Shiv says nothing, though he sees what she means. Alongside the healthy leg, this one looks terrible. The skin is shriveled, gray-white and flaky with dead skin, bits of thread and cotton fluff. Shiv only realizes the other leg is not naturally smooth when he notices the stubble of hair struggling out of the newly exposed, scaly skin.
The nurse catches him looking and frowns.
His eyes obediently move from Meena’s leg to the floor where the cast lies. In spite of weeks of intimacy, the cast has already lost the shape of Meena’s leg. The wild-colored garden Meena, Babli and Shiv planted on its dry surface has been uprooted. Some of the colors have faded. Others have run into each other from exposure to water. The imaginary garden that drew them together that dreamlike morning lies used up on the floor, as dispensable as the removed cast. The images they filled in with color have been ripped apart. The ground the painted flowers and leaves grew out of has split open.
Shiv moves to the stiff, hollow tube and picks it up, suddenly intolerant of such untidiness. He has never seen a silkworm’s empty cocoon, but that is what the torn shell in his hand brings to mind. Later, as he goes to fetch the car for Meena, he finds he is still holding the cast. Cast off, he thinks; cast away; castaway. He considers all three forms of the word with loathing; then he puts the broken thing away in the boot of his Maruti and locks it in.
The cast has come off. Meena is getting to know her leg again. She lavishes care on its dry, hungry skin. Kamla and she are closeted together in the bathroom for long sessions with oil, lotion, sponge and loofah. The leg no longer looks like the other leg’s impoverished twin. The scales have fallen. The skin is now as smooth and silky as that on the healthy leg.
But Meena is also a stern taskmaster. She showers attention on the prodigal leg, but she expects it to reciprocate. Move as she wills it to. But to her indignation, the leg is both painful and disobedient. “It won’t listen to me,” she mutters like a bewildered, disappointed parent. She bites her lip as she tries forcing the leg to obey her commands.
“I knew that doctor was a bastard,” she says bitterly. “He didn’t say a thing about how difficult it would be to walk again.”
But Shiv can see that despite all her complaints about how slow and painful it is, she will soon be on her feet again. Like the cast, the crutch will soon be cast aside. Already she shoos him away if he tries to help her.
“Let me do it alone,” she hisses though he can see from her set face that she needs help. His days as Meena’s guardian are numbered. Soon she will walk again, walk on. Walk away.
And Shiv? The storm helped him postpone his visit to the university to meet the Head. He has made a request for another appointment, this time with the entire trinity, the VC, the Dean and the Head. But he has not yet followed it up. Meena’s exercises to reactivate her leg, her desire to discard the hated single crutch, her impatience to be done with it all, to get on with her life, to get back to it—his days are filled to the brim with Meena’s preoccupations. With her determination to push convalescence into fast-forward mode. Her single-minded wooing of strength and well-being. And most of all, her energetic, obsessive pursuit of independence.
A week has passed, and it’s Sunday again. A holiday. Perhaps he will look back on his time with Meena, sitting idle in his waiting room in purgatory, as a month of Sundays. Kamla too is on holiday. Without a qualm, as if he has been doing it all his life, Shiv cooks a large breakfast for Meena. In the midst of the food laid out on the table—an omelet, slices of hot buttered toast, orange juice, hot chocolate—he places a solitary sunny-yellow flower, a victim of the recent storm, in a little vase. The apples he has sliced lie on the plate in a red-skinned, fanlike cascade.
Meena walks slowly—minus crutch—to the table where Shiv waits for her. She sits down and eyes the laden table with approval. He exhales; he had not realized he was holding his breath.
As always, she eats with concentration, as if she must possess all tastes and flavors instantly and entirely. Shiv watches her silent, absorbed chewing, an image he has come to know so well.
Once she has drunk every drop of the frothy hot chocolate, she puts down the mug and turns to him. “Shiv, I spoke to Amar on the phone last night. He’s got a friend’s car for the day. He’s going to take me back to the hostel this morning.”
Shiv sits silent, watching her gladness. Her leg has been liberated from the oppressive cast. Though still painful, it is getting better every day. Meena’s eyes are bright; she doesn’t need him any more. His own little trouble has not been resolved, but he has taken a stand of resistance; Meena can now make believe he doesn’t need her any more either.
The chocolate has left bubbly whiskers on her upper lip. He longs to wipe them away.
He looks at her as if his hand has moved, as if all it has to do is reach out to touch her. As if it has begun at her upper lip and traced a line down the stubborn chin and the fine edge of her jaw. The hand slides the curve of her proud neck, her strong shoulders, then lingers at the heavy breasts topped with rich brown nipples, the gently swelling smoothness of the belly with the perfect swirl of a button at its center. His hand moves down, travels around those wide hips, between the dangerous, generous legs, before it slips down her ankles to her earthbound feet.
His hand crawls off her toes and lands on the floor, letting her go. His hungry hand evaporates. He looks up from the floor and meets her eyes.
What can he say? And what difference does it make whether she leaves today, tomorrow or next week? She has to go back; he has to go on. Already he is learning to miss her.
Then he thinks of Amar spiriting her away. Confident Amar, who knows what it is to act, whether it is in love or on the streets. Ruthless Amar, so-very-young Amar. It’s not a simple jealousy Shiv feels for Amar, not the age-worn, sexual jealousy of one man for another, or shop-soiled age for youth. What Shiv finds puzzling is that he is almost as fascinated by Amar as he is by Meena.
Shiv waits in the garden—what remains of it—while Meena packs. The sun is still high up in the sky, directly overhead, though it is an hour or more past noon. Though it is the third week of October, it is again so humid that the moist ground is fairly steaming. Clumps of striped brown worms writhe in the grass. The whole world, after its brief intermission of cool wind and shower, is on the boil again, seething with life.
He can hear the doorbell. Just a few hours ago he would have dashed to the door to save Meena a painful trip from her room. But now he finds it impossible to move—or move in time. Turning back, going into the house, facing Amar, facing Meena’s goodbye. The images of the imminent future, the next fifteen minutes, flash past at lightning speed. It is the present that is played out in slow motion. It is this endless moment Shiv must step out of, this great bubble holding him in its sticky embrace, preventing him from going to her.
Look, the world, in a swell of waves, is beating upon my face. For a minute Shiv in his bubble sees Basava’s end with startling clarity, a sharpness he has not been able to bring to his tentative narratives of his father’s last day. Shiv sees Basava, an exhausted, frail reed by the river, a reed that still breathes. But the reed bends—how low it bends, letting the night air whistle through its skin, letting the whispering river flow over its feet. Basava takes a step forward, the river cool around his ankles, then flowing coolly round his knees. The river’s wet fingers flutter round his thighs. Today my body is in eclipse. When is the release, O lord of the meeting rivers? Basava adds step by step; the river murmurs its approval; it surges forward. The river takes Basava in its arms, hushes all his last-minute plaintive cries. It is time to come together at last, to embrace that long-promised reprieve from interminable questions. The river, the river’s watery void, glows. Then the world, the known world, pales.
…
But in another city, another millennium, everything around Shiv remains persistently alive and separate. Rekha’s garden, the campus, the world beyond with its untasted delights and dangers, remain perver
sely colorful. Everything this sunny afternoon is flux, motion. The birds’ full-throated chatter, the leaves’ rustling, the awkward jerky movement of grass blades weighed down by scurrying ants and worms turning earth—all urge Shiv forward. (The root is the mouth of the tree: pour water there at the bottom and, look, it sprouts green at the top.) He too must become a part of this gigantic movement-loving ball rolling ahead purposefully. Like all living creatures going about their business as if fate does not lie waiting for them, he too must move, consign the puny self, its weak-hearted hesitations, to oblivion.
Shiv takes a step forward, stiff with self-consciousness. He bends his head, as if he has to walk uphill against a pushing, bullying wind.
The door to Meena’s room is shut. He can hear animated voices, Amar’s and hers. A theatrical exaggerated groan from her, then laughter.
Shiv takes a deep breath, straightens his back. When he knocks, their voices fall silent.
In the room, Meena’s room, their room, Amar and Meena sit on the bed, waiting for Shiv.
Amar gets up when Shiv enters the room and greets him courteously. He calls Shiv sir. He is smooth, this champion of Meena’s who has both words and passion at his fingertips. Politically committed and a gentleman if occasion calls for one. A well-brought-up hero.
Shiv returns his greeting but his eyes do not meet Amar’s. Or Meena’s. Instead they dart about the room. It is a strange, empty hole. No longer his study, no longer Meena’s room. No longer his refuge, his sanctuary from the predatory world outside its walls. The room, the house, was so full of her things, of her, for the past few weeks. But he sees now, with astonishment, with a sickening lurch in his stomach, that everything that belongs to her has fitted into a suitcase and two open-mouthed plastic bags.
“Shall we go?” Amar, having made a few polite gestures in Shiv’s direction, is finished with him.
Amar gets up, puts out a hand to help Meena. “Where’s your crutch?” he asks her. “You had better take it with you.” Shiv hears the undercurrent of authority in Amar’s voice and winces, though he hardly knows why.
“I don’t want it,” Meena snaps at Amar. “I hate it. And why are you in such a hurry?”
Amar sits down abruptly and begins drumming on the table with long, nervous fingers. There is an awkward silence, the kind of pause when each one is waiting for the other to go first. To make a fool of himself first.
The awkwardness has touched Amar too. Suddenly he no longer looks so sure of himself. Shiv finds himself warming to him; Amar is only a boy. A precocious, dazzling fellow who may yet grow into a powerful man. But for now he is still a boy, learning his way through the labyrinth all men must travel.
Amar looks at Meena now—as if Shiv is not in the room—with a visible mixture of aggression and pleading. “Manzar is in the car,” he says. “I asked him to wait there. I told you he has to return the car to his brother in a couple of hours.”
“All right,” agrees Meena, though there is nothing in common between her words and the challenging look in her eyes. “You take my bags to the car and wait for me. I’ll be there in a minute. I’ll—Shiv will help me to the car.”
Amar’s eyebrows rise a fraction. He is on the verge of a retort, but swallows the argument ready on his lips. He shrugs, gets up. He takes the suitcase in one hand, the two plastic bags in the other. He leaves the room without a word to Shiv.
Meena and Shiv consider each other, wary, unsmiling.
Then she gets off the bed with a barely suppressed groan and stands. “Maybe I do need the crutch,” she says.
Her voice is low and husky as if she has just woken up. All the certainty that is second nature to her, all the challenge that she exhales with every breath, has deserted her for the moment.
“Wait,” Shiv says, and reaches for his father’s walking stick propped up in a corner of the room. It has been there all the days and nights Meena was in his house, watching over her. Watching out for both of them.
“It’s your father’s, isn’t it?” she asks him. Her hand curls around the hooked knob and covers it. “I’ll take good care of it.”
“I know you will,” he says. He is not sure why they are both whispering.
She leans on the stick and hobbles closer to him. She stops. Their faces are just a few inches apart.
She steps back, places a gentle hand on his cheek in a brief, almost maternal caress. “Don’t come with me,” she whispers. “I can manage.”
He nods.
She limps past him, out of the room.
He can hear his father’s cane, now Meena’s, tap its way out of the house. Then he hears the door shut behind her.
Acknowledgments
The lines by Zbigniew Herbert are from his poem “Report from the Besieged City” (Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter, The Ecco Press, New York, 1958, p. 77) and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers. The lines by Basava (“The mind is the snake; the body is the basket …”) are from vachana 160, translated by Kamil V. Zvelebil (The Lord of the Meeting Rivers: Devotional Poems of Basavanna, Motilal Banarsidass/UNESCO, Delhi, 1984, p. 31), and are quoted with permission from the publishers. All the other vachanas by Basava quoted in this novel are from A. K. Ramanujan’s translations in Speaking of Siva, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 67–90, and grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers for their permission to use these extracts. In 1974, when I was a student in Bombay, a friend gave me a copy of Ramanujan’s book, and this inspiring translation of medieval vachanas was my introduction to the poetry and ideas of Basava. Now, more than twenty-five years later, I find that my pleasure in these translations, and my gratitude for them, endures.
My understanding of Basava’s ideas and poetry, his life and times, owes a great deal to other books too, including R. Blake Michael’s The Origins of Virashaiva Sects (1992), J. P. Shouten’s Revolution of the Mystics (1995) and Kamil V. Zvelebil’s The Lord of the Meeting Rivers (1984). I am also grateful to the Kannada poet and playwright H. S. Shivaprakash, who shared with me his impressive knowledge of vachanas and virashaivism, as well as his own encounter with censorship some years ago.
But In Times of Siege is a work of fiction. It has used a variety of sources to imagine a life of Basava in a way meaningful to our times. Any resemblance to real individuals, places and events is purely coincidental. The same, alas, cannot be said for any resemblance to real-life ignorance, prejudice or bigotry.
In Times of Siege Page 18
