by Anita Desai
'Pinky, where is the water bottle? Pass the water bottle to Daddy,' commanded the mother solicitously.
He drank from the plastic bottle, tilting his head back and letting the water spill into his mouth. But it was so warm it was hardly refreshing and he spat out the last mouthful from the car window into the dust. A scavenging chicken alongside the tyre skipped away with a squawk.
All along the road with its stalled traffic, drivers and passengers were searching for shade, for news, for some sign of release. Every now and then someone brought information on how long the line of stalled traffic now was. Two miles in each direction was the latest estimate, at least two miles—and the estimate was made not without a certain pride.
Up on the bank of the culvert the man who had caused it all sat sprawling, his legs wide apart. He had taken off his bandana, revealing a twist of cotton wool dipped in fragrant oil that was tucked behind his ear. He had bought himself a length of sugar cane and sat chewing it, ripping off the tough outer fibre then drawing the sweet syrup out of its soft inner fibre and spitting out, with relish and with expertise, the white fibre sucked dry. He seemed deliberately to spit in the direction of those who stood watching in growing frustration.
'Get hold of that fellow! Force him to move his truck,' somebody suddenly shouted out, having reached the limit of his endurance. 'If he doesn't, he'll get the thrashing of his life.'
'Calm down, sardar-ji,' another placated him with a light laugh to help put things back in perspective. 'Cool down. It's hot but you'll get your cold beer when you get to Solan.'
'When will that be? When my beard's gone grey?'
'Grey hair is nothing to be ashamed of,' philosophised an elder who had a good deal of it to show. 'Grey hair shows patience, forbearance, a long life. That is how to live long—patiently, with forbearance.'
'And when one has work to do, what then?' the Sikh demanded, rolling up his hands into fists. The metal ring on his wrist glinted.
'Work goes better after a little rest,' the elder replied, and demonstrated by lowering himself onto his haunches and squatting there on the roadside like an old bird on its perch or a man waiting to be shaved by a wayside barber. And, like an answer to a call, a barber did miraculously appear, an itinerant barber who carried the tools of his trade in a tin box on his head. No one could imagine from where he had emerged, or how far he had travelled in search of custom. Now he squatted and began to unpack a mirror, scissors, soap, blades, even a small rusty cigarette tin full of water. An audience stood watching his expert moves and flourishes and the evident pleasure these gave the elder.
Suddenly the truck driver on the bank waved a hand and called, 'Hey, come up here when you've finished. I could do with a shave too—and my ears need cleaning.'
There was a gasp at his insolence, and then indignant protests.
'Are you planning to get married over here? Are we not to move till your bride arrives and the wedding is over?' shouted someone.
This had the wrong effect: it made the crowd laugh. Even the truck driver laughed. He was somehow becoming a part of the conspiracy. How had this happened?
In the road, the men stood locked in bafflement. In the vehicles, the tired passengers waited. 'Oo-oof,' sighed the mother. The baby, asleep as if stunned by the heat, felt heavy as lead in her arms. 'My head is paining, and it's time to have tea.'
'Mama wants tea, Mama wants tea!' chanted the daughter, kicking at the front seat.
'Stop it!' her father snapped at her. 'Where is the kitchen? Where is the cook? Am I to get them out of the sky? Or is there a well filled with tea?'
The children all burst out laughing at the idea of drawing tea from a well, but while they giggled helplessly, a chai-wallah did appear, a tray with glasses on his head, a kettle dangling from his hand, searching for the passenger who had called for tea.
There was no mention of cholera or typhoid now. He was summoned, glasses were filled with milky, sweet, frothing tea and handed out, the parents slurped thirstily and the children stared, demanding sips, then flinching from the scalding liquid.
Heartened, the father began to thrash around in the car, punch the horn, stamp ineffectually on the accelerator. 'Damn fool,' he swore. 'How can this happen? How can this be allowed? Only in this bloody country. Where else can one man hold up four miles of traffic—'
Handing back an empty glass, the mother suggested, 'Why don't you go and see if the policeman's arrived?'
'Am I to go up and down looking for a policeman? Should I walk to Solan to find one?' the man fumed. His tirade rolled on like thunder out of the white blaze of afternoon. The children listened, watched. Was it getting darker? Was a thunder cloud approaching? Was it less bright? Perhaps it was evening. Perhaps it would be night soon.
'What will we do when it grows dark?' the girl whimpered. 'Where will we sleep?'
'Here, in the car!' shouted the boys. 'Here, on the road!' Their toys were long since broken and discarded. They needed some distraction. The sister could easily be moved to tears by mention of night, jackals, ghosts that haunt highways at night, robbers who carry silk handkerchieves to strangle their victims...
Suddenly, simultaneously, two events occurred. In the ditch that ran beside the car the yellow pai dog began a snarling, yelping fight with a marauder upon her territory, and at the same time one of the drivers, hitching up his pyjamas and straightening his turban, came running back towards the stalled traffic, shouting, 'They're moving! The policeman's come! They'll move now! There'll be a faisla!'
Instantly the picture changed from one of discouragement, despair and possibly approaching darkness to animation, excitement, hope. All those loitering in the road leapt back into their vehicles, getting rid of empty bottles, paper bags, cigarette butts, the remains of whatever refreshment the roadway had afforded them, and in a moment the air was filled with the roar of revving engines as with applause.
The father too was pressing down on the accelerator, beating upon the steering wheel, and the children settling into position, all screaming, 'Sim-la! Sim-la!' in unison. The pai dogs scrambled out of the way and carried their quarrel over into the stony field.
But not a single vehicle moved an inch. None could. The obstructive truck had not been shifted out of the way. The driver still sprawled upon the bank, propped up on one elbow now, demanding of the policeman who had arrived, 'So? Have you brought me compensation? No? Why not? I told you I would not move till I received compensation. So where is it? Hah? What is the faisla? Hah?'
The roar of engines faltered, hiccupped, fell silent. After a while, car doors slammed as drivers and passengers climbed out again. Groups formed to discuss the latest development. What was to be done now? The elder's philosophical patience was no longer entertained. No one bandied jokes with the villain on the bank any more. Expressions turned grim.
Suddenly the mother wailed, 'We'll be here all night,' and the baby woke up crying: he had had enough of being confined in the suffocating heat, he wanted air, wanted escape. All the children began to whine. The mother drew herself together. 'We'll have to get something to eat,' she decided and called over to her husband standing in the road, 'Can't we get some food for the children?'
He threw her an irritated look over his shoulder. Together with the men in the road, he was going back to the culvert to see what could be done. There was an urgency about their talk now, their suggestions. Dusk had begun to creep across the fields like a thicker, greyer layer of dust. Some of the vendors lit kerosene lamps on their barrows, so small and faint that they did nothing but accentuate the darkness. Some of them were disappearing over the fields, along paths visible only to them, having sold their goods and possibly having a long way to travel. All that could be seen clearly in the growing dark were the lighted pinpricks of their cigarettes.
What the small girl had most feared did now happen—the long, mournful howl of a jackal lifted itself out of the stones and thornbushes and unfurled through the dusk towards them. While she sat mut
e with fear her brothers let out howls of delight and began to imitate the invisible creature with joy and exuberance.
The mother was shushing them all fiercely when they heard the sound they had given up hope of hearing: the sound of a moving vehicle. It came roaring up the road from behind them—not at all where they had expected—overtaking them in a cloud of choking dust. Policemen in khaki, armed with steel-tipped canes, leaned out of it, their moustaches bristling, their teeth gleaming, eyes flashing and ferocious as tigers. And the huddled crowd stranded on the roadside fell aside like sheep: it might have been they who were at fault.
But the police truck overtook them all, sending them hurriedly into the ditch for safety, and drew up at the culvert. Here the police jumped out, landing with great thuds on the asphalt, and striking their canes hard upon it for good measure. The truck's headlights lit up the bank with its pallid wash.
Caught in that illumination, the truck driver sprawling there rose calmly to his feet, dusted the seat of his pyjamas and wound up the bandana round his head, while everyone watched open-mouthed. Placing his hands on his hips, he called to the police, 'Get them all moving now, get them all moving!' And, as if satisfied with his role of leader, the commander, he leapt lightly into the driver's seat of his truck, turned the key, started the engine and manoeuvred the vehicle into an onward position and, while his audience held its disbelieving breath, set off towards the north.
After a moment they saw that he had switched on his lights; the tail lights could be seen dwindling in the dark. He had also turned on his radio and a song could be heard like the wail of a jackal in the night:
'Father, I am leaving your roof,
To my bridegroom's home I go...'
The police, looking baffled, swung around, flourishing their canes. 'Get on! Chalo!' they bellowed. 'Chalo, chalo, get on, all of you,' and they did.
Tepoztlan Tomorrow
LOUIS was let in at the big door by the old workman who had married one of the maids. He greeted Louis with becoming joy and affection, then led him through the courtyard which was quiet now, the maids having finished their work and gone. Louis had to duck his head to make his way through the rubber trees, the bougainvillaea, the shrubs of jasmine and hibiscus and plumbago that had tangled themselves into a jungle, leaving barely enough room to pass. The evening air was heavy with the scent of jasmine and lemon blossom. As he remembered, every branch was hung with a cage—he had memories that were still sharply etched of day-long screeches and screams that would ring through the courtyard and every room around it: the maids, doing the laundry at the water trough in the centre of the courtyard, crying, 'Pa-pa-ga-yo?' and being answered by twenty screeches of 'Pa-pa-ga-yo!' hour upon hour. But at this hour all the cages were covered with cloth and there was silence. A thought struck him: were they still alive? Perhaps they had all died: he imagined their skeletons clinging to the perches inside the shrouded cages, all beaks, claws and bones, dust and dried droppings below. 'Papa-ga -yoi Pa-pa-ga-yo!' he whistled softly.
The house, to him, was a larger cage, shrouded and still. It seemed equally dead. There was one light on, deep inside; the other rooms were all shadowy, except for the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her gown of dusty net and tinsel, illuminated by thè glow of a red light bulb suspended over her head.
The old man was hobbling along the dark passages as if he could see perfectly in the dark. Perhaps he was blind, and accustomed to it. Louis bumped, into a sharp-edged table and suddenly all the picture frames on it clattered in warning, and a voice called out, 'Quièro es?'
As Louis approached the innermost rooms—actually the ones that fronted the street, but they could not be approached from it—the scent of lemons and jasmine in the courtyard and the heavy perfume of incense burning perpetually at the shrine receded and were replaced by an overpowering odour he remembered as being the distinctive smell of the house on Avenida Matamoros: that of mosquito repellent.
And there they were, Dona Celia on her square, upright, wooden-backed and wooden-seated throne, strategically placed so that she could look out of the window into the street and also, just by turning her head, into the house all the way down its central passage into the courtyard; and Nadyn beside her, poking with a hairpin at a Raidolito coil which was smoking ferociously and yet not enough to keep the evening's mosquitoes at bay.
Whereas Nadyn appeared stunned by the sudden appearance of a young man out of the dusk, and stepped back almost in fright, Dona Celia recognised him without a moment's hesitation. 'Ah, Teresa's son, eh? Louis, eh?'
Of course they were expecting him—his mother had telephoned, he too had spoken to them on the phone, all the while imagining it ringing through the empty house and the fluster it would cause in those silent rooms—but he was late, very late.
Dona Celia reminded him of this immediately. 'You are late,' she accused him. 'We have waited all day. What kept you, eh?'
He tried to explain, laughing falsely: he had hoped to get his father's car and drive up; he had waited, it hadn't turned up; he had made his way to the bus terminal but met friends on the way who insisted he stop, who delayed him. It was true, he admitted, taking off his hat and wiping his face, true that he had only managed to get away and catch a bus hours after he had said he would. That was how it was, he laughed.
Dona Celia's long face swung in the dark like a cow's. She shifted on her chair, wrapping her shawl about her throat—a shawl, on such a still, warm evening indoors; that too he remembered. All her movements expressed her displeasure. 'Well, we have eaten. Finally, we ate, Nedy and I. But Nedy will show you to the kitchen and you can help yourself before you go to bed.'
'Oh, is it bedtime?' he blinked. Already?
This was taken as an impertinence. She was not going to reply. A young nephew to speak to his aunt so, and tell her what should and should not be the hour for bed? Her face set into its deeply cut folds. Louis could hardly believe this sour old lady could be the sister of his laughing, plump, brightly dressed mother. A much older sister, it was true, and the daughter of their father's first marriage, more like a mother to her younger sister by a second marriage, but still, there was not the faintest resemblance. Perhaps it was the difference between the old family home in Tepoztlan which the old lady had never left, her own husband having entered it when they married, and left her there when he died, while Louis's mother had married into a family that lived in Mexico City.
Following Nadyn into the kitchen for a bowl of sopa tortilla she said she had kept warm for him, he sighed. Yes, Mexico City was very far, in a sense, not geographical, from Tepoztlan.
The bowl of soup Nadyn promised him turned out to be only one course of a succession of dishes she kept placing on the table and watching him eat his way through out of politeness, not hunger. She placed her elbows on the table, her chin on her cupped hands, and let her eyes wander. Why did she not put the light on? he thought querulously, peering into the dishes in the gloom, not even certain what he was eating although Nadyn assured him each time 'Your favourite.' 'It is?' he asked doubtfully, lifting a spoon and stirring. 'Of course,' she replied, 'we remember.'
What else do you remember? And what do you do besides remember? he wanted to ask her, bad-temperedly and unfairly, since she was telling him, in some detail, all the events of their lives in the time he had been away in the USA, quite as if she were sure he had heard nothing about them, living as he did in exile. As she mentioned this uncle, that cousin, or the other nephew or niece, he drooped over his plate gloomily, wondering if he dared light a cigarette and indicate he would not eat any more.
But now she was bringing out the pièce de résistance of the meal, carefully preserved in an ancient icebox that stood grumbling in its corner, and even in the gloom the colour of the jelly that wobbled in its dish was such that it made him cringe. 'Your favourite,' she challenged him as she set it, trembling, before him. How could he tell her that he had long since outgrown green and red jelly puddings?
'On
ly if you share it with me,' he said, inspiration having suddenly struck. By the brevity of her hesitation, and the eagerness with which she brought across a glass dish for herself, he remembered how Nadyn had always been the one with the sweet tooth.
'So, Nedy,' he decided to tease her, passing over all but one spoonful of the jelly to her, 'que hubo? Pedro—is he still around?'
She collapsed against the table, as if she had been struck. He had been unfair: he should have let her finish her jelly before bringing up the matter which he knew to be unpleasant, had a long history of being unpleasant. Now she would not be able to enjoy her pudding.
But somehow she managed to combine two emotions and two activities—and he watched with fascination as the woman with the long grey face and the two pigtails who sat across from him in her grey dress managed to spoon the sweet into her mouth avidly, relishing each chill, slippery mouthful as an armadillo might enjoy slipping slugs down its throat, and at the same time emitting an endless flow of complaint and grumbling, all bitter as ash, raw as salt. There was such a long, long history, after all, of Dona Celia's opposition to Pedro as a suitor, and her objections: that he was muy sucio, dirty, not fit to enter their house, and just because he ran a business in town. A business? queried Louis, was it not a truck? Oh yes, a truck was a part of it, how else was Pedro to deliver those bombas de gaz if not by truck, but did Louis know how the people of Tepoztlan now relied on those bombas for heating and cooking, how good, how thriving a business it was? It was not that Pedro was not doing well, or that he did not work hard. Then what was it? Louis enquired. Here she threw up her hands, then clutched her head, then clasped her arms about her, and went off on another tack: that of Dona Celia's stubborness, her adamant attitude, her rejection of Pedro's family—for how could she object to Pedro? No one could object to Pedro, it was his family —and here Nadyn became dejected, her mouth and shoulders and hands all drooped. She tinkled a spoon in the empty glass dish, making a forlorn sound: even Nadyn could not speak for Pedro's family. She had visited it, after all, and had to admit—and had told Pedro, too—that it was not the kind of home she had grown up in, that anyone could see. Pedro's home and Pedro's family could not be described as anything but sucio, not even by Nadyn. And she had not been given such a welcome by them either: they were not used to cultivated and aristocratic women such as the women of their own family, said Nadyn with a shrug, and their way of living—well, it was little better than pigs'. After all they had only recently made the move to Tepoztlan from the hills where they had raised pigs, turkeys, and scratched maize from the fields, but how could Pedro help that? He had worked hard to rise above that himself: only Mama would not see that, being of the old school—old-fashioned and stubborn.
