by Pawan Mishra
Ratiram looked at the empty water bottle with disappointment, then continued.
“I can already see perfect goatee potential. You are destined to rule with a goatee’s support. It is common knowledge now that a goatee has helped people, even ones without any ability or persona, in winning attention and respect. Why don’t you grow a beard and then trim it as a goatee? A person with a poised goatee not only achieves a higher confidence level but also looks mature. The joy one gets out of wearing a goatee is unmatched.
“People often gauge your beard first to discern more about you. And if you have a good, healthy, and attractive beard, especially a goatee, you tend to make an instant good impression. A positive goatee sets the platform right in your favor even before you start a conversation. Many a time, you may not even have to speak, however difficult the situation; your goatee speaks for you. To tell the truth, the person conversing opposite to a goatee holder feels that goatee can look into his mind and read it like a book. And that hypnotizes him to tell all his secrets all by himself. A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments.”
“That’s really promising. I have one little doubt.”
“There can’t be a doubt. The goatee is well beyond the realm of doubts. Well, I am just joking. Shoot.”
“All the benefits of the goatee that you have highlighted are extrinsic. Does that mean that the goatee doesn’t improve the intrinsic part of an individual?”
“Not at all,” Ratiram replied. “If you think that a goatee only creates an impression and does not help the personality of the beholder intrinsically, then you are mistaken. A goatee instills confidence in others about you, which induces enviable support to your fortitude, thus unblocking the path to the sincere wisdom which is desperate to announce itself through you and impress people around you in unprecedented ways. Does that click with you?”
“Yes.”
“Lock, stock, and barrel?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent.”
Coinman was surprised that he had never considered goatee-ful life by himself.
“Ratiram is glorifying the goatee a bit dramatically,” he thought to himself, “but everything he has said makes perfect sense.”
Seeing that Coinman was lost in his thoughts again, Ratiram plucked him again from his world. “Here is a tip for you. The period while you grow a full beard can be pretty unexciting. You can make it a little more interesting by observing people who have goatees, seeing how they look, and comparing their faces to yours. The best places to find such people aplenty are high-profile shopping malls, management schools, and offices of high-paying firms. You can even take some pictures for reference later. If someone objects, tell him about your noble goatee intentions, accompanied by a compliment for his goatee; I think you’ll be all right. Hey, let me quickly get some water.”
Ratiram was back within few seconds, gulped more water from the bottle, and asked, “So remind me, where was I?”
“You were talking about how to spend the lull time while the goatee grows slower than the movement of a snail on a concrete road.”
“So, basically, that’s about it. Now go get the goatee of your dreams.”
“While you were away to get water,” Coinman said, “I had an idea. If you don’t mind, may I run it by you?”
“I am at your service.”
“What do you think about earrings? I am sure that earrings, coupled with a goatee, would double the impact.”
“Well, earrings, without a doubt, suck. But if you want them, I wouldn’t stop you.” Ratiram sounded a bit agitated.
“I am sorry, Ratiram, I did not mean to irritate you. Sorry for such a stupid proposal.”
Ratiram smiled. “It’s fine, Coin. You are responsible for your own looks in the end. Feel free to make your own decisions.” Ratiram intentionally made his statement a tad melodramatic, deviating Coinman’s mind from earrings.
“Ratiram,” Coinman said, his chin trembling, “I didn’t know it might hurt you that much. Look, I am sorry! You know how much I care about your opinions.”
“Hey, I got you,” said Ratiram, smiling. “Remember, it’s an insult to a goatee if we put it in the same class as earrings. If nothing else, the goatee is a gift from God, while the earring is a gift from man himself.”
“You know,” Coinman said, “sometimes thoughts come to your mind and, if you are with a close friend, you express them without much thinking. That’s exactly what happened here. I am glad you did not mind it at all.”
Later that afternoon, Ratiram collected everybody and recited the interaction word by word.
“Coinman with a goatee!” Daya cried. “What a sight that will be! And he thinks that he’ll have the look of a wise man, and strangers will insist on a photograph with him.”
“And the girls will drool over him”—Panna laughed madly—“and he will have his face buried so deep into honey pots that the bugger won’t be able to even breathe.”
“Better be his friend now and share the adventure with him.” Sevak winked at Panna’s commentary.
“But why wouldn’t you let the nutsack go for earrings as well?” Panna questioned.
Ratiram replied calmly, “Yeah, that would have been fun. But allowing his ideas would have instilled a germ of self-confidence that could have multiplied eventually to guide him to trust his own thoughts. Then he would have started caring less for my advice.”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
7. The Lady in the Veil
Coinman’s ménage consisted of four living souls beside himself—his father, Daulat; mother, Kasturi; wife, Imli; and distant-cousin-cum-maid, Shimla. The house enjoyed two bedrooms that belonged to the two couples, and one hall of which one corner turned into Shimla’s bedroom each night when she arranged her homemade mattress as soon as she was done with the day’s housework. She usually went to sleep after and woke up before everyone else.
Shimla never forwent wearing a veil when she stepped outside the home, or if someone visited the family. People outside the family wondered if the veil was forced upon her by the house or if it manifested her voluntary surrender to social engagements. She spoke very softly, if at all. Such was her speech that it could not have caused any soreness to the most sensitive soul; it would, rather, have soothed it like soft music. When there were family invitations, Shimla rarely came along to the event; she stayed at home to finish the pending work.
Shimla’s advent into Coinman’s family had been a planned move, to serve a mix of humanitarian and personal objectives, and no one could have guessed at that point the far-reaching consequences it was to give rise to as time went on.
The prologue to her entry to the family dated back to the time when Kasturi was in the seventh month of gestating Coinman—a high-attention and high-priority stage of a pregnancy—a time that requires utmost care in bringing one life safely to the world without losing the other.
Daulat and Kasturi had scanned though all the relatives for a woman who could provide the necessary support during those delicate days. They judged each prospect on a number of parameters: availability, forbearance, simplicity, sincerity, devotion, integrity, contentment, respect for elders, pleasant face, cleanliness, plausibility of staying for a longer duration, and—it must be admitted—level of destitution in current life and likelihood of grumbling about the neighbors. Shimla not only surpassed all relatives in her cumulative score; she also outdid all of them on each individual parameter. This, combined with Kasturi’s philanthropic objective, made the decision easier.
Katori, Shimla’s mother, was Kasturi’s distant cousin; the relation was an uncle’s wife’s mother’s nephew’s cousin’s niece sort of thing, which no one was really interested in accurately tracing, as long as it provided them a bedrock for a mutual companionship that prospered for five years when their families happened to be neighbors. Even when Katori’s family moved to another nearby city, Kasturi often visited her, almost once every month—although only during afterno
ons, when Katori’s husband, Adham, was out at work, because of his screwed-up mind.
Kasturi loved Katori’s three daughters, but her favorite one was Shimla, who was silent, meticulous, and good at household work. Whenever Kasturi visited them, she brought gifts for all three girls, with a special one for Shimla. Shimla’s childlike heart was so touched by this that she carried a noble image of Kasturi even later as an adult.
Kasturi showered immense affection on the family to offset the maltreatment the four females of the family received from Adham. During the time they were neighbors, Kasturi often discussed the issue intensely with Daulat, opinionating that Adham should be sent to the darkest of the prisons, no arguments entertained, and without a possibility of release.
Despite Adham’s unfaltering savagery, Katori declined Kasturi’s secret offers to summon police protection, reasoning that she didn’t wish to raise her kids without a father.
Adham was addicted to executing punishments—he knew nothing more satisfying—so he made sure someone was always up for punishment of some kind. He was a chicken in the outside world that turned into a lion on entering the house.
Shimla was twelve years old, and her younger sisters were eight and six, respectively, when Kasturi became aware of Adham’s animosity for the first time.
Adham looked for an opportunity of any kind to enforce punishment; and if there was none, he converted absolutely normal things into such opportunities. When he ran out of reasons, he typically resorted to punishing his daughters for things like not receiving their last punishment in the right spirit; for being found not studying when he entered the house from work; for burying their heads entirely in books, disregarding his entry into the house; for wearing dirty clothes; or for wearing clean clothes that were supposed to be worn only for parties.
The reasons for Katori’s punishment included the ones for the daughters, plus many more. She could also be punished for not starting the cooking before he entered the house from work; for meeting a neighbor’s wife; for inviting someone to her house; for keeping no control over the children; or for keeping too much control over the children.
The punishment often started off with one person, and then traversed through the rest—completing multiple such cycles. Adham very proudly demonstrated that the human was an animal once and rediscovered his origins regularly in everyday life.
While his favorite punishment for his wife was caning with a long dry twig from a neem tree, his little girls had to stand below the spout of their rusty hand pump, entirely naked, summers or winters, while he pumped the water. “It teaches the little girls at an early age how bad are the two extremes of anything,” Adham had said to write off Katori’s protest against his bestiality when he was, a rare occurrence, in a happy mood. The only traces of relative kindness in his devilish behavior emerged when he used only half the force he used on his wife in swinging the twig on his eldest daughter, Shimla.
Sometimes he returned home fully drunk, and grabbed Katori by her long thick braid to drag her from the couch to the floor. She would grab the other end of her hair to save her scalp. But still, at times she blacked out with pain—fortunately, as it turned out, because then he left her to herself for the lack of resistance.
As a result, the mother always bore swollen ankles, wounded hands, and a perforated soul. The children were afraid, quiet, and depressed. Adham left the house for a few hours after he completed a punishment, as a boastful criminal proudly leaves the scene of the crime. Often, as soon as he left, Katori called Kasturi. Kasturi was thus a constant eyewitness of the aftermath of this man’s brutal conduct. On each occasion she wept heartily and embraced the mother and the daughters.
Thus, when Kasturi needed to ask for Shimla to aid her during her pregnancy, she asked Adham directly, during one of those rare occasions when he was happy by his standards. She knew that asking Adham presented a better chance than asking Katori; if she had asked Katori, Katori would in turn have asked Adham, who would simply have turned down the request as a pointed demonstration of the insignificance of Katori’s existence. When Kasturi asked him directly, it worked for two reasons—firstly, he did not get much time to formulate a response to the request; secondly, being a chicken to outsiders, he could never easily say no to them. He did not say yes, but couldn’t say no. Kasturi did the rest by skillfully converting this lack of denial into his agreement. The only condition that she had to agree to was that Shimla would never come back to Adham’s house. She was dead to him.
Katori’s sadness about not being able to see Shimla in the future was trivial compared to her happiness that Shimla was being freed from the hell of their lives. For her it was a choice between not being able to meet her happy daughter for the rest of her life versus being able to see her miserable daughter every day. What would a mother choose?
Under the spell of moving emotions, she recounted to Kasturi, “I beg you—please take extra care of my daughter. She is as simplehearted as a cow. The poor girl has hardly spoken since she was born.”
“I can’t produce proof now,” Katori had continued, “but I can give you my word that she was very talkative while in my belly. No one else but a mother can make out those indications. Her activities in my belly were like a whisper to me which I could clearly understand. Now you yourself can decide and tell me if I can still be wrong with my judgments. You yourself are going through that splendid time awarded only to women by God, and unless you are unfeeling for emotions aroused by one’s own child—which I am sure you are not—you will be more than happy to accept my point of view. Shimla moved extremely happily, and impatiently waited to see the outside world. Through those movements of hers, she once whispered to me very clearly, ‘Mummy, when do I get to see you? I can’t wait here any longer. It’s getting so boring here.’ She counted every passing minute in the excitement of meeting me in person.”
Katori had moisture in her eyes by this time. She continued, “I didn’t know how to make sure my reply reached her. So I touched my belly in order to appeal to her to have a little more patience. She understood this communication. From then on we talked in that manner and established a very strong bond of companionship.”
Kasturi took a napkin from her purse and passed it to Katori.
“But destiny apparently did not have similar wishes,” Katori said. “On the very day Shimla came out to the world, Adham had something come over his head. I had to receive Adham’s idiotically timed fury on the day, thankfully only verbal, yet it seemed that the angelic bundle got an instant glimpse into her future. Her newborn face became devoid of smiles. Thereafter she hardly spoke and it seemed she wasn’t excited anymore about our sacred bond of companionship.”
Katori paused to wipe her tears. She looked around furtively, as if afraid that Adham might be listening, and continued again.
“Shimla had left all her joys inside before coming out to see the world. She only carried her shyness and forbearance. I want her to see and receive all the joys of the world because I could not offer her anything, not even protection from her father’s evil treatment. I have died every day in my mind with disgust for not being able to protect my own children. I pray to the Maker to grant me at least so much control of my life that I can protect my own children. Give her so much love that she forgets about all the agonies of the past. I wouldn’t even mind if your love makes her forget about us.”
“She will never feel like she’s not the daughter of my house,” Kasturi promised Katori. “I have never wished a little harm even to my enemies, if I have any, but I wish Adham dies with no delay. I know you want him to live for your daughters to have the shadow of their father; but why would you want a shadow that only eats them alive?”
“Hope spoils our lives, more than anything,” Katori replied. “I know too well that he is a Satan, but the hope that he would be fine springs from everywhere in my mind, completely conquering my wish to get rid of him.”
When Kasturi was leaving, Katori gave a parting kiss on Shimla�
�s forehead and promised to visit her at Kasturi’s house.
After joining Kasturi’s family serendipitously as a permanent member, Shimla started adding work to her responsibilities, all by herself. Despite Kasturi’s affectionate opposition to it, Shimla actively looked for opportunities to take over all the humdrum work of the family. It made Kasturi cry, but she let Shimla follow her heart.
Shimla had complete freedom in the house to choose anything she wanted. Relatives often talked about how Daulat and Kasturi loved her like their own child.
Shimla’s unassuming nature influenced her choices; she always chose things that she thought no one else would choose—so as to leave better things for others. No one stopped her from buying new clothes, for instance, but she chose to wear the old ones that were rejected by the other members of the house. Sometimes Kasturi forcibly ordered her to buy new clothes, unaware that Shimla’s tacit goal wasn’t to buy a good dress but to return as much money as possible. Hence her new clothes looked no better than the old ones.
Shimla’s veil, as was now evident to the family, was an armor that had helped her hide from questions she might have faced from her friends if they were to see the marks given her by her father’s stick. Apparently she had started covering herself at age ten. It was much easier to explain the veil than to answer questions about the wounds.
By the time she moved to Kasturi’s house, the veil was almost like a part of her body, inseparable. When Kasturi initiated polite attempts to get her outside the veil, she finally realized the unification the veil had with the girl’s soul. So Kasturi let Shimla be herself, forever in her veil.
Shimla had never imagined good people like Daulat and Kasturi existed in this world. Because of this, she prayed to God several times a day to bestow the best possible happiness on the family, even if it was at the expense of her own happiness.
Several years after Shimla’s advent, when Coinman got married, Imli’s anomalous passion for acting frequently invaded Shimla’s personal space by making Imli disappear completely in her current role and making her exaggerate her behavior according to her role. But Shimla never realized it because her loyalty to the family had formed a layer of high tolerance around her body, her soul, and her mind.