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  ‘Shuddup!’

  Kamala rubbed her eyes and looked again. There was no song, no Hozier, no stereo. Before her eyes, the room transformed into a shoreline with sandcastles waiting to be demolished. Alarmed, Kamala looked at the monster, by then so blown up amidst the sand dunes that it looked like Gulliver in the guise of a mad slut. ‘Please, please be careful. Please don’t step on my castles,’ Kamala touched the polished red toenail of the monster and begged.

  Shaly quickly scampered out of the room and slammed the door shut. She saw Aadi on the stairs, leaning against the banister. Obviously he was trying to overhear what was going on inside the room.

  ‘Haven’t I told you not to come up?’

  ‘Amma,’ screamed Shiva, who was sitting in his wheelchair at the foot of the stairs. There was no answer, except Shaly’s cold stare. He waited for a few minutes more and then said, ‘Aadi, come. I want to lie down.’ Indecisively, Aadi climbed down the steps. Shaly watched the boys disappear behind the closed curtains.

  ‘This is the problem with the middle class, especially with the women. Once you leave your house, you are done forever. The next time you have to pay for the room and board just like some regular tenants,’ Kamala had once said as she was climbing into bed, laughing. Shaly was lying flat on her belly on the bed.

  ‘Some piece of ass you’ve got!’ Kamala spanked her bottom playfully. Both of them had laughed. But that was a long, long time ago. Aadi and Shiva were kids then, going to primary school. Kamala was a young woman, dumbfounded and mystified. Shaly, on the contrary, was a dandelion puff riding on the wind. Fancy-free! Always! They lived in a nowhere house, on the banks of a nowhere river, in the midst of a nowhere forest and, happily for them, they all spoke a nowhere language.

  Ogling passers-by got the shock of their lives and gossiped at length. They tried their moral policing on the women in vain, making their frustrations stand ungratified like obsolete erect dicks.

  3

  Kamala’s mother died last night. It had been several months since she started dying. Now that she was dead, Kamala should have been beside her body for the eulogy in absolute mourning. But Kamala felt an appallingly sincere lack of feeling and a pain numbed by dullness.

  She had visited her mother three months ago. Truth be told, she went there not to see her mother but to make arrangements to buy a flat in Kadavanthra. After a long and weary drive from Bangalore, she reached her mother’s house at six-thirty in the evening. In the dim light of the room her mother couldn’t recognize her. She couldn’t recognize her mother either. That was not the mother she had been used to since her childhood. The woman in front of her was incontinent and lay crumpled up on the bed. She was wearing large and heavily soaked diapers, and farted every so often. She looked as if she was nobody’s mother, a disfigured skeleton wrapped in loose skin. When Kamala touched her, her bones rattled.

  Aadi stood by the headboard, looking compassionately at the figure that was once a woman. His eyes welled up. He had seen only babies in diapers before this. When he listened to her closely he heard some unconscious prayers in an unconscious tongue. He looked at the photographs of the ancestors on the wall, arranged like surgical knives in a long tray. There was his grandfather, a man who died young, in his early forties. It seemed he had lived only to be photographed and framed, a shiny scalpel with a sharp edge.

  Early the next morning Kamala set out with Aadi to Kadavanthra. As they drove to the city, she talked loudly to the land broker over the phone.

  ‘We have to go back to Bangalore tomorrow. If you can arrange it today, please do or else forget it. We are on our way already.’

  ‘Madam, there is a huge traffic jam here. Some strike is holding up the traffic. You can’t imagine what a huge mess it is.’

  ‘You should have informed me earlier.’ Kamala disconnected the call, but she continued to drive.

  It was not the rush hour. But they had to wait for hours in the long queue of vehicles honking madly every now and then. When at last they managed to get out of the car, they saw the city transformed into a garden of love, emanating sulphur fantasies and blissful delights. It exhaled the fragrance of wild magnolia and dark roses. ‘Is this some kind of a festival of love? Some fancy show?’ They looked at each other. Both mother and son blushed alike. Embarrassment reddened their faces. On the streets, people were kissing. Kissing gently. Kissing passionately. Kissing wildly. As if their kisses answered the meaning of their existence. Kamala felt a sudden urge to kiss her son. She held his hand tighter and continued to blush at this rainbow sight of love.

  Some of the kissers had zills on their fingers, which jingled as they kissed each other. The sound of the finger cymbals reminded her of the voices of bedtime stories, and the sound of the heavy tambourines brought back unwanted memories. Once upon a time, or a long time ago, or whatever the fucking phrase was, she had kissed a friend of hers passionately on the lips. She was in her white chemise and her friend had looked like a flower, a girl in her early teens. Her tongue was a petal, as rosy as could be. And Kamala couldn’t help but kiss. She kissed her hard till someone’s belt whipped her on her back. Before she could turn around and see who the hell it was, she was prostrated on the ground, bleeding for the first time in her life, staining her white chemise.

  Everything turned pale and purple in front of Kamala. She noticed the waste piled up in the corners of the city, the dumpsters yawning in the void, the faces of the kissers (were they lovers by any chance?) getting slimy with thick saliva, which she was sure smelled of rotten semen. The kisses slithered down their faces, evoking reminiscence of a hellish fall. When she saw the policemen swinging their canes, getting ready to charge at the kissing mob, she felt relieved. Reality means a hell of a lot in life. She sighed.

  Aadi was still inside the car. He didn’t wish to get out. Kissing was nothing new in Bangalore. Lovers kissed in every nook and corner of the city. In Lal Bagh, kisses bloomed better than flowers. But still, this was novel because this was a strike, a protest against the moral policing of Kerala and they called it ‘the kiss of love’.

  Soon the canes swirled overhead, the polish on the shoes was stained by dirt and the people began to dissolve. Someone got fed up and sang fack fack fack in the background.

  4

  Predominantly, everything dwells in duality. Kamala decided she would not think of life and death and of mother and daughter as these were the creations of maya. But that night, during severe hallucinogenic delusions, Kamala saw funeral cortèges passing before her eyes.

  There was this young mother, a beautiful woman, dead twelve hours ago. Women bathed her in turmeric water. The yellowness of the fresh turmeric water glowed on her dead face. She had on her body an exquisite red Kancheevaram sari for her winding sheet. A single diamond with the white light of the glass coffin shining through it glistened on one of her nostrils, and cast glimmers of sorrow on her dead face. Beside her, her daughter cried non-stop and her son fell unconscious. The pall-bearers waited outside under the temporary parasol while the women came with rose petals and golden chrysanthemums in open baskets. The dead woman was to mark her way to the graveyard with petals and silence. The tarred road lay bare, waiting to be shrouded by flowers. Later, an elderly woman forcefully tried to remove the diamond nose pin. She wanted it desperately for she knew it was valuable. But this was not an easy task. The body had spent almost twelve hours in a gold-rimmed glass freezer coffin. Would it bleed if it were cut open?

  Kamala remembered her mother. Her mother, too, had a diamond stud on her nose. Kamala had her nose pierced when she was a very young girl. She couldn’t remember the pain or the pleasure of it. Someone might have removed the stud from her mother’s nostril before she was taken to the freezer. (Did her mother have a freezer coffin?) It was not mandatory to order a freezer coffin. It took a two-hour flight from Bangalore to Cochin including the check-in and waiting and then another two hours on the road to reach the dear departed. Did she really need a freezer coffi
n?

  Her visions swung on gold-rimmed glass coffins and sparkling nose pins, until one by one her mother’s ornaments started flashing in front of her. She smiled. What bliss! When she was just a little girl she used to ask her mother, ‘Mother, can I have all your jewellery when you die?’ Those were the days when the family cherished talk about handing down the properties, dividing and bequeathing whatever they had. Kamala was the only child of her parents. ‘Kamala is lucky,’ her aunt would say. ‘She need not worry about divisions when she grows up.’ Her cousins looked at her with jealousy, for she was immensely rich and an only child. Everything her father had would be transferred to her as a rule of thumb. And thus she inherited his melancholy heart, either sometimes sad or always depressed. And her mother said to her, ‘Darling baby, why do you have to wait till I die? All that I have is yours, my love.’

  Kamala reached out to touch her mother. She stretched her hand as far as it could go. Like those one sees in ghost movies, her hands and her arms grew in length inch by inch at a rate faster than one could imagine, and wriggled and writhed and moved forward. She looked dubiously at her octopus fingers and laughed. ‘Go, go, fetch me what I want.’

  Her hands banged on the door and opened and closed the chest of drawers. Her hands searched for something inside the drawers, something behind the bookshelf. But there was nothing. Her hands felt depressed and heavy and wanted to help her commit suicide. Defeated and out of control, her hands banged and knocked down the sand castles. Her room was no more a shoreline, it was a desert. One by one, the processions of death marched through the desert. Kamala choked.

  ‘I can’t walk any further than this. You can abandon me here, my children,’ said someone.

  Frantically, Kamala looked at the nooks and corners of her desert-room. There was a group of people and this dying old woman, a mother. The people looked like poor gypsies and the woman resembled a broken and worn-out piece of furniture that once was padded and cosy. The woman said, ‘Please leave me here and get moving. I can’t manage any more, I am sorry.’ Her children and people surrounded her and sang dirges of abandonment. When they finished singing, they gave her water from a container that looked like a blown-up bota bag. One after the other, they kissed her goodbye and walked away. They sang as they walked. They sang and they cried and they sang and they cried and they sang and laughed and laughed.

  Kamala thought of people. People were covered with shrouds, not just one but many, many layers of shrouds. In every case, on every occasion it was the same. Under the scorching sun, the old hag that was once a woman lay. She had on her nothing but the last shroud of her life, her skin. Kamala felt the old woman’s mouth going dry. Her tongue rested parched in her open mouth, like the broken fields of drought. Her skin waited to be blazed away. ‘Devour me, O Mighty Sun,’ she looked at the sun god and closed her eyes.

  The sun blinked and a weighty madness consumed Kamala. She clenched her fist and dug her face in the snuff box of anatomy. She inhaled hard. ‘Give me; give me your scent, the excitement in between your thighs.’ Then she struck the floor with her fist.

  ‘I wish I were young again,’ she blabbered, longing for the slender happiness of youth. She remembered how happily they used to lock the room from the inside and throw the keys up on the mounted racks. Drunk, high, one would never find one’s way to the keys. One would never find one’s way to the other. They breathed in the ecstasy of the well-prepared Mexican leaves. ‘You asked for sex, you get it. You want pleasure? Have pleasure.’ They searched for the keys only in the morning when everything was back on wheels. Shaly was both a bitch and a boon companion, a bewitching bitch who spoke to Kamala’s remorse-stricken spiritual sexuality, her hatred and her ecstasy. She was from the mountains, the daughter of a priest. The mountains had taught her the secrets of the unrestrained, revolting euphoria of love. Neither nights nor drugs were as compelling and as intoxicating as Shaly.

  ‘Every wino deliberately puts on the mask of a clown. Have you ever noticed that?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. But I enjoy making others wear the mask of a clown. You may think that I am sulking here in the desert. It is not so. I am watching my friend. I am watching people. I would like to close my eyes to the absolute bliss. I would like to become the visions I see.’

  ‘No. You are what you are. No one becomes the visions they see. You can watch, enjoy and return to yourself, sit back and relax in some dirty armchair.’

  ‘You? ME? Come on, who is going to leave? There is no you and me. I would like to be dissolved into the ultimate darkness where there is no you and me, not even Brahma.’

  ‘Then why the hell do you use the word I?’

  ‘That’s language. I is a word just like a name. Things need to be represented somehow. Like Nike shoes, Juki sewing machines, Johnson’s diapers. I hope you know those kinds of things.’

  Kamala noticed something crawling out of the half-collapsed old house that was on the other side of the desert. People stood scattered around the house, some of them peeping inside. Kamala wondered what sight lay behind that chit of a window to keep them so intrigued. Some women who managed to get a glimpse covered their faces the moment they glanced inside. They hurriedly came back and joined the rest of the crowd. Their faces turned pale and purple. Kamala was still glued to the bedpost, she couldn’t move from there. She wanted to go and take a peek. She looked around. Her octopus fingers were digging into the sand—sandcastles again? But to make castles, be it brick, sand or mud, you need water. Kamala felt the warmth of lukewarm water in between her fingers, her thighs. The water had a pleasant yet pungent smell. Her mother was incontinent before she died. Half the time, she lay on her bedspread, heavy with urine and shit. Kamala had to run to the toilet twice from her mother’s bedside to vomit the nauseating smell out. She made an attempt to push her out of the wetness. But, unable to move from there, she lay in the puddle soaked to her ankles.

  There is no duality, no birth, no death, no rebirth, no mother, no daughter.

  ‘Amma, I want to travel,’ said the daughter, ‘I want to love myself.’ The mother looked at her in surprise. She couldn’t make out what had come over her. ‘I said I am going to travel. I have packed my food and everything that might be of use on the way,’ the daughter said, and set out. The mother was shocked by this but once she recovered she started screaming and running after her daughter. Her daughter was youthful and energetic like a young pony. She ran faster than her mother and didn’t look back. The mother had to give up.

  Before she left, the daughter had said a lot of things of which the mother couldn’t make head or tail as she was in a fit of emotions. Now that the daughter had gone the mother sat down in a sunken armchair on the veranda and remembered the conversations one by one. The daughter had said she had attended a session run by a twenty-five-year-old entrepreneur called King Siddharth, to which the mother nodded and smiled. The daughter said again, ‘Never in my life had I thought I would enjoy something like this. You know very well how much I hated classes and speeches and stuff like that. I expected him to lecture on entrepreneurship and money-handling but he didn’t say anything of the sort. Instead he gave us an idea of life in general.’

  By this time, the mother had lost the trail of the talk and started nodding automatically in between yawns. The daughter continued.

  ‘I want to read as many books as possible for he asked us to start with books in the journey of understanding oneself. I went to the library after his speech and took out Gustave Flaubert and now that I am reading it, I realize how imbecilic I have been all these years. But that’s another story which I will tell you later. Then, he wanted us to write. Then, he wanted us to travel. Do you hear that, Amma? ‘Travel’? Such a beautiful word, isn’t it? He specifically mentioned solo trips. Trips! You can imagine how excited I was after that. He said the best way to learn about life is to experience it our own way. See, when I am travelling on my own I’ll be conscious of the money I have in hand, what to order, what time I
have to be back . . . In short, it’ll make me become more responsible in life.’

  At this the mother thought for a while: What should I say? She walked out of the room, and the daughter followed her down the hall, continuing, ‘Look at me, Amma, you share your wisdom with me but that is your experience or what has been passed on to you. Do you know, Amma, he said one more thing. He said that mothers are always right but if we blindly follow them it will boost only their confidence, not ours.’

  After a pause she said again, ‘I have always wanted to pack my bag and travel and spend some time on my own in some faraway, secluded place, or walk on the wild side. Amma, I want to be happy in life. Look at me; I have been trying to concentrate on a mathematical problem for the past two hours. I haven’t solved a single step because I am not happy. Our strength lies in our happiness. When we are happy nothing in the world seems to bother us. Do you understand what I’m saying, Amma? He told us that through meditation and silent introspection we will be in control of our brain. I am sure you can relate to this, Amma, and I really think you should try this too!’

  ‘Do you like that young man? What is his name? King or what is it?’

  ‘Yes, I love him,’ replied the daughter. ‘Such a great fellow.’

  ‘Are you serious about this?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About this young man?’

  ‘Are you crazy, Amma? I think it’s my mistake. I think I have shocked you enough with all this. Now listen, keep this to yourself. Don’t go telling people about this.’

  Once upon a time there were athanis on the side roads and frontage roads. Large flat stones placed horizontally over two vertical stones that resembled stone benches, on which tired peddlers could sit and rest for a while before resuming their journey. Buttermilk was served to the tired people for free, a service by the community. Someone or other would always be around, telling stories, cracking jokes, munching little bits of gossip but always ready to help a person in trouble. The mother shuddered at the thought of a world bereft of athanis. The daughter was radical. She had left home for she wanted to grasp things by the roots. These things always demanded a struggle—economical or emotional. She was seeking her share of hunger and cold.