And yet, I am certain that the man who visits me in my dreams is my father. The knowledge belongs not to me, the man that I am now, but to the I-figure in my dreams, that disembodied self who is always a boy. This father of my dreams smiles at me, we walk the streets together, he waits for me when I lag behind, he holds my hand when I’m tired, he looks at me affectionately ....
I know, of course, what it is I’m doing: I am recreating my father in my dreams as I had done in my waking hours, all those years ago, as a boy. Inventing him. Knowing nothing about him then, except that he had married his brother’s widow who became my mother; the possibilities had been innumerable and my adolescent mind had drawn various selves out of the protean being of the father I had imagined. So many of them:
A man who sinned against his brother by loving his wife. The brother dying of grief and the wife and the man marrying immediately after.
A kind man moved by pity to marry his brother’s widow, to make that brother’s daughter his own.
A Lakshman-like younger brother, keeping a promise made to his dying elder brother to look after his young widow and child.
(No, this never worked. Lakshman, who never looked at Sita’s face, not once, so that the only bits of her jewellery he could identify after her abduction were her anklets—this devoted brother had to be discarded.)
It was when I read Hamlet, fortunately much later, that the most terrible version of my parents’ story entered my mind. Just that once, though, for I slammed the door on it immediately. In this story my father became a man succumbing to his passion for his brother’s wife, the woman compliant, a pregnancy and a child to come and then, after the husband’s convenient death (no, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t make my father poison his brother) a marriage of convenience.
The facts, of course, few as they are, spell out a different story: Sudha’s father died of typhoid and I was born two years after my parents were married.
But that was how it was for me—my father was never a father to me—not after I knew their story. He was my mother’s guilty partner, he was Sudha’s uncle, her stepfather, he was my mother’s husband ....
And now I dream of this kindly man, as if we have, through the years, achieved a kind of peace in our relationship, as if, like any son with a living father, we have finally, after a long struggle, achieved a harmonious relationship.
These are peaceful dreams that don’t trouble me—unlike the ugly dreams that tormented me in the last few months before I came here, exhausting dreams that seemed to go on all night, punctuated by the need to empty my bladder. So exhausting that once, waking up, I had been astonished to see that it was only fifteen minutes since I last woke up; those fifteen minutes had seemed a weary lifetime.
All a thing of the past. Now there is only this room in which nothing is mine. For a few days after I came here, I heard Shankar and his wife trying to hush the children and servants; but the noise and bustle in the courtyard do not disturb me, they have nothing to do with me. Like the rain-trees on the road outside, so very mysteriously, wonderfully flourishing in this human jungle, which seem to have raised themselves above all the futile activity on the road below, I am untouched by all that is happening under my window.
Yet sometimes, when I wake up in the morning and see the branches of the rain-trees filling up my window, I feel I am back in that tree-enclosed room of the outhouse behind Kalyani’s house. I hear Shankar’s wife call out to her children and it is Kalyani’s voice calling out, ‘Sumi, Premi’.
Yes, I was at peace then too, like I am now. Sudha, absorbed by her young children had freed me from the tug of her concern, I had moved away from Shivpur, from Girija and a relationship that had been threatening to complicate my life. In the outhouse I was left alone, set apart from the Big House by much more than the physical distance between us. It was as if the mist that sometimes came down in the mornings, never lifted, so that the figures I saw seemed always hazy, the voices muted and muffled, coming to me from some great distance. I watched them, after a while it became a pastime, but there never was a sense of involvement. There was the man whom I rarely saw after my first meeting with him, coming out onto the terrace, standing there, gazing at nothing. My landlady, whose tense, small figure advanced towards me in a burst of cordiality, then retreated just as abruptly. The younger girl, sitting on the side steps, silent as a wraith, her knees drawn up to her chest, squeezing herself into the smallest space possible. And the older girl ....
Years later, when we went to Abu, I saw the richly draped idol of Parvati, glowing with colours among the cold, white, marble figures of the Tirthankaras in the Dilwara temple. Sumi was like that, drawing all the colour and movement in that house into herself. She filled me with the same astonishment and delight that the idol of Parvati in the temple had.
I can still remember the day my detachment ended. I woke out of a heavy drugged sleep in the afternoon—it must have been a Sunday—to the sound of girls’ voices. I went out to the tap to wash my face and saw them, Sumi and a friend, on the stone seat under the neem tree. I went back to my room, picked up my book and tried to go back to reading, and the voices and laughter came to me still, like a distant melody, filling me with ecstasy. I ceased to be an observer then and, like the king who stood watching Shakuntala and her two friends, I became part of the enchantment, I could see the bee hovering, I could hear its buzzing ....
‘We are searching for the truth; you, O bee, have found it.’
Found it? Yes, for a while it was that way. After years of blundering I had found the truth in my feelings for Sumi, my love for my children. But now I know I had only lost myself in that beautiful, dense green foliage.
Can I say this to Ramesh? No, he will never understand me. Ramesh is the son of P.K., a man whose sense of duty and responsibility was absolute. And yet, after his death, when the crows would not come for the pindas, the priests said, ‘He must have left something undone.’
‘Men don’t die easily, Guru,’ Ramesh had sobbed out to me when, as an intern, he had lost his first patient. ‘Men don’t die easily.’
Is there to be no end to it even after death? Was a man to be tied to his duties forever? Could he never be free? It astonished me that Ramesh so tamely made a promise to his dead father, as they told him to do, to complete whatever was undone. He squared his shoulders and accepted his father’s burdens. He will do the same now. He will not despise or hate me, the bond between us is too strong for that. Instead, he will make up his mind to take on the responsibility of my family on himself. And then, only then, he will tell Sumi where I am.
It is not Sumi, however, but Kalyani who is the first to come to Gopal. ‘There’s a lady come to see you, sir,’ the press boys tell him and he thinks it is Sumi. But it isn’t, it’s Kalyani. For an instant, perhaps because he has so rarely seen her outside her own home, he does not recognize her. She looks a different person in these alien surroundings. Was she always so tiny, so frail-looking? Charu is with her, Charu who makes it absolutely clear that she is here only as her grandmother’s escort. Scarcely looking at her father, she helps Kalyani up the stairs and saying, ‘I’ll be waiting downstairs for you, Amma,’ prepares to leave.
‘Don’t go, Charu, stay here.’
‘Let her go, Gopala. Go, child, I won’t take much time.’
‘Come out here then.’
He shows her out through the narrow door, into the small terrace behind the room and then hesitates; it’s too sunny here, there is no shade at all. But Charu, her back to him, goes and stands near the railing, ignoring him.
The moment he comes back into the room, Kalyani bursts into words.
‘What have you done to my daughter, Gopala, don’t do this, don’t let it happen to my daughter, what happened to me.’
And