Exile

by Akhilesh

  What happened was that she went to watch a movie with her friends from university. When the show ended, all the friends went their own ways. One of them, Rashmi Sarin, walked with her for a distance and then they parted. She sensed that two loafers were following her. Before she could decide whether it was her imagination or reality, ten to twelve young men on bikes burst on the scene and started zooming around her. She found herself trembling and wondered if her beauty had become an encumbrance this day.

  Suddenly, she had a strong desire for her beauty to fade in order to prevent her from falling prey to the loafers. And it did happen. Several girls and women in Hazratganj were molested by the ruffians but miraculously, she remained unhurt. The degree of transformation was revealed when her mother started wailing as soon as she saw her. ‘Gauri, what has happened to your face? You were as pretty as a fairy, but you look so horribly ugly now!’

  She raced to the mirror and was shocked to see her own hideousness, scared that she might never regain her former beauty. Then she used her power. She expressed a fervent desire to get her beauty back. In a little while, she found that her beauty imbued each pore of her body. She ran and hugged her mother, laughing, skipping.

  In the course of time, she honed her skill so well that she started performing miracles. After their marriage, her skill drove Suryakant crazy. He discovered a new girl in her every day. Once he would find himself in the company of an ultra-modern girl, and the very next day a simple village maid would be putting her arms around his neck. Once she changed into a tribal woman and once into a pure behenji from a small settlement. Suryakant would be mesmerized, bewildered. One day, she was a dusky damsel instead of a fair-skinned missy. Another day, he saw her as a sagacious woman, the epitome of wisdom, knowledge and study, and on another, she was nothing but a simple girl overflowing with love. He was anxious one morning when he realized that Gauri’s height had decreased, but in a little while she transformed into a tall girl.

  What antics she would get up to! Suryakant would be driven wild by her frolicking during sex, so much so that he almost swooned. Once, when he tried to kiss Gauri’s eyes, she closed her lids in such a manner that Suryakant’s lips were imprisoned like a bee within a flower. On a Wednesday, Suryakant put his hand on her hip. God knows what magic she resorted to but the spot he touched started quivering and flashes of an electric current coursed through Suryakant. And then, she stilled the pulsation and placed both his hands on her breasts. Suryakant caught his breath. He discovered that her nipples had grown gigantic like lingams and her breasts had grown small, like conches. He put his head on Gauri’s waist on a Friday. It was so silky that his head slipped, while on a Saturday, when he repeated the act, his head got stuck on her waist and he was unable to pull it free.

  Real wonders took place when Gauri transmuted her physical form beyond the might of Time. She never looked older than thirty. She looked thirty during the day, but as soon as the sun set, she did not look a single day over twenty-five. For years, she had looked twenty-five or twenty-six after sunset. Was it because she wiped the dust of time off her skin and made it brighter by immersing her spirit in the glow of energy?

  So that day, after looking at herself appear as a sleuth in the mirror, she focused the torch on another nook of the wardrobe; it held the familiar Mayfair notebooks. No sooner had she seen them than her tense face broke into a smile. She pulled out four notebooks. She preferred to go through the notebooks instead of combing the wardrobe. Maybe the notebooks would provide a clue, leading Gauri to Suryakant’s alien and secret truth, the one he had manufactured without her and concealed. She carried them into the study, put them on the table and switched on the light. The circle of light from the lamp descended on the notebooks. Suddenly, the halo of light vanished and the house was filled with darkness. She remained indifferent for some time, but gradually the darkness filled her too. She grew afraid that someone might come in! She imagined more than one criminal breaking in. She shivered. She wanted to switch on her mobile phone for light, but she did not know where it lay, switched off as it was. She got up, intending to find it but sat down again, afraid that someone might be hiding in the dark.

  She broke into a sweat. Murders, theft, rapes were routine in the country. Criminals stalked lone women, children and old men. In this house, she was alone in her own room and the child, in his own. Several mishaps had already taken place in the colony. A whole family had been slaughtered. In another incident, a freedom fighter, a woman who used to live alone, had been murdered. In the third, an uncle had killed three of his nephews and buried their bodies in the backyard. In the fourth, an old woman’s corpse rotted for two days in a locked house. Moreover, she used to read about such crimes, watch them on television and it frightened her.

  On one such day, Bahuguna was worried to see Gauri so anxious. He had tried to lighten the atmosphere and said, ‘Bhabhiji, I’m seriously considering stopping to publish such reports in my newspaper. I instruct my crime reporters every day to collect such information, but I never realized it worries people so badly.’

  ‘Bhai Sahib,’ Gauri replied, ‘if you really want to do something, stop the incidents. The news will stop automatically.’

  The next morning, Bahuguna arrived quite early.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Suryakant voiced the unspoken question.

  ‘I’m here to enjoy breakfast,’ Bahuguna replied.

  But he was not really there for breakfast. He unzipped his bag and the object he pulled out made Gauri and Suryakant quake. It was a revolver. Bahuguna put it on the table and laughed, ‘I’m not here to snatch something from you at gun point, but to present it to you.’

  ‘Why?’ Suryakant asked.

  ‘Because I have three more, this is the fourth. You should accept it, and your worries concerning crime will diminish, Bhabhiji. God forbid that you have to use it, but it will be handy.’

  ‘Take back this plaything of yours,’ Suryakant said in a quaking voice.

  ‘It’s not a plaything but a real revolver. The best kind as well. It can fire rapidly, and it has a long range. Don’t worry, I’ll get your licence from the district magistrate in a week,’ Bahuguna informed Suryakant. Leaving the revolver on the table, he stood up and said, ‘Bhabhiji, breakfast can wait …’ Just then, his cell phone warbled. He walked out of the house, talking on the phone. The sentence Suryakant wanted to utter remained unsaid because Bahuguna had left. He wanted to say, ‘You couldn’t manage a job for me, and now you are here to offer a revolver?’ But he was unable to speak it even when Bahuguna returned two minutes later, put five cartridges for the revolver on the table and whizzed out like a bullet.

  Suryakant too left early on some errands, but he kept calling Gauri every half hour. He resorted to a variety of banal excuses to check in on her. Had someone called? Had the post come? There was a visiting card in the shirt he had worn yesterday, and could she please take it out before it went in for a wash. Had Gauri eaten? Was Gaurav watching TV after coming back from school or was he studying? Was there electricity in the house?

  He returned home late. It was night, and Gaurav was finishing his dinner. Gauri laid two plates on the table. By the time they finished eating, Gaurav had gone to his bedroom. Gaurav was asleep before they went to bed.

  The two did not enter the bedroom together. Suryakant went in first. It was routine. However, in the early days of their marriage, Suryakant used to carry her into the bedroom. Or Gauri would push him inside and tempt him by assuming different forms. But as time went by, she would finish her chores first and then come to bed. Tonight, when she entered, she found Surya lost in thoughts, staring unblinking into nothingness. Often, when Gauri found him morose, she was suffused with love, but tonight she was worried. She said, ‘It doesn’t matter if it is taking a while to find a new job. Why are you moping?’

  ‘It is not that …’ Suryakant replied coldly.

  ‘What’s it then?’

  Suryakant pulled out the revolver from un
der the pillow and said, ‘I can’t have a revolver in the house.’

  ‘What’s the problem? It’ll come handy in case of trouble.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I haven’t been feeling easy since it arrived. I’m afraid I might use it to kill you some day or perhaps myself.’ He threw it away with a jerk. ‘Even touching it terrifies me – what if the trigger gets pressed accidently? Get it off the bed. Although it won’t happen, I’m still scared that it might start shooting even though there are no bullets in it … please call Bahuguna and tell him to take it away.’

  When Gauri picked it, a shiver ran through her body. But she bolstered herself and turned into a lady police officer. She threw it up in the air and caught it as it fell. She pressed the trigger, pretending to fire without a cartridge. She blew into the barrel to cool it and caressing it, she put it in the wardrobe and stroked Suryakant’s head.

  She wondered, had the revolver not been returned to Bahuguna and had she needed it in this dark night, how would she have managed? She couldn’t even locate her cell phone, how would she have found the revolver? Suddenly, the electricity supply came back. There was the glow of light and the apprehension hovering within her weakened. She wondered why fear swells in the darkness and weakens when there is light, in spite of the fact that neither darkness nor light ever changed her in any manner.

  The circle of light from the table lamp flooded the Mayfair notebooks once again. She walked to the wardrobe before examining them and yanked out a bottle of wine. She poured a drink and got a salad and some papad. She lifted the glass in air, clinked it against an invisible glass and took a swig. With the crackling sound of the papad breaking, she picked up one of the Mayfair notebooks. She turned the first page after another sip, Suryakant’s writing lay open before her. When Suryakant had handed her a lengthy letter at university, she had concealed it between her books to read later. It had filled her with a unique sensation. Suryakant wrote in Devanagari but she felt it was in a special script, dissimilar to all other scripts in the world, invented for her alone. Only two people in the cosmos had an idea of its alphabet, inflexions and meaning – Suryakant and herself. But the sensation was different today. She felt as if Suryakant had noted down everything in a kind of code and she had to break it to find out the real meaning…

  Gauri noticed that Surya had used only the right-hand pages in the notebooks. He had put the date on most pages. In the initial days of the university, his handwriting was beautiful, but it had grown more like a scrawl in later years. The use of the cut and the sharp end in some letters like ‘kha’, ‘na’, ‘ra’, ‘la’, ‘ma’, ‘bha’, was almost negligent now. Another significant fact was that some of the sentences and words had been crossed out so carefully that it was impossible to deduce them. But in a few sentences, only a line was drawn through the middle to enable deciphering. The third interesting thing was that identities were hidden in the early writing by using pronouns instead of nouns. In several instances, when the pronoun was not employed, only the first letter of a person’s name was written instead of the full name. The funny thing was that she was able to understand all the old entries easily, while the later writing flummoxed her.

  Her eyes raced through the later writing but she had to halt now and then while perusing the early writing. Her gaze reached out and felt them. Gauri knew the reality of each noun that was hidden by a pronoun. She was also able to guess the names from the letters. She had discovered who ‘G’, ‘G’, ‘C’, ‘S’, ‘R’ and ‘B’ were. As if this was not enough, she could decipher even the sentences that had been fully scratched over. She realized that one of the words that had been crossed out was ‘breast’ and had been replaced by the word ‘locks’.

  The secret lay in the later Mayfair notebooks which Gauri interpreted without any trouble and the words and sentences crossed out in these volumes were easily decipherable. But Gauri knew Suryakant’s secret lay exactly here. The enigma of Suryakant was in these books. After going through a couple of entries, she realized she must study them carefully. She may have to read some of the lines and paragraphs many times over. She siphoned a little more wine in to her belly.

  These notebooks could not be called diaries. If they must be given a name, they could be called Bhanumati Ka Pitara or Pandora’s Box. Suryakant had noted down his emotional and mental states in these books besides countless other things. In some places, there were excerpts from various literary books, shlokas, shers and poems. Some of the pages bore details of his expenses, some had lists of people who had borrowed money from him, while others had the details of who he had borrowed from. On many pages, there were lists of names without a caption or comment. Naturally, it was hard to understand why these names had been jotted down. In the same manner, telephone numbers had been written haphazardly without the cue of who they belonged to.

  Had Gauri been an expert spy, she would have scrutinized these apparently useless facts intently because the clue to a secret, or the secret itself, is sometimes concealed in the most innocuous place. But at this moment, Gauri did not have that much patience, or expertise, and so she inspected it simply like a diary. She did not even read all the entries. Whatever she had gone through, she did not consider relevant. For example, at one place Suryakant had written:

  I came to Delhi this morning with my colleague Nilratna, and I can’t forget what happened this evening because it made me realize what life is and what death is! We walked aimlessly till late in Connaught Place and then visited a bar. We drank a couple of pegs and then waved down an autorickshaw to our hotel. But I did something else before getting into the auto – I called Gauri. At the other end was Gauri’s voice, a mix of love and concern. When I am away from Lucknow, my love for Gauri and Gaurav swells. I sometimes feel Gauri is an innocent child suffering from my excesses. And Gaurav is now growing up, and he sometimes looks at me with a complaint in his eyes.

  Anyway, everything was okay at home and they also found out that I was fine. I was now in an autorickshaw with Nilratna, travelling back to my hotel. Life appeared beautiful. The work we had come for had been finished properly. Everything was fine at home. I was fine. My spirit was tipsy on two pegs of whisky. What else did I care for? I was happy! And it was right then that we came to a crossroads. Our auto jumped a traffic light and turned. All of a sudden, I saw a military jeep approaching extremely fast – as if it was going to crush us. It sped towards us. Death was a few metres, a couple of seconds away. The strangest thing was that neither God, nor family, nor a prayer surfaced in my mind. Perhaps it happens only if Death gives you a little time to reflect.

  The horrible shape of the jeep bore down upon us. I neither saw nor recall how the jeep hit the auto but it overturned. I felt I had plummeted into a murky well. I wondered if I was alive or dead. Perhaps to ascertain my being alive or perhaps I was concerned about Nilratna after I found that I was safe, I shouted, ‘Nilratna!’ We somehow managed to crawl out of the overturned auto. A throng of people had collected to watch the accident. The driver had not received even a scratch. We started picking up our things that had scattered on the road – watches, glasses, money, change, pens – everything lay scattered. God knows what miracle had kept us absolutely safe; we had received only a few scratches. The situation was so ludicrous that when the police took us to the hospital, the lady doctor on duty instructed the nurse to dress Nilratna’s wounds as I had no injury. I felt my body but there was not even a scratch. The doctor glared at me with disgust. She thought I was a loafer who had come to gawk at her beauty.

  By the time we returned to the hotel, it was past midnight. Nilratna ribbed me for the lady doctor’s reaction, and I too joined the banter. Suddenly, I felt hungry. No sooner had I mentioned I was hungry than Nilratna also felt famished. But the hotel did not serve food at such a late hour. There was nothing to eat in our bags either. Does a terrible accident have no power over hunger? We realized that only sleep has the authority to numb the aftershock of an accident and subdue hunger.


  I got up, put out the light and lay down. But I was barely on the threshold of sleep when Nilratna switched the light on again. I snapped, ‘Why have you turned on the light?’

  ‘I can’t sleep in the dark.’

  ‘And I can’t sleep with the light on.’

  But I tried, succeeded and was about to doze off when Nilratna called out, ‘Suryakant! Suryakant!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Don’t sleep, pal. I’m scared,’ he implored.

  He put up an amazing charade all night. He wouldn’t sleep and neither would he let me sleep. He told me that not only he but his entire family were victims of anxiety. His younger brother did not dare travel by train because he was obsessed with the idea of the train meeting with an accident. His father had not eaten outside their home for twenty-five years for fear of being poisoned. He chews paan twenty times daily, but he puts in the lime, kattha, areca and tobacco personally. His elder brother never slept alone, and if he did, he wouldn’t switch on the fan. He was afraid that the fan or the lizard crawling on the ceiling would plop down on him. He also sat up awake at the thought of a fire beginning from a short circuit.

  How can I accuse Nilratna of madness? When I am alone, I too sleep with the lights on. But my reasons are different. I am not afraid of a fire, falling lizards or the ceiling crashing down. In fact, I am terrified by my imagining of the spirits of my friends. Although I have not the slightest belief in ghosts, ghouls, witches and fiends, when I am alone at night, especially when I am in a strange place, I am filled with a great terror – as if spirits would come there right then. One of them was my poet friend Manbahadur Singh, a college principal.