Dreamt Lives
Anirudh Deshpande
IV
The Doctor and the Patriarch
Ravi tried his best to look at his father’s life from a distance. He knew very well that a son can rarely do that with his father. In life, unlike a neatly narrated story, the present is always kneaded into the past.
Once his friend Dheeraj had asked him “Do you think we would have led the same life Uncle did in his times?When I think of my father I often ask myself this question”
The friends were talking about Sunita Vohra, a well endowed female table tennis playerwho was Dheeraj’s neighbor in Patel Nagar.The girl was interested in Dheeraj and often visited him when he was alone at home. The night before, Dheeraj had given up a ‘golden’ opportunity with her as she sat in his lap her blouse unbuttoned for half an hour expecting him to make a move. Her younger brother, asleep in the adjacent room, had plagued Dheeraj’s mind throughout the smooching session.
The conversation had drifted towards Ravi’s father.
“I don’t know how Uncle screwed so many women. I can’t even do it to Sunita in the fear that I might have to marry her” Dheeraj said with downcast face.
“I don’t know Dheeraj, maybe in my father’s place I would have done what he did” Ravi had replied philosophically looking into his friend’s expressive eyes.
Ravi’s father had fought the Wehrmacht in North Africa and Italy.He ran away from home as a volunteer to join the Indian Army in 1941 with a group of friends. Recruited to the Maratha Light Infantry in Belgaum, which the group reached without tickets in a creaking railway carriage from a temple town in Maharashtra, they were trained in a camp on the outskirts of the city before being transported to Iran. From there they travelled to Alamein. His father’s narrative of this grand adventure, a mix of fact and fiction, was peppered with names redolent of historical romance. Bandar Abbas, Baghdad, Alexandria, Bengazi, Tunis, Monte Cassino fired Ravi’s orientalist imagination. His father lived to tell the story of grapes, wine and breads.He corrected their pronunciation of Italian words like pizza.
Ravi’s fictional heroes lived for honor. Due to a passion for fiction, and the stories his father narrated of the World War, Ravi developed two lives. One was a dream fashioned by his reading. It was an unreal and impossible world. He sailed with Francis Drake and fought the Spaniards. He was a Mughal Prince or a gentleman like JamesBigglesworth. The other was less unreal.In it he searched for his dreamt values. This life intruded threatened his dreams. His father had numerous faults but a lack of imagination was not among them. His narration was capable of giving a humble passenger train of the Indian Railways a personality.The trains approached the stations with a life expressed in the sounds made by their engines and bogies. The names of the trains gave them character.
Ravi was thirty-six and considered himself young. His mother’s sober reminder that a man above thirty was middle agedshocked him one day. Most of his college mates had secure careers butRavi had no job.
His thesis supervisor did nothing for him.
“I don’t know what you will do after getting your degree” the indifferent pseudo intellectual had said to him a week before he submitted his thesis.
Ravi was staring at the drizzle outside the window when he heard the sentence. He drank the tears welling up in his eyes and remained silent. His road in the university was at a dead end. He knew the cynical professor would not lift a finger to help him.
With a thesis in hand, he was alone in a cruel world. A week later he went to submit the copies to the office. The finance staff misbehaved with him. Nobody congratulated him. No party was held. His mother congratulated him in muted words. Smita called long distance from England to say she felt proud of him.
The choices he had made fifteen years ago wreaked vengeance on him. With melancholy he thought his life would be wasted looking after two old ill people. When he met wastrels in their forties and fifties an icy feeling gripped his heart. His semi educated friends had got jobs. He felt all workers in the world luckier than him. All were busy and did not worry about ideas. Childhood memories brought a painful nostalgia to him. Compared with his father’s life, his had been sedate.Even with women, he thought, he failed to achieve what his father had.Unlike the dying man, he had fallen in love seeking emotional permanence like a fool. His dreams and passions had made him impractical. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and Outsider by Camus reminded underlined his station. A man in love is a fool doomed to exchange captivity with adventure.
Years later a venerable friend said to him “Love is a myth. There is either lust between a man and woman or nothing. What you call love is window dressing.” The words had shocked Ravi. They left him in introspection for weeks.
The patriarch had mastered the method of promoting self interest as a child.His fatherwas brought up in his maternal grandparents’ joint family away from his declining paternalhome. His grandfather, scion of a powerfulwatandar family, had squandered an estate of eighty four villages before 1947. The large wadaswere ruined, the family silver was sold to the moneylenders and former servants.It became difficult to find dowries for the girls who grew like shrubs in the monsoon. The decadence produced a crop of ill educated lower middle class humanity.Over time they became grumpy conservatives clinging to caste and religion. As the eldest of seven siblings, Ravi’s father had been sent to his maternal grandfather.There the women of the household ate only once a day but he was fed milk and ghee. At sixteen he led the village louts who passed time smoking bidis, drinking country liquor and fucking whores in the town nearby. The loafers decided to join the Indian Army laterwhen military recruitment party informed them that war had broken out between the King Emperor and Germany. The British Sarkarpromised rich pickings.
The patriarch reminded Ravi of his teenage friends. The friends were obsessed with girls and the mothers of these girls.Many mothers were in their prime. Ravi and Dheeraj had a favorite fantasy in Ravi’s locality, the young wife of a businessman who remained out of station for long periods. The woman had a seven year old son Varun humored by the two friends. All the boys read porn in Hindi by Mastram. Their imagination of sex was colored by this lurid prose picked up from the railway stations and bus terminals. The boyssaw morning show soft porn at the Plaza or Odeon. On popular demand and threatenedviolence scenes were repeated. The theatres resounded with “once more” or “bhenchodphirdikhao” because the Punjabis and Hindustanis wanted more of the voluptuous south Indian B grade actresses. After the shows the crowd poured onto the streets.Hundreds of hungry eyes visually raped the women in sight. The lust spread far and reached the hospitals in Delhi where Malayali nurses worked hard for their cash starved families.
Ravi remembered thehigh class girls-only public schoolwhich hadfortunatelybecome the class twelve examinations center of his school. His school was considered a model school. The young lady teachers of that school wore low slung body hugging sarees.They made the exams a memorable experience.Ravi thought of the contradiction between being a gentleman, and a man lusting after women. He remembered the young, sexy and self conscious upper class women who came in cars to drop their kids off in the morning while he and his mates entered the exam centre. That his class scored well was a miracle! Long after the exams the women were remembered.
An attractive fair young maid with prominent breasts and shapely hairless thighs bathed him every day in NEFA. She was the hospital peon’s wife. His mother, the only doctor in that outpost, treated patients whom often trekked several miles from mountain hamlets to the hospital. The doctor had little time for her only son in the mornings. One day the maid’s beautiful hand began to soap his front with a new gentleness. Ravi felt good and his six year old organ awakened. At first the maid looked surprised but soon a smile spread across her beautiful broad face. She fondled him with great emotion.
“Like father, like son” his first teacher muttered.He heard her.
“What do you meanKusumDidi” he asked her, his large eyesexuding innocence.
“Nothing really” she replied. He remained quiet after that enjoying the rest of the bath.
His curiosity was satiated, and innocence lost, some weeks later.One sunny dayhe saw father’s naked bottom bobbing up and down between the milky thighs of the fair Didi. Both man and woman lay on a mattress spread on a bamboo cot in a small store next to the stall of the brown cow.The bovine had been acquired specially for Ravi who was supposed to drink this milk to grow into a strong virile man. The maid saw him first from under his father.Shelaughed as he stood rooted to the door on his way home from the makeshift school.The school was run by the attractive Punjabi wives of army officers a kilometer away. The school had dispersed earlier than usual that day. Distracted by the laughter, his father interrupted the thrusts and cast him a glance over his shoulder.
He banished Ravi from the scene with a curt command “Go and play.”
That eveningRavi narrated the story to Deben while they practiced rudimentary archery with the cane bows and arrows. Deben’s father, a local hunter and handyman in the hospital, had made the bows and arrows. Deben heard him with a mischievous look in his eyes. Obviously the wiry boy was more informed in these matters.
“My father does this with my mother often. I think he knows that sometimes I watch them though I pretend to be asleep behind the curtain. Come let us play.” While shooting arrows at semi-feral pigs who roamed the free in the area, Ravi thought of the wooden hut in which his friend lived a frugal life with his parents. He had eaten many meals in that happy home. Deben’s mother loved feeding him chicken, mutton and fish dishes. She called him her second son. He imaginedDeben peering from under the thin curtain which separated his sleeping area from his parents’ bed to see his nude parents fornicating. Ravi smiled to himself and imagined his father and Kusum on the bamboo cot.He heard the loud male grunts and the feminine giggles. He felt more curious but no shame.
Ravi watched his father and Kusumfuck in the store several times secretly. He made excuses at the school and ran home early on the days his father visited them. After a while the teachers became concerned with his absenteeism. At a tea party hosted by a senior army officer, his teacher asked the doctor whether her son was unwell.
“He is fine. Why do you ask?” the Doctor responded, her eyebrows arched.
“I wanted to know because he often does not come to school when your husband is here. I am sure he is close to his father and likes spending time with him. But do tell him to take his lessons a little more seriously” said the teacher before the conversation drifted to another topic.
That night his mother beat him with a cane in a fit of anger. He had never been beaten like this before.
“Why do you run away from school when your father is here? Tell me the truth. What do you want to see?” she asked him in between the beating.
He dared not look her in the eye.He suffered the pain silently, each blow scaring him for life. After that day he stopped coming back early from school and, with Deben beside him, went after school to play with Radha.She was the daughter of the District Commissioner and lived in a sprawling bungalow on a hill near the army camp where the school was located.
For Radha’s mother the arrival of Ravi and Deben proved a pleasant distraction in a boring life. The three friends played games in her large bedroom and relished the snacks prepared by the Bihari cook. Radha was destined to become a famous radio presenter in Delhi. He always heard her voice with pride on the radio in the 1980s and never tired of telling his friends of his past with her in NEFA.
Some days after the caning, the wooden boards on the floor in his mother’s room creaked waking him. He heard the familiar sound and crept out of bed.Without making a sound with his soft flat feet he walked to the wooden wall between the two rooms. From a narrow slit between the planks he peered into his parents’ room.The room was lit by a small turned down kerosene lamp around which night flies and mosquitoes fluttered. He saw his parents inside the mosquito net.
He saw his father’s clumsy actions and understood what the man was trying to do. He froze in anticipation.
He heard his mother’s irritated voice, “Has Kusum not satisfied you that you find it necessary to force yourself on me? Is she having her periods?”
His father laughed and commanded his wife “open your legs.”
“You are reeking of alcohol. Stop behaving like an animal and leave me in peace. Don’t try this with me anymore. I have hated this since the day I got married. Our daughters have grown up. Have you lost all shame? I must think of my children.” His mother pushed his drunk father of her.She pulled down her nylon saree and walked towards his room fully clothed.
He quickly jumped back into bed and pretended to be asleep.The Doctor stroked his head and hugged him tight. Silent tears streamed down her eyes. She delicately felt the scars of the welts her beating had left on his back, hips and shoulders. He dare not awake lest she came to know that he knew what had happened. With an effort which surprised him, he suppressed his tears. The next day his father left for Assam.He returned a few weeks later to give him some toys and take pleasure in the young body of Kusum.
Her dissipated husband was either ignorant or indulgent of liaison.Hewas truly interested in the Englishliquor Sahebbrought him from Dibrugarh, a town he dreamtof visiting.
The cuckold was impotent.He had married Kusum in middle age to save her from a life in a Calcutta brothel. She cooked and kept house for him without much feeling.
“Better to let Sahebsuck her tits than have her screwed by a low caste chowkidar” he reasoned with himself. Liquor, tobacco and gambling were his life.
Ravi understood the connection between alcoholism and impotence later in life. When some of his friends and their wives turned to satsangs in their forties he knew what had happened. Late night parties, heavy food, excess drink and boredom of monogamy took aheavy toll of sexual potency.
Ravi’s father had slept with maids, aunts and cousins in a life about to end in a cold room. His brothers were different with one exception. Ratnakar, Ravi’s eldest uncle, passed maids to his Dada having firstfucked them to his heart’s content.
“Dada, she will serve your wife with dedication” he said while presenting them to Ravi’s father. The whores sported coy expressions as the Patriarch undressed them with his eyes.
“Will you come to Delhi? In my house machines do the washing and maids come for the cleaning and utensil work. You will live like a queen!”
The maids feigned astonishment and deals were struck.
Themaids were transported from Maharashtra in reserved coupes. The Patriarch treated them well. The well tipped coach attendants brought good non-vegetarian food and at night the Saheb took pleasure with the nude maids to the rhythm of the fast train. The pervert enjoyed seeing them sitting and walking naked in the coupe with the curtains drawn. Ultimately these women became faceless creatures in his life wasted by drink, tobacco and dirty thoughts. Alone in his room the Patriarch called his childhood friends in a loud voice Namya, Prakash, Gopal, Vilas… and many others.Ravi had never heard these names but assumed what they meant. His father never shouted the names his sexual prey.
Vaini was the exception.
A few days before the week he died, the man shat and pissed his life out of a body destroyed by debauchery. The pervert did not spare his female attendant. Abuxom battle scarred veteran of many such battles, Rampyari took the paper tiger in her stride. She was told many times what he would have done to her in good health. Her mother, sister and daughters were dragged into the bargain. She took no offence and smiled as he ranted.Finally, the effort was too much for the Patriarchwho collapsed in bed. His emaciated chest rose and fell with each labored breath. He was covered till his neck by a thick clean sheet which could not be soiled because nothing remained in his dry intestines.
She thought of the rich old dying lechers who had lunged at her breasts and hips with their weak arms.One had managed to put his hand in her salwar at night as she dozed off. That was too much.
“Bastard” she had screamed and slapped him hard with a heavy hand knocking him to the floor.
The molester had complained to his incredulous family and she left for another position. Nothing really affected the soft spoken woman as long as she was paid well. But she was not game for physical assault.
One day Rampyari vanished. That left the Patriarch rotting on the bed despite Ravi’s best lonely efforts.
Khem Bahadur replaced Rampyaria few days before the patient died.
The Doctor had tolerated her husband for decades with resignation.After the couple crossed its fifties, the balance of power tilted in her favor. She earned far more than him. As a class one officer in government service her social prestige was way above him. As she sensed her power, sheturned on him with vengeance in old age. Her tongue, always harsh in the fashion of the family, turned acidic as the couple entered the last decade of their unhappy marriage. His invasion of her virgin life had driven away the little softness possibly graced her heart till then. Since the day which brought a cruel pervert into her life, she regarded love, and particularly love within wedlock, with derision. To her, marriage was a necessity not always forged in heaven. Young couples in love angered her. When her nineteen year old daughter became infatuated with a distant cousin she had felt like stabbing her with a surgical knife. The shameless girl made matters worse by decamping to Bombay to marry the semi-literate loafer. Thankfully, better sense prevailed over the girl. She grew tired of the boy and returned to Delhi repentant. Later, when things were beginning to settle down, a lower middle class bearded man with Communist pretensions had enticed the stupid girl.Secretly the Doctor felt her children were disappointments. Sometimes she looked at her son and imagined him as a civil servant or doctor. How nice he would have looked, she thought briefly.
Her references to happy marriages and her own children were laced with sarcasm. Strangers found this acidity unfathomable. Some blamed it on her bad looks. Some, familiar with her husband, guessed right. When his mother died six years after his father her memories turned to ashes. Anecdotes by close relatives resurrected the painful memories of a woman who lived for her profession and children in young age. Young women dress up for their husbands as foreplay to rememberin private when the children grow up. The only cosmetic she used was talcum powder,necessary in the humidity of the north east. Her youth was destroyed in the hospitals. In those remote areas she spent years, with a bitter heart, returning to houses without electricity from parties where she neither consumed alcohol nor meat.
She remembered the young attractive wives of the Army Officers. The sleeveless blouses and the low slung sarees angered her.Their makeup, lack of professional education and gossip irritated her. But what made her hate them was the way they were treated by their young strapping husbands.
In the endless time of the North East she lay on a cold humid bed under a mosquito net imagining her young colleagues, with perfect teeth and sharp noses, cavorting undressed with their husbands. Some probably hadlovers as well.Her heart was lacerated bya rage which professional success never wiped out. Anger blighted her life and she never knew what made her trulyhappy. Her brief moments of happiness occurred when her daughters clung to her sareein delight in Dibrugarh where they lived with their father and attended a convent school, Young Blossoms, run by Italian nuns. Her second daughter died of hepatitis in Delhi. She was the brilliant one. She stood first in class. She won the most awards on the annual day. Her teachers loved her and came to the Doctor’s house to mourn the premature death.
“Had she lived, she would have brought glory to the family” said the Doctor to herself.
When the doctor became pregnant for the third time her spiritssoared at the prospect of having a son and more respect in society. Her colleagues were hopeful. The months passed and she barely saw her belly expand. Doubts assailed her. She dreamt of giving birth to something which was not human. She though providence had punished her for not loving her husband.
Her anxiety turned to sadness when she noticed the expression on the face of the handsome six feet two inch tall Dr. Bikram Mukherjee, the male gynecologist who helped her expel a boy from her womb.It was a forceps delivery because the head of the baby was stuck in the uterine passage. The Doctor felt her groin come apart when the twisted legs of the newborn were pulled out of her.
“The boy has talipes. I must call the surgeon immediately” Dr. Mukherjee said with a gravity which alarmed her. She looked down at the male she had borne after two daughters. All three were products of sexual unionsshe had preferred over being called a barren woman.A baanjh was the last thing she wanted appended to her name! She saw the feet, ankles and knees of the boy.She remembered drying up her waters a month and half before his birth. Her heart sank.
The surgeon came in, examined his shriveled patient and said he would do his best after two days. “Cheer up, we have fixed these problems earlier” he said to the crestfallen mother before going to the OPD. Two days later he came back with a nurse to assist him.Hefirst measured the millimeters between the boy’s upturned toes and shins. He tested the patient by pulling the toes down sending the infant into fit of bawling. Then, ignoring the pain being inflicted on the tiny body, he straightened the boy’s legs, gave shape to his mangled feet and put them in a strong plaster cast.
“Is he disabled? Will he be able to walk?” the Doctor asked the orthopedic surgeon who was putting the final touches to the cast.
“Do you believe in God, Doctor?” the surgeon replied straightening up and looking the Doctor in the eye.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I do” replied Ravi’s mother.
“If you do, pray” said the surgeon. “I shall examine him after two weeks” he added and left the room with the young Manipuri nurse behind him.
Though the newborn’s bones and muscles were supple he shrieked in pain for week. Gradually he started drinking the milk of a tribal wet-nurse whose new born boy had died within five days of his birth. Ravi’s mother’s breasts were dry. She never breast fed her son. The boy was dark, underweight and sickly. His eyes were large and bright and this elicited the visitors’ admiration. When the wet nurse laid him next to his mother after feeding him the Doctor felt the tiny bundle radiate warmth in her cold soul. She held the bundle gingerly and prayed for her son’s recovery from his congenital condition.
After two weeks the surgeon examined the infant in the OPD. The cast was changed and boy’s ankles were bandaged once again. This time he did not cry to everyone’s surprise. The surgeon managed a smile which could not hide the creases of worry on his forehead.
“His knees are okay” said the surgeon. Except the ankles the infant was moving all his joints normally. He had developed a good appetite for the tribal’s milk for which the woman was handsomely remunerated his parents.
The boygrew slowly and almost proved the skeptics right. When he turned three, the orthopedic surgeon prescribed a set of special shoes. With the aid of these shoes which had long steel braces running up to his knees Ravi began to walk slowly.Both his sisters doted on him. Gradually, step by step, the boy grew nourished by the milk of the cow bought specially for him.The fresh eggs, river fish and delicious chicken curry supplied to the doctor’s house by her obliging Assamese neighbors supplemented the nourishment supplied by the cow.All the food taboos in the house were broken for the boy who. Above all, he was a boy destined to grow into a man and become the kuldeepak of the family.
He was encouraged to play a variety of games by his sisters who visited him during the holidays. They took him out to play with their friends and insisted on his running around despite his problems. He was loved by his father who did not mind his disability. The Patriarch held his son close to his broad chest and teased him in ways which made little Ravi squeal in delight. His father’s behaviorsurprised everyone.Ravi began to run as fast, and sometimes faster, than boys his age with normal feet at the age of five when the leg braces were removed by the doctors. He was an excellent archer and proved a competent gymnast in school. By his tenth year the talipes club foot condition had been reduced to flat fleet. Nobody guessed at the time that the deformity would leave him with a shortened left leg for the rest of his life causing him great trouble in old age. What people noticed was that the mischievous boy was the favorite of his teachers most of whom emphatically refused to entertain complaints against him. By his twelfth birthday his elder sister and close friends knew that he was determined to overcome his childhood handicap completely. Ravi was good at all sports. His eyes were sharp and forehead broad.He developed a walk and sartorial style which camouflaged his physical imperfections. If his ankles ached after long walks, too much running or football matches he never complained. Ravi turned out to be a diligent student and stood first in class with an A in all subjects.
But among his close friends his prestige rested on non academic matters.
At seventeen, he achieved a unique distinction by committing an act of boldness which left his friends in lifelong awe of him. He fell in lust with a well endowed Bengali girl in the neighborhood.This girl had become infatuated with him.Very quickly the lust became love for Arpita Goswami who was coveted by numerous boys in the strong Bengali community of the area.
He deflowered this girl and slept with her every week in a torrid two year long affair. The affair ended when the girl grew fed up with the anxiety of getting pregnant every other month. She also realized that the weekly love making sessions between the two had spoilt his high school grades.This threatened to preempt, she thought, a promising career in store for him. A day came when Arpita stepped back, refused to meet him and left him broken hearted for six months after.
In between, the school director, alarmed at his absenteeism, sent a letter of warning to the Doctor. Ravi was shown this letter reprimanded by his mother.
“I am sure you feel proud of yourself having done this. Look at yourself in the mirror and see what you have become” the Doctor had said to him, acid dripping from her tongue.
Ravifelt cornered and decided to teach everyone a lesson. He returned to his textbooks with vengeance and topped a class full of mates who had attended all the classes!He repeated the performance the following year and sailed into the most prestigious college of Delhi University.
One day, towards the end of the first year of college, he bumped intoArpitain Gandhi Market. It was a lovely October Sunday with light sunshine and a gentle breeze.
“Arpita, do you mind spending a couple of hours with me?” he asked her softly.
She noddedand they went to the Old Fort lake in Delhi on his Enfield Bullet motorcycle which he rode with a straight back military style. They sat on a bench close to the lake at first not speaking and without touching each other. After a long moment they drew closer and his hopes rose. She kept staring at the lake and tears began rolling down her cheeks. He threw his arm around her shoulder and held her close.
“Are you happy?” he asked her a stupid question.
“With what” she replied through a choked throat with some difficulty.
Slowly the tears of grief and humiliation dried up. She sat, her back straight and slim waist outlined, proud and defiant. It was as if she was trying to prove something to herself. But she felt weak and vulnerable and wanted him to take her in his strong arms.
“You wanted me to go to that college and I did” he broke the silence, remembering the day she had said this when they had met and made love in his sister’s empty house in Patel Nagar for the last time. He remembered how she looked nude. He saw a grown up girl sitting next to him on the bench.He wondered how she would appear nude in that state. He continued to remember her with gratitude for years.
She was the first woman who gave him everything without conditions. His friends knew this. They often talked about him and her in his absence. During a drinking session on the engagement day of Dheeraj, one of his old friends had said to him “Ravi, your life would have been different if Arpita had married you.”
Arpita remained etched in Ravi’s memory but the wound of their separation healed completely when Smita swept Ravi off his feet years later.
Arpita looked different as they sat on a warm concrete bench. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply looking at her shapelydusky arms. She liked seeing him smoke.She had said as much to him when they had started exploring each other in a dark room where a television set attracted everyone else present. This had become routine in a time when TVs were rare and communal viewing common. Once he fell ill and was hospitalized for a week.During that week she fasted for him and ate only once a day. His recovery had convinced her that he loved her. His eyes travelled to her hairless crossed legs on which a printed skirt had slid back a little. He saw her slim waist with a longing.
“I am happy for you. Listen Ravi, you must travel a great distance. My life will be different from yours and you deserve much better. Remember what I used to say? That I never wanted to become an obstacle in your progress” she said, her dark eyes fixed on the gentle waves on the lake.Some ducks swam by without purpose.
“Who said so? What makes you think we cannot travel together?” he replied in desperation.
“I know you love me and that is why we are here. The lakeis filled with our memories.Maybesome things happened between you and me before time, but this happens without anyone’s control” he said,remembering the days when they stole kisses at the lake and fed grain to the ducks and squirrels.
Nothing happened. The ducks swam away to another couple preparing to throw them food. On the benches couples were kissing,their arms thrown across each other. Under the trees lovers reclined in silly cinema inspired postures. The sun went down behind them and the traffic sounds increased. The water turned orange as evening approached. The flock of ducks headed towards the bank next to the fort wall. Some had made it and were waddling towards the bushes which grew close to the base of the wall.The hidden birds began a pleasant racket in the leafy branches where darkness was spreading. A lonely mongoose scurried away in the grass. He stopped to sniff the air and moved on, his brown bushy tail reflecting the slanted autumn sunlight.
From a distance the aazaancalled the faithful to prayer.The plaintive call reminded Ravi of his childhood spent close to the Shakur ki Dandi mosque with its tea shops, red tea, fennel rusks and a crowd of embroidered skull caps.
Dusk was approaching fast. The time to leave had arrived.
He asked her a question with an abruptness which surprised him.
“Why did you break away suddenly, knowing that your action would leave me distressed?Was there another man? Is it because of him?”
He referred to a young tutor who had appeared on the scene a few weeks before their break upsparking off rumors. He had gone to Bihar for a summer vacation when this happened. Upon his return, his friends had described a tall handsome man who had started visiting her house to teach her science and math.
The man was a Bengali and liked by Arpita’s parents.
She said nothing and looked across the water at the thick walls of the fort on top of which were the tiny figures of people exploring the site despite the approaching twilight.
Then, before she spoke, he knew and bit his lip.
“I don’t know whether I should say this, but I must speak because you suspect me of infidelity. How I wish you had not asked this question! Ask your mother, Ravi. She knows best” Arpita said in a soft measured voice.
They walked to the parking where he kicked the Bullet alive. She sat behind him and durng the journey back she held his muscular waist in her soft hands. He dropped her two hundred meters from the cluster of red government houses where she lived a lonely life. They never saw each other. Years later, for the sake of curiosity, Ravi made inquiries but received no clue from anyone.
Ravi came to know from his friends that the Doctor had met Arpita’s parents. One afternoon she stormed into their modest government flat to teach them a lesson. She cast aspersions on Arpita’s character in words which Ravi never heard but could imagine.
“You have let your daughter loose. Is that the way a girl should be brought up? To fling her body at the boys of good families with the intention of making a good catch? As a class three government servant how dare you forget your station” she had thundered at Arpita’s father while the family stood quiet and shocked.
“Is that why you sent your daughter to our house to watch TV? To ensnare my son knowing well the character of boys who fall for such permissive girls” said the Doctor rubbing salt in the wounds of her hosts.
One Saturday afternoon the Doctor had paid them a surprise visit.
They welcomed the unexpected visitor and offered her tea and snacks. The tea grew cold, the snacks remained untouched and the short statured Doctor flew into a self-righteous rage permitted to a boy’s mother in India. Arpita’s parents fell silent. Their eyes flitted from the visitor to the table on which the food, like their hearts, grew icy cold. They did not even exchange glances.In another room her brother maintained a stoic silence while the indignant visitor berated his parents.
That night Arpita saw her parents cry and curse the day she was born. The brother narrated everything to her and buried his wet face in her shoulder. Her mother had slapped her the moment she entered the house after meeting Ravi in the Nehru Park.
Arpita understood the futility of her love for Ravi.She had confided in her mother a few months earlier. Her mother heardeverything patiently. She was fond of the boy. She liked his laughter and banter. She admired his intellectual and physical courage.In her early thirties,she would have made love to Ravi given a chance. But doubts had lingered in her pure heart. The boywas not Bengali. She knew this would create problems with the relatives.To make matters worse Ravi’s mother was known for her temper. Arpita’s mother had been married to a man much older than her seventeen years ago.She felt no love for him despite surrenderingher beautiful body to compulsory conjugality. For some years her husband had dutifully mounted hertwice a week. Ignorant of her aching breasts and thirsty thighs, he was done and asleep before her desire began to flow.
Her beauty had been wasted on a man who did not deserve her.
The boring man became impotent early in life and stayed buried in a newspaper before eating his evening meal.He retired to his bed in a check lungi which put his wife off. Her daughter was on the cusp of escaping her fate and she wished the girl well. But that was not to be. After the doctor’s attack, the girl turned away from love. Years later she married without happiness and vanished from Delhi. It was rumored that her gentle brother, Ravi’s collaborator, fell in bad company and lived his best years in jail. Arpita’s mother died at fifty of a heart attack.No one knew what happened to her father.
The feared Doctor had warned Ravi’s friends, one of whom had shown her to the house of the Bengalis with unhidden reluctance, to keep this a secret. They obeyed her till his misery made them spill the beans. By then Arpita had told him everything. He neither raised the issue with his mother nor tried reclaiming alost love. There were days when the locality saw him pining for lovely Arpita in places where she might have run into him by accident. Aftermany weeks he gave up. His friends were astonished not to see her appear on the balcony of her father’s house even once during that time of emotional anxiety.
She became invisible to the world.
The dashing Bengali tutor was also not seen on Press Roadever again.
*****
