The Lilac House: A Novel

by Anita Nair

  Chinnathayi undid the pouch where she kept the handful of paddy. She took one and looked at it carefully. She ran her finger along its side. It was dried to a shell-like brittleness. The ends were dagger like. But she would still need to check its piercing point. There could be no errors. She pressed the flesh of her thumb down on one end of the paddy. A bead of blood.

  Chinnathayi let her eyes settle on the girl’s. She allowed herself this every time. It is to be your choice, she would let her eyes speak to the girl. I know what I have been told to do. I know I will be paid for the deed and my silence. But I won’t do it if you don’t want me to.

  The girl’s eyes were shut. Chinnathayi looked at her for a long moment. The girl wasn’t asleep. She knew that she was hiding behind the closed eyelids. Chinnathayi wouldn’t speak. She wouldn’t even sigh to register her waiting.

  Then she saw the tear trickle down the corner of the girl’s eye. A slow slithering tear, wet with remorse and self-hate. The salt of acquiescence. Do what you must. It is the only way.

  Chinnathayi woke with a start as she always did, with wails in her head and a burning throat. Scores of throbbing lacerations. As if someone had set about slicing the inside of her throat with a razor blade. It was the same dream every night. A ghoul strangling her sleep and the few hours of peace. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself that it was all in the past. The wailing child stirred her sleep. All those infants, mouths wide open, their limbs flailing. And between their parted infant thighs, the tiny slit. The silent mouth that had condemned them the moment they were born.

  ‘What is it? What is it? Tell me…’ voices would demand as they waited for the lower half of the body to emerge.

  Chinnathayi’s granddaughter touched her elbow. ‘Paati, Paati… what is it?’

  Chinnathayi stared unseeing into the girl’s eyes. ‘What is the time?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Almost five,’ the girl whispered, frightened by the manic gleam in her grandmother’s eye.

  ‘Take Kanaka to Rajeswari’s next door. Tell them we’ll be late returning. We’ll fetch her when we come back,’ Chinnathayi said, rolling up the mat. Her limbs ached and her head felt heavy. A chill swept through her and the insides of her eyelids felt warm and sore. She felt as if she was starting a fever.

  ‘Where are we going, Paati?’ Vana asked in the bus that took them to the other end of the town.

  ‘Nowhere in particular,’ Chinnathayi said, stuffing a wad of tobacco into her mouth. Vana looked out of the window. When Paati filled her mouth with tobacco, it meant she was in no mood to talk.

  Chinnathayi rolled the wad into a ball with her tongue and let it rest against her cheek. The juice seared her mouth and stilled the countless demons that ran amok in her head. She didn’t trust Srinivasan. They wouldn’t let the girl go so easily. And Chinnathayi felt responsible. How could that silly Kanaka have bleated out everything? But then, she was only a child. A feckless child perhaps, but how could Chinnathayi blame her? She should have been more careful, more assiduous in her dealings with the girl and Srinivasan.

  And then, suddenly, Chinnathayi was stricken by a thought. Why hadn’t she thought of calling and warning Smriti? Of telling her that it was all a set-up.

  ‘Do you remember that akka’s number?’ she asked Vana.

  The girl nodded. ‘It’s in my head,’ she said.

  Chinnathayi looked around her desperately. An elderly man had a mobile in his pocket. ‘Aiyah, I need to make an urgent call. Will you please let us use your mobile?’

  Vana recited the number to him. He frowned. ‘It is an outstation number.’

  ‘I’ll pay you whatever it costs,’ Chinnathayi said quickly.

  He punched in the keys and held it to her ear. Then he tried once again. ‘It’s not going through. The party at the other end is out of range. Do you have another number?’

  Chinnathayi felt that peculiar grinding of stone against stone. Of knowing that powers beyond her were reigning here.

  In the twilight, the eastern sea takes on a peculiar hue. The sun, dying orb that it is, looms in another horizon. Shorn of light, the world mutes into misshapen shadows and dark spots. When the tsunami happened, the coast had been hit. An inlet further up the coast and an estuary a little down had saved the town from being destroyed. The waters had rushed to swallow the land there and Minjikapuram had escaped with not too much loss to life or property. But the coastline changed. The sand banks were eaten away and debris from the waters still littered the shore. Driftwood and rusted pieces of metal, castaways of the sea. Lording over it all, a misshapen log of wood, the stump of a dead tree from some distant land.

  Chinnathayi and Vana walked quickly down the road. Would she have arrived already? Or, would some force within her have cautioned her against what lay in store?

  They saw her in the distance. She stood facing the waves some distance away from the log. ‘Look, Paati, Akka is there.’ Vana’s voice rose in excitement.

  ‘Ssh!’ Chinnathayi cautioned her. ‘Be quiet. We must get to her and take her back with us before anyone else comes.’

  In the end, all that Chinnathayi could do was watch. Muffling her horror by stuffing the end of her sari into her mouth and pressing Vana’s face into her side so the child saw nothing, heard nothing.

  The three brawny men. The swagger as they walked towards Smriti. One of them gestured with his hands. Another lit a cigarette. And the third, he stood there with his arms crossed, his head cocked at an angle. Chinnathayi had seen men take that stance. At the mutton shop as they eyed a carcass strung on a hook, the line of goats’ heads on a block with their dead, unseeing eyes. Should it be chops or the brain? One thing was certain. They wouldn’t leave without meat.

  She stood there unable to believe what she was seeing. They were animals, these men. They tore at the girl and it seemed the more she screamed, the more excited they became. Even from where she stood she could feel the girl’s fear. It was the smell of blood. And Chinnathayi knew that no matter how much the girl pleaded or sought for reprieve, they wouldn’t leave her alone. She was their kill.

  Chinnathayi thought she had seen it all. The depravity of the human mind in all its twisted forms. But nothing had prepared her for this, the pleasure they derived from the girl’s fear. She would not forget till the moment she died, the laugh that echoed along the shore as the girl tried to flee and they rounded her in, knowing there was nothing she could do to escape them, their vile minds and bodies.

  Run, run, Chinnathayi prayed. But Smriti wouldn’t. She stood there wildly gesticulating. What was she saying to them? What did they tell her? The wind ate away the words.

  The third man, the mutton shop man, he was the one who moved suddenly and pushed her down. They loomed over her as Smriti tried to get back onto her feet.

  Don’t, please don’t. Chinnathayi’s mouth widened but there was no sound. Fear stifled every shred of decency she had. If she gave herself away, there was no saying what they would do to her and the girls.

  So Chinnathayi was a mute witness to the ease with which they held Smriti down and slapped her. The casual stripping of her clothes. The scream of terror that turned into a catena of howls as they, one by one, quickly and methodically, entered her.

  As if that wasn’t enough, one of them turned her on her back with his foot. The others laughed aloud. A murder of crows in the twilight sky.

  As the others watched and urged, he entered her there as well. The girl tried to shake him off, sought to pull away, finding the strength to crawl on her hands and feet through the sand. Panting. Heaving. Sobbing. Seeking to escape. The booming treacherous sea waited, but anything was better than what these predatory beasts could do to her.

  And then the monster king of the rubbish – the giant twisted log that lay on its side – rose with the wave and came to slam against her head.

  ‘What will you do now?’ Meera asks.

  They are sitting in the balcony of their room. A sea-facing room
in a boutique hotel, complete with little touches for the discerning traveller.

  Jak sips his drink. The ice in the glass clinks. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

  It was dusk when they returned from Chinnathayi’s home. Neither Jak nor Meera had been able to speak. He had held her hand all through the car ride. It was Meera who urged him to sit in the balcony and called room service for drinks and dinner. It was Meera who poured him his drink and pressed it into his hand.

  ‘What is it that I can do?’ His voice breaks.

  This could have been my Nayantara, she thinks. If it had been my child, how would I have endured it? All this, and the knowledge that she is trapped in a frozen world of odious beasts and winged demons. That her last conscious thought must have been a plea.

  ‘Why do we love our children so much?’ In the darkness his voice cuts through her.

  She shakes her head and whispers, ‘I wish I knew. I wish I could tell you, Kitcha, that there is another way to love our children rather than this. Sometimes I wonder if that was why in earlier times people had more children. As self-preservation. When you have to spread yourself among so many, you are less overwhelmed.’ Meera subsides into silence as she sees his shoulders heave.

  His pain fills her with anguish. It is not the sorrow from witnessing the pain of a suffering soul. It is Kitcha. The extent of his grief. How could this man have come to mean so much to her in so short a time?

  ‘Kitcha, Kitcha…’ she says. Her fingers reach for his.

  ‘I have never felt so alone. So bereft. So defeated,’ he cries against her cheek.

  She shuts her eyes tight. But into them swims an image of Smriti with her mouth open in an animal howl. What if it was Nayantara… ‘No, no,’ she says, as much to herself as to him. ‘You can’t think like that. You have to be brave. You have to be strong.’

  ‘When Smriti was a baby and wouldn’t sleep, I would take her out of the baby cot and walk her. I held her to my chest and rocked her each night. As long as I held her close, I thought she was safe. She would come to no harm. How did I forget that? How did I let her go?’

  Meera tries to not think of the expression she glimpsed in Nayantara’s eyes each time she held her back from an impetuous move. The animosity, the dislike. In the end, she would buckle and let her have her way just so that she would smile at her.

  ‘Kitcha, there is no getting it right. All we can hope for is that we do right by our children, and someday they will understand. And that eventually it will all work out…’

  ‘There is not even that with Smriti. There is nothing to look forward to.’ His voice is flat, his eyes shut.

  With great care and gentleness, Meera cups his face in her palms. Slowly she leans forward and presses her lips to his eyes.

  She feels his eyeballs move beneath her lips. She thinks again of what he must be seeing. The broken child. His lost daughter. The break with eternity. For isn’t that what they are to us? Children, our children. A line that takes us beyond tomorrow.

  Meera shrugs away the sadness that threatens to swamp her. Her lips move, searching the contours of his face. Gently, ever so gently…

  He feels something squeeze his very being. Such tenderness. Such sweetness. When had he last known such solace? She rains kisses on him. The gentle afternoon rain, washing away the past. He feels cleansed, alive, and as life stirs beneath the gentle but persistent pressure of rain on earth, within him a movement, an awakening, a tentative shaping of possibilities.

  He gathers her to him with a fierceness that he hopes will say all that he has no words for. She can read him. That much he is certain of. One day, perhaps, he will find the words. But for now all he has is what he murmurs against the curve of her neck: Meera, oh Meera, my Meera…

  Other people baffled Meera. They always had. Giri had teased her in the early days of their marriage, ‘Honestly, doesn’t anyone else exist for you but your family?’

  She had shaken her head earnestly. No, no, no one else did, but you do now.

  Only later, much later, he had narrowed his eyes and said scornfully, with a furtive admiration, ‘Other people don’t exist for you, do they?’

  By which time Meera had some knowledge of other people’s lives. How they lived. What they ate. Who they slept with. And with the confidence of someone who had pieced together a difficult jigsaw, she tossed back a disdainful ‘I don’t know what you mean. I know everything about everyone you and I know, including everyone you work with. So who doesn’t exist for me?’

  But Meera knew that she still didn’t comprehend people.

  She thought she had fathomed Jak. This man who paints seascapes of utter stillness or violent storms, of a musical leaning that veers from old Tamil songs to Barry White, Cat Stevens and Leonard Cohen; of the extra large sizes he wears because confinement of any sort stifles him. She knows that his mind races into territories she will never be able to understand. That he hides his intensity, so he appears a big bland man of indeterminate likes and dislikes, hard to pinpoint, hard to capture. Loving him will be frustrating and even self-defeating, she fears. And yet, as his ‘Oh Meera, Meera’ washes over her, it unsettles her.

  It excites her. It makes her turn to him with a voracious hunger she hasn’t known before.

  ‘Oh, Jak!’ she whispers. ‘Or should I call you Kitcha… I don’t even know what name to use.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as you know it’s me.’ His fingers move as if to memorize all of her by touch alone. ‘How I need you… oh Meera, my Meera.’

  Meera leans into him.

  Later, she will remember precisely how it was. The swelling of consciousness, the knowing of her body. The languor. Meera searches the clock face and then the pearly tinged skies outside the window. Is it night or day? When has she last seen this hour carve itself out of time? This riddled-with-sleep-and-multiple-dreams, dig-deep-into-the-pillow hour. Meera brushes the hair off her cheek and lies on her back.

  Then she hears a sound from the bathroom. Meera clenches up. How is she to arrange herself at this moment? Who is she to be? Like the indefinite hour, Meera’s mind hovers. Between sleep and wakefulness, arousal and embarrassment, guilt and a curious lightness of being.

  Her eyes glitter in the dark.

  All these years she chose to bury herself as Hera, the perfect wife. When Zeus sought her body, she responded. She was his for the taking, never asking herself if she could know desire. Silly Hera, who thought it was men who delighted in the sexual act and all a woman had to do was acquiesce. When Teiresias, who had known sexual pleasure both as woman and man disagreed, she was enraged. How could it be that if pleasure were marked on a scale of one to ten, women derived nine and men knew only one!

  For that blasphemy she had blinded him. But this is a Meera who has removed the scales from her eyes, her desires.

  What will Vinnie say when she finds out? A smile settles on her face. Vinnie wouldn’t exactly approve. No, she won’t dwell on what Vinnie might say. Instead, she will think of what Vinnie would have done in her place. Would she lie as she did? Afraid and dreading the moment he appeared from the bathroom. Or, would she reach out for the bedside lamp and switch it on? Sit up in bed propped against the pillows with the sheets draped casually over her breasts and thighs. The cat who has fed on cream but isn’t averse to more. Would she fluff out her hair and call out languorously, ‘Where are you?’

  Would she be able to muster up such courage? Meera’s toes nudge the bundled heap of her nightie. She sits up and tugs it over her head in one swift movement. Should she pretend to be asleep when he comes in? Should she? Should she not? Should she? Should she not? Daisy petals drop to the floor till there is only one. She licks the dryness from her lips and waits. Meera once again.

  Just after Appa went away, Kitcha had accompanied a few relatives to Rameswaram. Early in the morning, he had been woken up by Kala Chithi.

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ he had whimpered in sleep.

  And Kala Chithi had whispere
d, ‘Look at the sky, Kitcha, it will be dawn soon. We have to be at the temple before the sun appears. That is the rule!’

  Kitcha had looked at the night with its grey underbelly and wondered how anything could be more fascinating. And about a god who shied away from the sun.

  Thereafter, Kitcha had set the alarm for three and much to the consternation of his aunts, he woke at that hour, every day, the whole week they were there, to study the celestial light. ‘Show him a few constellations,’ an uncle advised. ‘What is the boy doing reading the vacant skies?’

  But Kitcha wanted none of it. ‘No, no.’ He shook his head and looked away resolutely.

  The rest of them grimaced. Reproof lit their thoughts. Just like his father. Obstinate as a mule. Everything had to be his way!

  Only Kala Chithi understood. ‘Let him be!’ she said in her soft voice that cloaked steel. ‘Maybe he has a point. Once you know what there is to know, where is the magic?’

  And so Kitcha saw all he wanted of the three o’ clock sky. Of a light that drew nothing from the sun. Of the sea echoed in the skies. Of a world that was the same up and down, when in between was chaos in his thirteen-year-old world.

  Kitcha in the bathroom – only he is Jak now – searches the skies from the ventilator slats. The mother-of-pearl sheen. It fills him with rapture as it did then. An endless vista of possibilities. He wonders if this is the moment of truth Appa talked about.

  Then he hears tiny muffled sounds in the room beyond. His hand pauses on the tap.