Mahesh Rao - The Smoke is Rising

After that Uma had been alone in the house. As she swept and dusted, the silence had been heavy and exacting after the early morning turmoil. She had spent the previous night at the Sangam Continental Lodge, at first light rushed back home in a rickshaw for fresh clothes and then arrived at Susheela’s at the agreed hour. There had been a brief argument with Shankar when he had insisted on giving her money for the rickshaw. She had finally accepted it but by then their tight voices seemed to be disagreeing about something else altogether. He had ended the conversation with a joke about her hair, which had been even more riotous than usual that morning. As she got into the rickshaw, she had felt his hand gently press the dip between her shoulder blades.

It was the disorientation of metamorphosis. The entry of kindness, pleasure, subterfuge and uncertainty, where before there had been only a wary monotony. The encounters at the lodge were hardly flecked with the glitter of romance or promises foretold. Yet they carried the weight of fascination. There was the knowledge of a secret, lodged deep within. There was the solicitude of a generous regard. There were flights of fantasy, realised in the harsh light of the Sangam’s first-floor rooms.

Shankar’s single act of sympathy on the day of the floods had brought forth from her the only possible response in gratitude. He had accepted that gratitude with a humility she had never known. The palisade around her had fallen away, stake by stake, as the hours of her days reorganised themselves into new blocks of longing. Until recently, she had warded off new experiences for this very reason. Her encounters with Shankar had deposited a patchy lamina of expectation over her life that now obscured her vision and made everything that had been familiar seem somehow unsettled.

When she heard the key in the lock, Uma rose at once. She hurriedly rinsed her plate at the back sink, as if trying to erase the shame of sustenance.

‘Uma?’ called Susheela, who had just come in through the front door.

Uma walked back through the house.

‘Had your lunch?’ asked Susheela.

Uma nodded.

‘Here, for washing,’ Susheela said, handing her a basket with a flask and a lunchbox in it.

Uma took the basket and then said: ‘I need to leave a little early.’

‘Yes, that’s fine. You came early.’

Uma nodded again and slipped out of the back door.

Susheela sat down in an armchair and shut her eyes, her face in absolute repose.

A few minutes later, when Uma walked past her to go upstairs, Susheela was fast asleep.

Twenty years ago, the Central Lending Library — not to be confused with the City Central Library — occupied the entire ground and first floors of 34 Mirza Road, a three-storey building supported by sturdy pillars the colour of earth. Registration was free, members were allowed to borrow up to six books at a time and there was a special Reference Room for rare or delicate collections. The Chief Librarian had his own office adjacent to the Main Reading Room, and the noticeboard in the veranda usually advertised a variety of English literary events. Particularly well attended in those days were the Mysore Literary Society’s Great Masters discussion evenings and the talks and readings arranged by the University of Mysore’s Department of English.

In the late nineties, the library was confronted by a deadly combination of drastically diminished allocations from the state’s consolidated libraries’ fund and shrinking interest from the residents of Mysore. In spite of the heroic efforts of the then Chief Librarian, the library was compelled to reduce its active lending stock and take up residence on the first floor of the building. The prestigious ground floor was quickly occupied by the offices of the Mineral Concessions Directorate, the Reading Rooms were lost forever and, along with the fustiness of old paper and threadbare armchairs, the astringent odour of loss pervaded the upper rooms.

Continued financial adversity meant further deterioration in the core collection and the imposition of a registration fee and refundable deposit. Little enterprising flourishes like the introduction of a home delivery service and a single computer for public Internet access did not improve matters; the library was forced to cede some of its first-floor space to the insatiable appetite of the Mineral Concessions Directorate.

Girish had accompanied the library through its lengthy travails, a frequent visitor to the Reading Rooms as a student and still a loyal member. Of course these days he purchased books online, at the regular book expos and in the seductive bookstores at the malls; but he still periodically negotiated the uneven stairs leading up to the first floor of 34 Mirza Road.

The current Chief Librarian at the Central Lending Library was a retired academic, a man who once held considerable influence at the Department of History at the University of Mysore. Traces of his former standing remained in his puckered lips and the haughty look of enquiry he directed at the strays who wandered up to the first floor. How he reconciled his current circumstances with the significance of his legacy at Mysore’s leading institution of further education was a perplexing question, as imponderable as what he did to occupy himself during the course of his barren days on Mirza Road. A thin, carefully groomed moustache and a promontory of dyed hair made him look like an unlikely hybrid of Clark Gable and Dev Anand. Naturally, Girish’s dislike for the man was intense. They behaved in each other’s presence rather like the first and second wife of a lascivious seignior. Having lost pride of place to the more comely third wife, all that remained was for them to belittle each other in the course of meaningless battles.

Today their discussion touched on the precise meaning and origin of various Latin phrases but it was clear that neither of them could muster up much enthusiasm to ambush the other. After a while, Girish drifted back through the room’s dark aisles, casually running his finger along the rough cloth spines of the older reference volumes. Daylight had faded and the dim lights above the shelves only served to emphasise the hopelessness of any search. He had come to the library with the half-hearted intention of picking up something interesting and improving for Mala to take on holiday. Very soon after his marriage, his natural didacticism had trained itself on his young wife, a blank slate, ready to receive his painstaking inscriptions. His instruction was absorbed but seemed to have little impact on Mala’s desires and enthusiasms. But Girish persevered.

He remembered once having watched a Bengali film set in a period before independence. A cultured landowner, equally comfortable with Keats and Kalidasa, had been forced, or perhaps had blundered, into marriage with a traditional wife whose ambitions had only swept as far as the elaborate palanquin in which she had arrived at her new home. The landowner had quickly made amends. He had engaged an English tutoress, a woman of steel and scholarship, who would endow his new wife with all the important attributes of classical cultivation and learning. The young wife had spent hours closeted with the gracious lady, exploring music, literature and history. Scales had been sung, dates memorised and quotations relished like plums sucked dry of every last drop of juice. Girish could not remember what happened in the rest of the film but he had begun to recall with increasing regularity those first images where a woman, in spite of herself, was lifted on to the same plane as her husband.

That was all he asked for, he said to himself: a consort who could be his equal, a truly companionate wife. He had suffered the occasional doubt but he had never thought it would be impossible to achieve with Mala. He sometimes felt the need to overwhelm her with good things, with the care and the direction that she needed. He had to protect her, guide her and warn her. Girish was not a man so lacking in self-awareness that he could claim complete ignorance to the effects of his little slips of self-control. But he viewed them as the unfortunate adjuncts of his zeal, the collateral damage precipitated in trying to bring equilibrium to their relationship. As he stopped in front of a shelf crammed with dusty classics, he told himself that they would have the time and the space on this holiday to forget each other’s transgressions, her infuriating dispassion, his occasional irascibility. They would explore and discover, returning home refreshed and renewed.