by Ram Govardhan
The news from ground zero of our lovely bungalow is that your death has given birth to my loneliness. No, not of the sort we felt in the aftermath of every nasty fight that always left behind a hope of its vehemence dying down sooner rather than later. But this one is blunt, persistent and deathly. Yes, this one seems to have enough venom to sustain a long crusade, enough to break me down, and enough to go all the way.
Even for a voluble bloke like me, articulating this one seems tough. Every word I stumble upon seems flimsy, inadequate, and, worse, ungainly. The verses about solitude by great poets must have meant this very sort of loneliness but, mesmerized by their rhyme and jingle, back then, perhaps, our togetherness missed the throes between the stanzas.
And the myriad poems we wrote, rewrote and polished together defying the demands of metre in the handmade book we named The Book of Our Poems languished on the attic refusing to come down. I had neither the nerve nor vein to bring it down and open it without you by my side. Four years later, at long last, summoning rare resolve, I brought it down, dusted it clean and tried to recite them aloud, just the way you loved, imaginary you by my side. But the poems seem hollow now, all of them, every one of them. The very same ones we adored, cherished and the very same ones the publisher sought but we had declined, calling them our private treasures for our old age, when we would no longer be writing. Bereft of euphony, they now sound too mundane, unpublishable and, to my horror, false. Perhaps the sweetness was hidden somewhere in the lyrical ambience spawned by our togetherness and the verses. Along with you, their intrinsic mellifluence seems to have flown away, leaving the skeletal, insipid words behind.
When the bungalow is so huge, high and empty, loneliness is amplified and when the emptiness is so big, I am too small to be meaningful. It was your idea; you had dwelled at length on living in spaces or, in your words, a spatial life, calling temporal existence ‘pathetic’. The living-room had to be large enough to take a walk, and walk a take; usually your take on several of my takes. The hall table must sit no less than twenty. And the bedrooms had to be forty by forty in any case, and, the bigger, the better, to bask in early morning sun as age had eased sensuality out of our night lives. Even bathrooms had to be large; so large that they could be living rooms for many. And the opulence of interiors must be grand enough to induce a jaw-dropping awe in our guests. The outhouse, you insisted, must be roomy enough to lodge, at best, seven retainers. Those were your ways of living a larger-than-life fame, not knowing simple ways of outliving me or ways of departing together.
Every brick was set before you, every square yard has your stamp of brilliance, your warmth, and your memories. And when you have so many such square yards, it is tough to manage your absence. You didn’t know, nor could I grasp then, that the very spaces could turn so melancholic, so shadowy and so hideous. The outhouse too has turned a morose shack hosting ghosts—every one of the maids has left frightened of the apparition.
When we argued, mistook, misjudged, and blamed each other, the feeling of revulsion was mutual and, in twenty eight years, not a day had passed when both of us did not prefer solitude, albeit within the realms of conjugal orbit. Sometimes sitting a little away was hatred enough. Sometimes going on with daily chores as usual except saying a word to each other was solitude. Sometimes sleeping in separate rooms was. Sometimes going away for a couple of days was. Sometimes a week. Sometimes a month. But the common thread among all the modes of solitudes was the promise of one fine morning, one fine phone call, one fine sentence of 140 characters, one fine email, or one fine abbreviated SMS.
With no such promises to wait for, these days, when the gloomy nights conspire with the spectral silences, I kneel and throw my bare back, throw my hands up in despair, exactly like the forlorn man in ‘Solitude’, the Jean Henner painting. The fact that it was that painting that had caused our first meeting is too eerie a reminiscence to study the chemistry of the glue that subsequently brought us together. Creepy-crawlies have almost eaten away the painting, while the hollowed out olive-green-purple frame still supports the dangling cobwebs.
But I go on, seeing glimpses of you in our bundles of joy: our children, who have moved on, leaving the crumbling bungalow to me. And I persist; I visit them, sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week, but not beyond seven successive days for, your memories haunt me, and your memories are here in the ruins. So I come back, to go back, and to come back.
Ram Govardhan’s first novel, Rough with the Smooth, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize, The Economist-Crossword 2011 Award and published by Leadstart Publishing, Mumbai. His short stories have appeared in Asian Cha, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, Saraba, Muse India, Asia Writes, Open Road Review, Cerebration, Spark and several other Asian and African literary journals. He works, lives in Chennai, India. Email: ram.govardhan@ymail.com
