Bhava Page 4

  7

  * * *

  Everything was made ready for the ritual. Saroja's eyes, usually blank with indifference, became totally intent as soon as Karunakara Pundit, wearing his silk dhoti, began laying the mandala on the floor using rangoli powder, kumkum and turmeric. Piously, she made cotton wicks for him. She shelled a coconut. She brought oil in a polished bronze long-spouted jug. Shastri felt happy, thinking that these were all good omens.

  A sprightliness appeared in Saroja which Shastri had never observed before. The uneven parting in her hair was made straight. She put on all her bridal ornaments. After the ritual, the coffee she prepared was just the right temperature, and had not lost its aroma. Now she did not make coffee by heating an old decoction. It seemed to Shastri as if she were gradually developing a respectful attachment for Karunakara Pundit.

  Of the prescribed month's puja, fifteen days were over. As it happened, the ritual had begun after the purification bath marking the end of menstruation and the beginning of fertility. When Saroja menstruated again, Shastri would have to do the ritual alone. And after another purification bath she would, for the last three days, have to sit naked and do the rites.

  According to Karunakara Pundit, this was how it had to be done, even if others might perform it in a different way. Shastri felt confident that Saroja, because of her reverence for Pundit, would agree to the last stage of the ritual.

  During this whole time, Shastri was not to sleep with a woman. He obeyed Karunakara Pundit and didn't even visit Radha. Saroja went through her menstruation and the sacred bath, sat naked and did the rites.

  Karunakara Pundit would not accept any money from Shastri. But he did consent to accept a rudraksha mala in gold, and silk clothes, and he blessed the couple. Touching Saroja's head, he said ‘May you become a mother of ten children.’

  Shastri, who was very pleased, told him, ‘You should come and go more often.’ So Karunakara Pundit began coming and going more often. One evening when Shastri had gone to Radha's house, Pundit came and then waited for him.

  Shastri said to Saroja, ‘Tell Pundit that he should come in the morning, because I won't be here in the evenings.’ After a couple of days, Shastri grew suspicious and asked, ‘Has Pundit come?’

  ‘Yes,’ Saroja said with indifference, Pundit had come.

  Shastri controlled his rising anger and with mocking politeness asked, ‘You gave him coffee, of course?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Didn't you tell him that I wouldn't be here in the evenings, that he should come in the morning?'

  Shastri remembers again and again how Saroja didn't reply to him, but turned and went into the house. The manner in which she stepped across the broad high threshold, raising her leg in utter disregard, straight-backed, pulling the end of her sari tight around her proud long neck, all that created a fire in his heart. Shastri got in his car and drove to Udupi. With a smile, Karunakara Pundit welcomed Shastri's burning face.

  ‘What, Shastri-gale, you insist that I should come, but when I come you are not there. Every day you disappear. But your wife treats me with great courtesy.’

  Karunakara Pundit took a pinch of snuff, then continued in an intimate tone, ‘Your wife didn't reply to me when I asked her whether you have changed your bed-chamber. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked that question when you were not there … But tell me, do you find that the house is more peaceful now?’

  The charm of Pundit's words calmed Shastri's mind. Pundit went on, ‘I have asked you this because whenever I come to your house I see an angry spirit hiding in some dark corner or other, lying in wait to get hold of you. It is no ordinary spirit, but a bloodthirsty one. So you must keep meditating on the mantra that I gave you.’

  ‘I came to ask you not to come in the evening, but in the morning. I am rarely at home in the evening—I have another garden that I have to look after. There is some disease in the coconut grove.’

  Shastri tried to say this in a friendly manner. Earlier, he had imagined that Pundit did not know of his relationship with Radha. Yet now he felt frightened because, if Pundit could hear a spirit hiding in a corner of the house, wouldn't he know everything?

  ‘Do you see something red burning in your brain?’ Pundit continued. ‘If, by God's grace, everything goes well, you will feel cool eyes opening in your heart. Until then, you will never be free from the bloodthirsty spirit. Such spirits make you roar “me me me” and so there is no peace for you. Think of the blue sky, imagine yourself floating in it, and meditate. I have prayed to my ishtadevata that she should warn me if either you or your wife is in danger. You requested that I come in the morning, but that's not possible for me. I have my own vows to keep, and patients come to see me.’ He took another pinch of snuff and said, ‘Look here, I too have a weakness. As long as we live in the body, we are all human. Kama, krodha, moha, leave no one untouched.’ Pundit laughed and gathered his dishevelled hair into a knot. Shastri remembers that he burned, seeing how attractive Pundit looked as he tied up his hair.

  Feeling he was under a spell, Shastri wanted to shout, ‘Don't come home when I am not there!’ If only he could say this, Pundit's spell would be broken. But he could not make the words come out of his mouth. ‘If this Pundit has such a spell on me, what about Saroja?’ Worrying over this, he drove his car back to the village. ‘Pundit looks like a great connoisseur, perhaps he eats some special thing to make his breath smell so intoxicating … and what sandal-paste does he put on his body?’ he wondered.

  As soon as he reached home, Shastri began to fidget, thinking ‘Saroja cooks and serves my food, gives me coffee whenever I want, but without speaking or looking at me, and even when she does look, her eyes still seem to be gazing far away. But when she sits with a book, her eyes appear to fix on something. Then she seems so absorbed, it's as if she is communing with herself. When she is stringing jasmine flowers her teeth bite her lower lip and she smiles as if sweetly conversing with the stem of the flower. Sometimes she puts her hands on her hips and, gazing at the parijata tree, hums to herself. All these things she does when she thinks that I am not looking at her. Otherwise, she is like another ghost in this house.’

  Shastri began to feel anguish whenever he prepared himself to sleep with Saroja. After lying by her side for a while and finding himself unable to do anything, he would get up and go to Radha. One night, telling himself that Pundit probably would not come, he went to Radha, who made him drink almond milk and advised him not to come to her house, but to sleep with his wife.

  She tried to teach him ways of seduction by showing him what he should do around the thigh, around the yoni, how to set the scene to win over Saroja. Shastri felt very envious, thinking that some other man must have done all these things to Radha. ‘It's not as if you have no such knowledge. Why should I have learned it from anyone else?’ Trying to console him, she continued, ‘Have you forgotten? What have you not done to me when you brought me to this house, and what have you not got me to do to you? It seems a wicked spirit has entered you and made you dull’ she laughed. Shastri was shocked to hear her speak about the spirit in the same words that Pundit had used.

  The next day, wanting to test his suspicions, he went at his usual time in the evening to Radha, but waited until eleven o'clock before coming back home. Pundit's car was in front of his house. His heart began to pound heavily. He feared that he might murder two people that night.

  Trembling, he pushed the door to his house. It was not bolted. ‘What guts!’ he thought, wondering in his rage at their boldness. His ears were ringing from the blood that was rushing into his head, and along with the ringing in his ears he heard the alap of music. ‘The bastards must be going at their work together with the music on the radio,’ he thought. His legs felt weak. The music was coming from the puja room where Pundit had conducted the ritual. He must have already made her naked there, telling her she would become sacred. Now the bastard must be giving her womb his gift of seed. Shastri groped his way to the door of the room
. It was closed. He pushed it open.

  Ten buds of light were burning in two brass oil-lamps. Between them sat Saroja, hair over her breast, one leg folded under her, playing on the tamboura. Although Shastri had pushed open the door noisily, her eyes remained closed. She kept on playing the tamboura brought from her mother's house as if his coming there was of no consequence at all. He knew that she had been taught music, but he had never heard her sing like this.

  In front of her, Pundit was sitting in the lotus posture. Not looking at Shastri, yet aware that he had come, he signalled for Shastri to sit beside him. Pundit began to join the alap. Now his voice would merge with hers, continue where she stopped, and she would anticipate and join him again …

  ‘Arrey, he's playing host to me in my own house!’ Not knowing what to do, Shastri sat. Saroja finished singing, touched the tamboura to her eyes, and put it down. In the soft cool light of the oil-lamp, nothing was clearly visible. Shastri held his breath, feeling the red eyes hastening to open in his brain. At the same time, he thought, ‘No, I would not be able to beat and kill either Pundit or Saroja. I have become impotent.’

  When the music ended, Pundit said to Saroja, ‘I will come tomorrow,’ and left the room. Shastri heard him slip on his chappals. Then heard the sound of his car starting. Then the drag on the first gear, and then the silence of all sounds receding. And then, in the cowshed, the now-and-then sound of the cows’s bells as they chewed. And then no other sound. He thought, ‘There must be only ghosts now, silently walking back and forth on their turned-around feet’

  Saroja got up and, as if nothing had happened, went to the bedroom. Shastri collapsed where he sat, as if he had died and become a ghost.

  Then a strange thing happened to him—a fearful sound arose in his closed mouth, as if he had become a cruel beast secretly wandering among the deep bushes of a thick jungle.

  The sound he made was a long sound, going higher and higher, then falling and falling into silence, terrifying him even when silent … and then it began rising again. It was a moan, and it was the bellowing of a cruel animal.

  No human animal could produce such a sound.

  Shastri felt that his body was making a sound more terrible than the cruellest language, something like the empty husk of a language. Inside him now there swelled a huge prideful demon that could eat language, that would destroy the waves of alap created by Saroja's divine throat a little while ago. It was something that could destroy all beautiful and tender things, kill the earth's inborn urge for good, for what nurtures the roots of plants and trees, for what makes birds build nests for their young, for what gives insects the power to move. Moaning, full of the enormous malevolence inside him, he moved with long strides to his bedchamber. He lighted a lamp and looked down at Saroja as she was drifting into sleep.

  Even demons could not have engaged in such a violent coupling. He tore the clothes off Saroja and fell on her, shrieking and moaning. The way in which he took her was meant to destroy the cold untouched core of her, that unearthly indifference which negated him. That she did not suffer like he suffered, that her eyes did not flare in anger, that she endured him as if all his tantrums were irrelevant—all this fed the demonic rage in him even more.

  But he has wondered over the years whether at the last moment, somehow, she could have given way …

  Now, getting down from the car at Radha's house, this is what came from nowhere into his mind.

  8

  * * *

  It was a terrible moonless day. That day he killed Saroja. Or so he had thought for forty-five years, until he saw the amulet on Dinakar's neck.

  Pundit had begun to come every evening. He seemed to have no inhibitions on account of propriety. That he was teaching music to Saroja was some sort of excuse for him. Also, he was growing medicinal plants in Shastri's backyard, where there was a deep pit of red earth. Even after digging up to a man's height, there was still fertile red earth left in it. Pundit himself had dug some up and kept it at the edge of the pit, using it for planting his new medicinal plants. He had given Saroja the job of watering the newly-arrived ones.

  Shastri even saw her carrying red earth on an iron pan. But the great noise within him which had pierced him in his swollen fury had settled gradually to a tortured pitch, a quiet, tormented moan that stayed with him constantly, like a pulse-beat.

  Then one evening, in the backyard, Pundit had his dhoti tied up around his waist and, as if no one else existed, was explaining to Saroja, ‘This is the scent of Vishnu.’ He stood close to her, giving off his fragrance. He had put the leaves and roots of the plant on her palm, crushed them, asked her to smell them, and helped her hand to her mouth so she could taste them. Even when Shastri came and stood in front of them like a devil, Pundit took no account of him. Seeing Pundit's straight hairy legs, Shastri's heart began to pound, his whole body reverberating and wailing like a tamboura.

  He felt he was growing impotent. Sometimes he would get sexually aroused when Pundit sat in the puja room and joined his pitch to Saroja's, intensity growing wave after wave, the two bodies, male and female, joining in alap—and then he would go to Radha's house. But even with Radha he remained impotent. Radha had taken to lighting ghee-lamps for the gods, and she also prayed to a private spirit in which she believed. She prayed that Shastri should be blessed with a child, that the ghost which haunted his house should leave, and that Saroja should be liberated from her coldness and flower into womanliness—that her hostile womb should welcome Shastri's seed. Shastri knew all this.

  ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’ he would tell himself, ‘I will denounce the evil enchanter, I will spit in his face,’ and he built up courage talking to himself like that. But he became timid again, while that Pundit, with his hairy chest and hairy legs, grew like a great-striding Trivikram. Yet when he saw the two of them in the puja room, he would say to himself, ‘Let him go to hell and teach her music,’ and abandon his resolve.

  One night he came home very late and saw that Pundit had parked his car in Shastri's accustomed place and was sleeping in his office. And in the bedroom Saroja slept, looking peaceful and remote.

  Shastri became excited, imagining how Pundit would have had Saroja—if he did—and then he woke her up and took her. After it was over, she went out, took a head-bath, and came back. That made Shastri want to kill her. Unable to sleep by her side, he went and lay down on a mat in the room where Pundit was asleep. All through the night he ground his teeth, thinking that he had become a ghost in his own house. He watched every small movement of Pundit's as he slept, spent the whole dark night in this way.

  Saroja probably gave coffee to Pundit when he was still half asleep in the morning. The bedding on which he had slept was neatly folded. Saroja must have done that. By now Pundit must have reached Udupi, bathed, applied sandal-paste on his body, and begun meditating on the art of seduction.

  At the back of Shastri's house was a big hill, and on the hill was a jungle with leopards. In front of his house was a large veranda. Half a mile away was his nearest orchard. He owned many other orchards, and he also owned paddy-fields. Even his workers did not like to come anywhere near his house. The manager who looked after his estates had a plain tiled house near the workers' quarters. Shastri now went to these hutments, sought out the manager to scold him for not sending the men to work, and then went to oversee his other estates.

  He visited Radha's house, ate some bananas, and drank hot milk. When he said that he would eat the dosas which she had made, she laughed, saying, ‘Such a thing is not permitted here.’ Shastri, observing the way she guarded his orthodoxy, forced a smile, thinking that he had not yet completely become a wraith. When she saw him smile so disturbingly, Radha went to the puja room, adjusted the burning wick, made the light burn brighter, and prayed for protection.

  Shastri didn't feel like eating more than he had eaten already. So he wandered here and there, then came home at about three o'clock in the afternoon. He saw a pariah in the veranda a
nd scolded him, ‘What work have you here? Go and graze the cattle.’ The pariah bowed and said, ‘Mother said she would give me the leftovers.’ Just then, Saroja came out and gave the pariah the lunch she had cooked for Shastri.

  Shastri, waiting for Pundit's arrival, became aware that he was wailing again inside. He sat in his office, looking for the wailing to intensify, and willed, ‘Today should be the end.’ He received an omen from a lizard on the wall. It was then that the big clock struck and drummed its four hours into his brain.

  Suddenly, he heard the sound of retching in the bathroom. He went to look and Saroja was there, trying to vomit but unable to do so. His vision darkening, he intoned like a wraith, ‘Have you become pregnant, whore?’ Afterwards, he often recalled the way she moved her neck as she stood there, bent over: was it to bring out the vomit, or to say ‘Yes’? That day, he had thought she was saying yes. Then Saroja stood straight, took water from the pitcher, and washed out her mouth. And the way she stood in front of him!

  ‘O you adulteress, have you become pregnant from that bastard Pundit?’ The demon inside him began to wail and laugh grotesquely. Didn't Saroja then stand calmly, unmoved, the amulet lying on her left breast as both breasts heaved with her breathing?

  ‘How could I have completely forgotten myself at that moment?’ he wondered. ‘Was it because I could never bear how her beautiful eyes looked at me with such indifference? Or did I imagine then that those eyes were saying, “Who are you, bastard, to ask me such a question?” Or did this bhava of mine cause itself to think so, in order to prepare itself for what was to follow?’

  Shastri lifted the heavy wooden cover of the big brass pot that was kept for hot water. Saroja had put both her hands on her head and bent it, but it seemed to him that her gesture was not from fear or pleading for mercy. It was more like a cow shaking its head, struggling to free itself when you are about to untie its halter. Before realizing that he would do it, he had smashed her head three times with the wooden lid. He felt her blood splatter his face. Lifting her slumped body, he strode like a gloating demon on his two great legs, from the bathroom to the backyard. She had seemed dead, and he had thrown her into the red earth pit. Then he had come inside, wailing; had changed his clothes, thrown his blood-soaked clothes into the red earth pit on top of her, and driven away quickly in his car. ‘Why didn't I suspect that Saroja might not have died? I had beaten her only at the back of her head,’ he thought. But then he realized that if such an idea had come to him, he would have beaten her further and made sure to kill her.