The Two Krishnas (36 page)

Pooja shrugged, “I don’t know, a certain resemblance, I just thought…” her voice trailed off. “Have you never been married, Charlie?”

“No,” he chuckled. When she looked at him, and before she could ask why, he punctuated it simply with, “She said ‘no.’ ”

“My husband…”

“Yes?”

She glanced away from him momentarily, feeling her throat seize up.

“Rahul?”

“You know another one?” she managed to joke. “You know, I love the way you pronounce his name. Perfectly, Charlie, not like others.”

“Ah, you mean like other
goras
?” he laughed self-deprecatingly. “Ra-hool, Ray-haul! Dear God, I can only imagine all the bloody variations!”

She laughed with him, then just as quickly her face solidified again, the smile waning, a look of distance shadowing it.

“Haven’t seen that chap since that first time when I met you both at the bank party. Ah, you cut such a handsome pair, Pooja. How’s he doing?”

She turned aside and continued gazing out the window, but this time she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. “You know, Rahul is the only man I’ve ever loved,” she said. “The kind of love that makes us abandon our life’s plans, all other obligations. It’s crazy—love, marriage. You give your whole life, your entire being, all your happiness over to another human being, trusting completely. I’ve loved him this way, down to the very last nerve ending.” When she turned to look back at Charlie, her eyes had filled up.

“That’s the only way, is it not?”

“But you don’t realize the peril of such love, not until it’s too late. You see, mediocre marriages, and I’ve known some of those couples, they are not in this kind of danger, perhaps because the expectations are lower, I don’t know. But the good ones, the ones you have invested so completely in, those are the ones that damage you the most,” She gave an uncharacteristically bitter laugh. “All those years of feeling secure, grounded in love, in faith, all of that, just gone one day. Gone. It turns out that in the end, the stronger you feel, the more fragile you become. Everything comes unhinged so easily, so quickly.”

Charlie was stunned at such candor in the woman who he always saw as being especially private. He drew closer to her. “Love is never pure, nor constant, Pooja. Ups and downs, that’s what’s normal, love. We grow dissatisfied with one another and pull apart and then, if we hang in there, and if we are bloody lucky, the affection returns and we sort of pull together again, don’t you think?” He paused. “Pooja, has he done something?”

Unable to speak, Pooja grimaced and covered her mouth with her hand, the tears coming again.

“Pooja?”

“He’s having an affair, Charlie,” she said, her voice strained to a whisper.

He touched her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, love,” he said. “How are you holding up? Oh, that’s a bloody stupid question.”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head and gnawing at her fingers like a frightened little child. “I don’t think I can live through this, Charlie.”

He knelt down beside her. “Is it serious? Maybe…maybe…it’s just a phase?” he asked hopefully.

“Oh, God, Charlie,” she said. “It’s so much worse…”

“Worse? Pooja?”

She tried to speak but the words were stuck within her. She thought again about Rahul and the boy, saw their naked bodies locked together, and the words swelled upwards from her chest in one enormous wave. She clamped her mouth shut with one hand, looked around frantically and, noticing Charlie’s private bathroom, rushed past him and into it. There, crouched over the toilet bowl, she retched. Charlie rushed in behind her and he too got down on the floor next to her, bracketing her with his arm.

“Oh, God!” she cried. “I’m so sorry. What have I done?”

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Please, don’t worry about it, love,” he said, handing her the yards of toilet paper he ripped from the dispenser.

“No, no, it’s not okay,” she remonstrated, flustered and frantically swabbing the toilet seat. “I’m so sorry, Charlie. Please, you must give me a moment. I’ll just clean this up.”

“Pooja, oh, my dear, it’s nothing!” he insisted, taking her hands in his. “Please don’t worry about it.”

But she broke away from his grasp, quickly slapping her hand on the flush button, disposing the bile, as if by doing so she could pretend no one had seen it.

“Pooja, it’s all right, really.” In his effort to raise her, Charlie pulled her into his arms. She could smell his cologne. It smelled old, paternal, like vetiver, lavender and vanilla all mixed together. She ruptured into tears, hiding her face in his chest, consumed by shame and remorse, but not without at least some relief. They stayed this way for some time and when, at last, she raised her head and looked at him, she said, “I’m so ashamed, Charlie. I’m so ashamed.”

“Why? You haven’t done anything.”

“But I must have…I must have caused this.”

“Oh, Pooja, Pooja,” he sighed, taking her face in his hands and looking deeply into her eyes. “You can’t blame yourself for this, love. It’s not your fault he’s seeing her.” She started to tell him but then she heaved into sobs again and he took her back into his arms. “There, there. There, there,” he patted her on the back. “It’s going to be all right. He’s just going through some phase, I’m sure of it.”

“No,” she said, disengaging. “No, it’s not. It’s…another man.”

Charlie started to say something but was struck silent.

“How can this be happening?” she asked, confounded. “He was never that way, Charlie. Never! I don’t know what has come over him.”

He ran his fingers over her tear-stained cheeks. “Dear girl,” he said, suddenly noticing how warm she was. “You’re burning up.” Charlie helped to raise her to her feet and silently they went back into the office where she sat down by his desk, her head hanging low.

“The tea—no, one moment,” he said and from somewhere behind his desk, he retrieved a small plastic bottle of mineral water and a container of pills, a couple of which he shook onto his palm and handed over to her. He also placed a box of tissues by her. “Apis,” he said to allay her fear when she looked at the little pearls in the palm of her hand. “Completely homeopathic. They’ll help, trust me, love—” but then he hesitated, suddenly unsure if consuming ground-up bees was against her Hindu sensibility. But by then she had already thrown them back into her mouth and chugged down the water unceremoniously. She plucked a few sheets of the tissue and dabbed at her face, regaining some of her composure. Her kohl had begun to run and left a streak on one of her cheeks.

“Sometimes,” she said. “I feel like it’s all happening to someone else, not to me. And then, I just want to laugh, a relief comes over me, like what was I thinking, you know? It was all just a hallucination, nothing else. But then it all comes back and –” she took more swallows of water. “Do you know what
birha
is?”

At first the question seemed so out of context to Charlie that he was momentarily confused, but then he said, “Yes, yes, of course. The anxieties and pangs of separation from your beloved.”

She nodded. “It’s necessary to cultivate love in separation, just as Radha did for Krishna or the
gopis
that he danced with…” but then she winced and started shaking her head, as if trying to stop the onslaught of another spasm of pain.

“Whatever happens, Pooja, you must know that you can’t blame yourself for something like this. Such things,” he said, coming around the desk to be near her, and choosing his words cautiously, “such things are seldom instigated by, or a reaction to what someone’s done. Sexuality is deeply rooted, Pooja, so congenital. Nothing a wife did could drive a man to want another man.”

“It’s wrong,” she said. “It’s not natural, Charlie, not for us!”

“Pooja, really. You mustn’t worry about it on the basis of religion. I don’t know of any religion that is more, well, progressive, inclusive about such matters than Hinduism.”

“But we don’t have such things, Charlie. I should know,” she protested, slapping her chest.

“You have followed, you have read but…Oh, Pooja, let’s not get into all that,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “The important thing here is that he’s being unfaithful to you. Let’s leave the gods to their own personal dramas.”

“I need to talk to him again. I must make him see,” she said frantically. “This sickness…Maybe we can talk to someone. Maybe there is some kind of cure.”

“Not that it makes your situation any less painful,” he said gently. “But these things, they’re connate. They’ve existed from the beginning of time. That’s why I don’t think it’s anything you’ve caused. And do you know what I find especially ironic? It’s that a Hindu of all people can be so shocked by such matters. I mean, it’s so prevalent in the culture, Pooja, in all your mythologies, sacred texts, all that imagery—” But then he noticed that she wasn’t listening at all. He had lost her to the vortex of her thoughts again. Charlie abandoned his discourse at once. He knelt down beside her, took her hands in his and when she slowly looked back up at him, he said almost longingly, “Just tell me how I can help.”

She threw her head back at the ceiling, a deep sigh escaping her lips. “I wish I could understand. I don’t know how to stop this pain,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I don’t know how to help him.”

“Then for now,” he said, squeezing her hands, “we shall simply have to start by focusing on you, Pooja.”

But from the look on her face, childlike, puzzled, it was clear that she had no concept of self-preservation, of what it meant to exist without being subsumed in another.

* * *

The house, empty again as it usually was in the middle of the afternoon, rang with silence. Instinctively, Pooja closed the bedroom door behind her. She got on the floor and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser in her closet, billowing with old undergarments scented by a sachet of magnolia fragrance beads. Even though she couldn’t remember the last time she had done this, her hands dug deep into the clothes until her fingers felt a small, rectangular tin box resting where she had left it years ago. Slowly she lifted the tin, lightly rusted on the edges, up and into the light. The Cadbury’s chocolates had been long depleted, the room inhabited now by the proof of several lives.

Her hands were trembling as she placed it gently on the carpeted floor and prepared to open it.
How strange,
she thought,
that in the end, this was all that remained of entire lifetimes, of a whole era, of love, something that could be neatly encompassed in a loaf-sized box that once used to hold hazelnut chocolates in little paper trays.
After looking at the shut door one more time, Pooja pushed the lip open. It gave no hesitation and snapped open like it had just exhaled. Photographs, letters, keepsakes, looked back up at her like long-forsaken paramours reaching for reconciliation. There was also a neatly folded, white cotton handkerchief with “R.K.” embroidered in red, and there were faint, brown stains on it. Pooja lifted it to her and smelled it, hoping for a fragrance of the past.

She picked out a fading photograph and they were all there—Rahul’s sister, Kiran, with her expectant smile and striking resemblance to him, and both his parents—the gregarious Ravi Kapoor in a checkered safari suit and the impeccable Suchitra Kapoor in a turquoise printed sari, and next to them, with Ravi’s arm extending all the way around her back, Pooja in one of Kiran’s saris, young and blissful besides her in-laws. They were standing on the verandah of the Kapoor household in Mombasa, against a trellis of abundant bougainvillea, and though she couldn’t see it clearly from the old photograph, she sensed the Indian Ocean roaring over the balcony behind them as it broke over the coral reef on the island. It had been at the end of the Ram Naumi celebration of Lord Rama’s birthday when the family celebrated with temple offerings and feasts at home. For eight days there had been daily recitals of the Ramayana recounting Lord Rama’s banishment and exile into the forest, the abduction of his wife Sita by the demon Ravana, and upon her returning, the cruel trial by fire through which she proves her purity.

Pooja heard them again now—Kiran’s delicious, full-bodied laughter as she teased Pooja mercilessly about her brother, Ravi Kapoor calling her his “little
apsara”
and the regal Suchitra Kapoor rolling her eyes at both father and daughter and trying through disapproving grunts to maintain some dignity as they were immortalized by Rahul’s camera.

She ran her finger longingly over them. A single teardrop fell upon the photograph and one by one they rebounded from it, coming alive.