The Lilac House (4 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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A
n undefined terror threatens to pull him deeper and deeper into the maze.
He wakes up shivering, cold. Icy fingers clutch his toes.
Smriti used to do that. Hold her hand under the cold water tap, come into his room, lift the bedclothes and grab his feet. When he woke with a start, she would crouch behind the footboard, trying hard not to giggle and give herself away. If he looks now, will she be there?
The sea breeze has an edge. He stares at the sky. The clouds are the colour of brushed steel. He can smell rain.
 
It has been a long time since he was in the field. But he has always had it. A stirring within him that warns even as the winds gather and collide. Kitcha, the reader of omens, the collector of warnings, the storm warning buoy, his professor called him, only half in jest. That was how accurate Kitcha used to be in his predictions. Then he became JAK. The guru of simulated cyclones. Shorn of his powers, deserted by that intuitive knowing, he didn’t know that across the world, his child was being mauled and ravaged. Instead, he was in a Florida beachside home, fucking a colleague’s wife against a wall.
‘You’ve wanted this for so long, haven’t you, you bitch?’ he growled in her ear. And she murmured her willingness, biting down on his shoulder. Bitch. Cunt. Whore. He knew with that unfailing instinct of his that this one was definitely not a blueberry muffin, sweet darling, or
mon petit chou
sort of a girl. That inside the quiet academic wife lurked a slut only he could excite with his magical incantations of filth: Bitch. Cunt. Whore.
Did someone say that to Smriti? The thought wrenches itself out of his mind. He stumbles out of bed. From his bag, he takes out a blue denim shirt and a photograph. He swaddles the photo frame like he once swaddled her in a shirt, and takes it to bed with him.
 
You never wanted a child. It frightened you, the thought of being a father. We bring to our adult lives what we learnt from the adults we knew as children. How could you be a proper father? It terrified you that you would be unable to keep the commitment a child would demand of you. That you would fail the child somehow. Just as your father did. Who knew, when the time came, how you would be? Would an innate selfishness emerge? And then there was the responsibility. What did you know of how to bring up a child?
But Nina pooh-poohed your fears. ‘You are not the first man to be a father; I am scared too. But this is what I want,’ she said, pressing your palm to her still flat abdomen. ‘In here is a life. Our life. Our child! Imagine, Kitcha!’
When Smriti was born, you spent all of that first night gazing down at the sleeping child. Your child. You had never known anything like it before: this liquification, this snagging of your heart when her tiny fist clutched at a finger of yours. Mine. My daughter. My life.
 
When she woke in the night, you would wrap her in an old blue denim shirt soft with many washings. She seemed to prefer it to the gaily patterned baby things Nina and you had bought at the baby shop. And you would take her into the living room. For a while you would walk her slowly, humming under your breath, and then you would sit in the rocking chair by the window and rock her to sleep. Slowly, ever so slowly, the softness of her baby cheek nuzzling the side of your neck, her baby breath of milk and sweetness fanning the skin, the warmth of her body seeping into you. In those dark solitary hours of osmosis you knew yourself to be one with the universe and your child. If her eyelid fluttered, you felt it in the beat of your heart. If her breath paused for even a quark, you felt your heart stop: My child. My daughter. My life.
 
His eyes feel hot and heavy. His throat aches. The dampness beneath his cheek spreads. In the grey dawn, he lies, a man felled by a thought: why did it have to happen to her?
He draws the sheet to his chin and turns on his side, cradling the bundle.
A sound startles him. He has never heard it before. He hears it again as it escapes his throat. A whimper, a low call of helplessness, a querulous note of fear. And then, because he can’t bear to be strong any more, he cries. Quietly at first, muffling his pain and
anguish. Only, he can’t hold it within any more. The hurt wrenches itself out of him. Jak weeps.
 
In the morning, he wakes up with a thought: someone would remember. He would ask around. Someone would know. He leaps out of bed and rifles through his bag again. In the documents pouch is the printout. He had folded it into four and thrust it there. Now he draws it out and smoothens it on the table.
She had sent it to him two days before she arrived here. A smiling girl, and behind her, three boys. ‘Papa Jak, these are my friends. Asha is not in the picture. The five of us are heading out on the “save the girl child” programme. I am sooo excited!’ she had written.
Jak looks at the faces. Where are these children now? The three boys and Asha. Why didn’t they come to see her even once? Guilt, perhaps. He could understand that. That they hadn’t been there for her.
Yet, something niggles. A feeling of disquiet at such complete silence. There have been a few calls and even a couple of visitors. But none from those in the photograph. The invisible Asha hasn’t been in touch either.
What happened here in Minjikapuram?
Lives changed. Smriti’s, and his. That much he knows for certain.
The knots will need to be undone. The knots of silence that seem to surround the days before the accident. But how and where will he find that first slack in the string?
J
ak unties the string carefully. He opens the newspaper wrapping and within, on a banana leaf, lies the masala dosa he ordered for
breakfast. A blob of red chilli chutney smears an edge of the dosa. A composite wave of memory and aromas rides up his nostrils. The hiss of the batter on the griddle, the dollop of ghee melting and turning the batter to a brown crispness, the onion and chilli from the chutney, the fragrance of food wrapped in banana leaf. Jak feels his mouth water.
Despite everything, despite the world falling around our ears, our bodies will never let us forget that we are alive and needy. That our hunger has to be appeased, our thirst quenched, our desires slaked; our lives spent. There is no escaping that, Jak thinks, as his hand reaches greedily to tear a piece of the dosa.
The boy peers anxiously at Jak’s face. ‘Is it all right? I had the sambhar and chutney packed separately!’ he says, pointing to two plastic sachets brimming with a green and brown fluid each.
Jak nods. ‘It’s fine. What about you? I asked you to get yourself something too. I hope you did.’
Swami smiles. ‘Shall I pour the coffee?’ he asks, unscrewing the lid of the flask.
‘How long have you been working here?’ Jak asks.
‘Some months now. Why?’
‘Nothing,’ Jak says, feigning indifference. ‘Someone I know came here earlier in the year. I was wondering if you remember her. She was your age. Nineteen. She came from Bangalore.’
Swami shakes his head. ‘There was some problem with that girl. A police case. They sent the clerk and the hotel boy who were here then to Tuticorin. But why? Why do you want to know?’
Jak looks at the floor, schooling his features to not give anything away. ‘Just curious. I read about the accident.’
Swami begins cleaning up. ‘I could ask Chinnathayi. She works as the sweeper here. She’ll know, I am sure. She knows everything and everyone.’
Jak thinks of the elderly woman he has seen sweep the corridor and knows a flaring of something akin to excitement. A feeling that has evaded him for a long time now.
‘Chinnathayi hasn’t come in this morning,’ Swami comes back to tell him.
What do I do now? Jak asks aloud of himself. But Swami has an answer. ‘Sir, why don’t you go to the government hospital? All police cases are taken there.’
 
The doctor at the district hospital glances at him as he walks into his room. He has the attendant call Jak in despite the long line of patients. ‘Yes, yes, what can I do for you?’ he beams, eyeing Jak with the rapacious hunger of a vulture waiting for road kill.
When Jak explains who he is, the doctor’s eyes drop. The smile vanishes. ‘Please wait outside. I have a long line of patients, as you can see. Actually, why don’t you come another day? I am very busy now,’ he says, ringing the bell to alert the attendant.
But Jak refuses to leave. He sits there, peering through a crack in the door each time a patient leaves, hoping to catch the doctor’s eye.
 
‘Naked. I remember now. It happened some five-six months ago, right? First week of March, if I am not wrong. How can I forget? How can anyone forget? We were all shocked by the state they brought her in. You know how it is usually… we have to cut the clothing off an accident case but in her case, someone had just flung a cloth over her. It was quite obvious that she didn’t have a stitch of clothing on her when she had the accident. It makes you wonder what she was up to.’ The government doctor turns the pages of the file in front of him, each flick of paper suggesting the contempt he feels for a young woman who is so careless of her modesty and her NRI father who brought her up so.
 
You stare at the man’s bent head and want to punch his face. That’s my child you are talking about. If it was your daughter, would you be as callous? Would you sit there exhibiting your disapproval and emanating this ‘she deserved all that happened to her’ attitude?
And it wasn’t an accident. You know that just as I do. They paid you off to turn it into an accident. Is that what paid for the expensive watch you wear, the mobile in your pocket, the car parked outside? You bastard!
You clench your fist, restraining your impulse to haul the man up by his shirt and slam him against the wall.
‘Please, sir,’ Jak grinds the sir out with as much servitude as he can muster, hoping to evoke a slightly less guarded response. ‘We, her mother and I, still can’t understand how it happened.’
The doctor looks up and beyond him. ‘Is her mother here?’
‘No.’ Jak wipes his forehead with the back of his palm. ‘No, she is not here.’
‘You see, that’s the problem with you people. You NRIs. You don’t understand that grown-up girls need to be with their mothers. You think this is America. You send your daughter back filled with all the permissive ideas you teach them in the West and then when something goes wrong, you blame India for it. She was here with a man, I hear. By herself.’
‘She wasn’t here with a man. She was part of a group. They were volunteers in an NGO programme,’ Jak tries to interject.
The man shrugs. ‘A man, a group… Would any Indian girl be so bold? They may have been classmates, but she was alone and who knows what transpired? Didn’t you or her mother teach her what to do and what not to do? If you ask me, I would lay the blame at your feet. Her parents.’
 
Jak rises from the chair. He will not sit here, listening to this pathetic, corrupt creature lecture him on parental responsibility. What does he know about them? Or her? To him, she is just the naked accident case.
‘How is she now?’ the doctor asks suddenly.
Jak pauses. He stares at him. He sees the tapping fingers, the beads of sweat on his forehead; he sees the evasiveness in his eyes,
the compromise he has made with his conscience. He sees a man who has doctored the case sheet.
‘You do know the condition she was in when she left here. What do you think could have changed?’ Jak says, feeling his shoulders slump.
 
‘But hope is all we have. Don’t you see that? You have to believe that somewhere in her, there is a part that is still alive. It tells her that things will change. It will bring her back to us. We have to cling to that thought, Kitcha,’ Kala Chithi said in that low, measured voice of hers, which he knew so well and loved. All through his life, hers alone had been the voice of reason.
They were sitting in Smriti’s room the day before Jak left for Minjikapuram. ‘Look at this,’ he had burst out, demanding she see what he did. The room was filled with all the little odds and ends Smriti had collected in her lifetime. Postcards and pebbles. Feathers and paper clippings. Photographs and books. All day they played her the kind of music she used to listen to. On a wall were shelves of her books. And on all the remaining surfaces, the dolls. Plastic, shell, bone, terracotta, metal, rubber, poly-fibre-filled velvet shod dolls… All of Smriti’s dolls that had lain in storage in Nina’s attic for the last four years. Nina had complained when Smriti packed them away, ‘I wish she would let me give them to the Children’s Hospital. Why does she want to keep them?’
 
Box after box of dolls from day one to age fourteen and two months, when Jak and Nina separated.
When Jak sent for them. Nina’s voice had cracked on the telephone: ‘What perverse idea is this, Kitcha? What are you planning to do with the dolls? You are not making this any easier for any one of us… to handle this… to deal with this tragedy.’
‘Tragedy! You sound like one of those plastic women in a TV newsroom,’ Jak had snarled. ‘She is our daughter. You do not get past her or deal with her. Smriti is our child!’
Nina’s voice was quiet when she spoke next. ‘What about Shruti? Think of what this is going to do to Shruti. Do you remember you have another child? Think of her, Kitcha, for heaven’s sake! You haven’t even asked about her.’
But Jak had wanted to surround Smriti with all that she loved in her once picture perfect world. In every doll was a wealth of memories. Who knew what would bring her back? The boot black of an eye, a blonde curl, a gingham pinafore, a white rubber shoe…
 
‘It’s like the tombs of the kings. Everything she loved, all that was precious to her – except that she isn’t dead. Do you know what we are doing? We are burying her alive.
‘Look at these dolls.’ His fingers trailed along a row of cabbage patch dolls. ‘Her babies, she had a name for each one of them when she was just six years old. “I am going to have a houseful of babies,” she’d say and we would laugh at the notion of our Smriti becoming a mother. Can you imagine our Smriti a mother, Nina and I would smile at each other.
‘It kills me, Kala Chithi, to think that my Smriti’s life is over. That she will never have anything of what she wanted… Nina thinks I have forgotten Shruti. That she doesn’t exist for me. But I am scared to even think of her. How can I love again? How can I lay myself open to this again?’
He stared at the floor and as a glassiness entered his eye, he heard himself say, ‘It would have been better if she had died.’
He waited for Kala Chithi to gasp. To tell him that he was a heartless creature, an unnatural father. What parent would say such a thing?
When she didn’t, he raised his eyes and saw in hers only a deep sorrow. Did she, he wondered, feel the same? That despite all the
reassurance she felt she owed him, there really was no hope of Smriti ever recovering.
 
In the shadows of the room, Kala Chithi seemed more gaunt than ever, the stubble on her head a million grey dots. ‘You look tired,’ he said.
‘I am tired,’ she said. ‘I am tired of worrying about you. Will this never end?’
‘What are you talking about?’ He frowned.
‘Look at her, Kitcha. If her life is on hold, it’s because of an accident. But you, Kitcha? You too have put your life on hold. You behave as if to recover and move on would be an act of betrayal. Nina is dealing with this better than you are. What are you doing to yourself?’
He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I am all right. I just need to sort out a few things, then I will be fine.’
Kala Chithi touched his elbow. ‘Why are you doing this, Kitcha?’
‘Doing what?’ He affected ignorance.
‘I know you too well. Don’t hide it from me, Kitcha. I know you have been going to Smriti’s college, probing and questioning.’
He shrugged. ‘I have to know. I can’t believe it was a freak accident!’
‘Would that make it easier to bear?’
‘What I can’t get past is a detail…’ Kitcha spoke haltingly.
‘What detail?’
‘That there was evidence of sexual activity before the accident. With more than one man… That my daughter, my Smriti was… The accident happened on the beach. Do you think she would…’ His voice broke, unable to continue the thought – fuck on the beach like a bitch on heat with more than one man.
He straightened. ‘I cannot accept what they say. If someone did this to her, they should be punished.’ Jak spoke slowly. ‘I am her father. I have to make it right for her.’
The old woman sat next to Jak, her Kitcha. ‘This is not a book or a film, Kitcha. There will be no happily ever after when you have finished playing avenging father seeking retribution!’
‘I know.’ He sank his head into his arms. ‘I know… the consequences. But I need to find out what happened to her. I am a scientist, Kala Chithi. It is my natural instinct to seek, to try and fathom, to make sense.’
 
Jak waited for Kala Chithi to speak. To refute his claim of scientific need with an exclamation of ‘That’s rubbish’. When he raised his head, he saw on her face a twisted mendacious smile of disapproval.
As he watched, the smile slipped. ‘How will you know when to stop?’
He rose from where he was sitting. The need to get out tussled with his need to retreat into some back room where he could bury himself amidst books and long columns of data and graphs.
‘I don’t know. But it is the way of all scientific investigation to end in a conclusion. Perhaps then I will stop.’
‘And Kitcha, what do you do with the conclusion you arrive at?’ Jak shook his head. ‘I am a scientist, but I am a father too. It depends on what I discover. I can’t promise you anything now, Kala Chithi.’
He walked out of the room, deep in thought. He even forgot his customary tickle under Smriti’s chin. A wiggle of fingers and ‘You better wake up, little girl, in the next two minutes, or Papa Jak will be very angry!’
 
Jak sits in the balcony of his room and stares at the horizon. It is the hour that always causes in him an ache. The boy Kitcha had vested his hopes in the evening sky, but it only fills the adult Kitcha with fatigue. Yet another futile day gone.
 
Chinnathayi seemed to have disappeared, Swami said. ‘She is
not at home either. I went there looking for her but the house was locked.’

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