The Room with a Sea view

Kohl-eyes, lush-hair, skin bathed in glean and two chandelier earrings – those were the remains of her on this wide, soft morning by the looming sea. Jaganlal felt he was on a high ship and soon his building, this bay window would move right on its ebb.

Dia… as lingering as the dawn, her nature like the temperament of the rouge-induced sky, slowly flickering to an orange.

It had been years since he had met someone as faint, as petite, as pretty …

‘Butterfly and air cannot be held, Sir, can it ever?’ Satish, his broker-friend words came back to him. 

It was Satish who had brought Dia to Jaganlal.

“Introduce me to someone new. You know so many people,’ Dia had told Satish the day they had met over drinks not too long ago, ‘I am sick of the same people in the same circles. You know how repetitive things can get…na.” 

Jaganlal was seventy. He would gift paintings from his collection to any woman who gave him a feeling from where none was easily possible. 

He would speak for hours and hours on any subject that even Satish, vernacular in his language, impatient with nuance, hasty with deals and sales targets, would sit back and listen. 

As he would always come away with new thoughts on politics, sports, alien-science, TV, technology, wind farming, geniuses… Sometimes it was about missing people found successful elsewhere, or the world’s best heists, UFOs, global warming, a superstar’s closeted life, Mirza Ghalib, or the way bees produced honey through regurgitation…

There was something alluring in that room… that faced the sea. Where the noon sun ducked to a certain angle giving the observer a feeling that they were hide-watching the stealth of sea, its steely resolve of resisting the dredging, mud-filling, and land reclamation for more real-estate, more homes, more roofs for the immigrant population teeming the city. The grey sea under tumultuous sky that danced outside as if she didn’t want to trade anymore with her volume of body, her salinity, or sea grain.

Satish did take Dia seriously. The next when he was taking Jaganlal’s leave, after handing over the lease money for Jaganlal’s other flat in Cuffe Parade, he mentioned about a friend he would bring along the next time. Would the old man oblige? 

But Jaganlal was used to having women around, their names and allusions running up the walls and windows long after they had gone: young, pretty, established, senior, famous, old, mature, anonymous, guilty, liberated, disillusioned, and illusioned. Every kind. 

He liked their disciple-like intonations. What he did after they submitted their interest to him was a guess. The realtor suspected he took them to more intricate acts of intimacy after that and paid them for it. With each passing month, he had noticed rare objects of art and paintings missing from the walls, corners, and shelves – their screaming vacant spaces a stark reminder of their stranglehold pasts. 

The old man’s wife had passed away years earlier. He had loved her dearly and until then it was said that he was a faithful man. He allowed his sea-faring side to show up only once she went down the black abyss from which none could ever return. 

But if Satish were to doubt, he would have doubted it there. Could someone as indulgent, affluent, and restless as Jaganlal, who not only looked good but had indescribable charm at such an old age not have commanded a woman’s attention at even a younger age?

Dia was not the one who could be told to please. She hadn’t come through his regular ways, thought Jaganlal. She was Satish’s friend and had come to seek an audience. To perform not to listen. Her needs were very nebulous. She would not show herself without her clothes. She could get offended if he were to ask her to do something for him. This internal debate drove him into a frenzy. The temptation and inner scuffle to bring his thoughts out and word it became more than the need to have anything of it in reality.

Jaganlal finally marked his tongue in silence. It was Dia who spoke when Satish, feeling like an unwanted entity, excused himself glancing back only slightly, to watch how Dia settled down on the edge of dusk, with an apple-flavored hookah between the fervor of her plump lips. 

As the light by the window dimmed, Jaganlal who sat facing the girl could tell how Satish’s back stiffened as he retreated, as if making resolutions to not look back. It thrilled the old man. He decided something new was going to happen in his life, now that this young woman was by his side, now that his broker friend had acquired an unnamed, unarticulated turmoil – the otherwise forthright Satish.

Dia could construct galaxies of anecdotes. She could speak of spectrums of music, microcosms, and vast ecological systems of man and beast. She could spin analogies, illusions, twist words into utopian prepositions, promises. Sometimes it felt that she was seeking aloud as she went along, until Jaganlal felt her monotonous mantra-like voice disengage from her body and become a creature of its own, slithering sonorously for the sea. She was as nuanced as him, just as curious but young. And he? He had lived his life and yet it had felt short. Too short. 

How time flies. It steals life. He felt young again now listening to Dia – as young as her. 

He felt he was meeting her through his younger self. Like it were his past. Like he was meeting her again. The name he could not bring to his lips without a quiver. The woman who had left him in his youth. Who like this young lady could speak on anything … without ever sounding dull.

They had met at a social gathering. Both of them married for long, searching for a secret world where something could be different, a thrill more than visceral, a novelty of broad proximity rather than earthy coupling. And they had all of it. It was perhaps the best relationship Jaganlal had had outside his marriage although while he was in it, he hardly realized it. He would have wanted her to stay but could you hold on to air or a butterfly that sought freedom, adventure?

*

Dia had been drunk the night she met Satish. He had been late to get to the pub and she had already started on her third Long Island. It took her two drinks to get past her range of polite defenses and bring her loathe boiling to the surface. It came as if from her core – chaos looking to unfurl at the first snap, the first right question.

“Dia, what is the matter wrong with you?” Satish asked.

Over the telephone, she had told him she was bordering on a breakup, which made him hurry to the place they were to meet. Dia broke up every few months with her boyfriends, each relationship lasting like a season for three to four months. But this one was different. Although, he remembered her saying that for each one of them.

No, this was really different! she had insisted and they went along with their drinking. This one was an intellectual. He could talk. They could talk. Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the confines of her strait country into the vast, extravagant sea spaces of his.

“What about your romance time?” Satish had asked. For he knew Dia always had it once with each man before moving on. Repeating things were not her habit and the novelty would die down soon, but here it had been five months and all they had gotten down to doing was kissing. 

Why?

Because the rest of the time was spent talking. Yes, Speech. She should have been devastated but she wasn’t. There was something else in her rhythm that night in the dim-lit pub that seemed to be underneath her drunkenness. 

Love? Was she…?

No. She wasn’t sure. What was love? How was it defined? Wasn’t it being alone or young or hormonally supercharged? By that definition, she could have been in love four times a year. 

Did it matter? When they couldn’t even define what it really was.

A certain togetherness? Familiarity? Recurring fondness? Memory? Or habit?

‘This was unusual’, she insisted, starting on her fourth glass. ‘He was intriguing. He could take her through a maze of suppositions and superimpositions. A matrix of deliberation over a labyrinth of longing. By the time they were done, there was hardly any time to get close with skin on skin and yet she wasn’t dissatisfied, only confused.’

Was his desire weak? Libido low? Or morals high? Did the thought of his wife interfere during their various rendezvous? Why was it taking him so long? 

She wasn’t dissatisfied with the experience, she told Satish, only slightly impatient because of her habit with men to last not too long, certainly no longer, than a few months.

What if he was in love with her? 

How would she know? Wasn’t love a discovery in retrospect?

So Dia had decided it was enough. It had been five months, threatening over the sixth. A decadent, physically boring relationship with just talking and going nowhere else annoyed her the most. Though the patient way with which he enjoyed talking to her was somehow more than how other men had enjoyed making love to her.

*

Meera! Jaganlal could see her in Dia every morning in remembrance, every evening in person. She, who had opened him up like a surgeon about to perform an incisive, invasive surgery but who then changed her mind midstream, leaving the patient open like a bag on the high table. She had undone him, unstrung him, and then she was gone. With so much talk, so much sharing…

But Jaganlal continued talking. All the openings needed closure. The strings had to be pulled through tight together and tied. So long after his wife died, he continued what Meera had started, the Pandora’s box she had unwittingly opened that he had to keep closed and out of reach while his wife existed, now after her death, was brought out again. 

Now Dia was Meera, and life had come full circle. The old man’s eyes brimmed. His voice was silent again today. He shared its vastness with Dia who was equally lost in the glare of the setting sun outside the large bay window. 

The sea would boil. It would churn and bring up waste and dead fish if she waited a moment longer.

 “Come here often’, he whispered gently to her, ‘You just need to be there, Dia. That’s all. Will you?”

Dia turned and looked at him as if setting her eyes on his face for the first time ever. Karthik. Old Karthik would be like this. 

Then she left. 

This is what happened when you quizzed too much. The act of familiarity breached. 

Why did we engage so intricately with anyone, then? And if this wasn’t love what was?, thought Jaganlal.

And if this wasn’t love what was? thought Dia.

Now her search for him would take long. For while she had enjoyed his company, the smoking tendrils of his naked talk, she being what she was, had never asked Karthik his last name, his residence or workplace coordinates, nor his mobile number. She didn’t even know if that was his real name or a redefinition of himself, like the many things he rechristened, after breaking them down, deconstructing and rebuilding them.

Where in the world would she find him? Now that she had skipped the last rendezvous with him in reproach after the meeting with Satish. 

He, who would blindly pick love nests for their next dates by placing a finger on a page in the directory of seedy hotels.

… would she be left now just as opened as Jaganlal?