Dreams Of Déjà Vu - Chapter 2

Nathan’s father, Mr. Narmadan Raman, was in the business of transporting people through his fleet of luxury buses. He was at the cusp of a business expansion, buying a few more buses to ply interstate. That had kept him busy traveling from Varanasi to Rajasthan. He would come home only once a month, for a couple of days.

And Nathan would play the same game with his father.

As Mr. Raman immersed himself in the pages of The Transport Times, Nathan would watch his father’s body turn into a gray blurry mass within his outline. He would ‘hear’ his father’s silent murmurings, anxious thoughts, misgivings, running doubts, and concerns.

From his favorite corner of the drawing room, Nathan sensed each pulse of his father’s body, each frown that grew over his work-weary forehead, each knot in his mind, as he read those travel bulletins. Each worry from the world and newspaper appeared as a gray thread in his father’s wispy blur.

Mr. Raman wouldn’t notice his son standing at the far corner, staring so hard at him that it could break air.

If Nathan stared any longer, he feared he would receive so much of his father that he would bloat, his head filling and expanding to the size of the room and bursting off into the streets outside.

He wanted to touch his father’s forehead and ease his worries. But all Nathan did was bump his back to the wall or tap his foot.

This disturbed Aunty Marie.

“Stop tapping your foot like a lizard’s head,’ she shouted, ‘Give your father some peace and quiet at least until your mother comes. Heaven knows when she’ll be back. Today. Tomorrow. Early. Late. Does she even know he’s come home?” Aunty Marie’s voice scratched out like thermocol scraping over a grate. Throwing her wilted hands into the air, she would continue her tirade under her breath, retiring to the kitchen.

She would dare not cane him in front of his father, and Nathan’s thoughts would return to the disharmony of his father’s thoughts. Why was Paapu so concerned about his work all the time? Why did he not relax when he came home? When would he talk to him? Didn’t he even know his son was waiting for him?

Nathan was just short of reading his father’s whole mind like a book. It scared him to think that he could do it, if he tried. And that’s why he didn’t. It was too unbecoming, scary, and disrespectful.

He also resisted reading Leonara’s mind, preferring instead to just watch her for hours: her fine golden hair that shivered against the gradient of her hands and shins, her hair that fell over her forehead, the way she hunched in curious concentration over a textbook, or the way she looked at him and smiled when least expected… the way she was aware of him when he was lost in himself.

Were thoughts and feelings the same things? Or were they different even during the same times between her and him?

Nathan found ways of meeting Leonara in special places: at a shaded corner on their building terrace, or on a mat in the wet gardens of Lovely Sadan, or under the papaya tree. They would spend hours on the how’s, why’s, and when’s of life. Their questions and answers were wet clay in their growing hands.

Sometimes a patch of grass in the building’s backyard or the cement water tank scaled by an iron ladder were enough. Sometimes her house or his, her room or his. The balconies of their homes, where they would fling pillows together over mats and jump over the next day’s classwork, or complete herculean amounts of home revision.

He would teach her a thing or two, solve a difficult Algebra sum, crack a Geometry formula, or explain Chemistry equations. In turn, she would read questions aloud from his classwork book and make sure he recited the correct answers.

Nathan couldn’t care about being with anyone else, maybe not even his mother, but he had to meet Leo at least once every day.

“You know I made a new friend. A girl called Larz,” Nathan said one day, not sure if Leo herself was behind this prank.

“And? What did she say?”

He shrugged, “That she’s always with me. I think my doll has returned. You remember my favorite Daisy doll that I used to play with when I was small? My favorite toy?”

Leonara nodded vigorously. There was no way of knowing if she really did remember.

Nathan could go inside her mind to plunder her secrets - her transient growing pains of being a gorgeous girl, other thoughts, feelings, and emotions - the biggest being what she thought of him... but he knew where to stop. He never permitted himself that.

Not to Leo. His Leo.

He’d rather wait for her to tell him what she thought of him.

And he could wait forever. As if he did not have this peculiar skill at all.

Nathan also couldn’t study his mother. There was a block somewhere. She remained a stranger and a mystery. He knew he loved her and more because he couldn’t get to her. He sensed her pain like a child sensed a parent’s, like any human felt another’s, but never like he sensed Aunty Marie’s or Paapu’s anguish.

It troubled Nathan if he tried. His temples throbbed with the effort he made to understand her. A vast arid land unfurled like a desert into ever-expanding arcs, threatening to form a full circle between him and her.

Love grew in moments, but also asphyxiated in similar moments of disconnection, when no echo or name, speech, or sound stayed back.

No cooking aromas came from his mother’s kitchen, like it came from everyone else’s kitchens, wafting to their ground-floor verandah corner, where Nathan stood when his mother was at home. Those whiffs of other people’s food tickled his nose, and eked rumbles, groans, and insect buzzing from his stomach.

His mother’s cooking simply lacked something.

Often Nathan would say, “Mamma, what’re you doing? Come here and play with me. Read to me.”

She would force a smile, bring the curio she was cleaning and sit beside him. Rolling out tiny ends of a muslin cloth, she would dig into the crevices of the artifacts, making him read his own story books in broken phrases. The stories would change as he read them to their ruined, stuttering ends. Hopeful stories would seem bleak, dark stories more horrid…

Even his mother’s absences were equally daunting. Once when Nathan was six, he had woken in the middle of the night as light flooded his room from his parents’ bedroom. He tiptoed into that light, entering their room. Contents from his mother’s cupboard lay in heaps and clusters, with her sitting in the center.

“Ma, what are you doing?”

“Baby, have you woken up? I’m going to Puducherry… I need to clear my head.” There was probably a whimper in her chest, a wet nose, a red eye, a sniff behind what she spoke that night or the many nights thereafter, but he couldn’t be sure. She never looked up at him or met his gaze.

By not talking, they had large spaces spread between them. Nathan searched for words, to fill those gaps, seeing how his voice strolled and frolicked around the house and came back to him. Soon, he gave up. It took so much out of him.

His mother took so much out of him.

A few years passed like this in loneliness; bereft, in the absent company of his parents, and the present company of Leo and Larz.

Larz knew about Leonara, but Leonara wasn’t told anything about Larz after Nathan’s initial confession.

But as he progressed more and more into the outer world, Larz’s visits became less frequent, until one day she vanished altogether.

Nathan looked for her everywhere. He waited and waited. But she had vanished without a trace, explanation, or goodbye. She was gone from every nook and corner and familiar visiting routine, he had hoped to find her in.

With only Leo around, Nathan feared he would have to be only half himself – his happy self – now.

And by the time Nathan reached college, he had forgotten about Larz completely. He was also popping pills every day, which his father made sure he took. Nathan had opted to stay in his college hostel even though his hometown, Saravalli, was an hour-and-a-half away by train.

Sometimes his father would request his roommate Chuck to stand by Nathan every morning, until he gulped his two fine white tablets.

“For your peace and health,” his father reminded him every time he visited the hostel.

The pills did no harm and Nathan figured out there was no point fighting or refusing them, if it made his father happy. If anything, the pills kept him peaceful. They were a stitch in the blanket of time. They sewed together the tears in Nathan’s life, so things could perhaps be buried beneath them.

What they didn’t bury was his secret skill.

This skill that had helped him negotiate his way with bullies and class heads in school, by knowing what they wanted of him and giving them that or bluffing them into believing that.

He only had to remember to use it judiciously. If he needed a muse, like those beggars inside him, he would stop at a point where he could have enough without taking them out of their bodies. If he couldn’t stop at that point and it seemed inevitable that they were getting deeper inside him, he would opt for the night, when unconsciousness couldn’t be differentiated from sleep.

Nathan didn’t tell anyone about this. Not even Chuck, who was his closest classmate, and was turning out to be his best friend.

He only let Chuck know about Leonara.

Nathan carved many paintings and charcoal drawings of Leonara during those college years. It had been years since he had seen her, so the paintings were of her adolescence and growing up, as he interpreted them, extrapolating her appearance, moods, facial features, length of hair, volume and swing of hips, body type, and experimenting with clothes she might have worn from a young girl, a teenager, to a woman.

His interpretations of her dressing styles featured in the variations of his drawings, so much that they made Chuck and the others gape in awe. Between flowing ethnic fabric to snug western wear, between floral prints to mellow shades, she was dressed in everything. The media on which Nathan drew Leonara grew in number, and Chuck had to go around looking for places to stack them. He would ask friends to lend corners of their rooms for Nathan’s large sketch books and water- or oil- canvases: a nook here, a wedge behind the cupboard there, under beds, by the sides of walls. Anywhere. Everywhere. It wasn’t Nathan’s work alone that was spreading. His longing for Leonara was too. Chuck began paying rent to the cafeteria manager to stack new sketches and paintings of Leonara on his canteen loft.

Chuck liked his new friend. It hadn’t taken long for Nathan to return the fondness. Friendships happened like love - at first sight or smile, at first easy reckoning, the first few words and gestures exchanged.

Chuck was part of a small boy band – one of the many that had sprung up in college - and he fidgeted every so often with new compositions, getting brainwaves for new melodies in the middle of the night. Perhaps, that was what was common between him and Nathan: the love for tunes and melodies.

But his band did not take off. It remained insular in its tastes, limited in its experimentation of hard rock and metal. The musicians in his band loved what they were doing, but were too carefree to have ambition. Once they were given a five-minute chance to a gig at the college’s annual fest. They didn’t make a success of it, because the lead vocalist didn’t turn up after a late night party.

Nathan appreciated Chuck’s unfaltering affection. It was sunshine to a plant, both needed and missed. Though it hardly filled the vast, wide spaces of emptiness inside him, Chuck’s friendship was a drizzle in the desert of his being.

Nathan didn’t write letters or emails to Leonara through these college years. Every feeling he wanted to share destroyed itself the moment it shaped into words. Each letter that he started addressing her felt formal. His feelings were so vast and vague, and the words a letter demanded so concise and precise. The slipstream of rapidly passing days, weeks, months couldn’t touch the feelings he had for her; like dust that sat on a picture frame, but couldn’t touch the real picture inside. The day they reunited, Nathan was certain, distance, space, and time would evaporate between them.

His stirrings for Leonara first felt at 12 were still the same. If he could slip through the side channels of thought, he would be with her forever in the realness of memory. He had spent so many moments with her in her house under the gaze of her loving mother Aunty Beth that he understood how women – mothers - could be different in keeping their homes, bringing up their children and families.

Nathan’s father informed him about Leo every time he visited the hostel, and Nathan assumed he was in touch with Leo through this. All he needed was to complete his graduation and return to her.

Sometimes during painting and drawing, Nathan wondered that if he could call people into his mind just by staring intently at them, could he also call people he couldn’t see… into his mind, if he knew their whereabouts…