by Anita Desai
Bim, who was lighting herself a cigarette, stopped to watch her brother-in-law cope with this interrogation. It was quite dark on the lawn and although a light had been switched on in the veranda so that the old father could see to eat his dinner, it only threw a pale rectangle of light across the beds of cannas close to the house, and did not illuminate Bakul’s face. He kept them all waiting in silence as he considered and then began his measured and diplomatic reply.
Elegantly holding his cigarette in its holder at arm’s length, Bakul told them in his ripest, roundest tones, ‘What I feel is my duty, my vocation, when I am abroad, is to be my country’s ambassador. All of us abroad are, in varying degrees, ambassadors. I refuse to talk about famine or drought or caste wars or—or political disputes. I refuse—I refuse to discuss such things. “No comment” is the answer if I am asked. I can discuss such things here, with you. but not with foreigners, not in a foreign land. There I am an ambassador and I choose to show them and inform them only of the best, the finest.’
‘The Taj Mahal?’ asked Bim, blowing out a spume of smoke that wavered in the darkness, and avoiding Tara’s eye, watchful and wary.
‘Yes, exactly,’ said Bakul promptly. ‘The Taj Mahal—the Bhagavad Gita—Indian philosophy—music—art—the great, immortal values of ancient India. But why talk of local politics, party disputes, election malpractices, Nehru, his daughter, his grandson—such matters as will soon pass into oblivion? These aren’t important when compared with India, eternal India—’
‘Yes, it does help to live abroad if you feel that way,’ mused Bim, while her foot played with the hem of her sari and she looked carefully away from Tara who watched. ‘If you lived here, and particularly if you served the Government here, I think you would be obliged to notice such things: you would see their importance. I’m not sure if you could ignore bribery and corruption, red-tapism, famine, caste warfare and all that. In fact, living here, working here, you might easily forget the Taj Mahal and the message of the Gita—’
‘Never,’ interrupted Bakul firmly, ripely. ‘A part of me lives here, the deepest part of me, always—’
‘Ah,’ Bim in turn interrupted him. ‘Then it is definitely important to live abroad. In all the comfort and luxury of the embassy, it must be much easier, very easy to concentrate on the Taj, or the Emperor Akbar. Over here I’m afraid you would be too busy queueing up for your rations and juggling with your budget, making ends meet—’
‘Oh Bim,’ Tara burst out in protest, ‘you do exaggerate. I don’t see you queueing up for your rations—or even for a bus!’
Bim burst out laughing, delighted at having provoked Tara, and agreed there was some exaggeration in what she said. This annoyed Bakul who had taken it all so perfectly seriously, and he tapped his cigarette holder on the arm of his chair with the air of a judge tapping a gavel at a meeting grown unruly.
Tara cast her eyes around, looking for an escape. But Bim had thrown back her head in laughter, all the men beside her were laughing. Then she leant forward, a cigarette in her mouth, and Bakul leant towards her to light it. Seeing the match flare, the cigarette catch fire with a little throb, Tara was pricked with the realisation that although it was she who was the pretty sister, had always been, so that in their youth the young men had come flocking about her like inquisitive, hopeful, sanguine bees in search of some nectar that they sniffed on the air, it was Bim who was attractive. Bim who, when young, had been too tall and square-shouldered to be thought pretty, now that she was grey—and a good deal grey, observed Tara—had arrived at an age when she could be called handsome. All the men seemed to acknowledge this and to respond. There was that little sensual quiver in the air as they laughed at what she said, and a kind of quiet triumph in the way in which she drew in her cheeks to make the cigarette catch fire and then threw herself back into her chair, giving her head a toss and holding the cigarette away so that a curl of smoke circled languidly about her hand. Tara thought how attractive a woman who smokes is: there is some link formed between the man who leans forward with a match and the woman who bends her head towards that light, as Bakul and Bim did.
Tara did not smoke and no one offered her a light. Or was it just that Tara, having married, had rescinded the right to flirt, while Bim, who had not married, had not rescinded? No, it was not, for Bim could not be said to flirt. Slapping hard at a mosquito that had lighted on her arm, she was saying to Manu who had offered to fetch a Flit-gun, ‘That’s too much of a bother—don’t.’ Bim never bothered.
The Misra brothers and sisters were not interested in the subtleties underlying such exchanges. One brother wanted to know ‘What is the price of good whisky in Washington? Not that terrible thing called bourbon but scotch—can you get scotch?’ and the sisters asked Tara where she had bought her chiffon sari and her leather bag, and for how much. Bim listened to Tara giving them shoppers’ information glibly but a little too fast, making her sound unreliable. It amused Bim to see, through a haze of cigarette smoke, Tara’s not quite assimilated cosmopolitanism that sat on her oddly, as if a child had dressed up in its mother’s high-heeled shoes—taller, certainly, but wobbling. Then the sisters’ heads drew closer still to Tara, their voices dropped an octave, and they murmured, one from the left and one from the right, ‘But how much longer can you keen your girls abroad? Mustn’t they come home to marry now?’
Tara cowered back in her basket chair. ‘They are only sixteen and seventeen,’ she said plaintively.
‘Time to marry—better to marry—time, time,’ they cried, and Tara rubbed her mosquito-bitten toe in the grass in pained embarrassment, and Bim, overhearing them, lifted her eyebrows in horror and turned to Mulk, the younger brother who was silent, for sympathy.
Mulk had already drunk more glasses of whisky than anyone could count and sat ignoring the company, beating one hand on his knee, singing in little snatches in his hoarse, cracked voice, swaying his head joyfully to music that was audible only to him. Even since she had last seen him, he seemed to have deteriorated—his jaws prickled with several days’ growth of beard, he wore a shirt with several buttons missing and a sleeve irremediably stained with betel juice, the slippers on his unwashed feet needed mending. He rolled his eyes in their sockets like a dog howling at the moon and hummed to himself. ‘Zindagi, O Zindagi,’ he sang, tunelessly, and refreshed himself with another gulp of whisky.
Then suddenly the scene split, with a tearing sound. It was only whisky pouring out of an overturned glass and Mulk struggling to get out of the canvas chair, too tight for his heavy frame. As they all stopped talking to stare at him, he gestured widely and shouted dramatically, ‘Where is my tabla-player? My harmonium player? My accompanists? Where are they? Chotu-mia! Bare-mia!’ Standing, swaying on his thick legs, he roared at the lighted house and the scurrying figures on the veranda.
‘Shh, Mulk-bhai,’ cried Jaya and Sarla, their faces shrinking into small dark knots. ‘You will wake Papa. Why are you shouting? You know they aren’t there.’
‘Yes, I know they aren’t there’ he blasted them, turning around and staggering towards them so that Bim and Tara had to hastily draw up their feet or he would have tripped over them. ‘I know who turned them out—you two—you two turned them out—’
‘Mulk, Mulk,’ murmured his brothers.
Suddenly Mulk was clutching his hands to his chest like two puffy little birds and his voice rose in shrill, grotesque mimicry. ‘“It is a waste of money. How can we afford to keep them? We have to feed ourselves. Tell them to go, they must go—go—go—”’ and he pushed out the two birds so that they fluttered away and fell at his sides. ‘That is all I hear from them—these two—’
‘Mulk, Mulk,’ rose the pacifying croon from the pigeons in the chairs.
Mulk swung around to face Bim and Tara and Bakul now. They have got rid of my musicians,’ he nearly wept. ‘Sent them away. How am I to sing without accompaniment?’
‘Mulk-bhai, we only pointed out that we haven’t the mone
y to pay them and we could not keep feeding them on kebabs and pilaos and kormas as you expected us to. Is it our fault if they went away once we stopped serving such food?’
‘Food! It wasn’t food they wanted. You are insulting them. You are insulting my guru. He does not want food, or money. He wants respect. Regard. That is what we must pay to a guru. But you have no respect, no regard. You think only of money—money—money. That is what you think about, you two—’
‘Mulk, Mul-lk.’
‘They have minds full of money, dirty minds. They don’t understand the artist, how the artist lives for his art. They don’t know how it is only music—’ here he clasped his chest with a moist, sweating paw—‘only music that keeps me alive. Not food. Not money. Music: what can it mean to those who only think of money? If I say “I must have accompaniment for my singing”, they say “Oh there is no money!” If I say, “I want my friends to come tonight so I can sing for them, cook dinner for them please,” they cry “Oh we have no money!”bavababan Do you need money to make music?’ he roared, lifting his arm so that the torn sleeve showed his armpit and the bush of grey hair in it. He stood, swaying, with the arm uplifted, the torn sleeve drooping, as he faced his visitors. ‘Do you?’ he roared, and they could see spit flying from his mouth and spraying them where they sat, helpless. ‘Tell me—do you?’
The visitors were frozen. The family seethed. Then the sisters cracked like old dry pods from which the black seeds of protest and indignation spilt, infertile. Money, they were both saying, where were they to find money to pay for concerts and dinners?
‘Don’t I give you money?’ shouted Mulk, lowering his head and swaying it from side to side threateningly. ‘Where is all the money I give you—hey? Tell me. Tell me. Where is that five hundred rupee note I gave you—hey? Where is it? Show it to me. I want to see it. I want it.’
He began to plunge his legs up and down in the grass like a beast going methodically out of control. One of the small bamboo tables was knocked down, a glass spilt. Now at last Bakul acted. Rising to his feet casually, elegantly, he took Mulk by the arm, murmured to him in his most discreet voice, began to lead him away towards the house. They heard Mulk crying something about ‘My guru - his birthday—I want to give—they won’t let me—for my guru - and then some sobbing intakes of breath, gasps for reason and control, and then only the flow of Bakul’s voice, slipping and spreading as smoothly and evenly as oil, and then silence in which they became aware of Badshah barking fiercely out on the road.
Bim rose at last, brushing her sari as if there were crumbs, saying ‘Listen to Badshah—he’s saying we must get back. Come, Tara, if we don’t go home at once, the cook will fall asleep and we’ll have no dinner and Baba will go to bed without any.’
Now the Misra sisters too were released from their shell-shocked postures and rose gratefully, chattering once more. ‘But why don’t you stay to dinner, Bim?’ ‘Tara, have pot luck with us. We can’t throw a dinner party as we would have in the old days—but pot luck . . .’ and the brothers shouted ‘Let’s call Baba. Tell him we’ll have music that will make him forget that rubbish he listens to—we’ll get Mulk to sing!’ Strangely enough, and much to Bim’s and Tara’s astonishment, Brij and Manu began to laugh, thumping each other like schoolboys. One even wiped his eyes of tears as he repeated ‘Get Mulk to sing—Mulk to sing for us—’ as if it were a family joke that only needed to be mentioned to set them off uncontrollably.
The sisters, a little more circumspect, edged closer to Tara, saying ‘Mulk gets that way when he has had too much to drink. He doesn’t mean it—he will forget about it—we’ll give him his dinner—and, oh stay for pot luck, Tara!’
But Bim would not listen. The last time she had accepted an invitation to ‘pot luck’ she had been distressed to see the two Misra sisters halving and sharing a chapati between them, and jars of pickles had had to be opened to make up for the lack of meat and vegetables. It would not do. ‘No, that won’t do,’ she said firmly. ‘Can you hear Badshah calling? Listen to that bark—he’ll have all the neighbours up, and your father, too,’ and she swept up the veranda to say good night to the old man who lay supine on the divan, his two white, knobbed feet sticking out at the end of the sheet that covered him, saw that he was asleep and then went down to herd Tara and Bakul down the drive.
The sisters came to the gate with them, lingering by the jasmine bush to pick some for Tara. Giving her a handful, Jaya said ‘Oh, Tara, these flowers make me think of that picnic—so many years ago now—do you remember, too? It was springtime—the flowers in Lodi Gardens—’
‘And bees!’ cried Sarla suddenly, catching Tara by the wrist so that a few of the jasmines fell. ‘How those bees attacked Bim—oh don’t you remember?’
But Tara withdrew her hand, dropping the remaining jasmines as she did so. She shook her head, refusing to remember any more. Bim, smiling faintly, covered up her ears with her hands and said ‘How that dog barks—he has a voice like a trumpet,’ and led Tara and Bakul across the road to their own gate where Badshah waited.
As they crossed the dusty road, Bakul cast a look at the tall dark house behind the hedge and asked ‘What has happened to the Hyder Alis’ house? Doesn’t anyone live there?’
‘No. I mean, only a poor relation of theirs. He must have been a nuisance to Raja in Hyderabad so they sent him here as caretaker. He takes opium—he just lies around—and the house is falling down about his ears. No one’s replaced a brick or painted a wall there for years.’
‘Oh what a shame—it was a lovely house, you know, Bakul,’ said Tara.
Badshah’s barks grew so urgent they could not speak to each other any more.
Baba was already asleep on his bed in the veranda when the sisters slipped quietly past, only glancing to see him lying on his side, one leg stretched out and the other slightly bent at the knee as if he were running, half-flying through the sky, one hand folded under his chin and the other uncurled beside it, palm upwards and fingers curved in—a finely composed piece of sculpture in white. Marble. Or milk. Or less: a spider’s web, faint and shadowy, or just some moonlight spilt across the bed. There was something unsubstantial about his long slimness in the light white clothes, such a total absence of being, of character, of clamouring traits and characteristics. He was no more and no less than a white flower or harmless garden spider, the sisters thought, as if, when he was born, his parents, late in their lives, had no vitality and no personality left to hand down to him, having given it away in thoughtless handfuls to the children born earlier. Lying there in the dark, dressed in white, breathing quite imperceptibly, he might have been a creature without blood in his veins, without flesh on his bones, the sisters thought as they tiptoed past him, down the steps to the lawn to stroll.
The whole neighbourhood was silent now, asleep. The sound of traffic on the highway was distant, smothered by dust and darkness. At last one became aware of the presence of stars, the scent of night-flowering plants. The sisters, sleepless, rustled through the grass, up and down beside the long hedge. The black cat, pacing sedately beside them to begin with, suddenly leapt up into the air, darted sideways and disappeared.
Hands behind her back as she paced, Bim murmured ‘Do you know, for a long time after Mira-masi died—for a long, long time—I used to keep seeing her, just here by the hedge—’
‘Bim,’ Tara cried incredulously.
‘Yes, yes, I used to feel I was seeing her—just out of the corner of my eye, never directly before me, you know—just slipping past this hedge here—’ she put out her hand and touched the white-flowering chandni—‘quite white and naked, as she was when she—when she—’
‘Then—at that time,’ Tara helped, pained.
‘—small, like a thin little dog, a white one, just slipping along quietly—I felt as if towards the well at the back—that well—’
‘That the cow drowned in?’
‘And she used to say she would drown herself in but because she didn�
�t, because she died, after all, in bed, I felt she was still trying to get there. A person needs to choose his death. But if I turned my head very quickly—then she would vanish—just disappear into the hedge—’ and Bim touched it again, to remember, and had the back of her hand scratched by a thorn and heard some small creature skitter away into the leaves. ‘I felt like one of those Antarctic explorers T.S. Eliot wrote about in his notes to The Waste Land, to that verse, do you know it, Tara?
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
They were silent as they scraped through the catching grasses at their feet, and had their heads bowed, not looking. Tara gave a small sigh that she disguised as a yawn: she had listened so often to Bim and Raja quoting poetry—the two of them had always had so much poetry that they carried in their heads. As a little girl, tongue-tied and shy, too diffident to attempt reciting or even memorising a poem—there had been that wretched episode in school when she was made to stand up and recite ‘The Boy Stood On the Burning Deck’ and it was found she could not proceed beyond the title—Tara was always struck dumb with wonder at their ability to memorise and quote. It was another of those games they shared and she did not. She felt herself shrink into that small miserable wretch of twenty years ago, both admiring and resenting her tall, striding sister who was acquainted with Byron, with Iqbal, even with T.S. Eliot.
Bim was calmly unaware of any of her sister’s agonies, past or present. ‘Only I was not at any extremity like those explorers in the icy wastes who used to see ghost figures,’ she continued. ‘I was not frozen or hungry or mad. Or even quite alone. I had Baba. After you married, and Raja went to Hyderabad, and Mira-masi died, I still had Baba. And that summer I got my job at the college and felt so pleased to be earning my living—’
