‘Will you be sad?’
‘Vik, let’s not talk like this. What do you mean, sad? Of course I will be sad.’
‘That’s nice, my dear. I thought maybe you would just be relieved. Relieved to be rid of a frivolous tycoon. A fat pig.’
She sat bolt upright in bed. ‘What did you say? A fat pig?’
He laughed, ‘Just kidding. Just kidding, my love-in-a-mist.’
Layers of quiet stretched around the room. Victoria Villa was spooky at night, sending her mind hurtling off in all sorts of directions. A circle of anxiety formed in her stomach, drawing all her feelings into it. A man’s eyes were piercing her from the semal tree. A man hung back, away from the crowd, seducing her with the promise of a Purification Journey, and handing her a pamphlet. One man had a cut on his leg, so did another man, on the same leg. Moksha Herbals, a company selling make-up to film studios.
What sort of disguises did actors require? Did they have false skin, or contact lenses or teeth that could look like someone else’s? Another man was taking her to a party, but leaving her alone and going to stand under the same tree as if the tree was known to him, as if the tree was his parent. She turned in bed, to find, with a shock, that Vik was staring straight at her.
‘Anything the matter?’ she asked quickly. ‘Don’t be sad, Mia,’ he whispered. ‘Never be sad, okay? Promise you’ll never be sad?’ ‘Sad, no, I’m not sad, Vik.’
‘If I’m ever not here,’ he whispered again. ‘If I’m ever not here to protect you, you promise me you won’t ever be sad?’
‘Silly!’ she laughed uncertainly. ‘Don’t be silly.’ ‘No, I want you to promise me, Mia. Never feel sad if I’m not around, okay? Because I’m going where I want to go. Nobody’s forcing me to do anything. I’m happy to do it and I’m happy to die for what I do. I want to get rid of this ruffian forever. I have to prove that I’m stronger than he is. I have to fight him so he never rears his head again.’
‘Where are you going?’ she cried in a panic. ‘Where?’ ‘Why, down the road to Moksha Herbals.’ They laughed into the darkness. There was something in his voice that she had heard before. The sheet felt cold against her thigh. Its clamminess reminded her of cold rainy days in England. Once, when it was raining hard, Anand had taken her down to the street to perform a rain dance for the slowly edging cars. In her raincoat and boots, she had jigged around, a small Good Samaritan, providing rain entertainment for the unhappy folk crawling through a mighty jam. There’s that word which reminds me of the flaming arc of a falling comet. What’s the word? Ah, yes. Trajectory. That’s the word. Trajectory.
My life has taken a trajectory which I could never have imagined.
The bleakness of the night fled with the sunlight of the next day. In train stations all over India, a wintry dawn brought a cup of tea and the latest chartbuster on the radio. Vik’s Azarro was all over the house; he had already left. The jamun stood forlorn but upright. She showered, changed into a bright skirt and blouse and waited for Karna. He came a little later than he had promised, his eyes twinkling, his white pyjama kurta looking freshly ironed. He stared around the garden and grinned. ‘So did you tell him? Did you tell your husband about the photograph and the tree?’
‘No,’ said Mia.
‘Why? his spectacles flashed. ‘Didn’t he notice?’
‘No,’ she lied. ‘There was no time, there was another party here last night.’
Karna threw up his hands. ‘I think the garden looks much better without the tree. Much cleaner.’
‘We’re going to Goa. In a few weeks.’
‘No, you’re not, Maya. You’re not going. You’re coming with me. You’re not going with him.’
She didn’t answer. Vik didn’t deserve Karna’s scorn. He cut his leg to entertain his friends and held masked parties but she couldn’t punish him with her scorn when he loved her so terribly.
As she looked at Karna, he seemed to fade from view. Somebody else stood in his place. Someone who awaited her at the Kumbh Mela. There was somebody there she would see, she knew it. Not Karna, not the pilgrims, not her father, but somebody else altogether, distant from her life at the moment. Somebody – this person – was waiting for her. And he had always been waiting for her to come and see him. She would outwit them all. She would conspire against those conspiring against her. She would persecute all those trying to persecute her. She knew their plans. She knew everybody’s plans. She was the jabbering madcap in a corner who would rise up and trap them all.
‘A heightened sense of persecution, the feeling of a uniformly hostile environment, a focus on coincidences and schemes, is another dangerous sign that the mind is breaking up into delusion and that the patient might require drugs simply to slow down the rate of thought.’
Delhi slid into Christmas and New Year spirit. Silver ribbons formed a canopy across Khan Market. The walkway leading to Greater Kailash market was strung with coloured streamers. Roses bloomed in colonial gardens and cake shops laid out cookies, marzipan and Christmas pudding in their windows. Vik took her to see the Christmas decorations at Moksha Herbals – one of the windows decorated with lots of woolly snow and a clay Santa Claus painted with herbal colours. And then they went to sing carols during midnight mass at Sacred Heart Cathedral.
Their last night in Victoria Villa before they were to leave for Goa was New Year’s eve. The Kumbh Mela was set to start in three days. Karna called Mia saying all the arrangements had been made, she was not to say a word to Vik, she was get a taxi to Pavitra Ashram on the first day of the New Year, stay there for a couple of days so Vik didn’t find her, then the Brothers would give her a ticket to Allahabad, take her to the airport and give her instructions about where to meet Karna at the festival site. Nothing to worry about, Mia had whispered back. I’ll be there. I’ll be there after Vik’s New Year party.
On the last night of the most tumultuous year in Mia’s life, there were bonfires and popcorn machines along the brick-edged flowerbeds of Victoria Villa. The twilight sky was ripe and bursting with colour like a mango split by the force of its own juice. The runner-up stalked past covered in gold glitter. The gun-trader, who declared that it was he who had given Vik the Smith & Wesson Model 640-1 revolver and that he had divorced his wordless wife, was wearing a flowing white toga and a wreath of leaves positioned on his sweating baldness. The newspaper baron wore leather trousers and sipped a whisky. A group of girls, their bodies sheathed in synthetic fire-proof gel, set themselves alight and danced with limbs aflame.
‘Remember, you once said we’ll have our own beautiful world?’ Vik said rushing past her, his hands full of glasses. ‘This is it, right? Once you see the sea, you’ll see how beautiful our world is.’
‘Vik, I want to tell you…’
‘What, baby, what?’
‘A photograph I saw…it was just like how you described the way the intruder, the prowler, no, whoever he is, a photo…’
‘Yes, baby,’ he turned to her smiling distractedly. ‘What of the photograph? Did you find it?’
‘In the tree…’
‘The police sent it to me,’ he said, still smiling, like synchronized swimmers whose lips are clamped in a perpetual grin as they emerge through the water. ‘The police sent it to me, the servants must have crumpled it and put it in the tree. But, tell me Mia,’ his smile widened, his voice turned a little shrill. ‘Where is the tree?’
‘Vik, I…’
Before she could tell him, the runner-up came marching through the door and fell in a straight line on the dance floor. Vik dragged her to a chair and sat her down. Her head fell forward like a doll broken at the waist. ‘Can’t wait for you to meet everybody, love-in-a-mist,’ Vik grunted, trying to position the runner-up at a stable equilibrium. ‘You’ll love my mother and Justin. You’ll love Alqueria.’
‘You don’t fool me!’ the runner-up screamed suddenly from a snarling red mouth. ‘I know everything about you!’
The music rose to a crescendo. Bright flo
wers came charging out of the darkness, touched by champagne froth. The trees were dressed up with lights as usual. All around there was the joyful noise of heartache. People began to dance and so did Mia, feeling the earth judder, watching the runner-up slide in slow motion down the chair and onto the floor like perfectly intact glass. She noticed after a while that Vik wasn’t dancing any more. She would tell him. She would tell him that she wouldn’t be coming with him to Alqueria. That she had somewhere else to go.
Where was he? She searched among the crowd. He was nowhere to be seen. The runner-up jumped to her feet like an electrocuted corpse and went straight to the toilet to vomit. The wordless beauty swayed from the waist like a performing king cobra.
She couldn’t see him anywhere. In the living room, where he had once pranced with the bloodstained sheet, bodies sweltered under a mercilessly hot strobe while the screaming DJ barked instructions. She found him at last in the study. His grandfather’s study now lined with paintings of his life.
‘Vik?’ She crept in.
‘Yes, I’m here,’ she had heard that hoarse voice somewhere before.
He sat on a chair, upright, bright-eyed and shaking with what looked like euphoria. His pupils were dilated and his hair was uncharacteristically messy. Down his shirt front was a thick ochre-coloured rivulet. Moonlight fell in stripes across his face. She recognized immediately the little pyramids of white powder on the study table and started back.
‘Hello, Mia! My love-in-a-mist.’
‘Vik, what are you doing here? Why are you sitting like that?’
‘I’m sitting here, waiting for you. Waiting for my wife to return to me. Waiting for her to return to me from her lover. My wife who killed my favourite tree.’
‘I’m sorry. I can explain.’
‘Why did you cut down the tree?’
‘It was blocking the sunlight from the flowerbed.’
‘No,’ his voice sounded rough. ‘It wasn’t. Why did you kill my semal tree? My semal tree which looked after me all my life? My semal tree which protected me, which cared for me?’
She was shocked. My god, had the tree really been that important? They essayed a mock question-answer session. There was a storm, she ventured. No, not convincing, he shook his head. Municipality gardeners had come in and chopped it down because it was so tall it was obstructing electricity wires, she explained. No, he shook his head again, they wouldn’t have done it without permission from me. She looked straight at him. She had to get out of Victoria Villa fast.
He pointed to his chest. ‘Clean it,’ he ordered.
‘Clean what?’
‘Clean my puke. Can’t you see it’s all down my front?’
She stared at his pale, striped face. The vomit had spread around his mouth and up his nose and on his cheeks like gashes of beige.
She got a bucket of water and wiped his pale face and neck. She hadn’t noticed how vulnerable his skin was, how slender his neck. Karna’s neck was slender too, but so dark that it looked stronger. She helped him take off his shirt and led him to the sofa.
‘Vikram,’ she whispered as he lay back. ‘Vikram, who the hell are you? Are you who you are? Or are you not?’
‘I am whatever you want me to be, love-in-a-mist. Just love me this one last time.’
The impending farewell, the sudden quiet of the study after the noise of the party, drew them together. He grabbed her down with him, fumbled at her clothes, snatched away her panties and pushed himself into her with unconscious energy.
‘Mia,’ he whispered, ‘I only want an overdose of you.’
In a few seconds Vivan yawned to life in her womb. She pushed Vik away and pulled on her clothes. She ran out of the study, leaving him asleep on the sofa, threading past the sweating bodies, bolted the door and flung herself on the bed. Her rucksack was already packed. She took Anand’s painting down and slid it under the bed. In case Vik found it, god knows what he might do. She looked out of the window into the lawn. The empty space of the semal was full of voices.
At daybreak, leftovers of the party lay asleep in ones and twos on the sofas. The study door was locked. Vik was probably still asleep. She left a note on her pillow:
‘ I’ll be back to pick up the rest of my things. I don’t know what I’ll do afterwards but I won’t be coming back here. Sorry. This should never have happened. Love, Mia.’
She shouldered her rucksack and ran down the driveway. Karna was waiting for her. He had been waiting for her ever since he had first seen her, ever since he had stepped out of her father’s painting, and had been curious to find out whether she, of all the people in the world, would walk with him down the last and deadliest mile.
The garden was lit with a sharp light. Cobwebs of dew floated above the grass. The guard smiled at her. She murmured that she was going out for a morning walk. The veranda arches of Victoria Villa were like slanting eyes as they watched her leave.
Goodbye, Vik.
Goodbye, Victoria Villa.
Good morning, 2001.
ALQUERIA, GOA
Now the New Year, reviving old desires, recited Justin, staring at the sea. A year that begins with the Kumbh Mela would end with a transition, there would be a break in the continuum, and for him, he felt convinced there would be release. Some kind of release. Perhaps death from this time and rebirth into another, without the physical loss of life. Or perhaps my heart will stop altogether after so many decades of service to my Sara, my Isis, my Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
The rain in Alqueria was a wondrous creation, he thought. Sometimes it formed gymnasts over the sea and somersaulted over the barges like a Nadia Comaneci made of water. Other times it sluiced through the palms. Sometimes it became a fairy skirt spreading gently over the old homes. There were so many different Alquerias. The sea when it was foamy and celebratory. Pink and white bougainvillea against the houses. Palms bending towards a frothy wave like a sprig in a glass of Pina Colada.
A seagull circled over Indi’s cottage. The sea shone away towards the big ships. Barges pulled along slowly, leaving eddies behind. Water, uncaring of what was happening on the shore. Slow water, its edges diffusing away into sunlight. Santa Ana dreamed in the reflection of the water. Is there, thought, Justin, some ultimate squaring off? Some way in which scores are settled? Or perhaps scores are never settled and life just dwindles away into the sun like the sea. He sat in Indi’s locked and barred cottage, staring at the bow and arrow painted on the wall opposite her bed. He stared at it for a long time. Then he held his head in his hands and wiped away tears that wouldn’t stop. He got a pail of water and a rag and began to wash off the paint. He wiped and scrubbed until the wall was washed clean and only faint black markings remained. Then he drew out a crayon from his pocket and drew a giant red heart where the bow and arrow had been.
He brought his face against the wall and kissed the heart. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered.
The child had once been swinging from a tree, when he pitched forward and fell on the ground. ‘Justin!’ he had cried, ‘I is died away.’
‘No, sweetheart,’ Justin had laughed. ‘You isn’t died away. Here you is with your dad, on his lap.’
‘Dad?’ the child had blinked.
‘No!’ Justin had shouted, ‘Dada doodoo, just fooling.’
He dreamed his son was falling into a swamp but he was paralysed and couldn’t help him.
He dreamed his son was being kidnapped by guerillas, spirited away through elephant grass, while his father looked away.
Indi told the boy a story she had heard from north Bengal about the semal.
The semal tree is a strong tree, she told him. It bursts into thick red flowers in season. And because it’s so tall, ghosts and goblins come to perch on its crown on nights of the full moon. Many years ago, inside a semal, was a palace made of wood. It belonged to a really ugly witch. She was bald, with a hooked nose and had warts on her chin.
Now the witch had a son who was her pride and joy. She loved him de
arly, but he wouldn’t take her anywhere because she was so ugly. Nor would he ever bring any friends home because she had no teeth and could barely talk, and she was a bit slow and couldn’t cook anything nice. She was just an atrocious old witch. Whenever any children came near, the witch scared them away.
One day, the witch’s son came home from school and found the door to the tree locked. He knocked. His mother emerged after a while in crumpled clothes, with leaves in her hair. But this time she no longer looked like an ugly witch – she looked like a beautiful tree nymph. ‘Don’t I look good?’ the tree nymph asked her son.
‘Oh, yes,’ he smiled back at her. ‘How have you become so nice?’
‘Because there is a magician inside my house who makes me look very pretty. He knows many magic tricks. So now all I have to do is bring more magicians to our palace and they’ll make me look nice. Then you won’t be afraid to take me with you to school and you won’t be scared of bringing your friends home.’
‘What magician?’ the boy asked. ‘Where is the magician?’
The witch opened the door wide and inside stood a tall man wearing a long cloak who smiled and waved at the boy.
‘See, that’s the magician. Now, I’ll get another magician who’ll make me look nice tomorrow also, all right?’
‘All right,’ said the boy, happy that his mother was no longer an ugly witch. ‘Can I come in now?’
‘No, no, you can’t come in here. You have to go to another tree. From now on you and I will live in separate trees so I can be beautiful. That’s the price we’ll have to pay, but in return you’ll be able to show me to your friends.’
So, everyday the witch would bring home a magician and he would make the witch look nice. When the boy came home from school, he went to his own tree and in the evenings came to visit her, happy that she no longer looked ugly.
‘Nice story, right?’ Indi said to Vik.
‘No,’ he closed his eyes. ‘Stupid.’
Why?’ demanded Indi. ‘Why is it stupid? What do you mean, stupid?’
Blind Faith Page 20