Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday Page 4

  So she tried her hand at love stories. Nothing too risqué, lest Miss V. Rani and her ilk at the Tamil Nesan have their sensibilities offended—just some hand-holding, some pronouncements of love, and one extended scene in which the protagonists stare so long into each others’ eyes that they see the other’s soul.

  The love stories suffered the same fate as their predecessors, that is, they were not published, but Prema remained convinced of their inherent value, and felt it made her future testimony all the more impressive. “I tried 28 times before I was finally published,” she would say to Meena when she herself was finally interviewed at that sacred 8 o’clock hour on Sunday nights. Her rehearsed speech altered slightly every month with each new non-publication, making the “interview” all the more heart-wrenching and dramatic, she thought.

  Her 31st story was her magnum opus (thus far: she hoped to have more opuses, or was it opii? She would have to check). It was part-desperation, part-inspiration. Between Mano’s dismissive comments, her own fears of sounding like she was rehashing someone else’s original material, and the fact that she had now submitted thirty manuscripts without success, she knew she was on the verge of losing all self-belief and perhaps even giving up altogether. She voiced this fear to Vimala, but unfortunately caught her in one of her less pleasant moods, because Vimala agreed with her, and said she would have given up a long time ago if she had received rejection upon rejection.

  The word “rejection” was what Vimala used—not Prema. She had never thought of her lack of success as “rejection” exactly, and she was startled to hear it now. She had simply thought that one month, she would win. And the months when she hadn’t, it was just someone else’s time to win. Sure, she had been disappointed— especially after submitting her first few stories, she had been sure they were winners—but she had come to so enjoy the whole process, from anticipating the theme, to waiting for her father to come back with the newspaper, to thinking of a plot, to putting it down on paper, and seeing a whole story formed from nothing more than a prompt of a couple of words and her own imagination. She didn’t win, but she had never thought that her work was not good, or that it had been “rejected”.

  So Vimala’s comment had disturbed her, which accounted for her new desperation to get the Tamil Nesan to take notice of her and publish her writing. But she was also more excited and confident of success than usual because she had what she thought was her best story yet. Part-memoir and part-fiction, her newest story, sparked off by the ingeniously vague Tamil Nesan prompt “celebrating differences”, she would write a story about the most different people she knew—her family.

  She took pains to disguise her family members in the story on the chance that she did get published and they recognised themselves portrayed unfavourably. She changed names and appearances, and added two extra siblings. She gave them all English names and situated the story in London, which was believable, because she had an aunt and an uncle there, and they said there were all sorts of Tamil people over there. And she made them Christians. She made the youngest child the narrator, a girl born just after a long-awaited boy child, who stayed largely in the shadows and observed the dynamics of the family, all the while making notes about how she would run her own family one day.

  The story took longer than her others had. She was still not done with it by the middle of the second week, which made her worry she wouldn’t have time to revise it and send it in before the deadline. But when she finally finished it (six days later than usual), she felt so satisfied that she believed hardly any revisions were going to be necessary. She did edit it for grammar, but left her plot and dialogue largely unchanged, feeling it did justice to the odd balance of comedy, dysfunction and conservativeness of her family—while giving no hint that she was actually talking about them, of course.

  The story ended with the precious son dying in a tragic traffic accident and the family, in the midst of their grief and shock, realising they had another child they never paid attention to, who was now, as a result of that deficit, scrawny from being under-fed, but brilliant in all other aspects.

  In a tear-jerking conclusion, the negligent parents and the overshadowed daughter embraced, and the father made a half-page monologue vowing to spend the rest of his life making it up to her, while the other siblings looked on in a mixture of envy, awe and camaraderie.

  The ending was so good that Prema herself shed a few tears while writing it—not so much for the dead son as for the triumph of the unassuming underdog (also, she was quite taken with the unprecedented poetry of her prose). She had heard that many writers got emotionally involved like this with their characters—she imagined they often penned the last word and collapsed into tears, re-reading the last paragraph several times, as if hoping somehow to extend it and stave off the moment when the story would be over. It was almost how she felt that Sunday night, when she turned on the radio a few minutes earlier than Meena’s usual time slot, and recognised the words being read out as her own. She gasped and turned the volume up so that she could hang on to every word, her moment that had arrived so unceremoniously. Read out over the radio, the story seemed more impressive than ever, and she marvelled once again that she had written it. She felt jolts of impatience when the reader’s tone did not rise and fall as she had written it, or when emphases were misplaced, but these flitted in and out of her mind in an instant, in her nervous anticipation for the reader to get to the next word, and the next after that. The voice was high and over-articulate, probably a special voice reserved for reading in public that would sound nothing like the reader’s normal speech, but Prema was happy enough that it was clear, and hundreds, maybe thousands of listeners across Malaysia were now hearing the story that Prema had conceived and written, hanging on to every word and eager to hear how it all ended.

  So intent was she on not missing a word that she hadn’t thought to call any of her family members to come listen, and now as the story reached its climax she was suddenly gripped by the thought that there was no one to witness her glory. Unlike a notice in a newspaper, the words over the radio were slipping away every second.

  “Amma!” she called, not wanting to leave the big radio in the living room, but she didn’t know if her voice would carry to her mother in the kitchen. “Amma? Appa?” No response, so she tried: “Vimala akka?” And against all reservations, desperate: “Mano?”

  As luck would have it, her brother popped his head in immediately, as if waiting for her to say his name. “What?” he said, mildly interested at being addressed after having been ignored by Prema since his blistering critique of Story #28.

  “It’s my story,” she told him excitedly, jabbing towards the radio. “My story is being read out,” she said.

  He walked over to the radio and sat himself down cross-legged next to it, an intent look on his face, and he glanced over at Prema curiously.

  “Just in time,” she said. “It’s ending.”

  The teary dialogue at the end was wrapping up, and Prema sat back as the last line was read, satisfied, only to jerk up as she heard the next thing the reader said.

  “Thank you for listening to my story titled ‘Celebrating Differences’,” said the reader in a still clear but now less forced and more familiar-sounding voice. “This is yours truly, Vimala Chandran.”

  Afterward, she would tell her sisters that the feeling that overcame her was one of an immediate fury that caused a temporary blindness, as if a white-hot skewer had been pressed down into her eyes, causing the world to appear like a bright, hot space that was suffocating her.

  But the truth was that she remained sitting still for a long time—back erect, head cocked at an angle, eyes focused straight ahead on the radio, lips parted and brows wrinkled. The current programme had ended and the next was starting—the one she had originally turned on the radio to listen to—but she didn’t notice. The parting words of the previous voice on the radio were repeating themselves in her head, and she was trying desperately to understand
them. In fact, her first coherent thought was that they must have mispronounced her name, that somehow the reader, intending to say that the story was written by one Prema Chandran, had flubbed, accidentally saying “Vimala” when she meant “Prema”. Perhaps the reader had the name “Vimala” on the brain.

  It was Mano who reacted first. He jumped up, and in the quickness of his movement nearly fell over backward. On his face was etched pure indignation, and he stared at Prema furiously, like a soldier looking to his general for the command to fire. As the seconds stretched and Prema still sat there with her unreadable expression, he ran over to her and grabbed her arm, as if trying to jolt her into action.

  “Prema akka,” he cried, his voice the high-pitched hiss of one who has been personally wronged. “Vimala akka stole your story!”

  Mano’s proclamation, strong, sure of itself and leaving no room for an alternative explanation, snapped Prema out of her temporary trance.

  “What?” she asked, although the real question her brain was struggling to ask was more along the lines of “how?” or really “why?”

  Mano put his hands on her shoulders. “Prema akka,” he enunciated slowly, looking her dead in the eye as if it might aid her comprehension. “Vimala akka stole your story.”

  He frowned. “How do you usually submit your stories?” he asked.

  Prema was struggling to string a sentence together. “I mail them in,” she said. “I put them in an envelope, ask Appa for a stamp, and then the next time we go into town I’ll mail it.”

  “And you always do this yourself?” asked Mano, not convinced.

  No, Prema did not always do this herself. She often just asked whoever was going into town to mail it for her. But this was too hard to articulate at the moment—she could have cried for letting this happen. But how was she to have known?

  “Sometimes I ask Appa,” she said weakly.

  “Sometimes,” Mano repeated. “Or you could have asked anyone else who was going into town, am I right?”

  For the life of her, Prema could not remember. She could have asked Vimala, yes, but she could have asked any other sister, and with so many of them, who could keep track? Who could remember which sister she asked to mail which story? She stared mutely back at Mano, who was now shaking his head with a look of immense sympathy on his face. He then turned and bolted out of the room.

  “Amma!” he screamed. “You need to hear what Vimala akka did, now.”

  The conversation that ensued did not quite register in Prema’s brain. She didn’t leave the room, but sat there in the same spot, listening to the unfolding commotion in the kitchen where Mano had accosted their mother. She remembered knowing that all her sisters had gathered around them to listen to what Mano was saying, because of the numerous interjections from different voices. She remembered her mother distractedly repeating, “Oh dear, oh dear”, while Sumathi clucked disapprovingly (soft) and Malathi clucked disapprovingly (loud), and Kalai, who had just arrived from Singapore, said, “Oh our poor Prema” twice and “What can that Vimala be thinking?” three times.

  And she remembered Mano, spoilt little brother Mano, who had not known tact or constructive criticism, and whom she had not talked to for three months, but who was now screaming bloody indignant murder at the wrongness of it all.

  She felt a vague wave of guilt for killing his character counterpart in the story at the centre of the current upheaval, even in the midst of the hurt, confusion and non-comprehension that had lodged themselves into her brain.

  Her family would tell people later that Prema had handled the betrayal with grace and composure like they never would have been able to muster up themselves, never would have thought Prema capable of. Prema herself would add a few extra details whenever present for these retellings, speaking in a strained modest manner of the initial fury that made her throat constrict and her eyes burn, and a forgiveness that came almost immediately and without her summoning it.

  But in that moment, if she were to tell it honestly, her mind had created a vacuum that wanted to close in on itself, and she felt herself unable to move, to get up and join her family now traipsing upstairs in single file, led by the righteous Mano, clucking, disappointed and about to don the full armour of Indian indignation. She knew where they would find Vimala, who would not be hiding, but sitting on her metal desk chair in the room they both shared, still next to her radio, legs curled under her and neck poised for the look of defiant shame she was about to present to her family.

  Prema would say later that her family’s admonishment was punishment enough for Vimala, and mollification enough for her. She would leave out the thoughts that occurred to her much later, that kept her awake at night, wondering if she might actually owe the win to the fact that it was not her name on that story.

  But even if she had thought all that then, while sitting on the maroon rug, staring straight ahead at the radio while her family marched upstairs, her emotions did not present themselves to her as all that complex, but collided within the vacuum inside her head into one unified and crazy longing for a piece of paper and a Bic.

  NEVER HAVE I EVER

  NEVER HAVE I ever been so allergic to something in my life.

  That is probably not technically allowable game play, but it is all I can think of as people go around the circle, taking turns to coax others into admitting all the outrageous things they’ve done. “Never have I ever had sex on a plane,” says Radhika from India with a smirk, and there is the obligatory brief silence, before two people take a drink, and the group erupts into raucous, already tipsy, laughter.

  I will win this game. I have done almost nothing— salacious or otherwise—during my nineteen years on this earth.

  One thing I have done, however, is discover that I am fantastically allergic to all manner of things, one of which is cat dander. The others are more interesting, including yellow food colouring Number 5, but it is the mundane feline allergy that is currently constricting my throat and lungs and producing a slight but alarming wheeze with every inhale.

  I wouldn’t even be here, if I weren’t still ruled primarily by hormones instead of sense, despite my best hopes to the contrary. It is a boy—it always is—and the boy in question happens to be the owner of the cat in question. As luck would have it, I know the cat’s name but not the boy’s.

  I don’t know what breed of cat Louie is, but I should probably find out, for future reference, so I can tell doctors and other interested parties which type of cat affects me in the strongest and strangest ways. Typically, I feel an itch in my throat that ranges in severity, then I start making an embarrassing and horrible sound that I can only politely describe as “throat-clearing”, and my eyes begin to water. A little asthma is not uncommon, but nothing that requires much attention, maybe one puff of my trusty Ventolin inhaler.

  Today, however, I have already snuck off to the bathroom twice to rapidly puff away on the inhaler, and I am contemplating a third trip. The puffs temporarily convinced me, while I was still sitting on the closed toilet bowl, that I actually felt better. But upon returning to the group, seated in a haphazard circle on a couch and some bean bags, Essence Of Louie would waft up my nostrils. I imagined Ventolin the Valiant, waging a fierce battle with whatever it is in cat saliva that permeates the air and causes mass suffering, putting up a commendable fight even in the face of great opposition, before finally succumbing to his much more powerful opponent, waving the white flag and slinking back into the background of my bloodstream.

  I know I should probably leave but I came with Clara, and I’m not sure I can find my way back to our dorm without her. I am terrible with directions and other spatial matters, and Clara is seated on the floor with a look of pure delight on her face, lapping up the game and the company of everyone around her, holding her rapidly condensing can of beer up as if ready with every round to admit to a statement and take a swig. But she never does. Clara hasn’t done anything either, unless you count drinking underage, but I don’t reall
y, since it’s only underage in the States, and we’ve been able to drink back home in Singapore for a year already. I never thought going to college in the land of the free would curtail any of my freedoms, but there it is.

  It’s one of the reasons Clara was so eager to come tonight, to this random house party in a run-down off-campus apartment shared by a few Moroccan and Turkish students. We’d gone to a school-sanctioned mixer for new international arrivals this morning, where we were expected to eat cookies, sign up at one or more of a dozen different activity groups’ booths, and meet students and faculty interested in appearing “global”. I had already signed up for my activity of choice—the campus newspaper—at the regular activities fair, and was in fact carrying in my bag three copies of my first article (a fact I had perhaps reminded Clara about a few times too many). I thus focused my attention on the free chocolate chip cookies, America’s greatest contribution to the world. While on my fourth, another foreign student, Tarik, asked us if we were going to the party later. We hadn’t heard of it, of course, but as soon as it was intimated that there would be libations, Clara began talking as if it had been our plan all along.

  I don’t remember Clara as being all that much of a drinker back home, but I suppose you don’t miss something until it’s taken away from you. After Tarik left, Clara had squealed and promptly declared that we had to go. I was about to register a feeble protest that we hadn’t come all the way to the States to hang out with the United Nations, when I glimpsed Tarik talking to another student I had not noticed before, who appeared to be manning one of the activities booths. He looked tired from having had to stand out in the hot Virginia summer sun all day, and his wavy hair was plastered against his forehead with sweat, but he still shot me a smile as he saw me looking his way. I turned to Clara and agreed to go.