by Anita Desai
Bakul said one could rise above the climate, that one could ignore it if one filled one’s mind with so many thoughts and activities that there was no room for it. ‘Look at me,’ he had said the winter that they froze in Moscow. ‘I don’t let the cold immobilize me, do I?’ and she and the girls, swaddled in all their warm clothing and the quilts and blankets off their beds, had had to agree that he did not. And gradually he had trained her and made her into an active, organised woman who looked up her engagement book every morning, made plans and programmes for the day ahead and then walked her way through them to retire to her room at night, tired with the triumphant tiredness of the virtuous and the dutiful. Now the engagement book lay at the bottom of her trunk. Bim had said nothing of engagements and, really, she could not bear to have any in this heat. The day stretched out like a sheet of glass that reflected the sun—too bare, too exposed to be faced.
Out in the garden only the coppersmiths were awake, clinging to the tree-trunks, beating out their mechanical call—tonk-tonk-tonk. Tonk-tonk-tonk.
Here in the house it was not just the empty, hopeless atmosphere of childhood, but the very spirits of her parents that brooded on—here they still sat, crouched about the little green baize folding table that was now shoved into a corner with a pile of old Illustrated Weeklies and a brass pot full of red and yellow spotted canna lilies on it as if to hold it firmly down, keep it from opening up with a snap and spilling out those stacks of cards, those long note-books and thin pencils with which her parents had sat, day after day and year after year till their deaths, playing bridge with friends like themselves, mostly silent, heads bent so that the knobs in their necks protruded, soft stained hands shuffling the cards, now and then speaking those names and numbers that remained a mystery to the children who were not allowed within the room while a game was in progress, who had sometimes folded themselves into the dusty curtains and stood peeping out, wondering at this strange, all-absorbing occupation that kept their parents sucked down into the silent centre of a deep, shadowy vortex while they floated on the surface, staring down into the underworld, their eyes popping with incomprehension.
Raja used to swear that one day he would leap up onto the table in a lion-mask, brandishing a torch, and set fire to this paper-world of theirs, while Bim flashed her sewing scissors in the sunlight and declared she would creep in secretly at night and snip all the cards into bits. But Tara simply sucked her finger and retreated down the veranda to Aunt Mira’s room where she could always tuck herself up in the plum-coloured quilt that smelt so comfortingly of the aged relation and her ginger cat, lay her head down beside that purring creature and feel such a warmth, such a softness of comfort and protection as not to feel the need to wreck her parents’ occupation or divert their atttention. It would have frightened her a bit if they had come away, followed her and tried to communicate with her.
And now she stirred uneasily in her chair although it held her damply as if with suckers, almost afraid that they would rise from their seats, drop their cards on the table and come towards her with papery faces, softly shuffling fingers, smoky breath, and welcome her back, welcome her home.
Once her father had risen, padded quietly to her mother’s bedroom behind that closed door, and Tara had slipped in behind him, folded herself silently into the faded curtain and watched. She had seen him lean over her mother’s bed and quickly, smoothly press a little shining syringe into her mother’s arm that lay crookedly on the blue cover, press it in very hard so that she tilted her head back with a quick gasp of shock, or pain—Tara saw her chin rising up into the air and the grey head sinking back into the pillow and heard a long, whimpering sigh like an air-bag minutely punctured so that Tara had fled, trembling, because she was sure she had seen her father kill her mother.
All her life Tara had experienced that fear—her father had killed her mother. Even after Aunt Mira and Bim and Raja had explained to her what it was he did, what he kept on doing daily, Tara could not rid herself of the feel of that original stab of suspicion. Sometimes, edging up close to her mother, she would study the flabby, floury skin punctured with a hundred minute needle-holes, and catch her breath in an effort not to cry out. Surely these were the signs of death, she felt, not of healing?
Now she stared fixedly at the door in the wall, varnished a bright hideous brown with the varnish swelling into blisters or cracking into spidery patterns in the heat, and felt the same morbid, uncontrollable fear of it opening and death stalking out in the form of a pair of dreadfully familiar ghosts that gave out a sound of paper and filled her nostrils with white insidious dust.
In the sleeping garden the coppersmiths beat on and on monotonously like mechanics at work on a metal sheet—tonk-tonk-tonk. Tonk-tonk-tonk.
To look at Bim one would not think she had lived through the same childhood, the same experiences as Tara. She led the way so briskly up the stairs on the outside of the house to the flat rooftop where, as children, they had flown kites and hidden secrets, that it was clear she feared no ghosts to meet her there. Now they leant upon the stucco balustrade and looked down at the garden patterned with the light and shade of early evening. The heat of the day and the heavy dust were being sluiced and washed away by the garden hose as the gardener trained it now on the jasmines, now on the palms, bringing out the green scent of watered earth and refreshed plants. Flocks of parrots came winging in, a lurid, shrieking green, to settle on the sunflowers and rip their black-seeded centres to bits, while mynahs hopped up and down on the lawn, quarrelling over insects. Bim’s cat, jet-black, picked her way carefully between the puddles left by the gardener’s generously splashing, spraying hose, and twitched her whiskers and went ‘meh-meh-meh’ with annoyance when the mynahs shrieked at the sight of her and came to swoop over and divebomb her till she retreated under the hedge. A pair of hoopoes promenaded sedately up and down the lawn, furling and unfurling the striped fans on their heads. A scent of spider lilies rose from the flowerpots massed on the veranda steps as soon as they were watered, like ladies newly bathed, powdered and scented for the evening.
On either side of their garden were more gardens, neighbours’ houses, as still and faded and shabby as theirs, the gardens as overgrown and neglected and teeming with wild, uncontrolled life. From the roof-top they could see the pink and yellow and grey stucco walls, peeling and spotted, or an occasional gol mohur tree scarlet with summer blossom.
Outside the sagging garden gate the road led down to the Jumna river. It had shrunk now to a mere rivulet of mud that Tara could barely make out in the huge flat expanse of sand that stretched out to the furry yellow horizon like some sleeping lion, shabby and old. There were no boats on the river except for a flat-bottomed ferry boat that idled slowly back and forth. There was no sign of life beyond an occasional washerman picking his washing off the sand dunes and loading it onto his donkey, and a few hairless pai dogs that slunk about the mud flats, nosing about for a dead fish or a frog to devour. A fisherman strode out into the river, flung out his net with a wave of his wrists and then drew in an empty net.
Tara could tell it was empty because he did not bend to pick up anything. There was nothing. ‘Imagine,’ she said, with wonder, for she could not believe the long-remembered, always-remembered childhood had had a backdrop as drab as this, ‘we used to like playing there—in that dust and mud. What could we have seen in it—in that muddy little trickle? Why, it’s hardly a river—it’s nothing, just nothing.’
‘Now Tara, your travels have made you very snobbish,’ Bim protested, but lazily, good-naturedly. She was leaning heavily on her elbows, letting her grey-streaked hair tumble in whatever bit of breeze came off the river up to them, and now she turned to lean back against the balustrade and look up at the sky that was no longer flat and white-hot but patterned and wrinkled with pale brush-strokes of blue and grey and mauve. A flock of white egrets rose from the river bed and stitched their way slowly and evenly across this faded cloth. ‘Nothing?’ she repeated Tara’s
judgement. ‘The holy river Jumna? On whose banks Krishna played his flute and Radha danced?’
‘Oh Bim, it is nothing of the sort,’ Tara dared to say, sure she was being teased. ‘It’s a little trickle of mud with banks of dust on either side.’
‘It’s where my ashes will be thrown after I am dead and burnt,’ Bim said unexpectedly and abruptly. ‘It is where Mira-masi’s ashes were thrown. Then they go down into the sea.’ Seeing Tara start and quiver, she added more lightly ‘It’s where we played as children—ran races on the dunes and dug holes to bury ourselves in and bullied the ferryman into giving us free rides to the melon fields. Don’t you remember the melons baking in the hot sand and splitting them open and eating them all warm and red and pouring with pink juice?’
‘That was you and Raja,’ Tara reminded her. ‘I never dared get into that boat, and of course Baba stayed at home. It was you and Raja who used to play there, Bim.’
‘I and Raja,’ Bim mused, continuing to look up at the sky till the egrets pierced through the soft cloth of it and disappeared into the dusk like so many needles lost. ‘I and Raja,’ she said, ‘I and Raja.’ Then ‘And the white horse and Hyder Ali Sahib going for his evening ride?’ she asked Tara almost roughly, trying to shake out of her some corroboration as if she were unsure if this image were real or only imagined. It had the making of a legend, with the merest seed of truth. ‘Can you remember playing on the sand late in the evening and the white horse riding by, Hyder Ali Sahib up on it, high above us and his peon running in front of him, shouting, and his dog behind him, barking?’ She laughed quite excitedly seeing it again, this half-remembered picture. ‘We stood up to watch them go past and he wouldn’t even look at us. The peon shouted to us to get out of the way. I think Hyder Ali Sahib used to think of himself as some kind of prince, a nawab. And Raja loved that.’ Her eyes gleamed as much with malice as with remembrance. ‘Raja stood up straight and stared and stared and I’m sure he longed to ride on a white horse with a dog to run behind him just as old Hyder Ali did. Hyder Ali Sahib was always Raja’s ideal, wasn’t he?’ she ended up.
Her words had cut a deep furrow through Tara’s forehead. She too pressed down on her elbows, feeling the balustrade cut into her flesh as she tried to remember. Did she really remember or was it only Bim’s picture that she saw, in shades of white and black and scarlet, out there on the shadowy sand-bank? To cover up a confusion she failed to resolve, she said ‘Yes, and d’you remember Raja marching up and down here on the roof, swinging his arms and reciting his poems to us while we sat here on the balustrade, swinging our legs and listening? I used to feel like crying, it was so beautiful—those poems about death, and love, and wine, and flames.’
‘They weren’t. They were terrible,’ Bim said icily, tossing her head with a stubborn air, like a bad-tempered mare’s. ‘Terrible verses he wrote.’
‘Oh Bim,’ Tara exclaimed in dismay, widening her eyes in horror at such sacrilege. It was a family dictum that Raja was a poet and wrote great poetry. Now Bim, his favourite sister, was denying this doctrine. What had happened?
‘Of course it was, Tara—terrible, terrible,’ Bim insisted. ‘We’re not fifteen and ten years old any more—you and I. Have you tried reading it recently? It’s nauseating. Can you remember any two lines of it that wouldn’t make you sick with embarrassment now?’
Tara was too astounded, and too stricken to speak. Throughout her childhood, she had always stood on the outside of that enclosed world of love and admiration in which Bim and Raja moved, watching them, sucking her finger, excluded. Now here was Bim, cruelly and wilfully smashing up that charmed world with her cynicism, her criticism. She stood dismayed.
Bim was fierce. She no longer leant on the balustrade, drooping with reminiscences. She walked up and down agitatedly, swinging her arms in agitation, as Raja had done when quoting poetry in those days when he was a poet, at least to them. ‘If you’ll just come to my room,’ she said, suddenly stopping, ‘I’ll show you some of those poems—I think they must be still lying around although I don’t know why I haven’t torn them all up.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t!’ Tara exclaimed.
‘Why not?’ Bim flung at her. ‘Come and see, tell me if you think it worth keeping,’ and she swept down the stairs with a martial step, looking back once to shout at Tara ‘And, apart from poetry recitals, Tara, this terrace is where I cut your hair for you and made you cry. What an uproar there was.’ She gave her head a quick, jerky toss. ‘And here you are, with your hair grown long again, and it’s mine that’s cut short. Only no one cared when I cut mine.’
Tara hung back. She had been perfectly content to pace the terrace in the faint breeze, watch the evening darken, wait for the stars to come out and talk about the old days. Even if it was about the haircut, painful as that had been. But Bim was clattering down the stone stairs, the bells of the pink-spired temple at the bend of the river were suddenly clanging loudly and discordantly, the sky had turned a deep green with a wide purple channel through it for the night to come flowing in, and there was nothing for it but to follow Bim down the stairs, into the house, now unbearably warm and stuffy after the freshness and cool of the terrace, and then into Bim’s cluttered, untidy room.
It had been their father’s office room and the furniture in it was still office furniture—steel cupboards to hold safes and files, metal slotted shelves piled with registers and books, and the roll-top desk towards which Bim marched as Tara hesitated unwillingly by the door. Throwing down the lid, Bim started pulling out papers from the pigeon-holes and opening drawers and rifling through files and tutorial papers and college registers. Out of this mass of paper she separated some sheets and held them out to Tara with an absent-minded air.
Tara, glancing down at them, saw that they were in Urdu, a language she had not learnt. It was quite useless her holding these sheets in her hand and pretending to read the verses that Raja had once recited to them and that had thrilled her then with their Persian glamour. But Bim did not notice her predicament, she was still occupied with the contents of the rifled desk. Finally she found what she was looking for and handed that, too, to Tara with a grim set of her mouth that made Tara quake.
‘What is this, Bim?’ she asked, looking down and seeing it was in Raja’s English handwriting.
‘A letter Raja wrote—read it. Read it,’ she repeated as Tara hesitated, and walked across to the window and stood there staring out silently, compelling Tara to read while she tensely waited.
Tara read—unwillingly, unbelievingly.
Raja had written it years ago, she saw, and tried to link the written date with some event in their family history that might provide it with a context.
You will have got our wire with the news of Hyder Ali Sahib’s death. I know you will have been as saddened by it as we are. Perhaps you are also a bit worried about the future. But you must remember that when I left you, I promised I would always look after you, Bim. When Hyder Ali Sahib was ill and making out his will, Benazir herself spoke to him about the house and asked him to allow you to keep it at the same rent we used to pay him when father and mother were alive. He agreed—you know he never cared for money, only for friendship—and I want to assure you that now that he is dead and has left all his property to us, you may continue to have it at the same rent, I shall never think of raising it or of selling the house as long as you and Baba need it. If you have any worries, Bim, you have only to tell—Raja.
It took Tara some minutes to think out all the implications of this letter. To begin with, she studied the date and tried to recall when Hyder Ali had died. Instead a series of pictures of the Hyder Ali family flickered in the half-dark of the room. There was Hyder Ali, once their neighbour and their landlord, as handsome and stately as a commissioned oil painting hung over a mantelpiece, all in silver and grey and scarlet as he had been on the white horse on which he rode along the river bank in the evenings while the children stood and watched. He had cultivated the best ro
ses in Old Delhi and given parties to which poets and musicians came. Their parents were not amongst his friends. Then there was his daughter Benazir, a very young girl, plump and pretty, a veil thrown over her head as she hurried into the closed carriage that took her to school, and the Begum whom they seldom saw, she lived in the closed quarters of the house, but at Id sent them, and their other tenant-neighbours, rich sweets covered with fine silver foil on a tray decked with embroidered napkins. They had lived in the tall stucco house across the road, distinguished from all the others by its wealth of decorative touches like the coloured fanlight above the front door, the china tiles along the veranda walls and the coloured glass chandeliers and lamps. They had owned half the houses on that road. When they left Delhi during the partition riots of 1947, they sold most of these houses to their Hindu tenants for a song—all except for Bim’s house which she did not try to buy and which he continued to let to her at the same rent as before. It was to this that Raja, his only son-in-law and inheritor of his considerable property, referred in his letter. It was a very old letter.
