Terra Firma, Terra Incognita
By Chitra Gopalakrishnan
As winds push the rainfall in irregular lines down the broad, slanted pane of Vrinda’s New Delhi drawing room, a swank Jor Bagh studio apartment, on an icy-cold January morning, the outside world…trees, grass, shrubs, flowers, gravel, mud, asphalt, overhead wires, street lights…blurs into gauzy impressions as if coaxed into a dull, neutral oneness of gloom.
The rain that pelts down like stones on the window, the numbing cold that wicks away body heat and the wet winds that wreak havoc on the wintry outdoors, heave together indoors too with the same restiveness.
Inside Vrinda’s drawing-room, an animosity, peculiar to women, particularly those who are extremely close, that is at once direct yet elliptical, sweeping yet specific, poisonous yet innoxious, repressed yet effervesce, rises in a cloud of ashen steam.
The severance between Vrinda and Radha, her best friend and life co-traveler, hems the early hours of the day, already lacklustre, with a drab dispiritedness and an aura of such contrariness that it strains the room with its denseness and the very core of their friendship nurtured from infancy.
Vrinda stiffly sits with Radha, face swivelled towards her, on a gray, open-backed chaise that offers enough space to seat more than two people.
She is crowded by emotions, shock, rage, resentment and hurt.
Accustomed to a stream of fleeting friends and lovers, the idea that one of these relationships should be treated permanent by Radha, at a mere twenty-seven years of age, strikes her as an unthinking folly.
Vrinda and Radha’s relationship goes beyond a girlish friendship. They both work in the hospitality sector for a large conglomerate and are confident that before long they will find the next hot start-up in catering together. They have set goals, long-term and short, planned their lives to travel to a point at the very same speed and set dates to go to London the coming summer to meet with investors and executives with insight, who could guide them on how to make profits and avoid pitfalls.
Radha’s, just-moments-ago, announcement of “Oh, I have some brilliant news for you”, with her right hand extended with a flourish to declare her engagement, foils the way they are both trying to live: stepping cautiously on their terra firma, edging past the absurdity of human emotions, their enticements, their seeming certainties.
Radha’s news is greeted by Vrinda not with exhilaration, or at least acceptance, as Radha hopes, but with a contemptuousness reserved for betrayal. “Oh, so you choose to find joy in what everyone believes contains joy. How banal,” is Vrinda’s sneering retort to Radha’s unexpected detour in life that threatens to de-link her fate from hers.
On this rain-flecked day of caprice, Radha wishes she had chosen to sit in one of the elegant, high-backed single chairs across the room, where the tall stemmed white lilies in the vase would have blocked her direct vision to Vrinda. Or anywhere else really, to put a safe distance between an angry Vrinda and her. Between her and Vrinda’s sullen watchfulness, her bitter withdrawal.
Vrinda’s long hair, enhanced with highlights, seems unusually frizzy today and gives her an odd appearance, that of a wind-blown, disarranged person, like a woman who lives in a red swollen mind. Her usually ochrously oval face that typically glows with health looks older and sour like it has a different meaning now. And her easy, willowy presence bears a stiff, aloof veneer as if her supple youthfulness will forever remain like this, frightfully imposing.
As Vrinda flattens her hair down with her fingers with impatience, crushes the marvellously elegant and delicate silk of her pale onion-pink kurta with her fists, as her boots tap a rapid rhythm beneath her matched pants and her classy, thick silver bracelet and the silver hoops in her ears jangle to the rhythm of the mounting beat, Radha’s nervousness increases.
With the clenching, the balling up, high-pitched, acrid words flow out of Vrinda’s mouth, her tone drumfire deliberate, her glare unblinking. “The vital thing,” she says, with a sharp intake of breath, “The absolutely most vital thing, we decided upon is not to get caught up in others’ lives, to not let anyone get to the bottom of us.”
After a pause, she shrills, “We made a pact not to entangle our lives in the joys of men. Or to not try and rid them of their restiveness, their burdens, their wearisome guilts, or their unfulfillments. And especially not to fall for the wilful alchemy of the promised life of togetherness with them.” Her ears ring with pent-up outrage.
Vrinda’s words buzz within Radha’s head too. They frazzle her straight hair cut short around her pointed chin. Her petite, diminutive frame in jeans and a bone-colored cardigan, in which she is always at home, now shrinks inward like a leaf on fire. She tethers on the edge, her insides rising and falling, wondering what to say and how to begin to put out the flames of their first fight. Her fair face and hazel eyes alight with a strange light, her cheeks flush and a heightened color rises to her cheekbones.
Sarla, Vrinda’s live-in help, chooses this strained moment to serve tea, her movements accompanied by clinks and clatter. As she opens the door, a chill breeze invades the room. Vrinda’s words that overhang in the air collide with the chill. Shivers run down Radha’s spine and goosebumps dot her skin.
She hopes Sarla will hover, as she normally does, fuss and exchange genial pleasantries. Sensing her employer’s volatile mood, Sarla, however, chooses to acknowledge her with gazing politeness. She says a demure, murmured namaste, places the tea tray with an assortment of snacks, square napkins of sandwiches included, on the ottoman that doubles up as a table, and hastily leaves the room. Her flat feet and the rubber soles on her footwear give her an endearing, bouncy gait. Radha looks regretfully at her receding back.
With hesitation in her body movements, fear swimming in her stomach, a shyness to her words, she begins her explanation, pliant and eager. “Yes, Vrinda, we did decide that this is the best armor we could wear and that this would be our basic law of existence.”
Picking up her teacup, though Vrinda left hers untouched, she says, with solemnity in her voice, “Please know that I did shuffle around the muddle of longing and desire for a while, a whole six months to be exact, and then made this decision. I am afraid I have crossed the boundaries of our understanding, of my own mind as well, to foray into the unknown.”
Something radiates from within her that renders her vulnerable to Vrinda. Softening her tone, Vrinda says, “You do know, don’t you, that the consequences of your choice are where our life, our linked fates, will be from now on.”
“Believe me, I do know that,” says Radha, clearing her throat, letting the words flow out of their constriction, “We both have needed thus far to have control over our lives, keep our commitment to self-containment and observe relationships from a distance to keep up with our frictionless way of life, one focussed on our careers and ourselves.”
Pressing both her palms on her cheeks involuntarily as she has chewed their insides, she says, after taking a breath, “Vrinda, I understand we have let our minds keep their own shape by not making space for other people’s thoughts.” She hesitates before she ventures further. “Yet are good choices and bad choices all that different? Are they not somehow muddled?”
“What do you mean?” Vrinda reacts instantly, suspicious of where Radha’s arguments are leading, her anger still in an effervescent froth.
“Instead of seeing my engagement as neediness, my intent to plant Trojan horses around Mohit in order to invade his spaces, or as a surrender of my will to his, or as even as creating my own trap by letting Mohit take away my life and generosity, can you look at this as sharing, of the opening up new spaces that will allow me and my heart to accept both my life and his and be unbowed by both burdens,” Radha begs.
“Why can’t you see me as a girl with one name, emerging enriched with two, rather than being depleted?” she asks, tears hovering at the edge of her eyelids.
“Do you really expect me to say I am glad about this surging space of yours? That I approve of your cloying little boudoir de amor?” Vrinda says, unmoved by Radha or her tears, her voice a small, cold blade.
“You must know I still see it as mere naïveté on your part, Stockholm syndrome, a silly seduction of seeing yourself in the storied silhouette of something artful and dramatic. Yet you are nothing more than a souvenir to his life, his mind,” Vrinda rasps, puffing her lips, her tone brambly at one level, incredulous on another.
Radha, flushing with unease, understands the time for their nudging, pinching, fledgling arguments is over. She knows instinctively that a full-fledged battle, a plunge into the area of darkness, into that stinking, horrible place, with the rictus of hostility stretched into duelling dialogues, is the only way that Vrinda will allow their estrangement to be mended. That much as she hates to do this, it is the only way out.
Her hands clasped together, almost in a prayer motion, and mutely holding them up to Vrinda, she says, in a soft note “I am at an age, not helplessly young, to know that my love for Mohit will not translate into being trapped in a mildewed marriage or an aborted career. Perhaps, you think it will, if not immediately then later. Maybe so. I know the heart is deceitful, above all things, and desperately wicked, even as it is generous and enthusiastic. But even if my life breaks down at some point, I am okay to face up to it.”
Vrinda shakes her head in exasperation, brushes away the hair that flaps at her shoulder and laughs a dangerous laugh, exaggerated gestures that Radha correctly construes are meant to be dismissive, reproachful and convey revulsion.
Though deterred, Radha locks eyes with Vrinda, looks at her boldly, openly, with blind courage and continues tightly, “Understand that I am not going into marriage with the defencelessness and abandon of a teenage girl. While to you, my commitment to him feels like so much stale air, tight spaces and a windowless nightmare, to me it signals freedom of fresh, clean places, within and without, as areas where my career cannot take me.”
Not willing to rest her case at this, knowing that Vrinda’s arguments need to be tackled through the entire emotional maze, scraping at its walls, delving into the shallows of obscure anguish of the subconscious, until they both arrive at the other end of the labyrinthine, soiled and sweating and reeking, Radha allows her words to follow each other into a line, to let them crash recklessly into Vrinda’s interiors, her breath shallow, her voice tinny.
“Admit it, you are incapable of acknowledging the truth behind your own most intimate feelings, of showing courage to descend into the unknown,” she says.
As she feels Vrinda’s hostile attention down the side of her body, Radha carries on, gathering courage and animation with her chance to talk without interruption. “Your inscrutability is a defence against letting out your emotions, really letting it go and feeling the real feelings within you. And your life has been one long lesson in denying and pushing aside your true feelings, veiling your mirror and creating a façade of a competent woman.”
Digging her nails testingly into her flesh and winching at the pain, Radha is relentless and as searing as Vrinda has been earlier. “You believe that this won’t jeopardise either your sanity or your tyrannical need to keep the deepest layers of yourself buried and hidden. And I, as a friend, have followed you until now. But I intend to embrace the buried part of myself, see the edges of my body and mind glimmer and welcome the experience of marriage.”
The glass pane behind them sweats condensation.
A window flies open.
A sharp, frosty wind exposes the young women to the extremity of their experience, where contradictions and boundaries have collided.
Vrinda and Radha sit in the icy silence to absorb what has been put in words for the first time, hard, secret things, to try and find a level of consciousness to accommodate these new thoughts.
Their silence stretches. It leaves the mood in the room awkward, with a kind of nervous shame, yet also with wild release.
Stripped of all defences and arguments, Vrinda closes her eyes and makes no protestations and Radha is far too drained to say anything more.
Behind her eyelids, Vrinda sees her chosen life as a slender thing, a tiny being that she found by chance and decided to raise. She could fit it into her small, closed spaces and forget everything not in accord with it. But somewhere she has known all along that it has to separate from herself because of its limitedness. She realizes that time is upon her.
“Vrinda, I truly hate that we have fought. We have never ever done that. I really did not mean to be harsh or put you down. You do know, don’t you, that when we are together everything broken, unanswered and abandoned is made whole. And please know that I don’t see you and Mohit as being on opposite sides but making me stronger with both your presence,” Radha says and immediately breaks down into tears.
“Radha, I do hear you,” Vrinda says, in a low, choked voice. “You are responding to the call of what the universe can and should give you.”
In a timbre, more in harmony with her body and mind, she says, “I understand now both you and I cannot continue to break all human connections, exile many parts of ourselves, imagine less in life or live within static selves that live up to fixed standards.”
After some deliberation, in an undertone, as if speaking to herself, she says, “I know now I have no right to stop you from pursuing your future with Mohit and that even if I did try, I am certain you would choose him over me. Not because you love me less but because he, unlike me, will allow you to stretch your real abilities, with the delicious carelessness of a human, in ways I won’t.”
As Radha tries to shush her, placate her, she motions for her to stop and continues, “I know he and you will together explore what it is to love, to love with your ragged fragilities and frissions, which will tell you what it is to be human. For it is only this emotion that truly enfolds the complexity and contradiction of the human spirit. I have known this all along but denied it with a cursed stubbornness.”
Then putting up both her hands with a broad smile, she says, “As for me, though I fear being left by you, I need to learn to let go of my resistances, my cerebral mode of understanding life and enter the backdoor of consciousness, with its surefooted gait and slips of irrationality, to remind me of who I really am, to show me the true velocity of my being. It will be hard and the treachery of uncertainty will be humiliating to bear, if not simply unbearable on days.”
As the shadow of her old life begins to slope away from Vrinda, taking away the wall she worked so hard to erect between her powerless being and the outside world, a void forms.
Radha holds out her hand to her. Vrinda takes it in her own.
“We may become what we love and yet remain ourselves. Love changes into devotedness to ourselves and unconditional faith in the other,” Radha says.
Then bridging the gap between them on the chaise, she hugs Vrinda and says, “You will remain as present to me as you were on the first day of our meeting.”
*
Chitra Gopalakrishnan, a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communications consultant uses her ardor for writing, wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript and treeism and capitalism.