The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  She was shocked, although she made a stout attempt to disguise it, and he was gratified to see this. ‘When d’you want to leave?’ she asked, spitting a plum seed into her fist.

  ‘Next Monday, I think,’ he said.

  She said nothing and disappeared for the rest of the day. She was out again before he’d emerged from his bath next morning, and he had to go down to the bus depot by himself, hating every squalid step of the way: the rag market where Tibetans sold stained and soiled imported clothes to avid Indian tourists and played dice in the dust while waiting for customers, the street where snot-gobbed urchins raced and made puppies scream, only just managing to escape from under roaring lorries and stinking buses. He directed looks of fury at the old beggar without a nose or fingers who solicited him for alms and at the pig-tailed Tibetan with one turquoise earring who tried to sell him a mangey pup. ‘We’re going to get out of here,’ he ground out at them through his teeth, and they smiled at him with every encouragement. The booking office was, however, not yet open for business and he was obliged to wait outside the bus depot which was the filthiest spot in the whole bazaar. He stood slouching against a wooden pillar, watching a half-empty bus push through a herd of worriedly bleating sheep and then come up, boiling and steaming, its green-painted, rose-wreathed sides almost falling apart with the effort. It groaned the last few yards of the way and expired at his feet, with a hiss of steam that made its bonnet rise inches into the air.

  The driver, a wiry young Sikh who had hung his turban on a peg by the seat and wore only a purple handkerchief over his top-knot, leapt out and raced around to fling open the bonnet before the contraption exploded. His assistant, who had jumped down from the back door and vanished into the nearest shop, a grocer’s, now came running out with an enamel jug of water which the driver grabbed from his hands and, before David’s incredulous eyes, threw onto the radiator.

  The next thing that David knew was that an explosion of steam and boiling water had hit him, hit the driver, the assistant and he didn’t know how many bystanders – he couldn’t see, he flung his hands to his face, but too late, he was on fire, he was howling – everyone was howling. Someone grabbed his shoulders, someone shouted ‘Sir, sir, are you blind? Are you blind?’ and he roared ‘Yes, damn you, I’m blind, blind.’ And where was Pat, his bloody useless wife, where was she? Here was he, blinded, scalded, being dragged through the streets by strangers, mad-men, all trying to carry him, all babbling as at a universal holocaust.

  ‘There, try opening your eyes now. I think you can, son, just try it,’ a blessedly American voice spoke, and prised away his hands from his face. In his desperation to see the owner of this blessed voice, David allowed his hands to be loosed from his face and actually opened his eyes – an act he had never thought to perform again – and gazed upon the American doctor with the auburn sideburns and the shirt of blue and brown checked wool as at a vision of St Michael at the golden gates. ‘That’s wonderful, just wonderful,’ beamed the gorgeous man, solid and middle-aged and wondrously square. ‘You haven’t lost your eyes, see. Now let me just paint those burns for you and you’ll leave here as fit as a fiddle, see if you don’t …’ So he burbled on, in that rich, heavy voice from the Middle West, and David sat back as helpless as a baby, and felt those large dry hands with their strong growth of ginger hair gently dab at his face, bringing peace and blessing in their wake. He was the American mission hospital doctor but to David he was God himself on an inspection visit mercifully timed to coincide with David’s accident.

  It was David’s accident. He quite forgot to ask about the driver or his brainless help or the hapless bystanders who had been standing too close to the boiling radiator. He merely sat there, limp and helpless, feeling the doctor’s voice flow over him like a stream of American milk. And then he was actually handed a glass of milk – Horlicks, the doctor called it, sweet and hot – and he sipped it with bowed head like a child, afraid he would cry now that the agony was over and the convalescence so sweetly begun.

  ‘It’s the shock,’ the doctor was saying kindly. ‘Your eyes are quite safe, son, and the burns are superficial – luckily – it’s just the shock,’ and he patted David on the back with those ginger-tufted hands that were so square and sure. ‘We see all kinds of accidents up here, you know. Yesterday it was one of those crazy hippies who had to be brought in on a stretcher. He’d fallen off a mountain. Now can you credit that? A grown man just going and falling off a mountain like he was a kid? He’d broken both legs, see. I had to send my assistant with him to Delhi. They’ll have quite a time getting him on his feet again but the Holy Family Hospital tries its best. Still,’ he added, in the considerate manner of one who knows how to deal with a patient, ‘yours sure is the most unnecessary accident we’ve had, I’ll say that,’ he declared, filling David with sweet pride. Bowing his head, he sipped his milk and drank in the doctor’s kindly gossip. He tried to say, ‘Yeah, those hippies – they shouldn’t be allowed – I don’t see how they’re allowed—’ but his voice died away and the doctor shrugged tolerantly and laughed. ‘It takes all kinds, you know, but they really are kids, they shouldn’t be allowed out of their mamma’s sight. How about another drink of Horlicks? You think you can walk home now? Feel OK, son?’ David would have given a great deal to say he was not OK at all, that he couldn’t possibly walk home, that he wanted to stay and tell the doctor all about Pat, how she had practically deserted him, and about the unsavoury friends she had made here. He wanted to ask him to speak to Pat, reason with her, return his wife to him, return his former life to him. It made him weep, almost, to think that he was expected to get up and walk out. He threw a look of anguish at the doctor as he was seen down the rickety stairs to the bus depot, and did not realize that no one could make out his expression through that coating of gentian violet that coloured his entire face, neck and ears with an extraordinary neon glow.

  ‘My God, what’s up with you?’ screamed Pat when she came in, hours later, and was struck still by shock.

  He glared at her, exulting at having elicited such a response from her. But a minute later he saw that she had collapsed against the door frame, not with shock, but with laughter.

  ‘What have you done, Dave?’ she squealed. ‘What made you do that?’

  Harsh words were exchanged then. David, having lost his tight-lipped control (that morning’s sweet Horlicks had washed it away) demanded roughly where she had been when he was standing in the sun to buy tickets and getting scalded and very nearly blinded in the process. Didn’t she care about him, he wanted to know, and what did she care about at all now? And she, revolted, she said, by his egoism and conceit that didn’t allow him to see beyond the tip of his nose – what was wrong with him that he couldn’t move out of the way of a bus, for Christ’s sake, didn’t it just show that he saw nothing, noticed nothing outside himself? – told him what she cared about. She had found a place for herself in the commune at Nasogi. It was what she was meant for, she realized – not going to parties with David, but to live with other men and women who shared her beliefs. They were going to live the simple life, wash themselves and their dishes in a stream, cook brown rice and lentils, pray and meditate in the forest and, at the end, perhaps, become Buddhists – ‘A Buddhist, you crackpot? In a Hindu temple?’ he spluttered – but she continued calmly that she was sure to find, in the end, something that could not be found on the cocktail rounds of Delhi, Bombay or even, for that matter, Long Island, but that she was positive existed here, in the forest, on the mountains.

  ‘What cocktail rounds? Are you trying to imply I’m a social gadabout, not a serious student of sociology, working on a thesis on which my entire career is based?’

  ‘Working on a thesis?’ she screeched derisively. ‘Sociology? The idea of you, Dave, when you’ve never so much as looked, I mean really looked, into the soul, the prana, of the next man – is just too—’ she spluttered to a stop, wildly threw her hair about her face and burst out, ‘You, you don’t e
ven know it’s possible to find Buddha in a Hindu temple. Why, you can find him in a church, a forest, anywhere. Do you think he’s as narrow-minded as you?’ she flung at him, and the explosiveness with which this burst from her showed how his derision had cut into her, how it had festered in her.

  The English boarding house was treated to much more hurling of American abuse that night, to throwing around of suitcases, to sounds of packing and dramatic partings and exits, and many heads leant out of the windows into the chalky moonlight to see Pat set off, striding through the daisy-spattered yard in her newly acquired hippy rags that whipped against her legs as she marched off, bag and prayer beads in hand, with never a backward look. There was no one, however, but the proprietor, bland and inscrutable as ever, to see David off next morning making a quieter, neater and sadder departure for Delhi, unconventional only on account of the brilliant purple hue of his face.

  If the truth were to be told, he felt greater regret at having to arrive in Delhi with a face like a painted baboon’s than to arrive without his wife.

  Royalty

  All was prepared for the summer exodus: the trunks packed, the household wound down, wound up, ready to be abandoned to three months of withering heat and engulfing dust while its owners withdrew to their retreat in the mountains. The last few days were a little uncomfortable – so many of their clothes already packed away, so many of their books and papers bundled up and ready for the move. The house looked stark, with the silver put away, the vases emptied of flowers, the rugs and carpets rolled up; it was difficult to get through this stretch, delayed by one thing or another – a final visit to the dentist, last instructions to the stockbrokers, a nephew to be entertained on his way to Oxford. It was only the prospect of escape from the blinding heat that already hammered at the closed doors and windows, poured down on the roof and verandas, and withdrawal to the freshness and cool of the mountains which helped them to bear it. Sinking down on veranda chairs to sip lemonade from tall glasses, they sighed, ‘Well, we’ll soon be out of it.’

  In that uncomfortable interlude, a postcard arrived – a cheap, yellow printed postcard that for some reason to do with his age, his generation, Raja still used. Sarla’s hands began to tremble: news from Raja. In a quivering voice she asked for her spectacles. Ravi passed them to her and she peered through them to decipher the words as if they were a flight of migrating birds in the distance: Raja was in India, at his ashram in the south, Raja was going to be in Delhi next week, Raja expected to find her there. She would be there, wouldn’t she? ‘You won’t desert me?’

  After Ravi had made several appeals to her for information, for a sharing of the news, she lifted her face to him, grey and mottled, and said in a broken voice, ‘Oh Ravi, Raja has come. He is in the south. He wants to visit us – next week.’

  It was only to be expected that Ravi’s hands would fall upon the table, fall onto china and silverware, with a crash, making all rattle and jar. Raja was coming! Raja was to be amongst them again!

  A great shiver ran through the house like a wind blowing that was not a wind so much as a stream of shining light, shimmering and undulating through the still, shadowy house, a radiant serpent, not without menace, some threat of danger. Whether it liked it or not, the house became the one chosen by Raja for a visitation, a house in waiting.

  With her sari wrapped around her shoulders tightly, as if she were cold, Sarla went about unlocking cupboards, taking out sheets, silver, table linen. Her own trunks, and Ravi’s, had to be thrown open. What had been put away was taken out again. Ravi sat uncomfortably in the darkened drawing room, watching her go back and forth, his lips thin and tight, but his expression one of helplessness. Sometimes he dared to make things difficult for her, demanding a book or a file he knew was at the very bottom of the trunk, pretending that it was indispensable, but when she performed the difficult task with every expression of weary martyrdom, he relented and asked, ‘Are you all right? Sarla?’ She refused to answer, her face was clenched in a tightly contained storm of emotion. Despondently, he groaned, ‘Oh, aren’t we too old—?’ Then she turned to look at him, and even spoke: ‘What do you mean?’ Ravi shook his head helplessly. Was there any need to explain?

  Raja arrived on an early morning train. Another sign of his generation: he did not fly when he was in India. Perhaps he had not taken in the fact that one could fly in India too, or else he preferred the trains, no matter how long they took, crawling over the endless, arid plains in the parched heat before the rains. At dawn, no sun yet visible, the sky was already white with heat; crows rose from the dust-laden trees, cawing, then dropped to the ground, sun-struck. Sweepers with great brooms made desultory swipes at the streets, their mouths covered with a strip of turban, or sari, against the dust they raised. Motor rickshaws and taxis were being washed, lovingly, tenderly, by drivers in striped underpants. The city stank of somnolence, of dejection, like sweat-stained clothes. Sarla and Ravi stood on the railway platform, waiting, and when Sarla seemed to waver, Ravi put out a gentlemanly hand to steady her. When she turned her face to him in something like gratitude or pleading, a look passed between them as can only pass between two people married to each other through the droughts and hurricanes of thirty years. Then the train arrived, with a great blowing of triumphant whistles: it had completed its long journey from the south, it had achieved its destination, hadn’t it said it would? Magnificently, it was a promise kept. Immediately, coolies in red shirts and turbans, with legs like ancient tree roots, sprang at the compartments, leaping onto the steps before the train had even halted or its doors opened, and the families and friends waiting on the platform began to run with the train, waving, calling to the passengers who leaned out of the windows. Sarla and Ravi stood rooted to one place, clinging to each other in order not to be torn apart or pushed aside by the crowd in its excitement.

  The pandemonium only grew worse when the doors were unlatched and the passengers began to dismount at the same time as the coolies forced their way in, creating human gridlock. Sighting their friends and relatives, the crowds on the platform began to wave and scream. Till coolies were matched with baggage, passengers with reception parties, utter chaos ruled. Sarla and Ravi peered through it, turning their heads in apprehension. Where was Raja? Only after the united families began to leave, exhorting coolies to bring up the rear with assorted trunks, bedding rolls and baskets balanced on their heads and held against their hips, and the railway platform had emerged from the scramble, did they hear the high-pitched, wavering warble of the voice they recognized: ‘Sar-la! Ra-vi! My dears, how good of you to come! How good to see you! If you only knew what I’ve beeen through, about the man who insisted on telling me about his alligator farm, describing at such length how they are turned into handbags, as though I were a leather merchant …’ and they turned to see Raja stepping out of one of the coaches, clutching his silk dhoti with one hand, waving elegantly with the other, a silver lock of his hair rising from his wide forehead as he landed on the platform in his slippered feet. And then the three of them were embracing each other, all at once, and it might have been Oxford, it might have been thirty years ago, it might even have been that lustrous morning in May emerging from dew-drenched meadows and the boat-crowded Isis, with ringing out of the skies and towers above them – bells, bells, bells, bells …

  ‘And then there was another extraordinary passenger, a young man with hair like a nest of serpents, you know, and when he understood I would not eat a “two-egg mamlet” offered to me by this incredibly ragged and totally sooty little urchin with a tin tray under his arm, nor even a “one-egg mamlet” to please him or anyone, this marvellous person leapt down from the bunk above my head, and shot out of the door – oh, I assure you we were at a standstill, in the most desolate little station imaginable, for no reason I could see or guess at if I cudgelled my brains ever so ferociously – and then he returned with a basket overflowing with fruit, a positive cornucopia. Sarla, you’d have fainted with bliss! Never di
d you see such fruit; oh, nowhere, nowhere on those mythical farms of California, certainly, worked on by those armies of the exploited from the sad lands to the south, I assure you, Ravi, such fruit as seemed a reincarnation of the fruit one ate as a child, stolen, you know, from the neighbour’s orchard, fruit one ate hidden in the darkest recesses of one’s compound, surreptitiously, one’s tongue absolutely shrivelled by the piercing sweetness of the mangoes, the cruel tartness of unripe guavas, the unripe pulp of the plantains. Oh, Sarla, such joys! And I sat peeling a tiny banana and eating it – it was no bigger than my little finger and contained the flavour of the ripest, sweetest, best banana anywhere on earth within its cunning little yellow speckled jacket – I asked, naturally, what I owed him. But that incredible young man, who looked something like a cornucopia himself, with that abundant hair – it had such a quality of liveliness about it, every strand almost electric with energy – he merely folded his hands and said he would not take one paisa from me, not one. Well, of course I pushed away the basket and said I could not possibly accept it, totally against my principles, etcetera, and he gave me this tender, tender smile, quite unspeakably loving, and said he could take nothing from me because in a previous incarnation I had been his grandfather: he recognized me. “What?” said I, “what? What makes you say so? How can you say so?”’

  ‘Watch out!’ Ravi shouted at the driver who overtook a bullock cart so closely he almost ran into its great creaking wheels and overturned it.

  ‘And he merely smiled, this sweet, ineffably sweet smile of his, and assured me I was no other than this esteemed ancestor of his who had left his home and family at the age of fifty and gone off into the Himalayas to live as a hermit and meditate. “Well,” said I—’