The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  ‘I’m just not sophisticated enough for you,’ she gulped over the iced lemon tea David brought her. It was the first time she mentioned the disparity in their backgrounds – it had never seemed to matter before. Laying it bare now was like digging the first rift between them, the first division of raw, red clay. It frightened them both. ‘I expect you knew about such things – you must have learnt them in college. You know I only went to high school and stayed home after that—’

  ‘Darling,’ he said, with genuine pain and tenderness, and could not go on. His tastes would not allow him to, or his scruples: the vulgarity appalled him as much as the pain. ‘Do take a shower and have a shampoo, Pat. We’re going out—’

  ‘No, no, no,’ she moaned in anguish, putting away the iced tea and falling onto her pillow.

  ‘But to quite different people this time, Pat. To see a social worker – I mean, Sharma’s wife is a social worker. She’ll show you something quite different. I know it’ll interest you.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she wept, playing with the buttons of her dress like a child.

  But they did prove different. The Delhi intellectual was poorer than the Bombay intellectual, for one thing. He lived in a small, airless flat with whitewashed walls and a divan and bits of folk art. He served dinner in cheap, bright ceramic ware. Of course there was the inevitable long-haired intellectual – either journalist or professor – who sat crosslegged on the floor and held forth, abusively, on the crassness of the Americans, to David’s delight and Pat’s embarrassment. But Sharma’s wife was actually a new type, to Pat. She was a genuine social worker, trained, and next morning, having neatly tucked the night before under the divan, she took Pat out to see a milk centre, a creche, a nursery school, clinics and dispensaries, some housed in cow sheds, others in ruined tombs. Pat saw workers’ babies asleep like cocoons in hammocks slung from tin sheds on building sites; she saw children with kohl-rimmed eyes solemnly eating their free lunches out of brass containers, and schools where children wrote painstakingly on wooden boards with reed pens and the teacher sneezed brown snuff sneezes at her. It was different in content. It was the same in effect. Her feet dragged, dustier by the hour. Her hair was like string on her shoulders. When she met David in the evening, at the hotel, he was red from the sun, like a well-ripened tomato, longing to talk, to tell, to ask and question, while she drooped tired, dusty, stringy, dry, trying to revive herself, for his sake, with little sips of some iced drink but feeling quite surely that life was shrivelling up inside her. She never spoke of apple trees or barns, of popcorn or drug stores, but he saw them in her eyes, more remote and faint every day. Her eyes had been so blue, now they were fading, as if the memory, the feel of apple trees and apples were fading from her. He panicked.

  ‘We’d better go to the hills for a while,’ he said: he did not want murder on his hands. ‘Sharma said June is bad, very bad, in Delhi. He says everyone who can goes to the hills. Well, we can. Let’s go, Pat.’

  She looked at him dumbly with her fading eyes, and tried to smile. She thought of the way the child at the hospital had smiled after the doctor had finished painting her burns with gentian violet and given her a plastic doll. It had been a cheap, cracked pink plastic doll and the child had smiled at it through the gentian violet, its smile stamped in, or cut out, in that face still taut with pain, as by a machine. Pat had known that face would always be in pain, and the smile would always be cut out as by the machine of charity, mechanically. The plastic doll and the gentian violet had been incidental.

  At the airlines office, the man could only find them seats on the plane to Manali, in the Kulu Valley. To Manali they went.

  Not, however, by plane, for there were such fierce sandstorms sweeping through Delhi that day that no planes took off, and they went the three hundred miles by bus instead. The sandstorm did not spare the highway or the bus – it tore through the cracked windows and buried passengers and seats under the yellow sand of the Rajasthan desert. The sun burnt up the tin body of the bus till it was a great deal hotter inside than out in the sun. Pat sat stone-still, as though she had been beaten unconscious, groping with her eyes only for a glimpse of a mango grove or an avenue of banyans, instinctively believing she would survive only if she could find and drink in their dark, damp shade. David kept his eyes tightly shut behind his glare glasses. Perspiration poured from under his hair down his face, cutting rivers through the map of dust. The woman in the seat behind his was sick all the way up the low hills to Bilaspur. In front of him a small child wailed without stop while its mother ate peanuts and jovially threw the shells over her shoulder into his lap. The bus crackled with sand, peanut shells and explosive sounds from the protesting engine. There was a stench of diesel oil, of vomit, of perspiration and stale food such as he had never believed could exist – it was so thick. The bus was long past its prime but rattled, roared, shook and vibrated all the way through the desert, the plains, the hills, to Mandi where it stopped for a tea break in a rest house under some eucalyptus trees in which cicadas trilled hoarsely. Then it plunged, bent on suicide, into the Beas river gorge.

  After one look down the vertical cliff-side of slipping, crumbling slate ending in the wild river tearing through the narrow gorge in a torrent of ice-green and white spray, David’s head fell back against the seat, lolled there loosely, and he muttered, ‘This is the end, Pat, my girl, I’m afraid it’s the end.’

  ‘But it’s cooler,’ fluted a youthful voice in a rising inflection, and David’s head jerked with foolish surprise. Who had spoken? He turned to his wife and found her leaning out of the window, her strings of hair flying back at him in the breeze. She turned to him her excited face – dust-grimed and wan but with its eyes alive and observant. ‘I can feel the spray – cold spray, David. It’s better than a shower or air-conditioning or even a drink. Do just feel it.’

  But he was too baffled and stunned and slain to feel anything at all. He sat slumped, not daring to watch the bus take the curves of that precarious path hewn through cliffs of slate, poised above the river that hurtled and roared over the black rocks and dashed itself against the mountainside. He was not certain what exactly would happen – whether the overhanging slate would come crashing down upon them, burying them alive, or if they would lurch headlong into the Beas and be dashed to bits on the rocks – but he had no doubt that it would be one or the other. In the face of this certainty, Pat’s untimely revival seemed no more than a pathetic footnote.

  To Pat, being fanned to life by that spray-spotted breeze, no such possibility occurred. She was watching the white spray rise and spin over the ice-green river and break upon the gleaming rocks, looking out for small sandy coves where pink oleanders bloomed and banana trees hung their limp green flags, exclaiming with delight at the small birds that skimmed the river like foam – feeling curiosity, pleasure and amusement stir in her for the first time since she had landed in India. She no longer heard the retching of the woman behind them or the faint mewing of the exhausted child in front. Peanut shells slipped into her shoes and out of them. The stench of fifty perspiring passengers was lost in the freshness of the mountains. Up on the ridge, if she craned her neck, she could see the bunched needles of pine trees flashing.

  When they emerged from the gorge into the sunlight, apricot-warm and mild, of the Kulu Valley, she sat back with a contented sigh and let the bus carry them alongside the now calm and wide river Beas, through orchards in which little apples knobbled the trees, past flocks of royal mountain goats and their blanketed shepherds striding ahead with the mountaineer’s swing, up into the hills of Manali, its deodar forests indigo in the evening air and the snow-streaked rocks of the Rohtang Pass hovering above them, an incredible distance away.

  Then they were disgorged, broken sandals, shells, hair, rags, children and food containers, into the Manali bazaar, and the bus conductor swung himself onto the roof of the bus and hurled down their bags and boxes. David was on his knees, picking up the pieces of his broke
n suitcase and holding them together. The crying child was fed hot fritters his father had fetched from a wayside food stall. The vomiting woman squatted, holding her head in her hands, and a pai dog sniffed at her in curiosity and consolation. A big handsome man with a pigtail and a long turquoise earring came up to Pat with an armful of red puppies, his teeth flashing in a cajoling smile. ‘Fifty rupees,’ he murmured, and raised it to ‘Eighty’ as soon as Pat reached out to fondle the smallest of them. Touts and pimps, ubiquitously small and greasy, piped around David ‘Moonlight Hotel, plumbing and flush toilet,’ and ‘Hotel Paradise, non-vegetarian and best view, sir.’

  David, holding his suitcase in his arms, looked over the top of their heads and at the mountain peaks, as if for succour. Then his face tilted down at them palely and he shook his head, his eyes quite empty. ‘Let’s go, Pat,’ he sighed, and she followed him up through the bazaar for he had, of course, made bookings and they had rooms at what had been described to them as an ‘English boarding house’.

  It was on the hillside, set in a sea of apple trees, and they had to walk through the bazaar to it, nudging past puppy-sellers, women who had spread amber and coral and bronze prayer bells on the pavement, stalls in which huge pans of milk boiled and steamed and fritters jumped up and hissed, and holiday crowds that stood about eating, talking and eyeing the newcomers.

  ‘Jesus,’ David said in alarm, ‘the place is full of hippies.’ Pat looked at the faces they passed then and saw that the crowd outside the baker’s was indeed one of fair men and women, even if they seemed to be beggars. Some were dressed like Indian gurus, in loincloths or saffron robes, with beads around their necks, others as gypsies in pantaloons or spangled skirts, some in plain rags and tatters. All were barefoot and had packs on their backs, and one or two had silent, stupefied babies astride their hips. ‘Why,’ she said, watching one woman with a child approach an Indian couple with her empty hand outstretched, ‘they might be Americans!’ David shuddered and turned up a dusty path that went between the deodar trees to the red-roofed building of the boarding house. But several hippies were climbing the same path, not to the boarding house but vanishing into the forest, or crossing the wooden bridge over the river into the meadows beyond. Americans, Europeans, here in Manali, at the end of the world – what were they doing? she wondered. Well, what was she doing? Ah, she’d come to try and live again. She threw back her shoulders and took in lungfuls of the clear, cold air and it washed through her like water, cleansing and pure. Someone in a red cap was sawing wood outside the boarding house, she saw, and blue smoke curled out of its chimney as in a Grandma Moses painting. There was a sound of a rushing stream below. A cuckoo called. Above the tips of the immense deodars the sky was a clear turquoise, an evening colour, without heat although still distilled with sunlight. Dog roses bloomed open and white on the hillside. She tried to clasp David’s arm with joy but he was holding onto the suitcase which had broken its locks and burst open and he could not spare her a finger.

  ‘But David,’ she coaxed, ‘it’s going to be lovely.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said, white-lipped, and pitched the suitcase onto the wooden veranda at the feet of the proprietor who sat benignly as a Buddha on a wooden upright chair, in a white pullover and string cap, gazing down at them with an expression of pity under his bland welcome.

  The room was clean, although bare but for two white iron bedsteads and a dressing table with a small yellow mirror. Its window overlooked a yard in which brown hens pecked and climbed onto overturned buckets and wood piles, and wild daisies bloomed, as white and yellow as fresh bread and butter, around a water pump. The bathroom had no tub but a very well-polished brass bucket, a green plastic mug and, holy of holies, a flush toilet that worked, however reluctantly and complainingly. The proprietor, apple-cheeked and woolly – was he an Anglo-Indian, European or Indian? Pat could not tell – sent them tea and Glaxo biscuits on a tin tray. They sat on the bed and drank the black, bitter tea, sighing ‘Well, it’s hot.’

  But Pat could not stay still. Once she had examined the drawers of the dressing table and read scraps from the old newspaper with which they were lined, turned on the taps in the bathroom and washed, changed into her Delhi slippers and drunk her tea, she wanted to go out and ‘Explore!’ David looked longingly at the clean white, although thin and darned, sheets stretched on the beds and the hairy brown blanket so competently tucked in, but she was adamant.

  ‘We can’t waste a minute,’ she said urgently, for some unknown reason. ‘We mustn’t waste this lovely evening.’

  He did not see how it would be wasted if they were to lie down on their clean beds, wait for hot water to be brought for their baths and then sleep, but realized it would be somehow craven and feeble for him to say so when she stood at the window with something strong and active in the swing of her hips and a fervour in her newly pink and washed face that he had almost forgotten was once her natural expression – in a different era, a different land.

  ‘We’re surrounded by apple trees,’ she enticed him, ‘and I think, I think I heard a cuckoo.’

  ‘Why not?’ he grumbled, and followed her out onto the wooden veranda where the proprietor continued to look comfortable on that upright chair, and down the garden path to the road that took them into the forest.

  It was a deodar forest. The trees were so immensely old and tall that while the lower boughs already dipped their feet into the evening, the tops still brushed the late sunlight, and woolly yellow beams slanted through the black trunks as through the pillars of a shadowy cathedral. The turf was soft and uneven under their feet, wild iris bloomed in clumps and ferns surrounded rocks that were conspicuously stranded here and there. Pat fell upon the wild strawberries that grew with a careless luxuriance – small, seed-ridden ones she found sweet. The few people they passed, village men and women wrapped in white Kulu blankets with handsome stripes, had faces that were brown and russet, calm and pleasant, although they neither smiled nor greeted Pat and David, merely observed them in passing. Pat liked them for that – for not whining or wheedling or begging or sneering as the crowds in Bombay and Delhi had done – but simply conferring on them a status not unlike their own. ‘Such independence,’ she glowed, ‘so self-contained. True mountain people, you know.’

  David looked at her a little fearfully, not having noted such a surge of Vermont pride in his country wife before. ‘Do you feel one of them yourself?’ he asked, a little tentatively.

  He was startled by the positive quality of the laugh that rang out of her, by the way she threw out her arms in an open embrace. ‘Why, sure,’ she cried, explosively, and sprang over a small stream that ran over the moss like a trickle of mercury. ‘Look, here’s dear old Jack in the pulpit,’ she cried, darting at some ferns from which protruded that rather sinister gentleman, striped and hooded, David thought, like a silent cobra. She plucked it and strode on, her hair no longer like string but like drawn toffee, now catching fire in the sunbeams, now darkening in the shade. After a while, she remarked, ‘It isn’t much like the friendly Vermont woods, really. It’s more like a grand medieval cathedral, isn’t it?’

  ‘An observation several before you have made on forests,’ he remarked, a trifle drily. ‘Is one permitted to sit in your cathedral or can one only kneel?’ he asked, lowering himself onto a rock. ‘Jesus, is my bottom sore from that bus ride.’

  She laughed, threw the Jack in the pulpit into his lap and flung herself on the grass at his feet. And so they might have stopped and talked and laughed a bit before going back to an English supper and their fresh, clean beds but, swinging homewards hand-in-hand, they came suddenly upon a strange edifice on a slope in the forest, like a great pagoda built of wood, heavy and dark timber, rough-hewn and sculpted as a stone temple might be, with trees rearing about it in the twilight, shaggy and dark, like Himalayan bears.

  ‘Could it be a temple?’ Pat wondered, for the temples she had so far seen had been bursting at the seams with loud pilgrims and busy b
eggars and priests, affairs of garish paint and plaster, clatter of bells and malodorous marigolds. A still temple in a silent forest – she had quite lost hope of finding such a thing in this overpopulated land.

  ‘We might go in,’ David said since she was straining at his hand and, after hovering at the threshold for a bit, they slipped off their sandals and crossed its high wooden plinth.

  It was very much darker inside, like a cave scooped out of a tree trunk. The floor, however, was of clay, hard-packed and silky. A shelf of rock projected from the dark wall and a lamp hung from it with a few flowers bright around its wick. It had that minute been blown out by a tall woman with an appropriately wooden face who wore her hair in a tight plait around her head. She lifted her hand, swung only once but vigorously a large bell, and left with a quick stride, barely glancing at them as she went. They bent to study the stone slab beneath the gently smoking lamp and could only just make out the outline of a giant foot-print on it. That was all by way of an image and there were neither offerings nor money-box, neither priest nor pilgrim around.

  They came out in silence and walked away slowly, as though afraid something would jump out at them from it, or from the forest – they were so much a part of each other, that forest and its temple.

  Finally they emerged from the trees and were within sight of the red roof and chimney pot of the English boarding house amongst its apple trees, far below the snow-streaked black ridges of the mountain pass, still pale and luminous against the darkening sky, at once threatening and protective in its attitude, like an Indian god.