Crossing the Mirage: Passing through youth, BS Murthy [free reads .TXT] 📗

contrary, and for the same purpose, it vests virility with men well past their prime.   

Anasuya, however, thought of a detour as she saw that they had reached a dead end. She said that it would be an idea to let a widower lead her daughter to the altar. But Yadagiri would have none of that for he felt it would devalue the family and demoralize their daughter. Thus, the status quo prevailed and Vasavi, to her discomfort, remained single.

By the time she crossed thirty, Chandra crawled into the final year of his B.Com. With her emaciated frame and pimpled face, Vasavi seemed even more pathetic to his sympathetic eyes. The thought that they shared the ugliness, bequeathed by their father in equal measure, made him   empathetic towards her, even as he was embittered towards his parent on that very score. 

‘Oh if only we had taken after our mother!’ he thought endlessly. ‘Why, we would’ve inherited her beauty, wouldn’t we have?’

For its very possibility, the thought of deprivation made it all the worse for him. But, in time, the realization that ugliness was a worse curse for women than men, evoked sympathy for the weaker sex in his empathic soul.

Whenever he found himself in his sister’s presence, the pity he nursed for her insensibly surfaced in his eyes. The first time she was struck by his manner, finding his stare scaring, she gazed at him to gauge his mind. As their eyes scanned the bounds of mutual sympathy, at length, their souls got bonded in eternal empathy. In their state of fellow-feeling, fearing that speech might impair the purity of their emotion, they preferred to keep mum.

‘How wretched it must be for her, in her condition!’ he thought then. ‘Hasn’t she reached the dead end, in the midst of her life? Maybe, a career would’ve provided some distraction for her. But dad would have none of that. It’s as if, the very idea scandalizes him. It is really stupid of him to stick on to the old times!’

Often, as he felt his own life was no less oppressive, he became melancholic to his mother's worry. Whenever she tried to probe his mind, he put it in the wraps, lest its exposure should burden her even more. Despite finding him dismissive of her inquiries, she never ceased pestering him but to no avail. Thus feeling helpless, she kept an eagle eye on him, and whenever she found him depressed, which was often, she sent him on some errand. She had reasoned that an outing, if it did not alleviate his melancholy, would at the least help unstring him a little.

That day, as Chandra was confined to his room for too long, Anasuya went up to him in concern.

 “What’s wrong?” she said feeling his forehead.

 As their eyes met, he savored her affection.

 “What a beautiful mother!” he thought.  “What a pity she bore us ugly.”

 Seeing his condition, she sent him on an errand to the Princely Pearls. When he was leaving home, he found his sister playing with the kids of the neighborhood.

 ‘How she loves children!’ he thought with mixed feelings. ‘Won’t she be distressed for not having one of her own? Is it as an escape from boredom that she gathers them? But would that help her in any way! Maybe, it could be even worse for her. Why, wouldn't the charm of their company sharpen her lacking even more? Isn’t all this misery because she is ugly? What an angelic soul, with life so sour! Oh, ugliness is the worst of fates, so it seems.’

While he crossed the Lal Darwaza, he happened to come across two burka-clad women.

 ‘What's this Muslim custom of wrapping up woman in burkas!’ he wondered. ‘What is it that is sought to be hidden behind the veil? Is it beauty or ugliness? Whatever, the veil seems to be an ingenious leveler of the inequities of genes, at least in the public view! But, on that score, do women really care to hide themselves behind their veils? After all, it can't be, moreover, how can they be mad to endure the ordeal of breathing and the discomfort of constraint in that? Then, of what avail is it to women than to cater to the male sense of insecurity about them? Oh, how man's falsity of purpose deprives women the joys of being her free selves? Won't the burka symbolize the hold of man over woman’s body and soul, not to speak of her psyche? Well, the slaves were better off than these women in their veils, why doubt that.’

As he went along, feeling sad about that, he found two hamalis toiling to push a cartload of cloth bundles.

 ‘Why, men like these too have no way to lighten the burden of their birth,’ he thought, looking at them. ‘To be born poor and ugly is a double jeopardy really. Oh, how the color of the skin came to be the measure of the looks! Well, it could be that the white man owes his dominance of the world more to his fair skin than the grey matter of his brain.’

Inexplicably, he was seized by an impulse to follow the travails of the hamalis. So, unmindful of the surrounding traffic, he kept course with the cart. As if to shorten their arduous course, the laborers exerted themselves to accelerate their motion. Lost to them, he came in the way of a speeding car.

Bringing the vehicle to a screeching halt, the woman at the wheel yelled at him in her sarcastic tone, “Hi, you find life burdensome?”

Muttering an apology, as he moved away in confusion, she sped past him in irritation. The poignancy of her insensitivity perturbed him as he lumbered along to the dismal destination.

‘Won’t it seem the color of the skin is the measure of man's worth as well?’ he thought in humiliation. ‘Oh, how dark skin devalues man in more ways than one. Would I ever be able to induce a decent dame to become my wife? Why, even Vasavi refused to entertain ungainly men, didn’t she? How come, even the ugly seek beauty in their mates? Why not, it's the beauty that triggers the biological impulse.’

At that, inadvertently, his thoughts turned to his mother.

‘What should have been her compulsions to marry my father?’ he thought. ‘Being so beautiful she herself that is! If only she married another, perhaps, Vasavi and I could’ve been differently made, wouldn't we have been? Won’t mother be thinking that way, seeing the plight of her children more so her daughter that is?’

But, on second thoughts, he felt ashamed that he allowed himself to think in those terms.

‘The reality of life is unmistakable, isn’t it?’ he felt dejectedly. ‘It’s the fact of heredity that shapes one’s looks for good or for bad. Unfortunately for us, we took after our father. Had we acquired our mother’s features, and even a shade of her complexion, it would’ve been all too different. Vasavi would have been a mother many times over by now and I could have been the playboy of the college. Wouldn’t that have made all those who snub me envious of me?’

The envisaged envy of others in his fantasy made him envious of them in reality.

‘Surely, it could be a heady feeling to be admired by women,’ he thought. ‘How wanted that might make one feel! Won't the glow of the favored shows it could be infinitely fulfilling. But looks like, it's my fate to encounter indifference indefinitely. What a wretched life, I can't even dare to daydream!’

In that state of depression, when he saw his father at the Princely Pearls, his state of mind ensured that he found him more oppressive than ever. The grouse he nursed that it was his father’s genes that were the source of his and his sibling’s troubles came to the fore as though to settle scores with his hapless parent.

The psychic mix of hostility towards his father and empathy for his sister catalyzed by self-pity made Yadagiri's welcome words seem absurd to Chandra's pixilated mind. What was worse, the father’s show of affection appeared apologetic to his son’s afflicted mind. Unfortunately thus, in the son’s myopic vision, the paternal love seemed an embodiment of parental guilt. It was as if at that very moment the son’s alienation from his father reached a point of no return.

 

Chapter 2

End of the Tether

 

 

When Chandra had graduated in commerce, Yadagiri wanted him to join him at the Princely Pearls. Though Chandra knew it was coming, yet he felt like it was a bolt from the blue. Having come to mirror his misfortunes in his father’s visage, the prospect of the paternal proximity in perpetuity sickened him.

‘But how can I possibly object to something that’s obvious, natural even!’ thought Chandra, and the more he thought about it, all the more he wanted to avoid being drafted into the family business. ‘Come what may, I won’t have any of it, that’s all,’ he resolved in the end.

So he began to stall the issue on one pretext or the other, all the while weighing his options, and Yadagiri, who envisioned grandiose plans for the Princely Pearls with   Chandra in the saddle, was not amused by his prevarication. The inexplicable conduct of his pride-of-the-future perplexed the father in the beginning only to vex him in time. Chandra, for his part, could not conjure up a credible escape route though he thought long and hard about it. But, in the end, having come to know of an obscure management institute, he tried to sell the idea of MBA to his father through Anasuya’s good offices.

“I’ve more business tricks up my sleeve than the market feel of all the MBAs put together,” said Yadagiri dismissively. “They are but snobs in the tweed suits, these MBAs.”

With his hope of good hope too ending up in the deep desert, Chandra feigned sickness by way of finding an oasis. Losing his patience at last, Yadagiri forced the issue and fixed the muhurtham. Dreading the diktat and determined to avoid the draft, Chandra became pensive. But, slowly, pondering over his predicament, brought about by his parent, he felt outraged. The perceived dominance of his father, and his own inability to resist him, made him hate his parent and pity himself in the same vein. His sense of inadequacy to oppose his father overtly made him think of revolting against him covertly.

‘What if I run away!’ spurred on by the stray thought, he felt. ‘Won’t I be free then? Am I not qualified, after all? Can’t I live on my own?’

Plagued by the fear of the unknown and pricked by what was known---apprentice on sufferance---he thought he was caught between the devil and the deep sea. Compounding his misery was the thought of the effect his desertion would have on his hapless mother. Thus, he felt as though he was a bird caged at birth, not acquainted with the faculty of flying.

‘What’s the way out?’ he racked his brain. ‘Why not tell mom and seek her support?’

But on second thoughts, he became doubtful about the wisdom of it all. ‘She would sympathize with me only to plead that I fall in line,’ he figured it out. ‘What’s worse, she may even extract a promise from me never to desert her. Moreover, what if she blurts out, it would only make matters worse.’

Puzzled by the predicament, his mind played snakes-and-ladders with his resolve---even as his enthusiasm for freedom surged him to the threshold of action, the fear of the  fallout pulled him back to square one. Unable to take the plunge and yet detesting the status quo, he decided to approach his sister for a solution.

‘Being in the same boat,’ he sought to pump himself up, ‘won’t she appreciate my lot? Besides, she won’t let me down even if she doesn’t help.’

When Chandra revealed, Vasavi was raveled.

‘It's okay for women to feel helpless in this man’s world,’ she contemplated, ‘and advantaged that they are, it ought to be different