Love and the Dark Night

FIFTEEN

The lady bent down and pressed what looked like a switch on a panel below the window. A soft sound like the swish of a peacock feather ran up my thigh, and at the same time a door on the right of the room began to open. Noiselessly and slowly a fraction of an inch a second until it came to a stop at an angle to the ground. And as it moved, I saw through the hazy mist of my mind the sky move with it as well and what was just white and blue was beginning to stain brown and green as the glass, now inclined downwards, caught the ground and the grass below.

It was a green field, with each and every strand of grass prominent and standing out as if in my palm. I was standing there with the floor of the room beneath my feet having gently placed me on this green carpet. In front of this enormous stretch of the green carpet colourful tents stood, their ends fluttering in the breeze. Ladies in loose colourful dresses came out from the first few tents. And from the others, young men, some bearded some fresh stood in the patch of brown grass. Suddenly sound filled the air, and turning my head to the right, I saw men and women holding huge brass bugles to their mouths. There was a central tent draped in golden cloth, and from there, walking in slow steps was a head-shaven bearded man in flowing robe of golden and purple. He looked at the standing people around him and as he passed them, they bowed down, holding their palms in namaste. He came up and sat on a high-backed chair on a raised platform.

The man held out his hand and the bugles stopped playing. Young men and women appeared in order and began moving their heads to a slow rhythm. Several men appeared carrying a bed, and placing it in the centre of the grassy patch sprinkled mountain flowers. I have seen these flowers – purple, their mouths open like a funnel’s but dangling out – yes, the devil’s trumpet I had seen in Kurseong opposite to my cousin’s house. When I closed my eyes the colours in my head popped like firecrackers softly yet silently bursting in the air. Next my eyes opened and the entire scenery of the greenery was inside the room.   

The head-shaven man appeared, and now with him closer as if almost sharing the same bed, his action took place. And what he did was being written down:

At the sound of the iron gate at dusk, I, Pedro Garcia, a college professor, bachelor, at the window, watch the lithe figure of my student walk up the driveway to my house. Once I have opened the door, stepped aside, I lead her towards the bedroom. Knowing the routine, she begins pealing my tee, unbuckles the belt of my faded jeans and without any hurry, gently pushes me into the bed. Next she unbuttons her shirt, slides out of her jeans and slides into bed. Next to me.

The bed cover is soft brown, and the mellow-yellow glow from the twin table lamps rests on the soft-yellow walls. Her dusky body writhes in mermaid-ian style, and it is flawless save the little scar on the left thigh. My eyes on her thigh, I pick up the ink pen and words in black begin to be born on the duskiness:

Flow with the river,

don’t be a Crusoe

and build a home.

Home is within you.

   This is a recently-composed piece; a philosophy. I read out the lines, my husky voice dominating the room; run my hand over the scar. I caress her. We make love. 

 Dores, aka Anais lives several kilometres away from the college campus. The authorities don’t get (have not yet got) a whiff of the whereabouts of some students living double lives: students by day; call girls by dusk. Inversely (ironically is not defined in his personal dictionary), they don’t know that a professor is in a physical relationship with his student. A brand new student. Delectable bread fresh from the oven of youth.

   But though I have been leading an active s*x life with her, I have, of late, begun to grow affectionate towards her. Affection, I firmly believe, is sunlight imperative for the growth of the plant called love.     

Dores, yes, calm, in bed, possesses a sharp contrast to her age when girls, at eighteen, burst with excitement, accompanied with occasional clawing. I wonder at her quietness, though her silent, yet observant eyes do most of the talking. It appears she understands why the plant near the bed lamp is a croton and the reason for the Erika palm a guard near the doorstep. She dislikes judges on reality shows smirking on contestants shaking their buttocks jelly-like and spreading their legs in mid air. “Their sense of art is so perverted,” she remarks. She stares at the switched-off T.V. on the wall as if the reality show is on and the judges are in the midst of their remarks. “Art crosses all barriers,” she says, eyes at the coffee cup on the table. “I’ve doodled with my menstrual blood. Played knots and crosses with it on the washroom floor.” She pauses. “That’s art to me.”

Who is Anais? I close and shut my eyes. I realized my hands were still tied to the scaffolding, and no wonder they couldn’t be moved, leave alone shaken a bit too. A dull and heavy pain had crept and settled into them.  I desperately made an effort to shake off whatever was taking place in front of me. Who was this Pedro Garcia? Why was I being shown all this? How am  I connected, or not connected to this? Leave me alone…

A part-time creative writing instructor, my profession does not cut me into a professional figure. I teach to sustain myself. Primarily, I am a poet. While in college I am an instructor and poet, but no sooner does my teaching hours end than I am a poet. Poet. POET.

I appear in college in frayed jeans and kurtas and love wearing cigar scented deodorant. My mind is always weaving poetic lines for I have been writing poetry since as far back as twenty-eight years. But inspiringly, my blood stream teems with poetic genes. My uncles and aunts are quite a known figure in poetry circles, and my cousin too cannot be ruled out. My own first book of poems appeared when I was twenty-two, and during then and now, at forty, I have already crafted seven books of poems, had been an invitee into prestigious world poetry societies within the country and overseas, and has been conferred with honorary D. Litt. and other such-like recognitions from equally prestigious universities and organizations as old as the hills. But writing poetry does not make one a poet. My definition of a poet is one perpetually basking in a poetic world. A poet reads fevered lines in his meal; in the midst of incessant rain, he sees a patch of sunlight; the pain of the roadside beggar becomes his when his eyes fall on him.

A poet is he whose soul is in constant search for truth, and when he discovers it, he hurls himself into the pitch black but colourful pathway to look for more truths hiding there, desiring him to seek them out. All in all, his soul is a desert eternally thirsting for rain. Even during such a time as with her, he needs poetry to do the foreplay.

In class, during my lecture on creative writing, Dores, aka Tessa admitted two months after the freshers’ welcome, sat quietly, head down, eyes in class, but mind in a land far away. And that is what attracted me towards her, sermonised to me in one sentence: Drop off your protective robe, scrape out from your skull this stubborn protective nature. I am under the firm belief that my protective nature has given rise to my temperament. 

My one time girlfriend had vanished one day. Though that was around eighteen years ago, women had been falling in and out of love with me since then; every fortnight for that matter. For a while girls served my soul – or is it my soul served girls, I wondered at times. I needed the company of women but somehow the protective feeling held me full throttle, refusing to take the right turn to the road called Mental Direction. The s*x-less days have now become an appetizer. I have already realized that girls come to me as easily as poetic lines, for girls are nothing less than poetry to me; the potted plants of my verses. I have confirmed to myself that my respect for females is of the highest category as the poems my heart gives birth to.

            Dores, my student, will satisfy me, emotionally, as well as physically. Perhaps. That is my conviction.      

“You possess interesting thoughts, given the fact that you are quiet.” He had asked her once, when, after an evening of heated love making, they lay spent next to each other. “Are you always like this?”

She had only looked into his eyes, her face marked by an unexplainable expression.

*

“What’s all this?” I ask myself.

Pedro Garcia looks at me.

“This is eighteen years later.” He whispered in my ear. “Of Pedro Garcia’s life, Pedro Garcia, that’s you.”

“And Anais? And Tessa? Why are they here?”

“They were with you. They are with you. And they will be with you.”

*      

Anais’ POV

I punched the numbers.

“Hello Tessa.”

“Hi.” Tessa’s voice was a whisper.

“How’s everything going?”

“As planned. Rudi’s drugged, though the doctor took quite a good amount.”

“Good. Let’s meet at The Pirate’s Deck. We need to plan the next move.”

“Yupe. Before that, my men will throw him into the street.”

*

Rudi’s POV

 “Can you see the little dots,” Tessa’s voice reached me from far. “Can you see each moving at its own speed?”

“Who are they?” I said to myself.

“Those are people. The dots are scattered in the middle. You know why? They are running away from the tyranny of someone called Jashwant Singh. But as you move towards the edges hwere the road is, where the wood is, you can see them bunched together, like bubbles of foam at the sea beach. I like watching them. They give me pleasure. They will go against the tyrant, the killer. They are planning, and plotting. And they are friends of the same feather flocking together.”

As I listened to her, she was not the Tessa I knew. My eyes travelled beyond what she was saying, and I searched the landscape that had suddenly unfolded in front for landmarks and scenes that I was familiar with. Was that the thin dark line, smudged and hazy, I knew. Some bell rings in my head. There’s a café close by to that smudged blotch. Next to it was the green stretch where on Saturday mornings young men, led by a middle aged handsome and smart tall man, practised base ball. Someone called Rudi would practise with them. Yes, the picture appeared vague. And on Sundays, other club members would gather at St. Thomas’ Boys School ground for a tournament. Yes, the pictures are getting distinct, the fog hanging low over the city’s buildings are lifted by the sunlight becoming stronger with the progress of the day.