Cool, Dark Place , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Supriya Dravid

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105 pages

English

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'The more I write, the more I revisit memory like this, putting pen to paper, ink to blood, the more the dots seem to connect, and the silences speak.'Following her faux father's suicide, Zephyr's life unravels into a shapeless tapestry woven in the ethanol-hand of her grandfather, Don-an amoral, sensual, manipulative bastard who's too clever for heaven and too deranged for hell. An alcoholic extraordinaire for whom the clock always struck quarter-past rum; for whom it was always just about the libidinous moment; a man with imperial swagger and disco-ball eyes; the super king of a vast empire of solitude, and permanent resident of his daughter's wounded heart, Don's actions shatter Zef's past into fragments of warring memories. Armed with only her blade of tears, she carves her way through a quagmire of dark, atavistic forces. A mother-daughter bond formed in the afterlife, memories stored in Ziploc bags, and the horrific struggle to piece together a past that's been through the shredder-A Cool, Dark Place is all of these plus the unsettling realization that one's life was ghost-written by two drunks.

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	08 août 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184004717
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright Supriya Dravid 2013
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184004717
For my father Shekhar Dravid who keeps my heart in the safest place (inside his). For my mothers Sukanya Dravid and Shampa Dhar-Kamath who taught me to always love more. (Because really, how do you love less?)
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Arjun Krishnan, my love, my life, my most compelling axis. For letting the light from your life reflect on to mine.
Binoo John for realizing that I had this book in me before I did.
Jiggy George for being a kind and patient reader who pulled me up if the plot was travelling without moving .
Divya, Mahima, MayaG, Neha, Shhiv and Shimauli, protectors of my sanity, my everyday heroes.
David Godwin, agent provocateur. For your faith in helping me map my way under this unfamiliar sky.
Meru Gokhale and Faiza Sultan Khan for their Olympian strength in shaping this book into what it is. For being the best and most perceptive editors a writer can hope for.
Appu, Arjun, Beulah, Chika, Faye, Mandy, Madhusree, Manjul, Maurya, Mika, Renate, Rick, Riju, RohanM, Shaalu, Shailesh, Sruthi and Tara for feeding me your stories, deep-fried love and support through the years.
The Kichus for making me one of their own.
And finally, Madras Thatha. For your lines, and for your life.
Thank you.
C HAPTER 1
Memory is a beautiful, generous thing. But it is also such a bastard. It is the contamination of the mind.
I read that line, the only line, in my father s suicide note.
My father s death came two weeks before I was supposed to start university. One year, three months, twenty-seven days ago.
We were your average family, close-knit and a little cuckoo. But then two years ago, my father s twin sister (younger by 3.25 minutes) killed herself by jumping off a building, and the year before that my father s older brother returned from a wedding lunch, went to bed and never woke up. No one even realized that he had been dead for ten hours until the family pets surrounded him and started wailing. And just as our family grappled with that sadness, my father made it easy for himself by exiting this world. We weren t even a political dynasty. It had to be a family curse; there was no other logical explanation.
At his funeral I heard my grandmother whisper to my grandfather that she had cried so much in the past two years that there was no salt left in her tears. But a fresh batch of tears started all over again. Her universe had been hijacked. My grandfather didn t respond. He just stood there, his face hollow with helplessness, fighting gravity to stay standing. I was convinced that his purple, mute soul had left him in permanent disgust. All the emotion had drained off his face, and his soft, kindly features had hardened. The folds on his face had multiplied so quickly in the last three years. The book of life implies teaching children to fly from under the wings of their parents, to learn to survive without them, but how do you teach parents to survive without their children?
There were no speeches. A priest, organized by my grandmother, was conducting the token rituals that precede the departure of the dead by burning them on the ground to send them skywards. He was mumbling some prayers in Sanskrit without opening his mouth properly; enunciating the words in a metronomic drone that occasionally rose to a high pitch like a steam liner announcing its presence on rocky seas. He wore only a dhoti and a sacred thread around his untrimmed chest, which was so hairy that it looked like he was wearing a black sweater. The little knotted ponytail at the back of his head bobbed up and down. I remember staring at him wondering if he was okay, considering he was drenched in rain, or sweat. Or both.
At some point my mother interrupted the prayers by stepping forward to caress my father s face as he lay in front of us. I didn t stop her. No one did. She tried to open his eyes, which had been stitched shut haphazardly with a black thread. I wondered what had gone through the mind of the person who had sewn my father s eyes up, the same eyes that would never see me grow up. Perhaps my mother thought that if she stared hard at my father s face he would come back to life. She held him in her arms, and looked at me with a panic-stricken face and said, Zef, I can t remember his laugh the sound. Do you know how it went?
I said nothing.
My father wasn t just the love of my mother s life. He was her heartbeat, a beat that she would never replace.
My mother was trying to stalk her memory. She placed her jaw against his collarbone. She kissed him hungrily, hoping that he might wake up. But what use are kisses to the dead? She kept mumbling that my father, Gravy, a man with one-and-a-half eyebrows, ran away with her words, and her world. Eventually, my grandmother enveloped my mother with her frail, parched, crooked black hands, so that the rituals could be completed. Everything had to be done by noon. The priest continued chanting like a robot, from the same point at which my mother had interrupted him. He must have been used to the outbursts of madness that the dead bring among those who are left behind.
This would be the last time I would see my father. I stared at his still, preoccupied face and tried desperately and hurriedly to memorize everything about it-the stamp of startled confusion, the exact placement of the mole under his right eye, the bald patch of skin next to half of his left eyebrow, his dishevelled hair; how his earring clung to his right earlobe; how his thick cheeks hung low with anguish; his lips pursed in an upside-down smile. I tried to pray that time would never bend this image of his face in my mind. I placed his favourite book of Marathi short stories by P.L. Deshpande next to him, the one that he read repeatedly for several years while he ate his meals. But I think it was also the book he unconsciously stopped reading some time ago, because he decided that he didn t really want or need to laugh any more. Perhaps I hoped the book might make him smile a little in his other life. I also put his snuff box between his hands.
I played with the idea of reconstructing bits of my father like a life-sized doll with a heartbeat. It consumed me with its hypothetical optimism. But then there was the reality of what was happening in front of me. The rituals seemed to take forever. I didn t complain. I didn t want it to end, because then my father would be gone with no tangible trace. Soon my world would be ablaze, and there was no one who could salvage me. I was trying to see his form in the smoke that arose from his funeral pyre, but it kept changing, kept charring. What was the point of seeing his life downsized to ash in an urn? What was the point in anything any more? My father s death just burned my heart. I lost the only man in my life who had promised to love me more than any other man, and who loved me more than anyone could possibly love me. It was a love that could not be touched.
My mother and I left soon after the funeral, scurrying under the weak, scrawny sunlight like a couple of old bats, rushing as though to some pressing engagement. We hurried home with eager eyes, almost expecting him to be there. We were fooling ourselves into believing that the man we had just sent into the wild stretch of unruly fire-to be free?-was his doppelganger, a twin ghost, as though all of this was just another bad dream. Neither of us exchanged so much as a glance, but we both knew what we secretly wanted. It was so stupid but you couldn t argue with us then. It was only when the empty room slapped us in the face that we realized the truth of what we didn t want to confront. Now we were left with nothing but Hitchcockian memories of him-some happy, some silly, but mostly of his spiralling into the descent of doom.

For a long time before my father ended his life, he d hidden himself in the darkness. So my mother had hidden there with him, in the forlorn shadow of his helium heart, in the never-ending nuclear light, under sunken iron beds and love-sewn quilts. I think she hoped her Olympic tolerance would help him map his way back to the living, and destroy the lonely world, the Prozac paradise he had cocooned himself in. But it didn t help. She became an exhausted lady with an unpleasant husband to tolerate.
My father had a mental problem which seemed to have burgled his rational brain. First he dyed our beautiful brown dogs purple and pink. Then he said that the dogs were staring at him, and he didn t like it. Then he worried that they had turned into jackals in the night and were out for his blood. So one day when my mother and I were out, he took the dogs and disposed of them somewhere. I never did find out what the true story was. He said he had cremated them, and gave us a phony number where he took them to get cremated, and when that didn t add up, he said he drove them to a busy market area and tied them to a lamp post and returned home. He told me he would kill himself if I told my mother. This was not the normal behaviour of a sane human being.
On the face of it we seemed like a loving family. That was before the sinister undercurrents started sucking us all into some kind of sequence of synch