The Lilac House: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  Only now, eleven months into their relationship and three weeks into their holiday, Monique couldn’t keep the vexation out of her voice when she looked up from the roses and demanded, ‘This isn’t the first time, right? She’s done this before. Got into trouble. Didn’t you know that your daughter was furious about your coming away with me? That she would do something to ensure you went back… I knew it would happen. That, or you would have had to bring her with us.’

  You ran your hand through your hair, rubbed the bridge of your nose, stared moodily into your glass of white wine and said, ‘I wish I had. I wish there was a way of knowing what Smriti will do next. It is ironic that I who study the clouds and the sea, I who can forecast storms and chart their path almost intuitively, I can’t read Smriti, her moods and phases. She defeats me.’

  Sometimes you thought that you were just paying for what you had put your mother through.

  Monique didn’t speak at first. When she did, she didn’t hide the anger in her voice. ‘You can perhaps forgive her for what she puts you through. I can’t. Not when she called me a fucking cunt, and she and her friends ruined my home. I love you, Jak, but this… this is ridiculous, your quiet acceptance of her unruly behaviour. Sometimes you act as if it was inevitable!’

  You flinched then.

  Smriti bared fangs when she saw Monique. She saw her as an usurper. It wasn’t Monique – any woman would have been subjected to the same hate. Smriti was merely replaying what you had done. ‘She will like you once she gets to know you,’ you said soothingly.

  Monique snorted. She still hadn’t forgiven Smriti or you for ruining the Christmas vacation in Venice. You had insisted on taking Smriti along. It was the safest option during the whirl of parties in the holidays, Nina and you had decided – to remove her from her environment where she could get into trouble. The two of you took turns every year, ever since the separation. Shruti was going with Nina to England. Malleable, pliant Shruti who could be trusted to amuse herself. But not Smriti, who would sneak away and do something stupid that could jeopardize her future, her life.

  So Smriti had gone with them to Venice for a week of incessant torture she piled on quite easily and uncaringly. She sulked or slept in late, found fault with everything including the pigeons, dismissed the gondolas and the sights as ‘bor-i-ing!’ and got on Monique’s nerves till you could hear them twang.

  To compensate, you had plied Monique with wine and food, made love to her as often as you could and even went with her on some of her buying trips. It had been a hard time and pointless.

  Smriti had her way. After you went back that summer to sort out Smriti’s latest escapade, Monique and you broke up. Smriti was delighted. And the next month she announced her decision to move to India.

  Jak halts mid-stride. He has not thought about it until now. This thing called forgiveness. Of how it unfurls into life. Perhaps we start learning to forgive only when our sins come back to visit us. It was only when Smriti became a sulky, fractious, recalcitrant fifteen-year-old that Jak began to understand the torment he had subjected his mother to. It was when Smriti refused to accept that he could have a life of his own that his own bristling, unyielding stance at his mother’s attempt to rebuild her life seemed childish and unjustified.

  He found it easier to forgive Smriti then, for the pain she was causing him. All he had to do was tell himself that it was the cycle of fate. There was no escaping it. There is some measure of comfort in this notion called karma, he thinks. There is only so much you can do, so much you can control.

  Jak turns back towards home. He is tired. But it is a fatigue cushioned with calm, as if he has come to the end of a long journey. How is Meera coping, he wonders. The serenity she is usually swathed in seems to have been punctured.

  ‘I haven’t been able to sleep,’ she had admitted the day before. ‘I wake up with a tightness in my chest, as if I can’t breathe. I don’t know what to do any more.’

  Perhaps tonight he will sleep well. He hopes Meera will too. It has become important to him. Her wellness.

  STAGE IV

  THE EYE WALL OF DEVASTATION

  For many years now I have owned a small 8”x8” painting a Buddhist monk gave me. He was from one of the smaller monasteries in Darjeeling and I met him while I was in Cambodia in the early eighties. It is a depiction of a mandala, he said. An abstract of chaos and disorder. It was his advice that when I felt torn within, I should sit before it and look at it, and in that sacred space would emerge an order that would eventually calm me.

  It is a small painting and it has travelled with me from home to home. Though it is a fantastic swirl of colour trapped within geometric forms, I have been unable to hang it up, ever. The mandala, Carl Jung said, is a representation of the unconscious self. By my constant meditation on this painting, I could perhaps achieve wholeness in my emotional life.

  But the truth is, my Buddhist painting frightens me. When I look at it, what I see is the penultimate stage of a cyclone. Its most terrifying aspect.

  From the heart of the storm spins an outward directed force of fury. Vicious as a herd of monsters, it raises a ring of violent storms. Sometimes twice as many. It is here that danger awaits. For the eye wall winds have no soul, know no mercy.

  Professor J. A. Krishnamurthy

  The Metaphysics of Cyclones

  What does she feel about him, Jak often catches himself thinking. Does she think of him at all? There is no way of fathoming Meera. She gives everything and nothing away. In the months after her mother’s death, Jak watched her wrestle with her demons. He watched her grapple and throw. His liking for her has become tempered with admiration. And something else. This quiet woman is a bank to shore himself upon.

  Jak feels a great urge to drop a kiss on her head as he walks past to his desk.

  They are in the study. They have been looking together at a paper he has to send to a journal. A paper that is already late by six weeks and has the editor frothing at his mouth while pretending to be calm and understanding. ‘He must be tearing his hair out in frustration,’ Jak laughs, reading the carefully worded but terse email. ‘But he’s so scared of pissing me off that he doesn’t dare say anything outright. All this hedging merely implies: send us your fucking paper, you lazy son of a bitch.’

  Meera smiles. She doesn’t especially like his colourful language but Jak speaks with such a lack of malice or venom that it seems perfectly civil. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I have something written down. We just need to knock it into the shape Professor Anderson expects to see it in,’ Jak says, rummaging through his laptop bag.

  Meera watches aghast as he pulls out a hotel pad with notes scrawled all over it.

  ‘That’s the paper?’ she asks in a faint voice.

  ‘Pretty much. Don’t look so shocked. This is the crux of what I plan to present. For the rest, we’ll tart it up with indices, footnotes, appendices, etc.’ Jak leans back in his chair. ‘That’s how all academics do it. When in doubt, add a footnote. When you have to make yourself sound knowledgeable, add a few appendices. Show the workings! Show how you arrived at the magnificent conclusion. Or, even better, how you couldn’t arrive at it. But show the workings, that’s the trick!’ Jak smiles a lazy grin. ‘It’s practically an art form, writing for an academic journal.’

  Meera shakes her head, bemused. She is puzzled, he can see. She doesn’t know if he is being funny or sarcastic. ‘But you still have to arrive or not arrive at that conclusion. And this is all you have.’ She holds up the three tiny sheets of paper.

  ‘That’s a good place to begin. The rest will happen. All in good time. Let the good professor stew a bit more.’

  ‘Why don’t you begin now?’ Meera asks.

  Jak narrows his eyes in speculation. ‘You think so? Right, let’s! Here, write down the title: The Metaphysics of Cyclones. What do you think?’

  Meera doesn’t say anything.

  He knows what she is thinking. That he is mer
curial. That he switches moods in a flash. How can you trust a man like that? One day he is here. And the next day he will be gone.

  February. The days stretch into longer hours of light; an insidious warmth. Who says there are no seasons in India, Jak thinks as he turns up the fan regulator. Every day is a season by itself. There is no overwhelming variation to suggest a changing pattern. Instead, in a million subtle ways, the texture of each day varies from the others. How could he have missed all of this when he lived here? Increasingly, Jak finds himself looking at the world with his eyes wide open. A change prompted by Meera. He likes it that she doesn’t talk at him. Not like Nina, he thinks. Instead, Meera talks to him.

  ‘Do you know they call you Cyclone Jak? I googled you and found 39,400 entries. And almost in every entry, on the first two pages, that term was used. Cyclone Jak,’ she says with a sidelong glance. ‘I am not surprised!’

  He cocks an eyebrow. ‘Are you saying I am unpredictable?’

  She smiles. ‘The rest of the world does. I am not sure. I think you hide behind this unpredictable veneer. I think it is an act. What? Don’t look at me like that.’

  Jak’s heart skips a beat. For sometime now, they have engaged in this sort of banter. Mildly flirtatious, loaded with possibilities. Who will take it forward? Will she? Or will he have to be the one? Does he want to? The wooing, the dancing, two-steps-forward, three-steps-back, the pondering, the worrying, the whole commitment thing – is he willing? Is she ready?

  The nurse knocks at the door. ‘Sir,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to disturb you, but will you come?’

  The lightness in the room dissipates with the ominous undertow in her voice. Jak jumps up. He sees Meera hesitate, then rise to follow him.

  I

  Did he follow someone in here?

  He can’t remember walking in. Or sitting down.

  Did he stumble in blindly, drawn by its deep dark confines, the hushed silence of desolate prayer and the sight of a man interred? Could anyone else be as tormented as he is? Could anyone else bleed as he does? Where is relief? Where is escape?

  Jak raises his forehead from the wooden bar of the pew. Two rows from him, across the aisle, sits an old woman with a scarf covering her hair. Her eyes are closed and her palms folded in a tight knot of supplication. Her lips move fervently. When did she come? What ails her life that makes her beseech so? And then Jak thinks: I must look the same. I am no different. We may have nothing else in common but we are both troubled souls.

  The candles flicker. Jak rises from the pew and walks towards the altar. He stares at the face of Christ on the cross. Once, in some European town, he had seen a Christ in one of the smaller churches. Monique had said it was called The Christ of Redemption. ‘Strange,’ she had added thoughtfully. ‘Michelangelo’s Christ of Redemption, despite bearing the cross in his right arm, wears a triumphant expression. But I have never seen a Christ as tormented as this.’

  He couldn’t remember Michelangelo’s Christ. But what he wouldn’t ever forget was the expression on the face of this Christ hewn by some lesser known sculptor: What have I come back to, it seems to ask.

  And now Jak, standing in front of Christ in the Holy Ghost church on Richards Park Road, asks of the son who died for all of mankind: What have I come back to?

  He shudders.

  The nurse, with the practised ease of one who did it all the time, had toppled Smriti onto her side. Then she lifted Smriti’s ankle and pointed to the skin on the lateral side. ‘Do you see this?’ she asked, pointing to the redness. ‘Touch it!’ she said.

  Beneath his tentative finger, the skin felt warm and the flesh spongy.

  Theresa placed the ankle back on the bed as if it were a sleeping baby. She moved briskly to her right and raised the long T-shirt Smriti was dressed in. Up and above her knees, over her thighs and buttocks. Jak heard Meera’s indrawn breath.

  You sensed what Meera was thinking. How can the nurse be so thoughtless and how can you, her father, not have the decency to look away? How can you stand there looking at your daughter’s body? She may be the child you bathed and dried when she was a baby, but this is indecent and nauseating.

  You wanted to ask her – Do you know how it makes me feel, Meera? That I, her father, have to be the one to touch her womanly parts?

  There are days when the nurse is late or absent. Kala Chithi manages Smriti on her own then. But do you remember when Kala Chithi sprained her wrist? There was a day when the nurse didn’t come. Could I leave my daughter unattended? I had to wash and clean my adult daughter that day. And, pathetic frozen creature though she is, she knows it’s me. She never flinches at my touch. Not even when I have to separate her legs and run a wash cloth around the folds of her vagina.

  The first time, Kala Chithi looked away. She was aghast, but what else was there to do? ‘She is my daughter,’ you said as gently as you could. ‘The baby I helped bathe and feed. She is still my child!’

  ‘It isn’t right.’ Kala Chithi’s mouth was a line.

  ‘What is right about any of this?’ you said, dusting talcum on Smriti’s back and using a powder puff to work into the folds of her armpit. Her mind may be elsewhere but her body was here.

  The nurses were meant to keep her armpit and pubic hair short. But the last one had been lazy and slatternly. You were scared that you would nick her, but you did that as well. Dealt with the hair in her armpit and pubis. When it is your child, and she is suffering, none of the norms of civilized society has any meaning. What a parent may or may not do for a child is irrelevant.

  You thought of when Smriti was twelve and brought her artwork for you to admire. You would frame it and hang it up. And Smriti, unable to decide if she ought to be flattered or embarrassed, would complain in a pleased voice, ‘Papa, I hate this thing called unconditional love. There is nothing rational about it.’

  You agreed. It was not rational. Which is why, even though she was a woman, all folds, creases, crevices and hollows, you saw your child in her, not a woman, not this wretched creature.

  ‘Sir,’ Theresa’s voice rang through. ‘Do you see this?’

  Then Jak knew the purport of Meera’s gasp of horror. For on Smriti’s back was the beginning of a blister. The skin looked broken and red.

  ‘Is that a bedsore? Is it, Sister?’ Jak’s voice rose.

  ‘I told the nursing assistant what to do but these girls are careless and duty means nothing to them. She must have forgotten to move her every few hours. And it is beginning to get warm now.’ Theresa’s tone hovered between an accusation and an apology. And something else – the inevitability of the occurrence of bedsores.

  ‘It’s fortunate that we saw it now. It is easy to treat at this stage,’ Theresa continued. ‘Will you speak to the doctor, then I will consult with him.’

  ‘Sister, is she in pain?’ It was Meera who asked.

  ‘I don’t know, madam. When a patient is bedridden, bedsores can be painful. Very painful. But we don’t know with this patient. We don’t know how much sensation she has or can register.’

  Jak can’t stop looking at Jesus. It is as if their eyes are locked in a rare understanding. Our gods seldom show us this: a compassion, an empathy, and a willingness to heal bruised souls… Jak feels a pang in him. He isn’t a religious man. He lost his faith when Appa left home.

  ‘Kitcha, Kanna,’ Amma tried to persuade him to go with her to Thirumulavayil, the family temple. ‘Countless generations of Shivacharyas have been priests there. Our family has known the powers of Eashwara… So how can you disdain God?’

  ‘If there is a god, would our lives be like this?’ he responded.

  His mother was silent then. So Kitcha went. He hated to see his mother so beaten.

  He wouldn’t enter the temple, though. Like the Nandi bull at Thirumulavayil who sits facing the gate rather than the sanctum, Kitcha waited in the courtyard, watching the skies, while his mother laid her woes at the foot of a god who seemed to have shut his eyes.

&
nbsp; Later, in the bus, he had asked her, more curious than angry, ‘How can you believe in god? How can you after everything that has happened to us?’

  His mother looked out the window as they hurtled past the suburbs of Madras. ‘Do you know the legend of the Nandi at Thirumulavayil? The king who built the temple was a great devotee of Shiva. Once when he was praying in there, enemies decided to attack him, knowing he would be alone and unarmed. That’s when the Nandi came to life. It rose and sat guarding the temple while the king finished his prayers. Perhaps faith is reinstated when things happen to you. Perhaps we discover the power of divinity when there is no solace from anywhere else. I wouldn’t ever wish for you to know this, Kitcha, but in one’s darkest hour, God is the only glimmer of light.’

  Is this his darkest hour? Jak asks the alien god whom he had dismissed as he had repudiated his own. What solace can you offer me who came crawling here seeking only a dark and empty place?

  My religion taught me to accept everything that happened and will happen in my life as inevitable. That it had all been decided by someone somewhere before time or I existed. So there is peace in accepting each day, each twist of fate – Appa leaving home, Amma’s marriage to another man, my divorce, my dead-to-the-world daughter, the stilling of my own life. But my education demands something else of me. It taught me to ask questions. To go beyond the surface and to probe. To know, to know, to know, for in knowledge is salvation.