The Illusion

by Parth Pandya

[box] Vishruthi is waiting for someone as the waves go about their business in the busy city of Mumbai. Who is she waiting for and what’s the meeting going to be all about? Parth Pandya writes a story to convey the essence of the February 2011 theme, ‘Exploring Relationships’.[/box] [box type=”info”]MONTH: February 2011

THEME: EXPLORING RELATIONSHIPS

CONCEPT: Taking one step forward from last year’s theme, we decided to explore all sorts of relationships including love.

FEATURED WRITER OF FEBRUARY 2011: Mridula Koshy, Author, ‘If it is Sweet’.

The February 2011 edition was a rather light issue, particularly after all the work that we had put in for the anniversary issue. Thanks to our improved sharing options, Spark reached more people and it delighted us no end, when we realised that more and more people were knocking at our door (or should we say our inboxes?), wanting to be part of the team! Our interview with Mridula Koshy remains to this day, one of our most favourite conversations with an author.[/box]

Vishruti gazed at the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea as it caressed, cajoled and lashed the city of Mumbai. She had been sitting on the shore for a while now. She looked at her watch. 5:55 pm. It is about time.

Vishruti knew that her appointment for the evening would be met on time. It was among the dossier of things she had put together about Aakansha. Aakansha Shrivastava. She was a writer, Vishruti had surmised, working for a daily newspaper in Mumbai. That aside, there was nothing remarkable about her that Vishruti could gather. She could turn a few heads when she entered the room, she could elicit praise for being bubbly if she tried hard, she could raise a storm and drink an ocean if she really put her mind to it, she could be the void that made others want to protect her … Vishruti took a deep breath. A little voice in the back of her head reminded her to remain objective. Jealousy really could render objectivity useless.

Vishruti’s thoughts wandered to a nondescript building in the city which contained her flat. “Vishruti and Pranay”, said the nameplate outside their door. Two names, one home. An equal and obvious partnership. Vishruti and Pranay had been married for six years. “Let’s get married,” Pranay had said. Was it a proposal? A suggestion? An order? It was hard to say. It was a typical Pranay statement. There was a lot lost in translation before his thoughts reached the tip of his tongue. Vishruti had an inbuilt decoder though. She understood. She agreed. She got married. Life happened. She never once questioned it. Not when she fell in love with him, not when his presence filled her very existence, not when they came away from family to build their own little space, not when the years passed by with nary a change in their relationship. She imagined her complete surrender to the life she had fashioned with Pranay as keeping up her part of the bargain.

She saw a boy playing among the waves. She smiled. What would it be like to have a child of my own, she thought? Almost immediately, she castigated herself for that thought. She pursed her lips and took another look at her watch. 6:15 pm. The sun had begun its slow descent into the vast wet abyss of the sea.

“Hi,” came a voice from behind Vishruti, straining to be heard over the noise of the waves. Vishruti let a full minute pass before she responded with the only word she could muster, despite the million thoughts floating in her mind: “Hi”.

The two women sat down on the bench to watch the sun dip away some more, both glad for the sounds of the evening fill in the silence between them. They had spent moments sizing each other up – like gladiators who realise that it is the warrior wielding the weapon that had to be gauged.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” said Vishruti.

“I almost didn’t. I was not sure what purpose this would serve.”

“I suppose you never thought I’d never find out about you. But I did. Pranay really shouldn’t have left his laptop unlocked. And here we are.”

“We often came here”, continued Vishruti. “Me and Pranay. Sitting by the rocks. Walking on the sand. Talking about how the week went. A new place to eat. India’s chances at the World Cup. It was nothing in particular, and yet everything. We were happy. I know I was, and I thought he was too. And yet, here I am with you, left with one simple question. Why?”

Vishruti’s tears streamed down her face. She didn’t realise that she had dug her nails deep into Aakansha’s hand. No answer came from Aakansha. She absorbed the bruises from Vishruti’s grip, taking in her hatred, her confusion, her need to understand.  She didn’t apologise though. She wouldn’t.

“Care to comment?” Aakansha had asked him, when he had indulgently checked his BlackBerry while she impatiently waited for him to comment on his company’s accounting malpractice scandal. His piercing brown eyes had then settled their gaze on her. Once he had tackled all her questions, he responded with one question of his own. It must have been the sparkle in his eyes when he asked her that led her to agree to a dinner that evening. One dinner led to another and then some more. There were no secrets from the start. She knew she was getting involved with a married man, but that did not stop her. Or him. No, she wouldn’t apologise for what she never believed to be wrong.

Vishruti eventually stopped crying and let go off her grip. “A man I thought I knew so well has become a mystery to me.”

“What would you have me do, Vishruti? I can’t express regret for something I never was sorry about. And I can’t answer for Pranay. Perhaps some questions are best left unanswered. I can’t leave Pranay, but I can share him, as I have so far. You are the one who needs to make a decision here.”

The light drained away from Vishruti’s face, as it did from the sky above. She saw it clearly – the losing hand had been dealt to her. She had been made a bystander in her own marriage, the outsider in a crowd of three.

She rose from her seat. She was not stunned by the betrayal of her faith. She was stunned by her own refusal to make peace with it. She looked at Aakansha and said, “You are right. The decision is mine to make.” As her hand reached inside her purse, she looked at the other woman with an unexpected degree of pity in her eyes.

In a country of more than a billion, you can rarely have a loud noise not attract any attention. Those who rushed at the loud crack of a sound that day would recollect going to the seashore and finding a young woman standing ever so calmly over another one sprawled on a seat. They would say that they could not forget the look of shock in the woman lying down and the absolute lack of emotion in the eyes of the other, standing motionless, rooted to her place. They would remember her telling the constable to send an ambulance to an address that she seemed to know all too well. “There is a man there who needs it. You’ll know the flat when you get there. The nameplate says ‘Pranay and Vishruti’.”

Parth Pandya is a passionate Tendulkar fan, diligent minion of the ‘evil empire’, persistent writer at http://parthp.blogspot.com, self-confessed Hindi movie geek, avid quizzer, awesome husband (for lack of a humbler adjective) and a thrilled father of a precocious three-year-old boy. He grew up in Mumbai and spent the last eleven years really growing up in the U.S. and is always looking to brighten up his day through good coffee and great puns.

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