Glaring Shadow A Stream Of Consciousness Novel

by BS Murthy

  "If only I had heard about it," he said seemingly convinced, "maybe I would have handled our mutual attraction more languidly saving my friend from such a predicament. But all said and done, his hurt owed to his wife's lack of sensibility; maybe it's the maturity of a spouse that shapes the course of the other's life where it really matters."

  Chapter 27

  Veneer of the Vile

  "Don't we find women carrying their paternal baggage into their married life!" he continued. "By and large, they tend to stick to their parental roots than sowing fresh family seeds in their matrimonial soil; it could be the natural weakness for one's kith and kin or it may be individual inhibitions for integration; whether or not the environment at the in-laws' place is conducive for camaraderie. Ruma opened her heart and home to her people who had shunned her when she needed them the most and as they wormed their way into her affections, she lost her sense of proportion; given her snobbishness as my people paid no more than courtesy calls, I too developed a distorted vision of relationships in the ingratiating company of her relatives. So, as her flock became hangers on, my folks ceased visiting us altogether; why should they for we seldom reciprocated their visits, and even when we went to them on occasion, we never gave them the feeling of our being at home in their homes. What with a false sense of being apart from them, we came to live in our ivory tower, flocked by those who came to grind their axes."

  "How did all that affect your son?"

  "As I see it in hindsight, Satish was born to a right couple gripped by a wrong psyche," he said with apparent sadness. "Having survived that road accident, Ruma and I live in guilt, I for the death of her daughter in Rathi's lap, and she for the demise of her friend with my child in her womb. So, we began pampering Satish as if the atonement of our sin lay in catering to his every whim and fulfilling his every fancy; even when our purse was lean and our mind subdued, we spent a fortune on his birthday bash; how silly that we come to celebrate our kids' birthdays as if they have become national heroes. If not for 02 October being the national holiday, would any notice Gandhi's birthday coming and going; I bet none remembers in which year he was born, save those readying themselves for the quiz competitions; yet, we come to lay store on our children's birthdays when they wouldn't be knowing what was going on around them."

  "Showiness has become the malady of our times; haven't wedding cards come to resemble wall posters. None seems to mind that the card and the copy don't jell at all; maybe, it's all prognostic, who knows?"

  "If one has money to spare, maybe it's an excuse to spend," he continued. "But thanks to the peer pressure, even with a shoestring budget, it has become the in thing for all. Maybe, one cannot expect forbearance from our people in the face of the newfound prosperity that too as our nation remained poor for centuries on. But still, how the poor were to tackle this financial burden imposed upon them by the profligacy of the rich is anybody's guess; perhaps the ever growing size of the bribable provides the clue. Why blame the lesser mortals for their corrupt ways; if they were to remain upright and teach philosophy at home, won't the children of the nouveauriche teach their kids some lesson in inferiority complex; so the rich man's vulgarity has become the poor man's alibi to be corrupt. Some how, we have contrived to pervert our thought process even; take the case of the school curriculum; the grind is the same regardless of the mind involved. What the sluggard could do than to mugup, ending up as an also ran. Why not make the courses for the horses instead of flogging the lagging but to no avail; it's only in the sports that the differing capabilities are appreciated to devise ways and means for all to have their place under the sun; won't the bantam and heavy weight classification in boxing, wrestling and weightlifting suggest that; the perils of pitting a lightweight champion even against a heavyweight trainee are not beyond anybody's imagination."

  The dilemma is real and when synthesized, maybe your saga could help."

  "So I take it that you're inclined to pen it," he said in excitement. "Spoiled though my son was in every way, yet he was no snob. But the aberration in his character was his inability to take 'no' for an answer, and that was bad enough; so to say, it became a case of, 'as is father so is son', but with a difference. Like me, he too managed a scrape-through degree, but unlike me, the girl he loved was all eager to become his better half. When he introduced Uma to us as his future wife, Ruma and I were dumbfounded; I couldn't figure out my son's poor taste to fall for a plain girl and Ruma felt her upbringing of him had no meaning if he were to choose someone so plebeian for a wife. When we tried to make him understand about her unsuitability, he said we wouldn't be saying so if only we could've divined her inner beauty; as we gave in, despite our better judgment, he led his first love to the altar of marriage amidst great fanfare."

  "It was as well; otherwise it would've been a shame to have induced him to desert her."

  "Oh, won't that prove there's always a need to look at things from the others' perspective as well," he continued. "But as it happened, she turned out to be a golddigger; what was worse, she was immoral to the core of her heart; as she gave him hell from the day one, he realized what a third-rate bitch his wife was. M aybe man can understand another man if he were to be his boss and a woman when he takes her as his wife. With the imagined inner beauty becoming the mirage of his married life, as Satish became an emotional wreck, I felt guilty for not having taught him the virtue of judging people for their small gestures; if only I had parented him properly, maybe he wouldn't have had to undergo that trauma. Oh, what it had taken us to rescue the poor fellow from her clutches only we knew; ultimately it was my threat to get her killed by hired hands, even at the risk of myself ending up on the gallows that made her agree to divorce him for a royal sum."

  'Don't I see your son has complexity for heredity?"

  "Not only that," he continued, "as if history repeats itself, it was a whore who played a part in his second marriage, that I came to know that from the man who had lost his wife to him."

  "Strange it is!"

  "Better save your double exclamation mark to do justice to that mother of all tales, a verbatim account of the whore who had played a part in it."

  Chapter 28

  Swap for Nope

  "Here is that fact beyond fiction," he began to narrate with a parental pride that didn't escape my attention. "What a handicap it was to be divorced, thought my son; self-service at home and harlot-solace in a brothel; what service and how much solace! Women were ever scary of even wealthy divorcees as if divorce underscores one's incompatibility once and for all, and a whore was no answer for a wife. Surely some featureless young thing could be willing and that's no choice of a wife any way; but a lucky guy could bump into a desirable dame in the blind alleys of the Cupid and that's a rarity anyway; as for affairs, they were seldom, even for the well-heeled in their prime, but as life is meant to be lived, he resolved, one had to go about it regardless and how to make the best of time was the essence of existence."

  "Envisioning liaisons through friendship magazines seemed to him no more than chasing the mirages of lust," he continued with the account of his son's life. "But for an ad here and there from a genuine dame, the rest were all from the cravers of female flesh, and given the lack of proper response, one might wonder whether the 'willing women' were in deed real beings or merely fictitious characters meant to buttress the publishers' bottom lines; even otherwise, with the exhibitionist tone of the machismo ads, going through the pages left one with a sickening feeling; pity the dames who fell for such guys. Maybe the saving grace was the insertions for wifeswapping that seemed genuine for they were all about give and take; but then, wasn't he rendered a hors de combat for he lacked the means for a quid pro quo? What about Vimala, he thought as he recalled that evening when he was led into a lounge of a mansion where he found a score of whores in awkward postures, and as he turned his back on the gaudy dames in disgust, one lissome lass in a Turkish towel walked in. Enticed, as he followed her in a trance, she sauntered alo
ng endearingly in her seminude, and that ushered in an unusual romance between them."

  "It's as if your son had stolen your address-book of those places."

  "Well," he said after a hearty laugh, "it occurred to him that Vimala could carry herself to pass off for his wife; what's more she was bound to tempt any hesitant husband to jump into the swap trap. W hat an idea to pay her for the favors of a M ILF or two in the wife swaps though not all of them were honeys? So roping in Vimala, he went on a hunt for the promising, and soon succeeded in roping in the willing - an educated and sophisticated couple in their mid-twenties, who were married for some years by then; he was handsome and successful, and she was sexy and charming. While they led an active sexy life, their family cradle remained empty, and that let the ennui set into their otherwise wondrous life. So, they tried to enliven their life by seeking pleasures as their fancies suggested, but as the novelty of those diversions wore off, their cumulative exasperation increased reducing the span of their thrill; and back to square one, they realized that they had lost the capacity to enthuse each other, so bored to death but committed to each other, they dragged their feet on their drab marital course. But when their love for adventure made them think in terms of venturing into the forbidden avenues of human joys, they began searching for a suitable couple to make it a foursome for a fulsome life."

  "Cynically brilliant, and surely it's a notch above your threesome idea in the hospital."

  "Didn't I tell you that my son did far better than that," he continued. "The orgies that followed brought them all closer and that made them feel blessed in their blissful state. Soon the lover in my son cherished the woman of that wife and began to wish that she were his spouse, and she, used to sex as a marital obligation, found his lovemaking emotionally fulfilling. When she was in the family way, she instinctively knew that Satish was the father of the child; and as the issue in the offing began to draw her towards him, she thought about the ethics of its upbringing in the existing setting; as her maternal instinct got the better of her feminine infirmities, her husband's position in her life seemed untenable in her perception, and it took little time for her to resolve that my son was the man of her destiny. Much before the expected delivery, she deserted her man to begin her life afresh with Satish; and to avoid a first rate scandal, we got them married in secrecy. Didn't you hear the talk on the grapevine about the simple wedding of Satish and Sarala?'

  "Yes, but....''

  "It was not the end of it," he continued. "Let down and lonely for his misadventure, the lost soul was left to rue his folly; but as time started clearing the debris of his fate, he began to pick up the threads of life. As woman could only heal the wounds caused by woman, he went to a brothel for solace, only to be doubly wounded; he found Vimala among the girls and was dumbfounded to learn that she was picked up by Satish to act as a dupe to deceive him. When he threatened to sue Satish for the breach of trust and other criminal offenses, I had to cough up much to keep him off; legal case or not, surely he had a damaging story to sell to our hurt."

  "Isn't it like making the best of a bad bargain? But not everyone would resort to that I suppose."

  "That's about the inscrutability of human behavior," he said. "So, hardly had we come to terms with the fiasco of Satish's divorce than we had to contend with his scandalous alliance with Sarala. It was one thing to avert a scandal and another to reconcile to the oddity; while it brought to the fore our own liaison in the wake of our spouses' demise, yet their offence offended even our blunted sense of righteousness. As we sought to punish them through our indifference, we all became strangers in our own house; and it pained me to realize that I had failed as a father to weave a right moral fabric for my son; well what can a fallen father do than to see the fall of his son? In those stressful times, I thought of Anand, and regardless of my past indifference, he came to see me; when I began my lament, he cut me short to aver that parents want their children to be happy the way they want them to be happy and not happy per se; and if their complying children were to be unhappy, they only turn philosophical to unburden themselves. It was this eye-opener that set our family ball rolling all again."

  Chapter 29

  Goring Syndrome

  "Once we could remove our indignant blinkers," he continued, "we had seen what a wonderful woman Sarala was. As our son and his spouse doted upon each other, Ruma and I reminisced over our own times, and soon as Sarala delivered Ramesh, we gloated over our grandson, and well before his second birthday as he had Ramya for his sibling, our cup of joy was seemingly filled to the brim; as if to meet the future needs of the growing family, our ventures too began yielding in their bountiful. After

  all those inimical twists and ironical turns as life went on for long without any hiccups, it appeared as if life had left with nothing up its sleeve to surprise us; so it never occurred to me that it could be a lull before the storm that was about to be unleashed on us by the inimical fate; like all of Gen-Next, Satish too was fond of fast cars; how often I used to tell him, 'go west my boy for the roads here are deathtraps', but he would rather prefer the comforts of the eastern life to the mundane luxuries of the west. M aybe at the dictates of fate, as he began pushing us to make it to the M ount Abu in his Ferrari, I relented only when he promised never to cross eighty; well, he kept his word but that truck driver was too drunk to have kept his course. What an irony of life is that it often tends one to be the victim of others' follies.'

  "Sad though, it's the reality of life."

  "Man's folly at times might give a weird twist to the history of his land," he said. "You might have seen the movie Dunkirk; in the World War II, the Wehrmacht cornered the British in and around the port town of Dunkirk, and all that was left for it was to push and prod the enemy into the sea. But Goring, the head of Luftwaffe in the Third Reich put it into Hitler's head that Wehrmacht's victory would be perceived by the Germans as the victory of their armed forces, but if Luftwaffe were to annihilate the entrapped that would be to the Fuehrer's account as the air force was his creation whereas the army was as old as the nation. Luckily for British forces, the Fuehrer fell for it, and as Goring bit more than he could chew, Churchill had enough time to affect their rescue across the English Channel. But sadly for Germany and arguably for the good of the world, while it was his grandeur of delusion and not the well-being of his country that made Goring envisage that absurdity, it was Fuehrer's false sense of invincibility that made him overlook the danger the move had portended. If not for Goring's self-serving advice the flower of the British youth might've perished on the sands of Dunkirk and the Nazis would have been the masters of the World sans the Goring Syndrome - the self-serving ways of one that imperil others' course would serve the unintended in unexpected ways."

  "I've never heard of this Goring Syndrome."

  "It did occur to me only now," he said, "and you might as well give me the credit for that, unless, unknown to us, someone, somewhere, had already come up with it; you know such are known to happen more often than one might think it could be the case."

  "That's true."

  "Maybe the corporate health sector symbolizes the Goring Syndrome like nothing else; the assorted diagnostic reports sought by the self-serving doctors that rob their patients' savings would only serve the auxiliary health services; even conceding that the capital involved in setting up a corporate hospital is mind-boggling, begging for returns on investment, that the doctors there allow themselves to turn into con men to trick the sick is indeed sickening; I wonder how these are better than the pimps fleecing the whores; in spite of their daytime black deeds, the fact that they are able to sleep at nights shows that they have self-anesthetized their collective consciences; even as Hippocrates could be turning in his grave, wonder how these fare in hell as and when they reach there. M aybe death is no better than these supposed to be lifesaving guys for while devouring your near and dear; it lets you go as if to derive a vicarious pleasure in seeing you thanking life in spite of it all. It was
in that confused state of mind that I dusted the much vaunted Bhagvad-Gita for an understanding of life and death in philosophical terms."

  "I began to see death in its true perspective through verses such as these/' he began reading from the Gita that lay beside him. "You and Me / As well these / Have had past / Future as well; Clear are learned in their minds / Embodies selfsame spirit all one / From birth to death, in every birth; Spirit as entity hath no birth / How can thou kill what's not born; What's not real, it's never been / And that's true, it's ever there / That's how wise all came to see; Prima facie if thou feel / Subject Spirit is to rebirths / Why grieve over end of frame; Dies as one / For like rebirth / Why feel sad / Of what's cyclic; Isn't thy lament over that / Un-manifested to start with / Gets manifested just as guest / And bids adieu in due course, and, Dies not Spirit as die beings / What for then man tends to grieve. And that helped. Even otherwise maybe time would have healed the wounds of my grief but where else I would've acquired the depth for contemplation."

  "How mean is man that he turns to the scriptures only when he's down and out."

  "Yet they are magnanimous to him," he said. "It's not their fault that we don't derive benefit from them. But what eye-openers the end chapters of the Gita were to me; what a vile creature I was, I came to realize from these verses - Make all vile, rude guys all / Vainglorious 'n haughty too / Besides being indignant / No less are they indulgent; Gives as virtue man freedom / Keeps him vileness in bondage; Pride 'n lust, long wish list / Vile in conceit live impure; Seeing life as one to gloat / Vile by impulse go to lengths; Seek vile creatures ever shortcuts / On way to wants, they ill-get wealth; Think all vile, in like terms- / This is mine so let me keep / Why not have I more of it, Foe this mine I've truly floored / Won't I tackle the rest of them / Sure I'm Lord of mine own world; Note all vile, gloat as such - / Besides wealthy, I'm well-born / Won't I give and enjoy too, To their hurt in illusion vile / End up slaves of joys of flesh."