By Aditi Pant
‘The way you wrote about her
With hostility, hurt, derision
And just a hint of wistfulness’
There are two facets to this story. One is simple and the other not so. When you are caught in a current that is stronger than you, you swim with it and give yourself a chance at survival. This is simple. Or you struggle against it and either drown or create a story. This is not so simple. It seems all my life I’ve been working against the will of fate. Yet, destiny, fate, call it what you will has its tentacles all around me and I am winded. I’ll leave it to you to decide if I am drowning or if I have created a story.
I could start at the beginning; however, I’m not sure where it all began. So, I’ll start somewhere in between. There was a time when I couldn’t sleep unless I wrote something. So, stalked I was by reality that if the words were wistful and surreal I slept sooner and better. These days however, my dreams are becoming more and more real and reality is slipping into a dream. At times, I’m not sure if I’m awake or asleep or if it really matters. The doctor that comes to see me once a week says I’m prone to rambling (among other things), but then what is a good story without the subconscious surfacing occasionally?
Is love really blind or does it give us an alibi to be blind to the society, to own up to our fragilities, our vulnerability that make us truly human? Is everything just perception? It could be my medication but what seems real right now are phantom shapes, muffled sounds and the arbitrary traces of memory which blends the septic with the sterile. The storyteller, they called me, even though they knew the stories I told were not my own. The irony is, today when I have my own story I can’t tell it right. My senses are fuddled. I feel drugged. My weakness is exposed. All the learning I audaciously shared with others was just chaff in the wind. I fell – and how!
Even my present seems like a flashback. All I have is a flashback and a story I can’t tell. So, I’ll just show it to you in glimpses that are more lucid than the big picture. What I’m concerned about is the fact that if my present is a flashback, how will my past be presented? Do I even have a future? This is where your genius will help me out. Connect the dots for me, connect this haiku like life and see if the story reveals itself.
Right now, I’m waiting. You’ll know for whom soon enough. Nainital is beautiful after a storm. The rain wipes out all the grit and there is a poignant clarity in the air that moves the soul. Once this picturesque beauty would have calmed me, even inspired me, however, right now, like reality, it eludes me. As I stare at the lake from the balcony I know the olive placid waters are deceptive. There are undercurrents and hidden depths that fascinate and scare me at the same time. My meditative mood is broken as former events abruptly surface like ripples in the lake and assail with a kaleidoscope of emotions. I’m torn. The tea grows cold in my cup. I go inside for a refill from the warm kettle she has left me. The quiet waters of my being are disturbed and underneath I’m unpredictable, just like the lake. However, don’t see me as an unreliable narrator yet. They called me the storyteller, right? That should count for something.
Am I rambling again? Yet what can I do? I’m only a puppet; puppet in the hands of my own obsession, love, and an angst that keeps one awake at night. Love is the reason for all unreasonable actions and hence the sharp bends in my feelings for Basu – from jealously to hate to doubt to infatuation to love and to jealously again are justified…I think. Who is Basu you might ask? I didn’t promise a linear story, did I?
To a waif, rebel and a person with few means it meant a lot to be adopted by Pritam. Adopted seems like a strange term to use (I was a 23-year-old then), and I would have said befriended but then I owe everything I have to Pritam hence ‘adopted’ should suffice. We first met at the Boat House Club that organises poetry reading sessions. Our conversations were often engaging and sometimes argumentative. How could they not be when our worlds were so diverse. Pritam was aristocratic, affluent and influential. His beautiful colonial bungalow, overlooking the emerald lake was the talk of the town. But what really attracted people to him like moths to a flame was his large warm heart. He loomed larger than life. I had nothing except a brooding silence that only underscored my poverty and loneliness. Despite being only a decade older than me, Pritam soon became my mentor, benefactor, guide, and a father figure. He opened his heart and home to me and all because he thought I had ‘potential’. What he saw in me, a twisted mind with a sour disposition (the metaphor of a moth describes me quite well) I never knew. Yet, I knew for a fact that his friendship changed my life as I knew it. He gave me a place to stay (his own bungalow), and everything else including the clothes on my back till I could afford them on my own. Even my earning a living and some fame at my vocation came from the few discreet calls he made to his ‘friends’. (If you haven’t guessed it already I’m a writer and a very mercurial one at that). He gave me a chance at living and I looked up to him with reverence. I missed him on his frequent visits abroad and looked forward to his company when he returned. We would sit under the mango tree in the courtyard where he would talk of his journeys as I listened with rapt attention. Or we would just stare at the chestnut trees illuminated by the lamp post near the gate and share a communicative silence. So, deprived was I of any humane feeling before I met Pritam that if my love for him turned obsessive, or if Pritam’s regard for me was a mere guise to use me as an emotional punching bag- I wouldn’t know.
Coming back to the heart of the story. My being jealous of Basu made extreme sense as I saw her poised to take away the only certainty I knew – Pritam. When his letters from London started mentioning Basu I didn’t pay much attention and brushed her aside as his latest infatuation. But as Pritam’s helplessness became evident I knew this was more than just mere craze. “She is a dream …elusive and encompassing all at once” he once wrote. At first his letters were full of love; eulogizing the beauty of Basu. Then they reeked of doubt and rancour that I didn’t know Pritam was capable of. “She was gone as soon as it was midnight and she is no Cinderella” he wailed in one letter and in another he pondered, “is she trying to kill me…or is it my imagination?”
Pritam’s letters fuelled my growing hatred of Basu, as not only did she take away from me the only solace I’d known but also it seemed that she had a sinister side that had completely changed Pritam. Or was it Pritam who had the ominous side? He seemed crazed and bitter. His letters were now getting more and more ambiguous and I couldn’t fathom if he thought Basu was deliberately harming him or he felt gall; poison develop inside him as he suspected her of loving someone else. My hatred was solidified when I received a letter from Pritam saying, “We are married now…nothing and no one can take her away from me. “ Such an extreme step? Why? How could he marry someone who he suspected was destroying him in bits and pieces.
I decided to visit them and made all the necessary arrangements when I got a message informing me of Pritam’s death and of Basu’s impending visit to his estate. My head reeled. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Not only had I inexplicably lost the only human I cared about but my sanctuary, my home, would now be violated. I vowed retribution.
When my nemesis, Basu arrived at the estate, the juxtaposition in my attitude towards her was so acute that I wouldn’t have believed it had my being a writer not made me more astute towards the human condition in general and my own in particular. Was it her innate beauty? Her seemingly innocent eyes? Her careless laugh? My heart it seemed had completely manipulated my mind and all my worlds came crashing in as I could not prevent myself from being besotted by her. Basu was exactly the kind of woman who would inspire such passion in a man. I was the third man (if Pritam’s letters were to be believed) that thought himself in love with her. She would flick her hair from her forehead and look at me straight in the eye; “You are exactly how Pritam described you- I’m not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed”. I wouldn’t know what she meant when she said that, and yet everything she said or did seemed so fascinating that I was consumed by the stardust. I knew then what it meant to bring the murderer home and in this case to bring the murderer to the heart. I was cognizant of wanting her to be completely innocent. It seemed my own mind was tearing those damning letters from Pritam into small bits and was letting them flow wherever the wind blew. Was I being disloyal to the one person who had been magnanimous and true to me in this entire world? And more importantly did I even care?
Are you connecting the dots yet? Can you see my boat buffeted by the winds of fate and waves of destiny?
Love can make a fool out of you. One clings on to hope that isn’t there. One imagines scenarios that never happened and one denies what is actually taking place under one’s nose. I was no exception and putty in the hands of the very woman I promised myself to redress. Reality, began to bite, and I winced in pain when I finally received a letter from Pritam that was lost in transit. It seemed that Pritam had lost his mind. He hallucinated and further questioned Basu’s character and morality to the extent that he wrote “she might have married me for my wealth… I found sleeping pills at the bottom of my coffee mug.” Despite these suspicious if not damning developments I remained blinded by my infatuation. Like the placid waters of the lake everything looked tranquil at the surface but the undercurrents were winding me. Denial created its masterpiece when I not only ignored the evidences that were piling up, but also decided to turn over Pritam’s estate to Basu. I don’t know why I decided to do that. What was I trying to prove and to whom? Was it loving that made me so weak? Was I defying fate? This duplicity with a father figure especially after his death made me question my ethicality. I just wanted someone to shake me out of my trance like state. It was almost as if Basu had cast a spell and I was trapped without redemption.
To give credit where its due, Basu never really showed any affection towards me. She was almost always polite except when she would sometimes smirk and say, “That is the writer in you speaking.” She would look at me sometimes and not see me at all. I desperately wanted her to see me. She would be singing and would stop abruptly. I needed to know why. She would stare out of the balcony for what seemed like hours and I wanted to be her thoughts. The only time I actually got her attention was when I told her of my decision to give the estate to her. Even then I saw no triumph in her eyes – only something akin to pity. Or was it amusement? What did she want? Was she the grieving widow who sighed into her tea cup or the girl next door who petted the pathetic street dog that sometimes strayed into our courtyard or was she the temptress that shook the very foundations of my being by her unexpected laughter.
Now you see me as not only an unreliable but also possibly an unscrupulous narrator. Ambiguity is key here. Was Basu really a murderess? Did I really want to know? Like in life at the end of it all, we are just left with questions and no definitive answers. We are mere puppets in the hand of The Almighty and the wilful author changes our mind about characters with gay abandon. Is this why I wanted to be a writer?
Enough of my musings, the storm had passed. As the darkness approached I knew it was getting late enough to be worried. I once again stepped into the balcony and looked down. Except for a drenched street dog that was lying down miserably near the gate, there was not a soul to be seen anywhere. Rain water had puddled under the lamp post. A breeze ruffled the mango tree in the courtyard and a few twigs fell down and broke. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Did I hear a soft knock at the door? I turned back: no one. It was possibly just the wind or probably my imagination. I know there is no one at the door, and yet at the slightest sound I always turn to look. It has become a habit. This anticipation will be my undoing.
Turning over the estate to her was a tedious process. The dashing lawyer visited us several times. I saw how he looked at her, with contempt and doubt. He also asked me to reconsider my decision. “It’s only a stroke of fate that Pritam bequeathed the estate to me in the first place. It should rightfully go to Basu; she is his widow,” I replied. It was uncanny to see my initial feelings for Basu reflected in the young lawyer’s eyes. He hated her. He pitied me.
But if you are connecting the dots you would know that I also saw how Basu looked at him, and intuitively knew that the young lawyer’s hatred wouldn’t last for long.
Once I turned over the estate to her, the changes became apparent. Had the sparkle in her eyes dimmed? Was she less or more mysterious? Or had my perception changed? Was I fixated and hence bitter? Did I feel insecure? Was there a reason why I felt unhinged most of the time? Was this an emotional ramification of a physical state or a physical manifestation of an emotional one? I stopped writing-my only tool against destiny. Was Basu trying to kill me? Why? Did I wish to possess her? Could one really possess the wind? With horror, I realised I had become another Pritam.
Call it epiphany. Call it state of mind. The present, the flashback, return all at once. The thunder rumbles. The lightning once again illuminates the beauty of the hills and valley. The lake is silent, dark, and waiting. At some point Basu will return. “I needed a long walk,” she will say.
“Where were you during the storm?” I’ll ask. Her reply will shock me. Later, while taking the kettle to the kitchen sink I’ll see this strange residue in the lees. Pills?
As I fall into a fitful sleep I’ll hear our voices ricochet in my dream.
“Where were you during the storm?” I whisper.
“I am the storm, you fool!” she laughs.
Aditi Pant is an award-winning educator, columnist, author and poet. A postgraduate in Education from the University of Delaware, she enjoys teaching English to high school students in India and USA.
Aditi writes for the column ‘Oasis’ for the Deccan Herald newspaper and spiritual stories for Masala Radio, Sugarland, Texas. Writing is both her passion and sanctuary. Her debut, Zen on the go, a collection of uplifting stories garnered much acclaim. Her novels, The Turning of Seasons, where she blends prose and poetry in a poignant tale of love and loss and Maya, an epistolary novel with a psychological twist have won her many salutes. When she’s not writing, Aditi can be found reading, teaching, cooking, going for long walks and what can only be described as multitasking while drinking copious amounts of tea.