by Anita Desai
‘What is the hottest thing you can think of?’
‘Melting lead over the kitchen fire and going out in the sun to pour it into a groove in the clay,’ said Bim because that was what they had done that morning and she felt sure she had got heatstroke.
‘Holding a magnifying glass over a sheet of paper in the sun and burning a hole into it,’ said Raja.
‘White chicken feathers lying in the ash heap by the kitchen door,’ said Tara unexpectedly, and then instantly mumbled ‘No, no, not really,’ because she had just remembered what it had felt like to roll off Aunt Mira’s bed and crawl under it to visit the cat’s newest litter, all lined up against her panting flesh like leeches. The dust under her bed, the cats’ fur, matted and grey and marmalade, immobilized by the heat except for their panting breath and little pointed pink tongues hanging out of their open mouths—that was the warmest thing she knew.
‘And the coolest thing you can find in summer?’ the game continued.
‘A long drink of water from the earthen jar on the veranda.’
‘Watering the rush matting at the door with a hose-pipe, seeing it trickle down and smelling the wet khus.’
‘A water-melon cut open and sliced, all red and juicy.’
In search of such balm, they would steal out of the house although forbidden to do so under pain of sun-stroke. They could hear the grass frizzling in the sun, the dust seething in the air, nothing else—even the pigeons were dumb, and the coppersmiths. They made a dash across the scorching earth to the water tap at the end of the rose walk, quietly trickling into the green mud around it. They squirted each other with the water but it was tepid and lifeless. The gardener’s family lay on a string cot under the mulberry trees, and their smallest baby cried and cried, its skin angry and sore with prickly heat.
They wandered down to the long row of servants’ quarters behind the guava trees. There Tara’s old ayah sat like a bag of rags, chewing her betel nut and stirring up a fire of smouldering sticks to boil some tea. The acrid smoke billowed out into their eyes and made them cry. This made her laugh: ‘If the smoke follows you like this, it means you will have faithful husbands.’ They snorted at her scornfully and went into her room, odorous of cowdung fires and mustard oil, to look through her bags and baskets filled with old rubbish gleaned from their house over the years—bent forks, scraps of lace, curling yellow photographs and empty tins. The sooty walls were papered with bright pictures from the illustrated papers but it was too dark and smoky to make them out, and they soon grew bored and drifted out, stopped to whistle at the bedraggled parrot she kept in a cage, feed it a chilli or two that it only stared at beadily and refused to touch, then went back to the house to collapse onto the bamboo matting spread on the floor for them, pinioned to it like leaves drying and fading into mere brown tissue held together by bleached skeletons.
‘What is the most frightening thing you can think of?’
‘Finding a centipede inside your slipper just as you are putting it on.’
‘The well the cow drowned in.’
‘A cholera injection,’ said Tara, but immediately followed that by a small gasp for it had led her to think of something far more frightening and disquieting, something she feared to speak of at all. It gave her face a baffled, secretive look as she grappled with a memory that heaved out of her mind like a shape emerging from the surface of dark water, at first grey and indistinguishable, then gradually coming closer and growing larger as she backed away in fright.
She had followed her father into her mother’s bedroom on a day when her mother had not emerged at all, very quietly so as not to disturb her and therefore not noticed by her father. Then what she saw made her back into the dusty crimson curtain that hung at the door and hide in its folds, watching something she did not wish to see: her father, with his mouth folded up very primly, his eyes pinpointed with concentration behind the lens of his spectacles, bending over the bed, pressing a syringe into the thick, flabby arm that lay there. As the needle went in, the mother’s head tilted back and sank deeper and deeper into the pillow, the trembling chin rose into the air and a little sigh issued through her dry lips as if the needle had punctured an air-bag and it was the very life of her that was being released, withdrawn from her. Then Tara knew she had witnessed a murder—her father had killed her mother. She stumbled out of the room and was sick on the drawing room carpet.
‘What is the matter, Tara?’
Tara had crawled into Aunt Mira’s bed in the garden that night and lay in a ball, pressing against her aunt’s feet as she sat cross-legged, telling them a story that began ‘Once upon a time there was a king and he had three sons . . .’
‘When will they come home?’ Tara whispered. To her baffled wonder, that evening the car had driven up to the veranda steps and her mother had come out of the house and stepped into the car with the father and driven off to the club as usual, dressed in green silk and several pearls, palpably alive. They had not returned yet and the square of light that was the dining-room door kept Tara awake as a tyrant does its prisoner.
‘Soon,’ her aunt comforted her.
‘Poor Abu, still waiting up with the dinner,’ Bim grumbled. ‘It’s so late, why don’t they come home to dinner?’
‘When people play cards, they don’t notice the time.’
‘Why do they play cards?’
There seemed to be only one answer, too obvious to make, but that night Aunt Mira gently hinted at another as if she knew what kept Tara so miserably awake and tortured. ‘It helps your mother to forget her pain,’ she suggested.
Tara stiffened immediately. Bim and Raja were startled. What pains had she? they clamoured to know. Then Tara heard the word: diabetes. Now they understood why the doctor came so often to the house. Injections, said Aunt Mira, it was the daily injections that kept her alive.
‘Alive?’ wondered Tara, the morning scene unreeling through her mind like a film cut loose in the projector and wildly flying backwards.
Bim and Raja argued ‘If she is ill, she should stay in bed. Then she would get better. She should not go to the club,’ they said censoriously.
‘She is trying to lead a normal life, for your father’s sake,’ Aunt Mira explained, but such adult clichés could satisfy no child. Unappeased, they continued to question Aunt Mira. Insulin, they wanted to know more about insulin. Their aunt could tell them nothing beyond the need for the daily injection of insulin that their father gave her.
‘Oh,’ sighed Tara, ‘is that why she has those little blue marks in her arm?’ and she laid her head against her aunt’s shoulder, weak with relief and gratitude at having been given an explanation that would cover up the livid, throbbing scene in her mind as a scab covers a cut.
Raja of course outgrew the efficacy of his aunt’s answers to his questions and her stories spun shining through their nights like a spider’s silver webs. He would make scornful remarks, point out the illogic of her fairy tales. Impatient, he would leave his sisters to his aunt and go off to the servants’ quarters or hail the soda-man, a jaunty young Sikh who came to the house driving a cart in which blocks of ice and crates of soda bottles slithered on the wet sacking and smelt pleasantly of damp straw. While the cook exchanged empty bottles for full ones and had a block of ice put in his ice-box, Raja drank a bottle of ginger beer, tingling to its spiciness, and then leapt up onto the cart and, waving the whip over the yellow nag’s ears, set off at a rumble down the drive, making the soda-man rush out and abuse him and the girls jump up and down with delight and cheer him. He would drive it at a furious rattle up to the gate and then stop and jump off, surrendering the whip to the angry driver, and smile smugly at the admiring girls. Or he would go and call Hamid, the driver’s son who worked in a cinema house in Kashmere Gate and was already a wage-earner although not much older than Raja. Hamid used to take him for rides on his bicycle when he was small, then taught him how to cycle. He also taught him wrestling. The two of them dug a shallow pit behind the gar
age, beat and crumbled the earth till it was smooth and even and then they would wrestle, grunting and groaning and pushing at each other in mock combat that always ended in being serious. Raja was always beaten and emerged bleary-eyed and dusty but panting with pride at having partaken of this manly sport. For a while he went in for a daily oil massage and for eating blanched almonds with his morning milk, absolutely serious in his pursuit of excellence, but after a while Hamid’s own dilettantism infected him. Cutting short a halfhearted wrestling bout they would get onto their bicycles and set off for the cinema in Kashmere Gate and Hamid would smuggle Raja in without a ticket to see the latest Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks or any Bombay film for which Sehgal had sung the songs. Raja had no ear for music but the Urdu lyrics that were sung appealed to him powerfully and he would recite them emotionally and dramatically as they cycled slowly home at night, passing from lamplight to shadow along the pipal-tree lined street, quite sure that the parents would not be back from the club and that the girls would be asleep.
But Bim, a light sleeper, would lift her head when she heard him steal up across the inky lawn and murmur a muffled reprimand at which he would stick out his tongue.
As he grew long-legged and lanky, he became more difficult to catch. Tara, who had always felt at a disadvantage when competing for Raja’s attention since she was the smaller and weaker one, born to trail behind the others, while Bim and Raja were not only closer in age but a match for each other in many other ways, began to realize that she and Bim were actually comrades-in-arms for they pursued Raja together now and Raja eluded them both.
In games of hide-and-seek in the garden, on summer evenings when the long, flattened-out afternoon could at last be ripped away so that their refreshed evening selves could spring up and come into being, it was always Raja who was the leader, who did the counting-out, who ran and hid, and it was always the two girls who were left to run about in frenzied pursuit, tearing their dresses and bruising their knees, quite unmindful of stains and scratches and beads of blood while their eyes gleamed and their faces flushed with lust to find and capture him and call him captive.
There was one glorious moment when they cornered him, up against the impenetrable carvanda hedge, and leapt upon him, from east and west, all nails and teeth and banshee screams. But, ducking beneath their arms, he turned and dashed his head madly into that thick, solid hedge behind him and broke his way through it with one desperate, inspired thrust of his body. And they, too, were sucked into the tunnel he had so surprisingly made in that wall of thorns and twigs and leaves, fell into it and blew through it, then streamed after him, made limitless by surprise, into the forbidden area of the back garden. This was the still, uninhabited no-man’s land into which the gardener hurled branches of thorn and broken flower pots. Here he built his steaming, fetid compost heaps. Here was the well in which the cow had drowned, the deep stone well that held green scum and black deeds.
Here the girls stopped, halted in their mad stampede by the sad realization that Raja had escaped them again, fled past these barriers and probably found shelter in the servants’ quarters where Hamid would help to hide him from them. Out of breath, heated, glaring, they looked down at the thorns they stood in that had scratched long strings of blood-beads out of their brown legs, and at the convolvulus and the castor oil plants that grew thickly about the well.
For a while they panted noisily, unnecessarily noisily, trying to recapture the glory of that moment when they had caught Raja, nearly caught him, up against the hedge. Then they bent to wipe the blood from their legs and straightened to slap at the mosquitoes that rose humming from out of the moist compost heap and hovered about their heads in dark nets.
Then Tara breathed ‘Bim, we’re right next to the well,’ and instinctively they moved closer to each other in order to face together what was such a source of horror to them all and definitely out of bounds as well. But Bim, left flat and emptied out by disappointment at Raja’s escape, gave Tara a sudden little push, saying ‘Let’s look.’ When Tara hung back, she took her firmly by the elbow and made her kneel beside her, then bent forward to peer through the weeds into the depths of the well.
The water at the bottom was black, with an oily, green sheen. It was very still except when a small frog plopped in from a crack between the stones, making the girls start slightly. They narrowed their eyes and searched but no white and milky bone lifted out of it. The cow had never been hauled out. Although men had come with ropes and pulleys to help the gardener, it had proved impossible. She had been left to rot: that was what made the horror of it so dense and intolerable. The girls stared, scarcely breathing, till their eyes started out of their heads, but no ghostly ship of bones rode the still water. It must have sunk to the bottom and rooted itself in the mud, like a tree. There was nothing to see—neither hoof nor horn nor one staring, glittering eye. The water had stagnated and blackened, closing over the bones like a new skin. But even the new skin was black now and although it stank, it gave away nothing.
Nothing in their hands, the girls backed away on their knees till it was safe to stand, then turned and hurried away, through the grey thorns and over the midden heap, and finally butted their way through the hedge back into the garden, the familiar and permitted and legitimate part of the garden where they found Raja coolly sitting on a cane stool beside Aunt Mira, eating the slices of guava that she cut and peeled for him.
Rushing forward with renewed fury, they screamed and jeered and raged at him. He stuck out his tongue at them for he had no idea that they were not screaming with rage at his escape from their clutching fingers and pinching nails but at the horror behind the hedge, the well that waited for them at the bottom of the garden, bottomless and black and stinking.
When Bim realized, although incredulously, that Raja was withdrawing, that his maleness and his years were forcing him to withdraw from the cocoon-cosiness spun by his aunt and his sisters out of their femaleness and lack—or surfeit—of years, she grew resentful. She still sat listening to Aunt Mira’s fairy tales but with a brooding air, resenting being left there, bored and inactive, by Raja. Her resentment led her at times to be cruel to Tara.
She knew how Tara longed for curls. Tara’s hair was as lank and black as Bim’s, hanging limp to her shoulders, so that she yearned for a little wave to it, some soft curls. To ask for the golden locks of fairy-tale heroines was too much, Tara knew, but at least she might ask for a slight wave, a bit of a curl. Bim overheard her confiding in her aunt: ‘Masi, I wish God would give me curls. If I pray to him, will he give me curls, masi?’ Bim went immediately to the sewing box and fetched a pair of scissors. Flashing them at Tara, she whispered ‘Come, I’ll cut your hair for you. Then it will curl by itself. Long hair never curls—it has to be cut very, very short.’ Tara was enticed by this promise and at once slipped out of Aunt Mira’s bed and followed her sister.
But when she saw Bim leading her out of the house and up the outer staircase to the rooftop, she grew apprehensive and hung back, putting her hands round her long bunches of hair, protectively. ‘Come on, come on,’ Bim hurried her roughly, snipping the air with the big heavy sewing scissors and, making Tara crouch down behind the cast-iron water-tank on the roof, she cut through her hair at the ears with great sure crunches of the steel blades. Thick inky swathes lay about their feet, peppered Tara’s neck and back with snippets and drifted with the evening breeze to the edge of the terrace then lifted up and floated over the balustrade and into the garden.
Tara began to whimper as she felt the unaccustomed touch of cool air on her neck, bared and naked, then raised her hands to feel the bristles about her ears, as sharp and rough as stubble, and let out a loud wail of distress. When Bim marched off with the scissors, looking undeniably smug, Tara stayed back and refused to go down.
After a while the strands of hair floating down from the terrace were noticed by those in the garden and in the veranda. They came out to stand in the driveway and gaze with shaded eyes t
o see where it was coming from. The white sky stared blankly back. A circling kite whistled thinly—and Tara sobbed and whined. They could hear her now.
Bim was asked to go up and fetch her but would not—she was doing her homework, she importantly said. Then Raja and Hamid went and shouted with laughter at the sight that met their eyes—they said Tara looked like a baby pigeon fallen out of its nest, blue-skinned and bristly, crouching behind the water-tank and crying for her lost hair. As the boys roared with laughter, her crying grew wilder. Finally Bim stomped up and grabbed her by the arm. ‘Stop howling, you booby,’ she said roughly. ‘You wanted curls, now you’ve got curls. You said I could cut your hair and I did. How was I to know you didn’t mean it?’ and she pulled the wailing sister down the stairs and scornfully turned her over to Aunt Mira’s tender ministrations.
Tara was sure she would never forgive Bim her cruelty. Bim’s big-sisterliness would always be linked with that ruthless and cynical chopping of her long hair, Tara felt. It grew again, as Aunt Mira assured her it would, but as straight and lank as it had been before.
These were the dramas that seemed not so much to make cracks in the dull metal bands that held them all down into a world, an age, of unbearable, total inactivity, eventlessness and apathy, as to emphasize them by hitting them with a hammer so that they clanged and the clangs resounded and echoed. As they grew into adolescence it seemed to Raja, Bim and Tara that they were suffocating in some great grey mass through which they tried to thrust as Raja had thrust through the thorny hedge, and emerge into a different atmosphere. How was it to be different? Oh, they thought, it should have colour and event and company, be rich and vibrant with possibilities. Only they could not—the greyness was so massed as to baffle them and defeat their attempts to fight through. Only Raja sometimes did. On his bicycle, cycling off to the cinema in Kashmere Gate, or in the wrestling pit with Hamid, or rattling down the drive in the soda-man’s cart, hallooing and waving a whip over the startled nag’s head, or flying kites on the terrace in the evenings, he seemed to come alive and elow even if briefly to be followed by a long trough of brooding sullenness and irritability.
