That we didn’t have conversations any more didn’t surprise me. But what did was how we snapped at each other and as always, our arguments ended in my carping about his not helping with any of the household chores.
‘You never have any time to devote to the house,’ I grumbled. ‘You always have meetings with the trust board or your welfare committee. Why don’t you spare a moment for the welfare of your wife? What is that thing you advocate with such emphasis in the school? SUPW – Socially Useful Productive Work. Ha! How about some supw in your own home?’
He squashed my rebellion sharply. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. My job is a very responsible one. There can be no half-measures. Unlike you, I take my responsibilities seriously and fulfil them.’
I felt my mouth fall open. What responsibilities didn’t I take seriously?
‘Besides, what are you complaining about? There are just the two of us in this house. How difficult can it be to manage a household of two people?’
After a while, I gave up. I didn’t have the energy to try and thrash things out. Or, perhaps it was that I lost hope. That should have told me something. That when I knew I couldn’t change him, I had no more expectations of this marriage or relationship …
I no longer protested. I smiled and joined in the laughter. I became what he wanted me to be: a good sport and a team player. The universal solvent.
Every time I meet someone, after a few minutes, they cease to be a person. To me, that person becomes a chemical. Someone whose nature has been identified, recorded and reckoned with. It helps me understand the person better; formulate my behaviour in his or her company and therefore reduce any chance of accidental explosions. It is a quirk; a peculiar but harmless one. And it has always worked for me. For what is a creature sans its chemical nature?
Ebenezer Paulraj smirked when I tried to explain my theory to him. ‘You think you are original? Let me tell you that Virginia Woolf thought of it long before you were
born. Except that she used animals. Now, that is imagination for you. Who would think of chemicals except someone completely lacking in imagination? Nasty smelling horrible things!’
I don’t care how Virginia Woolf came to terms with aspects of human behaviour. To me, my chemicals are everything. My friends, companions and guides who have been with me through most of my thirty-five years. And it is they who wafted to the top of my mind as I watched Ebenezer Paulraj and his coterie display their unity and camaraderie.
I was not sure if each and every member of the teaching staff felt the same adulation for Ebenezer Paulraj. I will never know. For as his wife, they thought my allegiance rested with him. They did not trust me either. So each time I walked into the staff-room, an uneasy silence crawled on all fours, weaving its way through the rows of tables and chairs.
For many years, I spent all my free hours in the chemistry lab. Sometimes a member of the coterie came looking for me. But I avoided them as deftly as I could. And if my silence didn’t drive them away, I made sure the smell of the chemistry lab did. All I had to do was open the jar of hydrogen sulphide and the stink of rotten eggs would cloud the air. Why they sought me out, I don’t know. Perhaps it was out of some misguided sense of loyalty they felt for their captain.
The coterie wasn’t a large one. But it held the reins of the school.
There was Premilla Madhav, the Senior School economics teacher. The chemical element bromine. Heavy, with hair tinted a reddish brown. Volatile and giving off a strong and disagreeable body odour. Not very active by herself, but united readily with others. But she needed to be watched. For she was capable of causing much injury; inflicting wounds that almost never healed. And so maximum precaution had to be taken when handling her.
Next in line was Daphne, the English teacher. Light and silvery like the element lithium, she dazzled everyone with her charm and smile. When she was excited, crimson stained her cheeks, adding to her allure. Sometimes when he thought no one was watching him, Ebenezer Paulraj gazed at her, bewitched. She was special, that much was certain. More than her charm, more than her beauty, what made her so was her ability to make a person feel less unhappy. But she wasn’t very popular with women; they felt dowdy in her presence.
Then there was Sankar Narayan, the Hindi master. There was only one element that could be him — cobalt. Goblin. Evil spirit. Short and dumpy. Hard and brittle, but posturing as the amiable iron and nickel. He could be counted upon to trace almost anything that happened in the school, from thefts to bathroom graffiti to romances. The children told me that they called him Tracer Gamma Ray and there was even a ribald limerick about him that made the rounds of the school, handed down from one class to the next:
Sankar Narayan Gamma
Went to a drama
Without his pyjama
Dangling his banana.
Not all of the coterie were elements. Some of them were so much more complex that they could be classified only as salts, acids or gases; derivatives displaying several characteristics. It was to this group that the last three members of Ebenezer Paulraj’s coterie belonged. First of all, there was Xavier, the history master. Colourless, pleasant, sweet and completely undependable if one was in hot water. But one sip of alcohol and he was a different man. Droll and funny, he reduced everyone around him to uncontrollable laughter. Xavier, nitrous oxide, laughing gas. He was a great supporter of combustion, but by himself was incapable of igniting anything, let alone a child’s mind.
Arsenic. Her name was Kalavati. With grey hair and a
turmeric-tinted face. Teacher of mathematics and poisoner of minds. Reeking of garlic and with a temperament that verged on the extreme, arsenic knew nothing of the middle path, the in-between stage. Either she was your best friend or your worst enemy.
And finally, tetrasulphur tetranitride. The trickiest of the lot. Nawaz, the vice-principal. Second in command, trusted aide, he changed his colour with the temperature of the room. Vociferous when there was a general discussion; sitter on fences when opinion was divided, and almost invisible when an argument reached its climax. While he was stable enough, he could also explode in response to any sudden friction, so perhaps it was just as well that he stayed away from all controversial discussions and was simply a superconductor of Ebenezer Paulraj’s theories.
And then there was him. Ebenezer Paulraj. Biting. Scathing. Colourless. Oily. Dense. Sour. Explosive. Given to extremes. Capable of wiping out all that was water, fluid and alive. Fortified to char almost anything that was organic – wood, paper, sugar, dreams. Concentrated sulphuric acid. H
2
SO
4
. Hydrogen sulphate. King of chemicals. Oil of vitriol.
There were shades to Ebenezer Paulraj. At times, he was blue vitriol, imbued with copper. Radiating goodness and positive energy; remedying deficiencies with his presence; helping, cleansing, healing. Other times, he was green vitriol, possessed by iron. Capable of reducing anything and anyone to insignificance by the sheer force of his personality. He did it unconsciously and naturally. When he was ruled by cobalt, he was rose vitriol. Protective of all that was weak and defenceless. Then there were times when zinc took over and he was white vitriol. Mordant and destructive of anything that he considered irrelevant. But nothing could change his core quality which determined who he was – oil of vitriol.
Ebenezer Paulraj liked to run. Ebe liked the image of himself running. When I first met Ebe, he took with him everywhere he went, a book called The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner
. ‘This is one of the greatest books ever written,’ Ebe said. ‘Listen to this …’
I didn’t know what the writer meant or why Ebe was so excited about it. But I was content to accept what Ebe claimed. That it was one of the greatest books ever written.
Only later, much later, when I read it, I realized that what Ebe liked about it more than anything else was its title. It was the kind of book he liked to be seen with. There was a copy on the bookshelf at home and another one that rested on his table in his office with its cover tantalizingly displayed, so that everyone who walked in could see it and draw their own inferences. It was unconventional. It was angry. And it was just the right age; too new to be called a classic in the true sense and too old to be thought of as avant-garde or modern. Ebe was like that: anyone who was his contemporary and an achiever, Ebe saw as a threat. Never mind that they probably lived in another country.
Ebe took the book with him everywhere he went. By now, he knew enough to recite a few passages from memory. But I doubted if Ebe ever really cared what the book was all about. It was simply his way of making a point about himself and his running. Just as with the movie Chariots of Fire. Ebe loved it. He arranged for a friend to bring him a video copy from the US and he watched it again and again. All those supple young men, running and racing against themselves. Ebe saw himself as one of them. The runner. The lonely runner. The runner who kept on running because that’s what he did best.
Ebe would have liked to run by the sea. Or along a mountain trail. But Ebe also liked an audience that would give him their complete attention and so he chose the school. He stayed back after school, waiting for the last bell to ring before he changed his clothes and shoes. The children hovered in the playground watching the school
teams and the coaches as they went about their evening practice of football and hockey. Ebe knew they would all be there – waiting, watching. He would go to the school playground, to the tracks, and run for the next forty-five minutes. Some days he ran longer. When Ebe stopped, there would be sweat dripping off him and his breath would come in little gasps. The children and the coaches would watch him admiringly. ‘Running,’ Ebe would claim to them, ‘is the best exercise. Nothing can match it, neither swimming nor tennis – my other favourite sports.’
Running, Ebe claimed, helped him concentrate and focus. Running was what had made him the man he was, he left unsaid.
Ebenezer Paulraj was a man of routine and punctiliously followed a timetable. Every evening, he came home by a quarter to seven, if he wasn’t attending a meeting or engaged elsewhere. When I heard the car at the gate, I would put the kettle on. He sipped his tea and walked around the house. Often he stood before the gilt-edged mirror that hung near the door and preened. He was still a magnificent looking man, with taut muscles and skin like silk. Once, just looking at him had made me desire him. Now all I felt was scorn for his vanity. Ageing peacock!
When he had showered and changed into fresh clothes, Ebe would switch on the stereo. His taste in music, like his appetite for food, was characterized by restraint.
If Ebe had a weakness, it was food. He loved eating; the richer the food, the better he liked it. Fatty bacon, roe-filled sardines, chicken liver, the globs of fat that butchers threw in to make up for the bones when selling mutton, double-yolked eggs, mangoes with cream and ripe sapodillas, puris, fritters, chips – heavy with oil, dense with calories. But Ebe loved his body even more. So he controlled his natural fondness for eating. He never took a second helping, fasted for a whole day once a week and had forbidden me to cook anything that would test his will and make him succumb.
I was the weak one. I allowed myself all that I shouldn’t. Sometimes it was the only thing that comforted me. I bought the biggest bar of chocolate I could find and hid it. Each time I chose a different place. In the fridge; in the wardrobe; on top of the bookcase … Just knowing that it was somewhere in the house gave me a secret thrill that made me forget that I was dissatisfied with life. Ebe would get angry when he saw me snack. So I would wait for him to go out of the house and then I would take out my bar of chocolate. I allowed myself the pleasure of peeling the purple paper wrapping and then tearing open the gold foil little by little as I nibbled at my chocolate. Some days when I was not content with the chocolate alone, I opened a tin of condensed milk and dipped a spoon into it, eating till I felt nauseous. But my ‘Milkmaid’ days were not very frequent. Usually a bar of chocolate and a packet of chips to take the sweetness away from my mouth were all I needed to fulfil my cravings.
It showed on me: in the double chin, in the rolls of fat around my waist; in the thickness of my calves and the puffiness of my wrists. I hated to look at myself in the mirror. But at least I was no longer daddy’s little girl.
Ebe liked Western classical music. I don’t know if he really liked it or if he made himself like it because that’s the kind of music principals of prestigious schools ought to listen to. To me, it sounded like the music they played in elevators and in the lobbies of luxury hotels.
Ebe worshipped the masters. But he was meticulous about categorizing his worship. So he chose a composer and then read everything he could find about him. While he read, he played the composer’s music. He was forever getting tapes recorded or CDs sent to him. That night it was Bach.
Bah! Bah! Bah! I spat the name under my breath and felt like a defiant child.
Why couldn’t we listen to music most people heard?
Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles, Madonna, Chicago, ghazals and Tamil songs … No, it had to be Bach or Beethoven, Chopin or Mozart. Sometimes the voice in my head raged and fumed so hard that it felt as if my skull would explode.
That night Ebe put aside his book and came to stand at the kitchen doorway. ‘What have you cooked?’ he asked.