The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  ‘We’re not interested in scenery,’ Bhatia assured him and then, thinking this man might prove a ‘contact’, expanded: ‘We are looking into illegal mines, illegal logging, reasons why this scenery of yours is getting spoilt.’

  His instinct proved right. Not only did the photographer plant his elbows on the glass counter and begin giving him the inside story of the corruption and skullduggery going on in the town, but several of the men who had been slouching in the doorway, watching the street for something interesting to happen – so little did in the off-season – edged deeper into the shop and began to add their own stories, and suggestions. Bhatia grew more and more comfortable: this was his scene, this was how he had always known the project would work. Accepting betel leaves, handing out cigarettes, he asked his new acquaintances if they could set up some interviews for him.

  Chand drove the jeep back to the milestone where they had first stopped. But Shalini could not find the track she had taken the day before. Of course they had to go downhill but this time the track she mistakenly chose led through a thick growth of pine and instead of coming to the glade from around the boulder, they came upon it from above, not even aware of it till they almost plunged off a shelf of rock into it, it was so well concealed in the fold between the hills by ferns and the shadows of ferns.

  Shalini put out her hand to alert Chand. He stood with his hands on his hips, staring, and what he saw – what he could make out through the screen of foliage and shadows – affected him enough to make him silent, take out cigarettes and matches from his pocket, then put them away again, unlit.

  ‘Good?’ Shalini whispered, trying not to grin.

  Good, bad – hardly the words that applied. He was not even sure this garden – this design, whatever it was – was man-made. How could anything man-made surpass the Himalayas themselves, the flow of hills from the plains to the snows, mounting from light into cloud into sky? Or the eagles slowly circling on currents of air in the golden valleys below, or the sound of water gushing from invisible sources above?

  What he saw here, however, contained these elements, the essence of them, in constricted, concentrated form, as one glittering bee or beetle or single note of birdsong might contain an entire season.

  He let out a low whistle and turned to nod to Shalini. Yes.

  They drove back along the loop that ringed the hilltop to the tea stall where they had stopped on their first night for omelettes.

  Nakhu had clearly kept his uncle informed of the television crew’s doings. Balram greeted them with an almost familial welcome, wiping a table clear of flies for them, suggesting, ‘Chai? Coffee? Omelette?’

  Shalini and Chand unburdened themselves of their back-packs, and exchanged looks: shall we ask? Chand did, carefully. ‘There is a garden down that hill. Whose is it? Who made it? Do you know?’

  There was nothing Balram did not know: that was the reputation he liked to maintain. But here he encountered some uncertainty. His fingers searched for an answer in his moustache. ‘On that hill?’ he asked eventually. ‘The one with the burnt house at the top?’

  ‘We didn’t see one.’

  Now he could tell them about the burnt house, its reputation, its mystery. But as he was telling it, it occurred to him that he could tell them nothing about the survivor of the fire except that there was one. And what they called a ‘garden’ might belong to him. ‘Ask Bhola,’ he said at last. ‘Bhola is the caretaker. He will know.’

  ‘Where will we find him? Where is this house?’

  ‘Nakhu is with you. Nakhu will show you the way.’

  They had almost left Nakhu out of their plans, he had been of so little use. But now they had to include him. And Bhatia.

  Over dinner, they listened silently to Bhatia boast about his day’s achievements. ‘Got some good interviews. Lots of info. You should see the men running these businesses. You won’t believe, such goondas. They talked, they don’t care who knows. They’ve got everyone in their pockets. The whole town is making money. So we can wrap it up here, and on the way down to Dehra Dun, stop at some of these quarries – right out in the open – for background, and finish off.’

  ‘Wait!’ Shalini cried agitatedly since Chand did not.

  ‘For what?’ Bhatia turned an annoyed look at her.

  She turned to Chand to explain, so he did. ‘We think there might be something for us to film. Shalini showed me. It is a kind of garden. Very private, no one knows about it. But if we can find who made it – is making it – it could make a beautiful ending for the film, Bhatia. Someone who is different, someone who is not destroying the land but making something of it, something beautiful. You can see whoever it is really understands this landscape, appreciates it. We need to speak to him and see if he will let us film his garden.’

  Bhatia lowered his head into the palm of his hand and ground it, groaning. Suddenly he was sick of the whole project. Everything about it was wrong, hopeless. And he needed to get home, to his wife’s cooking, her care. He had had enough discomfort. Now he needed to leave.

  ‘It’s true,’ Shalini broke in eagerly. ‘It will make the perfect ending. First, all the bad things happening here. Then finish with something beautiful. Hopeful.’

  ‘It’s worth trying for, Bhatia,’ Chand urged. It was, after all, the closest he had come in his career to art.

  ‘And how are you going to produce this magician? Have you even seen him?’

  ‘We will, we will,’ they assured him, ‘just give us some time,’ and they sent for Nakhu. Nakhu was to lead them to the burnt house, and the magician.

  Ravi was sitting on the veranda steps in the late-evening light, waiting for the homestead below to settle into its familiar pattern, smoke to rise from the thatched roof, his meal brought to him as usual, but it was Bhola who came up the path, empty-handed and strangely hesitant in manner. In addition, he cleared his throat to make Ravi aware he had something to say, and that he had been right to sense some unease in the air, something he had not been able to identify.

  ‘There are some people here from Delhi,’ Bhola began, ‘they came to see me. People have been talking about them. They are here to make a fill-um.’

  Ravi decided he needed to give himself time to adjust to this information. He offered a biri to Bhola although Bhola never took one from him, and lighted one himself.

  ‘They are here to make a film,’ he echoed, and wondered why he was being told this. Surely Bhola knew he had no interest at all in anything that was happening in town.

  ‘And they wish to come and talk to you.’

  It was too dark to see the expressions on each other’s faces but not so dark that Bhola could not see Ravi’s hand, holding the lighted biri, remain in mid-air and his entire posture freeze.

  ‘No!’ The answer finally broke from Ravi like something breaking deep inside him. ‘No!’

  Bhola felt compelled to offer understanding, and comfort. ‘I will tell them. I will tell them you will not speak to them.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ravi said from between tightly compressed lips, a tightly constricted throat. ‘Tell them. Tell them that.’

  ‘I will tell that boy Nakhu they have engaged. I know Nakhu. Nakhu will tell them.’

  Bhola meant the words to be reassuring but they did not seem to reassure Ravi. That was clear from the way he got to his feet and went blundering up the steps to his room. Bhola waited to see if he would light his lamp but he did not. The room stayed dark.

  Ravi did not come out next morning. The house remained shut and silent. But at dusk, after he had brought home the goats and cow and a load of firewood for his wife, Bhola climbed the path and, on not seeing Ravi, went up the stairs and opened the door to his room. This was unprecedented: he never intruded on Ravi for any reason. But now he stood in the doorway, silently, looking in, so Ravi should be aware he was there.

  ‘They found your garden,’ Bhola told him, and he was as upset as he knew Ravi would be on hearing of the trespass. ‘They filmed it, and tom
orrow they want to come here. Nakhu is to bring them. They pay him.’

  He could make out that Ravi was sitting at the table by the abrupt movement he made now, half rising from his chair.

  ‘Come with me,’ Bhola said and, going up to him, took him by his arm and directed him out of the room, down the steps. On the path he loosened his hold a bit but still held him by his sleeve as they followed each other down the uneven, stony track.

  The dogs ran up to them in a band, clamouring. Bhola silenced them gruffly, and they turned round and led the way to the hut. Bhola’s wife Manju was in the cowshed, milking the cow he had brought back from grazing. The air was thick with the smell of straw and the milk she squirted into the tin pail. The children had been whooping around, driving the chickens into their pen, but now they fell silent and stared.

  Bhola took Ravi into the hut where the fire had just been lit to make the evening meal. In the semi-dark, he took down some clothes that were hanging on a line across one corner of the room and handed them to Ravi. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘change into these. Even if you are seen, no one will think it is you. I will tell them you are my brother, visiting.’ He left the room, leaving Ravi to follow his instructions, removing his khaki trousers and white shirt and pulling on Bhola’s old, ragged pyjamas and a long shirt that came down to his knees. He removed his shoes and let his feet find their way into a pair of stiff, cracked leather sandals.

  After a while Manju Rani came in with the milk pail and on seeing that she kept her face averted and acknowledged his presence only by drawing a fold of her headscarf a little lower over her forehead, Ravi went out into the yard among the animals. He looked for a corner where he would be out of the way. There was a log beside the cowshed and he went and sat there quietly to let the disturbance he had caused subside. The children stood and stared, not knowing what to make of all this: was he staying? Was he not going back up the hill?

  When their mother called them, they went in, and Bhola came out to fetch Ravi. He indicated that Ravi was to sit beside them on the swept clay floor by the fire and passed him a tin plate that Manju Rani had filled with the potato curry she had made and some thick rotis that smelled of roasted wheat and were pleasantly charred. He ate, they all ate, no one spoke and there was no sound other than of eating and the occasional crackle of the fire. Its smoke thickened the darkness, making the darkness visible. No one was at ease.

  Then Bhola led him out and showed him where he could wash at the pump, which he did, water splashing onto his sandals, making a puddle of mud around. Then he took him to an outhouse where stacks of firewood and implements were stored in the lower half and a ladder led to a shelf where there was hay and straw for the cow. Bhola had already been there and laid a rough wool blanket to make up a bed. Ravi, visibly relieved to find he was not expected to sleep with the family in the main hut, impulsively turned to thank Bhola, or in some way express his gratitude, but could not overcome his reserve, and simply nodded in acceptance of all he had been given. Bhola neither expected words nor required them and left him there.

  Bhola’s sons brought news to their father of the film crew’s movements – down in Ravi’s glade or up on the hill and around the burnt house. The children followed them around, fascinated, ready to hoot and guffaw, till they were called away roughly by Bhola who did not pass on any information to Ravi, telling him only ‘It is better that you stay here. Till they are gone.’ He found Ravi a Himachal cap such as he wore himself, with a band of red velvet on grey felt, to put on his head. It completed the disguise.

  All day, while Bhola was gone with the beasts and the boys were supposedly at school but in truth up on the hill, Ravi had nowhere to go and nothing to do. He sat on the log by the cowshed, watching the chickens pick at grains and the insects they found among the stones, or rising up in sudden flurries of beating wings and frightened squawks at the shadow of an eagle crossing their earth, and Manju Rani going in and out about her chores, her head tied up in a long Himachal scarf and her eyes averted from him. Bhola had brought her back from Tehri as a bride; it had marked the end of his boyhood, of catapults and cricket games. After that he had been a householder, with responsibilities, and Manju Rani clearly had hers. Ravi never looked directly at her but was aware of her movements as she filled a bucket at the pump or clambered up the hillside to cut grasses for the goats with her curved scythe, tossing them into the basket strapped to her back. Her youngest child, a girl of about four, followed her around. Her feet were always bare, her nose was always running, her flowered frock filthy as was her hair, but her face was as round and pink as a rose in bloom. Mostly she clutched at her mother’s kameez and followed her, but sometimes she broke away and came to study the man seated on the log, wondering at his stillness and silence in the midst of such continuous sound and movement. Her mother would call her sharply and she would run away, laughing.

  It was a long time since Ravi had been around a woman. His mother, his female relatives in Bombay, Miss Wilkinson the last. He had no way of making any connection with those in Bhola’s family but he knew he did not want to: they in no way compensated for what he had lost – his space, his enclosure, the pattern and design he had created, was creating within it. Would those barbarians from the city have stepped on it? Touched it, broken and wrecked it? Their gaze alone was a desecration. Then there were all the natural changes that were wrought daily and nightly by a passing breeze, a fall of leaves, a dwindling and dying of what had been fresh and new the day before, or else the eruption of the renewed and unexpected – and he was not there to observe and mark and celebrate them. He knew he would never go there again. It would revert to wilderness. His longing to resume what was his real life was left smouldering inside him like a match blown at but not put out. Brooding, he sat studying his hands as if they were all that were left to him now that he had nothing to work on.

  Then, after a glass of tea and some bread in Bhola’s hut one morning, after everyone had gone their separate ways, he saw that Manju Rani had left an empty matchbox on the clay hearth. He picked it up and went outdoors with it in his hands. It was his way, to observe and study. Seating himself on the log in his corner, he slid the flimsy container open and studied its emptiness with his habitual concentration. It might have been a crib, a cradle – but to hold what? Looking around for something small enough to fit in it, he found a sliver of bark and a scrap of moss but they left room for more. In the ground at his feet he spied a fragment of quartz that could be added. He slid the box shut and put it in the deep pocket of his shirt. All day long he reached to touch it, finding there a source of contentment and wonder at what other collections might be made.

  He began to look out for empty matchboxes. Each offered a world of possibilities for the minute objects and the patterns he could make of them, patterns that he could alter endlessly as pieces of coloured glass can be shifted in a kaleidoscope. Lying open, they revealed themselves like constellations in the night. Shut in a box, they became invisible. And he could carry them on him, keep them to himself; no one would know.

  Up at the burnt house, the film crew prowled around with their camera, searching for the hermit. From the veranda they could look down at the clearing, at Bhola’s hut, the chickens picking around it, Manju Rani going in and out with armfuls of grass, her child in a pink frock following, a man seated by the cowshed, idly, a dog asleep in the sun.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ Bhatia pronounced authoritatively. ‘He’s gone.’

  Crouching around the projector later in the back room at the photographer’s, they viewed the film they had shot ‘in the garden’ as Shalini called it. It was a scene drained of life, with neither colour nor fragrance nor movement. Tree, rock, leaf, stone, together or separately, they remained lifeless, the backdrop of a stage on which nothing happened.

  The spool unwound with a long, rasping whirr, and its last flashes and symbols vanished into the dark. They remained crouched, unwilling to turn on the light and face each other.

&nb
sp; Finally Bhatia said, ‘We can’t use this. Who would want to watch it? We’ll just have to throw it away. It’s dead, a dead loss, a waste of time.’

  Shalini turned to face him, her face full of protest, but Chand merely sighed, accepting defeat. She realized he would not fight.

  As they went to their separate rooms at the Hotel Honeymoon with Bhatia loudly bellowing, ‘We can leave in the morning! First thing! It’s a wrap!’ Shalini said to Chand, in a low voice, ‘I could have made it better, if we’d only found the artist who made it to show us around and talk about it, that would have been the ending we needed.’

  ‘But we didn’t,’ Chand said with a resigned shrug. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t exist.’

  The jeep descended the tawny hills, curve by curve, in the wake of the dust raised by a long line of buses and trucks ahead. The air grew warmer with each turn. The pine trees grew fewer, the grasses drier.

  The traffic moved sluggishly, then came to an abrupt halt. Chand braked sharply to avoid crashing into the truck in front. At the bend two or three men appeared, waving red flags. Their appearance was followed by a series of dull thuds that seemed to come from inside the hill, rocking the jeep on its wheels. White dust spouted into the air, spreading in balloons and descending in parachutes, so thick it caused everyone to cough and choke.

  All traffic had halted, exhaling fumes that added to the dust cloud. Bhatia jumped out of his seat – now that they were on their way back, he seemed filled with energy and determination – and joined some drivers who had climbed out along the verge. As Shalini and Chand watched, still half blinded by the explosion, they heard him give a shout and saw him throw out his arm, pointing downwards like an explorer who had made a discovery.

  With reluctance and resentment, the two got down to join him and follow the direction of his pointing finger. The shelf on which they stood seemed dangerously precarious: right under it they could see great gashes that had opened out into caverns of white limestone. Even as they stood staring, another explosion went off and more white dust came boiling up towards them while echoes of the dynamite blast continued to reverberate.