Rainbow Colours

I met her on the second day at college. We were standing outside the classroom, looking down at the morning bustle of students arriving, excited squeals of friends meeting, and high decibel chatter.

I sensed her watching me and looked up at her. She seemed uncaring of trends and her clear creamy skin and round bespectacled face gave her a neat and comely appearance. She was in a printed salwar kameez, and her frizzy hair hung as a short braid and her red felt dot on her forehead was underlined with a little smear of vibuthi. I smiled. She smiled back asking, “Lit?” I nodded and we introduced ourselves.

As the class began to fill in, I walked in to take a seat at the last row. She found a seat next to mine. Good girl, looks studious but isn’t square, I thought. We giggled at nothing. Perhaps we struck an odd pair. She, studious and prim and I looked like a moll yet to catch religion at the last hour. It was at lunch we found a kinship. My tiffin box’s content was vegetarian as was hers.

“Iyer-a?’ she asked. I nodded.

“I am a Saiva Pillai from Tirunelveli”, she said by way of explaining.

It was sealed then. The respective mothers were informed the same evening, names of aunts and uncles were dropped and family connections were established. We hung around and she played along to all my caprices, my shrieks and scenes gamely. We felt a jolly pair together. I’d discuss cinema heroes in breathless whispers in class, exchange vilest of suggestions, wicked jokes, the works. She would notice me even across the room or the canteen or campus and her eyes would pierce through mine and she would always hold her look a little longer when we chatted. She gamboled along when I bunked college and landed at the cinema. I never probed about a boyfriend or some fling in the past and she would always say, “I can’t remember having a crush like that at all”.

As the year went by, I had become everyone’s friend. I would jump from first row to the last, run off to watch films with the girls who had an extra ticket, to the beach with my school pals, tag along to the British Council library with the ‘pazhams’. My grades were consistently good and so the faculty indulged my whims.

And then she stopped talking to me. Everyone asked why. I had no answer. No phone calls. I said ‘Hi’ and she looked away. But I had no time to feel crushed. I was not tethered to anyone in college and everyone was a pal. And regularly I would go missing from the college group for my bonds with my school chums were unwavering. The class-clown’s loyalty was never demanded by a single group so I had everyone to hang around. “She is jealous because you are friends with too many people”, someone said. She kept to herself and even began to sit out in the front row.

On the week before graduation we bumped into each other at close quarters by the loo. I giggled, she giggled too.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
She replied, “Uh, dunno”.
I held her hand and she squeezed it back. But our connections snapped for she left to pursue law and I, to study further.

A year later she called out of the blue to announce her marriage.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter. He looks respectable and our parents find us well matched and we are off to America”, she said.
Well, she had always seemed sane to my flightiness and I wished her well. The class attended her wedding, the first among our crowd, created appropriate ruckus, made inappropriate suggestions and left.

We were past letter writing and e mails had not yet been in vogue, so we went our ways.
Some eight years later I got a phone call from her.
“Remember me? I am home”, she said.
She wanted to meet me. We met at a coffee shop.
“You are looking drawn and tired”, she accused.
“You look different too”, I smiled a little too widely unable to check my surprise.
She looked butch. Her hair was cut in a severe boyish mop, the spectacles were steel, and she wore baggy jeans and a shapeless shirt.
“I am divorced”, she said.
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t”, she said.
“Oh”, I said knowingly, “It happens. Counselling can help frigidity”, I said sounding adult, wise and comforting. “There’s a long life ahead of you”, I said.
“No, you don’t understand”, she said sounding stern. “I couldn’t”.
“Oh, okay. Where do you live?” I changed tack.
“Back in Madras, with my parents who don’t understand me, working as a legal advisory for a foreign organisation”, she said, curt.
She paused at her drink. “What about you?” she asked, “Still holding out?”
I tried the old giggle. “I am dating”.
“Will you marry him?” she asked, without a smile.
“Uh-huh”, I said nodding.

I can’t recall what we said after that. A bit about the watermelon juice being too sugary, the clouds gathering, and that I had to chase some work. She promised to give me her phone number and left without sharing it. And that was that. It’s been another decade since then and we’ve lost touch.

***

This morning, the Indian newspapers are splashed in colour, celebrating the Delhi High Court’s decriminalization of a redundant colonial law, Sec 377 of the Indian Penal Code.

I wonder: did I fail to read her right in my youthful ignorance?
Or am I imagining, now that I am slightly better informed?

Marriage, Anyone?

India’s motor-mouth and brazen item girl Rakhi Sawant will host her own TV show, Rakhi ka Swayamvar very soon. The lady who worked her way up from the ghettos of Mumbai through plastic surgeries, eyeball-grabbing antics, and frolicking dances will go groom-hunting on TV. She will choose in the manner of “Indian tradition” a husband, the way “Sita chose Ram” through a swayamvar, an ancient Hindu custom of the royals that apparently allowed virgin princesses to choose their life partners from a conglomeration of eligible princes.

I don’t know whether it’s a dirty female fantasy to be able to do that- select one man openly while reject others ruthlessly, before a gathering of gaping family members.

Despite rising divorce rates- divorcees are most likely to want to remarry say family counsellors, violent incompatibility displayed at family courts, break down in traditional family units, demanding spouses, education and awareness, illiteracy or ignorance, marriage remains a social mainstay in India, in rural and in urban areas.

Wised up folks quip, ‘To marry once is a duty, twice a folly, thrice is madness,’ but in India despite the many, many, dysfunctional marriages, it is considered the holiest of social unions. To remain married despite odds, reluctance, doubts, violence, and misery is overwhelming. Cynics who remain steadfast will resist, go single, live-in, walk out, but they remain a minor population. The dreams of both the rustic tiller and the techie nerd of lifelong love and companionship culminate in marriage. We feel reassured that the most disparate of individuals have made their marriage work, held down jobs, raised children and retired in peace. The fear of commitment phobes is often hushed in the general cacophony of marriage being a negotiation that can be worked through years of incompatibility with growing affection.

Many young people are discomfited by the traditional arranged marriage route that Indians through generations have passed through. Often, women protest against the ‘match making’ of social standing, education, finances, and other specific considerations as humiliating. I am told, on conditions of anonymity, that young men who are rejected along the same lines remain a small but growing group.

Yet a majority prefer variations of letting the parents decide even now to seek life partners. The Hindu ’s matrimonials may be embarrassing for some, but surely has its committed followers. The internet matrimonial sites (Why the hell did I not set up a site and make money engaged in assisting in the holy union of hearts?) are hugely popular and useful for the not-so hick and meek, seeking spouses.

The arranged marriage concept in India is challenged by gender-divide questions- Does a woman need to be married for social status accorded by a man? Can she not be her own keeper and not expect a man’s wallet to bail her out? Should a woman be chosen in marriage in a manner that commodifies her? Is marriage the only status for a woman? Why should she do the major portion of housework? And so on on cohabiting rights, duties and responsibilities between partners.

For many the possibility of finding a life partner nudged by parents or with a little help from friends helps fulfill needs of finding life long companionship. Blushing brides announce that “ours was an arranged-love marriage”. It’s such a typical Indian terminology that the many dating services for lonely hearts in the West may never have courage to drum up, just as we may take time to bring up pre nuptial contracts into our marriages. Talking of which, I wish to state that I sent a rare pre-nuptial by office email that post-marriage, any lizard, grey or brown, big or small, would be chased out of the residential premises as they mortify me by him to preserve conjugal bliss. A decade later, if you hear ravaged cries, and a person holding a broom, chasing gekhos across the flat, it’s me, only me. And the snores from the bedroom are those of he-who-violated-the-contract!

Also I squirm upon hearing the haloed term “love marriage”. Erm, marriage is marriage, involving cohabiting quarrels, picking towels, halving responsibilities, dividing duties, enjoying laughter, shouldering distress, stirring heat, fighting odds together, and sharing sweetness of winning battles. We’ve heard enough of, “He’s not the man I loved” after years of marriage or “She changed after marriage” too, haven’t we all?

But someone please hurry and inform Rakhi Sawant that Sita may have chosen her husband through a traditional swayamvar, but her conjugal life ended with a walk out on her husband into the deep dungeons of the earth.

The Bitch about Besant Nagar

Among the many inconsequential battles during school days was the one over our suburbs.
We were divided between the Besant Nagar gang versus the Tiruvanmiyur gang.
“So idyllic”, we would say of our avenue.
“Yeah, with red mud tracks and sad looking flats”, P & N would sneer.
“The grand edifice of the School of Arts, Kalakshetra, sits in Tiruvanmiyur”, H & I would try a new tactic.
“We don’t live in the past, us B Nagar chicks”, P&N again.
And on we’d go sparring.
We have Elliots Beach, so hep.
Cosy’s, such fun.
All those boys on mobikes that roared while wheeling.
And Besant chicks like us with long hair and endless legs- P & N.
“Erm, there’s the nice Marundeeswarar Temple where you could get a glimpse of Bharatiraja, Radha and mike-Mohan and other stars shooting films for cheap,” we didn’t give up on a losing battle.
“Hyuk hyuk, can’t do better or what?” them again.
We tried getting even.
Our beach was still virgin, the B Nagar one was a wench.
Besides, we insisted, nasty rascals smoked reef behind that Schmidt monument at Elliot’s.
To prove a point, we’d go on long rides on our BSA SLRs up the ridge.We would halt at the edge that overlooked the unending expanse of Tiruvanmiyur beach, dotted by catamarans and knots of fisherman’s huts. We couldn’t smell the drying salt-fish as we could when we chased each other at play near Nochikuppkam at Elliots. At the Tiruvanmiyur beach we would get pounded by the waves. We would squeal and shout, knowing no one would hear us and yell profanities into the water with glee.
Another time, we lay on the terrace of V’s beachfront bungalow after a skinny dip in the Valmiki Nagar sea. Wet with sea spray, we let ourselves be cooled by the night breeze, and smoked a limp cigarette smuggled off one of the brother’s pockets and sipped our first gin.
There, Tiruvanmiyur gave you the silence to enjoy secret pleasures.
“Chi, podi, full of LTTE wounded, bad men”, P&N spoke of a maimed Kittu who was under house arrest and a neighbour at one point.
“Besant Nagar is full of upper class snobs like you”, H threw a salvo.
“Tiruvanmiyur is a sea side ghetto for those maamas and maamis who couldn’t afford Mylapore”. Ouch!

The battle didn’t stop us visiting each other’s homes and chasing boyfriends and holding on to each other through decades.
The sands on Blue Beach Avenue and Utthandi beachfront are still mute on our many frisky adventures under the casurina beach woods;and the bleached catamarans that shielded us in their shades as we settled down to some serious trial and error acts of adults.

On Elliots sands were cemented many long-term relationships that have run into steady marriages.
For years (a decade if I’m correct) we would faithfully gather on Elliots beach on a little rock near the pavement. It was devoid of shacks and balloon shooters and merry-go-rounds. Without fail, on each evening, a group of geriatrics, looking like a flock of gulls in the whiteness of their veshtis and shirts and the silver of their hair would gather atop a mound on the sand.They would look like Moses collecting his flock before delivering the Commandments, leaning on mahogany sticks, some still agile despite their ages, discussing perhaps sagacious issues such as the fall in standards in life- corporeal, moral and social.

We kept a safe distance from the stenatorian seagulls.

S and G would walk all the way from Tiruvanmiyur, holding hands, locked in steadfast love, to snuggle on the sands.
P&V would walk to the water when they had to sort out their little skirmishes over whether their next date would be at Luz or at the culvert near Loyola College.
The rest would clown around. The gang would commiserate at my lack of luck at nailing them B Nagar boys for myself. But others from Tiruvanmiyur were fortunate.
“Hey, where’s H?”
“Hunting that Besant Nagar boy all the way from grubby Tiruvanmiyur, is she?” P & N would giggle. H couldn’t care if I called her a turncoat. After a due romp on the Elliot’s sands, she held the chap down and after years of marriage is settled in a cosy Kalakshetra Colony apartment.
We’ve warm memories of having tea on the airy veranda’s of B’s flat and sharing gossip; we spent many a New Year’s singing tipsily to the toll of the Shrine Vellankani bells and buying imported stuff from Maharaja’s and buying contraband tapes at a neighbouring videostore.

There was also an extended group of renegade dancers and theatre artistes and singers. After a rigorous practice at their beachfront dance school we would join them in their flats in the lanes leading from the main beach road. There would be loud singing, raucous laughter, gossip. M & K carried on a long innings of living in their Besant Nagar flat where the Fab India shop now stands where we brought the New Year’s down. D & M flirted, married and separated on the beachfront and moved to Palavakkam with their silences and hurts; and S continues his acting career of sorts while residing in a modest flat in the lanes off Elliot’s beach.

We no longer gather on the beachfront these days, the sands of time having tossed us around and apart.

This Sunday morning, more than 1600 miles away from Elliots Beach, the beachfront and its denizens came to life again while I read Salman Rushdie’s latest short story. A “Bombay boy” Rushdie’s story seems to read like a nostalgic trip to include his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi’s Palakkad relatives who live in Besant Nagar.

P, you can crow that Rushdie has put your Elliot’s Beach on the literary map of India.

I am eating the humble dust of Tiruvanmiyur sand, if it pleases you.

Believers II

Part I

A change came over Subramani since he began work on the idol of the goddess. He had built a makeshift area in his workshop with bedsheets so that the sculpting of the goddess was done in secrecy. When I asked him if I could take a peek playfully, he requested to let him be.

It was a busy time for me too. A businessman from Malaysia had arrived with real estate interests. He was wealthy and was ready to buy properties as he had decided to come back to Chennai for good. It provided ample business opportunity for me and I followed him daily, offering him ideas to buy a cinema hall, a large piece of land for an apartment complex, department stores and throwing such carrots his way. I took him on trips to cities like Coimbatore and Tiruchi and elsewhere down the fancy beachside properties down the Coromandel Coast Road.

It was late one night that I found Subramani’s wife standing hesitantly by my gate as I returned home. “Is all well, young sister?” I asked, bringing my scooter to halt beside her. I was curious that the shy, dumpy woman who would silently offer coffee and tea at their home before vanishing into her kitchen’s darkness and who never befriended me and my chatty wife was here so late at night, alone.

“There’s a bereavement in my family. It’s my father, and I am leaving home by bus early tomorrow morning. Please take care of my husband as he’s not been well for the past few days”, she said, concern in her voice, and retraced her way back to their house.

The next morning my client from Malaysia phoned me and I sped away to his side. It wasn’t until the day after that I walked to Subramani’s house after a late dinner and well past my usual bed time.

There was a small light in the front yard of his house that cast its shadows long and dark about the place. I felt a little spooked at some of the headless stone figures, a few faceless figures, their features yet to be etched as they lay on the ground in the workshop. I found Subramani sitting among the shadows on his wooden plank among the stones.

“What’s the matter? Not yet in bed?” I asked.

He looked up and said, “Can you help me?”

“How much money do you need?” I asked in response.

He shook his head vigorously. “ No, not money. I’ve made a mistake. I need to discard her”, he said, the words coming out of him in a rush.

“Who?” I asked, feeling the night’s wind slightly chilly.

“Her”, he said pointing to the spot where a stone idol stood shrouded in cloth.

I picked the lantern that stood near his feet and walked to the spot. I found my hands suddenly clammy as a sinner as I whisked the cloth away from the statuette. The figurine was sculpted out of black unpolished granite. It was some three feet tall. I held my lantern up to take a closer look. The stone visage was breathtaking, a countenance at once beatific and strangely erotic, in the angular points of its jawline, the curved moonscape of the forehead, the lotus eyes, proud nose and the jaunty thrust of its lips. The idol’s shoulders were sculpted with jewels and sloped to burst forth in a pair of breasts, full and smooth, and then curve and dip towards a small waist to flare over rounded hips and thighs. The idol stood fixed on a pedestal of stone, the whole sculpture a monolith no doubt. I found my hand going out to touch the face but checked myself and muttered, “She is beautiful”. I looked the statue up again and it was then that I noticed. The right hand that would usually be sculpted in a posture of offering divine benediction, palms held up, had been rendered mutant.

“What happened to the hand?” I asked, the beauty of the idol suddenly turning grotesque in my eyes at the malformed hand.

“It’s here”, Subramani said holding a piece of black stone, the size of an upturned palm chiselled with nimble fingers in his hands. “Please don’t ask me questions, I was careless and the hand got broken, it’s a flaw on my part. I can’t keep it here. Just help me discard it’, he said, walking to me and clutching my shirt in an act of desperation.

I nodded and wordlessly wrapped the idol in the cloth. I turned around to find Subramani pushing along his cycle cart. We both heaved and puffed and carried the idol and placed it on the cart. I walked along to a quick trot as Subramani laboured to pedal and move on. We went past the neighbourhood, past a stretch of shrub land and up the main road. We crossed the highway to go down a slope into the beach sands down a makeshift road of pebbles and stones before the path ended in dunes and the tricycle came to a halt. We must have done a good two hours from our home and were profusely sweating, bathed in grime, dirt and a strange guilty fear. We lugged the icon resembling a cadaver wrapped in cloth, and dragged it down the sands, lifting and carrying it together until our aching limbs could go no more. We panted and heaved until we finally reached the shore in a near collapse from our exertions. The idol fell from our tired hands in a burst of sand at the water’s edge and the waves softly lapped at it. We hoped the night’s tides would wash it into the ocean bed and left pushing the cart, feeling heavier with our thoughts.

**********************

It wasn’t until mid-morning that I awoke, my limbs aching and head pounding from the previous night’s exertions. I quickly dressed and left to call on Subramani. He was sitting at his doorstep and welcomed me with his old smile, as though the previous night has not happened.

“You all right?” he asked.

I nodded and asked, “And you?”

He stood up and walked to me and held my hands. “Promise me you won’t speak of what happened last night to any soul, not even …” his voice dipped and he looked down.

“… my wife, though I feel you’ve overreacted. You can make another idol or even repair the hand”, I reasoned.

He shook his head and said, “I am off to Swamimalai for good now”, and handed me the keys to the house. “My sons will come in a week’s time and clear the workshop out and give you the house keys. Please pass them on to the owner and you can return the advance money to my son”, he said.

“Subramani don’t do this”, I said, a plea in my voice. “What went wrong? There’s no need to flee as though in shame,” I beseeched.

“The desecration of it all”, he muttered, before abruptly walking away from me.

*********************

Ah, it’s been sometime since then.

Today is an auspicious day. The famous godman who founded the Fertility Goddess cult will arrive this morning to offer special prayers and offer darshan to his followers at the temple precincts. It’s a beautiful temple of exquisite stone carvings and stands upon the sea shore. The temple was built some four years ago and was funded by a prosperous Chetty businessman from Malaysia.

Haven’t visited that temple yet, dear friends?

It is the temple of the One-Hand Mother Goddess. My wife tells me that the temple’s mythological origin or sthala purana goes that the Mother Goddess’s bounty was unmatched. The jealous angels and demons of heaven and hell got together to defeat her in a battle and flung her down into the ocean’s deep. An ogre took the form of a shark and snapped her hand and She chose to float up from the ocean’s belly to bless Her devotees on earth. She is the Goddess of countless boons. Devotees pray for miracles by placing a handful of cowries and millet as offering at her feet on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Such is the awesomeness of the Goddess that our once wasteland of a neighbourhood has now turned into a pilgrim spot for devotees from afar in recent years. Why, even our seedless marital life has been blessed by my wife’s prayers to the One-Hand Mother Goddess. We now have a toddler, whose chubby hands and shy smiles make even a crusty middle-aged couple like us lighten up. My wife’s faith has finally had its reward. You may trust my word for it.