M&G: Mr Iyer & Mrs Khurana - CLOSED - Page 46

He woke up just as suddenly as he'd fallen asleep.

After they settled for lunch and much after a terrifying struggle to have a civilized meal, he'd been eventually subdued by the sleep he'd fought tooth and nail over the last two days. He'd thought he could kill to have a thali of roti, kadi and sabzi. The disappearing rasam act had left him more clueless than the F-theorem he had been currently working on. Eventually, with the help of three elders and a thirteen year old, he had figured out a good length of imperceptible slit on his banana leaf that had drained the tangy rasam off the surface and had left a thin stream running down the table and onto his Kurta, which he hadn't noticed until then.

What was with every South Indian's morbid obsession with mixing a jug of water with all curries they served? Above all, whatever happened to using plain old steel plate for meals? He was almost sure one had to keep a penance to obtain certain blessed powers to learn to eat directly off of a banana leaf without accidents. Somehow he couldn't get past the absurdity of serving a cuisine that hosted only main courses that had a gallon of water almost always mixed in, on a flat surface that had no boundaries to contain the liquid part of the curry from running all over.

It had been a tiring meal as it is. That and the exhaustion of cleaning the stain and changing to another Kurta had put him to sleep much sooner than he had expected. Unfortunately the morbid fear of having to endure a lifetime of runny meals had seated so deeply into his conscious that it had escaped a few levels below, manifesting as vividly possible dreams in which fountains of rasam and sambhar flowed down the streets of Boston that he so often walked. One such terrible dream had woken him up just then.
And then the frenzy began, before the blur from his sleepy eyes could clear.

He woke up to find Athi and a few of her other cousins running bonkers following something red and yellow that lined the floor. Jumping off the bed, scratching his head as he made his way to the bedroom entrance, he realized that the yellow something was not a streak at all, but a sari that looked far more familiar than he would have liked. His pulse picked up in slow beats and before he grasped the danger in the situation, he was chasing them at a crazed pace.

Crossing the back wall they headed down to the ruins and the pack of runners came to an abrupt halt, staring down at each other's faces in that moment of panic.

"Is Geet ok?" Maan let out before he could catch his breath and shook Athi by the shoulder.

"There is something we have to tell you..." Athi said as a shadow of terror crossed his face.

"Actually there is no time for explanation...let's go" Her other cousin, Anirudh cried and everyone except him made a mad dash towards the backyard.

His feet turned as heavy as lead as he placed one foot in front of another and felt the acid churn in his stomach. The fear of the unknown truly had him in his grips and his logical mind had taken the back seat letting the same alarm that reflected off her cousins' face, take control of him. Why was his Geet's sari strewn in the hallway? Without another thought, he pursued them and found them peeking into the courtyard through small openings in the wall that served as windows. He allowed himself a view pushing aside Athi and what met his eyes brought his racing heart to a stop.

It was heart wrenching and equally disquieting to watch her in profile, dancing and singing simultaneously with difficulty in tattered classical attire. He was no expert at dressing up for a classical performance, but even he could make out that she'd donned it in a hurry and the jewels were hanging off her neck and arms loosely about to fall off. She turned and upon catching sight of her full face, he stepped back instinctively, as if it wasn't his wife streaming across the floor - holding mudras and seductive stances that he didn't recognize - but a possessed soul. Her disheveled hair, hung as black coils outside of her plait and her eyes were layered an inch wide with Kajal, with a big round of red kumkum haphazardly gracing her forehead.

Dear Lord! He'd never thought anything would shock him out of his senses. And then it had happened along with the entry of her in his life. He wasn't going to let any external force or even her own self do this to her. Whatever it was, he was going to deal with it head on and without bothering to ask for any answers, his feet once again found its way back to the front. But just as his feet swiveled, he found himself being dragged in another direction by both his wrists.

He found her cousins divvied up on each side, to haul him through what seemed like another entrance to the same courtyard where she was dancing as a dervish, almost in a trance. The act left him puzzled and everything that happened ever since that instant went by with a breath's notice.

"Chandramukhi...Look here" Anirudh yelled with an air of defiance "Here is your Manicheri Numbudiyar...have your revenge and leave our Geet"

What sort of a deal was that? His helpless mind couldn't quite grasp what was the point of having him harmed when their cousin's happiness was beginning to base on him. Alright...it wasn't that she would die without him, albeit, he liked to think she needed him just as much as he did. But he didn't know what else to say or do then, when he had listened to her possessed self, singing entirely in a tongue he didn't understand and it didn't give him scope for negotiation, if that was even possible with a begrudging spirit.

She stopped her dancing act and swaggered across the floor to where he stood shackled by her cousins.

"Naa Maanisharma ni champi...nannu kaalchi buditha chesina ninnu...vadhalanu raa..." (You killed my Maanusharma and you burnt me to ashes...I won't leave you...)

"Naa paga theerchu kunta...ippude...ikkade" ("I will take my revenge...right now and right here")

Her voice boomed, bouncing off the walls like the wind. He badly wanted to protest, when they dragged him down on a plank and held him pinned to the floor. She came forward with a fury that could burn smoldering coals to white ash in seconds. If there was a time he'd stood frozen watching her fish tailed eyes, then her now wide seething eyes held no such enchantment any more. It wasn't fair he thought that the angry spirit was trying to settle its score through two people, who had nothing to do with its passing away.

"Aaiii..." He heard her pitch her voice in a threat and his eyes scrunched henceforth from having seen her raise something up above her head. A loud shill-whistle of a cry sounded at first and after which everything went silent as the insides of a sea-shell.

He hadn't realized until then that his heart had been beating up a thousand times against his chest. Almost once again an unsettling peace surrounded him and he fought a bewildering urge to keep his eyes both closed and shut at the same time, as if he wanted to wake up and face the light of day, only if he was certain by some means that what he was to see there would be in his favor.
As if by some force outside his will, he pinched one eye lid up and slowly gathered his bearings to fully open his other eye as well. It was another mystery that awaited him as he rubbed his eyes to bring the image more into focus. There wasn't a single soul in the vicinity and it appeared as though he'd fallen asleep there ever since the afternoon he'd visited the place with her. His palm made its way up, slapping onto his forehead with a disbelieving hand.

He got to his feet after a few minutes and while he'd sat there, he couldn't help pondering about all that he was half-sure about having seen with his own eyes. The funny thing was that he suddenly didn't have an intuition making him lean towards any particular feeling of doubt or certainty. He was shaken, no doubt, but there hadn't been anything around to him tangible enough to ascertain it hadn't been a hallucination. Just like that the movie 'A beautiful mind' flashed in his mind and he caught his head, stopping short, as a strange fear coursed his body.

If his wife's intentions had been naive enough to only pull a prank with the events of that evening, then she'd been successful beyond what she'd aimed for...perhaps a little too successful that it came close to having her act turn against her own agenda. She hadn't accounted for his high intellect and well roundedness to assume he would rightfully and conveniently hypothesize a differential diagnosis of his own symptoms, to arrive at the tentative conclusion that he might be suffering from a sudden on-set of schizophrenia.

Resigned over his skepticism, he walked aimlessly trying to barge in and out of a sequence of doors to get back to the house. His palm halted at one such door, that wasn't far from the back-wall that separated the ruins from the house. He paused there momentarily as his forehead crumbled trying to make sense of the one thing that didn't fit into his any of his reasoning.

He was about to pull his hand back from the door and turn back, when her bloodcurdling face jerked up from behind the door in a flash.

"Boo..." She said with a gentle whoosh, making his feet tangle as they strode backwards. The next he knew he was slipping to fall on his derriere, while her entire drama cast came out of their hiding with a mocking snicker, as he winced loudly to their satisfaction.

He lifted his head to catch her break into peals of laughter and in that moment when he was being the laughing stock of their home, it all came back to him...his head cleared then to distinctly recollect her earring that had slid off his leg when he'd gotten up from the floor to start with. If he hadn't been sure of anything before, then he was assured now, that the ghost story she'd invented that day was going to haunt him for the rest of his life. Chandramukhi was no longer just an old wife's tale...at least not for him.