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Chapter 17: Lure
"Can you pass me the one with peacock print?" She asked the saree merchant who had opened shop in their living room. It was a common sight at the Draupad residence, to find boutique owners come, by invitation, and showcase objects that hold a woman's interest - a practice that Shyama's Daadi had started; having come from a small town, she'd begun a familial ritual of sorts to give her family a reason to come together, to shop, bicker and remark over other's choices and ultimately bond, in ways the new age families didn't.
Slipping out of my shoes, I walked to where she stood posing with the saree over her shoulder; her svelte form reflected in the antique oval mirror dragged to the center of the room.
"How is this one, pinni (aunty)?" She asked her step-mother, just as she smiled catching my image in the mirror. Still dressed in her night clothes, she had a sickly pallor; her hair in an unkempt knot told me she hadn't left home all morning, while her ecru linen pants recalled to my memory the aloof adolescent she was when we'd met, coiled in her day bed all day long with a lemon green coverlet and choicest of her books stacked on a nearby table.
"Choosing different shades of white, with varied prints doesn't warrant you an opinion," her aunt said, flipping through the sarees displayed on the floor; a fine string of rebuke taut in her voice. "You already have a closet full of white clothes. Pick another one, Kushi. Maybe this turquoise, for a change?"
She made a face, at first, but gestured to me seeking my secondary assessment. "It looks beautiful. The print looks fine."
"Thank you." She said. Tossing the folds of the saree around her feet, she turned hither and far by the mirror; it showed on her face that something about the saree didn't seem to flatter her. She swung around and cast the saree back to the merchant.
"Can I get you Chai? Or do you want breakfast?" she asked while still being distracted with the other selections stocked up as bales.
"I'm fine." I said, tying my hands behind my back.
"Ok," she drawled with a finger between her teeth and the merchant's attendant came to her. "I think I will have the first one you showed me. The one with the traditional mango print?"
"Why?" I interrupted, "this one looks good on you."
"Oh! Vishwa," she shifted in profile and smiled at me, "mostly our tastes match, but it doesn't have to be always."
"Indeed." A wry smile came upon my face with that agreement. It didn't help that her casual dismissal sounded like a reminder that she had her own volition too, which I was overruling in the matters of her wedding.
Arnav's words collected again in my consciousness, a dull weight bearing down the subject I wanted to pick then. Shit! the man had certainly managed to sneak in guilt inside me.
"And here," she said bringing me back to the present, as she bent down to pick up a fine silk saree, " I chose this one for Riti; Peach suits her the best."
Just as she was about to hand me the saree though, she held back the gift with some doubt. "But, is she still wearing sarees? Or does she want to hide the adorable bump from everyone?"
"Not yet, but she is fussy," I smiled picturing the instance from last week - Riti had managed to get into every position there was - on the floor, up on the chair - trying to zip up her jeans. "Spoilt with her mother being here. I can't wait to get her back into our room."
"Shameless," she laughed, her eyes crinkling with aghast over what she'd understood and took a few steps away from the bustle, to lead me aside.
"It's not what you are thinking," I amended without the mood to humor her, "She has made the bathroom her permanent dwelling."
Her forehead creased with worry. "The nausea hasn't improved, is it? Poor thing."
For once, my voice held some gravity. "She is a mess, at the moment; besides, she is mad that I'm not bringing her along to our Badrachalam trip."
Winking at her, I shook my head. "If only I had known beforehand the turn her temperament would take -" I said, attempting to get levity back into our conversation.
Her gaze held mine, unwavering, a tad amused, but more with amazement that I had spoken about Riti more than two sentences in a row.
"If I had my way, I would tie her to a chair and have her fed all day-" Unknowing a sigh escaped my lips. When I thought she would snicker at best over my bondage tendencies, she simply looked on.
It was a while before the long lingering thought escaped me. "I will have some peace of mind, if she could stomach just a little of what she eats."
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked, her voice laced with doubt, but worried over the fact I had shared them at all and not over Riti. "You are not the one to give details, so much so that after all these years, I still not clear how you two met."
When I didn't respond, she ambled to my side and leaned by the window frame. "As much as I want to hold your hand at times like these, I'm just as glad for these moments when you give away that you are not above all of us."
I scoffed. "If anything, I'm a con artist. I scheme people for a livelihood. "
"Good for you that I don't believe in such labels," she said, smiling.
"Then, what do you believe in?"
"In the man behind the mask," her response came unthinking and she laughed uneasy a second later. It was impossible not to wonder, if she also understood thoughts I didn't bring myself to speak.
A text message arrived from Riti, to give her the distraction she needed and I turned in profile to finish reading it.
Riti wrote,"What have I gotten myself into? No more porch nights for us. Going to get me some chaat."
Dismissing the nights we slept on the porch, I flipped about to find her gone from the window and settled on the bed again, reading her time worn book, The English patient. "You are reading it again?"
"I can never be done with it..." She took a whiff off the aged paper, breathing in the forgotten pain of the desert lovers.
"He has been disassembled by her," I quoted another of my favorites from the same book she was reveling in, "and if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?"
It was a lesser known secret that I had photographic memory, a detail that enabled me to recite any length of words, or a scene, from a recollection that spanned decades, but she didn't have to know that. And she needn't be aware that it was a curse too. If you could remember every incident you had experienced, for as long as you could did the recollection become something else? I was caged in my memories, just as they were caged in me.
"Vishwa, if I hear one more quote today, I'm going to be at your throat with a knife." She bit into her words with mock contempt.
"I was talking about myself." I said, throwing my brows up with a show.
She paused her reading to meet my eyes; an eagerness flickered in them, along with a stark shade of suspicion.
I saw it was about time I lured her in. "Before I could tell you the story about how I met Riti, you should know about the woman who left me behind for Riti."
Being perfectly familiar with my manner of speaking - telling twisted tales - she didn't appear confused, only concerned.
Given that she was aware of my childhood - born and raised in a small village by the banks of Yamuna and that having spent much of my time in a Delhi boarding school, landed me overseas for higher education - I skipped to the time I spent in Italy, of which Shyama knew no details about; lacking a preference for numbers, I was drawn to philosophy and where else, but in the heart of Italy and Greece, the very cradle of such brilliant minds that spent ages over discourses of wisdom, life, reason and reality, could I opt to study them.
"I met her during the winter break of my second year," I began, leaning by the window frame, and even she could tell, it wasn't Riti, I was talking about. "One of our friends had a cottage in the countryside of Sicily with a view of Mt. Etna. We all thought it would be a fun weekend, but never imagined to be stuck by calamity - Etna blew up ten hours after we landed there. The troops came in to rescue us - some roads were flooded with lava, others with molten ash. A little more than half the village was saved and evacuated, but it would be days before the roads would open up again. In the base camp, she was one of the volunteers who had come with Doctors without borders.
"Shradha," I said bringing her name to my lips; her name aged over a decade in its sounding - wispy and yet, anchoring. "Being the daughter of wealthy parents, she defied them for the same reasons every child did and joined an aid organization, instead of starting her own practice in the hospital they owned. In that line of work, self-interest was an after thought. In my opinion they were no different from the desert people - their family was the circle they traveled with. So it was natural that the man in her life was their team leader - Brad."
I told Shyama about the anger that she always had in her reach; her resolute eyes that wavered when it found me - she wouldn't look at me when she nursed my burns; the color of her skin that burned orange from the night fires at the camp. Of our fights over rationing of water and painkillers - my pretenses of insensitivity which she too indulged.
"On the third night, I tied her up to a pole and distributed the candy she was saving to hand out to the kids before we left camp. That night she came to my tent and slapped me, as if it was the only rational thing to commit midst web of insanity we had spun, unknowingly. My temper failed me and I did the only thing I could bring myself to do. I fell on my knees and held her hand that struck me. For all the time I spent memorizing quotes until then, nothing would come to my mind." My shoulders shook from the laugh that surfaced at the irony.
"What did you tell her then?" she asked, her voice a mere hum, lost in the tell tales of my past.
"Is this the only part of you, you would allow to touch me?" I'd asked.
"Closing her eyes, she sunk to the ground too and let me hold her face. 'If I give you any more of me, will I be my own being, Vishwa?' she'd prompted me to answer with her chin and when I didn't, she asked again, 'Tell me, that I will exist outside of you. Tell me that I will not want to leave everything and run away with you.' Somewhere in that refusal, I could only sense the unconditional submission she'd offered a glimpse of."
I exhaled. "The next evening when she didn't find me, I went in search of her and found her beside the lake near the camp - it had nearly solidified with a thick layer of magma that had cooled on the top. 'Sit next to me,' She'd asked. 'I'm giving company to that lotus which will die soon.' In a distance, I saw a shriveled flower, partly charred from the approaching river of lava. We sat there as long as we could, her hand in mine, while she settled into my hold. By the next morning, we both knew there would be no life without the other. When the roads were functional again, we parted ways with only my phone number scribbled in her hand."
"You two must have met outside of Sicily, no?" Shyama asked with a tremor in her voice.
"She didn't call for a while, but when she did, everything happened too fast. She wanted me to meet her in Berlin - the loveparade was on then. With sixteen lakh people storming the city, I had no hopes of finding her. But it was a bit surreal, when I bumped into her the same night I landed there - she was standing by a road corner, struggling with something that had fallen into her eyes. From there we backpacked all over Europe, taking a break from school and she, her volunteering - doing the odd jobs we got cleaning dishes or tidying up a barn. For the next eight months, we thought the world began and ended in the only space we put between us."
I traversed across the room to sit by the corner of her day bed; her hand slipped into mine from behind. "At least we did think that, until she got called for relief work - there had been some minor activity around Mt Etna again; a few hundred casualties, not like the last time. When I dropped her off at the helicopter base - she was still wearing my shirt from the previous night."
Her fingers tightened around mine; "Two days later the core of the mountain collapsed, making it the most severe volcanic activity of the 21st century. There were no survivors."
Her forehead rested behind my shoulder. "Vishwa," she said, but nothing more, as the silence fastened around her words.
"I left everything behind in Rome and traveled. Egypt, Turkey, Thailand, some parts of Africa before I ended my trip in her hometown in the suburbs of London. I had no remains of her to give back her parents; I didn't tell them that sometimes, I felt the ash in my tongue - hot and tasteless."
It helped that she didn't face me and so, I continued as I intended to. "Having nowhere to go, I came back to India. Of course, the fever of her loss had broken by then, but I was left empty with only a body to live in."
"I know I asked for your story, Vishwa." Her hand pulled out of my clasp and she slid forward to sit by me.
"Yes" I shrugged.
"I understand I have a morbid interest when it comes to you and your life's particulars." She was so calm that it could only be indicative of an incoming lash.
"Where are you going with this?" I asked impatient.
"I have the same question for you," and her pitch rose with every word. "I know why you are here, so why exploit my inquisitiveness alongside."
This was only bound to happen, I thought, shaking off the disappointment that she hadn't bought one word of it.
"Well, if that wasn't a stint from the movie Usual Suspects?" she cried with her voice wrung tight with frustration. "You picked up on the English Patient I was reading, added your own embellishments and turned it into everything I wanted to hear."
She got to her feet and began pacing back and forth. "I wouldn't have doubted had you not made a reference to the desert people, a subject that is extensively discussed in the book. In your story, you substituted, Sicily for the desert where the two leads meet, the Berlin Loveparade instead of Cairo - a city that is nothing short of a carnival. In the book too, Katherine slaps Almasy and in the end, she dies alone."
When she came to stop in front of me, she looked impaled from that argument. "Just ask what you are here to find out."
Breathing out loud, I stood up to hold her hand. "I like to think of time as a line that erases itself. But if you look back, there are penciled portions that remain. Some are mere dots; others the length of a hyphen and some others longer than a dash. All that you need to know of your future, already in that morse code of your past."
She caught my knowing smile and seemed more exasperated. "So what was it? A dot? A dash? Or both?" I asked her.
She was silent for a moment, but her eyes changed in the way you can tell that despite the anticipation, she'd not prepared herself to answer me. "You are forgetting that the gaps between those dots and hyphens are just as important to acknowledge. I doubt there was anything left behind to read, Vishwa."
I let go of her hand and bent down to pick up the jacket I'd cast on a nearby chair. "And you ignore that a blank page is not bad news either. Only a promise of all that could be written."
The phone rang then from an unexpected caller. "Yes, Subha tell me."
The name commanded her attention and she swung away from my gaze. "Ok, I can, but why can't Arnav..."
I repeated any keywords for good measure "And he wouldn't pick up his calls?"
I let Subha do the talking for a bit, before I ended the call. "Hmm - just text me the details. I will see if I can get hold of him, if not I will be there myself."
Pocketing the phone, I called out to her. "I have to go now. Will see you when I see you."
She followed me. "It was Subha on the call?"
"Yes, a friend." I said moving my head from one side to another with a building excitement.
"She is...I mean..." Her feet shuffled faster to keep up and she sounded choked with the question that she wanted to pose. Too bad that her downfall came with her curiosity.
"She works with Arnav. His Creative head." I fed her with information to exact more of what she knew.
"Oh!" being her only response.
"You know her?" I stopped to pry open her silence.
"Not really," she toiled with the nonchalance she wore then.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Tick Tock! Tick Tock!
I kept walking to exit the main door, when she gave in. "Is everything all right?"
"Never better." I said and waited for my car to pull up by the entrance.
"Sure? I thought - it sounded like an emergency." She insisted for me to clarify.
I looked on, until she realized that she'd taken my bait and smiled. "Is that a dot and a hyphen that I read there, Shyama?" I asked, as I held the car door open to get in.
Even as she rolled her eyes with mock contempt, I knew my job was nearly done with them.
CID
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