"MARIGOLDS"
Stifled by the pressures of an unproductive life both in the private( the domicile, the individual psyche) and the public realms (his workplace as well as the society he inhabits), the Marigolds represent the last surviving vestiges of Chhetri's dream, an Indian expatriate in the Fiji Islands, still burdened with the racial trauma of a past that seeps into, and ravages much of his present. Weathered by the relentless onslaught of a crippling psychological inertia, he must hold onto the utopic fantasy proffered by the possibility of the blooming flowers to maintain his composure against his frustration caused by the impasse of sterility that has come to define him on these levels. He keeps "expecting to be rescued from this self-made prison"- of desperately wanting things to happen- of change. He has nothing to fall back upon except for the discernibly predictable patterns entailed in diurnal sounds and movements. His mother, embittered by what she perceives to be her son's failure. keeps reprimanding him, while simultaneously playing "strange tricks" on his wife, Dharma, who insistently suspects her of sabotaging their home. His wife who appears to have been locked in her own swirling world of distrust and disbelief for her husband, adheres more and more to the actual performance of ritualistic obeisances, like bathing the Tulsi plant or worshipping the Sun for instance, and resorts to her culture to cope with the alienation she falls victim to.
Mr. Rangaswamy's discourses on the "issues and hidden trends in government" can hardly offer him the much needed break from his reality. But the only strategy that seems to offer him temporaray solace against his monotonous passivity is that of silence, which he uses to conceal his grievances and not give his bickering wife, for instance the chance to explode at him. He ensures the stagnation ( the convenient incommunication, to be more precise) paradoxically and subversively to his own ideal advantage, specially in moments of heightened awareness. This power unleashed from this most unlikeliest of sources is also embodied in the figure of the doll, who, like Chetri himself, seems to be physically striving to extend the borders of its own physical existence, to occupy and affect the space it merely/vaccuously inhabits. The doll also bears eery resemblances to Dharme herself. in terms of their silent and shared (supposedly so for Dharma) hostilities which are beyond articulation. Though their voyeuristic stances afford them the possibility to observe from a safe distance without being affected, Silence can hardly offert any permanent solution or remedy to the sterile insularity of their lives. The lack of the plausibility of a healthy, sybiotic relatonship between the husband and wife is signalled by the doll's tears. Desires are meant to be represses, and consequently, if revealed, misunderstood. Seeing her husband with a knife in her hand, Chetri suddenly presumes that he is meaning to stab her,and frantically locks herself up in the cloistered cocoon of the bedroom's darkness.
Dharma's dream where he sees himself as escaping gravity, and being wafted off onto the air (literally, an unaccomodated man), stripped of all obligations to teaching or to his apathetic colleagues; but this ends viciously with the piercing cries of children, and him eventually descending onto the slow, intractable obdurateness of the stone altar. His ripping off the Marigold shoot from the school garden ( which he himself had planted) makes us wonder if this act was prompted on his part by an awareness of the inescapability of his trauma. Cut off from the social milieu, unaware of its urban lingo, uninvited to its exclusive parties, devoid of the bliss of material success, his identity is further problematised by the stinging remark of Enomi (the only Fijian " to take him seriously") that he is enjoying his success at the expense of an ethnic Fijian who is more entitled to that success. He plunges into a profound depression, a humiliation which comes from having realised that he has lived his life in "bad faith" ( to use Sartre's terms)- that his internalising and subsequently repressing the wounds of individual and socio-historical trauma has warped all his possibility for growth. Like the Marigold seeds, he is doomed to not prosper, and remain, in his mind, a mere vestigial shadow of himself, constantly trailing behind history. His "inauthentic " living, or living-for-others, he realises, has deprived him of having attended to his own dreams and desires, and the pent-up aggression that had been accumulating steadily in him over the years, finally is unleashed in an act of inexplicable violence on his defenseless wife. This unfolds in a sudden turn of events, whereby his outlook onb the familiatr aspects of his environment alters drastically,a s he starts seeing his own life implicated into the collective memories of myriad colours. The sudden "splash of colour" he emphatically associates with the unborn Mrigolds, which contain the last residue of his sane functional self, the promise of which is kept intact, ironically by their not-being-born.
His companion made him realise how easy it was to live- which pushed him to bring in change in his life by violence, and that becomes the agent for him asserting his principality in the face of a world indifferent to his aspirations, scrutinising him for his "animalistic" smell. The curiously disturbing moment where he returns to his bed, after having throttled his wife,and even having kicked her in the groin ( perhaps an indicator of his unproductive sexual life too) illustrates that failed return to silence, which can never compensate for his growing sense of failure, frustration and incompatibility to all human beings around him. This act of violence, unjustifiable as it is, is the crucial fissure in the profile of his psyche,and offers him the first chance of channelising his anger in any direction whatsoever. What he ends up with is what he began with-an endlessly repetitive chain of violence, doomed to repeat itself- a past of historical incongruencies, of suppressed memories, of stagnation, from which there is no escape.


PRITAM BHAUMIK, PG-1, ROLL-36.