by Anita Desai
Still staring at the hen which was greedily gulping down bits of worm, she thought of her husband’s face and the way he would plait his fingers across his stomach and slip heavy lids down over his eyes whenever Ila Das came, bobbing and bouncing, in button boots, her umbrella wildly swirling, to tea. The memory of his face, his expression, made her lips twist almost into a smile.
At the other end, Ila Das put down the sudden silence to nothing more unusual than an accidental cutting of the line, but she also wondered if there really had been a total lack of joy in Nanda Kaul’s voice when she spoke of her great-grandchild’s visit, if there really had been nothing in her voice beyond annoyance and apprehension, or if she had only imagined it. Fingering a yellowed curl, Ila Das hummed and wondered for a minute.
Chapter 7
THE SUNLIGHT THICKENED. No longer lacquer, it turned to glue. Flies, too lazy for flight, were caught in its midday web and buzzed languorously, voluptuously, slowly unsticking their feet and crawling across the ceilings, the windowpanes, the varnished furniture. Inside, the flies. Outside, the cicadas. Everything hummed, shrilled, buzzed and fiddled till the strange rasping music seemed to materialize out of the air itself, or the heat.
Nanda Kaul lay on her bed, absolutely still, composing her hands upon her chest, shutting her eyes to the brightness of the window, waiting for the first cool stir of breeze in the late afternoon to revive her. Till it came, she would lie still, still – she would be a charred tree trunk in the forest, a broken pillar of marble in the desert, a lizard on a stone wall. A tree trunk could not harbour irritation, nor a pillar annoyance. She would imitate death, like a lizard. No one would dare rouse her. Who would dare?
The parrots dared. A sudden quarrel broke out in the tree-tops, for a moment they all screamed and scolded together, then shot off like rockets, scattering pine nuts, disappearing into the light, disintegrating in the heat.
Then the stillness drew together, like glue drying in the sun, congealed, gathered weight, became lead. The heat had actual weight, she felt it on her chest, rising and falling with her slow breath. She groaned under it, very softly, and kept her eyes shut.
She had practised this stillness, this composure, for years, for an hour every afternoon: it was an art, not easily acquired. The most difficult had been those years in that busy house where doors were never shut, and feet flew, or tramped, without ceasing. She remembered how she had tried to shut out sound by shutting out light, how she had spent the sleepless hour making out the direction from which a shout came, or a burst of giggles, an ominous growling from the dogs, the spray of gravel under bicycle wheels on the drive, a contest of squirrels over the guavas in the orchard, the dry rattle of eucalyptus leaves in the sun, a drop, then spray and rush of water from a tap. All was subdued, but nothing was ever still.
From all sides these sounds invaded her room which was in the centre, and neither the wire gauze screens at the windows nor the striped Orissa cotton curtains at the doors kept them out. Everyone in the house knew it was her hour of rest, that she was not to be disturbed. She could hear a half-asleep ayah hiss at the babies ‘Quiet, go to sleep, you’ll wake your mother.’ She could hear her husband tell someone in a carefully lowered voice ‘Later, I’ll have to consult my wife about it. I’ll let you know later.’ She could hear her sons tiptoe past in their great, creaking boots, then fling their satchels down with a crash.
This would go on for an hour and she would keep her eyes tightly clenched, her hands folded on her chest – under a quilt in winter, or uncovered to the sullen breeze of the fan in summer – determinedly not responding. The effort not to respond would grow longer by the minute, heavier, more unendurable, till at last it was sitting on her chest, grasping her by the neck. At four o’clock she would break out from under it with a gasp. All right, she would say, sitting up on the edge of her bed and letting down her feet to search for her slippers, then straightening her hair – all right, she’d sigh, come, come all of you, get me, I’m yours, yours again.
She would barely have splashed her face with some water and combed out her hair when the baby would come crawling in, the first to hear her stir, the most insistent in its needs. Lifting it into her arms, she would go to the kitchen to see the milk taken out of the ice-box, the layer of cream drawn off, the row of mugs on a tray filled and carried out to the green table on the veranda around which the children already sat on their low cane stools – the little girls still having their long hair plaited and their fresh cotton dresses buttoned, and the boys throwing themselves backwards and kicking the table legs and clamouring with hunger. Then there was the bread to be spread with butter, jam jars opened and dug into, knives taken away from babies and boys, girls questioned about homework, servants summoned to mop up spilt milk and fetch tea, and life would swirl on again, in an eddy, a whirlpool of which she was the still, fixed eye in the centre.
Had they never been silent? Never absent? Plaiting her fingers together, contracting her eyelids, she fretted to catch at a saving memory, one that did not distract and hustle but cooled and calmed.
It seemed to her there had been an evening, or perhaps it was a night, certainly it was dark, and it was spring when only the evenings were cool and the last of the phlox bloomed in a border edging the lawn, close and white and fresh in the moonlight, giving out a scent of freshness and cool as she stepped onto the crisp grass of the lawn. Cool, yes, she had to wrap her arms about herself as she paced the lawn, almost walking into the badminton net that hung so grey and spidery as to be invisible in the ghostly light. Stepping back, she had walked around the badminton pole, along the line of lime dribbled over the close, dry grass, and stepped over a broken shuttlecock discarded beside a bed of white petunias over which moths fluttered in a kind of frantic ecstasy.
There had been badminton earlier in the day – not the children, but teachers, friends from the campus, had come to play. Now they had gone. The court was deserted. A waxen moon was climbing over the ghost-grey branches of the eucalyptus trees along the drive, eerily silent. There was a mingled odour of grass, of phlox, of eucalyptus leaves along with lime, sweat-soaked sports clothes, catgut and clammy tennis shoes. She sniffed at it with pinched nostrils, finding it offensive, lacking in composition and harmony.
Walking faster and faster back and forth, back and forth over the lawn, she had stayed out till she heard the car, an aged maroon Rover, turn in at the gate, seen its yellow headlights sweep over the quisqualis creeper that festooned the porch and light up the white pillars of the veranda, the beds of phlox and the uneven line of lime on the lawn. Lights off, silence, then the throwing open of the car door, and her husband had come out. He had been to drop some of the guests home – no, she corrected herself with asperity, one of the guests home. She watched him go up the veranda steps, puffing at his cigar, and smelt the rich tobacco. She had stood very still in the shadow flung by the loqat tree in the corner of the lawn. She had not moved, not made a sound. She had watched him cross the veranda, go into the drawing-room, and waited till the light there went out and another came on in the bedroom that had been only a small dressing-room till she had had his bed put there. Then she paced the lawn again, slower and slower.
A lapwing started up in the mustard fields beyond the garden hedge, and rose, crying, in the air. That nervous, agitated bird, thought Nanda Kaul, watching its uneven flapping flight through the funereal moonlight, what made it leap so in fright, descend again on nervous feet, only to squawk and take off once more, making the night ring with its cries? That hunted, fearful bird, distracted and disturbing.
Herself a grey cat, a night prowler, she watched it till it disappeared in the direction of the river, its cries growing fainter. Then, rubbing her foot in the grass, she relished the sensation of being alone again.
That was one time she had been alone: a moment of private triumph, cold and proud.
The memory of it cast a shadow across her – it was cool. It made her stir, raise her hands to her cheeks
, her hair, then slowly sit up. From the window the first breeze of late afternoon came wandering gently in, swinging the curtain with a dancer’s movement.
She went to the window and looked out on the flushed ravine, the molten plains, the sky filled with a soft, tawny light in which the sun floated like a lighted balloon, making the pine-needles glisten like silk, like floss. It was time for tea.
Chapter 8
SEATED ON THE veranda in the late afternoon shade, Nanda Kaul waved away the tea tray and read, in small sips, bits and pieces from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
When A Woman Lives Alone was the title of one scrap that caught her eye:
‘When a woman lives alone, her house should be extremely dilapidated, the mud wall should be falling to pieces, and if there is a pond, it should be overgrown with water plants. It is not essential that the garden be covered with sage-brush, but weeds should be growing through the sand in patches, for this gives the place a poignantly desolate look.
‘I greatly dislike a woman’s house when it is clear she has scurried about with a knowing look on her face, arranging everything just as it should be, and when the gate is kept tightly shut.’
Nanda Kaul looked up with a faint smile, then bent her head to read it over again. Each time it went down her throat with a clear, luminous passage, like chilled dry wine.
The afternoon light had softened. After a while, she went out into the garden, still holding the book in her hand, down to the three pines at the gate.
The hills were still sunlit, but the light was hazy, powdery. They seemed to be covered with a golden fuzz and melted into soft blues and violets in the distance.
She wished, as often before, that she could invite an English water-colourist of the nineteenth century to come and paint the view from her garden. They were masters, she felt, at conveying light and space, the two elements of the Kasauli view. Or was it too unsubstantial a scene for an English artist? she wondered. No Indian artist of any epoch could have painted it, she knew, and she had her doubts about the English. She had seen nineteenth-century lithographs of what were then known as the Kussowlie Hills and although they had amused her, they had not satisfied. Perhaps a firmer outline, a more definite horizon was required by an etcher. Here hills melted into sky, sky into snows, snows into air.
She leaned over the gate, musing, her eyes resting on the hillsides mauve and violet in what her husband, a scholarly man who read many languages, had liked to call the Abendleuchtung. Cattle browsed homewards to small hidden hamlets in the valleys, all grew softer and greyer till it was quite dark and lights came out where she had not thought there was any habitation at all – single lamps here and there in Kasauli, pinpricks of light for Sanawar, little pools of blurred light for Sabathu and Dagshai and, far away in the distance, the pale fairy shimmer that was Simla.
The crickets fell silent. The wind dropped. She turned and went slowly in to find the light on in the small drawing-room. She sat reading Sei Shonagon’s lists of Wind Instruments, Things that Give a Clean Feeling, Things That Give An Unclean Feeling, Things That Have Lost Their Power (‘a boat which is high and dry in a creek at ebb-tide. A large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air.’), Awkward Things, Things That Lose By Being Painted (‘pinks, cherry blossom, yellow roses’), Things That Gain By Being Painted (‘Pines, Autumn Fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer.’), Herbs and Shrubs, Insects, Elegant Things, Birds, Trees and Festivals, and found herself spinning out lists of her own.
Then she returned to the passage about the woman who lived alone and smiled again, in spite of herself, wondering if Carignano would live up to that epicurean lady’s ideas of how things should be. Not quite, for it was not desolate and it was not derelict. But she had an idea that its sparseness, its cleanness and austerity would please the Japanese lady of a thousand years ago as it pleased her.
The old house, the full house, of that period of her life when she was the Vice-Chancellor’s wife and at the hub of a small but intense and busy world, had not pleased her. Its crowding had stifled her.
There had been too many trees in the garden – dark, dusty guava and mango trees, full of too many marauding parrots and squirrels and children that raided them for fruit and either over-ate or fell from the tops.
There had been too many servants in the long low row of whitewashed huts behind the kitchen, so that the drains often choked and overflowed, and the nights were loud with the sounds of festive drumming, of drunken singing and brawling, of bathing and washing and wailing children.
There had been too many guests coming and going, tongas and rickshaws piled up under the eucalyptus trees and the bougainvilleas, their drivers asleep on the seats with their feet hanging over the bars. The many rooms of the house had always been full, extra beds would have had to be made up, often in not very private corners of the hall or veranda, so that there was a shortage of privacy that vexed her. Too many trays of tea would have to be made and carried to her husband’s study, to her mother-in-law’s bedroom, to the veranda that was the gathering-place for all, at all times of the day. Too many meals, too many dishes on the table, too much to wash up after.
They had had so many children, they had gone to so many different schools and colleges at different times of the day, and had so many tutors – one for mathematics who was harsh and slapped the unruly boys, one for drawing who was lazy and smiled and did nothing, and others equally incompetent and irritating. Then there had been their friends, all of different ages and sizes and families.
She had suffered from the nimiety, the disorder, the fluctuating and unpredictable excess.
She had been so glad when it was over. She had been glad to leave it all behind, in the plains, like a great, heavy, difficult book that she had read through and was not required to read again.
Would Raka’s coming mean the opening of that old, troublesome ledger again?
Sighing, she went off to bed, dragging one foot uncharacteristically.
Discharge me, she groaned. I’ve discharged all my duties. Discharge.
Chapter 9
THE CARE OF others was a habit Nanda Kaul had mislaid. It had been a religious calling she had believed in till she found it fake. It had been a vocation that one day went dull and drought-struck as though its life-spring had dried up.
It had happened on her first day alone at Carignano. After her husband’s death, her sons and daughters had come to help her empty the Vice-Chancellor’s house, pack and crate their belongings and distribute them, then escort her to Kasauli. For a while, they had stood about, in Carignano, like too much furniture. She had wondered what to do with them.
Fortunately, they had gone away. Brought up by her to be busy and responsible, they all had families and employments to tend. None could stay with her. When they left, she paced the house, proprietorially, feeling the feel of each stone in the paving with bare feet.
She had drifted about the garden. Unlike any other owner of house and garden, she had not said: Here I will plant a willow, there I will pull out the Spanish broom and put in pampas grass instead. No, she revelled in its bareness, its emptiness. The loose pebbles of the gravel pleased her as much as rich turf might another. She cared not to add another tree to the group of apricots by the veranda or the group of three pines at the gate.
Like her, the garden seemed to have arrived, simply by a process of age, of withering away and an elimination, at a state of elegant perfection. It was made up of a very few elements, but they were exact and germane as the strokes in a Japanese scroll. She no more wished to add to them than she wished to add to her own pared, reduced and radiantly single life.
She could no more picture a child – a new, additional child – in this perfected and natural setting than she could a pergola of roses, a marble faun or a fountain. She wished for none of these. On the contrary, the thought of them sickened as a box of sweets might sicken.
In distress and agitation, she walked
out to the kitchen to speak to Ram Lal when he returned from his daily expedition to the bazaar. As he sorted potatoes and onions on the wooden tabletop, she spoke to him with a nervousness that alarmed him as a thunderstorm in the air might have alarmed him.
‘My great-granddaughter will be arriving tomorrow, Ram Lal,’ she began, and her hands clung to each other and sweated.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, trying to sound reassuring, but failing.
‘What will you cook for her, Ram Lal?’ she asked, curiously troubled. It was as if she had never made up handsome dinner parties for fifty or seventy guests on Convocation Day, and been praised for the brilliance of the kebabs she served, or the richness of the puddings. So many scraps of paper, she had torn them up and thrown them away. She had lost the ample book with its frills and cuttings from magazines and papers of recipes with which to please and comfort her large family. Now not one idea remained, not one, with which to feed a single small great-granddaughter.
The amount she had jettisoned from her life might take another’s breath away.
‘What shall I make, Memsahib?’ mumbled Ram Lal, his eyes downcast.
‘I don’t know, Ram Lal, I don’t know,’ she sighed, and suddenly clutched the edge of the table. ‘Tell me. Suggest something.’
As suddenly, he looked up and inspiration gleamed in his bloodshot eyes. ‘Potato chips, Memsahib,’ he trumpeted. ‘All children like potato chips.’
‘Do they?’ she murmured, and gazed at him with a dazed kind of hope that the potato chips might surfeit the child, lull it into a decent stranger and render it harmless.
‘Yes, potato chips they like, with ketchup.’
‘With . . .’
‘Ketchup, Memsahib, tomato ketchup. I will buy a bottle from the bazaar. I will make it for lunch. Will she be here for lunch?’
