Acid

by Sangeetha Sreenivasan

  My god, an open manifesto! She lifted her arms towards the sky. Either her arms were stretching a bit too much or the girl was descending, for she touched her stomach and felt her nipples, like the knobs of a joystick. To the strumming of a guitar, the girl smiled, dimpling.

  Now, Kamala floated in a paper boat, in crystal clear water. You want the water blue; yes, you take blue, green. But the tangerine trees and the marmalade skies that surrounded her had the same colour, immutable. Through the cellophane flowers of yellow and green she searched for the girl with the kaleidoscope eyes.

  Somebody was calling her. Unhurried, in a voice not audible to others, Kamala said, ‘She looks like her.’ A newspaper taxi was waiting for her outside the firing range, on the shore, an open taxi; she could ride with the clouds on her face.

  She remembered there had been no trellis for passion fruit, nor espaliers on a lattice in her garden a long time ago. Her garden was not even named. It was Shaly who had named it ‘barsati’, the terrace garden that had then only some wild creepers, cotton plants, a variety of orchids and an old barbeque in the corner. She was the one who took care of the garden; her barsati changed its colours and contours faster than Kamala changed the curtains in the rooms. The old terrace had been just a smoking area for Madhavan, to spend his idle hours in or sometimes play cards with his friends. Once he left, it breathed with the pleasure of women, of the earth they brought in small bags to the concrete terrace, of the green plants.

  Bits of moonlight fell on the indoor plants in the pots. There was a party going on there; the invitees were mainly his friends, some hers. Kids also played on the terrace, including Shiva who was making a mess out of everything. In fact he was attracting attention; making faces at the visitors, picking his nose, and jumping down from certain heights making the guests say ‘Oh my god’ every now and then, forcing them to remark that he was the most adventurous soul on earth. Aadi, on the other hand, played his silent games sitting in the centre of the terrace, watching the people moving around. Some of the guests wanted the kids to talk. Some of them asked, ‘Hello little one, what are you doing?’

  ‘I am practicing being a hungry, wild lion, which hasn’t eaten for a month,’ Shiva said.

  ‘But it seems like you have eaten too much already. What is there for the party? What is your mother going to give us?’

  ‘Roach-rice,’ he said.

  The children made a lot of noise and laughed aloud at that. The guests joined them in their laughter mechanically, mostly because they didn’t want to offend the boys’ mother, as she was an extremely beautiful woman. When the children started circulating the menu with the special mucus rice their mom had made for the guests, Madhavan dragged them downstairs.

  Rane, Javed and Faizy along with their girlfriends were from Kamala’s office. Faizy’s girlfriend was German, a beautiful blonde called Astrid. Each time they met she gifted Kamala a new book, even on the day Kamala resigned. The last book Astrid had given her was Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith and on the first page she had written in violet ink, ‘There should always be a book between us’ in small letters. She remembered the first book, Madame Bovary, and what she had written: ‘For Kamala, for being the fairy you are’. It was the same book she had taken years ago from the college library.

  Javed always used to bring two girls along with him and he would say like a public announcement, ‘I won’t be marrying either of these girls, such pains in my ass,’ and the girls would titter. The people from her office were Madhavan’s friends too; he had worked at Purple Ocean for a short while. Kamala had invited just one girl for the party, someone she had met during her travels, who had given her her phone number and address. Kamala had offered to find her a job, and she hoped this party with lots of people would help.

  ‘If she is smart, there is nothing wrong in giving her a shot,’ she said looking at Faizy.

  ‘This is the third time you are saying this. But where is your girl, will she ever turn up?’

  Someone put on some music, and the voices of those who had gathered rose above it; someone started swaying his body and others joined, followed by torrents of drinks.

  She should have at least telephoned me, thought Kamala.

  Then they saw a large bunch of red roses coming up the stairs; they were really wonderful with the silver ribbon lacing around the flowers. It was Shaly. Kamala felt her heart beating uncontrollably for some time, and then she took a deep breath. Shaly was waving the bunch up in the sky and smiling with her kaleidoscope eyes. When she saw Kamala she threw the bouquet at her. Kamala had to not let it fall.

  ‘This is Shaly, my friend.’

  All eyes were on her then. In the yellow lights mingled with the moonlight they read the letters on her tee: LSD.

  Someone wanted to make fun of her. It was Parvesh who ate grass the way cows ate it.

  ‘Hey girl, I understand, I got it, you LSD chick,’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ Shaly smiled.

  Kamala was upset by the way he behaved. She knew he was a man who annoyed women. A friend of Madhavan’s.

  ‘Would you like to have some wine, or Bailey’s?’ Kamala asked.

  ‘Wine! Kamala!’ Parvesh mocked. ‘Don’t try to domesticate her,’ he said, blocking Shaly’s way.

  ‘Parvesh, could you please move aside? You’re making her uncomfortable.’

  ‘Okay, I will get out of the way, but just one question. Could you please give me the full form of the letters on your tee?’ he asked Shaly.

  ‘Of course, why not,’ she smiled and said, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’

  That night, Kamala dreamed of the sadness in the eyes of cows. She had not experienced remoteness so intense. What did those eyes say? She listened to the language of the eyes, their lashes laden with anguish. With an implicit apprehension, they kept saying, ‘If I were free, I would have talked with you more often.’ Then she saw Astrid coming towards her, dragging along a humongous, worn-out hessian sack. She emptied the contents in front of her—books, Kamala realized, from her own bookcases—and ran away. When she ran, Kamala saw her white thighs through the slit of her wrap-around skirt. She looked down at her books. Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Vincent van Gogh, each jacket reflecting the sadness of cows’ eyes, the sadness of the lives they had seen—the sadness of insatiable love and that of much endured loneliness.

  Kamala had swallowed three pills long before her eyes transmogrified into those of the cow. It was with the cow’s eyes that she looked at the bunch of sunflowers and waited for Dylan Thomas’s ball that had not reached the ground yet. In between her wakefulness and sleep, she saw a person standing in the corner of the terrace leaning against the railings as the last remnant of the boozy night faded, barefoot and shaky. He was in a white nightshirt, the long strands of his hair swaying in the night wind.

  I know this man, I think I have studied something somewhere, she said to herself. Was it he who said, ‘The book of life begins with a man and a woman in a garden and ends with revelations?’ What did he mean by revelations? What kind of revelations? I have always wanted to know more about this, the man and woman and then some other revelations, the first part concrete and the second part intangible. I am happy to meet this guy at last; I never thought I would be able to.

  ‘Where . . . where is your lover Lord Alfred Douglas?’ she asked.

  33

  In the afternoon, children were practicing dance in the school compound. It was a dress rehearsal and they all seemed extremely happy.

  ‘We will be champions this time,’ Fila said, happily kicking the stones along the pavement.

  He wanted Shaly to come and see the dance, but she was in no mood to do so. Fila came to her house wearing the traditional piece of cloth with black and red stripes for the bamboo dance. He plucked a frangipani flower and stuck it behind his ear and walked gingerly, calling out her name. But for the piece of cloth around his hips, he was naked. Rita Mama felt enraged at the sight.

  ‘Hey
, Shaly, aren’t you coming for the dance?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I am not in the mood,’ she said.

  ‘You said the same thing on Wednesday and Thursday. Today is the final rehearsal. Are you sure you are not coming?’

  She shook her head as if to say no.

  ‘Go get dressed and come,’ he insisted.

  ‘She is not going anywhere!’ Rita Mama shouted.

  Fila’s face turned pale but Shaly said, ‘Wait just a sec.’ She ran inside and came back without bothering to change her dress.

  ‘Come,’ she said, holding his hand in hers as they walked. She could sense Rita’s disappointment in the background and felt a thrill of satisfaction.

  The girls were also in their ethnic wear, in red and white striped shirts and long cloths. Silken strands of their hair were swaying with the movement of their bodies. Boys were squatting on the ground, holding the ends of the bamboo staves in formation on the ground. They were waiting for Fila. When the music began the boys started moving the bamboo staves in rhythmic motions, and the girls, dancing to the tune, stepped in and out of the blocks. But Shaly couldn’t focus on the dance or the dancers’ attire—they did the same dance every year, no change, nothing new. Fila had promised to accompany her to the hilltops with his friends after the dance. So she waited, watching them dance. It was all a kind of calculation, she thought. The boys had to be very careful, for they had to clap the bamboo staves together on a particular beat and girls had to keep the count in mind while stepping in between the staves. This was a mathematical sort of a dance that demanded brilliance, it kept them going, no matter how mechanical the counts were.

  The views from the hilltops were splendid; it was not like the dance they did every year. Every day she saw something new, behaved as if she had been caught in a storm, with a euphoric sense of liberation.

  ‘What’s over there?’

  ‘A moving panorama of wildlife.’

  ‘You must be kidding!’

  ‘No, I’m not. I think I see things, extra,’ she said. ‘Colonel, open your eyes and see.’

  Children used to call Fila ‘Colonel’. He partly closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, and saw the usual grassy knolls, mounds and valleys in green.

  ‘I want to see more . . . more!’ Shaly shouted. ‘Colonel, can you see the sea? Can you see small vessels, ships floating over it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m trying.’

  He looked again at the knolls, this time with greater attention; it must be the end of the sky she calls sea, he thought.

  Shaly was proud of her eyes, nothing like the slanted eyes of her friends, and those who have large eyes, she thought, get to see more. Then she said she wanted glasses, something to enlarge, widen her vision. Fila smiled.

  ‘Is that something you would love too?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I would love to have glasses.’

  ‘We should do something to boost ourselves, our senses, on a daily basis. You got me?’

  He gave a nod of understanding.

  Rita Mama was left with no choice but to take her to the doctor. When the doctor asked her to read the board of alphabets that was on display, she pretended she couldn’t see the letters clearly.

  ‘Why don’t you read? Try to read,’ the doctor said.

  ‘I am afraid I can’t, it is all hazy.’

  The implicit sadness she faked seemed so real that the doctor tried many lenses on her eyes, and she enjoying watching the doctor’s pleasant smile turn grotesque and humongous with each new lens. She wished she could look at Rita Mama through the lenses, to see what she was in reality. She felt happy and extremely satisfied with the no-power lens, ‘It’s all very clear now, I can read.’

  Rita Mama didn’t let her take off the glasses even for a single minute. At first, Shaly was happy about this; she sincerely believed that she was seeing more, but soon the glasses began to seem like a burden.

  The children poked around in the undergrowth for tinder. They gathered dried bamboo leaves and twigs from the fallen branches and the scorched logs they found on the way to keep the fire burning. They lit the fire and danced around the flames which were eating the bamboo leaves trying to escape with the wind. Finally, when the fire was down to embers, they threw in raw cashews and waited for the nuts to sizzle.

  Meanwhile Shaly climbed the hills with her glasses on, but when she started to brag as usual about her magnificent vision, the boys scrambled up the hilltop and grabbed her glasses off her face. There was a big row over it—and then they saw the glasses flying down, tumbling on the rocks, smashing to pieces.

  ‘Do you think they grow on trees?’ That night, Rita Mama struck her violently till she stopped crying.

  The next week Shaly heard Rita Mama cursing her mother, whom she had never seen. In fact, she had never thought of her mother so far. She tried to smile at her as if to say: Rita Mama, you are all I have, I don’t have any other mother. But Rita was so uncontrollably furious, she yelled, ‘I will wipe your smile off your bloody face.’

  Shaly pushed her from the veranda with such force that she fell and got the first bandage on her rheumatic leg two hours later.

  It had been almost one hour now, waiting outside the doctor’s room. Shaly heard a woman cry from inside the room. When she remembered her days with Rita Mama, it evoked good memories and she was seized by a strong desire to see her again. Poor Mama, she manages herself alone these days. Shaly sat there, devastated by thoughts. It was important that she discussed Kamala’s situation with the doctor. Something had to be done, or else things would fall out of place, irreparably. She looked at the closed door, behind which the subdued weeping continued, and decided to linger. There was a large poster on the door, in black and white: To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that’s all. She read it, the words printed over the picture of an old man helping a boy to walk.

  The woman looked at Aadi for two or three minutes. ‘Aadi, how are you? What are you doing these days?’

  He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Nothing. I just finished my PUC. Now I’m waiting.’

  ‘Is your mother home?’ she asked in a cordial voice.

  ‘Yes, I will tell her,’ he said. But she shook her head and went inside.

  Kamala was fiddling around in the kitchen, a packet of bread in her hand. Janu had not come for the last two days and Shiva wanted her to make something edible, not like the fried onions Aadi bought from the shop. He said they made him puke.

  She thought of making French toast. She put the packet of bread on the side table and made a mental inventory: eggs, milk, sugar. She paused again, made some calculations in her mind. She took three eggs from the fridge and broke them into a pan, then added the milk and sugar. But something was just not right. She thought again and jumped up in alarm. Oh my god, the bread! One needs bread to make toast! Thank god! She was happy her memory was working. A lapse of memory makes a person suffer. She could not let that happen to herself, she was happy there were eggs, sugar, milk and a packet of bread readily available in the kitchen; she even found a packet of butter in the fridge.

  ‘Kamala!’

  She turned back and saw the woman. She couldn’t remember who it was though. How dare people come to another’s kitchen without notice?

  ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

  Demanding recognition is something awful, thought Kamala. The woman, whoever she was, looked dismayed, as if she were displeased with either the look on Kamala’s face or the way her face had altered with time.

  ‘It’s me, Maya,’ she said disinterestedly.

  Taken aback, Kamala said, ‘My god, Maya, is that you?’

  Kamala looked at the woman’s double chin and the pendulous breasts, sacks like those of any other jaundiced woman of the neighbourhood. Though she accepted it resentfully, she couldn’t believe it. The Maya she remembered had been a very beautiful girl. Maya too might have been looking at Kamala’s hollow eyes and colourless face similarly.

  Little
by little, she remembered how graceful those days had been. Maya used to have a handmade notebook in which she had copied her favourite lines of poetry, which she used to read aloud in times of leisure—one beautiful thing she loved about her. She also remembered the day they all went to the cinema in town; it was like a festival. In 1984 they were children and so their parents had driven them to town in their old-fashioned cars to watch the movie. It was about a fictitious good little ghost, the first Indian movie to be filmed in 3D. The children were quite excited about wearing the black 3D glasses. Someone said they could go inside the movie, and someone else said, ‘No, actually, the cinema will come to us.’

  ‘Do you mean to our seats?’

  ‘Yes, actually, the cinema will come to wherever you are sitting.’

  ‘Then what will happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something will happen for sure, if you don’t want to see it you can take off your glasses.’

  Fancy 3D glasses or not, they all went. They didn’t get the tickets for the morning show so they had to wait for the matinee. It was a long queue, plus everybody crowded around everybody else, scrumming for a little space. Madhavan’s mother was not very happy about waiting for another three hours in the queue, but he was very adamant, and he started yelling at her. The children didn’t see anything wrong with this, for half the children gathered there were either yelling or crying. Besides, they had come all the way from their neighbourhood to town just to watch this movie and, maybe, if time permitted, they would have some ice cream too. While they waited, the children took turns playing on the stairs carpeted in red velvet. This was a luxury their village theatres lacked. They leaned over the railings, stretched their arms as far as they would go to touch the cement heads of the elephants which kept spraying water through their trunks down to the artificial pool in the middle of the theatre. There were policemen too, to control the crowd. Everything about the movie was hilarious, the movie itself and the games before the movie. But afterwards, when they got out of the theatre, there was no queue or order. Where are the policemen, they wondered. Kamala started crying in the crowd, she was worried she would lose her folks.