by Anita Desai
Raja also had the faculty of coming alive to ideas, to images picked up in the books he read. The usual boyhood adventure stories, Robin Hood and Beau Geste, set him on fire till he almost blazed with enthusiasm as he showed Hamid how to fashion swords out of bamboo poles and battle with him, or pictured himself in the desert, in the Foreign Legion, playing some outsize, heroic role in a splendid battle. He cycled to Connaught Place and bought cheap paperbacks printed specially for the American Army and sold on the pavements, and took them home to share with his sisters. ‘Book worms, book worms,’ Aunt Mira called them, rather proudly and indulgently, as they lay stretched on their beds under the stickily revolving fans, reading with almost audible concentration.
The sisters, however, read themselves not into a blaze but a stupor, sinking lower and lower under the dreadful weight of Gone With The Wind and Lorna Doone, their eyes growing glazed so that they seemed to read through an opaque film and the stories and characters never quite emerged into the bright light of day and only made vague, blurred impressions on their drowsy, drugged minds, rather than vivid and clear-cut ones. They hadn’t the vitality that Raja had, to participate in what they read—they were passive receivers bulging with all they read, sinking with its weight like water-logged rafts.
While Tara would be dragged helplessly into the underworld of semi-consciousness by the romances she read, Bim was often irritated and would toss them aside in dissatisfaction. She began to realize they were not what she wanted. What did she want? Oh, she jerked her shoulders in irritation, something different—facts, history, chronology, preferably. She was bored by the books Raja brought her and tried not to disappoint him by showing her boredom but of course Raja saw and was hurt. Bim began to read, laboriously, sitting up at a table with her elbows placed on either side of the book, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall that she had found on the drawing-room bookshelf. Raja secretly admired her for it as he could not have tackled a study of such length himself, but would not show it and said only that she did not know what she was missing, that she had no imagination: to him, the saddest sin. That hurt and puzzled Bim: what need of imagination when one could have knowledge instead? That created a gap between them a trough or a channel that the books they shared did not bridge.
Yet when they came together it was with a pure and elemental joy that shot up and stood straight and bright above the surrounding dreariness. There were still those shining summer evenings on the banks of the Jumna when they went together, Bim and Raja, barefoot over the sand to wade across the river, at that time of the year no more than a sluggish trickle, to the melon fields on the other bank to pick a ripe, round one and cut it open with Raja’s pen-knife and bite into the juice-suffused slices while the sun sank into the saffron west and the cannon boomed in the city to announce the end of the day’s fast in the month of Ramzaan and the start of prayers in the great mosque. At this hour the dome of the sky would soften from white-hot metal to a soft mauve tapestry streaked with pink. The washermen would fold the dried washing spread out on the sand and load it onto their donkeys and ride away. Smoke would rise from small fires in the hovels at the bend of the river and from under the thatch of the melon-growers’ huts, turning the evening air furry and soft. A lapwing would start out of the dark with a cry and a star wink into life simultaneously, it seemed.
Tara was sent to fetch them home. She came, holding Baba by the hand. Now and then she bent to pick up a small, insignificant river shell and press it confidingly into his hand. Seeing Raja and Bim wading slowly back through the river, muddy and tired, she waved. They shouted. The two pairs of children trudged slowly towards each other over the dry silver of the sand. When they met, they became a blur in the dark, wavering homewards.
As they turned to make their way back to the house, a kind of low drumbeat started up in the pits of their stomachs, reverberated through them, making them stop and clutch each other by the hand.
‘Hato! Hato!’ shouted a man in a khaki uniform and a scarlet turban, and pounded past them on urgent heels, making way for a white horse that loomed up out of the dunes and floated by with a dimmed roar of hoofbeats on the sand, followed by a slim golden dog with a happy plume of a tail waving in the purple air. The pampas grass bent and parted for this procession and then rustled silkily upright into place again.
When the three figures had vanished into a dip in the dunes and then reappeared in the white dust of the road ahead, at a distance, Raja breathed out in awe ‘It is Hyder Ali Sahib on his horse. He looks like a general! Like a king!’
‘Perhaps he likes to imagine he is one,’ said Bim tartly, drawing Baba forward by the hand. Some of the sand had been flung into their eyes. They were all rubbing at the grains.
Tara jumped up and down on her toes, watching them still. ‘And his dog,’ she cried. ‘See the lovely dog running after the horse.’
‘I wish he were a friend of Papa’s,’ Raja said wistfully as they shuffled up the road, sand filling the spaces between their toes. ‘Then he might let me ride his horse sometimes.’
‘You don’t know how to,’ Bim said.
Ahead of them, the magical procession turned in at the Hyder Alis’ tall wrought-iron gate and a light came on in the porch and, a moment later, another one in their own house behind the trees.
After that the sense of dullness and hoplessness that reigned over their house took on the intense aspect of waiting. They were always waiting now—superficially, for their parents to come home from the club, or Aunt Mira to put Baba to bed and come and tell them a story. Yet when the parents were back and Aunt Mira free, they were still unfulfilled, still waiting. Perhaps for the white horse to appear again on the dunes, followed by the golden dog. Or for some greater event, some more drastic change, a complete reversal of their present lives and the beginning of a new, wondrous phase. They would wander about the garden, peering intently into the phosphorescent green tunnel of a furled banana leaf, or opening a canna lily pod and gazing at its inner compartments and the embedded pearly seeds, or following the path of a silent snail, searching for a track that might lead somewhere, they had no idea where.
Bim felt she knew the answer for at least some of the daylight hours on six days of the week—the hours she spent in school. At school Bim became a different person—active, involved, purposeful. A born organiser, she was patrol leader of the Bluebirds when still a small pig-tailed junior, later of the Girl Guides, then captain of the netball team, class prefect, even—gloriously, in her final year at school—Head Girl. A bright, slapdash student, she spent little time at her studies but did almost as well as those dim, bespectacled daughters of frustrated failures who drove their children frantically, bitterly, to beat everyone else in the exams and to spend all their waking hours poring myopically over their schoolbooks. Bim had an easy, teasing manner with the teachers who liked her for it even if they sometimes scolded her. They were always admonishing Tara in reproachful tones: ‘Look at your sister Bimla. You should try to be more like your sister Bimla. She plays games, she takes part in all activities, she is a monitor, the head girl. And you . . .’
Tara hung her head lower and lower, dragging her foot as she walked, irritating them still further. Physically smaller and weaker than Bim, she lacked her vigour, her stamina. The noise, the dense populace, the hustle and jostle of school made her shrink into a still smaller, paler creature who could not rouse herself out of a dismal apathy that made the lessons as irrelevant and meaningless as the buzzing of a fly against the windowpane, and friendship with the loud, vulgar, vigorous young girls in the class, so full of unpleasant secrets and revelations and so quick to betray and mock, an impossibility vaguely wished for but quite beyond her capacity to undertake.
Whereas school brought out Bim’s natural energy and vivacity that was kept damped down at home because of the peculiar atmosphere of their house, school to Tara was a terror, a blight, a gathering of large, loud, malicious forces that threatened and mocked her fragility. When confined within its hig
h stone boundary walls, she thought of home with tearful yearning, almost unable to bear the separation from Aunt Mira, from Baba, from the comfortable, old, accustomed ayah, the rose walk, the somnolent mutter of the pigeons in the sunny veranda eaves, all of which took on an aura of paradise for her when she was separated from it.
To Bim, school and its teachers and lessons were a challenge to her natural intelligence and mental curiosity that she was glad to meet. Tara, on the other hand, wilted when confronted by a challenge, shrank back into a knot of horrified stupor and tended to gaze dully at the teachers when asked a question, making them wonder if she were not somewhat retarded (in the staff room, over tea, they said ‘There is a brother, I’ve heard, who is . . .’ and tapped their heads significantly). Tara was capable of spending a whole lesson seemingly hypnotised by a fly exploring a windowpane beside her desk or sticking the broken nib of her pen into a scrap of blotting paper and watching the ink ooze and spread. She did this quite without any curiosity in the scene that might have made her preoccupation excusable. Her teachers did not know that she had only to enter a classroom for the mucous membrane in her nostrils to swell and block her breathing apparatus. She was too polite to sniff but it gave her face a set, congested look that they took to be stubbornness, even insolence. She made them all bridle, teachers and students alike. She made no friends. When the others clustered together, sharing a delicious secret like a lollipop passed from one to the other for an unhygienic lick, Tara was left out. If they were choosing teams for a game, Tara was always left to the last, standing forgotten and wretched, and then one of the leaders would reluctantly agree to include her. She was no good at any game while Bim had a natural affinity with the bat and ball, and had the most splendid coordination, trained in sports as she was by Raja and Hamid who had often made use of her as a fielder when they got up a cricket game between them.
If only Tara had made up by showing some talent in the field of arts, as it was called by the staff, it might have given them cause to excuse her lassitude, her ‘insolence’. But her fingers were so stiff, she could neither draw nor paint or even knit or weave paper baskets in the crafts class. She tended to reduce things to the smallest possible circumference as if in the hope they might then vanish altogether—a large brass jug and great pestle and mortar set up on a table in the arts class would appear on her sheet of drawing paper as a series of knobs and buttons, rubbed and rubbed at with her eraser till smudged to a shaky blur; a scrap of weaving or knitting in her hands became a tight knot that had to be cut away from the loom or knitting needles when it could be worked no tighter.
The missionary ladies who ran the grey, austere mission school, found this lack of ability, this lack of will too deplorable. They were all elderly spinsters—had, in fact, taken the vow of celibacy although not the nun’s habit—awesomely brisk, cheerful and resourceful. Having left the meadows and hedgerows, the parsonages and village greens of their homes behind in their confident and quixotic youth, they had gone through experiences of a kind others might have buckled under but that they had borne and survived and overcome like boats riding the waves—wars and blitzes, riots and mutinies, famines and droughts, floods, fires and native customs—and they had then retired, not to the parsonages and village greens, but to the running of a sober, disciplined mission school with all their confidence, their cheerfulness and their faith impeccably intact. Tara could not suppress a baleful look as she observed them bustling about the classrooms, cracking open the registers or working out algebraic problems across the blackboards, blowing whistles and rushing across the netball fields, organising sports days and annual school concerts, leading the girls in singing hymns and, every so often, dropping suddenly to their knees, burying their faces in worn and naked hands, and praying with most distinguished intensity. Tara wondered uneasily if hers were one of the lost souls they prayed for.
Yet she preferred them to the Christian converts who made up the rest of the staff. She deplored their taste in clothes and definitely preferred the missionary ladies’ grey tunics to the fancifully patterned and embroidered saris of pink and purple georgette that the converts favoured. She was offended by their names which were usually Rose and Lily or even, in one case, Pansy. Many of them were spinsters but even in those who were married and were met at the gate after school by husbands on bicycles or even had some of their children in the school, unnaturally clean and with charity clearly stamped on their subdued faces and shabby clothes, Tara sensed a bank of frustration—surely that was what made them so frighteningly spiteful, bitter and ill-tempered. They had such very sarcastic tongues and always seemed to single out Tara, as if sensing her distaste and disapproval, for their sharpest tongue-lashings. The other girls, instead of siding with her against the enemy, tittered and smirked to see her scolded and have her homework flung at her in rage. The truth was that they all considered Tara unbearably snobbish and conceited. The very fact that she wandered about the playground by herself during the lunch-break morose and aloof, watching the kites that circled in the white sky waiting to swoop down on an unprotected lunch-box in a flash of claws and beaks, or picking up the neem pods under the scattering, yellowed trees, simply out of an embarrassed need to have something to do with herself, led them to conclude she was too conceited to join them in their songs and their gossip and chatter.
Bim, observing her out of the corner of her eye while she played a wild impromptu game of basketball with the bigger girls, carefully avoided having anything to do with her anti-social misery: it was contagious.
The dreariness of school intensified and reached its intolerable acme, for Tara, on Thursdays when the girls were sent, two by two, with a teacher at the head, to the mission hospital on the other side of the thick stone wall, to distribute fruit and blankets to the non-paying patients. These blankets were made up of squares of red wool that the girls knitted during craft class on thick, blunt wooden needles. White chalk dust became thickly embedded in the coarse wool. Tara suffered genuine physical agonies working the rough wool with her perspiring fingers, getting it knotted tighter and tighter on the thick needles till they couldn’t move any more and she had to appeal for help and be soundly castigated by the very cross crafts teacher, a Miss Jacob who had a wart on the side of her nose and whom Tara saw as a medieval witch. When enough squares had accumulated, they were sewn together and these thick, scratchy, hot blankets were borne in triumph to the hospital wards along with baskets of blackened, oozing bananas and green, sour oranges. The girls would form a crocodile and be marched through the hospital wards, stopping at the iron bedsteads to unload their bounty upon women who had just given birth and were obliged to wrap their fragile new babies in these coarse, itching blankets, others who had open, running sores or wore green eye patches or lay groaning and calling upon God to deliver them—nightmare figures emanating an odour as thick as chloroform, compounded of poverty and charity, disease and cure. Sometimes they would meet the hospital kitchen squad dishing out the patients’ meals and once when Tara saw the rice and dal being ladled out of pails onto aluminium platters in slopping piles, she was obliged to run out behind a hedge to be sick. After that, charity always had, for her, the sour reek of vomit. The next Thursday she pretended to be ill. Other weeks, she made the most preposterous excuses, trying anything to be let off going to school on charity Thursdays. But Bim realized what was going on and told Aunt Mira. Aunt Mira was puzzled and concerned, Bim outraged.
‘You could do just that little bit without complaining,’ she said severely. ‘It’s not too much to ask of anyone—just to save up their breakfast fruit and give it to someone who needs it.’
‘I don’t mind giving them my breakfast fruit,’ cried Tara passionately, tearful and red-faced now that she had been found out. ‘They can have all my fruit, every bit. Only I don’t want to go and give it to them!’
‘Why not?’ said Bim. ‘Too fine a lady to step into the hospital ward? The smells upset you, do they? The sights keep you awake at nigh
t, do they? Oh, you poor little thing, you’d better get a bit tougher, hadn’t you—auntie’s baby? Otherwise what good will you ever be? If you can’t even do this little bit for the poor, what will you ever be able to do when you grow up?’
Bim of course worshipped Florence Nightingale along with Joan of Arc in her private pantheon of saints and goddesses, and Tara did not tell her that she hoped never to have to do anything in the world, that she wanted only to hide under Aunt Mira’s quilt or behind the shrubs in the garden and never be asked to come out and do anything, prove herself to be anything. When challenged to name her own particular heroine, she looked vague, tried to shift away, saying she would think about it. Seeing Bim’s eyes flash so righteously, her mouth fixed so censoriously, Tara lacked the boldness to make an answer even if she could think of one.
Forced to go back to school, she accepted with a weak abandonment of hope that these grey, wretched days would stretch on forever, blighting her life with their creeping mildew. When she came home in the afternoon, she would embrace her aunt with such fervid passion, with such excellent intentions of helping her more, being patient and sisterly to her little brother, that her family wondered at her intensity, saying ‘You’re only a day girl, Tara, you haven’t been sent to boarding school, after all,’ quite failing to gauge the depth of her despondency. She would sit on a stool on the veranda, winding woollen balls for her aunt, or read nursery rhymes to Baba, trying to make him say ‘Ba-ba, Black Sheep’ after her, till the wool was all in tight knotted balls and Baba failed to make any response beyond the faintest smile, not in her direction but the cat’s, and then she would walk off to trail amongst the rose bushes or climb up to the terrace and watch Bim and Raja fly paper kites.
