Hello and welcome! to the year of the music at
Write...Edit...Publish...We're starting off with All You Need is Love...I’m
posting a super condensed story from a collection of shorts called The
Intricacies of Returns I did in 2014-15. The original is close to 5000 words, so
I hope you will forgive me the 200-odd words it's gone over the limit.
Dead Lake Eyes
Saroja is accustomed to rise before
daybreak. By the time she finishes the dawn worship, her much younger, twin
brothers are here for the first cups of
tea. That too is a habit, her
brothers in the house every morning. Saroja is a striking, willowy woman, her
features regular; thick hair, greying close to her scalp, two small silver
wings at her temples, discreet and symmetrical.
Her large eyes are beautifully sculpted into their sockets, irises deep
black. Her husband at his most romantic
used to compare them with the black waters of a lake in sparkling
sunlight. Her irreverent, much younger
brothers call her “dead-lake-eyes.”
***
Saroja has always been her father’s
favourite child. The only one who he
speaks to now, the only voice to which he responds. She visits him daily – her childhood home is just minutes away. She reads the scriptures aloud, he listens
mostly in silence.
He has always been a family man,
wanting his children close. He had sent
the twins abroad to study, but had insisted they come back to work here.
The daughters were married close by too.
Any distant proposal he would reject, “ No, that’s too far, we’ll never get to
see her!”
His planning had come to nothing though. The sons-in-law had, one by one, got jobs in
other places.
But Saroja has never been away, never had
any respite from her blood family and her family by marriage. One time her husband had got an offer to go abroad
– she remembers it vaguely now - both
families had been completely horrified.
Her mother-in-law had lectured non-stop about abandoning one’s roots for
mere money.
Her father, more diplomatic, had steered
him gently, “By God’s grace, you have enough. All you need is love. Why go?”
***
She showers and goes straight up to the
terrace shrine. The family deities are woken, prayed to and put to bed daily in
cyclical rhythms handed down for generations.
She grinds the sandalwood paste, pours out the holy waters. She wakes the idols with gentle clapping
around their tiny doll-size four-poster beds.
Lights the lamp, burns the incense, blows the conch shell. She offers
flowers, food and drink, rings the small bell, chants and sings to them as if
they were family members. She performs a final prostration before she rises to
leave.
As she comes down the stairs, the
doorbell chimes. Her brothers have arrived.
Mukund flashes a smile, “What’s up?”
Madhav snatches her sari end, wipes his
sweaty forehead, pretends to elaborately blow his nose into its pristine folds.
She cannot help laughing.
“Really, you two! Incorrigible. Get in
now. I’ll put the kettle on.”
“What? Tea isn’t ready? What’s happened
to the standards around here?”
She can hear them talking, the murmur
of words interrupted by the crackle of unfolding newspapers. Like the noise of the
TV, also turned on a minute later. She brews the tea against a backdrop of
insignificant local news.
She sits with them, her eyes on the
screen, her mind on other things. The twins carry on teasing and joking, so
that when Mukund brings up illness and wills, she thinks it is another attempt
to needle her.
“No, death’s off-topic, that’s too
much,” she rebukes him.
“Well, you need to know. Father asked
for Suren-kaka, wants a new will.”
“Again?”
“He didn’t tell us more. Remarkably taciturn,” Mukund says.
She cannot decide whether he is joking.
***
Her father looks drawn. She is suddenly
shocked at the crinkled parchment skin around his eyes, the fine folds at his
waistline, his belly hollowed out with his great age, the skin hanging off him
like a loose, ill-fitting shirt. His teeth
are good but discoloured with chewing tobacco, his rheumy eyes float as if
unmoored in their orbits.
She wipes his brow with great
tenderness, prepares a betel-leaf for him, the old vices become strangely less objectionable
with age. His body has failed but his
mind is sharp still. He notices if she
misreads a known verse, or deliberately skips a line to check his attention.
“Baba, you’ve called Suren-kaka?”
His eyes are swimmy, but their vision is suddenly shrewd.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Changing my will. Upsets you?”
“No, it’s your property. I just don’t
like death-talk. It’s inauspicious.”
“Death isn’t inauspicious,” he tries to
recite,” Just as – a man –discards –old garments –”
She completes the verse. “What happens
to the old will? What will you change? Or can I not ask? “
His will had been made years back. With
a typical archaic conservatism he had willed his property to his two sons. The daughters had been left mementoes only – nothing
of any substantial value.
It did
not bother her, she had her own home two steps from this one. The
brothers getting the house was the best, the status quo undisturbed, no extra
responsibility, the freedom to come and go unchanged.
“Not Mukund. Not Madhav.”
She is dumbfounded. “Why? Your own sons!”
This parental house has been an
unshakeable landmark all her life. It disorients her to think it gone.
“And what about Makai and Madhai? Where
will they go?”
His lashes are sparse against his
cheek, almost invisible, a thinned out silver fringe moving cumbersomely, like
a broken insect wing being dragged in the mouth of a lizard.
“New homes.”
A sense of impending doom, of terrible, unwelcome change hounds her. How can her father, the same father who had
refused to marry his daughters away from this city, suddenly decide to disinherit
his sons?
***
Next morning, she cuts through the twins’ banter crisply,
“What are you doing about this new will?”
“You think we should contest?” Mukund
says mischievously.
“Seriously. Where are you going to live?”
“Well, we aren’t being thrown out this
instant. But as a matter of fact, change’s
afoot.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re moving,” Mukund finally shuts
his smile, ”I’ve got an offer to head my own lab down south, I’m out soon.”
Saroja is completely non-plussed, “Out
of the city?”
“Yes, actually.”
“And Madhai?”
“Yeah, me too. For a UN project abroad.”
“But you’ll return?”
“Who knows?
“And…Baba?”
“That’s it, Didi. Couldn’t you move in? You mean more to him
than the rest of us. And it can’t be
very long now.”
“What a horrible thing to say,” Saroja
is suddenly raging. “Why didn’t you tell
me? Does he know you’re going away?”
“Yes, he knows.”
“Then I’m the only one who didn’t!”
It falls into place now. The things her
husband had given up to keep her close to her blood family, to her twins, to
her father! Her husband dead many years
now, her siblings gone soon, only she and her father left in the eddies of
loneliness.
“You’ve never lived away from each other, how will you
manage?”
“We’ll be fine. Too much living in each other’s pockets is
bad too. Wears a hole in the pocket,”
Madhav refuses to take his sister seriously.
***
Saroja rises and performs the rituals for
the final time. But unlike other times,
she lays the deities back one by one, from their silver day-thrones into their
ornate beds. She strides out to go back
to her childhood home.
It’s only a few steps. Saroja looks
over her shoulder, you can run back whenever you want. No need to fret. All you
need is love.
~~~~
WC - 1223
FCA
Tagline : Sometimes, love means having to move back instead of forward.
Read the other entries here -
