by Abha Dawesar
“Even you may barely scrape through,” Adit added, looking at me with a sidelong glance.
“I certainly won’t,” I said, laughing.
“Get out kids, get out. Go to America or Australia,” Adit said in a spirited voice. I could imagine him using the same tone to tell soldiers to go to battle.
My father’s colleagues at the sagai professed great patriotism, but someone like Adit, who had actually taken a bullet wound for his country, wanted his kid to get out.
After the lesson Adit and Vidur dropped me off but didn’t stay for chai. The day had left me exhausted. I had met India and Sheela and Adit, all in one day. I had also done something I was deeply ashamed of. Adit had not understood the full extent of my shame. While I could talk to him openly, I didn’t feel he was as sensitive as India or Rani, who seemed to understand my heart better. But I couldn’t confess to them about Sheela. They saw me as their lover, not a cheapad on the loose.
I opened my English textbook and read a lesson to calm myself down. Usually I read English lessons only once, in class, when everyone read them together. I had never studied for an English exam. I reread a story by Ray Bradbury that described the life of a prehistoric dinosaur-like animal who lived on the ocean floor. It was the only one of its species to survive. When he heard the low bellowing sound of a lighthouse, he thought it was a female from his species calling, so he came up to the surface of the ocean. He did this year after year on a particular date. Then it got too much and he destroyed the lighthouse, lashing at the bricks with his tail. The story was lonely. It was the opposite of my own in some ways because I had many people in my life. But deep down it was my story, too. I had split myself like an atom into many electrons and neutrons. Each subatomic particle danced with a different person and led its own life. But all of me, the whole me, did not exist for anyone but myself. On a day like today I was so alone that I didn’t feel whole, even from within.
At dinner my parents and I watched the news. There had been no incidents of self-immolation that day, but a large number of college students had gathered in Delhi for a rally and sat cross-legged on the Ring Road in protest. I watched the TV set feeling entirely dead.
“You look rather upset today,” my father said.
“Yes, Beta, what happened? Is everything okay?” my mother asked.
“I’m fine. Just tired,” I said, retiring to my room. I turned off my lights before Rani joined me. When she came in I whispered to her to lie down beside me. She hugged me and fell asleep. As soon as I heard her light snoring I reflected on what had happened with Sheela. I tried to think of a single thing half as bad that I had done in my life. There was nothing that even came close. I remembered things that I had not thought about for many years. Memories that remained vivid even though they had been upstaged by the torrent of daily life, a life lived increasingly in the moment and at a faster and faster rate. It seemed that the past few months were more condensed and had more data points than entire years from before.
I remembered how I had been ashamed of Delhi, of India, in 1984. The state machinery, politicians, police, and mobs, Hindus and Muslims, all joined hands to set fire to the Sikhs as the son of the recently assassinated prime minister was sworn in. He was inheriting the prime minister’s position like a fiefdom, mocking the independence that the freedom fighters had fought for, mocking democracy. After a few days the army was called in, and shoot-at-sight orders were enforced, but only after every Sikh house had been pillaged and Sikh men burnt alive, chopped, and even skewered. Stepping out of the house one could see all of Delhi smoldering, black smoke rising from everywhere. I thought of all the people who were Hindu and Muslim who had done this. I wanted to drown in shame. The guilt corroded my bones.
Feelings of shame at being a Hindu in 1984 mixed with feelings of shame at having forced myself on Sheela. I hadn’t slept a wink by the time my mother woke up and Rani went to the kitchen to make our morning tea.
“You still look upset, Beta. Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” my mother asked, bringing my cup of tea to my bed.
“I was thinking of the Sikhs and of 1984.”
“Why? Is it because the schools are closed?” My mother placed my tea by my side.
“No. What’s the point? What’s the point of living?” I asked.
“Let’s talk to Papa,” she said. She held out her hand to lead me out of bed.
I followed her to their room with my cup. My father was sitting in bed reading the paper. He told us about another self-immolation incident.
“Papa, it’s better than 1984,” I said.
“Don’t look back at blood that has been spilled. India has survived so much violence: Partition, the British, Tamurlane, Ghazni. It will survive this, too. History repeats itself and is full of violence. It is in our nature.”
It was in our nature. Not just the nature of the Hindus and the Muslims but my own nature and Chakra Dev’s, too. We all had this terrible beast inside. I wanted to tell my parents about Chakra Dev and Sheela. Maybe my father would understand.
“I really don’t see the point in living if it’s all going to keep repeating,” I said.
“Beta, don’t talk like this. We love you,” my mother said.
I shook my head and left the room. I got back into bed and buried my head under the pillow. I thought about dying. It seemed like the rational thing to kill myself. I thought of my parents. I knew I couldn’t do it as long as they were alive. I thought of Rani needing me. I couldn’t do it if someone needed me or loved me. Love was the only thing in my life. Everything else had already proven itself hollow and meaningless.
I felt someone come and sit on my bed, and then the weight of another body on mine. My mother whispered urgently in my ear, “Please look at me, Anamika. Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying, Mom. I love you,” I said, looking up. She had brought my tea back.
“It’s stone cold. Do you want me to make you another cup?”
“No,” I said, taking it from her.
I tried to study during the day, but after lunch I felt very tired and slept for a little while. When I woke up I found Rani sitting on the edge of my bed, stroking my head. I had no idea how long she had been there. My sadness had rubbed off on her. She wasn’t able to lift my spirits. Before my mother came home I called India.
“I hate my life, I’m sad,” I said.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I wish we could go away. I’ll die here.”
“Let me fix something and call you back,” she said.
At dinner my parents were very gentle. We didn’t speak much.
At night I returned to the Sheela problem. A day had passed since the event, more than twenty-four hours. And time always gave a fresh perspective. I tried not to think of my behavior as high or low but just as something Sheela had not wanted. I had to call and apologize. Pushing your finger into someone against their will was no way of getting into a woman’s pants. I had to be more elegant when I had my way with girls.
xix
Kasauli
Delhi felt as if it had been wrapped in a thick layer of heat. The air was a milky, translucent color, like the cover of a Chinese dumpling. Within minutes of having a bath I would be covered with tiny droplets of sweat. No matter how many times I washed my face with my astringent soap and wiped it dry, I could never quite get it to be completely dry. Rani’s face looked constantly shiny. So, too, my parents’ and mine. We all looked like villains in a Hindi movie. I even felt like one. I had learned that if I moved very slowly after my bath I would sweat less, so I gave both my mind and my body over to the lassitude. I walked at a snail’s pace to the dining room for breakfast and returned equally slowly to my desk. During the day, while my parents were out, Rani would splash water on the veranda outside my window so that some cool air could blow into my room. But the air was static, and this mostly did not help. I liked watching the six inches of exposed skin between Rani’s sari and her blouse when she ca
rried the bucket out to the veranda. Her muscles would tense in strange places. She would place the bucket outside and pour water mugful by mugful on the veranda floor. She tipped the mug at different angles so that the water would wet every corner of the veranda. Watching Rani in motion was like listening to one’s favorite song. It was like watching India’s hair uncoil from a bun or seeing a photograph of the sun rising over the Ganges in Benares. It was beautiful and sacred. I wanted my life to be filled with these moments. It was the closest I could come to finding an end that was justifiable.
My mother worried about me. She worried that I had no appetite and that I was sleeping very little and working too hard. She worried that I hadn’t spoken about my friends or been interested in meeting them for days. She knew that I was in the doldrums. Hence it was that when India called to ask my mother if I could go to the hills with her, my mother took it upon herself to convince my father that the break would do me good.
“It’s just a few days. Her studies won’t suffer, and she might cheer up,” she said over dinner.
“How well do you know Mrs. Adhikari?” my father asked.
“I trust her completely to take care of Anamika,” my mother said.
I ate my dinner quietly, trying to keep my expressions neutral. “How safe is it for just the two of them to go to a hill station?” he asked.
“A young couple will drive them to Kasauli. Tripta thinks that Anamika will love their company. And she said Deepak is a karate black belt. They’ll be safe,” my mother said.
I decided it best not to argue on my own behalf and excused myself after dinner. My mother must have talked to my father again, because by the morning he had yielded. India’s friend was away, and we’d have the cottage in Kasauli to ourselves. Deepak and his wife would stay in a nearby cottage. The hills were cooler, the air cleaner. Everyone agreed it would be good for me. With the state of political unrest escalating in Delhi, it was unlikely that schools would reopen anytime soon.
I packed the large tennis bag my mother had given me with jeans and shirts, toothbrush, and Lolita. Rani ironed everything that I chose to take. She even ironed my cotton panties and white socks. Neither of us spoke much. I gave her no excuse for going away. If she knew of my relationship with India, she did not say anything. She had sensed for a few nights now that I was sad, and she worried no less about me than my mother did.
As she went about ironing my things, Rani said, “Babyji , I dreamt that the rains had finally come and it was cool. I was making pakoras for you as you did your work, watching the rain. The weather was really good. When you come back maybe the rains will be here.”
I knew that Rani would miss me more than I would miss her. For me the excitement of seeing a new place, of drinking chai in the hills on cool misty mornings, outweighed everything else. One day maybe I’d be able to go on a holiday with her.
My mother and Rani dropped me off at India’s house on Saturday afternoon. Deepak and Arni were already there. My mother seemed to like the young couple instantly. I did, too. Deepak looked freshly scrubbed and almost scholarly. His wife was petite and wore tight blue jeans. She had a nose ring. India looked terribly dignified. Despite the heat she was wearing a South Indian cotton sari with a temple border and butta work on the pallu. The sari was a soothing straw color.
“Don’t worry about Anamika,” India said to my mother.
“I’m not worried, Tripta. I am sure it will be good for her to have a break with you.”
I went with Deepak to load my bag into his car. He had already placed India’s small blue suitcase in a corner of his trunk. He put my duffel bag on top of his suitcase. It had all sorts of travel stickers on it. I read one that said Florence and another that said Rio. When we were ready to leave my mother gave me a hug and kissed me on the cheek. Rani and I could not really say good-bye properly. I squeezed her forearm tightly, and she grabbed my wrist and squeezed it. “Babyji, take care of yourself,” she said.
“It’s only a few days, Rani,” I said to her.
The drive to Kasauli was six hours long. Arni and Deepak both called India “Aunty” when they addressed her. Arni was only twenty-one, the same age as Rani. Deepak was a couple of years older. They looked good together. The weather in the plains was very hot, and the car did not have an AC. Deepak said he had ordered a new car with an AC, but it was not going to be delivered for another three months. We had to leave the windows open during the drive and breathe the black exhaust fumes of the trucks on the highway. After a couple of hours we were in cleaner air. My glasses protected my eyes, but India’s were watering. Though India and I were both sitting in the backseat, it was difficult to touch or be expressive. Deepak used his rearview mirror quite a lot, and I could see him looking at us now and then. Arni would sometimes touch Deepak behind his neck and rub it while he drove.
Deepak told us we would pass Kurukshetra on the way to Kasauli. I didn’t know it still existed. I could not imagine the great battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas taking place amidst its brick-and-mortar flats. Even less could I imagine Krishna revealing to Arjuna his full and terrible splendor as the Lord of the Universe on Kurukshetra’s dusty plain. Deepak was whistling in the car as he drove us at top speed past the place where all Hindu philosophy had sprouted. Time soiled everything, even the birthplace of the Bhagavad Gita itself.
After a while I started reading my book. It was easy to get into Humbert Humbert’s head. I instinctively knew what he was saying about nymphets, their barely budding breasts and their long forelimbs. I imagined Sheela as the young nymphet, and I thought of myself as the rough and sexy man who liked her. I decided that Nabokov was my kindred spirit.
I must have been chuckling a lot to myself as I read because Deepak asked me what I was reading. “Lolita,” I told him.
“Aunty, isn’t she too young to read Lolita?”
“Deepak, have you become the moral police?” India said.
“But she’s still in school,” he argued.
“Tripta, tell them I’m a sixty-year-old man,” I said.
“Deepak, Anamika is more grown-up than you were at her age.”
The drive got progressively steeper. I had thought that the high hill slopes would offer spectacular views, but the valley was full of clouds. As we drove higher it got cooler. The winding ascent into the Shimla hills made me nauseous, and I prayed for the car to stop. When Deepak finally said, “We’ve arrived,” I did not feel pleasure at the majesty of the imperial red brick bungalow, a leftover from the days of the Raj, with its sloping roof tiles, or at the immensity of its garden. I just felt relief that we were now still.
Arni and Deepak were staying a bit farther up, in the center of town on the Upper Mall Road. They arranged to meet us the next day and drove off.
India’s friend who owned the bungalow had left the keys with the servant who lived on the premises. The house was large and opulent, with high ceilings and a big veranda that opened onto a garden. A fresh breeze was blowing. The servant told us he had dinner ready. He was a short man in his late fifties. He spoke a strange Hindi. We washed up and dined, then retired to the bedroom. The temperature was very agreeable. There was no need for us to turn on the fan.
India sat on the bed while I rummaged through my bag for my nightclothes. She watched me pull out my stuff as she spoke.
“So, why did you call yourself a sixty-year-old man?”
“Because I identify with him, the old lech. Not the nymphets,” I said.
“Do you like to lech at nymphets?” she asked.
I wished I could tell her about Sheela, unburden myself of what I had done.
“Never looked at anyone younger than myself,” I said.
“I, on the other hand, am clearly leching at a nymphet,” she said with a wry smile.
“Does it bother you?” I asked. I wanted her to think of me as a mature, dependable, solid man. A Hindi film hero except with more intelligence, wisdom, and good sense, which those machos lacked. Only Gir
ish Karnad portrayed intellectual men in films, and he was hardly a hero type.
“No, it doesn’t bother me. You’re very grown-up,” she said. “But we are in an unconventional relationship, you must admit. We can’t be open as a couple at all.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that she thought of us as a couple. It sounded very serious.
“Do you understand me?” she asked.
“That we are a couple?” I felt I had only just learned the etiquette of lovemaking, and now I was already moving on to my next lesson. For the first time I felt she was older.
“I didn’t mean ‘couple’ in that sense. I don’t expect anything from you.”
“Pleasure. You should expect pleasure,” I said flippantly. I imagined I was Adit or Humbert Humbert as I said it. A grown man with a sense of lightness. But I had a gnawing feeling that growing up was not just a mental thing. One’s experiences counted, too, and I had few.
I took my shorts and T-shirt to the bathroom to change. When I got back India had slid under the covers. Her clothes were piled on top of her suitcase. I felt foolish and young for having worn my nightclothes. In French books the girls just removed their clothes before getting into bed. I made my way to the end of the room to turn off the light.
“No! Don’t. I want to see your face,” she said.
I walked back to the bed and climbed in. I felt slightly self-conscious. I had not felt like this with Rani. In fact I hadn’t felt this way with India before, either. I removed my clothes in a hurry so that she couldn’t stare at me for too long. Then she pulled me close to her. Her arms and legs and belly were deliciously warm. As soon as my skin touched hers I felt I had arrived someplace after a long journey. India’s embrace was so well placed, my whole body savored it. Every part of her, from the tips of her toes to her forehead, was seeking its counterpart in me. For the rest of the night we did not speak much. There was no need.
I woke up in the morning and checked my watch. It was only six. Birds were chirping. In Delhi the only sounds I could hear apart from the traffic and the milkman were the barks of stray dogs. I looked at India. She was still asleep, the thin bedsheet covering her only up to the middle of her stomach. Her brown bosom was entirely exposed to the ceiling. She looked like a painting. Life was at the tip of my fingers. All the questions I had asked myself about the meaning of life, the future, success— everything was answered. Beauty was all that mattered.