The Lilac House (24 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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He had an unfair advantage, he knew. He was the older man. Older than the other two. She would see them always as boys. Playmates. But he was the one who knew how to lower his voice to a seductive timbre and toy with her already errant emotions; the one who could lean back, fold his arms, shake his head at her youthful impetuosities and say, ‘You are such a child! What am I to do with you?’
The child she was flowered.
 
Jak’s eyes narrow. This bastard, it seems, always has the unfair advantage. The older man to Smriti and the younger man to Meera. He is a professional charmer of women. Jak rubs the bridge of his nose absently, furiously.
 
They played house, Smriti and Rishi Soman. At first everything was a game. Days speckled with playacting and role playing. You Tarzan, me Jane. You husband, me wife. You daddy, me mummy. They cooked. They cleaned. They shopped. They made love. They made plans. They slept wrapped in each other’s arms and dreams.
Everything was perfect when it was make-believe. Then Smriti didn’t want it to be a game any more. In the apartment he shared
with his cousin, she allowed the swelter of emotions to swirl and bank. This feeling he aroused in her, she wished him to know, it consumed her. She dressed the way he liked girls to. She ate what he ate. She switched to the music he listened to and gave up everything he professed a dislike for. She bathed using his bar of soap; she borrowed his toothbrush; she wore his shirts… She followed his every move and if he slammed a door between them, she would wait outside till he emerged.
At first, he was touched. Flattered, too, that he could raise such an excess of feeling in another person. But soon her devotion felt like clinging, her love a trap, her presence a weight on his shoulder. He didn’t know if he could stand it any more. Ease up, he wanted to tell her. What is this strange intensity? We are young. We don’t have to think forever. Not yet. Let’s just enjoy each other.
It unnerved him to be the object of her passion.
No, it wasn’t that. Passion was something else. Less consuming, less fearsome, and more to do with the call of the flesh. This was an obsessive love. And it scared him. He felt as he was being devoured alive.
At first Smriti was a coveted prize. Then she became a bloody nuisance he wished to shrug away.
 
The monotone pauses. Hesitant eyes. Rishi Soman clasps his fingers and asks softly, ‘Do you wish me to continue the story?’
Across the room, two old men with rheumy eyes sit with half empty glasses in front of them, and a plate of crumbs. They stare at the tableaux the trio are frozen in. Meera sunk deep into her chair, fearful of what would come next. Jak bracing himself to hear the worst. And Rishi trying to school his features, his thoughts, his words.
 
‘I thought she had unreal expectations of the life we would lead,’ Rishi said. ‘She was used to flinging around money. I mean, she was this typical NRI type! She drank mineral water and kept moist
wipes and hand sanitizers in her bag. And I was just a middle-class boy. The truth was, I couldn’t afford her.
‘She wasn’t really rich in that sense. Not like girls whose parents were in the Middle East. I knew her parents were academics. She had money but not enough to subsidize the two of us. And I wasn’t sure when I would start making decent money.
‘I hate having to say this, but I didn’t think Smriti could afford us.
‘I decided to go with her to Madurai. I knew she was reluctant to be parted from me for even a moment, but this was the best thing to do, I thought.
‘I didn’t know what I was going to do when we got there. But I knew that by the end of the trip, I would tell Smriti that it was over. I couldn’t go on like this. I wasn’t ready to be tied down yet. At least, not in the way Smriti wanted me to be.’
 
Jak’s mouth tightens. Meera puts her hand on his. In that furtive gesture is a wealth of meaning: Let him speak. If he clams up, we’ll never get to the truth.
His eyes seek hers in one last plea. Would you sit here and stomach silently this dismissive negation of Nayantara?
Meera shakes her head. Jak says nothing.
‘N
othing. It really doesn’t matter.’ Vinnie tries to steer the conversation in another direction.
‘No, you have to explain. Why uh-oh?’ Meera, already bewildered, is further confused by Vinnie’s exclamation. ‘You don’t approve?’
‘How do I explain this? I approve because you finally seem to be moving on. At one time, I thought you’d build a temple to your life with Giri and worship there for the rest of your life. Then there was the actor…’
Meera shudders. She doesn’t know how to slot Rishi in her life any more.
‘He was bad news, at least for you,’ Vinnie continues. ‘But I don’t like the idea of the Professor either.’
‘Why?’ Meera swallows. She knows what Vinnie is going to say but she needs to hear it anyway.
‘He is too needy. Look at his situation. You need someone who will be there for you. Not the other way round. You don’t want him using you as a crutch and then walking away.’
‘I told you. He doesn’t need a crutch.’ Meera’s voice is flat and toneless.
‘You sound hurt,’ Vinnie says.
‘Yes… no, I don’t know.’ Meera rubs the bridge of her nose. A mannerism she has picked up from Jak. She can see Nikhil shooting baskets. The thump thump of his basketball reverberates on the cement floor. ‘All I can think of is, why has he suddenly become so aloof? What did I do wrong? Should I bring it up? Ask him why he is giving me the cold shoulder?’
‘Meera, don’t say or ask anything. You heard what the actor had to say. The Professor has to deal with it. Think of it from his point of view. He’s a man with too many shadows on his soul. That’s why I think he’s wrong for you.’ Vinnie is clear in her denouncement of Jak.
Meera doesn’t speak.
All she can think of is how they parted that noon, at Dewar’s.
 
Meera and Jak waited for Rishi Soman to leave. For a few minutes they didn’t speak. Then Jak asked, ‘Where are you going now?’
‘Home. Where else? Why?’ Meera was puzzled by his query.
At the door she waited for him to ask if he could drop her home. He seemed bereft, desolate. There are so many things that a father, a parent, ought to never know about his child. But he had listened, allowing hardly a flicker of emotion to show except when
their eyes met a few times. It was this that strengthened her resolve to not shy away from him.
But he didn’t make the offer. Instead, he nodded and walked to his car, leaving her to find her own way back.
Meera watched him leave with a sinking heart. This was the second time that he had moved away when she tried to bridge the distance.
 
He appears in her doorway the next morning, contrite and hopeful. Meera looks up from the dining table where Nikhil sits reluctantly spooning porridge into his mouth.
‘Kitcha! Jak!’ she exclaims, unable to decide how to address him. ‘Is something wrong?’ She is already pushing her chair back.
‘No, no,’ he stutters. ‘I was just passing by…’
It is Lily who pauses her breakfast to invite him to join in. ‘It’s so nice to see you, Professor. We haven’t seen you in a while. How are you? Have you eaten? Take your pick. There is porridge, toast and fruit. Or you can have pongal and chutney. Or would you prefer an egg?’
He lowers himself into the chair next to Meera’s. ‘No, just coffee will do.’
But his fingers won’t still, Meera notices. He plays with a piece of toast. She ladles a small portion of pongal into a bowl. ‘Try some of this,’ she urges, ‘Raniamma makes it well.’
‘Which makes it the only thing she can cook,’ Nikhil murmurs sotto voce.
Lily frowns, but doesn’t speak. She is no longer the ebullient Lily she used to be.
Meera shakes her head disapprovingly. Finally Jak’s face relaxes into a smile.
‘It is good,’ he offers.
‘Don’t be polite, Professor,’ Nikhil continues.
‘No, it really is. It’s exactly what I needed,’ he says, but his eyes seek Meera’s again.
She is unable to hold his gaze.
‘Some more coffee?’ She hides behind the haus frau Meera act she can conjure up in an instant.
She hears him inhaling. Is he counting till ten? she wonders, a hysterical giggle coming on.
‘Yes,’ he states. ‘Thank you!’ Is that sarcasm in his voice? Meera gives him a sidelong glance.
Then she feels his fingers weave through hers under the table and squeeze them ever so gently. Sorry, sorry, sorry, the gentle pressure exerts. I didn’t mean to pull away. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I felt I couldn’t drag you into the mess I am in now.
Meera’s eyes widen.
She drops her head. A curve of hair hides her face. She feels him reach out and lift the strand, and tuck it behind her ear.
Meera stops breathing.
It occurs to her from the stillness that has crept into the room, so have Lily and Nikhil. And Jak too.
L
ily wants to talk, she tells Meera. She emanates a stillness.
‘You have to make the time, sneak the moment, whatever. But we need to talk. You mustn’t disregard what I say until you have heard me out.’
A wind blows outside. Meera hates the wind. The constant humming fans all her fears. It tells her exactly what is wrong with the house: the roof tiles that could dislodge, the windows that creak, the door stoppers that don’t pull their weight any more. And now here is Lily, her fingers plucking at a hanky, her mouth shorn of its dentures, and her face wiped clean of all artifice or expression.
‘Why, Lily?’ Meera says. ‘What is all this ceremony in aid of? You don’t need to make an appointment to talk to me… Tell me!’
But Lily will not sit. Nor will she unburden herself of the words that wait in her mouth. ‘No, no, not like this. I need your full undivided attention. I need you to concentrate on what I have to say.’
Meera’s brow wrinkles. Traces of the old imperial Lily. Standing straight at seventy-six without the slightest hint of a slouch in her body or tremor in her voice. That Lily had disappeared when Saro died. Almost as if her very soul drizzled away with the blood that had trickled out of Saro’s mouth as they carried her into the ambulance.
 
‘We do not know what grief is until a child dies,’ Lily had said that night. ‘The inconsolable sorrow of knowing nothing will ever be the same again.’
Meera huddled beside Lily, unable to grieve or console. All she knew was a numbing within.
 
She thinks of Kitcha, the sadness that clings to him. She has seen it come to sheath Lily, too, in the past few months. She shivers now. ‘I hate this wind,’ she says abruptly. ‘I hate the rubbing of the branches against the roof. It makes my flesh crawl.’
Lily’s mouth caves in further. ‘This is what I mean,’ she says, her displeasure evident. Lily will no longer make an effort. She never really had. But in the months after Giri left and in the days after Saro’s death, she has become guarded. ‘I need you to make the time. What I have to say is important. I don’t want to talk about the wind or the trees. If they bother you so much, chop them down!’
Meera smiles suddenly. Tall trees were sacred to Zeus. And these even more so. ‘How can you even think of it?’ Giri had bristled when she suggested they trim their length. He liked the picture of the house framed by silver oaks, their wispy branches and lacelike leaves. Picture postcard trees that loomed and threatened to kill them in their beds, she had worried all these years. Lily is right. If
they bother her so, she ought to do something about it. She will chop them down to six feet, she decides. Men and trees are the same – give them an inch and they turn unmanageable after a while. Meera Hera no longer worries about pleasing her Zeus.
 
Silver oaks dealt with, Meera sits in the patio hugging her thoughts. She finds that she is strangely reluctant to discuss how she feels, even with Vinnie. It is too new and too nebulous. It is also what she is yet to acknowledge to herself. That here is a man she would like to be with.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ Vinnie would exclaim, her eyes ferreting out Meera’s secret thoughts. ‘Are you saying you want to marry him?’
‘No, not marriage. I am not thinking that far ahead,’ Meera would say.
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t know, Vinnie. I really don’t know. I just like him.’
 
Meera says that to herself now. Kitcha. Jak. She can’t even decide how to address him in her heart. ‘It’s not just you,’ he had told her once. ‘I don’t know how to address myself any more. My family calls me Kitcha, my colleagues Jak, and my daughters Papa Jak. Am I Kitcha? Am I Jak?’
‘So what do you do?’ She smiled.
‘I take the cue from the person in front of me. Do they want me to be Kitcha? Do they want me to be Jak?’
‘Who do you think I want you to be?’ she asked, holding his gaze steadily.
‘What do you think?’ Jak, or was it Kitcha, leaned into her. She could smell the tang of his cologne and she wanted to rub her nose against the skin of his neck.
‘I’ll have to figure that out.’ She nibbled her lip.
For, as unbound as Meera had become, one part of her was still Hera, who feared the birth of change. Hera, who waited outside Acmened’s door, squatting crosslegged, her clothes twisted into
knots and her fingers locked together. Let it not happen yet, let it not happen yet, Hera had willed the movement of time.
 
It is twilight. As the summer approaches, the days get longer and longer. Meera thinks of how on summer evenings, they would all go swimming. Giri had a corporate membership in one of the private clubs and he would send the car for them. Some days Lily and Saro would accompany them. Saro would sit at the poolside commenting on the children’s lack of finesse as they swam. ‘You are not a dog or a hippo to splash the water so,’ she would say, pulling her legs in when Nikhil sent a tidal wave across the pool’s edge.
‘Why don’t you show us how to swim?’ Giri snapped one evening.
Saro, who would never allow herself to get into an argument with her son-in-law, cocked a finely arched eyebrow and murmured, ‘Perhaps I will!’
And so Saro emerged in a bathing costume the pool attendant found her, her hair tucked into a bathing cap and as Meera watched in astonishment, clambered down the steel ladder into the waters where, with perfect aplomb and the style of a practised swimmer, she showed off her breast stroke. And the back and the butterfly. And the Australian crawl. Only, when Saro swam, the pool’s surface scarcely even rippled.
The children were awestruck and so was Meera. She hadn’t even known her mother could swim.
Saro never swam again. She wouldn’t explain why, despite Meera asking.
 
Now as Meera watches Lily put on her glasses as a preamble to her important discussion, she bursts out, ‘Lily, why didn’t Mummy ever swim? I mean, we all saw what a stylish swimmer she was. Why wouldn’t she swim?’
Lily frowns. ‘I thought I said, no chit-chat!’
Meera sighs. They are sitting at the dining table, the two of them.
 
‘It’s like this.’ Lily launches into an explanation for their need to sit across a table in such a manner. ‘Ever since Saro died, I have been thinking about many things.’
Lily has combed her hair back and wound it into a little bun at the nape of her neck. Fine silky grey hair which she has the salon rinse with an ashy glow that makes her skin seem even more translucent. Bone china. Touch it and it would splinter. She has put on make-up and dressed herself in a heavy cream silk sari. Blue sapphires gleam in her ears and around her throat. Most importantly, Lily has put her dentures on. Her mouth stays in place and her jaw is firm in its tilt as she straightens her back and snaps, ‘This is important!’
 
Meera rests her elbows on the table and begins playing with her rings. They did this when Saro was alive too. Invite her to a discussion where they would tell her how they hated being a burden on her and that they thought they ought to go to an old-age home.
‘There are these really nice ones, you know,’ Saro would say. ‘Not all of them have little dingy rooms smelling of decaying bodies or stale food. I have made enquiries and you would be surprised at what is offered.’
And Meera would explode, ‘What’s wrong with you? This is your home. If anyone should leave, it’s Giri and I!’
What if I had actually taken them up on their offer and said yes, Meera wonders. Would they have left? A stab of sorrow – this too must be part of parenthood – to feel unwanted as one grows older, to want to be needed… One day, I probably will do the same to Nayantara and Nikhil, play my version of Do you love me? Do you really love me? Do you need me in your life?
So Meera hastens to reassure. ‘Lily, I know where this is leading… no, don’t even bring it up. You are not a burden. And no, I am not going to let you go into an old-age home!’
Lily sits up frowning. She works her jaws in consternation. ‘Who said anything about going to an old-age home?
‘Then what?’ Meera’s heart pounds. Is Lily ill?
Lily smiles. For a fleeting moment, Meera sees the beauty that she once was. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘My friend Zahira, you know, the actress who gave it all up some years ago and lives in Mysore now with a houseful of animals. Well, her son is a very successful television producer and he wants me to act in a new series. It’s going to be dubbed into six languages.’
The excitement in Lily’s voice fills Meera with dread. She has never seen Lily so animated. She is too old and too used to being the star of the show. What role would she be given?
‘Lily, I don’t know what to say,’ Meera begins. She must dissuade Lily from this wild caper. To hang around a set all day at her age would kill her. And the children wouldn’t like it. Their great-grandmother as a TV soap granny would embarrass them.
‘You don’t have to say anything. I am not asking you for permission. I am informing you of my decision,’ Lily bristles. She can see Meera isn’t pleased.
‘The terms they have offered are excellent. After all, I am a national award winning actress. It will also help ease some of the burden on you.’
A dark suspicion creeps into Meera at the mention of money. ‘Is that why you are doing this, Lily?’
Lily snorts. ‘Yes, the money is important but I wouldn’t kill myself for a two-bit role, you know that, don’t you? I like the story. I like the expanse of the character I am to play. Do you know how hard I have been working to get into character? I have been managing without my dentures because I think the character requires it in the initial part of the series. Before the flashbacks, etc.’
Meera feels foolish. I am so much more of a drama queen than she is. Here I was, attributing depression and despondency to her, while she has been method acting. Meera reaches across and takes Lily’s hand in hers.
The skin is papery and dry, the blue veins under the almost transparent skin criss-crossing the back of her hand. Meera squeezes the fragile hand ever so gently. More and more, she has let the irritations of her daily routine overwhelm her.
‘If it makes you happy, Lily…’ she says. ‘I am so proud of you.’
She wonders if it is tears that bring a sheen to Lily’s eyes. Lily murmurs, ‘Thank you, thank you, my dear. And…’ She pauses and focuses at a point in the middle distance. ‘I am lost, Meera. Without Saro, my life has lost its definition. I miss her.’
‘I miss my mother too,’ Meera admits, realizing the vacuum that Saro’s absence has created.
‘There is one more thing,’ Lily says abruptly. ‘If there is a chance for you to make a new life, you must.’
Meera looks away.
‘When your father died, I should have told Saro this. But I didn’t. I was selfish in my fear that I would be alone. So I clung to your mother and let her use me as a crutch. She was too young to be a widow as I was. I should have spoken then, but I didn’t. So I must tell you this.’
Blood rushes into Meera’s face. ‘I don’t know what you are thinking but there is nothing between the Professor and me,’ she says lamely.
Lily leans back. ‘Not yet. But I can see he likes you and you him. It isn’t about cutting your hair or acquiring a new wardrobe. That’s good in the movies. A new look that turns you into a new woman. Get real, Meera. Get real before your life slips away from you.’
Meera squares her shoulders to bring more vehemence into her denial. And then she stops. Why is she denying the truth?
 
‘By the way, there is no dark secret why Saro wouldn’t swim.
She hated water and I forced her to swim as a child. When she left home, she swore she would never swim except for an exigent circumstance.
‘And that day at the pool, Giri was one,’ Lily says, rising from her chair. ‘The first thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Meera, listen to me, all of us need our dreams…’

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