The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  The neighbours lost sight of Harish. Once some children reported they had seen him lying under the pipal tree at the corner of their school compound, staring fixedly at the red gashes cut into the papery bark and, later, a boy who commuted to school on a suburban train claimed to have seen him on the railway platform, sitting against a railing like some tattered beggar, staring across the criss-cross of shining rails. But next day, when the boy got off the train, he did not see Harish again.

  Harish had gone hunting. His slow, silent walk gave him the appearance of sliding rather than walking over the surface of the roads and fields, rather like a snail except that his movement was not as smooth as a snail’s but stumbling as if he had only recently become one and was still unused to the pace. Not only his eyes and his hands but even his bare feet seemed to be feeling the earth carefully, in search of an interesting surface. Once he found it, he would pause, his whole body would gently collapse across it and hours – perhaps days – would be devoted to its investigation and worship. Outside the town the land was rocky and bare and this was Harish’s especial paradise, each rock having a surface of such exquisite roughness, of such perfection in shape and design, as to keep him occupied and ecstatic for weeks together. Then the river beyond the rock quarries drew him away and there he discovered the joy of fingering silk-smooth stalks and reeds, stems and leaves.

  Shepherd children, seeing him stumble about the reeds, plunging thigh-deep into the water in order to pull out a water lily with its cool, sinuous stem, fled screaming, not certain whether this was a man or a hairy water snake. Their mothers came, some with stones and some with canes at the ready, but when they saw Harish, his skin parched to a violet shade, sitting on the bank and gazing at the transparent stem of the lotus, they fell back, crying, ‘Wah!’, gathered closer together, advanced, dropped their canes and stones, held their children still by their hair and shoulders, and came to bow to him. Then they hurried back to the village, chattering. They had never had a Swami to themselves, in these arid parts. Nor had they seen a Swami who looked holier, more inhuman than Harish with his matted hair, his blue, starved skin and single-focused eyes. So, in the evening, one brought him a brass vessel of milk, another a little rice. They pushed their children before them and made them drop flowers at his feet. When Harish stooped and felt among the offerings for something his fingers could respond to, they were pleased, they felt accepted. ‘Swamiji,’ they whispered, ‘speak.’

  Harish did not speak and his silence made him still holier, safer. So they worshipped him, fed and watched over him, interpreting his moves in their own fashion, and Harish, in turn, watched over their offerings and worshipped.

  Sale

  There they are, at the door now, banging. They had met him, written a note and made an appointment – and here they are, as a direct result of it all, rattling. He stands on the other side of the door, in the dusk-mottled room, fingering an unshaven chin and dropping cigarette butts on the floor which is already littered with them. There is a pause in the knocking. He hears their voices – querulous, impatient. He turns and silently goes towards the inner door that opens onto a passage. He pushes it ajar, quietly, holding his breath. At the end of the passage another door stands open: it is like a window or an alcove illuminated by the deep glow of the fire. There his wife sits, kneading dough in a brass bowl, with her head bowed so that her long hair broods down to her shoulders on either side of her heavy, troubled face. The red border of her sari cuts a bright gash through the still tableau. The child sits on the mat beside her, silent, absorbed in the mysteries of a long-handled spoon which he turns over with soft, wavering fingers that are unaccustomed to the unsympathetic steel. His head, too, is bowed so that his father, behind him, can see the small wisps of hair on the back of his neck. He looks at them, holding his breath till it begins to hurt his chest. Then the knocking is resumed and his wife, hearing it, raises her head. She sees him then, at the door, like a dog hanging about, wanting something, and immediately her nostrils flare. ‘Can’t you answer the door?’ she cries. ‘What’s the matter with you? It must be them – this is your chance.’ Startled, the child drops the spoon with a clatter. Quickly he shuts the door. Then he goes and opens the front door and lets them in.

  ‘We were about to give up,’ one man cries, laughing, and brings in his friend and also a woman, seeing whom the artist, who is not expecting her, finds himself dismayed and confused. A woman – therefore someone in league with his wife, he thinks, and stares at her lush, unreluctant face and the bright enamelled earrings that frame it. He is silent. The two men stare at him.

  ‘You were expecting us, weren’t you?’ enquires the jovial man whom he had liked, once. ‘We wrote—’

  ‘Yes,’ he murmurs. ‘Oh yes, yes,’ and stands there, on the threshold, with an empty match box in his hand, his face looking like a house from which ghosts had driven away all inhabitants.

  Then the man introduces his wife. ‘She also paints,’ he says, ‘and was so interested in seeing your pictures, I brought her along. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No,’ he says, gathering himself together with a laboured effort, and steps aside to let them in. Then it is they who are silent, staring in dismay at the shambles about them. There are pictures to look at, yes, but one lies on the floor with a bundle of rags and some cigarette stubs on it, another is propped up on a shelf with bottles of hair oil, clay toys and calendars before it, and others have drifted off the wooden divan into corners of the room, peering out from under old newspapers and dirty clothes. The artist watches them, wondering at the imbecility of their appearance as they huddle together and gape. ‘Oh,’ he says, recovering, ‘the light,’ and switches it on. It is unshaded and hangs low over the flat table at which he paints so that they are illuminated weirdly from the waist downwards, leaving their faces more confused with shadows than before. The woman is quickest to relax, to make herself known, to become acquainted. ‘Ah,’ she cries, hurrying to the shelf to pull out a picture. ‘What are they?’ she asks him, gazing first at the flowers that blaze across the dirty paper, then at him, coaxing him for their secret with an avidly enquiring look. ‘Not cannas, not lotuses – what can they be?’

  He smiles at her curiosity. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Not real flowers – just anything at all.’

  ‘Really!’ she exclaims, shaking her enamelled earrings. ‘How wonderful to be able to imagine such forms, such colours. Look, Ram, aren’t they pretty?’ The two men become infected by her exaggerated attitude of relaxation. They begin to prowl about the room, now showing amusement at the litter which is, after all, only to be expected in an artist’s studio, then crinkling their noses for, one has to admit, it does smell, and then showing surprised interest in the pictures of which they have come to select one for their home which is newly built and now to be furnished. What with the enthusiasm and thoroughness they bring to their task, the rags and grime of the studio are soon almost obliterated by the fanfare of colour that spills forth, a crazy whorl of them, unknown colours that cannot be named, spilling out of forms that cannot be identified. One cannot pinpoint any school, any technique, any style – one can only admit oneself in the presence of a continuous and inspired act of creation: so they tell themselves. The woman gives cry upon cry of excitement and turns again and again to the artist who stands watching them thoughtfully. But how did you get this colour? You must tell me because I paint – and I could never get anything like this. What is it?’

  ‘Ahh, Naples Yellow,’ he says, as if making a guess. ‘No, but there is some orange in it too.’

  ‘Ah yes, a little orange also.’

  ‘And green?’

  ‘Yes, a little perhaps.’

  ‘No, but that special tinge – how did you get it? A little bit of white – or flesh pink? What is it? Ram, Ram, just look, isn’t it pretty – this weird bird? I don’t suppose it has a name?’

  ‘No, no, it is not real. I am a city man, I know nothing about birds.’

&nbs
p; ‘But you know everything about birds! And flowers. I suppose they are birds and flowers, all these marvellous things. And your paintings are full of them. How can it possibly be that you have never seen them?’

  He has to laugh then – she is so artless, so completely without any vestige of imagination, and so completely unlike his wife. ‘Look,’ he says, suddenly buoyant, and points to the window. She has to stand on her toes to look out of the small aperture, through the bars, and then she gazes out with all the intentness she feels he expects of her, at the deep, smoke-ridden twilight wound around the ill-lit slum, the smoking heaps of dung-fires and the dark figures that sit and stand in it hopelessly. Like fog-horns, conch shells begin to blow as tired housewives summon up their flagging spirits for the always lovely, always comforting ritual of evening prayers. She tries to pierce the scene with her sharp eyes, trying to see what he sees in it, till she hears him laughing behind her with a cracked kind of hilarity. ‘There you see – my birds and my flowers,’ he tells her, clapping his hands as though enjoying a practical joke he has played on her. ‘I see a tram – and that is my mountain. I see a letter-box – and that is my tree. Listen! Do you hear my birds?’ He raises his hand and, with its gesture, ushers in the evening voices of children uttering those cries and calls peculiar to the time of parting, the time of relinquishing their games, before they enter their homes and disappear into sleep – voices filled with an ecstasy of knowledge, of sensation drawn to an apex, brought on by the realization of imminent departure and farewell: voices panicky with love, with lament, with fear and sacrifice.

  The artist watches the three visitors and finds them attentive, puzzled. ‘There,’ he says, dropping his hand. ‘There are my birds. I don’t see them – but I hear them and imagine how they look. It is easy, no, when you can hear them so clearly?’

  ‘You are a magician,’ says the quiet man, shaking his head and turning to a crayon drawing of pale birds delicately stalking the shallows of a brooding sea. ‘Look at these – I can’t believe you haven’t actually painted them on the spot.’

  ‘No, I have not, but I do know the sea. You know, I am a fisherman! I should have been – my people are. How do you like this one of fishing boats? I used to see them coming in like this, in the evening, with the catch. And then my mother would cook one large one for dinner – oh, it was good, good!’

  They all stand around him, smiling at this unexpected burst of childish exuberance. ‘You paint from memory then?’ enquires one, but the woman cries, ‘You like fish? You must come and eat it at our house one day – I cook fish very well.’

  ‘I will, I will,’ he cries, scurrying about as though he were looking for something he had suddenly remembered he needed, hunting out seascapes for them to see, and more of the successful flowers. ‘Oh, I will love that – to see this new house of yours and eat a meal cooked by you. Yes, I will come. Here, look, another one – a canal scene. Do you like it? That is paddy growing there – it is so green …’ Now he wants to turn out the entire studio for them, bring out his best. He chatters, they laugh. Pictures fall to the floor. Crayons are smeared, oils are smudged – but he does not mind. He does not even sign his pictures. When the woman pauses over a pastel that is blurred by some stroke of carelessness, he says, ‘Oh that is nothing, I can touch it up. Do you see the blue? Do you like it? Yes, I will see your paintings and I will tell you plainly what I like and what I don’t like, and you will appreciate anyway. Oh, I love fish …’ Only now and then he grows aware of his wife, breathing heavily because of the weight of the child asleep on her arm, straining to hear at the door, frowning because she cannot understand, is not certain, is worried, worried to death … and then he draws down the corners of his mouth and is silent. But when a picture of curled flowers is brought to him, he stares at it till it comes into proper focus and explains it to them. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I painted that long ago – for my son, when he was born. I wanted him to have flowers, flowers all about his bed, under his head, at his feet, everywhere. And I did not have any. I did not know of a garden from where I could get some. So I painted them. That is one of them. Ah yes, yes,’ he smiles, and the three who watch him grow tender, sympathetic. The woman says, ‘This one? It is your son’s? How lovely – how lucky.’

  ‘No,’ he cries loudly. ‘I mean, you can have it. Do you like it? It is what you want for your new house?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says softly and puts it away. ‘You painted it for your child. I can’t take it from him.’

  The artist finds himself sweating and exhausted – he had not realized how he was straining himself. He has had nothing but tea and cigarettes since early that morning and there is no breath of air coming through the barred window. He wipes his face with his hand and blotches another crayon with his wet fingers as he picks it up and flings it away. ‘Then what do you want?’ he asks in a flat voice. ‘What do you like? What do you want to have – a flower picture or a landscape?’

  ‘Perhaps figures – people always make a room seem bright.’

  ‘I don’t paint figures,’ he says shortly. ‘You told me you wanted a landscape. Here they are – all sizes, big, small, medium; hills, seas, rivers; green, blue, yellow. Is there nothing you like?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ they all assure him together, upset by his change of tone, and one holds up a picture at arm’s length to admire it lavishly, another bends to shuffle through the pile on the table. But there are so many, they say, it is hard to choose. That is nothing, he says, he will choose for them. Oh no, they laugh, glancing to see if he is serious, for they have something very special in mind – something that will light up their whole house, become its focal point, radiate and give their home a tone, an atmosphere. No, not this one, not quite – it is lovely, but … Before he knows it, they are at the door, descending the stairs with one backward look at all the heroic mass of colour inside, saying goodbye. He rushes down the stairs after them, spreading out his arms. Their car stands under the lamp-post. He flings himself at the door, hangs on to it.

  ‘There is not one you liked? I thought you had come to buy – you said—’

  ‘Yes, we wanted to,’ says the man whom he had liked, once. ‘But not one of these. You see, we have something very special in mind, something quite extraordinary—’

  ‘But – not one of those I showed you? I thought you liked them – you said—’

  ‘I did, I did,’ chirps the woman from the soft recesses of the back seat. ‘Oh and those lovely flowers you painted for your son – lucky child!’

  ‘You liked them? I will paint you another like it, just like it—’

  ‘But we wanted a landscape really,’ says the man. ‘Something in those cool greys and whites. Perhaps a snow scene – now that would be something different.’

  ‘Snow?’ shouts the artist. ‘I will paint snow. I will paint the Himalayas for you. How big do you want it? So big? So?’

  ‘No, no,’ they laugh. ‘Not so big. That would be too expensive.’

  ‘All right, smaller. I will paint it. By the end of the week you will have it.’

  They laugh at his haste, his trembling, shrill excitement. ‘But, my friend, have you ever seen snow?’ enquires the jovial one, patting his arm.

  ‘Ah!’ he gives such a cry that it halts them in their movements of departure, to turn and see him spread out his arms till his fingers reach out of the smoke of the dung-fires and the dust of the unlit lanes, to reach out to the balm of ice and snow and isolation. ‘I will paint such snow for you as you have never seen, as no one has ever painted. I can see it all, here,’ and he taps his forehead with such emphasis that they smile – he is quite a comic. Or even a bit crazy. Drunk?

  ‘Now, now, my friend,’ says the man, patting his arm again. ‘Don’t be in a hurry about it. You paint it when you are in the mood. Then it will be good.’

  ‘I am in the mood now,’ he cries. ‘I am always in the mood, don’t you see? Tomorrow, tomorrow I will have it ready. I will bring it to your house. Giv
e me the address!’

  They laugh. The engine stutters to life and there is a metallic finality in the sound of the doors being shut. But he clings to the handle, thrusts his head in, his eyes blazing. ‘And will you give me an advance?’ he asks tensely. ‘I need money, my friend. Can you give me an advance?’

  The woman creeps away into a corner, wrapping herself closely in a white shawl. One man, in embarrassment, falls silent. The other laughs and puts his hands in his pockets, then draws them out to show they are empty. ‘Brother, if I had some with me, I would give it to you – all of it – but since we only came to see, I didn’t bring any. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I need it.’

  ‘Listen, when you bring the picture, I will give you something, even if I don’t want it, I will give you something – in advance, for the one we will buy. But today, just now, I have nothing.’

  The artist steps back to let them go. As they drive out of the lane and the smoke smudges and obscures the tail-lights, he hears his wife come out on the stairs behind him.

  Pineapple Cake

  Victor was a nervous rather than rebellious child. But it made no difference to his mother: she had the same way of dealing with nerves and rebels.

  ‘You like pineapple cake, don’t you? Well, come along, get dressed quickly – yes, yes, the velvet shorts – the new shoes, yes – hurry – pineapple cake for good boys …’

  So it had gone all afternoon and, by holding out the bait of pineapple cake, his favourite, Mrs Fernandez had the boy dressed in his new frilled shirt and purple velvet shorts and new shoes that bit his toes and had him sitting quietly in church right through the long ceremony. Or so she thought, her faith in pineapple cake being matched only by her faith in Our Lady of Mount Mary, Bandra Hill, Bombay. Looking at Victor, trying hard to keep his loud breathing bottled inside his chest and leaning down to see what made his shoes so vicious, you might have thought she had been successful, but success never satisfies and Mrs Fernandez sighed to think how much easier it would have been if she had had a daughter instead. Little girls love weddings, little girls play at weddings, little girls can be dressed in can-can petticoats and frocks like crêpe-paper bells of pink and orange, their oiled and ringleted hair crowned with rustling wreaths of paper flowers. She glanced around her rather tiredly to hear the church rustling and crepitating with excited little girls, dim and dusty as it was, lit here and there by a blazing afternoon window of red and blue glass, a flare of candles or a silver bell breathless in the turgid air. This reminded her how she had come to this church to pray and light candles to Our Lady when she was expecting Victor, and it made her glance down at him and wonder why he was perspiring so. Yes, the collar of the frilled shirt was a bit tight and the church was airless and stuffy but it wasn’t very refined of him to sweat so. Of course all the little boys in her row seemed to be in the same state – each one threatened or bribed into docility, their silence straining in their chests, soundlessly clamouring. Their eyes were the eyes of prisoners, dark and blazing at the ignominy and boredom and injustice of it all. When they shut their eyes and bowed their heads in prayer, it was as if half the candles in church had gone out, and it was darker.