A Game of Chess | Ruhi Jiwani

But now, it was as though the things that were in the background had come into the foreground.  Chintu belied his name by seeming more like a full-fledged person than ever before—a human being with his ups and downs, the things that caused him concern and amusement.  He engaged her more than before, partly because he seemed to act as though she was still the same old Rachna.  It shouldn’t have been that surprising, given that he had known her since her school years, when she hadn’t even met Ravi.
Chintu had never had anything negative to say about Ravi, had always listened to her talk about her life with absorption.  He himself had never been married and therefore only had scattered bits of news to give her—about his work and acquaintances.  He was an only child and his parents were old, so there were no familial relationships to engage him either.  And he seemed to like it that way.
While Rachna had thrown herself fully into life, desperately trying to get ahead in her career and personal life, Chintu had always remained on the sidelines of his own existence.  She never felt like the protagonist of her own story, just a shadowy character who wasn’t quite strong enough to retain the audience’s attention.  Chintu, on the other hand, was a part of the audience, gazing at her with rapture and applauding at the right time.
Rachna had never understood how a person could live like that—constantly observing and often amused but never taking center stage.  At times, she felt impatient and wondered when he meant to step up, but she’d come to realize that what she perceived as a lack of action was just a stillness that allowed his mind to run ahead in circles.
Chintu had the gift of foresight and never took any step without examining its possible repercussions.  Most of the futures he saw for himself were like roads with potholes.  During the rains, they filled with water, enabling him to see his reflection, if he was calm enough to do so.  But mostly, they only succeeded in tripping him up while the monsoon pelted his face.
Life was a vehicle making its way along these roads and it was hard enough to maintain one’s equilibrium in stormy weather.  Chintu didn’t see the need to make things worse by doing the things that he knew would lead to emotional tsunamis.  While Rachna was careless with her emotions, bestowing them on random things, small and large, Chintu was on the opposite side of the see-saw—excessively cautious to such an extent that he often found himself grinding to a halt.
There was something calm and collected about Chintu which made Rachna want to spend more time with him after Ravi’s death.  It was as though she expected his state of mind to be conveyed to her via osmosis.  And, in fact, it was hard to become a sobbing mess around someone who seemed to have forgotten that there was any reason to be that way.
For Chintu, Ravi’s death had happened and was past already.  It was as though her husband had made no ripples in Chintu’s life, the way he had in hers.  Chintu had only seen Ravi as an extension of Rachna and for him, that extension was now gone, but the main person still remained.  And it was gratifying to be seen that way to Rachna because she herself had never managed to put her own life before Ravi’s.
To her, Ravi’s death felt like the passing away of a twin soul, someone who was so similar to her that she recognized that there ought to be a distinction between them but was unable to find one.  At this level, it had not been Ravi who’d surrounded her; she’d surrounded him.
She’d lavished her unused maternal instincts on him, absorbing any shocks that threatened him.  Her soul was like so much amniotic fluid in which she watched Ravi grow and flourish until it was time for him to emerge.  She’d never counted on the fact that he wasn’t really a child, so the withdrawal of her womb-like stillness left him ill-equipped to deal with the real world around him.
“Your move,” said Chintu, settling back on the bench, looking up at the leaves shivering against the sky.  It was a pleasant evening and there were many people, old and young, taking walks in the park.
Rachna stared unseeingly at the chessboard; she felt as though she was playing blindly.  She couldn’t remember any of the strategies she had learned so painstakingly while at school.  All she knew was that pawns moved ahead one step at a time, bishops went diagonal, rooks went straight ahead, backwards or sideways, knights could jump over pieces in their L-shaped movements and the queen could move diagonally, backwards, forwards and sideways.  The king was weak, of course, always needing protection, which was provided by the queen and the remaining pieces.
Chintu claimed that he didn’t remember much about chess either, but he was the one who had brought up the idea, producing a lovely wooden chessboard with carved pieces in blue and white, a gift from a friend who had bought it on his travels.  Rachna had reluctantly fallen in with the plan, although she suspected that Chintu had been playing on his computer all along.  She herself had always considered computer games a waste of time; they created a fantasy world which drew her attention away from real life.  People who played them seemed to her to be lacking in basic life skills and Chintu was no exception.  
At times, Rachna felt that it was her duty to try to draw him out of his confined world, expose him to a bit of popular culture or contemporary literature.  She’d given him a copy of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy a few years ago, hoping to have a discussion about its merits once he’d read it.  He’d accepted it with amusement but hadn’t brought it up again, so she’d assumed he hadn’t cracked the spine.
She’d ended up feeling a bit ashamed at having judged his way of life and had dropped the topic.  She had never meant to test him based on her beliefs, but she wondered if it was possible for people to avoid doing that.  Everyone thought that their tao, their way, was the best way.  Chintu undoubtedly thought so too and had deliberately brought her here to assess her skills at the things he thought were important.
Rachna knew she was failing the test.  When she looked at the chessboard, she remembered who she was before Ravi—a highly intelligent girl with opinions, optimism and self-confidence.  She knew that none of these things could be ripped away by circumstances alone but her store of them had decreased.  It was as though they’d formed a jar of mango pickle in the kitchen of her mind and she’d emptied it a little bit everyday to add a bit of spice to her meal.  But she’d never gotten around to replenishing it.
The first day, she lost quickly.  But Rachna was stubborn and when she decided to do something, she kept trying until she succeeded.  It was she who suggested playing chess again, which seemed to surprise Chintu, given how she’d never been interested in pursuing it throughout her adult life.  But he accepted with alacrity and played with her whenever she suggested it.
They even started to have a little following in the park, mostly senior citizens who emerged in the evening to take the air.  Some would suggest moves to Rachna but they were as bad at the game as she was.
To her amusement, they actually started to take a real interest in improving her game.  One day, she found two of them poring over a book of chess strategies and they proceeded to regale her with various gambits that could help her win.  And when she tried to use them during the game, they got really excited.
“Ab kya karega?” they arrogantly asked Chintu.  What will he do now?
But he just smiled and countered the move easily.  They reacted with such disappointment that you would have thought that Sachin Tendulkar himself had just gotten out.
Rachna couldn’t help laughing at their reaction, perhaps her first real laugh since Ravi had died.  Chintu seemed to notice it too as his gaze lingered on her face, lighting up for a second, like a string of tiny Christmas lights wound through the trees and bushes of the park.  Rachna realized, in that moment, that he admired her and she basked, for a moment, in his unfiltered, honest affection.
***
The chess games might have gone on forever, a balm to Rachna’s battered soul.  They might have at least restored her to normalcy, even though “normal” was never something she had aimed for.  Rachna wanted brilliance, which was why she’d adopted the hardness of a diamond whenever she could.  But it had chipped away at her intuitive processes, leaving her with emotional residue that stuck everywhere, refusing to be washed away.
The mess she found herself in was of her own making, she thought, and she wanted to deal with it herself without allowing outside influences to do anything more than mirror the calm she projected to the world.  Chintu shouldn’t be allowed to know how volcanic her inner life felt.  So when she started getting to the point where it threatened to spill out, she started avoiding him and the senior citizens she’d struck up a friendship with.
Perhaps, at the bottom of it all, was the idea that she had done nothing to deserve kindness.  Or maybe she was afraid that it would soon be replaced by indifference.  So it was smarter, really, to withdraw her own friendly overtures before others withdrew theirs.  After all, how long was Chintu likely to be satisfied with chess games?  How long before he put his hand into the heart of the volcano and got burned?
Chintu’s disappointment at the change was palpable.  Rachna could hear it in the silence that followed her refusal, and she hung up the phone as soon as possible, leaving him to deal with the impossibility of her excuses.  He called again the next week and the week after that, but their conversations grew shorter and shorter.  Finally, she stopped answering her phone when she saw his number on the caller id.  But, for some reason, she continued to feel his hurt, a shadow that followed her throughout her daily tasks.
She knew that it would eventually go away.  Everything did.  Even Ravi’s death was beginning to crystallize in her mind, as she pulled her emotions in.  At first, they had been like trickles of water spreading outwards from a geyser.  There had been no way of containing them or calling them back.  But now, the heat had subsided, the water had been absorbed by the ground and only the minerals it contained were spread around the landscape of her mind.
She could imagine how, after a decade of this, her mind would resemble the limestone formations of the Sahyadri hills which ran parallel to the West coast of India.  It would rise nobly up towards the sky, impenetrable and isolated.  It was this image that finally made her break down and call Chintu again.
Halfway through the phone call, she found her voice trembling, and her eyes filled with tears.  She blinked furiously, trying to hold them in, but one slipped out from the corner of her right eye.  She wiped it away, wishing that she could forget this moment.  She wasn’t rejecting the emotion itself but the memory of it.  What she wanted was a whole new set of memories which would make her happy every time she thought about them.  She would have invested in the Total Recall package if it had been available to her.
But no, the thoughts that darted into her mind unawares were always dark, even suicidal.  She kept seeing Ravi’s blood trickling into the grooves between the tiles of the walking path.  And the idea of taking a warm bath while she cut her femoral artery almost gave her a sense of relief when she thought about it.  After all, she already felt dead on the inside and she only needed to establish a congruence between her surroundings and her inner life.
“Rachna, don’t worry.  I know you’re feeling depressed.  And that’s normal.  But you can’t lock yourself away.”
Chintu’s voice called her back from that inner place of desolation; it felt stronger than it ever had before.  It was a representative of the present, a microcosm of all that lay in store for her if she managed to break through the barrier between her past and her future.  But when she reached to pluck it out, it seemed to recede further and further.  It was as though a part of her was reaching out for help but another part was sliding down a muddy crevasse—the gap between understanding and action which swallowed her with its ambiguity.  There was no foothold here and she fell slowly, listening to his words.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
She opened her eyes and found that she was here, in the present, the phone in her hand, the remote control for the AC lying unused next to her.  It was late morning but she’d been awake since dawn, when the azaan, the call to prayer, from the nearby mosque had broken into a surreal dream.  She saw now that there was a new dimension to unhappiness which had previously escaped her.  It wasn’t guilt, per se, or shame which prevented her from showing her face.  It was her knowledge that she had not been in love with Ravi for a few years.  If she had held on to him more tenaciously, gripped him with the pincers of her love, she might have prevented the fall.
“No one blames you for what happened.  There was nothing you could have done…”
She felt his voice droning on in the background now.  A fly had managed to get into the room despite the closed doors to the balcony.  She followed its movement with her eyes but made no effort to catch it.
“Chess game tonight?” she asked.  “Or maybe we could go see a movie?”
Chintu paused for a moment and she could hear the smile in his voice.  “Sure, let me check the newspaper to see what’s on,” he said.
She heard him shuffling through the Bombay Times and waited for the usual bombardment of movie names, reviews and showtimes.  Chintu was very detail-oriented, even about the little things.  And it struck her that she had never felt his happiness as vividly as she did in this moment.  It was like a doorway enabling her to pass out of the morass of her consciousness.  She strolled through like an actress running in slow motion across the fields, the veil of her sari flying in the wind.
This was not love, just friendship.  But it felt like enough.

Ruhi Jiwani has a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature department. Currently, Ruhi writes blogs for small businesses and I’ve also done some fashion writing. I’ve published poems in Femina, The Writer’s Eye, Off the Coast, The Binnacle and The Eclectic Muse