Seven Shades of Grey

by Vivek Mehra

  The foundation had been laid by my interactions with strangers on the Net. Snow falling on a mountain slope, steadily, over a period of time, quite like the events in my life, etching themselves on the contours of my mind. With every fresh snowfall, a new layer was added, building on the previous one, shrouding it but never eliminating it. Tranquility! This happened with painful persistence till the mountain reached critical mass, awaiting that one trigger that could cause a devastating avalanche or cause the ice to melt gently, giving birth to scores of rivers and streams.

  That is the way my mind was, my friends bringing me comfort, my work building up anxiety, mediation taking me deeper inside my soul and everything around me waiting for an avalanche or Nirvana to happen, sanity at its definable best, the calm before the storm.

  It was the 5th of August exactly a year ago when the season’s few remaining snowfalls were scheduled to assault my fragile state of mind. None of my friends was online when I logged in and soon I was back in the familiar confines of an Indian chat room. My attention was grabbed by an ID that was chatting in there because it bore the name of my beloved wife, reading Dolly66.

  *

  A chill runs through my bones, my breath coming in short gasps. The mere mention of her ID triggers an avalanche of thoughts. I have to fight to control this reaction, face the dragon that stands outside the door. My thoughts turn to MAA.

  Please give me the strength to comprehend and not get swept away by the pain!

  The chair is losing its comfort, the prison walls closing around me. Sweat threatens to seep despite being doggedly fought by the cold air-conditioner air. My eyelids race to fuse with my brow, eyes burning. A year of procrastination has deposited another mountain of snow ready for another avalanche, and this time I will not allow it. This time the dragon will be slain.

  *

  Amusement was the first emotion to flirt with me, fast changing to awe at the odds of finding a person with my wife’s name in a chat room. At any given time the odds of this were one in millions and, if narrowed down to just Indian chat rooms, were still a mind-boggling one in hundreds of thousands. I was not about to let the opportunity pass.

  The greeting I sent the ID was different because I used my wife’s name to break the ice. I merely stated that my wife was also named Dolly. The response was instantaneous and humorous.

  Dolly66: he he he, its me, vik, yr wife.

  One innocent remark that set an avalanche in motion!

  She had been chatting with some chap in the main chat room, so I took the opportunity to browse her profile. It stated that she was 32 - my age group, married - as I was, mother of two kids - quite unlike me. Her profile was honest enough, in stark contrast to the chat she was engaged in. I clearly read her stating that she was a 24-year-old college student, very single. The virtues of honesty and the pitfalls of deceit had ensured that Rules for the New World were clearly defined in my mind - honesty stayed, deceit walked.

  I waited patiently, watching the events unfold, a mute, cynical spectator. As normally happens, the two lost interest in each other, and there was a message from Dolly66 asking me if I was free to chat with her.

  I had to know why she had lied and chose an arrow of diplomacy to fire at her. I asked her age and her marital status. I could attribute the answer I received to her clandestinely looking up my profile, the one that honestly mentioned who and what I was. She startled me by her honesty, stating she was 32, married and mother of two kids. So far so good!

  I probed further asking why she had stated otherwise in the chat room. Her reply was eloquently simple: no one wanted to chat with a married mother-of-two, while a zillion hounded a single twenty-four-year-old. I had no choice but to accept this and move on. I should have questioned the motives of wanting a zillion to hound her, a clue that would have warned me of impending danger. But no, Rationality was my consort, assuring me that there was no real reason for me to be suspicious.

  As was customary, we exchanged cursory details, her name being Dolly Nair, an expatriate from Kerala now living in Singapore. A lot of South Indians, especially from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, had made Singapore their home, and hence I was not surprised. She had to leave but promised to keep in touch through Messenger.

  The days lumbered on. I rarely caught her online the first few days after our first meeting. With my friends it was customary that offline messages be left if one did not find the other online. The other customary practice was that whenever a friend of mine saw me log on, a greeting was flashed and me reciprocating arduously. With Dolly66 all this was conspicuous by its absence. Over a period of time we did manage to hold conversation, keeping it light and friendly. I got to know that her husband was a leading cardiovascular surgeon in a large hospital there. Things were going apace till one day I happened to praise the husband.

  It all started by her telling me that she was mostly alone with her kids because hubby was busy probing someone’s chest. I responded by telling her that what he did was very noble and that she should be proud of it. She listened for a while, agreeing with me, till she could take it no more, unleashing a torrent of pent-up emotions.

  She told me that she had not made love in the last two years, sacrificed her career for him, looked after the kids, kept the home fire ablaze only to discover that he was having an affair with a doctor. A small twig snapped inside me.

  Marilyn, Reshma and all the others discussed their personal lives with me, and not one of them had a crisis of this magnitude confronting them.

  My heart went out to her!

  In the next couple of days I sent her e-cards and little messages to cheer her up. There was always one in return thanking me generously.

  It was eerie, but after her revelation there was a sense of pain and suffering every time I was online with her. I tried to rationalize it, attributing this to her husband, but somehow the eerie feeling haunted me, as if it were trying to tell me something else, trying to reveal that which I was blissfully oblivious to.

  Chatting with her triggered pain that I had suffered, some recent, some buried in the sands of time. It brought back memories of how pain had made me a raving, sex-crazed fiend. My mind raced to the time when my girlfriend left me. I was young and living all by myself in the States.

  Her departure affected me terribly, and I hated what it made me. At the time, I hated all women just because one of them had hurt me. This hate changed to rage, and I resorted to every trick I knew or read about in seducing them, bedding them, and hurting them. I changed women faster than the sheets they adorned in my bedroom and within six months was left feeling disgusted and hollow on the inside.

  I did apologize and make amends with a few that listened to me, before I headed back home to India. But I had scarred a few forever, their pain the darkest scar on my soul. I realized that it was human to hurt people when we hurt inside. I could not condone this, but accepted it as one of my limitations, created by my free will. I now tried hard to make amends whenever and wherever I could.

  I had grown older, wiser, fatter, with a scarred heart, emotionally vulnerable. I saw a lot of my pain in Dolly66, and that is why I spent more and more time talking to her. Somewhere in the conversations our respective spiritual beliefs crept in. They were innocent remarks, she confessing that she was not an atheist but had stopped praying since she learnt of the affair. She also possessed an uncanny knack of making an emotionally upsetting statement adding just the right amount of grief to it. There were quite a few, but there is one that stands out among the many.

  When she told me about her having stopped praying she added that she had removed her mangalsutra and laid it at the small altar in her house.

  To a married Hindu woman, a mangalsutra was not a string of black beads; it was a visible symbol of her marriage. Tradition had bestowed on it an aura of sanctity, of social proclamation of marriage, one that I did not subscribe to at all. And yet to a woman it was precious. For one to wear it would mean accepting the sanctity it brought with it;
for her to then remove it while still married meant making a statement that went with the sanctity of wearing it: only a widow ever removed her mangalsutra.

  A married woman, openly proclaiming widowhood when her husband was alive and living with her, spoke volumes of the hurt she felt. And she made me feel it too.

  My emotional state was taut but by no means fragile, or so I believed, for in the pain bared by Dolly66 the fragility was exposed. It was not something that happened overnight. It was a systematic assault on the happiness that had hitherto hovered around me. A chat with her always left me drained, quite like a battery whose power had been sapped. The process was not quick enough for me to realize it, and yet it took place every time I logged on with her, a little of me being lost in her. The deeper sorrow seemed to take me, the more I sort refuge in MAA and meditation.

  She was like an anaconda wrapped around me, gently squeezing me. The more I saw of me in her the more forgotten issues and unresolved problems started leaving banishment, steadily encircling me. It was not just happening in my mind; the events around me too started reflecting this.

  There was one problem in my life that had been filed away and one that was forced to the forefront, Dolly66 not being instrumental. She happened to be in the right place at the right time to use the opportunity to craft a well-disguised trap, ensuring that I got closer to her, this anaconda encircling its prey, squeezing harder and harder.

  *

  I would not be alone in this waiting room, in all probability would still be with the ‘problem’ in tow had things worked out differently. Today it matters little; only its specter still hangs around, a cobra de-fanged, and yet that cleverly crafted trap had for a time ensnared my sanity.

  9. The Problem

  The years of doing the rounds of infertility clinics had taken its toll on both Dolly and myself, and there had to be an end to it. A solution was proposed by a lady doctor, one who also happened to be a very good friend. She suggested that we adopt a child.

  Adoption in India is still frowned upon, a child still traumatized by its revelation no matter at what age it came. The problem became even more contentious once a natural child was born. I always fantasized that I would adopt one child no matter how many I bore naturally. In that context I was an abomination, an aberration, a renegade in society in general and to my parents in particular. They were still from the old school of thought, firmly believing that a mother would love her natural child more than an adopted one. It was sadly true that Indian history, grandma stories and kitty-party gossips abounded with horror stories in ardent support of this theory. They were tales of trauma caused by family members, by schoolmates, by siblings, permanently scarring the child. Suicide, fleeing, regression, depression and plain frustration had been popular ways for victims to get away from it all.

  ‘It were better the child be left to his or her own destiny in an orphanage than suffer this cruel fate artificially thrust upon it’ was a standard statement coined by god-alone-knows-who to justify non-adoption of a child. But it meant little to me.

  I still remember how Dolly’s eyes had lit up the day the suggestion was made. She saw a way out of her suffering - not just mental but physical as well, her body turning blue, suffering excruciating pain whenever and wherever expensive hormones entered on the tip of a needle. From that day forth the suggestion became the bane of my existence. Dolly tried to convince me to stop doing the rounds of clinics and start the ones of orphanages, but such a plan was irreconcilable to the ghosts haunting my mind.

  I wanted to adopt a child someday, I told myself, but today was not the day. Truthfully, to me adopting a child was admitting defeat. I believed that we had to exhaust every known medical possibility before even thinking about adoption. Money was not the issue at the forefront because adopting too cost a lot. The issue was of belief, trust and faith!

  For eight years we had prayed at every religious venue, be it a temple, a church, or a mosque. Astrologers were consulted, religious rites performed, and prayers rang forth from groveling lips, aching hearts, and penitent legs. All of this was done because we believed in the power of the one that gave life to us.

  ‘If my destiny does not have a natural child written then I should have not been allowed to wander in the wilderness in pain and hope for all these years’ was my most prolific response. I hardly bought it myself, and yet I clung to the words of my guru, my friend, my professor: ‘You will have children of your own, just like you will have all that you seek. Put your faith in MAA and remember time is only relative to your state of mind.’ He had not been wrong about all else that he had predicted; he would not be wrong about this either. I just had to cling to my belief and wait for my time to arrive.

  Discussions on adoption ended in fights, leaving Dolly in tears and me with an aching heart. Every tear she shed was a drop of my blood sapping the very life from me. And yet I desperately clung to my belief.

  Over time I chose rationality as a shield. I argued that she was an only child of her parents, their only heir; their reaction to this was of prime importance. I had to be sure that they would accept the child of another as their own. My parents would have to be given the ultimatum too. The issue slid into oblivion because this matter could never be discussed over the phone, had to be pursued in person. Both sets of parents lived in distant cities and would have to be consulted face to face, whenever such a meeting could ensue. Besides this I had one major concern, one more unresolved problem, one that I could not get Dolly’s consent on.

  Should we adopt and a natural child followed, what would we do then?

  I would have to know that before we ventured out into these uncharted waters. I was sure that we would not have a natural child should the first be adopted. This would ensure that the adopted was never subject to the trauma that I had only heard about. Dolly argued that if we did have a natural one after adopting one, it would be nothing short of a miracle, one that was induced by the arrival of the first. Her words were laden with truth, and yet I could not agree.

  I believed that a natural child would always be loved more by the mother, adored more by the grandparents, and eventually would overshadow the adopted one. She tried hard to convince me that it would never be so. My heart knew it to be true, my rational half refusing to buy it. We left it at that, agreeing first to tackle the ‘grandees-to-be’ and only then to decide on any further course of action. My work ensured that I could not leave Bombay to visit my parents and discuss the issue with them. Dolly got her opportunity with her visit to her hometown.

  It was a Sunday night when Dolly called me, her voice freshly buoyant, and immediately I could sense the excitement in the air around her. She had spoken to her parents, and they had agreed with her that the first child, adopted or natural, would be their heir, the bearer of their name and recipient of all honors that went to an Indian first-born child. That night Dejection decided to come pay me a visit. I had placed a lot of faith in her parents, but somehow they had been persuaded by Dolly. I had no knowledge of what she had said to them, what promises she had made, and if my views on the subject were ever placed before them.

  I tried hard to get sleep, and when it eluded me I chanted the name of MAA until sheer exhaustion made my body slumber.

  The next morning came bringing dark clouds of sorrow with it. I was losing a battle, one I never believed to have ever existed save in my own mind. But who would understand my plight? No one would, unless I told them about it. With a steely resolve I entered my office and started penning a letter to her parents. The more I wrote the more grief engulfed me. I relived the pain of years, the trauma of doctors and the complete destruction of faith by their decision. I sent it once completed to the rightful recipients, my heart numb with pain. I had to find solace, a shoulder to cry on and a patient ear to listen to me. The answer came in a flash – my friends in cyberspace.

  *

  That was on a Monday, a first of a string of Black Mondays that would forever scar my life. My solitary con
finement in this waiting room can be traced back to that first Black Monday. Yet when viewed objectively it never was a black day for me. That day the miracle-to-be was predicted by Dolly66, the day I was made to reaffirm my faith in my belief, the day a meticulously planned, vicious assault on my sanity was begun. Reliving that day still makes my heart beat faster and rain in the form of sweat starts to seep from my pores, all in a room that has seemed comfortable before. I rise up and stand in the cold draft of the air-conditioner, my eyes closed, my -breathing long and labored; a vain attempt to calm my racing pulse.

  The dragon has to be slain.

  *

  Messenger informed me that only Dolly66 was online.

  Since the day I first met her a few emails had been exchanged and quite a few lengthy chat sessions engaged in. I don’t know what prompted me to do it, but I saved most of them in my computer. The common factor in all these was that we had discussed her problems, rarely touching on mine. Along with problems we had touched upon spiritual matters. My honesty, worn as an ornament in full bloom, had told her all about MAA, about how She would help heal a broken heart and bring the answer to prayers.

  Somewhere it wrought a welcome change in Dolly66’s interaction with me. She hunted for me on the Net, never failing to send me a message should she see me online. That Monday she was to bring solace to my aching heart, ensuring that it was my turn to become addicted to her.

  She began by telling me it was raining in Singapore, flitted around mundane thoughts, then focused on my lack of focus and mellow mood. I told her what the problem was; my thoughts on adoption and Dolly’s parents’ reaction. Slowly inroads were made into my sanity.