Last Labyrinth Read online

  Returning to Bombay, at four in the morning, walking towards the glass exits, I slipped on the polished floor. I lay perspiring for an hour in the car and at the house, my head in Geeta’s lap. ‘It is the exhaustion of the travel,’ everyone said, everyone except K. He monitored the cardiograms without a word. I heard Geeta quiz him outside the door. ‘He will be all right. Don’t worry.’ And all right I soon was except that I couldn’t leave the bed. I felt as though struck by thunder, bled totally of all energy. Inside me, there was nothing but an empty roaring, like the roar of the sea in a conch. It slowly dawned upon me that I enjoyed staying in bed. I kept the discovery to myself lest it should start a new chain of enquiries. But K, too, suspected it and came along one evening when Geeta was not home. He sat about, smoking, listening to the records that I had brought back from the trip. Finally, he said, ‘You know, Som, there was nothing wrong with any of those ECG’s I took.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What I mean is that there is nothing as such wrong with you.’

  ‘What is “as such”?’

  ‘What I want to know is are you hamming it?’

  I laughed. ‘I wish I were. But this is not my kind of hamming, you know.’

  ‘One never knows what is one’s brand. Your father was not above hamming himself. He did a lot of it towards the end without realizing what he was doing.’

  He looked at me through his cool steady eyes. ‘If you know what I mean,’ he added after a pause. He did not elaborate but I got his meaning and was shattered by the understanding. I certainly didn’t want melancholia if that was what he had in mind.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I shall get up tomorrow and I shall go to the office.’

  ‘Is that really what you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know what I want to do.’

  He kept quiet.

  10

  When I went back, it was to Gargi. With the rains the heat had declined. A damp musty wind blew along the ghats. It had long since blown out the rickshaw puller’s lamp but we were still far from the heavy traffic and the policemen. He had finished his peddling of fine young ladies who sang and did excellent chikan work and could be induced to do other things. He was breathless now, his lungs wrecked by ten years of smoking and rickshaw pulling. As we passed under the street lamps, I noticed the steady increase in the perspiration down his back. His muscles twitched in jerky movements, as though they existed independent of him.

  That morning I had had breakfast in Bombay. To Geeta I had said I was going to Delhi on business which was not a lie because I might have done just that and gone back. I had no clear idea what I planned to do in Benaras. K had suggested I stop hamming. How did I know where all I would wander before the hamming stopped, if it stopped at all.

  The light of the chowk approached, trembling through a haze of dust. The rickshaw man got off, lighted the lamp, cleared his lungs of phlegm. ‘I can take you to little children,’ he said desperately, as though offering me the accumulated innocence of Benaras’ children.

  ‘Take me to the cinema hall with mirror doors.’

  That was all that I remembered of the location.

  It was just then that I had decided to go to Gargi. I felt at home with her. I wanted to talk, to explain, to understand. I remembered Aftab’s plaintive peevish complaints to her, and the thought crossing my mind: ‘She understands. The only one who understands.’

  I sat across from Gargi. The windows had been flung open letting in the noise and the smell of the streets. Gargi sat in her usual place, against the wall, straight-backed, watching me through pleasant, intelligent eyes. She was not surprised to see me. I might as well have dropped in from the house next door.

  I had a cough. There was a dryness in my nose and my throat. She got up — how neat and cool she looked — and got me a glass of water in a steel tumbler. She watched me drink it down, then opened her paan box. She made up a paan, offered it to me. I remembered refusing it during the first visit. I took it now. I thought I needed it. She made another for herself. She sat back, her hands clasped around her knees, and smiled at me through stained teeth. Once again, I wanted to hug her.

  ‘You know, I have been away.’ She watched my lips, nodded.

  ‘After I met you the last time I went abroad. To Europe and America and Japan. With Geeta, my wife. I would like her to meet you some time. She is your type. Believes in God. Krishna and all that.’ Gargi smiled.

  ‘I have not been well. Bombay is still quite warm. The heat has been getting me down. It was nice and cool everywhere we went. Now, we are back in this blasted heat. You are wondering why I am in Benaras? The fact is I don’t know. I didn’t know I would be coming to Benaras when I left Bombay this morning. Maybe, I wanted to see you. I am staying at the hotel. We took nearly an hour getting here.’

  An interval passed in silence.

  ‘I am fed up of this restlessness,’ I shot out suddenly. ‘So absolutely fed up. Can you help me?’ I had tried to make a jest of it but my voice trembled. Gargi looked at me closely, scrutinized my face. I don’t think she had heard me.

  ‘Can you help me?’ I said again. As I watched, her expression changed. She had been deeply touched. She took out her pad.

  ‘God will send someone to help you.’

  ‘Who?’

  She smiled, wrote again, ‘Someone who has known suffering.’

  ‘But what if there is no God?’

  Gargi quietly tucked the pad under the mat, nodded, smiled.

  Across the street, a ramshackle temple, a favourite of the prostitutes, came alive with the evening aarati. ‘Prayer does not change God,’ Kierkegaard had said, ‘but it changes him who prays.’ Maybe, I ought to start attending temples every evening.

  Gargi got up, entered the little kitchen. She took down a brass thali and started to lay out the food which the girl must have left. There was rice and curds and a mysterious vegetable. I realized I was hungry. I ate in silence. She watched me eat. I said, ‘How is everyone? Azizun?’ She did not catch me so I repeated the question. She nodded slowly.

  ‘You know, those little girls — the ones Azizun teaches — they really work hard at their dancing. I watched them the last time. Azizun still lives downstairs? And Aftab? Have you seen him lately?’ I didn’t know why I was prattling on unless I was trying to build some bridge to Aftab’s world. It was getting late but I had no desire to leave. I could have slept right there if Gargi had permitted. The noises of the street had been gradually dying out. It was cooler. Gargi opened her paan box again and made paans for both of us. Then she wrote out a note for me. ‘Aftab is not well. I am going to see him. Come with me.’ I looked at her uncertainly. She nodded, smiled. There was the sound of the front door opening, followed by Tarakki’s heavy step. Mouth full of paan juice and lips red, I stared at him. Gargi closed her paandaan, picked up her cane — I never understood why she carried that cane around — and got ready to go. I was wondering what to do with myself when she bent down, caught me by the wrist, tugged me along down the stairs where the car waited.

  Aftab, goggles and all, against the head board of the bed. I had never been to his room or, to that part of the haveli. It was far removed from the Blue Room and the room in which I used to stay. The single bed was covered with a green sheet. There was a spittoon. His chess board stood on a side-table. It was a narrow room with ventilators next to the high ceiling. It did not look as though Anuradha shared this room. Azizun, who had been waiting on him, now came forward to greet Gargi.

  Aftab looked gaunt, yellow. Perspiration poured down his face. He wore narrow pyjamas and a kurta of very fine mul. He reminded me of a portrait of Bahadur Shah. He took no notice of my presence.

  I wondered what the matter was with him. Gargi sat by his side, her hand on his forehead. He talked hoarsely to her. I could not catch what he said. Neither could have Anuradha who stood equally removed. From her expression, she might have been as much of a stranger as myself. Gargi patted Aftab’
s hand, a picture of motherly good humour.

  The scene had the quality of tableau that had been staged many times before. Whenever, I imagined, Aftab’s precariously balanced nerves received a shock. Each actor knew his appointed role, including, perhaps, Aftab. At one point, he lifted his goggles, dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief, then carried on rapidly. He improved, gained energy, as he talked to Gargi. His words, although still hoarse, came out more clearly. He did not perspire as profusely. Gargi encouraged him to go on. She wanted him, perhaps, to get things off his chest, talk himself into sleep. Presently, signs of exhaustion appeared. His back lost the iron-like rigidity. His voice became feebler.

  It was only now that I became aware of the tension in the room. A ritual it might have been but it was obviously a tense one: For both Azizun and Anuradha and, strangely, even for me. What meaning could it possibly have held for me, a stranger, so unexpectedly present? I shook my head in disbelief. I wondered what precise shock Aftab had received this time. Why did I feel guilty? The tension had begun to blow away though. Anuradha, dressed as ever in her dated costumes, was visibly relaxed. So was Azizun. In a little while, Aftab fell silent, slid under the green counter-pane and fell asleep.

  Azizun stayed with Aftab. Anuradha and I followed Gargi down a couple of stairs into another room. It might have been a replica of Gargi’s room in the bazaar. There was a mat, a pitcher of water, some books. A Sri Chakra, drawn on parchment and framed, hung on one wall. It looked like a piece of rare art and a decoration rather than anything else. It might have come down in the collections of Aftab’s ancestors. We sat on the mats. Gargi did not look any worse for her exercise with Aftab. What with the heat and talk and the travel of the day, I felt very tired. Gargi noticed it and, patted my arm.

  ‘Why don’t you go to sleep?’ Anuradha said to me.

  ‘I think I will.’

  ‘I will take you to your room.’

  ‘I will go back to the hotel.’

  ‘At this time of the night!’

  ‘Tarakki will drop me. I can find a rickshaw.’

  ‘You are being difficult,’ Anuradha said with a sigh.

  I was aware of a strident childish clamour in my voice. I had thought of Anuradha, lusted after her all these weeks, but now that we were face to face I was resisting her, fighting her off. I wanted her and at the same time resented my need for her. I also resented that she had somehow seen more of me than I would have liked to reveal. Faced with her, in the loneliness of that haveli, I realized how inadequate I was to deal with her. Even for this I blamed her. It was silly.

  ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ I said, sulking.

  Gargi had been watching me with amusement. She pulled out her slim little pad and passed me a note. ‘Go with her,’ it said. ‘Don’t quarrel. She is your shakti.’ To this day, I do not know what Gargi meant by that. But Anuradha, I learnt that night, was indispensable to me.

  I was fated to return to that haveli over and over. We possessed each other with singular ferocity, neither willing to loosen the clasp.

  Yet each meeting, far from cooling my passions, served only to fuel them. I lived on the nourishment of the shades thrown by her naked body under the chromatic shower. Beyond that room lay the silent labyrinth through which, too, before the invisible audience of Aftab and Azizun and Tarakki, I sometimes walked. By myself or with Anuradha, hand in hand. And always in various shades of coherence, the spoken or unspoken question, like a vulture, circled the corpse of my life: what lay in the last labyrinth?

  From these penumbral regions, at intervals, I returned to Bombay, picking up the threads which, in any event, were carried very well by Mr. Thapar. If he suspected things he made no mention of them, nor did he inquire about our suspension of purchases of Aftab’s shares. In Bombay, invigorated by tall buildings and swift lifts, a bracing give and take of commerce, I would soon be my old self and wonder if Aftab’s Haveli was not a horror-dream, drummed up by a sick imagination. It would seem, indeed, that I must be equally sick to return to it. But, then, turning on a golden hinge — a fragrance, a tapestry, the sound of a dripping tap — the swing of the pendulum would begin and very soon I would be back in the little room with the stained glass ventilators and a peacock on the rug and the embrace of a strange woman whose distance from me, for all the loving, seemed never to diminish.

  Once, in the middle of a warm night, I heard the sound of drums and hoarse happy voices singing. I sat up, untying the knots of our naked limbs, feeling for a moment lost, as though in a different, if not unfamiliar, country. A song came floating on the air, indistinct but haunting, like the song of the old man at the carnival.

  ‘My mother used to sing that song,’ Anuradha said.

  I looked at her. What did I know of her except that I could not live without her?

  ‘You were born in Bombay?’ I asked.

  ‘Mr. Thapar should know.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Tell me.’

  ‘In Biharsharif. You know where it is?’

  I nodded.

  ‘In a house with one room where in the evening my mother sang for strangers.’ She paused. ‘You want to know more?’

  She lit one of Aftab’s cigarettes, a sign, I knew by now, of tension and distress. I put my arm around her naked waist.

  ‘I have to know,’ I said. She smiled.

  ‘Later in the evening someone would stay on. Then a man came and refused to leave. He was tall and very thin. He had a black beard and large black eyes. He carried a suitcase full of bank notes which he gave to my mother. He drank. A week after he moved in with us, he went out and returned with a crate of bottles. The bottles rattled as he dragged them from one end of the room to the other. He drank every evening. He sat drinking and stared unblinking at mother while she sang. There were mangroves in Biharsharif. Sometimes, on summer evenings, we took walks. One day we moved to Gwalior. We had a bungalow at the edge of the town. Now, my mother also drank. At times they quarrelled at night when it was very quiet. The bungalow shook with the sound of their shouting. I would lie in bed and feel as though a storm raged outside. I would start to tremble and the trembling would go on for hours. It was a disease, I knew, but I dared not tell anyone. In the morning, holding each other, they cried, the man and my mother. My mother sat before Krishna and sang and wept. Then, one night, the shouting suddenly ceased. The man stabbed her twelve times with a broken whisky bottle and hung himself from a hook which was meant for a fan.’

  ‘Good God, Anuradha,’ I stammered out.

  ‘My name was Meera, then.’

  She fell silent. Outside, on the quiet air, the song flowed on. I put my hand on her shoulder. She laid her cheek on it. Her warm tears flowed silently across the back of my hand.

  ‘It must have been terrible.’

  ‘I don’t remember. I was only a child. My aunt brought me to Bombay, put a uniform on me, changed my name, and sent me to a convent.’

  ‘After all you have been through...’ I began.

  ‘It is nothing. In that world it is nothing, not even a drop.’

  ‘Still... How do you manage to live with it?’

  ‘Like others have done before me.’

  ‘And how did they do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Suddenly, she turned towards me and took hold of my wrists. ‘I wish we had never met. I wish you had not come to Aftab’s party. I wish you had never come to this haveli.’

  ‘Let us go away from here.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Come to Bombay.’

  She laughed. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You won’t understand. But I like to live here. With Aftab, Gargi.’

  I started to speak. She put a hand on my lips and pulled me down to her breasts.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ she whispered against my ear. ‘Don’t talk.’ Her voice trailed off. The distance remained.

  And so to diminish the distance, to grab her, to possess her wholly,
I hustled her off to the hills, to a beautiful valley in the shadow of snow-covered peaks. There, I thought, no one would know her and she would think of none and there would be no one to distract her from her loving of me. What she said to Aftab, I did not know. Or, perhaps, he did not care, busy as he seemed in preparing for his annual trip to Lucknow.

  In the mountains, through the mist and the rain and the sprinkling of sunny days, I clung to her. I threw myself, my entire desperate weight, the turbulence of my forty years, on her.

  How did she bear the sheer ferocity of it all!