Read Online The Lilac House by Anita Nair - Free Book Online

morning after Giri’s disappearance. In the span of sixty seconds, her mind leaps,
vaults, hops, skips, tumbles, cartwheels, gyrates and contorts into a million possibilities of anguish in waiting.
    Explanations. Nayantara. The police station. Mummy, Lily and Nikhil. The neighbours. Colleagues. Friends. The driver, the maid, the people in the park. Telephone calls. Credit cards. The bank manager. Hospitals. Telephone books. The morgue where bodies wait to be identified… Stop it, stop it, Meera tells herself. She catches sight of herself in the mirror and thinks, do I know that woman? Sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking ever so gently, as if to soothe herself. Do I know that woman with bereavement written in her eyes, face and limbs? A woman who doesn’t know what to do next except alternate between grief and abasement.
     
    There was a time when Zeus decided to punish Hera for her wilfulness. He hung her from the sky, shackled by golden bracelets at the wrist and an anvil at the ankle.
    In the oceans below, Hera saw herself reflected. She quailed at the image of what she had been turned into. Worse was the knowledge that she would be seen thus: a woman petrified.
    How could something like this have happened to her? Hera didn’t know what hurt more, the pain or the humiliation. A cry escaped her.
    And so Meera Hera cries as she opens her eyes to a dank September morning.
     
    ‘Where’s Giri?’ Saro asks at breakfast, forking a papaya cube.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Meera says. Her mother needs a whole papaya every morning, one half of which she cuts into cubes and eats. The rest she smears on her face. Meera gapes at her now, as if seeing her for the first time. This orange-faced silly woman, my peacock of a mother, is this the woman I am to turn to for comfort and succour?

    ‘Isn’t he having any breakfast?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘What do you mean, I don’t know? Is it too much to expect a civil answer?’
    ‘Now now, Saro,’ Lily interrupts. ‘No need for you to get so upset! Meera means she doesn’t know if Giri is in the house or in the garden.’ Lily smears butter on her toast. ‘He’ll be here soon!’
    The scraping of the knife on the crisp surface of the bread. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Meera feels it grate inside her skull.
    ‘No, I don’t know. That’s what I mean. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where he spent the night or who he is with. I don’t know if he will be here for breakfast or back in this house ever again. I don’t know if he is alive or dead or lying in some hospital in a coma… I don’t know a fucking thing!’ Meera snaps. Her eyes fill and she brushes the tears away. ‘Satisfied? Does that satisfy your curiosity, Ma?’
    Saro’s eyes are round with shock. Lily’s crafty old eyes narrow. Meera drops her head and rests her forehead on the table’s edge. She wants to crawl into a deep dark hole and stay there. Away from their prying eyes, their questions, and the sight of Nikhil, a mute Nikhil pretending that he has heard nothing, trying to hide behind a tightly clenched face his perturbation at a suddenly foulmouthed, raging mother and a mysteriously missing father. His fingers alone give him away as they shred a piece of toast into crumbs.
    ‘But he must have said something,’ Saro begins.
    ‘Did you try calling him?’ Lily asks.
     
    Meera rubs her forehead on the edge of the table. Each time the children or Giri fumed at the old ladies for making a fine art of stating the obvious, Meera had frowned at them.
    ‘Then tell them to lay off. I don’t need them telling me what I can see for myself,’ Nayantara would snap back.
    Now Meera wishes she could do as Nayantara does. Toss her
head and flounce off in a rage. ‘What do you think?’ she asks between gritted teeth.
     
    Precisely eighteen hours after Giri disappeared, Meera’s mobile lights up with a message from him: Check your email.
    She stares at the screen in shock. Check