karan wasn’t going to give her the details of the fight and she resisted intruding further. ‘Have you tried to meet up with her since then?’
‘Her husband might be in town. I don’t want to show up on her doorstep when he’s around. If she wants to be alone,’ he reasoned, ‘why crowd her?’
‘Are you sure your pride is not coming in the way?’
‘Well, she’s never said as much but I get her need for solitude. She’s a bit of a solo show.’
The blurry details Karan furnished slowly coalesced into a clear picture in Zaira’s head. Rhea had recognized Karan’s electric talent, and she had taken him under her wing. She had driven him around the city, given his mind her alert, vigorous and sophisticated companionship. But when Karan had grown needy—maybe even possessive—it was enough to make the feline Mrs Dalal up and go.
‘You’re having an affair, aren’t you?’
‘An affair?’ He gulped uneasily.
‘Yes, she’s cheating on her husband with you.’
Zaira’s words alarmed him. ‘I don’t have a name for our set-up,’ he said stiffly.
‘I can buy that.’ Zaira was only too well versed with love that lay beyond language. ‘Maybe the two of you are, as the trade press likes to say, “just good friends”?’ she teased.
He shot her an exasperated look.
‘Give her some time,’ Zaira said. ‘She’s overwhelmed, but she’ll come around.’
‘I guess.’
She touched Karan’s cheek and, in his watchful, tender eyes, glimpsed his engagement with first love, its insurgency and disrepair. Having known this love, its permanent wound, she was glad for Karan. ‘What do the boys of Bandra call it? Loveria. Fever of the heart. Do what it takes to get you through it. Eat a peach. Go for a walk. Drink gin. Wish on falling stars. And then there’s steam inhalation.’ Momentarily, loneliness flared out of her, almost scalding him. ‘That always works. Steam.’
Although she swiftly returned to the succour of her low-lit studio, Rhea remembered Karan with reproachful regularity, like a newly abandoned bad habit.
Before long, loneliness set in once again like a nagging toothache. Adi was away in Singapore. There were no friends to call. She missed her father. She put in an extra shift at the animal shelter, returning home after long, tiring days, counting on exhaustion to bring sleep. But that was not to be and, lying in bed, her mind relentlessly sought Karan.
She missed how he had reacquainted her with the city that had grown her up, mercurial and revolutionary, congested and irate, a city she had forgotten she had loved too greedily for too long already. If she had been looking for neither friendship nor romance, what had she hoped to derive from her association with Karan? And what question in her heart had he answered that she was still remembering him? She was furious with herself for succumbing to the gleaming coin of Karan’s genius, his subtle, unhurried, engaging charm. Although she had resolved never to meet him again she no longer knew how she would cope with the inertia of her marriage.
A month after she had left Karan on the streets of Bandra and driven away, he reappeared at her doorstep. Longing had left him suddenly gorgeous.
‘Is Ad
i in town?’ he asked cautiously when she opened the door to her apartment.
‘Singapore.’
‘Are you busy?’
‘Only occupied.’
‘May I come in for a bit?’
She led him up to the studio where, minutes later, her arms thrown out in ecstasy wrecked an exquisite but flawed vase.
Karan cradled her in his arms as she wept. ‘Why are you so sad, Rhea?’
‘It’s broken.’ She pointed to the pieces of pottery. ‘It was perfect.’
‘I thought you were crying…because you’re cheating…’
‘Don’t be so pedestrian!’
‘You love Adi.’
She closed her eyes, turning away.
‘Then why do you want to see me?’
‘Consolation in contradiction?’
‘Not to forget convenience.’
She slapped him. ‘I just want love to leave me alone for a while.’
He said nothing; the ardour of her wrath excited him terribly.
Their field trips recommenced.
The road leading to Kanheri Caves was narrow, potholed. From either side of the road, green bamboos shot into the sky, forming an overhead trellis that banished almost all light, leaving them in leaf shadow. Karan found the air pungent; he heard crickets chirping in verdant places of renewal as a puzzle of shadows changed shape with the passing sun.
Rhea brought the car to a halt near a signboard warning visitors of leopards in the vicinity.
When, after an hour of meandering through second-century monastic chambers, Karan blurted impatiently, ‘I’m not into this historical shit,’ Rhea disappeared into the spectral gloom, craving Adi, his old-world poise, his ability to indulge her without making her feel indulged.
‘Let’s go and sit by the waterfall, Rhea.’
‘If you don’t want to take any photographs then we should leave.’
‘This is a wonderful place; thank you for coming up here with me.’
‘But if it’s of no use to you…’
‘Everything does not have to have use, or a function, Rhea.’
She looked at him, astounded.
‘Who brought you here?’ he asked, his tone softer now.
The expression in her eyes mellowed. ‘Adi. Our last year in college. He’d once stolen fireflies from the forest bordering the caves as a gift for me.’
‘I remember. You told me about it one afternoon in your studio.’
She studied Karan’s face; its tightness reminded her of a bowstring on which an archer has balanced a poisoned arrow.
‘Would you ever tell Adi you came here with me?’
‘No.’
‘You should.’
‘I don’t tell Adi everything about my life,’ she said. ‘Just the interesting bits.’
‘Would that include your gift of being able to fuck two men at the same time?’
‘In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve never fucked two men at the same time. But now that you’ve planted the idea in my head.’
Several minutes of silence passed.
A copper-winged cuckoo called out from the verdure. Screeching wildly, two monkeys flung themselves on to a branch high above them, unleashing little leaves like rain.
Her words had hurt him, she knew, and she drew him into her arms.
He shrugged off her embrace; it felt like ugly charity.
They were quiet for a while, their eyes drifting over the topography before them. Here, the wild forest had met the remnants of civilization in the caves, and they felt suspended in the collision between the two. The timeless splendour surrounding them resounded with wisdom and betrayal, and they were compelled to speak in whispers, for the landscape discouraged sound, supplying a stillness that held them both like a flag in a fist.
‘My marriage is not perfect.’ She dusted leaves off her hair. ‘It’s not what you think.’
Right after their marriage, Adi had eagerly suggested the idea of raising a family. ‘I agreed. I didn’t care about children one way or the other. If it made Adi happy, I was ready.’ But when she didn’t conceive after three years of trying, they started to frequent doctors who gradually made their lives hell with innumerable tests, awkward questions and enterprising but impossible advice.
Finally, peacefully, she resigned herself to the bleak, cruel possibility of infertility.
‘And Adi?’ Karan asked. ‘How did he take it?’
Her forehead crinkled. ‘There must be something he’s trying to forget in his bourbon. There must be some noise in his head he cannot bear to hear…so he listens to jazz.’
‘Has he been depressed for long?’
‘Several years now; he’s not the man I married. It’s easy to feel loved by him, but also terribly lonely.’ Adi’s sadness was his mistress; a secret shrew she could neither confront head-on nor overcome in private. ‘I would do anything to make him whole again.’ Her eyes glinted. ‘Anything at all.’
‘Did you consider adoption?’ Karan asked. He now knew what Rhea had prayed for at the shrine of Mount Mary.
‘We went to several agencies,’ she replied. But she had sensed Adi’s reservations: he wanted children of his own. ‘I refused to bring home a child only to have her feel like a second-class citizen.’
‘But there’s still hope?’
‘I could conceive any time…’ She struck her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘It’s a matter of luck and chance, and I can’t seem to wrap my head around that.’
‘The last few years have been rough for you…’
‘And for Adi.’
‘He must be resigned to it by now.’
‘I wish…at one time there was nothing more important for him than his own flesh and blood. It’s left him so…’ she struggled for the right word, ‘…aloof.’ She could picture him on his chocolate-coloured recliner, immured in the blues, sipping bourbon, a soft, slow melancholy waltzing between them, in the ballroom of their marriage. ‘Actually, he’s been very depressed. He’s been treated for it. But it’s not as simple as a chemical imbalance.’
‘What is it then?’
‘An old-fashioned melancholy. It’s strange; he’s such a pukka corporate guy that you’d never associate such complexity of emotion with him. But he’s also got a wonderful, large heart, and it’s only natural he should want to fill some of it with children.’
‘And you would have his children even though you’re not actively interested in them?’
‘If it would make him happy, yes.’
Karan was silent. It occurred to him that she had committed some extraordinary sacrifices for Adi. She had given up her career as a potter because she didn’t want to compromise on the quality of her marriage; she had tried hard to have children, although she knew that if she ever had them they would only disrupt her solitude. He thought of the first time he had gone to her house; foolishly, he had been impressed with the exquisite interiors when, in fact, the house merely curated the unholy quietness held hostage in Adi’s heart. He thought of her baking a cake for Adi, and he remembered thinking that she could just as easily have bought it; now he saw it was the depth of her love that had encouraged the selflessness with which she whisked eggs and dusted cocoa on her kitchen counter.
After a moment, he reconsidered the word he associated with her: sacrifice. Perhaps they had not been sacrifices, he thought, but choices she had exercised to live her life with the man she had fallen in love with as a young woman. The choices had driven her from the safety of her Breach Candy apartment to Chor Bazaar and into the web of their initial conversation; the choice had led her to this moment. He wondered where choice and chance intersected, and how much either he or she was responsible for anything they had done so far, and would embark on in the future.
His heart shuddered. ‘I’m sorry…for the both of you.’
If she had concealed the discontented details of her marriage—the infertility, Adi’s depression, her truncated career—it was not to appear mysterious but b
ecause she despised being pitied. ‘How can you say you’re sorry for us?’ she asked.
He didn’t know what to say, or if he should say anything at all; she looked like a sky readying for a storm.
When he opened his mouth to speak she had already left his side.
He followed.
She ran through the maze of caves, darting around pillars, hiding behind a lingam.
He caught up, reached for her.
She buried her head in his chest.
Her eyes were not moist as her lips reached for his mouth; she saw then, in his eyes, the hint of a wolf, the man he would become one day.
Grabbing her by her hair, he buried his lips in the hollow at the base of her throat.
The nail of her thumb, painted the red of ox blood, tore a line along his neck.
8
Zaira pottered about in her kitchen, a part of her conscious that Samar was by her side. They darted round each other as they got dinner ready, with the charmed, chaotic, intercepting motions of two people who had known each other for far too long.
‘Thanks for getting the biryani,’ she said.
‘I bet you single-handedly keep Mahesh Lunch Home in business.’
‘Arre, yaar, their biryani is a killer!’
‘How was work today?’
‘I had an interview with Cine Blitz.’
‘Didn’t you stop giving interviews?’
‘They’re giving me a cover, and my producer asked me to work the machine for this new film,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Anyway, this young journalist walks into my trailer and asks me what I do in my spare time. I told her I watch films and read books. She looked at me in horror and asked, “You read?” and I was, like, “Yeah, it’s not tough,” and she continued to look amazed, and repeated, “You actually read,” at which point something in me snapped and I said, “Well, only when I’m not masturbating fervently, you know, so I don’t get a lot of reading done but you’ve got to keep at it…”’
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Page 11