by Shobhaa De
It was on one of his visits to Bombay (he’d brought some obscure play here, I forget which) that we met. Someone had sent us free tickets. I think a cigarette company was sponsoring the scheduled four performances. We went because we had nothing better to do—and I’d run out of books. A few minutes after the play started, the husband suddenly perked up.
“I know that guy.”
“Which one—the pansy or the hunk?”
“The one with the beard.”
“And the eyes?”
“I don’t know about his eyes—but that’s him—that’s old Krish. I’m sure—why don’t you check the program? I haven’t brought my glasses—go on—just check the names.”
“All right. Don’t get so excited. The way you’re going on, one would think it was Robert Redford himself.”
“It’s not that. I used to know the guy. We were at college together. He was quite a fellow in those days—one of those anarchists or something.”
“What fun. Maybe he’s a terrorist in disguise. Maybe he’ll blow up this theater at the end of the performance. OK—I’ve got it—is his name Krish Mukherjee?”
“Yes, that’s good old Krish.We must meet him backstage. I wonder if he’ll remember me.”
“Why shouldn’t he—you remember him—don’t you?”
“That’s different. I told you he was a revolutionary or something.”
“Anarchist.You said anarchist.”
“Same thing.”
“Not quite.” Somebody in the row ahead of us ssh-ed angrily and that ended our conversation.
But we did go backstage. I remember it vividly. Krish was standing in front of the dressing table with a towel around his neck. He would have looked like a Davis Cup player, only he was removing his makeup. He looked so absurd, this bearded brute carefully removing the rouge from what little one could see of his cheeks!
“Krish?” my husband said with some hesitation.
“Yes?” He turned to look at us.
“Hey, fatso—it’s you! What a surprise. So, how’s the business? Minting money?” he shouted, throwing an affectionate arm around the husband. For the next couple of minutes, there was much horseplay with Krish punching his old friend in the belly—“soft underside”—and generally indulging in the sort of juvenile play men invariably fall into when they’re meeting up after a long gap. Suddenly, the husband noticed me standing awkwardly with a forced smile on my face. The sort of smile wives have to put on with a matching “men will be men” expression.
“Meet the old girl, Krish,” said the husband without mentioning my name. Krish grabbed my hand roughly and bent low over it with an exaggerated bow.
“Charmed,” he said and straightened up.
“Hey Krish—what are you doing tonight? Come on home with us. Potluck—don’t know what the old girl has rustled up—but it will be edible. And of course, there’s plenty of daaru shaaru.You still drink like a fish, don’t you?”
Krish handled this exchange with suave tolerance. “Well, let me see—I do have a cast party to attend—you know, it’s the done thing—postmortem and all that. But maybe I can run away early and catch up with both of you. How about that? Don’t wait dinner—but save the booze. I’ll bring my own straw.”
A hastily scribbled address was pressed on him and off we went to check on what the “old girl” had “rustled up.”
I deeply resented the husband’s patronizing tone. I hated being referred to as “the old girl,” it made me feel like a bag of bones. I didn’t like the put-downs about potluck and the expression on my husband’s face when he introduced me. Had I imagined it, or did he look slightly ashamed? I’d begun to wonder about that lately. Maybe I was being oversensitive, but I thought he was invariably apologetic about me in the presence of his friends. As if I was not good enough. I’d even asked him once. He’d dismissed it irritatedly. “What’s the matter with you? Chip on the shoulder or what? Why should I feel ashamed of you? Have you done something shameful?” Oh hell—it wasn’t any use at all. But that feeling stayed and that evening it was more pronounced than ever. My husband was lost in a reverie on the way home. I wondered what it was that these two unlikely persons had shared? Women? Books? Music?
“What do you have in common with that man?” I asked.
“Which man? You mean Krish? I don’t know. I just liked the guy. He was different, full of mad ideas. He tried to organize a protest march, then he got arrested for doing something stupid. I forget what—maybe breaking tables in the cafeteria. He was always up to something. He tried to stage Shakespeare in Bengali.Then he knocked up some Swedish girl. He used to write poetry—I didn’t understand it, but the college magazine published a few of his poems. He dropped out for a while to write subversive articles for some underground paper. Mad fellow. But a great guy.”
“You still haven’t answered my question—what did you have in common with him?”
“Oh—I don’t know. Wait a minute—I know—food. We both used to die for Indian food. When we got desperate we’d attempt to cook together. He’d fry the fish and I’d make the dal chawal. And we both liked music. He’d play Nikhil Banerjee while cooking and I’d switch on Aida while eating. Food and booze. We had some good times drinking—going to all the bars, or just getting some bourbon and staying home watching television. I used to listen to him talking—without paying much attention.That man doesn’t stop talking once he starts.You’ll find out when he comes home tonight.”
CHAPTER 13
WHAT I FOUND OUT WAS SOMETHING FAR DIFFERENT. INSTEAD OF THE fiery revolutionary who went wenching in the West, waving his libido like a lal nishan flag, I found a shy, sensitive, mixed-up man who I instantly fell in love with. He arrived pretty late, clutching a paper bag with a bottle of rum in it. In the other hand, he awkwardly held a chameli gajra, which he thrust at me saying, “This is for you—someone was selling it at the traffic lights.”
The husband repeated the back slapping routine with plenty of ’60s American slang thrown in. “So, what’s cookin’?” he asked and Krish looked embarrassed.
“Oh, nothing much—the usual, work, theater, that sort of thing.”
“Family?”
“No—I mean, yes. Actually nobody would have me, but I am married.”
“Great—finally joined the club, have you? Let’s have a drink to that. With or without ice?”
“What?”
“Scotch, of course.”
“No, no, don’t waste that stuff on me. I don’t touch it. If you don’t mind, I’ll stick to rum—actually, I’ve brought some along.”
“Forget it, yaar. What is this rum-shum? Since when? This is a celebration—Black Label—that’s it.” So Black Label it was, with a sweet-lime juice for me. I could see Krish recoiling each time the husband hollered for a servant or yelled at the ayah for not replenishing the ice. I sat silently as I generally did when his friends were around. At one point, I picked up a book and started to read.
“Are we boring you that much?” Krish asked and I put away my book guiltily.
“My wife is different, yaar,” the husband explained with what I thought was a sneer. “She reads books and sleeps—those are her two main hobbies.”
“What are you reading?” Krish asked gently.
“Something stupid—one of these cheapie bestsellers. Ludlum.”
“That’s a fun read.”
“Fun?” scoffed the husband. “Waste of time, if you ask me.” And he excused himself to go to the loo.
Krish waited for him to leave the room, leaned forward and touched my hand. “I thought the chamelis would cheer you up.”
I quickly withdrew my hand and looked at the door.
“It’s OK—he’s still in the loo.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll find out—if you’re interested. By the way,
I like your feet. They have a lot of character.”
Bloody flirt, I thought angrily—my feet—I hated my feet! They were truly awful, with a big toe like a fat, overboiled potato. Character! Maybe he was being bitchy. I was relieved when the husband walked in and asked in his irritating ha-ha way, “So have you two become friends or is the vow of silence still unbroken?” I excused myself saying I had my sleep to catch up on. Krish caught the irony of the remark, but not thick husband, who waved me off gladly and even planted a kiss on my cheek to impress Krish.
He called at noon the next day. “We are planning a little workshop at around four today. I think you’ll enjoy it. Why don’t you come? You can bring your book with you, but please don’t fall asleep while I’m talking—that will hurt my ego and damage my reputation.” I nearly chickened out but then my husband’s taunt about my being feckless suddenly surged through my mind and I thought why the hell not, theater is as good an activity as any to be involved in. Besides, though I didn’t want to admit to it, I wanted to see Krish again. Once again, I had nothing to wear. I didn’t want to look “dressed up” but I didn’t have anything attractively casual either. Khadi would have been an affectation, jeans—well, I was never the jeans sort. I picked a sari at random, thinking—what the hell, why am I acting like a schoolgirl, I bet he’ll be too busy to notice. I reached late and the workshop was well under way. Quickly, I surveyed the room—there were more women than men, and all of them were frighteningly attractive. There was one chain-smoking woman in particular, who gave me an instant complex. She looked so self-assured, so studiedly elegant. I detested her. But more than that, it was the way she was looking at Krish—hungrily. He too was obviously aware of her presence, directing most of his remarks straight at her. I wanted to leave. Suddenly, he stopped midsentence to greet me. “Lovely to see you, glad you could come. The chamelis are waiting for you.” Everybody turned around to stare. It was one hell of a way to make a pass and start an affair.
I won’t trot out the standard line—I didn’t know what I was doing. I bloody well did.The affair seemed inevitable, and was the best thing that could have happened to me. I didn’t feel mortified then, as I don’t now, when I think of it. Neither do I regret it coming to naught. As Anjali would’ve promptly reminded me, had she met Krish, he was not husband material. But he couldn’t have been a better lover. For three years we plunged into what the tabloids call a “torrid affair,” the better part of it conducted through letters.There were days when we scribbled over twenty sheets each, in three batches, and sent them off QMS. It came to a stage when the postman was the most important individual in my life. I would wait like a lunatic for the fat envelopes to slip into my hands as I waited this side of the door. I would pounce on Krish’s words and gobble them all up, savoring each one, hungry for more.
The affair was cockeyed from the very beginning. The logistics of it even crazier. He would engineer a trip to Bombay every couple of months. The question of my going to Calcutta did not arise. Though once, when I was feeling really desperate (no letters for a week), I told my husband I felt like going to Calcutta. He was surprised but not suspicious. “Why Calcutta?You don’t know anybody there. Of course, Krish can take care of you. Maybe you could stay with them—I hear his wife is a sweet girl—but how come you want to go to Calcutta?” I just burst into tears and sobbed like a fool. This puzzled him further. “Are you all right? Is there something wrong? Do you need a holiday? Why don’t you visit your family? Maybe you need a checkup. Shall I fix up an appointment with Dr. Kapadia?” I just continued to cry which was pretty uncharacteristic of me. For one mad moment I actually considered “confessing” but something stopped me. What was I going to tell him—I’m having it off with your pal from America? How do you like that? Fortunately, I shut myself up . . . and allowed him to dismiss me as yet another hysterical woman.
In my more rational moments I found the whole thing awfully depressing—the subterfuge and tricks we had to resort to. I don’t suppose Krish had the resources to make long-distance calls. So I was the one calling. Then there were all the rules that adultery immediately imposes: no calls on Sundays, no calls at home, letters to be destroyed immediately after reading (I didn’t follow this rule faithfully and it got me into a lot of trouble later on—but I’m getting ahead of myself), no presents. There were times I would die to hear Krish’s voice, and quite often this coincided with a Sunday.
I remember one occasion distinctly. Krish was leaving for London. He was going to be away for a fortnight. I wasn’t sure he’d find the time to write or call, and I had to speak to him before he left for the airport. I decided to break the rules for once and rang him. It was a reckless decision and one that I regretted later. After much difficulty, I got through. It must have been around seven in the evening. The servant answered. “Saab, memsaab bahar gaye hai,” he said in heavily accented Hindi. I couldn’t resist asking where they’d gone. Innocently the servant replied that his saab had taken the memsaab for an ice-cream. I gagged hearing those words. I honestly thought I’d throw up all over the phone. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like such a betrayal. How could he do it—ice-cream! The effect of that word ice-cream lingered for a long time. I couldn’t get myself to eat it for over a year. I never asked Krish about this episode. In fact, it proved to be the turning point in our relationship. When he returned from London, I felt tense and hostile. All of me was knotted up. Maybe I was heading for a breakdown. Even books didn’t help.
My husband knew nothing. Sensed nothing. He seemed terribly preoccupied and I assumed it was a complicated business deal. For the first time in my life, I felt like dying. I felt sick of myself and full of self-pity. I hadn’t told anybody about Krish and me. It was a secret I felt extremely possessive about.
But Ritu managed to pry it out of me one evening. I was at my lowest. Out of some sort of crazy defiance, I’d enrolled myself in a suburban theater group. It was to prove something to Krish, something nebulous—what even I didn’t know. His letters were less frequent now, though I continued to write mine (at the office address, of course) as feverishly as before. I would drive myself into a state if three days went by with no contact. I’d imagine he’d found someone else or that he had rediscovered his wife. And for all this I’d detest myself. It was a demeaning experience and I felt I was wasting away, draining myself physically and emotionally. It was beginning to show. I looked wan and wild-eyed. My day began and ended with the letter or the absence of it. Everything hinged on it—even my meals. I’d make insane promises to myself. “If the letter comes, I’ll eat my lunch—if not, I’ll starve.” I began to imagine that fasting or punishing myself in some way would make the letter arrive. In saner moments I’d tell myself this was crazy—the letter had assumed a life of its own. It was as if it had become independent of the sender. I’d feel angry or happy at the letter, not at Krish. I’d blame the postman, the weather, Indian Railways—everybody and everything else. My own letters must have sounded manic, but I didn’t know it. Obsessed with the thought of love, I was behaving like Adele H, chasing an illusion like a woman possessed.
Intuitive and shrewd, Ritu zeroed in immediately. “It’s some man isn’t it?” I suppose I was bursting to tell someone. And Ritu had the knack of being sympathetic, particularly in matters such as these. “Don’t forget I have a doctorate in the subject,” she laughed and urged me to tell all. It was such a wonderful feeling to be able to talk about Krish. It all came gushing forth in schoolgirlish garb. Ritu said later that my entire appearance underwent a dramatic transformation as I spoke. She said I had looked twelve years old, and even my voice and accent had changed as I broke my silence on Krish. She may well have been right for once I had begun talking Ritu became unimportant, irrelevant, it was just the sound of my own voice talking about Krish that was thrilling me.
I heard her ask, “What is it that you like about him?”
And I said, “His teeth. I’ve never seen such sexy teeth. Strong, white, large.”
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br /> “What about the rest of him?”
“He has knobby knees and they hurt.”
“And the rest, you know, the rest??”
“He’s not exactly Playgirl pinup material—but I love him. I absolutely love him. I want him. I can’t bear the thought of not having him as my own.”
“You mean, you want to marry him?”
“Yes.”
“Does he want to marry you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I want him. I’ll go crazy.”
“Wouldn’t it be simpler to get all this straightened out—why don’t you ask him whether he has marriage in mind? From what you tell me, and to quote our friend Anjali, this man doesn’t sound like husband material. It’s best you have him as a lover—even a long-distance one—till one of you decides to move on—let’s hope it is you. I know your marriage isn’t fantastic, but it isn’t a total write-off either. If you can have both—a boring husband in the home and an exciting lover on the sidelines—perfect.”
“You are making it all sound so sordid and cynical. For the first time in my adult life, I’m feeling ready to give of myself, to risk love, and you are saying it’s not worth the effort. Just imagine if I let it go now, it will never happen to me again. I don’t mind the hurt, but I want to give it all I have, or I’ll regret it always.”
“Then, why don’t you, for starters, come clean with your own husband? Why don’t you make a couple of hard decisions? Why don’t you get to the bottom of this with Krish? Ask him if he’s told his wife. I am certain he hasn’t. Men like him don’t. And why should he? It would only complicate his comfortable existence and cause trouble.”
