As Deoli platform receded, I decided that one day I would have to break journey there, spend a day in the town, make enquiries, and find the girl who had stolen my heart with nothing but a look from her dark, impatient eyes.
With this thought I consoled myself throughout my last term in college. I went to Dehra again in the summer and when, in the early hours of the morning, the night train drew into Deoli station, I looked up and down the platform for signs of the girl, knowing I wouldn’t find her but hoping just the same.
Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to break journey at Deoli and spend a day there. (If it was all fiction or a film, I reflected, I would have got down and cleaned up the mystery and reached a suitable ending for the whole thing). I think I was afraid to do this. I was afraid of discovering what really happened to the girl Perhaps, she was no longer in Deoli, perhaps she was married, perhaps she had fallen ill . . .
In the last few years I have passed through Deoli many times, and I always look out of the carriage window half expecting to see the same unchanged face smiling up at me. I wonder what happens in Deoli, behind the station walls. But I will never break my journey there. It may spoil my game. I prefer to keep hoping and dreaming, and looking out of the window up and down that lonely platform, waiting for the girl with the baskets.
I never break my journey at Deoli, but I pass through as often as I can.
Phoenix Fled
ATTIA HOSAIN
Everyone who lived in the village and the hamlets nearby knew her. In their minds they associated her deathless years with the existence of their village. Both were facts accepted without question since the birth of consciousness.
She was so old she had become static in time, could never be older, had surely never been young. Her dry wrinkled skin was loose around the impatient skeleton. It enclosed her eyes in folds, hiding the yellowed cornea surrounding lustreless pupils. Yet there was vision enough to make her unconscious of its loss.
She used her withered hands for feeble grasping, her crooked fingers for uneasy touching, her bent legs for unsteady shuffling, and not her eyes but time’s familiarity for seeing and recognizing her changeless, circumscribed world.
Through the years the mud of the walls had not changed, the same wooden arches supported the same sloping thatched roof, the same doll’s house sliced off a corner of the small courtyard. And the heavy wooden door leading outside cracked the same warning as it opened and the curtain of matting was lifted.
This was her complete world as she lay in the sun on her string bed—the walls, the arches, the thatch, the courtyard, the doll’s house, the curtain, the door to the world outside.
That world had changed, quickening its step in noisy haste. As she lay on her bed, shrivelled lips moving in constant prayer, she heard the impatient sound of a car horn, and the distant desolate screech of an engine’s whistle.
Sometimes that alien world stepped through the creaking door. A grandson, a granddaughter, a visitor from the city lifted the curtain. They were self-conscious as they bent towards her for her embrace, lowering their eyes, covering their heads, denying the world that violated her principles, where men and women walked and talked together. Her eyes were protectively dim to new stimuli, her ears dull to new sounds.
Yet they were bright and sharp when the great-grandchildren, the little ones, raced through the door. Then there was no conflict of worlds, they shared one created of their bright young love, not flat one-dimensional but given depth and form and colour by their curiosity, amusement and repulsion.
‘How old, how old—and don’t say it loudly—how ugly is Old Granny.’
They would flap the loose hanging skin of her arm, lie on her lap and look, when she chewed an invisible cud, at the fascinating movement of her chin toward her nose, just missing it, then dropping down to begin again its upward drive. They would suddenly scream with high clear laughter, whirl around the bed, somersault to the floor and shout:
‘Can you see us, Granny?’
‘Of course, of course. An elephant has tiny eyes, but it can pick a needle off the ground.’
‘Can it, can it really? Tell us the story of the Elephant and the Needle, Granny.’
When she walked, her back a broken spring, bent to the ground, they laughed.
‘What are you looking for, Granny?’
‘Looking at the ground into which I must go one day to look for the treasure that is buried there.’
‘Tell us of the buried treasure, Granny. Tell us a story.’
That was their invisible bond, the common language they talked in their own private world. The daughters and sons, the granddaughters and grandsons stood outside it, deaf to its sounds, wrapped in their impatience and hostility, grudging dutiful affection to a parasitic old woman whom time refused to drop into releasing oblivion.
The visible bond between the old woman and the children was the doll’s house. They loved it with the same passion. The children hung coloured glass globes in the tiny arches, dug twigs and grass into its small courtyard. Their gaily dressed rag dolls were propped on string beds under the thatch. She cleaned its mud walls with wet clay, her fingers following each curve and crevice with familiar affection. Their interest in it flamed high and burned low, but hers was as steady as her hold on life.
‘Tell us a story, Granny.’
She dipped into the deep well of her memories. She had no need to stretch in her effortless reaching to draw its constant treasure. The live past was always happily with her, the present an irritating dying burden.
The fly that sat on her nose a moment before was as forgotten as the reflex brushing it away, but her nose still twitched with the itching of the one that had sat on it seventy years ago.
Her mother said, ‘Don’t sit there making such faces. The wind will blow on you and set your face for ever in that grimace. Kill the fly with your fan, can’t you?’
Her mind telescoped life to make it possible for her weak old age to be sustained by the strength of her childhood. She was happy with the children, because she lived in their time.
The youngest one screwed up her face. ‘Granny, look at me, listen to me. I can whistle.’
‘Don’t do that or the cold wind will blow on you and set your face in that grimace. Don’t whistle or the soldiers will get you.’
‘Soldiers? Which soldiers?’
‘The red-faced ones, like monkeys in red coats. They whistle to bad women. No village woman is safe when they pass by.’ Her aged body felt the fear of young girls when old women whispered:
‘No woman is safe, no girl is safe.’
‘Oh, Granny,’ laughed the children. ‘How funny you are. The soldiers don’t wear red coats, their clothes are dirty. And there are black-faced monkeys too. And they did not hurt us. They laughed and threw us sweets from their lorries.’
‘Don’t eat their impure poison,’ she scolded. Then past memories lashed her present security. ‘Why,’ she quavered, ‘why did the soldiers come to the village?’
The children did not know, their elders did not care to tell. They could not find time from their own fears to reason why violence had changed its face, why they feared the departure of the soldiers as once she had feared their arrival.
The soldiers had driven into dust-clouds that billowed thick over the fields, thinning into an emptiness over distances that held a threat.
She did not feel it nor did the children, but the others lived heavily under its weight. The familiar stillness of their surroundings was an accomplice to their solace-seeking minds, as to hers. It could not come to them from out of known distances, to this village, these huts, themselves, the bestiality that was real only to their fear. The village lived uneasily, the breath of its life quickened or caught when some outsider brought chill confirmation. Only Old Granny who had survived the threats of too many years refused to believe in its finality.
When the dread moment was upon them naked of their disguising hopes, they remembered only the urgency of their
frenzied need to escape. Terror silenced the women’s wails, tore their thoughts from possessions left behind; it smothered the children’s whimpering and drove all words from men’s tongues but Hurry, Hurry.
She refused to go with them. Her mind in its pendulum swing from their infecting fear to incredulity that neighbours should turn murderers rested always at one point. ‘I am old, I am feeble. I shall slow your flight. It is the children you must save. Besides,’ she added, drawing conviction from her years, ‘you will return. In the Mutiny we returned and our fears were more cruel than reality. Take care of yourselves, give my blessings to everyone in the Casbah. It is long since I went there, not since the wedding of . . .’
She sat on the string bed and looked at the door until all movement had ceased in the curtain before the creaking door now silent. Soon the outside air was stilled of all woeful noises. She looked around the disordered house, its beloved familiarity ebbing away. Near the doll’s house sprawled a rag doll. She shuffled to it and propped it carefully in its proper place. Then she waited in silence, and suddenly whimpered like a lost child until she slept.
The creaking of the door woke her. She could not see who came, how many. She smelt the flaming thatch, and as shadows came nearer across the courtyard she tried to sit up.
‘Mind,’ she scolded, pointing her bony finger, ‘mind you do not step on the doll’s house.’
Games at Twilight
ANITA DESAI
It was still too hot to play outdoors. They had had their tea, they had been washed and had their hair brushed, and after the long day of confinement in the house that was not cool but at least a protection from the sun, the children strained to get out. Their faces were red and bloated with the effort, but their mother would not open the door; everything was still curtained and shuttered in a way that stifled the children, made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun and feel the air, they would choke.
‘Please, Ma, please,’ they begged. ‘We’ll play in the veranda and porch, we won’t go a step out of the porch.’
‘You will, I know you will, and then—’
‘No, we won’t, we won’t,’ they wailed so horrendously that she actually let down the bolt of the front door so that they burst out like seeds from a crackling, over-ripe pod into the veranda, with such wild, maniacal yells that she retreated to her bath and the shower of talcum powder and the fresh sari that were to help her face the summer evening.
They faced the afternoon. It was too hot. Too bright. The white walls of the veranda glared stridently in the sun. The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid balloons. The garden outside was like a tray made of beaten brass, flattened out on the red gravel and the stony soil in all shades of metal—aluminium, tin, copper and brass. No life stirred at this arid time of day—the birds still drooped, like dead fruit, in the papery tents of the tree; some squirrels lay limp on the wet earth under the garden tap. The out-door dog lay stretched as if dead on the veranda mat, his paws and ears and tail all reaching out like dying travellers in search of water. He rolled his eyes at the children—two white marbles rolling in the purple sockets, begging for sympathy—and attempted to lift his tail in a wag but could not. It only twitched and lay still.
Then, perhaps roused by the shrieks of the children, a band of parrots suddenly fell out of the eucalyptus tree, tumbled frantically in the still, sizzling air, then sorted themselves out into battle formation and streaked away across the white sky.
The children, too, felt released. They began tumbling, shoving, pushing against each other, frantic to start. Start what? Start their business. The business of the children’s day which is play.
‘Let’s play hide-and-seek.’
‘Who’ll be It?’
‘You be It.’
‘Why should I? You be.’
‘You’re the eldest.’
‘That doesn’t mean—’
The shoves became harder. Some kicked out. The motherly Mira intervened. She pulled the boys roughly apart. There was a tearing sound of cloth but it was lost in the heavy panting and angry grumbling and no one paid attention to the small sleeve hanging loosely off a shoulder.
‘Make a circle, make a circle!’ she shouted, firmly pulling and pushing till a kind of vague circle was formed. ‘Now clap!’ she roared and, clapping, they all chanted in melancholy unison: ‘Dip, dip, dip—my blue ship,’ and every now and then one or the other saw he was safe by the way his hands fell at the crucial moment—palm, or back of hand on palm—and dropped out of the circle with a yell and a jump of relief and jubilation.
Raghu was It. He started to protest, to cry, ‘You cheated-Mira cheated-Anu cheated—’ but it was too late, the others had all already streaked away. There was no one to hear when he called out, ‘Only in the veranda—the porch—Ma said—Ma said to stay in the porch!’ No one had stopped to listen, all he saw were their brown legs flashing through the dusty shrubs, scrambling up brick walls, leaping over compost heaps and hedges, and then the porch stood empty in the purple shade of the bougainvillea and the garden was as empty as before; even the limp squirrels had whisked away, leaving everything gleaming, brassy and bare.
Only small Manu suddenly reappeared, as if he had dropped out of an invisible cloud or from a bird’s claw, and stood for a moment in the centre of the yellow lawn, chewing his finger and near to tears as he heard Raghu shouting, with his head pressed against the veranda wall, ‘Eighty-three, eighty-five, eighty-nine, ninety . . .’ and then made off in a panic, half of him wanting to fly north, the other half counselling south. Raghu turned just in time to see the flash of his white shorts and the uncertain skittering of his red sandals, and charged after him with such a blood-curdling yell that Manu stumbled over the hosepipe, fell into its rubber coils and lay there weeping, ‘I won’t be It—you have to find them all—all—All!’
I know I have to, idiot,’ Raghu said, superciliously kicking him with his toe. ‘You’re dead,’ he said with satisfaction, licking the beads of perspiration off his upper lip, and then stalked off in search of worthier prey, whistling spiritedly so that the hiders should hear and tremble.
Ravi heard the whistling and picked his nose in a panic, trying to find comfort by burrowing the finger deep-deep into that soft tunnel. He felt himself too exposed, sitting on an upturned flower pot behind the garage. Where could he burrow? He could run around the garage if he heard Raghu come—around and around and around—but he hadn’t much faith in his short legs when matched against Raghu’s long, hefty, hairy footballer legs. Ravi had a frightening glimpse of them as Raghu combed the hedge of crotons and hibiscus, trampling delicate ferns underfoot as he did so. Ravi looked about him desperately, swallowing a small ball of snot in his fear.
The garage was locked with a great heavy lock to which the driver had the key in his room, hanging from a nail on the wall under his work-shirt. Ravi had peeped in and seen him still sprawling on his string cot in his vest and striped underpants, the hair on his chest and the hair in his nose shaking with the vibrations of his phlegm-obstructed snores. Ravi had wished he were tall enough, big enough to reach the key on the nail, but it was impossible, beyond his reach for years to come. He had sidled away and sat dejectedly on the flower pot. That at least was cut to his own size.
But next to the garage was another shed with a big green door. Also locked. No one even knew who had the key to the lock. That shed wasn’t opened more than once a year when Ma turned out all the old broken bits of furniture and rolls of matting and leaking buckets, and the white anthills were broken and swept away and Flit sprayed into the spider webs and rat holes so that the whole operation was like the looting of a poor, ruined and conquered city. The green leaves of the door sagged. They were nearly off their rusty hinges. The hinges were large and made a small gap between the door and the walls only just large enough for rats, dogs and, possibly, Ravi to slip through.
Ravi had never cared to enter such a dark and depressing mortuary of defunct household goods seething with such unspeakable and alarming animal life but, as Raghu’s whistling grew angrier and sharper and his crashing and storming in the hedge wilder, Ravi suddenly slipped off the flower pot and through the crack and was gone. He chuckled aloud with astonishment at his own temerity so that Raghu came out of the hedge, stood silent with his hands on his hips, listening, and finally shouted, ‘I heard you! I’m coming! Got you,’ and came charging round the garage only to find the upturned flower pot, the yellow dust, the crawling of white ants in a mud-hill against the closed shed door—nothing. Snarling he bent to pick up a stick and went off, whacking it against the garage and shed walls as if to beat out his prey.
Ravi shook, then shivered with delight, with self-congratulation. Also with fear. It was dark, spooky in the shed. It had a muffled smell, as of graves. Ravi had once got locked into the linen cupboard and sat there weeping for half-an-hour before he was rescued. But at least that had been a familiar place, and even smelt pleasantly of starch, laundry and, reassuringly, of his mother. But the shed smelt of rats, anthills, dust and spider webs. Also of less definable, less recognizable horrors. And it was dark. Except for the white-hot cracks along the door, there was no light. The roof was very low. Although Ravi was small, he felt as if he could reach up and touch it with his fingertips. But he didn’t stretch. He hunched himself into a ball so as not to bump into anything, touch or feel anything. What might there not be to touch him and feel him as he stood there, trying to see in the dark? Something cold, or slimy—like a snake. Snakes! He leapt up as Raghu whacked the wall with his stick—then, quickly realizing what it was, felt almost relieved to hear Raghu, hear his stick. It made him feel protected.
But Raghu soon moved away. There wasn’t a sound once his footsteps had gone around the garage and disappeared. Ravi stood frozen inside the shed. Then he shivered all over. Something had tickled the back of this neck. It took him a while to pick up the courage to lift his hand and explore. It was an insect—perhaps a spider—exploring him. He squashed it and wondered how many more creatures were watching him, waiting to reach out and touch him, the stranger.
Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1 Page 10
