‘You didn’t have to bring this, Ramesh.’
Kalyani makes a formal protest when Ramesh comes with a large pack of ice-cream.
‘I was just passing by,’ he murmurs.
‘He’s trying to cheer us up, Amma.’
Ramesh gives Sumi an embarrassed, almost agonised look that silences her.
It is when she is serving the ice-cream that Aru suddenly asks Ramesh, as if she has been pondering on this all the while, ‘Don’t you have any idea where he could be? You must be having some clue, maybe there are people we don’t know about ....’
‘I’ve tried all the places I could think of, Aru. And I’ve been trying to get in touch with anyone who had some contact with Guru. But it’s so hard to explain, I don’t know what to say to them ....’
‘Say it, Ramesh, say he’s missing, say he’s walked out on his wife and children. It’s got to come out some time, how long are we going to hide it from the world? And do you think people don’t know? I’m sure they do and frankly I don’t care.’
‘You don’t care?’ Aru’s reaction to her mother’s words is violent and sharp. ‘That’s wonderful. You don’t care about his having gone, you don’t care where he is, you don’t care what people think—but I care, yes, I do, I care about Papa having left us, I care about not having our own house. I don’t want to live like this, as if we’re sitting on a railway platform, I want my home back, I want my father back ....’
After a moment’s stunned silence, they move towards the sobbing girl, all of them except Sumi, who walks out.
When Ramesh comes out in search of her, he sees her standing still, her face lifted to the sky, a reflective look on it, as if she is weighing something. A lover watching her would be intrigued; but for Ramesh, it only means a moment of respite he welcomes. When he joins her she has resumed her pacing. They walk together in silence for a while, Sumi scarcely aware, he thinks, that he is with her. She speaks only when they reach the gate.
‘I never thought Aru would take this so hard. I was more anxious about Seema, but ....’
Sumi has suddenly stopped. The strong odour of the plant which Kalyani swears keeps snakes away, assails them and they move on.
‘Once when Aru was little we’d gone somewhere, I don’t remember where, now. At night, I can remember this, she wouldn’t go to bed. I want my own bed, she kept crying.’
‘I never thought Guru would do such a thing, I never imagined he’s this kind of a man ....’
‘What kind of a man is he, Ramesh?’
Ramesh looks at her in surprise. But no, she isn’t being sarcastic, she’s entirely serious, she wants the answer to her question.
‘Yes, tell me, Ramesh, what kind of a man do you think he is? Sometimes I think you know him better than any one of us does. Sudha was more like a mother than a sister to him, you’re a kind of brother, not a nephew. He was closer to you than anyone else I know.’
‘Guru? I was eight when he left home. I don’t know why he left, nobody ever told me. When you’re a kid, you accept these things, you never ask why. But I can remember that my mother was very upset, that she used to cry a lot. And I can vaguely remember us, my parents and I, sitting in a train and my mother crying. I think that was the time we left him in Shivpur. Something happened to him then, my mother told me that later. He suddenly decided he didn’t want to live with us in Bombay, he decided he’d join a college in Shivpur ....’
‘Gopal himself never spoke of this to you?’
‘No, never. He did come home during vacations, not every vacation though. It was only when he got a job and stayed here in your house—I visited him, remember?—it was only then that we became friends. I went back home so full of “Gopal this” and “Gopal that” that my father began to call him “your Guru”. And that’s how he became Guru—Sumi, do you think he’s had some kind of a breakdown? I can’t help thinking it has to be something like that.’
‘No, I don’t think that’s what’s happened. He was very clear and very calm when he spoke to me, he was ...’ Suddenly she shivers. ‘I’m feeling cold.’
‘Shall I get you a shawl?’
‘No, let’s go in.’
‘What are you going to do, Sumi?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything, not as yet. Premi wanted me to go to Bombay with her, but I can’t think of anything, not as yet. I need time, Ramesh, give me some time.’
Lying in the semi-darkness, listening to the patter of raindrops on the mango leaves, each sound distinct, framed in the surrounding silence, Sumi is tantalized by a sense of deja vu. I have been in this room before, I have woken up here, just this way, watching the morning light slowly fill the room, relieved to see the menacing shadow in the corner become a cupboard. It’s a child’s fear that comes back to me. Did I ever sleep in this room as a child? This is my grandfather’s room, the room where he lived and died. Perhaps that’s why Kalyani didn’t want me to move in here. But she didn’t say that.
‘Why do you want to be alone?’ she had asked.
Not to lose sight of my loneliness, not to let the empty sound of it be muffled by the voices of other humans during the day, by the sounds of their breathing and rustlings in the night. It takes time to get used to sharing your life with another person, now I have to get used to being alone.
Of course, Sumi had not said any of this to her mother. She has to smile at the thought of it. And the truth is that it is not loneliness that is her enemy right now, it is a sense of alienation. The sight of Premi flanked by her daughters, the hostility on Aru’s face as she said ‘I rang her up’, had made Sumi feel suddenly vulnerable.
The three of them ranged against me. Am I the enemy? Do my daughters blame me for what Gopal has done? Do they think it is my fault? Why can’t I talk to them, tell them what I feel, how it was? Why can’t I open my heart to them?
Sa-hriday—Gopal and she had argued about the meaning of the word once. Smiling at her attempt to find an English equivalent, Gopal had said, ‘There’s no word in English that can fit the concept. English is a practical language, it has no words for the impossible. Sa-hriday in the sense of oneness is an impossible concept.’
Then, abruptly, he had pulled her close to himself and said, ‘Listen, can you hear? It’s two hearts beating. They can never beat in such unison that there’s only one sound. Hear that?’
It was these unexpected quirks in Gopal that had at first fascinated Sumi. Not for long, though; she had soon ceased to find them amusing or interesting. Nevertheless, she knows now that they were hints, telling her that it was always there in Gopal, the potential to walk out on her and their children.
Unlike her daughters, Sumi has no fears of his death; on the contrary, there is a certainty of his being alive, of his steadily pursuing his own purposes. While the others are trying to find reasons for what he has done, she knows that the reason lies inside him, the reason is him.
Sumi remembers, now, the night she had gone to his room, knowing that only this way could she break out of her father’s authority. But Gopal, to her consternation, had closed himself against her. ‘Go back, Sumi,’ he had said, almost coldly. Only her stubbornness and the thought that she could not possibly return to the room she shared with Premi, had kept her there, alone in the room, that whole long night, while Gopal sat out in the tiny, open veranda. Until morning, when he had come in and put his arms about her, as if folding her into himself, into his life. And she had heard his heart beating.
Two