Claimed!

 

I have always thought of myself as lost property, someone waiting to be claimed.

– Black Vodka, Deborah Levy

Snails, (like all things hermaphroditic?) are philopro-genitive! (like you perhaps,) they are also home birds. Two weeks–not more–two weeks and I can count–one, two, three, four, five, six, seven–seven little hatchlings, the size of papaya seed, tilted, swooshing their dainty little tentacles about, in the dank of the pot of the turmeric plant. 

 

Two days back it had rained. In the supermarket, shelled with gloves and shield and double masks, I shopped for groceries. ‘Home delivery’ was now cancelled what with the lockdown the entire city of Delhi was moribund. Ambulances alone careering past one. Sirens ringing through the earholes. I was lugging a suitcase full of groceries (for an entire month) and it was as I’d got to about just a few metres from home when I saw a snail inching at the centre of the road; and about two feet further,  another. I  was about  to approach  them, take a photo of them for my Twitter page when an ambulance scudded past and missed them both by a ‘tentacle’! The larger one had torqued into its shell and, from the force perhaps, lay upended; the little one just feigned dead. I rang my mother; father came; he was livid; people were dying in the streets; four hundred people had died that day alone; in Delhi alone; how could I be so callous? he swaddled  them both in the tip of his white cotton veshti and, ignoring the sneers of our neighbour, whose only son was in Germany, married, PhD., he placed them gingerly on the first pot that he could spot — the turmeric plant. 

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(Like most boys my age) I studied computer science.   And like you I went to Madras (where (like yours) my relatives lived and from where (like yours) my parents had moved). But, I do know a thing or two about Metabolism. Apple chunks for poop, drumstick leaves and soaked almonds (both rich in calcium) for the shell, cucumber; all night my Giant African snails champ. In the days they bury themselves in the dank and snooze.  

 

I’ve read somewhere that snails can snooze for up to three years if the climate around them becomes un-favourable. So, if you put a snail to snooze in 2020 (when the Corona began) and woke it up at the other side of this, the ‘liminal peak’ as it were, it would find itself sailing through a different world, a freer world? a calmer world? little would it know of the struggle we’re going through to keep the sandwich together. I and my sister moved in to our parent’s home to help (and save on rent money! I faced a salary cut at the training institute where I teach English; my sister, a lawyer cum journalist has hardly had any cases, commissions; her roommate’s stranded abroad, and she’s moved in with her Alsatian).

My mother’s a cave girl. She’s also a minor musician and a student of English literature. She teaches music to kids and my house would always be full of them! Some singing affectedly, some rifling through their phones, some cutting capers. (Now of course she takes remote classes.) When she was a young woman mother had liked the works of Doris Lessing a lot. I remember a quote of Lessing’s she’d put up on her almirah door – 

 

‘I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use.’ 

 

This quote became a kind of dictum in my head ever since I was a young boy of eight years old studying third standard in Meenakshi Public School and won a copy of  an illustrated adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray in an essay-writing competition. What was the problem the writer was trying to solve? Eventually, I couldn’t read a book unless there was a problem in it. A problem, you had to work out with paper and pencil. A conflict, resolving which the Universe grew more stable…

There are three qualities an ideal reader should possess: Empathy, Acumen, and Time. You are my ideal reader. And my story, simultaneously a Private love letter for you, and a public declaration. You are, as I have said earlier, philoprogenitive: so many of us are writing to you, for you, our judge, our most beloved judge of the Sunday Reader Short-story Competition, but I have reasons to believe that my claim is a cut above the rest! not just because I see in you a female Kurtz (someone who broached ‘beyond the bounds of permitted aspiration’ becoming  ‘an  animated  image of death’)… but because I had an omen! Today! Now!

 

Today you see, one of mother’s favourite musicians (one Rajan Mishra, by name) died in Delhi of Covid. I was in the kitchen making myself a spot of tea when mother declared theatrically of his demise. The water came to boil. I was about to reach for the tea when I heard mother play some song of his. What a mistake it is to risk even two minutes in India without the shield of one’s earphones? Even if it was going to leave one deaf as Beethoven? As I was giving the pot a good twirl I heard a man (the late Mishra?) say in a rich, gruff baritone (and in English), ‘We’ve received requests to end the recital in raag Bhairavi. So, —’, and just as I was about to turn and get to the room that is half my own (I share it with mother) I heard the selfsame man sing —

 

‘Ay, Bavani!’

 

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I shut the door, put the tea things on the table, fed the snails a couple of soaked groundnuts and started writing this story for you, my judge, not hoping to get shortlisted or anything, it’s been donkey’s ears since I attempted fiction so I know I’m out of touch and don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of making it – but because I want to honour the omen. Of having your name spelled out. So… Operatically! (and in ‘raag Bhairavi’ too!) – Ay, Bavani!   

 

You are philoprogenitive. So many of us could have been you with minor shifts in alignment. At this stage, I am reminded of the painting Illusions by Henry Brown Fuller. 1901. Most allegorical! The daughter bidding for the bubble of roundness from her mother the way the pigeon chicks in my balcony pluck at their parents’ beak for milk. (Did you know pigeons lactate? Bet you did. But did you know both the mother and the father lactate and it is in fact the father’s milk for which the chicks crave? we’ll discuss this aspect of their androgyny later on, if Time permits.) The mother as you can see is reluctant to part with her rondure. The child protests. Eventually, the mother will give in. A game of throw-ball will begin between mother and child. Then (in the form of the father?) society will creep in and, in the fullness of time, the mother will lose her role and the cycle continues. But you, Bavani, returned to your mother like Oedipus, no, like Persephone, and, cutting all traffic with the world of human noises, resumed your game of throw-ball with her. Your mother died for you and you died for her and the cycle was complete. But with me, Bavani, the pattern is complex; as I’ve said earlier, I have a sister: A wide-eyed, toffee-nosed, coffee-hued, ristra-haired, mean-miened, loud-mouthed, broad-shouldered, stubby-fingered, thin-lipped darling, and I love her more than anyone else. It’s like this Bavani: By the time I was three I was so adept at identifying ragas and songs that mother thought  I was  a prodigy  and began  to train  me to  be a violinist. By the time I was six I could play most of the Lalgudi-tillanas. My childhood until that point was what you might call idyllically happy! (like yours!) A jolly game of throw-ball. Just mother and I.  Then sister was born. Mother stopped teaching as she now had two children to mind. She  became, as  father  would  later put it, ‘Just  a serf wholly dependent on my income.’ But the game continued. I would still piggy-sleep with my parents (like the old Elizabethans) and play the violin until my sister slept. Then I got to 5^th standard. Algebra. And father took over. ‘Arts and all are useless da: only one in one million will make it and you need to be exceptional! and you need to come from a rich family and luck, you need lots of luck, otherwise you will end up like your mother only. Now Engineering means Stability. Even if you are average you will get a job.’ He started hobby electronics classes (to which all mother’s boy students, including me, enrolled), and soon for me violin was replaced with soldering ion. 

 

It’s like in The Picture of Dorian Gray you know, Bavani, where, the consequences of Dorian’s actions reflect on his picture, not on him; the consequences of my actions reflected on mother, not on me. Her hair for instance, began to turn silver the night I’d first wanked. Very eerie. I remember it distinctly. By the time I was in 12^th, the ‘pressure year’, mother became just a cook. A broad cook. I’d take long walks with father where we’d discuss proper-and-improper-integrals, its applications in the modelling of Magnetic fields... I did well. Got into Anna University. Other state quota. Sister was in 7^th. The year we middle class people stop music (and dance) classes. She took an interest in civics and history. Again, father decided. She’d go to law school. Revive the family’s ancient tradition of lawyers… But I must accept, as long I was at home I grabbed all my parent’s attention. When we’d got our first wireless internet connection for instance, it was named after me, ‘Prahalad’; consecrated fires were raised for my good health, initiation ceremonies; sister got nothing. Just like pigeon chicks I suppose. The dominant chick grabs all the nosh and the weaker one dies. I’ve buried four distinct chicks this year alone. (This time though I’m not going to let that happen. After lunch at 1:30 I keep the larger chick in my room on detention so the little chick gets some nosh and some attention!) Anyway, as I was saying, I left my parents and, father–who’d been promoted to Assistant General Manager–took to drinking. He’d drink a right skinful (because that’s what he thought managers did) and when mother, orthodox, Hindu, would make a scene, he’d turn violent, as my sister would ring me. Father was a problem mother could not solve. Perhaps this is the reason why she chose to stay. Or maybe it was me, and sister. Our marriage. Though it was marriage that had marred her.  

 

After sister left mother reduced the time she spent at home. Enrolled for a degree in music. Took to travelling to temples. Became a part of several ensembles… I’m glad she’s working from home now; I play the violin for her, arrange her remote classes.

 

Do you see how much more complex the pattern is for me, who has a sibling, Bavani; to say nothing of the grave injustice to which I (unlike you) am liable (vicariously)? Yes, caste, sex, religion, among so many other things. Dominance. My sister is Athena, demanding, fighting to be taken as seriously as her father, the dying god, while I’m trying to rescue the devoured mother. But maybe we are working in the same direction after all. It’s too early to say because my father just won’t yield. (Like you) I went abroad for an MS, in Computers and (like you) I dropped out after my health failed and (like you) I took to English Literature, but (unlike you) I haven’t won any prizes. When I came back from Colorado, dead and cadaverous (like you), both my parents had changed. They were sleeping in different rooms now. But father behaved in such a masterful way. He asked me not to bother. To take as much time as I wanted to settle down. He even called a relative and got me a job (English teacher). He was still the master, Prospero, wielding his magic wand – the soldering ion. But over the past year, after the Corona breakdown, I can see the alignment change. Sister sleeps with her dog in her room (she wanted her privacy), and father in his, and I muck in with mother. It’s been years since I formed a romantic relationship (the last time was a disaster, though it made it abundantly clear to me that I was asexual!); so, I am not half happy at this intense friendship I’ve formed with mother! I read her the stories of Muriel Spark, Deborah Levy, as we cook, (and as sister writes her newsletters about the peculations of the Indian government, even during Covid!) and I read her all the mother and daughter scenes from your novel, Bavani, Every Day is a Holiday, which I’d gifted her the year it won the 50^th Cocker Prize, 2019, ‘The year after which Every Day would indeed become a holiday,’ as you put it in an interview. A snag in the Wheels of Time. 

I  also  bought  her  a  posture-corrector  to straighten her back and, it works like a kind of corset, it’s had a great effect of her. Together we mind pigeons and snails (I have now added substantially to my snail-collection) and in the nights we throw the windows open and, what with the mellow syncopating thrum of the pigeons and the methodical munch of the snails, it feels like the first ages of Time.

The slush is back to her. Her eyes soft as a heifer’s. With father, and sister (who will leave anytime soon to join her roommate) she is formal, and casual. With me – it’s not throw-ball! – rugby! ‘How dare you use the dosa pan to make chapatti? why do you even enter the kitchen?’) and I am beginning to like this! this repatriation of rondure, a rondure stripped of its cloak of Time. 

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I called my best friend Vishnu and invited him home for lunch and he’s coming! I’ve cooked for him the–steamed and crumbled lentils and cluster beans–dish my grand-mother calls parupu-usili and some pumpkin sambar (Vishnu is a perfect sambar deer!) and some curd rice and of course, some fried colocasia corms! All cooked with slabs and slabs of butter – minus chillies and pepper! (I’m allergic to them, I suffer from an autoimmune disease). Very tasty! Very sweet! A veritable gastronomic orgy it’s going to be! What a pity it is that my sister’s left?  

 

That’s Vishnu! ‘Hi Vishnu! You’re late! We’ve been waiting!’ Look at that face! Or at least that shell like ears, that aquiline nose jut out over that double mask! He first gets his face shield off and washes his two masks and puts them to dry, then washes his hands and sanitises them. Soon father will bring a vaporizer and ask him to inhale. You can’t be too careful. Fifteen thousand cases today alone; and in Delhi alone. Three fifty people dead. But the second wave’s ebbing for sure.   

After lunch I told Vishnu of how this time, after I’d ensured that the younger chick gets more attention, by putting the bigger chick on detention, they’d both made it! I also showed him the snails on the dank of the turmeric plant (there were nearly eleven large ones now and we had to divide them into various pots, all placed in my and my mother’s room, so that, as I have said earlier, you could hear them champ in the nights!) 

 

But I didn’t tell him that in the five days in which I wrote this story something has opened up in me. Some ancient channel… Sometimes when a dog barks or a squirrel squeals or a cooker whistles and the pigeons start with such a roaring flutter from the 3 kg of millet they nosh on each morning, at our terrace, I can’t help wondering whether, if you tied lengths of ropes to their talons, the other ends tied to the tip of this bold imposing façade of the serried ranks of warm cells, we call cities, they might not lift the whole thing up like scab, and leave us all exposed. But first the wound must heal... 

 

I am not enlightened. Sometimes I feel I’m on virgin grounds again, pent in a bourn of blue funk. I’m not sure if I’ll make it to this shortlist (or to any shortlists) – but I feel I’ll be vital and inconspicuous, like Sherlock Holmes. And, I feel I’m not lost property anymore. I feel I’ve risen, from the details to the pattern. Pattern I will leave behind when I’m gone–like the shell of a dead snail buried  in  the sands  of the sea’s  jaw–always  yielding  to curiosity. I feel, calm. I feel, Claimed!

 

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