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

to school then, it was like being jailed at home and soon, I asked the carpenter how long it would take for him to complete the assignment. When he said that it would take a fortnight more, I told him that I would give him an ana if he completed the work in a week; amused, he asked me what the urgency was, and I told him that once the work was over, my father would go out as usual and that would let me be on my own. When he told my people about it, all had a hearty laugh, and years later, when my father chanced to meet him in another town, well he became a prosperous hotelier there, recalling that incident, he expressed his keenness to see me; and when we met, serving me personally in his restaurant, he narrated the incident to the amusement of all those present. Well, as I fondly relived that moment, my father was joyously embarrassed about it.”

“Moments like those bring charm to one’s life but I don’t have any to recall; maybe current day life doesn’t lend scope for any.” 

“Why doubt that,” he said, “but there are moments in life that are bitter to experience and sweeter to recall. While the first of my sisters obediently sat at home, the second one always joined me at playtime. I wonder how in the thick of things her sixth sense would warn her about our father’s impending home-coming; well she used to alert me before leaving the field, but lost in the game, I was always caught on the wrong foot and faced his ire for late-coming. Oh how his intemperance turned demonic once; why he nearly split my head with a pounding staff. It happened in the small hours of that atlataddi when I pestered him to let me join my friends at the annual fete; even my grandmother’s pleadings didn’t deter him from bashing me up for my insistence. I shudder to think how a mishap then would’ve affected him forever; maybe, my skull is made of sterner stuff for I can take any beating at the champi that I came to love in later years.”

“It was child abuse and no less.”

“Being human, parents too can lose their temper on occasion and a little bashing that ensues can’t be deemed as child abuse,” he said. “Once when my son disturbed my sleep, having bashed him up in indignation, I realized that my nagging that atlataddi night would’ve been no less irritating to my father. But think of tel-maalish, and I recall a naayi of my hostel days; he was barely sixteen, and like most Biharis in those days, he was married for a year or more by then. Goading the students to get married early, he used to assert that the real ecstasy of tel-maalish lies in the crackling sound of the bangles as one’s woman was at it. How he used to pity us, the prospective engineers, for we would have a bride in her early twenties that is in our late twenties; of what avail are the girls out of their teens for they would have past their prime by then. But then, Gen. Yahya Khan of Pakistan never had anything to do with women below forty for he felt such wouldn’t be randy enough in bed; how perceptions about sexual pleasures vary really! Doesn’t that remind us of what Shakespeare said of Cleopatra – “Age cannot wither her / nor custom stale / her infinite variety. Other women cloy / the appetites they feed / but she makes hungry / where most she satisfies.”

“How intriguing sexual preferences are? I’ve read about a survey that revealed the inexplicable preference some of the beautiful women have for ugly looking males!”

“Isn’t it appetizing news for the ungainly men? But the problem is that a hopeful wrong pass could invite a ‘beauteous’ ridicule,” he said mirthfully. “Why all is not lost for ugly women either for there are men who get attracted only by such, why there was a king or was it a sultan, I don’t recall, who had in his harem only mustachioed women rotund to boot. As for me, Yahya like, I find the thirty-ish randiness swaying as by then they would’ve gained much in bed without losing too much of their figure. Noticing my roving eye, once when Rathi wondered what if all men were to be covetous of women, I told her that in its balancing act nature makes men covet different things – money, power, position, fame etc. apart from fair sex that is. You know at the end of the World War II, when the Russian army entered Berlin, while most soldiers raped every female in sight, a few of them spared their honor but not their bicycles. Why Khushwant Singh’s sardarji joke underscores this; a pretty thing offers lift to a sardar in her limousine and drives him deep into the woods, and after taking off her clothes, when she asks him to take whatever he wanted, he drives away in her car. Jokes apart, sex is not all that fair to the female if her mate were to be a ‘premature’ kind; and won’t that validate the woman’s right to ‘mate and marry’ and not the other way round.”

“I think we’ve strayed away enough, now we may as well be back onto the track.” 

 

Chapter 10

A Character of Sorts

 

 “Now back to my dad,” he continued his extraordinary reminiscences. “When he made me board a train to Ranchi, what a pleasant surprise it was to discover the softer side of his! Why his tears of farewell that brought to the fore the love he bore for me readily washed off my bitterness for him. Moreover, as I exchanged the domestic notes with my hostel mates, I realized that no dad did spare the rod to spoil the child, and that made me see childhood in a joint family in a fresh light; the grandparental indulgence countervails the inhibiting parental discipline to condition children to the ayes and nays of life from its very nascence. But as life would have it, the joint family makes everyone, save the head, irrelevant in its setting when it came to the household affairs, and on the other hand, the nuclear family that affords self-realization for the couples, fails to cater to the children’s need for a disciplined upbringing. What a sad spectacle it is these days seeing the single-child parents vying with each other in pampering their kids or treating them as their ‘toys of joy’, but tell them that is not the way of rearing kids if only you are prepared to put your relationship with them on the line. Well time only would tell what affect this mindless upbringing brings to bear upon the adulthood of these unfortunate kids.”

“That is in spite of the advanced human psychology on hand!”    

“Who’s making use of it anyway?” he said in consternation. “All seem to hustle  themselves with their kids into the blissful Shakespearean mould of, ‘he that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, let him not know it, and he’s not robbed at all’. So be it, but who said one cannot have the cake and eat it too for my dad managed to do so all his life. Level headed though, he tended to be reckless at times; that diwali, when I turned five, he didn’t have a second thought about teaching me how to handle the fire-crackers in the mandua, which opened to the sky in the middle of our house. But how my father failed to foresee the possibility of an odd cracker setting our dwelling on fire I would never know. Why as if guided by the Murphy’s Law, a cracker of a missile made its way to the attic full of dry coconuts and how that made all miss a heartbeat or two. Well chastised by my grandfather as my dad sheepishly went up the attic with a bucketful of water, driven by curiosity I too had ascended the ladder behind him. Possibly the missile had expended itself before its landing in the midst of the coconuts but keeping an eye on the attic to nip the possible flare-up in the bud, none had a wink that night, why the excitement of it kept me too awake for long.”

“What a change! Those days, if parents threw caution to the winds to expose their children to the ways of the world, parents these days are proving to be more timid than their kids.” 

“How true, when I was eleven year-old, my mother had been to her parental home for her fourth confinement,” he continued. “Even as she delivered my third sister, the Godavari was in spate like never before, and the steamer service too was put on hold for want of safety. But underscoring the fact of life that someone would be around always to aid and abet the lawbreaking, there were boats in wait to ferry the willing on the sly, of course, for a premium. Though my father was law abiding otherwise, maybe driven by the impulse of espying the new arrival, risking our lives he ventured across the unruly river with me; why we were not even some way into that hazardous voyage, giving me scares the boat began to rock but my father’s imposing presence and his assurance that there were expert swimmers on board, just in case, turned my sense of scariness into a feeling of daring. But later in life, I always felt that he shouldn’t have ventured on that voyage putting our lives at risk; after all, he could’ve waited to espy the new arrival, but then that’s what he was, a fearless man till the very end. Well the way he faced premature death was bravado no less.” 

“Isn’t it illustrative that the dividing line between daring and risking is wafer-thin?”

“Well, my father was innately bold,” he continued. “Oh, the way he ventured out whenever there was a burglary alert in the neighborhood! Why with a stick in my hand, I too wasn’t afraid to follow suit; it was his daring that might’ve percolated down into my childhood subconscious, enabling me to imbibe his credo in good measure. Although, he softened with age, he remained bold, and how tough he was with the in-laws of one of my sisters when they came up with their ludicrous post-wedding demands. As a matter of principle he didn’t want to yield and when they hinted at abandoning the bride then and there, he told them that he would ensure they took her along with them, and after that, it was left for them to harm her at their own peril. If anything, his stance then summed up the man in him, a la Alec Guinness in the Bridge on the River Kwai, and that called their bluff, and all was well in the end. If only the fathers of the afflicted brides can muster half of my dad’s courage, I’m sure dowry-deaths, like sati, would be a thing of the past.”

“If only the media has a way of knowing such incidents.” 

“Don’t you think the media is manned by morons?” he said. “Oh, how they carpet-covered the newlywed Bachchans’ temple trysts to save their marriage from the mangalik affect! What message did the media carry to our folks, bogged down by superstitions? Maybe, man was better off without the media and now worse off for the 24 x 7 non-stop humbugs; and what an opportunity the senior Bachchan lost to make a difference to the prejudiced heads by making a statement against the nonsense. Oh how small really the Big B is, and how big the media made Diana the small. It’s incredible how her quest for lust was portrayed as her search for love! No faulting her taking a lover on the rebound as her man thrust a rival into her marital life but for the media to