Actaeon’s Heart in Two Parts

 

Love, like art, is born with trespass. When I first saw you, your sisters and friends from a distance, it was like being in the midd1le of a Jane Austen novel! the pattern was familiar, but the details weren’t and so I peeped into your ladies’ only compartment.

 

Love, like art, is born with trespass, it is true, but I’m not Goldilocks! Snow White! And you’re the Goddess of Love: so what could I expect except armed response? You flung your clothes back on, locked your profiles, and slung an arrow through my overused hunter’s heart, blocked me…

 

I may not be a very moral man, but my manners are impeccable. I understand. I would’ve loved it if a stranger was to soil his/her hands in the quagmire of my life, have a peep, study me; and in a world where we reproduced as pigeon (with some equitability) I may have expected of you the same equanimity; but in a world as lopsided as this where some of us live lives of ‘great comfort, order, stability, at the cost of consciously or unconsciously inflicting discomfort, disorder, instability, in the lives of others.’ as I put it in a Tweet, maybe this was nothing short of an act of appropriation! or–is it possible?–was it the literary equivalent of flashing a dick pic? Some nights when I think of this I cannot sleep a wink for brooding.

 

I caused panic. I apologise. Sorry. I was precipitate. Even as Vinata, the mother of birds was, as she precipitately cracked open her first laid egg, and like her, I intend to wait, not to make haste, posthaste; to make the most of this, my second, no, my final chance.

 

II

 

My father’s suffering from Paralysis. He’d lost movement in the right side of his body. He’s recovered almost 95% but he’s still woolly minded. Not that we’re imputing this to her (my father is seventy one), but my younger sister Rukmini’s coming out as a homosexual may have had something to do with it. Rukmini is a litigation lawyer and unlike me–and like most millennials who make more money in the first year of their employment than their old middleclass parents have scrimped up all their lives–unlike me, she is quite affluent. A year back she moved into a posh villa at Gulmohar Park (South Delhi) where she lives with her partner (a colleague named Afifa Jaffar) while I live in a little hovel,  some remote gullies away from my parent’s home in Geeta Colony. (I nip in all the time for free meals! of course I do my bit: I help with the groceries, cooking, washing up.) And so her ‘coming out’ obviously choused up something of a furore. I say ‘choused up’ because, like every other excitement of our age, it came but as a high intensity impulse, a point charge (not that smooth bell curve with a gentle rondure to which the artists have got so used)… But the impulse rattled. It broke into areas that hadn’t been rattled for ages. My parent’s WhatsApp groups. ‘I gave my children full freedom,’ my father told old friends, relatives, as tongues began to wag, ‘I gave them a good education sir, fed them with traditional values, you can only take an ass to the lake, can you make it drink water?’ And then one morning–it must have been five o’ clock–I was in the toilet, as mother screamed, ‘Prahalad, Prahalad, come quickly,’… At first, I thought he was dead. There was blood on his vests, at the cusps of his lips, and as I was waiting at the street front for the Ambulance to arrive, I was preparing myself with excuses. There was no way I was going to take off my shirt. For the funeral-ritual. There was simply no way I could. Maybe, I thought, I’ll tell the priest I’ve got rashes on my chest that shouldn’t be exposed to flames, for after all, what with the Covid restrictions, it was going to be a very small gathering, just the few friends, relatives living in Delhi, and in the evening we’d have him cremated, his ashes packed off to be scattered along the banks of sunken Ganga. 

‘I’d just started my pooja,’ mother said to the doctor in broken Hindi, ‘I’d just lit the lamp, when I heard him scream. I ran to him and there was blood on his vests and mouth and he was completely motionless. I gave him these tablets sir, Disprin, Atorastatin, Clopidogrel. And he immediately recovered.’

 

‘Has he had an attack before ma’am?’

 

‘In 2015 sir, when my son had just left to Colorado. It was a minor heart attack, it was the doctor who’d given me these tablets, in case there’s a relapse.’

 

‘This isn’t a heart attack…’ the doctor said as he noted the names of the tablets on his rubber glove.

 

‘What is your name sir?’ the doctor asked in English.

 

‘Mani.’ father slurred.

 

‘Where are you from?’

 

‘Madurai.’

 

‘When did you come to Delhi? Rotate your right arm sir, like this, you are not able to? now left, right leg, no? left… Yes, please go on.’

 

‘ ‘74, ‘75, I did my M.Tech here from IIT Delhi. Then I worked at DRDO.’

 

‘Blink your eyes, do like this,’ he said, bloating his cheeks, then grinding his teeth, ‘any pain is there? No. Okay. Are you working?’

 

‘No, I’m retired.’

 

‘I feel he’s had a stroke ma’am, he’s bit his tongue. We’ll take him to the emergency ward, our Neuro-expert will be there, he’ll diagnose. Who is this?’

 

‘My wife, Parimala.’

 

‘And this?’

‘That is my only son, Prahalad.’

 

He refused a stretcher. He limped leaning onto my shoulder.  He’d gone numb on the right side of his body. His speech was a blur. But the doctors were stunned at his resilience. After the three days at the ICU, he refused bed pans, sponge baths, bath chairs; asked for a rollator. Mother would stay with him in the days, I’d stay with him in the nights… It was I who informed my sister. She was lost and distraught and it was I who had to tell her that she had to do her thing; she had to leave her mark; but could she have been a bit furtive?

 

‘Dudeeeee,’ she texted, for that’s how she addresses me, ‘You remember when we had our first Wi-Fi it was named after you, not that I bother, but there wasn’t even an argument! you had everything, all of us were rallying round to keep your self-possession from spluttering, you were our representative, you were going places, I was laying eggs! I was a history-geography girl. Remember?’    

 

Tethering at the arc where an old world ends: I am glad I get to die into silence…

 

So that’s how it all started: ‘The match making factory,’ as I call it in one of my Tweets: my parents began to look for a bride for me (after I had given consent of course: because I was sure there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of a woman, young or extant, who’d want to marry–or for that matter, bear any sort of an amatory relationship with–me: a thirty year old slaphead drawing an English teacher’s salary!)…

 

This is when I had got that e-mail from you, prose editor of Indian Excerpts, accepting to publish one of my more highbrow stories that I thought I couldn’t shift in a month of Sundays. I googled you. Followed you on Twitter. Read your every article in the feminist e-zine Audacter Calumniare… When I saw you, your sister and friends from a distance, it was like being in the middle of a Jane Austen novel! The pattern was familiar, but the details weren’t and so I peeped, into your Ladies’ only compartment…

I was besotted… Young, impressionable, and truant men ought not to read very much P.G. Wodehouse. I thought, What would a Wodehouse character–say Bingo–do if he took a shine to a young woman who happened to be the editor of a Literary Magazine? The answer was simple. He’d write a Love Poem and submit it to her and this didn’t seem wrong then, either artistically (isn’t all good art, after all, a Private Love Letter and a Public declaration happening simultaneously?) or ethically (at this time we were co-followers on Twitter). But, I am not trained to be a poet and so I wrote a short story with you as its narrator-protagonist and gave it a fustian epigraph from the novelette I had been re-reading at that time, Heart of Darkness – ‘I am not disclosing any trade secrets.’

 

So what could I expect except Armed Response when I made the grave mistake of submitting it to you? You locked your profiles, blocked me, got your magazine to threaten to set the Home Ministry–the hounds–on me. ‘Manners before Morals,’ as Oscar Wilde–or rather as Mrs. Erlynne–puts it: I may not be a very moral man, but my manners are impeccable. I have withdrawn the story from all the magazines to which I’d submitted it, removed all traces of you, your friends and familiars from it... It is true that I would’ve loved it if somebody else were to soil their hands in the quagmire of my past, have a peep, do a story of me, and in a world where you were allowed to be as comfortable as I am: being able to lose yourself in rumination over the inseparability of Love from the fear of what death might do to the object of your Love, and still being able to make enough money to pay rents, command respect in the world of men: in a world where you were allowed to be as comfortable as I am: where we lived and bred with some equitability, I may have expected of you the same equanimity; but as it is, I realise now that seeing yourself in a story–especially one in which the markers haven’t yet been removed (how stupid of me! if only the manuscript had stayed with me for one more day! I was cuckolded by sleeplessness, euphoria!)– I realise now that seeing yourself in a story can be quite an unsettling experience, something like seeing a photo of your own corpse. And it was an act of appropriation or–is it possible!–was  it  the literary equivalent  of  flashing  a dick pic? Some nights when I think of this I cannot sleep a wink for brooding. Love, like art is born with trespass, but my trespass wasn’t a pleasant one like Snow White’s, Goldilocks’s… I have caused panic. Sorry.

 

Thank you for unmanning me! I am now able to love mother better. The other day, mother was in her yellow pooja room, I was in the room I share with her, having my morning black tea, and a mice was in the kitchen; my father limped to the kitchen to fix his morning coffee, and was rattled; he shut the kitchen door, saw the front door ajar, hobbled to it and banged it shut and shouted at mother. She coolly said, she was doing her morning pooja and the front door had to be left ajar. He called her superstitious, foolish, irrational, and this was more than I could brook. I ran to the front gate, flung it open… We both gave each other the rough sides of our tongues. And he asked me to leave his house if I cannot live in cooperation with him and just as you staggered dead the last vestiges of masculinity still lingering onto me: I did his. I left. That evening. Mother was lost and distraught. But when I showed her the hovel that was just some remote gullies away from our house (the Vastu was perfect! Unlike in our house) she got placated but got me to promise never to cook anything beyond my strong black teas there but always nip in to our house for meals. I did. After all, the house was half hers and it was her half that I was visiting.  

 

I moved there on 16^th October, 2021. My father came along to see me off. ‘Like the child god Murugan,’ he said, ‘who left his parent’s home and took recluse at the top of Palani hills, you have moved here, into this little pent house; and like him I hope you find a bride.’ I thought of you and kissed mother. Mother got me some god photos (and among them, a photo of Meenakshi of Madurai), lamps, a bell, joss sticks, camphor, flowers…  she placed all these on the top compartment of my bookshelf.  We had to help my father up and down the three narrow flights of stairs. Now he can do it by himself.

 

One month later, I Tweeted, posting pictures:

 

In the June of 2015 I had come back home dropping out of an MS program in Computer Science from a small college in Colorado; since then I've lived with my parents. On this day–the sixteenth–of last month, I had moved into a hovel of my own, that is just a few remote gullies

 

away from my parent's home so I can still nip in for free meals (of course I do my bit: I help with the groceries and with the cooking)! 

 

So that's Roots and Wings isn't it? I get to stay connected to, provide assistance to, my parents, and I get to have my own privacy!

 

Each day a little bit more of the larger narrative is unravelled to us, you could think of it as insulation, wearing off slowly baring ‘the shockingly naked wire at the centre of the world’ (as a better poet puts it); the major and the minor characters of our lives change; each change, brief but final, loud but crisp like the sledgehammer bangs of Mahler’s sixth symphony.  The way I see it, father died with the 555 timer. But that journey towards the final departure – doesn’t it teach us that wisdom to say ‘Dying is as hard as birthing.’? Father had his first sledgehammer bang when I returned from Colorado, dead and cadaverous, and declared that I was going to pursue a career in literature; but that was mild in comparison to the second sledgehammer bang of Rukmini’s coming out as a homosexual, and the third, again mild sledgehammer bang of my leaving home was the making of him. Now he chats for nearly half an hour with mother before he sleeps (they sleep in the same room (but on different beds) since his stroke), he helps her with the cooking, cleaning up, the hanging of clothes. On Tuesdays each week (which is my weekly holiday) I buy us a slap-up lunch: baby corn Manchurian, roti, palak paneer, mixed vegetable curry, peas pulav (all without green chillies and black pepper of course: I suffer from an auto-immune disease), and after the meal they tell me their childhood-tales: of how mother stopped going to tailoring classes after her teacher had asked her for jackfruits from their tree! of how my father had hid himself on top a banyan tree for close on three days, snatching meals, intermittently, from nearby temples and shops, because he’d dropped the five rupees his father had given him for tuition fees in the bus-stop…

 

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13 months later

 

Am I where the Ramayana could’ve ended–the happy image of a young man at rest with his old parents–before it’s turned into such a tragedy? An entire nation in Ram-shackle. Anyhow, I am at rest: I teach at a bigger institute and am so comfortably off these days that I decided to adopt an abandoned puppy and her daughter. I adopted them exactly on August 15. Independence Day. For me! ‘Have you had pets before?’ their foster father, one Kartik, whose Tweet appealing for someone from Delhi to adopt these two puppies, Bavani, the Bangalore based short story writer, had shared. (So that literally it was she who has brought these puppies into my life, as if bringing those excellent stories wasn’t enough!) ‘I have kept snails,’ was my reply. Kartik wasn’t very convinced. More so when he visited my little hovel and thought it would be too small for two dogs. How true! In three months they grew so much that I wasn’t able to keep them in my tiny hovel any longer and had to move back to my parents’ house after all! How lively is our house now with the patter of their tiny feet! They run round and round our dinner table and keep a-lit that dim dynamo bulb of hearth-ly happiness. When I take them out for walkies I feel again like the hunter: keen, cool, controlled. Lest I forget the lesson learnt I named the mother puppy after you, and the daughter puppy after the woman who’d turned me down–and in what style!–before you. Maybe we should end with that story! It’ll give you a good laugh! There was this young woman (she’s two years older than I am, about your age, I think) and we were friends on twitter and I’d really taken a shine to her; fortunately she wasn’t the editor of any literary magazine! so, I wrote this letter for her and sent it to her through Direct Message:

 

I’m sorry for being a pain in the ears. But such is your personableness that this is only to be expected. Over the last few months, I have developed a deep admiration of you–your past, your posts, your general demeanour–from your ‘Tweets’. If you’d like to consider exploring the possibility of friendship, please get back to me. If not–and I couldn’t blame you for this–please don’t get perturbed. You will probably never hear from me. I know so much about you (and there’s so much more I’d like to know). But here’s a bit about me (if you’re still interested):

1. I’m a 30 year old English teacher, I write short stories.

2. I live in a small hovel, in Geeta Colony, New Delhi.

3. I’m asexual. (I’ve always thought of sex as make-up. That is, I understand that a slaphead like me doesn’t need make-up (or at least more make-up than an early morning shave!). But I also understand that other people do.)… So there, I hope I haven’t done anything not unexceptionable.

Always your ally,

Prajapati

P.S, In the unlikely event that you do reply to this message I may not be able to respond immediately as I am going to bed. All the best.

 

The next day when I woke up and, with bated breath logged in to my Twitter account, without even the habitual shower and shave, I found myself blocked. I was cut up… I tweeted, attaching a link to a YouTube video of Claudio Arrau performing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – that I called the ‘Heart Break’ sonata, –

 

Suddenly, the sonata makes so much more sense to me. The rage is more apparent. It’s probably the curse of Midas. Everything you touch turns to gold. The price you pay for this is the impossibility of personal relationships.

‘The curse of Midas,’: a thin consolation… Yet I could’ve sworn that she–like you, like all the women who’ve given me the bird–was the nicest, dearest, least snobby, most garrulous girl and should I take this as a compliment? The fact that one isn’t treated like a normal man is sometimes the only proof that one must be an artist. But how should I understand this? This bald discomfort that I foment in the ladies! is it fear of intimacy, emptiness, or is it the effect of not having a language in common –  me, spinning slowly, yet to arrive at a stroboscopic equilibrium with a fast flashing world? Or is it just Love (as a better poet puts it) without storeys?

 

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