Mistress (45 page)

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Authors: Anita Nair

Tags: #Kerala (India), #Dancers, #India, #General, #Literary, #Triangles (Interpersonal Relations), #Travel Writers, #Fiction, #Love Stories

BOOK: Mistress
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Koman
A few weeks later came another invitation. The second day of
Nalacharitam. Would I play Nala? I agreed. It would take my mind off Aashaan and Angela, I told myself.
Two days before the performance, Angela said that she would come to see me play Nala. ‘It will be interesting to see how you transform from the heroic and romantic Nala to an ineffectual and crazed man.’
I flushed. I felt self-conscious. Why couldn’t it be a vesham where I was a truly heroic being instead of this mortal creature pulled and twisted by destiny’s doings, I asked myself wryly. I would be Nala who was a slave to his senses, doing their bidding, all good sense distanced.
It was only in the first scene that I would be allowed to be Nala, the noble and sensitive man. Suddenly I knew. With that one scene, I would tell her what I was feeling.
 
After Nala went back to his kingdom with his bride, he discovered yet another impediment to their happiness: Damayanti’s shyness.
‘
Kuvalayavilochane bale
,
bhaimi
…My lotus-eyed beauty, my precious girl, my wife, having got this far, don’t you think we are wasting our youth and time? Think of all that we had to go through. Think of the various impediments that came our way. Now it is your shyness that stands between us; it is your bashfulness that is my greatest enemy. Don’t you think it is time you shrugged that away and let me fulfil my desires? bale’
I thought of the scene as I lay on my back. Gopi was working on my face. He knew better than to intrude on my thoughts. Yet, as he drew the rice-paste patterns, he murmured in a hushed voice, ‘Why do I get the feeling that this is you lying here and not Nala? What is wrong?’
I felt a great wave of mortification. What was I thinking? I had no place here. My dreams and desires did not belong here; mine was merely a body for Nala to be. I was Nala. And my love was Damayanti, not a blue-eyed Madaama.
And yet, when the music began and the singers poured forth the longing in Nala’s heart,
Kuvalayavilochane bale
,
bhaimi
, I knew that I was incapable of retreating. That it would be I, not Nala, who stood there and wooed her. With this slowest sringaara padam amongst all kathakali padams, I would make my intentions clear.
For once, I would use the power of the veshakaaran to beguile the audience into thinking I was Nala. Only she would know better.
Angela
I wasn’t shy, or bashful. Neither was I easily overwhelmed by pretty words or a handsome face. Otherwise, I would have chosen Sundaran to be the object of my desire.
I worried that I would end up a cliché. It had happened before. A blue-eyed foreigner falling for a dark-eyed Indian. I loved India, but I wasn’t here to discover myself or curb my restless spirit. I was here to research and finish my dissertation. I didn’t want a relationship of any sort. Yet, with Koman, I felt the edge of attraction getting sharper and sharper.
I could see that he too felt the pull, but he worked hard at resisting it. I could see that he thought it was wrong to admit his attraction for me. I was his student.
I don’t know when I stopped seeing him as my master and saw the male in him.
Perhaps it was at the exhibition performance of Kuchelavrittam they held at the institute once. I had decided to document every step of the performance. So, as his face was being made up, I sat by his side watching him change. Later I sat in the front row of the audience, waiting for the performance to begin and suddenly, there he was. Krishna.
In him I saw the shaping of my desire. A man who was playful and mischievous, affectionate and teasing, generous and romantic.
My heart stilled. The redness of his eyes drew my gaze. Suddenly his eyes met mine. I let him see the desire in my eyes.
When Krishna threw a handful of thechi flowers at Kuchelan’s feet to welcome the poor brahmin and to show him respect, a flower fell into my lap. It occurred to me that he had intended it to happen. I felt a secret smile tug at my lips. I held the dainty flower between my fingers and slipped it between the leaves of a book. An imprint of his desire, I thought.
The next day in class, I said, ‘I’m going to attend all your performances while I am here.’
He looked up in surprise.
‘It helps me in my research to see as many veshams as possible,’ I said. ‘I know my understanding of kathakali is negligible but when I see a vesham, I come a little closer to understanding it.’
Koman smiled. For a moment, he searched my eyes. I knew he was asking: Is that all you’ve come for?
I could see that some instinct told him there was more.
I met his gaze for an instant and felt my eyes drop in a wave of confusion.
 
I sat in the front row. The rest of them made way for me. My obvious foreignness invited comment. Everywhere I heard, ‘Madaama is Koman Aashaan’s student.’
And I would smile secretly to myself. I am not just his student, I am more than that. He wants it to be more than that. I felt a flush of power then. This magnificent being was mine. He would like it to be so.
Could this be termed an obsession? I didn’t know. But every role he played, I saw myself as the woman who stood alongside. It didn’t matter who she was, I was her. So I was Urvashi the heavenly nymph, wanton slut, beseeching Arjuna to let her taste the nectar that resided in his lower lip. When she cried, the arch of your brow fills me with a desire that is as painful as a whiplash, I wanted him to cast away the demands of the libretto and pleasure me.
When he was Arjuna disguised as an ascetic, I was Subhadra, the princess, now his handmaiden. I was prepared to forget my loyalty to my brother’s wishes, set aside my modesty and elope with him.
It was pointless and fraught with danger and yet I couldn’t stop myself.
On the second day of Nalacharitam, I watched him carefully. Was this Nala or Koman, I wondered. What did it matter? They were one and the same.
I watched his face, the dancer’s face. He seemed to be addressing me rather than Damayanti. Then he turned and looked at me from the corner of his eyes. I saw a repertoire of glances. Lust. Shyness. Sorrow. Affection. Valour. Respect. Suspicion. With each of these he told me: It is your hesitation, your shyness that is my enemy now.
Kalayallo veruthe kaalam ni
. Aren’t you wasting time, my precious?
I met his eyes. The desire in his gaze kindled a certainty in me. He is, I thought, a man who knows how to love. A man who knows no mortal limits to love.
 
Later we quarrelled even about that, hurling accusations, each seeking to blame the other: you seduced me.
But when we resonated with that first wild yearning for each other, who could tell who made the first move? Was it him or me?
A widening of the eye. A touch. An embrace. A love affair begins with all these and more. Who could tell who leaned into whom? When we finally sought each other, it was in a frenzy to satiate suppressed desires. An ashtakalasham of lust and want. The dance of all dances. A complex sequence of steps that was the natural culmination of all those months when we had done nothing but watch each other.
Our days and nights became one. A matrimony of limbs, thoughts and oddments. My suitcase found a place alongside his in the attic and my mirror-work cushions lay scattered on the mattress on his floor. My body lotion stood beside his hair oil and his comb nestled amidst the bristles of my hair brush.
We read poetry together. I read Neruda aloud to him and he fashioned my words into mudras, each gesture pulsing and alive.
I lit incense sticks and let the coil of smoke bind us together. A wedding ring of smoke and fragrance.
He braided my hair and adorned it with flowers. A jasmine star into every twist. He held a mirror for me to admire my hair in. ‘Do you see this?’ he asked.
‘I do, I do,’ I said in amazement that he, godly being, was doing this for me.
He brought leaves of the mailanji plant from a house nearby and ground them into a fine paste. Then he daubed my fingertips with it and forbade me to move or use my hands for the next hour. He pressed down my eyelids and then flicked the dried paste off my fingertips and showed me the colours of the sunset that tinted them. ‘Do you see this?’ he whispered.
‘I do, I do,’ I murmured in wonder.
He laid me on the bed and peeled my clothes away. He dripped oil into the well of my navel and with his fingertips he drew the oil
into my skin, anointing me his woman. I lay on my back, a willing supplicant to his administrations.
I do, I do, I cried. What could be more perfect than this? You and me, and our life.
Koman
In the little house by the river, we found a home for our passion.
A few days later my father came calling. In one glance he took in the changes that affected my home and me. His eyes said it all. That he had heard rumours of his son and the Madaama.
‘You are old enough to know what you are doing,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you marry her? All your life has been wasted on kathakali. Will your art fetch you a glass of water when you are thirsty? Will it lay a wet cloth on your brow when you are burning with fever? Will it hold you up when your legs tremble, or hold your hand when you are lonely? That is why you need a family and a home.’
‘I have a home and a family,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Angela wants to be married now.’
‘Then when?’
‘Maybe later. Maybe never. Angela is my wife. Sometimes relationships don’t need rituals to sanctify them.’ Have you forgotten about you and Saadiya? How can you talk about rituals, I left unsaid. But he understood and didn’t dare say anything more.
 
When my father left, I went to sit on the steps by the river. Angela and I had been living together for only three months, but already things were not the same. What could have gone wrong, I asked myself again and again. What had begun as the most perfect time of my life had dwindled into a greyness I couldn’t even understand.
I wondered what she would say when I told her about my father’s visit.
We had never discussed marriage, Angela and I. Would she want to? It would be very hard to live here unless we were married. I couldn’t even take her home until then. I knew she felt hurt that, though we lived so close to my family, I hadn’t even introduced her to them. But what could I say? ‘Achan, Babu, meet Angela, my lover!’
I was worried about her. And I worried that she was the way she was because of me.
After she and I began to live together, I had to draw very clear lines between our personal and professional lives. ‘I can’t be your teacher by day and lover by night,’ I had said. ‘I suggest that we ask Sundaran or one of the others to take you into their class.’
But she refused. ‘It won’t be the same.’
She had given up kathakali for me. What more could I ask of her?
Angela
I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t understand it. I had a headache some days and on other days my neck hurt, or my back. Or it was my digestion. Until now, I had never known a day’s illness. But now I felt ill all day.
‘I feel so tired,’ I complained.
‘Do you want to go to a doctor?’ he asked gently. The concern in his voice made me angry. I didn’t like feeling ill or listless.
‘I feel so bloated and full,’ I said.
‘It is because you are idle all day,’ he said and went to the kitchen to find me a piece of ginger and pound it with salt.
‘Here, eat this, you will feel better.’
I nibbled at it and he asked me again, ‘Why don’t you practise at home?’
‘How can I practise without the accompaniments?’
‘I could get you a recording. Or we could even make one during a class,’ Koman offered.
‘Oh no, it isn’t the same,’ I said, turning away.
‘I wish we could go away,’ I said. ‘I feel suffocated here. What am I doing here, Koman?’ I asked suddenly. ‘I can’t fritter my life away as I am doing now.’
‘But what will I do elsewhere?’ he asked. ‘No, you have to give up that thought. I cannot leave this place. If you find it so hard to live here, then you must return,’ he said.
Was that an ultimatum?
I cried then. ‘But I can’t. How can you even suggest it?’
‘Then try and understand me better,’ he said.
For a few days I made an effort and then I felt that familiar desperation settle back over me.
Koman
It occurred to me that she seemed to have no further use for kathakali. She no longer even came to see me perform. When I asked her to, she said she didn’t feel up to it. It isn’t envy, I told myself. It is melancholy. So I let it be.
I felt as if I was crippling her soul, sucking all the happiness out of her.
In desperation I took her to a doctor. ‘It is the change in environment,’ the doctor said. ‘Otherwise, she is perfectly all right. I am going to start her on some mild anti-anxiety treatment and she should respond to it soon.’
I bought the medication and said it was for her poor digestion.
The old Angela would have wanted to know everything about it, including its pharmaceutical composition. This Angela, with slack jaw and dull eyes, swallowed her pills dutifully without any questions.
At night, we lay side by side. She slept deeply, entombed in the arms of the all-comforting pill. Her loneliness ate into me. Then there was the guilt. What use was my art if it made her so unhappy? Was I a monster to put her through such agony? How could it be that what had brought us together could also distance us?
One morning I woke up with a start. I’d had a strange dream. Of my beautiful Angela in a white anti-septic ward of a hospital. Her face had lost all traces of knowing. Her hair was scraped into a knot on top of her head. Her smile was vacant. Her melancholy had taken her where I and kathakali no longer existed.
The picture stung my soul. I felt a heaviness in my heart. What next, I wondered.
Should I let her go? Or should I go with her? Her love, I saw, was tinged with an unconscious envy, and unhappiness at her inability to do something with her life. How could such a love thrive?
Then Babu came to see me. ‘This is a small town, Etta,’ he said.
‘People talk. You know that Achan and I will stand by you. Why don’t you marry her? There will be no room for gossip then. You should hear what they say about the two of you in the marketplace.’
‘Does it bother you that much, Babu?’ I asked gently.
‘It does. I cannot let our family name be disgraced. You know that. You know how far I have gone to preserve our social standing. Now I also have my child to think of. This is a small town, like I said. I don’t want any slander spoiling my child’s prospects.’
‘The child is not even born,’ I said.
‘So what? These things return to haunt you. Do you know what my life is like? Every day I fear that he will come back and stake a claim. That all I have worked to put together will fall apart. I don’t need this. I can’t handle this.’
I nodded. ‘I will sort it out,’ I promised. ‘But I will not give her up.’
‘Who asked you to? Marry her. Make her your wife. That is all we ask of you.’

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