‘Prakash had gotten very close to his mother while he stayed at home recuperating. He told me himself that this was the first time his mother was actually talking to him because during his growing years, she was either immersed in daily activities or out gallivanting with her friends from the neighborhood. She fed him and clothed him and that was about the only active participation that she ever took in his rearing. He too, had found his society outside. Hence, he was happy that he was now finally connecting with her. She had a lot of tales; fabricated or real, I know not, to tell from his childhood which entertained him a lot. I was happy for my husband and felt glad to see him fill those empty spaces within him that he had carried from his days of boyhood. Within a month, he was walking slowly with the help of a crutch but due to a shortened ligament, the doctor finally pronounced that he would never be able to walk straight again. Although it crushed me to see him limp like that, I felt a modicum of relief to see that he was now forgetting the pain by immersing himself in his new work environment. As the days went by, I started noticing certain changes in him. After the accident, he had slowly become silent and reserved. He also suffered from frequent mood swings and a slight provocation was enough for him to lose his temper. He often shouted at me and his father would now retire for months to his village, trying to avoid the unpleasantness. Prakash, before the accident, had often talked to me about his father’s aloofness and a tendency to avoid troubles rather than face it. Well, I was putting up a brave front and whenever he lost his mind over trifle issues like his clothes not being properly pressed, or the lunch not delicious enough, I would keep quiet in a hope that the tempest would soon pass. What was the use of provoking him further? Sometimes, when he seemed out of control, his mother used to come to my rescue and mitigate his anger by appealing to his good nature. I could see that where I was failing, Kamala was passing and with flying colors. Soon, his behavior started to draw flak from the university too and the administration cautioned him that if he did not behave himself in the lecture room and with his colleagues, he would be expelled. One day, the inevitable happened. Prakash abused a student in his class who happened to be the son of a power wielding politician. In less than two days, he was ordered to hand in the resignation letter.’
‘He now used to stay at home while I went out to work.’ Savita went on with her face clouding further. ‘I thanked to God that I had this job because if I did not get out in the morning, the suffocating environment back home would have surely killed me. My father in law now practically stayed in the village which left Prakash ample time to spend with his mother, who was now the only person he listened or talked to freely.’
‘Days slowly flew into years and my son was now big enough to go to school. I got him admission in the one I taught. Chandan, my son, was my sole comfort and as his father seldom paid attention to him, I was now substituting for his father as well. The equation of relationships in my house was absurd at that time. One family, living under the same roof had divided into two similar groups; one constituting of Chandan and I, the other was made up by my husband and Kamala. I tried to reason with him; beg him, if I am truthful, to open his eyes and see how he was destroying himself to which, for the first time, he had asked me in a voice that had shook with hopelessness. ‘Why do you still want to live with me, Savi? You are still as pretty as a picture and can find the best of men again. Why do you insist on spending your life with a hideous creep?’ However I explained to him that I loved him, he failed to understand or believe me. Only one time he expressed what lay in his heart and then he resorted to his cold war; hell bent on making my life as difficult and painful as a life could be.’
‘One day, one of my male colleagues paid me a visit. He had come to invite us for the wedding of his eldest daughter. Oh! I shudder to think about that day. Prakash insulted me in front of him and called me a woman of bad reputation. He further added with a shameless mockery that my male colleagues had developed an amusing habit of visiting her often after his accident and how he was fairly convinced that my parents were right to suspect me. That…that Ganesh was my lover! I knew then and there that my marriage was over.’
‘Still, when my temper cooled down, I thought of giving it a second chance for the sake of my young son. But now…now he would dredge up the past and insult me beyond human endurance. He asked me to tell him how many lovers I had! I also observed that while Kamala used to come between the fights which we had in the beginning of this mess, she would now go about her work paying the slightest attention to what was happening. Never once, did she come out in support of me and I often saw her chirping happily like a bird after any such incident, leaving no doubt in my mind that she had somehow used the insecurities of his son to plant and nurture a doubt to cure insecurities of her own.’
‘One day’ she said slowly. ‘I realized that I would go mad if I did not do something fast and packing my bags and taking my son along, I left the house, swearing never to see their faces again.’
‘But’ I began. ‘Why did you tell everyone a lie? Why did you say that your husband had died?’
‘Because rumors were rife about you back home’ said my friend quietly. ‘And you knew that if you narrated this bad episode that had happened in your life, people were bound to hold you guilty as eventually they did.’
‘Yes, sir. That’s the only truth.’ she replied with a worn expression. ‘People readily believe in a rumor because there is where all the gossip lies. Cheap gossip gives pleasure to a lot of dregs of humanity.’
‘But Savita ji’ he said again. ‘Why did you come back to this village at all? You had both money and a good education. You could have moved to a better place.’
‘I…I was numbed with shock and grief.’ she said as her face sagged beyond recognition. ‘My mind had refused to work. I came here almost as a reflex and have stayed here since.’
‘One more question.’ I ventured. ‘Did you not consider the risk of lying? I mean what if your husband contacted you or anyone in your family?’
‘Sir’ she said, looking straight at me and I could feel my heart awkwardly miss a beat. ‘My husband would only contact me again if he wanted me back in his life. And if he took any action in this direction, don’t you think it would hardly matter to anyone what I said in the first place? People wag their tongue only when they catch the whiff of a scandal. They steer clear of anything that only goes into the making of something acceptable by all. There is no fun in that. Hence, I am safe either ways.’
‘You…you are right, S…Savita ji’ I said, overcoming my loss of confidence of a moment before. To distract the state of affairs at hand, I asked. ‘For how long have you been staying here?’
‘Three years.’ she replied in a small voice.
‘Have ever thought of relocating?’ Bhrigu asked again. ‘What can you possibly hope to gain here? There is no harm in starting afresh. You still have a shot at good life.’
‘I…I know but…’ she struggled with herself, as if she wanted to express herself but could not find the proper words. ‘And I tried but I still don’t have enough energy or courage left inside me to go out in society again. Let me heal completely, sir, and God willing…’ In her voice had crept a note of determination. ‘One day for my son, I will.’
That concluded our meeting with Savita. Bhrigu was quiet in the silence that followed the interview and I think he kept pondering over whatever he had just heard. I did not know how he had received the narrative but from his face it was abundantly clear that he was feeling a modicum of pain and, if it was not imagined, the slightest of alarm.
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked, failing once again to control myself.
‘Savita is a fine woman.’ he replied as if in a trance. ‘A finer woman than her I have yet to see. And that is exactly why I am worried for her.’
‘Why should you worry if she is a fine woman?’ I asked, confused. ‘She will go from strength to strength, I am sure.’
‘If she is not pulled apart, that is.’ he replied slowly.
However hard I tried that he explains more clearly his cryptic remarks, the stubborn man simply retreated in his blasted shell and as he had done with me many a time before, refused to budge. He took a mint gum from his backpack and started working it slowly in his mouth. I now knew that he would be lost to me and the world in general for at least an hour or two and an idea occurred to me of capitalizing on the moment. Taking out my laptop that for once was charged, owning to an unnatural burst of electricity in the night where I had left my laptop plugged in, in case, I sat to compose my article titled. ‘Why the Prime Minister should get insured now.’
I can give my audiences a detailed account of what ever happened after our interview with Savita but the problem is that our interest is only held affectively if we concentrate on things which are outside the realm of the ordinary. If, by any chance, the narrative falls in the deadly zone of the mundane, a person quickly finds that his interest is sapping faster than you could say ‘Fast.’ The point I am trying to make is that I stick to my principle, while relating a case story, to deliberately omit all those unsavory elements that in no way contribute in the clearing of a mystery or in throwing a significant light upon a portion of the hidden picture. For example, if I related to my readers how Nataraj Bhakti bored us one evening with a not-so-hilarious account from his days as a clerk, you would surely thank me profusely for having saved you from that slow torture that I had to endure. Or if I wrote how Premkala made a mess of a couple of dinners by forgetting to add salt in the curry (I secretly believe she deliberately did it. The woman is capable of anything), you would surely criticize me by complaining that I am deliberately exploiting this medium to vent my own personal grievances. You would also judge me harshly if I reveal the details of the brawl that happened between Manjunath Gupta and Chiranjeev when the former accused the latter of speaking ill will against him to the village’s main vegetable man, and how they hurled invectives at each other, coming into a hitting distance three or four times but surprisingly not succeeding in touching as much as a hair of each other. What is the use of wasting precious pages and taxing the patience of the readers if doing so did not amount to anything? What pleasure will you get if I wrote that I did not take bath for two days straight only because there was no water in the tap? Or what satisfaction would you derive if I confessed that I was now on the verge of a collapse in these supremely uncomfortable circumstances? None. My friend went about talking easily with Savita here, Bhakti there, Premkala here again; scribbling something or the other in his diary, advancing on his book on ‘Strange mental illnesses’, chewing and meditating and paying as much attention to me as a teacher pays a backbencher. I would rather edit all these not so sweet nothings and give you a general account of how the matters progressed there on.
For one thing, there was no haunting to report at all. For a week straight, we were as vigilant as a soldier posted on the border for any sign of the supernatural and equally receptive to any activity; sound or movement of the unseen phantom but nothing happened to stir us in anyway. The comb too did not move an inch from where our host had last placed it. Yes, once or twice Bhakti would come running to us complaining of a pseudo terror but it turned out to be nothing more than the residual effect of a shock from the past and the overworked imagination of a suffering man. My friend kept a keen eye on everyone in the house and took many trips to Damyanti’s room, standing there immobilized as if in a day dream but the crux of the matter remained that the situation had frozen in time. Nothing remotely strange occurred to take the mystery further and it looked as if we were caught up in an old house struggling to provide nervous shelter to a few unfortunate human beings.
When I could not take it anymore and announced to my friend that he does something or I would pack my bags and leave, he had to finally relent. ‘Alright’ he said, twelve days from the Savita interview. ‘I too have come to believe that there is no good staying here. I will inform Mr. Bhakti that we will be leaving tomorrow. If anything happens, he has to contact us at once.’
With these lines that were all but music to my ears, I happily set about packing my bag.