I
A 100w bulb just exploded in my head.
Every single nerve is crackling with the electric wave that rips its way through my besieged, juddering body. I knew it was coming, raising itself from the abysmal pit, crushing all resistance of logic it was coming to take me over yet again.
The white blinding flashes have begun to fog my sight and the faces will soon become a blur bobbing helplessly at the fringes of my vision. In agonizing panic I claw around to hold onto the retreating figures, I sense the yield of clenched flesh to my raking nails and the muffled yelp and the sharp push of rejection as he tries to untangle himself from my clutch. He shoves the kids protectively away from my reach, hustling them away to their safety.
Don’t leave me alone! Don’t leave me, there! Yet the words get stuck in my throat and force their way out in a rending cry. It is coming again! Its appetite whetted, it rears its head this time with vengeance. Like a puppet devoid of will I fling myself into the air, arms flailing wildly, I hit my head against the unrelenting wall, all the while the throbbing, pulsating currents sizzling through my veins, and bright, clashing stars converging into the shape of pain in my head.
The faces looming over me look distant and strained, like haunting visions from another time. Then silence creeps in heavily on me.
II
The dress is plastered in a ‘v’ against her chest, her thinning hair framed her face in limp strands, making her wild eyes stare more fixedly into the air. The spell is over for now. She will let herself be coaxed out of her sanctum, a room she calls her dark room, where she professedly fights her demons. From outside you can hear tortured moans and groans, occasional clang and jangle of things being thrown. Then when there is a spell of longer silence someone will tentatively try to turn the door-knob, if it yields then cautious steps will follow inside not before weary eyes peer around the door to make sure she is tame.
She is sitting slouched in a chair, I comb my fingers through her shampoo roughened hair to restore a semblance of order to her person as well as the state of overall affair. She had decidedly neglected the care of her hair since the first-born. Her styling alternated between a disheveled mass falling just below her shoulder and a sever ponytail raking meandering tracks across her scalp. Her skin grew blotchy with patches of lobster-pink around the nose spreading out in butterfly wings. The baby was colicky and was given to howling for hours on end after his last feed at night. She used to tell me about these agonizing hours and how she, to take her mind off the unceasing din, would try to concentrate on her college assignments. Unable to ignore the plea in her voice I would often go to her place between my classes on the pretext of collecting her write-ups and she would tell me about weirdly trivial things twirling her strands dotted with lice neat round her fingers. The mental images jostle each other for attention as I try to refocus on the slumped figure in the chair. This is my friend or what is left of her. She says she detests the world, life to her is like an ever tightening noose stopping just short of snapping the neck, thus, prolonging the anticipation of it. She is nervous of people, whose happiness she thinks mirrors her own misery. Yet there are days when she would transform herself into a pretty little sight waltzing her way in and out of art galleries, her enthusiasm oozing out every little pore of her being. These are her breather moments when she felt life relaxing its stifling grip round her neck, and the home felt less of a prison. Over the years I have learnt to read the signs of her mood swings like notations of a music score. I remember there was a hiatus of stability after she had had her second child, which later turned out apparently to be the gestation period building up to a cataclysm that left us permanently wary of the lulls before the storm. That was the time when surprising the unsuspecting dear ones she just calmly slit her wrist.
I am looking at her now. Her hands are shaking in involuntary tremor. She wears the apologetic look that makes her appear so vulnerable. She will now throw glasses of water down her throat to replenish her withered interior. What is emerging before me is the docile construct that has just fought against laws of her own nature to bring herself to a conformation to the ways of the world. She turns her eyes at me, for a painstaking moment she holds my gaze as she tries to pass a signal of reassurance. Her glassy eyed appeal sealed the pact once again of our guilty collusion, now we will prepare ourselves to slip into the roles of our daily routine and before long will start to plan the day.
On days like these I am infused with a spiritual gratitude, however daunting at times, I insist on being sent for when she falls into her fits, I want to be there all the way through, just like I did during her labours. There is an amount of selfish gratification in the encounter of a thing coming to life , be it a baby from the womb or a mature woman from her dark room.
III
The man from the art gallery called again. I was simply taken with the round, bird-nest eyes that stared out of the measured Pollockian strokes of ochre and Prussian blue that formed the evasive contours of the provocative face. The frame is unimpressive embodying in its rusticity the shoddy interior of the impoverished gallery. Today I am committed to pick up the painting. That puts me in a quandary… what to wear… how piteous I look in my capris and the flared top that might even earn me congratulations on my third pregnancy! I will dare the outdoor today which, to me, is always crisp and crackling with people’s scorns and disapproval. Today I will give you a run for your money, it’s show time, indeed!
IV
A quite murmur floats through the labyrinthine chambers. The crowd seems subdued, an apt answer to my prayers. The congregation drifts and swells rhythmically in slow swirls. My friend picks her way through the undulating traffic of spectators in her trademark ‘walking through the clouds’ gait. There is a tug at my elbow and I am being gently steered to a corner by an enthusiastic member of my book club. She always wears a conspiratorial look and speaks in a sing-song voice, keeping the beat with the fluttering of her fingers. She delivers a breathless briefing on the previous session’s proceedings which I missed to her expressed dismay. I half-listened patiently, my eyes wandering around the flux of crowd to locate the slight figure of my friend who kept flashing in and out of my vision with the ebb and flow of the growing visitors.
I was growing restless. ‘I can not let her out of my sight,’ I thought. Moving in fruitless circles I finally arrived in a room dedicated to smaller works of a dark and somber appearance. I sensed her immersion in the contemplation of a piece that was placed at the farthest corner, unwittingly beneath a slightly larger work. This work bore the features of abstract expressionism which I surmised from my limited knowledge of the various schools of fine arts. The one that she had her eyes glued on displayed an almost monochromatic preoccupation with the play of light and shade that rendered a peculiar sharpness to the forms and shapes covering the canvas. Brush stokes ranging from gentle to forceful lent themselves cleverly to the principles of chiaroscuro that seemed to breathe life into the outline of a door, ajar, letting the light in tangently, which pools at the threshold before beaming out across the canvas, and then is brought up short by a seething, crouching darkness that seems to heave with the presence of an indeterminate form that occupies much of the foreground. The sharp edge of the line defining the door is blurred at one place by what can be barely conceived as fingers while a mere suggestion of a garment drapes around the foot of the door.
I had no intention of startling her by breathing down her neck, so I stood at a respectable distance. Now, I inched myself forward and softly called her name, and she reluctantly tore her eyes , as if from a dream, from the picture. Her mouth was fixed in a contemplative pout then it slowly broke into a smile akin to the one that forms itself across her face at the smell of home baked cookies. I with a matronly maneuver guided her to the refreshment corner. She ate moderately, nodded and smiled judiciously and and made appropriate comments and the afternoon glided by…
At her request we stopped at a classy café right off the street from the gallery for coffee. She seemed relatively composed but there was an air of troubled restraint about her. Under the conical light showering from the hanging lamp the otherwise barely visible claw marks radiating from the corner of her eyes stood out. She was studiously ironing out a stubborn crease from the table cloth. I wanted this fiesta to be short. I had left the pieces of chicken marinating in garlic and rosemary sauce to be grilled and served for the children when they came back from the park. By force of habit I was every now and then rubbing the side of my neck as I waited nervously. Presently she raised her eyes that had to some degree lost their glaze of a torpor over the rim of her cup and yet kept her mouth shielded behind its protection as she steadied herself to speak.
‘Reeti, I’m getting a flat from Maa, I might want to move in there. It has a French window that overlooks the walkway around the Gulshan lake. The day I went in to see the flat I saw a regal old dog sprawled out right below the window of what would be my bedroom. He, somehow brought back some of the fading memories of my sunnier childhood. I had a friend whose dog always followed her all the way to the school bus constantly prancing about, madly chasing off an imaginary enemy.’
‘ Why now, when things were looking up for you two?’
‘In a manner of speaking, I want my own space. I want my laptop to be placed right in front of that window. I don’t want my towels reeking of sweat and aftershave. I want to be able to slip into my bed when I want and pad around the rooms in a restful state without having to jump as someone speaks loudly on the phone or at the blasting sound of the TV…’
I interrupted her with a rakish challenge:
‘ And the Darkroom, have you already set that one up, too?’
She was visibly startled and I was immediately sorry.
‘Im so tired, Reet!’
Then after a long , pregnant pause she once again spoke from behind her impregnable screen:
‘That painting, it was so real, so vivid I could have easily slunk into it!.’
I was rescued from another spell of uneasy silence when my mobile began to ring.
‘ It was the woman from the book club. She called to let me know that we are invited with our spouses to a dinner with the artist from the exhibition. I am sure, the prospect of the free drink will rope the men in but what about you , are you up to it?’
She was trying to wring a snatch of sound out of the friction of the moist finger against the rim of the goblet we were served juice in after our round of coffee. I knew she would not readily respond to anything right now, so after paying the bill I virtually hustled her out of the joint. By then I had begun to visualize the stricken faces of my poor devils clutching their stomachs to subside the pang of hunger terribly hurt at the betrayal of their mother.
V
The push Reeti gave me right in front of the exit felt too purposeful, I stole a glance at her to see how far I had outstayed my welcome, I could see her lips compressed in a firm line of righteous determination. I know right now her mind has clamped on the fulfillment of motherly duty which at this time of the day can only translate into the preparation of the late afternoon meal which takes much planning on her part. Nothing can come in the way of her sacrosanct domestic rituals. I barred my husband’s call, I would like to remain out of reach for a while. Like an onrushing twister a thought came whirling to my mind, whisking me off my feet with its urgency. It’s my brand of brainwave; I will bake today, the tart I learnt from Nigella Dawson’s cooking shows. I tried to adopt the look on my friend’s face and helplessly gave to a peel of laughter that startled Reet by its suddenness.
VI
I was slathering night cream over my skin which has lost much of its elasticity when the phone began ringing. My husband tiptoed mischievously with the handset held dramatically in his hand and an exaggerated grimace disfiguring his normal good looks, an oft-practiced antic that declared without a word that the call was from my dearest friend, Mallika. Now, his expression softened into a wicked grin as he waited for me to take the receiver. He hung around long enough to enjoy my initial nervous indecision then handing the set over he slipped out of my sight with the discretion of a gentleman who values the idea of privacy.
The breathless voice spewed out in a gush into the receiver;
“ Reeti, I am wearing a sequined sari that matches my new peridot earrings… he says he has an important meeting tomorrow night… are you coming?”
I could hear the unmistakable, trembling earnestness in her voice, I could see her twirling the chord round her finger as she waited with eager anticipation. I could resist no more and called it a date.
The interior spoke of ostentatious opulence. It was a ‘falgun’ theme party and no details had been left unattended. Marigolds were draped round the oval table in quite an artistic feat to which I was being ushered like a girl on her first day at school. It was the same book club lady who had decked herself with an overdose of saffron, and was scurrying about in a seemingly untamable nervous energy. After we had sat, fidgeted and found our comport zone, I began to take stock of the crowd, who looked studiedly lively, beaming at each other while throwing the usual pleasantries. A flush of excitement caught on like contagion with the steady flow of good food and alcohol.
A witty remark caught me off guard and to hide my embarrassment I picked up the napkin to wipe the imaginary crumb from my mouth when out of the corner of my eyes I caught the swish of a glittering sari that caressed my fingers resting on the edge of the table before the dainty creature in it settled herself on the chair next to mine. Butterflies were fluttering a mellow tune in my head, I had mixed my drinks. In lightheaded humour I turned my eyes on her face and the butterflies disappeared and in its place an alarm was set off as I could make out underneath the careful application of foundation a smudge of a bruise clearly marking her forehead extending towards the right from the centre of her parting. With the recognition of the drug induced slackness in her features now,the bells began to chime more vigorously in my head.
Then slowly I came to realize something else, she was gazing intensely with a steadfast fixity at something, following her gaze my eyes came to rest on a familiar painting that dominated the space above the sideboard, less by way of its size and more so for the peculiar morbidity of its subject that struck an incongruous note with the colourful surrounding.
I heard the sharp intake of breath and turned again to watch her, the lips were moving, I could quite clearly read them say, “My dark room.”