Arhi FF: Kalarikkal House-2 [Thread 3 link posted] - Page 23

Chapter 23: Another Dawn

[Not yet proofed]

He didn't sleep the rest of the night after Kashi left his room. In her anger, she had been distracted enough to not ask him about why he screamed and he was relieved.

He went back to the window and stood there a long time watching the edge of the woods. The woman did not return. He finally noticed the photos lying by his feet where Kashi and dropped it and picked them up.

He took in the woman's features one by one… the first photo – the one in which she was smiling widely, he just couldn't see Kashi. He couldn't imagine Kashi smiling with such joy or abandon.

But the second picture, the one that he found more interesting, almost as if the dancer had been cajoled into striking a pose and she did so at her own terms, letting the viewer know that she was still beautiful in her petulance. This was Kashi. Well, the Kashi that he had known for 24 hours. He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked down into the woods again, there was no one there.

He wondered how much he could trust his own sight. He had wondered briefly whether Kashi was playing a trick on him, but it seemed unlikely. She couldn't possibly have known that he would be at that window at that exact moment to plant that woman there. And it was the same woman in the pictures that he held. He doubted that she had manufactured the pictures in his hands, simply because she didn't have the money to go to such lengths. He wasn't entirely sold on the ghost idea either and thus he stood there by that window until he could see the sun rise in the horizon, willing the woman to come back.

She didn't.

He walked out of his room around the same time as the previous morning and looked over the balcony waiting. Soon enough, Kashi came to do her circumvolution around the plant. She had the same routine as yesterday; she did her three turns, she unwrapped her towel, she shook our her wet hair and did that little braid down the center and broke off and tucked a little piece of the plant in the middle of that braid. She should have walked away in that rush of hers just like she did yesterday; instead, for whatever reason, she looked up, almost as if she sensed him. He straightened from where he had been leaning on the balustrade when her gaze fell on him. They stared at each other for a moment and then without any sort of acknowledgment, she abruptly walked away.

He watched her until she disappeared from view before he walked to where he had found the veena yesterday.

When he got there, he found that Pallavi was already there.

He was surprised, but thankfully he had a good poker face and he walked towards her with no expression on his face before he sat down against the pillar just where he had sat yesterday.

It felt as if an eon had passed instead of 24 hours.

Pallavi looked at him and gave him a brief smile and turned to look at her veena without waiting for him to acknowledge her. The woman was a quick learner, he was discovering. And much more subtle in her approach than Kashi. In fact, Kashi was quite transparent where Pallavi was a dense layer of molasses that he could guarantee that no one would wade through with any success in a life time.

She started playing the veena one string at a time just as she had done yesterday and it wasn't long before he felt the stillness consume him again just as it had previously even though what she played today was something entirely different from the day before.

"Reethi Gowla" she said a few minutes after she stopped playing.

He raised an eyebrow.

She set the veena next to her and leaned back against the wall behind her as she repeated, "Reethi Gowla. It's my favorite raga."

He didn't understand, but he nodded just the same.

He leaned back against the pillar and they were quiet like that for some time before he spoke.

"Do you know who bought Vishnu Namboothiri's house?"

He saw her eyes flicker and close before she opened them and looked at him.

"You."

He sighed internally as he tried to figure out how to ask her what he wanted to ask. Kashi made it so easy to blurt out whatever he wanted, while this woman… this woman, he had to tread carefully…

"What was his name?" he finally asked. It was not what he had intended to ask.

"Ananthan." She answered after a pause.

"How did he…" he petered off, unable to complete the question.

"Bike accident. He had had to go away for work for two days and had been anxious to get back. I had taken a little fall the day before. It was nothing serious, but his mother told him about it when he called and he… he could never bear to see me hurt. Ever… he was rushing back early that morning on his bike when he rounded an especially narrow corner and his bike went off the cliff." She said, her voice breaking at the end just as she reached her veena and ran her fingers over it, a sufficient mask for her grief.

He exhaled quietly.

This was a woman who had truly loved and lost.

Who had known the sort of love that most people only dreamed of knowing.

"I am sorry." He said finally.

"Don't be…" she said looking at him finally. "We loved for many years…. More than most people experience in several lifetimes. He gave me everything of him before he was taken from me. When you have the sort of love that we did, you always live in fear. Someone somewhere must think it too much. Too much love for any two people to have between themselves. I am grateful that I had him for as long as I did."

He didn't know what to say to her. He had not met people like her. Or love like what she described. He had experienced a different kind of love… the earliest of loves… for his family… but they had all been taken from him… and he certainly didn't have an attitude towards loss like she did. Maybe the music helped her where nothing aside from the chaos of work helped him.

"Ananthan…" he whispered.

He saw her smile now as she repeated. "Ananthan. He would have liked you, you know."

He looked at her in surprise. "Why is that?"

"Who would have the nerve to bite Kashi and live to tell the tale? He would have been thoroughly impressed."

He blinked as he tried to replay what she just said in his head.

He couldn't have possibly heard her right.

He raised an eyebrow as if he did not understand her.

She smiled as she got up from where she sat. "It seems that I may have underestimated you yesterday."

He didn't know what to say. She must be testing him out.

"I don't know what you are talking about." He said aloofly.

She smiled again and said, "I was in love with a man for 26 years, Arnav. With a man who loved me in every way possible. You think I wouldn't know the difference between what a man can do and what a table can do?"

He couldn't even think of a single thing to say to her in answer to that!

Evidently, she wasn't expecting a response because she said, "You have another long day ahead of you. Try not to bite her anywhere where it would be up to detection for someone less understanding."

When she was about to walk away, he finally found the voice to admit, "I don't understand you."

"That's not necessary. You just need to understand her."

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Originally posted by: napstermonster

This is my take on the whole man-eater thing--what is so wrong with the label? When women are in a position of utter and abject powerlessness--their father, their brother, their home, their prospects of a life beyond these decaying walls have all been removed from their control--when everything is taken away, what is left is exactly one thing-image, and perception.

Khushi clings to the concept of their lineage, but to me, this one is so much more useful to have, as young nubile women basically unprotected in rural India! Man Eaters, Manglik-- these terms make the sisters actually dangerous, and not just vulnerable--it is a powerful restorer of their image. And if the image is dangerous, if it is a ward against the evils of the lusting men just outside K House...why should the label be termed as negative?

I feel for Kashi, and for her sister. But somehow, both have come across as creatures of magic well before this whole tragic fated spin on who they can and cannot be with. I cannot see them as the ordinary women who will cook and clean and know how to tend to a regular man's little home.

The term man-eater, too, is loaded--i wonder if you used it deliberately as opposed to the much more common image of the feminine seductive charmer?

Because both these women are..well, they aren't ordinary, are they? Everything about them is a little bit..extra. Their poverty is heightened, their beauty if unreal, their lives are on the extreme edge. Be it romance, attraction, or tragedy--they don't live by half measures, so their men can either rise to that extra dimension like Arnav is doing, or die into meek oblivion like Pallavi's accident prone fiance did.

Because for me, Pallavi is just as magical, right? The magical veena music, the power of the tune/playing that wove through ASR's mind some chapters back,? Its not a normal reaction to music by a pragmatic businessman, and hers was not a normal hand on a veena.

And now, we have, aside from her natural extra-ordinariness, the snake protected vedic- cursed Kashi.

Neither are the normal women you take home to mother. Both are imbued with the tragedy of their bloodline, and both have grown up in a way where they cannot really be true, normal mates to normal men. Educated in subjects that are...different, behaving in a manner that is at once unnaturally submissive (to daddy dearest) and ferociously masculine...They cannot make a normal man feel..normal.

So they ARE man-eaters--because no ordinary man can just show up and claim such extraordinary women. Isn't that, it itself a kind of power?