Riot (27 page)

— Nothing?

— I didn't mean that. You give me your affection, you give me your poems, you give me little gifts, you give me dinners, you help me here in all sorts of ways. But you haven't given me the assurance of a future. Sometimes you talk about us being together in America, in India, and it
is
fantasy, that's all it is, except that I've been slow in catching on.

— That's not fair. I've meant it every time we've talked about the future. I've contemplated turning my life upside down. I've agonized over the pain and disruption this would cause, to my family, my daughter, my work, my place in the world. But I've also told myself that all this would be worthwhile because you love me and I love you and I would have a new chance of “being beloved in the world” — something I had felt I would never experience in my life. And then, I think of my daughter, the most vulnerable and innocent victim of my future happiness, and I can't go on.

— You can't go on. And you keep saying you love me.

— Of course I love you. I'll love you as long as I live.

— But you won't give me any assurances we'll be together.

— I don't want to lie to you. I want only to give you a certainty I myself feel. I feel certain of my love. I don't feel certain that I can risk destroying my daughter to fulfil my love. Don't you see?

— Aren't you afraid you could lose me?

— More afraid of it than of anything else, except losing my daughter.

— But you don't have to lose either of us. Your daughter'll always be your daughter, Lucky. And you don't have to lose me. You could have me so easily. Just by committing yourself, clearly, now.

— I can't. Not now.

— I understand you're scared. About your daughter.

— I am scared. But not only about my daughter. About you too.

— About me? Why?

— Look, this is difficult to say without hurting you, and I don't intend to hurt you.

— Go on.

— It's not easy. You're from a different world, Priscilla. There are a lot of adjustments I'd have to make to be part of that world as your — husband.

— It's not that difficult, Lucky. You're more Western than you think you are. You'll adjust pretty easily.

— It's not that kind of adjustment I'm talking about. I mean adjusting within myself. Look, let me explain. It's something that troubled me from the start, but I kept pushing it aside, telling myself it didn't matter. In my culture, no man with any self-respect gives his mangalsutra, his ring, his name, to a woman who's been with other men before. I never thought that in my life I would ever be in a position where another man could even think, “I have slept with his wife. I have seen his wife naked. His wife has pleasured me.”

— You're sick.

— I'm Indian. As far as I know, that's the way the vast majority of the world thinks: The woman you marry is the repository of your honor.

— I don't believe I'm hearing this, from an educated man in 1989.

— That's the point. I learned. I became an educated man of 1989. I trained myself not to let it matter. I learned to love you without letting the shadows of the others fall between my love and your body. Oh, I suppose that, without thinking about it, I had sort of shared the general belief here that there are the women you sleep with, and the women you marry. I've grown out of that belief, quite consciously. I had started off sleeping with you, not even thinking of anything permanent, let alone marrying you. Then I fell in love. Now I found myself wanting to marry the woman I was sleeping with.

— How convenient.

— Spare me the irony, Priscilla. My knowledge of your past has tormented me far more than I let on. But I told myself I had to understand the culture you came from. That by the standards of your peers you're practically virginal. And above all, that what mattered was that you loved me.

— Yes.

— I told myself, how does it matter who she's been with before? What matters is that she's with me now. I have her. These other men don't.

— Exactly.

— I want so much for it not to matter, don't you see? But can you blame me for being scared? How can I know that a woman who has slept with six men will never contemplate sleeping with a seventh? Can I afford to sink myself emotionally into a love that might be withdrawn from me as it has been from others? Or should I tell myself, love her while she loves you, love her while you can, let the future take care of itself?

— What does that mean? The future never takes care of itself. You have to take care of your own future if you want one.

— I'm just trying to explain my torment to you. I have a career where I try to make a difference to my own people. I have a daughter whom I want to see make her way in the world. And I have you. Or at least I think I do, but I'm scared.

— You can only have me if you want me, Lucky. If you truly love me.

— I love you, Priscilla. But …

— But?

— But there's too much involved. I'm wondering whether I can find the strength to accept that I have to love you enough to let you go.

— How can you say that? That's nonsense. How can you love me and let me go?

— I don't know. I only know it would be as painful as amputating a limb. It would mean going round for years afterwards haunted by the ghost of what might have been. And yet, old Oscar put it best: “In love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others.” I guess I've deceived myself; I had no intention ever of deceiving you. But the more I think of it, the more it seems to me it would be the right thing to do.

— Right by whom? Not by me.

— Right by my family, by Rekha, and by you. You have a wonderful future awaiting you in America. I shouldn't presume to deprive you of it. If I were to say, darling Priscilla, I do not know about our future, I am full of doubt and uncertainty, I love you but I am in torment, I do not want to inflict this on you, take your freedom if you want it — what would you do? What is best for you? Think about it. But please don't doubt my love. Everything I've said comes out of my love for you. Even my willingness to let you go.

— I can hardly believe all that I've heard. Are you saying you want me to be involved with you but you can't leave your wife and daughter? Are you saying you might leave them for me if I hadn't been with other men before? Are you saying you love me but not enough to disrupt your life to be with me? You sound terribly confused.

— I am. When we got involved I began to think nothing else mattered. Not my wife, not my job, not my child, not your past. But I've discovered it all does. That I can't just walk away from it all.

— But you can just walk away from me.

— No, I can't! Don't you see how terrible my torment is?

— But don't
you
see that I can't wait forever for you to end your confusion?

— I know you can't.

— You've come to mean more to me than anyone I've ever known. I thought we had a future together.

— Please don't cry. Here, take my handkerchief.

— I don't understand, Lucky. You tell me I'm the woman you've always dreamed of, I fulfil every desire you have as a man, and when I tell you I feel the same way and I want us to be forever, you withdraw?

— I'm not withdrawing, Priscilla. I love you. I just can't break up my family, destroy my daughter—

— I'd never ask you to destroy your daughter. Can't you take her away from that dreadful wife of yours?

— I doubt a court would give her to me. And with my life, my work, how could I take care of her?

— I'd help.

— But you're not her mother, Priscilla. With all her faults, Geetha is.

— Please remove your arm, Lucky. I'm leaving.

— I don't want you to go.

— No, you want me to stay, so that you can fuck me and then you can go, to your wife. Thanks, but I've had enough of that scenario.

— Priscilla, don't get up, please.
[Silence.]

— Priscilla, I love you.

[Silence. A long silence, followed by the creaking of a door, a sibilant sniffling retreating down the stairs, the rattle of a bicycle chain, and the squeaking crunch of thin tires on the twig-strewn ground, fading into the distance.]

 

from Lakshman's journal

August 22, 1989

Words, old Oscar would have said, mere words — but how terrible, how vivid, how cruel. And is there anything so real as the words we use to define our lives?

I remember an old sadhu my parents took me to once, a wizened bare figure whose skin hung impossibly in folds, the hair on his head sparse and unruly, his white beard his only adornment. We sat at his feet for what seemed to me the longest time, but when I began to speak he raised an aged finger to his white-shrouded lips. “Whatever you have to say, my son,” he said, “say it in silence.”

It is a prescription I forget too often: Whatever you have to say, say it in silence.

With Priscilla now, silence is all I have.

letter from Lakshman to Priscilla

August 25, 1989

My darling Priscilla,

Please try and understand what I'm going through. The last three days since I saw you have been the worst three days of my life. I was shattered when you left like that, and I haven't slept a wink. I feel physically ill. I told you that losing you would be like amputating a limb — they say you constantly feel pain from the place where the limb used to be. In my case, that's my heart.

I feel I've conducted a terrible mutilation of myself in telling you why I couldn't give you the commitment you seek. Watching you cycle away into the darkness last Tuesday was the most wrenching experience of my life.

And yet I have made my own bed and I must lie in it. I'm a desperately sad human being who is suffering terribly, and my suffering is made no more bearable by the fact that it is self-inflicted. I could have said something else to you, but I knew you deserved the truth. I felt I could not do otherwise, my dearest Priscilla, and be true to myself, above all to my obligations as a man and my duty as a father. It was the most difficult choice I've ever had to make, and at one level I still can't believe I've made it.

I can't bear to think I won't see you again at the Kotli. I'll be there anyway tomorrow, as usual. I'll understand if you don't want to come anymore. I'm in too much pain to be anywhere else on Saturday, so I'll go there, even if it is to be alone with my memories.

May the divine Providence in which both of us believes give you strength and happiness, and may some of it rub off on me.

Always your (un) Lucky

 

from Lakshman's journal

August 26, 1989

She comes to him that Saturday, of course. She leaves her cycle in the shrubbery and walks softly up the old stone stairway to their lair. He is sitting on the ledge, his hair swept back by the wind, looking pensively at the river as darkness slowly reaches out to embrace the horizon. She sees him and her heartbeat catches in her veins like a scarf on a doorknob, so that she stumbles on the threshold and has to steady herself. He turns then, mist in his eyes, and when he sees her the gloom lifts off his shoulders like a veil. He rises and bounds to her, and she is caught up in his arms like a butterfly in a strong gust, fluttering but imprisoned, and he is kissing her so hard that the breath is pushed out of her. She surrenders, feeling his hands running up and down her body as if to reassure himself she is all there. He finds that she is, and his heart is delighted, his eyes sparkling in wordless pleasure as she in turn strokes his face, still silent, and he catches her fingers and kisses them, and before she knows it he is on top of her and inside her and it is as if he is strumming the same tune she has always heard and it has never stopped playing. And afterwards neither of them wants to speak because each is afraid of what the other might say.

And they are right not to speak, for how can either of them explain what has happened? It is a blur in his mind, and yet an indelible blur. He peels off her clothing, the soft cotton skirt with the swirling print, the comfortably loose blouse, as light and flammable as the spirit it sheathes. The hooks of her bra do not resist him this time, her panties slide off like a wisp, and she is naked in his urgent arms, unquestioning in her surrender. He is still kissing her as he turns her around, and she shows no surprise at finding herself on her knees on the mat. He is behind her now, tugging at his belt, and he sees them both in the mirror, that long mirror in which they have so often seen the sunset, except that what it reveals now in the shadows is the paleness of her beneath him on her hands and knees, her face averted, her breasts swaying with each thrust as he takes her from behind. He is transported by his conquest as he watches her in the mirror and beneath him, the curve of her back vividly stretched in her submission, his hands on the soft flesh below her hips as he drives home his message of need and possession. He remembers that this is not supposed to happen, that this is the one thing she will not do, but he has not asked and she has not resisted. He keeps his eyes open throughout, blinking only briefly in climax, and in his wonderment he does not see, or he imagines he cannot see, the solitary tear that drops gently down her love-saddened face.

 

Geetha Lakshman at the Shiva Mandir

September 2, 1989

Every Saturday I have come here with my daughter to pray, Swamiji, and I have sought your blessings and your advice. Remember how you told me that a devout woman like me should not hesitate to come to you with any kind of problem? Tonight I really need your help, Swamiji.

Yesterday my husband's friend Gurinder told me he had to speak to me. He said he had thought about it for a long time and hesitated but now he felt he had no choice. He made me swear not to breathe a word to my husband about what he was going to tell me. And then he said — aiyo, such a terrible thing. He said my husband was in love with another woman and wanted to leave me. It was the yellow-haired American woman, of course. And he was thinking of leaving my daughter and me and running off with her to America.