The Lilac House: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  Jak stands up abruptly. The plastic chair jerks back, catches in a dip in the chipped mosaic floor, and topples backwards. He reaches to set it upright, then kicks it away. His daughter lies on her back, will perhaps never sit up again. What is he getting so uptight for, about a fucking chair?

  From where he stands on the balcony, Jak can see the strip of sand behind the lodge. The sand bank. Did it happen here? Or was it further up the coast? Or, perhaps down in some secluded cove?

  Would this self-inflicted torture never end?

  Jak stuffs his still wet towel into a plastic bag and locks the door behind him. The coast is treacherous. Only fools and idiot tourists would swim out into the sea, he knows. But he cannot contain the restless beast that paces within him.

  He strips his clothes off and in his boxer shorts runs into the sea. The waves break against him but he pushes through the swell. This isn’t the gentle ocean he swims in most days of the year. This isn’t the placid sea he has vacationed by. The violent rough seas here hoist him and throw him back towards the shore. But Jak won’t turn back. He won’t heed the sea’s warning. I know you as well as I know myself. Do you think you scare me? What’s the point? The worst that can happen has already happened. What do you think you can do to me now, he screams at the waves. And then, as he knew it would, the shelf of sand beneath his feet falls away. A bottomless abyss. He is on his own now.

  Alone.

  V

  He didn’t mind being alone any more, he was used to it. Sometimes he feared he would never be able to live with another person again. His space had become important to him. In fact, some days it was almost with relief that he walked into the silence of his apartment. That afternoon, he had been glad that there was no one waiting as he turned the key in the lock.

  He had whistled under his breath as he opened his apartment door and sauntered in. It was one of those irritating things: a tune without words. He’d forgotten the words but the tune had stuck in his head that first time after Lisa called, and stayed there ever since.

  A week before, he had hosted a party in his home for a few of his soon to be ex-colleagues and their wives. He was leaving on an open-ended sabbatical to research the book he was going to write. If he didn’t do it now, he never would, he laughed. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lisa devour him with her large blue eyes.

  That was when it began. The wooing of Lisa Sherman.

  He had enjoyed flirting with her. He did it rather well and effortlessly. All he had to do was stick to a pattern. Cyclones had taught him as much. That there is nothing random about life, ocean currents, clouds, or affairs with married women, even if they are the wives of colleagues. He had singled her out as the one he knew to be most vulnerable and hence most eminently fuckable.

  She wore a single string of amber beads around her neck and her need on her face – twin creases of discontent at the corners of her mouth and hunger in her eyes. Her fingers teased and played with the amber beads while her eyes swooped on him from across the room. ‘Come back Liza, come back girl, wipe the tear from me eye,’ Belafonte sang on the stereo, his Bose speakers speaking only to her.

  And then he brought out his Leonard Cohen. The only poet who sang within him. Cohen, who had a line for every man, woman and moment. For Lisa and her sisters. For every woman who bore her loneliness like a sin.

  She called him the next day. That too was part of the pattern. Good wives calling to say thank you. Two days later, the next call was to tell him about a documentary on Bangalore on CNN. Wasn’t his daughter there? She thought he’d like to see it.

  He had felt that familiar curl of excitement spiral in him; it was like spotting the eye of a cyclone through a cirrus canopy in a satellite picture. Once he’d seen it, he knew what was coming.

  It was late afternoon and already the room was sunk in a shadow of dying light. Jak threw his keys on the table by the door. The clatter of the keys against the metal tray filled the hallway. Jak paused. The emptiness of the apartment, its silence, filled him. In two weeks he would be in Hawaii. At forty-eight, it was daunting to start life all over again, like when he was twenty-two and had moved to the States. If he could relive those years, would he have done things differently?

  The tune wouldn’t stop in his head and Jak felt it escape his mouth again. He went to the fridge and took out a carton of fruit yoghurt. And from a bag, a handful of carrot sticks. The fridge was almost empty. He would pick up a few things tomorrow. Then it would be time to close up and leave.

  Jak leaned back in the sofa and flicked the TV remote on. The sounds of a ball game filled the room. He pressed the mute button and opened the carton of yoghurt.

  Lisa’s armpit. A cloud of strawberry with an undertow of a cheesy pong. Lisa, who hadn’t been washed and deodorized and prepared for him. He had caught her unawares that first time with armpit stubble and lank hair, her jeans pulled over panties soft with many washings and the beginning of a fray in the elastic. Slatternly, ripe Lisa, hidden behind the façade of a proper wife. Feral Lisa with sharp pointed teeth and an insatiable hunger. ‘Not here, not here,’ the amber beads clak-clakked against the door as she moaned. ‘Not in this house! Not in his house.’

  You had wanted a fuck, a series of fucks perhaps. But you didn’t want to break up Lisa’s marriage. Yet, when she suggested that the two of you meet at a beach house a friend of hers owned, you agreed. What was the harm? She knew what she was doing. Between two consenting adults, etc. She had planned it all to the last detail. The babysitter for the kids and an alibi for herself. A hamper with little things to nibble at, wine, and even a corkscrew. Sexy lingerie, freshly washed hair and painted nails. As she sucked you on that hastily made bed, you wondered how long she had been thinking about this.

  And then, as you latched the windows shut and locked the door, she clung to you. ‘When? When can I see you again, darling?’

  And you felt that curl of postcoital content crumble. ‘Darling!’ You saw how her fingers wrapped themselves around your wrist and ash coated your tongue. Didn’t she know you were leaving?

  Images flickered in front of him on the TV screen. What had he gone and done? He could hear Nina say, ‘You never think. You never do. You just give in to that wild reckless impulse. Did you for one moment think of the others involved?’

  Then the phone rang, echoing through the apartment, its ring soft but persistent. Lisa, he thought. That too was the pattern. They always called after that first bout of dammed hunger was released. No woman would call a fuck just a fuck. It had to be tarted up and sanctified with words of love. He sighed and picked up the phone. ‘Jak here,’ he said.

  It was Kala Chithi. ‘Kitcha.’ Her voice was wary as it reached his ears. ‘I received a call from the police station in Minjikapuram.’

  And he felt the floor slide away.

  VI

  Each time he thinks he has found a sand bar to rest on, it slides away.

  The waves continue to slam into him. Jak fights the water, the heave and push necessitating every ounce of his strength. If he allows himself to slacken even a little bit, he will not be able to breathe. The water stings his eyes. His arms ache, his legs tire, but he cannot turn back. He needs to flee the guilt that haunts him. He was the one who created the magical land of Minjikapuram. In his telling of all that happened to him there, he planted a seed in Smriti’s head. He thinks of that first time now.

  She was seven. Leaning against him with a rag doll clutched in one hand and her thumb in her mouth.

  ‘There is a temple on a hill by the sea. But it is not like any other temple. This one has two deities. Minjikaiyan and Minjikammal. They were born when Shiva’s seed was split on that hill.’

  ‘What seed? Is Shiva a fruit?’

  Jak laughed. ‘No, silly. The lord Shiva with the third eye. If he opens it, you and I, Mama and baby Shruti, and your Melissa and Sita, Tinkerbell and Kokila,’ he gestured to the dolls she had brought into the living room, ‘will be barbecued meat.’
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br />   ‘Oh, how do you know? Have you met him?’ Smriti asked, her eyes brimming with admiration for her Papa Jak.

  ‘I almost did. It is believed that if you swim in the sea by the temple at Minjikapuram and then climb the one thousand three hundred and thirty-three steps and make a wish, it will come true. So I leapt into the water. All I meant was to go for a little swim and make my wish. But the sea had other plans for me.’

  ‘And then, Papa?’ Smriti touched him on the shoulder.

  Jak looked at his daughter’s face and tried to laugh off the horror of the moment when he knew there was no escaping the current.

  Besides, how could he admit that he had been terrified? To confess to fear would make him and his reassurances suspect: You are a big girl now, you don’t need a night light. Papa is in the next room, what do you have to fear? It’s just a bad dream, baby. Too much pizza. No monster will get you. Papa is here.

  The waters off the coast were violent, the currents unpredictable and almost demonic in intent. ‘What are you playing at, you silly fool?’ the man had hurled at him as he pulled him onto his catamaran. ‘This is the ocean, not some stupid pond for you to paddle around in. You have to understand the ocean, read the skies before you venture in.’

  Fifteen-year-old Kitcha had lain with his head hanging over the side of the boat. His chest had hurt and he had felt the rasp of salt in his throat, the bloat of water in his belly. Dead. He could have been dead and his body would have washed ashore on the coast three days later.

  He caught her searching his face. Her little fingers were wrapped around his wrist.

  ‘Papa, did your wish come true?’

  Jak smiled. He had been so afraid that he had forgotten to make his wish. ‘I never feared the sea again.’

  ‘You are not afraid of the sea! Really?’ Her eyes sought his. They had been teaching her to swim then. ‘All that water around you, over you, you were very afraid at first, right Papa?’

  Nina came in from her study then. ‘Kitcha, you know you shouldn’t fill her head with your stories. As it is, she is a reluctant swimmer. And now you are going to scare her even further!’ As if to erase the sting of her words, Nina ruffled his hair as she went past.

  She hadn’t yet got to the point when all he did, all he said, even the way he breathed, was an affront to her.

  ‘Of course I was scared at first. But then I learnt something. I learnt to respect the sea and I was never afraid again. You must always treat water with respect,’ he said. ‘No silliness. No taking stupid risks. You see, that’s why Minjikapuram has a very important place in my life. I learnt a lesson there. You don’t run away from things that terrify you. The water scared me but not for long. If you understand it, it will never be able to dominate or scare you.’ Jak was trying to be at his paternal best. A father imparting life lessons and guiding his child through the complexities of living.

  He saw the intensity of Smriti’s gaze. She was a child who took everything he said to be the holy truth. She would never allow him any fallibility or weakness. And so, feeling a sudden qualm of disquiet at how seriously she took him, he reached across and pulled her pigtail. ‘Do you know when I was really scared?’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘When I asked your mother to marry me. I was shaking. Now that was scary!’

  Nina smiled at him from across the room. ‘Liar,’ she mouthed. ‘Liar, liar, liar…’

  Jak pretended to cringe. ‘Do you know who she was?’ He turned to Smriti.

  ‘She was the Madras Girl. The only Madras Girl in all of Syracuse. And I was this really wide-eyed boy from a little alley in Mylapore. A little brahmin boy who couldn’t even figure out which jeans to buy. But the Madras Girl knew everything.

  ‘And that wasn’t all. When I asked her to marry me, she gave me the Madras Eye. Do you know what that is?’ Jak narrowed his eyes till they were slits. ‘She looked at me through her sunglasses with her Madras Eye and said, “I don’t know Kitcha, I don’t know.”’

  ‘Kitcha, stop filling the child’s head with misinformation. I don’t know why you do it. Smriti, listen to me. Madras Eye is conjunctivitis. I don’t know what Papa means by saying I gave him the Madras Eye…’ Nina stirred her coffee and licked the spoon.

  ‘But she knew, Papa, she knew she wanted to marry you. That’s why you married each other and I am here and baby Shruti,’ Smriti cried, aching to be part of that moment when Kitcha and Nina, Papa and Mama had found each other.

  Kitcha, Nina, Smriti and Shruti. When did it all change?

  A wave breaks over his head.

  The middle phase. It is this period that you need to watch for, Jak thinks.

  He has seen it happen. How, sometimes, even a well developed wave, a young cyclone full of promise, will not grow into the mature one they had predicted it would.

  Jak wonders why he didn’t see it coming. As his life became more and more contained in classrooms and labs, he failed to sense the change. And Nina and he grew apart… until one day the marriage was over.

  The embarrassment, the shame, the disappointment… You resorted to the God of the Gaps theory to explain the dying out of promise to your children. You felt the eyes of your older child trail you and Nina. You saw her gather her younger sister into the fold of her embrace. She didn’t trust either Nina or you as parents any more. You tried logic; all the theories you knew, all the reasoning you could muster to make sense of the situation. That was all you had, to help her make sense of the constant bickering, the fault finding, the relentless criticism, the snapping and snarling that grew into cold quarrels that wounded and crippled. The palpable resentment when Nina and you were merely in the same room together.

  Smriti became a child caught between two fronts. She wouldn’t buy into the sometimes-people-grow-apart-it-is-inexplicable explanation. Was that what caused her to flee their warring world? And from a distance, she tried to instigate Shruti’s relocation. ‘We will be happy here,’ Smriti wrote. ‘This is our home. Here family means everything!’

  Were Nina and you the perpetrators of what happened to her? Was that ass of a doctor right after all?

  All your life, all you ever wanted to do was protect your children. From demons and heartbreak, big and small. From hurts and wounds inflicted by a careless, callous world. Even when all you could do was watch from the sidelines: when Smriti was not chosen for the school play, when Shruti’s friends didn’t turn up for her birthday party, when Smriti’s boyfriend dumped her.

  You shared with them all that life had taught you about life itself so they could avoid the mistakes you made. And yet, when they chose to make their own mistakes, you had no option but to be there for them.

  How can you cease to be a parent even if your child is determined to shrug off the mantle of being a child?

  When do you let go? Where do you stop? How does one draw the line?

  Jak treads water and looks around. He can see the temple in the distance. How could you have not looked after my child? When she came here, it meant you became responsible for her. How could you have let this happen? Jak rages at the brother and sister duo and then abruptly ceases. What is he doing? Trying to shift responsibility to deities of stone in a derelict temple on a hill?

  If he is swept into the sea, there will be no one for him to throw accusations at but himself.

  And Smriti, what would happen to her then? Nina would have her put in a home somewhere. Nina is no longer the woman he knew. What was once a chitinous shell, easily cracked, has turned into stone.

  Nina sat there by Smriti just before she returned to her life in America. An inert Smriti, for once. She often sat at her bedside, looking at her daughter’s face, studying it for some sign of change. ‘You, Kitcha,’ she snarled suddenly, ‘I hold you responsible for this. You and only you. I don’t want you to come anywhere near Shruti. I will get a court order if I need to. I won’t lose another daughter to you, to India.’

  ‘Nina.’ He reached out to take her hand in his. But she flung his hand
away.

  ‘You wouldn’t listen to me ever, the two of you. You ganged up against me. I was the stick in the mud. I was the gargoyle spitting advice, I was the one you had to defy and even spite. Fine! Now you look after her. You take the responsibility.’

  Jak turns towards the shore.

  Out there on land is Smriti. The responsibility of her life. The burden of the past. Her petrified future.

  VII

  Meera’s petrified future. It begins thus:

  The raucousness of a rowdy flock of mynahs in the avocado tree by the bedroom window.

  Just for a moment she knows respite as she stirs from sleep. A sleep she had lured in the early hours with a Restyl tablet. She had lain on her side reading the chemical composition of the little angel who would lull her nerve ends to repose.

  She keeps her eyes shut and holds her breath. What if Giri crawled into bed while she was asleep? A movement at her side. A breath. A hand that snakes its way to drape around her hip. A clearing of throat. The presence of Giri.

  She lies there with her eyes pressed tightly shut.

  Meera lets her fingers crawl and encounters the unslept side of the bed. She knows then it is the morning after Giri’s disappearance. In the span of sixty seconds, her mind leaps, vaults, hops, skips, tumbles, cartwheels, gyrates and contorts into a million possibilities of anguish in waiting.