Indira finished her song. Coasting on a polite ripple of applause, some discreet coughs and a Dionysian clamour for drinks, she proceeded directly to the rather isolated alcove where I sat.
‘Run along!’ she commanded her offspring on the pouf. ‘I wish to chat with a very old friend of mine.’
Their eyes met and locked in a prolonged conflict, the daughter immoveable as Gibraltar, anger flashing in the dead silence between them. Then she rose abruptly to her feet and walked away, leaving her mother standing over me with a smile grown stiff round the edges, but bravely worn.
‘Well, what did you think of my performance just now?’ Indira began without prelude, one fist resting on a massive haunch, more like a fishwife than a prima donna. ‘Think I’d qualify as the siren who lured Ulysses to his doom?’
I drew on my cigarette and measured her heft with my eye. Her derrière, once so cheekily rounded and bewitching that it had invited pinches, now must weigh a ton.
Indira gave a high short laugh as I did not reply, and grounded on the pouf like a weighted balloon. I wondered if under the bunched sari skirt she had varicose veins. ‘This is like old times, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes,’ I agreed. ‘A reunion of old friends delighted to be seeing each other again. In the Christmas season, too.’
She wasn’t listening. Her eyes were busy. ‘You haven’t aged much, you know. Though I’d touch up my hair a little if I were you.’ Another stare at the elegantly dated thing before her. ‘You were never pretty, but you’ve kept yourself trim – which is more than I can say for myself.’
I wanted to assure her that I’d grown thinner, I’d grown meaner, that I had been preserved in vinegar. But she had rolled me up and put me away, like an ancient scroll that sees the light only when its owner wishes to enjoy it, and was looking beyond me, into the past.
‘The good gone days,’ she sighed. ‘We would sit like this, and talk. I about my singing, you about your book, both of us about our dreams…. How we would talk.’
She began to sparkle, as she had done on those nights when she breezed into my room after her stolen hours with the man whose picture I wore with perfect asininity in a locket round my neck. ‘I was going to conquer the world on the wings of song! The ginger and sugar I crunched every morning though I hated it – you remember that?’
‘Perfectly.’
She sat motionless for a moment, frozen midstream in her thoughts. ‘I was good in those days, wasn’t I? I could sing?’ Then explosively, ‘Tell me, damn you! Don’t sit there so smug and punish me with those eyes!’ She grabbed my arm with gouging fingers. ‘Tell me I could sing!’
‘Your voice had power and range,’ I said matter-of-factly, ‘and a lyrical quality that was lovely and rare.’ Firmly I disengaged my arm.
Her eyes filled slowly as she stared at me. ‘It did?’ she whispered incredulously. ‘Of course it did!’ Now her face had violence under that glazed smile. ‘But I chose to throw it all away, my lovely gift, the years of work…I had to have him even if it meant betraying a friend. I turned myself into a double-dealing sneak, a mealy-mouthed Christian to bag him! The Brahmin’s daughter knelt before the cross.’ She save a hoarse laugh. ‘And you know what I married? A pig!’
Well! Her sin-and-win offensive had secured her a spouse, but evidently he had not settled down to a lifetime of prams. I composed myself more comfortably in my seat. The evening promised to be fun after all.
‘A pig!’ Indira repeated in a distraught whisper. An animal whose glands keep throwing him at every young girl in sight. At first he swore it was just a lapse on his part, a minor masculine flaw, and that the affair was ended that very day. Now he brings his whores here, in my own home…’
Heads seemed turned to us all over the room, wearing narrow glances, hissing lips, furtive grins, but Indira raised her voice: ‘I’m sorry I took him away from you! From the good little Catholic girl. But I did you a favour, didn’t I? As it’s turned out? Do you still hate me?’
For a long moment I stared at her, and it was as if I were on the top of a mountain at the start of a big ski-run. My knees were trembling a little at the height, at the plunge to come, the distance to go, the lonely descent into my past. But I jumped anyway, and pictures flashed by, forgotten landscapes, dark nights, astigmatic blurs of weeping and despair…and I had reached the stillness of the bottom.
‘No,’ I said contemptuously, ‘I don’t hate you.’
Her eyes were baffled. Then they sparked with anger. ‘Don’t you go noble on me, Myrtle! You were well rid of him, and you know it. You went ahead and did what you wanted, you wrote that book! But I wasted my life, threw it away’ Her anguish was keen and real. ‘And now my voice is a croak. Lost, everything, all. Wasted. What is left in my hands?’ She looked like a wounded whale. The large auspicious Hindu daub in the middle of her forehead was a smear of blood.
‘You have a daughter,’ I said in a loud voice. An uneven chorus at the far end of the room was attempting Jingle Bells in fourteen different keys.
‘A daughter.’ All expression was wiped off her face. A daughter, you say? To hold my hand? That’s a laugh! Not out of school yet and I catch her with this boy on the staircase,’ her thick voice trembled, ‘like a servant girl, and she is not even ashamed!’
I raised a brow. Was the mother sorrowing that her daughter was not unduly virginal?
‘I can do nothing with her and nor can her father, though in some ways they are as thick as thieves.’ Indira looked round the room. ‘There she is now, sitting between him and his slut – knowing that it makes me appear ridiculous and that we‘ll row over it in the morning.’ She heaved herself to her feet. ‘You know something else? She can’t carry the simplest tune, my daughter!’
Prepared to exit, she lingered over me with her humiliated mouth and the smile that had no heart in it. ‘I was surprised you turned up. Told Tony you wouldn’t. But you were curious, I guess.’ And with a nod and toss of her head she left me to flounder alone in the swirling, turbid waters she had released round my feet.
When I at last looked up, Tony was standing before me, risen Proteus-like from the depths of a choppy sea. His hair was sleek, his face glistened.
‘I came to tell you,’ he raised his glass to me in mock salvation, ‘that I now know what Lamb meant by the ‘measured malice’ of music’ High on gin, he slid down to the pouf at my feet. ‘You still read Charles Lamb?’
‘Sometimes,’ I answered cautiously, for the look he gave me managed to exclude everybody else in the room, to make me the centre of his world, to force me to a recollection of what we had once shared. To break the spell, I willed myself to glance across the room at the girl he had deserted to accost me.
Tony followed my glance with eyes that were still bold and quick – the better to ensnare maidens with, my dear? ‘Have you been listening to all the gossip too, Myrtle?’ He sounded amused.
‘Dear Tony,’ I said tartly, ‘I wonder what would distress you more, being talked about, or not being talked about?’
He laughed. ‘Is a lover without indiscretion a lover at all?’ He ran tapering fingers through his thinning hair, and I knew that though he had sentenced himself to a disastrous marriage, he had still not outgrown his self-infatuation. He moved closer, ‘You haven’t changed at all, you know that, Myrtle mine.’
‘The evergreen shrub,’ I returned with an autumnal smile, ‘that’s me.’
He did not smile back, but held my eyes challengingly. ‘I play around too much, I guess that’s obvious.’ His jaw muscles tightened as he put on his sincerity face, which had once been my undoing. ‘God knows I no longer make any excuses for myself. Except that you look for a little love – yes, even when you are grey and tired and have pouches under your eyes.’
Such an ingenuous statement, so guiltlessly framed, but he read my face and quickly broke into an endearing Peter Pan smile. ‘Damn it if I’m not making excuses for myself after all!’ With practised impunity he stared at me for
a long moment. ‘I love the way that grey streak runs through your hair, Myrtle,’ his words fell like gentle rain from heaven. ‘Promise me you’ll never do anything to it.’
‘I make no promises,’ my voice was spinster-dry, ‘that I may not keep.’
‘No, you don’t, do you?’ He stared into space with noble gravity and an unforgettable profile. He sighed. His bowed shoulders sent out a mute appeal to Saint Myrtle. ‘That’s one of the things I tell Bindu about you.’
‘Bindu?’
He lit up his face in a warm, paternal smile. ‘My daughter, baptized Belinda Anne after my mother, wilfully distorted to “Bindu” by my incurably pagan wife. That girl with the snub nose and ponytail and heartbreakingly serious face who sat mum at your feet half the evening. She stayed up tonight only because we were expecting you.’
He laughed boyishly at my startled expression. ‘Don’t look so appalled, we talk a lot about you, Bindu and I – she’s adored you ever since she read your book. You see, she’s a lady with literary ambition. She aspires to be a writer like you, not a singer like her mother. Praised be the Lord for such slender mercies.’
I sat still. Even before he opened his mouth again, I had assessed the parental campaign that had earned me an invitation to this party. For Tony was nothing if not strategic. I should know. Myrtle meek and mild had been used before only to be disinherited for her due portion on earth.
Tony was saying rapidly, with the adman’s sleight-of-tongue: ‘And when Bindu learnt that I knew you, I couldn’t tell her enough about you. How you are the one person I know who walks in beauty. Who does not cheat or lie or cheapen anything. Your integrity as an artist…’
I winced. ‘Shut up, Tony. Or go away.’
‘Of course,’ he overrode me in his proud baritone. ‘I haven’t told her the sorry part I played in your life, I dare not. I haven’t given her much, Myrtle, for I have nothing to give. I am totally bankrupt.’
He crouched there at my feet like a suppliant, but fantastically enough his self-esteem developed in a crescendo as he continued his self-flagellation: ‘I have failed her in all sorts of ways, and I will continue to fail her because I cannot change. Indira and I live on hate. We devour each other.’ He stopped, as if for a throb of violins from the pit, a flight of choral voices from the wings, but what was audible was a discordant belabouring of Silent Night by men bellied up against the bar.
He raised his voice above the din: ‘Our marriage is a tug-of-war, perhaps we are engaged in a death grapple…’
‘Don’t say any more, Tony.’ He was most odious to me in his self-regard. ‘You make me tired.’
But he evidently knew himself to be irresistible. ‘Now, Bindu,’ he raced on, ‘all this hasn’t been easy on her. She is like a bulb planted upside down. I don’t want her hurt. I don’t want her maimed. She passes out of school this year and I want to see her grow tall and straight in the clear blue sky of her future.’
Somehow even this became a lie when Tony said it. By comparison his wife’s hysteria had been authentic. She suffered. Dandy Tony merely postured and spouted.
‘And I know of only two things that can help Bindu,’ he continued. ‘One is her talent for words – I believe she has this talent – and the other is you. So you will talk to her, Myrtle – take her under your wing?’
I reached for my evening bag. Surely now was the time for a fine-edged valedictory. Though you may not believe it,’ I began in deceptively mild tones, ‘I’m not a soul expressly designed by Providence for the encouragement of others.’
He smiled. ‘I know you better than that…’
‘You don’t know me at all,’ I corrected him gently, ‘if you think that by your performance just now you‘ve beguiled me into an alliance I do not intend.’ For a passing moment his face registered shock that I should be so uncharitable – in the Christmas season too – and before he could recover his aplomb I had unsheathed the flint in my voice: ‘I am nobody’s kind aunt. And certainly not your accomplice in your rescue schemes for a delinquent daughter.’
A strange flush had mounted his cheeks. ‘I don’t know what gave you the idea…’ he began to bluster, then broke off. There was a flutter and a shadow, and Bindu stood before us.
‘Dad?’ Though she spoke his name hesitantly, resting a small hand on his shoulder, she was looking directly at me. I did not smile. After a dreadful pause she said in an obstinate but unsteady voice, ‘I feel I know you because I’ve read your book.’
She seemed to grow smaller as I still did not speak. Her eyes were unsure and asked for confirmation, but against my unreasoned hostility, the chin retained its marvellous pride.
This girl, I suddenly knew, was no trespasser. She wanted to be invited to enter my world, to be admitted there gracefully or she was prepared to walk away. And I was overcome by the oddest sensation: it was as if I had set off with a tremendous spurt in an unknown direction, which filled me with apprehension, so that I wanted to grab a familiar guard rail, a handbrake, anything, to decelerate the impetuous motion. But at the same time I didn’t really want to stop; I knew of nothing that I had accumulated in all my years that I wanted to stay with.
Later it seemed to me that I had passed a vast time in reflection, but now I said abruptly to Tony, without looking at him, ‘You must not neglect your other guests for me. Bindu and I have much to talk about.’
I did not see him go. She took his place on the pouf, offering herself to me on a platter. I heard the distant slurred rendition of Noel Noel. And I sat there very still as the child gazed up at me, knowing that like the ancient kings I was confronting a mystery.
EIGHTEEN
An Unprofitable Sin
MOHAN RAKESH
When someone went up to the counter and whispered to Sardar Sundar Singh that a police car with Sundari and her sister was patrolling Civil Lines, his face became red and the pencil fell from his trembling hands.
All morning he had been hearing that Sundari was telling the police the addresses of all the people to whose homes she and her sister Shammi had been taken. Some very important clients had been arrested, among them the brother of a magistrate, and a police inspector as well. Still, Sardar Sundar Singh felt in his heart that he could not be arrested. The moments he had spent with Sundari were the pleasantest moments of his life. Could life be so unjust to him as to snatch away the memory of those beautiful moments and make an absolute bankrupt out of him?
Besides, he hadn’t really indulged in any licentious activity. He was essentially an upright gentleman and his heart told him that such an upright gentleman couldn’t possibly be arrested. He was confident that his heart would never lie.
Some years ago, when he had roamed the alleys selling tea and cold drinks from a push cart, his heart had assured him that, one day, he would open a great restaurant and that several waiters and chefs would work under him. Long before he had hoped to fulfil this desire of his heart, it had become a reality. Within five or six years, he had gone from wearing ragged old kurtas and pyjamas to sharkskin suits; his income had risen from two rupees a day to thirty or forty rupees a day; and such a change had come into his speech and manner of walking that even his acquaintances couldn’t say that this was the same Sundar Singh who had once pushed a cart. He himself felt that he had not only changed in externals but also completely within.
Only one thing had not changed and that was his wife, whose very face he despised. Whenever he approached her, all the enthusiasm of his heart would evaporate. It was because of this that the Vaheguru hadn’t given him any children, but his heart told him that his entire life would not be spent in this way. He, Sundar Singh Talvar, would certainly one day fulfil all his desires.
So, on the day it was decided that Sundari would come to his house, he became even more convinced of what his heart had said. Indeed it seemed to him that some saint had taken up abode within him.
It was with great difficulty that he managed to persuade his wife to go to her father’s house. He
knew she wanted to go because, whenever in the past she had expressed the desire to go, he had rejected the idea. He had said that he was putting every penny into expanding the business and that he didn’t have the money to be sending her here and there. But this time he even went so far as to apologize for his previous behaviour. He implored her to go, for her own sake. After his wife had left, he looked around at the empty house, as if he had just given it a good cleaning, and then he lay on the empty bed and tried to get a good feeling of the change.
That night Sundari stayed with him from ten o’clock until twelve thirty. When the plump Harjit Kaur brought her and left, Sundar Singh shut the door and bolted it. This was the first opportunity in his entire life to be so close to a pretty girl. Yet he didn’t feel the slightest bit of fear or misgiving. He could fulfil all of his desires and longings through her body. He went up to her and took her hand, saying: ‘Sit down, my lovely.’
Sundari took her hand away and began to stroll around the room. Sundar Singh began to tease her in little ways. He would take her by the shoulder and kiss her on the cheek, then squeeze her swollen breasts with his hand. As soon as he touched her, an electric shock would race through his body. Part of the time he couldn’t believe that what was happening was a reality. He firmly grasped Sundari’s hand and said: ‘Sit down, little chickadee.’
Sundari did sit down but, to Sundar Singh, it seemed as though she was looking at him in a strange, suspicious way. Suddenly his excitement began to cool and, in an attempt to preserve it, he pulled her up against him and said: ‘Don’t you love me, my beauty?’
When Sundari tried to free herself from his arms, Sundar Singh began to cool off even more. He wrapped himself around her like a drowning man who catches hold of some swimmer’s arm and in no way wants to let go. He began to tell her that today, for the first time, he was experiencing true love, that he had never been able to love his wife and that he couldn’t begin to tell her how much he had suffered at his wife’s hands.
Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 2 Page 16
