by Sara Banerji
She bought some mangoes and got into the car, the smells of hot leather and mangoes, the drains of Ampukur and petrol, the dung of the roadside grazing goats, all mingling together in a purée of stink that she would remember for ever.
As she sat and prepared to turn the key, through the mass of faces pressed to the window she saw Yudhishthira.
He came towards the car casually, not naked or ghee-smeared, dunged or yellow robed. He was not bald or flowing haired or long bearded. He looked, she thought, almost exactly as he had done on the day he’d come to meet her parents, except that he now wore glasses. He had on his cream silk kurta and pyjama. On his dark skin was a sheen like the gloss on a healthy horse. His face looked smooth and serious. He was as thin, as tall, as straight, as dark.
Because Hermione had waited, searched and hoped so long, now that she really saw him she could not take it in and nothing happened to her heart at all.
She just sat back against the scorching leather and watched as Yudhishthira came under the mango trees, now in sun, now shade, now dappled with the reflections of leaves. She felt herself tremble a little when he leant his head into the window but no emotion seemed to accompany the purely physical tremor.
Without smiling Yudhishthira said, ‘I remember how much you loved langras …’
Feelings did rush through her then, but what surprised her, after so much waiting, so much hoping, was that they were not joy or relief but rage. Almost stifled by the smell of mangoes, the close-packed children’s bodies and the wave of fury that passed over her, she said in a dry cross croak, as though accusing, ‘You are wearing spectacles.’
‘So I am,’ he smiled, pushing them back against his nose bridge with his index finger.
She did not know why his glasses should have provoked such aggression in her. Perhaps it was because he had failed her by not remaining exactly as she remembered him; or perhaps it was because if he could have afforded glasses then he could have afforded her as well, for the glasses implied a life style of books, newspapers, postal communications.
He wore silk. He had good shoes on his feet. The shirt at his throat was closed with little gold buttons. She felt that he had accepted the life style he desired and that it had not included her.
During the nineteen years since he had gone away she had often thought of what she would say to him if they met, but she had not expected it to occur in this public way. Adults were gathering as well as children by this time, calling to each other from house to house, shouting to friends in fields who at once abandoned their oxen and ploughs and came running to see. It was as if the intense and furious passion the sight of Yudhishthira had finally aroused in her was a tangible perfume that had wafted into the little huts like a signal.
Not one of them probably spoke more English than, ‘Good morning good night!’ chanted mockingly and with incomprehension, but from her tone and the scarlet colour that had risen into her face Hermione felt sure they understood what she was feeling and laughed at her.
‘Get in,’ she hissed to Yudhishthira, shaking the car door.
He looked at her and said, ‘I’m busy.’
‘Busy?’ Hermione almost shrieked, her voice coming out on a high note that sent a ripple of voyeuristic pleasure among the watchers. She knew she was behaving badly but because of the years of pent-up longing could not stop. ‘You walk out on me and when we meet again after all these years you announce that you are too busy to explain.’
‘I wrote a letter,’ he murmured, moving his body restlessly. ‘Did you not get it?’
She couldn’t respond in any proper way for she felt too choked with desperate emotion.
‘What sort of “busy” could you possibly be in this stinking place?’ She wanted to be cruel, to hurt him, to penetrate his imperviousness.
‘Hush, Hermione,’ said Yudhishthira. He drew his flowing silk clothes against his body, softly he got in the car and shut the door.
‘Why? Why did you go off and leave me? Not even say goodbye?’
The children nudged each other tittering, not understanding but sensing, like people watching a good film, that this was a crucial moment.
‘But didn’t you see?’ murmured Yudhishthira, frowning as he tried to summon up the right words with which to explain.
Before he could speak again, Hermione burst out, ‘I thought I was pregnant!’
‘Ah!’ cried Yudhishthira, with a sound like pain. And he caught at his chest with both hands as though trying to keep a struggling bird from breaking loose. ‘Hugh was right for you and I was not.’
‘You were the one that was right for me!’ shouted Hermione. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t pregnant by you, after all.’
She had had nineteen years of pretending and holding her body back from sensual delight because she had not been allowed to experience it with Yudhishthira.
There had been times when Hermione, shutting her eyes and pretending Hugh was Yudhishthira, had toppled on the edges of desire, but as the years passed, she had found ways of preventing herself from progressing any further, as though she was keeping everything for the day she met the yogi again, and could complete what had been begun in the little window-barred Calcutta room.
‘Never?’ cried Yudhishthira when Hermione tried to explain. ‘Never in all your years and with three sons?’ Also remembering the little room with the barred window he said sadly, ‘Not then even?’
She shook her head.
The car rocked like a ship buffeted by hard waves as the women craned to see in and the children pressed their noses against the windows, leaving smears. Suddenly Hermione’s anger rose again. Pointing into the hemming crowd she demanded, ‘Which?’
Yudhishthira’s forehead crinkled, bewildered.
Waving a finger that must have appeared accusatory, for the children and even the women in the background shifted out of the way, Hermione shouted, ‘Which of these little huts is your home?’ She tried to thrust contempt into the words but somehow felt she had only managed to convey longing. ‘Which is your wife? Which are your children?’
Yudhishthira looked down at his hands. She saw they were shaking as though great emotion was raging inside him, belying his calm exterior, and she heard him sigh. At last he looked up at her and said quietly, ‘I am a yogi, Hermione.’
Then, as though having made some sort of final decision, he sat upright, drew back his shoulders, and looking ahead through the windscreen said in a sharp decisive voice, ‘Right. Drive on.’
She gazed at him blankly, her hands resting on the steering wheel, shivering from the exhaustion of anger. Children swarmed over the bonnet of the car, pressed against the bumper. There came a wrenching jerk as though some part of the car was in the process of being torn off. Winding down the window, Yudhishthira leant out and, clapping his hands, shouted something which caused a slow and slight withdrawal.
‘Drive ahead now, Hermione, please,’ he said.
Having no idea what his intentions were, but seeing a small gap which might vanish in a moment, she slowly put the car in gear and began to move gently through the crowd of children. She drove blindly, following his instructions, and after a while began telling him of the months of worried waiting and wondering that had preceded the birth of her first child.
‘My whole system was taut with anxiety. Suppose the baby was yours and was …’
‘Black,’ said Yudhishthira, which made her laugh suddenly. He added very earnestly, ‘Actually nobody in the whole world is black.’
‘Oh?’
‘And nobody white.’ He said no more, only giving her directions, ‘Keep straight on. Turn down this little track here. Follow the tamarind avenue.’ Green Bengal – with the summer floods still subsiding, trees bearing fruit, verdant flushes of young rice standing throat high in their acres of bounded brown water, green parakeets wheeling, screeching and plundering, baby goats battling with joyful gluttony – it all poured past as Hermione’s Ford chuntered through the countryside.
Numbly she
drove over bridges and past rocks on which washermen beat clothes, through herds of panniered donkeys, round the sides of fields of cauliflowers, and the whole of her awareness was filled by the long, quiet, incense-perfumed man at her side, who, from the day she had first heard his voice in the tea shop, had filled her life.
‘I went into labour less than nine months after we were married,’ she explained. ‘Edward is a very nervous person. Probably because when he was in the womb I was always afraid, dreading the day of his birth.’
Yudhishthira gave a small subdued groan but said nothing.
‘I was horribly aware as the child emerged,’ she spoke in such a low voice that he had to lean towards her to hear, ‘I lay helpless, with all these people around me and I tried to hide him with my knees, tried to delay the moment when they found out. What could I have done, Yudhishthira? Where would I and this newborn Indian child have gone to? How could we have survived?’
He was listening attentively.
‘You can imagine my parents, my mother especially. What she would have done, said? How she would have made the child feel?’
Yudhishthira murmured in a way that made his understanding clear.
‘It was blond! I wept from relief.’ She was silent for a little while, then added, ‘And I hated it for not being yours. I realized as soon as I saw that pale skin, that fair head that I had hoped all along it was yours.’
Following Yudhishthira’s instructions Hermione turned up the drive and saw sunshine glowing through the leaves of banana trees.
The house was surrounded by a great dark pond and stood, too tall, too thin, in too small a piece of land, reminding Hermione of a woman whose skirts had been cut away.
‘My parents owned all this,’ said Yudhishthira, waving his hand around to villages, dirt roads and spilling rivers as far as the eye could see. ‘But the house is all that’s left now. Not much of that either,’ he smiled.
‘Your parents?’
‘Both dead,’ he said, speaking reluctantly.
‘Oh,’ she said, and suspected she did not really want to know more.
‘In prison,’ He looked bleakly round at the little bit of India that still belonged to him. ‘They were sent there when I was at college. The British. My parents were fighting for Indian independence.’ He added tiredly, ‘I gave the land to the peasant farmers. I didn’t need it.’
The bright green leaves and even brighter green of parakeets flying among them was so sharp it stung the eyes and Yudhishthira brushed the back of his hand across his face before greeting an old man, black skinned, shrivelled, wearing only a lungi and a sacred thread.
Then he turned to Hermione again, ‘He is Baba and has been with my family since my father was a boy. He would not go when the others did.’
Baba lit a smoky fire in the garden in a clay-lined bucket, and the air slowly filled with the surprisingly aromatic smell of cow-dung fuel burning. Everything in the meal he prepared for them came from Yudhishthira’s pond and garden: lotus roots, small fish, roasted chickpeas, fresh coconuts, fat purple banana flowers and squat pink bananas. To drink, they had the cool juice of green coconuts and clear water hauled by Baba’s wife from a well in the yard. They sat on a grass mat on the marble verandah floor, ate off banana leaves and ended with langra mangoes, fatter, sweeter and more golden-cheeked than those Hermione had bought in New Market and which had inspired her to come here.
When they had finished eating, Baba poured water from a jug over their fingers and after the old man had extinguished the fire, cleared away and gone, Yudhishthira told Hermione, ‘My whole life and that of my parents has been devoted to getting the British out of India.’
He raised his hand and stroked her very gently on her cheek and she realized that it was the first time they had touched each other since the night they’d shared his room together in Calcutta.
‘So how could I have married you?’ he asked.
‘You could,’ she muttered. ‘I would have done anything for you, Yudhishthira.’
‘I know,’ he said.
Then, as though the two things were connected, he told her about God being nourished by the thoughts of men and as he spoke, as though agreeing with him, a sleepy pigeon murmured.
‘It is important for the world that thoughts be good ones, and that there should be many, for the gods love life and hate death. Even when a mouse dies the gods lose a little, and when the gods lose we all lose.’
Not caring that she did not understand, hardly listening really, Hermione smiled and through half-closed eyes watched as the sky darkened. Pigeon murmurs became shorter, spasmodic, then silent, and their place in the inky sky was taken by the silent swoop of bats.
Baba had placed an oil lamp on the low wall, its light outlining Yudhishthira’s profile. The banana leaves in the garden clattered like liquid as the wind shook them, and the doves groaned as they settled down to sleep. The smell from the trumpets of the Queen of the Night was so strong and beautiful that it made Hermione’s body sting with happiness. They talked for hours and Yudhishthira put his arms round her shoulders, making her travel quickly from the cold fear that she was here because of his pity and guilt to a blazing hope as if a sun had been lit inside her.
Beyond the garden flowed the Jamuna and sometimes they heard dark river sounds: the echoing ring of floating lumber striking stone, the flop and splash of an animal drinking. With a rhythmic creak of oars a boat went by, the glow of its hurricane lamp bobbing among the mango leaves, the boatman calling in a strong confident voice so that no one would guess his fear.
The smell of paraffin came from the road, and the sound of creaking wheels, the smack of unshod cloven hooves and grunted instructions from a sleepy driver announced the passing of a loaded bullock cart.
Cicadas had started up as dusk fell. There were sudden wild cries of night birds and the screams of jackals.
What Yudhishthira did to her body that night exploded something inside Hermione that was neither physical nor spiritual but a mixture of the two. He scooped her up in great dry embraces so that she began to feel like an opening in the earth out of which, volcano like, heat poured. His thighs slid warm and silky against her hips, and his bare chest squashed her breasts so that she could feel her own heart beat in unison with his. He was smooth and strong, bare and bony. In a strange paradox it seemed as though she knew every pore of his body and yet had never experienced anything like him in her life. His hair was heavy and faintly spiced with incense. His smells were all quite new: like honey, perfumed rice and joss sticks but not quite any of them. The smell of his skin, she thought later, was India when it was quiet. And this, too, was a paradox because India was never quiet. Night and day, and every moment, something was always happening. The long hollowed body of Yudhishthira, like a cobra flute, rushed through her and sent her exploding round the universe like a loose planet.
Sometimes their bodies beat against each other like sea against naked rocks, and at other times like hands clapping. The fluids of their pairing became a single sea, the tides of which swept upon soft and tingling shores.
Hermione felt as though their nervous systems had, because of love, become indistinguishable and that they had gained sacred entry into the consciousness of each other which is a start at joining up everything.
She came outside her body. She looked along her thighs and saw, though the light of her eyes could see nothing, forests, ploughed fields, mountain ranges. She felt her arms take up the burden of cities filled with people. She felt the universe rising out of her stomach, so that Hermione did not exist any more but was mixed with the Cosmos like mud in water until she became everything. Almost screaming, she tried to roll away from under that great weight of universal responsibility.
‘That is what happens when you make love with a yogi!’ laughed Yudhishthira, kissing her sweating hair to comfort her. ‘You have experienced Unity.’
‘I was afraid,’ Hermione whimpered and then began to wish she had not stopped the marvellous
moment.
He said jerkily, as though baling out the knowledge from somewhere deep inside him, ‘Oneness is reality. Multiplicity is illusion.’ And Hermione thought she understood him because of the moment she had discovered a million miles of frosty rock instead of knees and had looked along her navel and found instead a lake so big and wide and deep that the whole world could have drowned in it.
For the rest of the night she lay by Yudhishthira’s long cool body and adjusted her own to it, curving her legs around him, twining her feet with his, laying her lips against his neck, her hands on the hollow of his stomach, rebuilding with her body the bridge of love each time he stirred.
They were still holding each other like this when the pigeons began their daytime cooing, very rich and satisfied because God had feasted well.
When they did get up, Yudhishthira followed her into the bathroom and tried to bathe her, throwing water from a brass pot, Hermione leaping out of the way of the sudden stream of cold. She had never seen him undressed before, had only caught glimpses in the lamp-lit room where they had loved, and the sight of him made her feel joyful. Ducking out of the hurled shower, she reached her hands towards him to caress new parts of him.
A cockroach emerged suddenly from the water exit-hole and Hermione screamed.
‘You haven’t changed at all really. You couldn’t have married me,’ said Yudhishthira.
Biting back the lurch of revulsion, body bare, vulnerable, Hermione screwed up her face and snatched the insect with her fingers. Keeping her eyes closed, holding her breath, she raised her clasped hands while her palms were tickled by the vile antennae. The sharp edge of the cockroach wing sliced against the rim of her wedding finger and the crawling of its legs became repeated in every cell of her body. She imagined the sensation of it crunching in her teeth, its masticated body passing her palate and going down her throat. As though insects trampled into her flesh, the women’s parts of her cringed as she anticipated the cockroach moving with that terrible hunched scuttle up her vagina. She breathed deeply until she began to control her shuddering.
