Revenge 2.0

 

 

I realized I was in love when I signed her name instead of mine at a bank. The bank clerk kept a straight face when she returned the check. Jaya, by my side, saw what I had done and burst out laughing. I glared at her.

That was not the first such instance. Once I dialled her home number, reflex action presumably, and blurted out some message to my mother. Her mother was patient. At the end of my monologue, she said, “Monay (son), this is Jaya’s amma (mother).”

We were mere acquaintances in school, she three years my junior. After I left school, we communicated by letters. And by phone when I was back home for semester breaks. After my Masters, I surprised everyone by not pursuing my dream of a PhD and a career in Academia. I joined an IT firm in Bangalore. Jaya made day-trips from her college in Mysore and spent the day with me in my apartment. Our friends knew we were a couple. Our parents knew too. Jaya used to say her parents trusted me. They must have known we were old-fashioned in many ways.

She was twenty-two years old when she told me that her parents had started talking about marriage. I talked to my parents and told them to meet her parents.

Jaya and I were not there at that meeting. She was sent to a cousin’s house. I remained at home. When my parents returned, I pestered them for information.

“Do you really want this?” my father asked.

I blew my top. I cursed their primitive attitude. I asked them why they treated me like a bastard.

They remained silent then. The next day, when my father went to the temple, my mother told me about the meeting.

Nothing much had happened. They were served tea and biscuits. Spoke little, about the weather and the general state of the roads. They sat on the veranda of Jaya’s house. My parents were not invited inside.

I ignored Jaya’s calls that day. Next day, I told her that I will be at her house later that day.

We stood on that veranda. She said, “Let’s go to my room.” I shook my head and said, “No, Jaya, this is over.” She stared for a while. Then, she slapped my face. I walked out of her house.

Out of that veranda.

Till that day, I had never thought about my caste or Jaya’s. That was textbook stuff, only theory, no ‘practicals’. Till then.

That must have been my Count of Monte Cristo moment. I decided to be a slave to Revenge, burying dreams and principles. Every move on the chess board of Life a step closer to self-annihilation. I wanted it to be a slow, long game waiting for the right, and not just any, kill.

I shifted career yet again. I joined the Civil Services. I wanted to be somebody in society.

I married couple of years later. When our daughter was two, we divorced. Rather amicably, apart from her repeating, “You just can’t love anyone.” I insisted on keeping my daughter. She was fine with that.

From then on, it was just me, my mother and my daughter at home. My father had died a year after my wedding. When I did the last rites, I remembered the pain in his eyes when he asked me, “Do you really want this?”

As a kid, my daughter was a pleasant girl with a lovely smile. The smile remained in her teens but it became more difficult to see her out of her bedroom. We still did lots of things together. I insisted on eating, shopping and doing other chores together. We played when we could. Badminton at first, a bit of tennis later and finally she settled for squash. We were both lousy losers. At the parent-teacher meetings, there were no complaints. Only one teacher said, “She is not a people’s person.”

I had noticed that. It is not that my daughter did not try to make friends. I thought she had a few close ones only to realize a little later that those were already in the past. I thought it was just teenage blues. The mood swings, the irritability, the constant introvert. It worsened when she entered her twenties. I got worried. I asked my mother if I should take her to a psychologist. My mother laughed and said, “Then, we should have taken you. She is just you.” That was not at all comforting.

At twenty-two, my daughter went abroad. She did a MS in an Ivy League college, joined a bulge bracket firm on Wall Street. Her visits back home were brief. Instead, she took my mother and me to her place in New Jersey. I searched for some clues about her personal life. No pets, no photos, a few cactus plants, a well-stocked kitchen and basement and a clean house. She was clearly earning lots.

A year or two after I retired, she left the Wall Street career. My mother and I were there then.

“I am writing books, with two writing selves,” she said. “One for serious fiction (no one reads that but that’s what I want to write) and the other a lucrative series (it’s a crazy genre---psycho-sexual-romance).”

Not surprisingly, I loved the latter and ignored the heavy stuff. She used to translate and read that intimate better stuff to my mother. I pretended not to listen.

We were back there a year later. She had changed in many ways. One change, in particular, affected me. I protested loudly about her conversion to vegetarianism.

“Am I not cooking non-veg for you?” she asked.

“That’s not the point,” I replied.

There were other changes, unconnected to her dietary revolution. I hardly recognized my daughter. She was lost in thoughts, excited, expectant and constantly waiting for something. Irritable too. That was gratefully kept to a minimum by the cause of all that.

We met him. He was a few years younger than her. He seemed to be as smitten with her.

I tried to use him in my fight against vegetarianism.

“Acha (father), I am also planning to become one,” he replied. I groaned. I thought of being petty and telling him not to call me Acha, what my daughter calls me.

That was before I found out he is Jaya’s youngest son.

I got to know that during a dinner together. My mother looked at me. I stared at my plate for a while before continuing as if that did not matter at all.

The next day, when my daughter was not at home, I asked my mother if my daughter knew about Jaya and me. She nodded.

“Why did you tell her?” I asked.

“She found out,” my mother replied.

“How?”

“Probably from all the old stuff in your study room. Your diaries…”

I wondered what my daughter was up to. Was she plotting revenge like me, for me? I knew I could not talk to her about it, after keeping it under wraps all her life.

The kids came back with us to India. They wanted to get married. I agreed to meet his parents.

They arranged the meeting and promised not to be there.

“We really need the blessings from both sides,” they said. I thought there was an implicit threat in that statement of them going ahead even with one side’s blessings or without either.

I knew the way to Jaya’s house. The old house had been renovated. It looked rich and grand. Only the imposing veranda remained as it was.

Jaya and her husband welcomed me warmly, “Come in, come in.”

I suggested sitting on the veranda. Jaya winced, I thought.

I wondered if Jaya had told her husband about us. Her son had not given any indication of that being a family joke. But then, my own daughter had concealed her knowledge of the same.

Jaya’s husband, a successful and very rich businessman, settled those worries with a light-hearted jibe, “Always wanted to meet you, a fellow-sufferer of Jaya’s famous right hand.”

I do not know if my left cheek turned pink. Jaya came to the rescue, “And not because you have been in the papers regularly.”

“I don’t know whether you remember,” Jaya’s husband said, “We met couple of times when the government was laying the groundwork for our industry. I used to tell Jaya that you were the reason we survived.”

I nodded. I wondered if he was being condescending or patronizing, two words I have never really understood. Talk shifted to matters closer to the issue of the day.

Jaya brought tea and biscuits. I wondered if it was the same my parents had had when they visited.

In the background, I could hear them talk of the inter-religious and inter-caste marriages in their family.

“…niece…married a Punjabi…a Kulkarni…that is a Brahmin, is it not…we even have a Polish girl in our extended family now…”

I must have acted well. They continued.

“We have allowed our kids total freedom in choosing their partner. They can bring anyone. Times have changed,” Jaya said.

“Oh yes, anyone…” Jaya’s husband agreed. After a brief pause, “Just not them, though…”

I continued to stare at the last inch of tea in my cup.

“That we have made it clear,” Jaya’s husband said. “They can marry that lot but that would be the end of their relationship with us. Not a penny from us if they go against us on that. That lot…they are just different, aren’t they?”

How much ever I tried then, I could not keep the image of my father’s pained look out of my mind.

There was another image too, my daughter.

My father had taken as much as he could. I just had to take a little bit more. The long, slow kill I had waited for, the check mate, was a move away. I could have justified my actions to my daughter. All for her best, I could say. Trust me, I could plead. I have seen the world more than you, my last argument.

I looked up from the tea-cup, smiled at them and nodded.

For my daughter.