The Lilac House: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  ‘Look who’s here.’ Joseph John beams. ‘You didn’t think Professor Jak would come here, did you? Come, come, join us.’ Joseph John thinks of his family in Fort Worth and Long Island. And of a possible move there if Mathew made America his home.

  ‘It’s just like being here; you get everything you need, except it’s a lot cleaner and more efficient,’ a visiting cousin had said, showing off photographs of his house, roses, dog and car. ‘Here, take a look! You should think very seriously about sending Mathew there for higher studies.’ And so the seed of imminent migration was sown.

  Mathew looks wildly around. Jak sees the widened eyes and flaring nostrils, then Mathew’s features slowly twist into a grimace of a smile. Fear fights with acceptance of the inevitable. The grimace contorts into resignation. The Que Sera Sera look. Mathew probably knows the song from his father, Jak tells himself wryly. Joseph John seems to be the kind of man who would have an impressive collection of Jim Reeves, Kenny Rogers and music from the fifties.

  ‘How was church?’ Jak asks. He sounds foolish to his own ears. But seeing the flare of panic in Mathew’s eyes, he sees how the innocuous question is striated with sinister serpentine turns: it doesn’t escape me, my boy, why you need to go to church!

  Mathew is quiet.

  ‘Was the choir practice better today?’ Joseph John tries to aid his suddenly tongue-tied child. What is wrong with him? Here is this man, all the way from America, seeking his son out to possibly passage his way into his hallowed institution and the boy is behaving like the village idiot. Alternating between moronic grins and silly grimaces and not speaking a word.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it! No doubt you have much to say to each other.’ Joseph John rises and as he leaves, gestures for Mathew to follow him.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’ Mathew’s voice finally emerges, low and tremulous.

  In the corridor, Joseph John frowns at Mathew. ‘What’s wrong with you? Instead of making an impression on him, you are behaving like a frightened bridegroom! Go on, talk to him. When he goes back, I want him to consider you as a serious candidate for his course.’

  ‘Chachan, you don’t know who he is,’ Mathew begins.

  His father holds up his hand. ‘I know. I know that your future lies in his hands. So go and be as he expects you to be!’

  Mathew huddles in a chair. Jak waits for him to speak.

  ’Let us go for a walk,’ Jak says to the hunched boy, feeling a wave of pity for him. ‘I think you would prefer that. What do you say?’

  They sit in silence by the sea wall. Gulls circle a crop of rock in the distance. The skies are slowly changing colour and Jak feels calm beach itself in him. The sea always does that for him. It is true, he thinks, that tattered cliché about time being a healer. My daughter lies there in her tomb of silence. And I can sit here and gaze at the horizon with what seems to be pleasure. Should I feel guilty? Or should I think that this is wisdom, this acceptance of circumstances. Jak cuts the end of his cigar and puts it into his mouth. He lights it, turning it slowly. In his most reasonable voice he inquires, ‘Why didn’t you come to see Smriti even once?’

  The boy stares into the distance. He doesn’t reply.

  His new-won calm dissipates. ‘Answer me.’ Jak grips the boy’s arm.

  ‘How could I?’ The boy shakes Jak’s hand off angrily. ‘How could I? Would you have been able to? I can’t even ask her for her forgiveness. Do you know what I am going through? Do you know what it is to be tormented by guilt every moment? Knowing I am responsible…’

  Jak is surprised. He didn’t think Mathew would admit to any responsibility. Not so easily and quickly.

  ‘Shivu must have told you,’ Mathew begins.

  Jak nods. ‘Some of it,’ he says, lighting his cigar again. The sea air gathers the sweetness of the cigar smoke with a casual ease. ‘Shivu told me that you and Smriti were… that you were in love with her.’

  ‘I was a fool,’ the boy says bitterly. ‘I was a small-town boy who was overwhelmed by her. By her American ways.’

  Mathew thought he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t feel like this. All churned up by love, anger, tenderness, resentment, jealousy, clowns cartwheeling and tumbling in the sawdust that was his heart. He found himself writing her name on pieces of paper. Smriti. Smriti. Smriti. Smriti. Smriti. Pages and pages of it as if by committing it to paper, she would be his forever. She lived in his inner eyelid; each time he shut his eyes, she was there, her head thrown back in laughter, the curve of her throat, all his, all his. She perched on every breeze, the fragrance she wore rode up his nostrils so that it came to him again and again. His ears quickened; her footsteps were hers alone. His skin warmed in memory of her skin against his… Smriti. Smriti. Smriti. Smriti. Mathew leaned back against his bike and glanced at his watch again. She was late. She had no concept of time and if he pointed out to her that she was late, she would crinkle her nose and demand, ‘How does it matter?’

  He would wait another five minutes and leave. She could call him when she got here and if he was free, he would come by. He started playing a game on his mobile. His fingers itched to text: Where are you? But he was already too much of a soppy fool around her.

  When Shivu had introduced her to him, he felt a bolt of lightning shoot through him. It really had been that thing: love at first sight. All he could think was, Shivu is my best friend but I can’t let it stop me. I love her. I love her like Shivu would never even know how to. I am the one who deserves her. Not Shivu, even if he’s my best friend.

  He had to employ all his cunning to find out where he could meet her alone. A space to wedge himself in and snare her. Steal her from Shivu, his conscience reminded him, but Mathew wasn’t listening. All is fair in love and war, he told himself.

  He glanced at his watch. Two more minutes. He wished Shivu was here. He missed Shivu. But there had been an ugly scene at the hostel a week ago. Shivu had found out that Mathew had taken Smriti to Wayanad. ‘It’s not on,’ Shivu had said, white lipped. ‘I know Smriti wanted to see wild elephants and I know your dad could arrange it because of his connections but Mathew, she’s my girlfriend. You can’t go off with her like that. If it wasn’t you, I’d think you were hitting on her.’

  When Mathew didn’t defend himself, Shivu stared at him in shock. ‘You are, aren’t you? You are trying to take her away from me. But Mathew, you are my friend.’

  Mathew turned his head away and said, ‘All is fair in love and war. Smriti isn’t in love with you. Why else would she go out with me?’

  Shivu turned on his heel and walked out. He hadn’t seen him since.

  Mathew kick-started his bike. He would go to the coffee shop. In its bright interiors and with the music playing, he wouldn’t feel so torn and twisted.

  As he walked into the coffee shop, he saw Smriti. She was sitting with someone. Shivu, he thought. That fucker, he’s trying to snatch her back from me. The pilayadi mon!

  Mathew strode towards them angrily, his fingers already clenching into fists and then he stopped abruptly. Smriti, he saw, was sitting shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh with Rishi. And that bastard was using the oldest trick in the world to hold a girl’s hand. He was pretending to read her palm.

  As for Smriti, she sat there resting her chin on her other palm, her eyes half closed, rapt in attention – or was it something else? How could she? Didn’t it bother her that someone would see her like this with Rishi? Mathew could see her frown and demand in her most acid tone: ‘Like what with Rishi? He was just holding my palm, I wasn’t giving him a blow job! What’s wrong with you, Mathew?’

  Mathew heard another voice in his head. Joseph John’s, when he had Mathew admitted to the Deccan College for Biotechnology. ‘I am paying a lot of money just for the admission. I hope you understand that! And the course isn’t cheap either. I want you to work hard and get very high grades. Do you hear me?’

  Mathew had nodded, eager to flee his father’s censure and ambitions f
or him.

  ‘One other thing,’ Joseph John said, leaning forward. Mathew looked up from his plate. His mother, he noticed, kept her eyes on her plate, afraid to meet his gaze. ‘You are going away from home and neither your mother nor I will be there to watch over you. The devil takes many forms. You have to watch out for yourself. The devil will charm you and entice you. The devil will make you its own with the face of an angel. Do you understand what I am saying?’

  Mathew nodded again. Decode to ‘Don’t get involved with girls!’

  But perhaps Chachan had been right after all. Mathew felt bile fill his mouth. The devil smiled and had the face of an angel. The devil played with you, shredding your soul, your mind. The devil called itself Smriti.

  Mathew bellowed.

  ‘Who was it who dragged me away? I can’t remember. It must have been Shivu. When the red cloud in my head lifted, I found him there.’

  Jak can’t speak. Something akin to revulsion fills him. Who is this girl these boys knew? It couldn’t be Smriti. Not his Smriti, who knows neither guile nor deception.

  ‘Did you speak to Smriti?’ Jak asks.

  ‘She said I was silly to think that she was seeing Rishi. For that matter, she wasn’t seeing anyone – neither Shivu, Rishi, nor me.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to. How could she not love me? I loved her that much, you see. Shivu insisted that she was just friends with all of us. That he had made the same mistake, reading too much into their relationship. “That’s how these girls are, don’t take it too seriously!”

  ‘But I couldn’t let it go. I pretended to let it all settle down. We were all friends once again. Shivu, Smriti and I. But I don’t think any of us trusted the others. Only Smriti, poor Smriti, trusted us. She was so happy to have all of us back together again.

  ‘“My family,” she said. “You are my family. Do you understand?”’

  Jak closes his eyes. It tears into him, the stab of guilt and sorrow.

  ‘Your appa wasn’t happy,’ Amma had said one evening. It was a few months after Appa left.

  Kitcha stared at his mother. Why was she suddenly talking about Appa? Then he saw her eyes linger on the calendar and he realized it was his father’s birthday.

  His mother had been in a strange mood all day. Humming under her breath as she bustled about her chores in the morning. In the evening, he had come home from school to discover that she had cooked a feast of ‘tindi’. Who was she expecting for tea that evening, he had wondered, surveying the chakkara pongal and bonda, aval uppuma and kuzhipaniyaram.

  She had looked up each time an autorickshaw turned into their alley, her eyes on the door, waiting for the appointed knock. Kitcha felt a wave of pity engulf him.

  In what desperation had she cast portents for the day? It would be the day he would come home. Her husband would walk in and discover how he lived there even if he didn’t any more. So she hummed his favourite kirtanams, dressed in his favourite colour of M.S. blue, cooked his favourite tiffin and beguiled herself into expecting his return.

  Kitcha looked away. He had always known it. Appa’s dissatisfaction with everything around him – his home, his wife, his son. And with it the acrid stench of regret. Of wrong choices made. Of the meandering of the life force. Kitcha hadn’t wanted to see it. If he didn’t, it would go away, he thought. Like those horrific nightmares he used to have every night for a while. Amma had taught him a mantra to chant at night. ‘Repeat it two times before you go to sleep and you won’t have those bad dreams any more. Wish them away from the bottom of your heart!’

  But Appa’s sorrow hadn’t gone. Instead, he had.

  ‘I clung to him. I shouldn’t have. When people stop loving each other, they shouldn’t stay together. It doesn’t do any good,’ Amma continued. ‘I should have understood his unhappiness. I should have let him go when he first wanted to.’

  ‘When?’ Kitcha whispered.

  ‘A year after you were born. But how could I? The child needs a father, I pleaded. I need my husband, I wanted to say but didn’t. Your father wouldn’t have let that hold him back. But you… I bought time with you. And I did everything I could to please him, but it only seemed to make him resent me more.’

  Kitcha stood up. He didn’t want to hear any more. The sordid unravelling of a marriage, the fragmenting of lives. He was fifteen, but he felt like an old man. ‘You should have let him go. I wouldn’t ever have known him then.’

  A silence. Much later, as they prepared for bed, Amma asked him, ‘Would you like to visit Kala at Minjikapuram? I have to go away for a few days. And I would go with an easy heart if I knew you were with Kala.’

  Kitcha nodded. His mother had taken to visiting one temple after the other. It wasn’t peace she sought, he knew. Her eyes searched temple corridors and bathing ghats. Perhaps one day she would find her husband seated under a tree, fatigued and careworn, and easily susceptible to her blandishments to go home with her. This was the prayer she carried in her heart and on her lips as she went on her pilgrimage of desperation.

  It was this that Kitcha who had become Jak remembered when he looked up from his drink one evening and asked Nina who sat with a sheaf of papers, mutinous in her silence, ‘Would you like a divorce, Nina?’

  More and more, it seemed Nina and he had nothing to say to each other. This was a Nina he no longer recognized. A Nina who at faculty parties and her publishing dos talked at length about Indian spices and miniatures and kathakali and the Chola bronzes, all of which she only had a fleeting knowledge of. When she was applauded for her expanse of erudition, she would say with a newly cultivated breathless laugh, ‘But oh, I am an Indophile!’

  The first time, Jak almost yelped in laughter. ‘Nina, what’s wrong with you? Indophile indeed. You are Indian!’

  Soon his amusement turned into derision that he threw in her face. ‘I would like to see you do this act in India. That’s why you won’t go back. You know they would laugh themselves silly at your Nine Yard Noose and the Grinding Stone of Desire!’

  She retorted with her own observations. ‘Well Kitcha, if you love India so much, why don’t you go back? Look at yourself and the ridiculous lengths you go to. The leaky tap in the garden so you can hear it drip because it reminds you of the kitchen tap in the house you grew up in. The bird shit in the patio that you won’t and will not let me hose away because it reminds you of the backyard in that house.’

  This was a Nina quick to anger. With every day the rift widened, until they lived strangers to each other’s dreams and bodies.

  He wouldn’t cling as his mother had. He wouldn’t wait till she left like Appa had. He wouldn’t make his daughters ever wonder, ‘Is it our fault?’ He only wanted for them what he couldn’t have. Stability. In whatever form he could provide.

  But as he sought consolation, Smriti too sought hers. In a faux family, to compensate for the one that Nina and he weren’t able to provide.

  Will it never end? Will the past never leave us alone?

  Like his father, is he too guilty of parental irresponsibility? How could it be, when all his life, all he had wanted to do was not repeat Appa’s mistake?

  ‘You said you feel responsible. But why?’ Jak asks, taking up the threads of his questioning.

  ‘Smriti lied to me when she said Rishi was just a friend. I discovered that she and Rishi were seeing each other, and I went berserk. I was angry, jealous and hurt. All I could think of was how to wrest her back from him. Rishi is a good-looking dude and he’d been to these posh schools. He is sophisticated and stylish and I felt like a boy, a village boy, when I compared myself to him. But I knew Smriti and I had much more in common. Whereas Rishi and she had nothing in common. She was just infatuated with his looks and charm. He had no depth. I knew she would come back to me if only I could get her to myself for a few days.

  ‘That was when Shivu told me about the workshop series Stree Shakti planned to conduct in Tamilnadu. Rupa, the coordin
ator, had asked if we could assist. We would start at Dharmapuri, move to Salem, on to Madurai, and were to cover all of Tamilnadu. There would be detours to many of the other districts, too, he said.’

  Mathew felt his pulse quicken as he listened to Shivu describe what was lined up. They were to show the volunteers of the local nodal units how to put up the skit and also take it to a few villages. ‘I’ve said yes,’ Shivu said, ‘I’ve said yes for the two of us. I know Ram, Chetana, Kripa and Maria have accepted too. It should be interesting, Mathew. But I want us to work on the script of Dying Daughters once more.’

  Mathew nodded as he shredded a leaf to bits. He knew what he had to do.

  ‘Smriti,’ he said into the phone. He had chosen a moment when he knew she would be alone and more susceptible to persuasion. ‘Think about it. You would be truly seeing India. The India that worries you. Here is your chance to do something. To talk to these women who kill their daughters in their wombs without a qualm. It is not awareness that is needed here. It is to be able to stoke up guilt, regret, remorse, the works. Shivu said you were tireless at the forum Stree Shakti organized. And even Rupa, you know how she is, cynical and aggro about everything, she said you were one of the most dedicated people she knew and if only there were more volunteers like you. They need you now. The dying daughters of India need you.’

  Mathew paused. He saw himself in the mirror. He reminded himself of his uncle, the real estate broker, in whose eyes such a light gleamed as he tried to sell ugly little boxes to his non-resident Indian clients as traditional homes with modern conveniences – going back to nature in the middle of bustling Ernakulam, waking to birdsong and the romance of a time long ago. Mathew was selling Smriti a dream, appealing to what he knew would excite her. He felt dirty but he didn’t care. The cause was real and she would be invaluable for what she brought to the project. Relationships were born when people shared a vision. Away from Bangalore, Smriti would see for herself what Mathew and she shared. And how flaky her relationship with Rishi was.