‘So, have you learned to swim yet?’ the coach mocked a few days later.
‘I will,’ she said, quietly brushing aside his scorn with dignity.
Prabha Devi watched the children. She saw how they kicked the surface of the water raising glittering rainbows. How they stretched their arms. How they moved their arms. How their legs propelled them forward. And how they did all this with borrowed air held so desperately in lungs that strained to hold it in. Air that demanded to be let out. Prabha Devi took a deep breath and held on. One of these days, it would be time.
For a while Prabha Devi despaired. It seemed the time would never come. October spent itself out in storms. The monsoon descended on the city and wrung everything and everyone out into a state of tiredness. Then came the festivals, Dussera and Deepavali, for which Prabha Devi had much to organize. The hours of the days were dictated and monitored by Jagdeesh. There was the puja; the sweet boxes for employees, associates and clients to be ordered; fire crackers and new clothes to be shopped for; visits to various homes; playing hostess … Prabha Devi thought of the swimming pool longingly and forced herself to go on with her chores.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jagdeesh demanded. ‘Are you unwell? You don’t seem very interested in anything.’
Prabha Devi shook her head mutely. ‘Nothing is wrong. I’m just a little tired,’ she said.
He gave her a piercing glance and went away to make a telephone call. Prabha Devi stared at his back, dejected.
For so many years now, this has been the tone of voice he uses when he talks to me. Halfway between a reprimand and a lesson … why does it rankle now when it never did before? Prabha Devi asked herself. Perhaps it is his disappointment speaking. For the woman I have become. A meek, mean-spirited shadow of who I was. How could any man not be irritable when faced with the thought of spending a lifetime with such a woman? And yet, I do not know how to change; how to restore the balance of our relationship … It seems to me more and more that I know nothing.
A week after Deepavali, Prabha Devi decided that the day had arrived. She told Jagdeesh that she had enrolled in a baking class for three weeks.
‘Why?’ he asked curiously.
‘Why not?’ she retorted.
Jagdeesh looked at her in surprise. For a second, he thought he saw the woman she had once been. The spirited sensual creature who had whetted his senses with her dazzling smiles, mercurial disposition and exacting body. This Prabha Devi was the keeper of his home and the mother of his children. She listened. She obeyed. She lived on the outposts of his life. And frankly, he found himself getting a little irked by her complete lack of self-worth. What was this sudden fascination to learn to bake, to do something more with her time, he wondered.
Prabha Devi was oblivious to the gyrations of Jagdeesh’s mind. All she could think of was the moment when she would feel the waters of the pool surround her.
Prabha Devi walked to the swimming pool with a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. Part fear, part excitement. With a little girlish giggle, she thought how it reminded her of her wedding night when she was led to the flower-bedecked
bedroom. Jagdeesh had waited for her there. The pool waited for her here.
Prabha Devi stood in the changing room, uncertain. Should she keep her bra and panties on? Or should she strip completely before she pulled the swimming things on? In the end, she took off her underclothes, smeared herself with sunscreen lotion and put on the swimsuit-bicycling shorts combination. She wrapped a bath towel around her, put on the cap to keep her hair dry, left her stick-on bindi on her forehead and holding the float walked to the pool.
The pool attendant gave her a curious look. She hesitated. How could she take her towel off when he was around? ‘What are you doing here gawking at the pool? Don’t you have anything else to do?’ she demanded in her most imperious manner.
‘I’m on lifeguard duty, madam,’ he stuttered.
There was nothing she could do but pretend that he wasn’t there. She began to walk towards the pool.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ he mumbled, ‘you have to take a shower before you enter the pool. It’s the rule,’ he said, pointing to a wall where the pool rules were clearly written in red paint. Dictates about long hair and swimming caps; showering; eatables and drinks; proper swimming attire and behaviour; diving and unaccompanied children below twelve; and the club authorities not being responsible for any accidents …
‘Of course I was going to shower,’ Prabha Devi said, anxiety adding a scythe-like edge to her voice. ‘Do you think this is my first time at a swimming pool?’ Prabha Devi walked to the open-air shower area at the side of the pool. She took a deep breath and removed the towel. The shower came on, spouting jets of piercingly cold water. It took her breath away, and made her forget her embarrassment at being near naked in front of a strange man.
She stood by the pool rim at the shallow end. There was a little metal ladder leading into the water. Which way now? Do I climb down with my back to the water? Or
facing it? Everything I do now is at my own risk. I won’t even have the club authorities to blame, Prabha Devi told herself as she climbed down the ladder.
The water was cold. It nibbled at her skin, raising her flesh into bumps and sending little electric shocks to her brain. Then she remembered the coach hollering at the children, ‘Duck down, go on, hold your breath and go underwater. You won’t feel so cold any more …’
Prabha Devi did just that and the water gathered over her head. When she surfaced, spluttering and swallowing as the air rushed out of her mouth, she felt completely unprepared for what lay ahead. What am I going to do next?
Prabha Devi held the bar, put her face in the water and tried kicking. When it was time to leave, her legs felt like sacks of sand, heavy and rooted. Muscles she had never known she had announced their presence with little spasms of soreness. It was a struggle to climb up the ladder without falling back into the water.
For three days, she did nothing but kick the water into arcs of misty spray and fill the air with the flat thwack-thwack sound of limbs slapping water. When she tired, she ducked under water trying to keep her eyes open. The chlorine waters stung, causing her eyes to redden, but she would get used to it, she told herself as she held onto the bar and raised her back so that it seemed as if she was almost floating on her back.
On the fourth day, Prabha Devi discovered that she didn’t need to cling to the bar. She held it with just the tips of her fingers, and she could still stay afloat, as long as she kept her head in the water and held her breath.
Fifth day. Prabha Devi decided it was time she weaned herself away from the steel bar. She rested a leg on the pool’s sidewall, gathered as much air as she could in her lungs, and propelled herself forward, hanging onto the rubber ring the pool attendant had given her. She moved. She tried to let go of the rubber ring. She sank. For a second, panic swirled. I’m drowning, I’m dying, a voice
shrieked in her head. Then she surfaced. Prabha Devi reached for the bobbing ring and went back to the steel bar. She wasn’t ready yet, she decided.
Sixth day. Prabha Devi tried to explore the breadth of the pool at the shallow end. When she ran out of air, she sank. When she surfaced, she saw the swimming coach watching her with amusement. ‘Throw that ring away,’ he said.
‘How can I stay afloat without it?’ she asked.
‘You are already doing that,’ he said with a grin.
‘Oh,’ Prabha Devi said, pleased by his words. Then realization dawned. It was all very well for him to say so. What if she drowned? ‘I could drown. With the ring, I have something to cling to,’ she tried to explain.
The coach squatted by the side of the pool and asked her, ‘How tall are you?’
‘Five foot, two inches,’ Prabha Devi said, wondering what that had to do with the rubber ring. In tennis, she had heard Vikram mention that the weight of the racquet depended on the weight of the player. Was there a similar equation she didn’t know about in swimming?
‘So what do you have to worry about?’ the coach retorted. ‘Look, you are in four feet of water. How can you drown? Even if you ran out of air and sank, your feet would touch the bottom instantly. And you’ll surface,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Here, give me that useless thing.’
Prabha Devi gave him the ring wordlessly. What he said made perfect sense. She smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘I’ll come by in a couple of days and see how you are doing,’ he said on his way out.
For the rest of the hour, Prabha Devi tried to float. As long as she trapped air in her lungs, the water gave her right of way. When the air escaped, like irate prison guards, the water closed in on her. At the end of the hour, she had floated across the pool’s breadth in three consecutive attempts.
On the seventh day, Prabha Devi rested. That night she
felt a tiny fist of desire unfurl. A flowering of senses. A singing of nerve ends. A passion tinged with recklessness that made her press the line of her body against her husband’s. Jagdeesh, half asleep, felt the warmth of her body against his. A sensuality ripe and about to explode. For so long, there had been none of that between them. When Jagdeesh wanted to, they coupled quickly and quietly. For him, a mere satiation of a bodily need. For her, a dutiful acceptance of her role in his life.
Jagdeesh stirred. A slow excitement crawled through him.
In his arms, she felt different. The slackness gone. A new tautness. A hint of muscle. Tensile sinews. Electric shocks.
‘What have you been doing?’ he asked, his hands seeking with a boyish fervour this almost strange body.
‘Nothing. Just floating around,’ she murmured truthfully, revelling in the awakening of what she had thought were forever-entombed desires.
When had she last known such a plethora of sensations?
Skin against skin. Fingers. Mouth. The arc of eyelids. The curve of the ear. The bristles of his moustache. The coil of her hair. His breath hers.
Taut nipples drew patterns. A clenching within: not yet, not yet. Toes that explored. A tingling down the spine; now all over … The rustle of desire. Floods that raged. A rush of wetness. Bodies arched. Clung. Parted. Only to melt together again.
The roar in the eardrums as water gathered over the head suddenly. I’m drowning. I’m dying. When there was no more air to draw upon, cut through the waters to the surface and the feet touched ground.
Jagdeesh went to sleep with a smile. God was just. Life was good. And Prabha Devi made him feel like a boy of twenty-one.
But Prabha Devi lay awake. When would this body that had spun and whirled through corridors of pure feeling learn to stay afloat?
The next morning, Prabha Devi stood in the pool deep in thought. Last night had taught her many lessons. All of her married life, she had wondered what would happen if she let Jagdeesh know that she wanted to make love. Would he be repelled by the nakedness of her hunger? Would he turn away? Would he lose his respect for her?
But she had discovered that desire spawns desire; fulfilment begets fulfilment. A kiss for a kiss. A caress for a caress. What one gives comes back manifold. Ever since Pramod, ever since the souring of life, she had held back. Crippled by the fear of what would happen if things didn’t work out the way she wanted them to. Prabha Devi looked at the stretch of water. She took a deep breath and pushed herself forward. Beneath her the floor tiles gleamed with dancing reflections. The water was like silk, curling around her with a quiet swish.
She felt the years slip away from her. This body that had been the cause of much unhappiness, first with its excessive demands for gratification and then with an abrupt deadening of nerve ends, now melted. She was the blue of the pool and the water was she.
Time ceased. A weightlessness. A haze of memories. A cloud of unconnected thoughts. Of being and not being. From the tips of her toes to the tips of her fingers, a straight line, a slow triumph. I am afloat. I am afloat. My body no longer matters. I have this. I have conquered fear.
When Prabha Devi’s fingertips touched the other end of the pool wall, she straightened. And Prabha Devi knew that life would never be the same again. That nothing else that happened would ever measure up to that moment of supreme content when she realized that she had stayed afloat.
Akhila gazed at the landscape that whizzed past her. The lushness made her eyes smart. She had never seen so many shades of green. The train ran alongside paddy fields fringed with coconut palms. It was harvest time. Yellow stacks of paddy lay supine on the brown thirsty earth. Yellow and brown, green and gold … how restful the landscape seemed even though change was so much a part of it. Why is it only we humans who resist change? Why do we fight it? Why couldn’t her family accept her decision?
Some weeks ago Akhila was filling in a raffle coupon in a supermarket and when she came to the box against which was written ‘age’, she wrote mechanically the number 45. All of a sudden, Akhila paused. She was forty-five years old and she had nothing to show for it. Not even memories.
Akhila looked around her at the other women shoppers, their baskets brimming like their lives. She glanced down at the basket she held. Its sparseness was pitiful. A face cream that promised to defy age; a shampoo that offered to put the bounce back in her lank hair, and a packet of instant starch. She could have bought any of these from the corner shop near the railway quarters but Akhila didn’t like the thought
of Padma standing beside her at the shop counter, unscrewing jar lids and sniffling at their contents. Nor did she want to be present when Padma announced to anyone who cared to listen: when I get to be in my forties, I intend to age gracefully. None of these creams and hair dyes for me. Let me tell you, nothing can match the glow of contentment on a woman’s face.
An opinion that she was perfectly entitled to, but nevertheless it wounded Akhila’s feelings as it was meant to. These days she thought two steps ahead of Padma to protect herself from hurt. But it wasn’t fear that old age would increase her dependence on Padma and with it bring pain that prompted Akhila’s decision to make a life for herself
First of all, it was the realization that at forty-five, she was still living life from the sidelines. But mostly it was because of Karpagam.
Karpagam who squeezed herself into the aisle and back into Akhila’s life with the ease of a veteran queue jumper. ‘Akhilandeswari, is that you?’ she shrieked, her breath fanning down the back of Akhila’s neck.
A voice from the past. From a time when life had been a series of boxes drawn in the dust beneath a mango tree. All one had to do was hop, skip and jump to triumph.
The measure of the familiarity in that voice was born of a bonding sprung within the arc of a skipping-rope. As it slid beneath their feet, swept the dust and swung into the air, binding them together by a single rhythm and an obsessive need to go on and on till they could jump no more.
A friendship that flourished while walking to school and back, sharing secrets and five-paise coconut toffee. A relationship that ran itself out when they left childhood behind and Karpagam became a wife and Akhila, the head of her family.
Akhila stiffened. No one had called her by her full name for almost twenty-five years now. She felt afraid. Her mouth dried up and her tongue felt like that of an old shoe. Unwieldy and brittle.
‘Who? How?’ Akhila stuttered.
‘Have you forgotten me?’ she cried jostling her arm. ‘I’m Karpagam. Don’t you remember me?’
Akhila took a deep breath and let the air cushion her nerve ends. ‘This is a surprise. A real surprise!’
Karpagam gave Akhila an amazed look and put her basket down on the counter with a thud. ‘It should be. I haven’t seen you for more than twenty years. You look the same, though.’
‘What is this? Is that all you are buying?’ she asked, looking at Akhila’s basket.
Akhila felt Karpagam’s eyes sweep over her. What did she see?
When Akhila looked in the mirror, a stranger accosted her. A pale ghost of a former self A woman with sallow cheeks and a droop to her mouth. Lines on her throat. Concentric circles on the trunk of a teak tree. Either way they determine age.
Akhila would touch her hair. During the day she coiled her hair into a little bun and let it lie on the nape of her neck. Only in the night, only when she was alone did she let her hair flow down her back. Akhila pulled her hair to either side of her face and sometimes, perhaps it was a trick of the light or it was a flowering of a secret desire, but she saw Akhilandeswari. The girl who talked in soft rounded sounds. This stranger had a voice with the rasping hoarseness of responsibility.
When Akhila stepped two feet back, the stranger in the mirror disappeared. She knew this body: Akhilandeswari’s body. Akhila wedged a pencil beneath the curve of her breast. It rolled off. Her stomach was flat and smooth. No silvery fish sailed across it. She slid her hands over her body.
Akhila paused. Who was this creature in whose thighs age crawled in green-blue bands? How could time have stilled and been laid to rest in a nest of blue veins on her calves? This was not her. The real her. Akhilandeswari.
In Karpagam’s eyes, Akhila saw the stranger. A quiet
creature with little life or spirit. Barren of all the marks that proclaimed she was a wife – no thali sparkling on her bosom, no kumkum bleeding in the parting of her hair, no glistening toe rings bonding her to connubial bliss. A colourless insignificant woman who had nothing better to do than drift aimlessly through the aisles of a supermarket pretending to shop for things she didn’t need.
‘Let’s sit down somewhere,’ Karpagam said, taking Akhila’s arm and leading her to the supermarket café.
Akhila sat at a table and watched Karpagam as she piled the tray with jam rolls, a plate of samosas and two steaming cups of coffee. She radiated content. It was there in the roll of flesh around her midriff; in the hint of a double chin; in the padding of fat around her wrist. It was in the colours she wore: the chrome yellow of the blouse; the green and yellow Bengal cotton sari; the gold of her jewellery, the vibrant maroon of her kumkum. Her eyes sparkled. Her cheeks dimpled. Her hair was streaked with an occasional line of grey. Ripeness in all.
‘I couldn’t resist it,’ she smiled, pointing with her chin to the loaded tray. ‘I don’t understand how people can ever go on a diet. My daughter is always on a diet. One week, she exists on juices – have you heard of anything more ludicrous than that? The next week, it is just raw chopped vegetables. All nonsense. If you ask me, you only live once. So you might as well live well.’
Akhila smiled uncertainly, wondering if there was a reproach hidden in there for her.
Karpagam bit into her samosa and brushed the crumbs off her chin. ‘All of us admired the way you took charge of your family when your father died. My mother would often talk of you almost with awe and then bring up Jaya’s name. Do you remember her?’
Akhila nodded, unable to speak.
‘I wonder what’s happened to Jaya. Where she is now and what happened to Sarasa Mani and the other children. When the head of a family dies, the family dies with him,
my mother would say, unless there is a daughter like Akhila.’
Akhila smiled. She didn’t know what else to do. She hadn’t thought of Jaya for a very long time now.
‘So tell me, what have you been doing with yourself? I know that you left Ambattur after your mother died. Have you decided to live in Bangalore for good?’ Karpagam asked.
‘I haven’t been doing anything. Just the usual. Office, home, office … Padma – you remember her, don’t you, my younger sister – and her family live with me, so she takes care of the house.’ Akhila dismissed questions for which she had no answers anyway.
Karpagam reached across the table and squeezed Akhila’s hand. ‘I thought you would have a life of your own by now. I can see that you don’t. Doesn’t your selfish family realize that you deserve some happiness of your own?’
The samosa lodged in Akhila’s throat. ‘What can they do? I’m past the age for all that.’
‘Past the age for what?’ she asked. Akhila saw Karpagam’s eyes narrow. For a moment, she gazed at Akhila appraisingly. Then she asked softly, ‘Define happiness for me. What will make you happy?’
Akhila drew patterns on the formica table-top with her forefinger. How would she define happiness? Would she even know what happiness was if it stared her in the face?
She thought of the New Year greeting cards that she and Katherine sent each other every year. ‘Happiness is,’ Akhila said, parroting the greeting card messages, ‘being allowed to choose one’s own life; to live it the way one wants. Happiness is knowing one is loved and having someone to love. Happiness is being able to hope for tomorrow.’
Karpagam sighed. ‘Akhi,’ she began, reverting to her childhood name for Akhila, ‘What do you want? A husband? Children?’
‘No, no,’ Akhila whispered, wondering if anyone in the café was eavesdropping. ‘No, I don’t know …’
Sometimes Akhila thought that what she wanted the most was an identity of her own. She was always an extension of someone else’s identity. Chandra’s daughter; Narayan’s Akka; Priya’s aunt; Murthy’s sister-in-law … Akhila wished for once someone would see her as a whole being.
But would Karpagam understand? Would she who wore marriage as if it were a Kancheepuram silk understand that what Akhila most desired in the world was to be her own person? In a place that was her own. To do as she pleased. To live as she chose with neither restraint nor fear of censure.
That while Akhila did ache to be with a man and yearned to allow her senses to explore and seek fulfilment, that while she wished to be loved by a man who would fill her silences and share all of himself with her, she didn’t want a husband. Akhila didn’t want to be a mere extension again.
Karpagam listened as Akhila tried to explain what she had never dared to voice even to herself
‘So why don’t you live alone? Your sister is old enough to look after herself. And it isn’t as if she doesn’t have a husband and family. Akhi, you are educated. Employed. Get a life for yourself,’ Karpagam said, pushing a hairpin into place with the same determined attention she was giving Akhila’s life. ‘And,’ she added, ‘stop looking around every few minutes. What are you afraid of—what the world will say? Akhi, ask your sister and family to leave your home. That’s the first thing you need to do.’
Akhila looked at all the other people in the café. Cups of coffee being drunk, pastries being eaten; everyone was with someone.
‘How can I live alone? How can any woman live alone?’ she asked hopelessly.
‘Look at me,’ Karpagam’s voice tore through the dense layers of self-pity. ‘If I can live alone, why can’t you?’
‘But you are married. You don’t live alone,’ Akhila said
in exasperation. How could Karpagam compare herself to her?
‘I was married,’ Karpagam said, meeting Akhila’s gaze steadily. ‘My husband died some years ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. But …’ Akhila mumbled.
‘I know what you are thinking. You are wondering how is it I still wear the kumkum and these colourful clothes? Would you rather that I dressed in white and went about looking like a corpse ready for the funeral pyre?’
‘No, of course not,’ Akhila murmured. ‘But what does your family have to say about all this?’
Karpagam took a deep breath and said, ‘I don’t care what my family or anyone thinks. I am who I am. And I have as much right as anyone else to live as I choose. Tell me, didn’t we as young girls wear colourful clothes and jewellery and a bottu? It isn’t a privilege that marriage sanctions. The way I look at it, it is natural for a woman to want to be feminine. It has nothing to do with whether she is married or not and whether her husband is alive or dead. Who made these laws anyway? Some man who couldn’t bear the thought that in spite of his death, his wife continued to be attractive to other men.’
The words cascaded out of her mouth with the ease of one who has mouthed them several times before. And Akhila realized with shame that while she had in the manner of a docile water buffalo wallowed in a pond of self-pity, allowing parasites to feast on her, Karpagam had gone ahead and learnt to survive.
‘I live alone. I have for many years now. My daughter who is just twenty-three does as well. We are strong, Akhi. We are if we want to be.’
‘So what do you suggest I do?’ Akhila asked.
‘Whatever you think you want to. Live alone. Build a life for yourself where your needs come first. Tell your family to go to hell or wherever.’ Karpagam smiled and scribbled her address on the back of the bill. ‘Write to me. Let’s stay in touch.’
Akhila put the piece of paper in her purse. Outside, she touched Karpagam’s arm. ‘Karpagam, are you real or are you some goddess who has come here to lead me out of this …’ Akhila stopped, thinking of the dark and dismal hues of the world she had lived in for so long now.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Karpagam laughed. And it was the memory of that laugh, a cock-a-thumb-at-the-world laugh that became Akhila’s totem for what she intended to do with her life.
On Sundays Padma oiled her daughters’ hair. She warmed sesame oil and rubbed it into their scalps till the hair glistened and lay heavily against the scalp. Then she washed their heads with soap nut powder. Padma should have been the older one and not I, Akhila thought.
A month had passed since she met Karpagam. A month of frenzied planning, frantic activity and furtive thoughts. A month in which she examined every single thought and her service files with close attention. A month in which Akhila took the many skeins of her life and began to braid them into a future. A month later, she was ready.