Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel by BS Murthy (read full novel txt) đ
- Author: BS Murthy
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âIsnât it interesting that a happy story neednât be an interesting copy?â
âI appreciate that you care for your prospective readers and they too need not turn the pages,â he said smiling wryly. âAfter Anandâs graduation, though Ruma wanted him to join our firm, I didnât want to stifle his career in our small outfit; so he moved out to begin his career in some other place. I knew all good times would come to an end, but how were I to know that they would lead me up to one bad phase after another; why canât life make it neutral in between its highs and lows?â
âGiven its penchant for variety, isnât it a boring proposition?â
âHow nicely youâve put it; Iâm glad you have it in you to make my memoir as memorable as possible,â he said, and continued with his tale. âSoon, we started missing Anand, and once when I said that if only âRajan Buildersâ were to be some âImperial Infrastructuresâ, it would have been a fitting launch pad for his career, her repartee was that it was ironical that what served the uncleâs mid-career should be unworthy of his nephewâs apprenticeship; maybe what she said in jest was about the changed times, but I felt she was reviewing my progress card, and that brought the limitations of love not backed by money back to the fore. But the next day, when she said in earnest how âRajan Buildersâ would stunt Satishâs future, my apprehensions of yore came to the fore making me worry about my smallness in her vision; so when she began a correspondence with Anand, which she came to relish, I started suspecting that she had transferred her affections to his personal account; oh, how miserable was the thought of having lost her love and esteem. Maybe, her affection for him was innocent and my worries about her state of mind were misplaced, but as I came to be obsessed with success all again to regain my supposedly lost position in her heart, the devil took hold of me in its second attempt, so to say, squarely and firmly.â
Chapter 24
Disown to Own
âHow the glaring shadow of my life came to distort my vision!â he continued in lament. âThe grandiose âImperial Infrastructuresâ was the stilted idea of my fucked-up psyche, and as if manâs fate factors the times he lives in to shape his life, Harshad Mehta came onto the scene; can one ever fail to recall the euphoria he had helped generate in the bourses? Hadnât business magazines, all and sundry that is, goaded the public to sell the family silver to invest in stocks? Oh, how the public issues of never-heard-of-entities without a factory shed to name came to be oversubscribed many times over; and when the bubble has burst as Mehta was caught stealing, how many became broke no one knows. Why, I too was guilty of laying the superstructure of âImperial Infrastructuresâ over the tenuous foundations of Rajan Builders; wonder how I suffered no qualms in gambling with the public monies to raise my domestic stock; but my love for my woman and the luck of the investors might have helped me succeed in my unethical venture; whatever, it was then that I lost my soul and became a devilâs slave, though I didnât realize it then.â
âOnce man crosses the moral threshold, heâs likely to lose the reins of his life.â
âTrue, but I met a woman who had been astray for a while and yet regained her moral ground just in time,â he said with apparent admiration. âShe was the wife of a man of meager means who had big dreams for their twins, a boy and a girl; so he strived to improve his net worth through hard work to uplift their future. But when he realized that his hard work alone was not enough to ensure their rosy future, he had pleaded with her to prostitute herself to fashion their future. Well, like any other woman, she was averse to the idea, but in time, as his obsession for her kidsâ future dented her resolve to remain chaste, she started making other men feel at home when her man and her kids were away from it. What with the referrals from those philanderers helped her to develop a fetching clientele, her earnings far exceeded her manâs expectations, but as he worked harder than ever to augment their fund, she moved ever emotionally closer to him, and ironically, as if to lighten his burden, she endeared herself more than ever to other men. When I came to know of her, I approached her with great expectations but how disappointed I was is still fresh in my memory; as I knocked at her door that morning, I found her readying her kids to school; fascinated by her beauty, I was all eager to have her but she told me that she had drawn the curtains down as she didnât want her growing up kids to smell the rat. Bowled by her sensitivity (I hadnât become insensitive yet), I pressed my suit to the hilt but finding her unyielding, I even begged her not to disappoint me, but with a charming firmness, she asked me to update my informer about the change in her posture. So, I left her as much in disappointment as in admiration, only to meet her on a different footing later on; how small the world can become.â
âIt calls for a rare character in them both.â
âThatâs true as I found it out later and about it later,â he continued. âYou know my firm became a force to reckon with and that took me back to square one to win over Rumaâs mind to retain her love. But soon, I had realized that it was success that began to rule our heads; hers to begin with, inducing us to acquire the trappings of wealth for the sake of those who looked up to us, so we thought. How man tends to imagine himself as the tracking object on othersâ radars to justify his extravagance as but the dictates of his lifeâs circumstances! But then man fails to realize that but for a sleaze or a scandal, the world at large never bothers about him, whatever be his station, and so fails to fashion a purse-supportive lifestyle and allows himself to dabble with the delusions of grandeur. Adding to that, success distances man from the genuine, and whatâs worse, it brings the shady and the shallow closer to him; it was this script of fate that had moved us into this posh place, far from the simple folks.â
âMaybe itâs the spiritual price life has to pays for its material success.â
âWell said,â he said with apparent sadness. âAs if life doesnât believe in half-measures, to make it worse for both of us, the devil possessed Ruma no less; bitten by the status bug, as her mind began to foul her soul, she turned cozy to the rich that she wouldnât have otherwise touched with a barge pole; what was worse, she began to condescend to descend to the genuine, making them feel constrained in our palatial bungalow that is yours now. But obsessed as I was to keep Rajanâs memory out of her mind, I kept her in good humor regardless; and having brought her to that pass, I too fell into the trap of conceit. Why, I began to feel embarrassed to have Raju any more around my circle of the wealthy, and entrapped in that snobbish trap, there was no way I couldâve pulled Ruma out of its inimical grip.â
âWhat a Catch 22 it is, donât mind itâs a catch-phrase.â
âWhy not give Joseph Heller his due for the catchy title,â he said. âWell, Raju was not dumb to read my mind and so he steered clear of my course; but what if he had chosen to embarrass me by sticking to me on purpose? Wonât it make a strategy to hurt the jealous and the conceited by imposing ourselves upon them, never mind they cold-shoulder us? Well, he was too good a soul to resort to such a foul; but shortly after Anand came back on transfer, when Ruma advised him to keep away from his poor friend with no future to name, I had a full grasp of the complexities of the trap into which I willy-nilly pushed her into; and so I began to worry about the possible fallout of her changed ethos on my life as well.â
âWonder how success eclipses oneâs innate goodness?â
âWhat if she weighed me light in comparison with someone more successful?â he continued. âAs I was bogged down with that thought, the negativity of it began to bother me; I was alive to the fact that the seeds of liaisons sprout in the stilted minds of the disaffected spouses, and if Ruma were to take a lover, the slight apart, wonât the scandal be scary. What if she chose to seduce Anand to score over me and still keep it in the family; but soon as if to relieve me of my worry, like I distanced myself from Raju before, she came to cold-shoulder Anand, but for a different reason; while I avoided Raju imagining that I had outgrown him, I suspect that she began to shun Anand to disown her humble past. How ironical it was that her moral decline shouldâve assuaged my fears about her feared sexual fall; whatever, as if they served their purpose, my unfounded fears about her affection for him were put to rest in my mind.â
âWasnât it rank depravity that you should have felt relieved even though your wife had lost her soul? What a fall though itâs a folly to judge others.â
âWhatever, I toyed with the idea of roping him into my venture for I began to feel the need for someone capable that I could trust as well,â he continued. âWhat a value addition he had been at the office, and ironically that hastened my moral decline even more; as he refused to soil his hands with our murky deals, I had to handle the underbelly of business that heralded my nose-dive into a moral abyss; and equally worse, Imperialâs vertical take-off into the galaxy of infrastructure only pushed Rumaâs moral ethos further down the ladder of materialistic callousness. So, in the process of his growing up, Satishâs psyche had to bear the brunt of our moral fall; well, who to blame but me for denying him what was left of the childhood for the kids of his generation?â
âWhy blame yourself when it was and is the order of the day?â
âDo you think so?â he said looking at me vacantly.
Chapter 25
Sentiment of Ruin
âIt was my wining and dining with the rich and the powerful that had hastened my moral fall,â he said wryly after a while. âDidnât Rousseau observe that ruthlessness is the common characteristic of the successful; maybe I insensibly turned insensitive in their infectious company. Whatever may be the rationale for my twisted vision of love, the reality of my life was that I allowed myself to slide into the abyss of immorality. What with the materialistic veil shrouding our love life, I tried to fill my emotional void in an extramarital affair without knowing that I became incapable of inspiring love. How shameful, but Iâm not going to hide my ugly side to let you have a true picture of me and of those who came into my life.â
âVices are the price that one pays for his virtues.â
âBut it was as if I had sacrificed my virtues to propitiate the goddess of vices,â he continued. âI used to know an upright officer and that amounts to much in todayâs world; maybe honesty had never been the dominant character of man, didnât Shakespeare aver that to be honest is to be counted
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