Sulekha.com
2,400 words
Parallel Lines
Leatherbacked Crime and Punishment slips from drowsy fingers, strikes the floor plangently, nudging the sleeper from intermittent slumber into wakefulness. He looks vaguely upwards at the wall and the clock in anticipation answers in twelve metronomic chimes. Surmounting inertia after a brief struggle, he sits up in the four-poster and looks around.
Shoes, socks, shirt and underwear embellish the carpet, the last three turned inside out. Dark olive green Heineken has found its niche amidst the legs of the dining table and the chairs. The uncluttered portion of the table exposes its grimy face shamelessly to the sunbeams the curtains have failed to keep out. Grim resolutions of castigating and dismissing the servant-maid gestate within Abhishek.
Self-motivation succeeds in pushing him into the bathroom where he stands before the mirror coaxing toothpaste out of the tube and finds that his face is in no better condition than the room he has just surveyed. Dark half-rings support his eyes from below, black algae-like stubble smothers his cheeks and jowl; his hair stand in uprising against the comb, daring it to lay them down again.
Abhishek flinches from the apparition in the mirror, but then boldly accosts him. “You spineless invertebrate,” he tautologically begins, “is this what you so presumptuously call your life? You are twenty-seven, single, have a bank balance of six figures (seven, counting your stock options) and can make yourself look presentable unless you are against deforestation. Surely even you realise that there is something missing in you?”
But the apparition is no pushover; it is ready with its laterally inverted answers. “That bank balance,” it responds, “which you so proudly quote at me, has come about because I stay back late working to meet deadlines and please my boss. How then, pray tell me, do I find the time to look after myself? Only weekends can I indulge in pleasures like reading, drinking and watching TV.”
It ignores Abhi’s cynical chuckles and murmurs of ‘excuses’ and continues, “Yes, I know what is missing. A girl, woman, female, distaff—that is what is lacking, a feminine presence. There are colleagues in office, but I don’t want to talk Java Beans and Active Server Pages, I want to talk about…” he indicates the tome spread-eagled on the carpet, “about Dostoyevsky. I want to wake up in the morning, turn to her supine form lying beside me, shake her shoulder gently and ask, ‘Why do you think Raskolnikov killed the moneylender?’”
“The question why Raskolnikov killed the moneylender,” she tells the class, “is to be seen as a specific instance of a larger question—can one kill another for the sake of a principle? But the fundamental question that Dostoyevsky poses here is whether evil means justify noble ends ultimately. What do you think, Ganesh?”
Ganesh has been keeping himself updated with the progress of the India-Australia match with his pocket transistor and would fain have answered a query on Sachin Tendulkar’s cricketing statistics. Gently tossing her braid over her shoulder, she glides on however, without expecting an answer. She knows she is not the teacher who galvanizes her students into action, or one who inspires respect, but one who passes muster.
She passes muster because she ignores proxy attendance, never flunks students, who in turn do not bother her in the class. It is a give and take of mutual indifference for she knows they are there not vying for a B.A. degree out of choice; that most days they spend in computer training classes. Thus, she paces countless steps up and down the aisle until the class ends in her grey sari that makes her look as uninteresting as the flat tone in which she reads out a passage from Crime and Punishment which she has chosen as part of the Reading the Novel syllabus.
Predilection for Dostoyevsky and Russian literature wins her the epithet Comrade Protimov in the staff room. It is there she takes her unvarying two chappatis-rice-dal-curd-pickle lunch prepared by maternal hands, because her culinary skills, like the didactical, only pass muster. She prefers not to walk twenty minutes in the sun to her house where her mother will pound her continually with well-intentioned homilies on the merits of connubial life.
Piscine odour assails her olfactory senses causing her to wrinkle her nose in disgust, the reaction noticed by her neighbour Mary Verghese whose lunch box is the source of the offending smell. “Why don’t you take non-veg?” she goads Protima.
“Because I think it is a sin to kill animals for one’s food,” the vehemence in her reply surprises both speaker and listener. But Madam Verghese rallies strongly with what she is convinced is an irrefragable argument. “But don’t you kill plants for your food? Are they not living?”
Gamely, Protima attempts to carry on what she knows will end a futile exercise. “The issue here is of conscious and avoidable cruelty, not…” but her opponent’s sneer halts her in mid-sentence.
“…not quibbling about what is living and what is non-living,” he finishes, pushing his plate away, which fortunately he has emptied, and so doesn’t lose his lunch along with his temper. “Fish is nothing but the vegetable of the sea, indeed!”
Nisupta Biswas withers under his fiery gaze. And this is the girl, his colleague, on whom he had decided to bestow affectionate glances, not scorching looks because… because their cubicles are adjacent, are thrown in together for hours at work, have lunch at the same table in the cafeteria.
Abhishek is conscious he has been trying to force a jigsaw piece fit into a pattern to which it did not belong; Nisupta Biswas has nothing in common with him but for their reporting manager. Also, there is the awareness that while earlier he used to mentally classify women as attractive or plain, for some time now he has been involuntarily assessing how well they would blend in his homestead.
Such assessments are not limited to the precincts of the office, but are processes that are carried out subconsciously on faces glimpsed while walking in the streets, on salesgirls in shopping malls, even on fashion models on TV. Strangers are sized up, their looks evaluated, characters appraised, tastes conjectured at, and a final rating on a scale of ten calculated, much in the manner his performance in the office is rated.
Scattered somewhere in the memory of his computer resides a document named My_Ideal.doc that contains a lexicographically ordered set of phrases, which he compiles whenever he finds both leisure and inspiration. Like a police artist drawing a picture from the witness’ description, he strives for a picture in his head: but his agnostic, crossword-solving, Dostoyevsky-Kafka-Sartre relishing, height 5’4” and weight 120 lbs, knowing-just-enough-cooking-not-to-set-the-kitchen-on-fire, narrow-waisted, one year younger, quiz-freaking, short-haired, vegetarian-only dieting woman easily eludes his tenuous net of imagery. Sometimes he thinks he has succeeded in capturing her, but it is a silhouette; the details, the colours, are absent.
In Robert Bruce fashion, he begins all over again, starting with her hair. His penchant for the bob cut gives her a boyish flat sweep of hair in front, cropped close and tapering at the nape. Stepping back, he regards his mental handiwork with satisfaction.
The hairdresser in Liu’s Beauty Parlour is indeed satisfied with her hour-long diligence. “You are done, Madam,” she informs Protima. “The mushroom cut really suits you.”
Protima regards the mirror as she would a stranger; her mother would need some convincing before she let her into the house. But at least it would give her mother something else to think about other than persistently accumulating marriage proposals for her.
Perseverance is a trait of the Mathurs, and Protima admits willy-nilly that however nettlesome her mother might sound, she has got a point or two—that Protima is twenty-six and can only grow older, that her chances of getting married became inversely proportional to her age once she crossed twenty-four, that she can do her Ph. D. even after marriage, that at this very moment, she has three proposals on the hold only awaiting the slightest affirmative sign from Protima.
Equally steadfast in refusing every one of them is Protima, who, to please her mother, peruses the bio-datas received in response to the advertisement placed surreptitiously by the latter, but as she expects, finds nothing in them that she can relate to. What she expects is not fair, she confesses; the day she finds the man who can express his life in one and a half typewritten, double columned, foolscap sheets, she vows she will marry him.
Attractive men are not complete aliens to her, there are students almost her age whose looks she finds appealing, but who take to their heels if she as much as mentions existentialism; those who don’t are the professors above fifty with grandchildren, and a third category she has not met on the campus. The attraction of opposites she dismisses as pure bunkum, a pretty figure of speech and nothing else. What really counts is the similarity of thoughts and tastes, similarity, she stresses, not identicalness. The only man she can relate to, she feels, is Dostoyevsky. She visualizes an exchange with her mother, “Mamma, I like a man. He is a writer, a Russian, was a prisoner in a Siberian camp, and dead for the last 120 years.” Her mother’s reaction, she does not dare envisage.
Hoydenish hairdo causes consternation at home, staff room and classroom. But Mrs. Mathur is surprisingly positive about the new look, hopeful that it is the harbinger of a new outlook in her daughter that life could exist beyond the covers of her books. She even finds the way Protima sits and doodles over the crossword refreshing: with her back leaning against one arm-rest and legs dangling over the other; there is some air of abandonment in her.
Protima, too, is sanguine—she has won a place in the semi-finals of the Mastermind Quiz and is to go to New Delhi by flight—she has never been in a plane before. “On an impulse,” she answers truthfully whenever she is asked why she cut her hair for it was an impulse that made her rush to Liu’s Parlour as soon as she received the flight tickets and say, “Cut if off, shear off as much as you can, I have to feel light because I am going to fly.” But 27 Across stymies her progress and brings her down to earth: Shadow fencing cannot alter their course when they begin to blow (5,2,6). She suspects it is an anagram and thinks with pencil-end-gnawing concentration.
WINDS OF CHANGE, he fills the white squares with neat capitals after reshuffling ‘shadow-fencing’ and shakes his head ruefully. The winds of change in his life cannot stir the lightest leaf. Tomorrow morning he catches yet another flight to New Delhi, to meet yet another client to discuss yet another project. He shuts off all lights and goes out to the balcony and sees the full moon. It’s been months, he recalls, since he has last seen it. At least on board he has the chance to finish reading the final two chapters. Also on board, knee-length airhostess skirts will trigger off a mental slideshow of similar visions—all images that remind him with a pang of the absence of the feminine element in his life. In rapid succession, there will flit by minis and midis, shapely and stockinged legs, sandals and high heels, midriff skimming tops, shirts softly accentuating the contours of breasts, glabrous stretches of skin of arms and cheeks, heady mixtures of perfumes and deodorants inhaled furtively standing close by in elevators, and the palpable softness of handshakes.
Although he tries hard not to, he cannot help feeling that he is above it all whenever he sees young couples in parks and cinema halls, because he is scared the truth might be that he is not beyond it, but too old already at twenty-seven. Unchanging and ugly as the pockmarked moon he watches, he fears he will remain secluded through the centuries.
Stately and splendid it will remain forever, she feels, watching the moon dreamily from her terrace. Her arm draws backwards on its own seeking support, but then suddenly, remembering itself, stops short. It is not mother’s warm touch she needs now; she is looking for a firmer, broader, taller frame against which she can rest her head: a male chest, for example. The tall and broad shouldered owner of that chest would not speak, just his stable presence would suffice—were words needed between them and their moon? She blushes in the darkness, thankful no one can see her blush nor read the thoughts that make her blush, but she has just realized that her hero is quintessential Mills & Boon.
“Forgive me, Fyodor,” she murmurs, “but your characters are not hero material. They are anything but dependable. Wouldn’t you like it if I could depend on him totally, he being so well off… I could chuck this stupid teaching job, and devote all my time to you?” And then, perhaps, even the thought of flying on the morrow will not be as outlandish as it appears now.
It could be as mundane to her as it is to the young man who stands in front of her the next morning, in the check-in queue. “Window seat, please,” he says in an utterly bored voice that sounds as if he wishes he were at any place other than this.
“Window seat, please,” echoes Protima when her turn comes. Flight IC914, seat 22A, boarding Rear: she follows the instructions on her boarding pass dutifully.
Mid-flight, she realizes she has to visit the toilet: the first time, she remembers, as she brushes past withdrawn knees and stands in the aisle, at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The young man in 21A, she observes indignantly, is reading. Why then did he ask for a window seat if he does not want to look out the window?
A cute haircut, Abhishek notes from the corner of his eyes as she walks to the rear.
That’s the closest they ever come to in each other’s thoughts—as the young man in 21A and as the cute haircut in the aisle; and half a foot close, or far, from her knees to his back. For whatever power that decides the course of their lives has a sick sense of humour. And yet, it is not so bad either, because it never lets them know that they once came within six inches of their perfect mate.