Panic fans the flames of fear. Panic dulls. Panic stills. Panic tugs at soaring dreams and hurls them down to earth. Panic destroys.
Akhila felt panic dot her face. She had escaped. But from what to what?
Quo vadis.
Akhila remembered the name of the strapped Bata sandals her father had bought just before he died.
‘Quo
vadis,’
Appa read aloud from the side of the box. ‘Do you know what that means? It’s Latin for “Whither goest thou?” I like the conceit of a pair of sandals that dares ask this question. Something I haven’t asked myself for a long time.’ He justified the expense of buying an expensive pair of footwear, of allowing himself to be inveigled into buying a brand from a shoe showroom rather than picking up a pair from the usual shoe shop.
Quo
vadis?
Akhila asked herself. Then in Sanskrit:
Kim gacchami.
Then in Tamil:
Nee yenga selgirai.
Akhila didn’t know any more languages but the question dribbled through the boundaries of her mind in tongues known and unknown. Kicked by a creature in a yellow-and-red striped jersey and spike-studded boots called panic.
Akhila saw herself as a serpent that had lain curled and
dormant for years. She saw life as a thousand-petalled lotus she would have to find before she knew fulfilment. She panicked. How and where was she to begin the search?
She rested her forehead on the peeling brownish-red window bars. For the rest of her life, the smell of orange peel and rust would be for her the odour of panic.
The train pitched and heaved through the night. The window bars felt cold against Akhila’s skin. Janaki’s soft voice continued to echo in her head. It occurred to Akhila suddenly that she was doing it all wrong. She was treating another woman’s life as though it were a how-to book that would help her find clear-cut answers to what she needed to do next. She let the thought loose on her tongue. She hadn’t done this for a long time, she thought. Air her feelings, her thoughts, without having to worry that it would be used against her someday.
‘You are right,’ Akhila slowly turned towards Margaret, feeling the words form in her mouth with relish, ‘I can’t ask other people to make up my mind for me. If I were to make up my mind based on what Janaki had to say of her life, then I should continue to live with my family. I might not love them, but at least they are there.’
‘You’ve only heard Janaki’s story. How can you give up so easily?’ Prabha Devi said. The disappointment in her voice was palpable.
‘I didn’t say I’m giving up,’ Akhila said.
‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know. Not yet … When I worked in Madras, I had a friend. A young Anglo-Indian girl. Her name was Katherine Webber. I used to visit Katherine’s home every week and some days her Mummy would chat with me. One time, she said something about finding sermons even in stones. I don’t remember why she said it nor did I understand what she meant. But I do now. Your lives are different from mine. And it is silly of me to think that if you told me about yourselves, your lives, that would guide me
in my decision. And yet …’ Akhila shrugged, unable to continue, her thoughts suddenly in a tangle.
Janaki paused in the middle of combing her hair and smiled.
‘Why are you smiling?’ Akhila asked.
‘I can already see a change in you. For the first time this evening, I can see life in your eyes. I can almost feel the excitement that is within you. Earlier in the night, when I saw you standing on the platform, I thought to myself, what a rigid looking woman, with capable hands and a stern face. I thought you were a school headmistress or a nursing superintendent.’
‘I didn’t know school headmistresses had a certain look,’ Margaret said, not bothering to hide her annoyance.
‘Oh, they do,’ Prabha Devi butted in. ‘They have this air about them as though the whole world is a bunch of unruly school kids who have to be put in their place. But you don’t look like that … you look like someone working in a multinational company, you know, successful, confident …’
‘Alright, alright, I get your point,’ Margaret said with a smile. A radiant smile that made her eyes sparkle and took everyone by surprise.
‘I’m not who everyone thinks I am,’ Akhila said slowly.
‘I know that now. But you hide behind such a stiff armour of control that most people must be in awe of you,’ Janaki said.
When Akhila remained silent, she said gently, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’
‘You didn’t hurt my feelings. Not at all,’ Akhila said. ‘But I was thinking about what you said. I wasn’t always like this; so stiff and restrained. I had to grow a shell around myself To protect myself. To deflect hurt and pain. If I hadn’t, I would have gone insane.’
Janaki reached over and touched her arm. ‘I’m sorry if I made you think of something painful from your past. Forget it. Forget this conversation.’
She briskly plaited her hair and then turning to the others said, ‘Isn’t it time we thought about settling in for the night?’
One by one, they opened their bags and took out sheets and pillows. Janaki had the lower berth. She stood up so that Margaret and Prabha Devi could raise the middle berth and fix it to the top-most one.
‘Which one do you want? The middle one or the top one?’ Prabha Devi asked Margaret.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t mind either.’
‘In that case, I’ll take the top one.’
Janaki filled a glass with water from a bottle, unscrewed a small vial and took out a tablet. When she caught Akhila’s eye, she let a wry smile flutter on her lips. There were no more secrets, it seemed to suggest. And suddenly, the awkwardness that had crept in between them seemed to dissipate.
Prabha Devi hovered by the door of the coupé. ‘Shall I latch it?’ she asked.
‘No, don’t worry. I will latch the door once the last passenger comes in. I’m not sleepy yet,’ Akhila said.
‘Goodnight’ floated from berth to berth; woman to woman.
‘Sweet dreams,’ Prabha Devi giggled.
‘I don’t dream, ever,’ Janaki said wistfully.
‘I do, I think. But I never remember what I dream,’ Margaret said.
Akhila heard their voices drift somewhere in the distance. She was back to staring out of the window.
Akhila shut her eyes and tried to let the rhythm of the train lull her to sleep. And into the past …
Appa was a quiet man with bowed shoulders and a grizzly head of greying hair. An income-tax office clerk who counted the passage of time by the number of brown files that crowded the ‘in’ tray on Monday and moved to the ‘out’ tray by Saturday. From morning to evening, he
shuffled through the hours demanding little from them or anyone, except that they leave him alone for one day of the week.
To Appa, Sundays were a full-fledged weekly dress rehearsal for that day when he would retire and could live life on his own terms again. He should have been a scholar; someone whose job it was to pore over ancient texts, blowing the dust from stacks of palm leaf on which a sharp writing tool had imprinted the tenets of life and religion. Mumbling, memorizing, devising corollaries that allowed him to travel through the inner alleys of his mind while life wrapped itself silently around him.
Instead of which he was thrust into the middle of an office where someone always had something to say to him: a taunt, a jibe, an insult, a titbit of trivia that in some convoluted fashion was a reflection on him. He was the butt of jokes and much laughter. They laughed about the way he walked, the clothes he wore, the food he ate … why, they even laughed at the way he suffered their mockery. He stomached his humiliation silently in the misguided belief that if he didn’t react, they would finally leave him alone. Instead, it merely incited his tormentors and provoked them to subject him to greater ridicule.
Besides, there was the matter of bribes. A file moved from one table to the other in that office only when its passage was aided by the greasing of palms, a little lubrication to smoothen its transit. Except, Appa did not take any bribes. Which meant the files on Appa’s table took longer to leave. He put his signature on a file only when he had read every word and checked every figure until he was satisfied that everything was the way it was meant to be. Some of the clerks grumbled that he was doing it wilfully; that while he might not want to accept bribes, what business did he have preventing them from taking any. ‘If he keeps delaying every file, who do you think is going to pay up?’ they demanded.
The others – crafty ward officers and sometimes taxpayers with incorrect figures – scorned Appa for his foolish integrity and said, ‘It is not as if you have to do anything. Just do as we all do. Turn your head the other way and don’t ask any awkward questions. For this you will be paid handsomely. What kind of a man are you? You don’t know how to milk an opportunity.’
But Appa always did what his conscience asked him to. So he bowed his head, hunched his shoulders and said, ‘I have to live with myself and this is the only way I can do it.’
Appa often talked about his superior, a man called Koshy. ‘How does that Koshy sleep at night?’ he would say. ‘He is so corrupt that he’ll ask for a bribe if you ask his permission to sneeze in his cubicle. Even the files that I have verified and signed, he will set aside on his table pretending that I have found a major discrepancy in the computation and that the only way to clear the file will be to pay me a bribe. Only this afternoon, I heard him tell someone – I don’t take any bribes, I don’t know about other people in this office. Who does he mean by that? Me. And all those people go away thinking that I am the reason they have to come back to the tax office again and again. And as if that weren’t enough, since he knows that I won’t accept any bribes, he has instructed the peon to route the bribes through that Jain fellow who has no scruples about accepting them, for himself or anyone else.’
The unscrupulous Jain, Babu the peon, Dorai the clerk who sat next to him, these names were part of their lives but it was Koshy that Akhila and her family had learned to hate. They didn’t know what Koshy looked like but in their minds, he was a demon. A Narakasura, a Hiranyakashypu, a Ravana, all rolled into one vile monster with poison for blood and sharpened quills for words. Koshy who tormented Appa and tested his goodness. Koshy who hated Appa and every year ensured that Appa’s confidential files bore no relation to what Appa actually did in that office.
Every year, Akhila and her mother would wait for Appa to be promoted, for his increment plus benefits to grow so that Appa’s face would finally be wreathed in a smile and Amma would have more spending money. But every year Appa knew only disappointment. ‘As long as that Koshy is my superior officer, I am destined to work like a mule without any rewards,’ Appa would say, anger cresting his voice. And they would turn away, knowing that nothing would change in the way they lived their lives as long as Koshy reigned.
On a Sunday, the first act of pleasure for Appa was the walk to the corner shop to buy the Hindu. At the income-tax office, by the time the newspaper reached him, it was stained with tea spills and ink blots, and tattered at the edges. A sheet or two was always missing. On a Sunday, Appa read the newspaper end to end, beginning with the Art Buchwald column on the back page and working his way to the front page, wading through miles of classified advertisements. Sometimes Akhila thought he read every word of those as well. Only when he had finished with it was anyone else allowed to even touch it.
At quarter past ten, Amma would stand at the kitchen door wiping her hands on a rag. He would glance up from the newspaper and stare at her appraisingly. When her lips parted, it was with an invitation that excluded everyone else. ‘Aren’t you hungry? You must be. You have had nothing to eat since you woke up.’
Akhila and the other children knew that they had to wait for their mid-morning meal till Amma had finished attending to their father. If their stomachs rumbled, they were expected to stay out of hearing distance so that he didn’t hurry through his meal. Sometimes Akhila wondered if Appa would have preferred for all of them to dine together but she never found out. Amma liked it this way.
He would sit on a little wooden platform and Amma would lay the green plantain leaf before him. The mound of white rice glistened whiter than ever. On Sundays, Amma
cooked Appa’s favourite dishes. Piping hot, fragrant with the alchemy of steam, spices and Amma’s devotion to this man who for her sake and the children’s sake lunched on rice and curd and a slice of lime pickle six days a week and never complained.
When Appa had belched to signal that he was replete, he would walk to the broad wooden plank that hung from thick iron chains fastened to the ceiling. He would lie on it with his legs crossed at the knees and allow the swing to lull him into a stupor where all his worries and fears had no place to roam.
The rest of them – Amma, the boys Narayan and Narsimhan, the baby of the family Padma, and Akhila would lie on the grass mats. Outside the sun scaled the skies but the cold stone floors kept them cool. They would lie there, with full bellies, with sleep weighing down their eyelids, languishing in individual pools of want.
What did her brothers seek to complete the circle of their lives? A toy? A book? Some money to buy a ticket for a matinee show at the cinema theatre?