As Flies to Wanton Boys

Fiction 

She looked so emaciated that I would have mistaken her for a beggar. But she had said, “Hi Tom.” There was no way a beggar would know my name since I was not a politician or any such public figure that appears in the media. Moreover, her dress, a simple but elegant churidar suit, bore the fading shades of some bygone aristocracy. I stared into her eyes, deep and stagnant pools of grief, which reflected a different me, a young me.

 “Mercy!” I cried.

“Yes,” she said. And she smiled like a moonbeam trying to pierce the winter fog of a terribly polluted city-sky.

We were both sitting in a park in the horizon of which the sun was sinking rapidly into the Arabian Ocean beyond the trees in the park. An old man with grey hairs all over his head and face: that’s me. And an old woman with grey hairs that seemed to be lingering on out of some sympathy. That was Mercy.

Mercy and I were classmates at college. She was a brilliant student who could solve all the problems of real analysis and coordinate geometry with the grace of a beauty queen ambling the ramp. I admired her in those days. But I kept a distance from her as I was scared of the brilliance of her mind.

Where had all that brilliance gone? I wondered as I stared into the stagnant pools of her deep-set eyes.

“What a tragedy life is, Tom!” She said with a wry sigh. I couldn’t make out whether she was sad or happy when she defined life as a tragedy with a sigh that sounded comic. “Do you remember how Menon Sir used to repeat time and again those lines from King Lear? As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.”  Menon Sir was our favourite English lecturer.

Mercy narrated to me her story. She was married off as soon as she graduated. No one cared to pay heed to her wish for a job. A woman’s job is to look after her husband and children, they told her explicitly. Even Saint Paul had said that in the Bible. Submit yourselves to your husbands, that’s what Paul said among many other equally patriarchal things. Mercy obeyed. She had no choice. Moreover, her beloved aunt told her that given the brilliance of her brains her husband would treat her like a queen.

“Queen!” Mercy chuckled. Sadly. “I was his slave. Worse, in fact. He would beat me for any silly thing like cleaning up the space below our bed where he used to keep all sorts of things like spanner sets and hacksaw blades.... Now that he's no more, the bedroom is serene."

Their son turned out to be just like the father. “But the daughter was a bit like me,” Mercy said. “Jennifer was intelligent. She was a rebel.”

Jennifer fell in love with a boy who was a Hindu. There was a commotion in the family and outside as well when she asserted her right to marry a man of her choice. Even Mercy questioned her choice. “A Hindu? Couldn’t you find a Christian, if not a Catholic?” Mercy echoed the family’s sentiments. Religious sentiments are like touch-me-nots.

“What did a Catholic husband do to you, Mom?” Jennifer asked. “Treated you like scum. And gave you a son and a daughter. What more?” She spat out. “I wonder how you lay supine beneath that filth called your Catholic husband and let him eject his venom into your innards.”

Mercy laughed as she quoted her daughter to me. The sun had sunk beyond the horizon. The Arabian Ocean must have turned turbulent beyond the massive trees in the park. I could sense the turbulence in my veins. Only, I didn’t realise that the turbulence was raging just next to me.