Blind Faith

by Sagarika Ghose

  ‘Lecture me all you want,’ Ashish Kumar minced. ‘I will not allow you to come.’

  ‘But Pom’s my sister!’ Indi shouted again. ‘We’re supposed to be a family.’

  ‘Don’t let her come!’ screamed Pom in floods of tears from behind the curtains. ‘Don’t let the shameless one come to my wedding!’

  ‘Keep away!’ ‘Shiela Devi quivered. ‘Keep away, Four-Armed-One.’

  ‘You,’ said Ashish Kumar to Indi, ‘cannot come. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is this your final word?’

  She had her career, didn’t she? Her successful, wonderful career. Her looks, her whore-like looks. Wasn’t that enough for her? She had heard she had been recommended for the Magsaysay Award, one of the youngest names ever to be considered. He had heard of the prime minister’s partiality towards her. He had heard that the road she had been supervising was one of the best highways in the country. ‘Your mother and sister do not want you to come,’ sidestepped Ashish Kumar.

  All right, thought Indi, leave me out. Leave me out with my blind eyes and my widow’s weeds. Leave me alone with my highway construction with nobody to keep me company but construction engineers and road-repair men and my secretaries. And the Constitution. But I will have my revenge on you. She dictated another letter to Justin, her words transcribed by stenographers who worshipped Madam District Collector too much to ask questions.

  It’s lovely here in this little mountain town where I live. I’m working with the local government supervising the construction of a new bridge. D’you feel like a trip? Love. XX

  He was still in Saigon. As soon as he received her letter he telephoned his parents in New York to say he was going to be with her because at last she had asked to see him.

  ‘But she is so awful to you,’ complained his mother. ‘She betrayed you. Now her husband’s dead, she wants you again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re still running to comfort her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, if you and your girl love each other so much why don’t you settle down?’ asked his mother. ‘We could get her some treatment here.’

  ‘I can never marry this woman,’ Justin said resolutely to his mother. ‘Never.’

  His parents couldn’t help but admire this toweringly hostile love.

  He flew to her side. With his unshaven face, tattered rubber sandals and army rucksack, Indi’s betrayed lover came to stand by her looking like a ragged street performer. He forgave her instantly for that night in Victoria Villa. He craved to see her made repugnant, so he might love her for her inner ugliness instead of her outer radiance which others inevitably worshipped.

  He remarked at the change in her. The clinging saris tied inches below the navel and skimpy blouses were gone.

  Instead she wore high-necked shirts and starched white saris with her hair tied by her maids in a waist-length plait down her back. To Justin she looked like a clothed Venus De Milo.

  One early morning, they went down to the banks of the icy transparent river He let his hands slide under her blouse and along her back so he could pull her against his thighs. He brought her face against his and kissed her untidily. That made her laugh, but he kissed her again, more skilfully this time. She giggled against his mouth letting the smell of his blond beard and moustache flood into her face. He clutched her breasts, she winced, shifted and eased herself against his palms so that his touch became softer.

  ‘My god, Indira,’ Justin whispered. ‘You’re so fucking beautiful.’

  ‘So I am told,’ she whispered back. A huge snowy profile of mountain floated in the clouds. Shiva’s profile, asleep, with his icy nose against the sky. The sun dazzled down on them as they made love at midday. Justin was the sun, bending towards her in the brilliant light, his fair hair ablaze. He was Surya and she was Kunti, and they were the parents of the unknown.

  There was a new vision in her eyes when they said goodbye. He went back to Saigon. And she stayed on with her construction team in the little mountain town.

  When she doubled up with nausea a few weeks later she knew that her moment of revenge had come.

  The Catastrophe came to Victoria Villa.

  Indi’s revenge on her parents for not being brave enough to love her, was so swift and so final that Ashish Kumar and Shiela Devi died within a year of each other.

  Now that Pom was securely married and Indi working far away at her job, Ashish Kumar and Shiela Devi had thrown themselves happily into a daughter-less idyll. Ashish Kumar had started on the Complete Works of Tolstoy. And Shiela Devi had begun to flavour his yoghurt with little pieces of fruit.

  Then Indi came to Victoria Villa and announced that she was pregnant.

  Victoria Villa was shaken to its foundations. The semal tree trembled and the jamun’s branches sank closer to the ground. Shiela Devi flew into a panic and croaked that unless she bathed in the Ganga this very second, kaliyug would descend on the family. Ashish Kumar contracted mild diphtheria and lay in his study wishing the Four-Armed-One would come for him without further delay.

  A nerve-edged silence sat in the living room. The bedrooms were darkened by a softly playing transistor-radio gloom. This was a shock of monumental proportions.

  ‘It can all be set right,’ said Ashish Kumar defeatedly lying on the sofa in his study. ‘You know it can be set right. Nobody need ever know. Why don’t you go and get it taken out?’

  ‘Taken out? Set right?’ Indi cried. ‘But there’s nothing wrong for anything to be set right. I’ll take care of everything. If anyone asks any questions, I’ll say I conceived on my honeymoon.’

  ‘Conceived on your honeymoon? Are you mad or what? That was almost two years ago,’ whined Ashish Kumar, frantically rotating his eyes. ‘Everybody can calculate. Not everybody is blind.’

  She stood next to her father’s bed like a tall sentinel. ‘I’m not a helpless woman. I’m an IAS officer. I’ll take care of everything. The government has too much sympathy for me. They won’t touch me. Nobody will calculate dates.’

  ‘Monstrous girl!’ burbled Ashish Kumar. ‘Destroyer of my existence!’

  ‘Who? Who? Who?’ Shiela Devi wailed after she came back from her baths in the Ganga. ‘Who is the child’s father?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You can’t remember?’

  ‘I’m single. I sleep with a number of men. It could have been any of them.’

  ‘Any of them?’

  ‘Because I can’t see! Understand? I can’t see anything at all sometimes. I could hardly see who it was. I don’t know who. Maybe a construction engineer. Maybe the postman.’

  This was too much for Shiela Devi. She gave up trying to make yoghurt for Ashish Kumar. She gave up trying to get Indi to keep her voice down, and trying to keep her blindness at bay. She travelled to Benares every week to bathe in the Ganga, sometimes forgetting to dry her clothes. Eventually, she contracted pneumonia and died, telling herself with her dying breath that you had to be truly cursed to be consumed by your own child.

  Ashish Kumar took to his bed with high blood pressure and breathing difficulties. Murmurings about Indi circulated busily in Delhi’s salons.

  Then Indi found an unexpected protector. None other than India’s prime minister and Indi’s namesake reached down from her highest office to come to Indi’s rescue. Indira Ray is the jewel of the service, the prime minister snapped. Is everyone not impressed with her? Her hard work, her dedication, the dignity with which she battles blindness every day. The prime minister put an angry end to the rumours, saying Indira was an extraordinary woman who lived by her own rules. When Indi went to thank her, she found a hard palm cupping her chin with a whispered chuckle, ‘We Indiras understand things, my dear. We’re not very nice people but there’s no getting away from us, is there?’

  In Victoria Villa, oxygen cylinders were brought in for Ashish Kumar. Shelves of syringes and tablets teetered over the bed. Pom came to stay with her dying father while Indi chose
that moment to announce she was going on holiday.

  Justin took Indi to his home in New York. New York exhilarated her: a booming, plentiful city of love, peace and protests against Viet Nam. He took her to see the new skyscrapers that had transformed the city’s skyline. The Sixties were drawing to a close but hippies played music on street corners. Lovers held hands under posters of the nuclear bomb. Flowers came flying out against the Pentagon and the sky was alight with youth. Her eyes flickered in the sunlight. The black bars had thickened slightly, but she could still see if she looked straight ahead. She coveted the mini skirts and bell bottoms that she couldn’t wear in her swollen condition. The peace marchers outside the United Nations building were enviably slim. The first migrants from Asia had begun to arrive and directed openly curious looks at her. She was pregnant yet she was obviously alone and walked with a stick. Where was her husband?

  ‘Marry me,’ Justin said.

  ‘No. I’ll have to leave the IAS if I do. And I can’t do that. I can’t do that for my country’s sake. I can’t do it. India is my destiny.’

  ‘The child?’

  ‘Who cares?’ She squared her shoulders and held herself upright. ‘It’ll grow up in its own way. The way I did. On my own. Why does it need any help? Did I have any? Did I have any help? Any doting parents? Did I have eyesight? How did I pass my exams? Did anybody help me?’

  ‘My child too,’ he reasoned.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I’ll do what I want with it. It’s mine. I’ll give it to an orphanage if need be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Children don’t need much. Food from time to time. And shelter. That’s all a child needs. Like an animal. The rest is an elaborate myth, created by self-indulgent people who want to escape into their children. Because they can’t make a go of their own lives.’

  ‘But I want to be a part of your life.’

  ‘I and the child will be fine. You can do what you want. You can get out if you want.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘My palms were burnt by my own father, Justin. I still got on in the world, didn’t I? I have no eyes. Yet I made what I could of myself. Man was created to forge civilization from the jungle. He didn’t have anyone washing his nappies and slavering over his baby bum. All I have is myself. You get out of my life. Go on, get out!’

  ‘I’ll never get out, baby. Not even when I die.’

  ‘I don’t need you in this. I’ll do it my way.’

  ‘Then I’ll go with you. I can’t be separated from you or my child. I shall come back with you.’

  She shrugged. ‘As you like.’

  ‘Let me be my child’s father.’

  ‘No.’

  He fell to his feet: ‘Please.’

  ‘I won’t ever see you again if you tell the child you are its father. Remember that, Justin. My child is the only thing I have. It’s mine. Only mine. I will be everything to it. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. It’s either the child or me, Justin. You choose. Choose me or your child. If you take it away from me and keep it here in America and tell it that you are its father, I’ll never see you again.’

  ‘Why? Why, Indi?’

  ‘Because I’ll be everything for my baby. I’ll be its father and mother. I’ll see it to it that it learns how to grow up, without this cloying stuff they call love and family life and all that rubbish. Families are nothing but traps; they weaken you. Weaken you into a morass of emotional need. Freedom from attachment was the message of the sages. And I reject all attachment and all the needless weeping and wailing. There are greater battles to be fought, for god’s sake. I’d like my son to be strong enough.’

  She would resist him with her dying breath and the potential of her womb. She knew they would never be equal. She knew they would never be the same in the eyes of the world. But she would never surrender. She would go on fighting her guerilla war. Because she feared that if she stopped he would stop loving her.

  ‘Choose. Me or your child.’

  My love for her is so desperate and so egoistical that even our child is an irrelevant pawn, he told himself. It is only by loving her that I am able to redeem myself. She is my redemption, my only hope against the cruelty of my culture. She’s the cross I want to bear, the burden I’m determined to carry.

  He chose Indi over himself because loving her was the only way he could save himself from self-loathing. Nothing about her would ever repel him. He dared her to become more repellent, drove her to declare a red-eyed war on goodness, so that he could love her with self-indulgent selflessness. He had yearned to lose himself in love and his passions would have vapourised if she had ever made the mistake of being ordinary.

  Perhaps she was right. Perhaps attachment was weakening.

  It had certainly weakened him.

  The child was born in a New York hospital with his father’s blond hair and pale skin. Indi snatched him away from Justin and went back to Victoria Villa with her baby, after a phone call from Pom that Ashish Kumar was sinking fast. Her eyes sparkled as her taxi drew up at the Victoria Villa gate. She walked down the veranda to the semi-circular study, with her baby boy in her arms.

  She sat beside Ashish Kumar and stroked his head. But her father edged away from her to the extent that his airless limbs would permit. ‘Go away,’ he croaked, gazing at her in open disgust. ‘Get out with your bastard.’

  ‘But it’s a boy, baba,’ she said. ‘A golden-haired baby boy. Not a girl.’

  ‘Get out!’ His voice cracked. ‘I don’t want to see any golden child. Any dirty golden child. Get out of here, get out of my room and let me die.’

  Ashish Kumar looked at the foot of his bed to see if the Four-Armed ancestress was still there. He had seen her a few moments ago standing with her head bowed. But with the entry of Indi, the Four-Armed-One had gone, scared off by Ashish Kumar’s elder daughter. Not even a deadly, many-limbed great-granny dared come near Ashish Kumar when Indira sat by his side.

  ‘You,’ Ashish Kumar pointed a shaking finger. ‘You killed me.’

  She gathered the baby into her arms and stepped back from the bed. The Four-Armed-One slunk back into the room and Ashish Kumar was gone. Death had saved him from surrender to Indi.

  She went running out of the room with the baby in her arms. She flung the baby towards one of the maids and marched away to her office. ‘Do what you want with the boy,’ she tossed over her shoulder before stepping out to work. ‘Feed him if he cries. No, he doesn’t have a name. Why don’t you think of something?’

  All over the land, first-born sons were named with fanfare. Naming ceremonies involved priests and families clucking in robust approval at the infant’s penis. Heaven has blessed us with a boy! Sandalwood pens were used to inscribe the boy’s name on betel leaves. His father or grandfather held him aloft, while his mother bathed his head and the gathered priests recited prayers. Planets clashed vigorously in the solar system to announce that the boy was destined to be a doctor. If he was to be a professor (hopefully at MIT), then all the trees bowed in obeisance.

  But Indi’s boy was different.

  Indi’s boy was named by giggling servants.

  They held him against the semal tree and whispered a name. Let’s call him Vikram, they decided. After the dead Vikram who had been married to Indi for a week.

  In New York, Justin squashed a lit cigarette into his palm to feel the same pain that Indi had many years ago. He hardly slept, worked himself to the bone, and went for long walks at night. He wrote to his hospital submitting his resignation. After considering many possibilities, he decided on St. Theresa’s Hospital in Goa, near the scenic town of Alqueria, far away from the city. Perhaps Indi would visit him and or he could visit the child in Delhi. The government had brought her back from her district posting in view of her eyesight and her enormous capacity for work; by prime ministerial decree, Indira Ray was stationed permanently in Delhi.

  When Justin left America, he vowed to his mother t
hat this was the only thing in the world that would make him happy. You have abandoned and lost all rights over your child because you’re so addicted to the wicked Indi, his mother said. Yes, he agreed, but he needed her like a life-giving drug. No child could ever compete with his adoration for his child’s mother, adoration which was fleshed out by a revulsion of himself. Obsession that degraded them both and let him wallow in degradation, helpless to get out of the trench into which he had dug himself.

  The child crawled between the semal and the jamun. Nobody heard its hopelessness but the trees. Nobody saw its gums bleed, or its knees buckle, or its first stumbling steps.

  Their child mourned. But Indi and Justin felt ecstatic in each others’ presence. A burning desire freed their spirits and sent them bounding over the clouds. Their perpetually intoxicated love made everything else, even their own flesh and blood, negligible.

  The way her bra strap sometimes hung out of her blouse, her wet body in a swimsuit when he took her swimming, her hopeless culinary skills, her mannish roughness and extraordinary mind – these were his universe and heaven. They looked on at their child with detached bemusement, from afar, without emotion, because they had no love left to give anyone but each other.

  Winter was in the air. A few months later, the Kumbh Mela would begin in Allahabad. ‘I’m thinking of going,’ said Justin as they sat in Indi’s veranda in Alqueria. ‘Maybe I’ll meet Anand Bhagat again.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘You come with me.’

  ‘Why d’you want to go anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘Because of the dope of course!’ he laughed. ‘What else does an ageing hippie like me need? No, seriously. Just thought it would be good, you know. Wash away my sins.’

  They cooked themselves pomfret curry and ate it on her veranda while Francis Xavier patrolled the beach. Then they went to her bedroom and made love in the life-giving way that they had always done, even though they knew that their tomorrows were diminishing. Her eyes sent tremors down his back. Their unseeing depths made him want to cry out in joy.