Kalyani, whose father built the house, is enormously proud of it.
‘People used to come just to look at it,’ she says. ‘There was no house like it in the city,’ she adds.
However exaggerated the statement, it has now taken on the colour of truth, for now the house is, in a sense, unique. It is the only one of its kind, of its size and period, left in the neighbourhood. The sharks who have devoured all the rest are eyeing it greedily, but the curious history of the house and of its two occupants has kept them at bay. Until now.
SHE IS LYING full length on the sofa, watching a movie on TV, her eyes fixed unblinking on the screen as if she has never seen these things before: a circus. A clown in the centre of the arena, singing and dancing. And the spectators, in the manner of the spectators in any movie, gazing ahead in complete unison. Perhaps, in a sense, it is true that she has not really seen this before. She had never been to the circus as a child; children don’t go, they are taken. And who could have taken them, Premi and her? In fact, the first (and the last) time she saw a circus was when Gopal and she had taken their daughters to one. The girls, four and five then, has been enthralled and Gopal’s enjoyment had been almost as childlike as theirs.
But she had been appalled. She had hated all of it—the dust, the noise, the smell of the animals and their fears, almost as malodorous as the stench of their dung. It had made her sick. Even the acrobats had made her uneasy. She had sensed an enormous despair behind the bravado of their feats, a fear under the star-spangled gaiety of their costumes. Skilful, yes, but desperate. Like a statement—‘we have to do these things in order to live, yet ....’
It was only the music that had made it bearable for her. There was something about it, rousing her expectations to a pitch so that her heart seemed to expand in her chest, throbbing like a powerful drum. The music created an illusion of magnificence, of drama to come, an expectation that was never fulfilled. Everything that came after, every act, seemed slightly tawdry, like tinsel crowns seen in the daylight, after the play is over.
Now she is watching the circus at a safe distance. Diminished by the size of the screen, yes, but with the dirt, the smells, the fear and despair left out. Sanitized. Bacteria-free. And the clown, prancing and skipping in the centre of the ring, allowed a dignity a clown in a real circus never has. And instead of the heart-throbbing music, this melodious song ....
Gopal comes in. Thinking that he will join her, she draws up her feet, making room for him on the sofa. But he goes to a chair opposite her, from where, she knows, he cannot see the TV. She gestures to him to turn it round. When he does nothing, scarcely, in fact, notices her gesture, she begins reluctantly to get up to do it herself. This time he stops her with a word—‘don’t!’ And only then, for the first time, she turns her eyes away from the screen and gives him her whole attention. Something unusual about him that has nothing to do with the fact that he has not changed into his pyjamas ... She can’t pinpoint anything specific, just this odd feeling that he seems—disjointed? Uncoordinated?
And then, suddenly she has a feeling as if someone has nudged her, telling her that something unpleasant is approaching, that she should get up and walk away. Later, she will wonder if she could have escaped, if, in fact, the moment of speaking would have passed for Gopal if she had walked away. But that is not how it is to be. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he says and abruptly begins. And she sits and listens in silence to what he has to say to her.
The TV goes on through his talk, neither of them thinks of turning it off, or turning down the sound either, so that his words come to her against the background of the clown’s song: Jeena yahan, mama yahan, iske siwa jana kahan.
The telling of what he has come to say takes him so little time that when he has done, the song is still going on. He looks at her for a reaction, but she is gazing at him just as expectantly, waiting for him to go on. The realization that there is nothing more to be said—by either of them—comes to them almost simultaneously and he goes out as quietly as he had come in.
She continues to watch the movie until the end, when the clown, tragic, doomed victim, dies. She goes to bed with the song still going on in her head, the slightly off-key voice of Mukesh singing ‘jeena yahan, mama yahan,’ the nimble feet of the clown dancing to its tune. And as if this is all there is at present to trouble her, her mind puzzles over the meaning of the words: what do they mean? That this world is all we have and therefore there is nowhere else for us to go? That we have to live here and die here? Or does it mean: this is what we have, this area of action is enough for us, we live here and die here, we need no more?
Her mind slides from one interpretation to another, over and over again, until in sheer exhaustion she falls asleep. And gets up abruptly at three in the morning, a panicked waking as if someone has prodded her awake. She finds herself alone in bed, the pillow by her side cold and smooth, the other half of the bed unrumpled, the blanket still folded. So it is true what he told her, he meant it, he’s already done it.
Having reached this conclusion, she lies still, waiting for the dawn. There is none of the tangle of the internal colloquy of last night in her now. Her mind is crystal clear, she knows what has happened, she sees the picture with a detachment that will not be hers, not for a very long while. With infinite patience she waits until the early morning light dispels the shadows and makes every object in the room clearly visible. Only then does she get out of bed, wash, make tea for all of them and go into her daughters’ room to tell them what has happened. And now the thought comes to her—he could have spared me this, he could have spoken to them himself. But she does not draw back from what she has to do; she tells them about it, almost exactly repeating Gopal’s words, leaving out nothing.
And so it is that Aru, a few days before her seventeenth birthday, wakes up to the knowledge that her father has walked out on them.
Once, years back, when Aru was only a child (but she was born an adult, Gopal used to think, when he remembered this incident), she had been separated from Gopal in a crowd. Gopal, frantically searching for her, had found her at exactly the same spot where she had realized he was no longer with her.
‘I was not lost,’ she had said to him after their initial hysteria had subsided. ‘It was you who got lost.’
Now, it is as if the same thing has happened all over again. But this time, though it is her father who has gone away, Aru knows the panic, the disorientation of being lost. It will be very long before she will realize that something ended for her, for all of them, that morning. Perhaps it is Sumi’s behaviour that makes it so difficult for them to understand the enormity of what has happened. She answers all their questions with infinite patience, she listens to their repeated exclamations with what looks like composure; there are no signs of irritation or annoyance. Aru is adult enough to be conscious of the curtain beyond which her parents lived their life together as man and woman. Yet Sumi seems to give the impression that the room did not exist, that whatever life they lived together was with their daughters. And she has revealed all of it to them.
To the astonishment of her daughters, Sumi’s routine that day is as usual. They are baffled, but as if she has set the tone for them, they go through the motions of their normal routine as well. Sumi’s calmness, her normality, make it possible for them to think—‘it was only a quarrel’; it makes it possible for them to hope—‘he will come back’. When she returns home in the evening, Aru looks around quickly, eagerly, for some sign that he has returned; but nothing has changed since the morning.
In the next few days the girls can almost imagine that there is, indeed, nothing wrong, that their father has gone out for a few days and will soon return, but for the fact that Sumi, despite her facade of normality, has a quality about her—a kind of blankness—that makes them uneasy. The two older girls feel that they should do something, but they do not know what it is they can do. They are waiting for a lead from their mother, but she gives them none. In fact, after that first morning when she