‘God, I will kill
him.’ Anjali swore publicly to do away with Satya on the day their music
teacher was buried.
Last week, triggered
by the latest news about them, Anjali’s old promise went viral on the old-mates
network. Why that network of cronies, in their late thirties or early forties,
relegated the recent events to the background in favour of what happened that
day nearly a quarter of a century back is anybody’s guess. For a few amongst
them, the finale was just a logical but rather irrelevant denouement; and, the
story that seemed to matter was in the preface, in the past that ended ten
years back, with the said, the unsaid and the gutter-talk.
In those crisscrossing
messages on that network, they remembered Anjali as a friendly, soft-spoken, petite
girl. The men noted her lovely eyes and lovelier smile; and, the ladies vaguely
remembered her hairstyle (Princess Di’s opined some, feather-cut said others, and
the rest asked if those were the same before dismissing her style as something
trendy but common). Some of the old boys fondly remembered her ‘blossoming’ in
the final year at school.
While Anjali hogged
the limelight, Satya’s name did not enter the top-twenty buzzwords in that
virtual exchange. A lady known in the network as Guess-Who described Satya as
the ‘worst, nasty, odious, vulgar’ guy she has ever known. A few men mentioned,
only as an afterthought, his sterling performances on the stage and the field. A
rare academic voice grudgingly admitted that Satya had been way ahead of all,
challenged only by Anjali. For some of the active members of that network, the
fact that Anjali and Satya had never joined their network explained everything.
With regard to those two, the members agreed unanimously on one issue - the
starting point.
On the day the
teacher was buried, their whole class had attended the funeral service at St
Mary’s Cathedral. Anjali had been nervous and anxious at the service,
unfamiliar with the Christian customs and prayers, and overwhelmed by the large
imposing century-old structure on top of the hill, the spacious interior and
the reverberating acoustics within. The fifteen year old had prayed hard for
her favourite teacher and later as she walked down the hill along with her
classmates, she had felt a sad peace within, convinced that her silent but
ardent farewell had been heard.
Their
school-bus was parked near the gates at the bottom of the hill. As the kids
queued up to enter the bus, Anjali saw Satya leaning against the back of the
bus, finishing off a packet of crisps and a bottle of coke, and when she caught
his drooping, bored eyes, he slurped and munched with exaggerated relish. She
knew that he had not attended the service and rightly guessed that he had not
even bothered to enter the Cathedral grounds. She found his insouciance
galling.
She walked up to him
and asked, ‘Do you have to party here … before the grieving?’ When he did not
respond, she continued, ‘Can’t you at least pretend to be sensitive?’
‘Is that what you did
out there … pretending?’ he queried.
She stared at him,
tears of anger and sadness welling up in her eyes.
‘I don’t think you
will understand,’ she said, trying hard to be cool and restrained.
She had been a pet of
the music teacher and the death had affected her deeply. She had visited him in
the hospital, along with another teacher, and that night, at home, sobbed uncontrollably
when she talked with her folks about his wasted body. Her parents had later
admonished that teacher for taking her, without their permission, and for
exposing her to the cruel reality of death.
Satya watched her
closely, probably sensing the turmoil within her. He taunted her with a wry
grin, waiting for her tears to break through the fragile dam. When the first
tear rolled down her cheek, he was ready with the next assault.
‘He was a paedophile,
you know?’
Anjali’s anger poured
out in a hoarse whisper, ‘He was not. If only you knew him like I did. He was
like a father to me.’
‘Well…’ Satya said
with a slow drawl, ‘he was not interested in girls, was he?’ Her trembling
anger and sadness seemed to spur him further, ‘Or, maybe, you did not realize.’
He laughed at her.
She experienced a
surging hate, rising like bile to leave a bitter aftertaste, and it hit her
with a force that she thought impossible. If she had a knife, she would have
tried to kill him then and there.
‘You are just
despicable. The worst kind of…’ she was overwrought with emotion.
Satya carried on,
unaffected, ‘One of my family friends … he said his uncle, a doctor, treated
your lovely teacher … guess for what?’ He left it hanging cruelly unsaid.
She moved away from
him, and back with the rest of the class she had thought out loud her wish to
put away that source of filthy insinuations.
For many days, she
felt his words like a knife repeatedly stabbing and then thrusting deep, twisting
and mutilating within, shredding her mind and body to pieces. She was no
ingénue but like most girls then (for that matter, like most boys too) in this
small middle-class town, she had remained insulated. In those days of the
eighties, with government controlled media and vapid newspapers, such news and doubts
usually remained hushed, and surfaced as near-silent whispers in the
disjoint groups of teachers and students, with parents never even getting to
know or maybe, not wanting to know. In the weeks that followed the burial,
Anjali heard the same accusations voiced by members of her close group of peers
but she could not forget how brutally Satya had corrupted that sad memory.
Anjali studiously
avoided him after that day. She promised herself that she would do just that
for their two remaining years in school and hoped she would never even see him
after their school days. Her plans were spoiled by two events in the final
year.
In the first, she was
involved only indirectly. Her best friend Deepthi fell in love with Satya. That
was partly fuelled by his brilliance in academics and extracurricular activities
but the main catalyst turned out to be some type of charitable sympathy or
altruistic empathy borne out of knowing his closely-guarded personal history.
Deepthi had a glimpse of it through a mutual acquaintance of their families and
she got to know that he was nearly an orphan.
‘…or maybe even worse than one,’ Deepthi said
before describing his case to Anjali.
His father and two
elder siblings died in a car crash when he was three. They were then living in
the Middle East. He and his mother survived that crash and they returned from
abroad to live with his mother’s folks.
He had come out of the crash miraculously unhurt but his mother remained
bedridden till she died two years later. During those two years, she made it
clear to her young child that she thought his birth had brought the bad luck.
He stayed in that house for three more years till his maternal grandparents
died, both their deaths ominously occurring within a month. A cousin close to
Satya also died of viral flu around that time. That devout family prayed
fervently and sought the advice of priests and astrologers. Prayers and
sacrifices were offered with increasing regularity. The house and inmates were
exorcized of bad spirits. Satya, believed to be at the epicenter of those
deadly aftershocks, had to wear charms and follow special rituals. He lasted
there for four more months before he was shifted to his paternal grandmother’s
house. She was a devout person too but Satya reminded her of her dead son,
Satya’s father, and that sentiment alone saved him from the streets.
Fortunately, the deaths that followed Satya did not cross that threshold. An uncle
who inherited the ancestral house and his ever-growing family also lived there.
The uncle tolerated Satya’s presence in that house with great reluctance and,
in unequivocal words, promised to chuck him out at the first sign of bad omens.
Satya had a small room in the back of the house, near the kitchen and the
servants’ quarters, and he had little else to say as his.
Anjali was perturbed
by his precarious situation but that did not interfere with her grasp of his
harmful nature. She tried to make her best friend understand that her misplaced
love would only lead to hurt but her advice fell on deaf ears. Deepthi gushed senselessly
about
‘…his careful
indifference … and careless insensitivity … the aura of a recluse…’
When all her good-natured
attempts to influence her friend’s decision failed, Anjali clearly stated the
obvious, ‘Satya doesn’t give two hoots about you.’
‘You are just plain jealous,’ Deepthi
retorted, ‘others can’t have what you can’t get, huh?’
The cuts on both
sides proved to be deep. Anjali cursed the guy involved for wrecking the girls’
friendship. As for Deepthi, rather than impeding her progress towards love, the
barb spurred on her infatuation. Deepthi decided on the quick and direct
approach.
On a Saturday
morning, a holiday, she phoned Satya at home.
‘Satya here...’ His
deep voice came on the line.
‘Guess who…?’ Deepthi
asked coyly, realizing too late that she had deviated from her plans for a swift
and direct conquest.
There was an intimate
silence on the line, as if Satya was thinking. Then, he said a name of a girl
in their class; he heard her say no; he paused and thought again; he tried
another name; and, that continued till he went through half a dozen names in
their class. Deepthi then reverted to her original plan.
‘This is Deepthi.’
‘Who…?’
‘Your classmate,’ she
explained patiently.
He was silent again
for a while, and then he asked innocently, ‘Are you the one who walks around
with Anjali?’ That reference, presumably intentional, summarily ended the
infatuation and also accomplished the proverbial trick of hitting two birds
with one stone by bringing in Anjali into that disintegrating ménage.
‘Yes,’ Deepthi
admitted.
‘What can I do for
you?’ his cloying innocence continued.
‘Nothing,’ the call
ended.
As Anjali expected,
Satya did not end the affair with just that much. Before the first class on the
Monday that followed, nearly their whole class and most of the other senior
divisions too had his intimate, though racy, version of Deepthi’s call. That
spread of information was rather remarkable in that age without e-mails or
mobiles and with expensive telephony usually restricted to telegraphic grim
messages such as ‘passed’, away from life or nearly so in exams. If Guess-who-Deepthi,
as she was known in school from that day, had been on talking terms with
Anjali, she would have confided to her ex-best-friend that they shared an
object of hate.
Other than for this minor
intrusion in the early part of their final year, the cruel drag of daily school
routine allowed Anjali to stick to her resolve of remaining immune to Satya’s
presence. When extracurricular competitive events threatened to put them
together, she made excuses not to participate. On the few occasions when she
had to, she never lowered her guard. Satya used these opportunities to goad
her. His sneering look and repulsive talk made her blood boil but she refused
to give him the satisfaction of having a bitter hateful confrontation.
In late autumn of that
year, the two were selected to represent the school in an essay writing
competition. Since it was a prestigious inter-State affair, the Principal had
directly approached Anjali’s father and sought his permission to include her in
the two-member team that would travel to the city of Trichy in the neighbouring
state. Even before Anjali could argue with or explain to her father, her
participation was confirmed and she could not pull out of that commitment.
Till the date of departure, she prayed that
either she or Satya or both would succumb to some terrible illness. On that
day, when she reached the bus terminal along with her parents and two younger
siblings, and saw only the lady-teacher who was to accompany them but not Satya,
she smiled and her spirits lifted for the first time in many days. But the
smile vanished after a few minutes when Satya reached the bus-terminal alone
and stood away from the group. Her father went up to Satya and Anjali watched
them talk to each other, amiably and with mutual respect.
In a brief private
moment before departure, her father told her, ‘I am glad that he is with you and
the teacher. I was worried … two young ladies on this long bus trip … but not
now…’
Anjali did not voice
her own fears, not wanting to alarm her father. She guessed that Satya was up
to his usual tricks and that she just had to wait for something nasty from him.
The onward journey
was uneventful. The ladies sat together and Satya kept to himself in the seat
across the aisle. At the competition too, stars seemed to have aligned well for
Anjali. She came out on top with Satya in an uncharacteristic third position
and their team won the overall championship. Anjali was in a celebratory mood,
happy with her own achievement, though nonplussed by Satya’s placing. Then,
soon after the prize distribution, the situation changed and Anjali was
resigned to her fate of having her predictions come true.
The lady teacher with
them had received the unfortunate news that her mother, living with the
teacher’s brother in Madras, had slipped and fallen, breaking a hip bone. The
young teacher called up Anjali’s father to explain her predicament. The latter
kindly advised the teacher to go directly to Madras from Trichy rather than
returning with the kids and then travelling back again, wasting time and money.
He told the teacher that he trusted Satya. Anjali’s father also assured her that
he would not inform the school of this arrangement, knowing that the school
authorities would not be so kind to her and that they would take it as a gross
dereliction of duty on the teacher’s part to leave the kids alone.
Anjali suppressed her
protest though she was being torn apart. She knew that her father would not
like her to be inconsiderate to the teacher. She was not even sure if her
loving father would understand her fears. When she looked in Satya’s direction,
his blank poker face only indicated to her that he was waiting for the right
moment to strike in those hours when she would be left alone with him.
The teacher took them
to the bus station, made reservations for the young students on the evening bus
and then left immediately to catch the train to Madras. The two students had an
hour to wait for the 6 pm bus. They did not talk to each other. Anjali kept her
head buried in a magazine and Satya reclined on the hard seat observing the
rush hour crowd. The bus did not turn up and after many inquiries they got to
know that the bus had been cancelled. Satya, who had a better grasp than Anjali
of the local language Tamil, managed to learn that their only option was to
catch the 8 pm bus to Madurai, though there were no seats available for
reservation, and from there, catch another bus to their hometown.
Satya phoned Anjali’s
father and updated him about the latest developments. Anjali talked to her
family after him and even that did not manage to lift Anjali’s flagging
spirits. She did notice that Satya did not call anyone on his side. He offered her
biscuits but she declined, feeling sick with worry.
The darkness of the
night and the dim lighting at the bus terminal gave the place an edgy, noir air.
The swaggering, cursing men smelled of sweat and liquor, lurking around like menacing
predators. The few ladies there at that hour were mostly old and shriveled, and
they seemed to frown at Anjali as if she was there just asking for trouble. Even
the policemen on patrol were far from comforting with their loud callous
guttural commands, searching stripping looks, heavy mustache and bulging
potbellies. Images of recent brutal incidents involving young girls in
avoidable circumstances pounded the girl’s head like a bludgeoning
sledgehammer.
Satya maintained a
constant vigil over her, with an adolescent’s exaggerated sense of duty and
bravado coupled with a vicious edge. But Anjali hardly noticed his efforts, her
senses still drowning in the flood of real and imaginary fears. He tried to
talk to her. She heard him ask about her family. She replied mechanically. She
had nothing to ask him in return about that. She remembered her earlier
puzzlement regarding the results and asked him how he had managed to commit
hara-kiri in the competition (the topic for the main round had been: ‘Oppression
– is there an end?’). He admitted that he had included a few points he could
have avoided, especially after knowing the constitution of the jury. For the
left-leaning judge, he had his arguments about how communists and the left-leaning
lot had a symbiotic (or even, parasitic) and therefore non-liberating relationship
with the oppressed classes. He also tried to convince the two women in the jury
that most woes of the female sex are self-inflicted and further taunted them by
saying that the fairer or weaker sex had little chance of escape because they themselves
considered life more comfortable within the constraints imposed by men than
without. He had concluded that as long as the holy tried to lord over the
unholy, there would always be the oppressed. Much before that gleeful
exposition of his main thesis, Anjali realized that it was actually a wonder he
had managed to get the third position.
By the time the 8 pm
bus arrived at the bus stand, Anjali was in a much better state of mind,
stimulated by the talk and feeling less uncomfortable with Satya. She found the
occupants and the cramped bus less intimidating. She still expected Satya to
unleash his usual self at her and assumed that he was trying to soften her
stand against him to catch her unawares.
The bus was crowded and it gathered packs of
passengers at frequent stops. There were teams of manual labourers jostling for
standing space with large gangs of unruly loud college students. The young and
the old in that first group of itinerants tried to encroach into the reserved
seats but these were stoutly defended by the easily agitated families, young
couples, affluent traders and businessmen.
Anjali found standing
space near a mother with three young kids occupying a seat for two. Satya stood
next to Anjali, shielding her from the crowd, his hands resting on the headrests
of the seats between which Anjali stood, with his left arm supporting her back,
nearly cradling her. Her right hand was next to his on the headrest she faced,
her arm and side leaning against his front.
At some point in that
tiring journey, under the cover of darkness within and in the passing light
from without, she noticed him staring at her. Her face was hidden by the
shadows and he did not realize that she was looking at him too. The look in his
eyes troubled her. There was tenderness there for a long while and then, rather
suddenly, that fragility seemed to shatter with some gut-wrenching pain or
anguish. That look of pain, fear and sadness was quickly subdued and it was his
usual impassive and disinterested face that remained at the end. She too
assumed the same.
The whole sequence
must have been brief though it seemed to her that it lasted for ages. Later,
she even wondered if she had imagined it all. The raucous noise within the bus,
the smell of tightly packed bodies and the sight of threatening strangers
around, and even her fear of Satya, gave way to the new rush of thoughts that
stunned her following that look. That left her cold and numb for a few moments
till realization made her whole body flush, as if with fever. She experienced
joy and sadness together, and a strange sense of calm coexisted with heightened
excitement. She felt secure in that close confined space that had seemed
claustrophobic till a few moments earlier. The swaying crowd in the bus brought
them closer for fleeting seconds. She could feel him tense against her, and she,
unsure though ready, wondered if she could give herself more. The two
maintained their silence throughout that trip from Trichy to Madurai.
At Madurai, they were
lucky to catch the last bus to their hometown and also fortunate to get seats. Before
leaving Madurai, Satya called Anjali’s father again with the latest update
about their journey. Anjali’s father was glad to hear his daughter speak with
better spirit that time. The two slept throughout that second leg of the
journey, exhausted and finally feeling safe. With each mile towards their home
territory, they were also returning to their normal roles.
The bus reached their
hometown around 7 am. Anjali was glad to see her parents waiting at the bus stand.
While the bus cruised to its place in the stand, Anjali turned to Satya with a
smile and said, ‘Thanks.’
Satya leaned towards
her and whispered harshly, ‘Don’t make it sound as if we fucked.’
Anjali had expected something
like that from him when she had decided to express her gratitude. She retaliated
with a bigger smile. In return, he glared at her furiously.
Anjali got off the
bus and went to her family. Her father gave her a quick hug and then went to
Satya. She saw them shake hands and wish each other well. Her father offered
the boy a lift to his house. Satya declined the offer politely, took his leave rather
formally and quickly left the scene, disappearing into the morning crowd.
In their last few
months before the school-leaving Board exams, his aloof nature went into overdrive.
People put it down to the tension before exams. Anjali thought differently but decided
to let nature take its own course.
Thirteen years passed
before they met again and talked to each other. She was a doctor by then,
specializing in critical care and general medicine. She had not married,
blaming her studies and career for that state of affairs. Off and on, she heard
about him, though little, but their paths never crossed.
Satya tried new and
challenging areas in technology, flitting in and out of booming start-ups, quitting
before the bust or losing interest when the love reached the plateau of routine.
His personal life was a vacuum. By chance, or by design, he remained oblivious
of people in his past, including Anjali, and he travelled through life
incognito and at least outwardly amnesiac.
As soon as he was on
reasonably firm footing financially, he got himself a place of his own.
Ironically, his folks flocked to him then. After getting a home, he decided to
have people of his own too. He married at twenty five. With his customary
detachment, Satya had found for himself a strange suitable girl through the
classified in the local newspaper. His folks were there to protest.
‘You are too young,’
they said. They were bothered about the prospective bride. Her family did not
match with their fine pedigree.
‘You are challenging
fate.’ They backed that forecast with astrological charts about his misaligned
stars. Some shrewd voices noted that it might be a calculated challenge on his
part.
‘If there is no love,
death might not strike,’ but that did not convince all.
Satya told his folks
to get lost and went ahead with his plans.
By twenty nine, he
was a widower with a three year old daughter. His wife had died suddenly of an
aneurysm. His folks flocked back to goad, advice and gloat; and worse, treated
his three year old child with false tenderness, pregnant sighs and careless
muttering, ‘Ah! When will his bad luck hit the child?’
Satya shifted to a
less taxing job that allowed him to take care of his daughter. He also cut off all
connections with his folks. He was a loving father and tried hard not to expose
his child to wrong beliefs or superstitions. On his part, Satya projected a
cool, reasonable and even indifferent attitude towards his kid’s well-being.
Not once did the young daughter feel that Satya was troubled by worry or
unfounded fears. But it was in the air.
When the liberalized
nineties gave way to a booming new millennium, his hometown too had changed
fast. Nuclear families became the norm rather than the exception. The
middle-classes assumed chic and rich ways. The liberal and the conservatives
teamed up. The left tried to appear as an alternative right. The difference
between the secular and the hardliner became a matter of semantics. Caste,
class and religion became more distinct and self-serving. People revived the
religious rituals, practices and beliefs that their forefathers had debunked with
great difficulty just a century earlier. It was difficult to escape its
pervasive influence. That God got back its voice and ruled the stage.
Two years went by
without incident. Then, Satya’s five year old daughter fell seriously ill. Satya
took leave from office and stayed by his kid’s side. After a prolonged fever,
the child was hospitalized and it was in that hospital that they met. Without
wasting time on formalities or greetings, he brought Anjali up to speed on his
daughter’s condition. She promised to help him in every way possible. She
monitored the kid’s condition, and liaised with the experts in the paedeatric division
and her own critical care unit. They were all stumped by the girl’s illness and
symptoms. The situation seemed bleak. Anjali answered Satya’s persistent
queries carefully, never letting out that the doctors were losing hope. Satya
remained calm and even though she was not unaccustomed to it, she was perturbed
by his unnatural passivity with regard to his daughter’s condition.
On the tenth day,
after another round of scans detected a shadow around the lower part of the kid’s
lungs, Anjali learned from the experts that they had finally got a
breakthrough. They checked the earlier scans and admitted to Anjali that they
had missed an important, though difficult, clue present even in the first x-ray
films. They had overlooked the evidence of a strain of pneumonia. Without
wasting any more time, the right antibiotics were immediately prescribed and administered.
Anjali left the cheering experts to find Satya to tell him the good news.
She did not find
Satya in the kid’s room. She enquired with the duty nurses. One of them had
seen Satya take the rarely used stairs at the back. She searched for him there.
Not finding him on that floor, she went down one flight of stairs. She heard
some sound from below and looked down the stairwell. She saw him sitting on the
stairs two floors further below. He was crying like a boy – repeatedly weeping,
trying hard to control the sobs and then breaking down once again. Anjali
retraced her steps and went back to the kid’s room, and waited for Satya. He
appeared after ten minutes, his face as usual blank, and his eyes impassive,
stone-cold.
She told him the good
news and also that the experts expected the girl to recover fast. Satya
received the information without any change in his countenance. He thanked her
formally and stood near the door as if he expected her to leave him alone with
his daughter. But instead of doing so, Anjali moved towards the girl’s side.
She examined a bouquet of flowers near the bed and looked at the card within
that bouquet. She looked up at Satya and quizzed him with a raised eyebrow.
‘A well-wisher,’
Satya informed her.
‘A very truthful loving
one, it seems.’ She then read the words on the card, ‘A short love is better
than a long hate.’ She looked at him. They burst out laughing together.
‘Yesterday, we got another
encouraging beauty … apparently to jazz up my life here,’ he said, ‘God calls
the lovely innocent early.’
‘From where did you
get such morbid well-wishers with a taste for crappy lines?’ she asked him.
‘Biologically … relatives…’ he replied.
‘That explains … do
you get anything other than gutter-talk from them?’ she asked.
He shrugged and looked
up, to indicate the source of such bad fate.
Anjali recollected in
an off-hand manner, ‘I came across the mother of such crappy lines some time
back…’ she paused, looked straight into his eyes before saying, ‘if you live
scared of love’s death, alone with death love will live.’
‘O Big Chief Dry
River! You so deep me no follow…’ he said with a mock Red Indian accent. The smile
and tenderness in his eyes faded quickly but still staring, he reverted to his
usual disinterested tone, ‘Have you figured out that one?’
‘How would I know
anything about that?’ she sounded wistful.
She moved towards the
kid’s bed and examined the flow of the drip. She caressed the sleeping girl’s
cheek.
After a brief silence
he asked her hesitantly, ‘You … any kids?’
‘Don’t make it sound
as if we fucked,’ she mimicked his harsh whisper well.
He stared at her. She
stared back, as if she was challenging him.
‘It doesn’t suit you,’
he said.
She shrugged, ‘It helps,
right? To avoid…’
Satya did not respond
to that. Anjali moved towards the door. Satya stepped away from the door moving
towards the bed, looking at his daughter. She left the room, closing the door
behind her. He then turned back and stared at the closed door.
