Random Expressions

A Story By Deepak Jeswal
Episode One

“I am pregnant.”

We were walking towards Patel Chest Institute, from where we were to board our bus to return home. I froze in my tracks, and gathered no import of her words, till she repeated them slowly and quietly this time. There have been many times in my life when I have been left grappling for words, but never has been the impact been as stunning as this; it took the wind out of my sails, and lungs and brain, and drowned me in a sea of sheer confusion.

“Err what how?” I stammered, struggling out desperately from my helplessness, only to be plunged into a bigger whirlpool of curiosity that had suddenly formed itself. “But who is the…”

She hesitated before replying. I stole a glance at her, trying to catch any tell-tale bulge, but it was probably still too early a stage to be visible.

“Ashish Sehgal,” she spoke, barely audible. Once again, she had to repeat the words for them to clearly make their passage through my aural cavities. I realized immediately that her reply would have had a similar impact even if she had mentioned Tom Cruise because I was still not sure how to react. And amidst the confusion, it also struck me that Ashish Sehgal wasn t anyone that I knew intimately or even remotely, for that matter. I mean I knew about him and her, and had met him once when she herself had introduced him as an ex-classmate and a good friend, but that s about it. Only now I came to understand how good the friend was. I was always wary of such rich, accented fellows wearing a ring in their right ears and riding a fancy bike, gifted by their super rich dads. These guys were always popular with college girls. But I had imagined Smita to be different.

“Are you sure you are… er… pregnant?” I made a very clumsy effort to break the silence that had swooped in between us. We were nearly at the bus stop. She stopped, sighed and gave me a sharp glance. I retracted. Of course, she was sure. No girl would like to talk about her pregnancy without being absolutely sure, and definitely not when she is still single and studying in second year college!

Still she was valiant enough to offer an answer. “Yes. The home pregnancy test is positive; the symptoms are all there”

The bus stop, in front of Patel Chest Institute, was a dilapidated shed probably neglected for centuries. It wasn’t our regular stop and we had to walk up till here, a kilometer away from our college, only when we had overstayed for an extra subsidiary class. With time the nomenclature for the stop had been shortened to simply Patel Chest which had sparked its own cheesy PJ: “if Patel was a lady, what would it be called?”

Stationary now, I viewed Smita more closely. She was beautiful, and the focal point of the attraction lay in those large expressive eyes, which she underlined with a bold line of kohl. A pert nose over bow-shaped mouth lent aristocracy to the fair face. And the lush flowing hair added a bounce to her personality. But as I stood watching her on that humid late July afternoon, I concluded that for me she was beautiful from within as well my best friend for the past two years. I did not like the idea of such a sweet girl getting into this messy trouble. I had always thought of her to be a strong girl, coming from a conservative family and one who kept boys, including me, at a respectable distance. To be honest, I admired her ability to ward off some nasty pile-ons from our class. But here she had walked into this, open-eyed and that too, with someone like Ashish!

“You hate him because you are jealous of him,” she had once said, when I had casually objected to her friendship with him.

“Jealous, me? Why?” I replied indignantly.

“Because I am going around with him,” she replied conspiratorially.

“You are kidding me,”

She had left without replying, giving a smile that would have made Mona Lisa’s cryptic one look clearer than a midsummer night’s sky.

Now, I tried to recall as to when this conversation of ours had taken place. It was near the first year exams, was all that I could retrieve from my fuzzy memory. So that made it some four months back. After this I recalled she had spoken about a few of her dates with Ashish. But it hadn t struck me anymore serious than her meetings with me. She was the one who always spoke about the emotional attachments and undying sincerity and purity of love it had not crossed my mind even once that she could get any of these from Ashish!

A few buses stopped and passed by but neither of us bothered to check.

“Have you told Ashish?” I asked, and immediately regretted having opened my mouth. It was yet another silly question, but dammit a man doesn’t get to know about his best friend’s pregnancy everyday and I suppose I had the right to act shaken.

She bit her lip, and her eyes opened wide open. I was prepared for a full blast rebuke this time. But what followed was something unusual. Her eyes were wet. And she was controlling her tears from falling.

“Smita,” I said softly, “Control yourself. Let’s go by an auto we’ll sit and discuss this at your place.”

She nodded absently.

Throughout the twenty five minute journey back we didn’t speak. As we crossed from Delhi University to Shakti Nagar to Shastri Nagar to her house at West Patel Nagar, my mind raced back to the days when we had initially met more than a year back, when both had joined Kirorimal College’s English Hons stream. Smita and I hit it off from the word go. There were many overlapping interests.

There was a small misunderstanding at that time. One bright student, in his zeal to play cupid, had sort of paired us off. The next morning when she was having her coffee, casually she had remarked, “too much jhaag” to which the bright chap had retorted, “well what did you expect, too much Dinesh in that?” When I reached college that day, I found her upset. But later we cleared the air and it settled that we shall always be friends, whatever the wagging tongues say; and soon they stopped when they saw no fire lit from the smoke spread by them.

From our class of twenty five students (which seemed to be made up of students picked up en masse from the telephone directory’s S and V listing), there were three clear beauty queens ones around whom the attention centered. Of them, Shilpa was too much into dramatics society to bother about lectures or her classmates. That left the kingdom shared between Smita and Vineeta Chawla. To many Vineeta took a clear lead she was from a background for which newspapers have created a special page, and her dress sense was clearly an echo from what she saw at those parties no doubt she was pretty, but L’Oreal and Max Factor had equal share in that enhancement.

It wasn’t official or ever stated, but there were obviously two groups formed due to them. Since I was the closest to Smita, automatically I came under her group, and consequently Vineeta’s biggest bete noir.

In the course of the year, I had befriended Smita’s parents, and during the exams was quite a regular guest at their place for joint study sessions. Her parents trust in her was explicit. They didn t mind my visiting her place when they weren t around. And that’s why I had suggested her place at this time, knowing fully well that her parents wouldn’t be home. We could talk easily.

The auto grinded over the hot asphalt and a pang grated my heart. What if on the day of that coffee incident our conversation had been different and had ended in us to use a common parlance going around ? I looked at her, feeling sorry for her, and for myself. Because I knew, that had the course of our friendship been different, I would have been a very happy man. And perhaps she would not have been in this awful predicament!

It was clear Ashish hadn’t been clean with her when she told him about the pregnancy. My anger against him was strong, and my mind framed a speech to speak against him when we reached her place.

I guided the auto rickshaw driver to her house, paid the fare and we ascended the small flight of stairs to her first floor flat.

“I love him, ” she said when we entered the house, without preamble, without any introduction. Again, she had punctured the wind off my sails, and I found myself drowning. “And I will always love him.”

I bore her with a steady gaze.

“Don’t say anything bad against him,please,” she half whispered, half pleaded.

I was aghast. That speech I had sort of prepared was washed away by the waves of tears welling up in her eyes. “You love him for disgracing you?” was all that I could manage.

“No. I love him for loving me,” she stated. There was something wrong that tone. There was a harshness to it.

Frustrated, I raised my arms and dropped myself on the beige velvet sofa, while she went inside to freshen up . The room was elegantly decorated, with an expensive cut-glass center table on which stood a fragile vase containing a single strand of rose, which her mother purchased fresh daily. On the floor, over the concrete marble, was an ethnically designed Kashmiri carpet, which covered nearly the entire room, leaving aside a small strip near the long French windows that overlooked a balcony.

She returned, relatively brighter, and sat opposite me.

This time I leapt at taking lead before she flummoxed me again. “You don’t love him any longer,” I told her. “And if you want to talk, be honest. First clear yourself up here,” I pointed to my temple, “and then we will think of clearing up here,” I placed my finger on my tummy.

She viewed me for an instant, but like always her mind was already made up, and she spoke. “Right. I don’t love him any longer. I stopped meeting him some two months back.”

I gasped. “Two months?” That would make it immediately after the exams.

“Yes. Two months. It didn’t seem long. I was sure I would bring him around. He was just a bit elusive, and then came the holidays and he was away to the US with his parents, so in any case we couldn’t have met, and now this,” she broke off, sniffing. “You know how it happened?”

I didn’t. Frankly, I wasn’t here to listen to her love making account, either. But still, there is a male curiosity in this regard which always takes a keen interest in knowing what’s happening in someone else’s bedroom. I stayed silent.

“It happened the day of our last exam. We had gone to Chanakya, remember?”

I did.

“Well, after that he said he wanted me to meet his mother, so he took me to his home. His mother wasn’t there. I don’t think she was ever supposed to be there. Anyways, we were alone. We talked and talked about our future, our marriage. And we came very close. When I tried to refuse,” she wet her lips nervously, “he didn ‘ agree. He said we were to marry. It s all fair. All Ok. I tried to reason, I tried to leave, but he didn’t let me.” She broke off again. Taking a deep breath, she said, I was nearly forced upon he was I was I mean I don t know if I relented or not but it just happened”

I saw her breath pass from a steady evenness to spasmodic sobbing. I allowed her to flush herself. Such incidents are bad when they happen, worse when said aloud but worst when thought of.

The human mind conjectures up stupid images. In front of me, she was sitting and sobbing, and my mind was trying to replay that scene where she was struggling to ward off Ashish. Date rape cases were not uncommon. But that it would happen to someone so close was something I wasn’t ever prepared for.

She sniffed again, and I broke from that vile imagery to the one in front of me. Her body was shaking, and tears had rolled down her fair cheeks, leaving a light trail of smudged kohl. Immediately I was overcome with immense love for her. I wanted to jump and hold her.

She wiped the tears with the back of her hand, and spoke, “From my childhood I have had a fulfilled life. Being the only daughter was easy I had to state it and my wish was always fulfilled. But I wasn t spoilt. I was put in a hostel for a few years so that I could value independence and discipline. My mother never failed to remind of a girl’s greatest gift from God her honor. My parents gave me immense freedom, yet I was always under their command . Maybe it wasn’t command. It was a friendship. Leaving my status of Ashish’s relationship, I have never hid a secret from them. Even about Ashish I told them he is a very good friend which I hope they will understand, since they themselves have had a love marriage.

“My principles, my values and all that I have been proud of, have been shattered. As modern as we may be, my parents won t accept that I am an unwed mother. I feel dirty.”She paused and wet her lips.

“For him,” she continued, “the relationship was just a timepass one. That’s what it sounded when I told him about this. For him, it’s over. But how do I explain this to my self, how do I tell this to my soul? Before I react to my body, I have to cure my soul and cleanse my conscience!”

That brittleness was returning. I feared it. “Smita, first up stop blaming yourself, please!”

She didn’t reply.

“Certainly love is not a sin,” I took a line of reasoning from her own book. “Why do you want to punish yourself for no fault of yours? Whats happened has happened. Neither you nor Ashish nor I can change it now. But what happens next is entirely in your hands. Think about that! Explain that to your soul and it will be cured. The process will be slow and painful but you will overcome.”

“I cannot, I will not. I guess this unhappiness is part and parcel of my life now.”

“It doesn’t have to be if…” I replied.

The hardness had solidified; she stared at me unblinking answering my unasked question. “I will not kill the child!”

“What?!”

“I will kill the father!”

I nearly fell from the sofa.

“I have a plan. You will have to help me.”

“Hold it hold it, Smita. For heaven’s sake, talk sense! You can’t go about murdering people!!” The pain and shock of the situation had made the normally sensible Smita inconsistent and incoherent girl.

“Then what else can I do?” She looked at me with the helplessness of a person who had examined all the options to get out of the predicament but couldn’t accept any of them.

“Abort the baby, and move on in life. There I will help you so that no one…”

“And leave that bastard to spoil lives,” she interrupted, sharply.

“You cannot take law into your hands.” I grimaced at my own sentence. It was a pathetic translation of a phrase used countless times in cheap Bollywood films.

“I don’t care. Are you or are you not helping?”

That was cornering of a typical woman-kind, but I wasn’t really keen on getting blood on my hands, and certainly wouldn’t ever allow Smita to get embroiled in further trouble. I refused any answer, and changed track again. “You know Smita, killing him actually means that you will be killing a part of yourself and the baby.”

“All the more better,” she threw back the words at me.

“But his death is no solution!”

“His death is the only solution for me.”

I was nearly tempted to ask which goddamn third rate bollywood film she had seen last night, but seeing her expression the words froze on my lips. Instead, I spoke from logic again. “If you really want to save the world from the likes of Ashish, get to the root of the problem flirtation, blind aping of western culture etc kill that and not the person, Smita!”

“He is the personification of sin. I shall kill him!” Her record was stuck, and I just didn t know how to proceed, and that I had to do before she again flung a ‘helping me or not with a caged yes or no’ question and honestly, I was always bad in these objective type of tests.

“Don’t forget Smita, you were a part of this sin, however small it may be!” I forwarded reasoning. I knew it wasn’t really small but at that point, seeing her vulnerable frame of mind, I wasn’t very keen on rubbing in the fact that she had been equally responsible.

My reasoning stuck its mark.She hesitated in her reply, and I carried on, “Were you really so low in will power?”

“I am not!”

“Then why didn t you stop him that very night? Why didn t you kill him then? Why now?”

“Because I loved him then.”

“Or his body probably,” I went on relentlessly. I saw that it hurt her ego, and it deflated the false indignation that she had built around herself. This would help her get back to the ground, and that ’s what I wanted at that moment. “Come on, what do you have to say to that?”

She eyed me like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. “No, no,” she shook her head violently. “It wasn’t that. I mean, love starts physically but it went beyond.”

“Maybe for you, but certainly not for him.”

“Fine. But I was innocent. How could I read his mind?”

“Now don’t give me that. You weren’t exactly babe in the woods. You were plain simple foolish. I am sure apart from you anyone could read his mind.”

“Who did?”

“For starters, I did. Didn’t I warn you even about it?”

“Yeah but I thought…”

“…Thought that I was jealous? Yeah I was bloody well jealous. But that still doesn t take away the core fact that you didn’t heed to my advice. And that was because…”

“…because I thought you …”

“…because I cared for you!” I completed her sentence, and in a valiant sweep quite unbecoming my real self I fished out my inner feelings. “Because I found you sweet, Because I found you innocent, because I found a best friend in you, because I love you yes, that’s why I warned you..and… and…” Once the steam of speaking out is over, such tirades always end in a whimper which hangs between individuals in an awkward smoke trail. And so I just broke off. A lump hurt my throat, and I could feel the rushing beats within my ribs. I had finally said what I wanted to say to her, but the impact seemed to be lost. There was no expected sudden widening of eyes like I had expected. She just looked at me with a stupid pitiable expression. Perhaps, she had just taken my confession as a friend’s consolation.

To Be Continued

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Fiction . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.