The Lilac House: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  Jak stands framed in the doorway. She is feigning sleep. He sees it in the way she holds her body, aware of his every breath. He goes to sit by her side. He sees with amusement that she has pulled her nightie on. He gropes on the bed and finds his boxer shorts. He pulls them on and then reaches out and touches the tip of her nose. ‘You can open your eyes now,’ he murmurs softly. ‘I am decent. Decent enough.’ He laughs.

  Her eyes open abruptly. He sees the flush of embarassment. He feels again that swoop of tenderness. ‘Oh, Meera, Meera,’ he says softly.

  Jak leans over her and ever so gently lays his cheek against hers. He nuzzles his face into the side of her neck. ‘Come,’ he whispers. ‘Come and look at the skies with me.’

  He pulls her up from the bed and leads her to the window. He takes her hand in his. She lets it lie there for a few minutes and then slowly, she weaves her fingers through his. Outside, the skies heave and the clouds shift.

  She hears his whisper, half in hope, half in marvellous wonderment. ‘I have to finish what Smriti set out to do. How can I not, Meera? Remember that Cohen line? About ringing the bells that still can be rung…’

  Meera doesn’t speak. Last night was waiting to happen. He responded to her embrace and she matched his manic hunger with hers, entwining limbs and desires. But Meera was struck by the very nature of their slaking of need: two desperate people clinging to each other. Is that all we will ever have? Will it ever become something else? A more enduring bond. A more sustaining love.

  Now, as Jak seeks her as his anchor to root him in what could be a long and frustrating quest, Meera knows yet another qualm.

  All of her aches to rush forward and give herself to him. To make his battles hers. To mesh their lives and hopes. To fashion something out of nothing.

  But she knows that if she does this, the Meera she has become will wither and die forever. She will be there for him, Meera decides. But to keep herself alive, she will need to dredge all the selfishness that lies deep within her. That alone will ensure that Jak does not swallow her up, as once Giri did.

  ‘Yes, you must,’ she says.

  In the way he holds his body, she knows he waits for a pledge of her troth.

  But Meera cannot speak it. Not yet. She cannot give him the reassurance he wants from her. Not yet. Meera thinks of her favourite fruit: the pomegranate. Of how she savours it best when she eats it seed by seed rather than as a handful thrown into her mouth. She will take a cue from that. Of how resurrection is to be fashioned one day at a time.

  So Meera does what she can. She rests her head against his arm. This is all she has to offer for now.

  Perhaps one day there will be more.

  And a thereafter.

  THEREAFTER…

  The man shifts in his sleep. He has been restless all night. A series of images chase themselves in his mind. A montage of thoughts that he doesn’t like to dwell upon. He knows where they spring from. Like his little toe and the coccyx, the vestigial organ called conscience announces its presence in these unfamiliar beds across three districts.

  In the early days, he ran the probe on the bellies of the women with an easy hand. It was a prestigious hospital. The diagnostic centre attracted many patients. After a while, he ceased to even look at the faces of the women. It was routine work. And it was best not to get involved. Only if there was an abnormality did he look up from the monitor and speak.

  Sometimes, a hesitant voice would query, ‘What is it?’

  And he would snap a question back: ‘Why?’

  Then he learnt to temper it with a careless flick of his hand. ‘It’s too early to tell.’ Those days the Hippocrates Oath was still freshly etched in the palms of his hands: for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.

  Until the day the director of the diagnostic centre summoned him to his room. ‘You know why they come here,’ he said. ‘If you do not give them what they want, they will go elsewhere, and I can’t have that.’

  ‘But sir, it isn’t ethical,’ he protested. Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion, Hippocrates murmured in his ear.

  The director gazed at him with a strange look. ‘Which world are you living in, sir? It is their choice, not your decision, you know. And if you don’t meet targets, you won’t leave us with much choice either.’

  Choices. It came down to that. The patient’s. The hospital’s. To keep or to kill. To stay or leave.

  He succumbed, as the director knew he would. He learnt to answer the ‘What is it?’ He stopped being a fool.

  He lies on his back, staring into the darkness. I should be used to it by now, he tells himself. It isn’t as if I am actually committing a crime. I am not playing god. I am merely fulfilling my professional obligations.

  Soothed by the thought, the man feels his eyes close again. Soon it will be time to wake, bathe and dress. It is going to be a long day.

  A man needs his rest.

  Elsewhere, in a room cast with a green light, a thought sails through many months of nothingness, through a morass of deadened cells, and remembers:

  Her blue denim shirt. Papa Jak’s shirt. The mother-of-pearl buttons that gleamed in the dark. Papa Jak’s here. No, no, it’s only his shirt. Papa Jak, where are you?

  Look, Papa Jak, I am here. Where you were once. You would never tell me enough about your days here. Maybe you didn’t want me to come here.

  The sea, Papa Jak. The sea. I can smell it. It is a violent sea. The waves crash. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  I wanted to do something real. I wanted to stop what they were doing. See, Mom, I wanted to say, I didn’t squander my future when I chose to come back home…

  Remember the time the cat got my budgerigar? Birdie lay on her back. The cat raised its mouth, entrails dripping. I screamed, Get away! The cat stared at me and snarled.

  They came for me in that purple hour before night. All three of them. In their eyes, I saw what lurked in the cat’s.

  I am on my back. I scream. Get away! I try to push them away. I scream. Papa. Papa Jak.

  Catatonia quells. Within a frozen abyss, a tiny vein splinters. A nerve cell is born. A toe wiggles. Smriti. I am Smriti…

  The horizon is darkening. A steely cast settles on the blue skies of the afternoon. There is none of the oppressive heat that announces the arrival of the rains in June. Instead, thunder rumbles from deep within the massing greyness. From the corner of his eye, Jak sees the woman shiver and pull the ends of her stole closer together. He frowns. It isn’t all that cold in the little tinbox that is his car. He glances at his watch. It is half past three. ‘Hmm … the monsoon will soon be here,’ he says, filling the silence in the car.

  The woman and the boy are quiet. Their stillness fills him with unease. If the goddamn car had a radio, he would switch it on. Anything to dispel the pall of mourning. Their colourless faces match the leaves of the trees they pass, an ashen sheen that seems to have taken on the reflection of the grim skies.

  He waits for one of them to speak. When they don’t, he continues.

  ‘I love the rains. I think I missed it more than anything else while I was away. That pure loamy earth scent after the first rain. It’s funny how we miss these little things more than the really important ones. Did I mention to you that I used to live in the US until I relocated to Bangalore … Oh, do you call it Bengaluru?’

  Meera shakes her head. ‘Hardly anyone does, except announcers at airports and railway stations. And politicians perhaps. It will always be Bangalore for me.’

  ‘Like Chennai will always be Madras for me.’

  A scream rents the car. He brakes abruptly.

  ‘It’s your phone! It’s your phone!’ a tinny voice screams.

  The boy pulls the phone out of one of his numerous pockets and shuts it off. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbles. Then he grins, unable to hide his glee at the shock his ring tone has caused.

  Jak tries to grin back, but his heart is thudding. Idiot bo
y, he thinks.

  The woman looks as if she is going to burst into tears. ‘Nikhil,’ she hisses. ‘Didn’t I tell you to change that ring tone?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the boy says. ‘I meant to. I forgot.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘But I must confess that for a moment it scared the shi…’ He stops abruptly, conscious of what he was about to say, and clears his throat. ‘I was petrified.’

  He looks at the woman and boy.

  He had gone to the brunch on a whim. He knew hardly anyone there. But Sheela, who was a director of the PR firm that was organizing the brunch, was an old friend and she had been very persuasive. ‘I need you. I need some new faces in the pictures. It’s almost a joke… whether it’s a wine launch or a book event, the same people are everywhere. Credibility is becoming an issue, so you, Kitcha, can be the credibility man. The new kid on the block. I love that combination of grey at the temples and the designer stubble. And all those bracelets, the diamond stud and the cigar. Epitome of cool! Professor JAK, visiting from the US, etc.! Also, how else will you meet people in the city? Come on, just for an hour or so.’

  He shook his head in amusement. Epitome of cool indeed! She’d say anything to drag him to her wine event. He didn’t bother too much about his appearance, settling for comfort in clothes rather than elegance. He was a tall man, six feet two in his socks, and his broad shoulders made him look fitter than he was. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he would often pinch with a sigh the roll of flesh around his middle. He was a man going to fat, he told himself as he angled the mirror this way and that, quite aware in a detached way that he would do nothing about it.

  He didn’t mind growing old and didn’t particularly seek ways to hide the toll of age. No dyeing the grey in his hair or styling it in such a way as to disguise the receding hairline. He didn’t gym or diet. Sometimes when he was truly restless, he went for a run or a swim. That was it. So when women found him attractive, he wondered why. In his mind, he was still the lanky awkward boy he once was, unable to figure out what to do with his arms and legs. In time, he had learnt to accept the female attention with an easy regard. He didn’t go looking for it but he didn’t disdain it either when it came his way.

  Sheela had known him when he was Kitcha. She still called him Kitcha and not Jak as everyone else did. It did something to him to hear himself being called by his boyhood name. She must sense how starved I am for companionship, he thought. No, the word was diversion. His life had fallen into a rut and he was not given to staying in one place for too long. Yet, here he was, bound to Bangalore for the last seven months and there was no telling when he would ever be able to shake the dust off his feet.

  He had smiled again at Sheela’s description and leaned forward to light her cigarette.

  And he went. He drank a few glasses of wine. Stayed on the fringes of groups and out of arguments and was wondering if he could leave without offending Sheela, when she asked him if he could offer a lift back to the woman and the boy – ‘If it isn’t a bother, that is? They live in the same part of town as you do. The husband had to leave suddenly and they are stranded.’

  So here they were, in his car. The woman was supposed to be a cookbook writer. A gracious woman, but quiet. He wondered what had happened for the husband to leave so abruptly. Did they quarrel? He hadn’t noticed any unpleasantness. Or, maybe it had happened before he reached there.

  In the rear-view mirror he glimpses the boy: bewilderment and hope jostling in a child’s face, waiting for things to right themselves. In the presence of the thirteen-year-old with his nose pressed to the glass, he knows a stilling of time.

  I was that boy, he thinks.

  Bright thirteen-year-old Kitcha, unsullied by adult troubles, who thought every mango worth a shy, every shell a conch with the sea’s song trapped in it, and every blank page waiting to be turned into a picture of his making.

  Kitcha, who couldn’t fathom the hunted look in his father’s eyes and puzzled at what could frighten an adult. Kitcha had a history teacher waiting to pounce on him, but whose relentless scrutiny did Appa fear?

  Kitcha had watched his regal mother, two inches taller than Appa, and with the wide shoulders that she bequeathed to him, crouch into a whimpering huddle the day his father made known his decision to join an ashram. To renounce the world. Their world.

  His father no longer cowered and all his twitches had ironed themselves out. Appa was no longer his appa, and all he would say was, ‘The time has come!’

  His mother raised herself on an elbow. ‘Whose time are you talking of? Yours or mine? Do you understand what you are condemning me to? Has it occurred to you even once? Tell me, what did I do wrong? Tell me, what was my fault?’

  Appa shook his head dismissively. ‘It is not what you think. You are not to blame. If someone is to be blamed, it is me for being such a coward. I should have told you. My parents knew I never wished for any of this. A wife, a child, the murkiness of grihastha ashrama ….

  ‘It was my duty to provide them with an heir, they said. For the family line to continue. Don’t forget who we are, they said. Who are we? I wanted to demand. The Hoysalas or the Cholas, for all this talk of an heir? But I couldn’t hurt them. So I was obliged to shelve my desire.

  ‘So you happened. And then Kitcha. Their heir. But I discovered that you had me wrapped in your coils.’

  For a moment Kitcha thought he saw hatred in his father’s eyes. How could his father look at his mother like that? Then he heard his father say, ‘I told myself I would wait until Kitcha’s brahmoupadesham. Once his upanayanam was conducted, I thought I could leave. I was such a fool! ’

  Kitcha rolled between his thumb and forefinger the sacred thread. Was this already yellowing slender thread, testimony to his brahminical destiny, the cause of all this trouble? If he hadn’t had his upanayanam, would Appa have had to stay on?

  ‘But then I couldn’t go. I wished to see him, be with him, hear his chatter and his laughter. I still couldn’t sever the ties. But now the time has come. None of this.’ Appa flung his arm out in a gesture that encompassed everything – Kitcha, who sat with a sketch pad and box of Camlin watercolour tubes and two brushes in a glass of water, his weeping mother, the long bare hall with a swing, the veena propped in the corner, the old clock on the wall, and the sofa-cum-bed that Kitcha opened out in the night and slept on. ‘None of this means anything any more. I see all of it as bandhanam. Bonds. Shackles. I am suffocating!’

  Appa had turned to him. He had raised his hand as if to gather him into an embrace, then dropped it abruptly. Kitcha thought, was he a bandhanam too? How could Appa have turned himself into this cold stranger?

  Kitcha’s mother Sarada Ammal, the perfect wife who observed every auspicious date and ritual, who braided jasmine for the evening puja and played the veena, who on Janmasthami laid a trail of footprints through the house and lit a hundred and one lamps on Karthika Vilakku, lay on her side muttering, ‘For fourteen years, I never ever disagreed with you. Your will was mine. And now, you call me a chain tying you down. How can you? What am I to do now? What do I do now?’

  When Appa spoke next, he addressed only Kitcha. It was as if he had already erased the presence of Sarada from his life. ‘One day, Kitcha, you too will know it. A moment of truth and then everything else will cease to be of any significance. Everything else will only seem a deterrent then. An irritant standing between you and your goal.’

  Kitcha wondered if Appa was possessed. He was using words he didn’t understand. What Appa said made no sense. Yet, there was a ring of certainty in his voice.

  And Kitcha felt torn. Admiration for a father who already seemed to have turned into a demigod and anguish for his mother whom he had never seen so desolate or broken.

  Kitcha ran then. He threw aside his paints and brushes, crumpled the painting into a messy wet splodge of paper and ran to the slatternly Marina with its side shows of the two-headed woman and the monster child, the horse, the c
amel rides, the vendors and other strays like him. To the swell and plish plash of waves against the shore.

  He stared at the sea, counting the waves. He saw the sea wash away the debris and the words he wrote on the sand. Fuck you Appa, he wrote. Fuck you. Arsehole. Jerk. Motherfucker. Bastard. He wrote all the words he had found in the Harold Robbins novels he borrowed from the lending library. A calm settled on him.

  He leaned into the cold gritty brush of the wave and learned in its touch an infinite sense of hope. The wave. It came. It went. It came. It went. It came. It went. Nothing changed that. Perhaps his world too would right itself again. When he reached home, his horizon would be the one he had always known: Appa with the shortwave radio pressed to his ear, as if by osmosis he could make the world of BBC and VOA his own. And Amma? She would be picking bits of husk and grit from the rice for lunch. She would look up from the plate and frown. Even before he had crossed the threshold, she would rage and rant at him for having run away. And Appa would rush to his defence. ‘Let the boy be, Sarada. He won’t do it again, Will you, Kitcha?’

  Nothing had changed when he reached home in the evening, grimy, wind tossed, hungry and tired. He discovered a mother who lay stone faced and a father gone.

  ‘What do I do now?’ his mother asked the silent rooms of their home. ‘They tell me I ought to feel blessed to have been married to a man who has taken up sanyas. I am cursed, Kitcha, that’s what I am. Neither a wife nor a widow. Who am I, Kitcha? You tell me. He says – it’s not you. That’s what I can’t bear. If he left me for another woman, I would woo him back. I would bring him back to us. But this! How do I fight this, Kitcha?’