1. A bag of hungry bones
The women lived across the railway tracks, haggard and vulnerable.
They had their vulnerability on their bodies deceptive to the eye.
Underneath there was a steely toughness of spirit and a most cutting
irony which was not lost on him. They did not need his sympathy and a
reformer's gushing empathy. They could take care of themselves. Did
he imagine an abyss of bottomless misery in the holes of their eyes?
What was it that lay in the depths of their hearts waiting to be
discovered? He could not swallow their pride and the utter comic
relief their apparent helplessness provided as though the women were
laughing at him, a most despicable member of the human species which
conspired to create their apparently helpless condition. Once he
accompanied a bunch of cronies, at the dead of the night, to a local
brothel merely because he wanted to experience it not as a young
student trying to go through the chiaroscuro of life's varied
experiences but merely because he wanted to feel one with the women
spiritually .He wanted to take their souls in his hands to comfort
them for the nice feelings it left behind in him. That was how his
thinking worked in those days. At the same time he felt guilty about
God knows what when he confronted the woman who seemed to laugh at
him for his apparent lack of nerve. He espoused freedom which meant
not merely of the soul but of the body. It was ludicrous to imagine
that the women had forfeited their freedom merely because they
bartered their physical forms for a few pieces of silver. But that
was what he thought and believed.
He abhorred violence .He never approved the physical battering his
mother’s cousin used to routinely perform on his hapless wife. When
he asked the woman why she had been tolerating the violence on her
body being inflicted by a thin and wiry husband she laughed it off
saying that she had no option. But why would she not protest? He
looked into her laughing eyes looking for an answer to the terribly
vexing question of why she would carry on a love affair behind -the -
curtains with a low-caste man knowing full well that she would get a
battering at the end of it all. It was all a part of the deal: that
was what she used to say. She carried on an affair with a low-caste
man because that was what one would expect from a woman who would get
a battering at the end of it. And why would she get a battering at
the end of it all? Because she carried on an affair with a low-caste
man! It was all a part of the deal: that was what she would say as he
sat near her in her kitchen sipping her tea while her cows were
returning home. He wanted to ask her whether it was true that out of
her four children one resembled, in facial features, her alleged low-
caste lover but that did not matter and he never asked her the
question. Her shining nose-ring sparkled against the fire of the
stove as she expected this devastating question from him, whom she
2. loved deeply within her soul .He sat on the large wooden box near the
kitchen expecting an answer from her to this question which he had
not brought himself to ask. She wanted the question from him very
much because she did not want it from anybody else. He only wanted
the answer to the question but never wanted to ask the question
because he loved her deeply within his soul .She wanted to tell him
the truth which she alone knew if only he asked. He wanted the truth
from her from her own account so that he could continue to love her.
A lot of questions came to his mind. What was it that made her go
through the banality of an extramarital relationship with a low-caste
man who had nothing to recommend as a lover? When he wanted to ask
her the question a lump in the throat came from somewhere and nothing
eventually came out of him. Again she wanted to tell him why she went
through the horror of this relationship and the absolute
pointlessness of it all. There was something about him, which made it
impossible to complete the triangular transaction of a fruitless
relationship between him, her and the faceless lover because it was
he who made the relationship pointless.
Years later he tried to capture the pointlessness of an adulterous
relationship in a poem:
Adultery
This wretched body
A handful of bones
And aching tissue
Plays the melody
of purposeless passion
His bony fingers
Wrought fine music
Out of my rosy-hued body
In the warm summer nights
I steal another's man
Our sweaty union
Derogatorily called
Adulterous love, goes on
Under drawn curtains
And smothered lamps.
Waves of tiny ants crawl
Under the burning skin
Tingling, tickling
The underside of the knees
This pathetic creature
Wants me to whisper
Love-words into his ears
3. The magic of my body
Belongs to me alone
And not to this moron
I look in the mirror
I have gone through it all
The creaking door ,
The sound of the flush
The gathering of the clothes
The inane small talk
The attempts at politeness
It is so painfully boring .
This wretched body
A bag of hungry bones
And aching tissue
Remains as yearning as ever.
His cousin Laxmi had her first bout of depression, like her mother,
at the age of eighteen. She sat morose and hunched up with tears
streaming down her cheeks .Everything was wrong with the world and
there was nothing one could do about it . Her splintered personality
took no notice of him who tried to superimpose some external meaning
on the entire thing. He tried to comfort her saying that everything
was not wrong with the world and even if it was , it did not really
matter to her or to him . She did not apparently agree probably
because she felt that the world was beyond repair. The more he tried
to comfort her more she cried because he gave her the feeling that he
was responsible for all the ills of the world. He felt absolutely
distraught and could not look her in the eye. It was only the next
day that she shifted the blame on to her brother and he felt
relieved.
After marriage Laxmi went into a second bout of depression this time
leaving a permanent scar on her fractured personality .She felt that
her husband had no business to carry on an affair with a girl in the
neighborhood .She also felt strongly that he might kill her because
he did not like her at all and wanted her to go away to the dark inky
infinitude of the other-world. She kept vigil at night because he
might strangulate her or liquidate her otherwise because she had
heard of such things happening. She had her own logic as to why this
would happen .Her logic never failed and it was better she remained
vigilant. It was this logic which haunted her all the time. There
were phantoms of people all around her who were making wild
gesticulations at her trying to make her feel that her inner logic
was at fault.
The specters of people around her were closing in on her jabbing
their filthy fingers at her face. Weren't they responsible for the
4. refusal of her child to come into this world? She had no option other
than to protect herself against these dangerous people who were
getting ready to finish her once and for all. The dark rings around
her eyes betrayed no emotion but only fear, a stark fear of the cruel
world which was gunning for her all the time. Alone she stood in this
terrible world trying to defend herself against their machinations.
Years later, he recapitulated her condition in a poem:
Ramblings of a Schizophrenic
My splintered consciousness is
A medley of broken images
Shards of shattered tough-glass
Pierce through forced attempts at order
Dark and threatening circles
Close in on my eyes, concentrically.
My muscular male arms
Negate my underlying femininity
Sometimes I am male, sometimes female
Sometimes I am me, sometimes somebody else.
In my unified moments
I attempt in vain
to gather pieces of broken glass
for a multi-hued kaleidoscope
the kaleidoscope remains a dream
I only collect bleeding injuries.
My soul lies inert, in a glass jar
in the amniotic fluid of primordial confusion
as research material for neuroscientists
Cushioned in chaos, there I lay
Afraid that the jar would break one day.
