The Lilac House: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  Did she love him? She didn’t know. But she needed him and was petrified of losing him.

  And yet, to give him the money would be changing the trajectory of ‘this thing, whatever it is’ as he called their relationship.

  Would it bind him to her? Or, would it just make her his money-dispensing machine each time he fell short? An edge of a wheedle in that deep baritone voice, a hint of helplessness in those eyes. Would he think that was all it took to send Vinnie rushing to the nearest ATM?

  Vinnie didn’t know. She couldn’t decide what was right, what was wrong.

  She pushes her wandering thoughts away as she leads the woman towards another café a little further away. One of the coffee shop attendants saunters to their table. ‘Two filter coffees, please,’ Vinnie says.

  ‘We don’t have south Indian coffee.’

  ‘I don’t believe this.’ Vinnie’s mouth curls. ‘Here we are in Bangalore, south India and you have, what is that?’ she peers. ‘Colombian, Brazilian, Kenyan … and no good old south Indian filter coffee. Bring us two espressos and two glasses of ice water.’

  The woman is dabbing at her cheeks with a tissue. ‘I am sorry to have imposed,’ she says, a watery smile creasing her face.

  ‘Don’t. I am Vinnie. I am sure whatever is troubling you can be resolved.’

  ‘I am Meera,’ the woman offers shyly. ‘Thanks, Vinnie. Thanks for…’ She pauses, unsure of how to describe the situation she has been found in.

  II

  ‘So this is my situation. Perhaps I should consider becoming a whore! What else am I trained for?’ Meera finishes, feeling her lips tremble, her hands shake. It has been a relief to talk to someone, this perfect stranger, of how her life changed; of not knowing; of the questions and answers that hovered over her, every waking moment and in her sleep.

  The trembling will not stop. Vinnie notices how Meera’s hands shake but she pretends not to see and takes her up on what she has just said.

  ‘A whore!’ Vinnie throws her head back and laughs. ‘I can just see it. What do you think you will be doing? Offering your clients tea and biscuits and a lesson or two in etiquette? Meera, Meera, what is wrong with you?’

  Then Vinnie stops abruptly. Meera, she sees, isn’t smiling. She doesn’t even look sheepish at having touted such a preposterous idea. Instead, she is nibbling her lip as if that is the only way she can prevent her face from crumpling into a wail.

  ‘Meera.’ Vinnie touches her arm. ‘What are you thinking of? I don’t even know what to say.’

  Meera squares her shoulders and says, ‘What else can I do? This job I have applied for – I don’t even know if I will get it. And if I do, it doesn’t pay very much.’

  Meera opens her handbag, an expensive Coach, Vinnie sees, and takes out a pocket book. She flips a page and pushes it towards Vinnie.

  ‘Look at this. This is how much money I need every month. Expenses. I have economized as much as I can. My family, my grandmother and mother and my children, why even the maid, all of them are so careful, it breaks my heart to see them like this. But even this tightening of purse strings, it isn’t enough, Vinnie. If I don’t find a job soon, we will be in serious trouble.’

  Vinnie sees the columns of figures in Meera’s neat hand. Each item carefully written, every i dotted, each t crossed. How desperate does a woman have to be to consider selling her body?

  ‘But didn’t you have any sense of what was coming? Some deep rooted discomfort at what was happening between the two of you?’ Vinnie asks.

  Meera watches Vinnie as she tears open a packet of sugar and empties the contents in the saucer, her hand carefully trailing the circumference of the cup. Then Vinnie stirs her sugarless coffee.

  ‘Why do you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’ Vinnie frowns. She looks at the empty sugar sachet.

  ‘Oh, this.’ She smiles sheepishly. ‘It’s silly but some part of me, the sugar craving me, is quite appeased by this. And I don’t have to worry about the empty white calories coming to live on my hips!’

  Vinnie takes a sip and asks again, ‘Did you really have no idea that everything wasn’t well between the two of you?’

  Meera stares at the middle distance. ‘We squabbled. Which couple doesn’t? But I didn’t think there would be another woman or it would lead to him leaving…no, walking out on us.’

  Meera sits up abruptly, stricken by a memory.

  The night before Giri left, he drank steadily. He seldom drank more than his one shot of whisky but that night, he had already had two drinks. He came into the bedroom clinking the ice in his drink. Meera looked up from where she was sorting her clothes for the next day’s brunch and smiled at him.

  He walked to the dressing table where her few articles of make-up and her bottle of perfume resided. He picked up the perfume and sniffed at it. ‘You ought to try a new one. A Dolce Gabbana or an Armani. It’s time you had a new fragrance!’

  Meera looked up, surprised. ‘I thought you said this one was me. I thought you liked it. Which is why I never buy anything else.’

  He took a sip of his drink. ‘The problem with you, Meera, is that you want everything to stay as it is. You have to allow room for change. For me to change. I used to like this fragrance once. Not any more. I find it boring. Old fashioned, with no zest at all!’

  Meera didn’t speak. Instead, she held up a skirt and asked, ‘What about this?’

  ‘Hmm…’ Giri said, feeling the chiffon between his fingers. ‘A little too sedate, I would say. Don’t you have anything more vibrant?’

  Meera’s face fell. ‘I am forty-four years old, Giri. I can’t dress like I am twenty. Mutton dressed as lamb, etc.’

  Giri shrugged. You asked and I replied, the shrug said. Meera bit her lip as she hung up the skirt. What did he want from her? She couldn’t seem to please him any more.

  ‘I have a daughter who’s nearly twenty years old,’ Meera began abruptly. ‘It looks so silly for me to dress like she does…’

  ‘Please. Let it be.’ Giri held up his hand. ‘You must dress or do whatever you want, exactly the way you want to. Anyway, it isn’t as if you do only what I want you to.’

  Meera went towards Giri and touched his elbow. ‘Tell you what, I’ll lighten it up with some jewellery. Chandelier earrings, the bead anklet, what do you think?’

  Giri waved his hand in a careless gesture. Now what? Meera wondered. Is he going to sulk about this?

  ‘Have you thought about what I said this morning?’ he asked from the depths of the armchair he had retired into.

  ‘About what, sweetie?’ Meera asked absently, staring into the innards of her closet. Should she attempt a quick sorting through of her undies?

  ‘Don’t use that fucking tone when you talk to me. I am not a three-year-old child.’

  Meera turned in surprise as the vicious bolt of rage hurled itself at her.

  ‘Giri,’ she began.

  ‘I asked you this morning to consider the offer from the real estate people. Have you thought about it?’ He leaned forward, his hand clenched around the glass.

  ‘What is there to think about?’ Meera said quietly. ‘I can’t. We can’t sell the house.’

  ‘Think about it,’ Giri said slowly, coming to stand by her side. ‘Apart from the money, the developers would give us two flats. One for us and the other for Lily and Saro. In the same block. They don’t have to think you are abandoning them. And you can pop over as and when you or they want, so they don’t get lonely.

  ‘It would be perfect, Meera, think of it. Money won’t be such a priority any more. All you need to do is say yes.’

  Meera sat on the bed. She felt that old fatigue suffuse her. What was she to tell Giri?

  ‘No, Giri.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t. Even if I were to agree, they won’t. They never would… And it’s their house after all.’

  ‘What about me?’ Giri stiffened. He took a deep swallow of the whisky. ‘What about me?’ His rancour no longer hid behin
d a façade of civility. ‘Don’t I have a fucking say? For the last twenty-two years I have sunk so much into the house. Look at it, Meera. Who is paying for its upkeep?’

  Something snapped in Meera then. Was it the strain of keeping a lie alive this long? Or, was it having a husband turn into a nitpicking ogre? ‘That’s true. But come to think of it, you didn’t pay any rent either.’

  Meera saw his face and felt all churned up again. ‘Giri,’ she tried to make amends. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. They won’t agree. They won’t. I know how they think. They don’t like change.’

  His face was averted. She placed her hand on his arm. ‘What is wrong with us? I can’t believe that we are arguing about this house, money, really!’

  Giri slithered his elbow out of her grasp and walked away. He picked up his glass and his voice when it emerged from the swallow of whisky and ice was cold. And his words chilling: ‘That’s what couples argue about. But we are not one, are we? You are the landlady and I am the tenant. There is no us. It is always you. Your house. Your family. Your friends. Has it occurred to you how I feel?’

  ‘But you wanted us to live here in this house with Mummy and Lily. You wanted to meet all my friends,’ Meera began. ‘You said you wanted to make my life yours…’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? You never did,’ he interrupted, moving further away into the shadows.

  What is it that I don’t get? Meera clenched her fist. Why is it that each time I question him, he throws this in my face? As if not comprehending him is a fatal flaw. As if from that point in my brain where all comprehension begins, from my cerebellum to my vagina, there is a long catheter that drains away my capability to absorb and understand. As if, only by his filling the gap can anything decent, noble, or right be imbibed by me.

  ‘What is it that I don’t get, Giri?’ she asked, not bothering to hide the bitterness in her voice.

  The tirade then. A long laundry list of linen that she had soiled; of hopes thwarted and disappointments endured. Of not finding in her the support he had expected; for turning him against his family, his past. ‘You don’t want a husband, Meera, you want a fucking puppet.’

  Meera felt a foolish grin split her face. What was he saying?

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t want to move, to change your life here, so I put my career on the back-burner. I had so many offers but I told myself, no, I wouldn’t disrupt your life.’ In his voice she heard a deep regret now.

  At the door he turned. ‘You know what your problem is, Meera? You want to make life fit those lists you are making all the time. You don’t see it, do you? That your lists are all about the past or the future. Pending chores. Things to do. What about the present, Meera? What about now? That’s what I am worried about. That’s where I want to live.’

  Meera continued to sit there, on the bed. She felt herself grow cold. Giri had never spoken to her like that. He sounded almost as if he hated her. As if she had trapped him in an unbearable situation. She stuffed her fingers into her mouth to stop a sob escaping her.

  In bed that night she pretended that none of those bitter words had been spoken, and snuggled up to him. She was tired. It had been a long and weary day but she wanted to make up to Giri. Smoothen any wrinkles that had crept between them. Restore the limbo their life was all about. If he wanted to make love, she was willing and ready. If somewhere deep within, a little voice taunted her that she was bartering her body for peace, she knew how to silence it effectively. For the greater common good, what was a little desecration of self-respect?

  But he lay there, still and unresponsive. Worse, she felt him pulling away. He lay with his eyes closed and an arm draped over his forehead, pretending to be asleep.

  Meera rolled on to her back, bewildered. Frightened, too. She had never known him to be so withdrawn. What now? What have I gone and done, Meera asked herself a thousand times as she hovered between wide-eyed consciousness and fatigue that shut her eyes in fitful sleep.

  But in the morning Giri smiled at her. Meera clutched at that carelessly tossed smile with the tenacious pluck of the drowning woman groping for anything, even a smile as hollow as straw. I’ll make it up to him. I’ll try and unspeak those words. I’ll try and be his goose girl again, she told herself as she fastened teardrop clusters in her ears and slipped on her daughter’s anklet. Then, on an impulse, she daubed herself with Nayantara’s perfume.

  ‘He didn’t leave much. He wanted us to sell the house. I refused. So he’s punishing me. This walking out on us, it’s childish vengefulness.’ Meera’s voice shakes.

  ‘But why don’t you sell the house?’

  ‘I can’t, Vinnie. I wish I could. That’s the whole trouble. The house isn’t mine or my mother’s or grandmother’s to sell. We are just allowed to live in it. It’s the strangest bloody thing. My great-grandfather took the house on a ninety-nine-year lease. That was fifty-four years ago. Forty-five years from now, it will revert back to the original owners. I don’t know what he was thinking of. Maybe he meant to provide for his daughter and granddaughter; the following generations would have to look out for themselves, etc. I have no idea why such a deal was struck and my grandmother has no logical explanation either.’

  ‘Does Giri know?’

  Meera shakes her head. ‘He doesn’t.’ She looks up from the table at Vinnie. ‘It wasn’t that I chose wilfully to hide it from him. At first when I brought it up, he didn’t want to know. He kept shushing me. Then later, I was much too scared. I knew that we came together as a package, the house and I. If he couldn’t have the house, I thought he wouldn’t want me either. And the lease, I thought, would expire only when we were very old or dead, and it wouldn’t matter then.’

  ‘What about the rent?’ Vinnie remembers seeing the huge old house and grounds. ‘Can you afford that?’

  ‘Two hundred rupees. Six years from now, it will be five hundred!’

  ‘What?’ Vinnie laughs aloud in disbelief.

  ‘Exactly. The landlord was my great-grandfather’s best friend. His family tried to take the house back, raise the rent, etc. but the old men had drawn up a watertight contract. We may starve to death but it will be in gracious surroundings!’

  III

  The surroundings fill him with a great sense of loss. Jak rests his arms on the steel table and watches the boy in front of him. For someone his age, he drinks a lot. He drinks too much, Jak thinks. This boy is all messed up. Heavens, how has he managed to put away so much rum without falling on his face?

  In the end Minjikapuram wore Jak out. Like that time before, when he was fifteen. It could give him nothing of what he sought. Instead, it did exactly what it had once before. It pushed him into doing what inertia or perhaps even apathy might have prevented him from doing.

  The silence of Minjikapuram so infuriated him, he decided he must find out what had really happened, one way or the other. It could mean starting afresh from another point but Jak knew all about that as well. When available scientific data offered only inconclusive answers, one looked elsewhere. In the stories of men who had seen it happen, in remembered portents and stipples of hearsay. On the field Jak knew of fishermen reading storm signals though radars maintained a resolute silence, of the spotting of a cyclone from the crest of a wave and the cry of a seagull. So Jak went home and began all over again.

  The boy’s hand shakes as he pours rum into a glass and tops it with water from a steel jug. Behind him shadows dance as men come and go. There is no laughter and hardly any conversation in that room lit with a lone naked bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling.

  ‘How did you know I would be here?’ the boy asks.

  Jak shrugs. ‘I have my ways.’

  For a moment you think of the days spent in the college corridors and the canteen, seeking a face from the printout you carried. Faces imprinted in your mind so that you would recognize them anywhere.

  They threw strange looks your way. Who was this man who haunted the college campus, searching every face? Th
en you asked to meet the principal.

  ‘I can’t allow it. I can’t give you personal information about the students here,’ the man said categorically. ‘Why do you need to know about them anyway?’

  Smriti wasn’t a student of this college. The boys were Asha’s friends, she had said. What could you say?

  ‘They were my daughter’s friends,’ you said.

  ‘Were?’

  ‘She is not well,’ you said quietly.

  ‘If it is a police matter, they will do the questioning. I can’t let you loiter here in the college campus. Please leave…’ He looked at the card you had given him. ‘Professor Krishnamurthy, oh, I see… at the University of Florida.’ A note of respect crept into his voice. Apology even.

  As he saw you to the door, he said again, ‘I hope you understand my position. I am helpless. Really!’

  Outside and across the road was a petty shop. Cigarettes, soft drinks, biscuits, bananas, magazines, betel leaves, chewing tobacco, everything a college boy might need to alleviate the hours spent cooped within the classroom.

  You started a conversation with the man there. He knew one boy, he said. Used to be my regular, he beamed, though I haven’t seen him in a while.

  ‘Where do you think I can find him?’ you asked.

  The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know where he lives.’

  You looked away. What were you to do now?

  You had thought it would be easier to trace the boys rather than Asha. A girls’ college run by nuns would require many explanations. And you didn’t even know what you were seeking.