The Lilac House Read Online Free PDF Page B

life blessed with fairness, he wondered if in the movies Amma had found hope, while Appa had sought something else – respite from his everyday. Escape from the life he was condemned to. Or perhaps what he saw in them was the banality that strengthened his resolve to abandon this life.
     
    Late in the night, Jak approaches the bed. Did she sleep on it? Was she alone? Or was there someone else with her? Did they share this room that trapped the sea within its dingy blue walls? Did they make love here? Please god, he prays, let her have known what it is to be made love to gently, carefully and with tenderness. The horror of what happened will never be mitigated. But it makes it one fraction more bearable to know that someone loved her. And that she knew how to give, not just be ruthlessly plundered and violated.
    He slams his fist against the wall.
    He didn’t mean to do this, go back to where it happened. Recreate each moment, examine and deduce. What is the point? Knowing the how and why isn’t going to reverse Smriti’s condition.
    But what is Smriti remembering? He knows he has to find out the genesis of that scream, the source of that terror.

III
    A n undefined terror threatens to pull him deeper and deeper into the maze.
    He wakes up shivering, cold. Icy fingers clutch his toes.
    Smriti used to do that. Hold her hand under the cold water tap, come into his room, lift the bedclothes and grab his feet. When he woke with a start, she would crouch behind the footboard, trying hard not to giggle and give herself away. If he looks now, will she be there?

    The sea breeze has an edge. He stares at the sky. The clouds are the colour of brushed steel. He can smell rain.
     
    It has been a long time since he was in the field. But he has always had it. A stirring within him that warns even as the winds gather and collide. Kitcha, the reader of omens, the collector of warnings, the storm warning buoy, his professor called him, only half in jest. That was how accurate Kitcha used to be in his predictions. Then he became JAK. The guru of simulated cyclones. Shorn of his powers, deserted by that intuitive knowing, he didn’t know that across the world, his child was being mauled and ravaged. Instead, he was in a Florida beachside home, fucking a colleague’s wife against a wall.
    ‘You’ve wanted this for so long, haven’t you, you bitch?’ he growled in her ear. And she murmured her willingness, biting down on his shoulder. Bitch. Cunt. Whore. He knew with that unfailing instinct of his that this one was definitely not a blueberry muffin, sweet darling, or mon petit chou sort of a girl. That inside the quiet academic wife lurked a slut only he could excite with his magical incantations of filth: Bitch. Cunt. Whore.
    Did someone say that to Smriti? The thought wrenches itself out of his mind. He stumbles out of bed. From his bag, he takes out a blue denim shirt and a photograph. He swaddles the photo frame like he once swaddled her in a shirt, and takes it to bed with him.
     
    You never wanted a child. It frightened you, the thought of being a father. We bring to our adult lives what we learnt from the adults we knew as children. How could you be a proper father? It terrified you that you would be unable to keep the commitment a child would demand of you. That you would fail the child somehow. Just as your father did. Who knew, when the time came, how you would be? Would an innate selfishness emerge? And then there was the responsibility. What did you know of how to bring up a child?

    But Nina pooh-poohed your fears. ‘You are not the first man to be a father; I am scared too. But this is what I want,’ she said, pressing your palm to her still flat abdomen. ‘In here is a life. Our life. Our child! Imagine, Kitcha!’
    When Smriti was born, you spent all of that first night gazing down at the sleeping child. Your child. You had never known anything like it before: this liquification, this snagging of your heart when her