In the world of human matters there is no worse nuisance than a fourteen-year-old boy. He possesses neither beauty nor usefulness. He cannot be showered with affection like a child; nor does he especially desire company. If he speaks with a childish lisp, then he is called a milk-toothed baby, and if he speaks like an adult, he’s considered impertinent.
It’s more precise to say that he’s considered arrogant if he speaks at all. People consider him boorish as he has no regard for the measurements of his clothes and continues to grow at an ungainly rate. People think him a criminal in the disappearance of the charms of childhood and the sweetness of his voice. So many mistakes of early childhood are easily forgiven but for a boy of his age even unavoidable errors were unforgiveable. And he himself is made painfully aware that he doesn’t seem to do anything correctly, so he’s constantly embarrassed by himself and always asking for forgiveness. But it is at this very age that his heart becomes exceedingly desperate for love and respect . . .1
When he read it, he realized that this was the reason he was crying . . . One day, he heard someone say that college was the best time of your life, completely carefree. He realized that his brothers must be enjoying themselves, must be completely carefree, and this made him cry . . .
But even though he wasn’t able to determine why he was crying, he was slowly coming to the conclusion that the world was full of injustices, and these injustices were especially made for him to suffer! It was as if the world were turning on an axis that he was the centre of, and that everything that existed only existed because he did . . . Simultaneously he became more intolerant—he became furious about these injustices . . .
One day, he knew, for no reason, that he couldn’t take it any more. He thought to himself, ‘Why should I stay here and tolerate this unfairness? Surely there is a place for me in a world this big.’ And he left home with an overcoat, a package of biscuits and a loaf of bread . . .
Where was he going? He didn’t know either. All he knew was that he wasn’t going to some place, he was going away from some place . . . a place which he had left behind him forever . . .
After walking all day, he went to sleep, exhausted. The next day he came to the base of a waterfall and watched it all day long.
But you can’t eat beauty, and he’d eaten his bread . . .
Shekhar observed the waterfall to his heart’s content. First he was in awe of it, drawn to it, and then he began to detect unison, a changelessness, and therefore an inadequacy. Then he felt depressed and angry . . .
And he went back, spending the night on the road somewhere, getting back home the next day.
He hadn’t assented to the way of life at home, but he had a new-found respect and wonder for it . . .
His father quietly accepted him and the fact that he had run away. He didn’t ask where he had gone or why . . .
*
Shekhar was beginning to chafe at his own uneasiness, his unsteadiness. He began to feel he wanted for something, but he didn’t know what. And to work out just what he wanted, he endeavoured to do all sorts of things—he began to drift along all sorts of paths at the same time . . .
From a distance, all human development, at least up until now, has looked like this. Humanity wants for something but doesn’t know what and in order to find it begins to wander on all sorts of paths at the same time . . . It is as if all humanity, in the course of its life, stands on a vast, empty expanse of time and is caught up in itself; its youth and its days of creativity still lie ahead.
And in a miniature form of that expanse—the uninterrupted soft hum of the ocean concealing itself within a tiny conch—Shekhar was also caught up in himself and wanted to apprehend himself.
He felt that his body was undergoing a change. He felt as if he were ill; he felt as if he had much strength and energy; he felt as if he were about to start a new phase in life . . . He was wild, self-intoxicated, like a musk deer, or like a plague-carrying rat, or a dog chasing its own tail—he made a few circles around himself and then stopped . . .
Shekhar would get up when the darkness was thickest at night and quietly sneak down to the sitting room, take the gramophone and bring it back to his room. He would close the door and play a particular record over and over . . . It was a recording of some English musician playing the violin; he’d never bothered to look at the name, and he couldn’t recall the melodies despite having heard them countless times. But at the very beginning, after a rich, deep sound, there was a sudden sharp call, and to him it felt as though that unexpected, bold sharpness had pierced through a shell surrounding him and like a silkworm or a butterfly he was emerging from someone else’s custody . . . And he played that very record, sometimes just that part, over and over again and somehow it never got old. He never comes down from that height back to earth . . . He turns the lamp down low and cries sometimes. His dreams race—‘O music, where are you from, to whose cry do you give voice?’
Where are you urging me to go? Why do you offer promises of freedom, of liberty, to one in chains?
That’s when he stops the record and starts writing poetry . . .
But as soon as he turns it off he feels as though his whole body has come awake and he’s stuck back inside that shell. He doesn’t understand what his body wants but he knows that it’s something illicit, forbidden, sinful. He wants very much to suppress this desire, grind it out, bury it in the dust so that he can’t ever find it again—even if that means his body is destroyed with it . . .
He wants to distract himself. He didn’t know how he would do that, but he was interested in poetry, and so he hoped that he could lose himself in that. He began reading all sorts of poetry at every opportunity. He read Sanskrit poets, poets translated from Urdu and those that were in his textbooks—Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Scott—in their entirety. Then he began reading those poets who weren’t in his books but whose names he had read and heard—Keats, Byron, Rossetti, Swinburne and even Tasso and Dante in translation . . . He understood some, didn’t understand about half. He read the things he didn’t understand with even more determination as a way to beat himself up, as punishment.
He became obsessed with some of these poems and they made him restless in the same way . . . Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The May Queen’, and these lines from ‘The Death of Oenone’:2
Ah me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms
Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest
Close, close to thine in that quick-falling dew
Of fruitful kisses, thick as autumn3 rains
Flash in the pools of whirling Simois.
Reading these lines, his body tautened; his hands began to tremble and his head spun . . . One day he read these two lines from Rossetti:
Beneath the glowing4 throat the breasts half-globed
Like folded lilies deep-set in the stream
That day he felt as though some unbearable current of energy suddenly coursed through him and it thrilled him . . .
Helplessly he left the room and, unable to make sense of things, picked up an axe, went behind the kitchen and began splitting wood, as much as he could find. When he finished, he went back and read a poem by Lady Norton—‘I Do Not Love Thee’—and that seemed to calm him . . .5
There were poems that brought him peace when he read them even though he didn’t understand them, although it was usually a tormented and unstable peace. Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’ contained these lines:
Like a vapour wan and mute,
Like a flame, so let it pass;
One low sigh across her lute,
One dull breath against her glass;
And to my sad soul, alas! One salute,
Cold as when Death’s foot shall pass.
Or when a lover feels the touch of the tresses of a departed beloved and immediately knows:
Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves.
And a few poems by Swinburne that he would suddenly read out aloud; his words cont
ained a rhythm that compelled him to . . . And, yes, Kalidasa’s ‘Ajavilap’ which he still remembers and which Saraswati used to sing often:
If this garland can rob one of life, why did it not kill me when it fell on my heart?6
And then his entire will would suddenly be overcome by a death wish and he’d repeat, ‘Why did it not kill me?’
*
This was how Shekhar was being carried away by the forces flowing through him. But sometimes there would also be intervening moments when everything became so clear to him, so plain, familiar—moments like the moment Rossetti described in his poem ‘Sudden Light’. But then the extraordinary clarity would hurt him . . . One day, while reading Rossetti, he closed the book, closed his eyes and began to hum:
Such a small lamp illumines7 on this high way,
So dimly so few steps in front of my feet,
Yet shows me that her way is parted from my way;
Out of sight, beyond light, at what goal may we meet;
And then a moment arrived when a voice from inside him said, ‘Shekhar, you are in love!’
Then his whole body tensed and said, ‘Yes, yes, I do love.’
But whom?
A few days later he read this poem:
A lad there is, and I am that poor groom
That’s fallen8 in love and knows not9 with whom.
And it made him angry, ‘How did my personal experience become someone else’s cliché?’
So Shekhar said, ‘No, I don’t love. I won’t.’
And because poetry always reminded him of this fact, he stopped reading it altogether. He began reading the most difficult and dense books he could find. First he read Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, then Darwin’s books on evolution and then he went on to the biographies of Shankara, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, medical books, homeopathy books, books on mental illness, anatomy, exercise, yoga and even books on food science—whomever and whatever as long as it was impossible to be excited about reading them, as long as reading them meant beating the brain into submission . . .
And he tried to conduct all the experiments he read in those books on himself . . .
He imposed extreme controls on his daily activities. Getting up at 5 a.m. every day and bathing in cold water (even though no one could bathe with cold water even there in the summer months, and Shekhar had never done it before); scrubbing his skin with a towel; jumping out of the window at 5.30 a.m. to go for a walk (Father woke up at the sound of the door opening, and Shekhar didn’t want anyone to know where he was—he was afraid that his father would put an end to his programme and would certainly put a stop to his bathing in cold water which was especially important to him because of all the things in his daily routine it was the least pleasant . . . ); skipping breakfast in the morning; eating at 10 a.m., and if food was served even five minutes late, then fasting, no matter what Mother said; not eating anything outside of a prescribed time throughout the day (he had even established times for drinking water); not speaking to anyone; and not playing cards (and not playing anything else that might also be ‘useless’). In short, nothing was allowed that was prohibited by his daily routine, and his daily routine, like the British Raj, wouldn’t allow even a reasonable interpretation of the restrictions.
There was only one way that changes could be made—if there was something that he particularly found unpleasant, he would have to do it twice. Often, Shekhar would have to bathe twice—and the way he did was to bathe a first time, dry himself off, put on his clothes and then as soon as he warmed up, he’d get undressed and bathe again . . .
When food was a little late in being served, he wouldn’t eat anything. Mother would insist, but he still wouldn’t listen—he felt it was like being lured to listen. Then she would think that he was angry with her and she wouldn’t eat either . . . Once, she didn’t eat for three days, but Shekhar didn’t budge; he even told his mother that she should eat—it irritated him that she was trying to make him slip up. On the third day, Mother was enraged. She said, ‘So no one cares whether I live or die! I can’t put up with this nonsense,’ and ate. Afterwards she gave up paying any attention to any of Shekhar’s activities. At least she didn’t utter a single word . . .
*
One day Shekhar overheard Mother talking to Father, ‘This boy has gone insane. We need to take him to see someone—he’s losing his mind.’
Shekhar went and got Moore’s Family Medicine down from the shelf and began flipping through the pages from the beginning (he hadn’t learned how to use an index yet). Every time he read about a new disease and its symptoms he would conclude that he had it. He managed to diagnose the symptoms of dozens of diseases in himself before he got to the section about mental illnesses, where he discovered that he also had ‘melancholia’. Then he got to hypochondria, and in its symptoms he read, ‘People suffering from this illness generally read medical books and they mistakenly believe that they have every disease . . .’ Shekhar said, ‘Hey, that’s what I have!’
He put the book down. Immediately all the diseases disappeared and he burst out laughing . . .
But on the inside there was still unease, something sprouting—it hadn’t gone away. He still felt like a seed beneath the surface that was about to sprout—as if he was being torn apart by the force of a new life about to be born . . .
He began to look at his mother and father differently. All of his unanswered questions, which he had managed to keep to himself and which he was still continuously trying to repress with double the force and double the strength, began to return and torment him with a bestial, violent joy . . . And they became even more cruel as they fed on the half-answers he received to a few of his questions from the servants or Father’s peons, or which he secretly found in the books he read . . .
*
One day, Shekhar’s parents fought.
They had fought several times before. It was never a big thing—some thunder, some rain, silence and Mother going without food. Shekhar didn’t worry about this overmuch—except for the fact that on such days he had to try constantly to stay away from both of them, and to stay out of sight as much as possible.
But that day, Shekhar knew that this was a different kind of altercation as soon as he heard their muffled tones. He tried to catch the little that he could overhear from where he was standing—he didn’t have the courage to get any closer. He didn’t hear much, though he would catch something every time they raised their voices . . .
Mother said, ‘Then kill me!’
Father said, ‘Have some shame! What if someone—’
More was said, certainly, but Shekhar didn’t hear any of it. He tiptoed out and went behind the door and, after looking out from its cover, leaped out and ran off.
Father was standing to one side of a small, round table, and in front of him, on the other side, was Mother. Her anchal no longer covered her head, and she bared her chest as she said, ‘Then kill me!’
Father immediately left for his office. Shekhar heard a strange sound coming from the room—perhaps Mother was beating her chest . . . She beat her chest a few times and then went off to some other room.
Shekhar was sitting in front of the window. As he stared outside he began running through this incident in his mind . . . He recalled that there had been some tension between his parents for several days.
He hadn’t placed too much stock in it at the time, but now he knew that the source of this outburst had been simmering for some time . . .
Mother passed in front of the window. Shekhar saw that she had a determination in her gait that she had never had, and she was walking on straight, quickly. He began to think . . .
It was evening when Father returned from the office. No one came to greet him at the door. He went inside. The servants had tea waiting for him, but there was no one sitting at the table. He went to the bedroom. There was no one there. He went to the kitchen. There was no one there. He looked outside and saw the servant standing there quietly. Shekhar,
although he hadn’t revealed himself, saw all of this clearly.
His father came over to him and asked, ‘Where is your mother?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ravidutt, Chandra—come here.’
‘Yes?’
‘Where is your mother?’
‘Don’t know. Probably inside.’
‘Like hell she is!’ Father lashed out. He slapped Chandra across the face with an open palm and then gave one to Ravi, which left their ears ringing. Then he went to Shekhar and shoved his chest so hard that it sent him crashing into a chair and ending up on the floor.
‘What is the use of having you around here if you don’t even know where your mother is?’
A frustrated anger, at its highest pitch, cries out for respect. Shekhar got up, looked at his father without a trace of vengeance and said, ‘You went to the office and that’s when she went out.’
Father boxed his ears and asked, ‘Why didn’t you say so earlier?’
All of a sudden his voice cracked. He said, ‘She’s gone . . . gone . . .’
The words seemed to drain the life from him. He said, ‘She’s gone . . . She left after fighting about the slightest thing . . .’ It seemed as if he wanted to move but couldn’t. He looked at Shekhar like a helpless deer wounded by an arrow and said, ‘Shekhar, your mother is gone . . .’
And then suddenly his lifeless anger transformed into a flurry of activity. He caught hold of Shekhar, who had been sitting on the ground after he had fallen, by the hair and dragged him outside and said to him, ‘Good for nothing! Go and find her!’ He ran outside. Shekhar went off in one direction and he went in the other. The servant who had understood some of what had happened went off in yet another direction . . .
Shekhar Page 18
