And then, as always, the frame that will always be there, the frame that holds Rekha. Competent, thorough Rekha, an expert at keeping up appearances. Shiv sees Rekha, arched eyebrows raised as if she is assessing something, her sari and hair held firmly in place with an assortment of pins. (Shiv has for the moment forgotten, or misplaced, his glimpse of a frightened, vulnerable Rekha.) It has been years since Shiv had an inkling of what she feels about him. Rekha, poised wife at all times, knows just when to move, when to go limp and lie still. But the face he sees before him does not look like it belongs to the overseer of a well-oiled machine. Her face now has a look of pensive waiting, as if she has many more years to go before she is let out on parole for good behavior. Shiv tries to remember where he has seen this look before. Then he places it: it is the look of someone, a tourist perhaps, who has overstayed in a small, boring place. She has nothing left to discover, but there are weeks of emptiness stretching before her, empty days and nights she must will herself to fill. Rekha’s face says she has seen everything there is to see; she has seen through Shiv. Having exhausted emotion, all that remains is habit. The management of the masks she presents to the world; the management of his small, drifting life.
Shiv squeezes his eyes shut, desperately trying to fall asleep. But a little question or two lie in wait on the road to oblivion. What does he look like in their private nightly screens, in Amita’s, Rekha’s and Meena’s? If Meena could see the moving images in his head, she would ask this question sharply, defying him to answer. Where does he fit in the place where neither censor nor peeping Tom can follow?
Friday evening. Another setting sun, an overripe orange hanging low in the sky. Shiv sits by Meena; close to her bed. Sitting close, one track of awareness on the conversation. The other track, the hungry, grasping one, looking. Looking at an arm: Shiv’s eyes move down Meena’s sleeve, then down an inch of skin followed by an elbow with a gray dry patch. Another two inches, past two small abrasions, one red from scratching, the other scabbed. Then the forearm with its fine dark down, soft and untouched. The hand. It moves carelessly to the scab, picks at it experimentally, loses interest. A hand that does not know what other hands would give to go where it goes so casually.
Hands. A tongue. Why have these if she cannot know them?
The guard’s radio comes on with a burst of static, then thankfully gives up the ghost. Shiv draws the window curtain and returns to the chair by Meena’s bed.
What should he talk about? How should he pretend he is here to talk? But he must. He must begin a conversation, keep it going, so there is no question of having to leave the room. If he talks, a gift may come his way. A quickening of response in the eyes, or a smile, or even a full-fledged laugh with its flash of even white teeth. But he doesn’t know where to begin. The Decision, or What I Will Do Next, lies sullen and heavy between them, a better watchdog than the gun-toting man in the tent.
Meena too remains silent. There is no use pretending she cannot read his mind, or that she has not diagnosed at least one of his sicknesses. She has read the doubts that lie like an inch-thick layer of dust on Principle and Strength of Purpose. She has seen his fear that he will not be able to sustain his quasi-heroic stance for much longer.
Shiv forces himself to look into her face, a masochist preparing for her scorn. Her disappointment. He steels himself to meet the look that will tell him he will fail.
But what he sees on her still, attentive face is more than the now-familiar watchfulness. There is also something new, the glimmer of something hard and flinty in her eyes. A determination, as if the way out has just been revealed to her. As if she has, in anticipation of his dithering, made some irrevocable decision on his behalf.
Words, those tenuous links that chain them together syllable by syllable, have at last failed them. The silence between them stretches into a long, unbearable intermission. Life before this pause is over and done with. But when will the afterlife begin? And how do they get to it?
They watch each other, one waiting for the other’s move. Waiting to see which of them will dare to come out into the open, declare predatory intentions.
Shiv tells himself: It is important never to hurry. The beloved object is in sight. I know my destination; I know it only too well. But I must pretend (just a little longer) that it is obscure, that I am not even aware of it. I must ignore my heartbeat, the insistent throb of my pulse. The inevitability of inhaling and exhaling. Breathing is more natural when you are not conscious of it. It doesn’t stop or go away just because you are not looking at it.
Meena too is still: a clear, waiting sky, looking on unblinkingly. Shiv is the cloud. All the desire in the room—and there is so much of it, the air is thick with humidity—is concentrated in him. She must know how he feels—or she must know something of it. She must see, even she must see that he is on the brink of more than one precipice. Sense his ache for her, forever coupled in his mind with the fear of living with danger, choice, commitment. Fear of his new life, a small room crowded with strangers. With thugs, bare knives glinting in the dark. He must take hold of it all, claim his life as his own.
Shiv gets up, pushes his chair back. He picks up the sheet she has tossed aside. He folds it carefully, places it on the table. Then he finds himself approaching the bed in a smooth, continuous movement as if the chair has dissolved once he has left its refuge.
His feet slip out of his rubber chappals; he sits on the edge of the bed. He takes a hand, one of her hands, in his.
She suddenly jerks free, struggles to a sitting position, and slaps her unbroken knee. She lifts her skirt, picks up the corpse of a mosquito between her fingers, her face gloating; she crushes it though it is already dead. Then she lies back, restores her hand to his. Her fingertips feel sticky.
She looks so matter-of-fact. So removed. But she does not resist. Instead, despite her casual, noncommittal air, she reaches over and her free hand strokes his arm gently. As if to give it courage. Take it forward. His mouth dries; it is hard to breathe. A charge, a low-voltage current, passes through his stomach then travels downward.
The guard’s radio sings aloud for a minute, dies again. Then there is a thud; he seems to have given up on the temperamental thing and flung it across the garden.
Shiv takes the hand on his arm and guides it down his belly. But Meena takes it back and places it chastely on his shoulder. He pauses, afraid he has misread her touch. He steals a look at her face. Her eyes meet his steadily. There is no invitation there, but it is clear, even to him in his confused and excitable state, that she is saying: Decide. Enough dithering. This is the signal picked up by his eyes, hands, lips, and tongue, all at the same instant.
The lightbulb in the room surges, dims, surges again. Then the power goes. A hush settles on the room without the droning hum of the fan and cooler. The room turns dark and stuffy.
Shiv kneels precariously by her good leg, bends over her, lips and hands skimming lightly over bare skin first: her face, neck, arms. His hands feel damp. Meena’s forehead tastes of salt.
He sits back on his haunches and slips a hand under her T-shirt. He rolls it up gently; she is not wearing a bra. He gazes worshipfully at the shadowy mounds of her breasts. Then he lays a finger, and a thumb, on one brown nipple.
He looks at her face again. He squints in the gathering darkness, trying to read her expression. He thinks he sees her lips part; he waits to hear her moan. Instead he hears a singsong buzz that begins somewhere behind him, then darts across the room and back. Silence for a moment; then Meena brushes a breast indignantly and the fly takes off, lands on his neck.
He hears a gentle, exhaling hiss from Meena, but he can’t decipher it. Then silence again, a dense, weighted silence. The bed, the room, float free in time and space. His thighs hurt.
The fan and cooler return to life and fill up the room with their background music. But it remains dark; the lightbulb must have fused when the voltage went berserk earlier.
Shiv gets off his ha
unches and takes the measure of Meena’s cast. He balances himself carefully, one kneeling knee on either side of her wide hips. His torso hovers over hers. He bends over a breast; his lips meet a taut, hard nipple. His hand stretches down, explores the hemline of her soft skirt.
The doorbell rings; Shiv ignores it. His hand is inching its way up her good thigh. Someone taps loudly on the window, then they hear the baby-faced guard call.
“What is it,” Shiv says dreamily, his hand now between her legs—or between a leg and a cast.
“My radio is not working,” Babyface informs him. “And there are a lot of mosquitoes here.” Shiv can see Meena’s grin clearly in the darkness. He removes his hand from under her skirt and takes it to her lips, traces the outline of her smile.
Babyface is not discouraged by Shiv’s silence. “It’s time for Boogie-Woogie, sahib,” he now says. “I watch it everyday. Can I come in and switch on the TV? The power’s back.”
Meena shakes with laughter as she pulls down her T-shirt and pats her skirt into place. “Let him in,” she whispers to Shiv. “Don’t be a spoilsport. We’ll watch it too and give Babyface some tips for his Bollywood career.”
Meena, at the very heart of things. Meena, a sweet and disturbing mixture of irony and inexperience. Meena, whom he has just about touched; who transformed him, for all of fifteen minutes, to a simple organism that is all (and only) hands, lips, tongue.
And afterwards, despite The Boogie-Woogie Show and Baby-face, despite the return of his mind and its chaotic jumble, the astonishing sense of oneness. Shiv feels—and even young Meena cannot take this away from him—that they are as close as they will ever be, regardless of what was done and not done. It is surprising how little the details matter. He has the sense that they have given each other something that is, for all its namelessness, more solid and memorable than actual physical love. And this, regardless of the promise she has extracted from him, though they did not exchange a word about it all evening. Oh yes, he is not entirely deranged by middle-aged lust. Even when his hand first touched hers, he knew there would be a price to be paid, a price only she could help him pay. A promise to stand firm, to resist giving up. A promise bigger than both of them; a promise he has made though it may change his life.
But what she has drawn out of Shiv without the crutch of words does not come between them. It leaves untouched the bit of land they own together. There is no law, no government, no ghost that can tell them how they should cultivate it, when they should let it remain fallow. With Meena at the heart of things, all backgrounds dissolve, then re-emerge with one coherent image of union. A center filling up the frame. Though his shadow sniggers a little, Shiv recalls Basava’s poem on the oneness possible between a man and a woman: if a man and a woman really look at each other, a union is born; a union fit to unite with the lord of the meeting rivers.
ELEVEN
OCTOBER 10–13
Saturday, Sunday, Monday; three whole days since Friday evening. Though Shiv and Meena have not so much as touched each other since, though Kamla is back as chaperone and keeper of propriety, he still feels a steady surge of newborn hope. He still feels blessed. He could swear he is ten pounds lighter.
Not long ago (twelve days? fifteen days?) his room at the university was stripped bare and a new padlock put on the door. A lock to which he does not have the key. But he is in such a state of grace that he finds himself entertaining a few grandiose thoughts. Could he have tired of a lifetime in one night? A lifetime of spineless liberty from commitment?
Meena’s searching eyes follow his every thought like a flashlight, but she too appears calm. Quieter, less excitable than usual. (Perhaps she is not entirely untouched by what he feels for her?) Even when the doctor looks approvingly at a fresh X ray and tells her that the hated cast will come off in a matter of days, her joy is muted. They seem to have declared a moratorium on all unrestrained emotion. On anything that may get out of hand and upset the delicate balance between them.
Maybe he is imagining the change in Meena. But is there a little uncertainty in her now, a cloud to disturb her clear, sectarian sky? Are there more dimensions in her world, more unknown spaces and gaps?
In keeping with this lull, this sleepy-sweet interval following the intensity of the past few weeks, the “case” too is on hold. After the vandals’ orgy of destruction in Shiv’s room, and the ensuing noise of charges and countercharges, support and condemnation, a curtain of silence has fallen on all stages. All fronts. As if the players concerned have agreed, even the most bitterly contesting ones, to retire backstage and recoup before returning to the fray.
The phone has not rung once for Shiv. The papers, the TV, the University, the Manch, Amar’s band of saviors—all seem to have forgotten the notorious professor, along with the glories of Kalyana’s temples and the truth about Basava’s life and death. Both supporters and opponents have either been stunned into silence, or satiated by the most recent act of violence. And the public? They have now been pushed onto a moving conveyor belt of stories-in-transit. Two news stories far more engaging than Shiv’s have been hogging the limelight for the past three days.
The first is a “high-profile” hit-and-run incident involving six affluent college boys. They apparently decided, at four in the morning, on their way home from a party, to test-drive one of their parents’ Mercedes. Whether the car lived up to its manufacturers’ promises is not known. What the car (or its driver, or its occupants) did manage to do was mow down a family of pavement sleepers. A night watchman nearby and a milkman on his early morning rounds are eyewitnesses. The night watchman identified the car’s license plate; he and the milkman have described what happened.
The car flew down the wide and empty road, screeched around the roundabout and turned onto Ring Road, climbing the pavement and running over four sleeping bodies before the driver could bring it to a halt. Three of the boys are management students, two of them final-year law students. The driver has just got his American visa. He has, plead his parents through his lawyers, a promising future in information technology.
There is the usual spate of “man on the street” interviews. The usual moral indignation about what the youth are coming to. (Or where they are going to.) A couple of professional letters-to-the-editor writers rave about the damage foreign cars are wreaking on Indian roads and morals. There is also the smaller group of the usual suspects, mostly lawyers and relatives of the accused, spinning out tearjerkers about the heartbreakingly bright future stretching before these dazzlingly bright boys.
The incident recalls to Shiv’s mind his encounter with the Mitsubishi boys on the day he bought Meena’s crutches. Mitsubishi, Mercedes, the brand name is immaterial. The car in question is usually expensive, foreign, big—certainly bigger than his, a shamelessly middle-class Maruti. More important, its occupants are thugs at large. How can he forget his Lancer thugs? The thugs who thought themselves heroes? He can never forget the identical masks on their faces. Masks frozen in his memory, with their potent combination of threat, derision, amusement. Their confidence that they will prevail, that no man or law can touch them. Their simmering energy, their unbridled aggression, their lethal boredom.
But as a story in transit, a story to distract Shiv from the real plot unfolding about him, the Lancer boys’ misadventure is not a success. Their threatening presence is far too close to his bones; they do not appeal to his sense of the ridiculous. How do you make the question What is a man? funny, at least for men?
It’s the second news story that provides Shiv the comic relief he craves. Most of the story is pure froth (and skin), though it generates a pro-and-con discussion as passionate as that provoked by the Lancer boys.
Miss India, a lissome twenty-two-year-old called Nixie, has just returned to Delhi as Miss Universe. (Nixie explains that her father visited the US for the first time when Nixon was president.) Indian Beauty Rules the Universe, gushes a headline, but young Nixie is not satisfied. She holds a crowded press conference,
wearing her royal white gloves and fake diamond tiara. Everything else, she explains proudly, is homegrown. Her strappy sequined dress, her hair, nails and teeth are all examples of Indian couture by Indian designers, specially created for the occasion.
Nixie gets a little tearful when asked about the party-poopers who have been saying nasty things about beauty contests. “I think they are very negative,” she says firmly. “There is such a thing as Beauty with Purpose.”
In fact, says Nixie, she has returned to Delhi with a promise. She is going to spend the rest of her life working in Mother Teresa’s mission houses. But obviously she has to complete her year’s reign as Miss Universe first.
An unfeeling reporter asks her a pointed question about how this year as “queen” will advance her plans for the rest of her life.
“This year is going to be important training for my charitable work,” Nixie says. “It will give me the experience I need in interacting with all sorts of human beings.”
The silly season promises to continue all week. Thursday, Nixie and the Lancer boys compete for media space with a new story, Meena’s favorite among the recent crop. Two magicians have been issuing challenges to each other via the press. One of them, a venerable old magician, has made the Taj Mahal disappear for forty-five seconds in the presence of journalists. His challenger, a young upstart who calls himself I. M. Jaduwala, claims the Taj trick is nothing: he can make Parliament House disappear for sixty seconds, even when Parliament is in session. What he promises is an out-of-body experience for the Indian state for all of sixty seconds. An entire headless minute.
“If I have made even women disappear,” he boasts, “why should this be difficult?”
Meena is charmed by I. M. Jaduwala and his promise of a one-minute vanishing act. But as even Jaduwala will admit, magic is not permanent. Even as Meena and Shiv enjoy Jaduwala’s pranks, Shiv’s minute-long reprieve is drawing to its inevitable end. The university and its controversy—though Shiv had dispatched both to temporary oblivion with a dubious magic—is even now on his way back to him through a special delivery letter.
In Times of Siege Page 16