by Anita Desai
Still confused, she said slowly ‘But, Bim, it’s a very old letter—years old.’
‘But I still have it,’ Bim said sharply, staring out of the window as if she too saw pictures in the dark. ‘I still keep it in my desk—to remind me. Whenever I begin to wish to see Raja again or wish he would come and see us, then I take out that letter and read it again. Oh, I can tell you, I could write him such an answer, he wouldn’t forget it for many years either!’ She gave a short laugh and ended it with a kind of a choke, saying ‘You say I should come to Hyderabad with you for his daughter’s wedding. How can I? How can I enter his house—my landlord’s house? I, such a poor tenant? Because of me, he can’t raise the rent or sell the house and make a profit—imagine that. The sacrifice!’
‘Oh Bim,’ Tara said helplessly. Whenever she saw a tangle, an emotional tangle of this kind, rise up before her, she wanted only to turn and flee into that neat, sanitary, disinfected land in which she lived with Bakul, with its set of rules and regulations, its neatness and orderliness. And seemliness too—seemliness. She sat down weakly on the edge of Bim’s bed, putting the letter down on the bedside table beside a pile of history books. She turned the pages of Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s Early India and Pakistan and thought how relevant such a title was to the situation in their family, their brother’s marriage to Hyder Ali’s daughter. She wished she dared lighten the atmosphere by suggesting this to Bim, but Bim stood with her back arched, martial and defiant. ‘Why let this go on and on?’ she sighed instead. ‘Why not end it now by going to Moyna’s wedding, and then forget it all?’
‘I have ended it already,’ Bim said stubbornly, ‘by not going to see them and not having them here either. It is ended. But I don’t forget, no.’
‘I wouldn’t ever have believed—no one would ever have believed that you and Raja who were so close—so close—could be against each other ever. It’s just unbelievable, Bim, and so—unnecessary, too,’ she ended in a wail.
‘Yes?’ said Bim with scorn, turning around to stare at her sister. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think it is unnecessary to take offence when you are insulted. What was he trying to say to me? Was he trying to make me thank him—go down on my knees and thank him for this house in which we all grew up? Was he trying to threaten me with eviction and warn me what might happen if I ever stopped praising him and admiring him?’
‘Of course not, Bim. How silly. He simply didn’t know quite what he was writing. I suppose he was in a state—his father-in-law having just died, and you know how he always felt about him—and then having to take over Benazir’s family business and all that. He just didn’t know what he was writing.’
‘A poet—not knowing what he was writing?’ Bim laughed sarcastically as she came and picked up the letter and put it back in the desk. It seemed to have a pigeon-hole all to itself as if it were a holy relic like fingernails or a crooked yellow tooth.
‘Do tear it up,’ cried Tara, jumping up. ‘Don’t put it back there to take out and look at and hold against Raja. Tear it up, Bim, throw it away,’ she urged.
Bim put the lid up with a harsh set to her mouth. ‘I will keep it. I must look at it and remind myself every now and then. Whenever you come here and ask why I don’t go to Hyderabad and visit him and see my little nieces and nephews—well then, I feel I have to explain to you, prove to you . . .’ She stammered a bit and faltered to a stop.
‘Why, Bim?’
But Bim would not tell her why she needed this bitterness and insult and anger. She picked up an old grey hairbrush that had lost half its bristles and was so matted with tangles of hair that Tara shuddered at the sight of it, and began to brush her hair with short, hard strokes. ‘Come, let’s go and visit the Misras. They’ve been asking about you, they want to see you. Ask Bakul to come, too—he must be getting bored. And he knows the Misras. You met him at their house—I’d nearly forgotten,’ she laughed, a bit distractedly.
Tara followed her out, relieved to be in the open again, out of the dense musty web of Bim’s room, Bim’s entanglements, and to see the evening light and the garden. A bush of green flowers beside the veranda shook out its night scent as they came out and covered them with its powdery billows. Badshah rushed up, whining with expectation.
The sound of a 1940s foxtrot on Baba’s gramophone followed them down the drive to the gate as if a mechanical bird had replaced the koels and pigeons of daylight. Here Bim stopped and told Badshah firmly to sit. They stood watching, waiting for him to obey. He made protesting sounds, turned around in circles, pawed Bim’s feet with his claws, even whined a bit under his breath. Finally he yawned in resignation and sank onto his haunches. Then they turned out of the gate and ceased to hear the tinny rattle of the wartime foxtrot.
Walking up the Misras’ driveway, they could hear instead the sounds of the music and dance lessons that the Misra sisters gave in the evenings after their little nursery school had closed for the day, for it seemed that they never ceased to toil and the pursuit of a living was unending. Out on the dusty lawn cane chairs were set in a circle and here the Misra brothers sat taking their rest—which they also never ceased to do—dressed in summer clothes of fine muslin, drinking iced drinks and discussing the day which meant very little since the day for them had been as blank and unblemished as an empty glass.
They immediately rose to welcome their neighbours but Bim stood apart, feeling a half-malicious desire to go into the house and watch the two grey-haired, spectacled, middle-aged women—once married but both rejected by their husbands soon after their marriage—giving themselves up to demonstrations of ecstatic song and dance, the songs always Radha’s in praise of Krishna, the dance always of Radha pining for Krishna. She hadn’t the heart after all and instead of joining the men on the lawn, she went up the steps to the veranda where the old father half-sat, half-reclined against the bolsters on a wooden divan, a glass of soda water in his hand, looking out and listening to his sons and occasionally shouting a command at them that went unheard, then sadly, meditatively burping. Tara and Bakul sat down with the brothers on the lawn and talked and listened to the voices of pupils and teachers mournfully rising and falling down the scales played on a lugubrious harmonium and tried, while talking of Delhi and Washington, politics and travel, to imagine the improbable scene indoors. Eventually the little pupils came out, drooping and perspiring, and rushed off down the drive to the gate where their ayahs waited for them, chatting and chewing betel leaves. After a while, the teachers, too, emerged onto the veranda. They too drooped and perspired and were grey with fatigue. There was nothing remotely amusing about them.
‘Bim, Bim, why must you sit here with Papa? Come into the garden and have a drink,’ they cried at once, together.
But Bim would not listen. She tucked up her feet under her to make it plain she was not getting up. ‘No, no, I want to listen to Uncle,’ she said, not wishing to add that she had no liking for his sons’ company. ‘Uncle is telling me how he was sent to England to study law but somehow landed up in Burma and made a fortune instead. I want to hear the whole story. And you must go and meet Tara and Bakul. They’ve come.’
‘Tara and Bakul?’ cried the two sisters and, straightening their spectacles and smoothing down their hair and their saris, they rushed down into the garden while Bim stayed by the sick old man.
‘But Uncle, is it a true story?’ she teased him. ‘I never know with you.’
‘Can’t you see the proof?’ he asked, waving his glass of soda water so that it spilt and frothed and sizzled down his arm. ‘Now if I had gone north and had to work in a cold climate, learnt to wear a tie and button a jacket and keep my shoes laced and polished, I would have returned a proper person, a disciplined man. Instead, as you see, I went east, in order to fulfil a swami’s prophecy, and there I could make money without working, and had to undress to keep cool, and sleep all afternoon, and drink all evening—and so I came back with money and no discipline and no degree,’ he laughed, deliberately spilling
some more soda water as if in a gesture of fatalism.
‘What, all to satisfy a swami?’
‘Yes, yes, it is true, Bimla. My father used to go to this swami-ji, no great man, just one of those common little swamis who sit outside the railway station and catch those people who come from the village to make their fortunes in the city. “Swami-ji, swami-ji, will I have luck?” they ask, and he puts his hand on their heads in blessing and says “Yes, son, if you first put five rupees in my pocket.” That sort of man. My father went to him to buy a blessing for me—I was leaving for England next day. My trunk was packed, my passage booked, my mother was already weeping. But perhaps my father didn’t give the swami-ji enough money. He said “Your son go to England? To Vilayat? Certainly not. He will never go north. He will go east.” “No, no,” said my father, “his passage is already booked on a P & O boat, he is leaving for Bombay tomorrow to catch it, he is going to study law in a great college in England.” But swami-ji only shook his head and refused to say another word. So, as my father was walking home, very slowly and thoughtfully, who should bump into him, outside the Kashmere Gate post office, but an old friend of his who had been in school with him and then gone to Burma to set up in the teak business. And this man, this scoundrel, may he perish—oh, I forgot! He perished long ago, Bimla, leaving me all his money—he clasped my father in his arms and said “You are like a brother to me. Your son is my son. Send him to me, let him work for me and I will make a man of him.” And so my passage was cancelled, I gave up my studies and went east, to Burma.’ He gulped down half a glass of soda water suddenly, thirstily. ‘That swami-ji,’ he burped.
‘And do you think if the swami-ji had not made that prophecy, your father would not have accepted his friend’s offer?’ asked Bim, filled with curiosity.
‘Who can tell?’ groaned the old man, shifting about in search of a more comfortable position. ‘Fate—they talk about Fate. What is it?’ He struck his head dramatically. ‘This fate?’
‘What is it, uncle? Does it pain?’ Bim asked because his face, normally as smooth and bland as butter, was furrowed and gleaming with sweat.
He sank back, sighing ‘Nothing, nothing, Bimla, my daughter, it is only old age. Just fate and old age and none of us escapes from either. You won’t. You don’t know, you don’t think—and then suddenly it is there, it has come. When it comes, you too will know.’
Bim laughed, helping herself to some of the betel leaves in the silver box at his side. As she smeared them with lime and sprinkled them with aniseed and cardamoms, she said ‘You think one doesn’t know pain when one is young, uncle? You should sit down some day with ninety examination papers to correct and try and make out ninety different kinds of handwriting, all illegible, and see that your class has presented you with ninety different versions of what you taught them—all wrong!’ She laughed and rolled up the betel leaf and packed it into her mouth. ‘That is what I have been doing all day and it has given me a fine pain, too.’ She grasped her head theatrically and the old man laughed. Bim had always made him laugh, even when she was a little girl and did tricks on her bicycle going round the drive while his two daughters screamed ‘Bim, you’ll fall!’
‘You work too hard,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how to enjoy life. You and my two girls—you are too alike—you work and let the brothers enjoy. Look at my sons there—’ he waved his arm at them, the muslin sleeve of his shirt falling back to reveal an amulet tied to his arm with a black thread running through the thick growth of white hair. ‘Look at them—fat, lazy slobs, drinking whisky. Drinking whisky all day that their sisters have to pay for—did you ever hear of such a thing? In my day, our sisters used to tie coloured threads on our wrists on Rakhibandhan day, begging for our protection, and we gave them gifts and promised to protect them and take care of them, and even if it was only a custom, an annual festival, we at least meant it. When my sister’s husband died, I brought her to live here with us. She has lived here for years, she and her children. Perhaps she is still here, I don’t know, I haven’t seen her,’ he trailed off vaguely, then ended up with a forceful ‘But they—they let their sisters do the same ceremony, and they just don’t care what it means as long as they can get their whisky and have the time to sit on their backsides, drinking it. Useless rubbish, my sons. Everything they ever did has failed . . .’
‘What, not the new business as well? The real estate business that Brij started? Has that failed already?’
‘Of course,’ cried the old man, almost with delight. ‘Of course it has. Can it succeed when Brij, the manager, cannot go to the office because he thinks it is degrading and refuses to speak to his clients because they are Punjabis, from Pakistan, and don’t belong to the old families of Delhi? What is one to do with a fool like that? Am I to kick him out of the house and flog him down the road to the office? And look at Mulk—our great musician—all he does is wave his hand in the air and look at the stars in the daytime sky, and sing. Sing! He only wants to sing. Why? For whom? Who asked him to sing? Nobody. He just wants to, that is all. He doesn’t think anyone should ask him to work or earn money—they should only ask him to sing.’
Out on the lawn there was a burst of laughter.
‘And what about the old business they ran—the ice factory and soda water business? They had a good manager to run that.’
‘Good manager—ho, yes! Very good manager. Had them eating out of his hand. They thought he was an angel on earth—a farishtha—slaving for their sakes, to fill their coffers with gold—till one day they went to the office to open the coffer for some gold—they must have needed it for those Grant Road women they go to, those song-and-dance women—and they found it empty, and the money gone.’
‘And the manager?’
‘Gone! He took care of money—the money went—he went with it.’ The old man roared, slapping his thigh so that a fold of his dhoti fell aside, revealing the grey-haired stretch of old, slack flesh. Straightening it casually, he added ‘What did they think? Someone else will work so that they can eat?’
‘I didn’t know about that,’ said Bim, concerned. She had thought the Misras had at least one secure business behind them, as her own family still had their father’s insurance business that still existed quietly and unspectacularly without their aid and kept them housed and fed. If the manager made more money than he ought to, Bim did not grudge him that. She earned her own living to supplement that unearned income, and it was really only Baba who needed to be supported. But the Misra boys—fat, hairy brutes—why should others look after them? The poor Misra girls, so grey and bony and needle-faced, still prancing through their Radha-Krishna dances and impersonating lovelorn maidens in order to earn their living . . . Bim shook her head.
‘Fools,’ the old man was still muttering as he fumbled about, looking for something under the pillows and bolsters and not finding it. Bim knew it was the hookah he was no longer allowed to smoke. ‘Ugh,’ he cried, the corners of his mouth turned down as though he were about to cry, like a baby. ‘Not even my hookah any more. The doctor has said no, and the girls listen to the doctor, not to their father. What it is to be a father, to live without a smoke, or drink . . .’
Out on the lawn they were laughing again, their laughter spiralling up, up in the dark, as light as smoke.
‘Laugh, laugh,’ said the old man. ‘Yes, laugh now—before it is all up with you and you are like me—washed up. But never mind, never mind,’ he said to Bim, straightening his head and folding his arms so that he looked composed again, like a piece of stone sculpture. ‘When I was young, when I was their age—do you think I was any better?’ He winked suddenly at the surprised Bim. ‘Was I a saint?’ he laughed. ‘I can tell you, I was just as fat, as greedy, as stupid, as wicked as any of them,’ he suddenly roared, flinging out an arm as if to push them out of his way in contempt. ‘A boozer, a womaniser, a bankrupt—running after drink, women, money—that was all I did, just like them, worse than them, any of them . . .’ he chuckled and n
ow his head wobbled on his neck as if something had come loose. ‘Much worse than any of them,’ he repeated with desperate pride.
Bim, red-faced in the dark shadows, let down her feet cautiously and searched for her slippers.
And here was Jaya coming up the steps to fetch her. ‘Bim, come and join us,’ she called. ‘Tara is telling us about Washington—it is such fun—and Papa should eat his dinner and go to sleep. Papa, I’m sending the cook with your dinner—’ and she rushed off towards the kitchen while Bim went down the steps into the garden. The old man had sunk back against the bolsters and shut his eyes. She even thought he might have fallen asleep, he was so still, but a little later she heard him call ‘The pickle, Jaya—don’t forget the black lemon pickle—let me have a little of it, will you?’
Out on the lawn the talk was more sober, more predictable in spite of the whisky that accompanied it. Someone brought Bim a tall glass that chattered with ice. Could it be from their factory, Bim wondered, sipping, stretching her bare feet in the grass and feeling its dry tickle.
‘Bakul-bhai, tell me,’ said the older brother, rolling the ice cubes around in his glass, ‘as a diplomat in an Indian embassy, how do you explain the situation to foreigners? Now when the foreign press asks you, perhaps you just say “No comment”, but when you meet friends at a party, and they ask you what is going on here—how can a Prime Minister behave as ours does—how can ministers get away with all they do here—what is being done about the problems of this country—who is going to solve them—how, why is it like this?—then what do you say to them, Bakul-bhai?’
