by Anita Desai
Her thesis supervisor accepted the subject with the greatest reluctance: it was not part of the regular syllabus and it was hard to see how it could be made to fit in. But then Prema showed she could be stubborn when she chose: her subject was not the language itself but the author and how her work belonged to the greater world. She wrote the thesis and, rather to her supervisor’s surprise, it was accepted.
She might have anticipated what followed. After so many years of thinking this would be the climax of her life, she discovered that instead everyone expected her to continue as if there had been no such climax. What next? she was asked continually, by family and friends, what next?
After a wait of too many unhappy and discouraging years – the first sighting of stray white hairs a defining moment – she finally accepted a junior position in a minor women’s college in a bleak and distant quarter of the city. And even here her thesis counted for little. What an odd subject, they all thought, a writer in Oriya? Why, what had made her pursue such an unpromising course of study? Why had she not gone to Jawaharlal Nehru University and studied French, Russian or Chinese? What good was this provincial author in a provincial language to her or to anyone here? So Prema found herself in the department of English literature after all, teaching Jane Austen and George Eliot (though not Simone de Beauvoir).
This left a small, smouldering ember deep inside her soul (so she designated its location, no other would do), where it released an odour of heated rubber, threatening to destroy whatever pleasure or satisfaction she might court. It burnt two deep grooves across her forehead as if with a stick of charcoal, and two more from the corners of her nostrils to the edges of her mouth. Sometimes, when passing a shop window filled with spangled and sequinned saris that encouraged reflection, or catching a glimpse of herself in the small, chipped mirror over her bathroom sink, she was startled by the grimness of her expression. No wonder she was rarely invited out, or made part of any gathering for celebration or enjoyment. She turned away and trudged along to the bus stop with the satchel of books weighing down her left shoulder. She put in the necessary hours of work, meeting her colleagues in the staffroom during the lunch hour which they all utilised to complain of their workload and the perfidy of the principal and heads of departments, and the disrespectful, boisterous and unruly students. At the end of the day she trudged back even more depressed than when she had set out. That was when she wondered if her life was any different from that of the crows dividing their time between the telephone lines and the dying tree in her street with equally raucous disorder and dissent.
This was what had made her accept the invitation to attend the Founder’s Day function at her old school. Her schooldays had not been a particularly happy period in her life either – she had already shown signs of a failed life there, it seemed, something that attracts no friends – but at least it was now so far in the past that she could look back on it forgivingly, almost benignly.
And, as it happened, it had turned out well. She had not only met her old school idol Tara, after so many years of following her brilliant career in the press, but Tara had recognized her, and by showing an interest in the book that had so providentially fallen out of her satchel, given her a nod.
A nod. Such a small gesture, almost inconspicuous, but it was what Prema had been waiting for, she now realized, a nod no one had been willing to give her before. It must have been the sign she needed because now, sitting over the empty plate from which she had eaten her dinner – some slices of bread with pickles – the book propped up beside the pickle jar, the sugar pot and the bottle of antacid pills, she began to have thoughts that ought to have come to her earlier: thoughts, plans, like a hand of cards dealt to her that were worth studying.
She began nodding to herself, unconsciously but encouragingly. In the street below, quieter now than an hour or two earlier, a car with a siren tore past, screeching its metallic nail across her eardrum. But Prema barely noticed, even though it set all the neighbourhood dogs howling.
Having made an appointment – costing her an anguish of indecision no one else would have understood – Prema was at Tara’s office in Sri Aurobindo Market punctually at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon. She was somewhat disappointed to find Tara’s office was not in a shiny new high-rise but in somewhat obscure quarters above a grimy copy shop with a small arrow on the wall pointing up the stairs, stairs just as unswept as in her own building, she noted. The office itself, she was relieved to find, was bright and neat, freshly painted, with a tall potted plant in the corner that appeared to be flourishing, and a row of shelves on which the latest publications of Tara’s press were lined up, the newest of them facing out. These were so attractive – small in size but with covers of terracotta, lapis lazuli and moss green, each with a small miniature painting printed in the centre above the title and below the author’s name – that Prema felt deeply ashamed of the state of the paperback she had brought with her to refresh Tara’s memory. While the secretary dialled Tara’s number to announce the visitor, Prema gazed at these delectable, desirable objects, recognizing some of the authors’ names and wondering about the others. Then the door opened and there was Tara, dark glasses pushed back over her hair, which Prema now saw had a fashionable red glow of henna, and wearing a sari that was elegant in its extreme simplicity – fine white cotton, black-bordered, such as Prema would never have considered wearing. She looked a bit preoccupied but remembered having made the appointment – flattering in itself – and had Prema come into her office which was larger and untidier than the little reception room, with ceramic coffee mugs amid the books on her desk, and a lingering odour of cigarette smoke.
‘It was wonderful to see you the other day,’ Prema began, determinedly smiling to keep those depressing wrinkles away, but, on seeing Tara assume a somewhat impatient air, decided to hurry along to the purpose of her visit. Placing the book she had brought with her on the desk between them, she went on: ‘When you said you were thinking of commissioning translations from indigenous languages – our many great languages – and bringing writers to the notice of those readers who don’t know them – I thought of Suvarna Devi.’ She had to stop for breath, she had spoken so fast and was almost panting. ‘She is such a great writer and no one here even knows her name. It is very sad but I am sure if you publish a translation of her work, she will become as well-known as – as – Simone de Beauvoir,’ she ended in an inspired burst.
Tara was listening, although she was playing with a pencil and occasionally glancing at her watch – she clearly had something on her mind, probably another engagement coming up – but after calling her secretary to send in a bottle of Fanta for Prema – such a hot day – she did begin to tell Prema her plan for this new division of her publishing house and what she hoped to publish under its imprint. ‘Of course, I am no linguist myself,’ she apologized, ‘and I will have to depend on others – academics and critics – to tell me what they think worthwhile.’
And by the time the Fanta had been drunk (bringing on an embarrassing sequence of barely suppressed burps) and Prema, the academic and critic, was on her way out, it had been decided she would write a synopsis of the book, a brief biography and bibliography of Suvarna Devi’s work, and a few pages – oh, five or ten – of her translation as a sample. Once she had sent that in, she would hear from Tara. Yes, definitely, within a month – or two at the most.
Then the secretary rang to announce the next visitor and Tara flew out of her chair to receive the young man who had come in with his arms flung wide, no longer merely polite but positively exuberant. Of course, he was young and attractive, Prema could see that before she left.
What actually saddened me when I left was not the sight of masculine youth and its attraction for Tara but the thought, now settling on me as I sat on the bus – it was a Ladies’ Special which was why I had a seat – that Tara had not asked me a single question about my involvement with this language. I had been given no opportunity to explain how I came abo
ut it, what it meant to me and why, while teaching the usual, accepted course of English literature in a women’s college, I had maintained my commitment to it. I could have told her so much, so much – but was given no chance and so I had to keep the information withheld, a secret. No one knew what a weight that exerted, one I longed to relieve.
But, getting off the bus and climbing the stairs to my room at the top, I found I could, in a quite miraculous way, unload myself of that weight. As soon as I took out the little paperback – its pages were coming loose from the binding, I noticed – and pulled a piece of paper to me and began to translate the first line, it was as if I had been given a magic key that would open the rest.
‘It started to rain. It was getting dark.’
But no – immediately I could see how blunt that looked, how lacking in spirit. Where was the music, the lilt of the original?
‘Rain began to fall. The village was in darkness.’
Yes, and yes. How easy to see that these words worked, the others did not. I hurried on, hurried while that sense lasted of what was right, what was wrong, an instinct sometimes elusive which had to be courted and kept alert. Selecting, recognizing, acknowledging. I was only the conduit, the medium between that language and this – but I was the one doing the selecting, the discriminating, and I was the only one who could; the writer herself could not. I was interpreting the text for her because I had the power – too strong a word perhaps, but the ability, yes. I was also the one who knew what she meant, what worlds her words evoked. They were not mine but they were my mother’s. I barely remembered her or those earliest years spent in her lap; I only imagined I did. I was not sure if I had ever seen the shefali tree’s night-blooming flowers in the morning, or the pond where blue lotuses bloomed and intoxicated bumblebees buzzed, or heard the sound of cattle lowing as they made their way homewards at twilight, but at some subconscious level, I found I knew them just as she did. Translating Suvarna Devi’s words and text into English was not so different, I thought, from what she herself must have felt when writing them in her own language, which was, after all, a kind of translation too – from seeing and hearing and feeling into syntax. And I, who had inherited the language, understood it and understood her in a way no one else could have done, by instinct and empathy. The act of translation brought us together as if we were sisters – or even as if we were one, two compatible halves of one writer.
Of course there were instances – small stumbles – when I could not find the exact word or phrase. In Suvarna Devi’s language, each word conjured a whole world; the English equivalent, I had to admit, did not. Cloud, thunder, rain. Forest and pool. Rooster and calf. How limited they sounded if they could not evoke the scene, its sounds and scents – images without shadows. Perhaps an adjective was needed. Or two, or three.
I tried them out. In the original, adjectives were barely used, but I needed them to make up for what was lost in the translation. Of course I could see that restraint was called for, I had to hold fast. Not too fast, though. A middle way. A golden mean.
I laughed out loud and struck my forehead with my hand to think of all the different strains and currents of my life and how they were coming into play. I had never felt such power, never had such power, such joy in power. Or such confusion.
I stopped only when I became aware it was night outside, the crows silent, the street lights burning, the traffic thinning, its roar subsiding into a tired growl. The television set in my landlady’s flat was turned on, the evening soap opera at full volume – and I hadn’t even noticed it earlier.
Pushing back my hair – as if I too had a pair of dark glasses perched up there, or a gleaming strand of distinguished white like Tara! – I got up, picked up my purse, went downstairs and crossed the street to the small shop where I sometimes bought essentials, a bar of soap or a packet of candles during a power breakdown. Tonight, though, I bought a packet of cigarettes – not the brand I had seen on Tara’s desk and that I wanted but a cheaper one that the shopkeeper stocked. I had never bought cigarettes from him before and he gave me a strange look. He recognized me of course but I didn’t care what he thought. This was something I was now discovering – that there were things about which I did not need to care. I recrossed the street with the packet in my purse, stepping aside just in time to avoid an autorickshaw that came careering round the corner, its driver singing at the top of his lungs with the joy of going home, free, at the end of a day’s work. I almost could not restrain an impulse to join in before I went up the stairs to my room to see what the cigarettes could do for me, for my new career – Prema Joshi, translator.
Smoking one was another matter, I admit, and not very successful. I was glad no one was there to observe how I doubled over, coughing, and stubbed out the obnoxious weed, in disappointment.
The synopsis and the sample pages were quickly done. Perhaps a little too quickly, Prema worried, but found she really did not wish anything to slow or halt the momentum, and so she slipped them into a brown paper envelope and took them to be posted in the same flush of high excitement with which she had written them.
Tara had her secretary call Prema – that was a disappointment, Prema had not expected to have to deal with an intermediary – to tell her to go ahead with the translation. So the first step had been taken, and Prema drew a deep breath, poised now on the brink of this new career.
Her old career began to seem irksome. Her lectures became perfunctory; she no longer cared if they did not inspire her students with the same passion she felt for literature. The Mill on the Floss, Emma, Persuasion – what did they mean to these girls? She marked their papers impatiently, merely skimming them, not stopping to put right their grotesque errors and misrepresentations. She could not be bothered: every one of these girls would leave college to marry, bear children and, to everyone’s huge relief, never read another book.
All that mattered now was to do as fine a translation as possible of Suvarna Devi’s stories, so simple in their language and structure, but how forceful and powerful for all that!
The experience had aspects to it that Prema had not imagined when she set out. It reminded her, for instance, of how she had struggled to write stories herself when she was young – younger – and how she had sent them out to magazines only to have them returned with curt rejection slips, the hurt and bitterness with which she had mourned them as she put them away, and how discouragement had made her admit she was probably no writer after all.
Now she could laugh at those rejections and the way she had taken them to heart, letting their poison seep into her till the urge to write, the ambition to write, had quite died inside her.
She realized that all she had needed was this opportunity, this invitation held out to her – by Tara, of all people – to discover her true vocation. It was surely the right one since it had given her this new-found ease, and speed, and delight.
So the work was done sooner than she, and perhaps Tara, had expected, and it was with a certain sense of regret, and trepidation, that she typed it out, then had a typist she knew at a copy shop down the road retype it for neatness – ‘Don’t worry, auntie,’ he said, ‘it will look just like print’ – and carried the bundle ceremoniously to Tara’s office. Mailing it was of course possible and perhaps more professional but she couldn’t resist the satisfaction of handing it over herself and seeing Tara’s face register approval. The completion of this labour needed somehow to be marked and rewarded.
Unfortunately, Tara was away. Her secretary informed Prema that she was at a conference in Prague, would be back in a week. If she left the manuscript, it would be given to Tara on her return. Prema could expect to hear from her very soon.
She did not. Tara took her time, a very long time it seemed to Prema. In fact, Prema advanced from disappointment to impatience to annoyance at being treated in this manner and kept waiting as if she were only one of many people in a queue for Tara’s attention. Had she no consideration for what an author – all right, a tran
slator – might feel at being ignored, left in the dark, waiting, hoping?
She could feel the grooves across her forehead and from her nostrils to her mouth deepening by the day. She snapped at her students. She marked their papers with increasing severity. She knew they found her unfair, ill-tempered and dull. But why did they consider themselves worthy of her attention? They were not, not. She was a translator, an author.
Then, just like that, a change in the atmosphere, a sudden breeze to fill her sails, give her hope and move her forwards at last.
A telephone call from Tara – first her secretary, then Tara herself – to say she was pleased, she approved the translation and would publish it; it would appear in the first list of translations by her press.
It was true she did not exactly convey enthusiasm. She was certainly not effusive. In fact she did not even say she thought the translation ‘good’. She said it was ‘quite good’. Could there be a more tepid qualification?
That might have crushed Prema as much as an outright rejection but Tara followed that limp opinion by saying she would get in touch with Suvarna Devi to draw up a contract, and asked if Prema knew how she might do that.
So suddenly Prema had not only to see to the few notes and suggestions Tara made about the translation – just as the students were sitting their exams which meant their papers would soon be pouring in for her to mark – but she also had to busy herself with finding out about Suvarna Devi’s whereabouts. Why had she not done that when she was actually there in her home town? And why did the publisher of her book, evidently a local one in the same town, not reply to her queries?
It all proved incredibly difficult and frustrating. Until she thought of writing to the principal of the women’s college where she had spent that one summer. To that she received a reply with an address but also a warning that she was often away in the tribal regions with her husband who ran a string of clinics there (and where she obviously found the material for those heartbreaking stories that Prema found so moving).
