The Two Krishnas (34 page)

“Pooja?”

She covered her face with both her hands, shaking her head like a frightened child, still refusing to look at him. She needed all the composure and strength that her mother had instilled in her, but it was nowhere to be found.

“Pooja?”

Reluctantly, she turned around to look at him. In that glimpse, she saw in his hands the bookmark from the store. She quickly turned away again, her back to him, feeling her heart in her throat. “Please,” she said, her voice trembling, praying on the inside. “I don’t know how to do this…”

She felt him standing there, both of them feeling like fugitives who had run from the truth for too long. Pooja drank the air deeply, wiped her eyes with the end of her purple
chunni,
and went straight to the sink where she started to vigorously wash the greasy crock-pot with a sponge. She would not make a scene. She would not let them dishonor themselves in this way despite what he had done. She would remain strong, elegant, magnanimous.

“Your chai is getting cold,” she said, sniffling. “These
bhajias
are very spicy, I’m warning you, just the way you like them. Then if you have heartburn or anything, just make sure you have some
sat-isab-gol
and you’ll be fine.”

“Poo,” he said, the urgency apparent in his voice.

“You know where it is. In the closet over there.”

He grew silent but remained there unswervingly.

Then, as hard as she tried to suppress it, and perhaps because he had called her that name, the term of endearment that went as far back to when they had first met, something rose from the pit of her belly, a dark, toxic bubble, rumbling its way up to her throat until it erupted into heaving sobs. Pooja threw the crock pot against the porcelain sink, its clangor shaking the air violently.

“Oh, Rahul….oh, Rahul,” she broke down, her face in her hands. “How can this be happening? Oh, God, I don’t know how to deal with this. I just don’t know…”

He wanted to hold her, to say something, but realized the futility of trying. Overcome with embarrassment, he did nothing except clench his fist, crumple the bookmark and leave it on the counter beside him. “Ajay? Is he…”

She shook her head to indicate he was out. She gulped more air, wiped her eyes with the back of her wet hands, streaking the mascara in the process, and grabbed hold of the pot. Hot water ran and as clouds of suds began to form, she scrubbed the
kadai
relentlessly. All the time she kept repeating to herself,
I must find a way. I must. I can do this. We’ve been through worse, yes, we’ve been through much, much worse.

It came to her now, an epiphany, that she was perfectly willing, perhaps even able, never to confront what she now knew to be the truth, to just go on living as if nothing had happened to defile what she had accepted as a faithful if imperfect marriage. After all, had they not already built an entire life around denial, pretending the past didn’t exist, moving half way around the world to siphon away ugly and painful memories? Why should this be any different? They would dig deeper, bury this in the same grave.

“Well, never mind,” she said, finally, her voice strained by emotion. “We’ll just forget about this. We’ll just move on, you know, just put it behind us.” She continued sloughing away under the scalding water, her bangles clinking away frantically. “No need to talk about this. No need. No need.” But then she turned around and saw his hesitation. “My God!” she gasped. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

“Pooja, I…” he tried to sound confident but the words came out as a squeak. He could see the toil on her face, the dark circles around her eyes, her skin sallow, and could barely face her.

“Aren’t you even going to try and deny this?” she asked.

He still couldn’t bring himself to say anything. He wished he could lie to her, it would be so easy to just deny it all, and she would probably even welcome the deception, but nothing came out of his mouth and the silence served as his truth, his admission that after all the years of running, here was something they wouldn’t be able to escape. There was nothing they could do now to camouflage this with the routine of their lives and the charade of marriage. No matter how hard they tried, she would always see the transgressor in his eyes and his love for her, however real, would always carry the taint of larceny.

“Then what are you—are you going to do this again?”

“It’s not that simple anymore, Pooja.”

“Not that simple?” she asked incredulously. “Why? What’s not simple?”

“This,” he said, struggling for the right words. “I just don’t know if I can make any promises.”

Pooja turned the faucet off, letting his words sink into her. She faced him, the amber of her eyes shinning like a lake between the heavy fringes of her black lashes. “You don’t know if you can make any promises? To me?”

His face fell.

“What kind of a man are you? Answer me!” she cried. “I’ve given you everything. Everything. What more is left, tell me? I made a promise to you, remember? For you, I gave up my home, my family.
Bas
, just left them there, so that I could give you a home. And now you can’t make any promises? How about just keeping the ones you’ve already made?”

Rahul cracked open and tears swept down his face. The worlds Pooja had moved to be with him, everything she had sacrificed to take care of him, his inability to even be a faithful husband to her, to resist the beckoning of his desires, made him feel wretched and helpless.

“Oh, no, you’re not going to do this to me. Not this time, you bastard,” she said. “After everything we’ve been through, now you want me to go through this? This? How do you think your son is going to feel,
hunh?
When he finds out his father is a…” she couldn’t bring herself to say the words, wasn’t sure if she knew the right ones.

He stared at her, mortified, never in a million years believing she would be capable of something like this, even in the most excruciating pain.

“I never wanted it to be this way,” he said, meekly.

“But it
is
this way and it’s all your fault! What did you expect? Oh, God, Rahul, what were you thinking?” she cried, shaking her hands so that droplets of water flew up to his face.

“I don’t know. I don’t know…” he said, wondering how he could ever have thought it would turn out differently.

“Don’t lie to me!” she shouted, her face contorted with pain. “You do know! You always know! Always there’s that moment, when you can decide not to do it, when you can stop yourself from throwing everything away. When was that moment for you, Rahul? When?”

He shook his head. How could he explain to her the moment? How could a lifetime of self-deception be truncated in a single moment? How could he explain his attraction to another man and his betrayal of the woman who had placed him above everything?

“Don’t you love me anymore?” she asked.

“Oh, Poo. I never stopped,” he said, his voice cracking, the tears running freely.

“But it’s just not enough? For me, you’ve been my whole existence. And now, now what do I do?” she asked. “When did it start?”

He looked at her, palms held open as if to say, what difference will that make?

“I want to know,” she persisted. “How long…how many…”

“A few months…Six months. He’s the only one. Pooja, I don’t want to lose you.”

The remaining color drained from her face. “Six months?” she said in a whisper. And then she laughed, a cruel, mocking ring to her laughter. “Then what do you want? You want us all to live together? One big, happy family? You want to bring that boy here? To share our bed?”

“No…”

“Then? You want to do it in front of your wife and son?”

“Pooja, please,” he said, reaching out to touch her.

She shrank away from him. “Oh, God, Rahul, do you know what this is putting me through? You of all people, how can you do this? You know that when a woman marries, her husband becomes her god. She’s raised to think that in everything he does, everything he says,
everything
, there’s a god. His word, it’s divine. His deeds are divine. But this, what you have done…” she heaved a cry, “Where’s the god in it?” And then her face hardened, a thought so harsh and irrevocable crossing her. “It would’ve been better if they’d taken me too.”

He looked at her wildly, as if he were mad himself or thought her mad. “My God, how can you…” But he was unable to finish, stupefied.

“Yes, it should’ve been me. At least then I wouldn’t have had to go through this. I would have been violated but by strangers. Not you. Not my own husband.”

“Pooja,” he said, advancing cautiously towards her. “I don’t know what’s happened. I never wanted to hurt you. Please believe me. It’s something I’ve carried with me for so long, always, and now, suddenly, suddenly I just don’t know how to stop—”

By the time she realized it, Pooja’s hand had already swung across Rahul’s face, halting his speech. She gasped, her hand flying to her mouth, and she stood paralyzed between his words and the abject terror of the action they had provoked. But there was no shock on his face, nothing other than the anguish of the condemned.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ll just…”

He turned around and walked away and she stood rooted, waiting for something else to happen, for guidance, intervention, deliverance. But the earth did not open up, nor did the heavens, and there was not a savior in sight, neither man nor god.

* * *

Something horrible could happen to him. Maybe the boy would die tomorrow. While crossing the teeming boulevard, he could be struck by a speeding car, tossed up in the air like a rag doll, his body mangled up, bloody like her heart.

Then they would both be free of him. Go back to pretending that it had never happened. That such a person had never existed and, in time, they would treat the whole episode like an unpleasant dream. In the beginning, while he suffered, she would be there for him, yet again, like she had been all his life—hiding him, shielding him, nurturing him—and he would need her again because she was the only one who had lived in his shame, the only one who could love him despite it. Yes, she would restore him to himself one more time. Neither by word nor by deed would she make a reference to his tendency and the shame it had brought on them, and in time, they would continue the ritual of aging together, that ritual which is the rightful dividend of every marriage.

He left the same night. As he silently packed a little bag in their room, she waited outside on the patio, listening to the wind chimes eulogize their marriage. Several times she felt terror-stricken and wanted to rush up to him, to weep in his arms, to shake the madness out from him, to implore him not to leave her, but she remained frozen, powerless like someone watching death seep the life out of a loved one, waves of sadness and anger crashing together within her. And after he was gone, she remained in the vast, cold bed, prayers tumbling out of her mouth in anger and desperation. There were dreams, both violent—where she saw the boy’s body cleaved by metal and fire—and redemptive—in which Rahul, dissolving in remorseful tears, fell at her feet and they recommenced their life together.

When she went down at around six in the wintry morning, a scarlet-colored Kashmiri shawl thrown around her feverish shoulders, she found the note that he had left for her on the dining room table. The note read in Rahul’s slanting, exquisite handwriting –
I’ll call you later
– and it had his cell phone number as if she didn’t have this already. It all sounded so casual, so palliating that for a moment she experienced a sense of relief, as if he was in fact coming back at the end of the day, no matter how late. But then she wondered if Rahul had gone straight to this boy, in some fantastic, chimerical abode where she didn’t exist, and the pain stabbed at her again. She shivered, rubbed the tops of her arms, goose-pimpled with the cold emanating from within her.

In the hours before Ajay would rise and—she was afraid—inquire about his father, she showered, derived energy from a strong brew of Assam chai and performed her
puja
at the altar of Radha and Krishna. Grief had proliferated throughout her body like a cancer and her hands quavered as she performed the ritual she now observed with some bitterness. She tried hard to surrender to the familiar comfort of faith, reminding herself that even the staunchest—perhaps especially the staunchest—were tested to superhuman levels, but the rationalization felt brittle, and the frozen, blushed countenances of the gods provided little solace.

She longed to hear something now, audible words of advice, compassion, something from the stone simulacrums rather than having to make it up herself as she crouched at their feet, looking up at them, plumes of perfumed smoke dancing up majestically. She accepted that she lived in a time devoid of tangible miracles, but as tears pooled in her eyes yet again, Pooja wished for nothing less than a miracle, pure and unadulterated by commonsense or logic. Only then, perhaps, would her pain end. Through divine intervention. The tragedy of worship, she knew, was that the almighty could do anything except express himself in a base, human voice, and that was what the beseecher needed the most in times of crisis.

You can go through ten avatars to save your loved ones, to make sure the earth continues to spin on its axis. What do I have to do to hear one word from your lips?
she cried silently.