by Anita Desai
Only their efforts to make him talk failed. He would say one word at a time, if pressed, but seemed happier not to and could not be made to repeat a whole line. Gradually, as his family learnt how to anticipate his few needs and how to respond, they ceased to notice his silence—his manner of communication seemed full and rich enough to them: he no more needed to converse than Aunt Mira’s cat did.
Not only Baba but animals, too, followed in her wake as she scurried busily through the household. One day a small kitten took to mewing desperately under the veranda. A saucer of milk was set out for it, surreptitiously, a watch kept on the parents’s door to make sure they did not suddenly emerge and catch them at it. The kitten had no such qualms and in no time was slipping up the steps and rolling about the veranda, catching its tail or scampering after a wasp, and soon it was wrapped up in Aunt Mira’s quilt where it grew larger and larger and eyed them commandingly with its yellow eyes, more mistress than Aunt Mira.
Then Aunt Mira summoned courage to speak out on a matter that had been bothering her. Slipping into their mother’s room, she described how she had often watched the milkman fill up the milk can at the garden tap before coming up the drive to the kitchen door to ladle out the watered milk into the saucepan held out by the cook. ‘It is more blue than white,’ Aunt Mira’s voice cracked into splinters with indignation, ‘and there’s no cream at all. It is as if the children were drinking water. They get no nourishment. It can’t go on.’
The mother seemed as displeased with Aunt Mira as with the milkman, or possibly more. ‘Then what do you suggest?’ she asked sourly as if to put a stop to the distasteful conversation and get on with the inserting of ear-rings into the waiting ear-lobes.
‘It would be best to have a cow,’ Aunt Mira said excitedly, and the children at the door jumped in surprise and joy at the unexpected boldness of her imagination. ‘The gardener could look after it. He could bring it to the door and I could watch it being milked myself every morning. We would have pure milk for the children.’
The mother looked at her as if she were mad. A cow? A cow to give them milk? She shook her head in amazement, but now the ayah came up and loudly supported the aunt, and then the cook. It seemed the milkman was a rogue, had swindled them all, they did not wish to have anything to do with him. Faced with a rebellion of this size, the mother capitulated and the cow arrived, led in by the gardener on a rope to be examined and admired like a new bride even if she had her calf with her.
There was something bride-like about her white face, her placid eyes and somewhat sullen expression. The children fondled her pink, opaque ears that let in the light and glowed shell-pink in the sun. Tara laid her face against the folds of her neck, milky white and warm. She smelt sweetly of straw, and cud. She was housed in a shed. For a week, she was treated like a bride, fed on the tenderest of grass and newest of shoots. Her milk was the subject of ecstatic admiration: how it frothed into the pan, how thick the cream that rose on it. She stood in the garden, under the jacaranda tree, the lilac flowers showering down on her as at a wedding.
It was spring. The nights grew warmer. The gardener left her out instead of putting her in the shed at night. In the dark, while everyone slept, she broke the rope that tethered her and wandered through the garden like a white ghost, her hooves silent in the grass. She blundered her way through the carvanda hedge at the back of the house, and tumbled into the well and drowned in a welter of sounds that no one heard.
The well then contained death as it once had contained merely water, frogs and harmless floating things. The horror of that death by drowning lived in the area behind the carvanda hedge like a mad relation, a family scandal or a hereditary illness waiting to re-emerge. It was a blot, a black and stinking blot.
The parents were furious at this disastrous expenditure, the gardener guilty and therefore sulky, and the children shocked. Most horrifying of all, the calf pined and died. It kept Aunt Mira awake in the night and nightly she saw the white cow die in the black well.
Aunt Mira was younger than their mother although she looked so much older. She had been twelve years old when she married and was a virgin when she was widowed—her young student husband, having left to study in England immediately after their wedding, caught a cold in the rain one winter night, and died. She was left stranded with his family and they blamed her bitterly for his death: it was her unfortunate horoscope that had brought it about, they said. She should be made to pay for her guilt. Guiltily, she scrubbed and washed and cooked for them. At night she massaged her mother-in-law’s legs and nursed wakeful babies and stitched trousseaux for her sisters-in-law. Of course she aged. Not only was her hair white but she was nearly bald. At least that saved her from being used by her brothers-in-law who would have put the widow to a different use had she been more appetising. Since she was not, they eyed her unpleasing person sullenly and made jokes loudly enough for her to overhear. There was laughter till they grew bored. She stayed with them so long that she became boring. They suspected her of being a parasite. It was time she was turned out. She was turned out. Another household could find some use for her: cracked pot, torn rag, picked bone.
The children wondered why she always wore white. The mother explained, smoothing down her own ripe, flushed silks, that white was the widow’s colour. ‘But now she is not a widow, now she lives with us,’ said Raja, and the girls asked if she had not had any wedding finery. Oh yes, she said without resentment, she had had some but had given it all away to her sisters-in-law when they married, to fill out their dowries. She added, with regret, that she wished she had been allowed to keep some for her nieces. The girls, too, regretted this and looked through the green tin trunk once again for some remnant of her wedding, of her improbable married life. And there was one: a stripe of crimson and gold edging an untouched Benares silk sari. Since it was white, she had been allowed to retain it, and now it was yellowed like old ivory. The strip of crimson and gold made it impossible for her to wear: taboo. It was wrapped carefully in tissue and laid away like some precious relic. The girls would try and persuade her to wear it once when her Theosophist friends took her out to a meeting or arranged a tea for a visiting Friend, but she always shook her head nervously and refused, superstitiously afraid. The girls fondled it, buried their faces in it, sniffed at its old, musky scent that they preferred to their mother’s French perfumes: it seemed more human. After all, it contained Aunt Mira’s past, and the might-have-been future, as floating and elusive as the musk itself. But she would not touch it. When they became insistent, she said, laughing, ‘All right, when I die, you may dress me in it for the funeral pyre,’ then immediately looked guilty and repentant at the shock that swept across their faces.
Aunt Mira, though widowed, could not be said to be abandoned. She was searched out, even, by those whom misery attracted just as it nauseated others. As she was such a useful slave, she might be a useful convert, these thought, and burrowing into the suspicious family like persistent wood-borers, they found her out and carried her off to the Theosophy Lodge for meetings, lectures and teas. Aunt Mira shook at the possibilities, at the stormy wastes she glimpsed there, and the cyclones and avalanches and apparitions that swept through it. While she shivered and dithered, the dead man’s family disapproved, disapproved. Removed from them, she dithered again—should she? could she now? Raja and Bim urged her on excited giggling—it was as good as opening up a cupboard full of ghosts, they felt, shivering in delighted anticipation. They fully expected poltergeists to arrive by air three-legged tables to rise to the ceiling, strange messages to be imparted. But Aunt Mira was too weak. She had to be dragged to meetings, she was so afraid of them, and soon found excuses for not going. So they sent her books. She had little time for reading. Yet she seemed to imbibe something from their uncut pages and closed covers, and grew more vague, absent-minded—‘ectoplasmic,’ Raja said.
To Tara, she was nothing of the sort: she was solid as a bed, she smelt of cooking and was made of knittin
g. Tara could wrap herself up in her as in an old soft shawl. This Tara needed for she had lost most at Baba’s birth and the turning of the entire family from her to the new baby. Wrapped in the folds of Aunt Mira’s white cotton sari, or into her loosely knitted grey shawl, or the plump billows of the plum-coloured quilt in winter, she became baby again, breathing in her aunt’s smell, finding in it a deep, musty comfort. On summer nights she lay on the pallet closest to her aunt’s string bed out on the lawn where they slept in a row of cots under the stars. Then Aunt Mira would tell them stories: ‘Once there was a king and a queen. The queen said to her pet parrot, Go to the king and tell him I want the red ruby that the king cobra keeps hidden under its hood . . .’ and Tara, who believed ardently in jewels, gave a wriggle of pleasure. Aunt Mira’s voice murmured on and on, following all the loops and turns of the story as skilfully as water flowing down its necessary channel, till the car’s headlights lit up the gate-posts with its green flood of phosphorescence and came sliding up the drive, bringing their parents home from the club. Then they would hastily lie down flat and stiff as a row of corpses, pretending to be fast asleep. When the parents had gone in to change and to sleep on their own veranda at the other end of the house, Tara would whisper urgently, ‘And then, Mira-masi? And then?’ and the voice would continue, in an even lower register, ‘And the cobra said, I will give you my ruby if the Queen sends me the princess dressed in a gold wedding sari and holding the Queen’s pet parrot on her finger . . .’ and the stars blurred and the jasmines shook out the powdery frills and flounces of their night scent till sleep came out of the dark hedges to devour them.
Sunny winter mornings had the same quality of perfection. Then the quilts would all be carried out and laid onto a string cot in the sun to air and Tara and Baba would roll themselves into them till they went pink from the heat of the cotton stuffing and the sun. Aunt Mira would sit on her cane stool, the knitting needles going clack-clack while she knitted their school sweaters, and now and then turned the brown and white pottery jars filled with pickles that lined the veranda so that each side of the jars got the sun in turn. When she was not looking, they would lift the lids off the jars and fish out bits with their fingers to eat, but it always made them sneeze and their eyes water so that Aunt Mira would know what they had been up to and scold, in a low voice so as not to be heard by their mother who sat playing cards with her friends on the veranda amongst the massed pots of chrysanthemums, pink and egg-yellow and bronze, fretted and shaggy and spicy. The cat stalked the butterflies that fluttered two by two over the flower-beds, as packed and coloured as a paint-box, but Aunt Mira was quick and never let her catch them.
Quick, nervy and jumpy—yet to the children she was as constant as a staff, a tree that can be counted on not to pull up its roots and shift in the night. She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived. Strange, when she was not their mother and did not rule the household. She really had not the qualities required by a mother or a wife. Even the children did not believe she had. Looking at her, they could not blame the husband for going away to England and dying. Aunt Mira would not have made a wife. What does make a wife? Why, they felt, a wife is someone like their mother who raised her eyes when the father rose from the table and dropped them when he sat down; who spent long hours at a dressing-table before a mirror, amongst jars and bottles that smelt sweet and into which she dipped questing fingers and drew out the ingredients of a wife—sweet-smelling but soon rancid; who commanded servants and chastised children and was obeyed like a queen. Aunt Mira had none of these attributes. Stick-like, she whipped her sari about her, jammed a few long steel pins into the little knot of hair on her head, and was dressed in an instant, ready to fly. She neither commanded nor chastised, and was certainly never obeyed. She was not soft or scented or sensual. She was bony and angular, wrinkled and desiccated—like a stick, or an ancient tree to which they adhered.
They grew around her knees, stubby and strong, some as high as her waist, some rising to her shoulders. She felt their limbs, brown and knobby with muscle, hot with the life force. They crowded about her so that they formed a ring, a protective railing about her. Now no one could approach, no threat, no menace. Their arms were tight around her, keeping her for themselves. They owned her and yes, she wanted to be owned. She owned them too, and they needed to be owned. Their opposing needs seemed to mingle and meet at the very roots, inside the soil in which they grew.
Touching them, dressing them, lifting them, drawing them to her, she felt how their life streams met and flowed into each other. They drew from her and she gave readily—she could not have not given. Would it weaken her? Would she be stronger if she put them away and stood by herself, alone? No, that was not her way any more than it was the way of nature. She fed them with her own nutrients, she reared them in her own shade, she was the support on which they leaned as they grew.
Soon they grew tall, soon they grew strong. They wrapped themselves around her, smothering her in leaves and flowers. She laughed at the profusion, the beauty of this little grove that was the whole forest to her, the whole world. If they choked her, if they sucked her dry of substance, she would give in without any sacrifice of will—it seemed in keeping with nature to do so. In the end they would swarm over her, reach up above her, tower into the sky, and she would be just the old log, the dried mass of roots on which they grew. She was the tree, she was the soil, she was the earth.
Touching them, watching them, she saw them as the leaves and flowers and fruit of the earth. So beautiful, she murmured, touching, watching—so beautiful and strong and living.
The first summer that Aunt Mira was with them, Bim and Raja caught typhoid. They were fortunate to have her in the house since she nursed them alone. They were so ill they were often unconscious, drifting about without any moorings in the luminous world of fever and then returning to the edge of consciousness in a kind of daze, not really aware who it was that lifted their heads and spooned barley water into their mouths or held cold sponges to their foreheads so that the water trickled into their eyes and ran down their cheeks onto their pillows. The doctor would come but he had no medicine for them: nursing was all, he said, and nursing was what Aunt Mira did best.
Tara hovered at the door, not allowed in, or played quietly on the veranda, now and then lifting the bamboo screen at their door to peep in, and Aunt Mira would make a great effort and rouse herself from her anxiety and exhaustion and go out and play a game of cat’s cradle with her, or give her a poem to memorize, or thread a string of leaves to tie round her waist for a dance or, if she could not leave Bim’s and Raja’s bedsides when they were delirious, wave gaily to Tara at the door and point out a squirrel on a tree to her. This became the basis of their special relationship—an affectionate, demonstrative one, always assuring each other of their love, while the one that grew up between Aunt Mira and the two older children was silent and instinctive, seldom demonstrated, often quite sarcastic, but organic, a part of their sinews and their blood.
The difference showed when they played their favourite game of questioning each other: ‘What will you be when you grow up?’
Raja said promptly and proudly: ‘A hero.’
Tara said you could not be a hero, you could only be a heroic soldier, a heroic explorer, a heroic something, but he insisted he would be, simply and purely, a hero.
Then Bim declared, with glistening eyes, that she would be a heroine, although she would secretly have preferred to be a gipsy or a trapeze artist in a circus.
Tara looked from one to the other in incomprehension. ‘I am going to be a mother and knit for my babies,’ she said complacently, but the older two laughed at her so uproariously, so scornfully, that she burst into tears and ran to bury her head in her aunt’s lap and complain that they made fun of her.
Aunt Mira smiled faintly when she heard of Bim’s and Raja’s ambitions and was really in complete sympathy with them, but she stroked Tara’s head and consol
ed her. ‘There, there, you’ll see you grow up to be exactly what you want to be, and I very much doubt if Bim and Raja will be what they say they will be.’ This consoled Tara entirely and turned out to be true as well.
They had other games to play on summer afternoons, lying on bamboo matting on the floor under the slowly revolving electric fan, watching the geckoes crawl across the ceiling after the flies, wiping the perspiration from their faces and feeling swollen and flushed by the heat.
