by Anita Desai
Suddenly convinced that she would not, after all, want to occupy this unwelcoming family’s barsati, Moyna lowered her feet to the floor gingerly and tried to rise and murmur an excuse. ‘I have to be at the hostel before nine,’ she said when the episode of the Mahabharata ended with a great display of fiery arrows being shot into the sky and a whirling disc beheading the villain. The landlord gestured to the children to turn off the set and, turning to Moyna, he shouted to the servant boy to bring her a drink. ‘What will you have, beti? Chai, lassi, lemonade?’
‘No, thank you, no, thank you,’ she murmured, seeing the landlady’s steely eyes on her, willing her to refuse, but the servant boy came out with a thick glass of tepid water for her anyway. While she sipped it, the inquisition began, interrupted frequently by the children who alternately demanded their dinner or another show on television and by the dog who emerged from under the bed and sniffed at her suspiciously. Moyna kept her eyes lowered to watch for Candy and perhaps they saw that as becoming modesty or demureness because, to her surprise, the landlady said, ‘You want to see the room? Ramu, Ramu – eh, Ramu! Get the key to the barsati and open it up.’
And there, on the flat rooftop of the plain yellow stucco villa in a colony Moyna had never heard of before on the outskirts of New Delhi, there to her astonishment was a palace, a veritable palace amongst barsatis. The rooftop, which covered the entire area of the villa, seemed to her immense, larger than any space she had occupied since her arrival in Delhi, and it was clear, empty space under an empty sky, with a view of all the other rooftops stretching out on every side, giving Moyna, as she stood there, a sense of being the empress of all she surveyed. Of course it would bake under her feet in the heat of summer but – and this was the crowning glory – a pipal tree that grew in the small walled courtyard at the back of the house rose up over the barsati itself, sheltering it from the sun with a canopy of silvery, rustling leaves, spreading out its branches and murmuring, Moyna felt certain, a gracious welcome.
After that auspicious view, what could it matter if the barsati itself was merely a square walled cube, that it had not been cleaned in so long that its single window had turned opaque with dust, and spider webs hung in swags from every corner, that the bed was nothing but a string-cot, the cheapest kind of charpai? What did it matter that the single cupboard against the wall had doors that did not seem to meet but sagged on their hinges and could never be locked, that the ‘kitchen’ was only a blackened kerosene stove atop a wooden table that also served as desk and dining table, that the ‘bathroom’ was a closet-sized attached enclosure, open to the sky, with a very stained and yellowed squatter-type toilet and a single stand-pipe? Already Moyna’s mind was racing with visions of what she could transform the place into. Why, its very bareness gave her the freedom to indulge her wildest dreams and fancies.
Then her look fell upon the servant boy who stood waiting by the door that opened onto the staircase, twirling the key round his finger and smirking, and she became aware that she herself had a smile across her face and that her hands were clasped to her throat in a most foolish fashion. Immediately she dropped them, adjusted her expression to one of severity, and followed him down the stairs.
The landlord and landlady, now risen from the bed and waiting for her on the veranda, looking as alike as twins with their corpulence, their drooping chins and expressions of benign self-satisfaction, appeared confident of her answer: it was only what could be expected after seeing what they were offering. She would of course sign a year’s lease which could be terminated whenever they chose, pay three months’ deposit, plus the first month’s rent right now, immediately, ‘and we will welcome you to our house as our own beti,’ they assured her magnanimously. ‘From now on, you need worry about nothing. Your parents need have no worries about you. We will be your parents.’
Tara came over from the office with her husband Ritwick to help her to move in. Moyna had only one tin trunk, a bedding roll and now her kitten in a basket, but they insisted she would not be able to move on her own, and Ritwick growled that he wanted to meet the Bhallas ‘to make sure’. The Bhallas were seated on a wicker sofa in the veranda when they arrived, and watched them carry every item up the stairs with openly inquisitive stares. It seemed to Moyna that it was not Ritwick who was sizing them up so much as that they were sizing him up. Certainly they questioned him closely, when Moyna introduced him to them, regarding his parentage, ancestral home, present occupation and relation to Tara and Moyna before allowing him to set one foot on the stairs. But once they arrived on the rooftop, Ritwick looked into every crack and crevice with a suspicion to equal theirs. Then he asked, ‘Where’s the water tank?’
‘What water tank?’
‘Your water tank. Where is your water supply coming from?’
‘I don’t know. Where does it come from? The pipes, I suppose.’
He strode to the bathroom and turned on the tap. It spun around weakly, gurgled in a complaining tone, and sputtered into silence. There was no water. Moyna stood in the doorway, stricken. ‘Water shortage,’ she explained. ‘You know Delhi has a water shortage, Ritwick.’
‘Not if you have a storage tank. Everyone has a storage tank – or several. The Bhallas will have one downstairs, but you need a booster pump and your own tank up here so water can be pumped up from the one below.’
‘Oh.’
He looked at her with the kind of exasperation her own brothers turned on her when she failed to understand what they were doing under the bonnet of the car or with electric gadgets at home. She came from a family so competent that she had never needed to be competent herself.
‘Did you ask the Bhallas about it?’
‘About what?’
‘The storage tank. The booster pump.’
‘No,’ she admitted.
He strode off towards the staircase with every show of determination to enquire immediately. She ran after him, crying, ‘Oh, Ritwick, I’ll ask them – I’ll ask them – later, when I go down.’
Tara came out of the barsati. ‘D’you have curtains?’
‘What for?’
‘Because if you wipe the windowpanes clean, your neighbours can look right in.’
‘No, they can’t! There’s the tree – don’t you see my beautiful tree? It’s like a screen.’
‘Come in and see.’
Tara had wiped the windowpanes clean, and a young man with a face like a pat of butter and with a small moustache twitching over his pursed lips was standing on his rooftop and gazing at them with unconcealed curiosity and, it could easily be made out since the distance was small, some admiration.
‘Oh, Tara, why did you go and clean that?’ Moyna cried. ‘No, I don’t have a curtain. Where would I get a curtain from?’
‘Get me a bedsheet then,’ Tara commanded, ‘and help me put it up at once.’
‘But the tree—’ Moyna tried again, and went out to see why it had not lowered a branch where it was needed. The tree shaded the entire barsati (and Ritwick admitted it would keep off the sun which would otherwise make a tandoori oven of it) but it was tall and provided no screen against the other rooftops and the rooftop dwellers who suddenly all seemed to be standing outside their barsati doors, surveying this newcomer to their level of elevation. Moyna suddenly realized she had joined a community.
‘When I came yesterday, I saw no one,’ she mumbled, abashed.
‘Well, you can introduce yourself to all of them now,’ Ritwick said, ‘and just hope none of them are thieves or murderers because if they are –’ he looked grim and gestured – ‘all they need is one jump from their ledge to yours.’
‘Don’t, Ritwick,’ Tara said sharply. ‘Why are you trying to frighten poor Moyna?’
‘All I’m saying is Moyna’d better stay indoors and keep her door locked.’
‘But I was going to drag my bed out and sleep under the stars!’
‘Are you crazy?’ both Tara and Ritwick said together, and Tara added, ‘D’you wan
t your picture in the evening news, with a headline: “Single Woman Robbed and Murdered in Barsati”?’ They looked at her sternly to see if their words had had the requisite effect, and Tara added, ‘Now let’s go to the market and get you all the things you need. Like one great big lock and key.’
When they returned from the market with cleaning fluids, brooms, scrubbing materials, provisions for ‘the kitchen’ – and the lock and key – Ritwick confronted the landlady who had in the meantime shampooed her hair and now sat on the veranda, to dry it in the sun.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, not very politely. ‘Can you please show Moyna where the switch is for the booster pump?’
‘What switch? What booster pump?’ She parted her hair and peered out from under it with some hostility.
‘Is there no booster pump to send water up to the barsati?’
‘Water up to the barsati?’ she repeated, as if he were mad. ‘Why? Why? What is wrong?’
‘There’s no water in the tap. She’ll need water, won’t she?’
‘She will get water,’ declared Mrs Bhalla, drawing herself up and tossing her head so that the grey strands flew, ‘when municipality is sending water. Municipality water is coming at five o’clock every morning and five o’clock every evening. The barsati will be getting water whenever municipality sends.’
‘At five in the morning and five in the evening?’ shouted Ritwick. ‘You need a storage tank so water will collect.’
‘Collect? Why she cannot collect in a bucket?’ Mrs Bhalla shouted back. ‘She has no bucket?’ she added insultingly.
Tara and Moyna were standing with their purchases in their arms, ready to bolt upstairs, but Ritwick yelled, ‘Yes, she has bucket, but how can she collect at five in the morning and five in the evening?’
‘What is wrong?’ Mrs Bhalla screamed back. ‘We are all collecting – why she cannot collect also?’
‘Because she will be sleeping at five in the morning and at work at five in the evening!’
Mrs Bhalla turned away from him and looked at her tenant with an expression that made clear what she thought of any young woman who would be asleep at five in the morning and ‘at work’ at five in the evening. She clearly had an equally low opinion of sleep and work, at least where her young tenant was concerned. Ritwick was shouting, ‘Storage tank – booster pump—’ when Moyna fled upstairs, dropping matchboxes and kitchen dusters along the way. When Tara followed her up, she found her sitting on her bed in tears, howling, ‘And I’ve signed the lease for one year and paid for three months in advance!’
Moyna’s way of life changed completely. It had to be adjusted to that of the Bhallas. She left her tap turned on when she went to bed – which she did earlier and earlier – so she could be woken by the sound of water gushing into the plastic bucket at five in the morning and get up to fill every pot, pan and kettle she had acquired before turning it off. All around her she could hear her fellow rooftop dwellers performing the same exercise – as well as bathing and washing clothes in the starlight before the water ran out. She went back to bed and lay there, panting, trying to get back to sleep, but by six o’clock all the birds that roosted in the pipal tree were awake and screaming and running on their little clawed feet across the corrugated iron roof, then lining up along the ledge of the rooftop to flutter their wings, crow, squawk and chirp their ode to dawn. It was just as well that they made it impossible for her to fall asleep again because at six she had to go downstairs and walk to the market where Mother Dairy would have opened its booth and all the colony residents would be lining up with their milk cans to have them filled. She stood there with all the servant boys and maidservants, sleepy-eyed, for the the sake of having her milk pail filled for Mao, and then carried it back carefully through the dust, in her slippers, trying not to spill any.
No Ladies’ Special serviced this colony, and Tara had warned her against attempting to travel to work on an ordinary DTC bus. ‘You don’t know what men in Delhi do to women,’ she said darkly. ‘This isn’t Bombay or Calcutta, you know.’
Moyna had heard this warning in the women’s hostel but asked, ‘What d’you mean?’
‘In Calcutta all men call women Mother or Sister and never touch them. In Bombay, if any man did, the woman would give him a tight slap and drag him by his hair to the police station. But in Delhi – these Jats …’ She shuddered, adding, ‘Don’t you even try.’
So Moyna walked back to the marketplace after breakfast, to the autorickshaw stand in front of Mother Dairy, and spent a sizeable part of her income on taking one to work. She clearly made a woebegone figure while waiting, and a kindly Sikh who rode his autorickshaw as if it were a sturdy ox, his slippered feet planted on either side of the gearbox, the end of his turban flying, and a garland of tinsel twinkling over the dashboard where he had pasted a photograph of his two children and an oleograph of Guru Gobind Singh, took pity on her. ‘Beti, every day you go to work at the same time, to the same place. I will take you, for a monthly rate. It will be cheaper for you.’ So Gurmail Singh became her private chauffeur, so to speak, and Moyna rode to work bouncing on the narrow backseat, her sari held over her nose to keep out the dust and oil and diesel fumes from all the office-bound traffic through which he expertly threaded his way. Quite often he was waiting for her outside the office at six o’clock to take her home. ‘I live in that colony myself, so it is no trouble to me,’ he told her. ‘If I have no other customer, I can take you, why not?’ In a short while she got to know his entire family – his mother who cooked the best dal in the land, and the finest corn bread and mustard greens, his daughter who was the smartest student in her class – class two, he told Moyna – and his son who had only just started going to school but was unfortunately not showing the same keen interest in his studies as his sister. ‘I tell him, “Do you want to go back to the village and herd buffaloes?” But he doesn’t care, his heart is only in play. When it is schooltime, he cries. And his mother cries with him.’
‘Gurmail Singh thinks it is the school that is bad. Bluebells, it’s called,’ Moyna reported at the office. ‘He wants to get him into a good convent school, like St Mary’s, but you need pull for that.’ She sighed, lacking any.
‘Moyna, can’t you talk about anything but the Bhallas and Gurmail Singh and his family?’ Tara asked one day, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray on her desk.
Moyna was startled: she had not realized she was growing so obsessive about these people, so prominent in her life, so uninteresting to her colleagues. But didn’t Tara talk about Ritwick’s position in the university, and about her own son and his trials at school, or the hardships of having to live with her widowed mother-in-law for lack of their own house? ‘What d’you want to talk about then?’ she asked, a little hurt.
‘Look, we have to bring out the magazine, don’t we?’ Tara said, smoking furiously. ‘And it isn’t getting easier, it just gets harder all the time to get people to read a journal about books. Bose Sahib hardly comes to see what is going on here—’ she complained.
‘What is going on?’ asked Raj Kumar, the peon, bringing them two mugs of coffee from the shop downstairs. ‘I am here, running everything for you. Why do you need Bose Sahib?’
‘Oh, Raj Kumar,’ Tara sighed, putting out her cigarette and accepting the rich, frothing coffee from him. ‘What will you do to make Books sell?’
Tara was the first person Ajoy Bose had employed when he started his literary review, Books, after coming to Delhi as a member of parliament from Calcutta. He had missed the literary life of that city so acutely, and had been so appalled by the absence of any equivalent in New Delhi, that he had decided to publish a small journal of book reviews to inform readers on what was being published, what might be read, a service no other magazine seemed to provide, obsessed as they all were with politics or the cinema, the only two subjects that appeared to bring people in the capital to life. Having first met Ritwick at the Jawaharlal Nehru University during a conference on Karl Marx a
nd Twentieth Century Bengali Literature, and through him Tara, he had engaged her as the Managing Editor. The office was installed in two rooms above a coffee and sweet shop in Bengali Market. It was Tara’s first paid job – she had been working in non-government organizations simply to escape from home and her mother-in-law – and she was extremely proud of these two modest rooms that she had furnished with cane mats and bamboo screens. Bose Sahib had magnanimously installed a desert cooler and a water cooler to keep life bearable in the summer heat. Together they had interviewed Raj Kumar, and found him literate enough to run their errands at the post office and bank. Then Tara had interviewed all the candidates who had applied for the post of assistant, and chosen Moyna. Moyna had no work experience at all, having only just taken her degree, in English literature, at a provincial university. She managed somehow to convey her need to escape from family and home, and Tara felt both maternal and proprietorial towards her, while Moyna immensely admired her style, the way she smoked cigarettes and drank her coffee black and spoke to both Raj Kumar and Bose Sahib as equals, and she hoped ardently to emulate her, one day.
