The waiter led them to a ‘family’ table right at the back of the restaurant where they were cut off from the crowd; the empty tables they trooped past were smaller, much more intimate, designed compassionately for couples seeking privacy. Shanti sagar was festively dressed up for Diwali, the festival of lights. Golden streamers were festooned along the walls and lamps were hung from the ceiling; the low voltage bulbs splashed patterned light over the tables. Multicolored lights strung along the glassed shop front danced merrily as though provoked into a frenzied state by the wet wind.
Accompanied by thunder and lightening, the rain meant business. Outside, the road wet with rain water, glistened in the dark, portentous of more rain. They settled down at the table semi-wet leaving an archipelago of water islands behind them, their wet clothes squelched water onto the dry sofa; their wet feet felt uncomfortable trapped in the shoes. The intrusive lights gave Vaishnavi a headache, she excused herself, treading carefully over the heavily padded floor, stepping away from the muddy footprints, glancing back every now and then till she was out of their line of sight, like a thief stealing away from the scene of crime. At the entrance, she stood listening for the patter of the obdurate rain, it was so easy to miss that sound in the shuffling of people coming in and going out of the restaurant and their idle chatter: ‘yaar, Shanti Sagar’s dosas are unbeatable!’ or ‘next time let’s try out the kashmiri pulao and methi tikkas’. But Vaishnavi listened; her heart was racing as though the rain was trying to pass on some cryptic messages to her, as though the silvery slanting arrows that fell from the sky were pointing at something, saying ‘here! Look here! Now!’ She stood there long enough to still her galloping heart, to drive out the obsessive dream, push it out into the relentless rain and say, ‘screw you! I am not weak. I am not a creature of whim. I am a wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law. Not a rider of horses.’ People stared at her flushed face as she stood at the entrance for no reason apparently, her fingers knotted up, her distracted gaze seeking some kind of sign. And then, just like a benediction from the heavens above, a loud whoop of joy rang through the crash and boom of the rain. People who were standing at the portico for the valet to get their cars and a few who were just getting in stopped in their tracks and turned. As though challenging the rain gods, a horse and its rider, blackened and obscured by the rain pelted across on the other side of the road. The rider, rendered shapeless in the dark and by the rain, appeared to be bent low over the horse like he was whispering something into its ear. The rider let out another loud whoop and the horse encouraged by these exultations thundered, its hooves merely sparking off the wet metallic road. The spectacle lasted only a minute but Vaishnavi saw each detail; she saw the sinewy flanks of the black horse ripple in the dark and saw its legs draw in and then leap- its entire beastly form in the air for just one breathless second-and land with the kind of nonchalant grace that was unique to horses; she saw its mane pushed back by the force of the wind and the rider’s wild hair thrash about as they kissed the rain and the wind together. People who too had witnessed the unusual sight smiled at one another indulgently, uncertainly as though what they had just seen had been the prank of a mischievous elf. Long after the duo of human and beast had disappeared, her heart continued to thump wildly. She stood there for a few minutes to collect herself.
When she got back her father-in-law was grumbling. ‘We should have stayed at home. I told you people. But no one listens to me.’ He wiped his face with the paper napkins stuck in a glass on the table, promptly there after removing his glasses from his shirt pocket and poring over the menu with deliberation, his eyes peering over the rim intently.
“You were gone a long while. We were waiting for you to order,’ Ravi remarked watching her closely in a manner that had always made her uncomfortable.
‘There was a long queue at the loos,’ she replied casually and widened her eyes at Kritika who was kicking Mallika under the table and making faces. The two of them although three years apart, nine and six, were dressed in identical clothes: a long brown and blue checked skirt and a blue sleeveless collared shirt. Both of them wore pigtails but of late the girls had been putting up a strenuous fight to cut their hair, with a special demand for fringes on the forehead. Ravi had been the wet blanket, resisting change. He sat next to his mother who was sitting next to Mallika.
‘It’s a special occasion nanna,' he said to his father and smiled smugly at Vaishnavi over the chrysanthemums-filled ceramic vase, 'how many times do we eat out otherwise?’
Vaishnavi smiled back tolerantly. Her severe large glasses and the pulled back plait exaggerated the intellectual air about her. The discomfort she felt in the broad bordered Gadwal was apparent in the way she kept pulling the pleats of her pallu over the bosom. She was a good looking woman if one saw the clear bright eyes caged behind the inexplicably odd glasses and the youthful body trapped in a garment that did no justice to it.
‘But nanna we wanted to have Chinese! Aparna went to Chinese Pavilion last Sunday. Their chopsuey is supposed to be the best in the city.’
‘You know tatayya doesn’t like Chinese. Learn to adjust,’ Ravi bent over the table and addressed his younger daughter.
Kritika chimed in, ‘no! Nanking is the best for Chinese. Ramya told me.’ Mallika pulled a tongue at her sister. Putting a finger to her lips, Vaishnavi motioned to her daughter to behave, widening her eyes for further effect which usually meant ‘no more of that or you are in trouble.’
‘What is the point of being old in years? One should be able to make adjustments for children. Senseless man. Pig-headed,’ Vaishnavi’s mother-in-law spoke up out of the blue, her rasping voice always drew attention. People invariably turned and stared at the slightly senile looking elderly lady with a funny voice. She resumed the harangue she had embarked upon in the house, persisted with all through the journey to the restaurant and had temporarily put aside in order to settle down.
‘Amma,’ Ravi raised his palm and that’s all he said in the masterful tone of voice that Vaishnavi had watched him cultivate in the ten years that they had been married. Exactly ten years to this day. That’s what they were celebrating. They were celebrating her large black rimmed glasses, her unseemly sari, his mother’s senility, his father’s obsession with food and his increasing, well increasing fatuousness. They were celebrating the crowding of their respective personal spaces and the resulting friction.
‘What will you have?’ he asked her pushing the menu card towards her.
‘You decide,’ she didn’t feel like going over the menu, the tedious list of mixed vegetable korma, palak paneer, navaratan korma, gobi special, baingan delight, bhindi do pyaaza, the same names, the same order. What was there to choose? It was only a meal.
An imperceptible twitch of a muscle in the right cheek told her that he was hurt. She had not been gay enough. He had wanted her to smile, touch his hand when no one was watching, brighten at the idea of eating out, and more than anything else make a fuss over his anniversary gift to her.
‘Where’s the phone?’
She pulled it out of her purse and held it up to show him. It was a swanky piece no doubt. Sony Ericsson P910i. Had cost him a fortune, so he couldn’t stop saying.
‘Do you remember the number?’
‘Not yet. It will take me time. I have written it down in my diary.’
He took it from her and looked it over admiringly, ‘I have saved my number in this. Keep the instruction manual safely.'
‘It is safe Ravi. Don’t worry.’ She called the waiter and asked him to clean the table. A few grease and curry stains remained from the previous occupants of the table.
‘But amma doesn't like cell phones!’
The waiter arrived for the order. Her father-in-law was the only one who had meticulously planned his order. Ravi placed the order for them after endless debating and pontificating with the children. He ordered a cake too. Vaishnavi wanted to protest but checked herself not wanting to dampen his spirits further. She settled back and waited for the evening to get over.
‘Amma wanted a new camera. No amma?’ Mallika turned to her mother, her pigtails grazing the empty plate.
Ravi winked at his daughter and turned to his wife, ‘amma likes her new phone. No amma?’
Amma smiled back, joylessly.
Once the food arrived, Vaishnavi's mother-in-law resumed the drone. She complained about the old man’s habits, his ‘obstinacy’, his ‘obsession’ with food, leaping back into a remote time in the past.
‘Once when Ravi was about two, he came home and threw the plate against the wall because the rice wasn’t hot enough, ’ she gulped and shook her hand at her husband across the table, ‘my sisters were so frightened of him….’ Again the rasping voice, the voice of a pained woman, drew curious stares to their table.
It wasn’t clear who she was talking to. It never was. Everyone in the house had learnt to discreetly look away when she launched on her lengthy tirades. Her husband, the villain in her life looked like a harmless food-obsessed old man, if anything. It was difficult to cast him in the role of a plate-throwing, teeth gnashing tyrant.
‘Amma,’ that cultivated masterful voice again. It worked only occasionally though. Most of the time she continued regardless, but being out in a public place intimidated her, so she sat back muffled, frowning deeply, her hands visibly shaking and the lips moving imperceptibly. She was a short woman of about sixty, who owing to her hunch back and the scanty hair looked shrunken. A severe tonsillitis problem long back had drained out the strength from her voice leaving it a mere squeal, every word uttered by her seeming to be choked out with effort, making it all the more painful therefore to listen to her never ending exhortations.
‘When is the next appointment with the neurologist?’ Her husband hissed at her over the chrysanthemums-filled vase.
‘Next week.’
‘You make sure she keeps doing those mental exercises the doctor had asked her to do.’
Vaishnavi nodded and was grateful when the children began to clamour to be taken to Chinese Pavilion on his birthday which was the next grand celebration awaiting the family. He turned his attention to them. Her own wandering glance fell on the couple sitting at a table beyond theirs. The girl was pink all over-her clothes, her cheeks, her lips-and she was sitting thigh to thigh with her husband. Vaishanvi could tell they were married by the flaming red streak above the girl’s forehead. The podgy man at the adjoining table laughed that annoying laugh again. She put her hand to her forehead where it hurt. If only she could get out of this restaurant and find a quiet corner somewhere. Where was the time rushing off to? Not the hours but the moments, ticking by, unseen, creeping away.
Ravi is talking to her and her mother-in-law is grumbling again, this time freely using invective. She can hear him say ‘amma!’ yet again. As if disembodied, she watches the family seated at the table, she sees them as the world sees them-noisy, ordinary and unremarkable. She watches the cake arrive. She cuts it along with Ravi, her lips stretched into a smile, and there is energetic clapping by the excited children and benign smiling by the father-in-law. Her mother-in-law claps looking a little perplexed as if unwillingly forced into the present happy occasion from an unpleasant time in the past. People at the nearby tables turn around, smile indulgently and clap too, caught in the motion of things. Timidly, but emboldened by all the radiance in the faces around him and the screaming lights above, Ravi gets up, she sees him coming to her, a narrowly built self-conscious man. He surprises her by forcing a piece of cake into her mouth, and then bashfully wiping away the blobs of cream from the corners of her mouth.
‘Happy wedding anniversary, Vaishu,’ he leaned over and whispered into her ear. She smelt his familiar, slightly rancid breath, and wished him back startled.
The next day she left the University early and went to Gayatri’s. While in the bus she fell asleep, her head drumming against the bars of the window. In a few moments she could sense a tug that pulled her body inwards, she tried to open her eyes but her dream sucked her in and her eyelids remained glued, she could feel something flutter away from her.
The same dream: She was riding a black horse in a green bikini. Her hair, long and wildly tousled, streamed behind her. This time she was tearing through a lush jungle. The splendorous flanks of the horse rippled. Both she and the horse were breathing hard, purposefully, straining to get somewhere, suddenly now galloping across a vast golden hued desert, an open terrain, barren and uninhabited, riding past a long caravan of camels and gypsies.
The sound of crackers going off somewhere woke her up.
She got off at Somajiguda Circle, her broad bordered sari hitched up; avoiding the soliciting autos, she walked past the Amrutha mall, past the mannequin crowded shop fronts. Soon, short of the TVS showroom, she got into a lane, turned a corner at Chang’s Beauty Salon and got into Sunshine Apartments. As she waited for Gayatri to open the door, she felt the pocket inside her handbag to check for her cellphone. There were two missed calls from Ravi. He had called her at work already to tell her that the electricity bill had to be paid and to remind her to buy his mother’s medicines.
Gayatri was in the kitchen, cooking, which was rare because she didn’t have the patience for it. But sometimes she cooked ‘for the fun of it'. Vaishnavi could hear the crackling of the curry leaves in the hot oil as she lay in her friend’s bedroom, glad to be left alone, to be away from home for once. For just a guilty second her thoughts wandered to her children, she imagined them back home from school, still in their navy blue uniform, eating lunch under the watchful but grudging supervision of her mother-in-law. Folding her arms behind her head, her head sinking into the pillow, she breathed the quiet gratefully, glad to be left alone. Lying there, her eyes traversed the room. It surprised her how much clutter her friend had accumulated over the years. Gayatri bought everything that caught her fancy. There were too many things in her house giving an impression of confusion. This room for instance, Vaishnavi thought, could do with a little room. If only Gayatri used the windows and the balcony to advantage and let in some air. The colossal Saharanpur bedstead blocked the door to the balcony and it was lost forever. Then there were those antique wooden cupboards said to belong to a rich merchant from Chettinad, devouring the windows. Wall hangings there were galore: Madhubani, Pochampalli, Kalamkari, Tanjore paintings. Terracotta figurines were randomly placed here and there. Her obsession with collecting had gotten worse after the divorce, Vaishnavi reflected. On the dressing table (another restored antique from Pondicherry) she spotted Gayatri’s wedding picture, both she and her ex-husband in pristine white, fresh from the wedding altar, eight years ago. She still kept that picture although she had disposed of all other traces of her married life. But that was typical of Gayatri: always a whiff of hurried logic in whatever she did.
When Vaishnavi joined her friend in the kitchen she was on the phone with a colleague from work. A mingled scent of hing, karpooram, sandalwood and coriander leaves pervaded the kitchen which doubled up as the puja room as well. Gayatri winked at her and continued to speak on the phone.
‘Have you approached all the hostels?’ She was saying, her voice beginning to lose its rounded politeness, ‘you know there is a hostel for every caste? Brahmin men’s hostel, Kamma hostel, Reddy hostel…Ya…there are at least twenty such hostels in the Dilsukhnagar area alone. These are the people we need to tap for the SpeakWell course.’
Gayatri was a marketing manager with GoGlobal, an overseas education consultancy that coached aspirants for tests like GRE, GMAT, TOEFL and also other sundry entrance exams. The Speakwell course had been recently introduced for fluency in English. It was a lucrative job and Gayatri had been associated with the organization for the last seven years. Vaishnavi seriously doubted the efficacy of these courses. She was quite convinced that agencies like GoGlobal hoodwinked earnest students by making lofty promises of assuring them cent per cent success rate in cracking the exams. The English speaking courses were even worse. Burqua clad women, inhibited small towners, Telugu medium educated students with native intelligence gleaming in their eyes, desperate in their need to be reckoned by the mainstream, mistakenly believed that glib speakers of the English language were a cut above, enrolled in the 25-day, 30-day courses, hoping to unleash their English tongues at the end of it. Very often they left disillusioned.
Gayatri finally hung up the phone with an explosive sigh, ‘these branch managers are so incompetent. Asking to be spoon-fed all the time,’ she put the cooker on the gas and turned to her friend, her eyebrows raised, ‘anniversary gift?’
Vaishnavi smirked as her friend took the high end Ericsson cell phone from her hand and examined it, ‘not bad. But you are violently opposed to cell phones aren’t you?’
‘My husband’s idea,’ she shrugged. The phone began to vibrate in Gayatri’s hand. Vaishnavi made a face as she took the call, moving towards the bedroom. She lowered her voice as she spoke.
‘Where are you?’
‘At the University.’
‘I called you twice.’
‘I was in class when you called.’
‘Did you buy amma’s medicines?’
‘Not yet.’
‘When?
‘I will buy them on the way back Ravi,’ she spoke patiently as if to a child.
‘When are you planning to start?’
‘I have to finish a paper for tomorrow’s seminar. Might take a while.’
There was a slight pause at the other end, she could imagine him rubbing his nose bridge, his glasses dislodged from their perch, ‘remember amma can't handle the children for too long on her own.’
Gayatri scooped out a little gongura pulusu with a ladle and dropped it into her friend’s palm.
‘It’s good. A little more jaggery though.’
‘You really need to get out of that madhouse more.’
‘Ravi just about tolerates my working at the university.’
Gayatri turned off the gas and put a lid on the simmering vessel. She shrugged, ‘Well, at least he is very fond of you.’
‘Sometimes, I feel…,’Vaishnavi paused, searching for an appropriate simile, ‘like a fly caught in a bowl of honey?’ she cocked up her eyebrow questioningly, wondering if her friend understood her.
Gayatri looked at her friend for a minute, ‘how do you handle that kind of subtle domination?’
‘I just don’t let it affect me.’
‘What do you do when he is talking to you?’
‘I don’t listen.’
Sometimes while pretending to listen to him, her eyes would wander to the table, to the bookend, to all the books she intended to read but just couldn’t find the time to. She would continue to nod her head as he talked: ‘It’s a typical small scale enterprise syndrome; industries here have a long way to go to catch up with the changing scenario worldwide. Unless they change this shopkeeper mentality there will be no real progress. But then do they really care about those things? These are all family run businesses run without a vision aimed at short-term profits.'
Ravi railed against the company he worked for, a transformer manufacturing company owned by a friend. He was the General Manager of its operations, working out of the factory which was located at an industrial area called Bowenpally. She had by now understood the pattern of his complaints. Ravi was a man who followed his habits studiously and loathed any variance in it. She often wondered why despite complaining so much about the job he had not made a single attempt to look for another break in the last seven years that he had been with the company. She realised in time that he grew only mildly restless sometimes and would sail over those moments by riling the system, the establishment, the indifference of the rich, the obduracy of the poor and in general the ‘abysmal’ state of affairs everywhere. But the next morning he would be off to work, breathing the imperturbable contentment that she almost envied.
‘I dreamt the same dream again. In the bus, on my way over here,’ Vaishnavi revealed, embarrassed, guilty even, as one would be about a secret adulterous affair.
Gayatri was hunting for her car keys in her dressing drawer. She looked up surprised, the dream admittedly was quite uncharacteristic of her staid friend. She grinned wickedly, ‘this means you have a wild side that you haven’t explored yet.’
They drove to Nampally in Gayatri’s car, to Unique book store. A grubby looking shop that was caught helplessly between an Irani café called Golden Corner and a crowded building complex that housed all kinds of outlets- a hosiery store, a novelties store, a chemist’s, and among other such shops, a homeopathy clinic that boastfully announced:
Homeopathy for your family!
Enrol your loved ones in.
Dr. Dayal’s Family Plus Programme.
Get 10-30% off on annual registration
conditions apply
Vaishnavi shuddered every time she saw the board. Dr. Dayal’s approach to ailments was much too hearty. Gayatri drove past the stately Ravindra Bharathi and then the Legislative Assembly. As they shot past Ravindra Bharati, Vaishnavi read the board outside announcing a dance recital by a fourteen year old Kuchipudi dancer called Sneha Rao.
‘I believe they have renovated the place,’ Vaishnavi smiled, ‘the last time we came here was for Mandolin Srinivas’s recital. Remember? We got stuck in the rain and nanna came and picked us up from Lakdi-ka-pul.’
‘How long ago was that?’ Gayatri asked scratching her chin.
‘Nine years I think, before Kritika was born.’
Gayatri looked at her friend her eyes wide as if to say ‘that long’!
At the book shop, Asif bhai, the sixty odd year old proprietor of the shop greeted them familiarly. He sat on a cushioned stool behind a wooden desk, his sanguine mehendi stained hair crowned by the ultra white skullcap. He always greeted them with a wave of his hand which was a hesitant cross between a ‘hi’ and an ‘adaab’. Only a seventh standard drop out, Asif bhai was thoroughly acquainted with books and authors of all kinds ranging from the do-it-yourself variety to literature. Vaishnavi and Gayatri often wondered if he read any of these books himself, although sometimes while writing out the bill or dropping the books in a cover, he would nod at them with a hint of appreciation, ‘acche kitaab hai. Good books.’ Obscured from the teeming masses and the surrounding din outside, the seemingly small shop had a cleverly hidden spiral staircase to a mezzanine floor which housed its real treasure. Books, seconds mostly, from all over the world, every title, every author, sometimes even rare first editions were available and if one couldn’t find what one was looking for, Asif bhai sourced it for his customers.
In the hushed silence that was more a sort of shared awe, common to all bookstores, Gayatri and Vaishnavi (there were only three other people in the room) browsed through the books in companionable silence, intermittently hissing at each other excitedly when they chanced upon a good book. Gayatri focused her attentions on the coffee table books on interior designing, feng shui and cookery while Vaishnavi looked for books on Vedanta, astrology and photography. The rows and rows of closed books hinted at the unknown and even appeared to discreetly mock at the insular existence of the human race. Resting heavily on her left foot and leaning against the large table assigned for non-fiction, Vaishnavi was poring over a copy of ‘Kundalini’ when her phone began to ring. The other three browsers looked at her balefully.
He wanted to know where she was. What she was doing. If she had finished writing the paper for the seminar. What time the seminar was. Then out of the blue he asked her what she was wearing.
When she came back into the room, Gayatri smiled at her sympathetically, she had already picked out her books. Vaishnavi settled on two- one on photography and the other on Vedic mathematics.
Outside the bookstore, the two of them stood near a chaat bandi with their saris hitched up to avoid the puddles. They giggled and gossiped like teenagers, their mouths full of panipuris. The lack of hygiene would have scared the daylights off Ravi, Vaishnavi reflected, and then a dreadful thought struck her: What if Ravi passed by that way and saw her? She shrugged her shoulders slightly, mentally dismissing the thought as unlikely.
‘Sometimes I feel I should have stuck it out with him. Maybe if I had given it some more time things would have fallen into place,’ Gayatri was saying of her ex-husband, ‘especially when I see others. I mean every marriage has problems….,’ but she noticed her friend was not paying attention, her eyes were moving distractedly towards the bustling road.
‘So is it always a horse?’
Vaishnavi turned her wandering gaze back at her friend, ‘what do you mean?’
‘In your dream, are you always riding a horse?’
Vaishnavi nodded; she smiled embarrassed, turning red in the face, ‘I know it’s silly but there is no one else I can talk about it with,’ she blushed deeply and adjusted her glasses, ‘at this age, do you think it is normal?’ she looked at her friend searchingly.
‘I want to show you something,’ Gayatri said, as she drove in the direction of the Necklace Road. The latter was a bourgeois recreational place. Families, large and small, descended upon this winding stretch of road to spend their evenings on the lawns flanking it and partaking of the modest amusements it had to offer. Push cart vendors of sugarcane juice and chaat lined one side of the road, discarded newspaper cones lay strewn about everywhere. Two khaki clad constables hovered about a Police patrol jeep, randomly stopping motorcyclists and checking them for license and other relevant documentation. A few disgruntled under aged teenagers had already been caught and made to stand aside. Along the lake’s shore were a string of more sophisticated eateries and a large exhibition ground owned by the State which attracted the lion’s share of the crowds. The latter was host to a range of events from horticultural shows to popular music concerts, practically everyday, adding to the traffic woes in the area. With some uncommon foresight, the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad had provided parking space across the grounds, on the other side of the road.
‘So many people!’ Gayatri remarked, ‘have you noticed how people’s spending power has grown?’
Vaishnavi nodded not really listening to her friend’s banter. She sat with her feet up, clutching her knees, watching the faces recede away in the rear view mirror. Gayatri had switched on the radio, an old Hindi number was playing; she hummed along.
‘Why have we come here?’ She asked her friend. The people looked oddly familiar; their brave smiles and distracted searching glances saddened her. A few really loud crackers went off in the thick of the crowds near the exhibition grounds resulting in a melee as the traffic cops sprung into action and rounded up willy nilly two young boys who in their jeans and tight tee shirts seemed to be the possible mischief makers.
Gayatri parked the car next to a camel, which appeared completely oblivious of its towering presence amidst the cars and milling crowds. The gangling camel stood chewing cud and calmly appraising its surroundings even as it attracted a great deal of excited attention. Its owner, incongruously, was a middle aged man with a sullen expression that suggested he resented being in close proximity of such a stinking animal. He sat on a stone away from the camel, unconcerned, relying on the camel’s star power alone to bring in all the business.
‘Have you ever sat on one?’ Vaishnavi asked her friend, pointing to the ungainly animal.
‘No, but how about riding that?’ Gayatri pointed to a horse riding down the slope from the road to the parking lot. Vaishnavi took a closer look. A painfully thin young girl of about fourteen was riding the horse. She had brown stringy hair that was tied into a ponytail; her dress was a combination of pyjamas and what looked like an oversized borrowed shirt, the color of which was difficult to determine sullied as it was with use. Vaishnavi couldn’t take her eyes off the girl or the horse.
‘Are you serious?’ Vaishnavi looked at her friend surprised. The horse was black, like the color of night itself. Its thick black mane was slick and well nourished. The girl clip-clopped to a halt near the camel and greeted the man sitting on the stone who grunted back in reply.
‘How much for a ride?’ Gayatri enquired.
The girl contracted his fingers, ‘fifty,’ she looked at her doubtfully, ‘who wants to take the ride?’
Gayatri pointed at her friend.
The girl looked at Vaishnavi, her glasses and sari, with what Vaishnavi imagined contempt. The girl appeared to be in possession of something that made her at once remote and superior, ‘you'll have to hitch the sari up,’ she stated matter-of-factly and continued to feed the horse clumps of grass.
'No,’ Vaishnavi flushed deeply, ‘my friend was just joking.’ But she edged towards the horse all the same and stuck her hand out to stroke its snout. The horse moved its head away, and a few flies took flight from near its flaring nostrils.
‘I know this is not a distant mystical land but….’
‘What about you?’ Gayatri jerked her thumb in the direction of the exhibition and the crowds on the other side, ‘I need new curtains for the living room. I’ll go and check out the stalls there.’
The girl beckoned the camel-man to help Vaishnavi climb the horse. Looking unhappy as hell, the man obliged, joining his hands so she could step on his crossed palms and haul herself up on the horse. Vaishnavi sat astride the horse, pulling her sari down her calves, blushing deeply as she did so.
‘Who taught you how to ride a horse?’ Vaishnavi asked the girl who said her name was Mimdi, and that her uncle, the camel-man and she, belonged to a village in Rajasthan, near Bikaner.
‘I learned on my own,’ she replied and relapsed into silence. Every now and then she would reach and stroke the horse, whom she called Chetak. Vaishnavi stole glances at her. She walked tamely now in step with her horse.
‘Did you name your horse after Rana Pratap’s horse?’ Vaishnavi asked out of the blue, breaking the silence, feeling compelled to draw the girl into a conversation.
That Vaishnavi recognised the illustrious significance of her horse’s name thrilled her, ‘Yes! My uncle told me the story of Rana Pratap and Chetak. And when I got this horse, I called it Chetak right away.’
As if suddenly unbridled, her story spluttered out with only a little prodding from Vaishnavi. Her mother she said, died when she was very young. Until two years ago, they had been moderately well off, with fairly large tracts of red chilly farms and bajra which were taken care of by her father and two brothers. But for the last two years, around monsoon time, swarms of locust from out West had been attacking their crops and completely decimating them.
‘They say these bloody locusts come from some where near a big ocean in the west,’ she remarked, frowning fiercely, envisaging perhaps swarms of locusts nesting on the shores of some big blue ocean, ‘they are big and fat, and ugly,’ she showed with her fingers just how fat.
‘My father wanted to marry me off but I ran away with my uncle,’ she shrugged, pushing her hair back and smiling simply as if running away with one’s uncle was a natural solution to any crisis, ‘he owned twenty camels in Bikaner, which he used to peddle drugs across the border to Pakistan,’ she had a slight jagged edge to her voice, and the veins at her neck stood out as she spoke with the relish of a raconteur, ‘you know, they rip open the stomachs of the camels and stuff them with the drugs and then stitch them back?’
Vaishnavi couldn’t decide if the girl despised this part of the tale or relished it as much as the rest, because she paused and lovingly stroked the horse’s underside pensively before resuming her tale of adventure.
‘My uncle ran away from Bikaner because the Police were after him and I joined him. I promised him that I would work very hard and give him all the money I earned.’ Vaishnavi found herself trying to recreate the face of the camel man in her mind, who now going by Mimdi’s story was a fugitive on the run.
Her phone began to ring, ‘Here, can you hold this for me?’ She offered her phone to Mimdi who took the ringing phone skeptically, ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’
‘No. It’s okay. I’ll call back later. I don’t like cell phones. They are such a nuisance,’ Vaishnavi suddenly felt chatty. The phone stopped ringing. Mimdi’s face lit up, the fancy gadget excited her interest, 'are you sure you want me to hold it?’ She asked still incredulous; she wiped both sides of her grimy hand against the pocket of her shirt with care and then lapsed into reverential silence, devoting her attention to the phone. Vaishnavi watched the girl as they walked alongside, she on the horse and the girl in step, only the steady clip clopping of the horse breaking the silence of the night.
‘Sometimes late in the night, after the day’s work is over, when my uncle permits me, Chetak and I take off on our own. We ride several miles. The city is so beautiful in the nights,’ MImdi began to talk, warming up to Vaishnavi, the kindly lady in glasses who looked like she understood her, ‘don’t you think so? Once I rode all the way from Necklace road to Chaarminar. In half and hour flat, both ways.’ She looked up at Vaishnavi triumphantly, her eyes sparkling.
‘Do you ride in the rain too?’
‘Especially when it rains,’ she replied with excitement lacing her voice, ‘Chetak loves the rain. So do I.’
'So where do you live?’ Vaishnavi tried to imagine this young free spirited girl and that sinister uncle of hers living in some hovel somewhere.
She chewed her lip and ran her finger in circles in an attempt to point the direction to her house, then gave up, ‘We live near the Chintal basti, not exactly chintal basti, because it is so congested there,’ she screwed up her face in disgust, ‘we can’t live there with our animals. We live in a two room portion of a big house near the basti, it is owned by this very kind rich man who has even provided a shed for Chetak and Raja.’
‘Raja?’
‘The camel.’
‘Do you earn enough through these rides?’ Vaishnavi was now openly curious, she wondered who this ‘kind rich’ man was. Maybe he was an equally sinister ally of her no good uncle. Anyway the girl didn’t seem to mind any of it. On the contrary she seemed unconcerned, radiantly happy with her circumstances, without a trace of regret at being estranged from her father and brothers.
For a brief second Vaishnavi felt that the girl’s guards went up again, she tipped her chin away, shrugged and took her time before replying, ‘sure! I make up to four hundred everyday, even thousand on occasions, and anyway we lend Chetak for weddings too. There we make a lot of money.’ She stressed the ‘lot’ part as if to tell Vaishnavi to stop being condescending and that anyway how she fared monetarily was none of her business.
‘Aren’t you getting bored just sitting on the horse and walking like this?’ Mimdi stopped suddenly and looked up at Vaishnavi. She carefully slipped the phone into the pocket of her well worn shirt and buttoned its flap. And then as if making up her mind for the two of them, the girl lifted her leg and slipped it into the stirrup and in one swift movement heaved herself atop the horse, leaving Vaishnavi quite speechless. And before she could so much as utter a word, they were off, and all she could hear was the beating hooves of the horse and the girl making goading noises as she heeled its sides and worked the reins. It was not until the girl told her to sit back and dig her feet into the stirrups that Vaishnavi realized her back was feeling sore as a result of the bumpy ride. She did as she was told. They were like two fugitives in a Western making a desperate bid to escape. On the road, people stopped on their tracks and stared at the unusual spectacle. Vaishnavi’s sari kept riding up but she didn’t care. She could hear Mimdi’s hard breathing behind her as she held on to the bridle and felt the horse move under her.
‘Do you want to try?’ Mimdi shouted hoarsely into her ear as she reined in the horse and veered it around towards the parking ground. They had by now crossed the crowds and were on a secluded stretch of the Necklace Road, where the waters of the Hussain Sagar languidly snagged onto a grassy patch of land. Here, all the muck from the lake’s abused guts resurfaced and settled morbidly, emanating a stench of heedless consumption everywhere in the city.
But before she could say no, Mimdi had dismounted, ‘hold the reins tightly, lean back and dig your heels into the stirrups.’
Vaishnavi suddenly broke out in cold panic. She had never known the power of control over anything, she couldn’t even drive, let alone ride a horse, 'I can’t!’
‘What are you afraid of?’ Mimdi laughed, ‘Falling?’ She was running lightly to keep pace with the trotting horse. At an indiscernible signal-Vaishnavi thought she heard Mimdi whistle-from Mimdi, Chetak took off on a steady canter.
‘Hold the reins, and lean back,’ Mimdi shouted her standard instruction. She was running behind the horse, ‘and enjoy the ride!’
Vaishnavi marveled at the understanding between the animal and its mistress, the unquestioning faith on which it was founded. Chetak cantered with practised caution, responding to Mimdi’s authoritative commands, its unhurried pace putting her at ease. The road was empty and it was dark but for those few moments that she was alone on the horse she felt free like she never had, relieved of the regrets of the past and anxieties of an undetermined future. The act of riding a horse had always stood for an idyll of fierce self reliance; throughout history men had ridden horses either towards a revolution or away from servitude.
At first, Mimdi stoutly refused to accept the phone as payment for the horse ride. It took Vaishnavi some time and effort to explain that she really didn’t want the phone and that the ride on the horse was worth a lot more. Gayatri didn’t say anything, surprised though she was at her friend’s strange behaviour; the sullen camel-man, Mimdi’s uncle and the fugitive on the run watched the exchange with interest, prying his molars with the nail of his little finger.
‘Remember not to answer the phone. Get a new sim card,’ then stealing a glance at the camel man Vaishnavi whispered, ‘this is for you, don’t give it to your uncle.’ Mimdi looked at her incredulously; she had vivid light brown eyes that shone in the bright halogen lights of the parking lot. It was incomprehensible to her that someone could give her a whole cell phone for a mere horse ride.
‘He may look like that, but he is not so bad. He is like a father to me,’ she replied a little defensively, darting a quick look at her uncle, ‘You can come and ride the horse anytime,’ she added with alacrity, happy to imitate Vaishnavi’s magnanimous gesture. As they were driving away, Vaishnavi caught sight of the camel-man taking the cell phone from Mimdi and studying it with interest and a little while later, she saw Mimdi mount the horse and ride away.
Gayatri couldn’t stop chuckling, ‘What will you tell Ravi?’ They were in the car now, weaving in and out of the traffic.
‘I’ll think of something.’
'The horse ride seems to have had its effect on you,’ Gayatri laughed, ‘you should do it more often. That man didn’t seem like her uncle but the girl was fascinating,’ she added thoughtfully, reminded of her green eyes and wild hair.
‘She is free spirited,’ Vaishnavi murmured, ‘that Mimdi.’
Ravi was appalled, ‘how could you leave it in the bus? It was such an expensive piece.’ ‘I am sorry,’ she said looking away from him, fingering the leaves of her new books still hidden in her bag; the crisp fresh-off-the-shelves fragrance reached her, ‘anyway I bought your mother’s medicines.’
He nodded his head vaguely taking off his shoes, ‘Were you at Necklace Road today?’ he asked her out of the blue, his brows drawn close together. His manner had lost its usual confident familiarity, replaced instead by a suggestion of middle-aged befuddlement.
‘No, I was at Gayatri’s.’ He looked at her queerly as she handed him his mother’s medicines. Vaishnavi removed his rolled up socks and threw them in the laundry bag and placed the shoes carefully in the rack. He had seen her riding the horse, she knew; but it was dark and he probably dismissed what he saw as an optical illusion, yet it was plain to see that he was struggling inwardly with stubborn doubts. She felt a little sorry for him.
‘Did you have a good time?’
‘Yes,’ she turned and faced him for the first time in the day and smiled.
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