by Rumer Godden
They will have Durga puja in their own house, said Narayan. They will have ornaments for the Goddess, of real gold – all the rapacious and idle and greedy will gather there to be fed. Money will be poured out on a ceremony that has no reality at all. Ceremony is the curse of this land … But in spite of his scornful and sensible words his mind was already following the story of the puja and it seemed to him simple and beautiful. Nearly all the Hindu festivals have a quality of naïveté, and it is this that keeps them fresh; they come with a piquant shock of promise and surprise each year. It does not matter how many Durga and Lakshmi pujas are lived through, the puja is perpetually new.
The Goddess Durga is the consort of Siva; she keeps house for him, but once a year she too goes back to her father’s house; the festival celebrates her visit and in her wake all the sons and daughters of Hindu Bengal go back to their homes. Durga ends her holiday on the fourth day and her spirit is returned to her husband by the immersion of her image in the river; but the sadness of her leaving is healed in the worship of her daughter Lakshmi, the Goddess of Good Fortune, on the day and night of the full moon … Childish nonsense! cried Narayan, but suddenly he called Shila.
‘It is getting near the holidays,’ he said. She did not answer but he knew by the sudden constraint on her face, the trembling of the edges of her lips and nostrils, what she was waiting for. The festivals start with the autumn new moon, and last, with a short break, through the nights when the moon grows, until the full moon. Last year Narayan had forbidden Shila to keep the sacred days; nothing was allowed into the house, not a gift or an extra cake, or the smallest image. ‘It is silly superstition,’ said Narayan.
Shila’s heart had been hot with shame; in every Hindu house the festival had the significance of Christmas; the chief and most joyful days of the year; the Government observed it, offices were shut, universities and schools closed, everyone went home on holiday, everyone joined in worship – except Narayan; and Shila’s shame was sharpened by fear for him; goddesses were easily offended. If arrows of fire shot from an invisible bow had pierced him now as he sat at his desk, she would not have been surprised.
But instead, Narayan was handing her a small pile of notes. ‘Take this money,’ he said, ‘and buy whatever is necessary. You can use it and more. Make a list of the presents we should give, for Tarala and whomever it is suitable.’
She did not move. He had to open her hand and put the money into it.
‘But last year …’ She was mystified, trying to find out from his face why he had changed. ‘Last year, we did not have – anything …’
‘Is that any reason why this year we should not?’
He saw himself beneficent, a patriarch, as if his family were twenty and not two. Then he was aware that a delicate struggle was filling Shila.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What is it you want to ask me?’ and with a return of his old irritation he cried, ‘Well, ask. Ask. Ask.’
‘Indro …’ she asked. ‘Shall you … go to the temple?’
He hesitated. ‘I may go to take you’ – and he said magnificently: ‘It is necessary that I should inform myself of these things from time to time.’
He stood up and went to the doorway, where the steps led to the verandah, and he looked down past them to the river and the bank stretching out of sight. Everything he could see was either green or blue or white; the flat blue-white of the water, repeating the sky, the green of the bank and the foliage in his garden and the floating water weeds, and sharp touches of white, the clouds, a water-lily that had opened under the jetty, and along the banks, the tossing white heads of the pampas bushes.
‘Wherever I see pampas I know it is autumn,’ said Narayan.
‘And when it is autumn the festival time is here,’ whispered Shila. ‘We shall keep it in our house. We shall make Durga puja at the temple – we shall have our tiny Sree – we shall have gifts …’ and she began to plan them.
‘Tarala shall have new clothes – I shall make cakes for the children. Indro – you need new shoes, and new shirts.’
‘Not from that money,’ cried Narayan; ‘that is the condition. All, all of it is to be spent on the festival only. It is not for gifts. Spend it for worship. Give it for the feeding of the beggars. Take it and make it good. Give nothing of it to me.’ And he said, as he had said before, ‘Do not remind me of it ever again.’
IX
There was nothing of autumn in the night. It was hot with the heat of September that is deadly and stifling, as if all the months of stifling nights and days had culminated in the end of summer. The moon was old, nearly gone, the stars seemed to shine for themselves without shedding their light, there were clouds, and the heat was manifested in the blackness that was still and black and hot, pressing down upon the town and on the houses; pressing round the beds where some people lay in an exhausted slumber, where some people could not sleep.
The College was silent, without a light; it was possible only to make out the darker buildings against the dark sky; on the tree that wept into the tank, the flowers were dying with a sick heavy smell. The watchman’s lantern was on the drive but the watchman had disappeared, he had gone into the shadows and lain down to sleep, with his stomach pressed into the cool verandah stones. Shah had sensibly gone to bed in nothing but a loincloth, and his stiff-cut starched and polished uniform was left by itself in his house, where it could be seen by the light of his oil lamp, looking strangely more like Shah himself than the thin dark sleeper on the bed.
In the bazaar the unknown dog was still yapping, and Louise was awake in her room. It seemed to her now that she had not slept through a night since she came; and the endless void of dark wakeful hours culminated, like the heat, in these tonight. She heard Charles downstairs, she heard him get up and go into the garden; once she thought he came upstairs and she lay, tense, waiting, and held her face down into her pillow so that she would not call out to him in her loneliness: ‘I am awake – and bitterly lonely – lonely. Lonely—’ But the pillow muffled the words.
Once she heard Emily turn, and move her bed. What did she want? Louise was not alone in the night; Emily was awake too; but Louise shrank from speaking to her; Emily still had Don’s bed beside her.
It was dark; she longed for a light but lay perversely in the dark. There was a sound on the stairs that might have been a rat. A lizard slid down the wall near her bed with a tck that sounded loudly in her ear, and outside with the babel of night sounds, jackals began to howl; they howled like all the lost souls and banshees and ghosts in the world wailing together. The wind stirred in the sides of her mosquito-net and the blown-in sides touched her bed with a slurring animal sound that made her catch her breath, and she screamed for Charles.
She held her hand across her mouth struggling to hold that scream. She wanted Charles. She wanted his actual physical presence here beside her, she wanted to feel him and to touch him … How can I? she cried. She must be shocked at herself; she tingled. What are you thinking of, Louise!
It is only the night, she reasoned; it was the night and the heat and her sleeplessness and the worry over Emily. It was only Emily that made her think of Charles … Emily, I blame you for everything that has happened … I see you, Emily … And exasperation swept up in a storm at the way she had to see Emily now. For days Emily had worn a blind and wooden face, blind with obstinacy, wooden with determination, chalk-white; even her hair had a toneless look. Emily was so plain these days that the sight of her gave a pull to Louise’s heart; and she was taller, grown long in the legs, even her hair had outgrown its little-girl length; she had begun to look adolescent … Nonsense, she is only a child, said Louise; but Emily was exhibiting every sign of developing into a girl, with new glimpses of grace under her gawkiness, and soft swellings round her nipples of which she was secretly conscious and ashamed …
It’s the country, cried Louise; I hate it. Look what it has done to Emily. I don’t want her to grow up. She is still a child. She shall be a ch
ild … And she had a vision of Emily as she had been when she was a baby, between her and Charles, a baby girl, precious as a nest, bright as a star, with yellow silky fluff standing out from her head, in that sentimental glance, like a Holy Child’s halo … what has happened to her since? asked Louise. What has happened in between? I don’t know. What have we been doing?… And the answer came back to her. What have you been doing? That question seemed to be asked her again, with a deafening loudness: What have you been doing?
It sounded through Louise, loudly, accusingly, and she sat up in bed, shaking, pushing off the darkness. The whole of her body was wet, and she felt as if she were suffocating with blackness and heat and remorse and fear …
Emily, stop. Please, please stop it, Emily. I am coming to tell you: This cannot go on any longer. It must be stopped. I will give in to you for ever if only you will stop it; if only you will take that look off your face, try to be more natural and more childish, grow more flesh on your bones, show life in your hair. I did kill Don. You guessed it and you were right. I did lie to you. Yes, I did. I did. I did. I did it all so swiftly that it happened in one impulse. I was caught in it even before it was done and that is why I did it; under the laudable, plausible motives, that is why I did it. Panic comes like blood to my brain – you cannot understand that. Of course not, you are too young … Charles was the only one who did understand! Charles! Only Charles – and at the thought of him she began to cry.
She swung her feet down off the bed to the floor, the solid stone floor checked her crying and she groped in the darkness for the switch of the light. The light hurt her eyes, smarting with tiredness and tears, and she sobbed again, calling Emily and Charles confusedly – ‘Charles – but I must talk to Emily. I have to tell her what I did to Don …’ And she knew, surely and certainly then, that Don had not been mad … I killed him … She saw the doubtful, unwilling face of the veterinary doctor … I made him do it, I made him guilty too … And she listened and heard, still, clearly, across the night noises, the yapping of the dog.
‘Emily,’ she cried. ‘Emily! Emily!’
She ran down the verandah to Emily’s bed. She stopped and there was a long silence.
Emily’s bed was empty.
X
Idleness stayed with Anil. ‘What has happened to your work, Banerjee?’ Everyone asked him that, angrily, sternly or reproachfully, with curiosity from the other students, without surprise from Professor Dutt. ‘Young men are folly. All, all of them,’ the Professor would often say, and he gave Anil back his books without a scolding. ‘You have not made up your notes. Why do you hand them to me?’
‘He will not get his pass, will he, Sir?’
‘I expect that he will not,’ the Professor said mildly and Anil looked back at him with a smile so sweet and brilliant that the old man stayed, his breath caught, staring until he picked up his ancient umbrella that sheltered him across the quadrangle, and scurried off the dais out of the room.
‘What is the matter with you, Anil?’ His friends crowded round him, but Anil pushed them away.
‘I am engaged on an idyll of idleness.’ They thought he was being humorous, but it was true. In Anil’s room was a little glazed image of Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning, and now she was wreathed in jasmine flowers though Anil did no work. It was reported that he lay on his bed and looked at her, and sometimes he sauntered alone in the garden, holding her on the palm of his hand. This quixotic behaviour violently confirmed public opinion that he would take all the prizes, and other aspirants grew sulky: it was awkward for them, they dared not copy Anil and leave off their studies abandoning themselves to Saraswati, they needed every hour for study, and they were forced to appear to their admirers as neither so clever nor so pious as Anil. Naturally Anil had more adherents than they.
He did not want them. He spent his days alone. He sat through his lectures in a veritable fortress of thoughts, it was so impregnable; or else he cut them and lay on his bed in his room, not answering when anyone knocked at his door. In the evening he went out walking, so far and so fast that in such weather not even the most devoted cared to follow him. He left Narayan’s letters unanswered and did not go to his house.
People began to stare at him. He looked different, there was an elation about him and his eyes were excited though he was usually quiet, but sometimes they would hear him singing loudly and nasally and when they asked him, he did not know he had been singing. A rumour began that Anil Krishna Banerjee was drinking.
His walks were long and solitary. He walked by the river, far beyond the easy trodden paths where the students walked to get the breeze; he left the houses and the path behind, until the only path was a narrow deep-pitted one where the men who towed the boats put their feet; he had seen them, when the breeze fell, drop out from the boat near the land with a rope, and putting the loop of it round their chests, strain on it and draw boat and cargo and family along. Anil would have liked to try it but he was shy of the narrowness of his chest and his lightness; probably the boat would pull him off into the river.
On the low ground, when the river had receded after the rains, it had left great shallow lakes; and there he found water-lilies, and hyacinths and grasses of a bright surprising green, and villages built out of the water on stilts; once a flight of duck lifted out of the water almost over his head with a flash of their white breasts; a feather drifted down, it was the same white as the tufts of pampas grass.
He went into the fields and here the water had dried and the earth had a richness it had only at this season; paddy birds, white and long in leg and bill as little cranes, pecked in it and the farmers were finishing their ploughing; all across the plain they could be seen over and over again – in a repeating pattern of a little man, a yoke of oxen, and the earth turned up in dark lines on the fields. Weeds were stacked in the fields and these made, on the pattern, round purplish dots – some of them were fired in the evening and then the pattern altered: the chequered lines of the field walls were lost in the rising mist, the men and the oxen had gone and in their place the dark bone shape of the plough was left alone, and one after the other the fires burnt red and a spiral of white smoke went up into the evening.
With his power of bribing, Anil stayed out late. When he came home he wrote poems, he sat up writing them most of the night and with unusual reticence he did not show them to everyone. He showed them only to Narayan.
Narayan was always enthusiastic over Anil’s work. That meant nothing. ‘I want you to show them to Sir Monmatha Ghose,’ said Anil, ‘I want you to show them even to Mr Pool.’
Narayan showed them to Professor Dutt. ‘But these are good!’ said Professor Dutt in unflattering surprise. ‘I must show these to the Principal,’ but before he could do this, Anil asked Narayan to get them back. ‘I can’t spare them,’ he said, ‘I want to finish them first.’
‘There is no hurry. Let him show one or two for an opinion.’
‘I don’t want an opinion,’ said Anil crossly. ‘I know what they are like for myself. I want to finish them first.’
‘But Anil, it is to your interest—’
‘Let me finish them first.’
That was the only thing that spoiled these days for Anil. He was oppressed by a feeling of hurry; nothing else mattered but the finishing of the poems. He must finish them. He must get them down and he did not know how many there would be nor even what they would be; he knew they would follow one after the other, but to achieve them took a great deal of idling and dreaming and moving about. He had to shut himself away. Often, now, he went out at dawn and slept out under a tree at midday and walked on in the evening.
Often he missed the evening meal at the Hostel and then he would ask the villagers for food. One night, at dusk, when he had been out all day, he asked an old man sitting on his house step, where his and his son’s supper was laid out on plantain leaves; he had a little rice and vegetables and sauce and a brass lota of pepper-water.
‘May I eat with you?’
‘How can you eat with us? You are a Brahmin.’
‘I can eat with anyone,’ said Anil happily and he joined them, but when supper was over and the women had taken away their share, the father began to scold. The supper had been too small to stop his hunger and he wished he had not given any of it away.
‘You are a Brahmin. You should not say the things you say, let alone do them,’ he scolded Anil.
‘It does not matter what I do,’ said Anil dreamily.
‘You are not yourself. You are your caste!’ said the old man. ‘What would they say?’
‘I shall not be there to hear it,’ answered Anil as he drifted away.
It was dark. The moon was over and ready to rise again. As he followed the dark path only the dried jute stick stack, white and brittle, piled in the branches of a tree, showed him when he had come to the edge of the village, and it was difficult to find his way across the fields though some of the weed piles were still smoking. As he came through the back streets of the town where the electric light had not yet been taken, every doorway was filled with the warm soft light of wicks in oil, except where a more wealthy family had the roaring glare of petrol lamps. He passed those quickly and looked in at the door of the huts where the earth walls were turned to gold, for they looked attractive and a little romantic. Sometimes a woman came to the door with a light in her hand, a bowl with a single wick floating in it that lit her neck and chin and left her face in darkness; the effect of that seen over and over again was mysterious and quickening. Outside the men were talking and smoking a hookah or cheap cigarettes, and their voices followed Anil down the road. He knew they all looked after him. The bicycles passed continuously and some, like those of the clerks who went to Charles’s house, had bicycle lights and others had none and their riders carried wicks with shields made of paper bags. They passed him and whizzed into the night …
