by Rumer Godden
No. Anil would not come and speak to Charles. But one day, thought Narayan that morning in his study, I shall ask him to dinner, and Anil too, and they shall learn to know one another under my roof. We shall have a charming dinner, we shall talk. And he shut his book and called, ‘Shila!’
Shila came to the door.
‘One day I shall ask Charles Pool to dinner,’ said Narayan.
‘Mr Pool – to dinner? But – but – what does he eat? What could we do? How shall we do it?’ Her eyes widened and then she said, ‘He will never come.’
‘Certainly he will come and we shall give him dinner.’ They would sit in the study, though they must borrow another chair, for the study only had two chairs, and Shila should send in a tray of sweets and they would sit talking while the light died on the river and Shila came softly in and trimmed the lamps; talking in friendly understanding talk. ‘Certainly he will come.’ And at Shila’s dismayed face he laughed in good spirits and said, ‘Tell Tarala.’
‘Tarala has gone to the bazaar.’
‘And you? What do you do?’ he teased.
‘There is plenty to do in the house.’ She was delighted that he was in this mood and talking to her. ‘What do you think I should do?’
‘Sit by the river and dream,’ said Narayan.
Much of that was true. On the tumbledown pillar in the garden Shila would sit while minutes and whole half-hours slid away. ‘Where is the knitting they taught you at school? Where are the books I like you to read?’ They lay forgotten, and the small red ants that inhabited the pillar came out and ran across them. The sun lay hot there, and in the evening there was a breeze warm from the river, and Shila like one of the ants or a little lizard could never have enough of warmth and sun. The creeper by the pillar was an allamanda with big trumpet-shaped flowers of bright yellow and a heavy scent of honey – and all the time the river ran below and she watched the water running, running past.
‘You sit there and dream of all the things you wish for,’ teased Narayan.
‘No, I dream of all the things I have,’ said Shila softly, and she shut her eyes to see them …
When I am too happy and when I am too miserable I come and sit beside the river and a little of the sorrow or the joy is drained off by the flowing water and runs away with it; then I can go into the house again and no one will see anything unusual in me. No one knows I have to do this but the river. I should not do it, I am a wife and a wife should spend her days evenly; if she has moods they should reflect her husband’s; when he is glad, she is glad and when he is unhappy, she is unhappy too. My mother taught me this, but she was not married to Narayan.
Narayan has so many moods and he does not like me to watch him, it irritates him, and still I cannot help watching him. He does not want a wife like the wife I have been taught to be; he calls her a slave and a shadow, and he says he wants me to be myself. He makes me call him Narayan or Indro, as if he were not my husband at all; he makes me sit down in the room with his friend and he has asked me to eat with him, but this I cannot learn to do.
I am not clever enough for him; I was sent to school but I did not pay much attention; the bus used to call for me with the other girls and we sat in it, in two rows, facing each other behind drawn curtains and from that moment we began to giggle and we giggled till we came home. There were serious girls, and girls who used really to study; I laughed at them but now I wish I had been with them. Narayan likes mixed schools for girls and boys; what would my mother say to that? He says that girls can learn as well as men, but I have not found that yet; I find the books so very hard to learn, I cannot talk about them – like Anil Banerjee.
Don’t think I am unhappy. I am the luckiest girl in the world. I only wish I was clever and not shy and then I could amuse Narayan – like Anil.
I have so much. I never thought, for instance, that when I was married Narayan would have a home of his own. The house is small, the little rooms lead out of one another, but it is all ours; the study is larger and has a window facing the court, and a door facing the steps; it has a desk and two chairs and a bookcase with all Narayan’s books and a cabinet for his instruments. I should like our friends to see it, but would they come to see us now? I dare not ask them; they might say ‘No.’ Narayan is not orthodox; he is not even Hindu nor is he Christian; he is against religion. He says it is superstition, he says it is nothing and he will talk against it for hours. He forbade me to go to the temple or to keep the Holy Days or to fast – and yet I think he wanted me to go. At first – I obeyed him and said nothing.
(‘Why don’t you answer?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you want to go to the temple?’)
(‘Yes.’)
(‘Why don’t you go?’)
(‘Because you tell me not to go.’)
(‘Oh, Go! Go! Go! Go! How many times have I told you not to do everything I say?’)
Now I don’t know whether to go or not to go; neither will please him; but there is one day that I must go. I must make my puja to Shasti … Her lips curved of themselves into a smile … I shall pray to the goddess of all children and she will keep my child.
It is not long to wait now. I sit out in the sun and the sun shines on me warming me all through and the river runs very softly and the sound of it goes in at my ear through all my body. My baby stirs and moves gently at the warmth and sound. He will be plump like a little pigeon and his skin will be soft like the petal of a champac flower to touch. Narayan says it will be a girl. He will be delighted with the baby. Will he? Will he? I am not sure. I am never quite sure of Narayan …
She opened her eyes and asked Narayan timidly, ‘Has Anil Banerjee’s wife a son?’
‘I do not think so.’
‘Ah!’ said Shila softly, and she asked, ‘He has been married – how long?’
‘He has been married for nearly two years,’ said Narayan crossly. ‘The marriage was consummated ten months ago. I have told him it is absurd. The girl is not fully developed. She is only fourteen.’
‘Fourteen is developed,’ said Shila suddenly and boldly; there was a distinct gleam in her eyes. ‘And he – what does he say?’
‘He does not say anything at all. It is not his fault. He married her to please his father; if his father tells him, he will send her away. Meanwhile she is his wife, a little girl. It is a good thing he has to leave her and come to College.’
‘All the same,’ said Shila softly, ‘he must want a son.’
Narayan was tired of it. He said, ‘Here is Tarala, come back from the bazaar. Shouldn’t you go and see what she has brought?’ But Shila had already gone.
Shila saw the bazaar through Tarala’s basket; everything that was important to her in the bazaar was in it. At the beginning of the month the stores were brought; sugar, rice, oil, spices and grain to last the month; but every day Tarala went down and came back with a triumphant expression on her face and a coolie boy carrying her basket. ‘What have you brought, Tarala?’
Vegetables – young sweet carrots, and glossy purple knobs of brinjals, and a pomelo that opened like a big pink-fleshed orange; sour-milk curd in an earthenware pot, some fresh firm hilsa fish.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes, Ma.’
Neither Shila nor Tarala would look at one another. At last Shila spoke. ‘Was there – no mutton?’
‘No, Ma, none.’
‘Tarala – did you look?’
(Looked, and turned my head away quickly!) And aloud Tarala cried: ‘None, Ma, anywhere. Narayan Babu must have fish for his dinner.’ (‘And that is bad enough, God knows!’ she said under her breath.) ‘But we shall make it so good,’ she reassured Shila, ‘you will see he is pleased. Narayan Babu likes hilsa fish, Ma.’
‘He likes mutton,’ said Shila, and as firmly as she could make herself say the horrible word, she said: ‘There must be mutton tomorrow.’
Before she woke, Louise saw the horse and the rider going along behind the hedge, a tall white horse with a dreadful boniness that she most strangely knew; the
rider’s face was turned away from her, hidden by a hat with a long plume that trailed into lines of mist and lay on hedges and trees; a dim half-white, half-hidden landscape, where any noise was muffled in the mist. She stood in long grass wet above her knees and, as she stepped back, the grass drew after her drawing all the landscape with it, the hedge and the horse and the rider. To stop it she must stand still and look at the rider and then he would turn his head and she would see – she would see … But she would not look; she stepped back and back, though the grass grew heavier and wetter and the mist was lapping round her in tenuous spirals and folds … Look at the rider! Look him in the face. Look. Look. Look!… And she screamed dreadfully and silently, and the trees were immediately distorted and the mist changed to smoke that was coming to scorch and burn her. It was in her tongue and her throat, burning, tasteless, burning, and her throat began to swell. The swelling rose in her mouth and the landscape began to swell as well, swollen trees and leaves and hedge, and the malformed horse came backwards towards her, bearing its rider backwards while it went stepping on in a terrible duplication of itself. There was a bony grating – Ah! crepitus! She recognized it from the First Aid Lectures – but that meant the rider was turning his head … I must look. I must look. Look. Look. Look! And the swelling choked her and before she died, she woke.
The room was full of pale light and the grating, the crepitus, was the noise of the bee-catcher birds walking in the garden. It was hardly morning, but to Louise the room was full of heat; it ached with heat like her head, and her eyelids felt like eggshells, brittle and dry. Through the windows she could see the sky turning from grey to white with a line of hyacinth above the dark dusty tops of trees. Everything was dry, hot, dusty; and the dream filled her mind with a sharp horror of fear. She picked up a glass of water that was on the table by her bed and drank, but the water had been standing and was warm with a horrible body warmth, and she retched and in spite of the heat her skin was suddenly goose-fleshed and cold. She trembled so that the whole bed trembled too – and snatched up her dressing-gown and went out on the verandah.
After her padded the Pekingese, Sun and Picotee, that she had snatched with the children from France. She had refused to leave them behind – she bullied and cajoled to get them on the steamer; her love for them, for all animals, was touched with fanaticism, and now she lived in continual fear that they would pick up something from the bazaar.
Louise saw the bazaar as a patch like plague against the walls of the house … I see the bazaar, she said – at least I am prevented for ever from seeing it by smelling it first. I smell the street and the nest of lanes behind it as one foul latrine. I swear the Indians can have no sense of smell. If I walk through it I am contaminated even through my shoes, even through the high heels of them – soiled and contaminated. It is filthy, unhealthy, dangerous; there is cess in the gutters where the men squat down even while I am passing, there are stains and patches where betel-nut and cough-phlegm are spat out on the stones, there are flies that rise up from litter heaps and settle on the sweets and foodstuff in the shops. I smell the rancid ghee in these shops and the smell of mustard oil and garlic and rotting fruit and meat that has hung too long, and in the road all round me is the smell of refuse and the smell of unwashed sweat and oil from the coolies, the smell of musk and sandalwood from the cleanest white-clad clerk; and on some days I smell the burning of a body from the burning ghat and that I cannot bear. Charles, I cannot bear to go into the bazaar. I cannot bear to stay here when I must see it and hear it all day long.
It is hideous and cruel. I see the woman with elephantiasis, and the beggars withered, distorted, deformed, and among them the leper who is allowed to wander here for begging. The children’s stomachs are swollen with fever and spleen, and the babies have flyblown ophthalmic eyes. The dogs have mangy backs and bruised outstanding ribs, the buffaloes pull the carts in the sun all day long – buffaloes, that are water beasts and meant for water and for coolness; the iron bullock-wheels turn and creak along the road, so that I cannot forget them. I see a kitten lying where a crow has pecked its eyes, and the men are as cruel as the crows, they have birds hung in tiny cruel cages and sometimes they have put out their eyes to make them sing. I can forgive them their babies but I cannot forgive them the birds.
There is nothing picturesque or attractive in the bazaar, it is sordid and poor, it has no products of its own; it has no muslins or silk or pottery or weaving or rugs or ivory. Even the temple is hideous and cheap, even the sacred bull has a sore on its rump and filth on its tail. There is nothing but filth and squalor and misery in the bazaar. I hate to go there, I hate the children to go there and I am terrified the dogs will stray and catch some disease in the bazaar.
I asked Charles not to give the children a dog. I asked him not to give them Don. He gave them Don …
He gave him to Emily.
‘Why Emily? Why not Binnie? Why Emily?’
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that that little girl needs love.’
In her surprise Louise had stared. ‘Emily! Why, Emily won’t have love. That shows how little you know of her. She is hard. She is completely oblivious of everyone but herself. She doesn’t care an atom for anyone. She is almost unnatural.’
‘You don’t like her, do you?’
She answered icily, ‘I love Emily more than you could begin to understand.’
‘You may love her. You don’t like her.’
‘I love her and I know her better than she knows herself.’ And she said, ‘I must ask you not to interfere with the children.’
Charles’s eyes went dark and the cast in them showed plainly. ‘If you didn’t want me to interfere, why did you bring them here?’ he asked. ‘Did it never occur to you that I might get interested – in the children?’
‘You are – insufferable,’ said Louise, and she cried: ‘You know nothing about children. You don’t like children. You don’t know them. Why should you interfere?’
He said nothing to that. He gave Don to Emily …
Now, as the Pekingese poured in a wave of tails and feathers down the stairs, Don whined from between the children’s beds. Louise went quickly up the verandah where the two white-netted beds stood. Under Emily’s on the floor lay a watch face downwards.
(‘Emily, don’t take your watch to bed.’)
(‘I will put it under my pillow.’)
(‘If you do, you will break it. If it falls on the stone floor it will break. You know how you toss and turn. Don’t take your watch to bed.’)
Louise set her lips and picked up the watch. It was not broken.
Don was tearing at his rug and whining. She went round Emily’s bed to set him free and she stopped. She bent down to look at him, and looked again. For a long while she stood there looking down at him. Then she ran down the verandah calling for Charles and Kokil, the sweeper.
The world is square, said Charles in his sleep, and I shall have it square … That was the last moment he slept. He was awake; he still lay with his eyes shut, but he was awake, aware of the light on the outer side of his lids, and the hardness of the bed under him where before he had been floating – floating – floating … He was nearly asleep again and again he was awake. He stretched a little and yawned.
He began to consider the day. Before he went to sleep Charles added up his day, as soon as he woke up he forecast it, and tried to read it out. It was one of his fixed, lonely habits; he knew exactly what he would do in the day and he liked to know; but now, since Louise had come, it was not as clear and not as easy to read. Anything might happen in the day … And I can’t predict, said Charles, how well I can behave. He felt tired … Lying in bed is easy; to get up and face the day is not. I shall not get up – just yet … And he turned resolutely on his face, but a little pulse beating against his pillow, somewhere in his head, seemed to beat Louise … Louise … Louise – and impatiently he sat up.
The morning had a milky coolness under its promise of heat, the wind blew across
the garden that still had dew in all its shady places. There still was freshness in the wind, there still was dew and freshness in the garden, on the lawns under the trees, on the underside of leaves, between the shafts of the bamboo, inside the striped cyclamen trumpets of the blue convolvulus, in the lemon-yellow allamandas. His skin felt cool and dewy, he was strong and he moved in bed stretching, sending the sleep from his bones as he stretched and stretched, stretching his annoyance away. There was the sound of someone running and Louise herself came in without knocking, swinging the door back. ‘Charles! Charles! Charles!’
‘I’m here,’ said Charles quietly.
She stopped abruptly and the urgency faded on her face. She looked at the room: his clothes put out on a chair, the bath running in the bathroom, his dressing-table and shoe-stands, his crop and hat on the table, a row of photographs on the wall, cups on a shelf, a pile of papers; Charles’s room that she had not seen for years. It arranged itself in front of her eyes with a series of pricking shocks – and Charles was lying on the bed watching her, raised on one elbow, wearing nothing but a lungi wound round his waist. His chest and legs and arms seemed brilliantly brown and strong on the white sheet, and the sun shone on his head and made hundreds of dark bright points on the hair on his legs and arms and chest. ‘Haven’t you a dressing-gown?’ cried Louise.
‘You didn’t knock,’ said Charles, and she blushed. He made no attempt to get up; he lay there looking at her and his gaze went slowly down from her face over her body to the hem of her skirt. She wore a wrapper of thin white silk, tied at the wrists and neck and waist with rose-coloured woollen cords; it swung open at the hem to show the chiffon nightgown and her bare feet in mules. Her hair was down, loose on her shoulders; she tried to stem the hot colour that flooded her cheeks and neck but it grew hotter. ‘This is quite like old times, isn’t it?’ he said pleasantly.
For a moment he thought she Would go, but she controlled herself. ‘You know I shouldn’t have come if …’ Her voice broke into genuine panic. ‘Charles. Please come quickly. It’s Don. Oh, Charles. Please come.’
