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 11th and 12th 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!”
