The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  ‘This is my third,’ she confessed hurriedly, ‘and I can’t tell you how gay it makes me feel. I giggle at everything everyone says.’

  ‘Good,’ he pronounced, feeling inside a warm expansion of relief at seeing her lose, for the moment, her tension and anxiety. ‘Let’s hear you giggle,’ he said, sloshing some more gin into her glass.

  ‘Look at those children,’ she exclaimed, and they stood in a bed of balsam, irredeemably crushed, and looked into the lighted drawing room where their daughter was at the moment the cynosure of all juvenile eyes, having thrown herself with abandon into a dance of monkey-like movements. ‘What is it, Miss Dutta?’ the awed mother enquired. ‘You’re more up in the latest fashions than I am – is it the twist, the rock or the jungle?’ and all three watched, enthralled, till Tara began to totter and, losing her simian grace, collapsed against some wildly shrieking girl friends.

  A bit embarrassed by their daughter’s reckless abandon, the parents discussed with Miss Dutta whose finger, by her own admission, was placed squarely on the pulse of youth, the latest trends in juvenile culture on which Miss Dutta gave a neat sociological discourse (all the neater for having been given earlier that day at the convocation of the Home Science College) and Raman wondered uneasily at this opening of flood-gates in his own family – his wife grown giggly with gin, his daughter performing wildly to a Chubby Checker record – how had it all come about? Was it the darkness all about them, dense as the heavy curtains about a stage, that made them act, for an hour or so, on the tiny lighted stage of brief intimacy with such a lack of inhibition? Was it the drink, so freely sloshing from end to end of the house and lawn on account of his determination to clear out his ‘cellar’ (actually one-half of the sideboard and the top shelf of the wardrobe in his dressing-room) and his muddling and mixing them, making up untried and experimental cocktails and lavishly pouring out the whisky without a measure? But these were solid and everyday explanations and there was about this party something out of the ordinary and everyday – at least to the Ramans, normally so austere and unpopular. He knew the real reason too – it was all because the party had been labelled a ‘farewell party’, everyone knew it was the last one, that the Ramans were leaving and they would not meet up again. There was about it exactly that kind of sentimental euphoria that is generated at a ship-board party, the one given on the last night before the end of the voyage. Everyone draws together with an intimacy, a lack of inhibition not displayed or guessed at before, knowing this is the last time, tomorrow they will be dispersed, it will be over. They will not meet, be reminded of it or be required to repeat it.

  As if to underline this new and Cinderella’s ball-like atmosphere of friendliness and gaiety, three pairs of neighbours now swept in (and three kochias lay down and died under their feet, to the gardener’s rage and sorrow): the couple who lived to the Ramans’ left, the couple who lived to their right, and the couple from across the road, all crying, ‘So sorry to be late, but you know what a long way we had to come,’ making everyone laugh identically at the identical joke. Despite the disparity in their looks and ages – one couple was very young, another middle-aged, the third grandparents – they were, in a sense, as alike as the company executives and their wives, for they too bore a label if a less alarming one: Neighbours, it said. Because they were neighbours, and although they had never been more than nodded to over the hedge, waved to in passing cars or spoken to about anything other than their children, dogs, flowers and gardens, their talk had a vivid immediacy that went straight to the heart.

  ‘Diamond’s going to miss you so – he’ll be heartbroken,’ moaned the grandparents who lived alone in their spotless house with a black Labrador who had made a habit of visiting the Ramans whenever he wanted young company, a romp on the lawn or an illicit biscuit.

  ‘I don’t know what my son will do without Diamond,’ reciprocated Bina with her new and sympathetic warmth. ‘He’ll force me to get a dog of his own, I know, and how will I ever keep one in a flat in Bombay?’

  ‘When are you going to throw out those rascals?’ demanded a father of Raman, pointing at the juvenile revellers indoors. ‘My boy has an exam tomorrow, you know, but he said he couldn’t be bothered about it – he had to go to the Ramans’ farewell party.’

  One mother confided to Bina, winning her heart forever, ‘Now that you are leaving, I can talk to you about it at last: did you know my Vinod is sweet on your Tara? Last night when I was putting him to bed, he said, “Mama, when I grow up I will marry Tara. I will sit on a white horse and wear a turban and carry a sword in my belt and I will go and marry Tara.” What shall we do about that, eh? Only a ten-year difference in age, isn’t there – or twelve?’ and both women rocked with laughter.

  The party had reached its crest, like a festive ship, loud and illuminated for that last party before the journey’s end, perched on the dizzy top of the dark wave. It could do nothing now but descend and dissolve. As if by simultaneous and unanimous consent, the guests began to leave (in the wake of the Commissioner and his wife who left first, like royalty), streaming towards the drive where cars stood bumper to bumper – more than had visited the Ramans’ house in the previous five years put together. The light in the portico fell on Bina’s pride and joy, a Chinese orange tree, lighting its miniature globes of fruit like golden lanterns. There was a babble, an uproar of leavetaking (the smaller children, already in pyjamas, watched open-mouthed from a dark window upstairs). Esso and Caltex left together, arms about each other and smoking cigars, like figures in a comic act. Miss Dutta held firmly to Bose’s arm as they dipped, bowed, swayed and tripped on their way out. Bina was clasped, kissed – earrings grazed her cheek, talcum powder tickled her nose. Raman had his back slapped till he thrummed and vibrated like a beaten gong.

  It seemed as if Bina and Raman were to be left alone at last, left to pack up and leave – now the goodbyes had been said, there was nothing else they could possibly do – but no, out popped the good doctors from the hospital who had held themselves back in the darkest corners and made themselves inconspicuous throughout the party, and now, in the manner in which they clasped the host by the shoulders and the hostess by her hands, and said, ‘Ah now we have a chance to be with you at last, now we can begin our party,’ revealed that although this was the first time they had come to the Ramans’ house on any but professional visits, they were not merely friends – they were almost a part of that self-defensive family, the closest to them in sympathy. Raman and Bina both felt a warm, moist expansion of tenderness inside themselves, the tenderness they had till today restricted to the limits of their family, no farther, as though they feared it had not an unlimited capacity. Now its close horizons stepped backwards, with some surprise.

  And it was as the doctors said – the party now truly began. Cane chairs were dragged out of the veranda onto the lawn, placed in a ring next to the flowering Queen of the Night which shook out flounces and frills of white scent with every rustle of night breeze. Bina could give in now to her two most urgent needs and dash indoors to smear her mosquito-bitten arms and feet with citronella and fetch Nono to sit on her lap, to let Nono have a share, too, in the party. The good doctors and their wives leant forward and gave Nono the attention that made the parents’ throats tighten with gratitude. Raman insisted on their each having a glass of Remy Martin – they must finish it tonight, he said, and would not let the waiters clear away the ice or glasses yet. So they sat on the veranda steps, smoking and yawning.

  Now it turned out that Dr Bannerji’s wife, the lady in the Dacca sari and the steel-rimmed spectacles, had studied in Shantiniketan, and she sang, at her husband’s and his colleagues’ urging, Tagore’s sweetest, saddest songs. When she sang, in heartbroken tones that seemed to come from some distance away, from the damp corners of the darkness where the fireflies flitted,

  ‘Father, the boat is carrying me away,

  Father, it is carrying me away from home,’

  the eyes of her listener
s, sitting tensely in that grassy, inky dark, glazed with tears that were compounded equally of drink, relief and regret.

  Pigeons at Daybreak

  One of his worst afflictions, Mr Basu thought, was not to be able to read the newspaper himself. To have them read to him by his wife. He watched with fiercely controlled irritation that made the corners of his mouth jerk suddenly upwards and outwards, as she searched for her spectacles through the flat. By the time she found them – on the ledge above the bathing place in the bathroom, of all places: what did she want with her spectacles in there? – she had lost the newspaper. When she found it, it was spotted all over with grease for she had left it beside the stove on which the fish was frying. This reminded her to see to the fish before it was over-done. ‘You don’t want charred fish for your lunch, do you?’ she shouted back when he called. He sat back then, in his tall-backed cane chair, folded his hands over his stomach and knew that if he were to open his mouth now, even a slit, it would be to let out a scream of abuse. So he kept it tightly shut.

  When she had finally come to the end of that round of bumbling activity, moving from stove to bucket, shelf to table, cupboard to kitchen, she came out on the balcony again, triumphantly carrying with her the newspaper as well as the spectacles. ‘So,’ she said, ‘are you ready to listen to the news now?’

  ‘Now,’ he said, parting his lips with the sound of tearing paper, ‘I’m ready.’

  But Otima Basu never heard such sounds, such ironies or distresses. Quite pleased with all she had accomplished, and at having half an hour in which to sit down comfortably, she settled herself on top of a cane stool like a large soft cushion of white cotton, oiled hair and gold bangles. Humming a little air from the last Hindi film she had seen, she opened out the newspaper on her soft, doughy lap and began to hum out the headlines. In spite of himself, Amul Basu leant forward, strained his eyes to catch an interesting headline for he simply couldn’t believe this was all the papers had to offer.

  ‘“Rice smugglers caught”,’ she read out, but immediately ran along a train of thought of her own. ‘What can they expect? Everyone knows there is enough rice in the land, it’s the hoarders and black-marketeers who keep it from us, naturally people will break the law and take to smuggling.’

  ‘What else? What else?’ Mr Basu snapped at her. ‘Nothing else in the papers?’

  ‘Ah – ah – hmm,’ she muttered as her eyes roved up and down the columns, looking very round and glassy behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘“Blue bull menace in Delhi airport can be solved by narcotic drug—”’

  ‘Blue bulls? Blue bulls?’ snorted Mr Basu, almost tipping out of his chair. ‘How do you mean, “blue bulls”? What’s a blue bull? You can’t be reading right.’

  ‘I am reading right,’ she protested. ‘Think I can’t read? Did my B.A., helped two children through school and college, and you think I can’t read? Blue bulls it says here, blue bulls it is.’

  ‘Can’t be,’ he grumbled, but retreated into his chair from her unexpectedly spirited defence. ‘Must be a printing mistake. There are bulls, buffaloes, bullocks, and bulbuls, but whoever heard of a blue bull? Nilgai, do they mean? But that creature is nearly extinct. How can there be any at the airport? It’s all rot, somebody’s fantasy—’

  ‘All right, I’ll stop reading, if you’d rather. I have enough to do in the kitchen, you know,’ she threatened him, but he pressed his lips together and, with a little stab of his hand, beckoned her to pick up the papers and continue.

  ‘Ah – ah – hmm. What pictures are on this week, I wonder?’ she continued, partly because that was a subject of consuming interest to her, and partly because she thought it a safe subject to move on to. ‘Teri Meri Kismet – “the heartwarming saga of an unhappy wife”. No, no, no. Do Dost – winner of three Filmfare awards – ahh …’

  ‘Please, please, Otima, the news,’ Mr Basu reminded her.

  ‘Nothing to interest you,’ she said but tore herself away from the entertainments column for his sake. ‘“Anti-arthritis drug” – not your problem. “Betel leaves cause cancer.” Hmph. I know at least a hundred people who chew betel leaves and are as fit—’

  ‘All right. All right. What else?’

  ‘What news are you interested in then?’ she flared up, but immediately subsided and browsed on, comfortably scratching the sole of her foot as she did so. ‘“Floods in Assam.” “Drought in Maharashtra.” When is there not? “Two hundred cholera deaths.” “A woman and child have a miraculous escape when their house collapses.” “Husband held for murder of wife.” See?’ she cried excitedly. ‘Once more. How often does this happen? “Husband and mother-in-law have been arrested on charge of pouring kerosene on Kantibai’s clothes and setting her on fire while she slept.” Yes, that is how they always do it. Why? Probably the dowry didn’t satisfy them, they must have hoped to get one more …’

  He groaned and sank back in his chair. He knew there was no stopping her now. Except for stories of grotesque births like those of two-headed children or five-legged calves, there was nothing she loved as dearly as tales of murder and atrocity, and short of his having a stroke or the fish-seller arriving at the door, nothing could distract her now. He even heaved himself out of his chair and shuffled off to the other end of the balcony to feed the parrot in its cage a green chilli or two without her so much as noticing his departure. But when she had read to the end of that fascinating item, she ran into another that she read out in a voice like a law-maker’s, and he heard it without wishing to: ‘“Electricity will be switched off as urgent repairs to power lines must be made, in Darya Ganj and Kashmere Gate area, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. on the twenty-first of May.” My God, that is today.’

  ‘Today? Tonight? No electricity?’ he echoed, letting the green chilli fall to the floor of the cage where other offered and refused chillies lay in a rotting heap. ‘How will I sleep then?’ he gasped fearfully, ‘without a fan? In this heat?’ and already his diaphragm seemed to cave in, his chest to rise and fall as he panted for breath. Clutching his throat, he groped his way back to the cane chair. ‘Otima, Otima, I can’t breathe,’ he moaned.

  She put the papers away and rose with a sigh of irritation and anxiety, the kind a sickly child arouses in its tired mother. She herself, at fifty-six, had not a wrinkle on her oiled face, scarcely a grey hair on her head. As smooth as butter, as round as a cake, life might still have been delectable to her if it had not been for the asthma that afflicted her husband and made him seem, at sixty-one, almost decrepit.

  ‘I’ll bring you your inhaler. Don’t get worried, just don’t get worried,’ she told him and bustled off to find his inhaler and cortisone. When she held them out to him, he lowered his head into the inhaler like a dying man at the one straw left. He grasped it with frantic hands, almost clawing her. She shook her head, watching him. ‘Why do you let yourself get so upset?’ she asked, cursing herself for having read out that particular piece of news to him. ‘It won’t be so bad. Many people in the city sleep without electric fans – most do. We’ll manage—’

  ‘You’ll manage,’ he spat at her, ‘but I?’

  There was no soothing him now. She knew how rapidly he would advance from imagined breathlessness into the first frightening stage of a full-blown attack of asthma. His chest was already heaving, he imagined there was no oxygen left for him to breathe, that his lungs had collapsed and could not take in any air. He stared up at the strings of washing that hung from end to end of the balcony, the overflow of furniture that cluttered it, the listless parrot in its cage, the view of all the other crowded, washing-hung balconies up and down the length of the road, and felt there was no oxygen left in the air.

  ‘Stay out here on the balcony, it’s a little cooler than inside,’ his wife said calmly and left him to go about her work. But she did it absently. Normally she would have relished bargaining with the fish-seller who came to the door with a beckti, some whiskered black river fish and a little squirming hill of pale pink praw
ns in his flat basket. But today she made her purchases and paid him off rather quickly – she was in a hurry to return to the balcony. ‘All right?’ she asked, looking down at her husband sunk into a heap on his chair, shaking with the effort to suck in air. His lips tightened and whitened in silent reply. She sighed and went away to sort out spices in the kitchen, to pour them out of large containers into small containers, to fill those that were empty and empty those that were full, giving everything that came her way a little loving polish with the end of her sari for it was something she loved to do, but she did not stay very long. She worried about her husband. Foolish and unreasonable as he seemed to her in his sickness, she could not quite leave him to his agony, whether real or imagined. When the postman brought them a letter from their son in Bhilai, she read out to him the boy’s report on his work in the steel mills. The father said nothing but seemed calmer and she was able, after that, to make him eat a little rice and fish jhol, very lightly prepared, just as the doctor prescribed. ‘Lie down now,’ she said, sucking at a fish bone as she removed the dishes from the table. ‘It’s too hot out on the balcony. Take some rest.’