Two Pronouns and a Verb
A novel
Kiran Khalap
I love him.
He loves me.
I love her.
She loves him. I hate him.
He hates her.
I love you.
Who are you?
Who am I?
Two Pronouns and a Verb frames the first and the last question in life:
‘Who am I?’
Prologue: 1998
Arrival, Departure
They have been sitting on chairs separated by an hour of chatting, forty-plus-something men, Dhruv and Arjun, walking in and out of landscapes of moth-eaten memories, their movements jerky, like an old eighteen-frames-per-second movie showing at twenty-four.
Around them is a magnificent forest.
Its teak - appropriately named tectona grandis - once treasured as the finest on earth; its rivers still unsullied by human dung and chemical effluents.
The air is drenched with the sugary smell of the mahua flower.
A flower that ferments into fire. Swallow the hardest pebbles of pain and drink some mahua: there, dissolved.
They are meeting after a decade; retracing their lives in an attempt to meet at the point in the past when they were inseparable. They realise walking backwards is growing more difficult, for they are now dragging the unwelcome burden of unshared secrets.
A labyrinth, shaped not in space, but in time.
Why has Dhruv’s eyesight grown granular?
Why did Arjun run away from those whom he loved, that too for ten years?
Then, further back, why did Eva make love to Arjun when Dhruv had already sworn his love for her?
And before that, why had Dhruv’s father never returned home?
Arjun’s father, a practitioner of ayurveda, had explained the three principles that govern human beings; three principles emerging from five primordial elements.
Arjun, earth and water. Store and nurture.
Dhruv, water and fire. Flow and burn.
We are yet to meet Eva, child of air and space, the third point of the triangle. She flitted from moment to moment, unperturbed by the warning that the average lifespan of a butterfly is two weeks.
Somebody else had explained how the meanings of their names -irrespective of how they were acquired - would also play a role in their destinies.
Arjun, the hero from the epic Mahabharata, plagued by self-doubt, destined to kill his cousins, share his first wife, get consigned to hell instead of heaven because of his covert arrogance about his marksman skills.
Dhruv, the hero from mythology who is unshakeable, settled as he is as the North Star, unshakeable in the lap of Lord Vishnu, one of three reigning deities of 330 million Hindu gods and goddesses.
Eva, Greek, Hebrew, Italian. Giver of life, harbinger of good news. Eva, the first love in their lives. They, the first love in hers.
The jungle around them is now a shrubbery of sound.
Grunts and screeches draw scratches of different lengths, depth and colour on the blackboard of silence.
Chitals fling angry plaints for mates.
Wild boar snuffle deeper into moist clay.
A woman wails: Arjun remembers from his past visit that it is only a female bear’s cry.
Dhruv taps the chair arm with a ring on his middle finger, an impatient rhythm. The ring I gave him, thinks Arjun, when we are twelve. Or thereabouts. Used to fit his thumb snugly then.
The light of the fires within the bamboo huts of the madias converts them into luminescent amber.
Cubes of flickering honey-yellow within which are suspended, instead of insects, the hopes of another way of life. The fires are rarely put off. The madias fight the cold mountain air with the warmth of the flames rather than by covering themselves with blankets.
They do not know how to make blankets (no sheep, no warmth).
Dhruv sighs, pushes himself off the chair, shambles up to Arjun, stride leashed by the lungi he wears. He has aged faster in the last ten years: the muscles have lost their tightness, as if the metal scaffolding that held them in place has dissolved.
In school, he could defy gravity for an hour, snaking up the mallakhamb on oiled limbs, without touching feet to ground, weaving complex patterns around a polished pillar of wood; which is the sinew of human being and which is the sinew of wood?
As he draws closer, he reaches out to touch Arjun. They have postponed this moment to breaking point. Now they can savour it, the end of waiting for years.
Arjun stiffens involuntarily as Dhruv’s hand touches his face, traces nose and lips. Cheeks, no wetness, no tears. The hand moves up to feel his hair. Under his callouses, Arjun’s skull is a silent drum.
‘You need this?’ he asks as he feels Arjun’s shaven head. ‘…a symbol? Even our big-titted Hindi teacher used to feel your curls up…’
Arjun stands up, a full six inches shorter than him; then hugs him tight.
‘Wear ochre too?’ Dhruv has to find a side step to make this moment less sentimental.
Arjun laughs. Dhruv bends, plucks at the robe, runs his fingers up and down, squints at it, summoning every particle of light reflected off the coarse jute fabric into the murkiness inside his eyes.
‘Hah, it is ochre.’ Jubilant.
Later that night Dhruv returns to the topic of Arjun’s pilgrimage. They sit on rope cots outside the house, some distance from the Madia Rights Centre that Dhruv runs.
‘What else happened?’
‘Where?’
‘Where you went …retreated …went to hide…?’
‘Not retreating. Embracing, maybe, I think. Lot of physical and mental pain… you fought for the madias, you know pain.’
‘Want?’ Dhruv offers one of the two donas of mahua to Arjun.
‘Not actually...stopped.’
Dhruv sips the mahua in silence, while both rearrange the territories inside their minds.
Mine, yours, Eva’s.
Relook. Redraw. Rename.
They are digging up the past in intense privacy and with some urgency, with their bare hands, unable to trust the agency of iron and steel instruments. They uncover warm laughter, and they chance upon an occasional splinter of a heartbreak. The hurriedness is in stark contrast to the gooey meandering of their current life streams.
After a long time, Dhruv asks, ‘Flogging yourself like this…ten bloody years…there must be…why…or whom?’
Arjun’s pause is less for dramatic effect and more because he must set aside his own doubts about revealing a truth before its moment is ripe.
‘You of course.’
Dhruv slumps back into his chair.
‘Also for Dada, maybe, or mainly for Dada. So…went around the Narmada three times. Barefoot, empty-handed, over a thousand and three hundred kilometres each time…each pilgrimage took away three years…so....’
Dhruv is no longer attempting to face Arjun. His face is aimed at the sky, his eyes sucking at light from the past.
‘Does it help?’
‘Hmm...’
‘What about me?’
‘What?’
‘…Will I find justice along the Narmada?’
Arjun does not reply.
‘This thing inside my head…will she wash it away?’
Both must studiously unravel the silver skeins of memory until they have in their hands the beginning of the separation.
And we haven’t even, as yet, looked at the third star of this constellation of love and destiny.
Eva.
