Blueprint for Love Read online

  A BLUEPRINT

  FOR LOVE

  Chatura Rao

  First published in India 2016

  © 2016 by Chatura Rao

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

  The content of this book is the sole expression and opinion of its author, and not of the publisher. The publisher in no manner is liable for any opinion or views expressed by the author. While best efforts have been made in preparing this book, the publisher makes no representations or warranties of any kind and assumes no liabilities of any kind with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the content and specifically disclaims any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness of use for a particular purpose.

  The publisher believes that the content of this book does not violate any existing copyright/intellectual property of others in any manner whatsoever. However, in case any source has not been duly attributed, the publisher may be notified in writing for necessary action.

  BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  E-ISBN 978 93 86250 03 2

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

  Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4

  DDA Complex, Pocket C – 6 & 7, Vasant Kunj

  New Delhi 110070

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Created by Manipal Digital Systems.

  To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

  For my parents

  Nothing has changed.

  Except for the course of rivers,

  the lines of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.

  Amid those landscapes roams the soul,

  disappears, returns, draws nearer, moves away,

  a stranger to itself, elusive,

  now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,

  while the body is and is and is

  and has nowhere to go.

  – from Tortures by Wislawa Szymborska

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  1

  On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 11:47 AM, Suveer Bisht wrote:

  I looked up Google maps and found, midway between you and me, Nashik in Maharashtra. We’re lucky that Aboli’s birthday arrives in November (every year, unfailingly ). Fairly pleasant weather to travel. Let me know if you can make it. I’ll meet you at the station.

  Suveer

  P. S. After the 17th I have an interesting assignment in Gujarat. I’ll tell you about it when we meet.

  * * *

  On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 10:23 PM, Reva Amre wrote:

  I’ve asked my boss for the 3rd and 4th of November off. I’ll bring a small plum cake, Aboli’s favourite (you know!) and a candle to light. She would have turned 34 this year, but one candle will have to be enough.

  Looking forward,

  Reva

  When they were little girls Reva and Aboli had lived on the tenth lane off Prabhat Road, Pune, in a cream house with a red floor. Its two storeys were flanked with wide verandahs, the rooms large and high-ceilinged.

  For Reva even now the house was like a cupboard that wouldn’t close. She tried to spring-clean her memories, with a light heart whenever possible, arranging the odds and ends, patting them down and shutting firmly the old doors. She would wedge remembered conversations like folded pieces of paper between them. Yet ragtag shadows and sounds spilled out. Impressions that were nearly three decades old still called to her … in her bed next to Tarun, sometimes travelling on a local train, or sitting on a beach in Mumbai, the city she now called home.

  When Aboli’s sister, her cousin Sharada, called up to say hello, Reva would put aside whatever she was doing to listen carefully to news about the family in Pune. She’d ask for every last detail. Their words rode on currents of shared history like Aboli’s hand-me-downs in whose pockets she’d find clues, forgotten treasures, a bead perhaps or a button. They were auguries to her of the fine line her family trod between the possibilities of the present and the disasters of tomorrow.

  Outside the front door of their house was a long, wide staircase that lent itself to a good game of Simon Says. When the ‘den’, one of her brothers or sisters called out ‘Simon Says, go in’, she’d run through the verandah and step through the white-painted wooden doors.

  Once in, the hall opened into large rooms with windows that were high and narrow. Mango and country almond trees sifted in patches of light like diamonds on a card pack. Within, they played cards at the night-long vigils of Janmashtami: games of Donkey, Rummy and Bluff, blue light on their plotting heads, rounded shadows on their crossed legs.

  To get to the ground floor from the first, they’d slide down the smooth cement banister that ran along the stairs. The bigger fellows landed on their feet with a triumphant bounce. Reva mostly tumbled into a clumsy squat halfway down.

  Once when she was eight, the oldest of her cousins, 14-year-old Sharada, concocted lime juice right in her trusting mouth. First Sharada had poured water in and then spiked it with lemon cordial. Reva stood there, gasping and crying, mouth agape, not knowing whether to spit or to swallow. Aboli at twelve had no such problems. She walked into the kitchen, sized up the situation, placed her hands on Reva’s shoulders and steered her to the back door.

  ‘Spit!’ she’d said.

  Reva still remembered the sudden spread of lemonade on mud, and her own indignant tears, Sharada’s peals of laughter and Aboli urging her away upstairs to her special place … the doll cupboard.

  It was stuffed with old and new baby dolls. Each doll had a name and whenever Aboli invited any of the children to play, they’d sit for hours combing back their straggly hair and applying their mothers’ talcum powder on their necks. Crooning over a baby doll, Reva smiled again. And Aboli skipped away, planning revenge on Sharada.

  Aboli and Sharada’s father, Manohar Amre, was the eldest of four brothers, all of whom lived with their parents and families in the bungalow on Prabhat Road. Or at least they had, until the death of Reva and Aboli’s paternal grandmother.

  Shortly after, the family’s daughters-in-law wanted their own kitchens and to raise their children as they willed. When a part of the family’s wholesale cloth business was sold, with the proceeds the three younger Amre brothers could afford to move. They departed, one by one, taking their wives and children to live in two-bedroom apartments. The children now had to make do with the
ir siblings, but met every month for raucous family get-togethers at the Prabhat Road house and occasionally for long drives to the nearby hill stations of Lonavla and Khandala.

  Aboli and Sharada stayed on in the old house with their parents and grandfather. It was a house too large for five people, and often, Aboli told Reva, she heard ghost voices of earlier times and louder games echoing in the large rooms. The house, spare and utilitarian while their grandmother was alive, began to fill up with ornate sofas, brass lamps and traditional paintings as Aboli’s mother’s taste took over.

  When Suveer came into Aboli’s life, their spaces expanded. Suveer and Aboli met in coffee shops and movie theatres and Reva was often allowed to tag along. But for Reva, home remained the old house with the light like diamonds and the endless possibilities of friendly conspiracies and savage jokes.

  2

  T

  he air at Nashik Station was chilly and smelt of railway fuel, grass and trees. Enclosed by a simple fence, the platform was nearly deserted at 10 pm. Only a tall man about a hundred metres down the platform, hands in his sweatshirt pockets, walking towards her. She knew he could see her as well as she could see him, but neither waved, both delaying the social moment. She was back with Aboli and Suveer at Vaishali, a popular café near Ferguson College.

  The place was all agleam in the yellow ceiling lights and bright bustle of collegians. Pav bhaji and dahi puri garnished with green coriander and seeds of crimson pomegranate had floated past on the waiters’ trays.

  Their conversation had flowed over her pigtailed head as she perched on a stool between them, content to pretend absence, licking at her vanilla ice cream. She noticed they didn’t eat much—why come to Vaishali if you didn’t want to eat? She noticed they held hands behind her—well, naturally they couldn’t eat. She needed one hand to hold the toppling bowl in place and one to scoop the ice cream up. Suveer had recorded a Sony cassette of love songs for Aboli … Carey, Summer of ‘69, Endless Summer Nights. Aboli had rewarded him with the gift of her fingers, brown eyes shining.

  ‘Hi,’ Suveer was by her side.

  ‘Hullo,’ Reva returned awkwardly.

  Suveer stooped to take her bag. ‘Jet lag?’ he asked, grinning. He read her well, guessed that she was walking the pathways of their past.

  Reva smiled. ‘My jet lagged by an hour,’ she nodded her head in the direction of the dusty train, beginning to move on now.

  ‘When did you get here?’ she asked for want of something to say.

  ‘A couple of hours ago.’

  They walked past a string of small eateries and hotels, the standard, low budget accommodation outside railway stations in every town. Suveer stopped at one which looked like it was clinging to respectability. He had checked them into two single rooms.

  ‘Sleep early,’ he said. ‘We’ll head to Gangapur Dam about six in the morning. I want to record some sounds while I’m here.’

  Her room had nothing to commend it but Reva didn’t care. She washed up, changed into a pair of loose shorts and a T-shirt and stretched out on the spartan cot. She took out her mobile and messaged Tarun: Reached Nashik. She had hardly set the phone down when his reply beeped: Have a good trip. Tarun always messaged politely back.

  She remembered how when they got married six years earlier, Tarun and she had been spontaneous and silly with each other. They’d had a hectic social life: movies, shopping, drinks and dinner, out every weekend with his many friends. But in the last couple of years, Reva had begun begging off these more and more. She had reverted to the quieter activities she’d pursued before Tarun came into her life, reading or taking a walk on the beach on her day off. Tarun seemed puzzled but obliged. They spent less time together, and made love about once in two weeks. She thought herself an unadventurous lover, but Tarun made no complaints. As for herself, she tried to be a contented wife.

  What would Aboli have thought of her relationship with Tarun? Aboli had advocated fiery love. She would devour Mills & Boon and Harlequin romances from the local library and tell Reva stories from them. She’d try to enact the kisses she was reading about, plastering the back of her own left hand with them, Reva giggling uncontrollably at her dramatics. When Aboli began seeing Suveer, the love stories stopped. She said nothing about the physical side of her relationship with Suveer but coloured prettily when he was by her side. Reva did not ask any questions.

  Tomorrow Suveer and she would take the memory of Aboli to the lake. There was so much she remembered, so many little sachets and packets, so many potlis and bundles. Why was it that there were none of her life in Mumbai? Why did she not want to store memories, take them out to look at? Why were there none marked Tarun? Was it simply …

  She pushed the thoughts away. Time to sleep. Time to get rid of her ‘jet lag’ as Suveer put it. She wondered what he was doing in the next room.

  ***

  Suveer was at his laptop editing sound for his most recent story on how much money micro-lenders actually made from lending to the poor. He’d recorded in a slum colony in Delhi whose residents had availed such loans, but ambient sounds mixed into these interviews had made parts of it inaudible. Suveer was creating noise profiles and erasing these.

  He set the files to render and went out into the tiny balcony adjoining his room for a smoke. Taurus was in ascendance. He thought about the first time he met Aboli. He was eighteen and she, seventeen years old. He was new in Pune, there to pursue a diploma in sound design. He was excited at living this far south of his hometown of Haldwani yet nervous of the Marathi language and big city culture he’d never experienced before.

  Suveer had spent six years at a boarding school in Almora in the hills. He’d played every sport he could, but had specialized in badminton, playing for the state when he was sixteen years old. As soon as he’d settled into the Film and Television Institute hostel, he asked around about where he could play.

  The PYC Hindu Gymkhana, a sports club about two kilometres away from his college, agreed to hire him as a part-time assistant coach. He would earn a paltry thousand rupees a month, but he’d have access to the courts: he could play in his off time, for free.

  The first weekend into his new job Suveer was asked to help out at the Pune Taluka matches for junior players.

  Sitting at a desk with a couple of others, Suveer entered the results of each match in the chart he’d been handed. Four matches at a time were being played and there was a great bustle of activity in the high-roofed hall. Everyone perspired in the humidity of a dissipated monsoon, still, Suveer liked being there.

  In the few minutes between making his notes, Suveer noticed Aboli playing a warm-up rally two courts away. Something in the way she moved reminded him of the women of his native state, Uttarakhand.

  He felt a wave of homesickness. He wondered if she was from the hills. He focused on his task and tried not to stare, but his eyes strayed often to the pretty girl with the smooth elegant movements of a cat.

  The girl twisted her ankle eight points into the game. An older sister, heavy-set and authoritative, helped her off the court. Barking her orders out in Marathi she sent a younger one scurrying to the kitchens for ice. Suveer realised that he’d been mistaken. The girls were local. Still, she was beautiful.

  Suveer was at Aboli’s side with the first-aid box the instant he got a breather from his task. The older sister was nowhere to be seen.

  Aboli was surprised at being approached by a strange boy. She had played at these courts before and didn’t remember him from her previous visits. She darted a glance at the door, but there was no sign of Sharada. Suveer could tell from the pinched look on her face that the ankle was hurting and that she was probably worried that she’d lost her chance to play the Taluka matches.

  ‘How is it?’ Suveer asked rather diffidently.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said.

  ‘Do you have a crepe bandage?’

  ‘In my bag.’ Her purple knapsack was a few feet away, propped against a trough for play
ers to keep their things. He fetched it for her and she rummaged for the bandage.

  When she’d found it he extended a hand. Aboli reluctantly gave it over. When Suveer knelt down by her yellow plastic chair, setting the First Aid box by his side, ‘I can do it myself,’ she protested.

  Still he bent over her left ankle and checked the swelling, comparing it to the normal-sized right. Reva, anxious and eager, arrived with cubes of ice in a plastic bag.

  Suveer applied the ice pack, cradling Aboli’s heel in his other hand. Despite the ache she was aware of his proximity. Otherwise shy around girls, his mind was on the extent of the injury. He felt sorry for her: she was definitely out of the tournament.

  ‘You’re good at hitting shots from the back court,’ he said, glancing up into her brown gaze. ‘You scored five out of eight points from there.’

  Aboli realised that he’d been watching her game, and her, quite closely. She could see by now that the hint of gentleness in his voice was empathy. She would have lost her temper if he’d commiserated with her. Instead she listened.

  ‘Once this heals, pay attention to your footwork. Consider positioning your base slightly nearer to the service fault line. It will give you an advantage.’

  Sharada came back and, without preamble, complained bitterly about all the trouble she’d had getting a cab driver to agree to transport them home. Then she bustled about instructing Reva on how to pack their sister’s things. Suveer deftly wound the crepe bandage around Aboli’s ankle.

  ‘I’m Suveer,’ he offered, clipping the end of the bandage in place.

  ‘Aboli Amre,’ she murmured, knowing Sharada would not approve. ‘Thank you for your help . . .’

  In the time it took for him to memorize a name so foreign to his tongue, she was hobbling away with Reva’s shoulder as support.

  She glanced back at him and caught the whiff of an emotion identical to her’s–surprise stirring and a sense of inevitability, first love for both.

  Around them umpires continued to call out scores, rackets connected with shuttlecocks with soft firm thwacks and shoes squeaked as their wearers danced across the wooden floors. None of these interrupted the wonder he felt.