By Preeti Madhusudhan
[box]A journalist who looks fairly out of place in the city she is in; yet she is someone who carries herself with enviable ease, someone for whom being out of place isn’t much of a bother. And then there’s her friend too. So, what do these two women do? Preeti Madhusudhan tells you a story that’s set in Chennai.[/box]
Another warm day. Rainbow arcs of sunlight danced on the dirty blue walls of her bedroom diffracted by the textured glass window panes.
“Dirty is the shade, not the quality,” said Varsha, in defense of the wall she had painted on her own with the permission of her landlady.
She lay watching the sunlight dance on her wall for a few minutes. She could hear the waves beating upon the sandy shores. The beach was her only respite. Raised amongst pines and firs, she had felt an alien when she first landed in Chennai. The oppressive heat, the chaotic traffic and the psychedelic posters made her feel she was trapped inside a kaleidoscope.
The bathroom fixtures, heavy with the salt from the groundwater and the sea air, creaked as she brushed, answered nature’s call and bathed. It was six in the morning and the water was already warm. As soap and water erased the last traces of the late night party, she patted herself dry with her towel, dressed, shortened her yoga time by half and laced up for her run. As she ran nodding and smiling at familiar faces, she mentally wrote her article seeing each word clearly as it would appear on the news reel. She was quite a picture in her shorts and sleeveless t-shirt that revealed a slender, taut and fair body topped by an attractive face. The morning regulars at the beach had gotten used to her in these six months. But there were always newcomers who were taken unawares, and it always amused her to see the dazed look on their faces. Though known for the warmth with which they welcome newcomers and embrace them into their society, the farthest your average Chennaite went as far as adapting the alien’s culture was to pull on a modest salwar-kameez or the occasional kurta to a carnatic music concert, denims and skirts and colourful t-shirts being a fad of the young ones. She enjoyed the “shock value,” as Rajan, her photographer and best friend called it. “He has to be gay not to have made a move on you yet,” declared Ritu her roommate. She did not believe in platonic relationships though the party she worked as a volunteer for in the leisure time she got from being a painter, advocated brotherly love.
Ritu was still sleeping, curled into a ball near the poster she had been working on the previous night for her party. The ash-tray was brimming with the beedis she had been smoking. The room had probably become too stuffy for her, forcing her to open the windows. The thin white drapes fluttered. The sun was going up, the light had changed to a strong white now from her favourite mellow pink of the dawn.
Varsha hurried to the bathroom for her second bath for the day. The first one was to relax, the second one to tense-up for work. The more bunched her nerves were the better she was. She worked the old way, jotting things down on small notepads she carried in her satchel, typing on her computer at work only to submit the final proof to her editor. Typing on a computer robbed the romance off her work as a journalist, she felt. She studied and breathed to write, to twist sentences into stories, into reports that reached the door steps of millions. Her father, a sub-registrar who spent his leisure time reading, had lined her childhood with books. He was proud of his journalist daughter and wrote to her every week after reading her article. She was living the life he had dreamed of. Much to the agony of her mother, he was proud that she was single in a big city, living life on her terms. He was proud of her flagrant taunting beauty, her arrogance in her skill and her ram-rod straight manner that piqued those around her.
As she meticulously sliced her breakfast apple, she was still piecing together the penultimate paragraph. It was a series on AIDS that she was winding up this week. She had two more days to submit the piece. More than enough time to compose, edit and deliver. But there was something different with this article.
“Now that is a classic cliché, isn’t it?” she smiled to herself as she ran up the steps of the bus and sat at the back row by the window. The conductor nodded at her, tearing off her ticket and stopping to chat for a few seconds before swaying on to the next passenger. He was used to her now as well. Used to her appearance to be precise. She wore a loose white full sleeve shirt, the sleeves of which she had rolled up, the first few buttons opened to reveal a black t shirt, and baggy beige cotton trousers. Her slender frame made the clothes seem looser than they really were and made her look frail and delicate. She got her notepad out and jotted down short sentences. When she was on the field or in the press to the see the newsreel roll off or in her cubicle past office hours when she had turned the air-condition off to guard herself from her circus ring-master of a conscience, she took the shirt off tying it around her waist. Inside her office it did not matter. It was not what she wore, rather it was how she wore it that got her the second glances. Her clothes hung inches off her body, floating, flowing with her as she moved with the grace of an ascending pelican. She looked elegant and naked no matter what she wore. The clothes made her look vulnerable and her large eyes liquid, impassive, countermanded the effect. A mild confusion, unease and panic that arises with the mind’s inability to classify someone under a particular “type”, invariably alienated her from her colleagues, especially the female ones. One glance was just never enough. She was also aware that her editor kept her in for the “shock value”. She knew she was skilled and efficient; she was never refused an interview. Though it had a lot to do with her grit and nerve, she knew they wanted to see what would bend her, if they could make her feel obligated, snatch a grateful smile out of her, so they could place her, file her under category “c” or “z” or something. Anything. She was invited to all the launches, important events and parties. So while she actually just wrote a social column she covered all the important events with Rajan and a reluctant reporter who tagged along to report the event she had been invited to.
There it was again. She hated to admit it, but cliché or not, this was different. She had never been unable to express her thoughts.
“This cannot be a writer’s block, can it?” she wondered aloud. The regulars in the bus had become used to her mutterings. “But only a fiction-writer stumbles against a block, I just document and present.” She had been regularly turning down offers from her friends in publishing firms to author some fiction. “You just cannot beat around bushes, can you?” Rajan joked everytime she turned down another offer. “Raju, you bloody well know that they just want to bed me.” That always shut him up.
The bus stopped a few yards away from her newspaper’s office. She was picturing the last few lines of that paragraph as she walked past the security post, the tag around her neck beeping off her presence. Her manicured feet, clad in suede sandals, echoed off the cloister that led to the lobby. And she got stuck at the same place again. She just could not finish that paragraph. She stopped in her tracks. The sentence stopped. It won’t go beyond that word. The sun was ascending. It will still be a mellow pink back home she thought. She was blocking the entrance to the lift.
“Varsha, I hate to break a profound thought…”
She turned, her eyes as impassive as ever, her thin lips widening briefly into what could have been a smile or grimace or just a coincidental muscular spasm. She gripped her surprised colleague’s forearms as if to steady herself and turned towards the dingy, gray stairwell. She sprinted up the stairs, keeping the city in sight as she ascended. The pale brown haze that hung limp above the roads and buildings seemed a cloak, a golden honey awning that trapped the heat. Honey green house. Honey house? Naughty, Ritu would call it. She laughed to herself as she walked into her office.
She started typing her article. “Will get over that paragraph when I come to it, have two more days to go anyway,” she told herself. Words, sentences poured in, the nervous energy that had been building in her ebbed down. It was like a menstrual cycle to her, the accumulation of word tissues, sentence linings and walls of paragraphs all ready to receive a new child, each article a weekly delivery unlike the monthly disappointment of flushed tissues and fetal walls.
She stirred the tea bag in the chipped china while she opened her mail. A reminder from the editor to attend the Saturday soirees that his wife organised, responses to the ongoing series that was winding up this week, ads, and a mail from Ritu. She sent a mail once in a while when she couldn’t reach Varsha over the phone, inviting her to a party meeting when there was a speaker she particularly wanted Varsha to hear, or when there was a late night party at a friend’s place, or when there was an exhibition of boring paintings or a demonstration by a painter that gave Ritu obscene thrills.
“What is it now you schmuck?” she muttered as she opened the mail.
There was a single line.
Varsha closed her eyes to see a cluster of firs on a steep decline. The sun must be a white dot right above one’s head now, she thought. As it is here.
Pics : reset reboot – http://www.flickr.com/photos/resetreboot/
nina mathew photography – http://www.flickr.com/photos/21560098@N06/
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Excellent description of “colours” and clothes!