Blueprint for Love

by Chatura Rao

  Suveer remembered it as if it was yesterday.

  3

  M

  idnight and the night was still except for the occasional honk of a passing vehicle.

  Reva recalled the crumbling of her world eight years ago when Aboli returned from the U. S. only months after she’d left to do her Masters in Engineering. She’d died in a road accident on a highway so foreign and far that Reva couldn’t even imagine any of it.

  The brown eyes were closed, the face sallow. It had taken three days for her body to reach the family in India. She was taken out of the coffin, dressed in a saree her mother had planned to gift her when she came home on vacation, and laid out in the dim hallway of the old house on a bamboo bier, a garland of rajnigandha, her favourite flowers, about her neck. Manohar uncle in his dhoti and shawl, shoulders bent, sacred thread sagging, had performed her last rites in a corner of the hall, his back to both the living and the dead. At the priest’s muttered demand, spoon after spoon was poured into the flames. Home-made ghee fattened the sacrifice into a blaze.

  Later through the receding smoke from the rituals, he had emerged. He’d worn a shirt over his dhoti. ‘How was your train from Mumbai?’ He’d surely not wanted to hear that Reva had cried all the way.

  ‘It was comfortable,’ she’d replied, her words muffled in his embrace.

  Before Aboli left for the U. S. she had told her father about her decision to marry Suveer on her return.

  ‘He’s a sound recordist, the son of a policeman and from a caste lower than ours,’ her father had listed coldly. ‘Is there anything that recommends him?’

  ‘I love him,’ Aboli had said bravely.

  ‘It’s called lust,’ he’d retorted, looking at the wall above her head to disguise his reserve at having to refer to sex in a conversation with his daughter.

  ‘Marry a boy from our own community,’ Aboli’s mother appealed nervously. ‘You will come to love him. For a beautiful, well-educated, cultured girl from a good family like ours, there are no dearth of offers . . .’ Aboli found her mother’s logic common and stupid. How could anybody replace Suveer? She maintained a grim dissent.

  ‘How dare you disobey me!’ Her father, standing on the terrace of the house one evening, had spotted Suveer dismounting from her scooter at the end of the lane, seen them hug in full public view before she rode her scooter back home. ‘You’ll marry him over my dead body,’ he’d declared. Only, she died first.

  Suveer had come to the house and a swollen-eyed Reva had led him wordlessly, weaving a path through the gathered family, to Aboli.

  Twice-removed relatives cast curious glances at him, while Aboli’s immediate family shifted away, wishing to have nothing to do with a relationship they had opposed so vehemently. All except Reva, who took a protective, albeit brokenhearted, stance by standing behind him.

  Suveer crouched alone at Aboli’s feet, his fingers close to but not touching her shroud-covered left ankle, the ankle he’d ministered the first time they’d met. He moved to kneel by her shoulder and gaze dry-eyed at her still face, looking like death himself.

  He’d left immediately after for the crematorium in an auto rickshaw. A black hearse carried Aboli away from the house, her father and a cousin on her mother’s side squeezed awkwardly in by her coffin. The rest of them had lingered swollen-eyed at the open gates and doors. Spaces that Aboli’s exuberant presence had filled gaped between their bodies.

  Even after she died, Aboli stayed alive in the old house for Reva. There was her seat at the table and the cupboard she had kept her clothes in. Reva could hear her giggle about something from her day at school. She could still picture Aboli and her much-smaller self carrying their dolls up the steep, concrete stairs that led to a tree-shadowed corner of the terrace to play on afternoons after school. But the family’s fate line scored first its daughter out and then the house that had held her traces.

  Three years after Aboli’s death, Sharada sunk a fortune in her overseas software business and the old house (mortgaged for the loan) had to be sold to pay off the debt.

  Reva’s older brother Shiv lived in Indore and she lived in Mumbai, far away from each other and from the house of their childhood. Despite this, they were shaken by the loss.

  They had chatted about it over Skype one Sunday: Bad luck. I guess so, Dada. You know Swara aunty was going crazy trying to keep the place in order. Did you notice the water seepage in the kitchen? It’s all decaying, really. It’s probably for the best. Chal, time for tea with the in-laws. Catch you later, Reva had said. But she’d logged out and kept sitting, thinking with dread about the bulldozer.

  When it came, it would expose the dark corners to sunlight. Dust would rise and settle in other places. Alien feet would walk about, planning new homes, modern spaces that included the latest amenities. The heavy trunks of the mango trees would be sawed through; the blazing almond leaves would fall no more . . .

  Reva connected with Suveer again three years ago on Facebook. She’d sent the Friend Request and he’d accepted it in a matter of seconds. She told no one about it, not even her brother Shiv.

  Suveer and she began writing to each other, careful, light-hearted emails that detailed the lives they now led. They did not reminisce about Pune. A formal, tentative friendship grew between them.

  Last year Suveer and Reva met for the first time to celebrate Aboli’s birthday. For Reva it felt like a pilgrimage to a shrine that existed, now only in the compartments of her memory and perhaps, in his. Aboli’s place was anywhere on the map midway between where they were on her birthday.

  Reva lay in her bed on the other side of the wall from Suveer, bound to him by loss. It was all gone: the house, her sister, their dreams, and a half-imagined future. But in her memory they still played together. She felt lucky the cupboard wouldn’t close; that there was still space within it to nest, and familiar scents to comfort the child within.

  4

  T

  he November sky was just beginning to lighten when Suveer and Reva, bundled in sweatshirts, took a rickshaw to the dam. They walked about a kilometre towards the dense green bordering the lake.

  There, Reva sat on a rock while Suveer walked under the trees, a sound recorder the size of a chunky cell phone in his hand, headphones making him seem remote and distant. She set up the small plum cake with its one candle on a piece of newspaper, covered it with another, settled down to wait.

  Suveer was thirty-five and had never married. He had very few friends in New Delhi where he lived. He liked his work and immersed himself in it. After studying sound design from Pune’s Film and Television Institute, he had freelanced in the television industry in Mumbai. Two years ago, he had moved to New Delhi, needing to be closer to his home in the Kumaon foothills. In Delhi he worked for Prompt Broadcasting Service or PBS, a small news website and radio feature production company. He created sound documentaries.

  As he paused under a tamarind tree, the call of the sunbird took him back to his home in Chhoti Haldwani and his mother, Uma, who lived there. After Aboli’s cremation, he had travelled 33 hours straight by train and bus, to be with her.

  A memory came clear of the past as he walked back through the woods to Reva, of the first time he left his village to go to a boarding school. He felt like sharing this part of his childhood with Reva. But before that they had something important to do.

  Suveer seated himself on a rock a couple of feet away from Reva who uncovered the cake. She eased the knife into it.

  ‘Happy birthday, Tai,’ she said. Her voice wobbled a bit, but he smiled as if the birthday girl was still with them, and the moment passed.

  Suveer took the slices she handed him on a paper tissue, but also took her hand and drew her over to his rock. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder they ate companionably, enjoying the rich rum flavour of the cake.

  ‘Thanks for bringing this. Aboli would have approved of cake for breakfast by a lake,’ he grinned indicating the expanse of blue-green water. ‘A swim?’


  She raised her eyebrows. Was he joking? In the old days Suveer had often suggested crazy things to Aboli and she’d often gone along. Reva had been a reluctant party to some of his plans. But she was all of 30 years old now–an independent woman–and Aboli was not here to persuade her into agreeing to his wild ideas, so she shook her head in a firm no.

  ‘At least come paddle. Ever walked barefoot on a lake bed?’ he asked.

  Reva shook her head. She was an average swimmer, a city-dweller, who unlike him had only ever swum in swimming pools. Suveer considered her.

  ‘Don’t you wish to try out stuff sometimes? New experiences set you free.’

  ‘I am free,’ Reva shrugged. ‘I came here to meet you, didn’t I? That’s adventurous for someone like me.’

  ‘For someone like you?’ He pulled his sweatshirt over his head and then his t-shirt. ‘You’ve decided already that you are only as adventurous as taking a trip out of town. Not free enough to go for a swim in a lake. So that’s not fair on a girl like you, is all I’m saying.’

  Down to the swimming trunks he’d had on under his clothes he grinned over his shoulder at her and walked into the lake.

  Reva watched his head bobbing on the surface of the water as he swam out. She raised her hand to return his quick wave, and laughed at the sight of him spitting up mouthfuls of water for fun.

  She sat and watched for a while and then found herself watching both of them from above. A free spirit in the water. A land-bound woman on the shore.

  She found herself on her feet and before she could stop herself, she had rolled her jeans up as far as they would go and set out, paddling through the murky shallows until she was waist-deep. The water held all the chill of early November in central India. She shivered, enjoying the sensation of cold water swirling thick about her. Fish tickled her ankles and she almost shrieked when one too many came around to nibble at her toes.

  Suveer swam over to her.

  ‘You’re too dry,’ he remarked. He placed his hands on her shoulders and urged her head under for a proper dip.

  ‘Water’s muddy,’ she protested.

  ‘Be brave,’ he admonished, grinning. ‘There’s plenty to explore if you dive in. On the other hand there’s nothing you haven’t seen before on the surface.’

  She braved the cold, the currents, floating weeds, leaves and twigs to swim with him. He was right. Below the water’s surface was an experience she’d never had. The current changed from warm to cold without warning. Her eyes stung if she kept them open too long. Visibility was low and every shape was mysterious. There were large fish that moved like shadows, or shadows of things Suveer and she could only guess at. She felt like she was a shadow too, losing both body weight and vertical form as she dived to grab Suveer’s legs before he could get hers. Her yellow t-shirt opened at her waist like the fins of a goldfish. She rose up with weeds tangled in her hair.

  Suveer extricated them, long, strong, greenish-brown twine and wound them around her head as if they were a crown. He looked curiously at her like he was seeing her for the first time. Then he floated the crown of weeds off into the water again. He swam alongside her, making sure she never ventured too deep. They showed each other strange and interesting things. There were water birds wading at the edge of the lake and some floating closer to where they were. A black, long-necked bird which Suveer said was a cormorant sat upon the bare branch of a dead tree some way into the lake, scanning the water for fish.

  ‘Are there crocodiles in the water?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Small ones. A local variety. They only take small chunks out of your inner arm.’

  Reva immediately felt something nip her inner arm. She shrieked even though it was not a second later that she knew it was Suveer pinching her.

  ‘Crocodiles? That’s funny,’ she said, hitting him.

  ‘What’s funny? There are crocodiles in Powai Lake, can you imagine?’

  ‘I ate alligator once, did I tell you?’

  ‘No. What was it like? No, don’t say it was like chicken …’

  Their conversation drifted as they lay floating on their backs, looking at the sky.

  It was mid-morning when they came out of the water and dried themselves off with Suveer’s towel.

  ‘You’ve changed quite a bit from the kid who used to follow Aboli around,’ Suveer said as they sat on the rocks in the welcome heat. ‘You’re perhaps freer than you realise,’ he added almost to himself.

  His towel was draped across her shoulders to cover her t-shirt that was still damp, though drying fast. The reserve he’d noticed about her when she’d descended from the train the previous night had been washed away. Her eyes were clear and stayed on him without shyness. She’d been singing or humming songs they both knew from the tapes he’d once recorded for Aboli. He liked listening to her. She still had bits of weed entangled in her hair but he was not about to tell her that.

  They ate some more of the cake and shared the last of the drinking water. She began to clear away the debris of their picnic, a sign that she thought they were done. He didn’t want to leave just then so he turned to her and asked, suddenly serious.

  ‘I want to tell you about the first time I left home. Can I?’

  Suveer found them a shady spot under the nearby trees. He lay back on the grass, pillowing his head on his rucksack. Reva sat close by him, resting her back against the trunk of a tree. They looked up into it. The breeze stirred the delicate leaf-edged stems and the yellow powder puff shami blossoms that were luminous against the mid-morning sky.

  5

  W

  hen I was a child I felt somewhat trapped,’ he began. ‘Perhaps it was my parents’ . . . difficulties that were hard for me to comprehend. At any rate I wished I could be free. Then four months after my 12th birthday, I was woken up by my father while it was still dark outside. Papa and I were to take our first trip alone to a Government boarding school three hours north of our village on the Bhowali-Almora road. I was to appear for a scholarship exam at the school, a branch of Jawahar Navoday Vidyalaya. If I passed, I would be admitted to the 7th standard. My father had taken special permission from the school authorities to leave me behind if I cleared the exam. He said that he did not have enough leave or money to spend ferrying me to school again two weeks later.’

  ‘They agreed?’ she asked.

  ‘He was a cop, so they agreed. That morning I lay in bed for a few minutes extra–as long as I dared–feeling uneasy. Ma was going to be admitted in hospital that very morning to deliver a baby that had stopped moving in her womb. My father had been ever more grim since we’d had the news of its death . . .’

  ‘Do you not get along with him?’ Reva asked, noticing that Suveer’s tone stiffened slightly while referring to his father.

  He replied after a brief pause. ‘In 1983, despite a warning from his senior officer, Papa filed a First Information Report on the behest of an old woman whose property a politician’s goons had vandalised. The politician made sure that he was suspended for six months. And then kept at the same post for eight years. His righteousness became pride, a burden of rancour that Ma had to bear.’

  ‘Perhaps if she’d been able to understand the reality he lived in . . . Or let him know that she did,’ Reva suggested gently.

  ‘Whatever it was, back then he was aloof towards her sometimes for days on end.’ Suveer didn’t say that his father’s coldness had extended to him too, but she guessed it might have been that way.

  ‘So on the morning of my first journey away, Ma helped me dust out the suitcase and darned the holes in my winter jacket. We tried to speak lightly of daily things, not saying good-bye yet, not mentioning her swollen eyes.

  ‘Her brother, my Pratik Maama, arrived from Moradabad. He wouldn’t look at the bump of the baby, although I noticed how Ma’s gaze sought his in desperate, suppressed grief. Maama awkwardly put a hand to her shoulder and she pressed her cheek into his wrist, holding back her tears. Papa had said it was
alright to cry only once for this baby, and that she must move on.

  ‘When the rest had gone to the hospital to check the arrangements, Ma seated me–I was already taller than her–kissed my forehead and playfully pressed the end of my nose like it was a doorbell. I touched my palm to her stomach. “Bye, baby,” I mumbled. We had made so many plans for it in the past month since it had begun moving.

  “‘I feel like I’m about to lose two children, one of them my best friend,’’ she’d said with a small sigh. I resolved then to do well in the scholarship entrance exam. I’d get admitted to that boarding school and prove to him that I was good. It had after all been my father’s idea to send me away. He’d said that I must grow up among other boys: become a man; join the police cadre, like himself. My going away would also make space for the new baby. So although I’d been wishing to be free, this among my father’s reasons made me angry. My mother hadn’t had the strength to protest the decision, and I didn’t speak to her for days after she’d agreed to it. But I forgave her the day the baby stopped moving.’

  ‘The foetus had died in her womb and she was still carrying it?’ Reva asked.

  ‘Mm,’ Suveer nodded. ‘It had been a few hours since it had stopped moving altogether. Pratik Maama took her to the hospital at ten that morning for her delivery. About the time labour was induced, Papa and I were at the bus stand. He wouldn’t talk about Ma and he hadn’t told me the plan for the journey, apart from a single important detail. The bus for Nainital left at noon.

  ‘My father pointed me to a window seat and continued to stand outside, watching our bags being loaded on the top of the bus. He was a stranger to me, Senior Sub-Inspector Raghavendra Bisht, his face still and severe as he noted details of which buses plied to which destination and observed passengers, bus staff and people loitering or begging. I had squeezed into my corner and looked steadfastly out of the window. I was leaving my mother behind. She would be delivering my little baby brother or sister now. I was miserable at being sent away.