Authors: Kishore Modak
That afternoon, I
called the airline and reconfirmed my travel plans back to London. At
the pharmacy, I produced an old prescription and got some more
sedatives. I visited a few dispensaries before I thought I had
enough.
At the ISKCON, I made a
substantial offering, commensurate with the extended stay that I had
enjoyed there. I sat down with the caretaker for dinner, a vegetarian
one, a satisfying one. The priest- cum-keeper, he never once became
inquisitive or even hinted at wanting to know the root of my
travails. I told him I would leave on the following day and he simply
wished me the best.
That night, I read and
re-read this manuscript, correcting and polishing it like a
fastidious author. I would finish it on the flight back home.
Manuscripts are never
finished; they are simply mailed, as best as they are, which is
infinite, since they encompass a person, naked and revealing for
others to judge—mostly harshly, because one cannot accept
another without doubt and ego.
At the terminal, I
arrived well before my flight was scheduled. At the check-in counter,
I asked for a window seat and an upgrade to business class, ensuring
that I could buy and use a broadband connection while on my way to
London. All was in order.
After boarding, I asked
for champagne and booted my computer as soon as I possibly could,
completing the last bits of this journal.
With the first sip of
champagne I also popped a sedative, asking for my glass to be
replenished almost continuously, taking a pill with each glass, like
a champagne cocktail.
I thought I forgot to
run a spell check.
After dinner, I felt
groggy, nodding, but not before emailing this journal to my son, to
Eve, to Officer Joe Brown, to Mary and to my lawyers in London.
Weary and tired, I gave
up, knowing now that children with troubled childhoods don’t .
. . grow up just fine.
Eve Costello
T
he
pr
oblems posed by the inadequacy of money were well
managed, for a person for my age, thirty-three, through a few
fortuitous investments and eventually the inheritance that fell upon
me.
She had died on the
flight back to London, my landlord’s mother, mailing me her
journal, which I ignored for many days. I thought it natural not to
become inquisitive about a life that was not linked with mine;
moreover, it was a lengthy scream and simply languished on my
computer. I had moved on well and forward, confident than ever
before, that I was no longer a work-in-progress. I was complete and
enough for the closest association in my life to be taken in by the
new
m
e
, my landlord’s mother.
Naturalness, or being
oneself, it crumbles as soon as you think about being yourself,
measuring what is and what is not natural, before acting, leaving a
constant doubt as regards the nature of actions is concerned. I had
conquered that battle, and stood just a step from a complete
transition, till I was forced to read that email, and its shattering
contents, as far as I went.
What triggered it, I
mean the reading of that email? It was the inheritance, and its
communication, by the lawyers from London, who refused to be taken in
by me and my new beautiful self. They bludgeoned with a force that is
unimaginable for simple words to create over a phone line, a force
that set me back-a-ways, as far as the journey of
m
e
was concerned.
Words like ‘We
wish, you’d please cooperate, all we want is for you,
Ja
y
,
to accept the assets and the sum that is rightfully yours and then we
can all move on.’
When I grew stubborn,
refusing to acknowledge that it was
Ja
y
, on my end of
the phone line, they sent their representatives to see me, from their
New York office. When I refused to see them, they got the police
involved, who came with lawyers and settled in the couches of my
living room.
Naked, that is what it
felt like, when men peer away at any exposed inch of skin on your
body or the breasts on your chest, searching for bristly body hair
and the trueness of nipples beneath the clothes that cover you,
knowing well, that they are looking at a man who has chosen, and
dared to become a woman. That morning, I had dressed carefully in
jeans and a sleeved T-shirt, tying my hair up, ready to conduct the
business at hand, the business of inheritance. They would joke,
raunchy and raucous, when they brought me up over drinks, leering
about my sexiness, and how they could never get themselves to have
sex with me, no matter how sexy I now was; after all deep inside they
knew I was a man.
Deep inside, was I
still a man?
I did not blame them,
thinking the way they did, knowing what they knew, because in their
own exterior demeanour they were suited and business- like, males,
explaining the paperwork, collecting information and concluding with
signatures. It would be at the bar, later that evening, that the
bringing up of the strange case of the Kettlewood inheritance would
become inevitable, dwelling on the detail of the beneficiary’s
sex, a detail which would grow vivid and raucous with each drink.
When they left, I felt
completely humiliated, hating her for not letting me be, when all I
wanted was to be left alone. She had pulled me back to the hell I had
escaped from, forcing me to face what I had left far behind, my ugly,
grotesque maleness. In the present, yet well back-a-ways, as Jay, I
sat down and opened her email, reading it over and over for a few
days, hating her for having done what she did, as regards her final
attempt at murdering me was concerned.
I knew if I stopped the
medication, hints of a stubble would return in a few days, and before
weeks, I would become a eunuch.
My mother had failed in
keeping her home and her marriage straight; she could not keep a
husband satisfied or a child safe in the space of her home. If you
have any sympathy for her, I will not forgive you, because her
journal, the one you may have read, like all arguments is vehement
and one-sided, meant to create a martyr of an old woman, where only a
failed wife and a heartless mother walked.
She thought that I
never grew up to be a man and remained the bastard in the family,
no
mo
r
e
a
ma
n
tha
n
I
wa
s
a
t
fourtee
n
. Why, because I refused to acknowledge or
adopt the son that I had borne with her domestic maid, the one whom
she left me with, while she headed to the club for drinks and the
perverse merriment that followed afterwards.
In large part, my
sexual failure is because she chose to let things be, not speaking
about or helping with what got bottled inside a child’s mind.
She should have helped me open up, when she could, by becoming
maternal and delving into the convolution of folds that a corrupted
child’s mind turns itself into. Instead, she got me educated
and settled me on Wall Street, sleeping easy, imagining that all had
worked well.
In some ways it
ha
d
worked out well, all up to the point she fired that email to the lot
of us before dying, pulling me back to the madness of my past life,
one that I had forgotten and left behind, believe me with infinite
effort and resolve, as I built a new one. It had seemed silly,
chasing the impossible dream of becoming a woman; but, when I did get
there, it was ridiculously satisfying.
The guilt of
semi-raping the maid, at gunpoint, remained with me through all the
years of my past life. The images of a fourteen-year-old, gun in
hand, kept flooding back, intense and alive, each time I made love or
lusted for women. Sex, at least as a male, became a game of trying
and conquering that guilt, subduing the violence that I had unleashed
when I was fourteen. My maleness was a complete failure; it remained
a sin, one that I thought could be wiped and cleansed, by leading a
female life for the rest of my days, accepting as punishment what I
may have burned and looted through the pleasures of a male past.
It was the right thing
to do, but now she had ruined it, leaving me pacing my place,
sometimes for hours, before my fumbling-uncertain hands reached for
the pills that helped me remain a woman each day.
No matter what I did, I
could not get back with her anymore, since she was the first to dream
upon the discovery of a larger plan, that of killing oneself. With
her suicide, that final blow, too, was left for me to receive,
reeling as if with the time bells for a defeated fighter, ringing all
the time, like a boxer’s tinnitus, simply leaving me apace in
the apartment, viewless with the curtains drawn opaque.
I had visited her, for
her funeral, incognito, gaining access to the clerk at the ISKCON in
London, who had helped organize the small event. There were people
who paid respects and spoke at the ceremony, before the machines took
over, incinerating her body. There were murmurs, of the missing son;
it did not bother me much.
Mary was there; dressed
in a
salwaar-kameez
, fitting well, within the ethnic diversity
that the mourners brought in, South-East Asian face, with fake doll
nods, on an Indian dress. She looked well, not having put weight,
simply a bit wizened and grey with the years. No one noticed me much,
beyond the presence of an acquaintance, and the pleasantry of food
and water that they offered me along with the others in attendance.
The Hindu priest was in
a
dhot
i
with threaded strings around his body, hanging
symbolic, diagonally across his chest and looping back, up his back,
confirming his caste. ‘Are there any who would like to say a
few words, for a liberated soul and a devotee of Lord Krishna?’
he asked, mellifluously, pausing for a few seconds.
In the background, rock
music hung weak . . . a mantra,
Har
e
Krishn
a
,
by George Harrison . . . it was appropriate and soothing.
Mary, she got up and
moved towards the small podium, holding a small piece of paper in her
hand with talking points.
Hindus believe, all are
born Hindu, birth itself being a Hindu reality, some choosing other
religions, which are mere tributaries of Hindu rivers, diversions,
incarnations for Hindus to pray, too, accepting as they seemingly
spread away, draining back into Hindu oceans where religions meld
into Hindu ancientness.
‘I have wronged
her in many ways but
mu
m
has always been forgiving,
forgiving enough for me to feel the continuous pain of my misdeeds
throughout my life. Sometimes I wish she had shouted and screamed at
me, maybe even sent me to jail. That may have made my guilt lesser.
But she never did, and now she has moved on . . . and wherever she
is, I want to let her know that I will always respect her and I owe
almost the whole of my life to her.’ This was the gist of her
uninspired talk. She was tearing, which was disarming, and then she
stepped down.
In the end, I remained
unmoved and stoic, pondering the silliness of her little speech.
What I did feel though,
at my mother’s funeral, was surprising, even to me. It wasn’t
any deep sorrow of her passing, neither was it a mild respect that
the living hold for the dead, even the ones they never knew. It was
Mary, and her visions, naked and comely that suddenly gripped me,
making me a bit wet, and embarrassed at myself, with myself. Her walk
and her accent, it took on a shiver, sending a ripple of delight
through my body. At fourteen, I had had her, quite a few times . . .
and now at thirty- three, after two decades, she became alluring
again. In the intervening years, from then till now, I had never once
lusted after her in my mind. She had never repulsed me either.
I dwelled on every and
each part of her body, surreptitiously, as I lifted the spoon of
vegan food to my lips, striding aimlessly across the small hall for
views of her, throughout the ceremony.
Later, outside, I
strode up to her and did what I have never done in my life: hold a
trivial conversation while my mind toyed with sexual possibilities
and positions with the subject of my engagement.
‘Hello, my name
is Evelyn, and I knew Mrs Rashmi very well. She was going to
introduce me to you, before she passed away,’ I started up the
conversation, knowing not why, other than to stand a bit closer to
her, smell her, see her up close, take her in, with all of the senses
that I had.
Senses, and the taking
in of subjects with the senses, have levels, kicking in with sight
and then a bit closer with smell, before graduating for a longing of
taste and touch. Sound is ambient, sexually important, but
controllable by means.
‘Oh, okay, what
was it regarding?’ she answered, a bit surprised, unsure of my
relation to or knowledge of her situation, with the deceased.
‘You are Mary,
right? I thought you might be her Filipino friend, picking up from
your accent . . . when you were speaking earlier,’ I said,
smiling, trying to warm up to her, tucking the strands of my hair
behind my ears, the ones that had fallen across my eyes.
‘Yes, I am Mary,
and it is nice to meet you, though I confess Mrs Kettlewood did not
mention you to me at any point,’ she said, quizzically, wanting
to come to the point of this conversation.
‘I was planning a
visit to the beautiful isles of Southern Philippines, and was hoping
to have some local contacts while I was there, just in case I need
any help since I am travelling alone,’ I said, sizing her up,
creating a picture of her in my mind, trying hard not to look or act
distracted by the divinity that the image held.