IN DEVIKA’S EYES, VIVEKA HAD BEGUN TO DRESS EXACTLY LIKE THE person she kept hoping her daughter would not turn into. With no discussion, let alone permission, Viveka cut her hair short. Her parents were irked, yet curious in spite of themselves. Now Devika, too, saw the ghost of Anand in their daughter.
Anick Prakash visited Viveka at the Krishnu house often these days, but usually when Valmiki was at work and Devika out at a luncheon or appointment. Devika bristled the few times she saw them together on the patio, or down by the garden railing, leaning against it, oddly close to one another, a quiet between them that made them seem closer than was to her mind and good taste natural. She watched, horrified and at the same time mesmerized. They were an odd pair indeed, these two young women, listening to classical music, engaged by talk of novels, ideas, and theories Devika had no interest in, speaking unabashedly like ten-year-olds in their ridiculous gibberish of French and English.
Viveka also went twice, sometimes three times, a week to Rio Claro. One morning, Devika could contain her disapproval no longer. She called Valmiki at his office to complain that Viveka had yet again asked her at breakfast if it was alright to take the car and go out with Anick, this time to a lecture on the calypso as a socio-political medium. At this last, Devika shouted, “What the hell do you all think I am? A fool?”
Valmiki ignored the question and simply asked what she had said to Viveka. Devika replied: I told Viveka that she was going out too often. That Anick was a married woman. That their friendship was strange. It was unnatural. That if she wasn’t careful, didn’t put a stop to this nonsense right away, there would be a scandal. Single women should not have married women as friends. Marriages broke up because of that sort of thing. And the single woman was always blamed. Devika began to cry on the phone. “It is you who is to blame. You know damn well that you are the one who has brought this on us.”
The words “What the hell do you mean by that?” sprang instinctively to Valmiki’s mind, but he knew better than to ask: he did not want an answer. Neither of them would have had the vocabulary for the ensuing conversation.
“You and your daughter are going to ruin us,” Devika carried on. “How dare you do this to me? You should not have returned here after you finished medical school. You knew even then, didn’t you, you knew that you were . . .” But she couldn’t finish.
Valmiki wanted to retort, “You knew about me too, and you stayed with me.” But that one ill-advised comeback would have led to verbalized confessions and regretted accusations and a conversation he imagined only too well: So, what are you saying? Devika would ask. That I shouldn’t have? And he: You knew who and what I was, but it served you well to stay, you have not wanted for anything materially. And then she: I didn’t know when I let you touch me before we were married. And I didn’t know when I married you, but you did. You knew very well what you were doing. And you lied when you didn’t tell me . . . I wanted a man to love me, a real man.
That sort of conversation he needed to avoid. How would he and Devika carry on after that? He could never leave his two daughters. The scandal would ruin all four.
To avoid all of this he remained silent, a profound silence which, to Devika’s mind, was an admission of all she herself had no language for.
But admission, silent or explicit, was not what Devika wanted. The impossible — a reversal of time, a whole other life — is what she so deeply, deeply wanted. How clichéd to wish to close one’s eyes, and on opening them again find that the life before had only been a bad dream. But it was all she had, such clichéd wishing. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she snapped, “Why the hell don’t you take responsibility and talk to your god-damned daughter?”
He didn’t know how to talk to her anymore, Valmiki muttered, and Devika was about to begin again — Valmiki detected the beginnings of another controlled explosion. He wanted to tell Devika that he couldn’t have this conversation right now; he had patients waiting to see him. But she just carried on and he was overcome by the familiar weariness that welled up in him at the onset of quarrels with Devika. She had a tone that made him want to slam the receiver down, the door shut, his fist on the table, but he never did any of those.
It had always, always, always been left to her — now she was . . . what was that tone . . . screeching — to discipline the children because he didn’t want to alienate them and he always had to be the good one, and she was left to be the nasty parent. Or so she would accuse him.
Valmiki had stopped listening.
Really, he asked himself, what the hell was Viveka doing? He hated the question, for he knew the answer. She was beginning to live the life he had made choices to avoid. It was his doing. His fault. But how dare she? How dare she think only of herself. Had she no good sense after all? No sense of loyalty — if not loyalty, then responsibility — to her family, to society? To him? And why wouldn’t she have loyalty? They, he and she, had their differences, but those differences were their thing, their special thing they shared with each other to bond. There was no small love between them. Had she no discretion?
Defeated, Valmiki whispered into the phone, I have patients waiting, I can’t do this anymore. Devika was answering back, Can’t do what anymore? Are you threatening me? as he quietly rested the phone back on the cradle.