The Lilac House (10 page)

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Authors: Anita Nair

Tags: #Bangalore (India), #Widows, #Contemporary Women, #Domestic fiction, #General, #College teachers, #Fiction, #Cultural Heritage

BOOK: The Lilac House
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You were there when it happened. Is that what it is, Shivu? You can’t face the truth. That you could perhaps have stopped it somehow.
T
here can be no stopping. Once the unravelling of the past begins, it will be beyond him. Jak knows this. He will not at some point be able to put his hands up and say, ‘Stop. I have heard enough. I know enough!’
Does he have the stomach for this?
‘We knew that these girls were sluts.’ The boy wipes his mouth and then, aghast at his words, he reaches out to pluck Jak’s sleeve. ‘I am not saying that about her. She, Smriti, was different. She wasn’t like the rest of those girls. The NRFs, we called them. The Non Resident Fucks.’ Again the boy catches his breath. He sinks his head into his hands. ‘What am I saying? I am sorry. I don’t mean it like that. I don’t know what I am saying!’
Jak looks away from the boy. Do I make this easy for him? Do I tell him, yes, yes, I know it is all those other girls you were referring to. It’s not my daughter you meant. You wouldn’t. A nice decent boy like you wouldn’t make such allegations about nice decent girls. Especially my daughter.
But he doesn’t offer a line to the floundering boy. Instead, he taps him on his shoulder and says, ‘Go on. I am listening.’
 
The boy raises his head from his hands. Remorse is replaced by the inevitable need to unburden. To shed the weight of his soul that has driven him to obscure bars.
Shivu reaches for a glass. Booze steadies him. It calms him. It wraps him in a haze of forgiveness. You are not to be blamed. You did not know what you were doing.
‘There is a kind of hangout place near the college. They play good music and it has a hubbly bubbly. Most of us go there after college. The girls come too. The day scholars, and sometimes the hostelites. But it was the foreign girls who came there as regularly as the boys did. They had money to spend. And I suppose it was like one of the places they would go to in their own countries. A place where you could hook up with someone. Everyone knew that. It was like a tradition.’
He searches Jak’s face.
Jak meets his gaze steadily. He reads the purport of the boy’s expression: What is this man thinking as I lay bare his daughter’s life?
Jak wills himself to not show any emotion. Shall I tell him that we did the same? That university students all over the world have always felt the need to congregate and stimulate their already burgeoning hormones with coffee, beer, coke, whatever? That I know how plans are hatched, dares sprung and the camaraderie of one’s peers makes one feel ready to take on the world.
Jak allows the boy a tight smile. ‘I understand. So is that where you met Smriti?’
 
The boy shakes his head. ‘That’s where I first saw her. She came there with a group from their college. She walked in and we couldn’t take our eyes off her.’ The boy gestures.
Jak’s eyes drop. The boy’s meaning is quite obvious. Smriti’s body piercing would make anyone flinch.
 
‘Is this about Nina and me splitting up?’ he asked, unable to believe the mutilation he saw. Was this creature with studs in just about every conceivable place his baby girl?
‘Why does it have to have anything to do with you?’ She tossed her head, her dreadlocks swinging back. He grimaced at the sight she made. She looked like one of those demented creatures you found wandering in temple hallways, claiming to be possessed by
the goddess. With matted hair, glazed black-rimmed eyes and a set expression that would accept no truth but theirs.
Was that a stud in her tongue? He could see one in her navel too. Where else? Where else, Eashwara? In moments of stress, Jak found himself reverting to Kitcha, the Mylapore boy who called on his patron deity for rescue and succour.
‘Oh, stop it, Papa Jak. Don’t act so wet. This is my Goth look. It’s what I want for now. Don’t be like those Indian parents we know. C’mon, Papa Jak, do I ask you why you do what you do?’ She perched on his knee just as if she was eight and not seventeen.
Jak knew what Nina or any of his relatives would say to that. Nina’s mouth would narrow into a line of displeasure. ‘For heaven’s sake, Kitcha, she is not a child any more!’
The male relatives would turn their eyes away while the female relatives hissed, ‘Shiva, Shiva, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you have any sense? As for the girl, has she no decorum, no modesty?’
But Jak had turned his back on Kitcha, the boy he was, and had become a product of the new world he inhabited. He could let his grown-up daughter sit on his knee, close his eyes to the thought of nipple rings and clit studs and pat her head affectionately and ask, ‘Isn’t it a nuisance? All these studs and rings? Don’t they get in the way? Catch on your clothes, your hair?’
She jumped off his lap. ‘You get used to it. Papa Jak, guess what? You should get your ear pierced too!’
Jak touched his ear lobe. ‘My ear was pierced when I was a baby. But I guess it closed up. I might just do it again,’ he said with a laugh.
‘Cool!’ Smriti grinned. Her Papa Jak would never fail her. And Jak felt as if he had triumphed again. He had tried telling Nina this. No point in getting the children’s back up. You have to meet them halfway.
 
‘We hadn’t seen anyone like her. The studs in her eyebrows, the nose ring. The under lip stud and then the one in her tongue,
her navel. It was like any place she could, she had it pierced,’ Shivu speaks easily now. ‘But we met for the first time at the Stree Shakti forum.’
Shivu and his theatre company had been invited to conduct a workshop by the forum. Rupa, the forum coordinator, had asked if they would pitch in. ‘The least you can do after what you have put us through,’ Rupa said, grinning.
Shivu knew what was coming. ‘Which means we won’t get paid, I presume.’
‘You presume right.’ Rupa shoved a sheaf of printouts into his hand.
‘You mean there is actually a script!’ Shivu widened his eyes dramatically. ‘Not just polemic. So what is it this time? A Burnt Woman is not a Beautiful Woman?’
Rupa swatted his arm playfully. ‘Don’t mock us. Female abuse begins early, Shivu. This is serious. Female foeticide. We want to take this play to little towns. Stree Shakti is having representatives from its various nodal cells come here and if you train them to put up the play, they’ll take it further. It’s like what we did to spread awareness about the evils of dowry. There are fewer cases of bride burning now. And we need to take this up seriously.’
Smriti was roped in by some girls from her college to volunteer, and Shivu had wondered if it was a fad like the piercing. But she was a dedicated worker whose unbridled curiosity was matched by her tirelessness. In the following days, Shivu watched the girl with the strange look take on the work of ten people. When Rupa tried to tell her she was doing too much, Smriti wouldn’t accept it. ‘This is the least I can do,’ she said vehemently. ‘All those girl babies! Murdered even before they had a chance! It kills me to even think of it!’
Shivu felt his curiosity transform into admiration. And then something else. One day after rehearsal, he suggested coffee.
‘Smriti agreed easily enough and we went to the coffee shop where I saw her first. I was curious about her. What was she doing
here? In India? In Bangalore,’ Shivu narrated, his voice striated with the sweetness of a time long ago when all their lives had brimmed with promise and hope.
 
Jak and Nina had been appalled when she turned down Brown and Columbia and announced her decision to move to India for her undergraduate degree. Nina, who was at Berkeley then, had been unable to hold back her anger. ‘You are going to regret this! Kids from all over India, from even small towns want to come here, dream of studying here, and you want to go there! If you want to be a sociologist, then it is the US you should be in. India! You want to study in India! I don’t believe this! Tell her, Kitcha, make her see sense.’
 
At first they had been united in their efforts to keep her there. What is all this nonsense about social welfare? We thought you wanted to do women’s studies.
Smriti listened to them patiently. ‘You are an academic,’ she told Nina. ‘You do not understand what women’s studies ought to culminate in. I do. It has to translate into real life solutions. Do you know what is happening to women in India? You sit in your pretty little house with your labelled kitchen jars and a room full of books and think it is emancipation. Empowerment has to come from within.’
Mother and daughter argued for days while Jak watched and listened. And, as always, he weakened. He fingered the diamond in his ear lobe – his mother’s nose ring – and relented. ‘Let her give it a shot! If she doesn’t like it, she can always come back. Or she can always come to the States for her higher studies. Maybe it is time she got to know India. Discovered it for herself. She’s going through a phase. Of wanting to save the world. Didn’t we all? C’mon, Nina, it’s not all that bad. Both you and I studied there, remember?’
Smriti, seeing signs of Jak succumbing and Nina flagging, had
grabbed the ice cream scoop and crooned into it the lines she knew would elicit a smile from Jak. His very own Leonard Cohen advocating: ‘
Should the rumour of a shabby ending reach you, it was half my fault, it was half the atmosphere.
’
Nina shrugged. Your funeral, the movement of her shoulders implied. Your responsibility. Remember, you, Kitcha, are responsible, shabby ending or otherwise.
 
Should he have tried harder to make her stay back? Persuaded, cajoled, bribed, done what he could have to keep her with them. At least they would have all been in the same country, on the same continent. Instead of which, he had succumbed to Smriti’s superior will. She was still a young girl, wild, impetuous and wilful, but he had failed to see that. Rather, he had closed his eyes to it. What kind of a father was he? The thought haunted him. That he had been irresponsible. But he couldn’t see her unhappy. That was what it had always been about. Jak couldn’t bear to see Smriti’s eyes shadow.
 
‘So that was how the two of you met.’ Jak speaks quietly. ‘And the others? The two other boys and Asha?’
‘You keep saying Asha. There was no Asha. There was Nishi, Priya, Shabnam and Anu.’
‘I must have got the name wrong,’ Jak mumbles. ‘Tell me about the other two boys. You knew them?’
The boy nods. The lightness that briefly settled on him flees again. ‘Matt and Rishi. Mathew was from Kochi but he had chosen to come to Bangalore to do biotechnology like me. Mathew was my best friend. Rishi was a senior. He was from Coonoor. He had actually passed out by the time we met but he was very active in the theatre group we all belonged to. It was kind of inevitable that we became friends. We had so much in common, and in some ways we were also the outsiders. So we hung out together.’
Was. Liked. Hung out. Jak notices the use of the past and that Shivu’s hands are trembling.
He pushes the glass towards Shivu. ‘Drink,’ he orders. ‘Toss it down. What happened then? Tell me.’
But Shivu’s hands will not stop trembling.
‘At first, I thought she was attracted to me. I liked her. I liked her very much,’ Shivu says. Suddenly he looks up. ‘How can I tell you all this? You are her father. How can I talk to you about what we thought, said, did… It’s awkward. Shit man, it’s embarrassing.’
Jak doesn’t speak for a while. ‘Don’t think of me as her father. Think of me as your friend,’ he offers.
‘You are not my friend,’ the boy states baldly.
‘Then think of me as someone you just met. A stranger in the bar. And that’s the truth. You and I have no relationship. No tie. You can tell me anything, you know.’ Jak listens to his own voice, amazed. How did he manage to bring that wheedling note into it?
 
The boy stares bleakly into his glass. ‘All of us hoped to have a girlfriend. But Smriti was the girl one dreamt of. She was cute, smart, and she had none of the hang-ups that our girls did.’
Jak flinches. Our girls. My poor baby, did you even realize how your open ways would be misinterpreted? Jak isn’t able to hold himself back. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning she thought nothing of holding your hand in public. Or greeting you with a hug. Or wrapping her hands around your middle when she rode pillion on the bike.’
‘But don’t girls here do all that?’ Jak asks in an incredulous voice.
‘Yeah, they do. But they don’t strip down to a bikini when they go swimming, or sleep over at your place, etc. I am not saying Smriti was easy. She was cool. She was really cool. But she was uninhibited and if we got too physical with her, all she would do was push our hands away and say in that accented Tamil of hers, “Konnudu vein!”’
A nerve flutters at the corner of Jak’s mouth. He often mock-threatened
his girls: ‘Konnudu vein if you play with the matches. Konnudu vein if you stay up late watching TV. Will murder you, little beasties!’
‘You were saying you thought she liked you,’ Jak says abruptly. Did he really want to hear this boy list in how many ways Smriti allowed the boys to treat her like they would a slut?
‘Yeah! We met in the café a few times and soon I thought Smriti and I were a couple. I wanted to show her off. But mostly it was Mathew and Rishi I wanted to impress. So I introduced Smriti to them.’

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