Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel, BS Murthy [best black authors TXT] 📗

we began to console each other as we only could, but finding our outpourings were unequal to our feelings, we came to cling on to each other to let our mutual empathy seep through our skins. What with that physical proximity in our emotional upsurge infusing a sense of oneness in us, we insensibly felt closer to each other and, maybe, moved by the effusion of affection our minds nurtured for each other, our hearts goaded us to unite our bodies for our mutual solace. So, we came to ‘live-in’ so soon after losing our spouses.” 

“That’s why it’s said that fact is stranger than fiction.”    

“Why not,” he said. “Fiction is but the product of an author’s imagination about the possibilities of life, but the course of life is shaped by human proclivities that are beyond anyone’s grasp. In her emotional upsurge in our coition, Ruma told me that she always felt attracted to me in spite of herself, and how hard it had been for her to restrain her desire for me to retain her chastity. When I confessed about my own weakness for her, she told me that she could nuance it from my awkwardness in her presence; and about her gripping sex appeal on me, she said coyly that she had a full measure of it in her fantasies. I told her that I had even conceived a perfect murder to make her mine that was before I became friendly with Rajan, and she saw the hand of our love in the coupe d’etat of life. While the ecstasy of sex kept our sadness at bay, we clung to one another to be solaced by each other, oh, what an unceasing sexual indulgence it was, nursed by my craze for her body and fuelled by her craving for my lovemaking. Oh, how during our live-in, we became oblivious of everything other than our post-mourning wedding, and in an ironic symbolism of mourning, she handed over Rajan Builders to me as dowry-in-advance.”

“It reminds me of Sugreeva’s mourning-period orgies with Ruma, his brother Vali’s widow in the Ramayana? What a coincidence that your mate is a namesake of that woman, and you, like him, sidelined your obligations in the pursuit of carnal pleasures.”

“Your analogy is appropriate but you got the name wrong. Sugreeva’s wife was Ruma and Vali’s widow was Tara.”

“Maybe losing our cultural moorings is a side-effect of the westernization of our education,” 

“You lose something to gain some other thing don’t you?” he said. “But the poetic imagination in the epics is hard to find even in the fictional aspects of the best of novels; maybe the social restraints of our times wrap up novelistic ideas in our cultural folds. When we thought that it was time to get married for form’s sake, we broke the news. While her   folk felt it was redeeming for her as we happened to be of the same caste, my people had no hesitation in blessing our union for the same reason; seems caste rules our heads and hearts alike. Our well-attended wedding gave her a sense of spiritual union that our liaison failed to afford her, and again, it was Raju who took charge of the arrangements though I failed to attend his marriage that Rathi had insisted we should.”

“If I got it right, you made it seem that she had a great influence on you.”

“I’m glad you are observant and that portends well for my memoir,” he said in some excitement. “You may know that in any relationship, it is the stronger willed that calls the shots. Won’t in some ways it explains why some men are henpecked, well, some women too are cock-pecked, a rarer phenomenon at any rate. Whatever, how marriage gives a new dimension to man woman cohabitation; I felt a new sense of belonging for the woman whom I made my own for so long by then. Maybe for want of the cultural connect of marriage our live-in was bereft of a sense of spiritual union, which deprived us of the true sense of belonging in lovemaking without our knowing it. However, as we made conjugal love in our nuptial bed, from her spasms I could sense that she had experienced a rare kind of orgasm. Why, as I divined her visage in her ecstasy, her spiritual beauty that I espied gave me a premonition of her conception, that of a son. Never before or after that, with her or another, was it a like feeling.”

 “Don’t they say one is happiest in the newest love?” 

“No denying that but I loved to retain Rathi’s affectionate memories even as I was obsessed at not losing Ruma’s passionate love, and that should give you a measure of my weakness for Ruma, and the hold she came to have on my life.”

“You loved both of them and it’s no dichotomy. Why, a man can love more than one woman at the same time, and it’s no less a psychological possibility with women either.”

“Is it not against the ‘one life one love’ poetic grain but life as you know is more prosaic that poetic,” he said. “That day, as I returned home chastened from Raju’s place, I could clearly discern the falsity of my life! Who outgrew whom, after all? What were the yardsticks by the way, if not material possessions then it must be mundane positions; but could they be life’s quality indices in any way? Why without them, didn’t Raju outgrow all? More so, he helped others to grow as well, though on a different plane. It was as if we were dwelling on two different planets, he, on the artistic, and I, on the counterfeit. How self-limiting are all the worldly attributes; can one grow, leave alone outgrow, with a narrow vision. Oh, the naivety of my vanity! Damn my inability to see beyond the self-built façade of opacity. Even now I couldn’t help but wonder what my life would’ve been like had Rathi not left me mid-course. It was as if such a thought process, after crossing the Rubicon would be inimical, the exigencies of office then put me on the beaten track of life. And that’s life.”

 

Chapter 7

Pangs of Remorse

 

“Every life is unique but rarely one is exceptional,” he continued after a long pause as if he was reminiscing about his own life, “and mine was rather unusual; oh, I had my first brush with intrigue when I was in class seven, then aged ten. Chandu and I were classmates besides being neighbors for our families were co-tenants. All children in our neighborhood used to flock to his place to play caroms on holidays and his mother was wont to serve us some snack or the other. Well I used to avoid those for they were invariably prepared with garlic that I had always found repugnant.”

“Isn’t it said that one either loves garlic or hates it?”

“There was a king in the Roman era who hated garlic so much so that he had banned it in his land. He could as well be the progenitor of our present-day rulers who ban smoking in all and sundry areas dubbed public places,” he said. “Can you imagine us smoking in the cinema halls in our youth, why, the norm in those days was ‘smoking is no disrespect’, and  now the coinage is ‘desist passive smoking’, my foot, as if the air we breathe is pristine pure. That the addicts no longer smoke in the railway coaches is because of the changed social mores and not owing to a newfound urge to obey the railway rules. Oh, how the poor smokers quarantine themselves in the toilets for a puff or two while the police on scent wait on the sly to harass them for bribe. Before I gave up smoking, what a pain it was in the smokeless pangs on the flights and in the trains alike.” 

“The fate of a nation is the plight of its politics and the petty politician is the bane of the polity.” 

“Beautifully put, for the fate of the peoples is governed by the whims of the powerful,” he said, and resumed the saga of his childhood. “One Sunday afternoon, as was her wont, Chandu’s mother served us all with some pakodas, and Shankar, younger brother of my friend Murali, wanted more of them. I felt that it was inappropriate and said so to him; looking back, it was an unsolicited advice, all childish, but then a child would only think like a child.”

“Don’t we see even the grown-ups rendering unsolicited advice till the end, and more so towards their end? Maybe fate maps the course of life through an intellectual short-route from the cradle to the grave.”

“How do you like the Aviva ads of Rahul Dravid receiving cricketing advice from all and sundry,” he said heartily. “Well with his captaincy gone, the ads were withdrawn and that’s the way with the frills of life with which we tend to shroud its ethical core. But now, shorn of my aura, I see my life in the glaring shadow of its falsehood, and what I see but the derivatives of life within its voidness.”

“Won’t that better the Shakespearean ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’?”

“It’s only proper that we remain humble before the master, who as Alexandre Dumas said, ‘after God, he had created the most,” he paused as if in reverence to his idol before he continued. “Back to my story, that very night, Chandu called me out and asked me to taste some garlic-less preparation that his mother made for me. As I had my dinner by then, I excused myself, but he virtually forced me to have a bite at least, and even before I had a spoonful of it, Murali and Shankar came out from their hiding to accuse me of double standards. While I protested that there was no parallel, a perplexed Chandu apologized that he was tricked into the act by them; the brothers had induced him to offer me their home-made stuff as if it was prepared by his mother. Well it was the first and the last time that I ever gave an unsolicited advice.”

“What cussedness even in childhood?”

“What’s so surprising about it; won’t the plant of a kind grow into a tree of that kind,” he said. “Any way, during the month of karthik, our family was privileged to cater to the sky-lamp of Brahmeswara temple of our village; and at dusk, it was my wont to carry from home the needed sesame oil there. How fascinating it was watching the pulley and rope in motion as the pujari pulled it down from atop the mast and put the lighted one back in its post. Once, lost in some sport, I didn’t reach home in time, so my grandfather had substituted for me and what hell I raised for having been denied my due and how they tried to convince me that there was no way they could’ve waited for me as the lamp had to be lit up in time? But I had none of that, and insisted that the procedure be repeated, and as I stuck to my guns, my grandfather had to prevail upon the pujari to set a new precedent. I was still a kid when this happened.”

“Don’t worry I am not going to give a superstitious twist to that childhood sacrilege for your latter-day travails.”

“It’s sad that man has not benefited from the Shakespearean wisdom that superstition is the religion of the weak minds,” he said. “Shortly after that episode of an ill-fated advice, I found myself in a much more awkward situation. I was friendly with a neighborhood girl who happened to be my classmate as well. I used to go to her place for the so-called combined studies, but that day, as I returned home, she came running after me to check up if I took her fountain pen, and I let her search my rack and she left finding