Lear

‘Open the door! Open the door! CHEEE…CHEEE…FEED ME…FEED ME OPENTHEDOOR!’

            Lear had grown a bit senile, demanding a meal every time someone rang the doorbell, even though a half-eaten guava lay in his cage.

 ‘At least he’s not deaf,’ Veena muttered, casting a somewhat indulgent, somewhat annoyed look at her ancient rose-ringed parakeet, as she walked towards the door. A liveried chauffeur stood on the choir mat outside, crushing the Welcome woven on it in black cursive-writing, with the weight of his office. 

‘Good morning Veena ma’am,’ he said, removing his peaked hat from his head.

‘Good morning, Desraj,’ she replied with reciprocal politeness. He was the only one in the building who was respectful to her, even when, or especially when he had to convey some annoying message or the other from Mr Sethi, her landlord.

‘Goooodmorrning…goodmorrning…CHEE…CHEE…’ Lear shrieked.

‘Sorry to disturb you…but sir is late for golf…and…your car…Veena ma’am…it is in the way…’ The chauffeur paused to scratch his head for a span of time during which Lear attempted to perform a somersault in his cage.

‘Sir said…he said to get your biscuit of a car out of his driveway…that is what sir said, I am jus–’

‘It’s okay, Desraj – tell your sir to wait for five more minutes,’ Veena replied with feigned authority.

‘If you give me the car keys, I will–’

‘Oh no no, there’s no need for that. I’ll be outside in five minutes, okay,’ she managed to say, before closing the door.

Biscuit of a car, what nerve! She had parked it, her darling hatchback, right behind Mr Sethi’s Audi sedan earlier this morning, when she had returned from a hurried expedition to the grocery store, intending to remove it from its inconvenient position after she had completed her chores. The biscuit of a car was all that was left of her inheritance (and Lear, of course; no one had disputed her claim to Lear). Everything else was gone; everything else had been devoured by paperwork. The house, the garden, the mango tree, the bougainvillea that formed a glorious bouffant over the wrought-iron gates, the spiral staircase that led to the terrace, the fragment of sky that hung exclusively over the terrace – everything that was once hers now belonged to someone else. Paperwork had trapped her in loopholes; she had flailed around in a marsh of jargon while strangers had encroached upon her childhood. Her sister Bela’s lawyers, those crows in black coats, had cawed and cawed at her, spewing terminology that had made Bela the sole owner of their father’s assets – the parental home, the family’s publishing company. Veena had been offered a lump sum by way of settlement.

A lump sum. Biscuit crumbs that were meant to sustain her for the rest of her life. All she could afford now was this tiny apartment in a building where the richer tenants lived in brochure-perfect homes with laminated wooden flooring and modular kitchens. Hers wasn’t even a proper apartment. Mr Sethi, patron saint of midday golf, had converted a garage on the premises into a living space. It was narrow, and damp; there were patches on the walls that had formed an atlas of continents unknown and expandable. Veena had added to its claustrophobia by crowding it with bits of furniture that had belonged to her parents – their walnut-wood double bed, her mother’s dressing table, a baroque sofa with lavish curves, her father’s armchair, the round dining table with its revolving glass top. Bela’s lawyers had allowed her to keep the furniture as well. They were interested in real estate, not memories in unwieldy shapes and sizes. Bela was not attached to the objects in their paternal home, the lawyers had cawed. Veena could keep or sell or dispose of the furniture in any way she pleased.

She had brought whatever she could, and crammed it into this space. She would go back for the rest. She would go back for it all. But for now, she was here, in this garage-turned-apartment, in this smidgen of real estate. It was a temporary arrangement, Veena told herself as she got up from the single chair around the dining table, picked up her plate and empty tea cup, and walked towards her minuscule kitchen. It was a place to recuperate from the betrayals of blood. It was four damp walls and a roof that sheltered her from the duplicities of siblings and their legal counsel. It was a place within which she could brew and drink cup after cup of cardamom chai, and strategise. There were documents in the drawers of the old dressing table that proved with the infallibility of a molten lacquer stamp, that Veena, her furniture, and her pet parakeet belonged to a proper home. These documents she studied every day, within the privacy of these ugly walls. She would find a reputable lawyer as soon as she could, someone who would outcaw Bela’s legal counsel in court; she would fight for her parents’ house. Her home, until six or seven months ago, when her father Prakash Jaisinghani had died, and Bela, holder of the Power of Attorney, had arrived from Mumbai with her husband and their lawyers.

Blood. Destined to rot, thought Veena, as she washed the few utensils that lay in the sink. Destined to turn against itself. Corpuscle fighting corpuscle. Bloodlines at war. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but…the whimper of quarrelling siblings. She scrutinised the foamy tea cup between her fingers. What was TS Eliot doing here, in her wisp of a kitchen? Her education had betrayed her too. Of what use were the modernists in a legal conundrum? All the poetry she had read at the university had led her to this – a kitchen sink in a shard of space that was the lump sum of her inheritance. Had she studied something real…had she, for instance, acquainted herself with the law instead of contemplating the absurdity of human existence in poem after poem, novel after novel, she would have known how to fight Bela. 

Daddy had been pleased about her degrees in English Literature. He had wanted her to join True Voice Press, the publishing house he had founded all those years ago, when he was a young man with nothing but a rudimentary education and a bit of money stashed away in a tin box. Veena washed the teacup and placed it in a little tray by the sink. Daddy had wanted her to work with him, or rather, for him. But Veena had made other plans for her life. She was eager to become an autonomous entity, governed, not by filial duties but by her excitable spirit. She had plunged into the daily grind of ordinary job holders, immediately after graduating from the university, tasting for the first time its sweat and grime and the fury of stymied dreams. She had worked as a secondary school teacher and had volunteered at various organisations that cared for animals – stray, abandoned, wounded, diseased. She would come home smelling of dog or cat or squirrel, swathed in their saliva and excreta and the agonies of their death. Daddy hated the smell.

‘Take a shower, you filthy urchin,’ he would hiss at her as soon as she entered the house.

‘Good evening to you too,’ she would quip, flinging her handbag on the sofa in the living room.

‘Kindly do as you’re told,’ he would say, his syllables flying at her like shrapnel.

‘Never!’ she would reply before arranging herself on the sofa and calling out to the cook for a cup of tea.

‘So young and so untender,’ he would whisper to the walls of the living room, to the crystal vase crammed with damask roses, to the gaudy oil painting that was a gift from one of his authors.

Veena washed a few more utensils. Daddy, she thought, thundercloud Daddy, suited and booted Daddy, cigar-smoking pontificator Daddy, shrewd Daddy, gullible Daddy, lover of Scotch-on-the-rocks Daddy. He could quote Shakespeare with the deliberate, public-school eloquence of one who has never been to public school. His father, Veena’s grandfather, had been a kabadiwala who collected old newspapers, magazines and books from the sprawling bungalows of the posh neighbourhoods of South Delhi. He would then sell the discarded literature to a dealer, who would weigh it on a pair of gigantic scales, and pay him by the kilogram. Veena recalled how Daddy would love telling Bela and her about his first encounter with Shakespeare, whom he sometimes called Shakespeare sahib. He was sixteen and had dropped out of school to assist his father in the kabadi business. One day he chanced upon a collection of leather-bound books, lying in neat piles on a charpoy in their backyard, waiting to be loaded onto his father’s bicycle. The gold lettering on the covers had caught the rays of the sun and twinkled like strange gems on a heap of rubble. He had picked up a book and spelt the words on it, ‘J-U-L-I-U-S C-A-E-S-A-R’.

An incomplete education had bestowed upon Daddy helpful hints in the form of rudimentary English grammar and spelling. These he put to good use, stringing together words and graduating to sentences in the anonymous hours before dawn. Shakespeare sahib was spared the kabadiwala’s scales. And the kabadiwala’s son was spared the limiting fate of dealing in orphaned books and scrap.

Veena mopped her brow with a dishcloth. Daddy had flourished because of his readerly pursuits; she had floundered. Had she joined True Voice Press, the company would have belonged to her. The house, her home with the irrepressible bougainvillea trellis on the wrought-iron gates, would have belonged to her. Instead, Daddy, angry Daddy, heartbroken Daddy, unwell and sedated Daddy, had left it all to Bela and her reptilian husband Sameer.

‘So young and so untender,’ he had whispered one last time, before his face froze, before he lay in a soporific haze, before his dreams swept him away, far far away from his house and his company and his flaccid ambition and his jagged rage and his fatherly tyrannies and the Power of Attorney and the cawing lawyers and and…

‘Open the door…OPEN THE DOOR CHEE CHEE…’ Lear screeched from his perch.

Veena dropped the dishcloth and rushed out of the kitchen. The doorbell rang in rhythmic, discontinuous bursts that sounded like gunfire. She grabbed her car keys from the dining table and opened the door.

‘Sir is late for golf,’ Desraj informed her, without lifting his peaked hat. ‘Your car is blocking our way, Veena ma’am.’

• ••

Veena stood outside the old house. She had followed the cartography of an impulse, and had driven straight here, when she had reversed her biscuit of a car out of her landlord’s driveway.

            The wrought-iron gates were locked, but the bougainvillea that clung to the grills showered her with papery affection. Beloved magenta bracts – had they been waiting for her? She should have visited them sooner, to let them know that she had not abandoned them. That it was only a matter of time…that it was only a matter of disentangling the jargon, so that she could return home, permanently. She walked around the low brick wall with the spiky grills that surrounded the house. She could see through the grills that the garden was a bohemian wreck – a  crazed jumble of grass, stalk, root, bark, leaf. The rose bushes that fringed the lawn bloomed in an act of exquisite rebellion against the neglect. The mango tree in the far corner glistened with bottle-green derangement. It was, she noticed, flecked with unripe fruit, which a variety of branch-faring creatures were attempting to claim. Veena could hear squawking and buzzing and trilling sounds emanating from the tree. It was from these branches that a young rose-ringed parakeet had plummeted to the ground, all those years ago. She had caught him and taken him indoors. She remembered how the Jaisinghanis had argued over a suitable name for the bird.

            ‘Mitthu,’ she had suggested.

            ‘That’s too common. Let’s call him Lear…Lear Jaisinghani,’ Daddy had declared.

            ‘Sounds lov-ely,’ Bela had chirruped.

            Lear Jaisinghani was beady eyed, loquacious, and Shakespeare literate. Daddy would read to him often, and he would mimic the sound of syllables that contained love or anguish or scorn as he somersaulted on his perch. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on…’ Daddy would declaim, pacing up and down in the verandah; ‘WE ARE SUCH STUFF SUCH STUFF CHEE CHEE…’ Lear would repeat. ‘To be or not to be: that is the question…’ Daddy would ponder as dusk extinguished the summer sun, and the frantic city grew calmer. ‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE…’ Lear would cry out to the grain that lay scattered in his cage. Veena smiled as the memory appeared before her in cacophonous details. ‘VEENA…VEENA…’ he would shriek, imitating her mother, Kiran, who was bedridden. Mummy’s vocal chords had not lost their strength even though her body lay in a puckered heap of useless limbs upon the bed. She could holler above the din of domesticity – whistling pressure cookers, ding-donging doorbells, monologuing parrots – to draw attention to a wet diaper.

            O stench of maternal excreta! Veena could smell it now, wafting through the iron grills, a smell she wanted to hold on to…a smell she wanted to bottle if she could, even though it sickened her. She would change Mummy’s soiled diaper with the dexterity of a surgeon, and apply talcum power to her withered bottom. She would then pat the octogenarian to sleep with an affection that gave away a permanent reversal of roles. 

            ‘Veena! Veena!’ It was always ‘Veena! Veena!’ She was the multitasking genie who was summoned whenever a parent in rapid decline needed something. Bela, the escapee, was settled in Mumbai. Bela, the deserter, would call once in a while, to find out in her singsong voice if Mummy had been given a bath and if Daddy had been given his multivitamins and if there was anything she could do…anything at all…even though the kids had exams and Sameer was away for work, in London, as usual…Sameer, reptilian Sameer was always away for work, except when Daddy had died, and he had arrived with Bela to handle the business affairs of True Voice Press.

            Veena shaded her eyes from the noonday sun. The house looked like a shell-shocked beauty. The verandah, a serene alcove with wicker chairs and a small table, was strewn with leaves, old newspapers, plastic bags. Where was the caretaker? Hadn’t Bela said that they would employ a caretaker for ‘maintenance and upkeep…until…you know…until we decide what to do with it…’ She hadn’t made eye contact with Veena; she had spoken to her lawyer, who had tap-tapped on the keyboard of his laptop. The caretaker would clean the house and mow the lawn and let Veena in, if she chose to visit, Bela had said and her minion had tap-tapped and caw-cawed…but…there was no caretaker in sight, although the gate was locked from the inside, and the few pigeons who had infiltrated into the verandah were pecking at what was probably his leftover lunch on the table.

             Wretched Power of Attorney. Putrid document of paternal favour…O Daddy what have you done, Veena wanted to scream. She clasped the iron grills with her hands, wanting to bend them with the ferocity of her intent, wanting to break into her own home. Is this what I deserve, for taking care of Mummy…and then…for taking care of Daddy, when the stroke paralysed half of him, and he blubbered like a fool, she asked the sky that canopied all that she had lost to wily siblings and caretakers and pigeons. There was no answer, except for the vulgar chittering of the birds in the mango tree.

            This was what she deserved, to have a home but to be locked out of it. She let go of the grills. She remembered the day Daddy had announced, ‘I’m writing it…finally…my will…I have been advised to prepare it.’ He had spoken softly in the dingy room; Mummy lay on the bed, barely tethered to life.

            ‘Don’t mention such things now, Daddy…now is not the time for such talk,’ Bela, who was visiting, had sobbed. He had put his arms around her and let her cry into his old-man chest.

            ‘It is…a sensible…thing to do,’ Veena had managed to say. She was sitting beside the bed, her hand caressing Mummy’s forehead, her eyes on the wasted body that shook like a rusty locomotive with an effort to breathe.

            ‘So young and so untender,’ Daddy had taunted her, middle-aged Veena.

            ‘Shh Daddy…now is not the time to quarrel,’ Bela had whispered. She had put her delicate fingers on Daddy’s lips.

            Mummy had died quietly in Veena’s arms. She had opened her mouth one last time, probably to call out ‘Veena! Veena!’ Maybe the exertion had killed her. Maybe she knew of what was to come, maybe she knew that it would roil destinies and turn blood against blood. Daddy had prepared his will before the stroke turned him into a whimperer. But Bela had done that too…Bela had shushed him with her fingertips…Bela had turned him into a witless baby…Bela was mightier than any stroke.  

            Veena moved away from the boundary wall. The house was empty, but she would return to claim its ghosts. She would return to open the French windows and dust the rooms and cook a meal in the kitchen. She would return to sit on a wicker chair in the verandah, and pour herself a cup of tea from her mother’s bone-china tea pot.

            She was about to walk towards her car, which was parked under a neem tree opposite the house, when she saw someone in the driveway. 

            ‘Kaun…who is it?’ he said, squinting his eyes as he approached the wrought-iron gates.

            Kaun? What nerve. Should she tell him that she was Veena Jaisinghani, elder daughter of the late Prakash and Kiran Jaisinghani? Should she tell him that she was the rightful owner of this house, within which he stood, looking well fed and somewhat tipsy on sunshine and a long afternoon nap?

            Soon. Very soon. But for now, she would have to make her way back to her rented place – Lear was probably hollering for lunch. 

• ••

Dusk arrived devoid of flamboyance. There were no avant-garde streaks of orange and red in the sky above the building. Here, the light receded without ceremony. Veena lit an oil lamp at her doorstep. She stood by the open door, leaning against a wall. She liked to watch the lights come on in the apartments around her – first one, then another, until the building became full of luminous squares and rectangles. Even grey buildings could offer a bit of magic, she thought, sipping her tea from a chipped cup. One had to grab whatever peace there was, and this was a peaceful moment. The gods of twilight were benign creatures, lulled by the scent of raat ki raani shot through with a whiff of spices roasting in a pan, which emanated from an open window. They were not the conniving deities of the day, who turned the air to poison and corrupted the soul of this city and caused traffic snarls too, just for fun.

            Veena caught a glimpse of someone moving within an illuminated window. A maid inside a kitchen…was she chopping vegetables for the evening meal? These windows framed so much bustle or chitchat or so many gestures, intimate and annoying. It occurred to Veena (not for the first time), that she was outside these compositions of bright lights and beeping microwaves and squabbling children and families gathering around a dinner table. She was excluded from it all; she had no one to care for, and no one cared for her…she was alone in this world with her antique furniture and parrot…she drained her cup of tea.

            A pair of headlights glowered in the dark like the eyes of a big cat on the prowl. The guard opened the gates, saluting smartly as an inky sedan made its way into the building’s driveway. Mr Sethi, returning from work, or an intriguing miscellany of activities. He was alone too, she thought, surprised by her interest in her landlord’s aloneness. He was a decent divorcee – the other tenants gossiped – not an alcoholic or a druggie with a lady problem. It was the reason why so many good  families had moved into the luxury apartments that he had built. And his business interests were wide and well known: real estate, online pharmacies, artisanal coffee and what not. He was a serial entrepreneur, the tenants whispered loudly, swelling his entrepreneurial pursuits with their imaginings. The tenants. Good families of wealth and bawling progeny, framed by windows to apartments she could not afford. Veena gazed in the direction of a silhouette against a windowpane. They had resisted her, these tenants, they had not wanted her to live among them. She was a nutcase with no one but a parrot to call her own, and the parrot was a nutcase too, always screeching and screeching and talking gibberish like an old actor who had forgotten his lines. Everyone knew that Prakash Jaisinghani had left Veena penniless; everyone knew that she was not on speaking terms with her only sister, Bela, who was lovely. They blathered, these tenants, their words swarming around her like combative bees; their words hanging upside down like bats from the branches of the ficus tree outside the gates.

            Veena smiled at the car that had purred to a halt. Mr Sethi the decent divorcee had let her stay, if only on the fringes of his kingdom of fine masonry and quartz countertops. She could see a pair of trousered legs emerge from the car. He was walking with feral ease towards the building. Dusk, with its dubious light, suited him. The hour seemed to accentuate his contours; it intensified that whiff of an escapade that swirled around him, mingling with the indelicate scents of night-blooming flowers. Veena inhaled deeply as he walked past her door, and then, forgot to exhale. He had turned around. He had lifted a shirted arm to wave at…was he waving at her? Or at a lamppost…or…at an early star in the sky…or…or…at the potted marigold plants at the entrance to her apartment?  

            ‘Hello,’ he said, his greeting flecked with uncertainty. It was almost a question.

            ‘Hello,’ she responded. Could he sense her panic?

            ‘I see your…ahem…your biscuit of a car is resting now…in its proper place…and not in the middle of–’

            ‘So sorry my biscuit on wheels delayed you this morning…I had to rush off and buy a few things…and when I returned I parked whereve–’ Veena felt her syllables crash into the lamplight, like agitated moths.

            ‘Well, I’m not sure how you manage to rush off or even move from point a to point b in that thing.’ He spoke with exaggerated concern. 

            ‘I rattle along.’

            ‘Good for you,’ he grinned, revealing teeth of perfect shape and spotless character.  And then, after the briefest pause during which a cicada broadcasted its yearnings for a mate, he said, ‘I…I know this isn’t ideal…this…er…your situation…I know this isn’t pleasant…and you’re not er…you’re not exactly comfortable here…and…well…I meant to ask…have you heard?’

            ‘Have I heard what?’ Her syllables were suddenly alert.

            ‘Umm…it’s on the market…the house…umm…your parents’ house…Bela and her husband are looking for buyers.’

            ‘What? Already? I was there in the afternoo–’

            ‘Already? Veena, it has been months…almost a year since…since your father passed away. You didn’t think they would hold on to the house forever, did you?’

            ‘I’m still…the paperwork is a mess…I thought they would rent it out…I nee–’

            Mr Sethi moved closer to her, close enough for her to catch that whiff of an escapade, and other woody notes. ‘Veena, listen to me, the paperwork will always be a mess. You’re drowning in it. Do you have a lawyer? The house, your house will vanish – poof! – if you don’t find one, immediately. It’s prime property…great neighbourhood…surrounded by parks and all sorts of ruins…I mean, monuments, but you know that.’ 

            She knew. Of course she knew her old neighbourhood: the park adjacent to her house, the minaret that stood in one corner of it like a minor celebrity, the jamun trees, the local laundress who was a permanent fixture under the neem tree (it was as though she had grown out of its branches, with her giant coal iron), the by-lanes scarlet with silk-cotton flowers, where Veena had cycled in her youth, where she had walked and walked to get away from Mummy’s filthy diapers and Daddy’s taunts and Bela’s sickening perkiness. Of course she knew.

            ‘…they will probably sell it to someone who will demolish it and build apartments – that’s what happens to old houses…’ Mr Sethi was saying. For how long had he been talking? ‘Your paperwork will never be done, Veena. Veena? Are you listening, Veena?’

            She was gazing beyond his shoulder, at the long driveway, at the points of light plotted on skeins of the evening, at Desraj, who was off duty now and was standing by the gates, chatting with the guard, although he kept looking at them from under his peaked hat. This is what happens to old houses. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a demolition…

            ‘VEENA! VEENA! CHEE…CHEE…’ Lear made himself known from inside the apartment. He had heard Mr Sethi call her name.

            ‘You can’t go on living like this, in your jungle of paperwork and parrots,’ Mr Sethi declared. ‘Let me…allow me…to help – okay no, not help – you don’t need my help, you don’t need anyone’s uh…’ He ran his fingers through his tangle of salt-and-pepper hair. ‘What you need is a lawyer, a really good one. I know a few.’

            Veena stood by the open door, searching for new focal points in the growing dark.

            ‘Let’s talk again, maybe tomorrow over lunch or coffee or whatever. Let’s find you a lawyer so that you can go back home. Okay?’ 

            ‘I’m in touch with a law firm, but thanks for offering, Mr Sethi,’ Veena muttered, as she stepped into the apartment, and closed the door behind her. Her paperwork was waiting for her in towers of varying length and importance. Her parents’ furniture lay in uncomfortable positions within these damp walls. Lear was staring at her with his beady eyes, their colour somewhat altered but their keenness undiminished with age.

            ‘So young and so untender,’ she thought she heard him say. 

            Lear, demented Lear, had lived on. And so would she.