Glaring Shadow A Stream Of Consciousness Novel

by BS Murthy

  "It calls for a rare character in them both."

  "That's true as I found it out later and about it later," he continued. "You know my firm became a force to reckon with and that took me back to square one to win over Ruma's mind to retain her love. But soon, I had realized that it was success that began to rule our heads; hers to begin with, inducing us to acquire the trappings of wealth for the sake of those who looked up to us, so we thought. How man tends to imagine

  himself as the tracking object on others' radars to justify his extravagance as but the dictates of his life's circumstances! But then man fails to realize that but for a sleaze or a scandal, the world at large never bothers about him, whatever be his station, and so fails to fashion a purse-supportive lifestyle and allows himself to dabble with the delusions of grandeur. Adding to that, success distances man from the genuine, and what's worse, it brings the shady and the shallow closer to him; it was this script of fate that had moved us into this posh place, far from the simple folks.'

  "M aybe it's the spiritual price life has to pays for its material success."

  "Well said," he said with apparent sadness. "As if life doesn't believe in halfmeasures, to make it worse for both of us, the devil possessed Ruma no less; bitten by the status bug, as her mind began to foul her soul, she turned cozy to the rich that she wouldn't have otherwise touched with a barge pole; what was worse, she began to condescend to descend to the genuine, making them feel constrained in our palatial bungalow that is yours now. But obsessed as I was to keep Rajan's memory out of her mind, I kept her in good humor regardless; and having brought her to that pass, I too fell into the trap of conceit. Why, I began to feel embarrassed to have Raju any more around my circle of the wealthy, and entrapped in that snobbish trap, there was no way I could've pulled Ruma out of its inimical grip."

  "What a Catch 22 it is, don't mind it's a catch-phrase."

  "Why not give Joseph Heller his due for the catchy title," he said. "Well, Raju was not dumb to read my mind and so he steered clear of my course; but what if he had chosen to embarrass me by sticking to me on purpose? Won't it make a strategy to hurt the jealous and the conceited by imposing ourselves upon them, never mind they cold-shoulder us? Well, he was too good a soul to resort to such a foul; but shortly after Anand came back on transfer, when Ruma advised him to keep away from his poor friend with no future to name, I had a full grasp of the complexities of the trap into which I willy-nilly pushed her into; and so I began to worry about the possible fallout of her changed ethos on my life as well."

  "Wonder how success eclipses one's innate goodness?"

  "What if she weighed me light in comparison with someone more successful?" he continued. "As I was bogged down with that thought, the negativity of it began to bother me; I was alive to the fact that the seeds of liaisons sprout in the stilted minds of the disaffected spouses, and if Ruma were to take a lover, the slight apart, won't the scandal be scary. What if she chose to seduce Anand to score over me and still keep it in the family; but soon as if to relieve me of my worry, like I distanced myself from Raju before, she came to cold-shoulder Anand, but for a different reason; while I avoided Raju imagining that I had outgrown him, I suspect that she began to shun Anand to disown her humble past. How ironical it was that her moral decline should've assuaged my fears about her feared sexual fall; whatever, as if they served their purpose, my unfounded fears about her affection for him were put to rest in my mind."

  "Wasn't it rank depravity that you should have felt relieved even though your wife had lost her soul? What a fall though it's a folly to judge others."

  "Whatever, I toyed with the idea of roping him into my venture for I began to feel the need for someone capable that I could trust as well," he continued. "What a value addition he had been at the office, and ironically that hastened my moral decline even more; as he refused to soil his hands with our murky deals, I had to handle the underbelly of business that heralded my nose-dive into a moral abyss; and equally

  worse, Imperial's vertical take-off into the galaxy of infrastructure only pushed Ruma's moral ethos further down the ladder of materialistic callousness. So, in the process of his growing up, Satish's psyche had to bear the brunt of our moral fall; well, who to blame but me for denying him what was left of the childhood for the kids of his generation?"

  "Why blame yourself when it was and is the order of the day?"

  "Do you think so?" he said looking at me vacantly.

  Chapter 25

  Sentiment of Ruin

  "It was my wining and dining with the rich and the powerful that had hastened my moral fall," he said wryly after a while. "Didn't Rousseau observe that ruthlessness is the common characteristic of the successful; maybe I insensibly turned insensitive in their infectious company. Whatever may be the rationale for my twisted vision of love, the reality of my life was that I allowed myself to slide into the abyss of immorality. What with the materialistic veil shrouding our love life, I tried to fill my emotional void in an extramarital affair without knowing that I became incapable of inspiring love. How shameful, but I'm not going to hide my ugly side to let you have a true picture of me and of those who came into my life."

  "Vices are the price that one pays for his virtues."

  "But it was as if I had sacrificed my virtues to propitiate the goddess of vices," he continued. "I used to know an upright officer and that amounts to much in today's world; maybe honesty had never been the dominant character of man, didn't Shakespeare aver that to be honest is to be counted among one in a thousand; but these days the odds seem to be one in a hundred thousand. The good fellow had always been helpful to me within the rules that is but without any favors to return; once I told him to count on me just in case and he said that he hoped it would never be the case. When I came to know that he was caught red-handed, I knew it could be the handiwork of those who were irked by his honesty, and yet I was glad that the one who replaced him was corrupt to the core."

  "Often, it's the marginal operators and not the hardcore corrupt that get caught and the big fish, if ever trapped, find their way out as they would've made enough dough to feed the small fish who net them."

  "It's ironical but real, and that's sad," he said. "To go back to the tale of that small fish, given his thin resume and modest means, he had a windfall of a wife, who came to me to picture her helplessness. Qualified though and talented as well, she opted to remain a housewife to take care of his home, where his mother too felt at home; as that earned her his gratitude, she remained a fulfilled spouse. I think it was Bernard Shaw who said that any good natured fool would make a better husband than a Caesar, Shakespeare and Napoleon for great men are ill-equipped for domestic purposes, and as for me, I fell between two stools ending up an intellectual fool. As they were gloating over the flowering of their toddler son, throwing them into dilemma, the old woman's kidneys had failed. While common sense suggested it was as well to let her ripe-old life end its course in the crematorium, the son's sense of filial duty was for keeping his mother on dialysis as long as he could afford. But his wife thought it was an absurd proposition as she believed that the idea of medical science was to cure the curable, and not to cater to a gone case; remember that my father too saw it that way."

  "M aybe those who love the spirit of life than life per se perceive it that way."

  'Looks like that," he continued after a pause. "She tried to impress upon him that it was wise to spare the meager monies for the survival of the survivors but just the same he put the old woman on a ruinous dialysis course, making his young wife bear the brunt of his sentimental treatment. When the inevitable end came that ended his moral predicament, seeing his wife's plight in the debt trap, he was caught in the pangs of guilt; so to pull her out of the financial mess he had pushed her into, he took to bribe-taking; well, she was quick to caution him about the pitfalls on the road ahead, but he continued with the practice regardless that was till he was caught in the act and brought to book to account fora three-
year jail term."

  "M aybe a course correction in sentimental ruin would have been in order for those who cannot afford to buy justice."

  "Hope it won't make a case for contempt of court," he said in jest. "Her life seemed to be a drama enacted in the theatre of the absurd wherein the plot of fate pushed her onto the stage of climactic tragedy. Her nine year son had to undergo an openheart surgery but there was none in the family she could turn to for succor and support; she knew that though helpless as mother, being desirable, she could be resourceful as woman, but there was no way she would prostitute herself even to save her only child. She said that as she kept her fingers crossed, and prayed for a miracle, her husband suggested that she might seek my help for he thought I had a helping hand, and she was prepared to work for me for half of her take home pay till the loan amount was adjusted."

  "I've read in Benign Flame that the boasts of men about their conquests would sound hollow for it's the vulnerability of women that fetches them their favors."

  "Oh, how true it is," he said. "I had seen it as godsend and offered to take care of her son if she was prepared to be my mistress, but as she protested saying that she was a married woman, I reminded her that he was jailed and promised to let her go as and when he would come out of it. She said that's not what her husband would've bargained for when he sent her to seek my help, and I told her that I couldn't help as her charms corrupted my soul; when she retorted that she was not obliged to cater to my craving for her, I asked her, what if I helped her out only to woo her later? Won't her sense of gratitude tend her emotionally towards me? As she would be my P.A anyway, she being sex-starved and I being lovelorn, won't our physical proximity threaten her chastity; some catalyst can be expected to bring about our union, sooner than later that is. Calling me callous, she caved in nevertheless."

  "Why, it's a refinement of the Casanova logic you had talked about; how sad it was given that you were such a sensitive lover."

  "I really don't know if callousness was a streak of my character shrouded by my capacity to love," he said remorsefully. "Whatever, I kept my word and let her join her man on his release, but in the meantime to my dismay, being physically close, yet she was emotionally distanced from me; but it was her parting words - 'glad you've given up your reign on my body' - that wounded my pride of being a ladies' man. It was from then on that I took to one-night stands as a guarantee against emotional failures; what an end it was to the lover in me."

  "It's the tragedy of my life so to say," he continued pausing as if to mourn the death of the lover in him. "If in spite of my means, I failed to inspire her, then for the lack of youth, I lost a woman on the verge of conquest. I met M allika on the train, and it was a case of mutual attraction with the momentum to fast track affection. When

  she was all eager for a date, it was either my naivety for being truthful or vanity of not looking my age, damn them both, that put paid to it; unasked, as I revealed my age, she exclaimed, 'oh, you're my dad's age', and that was that. A la Ghalib, 'of what avail is my beckoning her / wish she gives up self-restraint', I hoped for long that the force of attraction would prevail upon her forcing her to seek me; well, she took my phone number before the fiasco of that seduction. When hope tired me, her enchanting persona was blurred in my mind but the beauty of that brief encounter ever remains fresh in my memory; even now, as I ponder over her inexplicable behavior, I wonder whether it was her vanity to desist from an affair with an older man that blinded her attraction; would've my disclosure in the midst of our lovemaking made her recoil from my arms? What if she were to know about my age after we were true and thick into an affair, wouldn't she have still carried on with me? I know that I would never know."

  "M aybe she would have carried on for it is said that any fool can get into an affair but it takes a wise head to get out of it."

  While he laughed heartily, I felt heartened for having lightened him, be it for a while.

  Chapter 26

  Enigma of Attraction

  "The beginning of my end was when Anand parted ways with me," he said resuming his remarkable tale. "But much before that, his destiny brought Anitha, a peach of a woman into his life. When he wanted to marry her, he made me privy to her poignant past that she had revealed to him, that is to let him decide whether it mattered to him; here's her tale of betrayal and retrieval."

  He paused for a while as if he needed time to retrieve himself from the sense of her betrayal.

  "As is the case with all love, the source of hers too was physical attraction," he said on resumption. "After her graduation, she dated with a man, who pressed her for sex that she had reserved for her nuptial bed; betraying her trust, as he tried to molest her, she broke with him, and treating it as a bad dream, she had opted for an arranged match. But when the just-weds returned home from their honeymoon, the lost suitor chose to prejudice her man's mind through an anonymous letter. The rouge wrote that she wants a lover to satiate her lust, the wherewithal of whom she had ditched could be heard from the horse's mouth, besides a husband to cater to her monetary greed. As her man was distraught at the development, she tried to assure him about her innocence, but sadly, he couldn't digest the fact that if not by body, at least in her mind, she was one with another man before him. So, even as his heart responded to her love, as his mind remained cold to her ardency, he failed to warm up to her; how the inhibitions of cultures come to influence our lives, and what a double jeopardy it was for her as she had to contend with her wretched fate as well as her man's predicament for which she was the unwitting cause. Seeing the futility of their purposeless cohabitation, she had set him free through divorce, and maybe to atone for its mistake, her fate led her to Anand, the man made for her."

  "What villainy it was!"

  "Villainy of a spoiler," he said. "Anand dismissed her past with the sympathy it evoked and vowed to give her due as his better half; and to seek her hand in marriage, he took me along to her parents. And lo, who was her mother? I told about the

  woman who once prostituted herself for her children's betterment; what a piquant situation it was for both of us as we recognized each other, maybe owing to her conviction of her compulsion, she didn't lose her poise, and my appreciation of her character enabled me to retain my composure. When I instinctively turned my attention on her man, I could discern in his demeanor, the anxiety of parental love and the strength born out of a sense of purpose. What was more, in his interaction with his wife, I could see his adoration for her, though my presence seemingly stifled her effusiveness; but as my own behavior towards her didn't show any hangovers of our past encounter, soon she had shed her inhibitions and turned lively towards the end. Later, when Anand told me that her son married a girl from an orphanage, it was clear to me that the ethos of the couple could have shaped the spirit of their children."

  "M aybe it is such who mitigate some of the vileness of the world."

  "But we need battalions of them," he continued, "As proclaimed in the banner at the function hall, Anitha wed Anand; it was a simple ceremony though I wished it were a grand show. While I was impressed with her sensibility, Ruma was wary about her simplicity; by then, busy with a doting circle of lazy women, she started living in a make-believe world. It didn't take long for Anitha to realize that Ruma only condescended to descend to her, and so she chose to keep her dignity from a healthy distance. That puzzled my queen who deemed it was her royal right to be courted by her; how delusions of grandeur makes one weary at the thought of being ignored by others. So, Ruma set out to snare the prey into her web of adoration but to no avail, and slighted, she began to pass snide remarks about her to Anand. Maybe, I too had taken Anand for granted as I didn't think overmuch about an equitable raise for his value addition to my ever expanding business; but it was Anitha's equanimity in dealing with Ruma that showed me the reality of life; it's one that lowers oneself but not others."

  "When Anand wanted to quit," he continued, having seemingly reflected over his averment, "I apologize
d on Ruma's behalf and offered to give him his due, but he would have none of it; however, as Anitha impressed upon him not to mix up the professional with the personal, he came to stay. Soon there was an income tax raid tumbling the skeletons from our cupboards, and it was more than Anand could bear; so he called it quits and moved out of town. I didn't miss him for long as I could hire someone no less talented but with fewer business scruples and he too set up a smallscale industry as if to show me that business can be clean as well. I didn't know how he fared as we lost touch that was till he came along with his wife and children to condole with me for the loss of my family. While their weeklong stay brought to the fore the memories of my life and times with Rathi, I realized that the equilibrium of life hinges upon the spouse's sensibility."

  "No lesson sensitivity."

  "That makes me recall this embarrassing episode," he resumed after a pause. "As I touched sixty, I happened to meet a childhood mate and his attractive second wife, who was on the wrong side of forties; when she turned flirtatious to my excitement, to her delight, I made a few passes at her, but when I became a little forthright, she turned cranky and showed me in poor light to my friend, and that was that. Leave aside my loss of face, what about the hurt she would've caused to her husband when a 'shut up' or 'no thanks' would've kept things clean for the three of us. Well, I've no clue why she tripped on the line of sensitivity!"

  "Maybe, we have it in Benign Flame," I said, and quoted from it. "It'sthe character of man woman chemistry in that feminine tendencies catalyze male proclivities. Carried away by the euphoria of her coquetry, man begins to woo woman with hope. With her vanity thus addressed by his advances, she turns flirtatious, furthering his passion for her possession. In the excitement of the moment, should he transgress the threshold of her sensitivity, fearing she had compromised her honor, she sinks in shame. Thereafter, she withdraws from him to brood over her infirmity, and in the end, as though to atone for her moment of weakness, she cold-shoulders him altogether, making him wonder what went wrong in the midst of his conquest."