The Plunge (4 page)
Authors: Sindhu S.
But did she really care? The only thing that she cared about at that moment was his love, him.
It wasn’t the usual suspect, infatuation, she was certain. She wasn’t so young as to be swept away by such a silly passion. She knew what infatuation was. She had felt it for Madhav, years ago.
.
A
njali had met Madhav during her college days. He was her first crush, at seventeen. Madhav was the twenty-year-old son of her father’s friend. She used to live with his family on the weekends, mainly to escape hostel food.
Madhav was in the third-year degree course. He had volunteered to help her with her physics lessons when she had mentioned that she found the subject difficult.
Madhav taught her after dinner. She would go to the room on the first floor that he shared with his brother Manoj, and there he would explain the tough chapters to her.
Their parents slept downstairs. She, too, slept in the spare bedroom downstairs, with the maid on the floor beside her cot.
Everything went well for five months, until his parents went away for a few days to visit an ailing relative in Pune.
She was aware of Madhav’s interest in her body during the lessons. He touched her while explaining, pretended they were unintentional. At times it was a caressing warm foot over her cold and nervous feet under the table. Sometimes his arm brushed against her face when he stood behind her chair and pretended to point out a diagram in the book or placed his hand on hers ‘accidentally’. Madhav made her feel nervous. She was scared to be near him, but strangely, she enjoyed the proximity.
Anjali knew he was asserting his masculinity; and didn’t mind it. He was slim and tall, had a chiselled face and deep voice. He had hairy limbs and chest, which he left exposed during the lessons. She loved to watch his Adam’s apple glide up and down as he talked. She heard nothing, understood nothing. As the days passed, she was in love, or so she believed.
It was the last evening of lessons, since exams were near and they had completed the syllabus. Anjali remembered that rainy night as one would a dream.
She had reached the room to find a copy an old
Illustrated Weekly
spread out on the table. She could hear him humming some romantic song in the shower. She gingerly turned the pages of the magazine and discovered shocking pictures, mostly temple murals of couples engaged in physical intimacy. The cover story of the issue was ‘The Art of Lovemaking’.
She understood that the article was not about love; lovemaking was something else. The photographs on the pages were not as vulgar as the murals she had discovered in the Padmanabha Swami temple some time back. These were erotic.
Anjali had been the first to spot one of the particularly curious pillar carvings at the temple, to the excitement of the other girls. A beastlike figure was licking a female form that was standing above it with parted legs. After the initial shock, they began searching for more, and were not disappointed. Probably since photography was prohibited inside the temple and the carvings along the corridors were miniatures, they mostly went unnoticed.
Thankfully, the pictures in the magazine were not as explicit. She closed the magazine when the shower fell silent. It meant he would be out of the bathroom any moment. She pretended to read something from her physics book, while her mind was trapped in the graphic details of the couple on the cover page.
She felt a little feverish. Fear crept in. Why did he leave the magazine open on the table? Was it done on purpose?
It was impossible for her to focus. She didn’t want to leave the room, but nor could she stay there any longer and pretend to be unaffected.
“Are you sleepy?” he asked.
She looked at him, struggling to hide her anxiety.
Manoj, his younger brother, was fast asleep in the same room.
“Come on; let’s go out to the terrace for some fresh air. You’ll feel better,” Madhav suggested.
Once on the terrace, for some reason, she felt calmer. It was cool after a drizzle. The peace of the moonlit night was breached only by the croaking frogs from the waterlogged vacant plot nearby. She giggled distractedly to hide the awkwardness of the loud noise that invaded the silent night.
He moved to her, shoulder brushing her arm. “Do you know why frogs croak?” he whispered into her ear.
She looked up startled. She was scared when his clasped her shoulder and his breath fell on her face. Anjali felt a shudder when he looked intently into her eyes.
She knew what mating was. She had read in the zoology text about the mating call of frogs, but moments before, the thought hadn’t crossed her mind.
She looked away into the distant darkness, unable to meet his gaze. Why was she trembling?
He turned bold, finding no resistance from her. He suddenly turned to her and boldly raised her chin towards him. He stared into her timid eyes, and said, “It’s the call for mating. Understood? Call for mating.”
She was too stunned to respond. Was there a hint of aggression in his tone? She hadn’t expected him to speak so openly of something as primal as mating. He had never said he loved her. Other than their supposedly innocent touching, they had never consciously expressed feelings for each other before.
“Do you know what mating is?” he asked. He began caressing her face and neck.
She wanted to stop him that moment, as his shaky fingers trailed beyond her neck to her shoulders.
She did not know for sure what people exactly did during lovemaking. But she had to somehow stop this impatient male from going any further. She wrenched his hands off her shoulders and rushed out, to her room.
The maid was fast asleep.
The incident had remained the closest she came to lust until a few years later, when Rasheed made that funny attempt. Rasheed, her libertine colleague, had almost convinced her that physical intimacy was necessary in close relationships.
But she had resisted lust until Siddharth came into her life. With him, she learned to believe that physical love was desirable, with the right partner.
Although she had gone to Madhav’s house with her parents a few times after that incident, he had remained confined to his room.
Three years later, when they met in Kochi, she was studying journalism and Madhav doing his post-graduation.
They had run into each other at the inter-collegiate arts festival. He pretended that there was no embarrassing past between them.
They went out to the movies, book fairs, and art expos. She enjoyed being near him. And why wouldn’t she? He was her first crush. She had to struggle to hide her excitement, with the warmth of his body near her when they walked together and his breath on her cheeks when they snuggled on the park bench.
The attraction was mutual. But was it love?
“We are a very conservative family, you know that,” he said. “We are not from the same caste. Marriage is difficult.”
They were standing in front of a small temple in a reserve forest, just the two of them.
“The goddess of this temple is believed to grant wishes,” he said.
She stared at him, unable to make sense of his words, trying to stifle the volley of misconnected thoughts.
He moved closer and grabbed her into a tight hug. When he pressed closer to kiss her, Anjali pushed him away.
Perhaps that’s all he had in mind, she understood. But, why did he imagine that he could sell her that story? She wasn’t stupid.
“I need to go now,” she had said, wiping sweat off her pale face with the back of her hand.
They did not see each other after that. They did not write to each other. She did not feel sad, only disgusted, and not just with Madhav, with men as such. Why were they so scared of committed relationships, yet so adventurous, when it came to women?
She had never been attracted to another man again. She never fancied men until she met Rasheed a year later. But then, that was never love, not even infatuation. It was an intrusion, a blotch she would remove from her life if she could.
As she tried to rein in memories, the train had picked up speed.
.
I
t was raining heavily when the train arrived at Belapur, the far end of Navi Mumbai.
Anjali glanced at her mobile phone as she hurried down the stairs with the crowd headed towards the underground walkway. 11:30 a.m. She waved down an auto-rickshaw outside the railway station.
By the time she reached her accommodation in the Artists Village, Priya had left for work. Good to have the house to herself. She sat on the cane sofa in the drawing room, near the window; her favourite reading spot.
Priya, her young colleague, was a perfect housemate.
When they had first seen the colony months back, both of them were instantly charmed by its unique design.
The Village was designed by the town planners as a housing colony for artists from various fields: painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, and the like. It consisted of numerous clusters of small houses facing common courtyards. Each cluster had eight homes, more like cottages, humble two-room structures. All the houses looked similar and had tiled roofs. Some of them had garden areas.
The open space in the middle of each cluster was a challenge to self-restraint. It was meant as a courtyard for the occupants, a sort of anteroom for every house, where people could meet in the mornings or evenings to chat, socialise, and live as a community.
A few years after the colony was opened to the residents, the idea of community living was abandoned for good. Those who did not have a garden area invaded the commons. When their neighbours objected, it brought on hostility.
Despite this, the place had a singular appeal. The tastefully conceived original design remained the basic structure of the colony. Most of the owners had rented out their houses. Now hardly twenty percent of the residents were artists. The rest were mostly bachelors, students, or working women like them.
The colony was a quiet place. It reminded her of the place where Sue and Johnsy lived in the short story ‘The Last Leaf’, the O. Henry masterpiece. She imagined it was probably a similar place. The walls of some of the houses in the village had moss on them, just like the ones in the story.
The story had a tragic climax. She felt sorry for the selfless artist, who died helping a sick colleague come out of a hunch. He was out in the storm a whole night painting a leaf on their neighbour’s wall to keep his friend alive. Johnsy? Or was it Sue? Whoever it was, her irrational belief, that the fall of the last leaf would mean her death, had instead killed him. Did he fall from the ladder? She could not remember.
Why did people pick up stubborn delusions?
A strange obsession kept a homeless woman busy in the lane outside their office. The beggar constantly drove away an imaginary something that she thought was hovering over her head. She had unkempt, short, grey hair, most of it covered with a scarf. Was it a swarm of bees or just one bee that bothered her? Or was it some disturbing thought from her past, maybe a horrid event in her life?
“Don’t look if it troubles you so much,” Priya would tell her each time. “Why worry about something you can’t change?”
When Anjali was about to leave for work, Parvati arrived. The housemaid prepared
upma
and tea for her. The fried grams, curry leaves and dried red chillies sizzled on being tossed in the hot mustard oil, releasing their assorted aroma. It made her hungry. The maid had started mopping the floor when she left the house for her office in Mumbai.
The station was somewhat crowded when she returned to it. Commuters at that hour were mostly students. The scarcely occupied compartment would have more passengers by the time the 1:20 p.m. local reached midway, from Vashi station.
There were only two other passengers in the first-class ladies’ compartment. An elderly woman was reading
Mid Day
, the popular Mumbai tabloid, at the far end. A young woman was occupied in texting on her mobile from the seat across hers.
Did Siddharth reply? And, did he really love her? She willed her mind to unfailingly answer to her liking. It made her happy when she believed that they were lovers.
Both the women got down at Vashi. A bunch of schoolchildren entered. She knew they did not carry first-class tickets, but did not mind them being there. It was safer with them around. The entire compartment would be empty without them.
It was barely two months since a shocking incident on a local train had created a fear psychosis in women commuters. A drunken man had raped a young girl in an Andheri-bound train, during the late hours. The act was all the more heinous considering that the seventeen-year-old street urchin was mentally challenged. Appallingly, it happened in a general compartment, in full view of five other passengers. Four men and a woman were mute spectators, and claimed they were too scared of the rapist to stop him.
The local train usually stopped at stations in five-to ten-minute intervals. This meant that the rape could have been prevented. How could a drunken man rape a girl in front of five other people? It was unbelievable. Fellow passengers could have shouted for help at the stations. Someone could have pulled the emergency chain. If not for such times, why was the chain there in the first place?
One of the passengers was a journalist with a reputed national daily. He lodged a police complaint when the train reached Andheri, the last station.
The abused girl was terrified. Unable to react, she sat huddled on the wooden bench at the station, barely clad, according to news reports. Charges were pressed against the offender, and the man was taken into custody.
The journalist went ahead and wrote a page-one anchor story for his newspaper, which was published with his byline the next morning. It was August 15, the Independence Day of India.
“Shame on us,” people reacted.
This followed reaction stories, and quotes from shocked citizens.
The girl was taken to a shelter for destitute women. Her family was located a week later.