And then it happens. There is the sound of something rushing at them, an impact, the scooter seems to move away from under them. Sumi hears a scream—hers? or Aru’s?—and feels herself being thrown off, her body hitting the ground with sickening, painful force. When she comes out of it, she finds herself sprawled on the ground, her ears filled with a whirring sound. The consciousness of being watched makes her look up and she sees two figures, dark silhouettes, looking down at her, blotting out everything else. Terror fills her, a panic that freezes her limbs and throttles her voice. The clattering sound has died away, leaving behind a total silence.
Suddenly the significance of the silence penetrates.
‘Aru, oh my God, Aru.’
Energy comes back in a rush. She sits up, unaware of how painful it is, and notices Aru lying on the other side of the scooter, eyes closed, one arm flung out, another somewhere under her. Sumi moves to her and sees she is bleeding from a gash on her forehead. Stupidly, as if this is the most important thing to be done, Sumi pulls down Aru’s skirt that has climbed up to her thighs and only then tries to staunch the blood with her sari, calling out ‘Aru’ over and over again. She remembers the two figures, yes, they can help, but when she looks up there is no one; only the sound—distant now—of a motorcycle receding. She bends over Aru again. Thank God, she is breathing, but why doesn’t she open her eyes, why doesn’t she respond? Sumi is frantic.
A shaft of light pierces the darkness; it’s the headlights of a car. Sumi gets up, waves, calls out and the car which has gone on ahead reverses and comes back.
‘My daughter, oh please help me, my daughter ....’
In a few moments there is a crowd about them, standing around her and Aru. Later, Sumi can never remember getting into the car or telling the driver where to go, but she must have done it because she is in the car, Aru by her side, and in a few moments they are in the nursing home where Ramesh works. And there is Ramesh—she isn’t surprised to see him, either, though it is not his usual time to be there. Later he tells her he was there to visit a critical patient; but now it is part of it, that he should be here, where she needs him. And it is the sight of Ramesh that brings Sumi out of the fog and things become real.
‘Ramesh, it’s Aru ....’
‘You sit here, Sumi, we’ll look after her.’
She is shivering uncontrollably. Someone gets her a cup of coffee—Ramesh must have asked them to do that—and she finds it hard to unclench her teeth; the cup makes a clattering sound against them. Ramesh, coming back, is aghast at her state. He has never seen her this way, she is hysterical.
‘She’s recovered consciousness, Sumi, she’ll be all right, I promise you she’s fine, Sumi, please ....’
It takes her a while to quieten down and even then she refuses to let them attend to her bruises until she has seen Aru. She is much more in control of herself by the time Charu and Shripati come there. But she won’t go home, she’s going to stay the night here, with Aru, Charu must go home. Nothing can move her, not even Charu’s tears.
They have to give in, though Ramesh manages to persuade her to go home with him for a wash and a meal. ‘I’ll bring you back, the neurologist will be here by then, and Baba and Charu will be here until we return.’
Chitra has obviously been told of her coming, for there are three plates set at the table. The house seems unnaturally quiet without the noise and activity of the twins who have gone to bed. Chitra follows Ramesh’s lead in leaving Sumi alone; they speak to each other in low tones, giving Sumi the freedom of being by herself, a mere spectator. She feels pleasantly remote from everything; the soothing, monotonous sound of the English news on TV, the clatter of spoons on plates and bowls, the low hum of conversation—everything comes to her from afar. And Ramesh and Chitra—she looks at them as if she has never seen them before. They look companionable—is it because the twins are not there with them, between them? And how different Chitra looks in her frilly nightdress, her hair loose; she seems gentler, her once-splendid athlete’s body slightly thickened at the waist, plumper and softer.
‘Shall we go, Sumi? Have you finished?’
Sumi comes out of the deadening cottonwool with a jerk. Yes, of course they must go. What if something has happened to Aru? She is frantic. But in the bathroom she is suddenly overcome by the desire for sleep. She rests her face against the mirror, feeling the cool pleasant smoothness of it against her warm face. And then it begins slipping away from her, like the scooter—the scooter ....
She jerks awake, splashes water on her face and goes out. Chitra is waiting for her with a plastic bag in her hands.
‘Only a nightie and a shawl for you. I’ve put in a toothpaste and two brushes as well.’
It seems to Sumi this is the kindest thing anyone has done for her. Tears spill out of her eyes, she is overcome by remorse, certain that she has never been fair to Chitra, never done her justice; she has thought her cold, indifferent to everyone but her own sons, caring for no one, not even Ramesh ....
As if she has to make up for this, she talks to Ramesh about Chitra all the way back, about her devotion to Jai and Deep, about how successfully she has transformed herself from being an ambitious athlete to a devoted wife and mother, how wonderfully she is shaping the twins, doing so much for them, going jogging in the morning, tennis practice in the evening ....
Ramesh lets her talk, he listens silently, he smiles, a smile she cannot see in the darkness.
Aru is sleeping when they get back. ‘Devi-mavshi was here,’ Charu whispers. ‘And Hrishi. They took Baba away, he seemed absolutely exhausted. I’ll stay with you, Ma.’
But Sumi is so vehement about Charu going home—‘Amma and Seema shouldn’t be alone’—that Ramesh silences Charu with a look and takes her away with him.
When they have all gone, the nurses too, as if they have been waiting for her to be alone, the pains begin. Her shoulder, her wrists, her hips—her whole body hurts unbearably. She knows that the painkillers they have given her will take effect after a while, but for now the pain is unendurable. The fear she had felt on the dark road, with the two faceless figures looking down at her, comes back. It seems to her that nothing in her life had equalled that moment of pure terror. She panics at the thought of being alone at night. Her hands and feet feel chilled and numb, she wants to ring the bell, to ask for help, to take Chitra’s shawl and wrap it around herself, but she can’t move. The chill is within her, her very bones are frozen. In a while she begins to shiver; it is like having convulsions, her body is shaken by spasms. This too passes, but her body is still cold. She moves now, slowly, stiffly, like an old woman, and goes to Aru’s bed. She fits herself carefully into the little space left by the girl’s body, careful not to touch her. Nevertheless, the warmth of the young body reaches her, she stops shivering and in a while she falls asleep.
She wakes up to a buzz of voices, to an instant realization of where she is and why. She opens her eyes and sees Charu standing by the table pouring coffee out of a thermos, Aru in a chair, hands clasping a mug. Charu sees her and asks laughing, ‘Well, who’s the patient here?’ And Aru begins to laugh too, the sound of their laughter filling the room like the aroma of Kalyani’s coffee.
Aru is back home the next day. ‘She’s perfectly all right,’ Ramesh assures them. And in fact there is nothing to show for the accident except a tiny scar, a pucker really, so high on the forehead that it is scarcely visible. Only a lover, tenderly pushing up her hair, will see it, only a lover will feel the roughness of it under his lips.
It is Sumi who bears the real scars of the accident. The moment of terror she had felt on the road in the darkness with the two figures looking menacingly down at her stays with her for long, it is never shorn of its nightmare qualities. It comes back to her, like nightmares do, suddenly, at odd moments, even during her waking hours. She tries to grapple with her fear, to understand it, she wonders whether there’s a kind of message in it for her; but it remains what it was—a few moments o
f total fear. She tries to rationalize her fears: They were frightened, they wanted to see if we were all right, when they saw I was, they went away because they didn’t want to get involved in a police case.
But it’s no use, it never helps. And anger succeeds fear each time. My daughter could have been dead, she could have died for lack of help, and they walked away.
She calls to mind Nagi’s philosophy, the sentence with which Nagi ends every story of cruelty, hardship and betrayal, even her own: ‘Some people are like that.’ Sumi now sees what the sentence that Nagi so mechanically repeats really means. It’s a universal acceptance. All is excused, all is understood. There are no norms and therefore no deviations and aberrations either. It seems to remove all barriers and open up vast territories of human behaviour into one common ground.
‘Some people are like that.’
For Nagi, perhaps, with an irresponsible husband, one son dead, the other uncaring, and a dependent daughter, this mantra is the only thing that makes life possible. What other way of survival is there?
But for Sumi, the feeling of being abandoned remains, the knowledge that came to her in Ramesh’s house that night, though she had not recognised it then—‘we are, all of us, always strangers to one another’—becomes part of her.
THE RIVER
Whatever desires are hard to attain in this world of mortals, ask for all those desires at thy will. O Nachiketas, (pray) ask not about death.
—Katha Upanishad (1.1.25)
THERE IS A great deal to be said for a belief in many lives. To think that we have only one life given to us, to know that this is all there is, to understand the implications of this, is to be stricken by paralysis. What can we do, what do we fill our lives with, what will we eliminate, and above all, what will we find significant enough to fit into the enormity of this concept of just one chance?
Whatever we do, however, the presence of despair, even of desperation, seems inevitable. Hovering in the wings, if not centre-stage. Whispering to us: if this is all we have, we may as well sing and dance. Like the clown in the circus, keeping the darkness away with mirth and laughter.
There is also, of course, the other way—of selfishness, of recklessness. The voice in your ears whispering: Do what you want, take what you will, for this chance, these things, will not come your way again.
To reject both these alternatives is to let in despair.
‘I can’t go on,’ Aru has confessed to her sister. ‘If we can do nothing but go on muddling this way forever, I don’t want to go on at all.’
The confession, coming as it did at the end of a harrowing day, nevertheless carried within it a grain of her true feelings; the despair was genuine.
Father, mother, son and daughter
go to the well to draw water
Gopal used to chant this couplet when Aru was a child and she had loved it—perhaps because of the way Gopal had sung it, making a funny song of it to amuse her. Or, maybe even then, it had been the words, capturing an idea of a family, that had attracted her?
‘Father, mother, son and daughter.’ The complete family. They had been that; yes, in spite of the lack of a son (lack? it had never felt that way) they had been complete. Aru had seen this unit as something that was intact and forever. She had never imagined a time when it would no longer be in existence.
And now Gopal has gone. To Aru, it has not meant merely an empty space in the family, but the disintegration of it. There is no family left. We are five separate individuals, all of us going our different ways. Five units that don’t add up to a whole.
Eighteen is not the age either to accept this or to understand it. Aru has a sense of having lost her footing in the world and she knows no way of getting it back. She sees that things are wrong, but has begun to realize that they can’t be put right again. She wants to know that justice will prevail in this world, and it hurts to realize that it rarely does. To see her grandmother fills her with indignation, a sense of pity at the enormous waste. If this is all that life can offer you ....
It is a greater pity perhaps that Aru does not speak openly to her mother about this; because of her silence, she is denied a glimpse of Sumi’s vision of Kalyani, so entirely different from Aru’s.
To Sumi, her mother seems to have finally come out of the room she had inhabited in her childhood, hers and Premi’s, a room that in her memory was always dark. There is one fearful memory of Kalyani standing in the centre of that room, striking herself on her face with both her hands, the muscles on her neck rigid like taut ropes, the veins on her temples standing out. And shrieking out to the child who stood in the doorway, as if hypnotised by this frightful sight, ‘Go away, go, just go.’
Sumi, with her facility for forgetting, had put this memory away in her chest of rejects, never letting it surface. And now, watching Kalyani moving through the house, it is impossible for Sumi, even if she wanted to, to resurrect the memory of that hysterical, self-punishing woman. In fact, noticing the complex net of relationships that Kalyani has with so many people, she is reminded of the spider she had seen one morning, scuttling from point to point, drawing silken threads out of itself, weaving in the process a web with a beautiful design.
But Sumi is forty to Aru’s eighteen. Nevertheless, for the very reason that she is only eighteen, Aru will not wallow in despair for long. She will come out of it, she will go on with her life, though the hopelessness that she feels now will always be lying in wait for her. It is only later, nearly a decade after the time when these events are happening, that she will stumble on a secret that will take some of this weight off her. That time is waiting for her in the future and to hitch it to this narrative is not very difficult. A slight sleight of hand will be sufficient.
But to do this is to admit that Aru is the heroine of this story; only for the heroine can Time be bent backwards.
Is Aru the heroine? Why not? She has youth, one of the necessary requirements of a heroine. And the other—beauty? Well, possibly. The potential is there, anyway. (The Natyashastra lays down that the heroine should have nobility and steadfastness as well. But we can ignore this. We no longer make such demands on our heroines.) Perhaps there’s this too, this above all, that Aru is trying to make sense of what is happening, her consciousness moving outside herself and reaching out to the others as well, embracing, in fact, the whole of what is happening. The moment of understanding is, however, denied to her now; it will come later, only when she hears the story of Yamunabai, when she sees her picture. A picture belonging to an age when taking a photograph was a serious business of recording an image for posterity.
And so there she is, Yamunabai, a rather stout woman, head covered by her sari, looking squarely, almost sternly at the camera. A fairly ordinary looking woman, Aru will think her to be, except for the eyes, which seem to reach across the century and more that separates them and hold Aru transfixed. Eyes that will remind her of the man in the picture Sumi had cut out some time from a photographic journal—Sumi herself couldn’t remember why she had done it—and pushed under the glass top of the writing table. A cutting that became in course of time so familiar that they scarcely looked at it. The picture of an African storyteller, sitting in the centre of a group of women and children, caught by the photographer at a dramatic moment in his narration, arms raised high above his head, eyes wide open and compelling. The eyes of a dreamer.
And the audience, rapt, trapped in the web of the man’s creation, their expressions mirroring his.
‘When one goes to sleep, he takes along the material of this all-containing world, himself tears it apart, himself builds it up and dreams by his own brightness, by his own light. Then this person becomes self-illuminated ... For he is a creator.’
Yes, she who dreams is a creator. To dream is to cross the boundaries of the physical world, to enter the regions of pure light, to be illuminated, and to illuminate then, the world for others.
Yamunabai was a dreamer. How Aru will get to hear her story, the coincidence
s that will bring this about, can be a story in itself. It is enough to say that Aru, on a professional visit (she will be a lawyer—the novelist’s crystal ball yields this revelation), finds herself by chance in Manorama’s birthplace, the place in which Yamunabai lived and died. Her curiosity, on seeing a ‘Yamunabai Pawar High School for Girls’, leads her finally to an old lady, the first headmistress of the school, and, she is told, the one woman who is likely to know something about Yamunabai.
And so it is that Aru, sitting in a bare, low-roofed room, hears the story of Yamunabai from an old woman, almost blind as Aru discovers, for when the lights go off, she neither falters nor pauses, but goes on speaking with scarcely a change of inflection in her tone. In spite of this and her shabby surroundings, there is no sense of sadness about her; in fact, Aru thinks she has never seen a person so clearly herself, taking nothing from her surroundings, impressing herself, instead, on them. And as she listens to her story of Yamunabai and gets a glimpse of Yamunabai’s dream, Aru has a thought, fanciful perhaps, that this old woman, the daughter of one of Yamunabai’s students, and she, the great-granddaughter of Manorama, Yamunabai’s prize student, are both part of that dream.
Yamunabai, the daughter of a well-to-do landlord, came back to live with her parents and brothers when she was left a widow at a young age. An only and well-loved daughter and sister, she could look forward to a reasonably comfortable and secure life. But Yamunabai had a vision, a vision in which girls and women would not have to live with nothing more in their lives than the slavery of endless drudgery and childbearing. In which, the minds of girls could be opened to the vastness and the beauty of the world around them, so that as women they would not be doomed to live in dark, airless rooms. In other words, education was the tool with which she would work for the realization of her dream.
And so she began, in a bit of open space next to the dung-smelling cattle shed, with just a handful of girls whose parents she had been able to persuade to send their daughters to her. One of these was Manorama.
A Matter of Time Page 18