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Love Is So Cruel by Subroto Mukerji

It was a bear. A huge, cuddly, ridiculous teddy bear made of synthetic
tiger-skin. It was pretty heavy. So was the price on the tag. But he bought it
for her anyway. He’d actually gone to the book-shop to buy himself a copy
of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ He’d asked her
several times to lend it to him or borrow a copy for him from one of her
friends. She was a great reader and had many sources for books. But she
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wasn’t interested in his request. She’d promised, not once but twice, to lend
him her copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. But she hadn’t. Either she didn’t
remember or she didn’t care. After some time, he stopped asking. Perhaps
she wanted that…

She never gave him anything, not a birthday card, not even a safety
pin to remember her by. Many times he’d thought of asking her for a
‘favour’ to wear, like a brooch, as knights of old wore the ‘favours’ of their
ladies! But prudence dictated silence. In any event, she refused to accept
the teddy and handed it back to him. She apologized, but said she just
couldn’t accept the gift.

He was bewildered. It hadn’t been such a big thing for him. He now
sensed he’d made a faux pas. His common sense belatedly told him that a
teddy was, in the lexicon of the young, a symbol of love. If accepted, it was
a signal that the feelings were reciprocated. He was crushed, both by the
events as well as his interpretation of her reaction.

She had been instrumental in pulling him out of a major depression in

the past, had befriended him, coaxed and bullied him till he had rallied. It
was she who prodded him back to life, earning his eternal love and loyalty.
Now she was withdrawing, perhaps tired of him and his eccentric ways. She
no longer cared (he realized with resignation) whether or not he minded her
obvious disinterest, her withdrawal. He didn’t figure anywhere in her
calculations. Not any more. Not after she’d rehabilitated him. Provoked him
to shed his inertia, start painting again…

She inspired him, but now she was too busy having a good time with
her friends and shaping her future. He missed her company acutely. The
cure had turned out to be worse than the disease. The withdrawal
symptoms were agonizing…

When he’d met her a year earlier, she really hadn’t registered. He’d
formed a vague impression of a girl who dressed quietly, used make-up
unobtrusively and was immersed in her work. The hand-knitted woolen
socks she wore with open sandals were rather incongruous. They made her
look a bit dowdy, even old-maidish, he’d concluded reluctantly. She played
herself down, kept a low profile. A survivor…

But she was possessed of a certain native intelligence and spirit, things
he valued higher than mere looks, and he watched with delight as she
emerged from her self-imposed obscurity, came out of her shell. He painted
little vignettes for her, extolled her genuine virtues. She was unreceptive,
apparently unused to male admiration of this intensity. He couldn’t stop,
helpless before his grand emotion. She struggled gamely to retain her
composure, to cope with the tide of sincere compliments he sent her way.
She modestly shrugged off his tributes, suspicious of his motives …

The blowback was that his awareness of her snowballed. She grew on
him. Contrary to his first impression, she was emancipated as far as her
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thought processes went (he wasn’t aware if it went any further), and she
wasn't exactly averse to cracking risqué jokes and using four-letter
cusswords. He found it stimulating, the sexually-liberated image she so
proudly, aggressively projected, but put it down to the rebelliousness of
youth. He was a good twenty-odd years older than her…

Then spring came, and he asked her whether the season would see her
break into a riot of colour. She replied with balance and composure. Or did
she dislike being anticipated? She was down-to-earth, she claimed, and
preferred the pastel, earthy tints that really suited her personality. He was
skeptical. He had seen through her façade, seen the rage to live she kept
hidden deep within her. A cautious one, a secretive one, a canny little
street-fighter…

He’d pierced the barrier of her disguise, looked past the simple clothes
and the severe bun in which she tied her hair. He saw her with his heart,
saw her as she really was. She was beautiful to his inner eye. Very beautiful.
He loved the timeless splendor of Eve that was in her. She saw what he saw,
now. Knew that she was beautiful beneath the plain-Jane persona she’d
adopted as her disguise. Possessed of peerless beauty…

Then her parents were transferred, and she had to live on her own, for
the first time in her life. She was free, more so than she had ever been in
her life…

What flower, what woman, doesn’t react to the sun and the seasons, to
the magic touch of spring? She was a woman, an earthy, sensuous woman
with all the natural appetites of the young and unfulfilled, and she
responded to the call in her blood. She exploded in a riot of colour. Not all at
once, but very gradually.

First, she got her hair styled, so that it fell in steps, in dark waves of
studied confusion around her oval face and slim shoulders. Then she got
herself some trendy clothes that at last did justice to her full, rounded figure
with the mature, alluring curves. She changed before his very eyes…

She had her eyebrows plucked to accentuate the beauty of her lovely
brown eyes, and she turned out to have a natural talent for applying blush-
on and lipstick. This last was fortunate, for to do justice to the sheer sorcery
of her high cheek-bones, her wide, generous, curvaceous lips, was not a
task for the clumsy. She used lipstick like Rembrandt van Rijn used his oils.
It was perfect for her. She metamorphosed into a femme fatale…

By mid-summer, the transformation was complete. She had gone from

larva to pupa to a glamorous, glittering butterfly that ‘put the entire
garrison to the sword’, as he’d observed admiringly. She came from behind,
from the obscurity of the pack, and left them all tossing helplessly in her
wake. The ‘ugly duckling’ had become a swan. He’d spotted a winner.
Perhaps even made one…
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Fat lot of good it did him. She’d turned the tables on him. Now that he
was in the queue, a mere supplicant, a sun-worshipper. She doled out her
friendship in condescendingly miniscule doses, making sure he appreciated
the favour she was doing by sparing time for him. The more he told her
about himself, the more the distance between them increased. He had
unmasked himself to her as a symbol of supreme trust.

It was a mistake. It robbed him of the element of mystery. Whatever

fascination he might have had for her was diluted. But he was besotted of
her, emotionally dependent, and therefore totally at her mercy. She toyed
with him, it seemed. Some days, she was affectionate and encouraging, and
it was during these phases that he was at his best. He worked like a man
possessed…

On other days, however, she derided him, insulted him, and hurt him.
He was helpless before her mockery. She realized her power over him and
savaged him at every opportunity. He had become her punching bag, the
outlet for her own little disappointments and tensions (which he could sense
but which she kept carefully hidden away from him).

She no longer confided in him as she had done early on in their

relationship. The more she avoided him, the more eager he became to
cultivate her friendship. She was having the time of her life; men flocked to
her, and she had a hectic social life. He could tell; he was psychic. He didn’t
blame men for being attracted to her. She was a magnet for testosterone…

She threw him a few crumbs occasionally to keep his interest alive, but
every now and then she delivered a broadside that sent him into acute
depression. She had the capacity to inspire him to surpass himself, and this
she did in full measure. She was noncommittal about his output (he sensed
intuitively that some of it went down well with her), rarely acknowledging it,
and then, grudgingly.

She derided his adulation of her, taunted him for his gentle, poetic
admiration of her timeless beauty and her myriad positive qualities. She felt
he was sycophantic to a fault. She didn’t realize he couldn’t help it any more
than the moth can stay away from the flame. He failed to choke off his
emotions…

She no longer found him interesting. Perhaps his unexpected shift of

focus had unnerved her, put her off. Or maybe she was hard on him to spare
him ultimate pain and disillusionment when she got married. She had hinted
to him many times that she was thinking very seriously of marriage.

He burned with a helpless envy, hating the man who would win her
hand and possess her, body and mind. There was nothing he could about it.
Spring and autumn make poor bedfellows without unlimited cash to sweeten
the mixture. He was penniless now. Despair overwhelmed him. The only
woman he had ever loved…
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He decided to opt out. Quit. Spell finis. Life had become such a burden,
such a source of misery. He who had never touched a drop now took to
alcohol as if brought up on it. He wanted to do it slowly, gradually, wanted
to destroy by degrees the treacherous brain and the healthy body that had
led him into so much unhappiness. He had residual responsibilities to
discharge, and it wouldn’t do to end it all abruptly. Every evening, he hit the
bars, and staggered home when they closed at 11 PM. Behind his back, they
called him ‘The Sundown Kid’…

He caught up with all the authors he had wanted to read but had saved
up for later. He read them as his mind and body slowly disintegrated, James
Joyce and James Jones, Robert Pirsig and Jonathan Bach, Einstein and
Aristotle, Adolf Hitler and Lewis Carroll, Geoffrey Chew and Werner
Heisenberg, Don Juan, the Yaqui mystic, and Carlos Castaneda.

He read the Bhagawad Gita and Yogananda continuously; he pored

over the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ and the Chinese I Ching. He read every
book he could find on death, karma and reincarnation. He studied Zen and
Tao. He had a game-plan, a strategy that he pursued doggedly to the death
(Ha! Ha!). She had once told him that his resilience was awesome: it wasn’t,
really, but his determination was. He had a plan…

He was aiming himself back to her in a colossal cosmic loop,

programming himself to return to her after traversing the void...in his next
life. He wanted to spend all eternity with her, and no other. The next time
around, he wanted her to love him unconditionally, selflessly. He wanted her
love to enslave her.
He wanted to be the centre of her universe. He wanted her to know
what it meant to love as deeply as he loved her, to know what the misery of
rejection felt like. He wanted her to learn the value of true love. He would
repay every insult, every slight, every put down she had inflicted on him. He
would spurn, decline, deny, mock, wound, humiliate, and crucify. He would
teach her a lesson by enslaving her with her own love…

All his reading, all his meditation, all his consultations with masters of
the occult was geared towards this objective. If his resilience was awesome,
his determination to accomplish something once he’d made up his mind was
even more so. He’d go to the ends of the earth to finish what he’d started.
But it looked as if he’d have to travel all the way to eternity and back to get
this job done.

One by one, he unraveled the arcane secrets…

The woman was in labour. Her water bag had burst in the car and by
the time they’d wheeled her into the delivery room she was in agony. She
sweated and screamed. Her heavy, bloated body convulsed as the spasms
came with increasing frequency. The baby moved reluctantly down the birth
canal. It was happy with its umbilical existence, the dark comfort and
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security of his mother’s warm body, the soothing sound of her heartbeat. It
had grown accustomed to the liquid rumbles and flushing of her intestines.
Now powerful muscular contractions were thrusting it out inexorably into a
world it didn’t trust, didn’t need. But it was necessary, it reminded itself. It
had things to do...
*

She was ecstatic. She loved the tiny morsel of life that had emerged
from her body, loved him more than life itself. He was flesh and blood of
her, meant more to her than sun, moon, and a sky full of stars. Her whole
life revolved around that of her infant son. He belonged to her alone!

Her husband, the one who’d planted the seed in her, was relegated into
the background, redundant. She’d got what she craved: a son! Got him
legally and within society’s ethical framework, too. Many had loved her, but
she knew instinctively when the right man had come along, how, she didn’t
quite understand. She just knew. And she had allowed his frantic seed to
reach the egg pulsing softly in her womb…

How he hated her. He couldn’t stand her stringy hair, her lumpy figure,
and the vacuous smile that she seemed to reserve for him alone. He learned
to dodge her in the morning, to walk past her even when she tried to waylay
him. He hated her taste in clothes, her use of garish make-up, her cloying
affection. She became the target for his ridicule, his taunts, his put downs.
He humiliated her at every opportunity, amazed that she absorbed it
bravely and came back for more.

She just refused to believe that he despised her. He loathed her face,
her pea brain, her idle chatter, her clumsy attempts to grab his attention. If
she cooked something special for him, he fed it to the dog. He crucified her
in front of her friends. She didn’t punish him…

She told him she loved him more than anyone else in the world. He told
her he hated her, and would she please leave him alone? She waited for him
on his doorstep when he came home evenings just to have a word with him
before he disappeared inside. He found this habit of hers vastly irritating.
She slipped little chits for him under the door that he never acknowledged.
She bought him sweets, chocolates, teddy bears and books. He bartered
them for sports gear or other stuff he needed. Really, the female was a pain.

Why couldn’t she be just a bit like the extraordinary woman he adored,
he mused, the only soul in the entire universe whom he really cared about.
He was obsessed— possessed. It was strange, the way he was drawn to her
like a moth to a flame. But on rare occasions, an inner tocsin sounded to
warn him that something was wrong…that he’d botched it.

There was an uneasiness lurking somewhere at the back of his mind

that she’d somehow managed to turn the tables on him, how or why he
couldn’t for the life of him figure out. Sometimes, he’d have even sworn she
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was toying with him, manipulating him, humouring him. At times like these,
he thought he could hear the gods, laughing…

Why couldn’t that stupid girl next door be just a bit like his dazzling
mother?

 Subroto Mukerji 

‘Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, our
one duty is to furnish it well.’

-Peter Ustinov, actor, writer and director (1921-2004)