Shashi Tharoor - Riot

I’m alone at home today, the office is closed, Lucky’s probably officiating at some flag-raising ceremony this morning, surrounded by self-important functionaries. I imagine him stiff in his safari suit, saluting a foreign flag, a flag without stars or stripes — heck, I don’t even know if they salute the flag at these things — and I tell myself, he’s a foreigner. But Cin, the word doesn’t mean anything to me anymore when I think of him. I know him so well — the strength of his long arms around me, the two crooked front teeth when he smiles, the slightly spicy smell of his sweat when we’ve made love, the little tilt at the corner of his mouth when I lie on his chest and look up at his face. He’s no foreigner. He’s more familiar to me, more intimate to me, than any American I’ve ever known.

Here I am, on Independence Day, wanting to give up my independence for him, knowing he has to win his own independence first. I can’t believe he’s even hesitating to leave a loveless marriage he hates for the woman he says he loves. It’s when he talks about his conflicted feelings, his obligations, that I begin to believe he really is a foreigner after all. …

Anyway, speaking of foreigners, I’ve just had another reminder that I’m one. I went to the bazaar on the weekend, just to see what I could pick up to bring home, you know? It’s crazy, these places, stores spilling out on the sidewalks, the shopkeepers openly importuning you to come and buy their wares, the flies buzzing about, the heat so oppressive that you think of going to the nearest Bollywood movie just for the air-conditioning. Anyway, I spotted a couple of embroidered cushion covers I thought you’d like. How much? I asked. “Two hundred each, but for you, three hundred the pair,” said the greasy man in the shop. Now, I’ve been here long enough to know about bargaining, so I promptly said, “No, two hundred for the pair.” I was appalled at the alacrity with which he accepted my offer. Sure enough, I show the cushion covers to the wretched Kadambari, and she says, “How much did you pay? Sixty?” Even making allowances for her bitchy nastiness, it’s clear I’ve been ripped off again. I guess it’s part of the price you’ve got to pay for being a foreigner in India. But why must I, of all people, have to pay that price? I’m not some tourist in a five-star hotel — I’m me! And that ought to count for something. …

from Lakshman’s journal

August 19, 1989

Can’t sleep, so am up at 3 a.m. writing this. Geetha is sleeping soundly as usual, her face swollen in unwitting complacency. I can’t bear to see that face every time I wake up, and I always wake up before she does. How the hell did I like that face enough to agree to marry her?

Despite myself, I looked in on Rekha in her room. I didn’t switch on the light but the moon was bright enough for me to see her angelic face, calm in repose on the oversized pillow. I gently brushed away a curling strand of hair that had fallen over one eye. In her sleep, she smiled at me.

It’s Rekha, of course, that I think about all the time now. Priscilla’s supposed to leave Zalilgarh in less than two months, and she thinks it’s decision time. Do I want to go with her? She has to return to the States, at least for now, and the prospect of escaping with her has its temptations. She showed me, only half jokingly, an ad in an American magazine: “Unemployment is lower in Switzerland. Owning a home is easier in Australia. Going to college is more likely in Canada. Vacations are longer in Denmark. And crime rates are lower in England. But more dreams come true in America.”

An alluring prospect, if I had those dreams. But do I, really? Is it freedom I want, or Priscilla? I know I could get her to change her plans and stay on in India, for me. She’ll do it — but only on one condition. Only if I tell her I’m leaving my wife for her. That’s what she wants. And she wants it now. I can understand her impatience, but I’m not sure I’m ready for anything quite so … cataclysmic. How can I explain to her that I’m not even sure I have the right to do that to Geetha, to abdicate my husbandhood? I didn’t choose to start my marriage in the first place; how can I choose to end it? My role as a husband and father is central to who I am; it concerns my rootedness in the world; it is inextricably bound up with my sense of my place in the cosmos. I have been brought up to believe that such things — marriage, family — are beyond individual will, that they transcend an individual’s freedom of action. Priscilla’ll never understand that.

And what about little Rekha, who did not ask to be born into my life but who is there, whose world is circumscribed by the pairing of Geetha and me? How can I ever explain what she means to me to Priscilla? “What’s the matter, Lucky?” Priscilla asked me this evening.

You ask, my love, what the matter is.

Why do I sound fatigued? stressed? torn?

The matter is that I am as I sound.

I, who have accepted your soul’s gift of love,

Am a soul in torment, fearing as I love.

I give you, my darling, the best part of myself:

The part that feels most profoundly as a man,

That knows the warm rush of passion

At every sight of your smiling body,

That rejoices in your warm embrace,

And belongs to you in total surrender.

That part is yours, my love, forever:

It can never know again the exaltation,

The exultation, the poignant sweetness of

Such flooding love as I bear for you.

That part is yours; but it is a part,

For I am, in rendering it, rent;

Having your love, yet not having it;

Giving my love, yet not parting with it;

Withholding, as I give, for a prior creditor.

I have, as you know, an earlier love,

One for a little soul, first glimpsed

Tadpole-like in a nurse’s arms,

Pink, precious, and premature:

The child I had prayed for, who did not seek

To be mine, but is, and whose life

Ennobles mine. I have loved her

Without reservation, without selfishness,

Without condition, as I could never

Love a woman. Even you.

Now I look at her each day,

Wake her in the morning, give her breakfast,

Do homework with her, take her to the library

And the movies, and I know I fear nothing more

Than I fear not being there for her.

When she cries out, “Daddy, am I as tall

As you were when you were six?”

I am there in the evening to confirm it;

When she tells me of news from school,

Or asks about God, or geography,

I am there as the question occurs to her.

I teach her Tamil songs, passing on a heritage

She traces in her genes; I trim her hair,

Cut her nails, quiz her over breakfast

On the oceans of the world.

Now I look at her and I ask myself,

Can I deny her that?

Can I deprive myself of her?

Can I absent myself from the rest of her childhood?

When she first meets a boy whose easy charm

Starts flutters in her heart,

Will Daddy be the one she tells of her confusions?

Can I ever be happy knowing that I

Have pulled from under the secure carapace of her life

The struts that held her up?

But can I be happy either,

Knowing that you are no longer mine,

That you have returned to America,

That I have shut my eyes to the one true glimpse of happiness

I have ever had as a man?

You ask, my love, what the matter is.

And I can only say, everything is the matter.

Deep emotion and lack of sleep make for unconvincing poetry. Fifteen lines a stanza: is there such a form anywhere in the canon? I know I should thrust it aside; in an hour now dawn will break across my torment like a twig. But this is what I feel, and it’s at a level quite different from what Guru was trying to make me feel. Truth, Wilde wrote, is just “ones last mood.” Is this mood of tormented despair the one truth that counts now? How will Priscilla understand that my agonizing is not about her, not about us? But if she loves me, mustn’t I help her understand? Perhaps I ought to give her this poem. I’d title it “The Heart of the Matter.” Or perhaps “A Matter of the Heart.” Or, more originally, both?