We bury our fears deep, we stamp hard on the earth, we build our lives on this solid, hard foundation, but suddenly the fears come to life, and the earth shakes with their struggle to surface. It was Sudha, the sight of her when she came to us after her illness, that brought my fear back, so close that the sound of its flapping wings filled my ears to the exclusion of everything else.
Sudha had been a vigorous, healthy, confident girl. And cheerful, yes, even after our parents died she was still that. (Or was that a facade she carefully preserved for my sake?) With marriage and motherhood she blossomed, she became an attractive woman. After P.K.’s sudden death, she looked empty, as if it was all over for her. And then she underwent surgery for her tumour. She came to us to convalesce after that, and this was yet another woman—a peevish, self-centred invalid, constantly complaining of her pains. But I, who knew her so well, realized what she was doing: she was diverting us, cleverly drawing our attention away from her real pain. It was not her illness, not the depletion of her physical self with surgery and post-radiation sickness, not even P.K.’s sudden death or the fact that he died first, when she had, with the knowledge of her cancer, expected to go before him—no, I knew it was something more than all these things that made her the way she was. She had retreated from us; none of us, not her own children, nor I, her brother, nor my children whom she so dearly loved, could reach her. And she was frightened of this world of loneliness she suddenly found herself in.
When she said she wanted to go back home, I did not try to make her change her mind. I rang up her children, and Ramesh and Veena came to take her back. We went to see her off and I knew I would never see her again. She knew it, too, but she turned her face away from us, weary, it seemed, of everything and it was left to Veena and Sumi to say the usual things. And I thought: if it can happen to Sudha, the most generous and loving of women, Sudha who invested all of herself in relationships, if this crutch of family and ties failed her when she needed it most, what hope is there for any of us? Must we reach the terrible point Sudha did before realizing the truth?
Emptiness, I realized then, is always waiting for us. The nightmare we most dread, of waking up among total strangers, is one we can never escape. And so it’s a lie, it means nothing, it’s just deceiving ourselves when we say we are not alone. It is the desperation of a drowning person that makes us cling to other humans. All human ties are only a masquerade. Some day, some time, the pretence fails us and we have to face the truth. Like Sudha did. And I.
I had a glimpse of it, not when my parents died, for Sudha was there then, she was the link that ensured the continuity of my life, and soon after, there was P.K. as well. It happened to me when I saw Sudha’s school certificate and knew that we did not share a father. That was a betrayal that cut away at the foundations of my life. Sudha never realized what this did to me. She had always known it, she said, she had not told me because—well, because my parents never had. And, she said, the truth was that she had almost forgotten that my father was not hers. He was our father, she never felt any other way.
She could not understand my reaction, she refused to accept my decision to go away, she refused to believe I meant what I was saying. When I told her I was going, she had the same stricken look on her face I had seen on her wedding day, when, bored, tired of sitting on the uncomfortable wooden folding chairs, I had walked out of the hall. She had come running out, frantic, looking garish and unlike her usual self in her wedding finery. And then she saw me, standing against a car, doodling in the dust on its surface and her face changed. But this time I was no longer a bored, confused child of eight, there was nothing I could do to wipe that look off her face.
‘Where are you going?’ she wanted to know, she had to know, and because I had to tell her something I told her I wanted to go back to Shivpur, the place my parents had come away from to escape the scandal that followed their marriage.
I had to go there after that, trapped into it by my own words, by Sudha’s insistence on accompanying me. It was she who made a crusade of finding the house our parents had lived in. It was not easy, she had forgotten everything—she was only six when they left—and the few landmarks she remembered had disappeared. But she would not give up. In the evening when we came back to the seedy hotel we were staying in, she was irritable, exhausted, but the next morning she was ready to start the search all over again.
It was on the third day—I think—that she said, ‘There it is.’ Doubtfully. Then more confidently, Yes, that’s it.’ We stared at the house. I was disinterested and Sudha listless; it meant nothing to either of us. We went back to the hotel, flat and dull and sat in silence. And then I said it, what I should have told her much earlier if I had not been too much of a coward: ‘I’m not going back to Bombay with you, I’m staying on here, I’m joining college here.’
She came out of her apathy in an instant and began questioning me: What was it? Was it something she had said? It couldn’t be P.K., he was so good he would never hurt me, no, not even unknowingly. It had to be her. But I knew her, didn’t I, she was quick-tempered, she admitted it, but surely I knew how little it meant?
From guilt I went on to annoyance and we began to quarrel, quarrels that went on and invariably ended in her desperate sobbing. I was frightened by her state, I had never seen my sister this way, not even after our parents died. I sent P.K. a telegram. He came at once with Ramesh and took charge of things immediately.
He persuaded Sudha, who had eaten almost nothing for two days, to eat and as a preliminary went to the market and got some lemons. A practical man, he bought a squeezer too, and I can remember him squeezing the juice, as earnest as any Gandhian disciple preparing for the end of Bapu’s fast, while Sudha sat on the bed, legs folded under her, indifferent to everything, even the mess P.K. was making. But she drank the juice, I was astonished to see how greedily she drank it. (Later, when Viju was born, I realized she was pregnant then, which explained some of her behaviour, though not all of it.) By evening he had persuaded Sudha to let me have my way, made her agree to go back without me.
I was frantic for them to go and leave me alone, I saw them off with joy. I can still remember the crowds and noise on the station, the sound of running feet on the platform, the last-minute desperate cries of passengers, the raucous call of the vendors—chai garam, chai chai. Then the train left and I was alone. There was nothing left but the smooth gleaming rails. And a sudden hush, as if the train had taken away all the people, all the noise with itself.
I did not go back to the hotel that night, I did not want to be there, not even for a night, in the room that seemed to be redolent with Sudha’s distress and grief. I spent the night there, on the station, on a stone platform built around a tree, watching in a dreamlike state the sleeping bundles on the floor and benches, hearing, once or twice, a child wake up and cry. Once, waking out of a doze I saw a train move out of the station in total silence, as if it was a ghost train. I got up and walked about until the first light brightened the sky, making the station lights look sickly and dim. I went then to the room P.K. had arranged for me to live in until the hostels opened. Unwashed, sleepless, I must have looked a sight, for I can remember even now my landlady’s suspicious stare. But she let me in and I went to a tap in the backyard, filled a bucket with water and poured it over myself. And I felt released. Free.
Years later, I saw a Dutch painting. I knew nothing about paintings then; that it was a Dutch painting, that it was by Vermeer—I learnt these things later. But I was fascinated, I can remember that, by the way the painter had captured a slice of time so that I was witnessing what he had seen, a bit of life in that narrow lane in a foreign land.
So I thought then. Now I know it was not just Time that the painter had captured; I was his captive too, caught inside that picture, seeing what the painter wanted me to see.
Only the creator is free, only the creator can be free because he is out of it all. I did not know this then. I know it now.
ARU