Mothballs of the Mind

“If you drop something down the gorge, it will come right back to you!”

The words rang out into the clear mountain air before vanishing down the valley on a spiral of cool breezes. Excited voices rose from the group of people crowded around the tourist guide. A couple of women, mostly middle-aged Indians clad in traditional garb, yanked off their stoles and voluminous dupattas while the men scrabbled in their wallets for the odd coin; in an age of e-commerce, metal coins were hard to find. A little boy kicked off his shoes and peeled off a sock hurriedly, and an assortment of personal items were flung down the cliff.

There was a long moment of breathless anticipation before the sundry items came rocketing right back out of the valley. Screams of delight and wonder rent the still air as people scrambled to reclaim their things. The tourist guide, shabbily dressed and smelling of hooch, bowed deeply. His unshaven face was lit up by a thousand volt smile as if he was, with utmost modesty, taking personal responsibility for the marvel of nature involving concentric valley wind currents.

“Move on, move on, move on! There are lots more to see,” his voice cut across the quiet dreaming mountain air as he swiftly herded his flock up a steep climb. There were not too many hours of daylight in this season, and a lot remained to be shown. The cluster of babbling tourists gathered their belongings, and forming a ragged queue, went panting after him obediently. They were soon swallowed by the dense foliage. Silence, broken only by the distant tapping of a woodpecker, descended once more upon the gray-green mountainside.

She watched the whole episode from her perch on a rock with interest and a kind of detached amusement. The little boy’s red and white sock, forgotten in his hurry to follow the guide, was lying on the ground a little way off, and she glanced at it indulgently. She’d pick it later and stuff it into the pocket of her jacket; she could return it to the boy on their return journey in the bus. She leaned against a tree trunk and raised her face to the watery winter sunshine. There was something tangible about silence in the mountains she thought reflectively, it had a solidly dense quality to it that was vaguely unnerving. Silence in the mountains was so much more of a definite entity than in the city, she mused, where silence was merely an absence of sound.

No wait, she thought changing her mind only moments later, if you listened, and listened carefully, you could hear things. You could hear the hormonal rush of wild things growing in the sun, the husky caress of foliage as they brushed branches and leaves, and the amorous whispers of fleecy clouds high up in the sky as they romped around. No, she told herself, the mountains were definitely not silent. They talked. And very articulately, at that….

She rose and pocketing the little boy’s sock, walked leisurely to the edge of the cliff. She peered down into the misty lavender depths. What could she toss into the valley, now? The unremarkable biodata of a Biology teacher (she had won the Teacher of the Year Award twice, though)? A report of her humdrum two-decade-and-some-more married life? Her burgeoning disenchantment with everything and everyone connected with her life? Her quietly ageing looks (she was still highly presentable to look at, they told her at college, elegant more than pretty)? She wondered whether things tossed into the valley came back altered in some manner, spun with some kind of magic….? Was there some power, some sort of intelligence, a pagan earth-goddess, maybe, down there that threw back the tossed things? And did the things return touched by a Circean quality, never to be the same sock, stole or coin ever again? What if she threw the accumulation of two decades’ experience of teaching adolescents down the valley…? The aching monotony of the years gone by…..? What if she traded the dreary life of being a dutiful wife and mother to indifferent recipients for the irresistible mystery of the uncertain lurking down in the gorge? What if she tossed her secret yearning for an extra-marital romance into the treacherously beautiful valley swirling with mists before her? Would they come back to her touched with mystique?

What if she threw herself?

Voices sounded behind her suddenly, and she started guiltily. She took a hasty step back fromthe edge of the cliff 

just as two men appeared in full view, walking leisurely down the mountainside. They were talking among themselves but slowed down uncertainly on spotting her. She recognized them as members of her own tourist group. The older man, short, paunchy, and balding had been fussing around his emaciated wife in the bus, she recalled, making sure she didn’t catch a chill from the wind at the window. The other man,younger, tall, lanky, and with wavy brown hair hanging below his shoulders, was a stranger.

The shorter man caught her eye and smiled nervously. He jerked a thumb back at the invisible group of tourists and made an enquiring gesture with his hand. “Vertigo” she mouthed silently, tapping a well-manicured forefinger to her temple. He nodded sympathetically.

“Forgot my binocs in the bus,” he shouted out to her, although she had asked him nothing.

The younger man ran an indifferent glance over her that was vaguely insolent, before moving ahead with his companion.

The duo was back very soon, the bus being parked only a little way off. A pair of sturdy-looking binoculars was now strung around the older man’s neck. He gave her a swift uneasy glance in passing. “I’d…I’d keep a little more distance from the cliff edge if I were you, Ma’am”, his voice was softly apologetic. She turned fully and gave him a complex kind of smile. The younger man seemed oblivious to the interaction between them and had his gaze fixed on the horizon. She gazed at their backs as they disappeared into the woods. I’m not suicidal, she told herself, oh no, not at all. I’ll have you know, my good man, that I counsel disturbed adolescents in junior college, and I’m a bloody good counselor. The soft angry muttering escaped her mouth to the accompaniment of cold puffs of silvery vapor, only to be blown away into the grass-scented winter breeze.

She sat by the deep blue lake trying to identify the bouquet of scents assailing her nostrils. Jacaranda, for sure, rain trees, laburnum, flame of the forest, and tamarind. A profusion of untamed oleander, hibiscus, and the golden blossoms of wild Allamanda…. The winter air was pregnant with some quality that begged for introspection. If it came to putting it down on paper, in what exact words would her entire life be summed up right now? she wondered. How would her professional resume read at this time? A respected Biology teacher with twenty-two years of teaching experience and a couple of awards in her kitty. A popular student counselor who had averted quite a few adolescent disasters and held high chances of being appointed Head of the Biology Department sometime soon. There! Not bad, she thought approvingly, not bad at all. For an overall maternal analysis now: an easygoing, sporting parent who had never, for even a single day, envisioned herself being a helicopter or a tiger mum, or a mother. Just a mother. And her daughter, studying to be an orthopedic (albeit a rather self-centered one), was proof of her successful parenting. Great going, girl, she lauded herself. Now for her most private desires. She thought of her secret literary aspirations and her unfinished books of poems lying like a pulsating jewel in the depths of her closet; her sacred little book that she went back to repeatedly, whenever time and inspiration permitted her to do so. Her book of poems, her oasis, her one reason to be alive…. Better not overthink the issue of secret aspirations, she advised herself nervously; her book now pulsed with a life of its own. There was a fragile touch-me-not quality to her manuscript, as if it were on the brink of contracting some terminal disease.

She moved on hurriedly.

Spousal analysis, now…ha! At what crucial point had she fallen out of love with her husband? Even though she continued to love him devotedly…. There was an entire galaxy of paradoxes between loving a person and being in love, she thought philosophically, the former involving grumpy days of non-communication, peeves, boorishness, and flatulence, while the latter involved only a kind of delicious madness. Or so the writers of romantic novels would have you believe. To wrap her spouse into a neat package, her cuddly panda bear of a husband, who snored loud enough to raise the dead and ate till his burps drowned out the soap playing on TV,who broke wind into the closed confines of their air-conditioned car, who was suspicious of every male who came too close to her (including her students), who presented her with kitchen cleaner on their wedding anniversary, who loved her so much and so painfully that he would get cabbage every Saturday although she hated the stuff, who filled her kitchen with unwanted stuff and ignored all that she desired, who never registered her loud proclaims of her likes and dislikes, and who over the decades was, like a genial steamroller, trying to flatten her into a female version of himself, who stopped listening whenever she was saying something significant, who thought writing poetry was the first stage of dementia, who was so infuriating that….

She halted abruptly, shocked at her own inner virulence. She gazed back at the immaculately groomed woman gazing back at her. Who would have ever suspected that the woman facing her hid so much turbulence? She continued to stare into her own eyes in a bewildered manner.

“Admiring yourself…?”

She saw him in the water first. His exquisitely fine-boned, dissipated face next to her froze none. She half-turned very slowly trying not to rob the moment of any kind of significance. “You’re back?” Her tone was coolly detached. He smiled. 

His smile had the radiance of a rainbow. It jarred oddly with his dreadlocks, his lean slouching body, and a look of constant physical erosion of some hidden sort. “Was he on some kind of substance?”, she wondered. Covertly, she took in his chiseled face with the large glossy eyes that seemed permanently focused on a point beyond the present and the slightly off-kilter expression that, in a vague manner, was surprisingly attractive. A lot like Lord Krishna, the enigmatic and promiscuous god of the Hindus, representing the cosmos or the cosmic juggernaut, she thought inconsequentially. Amorous, unpredictable, and fully capable of treachery and injustice to even the most ardent of his devotees.

She turned away from the man beside her to gaze at the lake again. She knew this personality blueprint very well. A bunch of her male students, a lot like the man behind her, had passed through her hands over the years. 

Insolent, insufferable but custodians of some strange inner magic, she had succeeded in cutting them to size in a matter of a few months. It was to her credit that some of her besotted ex-students till sent her greetings and mails, but she was of too modest a nature to acknowledge her own personal charisma. This man was, of course, much older than her students but younger than her. She wondered where the other man with the binoculars was.

“Your companion is not with you?”, she asked politely.

He didn’t seem to have heard her.

“What do you do? When you’re not admiring yourself or contemplating suicide, that is.”

“I wasn’t….”

“You were, you know.”

She turned to face him fully at last, in quiet fury.

“I’m a very successful volunteer of the college anti-suicide squad, I’ll have you know”, she hit out, “and to think that I, of all people, would think of suicide! And besides, even if I was thinking of jumping into the gorge, self-annihilation is almost as strong and as justified an instinct in humans as self-preservation. I’m not saying it, Sigmund Freud did, or maybe Carl Jung. One of them did, I’m sure.”

She was conscious of having contradicted herself in some hilarious manner judging by the man’s expression. There was silence between them.

‘What do you do? Professionally, I mean.’

‘I teach.’

‘Retired?’

Blast the man, he really was the pits, she thought in annoyance, did she look quite so old? And with her elaborate beauty regimen maintained over the decades…?

‘A couple of years to go before retirement.’ Her voice was stiff.

‘And then…?’

‘And then, well, then…cook, travel, housekeep, socialise, …..write.’

She could have happily sliced off her runaway tongue. Never talk about your innermost desires to anyone, not even those closest to you, the History teacher, and her closest friend, had whispered to her in the staff room, or else the green ghoul ensnares them. The stinking, rotting,bottle-green ghoul that feeds on the fetuses of secret desires and causes miscarriages,abortions, or the failure of such dreams to reach full term. She had trilled with laughter at her friend’s vivid fancies, but a sliver of superstition had been firmly planted in her fertile mind. The book of poems, an embryo in the dark spaces of her closet, pulsating, feeding, and growing steadily, flashed through her mind; it was not to be talked about. And she had just blurted out its existence to this audacious stranger.

His strange, fractionally divergent gaze focused on her momentarily before drifting off again,and he muttered something inaudible. Had he just whispered, ‘I would have expected it!’ under his breath, she wondered caustically. Was he, like her husband, of the opinion that poetry was a prelude to some form of serious mental disorder?

She rose, needing to get away from the man. With her head bent low, and kicking at pebbles moodily, she chanced upon a completely flat pebble. She picked it up and slanting her body, sent it skimming across the water’s surface. It bounced three times before sinking into the water. As a child, she had been able to manage around ten bounces.

‘Like this.’

His stone went dancing over the water that was now aglitter with sunshine. The stone leapt nearly a dozen times breaking the golden cone of reflected sunshine into shards before disappearing. That was really good, she conceded grudgingly. Again, he smiled his rainbow smile.

‘Well, good luck, Professor. With your words….and with your life….’

And then he was gone. By the time she had dusted the stone chips off her knees and turned, he had vanished into the foliage. 

-*-*-*-*

The flight to Mumbai was delayed by more than an hour. The tall man with the shoulder-length hair sat in an aisle seat, his long legs stretched out in the cramped space before him. His eyes were half-closed, and his foot tapped rhythmically to some inner music. The seat beside him was empty, and in the window seat, a plaid-clad passenger sat concealed behind an open newspaper. The pretty stewardess traipsing down the aisle slanted a coquettish glance down at the tall man, but he appeared to be oblivious to his surroundings.

The airplane was beginning to taxi, and the tall man’s sleepy gaze wandered around aimlessly before coming to rest on his fellow passenger’s newspaper. His foot suddenly stopped tapping,and he leaned forward to read something on the last page of the newspaper. It was a lengthy interview of a woman, an attractive fifty-something woman, from the look of her profile picture, with a pair of charismatic, empathetic eyes sparkling behind fashionable reading glasses.

‘Dissecting the Word: The Journey of a Biology teacher from Vivisection to Verse’, announced the title, while the opening paragraph informed readers about the book launch of the lady’s debut collection of poems at an swanky book-store in South Mumbai. And to be launched by none other a celebrated doyen of Indie-English poetry, announced the gushing text. A highlighted square carried a few lines of the lady’s poetry, and the man leaned forward,squinting.

‘At the vortex of all desire

is the country of one’s dreams

Unshackled,

sans inhibitions

No time, no space, no measurement

needed in this landscape

of bliss,

And the light here

is almost always mellow.’

The aircraft was cruising over the blue expanse of the Arabian Sea now. The lights went off, and the cabin plunged into a beige-gold gloom. The tall man leaned back in his seat, and with his eyes shut, went back to tapping his foot to an inaudible rhythm once again. An odd half-smile hovered on his lips.

_*_*_*_*

The Guest of Honour was avuncular, verbose, and ego-centric to a fault. She allowed him to fill every nook and cranny of the bookstore with his pulsating persona, before his effusive words and bombastic poetry finally petered out. She took the mic, her fingers trembling slightly. She read haltingly, her voice a summer moth fluttering around the flame of her poetry. Slowly, with a feeling of complete astonishment, the beauty of her own lines hit her, and her voice picked up confidence. The crowd sat enraptured.

She was on her last poem when she spotted him. Sitting in a corner in a neutral manner; maybe he was a part of her audience and maybe he was not. His long legs were crossed elegantly, his body draped around the plastic chair, relaxed, and his gaze, remote and dreamy, was fixed at a point above her head. She faltered momentarily before her voice gathered strength again for the concluding lines.

The enthusiasm was almost frightening. She was quite unprepared for the flurry of excitement that followed her book reading; the gushing interactions with complete strangers, the warm vocal admiration of her colleagues, and the smiling swarms of journalists looking to pin her down for comments. Poetry is alive in this city, she thought in wonder, alive and how! The queue of readers looking to get copies of their book autographed snaked till the doorway, but she managed to tackle it quickly enough. She felt a sense of panicky delight at the situation and guessed that most debut writers probably felt that way when they first saw their writing in print.

As it often happened with her when in crowds, she felt a gradual sense of detachment, a feeling of her mind gently disassociating from her body. She was intensely aware of the train of disconnected thoughts flitting through her head even as she autographed books smilingly for buyers. It was almost as if she was temporarily splitting into two people, each travelling on a plane at a very different altitude from the other. There was an extra thread of awareness shivering through her today, and she knew why. For anyone else, such multiple streams of consciousness might have proved unsettling, but for her, the momentary dichotomy of being was nothing short of exhilarating. 

When her mind gently returned to its official habitat, she felt a warm rush of connectivity with the people around her; the over-painted affluent grannies trundling around in a coterie, the young wannabe novelists, the genuine poetry lovers, the banker who had travelled all the way from across the city to attend the event, and others. Was human personality a porous affair then, a semi-permeable membrane which allowed all kinds of movement, and in every kind of direction? Was there something in the Hindu myth after all, that believed that all living beings(and inanimate ones, as well) were interconnected, and every man, woman, child, pebble, and iguana were extensions of a cosmic whole? She clamped down on her whimsical thoughts and smiled encouragingly at a young girl who had slipped her a notepaper with a hand written poem on it. She glanced at the email address at the bottom of the page and with convincing effusiveness, promised to read it and mail a feedback.

All too soon, as it happens with such events, the book-store fell silent. Her publisher, flushed and triumphant with the success of the evening, had left for her flight to Delhi. The crowds, even the odd late-night browser, had dispersed, and the book-store was beginning to take on a forlorn air.

She climbed up the narrow stairs leading to the mezzanine café with a heightened sense of achievement and slid into a chair, thirsting for coffee. He was there almost instantly, as she knew he would be, sliding into the chair before her. He raised a slim forefinger catching the attention of a waiter passing by. A Madras filter coffee for me, thank you, and a latte for the lady.

‘Madras filter coffee…? Are they likely to have that in this snazzy Americanised café?’

‘They should if they value their coffee beans.’

His voice was austere. How on earth did he know that she liked latte? Her coffee arrived in a large cup with a hand painted saucer, his in a quaint stainless-steel tumbler. The man at the coffee counter had done an exquisitely artistic job with her coffee foam; two Kashmir Chinar leaves had been piped with their stems entwined, and every vein and every leaf striation showed up with astonishing clarity. There was no way she could rupture the design, she thought, staring at it, and looked at him with an expression of anguish on her face. He laughed at her, his strange glossy eyes dancing.

‘A Biology teacher who dissects frogs and snails but can’t bring herself to puncture her coffee...?

Hilarious…!’

She gazed down at her coffee again, trying to stall. He reached across and picking up a dainty silver spoon, scooped a bit of foam with it. A high-voltage shock hit her, and she trembled at the intimacy of his casual action. Almost as if he had reached out and touched her. The Chinar leaves, likewise, trembled and gently dissolved into meaningless shapes. She took a hesitant sip of her coffee.

‘Do you enjoy poetry?’ she asked in a rush.

‘What have you done to your hair?’

Another tremor, another high-voltage shock….

‘When I saw you sitting by the lake, the winter sun spilling all over you, there was more auburn in your hair.’

She took a deep breath trying to steady her nerves. How did you find me, she ached to cry out, how do you find my poetry, do you connect with it, do my words make any kind of sense at all, and what colour do you prefer my hair to be, do you realize you’re easily ten years younger than me, do you know that I live in a constant state of denial, I actually live only half a life, the rest of my life I make up in my mind as I go along, just to make things more tolerable and you were quite right, I was planning to jump off the cliff hoping that I would spring back in some renewed nourished form, like a fixed deposit that has matured, do you know that I have a husband at home, a flat slob of a husband who will regale me with the details of his irritable bowel syndrome the moment I reach home even as I come to the end of my book launch evening, the most meaningful event of my life…?

She sipped her coffee with her head bent, saying nothing.

‘Autograph, please.’

A copy of her book slid into her view, with its artistically designed cover of a misty window. She opened the book to its first page, and her hand holding the slim silver pen trembled. There was so much she could write for him before she signed her name, she thought, bending to her task.

She shut the book and slid it across to him. He opened it. ‘Best Wishes’ it merely said, followed by her name. He smiled; smiled his radiant, intensely aware, inward-looking smile. The Krishna smile, she thought, why did he always remind her of the blue god? Lord Krishna, that great, fickle,trickster-god whom women loved so unconditionally.

They rose simultaneously, and climbing down the short flight of stairs, made for the exit. The bookstore door, two large slabs of clear glass, reflected them with a strange sort of tenderness, and she gazed back at their reflections captured in the panes. How different we are to look at and yet how similar in a way, she thought in wonder and confusion, to a stranger we might even look like siblings….

The night air outside was fragrant with an off-season thunderstorm that, unnoticed by them, had swept through the city during the book launch. The roads gleamed dark and slick, reflecting brokenly the amber and electric blue of the streetlights. The cherry red taillights of stalled traffic stretched in a neat curve as far as the eye could see, and the smell of wet earth rose raw and potent from the pavements.

Their steps echoed on the paver-blocks before slowing down. This is the moment, she thought agitatedly, this is the moment to ask him for his contact details; his mobile number, his email address, his residential address, his taste in music, literature, art, cuisine, his pet peeves, things that made him smile, laugh, exult, things that drove him to a murderous rage…, his taste in friends, what he did for a living, what were his passions, the name and its spelling on his driver’s license, in short, every single thing.

She knew she could never do it.

She turned to him urgently, unsure of what she was going to do or say. He was looking down at her- or maybe beyond her, or above her, it was difficult to tell- with his usual secretive half-smile.

‘Goodbye Professor…, and good luck. I’ll be waiting for your next book.’

He was gone then, vanishing into the wet night now spangled with lights, shadows, and raindrops. The tiny lavender flashes sparkling on the gleaming metal of cars on the road blinded her momentarily. The thunderstorm was done with the city and moving out to sea.

Her drive down Marine Drive with traffic lights sparkling on one side and a dark tumultuous sea heaving on the other was unremarkable. Generally, she would have leaned back in her seat and marveled at the communal diversity and clamour that invariably hit a person travelling down this route; the island mosque of Haji Ali winking with ivory-lights, the vast stone stairs leading to the ancient Babulnath temple of Lord Shiva, the skull-cap clad crowds of Mahim where the most divine cocktail of aromas rose from shops selling biryani, seekh kebabs, and phirni, and then the introspective silence of the mind as one passed St. Michael’s church where novena

offered to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour on nine successive Wednesdays was guaranteed to grant a devotee even the most unreasonable of desires.

But tonight, everything seemed different. The air was spun with a kind of enchantment that had shards of treachery in it, even the gleaming wet roads seemed vaguely menacing. The taxi driver crooned a song of love, pain, and betrayal in tune with his radio, and she had the dream-like feeling of floating through a flowering meadow while knowing fully well that it was actually quicksand in disguise.

Her mobile trilled, and she jumped. It was her husband. About time you started for home if you want to avoid the rush hour, and how was the book launch, wish I could have been there but this blasted meeting…did the press cover it, will you be in the newspapers tomorrow, I’m waiting to shove the news under my boss’s nose- my wife, the writer, hope the publishers pay you well, where on earth are my antacid pills, and the laxatives, I’m so constipated, I can’t even begin to tell you…. She held the mobile as far away from her ear as she could and allowed herself to sink into a gentle stupor. Presently, the loud aggrieved voice at the other end fell silent.

 *****

Goa. The land of sea, sands, surf, scorching sunshine, waving coconut fronds, and the best marijuana in the entire country…… She traipsed down the market road of Candolim, passing tiny stalls stacked with junk jewelry and roadside restaurants from which emanated the smells offried fish and the locally brewed toddy palm, feni. There was more white skin on display than brown, she noted interestedly, and Candolim could have passed for a mini-Russian town. The lunch hour pulsed with the languorous crooning of local singers who sang partly in English and partly in Konkani. The air was thick with blissful inertia as if the picturesque sea-side place had willfully fallen off the worldly radar and thrown itself into a time warp where the past thickly overlay the present, and no one really cared about the future. And so, it must have been centuries back, she thought gazing at the crumbling facades of the charming villas.

She bought a long bohemian skirt from an open cart parked under a tree, bunched tightly at the waist. She’d team it with a skimpy black top that promised to show a lot of skin. She grinned to herself, she’d come such a long way from her bourgeois sartorial tastes. ‘Now that you’re a moderately successful poet, dahling, do dress the part. These dowdy salwar-kameezes and saris you wear…ugh’ her svelte publisher had wrinkled her nose with distaste.

The beach bar