The Calf that Frolicked in the Hall
It felt cold to the touch. Like a wet kiss.
It wasn’t that difficult to contact Kadir, who lived in the United States. He had written her a long letter in the past year, soon after Udayan’s untimely death. He wrote that with Udayan’s death, something within him died too.
A kind of distaste threaded through everything Udayan did. She used to tease him, saying that of the navarasas, he was the hero of the bibhatsa rasa, the disgust mode. One of his younger brothers had committed suicide, for no apparent reason. He had not been in contact with Udayan for several years. This brother lived in a narrow lane, in a single room occupied by four other men. There wasn’t even a rope in the house for him to hang himself with. Nor was the ceiling of any height. Udayan’s younger brother, on the other hand, was six foot two and a half inches tall; he strangled himself with great difficulty, using his own veshti. Kadir recalled, in his letter to her, Udayan writing to him about this incident. “They sent me to bring home the body of a brother who had completely distanced himself from the family. Just as I was about to set off, my younger sister said to me, ‘He came to me out of the blue last month, and borrowed some money. He said it was for a gas stove. If the stove is in his room, please bring it away.’ I brought away my brother’s body, and I didn’t forget to bring the gas stove too. I trust that day was a joyous one for my sister.” So Udayan wrote.
Kadir said, in his letter to her, that Udayan was a man who had experienced an extreme alienation. Alienation perhaps was a phase in most people’s lives. But for Udayan it was his entire life.
When she telephoned Kadir, it was that letter she remembered. A handwritten one. When she rang the telephone number he had given, Kadir himself picked up the phone. The very first sentence which came from her lips was about Udayan. She couldn’t believe a whole year had gone by. “I keep remembering him all the time, Kadir,” she said. “I too,” he agreed. He said, in English, “He had in his hand a very long thread which held me to the years we spent together. His death snapped that. I was tugged back forcibly, and fell upon those years.”
There was a silence after that. In the United States, silences are not allowed during a telephone call. But in order to speak after twenty-five years, silence was indeed necessary, after that initial exchange. Memory can move very swiftly. Words do not possess the same swiftness.
A senior official in a bank cannot allow time to freeze, however. “And then? And then?” he pressed her.
And then they decided on a time to meet, and a place.
The early nineteen seventies. A time when some relationships came to an end suddenly. One relationship had lasted for six years. He was a married man. She fell easily into the web of stories he wove: his wife was an invalid; his intellectual thirst tormented him; his loneliness was his sorrow. It took all of six years to tear that web apart. And it was a small mouse that tore it. A mouse that cleverly brought her out — she who was caught in a spell and unaware of the web. She called him mouse, a man with a slight frame and a long face. “If I’m a mouse, then you are a cat. A cat that holds me in its mouth,” he would say. She could not swallow the mouse. He would not let her swallow him. When she opened her mouth one day, he leapt away to his hole.
They were relationships that did her no damage. During the six-year relationship, her musical wings began to spread. That was when she was allured by Begum Akhtar’s rendering of ghazals. Bhimsen Joshi, who could take a single line and create a whole world, found a permanent place in her house. Vaisnavite and Saivite bhaktas sat cross-legged comfortably, in her heart. The two-year relationship was different. It was a relationship closely involved with the world of jazz, the Beatles, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan; a relationship that introduced her to ganja. It reached a high point one night at about two o’clock, when she was somewhat stoned on ganja, conscious of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet music rising like white smoke pervading everything.
One year she came to Chennai from Jamshedpur, for a training session. She was staying with a friend, before moving into the Working Women’s Hostel on Poonamallee High Road. She had just arrived that morning. She met Udayan that very evening. When the bell rang, it was she who opened the door. He stood there with a big snake gourd dangling from his hands. He lifted it high, shook it from right to left and announced loudly in English, “Today it’s going to be a linga-puja meal in this house.” Her friend and his wife laughed and told her not to pay him any attention.
He invited her to eat at his room in T. Nagar the next day.
His was a small, tile-roofed room at the back of a large house. Books everywhere. He was not in any regular employment. Sometimes he worked; sometimes he didn’t. The feast consisted of sambar, poriyal and appalam; that was all. As soon as they had finished, he told her, “My friends and I have begun a new journal. I need to go and meet them.”
“Shall I come with you?”
He looked at her, as if he were taking in her sleeveless choli for the first time. “We’ll see. The elders in that family are a bit old-fashioned. I’m not sure whether they will let you in their house. What are my friends going to say, besides? Let’s see.”
He left her standing outside the compound wall and went in. That was Kadir’s house.
Kadir came out at once and invited her in. He berated Udayan.
The room in the front verandah was Kadir’s. Cover designs for the journal were scattered all over his desk. It was a struggle to make out its name, Thedal (Quest). The letters making up the name wandered all over the page.
“What do you make of them,” asked Kadir.
“They look as if they’re staggering about, drunk to the gills,” she said.
“Where have you brought her from?” Kadir asked Udayan. Laughter then.
In Kanchipuram, that night, they sat up for a long time, in the front thinnai of Amudan’s house. Arangannal had left for his home. The lights had been put out in all the houses around. They could hear, only intermittently, small noises from different houses, and the occasional sound of a passing vehicle.
It was a while since Thedal had ceased to appear. They shared a feeling of inexplicable helplessness: a sense of closure and lack of closure, of structure and lack of structure, of order and utter disorder. Inexplicable emotions that fell apart, however much they tried to string them into words. Each of them was silent.
Kadir came to the house where she was staying, in order to pick her up. His face seemed to have hardened, a little. His eyes had lost their light. She searched for the compassion of poetry she once found there.
“Why do you look like that?”
“I’m looking to see if you have changed.”
“And have I?”
“That’s how it strikes me.”
“Life here is a rat race. You cannot manage if you don’t change. But don’t worry; it’s only a superficial change.”
“Where are we going for dinner?”
“Only to my house.”
“I hope that hasn’t caused a lot of work.”
“What work? It’s already prepared; I only have to reheat it in the oven and serve it.”
“No cooking?”
“Only during the weekend. There’s no time during the week.”
“Was Shirley working today?”
“Shirley is not at home. She’s gone to California on office work.”
“Children?”
“How will they not be at home? They are eager to meet their father’s old girlfriend.” Then he laughed.
“Why do you laugh?”
“You called them children, that’s why. The boy is twenty. He’s studying at Syracuse; he’s here just for this week. The girl is eighteen; she’s going to college right here.”
“Do they speak Tamil?”
“How will they speak Tamil? I can’t talk Tamil to Shirley; only English, American English.”
“Then with whom do you speak Tamil?”
“It comes to me in my dreams. I wrote a few poems suddenly, last year.”
“Poems? You?”
She laughed.
He laughed with her.
At first they subjected every word and action of hers to an intense critical scrutiny, as if under a microscope. There was Udayan’s sarcasm on the one hand, Kadir’s analysis on the other. There were two others. They were from Kanchipuram, and were punch-drunk on Marxist-Leninist ideology. These two were the theoretical supports for Thedal. They had set aside their real names and given themselves the pseudonyms Arangannal and Amudan. Their love of books bound these four together. Even in the densely occupied Ranganathan Street, it seemed they were in a remote island of their own as they read and discussed Camus, Sartre, and Pablo Neruda. There were debates on T. Janakiraman, Indira Parthasarathy, Mauni, and Asokamitran. They described themselves as travellers and tourists of literature. They declared they were not devotees who would undertake literary pilgrimages to Madurai, Tiruvananthapuram Tirunelveli, Nagercoil, and Delhi. They were not prepared to go to the Literary Temples of Chennai, and prostrate before the icons there; they were only prepared to meet these deities when they circulated in the outside world. Only Coimbatore Kumarasamy, who shared with them all his experiences and thoughts, and supported them entirely, received their whole-hearted respect. Several issues of Thedal saw the light of day only after his forceful touch.
It was with him alone they were prepared to discuss, fight, and make peace. Kadir used to say, laughing, that you could enjoy a profound friendship with Kumarasamy only if you stopped talking to him.
Intent on analysing her, they took apart, piece by piece, her dress, her words, her attitude, her ideas. She couldn’t bear it. Once, when she went to Bangalore for another course in her training, she wrote a letter to them. “You look at me as if I belong to some strange species. It really troubles me. I could speak, read, debate with you. But it can happen only if I’m one of you. Otherwise I will always be an outsider. Just a spectator.”
The letter brought a result. On the day she returned from Bangalore, Kadir and Udayan were at the station. Flowers held in their hands. Smiling faces. They accompanied her all the way to Poonamallee. They waited while she had a bath, and then took her to a restaurant for breakfast.
“What’s so special, dear friends?” she asked.
“No more cold war. Hereafter it’s all cordiality,” said Kadir.
The good relations continued on every occasion she came to Chennai thereafter.
In the darkness of the thinnai they were all shadowed outlines. “In the nineteen seventies, only an alienated middle-class young man stands as the symbol of Tamil youth,” she began. He was present in every story or poem which appeared in Thedal. A young man who was unemployed, scorned by his own family, who returned home late in the evening to eat the cold buttermilk-rice and lime pickle left for him in the corner of the kitchen; who lived with the sorrow of Being, and other such sorrows. Or else he was a young man trapped in a permanent job which his heart rejected and which gradually sapped his life; caught up in the aridity of daily life. He ate. He rushed to work. On Sundays he soaped his clothes and washed them. He even got married. Then he published a book and proclaimed his life of detachment with the words, “This recently married man likes saffron, the colour of renunciation.” He was a young man who could neither break free of his family, nor live with them. The umbilical cord was still around his neck. Besides all this, he possessed a craze for literature. More, a craze for poetry.
It didn’t seem likely that she would meet Kadir again, after that dinner. The conversation, somehow, didn’t get anywhere. It went in many directions — literature, politics, culture — appeared to delve further, but fizzled out eventually. Before the marks were made, they were erased. His son and daughter conducted themselves very politely. Nothing could be faulted in the food, hospitality or conversation.
All the same. Something was discordant. The ascending and descending scales were all in perfect order, only the tune would not take shape. Besides, there was the cold.
After she had said her goodbyes, there was some kind of superficial conversation between them as he drove her home. Suddenly, after she had climbed out of the car, he came up behind her and wrapped a thick shawl around her. When she looked at him in surprise, he wore a smile such as she had not seen throughout the evening. Just as she crept into the comfort of her blanket that night, the telephone at her bedside rang. When she picked it up, wondering who would telephone her at that time of night, Kadir’s voice sounded.
“Have you gone to bed?”
“Yes, just now.”
“You weren’t happy with this evening’s programme, were you?”
She was silent.
“Hey, it’s a huge gap, twenty-five years.”
Her throat choked as she said, “Yes.”
“You are able to melt instantly, like snow. That’s your strength. It’s all easy for you. For me, it takes a while. I have to wander through many different spaces, before I can even begin to meet you. Don’t you know that? Sleep well.”
“You too.”
“I have some work I must finish. I can only go to bed after that. If you can’t sleep, you must call me at any time. All right? I’m here. I’m not about to go anywhere.”
She put out the light and slept instantly and very soundly.
Every time she came to Chennai, as soon as her work was done, she would set off directly to the bank where they were employed. All the way back on the electric train from Beach station to Mambalam, they’d talk and laugh and joke noisily. When they reached Kadir’s house, Udayan would be waiting there. Arangannal and Amudan would go to their own room and join them later. Theirs was a small thatched room built on the terrace of a house. Arangannal described such rooms as urban huts.
The first thing they did when they reached Kadir’s house was to look at the post. Kadir’s mother worked in a firm, and she usually arrived home a little before they did. Just as soon as Kadir changed into his veshti, her invitation would come from within, “Here, come and take your tea.” Kadir would go in and return with the tea.
By the time Kadir’s father came home, Arangannal and Amudan would have joined them. They’d make off to the terrace then. They worked furiously inside the thatched area. Udayan’s blunt criticisms cut in now and then. Once, she declared that a poem Arangannal had translated contrived to upturn language itself, and started to read it out at the top of her voice. He tried to snatch it out of her hands, she ran away, while the rest rocked with laughter. In Kadir’s mother’s words, “The whole of Mambalam was shocked to see such misbehaviour.”
It seemed that many years ago, Mambalam had been utterly shaken by Bhuvana of the corner house, who married for love. Kadir’s mother gave them several instances to prove that Mambalam had been brought to the same state of shock now. When these words reached Kadir’s father’s ears, they came coloured by his mother’s code of conduct. The older man, for his part, had no doubt at all that literature, music, painting, and dance were all strongly linked to impropriety. Now, Kadir’s father was not in the least concerned about her propriety, or lack of it. But the argument, “The boy will be ruined,” struck him forcibly. He told Kadir to behave in a less obtrusive manner. A long lecture followed, Kadir reported.
For some days following this, they met in Arangannal’s room. Or else at Udayan’s. Once the pillars of propriety belonging to the houses along Kadir’s street, so shaken by witnessing their horseplay, were firmly in place again, they returned to Kadir’s room.
The conversation continued into the night, as all other sounds died away.
So are women not bothered by questions about Being and Nothingness, Udayan and Kadir asked her.
Of course a woman reads Camus too. She reads Sartre. She also reads the Tirumandiram, Akka Mahadevi, and the Sufi poets. But when the entire family is engaged in creating the head of the household, a man, she has to find the nooks and crannies where she can create herself out of the evidence of her own being. It is because she continually asks herself philosophical questions concerning Being that she is able to redeem herself and come outside from the grave-pit of daily living. She lives in a world full of symbols. “Why are you at the window?” is the question underlying her life. The window is the symbol of the world outside. Her freedom lies outside the window. Both the running stream and the stagnant well are her symbols, too. Symbols of death. Words such as “I’ll fall into the river or well and die” are the sounds of her language-world. She is always denounced, finally, as a prostitute.
“Fine. All this is mere breast-beating. Are you saying that women are sacrificial lambs, then? I can hear songs like ‘If you are born a woman, this world must always be sorrowful’ playing away in the background,” Udayan said.
She denied it. A woman is aware of both the heaviness and the lightness of Being, she said. Sometimes, Non-being is itself her Being, she said. Sometimes she is when she is not. At other times, even when she is, she isn’t.
The shawl that Kadir gave her was snug and warm against the chill American winter. The telephone sounded each evening. Kadir spoke to her. Gradually his voice grew warmer, gaining in warmth like a hearth being lit. When she remarked on it, he said nothing is ever lost forever.
It seemed as if her American trip was one long car journey. She made several trips with Kadir. Sometimes Shirley came too.
Sometimes they talked about some of the incidents that had happened during the twenty-five-year interval. Once when they were travelling along a seemingly endless highway, he asked her about one such incident. “Amma wrote once. She said you visited her after Naomi was born; when she was about a year old. She said you had brought a silk paavaadai for the child.”
“True. I’d gone to Chennai on some work. Udayan gave me the news. I went to Nalli, bought the silk skirt-material and took it to your mother. She returned it saying you wouldn’t dress the child in silk clothes.”
“She was right. We didn’t put her in silk clothes.”
“I came outside with the silk. It was terribly hot. Your mother went back inside. You remember the mango tree in front of your house? It had been chopped down. Only the base of the tree was left standing. I went and sat on it. You know how, when the sun is very bright, there is a sudden dazzling white that strikes across the eyes? I felt just that. Nearby they had erected a pump-set with a tap. I pumped up some water and washed my face. I drank some water, drenching my clothes. It felt suddenly as if in all of that great city of Chennai, there wasn’t a single door I could knock on, Kadir. Udayan was somewhere in Tambaram. Amudan and Arangannal had lost touch with me entirely. I had continued to read everything that was published, but there was no way I could knock on the door of a writer and say, “I came to discuss literature with you.” Everything, everything lay within limits and bounds. Except for myself.”
“And then?”
“I walked out of your compound, found a small stall, and drank a bottle of soda. I looked at the newspaper hanging there and found out what pictures were running at which air-conditioned theatre. I went to a comfortable air-conditioned theatre and bought a balcony seat. I fell asleep even before the titles finished appearing.”
She laughed.
“What did you do with the silk material?”
“You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“Go on. Tell me.”
“When the picture finished, I walked all the way back to the hotel where I was staying. There was a wayside shrine along the way. Some Amman shrine, Bhadrakali or Esakki. All stone and kumkumam. I draped the silk over the idol.”
“What colour was the silk?”
“Dark blue, patterned with stars.”
A warmth and closeness sprung up between Kadir and herself, very quickly and naturally. On one occasion, as she arrived in Chennai, she was overcome with tiredness. She just could not go to the bank, as usual, to meet all of them. Neither could she bring herself to go to her hostel.
She decided to go directly to Kadir’s verandah room, which was also the Thedal office. Udayan was there already, correcting proofs. As soon as she got there, she spread out a mat and lay down.
“Hey, what’s happened?” he asked her.
“Udayan, please go and buy me two cups of hot tea and a Baralgan.”
“Why, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. Stomach ache. It’s what happens every month.” Udayan took the flask and ran.
She drank the tea, took the pill, and lay curled up.
By the time Kadir and the rest arrived, her stomach churned with pain compounded by the tea. She went to the toilet adjoining the room, and threw up. After that, she began to feel a little more settled.
Later, when she had washed her face, they set off to the printing press. Kadir didn’t take his eyes off her while she sat there.
That evening, when they had accompanied her to the hostel he asked, “Does it ache a lot?”
“No. Not so much now,” she told him.
“Will you come tomorrow?”
“Yes, I’ll come.”
“You know something? You know how I’ve got used to your coming to meet us in the evenings — when you weren’t there today, I had a sudden dread. Then when I came home, you were lying there, all curled up. I was really frightened then.”
She held her hand out to him. “Hold my hand, please.”
He hesitated a second, then took her hand in his. Slowly he tightened his grasp.
Stars lay in clusters against the Kanchipuram sky. As for the sky, it was that dark blue which Bharati’s songs mention. After their initial conversation, they were all silent for a while. Then Udayan began again.
“It’s true, nothing is clear. You can’t hold on to anything. Even during the Independence struggle there were journals which held firm beliefs. They had forceful names, Ezhuthu, Writing; Manikkodi, Banner. Now, even the names of the journals show a lack of goals: Vanampadi, Vaigai, Yatra, Kaatru, Padigal, Chuvadu, and so on…”
“Don’t generalize,” said Kadir. “There is still Visvarupam. Also Kollipaavai. Darsanam. Gnanaratham.”
“But are any of those names forceful, though? Visvarupam, Cosmic form; Darsanam, Vision; Gnanaratham, Chariot of wisdom…And what about us? Thedal! Quest! What quest?”
“Great, Udayan, you’ve started on your ninda sthuthi, have you, berating the deity on his failings?”
“Udayan’s sarcasm, Thanjavur style,” she put in.
“That’s right. I’ll be sarcastic, you be abrasive.”
“This is good,” remarked Amudan. “Sarcasm and abrasiveness. You could describe the clash between critics and writers in those terms.”
For the first time that evening, there was a sense of the ice melting.
During another car journey, he asked about her family.
“Didn’t Udayan give you any news about them?”
“He might have done. I can’t remember.”
“After we all went our different ways, I didn’t return to Chennai very often. I had my work in Jamshedpur. Within two years, my father died. Do you remember my younger brother, Mukund? Just as soon as he got himself a job, he insisted he would only marry a certain girl who had been in college with him. And immediately, at that. She was a fine girl, too. One day the two of them were going somewhere on their scooter, when a truck crashed into them. She died there and then, on the spot. Mukund suffered a severe blow to his spine. He is completely paralysed from his waist down. Now he can only go about in his wheelchair. My younger sister Gita is here, in the US. You saw her yesterday, didn’t you? She spoke to you, didn’t she?”
“Was that Gita? I didn’t recognize her at all.”
“It’s ages since you saw her. As soon as I said I was coming to this conference, she insisted stubbornly I should stay with her.”
“Didn’t your mother come with you?”
“Amma isn’t alive now.”
“Is it because of Mukund you’ve stayed single?”
“That’s one reason. But it’s not the only one. I now run the company that Appa started. We have a big house in Jamshedpur. I can’t abandon all that. I have a network of good friends. It isn’t as if being single leaves me wanting in any way. Gita’s second daughter lives with me and goes to school in Jamshedpur.”
“But isn’t love necessary too, in one’s life?”
“How can it not be? But it doesn’t last forever, it’s something that comes and goes. Sometimes it’s a delight when it happens. Sometimes it’s a delight when it leaves. If it’s there, it’s a sadness at times. At times, if it isn’t there, it’s a sadness too. Don’t imagine I haven’t been sad, Kadir. Sometimes I am deeply, deeply sad. But even that’s a comfort, too. Call it a kind of privilege.”
“Do you recall what Udayan used to say? He’d ask, ‘What’s an unfulfilled love? What exactly has to be fulfilled?’ ”
“True. Once, when a friend of his married the girl he loved, he remarked, ‘Poor man, his love hasn’t been fulfilled.”
“He had a way of plunging into seriousness, even when he was joking. Once we were on a bus together. Suddenly he turned to me and said, ‘If there weren’t love, nobody would have talked about death.’ ”
“In the end, he left us without telling us what he thought about death.”
“I can’t understand why he made that decision.”
They sank into their own thoughts after that. The car moved on steadily.
One evening there was a huge, jostling crowd near the T. Nagar bus station. All of them were there, part of the crowd. The occasion was the unveiling of a statue of Periyar. The statue was still covered in its wraps. Next to it a high stage had been erected. In a little while, K. Viramani arrived. The crowds broke into cheers when the wraps were removed. In his speech, Viramani enunciated the Gayatri Mantra, giving each word a special emphasis. This was how brahmins say it, he told the crowd; Periyar was a man who opposed brahmins, he trumpeted. The speech was punctuated by clapping, whistling, and frequent cries of, “Well said.”
She had never heard Periyar speak. She knew of him only through the books she had read. Nor had she ever heard a speech such as this. She felt as if she were participating in a historic event. She too clapped her hands enthusiastically. She screamed with the rest of them. They were standing very near the stage. During a magical moment when she was shouting gleefully, she had the sudden illusion that the Periyar statue came alive and looked steadily at her. She leaned her head on Kadir’s shoulder.
After the crowds had dispersed, it seemed to them they had been witnesses of history in the making. They walked along, all of them hand in hand. Because it was very late by then, they all lay down to sleep on the terrace floor. Nobody else was at home that day, in Kadir’s house. They talked for a long time, gazing at the mango tree’s branches high above them, and the moon, and the night sky. About the Self-Respect Movement and the stagnancy of its current policy. They discussed the unveiling of the Periyar statue, debating whether it was a symbol of rationality, or an icon of someone newly deified.
Long after she had fallen asleep, sometime later that night, she felt Kadir’s hand on her. That first kiss, soaking wet, went on for a long time. They lay there for a long time, seizing at each other’s lips. His lips, cold at first gradually began to burn. “Hamma,” he moaned from time to time.
When they finally finished talking and went inside, a tiny calf stood in the kuudam, the central hall of the house. The cow had calved that evening, even as they arrived in Kanchipuram. It stood there now, its legs still trembling. With its large wet eyes, the calf stood there like a small white fawn.
When she touched it, it gave a shudder. After they had finished dinner and were setting off to the thinnai, Amudan’s mother had said, “I’ve left the calf in the hall. It might gambol about in the night. You’d better warn the girl. I don’t want her to be scared.” Amudan hugged it, and stroked it for a while. From its stall in the backyard, the mother cow called for its young, “Mma.” “She will keep calling like that. But if we let her have the calf, she’ll pretty nearly lick off its skin.” The calf nuzzled against him.
Kadir had to go to Syracuse on some business of his. He thought he should look up his son at the same time. She too had some relatives in Syracuse whom she needed to visit. They decided to go there by car. The arrangement was that after the Syracuse visit, she would go on to New York, and return home from there.
It was their farewell trip. Kadir didn’t say much. After a little while, when the car had begun to run at a steady pace, she began.
“Kadir, I need to tell you something.”
“Go on, tell me.”
“Udayan and I were living together for ten years. It was after that, he died.”
He turned his head sharply, and looked at her.
“For some reason, he didn’t want me to tell you. It all happened unintentionally. He was working at one thing or another, desultorily. He began many things. Never finished them. Once he told me, “If only I could find an evening job, it would suit me down to the ground. Then I could read all day, and work in the evenings.” I found him such a job in my own company. I even arranged accommodation for him. A couple of months later he said, “The night shift doesn’t suit me at all, I can’t watch the stars.” Again I found him a daytime job. In time, he was bored with that as well. He grew very close to Mukund, meanwhile. He would come and talk to him for a long time, every evening. He stayed on and ate with us. We used to look forward to his arrival, every evening, Mukund and I. One day I went up to his room and invited him myself, to move in with us. He came without standing on any ceremony. He moved in as naturally as if we had been living together for many, many years.”
“Did Arangannal and Amudan know about this?”
“I think they must have known. Udayan continued to go to Chennai from time to time. He might have told them. But they had broken off any contact with me, so I didn’t know. He only hesitated to tell you.”
Kadir was silent. When they had gone a little further, he stopped the car at a petrol pump, and went in to buy two freezing-cold ice-cream cones. They began to eat them, as they sat in the car. He finished his quickly and started the car again.
Still eating her ice cream, she turned and looked at him. His hair was cropped close to his head. It was beginning to go grey at the back. His neck appeared very long. She stroked the back of his neck, very gently.
Once when she was returning from Chennai to Jamshedpur, Kadir and Udayan came away with her. The three of them travelled around many cities together. Finally, they returned to Chennai together. Kadir and she were at a stage when their relationship was at its most intense. The stage when you want to be inseparable at all times. His parents were deeply upset by this. A tense atmosphere filled the house. Arguments went on every day. Udayan and the others did their best to protect the two from becoming too frustrated. All the same, she was hurt by his parents’ stubborn opposition towards her. At the same time she was tormented to see how pained he was by his parents’ taunting. She wished that they could return to the carefree days of old when they selected poems for Thedal; when they sat together on the steps of the printing press in Mylapore, waiting for the proofs; when they woke up at dawn and hurried out to watch the sunrise; when they travelled on the electric train in the evenings; when they went to the same picture seven or eight times in order to critique it properly; when they attended literary conventions as a group.
On that occasion, when she was returning to Jamshedpur, Kadir looked miserable. “Do you really have to go?” he asked her. As the train began to move, he held her hand and pleaded, “Come back soon.” She wrote him a long letter soon after she reached home. That letter was to be the cause of a great disaster.
The letter which came from him made no mention of the one she had already sent. Soon after that, when her father returned home from his office one day, he asked her, “Did you send Kadir a letter recently, amma?”
“Yes, Appa. Why?”
“His parents seem to have intercepted and read it. It seems they have a relative here, in Jamshedpur. They sent the letter to him. He turned up at my office today and shouted at me in front of everyone, amma.”
She felt her face redden.
“I’m sorry, Appa. Did you retrieve the letter from him?”
“He refused to let me have it.”
Everyone in Jamshedpur knew that man, Swaminathan. He was an astrologer. He made predictions. He also took on the responsibility for all the pujas, festivals, and celebrations among the Tamil people in town. He took charge of collecting all donations and giving accounts. It was said that when his mother died, the first thing he did was to send his wife to remove the jewellery from her body.
One day he actually turned up at their house. It was a direct attack.
He made for her mother, “What is this, Amma, have you no idea about bringing up a girl properly? The boy is an utter innocent. It seems she hangs on to him like a pisaasu, and wanders about everywhere with him. It seems the whole town is laughing at them.”
He turned to her. “Get on with leading a decent and correct life. Leave off enticing the neighboring boys. I’ll see to it that you won’t be able to hold your head up in this town. Just watch it.”
“You get out of this house, first of all,” her mother told him, driving him out.
The letter went into the hands of every Tamil family in Jamshedpur. It reached all of them, but never Kadir. Eventually, it must have ended up among the waste paper in some Tamil household.
She had revealed all her doubts in that letter, all the anguish she felt.
“Of course I need you, and the closeness of you. That kiss on that terrace is still wet on my lips. The touch of your hand on my smoldering body does indeed set it aflame. But it seems to me that as far as I’m concerned, our meeting has happened too late, whereas on your part, it is too soon. I have travelled many miles. You, though, are still within the womb of your family. You don’t quite know how to come out of it. But you have to make your way outside, first of all. You can find a life of your own only after that.
I feel as if I am being tied down, hand and foot.
Sometimes I wonder if these feelings which well up within me and my body belong to an instant that will simply float away.”
It was as if everything was blasted apart by an earthquake. When the Emergency was declared by the central government, Arangannal made the decision to follow the politics of the extreme left. Amudan sought to change his job. Kadir asked for a transfer and went to Chandigarh.
After the storm died down, Kadir left for the United States. They planned that before he went away, they would all go down together to Amudan’s house in Kanchipuram.
They spread their mats and lay down to sleep. The early part of the night went by silently. Then the cow called out a few times, “Mmaa.” She heard the creak of the swing in the kuudam, as it moved. Noises of the calf, running about. Kadir lay on a mat within an arm’s reach. He slept with his arms crossed over his chest. She wanted to reach across and touch him. But she pushed away her desire. Let all that remain truly at an end. When she had fallen asleep at last she felt that wet roughness against her cheek. She shivered. When she opened her eyes, she saw the calf bending over her with wondering eyes, licking her cheek. As if it were gentling her. Its tongue felt cold against her cheek. Like a wet kiss.
Kadir’s letter arrived a few days after she returned home.
I don’t know why Udayan hesitated to tell me that you were living together. It gives me great satisfaction that he was with you for ten years. I still feel his loss. He might have thought that he never achieved anything in his life. But what have others achieved, other than the achievement of staying alive?
I continue to live in this country although I find fault with its politics and culture. But I don’t have the will to return to India either. I think this will be a lifelong struggle for me.
You have your feet firmly planted in some place, somewhere. As for me, I feel as though beneath my feet there is nothing but air. I am cursed, like Trisanku, neither to hold firm, nor to fall. Do you remember a poem by Atmanam, which says, what I need is a place where I can be. It strikes me it was written for me, or for people like me who cannot put down substantial roots.
I think one day I will die during a car journey on an American highway. You might come to hear of it. Or you might not.
On our last car journey together, you stroked the back of my neck with fingers that had been holding an ice-cream cone. Thanks. I shivered at that moment. That touch felt cool. Like a wet kiss…
Even before Kadir’s letter arrived, she had written to him in detail about Udayan’s death.
I don’t know entirely, why he made that decision. But I can make a guess. About a month before Udayan’s death, Mukund’s health worsened greatly. He could not even get out of bed. Udayan was with him constantly. One night, when he was in great pain, Mukund apparently asked him, “If anything happens to me, don’t abandon Akka. Stay with her.” Udayan was stunned. Apparently he wept and said, “Mukund, I am not capable of taking on any sort of responsibility. I am only a vagabond, a bird of passage. Please don’t threaten me.”
Do you remember that painting by Edward Munch? A face frozen with terror. I saw that look on Udayan. A look as if he had gazed upon death, close up. One evening, when I came home, I found him looking for Sampath’s novel, Idaiveli, Interval.
Even when he invited me to visit his sister’s house in Bangalore, with him, he hadn’t decided anything, I believe.
Perhaps he might have thought about it. In his diary, there was only a quotation from Tirumandiram. There was only that.
“If a kuyil lays its eggs
in the nest of a crow
the crow rears its chicks
tirelessly, in good faith.
Even so,
without movement, without direction,
without cause or reason,
as if in delusion
the body is cared for.”
The second day after we arrived in Bangalore, he fell into the well in the back garden of his sister’s large house. Someone screamed, and before I could reach him, he had been lifted out. I went to him, lifted his dripping hand and laid it against my cheek. It seemed then as if he was still alive. It felt cold. Like a wet kiss…