Acid

  Márgarét, áre you gríeving

  Over Goldengrove unleaving?

  Leáves like the things of man, you

  With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

  Ah! ás the heart grows older

  It will come to such sights colder

  By and by, nor spare a sigh

  Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

  And yet you wíll weep and know why.

  Now no matter, child, the name:

  Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

  Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

  What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

  It ís the blight man was born for,

  It is Margaret you mourn for.

  When the small eyes of the children dimmed in fear, Raphael said to them, ‘You should be brave, like our women who stripped in front of the soldiers and yelled, “Indian Army, rape us.”’

  He asked his students to ponder on the matters India was going to discuss in the coming days.

  When she woke, she found him sitting on the recliner. She sensed him looking at her. It was not morning yet.

  ‘Uncle, you haven’t slept?’

  ‘My nights are terribly long usually, sleepless and disturbed, but last night I slept very well, thanks to you.’

  When she came nearer, he kissed her hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘nothing more beautiful than this night is likely to come again in this old man’s life.’

  ‘You like it melancholic.’

  ‘Whatever! Oh God, are you hungry? That must be the reason you got up so early.’

  ‘I am happy you asked.’

  ‘I can scramble some eggs or maybe make you a bull’s eye if you like.’

  ‘Yes, I would love to, but not now. I want to sleep some more. It is so comfy in here.’

  ‘I still cannot believe this rain in a desert.’

  ‘Just say goodnight now, conversations are boring in the early morning.’

  ‘Would you like to say cheers to the sixth occasional glass?’

  She saw the Martini twisting in between his fingers. She covered her face with the blanket.

  Slut! How dare she turn off her phone! Kamala threw her mobile on the bed. What was she doing all night with her phone switched off? Was she fucking someone? Madhavan had called her many times on her mobile, but she didn’t feel like calling him back. Now, a fear, distinctively insane, started gnawing at her insides; she felt the pressure in her bowels, a gastric pull in her intestines. She took the phone and started calling them both. Her phone was switched off and though his was ringing, there was no answer.

  Slut! Slut! Slut!

  35

  ‘If only we had access to the Internet we could have said “Hi” to Shaly on Facebook,’ said Shiva.

  ‘Does she have a Facebook account?’ asked Aadi.

  ‘You are the only person on earth who doesn’t have one, Aadi.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference; you are in no way better than me.’

  ‘It makes a hell of a lot of difference to me. A netizen is never lonely, never bored. And what do we have here, except the fried eggplant Janu cooks? The Internet allows us to imagine that we are surrounded by many people—girls, women, men. Their company, especially that of girls, makes us feel rich. I can’t survive here; this is like living in hell, a pandemonium of serenity. There is no use trying to talk to Amma.’

  ‘True, it’s been two days since we ate anything nice.’

  ‘We should ask Janu to make something edible.’

  ‘When Shaly comes back, we can ask her to cook.’

  ‘Shiva, I miss Bangalore a lot. If I ask you something, will you get mad at me? When Shaly comes back can I go to Bangalore for a while? I would like to meet Rhea; you can’t imagine how much I miss her.’

  What Aadi said was a lie, for he knew Rhea was not there, but he considered her the sentimental trump card with which he could make his brother cave. Totally against what he had expected, Shiva smiled pleasingly.

  ‘You go and come back, for you Rhea and for me Shaly.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant that if Shaly comes back, there will be someone to take care of you. You know Amma can’t handle everything.’

  ‘Of course, but what the fuck is she handling these days anyway?’

  ‘Shiva, she is sick. She is not well, and we should realize that.’

  ‘I was just joking, I think I can manage myself. Don’t you worry about me, Aadi.’

  ‘In that case, I will send her a mail when I go to the town in the evening. Do you know her email ID?’

  ‘Why the fuck do you want to send her a mail? Can’t you just telephone her?’

  ‘No, no way! She makes fun of me whenever I try to begin a conversation. It would be better if I sent her a mail instead. Give me the ID.’

  ‘It’s [email protected].’

  Solitude was the silence buried deep within. Two teenagers going on nineteen, confined within the white walls of an old house, looked at each other in silence and savoured the taste of the poison on their tongues. It was something they could not swallow like they could finish a piece of ginger cake or tablespoons of bitter honey collected from a snakewood tree. It was real, though impalpable. In the mornings it woke with them, and they wondered at how slowly it spread, taking its sweet time. They saw it crawling over the white plaster of their bedroom, and strengthening its grip on the warmth outside. Their taste buds and food pipes suffocated under the strange smell of ash gourds cooked in water and turmeric, sometimes there would be raw mango and drumsticks, sometimes raw banana—whatever the vegetable, it was always cooked in the same way, the same recipe: water, salt and turmeric. But lately they had been hiding their distaste, for they knew their mother was seriously ill, weak or tired, though she was still young and somewhat beautiful. The sight of their mother shrinking every day, her clothes hanging off her shoulders like the coat of a lawyer, like the folds of a wild bat, deepened their insecurity. They had not seen her veins looking so prominent before, or hers eyes so hollow or her laugh lines so clearly visible. At times, the vein that began on her forehead seemed to pop onto the surface as if it were a pronouncement of her severe headache.

  Though they all lived inside the same house and they all wanted to separate and go back, at times they sat around the big dining table without seeing each other. Sometimes, the landline rang, but no one cared to answer, they would let the rings echo throughout the house. Each thought inside the house was plainly suicidal. If they had had a loaded gun, they would have fired without aiming; it would have been easy for Aadi to end Shiva’s solitude. Like Brecht had said all living things need help from the rest of the living. Once, in their room in Bangalore, they had watched a Hrithik Roshan movie. The hero was completely paralysed and bedridden, pleading for euthanasia. It was difficult to watch that movie sitting beside Shiva. Aadi had wanted to leave the room, but Shiva insisted he stay. When the hero asked a well-wisher for a packet of condoms, Shiva laughed aloud, and Aadi shuddered.

  They remembered what Shaly had told them the day after they had arrived here. ‘Breathe in as much as you want, the air is pure, not polluted like the air we have in Bangalore. No excess of vehicles, no mobile towers—life is like heaven, a paradise of trees, far away from the maddening wires and signals.’ They tried to draw in a deep breath, but their lungs choked as if attacked by deadly, acidic bee stings. Shaly, maybe you don’t know that solitude is the deadliest poison on earth. Pathways that don’t reek of diesel smoke and green fields without mobile towers are not always free of poison.

  Aadi was leaving the bedroom when he heard Janu cry out. He rushed towards the entrance hall, from where the cry had sounded. ‘What is the matter?’ Shiva was asking behind him. Kamala lay prone, near the threshold steps of the entrance hall.

  ‘What happened?’ Aadi asked Janu.

  ‘I don’t know! She hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday,’ she said. ‘I will go and get a taxi, let us take her to t
he hospital.’

  ‘It’s vertigo, no need for a doctor,’ Kamala said in a weak voice and in a dialect neither of them understood. Somehow, they picked her up, and lay her down on what used to be her father’s bed in the room next to the entrance hall. Aadi sat on the edge of the old four-poster bed, unsettled. Janu rushed to summon a taxi. Aadi heard Shiva calling him from his room, but fear didn’t permit him to answer or go to him.

  Kamala lay on her father’s majestic canopy bed like a misfit frill that has frayed a bit. The car in the temporary garage was of no use to her. Aadi remained on the edge of the bed, petrified, thinking about a time when his mother would not be around. He sat there motionless, unmindful of Shiva’s calls, till the taxi honked from outside and Janu rushed in.

  In the sunlight, two water droplets oscillated on a lotus leaf like two precious pearls that had no roots, no reality. The leaf, on the other hand, was mute, its mouth strapped by long cellophane ribbons of veins, it had no way to support them. Like toddlers taking their first steps, the droplets wobbled on the leaf’s surface for a while, then in unison they flowed towards the centre, to the heart of the leaf, as if going back to the womb: they shone there like a priceless gem.

  He waited around in what used to be her father’s room even after they came back from the doctor, even after Janu had gone, even after it struck eleven. In the end, Kamala had to force him to leave her room. She said having low blood pressure was normal, and that seven in ten suffered from the same issue.

  ‘What is there to worry about so much? Just go and sleep,’ she said.

  But this didn’t improve the feverish condition of his brain. Fear had transformed into a deadly ghost by then, one that threatened, ‘Your mother is about to die, you don’t have much time left with her, watch out.’ Fear, he had identified, had the smell of old mud walls getting wet in the rain. If only there were more light and wind in the room, if only she could keep one window open even if it was night, he sighed. Kamala’s headphones were on the table. He took them and walked towards her. He asked her in a gentle voice, ‘Would you like to listen to some music, Amma?’

  ‘Yes, I would love to.’

  Shiva had no complaints even after that long and weary day of abandonment. Aadi didn’t tell him much except that their mother had had a severe headache and they had taken her to the hospital. At one point, when he was alone, Shiva’s throat was parched and he had cried aloud, ‘Aadi, please come here! Janu! Anybody there?’ but there had been no answer. He kept calling them for some more time. Then he realized that the more he shouted the thirstier he would get and hence he decided to remain quiet. The water that remained in his body had to be preserved; no more anger, no more tears. He could not have climbed down from such a tall bed and got into the wheelchair all his own, nor could he imagine crossing the antique thresholds in his chair. Shaly used to tell him the story of a man who was the supernova of physics, who had spent a good part of his time in a wheelchair, to motivate him, though Shiva never felt inspired enough. The design of each flower and each plant in this universe is different, the needs and blueprint change with the playtime fantasy of the universe.

  After Kamala heard the door close, and Aadi’s footsteps recede down the corridors, she sat up on her bed and glanced around the room, taking in the anaemic white walls, the closed shutters of the window, the headphones he had given her and the huge black dog wagging its tail at her bedpost. There are people, she thought, who never get tired of the countless insipid coffees waiting for them every morning, from cradle to grave: no real sex, no mental nymphomania, no worries. The dog climbed into the bed and sat there, resting its head on her lap. She ran her fingers through the folds of its neck, the fur on its back.

  There were dirty clothes piled up around the room. She wondered why Aadi hadn’t felt like tidying up the place, for she knew he had been there all the time. At the very least, he could have put the clothes in the laundry basket.

  She got down from the bed and with much difficulty picked up the dirty clothes, her lingerie, wondering if he had seen them lying on the floor like that, and put everything in the laundry basket. She knew it was the room, its watered-down, unreal walls that were not letting her sleep. The lack of air inside the room was always trying to smother her and she pushed open a window, her arms suffering a twisting spasm of pain. An almost unexpected gust of wind rushed inside and somehow she stepped out of the room and stood on the veranda for some time, leaning against one of the pillars of the central courtyard. Afterwards she made her way across the threshold of the entrance hall. She wondered how she had fallen down there and why, whether there would be a decent way to settle her problems. She clasped the pineapple motif and looked up the dimly lit staircase. Shamelessly, Satan, the fallen angel who had become an antique piece, incapable of even a decent cough, looked at her. His yellowing teeth and decaying bones didn’t hold him back from chasing fallen angels, and so he followed her, climbed the steps after her. He knew he could no longer coil around the wilderness luring women, but he knew he had the potential to do something, though not in an elaborate way, something of his own, like old women chew betel leaves, like old men curse the young ones. He stealthily walked behind her, for his skin was no longer young and shiny, but weirdly shrivelled up and unravelled at the same time.

  Kamala pushed open the doors to Shaly’s room. She remembered how Sankaran and his woman and the other workers had pulled everything out of that room once. The heavy chest of drawers had knocked off some of the plaster from the wall then—the mark was still there, like a gash on the skin. She remembered the cardboard boxes, the junk that even ragpickers would not have dared to take for free, and the sadness in her mother’s eyes over the burnt waste. ‘Just in case of an emergency, my child, just in case,’ Amma had said repeatedly.

  There were no more just-in-cases there. The room looked washed out, except for the dangling bulb. She remembered how Maya and she had stood locked under that bulb once.

  ‘Shall I turn off the light?’ Satan stammered.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  On the bed, there was no scent of Shaly, nothing that reminded Kamala of her. Instead, some of the old voices came back, scampering moves, and the sound of short, quick steps. She thought she even saw the loft open, which had not been the case when she had gone to Shaly with a cup of hot coffee in her hand. Her mother would no longer come hurrying in case she gave a cry of alarm. She didn’t wish to disturb her sons, Aadi was already very upset. She couldn’t close her eyes; she sat down on the bed and looked around; she felt the old glances and the old fear again; she tried to concentrate on the loft that was not there. Satan was hiding behind the door, in the lingering light of the hour, she had seen his shadow on the floor. She thought it was Madhavan.

  ‘Madhavan, why are you standing there?’ she asked.

  Her children were sleeping on either side of the bed.

  ‘I want to go back tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Can we come with you?’

  ‘Wait for three more months. What will you do there with the babies? Stay with your mother, that would be better.’

  ‘Haven’t I told you, Madhu, that something always bothers me here? Something crawls into my ears. I want to be back in Bangalore.’

  ‘It’s just a feeling, dear, you are worried, that’s all.’

  She watched him pack his things, the zipper of his travel bag opened wide, and for a second she imagined packing the babies, putting them inside the bag, without him knowing it. Satan deliberately dropped something, making Madhavan bend over to retrieve it. When he came back to the room after packing his things and taking his nightly shower, he saw Kamala and the children sleeping peacefully. He sat down on the mattress stretched out for him on the floor and before slipping into a comfortable post-shower sleep he looked at the babies once more. This time, he heard something hissing very softly. Without waking her up, he lifted the edge of Kamala’s mattress slightly and checked. ‘Oh God!’ he drew his hand back as he felt pain seepin
g through his veins. Clumsily, he pitched forward to the switches.

  ‘Kamala, wake up, get up,’ he said.

  Still asleep, she sat up straight. ‘What happened?’ she asked him.

  Satan lit the bulb, in the light of which she saw the marks on Madhavan’s arm, two tiny red spots adjacent to each other on his left forearm.

  Madhavan is dying. Who will give the obituary? Do I need to wake up his sons?

  ‘Kamala, take the children and move aside,’ he shouted, his voice fearful.

  ‘I told you, there is something.’

  When she stepped backwards with the babies cuddled in her arms, he, gathering strength, turned the mattress upside down onto the floor. There, on the wooden bed planks, they saw two little golden snakes crawling about helplessly, and which, when she came forward to take a closer look, opened their purple mouths.

  The wind ruffled the curtains of the room. It couldn’t lift the curtains or make them sway uncontrollably, like the curtains in ghost movies, for the curtains were reluctant to leave the wood grills of the window shutters. Tormented by disturbing thoughts and sleeplessness Aadi walked towards her room, though he was not sure of a welcome. He thought, at the least, he could check whether she was sleeping or not. If the music had helped her sleep then he could go back and try to get some sleep himself. The silence of the furniture was audible in the dingy moonlight that was reflected on and through the courtyard. The days, nights, afternoons and mornings were chained to each other, to a tangled labyrinth of no time and no space and no concepts. Unbelievably, there was no difference between wakeful hours and sleeping hours. He hadn’t even read a book since he had come here. While they were in Bangalore, Kamala used to brag about enrolling him in some coaching classes in a neighbouring town in her native place, but it seemed she had completely forgotten about that, or that her son had passed PUC and it was her duty to think of his future. What a blissful sort of forgetfulness this is, he thought. Does she think her children were some sort of furniture she bought on the way to keep inside the ‘relatively big’ bedroom of her house?