Catharsis

To understand (and appreciate?) why Angai decided to take as grave a step as killing her brother, one has to know a little about Angai in a way that very few people do.

Angai had turned rather aloof and stoic of late—even more so than was usual for her. She realised as much the other morning when a woman came begging as Angai’s auto halted at a traffic signal, and she did not even turn her face toward the poor woman—so absorbed was she in her musings. Her usual self would have sympathised and pitied the plight of the woman. But that morning she did not feel even a smidgen of sympathy as she saw the hapless woman walk away as soon as she figured out that nothing was going to come out of this exercise.

 Angai had become peevish too. Anything and everything would excite her temper: sweepers sweeping the roads just early in the morning when she went to gym (why do they have to sweep exactly when I pass by? Why is the whole world sweeping? Isn’t there a more sophisticated way of doing this? This is insane; they just displace the mound of dust from one place to another!); people littering the roads (why can’t they be taught BASIC civic sense!); the tropical climate of the country; people parking their cars on the roads thereby blocking traffic and causing inconvenience (shouldn’t they be fined!); the infamous load shedding of Delhi; people spitting all about on the roads (God! It’s like they have hyperactive salivary glands or something!).

Angai tried to contain it all within her. And let nothing seep out. But seep out, it did. The pressure. The pressure to look good; to weigh a certain pounds; to reach work on time; to work and work well; to ace the psychology course that she had undertaken after many arguments with her family; to know things from past that she must know (why did the world-wars happen?); to know things happening at the moment she must be aware of (what's the bone of contention between Israel and Palestine?) ; to save money for a future she could not seem to know (how to save tax?); to keep unwanted hair from growing all over her body; to keep hair on the head intact as they’d been showing a tendency to behave otherwise; to find herself a suitable match despite her growing weight and age; to write, for she held the art of writing in great reverence, but then, again, there was the pressure to write well!

She was doing everything right, and yet nothing seemed so.

 Time was rushing past. She could see her youth wither ever so gradually yet perceptibly. There were expectations. By now, she should have charted a path for herself—a path to what they call success. Everything should have been sorted by now. The execution was allowed to be pending, but the roadmap, nevertheless, should have been drawn by now. And here she was, clueless about the future. Still groping. Still hoping.

Her biological clock was ticking. She was past her “marriageable age”. She kept wondering if she could ever get to have a family of her own. And even if she did, she wondered, after having seen all that she had since such a young age, would it be worth the pain and effort that goes into sustaining one. 

As it is the wont of thoughts to hit you when you least want to be bothered by them, this thought hit Angai as she sat reading in the bus on her way to work. The reading had to pause. Uneasily, she put her book in her lap, using her thumb sandwiched between the leaves of the book to serve as a bookmark. She realised that her demeanour as a teacher had changed. What was the change exactly was difficult to point, but it could not be denied, she concluded. Her patience had dipped maybe. She would get visibly irked by an inane query made by a student. She was more patient and generous with them earlier. And more secure, which was surprising for she was quite a novice then. She did not even know her subject matter well, and yet there was certain kind of effervescence in her teaching and her presence in a class. She would breeze into a class and take it over like an actor who is extremely confident of her lines and role. She knew that the students would be as enthralled as an audience who have just witnessed prestidigitation of very fine kind. That had been missing of late. She would not take kindly to students who were tried getting into circuitous arguments only to prove a point or to test her wits.

In times such as these we look for villains—people who could be held responsible for all the mishaps of our lives. If we don’t find them, we create them to feel better about ourselves. There’s a certain kind of intoxication in victimhood; once you get used to it, it becomes impossible to part with it. She’d found her villain too. Her elder brother, Manik.

Manik had lost his right hand in a car accident while returning from a New Year party six years ago. They had lost their father at a very young age. “You were hardly two and your Manik da was ten, when baba passed away,” her mother would tell Angai in a tone infused with an uncanny sense of pride. After Manik’s handicap the entire responsibility of running the household had fallen on Angai and her mother.  From a very young age, Angai had seen her mother struggle without any help. She had begun to look too old for her age. The wrinkles on her face were imprints of all the adversities she had to bear to bring up her children. When Manik had landed up a job with a construction company, all the struggle that went into making him a civil engineer seemed to have paid off. But that state of the felicity of the Ghosh household was short-lived. On that chilly December night, Angai and Manik had gotten into a nasty squabble, for their mother disallowed Angai to attend a New Year’s bash while allowing Manik to do so. All her rhetorical plea championing gender equality had fallen on deaf ears. “Have you gone crazy, Angai? Dada’s case is different. You’re a girl. Who would be accountable, (God forbid) should something go wrong? Na baba! I can’t take such a risk. Now bother me no more, Angai, I am telling you!.”

The look that Angai shot at Manik was more chilling than that rimy, fateful night. For a moment, Manik’s face grew pale as he watched Angai slip quietly into her bed and turn in to a mound of blankets and quilts. The mound stirred in joggled and sobbed. The sobs grew fainter and fainter and finally dissolved into the darkness and quiet. 

The chilly silence that had encrusted the Ghosh household, like the frost that had adamantly settled on the glass windows, was broken by a ringing telephone at around five in the morning. The sound of the ringing telephone pierced through the darkness, alarming both the Ghosh women and forcing them to quit the comforting warmth of their respective beds. Mrs. Ghosh was the first one to make it to the phone. Angai studied her mother’s face intently; groggy as she was, she tried to gather as much as she could. She did not remember much about how her mother had reacted to the news of her brother’s accident that night, except for the yelp she had issued as she leaned on Angai for support. Next thing she remembers was waking up Mehrotra uncle from next door and rushing to the hospital in his car.

“A bunch of intoxicated youth, New Year’s eve, papaji’s car! What else could you expect, madamji?” said the policeman in a rehearsed and indifferent voice. “You must thank God your son is alive. Have you even seen the state of the car? Don’t even dare to, if you take my advice. Just thank God.”

 “The right hand needs to be severed if we want the infection to stop from spreading,” the doctor had said. “Or there may be risk to his life,” he added. His tone, though, had a touch of sympathy and concern.

 From that day onward, Manik’s life was never the same. The shock was to take another two months to sink in. He had to relinquish his job, and live the life of a dependant all over again, only in more than one sense of that word. The tragedy had reorganised the roles and positions of the Ghosh household. Although circumstances had forced him to assume a more a subservient role to the women in the household, his ego precluded him from acting as such.  The women, on the other hand, could not afford to make any such choices. They were forced to take charge and step out to keep the house running.  Following the footsteps of her mother, Angai, too, had taken up teaching as her profession along with pursuing a master’s degree. Having majored in Economics as an undergrad, she could tutor 11^th and 12^th grade students.

    

After coming home after a tiring day of work when Angai would sit down to watch T.V., she would fret over the film of dust that sat on the T.V. set. A bathroom fixture that has come off would remain as such unless she or her mother would act upon it. The fruit basket that she forgot to replenish would lie as such for days at end. An empty cup of tea would continue to sit on her table, because she forgot to put it in the sink as she was running late for work. Every morning when she and her mother would be rushing through their morning routines, she would see Manik sitting in the veranda with a morning daily splayed out in front of him and a cup of tea lying next to him, served dutifully by their mother. The sight would evoke a strange revulsion in her heart.

More than the lack of his contribution in discharging the duties of the household, Angai begrudged her brother’s sense of entitlement and lack of compunction. Quite to the contrary, Manik would create nuisance every now and then by bickering with neighbours or by demanding money which he would want to “invest” in stock market or with which he could buy his daily quota of cigarettes. Because taking of care of minor household chores would make him seem less of a man in his social circle, he would not care for such activities; and because he was physically incapable of taking up the responsibilities that were traditionally considered masculine, he was exempt from them.

Seeing her mother get up so early to prepare meals and rush to work day after day would tear her heart. Yet she knew that her own salary alone would not suffice to meet the needs and demands of the family. “If only Manik da was earning. We could have asked Ma to retire and just cook us delicious food,” she would frequently say to herself.

Mrs Ghosh was a plain woman with an equally plain understanding of the world. She would read the stoicism of Angai, but could not divine the cause of it. She could not be blamed.  She was not majoring in psychology after all. But she would, very often, find herself to be at the receiving end of Angai’s conniptions.  Angai could not communicate her anxieties to her mother, even if she wanted to, for she felt that Mrs Ghosh lacked the idiom in which such problems could be expressed or explained.

Though Angai held Manik culpable in her eyes for most of their woes, if not all, she never uttered a word to that effect to Manik. She would never speak to him about any other subjects than which could not be dispensed with. She would try to maintain both a virtual and physical remoteness from him, mostly, inadvertently. She could not use words as barbed as her mother sometimes uttered in a fit of fury, lest Manik da would feel hurt. She could not be confrontational even if she wanted to. Was this awe or traces of affinity or the proverbial “pull of the blood”? she was reluctant to admit.

The grudges she held against him seemed to sting her almost every other day, nevertheless. The resentment kept simmering beneath her stoic exterior;  informed by the thick tomes on human psychology, she deeply feared that the resentment might just erupt on some unfortunate day, and that, she anticipated, would be a wretched sight.

She had picked up this fancy word from one of her Psychology classes: ‘catharsis’.

“Catharsis is what I require. It’s a must!” she resolved one night. “I will have to kill him. Yes, that is what I will have to do. I want out of this mess. I will have to kill him.”

Saying these words to herself over and over, she rose from the bed and headed to procure the weapon to be used in this ghastly scheme. She reached her desk, and, with a smoothness which the gravest of criminals are naturally endowed with, opened the drawer. She put her hand inside to search for the weapon. There, ah! There it was! A fine steel gray Pierre Cardin pen.

Yes, Angai firmly believed in the cathartic power of art.

“I must write a story with a character modelled on Manik da, and then have that character killed!”