After he has gone—‘it’s only a virus, she’ll be okay by morning’—Sumi settles down in a chair by Aru, overruling Kalyani and Charu who want to sit up with her. ‘It’s not necessary for all of us to lose sleep. I’ll call you if there’s any need.’
Aru, moving in a strange, shifting, chaotic world, is unware of everything. The jumble of voices, the constant movement about her bed, seems miles away. She wakes up sometime during the night with parched lips and a burning in her throat.
‘Water,’ she mumbles, ‘water.’
There’s someone by her bed, a glass is held to her lips, she can feel a hand supporting her head. Gratefully, she swallows the water and goes off to sleep again. When she wakes up in the morning, clear-headed, her body light and hollow, there is a sense of peace and quiet in the room. The shifting shadows, the confused voices of the night seem to belong to another world.
‘Oh God, Aru, I’m sorry I dropped off to sleep.’ Sumi is apologetic when she wakes up. ‘Don’t tell Amma and Charu I slept through the night.’
‘But you didn’t! You woke up to give me water.’
‘I? No, I didn’t.’
‘Then who did?’
It must have been her grandfather, Aru says, remembering the tall shadow on the wall, the feel of his hand against her head.
‘It can’t be.’ Sumi dismisses the idea. ‘Baba never comes down here, you know that.’
Yes, I know; nevertheless I know it was not a dream, I know it was him. And why is it, it suddenly occurs to her, that he never comes down here?
In a day or two, Aru is up and about, and Ramesh coming to visit them in the evening exclaims in satisfaction at the sight of her sitting up with the rest. Chitra and the twins have come with him and later, Goda and her husband, Satya, join them. The house is full of noise. For the first time since Sumi’s return, there is no sense of participating in a wake. Instead, there is a release of spirits, as if they have just escaped some danger and have to celebrate. Part of the liveliness is because of the twins, Jai and Deep. It is a constant source of wonder to everyone who knows them, that parents as quiet and subdued as Ramesh and Chitra can have children like the twins. Even Seema emerges from her self-absorption when they are around. She is both puzzled and fascinated by their enormous energy and high spirits and they, in turn, seem to need her as an audience. Hrishi and Charu come in from their class a little later and the babble of sound enlarges to include Hrishi’s loud voice, Charu’s laughter.
Kalyani and Goda try to persuade Aru to go to bed, but Aru resists, not so much because she wants to be with them, but more out of a lassitude, a reluctance to face the thought of the coming night. She feels herself encased in a bubble, her connection to the world, to all these people, a tenuous one that can snap at any moment.
And then the thunder of Bhimsen Joshi’s voice, regally unrolling the Raag Mian ki Malhar which has formed a background to all this noise, suddenly ceases. None of them notice it—except Kalyani, who stops suddenly in the middle of a sentence, a word, really. It is something she is scarcely aware of, almost a knee-jerk response. Her body becomes tense, her head is slightly raised as if she is listening to the silence upstairs.
Aru comes out of the bubble, her mind razor-sharp and clear, she sees a situation she has taken for granted for years. Why doesn’t Baba ever come down? Why doesn’t he have his meals here with the rest of us? Why doesn’t he ever speak to Kalyani? She is his wife, isn’t she? And why is she so frightened of him? He rings the bell and she responds, he controls her from a distance. What has Amma done to make him behave this way towards her?
Poor Amma, Sumi says, poor Amma. But why?
In her confusion, Aru’s mind spirals towards Gopal, and his desertion no longer seems a bizarre independent occurence, but connected somehow to the curious story of her grandparents, a story, she realizes only now, she has very little knowledge of.
GOPAL, WHO HAS had no intention of making a mystery of his whereabouts, is living scarcely a few miles away from Sumi and his daughters in the house of an old student of his. This is in an old part of the town, where tiny lanes criss-cross one another and homes, small shops and restaurants jostle together in a jumble of noisy existence. Gopal’s room, above the printing press that belongs to his student, is an odd place for a man to ‘retreat’ to—the thought will occur to all those who visit him. But like the truck drivers, who, after a night of frenetic driving, go to sleep in the womb-like interiors of their driving cabins, wholly insulated from the outside world, Gopal is unaware of the jangle of noises in which he is living his life.
Now the interlude of peace suddenly ends for him. Shankar, still the student, unwilling to sit down in Gopal’s presence, is there to tell him that Ramesh had rung up.
‘And you told him I was here? It’s all right, I never wanted to hide the fact from anyone.’
So Ramesh has traced me here. I should have guessed he would be the first; he has his mother’s doggedness, his father’s sense of duty. And so, he will be the first to ask me the question, ‘Why did you do such a thing, Guru?’
I had prepared myself for this question, I had rehearsed my answers before I spoke to Sumi, I had been ready to counter her arguments. Now I have to be ready to face Ramesh, I have to brush up my reasons, for Ramesh will not let me off easily. What do I say? What were the lines I had prepared?
I heard a voice ....
No, I can’t say that, it sounds utterly phoney. Even Joan of Arc didn’t get away with that one.
It’s a kind of illness, a virus, perhaps, which makes me incapable of functioning as a full human being, as a husband and father ....
This is the right answer to give a doctor and Premi may accept it, but will Ramesh? No, he won’t leave it at that, he will ask me for my symptoms, he will try to connect them and ultimately, yes, I’m sure of this, make an appointment for me with a psychiatrist. No, best leave this alone.
I thought of Purandaradasa’s line, ‘Listen, the hour strikes’ and I was terrified, I knew I was running out of time.
Sumi is the one person who may understand this, she will know what I mean. But this is not enough; I have to be more honest with her, more explicit.
What then? What do I say?
I stopped believing in the life I was leading, suddenly it seemed unreal to me and I knew I could not go on.
Is this the truth? Is this why I left my home, my wife and children? Could I have said this to Sumi?
In the event, there was nothing for me to say to Sumi, for she asked me nothing. I am thankful I never had to suffer the mortification of wading through this slush of embarrassing half-truths. I have not been fair to Sumi, I know that now. I should have spoken to her earlier, given her some hint of what was happening to me. But how do you interrupt the commonplace with melodrama? There is never the right time in daily life for these things. The knock on the door, the peal of the bell bringing news of disaster, they can only come from the outside.
Since coming here, I have been dreaming of my father. How do I know that the man I see in my dreams is my father? I was only eight when he died and nothing of him has remained with me, neither his face, nor his voice, nor his manners, nor any memory linking the two of us together. Just a blank. It is odd, yes, when I think of it now, I realize how curious it is. Can one erase a parent, even a dead parent, so completely? To some extent, of course, Sudha was responsible for this. She put away everything that was our parents’, even their pictures, immediately after their death. I accepted it then, but now, thinking of it, I can imagine that she must have worked in a frenzy, sweeping the house bare of their presence. And I know this