The Complete Stories gathers together Anita Desai’s short story collections Diamond Dust and Games at Twilight and the novellas of The Artist of Disappearance, with a new preface from the author. From the icy suburbs of Canada to the overcrowded B&Bs of Cornwall, via the hill towns and cities of India, Anita Desai observes human behaviour unflinchingly but not unkindly, recognising our ordinariness and our strangeness, and capturing both with quiet precision.
Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.
ALSO BY ANITA DESAI
Cry, the Peacock
Voices in the City
Bye-Bye, Blackbird
Where Shall We Go This Summer?
Games at Twilight
Fire on the Mountain
Clear Light of Day
Village by the Sea
In Custody
Baumgartner’s Bombay
Journey to Ithaca
Fasting, Feasting
Diamond Dust
The Zigzag Way
The Artist of Disappearance
I was always a scribbler. As soon as I was taught the alphabet I scribbled – even before I could spell so that I was always harassing everyone in the household (including the cook who knew no word of English) ‘How do you spell “house”? How do you spell tree, fire, bird, fish … ?’ (He responded by making me a magnificent gift on my birthday of an inkwell carved out of soft soapstone which I unfortunately ruined by pouring real ink into that delicate, decorative object.) I filled notebook after notebook seated on a cane stool at my round green table and was labelled, with an understandably resigned sigh, ‘The Writer in the Family’.
What was I writing? Consciously, with awareness and intent, very little. I simply had an urge to put everything, everything that I saw, heard and experienced on paper, in ink. I had little awareness of categories – books were books to me, the imposing leather-bound books behind the glass on my parents’ bookshelves, the worn, dog-eared paperbacks on my siblings’ bookshelves and boxes, and the exciting, inviting ones in all their diversity in the bookshop where I spent my pocket money. I can’t remember when I learnt to differentiate between the short story and the novel – no, actually I can: it was when I first decided to send a piece out to be published (publishing was important, I knew writing had to be in print if it was to earn its name) and it was of course of a short length to fit into a magazine or journal. But I was also always writing at length with the idea of a book, a proper book, in my mind, and a part of me believed short stories to be failed novels.
But a short story is not a failed novel any more than a novella is an extended short story. Each has an altogether different set of rules and effects. Length is one of them but lengths vary wildly. As Hortense Calisher said, ‘How long should a short story be? As long as a piece of string. I mean – to tie up the parcel with.’ I like her practical, workmanlike approach but there is in addition the element of chance. How did one piece I scribbled end up a short story, another extend, unwrap itself, wander, digress and venture onto a path, a road to a further destination – novella, or novel?
It is all a matter of instinct really, and exploration, a conviction that dawns upon one while one works that one has said what one set out to say, there is no need to go further. It may be just one small episode, stumbled upon unexpectedly, a glimpse out of a window, the fall of light on one object while bypassing another, that gives one pause and for some reason is not forgotten. Why has it stayed in the mind when so many other impressions, encounters and experiences have turned into a blur and disappeared? And when one has found the answer to that – the story is done. It can come to one quickly or it may take long, very long, to discover. In the short story it need not be pursued further. Many writers have commented on its identity being closer to a poem than a novel.
I have written only a few short stories that have provided me with that sensation that one craves: ah, I have done what I set out to do, no more is needed. The stories that constitute this collected edition are those that I ended upon that note. For the most part I have taken longer and watched the stone I’d flung into the pond create ripples that extend further, ripple on ripple, arc on arc, struggling to reach the far shore, and wondered: where will this go? How will it end? And that search has turned into a novel.
It is the latter mode that I have mostly chosen. It is the one that offers space both dangerous and forgiving, and lays one open to what may be years of discouragement, dejection, doubt and isolation while one considers options, takes one direction and then another, makes errors, corrects them, picks oneself up and struggles on, only gradually building up the momentum needed for narrative. But while involved in so much that is frustrating and exhausting, one may be granted – briefly and sporadically – that mysterious breath of air that comes up unexpectedly, creating a ripple, a stir, a tide that thrusts one forward and sends one soaring, sailing, flying through space and time.
It is the pursuit of that elusive and mysterious sensation that one undertakes in the short story, so different a form. Instead of those long stretches in which a novelist becomes stranded, the short-story writer must launch forth on what is a high-wire act, refusing to look back or down into the abyss, running the length of it at a sprint so as not to lose balance: quick, quick before you fall! You may go back and start all over again, or change sentences and scenes, but that initial urge must retain its urgency from beginning to end.
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)
In this the short story is the more challenging form – as I realized when I had the temerity to ‘teach’ the writing of it to students who came to the writing of fiction as complete novices, simply because it was easier to fit into the space of a class, a term – that ‘length of string’ again. But it was the very brevity and confinement of the form that demanded skill, learning and understanding to make it ‘work’, i.e. to create the desired effect.
But every once in a while, when completing that frantic dash of the short story, even after it is in print, one finds it won’t let go of one. It pursues one – or, rather, one pursues it because there is more to be said, more to be delved into, discovered and exposed. So every once in a while I have found, years and years on in time, a short story written long ago insisting on becoming a novel.
It is the experience I had when I wrote the short story ‘The Accompanist’. I felt then that I had put on paper all I knew – very little – about that minor figure of the musical world, the musician in the background, barely noticed, all attention being given to the maestro, the soloist. Was he content for it to be so? Was he – or not? There was so much in the life and work of that overlooked artist, and I wrote the novel In Custody to give him his due although I changed the two characters into a poet and scholar. And again, later still, into the novella ‘Translator Translated’. One of my earliest short stories, ‘Scholar and Gypsy’, eventually carried on a whole new life as the novel Journey to Ithaca, something I did not even know till a reader pointed out the development of the theme: the difference between the character who feels the world is all we need and the character for whom the world is limited, beyond it there surely lies more. The search for that other world – physical or spiritual – that compels them on their journeys, had carried on from the short story into the novel as a sketch might lead to a painting. This subterranean element rising to the surface surprised me, I had not been conscious of that development.
Each form requires a different set of abilities, even materials – as an artist might need pencil or pen and ink or water colours or paint for one work or another. Brevity and concision will do for one while the other requires doubt, mystery, mistake and stamina. If one writes both, which gives the greater satisfaction? Now one, now the other – that is the only answer.
Anita Desai
November, 2016
It was still too hot to play outdoors. They had had their tea, they had been washed and had their hair brushed, and after the long day of confinement in the house that was not cool but at least a protection from the sun, the children strained to get out. Their faces were red and bloated with the effort, but their mother would not open the door, everything was still curtained and shuttered in a way that stifled the children, made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun and feel the air, they would choke.
‘Please, Ma, please,’ they begged. ‘We’ll play in the veranda and porch – we won’t go a step out of the porch.’ ‘You will, I know you will, and then—’
‘No – we won’t, we won’t,’ they wailed so horrendously that she actually let down the bolt of the front door so that they burst out like seeds from a crackling, overripe pod into the veranda, with such wild, maniacal yells that she retreated to her bath and the shower of talcum powder and the fresh sari that were to help her face the summer evening.
They faced the afternoon. It was too hot. Too bright. The white walls of the veranda glared stridently in the sun. The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid balloons. The garden outside was like a tray made of beaten brass, flattened out on the red gravel and the stony soil in all shades of metal – aluminium, tin, copper and brass. No life stirred at this arid time of day – the birds still drooped, like dead fruit, in the papery tents of the trees; some squirrels lay limp on the wet earth under the garden tap. The outdoor dog lay stretched as if dead on the veranda mat, his paws and ears and tail all reaching out like dying travellers in search of water. He rolled his eyes at the children – two white marbles rolling in the purple sockets, begging for sympathy – and attempted to lift his tail in a wag but could not. It only twitched and lay still.
Then, perhaps roused by the shrieks of the children, a band of parrots suddenly fell out of the eucalyptus tree, tumbled frantically in the still, sizzling air, then sorted themselves out into battle formation and streaked away across the white sky.
The children, too, felt released. They too began tumbling, shoving, pushing against each other, frantic to start. Start what? Start their business. The business of the children’s day which is – play.
‘Let’s play hide-and-seek.’
‘Who’ll be It?’
‘You be It.’
‘Why should I? You be—’
‘You’re the eldest—’
‘That doesn’t mean—’
The shoves became harder. Some kicked out. The motherly Mira intervened. She pulled the boys roughly apart. There was a tearing sound of cloth but it was lost in the heavy panting and angry grumbling and no one paid attention to the small sleeve hanging loosely off a shoulder.
‘Make a circle, make a circle!’ she shouted, firmly pulling and pushing till a kind of vague circle was formed. ‘Now clap!’ she roared and, clapping, they all chanted in melancholy unison: ‘Dip, dip, dip – my blue ship—’ and every now and then one or the other saw he was safe by the way his hands fell at the crucial moment – palm on palm, or back of hand on palm – and dropped out of the circle with a yell and a jump of relief and jubilation.
Raghu was It. He started to protest, to cry ‘You cheated – Mira cheated – Anu cheated—’ but it was too late, the others had all already streaked away. There was no one to hear when he called out, ‘Only in the veranda – the porch – Ma said – Ma said to stay in the porch!’ No one had stopped to listen, all he saw were their brown legs flashing through the dusty shrubs, scrambling up brick walls, leaping over compost heaps and hedges, and then the porch stood empty in the purple shade of the bougainvillea and the garden was as empty as before; even the limp squirrels had whisked away, leaving everything gleaming, brassy and bare.
Only small Manu suddenly reappeared, as if he had dropped out of an invisible cloud or from a bird’s claws, and stood for a moment in the centre of the yellow lawn, chewing his finger and near to tears as he heard Raghu shouting, with his head pressed against the veranda wall, ‘Eighty-three, eighty-five, eighty-nine, ninety …’ and then made off in a panic, half of him wanting to fly north, the other half counselling south. Raghu turned just in time to see the flash of his white shorts and the uncertain skittering of his red sandals, and charged after him with such a bloodcurdling yell that Manu stumbled over the hosepipe, fell into its rubber coils and lay there weeping, ‘I won’t be It – you have to find them all – all – all!’
‘I know I have to, idiot,’ Raghu said, superciliously kicking him with his toe. ‘You’re dead,’ he said with satisfaction, licking the beads of perspiration off his upper lip, and then stalked off in search of worthier prey, whistling spiritedly so that the hiders should hear and tremble.
Ravi heard the whistling and picked his nose in a panic, trying to find comfort by burrowing the finger deep-deep into that soft tunnel. He felt himself too exposed, sitting on an upturned flower pot behind the garage. Where could he burrow? He could run around the garage if he heard Raghu come – around and around and around – but he hadn’t much faith in his short legs when matched against Raghu’s long, hefty, hairy footballer legs. Ravi had a frightening glimpse of them as Raghu combed the hedge of crotons and hibiscus, trampling delicate ferns underfoot as he did so. Ravi looked about him desperately, swallowing a small ball of snot in his fear.
The garage was locked with a great heavy lock to which the driver had the key in his room, hanging from a nail on the wall under his work-shirt. Ravi had peeped in and seen him still sprawling on his string-cot in his vest and striped underpants, the hair on his chest and the hair in his nose shaking with the vibrations of his phlegm-obstructed snores. Ravi had wished he were tall enough, big enough to reach the key on the nail, but it was impossible, beyond his reach for years to come. He had sidled away and sat dejectedly on the flower pot. That at least was cut to his own size.
But next to the garage was another shed with a big green door. Also locked. No one even knew who had the key to the lock. That shed wasn’t opened more than once a year when Ma turned out all the old broken bits of furniture and rolls of matting and leaking buckets, and the white ant hills were broken and swept away and Flit sprayed into the spider webs and rat holes so that the whole operation was like the looting of a poor, ruined and conquered city. The green leaves of the door sagged. They were nearly off their rusty hinges. The hinges were large and made a small gap between the door and the walls – only just large enough for rats, dogs and, possibly, Ravi to slip through.
Ravi had never cared to enter such a dark and depressing mortuary of defunct household goods seething with such unspeakable and alarming animal life but, as Raghu’s whistling grew angrier and sharper and his crashing and storming in the hedge wilder, Ravi suddenly slipped off the flower pot and through the crack and was gone. He chuckled aloud with astonishment at his own temerity so that Raghu came out of the hedge, stood silent with his hands on his hips, listening, and finally shouted ‘I heard you! I’m coming! Got you—’ and came charging round the garage only to find the upturned flower pot, the yellow dust, the crawling of white ants in a mud-hill against the closed shed door – nothing. Snarling, he bent to pick up a stick and went off, whacking it against the garage and shed walls as if to beat out his prey.
Ravi shook, then shivered with delight, with self-congratulation. Also with fear. It was dark, spooky in the shed. It had a muffled smell, as of graves. Ravi had once got locked into the linen cupboard and sat there weeping for half an hour before he was rescued. But at least that had been a familiar place, and even smelt pleasantly of starch, laundry and, reassuringly, of his mother. But the shed smelt of rats, ant hills, dust and spider webs. Also of less definable, less recognizable horrors. And it was dark. Except for the white-hot cracks along the door, there was no light. The roof was very low. Although Ravi was small, he felt as if he could reach up and touch it with his finger tips. But he didn’t stretch. He hunched himself into a ball so as not to bump into anything, touch or feel anything. What might there not be to touch him and feel him as he stood there, trying to see in the dark? Something cold, or slimy – like a snake. Snakes! He leapt up as Raghu whacked the wall with his stick – then, quickly realizing what it was, felt almost relieved to hear Raghu, hear his stick. It made him feel protected.
But Raghu soon moved away. There wasn’t a sound once his footsteps had gone around the garage and disappeared. Ravi stood frozen inside the shed. Then he shivered all over. Something had tickled the back of his neck. It took him a while to pick up the courage to lift his hand and explore. It was an insect – perhaps a spider – exploring him. He squashed it and wondered how many more creatures were watching him, waiting to reach out and touch him, the stranger.
There was nothing now. After standing in that position – his hand still on his neck, feeling the wet splodge of the squashed spider gradually dry – for minutes, hours, his legs began to tremble with the effort, the inaction. By now he could see enough in the dark to make out the large solid shapes of old wardrobes, broken buckets and bedsteads piled on top of each other around him. He recognized an old bathtub – patches of enamel glimmered at him and at last he lowered himself onto its edge.
He contemplated slipping out of the shed and into the fray. He wondered if it would not be better to be captured by Raghu and be returned to the milling crowd as long as he could be in the sun, the light, the free spaces of the garden and the familiarity of his brothers, sisters and cousins. It would be evening soon. Their games would become legitimate. The parents would sit out on the lawn on cane basket chairs and watch them as they tore around the garden or gathered in knots to share a loot of mulberries or black, teeth-splitting jamun from the garden trees. The gardener would fix the hosepipe to the water tap and water would fall lavishly through the air to the ground, soaking the dry yellow grass and the red gravel and arousing the sweet, the intoxicating scent of water on dry earth – that loveliest scent in the world. Ravi sniffed for a whiff of it. He half-rose from the bathtub, then heard the despairing scream of one of the girls as Raghu bore down upon her. There was the sound of a crash, and of rolling about in the bushes, the shrubs, then screams and accusing sobs of, ‘I touched the den’ – ‘You did not’ – ‘I did’ – ‘You liar, you did not’ and then a fading away and silence again.
Ravi sat back on the harsh edge of the tub, deciding to hold out a bit longer. What fun if they were all found and caught – he alone left unconquered! He had never known that sensation. Nothing more wonderful had ever happened to him than being taken out by an uncle and bought a whole slab of chocolate all to himself, or being flung into the soda-man’s pony cart and driven up to the gate by the friendly driver with the red beard and pointed ears. To defeat Raghu – that hirsute, hoarse-voiced football champion – and to be the winner in a circle of older, bigger, luckier children – that would be thrilling beyond imagination. He hugged his knees together and smiled to himself almost shyly at the thought of so much victory, such laurels.
There he sat smiling, knocking his heels against the bathtub, now and then getting up and going to the door to put his ear to the broad crack and listening for sounds of the game, the pursuer and the pursued, and then returning to his seat with the dogged determination of the true winner, a breaker of records, a champion.
It grew darker in the shed as the light at the door grew softer, fuzzier, turned to a kind of crumbling yellow pollen that turned to yellow fur, blue fur, grey fur. Evening. Twilight. The sound of water gushing, falling. The scent of earth receiving water, slaking its thirst in great gulps and releasing that green scent of freshness, coolness. Through the crack Ravi saw the long purple shadows of the shed and the garage lying still across the yard. Beyond that, the white walls of the house. The bougainvillea had lost its lividity, hung in dark bundles that quaked and twittered and seethed with masses of homing sparrows. The lawn was shut off from his view. Could he hear the children’s voices? It seemed to him that he could. It seemed to him that he could hear them chanting, singing, laughing. But what about the game? What had happened? Could it be over? How could it when he was still not found?
It then occurred to him that he could have slipped out long ago, dashed across the yard to the veranda and touched the ‘den’. It was necessary to do that to win. He had forgotten. He had only remembered the part of hiding and trying to elude the seeker. He had done that so successfully, his success had occupied him so wholly that he had quite forgotten that success had to be clinched by that final dash to victory and the ringing cry of ‘Den!’
With a whimper he burst through the crack, fell on his knees, got up and stumbled on stiff, benumbed legs across the shadowy yard, crying heartily by the time he reached the veranda so that when he flung himself at the white pillar and bawled, ‘Den! Den! Den!’ his voice broke with rage and pity at the disgrace of it all and he felt himself flooded with tears and misery.
Out on the lawn, the children stopped chanting. They all turned to stare at him in amazement. Their faces were pale and triangular in the dusk. The trees and bushes around them stood inky and sepulchral, spilling long shadows across them. They stared, wondering at his reappearance, his passion, his wild animal howling. Their mother rose from her basket chair and came towards him, worried, annoyed, saying, ‘Stop it, stop it, Ravi. Don’t be a baby. Have you hurt yourself?’ Seeing him attended to, the children went back to clasping their hands and chanting ‘The grass is green, the rose is red …’
But Ravi would not let them. He tore himself out of his mother’s grasp and pounded across the lawn into their midst, charging at them with his head lowered so that they scattered in surprise. ‘I won, I won, I won,’ he bawled, shaking his head so that the big tears flew. ‘Raghu didn’t find me. I won, I won—’
It took them a minute to grasp what he was saying, even who he was. They had quite forgotten him. Raghu had found all the others long ago. There had been a fight about who was to be It next. It had been so fierce that their mother had emerged from her bath and made them change to another game. Then they had played another and another. Broken mulberries from the tree and eaten them. Helped the driver wash the car when their father returned from work. Helped the gardener water the beds till he roared at them and swore he would complain to their parents. The parents had come out, taken up their positions on the cane chairs. They had begun to play again, sing and chant. All this time no one had remembered Ravi. Having disappeared from the scene, he had disappeared from their minds. Clean.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Raghu said roughly, pushing him aside, and even Mira said, ‘Stop howling, Ravi. If you want to play, you can stand at the end of the line,’ and she put him there very firmly.
The game proceeded. Two pairs of arms reached up and met in an arc. The children trooped under it again and again in a lugubrious circle, ducking their heads and intoning:
‘The grass is green,
The rose is red;
Remember me
When I am dead, dead, dead, dead …’
And the arc of thin arms trembled in the twilight, and the heads were bowed so sadly, and their feet tramped to that melancholy refrain so mournfully, so helplessly, that Ravi could not bear it. He would not follow them, he would not be included in this funereal game. He had wanted victory and triumph – not a funeral. But he had been forgotten, left out and he would not join them now. The ignominy of being forgotten – how could he face it? He felt his heart go heavy and ache inside him unbearably. He lay down full length on the damp grass, crushing his face into it, no longer crying, silenced by a terrible sense of his insignificance.
Mr Bose gave his private tuition out on the balcony, in the evenings, in the belief that, since it faced south, the river Hooghly would send it a wavering breeze or two to drift over the rooftops, through the washing and the few pots of tulsi and marigold that his wife had placed precariously on the balcony rail, to cool him, fan him, soothe him. But there was no breeze: it was hot, the air hung upon them like a damp towel, gagging him and, speaking through this gag, he tiredly intoned the Sanskrit verses that should, he felt, have been roared out on a hilltop at sunrise.
Aum. Usa va asvasya medhyasya sirah …
It came out, of course, a mumble. Asked to translate, his pupil, too, scowled as he had done, thrust his fist through his hair and mumbled:
‘Aum is the dawn and the head of a horse …’
Mr Bose protested in a low wail. ‘What horse, my boy? What horse?’
The boy rolled his eyes sullenly. ‘I don’t know, sir, it doesn’t say.’
Mr Bose looked at him in disbelief. He was the son of a Brahmin priest who himself instructed him in the Mahabharata all morning, turning him over to Mr Bose only in the evening when he set out to officiate at weddings, puja and other functions for which he was so much in demand on account of his stately bearing, his calm and inscrutable face and his sensuous voice that so suited the Sanskrit language in which he, almost always, discoursed. And this was his son – this Pritam with his red-veined eyes and oiled locks, his stumbling fingers and shuffling feet that betrayed his secret life, its scruffiness, its gutters and drains full of resentment and destruction. Mr Bose suddenly remembered how he had seen him, from the window of a bus that had come to a standstill on the street due to a fist fight between the conductor and a passenger, Pritam slipping up the stairs, through the door, into a neon-lit bar off Park Street.
‘The sacrificial horse,’ Mr Bose explained with forced patience. ‘Have you heard of Asvamedha, Pritam, the royal horse that was let loose to run through the kingdom before it returned to the capital and was sacrificed by the king?’
The boy gave him a look of such malice that Mr Bose bit the end of his moustache and fell silent, shuffling through the pages. ‘Read on, then,’ he mumbled and listened, for a while, as Pritam blundered heavily through the Sanskrit verses that rolled off his father’s experienced tongue, and even Mr Bose’s shy one, with such rich felicity. When he could not bear it any longer, he turned his head, slightly, just enough to be able to look out of the corner of his eye through the open door, down the unlit passage at the end of which, in the small, dimly lit kitchen, his wife sat kneading dough for bread, their child at her side. Her head was bowed so that some of her hair had freed itself of the long steel pins he hated so much and hung about her pale, narrow face. The red border of her sari was the only stripe of colour in that smoky scene. The child beside her had his back turned to the door so that Mr Bose could see his little brown buttocks under the short white shirt, squashed firmly down upon the woven mat. Mr Bose wondered what it was that kept him so quiet – perhaps his mother had given him a lump of dough to mould into some thick and satisfying shape. Both of them seemed bound together and held down in some deeply absorbing act from which he was excluded. He would have liked to break in and join them.
Pritam stopped reading, maliciously staring at Mr Bose whose lips were wavering into a smile beneath the ragged moustache. The woman, disturbed by the break in the recitation on the balcony, looked up, past the child, down the passage and into Mr Bose’s face. Mr Bose’s moustache lifted up like a pair of wings and, beneath them, his smile lifted up and out with almost a laugh of tenderness and delight. Beginning to laugh herself, she quickly turned, pulled down the corners of her mouth with mock sternness, trying to recall him to the path of duty, and picking up a lump of sticky dough, handed it back to the child, softly urging him to be quiet and let his father finish the lesson.
Pritam, the scabby, oil-slick son of a Brahmin priest, coughed theatrically – a cough imitating that of a favourite screen actor, surely, it was so false and over-done and suggestive. Mr Bose swung around in dismay, crying ‘Why have you stopped? Go on, go on.’
‘You weren’t listening, sir.’
Many words, many questions leapt to Mr Bose’s lips, ready to pounce on this miserable boy whom he could hardly bear to see sitting beneath his wife’s holy tulsi plant that she tended with prayers, water-can and oil-lamp every evening. Then, growing conscious of the way his moustache was agitating upon his upper lip, he said only, ‘Read.’
‘Ahar va asvam purustan mahima nvajagata …’
Across the road someone turned on a radio and a song filled with a pleasant, lilting weltschmerz twirled and sank, twirled and rose from that balcony to this. Pritam raised his voice, grinding through the Sanskrit consonants like some dying, diseased tramcar. From the kitchen only a murmur and the soft thumping of the dough in the pan could be heard – sounds as soft and comfortable as sleepy pigeons. Mr Bose longed passionately to listen to them, catch every faintest nuance of them, but to do this he would have to smash the radio, hurl the Brahmin’s son down the iron stairs … He curled up his hands on his knees and drew his feet together under him, horrified at this welling up of violence inside him, under his pale pink bush-shirt, inside his thin, ridiculously heaving chest. As often as Mr Bose longed to alter the entire direction of the world’s revolution, as often as he longed to break the world apart into two halves and shake out of them – what? Festival fireworks, a woman’s soft hair, blood-stained feathers? – he would shudder and pale at the thought of his indiscretion, his violence, this secret force that now and then threatened, clamoured, so that he had quickly to still it, squash it. After all, he must continue with his private tuitions: that was what was important. The baby had to have his first pair of shoes and soon he would be needing oranges, biscuits, plastic toys. ‘Read,’ said Mr Bose, a little less sternly, a little more sadly.
But, ‘It is seven, I can go home now,’ said Pritam triumphantly, throwing his father’s thick yellow Mahabharata into his bag, knocking the bag shut with one fist and preparing to fly. Where did he fly to? Mr Bose wondered if it would be the neon-lit bar off Park Street. Then, seeing the boy disappear down the black stairs – the bulb had fused again – he felt it didn’t matter, didn’t matter one bit since it left him alone to turn, plunge down the passage and fling himself at the doorposts of the kitchen, there to stand and gaze down at his wife, now rolling out puris with an exquisite, back-and-forth rolling motion of her hands, and his son, trying now to make a spoon stand on one end.
She only glanced at him, pretended not to care, pursed her lips to keep from giggling, flipped the puri over and rolled it finer and flatter still. He wanted so much to touch her hair, the strand that lay over her shoulder in a black loop, and did not know how to – she was so busy. ‘Your hair is coming loose,’ he said.
‘Go, go,’ she warned, ‘I hear the next one coming.’
So did he, he heard the soft patting of sandals on the worn steps outside, so all he did was bend and touch the small curls of hair on his son’s neck. They were so soft, they seemed hardly human and quite frightened him. When he took his hand away he felt the wisps might have come off onto his fingers and he rubbed the tips together wonderingly. The child let fall the spoon, with a magnificent ring, onto a brass dish and started at this discovery of percussion.
The light on the balcony was dimmed as his next pupil came to stand in the doorway. Quickly he pulled himself away from the doorpost and walked back to his station, tense with unspoken words and unexpressed emotion. He had quite forgotten that his next pupil, this Wednesday, was to be Upneet. Rather Pritam again than this once-a-week typhoon, Upneet of the flowered sari, ruby earrings and shaming laughter. Under this Upneet’s gaze such ordinary functions of a tutor’s life as sitting down at a table, sharpening a pencil and opening a book to the correct page became matters of farce, disaster and hilarity. His very bones sprang out of joint. He did not know where to look – everywhere were Upneet’s flowers, Upneet’s giggles. Immediately, at the very sight of the tip of her sandal peeping out beneath the flowered hem of her sari, he was a man broken to pieces, flung this way and that, rattling. Rattling.
Throwing away the Sanskrit books, bringing out volumes of Bengali poetry, opening to a poem by Jibanandan Das, he wondered ferociously: Why did she come? What use had she for Bengali poetry? Why did she come from that house across the road where the loud radio rollicked, to sit on his balcony, in view of his shy wife, making him read poetry to her? It was intolerable. Intolerable, all of it – except, only for the seventy-five rupees paid at the end of the month. Oranges, he thought grimly, and milk, medicines, clothes. And he read to her:
‘Her hair was the dark night of Vidisha,
Her face the sculpture of Svarasti …’
Quite steadily he read, his tongue tamed and enthralled by the rhythm of the verse he had loved (copied on a sheet of blue paper, he had sent it to his wife one day when speech proved inadequate).
‘ “Where have you been so long?” she asked,
Lifting her bird’s-nest eyes,
Banalata Sen of Natore.’
Pat-pat-pat. No, it was not the rhythm of the verse, he realized, but the tapping of her foot, green-sandalled, red-nailed, swinging and swinging to lift the hem of her sari up and up. His eyes slid off the book, watched the flowered hem swing out and up, out and up as the green-sandalled foot peeped out, then in, peeped out, then in. For a while his tongue ran on of its own volition:
‘All birds come home, and all rivers,
Life’s ledger is closed …’
But he could not continue – it was the foot, the sandal that carried on the rhythm exactly as if he were still reciting. Even the radio stopped its rollicking and, as a peremptory voice began to enumerate the day’s disasters and achievements all over the world, Mr Bose heard more vigorous sounds from his kitchen as well. There too the lulling pigeon sounds had been crisply turned off and what he heard were bangs and rattles among the kitchen pots, a kettledrum of commands, he thought. The baby, letting out a wail of surprise, paused, heard the nervous commotion continue and intensify and launched himself on a series of wails.
Mr Bose looked up, aghast. He could not understand how these two halves of the difficult world that he had been holding so carefully together, sealing them with reams of poetry, reams of Sanskrit, had split apart into dissonance. He stared at his pupil’s face, creamy, feline, satirical, and was forced to complete the poem in a stutter:
‘Only darkness remains, to sit facing
Banalata Sen of Natore.’
But the darkness was filled with hideous sounds of business and anger and command. The radio news commentator barked, the baby wailed, the kitchen pots clashed. He even heard his wife’s voice raised, angrily, at the child, like a threatening stick. Glancing again at his pupil whom he feared so much, he saw precisely that lift of the eyebrows and that twist of a smile that disjointed him, rattled him.
‘Er – please read,’ he tried to correct, to straighten that twist of eyebrows and lips. ‘Please read.’
‘But you have read it to me already,’ she laughed, mocking him with her eyes and laugh.
‘The next poem,’ he cried, ‘read the next poem,’ and turned the page with fingers as clumsy as toes.
‘It is much better when you read to me,’ she complained impertinently, but read, keeping time to the rhythm with that restless foot which he watched as though it were a snake-charmer’s pipe, swaying. He could hear her voice no more than the snake could the pipe’s – it was drowned out by the baby’s wails, swelling into roars of self-pity and indignation in this suddenly hard-edged world.
Mr Bose threw a piteous, begging look over his shoulder at the kitchen. Catching his eye, his wife glowered at him, tossed the hair out of her face and cried, ‘Be quiet, be quiet, can’t you see how busy your father is?’ Red-eared, he turned to find Upneet looking curiously down the passage at this scene of domestic anarchy, and said, ‘I’m sorry, sorry – please read.’
‘I have read!’ she exclaimed. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’
‘So much noise – I’m sorry,’ he gasped and rose to hurry down the passage and hiss, pressing his hands to his head as he did so, ‘Keep him quiet, can’t you? Just for half an hour!’
‘He is hungry,’ his wife said, as if she could do nothing about that.
‘Feed him then,’ he begged.
‘It isn’t time,’ she said angrily.
‘Never mind. Feed him, feed him.’
‘Why? So that you can read poetry to that girl in peace?’
‘Shh!’ he hissed, shocked, alarmed that Upneet would hear. His chest filled with the injustice of it. But this was no time for pleas or reason. He gave another desperate look at the child who lay crouched on the kitchen floor, rolling with misery. When he turned to go back to his pupil who was watching them interestedly, he heard his wife snatch up the child and tell him, ‘Have your food then, have it and eat it – don’t you see how angry your father is?’
He spent the remaining half-hour with Upneet trying to distract her from observation of his domestic life. Why should it interest her? he thought angrily. She came here to study, not to mock, not to make trouble. He was her tutor, not her clown! Sternly, he gave her dictation but she was so hopeless – she learnt no Bengali at her convent school, found it hard even to form the letters of the Bengali alphabet – that he was left speechless. He crossed out her errors with his red pencil – grateful to be able to cancel out, so effectively, some of the ugliness of his life – till there was hardly a word left uncrossed and, looking up to see her reaction, found her far less perturbed than he. In fact, she looked quite mischievously pleased. Three months of Bengali lessons to end in this! She was as triumphant as he was horrified. He let fall the red pencil with a discouraged gesture. So, in complete discord, the lesson broke apart, they all broke apart and for a while Mr Bose was alone on the balcony, clutching at the rails, thinking that these bars of cooled iron were all that were left for him to hold. Inside all was a conflict of shame and despair, in garbled grammar.
But, gradually, the grammar rearranged itself according to rule, corrected itself. The composition into quiet made quite clear the exhaustion of the child, asleep or nearly so. The sounds of dinner being prepared were calm, decorative even. Once more the radio was tuned to music, sympathetically sad. When his wife called him in to eat, he turned to go with his shoulders beaten, sagging, an attitude repeated by his moustache.
‘He is asleep,’ she said, glancing at him with a rather ashamed face, conciliatory.
He nodded and sat down before his brass tray. She straightened it nervously, waved a hand over it as if to drive away a fly he could not see, and turned to the fire to fry hot puris for him, one by one, turning quickly to heap them on his tray so fast that he begged her to stop.
‘Eat more,’ she coaxed. ‘One more’ – as though the extra puri were a peace offering following her rebellion of half an hour ago.
He took it with reluctant fingers but his moustache began to quiver on his lip as if beginning to wake up. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Won’t you eat now?’
About her mouth, too, some quivers began to rise and move. She pursed her lips, nodded and began to fill her tray, piling up the puris in a low stack.
‘One more,’ he told her, ‘just one more,’ he teased, and they laughed.
– Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off! First he listens to the news in Hindi. Directly after, in English. Broom – brroom – brrroom – the voice of doom roars. Next, in Tamil. Then in Punjabi. In Gujarati. What next, my God, what next? Turn it off before I smash it onto his head, fling it out of the window, do nothing of the sort of course, nothing of the sort.
– And my mother. She cuts and fries, cuts and fries. All day I hear her chopping and slicing and the pan of oil hissing. What all does she find to fry and feed us on, for God’s sake? Eggplants, potatoes, spinach, shoe soles, newspapers, finally she’ll slice me and feed me to my brothers and sisters. Ah, now she’s turned on the tap. It’s roaring and pouring, pouring and roaring into a bucket without a bottom.
– The bell rings. Voices clash, clatter and break. The tin-and-bottle man? The neighbours? The police? The Help-the-Blind man? Thieves and burglars? All of them, all of them, ten or twenty or a hundred of them, marching up the stairs, hammering at the door, breaking in and climbing over me – ten, twenty or a hundred of them.
– Then, worst of all, the milk arrives. In the tallest glass in the house. ‘Suno, drink your milk. Good for you, Suno. You need it. Now, before the exams. Must have it, Suno. Drink.’ The voice wheedles its way into my ear like a worm. I shudder. The table tips over. The milk runs. The tumbler clangs on the floor. ‘Suno, Suno, how will you do your exams?’
– That is precisely what I ask myself. All very well to give me a room – Uncle’s been pushed off on a pilgrimage to Hardwar to clear a room for me – and to bring me milk and say, ‘Study, Suno, study for your exams.’ What about the uproar around me? These people don’t know the meaning of the word Quiet. When my mother fills buckets, sloshes the kitchen floor, fries and sizzles things in the pan, she thinks she is being Quiet. The children have never even heard the word, it amazes and puzzles them. On their way back from school they fling their satchels in at my door, then tear in to snatch them back before I tear them to bits. Bawl when I pull their ears, screech when Mother whacks them. Stuff themselves with her fries and then smear the grease on my books.
So I raced out of my room, with my fingers in my ears, to scream till the roof fell down about their ears. But the radio suddenly went off, the door to my parents’ room suddenly opened and my father appeared, bathed and shaven, stuffed and set up with the news of the world in six different languages—his white dhoti blazing, his white shirt crackling, his patent leather pumps glittering. He stopped in the doorway and I stopped on the balls of my feet and wavered. My fingers came out of my ears, my hair came down over my eyes. Then he looked away from me, took his watch out of his pocket and enquired, ‘Is the food ready?’ in a voice that came out of his nose like the whistle of a punctual train. He skated off towards his meal, I turned and slouched back to my room. On his way to work, he looked in to say, ‘Remember, Suno, I expect good results from you. Study hard, Suno.’ Just behind him, I saw all the rest of them standing, peering in, silently. All of them stared at me, at the exam I was to take. At the degree I was to get. Or not get. Horrifying thought. Oh study, study, study, they all breathed at me while my father’s footsteps went down the stairs, crushing each underfoot in turn. I felt their eyes on me, goggling, and their breath on me, hot with earnestness. I looked back at them, into their open mouths and staring eyes.
‘Study,’ I said, and found I croaked. ‘I know I ought to study. And how do you expect me to study – in this madhouse? You run wild, wild. I’m getting out,’ I screamed, leaping up and grabbing my books, ‘I’m going to study outside. Even the street is quieter,’ I screeched and threw myself past them and down the stairs that my father had just cowed and subjugated so that they still lay quivering, and paid no attention to the howls that broke out behind me of ‘Suno, Suno, listen. Your milk – your studies – your exams, Suno!’
At first I tried the tea shop at the corner. In my reading I had often come across men who wrote at café tables – letters, verse, whole novels – over a cup of coffee or a glass of absinthe. I thought it would be simple to read a chapter of history over a cup of tea. There was no crowd in the mornings, none of my friends would be there. But the proprietor would not leave me alone. Bored, picking his nose, he wandered down from behind the counter to my table by the weighing machine and tried to pass the time of day by complaining about his piles, the new waiter and the high prices. ‘And sugar,’ he whined. ‘How can I give you anything to put in your tea with sugar at four rupees a kilo? There’s rationed sugar, I know, at two rupees, but that’s not enough to feed even an ant. And the way you all sugar your tea – hai, hai,’ he sighed, worse than my mother. I didn’t answer. I frowned at my book and looked stubborn. But when I got rid of him, the waiter arrived. ‘Have a biscuit?’ he murmured, flicking at my table and chair with his filthy duster. ‘A bun? Fritters? Make you some hot fritters?’ I snarled at him but he only smiled, determined to be friendly. Just a boy, really, in a pink shirt with purple circles stamped all over it – he thought he looked so smart. He was growing sideburns, he kept fingering them. ‘I’m a student, too,’ he said, ‘sixth class, fail. My mother wanted me to go back and try again, but I didn’t like the teacher – he beat me. So I came here to look for a job. Lalaji had just thrown out a boy called Hari for selling lottery tickets to the clients so he took me on. I can make out a bill …’ He would have babbled on if Lalaji had not come and shoved him into the kitchen with an oath. So it went on. I didn’t read more than half a chapter that whole morning. I didn’t want to go home either. I walked along the street, staring at my shoes, with my shoulders slumped in the way that makes my father scream, ‘What’s the matter? Haven’t you bones? A spine?’ I kicked some rubble along the pavement, down the drain, then stopped at the iron gates of King Edward’s Park.
‘Exam troubles?’ asked a gram vendor who sat outside it, in a friendly voice. Not insinuating, but low, pleasant. ‘The park’s full of boys like you,’ he continued in that sympathetic voice. ‘I see them walk up and down, up and down with their books, like mad poets. Then I’m glad I was never sent to school,’ and he began to whistle, not impertinently but so cheerfully that I stopped and stared at him. He had a crippled arm that hung out of his shirt sleeve like a leg of mutton dangling on a hook. His face was scarred as though he had been dragged out of some terrible accident. But he was shuffling hot gram into paper cones with his one hand and whistling like a bird, whistling the tune of, ‘We are the bulbuls of our land, our land is Paradise.’ Nodding at the greenery beyond the gates, he said, ‘The park’s a good place to study in,’ and, taking his hint, I went in.
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