Last Labyrinth Read online

  ‘A premika.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You will not get her,’ he said gruffly, as though getting something unpleasant off his chest.

  I stared at him in silence. The dance next door had come to an end. All of a sudden it was very quiet. I dared not speak in the silence. The astrologer’s glance hopped from me to the other two and back. He sighed as if he had understood something. In a minute, his understanding changed into agitation.

  ‘No... No...,’ he cried incoherently. ‘No... No.’

  He wrote something on a paper and handed it to me: ‘You should do this mantra jap one lakh times.’

  The interview had ended on the usual silly note. I gave him his fees. Aftab was next. His was the longest session, although it seemed more like a polite argument carried on among experts. From time to time, Aftab looked back at us and smiled, his goggles reflecting the dull lantern. The astrologer was certainly much more at ease with him than he had been with us. I wondered if he had realized that he was talking to people who were enemies of each other, appearances to the contrary.

  Finally, the arguments ended and we stepped out into the open. We looked at each other wondering, perhaps, what each of us had separately been told.

  We halted near a row of sweet shops. A thin reedy music now blared out of a gramophone, the records running higher than the prescribed r.p.m.’s Against its noise, conversation was impossible. What would have happened in that noise to the juggler’s drums or the old man’s song? Aftab and Anuradha had kulfis. I ordered a cup of tea. I envied them their habits. No doubt they always had kulfis whenever they went out. What did Anuradha and I have in common? Several like me had, perhaps, walked through her life. Even now she probably had lovers (where did she disappear for hours) who had greater claims on her than I ever had. The thought of the juggler crossed my mind. I was filled with self-pity and bitterness. Looking at her ravaged face, so intent on the kulfi in the plastic plate, I wondered what, after all, did I know of her. What had she shared with me besides a few of her goofy ideas and that bit of khir? In the dazzling glare, the pits in her face stood out. How many passers-by would have found her irresistible the way I did. Sitting in Bombay, I had imagined I had gotten over her but the last few hours had turned everything upside down. I was as much in love with this pock-marked phantom as ever.

  Aftab’s haveli lay in darkness. The car lights threw gigantic shadows of the fountain on the wall behind. Getting off the car, exhausted, I stepped off in the dead grass and reeled, cursing myself for not being able to control myself. We walked into the Blue Room but I did not stay there. I went quickly up to my room. I had a bad headache. I lay down without undressing and, drugged by the monotonous whirl of the fan, fell asleep.

  I dreamt I was in a narrow alley at the end of which a shroud lay. Tall houses stood on both sides of the alley. They were purple in the moonlight with black gashes for windows. The alley and the houses were deserted. I knew who was under the shroud but could not recall his name. Then, the alley turned into the Blue Room with Aftab’s ancestors smiling down at me. Azizun was singing. I heard her clearly although I could not see her. The power went off. The fan came to a standstill. I dreamt I dried my brow on the sleeve of my shirt. Then there was another hand, holding a handkerchief mopping my brow. I sat up.

  ‘You!’

  ‘I heard you groaning in your sleep.’

  ‘Is Aftab asleep?’

  ‘Sort of. And what have you been doing?’

  ‘I have been dreaming and listening.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To myself.’

  ‘And what have you heard?’

  ‘I have heard,’ I said steadying myself, ‘I have heard that I should kill myself.’

  Anuradha fiddled with the buttons on my shirt. ‘You don’t know what you are saying.’

  I let her think that. Because the thought was dreadful. I did not know I was going to say that until I had said it. When I had said it though, I knew it was true. That was why I was horrified.

  ‘And I have heard other things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘I heard a great threshing of the wind way up in the sky. And it says, I want. I want.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  And while I tried to forge a reply to fool her, to laugh the whole thing off, a sob arose from somewhere choking me off. In the darkness, tears flowed down my cheeks, into the pillow. Anuradha peered into my face. I could see the whites of her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered, her hands tightening on my shoulders.

  I wanted to choke the flow, grab the valve that controlled them. The tears flowed on, silent, independent of me. I looked around in despair. ‘Why should this have happened to me in this strange room, so far from home?’ I said.

  ‘But this, too, is your home.’

  I patted her cheek. ‘You are very nice. Maybe it is you I want.’

  ‘You don’t want me. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know what is wrong and you don’t know what you want.’

  The coloured ventilators blurred, focussed again.

  ‘Have you got any cigarettes? The usual stuff, not those fancy once. I have run out of mine.’

  ‘I can get some.’

  She went out and returned with a packet.

  She lighted a cigarette and handed it to me. It tasted of her lipstick. She lit another for herself. I felt better.

  ‘I know what is wrong,’ I said.

  Anuradha nodded. She sat very close to me but did not touch me. Yet I had the impression she was as much in need of physical contact as I.

  ‘I’ll tell you what is wrong,’ I repeated trying to organize my thoughts. ‘I am dislocated. My mind is out of focus. There is something sitting right in front of me and I cannot see it. Why am I here? Why do I come here? Because I want you. Why else?’

  ‘But you come here for those shares. If it were me you wanted you wouldn’t be going around buying up all those shares.’

  ‘Are you bargaining with me?’ I said.

  ‘Not in the way you think I am bargaining.’

  ‘What if I decide to stop buying those shares? Will you believe me, then?’

  ‘You probably think Aftab sent me to achieve just this kind of exchange.’

  ‘I don’t know what I think. I can barely think in this house, in this room.’

  ‘I know. I know. But I believe you. I don’t mind what you think.’

  She was tall, long-limbed, full. Not petite like Geeta. Or skinny like Leela Sabnis. There were scars on her belly, her breasts, scars that I could feel but not see. The coloured light, fusing over our bodies lent them a fourth dimension, as though we coupled high above the earth, independent of time and space, like a pair of asteroids, locked in each other’s gravity. Silent, unable to communicate except what we communicated through the trust and push and pull of our bodies, we circled high above the empty cities. Or, perhaps, the silence, as usual, was only on my side, I never felt more alone than when locked in this, the most intimate of dialogues. I knew that. Others — Geeta, Leela — had perhaps sensed the aloneness and had left it undisturbed for fear of disturbing more than they could handle. Anuradha, on the other hand, was the daughter of disturbance itself. I could feel her pushing against this shroud of silence — with her hips, her mouth, her nails, her teeth and, finally, a prolonged, wild, hoarse crying that could have been the cry of the world’s first lost lover, or of all men, destined as they are to cry, unfulfilled, to the stars.

  9

  The nights get cooler. The brief winter of Bombay has set in but my sleep is no better. At times, quite against K’s orders, tired and defeated — by insomnia, by this chronicle — I walk about the beach on dark nights. ‘When the sun is set and the moon is also set, and the fire has sunk down, and the voice is silent, what, then, Yajnavalkya, is the light of man?’ What, indeed? These little tit bits buzz inside my head along with film tunes, slogans, Mr. Thapar’s jingles for selling buckets. Now and then, they slip
out of their prisons and mock me. What indeed did Yajnavalkya say? I sit on the little mound under the glacial shower of stars, thinking, mostly of her. I thought I had flushed her out of my system that night, ejaculated my obsession of her along with my seed. I had done that before with other women. I was certain I would never go back to her or to the morass of Aftab’s haveli.

  It looked ridiculous from the skyscrapers of Bombay: a tawdry, sensual den, a dead house in a dead city. Aftab’s dargahs and temples were no less ridiculous for all their claims of commanding a mysterious world, as pretentious and meaningless as the holy bulls of Benaras. If there was nothing new under the sun, as he said, there was nothing new in them either, or in Lal Haveli, or in that room of Gargi’s where, in a waking dream, I had once been. If there was nothing new under the sun, then whatever it was that I wanted, I was not going to get.

  But I was just not myself. That was where the rub lay. I spent hours — in the office, at home, amidst the din of parties — struggling with her memory, trying to untie the riddle. With no effect. I must have had a great air of preoccupation those days; I could see it reflected in people’s eyes. Mr. Thapar would be sitting across me, his grey hair neatly parted, watching me with a puzzled, speculative eye and I would not have a clue of what he had been saying and I would say, ‘I am sorry. Could you please repeat that?’ I had seen that gaze of Mr. Thapar’s before, although I could not say where until one night, many months later, I remembered that that was how, towards the end, I had seen him observe my father.

  ‘What do you know of sorrow?’ Aftab had said amidst the burning ghats of the Manikarnika. How wrong could he be. I had sorrows that did not let me breathe. If I stayed up all night choffing tranquillizers, not knowing why I was awake, and came close to tears because I did not know, it came pretty close to sorrow. I had failed to make Geeta happy, or be anything more than a stranger to my children. My friends thought me a nut. I had been neglecting my companies. I had not even got over my mother’s death. Or my father’s, or the oppressive turbulence of the voids that never let me alone. Then, there was the greatest sorrow of them all — that no one even guessed: There was the sorrow of idleness. I had this idleness to cope with that no one knew of, not even Geeta or Mr. Thapar. It wasn’t that I had time on my hands or that I sat about. Quite the contrary. I ran about all day and most of the night: wheeling, dealing, quarrelling. But there was always this bit of me, a large bit, somewhere between the head and the chest, just idling about like a stationary engine, getting involved with nothing. It made me feel as though I was asleep. This was no joke. In fact it was one of the weirdest things to happen to anybody. I would be sitting in a meeting, listening, making notes, even talking myself and the feeling would begin to seep into me that in fact I was asleep. Had it always been like that? Had I always been half asleep? Or, could it be that I once had a stable, wakeful life but had gradually lost my bearings? My good friend Leela Sabnis said one was fully programmed by the time one was five. So, I must have been like that — half asleep, half awake — all this time.

  Maybe, it was this sleep that I had first to break. If I knew what had put me to sleep I could, perhaps, get rid of it like one got rid of a hangover. That night, in Gargi’s room, I thought a shadow had brushed past me, touching me lightly, telling me how to rouse myself but then all was confusion once again.

  Everything was a haze. Time itself seemed wiped off like the spools of a computer. The first casualty was sleep which had always been fragile. I had long spells of insomnia which left me drained and depressed the following day. It was during one such low that, walking down the aisles of a book store, I ran into Leela Sabnis.

  ‘My God, Som, how you have changed!’ was the first thing she said.

  ‘For the better, I hope.’

  Leaning against the stacks, she looked me up and down, her light eyes bright as ever.

  ‘You are looking older than your age, you know.’ Leela was never one to hide her thoughts.

  ‘You are as young as ever,’ I said. ‘Teaching still?’

  ‘No, I am in advertising now.’

  ‘Well, well, you never know!’

  She put her hand on my arm. ‘Come to my digs. They aren’t far.’

  She had bought a tiny flat with the money her father left her. He had died since we last met. Sitting on the floor, back against a wall, feet up on a chair, I wondered how she felt with her father gone.

  ‘You were quite attached to him, weren’t you?’ I addressed her in the little kitchen where she stirred the coffee.

  ‘I guess I was.’

  ‘Is that why you left teaching?’

  ‘Could be. Anyway, I want to leave psychology alone, like. For a while, at least.’

  Leela was several years younger to me but, at times, she put on mannerisms that belonged to an even younger generation. But I was fond of her. She was, in a way, the only surviving landmark of a past that, although ten years old, seemed to have existed ages ago. It might have been in another birth. How I had chased to get her into bed. That, I believed, then, was all I wanted. As she came out of the kitchen carrying the coffee mugs, I searched her face for clues that might reveal why I had so pursued her ten years earlier. She was a fine looking person with regular features and nice eyes. She wore jeans and a man’s white shirt. Her hair was browner than before and cut like a man’s. She had that peculiar neatness and straight carriage that young working girls have these days. Like the secretaries in our office. She had intelligence in her face and conversation. She was a fine product of Bombay, of India. As she squatted down, her feet raised on the platform shoes, I noticed her fair ankles. I was reminded of Azizun’s finely turned instep and how she played with her pajeb when she was idle.

  We settled down with coffees, lit cigarettes.

  ‘Busy as ever?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I hear a lot about you, how fast you have been growing. The rumour is you are buying up a lot of companies.’

  ‘Most of them would close down anyway,’ I said, trying to cover up my indifference. But it was hard to cover up things from Leela Sabnis. From above the rim of her cup she looked at me quizzically as though looking at a new man.

  ‘What’s the matter? You have lost enthusiasm?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  On an impulse Leela leaned forward, ruffled my hair and laughed. ‘You still hear that music, air threshed way up in the sky, I want... I want, or some such thing. It used to be quite a record.’

  I laughed, relieved at being made fun of.

  ‘I still hear that particular record, I am afraid, much as I would like to shut it off.’

  ‘It is a problem of identity, I suppose.’

  ‘I didn’t think problems of identity existed for people of my age.’

  ‘You would be surprised. There are people whose sense of identity at the end of life doesn’t go beyond: I own this house; earn so much; have four children; drive this car; have so much in the bank and so on. Maybe such identity is not enough for you.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘I suppose you can’t take your identity from your caste.’

  ‘What caste?’

  ‘You are a brahmin, after all.’

  ‘A Bhaskar, what is a Bhaskar doing in business?’

  A pain, as physical as of a wound, shot through me every time I thought of Anuradha or heard her name. Leela said: ‘Or, may be the identity of an extended joint family.’

  I kept quiet, sipping coffee, thinking vaguely of other ill-defined things. Leela meant well but she was always seeking explanations, immediately, fiercely. She could be a pain in the neck.

  We went on like this for another half hour. ‘Or, maybe,’ she was saying, ‘maybe what you want is a mystical identification, identification with a godhead, as most Hindus want, sooner or later.’

  ‘I want no such thing.’

  ‘You haven’t got the stamina for that, I know. You haven’t got the faith. You have always been a sc
eptic. You always will be.’

  That was enough of explanation for one morning. I said, ‘You are damn right. Now come and have lunch with me.’

  We went to a mod-mod cafe on the top floor of a wondrous new hotel. It was a monument of marble and shining glass. On tables of Mysore teak, bright yellow spreads lay along with polished cutlery. There was a bar and we had several martinis before getting around to lunch. Wine was poured for us in crystal goblets. The place was full of foreign tourists. They stood by the massive windows and admired the view of the harbour. Vikrant, the aircraft carrier, lay at anchor as it had, the day my father and I went to the Elephanta Caves.

  The steward, handsome in his dark blue jacket, greeted us. ‘Seeing you after a long time, sir. Have you been out of station?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. In a way, Aftab’s haveli was another station, another world. There was laughter and the tinkle of glass and the soft murmur of foreign tongues. I felt the miasma of Lal Haveli lifting, dissolving before the vitality of this throbbing cosmopolitan life. Benaras, Aftab, Anuradha, their haveli — all were bores, frogs stuck in their ancient marshy wells. What I wanted, I decided, was to go abroad, get the hell away from this land of obsessions.

  So I took off with Geeta for Europe and America, presumably for business. Nothing was more welcome just then than the roar of wide-bodied jets, the sleepless, burning universe of airports that griddled the world. The vision of men, who had designed the jets and laid out the airports, had an authority that could not be matched by the designers of Aftab’s labyrinth. New York, with its monuments of concrete and aluminium and its svelte women, their thighs rosy and slim under the mini-skirts, its dazzling bazaars and a face that had no past, was the haven that I needed. It contained, at the very least, a promise that I recognized. Geeta reeled under the fury of our travels. It had been years since she had been out with me like that. There were new lines about her face, and her body had lost some of its firmness but she had a charm all her own as well as that trust which did not waver as I stripped her before large mirrors in silent hotel rooms while thirty storeys below the traffic of Europe and America and Japan hurtled by. Or, did, at times, a pensive light pass through those soft eyes? Was there on her lips an unframed question that I was too drunk to notice? Was she puzzled by lust followed so startlingly by impotence? She must have, at times, wondered if it was just the whisky, as I always claimed before passing out. Then, one night, in Tokyo, on the last leg of our travels, semi-awake from a dream, I found her under me, her breath hot against my cheek, her eyes staring up into mine, restless with desire, then frustrated but comprehending, as I rolled off her, the blood draining out of me as swiftly as consciousness crept in. Geeta cried then, quietly, as was her wont, her little hands knotted in fists straight by her side. Petrified by my own sudden knowledge, I could do little beyond uttering incoherent noises. I lay awake a long time after she went to sleep. I could see it all: the room with ventilators of stained glass, the peacock on the carpet, the dark red floor. And Anuradha on the bed naked, gasping, her dark triangle almost touching my cheek. I drugged myself back to sleep, shuddering an hour later into a tormented wakefulness. I stood by a window and gazed at Tokyo through a blind. The skyscrapers grew out of the rock, like pins on a cushion. A grey, watery dawn broke in the east, the smog soaking up the light like a blotter soaks up ink. The struggle went on in the sky while on the ground Tokyo roused and threw itself into work. I decided we had to return by the first available flight.