Last Labyrinth Page 13

  I knew, then, that I had had enough. It was this city, diseased and bankrupt, wallowing in filth and humbug, it was this city of perversions, that stood between me and Anuradha. Until I broke her from its spell, I should never succeed in completely possessing her.

  We sat a few feet from an open drain our feet nearly touching the oily murky waters of the river.

  ‘You must come and live in Bombay,’ I said.

  She was surprised, puzzled. ‘Why do you feel that all of a sudden?’

  ‘Some things come to you all of a sudden.’

  ‘I can’t come.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about the expenses.’

  She smiled. ‘That is just like you. But I was not thinking of the expenses.’

  ‘What else, then?’

  ‘I can’t come.’

  ‘You mean you won’t come.’

  ‘There is Aftab.’

  ‘You don’t love Aftab. Nor does he care for you. I want you more than anything else and you can’t give me a reason except to say that you can’t come.’

  ‘There are other reasons about which you do not know.’

  ‘I don’t want to know about them.’

  ‘Don’t get angry.’

  She put her hand on my arm. I watched without feeling the curlicues of mehndi.

  ‘Anuradha,’ I said, ‘I won’t be coming to Benaras anymore.’

  She paled as the words sank in. Tears came to her eyes.

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing, darling. It is nothing you have done. I just can’t stand this place.’

  She clutched my arm and cried a long time wiping her tears with the end of her sari.

  ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want you to cry.’

  But she cried.

  Later that month we lay on an enormous bed in a hotel in Bombay.

  ‘Let us run away,’ I said, leaning over her.

  She laughed. She had a deep, joyous laugh when she was happy. It shook her breasts and belly and I could see the fillings in her teeth.

  ‘Men like you don’t run away.’

  I traced a line from her throat between her breasts, to her navel. Where other women wear marks of child-birth, she carried scars of her disease.

  ‘What about Aftab?’ I said.

  She shrugged.

  I looked at her. She was almost serious. My heart quickened. ‘I’ll come to Bombay, if you don’t mind the gossip.’

  ‘Gossip be damned.’

  ‘Aftab has Azizun. He can always come and meet us here.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Of course, I am serious. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You don’t sound the same.’

  ‘It always happens to me, as soon as I get something I had badly wanted. It means nothing.’

  ‘You know what I have always felt,’ she said speculatively.

  ‘That it is not you I want and all that crap.’

  She clasped me in one powerful movement and pulled me to her breast.

  ‘I hope it is all crap, crap, crap and crap. I don’t want to lose you. I would rather die.’

  I fondled her hair, watching a ray of the setting sun break through the curtains. We dozed off.

  When we awoke it was dark. A full moon hung just above the rim of the ocean. There were the usual neons and car lights and the blazing curve of the road. But, the moon remained undimmed. Behind me Anuradha dressed, made up her face before the mirror, gathered little odds and ends into her bag. I went up to her, put my hands on her waist, kissed the side of her throat. She watched me in the mirror. I said, ‘Why do you always wear such antique clothes?’

  ‘Maybe I am an antique person. Don’t they suit me?’

  ‘Antiqueness suits you all right.’

  I turned her around. ‘You are beautiful.’ I said slowly, my eyes locked with hers.

  ‘Gargi says my beauty was a screen. It is good that it was destroyed.’

  ‘You are very beautiful,’ I said.

  I drove her to her aunt’s home. As we passed Haji Ali she said, ‘Do you think all this was bound to happen?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this that we are going through. Do you think all this was predestined?’

  I was tempted to say I did not believe in the predestined business but I stuck to the truth. I said, ‘I have had such a difficult time with life I don’t know what to believe.’

  Anuradha took my free hand, kissed the knobbly joints of my fingers.

  ‘I had started off that evening at the Intercontinental by grabbing at Aftab’s company and here we are. There must surely be some truth that connects the two.’

  ‘I love to hear you talk like this,’ she said, planting a kiss on my shoulder.

  ‘You want me to become a second Gargi!’

  ‘No. And Gargi does not talk!’

  We drove in silence. After a while, she said, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I was thinking about Lal Haveli. I had not known such places existed.’

  She smiled as though to say, ‘You never know that all exists in the world.’

  I dropped her outside the gate of her aunt’s house. She left her handkerchief in the car. I put it in my pocket. It filled the car with her strange sad perfume. I drove back leisurely, aware that my life was about to take a turn. Coming home, I sat in the silent living room, waiting for Geeta. I did not know what I was going to tell her, if anything at all. I made myself a drink and put on a record. I walked up to the large bay window. The moon shone over an empty ocean. It had grown brighter, bigger. It grew and grew, until the whole sky was in flames. Havildar, lurking in the shadows, kept an eye on me. He was the first to reach when, staggering as though at a physical blow, amidst a massive crash, I fell.

  PART TWO

  1

  Yesterday, I went to office for the first time since I fell ill. High above the sea I sat in my room. Our offices have changed. They aren’t even in the same place. My father, for twenty years, had sat in the factory. Surroundings like our present offices made him fidgety, angry. I had seen that. He had walked out of a bank because, he said, of the stench. What stench? The acrylic emulsion, the bright shiny panelling, the smell of leather? The stench of the banker’s underarm? Or just the stench of money? He never answered. He was secretive about such things. But he never went to a banker again. For years we had no banker. Not until recently, when Mr. Thapar negotiated a loan for purchasing the shares of Aftab’s company.

  Many things have happened since that evening I collapsed on the living room floor. I was removed to intensive care. When I could be moved again I was shifted to the Maya, to this room. It at least has the second best view of the sea. The best belongs to the room where my mother spent her last days. I can’t say I am dying to get into it.

  The first thing K said to me after I came out of intensive care was, ‘You know, Som, you ought to have died that night.’

  Had I not known him better, I would have thought he wished me dead. But I agreed with him. During those last minutes of consciousness, the moon exploding behind my eyes, I had travelled terrains and registered sensations that had not belonged to any living world. I had felt then the embrace of something warm, tranquillizing, unrelenting and I had said to myself I know what this is; and I had sighed, almost in relief, until the memory of Anuradha had suddenly come back — standing before the mirror my lips against her throat — and I had fallen into a bottomless pit of despair, like a shipwrecked sailor sinking into the ocean, ‘Oh shit,’ I had said to myself as I drowned. ‘Not now. Not now.’

  ‘So you had given me up,’ I said.

  ‘All three of us had.’

  ‘All three of you? Who was the third?’

  ‘Anuradha was here.’

  I stared at him, not comprehending.

  ‘How was she here?’

  ‘She phoned for you. Geeta told her.’

  I thought for a while.

  ‘But wh
y hasn’t she showed up since I got well?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Isn’t it strange? Or isn’t it.’

  I was suddenly afraid. K leaned over and patted my shoulder. ‘These drugs are depressing the heel out of you,’ he said.

  ‘There is more to this though,’ I said. ‘Can I go to Benaras if she doesn’t come?’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ K said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You should know why not. You can phone her. I’ll book a call, if you like.’

  When the call came through an hour later it was Aftab who picked up the phone. He said he was sorry I had been ill. He laughed his drunken, drugged laugh and went off to get Anuradha. While I waited, I straightened up against the pillows, swallowed, put away all self-pity but when she came through and said ‘Hello’ in her quiet voice, all of it came rushing right back. ‘Hello,’ I said, unable, for the moment, to say much else.

  She seemed to stop dead as though she had heard a ghost. I said, ‘I have been ill. I suppose you know that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you were to come and live in Bombay.’

  ‘I am still in Benaras.’

  ‘Anyway, I want to meet you. I can’t come. K doesn’t permit. Can you come...’

  Before I had finished she broke in, ‘I can’t.’

  I could hardly believe my ears. ‘Can’t what?’ I said.

  ‘Can’t come to see you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You must have a reason.’

  ‘No particular reason.’

  ‘Anything to do with Aftab?’

  ‘No. No. Nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Does he... Is he bothering you?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Why can’t you come, then, for God’s sake?’

  K saw my mounting anger and took the receiver from me. He listened intently. Then, he said, ‘Can’t you come for a day?’

  I stared out at the beach in bewilderment. Surely, she would come for a day, especially if K also asked her. There was another spell of words before I heard a distinct click.

  ‘The connection was broken,’ K said, replacing the receiver.

  ‘Why don’t you say she hung up?’

  ‘She said she is going to Europe.’

  ‘Europe? With Aftab?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What d’you know!’ I laughed bitterly. And, here I had thought of nothing else ever since I could think again.

  I had phoned her again the next morning. She had herself picked up the phone. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Anuradha,’ I began. There was a silence, followed by a click, as she again hung up.

  Slowly, I guided the receiver back into the cradle. My hands had begun to tremble. It had happened before but nothing as bad as that. There was also a twitch at my left temple. I clasped my hands to stop them from trembling. There was nothing I could do about the twitch. If it goes on like this, I thought, I would soon be a shivering, sniffling wreck.

  Her reaction had been so totally unexpected that my faculties found it impossible to grapple with it. There had to be a mix-up somewhere. But where? I could only think of Aftab. Had he discovered that we were lovers? Did he care if we were lovers? Aftab was a medieval son-of-a-bitch. You could never tell what he knew, what he cared for. A secretive devil if ever there was one. Was he threatening her? For a moment, the thought shook me up. But, then, Anuradha wasn’t one to be cowed down by threats. I didn’t think anyone could prevent her from doing anything that she had set her mind to. There had to be a mix up.

  That afternoon, the mystery cleared up.

  Geeta was putting heavy curtains in my room so I could sleep even when the sun was high. She had lost weight during the previous month.

  I watched her from the depths of a terrible depression. For all my assurances to myself, the uncertainty about Anuradha was driving me insane. My chest would explode, I thought, unless I talked to someone about her. I heard myself say, ‘Geeta, I have been carrying on with Anuradha.’

  She continued with the curtains. For a year it had been as if she had been living away from me but she had taken over during the previous month as though nothing had happened. It was this cool strength of hers that I had always admired. She was sensible, brave, aware of certain fundamentals that lay hidden from me. There was, I now realized, another thing. There was some subtle understanding of me, Som Bhaskar, which, too, alas, had escaped me.

  She finished with the curtains, sat down next to me. ‘I know,’ she said, her eyes averted. I stared at her in disbelief.

  ‘You know!’

  She nodded.

  I was weary of surprises. My brain could not process them. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I guessed it when she came to see you at the hospital that night.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Some time back she wrote to me.’

  ‘She wrote to thank you for having loaned her your husband?’

  ‘Not that.’

  After a pause, she continued, ‘She wrote to say that I should forgive her and I should not mind. She said she had gone along with you because you had wanted it but it wasn’t her, she said, that you really wanted.’

  ‘Gone along with me! Gone along with me! She is talking rubbish.’

  I knew my temper was getting out of hand. It had been happening frequently of late.

  ‘You don’t have to shout,’ Geeta said, stiffly.

  ‘I will shout as much as I like. What else did she write?’

  ‘She said she will not be seeing you anymore.’

  My hands started to tremble again. I grabbed them before they got out of control. The twitch had also returned. Geeta, I knew, had seen the hands as well as the twitch. My hysteria turned upon her.

  ‘Who told you to get chummy with her, anyway?’

  Annoyance flashed across Geeta’s face, her mouth, her eyes, but she took hold of herself.

  ‘Why are you upsetting yourself for nothing?’ she said.

  ‘You call this nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘You gang up with a loose woman. You share secrets with her. And you call it nothing.’

  Geeta stared at me, horrified. ‘What has gotten into you? I am going.’

  And she went out.

  I started to cry. Great sobs shook my body. Had I been alone in the house I would have wailed. I took a Swedish vase that stood by the bed and flung it at the wall. It fell with a terrible crash scattering flowers and broken glass. That helped. ‘Screw the bitch,’ I shouted at the top of my voice, reaching at the same time for a bottle of valium. Geeta came rushing in. She looked at the shattered vase, then at my tear-stained face but said nothing.

  I felt better after the valium took affect. ‘I can do without her,’ I told myself aloud. What had pissed me off was her pretensions of unconcern, as though I were a child that she had been humouring all along. ‘She had gone along with me because I had wanted it’ and all that carp. And, what about our love? Her promise to come and live in Bombay? Was all that playacting? I refused to believe it, yet, there were the phone calls and there was the letter. It had either been playacting that I, in my stupidity, had taken for real. Or, she had changed her mind after this awful heart attack. Quite frankly, I told my valium-soaked nerves, quite frankly I didn’t give a damn which of the two it was. For all I cared Aftab and Anuradha could go and stick it. All that concerned me was that they had made a fine fool of me, made me look like a dunce: In the eyes of Geeta, in my own eyes. They were not going to get away with it, though. Not by a long shot. I was going to settle the score sooner than they thought.

  I had called Mr. Thapar that evening and told him to once again start buying the shares of Aftab’s company.

  The decision had not pleased Mr. Thapar. Far from it. ‘Start buying them again,’ he had said in disbelief.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is the hurry?
’

  ‘Perhaps not for you. But I am running out of time.’

  ‘I see.’

  I could almost hear his mind hum.

  ‘Are you serious, Som?’ he said at last. His voice had acquired a new gravity.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘You are making a mistake.’

  ‘Mistake about what?’

  ‘About those shares.’

  ‘It was your idea in the first place.’

  ‘My idea was about the shares, not about the prices. The prices that we first paid were high enough. Now they will be something ridiculous. They will not be worth a third of what we might end up paying for them.’

  Mr. Thapar paused because he was out of breath but also to see how his advice was taken.

  ‘I see your point,’ I said cunningly.

  ‘And what have you decided?’

  ‘I feel we should purchase all outstanding shares — at whatever cost.’

  Mr. Thapar now became very serious and stared at his nails. ‘Let me inform you, then, that there is just not enough liquidity in our companies to do what you want me to do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There is not enough cash.’

  ‘We can raise loans.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Mortgage the lands, the plants.’

  Mr. Thapar was aghast. ‘But they have never been mortgaged in our entire history.’

  ‘Well, mortgage them now.’

  ‘I hope you know what you are doing, Som.’

  ‘I know what I am doing.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said formally. ‘If you send me the orders in writing I shall do as you say.’

  That was one month ago.

  There was a knock on the door now and Mr. Thapar walked in. He looked dapper, preoccupied.

  ‘You need not have taken the trouble to come to the office,’ he said. ‘I would have come over.’

  ‘I thought I might exercise my legs a bit.’

  Mr. Thapar picked up a paper-weight in both hands and examined it for a minute.

  ‘As you know, we have been buying shares of Aftab’s company,’ he began.

  ‘Yes.’