The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories

by Stephen Alter

Almost unaware of it yourself, you will also get up then and say: Just a moment. I will come with you.

  You? With me? Mani will be very surprised.

  Yes. Do you mind?

  No, of course not, Mani will reply, a trifle taken aback. And, then, he will lead the way.

  After you have climbed the dark, crumbling staircase, you will enter a room that looks like an underground vault. There is only one window, tightly shut. At first, everything will look indistinct. And then, as your eyes get used to the dark, you will see a large, decrepit wooden cot. On it you will notice a shrivelled up woman, wrapped in torn rags, lying still. Jamini stands beside her, like a statue.

  At the sound of your footsteps, the bag of bones will slowly move. Niranjan? My child! You are back at last! You have come back to your poor wreck of an aunt! You know, I have been waiting, keeping death at bay, knowing that you will be here someday. You won’t slip away again like last time?

  Mani will be about to say something but you will interrupt him by blurting out: No, I promise you I won’t.

  You will not look up but you will feel the stunned silence in the room. You could not have looked up even if you wanted to, for your eyes are rivetted to the sockets of her old, unseeing eyes. Two tongues of dark will emerge from the empty sockets and lick every inch of your body. To feel, to know. You will feel those moments falling like dew into the vast seas of time.

  You will hear the old woman saying. My son, I knew you, would come. That is why I am still in this house of the dead, counting the days. The sheer effort to speak will leave her panting. You will look up at Jamini. You will feel that somewhere behind the mask of her face, something was slowly melting away, and it will not be long before the foundation of a vow—a vow made up of endless despair, a vow taken against life and fate—will slowly give way.

  She will speak again: I am sure Jamini will make you happy, my son. There is none like her, even though I, her mother, should say so. I am old and broken down, and often out of my senses. I try her beyond endurance. But does she ever protest? Not once. This graveyard of a place, where you will not find a man even if you search ten houses, is like me, more dead than alive. And yet, Jamini survives, and manages everything.

  Even though you may want to, you will dare not lift your eyes should someone discover the tears that have welled there. The old woman will whisper: Promise me you will marry Jamini. If I do not have your promise, I will know no peace even in death.

  Your voice will be heavy. You will softly mumble: I will not fail you. I promise.

  And soon it will be late afternoon. The bullock cart will appear once again to take you back. One by one, the three of you will get inside. As it is about to leave, Jamini will look at you with those sorrowful eyes of hers and softly remark: You are forgetting your tackle.

  You will smile and reply: Let it be. I missed the fish this time—but they won’t escape next time.

  Jamini will not turn her eyes away. Her tired face will softly light up with a smile, tender and grateful. Like the white clouds of autumn, it will drift across your heart and fill you with a strange and beautiful warmth, an unexplained happiness.

  The cart will amble on its way. You will not feel cramped this time; nor will the monotonous creak of the wheels bother you. Your friends will discuss how a hundred years ago, the scourge of malaria, like a relentless flood, carried off Telenapota and left it here, in this forgotten no-man’s land, just beside the frontier of the world of the living. You will not be listening; your mind will be drifting elsewhere. You will only listen to your own heartbeats echoing the words: I will come back, I will come back.

  Even after you get back home to the city, with its hectic pace and harsh lights, the memory of Telenapota will shine bright in your mind like a star that is distant and yet very close. A few days will pass with petty problems, the usual traumas of the commonplace. And even if a slight mist begins to form in your mind, you will not be aware of it. Then, just as you have crossed the fences, prepared to go back to Telenapota, you will suddenly feel the shivering touch of the oncoming fever.

  Soon the terrible headache and the temperature will be on you and you will lie down under a lot of blankets, trying unsuccessfully to ward off the fever or at least come to terms with it. The thermometer will register 105 degrees Fahrenheit and the last thing you hear before passing out will be the doctor’s verdict. Malaria.

  It will be many days before you are able to walk out of the house and bask in the sun, weak and exhausted by the long fever. Meanwhile, unknown to yourself, your mind will have undergone many changes, the inevitable transformations. Telenapota will become a vague, indistinct dream, like the memory of a star that has fallen. Was there ever such a place? You will not be sure. The face that was tired and serene. The eyes that were lost and lonely, hiding an unknown sorrow. Were they real? Or were they, like the shadows of Telenapota’s ruins, just another part of a phantom dream?

  Telenapota, discovered for one brief moment, will be lost again in the timeless dark of night.

  Translated from Bengali by Pritish Nandy

  Amrita Pritam

  The Weed

  Angoori was the new bride of the old servant of my neighbour’s neighbour’s neighbour. Every bride is new, for that matter; but she was new in a different way: the second wife of her husband who could not be called new because he had already drunk once at the conjugal well. As such, the prerogatives of being new went to Angoori only. This realization was further accentuated when one considered the five years that passed before they could consummate their union.

  About six years ago Prabhati had gone home to cremate his first wife. When this was done, Angoorit’s father approached him and took his wet towel, wringing it dry, a symbolic gesture of wiping away the tears of grief that had wet the towel. There never was a man, though, who cried enough to wet a yard-and-a-half of calico. It had got wet only after Prabhati’s bath. The simple act of drying the tear- stained towel on the part of a person with a nubile daughter was as much as to say, ‘I give you my daughter to take the place of the one who died. Don’t cry anymore. I’ve even dried your wet towel.’

  This is how Angoori married Prabhati. However, their union was postponed for five years, for two reasons: her tender age, and her mother’s paralytic attack. When, at last, Prabhati was invited to take his bride away, it seemed he would not be able to, for his employer was reluctant to feed another mouth from his kitchen. But when Prabhati told him that his new wife could keep her own house, the employer agreed.

  At first, Angoori kept purdah from both men and women. But the veil soon started to shrink until it covered only her hair, as was becoming to an orthodox Hindu woman. She was a delight to both ear and eye. A laughter in the tinkling of her hundred ankle-bells, and a thousand bells in her laughter.

  ‘What are you wearing Angoori?’

  ‘An anklet. Isn’t it pretty?’

  ‘And what’s on your toe?’

  ‘A ring.’

  ‘And on your arm?’

  ‘A bracelet.’

  ‘What do they call what’s on your forehead?’

  ‘They call it aliband

  ‘Nothing on your waist today, Angoori?’

  ‘It’s too heavy. Tomorrow I’ll wear it. Today, no necklace either. See! The clasp is broken. Tomorrow I’ll go to the city to get a new clasp . . . and buy a nose-pin. I had a big nosering. But my mother-in-law kept it.’

  Angoori was very proud of her silver jewellery, elated by the mere touch of her trinkets. Everything she did seemed to set them off to maximum effect.

  The weather became hot with the turn of the season. Angoori too must have felt it in her hut where she passed a good part of the day, for now she stayed out more. There were a few huge neem trees in front of my house; underneath them an old well that nobody used except an occasional construction worker. The spilt water made several puddles, keeping the atmosphere around the well cool. She often sat near the well to relax.

  ‘What are you
reading, bibi?’ Angoori asked me one day when I sat under a neem tree reading.

  ‘Want to read it?’

  ‘I don’t know reading.’

  ‘Want to learn?’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Why not? What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s a sin for women to read!’

  ‘And what about men?’

  ‘For them, it’s not a sin.’

  ‘Who told you this nonsense?’

  ‘I just know it.’

  ‘I read. I must be sinning.’

  ‘For city women, it’s no sin. It is for village women.’

  We both laughed at this remark. She had not learned to question all that she was told to believe. I thought that if she found peace in her convictions, who was I to question them?

  Her body redeemed her dark complexion, an intense sense of ecstasy always radiating from it, a resilient sweetness. They say a woman’s body is like a lump of dough, some women have the looseness of under-kneaded dough while others have the clinging plasticity of leavened dough. Rarely does a woman have a body that can be equated to rightly kneaded dough, a baker’s pride. Angoori’s body belonged to this category, her rippling muscles impregnated with the metallic resilience of a coiled spring. I felt her face, arms, breasts, legs with my eyes and experienced a profound langour. I thought of Prabhati: old, short, loose-jawed, a man whose stature and angularity would be the death of Euclid. Suddenly a funny idea struck me: Angoori was the dough covered by Prabhati. He was her napkin, not her taster. I felt a laugh welling up inside me, but I checked it for fear that Angoori would sense what I was laughing about. I asked her how marriages are arranged where she came from.

  ‘A girl, when she’s five or six, adores someone’s feet. He is the husband.’

  ‘How does she know it?’

  ‘Her father takes money and flowers and puts them at his feet.’

  ‘That’s the father adoring, not the girl.’

  ‘He does it for the girl. So it’s the girl herself.’

  ‘But the girl has never seen him before!’

  ‘Yes, girls don’t see.’

  ‘Not a single girl ever sees her future husband!’

  ‘No . . .,’ she hesitated. After a long, pensive pause, she added, ‘Those in love . . . they see them.’

  ‘Do girls in your village have love-affairs?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Those in love, they don’t sin?’ I remembered her observation regarding education for women.

  ‘They don’t. See, what happens is that a man makes the girl eat the weed and then she starts loving him.’

  ‘Which weed?’

  ‘The wild one.’

  ‘Doesn’t the girl know that she has been given the weed?’

  ‘No, he gives it to her in a paan. After that, nothing satisfies her but to be with him, her man. I know. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’

  ‘Whom did you see?’

  ‘A friend; she was older than me.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘She went crazy. Ran away with him to the city.’

  ‘How do you know it was because of the weed?’

  ‘What else could it be? Why would she leave her parents. He brought her many things from the city: clothes, trinkets, sweets.’

  ‘Where does this weed come in?’

  ‘In the sweets: otherwise how could she love him?’

  ‘Love can come in other ways. No other way here?’

  ‘No other way. What her parents hated was that she was that way.’

  ‘Have you seen the weed?’

  ‘No, they bring it from a far country. My mother warned me not to take paan or sweets from anyone. Men put the weed in them.’

  ‘You were very wise. How come your friend ate it?’

  ‘To make herself suffer,’ she said sternly. The next moment her face clouded, perhaps in remembering her friend. ‘Crazy. She went crazy, the poor thing,’ she said sadly. ‘Never combed her hair, singing all night . . .’

  ‘What did she sing?’

  ‘I don’t know. They all sing when they eat the weed. Cry too.’

  The conversation was becoming a little too much to take, so I retired.

  I found her sitting under the neem tree one day in a profoundly abstracted mood. Usually one could hear Angoori coming to the well; her ankle-bells would announce her approach. They were silent that day.

  ‘What’s the matter, Angoori?’

  She gave me a blank look and then, recovering a little, said, ‘Teach me reading, bibi.’

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Teach me to write my name.’

  ‘Why do you want to write? To write letters? To whom?’

  She did not answer, but was once again lost in her thoughts.

  ‘Won’t you be sinning?’ I asked, trying to draw her out of her mood. She would not respond. I went in for an afternoon nap. When I came out again in the evening, she was still there singing sadly to herself. When she heard me approaching, she turned around and stopped abruptly. She sat with hunched shoulders because of the chill in the evening breeze.

  ‘You sing well, Angoori.’ I watched her great effort to turn back the tears and spread a pale smile across her lips.

  ‘I don’t know singing.’

  ‘But you do, Angoori!’

  ‘This was the . . .’

  ‘The song your friend used to sing.’ I completed the sentence for her.

  ‘I heard it from her.’

  ‘Sing it for me.’

  She started to recite the words. ‘Oh, it’s just about the time of year for change. Four months winter, four months summer, four months rain! . . .’

  ‘Not like that. Sing it for me,’ I asked. She wouldn’t, but continued with the words:

  Four months of winter reign in my heart;

  My heart shivers, O my love.

  Four months of summer, wind shimmers in the sun.

  Four months come the rains; clouds tremble in the sky.

  ‘Angoori!’ I said loudly. She looked as if in a trance, as if she had eaten the weed. I felt like shaking her by the shoulders. Instead, I took her by the shoulders and asked if she had been eating regularly. She had not; she cooked for herself only, since Prabhati ate at his master’s. ‘Did you cook today?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Did you have tea in the morning?’

  ‘Tea? No milk today.’

  ‘Why no milk today?’

  ‘I didn’t get any. Ram Tara . . .’

  ‘Fetches the milk for you?’ I added. She nodded.

  Ram Tara was the night-watchman. Before Angoori married Prabhati, Ram Tara used to get a cup of tea at our place at the end of his watch before retiring on his cot near the well. After Angoori’s arrival, he made his tea at Prabhati’s. He, Angoori and Prabhati would all have tea together sitting around the fire. Three days ago Ram Tara went to his village for a visit.

  ‘You haven’t had tea for three days?’ I asked. She nodded again. ‘And you haven’t eaten, I suppose?’ She did not speak. Apparently, if she had been eating, it was as good as not eating at all.

  I remembered Ram Tara: good-looking, quick-limbed, full of jokes. He had a way of talking with smiles trembling faintly at the corner of his lips.

  ‘Angoori?’

  ‘Could it be the weed?’

  Tears flowed down her face in two rivulets, gathering into two tiny puddles at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘Curse on me!’ she started in a voice trembling with tears, ‘I never took sweets from him . . . not a betel even . . . but tea . . .’ She could not finish. Her words were drowned in a fast stream of tears.

  Translated from Punjabi by Raj Gill

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Nostalgia

  On a cold, snowless evening in December, Dr Manny Patel, a psychiatric resident at a state hospital in Queens, New York, looked through the storefront window of the ‘New Taj Mahal’ and for the first time in thirteen years f
elt the papercut-sharp pain of desire. The woman behind the counter was about twenty, twenty-one, with the buttery- gold skin and the round voluptuous bosom of a Bombay film star.

  Dr Patel had driven into Manhattan on an impulse. He had put in one of those afternoons at the hospital that made him realize it was only the mysteries of metabolism that kept him from unprofessional outbursts. Mr Horowitz, a 319- pound readmitted schizophrenic, had convinced himself that he was Noel Coward and demanded respect from the staff. In less than half-an-hour, Mr Horowitz had sung twenty songs, battered a therapy aide’s head against a wall, unbuttoned another patient’s blouse in order to bite off her nipples, struck a Jamaican nurse across the face and lunged at Dr Patel, calling him in exquisite English, ‘Paki scum.’ The nurse asked that Mr Horowitz be placed in the seclusion room, and Dr Patel had agreed. The seclusion order had to be reviewed by a doctor every two hours, and Mr Horowitz’s order was renewed by Dr Chuong who had come in two hours late for work.

  Dr Patel did not like to lock grown men and women in a seven-by-nine room, especially one without padding on its walls. Mr Horowitz had screamed and sung for almost six hours. Dr Patel had increased his dosage of Haldol. Mr Horowitz was at war with himself and there was no truce except through psychopharmacology and Dr Patel was suspicious of the side effects of such cures. The Haldol had calmed the prisoner. Perhaps it was unrealistic to want more.

  He was grateful that there were so many helpless, mentally disabled people (crazies, his wife called them) in New York state, and that they afforded him and Dr Chuong and even the Jamaican nurse a nice living. But he resented being called a ‘Paki scum’. Not even a sick man like Mr Horowitz had the right to do that.

  He had chosen to settle in the US. He was not one for nostalgia; he was not an expatriate but a patriot. His wife, Camille, who had grown up in Camden, New Jersey, did not share his enthusiasm for America, and had made fun of him when he voted for President Reagan. Camille was not a hypocrite; she was a predictable paradox. She could cut him down for wanting to move to a 300,000-dollar house with an atrium in the dining hall, and for blowing 62,000 on a red Porsche, while she boycotted South African wines and non-union lettuce. She spent guiltless money at Balducci’s and on fitness equipment. So he enjoyed his house, his car, so what? He wanted things. He wanted things for Camille and for their son. He loved his family, and his acquisitiveness was entwined with love.