Last Labyrinth Page 7

  Geeta was fine — as time has shown — but I had my doubts.

  It was K who broke them.

  The afternoon of my father’s funeral, K came and threw his arm around my shoulders as though we watched not the cremation of my father but a football match. I stiffened. I was annoyed. There were hundreds of people watching. I knew he was brilliant, an F.R.C.S and much else, but didn’t he have manners? Then in his deep tired voice, he said: ‘I knew he would die.’ And two tears rolled down his cheeks.

  A little later he was gone, right out of the gates.

  At dusk I came back, alone, to sit beside the pyre that would burn through the night, and, to my surprise found K on the top step, a slight, intense silhouette. He was smoking, something totally prohibited. He looked up as I approached. ‘Sit down,’ he said. He indicated a place as if in the vast amphitheatre of the burning grounds it was my special throne. I sat down. Outside, on the other side of the high wall, minute by minute, the traffic jammed. A hundred cars telescoped amidst a shower of abuse. We stared at the flames. ‘He left you a trust,’ I said, trying to compensate for my earlier petulance. ‘Did he?’ he said, without turning from the fire. ‘He must have known I wanted to be free. I am glad he died.’

  That was a hell of a thing to say. I tensed up all over again. K said, ‘I did not mean it the way you imagine. And what if I did. You didn’t think he was immortal? Anyway, what I meant was that he was developing melancholia.’

  I looked at him uncomprehending.

  ‘Melancholia,’ he continued. ‘If he had not died this morning he would have died of melancholia in a few years. In two years. Maybe three. It had been coming on ever since your mother died.’

  It was this bit that I had remembered two years later while I negotiated my terms of surrender. I did not want to die of melancholia, whatever else I died of. Melancholia! For God’s sake! I couldn’t imagine a more ridiculous, foolish, humiliating death. I would fight it to the bitter end. And to fight I would have all the equipment. Money I already had. If it was a whore so much the better. I shall also have a wife and children and fame. Yes, fame, too. What could be a better antidote to melancholia than fame!

  Fame! That bewitching siren whose song, I knew, had wrecked better ships than mine. Yet, I intended to pursue her. Better be dammed than not be mentioned at all. Fame was factual, quantitative. Almost quantitative. You knew you were first or tenth or sixteenth. There were the photographs in the newspapers and excerpts from what you said and the awed, envying, looks as men moved aside to let you pass. All this was fame.

  Three months later I married Geeta.

  It is a happy marriage from what anyone, including myself, can make out. I couldn’t imagine life without Geeta. But, then — and here is the big question — why these little fornications? Even if I can never go to the same woman twice. It was different with Leela Sabnis but, then, she was exceptional. And, she had, or I thought she had, all the answers.

  I could not stand at the window any longer. The night was too quiet, the landscape too thoughtful. For years now, I had not been at ease with such bounties of nature. God made them, people assured me, to redress the balance. Redress what balance? They did not redress any balance so far as I was concerned. To top it all, in the centre of this wasteland, stood the ghostly peepul. I shut the window and felt immediately better. I lay down on the vast bed. The coloured lights clasped me like a lover’s arms, caressed me into tranquillity, nearly put me to sleep.

  What of my obsession, then, obsession with women. It was not that I had not thought about the matter. I had spent money on it, a thick packet. The psychiatrists had taken the money, said a lot of things that either made too obvious a sense or no sense at all. For such a specialized profession, their command of English was particularly inadequate which led me to think the fault somehow lay with me because I so often failed to comprehend the full meaning of their disclosures. I was insecure, they said which was true but, then, who was not? I was afraid of death. That made a little more sense. I was mortally afraid of death. Maybe in the arms of my lovers’ I found a brief respite. But, then, why didn’t I go back to them? They were presumably still warm and I still had this nagging fear of cold, cold death. ‘You are looking for youth,’ said one of the shrinks. ‘This is rubbish,’ I told him. I wasn’t all that old, come to think of it and none of the women were all that young. One old fellow had a different explanation. One night, after a dozen sittings, he put down his pad and pencil, made drinks for both of us. We talked of this and that, with me wondering all the time what precisely was going on. Finally, after several drinks, he said, ‘You know, Mr. Bhaskar, psychiatry doesn’t allow certain approaches to problems like yours. The fact, however, remains that such problems existed much before the advent of psychiatry. Certain approaches were devised at that time.’

  ‘It is possible,’ he continued, ‘to conceive of this world as being populated not with people of flesh and blood, with certain sexual orientations, but with souls. You can imagine this planet humming with souls, each wanting something. Of course, many might want the same thing. A soul might also imagine that his wants, desires are best met through another soul, if that soul is the right one. That, no doubt, is a big if. Until he meets this right soul there is no peace. When you meet the right soul then, of course, things might be peaceful, may even move on towards a higher goal.’

  ‘What goal?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How do you know a higher goal exists.’

  ‘Religions would not have been so successful if such a higher goal did not exist.’

  ‘You talk like my father,’ I said.

  ‘Well, what do you think of what I said?’

  ‘It sounds good. One has to find a proof of the existence of souls, though.’

  ‘Mr. Bhaskar, we assume certain things a priori in all exercises of logic.’

  He took out a book from a shelf and read out something. It had touched me, moved me briefly to another plane. The book was by Carl Jung. I bought it later. A scatter of Jung’s words passed through my head while I lay on that bed. Flying through that shower of colour, propelled by the fine smoke, I did not want to grapple with Jung.

  I felt calm, hopeful. I stared at the ventilators. I did not think they would flare up again during what remained of the night. That was all for the best because I wanted now to sleep. Maybe that old shrink was right, more right than the rest of the bunch. Of course, even souls had to be governed by something. Maybe, they were governed by Freud’s stuff. Maybe by something else. Maybe by both.

  But what if nothing like a soul at all existed? What if nothing existed that could not be reasoned through as old Leela insisted?

  Walking this same beach, scholar Leela said I suffered from delusions. Maybe she was right. At some point on the horizon all mixed up. You can call things by any name you choose.

  Dr. Leela Sabnis, a professor, descendant of a long line of professors, M.A. and Ph.D. from Michigan, something else from London, short, shapely, small-breasted, skinny, trained in philosophy, emancipator of women, married and divorced, believer in free love, harbinger of a new order of things, reformer of the body and a mechanic of the spirit, a good lover.

  We met on a Sunday afternoon on the lawns of a seaside hotel. After several beers, the voids beating upon me in a thick bombardment, K and I sat, watching the spate of tourists and their assorted bikinis. Prof. Sabnis came up: Jeans, slippers, navy-blue T-shirt, hair pulled back in a pony-tail from the smooth intelligent brow.

  ‘Hello,’ she said to K. K invited her to sit down. We ordered a beer for her. For a reformer old Leela could be surprisingly quiet. And quiet she stayed that afternoon smoking cigarettes, crossing and uncrossing her legs, adjusting her pony-tail. K told me to drop her home. On the way, I asked her what she did.

  ‘I teach,’ she said. ‘And you?’

  ‘I make plastics.’

  ‘Buckets?’

  ‘Also buckets.’

  She nod
ded and lit a cigarette.

  ‘What do you teach?’ I said.

  ‘Philosophy.’

  ‘That is just what I need.’

  We laughed, fell silent. The Sunday crowds filled the streets. They were thick along the sea. Ice cream trolleys, chaatwalahs. Girls from Bandra jostled by the boys, giggling, white teeth in dark mouths. Skirts had grown shorter that year and have been growing shorter ever since.

  Leela lived in an apartment in a block of apartments. Would I like to come up for coffee, she said.

  I didn’t want the coffee and I didn’t want to go up but the voids were upon me, pulling and pushing, and Geeta was at Ooty with the children. I said: ‘Yes, I would like some coffee.’

  Leela Sabnis was a scholar, an educator’s child, much as I was a scientist’s. She could read at three and she hadn’t stopped, from what I could make out. She knew Marathi, Sanskrit, French and German besides English, Hindi and Tamil. The last she had picked up during the seven year posting of her husband at Madras, as an executive of an oil company.

  That flat of hers is not far from here. Two rooms, maybe three. Crammed with books. Books on the floor, books against the walls, on the toilet, inside the laundry bag, on the bed. The first time we made love, I had to remove a dozen books from the bed while she undressed. If I had been muddled by the voids, books had done the job for Leela Sabnis. Her husband, she claimed proudly, divorced her for reading too much. He did the right thing, for all I know. But I am not fair — to Leela or her books. There were little gems strewn about those ten tons of printed paper. I picked up a large assortment, like a child let loose in a toy shop. I stuffed my pockets with them, stuffed my mouth, my nose, my eyes. Then the voids returned, knocked them out of my hands, emptied my pockets, made me rinse my month with their bitter gall. Some, though, have stuck even if I can’t make much sense out of them.

  Leela Sabnis liked to sit deep in her emerald sofa. Behind her stood the philosophers of America and Europe. Freud as well, bearded and saintly, indefatigable, groping in the night of man’s mind, strewn with piss and excreta, struggling to put man together, the pervert and the insane, but also those who, whole otherwise, walked the beaches at night and cried for the spirit. Leela Sabnis was an explorer, trained in Michigan in the tools of exploring. But Michigan was crumbling; the West itself was crumbling; in Vietnam and Detroit and the by-ways of New York. Where did that leave her?

  Also, behind Leela Sabnis, stood the reformers, the saints of her own civilization. Whatever had happened to them? Who spoke, they or Michigan, when Leela said, ‘I am concerned about you, luv.’

  I shall never know. Leela Sabnis was a muddled creature. As muddled as me. Muddled by her ancestry, by marriage, by divorce, by too many books. When she made love — yes, we had got around to it soon after — when she made love, the confusion momentarily lifted. But immediately after, as she stood smoking, looking down at me — little bare feet on the stone floor, small breasts just a little sweaty — as she stood there looking down at me, the confusion descended in one roaring storm. Her first words would be ‘Let me being where I left off.’ And she would begin where she had left off, reeling off diagnoses, half sense, half poppycock, too much analysis.

  Leela Sabnis had obsessions. She had an obsession for explanations. Like my father. What led to what. Causes and effects. Effects and effects. What made people tick. The neat kingdoms of reason.

  ‘I am not fond of you,’ she told me one evening. ‘That would be lying, but I am concerned, I am worried. Tell me, what makes you tick?’

  ‘The voids,’ I said without enthusiasm.

  ‘The voids? What voids?’

  ‘I hear this song way up in the sky. All the time.’

  ‘What song?’

  ‘I want; I want; I want.’

  ‘I want. I want. I want. Just like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Leela Sabnis, braless, taut thighed, shook her head. Besides, I had begun to wonder what made her tick.

  Leela Sabnis analysed too much. She analysed like other people breathe. If we are talking of compulsions, there was a woman who had a compulsion — to talk, to analyse. There was nothing that she could not work out through cool analysis: the universe, the living and the dead, worlds seen and unseen. ‘All this is very well,’ she would say in answer to my lamentations about the voids. ‘Not irrelevant, but not very relevant either. It is too general, vague, too mystical. What we need is detail, data.’ ‘I do not say it will be easy to get the data,’ she would add, drying the moisture under the folds of her breasts, ‘but we are lucky in the tools that have now been put in our hands. If man can go to the moon, surely he can make a dent in understanding himself. Even if he cannot grapple with the whole of himself, he can at least make a dent. What can you do with mysticism? Take it or leave it. What good is a doctrine that says: take me or leave me, do not analyse me. It is Descartes that you need to understand, Som Bhaskar.’

  She would be dressed by this time. Slacks and churidars set her off. Hair loose, without make-up, she could have passed for one of her students. She was definitely skinny. It was only saris — chiffons, silks — that made her look the woman she was. And a beautiful one. In the pale chiselled face the breeding stood out. There was intelligence in the large brown eyes, touched a little with eye-shadow — she had her vanity. But there was also confusion, kept back, but very much there, not yet analysed.

  She would be dressed and outside the french windows the beach would be dark, and sufficiently cool, for us to step out.

  Mrs. Sabnis on my arm, we would go out into the dark evenings, along the sea, barefoot, on the wet, spongy sand. On the whole, she was no pedagogue, no name-dropper. She had ideas of her own that she catapulted with singular ferocity, charging them with the electricity of her brain. You couldn’t say she hadn’t worked at her thoughts. She had slogged. She had studied and understood and memorized. Oh yes, Leela Sabnis knew a lot even if she had experienced little and suffered even less.

  In the dark, walking along the line of the surf, her waist supple under my hand, I gloried in her chatter, her chatter mostly of me, what was the matter with me. ‘A man so successful, so intelligent, why should such a man so confused,’ she would say striding the sand.

  Ah, my Leela Sabnis, how little you understood the roots of the world’s confusion.

  ‘Tell me!’ I would ask her. ‘What do you think is the matter with me?’

  ‘You are much too high strung. Without reason. You are a neurotic. A compulsive fornicator.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You are always playing games with the world.’

  ‘Who is not?’

  ‘You are playing games even now. You must be serious and try to listen to me. You are lonely on the one hand. On the other, you have built a shell around yourself. To protect yourself.’

  ‘Protect against what?’

  ‘Against your feelings of inadequacy.’

  ‘The shell business sounds awful.’

  ‘You are still not serious. You are not listening to me. Don’t you agree with me?’

  ‘About the shell?’

  ‘You are bored, bored stiff in your little shell. That is the long and the short of it.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little too short?’

  She would ignore me, ‘And you are only thirty. Just imagine!’ She would look at me with sudden concern, even affection, and it made me feel sorry that I caused her such concern.

  Wondering, curious, analysing, correlating, getting nowhere. She tried to help me reason things through but I got nowhere. And when you get nowhere you get vengeful, angry, all the more querulous with that someone who put you on the planet in the first place.

  She had her prescription: Descartes.

  ‘Descartes?’

  ‘Yes, Descartes. He explained it all a long time ago.’

  ‘I think, therefore, I am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But is that really so?’

  ‘What else?’

/>   ‘What of intuitions? Of faith?’

  ‘You cannot have intuition or faith in what you cannot think through.’

  ‘What of the world of the soul?’

  ‘That, too, can be reasoned through, Descartes separated matter from spirit. The soul, too, has to be reasoned through.’

  I thought of Spinoza in the streets of Amsterdam, grinding lenses for a living. He was a proud man, a man my father admired.

  ‘What about Spinoza?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Didn’t he say both matter and spirit embraced in God, and flowed from Him?’

  ‘That is bullshit.’

  ‘Bravo!’ I would say, my hands on her narrow shoulders, twisting her around until I could kiss her. ‘Bravo!’

  Leela Sabnis fascinated me. For a while, I had believed in the powers of her cures. And yet, when I left her, with the usual two books that I borrowed every time we met, when I left her, a thirty year old shell, what I heard in the twilight was not the wisdom of Descartes, or the hum of the evening traffic, or the bulletlike whistling past of the suburban trains, not the whine of the ubiquitous jet heading for Santa Cruz, what I heard was not these but the strumming of great chords way up in the sky, beating the old tattoo: I want. I want. I want.

  Leela and I did not exactly break off. After six months our affair fizzled out. We met, talked, horsed around but didn’t particularly want to get into bed. Leela, of course, had her reasoned explanation. In the world of matter we had fed on sex and now we were satiated. In the world of the spirit we still enjoyed conversation. The two worlds, by her lights, did not meet, could not meet.

  Maybe, that was why we fell apart. What I needed, perhaps, was something, somebody, somewhere in which the two worlds combined.

  My eyes went to the peacock on the carpet. He seemed to stare right into my eyes. Hypnotized by its glance, wafted on the spectrum of the rainbow, I finally fell asleep.

  And I dreamt I was in a labyrinth. The walls of the caverns were damp, the ceiling low. I was alone. Then Anuradha joined me. She wore a petticoat and a blouse. I asked her, ‘What is in the last labyrinth, Anuradha?’