Being old, not having much longer to live, Shastri thought that he had lost his desire for life. He went to Radha's house feeling relieved by that thought. ‘When I die, who will perform my funeral rites?’ he had once asked himself. But now he was content to leave it to God, and told himself, ‘Let whatever is true be revealed.’
19
When Dinakar went to his room that night, he couldn't sleep. He got up and squatted on his bed, tried to listen to music on his Walkman, but now the Tibetan chanting seemed unreal. There was no response to it in his heart.
Dinakar decided to write letters. His first letter would be to someone who, with him as catalyst, had become a holy woman. He would write for his own sake, because he knew she would never read the letter, and his knowing this impressed on him his absurd state.
He began writing in English:
‘Dear Shrimati Mahamata,’
He laughed at himself, struck it out, and, more properly, still in English, began again.
‘Dear Mahamata,’
— and on top of the page, to please her, he wrote in Devanagari, om namo bhagavati.
‘Dear Mahamata,
When, in my troubled days, I was trying to understand my relations with you and Gangu, I read a story about you in the Illustrated Weekly. The story went something like this:
One night you were travelling to Kashi in a train, and you saw a handsome young man. At that moment, you suddenly recalled that you had been Radha in a previous birth. A divine love welled up in you and you became helpless. Your body, which belongs to this bhava, could not bear this experience. You even forgot that your father was there with you. When the train stopped for a little while in some station, you got off with only the clothes you were wearing and from there you began wandering about like a religious mendicant. Once, while wandering, you felt tired and sat under a bodhi tree. It was then that you saw a cowherd playing on a flute. He, like the handsome young man you had seen on the train, was Bhagavan Shri Krishna himself, come to release you from your cycle of births. Listening to his flute, you were liberated from this world and became Radha herself.
This was, in short, your history as given in the story. There were also some pictures of you as you look now. Yet I could immediately see that the old mischievous look had not disappeared from your eyes.’
‘Dear Mahamata,
It is from me, not Krishna, that you had your first great experience of love in this bhava. From looking at me, who these days is in spiritual anguish. Listen, and I will make you remember.
Twenty-four years ago, you must have been eighteen then. By chance I was travelling in the same second-class compartment. You were sleeping on an upper berth, your father was sleeping in the berth below you. As you told me later on, your father had brought you to Kashi to overcome your bad planets because you had refused to live with your husband. You were still a girl studying in college and you told me all this in your beautiful broken English.
But here is the important point. My berth was near yours and I could see that your berth was not properly held by the chain. That was a good excuse for me to watch you anxiously. You had been looking at me, too, your eyes filled only with me. Your father was watching me suspiciously, but you didn't know this. Very gently, you began to bite your lips and move your mouth as if you were chewing something. You pushed up your breasts as if they were a heavy weight, then looked at the fan as if feeling hot. Under cover of your bedsheet, you began opening the buttons of your sari blouse. You smoothed your hair and even winked, showing me you understood that I wanted to bite your lips. Your eyes were very mischievous, eyes that smiled on their own. Even now your eyes are like that.
I had been thinking of my love for a girl called Gangu a year before, a love that had dissolved our bodies. Now I was looking at you, wanting to eat you up, yet trying to behave as if the only reason I looked at you was my concern that, without being properly secured, your berth might fall. I came over and, making as if to fix the chain, brought my left arm near your thighs. Then you turned slightly and with your right thigh touched my left arm.
While I was lifting the berth slightly so that I could attach the hook, your father got up, started hitting me, and shrieked, “Hey! Ay, ay!” Fortunately, other passengers in the compartment appreciated my concern, appreciated that a young man dressed in modern clothes responded so courteously to a woman in distress. They scolded your father, who had an irritable expression on his face. You still watched all this mischievously, and had silently come to an understanding with me.
I have always been good at knowing the heart of a woman, even in the clothes I wear right now. I acted as if I had been insulted by your hot-headed father, yet had forgiven him. After everyone switched off their lights, you quietly got down from your berth and made your way along the aisle. I guessed where you had gone and, a little later, I followed and pushed open the toilet door. You were waiting inside, and you embraced me. Not only had you opened the buttons of your blouse, you had even removed your brassiere and tucked it into the waist of your sari.
The stench of urine didn't bother us. I began biting your lips. You kissed me all over my face and ears, took my hands to your breasts. You murmured that you were a college student and hated the marriage that had been forced on you. You would go with me anywhere I wanted. In your reckless intensity of passion you seemed like a goddess to me. The train slowed, to stop at a station. Then you said, “Let's get down here and run away.”
Although I felt great desire for you, I had no courage. Yet I said, “Yes, yes,” as if saying so were a part of foreplay, and began to touch you everywhere.
But you were a wild girl. You left the toilet and got down from the train. It moved off again almost immediately. Soon your father noticed your absence. He shouted and searched for you, then gathered together all the bundles of luggage and got down at the next station.
After Gangu, you were my second withdrawal. Both times I withdrew, and this made me doubtful of myself. I thought I might be incapable of real love, that I was perhaps obsessed only with my own self.
Years passed, and I became famous. After many love affairs, I finally married. When I found that my wife was happier in someone else's bed than in mine, I felt furious and humiliated. I was disgusted by our quarrels over how much gold I should give her in order to divorce me. Despite my disgust, I didn't turn over. I didn't change. Just as she had married me for my wealth and kept up another relationship, I — in my own glamorous world — was balancing a few other relationships, like a tightrope walker in a circus. You may say that since I did not experience the truth of who I am, I suffered the illusion of being held captive by this bhava. Although I had known this truth intellectually, it was delectable to be under the spell of such intrigues. Forgetting the time I promised to one woman, I promised the same time to another; cheating on one in order to placate another; using the anger and emotion that I caused as a spice to make the act of love more delicious — this became an addiction. Yet it also led to a certain weariness that made it possible for me to listen, however dimly, for another strain of melody in me.
I wasn't able to live with my wife. Yet, for the sake of convention, I felt unable to leave her. Then one day I was drinking fine Darjeeling tea with her in the Taj Intercontinental, and I simply got up and left, went to the bank, and brought back some of the gold which my mother had left for me. I placed before her bars of gold worth nearly twenty lakhs of rupees, and she was wonderstruck. I will never forget the way her face bloomed. I saw in her the delight of an innocent child, and felt touched by the play of illusion that the gold produced in her. It seemed then that my hatred for her disappeared.