Acid Read online

  She detested everything about him: smoking, drinking, his friends and whatever his habits were. She loved a life of luxury, she thought he was extremely rich, a landowner who had a handsome job, but he, on the other hand, never spent a single extra rupee on luxuries, lived the life of a simple man, devoid of gaudy cars and dreams. She loathed even his faded yellowish bath towel, for which he never wanted a replacement. He would say with the conviction of a bumpkin, ‘My mother and I shared one bath towel as far back as I can remember. My sister always wanted a new one, and changed her towel every year. New towels are difficult to handle, they don’t wipe your body dry, your skin takes time to get accustomed to them. And at times, at home, there would be just some buttermilk to go with rice for lunch, and my sister would go off, frowning. I would make my mother happy by eating her share too. You know, Kulji, Kamala’s mother used to make five separate dishes every day.’

  It was wealth that cheated Kamala, her estate that forced her into this unhappy wedding, poor woman; she was left with no choices then. He said to himself, I must give her the maximum price for her property, let that be my penalty kick.

  In her sleep, around three in the morning, Kuljeet shouted, ‘If you buy that estate, consider our relationship over.’

  30

  Desire could be palpable, like the strong sense of forfeiture she felt within, but it could never be concrete, never graphic. What did she really hope for, what was her desire? If she had achieved what she dreamed of, then what was the point in being bitchy, getting mad at things and behaving in a moody, unpredictable way? With a stern expression and severe tongue, what was she trying to prove? Was she trying to convey that she was not the polished woman they believed she was, that her language could get even darker? Last night, she had pushed her plate so hard that it had fallen down, scattering rice all over the floor. Even Aadi had been furious at this. If she did not want her uncle to interfere in her business, she should tell him to his face. There was no use in making others stand facing a loaded gun. The three of them were always supportive, willing to do whatever she wanted them to do, talk the way she talked. They carried her anger on their shoulders though it weighed heavily on them, making them stoop. But still the dyspepsia persisted—they crouched down, they wanted to throw up.

  Shiva raised his voice when he heard that the movers would transfer their things directly to the flat they were going to buy in Kadavanthra. What was wrong in getting mad about this? As it was the children were already bored and going through a very bad phase of their lives in slow motion; it was hard to believe that this time would also pass. True, she had paid a token amount as advance, but that didn’t guarantee them anything. The flat would be theirs only when she paid the full amount, otherwise it would wait for her for some more months, and then the advance would cease to exist. Now that her uncle wasn’t helping, he was being vengeful as well, and disposing of her estate and moving on with life seemed almost impossible. At first, she took no notice of what Shiva was saying and tried to concentrate on her plate, on the dishes her maid, Janu, had made. He started shouting, and when she thought it was getting out of proportion she pretended to listen. He yelled about the huge sum Movers and Packers were going to charge her for keeping their things for so long. He demanded that she have their things brought to the house so that they could keep them there and open only what was absolutely necessary. When they got the apartment they would make arrangements for another vehicle and people for transportation. The only extra amount would be the money for the second transportation but in a sense, compared to this, that seemed profitable. In short he wanted his gadgets back; he was sick of living here. At least they’d be able to watch TV or listen to some real music. Shaly intervened and spoke for Shiva and asked Kamala to call Movers and Packers. Kamala glowered at her in great anger as if dismissing her authority with her scornful looks, and she fell silent in no time. Shiva kept protesting, undeterred, and after a while she grew tired of going through the motions; having no idea how to handle the situation, she gave a violent push to the dish in front of her, towards him, overturning everything everywhere.

  ‘This is no place for throwing parties! I hope you are all aware that the woman who passed away was my mother.’

  She thrust her hand into the other dishes, grabbing at bowls and spoons, letting them all fall on the floor in random directions with loud clatters, the sound of steel crashing to the floor. She asked the children to get out of her sight. They hadn’t even begun their dinner, but she didn’t care even if they were hungry, and gave them a nasty look when Aadi started wheeling Shiva out, as if it was their fault, as if this show of cruel euphoria brought her satisfaction. Shaly thought Kamala would slap her, but that didn’t happen.

  Without even looking at her, Kamala walked unsteadily towards her room, once her mother’s, now hers.

  Shaly didn’t bother to pick up the dishes or clear the table or the floor. Let Janu see when she comes to clean the house in the morning, she thought, and walked towards her caracole stairs. But she couldn’t sleep at night, for more than anything else she was hungry, hunger gnawed at her. She considered going down and rummaging through the leftovers, but then she decided against it, for she feared that the children might see her. The house had erased the happiness of the cremation ground from her mind. Truth be told, there was just one problem in the world—hunger, the rest was all transitory. Kamala had never known hunger and that was the reason she woke with a new problem, a new dislike every day. She hadn’t seen little children sitting half-naked on the streets trying to sell half-baked rats.

  There was no blindfold darker than light. Kamala, listen, turn off the lights. Try to lie down on your bed peacefully, like the woman you saw in your dreams, lying belly-up in the water, dead and floating. Open your eyes into the blackness. Open your eyes to the darkness where you and I don’t exist, not even Brahma. Try to look at yourself, this thing that you call your body, try to look deep down. Remember, you touched your body as a girl, didn’t you? Now, try to say aloud that you are a lesbian, a beautiful word, isn’t it? Haven’t you seen how beautifully girls make love to girls? Like exquisite birds of the east, like the dawn inside a river, like a feather on the rooftop. Haven’t you seen girls getting high drinking moonlight? When they hug each other, and hold each other close to their bosoms their faces glow with pride, a sense of achievement. Sounds like an overrated, outdated cliché, doesn’t it? Make your heart vulnerable; give a chance to romance that always ends happily, like the stuff in Mills & Boon novels. But you can never be happy, for you are pretentious; you suffer from the discreet pretentiousness of the yokel bourgeois. You let me stay in your house, but you put me upstairs, in the company of the birds, so that no one would know of my presence in your house, like a cat that shuts its eyes while drinking milk. I know you feel safe within your secrets; even if they were to striptease in front of strangers with or without your knowledge, you would feel safe with them, these secrets you consider darker. Whom do you wish to please, you dirty female? Now, come on, shout, shout the way those hip-hop singers do. Tell the world,

  I can love only one woman,

  I can kiss only her,

  I am like that,

  I have two sons and

  I am bringing them up happily . . .

  Kamala was never willing to come out of the closet. Shaly raced through the veranda outside the doctor’s room. The doctor had asked her for the patient’s complete history. Shaly guessed Kamala might have told him about the condition of her sons, about how she and her husband had separated, about how Shaly had forcibly given her drugs, but she would not breathe a word about what was eating her soul up, leaving her looking like a pile of dust within. Shaly was decisive, and that was why she fixed another appointment with the doctor secretly.

  ‘Repressed emotions can drive a person crazy. I am afraid I don’t think she is normal. I came so that I could talk with you; maybe, I could explain things better.’

  ‘Yes, I have recorded her details here.
I know she is keeping things from me.’

  ‘Her sexual preference is different, and that is the main reason why she suffers a lot.’

  ‘But one thing you should understand. Lesbians and gays are not free to come out in a country like ours, where people don’t really have any respect for each other.’

  ‘But how can you say that, Doctor? We do have gay pride parades here, I have seen them myself.’

  ‘You might have seen the parades, but have you ever wondered how many lesbians or gays actually participate in such parades? Do you get what I’m saying? I would like to make my point clear. In LGBTQ only T is the active participant here in our country. How many of the others are willing to join hands with them? Hardly any. We are all tangled in a mess of knots, our history, tradition, socio-economic conditions, laws. First, I guess, all of us need to come out, and then everything will fall in place. The people who are still in the closet believe that their orientation is straight; they are the real sick people, lesbians are forced to remain in the closet because they are afraid of those who brag about their normalcy.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean, Doctor? Should they live like this all their lives?’

  ‘I am not a person for a discourse, child. As long as people do not hurt each other in the process, I strongly believe they should pursue their happiness, they should find meaning in their lives—it is a responsibility one should feel towards oneself, even if the person concerned is a homosexual or a bisexual. Kamala was in the closet as you said, but she hadn’t created problems for anybody, she was enduring it alone, the ultimate helplessness of the human mind. You said she is highly philosophical—this could be a veil, a kind of reaction of the mind to cover up certain other things, or maybe she is genuine in her outlook, we can’t say that now. The trouble came in the form of the acid, you know. You should not feel bad when I say this—I know you are already repenting—but the truth is that Kamala did not have enough mental strength to deal with the drugs and that is the reason for her present problems, not just her preferences. She was strong enough to handle her biological troubles, but not strong enough to deal with her mind, which was vulnerable to damage, and could be broken very easily.’

  Shaly bent her head and fixed her eyes on the desk calendar.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ the doctor said after a pause. ‘You said you are not a lesbian. Then why do you support her, even when you know that you are cheating her. Don’t you think that your indifference might have added to her sufferings? Can you say that you don’t suffer? Isn’t it all a stress on you too? If whatever you say is true . . .’

  Kamala is trying to hold the repelling ends of two contradictory lies at the same time. As if caught inside a whirlpool, she is swirling around in a life deprived of even the slightest concepts of non-duality. The poor woman!

  Kamala, whenever you tried to kiss me in the ecstasy of love, I told you in a voice almost hushed, ‘Kamala, I am not what you think.’ But you didn’t hear me speak. I was too cunning to say it out loud, because I wanted your friendship, because I needed your company. Your desire was so strong, so savagely happy, I could not even think of making you unhappy, for I love you more than myself. Remember the first time we played at sex on your great, wide bed? The next day when we went out for a walk in the park, I told you: ‘Kamala, I am not a lesbian.’ I thought you would be taken aback, but you didn’t show any signs of discomfort, you just smiled. Do you remember what you told me then? You said: ‘I am not a lesbian, too.’

  Shaly felt pained as she walked down the stairs, cautiously, without making any noise. The boys were sleeping in their room. She went to the kitchen and took the broom and the dustpan, two things, two objects she considered powerful enough to bring peace home. She put the dishes in the kitchen sink, cleaned the floor and wiped the dining table with a rag. Has she slept already, or is she still awake in her room? Before going back, Shaly carefully pushed open Kamala’s door, but the bed was empty. She turned the lights on. Kamala was sitting in a corner of the room, on the floor, on the rough granite stone with the drainage pipe; she had told Shaly on the day she showed her around that it was used by the older generations as a urinal at night. She clung to the edges of the stone with a terrified look on her face.

  ‘What the fuck!’

  Shaly rummaged through her shelves and cupboards for nearly forty-five minutes, and all the while, Kamala sat motionless in the corner, on the urinal stones, unparalleled fear in her eyes. Shaly tried to drag her to the bed, but she didn’t move an inch, she simply sat there clinging to the edges of the stone like a ghost, and Shaly had to give up. Leaning against the bedpost, Shaly sat on the floor, beside her. Eventually she fell asleep; in fact she slumped on the floor, and like a night owl, Kamala sat in the corner, watching her. Suddenly Kamala remembered: people fell asleep like this, on the floor, on certain funeral nights.

  ‘Mother died, she has gone to a better place,’ she consoled Shaly.

  31

  The human mind is both memory and the loss of memory. Unwilling to be buried in forests or to drown at sea, insatiable and uncontainable inside the flesh and the skin that wraps around the body or within the cells of the brain, it pokes its head out, shedding different layers of flesh, blood, plasma and skin. The mind! Kamala opened her doors to the temporary tombs.

  Not just one. Standing outside her closed doors, Shaly had experienced the many deaths of her beloved friend. The house where the relatives had assembled during the funeral rites, like flies around a kerosene lamp, buzzing non-stop, was almost desolate. It had been more than a month. The children were upset; they wanted freedom, peace of mind. Their things had not arrived yet. Aadi spent his time leafing through the pages of the book Anuraktha had given him, reading without order, reading without comprehension. Shiva spent his time sleeping, for he was upset and angry when awake.

  ‘Could you please take me out of this stuffy room?’ Shiva said, as if he were on the verge of a panic attack.

  ‘Where do you want to go in this rustic neighbourhood?’ Shaly asked.

  ‘Even that cremation ground is better than this place,’ Shiva shouted.

  It was not easy to control anger. They were, all three of them, not usually angry; Shaly had always known them as timid, submissive people who spoke softly, as if afraid to hurt something in the air with their voices. But now she saw things changing, voices hiking to insane heights, fears returning. She felt life was faster in the cremation ground, moving at a high speed where bodies became ashes in turbochargers, in zippy seconds. The smoke that rose from there could be the mortician’s anger; it could even be his poverty, the situations that had led him to the life of an undertaker.

  In Kamala’s house the antique clock was a gastropod stuck on her walls, with a second hand that moved once in a while. The snail on the wall arched its antennae to look at Shaly; the mucus line it left on the walls disturbed her. She felt the walls were swabbing down the greenness of her body, though one couldn’t easily make out the difference inside the prehistoric darkness of the room. How long was it going to be like this? The picture of her mother on the wall resembled Kamala; her uncle had brought it here two days ago, an old passport-size photograph enlarged and framed. It seemed he was no longer hostile; he just wanted to explain the situation. But Kamala was unfriendly; she said she wanted no further rituals, nor did she wish to feed any more relatives in the name of her mother. In the end both of them came to a solution by deciding to conduct the funeral banquet at an old-age home on the forty-first day of her departure. ‘How many days more,’ Shiva asked. Nobody answered him. His mother had been acting standoffish since she had come here, like the lotus pond in the backyard, murky with green algae. He didn’t expect an answer. He knew she was becoming unapproachable, at first with her relatives, then her children—and finally Shaly.

  Kamala’s stubbornness had hardened like steel. The thought of yet another day reaching nowhere maddened Shaly. Just because Kamala’s time had frozen at a certain point, it did n
ot mean she could freeze others’ time as well.

  Shaly withdrew her hand from the wooden pineapple only when she felt its sharp edges digging into her flesh. It was painful. How long had she been standing there? She saw the impression of the pineapple on her hand and stared at it for a long time, as if she were reading her palm. Hurriedly she went inside and knocked on Kamala’s door.

  ‘Kamala, open the door. I want to talk.’

  When the door opened Shaly was taken aback, for Kamala looked almost like a shadow. When she stretched her hands out and touched Shaly’s cheeks as if to welcome her in Shaly felt the pallidness of her presence, deprived of the usual signs of physiology. With an angry shove, she pushed her back and stepped inside the room. She sensed a kind of nervous excitement in Kamala’s look. With a tension which was not easy to conceal, Kamala asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘How long do you expect me to remain here? I am tired of it, I want to go back. I am sorry.’

  To her surprise Kamala smiled, something of her old beauty showing. Maybe some part of it would come back to her face. She said, ‘You can go. I don’t think I am happy here either, I also want to go. This is what we call helplessness, but I really don’t want you to suffer like this. You can go back. I will call you once everything falls in place. It’s strange . . . last night, Aadi came to my room, he also told me the same thing, that he wants to get out of here, he wants to leave, he who is silent all the time. I cannot decide anything unless and until I do something about the property. I am stuck—you know that, Aadi should know that. I am trying my best, I have even given an advertisement online, two or three brokers have already promised to help me, but they all demand time, the one thing we don’t have. I am afraid I am going to lose the advance amount as well. Bad luck.’