Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel by BS Murthy (read full novel txt) 📖

averse to their fellow-beings scavenging their latrines; now I wonder why I never thought of it before, maybe, we put up with what we come to grow up with; if not, why don’t the Sikh males find the turban burdensome and the Muslim dames put up with the inhibiting burka? Whatever, the world seems to care two hoots for the plight of the sex-workers as it had been to that of the scavengers, and God knows when it would be wiser to the ills of the unlicensed prostitution, if not AIDS, it’s the VD that’s the return on investment for these pleasure-givers; why, the malady of the flesh-trade is the bane of those who bring in the wares. How sad it is!” 

“What an irony that they are undone being the sexual scavengers of the male world?”

“Isn’t it a novel lament,” he said. “But, let the willing sell sex on their own, and see how it works for the sellers and the buyers alike, why it’s bound to benefit all, like in the rythubazars sans middlemen. But the farmers’ suicides make another story; it’s the marginal guys, who gamble on the cash crops that come a cropper; why not, lurking behind the probable windfall is the possible failure to devour; have you heard of a paddy farmer or a wheat grower committing suicide as the cash crop losers do? Yet with their eye on the rural vote-bank, how the parties in opposition tirade against the government of the day over these avoidable calamities; maybe the political power changes hands over their dead bodies but the destitute continue to consume pesticides as a way out of their debt traps. Won’t the callous politicians know that it’s in chasing the quick buck that these greedy guys bungle with their lives; why don’t they exhort farmers to part-opt for the cash crops to meet both ends? Moreover, it’s not as if the bankrupt traders and the insolvent others are not known to commit suicide but then, there is no political axe to grind over their deaths; it all boils down to lobbying, in the open as in the U.S or behind the closed doors in our country; but can sex workers ever muster the sort of clout that the farmers’ lobby has?”  

“Are they not making the right noises these days?” 

“God bless them,” he continued. “What a good turn one of them gave to my life; I was so put off with that metro jaunt that it was quite a while before I ventured into a brothel, where I chanced upon an angelic whore, who later became my Good Samaritan. Since she struck my romantic chord straight away, I stuck to her for it’s not the sexual variety that I sought even in the paid sex. After a hiatus, when I returned into her ardent arms, she told me that in the meantime she had conceived my child but was constrained to get it aborted. While I felt that something in me snapped, she said it was time that I got married and became a father, when she told me to court a suitable dame, I said that I was unlucky in love; she said that she knew a girl, who would be an ideal wife for me, and as if to goad me to her candidate, she said the dame had a rare sex appeal to eroticize the romantic in me; she said that the girl was not privy to her double life and even if she came to know about it, she was sure she would be sympathetic towards her. It was all too tempting not to follow the lead, more so as I was just then shunned by Devi, who opted to marry Raju, a bank clerk then; now I realize in hindsight that if only his father was half as resourceful as my dad had been, he might’ve been no less an engineer than me.”

“Isn’t it interesting that one woman should lead you to another woman?”

“Didn’t I tell you that my life is rather unusually unusual,” he said joyously. “Her lead led me to Rathi and I fell for her, so to say, head-over-heels, and her parents too were for hastening our wedding. With the wedding a week away, I went to thank her, you can guess who, and she offered herself as her wedding present; well I couldn’t say no to her and she dragged me into her bed, as she put it, to refresh my memory of an amorous woman’s lovemaking. Oh, what a time she gave me for one last time, but the day before the marriage party was to board the Circar Express to reach Rathi’s place, it occurred to me to take a VDRL test, just in case; and to my dismay, I tested positive. Nonplussed though, I rushed to a specialist, who said the tests could go awry at times, and how I wished that was the case in my case; anyway, putting my fears at rest, he said that even otherwise, he would treat me in time to make it harmless for my bride. What a nervous time it was waiting for the fresh report, oh, it was the anxiety of a lifetime; but how relieved I was as the second test negated the first result is beyond words.”  

“It’s as if your life never ceases to surprise.”

“It looks like that as I review it,” he said. “How my Rathi gloated over me for being better than the he-man of her dreams; as she lived by her devotion for me, I was lost in my adoration for her. How I used to savor every nuance of her enchanting persona to her heart’s content; as she made me feel wanted like never before, what a wondrous feeling it was, but still, in those fulfilling moments of our life, I opened the book of my unrequited love that she read with empathetic feeling. Yet, I know not why, I wanted to check up whether or not I would feel guilty being unfaithful to her, and seized by an urge to experiment, I took the test through paid sex, the result of which was neither ‘positive’ on the VDRL count nor ‘negative’ on my love count. So shorn of its moral shackles to confine it, my love soared to new highs, taking Rathi’s soul along to the zenith of our emotional union; oh what a life it was and how we both wished it lasted a lifetime; well, it had ended all too soon, but it was a lived life as long as it lasted.”

“Won’t it remind one of Gandhi’s experiments with truth?”

“I have no quarrel with Gandhi the man but I have problem with the Mahatma of his,” he said and as if to remonstrate his apathy for the Gandhian values, he had an extended sip of that Laphroaic.

 

Chapter 22

A Lingering Longing

 

“I’m no Gandhian and I don’t intend to be one,” he continued from where he had left. “But as is being done, I see it’s a disservice to his legacy to deify him; it’s when I approach him as man that I value him as a human being, but in his picture of mahatma, I see many a wart in his atma. Credit him for cleaning up the public toilets but why not condemn him for having forced his spouse to do the same; why laud him for his quixotic abstinence unmindful of his wife’s conjugal plight; was he not an inveterate autocrat in the democratic garb; what about his falling afoul of Prakasam, and how he played favorites with Nehru. Why bother about him as he’d been reduced for long as a political mascot of the slavish-minded of the self-serving Nehru family that hijacked his name to grind its dynastic axe! What an irony it is that his party that sundered the British yoke should have rendered the political reins into Italian hands? Bemoan the congress party.”

“I’m no apologist of the dynastic congress but what about the duplicity of N.T.R on the political stage,” I had interjected. “When he needed to fill A.P’s coffers, he advocated drink all over; prompting the IT tycoons and the corporate honchos to shun his dry land at the time of our early reform. But when voters pulled him out of the kursi for his eccentric governance, he made prohibition his political plank to regain power; that’s about the immorality of our politicians as the public memory being short; that’s how A.P missed out the early openings even as P.V’s vision helped shore up the country’s economy.”

“What to say when Rajiv Gandhi’s ignoble reign is celebrated and Narasimha Rao’s path-breaking role is sought to be sidelined,” he said “We are a naïve people to figure out our country’s heroes, say Nehru vs. Patel or Rajiv vs. Rao and zeroing on our national interests; maybe owing to our feudal roots and slavish moorings, we suffer from the approval syndrome, which is a compulsive need of one to be seen by the others as an egalitarian to a fault. But then, the world doesn’t seem to appreciate our quixotic mindset as the foreign press tends to picture Sonia Gandhi as the most successful Italian politician.”

He paused as if he was unable to digest the indignity of it all.

“While Ruma ruled my heart, Rathi became the heart of our family,” he resumed his tale.    “The inclusive camaraderie that extended to third cousins in our family appealed to her friendly nature, and so she took to my people as duck would to water; well what a knack she had in letting all feel at home in our 2BHK flat. But when a well-heeled visitor said if only we had a more spacious dwelling, he would’ve loved to put up with us whenever he was in town, she told him that we don’t bite more than we could chew; but how my poor dad used to go out of his way to please all and sundry; it’s as if man massages his own ego by playing host to those who profess closeness.”

“It’s stupid, really.”

“What else it is, but when the chips were down after he was stricken with cancer, none came forward to stand by him,” he continued. “My brother told me that once in need of a paltry sum, my dad sought it from an ex-colleague whom he had helped all along; but that man excused himself, prompting my father to give me that parting advice to be careful with my money. But by not parting a farthing with a dying friend, how that man had denied himself the satisfaction of discharging a bit of his debt of gratitude; while I felt sorry for him, it pained me that my father had to die after losing the little faith he had had in the virtue of friendship.”

“More than the lack of concern for the dying, it could be the fear of foregoing the money that was behind his insensitivity. Why, I know of an incident when the bride was pestered by her in-laws to fetch her jewels even though her father was battling for his life that was the day after her marriage.”

“I suppose your reading is right,” he said and continued. “But much before my dad’s heart was broken for a few bucks; he dropped in at our place and wanted to know whether I could spare him hundred rupees. How dumbstruck I was that he should’ve been as hard up as that; why even after I had started earning, he used to book my return tickets on my home visits and had declined my offer of twenty-thousand to facilitate my brother’s engineering education. While I was trying to figure out the import of his financial downturn on his psyche, Rathi fetched him five-hundred rupees that touched his heart no end; oh, even as I gloated over my fortune for having been blessed with such a wife, how his eyes glistened grasping the sense of her concern for him.