by Anita Desai
I am ashamed to say that once I was transferred to the capital I did not look back, I did not keep in touch with the keeper of the museum and I never found out what happened to it, or to him. What is that saying about ships passing in the night? Is there a landlocked version of it – caravans passing in the desert, or elephants in the forest?
Elephants – now those are creatures which make me uneasy still. Of course I rarely encounter one. Even when my children were young, I avoided zoos, circuses, any place an elephant might be sighted. I feared to have that sad, shrewd eye turned on me, taking my measure and finding it wanting.
Once I had a nightmare – it was while I was still in the district and it was never repeated and never forgotten – in which such a beast devoured, blade by blade, leaf by leaf, an entire forest till it was laid waste, and then it raised its trunk and stepped forward to the tree where I was hiding, to expose – what? I don’t know because such nightmares do not have endings. One flees them by waking.
And in wakefulness I would think of the immense creature as innocent and defenceless, who dwindles from neglect and finally lies down not to rise again. A death so huge as to be incomprehensible. This disturbs me and I turn away to distract myself from it. I know behind it is the question: Could I have done more? But it is not for us to do everything for everyone. In the end my reputation in the service was good, solid. What else could I have done?
In fact, by now I am not even sure the museum existed, or the man who created it or his mother who received it or the keeper who kept it. Or if it was a mirage I saw or a book I once read and only vaguely remembered, with none of the solidity, the actuality of objects and men and beasts.
Occasionally a scene from it will rise out of my subconscious just as I am drifting into sleep. Then it slips away.
Translator Translated
The two women had not met since they were in school together. And at that time they barely had anything to do with each other. That is how it is, of course, when one is a natural-born leader, excels in both sports and studies, is captain of any number of societies, a model for the subdued and discouraged mediocrities who cannot really aspire to imitating her and who feel a disturbing mix of envy and admiration – currents travelling in opposite directions and coiling into treacherous and unsettling whirlpools – and the other, meanwhile, belongs to the latter group, someone who stands out neither by her looks nor her brains and whom others later have a hard time remembering as having been present at all.
Yet, at the Founder’s Day function held at their old school one year, they were both present in the small group of alumni who attended. Prema, now middle-aged, even prematurely aged one might say, found herself in the presence of someone she had admired for so long from afar. It would not have occurred to her to approach the tall, elegant woman with a lock of white hair gleaming like a bold statement amid the smooth black tresses that swung about her shoulders. The woman wore enormous dark glasses – they used to be called ‘goggles’ – which she removed only to read the programme, but she must have looked around her and taken in more because she half turned in her seat to Prema who sat behind her and said, quite naturally and unaffectedly, ‘We were in the same class, weren’t we? Do you remember?’ And Prema had to make a pretence of being puzzled, confused and surprised, before remembering – as if she had ever forgotten.
Prema’s astonishment at being recognized made her tonguetied. As a schoolgirl she had never gone up and spoken to Tara – there had been no occasion to do so. Only once was a connection made, when she threw a ball right across the court with an unaccustomed, even anguished force, and Tara, leaping to catch it, twirled so that her short pleated skirt whipped about her hips, and effortlessly, balletically, lifted the ball into the net to eruptions of cheers. Now Prema could find nothing to say. If only there were, again, a ball to fling and to catch, so gloriously! Finally, ‘It’s been a long time,’ she stammered, and wished she had dressed better and brought her new handbag with her instead of the cloth satchel into which she stuffed books, papers, everything – just the way only the most despised and unfashionable teachers did.
‘Not when one is back here – it’s changed so little,’ Tara said easily. ‘Miss Dutt is gone, of course. I wish I’d come sooner and seen her again.’
Miss Dutt, the dragon? She wished she had seen her again? Prema blinked: it just showed what different worlds they occupied. To Prema, Miss Dutt had never been anything but a scourge and a terror; she could still remember the withering stare she cast at Prema’s battered shoes, unshined, slovenly and uncouth.
‘One is too busy,’ she said finally, awkwardly. ‘Where is the time?’
She should not have said that; it made Tara ask, ‘What have you been doing all these years?’ which of course uncovered the hollowness of Prema’s words. What had she been doing that she could talk of, compared with Tara’s achievements of which everyone knew?
Prema had kept herself informed of Tara’s career: how could one not when it had been so much mentioned in the media – one of the first interns to be taken on by a national paper, later a contributor to an international magazine, especially popular in their part of the world, eventually with her own syndicated column. It had been a bit surprising when she gave up her career in journalism and took up publishing instead, in those days not so glamorous as it seemed to have become now. She had founded the first feminist press in the country and made it, unexpectedly, an outstanding success. At least once a week a photograph of her attending a conference or speaking at a seminar appeared. And how could Tara possibly have kept herself informed of Prema’s progress – or stasis? Naturally there was no mention of that to be found anywhere.
But now there was a flurry of activity up on the stage, behind the row of potted palms; while the microphone was shifted and adjusted, figures came and disappeared, the next item on the programme was revealed to be not quite ready, and Tara actually seemed willing to carry on this pointless conversation that Prema wished she had not begun.
And then a providential act took place. A small, grubby paperback slid out of the overstuffed, ungainly satchel that Prema was trying to keep from falling off her lap. And as Prema tried to stuff it back before any further objects followed it out, Tara, idly continuing the conversation since nothing else seemed to be happening, asked, ‘What is that you’re reading?’
Prema had to hold it out for her observation so as not to seem unduly secretive, confident that Tara could not read the script in which it was printed, so distant was it from life here in the capital. But, as she did so, the thought flitted across her mind like an unforeseen fly that Tara may be genuinely interested since she was a publisher and in a very specialised field. Prema realised that there was, after all, something about which they might converse.
‘It is in Oriya,’ she said, handing over the soiled copy and regretting how badly she had used it, dog-earing the pages, scribbling in the margins, even putting down cups of tea on its cover so that the lurid illustration of a forest fire, a burning hut and a fleeing woman was marked with brown rims. ‘It is very good,’ she hastened to assure Tara in spite of its appearance to the contrary. ‘Very moving.’
‘Who is it by? And do you read Oriya?’
Prema fussily adjusted the spectacles on the bridge of her nose in an embarrassment grotesquely enlarged by their lenses. ‘It was my childhood language. And it is written by a woman who comes from the same area where my mother lived. She is very much respected there even if no one knows about her here.’
Tara continued to hold the book and turn its pages as if they could impart something to her. Onstage a row of schoolgirls in the school uniform of pleated skirts, white blouses, knitted ties, limp socks and once-white gym shoes had lined up to sing, but the book seemed to interest her more even if she could not read one letter in that script. When the song onstage ended – rising in a crescendo that could not possibly be maintained and wasn’t – she handed the book back to Prema, saying, ‘I wish I could read it.
I am thinking of starting a new division of my publishing house. We’ve published texts in English, you see, but I want to branch into translations now, and publish writers well known in their own regions but unknown outside which is such a shame. What do you think?’
Inarticulate Prema could not at first reply but her spectacles glittered with the enthusiasm of her unspoken response until, just before the principal’s speech began to be broadcast, the loudspeaker causing it to echo at fluctuating volume, she managed to say, fervently, ‘That is a wonderful idea. That is what we need.’
Then the principal was well launched upon her speech, the microphone tamed, it seemed, by her authority, and there was no alternative but to be silent and listen. At the end of it, some of the women who had been in their class and recognized Tara – although clearly not Prema – swooped upon her with cries and exclamations and Prema picked up her satchel and retreated. It was time for tea.
When she got home on the bus and climbed the stairs to her rooftop apartment – left unswept as usual by the landlady’s slatternly maid (she would have to complain again) – the day was sinking into its murky nicotine-tinged haze of dust with home-going traffic pouring through it like blue-black oil from a leak in the street below. The crows that spent the day swinging on the electric and telephone wires and squabbling were dropping into the scraggly branches of the lopped tree below with exhausted squawks. Would she allow herself to be dragged into the gloom by it all once again? Heaving the cloth satchel off her shoulder (which had become permanently lowered by its familiar weight), she determined she would not. Letting spill the book she had shown Tara – which had so miraculously caught Tara’s eye – she ran her fingers lightly over its smeared and smudged cover because that was where Tara had thought to run hers, and then opened it out on the table where she worked, ate, wrote and arranged her books, papers and pens. Without even fetching herself a glass of water or sitting down to rest, she read the first few lines to herself and once again the syllables of that language evoked the distant world which linked her to the writer.
It was the place where her father had been posted, briefly, as a junior officer in government service, and where he had met and married her mother, his landlady’s daughter – to the horror and consternation of his family, who had never imagined such a thing as an inter-caste marriage between its strict boundaries, and to the sorrow and foreboding of hers, equally strict within its own limits – then brought her back with him to the city. It was in her earliest years, steadily growing more distant, more remote in its wrappings of nostalgia, that Prema had heard her mother speak to her and sing to her in her language (only when her father was not present; he could not tolerate it once he was back where he belonged, in the capital). But after her mother’s early death (hadn’t her family foretold it, exactly this?) Prema had lost contact with what was literally her mother tongue. Then recovered it by choosing to study the language at an adult education evening class during a slack period in her life, after receiving her degree in English literature, a respectable but common qualification.
Not content to stop there, for some reason she could not explain to her father or his family who considered it an aberration, unfathomable in someone given the opportunity to take up any line of study at any college she chose, she decided it was imperative that she visit the region where Oriya was a spoken, living language. Her teacher, a preternaturally mild and soft-spoken man, dangerously thin and withdrawn, had offered, on hearing her plan, a baffled smile which confirmed that no previous student of his had ever responded in this way to the evening classes he gave so timidly and tentatively, in an almost empty classroom made available in a local, underfunded school for such lost souls as herself. He seemed unsure whether to congratulate her or warn her.
She remembered with what trepidation she had made her travel arrangements – if one could use the term ‘arrangement’ for such a haphazard journey involving many changes from broad- to narrow-gauge railway, then country buses, finally a choice of horse-drawn tonga or bicycle rickshaw – and how warily she had faced her time in a women’s hostel at a local college, no more than a scattering of brick barracks in a dusty field. There was a tea stall under a drooping neem tree where she kept herself alive on tea and biscuits through the many slow, stifling days she had to spend there before the language lifted itself off the pages of her textbook and assumed once again the mobility, the unselfconscious agility it had once had for her. Almost to her surprise, it slowly became recognizable in the speech of the tea-stall owner, the cycle-rickshaw driver and the women in the hostel with whom she shared a bathroom – a row of stalls along a perpetually wet and dripping hall – and whom she ran into after classes were over and there were empty evenings to while away.
Turning the pages of the limp little paperback, running her eyes over the script, she thought with a kind of guilty nostalgia of the homesickness she had suffered for the city, for its comforts and conveniences rather, and how she had found, once she could converse again in their language, that the other women were just as homesick for the villages and hamlets from which they had come for their ‘higher education’. They named them to her – she had never even seen them on a map – and she asked questions continually, always picturing her mother, as a girl, living in such a place as they described.
One day, in class, her teacher named this very writer whose book lay open before her – Suvarna Devi – and spoke of her as the unsung heroine of Oriya letters. She told Prema, the most ardent student she had ever had, that it was worth learning the language simply to read the work of Suvarna Devi. ‘She will not only reveal the sweetness of the language to you but open your eyes to what you don’t even know exists here.’ So Prema stopped in the bazaar on her way back to the hostel and found this very paperback amid the magazines, calendars and greeting cards with which the so-called bookshop was mainly stocked. She showed her find to the women at the hostel who expressed amazement that she had not known about this writer: they had been made to read her short stories in school – not always with reverence, it seemed. One of the women who stood out from the others because she wore her hair cropped in a place where all the other women had long pigtails or tightly wound and carefully pinned buns, and even wore trousers if she was not going to classes, said, ‘Why do you want to waste your time reading Suvarna Devi? You won’t get a job at a university if you do. You need to read Jane Austen, George Eliot and Simone de Beauvoir. No university will look at you if you haven’t read The Second Sex. Forget Suvarna Devi, read the feminists, read Simone de Beauvoir.’ This reduced many of the others to helpless laughter; they tried out the foreign name in many different ways, all of which sounded absurd.
Prema not only read the collection of Suvarna Devi’s short stories but returned to the bookshop to see if they had any more of her work. They did not, but in the college library she came across a journal the writer had kept while living in the tribal areas to the south; it was bound in green Rexine and the library flap at the back showed that it had been issued to readers exactly twice in the last seven years. Prema borrowed it and took it back to read in the hostel and found that the journal entries, many of them of an anthropological nature, and the notes on village life in the forest, provided a backdrop for the fiction she had already read but were otherwise disappointingly dry. Prema had little interest in nature or the rituals and ceremonies of tribal society per se and found the notes lacking in the characters and events that had made the short stories so lively and engaging.
She asked her companions at the hostel if they knew anything of the life of this author, so oddly divided between literature and anthropology. ‘Oh, she goes to those areas with her husband,’ they told her. ‘He is a doctor and runs clinics there. Who wants to read about that ?’ It suddenly occurred to Prema that the writer might live in this very town. She was told, casually, that yes, they believed she did. ‘Where?’ cried Prema. ‘Can you tell me where ?’ Her mind leapt ahead to that prized objective of any serious student: a personal
interview. Besides, such a meeting might create another link to her mother’s world. And there was so little time left, she was due to return to Delhi in just a week. Someone told her in which part of the town Suvarna Devi’s husband had his practice but no one could give her a specific address. They knew Suvarna Devi’s work from their school syllabus but that did not make her a local celebrity: instead, it just made her one of them.
Prema went there on foot one day, after her class, to see if she could find it for herself. It was a neighbourhood rather like a suburb on the far outskirts of Delhi where the city petered out into the dusty plains, a jumble of small bungalows no longer new, many with signboards on their gates to denote their middleclass status: doctors, lawyers, advocates, specialists in gynaecology, homeopathy, ayurveda, urology, and also schools that gave evening classes in typing, shorthand and tailoring.
Not knowing the exact address and coming across the same surnames repeated over and over, Prema gave up, suddenly conscious of the dust gathering between her toes and invading the folds of her neck and elbows, sticky and gritty at the same time. She could not continue to trail up and down the maze of little streets with dogs barking at her through closed gates, men staring at her from bicycle and radio repair shops and concrete bus shelters under stunted, lopped trees. Defeated, she returned to the hostel.
It did not matter, she told herself as she packed for the long journey back to the capital; she had found the subject of her studies and that was all that mattered. How could she have returned without one?
