The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad

by Kunal

  ICU. Some slept with their bags serving as pillows, some prayed and some just sat looking fixedly

  at the swinging doors of the ICU wing in apprehension.

  Early dawn brought a flutter of activity in the waiting room with a middle-aged woman wailing

  inconsolably when she was informed that her father had passed away. Anand ji rubbed his eyes,

  rotated his stiff neck and walked up to the nurse’s station to ask about Noni’s condition.

  A bespectacled nurse replied, ‘It’s same only. Doctor coming out, you ask to him.’

  When Dr Shah came out of the ICU he informed Anand ji that Noni Appa’s condition remained

  critical. They had started her on a new antibiotic but if that did not work she would soon go into

  multiple organ failure. Anand ji went into the ICU to see Noni.

  He saw her lying on the bed, hooked to an IV pole, a tube in one nostril to suck out fluid from her

  stomach and electrodes attached to her chest leading to a heart monitor. He reached out and

  touched her cheek gently. Though he had imagined this moment dozens of times, not once had he

  thought it would be at a time like this.

  Binni came to the hospital a few hours later and Anand ji went home to freshen up. He made

  himself a cup of tea and though he opened a packet of biscuits he found himself unable to eat any.

  He lay down on the bed, closing his eyes, hoping to sleep for an hour but he kept seeing a lifeless

  Noni lying on the hospital bed. Restless, he returned to the hospital.

  Binni met him in the waiting room. She seemed ebullient. ‘Anand ji, good news, Noni Appa is

  conscious. You know, I had not told Mallika till now, but I will make a call in the evening and tell

  her. These rubbish doctors had said that Noni Appa had nearly departed, but my Noni is too strong

  and with Allah’s blessings she has now made a U-turn.’

  Noni Appa was in the hospital for fifteen days and Anand ji spent all his time with her once she

  was moved out of the ICU to a regular room. He sat next to her, holding her hand, reading aloud to

  her from a Hindi novel with a lurid cover that Binni had brought along.

  After she complained about the smell of hospitals, the stomach-turning odour of vomit and

  disinfectant, he brought her a new string of sweet-smelling jasmine flowers to keep near her

  pillow every day.

  When Noni Appa left the hospital, it was he who accompanied her to her flat. He picked up Noni

  Appa’s small suitcase, took the key from her, unlocked the door and entered the small house that

  belonged to the long-departed Farhan and the nearly departed Noni.

  Anand ji visited her every evening, sitting in the balcony with her, drinking a cup of tea while

  making sure she drank enough juice and milk as it would be weeks before she could consume

  solids again. As Binni bustled about in Noni Appa’s small flat, gossiping loudly about the latest

  scandals, Anand ji would sit by her side, propping a pillow behind her back, playing rummy with

  her.

  Noni Appa, who all these years had lived solely by the dictates of society, began realizing that all

  the ‘Salaams’ and ‘Ya Ali Madads’ that people bestowed on her as a reward for being a

  respectable woman were worthless, a currency that would buy her nothing aside from synthetic

  eulogies at her funeral.

  After her hospital stay and her brief tussle with the djinns of death, she had slowly come to the

  conclusion that the only people truly there for her were Binni and Anand ji. So how did it matter

  what the world deemed correct or incorrect?

  She had to loosen these strings that tied her down because time was untying the knots with such

  great speed at the other end and pulling her lower and lower to the ground each day, till soon she

  would be buried underneath.

  This time it was Noni who brought up matters of the heart. One evening, sitting in the balcony, she

  said, ‘Do you remember what you said that day on the beach, Anand ji? I was so foolish that I

  refused to hear you out, foolish that I have spent most of my life worrying about what people will

  say, how they will perceive me.

  ‘Anand ji, I can see the finishing line in the mist ahead and I too want to reach the end listening to

  my heart hum.’ And she held his arm, resting her head against his shoulder.

  Soon Anand ji moved his meagre belongings into Noni Appa’s spare room. She had got it

  repainted from a dull cream to an eggshell blue for him, erasing sticker marks and scratches from

  the posters and picture frames that Mallika had once hung on the walls.

  Anand ji had left Jyotsna the apartment in Clifton and the rental from a small flat they had in

  Mahim. Jyotsna had tried to make things difficult by involving various relatives and friends to

  intervene and even intimidate Anand ji into returning to Clifton.

  But Anand ji had stood his ground. He had finally asked Sailesh to come down from Bangalore and

  talk to his mother. Sailesh, having grown up witnessing the brittle relationship between his parents,

  had explained to his mother the futility of continuing to live a life filled with conflict. In this final

  stretch of their lives, he argued, it would be good for both of them to find peace and happiness.

  Jyotsna then retreated into a stony silence.

  Noni Appa, on her part, had written Mallika a letter outlining her plans. Mallika called her mother

  promptly from London exclaiming, ‘What a sly fox you are, Mom!’ And then captivated by the

  prospect that life doesn’t really end at sixty, as she had lately begun to fear, she asked, ‘Mom, so is

  Anand ji the great love of your life then? The one you have been waiting for, to sweep you off your

  feet?’

  Noni Appa laughed. ‘Don’t be silly! Sweeping me off my feet – only your father could do that. We

  are perfectly happy but it’s not my-heart-beating-fast kind of love. If it were, then at this age I

  would have a heart attack, wouldn’t I? But it’s wonderful to have a companion.’

  And while talking to her daughter about Anand ji, Noni Appa realized that in their own way they

  had in fact found love, like a well-worn cashmere sweater that hugs in the right places and doesn’t

  tug at the wrong ones while keeping you warm on wintry days.

  ***

  Noni Appa brought two cups of tea and placed them on the small wooden table next to Anand ji. It

  had taken a year but she had finally made a full recovery though she had still not dared to have her

  favourite Scotch on the rocks.

  She sat on the rattan chair opposite Anand ji. Waving towards the cloudy blue sky, he said, ‘It has

  not rained the whole day today, Noni, have you noticed? You know, it is said that during Tansen’s

  time he could light a fire by singing Raga Deepak and if you wanted it to rain all you had to do was

  sing Raga Megh Malhar.’

  And just like that Anand ji began singing ‘Meghshyam Ghanashyam’ in Raga Megh Malhar,

  ‘Yeeeeaa aaa yeeeeeee ji...’

  Noni Appa calmly switched off her hearing aid and continued sipping her tea slowly. An hour

  later, the clouds darkened to a dusty grey and it started drizzling.

  Anand ji looked at her with childlike glee – though it couldn’t quite be considered a miracle since

  it was July and Bombay was in the middle of the monsoon season. But she, patting him on his

  shoulder, smiled all the same, as they sat together in silence, watching the rain fall, in the manner

  of a leaky fauc
et, all drips and drops, on the branches of the gulmohar tree.

  3 If weather permits

  The weather forecast in the Indian Express had predicted a week of sunshine but on the day that

  Elisa Thomas was getting married for the third time to the same man, it began to rain.

  It had been a cloudless day during the simple civil ceremony at the courthouse in Bandra three

  days ago. Overcast yesterday, when Elisa had become Ayesha, converting to her husband’s

  religion. The ceremony had lasted all of twenty minutes and the good Christian girl forgot her new

  name as soon as she removed the mint green kurta and billowing silk sharara pants with their

  intricate gold zardozi work embroidered in a little dusty workshop in faraway Lucknow.

  Today, at her third wedding at St Thomas Marthoma Syrian Church, the pouring rain obscuring the

  stained-glass windows made the interiors look dreary and grey.

  Elisa Thomas tried to look calm as she stood still in front of the slightly damp and disgruntled

  priest but all she could think about, as she glanced nervously towards the windows, was the garden

  party after and whether the rains would cut short the celebrations.

  She cut an imposing figure, three inches taller than the groom, her long, brown hair pulled tightly

  away from her coffee-coloured face in a severe bun, her perpetually arched eyebrows looming

  over her small, thickly lashed eyes. Today she was clad in a delicate white sari with a red silk one

  draped over her head that she would change into for the wedding reception.

  Her husband, Javed Gazi, a professional photographer, who at thirty-seven still nursed dreams of

  joining the Indian cricket team as a fast bowler, wore a borrowed black suit and a stoic grimace.

  Elisa’s father, Pothen Thomas, or Acha as she called him, sat in the first pew holding on to his

  Christianity like he was the weary custodian of the last crumbling communion wafer. He had lost

  one battle when his eldest daughter, Rahel, married a Punjabi banker. And though the chances of

  Elisa giving him three or four curly-haired grandchildren with names like Ninan and Cherian had

  always been rather unlikely, having to finally face this grim reality filled him with bleakness.

  He turned to his wife, Jincy, a string of orange kanakambaram flowers in her hair, a maroon silk

  sari tightly wrapped around her overweight frame, dozens of gold rings gleaming on her fingers,

  and whispered, ‘All the nice Malayali IPS officers we kept inviting over for tea and Marie

  biscuits, she rejected. And then she had to go and marry this Javed!’

  Pothen Thomas’s eyes misted up behind his thick black bifocals as he continued, ‘You tell me, in

  this India of so many billion peoples, she could not find a boy, okay not Christian or Malayali but

  at least an Indian boy? Had to find this Muslim refugee from third-rate country Bangladesh!’

  Jincy, without moving her eyes from her daughter and her new son-in-law, maintained a tight-

  lipped smile on her heavily powdered face and whispered, ‘Pothen, mark my words, it will not

  last even six months!’

  Jincy Thomas was wrong – it lasted for nine.

  ***

  Room no. 10 at the Hotel du Globe et des Quatre-Vents was decorated with an antique bed, a silk

  bedspread and fresh yellow flowers. The only drawback was that it was so tiny that they had

  to squeeze past each other to go to the bathroom.

  Elisa would usually open the room door and stand outside, in the hotel corridor, till she heard the

  sound of the toilet flushing, waiting till her husband made the trek back towards the other side of

  the room. But these inconveniences did not matter because she was in Paris.

  Every morning, Javed and Elisa would open maps and notebooks at the pastry shop next door, and

  over cups of steaming black coffee and buttery croissants they would plan their separate itineraries

  for the day.

  Though it was odd that two people on their honeymoon would choose to spend the entire day apart,

  Javed only wanted to go to the art galleries and museums, while Elisa wanted to see all the tourist

  attractions like the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. So they would go off on their

  independent adventures and meet each other in time for dinner.

  There was yet another odd thing about this honeymoon: there was no sex. No wooden headboard

  banging against the wall; no long brown legs, covered in sweat, being pried apart; no moans

  filtering through the wafer-thin wallpapered partitions and spilling into room no. 9, disturbing the

  elderly German couple that Elisa saw sometimes in the corridor.

  Javed and Elisa had been dating for eight years, an on-off-on-off relationship like a defective light

  fixture. As time went by, they began sleeping with friends and sometimes strangers during their off

  periods, but during their on periods, gradually without quite knowing why, they stopped having sex

  with each other.

  This desolate area of their relationship did not bother Elisa. She had married Javed partly because

  she had a bond with him and also because she needed to get married before she would inevitably,

  one weary day, succumb to one of the Malayali boys, a Varghese or a Joseph, it didn’t matter

  which, that her parents used as battering rams to break her defences down.

  Walking down to Pont de l’Alma in the 8th Arrondissement to catch a ferry and see the Notre

  Dame against the slanting evening sunlight, she felt that this life with Javed was good enough.

  Elisa had been on another ferry ride, not so long ago, crossing over from Versova to Madh Island

  with her older sister Rahel and Luke, her little nephew, holding a picnic basket. Rahel leaned

  against the rusty iron railing, the salt air turning her blow-dried hair into a frizzy mess, and asked

  her, ‘Elisa, why are you like this? Don’t you think you should stop slipping in and out of

  relationships and find the right man?’

  Taking a sip from a bottle of Kingfisher beer, Elisa replied, ‘You know, this reminds me of

  something a man told me just yesterday, “Things have a way of turning up when they want to be

  found, though they may not always be the things you actually want to find.”’

  Rahel, squinting in the sun, said, ‘That’s pretty profound, Eli, he’s a spiritual guru or something?’

  And Elisa, the corners of her eyes crinkling up, laughed. ‘No! He was just stoned, Rahel!’

  Javed was perhaps the right man, Elisa thought as she took pictures of the Jardin Tino Rossi,

  wandering through the sculpture garden and surrounding lawns on her way back to the hotel. He

  needed a lot of space, which meant that she, in return, got the space to do what she wanted as well.

  There were no restrictions on her, no demands.

  And she liked listening to him talk about art and books. Javed had lithographs, and a charcoal

  sketch by Souza next to his study table. There was a dusty bookshelf in one corner of his bedroom,

  with slim red volumes filled with poems by Rumi, Roald Dahl’s Dirty Beasts, a battered book of

  Ghalib’s poetry. These were not things she had grown up with in her two-bedroom house that

  always smelled of meen moilee, a watery fish curry that her mother insisted on making five times a

  week.

  Eight days in Paris and they were back in Bombay, enclosed in Javed’s small flat at Yari Road.

  Elisa went back to working at her father’s real estate firm while Javed spent his days earning his

  living as a photograph
er. In the evenings, he would practise his bowling, which inevitably led to a

  sprained shoulder or an aching back, while she would go off visiting friends or occasionally paint,

  leaving a series of unfinished canvases stacked in their garage below.

  Javed was a quiet man who, aside from a beer or two on rare occasions, did not like drinking; nor

  did he smoke or socialize. His only weakness was that he visited numerous psychiatrists, palmists,

  fortune tellers and faith healers, trying to find anything that might dispel the dark fog that often

  filled his mind.

  It was Elisa who was the gregarious one, with hordes of friends and a bad smoking habit. She

  would often go dancing till dawn and when she returned, her hair full of smoke, her mouth tasting

  of wine, and tumbled into bed, he would move over, and turn his back to her, pretending to be

  asleep.

  With time, Javed got quieter and Elisa was out more often. The shadowy nebula of resentment in

  Javed’s mind seemed to get bigger and bigger till Elisa could feel it when she brushed against him.

  It would encircle her when she passed him a cup of tea, sit between them during dinner, lie beside

  them in bed – like an invisible third person in their marriage.

  This silent stalemate could have continued indefinitely but it didn’t. That December they travelled

  to Goa with Elisa’s friends to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Javed, riding a motorbike with Elisa

  holding on to him, poured half a bottle of Old Port rum down his throat. He told Elisa that he

  wanted to die and rammed their bike into a passing truck.

  Elisa wrenched the handlebars from him, so they ended up falling in a ditch on the side of the road

  instead. Javed broke his nose, a rib and his right shoulder. Elisa had a scratch on her arm, straw in

  her hair and dirt stains on her sparkly silver top.

  She returned to the hotel, called her sister and said, ‘Rahel, since it’s New Year’s Eve it’s better to

  start the next year on a good note. You will tell Achan to do the paperwork for me, right?’ And she

  returned home to live with her Achan and her Amma, in the house that always smelled of

  meen moilee.