Realization

The first and last time I saw her dance was on television. It was one of those unpleasant nights, stiflingly hot and even though our six odd windows were open, I could not help feeling as if someone had knotted my trachea. From the bedroom, Anjali’s snores, monotonous and persistent were making me feel like…like a damn, hot, sticky fly going buzz, buzz, buzz. Yes, that’s it, strange but it was buzz, buzz, buzz. My unimaginative brain was obviously not seeking higher symphonies.

Suddenly, the screen vibrated, a long, black leg, beautifully curved foot, then another leg , similarly encased in mourning. A sudden fluid sensation ran through me as a sleek hip muscle rippled. Then the stage was all of her.

Big eyes, kohl-lined long nose, hollow cheeks and a mouth which was far too big. The hair was swept back, almost too severely, and secured into a tight bun at the base of the neck.

The announcer’s voice crackled over…she, suffering from tonsilitis, sinusitis and adenoids all the time. So, this was what she was going to dance…Realization.

My irritation got the better of me and I went to shut the bedroom door…to shut out Anjali’s snores, physically as well as mentally. She lay on the huge, Dunlop mattress, my fat, prosperous wife who still at forty stuck to intellectually low literature like Barbara Cartland and Mills and Boons. Perhaps, I was too hard on her. After all, she was comfortable, accommodating, cooked well and boosted my ego by agreeing completely with all my ideas. My first wife had died after a prolonged illness and Anjali had only too willingly taken care of my two children. I shut the door, gently now.

On the screen, red lights came on, sweeping through the shabby stage to rest on the black clothed entity. And among the dust and cobwebs, a small black flame danced on its toes.

The face in focus, slowly lifting, perfect cream, brown cheeks moving upwards, darker lips…eyes lost, bewildered, eyelids waking forth…some unseen image, mirage eluding her, legs slowly bending, knees sinking, waist curving into a semi-circle, hands clenched, even dead nails. Damn it, what was the realization in this. Nothing much, but perfect limbs and good acrobatics. This sort of performance could be put up by my daughter Reena.

I could perceive a series of emotions flooding her eyes ‘Meenakshi’, kohl-lined. Sitting there, I could watch it with the same clinical detachment with which I operated on my patients, pulled out a tooth. Sudden agony flooded her eyes, sinking into some deep recesses, and like the in-swirling waters of a whirlpool, it rose to maddening pain, hunger…she leapt up and balancing on one leg, pulled up her body…arching slowly… she reminded me of a patient I had. He would scream with pain, struggle in his bed, try to run away aimlessly… a vain and futile dissipation of energy.

The camera focused on her eyes, a curious new look, sharp and cunning…poised, to strike, then to tear and eat. Now narrowing, shining…dripping of cunning. To me, they were rather like those of Lala Banwari Lal, the podgy businessman out of whom I had unsuccessfully tried to wring some money. Damn him, damn those vicious, probing eyes staring at me now. No, no, I was just imagining it, but they were turned accusingly towards me.

Suddenly, it passed away, she sank down and started smiling…irony sinking into joy, growing, bursting into brilliance. A thousand images flickered past, the laughing girl, my daughter, on horseback…her hair chasing the wind…myriads of cherry blossoms curtseying into existence. Ripe cotton pods bursting and drifting in the breeze, fleshy red silk cotton flowers falling in a rain from the trees. The smile was becoming bigger, dazzling…her mad eyes…her open lips…those flared nostrils…burning, burning…I shut off the television then.

I slept a strangely, untroubled sleep and got up the next morning, ready to go to hospital. The breakfast was just correct, a pleasure to behold, brown, burnt toasts, a glass of orange juice, gleaming butter, yellow, fluid honey and my fat, beaming wife. It was after I finished eating did I read the article. Eloquent, ecstatic at the performance, but heavily edged with black. The danseuse had collapsed minutes after the finale. A vibrant person had leapt beyond us…forth…somewhere else.

I got up, gave Anjali the customary kiss quite detachedly and drove into the main road.

Only then did I think what the realization would have been like. I could imagine her frenzied limbs, now caught in flight…frozen…brilliant eyes out…shadowing every other feature. They must have burned, by god, they must have, like every evening at sunset, the broken bricks of the fort near my house dazzled…captured for fixed moments…naked yellow…the sun in wrath…blinding gold…the lost glow…before they died into the orange dusk.

Turning into the lane, I managed to unfold that closed secret which had made me scrutinize those fervent eyes time and again. They mirrored a realization, vision, a conviction and that was why she had died…moved beyond us…forth.

I, a nameless, faceless person, a non-entity, who just existed in a stream of people who turned away from the thing which comes as a force into your life and remains to become the force of your life had doomed my own life into a normal, vegetative routine.

The hospital gates were open. Ironically, the sign blazed out ‘Welcome.’

Rachna Joshi works as Sr.Asst.Ed at the India International Centre, and has published two collections of poetry: Configurations (Rupa, 1993), and Crossing the Vaitarani (Writer's Workshop, 2008) . She can be contacted at rachna06@hotmail.com.