Tag: fiction

Loya is twenty-five, solitary and with restless stirrings in her heart. In an unexpected move, she sets off on an unexpected journey, away from her mother, Rukmini, and her home in Bengaluru, to distant, misty Assam. She seeks her grandfather, Torun Ram Goswami, someone she has never met before.

Twenty-five years ago, Rukmini had been cast out of the family home by her mother, the formidable and charismatic Usha, while Torun had watched silently. Loya now seeks answers, both from him and the place her mother once called home.

In the excerpt below, find a glimpse of the fateful wedding day in 1983, which ends up defining Loya’s exploration of home and family.

The Wedding

3 December 1983

 

Despite her father’s enormous love for her and her brother’s steady affection, she had been consigned to the margins of life in the Yellow House by Usha. Well, Rukmini found she did not feel so negligible any more. In a glad inversion of the way Usha diminished her, with Alex Rukmini was enhanced; she felt more of herself.

The world would alter again this morning, Rukmini thought as she walked up the path towards Alex. In a few hours, she would be a wife and Alex, her husband. She shivered again and, as if sensing her fear, Arun turned and linked his arm with hers.

At the veranda, Arun released Rukmini’s arm and she walked, instead, beside Alex, into Robin Khura’s small drawing room. It was a humble room, with its old wooden threepiece sofa set and a couple of cane armchairs. That it lacked a woman’s touch was obvious. But Jitu and Robin, with the aid of the woman hired to help around the house, had done their best to smarten it up. The cushion covers were freshly washed and ironed. There were vases of clumsily arranged flowers on the bookshelves, one tall arrangement of fragrant rajnigandha and other of red roses, overblown and already shedding petals.

‘Sit, sit!’ Robin Khura ushered the couple into the twoseater sofa. ‘The magistrate will be here any minute.’

Rukmini sat down beside Alex. Her hand resting on the seat of the sofa was alarmingly close to Alex’s. She hoped he would not reach across and take her hand. She did not know how things were done in his family down in Bangalore but here it was taboo to touch even your spouse in public view. In fact, it was bad form to express any affection or love between a wife and a husband at all. This was not a society that believed in a hug or embrace outside the bedroom.

‘Tea, anyone?’ Jitu asked.

Rukmini spoke quickly, maybe too soon, and regretting her haste. ‘Not now, later, maybe.’ She could not possibly eat or drink anything now. When would the magistrate arrive? She wanted to be done with it all as soon as she could.

‘Easy, sweetheart,’ Alex said and Rukmini felt herself flush. She was embarrassed at Alex’s use of this endearment before the assembled.

There was just the five of them this morning. There would have been more had it not been for the bandh. All eight of their study circle group and many more of their batch mates—Alex after all was a favourite with many. Some of her friends too, from school, may have shown up. The bandh had kept them all indoors. No family either, though Arun and she had three cousins—all in Jorhat. There were none they were particularly close to.

But what of Alex?

Rukmini realized she had not given any thought to Alex’s family, who were absent. His father had died two years ago, but what of his mother and sister, Rose? When asked, he had said that it was too far for them to travel and they would be going down to Bangalore the next day anyway. There, he said, there would a big reception at Bangalore Club. She had not thought it odd then, but now sitting in the still drawing room, suffocated by the cloying scent of the rajnigandhas, Rukmini was struck by how very strange it all was.

The magistrate arrived, half an hour late. At ten minutes past ten, Rukmini put down the pen she had signed her name with and allowed Alex to gather her up in a quick embrace, before bursting into tears.

Undertow presents a delicate and poignant portrait of family and all that it contains. Through Rukmini’s and Loya’s journeys, Jahnavi Barua crafts a complex exploration of home and the outside world, and the ever-evolving nature of love itself.

Following the death of his wife, Dominic Ullis escapes to Bombay in search of oblivion and a dangerous new drug, Meow Meow. So begins a glorious weekend of misadventure as he tours the teeming, kaleidoscopic city from its sleek eyries of high-capital to the piss-stained streets, encountering a cast with their own stories to tell, but none of whom Ullis – his faculties ever distorted – is quite sure he can trust. Heady, heartbroken and heartfelt, Low is a blazing joyride through the darklands of grief towards obliteration – and, perhaps, epiphany.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

The mysterious quality of in-flight air. The low whine of tinnitus, a charged anxious ringing that kept adjusting its volume. The sense of something about to happen, something decisive. Then the lights dimmed as the aircraft dropped through the clouds and prepared to land. It taxied and turned, taxied and stopped.

Payal sprang up again, grabbed her wheeled case from the overhead bin, and went to the front exit, resplendent in her sari. Ullis stayed where he was until the other passengers had left. Then he put half an Ambien under his tongue and took the white plastic box from the overhead bin and floated towards the lovely slum city.

He’d left Delhi on a whim, carrying only the box from the crematorium. If not for the box what would he do with his hands? He would wring them. Repeatedly. Aki was dead and he didn’t know what to do from one moment to the next. The vast abstraction of time reduced to this: stupefaction with the hands. For now it was okay. For now his hands were cradling the box that contained her ashes.

The events of the week had passed through him without resistance from the moment he came home to find Aki dead in the study.

He’d panicked and called her mother. Then he drove to her house, breathless and shouting in the suffocating car. Aki’s mother had come back with him to the apartment in Defence Colony and they’d taken his wife’s body to the hospital. A quartet of stone-faced orderlies had moved her from the emergency room to the morgue. All night the panic sat like a heavy bear on his chest. The bear stayed for many days and nights, until it gave way to exhaustion and blessed amnesia. His mind disengaged from his surroundings. He felt separated from his body, but only partially, as if he’d been insufficiently anaesthetised.

Later, the only thing he remembered clearly was the crematorium, the priests in their white dhotis and saffron forehead smears, their oily faces peering at him from clouds of smoke, the cold young eyes devoid of all earthly emotion except boredom. He’d been shaken by their indifference and dazed by all that was expected of him.

Her mother had dressed Aki in a spectacularly inappropriate multi-coloured silk sari, and she’d made Ullis don a black suit and white shirt. He’d added a pair of chocolate loafers for urgent private reasons and foregone a tie as a concession to the April heat. This was how husband and dead wife had arrived at the crematorium: dressed for a wedding, in clothes neither had worn in their life together.

The suit and sari had been unnecessary. There were no mourners, no witnesses other than a handful of crematorium employees and Ullis and his dry-eyed mother-in-law. She had organised the cremation in such haste that there had been no time to call those who had known Aki and loved her. There was no time for anything other than the observance of rituals, each more pointless than the next.

The bored priests had mouthed their inane mantras. They had sifted uncooked rice and read from ancient leather-bound tomes and stared with their oily eyes. They rang tiny brass bells in a sequence to which only they were privy. (The bells are an omen, and they ring more than once in this story.) When they demanded of him some minor role in the general pagan tumult, he had obliged with the acquiescence required of the husband of the bride. After all, this was what she had been made to resemble, a young bride in silks and flowers. Except that the marigolds were uniformly wilted. Were they leftovers from a previous funeral?

When the priests told him to push the button that would slide her into the electric furnace, he had worried that the absurd sari would burst into flame.

He’d taken a last look at her slight figure dwarfed by piles of flowers and sundry low-priced objects, her face obscured by the sari’s pallu, artfully obscured so no viewer would remark at the blood vessels that had burst on her cheeks and forehead and neck like scarlet-brown buds that would never bloom. “Kar do,” the priest had said. Obediently Ullis slid her in, and some time later his mother-in-law divided his wife’s ashes into two boxes: “One for you and one for me.”

From the crematorium, clutching the box and dressed in his mourning suit, he walked into the dust of an enclosed courtyard surrounded by dead trees and broken concrete columns. From there he walked into the dust of the street.