A River Sutra by Gita Mehta

believe I was not a drunk until we passed evening after evening on my veranda, I pouring a single drink for myself but many for him. My abstemiousness exasperated him. When I said I did not want to leave the tea estate, Ashok told me I was losing my mind.
Raising his voice above the singing of the crickets and the deep-throated belches of the garden frogs, he said, "You are definitely going mad, yaar. You hardly drink. You want to stay in this god-forsaken wilderness when you could be a director of the company. You mastermind these perfect crops all day but at night you do nothing but read."
He leaned over and stared at me. "Admit it,
•yaar. It is downright sinister for a man your age not to have had a woman for two solid years!"
He went on and on trying to convince me to return to Calcutta in that soft blackness which had never ceased to affect me as it had from the first night, but which obviously upset him with its emptiness.
Not wishing to offend an old friend, I made excuses. "Which woman would live with me with
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out marriage? And you've seen the tea pickers. Could you take them to bed?"
    "Then come back to Calcutta, yaar, before it drops off or withers away like some unwatered tea bush."
    Too much drink made him insensitive to my silence, and I was glad the next morning to wave Ashok good-bye.
    But his words left a mark on my mind as if he had dropped a bottle of ink across a favorite book. Like some small night animal sexual restlessness began to gnaw at the edges of my content. After dinner I sat on the veranda, unable to relax in the wicker armchair as insects and moths flung themselves ceaselessly against the glass domes covering the lightbulbs. The darkness that had always seemed so serene now mirrored my restless mind. For the first time I was lonely, and when I entered my bedroom I felt the massive bed sneering at my unused manhood.
    Whatever I saw mocked my efforts to recover my composure. The women laughing at each other across the tea bushes now seemed knowingly voluptuous, revealing their breasts, their rounded bellies, their bared calves too much to my view. Even when I went shooting in the jungle I heard only the mating call of animals and I was disgusted with the gun in my hands.
    My grandfather's books offered no escape. Once I pulled the Rig Veda from the bookshelf, hoping to find some philosophical consolation in it, but the passage I read shocked me, so accurately did it describe my loneliness.
    At first was Death.
That which did mean an utter emptiness. And emptiness, mark thou, is Hunger's Self.
    Determined to recover my tranquility, I plunged into my work with redoubled intensity. It did no good. Everything about my work annoyed me. The stupidity of the workers with their constant demands for advances against their salaries. The stubbornness of the union leaders. The inefficiency of the clerical staff in the office.
    I frequently found myself shouting in irritation when something small had been overlooked, as if I had become Mr. Sen. The workers responded by withdrawing their affection, leaving me frozen in that isolation which had led so many of my colleagues to become alcoholics.
    Now I followed the example of my predecessors, putting aside my books to sit in the darkness, a bottle of whisky at my elbow, while the head bearer waited in the garden, drawing on his bidi as I drank myself into oblivion. Then, my body a dead weight across his shoulders, he dragged me into the bedroom and somehow undressed me and pushed me through the mosquito net where I lay in a stupor of stale whisky fumes never sure if I was awake or asleep.
    Perhaps my loneliness caused my mind to create its own enslavement. Or perhaps I had already become the victim of my grandfather's books. In any case, one night I was lying in my bed when I was awakened by a perfume that subsumed the smell of whisky that had become the companion to my sleep.
    As that musky fragrance enveloped me, calming me and exciting me at the