The Plunge Read online

  “Not again,” moaned Priya.

  “What can I do? It just happens. It’s God’s will,” Parvati said, quite convinced that the divine was indeed responsible for her situation.

  “Why didn’t you listen to me?” Priya stared at her, wasting no tenderness. “Why didn’t you go to the health centre and get yourself sterilised?”

  Parvati looked at her pleadingly.

  While Priya stared at Parvati in disbelief, Anjali laughed.

  “God’s will! Did you hear that, Anjali? This is the first time I’ve heard someone calling a prick God’s will,” she said, laughing uncontrollably. She grinned at Parvati, who rushed out of the room in embarrassment.

  Anjali was going to skip work yet again. She had already called in sick twice the week before.

  “What is Your Highness doing today?” teased Priya.

  “I’m tired. I’ll sleep.”

  Anjali tagged along with Priya to the railway station. She could see the trains passing in the distance. They moved towards each other, appearing to join into one long train. Soon, it telescoped into a shorter train before being torn in two, each part heading in opposite directions.

  It reminded her of the earthworms that had struggled under her brother’s weapon, a sharpened twig, years ago. Anup was about twelve years old then. He would look up grinning victoriously after tearing up a worm and then watch the pieces crawl away from each other like total strangers.

  It must have hurt; those poor creatures. She imagined that the sticky liquid at the injured ends of the worms was earthworm blood.

  Anup and his friend Roy would slice the worms, attempting perfection with each new captive, and laughed villainously when the parts behaved like two separate worms. Anup said they were creating two worms out of one, which would then live separate lives.

  Other times, the boys would roam about the plantation pursuing various new exploits. They would collect sap from the rubber trees from the halved coconut shells that were tied to the tree trunks. The sap dripped into the shells from the freshly cut wedges. They would roll the tapped rubber into long strips and wind them into the shape of a ball while they were still supple. They had a stink similar to burnt tyre. The ball was heavy and when hit with it, painful.

  Anjali tossed her head as if to clear her mind. Memories; why did they keep crowding her mind? Why did she dwell on the past more these days? Something to do with hormones?

  Parvati was drying washed clothes on the line when Anjali returned. She sat on the steps at the front door watching the woman hang clothes after squeezing the water out of them.

  Parvati should take Priya seriously. Maybe she should, too.

  “Shall I prepare lunch for you?” Parvati asked as she wiped her palms on her sari.

  “Cook some rice and dal… and roast papad.”

  Parvati nodded. She would surely expect a reward.

  Anjali heard the sound of utensils in the kitchen as she flipped through the newspaper. The pressure cooker whistled when the lentils were cooked into a mash with onions and green chilli. The house was soon filled with the overpowering smell of fresh garnish. Warm oil hissed wooingly when whole mustard seeds were thrown in, followed by cumin seeds. The pods spluttered while the curry leaves and dried red chillies turned crisp. A hiss followed as the garnish was thrown on top of the curry along with freshly chopped coriander leaves. Roasted papad liberated the trapped flavours of black lentil, black pepper, and other spices. Her stomach groaned. She was hungry.

  Parvati smiled gratefully when she handed over some money for her extra work.

  The food tasted divine. She picked up The Castle and tried to focus on the pages, curled up in her bed.

  Perhaps Priya was right. She did not know her lover very well. He had often warned her that men were incapable of understanding love as an emotion. Love was merely an emotion in action for the average man, he had said during one of their chats. She had considered it a joke back then. But what if he really meant it that way? What if he was only into sex? Such thoughts made her uneasy.

  She had to be sure of his feelings before she made any life-changing decisions. She had changed a lot in the last few months. The Anjali who had talked about a platonic relationship with Siddharth was dead and buried. The one who was alive struggled with desire, edging out reason. All she wanted was him. Was it lust? No. Maybe a trace of lust, but much love, she tried to cheer up her troubled mind.

  Why did she have these feelings for Siddharth? Could this be merely an admiration for a more successful senior colleague? Or was it a result of her past experiences with men? She had always assumed that men were sick, like Sugadan uncle, as they called him. They were not worth wasting time on.

  The dreadful experience with Sugadan uncle at her grandmother’s house during the summer vacation of class five had formed her basic opinion of men.

  Staying at ammamma’s house was fun. Anjali was an important guest, the youngest cousin who lived there for a few weeks every year.

  There were visitors every evening, relatives and neighbours. They brought news and gossip. Her cousins were five to six years older than her. The girls and their friends would exchange library books, magazines, and novels. They would share secrets, while huddled on the thinna, the concrete bench stretched all-around the house. The thinna was the ideal place to gather and gossip. The girls would discuss compliments received from idle young men gathered at street corners, on their way to the temple. They would parade their love letters from college, and giggle over lewd messages they had found scribbled on their desks. They would fall silent when someone like Sugadan uncle went past them.

  “Sugadan uncle” is how the neighbourhood children called the forty-plus doctor. The chronic bachelor lived with his mother in a large bungalow next to ammamma’s house.

  He had spent more than a decade in the Gulf, which ended with his deportation from Abu Dhabi after a six-month jail term. Ammamma did not know exactly why he was imprisoned and deported. Years later, Anjali had come to know that he was booked for sodomy, a serious crime in the United Arab Emirates. Some said he was lucky to have escaped alive.

  “Look at Anjali. She’s so thin. I’m worried,” one day, Ammamma shared her worry with Sugadan uncle. Big mistake.

  She was nervous to be alone with him in his clinic.

  “Lower your panties,” he had ordered.

  He drew apart her thighs to peep in. She felt embarrassed. His touch tickled her. Why was she being peered into and rubbed? He continued to finger the area, angering her. She got up and bolted out of the room, pulling up her underwear even as he yelled at her to stop.

  A week later, he had grabbed her in ammamma’s presence. He squeezed her playfully into an embrace and kissed her on the neck, rubbing his stubbly cheeks against her skin. She screamed to get away from his grip. Ammamma watched them and laughed, misinterpreting it for playfulness. Revolted by the violation and the toddy stink on her face, Anjali had to struggle to break free of his savage grip and join her cousins in the courtyard. She hated the way he crushed her against him. She kept spitting for a long time that evening, having bitten his wrist to break free.

  There was something wrong when a man touched a woman, she had learned with that episode. It was not right, ever.

  How her views had changed since Siddharth’s visit! Now she knew a woman could feel comfortable with at least one man in her lifetime. Siddharth was her man, whether the world liked it or not. She dozed off, thinking about him.

  .

  11

  CHAPTER

  Crossroads

  Two weeks had passed uneventfully.

  But today was different. Anjali was feeling a huge low.

  She approached the bureau chief’s cabin after filing her beat stories.

  Health was a fertile beat. She never ran out of stories. It was also an exhausting one, for the hospital visits made her sick. She felt ill whenever she did the rounds in the general wards of the government hospitals. They were forever littered and
overcrowded, with patients waiting in long queues for treatment.

  The chief was busy, as he usually was during the late evenings. He was reading something on his computer screen and smiling endlessly, probably some dirty joke.

  Older men were more lecherous, Anjali had learned from experience.

  She had felt humiliated, strangely, not scared, when a man propositioned her the first time on the local train. An impeccably dressed middle aged man had sat next to her. He scribbled something on the newspaper and pushed it towards her. The compartment was not crowded, as it was a Saturday. She had glanced at the paper out of curiosity and was shocked to see a sex fee scribbled on it. When she tried to embarrass him with a piercing look, he smiled shamelessly. She had sprung up, spat out, “Idiot!” and stomped out to sit beside an older woman at the other end of the compartment.

  Then there were the pimps who roamed the stations and the streets. They would deliberately walk past a woman and quote a rate. If she were a call girl, she would not have earned much. Her average fee would be about twenty dollars per client. An hour each? How many customers did a prostitute handle a day? Five? Not a profitable venture, considering the filth and risk involved. What a depressing line of thought.

  She felt restless. Why was the boss not acknowledging her presence? Was she invisible? Look up, look up, look up. She cleared her throat for attention. And it worked.

  “Yes?” He looked up, moving away his bald head from her view.

  Anjali stopped tapping on the desk and steadied herself on the chair. She cleared her throat again, this time for effect. “I’m not well. The doctor has advised rest. I’d like to take my twenty days of annual leave now. Can I?” She said it all in one breath.

  “No problem. Fill in the leave form and submit it to the admin. Come back in full form, OK?”

  That was easy! She smiled, amazed at her luck, and nodded.

  To keep herself occupied, Anjali did some spring cleaning during the first week. Parvati pitched in to sort out the newspapers and magazines that had piled up over the months.

  Anjali spent her afternoons reflecting on her past and dreaming of her future with Siddharth. She had thought men were sick until Siddharth had entered her life. Sugadan uncle, the watchman, Madhav, and Rasheed; all of them had done a disservice to menfolk.

  Rasheed was the most dependable media executive in the Alpha Advertising agency. Anjali had met him the day she joined the company as a trainee copywriter. She was twenty-one then.

  Rasheed was confidence personified. He had an athletic build and green eyes, the two striking features that caught her attention during introductions. His sharp nose complemented the high cheekbones. Always spotlessly dressed, Rasheed had a commanding voice that made others sit up and listen when he spoke.

  Rasheed was in his late twenties. He was well-read and could speak authoritatively on any topic, win arguments, and convince the toughest clients. He could speak with equal ease about the merits of legalising prostitution and the ideologies of Jean-Paul Sartre.

  Rasheed was also the copywriter to the company, by default. He was to mentor Anjali during a three-month training period.

  He was an effective professional, no doubt. But it was his moral side that Anjali had a problem with.

  Rasheed was very proud of his many girlfriends: colleagues, college girls, co-passengers in trains or buses, clients, aspiring models, and the like. He boasted about his many trysts in the office. Sometimes colleagues teased him about an old escapade. In the beginning, Anjali had not believed the stories. She thought they were all bluffs, his erotic exploits. But after hardly a week in the office, she realised he was indeed being honest about his sex life.

  Most of Rasheed’s fantasies were realised in a flat allotted to his politician friend, a member of the Legislative Assembly, Perumbra Sahadevan, if one were to believe his claims. His friend rarely used the flat at the MLA Quarters housing complex, which was in the heart of Thiruvananthapuram. Police raids were a definite no-no in a place that housed powerful politicians. Besides, Rasheed saved money on hotel rooms.

  Rasheed’s friend later became the youngest minister in the Kerala state cabinet, the minister of youth affairs. This was an appropriate post, considering his ‘key’ role in youth ‘affairs’, Anjali recalled wryly.

  Both ancient thinkers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and modern philosophers inspired Rasheed’s philosophy of life, he claimed. His favourites were, however, the existentialists. He named Jean-Paul Sartre as one of his principal influences.

  She got caught in his debates on ontology, such as, “What is being?” or ethics, with questions like, “What counts as right?”

  Rasheed said he was influenced by Descartes, with his statement, “I think, therefore I am.” His other big influences were Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriel García Márquez, and Franz Kafka, he had claimed.

  He would pick out books for her to read; Crime and Punishment and The Castle among them.

  She felt an intellectual connection with Rasheed, and was drawn to his ideas.

  It was a fascinating belief that an individual alone was responsible for making sense of his or her life. But could one live passionately, despite the existential distractions like angst, alienation, or even just plain boredom?

  She read Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude several times, to the extent that she still could quote lines with precision. “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it,” was still one of her favourites.

  Only a genius could write lines such as: “…no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages…”

  It was only natural, she thought, for her to become attracted to someone who had introduced her to such interesting ideas.

  In hardly six months, Anjali had realised that Rasheed’s life was not influenced by any of the thoughts he admired or advocated. He believed only in his own brand of pragmatism.

  They had discussed authors and books in coffeehouses. Sometimes he had chosen novels for her that included mature love stories. The lead characters were always following their hearts and defying social norms. She suspected that he was giving her hints through the books. He slowly indoctrinated her into his way of thinking, at least to an extent.

  She tried to convince him that physical love was entirely avoidable, pointing out characters from immortal love stories. He argued that if lovers were attracted by physical features, there was surely an element of lust. He said that a man felt love for a woman only when he was aroused by her body and sex was a must for him to feel committed. She foolishly hoped to change him and his approach to women, and to prove him wrong.

  Once, he bluntly expressed his desire for her. They were in the midst of a professional discussion for promoting a health centre, when he stunned her with his proposal, “Marry me.” Anjali felt nervous when he stared into her eyes and said those words. His face was tense and his lips were trembling. Never before had they discussed love between them. She froze, tried to read his face, to know if it was a joke. His gaze convinced her that he was not just serious, but desperate for her.

  Before long, she realised he was interested in her body. They were watching the movie Salaam Mumbai. During a particularly steamy scene, he thrust her hand to his groin to feel a massive erection. She was terrified. That had been her closest sexual experience thus far.

  “That’s what happens to men when they get excited,” he had whispered into her ears. “Let me feel you,” he pleaded. She felt scared when his breath fell on her face. She plucked his hand off her thigh. Thankfully, he did not attempt anything more.

  He repeatedly proposed to her during the week. Though she did not feel love for him, she wanted to go through the motions. It felt good to be desired by a man. Four years after Madhav had expressed his lust, this was certainly another level. Rasheed was talking of marriage, a committed relationship. That was exciting.

  He looked at her longingl
y, one evening, inching closer.

  But was it love? She felt anxious.

  “Let’s get married,” he repeated impatiently.

  All she could ask was, “When?”

  “How about now?”

  Her hands turned cold, and a shudder travelled through her body. It sounded like a bold idea. But was it possible to get married just like that to somebody you had never been in love with? He had kissed her on her cheeks before she knew what to say.

  It was her first kiss from a man, the first kiss she ever remembered from anyone. Did anyone kiss her as a baby, as a child? Amma or ammamma? She could not recall any such moment.

  Madhav had never kissed her. But he had probably never loved her. And perhaps this wasn’t love either.

  Rasheed was playing with her emotions. Maybe she was an experiment for him. He probably wanted to bed a difficult woman. “Reserved” is how colleagues at their office described her. She knew they meant walled, cold, icy, frigid…

  An urge to play along and defeat him at his own game came over her.

  “Let’s see,” she finally said. “We need to convince our families first.”

  He didn’t seem pleased, but agreed to her suggestion.

  A week later, things moved further. They had to travel to Kannoor for the promotion of a client’s fitness centre. They decided to spend the night at the branch office of their agency, which had a guest room for senior management on tour.

  Rasheed was at his tempting best that night. She allowed him to fondle her, but when it came to the actual act of lovemaking, she pushed him away. She could not allow a foreign element into her body. No way.

  He looked grumpy and frustrated when night turned into dawn. They drifted around the city with heavy eyelids, disoriented.

  On their return, she waited for a few days before asking him about the marriage he was so keen on before the trip. He had evaded the question for a few days before coming up with a ridiculous excuse. “My father said he would give talak to my mother and remarry if I brought home a Hindu bride,” he had said with a fake sulk.