(A1) Chapter1 Visitor

Sheetal sat on the sofa of their drawing room, waiting. Her husband Rajesh was expected for dinner any moment now along with his boss.

In the morning Rajesh had given a ring and said, “Sheetal, my new boss, Mr. Kuntal, will be joining us for dinner tonight. Don’t bother much. He is a nice chap. Just get something ready. One or two vegetables and chapatis will do. He is not the fussy type.”

Sheetal would never be satisfied with preparing just a couple of vegetables and chapatis. For her, formal dinner had to begin with soup and starters. Then there had to be a variety of vegetable-curries and rice along with chapatis. The dinner had to necessarily end with a sweet dish and fruit. Dinner for a visitor was always a full day’s job for Sheetal, and she enjoyed it. Now, dishes ready in the hotboxes, Sheetal sat waiting for the arrival of her husband and the guest.

The clock on the wall struck eight, as if to announce dinner time. She knew Rajesh did not like delay in serving food when a guest was invited. “The honourable wife of the Vice President of Kurla and Kurla Industries has a social obligation to be a good hostess,” he would say jokingly. Sheetal, the devoted wife of the honourable vice president of Kurla and Kurla Industries knew her personal obligations to her husband.

Not that Rajesh would make big fuss, even if there were delays. She had hardly ever seen him get angry. “I am a disciplined kid of a school teacher who treated his house as a class room,” he told Sheetal on the first night of their marriage. As time went by, she saw in him the product of a home-turned-school where the children were not expected to talk loudly or show anger. “why don’t you shout at me, as other husbands do?” she had asked him once. “You are too sweet for anger,” he had said and pinched her cheek.

Sixteen years had passed since their marriage and their only daughter Naavika was now fifteen and a student of Bachelor of Commerce in Lady Harding College. Naavika looked exactly like Sheetal. “She is the world’s first clone,” sheetal would joke about her daughter.

Sheetal liked to play host. This gave her the opportunity to wear good dresses and try new dishes. “At least when someone comes, he appreciates my cooking. From your stolid face I can’t make out how the food tastes,” she would complain to her husband about what she often called “his oppressive equanimity”.

Now she sat on the sofa of the drawing room waiting for the sound of the car that would bring her husband and the guest. Naavika was in her study, working on an assignment.

It was not long before the bell rang and she went to open the door. She had hardly an inkling that the next moment of her life held a jolting surprise and could set into motion a sequence of events that would bring a storm into her peaceful life.

Behind her husband in the door stood a man who looked exactly like her college friend and one-time lover, Rohit. She looked at him and dithered, not knowing how to greet him. Strangely, he seemed completely unaffected by the sight of her. Rajesh turned to the guest and said, “My wife Sheetal”. Then he looked at Sheetal and said, “My new boss, Mr. Kuntal.”

Sheetal and Kuntal nodded greetings to each other. Kuntal looked so like Rohit that the name Kuntal seemed a misfit on him. And yet she noticed vast differences between Kuntal’s demeanour and Rohit’s. Kuntal seemed unusually cool, Rohit was impulsive and wild. Rohit liked casual wear even on solemn occasions. Kuntal was dressed to precision.

Kuntal, whoever he might be, brought back into Sheetal’s life sweet memories of her days of passion for Rohit. And yet she feared the ominous shadow such reappearance of her past could cast on her settled married life. She wished Kuntal were Rohit and yet feared the idea.

Sheetal was struck by the polish in Kuntal’s style. His manners seemed immaculate, very unlike Rohit.

At the dinner table Naavika joined them and Kuntal, who had been quiet, suddenly became lively. He asked her questions and listened to the answers with rapt attention. And when they had finished dinner and Naavika was leaving for her study, he said to Rajesh, “Your daughter looks how your wife must have looked two decades ago.”

After dinner, on the way to the wash basin, Kuntal’s eyes fell on a painting on the wall of the bedroom. He looked at it and said, “That painting is very unique. Where did you buy it from?”

Sheetal watched keenly to see Kuntal’s reactions to the painting. This was the painting Rohit had done for her twenty third birthday. She had posed for several hours in a corner of the university campus for him to paint her. She said, “The painting should not look like me.” And Rohit covered the face in the painting with a thin veil that hung from head towards the ground.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Rajesh said as he noticed the keenness with which Kuntal examined the painting. “My wife did it when she was a student.”

Sheetal’s heart pounded. This was a lie she had told her husband and had then begun to believe it herself. Now a visitor’s presence made her keenly aware of the truth behind the lie.

Kuntal said in a formal tone, “I must say your wife is a great painter,” and then went on to the wash basin.

For a moment Sheetal wished that he should open his mouth and say, “This is the painting I made for you.” and she should throw away all caution to the winds and lose herself into his arms.

After dinner when Kuntal was leaving, Rajesh called Naavika to see “uncle” off. Kuntal, who seemed to be deliberately cold and unemotional towards Sheetal, became warm as soon as Naavika came out of her room. Sheetal felt uncomfortable at Kuntal’s coldness towards herself and his undue interest in her daughter. He repeated his earlier observation and said to Sheetal, “I think at her age you would have looked exactly like her.”

At night when Rajesh and Sheetal went to sleep, Sheetal had a heavy head from resolving whether Kuntal was Rohit.

She desperately tried to draw conclusions from the facts that had presented themselves. “Why is he behaving towards me as if he had never known me? Why is he so warm towards Naavika? Why did he say again and again that she looks as I would have looked at her age? Is he trying to pick the threads from where he lost them? Does he see in Naavika the Sheetal he parted with sixteen years ago? Is it a psychological transfer of the emotion he once felt for her to someone who looks exactly like her? But is he Rohit at all?”

She was utterly confused. Then an idea came to her mind. She turned to Rajesh and asked, “Rajesh, what is Kuntal’s caste name?”

“Baweja, Kuntal Baweja,” said Rohit unaware of the storm that raged in Sheetal’s mind. “Why do you ask?” he said.

“Just like that,” she managed. This seemed to resolve the confusion. Kuntal could not be Rohit. Rohit could have changed his name, but how could he change his caste? Caste is what you are born with and live with all your life. How could Rohit Kapoor become Kuntal Baweja? This must be his lookalike, she concluded and gradually slipped into a slumber.

Chapter 2: Suspicion