Free The Lilac House by Anita Nair

how is it that my life has never risen above a series of clichés: Big house, poor inmates; boy comes on work to house, falls in love with house and girl; they have two children – boy and girl; man rises in career, wife trails him, happy to be his helpmate; the crisis of middle-age; man abandons wife; family divides – boy with mother, daughter declaring her allegiance to the father…
    ‘Shut up, Nayantara,’ she hissed. ‘You don’t know anything about Daddy and me. He has always spoilt you and that’s what you are – a silly spoilt brat sitting on judgement on her mother merely because she’s been the one to lay down the law.’
    She heard Nayantara draw in her breath. The enraged silence. And then the click of the phone.
    One more cliché. Daughter hangs up on mother, unable to face the truth. Nayantara doesn’t mean it. She is frightened, confused, and needs someone to blame, Meera told herself again and again when her daughter’s accusations came back to haunt her.
     
    Meera crosses her legs. Giri is late. She glances at her wrist. She would have liked to go to the bathroom, put on some lip gloss, and
check her sari. But what if he comes then? She doesn’t want him thinking that she failed to turn up.
    Her eyes travel across the room once again, halting at the large floral arrangement of birds of paradise, ginger lilies and ferns on an antique round table. The plump cushions on the cane sofas, the glistening leaves of the indoor plants in gigantic brass planters and the sparkling floors. It is exactly the kind of setting Giri fancies himself in. She smiles, unable to help the bitterness that corrodes the stretching of her lips.
     
    She goes to stand by the plate-glass window. Outside, it is an idyllic world. A butterfly hovers over a cluster of frangipani flowers. The breeze rustles the leaves. In the pool, koi carp frolic.
    The perfect world as glimpsed from an air-conditioned room. Nothing to hint at the scorching sunshine or the grime outside. Neither sweat nor dust. Pretty much what my life used to be like until now, Meera sighs, and then catches herself in time.
     
    She has taken to watching TV documentaries at night, these last few weeks. Stories of tribal women in Afghanistan dying in childbirth; the starving children of Darfur; the wounded, the maimed. The more suffering that is unveiled before her, the less isolated she feels. In her head echoes the refrain of a woman speaking about her seventeen-year-old daughter’s death: The god who gives is also the god who takes.
    Then the children found her one night. Nayantara, still unwilling to absolve her mother of blame and yet longing to comfort her. ‘Mummy, why do you watch such depressing programmes?’
    And Nikhil, poor Nikhil, who has appointed himself her chief cheerleader: ‘I have a DVD of Heroes . Shall we watch that? It’s all about people who discover that they have special talents – supernatural powers.’

    Meera sighed. ‘I wish I had supernatural powers. I don’t. I am just an ordinary…’
    ‘Please,’ the children cried in unison, coming to sit by her side. ‘Please don’t start. We know what you are going to say.’
    Nikhil slipped his hand into hers. ‘Why do you sigh so much, Mummy?’
    ‘It’s depressing, that long intake of breath, the loud exhalation, I tell you, it’s depressing.’ Nayantara took her other elbow.
    Meera looked away and said, ‘Do you know what Keats wrote – There’s a sigh for yes, and a sigh for no/ And a sigh for I can’t bear it/O what can be done, shall we stay or run?’
    Meera caught the children staring at each other with an almost comical look of horror on their faces. Mummy had taken to reciting poetry. What next?
    So Meera resolved to never sigh. Or, at least, not as often as she seemed to these days.
     
    She sees him come through the lobby doors. And it seems that he has seen her, for he walks straight towards her. Meera looks at the floor, trying to still her heart, trying to