The Lilac House: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  At first, she didn’t want to. She was reluctant to leave Rishi even for a day, she said. She had changed. She had become more quiet. She had got rid of some of her piercings and got her hair fixed. Smriti so wanted to please Rishi. We could all see that. And so I told her that she was a fraud, all talk and no heart. Someone playing at being a social worker. And that she had no real interest in any living creature, except Rishi.

  She didn’t talk to me for a week. Then I had Shivu call her and work on her as well. Shivu seemed to know what to say to her, for she called to say she would go. She would join Shivu and me at Madurai. She would be free only then, she said.

  We waited for her at Madurai. She was to have joined us on the first of March. When she didn’t turn up, I was affronted at being stood up. Shivu was not so upset. He seldom is. He said she would turn up. A day later she still hadn’t come and we moved on with the group.

  We met Rishi’s cousin a month later. He said there had been an accident. Rishi was badly hurt. But he didn’t know where Smriti was. ‘I guess she dumped him like she dumped the two of you,’ he said. ‘The bitch!’

  Neither of us felt inclined to defend her. We were pissed off with her too.

  The next day Rupa was at the café and she said she had read something about Smriti in the newspapers. She had gone to a small town about hundred kilometres east of Madurai. She had a freak accident there. A log lifting in the wave and slamming into her. Can you imagine? She was paralysed, Rupa said.

  Then someone there wanted to know, ‘But what on earth was she doing wandering around small-town Tamilnadu? These NRI chicks, they land up here and think they can solve our problems with a fistful of daddy’s dollars and their self-righteousness.’

  ‘Smriti must have gone there on one of her causes. She was so full of them,’ someone said.

  ‘Full of shit!’ someone else laughed.

  We said nothing but we couldn’t meet each other’s gaze. We didn’t ever talk about it but I knew Shivu was as shaken as I was. If we hadn’t asked her to come to Madurai, if I hadn’t persuaded her to go with us, none of this would have happened. It wasn’t as if she really wanted to go.

  Shivu, who had planned to do his master’s in Bangalore, stayed back in Salem. And I moved back here to Kochi.

  ‘Think of how we felt. How we feel each day even now,’ Mathew says.

  Jak doesn’t want to know how or what they feel. It is of no interest to him. He has no reserves of sympathy to dip into. He wrenches his eyes away. The boy holds up his crumpled face as testimony of his remorse.

  Jak swallows convulsively. This banked in grief, how much is it for Smriti, the girl he has failed? And how much is it for himself? The tainting of his life that no penance, no good deeds would ever erase.

  Mathew plucks at his sleeve. ‘Uncle,’ he said. ‘How is she now?’

  ‘The same…’

  ‘She will get better, won’t she?’

  Jak stares at the boy. Should he tell him about Smriti? That would be punishment. But what were these boys guilty of? Nothing really.

  ‘She is…’ he began.

  Then Mathew says, ‘Have you met Rishi yet? I know Smriti and he went together to that small town by the sea. They spent a couple of days there.’

  Jak knows the grinding of gears. So Rishi must have been the man with her.

  Suddenly Jak feels a great weariness settle over him. He wants to walk away from it all. Go home. Go home to catatonic Smriti who has no more surprises waiting for him. Go home to Kala Chithi who was there for him, a bulwark of strength. Go home to Meera who has slipped into his life and settled there with such ease.

  Go home, Kitcha. Go home, Jak tells himself. You will know respite, some peace, and perhaps even normalcy in time.

  IX

  Time prevails. Time that brings with it some respite, a soupcon of peace and even a modicum of normalcy.

  It has been two months since that perfect September day when the axis of her world tilted forever. Meera is no longer sure of who she is. How can she be Hera when there is no longer a Zeus in her life? Some days she sites herself in another part of that mythical realm she has made her own. She is one of the golden mechanical women that Hera’s son Hephateus created to help him in his smithy. They could walk around and talk and could be trusted to accomplish the most difficult of tasks. They did everything expected of them because they had no heart or soul to deter them. How the gods and goddesses must laugh to know that I, who was Hera, queen of all she purveyed, am now this – a golden mechanical woman at the beck and call of a surly, ill-tempered, ugly creature called need. But hinged to that simmering anger is something else. A certain pride at the notion that she didn’t crumble or crumple; instead, she coped.

  Meera remembers a night from that other life. A few weeks before Giri left.

  He had come home one day with a strange expression. All evening he wore it on his face and it wouldn’t go away despite the dissonance of that particular evening.

  ‘Someone’s been at my bottle. I don’t like it. I don’t like it,’ Lily had complained in a plaintive voice, holding up the bottle. ‘If someone wants a drink, they should buy it themselves.’

  And Giri, who had always let Lily or Saro’s patter – accusations, gossip, snide remarks – slide off his back, looked up from the magazine he was reading. He stared at her and then said in a voice that was so mild no one could fault him, yet brimming with unmistakable disdain, ‘I don’t drink in the middle of the week. I am not an old lush like you!’

  And Saro, who couldn’t bear for anyone to use that tone with her mother, had sniffed and said in her coldest voice, ‘Don’t you dare call my mother an old lush!’

  And Giri had drawled, ‘So what is it you object to? The old or the lush? Both parts being, as we all in this household know, the truth!’

  Meera’s hand moved to her mouth in horror. What was happening? In all these years, no matter what, there had never been an open confrontation. Meera was always the conduit for dissatisfaction, pointing out irritants to either party so a semblance of peace could be maintained. Once fractured, it would never set, she worried. Only this evening, they seemed to have bypassed her totally.

  Then again, Nayantara, home for a midterm break, decided to turn vegetarian at dinner time, just as Meera was serving her celebratory kauswey. ‘I can’t eat this,’ she said, rising from the table.

  And Giri, who couldn’t tolerate anyone wasting food or even balking at a dish, spooned some peanuts, chopped eggs and green chilli slivers onto his nest of noodles and chicken sauce and said, ‘Well, get yourself some rice and dal from the fridge then.’

  Meera looked from father to daughter. It was as if Giri wouldn’t let anyone or anything get to him tonight.

  As soon as they were in bed, Meera turned to him, tugging at the sleeve of his T-shirt. ‘What is it, Giri? What’s happened?’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘You know, first that little scene with Lily.’

  ‘Oh that, she can’t accuse me of stealing her gin.’

  ‘And you didn’t mind Nayantara turning her nose up at the kauswey.’

  ‘Give the girl a break, Meera. She’s old enough to know what she wants to eat.’

  Meera knew for certain that Giri must have had a promotion at work, and a fantastic raise perhaps. Nothing else could explain this strange melding of cockiness and generosity, goodwill and unwillingness to stomach the old ladies’ pernicketiness.

  She leaned back into the pillows. A smile hovered on her lips. Nikhil was the same. A little triumph at school and he was Mr Heracles himself. Willing to hold up the world if it would let him.

  ‘Meera.’ Giri spoke now. ‘A colleague at work took me to a website this morning. It’s amazing. You can actually recreate yourself there. I have a new name, a new persona. It’s just amazing. I feel like a new man.’

  Meera propped herself on an elbow. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘What do you mean, is that it?’ Giri bristled.
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  ‘It’s not real, Giri. It’s like Nikhil playing one of his silly computer games and telling me in all seriousness – Ma, I got stopped by the police four times this morning. Get real, Giri!’ Meera snapped shut the light on her side of the bed.

  She cringes now, thinking about it. How could she have been so dismissive of him? So carelessly insensitive? There are moments when Meera flushes in repugnance at who she was – a smug, pompous woman who played queen of the universe with a total disregard for anything that didn’t move her.

  What plays in her mind now is the expression on Giri’s face. Part triumph. Part excitement. Totally alive.

  Second Life, Giri had called his game.

  So is this her second life?

  In Jak’s home, Meera sits at Jak’s desk. Now Meera’s desk.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Jak had suggested.

  There was very little in the room for her to make herself comfortable with. But as she wandered around the house and garden, collecting a cushion for her chair, a lump of quartz for a paperweight, a clutch of oleanders for a vase for the table, hanging up the stunning but unsigned seascape she had discovered behind an almirah, Meera knew she was being herself again.

  She leans back in her chair and stretches. She looks at the seascape hanging on the wall and is seized with sudden pleasure at how right the room feels. To her left is a window that overlooks a corner of the garden. A riot of grass and weeds, woody shrubs, and a giant oleander whose blossoms hang heavy and deeply pink. Amidst all this wilderness is a wrought iron bench with a broken arm. ‘It came with the house,’ Jak explained. ‘I ought to get it fixed too!’

  In the pause that followed, Meera felt again Jak’s helplessness. A better woman would have flung herself up from the chair saying, ‘But it can be fixed, I’ll find you someone.’

  A better woman would have offered to find him a gardener and sort out the mess he referred to euphemistically as the garden. A better woman would have taken him, his garden and his car in hand and weeded out the helplessness. But Meera had had enough of being the better woman. No, I shall not. Not unless he asks me to. I shall not offer to be more than he wants me to be. And so she pressed down her urge to hunt for him a fixer of wrought iron benches.

  It begins as a mewling. A shrill cry that becomes a long drawn shriek of terror. A wail that goes on and on. Meera rushes to the window. She thinks it came from the street.

  Then she hears it again and runs to the living room, her heart thudding.

  The wail becomes a howl. Meera creeps cautiously towards Smriti’s room. She wants to stay where she is, but she also has to know.

  Kala Chithi sits on the bed. The nurse is loading a syringe and between the two of them, locked in her inert abjectness lies Smriti. Her eyes stare at the ceiling and her fingers are curled into their habitual part fist. From her mouth emerges the howl again and Meera feels her blood chill.

  She goes to stand with Kala Chithi. ‘Should I call the hospital?’

  Kala Chithi shakes her head. ‘No, she will settle in a while.’ She strokes Smriti’s forehead gently. ‘I don’t know how she knows it. But when Kitcha is away, she is restless. That’s when she starts this.’

  ‘She sounds frightened. Could she be?’ Meera begins uncurling Smriti’s fist as she has seen Jak do.

  A whimper. Her insides shrivel. The poor child. The poor pathetic child.

  ‘Did it scare you?’ Kala Chithi asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Meera confesses.

  ‘This howl is all we have to cling to. If she knows that Kitcha is away, perhaps somewhere in her there is a fragment of consciousness, don’t you think? Our Smriti is there in this creature. And one day she just may wake up. It has happened. I have heard of such stories. Kitcha won’t admit it, but he, too, hopes for it. You must think us foolish, Meera?’

  Meera is quiet. Hope. All of us thrive on it, Kala Chithi, she wants to say. Who knows what twist of fate will set right our world again?

  ‘I have a daughter too,’ she says. ‘Each time I look at Smriti, I think of all that has been lost to her.’

  ‘Lost! Stolen, I would say.’ Kala Chithi’s mouth is a line.

  ‘Stolen?’

  ‘Kitcha thinks it wasn’t a freak accident. He thinks something happened to her.’

  Meera doesn’t speak. She knows all about clutching at straws. Grabbing at rage is easier than slithering into grief.

  The phone begins to ring. ‘Do call me if you need anything,’ she murmurs, making her escape. How do they endure it, Kala Chithi and Jak? How do they bear it, day after day?

  Six rings, and Meera holds the phone to her ear tremulously. Even now it hasn’t abated. First that furtive hope. Giri. Then the fear. Lily or Saro have had a fall. Nayantara has had an accident. Nikhil is hurt. A sea of worries for Meera to rise above everyday, each time the phone rings.

  Only, this time it is Jak.

  ‘I am calling from the airport,’ he says. ‘The flight is late. If we take off as scheduled, I should be home by six.’

  And Meera asks, not knowing what he has gone to Kochi for, ‘Did it go well? The research, the meetings?’

  There is silence.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ Meera calls into the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, it went better than I hoped. I’ll see you soon then, Meera.’

  Meera puts down the phone. She thinks again of how much her life has changed in only two months. The smudges of uncertainty that speckled her days are erasing themselves out. She thinks of how it was before Jak found her a place to locate herself in. Of how it was before she had this – her second life. And time.

  She feels a curious joy shoot through her. Joy – no, it can’t be. It is relief. Sheer relief that he will soon be home.

  STAGE III

  THE SPIRAL BANDS OF DECEIT

  The last painting that Salvador Dali ever did was the Swallow’s Tail Series on catastrophes. It was the last of the series based on Rene Thom’s catastrophe theory.

  There are seven elementary catastrophes: the fold, the cusp, the swallow tail, the butterfly, the hyperbolic umblic, the elliptic umblic and the parabolic umblic. It’s funny, this word catastrophe. A word for disaster that can also mean many other things.

  The ancient Greeks considered it the climax and point of resolution in their narrative plots. Stockbrokers call a risk-linked security that shares risks with bond investors a catastrophic bond. Insurance underwriters build in a catastrophic modelling projecting the cost of losses by an act of god.

  It is ironic that a natural catastrophe is referred to as an act of god. As if no one or nothing can change the course of what nature has set out to do. And it is here that theoreticians step in with their theory of catastrophe which tells us how a small variation, a tiny discrepancy that we may otherwise ignore, can drastically affect and change dynamic systems. And that is the inherent nature of a catastrophe: its capability to beguile and deceive. So you think danger lies elsewhere while the real peril lurks at arm’s length.

  Hidden within the cirrus canopy is a distinct pattern: bands of convective cloud spiralling into the eye wall. From these bands emerge heavy rain and squalls. But that isn’t where the real danger lies. For the spiral bands are master deceivers. They make us believe this is the extent of the storm.

  How utterly gullible we are when it comes to celestial forces and acts of god! The tipping point is yet to come.

  Professor J. A. Krishnamurthy

  The Metaphysics of Cyclones

  Inside her home, there are a thousand things waiting to be dealt with. But for this moment, Meera is just another woman waiting for a friend to pick her up. She flicks the end of her light woollen shawl over her shoulder.

  December. Blue skies above, with hardly a cloud. The sun shines down bright and piercing. Step out of the sun into the shade of a tree, an awning or a portico, and a chill climbs up your spine. In Bangalore, Meera thinks, it is December that wears a dual face, not January. Yet, she stands outside her
gate waiting for Vinnie this deceitful December morning and feels something akin to joy limber through her.

  She thinks she may have found a worthy successor to The Corporate Wife’s Guide to Entertaining. Only this time she will not offer it to Randhir Soni on a platter. If Watermill Press wants The Corporate Wife Abroad, they’ll bloody well have to pay for it.

  No one is going to profit from her experience unless she profits first, Meera tells herself firmly. What to pack; what not to pack. What to do in those hours when your husband is locked in conference rooms. What to wear to a formal dinner. What to order in a restaurant. What to bring back home. What not to buy your household staff after a trip abroad. For years Meera has been the one Giri’s colleagues’ wives called for tips and suggestions. And Giri had liked it that it was Meera they turned to. It enhanced his corporate guru standing.

  If anyone wants any more advice, they will have to buy it. Meera smiles.

  ‘Coffee?’ Vinnie asks as she jumps a red light with the practised ease of a habitual offender.

  Meera looks at Vinnie again in admiration. How does one get to be like her? Vinnie, who runs a boutique, drives her own car, manages the dual life of wife and mistress and never ever has one varnished hair out of place. Even her chopstick stays where it should.