Chapter 9

Satya’s Chevrolet arrived at nine in the morning. Sowmya had made a loose braid of her damp hair to dry, and dressed carefully but casually. She certainly did not want to send any wrong signals to anybody, particularly the married ones. She tried to get Mallika to go with her as a buffer.

“Come with me.”

Mallika shook her head, No. But she followed her move-ments with a wounded expression as Sowmya walked between the two front rooms, getting ready, as if her visit to the film studio was an act of betrayal against Mallika. She succeeded in getting Sowmya to feel vaguely guilty.

The black car waited at the usual place, at the top of the lane. The driver, a skinny fellow named Lazarus, opened the door for her. She recalled Yamini stepping down from this very car once in a swish of silk and gold, and vanishing into Naidu’s shop. The car very likely belonged to her. Her father had made his wealth as a contractor for the Indian Railways and had built a house in the orchards of Mylapore. Sowmya entered the car feeling like an intruder.

The driver had lit an agarbathi and stuck it to the dashboard on a holder. It had burnt down to a stub and its fragrance blended with that of the hot leather.

The car negotiated the narrow lanes thronging with pedestrians, vendors, carts, and animals. Once he turned into the Beach Road, however, the car sailed along, the sliver of shimmering ocean at her window. Sowmya relaxed into the comfort of the cushioned seats and the smooth motion of the automobile. The colleges, Lady Wellington and the Presidency, several other buildings, some built in a style to capture some bygone grandeur, some just plain and painted white or cream and their faces impersonal, melded into the landscape of bright hot light and tarred pavement.

The Ice House passed by. The man who built it must have had some kind of vision. He had built it two stories high, with circular verandahs and large paladin windows —baleful eyes watching the sea forever. Sunlight flashed around its window frames. It had warehoused ice that came from America at one time, but now a woman ran a boarding house there for young Brahmin girls, all widows. At night, these windows glowed a sad orange and sent a small shiver down her spine when she passed them.

The car turned right into Lloyd’s Road, which was canopied green with banyans and pipal. Within a few minutes Sowmya saw the gates with a small hand-painted sign in black and white at the entrance—Madras Cinetone Studios. She had somehow expected to see a large building on a busy street, like the Vel Studios on Mount Road where her promotional pictures were taken. Instead the car entered what seemed like a coconut grove. It dipped and bobbed over a dirt path that led from the gate. Curving around the periphery of this property, the driver finally brought it to a stop near a shed of corrugated tin topped by a thatched roof. A small table and three chairs were set up on a patch of grass in front of the shed. It seemed quite unbelievable that cinema was made, captured in tin cans, here.

The sandy earth was cool with shade when she stepped down from the car. A slim young man hurried up to her, dressed in white pyjamas and a long peacock-blue tunic. His hair hung to his shoulders in glossy waves.

“Namaskaram,” he said, and struck a pose with his hands pressed together. “Please come. Satya-sir is waiting inside.”

“Sowmya! Come, come, come in!” Satya emerged from the shed. “This is Kumar, I was just telling him to expect you. He’s the choreographer.”

“Choreographer,” she repeated.

“I saw your debut at the Krithivas Hall,” Kumar said, two small diamonds twinkling at his ear lobes. “That final piece in Mohanam . . .” Kumar pressed his right palm over his heart, shook his head, rapturous. A mother of pearl ring glowed on his fifth finger.

Kumar and his appearance delighted her. She didn’t know what to say, she smiled and bowed her head in acknowledgment.

“Yes,” Satya broke in, giving Kumar a look, which the younger man ignored. “Yes, yes, yes, right. We can all see how much you adore Miss Sowmya, Kumar. But there is something I need to show her, if you don’t mind. Sowmya, come in, come inside the studio. Kumar, get me when Prakash gets here.”

Satya picked up a chair and followed her inside the shed.

It was hot inside and smelled moist, of roots. A bright patch of light fell from the open doorway. A table in the center divided the room.

When her eyes adjusted to the dim light she saw that at the far end of the shed was a beautifully decorated room. Intrigued, she drew closer. It was not a room at all but a set. Set up with several painted screens, it was constructed to look like the interior of a mansion.

There were several painted flowerpots on painted pedestals. Voluminous draperies were tied back over painted windows. Outside the window was a park, a bridge over a small brook. In the distance was a hill on which a house or a temple, she was not sure, stood. Its walls covered with vines. There were woods beyond in the perspective. Her eyes searched for something in that painted horizon, in those mythical woods.

She turned to see a young boy setting up a screen a few feet from the table. He placed a gramophone on the table. A projector had been wheeled in to the center.

Satya dropped a disc on the gramophone and cranked it up. He signaled to Sowmya to sit down on the chair he had brought in. The projector lit up the screen with blinding light and whirred noisily.

A white woman appeared on the screen. Her skirt, a gauzy material in black striped with gold zari, billowed all around her legs, as though a wind was blowing. The camera panned the woman’s sturdy calves, and the bells she wore around her ankles, stitched in the stringy North Indian style. A wide belt gripped her bare waist. Her short and close fitted bodice was edged with pearl tassels, and she waved a sheer drape. A silk turban capped her hair, from which strands of beads hung. A peacock feather stuck out of it, and waved to and fro as she danced.

She held her face up like a flower; she lifted her chin and looked at the camera from beneath her half-opened eyelids. She smiled vaguely, as though she was either in a trance or being pious. She stooped down to pick up a plate with a lamp and some flowers in it. Carrying the plate on her left hand, she strewed flowers with the other.

Now a man, also white, in a tunic and dressed like a prince joined her. He shadowed the woman’s movements.

The gramophone suddenly began to play. Expecting to hear some European melody Sowmya sat up when she heard Kitappa’s voice. She looked at Satya with surprise but he pointed to the film silently, watch. Then a woman’s voice joined in. The white couple continued to dance to the Tamil song. Sowmya tried to ignore the mismatch of the melody and the movements of the silver images as they finished.

The film ran out and the projector sprayed white blinking light on the screen. The gramophone continued to crank out the song and then the song too ended. Satya shut down the projector. The record swished in the gramophone.

“Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, dancers from America,” Satya said as he lifted the needle off the gramophone. “Two years ago they toured Bombay and Calcutta, and here. She was not a big hit here in Madras when she came, but they loved her in Bombay. Somebody called her the avatar of Shiva in the Times of India.”

“Shiva’s avatar!”

“She calls it an Indian temple dance.”

Sowmya looked at him for a moment. “I see.”

“I know,” Satya said, nodding. “I don’t know what song that they danced to originally, the record that went with it is missing. Many dances are like that in Europe, no lyrics. The dancer expresses the feelings that are in the music.” He came near her and leaned on the table. “I just want you to have an idea of what it looks like in film.”

She imagined the dance again, the billowing skirt, the peacock feather, and a turban! Her expression of solitude was a passive portrayal, with very slight facial animation. The man seemed to be there only to highlight her dance. It made her nervous and excited.

“I just want you to see what is possible with film. You see what they are doing,” Satya pointed to the blank screen. “You see how the camera catches it all differently? That is the beauty.”

Sowmya thought of the camera panning the ankles, the calves, the bare waist, the woman’s face.

“You want me to dance like that?”

“No! No, no, no. I don’t want you to dance like that or in any other way. I just want you to see the possibility . . .”

Her mind raced with the brilliantly lit pictures. She nodded. She remembered Mallika in the front room, sullen, silent.

“This is not our way.”

“You sound like Mallika,” Satya said, annoyance darkening his face. “She will of course hate it. She cannot accept anything new—”

“Not true.”

Satya clicked his tongue dismissively.

“She’s fearless when she dances,” Sowmya continued. “She has developed so many new moves. This city has been just so hard on her . . . ”

“I know all that! You think I don’t know that? Every single thing I do, trying to get a sabha to open up here, over there—everything I do, I do for that, what she has. What she—”

“I am sorry,” she said, seeing him upset. “I shouldn’t have said that, I am sorry. Please don’t be so angry. Just . . . just don’t call this,” she pointed to the screen, “a temple dance in front of her.”

They sat silently.

“I have to make her comfortable about this. The costume, the dancing, I don’t know . . . well, that’s impossible. Let me see, let me see.”

“You are her student, not her possession.” A deep groove formed right above his left brow. She wanted to reach up and stroke it, smooth his annoyance away.

“Same thing,” she smiled to mollify him. What Mallika had given her was precious, and she did indeed own that part of what Sowmya had. She did not have to explain any of this to him or anyone else. She only needed to make her dancing work for his cinema.

“What I’m thinking is this,” Satya squeezed his chin. “Kumar can copy this dance sequence, he can copy anything. He just has to see it once. He can work with you. If you want to work with him,” he added quickly. “Whatever you want.”

Sowmya dabbed at her face with a kerchief. How was she going to meet all of this energy with just her dance?

“I am thinking a group dance. I already have a male lead, a singer. The hero—” Satya looked at his watch, frowned. “Prakash should be here, any minute now.”

“The hero?”

“No, the screen writer.”

“Isn’t he the one, he wrote the lyrics—”

“For Rangoon Typhoon, yes,” he nodded. That song that Kitappa set to music was lip-synched by a handsome actor in Satya’s film. It became an instant hit. The film however flopped. Satya lost heavily. He had quickly moved on to this next film.

She looked at the projector that stood silent, the film of the woman dancing that it contained. She rose, went around the projector and stood facing it. The film played in her mind.

Satya’s wrist watch flashed when he moved his arm. His attention distracted her, so she focused on the watch, the way she would focus on Mallika’s face to steady her mind. She lifted and tucked her sari folds at her waist. She began to think of the woman by her name, Ruth. She raised her hands, extended them overhead as Ruth did, and brought them down in a wavy motion. She twirled on her toes, trying to feel the movement. She imagined herself in that skirt that looked like it was made of a piece of rain-cloud, the way it moved with the dancer’s movement. A smile floated on her face, prayerful. Shiva’s avatar.

Satya crossed his arms and his shirtsleeve formed a V around his rounded and smooth elbows. In the humid room lit only by the light from the open door she realized she wanted to keep looking at him, and for a very long time. The dancing figure of Ruth St. Denis evaporated. She plucked at her sari folds, smoothed them down, and fixed the drape over her blouse.

Satya scratched his chin, ran his hand down his throat, stubbly already with beard. She watched him, waiting.

“Mallika’ll hate it,” he said.

Sowmya sighed, leaned against the table. She tried to heave herself up but it was a little higher than what she had judged. Satya made a move toward her as if to help, and she was afraid he was going to hoist her up like a child. She steadied herself and perched on the table. In the heat of the room she smelled the starch on his clothes, his sweat. She looked down at her bare feet, dangling above the floor. She swung them slightly. She felt giddy with a lightness around her shoulders. She wanted to laugh, as though there was something wonderful and shiny out there in the world, a fragile thing.

“What is your film about?” she asked, looking at her swinging feet.

“Well, that’s what this meeting with Prakash is about. I had discussed a rough idea with him. Let’s just say it’s about freedom. It will be that, if I get the permit when I finish the film.”

“Freedom? You mean Swarajya?”

“Well yes, but not like that. More personal kind of freedom,” he said. He sounded reluctant, like a boy shy about talking of some secret passion. She wanted to reach out and ruffle his smooth hair.

“Isn’t he in the Justice party?”

“Are you asking me how can we be friends?”

The Brahmins are incapable of the concept of democracy, Prakash had written in a Justice editorial, and the removal of Brahmin supremacy in the legislative council is paramount. Satya’s father-in-law, Sundaram Aiyar, a Brahmin, was contesting in the election. She read these things in the journals she brought home and sometimes Kitappa would talk about it with her.

“We have known each other since we were so high,” Satya held his hand at waist level. “I have eaten in his grandmother’s kitchen. Politics is politics, you cannot take it personally. In an election, Brahmins will win every time. It’s difficult to fight tradition and perception. So they talk about exploitation, but what they want are quotas, reservation of seats for non-Brahmins. Power, everybody wants that.”

He was standing very close to her now, and she smelled cigarette on his breath. It was not the smell of the tobacco that Kitappa chewed, but of money. He had a slim silver cigarette case. She has watched him as he selected one from the neatly arrayed row of white paper cylinders. When she was alone she would mimic his ways by holding the imaginary cigarette between her fingers, crinkle her eyes and suck at the tip like he did. These gestures of his were alluring, so full of power and determination they seemed to her.

She realized he had just asked her a question. He smiled at her, “Hello?”

Confused and embarrassed, caught with her lustful thoughts, she looked away from his face which, like the sun, drew her and repulsed her at the same time with some blinding radiance.

With a small movement Satya placed his hands on either side of her on the table, cradling her. His face hovered close, his heat in her hair and on her cheek, his breath in her ear. Irresistibly seeking a caress, she tilted her face, brushing against the roughness of beard, urgent moist lips opening, the taste of his mouth, his teeth, tongue—

“Prakash-sir is here.”

The servant boy was at the open door, silhouetted against the bright light outside. Satya dropped his hands and straightened up. Sowmya jumped down from the table.

“Fine,” Satya’s voice croaked.

The boy stood rooted to the spot for a moment and then left.

“Sowmya—”

She did not want him to apologize. She wished he would say nothing. His breath was still flowing down to her curling toes, pooling in a stain.

“Did I make you uncomfortable?”

She was quiet.

“Sowmya, I am sorry if—“

She hid her face in her hands, finding it impossible to look at him.

“What? no?”

She heard his smile, and smiled back through her fingers. He said her name softly, her name in his mouth. Voices came from outside the shed.

She quickly turned and walked out the open doorway, into the bright sunlight. The servant boy was talking to the man who had arrived and they both watched her. Her face was flaming hot, surely they must all know?

Satya walked out behind her. He made an elaborate gesture of lifting up his wrist to the light and looking at his watch. “Prakash, this is a record. Only late by two hours.”

His friend laughed without apology. Dark sunglasses shaded his eyes. A thin and tidy mustache expanded over full, deep purple lips. His thick, curly hair glistened with pomade. He had parted it in the center.

Satya snapped his fingers at the young boy, raised three fingers. “Coffee, fresh, hot. Jaldi, man. And get something for yourself at the canteen.”

“How’s the family?” Prakash asked. She couldn’t tell, from the luminous glasses, whether she was being watched or not. She heard Satya respond formally with returned courtesy.

The coffee came in small, silver tumblers, each nestled in a silver bowl.

“So what’s the story, professor?” Satya turned to Prakash.

“Miss Sowmya has agreed?” Prakash asked as he opened a small leather valise he carried and pulled out a bound notebook.

“Working, working on it,” Satya said and turned to look at her.

Her body shamelessly responded from her center to his look. To hide her discomfort she raised her tumbler to her lips, and the coffee spilled on the front of her sari.

“Oh, oh,” Prakash stood up, and attempted to brush the coffee off her sari. She quickly moved away, shocked at the brash gesture, pretending nothing had occurred.

She walked over to the garden tap to rinse with water. She took her time to walk around the garden before returning to the meeting. She heard Prakash laugh lightly and she felt exposed, as though he thought of her as a dancing girl.

When Prakash rose and took leave he made an exaggerated bow toward her. She did not respond.

“What does he mean by a new role? I thought it was only the dance. I am not sure about the dance at all.”

Satya was silent, fixing the pages in front of him.

“Whatever you want to do, it’s fine. Think about the program for the Earthquake Fund,” he said when she was ready to leave. He followed her to the car, shut the door for her and leaned on the window. “The government is coming down hard on every demonstration, every public speech or publication. They need to energize the movement. That is what your dance must do.”

When the car moved she looked up. The driver’s eyes quickly darted away from the rearview mirror.

When Sowmya returned home from the studio, she went directly to the trunk in which she had stored Mani’s notebook. She flipped it to the pages of Bharathi’s poems that were copied out in his tidy script. She flipped the pages, thumbed so many times the letters were smudged with fingerprints.

Bharathi’s prolific writing was consumed with fervor. He extolled, cajoled, scolded and lamented a nation to its liberation. She searched through this outpouring. The ideas were immense, of a nation in bondage to an alien power, a call to break the chains. She went into the back terrace and looked up at the clouds. How do you capture the sky in a bottle? That is how the task before her seemed, to express a grieving nation in dance.

In the evening, Lazarus arrived with the projector and gramophone. He set it up and turned the projector on, wound the gramophone, dropped the disc in. He showed her how to stop, resume, and then turn it off.

“I can come and get it in the morning, madam,” he said and then left.

Sowmya lifted the needle off the disc and the music stopped. Now Ruth danced in silence. She watched the movements that seemed random at first, the dreamy expression, a smile that was not quite a smile. Gradually shape and rhythm appeared in the movements, a grace in the dancer’s form. Sowmya sat down and watched the shimmering light in silence. She no longer noticed Ruth’s hair, the turban, the bare waist or arms, but only the expressive hands, the movement. When the man, Ted, appeared, their movements reflected each other’s and became two pieces of a unit.

Sowmya ran it again, and again. Finally she turned the projector off and sat for a while in the silence of the evening that was falling outside the door. A bird called plaintively in the dying light. Quickly her vision flooded with images of her own dance, the movements across the stage, its age-old grammar pre-stamped with meaning which was efficiently conveyed through symbols and stylized emotions. Bharathi raged at the cowardice of his people, submitting to a foreign master, selling out a nation. Sowmya walked into the compound and stood in the still evening light. She hummed a tune softly, and took a few steps on the earth. One of the songs settled in her mind and she tested the images of the ancient story, translating Bharathi’s emotion in the movements of her limbs. Mani knew in his center the fire that was in these words. If he were here she would have lit her own fire from it.

She thought of the dancer’s dress, so free and weightless. She went inside, pulled off her sari and dressed in a long skirt and a blouse. She imitated Ruth’s movements, her pattern, drowning the remembered rhythm beats of her own, the dance postures that had now become natural to her. She waved her arms, bent sideways at her waist. She twirled. Free of the sari, she felt different. She was not sure if she liked it, the bareness seemed cumbersome.

Hopeless. I hate it, this is nothing, it is a nothing dance! It is empty. I am imitating this woman imitating me, and it is not even me!

“What are you doing?” Mallika stood at the doorway.

“Umh! Come here, watch this.” Sowmya picked up her sari and quickly draped it back on.

Mallika sat down and looked at the projector with suspicion. The film rolled, the dance finished. Sowmya turned the projector off, and moved it away to a corner.

“She’s American. She’s called a prophet, an avatar of Shiva.”

“Hmmm.”

“People pay a lot of money to see her Indian temple dance.”

“It is a north Indian style of dancing,” Mallika said. “They call it a lamp dance.”

Sowmya was surprised at the calmness with which she took this in.

“She has changed it somewhat,” Mallika said.

“I have some ideas for the dance for the National Fund. I am going to add a new number.”

“Like this?” Mallika pointed to the silent projector.

Sowmya brought the poem she had selected and read it out to Mallika. Mallika listened quietly but Sowmya knew that ideas were filling her head.

“What do you think?”

Mallika moved her head in little nods. “Work it out and see.”

The next morning, Sowmya asked Kitappa to look through the notebook as well. He agreed with her selection. They went in to the front porch and Kitappa pulled out his harmonium. He sat down on a mat and placed the notebook in front of him, punched a few keys, pumping the instrument with his other hand. He played with the raga, testing the notes for a few minutes.

“We can do this,” he moved his head side to side, “Yes. Child, fetch me that blue notebook, please,” he said, pointing to a small shelf against the porch’s wall. A fat notebook, it was bound in blue canvas. It contained every song he had ever composed or set music for. This book went with him wherever he went, he was never without it.

Sowmya clasped her hands together with glee and jumped up to fetch the book.

Kitappa sang a verse to the tune he composed, made some notations, picked up the verse again. This went on for about half an hour. Sowmya waited patiently and would sing for him a verse when he asked. Then when Kitappa was finally done they sang it together. Mallika watched from inside.

Kitappa set the song to dance rhythm, inserted a few jati, a little pleasing decoration of series of beats.

Sowmya stood up, demonstrated.

“Do the verse in moderate speed. Set the last two lines to repeat in double time.” Mallika was at the door, holding the beaded curtain aside. She tapped out the beats on her palm, breaking down the syllables in demonstration.

Together they worked on the beat, making it come out right. Sowmya mimed variations: the toddler waking up to a new dawn; the sacred rivers, majesty of the mountain ranges; the young girl frolicking at the river, a sunbeam on the water; a maiden dancing in the moon-lit night; the worship of the ancestors; a wedding and a love-making; freedom.

Then Sowmya held up her hand. “Brother, just your voice. Just sing it, please.”

Kitappa muffled the harmonium. His pure and unblemished voice rang out.

Her eyes still closed, Sowmya said, “Now the mridangam. Alone.”

After a few seconds of silence Kitappa’s fingers stroked the sides of the instrument and it spoke to her. She saw the spinning of the wheel, a lone flag fluttering in the wind. She saw the entire dance shine behind her lids, and it was new and she suddenly understood what Ruth St. Denis was doing. She had invested the song with a brand new feeling, patriotism. To make it concrete in her dance she would express a little bravado, a little piety, and some kind of joy or affection.

“It has to be that kind of a thing, as if you are the child and the mother at the same time,” Mallika said.

Sowmya found a man named Farid at Amarjothi Tailors, at the corner of East Mada Street, who agreed to make the tricolor flag for her. She found him some silky and slippery material that would unfurl as required. He kept the project inside his house and worked on it at night. She would meet him at his shop after his work was done, and he would take her to his house and show her how he would piece the parts of the spinning wheel together in the center and embroider around it. She was pleased.

On the day of the dance the lawn at the congress office was covered with white sheets. The program started in the late afternoon with a welcoming ceremony and several speeches. So the stage was set up and ready when Sowmya arrived with the musicians. The lawn was now dotted with people who had gathered among the long shadows. Satya introduced Sowmya.

Sowmya began the program in the traditional way, with an invocation to Ganapathi. Nervous about how it would be received, she had planned the new item for the final piece just before a short and sharp concluding hymn.

When the time came for the dance the stage lights dimmed. Somu played a dirge like beat on the mridangam. The flute came on, and then Kitappa and Neelam’s voice rose in unison.

This land of a thousand years,

shaped by a thousand thoughts . . .

my mother’s playground,

where she learnt her first sounds,

and danced in this moonlit night,

frolicked in these rivers,

made sweet music with my father,

this land of my mother.

Sowmya raised the standard and pulled the string. The flag dropped down, and she leaped around the stage to the beat of the refrain, the flag unfurling:

Would I not adore it in my heart

and cry out in joy

Vande Mataram! Vande Mataram!

Even before the dance came to its conclusion, people rose to their feet, cheeks wet. Sowmya found her eyes filling over with tears when she finally stood waving the flag.

When she went inside to change and remove her make-up a messenger came in and gave her a slip of paper. The manager of Saraswathi Sabha wanted to meet her. He was waiting with Satya when she came out of the room. The man greeted her shamefacedly and she returned his greeting. He wanted her to perform the next evening at the sabha.

She looked at Satya.

“All the funds go for the relief effort,” he said.

She thanked the man.

The next day a journal carried a report of the event and an announcement of a repeat performance scheduled for the evening. There was a photograph of Sowmya receiving a garland from a congress leader.

The next evening the sabha was packed. This time when she went back to her green room, a young constable was waiting for her. With a shy smile he told her to come with him. When she came out to the front of the auditorium she saw three more constables and Satya was talking to them. He quickly walked up to her.

“Don’t worry, I will meet you at the station.”

“Police station?”

“They are charging you with subversion. These people will take you down to the station and finger-print you. Don’t say anything, don’t admit to anything. I will meet you there, but I first have to go see some people.”

The constable who met her swung his baton and cleared a pathway through the crowd, waiting for her at the gate when she came out. A fight had broken out earlier, protesting the arrest, when word had first spread through the crowd. It was put down swiftly by the police. She climbed into the van, still in confusion over what exactly was happening.

At the station in Santhome a clerk rolled Sowmya’s fingers and thumbs, one by one, on an inkpad and pressed them on a form. She was charged with violating public order and peace, and was banned from using the flag during her performances. She looked at the flag that Farid had worked on for several weeks. It was rolled up and thrown into a metal bin with other confiscated items.

She was pointed to a bench. She sat down and waited. A man was brought in, charged with vagrancy and thrown in a cell. She became nervous after an hour and there was no sign of Satya. The constable who brought her strolled by, watching her. She felt naked in the costume she was wearing, an orange skirt with glitter, a white blouse, and just a yard long sari of green chiffon draped across her shoulder. He returned after a few minutes and told her she may have to be moved to a cell for the night. As he was telling her this she heard a motorbike. Satya. She was grateful that he had thought to bring a cotton shawl to throw around herself. He carried a letter and asked to see the sub-inspector of police. In a half hour he came out, paid bail, and had her released.

Once outside, Satya pointed her to the motorbike and asked her to get on. She hesitated; she had never rode on one before. He kick-started the bike, threw a leg over it and asked her to climb on behind him, “Come on, come on.”

She sat sidesaddle on the pillion and gripped his shoulder. It felt solid under the shirt fabric. The motorcycle wheeled around and soon they were roaring out on Santhome High Road towards Marina Beach. Her hair ruffled in the wind. She wrapped the cotton shawl around her to keep it from getting windblown. The barely contained power of the machine was beneath her, carrying her away. She smiled into the wind. It had been a strange night.

Satya suddenly veered towards the curb when they arrived at the Marina Beach and pulled up, cutting the engine.

“Come on, let’s go cool off a bit before I take you home. This is big, what has just happened.”

He helped her down to the wide promenade which, pleasantly crowded earlier, was deserted now. A bright full moon grinned up above, but the violet light from the mercury lamps turned the colors of her outfit into strange shades. The breeze pressed the sari to her limbs and she felt light, as though floating. Satya’s shirt had turned a brilliant white and she pulled at her sari, which was fluttering towards him.

When they had walked about a mile, small gardens began to appear against the granite culvert, bright red cannas bordering patches of lawn, hedges of bougainvillea. They entered the beach, which was littered with remnants of moonlight picnics, and walked towards the water. Near the shore she saw a man and a woman nestled in the shadows of the catamarans. As they passed she got a better view of the woman, who seemed about fifty, her hair undone and loosely falling over her shoulder, staring out at the sea. The man was sleeping beside her. Sowmya caught, in the corner of her sight, the gleam of the woman’s diamond nose stud.

The tide was high. Waves crested and heaved in the moonlight, shimmered silver against the dark, and smashed themselves against the shore. She matched Satya step for step, keeping up with his long strides effortlessly, and their undulating motion was like breathing.

He pulled out a large handkerchief and laid it down for her to sit on. He dropped down beside her, stretched his legs out and leaned back on his elbows.

He took out his cigarette case, flicked it open and took a cigarette out. When he lit it the flame kept going out. “Here, cup this lighter for me, will you?”

She drew close and cupped her hand around the flame, and in the sudden flare of the lighter she saw the way he sucked in his cheeks, his fingers, touching hers to steady them, smooth and beautifully shaped, with clean white nail beds, and in the shadows, the shape of his arms rounded and solid. He drew deeply, and the tip glowed. She reached over and held the cigarette. He looked at her with a bit of amusement and let her have it. Clutching the cigarette, between thumb and finger, she took it to her lips and tentatively puffed on it.

“Take a small whiff, like this.”

He showed her how and handed it back to her.

She pulled on the cigarette and went into a coughing fit.

“Easy,” he said.

She drew again, smoother now, and then handed it back to him.

“Keep it, keep it, this is a celebration. You have pulled off something quite big. Watch what happens in the next few days.” He lit another one, turning towards the side of the catamaran to protect the flame.

“What did you tell them at the station?”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s over. You just watch the headlines tomorrow.” He grinned at her. Her heart flipped watching his happiness, something she had had a part in causing. He seemed proud of her and she realized the full depth of what she had done with so little awareness.

They smoked silently for a few moments, the roar of the waves constant in the breeze.

Satya buried the butt in the sand. He laced his hands behind his head and slid back on the sand and reclined. He had never seen so many stars in the sky, he said, every single one of them brilliant.

She probed Satya about his marriage, standing at the very edge, terrified of what lay in its center. Quite willingly he started to say something as though he had anticipated her questions. As quickly the words vaporized from his lips before he uttered them and he gazed at the stars silently for some time. A year after they were married he had got himself tested, he said. Yamini had wept when he told her it was possible she may not conceive. While it had descended on him as an unexpected shock, Yamini bore a heavier burden. Her barrenness would be held against her as a crime, no matter the cause.

Yamini. Her neck delicate and exposed as she bent down, concealing her pleasure when she gave herself to him. This burden gradually growing like a prickly vine binding him to her, piercing the skin. To free himself now would be to tear flesh. It was a marriage like that, he told Sowmya, it was not without affection. Sowmya believed him.

Sowmya stretched back on the sand and listened to him some more. A sprinkle like rain, barely perceptible, fell. The stars were still shining. She allowed the starlight to sink into her, percolate through every pore, taking into her the night air, and the man, who if he reached over, could fold her in his arms. She saw now how he must have looked as a youth. Not his physical form but what must have been in his eyes when his mother had called to him, Come to me, my golden child, from her bed, dying from hemorrhage and fever in her polluted state after a stillbirth, her young son standing at the doorway in the light that fell from the open courtyard. Taken away abruptly Satya never saw her alive again. She knew what that kind of memory could do. He grew up on the favors shown to him, from one relative to another. She saw his eyes lit up with images from the silver screen at the Gaiety, the swashbuckling hero, the masked man who rescues the beautiful woman. He would enact them in the light of the hurricane lamp, the shadows looming over the wall. He married the daughter of his mentor, he owed him much, and dutifully prepared for the Bar. But his dreams he kept. Sowmya, always there are ways of getting things done. He remained untouched by the means he employed to get them, all appropriation being rightful when the goal was so clearly for beauty. She wanted some of that energy, that kind of a desire so formidable that it made everything appear attainable. Sowmya turned and laid a hand on his chest.

The weight of her hand right below his neck, the faint perfume of her jasmine hair-oil, all mingling in the saltiness he would taste in her lips. She waited, her skin erupting with a thousand sparkles. Instead, he leaned into her and brushed the hair off her face, again and again, the motion infinitely more comforting than what she saw in the piercing brilliance in his eyes that had revealed so much.

Raindrops fell.