Every time we discussed something in the night’s she gave it a name-a private privilege of naming nights, making them loose their anonymity; Proselytization of a universal phenomenon to a private affair-Sartre’s Solitude, Dostoevsky’s Dusks, Court of Columbus. Dostoevsky was always special.

She enrolled in my philosophy classes in the summer of 1974.She was the only skirt clad Anglo Indian in the university. Neither her skin color nor her attire dissuaded her in any way. She pedaled an old bicycle to the university and rarely spoke to anyone. The first time she spoke, I guess, to me was when she raised a question in the classroom, lifting her right arm reluctantly, her index finger pointing skywards. Had I not married her, I doubt if I can recollect the way she raised her finger. I guess, am filling the abstractness of those moments with images from the present. But, isn’t that mostly true with most of our recollections? Don’t we always fill gaps with images from the present or, the time after the past that is recollected and a past nearer to the present than the moment recollected? She, I vaguely recollect asking something on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Sartre’s Nausea.
(One night, after getting married, on one of those stressful days in The University, she asked, “Should we name one of our children Doesktre, a portmanteau”. I curtly asked her “why?” ,“ I think the first time I spoke to you was about these two men”. The days stress did not let me attach any form of romanticism to it, and I replied, “Instead a question mark would be a better choice for a name”. That reply from me was like a gust of wind that snuffed a candle; she refused to talk to me for the next one week. After all coaxing, she spent a night talking how Question mark is an awful name for a Kid).

The next summer we chanced to meet much more often. The number of classes I handled per week increased. She enrolled full time for the Western Epistemology paper. Sometime midway through the course, I guess that was on the fourtheenth of June, she came down to the staff room .She was absent in the classes for an entire week before that. A week later – on fourteenth of June, she came down to my room on a sultry simmering afternoon. The open fields in and around the university were simmering with mirages, a multitude of mirages crisscrossing one another, dancing like shadows in darkness. We smiled- mine too abrupt and hers lingered across her face. She tucked a strand of hair only for it to curl again and festoon around her temples; it curled only for her to tuck it back-the ricocheting and the retucking happened relentlessly, one succeeding the other. In the midst of this tucking and ricocheting she requested me to help her with the last week’s course syllabus that she had missed. Western Epistemology was well known for its frustrating notoriety of retaining students in the same course for years together by detaining. I asked her to come down to the staff room in the evenings. She was too refined to talk anything more than the bare necessity during the next two days-a refinement bordering on cold detachment. She sat opposite to me, copying the notes I had used for my lecture; I was too passive save clarifying my illegible writing at places or a private short hand notation I used in the notes. I started counting the R&T every evening.

My preparation for the next day’s lecture did not permit me stay for anything more than half an hour after University hours, and her plans of copying my notes trickled down to another two more days. While I was about to ask her to wind up for the day, I saw the Peon rush into the staff room panting for breath, he announced, poignantly, in a voice muffled by his panting that Dusk’s mother met with an accident and that she is critical-a poor euphemism betraying itself terribly. She was too shocked to weep, and she did not. What if you wake up one lazy morning to find that your bedroom is drifting away from the continent and is progressively moving in an unknown direction? That’s how it was for me; I did not know to enumerate the array of reactions attached to the emotion grief. I took her home in my car. We did not utter a word in the car.

Her house was located in an Anglo-Indian community, most of the women were skirt clad, and death seemed to have a different color there. It was all very understated and subtle; it was more Christainlike. I went down there only to find that Dusk had lived alone with her mother. Her father, a retired Army officer in the British Raj, was now living in Liverpool. Her parents had separated few years back, her father moving to his home country, her mother deciding to stay in India. In an hour or so, neighbors had lent their furniture and the provisional furniture was just laid at the threshold of the house. Most of the men sat there and the woman taking care of things indoors. I left home around two in the morning and was late to The University the next morning. The day was restless and was dying to die. I couldn’t go to the funeral. After college hours, I went down to Dusk’s home. I saw her seated in the sitting room. We mumbled niceties. The house was crowded and I let myself dissolve in the flood of heads. When I decided to leave I tried to get her attention, pursed my lips nodded a grave goodbye and went home. The next day was no different, I went down to her house, and so did I for the next five days. The crowd trickled down to a few very close relatives and I could feel more than a pair of raised eyebrows on my evening visits. I never understood the impulse to visit her house. Rather, I did not give myself the time to contemplate my act of visiting her house. A week or two later there was no one around her save an old lady a distant relative of her mother who was alone and living in the same colony. We went on walks on the shore of the lake, around which the entire Anglo- Indian community of the town had settled. It was during these days that I mastered the art of stone skipping. We used to walk to the lake; collecting stones suitable for skipping the water surface and fly past like a lightweight saucer. We mostly talked about the University and sometimes the subject matter was as dense as Tractatus and at times as light as Burroughs’s Tarzan. Her mother’s death was somehow like a saw that had cut through an invisible part of her. Death, perhaps is irrevocable not because of the loss you inherit, but because of the intrinsic metamorphosis. It is an express metamorphosis.

The lake was just beneath a platform. We used to sit on the stairs that led to the lake from the platform. I practiced skipping stones; she was involuntarily involved in R&T- I missed that that stands for Ricocheting and Tucking (I had stopped counting by this time), and conversing. Dusk and Dusk. The water was stale and unclean, dried leaves and broken branches on the shoreline reminding the remnants of a hot summer. After, making a stone skip eight times, I turned to her, bending and resting my entire body weight on my knees with my palms, and animatedly asked if she would marry me. She meditated for a moment. I turned back and started throwing stones into the lake. She moved to the last step on the platform; she could touch the water now. She dipped her index finger into the water and felt the eddying ripples the skipping stones created, turned towards me, tucked her hair behind her ear and said just a Yes. The hair had curled back somewhere between the ‘e’ and ’s’.
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The windowsill was the coolest place in the house. Dusk loved sitting there. Since the day we got married and she moved in, I couldn’t recollect a day when we did not sit on the windowsill. We read books in semi-darkness, the room sparsely lit by light leaking from somewhere in the street-an invisible source. She lamented, sitting on the window sill,” Don’t you think adulthood is an unforgiving paradox? Isn’t it worse than death? It’s not even illusive it just remains an unbending paradox”. She meditated for few moments,”why should we embrace the paradox, why don’t we have kids?”

“Yes”, this time around it curled back to her forehead when Y was in the air and e was still on my lips.

Our marriage, though she being a student of mine, wasn’t much of a surprise in The University, as I was too young to be a lecturer and rightly old to get married and so was Dusk. She attended classes after marriage, but we planned it in such a way that she choose subjects that I did not handle. She had to miss the “Ethics” course as result of this self-imposed rule. The Gynecologist who had delivered me diagnosed her of being pregnant. She chose to get treated by the same Doctor. A week later she was diagnosed of carrying quadruplets. She jokingly said, she was reminded of the geometrical structure rhombus.

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The time spent contemplating in a throbbing hospital lobby experiences the privilege of an apostrophe in a sentence-time of selective omission. It lacks, the abruptness and expectancy of wait in a railway station and the animation of soul as it happens in a coffee shop. Hospital lobbies are like oxymorons, even the slightest contemplation while reading an oxymoron or an observation in the lobby makes you smile. I was sitting in the lobby and was trying to count. A couple was seated at a two arm’s distance from me. She had her arms around his shoulders. Their eyeballs tracked the names of the doctors in the nameplates displayed on top of the consultation suites-their head and their eyeballs tracing an invisible semi circle in the air. She flipped his ear lobe every time they read a nameplate like a click on a counter. Her index finger flipped the ear lobe thirteen times. I then counted the consultation suites-twelve. Should I ask her to recount reflipping? Perhaps, the couple owned a bakery. Every time, I peered trying to capture a glimpse of whatever the door permitted, when the nurse, walked into the Gynecologist’s suite. She sometimes carried a tray of medical equipments into the suite arranged with a sense of democracy. The trays she carried from the suite were medical anarchy-disarray and blood. I wondered if the sense of urgency at the time of pregnancy is an old habit we acquired sometime back-to annotate birth with the seriousness it demands. My mother used to say, “you troubled everyone in the hospital, the doctors, the nurses and not to mention me”. The doctors should have sweated profusely. I should discuss, once she is back, the psychology behind pregnancy with Dusk sometime, I thought.

The Doctor came towards me,” Her blood pressure is shooting up, not a good sign, nothing to worry about either”.

Blood pressure doesn’t reflect any seriousness to a medical situation.

“She is struggling a bit as they are quadruplets”.

Rhombus would be a better term.

“I shall let you know how is it going if and when necessary”.

“Sure, Doctor”.

It took less than an hour for the doctor to get back to me,

“She suffered a seizure, she is too weak, she has delivered two babies, pray that her blood pressure doesn’t shoot up, that is not at all helpful”.

She uttered that with the ease of rummaging a word in a dictionary. I was too numb to react. Almost, waiting for few restless minutes the doctor came out of the theater, attached to the consultation suite, she did not utter a word and navigated me into the theater with a nod in the direction of the door.

I opened the door to see the nurses cleaning the babies. Four of them. Vertices of a rhombus. Dusk was lying on the bed. I bent down to her.” Multiple seizures, the blood pressure shot too high”. I couldn’t draw conclusions from that; rather I was refusing to draw conclusions from that. I couldn’t garner the courage to disrobe the minimalist veil of the nurse’s statement. I bent towards Dusk my head next to hers. The single strand of hair looked tired and curled up in a warm way against her forehead. I had always seen it in a state of motion either back forward or forward, now it had curled up close to her forehead and was lifeless.

I go home late in the nights these days.I have employed a baby sitter.Two of the babies have been displaying signs of autism.I haven’t named any of them yet.They are more than a year old.I have been visiting the lake daily. Skipping stone,nine,ten skips per stone,sometimes.I let the stones skip,sit on the last step of the platform and feel the eddying water with my index finger.It hurts.

-Mathi