by Anita Desai
Eventually, she returned to the house, as she knew she would, her small car laboriously climbing the hill, seeming to remember the potholes and exposed rocks and roots, then arriving with a sudden, inexpert swerve. She tried hard to think of what she would say to the present owners if they saw her and came out to see what she wanted. Perhaps she could ask for some object she had left behind the house by the woodpile, or some garden tools propped up against the shed. Yes, she could do that.
What she had forgotten were the rooks, the way they yelled in alarm when she appeared under their hemlock tree, tumbled out of it as if they were going to launch themselves into the sky but fell to the ground instead and waddled away in their ungainly, lumbering way, darkly muttering.
Other than them there was no one around, although the new occupants’ car was parked in the open garage.
She stood there uncertainly, letting her eyes rove, waiting to see if anyone would come out and talk to her. No one did. No one ever did. She had missed the meeting on the landing.
She returned to her car, turned it around the hemlock tree and slowly withdrew.
The Museum of Final Journeys
We had driven for never-ending miles along what seemed to be more a mudbank than a road between fields of virulent green – jute? rice? what was it this benighted hinterland produced? I ought to have known, but my head was pounded into too much of a daze by the heat and the sun and the fatigue to take in what my driver was telling me in answer to my listless questions.
The sun was setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers along the horizon when he turned the jeep into the circular driveway in front of a low, white bungalow. This was the circuit house where I was to stay until I had found a place of my own. As a very junior officer, a mere subdivisional officer in the august government service, it was all I could expect, a temporary place for one of its minor servants. There was nothing around but fields and dirt roads and dust, no lights or signs of a town to be seen. Noting my disappointment and hesitation at the first sight of my new residence – where had we come to? – the driver climbed out first, lifted my bags from the back of the jeep and led the way up the broad steps to a long veranda which had doors fitted with wire screens one could not see through. He clapped his hands and shouted, ‘Koi hai?’ I had not imagined anyone still used that imperious announcement from the days of the Raj: Anyone there? But perhaps, in this setting, itself a leftover from the empire, not so incongruous at all. Besides, there was no bell and one cannot knock on a screen door.
I didn’t think anyone had heard. Certainly no light went on and no footsteps were to be heard, but in a bit someone came around the house from the back where there must have been huts or quarters for servants.
‘I’ve brought the new officer-sahib,’ the driver announced offi-ciously (he wore a uniform of sorts, khaki, with lettering in red over the shirt pocket that gave him the right). ‘Open a room for him. And switch on some lights, will you?’
‘No lights,’ the man replied with dignity. He wore no uniform, only some loose clothing, and his feet were bare, but he held his back straight and somehow established his authority. ‘Power cut.’
‘Get a lantern then,’ the driver barked. He clearly enjoyed giving orders.
I didn’t, and was relieved when the chowkidar – for clearly he was the watchman for all his lack of a uniform – took over my bags and the driver turned to leave. It was night now, and when I saw the headlights of the jeep sweep over the dark foliage that crowded against the house and lined the driveway, then turn around so that the tail-lights could be seen to dwindle and disappear, I felt my heart sinking. I did not want to stay in this desolate place, I wanted to run after the jeep, throw myself in and return to a familiar scene. I was used to city life, to the cacophony of traffic, the clamour and din and discordancy of human voices, the pushing and shoving of humanity, all that was absent here.
While I stood waiting on the veranda for a lamp to be lit so I could be shown to my room, I listened to the dry, grating crackle of palm leaves over the roof, the voices of frogs issuing low warnings from some invisible pond or swamp nearby, and these sounds were even more disquieting than the silence.
A lighted lantern was finally brought out and I followed its ghostly glow in, past large, looming pieces of furniture, to the room the chowkidar opened for me. It released a dank odour of mildew as of a trunk opened after a long stretch of time and a death or two, and I thought this was surely not a chapter of my life; it was only a chapter in one of those novels I used to read in my student days, something by Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle or Wilkie Collins (I had been a great reader then and secretly hoped to become a writer). I remembered, too, the hated voice of the gym master at school shouting ‘Stiffen up now, boys, stiffen up!’ and I nearly laughed – a bitter laugh.
All the actions that one performs automatically and habitually in the real world, the lighted world – of bathing, dressing, eating a meal – here had to be performed in a state of almost gelid slow motion. I carried the lantern into the bathroom with me – it created grotesquely hovering shadows rather than light, and made the slimy walls and floor glisten dangerously – and made do with a rudimentary bucket of water and a tin mug. To put on a clean set of clothes when I could scarcely make out what I had picked from my suitcase (packed with an idiotic lack of good sense: a tie? when would I ever wear a tie in this pit?) and then to find my way to the dining room and sit down to a meal placed before me that I could scarcely identify – was it lentils, or a mush of vegetables, and was this whitish puddle rice or what? – all were manoeuvres to be carried out with slow deliberation, so much so that they seemed barely worthwhile, just habits belonging to another world and time carried on weakly. The high-pitched whining of mosquitoes sounded all around me and I slapped angrily at their invisible presences.
Then, with a small explosion, the electricity came on and lights flared with an intensity that made me flinch. An abrupt shift took place. The circuit house dining room, the metal bowls and dishes set on the table, the heavy pieces of furniture, the yellow curry stains on the tablecloth all revealed themselves with painful clarity while the whine of mosquitoes faded with disappointment. Now large, winged ants insinuated their way through the wire screens and hurled themselves at the electric bulb suspended over my head; some floated down into my plate where they drowned in the gravy, wings detaching themselves from the small, floundering worms of their bodies.
I pushed back my chair and rose so precipitately, the chowkidar came forward to see what was wrong. I saw no point in telling him that everything was. Instructing him abruptly to bring me tea at six next morning, I returned to my room. It felt like a mercy to turn off the impudent light dangling on a cord over my bed and prepare to throw myself into it for the night.
I had not taken the mosquito net that swaddled the bed into account. First I had to fumble around for an opening to crawl in, then tuck it back to keep out the mosquitoes. At this I failed, and those that found themselves trapped in the netting with me, furiously bit at every exposed surface they could find. What was more, the netting prevented any breath of air reaching me from the sluggishly revolving fan overhead.
Throughout the night voices rang back and forth in my head: would I be able to go through with this training in a remote outpost that was supposed to prepare me for great deeds in public service? Should I quit now before I became known as a failure and a disgrace? Could I appeal to anyone for help, some mentor, or possibly my father, retired now from this very service, his honour and his pride intact like an iron rod he had swallowed?
Across the jungle, or the swamp or whatever it was that surrounded this isolated house, pai dogs in hamlets and homesteads scattered far apart echoed the voices in my head, some questioning and plaintive, others fierce and challenging.
If I had not been ‘stiffened up’ in school and by my father, I might have shed a tear or two into my flat grey pillow. I came close to it but morning rescued me.
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nbsp; I resolved to look for another, more amenable place to live during my posting here, but soon had to admit that the chance of finding such a place was very unlikely. The town, if you could call it that, was not one where people built houses with the intention of selling or renting them for profit; its citizens built for the purpose of housing their families till they fell apart. Many of the houses were embarked on that inexorable process, larger and larger families crowding into smaller and smaller spaces while roofs collapsed and walls crumbled. Families did not move even when forced onto verandas or into outhouses. The whole town appeared a shambles.
It must have had its days of prosperity in the past when the jute that grew thick and strong in the surrounding fields gave rise to a flourishing business, but that was now overtaken by chemical fibres, plastics and polyesters. Their products – the bags, washing lines, buckets and basins that hung from shopfronts – littered the dusty streets where their strident colours soon faded.
Every morning I went to court, a crumbling structure of red brick that stood in a field where cattle grazed and washermen spread their washing, and there I sat at a desk on a slightly raised platform to hear the cases brought before me. These had chiefly to do with disputes over property. You would not have thought the local property was anything to be fought over but the citizens of this district were devoted to litigation with an ardour not evident in any other area of life. A wall that had caved in or two coconut trees that had not borne fruit for as long as anyone could remember, even these aroused the passion of ownership. I began to see it as the one local industry. I took back files with me to read in the evenings on the veranda of the circuit house while the power cuts held off.
In my office in the administrative buildings, I attended to more urgent matters like power and water supplies and their frequent breakdowns, roads, traffic, police – very important that, the police force – communications, security, trade and industry. (The litigators, and especially their lawyers, were always willing to have their cases postponed from one hearing to the next.) My secretary brought in the files to me, tied with red tape – I was amused to see these existed, literally – and ushered in visitors with their requests, demands and complaints. I would order tea for them, but try as I would, I could never have tea, sugar and milk served in separate pots as my mother would have: these would always arrive already mixed in the cups, and for some reason this irritated me greatly and I never ceased to complain about it.
I must have complained in my letters to my mother, too, because she worried that I was not being looked after as I would be at home. She even made efforts to find a bride for me, convinced that a wife was what I needed, a woman who would order my life and make it comfortable and pleasant for me. I was lonely enough not to discourage her, even though the idea of some stranger entering my life in such an intimate fashion did somewhat alarm me. No such thing came to pass, however. When my father discovered she was interviewing the unmarried daughters and nieces of her friends and acquaintances, dangling my position in the Civil Service and my prospects for promotions to high and important posts in the future as incentives, he put a stop to all such machinations: there was to be no marriage till my training was over and confirmation in the service achieved.
In a very short time the routine of my working life became oppressive. When I entered the service it was with the thought that it would be an endless adventure, and each day would bring fresh challenges and demand new solutions. My father and my senior colleagues had all assured me it would be so. They talked of their own adventures – shooting man-eaters that had terrorised the locals and ‘lifted’ their cattle, confronting dacoits who had been robbing travellers on highways, hunting down ‘criminal elements’ that dealt in smuggling goods or illicit liquor, and, most threatening of all, instigators of political insurgencies. To me these remained rumours, legends, and I came to suspect that my leg had been pulled. My most strenuous activity seemed to be wielding the fly-swatter and mopping my face in the thick damp heat that clung like wet clothing in the most debilitating way.
There was the occasional visitor to the circuit house: another officer on a tour of duty would stop for a night on his way to inspect the waterworks or the sewage plant or the government-run clinic or school or whatever he happened to be in charge of, and leave the next day, having provided me with one evening of company. Since all we had to talk about was the business at hand, these visits did not provide me with the much needed diversion.
The only release to be had was to find an excuse to go ‘on tour’, summon my jeep and driver and make for the further reaches of the district. At its northern rim was tea country and the sight of that trim landscape of tea bushes and shade trees on softly rolling hills that rose eventually into the blue mountain range – alas, not my territory – was as reviving as a drink of cool water to me.
Seated in the ample cane furniture on the broad veranda of one fortunate tea-estate manager’s bungalow over a whisky and soda, I could not help a sigh of relief tinged with melancholy that this salubrious place was not mine and I would soon have to return to my sorry posting below.
My host enquired how I was faring. When I told him – I admit with an openly pathetic plea for sympathy – he said, ‘I know the town. I have to visit it from time to time. It doesn’t even have a club, does it?’
‘No! If only there were a club where I could play tennis after work …’ I gave another sigh, drawn out of me by his evident sympathy.
‘No social life either?’
‘There’s no one I could have a conversation with about anything but work. There’s no library or anyone who reads. I’m running out of books too.’
My host got up to pour me another peg at the bar constructed of bamboo at the other end of the spacious veranda. My eyes followed him, admiring the polished floor, the pots of ferns that lined the steps and the orchids that hung in baskets above them.
When he returned to his seat, he handed me my drink and said, ‘In the old days there used to be wealthy Calcutta families who owned land around here and who would come to visit it from time to time, throw parties and organise hunts. Of course, those times are over and their estates must have gone to rack and ruin by now.’
We talked a bit longer about this and that till I had to leave, and as I walked past the open door on my way to the steps and stood waiting for my jeep to be driven round to the front, my eye fell on a small object on the hall table – two small Chinese figures in flowered tunics and black slippers carrying a kind of palanquin between them. It was both unusual and pretty and I looked at it more closely: the details were exquisite and there was a gloss to it such as you see on the finest china. My host saw me lingering to study it and said, ‘Oh, it’s one of those objects one sometimes comes across in these parts that belonged to the old houses I was telling you about. One of them even had a museum once: perhaps this came from there. My wife picked it up, she has an eye for such things. I told her she had paid too much – it’s only a wind-up toy, you know, and has lost its key.’
‘A wind-up toy!’ I exclaimed. ‘It looks too precious for that. Is it very old?’
‘I couldn’t tell you, I don’t know a thing about it. It’s a pity my wife is in Shillong – our daughters are at school there – she would have been able to tell you more.’
‘Beautiful,’ I said, and reluctantly took my leave.
I can’t say I gave that beautiful object or its provenance any more thought. Inevitably, I grew more involved in my work and had to see through various projects I had started on as well as the daily routine of attending court to hear cases that grew drearily familiar, and going through the bottomless stack of files in my office. I even stopped asking for milk and sugar to be brought separately for my tea and resigned myself to drinking the thick, murky liquid I was served.
I became so settled in a state of apathy – it was like an infection I had caught from those around me – that I felt quite irritated when the chowkidar at the circuit house roused me from it one e
vening as I sat slumped in the reclining chair under the revolving fan in my room, waiting for darkness to fall and for him to call me to my dinner.
Instead he said, ‘Someone to see you, sahib.’
‘Who?’ I snapped, and added, ‘Tell him to come and see me in my office tomorrow. I don’t see visitors here.’
‘That is right, sahib,’ the chowkidar acknowledged, ‘but he has come from far and says it is a matter he needs to discuss privately.’
‘What matter?’ I snapped again (I had acquired this habitual manner of speech to those in an inferior position – servants, petitioners, supplicants; I found it was expected of me, it went with the job).
Of course the chowkidar could not know or tell. He stood there expecting some action from me, so, with a show of petulance, I threw down the newspaper folded to the crossword puzzle that I had been pretending to solve, and went out to the veranda where the visitor stood waiting: an elderly, rather bowed man with wisps of white hair showing under his cap like feathers, enormous spectacles with thick lenses and heavy frames attached to him by string, and dressed in a faded black cloth coat and close white trousers, perhaps the outfit he had adopted as a clerk (he had the obsequious manner of one) before his superannuation.
Some remnant of my upbringing surfaced through my adopted manner of irritable superiority (from behind my father’s looming shadow, my mother occasionally emerged to stand watching me, hopefully, trustingly). I gestured to him to be seated and called to the chowkidar to bring us water. Just that, pani.
The clerical creature folded his hands and asked me not to bother. ‘I am deeply sorry to disturb your rest,’ he said in a voice just slightly above the whine of a mosquito, perhaps closer to the sound of a small cricket.
I found my habitual annoyance beginning to creep back and said abruptly, ‘What can I do for you?’
