Acid

He wanted to leave the common ways.

  The second day, he thought it was a saddening experience altogether. Somehow he felt depressed and wanted to cry. Each word the actor uttered jabbed him straight in the middle of his heart. The moment he stepped out of the theatre, he called his mother. Her tired voice at the other end of the phone depressed him all the more. Amy Ammu was beside him, pulling at his shirtsleeve.

  ‘Excuse me. That’s my teddy bear. Give him back,’ she said.

  He didn’t pause to wish her or admire her. He just thrust him into her hands while talking with his mother.

  ‘Shaly, are you there?’

  Shaly . . . Shaly . . .

  Kamala heard him calling Shaly, his voice louder than before. She had noticed that he didn’t call anyone else as frequently as he did Shaly these days. I must ask Aadi to come back soon, she thought. He could go wherever he wanted once they shifted to the new flat. There would be light, air and security at the new flat. She could even arrange a full-time tutor for Shiva. There were three new leaves on the money plant ivy at the window. Each leaf was a hope, life. She was only in her early forties; half of her life remained, still. It was time she stopped playing with it.

  His voice was getting piercing. Slowly, carefully, she walked towards his room. His face turned pale when he saw her.

  ‘Do you want something? Why did you call?’ she asked.

  He didn’t say anything; she saw his eyes welling up. She walked towards him and sat beside him.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’

  She stroked his hair and kissed him on his forehead. The smell of sweat and dirt from his hair was sickening. She turned her face away. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d not had a bath since his brother had gone. But all the same she asked, ‘When was the last time you had a bath?’

  He pretended not to remember, but he was deeply hurt and ashamed. He saw tears at the corner of her eyes.

  ‘I will help you bathe today,’ she said.

  He thought he wanted to cry but he was too excited at the thought of a tub of lukewarm water to cry.

  Ah, sweet little darling! Apple of my eye! He remembered his mother’s childish, once-upon-a-time utterances, dialects of the heart; the way she had bathed him when he was a child, the way she used to massage oil on his partially disabled body after the subaqueous silencing of that misfortunate winter.

  45

  Aadi went to the same show on the third day as well. The same play was being performed at Jagriti continuously for eleven days; this was the seventh day of the show. When Amy Ammu, all dressed up for the theatre, came to hand over her teddy as usual, he asked her, ‘How is he?’

  ‘Oh!’ Amy Ammu pouted her lips at his ignorance and smacked her hands on her head in disgust. She said, ‘Look at it. Today it is not a he, it’s a she.’

  He looked at Blue. Yes, what she said was true. She should forgive him; he had not noticed the red bindi on Blue’s forehead, like the one the young pretty woman had been wearing the day before. It even had Amy’s butterfly clip on its ear.

  ‘Hello, Blue,’ he tried to talk to it the way she did. Again, the little girl pouted in fake anger and said.

  ‘You don’t know anything. She is not Blue; her name is White.’

  How easily she could call the blue teddy White. He didn’t like her changing its sex so smartly. To his surprise Sakthi and his mother had come for the show too and both of them smiled at him. Sakthi looked at the teddy in his hand at first, then looked at Aadi with a frown.

  ‘This teddy belongs to her,’ Aadi pointed at Amy Ammu, who was busy with something else. ‘I am just a caretaker.’

  ‘Appadiya?’ said Sakthi. Is that so?

  Aadi felt happy to be able to explain. Sakthi’s mother smiled in acknowledgement.

  ‘Hi, I am Vinita,’ she said.

  They shook hands and Sakthi asked him, ‘Why do you come for the same show every day?’

  ‘Where are your horns?’ Aadi asked him in turn, speaking in Malayalam as he hadn’t since leaving his family.

  Vinita became excited upon learning he was from her native place. They spoke mixing Malayalam, Tamil and English. She said she was living in an apartment near the theatre and that there was a scene in the play where the Tenth Head was feeling his underarm with his fingers and licking it. Sakthi had come again that day to check whether he was really licking it or faking.

  When Sakthi noticed that the conversation was mixing different languages and that it was about him, he announced, ‘I know three languages: Tamil, Kannada, and English.’ Then he thought for a while and corrected himself, ‘No, I know four languages. I know Malayalam, too.’

  Later, he said he liked the way the actor licked his fingers, and the woman shouted on stage and the percussion that followed with a hullabaloo of confusions.

  Before the play began, when it was announced, ‘Adishakti presenting The Tenth Head,’ Sakthi looked at Aadi in surprise.

  ‘It’s you and me,’ he said. Aadi didn’t understand what he meant at first.

  Vinita explained that he was referring to their names.

  Outside the theatre, Amy Ammu and her mother were waiting for Blue, now White. When Vinita wished her as Baby Amy, her mother corrected her, ‘She is three and a half, not a baby.’ Sakthi looked at his mother triumphantly, for he had asked her several times not to call him Sakthi Baby in front of his friends.

  ‘Would you like to join us for dinner?’ Vinita asked Aadi.

  He immediately accepted her invitation with thanks. It was a modest and elegant apartment nearby, with a number of water colours on the wall to the left of the entrance hall, a sort of memory wall. Vinita showed him Sakthi’s room. A huge cardboard ship in the centre, with an eye-patch wearing captain at the wheel, a donkey hanging from the mast and a cobwebbed niche on the east wall—the webs, she said he was growing on purpose. There was a figure of a Minion in the niche half obscured by the web. It would be fun to see once it was completely covered over.

  He was happy with the chapatti and korma as he was already bored of the food they served at the hotel, the repetitious and poor breakfast spread.

  ‘Won’t you get bored here once he goes to school?’ he asked.

  Suddenly the twinkle in her eyes faded. She looked down at the table and nodded indistinctly; it was neither yes nor no.

  Who else knew better than him that some lives, some specimens got caught in the tragic spaces of the webs of boredom, like the Minion on Sakthi’s wall.

  ‘That’s a big TV you have here, this looks almost like a theatre,’ he complimented her.

  ‘I love to watch movies. That’s how I spend my time, and I go to plays whenever I find time, I like the atmosphere there and the people. If you don’t have any other appointments in the morning, come over; maybe we can watch a movie together. There is a good video shop near Jagriti. What do you say?’

  ‘But bro, this TV is mine,’ said Sakthi. He added, ‘I have a PlayStation, do you want to play a game with me?’

  ‘Yes, but some other time, it’s already late,’ he said.

  ‘I am a pure vegetarian, Aadi. I shall prepare rice tomorrow, I hope you don’t mind a vegetarian menu.’

  Shiva’s call came while he was on his way back to the hotel. At one point, Aadi thought he was crying, his voice sounded so feeble and heartbroken.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Is everything all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Aadi, Amma helped me bathe today,’ his voice choked as he said it.

  Now Aadi was the one who was crying. He couldn’t hold back his tears. He walked fast, ignoring the boy at the desk, shielding his face with his cell phone. Back in his room he searched for his mother’s Kashmiri shawl. He missed her scent, the scent of the woman wrapped in a tragic dream. He too wanted to find the way that led to her. ‘Have I ever been a baby in my life?’ he wondered.

  On the shores of the lake, under the cover of darkness, a little face looked at him, all shrivelled up and sad.

  46<
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  The next day he went to Vinita’s apartment with a packet of chocolates for Sakthi. She said he would be back from school by two o’clock in the afternoon. Together, they had strong filter coffee and then went to the DVD shop.

  ‘Are you going to the play again today?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes, I am planning to,’ he said.

  She thought it was a little strange, going to the same play again and again, though she herself did the same thing at times.

  ‘If you don’t mind, could you please take Sakthi along with you? I will prepare dinner by the time you come back. Anyway, you have to babysit the teddy bear.’

  In Cinema Paradiso people were reading at leisure, sitting in the corners of the coffee bar. He looked at those who were browsing while sipping every now and then from coffee mugs. He also noticed a wonderful set of drums and a keyboard near the manager’s desk. Aadi instantly liked the place.

  ‘What kind of movies would you like to watch?’ she asked.

  He was not sure, he was not really into films. He shrugged as if he had no idea and looked through the racks.

  ‘Hosa CD yen banthithe?’ she asked the shopkeeper. Do you have any new CDs?

  He was showing her some of the new movies when Aadi spotted an old film.

  ‘Which language do you want?’ she asked Aadi, but he was not listening to her. He had taken the disc in his hand and was looking at it intently. On the cover was written: Molière. Starring: Romain Duris, Laura Morante, Fabrice Luchini, Edouard Baer, Ludivine Sagnier. He flipped the cover over in his hands. ‘Speak to me in the language of Molière.’

  She took the disc from his hand. While she was examining it, he found one more: Molière, starring Philippe Caubère. They decided to take both. When they passed the white walls of the theatre, he glanced inside with an eagerness that surprised him. What would Amy Ammu with her blue-white teddy be doing now? From the window of the seventeenth room, Amy Ammu saw him walking down the lane with Vinita. She got excited and called Nimmy by her side, ‘Nimmy, Nimmy, look at him.’

  Nimmy was busy preparing for the eighth day of the show. She looked out of the window and saw the whole city walking. She couldn’t see who Amy was pointing at.

  ‘Look at this, 260 minutes. How much does that come to, four hours or four and half?’ Aadi and Vinita calculated the length of the movies. It would take at least two days to finish watching these. They felt happy, they laughed.

  Back at the house, Vinita scooped the vanilla ice cream into vintage cocktail glasses like a professional.

  ‘Ferpect,’ he said.

  Then she poured the extra strong filter coffee over the ice cream scoops. What was she doing? She was ruining it! She didn’t even ask him whether he would like to have his ice cream plain or coffee flavoured. This, he thought, is not even flavoured; this is dipped or immersed in coffee. She put an ice cream spoon in it and gave it to him.

  ‘My god, this is fantabulous!’ he shouted.

  The coffee, with its frozen sweetness, was hitting him straight in the brain. Some jabs are ecstasy. They sat on the sofa and began to watch the movie. A little later, he got up from the sofa and sat on the floor with his legs stretched out. He was afraid his coffee ice cream would not last long.

  Abruptly he felt afraid of being abandoned, being alone; the same idea he had embraced so passionately on the first day of his journey. Family means a hell of a lot of happiness too. O God!

  When Sakthi came back from the school they all had lunch together. After the lunch Aadi thought they could resume the movie for a while, but Sakthi didn’t let them. He made him play with him instead. He watched the language of his brother filling the big screen in low spirits. Bang bang bang bang.

  Vinita told him she had a family pass to the theatre, that he didn’t need to buy a ticket anymore.

  He was thinking of Molière’s exile on his way back from the theatre, of the thirteen years of abandoned wandering through the streets of France, of travel, money, passion. Poor guy, how the audience marvelled, how he survived fights and storms, how earnestly he fell in love with the mother and daughter alike, how honestly he couldn’t separate the strands of life and theatre. When the boy behind the desk wished him, he smiled, still preoccupied. He saw two carpet moths dead on the stairway.

  Kamala was trying to make a comeback, each minute, each second. It was not a matter of remaining in the closet or coming out of it, like what the doctor had told Shaly. It was all about coming back, to life. She was observing how quickly life sprouted on the money plant, each second there was a new leaf. No wonder people called it the devil’s ivy, for her window was now rich with precious green, the newness of life, the absolute bliss of living, making life succulent. Each day she woke up to the beauty of this sight, life stemming from the glass bottle that had contained whisky once. She wanted to be Behrman’s last leaf that never fluttered or moved when the wind blew. When new life sprouted outside, buds, blossoms, tender green leaves, swayed in the breeze under the happy sun, in the lightness of living, while this one leaf was caught inside the room, struggling against the cyclone confined within the four walls.

  Aadi!

  Now she was really worried about him, the boy who had gone out to learn life—like her mother who had worried about her. This was the cycle. She too had gone through the same situations, she too wanted to challenge, and she too had sought the cover of darkness. She was afraid of the world outside, yet she had said: ‘I want to see the world. I would like to know myself better.’ Her mother must have lost her sleep on occasion on the same bed. She too must have looked out of the same window. All afternoon, all evening, all night, she must have kept herself busy opening and closing the door. She must have lit the lamp with her insides boiling over. Return was a bitter word at times—it is bitter when it never happens.

  What does the word ‘mother’ mean?

  Worry.

  Trauma.

  Tragedy.

  Noun, verb or adjective—she wished she knew whatever the fucking draining out meaning was. Today, she was worried, worried because her son was far away, because she thought her son was still young, at least he had been young on the day she last saw him. He had a blue haversack on his back and a smile on his face; this was how she remembered he had gone to kindergarten on his first day. But he had started crying towards the afternoon, a lot of other boys were crying too. Shiva complained that his cry was mute and went on for so long he felt ashamed of him. Would he be crying now? Had she ever cried as a young girl? How her mother might have suffered. Her mother was always her problem, she was always on her way to her, like so many other mothers the universe bore. She had thought she would be free once her mother died. But after her death, her mother had taught her this was wrong. No child could be free with the death of its mother. Kamala’s mother now slipped into Kamala’s body, and killed Kamala who was once her child. The one who died was not the mother but the child. Mothers never die; they keep rolling like money in black markets. They kill the children, they continue, they multiply. The mother Kamala thought was hers was the first woman, from whose womb it all began. It would be difficult to track down the first woman who was single and devastatingly docile in her ways. She should have taught her children the Story of O instead of keeping them chained within the dark rooms of submissiveness. Kamala’s mother also had no idea what she was doing, what she was supposed to do. She entered the living flesh of her daughter and destroyed her daughter thinking that she was doing justice to her mother who had in fact killed her a long time ago. Now Kamala’s mother, after entering her daughter’s body made her believe that it was she, the daughter, that was living.

  Kamala remembered she had slept on her mother’s bed—her own bed—the night she arrived for the funeral. Someone told her that they had burnt the mattress her mother had slept on; the one she had now was new. New or old, wakeful or not, she was sleeping and while she slept she remembered she was talking to her mother. They were planning, plotting and fooling the rest.
People thought it was the sickly old mattresses and pillows, the smell of the rotten dampness of death that spread sorrows, but it was the loss of the child, the baby girl, the love of her mother’s life, her pleasure, her happiness, her relief, the loss of everything she had longed for, the loss of Kamala that made her mother weep, made her shut herself away from her grandchildren, from the woman her daughter had loved so dearly. Everything, the mother thought, was sickening.

  They talked the whole night. Kamala lay on the bed in the foetal position. Her mother said that was the perfect position for the beginning and the end.

  At first, her mother thought Kamala wouldn’t come. She was worried. She wanted to run away when they were about to set fire to her body. She cried, ‘Wait! Let my daughter come,’ with her lips shut tight. Nevertheless her face was covered with flattened cakes of cow dung. They would not be able to see her even if she opened her mouth and yawned. She remembered how she used to train Kamala as a child; she fretted about etiquette and ethics.

  ‘Ammukkutty, remember to cover your mouth when you yawn. Little imps and gruesome ogres are waiting to get inside your mouth and slide down through the food pipe.’

  She laughed remembering little Kamala covering her mouth with her little hands. Ha ha! Oh God. Cow dung tasted awful. A little bit of it entered her mouth and got mixed up with the remaining saliva. She wanted to get out before they set fire to the pyre. She thought she would wait outside and watch her body getting incinerated. She had been stubborn throughout her life, she wanted to see Kamala married to Madhavan, and she wanted to see Kamala follow her rules—now she wanted Kamala to come before she was completely burnt. It took enormous effort to escape from the closely packed wood and cow dung cakes. Never in her life had she struggled so much. Once out of the blazing pyre, she ran to her bedroom and waited. She saw the women taking out her old mattress, on which she had breathed her last, on which she had peed many times. Wondering where they were taking all her stuff, she followed them and she saw them burning her belongings, everything that had been hers once. She had seen her body reduced to ashes and was calm—what did the form of these materials mean, after all? But when they didn’t bring a new mattress in she started to worry, again one of her traumatic, tragic worries. Kamala would need bedding to sleep on when she came. When the women returned and started washing the furniture in the room she went out and waited under the tree that bloomed glow worms in the night. In the light of the glow worms she saw some parts of her skin, a teenager’s skin—she couldn’t believe it! Now that she had freedom in the night, she came back late, very late, to her room that looked sullen and desolate, with a sheet on her bed that she had not seen all her life. She was feeling sleepy but then she heard her daughter ask: ‘Mother, how are you?’