Jaya

There was a boy in our street named Arul whom one could not easily pass without a second glance, though he himself seemed wholly unconscious of it. He was not handsome in the loud manner that compels immediate admiration, but carried a restrained grace that suggested nature had taken particular care in his fashioning, but was too modest to advertise the work. His skin bore a burnished tone, like it had borrowed dusk from the southern sun sitting behind the Ghats around our town. His hair, thick and coarse as the bark of an old tree, fell in exquisite curls upon his forehead, and no effort of comb or hand could persuade it into any obedience. His eyes were large, guarded with long lashes, which figuratively revealed very much of his character: Seeing was enough and words were unnecessary extravagance. One could enumerate his traits like this: His nose was straight and well-cut, lending firmness to his otherwise gentle face. His lips were set in a thoughtful line, and occasionally broke into a smile that altered his entire countenance into a beauty everyone was unexpecting of. His shoulders were broad and governed his gait… And yet, for all this teeming masculinity, the girls of the neighbourhood kept a curious distance from him. They would lower their voices when he passed, adjust their skirts with unnecessary care, or find sudden and urgent business elsewhere. It was not dislike, nor fear; There was something in his composure that unsettled them. He did not glance about to see who noticed him, did not linger where laughter gathered, nor did he offer those small, easy courtesies by which young men make themselves agreeable. His silence, which to him was natural, appeared to them as a reserve too puzzling to be lightly approached. But Arul himself remained untouched by all this. If he observed their withdrawal, he gave no sign of it. His mind, it seemed, was not a house open to every passing visitor; it had but one chamber lit, and that was occupied entirely. There was, in the far end of our street, a house shaded by an old neem tree, and in that house lived Jaya. He had never spoken to her at length, nor had he sought occasion to do so. Yet, in the quiet ordering of his thoughts, she had taken a place so complete that there was no room left for comparison or distraction. It was clear to us that what Arul harboured for Jaya, was not a trite, restless, admiration borne from the fountain of his youth. He very much abided a mature regard for her that was everlit in his altar. Often, in the evenings, when the breeze moved softly through the lane and carried with it the faint mingling of dust and jasmine, Arul would halt in his stroll. His ears lifted to their precise music: the sound of wind playing with the trinkets on Jaya's anklet. We could see it in him, the way the blood rushed to his face and made his feet restless, though he received it all as something sacred. He called it pure jazz. We laughed, with a mixture of mockery and envy, that we reserved for what we could not fathom. I remember now, what I had remarked: "What jazz? Almost every girl in our town wears anklets!" ------ Part 2 ------ By the tail end of summer, when the heat began to relent and the evenings grew forgiving, Arul’s patience grew restless. We noticed it before he did. These things are always visible to a street before they are visible to the person living them. There was a particular evening I recall. He sat on his front step longer than usual, watching nothing in particular, his hands resting open on his knees; the posture of a man planning something with finality. His face betrayed what his posture would not fully confess. There was something unguarded in it that we had never seen before, almost boyish openness, where the careful architecture of his composure had for a moment, left a window ajar. He was staring at the direction of the neem tree at the far end of the lane. Not towards Jaya; She was not visible from where he sat. Towards her direction, at the coordinates of her existence, in the way a man looks at the door he has decided he will knock on. Once, he rose from the step, took three deliberate paces toward the far end of the lane, and stopped. He stood there for a moment with his weight slightly forward, waiting for his perfect moment. Then, he turned and unlocked the gate. I said nothing; None of us did. We had long learned that he was not a man to be hurried. We all understood, watching him disappear into the lane that evening, that the decision had already been made. He was only allowing himself the time to become equal to it. The meeting was brief and without ceremony. Arul stated his intention with the same economy he applied to everything else: His words had been waiting and required only their moment. Jaya’s mother touched her eyes and looked away. Her younger brother grinned at the floor with the poorly concealed delight of someone who had waited a long time precisely for this. Her father, a measured man with a careful face, regarded Arul for a long moment. “Son, are you sure?” he questioned. “Yes, sir,” said Arul. Her father nodded slowly. A silence followed, dense of the thoughts a father could not easily give a voice to. After a pause, he asked again, “Are you sure?” Mustering a smile over his demeanour, Arul reached across and took the old man’s hand. He held it firmly. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.” Receiving him for a moment longer, her father's expression held several things at once: relief, admiration, and the quiet release of a long-kept worry. Then he broke into a brief smile and called: “Jaya, bring the coffee.”. ----- We were not present at that meeting, of course. What we know of it came to us later, through his mother, who recounted it to whoever would listen with that curious mixture of reproach and pride she never quite succeeded in separating. She had raised Arul alone, and he had not told her a single word of his intentions beforehand. This, she said, was unforgivable. It was also, as she admitted in the same breath, entirely like him. Though she spoke of it often, she was not aggrieved. She had not been consulted, but she did not require to be. It was enough for her that he had chosen, and that he had chosen without hesitation. In those days, when parents arranged the futures of their grown children with careful authority, her empathy flowed like honey to our ears. ----- The wedding was held the following month, on a morning long anticipated. The street dressed itself for it without being asked. Women appeared at doorways in silk. Children were scrubbed clean and released in colourful attires, onto the street. Someone had strung a line of mango leaves across the entrance of Jaya’s house, and they stirred lightly in the early breeze. It should be said, for those unfamiliar with such arrangements, that it was not customary for the bride and groom to speak before the marriage. They were seen together briefly at the engagement, allowed a few chaperoned minutes neither was expected to use, and then separated again until the rituals reunited them before the fire. This was considered proper, back then. It preserved, the elders said, a certain dignity. The priest recited, and the ritual smoke rose. The street watched from a respectful distance, which is to say, from as near as it could manage without appearing to. I watched too. I remember thinking that they looked, side by side, as two people who were written by the same hand. ------- Part 3 ------- The nuptial night arrived with the silence that follows a house full of people once everyone has finally left. The voices had thinned, and the last footsteps had faded down the lane. Their worlds, which felt relieved in withdrawal from all the clatter, contracted comfortably into the small room. Arul sat across from Jaya in the room that still carried jasmine, camphor, and the faint residue of wedding smoke. The lamp between them burned steadily, indifferent to the fact that it was now the only witness. She had her hands folded in her lap. The gold bangles had been pushed back along her wrist, setting her fingers free. The jasmine woven into her braid had begun to loosen. A few strands had slipped free and rested lightly against her neck. Her face carried the day, where the kohl around her eyes had softened at the edges. There was a faint trace of sandalwood on her cheeks that reckoned his urge to pinch them. If he had not kept returning to her, he might have spoken sooner. Each time he drew breath to begin, his attention went back to her again. Her lips were… Her lips were full and carmine, their hue ripened by the pomegranate she had been quietly eating from the tray beside her, so that each time she lifted her face, the faint wet gleam of it caught the lamplight. Now and then, between one ruby seed and the next, there escaped from them a small, unpremeditated humming, a private lilt that seemed to have followed her unbidden into the room. Arul, who had come with words arranged, found himself wanting only that she should continue. It settled finally on her glistening, doe-like eyes, which moved about the room with an untroubled ease. In another bride, on such a night, one might have expected some visible tremor of the spirit: a gaze lowered too quickly, a mouth held too still, fingers fastening and unfastening upon themselves in the lap. Jaya, however, was unbothered. Her glance rested on him with an unstartled gentleness that encouraged him to speak sooner. Perhaps she had already heard enough of Arul to know that no harshness, or no ungraceful demand would come from him. Or maybe, her composure issued from some inward poise entirely her own. Whatever its source, it lent the room such permission for speech that, when he finally spoke, his voice entered it almost gratefully. He began, “Jaya ” She looked at him. She did not speak. He waited, as he always did. Then, more gently, “You can – we can talk. It is only us now.” A small, thwarted sound escaped from her throat, with more breath than syllable, where the word had risen faithfully but was denied a clear passage. Her tongue touched her lower lip once, briefly; but with a little slurring and a great deal of stutter, the unyielding beauty resorted to her fingers, which took over, moving with the confidence of her body language. Her wrists turned, her fingers opened and gathered, her palms faced him, withdrew, and returned; and all the while her face moved with them, her eyes kindling, her brows lifting, her mouth striving to complete what the rest of her had already set forth. He did not know how to read any of it. No one had taught him how. No rule of the world he had grown up in had prepared him for this. Yet whatever she meant, came to him all the same. He sat with it for a moment, taking it in, before he found that he could not contain himself. He burst into a full, resounding laughter. It came suddenly, without disturbance, and spread through the room with such warmth that even the lamp seemed to burn more companionably for it. “You are quite talkative,” he cried in amusement. At this, her first answer appeared at the corners of her mouth. Then, there came again that small, obstructed sound from her throat, burdened equally with effort and amusement, while her fingers resumed their motion with a quickened animation, almost reproachful in their fluency, as though she had indeed been saying a great deal and found his laughter to be a poor interruption. Outside, the neem leaves stirred in the night breeze. Somewhere down the lane, faintly, an anklet tinkled. For months, he had listened to the sound of her anklet and drawn from it an entire inward life, persuading himself that this sound was all music. He understood now, watching her hands settle back into her lap with the unhurried grace of a woman entirely and unapologetically herself, that he had never been listening to the anklet at all. The anklet was mere announcement. All the jazz that had tugged at his soul was Jaya.