Short Story by Ravikumar Pillai
Lakshmi got up as usual at five in the morning. Over the past few years, she had grown comfortable with the exclusive company of the one person whom she had all along, especially since her marriage, taken for granted and hardly ever listened to, consoled or cared for.
When your time was not in your control and you had to shuffle a hundred demands on you by the exclusive circle of near and dear ones, where were the moments that you could self-talk, give gentle soothing strokes or sing an occasional silent lullaby to the inner you? Even now, when she looks at her image in the mirror, she has the nagging doubt rushing in, “Do I know this person well enough, in a non-judgmental way?”
She recalled that Sunday afternoon which had exploded on her face like an unexpected out-of-season thunderstorm, drenching her in a freezing splash, wrapping her in an instant numbness. As it turned out, those few moments transformed her life, shook her off her complacency and made her undertake a self-discovery that crumbled many illusory notions of marital fine-balancing she had accumulated.
They had spent nearly all their married life as nomads pitching, uprooting and relocating their existential tents across multiple locations, moving to wherever Dileep’s transfers and assignments took them. She had all along played the complementary role, aligning with what Dileep’s moves demanded, adjusting her routines and tempering her faintest and fleeting aspirations to the context. Apart from a few disjointed stints of teaching in the local schools where they were based for the time being and giving maths tuition to the children of friends and neighbours, she remained a homemaker for the most part.
He was a workaholic and busied himself like a humming bee with a narcissistic love of the flutter of its wings. Wealth, to him, was not to be flaunted but put away safely in the honeycombs of high-yielding investment - bonds, equity and gold, ostensibly for Lakshmi, but as both knew, more as a family treasure and fallback of last resort. So it was that they had not built a house for themselves. “The risk-averse fools build houses and the wise ones rent them for a living”, was one of his many aphorisms.
The children grew up and took flight on the wings of their academic and career ambitions. Dileep was feeling trapped in midlife syndrome and overwhelmed by the monotony at work and diminishing morale. He felt that the urge to keep moving was fast drying up and that he wanted a break for sure.
When the time came to fold up and settle down, they had little option but to return to Dileep’s ancestral home. The ease with which they adapted to the rustic village sans any urban glitz surprised Lakshmi in the first few months. They went through the new protocol as though they had only reclaimed their misplaced identity and nostalgic comfort zone after sedated years of listless wandering.
He used to say often that he felt like a clannish chieftain every time he rested his head on the legacy reclining chair in the foyer of the faded mansion. After all, his maternal great-grand-uncle and the successors who followed had slumbered on it. The privileged possession of the heritage chair was, to him, symbolic of his belated coronation of sorts.
The extensive courtyard that once bustled with post-harvest briskness and reverberated with the folksongs and traditional performing arts had long gone silent and drab. The inner labyrinth of rooms, faintly dark even when the blazing Sun outside was at its ascendant peak, seemed embalmed in an intriguing eeriness all around. The memories of treachery, intrigue, gossip and atrocities of the past mutely witnessed by the edifice and enclosures lay frozen in the pages of the family lore. Yet, when he sat on the chair and reminisced his childhood and recalled the stories that he had heard of the valour and vices of his predecessors, he sensed the full weight of its legacy upon him.
That afternoon, as he lay bare-chested on his favourite easy chair, squirming restlessly in the sweltering heat, he had a sudden spurt of excruciating pain in the chest, his head tilted to the side and he breathed his last. Lakshmi was downstairs, busy on the cell phone, immersed in the day's gossip trail with her bosom friend. Her husband transited in a flash from flesh-and-blood to an ethereal existence, leaving his mortal body, slumped in the chair, as a farewell note to his beloved wife.
‘Beloved’ wasn’t a cliché, at least in their case. Friends used to comment with a tint of jealousy about the enduring closeness between them. “Their relationship is like classic wine. The taste grows as the stuff ages.”
Over the years since Dileep’s abrupt departure, the experience of living alone, all by herself, did mould her emotions and self-image quite differently from what she was and how she felt till then. However, on looking back she felt immensely satisfied with how she manoeuvred the quicksand, slush and ruggedness. As she traversed the terrain she was hardly prepared for, she could feel the self-paced, erratic and at times clumsy transit into another being, far removed from the overly reliant wife in the years with Dileep around.
She had been habituated to leaning too heavily on her husband and had even abdicated to him the power to set and prioritise her life’s agenda. Now in retrospect, she felt the very idea was both absurd and demeaning. In the months since Dileep’s passing away, she felt that she had reclaimed, step-by-step, the power to be her own master.
She looked back over the years that went by. Everything around pretty much carried on as always – the humming of the morning birds that nested at the edge of the wooden ceiling beneath the roof, the newspaper boy who swung the morning despatch wide and swift into the portico and the fishmonger who announced his arrival through the shrill and rhythmic shout-out. Lakshmi’s moods, moorings and self-image did undergo a sea change for the better, as she realised. What more does one need than to get to a point of resilience and inner peace that reassures that you no longer need a shoulder to lean on?
Like the lone rock on the molehill seen from her bedroom window, she had learned to withstand incessant rains, biting cold and the furious Sun and yet remain stoic and self-reliant. Wasn’t she like a loose kite during the long years of togetherness, when she was practically unsure of what she wanted, where she was drifting to? What a self-negation it was to get herself enveloped by the overbearing presence, priorities and narratives of her husband!
As the children grew up, her eagerness to pander to their whims, fancies and sundry demands had kept her engaged and effervescent, all her attention and effort centred around her children. Admittedly, she had this submerged desire, succinctly expressed at times, to be the better of the two parents in the eyes of the children. But when the time came for her to shoulder the exclusive parenting responsibility, she was initially confused about how much she had to recalibrate her assertions and how far she was to yield.
Slowly and steadily, Lakshmi learned the nuances of her new role as the hybrid parent, father and mother combined seamlessly. She felt reassured of her renewed ability to handle her children all on her own. When Dileep was around, both the kids, still university students, used to smartly play the emotional leeway between the parents to their advantage and corner favours and permissions. But on her becoming the sole parent with a clear veto power, she behaved like a disciplinarian, out and out.
She presumed that her harshness and lack of accommodation would have not gone down well with them. She did not bother, anyway. At times she felt great about getting away from the shadow of Dileep and patted herself for overcoming the false notion that she desperately needed someone to shield her from emotional blues.
As the children grew independent, she let them be on their own and choose their path, partner and privacy. She wasn’t sure how Dileep would have reacted to Shreya announcing at the dinner table, on her vacation trip home after getting the first job, that she was in love with a boy at work whom she was determined to marry. Lakshmi felt at the very moment these words were uttered that it was time for her to let her daughter go her way. How illusory it was for her to think that the tenuous hold, she thought she still had on her daughter, would not snap any time soon!
When her son, Govind, told her he was least inclined to fall into the groove, get married, settle down with kids and get a ‘licence to lord over’ the wife, she thought that too was his choice. As a mother, she respected her son’s choice; she had to, that was the prudent, sensible and fair option.
Women are endowed with a sense of practicality and an ability to let go, reconcile and not burn bridges!
She looked at the cuckoo clock on the wall. The birdie was about to commence the long cooing as the needles were nearing the noon hour. She had to get ready. Juliet, her friend and hostel mate from college days, living in the nearby city, just an hour away, would drive in soon. They would together go over to the mofussil Gymkhana, an hour’s drive away for their monthly get-together and chill-out session with a handful of friends who have stuck together. Juliet had a life membership at the club, courtesy of her Planter husband, who was the Club President for a long time till his death last year.
At the cosy, exclusive inner chamber, the ladies unwound themselves and dived into the inhibition-free fellowship, away from pesky husbands, noisy children, nosy neighbours and sneaky relatives. As Lakshmi and Juliet lost themselves in the cool comfort of the exclusive Club, they had a point to prove, unsaid, silent and couched in self-congratulatory pride.
Juliet went philosophical in her barb with her glass of wine nearly empty, “You know, marriage is a gnawing relationship of sorts. The more they are together the more the couple lose their individuality and morph into a hybrid personality”
“And it takes a while after the days of togetherness are over for the rub off to thin out, the air to clear and the bruised self to re-emerge, chastened by the experiences”, Lakshmi added.
Juliet raised a toast, “This one is to two greying young ladies, two liberated souls on the go”. They both burst into a peal of loud laughter, much like in the delirious freak-out days in their hostel room years back.
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