by Anita Desai
‘Slow down,’ Ravi ordered the driver curtly.
‘“Well,” said I, “I assure you I have never been in the Himalayas – although it is indeed my life’s ambition to do so, and therefore I could not have returned from there.” By the way, I began to wonder if it was altogether flattering to be called Grandfather by a man by no means in the first flush of youth, more like the becalmed middle years, whereupon he told me – imagine, Sarla, imagine, Ravi – he told me his grandfather had died there, in Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganga, many years ago. His family had all travelled up from Madras to witness the cremation and carry the ashes to Benares, but now, in the railway carriage, that little tin box baking in the sun as we crossed the red earth and ravines of Central India, he claimed he’d seen his reincarnation. He was as certain of it as the banana in my hand was a banana! He would not tell me why, or how, but he was clearly a clairvoyant. And isn’t that a superb combination: clearly clairvoyant! Or do you think it a touch de trop? Hmm, Ravi, Sarla?’
The car lurched around one of the countless circles set within the radiating avenues of New Delhi, now steadily filling with traffic that streamed towards the city’s business and government centres, far from this region of immense jamun trees, large low villas, smooth hedges, closed gates, sentries in sentry boxes, and parakeets in flamboyant trees.
‘But that is the kind of experience, the kind of encounter that India bestows on one like a gift, a jewel,’ Raja was fluting as the car drew up at one of the closed gates. The driver honked the horn discreetly, the watchman came hurrying to unlock it, and they swept in and up the drive to the porch that stood loaded with the weight of magenta bougainvillea. ‘And,’ Raja continued as he let the driver help him out of the car, ‘I was so delighted, so overjoyed to find it still so, Ravi, in spite of that frightful man you have installed as the head of your government – an economist, is he not? – yes, please, I shall need that bag almost immediately, and the other too, if I am to bathe and refresh myself, but,’ he concluded, triumphantly, ‘what further refreshment can one possibly require after one has already been blessed with such, such enchanting acceptance, not, not physical, but positively, positively …’
‘Spiritual?’ Ravi ventured, smiling, as he helped Raja up the stairs into the shaded cool of the veranda with its pots of flowers and ferns, a slowly revolving electric fan and an arrangement of wicker furniture where he lowered Raja into an armchair with a flowered cushion.
It was not that Raja was any more elderly than they. They had all been contemporaries at Oxford, and Raja may even have been a year or two younger. Sarla had complained that his southern ancestry had given Raja an unfair advantage over their northern genes which seemed to produce businessmen and shopkeepers more readily than mathematicians or philosophers. Yet there was about him an air of fragility, of some precious commodity that they had been called upon to cherish. At Oxford Ravi had found himself taking Raja’s laundry to be done while Raja, who had neglected to attend to it till he had absolutely nothing left to wear, had stayed in bed under his blankets till Ravi returned with fresh clothes. He was wryly amused as well as a little annoyed to find that he still fell into the trap.
Sarla was hurrying into the house, to make sure Raja’s luggage was carried carefully into the room prepared for him – the bedroom at the back of the house, which Raja loved because it looked onto a garden full of lemon trees and jasmine vines that he said he dreamt about during that part of the year that he spent in Los Angeles – and against Raja’s wishes to order breakfast, because, after all, she and Ravi had not benefited from the generosity of the young man with hair like a serpent’s nest in the railway carriage, she said a little acidly.
Why her words sounded acid, she could not say. It was all she could do not to go down on her knees and remove Raja’s slippers from his feet, or to bring water in a basin and wash them. She had to sharpen her faculties to fight that urge. But she brought out the coffee pot herself – she had taken the silver coffee service out of storage for Raja’s visit – and poured him a cup with all the grace that she had acquired in her years as a diplomat’s wife in the embassies and High Commissions where Ravi had ‘served’, she ‘presided’. She could scarcely restrain herself, only tremblingly managed to restrain herself from mentioning that last day in May, that last embrace – oh, it would be so unsuitable, so unsuitable—
And then a second car came sweeping up the drive, parked beside theirs – an identical car, a silver-grey Ambassador with tinted glass and window curtains – and her sister tumbled out of the driver’s seat, a woman almost identical to Sarla, and in an equal state of excitement and agitation. And then they were all embracing each other, after all, successively, simultaneously.
Maya had not been with them on the bank of the festive, the bacchanalian Isis that May morning; she had not fetched Raja’s laundry or cooked him rice on a gas ring on foggy winter nights when he could not walk to the Indian restaurant in the cold, not with his asthmatic condition: Maya had been at the London School of Economics a few years later. Maya had also met her husband at university, but his path had been different from Ravi’s. ‘No bloody Civil Service for me; I’ve always thought it most uncivil,’ Pravin had declared when Maya suggested it, ‘and at this stage of history can you really contemplate anything so reactionary? Are we not moving into the future, free of colonial institutions?’ So it had been a political career for Pravin, not the dirty politics of people Raja had just referred to so disparagingly, but politics as practised by the press, idealistically, morally, scrupulously (even if only on paper). And so, when Maya embraced Raja, it was with vigour, with her head tossed back with pride so that her now grey hair hung from her shoulders with as carefree an air as a young girl might toss her darker, glossier locks, and with a laugh that rang out resonantly. ‘What, you’ve travelled by train in a silk dhoti? Oh Raja, must you go to such extremes when you play the southern gentleman visiting the barbarians of the north?’ and Raja hung upon her shoulder and shook his finger at her, fluting at a higher pitch than ever before, ‘Is that husband of yours still playing the patriot while dressed in Harris tweeds, and does he still wear that mouldy felt hat when following the elections amongst the cow-dung patties and buffalo sheds of Bihar?’ and Sarla was retreating to the wicker sofa with the coffee tray, glowering, turning ashen and tight-lipped once more. But her occupation of the sofa was strategic – now Maya and Raja could not sit upon it, side by side: it belonged to her, and she could preside, icily, silver coffee pot in hand, looking upon the two as if they were somewhat trying children, and Ravi would give her a look – of sympathy, or pity? – from the stool on which he perched, waiting patiently to be passed a cup.
She passed it, then said, interrupting Maya who was giving a humorous account of the last election campaign Pravin had covered, ‘If to go to the Himalayas is your life’s ambition, Raja, then that can easily be achieved. Won’t you consider driving up with us when we go for the summer to Winhaven?’
‘Winhaven? Winhaven?’ Raja twisted around to her. ‘Oh, Sarla, Sarla, the very word, the very name – it recalls – how does it go—
‘I have desired to go
Where springs not fail—
‘and then? And then? How does it go—
‘And I have asked to be
Where no storms come
Where the green swell is in the heaven’s dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea—
‘remember? remember?’
Who did not? Who did not, Sarla would have liked to know, but suddenly Simba was upon them, bursting out of the house, his great tail thumping, his claws slithering across the veranda tiles in his excitement as he dashed at Maya, then at Ravi, finally at Raja and, to Sarla’s horror, Raja was pushed back into his chair by Simba’s vigorous attention, but Raja was pushing back at him, laughing, ‘Oh, Simba, Simba of the Kenyan highlands! You remember me, do you?’ and Sarla, cupping her chin in her hand, leaving her coffee untouched, watched as Raja, sudd
enly as sprightly as a boy, the boy who had bicycled helter-skelter down the streets of Oxford, dark hair rising up from his great brow and falling into the luminous eyes, now ran down the stairs with Simba into the garden, then bent to pick up a stick and send it flying up at the morning sun for the pleasure of having Simba leap for it. Old Simba, usually so gloomy, so lethargic, was now springing up on his hindlegs to catch the falling toy and run with it into the shade of the flamboyant tree, Raja following him, his pale silk dhoti floating about him, his white hair glistening, making the startled parakeets fly out of the clusters of scarlet flowers with screams.
Then both Sarla and Maya released small sighs. Ravi watched their expressions from the stool on which he was perched, and finally asked, diffidently, ‘May I have a lump of sugar and a little milk, please?’
In spite of his poetic response to Sarla’s suggestion that he accompany them to the mountains, Raja continually postponed the journey. No, he had come to Delhi, all the way to Delhi in the heat of June, to see them, to relive the remembered joys of their beautiful home. How could he cut short his time here? And there was so much for him to see, to do, to catch up on. He wanted Sarla to drive him to the silver market in Chandni Chowk so he could gaze upon the magnificent craftsmanship on display there, perhaps even purchase a piece to take back with him to California where the natives had never seen such art bestowed upon craft, and then if Maya were to accompany him to the Cottage Industries emporium, and help him select a pashmina shawl, then he could be happy even on those chill, rainy days that he was forced to endure. What, didn’t they know, California had such weather? Had they been deceived by posters of palm trees and golden beaches? Didn’t they know the fraudulence inherent in the very notion and practice of tourism, that abominable habit of the Western world? Tourism! Now, when he returned to India, it was not to see the sights, he already knew them – they were imprinted upon his heart – but to imbibe them, savour them, nourish himself upon them. And so when Sarla and Ravi took him to Nizamuddin and beside the saint’s tomb they heard a blind beggar play his lute and sing in a voice so soulful that it melted one’s very being,
When I was born
I was my mother’s prince.
When I married
I became my wife’s king.
But you have reduced me
To being a beggar, Lord,
Come begging for alms
With my hands outstretched—
it was as if the thirst of Raja’s pilgrim soul was being slaked, and never had thirst been slaked by music so sublime as made by this ancient beggar in his rags, a tin can at his knee for alms – and of course he must have whatever was in Raja’s purse, every last coin, alas that they were so few. Now if this beggar were performing in the West, the great theatres of every metropolis would throw open their doors to him. He would perform under floodlights, his name would be on posters, in the papers, on everyone’s lips. Gold would pile up at his feet – but then, would he be such a singer as he was now, a pilgrim soul content to sit in the shade of the great saint Nizamuddin’s little fretted marble tomb, and dedicate his song to him as homage?
Raja, leaving his slippers at the gateway to the courtyard, approached the tomb with such ecstasy etched upon his noble features that Sarla, and Ravi too, found themselves gazing at him rather than about them – Sarla’s bare and Ravi’s stockinged feet on the stones, braving the dirt and flies and garbage that had first made them shrink and half turn away. Sarla had held her sari to her nose as they passed a row of butchers’ shops on their way to the tomb, buffalo’s innards had hung like curtains in the small booths, and the air was rife with raw blood and the thrum of flies, and she asked Raja, in the car, ‘How is it that you, a vegetarian, a Brahmin, walked in there and never even twitched your nose?’ He cast his eyes upon her briefly – and they were still those narrow, horizontal pools of darkness she remembered – and sighed, ‘My dear, true souls do not turn away from humanity or, if they do, it is only to meditate and pray, then come back, fortified, to embrace it – beggars, thieves, lepers, whoever – their sores, their rags. They do not flinch from them, for they know these are only the covering, the concealing robes of the soul, don’t you know?’ and Sarla, and Ravi, seated on either side of Raja on the comfortably upholstered back seat of the air-conditioned Ambassador, now speeding past the Lodi Gardens to their own green enclave, wondered if Raja was referring to himself or the sufi.
That afternoon, as they sat on the veranda, sipping tea and nibbling at the biscuits the cook had sent up in a temper (he was supposed to be on leave, he was not going to bake fancy cakes at a time when he was rightfully to have had his summer vacation, and so the sahibs could do with biscuits bought in the bazaar), Raja, a little melancholy, a little subdued – which Sarla and Ravi put down to the impression left on him by their visit to the sufi’s tomb – piped up in a beseeching voice, ‘Sarla, Ravi, where are those ravishing friends of yours I met when you were at the High Commission in London? The Dutta-Rays, was it not? You must know who I mean – you told me how they’d returned to Delhi and built this absolutely fabulous hacienda in Vasant Vihar. Isn’t that quite close by?’
‘It is,’ Ravi admitted.
Like a persistent child, Raja continued, ‘Then why don’t we have them over? This evening? I remember she sang like a nightingale – those melancholy, funereal songs of Tagore’s. Wouldn’t they be perfect on an evening like this which simply hangs suspended in time, don’t you know, as if the dust and heat were holding it in their cruel grasp? Oh, Sarla, do telephone, do send for her – tell her I pine to hear the sound of her avian voice. Just for that, I’m even willing to put up with her husband who I remember finding – how shall I put it – a trifle wanting?’
Sarla found herself quite unwilling. Truth be told, the morning’s expedition had left her with a splitting headache; she was not in the habit of walking around in the midday sun, leave that to mad dogs and – she’d always said. Even now, her temples throbbed and perspiration trickled discreetly down the back of her knees, invisible under the fresh cotton sari she’d donned for tea. But Raja would not hear of a refusal, or accept any excuse. If she thought the Dutta-Rays had left for Kashmir, why did she not ring and find out? Oh, there was no need to get up and go to the telephone – ‘In this land of fantasies fulfilled, isn’t there always a willing hand-maid, so to speak, to bring the mountain to Mohammed?’ and Sarla had to send for the telephone to be brought out to the veranda, the servant Balu unwinding the telephone line all the way, and she was forced to speak into it and verify that the Dutta-Rays were indeed still in Delhi, held up by a visit from a former colleague at India House, but were going out that evening to that party – didn’t Sarla and Ravi know of it? ‘We’re supposed to be away,’ Sarla said stiffly into the telephone. ‘Everyone thinks we are in the hills by now. We usually are.’ Well, the Dutta-Rays would drop in on their way – and so they did, she a vision of grace in her finely embroidered Lucknow sari, pale green on white, to Raja’s great delight, and only too willing to sing for his delectation, only not tonight since they were already late.
So Sarla and Ravi found themselves throwing a party – a party that was to be the setting for a recital given by Ila Dutta-Ray, a woman neither of them had any warm feelings for, remembering how unhelpful she had been when they had first arrived in London and so badly needed help in finding a flat, engaging servants, placing their children in school, all so long ago of course. Instead of helping, she had sent them her old cook, declaring he was the best, but really saving herself the air fare back to India because he proved good for nothing but superannuation. They rang up whoever of their circle of friends remained in Delhi to invite them for the occasion. It was quite extraordinary how many friends Raja remembered and managed to trace, and also how many who were on the point of going away, changed their plans on hearing his name and assured Sarla and Ravi they would come.
Then there occurred a dreadful incident: Sarla was choosing from amongst her saris one
cool enough for the evening ahead, which was, of course, one of the summer’s worst, that kind of still, yellow, lurid evening that it inflicted when one thought one could bear no more, and meant that the recital would be held not in the garden after all but in the air-conditioned drawing room instead, when a terrible thought struck her: she had forgotten to invite Maya! Maya and her husband Pravin! How could she have? It was true Maya had told her Pravin was very preoccupied with a special issue his paper was bringing out on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism but that was no reason to assume they might not be free. Sarla stood in front of the mirror that was attached to one leaf of the armoire, and clasped her hand over her mouth with a look so stricken that Ravi, coming in to ask what glasses should be taken out for the evening, wondered if she had a sudden toothache. ‘Ravi! Oh, Ravi,’ she wailed.
The telephone was brought to her – Balu unwinding the coils of an endless wire – and the number dialled for her. Then Sarla spoke into it in gasps, but unfortunately she had not taken the time to collect her wits and phrase her invitation with more tact. Maya’s sharp ears picked up every indication that her sister had been unforgivably remiss, and coldly rejected the insulting last-minute invitation, insisting proudly that Pravin was working late and she could not possibly leave his side, he never wrote a line without consulting her.
As if that was not agony enough, Sarla had to undergo the further humiliation of Raja piping up in the middle of the party – just as Ila Dutta-Ray was tuning her tanpura and about to open her mouth and utter the first note of her song – ‘But Sarla, where is Maya, that aficionado of Tagore’s music? Surely we should wait for her? Why is she so late?’ An awful hush fell – and Sarla again assumed her stricken look. What was she to say, how was she to explain? She found herself stumbling over Maya’s insincere excuse, but of course everyone guessed. Frowning in disapproval, Ila Dutta-Ray began her song on a very low, very deep and hoarse note.
