Mr Rao Jumps In
Varnika Yertha
After an excellent lunch (what delicious gulab jamuns), and a hot bath (feeling nice and clean) I am scurrying back to my bedroom, back to my books, back to the computer.
A torrent of texts on my phone.
My friend says he could not remember anything after the second drink last night. What a buffoon of a fellow! A liar and a scoundrel, I tell you. That means he doesn’t remember that I paid our bill at the table and my generous deed is forever lost to the void in which acts of friendship go to die. It is a miserable belief of this modern age, that friendships are meant to be an equal solace, and a shelter from the scourge of suffocating families. Sir no sir, you at least know there is no honor in families. You kick and scream when you don’t get your way and you shut up and stuff your mouth once you get hungry enough. You are an animal to your family even if you present a pretty-enough face to the world, gracious and patient. And they turn into animals soon enough, your children and your parents, even if they were quite human to start with. There is no facade of honor inside the family, whereas friendships, oh, friendships between gentlemen are all about honor and courtesy and remembering each other fondly.
Don't talk me out of this dear sir, it’s a time-honored path of once sane people losing their way, as they discover more and more of the structures underneath the surface world. The same is happening to me. I am going crazy and I am growing insufferable.
*
When I am not reading, I like to be perfectly still. I do not wish to contort my body in various positions, working out the painful kinks and knots that plague it. I do not wish to do something useful like cooking a meal for the family or clearing the stacks of books scattered across the bed. I like to be still, barely listening to the birds, and carefully examine the possibilities that once danced across my life. I remember the enigmatic childhood neighbor that flirted with me across many confusing meetings in the park, sometimes with undeniable electricity and sometimes with so much tentative disconnection. I wonder at the continuing pull towards my wife, for conversation and comfort, to tell her my dreams after waking, even if my once-commanding desire for her had faded over the years.
There are a thousand instructions my wife gives me all day. Pick this up, dust that fan, wring this orange. Not only has this made me lose my will to live, I walk around with a strange feeling of being nowhere at all, not in the head over my shoulders or the bed or a good book elsewhere. I am constantly trying to escape and she tugs at me, constantly trying to pin me to the needs of the family.
A few days ago, it was Vinayaka Chavithi, a festive time of pandals and traffic jams and temporary water tanks mushrooming all over the city. I woke up to my wife’s loud instructions to Irfan. Once a driver for hire, he had retired after his stroke and took great delight in being the neighbourhood’s amateur gardener, errand-runner and all-round-gossip. She wanted him to purchase a clay Ganesha for the puja at home. Get a small one, she was telling him, we are going to visit my sister in law anyway. The lord required puja and prasad everyday, and so the idol would have to be transferred to the larger street pandal the very same afternoon.
This procurement seemed rather inefficient to me and in this innocent spirit, I wondered aloud if everyone did the puja by installing their own idol. And flash! My wife sprang at me like a tiger. The much-loved God of new beginnings, the divine remover of obstacles, hadn’t we brought him home every year? Hadn’t our children put their textbooks at his feet and prayed hard to receive his blessings? In which world was I floating?
I defended myself poorly, mumbling something about whether it was compulsory. Nothing was compulsory! It wasn’t compulsory to wear clothes and go to the office! We didn’t have to cook our food and keep it on nice plates and then serve ourselves! I could just give up and roam the world naked, an uncivilized barbarian, oh yes, I had changed so much over the years, not the man her parents met, I had turned into a clueless numbskull that questioned traditions and clothes.
This crazy woman. I was aghast but had the good sense to keep quiet until this tirade died down. I helped my children arrange flowers and fruits and many kinds of small leafy branches around the somber, little idol. My elder one, an early victim of teenage angst and usually glum, seemed to find a great joy in the composition, layering elements and balancing them against each other just so, resulting in a careless, yet lush looking scene. She had once participated in a vegetable carving competition and after many sweaty hours of trying to make a garden, scattered the last bunch of limp spring onions around the whole tray, declaring it a tableau of post-tsunami destruction. I was rather fond of her but I dreaded what the world would make of her fanciful sense of organization.
Irfan hovered around in the role of capable handyman, wetting the wicks in oil and then pouring the oil in the lamps. He complimented my daughter on the arrangement, skills a girl must have, next to cooking like your mother, he said, sparking angry protests. I felt affectionate, towards him and my wife, and a corner of the world that still allowed for this eccentric coexistence. I hold on to a raft made of my books and these few peculiarities in a sea of violent change.
*
We are returning now from visiting my sister. Her daughter, my niece, had given birth two months ago and we drove to see the baby – six hours in our new subcompact SUV, navigated expertly by Irfan's enthusiastic son, the wispy-moustached Syed. After my promotion to Department Head and the significant salary increment, I had given in to the demands of my raucous household for a car. It had never occurred to me to feel self-conscious about taking the college bus everyday, but a new departmental gaze was present on me, and I too gave in to the siren call to seek its approval.
It seems as if I cannot be growing continuously, reading obscure philosophy, without becoming more and more of a social misfit. I rake over the seasons of my life, with pleasure sometimes at a memory so easily full or with grief at all the failures that surrounded it, all the ruinous years that I had not been responsible for, but yet found myself implicated in. Why could I not be like my wife, who was still so greedy for life, dreaming of the day our daughters would be settled, scowling, scolding, correcting us all, every step of the way? In my search for seeing clearly, the engines of belief that drove me each day had broken down, sputtering and outdated.
After a day of inane catching up, cooing over the chubby baby and an early dinner of mutton curry, we were on the highway again. With my chatterbox-kin asleep in the car, I had only Syed for company, who took after his mother in shyness and let me sink into my own thoughts. The darkness arrived slowly. It climbed down from the boulder-speckled hilltops to the green foothills and patchy ponds below. And then all at once, it enveloped us, hiding the miles of paddy fields we had passed through. The large eucalyptus trees that bordered the road loomed over us, mute giants watching the white stripes of the highway lanes disappearing fast under our car, behind them dark shapes and a world that mankind had once belonged to. Suddenly, a white shape lying still on the road, lit up by our headlights.
Syed smoothly maneuvered the car into the next lane, with barely a conscious thought passing between the two of us – the shape was of a dog, dead or wounded, I could not tell. It would be too impractical, too idealistic to even wonder aloud, never mind stopping for it. I felt a dull hatred however, for this brutal, artificial, man-made strip, for the billions of kilometres we had dug up, bifurcating the earth, so we could load up our cars and continue our rituals and celebrate our babies, giving them baths twice a day, dusting them in powder and dressing them in allergy-free diapers. Once, we walked in the dark with elephants, carrying our young, living amidst blood and mud, dying early, taking no more than any other creature. And now, with brains fattened on symbols and language, our needs and desires networked across the earth, the inheritance of the modern human. We were complex, pitiful beasts with burdens that could be borne no other way but with each other, looting and loving and begging for understanding.
I did not want to die. I had no great pain in my body and soul that justified such thoughts and besides, my remorse for my individual existence did not run so deep. No, we had to disappear all at once as a species like the dinosaurs. The mighty moral hopes of our civilization would always be too out of reach, and we would eat this earth inside out before a new age came along. Even my misery was utterly man-made, the gift of meaning-making freezing consciousness in time, making our imagination immortal when my body would decay and dissolve like every other.
*
My younger daughter wants me to take her to the pool. She does not wish me to actually teach her to swim, my job is to hover around while she splashes around in the baby pool. I am bored, but I go anyway, aware of the diminishing list of things she will ask me to be involved with, as she grows older. Sometimes the intensity of my failures as a father crushes me so deeply, I can barely breathe. My father, to me, had always remained a giant of a man, even when hooked to tubes that ran up his thighs and down his wrists, cleaning his blood when his kidneys had failed. He had carried the entire brood on his back and raised them to be a close-knit tribe, even if we had all splintered a bit after his death.
I had not realized this earlier, but my vision of fatherhood had been much the same, I would be a benevolent, nourishing patriarch, a grand banyan tree that gave shade to all that nestled close. It had seemed possible, when my daughters were younger and I had not been wracked with doubt. Taking them to the cinema, to a restaurant on Sunday, reading them books and playing board games, these simple activities had filled their little hearts and minds with so much joy. Sometimes I overdid it, like when I bought a book full of Ocean Park tickets from a sales executive and we only went twice after that. Or when I made my older daughter, who usually avoided curd, a mix of the creamiest, perfectly salted bowl of curd rice and crisps which she ate with delight and then threw up violently. The core of our life was strong, however, and unconflicted. I was a beloved son and father and I had not only deep roots with parents I worshipped, but a blossoming family.
The changes had started slowly, hollowing the world outside and my self-belief alongside it. After fifteen years of teaching literature and finally free from the all-consuming phase of caring for my sick parents and raising my children, I had published my first novel. It was a comic meditation on the split Indian – the post-globalization birth of a new urban subject, neither living in the world of his old mother tongue nor able to invent anew in the adopted one. I would not have minded if it was met with scathing critique or even only mild approval, but nobody read it. Not even the colleagues from my department who had all received free copies; I could tell they hadn’t made it beyond the first chapter. The nail in the coffin was the change in my wife, who had always believed me to be something of a genius, a myth that I myself adopted and fully expected to actualize. I could not blame her for my fall from grace. By feeling ethical dilemmas, by following my feelings, by stopping to write and then not doing it very well, paralyzed by my fog of fears, by my broken nature, I had failed the promise of my youth. You spend years
believing yourself on the path to a lovely ideal and then you are raked over the coals by your own anger, darkly amused at the deep unknowing of yourself.
The shock and subsequent fury took years to metabolize into an equilibrium at home, into a vague, disconnected depression under which I could pretend to function. I continued to pour myself into work even as the humiliation still smarted within me, tolerating the smarmy small talk at meetings and run-ins on campus, pretending to be above it all. A junior was headed in my direction right now, a trendy, good for nothing, young fellow, who had published a stupidly confident paper on media discourse that triggered such rage in me, it kept me up for two nights. He had not reached me however, when two children rushed right up to me – “Mr Rao. Mr Rao.” I knew the older boy, my daughter’s friend, he had once cracked my –
“ANYA IS SINKING” he screamed. “COME FAST!”
*
Mr Rao turned towards the baby pool in confusion and then the larger adult pool, where Anya was thrashing in the deep end. Mr Rao rushed along the pool edge when his leg slipped out from under him and he landed on his right knee, smashing it on the hard tile. He pushed himself up again and flung his slippers off, before plunging fully clothed into the water. In a few quick strokes, he had reached her, catching her arm and pulling her towards him. He held her up first, as her gasps first turned to coughs and then loud wails. "Shhh, it's okay, it's okay". He dragged her to the edge as she clung tight to his neck. He could feel the searing pain now travelling up his leg. Hands tried to lift her out of his arms, but she resisted, her nails digging into his neck.
"It's okay, it's okay, Anya" he said, wiping the tears off his sobbing daughter's face. "Nothing happened, just a small thing”.
“I'm here, Anya. I'm here now."
***
About the Author
Varnika has a decade of experience in data analytics and supporting strategy for user-facing platforms. While writing has always been a way of processing life, she is finally devoting time to write for an Other - a real reader. This will be her first published story.
This story was a runner-up for The Deodar Prize, 2025.