The Smoke is Rising

by Mahesh Rao

  In the offices of the Sentinel, a clearer picture of the Supervisory Committee’s difficulties was emerging. On strict condition of anonymity, a reliable source on the Committee had stated that the trouble began at a cocktail party when the artistic director had criticised the programming director’s approach as overly commercial. Unfortunately the phrase used was ‘shameless Bollywood whore’ and it had been relayed, unmitigated, to the programming director. The injured gentleman had retaliated via a smear campaign accusing the artistic director of nepotism and corruption: the latter’s wife had written the script for one of the films in contention for the closing night gala. Naturally the artistic director, a film historian of some repute, was incensed and had immediately called on his allies on the various sub-committees for their unqualified support. Further accusations and insinuations emerged over the next few months, piquant accounts in the Sentinel marking their passage.

  The timing of the current difficulties was calamitous as considerable progress had already been made. The Principal Secretary’s office at the Department of Culture had approved its participation some time ago and communications with the Directorate of Film Festivals were at an advanced stage. The chief sponsors had been confirmed as a mobile phone company and the state’s largest producers of metal casings for electronic equipment.

  Matters would probably have deteriorated further without the lucky intervention of a Singapore-based private bank, which agreed to step in as an additional main sponsor. The unexpected availability of further funds seemed to achieve a sudden convergence in the artistic vision of the two camps. In a matter of days, email subject headings became more optimistic, the event’s organisers were given concrete instructions and a number of press events were hastily arranged.

  It was decided that the festival opening gala would be held at the Anuraag Kalakshetra in December, at the height of the tourist season. The film chosen as the first screening was billed as a ‘futuristic jehadi chamber drama’ made by a prominent Malayali director who was apparently returning to form. As the festival took shape and publicity grew, a renaissance began to take place among the city’s cultural stewards. Moribund projects were steered back to drawing boards, new funding applications were completed and a whole series of suggestions made themselves known on the letters page of the Sentinel. A novel exhilaration spread even to the Mysore Tourism Authority. Further soul-searching at Authority meetings had not yielded a fitting alternative to the ‘Geneva of the East’ theme; now the film festival’s celebration of cinema at the edge of Tejasandra Lake seemed a brilliant opportunity to showcase the whole of Mysore in a jubilant lakeside setting.

  A few weeks later the Authority called a press conference of its own where, in rhapsodic association with its commercial partners, it announced that Mysore’s first Lake Utsava would take place on the Tejasandra Promenade, the day after the film festival’s opening gala. A fitting prelude to the construction of HeritageLand, the Utsava would present a diverse selection of the city’s talents along the lake shore, planting exhibitions of the work of local artists next to a Carnatic music tent, displays of street theatre alongside a parade of vintage cars. A dance stage featuring exponents of bharatanatyam and kuchipudi, a yoga fair, the obligatory food mela and a handicrafts bazaar would all be incorporated into the revelries.

  The timetable was tight and the countdown had begun. Nominations to various new committees were finalised; site inspections were made; stakeholders, willing or not, were identified. The sap of a certain section of Mysore society began to spit and swirl through channels formerly clogged by indecision and civic torpor. HeritageLand or not, Mysore was preparing to face the world.

  The first sprigs of intimacy revealed themselves in code, arrangements that both Jaydev and Susheela knew were crucial but which were never discussed. Susheela was taken aback to hear his voice the first time that he called, her surprise feathered by an enigmatic thrill. In the course of that first phone call, Jaydev did not say how he had got her number or on what pretext. But she had no doubt that the enquiry would have been made with a stolid discretion. That phone call had led to a few others, all made and received with the ease of a casual friendship but, for Susheela at any rate, ringed with the shards of a jagged anticipation. They did not speak of why they did not meet, despite living only fifteen minutes away. Their conversations took form around roomy imagined recesses that could accommodate any number of quirks of conduct or confession.

  As the conversations unspooled, Susheela was surprised to find herself the target of friendly accusations and the butt of the most obvious jokes. It was an attention that was new, distracting and delicious. When Jaydev called, Susheela went into her bedroom, shut the door and settled onto the divan facing the windows. She was sure that Uma was completely uninterested in her phone calls but why take a chance? It was, she knew, ridiculous to even be thinking of risks or chances; her conversations with a seventy-year-old retired lawyer should concern absolutely no one else.

  What was most surprising to Susheela was the number of conversations that they unlocked. She had not realised that she had that much to say. But the anecdotes and observations plunged out, a spontaneous flow that at first embarrassed her and then invigorated her. She found herself talking about Sridhar with an aching avidity, realising that some need to give voice to their life together had come fizzing up to the surface. Jaydev seemed genuinely interested in a man he would never meet and long-forgotten events began to lodge themselves in Susheela’s ken from a distant space.

  ‘After so many years of being together, I never thought about what it would be like to live without him. Even when he was very ill and we knew he would not survive, I didn’t think about what it would be like. I was just too busy, there was always something to organise or I felt that I had to try and keep his spirits up.’

  ‘And then it hits you weeks or months after they have gone.’

  ‘Exactly. But I should have tried to be more mentally prepared; it’s my own fault in a way. My daughter Priyanka always says that I have no imagination and she’s probably right.’

  ‘But how can you imagine loss, I mean real loss, until you experience it?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I just can’t get away from the feeling that there must have been something I could have done to be better prepared.’

  On another occasion she described to Jaydev those first tentative moments in her married life when she and Sridhar were still trying to map each other’s emotional contours. Two months after their marriage, Sridhar had been transferred to Bhopal, the first in a series of moves that would eventually lead him to the position of Director of Finance for the whole of House of Govind. They had arrived at the staff quarters, only to be informed by the caretaker that part of the ceiling had collapsed in the bungalow assigned to them. They had been quite prepared to spend a few weeks in the company guesthouse until the house was rendered habitable again. But Mr Mishra, Sridhar’s new boss, had been adamant that he would not commission such an injustice. A bulky man with glistening hair that looked like it had been squeezed out of a tube in little curlicues on to his head, he had insisted that the couple stay with him and his wife; otherwise he would never be able to forgive himself. Mrs Mishra had been less welcoming. A tall, joyless woman, like a length of driftwood wrapped in a silk sari, she had coldly fixed her gaze on the fragments of ceiling plaster while her husband put his arm around Sridhar’s shoulder and ushered him towards a waiting Ambassador.

  Sridhar and Susheela reluctantly spent six weeks staying with the Mishras. Any attempt at negotiating a passage to the company guesthouse was met by a jovial but solid admonishment from Mr Mishra and a disbelieving snort from his wife. It was a strange and unexpected beginning to their married life. Susheela’s mornings were spent trying unsuccessfully to engage Mrs Mishra in conversation or following the cook around the enormous kitchen while he tried to shake her off.

  In the afternoons Mrs Mishra went to her kitty parties, to which Susheela was pointedly not invite
d. She would lie on the bed in the spare room, under the hypnotic rotations of the ceiling fan, looking at the Constable print on the wall and listening to the sounds of Mrs Mishra’s departure: sharp instructions to the maid, the turn of the lock in the fridge, the padlock being clipped into the telephone dial, the drawing of the curtains in the sitting room against the afternoon glare and the clicking of her heels on the mosaic floor towards the front door.

  The evenings were only slightly better. The two couples would engage in a disjointed quadrille on the veranda, Mr Mishra encouraging Sridhar to join him in ‘a bit of one’s favourite poison’ while Mrs Mishra stared grimly at the receding level of whiskey in the bottle. In between frenetic periods of warding off mosquitoes, Susheela would disappear into long reveries that drew her into reassuring tableaux of life as a normal newly married couple. Sridhar would end the evening lavishly drunk, having attempted to keep up with Mr Mishra in his enthusiastic consumption and unintelligible career advice. As the darkness around them grew into a star-strewn shroud, the boy would bring plate after plate of snacks that went untouched.

  After the couples had retired for the night, Sridhar would apologise for their predicament, promising that if the ceiling was not fixed in a week, he would quit his job and they would leave Bhopal for good. Susheela would nod distractedly, listening to the telltale pitch of the voices that could be heard on the other side of the bedroom wall: Mr Mishra’s wheezing explanations that sounded like a broken harmonium and the snapping of sun-baked twigs that could only be Mrs Mishra’s clipped retorts.

  ‘So, can you imagine, if you bumped into Mrs Mishra today?’ Jaydev asked.

  ‘Oh God, please don’t even say that as a joke. You know, I think I’d have to tell her that, regardless of her best efforts, I managed to pick my way into her fridge every afternoon and eat one of her horrible imported chocolate hearts.’

  Jaydev’s wife, Debashree, had suffered a stroke eight years ago and died a few months later. At the first mention of his late wife, Susheela found herself in foreign territory, her normal social equilibrium deserting her. Would it seem inappropriate for her to display greater curiosity or would a delicate circumvention of the topic appear uncaring? It suddenly dawned on her that men in their seventies with dead wives were not her forte. But Jaydev required neither prompting nor guiding. His allusions were brief but numerous.

  Jaydev had known his wife, Debashree, at college. She was the first girl in his year to have her hair cut short and arrive at college on a bicycle. They had married in spite of the objections of Jaydev’s mother, who for years afterwards spent hours detailing disastrous predictions for their future in her letters to him. He had once shown Debashree a letter in which his mother had claimed that not only would his wife abandon their children one day, she would do so by running off with one of her dissolute colleagues at the Institute of Education. Debashree’s reaction had been typically brassy. She had written to her mother-in-law, setting out in laborious detail the combination of defects in each of her male colleagues that rendered them unsuitable for adulterous couplings.

  The telephone wrapped Susheela and Jaydev in the folds of its invisibility, giving them a safe haven for their pauses and reflections. An hour would pass, sometimes two or three, before Susheela emerged from the bedroom, her capillaries swollen with the sound of Jaydev’s measured voice, his quizzical teasing and that almost inaudible chuckle.

  ‘Are you an only child?’ he had once asked her.

  ‘Yes, how did you know?’

  ‘I can tell. You have that constant watchfulness that an only child has.’

  ‘I am a sixty-four-year-old widow with knee pain and you think I have the constant watchfulness of an only child?’

  She felt almost gratified when he had laughed so hard that it brought on a choking fit.

  The gloom inside the room was so dense that it had a texture, like cotton wool ripped from a bale. Through the open window Mala could hear rainwater dripping off the roof into the choked gutter, the last sobs of the dying downpour. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was still only eleven o’clock. At half past nine she had called the office to let them know that she would not be coming in. Shipra had answered the phone, sounding bored and distant.

  ‘Okay fine, are you coming in tomorrow? Actually, just hang on. Mr Tanveer wants to talk to you,’ she had said.

  ‘Ms Mala? What is the matter, not feeling well? What exactly seems to be the problem?’

  Mala had explained that she had a migraine and, she thought, a temperature.

  ‘That is most unfortunate, Ms Mala. Have you taken the opinion of a good doctor? Oh, I see. Well, you must not neglect these matters, of course. But I am sure that you will recover very soon; after all, you have youth on your side, not like us old fuddy-duddies. Shipra will call you later today to make sure you are not in need of anything. But in any case, I am sure we will see you tomorrow, isn’t it?’

  Mala lay in bed, looking at the damp patch where the wall met the ceiling. The surface of the wall had bubbled up like a pancake and now little flakes dangled over the dusty suitcases shoved on top of the cupboard. The last time they had been used was on the honeymoon to Ooty. On returning, as Mala had stood on the bed, reaching up to push them against the wall, she had suspected they might not be required again for a long time. She had been right. But now Girish had become obsessed with the idea of a trip to Sri Lanka, an indulgence they could not afford and which, as far as Mala could tell, held no significant attraction for either of them. The thought of following Girish around ruins or beaches far away from home made her want to cocoon herself away. It was taking every strand of equanimity to pilot her way through her everyday existence; the anxiety that would be engendered by new experiences on distant shores was terrifying.

  There was a knock at the door. Gayathri had said she would be late today. Mala got out of bed and let her in. As usual, there was minimal conversation. Mala returned to the bedroom, sinking down on the sheets that seemed to have sucked in the moisture from the walls. She could hear Gayathri opening the windows in the sitting room.

  She turned on to her side, away from the window, desperately tired but knowing sleep would not come. Living a secret life made innumerable claims. Every day she had to guard against the erosion of her will with a heightened watchfulness, induced at great cost and leaving her winded.

  Mala had considered leaving Girish, but her conception of leaving was shapeless. It was only a vaguely sensed mood, not something that could yet be termed a real choice. She stumbled at the first steps, trying to recall a time before the essence of her life became violence and humiliation, alternating with boredom. The intervals between Girish’s random acts of cruelty should have been periods of relief. But an enormous tedium took over and battered her with its slow, steady beat: the routine tasks that Mr Tanveer assigned her, looking equal parts stricken and suspicious; the organisation of life in that dark house, with its corners full of contempt and derision; Girish’s lengthy speeches, girdling a subject on which he had decided she needed instruction.

  Yet thoughts of any alternatives left her incapacitated, a sharp chill penetrating into her bones. When she married, Mala had made a mental break with her maternal home and Konnapur. She had departed for the legitimacy of adulthood. Picturing herself at home with her parents again was impossible, if it meant returning to Konnapur with nothing to show for her married life but the corrosive shame of her inability to make her husband love her.

  Gayathri stuck her head around the door.

  ‘Not well? What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Headache.’

  ‘Shall I quickly do the floor here?’

  ‘No, just leave it. You can do it tomorrow.’

  Gayathri nodded and walked to the bathroom, tunelessly humming a song; an odd sound that lay somewhere between a gasp and a croak.

  The old man next door turned on his radio. His sitting-room window was so close to Mala’s bedroom window that she could
have stretched her arm out over the low wall and touched it. A radio play was in progress. A woman had been accused of infidelity and she was proclaiming her innocence. The tremors in her voice were wrapped in a static echo as she tried to defend herself against her accusers. A smooth baritone cut in, a voice with the lacquered timbre that made it ideal for radio. His mother and his brother had discovered the truth, said the male voice, and he preferred to believe the people who shared his blood, rather than a stray he had rescued and married out of misguided compassion. The wife’s denials began afresh, swearing that she could never betray a man who had been so kind to her.

  Gayathri walked into the room again.

  ‘Finished for today. I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

  ‘Wait, can you do something for me before you go? Can you get me some tablets from the medical shop? Here take this chit, I’ve written down what I need.’

  Gayathri nodded and reached for the note and the money. She turned to leave but then stopped.

  ‘Not everything can be cured by a tablet, you know.’

  Mala propped herself up on her arms: ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll be back in five minutes. You better take some rest.’

  With that, Gayathri left the room.

  The lunchtime rush had thinned out at the Vishram Coffee House. The two public-sector bank officials had decided to take a late lunch and were at their usual table.

  ‘That Prakash called me yesterday,’ said the senior official, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘What for, sir?’

  ‘By mistake. I got the call but I didn’t recognise the number. I answered it anyway and you know what?’