Akhila smiled her thanks, knowing that she would never use either of Katherine’s gifts. Then Katherine placed a jute shopping bag on Akhila’s table and murmured mischievously, ‘Look inside.’
Akhila peered in and saw what seemed to be a green-coloured plastic egg case.
‘There are four eggs in it,’ Katherine continued to whisper. ‘For you to take home. Maybe you can hide them in your home and cook them when your mother’s asleep or something. Do you know how to boil an egg? Just fill a small vessel with enough water to cover the egg and boil it for about eight minutes. Then pour cold water on it and it’ll be nice and firm. If you boil it for just five minutes, the
white would have set and the yellow will be a little gooey. That’s nice as well. Try a soft-boiled egg sometime. I think you’ll like it.’
Akhila put the bag near hers and worried what she was going to do with it. Perhaps she could leave it behind on the train and that would be the end of it. But when it was time to get off the train, Akhila found herself taking the bag with her. As she walked home, she wondered if she could thrust it behind some bush and then suddenly, she was turning into her street and she knew that she was taking the eggs home. And she was going to tell her mother about it.
Amma accepted her taste for eggs like she had endured Akhila’s father’s fondness for snuff. It wasn’t the done thing but it could have been worse. What if Akhila had taken to eating flesh? An egg in many ways could be considered akin to milk. All Amma asked was that Akhila buy the eggs in the city and that she dispose of the shells secretly and away from the home and neighbourhood.
Akhila cooked and ate her eggs in her mother’s kitchen. Amma gave her a saucepan, a long-handled spoon and a little bowl that were relegated to a far corner of the kitchen when not in use.
All of Akhila’s wondrous explorations and magical discoveries were locked within the fragile shell of an egg. First there was the perfect eight-minute egg that she sliced and arranged on a slice of bread and butter. Then there was the five-minute egg. Akhila tapped a little hole on top and scooped out the almost set white and quivering, runny yellow insides with a spoon. But it was the three-minute egg that made Akhila feel the most adventurous. The three-minute egg was an almost raw egg that she tossed down her throat without gagging even once. But it had to be piping hot. Once Akhila tried beating a raw egg into a cup of milk. But she almost threw up. To Akhila, an egg was an egg only when it was surrounded by a shell and baptised by boiling water.
Akhila — spinster, government employee, historian, eater of eggs, reminisced about the years that had gone past. How easily the memories tumbled tonight. How effortless it was to remember when the coupé cradled and rocked; a mother that stroked the brow and said: Child, think on. Child, dream on …
Akhila raised herself on her elbow and peered outside. The countryside swathed by the night sped by. Sheela had finally said she was ready to sleep. Together they had pulled up the middle berth and now Sheela lay on it, curled, still clutching her leather bag to her chest.
Sheela and Janaki. Two ends of a spectrum. Young girl, old woman, and yet how different were their lives from hers? They could be her, Akhila thought. She could be them. Each confronting life and trying to make some sense of its uncertain lines. If they could somehow do that, as well as they knew best, why can’t I? With that thought, Akhila felt a slow gathering of joy. A thin stream that let loose tributaries of trickling hope. An anticipation that what she had set out to do might not all be in vain. That Akhila would triumph one way or the other.
Akhila settled back on the berth. The fiery, noisy mating of the wheel and track echoed through her head. She pulled the sheet to her chin and closed her eyes. For the first time, she felt protected. Sheltered from her own self The train knew where it was headed. She didn’t have to tell the train what to do. The train would stay awake while she slept.
Akhila, cherished, safeguarded, secure, felt sleep slither over her. Her eyes grew heavy. It was a respite from being Akhila. She dreamt:
Akhila is a little girl. She is in a railway compartment. A first-class coupé. They are all there – Appa, Amma, Narayan, Narsi and Padma. They are going to Vishakapatnam. Why Vishakapatnam, Akhila doesn’t know. But she knows it is far away and by the sea. The landscape is unfamiliar – sand dunes and a sea that is an almost impossible navy blue. Appa is happy. He is laughing. Amma
too. The boys are playing with a car and Padma is singing loudly. Akhila is so happy that her heart could almost burst.
Amma opens the huge lunch box that’s been kept on the little table attached to the wall of the coupé. Tiers and tiers of her delicious food. Mysorepak dripping with ghee and round brown pebble-like cheeda. Coconut rice and puliyodhare. Curd rice studded with jewels of glistening pomegranate seeds, emerald slivers of chillies and curls of coriander.
They eat. Akhila can smell the oregano in the murukku. Its salt floods her mouth. A crumb clings to the corner of her mouth. She snakes her tongue out and licks it in.
Appa stands up and combs his hair looking into the mirror above the little table. He smiles at himself in the mirror and says, ‘Let’s all take a little nap.’
Akhila wonders at this new Appa who can’t stop smiling.
They lie down. This is a first-class coupé. There are only four berths. Amma and Appa have a berth each. The boys share one berth and the girls another. Akhila puts her arm around Padma’s waist and croons her to sleep.
Akhila wakes up suddenly. The coupé is layered in darkness. There is no one there. She is alone. ‘Amma, Appa,’ she calls. But there is no response.
‘Narayan, Narsi, Padma, where are you?’ She is crying by now. She climbs down. The coupé is empty, she thinks. Then she sees the man seated by the window. She turns around wildly. The door has been latched.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ she demands. The voice that comes out is a grown-up voice. Akhila is not a little girl any more.
‘You don’t know me,’ he says. ‘But I know you. I know all about you.’
‘What … what do you mean?’ she stutters in confusion.
‘You are Akhila,’ he says and comes to stand by her. ‘You are Akhila the woman. Everyone else might have forgotten about the woman within you. But I see her. I see the desire in her eyes, the colours in her heart.’
His voice is low and husky. Akhila feels it wind around her. A python that gathers her within its grasping coils.
‘Don’t you know me, Akhila?’ he asks. ‘Don’t you know me, really? Think. Think hard.’
But Akhila can’t remember. All she knows is that suddenly she feels a strange elation. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, I remember,’ she lies.
‘Do you remember this?’ he says and traces the outline of her lips with the forefinger of his right hand. She sucks in her breath. She should feel outraged, she knows. She doesn’t. She feels electric shocks shoot through her.
His finger moves, along her jaw. She closes her eyes. He blows on her eyelids. She arches her throat. His finger slides down. He runs it down the length of her arm. Between her fingers. She moans.
‘Do you remember this?’ he says.
She doesn’t. These sensations are new but she fears that to say so would make him stop. ‘Yes, yes,’ she pleads.
With the finger, he flicks her sari off. It is sheer chiffon. It falls easily. A pool of yellow chiffon lies at their feet. He touches her breasts. First one, then the other. She wants to rip open her blouse and bare her flesh to him. Her fingers rush to the buttons. He murmurs, ‘Ssh, ssh, not yet.’
He circles her nipples through the cloth. An aching tautness grips her. She leans towards him.
Suddenly the door of the coupe opens. They stand there. Appa and Amma, her brothers and sister – except that they are children no more. ‘You shameless creature. You brazen slut,’ Appa thunders.
‘How could you?’ Amma cries.
‘What are you doing?’ her brothers shout and turn their faces away, ashamed by the lust that they can see dancing on her face.
Akhila feels blood rush up to her face. ‘Here, cover yourself,’ Padma says, a grown-up Padma who flings a towel at her.
‘I … I …’ Akhila tries to explain.
‘Don’t let them get to you,’ his voice murmurs in her ear. And as they watch, he cups her breasts. Hefting them, rubbing her nipples between his thumb and forefinger. And Akhila doesn’t care about anyone any more. She simply leans back against his body and closes her eyes. Nothing has ever felt so good before. She hears the coupé door slam.
Akhila woke up with a start. Where am I? she asked herself, looking around her wildly. Everything was unfamiliar … then slowly she remembered.
She thought of her dream and blushed. She ran her hand over her breasts. Her nipples were stiff. How can I dream such dreams?
She saw Margaret open the door of the coupé. ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ the younger woman said.
The train was still. Akhila looked out of the window. It was an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere. Akhila glanced at her watch. It was quarter past three. Neither night nor day. The hour of reckoning when dreams tumble and fears surface.
Margaret came back. ‘The train has been here for more than twenty minutes. I woke up to a crying sound.’
Akhila’s hand rushed to her mouth. Had she been voicing the lust of her dream?
‘It was that girl. She was crying in her sleep,’ Margaret said.
‘No one else seemed to have heard her,’ she said. ‘So I climbed down and woke her up. She is asleep now.’
Lying on her bottom berth, Akhila pictured the girl above her, curled on her side.
‘I don’t think I can go back to sleep,’ Margaret said. ‘The train gets in to Coimbatore at five in the morning and if I go back to sleep now, I won’t wake up and I might miss the stop.’
She leaned against her middle berth and looked down at the sleeping Janaki. ‘It’s such a pity we are not sleeping on
the same side or we could have folded down my berth and been more comfortable.’
‘I heard the girl and you talk,’ Margaret continued. She was whispering as if she didn’t want anyone else to overhear her. ‘I wasn’t asleep yet.’
Akhila didn’t say anything. Margaret, she thought, wasn’t expecting a response anyway.
‘I was thinking … of us, the women in this coupé. I don’t mean the woman in the top berth or Sheela. They don’t count … not really. I was thinking of Janaki and Prabha Devi. Women like you and me, and I couldn’t stop thinking of how angry I felt, no, I don’t know if anger is the word, it was more like vexation when I saw your face after Janaki told us about herself I saw how unsure you felt. As though you felt you had made a mistake and … I thought, even if Prabha Devi talks to you, how different would her life be from Janaki’s? That bothered me. Do you understand what I am trying to say?
‘They are nice women but they are the kind who don’t feel complete without a man. They might say otherwise but I know them and women like them. Deep in their hearts, they think the world has no use for a single woman.’
Margaret paused for a moment as if she was making up her mind on which direction her words should take. ‘The truth as I know it and as I live it is that a woman needs a man but not to make her feel whole. Are you asking yourself – what does she know? A married woman talking of not needing a man …
‘Which is why I am going to have to tell you about Ebe and me. And when I have, you’ll understand why I say that a woman doesn’t really need a man. That is a myth that men have tried to twist into reality.
‘Do you know what I was doing in Bangalore?’
Akhila shook her head. She felt overwhelmed by the intensity of Margaret’s words. What startling revelation was she about to hear?
‘I came here to drop my husband off at a health clinic. A
place where people go to get a hold on their weight; and on their lives. He goes to the health clinic every year. Ebe needs to. I don’t know about the others but the effects of the regimen there don’t last long with Ebe. For a few days, he is almost back to what he once was. Which makes him think that he has managed to wrest his life back. So I have to step right back in and wrench it back from him. Once I do that, Ebe becomes of no consequence.’
Oil of Vitriol
God didn’t make Ebenezer Paulraj a fat man. I did.
I, Margaret Shanthi, did it with the sole desire for revenge. To erode his self-esteem and shake the very foundations of his being. To rid this world of a creature who, if allowed to remain the way he was, slim, lithe and arrogant, would continue to harvest sorrow with a single-minded joy.
Among the five elements that constitute life, I classify myself as water. Water that moistens. Water that heals. Water that forgets. Water that accepts. Water that flows tirelessly. Water that also destroys. For the power to dissolve and destroy is as much a part of being water as wetness is.
In the world of chemicals, water is the universal solvent. Swayed by the character of all those who take it over. But just because I’m familiar, I’m not typical. That was the mistake Ebe made. He dismissed me as someone of no significance. So I had no other recourse but to show him what the true nature of water is and how magnificent its powers are. That it is water in its various forms that configures the earth, atmosphere, sky, mountains, gods and men, beasts and birds, grass and trees, and animals down to
worms, flies and ants. That all these are only different forms of water. That water is to be weighed carefully or it will weigh upon you! That was the first lesson I had to teach him.
All these years, I was frozen in a solid state. In this form, my ability to make things happen remained low. I let myself float on the surface of time, impervious and oblivious to what my life had become.
In my frozen state, I had forgotten what it was to be water. Then something in me snapped. Something happened. A chemical change.
There is a technical name for the water that I turned into. Supercritical water. Capable of dissolving just about anything which, as mere water, it wouldn’t even dare aspire to. Raging with a vehemence that could burn and destroy poisons that if allowed to remain, would kill all that was natural and good.
When I woke up that morning, it seemed no different from any other day. I went through the morning chores and walked to the school as I usually did. When there were just a few minutes for the morning assembly bell to ring, I went to stand by the window of the chemistry lab. From there I could see most of the quadrangle where the assembly is held, the senior school classrooms and in the distance, the school gate. The usual number of stragglers wheeling their bicycles were trickling in.
The older children were seldom late. In fact, they came in earlier than they were required to. In those precious minutes before the watchful eyes of the coterie began their incessant beat through the hallways of the school, love notes were exchanged, exploratory caresses managed and juvenile dreams spun.
The younger children had no such hormones to prise their eyelids open at dawn. There would come a time when they too would feel the tug of their teens, outgrow their shorts and skirts and take to entering the school portals long
before they were required to. But right now, late and breathless from running, they had to contend with the teacher and the boy prefect on duty.
Three minutes before the assembly bell rang, the gates were closed. And a prefect wrote down the names of the children who were stranded outside. The names were pinned up on the noticeboard and depending on the offenders’ frequency of lapses, punishments were meted out.
I craned my neck to get a better look at the teacher in charge. The god of the school gates and pre-teen anguish for the day. The stance was both familiar and unmistakable. Legs slightly apart. Hands clasped at the back, a slim cane around which the long fingers of the right hand curled ever so daintily, authority in every fibre, priggish righteousness in every breath. The quintessential school principal. And my husband. Ebenezer Paulraj.
The sky was the colour of freshly cast zinc. A bluish silver surface that would slowly oxidize to form a greyish protective film as the day wore on. Swirls of dust rose from the vast acres of playing-fields. Where hundreds of feet trampled, even the hardiest of grass couldn’t survive. The few shoots that dared show their effrontery by raising their green heads were ruthlessly pulled out and thrown into the compost heap as per the orders of Ebenezer Paulraj — the destroyer of blades, grass and humans alike.
I stood there watching him as he surveyed his kingdom. The cane was his sceptre; a symbol of the power that he wielded. He waggled the cane and, in my mind, I saw the curl of the upper lip, heard the voice that barely rose above a few decibels and could yet rip a child’s self-esteem to shreds in a matter of seconds. And I realized that I hated him more than I had ever hated anyone.
I mouthed the words: I HATE HIM. I HATE MY HUSBAND. I HATE EBENEZER PAULRAJ. HATE HIM. HATE HIM. I waited for a clap of thunder, a hurling meteor, a whirlwind, a dust storm … for some super phenomenon that is usually meant to
accompany such momentous and perhaps sacrilegious revelations.
The sky continued to shine a bluish silver and the breeze settled to merely rustling the leaves of the ficus tree and I knew that the literature that spawned such hyperbole had proved itself to be false again.
I turned my back to the window. A faint smell of sulphur clung to the room. The counters were arranged with gleaming lab paraphernalia — test tubes, beakers and pipettes, for the morning experiments. This was my familiar world. A world that was neatly divided into solids, liquids and gases. Predictable and orderly, where the composition of an element determined its behaviour. Here, there was no room for excesses and chaos. In my domain, there was order and calm.
I felt relief course through me. Pure, colourless, odourless, dense relief.
I was no longer unsure. My feelings, that had until now refused to clarify their chemical structure, had revealed themselves.
For so long, I had wondered what it was I felt for him. How does one know if one loves, hates or is merely indifferent to a man? How does one measure what one feels? With a test tube or a pipette? With a spatula or a weighing balance?
But now I knew. Peace licked at my insides with a luminescence as I hurried down the stairs. Children filed past me in orderly lines. There were staircase prefects who stood vigil at both staircases to ensure that there was no pushing or jostling. This was a far greater crime in Ebenezer Paulraj’s eyes and the punishments were so much more dreadful.
It wasn’t as if he resorted to corporal punishment. He was the regent of the incorporeal world. He simply found out what a student liked to do best and then forbade the child from doing it for a week or for as long as he deemed fit. No library for one. No hockey for the other. No taking part in
an inter-house football match. No representing the school at a quiz contest. I did try suggesting that there were probably other ways to instil discipline in a child, that there was really no need to take it to this extent. But he pretended not to hear me. Ebenezer Paulraj listens to no one but himself.
You would know that by looking at him. By the manner in which he stands on the dais surveying his charges as they fall into place. The smaller ones in front, the taller ones at the back. Middle school to senior school. Brothers, sisters, neighbours, friends. Grey old plodders, gay young friskers … It doesn’t matter who they are, when in front of Ebenezer Paulraj, they are all reduced to tongue-tied, round-eyed sponge bags, absorbing every word, every nuance, every inflection that he greets them with every day. Ebenezer Paulraj rouses fear; I doubt whether he has ever been adored, loved or worshipped by the children as some other teachers were. As for the coterie, they thought of him as their captain: a good captain, and a fair captain.
The coterie stood two steps behind him on the dais. It was only I, Margaret Shanthi, who stood apart. Positioned behind the children, posted there to reprimand the shufflers, jokers and trickster aces of senior school. But from where I stood, head tilted, I saw only his face. I saw Ebenezer Paulraj for who he really was.
There had been a time when he streaked my thoughts with jeweller’s rouge. Finely-powdered ferric oxide; rosy-red dust that polished precious metals, diamonds and dreams. But just as ferric oxide turns to rust, so it was with the hopes I had for our life together.
I met Ebenezer Paulraj when I was barely twenty-two years old. I was riding a wave of triumph then. The university results had been declared and I was the gold medallist for that year. ‘A gold medal in M.Sc. chemistry. She was always a good student but this …’ my parents took great pride in telling anyone who asked. ‘We’d like her to
study further. Work towards a doctorate and perhaps go to America where brains like hers are highly prized,’ they added, confident that their dreams were mine too.
I wasn’t so sure if I wanted to study further or leave Kodaikanal where we lived. I liked being home. Pottering about in the garden, taking long lazy naps in the afternoon and then, there was Ebenezer Paulraj. He had already insinuated himself into my life, corroding academic ambitions and parental aspirations. Ebenezer Paulraj wanted me to be a teacher just like him.
All through my university years, I worked so hard to be ahead of everyone else that I had little time to spare, for boys or real-life romance. Occasionally I read a Mills & Boons romance and allowed myself to fantasize about the time I would meet someone who was all that a man ought to be. Someone who would be worthy of the pages of a romance novel.
I always thought that fine features spoke of sensitivity. Ebenezer Paulraj’s features were finely chiselled and he was tall and well built, with a dark complexion. I fell in love with him the first time I saw him at the church youth group meeting. Who was this magnificent looking man? I wondered, eyeing him again and again. He was dressed plainly and affected none of the fashions the men of my generation did. He stood apart and in that aloofness I saw a dignity. He was someone my favourite Mills & Boons authors would have approved of and I wanted to know him better. And then when he began to sing, I knew I would give up anything to have him. Mid-way through the song, he looked into my eyes and smiled. He feels the same way about me, I gleamed.
I wore my happiness like a halo. Luminescent phosphor. Glowing in the dark. Shedding light and laughter.
Two months later, before there could be even a whiff of scandal, Ebenezer Paulraj did what was expected of him. He had his parents meet mine and our wedding date was set.
‘What a wily creature you are! Why didn’t you tell us
about him?’ my elder sister Sara teased as soon as Ebenezer Paulraj and his parents had left. We were sitting in the living room drinking a second cup of tea that winter afternoon.
I smiled in embarrassment. ‘I didn’t know how you would react. If you would find him suitable …’
‘Why did you think we wouldn’t find him suitable? We couldn’t have found a better match for you if we had looked ourselves,’ my brother-in-law said with a guffaw.
‘He’ll look wonderful in a suit; such broad shoulders and a perfectly upright carriage,’ my mother gushed. My mother was a great one for appearances. She lavished most of her energy on the house. My father often joked that we could eat off her floors. But he wasn’t joking now when he said, ‘And so intelligent and charming. But that’s no surprise. Everyone knows that the Paulraj family of Trichy is an aristocratic one. So many lawyers, judges, academics, high-ranking bureaucrats are Paulrajs – they are a breed of thinking men!’
‘If you ask me, he’s a terrific catch. Only twenty-nine and already vice-principal of such a prestigious school,’ my uncle said.
‘You will look very good together. He, so tall and dark, and you so delicate and pretty. Like a knight and a lady,’ my aunt, who cherished Walter Scott as much as she did my uncle, whispered in my ear.
How they adored him, my family. And I basked in the praise they chose to bestow on him. He was mine and I was the one who had brought this amazing man into their lives.
On the night before the wedding, my mother came to my room. My silly mother with her gay prattle was suddenly serious. She had come to fill in the gaps the priest had left while instructing me on the holy sacrament called marriage. She told me what it meant to be a wife. Of the loyalty that was demanded of me. Of being faithful. Of putting in more effort than a man ever would, to make a marriage a successful partnership. She told me how a divorce was very often the result when a woman didn’t
make that extra effort. Of sex, except that she called it the physical side of marriage. And how a good wife never says ‘no’ even if she isn’t in the mood. I listened patiently, wondering if she really believed I knew nothing about marriage or sex. I was a virgin as all good girls of good families are before marriage, but Ebenezer Paulraj and I had managed a few furtive kisses and experimental caresses. Besides, unlike her, I was marrying the man I had fallen in love with and not someone picked for me simply because he was suitable.
A few minutes after my mother left, my father walked in. I wondered what he would have to say. My usually reticent father who left all the gushing, explaining and narrating to my voluble mother. He pushed aside the heap of ironed and folded saris that were to accompany me to my new home and sat on the bed. He looked at my face and smiled. ‘Tomorrow’s the big day,’ he began.
I nodded.
My father took my hand in his. ‘He’s a good man. Ebenezer will make you very happy.’