Dreams Of Déjà Vu - Chapter 3

Mr. Raman, in reality, spoke very little to the residents of Lovely Sadan. What he shared with Nathan through letters and on visits were outdated news and gossip spurted by the milkman, maid, cook, and janitor of Lovely Sadan. He brought that along only to appease his son’s hunger for news from home. That was also Mr. Raman’s way of conveying to Nathan that everything was fine with him and that he was as sociable as before.

He updated Nathan about Leonara’s family - the D’souzas’ - relocation to Bombay, but Nathan hadn’t appeared upset. Leo here or there, Leo was his anywhere, thought Nathan plunging into the real-time moment of student politics, rudiments and rigors of contemporary culture, art intrigues, which both propelled and stymied art. There was art’s magic, science, history, and future to be learned.

Nathan was enjoying the unfurling of his real self, the peeling away of trite layers to find who he was as an artist, a painter. What the future held for him was exhilarating, from where one leap would take him into an exciting newness of an everything-possible place. His art, its idiom and slant were getting noticed by the others in college, and this was a preoccupying self-discovery in itself. One day, all he would need to arrive at was a line on an entire canvas, and the behavior of different lines. That would be the fulcrum of his work, its complexity and simplicity. A trip into infinity, eternity, dream, and memory.

Mind-spaces could be taken up by so many things.

Nothing left Nathan: visuals, expression, light, sight, sound, smile, tenor, or the pigments of color. Dust particles of a new day were the pixels of daily remembrance. His chalice never emptied itself. And because it didn’t, he never felt the need to pick up a phone and dial his father or Leo. He was in touch with everyone he ever wanted to be with. The chalice required a refilling, only a re-visitation, every now and then.

Lonesomeness, Nathan came to realize, could be offset with ever-expansible bits of memory.

But somehow he had forgotten time flows in one direction and changes things along its riverbed. Living widely and living deeply were not the same things.

One cold, forlorn night as sleep evaded him and he charcoal-sketched Leonara, Nathan wondered if he could get her into him without knowing where she was, just by observing her sketch. If not, what other way was there to join two unseeing dots on a plane, on the curve of time? Didn’t they share the same life?

Did rhythms join? Could they create a journey into space, wide-arching and intersecting? Was there telepathy in things and not just in thoughts? Tone-sound-lilt, thought-lyric-verse, film-shadow-light, color-texture-fabric, pixel-palette-grain teetering over a balance? He had to reach a place where they bound into blind-spot - an absence of consciousness…

A tune played in the background. Nathan always listened to something if he wasn’t humming and, now he stopped short. The lilt strumming into the thick of night had a mellifluous cadence. Even the light bulb over his head swayed.

“Hey! Chuck what music is this?” Nathan shouted at the sleeping figure under a blanket on the next bed.

Chuck startled, shuffled in bed, “Instrumental rock, African drum beats…?”

No… they were also silent sounds, vacuous echoes, low humming, pouring like thread through a needle’s eye.

“Go somewhere this very minute. Out of the room! This is an experiment. Let me see if it works,” said Nathan.

“Wh… What? Where?”

“Anywhere, dude. Just go. Quick! And listen to this very tune on your Ipod for the next 15 to 20 minutes.”

Chuck lumbered away, plugging his earphones into his ears sloppily.

Nathan visualized Chuck somewhere in the hostel premise… the canteen, courtyard, corridors, or dormitory and whispered his name. Now… now… now could music invisibly connect two people, drawing a bridge between the chasms of the unseeing? What if it was charged… could there be a chance… that it would...? Nathan got breathless. Mirth rumbled through him as if bursting from the blood in his veins. If this happened, Leonara could be inside his head soon!

He grabbed fistfuls of punctuated breath. “From where did this music come? Who created it? It’s very… very… very subliminal,” he told Chuck, when he returned to the room.

Chuck studied the CD jacket. “Nothing much is mentioned... just Instrumental Beats.”

“We need to trace its origins. Find out more for me, please, immediately.”

Chuck found the music file online three days later, though he didn’t find anything extraordinary about it, even after listening to it 10 times over. There was something catchy, but that was more because of repetitive listening.

But it was having a crazy effect on Nathan, and that stumped Chuck.

Nathan spoke indistinctly, “replicate-the-pitch-timbre-harmonics-loudness… -rhythm-sound-enveloping-and… playback-components. You-think-we-can-do-it? After-that-we-we-we-might … -distort-deepen-its-layers-embed-a-message-and-enhance-it...”

Chuck nodded his head vigorously. He didn’t want to shape the word ‘how’ out of his mouth, and displease Nathan. But there was surely something happening to his friend.

This was also the first time gross, puzzled expressions appeared on Chuck’s chubby face. From that point onward, these morphed into somber, serious, defrayed, flabbergasted, and shocking looks, giving newer levels of incomprehension a chance every day. The way Chuck struggled to catch Nathan in his fast gallop of ideas made certain his face never sorted into plain expressions.

Chuck had ripped apart that tune recreating a thousand different versions with the help of his band mates, so much so that he could sing it even in his dreams.

But nothing came of it.

No matter how much they tried, Nathan couldn’t get Chuck into his mind if he was in a different room, even on the same premise.

When college ended, Nathan heaved a sigh and dropped the idea of mind-transcendence and concentrated instead on traveling back home to live with his father at Lovely Sadan.

Mr. Raman had turned older than Nathan could have expected. It looked as if time had run too fast all over him, bulldozing him. His skin flagged. He had lost a lot of weight. His hair showed a skull cap of scalp. His cheeks swallowed into concaves, and a silver beard plastered itself over his dry, wrinkled face.

“Paapu, what is wrong with you? Don’t you pay attention to yourself? Look at you!”

Nathan thought his father would be happy to see how tall he had grown - taller than him. He had inherited the subtexts of his quiet, brooding temperament. The habits of eating moderately and going out on long strolls after dinner, the same love for fried and syrupy food, and the agility for racquet sports: badminton and tennis. But his father didn’t notice much.

It was neighbors who remarked how Nathan resembled his father. The same bushy eyebrows, well-proportioned face, strong hands, shape and heft of sturdy limb.

“You have become the more handsome version of your father,” said an elderly lady, smiling.

But other than that, he was his mother’s son with creamy light skin, gray-green eyes, a lean frame, a chocolate-boy mouth, and a stubborn chin. He, indeed, had the loveliness of his mother’s Anglo-Indian and father’s Keralite genes.

But his father was turning cold and blind. As if Mr. Raman had been strong and collected only until his son could return, and now the fort was crumbling.

“What has happened to you, Paapu?”

Mr. Raman didn’t use a walking stick, but took the support of walls, held door frames, and furniture edges to get by.

After Nathan was saturated with concern over his father’s frailty, and after he promised himself he would look after him now that he was home, his eyes searched for Leonara.

Oh! She would have turned so beautiful. He conjured her up at the gates of Lovely Sadan, until he remembered she did not live there. They were in Bombay. Oh yes! He had so much to tell her, about the thoughts and ideas raging, erupting like hot wisps in his mind – the mind of a certified fine artist, waiting to turn bland media into colored realities.

He was bursting to show her all that he knew and had learnt. He would take her through a crash course on fine arts and painting. In 10 quick days, he could pour an ocean into her small tumbler, that is if they spent those entire 10 days together.

“Paapu, where is Leo?”

“I told you they left Lovely Sadan... sold their house. We’ve bought it. Don’t you remember? Have you been overdosing on your medicine Nathan that you can’t remember even important things?”

The spaces and corners Nathan was hoping to see Leo in now shrank.

“But doesn’t she know I’m returning? I thought she would be here today, at least today. Has she left a note or something? A letter…?”

“She’s engaged to be married,” said his father in one short breath, bent over the light from the balcony as he pushed an asthma inhaler into his mouth, and pressed it.

The smell of old air and furniture that Nathan had enjoyed in his much loved and lived house, like déjà vu, turned stale and heavy. A queasy slime coated his tongue as if he was punched in the face in a bloody, bloody way. He lost his voice, his chest thumped, and he slumped into his father’s cloth-withered armchair.

“When…?” he asked, conscious that he was not to show the weakness of his emotions to his father. He was a man now, capable of holding his own more than the old man held himself against the silhouette of aging and the grief it brought with it.

“I heard it last month. The wedding’s next month,” said the slow voice of his father.

How could she...? Had she forgotten all they’d meant to each other...?

Leonara

During the time her family moved out of the quaint town of Saravalli and their apartment in Lovely Sadan, Leonara lost her grandmother, who they fondly called Avo to old age.

Arthritis and grief ensnared her mother.

Once settled in Bombay, Leonara let the concerns of her smaller family retreat into nothingness. She had to give her own life a chance. It was opening out limitlessly into a new world.

The city of Bombay was big, unnerving, and inviting, daring her to sample it, offering her freedom and avenues she could never have dreamt of. She had an interest in interior designing and enrolled in a school. While at that, she dated many men until she was certain of the types she would never want to be with. What wasn’t in place was the one she wanted to be with.

With each fading day, Leonara thought of Nathan. Not with longing, but in the way one misses a shadow-confidante. She knew Art college was doing him good. That was all she could wrestle out of his tight-lipped father. Apart from that, she knew nothing. Why didn’t Nathan phone or email her or at least send her a 75-paise blue inland letter?

But as Leonara gave in to the new city’s temptations by going on a splurge, befriending every interesting person in her wake, Nathan’s mysterious silence was forgotten. Her thirst had grown to such proportions that she not only lost track of how much her mother’s health was deteriorating, but even her father’s disquiet over her new lifestyle. Sometimes she caught him saying, “Leo, you’re getting reckless. Where were you last night? When did you return home this morning?”

Once out with the interior designing diploma, Leonara set eyes on carving out her own business. She hobnobbed with potential clients at parties thrown by new friends, gaining projects from people who had regular mood-swings about the color or effect on their walls, influenced by fads. Or with those who competed endlessly with their contemporaries for first-mover design and style advantage for their boutiques, homes, holiday homes, offices, dog kennels, and greenhouses.

At one such random do, Leonara came across a strapping young man. There was something electric in his gestures, as if he was moving even when standing still. She could see the fluidity in his body, the gush of dynamism and her heart was a bird in a shifty creaking cage, fluttering to the symphony of a hundred thunderous claps.

Were these the indications of love at first sight? She wondered.

His name was David, she discovered. And there was something very elemental in him that excited her in the way he used his sturdy hands, his well-manicured fingers to articulate his points.

She grappled for days on end with her enchantment for him. Then she realized it: it was contained lust that looked good on him, unlike on so many other men. He seemed a true worshipper of women. There was a physical, sexual energy so peaked and present in him.

Not long after this, Leonara went to parties just to watch the language of David’s body, glancing sideward at him all the time.

It was an intuition that allowed Leonara to think more and more about him, than she would have permitted herself. The way he looked at her! She was sure he would reach out to her, grab her, and wrap her into his arms if they were alone, embedding her into the fierceness of an embrace, asking her out to dinner, drink, dance… and thereafter. Or he would graze her cheek with his stubble, taking her hands into his fine ones, or cupping her waist, or nuzzling into her nape... She was day-dreaming, walking into this mesmerizing fantasy with him.

She wanted that moment when they would finally talk, wishing for it to come and wishing for it to not, until it drove her against his square chest at one party. In her delirium, she had walked blindly into him; her head bumping his chin. Her ears caught his gasp in that surreal moment and they were introduced by a common acquaintance.

She felt the rumble in her stomach, an intense punch below her belly button like someone had grabbed her solar plexus, twisting and turning it, changing the center of her body.

It was happening all too fast. She smelt the furtive, cologne hunger on his breath as they shook hands and he went a step further by kissing her cold-nervous wrist, his eyes hypnotically fixed on hers. His lips were soft. She had trouble standing steady through the evening after that.

Leonara had gone so far in her thoughts for David that she had interpreted his quiet lust to also mean his lust for life and good living. She was certain they would spend a lot of time together, unfettered by the boredom of existential issues, and that his companionship would shake the lethargy caking around her successful life. Success that she had much coveted, but which was turning out to be predictable and boring.

As soon as he would sweep her off her feet, the static around her would go! They would fly, move, travel, bring heaven on earth. When she told him this, he did not discourage her from thinking it.

Their decision to marry just happened. With David’s business expanding, he had much long distance traveling to do. That brought the outer limits of their magical carpet to a close crop. It was better to settle inside the four walls of belongingness, within the confines of convenience and snugness. Leonara wouldn’t have hurried toward marriage, but she was so lovelorn on the days David traveled that there was no way of waiting through another year of punctuated courtship.

News of her marriage could have reached Nathan earlier through Firoz whose ammi had contracted cancer. Firoz frequented a city hospital in Bombay for prognosis on his mother’s condition, and while there, had visited Leonara a few days before her wedding.

She appeared distant and disconnected, and it saddened Firoz. Where had his old friend from Lovely Sadan vanished inside this new woman? Leonara did not tell him she was getting married. It further revolted his inner faith when Firoz got news of her wedding two weeks later through an acquaintance.

Firoz would have gone straight to Nathan to bare his hurt, if it wasn’t for his Abba who called him back to Lucknow. By the time Firoz made his next trip to Bombay, Leonara was away on her Greco-Parisian honeymoon. He managed to pick fragments of her life from the same acquaintance, and bring them along to Nathan.

If Nathan was heart-broken, he did not pave a way of showing it. Not to Firoz, his childhood friend from Lovely Sadan. Not to anyone.

For Leonara, it was easier dealing with the absence of Nathan’s reaction. It made everything seem fine.

But Nathan couldn’t handle it by day. And, it only grew worse by night. How could she...? Had she forgotten all they meant to each other...?

It had to be her father who had brought unreasonable pressure on her to get married. Or her mother who shifted her conventions to her daughter of marrying a quintessential well-settled man.

Maybe it was the burden of her ailing mother’s promise, or work pressure, loneliness in a large city, work stress… What could a companionless, fragile, vulnerable woman do in a large city amidst new people? Loneliness, alienation, displacement had gotten to her. Just marry into a new place to feel at home. That was a way to handle unfamiliarity. To allow the new to intrude and invade, destroying and recreating ourselves so we could adapt, mutate, thought Nathan.

He allowed every reason for this breach, but could not accept that Leo could bring another man into her life because of need, freewill, or love. It had to be a dire compulsion. They had filled each other like the drone of bees and nectar filling up flowers, turning and shivering their faces to the sun.

It was impossible that Leo would want anyone else ever.

This just wasn’t possible.