After the untimely death of his wife, elder-brother sold his apartment, gave me the proceeds, handed his eleven-year-old Chandini to our safekeeping, and took off for Kampala, where he owned a modest sports store. He hadn’t been able to find a buyer for the glass desk and so that too had moved into our home, or rather, my bedroom, since it was too big for anywhere else. Three months passed and elder-brother hanged himself, may God rest his soul. It was only some six months hence, after Chandini had slowly but surely begun to count herself sister to my other two darling girls, Lakshmi and Parvati, that I let myself worry about trivialities such as an unwanted glass desk.
I will be blunt. There is something unpleasant about being able to see one’s lower limbs as one works. There is such a thing as too much clarity. My missus had found this claim amusing but had to admit I was right after trying it for herself. Strangely enough, I enjoyed watching her work at the glass desk.
This amorous detail is an instance of the desk’s inauspiciousness. That morning, had I not been thinking about the missus, missing her, looking forward to picking her up at the airport in the evening and the long chit-chat we would have thereafter, had I been paying attention to detaching the laptop’s cord from the power socket, I would not have knocked the back of my head sharply against the desk’s glass edge.
I must have cried out because Chandini came running into the room. What is it, younger-father, she cried, what is it? Her fright brought me to my senses. Does it hurt badly, she asked, and I said jovially: No, no, I just banged my head and finally calculus makes sense.
“You should get rid of the desk,” she said, smiling. “It’s a useless burden.”
“Yes, first chance I get.”
I bit my tongue only later. She had been seeking reassurance, and fool that I was, I’d flubbed the opportunity. I fired off a worried email to the missus who responded almost immediately. Single line, all caps: RE LAX, CHANDINI KNOWS SHE IS NOT A WRITING DESK.
I was less sanguine. A life can change in a look, a word, a gesture. Later, after making sure my girls were safely on the school bus, I set off for Somaiya College. Each day I take the harbor line from Dadar to Vidyavihar, and this morning, as with other mornings, the platform was crowded with the same set of familiar faces. Everyone had their favorite positions on the platform. Mine was to stand under the large railway clock. When the train reaches the platform, some of the younger, less-experienced office-goers lose their nerve and begin darting up and down the platform, trying to spot a relatively empty compartment. This makes professionals like me smile. Our friends are already holding places for us inside the train, just as we’ll hold places for others further down the line. The secret to a comfortable journey, in commuter trains as well as in life, is having people look out for you. In any case, I enjoy the few minutes’ wait.
As a mathematics professor, it hadn’t escaped my attention that there were many nice mathematical problems waiting to be solved in this act of rearrangement, but it also hadn’t escaped my attention I wasn’t going to be the one cracking them. For instance, everyone knows it isn’t surprising to spot a familiar face in a crowd of mostly familiar faces. But how do we spot a particular familiar face in a crowd of familiar faces? That is what happened. In the crowd of faces milling to catch the morning train, I spotted Martin-sir, my wife’s old mentor and former Honorable Justice of the Bombay High court, now a resident of Nagpur. Martin-sir had made time in his very busy schedule to officiate at our civil marriage, a gracious act for which I will be eternally grateful.
The old gentleman had seen me as well, because a smile lit up his noble face. It had been several years since we’d last met, but he seemed to be exactly the same. We exchanged pleasantries and when I inquired about his well-being and that of his family, he told me that families, like gardens, were always in a state of becoming. His ghostly tone left me nonplussed. Was Nagpur very cold this time of the year, I queried. Martin-sir laughed, punched my shoulder jovially and said, Damn it lad, it’s a wonder you managed to lasso that wife of yours. He promised to come for dinner, his mobile number hadn’t changed, we would catch up at leisure, et cetera.
At the math department, I found the staff room in a hubbub. Ramki-sir, our probability guru, had been asked to be an expert witness for the defense in the Zohrab rape case. The actor was accused of assaulting his mother’s nurse; the hospital had collected DNA evidence from the victim, but apparently hadn’t handled it properly. Ramki-sir’s articles in the Indian Express on the contamination of DNA evidence and the misuse of DNA matching had led to the present honor. He would have to shave his beard; he always shaved before a court appearance.
“But it’s an open-and-shut case,” said Mrs. Patwardhan, Statistics. “Zohrab confessed. He was drunk he says, but he remembers raping the nurse. He confessed. The police released the tapes.”
“The police!” snorted Ramki-sir. “You’d trust our bloody police. It’s a frame-up, I’m telling you. What you’re seeing and hearing is all an illusion.”
“Come on, Ramki-sir, she has a point,” said Mrs. Balamurali, Linear Algebra. “The man did confess. Don’t you feel the least bit guilty? You have a daughter.”
That struck home. Ramki-sir slammed his hand on the table.
“It is because I have a daughter,” he said dramatically. “I want the right man punished, not some poor idiot roped in by the police to satisfy the public’s blood-lust. Rape and murder? No sir! Seduction and suicide. It doesn’t matter Zohrab confessed. We can be made to remember anything.
“Take the case of Bradley Page, nineteen years old, accused of murdering his girlfriend. Not a shred of evidence, no motive. Nonetheless, the police lied to him, told him he’d been seen near the body, that he’d failed the lie-detector test, that his fingerprints had been found on the murder weapon. Sixteen hours of interrogation. Young Bradley begins to wonder if he could have killed his girlfriend and somehow ‘forgotten it’. The detective interrogating him tells him ‘It happens all the time,’ and together they recover his lost memory. Imprisoned for nine years before the real murderer is caught. The bloody police—”
“But he confessed!” insisted Mrs. Patwardhan, looking around piteously for support.
“Yes!” echoed Mrs. Balamurali.
“I rest my case,” said Ramki-sir. “You have just confessed to being idiots. Are you?”
Hubbub and halla.
“Confession or not, he will go scot-free,” said Rajan-sir, Discrete Maths. “The entire system is rigged. Ramki-sir will do his chamatkar, the slut nurse will withdraw her complaint, the hospital will admit it mishandled the evidence, and we middle-class fools will continue to believe there is law and order in the universe. Why should we fight over what has already been settled?”
“It’s all an illusion,” repeated Ramki-sir, finger-combing his beard.
Noticing my silence, one of the teachers tried to draw me in.
“What do you think? Is Zohrab guilty or not? Or is it just an illusion, as Ramki-sir says?”
“Everything can’t be an illusion if some things are to be an illusion. Even in a story, at least some things have to be facts. The Fixed-Point theorem says—”
“Please do not teach me the Fixed-Point theorem, sir!” begged Ramki-sir.
“The Fixed-Point theorem says—”
“Sir Isaac Newton to the rescue,” crowed Mrs. Patwardhan.
“Actually, it’s Jan Brouwer,” I corrected her, “The Fixed-Point theorem says—”
“Please do not teach me the Fixed-Point theorem. I can prove you’re biased, I’m warning you; I have a Brahmaastra and am prepared to unleash it.”
“Ramki-sir, I wasn’t aware we were locked in combat. All I’m trying to clarify—”
“Here’s my clarification,” said Ramki-sir. “Who is prosecuting the Zohrab case?”
I remember the silence in the room, the triumphant expression on Ramki-sir’s highly punchable face, the puzzled expressions of the others slowly turning to surprise then excitement.
“His missus!” shrieked Mrs. Balamurali. “Really? Is that true?”
I had to admit it was true. I was almost as surprised as they were. To be honest, I had put it out of my mind. It is not the sort of thing I like to think about. These are the times I wish the missus were an LIC agent or some such thing. How such a decent Brahmin woman, devoted mother and loving wife, could also be a bloodthirsty piranha of a prosecutor is beyond logic.
My wife had only been gone for two weeks, but for all that, it had taken a toll. When I met her at Arrivals, I was very glad but strangely unable to show it. Perhaps she felt that way too, because we talked in a rather stiff way, as if the two parts of a whole had become enjambed. How was the flight? Did I have a cold? Was it still raining in the evenings? However, my daughters had no such reservations. They made a scene. They clung to their amma, loudly complaining of all my misdeeds. I was pleased to see the missus pay some extra attention to Chandini.
“Let’s get going,” I barked. “We can shoot the breeze at home.”
“Oh, daddu can’t wait to pinch amma’s waist,” said my eldest, and the other two monsters laughed.
“It is his waist to pinch,” said the missus, cool as cucumber. “Your father has lost weight. I thought I told you all to take care of him.”
In the Indica, with the girls squashed in the back, whispering God alone knew what amongst themselves, as I adjusted the gear the missus moved her hand over mine. And just like that, we were connected again.
“I want to go nowhere this weekend,” she murmured, “Go nowhere, see no one, except you and the girls. Maybe not even the girls.”
I smiled. “That is my plan as well. But what if I told you I met Martin-sir at Dadar this morning?”
She sighed. “That is not funny, please don’t crack jokes about the dead like that.”
The moment she said, “the dead,” I felt a strange shiver run through me. Of course! Martin-sir was dead. He had died two years ago. We’d attended his funeral in Nagpur. Yet the memory of the morning’s meeting was—then I wasn’t sure any longer. Was my memory of an earlier meeting?
“He said that families, like vegetable gardens—” I began.
“Are always in a state of becoming. Yes, yes, I remember your telling me the day you met him. Martin-sir was really saying he didn’t expect to be around much longer. We should have invited him for dinner. But what to do? It was my first big case; he himself called to tell me not to worry, that we’d all meet another day. Now it’s too late.”
I didn’t turn my head because I had a terror of taking my eyes off the road while I was driving, but I knew without inspection that I had unintentionally hurt my wife. What on Earth had come over me to bring up that meeting?
“I’m so sorry,” I said, quite vexed. “I don’t know what possessed me.”
She smiled, poked me in the waist. “Don’t feel so bad, sir; it is simply the excitement of seeing me.”
Yes, perhaps. Nevertheless, I resolved to tend to my family better. I considered the matter settled but Chandini, who must have overheard us, considered it otherwise. The missus came to know I’d bumped—“cracked” is the word she used—my head on the glass table. She and the girls took turns to inspect the area, and though their combined expert medical expertise could find nothing wrong, their recommendation was that I schedule a visit with our GP. I rejected their advice, but a few days, I found myself in the GP’s office, with Chandini as guard, waiting to learn about the results of the MRI report.
The doctor’s office had a TV tuned to the news channel, since there are few other things guaranteed to induce a desire to live. Zohrab had been released on bail. Per usual, the news item was an excuse to display a salacious album of violence the victim had had to allegedly endure. Or rather, had failed to endure.
“What is this rubbish?” I barked at the receptionist. “There are children here. Please change the channel.”
She resentfully switched to the MTV channel, and since I’d spent my aggrievement quota, there was no choice but to endure this new form of violence.
The tests had confirmed, we eventually learned, there was nothing detectably wrong with me. Four thousand rupees down the drain.
“I hope you’re now happy,” I told Chandini, somewhat bitterly.
“Actually, younger-father, I’m now a bit hungry. Udipi?”
I always loved it when she wanted something. We stopped at an Udipi, not far from the quack’s clinic. Once the waiter had taken our orders, I cast about for a suitable topic. We had been able to chat like old friends once. I asked Chandini whether she still kept a diary. She said she didn’t and I sensed the distance between us increase. Stupid question. It’s a fact that a girl whose mother had been raped and murdered would lose interest in recording reality. The fact seemed strangely unfamiliar, like I had avoided thinking about it and had just become aware of it. Yet I had to admit the fact, just as I also had to add an “allegedly,” since whether Chandini’s mother had been raped and murdered or had been seduced and committed suicide depended on which side of the courtroom one stood.
I stared at Chandini, as if I were seeing her anew. This innocent child, my brother’s only daughter—no, my child—how she’d suffered. I was overwhelmed with emotion.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly.
I nodded, unable to speak. Some homes are protected by silence. My elder-brother, may God rest his soul, had been the strong-silent type. I had decided when the missus and I had gotten married that I would not have such a home. My home would be protected by conversation. I would say what I wanted to say. My children would say what they wanted to say.
“Chandini, your mother—your new mother—she is only doing her duty. She cannot prosecute without sufficient evidence. Hence the delay. His fame or influence has nothing to do with it.”
“I know that,” she protested. “Who cares about the Zohrab case? I don’t hate anyone.”
I looked at her closely. “Do you really mean that?”
“Younger-father, I’m old enough to see things clearly. Anything can happen in this world, I know that.”
“Yes, but we all need justice—”
“Younger-father, that I can love is the only justice there is.”
“My dear child.” I didn’t care if I embarrassed her; I grasped her palms. “How did you become so wise?”
“Amar Chitra Katha,” she said humbly.
She smiled when I laughed, and we talked more easily. She liked history, considered the ACK series a reliable source, and as someone who taught history for a living, I was torn between encouraging her interest and shattering her illusion. When I eventually remembered that the missus would be waiting to hear about the MRI results, Chandini said she’d already SMS’d that I was fine.
I was less sanguine. I felt fine, physically. I slept well, ate well, and moved my bowels regularly. I was virile as ever. Nonetheless, there were these odd slippages in my life. Like the morning I got up convinced I had three daughters instead of two.
“Where is Parvati?” I asked, at breakfast. “She’ll be late for school.”
“Who is Parvati?” asked the missus, baffled.
“Our child, who else?”
They goggled at me. I sympathized with them. I knew exactly how they felt. I only had two daughters. What Parvati, who Parvati? I knew as well as I knew the five fingers of my hand that Parvati existed only in the gaps in my head. My wife developed this amorous little smile that said: my dear sir, we can discuss a new baby but not in front of the children! Ha-ha and hee-hee from my two monsters.
It was all very entertaining for others, but for me, a terror began to haunt my soul. How can I describe this terror, especially in an age where the existence of the soul has been disproved? My wife sensed some of this turmoil. How could she not, when what happens to one happens to us all? Or has science disproved that too?
“Is everything all right?” she asked, touching my forehead. “Ever since I decided to drop this accursed case, you have been out of sorts. You understand why I had to drop it? In the absence of evidence, Zohrab is innocent. I cannot manufacture evidence. Even if the man is suspected of raping and murdering my sister-in-law. It is a sacred principle, the foundation of law and order. Tell me what I did was right; give me clarity.”
“You did the right thing.” I saw her in the battlefield of life, face resplendent, bow in hand. Life had assigned me to be her charioteer. I would drive her wherever she wished. “What is the use of a principle if we abandon it the moment it becomes inconvenient?”
“Then please tell me what troubles you,” she begged, her voice wobbling. “I want my jolly husband back.”
I confessed then that I feared I was going mad. I told her I remembered things, bits and piece of things, things that had never happened. For example, I had this crazy idea we had three daughters. I was terrified, I told her, I would awake one day to find that I only remembered having a wife. Her face relaxed slightly, as if I’d confirmed something she’d been suspecting for a while.
“What nonsense you talk,” she said tenderly. “As if you will ever lose me. I know what the problem is. I have been working too hard, we don’t see each other much, that is why. I will cut back. It pays really well, but let this job get over, I will cut back.”
We talked for a bit, she made some hot chocolate, we took out albums, we perused the photos of our family, birthdays, sports days, holidays, remember this, remember when. After a while I began to see the stupidity of my concerns. I told her so, and she sighed with relief.
“They’re not stupid. Let me tell you a real incident that happened with me also. It will blow your mind.”
She told me of a pet poodle she’d remembered loving greatly as a child, then discovering in a conversation with her father that the family had never had a pet anything, let alone a filthy dog. My mind stayed in one piece and her story comforted me. She’d recounted this incident once before, only it had been a pet cat in that version. If her mind could forget, then so could mine.
In the bedroom, post-ablutions, I waited for her to get into bed, then turned off the light. The missus said in a sleepy voice: watch your step. But I didn’t need the light. There was a full moon. The glass desk, a ghostly blue in the limpid moonlight, guided me to my wife’s side.
“Are you still looking to sell it?” she asked.
I had placed ads both online and in print. No takers. I rewrote the ads, made the desk sound more tempting, re-shot the photos. No takers. Eventually, I lost all sanity and began to post completely imaginary details. Once I gave the desk fluted golden wings. Another time I claimed I’d found it buried in a Peruvian rain forest. Still later, I boasted it was Samuel Delany’s personal writing desk and the real reason behind his success. I gave the desk clawed feet, headphone jacks, iPhone chargers, scaled it to golden rectangle proportions, and photoshopped religious symbols on its corpus. No takers. There did not exist a fiction that could sell the glass desk. If I threw it from a six-story building, it would probably bounce like a rubber ball and settle back in my bedroom.
“Don’t sell it.” My wife was almost asleep. “The desk has no duty to perform whatsoever and that somehow comforts me.”
My wife had been fond of the desk. I remembered her request. I told my brother I’d been able to dispose of everything but the glass desk. He and his wife would shortly arrive to take me to the airport and take Chandini with them. I sat at the desk, neither here nor there, neither in time nor outside it, caught in the twilight of all things. Chandini came into the room and stood by my side. Seeing my poor darling, I still felt compelled by duty, if not belief, to offer hope. I reiterated, I advised, I comforted. I failed.
“I’ll be all right, father. There is no need to worry about me.”
“Yes, yes,” I told her, clasping her hand to my cheek. “Let me set things up in Kampala and I will send for you.”
“When, father?” she asked.
The quaver in her voice stabbed me to the core. The Buddha, it is said, touched the Earth so that she would bear witness to his words. Oh, for solid ground. I took her hand, touched the glass desk.
“As soon as things are a little clearer.”