10
Radha saw signs of Shastri's release from the demon which tormented him. For a whole year she had been holding onto a secret, something which was essential for his liberation. Now she watched him, hoping that in a few days she could reveal to him what she knew.
Shastri looked at Radha's hair, which had begun to turn gray, and her lovely, still-unwrinkled face, which glowed with warm affection.
‘Why did I ever marry Mahadevi? Of course, you were urging me to marry. And I thought that if I had a child my troubles would go, and I would have peace. Saroja tortured me with her beauty and indifference. But Mahadevi was just like me. From the start she fell on me with her eyes burning. She is nothing like Saroja. She hates you too. And my daughter is truly my daughter. Stubborn. Marrying an idiot who wants to make revolution and destroy people like me with good family backgrounds. She left my house, I don't know where she went. Sometimes I feel a desire to bring her back home. Who knows what I become from moment to moment? Perhaps for people like me there is no release from this bhava, we stay entangled in this world. But at least Saroja has not died by my hand. I prayed to God to be released from bhava because, when my daughter was born, I suffered thinking that Saroja could have become pregnant from me. What God can give me solace? My fate is written here,’ he said, touching his forehead, suddenly feeling as if he were speaking well-rehearsed words in his role as puranik.
He returned to the waiting taxi and went home. He did not expect that as soon as he entered the house, Mahadevi would pounce on him without any reason. But, seeing her standing before him as if to devour him, seeing her flared nostrils in a contorted face, he felt, to his surprise, compassion welling in him for this helpless woman.
Mahadevi at once started to pick a quarrel over Radha's wealth and the gold bangles Radha had got made for a grandchild. She kept saying, ‘Because of your murderous nature …,’ working herself into a fury and screaming about the daughter she had lost. Shastri had never before touched Mahadevi in consolation. But now he embraced her although she tried to squirm away, probably thinking that he was going to strike her. But instead, very gently, he spoke her name over and over, ‘Mahadevi, Mahadevi …’
‘I have not killed anyone, Mahadevi. What the servants said was wrong. I myself once believed as they did. But yesterday in the train I came to know the truth.’
He knew that Mahadevi couldn't make sense of all he said. But, feeling the tenderness of his touch, she wept, and he caressed her and said, ‘Don't cry. I will find out where our daughter is and bring her here.’
Looking surprised, Mahadevi went inside the house, blowing her nose with the end of her sari. Shastri felt a faint hope that he might be healing. He looked at the parijata tree growing haphazardly in front of his house, the crooked-in-eight-ways tree which, by shedding on the earth all its delicate blossoms, fulfills itself. Saroja used to gather its flowers with the tips of her nails, careful not to wither them from the warmth of her fingers. One by one she would pick them up, collect them in a banana-leaf cup, and pour them over the snake pit which had formed in the backyard. Remembering this, Shastri again felt pain. Why had there been kumkum on Saroja's forehead when she was carried off in the river? Why was there a marriage thread around her neck? Had it meant that Pundit was not dead? Or did it mean that the one who had held her hand in marriage was not dead?
Feeling weak, the fragile signs of his recovery fading, he went into a bathing-room. It was not the same bathing-room in which he had smashed Saroja's head. That one he had got torn down, and he'd had another one built in a new place.
BOOK TWO
11
First, as if from the depths of a cave, one, one, or two, two, sprouts of melody, and now the clear sound of a bell emerging, and then a bass melody oooooo, and then jingling as if from belled anklets. All melody as if made from itself inside itself. As if going deeper and deeper down inside, melody wandering and searching the depth of the depths. Even as everything ended, again a melody arising from a deeper side of the kundalini. Did the melody find what it sought? As if saying look, look, the wonderment of small, small bells. Was it being lost, or drowning in ecstasy?
∗
Dinakar, reading an English translation of Bardo Thodol, listening on his Walkman to the chanting of Tibetan lamas, tried to relate his present state of mind to the bardo state described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Not reclining on a pillow, he sat up straight on a mat.
He was in the drawing room of Narayan Tantri's big house, sitting straight-backed even though mattresses were laid out together with large cushions covered in white cloth. Sitamma saw Dinakar and said, ‘What has happened? Come sit on a mattress.’
She saw Dinakar smile and said, ‘Ayyo, I keep forgetting that you don't understand Kannada. Get up and take a bath. Then I will give you your morning food. Everyone will be awake very soon. As soon as he sees you, my grandson will start dancing about and troubling you. That's why I haven't told him you have come, I left him tied to his phone. Get up, get up!’ Then she made gestures to make clear that he should take a bath.
Dinakar took a clean towel and Pears soap from her, surprised that after twenty-five years she still remembered he was fond of Pears. Humorously, forgetting that Sitamma wouldn't understand him, he said in Hindi, ‘This means you are my other mother.’ Sitamma shot back, ‘What? Early morning you get up and right away you speak to me in the Sahib's tongue?’
She went on, ‘Tripathi was such an orthodox brahmin, my dull mind could never understand why he spoke that Sahib's language.’ Then, feeling shy that perhaps she had said something which she ought not to have said, she covered her mouth with the end of her sari and, laughing, entered the kitchen.
By the time Dinakar came out of his bath, all was festivity.
Gopal, Narayan Tantri's son, flung himself at Dinakar's feet and then began dancing about. ‘See,’ Sitamma said, ‘my grandson will boast of you to his whole gang and get his dinner out of it as well.’ As Sitamma stood making fun like this, Narayan Tantri caught his mother's eye and gestured that she should not embarrass Dinakar. Dinakar considered the changes in Narayan Tantri. ‘I would certainly not have recognized him. He has grown stout. And now he weighs his words like a public man.’ The sharpness and mischievousness of his old friend didn't seem to be there. Dinakar felt a little disappointed to think that he had found a mother again, but not a brother.
As he watched Narayan Tantri, Dinakar's resolve to confide in him withered. How could he speak to this successful public man of the secret that gnawed at him?
He had even prepared what he would say to his friend.
‘Look, Narayan, it seemed there was nothing sacred left in my life, so I began wearing these clothes. After my foster father died, his sons had become very greedy, and I went less and less often to their house. Their eyes were on the gold which Tripathi had never even touched. I felt disgusted, but gave them what they wanted. Now I go there only for Tripathi's shraddha.
‘After my education in England, I lived in Delhi. Slowly I became empty. I could say anything, charm anyone. I didn't know where my roots were. Even if I searched for them, I knew I could not find them. But it wasn't in my nature to be lonely, either, and I lived a dissolute life. The women I made love to then are everywhere now. In Lucknow, Delhi, England — but gradually I got tired of this. Trying to hide one woman from another, having affairs … the weariness increased. At the same time, it was an addiction.