(A5) Chapter 5 Frames
Among other things, human civilisation has taught us to hide our emotions. You must suit the expression of emotions to the situation. You cannot show happiness in a funeral even if it happens to be the most joyous day in your life. Nor would anyone approve of your sitting morose in a wedding: if you are depressed for some reason, you better give some excuse and leave the celebration. Civilised society imposes pre-defined patterns of behaviour, and every sane person who wants to sail smoothly is expected to follow these.
Sheetal, who was now Rajesh’s wife, could not show her real emotional reactions to the long tale Rohit related about his sudden disappearance sixteen years ago and his changing identity from Rohit Kapoor to Kuntal Baweja. She would have liked to tell him how hurt and lost she had felt when she found in her Modern History book a three-line note that read, “Sheetal, I am going away from your life. Some day, if life gives a chance, I’ll tell you everything. For the present, you must forget and forgive me, and settle down in married life with someone else.” At that time she had wept, felt angry, depressed, desperate and empty. But more than even the years that had passed since then, it was the change in her social role as a wife and mother that now prevented her re-living those moments of forlorn emotion. She knew it would give wrong signals to Rohit.
Life in civilised society puts you into frames that determine how you must behave. Rohit had remained unmarried and was not constricted by a frame. He could tell Sheetal freely whatever came to his mind. But that was not the case with Sheetal. She was now framed. She was a wife and a mother. Getting back into the earlier frame of Rohit’s beloved could lead to a criss-crossing and the cracking of her present frame. So, she controlled every muscle of her face and prevented any expression of emotion at Rohit’s narration of his past life. He looked keenly to see how she reacted. He was dying to see in her face some little trace of the passion she had given him earlier. But, like a typical educated member of the twenty-first century society, she did not allow the storms within her mind paint an expression on her face.
Once they had finished lunch and the white-clad bearer came with the bill, Sheetal said with a cultivated tone of formality, “Shall I pay, Mr. Kuntal?”
“Let it be from me this time,” said Kuntal. “May be you could pay next time.” He would have liked to wink as he said this, but the frozen expression on Sheetal’s face did not encourage him to take such liberty.
Kuntal came up to the car to see her off. He wanted to say that he was glad to have found her again. He wanted that she should say something — anything. He wanted that at least once she should call him Rohit. But she behaved like a total stranger. She had listened to his story with the dispassionate detachment of a press-reporter collecting details for a newspaper report. She had shown no signs of being even remotely connected with Rohit’s tale, leave aside her being at the centre-stage of the emotional drama of his life.
Kuntal extended his hand and said, “Hope to see you soon again.”
Sheetal folded her hands and namasteyed him without saying anything in response. She got into the car and was soon on the main road where an isolated lorry moved at that time of sultry after-noon. As she drove mechanically looking vacantly at the long, broad, empty road in front of her, the words spoken by Rohit circulated in her mind. Now she was no longer under an obligation to control her emotions. The frames that bind you are afterall a part of the social situations. They disappear when you are alone and reappear when others are around.
As Rohit’s deeply emotional words echoed in her mind, her vision became hazy with a fog of tears that collected in front of the irises of her eyes. She took the vehicle to one side of the road, parked it and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Poor fellow, he has suffered because of me!” she said to herself. She felt guilty about the stolid face she had to maintain in his presence. She would have liked to catch his hand and tell him that she was sorry for whatever had happened in his life. She felt she had an emotional obligation towards him and that she had hurt him by stolidly appearing to be unmoved by his story.
She put her head on the steering wheel and sobbed. Her mobile phone rang. She cleared her throat and said, “Hello.”
“Mom, where are you? I am waiting at the door of our house!” Naavika said angrily.
“I’ll be there in a moment.” Said Sheetal, and started the car.
Rohit’s tale had just begun to draw Sheetal into a vortex of her past emotions and now her role of mother and housewife reasserted itself and pulled her back into the present. Sheetal’s mind was now preoccupied with questions about Naavika’s coming earlier than usual: “I hope she is well. Why did she turn up so suddenly?”
As soon as she entered the gates of her house, Naavika burst out, “Where did you go, mom? I’ve been waiting here for hours!”
“Sorry, dear. But you didn’t tell me that you were coming earlier!” said Sheetal and took out the door key from her purse.
“There was a sudden strike in the college today,” said Naavika. “A teacher misbehaved with a student and the students walked out of the classes.” Then she said, “Mom, prepare some grub for me. I’ll go and take a light shower.”
When Naavika had gone into the bathroom, Sheetal sat at the dining table recapitulating her meeting with Rohit. With her finger she wrote on the table words that left no print, symbolic of a silent letting off of emotions hthat could not brook louder expression:
Life is a tangle of multiple tangles
Criss-crossing and confusing
Pulling at each other
In their constant effort
To occupy more space —
Circles upon circles
Struggling to grow bigger
The mother, the wife, the beloved, the leader,
The worker, the shirker, the talker, the balker,
Multiple beings within one being
Desperate to grow and encroach my space
And I, like an amoeba,
Stretched and strained
Struggle to retain my shape.
The door bell rang. It was Mrs. Nameeta from the fifth house to theirs.
“Did you hear? Sundaram Pillai is in serious condition. I heard he has gone into a coma,” Nameeta told Sheetal. “They say he’ll not survive this day.”
“I heard he was not keeping well, but I didn’t know he is so serious. Let Rajesh come. Then he and I will go and enquire.” Sheetal said and got busy preparing tea for the visitor.
