As S and M talk, W walks over to the curtain on M’s side of the stage.
S: It will never go away.
M: Talk some sense into yourself.
S: Talk some sense into him.
M: Be optimistic.
S: Be courageous.
M: Be reasonable.
S: Be mine!
M: All this – they are just words.
S: If there are no words, what will your soul live on?
M: You can never trust a writer.
S: You can never trust the dying.
M: Stop now, before you write too much. This is one regret you will not be able to undo. Listen to me.
W resolutely draws close the curtains on M’s side of the stage. She then walks across the stage towards S who quickly climbs up to the platform. W sits down on the bottom rung of the ladder, in the spotlight, facing the audience.
W: I could barely survive three years of the illness. How did he manage for decades?
S: Forget him. He needed the disappointment as much as his idealism. Can’t you see? He has wallowed in his misery to his heart’s content. Nobody else mattered. His family was supposed to suffer with him and for him. He certainly succeeded in that.
W: You are the worst type of cynic. You have no life to look forward to. Don’t you feel lonely here? Don’t you wish—
S (cutting her short): It is childish to make wishes. Not everything has to be about you or me.
W (standing up as if struck by a thought): He is right. All this talking is in vain. Nobody is listening. The more I give it a name, I humiliate him, I expose myself.
S: The more tormented a writer, the greater is the clarity in the writing.
W (puts her head in her hands and shakes it in despair): Shut up! Don’t you ever stop? I need to think …
S quickly lies down. She drops her hands as if to touch W’s head but does not. S’s hand caresses the air above W’s head. Her voice is gentler.
S: You said it would end at thirty-one. What happened? Why did you change your mind?
W: I did not change my mind. That old self did die – that old life sweated, bled, oozed its way out of me.
S: Your choices were limited, but clear. You can go on for years like that man there, pretending the illness is the cure, till one lone organ, the liver, spoke the truth of death. Or you can leave with great conviction, just like I did, with one leap.
W: I was taking all these medicines – they were supposed to help me sleep, supposed to make me less sad, and there were all these other medicines for every real and imagined ailment. I had always joked about the pharmacy in our drawer, and the joke was both handy and deadly serious now. (She begins to enact her words) I filled a bowl to the brim with all the medicines I could find, especially the ones that would put me to sleep. I poured out a glass of something, I don’t remember, but it came from the liquor cabinet. I typed out a farewell email to someone in another country. I apologized to the dog for leaving under her watch. I was ready …
M: The dog …
Both S and W turn their heads to look at the same spot on the floor.
W: The dog would not take her eyes off me. She knew I was ready to go. She had watched over me for days, weeks now, doing all she could to keep me in this world. That night, she knew she would have to try her hardest. (mimics the action of pushing a dog down, a dog that is jumping at her arm, pushing her back) Stop it, stop jumping – what’s wrong with you?! Leave me alone – stop it!
S: I saw it too. She had never jumped at you like that before, her paws pushing into your arms, again and again …
W: I did not have the heart to lock her away, I did not have the heart to let her watch me go – we just wrestled on, the two of us, woman and beast, for long … how long?
S: Till … the doorbell rang.
They both turn their heads as a doorbell rings. Neither of them moves. The doorbell rings again. W gets up with a start.
S: You and I were sharing heartbeats that night. I begged you not to open the door. I was ready to leave, so were you, but then … why did you stay behind?
As S is talking, W is pulling the curtains close on S’s side.
S: Tell the truth, even if painful, it is redemptive. And it is the greatest offering of love you can give him. (realizes that W will be pulling the curtain over her and raises voice) Wait, don’t shut me out. I am wrong, this is not about him, this is about you and me. Listen to me. Listen. (doorbell rings again, more urgently) Answer the door. You will live to write about it. And the story reads better this way. Don’t you see it? A telling has more depth than silences. Wait, don’t do anything in a hurry. Let me read you the rest of the poem –
As S begins to recite the last stanzas of the Roethke poem, W hurries over to open the curtains on the other side, where M had been seated. The stage is lit and empty. She runs down the stage and looks around for M but he is not to be seen.
S: Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
As the last lines of the poem are being read, W runs over to S’s side of the platform and hastily pulls open the curtain. It is empty too. She clambers up the ladder and walks around the platform, looking for them both. Suddenly she stops still on the same edge that had tempted her at the end of the first scene. She turns and looks at the audience.
The stage is engulfed in darkness.
One More Reason Why
SGM, my father, was born an old soul. Like me.
He had a father who was prone to mood swings and explosions of rage, a father who left a deep imprint on him. Like mine.
SGM had a compulsion to retell his life many times. Each time he tinkered with the telling, it was a recasting of his life too. His life was his material and he flaunted it constantly. An audience was never lacking. Wherever he went, he gathered a crowd around him, or he would put a friendly arm around a passer-by and hustle him over for a cup of tea, or it would be groups of friends (for he made friends everywhere) and relatives (he made friends out of some of them) who sat back to be entertained by his tales, or it would be us, the three women in his house who heard of the same event one more time but never exactly the same story because some little detail would be different – if he had to err, it would be on the side of exaggeration, never prudence. At the end of forty years of telling and listening, many details had gone on to become shamelessly distorted, but nobody cared. Nearly every event was something that had happened to him or had been witnessed. Very rarely did these narratives venture far back enough to encircle his childhood.
His childhood was folded inside him, an origami in the making, and would stay folded. Like mine.
Sometimes, a child-self would be mentioned, but in a material sense. It would be about the grandfather who doted on him and gave him big beautiful coins that are now lost. Or about the massive house this grandfather built, with a door so hefty that it would take four people to close it. Then a few references to a father who refused to be photographed, a tough-willed mother who was querulous, an extended family of many children under one roof. Our father was among the older children, or maybe his sphere of awareness was always towards the younger children around him. He thought of himself as a big brother.
My childhood is like a Monet oil painting – all details are there and yet not there. His is a late Turner – one rousing detail, the rest effect.
That detail has to do with his high school. While he was growing up, a child could only study till the seventh grade in the village school, after which one trekked to the nearest town to complete high school. The girls in the family, not allowed to travel, studied only till the seventh grade and the boys continued on the education track to get as far as their brains and means
took them. In those days, my father said, one had to choose a stream of study (science, commerce or arts) in the eighth grade, and for a boy dreaming of becoming a doctor, it had to be science. That is what he had thought he would do.
There he is, in his tellings, a young boy invited to have a conversation with his school principal who informs him that the government has given permission to expand their village school into a high school with eight, ninth and tenth grades, and this was possible that very year. The catch was that they needed a minimum number of students to be able to do it, and they were short of one boy. Would he stay back to study in the village? It would mean he would have to study commerce or arts instead of science, for a suitable science teacher was yet to be hired, and it would mean that the doctor dream would have to be postponed or cancelled. But. The little boy would be doing a great act of sacrifice and generosity for the whole village, for his little sisters. What would he choose?
At twelve or thirteen, faced with this possibility of gargantuan selflessness, the boy said, I choose to gift a high school education to all the little girls in the village, to my own younger sisters, and never mind my own doctor dreams.
This is how my father told it, with billowing regret and an expanse of philanthropic pride that would become the leitmotif of his moral world. To be born the elder child is to sacrifice, to give up. He said this to me repeatedly, and this is among my earliest memories of him. It was imperative for him to see me give my sister the first pick of anything or to hand over my things to whoever fancied it. Charity did not begin at home for him – it was his home.
An afternoon comes to mind, from when I was the same age as he was in his high school sacrificial story. We were expecting some acquaintances – a family of adults and children – to drop by. The adults we did not care about, but we feared the nature of those particular children. They were not like us – they were vociferous, self-assured and demanding. The sequence of events was predictable to us even at that age. Objects would be pointed at, such as my favourite doll (the one missing an eye and a hand) or any of the odds and ends we have collected (shells, feathers, stamps), and we would be ordered to hand them over, most likely to never see the beloved object again. How we scampered around, my sister and I, hiding whatever we could hide before the visitors came, and how we heaved a sigh of relief when they left without our meagre worldly possessions. We felt exhausted and triumphant.
The expression ‘to give someone the shirt off your back’ has made complete sense to me only in the context of our father.
He would give you the shirt off his back, whether you were in need or not, just because you liked it, and even if it meant he had no hope of ever owning another shirt. He would also give you the shirts off his wife and children’s backs. And if we had no shirts, he would go around and find you one somehow, even if it meant he had to grow cotton, make yarn, weave cloth and stitch it with his own hands. Such was our father.
Everyone agreed – yes, he would give you the shirt off his back, such a good man, this SGM.
The training started early with us, and it was thorough. We were told to never be brats, to see the path ahead as not acquisitional but one of denial. And Discipline was the main organizing principle of parenting. The rule was to never say ‘I want’. If one is asked ‘Do you want?’ then one should say no, irrespective of desire or need. We were barely two feet tall when we knew that the slightest possibility of getting something we wanted lay in refusal. If perchance we did say yes, we would never get it – for that, my father was sure, was what spoiled children.
The same concern about not spoiling children lay behind the stick, the belt, the slapping hand.
There was no awareness that children might end up feeling utterly undeserving if turned into monks who have to hone an ability to refuse, and that it leads to a murky adulthood of repeatedly saying no when one means yes to friends, lovers, authority figures, one’s heart.
My sister G ran away from home once. At barely nine or ten years of age. Her tender spirit broken from the strain of saying no to herself and yes to anything my father decreed. He was absolute in the way one had to live – it was his house, and we did as he said. This applied to my mother too. She cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids and lived by his ways. To adore him, to obey him – her brief was streamlined – and when she did disagree, it was calamitous, but that is the story of their marriage and my bystander’s rights only go thus far.
But it is true that G did take flight from home. It was night, the television was raucous in the background, a Delhi smog had settled into the humming streets, our apartment that hovered two flights of stairs above the streets was a nervous hive. Our father was shaking with rage. G had just said no in a rare moment of rebellion. She just could not take it any more, none of us could, I can now see, but we were tightly pleated in his misery and fury.
I am leaving, she announced, and took her school bag and walked out the door.
Why the school bag? No clothes, no toothbrush, just the faded satchel with a few books. She did not care for her books, but she needed luggage – the gravity of the situation merited it – and this was all she had.
If the television was on, he must have been sprawled on the sofa, he must have been drinking. My mother must have been in the kitchen. In my mind’s eye, as I revisit that moment, this is always what I see. I am not sure this is how it was. What I do remember distinctly is the little girl in the sort of utter defiance that could have only come from unspeakable despair, walking out of the door, down the steps, two flights, and then darkness.
A door led out into the street. I stood on the balcony, peering below so I could see her emerge from the door. I was terrified she would disappear into the night, that I would lose her. I leaned over till I was at risk of falling down, but there was still no sign of her. Could I have missed her in the shadows? Was she really gone?
I bolted down the flight of stairs. There was nobody at the landing. I pushed the door open, and there on the last few steps that led to the street was a huddled figure, with her school bag, wanting not to be home but with nowhere else to go.
I sat down beside her. She was crying, but very quietly. Maybe I was too. There was just a large, silent, unseen river of tears and we were islands in it. That is all I remember of that night. Eventually we climbed the steps back to our apartment, but first we sat there together on the roadside, the night swinging low over our heads.
I did not want you – you often said to your younger child – it was all your mother’s doing, I was happy with just one child. In later years, in the throes of your darkness, you wished you had not brought any children to this world. You even wished yourself unborn.
Please come back to life, please go back in time, please love us equally, please love us kindly. Your love hurt just as much as your anger did. Can we please start this story all over again?
I worry about sweeping up your life into tidy explanations and try to stick to your versions about your life, but I am aware that these will be the versions I remember. I could plead that I am a hoarder of memories and the catalogue cards in my head are rarely misarranged or misplaced. But that would not suffice. I look for a pattern, an emergence, trajectories of something you refused to name. In my hand is a magnifying glass, and in my head is a thread, a quest for a shadow that I have known and that had engulfed you.
But to you, melancholy was not a condition, a state of mind or a phase – it spanned your entire life. How can that possibly be explained now in the wake of your death?
You attributed any spell of despair to the incompetence of the world or to specific events or people who disappointed and hurt, but never thought of it as sustained sadness that you could not let go. All decisions were taken in a high emotional tenor. Anything even remotely calculative or measured was distasteful. Everything appealed in its extremes – if you liked someone, you would listen to their every advice, treat them like royalty – and you took your decisions with great flourish and impulse. When things went
wrong or caused even the slightest inconvenience, you cursed fate and moped. A little foresight and planning would have yielded far better results, but there could be no planning in your world – the need was to gamble at any cost. You watched the roulette wheel of life events turn, all chips on the table, and no matter where it stopped, the outcome for you never matched the stakes – it was inevitably bad luck.
People around us saw a bank official with a steady income – for you did climb up the clerical ladder slowly, become a branch manager – but there was nothing in your own bank account. I was clearing your books one day when I found your salary slips. Endless loans and monthly deductions showed on the paper, almost nothing left in balance. How did we survive on the paltry amount you got every month?
One hesitates to call it poverty, for it was the kind that came cloaked in dastardly middle-class appearances, so taut that even the smallest unforeseen expenditure could break our spirits. We got to eat each day and our mother constantly struggled to stretch household provisions till the end of the month, but that was it. There was no question of asking for more, objects or outings, and definitely no cash to spend. Clothes were handed down or gifted by relatives, unless it was our birthday, the only time we got to go to the store. You do not know this, but we would wait for the old newspaper pile to grow, so that we could tie it up into bundles, haul them to the market to sell for a few notes, all three of us flush with the pleasure of having spare change that did not need to be accounted for, to buy small pleasures by the roadside. We thought of the better life as being able to own more than two pairs of frayed underwear, not having to wait for one pair to wash and dry in order to change. We saw you turn into hoarders, both you and your wife, storing away every stray piece of wire and cardboard box, and it is easy to see why.
His hands have holes – I have heard this said about you – he is generous, a spendthrift, incapable of saving money.
If I Had to Tell It Again Page 5
