Swapna

I did not see her die. But I killed her.

Two days back, I asked her to accompany me for a neighbourhood meeting. She did not want to get involved in that. I told her that I needed her there, in case I lost my cool. She joked that that would hardly get her there. She came along anyway. The meeting took place outside in the idyllic setting of the tree-lined lane in this middle-class ghetto. On one side, there was a mob of about twenty frothing and fuming; on the other, I more or less like them and she rather detached. In between, there were two men and a woman from the local police station and also two officials from the Water Authority, they were all leaning towards the mob. For seven months, my house has not got water supply while the neighbours had it 24x7. I had complained to the Managing Director of the Water Authority about the corrupt who had screwed up the supply network in my area. I wanted the Authority to rectify the situation, place valves to reduce the supply downstream or put a new pipeline to ensure water supply to my house which was at a slightly elevated level. The mob’s view was that that would happen only over a dead body, theirs or mine. The officials there seemed to share the mob’s view that one loser was sufficient. 

Till then, my complaints had been general, without naming anyone. At the meeting, I changed tack. I accused specific people in the area; included a contractor and an engineer (now deceased) in the Water Authority; and, as if I was short of enemies, named a sub-Inspector of police too. I gave details of their misdeeds, told the mob I had photos and video recordings to back my claims. The mob reacted as expected. They lashed out at me. My sneer must have goaded them to attack her. “What else can we expect from an immoral guy who sleeps with her? God save our kids from such an influence!” the mob brayed. 

That was the cue to play my first trump card. I told the police to note the attack on a woman. I told them I was recording the proceedings with the smartphone in my pocket. I went for the jugular with the second card. 

“Are we going back to the Dark Ages? A hundred years back, my kind wasn’t allowed to touch water meant for forward castes and classes. That’s what I read in history books. Are you reviving that practice? Is this your version of cultural renaissance? The discrimination against my caste has gone on for too long. For ten years, I have begged for water enjoyed by these...” I listed out the religious and the caste groups that formed the majority, and the mob, there. I turned to the government officials. “I expected you to function without religious and caste bias. The government should be working for all, not just for the majority, and never at the expense of the human rights of the minority, even though that is the prevailing fashion in the country.” 

I had prepared that speech well in advance. All of them protested. Even she looked shocked. It was not that that was false or a half-truth. It is just not stuff to be said openly, like parents having sex or whatever. We are supposed to be a model secular cosmopolitan society. Our prejudices are supposed to be private, even though politicians can use it for their benefit, and our voting pattern hardly kept such views hidden. 

My third trump card was not in my hands but it got played right then fortuitously. A high-ranking police officer my family knew made a call to the police inspector at the meeting. The mob had their own high-ranking officials and ministers but just then, I had them on the mat, that too with allegations (and recording) of abuse against a woman and the unmentionable religious-caste angle, both issues that could snowball into social media viral frenzy. The officials decided quickly that it was enough for the day. The mob scattered silently but the hatred in the air was palpable. The festering wound showed signs of gangrene.

The attack will happen late at night. I will not be there. She will be on the balcony, her workspace these last few weeks she has been with me, finishing work or puffing the last cigarette of the day. The men from up north will drop down from the terrace onto the balcony and hack her to pieces.

The media might present it as a hate-crime, given her work and views attacking the establishment. Even the police might accept it as such and let the investigation lead to nothing. If I am questioned, I will say, “I did not see her die. But I killed her.” I will express regret about taking her for the poisonous meeting. I will suggest that the mob must have ‘given a quotation’ (common parlance for a contract-killing) to hit-men. “Such is their hatred. Why her? They should have killed me,” I would wail. Every day, the newspapers scream out such solutions to settle disputes ignored by the police and the courts: a lorry crushing people to pulp; gunmen on motorbikes hacking or shooting victims; the inconvenient bound and gang-raped and hanged. The hit-men, if caught, will not reveal the source of the contract. Multi-level deals via the internet provide such benefits. I will be the grieving lover without a motive to kill. 

“In which world are you?” she said.

“What?” 

“You have been staring at the ceiling for…”

“Weren’t you sleeping?”

“I was.” She snuggled closer. “I always sleep so well with you by my side.”

“Cheesy…”

She pinched my side.

I turned sideways to face her and kissed her forehead. I placed my hand on her waist, caressed her back, moved towards her breast. 

“Naughty boy,” she said laughing. 

I removed my hand.

“Now, don’t sulk.” 

She tickled my sides. I smiled.

“You have changed a lot, Arjun,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. She raised one in reply.

“I had to, right?” I said.

“I wish you hadn’t.”

“Well, you were the one who told me to have a feel for everything.”

“When did I say that?”

“Long back…at least thirty years back…”

“Geez…” She rose a little and settled with half her torso on me, palms flat on my chest, chin resting on the intertwined fingers. She stared at me for a while. “I did not mean it this way.”

I was glad she did not say I remembered too much of the past.

“These bloody times…” she muttered, “we will all end up as murderers…or silent approvers of the homicidal bastards…we will be fellow-conspirators…for what…to preserve our…our culture…culture my bloody cunt. Everyone is so insecure. The imbeciles who make up the majority think everything is theirs. No one else can have anything. Not even a different thought. Decades of silenced hypocrisy and frustration, all coming up to the surface...they should fuck more.”

She could have been talking about me.

“Shhhh…you are not one of them…never you, Swapna….” I said.

She leaned forward and kissed my chin. I expected her to say you-neither-Arjun.

“Does my French shock you?” she giggled. “I can speak like that only with you.”

“Oh, you do enough without French…” I said.

“Never enough…”

After a long silence, she raised her head.

“I too have changed, haven’t I?” she said.

“Hmmm…”

“I had to…long back…” She moved her hands to my side, her head resting on my chest. My hand swept back hair from her forehead. “But…you didn’t have to, my dear Arjun…I still want that boy with a toothy grin…not this bitter angry old man.”

“Oh, thank you for stabbing...”

We laughed. Not for long. 

She reached for her smartphone.

“Nothing…?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“He will call,” I said.

“I don’t know why I can’t live without him. I have never felt this way. I must be getting old,” she said.

“You are…”

“Thank you, stranger.”

I gave her a bear hug. She was on top of me. She squeezed my sides.

“He must have decided to go back to his wife,” she said, “decided to stick to his generation.”

“And now you think this thing with him is ok,” I said.

She raised her head and stared at me for a while.

“When did you become a stickler for rules?” she asked.

I did not reply.

“I miss him so much,” she continued. “We had made plans to live together, to be totally exclusive.”

“No space for poor me in those plans,” I said.

She pinched my arm. 

“There’s always space for you,” she said. “In lots of ways, he reminds me of you back then.” That was supposed to be my consolation prize.

When did she decide that I would be happy with that little space, wherever, with whoever, for whatever? It had always been older men before. This new guy, so much younger than me, is a first. I just cannot understand why she never, not once, thought about me in that way, at least as a natural progression of our relationship. When we talk about it, she says the usual Arjun-you-are-different-and-important-to-me. Thirty years wasted. I am nothing to her, not even a toy boy. 

As I held her close, I hoped she would not hear the rumbling of impotent rage within.

She has to go. There is only one way to go without goodbye.

Maybe, she is right. It has something to do with the prevailing atmosphere, the dark gloomy despondence.

Maybe not… 

Nothing has really changed. Not the times. Not the people. Not the place.

Awareness screwed up everything.

Back then, when I fell in love with her, I did not give a fuck about who the PM was. It must not have mattered for most. That may not be true. There must have been the same proportion that cared for such stuff. After all, thousands or was it lakhs or millions were ready to massacre and kill even then...no, not just ready, they had killed and raped and buggered...for...exactly, that is the question...for god-fucking-what?

Now, why did I think of killing and raping and buggering when I thought of our love story?

The nineties and the decade after…was that not the time for animal spirits and selfish interests? No wonder the crazies who came later managed to spread their tentacles far and wide, feeding on the cynicism and the insecurity. I guess I am one of those crazies now. Back then, I did not give a damn about the world. They could have nuked my neighbourhood and I would have slept peacefully. I worked hard then. I was depressed when poor. I was not happy when I made lots of money. But, I had something in my life…she was there…I guess I was really alive only with her.

Yes, that is when I fell in love with her.

“I am finally in love with you,” I declared. Where were we that day, in my hostel room, or in her apartment?

“Didn’t you tell me that long back?” What was she doing then? Lying next to me or cooking for us? “I am sure you told me you love me.” I love the smile in her eyes, the affectionate tease.

“Well, now I have realized that I love you and that I am also in love with you.”

“Ah! So, you have started thinking from below your belt.”

“Don’t joke about it....”

“What else?”

“Oh, you know…don’t you?”

“I guess so. I too love you. I too am in love with you. But you know that I can’t cross some boundaries.”

“I know, I agreed to it, didn’t I?” I said. “But, at the same time, I disagree with you.”

“We will last long my way, my boy.”

I was in my twenties then but for her I remained a boy. When I disagreed with her, she smiled at ‘charming boyish petulance’. When I first saw her naked, she was surprisingly shy and also pleased, “boy, don’t look at me like that”. When she saw me naked, she seemed surprised, “you are still a boy”. It was not meant to be demeaning. She once mentioned that her husband’s cock is “very thick, unlike yours”. I think my response was, “well, it’s not size that matters, right?” “Oh, it matters,” she replied. I was not supposed to take it badly. In fact, I took it in the right spirit. Otherwise, we would not have lasted so long. I guess I was not a boy in many ways too. When she separated from her husband, she came to me. The whole world seemed to be against her. At first I played the role of devil’s advocate and argued against her stand. When I realized she needed my support, I gave it to her totally, without another question. I like to think I played a small part in her late blossoming. She started writing, that is, writing at a level I could only dream of. Consistency was not exactly her strongest suite. She left her own kids but she worked with differently-abled kids. She even attended some course on that. She was not a feminist but she became their activist. She used her parents’ connections to work with the UN (and claimed they had played no part), in parts of the world I will never see, with underprivileged people I do not want to meet. She attacked right-wing groups at home and abroad. She hated the ‘lefties’ too. She was going places, getting recognition and I was proud of her. I did not have to tell her about my admiration. “You keep me going,” she said. She needed men, women too. She told me about them. I too tried marriage for a few years. It never had a chance to succeed. While it lasted, Swapna and I remained out of touch. In that period, I did not write the pulp fiction and cheesy poems that seem to be my forte. I tried to be a family man, worked hard, saved lots of money, and had sex as and when required by middle-class norms. She told me later that she too could not write during that period “without my muse, my boy”. She is the love of my life but even back then I could not fool myself into thinking I was really special for her. I did not think too much about that or about why I had to be an ‘incel’. If she had died then, it would have been different. I would have become ‘the’ love of her life.  Death allows such distortion of facts.

Life was less confusing when our ‘thing’ started in the eighties. My friends were watching porn and ‘feeling up’ girls. That was not for me. I went to the temple regularly. I refused to enter churches or mosques, not even for weddings. My family, and close friends, joked that I was a fanatic. They must have realized later that I do not enter the famous big temples either. That was long before she and I stopped going to temples altogether.

I used to stay with her family during long holidays, or they used to come over to our city. The two families were closer than most relatives, close friends even before I was born. According to family mythology, my mother had taken care of her mother, every day for weeks, when Swapna was born prematurely and had to be nursed in the hospital. I too had been a difficult baby. She and her mother helped my mother then. ‘The League of Difficult Babies’, that’s what they called us when we teamed up for cards or anything else. Her parents did not try for a baby for a long time after she was born. Mine had enough with me.

Her younger brother is my age and used to be a good friend. Her younger sister is a few years younger and I think our families expected us to be an item. 

One year (I was in high school), there was some State-level competition in her city for nearly a fortnight.  I had to stay in the camp with the district team but every other day I hopped over to her house for a proper meal and a clean bathroom. I guess I got lucky that year and did remarkably well in everything, from quiz to debate, athletics to elocution, even drama. She attended some of the events and cheered for me. She was quite impressed with my grasp of current affairs. After my team won the quiz competition, she remarked, “You seem to know all about The Wall and the Cold War, Vietnam and all our wars too, even about Woodstock.” I must have given her my toothy grin. “I wonder if you feel it,” she said. “Feel what?” I must have asked. “Have a feel for everything,” that’s all she said.

I made the first phone-call on the second or third day of that stay. I did not have any competition event that evening and I was at her place for the night. Her parents and siblings had gone for a wedding reception. She wanted to prepare for some office-meeting and I had volunteered, “I’ll take care of her.” They had all laughed. I had tea with her and praised her latest attempt in baking beehive-cake. She smiled and ruffled my unkempt hair. 

“Why don’t you comb your hair?” she asked.

“Girls like you won’t touch it if it’s combed, right?” I was surprised with my reply. 

She playfully tweaked my ear. “I’m now going to work. What are you going to do?”

“Maybe go for a walk. Do you need anything?”

“Get me a ball-point pen, Reynolds, black ink, don’t forget that. Let me get you the money.”

“I have enough.”

“Oh, big guy…”

I told her to lock the front door after I stepped out.

“Yes, papa…”

It was meant to be a prank call, a gentle tease. I called from a phone-booth near her house. 

“Swapna...?” I said.

“Yes?” she spoke softly.

Her soft voice on the phone must have been the trigger. Not then, but many years later I wondered if she had been waiting for such a call, not from me of course.

I did not alter my voice too much. I let it come from deep within my chest. Nor did I put on some accent to be groovy.

“Can I talk to you for a few minutes? Please don’t hang up,” I said.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“I have known you for some time. You must have noticed me.”

“At work…? Who is this?” she repeated. She sounded more curious than alarmed.

“Don’t worry. If you don’t like it, I won’t call you again. I won’t trouble you at all. Promise. I just had to tell you that I find you simply gorgeous. Not just in looks.”

“Don’t be silly. Now, look here, tell me who you are.”

“Is that really important?”

“Of course…otherwise, you are just a coward. And I don’t like cowards.”

“True. I am a coward. I don’t even have the guts to face you and tell you that I find you wonderful. I am scared to lose you. But if you insist, I will face you…soon. Promise.”

“Guys who promise too much are not trustworthy.”

“Ok,” I must have been hurt, “bye for now.”

I browsed in a bookshop, bought her pen and returned to her house. She seemed a trifle distracted. 

I called again two days later, from another phone booth. Her parents were sleeping and siblings had gone for a tuition class. She had returned early from work and was having a late lunch. “Where are you going?” she asked when I left the house. “To Xerox these math questions…this Manickavachagom book is interesting. I found it in your collection. Hope you don’t mind me borrowing.”“Have you started calculus?” she asked. “On my own…” She had looked impressed.

She picked up the call on the third ring. 

“Hi, it’s me,” I said.

There was no response.

“Do you want me to hang up?”

Silence continued.

“Say something, please.”

“You are an idiot.”

“I agree totally,” I laughed.

She laughed too.

We talked for ten minutes that day. I told her that she looked lovely in the green kurta with cream pants she wore that day. She wanted to know where I had seen her. Everywhere, I replied. Cheesy, she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Call me Arjun.”

The fourth time I called, she asked, “How do you know when to call me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem to know when I am alone to take your call.”

“Are you scared I am a stalker?”

“Maybe…”

I remained silent for a while.

“Arjun…” she said.

“Hmmm…”

“I want to see you. I will not talk to you on the phone again.”

There was a long silence.

“Why are you scared to meet me?” she asked.

“I am scared to lose you.”

She remained silent. I thought I had already lost her with my weakness.

“Where can you meet me?” I asked.

“Tomorrow at the Devi temple near my house,” she replied without hesitation.

“Tomorrow…at the temple...?” The competition was in its last stage and I was not sure if I could make it to the temple. 

“Don’t you go to temples?” she asked. “You can stand outside…I will meet you outside around six.”

“Six in the evening…? I don’t know if I will be free then,” I said.

“No, six in the morning,” she said. 

“Ah…”

“Ok?”

“Am I going to be the sacrificial lamb?”

“Something like that…to start my day,” she said. I could feel her smile through her voice.

I was sleeping at her house that night. I had to be at the camp only by eight the next morning. I hardly slept. I got up early and had a cold shower. I went to the kitchen. Her parents were also up. I talked to them and drank a glass of hot milk. She came to the kitchen around quarter to six.

“Where to…?” her mother asked.

“To the temple…”

“Do a pooja for this little guy,” her mother said.

Swapna ruffled my hair, “Will do.”

“I will come along,” I said.

“Oh, don’t bother,” she said.

“No bother at all.”

“No, seriously, I go alone all the time.”

“Take him with you,” her father said. “Final days of the competition after all…”

“Ok,” she said rather blandly.

At the temple, I quickly made the round, gestured to her that I would wait outside. She waited for the pooja for me and came out after fifteen minutes. I was sitting on the platform beneath the big banyan tree. I pretended to be busy studying the tree. I saw her look around. She kept on chewing her lower lip, something she does when she is thinking or confused. She walked towards me. I remained seated. She stood in front of me. From the banana leaf with the temple offering, she took sandalwood paste on a finger and applied it to my forehead. Then, she took a slice of banana. I opened my mouth. She placed it in my mouth.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said.

She looked at me for a while, silent. Then, she said, “I know.”

“What?” 

“I am not a dumb girl, you know.”

I stood up. We walked back home. We talked softly, like on the phone. 

We talked like that only when we were alone. When others were around, I paid more attention to her younger sister. It was not always soft talk. We used to fight too. She loved to irritate me about my stance on issues, or rather my ignorance. She liked to poke at my fascination for traditional romance. She hooted with laughter when she read one of my not-that-bad heartfelt poems about finding a lovely lass by a lit lamp, all coy and sentimental, “bloody cheesy” as she put it.

She too was traditional then. She agreed to an arranged marriage. “I should have waited, but back then, girls didn’t really have that freedom,” she said later.

I was at her parents’ house for more than a week before her wedding, helping them just like her younger brother. I got her to myself only for ten minutes one of those days. I nearly cried. She told me not to make her cry. “We will never say goodbye,” she said. I think I told her that I love her. Or maybe, I told her that much earlier, or later. I did not have to say it. I asked her if I could kiss her. She said that she cannot cross that line. “Why are you such a stickler for rules?” I had protested. At least on your cheek, I pleaded. No, she said firmly. It stayed that way even later. She used to call me from her husband’s house. I used to write letters to her, just the innocent-younger-brother type of letters. We continued with our act.

I was Arjun only for her. She has been my Swapna. She is always the dream that has to end when I decide to wake up some day.