The room was an accurate description of what they were, or at least Sonia said. Aman liked to look at the different artifacts they had gathered over the course of their lives. It shone in the pale sunlight of the morning, diffusing, ever so slightly, into the room. The flowers of the sheer drapes twine in a shadow world, with the scatter of blue and pink precious stones, on a slate of clean marble. He tried this game, to jump from shadow to shadow, whenever he danced through the room to retrieve the newspaper at the wooden door. It was an obstacle course as if trying to cling to the night a little bit longer, to put off the start of another day just a wee bit more. Once when Sonia observed this ritual she said he looked like a ballet dancer, highly off balance. Compliment? Comment? He could never quite fathom them.
The stones glint mischievously at their beholder; the laughing Buddha. They had had more than one argument, about the placement of the cherubic idol. Should the figurine of an unfamiliar religion be facing the door or not, to bring in good luck to their home? These are things that need to be said. The most of the square footage of the room was occupied by a little oversized plush sofa set.
The most recent acquisition in their arsenal, was hanging on the wall opposite to the shelf, a Kashmiri fabric, draped rather casually over the wall. Aman disagreed with the Kashmiri ‘thing’ being ‘them’. He was not Kashmiri, on whatever side of his family. The only thing he knew about the place was what the TV news channels hooted as breaking news. The hanging had been bought in a rare fit of shopping fever, so common in Sonia. She had taken a fancy for it, and since his annoyance with it, had insisted on putting on the main wall. It’s unnaturally pink and blue flowers blended with the deep contrasting green of the dyed fabric. Still, it was a little too out there for his taste. Every time he gazed at it, it hurt his eyes.
He liked his things sober. Just below the hanging, the picture frame he had gifted to themselves on their anniversary (framing a rather joyous picture of their engagement), was plain white and black with stern straight lines. He considered it classy and sublime; to be out of one’s face rather than in it. The first time she opened it, he asked her if she liked it or not.
She replied, “It’s nice. A little inharmonious with the current scheme, but what the hell, it’s not as if we are following any rules for interior decoration anyhow.” She always had this coy smile on her face and it rarely changed. It was one of those features but he could never be sure if she was ever really serious or not.
The Kashmiri hanging, on the other hand, was shocking. It screamed to let it free from the nails which shackled it to the wall. It threatened to break out of its leafy border and run a riot of colours, blue and pink run amok in the room. Aman did not like it. Still, he had long ago accepted that decisions on all things; specially the smaller things like bed sheet thread count to toilet paper insignia, are to be made as partners in marriage.
He always commented wryly in half-jest, as is the wont of anyone married criticizing the sacred institution “These mutual decisions of married life are more like compromises. The scale just depends on who is on what side of half. The worse half doesn’t like a thing half the time. The better half loves it full time. That means the other one is more than half for the thing and the vote is a veto. The irony is that, even if I don’t like it full time, her percentage carries more weight.”
And if Sonia appeared to listen in on it to add for humorous effect, among their many insider jokes ”And this is not saying anyone’s tilting the scales on the wrong side, mind you.”
He always ended up deferring to her on purchases; she had better taste in these kinds of things. Still, the Kashmiri tour de force nagged him, and he couldn’t put his finger on the particular itch, after all he didn’t find it altogether monstrous a sight. He thought back to the day they bought it.
Comparison shopping in Connaught Place for a suitable cover for the sofa set, they encountered a street side vendor in Janpath. Just out of curiosity, Sonia asked to see the wall hangings. In no time, the whole place was swarming with wall hangings of all shapes and colours, from the weirdest hues spilling on the ground, to the snake skin textured ones floating magically in the air. After hanging the prizes of their
previous conquests that day on him, she bunched her hair in a banana clip (he only knew this terminology, because they had happened to go hunting for one, one fine Sunday) and got down and dirty with the woman selling the merchandise. He could have been replaced by a coat rack, almost as if he was not there.
After almost an hour of a harsh three-layered selection process, where she carefully screened each hanging on various parameters, ranging from aesthetic, compatibility with present items, ability to merge in, ability to multitask as a tablecloth, to the extent of ability of being gifted to someone else if necessary. He thought this whole jamboree rather silly, you pick the one you like and then you buy it.
Then, the bargaining started and this is where he tuned out; so he barely remembered the details. It must have been exhilarating for her as always. He never put in so much effort into the act of bargaining. He named a flat price with a note of finality in his voice. It was a one time, take it or leave it, offer. If he really liked the thing he would relent to repeating it once but that was as far as he went. It was not a surprise, not even to him, that he ended up shopping less. Almost everything that adorned the room was a result of Sonia’s willingness and expertise in shopping. She just dragged them off to one of these unending markets; to look, to find that one magical thing that would quench her will to spend that day.
To think of it, the only time they had returned home empty handed from these excursions, was when they had purchased a sofa; and it had been delivered the next day.
Did his annoyance stem from all the bargaining applied to buy the hanging? Was it way too cheap? If it was original, they ought to have shelled out more for it, than they did. When he mentioned this to Sonia, she said, it was ‘original enough’.
He hated the phrase, the condescending tone of it. He sensed it was in part a fault of his own. He had spent the first two decades of his life in a small ‘kasba’ just 30km from Delhi. It was far enough to be insulated from the captivities of the metro. Yet lamentably close to be intoxicatingly mesmerized by them.
His father always preached self-control. He was particularly fond of saying, “You are inextricably bound to the ground where you come from. Never forget that, or you will be bought down to the very same ground and painfully reminded of it.”
However he had tried to forget, he had earned that sense of entitlement to all things, which came naturally to many others. Still this feeling of being an outsider, eons old, hung in some corner of his heart. He was afraid someone would identify him as a phony and show him out the door.
One thing he had imbibed from his father’s words was that one can never be what one is not; and to do so is to be dishonest not only to yourself but your own legacy as well. ‘Original enough’? It seemed to make a mockery out his beliefs on their societal position. He liked to think that he knew where he stood, and that phrase made it sound like a place he didn’t want to be standing in.
It was heresy, akin to any of the deadliest sins according to him. He liked to comment. “I am if anything but, in the last, at least, not in any fathomable way, a hypocrite.” He liked the round-about way, the sentence framed itself. There was something superficially hypocritical about the sentence itself. Was he not a little hypocritical about denouncing the hanging as pretentious? It gelled in together with
everything, if a little precociously, that extra edge made it so much more beautiful.
In entirety the room was a blend of their choices, their lives in a single frame. The flowers inside the hanging bursting with revel were tempered and contained by the stern straight lines of the picture frame. These very same lines curiously frame the defining moments of their lives. And drawn to the pink and blue colours, he froze for a second; noticing the same strains of colour inside the picture. There were bouquets of flowers in the background, in the same garish pink and blue. They combined with their images, complemented their beings. How he had missed them till now, he did not know, but now he could imagine. Just as they had grown, those flowers had grown in the background, colouring the storyboard of their lives. These threads of colours pink and blue, unseen, ran through their entangled lives, connecting everything.
