Love and Dr. Aiyar

CHAPTER ONE

He looked at the drawing lying on his desk, put there by one of his grandsons. It was of a ship and young Ramu had captioned it: ‘this is a ship sailing along, it does not know where. Soon it will be shipwrecked and everything will go down into a cold dark sea.’

Dr Aiyar smiled grimly and without amusement; it could be a metaphor for the predicament in which he now found himself and he cast the drawing aside with an impatient exclamation.

‘Why should the elderly feel foolish because they have emotions? Do those emotions belong solely to the young?’ Dr Aiyar spoke aloud and his voice was bitter. He looked at himself in the mirror and frowned, not liking what he saw, a fifty seven year old man whose next birthday loomed. He did not need to look closer to see the grey hair, the sagging belly, although he told himself hastily, pulling in his stomach, standing very tall, that he was in good shape.

Yes, replied his other self mockingly, for your age, well preserved, like some kind of mango pickle. Nobody, not even Sita his wife, certainly not Kalpana his youngest daughter, understood that age is only an exterior, a physical thing; that inside oneself the clock stopped after maturity. Time passes, of course, but as someone had said, one’s own private and personal metamorphosis is not visible to oneself, except as a sudden blinding flash that is always a shock.

As it was now to Dr Aiyar, as it was when he looked in the mirror and when he saw himself as others saw him, not with his own inner eye, certainly not the reflection he had seen in Aruna’s eyes.

He had overheard his wife and Kalpana, his daughter, talking together. They had not known that he was in the house; he smiled wryly as he thought that it was true, eavesdroppers rarely hear anything good about themselves. Kalpana had been almost in tears, of anger rather than sorrow, at the thought that her father (an old man in her eyes) could even think of love, to her a rude word when applied to anyone not in their twenties. Sita had spoken more tolerantly of understanding, but what was it that had to be understood? Did he, had he, ever ‘loved’ Aruna Das in the way they meant? Had he perhaps only been flattered (as so many older men were) that a younger woman could find them of interest, worthy of love, at a time when everything, all the good things of youth, seemed to be ending? ‘One IS flattered, there is no doubt about it, when a younger woman seems to find one attractive. That’s human nature after all. And why should this be wrong? I have done nothing to hurt anybody, cannot two people of the opposite sex be friends?’ he thought defiantly. Then his shoulders sagged and he put his face in his hands.

Like a squirrel in a cage seeking escape, Aiyar’s mind worked incessantly, trying to come to terms with his circumstances. Circumstances which people would say (and all his colleagues, his children, would agree) were entirely of his own making, but no less bitter for that. He had been foolish, indiscreet, not taken into account his enemies in the university waiting to make capital out of his mistakes.

Now, what lay ahead but old age? If, as seemed likely, he was forced to retire, he would be virtually thrown on life’s scrap heap. Old age, he had been brought up to believe, was a wonderful golden time of maturity and wisdom, a time to rest from struggle, a time of achievement. Yet, old age was something he had always regarded as alien, a foreign species. Other people grew old, not golden lads and lasses, not he. However, it seemed now as if the stealthy thief of time had crept up on him and taken him unawares. His friendship (yes, he insisted on that word) with Aruna Das was being turned into an illicit liaison, the more disgraceful because he was no longer young, a man in his fifties. He had seen the prurient gleam in his assistant’s eyes when he reported the taking of Aruna’s letters from Aiyar’s desk drawer.

Aiyar knew he was middleaged, (he shied away from the word ‘elderly’, (that was not him at all) but it had not seemed to matter, not with Aruna; she had looked up to him, certainly, but she had also treated him as a man and a man in his prime. As some of his female students did . . .

Not everyone, it seemed, saw him that way . . . not his daughter and not his colleagues and in their separate ways they seemed determined to punish him. As, no doubt, his wife Sita would too; she least of all, could be expected to understand. No doubt she had been told by everyone, including the children, that he had been misbehaving in her absence; he could almost hear them saying it: while the cat is away, the mice will play. Wasn’t that what that woman, Hema Sundaram had tried to suggest to Sita? He winced at the cliche, it was all so predictable, so commonplace and yet, it had not been like that at all. But could Sita be expected to understand that? He very much doubted it.

He admitted he had been a fool, that he had been indiscreet, that he should never have let Aruna write those letters and having written them, he should not have kept them, in a locked drawer, true, but one to which his personal assistant also had access. All true enough, but he felt bitter because it seemed that life had been unfair to him, to men like him, men of his generation, denied so much that younger men took for granted, opportunity of every kind.

CHAPTER TWO

Dr Aiyar had been born into a poor but scholarly Brahmin family and he had grown up well versed in Sanskrit, able to recite slokas almost as today’s young people sing pop songs. It had been a traditional family with its emphasis on religion and education. His father always had with him one or two students who lived with the family in the old Brahminical tradition of the gurukulas. Some of these boys were trained to become priests. However, despite a sacerdotal tradition that required one son to be ordained a priest, Aiyar had not, largely because his ambitious and strong mother had decreed otherwise, but also because his own inclinations lay elsewhere. Aiyar’s father had been disappointed but had bowed to his wife’s will, to his son’s ambition and the financial necessity of his large family.

Dr Aiyar was the descendant of a long line of priests and their shades, he said later, half joking, had stood always at his shoulder preventing him from doing all that was pleasurable, easy, what other people seemed able to do without turning a hair.

Like adultery? There was that mocking inner voice again. He couldn’t even use an ordinary word like ‘love’, a harmless phrase like ‘having fun’. There had not been much fun, fun for its own sake, in his life. Everything in his life had always been serious; when he had been young there had never been time for having fun, no room for that other strange phrase, ‘hanky-panky.’ He recalled his student days, what many people thought of as the happiest days of one’s life. Aiyar had been desperately poor with no money for the things other students enjoyed such as cinemas, restaurants, new clothes, travel. He had subsisted on a meagre diet of watery sambaar and rice and had spent the little money he could muster on buying precious books, never taking a bus if he could walk, turning his collars and cuffs rather than buy a new shirt. In the process, he had taught himself to sew and often said to his children that the mother of inventiveness was economic necessity.

There had been many times in his life when he had been young when he might have had fun, the opportunity was always there, just out of his reach. It had never been possible because he had married early and had to work hard for his family: sisters and brothers, wife and children. Then there had been the legacy of the agraharam in which he had grown up, a brahmin ghetto, dedicated to orthodoxy and conservatism. Now, as he approached his sixties, it seemed that life had suddenly telescoped and there seemed such a few short years left before inevitable death. Old age that had once loitered far ahead, then had loomed menacingly in the mist, now seemed to him to be almost face to face. And now he asked himself, as others had done before him, ‘can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?’ He could not accustom himself to growing old, to the idea that the sand was running down in the hourglass. As a lover of literature and an academic, Dr Aiyar was in the habit of thinking in quotations. That was why he loved the daily crossword which he did punctiliously, consulting the Thesaurus and his collections of poetry to solve the clues.

Dr Aiyar’s parents being poor, he had been what was known as a ‘scholarship boy’, educated out of public bursaries. Very early in his life he had decided that he wanted to go to Oxford for higher education although he knew that the money for this was not available. He remembered how he had repined and been bitter until his practical and indomitable mother had come to his rescue as she always had, in the only way she could. Son, she said, I know what to do. You leave it to me.

Foregoing the custom of their community which dictated that he should marry a sister’s daughter, she had arranged his marriage with Sita, because while no branch of their family was wealthy, Sita had a rich father who could be prevailed upon to send Aiyar to Oxford. Sita’s father did so, supposing that his son-in-law would return to join the family business and he was allowed by young Aiyar’s parents to suppose so, although they well knew that their son had no intention of ever going into business and certainly not with his father-in-law whom he rather despised as having wealth but no culture. Aiyar had known of this little deception and had colluded in it.

Aiyar wanted to learn and he wanted to teach, but he wisely kept this ambition to himself because Krishna Iyer, his wife’s father, would never have agreed to invest in a scholar. Everyone knew that the rewards of an academic life were not pecuniary and Krishna Iyer, although he respected scholarship as an abstract thing, would not have wanted any of his daughters married to men who earned their living as scholars. He would certainly not have paid for Aiyar to go to Oxford had he known the truth, for while he enjoyed the idea of a foreign returned son-in-law, he had not intended him to become a teacher and that was what he always called Aiyar. Professor shofessor, what it comes down to is that he is a college teacher earning little or nothing, he said contemptuously.

When he had found out Aiyar’s real intention, it had caused a rift between him and his son-in-law that had never been fully bridged. Much later, Krishna Iyer was wont to say: I am surprised he did not become one of those revolutionaries who joined the freedom struggle, threw bombs at the British and went to prison, leaving his family to starve. Clearly, to him, the academic life was as irresponsible a thing for a householder to do as being a revolutionary. In fact, Aiyar never took anything other than the abstract interest of a bystander in the freedom struggle, being a completely a-political person. Although he admired and respected Gandhi’s non-violent stance, he knew that there had to be a certain amount of violence (you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs) of one type or another and he felt himself incapable of this. Besides, with the responsibilities of a large family on his shoulders he had from an early age to earn his living and he could not do that if he were sitting in jail.

Aiyar and Sita had been married with pomp and splendour, the ceremonies paid for by the bride’s father; the bride was barely fifteen and the groom just twenty ( B.A first class, first in the university) but no one thought that was too young to get married, to start a family. It was how things were done among the orthodox Brahmins of south India at that time, mere children married and this was reflected in the marriage ceremony where the bride sat in her father’s lap. Aiyar did not dwell on that other quaint Iyer marriage custom which placed a symbolic yoke on the bride’s shoulders. He smiled wryly, for in his opinion it was he who had been yoked like a draught animal to his family.

As for Sita, she had felt hurt because she knew her wedding was not half as grand as that of her sister who had married into a family of wealth and substance. At the marriage of Sita and Aiyar, diamond and gold studded relatives, preening themselves in their heavy Kanchipuram silks had sighed and said: Poor girl, she will have a hard time of it. The boy is the eldest in a large family with neither money nor land, poor Sita is in for a life of hardship.

Aiyar, too, had been aware of his in-laws’ contumely, that they looked down upon his parents and other relatives whose wedding finery was completely overshadowed, whose conversation contained no references to successful deals, in land or in goods, or the purchase of some special jewellery. Aiyar never forgot it and he was never thereafter really comfortable with any of his wife’s relatives and could not, when Gopi went to work in the maternal business, comprehend his only son’s closeness to these relatives.

There was enough time before Aiyar left for Oxford for the marriage to be consummated, for Sita to become pregnant and the baby, Parasram, to be born. While Aiyar prepared for his departure to Oxford, his every thought on the exciting future that lay ahead, the baby took sick and in a few short days was dead. Sita grieved inconsolably and was not comforted. Her young husband with his eyes on the future, could not enter into her grief for a baby he had not known and if the truth were told, had not particularly wanted. Other children had been born after he returned from Oxford and if he had long since forgotten that small first-born it was doubtful if Sita ever had. Aiyar had to admit that he had been impatient then as he was now of her