from Lakshman’s journal
August 19, 1989
Can’t sleep, so am up at 3 a.m. writing this. Geetha is sleeping soundly as usual, her face swollen in unwitting complacency. I can’t bear to see that face every time I wake up, and I always wake up before she does. How the hell did I like that face enough to agree to marry her?
Despite myself, I looked in on Rekha in her room. I didn’t switch on the light but the moon was bright enough for me to see her angelic face, calm in repose on the oversized pillow. I gently brushed away a curling strand of hair that had fallen over one eye. In her sleep, she smiled at me.
It’s Rekha, of course, that I think about all the time now. Priscilla’s supposed to leave Zalilgarh in less than two months, and she thinks it’s decision time. Do I want to go with her? She has to return to the States, at least for now, and the prospect of escaping with her has its temptations. She showed me, only half jokingly, an ad in an American magazine: “Unemployment is lower in Switzerland. Owning a home is easier in Australia. Going to college is more likely in Canada. Vacations are longer in Denmark. And crime rates are lower in England. But more dreams come true in America.”
An alluring prospect, if I had those dreams. But do I, really? Is it freedom I want, or Priscilla? I know I could get her to change her plans and stay on in India, for me. She’ll do it — but only on one condition. Only if I tell her I’m leaving my wife for her. That’s what she wants. And she wants it now. I can understand her impatience, but I’m not sure I’m ready for anything quite so … cataclysmic. How can I explain to her that I’m not even sure I have the right to do that to Geetha, to abdicate my husbandhood? I didn’t choose to start my marriage in the first place; how can I choose to end it? My role as a husband and father is central to who I am; it concerns my rootedness in the world; it is inextricably bound up with my sense of my place in the cosmos. I have been brought up to believe that such things — marriage, family — are beyond individual will, that they transcend an individual’s freedom of action. Priscilla’ll never understand that.
And what about little Rekha, who did not ask to be born into my life but who is there, whose world is circumscribed by the pairing of Geetha and me? How can I ever explain what she means to me to Priscilla? “What’s the matter, Lucky?” Priscilla asked me this evening.
You ask, my love, what the matter is.
Why do I sound fatigued? stressed? torn?
The matter is that I am as I sound.
I, who have accepted your soul’s gift of love,
Am a soul in torment, fearing as I love.
I give you, my darling, the best part of myself:
The part that feels most profoundly as a man,
That knows the warm rush of passion
At every sight of your smiling body,
That rejoices in your warm embrace,
And belongs to you in total surrender.
That part is yours, my love, forever:
It can never know again the exaltation,
The exultation, the poignant sweetness of
Such flooding love as I bear for you.
That part is yours; but it is a part,
For I am, in rendering it, rent;
Having your love, yet not having it;
Giving my love, yet not parting with it;
Withholding, as I give, for a prior creditor.
I have, as you know, an earlier love,
One for a little soul, first glimpsed
Tadpole-like in a nurse’s arms,
Pink, precious, and premature:
The child I had prayed for, who did not seek
To be mine, but is, and whose life
Ennobles mine. I have loved her
Without reservation, without selfishness,
Without condition, as I could never
Love a woman. Even you.
Now I look at her each day,
Wake her in the morning, give her breakfast,
Do homework with her, take her to the library
And the movies, and I know I fear nothing more
Than I fear not being there for her.
When she cries out, “Daddy, am I as tall
As you were when you were six?”
I am there in the evening to confirm it;
When she tells me of news from school,
Or asks about God, or geography,
I am there as the question occurs to her.
I teach her Tamil songs, passing on a heritage
She traces in her genes; I trim her hair,
Cut her nails, quiz her over breakfast
On the oceans of the world.
Now I look at her and I ask myself,
Can I deny her that?
Can I deprive myself of her?
Can I absent myself from the rest of her childhood?
When she first meets a boy whose easy charm
Starts flutters in her heart,
Will Daddy be the one she tells of her confusions?
Can I ever be happy knowing that I
Have pulled from under the secure carapace of her life
The struts that held her up?
But can I be happy either,
Knowing that you are no longer mine,
That you have returned to America,
That I have shut my eyes to the one true glimpse of happiness
I have ever had as a man?
You ask, my love, what the matter is.
And I can only say, everything is the matter.
Deep emotion and lack of sleep make for unconvincing poetry. Fifteen lines a stanza: is there such a form anywhere in the canon? I know I should thrust it aside; in an hour now dawn will break across my torment like a twig. But this is what I feel, and it’s at a level quite different from what Guru was trying to make me feel. Truth, Wilde wrote, is just “ones last mood.” Is this mood of tormented despair the one truth that counts now? How will Priscilla understand that my agonizing is not about her, not about us? But if she loves me, mustn’t I help her understand? Perhaps I ought to give her this poem. I’d title it “The Heart of the Matter.” Or perhaps “A Matter of the Heart.” Or, more originally, both?
I’m too tired to think. And too full of thoughts to sleep.
Rudyard Hart to Mohammed Sarwar
October 14, 1989
You know, I stopped at a cold-drink place this morning. Guess what they’re selling? Pepsi. Bloody Pepsi. Except that they call it Lehar Pepsi here. Some Indian rule against foreign brand names.
Despite myself, I bought it. Took a swig. And tasted defeat. Pepsi didn’t exist in the Indian market when I was here last. Now they’re here and we’re not. We could have been ten years ahead of them if we’d played our cards right.
You know, when we see a population without Coke we see an untapped market for the finest beverage invented by man. Not being here is an indescribable waste all around. Indians are being deprived of a wonderful product, and we’re being deprived of a chance to lead in this country too, as we do in so many countries.