by Anita Desai
Tara, trying to pen a letter to her daughters, one last hurried one before they arrived in India, felt she was being roasted like a chicken under the burning orange bulb. She wished she could switch it off and she and Bim could put their papers aside and sit in a companionable dusk, but Bim’s concentration on her work was so intense, it crackled a warning through the air. So she huddled inside her kimono and tore at her hair, trying to get on with the letter. It would not go. She laid down the pen. Suddenly coming to a decision that pinched her nostrils and made her look almost severe, she said ‘Bim, you must come. With Baba. It will be so good for you.’
‘What do you mean?’ Bim asked, pushing her spectacles up onto the bridge of her nose. They reflected the orange light that was swaying in the breeze that had somehow got into the closed room, a ghostly reflection of the storm outside. The lenses reflected the darting light, swinging from left to right crazily, dangerously.
‘I mean,’ said Tara, looking away, ‘I mean—you need a change.’
‘What makes you think that?’ asked Bim in wonder, and her sister’s expression which was rather as if a tooth were being extracted from her mouth very slowly, made her take off her spectacles and hold them in her hand so that they could face each other directly.
‘I mean—I’ve been watching you, Bim. Do—d’you know you talk to yourself? I’ve heard you—muttering—as you walk along—when you think you’re alone—’
‘I didn’t know I was being watched,’ Bim broke in, flushing with anger.
‘I—I couldn’t help overhearing. And then—your hands. You keep gesturing with them, you know. I don’t think you know, Bim.’
‘I don’t—and I didn’t know I was supposed to keep my hands still when I talked. The girls in college did a skit once—one of them acted me, waving her hands while she talked. It was quite funny.’
‘No, Bim, you do it even when you’re not talking. I mean, you must be talking to yourself.’
‘Don’t we all?’ Bim enquired, her voice and her eyebrows rising simultaneously.
It was a look that would have made Tara quail as a child. But now she insisted ‘Not aloud, Bim.’
‘I must be getting old then,’ Bim said, with a careless sniff. ‘I am getting old, of course.’
‘You’re not. You’re worrying.’
‘Worrying? I have no more worries,’ cried Bim, laying down her spectacles and slapping the tabletop with one hand. ‘No worries at all.’ She lifted her hand and touched the white lock of hair over her ear.
‘About Raja,’ insisted Tara, grimly determined to have it all out and be done.
‘Oh, you want to talk about Raja again,’ Bim groaned disgustedly. She picked up her spectacles and made to put them on, bending over the stack of papers on the table with an exaggerated air of interest. But she gave it up in an instant, laying the spectacles down on top of the papers. ‘I’m bored with Raja. Utterly bored,’ she said evenly. ‘He is too rich to be interesting any more, too fat and too successful. Rich, fat and successful people are boring. I’m not interested, Tara.’
Tara threw herself forward on her arms, her hair in its long curls—yes, at last she had achieved the curls she had prayed for as a little girl; now they were as luxuriant as vines, thanks to the best hairdressers of the international capitals—sweeping over her ears and across her cheeks, casting purple shadows. Between them, her eyes and her mouth agonised. ‘Why do you imagine such things about Raja? You haven’t even seen him—in how many years, Bim? You live in the same country and never visit each other. I come, from abroad, every three years, to see you, to see Baba and Raja. I know more about Raja’s home and family than you do, Bim. You don’t know anything about his life, about his family or his work.’
‘Yes, I do know,’ Bim replied loudly. ‘He is invited to weddings, engagement parties, anniversaries—they spread out carpets and cushions for him to recline on, like a pasha—and he recites his poems.’ She made a clownish face, ridiculing such pomp, such show, such empty vanity. ‘I can imagine the scene—all those perfumed verses about wine, the empty goblet, the flame, and ash . . .’ she laughed derisively.
‘You haven’t read any of it in years—how do you know?’
‘I know Raja. I know his poems.’
‘Why can’t it have changed? Grown better?’
‘How can it—when he lives in that style? Living in his father-in-law’s house, making money on his father-in-law’s property, fathering one baby after another—’
‘Five. And they’re quite grown up now—the girls are anyway.’
‘And the little boy is so spoilt, he’s impossible.’
‘You’ve never even seen him, Bim!’
‘I couldn’t bear to—I can imagine it all—after four daughters, much lamented, at last the little boy, the little prince arrives. What a dumpling he must be, what a rice-ball—with all the feeding that goes on in that house, Benazir cooking and tasting and eating all day, and in between meals little snacks arriving to help them on their way. Imagine what he must look like, and Raja! Imagine eating so much!’
‘Why do you imagine they eat all day?’ cried Tara in distress.
‘I know. They did visit me once. Have you forgotten? After their marriage, after their first baby was born, they did come to visit us. And Benazir was already so plump, and Raja—Raja looked like a pasha, he was so fat. They were visiting too, as if they were pashas, with presents to dazzle us with. He brought me a string of pearls—imagine, pearls!—and told me how Hyderabad was known for them. And I just told him “But Raja, you know I don’t wear jewellery!” Then he brought a hi-fi set for Baba—“the latest model”, he told us,’ she went on, laughing. ‘And Baba just smiled and never touched it. He only loves his old HMV gramophone, he loves to wind it up and sit by it, watching the record turn. All through their visit he was so afraid Benazir might ask for it back—it was hers, you know. Then Raja sulked and sulked. “Tara would have worn the pearls,” he said, “and Bakul would have known what a fine hi-fi set that is—you two know nothing.”’ Bim laughed again and repeated, mockingly, ‘No, we know nothing, we two—nothing.’
They sat in silence together, listening to the storm blow itself out, so that the roar of the trees bending and the creepers dashing against the walls and the gravel flying gradually lessened, seemed to recede, leaving them in a kind of grey cave that still echoed with the tides.
‘And now that baby is to be married,’ Bim mused, drumming her fingers on the table. ‘Moyna. I wonder if she’s as plump as Benazir used to be? Benazir must be huge. She never liked to get up or move if she could get someone to fetch and carry for her. And she fed that baby all day long. Little silver dishes of milk puddings would arrive—she’d brought along a woman to cook for them, she didn’t trust Janaki or me—and she would spoon it into her mouth, fattening her up. And Raja—how he’d grown to enjoy Benazir’s food—’
‘It’s very good,’ Tara said earnestly. ‘It really is.’
‘Yes, I know, but it’s disgusting to enjoy it so much, and eat so much of it. Such rich foods. They must be bad for him, I kept telling him that, but of course he wouldn’t listen.’ She shook her head, a bit saddened now. Then she sat up straight. ‘It’s unhappy people who eat like that,’ she said suddenly, authoritatively. ‘I read that somewhere. They compensate themselves with the food they eat for the things they missed.’
‘What things has Raja missed, Bim? He has a wife, children, his own house, his business, his hobby—’
‘But that’s just it,’ Bim exploded. ‘All—all that nonsense. That’s not what Raja had wanted from life. He doesn’t need a hobby, he needs a vocation. He knows he has given his up, just given up what used to be his vocation, turned it into a silly, laughable little hobby . . . That is why he needs to console himself with food and more food. Don’t you see?’
Tara’s mouth was open, she was full of protest. She felt it was wrong to allow Bim to follow the path of such misunderstanding. But she only wrung her h
ands in a distressed way, wondering how to persuade someone so headstrong, so habitually headstrong, as her sister. Finally she said ‘You should go and visit them, Bim, and see for yourself how it is. There’s the wedding. They want you there. Here’s a letter. Let me read it to you . . .’
‘No, it’s for you,’ said Bim, waving it away as Tara started to draw it out of its envelope.
But Tara pretended not to notice. She opened out the sheets of blue paper and began to read. ‘“It’s time you met your young nephew. We have just bought him a pony, a plump young white one that the girls say looks like a pearl so they call her Moti. Benazir has made him a velvet suit and when he sits on her back he looks like a prince in a Persian miniature . . .”’
Bim slapped the tabletop with her hand, loudly. ‘You see,’ she said, in triumph, ‘what did I tell you? He may be a grown man, respectable citizen, father of a family and all that—but what is he still trying to do, to be? Remember Hyder Ali Sahib’s white horse and how we would see him riding by while we played in the sand by the Jumna?’
‘Of course,’ Tara nodded, with a sentimental list to her head.
‘That’s what Raja was thinking of when he bought the white pony. Raja always admired Hyder Ali Sahib—probably envied him cutting such a fine figure on the white horse, a servant running ahead of him to clear the way of rabble like us and a dog to bring up the rear. Impressive, I suppose—and wasn’t Raja impressed! See, this late in life, he’s still trying to be Hyder Ali Sahib,’ she laughed. ‘Hyder Ali Sahib was his ideal in life and it’s the ideal he’s still pursuing, poor Raja. To gratify his own boyhood desire, he now forces his poor little boy to ride. Terrible, isn’t it, how parents drive their children to fulfil their own ungratified desires?’ Her face shone with vindication as if it were oily.
Tara drew back, affronted. ‘I don’t think little Riyaz is at all aware of his father’s ungratified desires,’ she said, primly.
‘No, but he will be. When that pony throws him and he howls and no longer wants to ride and his father insists he get back on, then he will know what it’s all for.’
‘Why do you foresee such terrible things?’ Tara protested, wincing, her maternal instinct touched as if with a knife-point. ‘The pony won’t throw little Riyaz. What a terrible thing to imagine, Bim.’
Bim was holding her head in both her hands, shaking it slowly from side to side. ‘That’s my trouble,’ she mumbled. ‘I do foresee all these terrible things. I see them all,’ she said, closing her eyes, as if tired, or in pain.
Tara, afraid of that expression, said gently ‘Well, when one grows old, one is said to have all kinds of fears, become very apprehensive,’ and then looked down at the letter in her hands and read on, details of the arrangements for Moyna’s wedding that were going on in Raja’s household, elaborate and expensive arrangements, for she was the first of his daughters to marry and it was to be a grand affair. There were to be lighted torches along the driveway, a shehnai player from Benares to play at the wedding, ice carved into swans on the tables . . .
But Bim did not make any response. Although she opened her eyes and stared at all the books and papers and letters scattered over the dusty table, she did not seem to be seeing anything. If she was listening to anything, it was to the sounds of returning normality outside, the usual summer morning sounds of mynahs quarrelling and shrieking on the lawn, the pigeons beginning to mutter comfortably to each other in the veranda, dry leaves and scraps of paper swirling down the drive and blowing into hedges and corners. Leaving Tara to read on, she stood up and picked up a plate of orange peels that had been lying on the table since breakfast.
Roughly interrupting Tara’s low, monotonous recital, she said sharply ‘Why do you peel oranges and then leave them uneaten, Tara? It’s such a waste.’ Tara, startled, put down the letter but did not say it was Bakul who had left the orange on the plate.
‘It’s half-rotten, Bim,’ she said. ‘I only left the rotten bits.’
‘It’s not rotten,’ Bim retorted. ‘It’s perfectly all right. I do hate waste,’ she added and went out of the room with an oddly uncertain step. Tara was disconcerted by it but would have been far more upset if she had seen how Bim’s lip was trembling and how her hand shook so that the orange peels slipped off the plate and littered the way to the kitchen. Something about Raja’s letter, Tara’s comments, the world of luxury and extravagance created by them and approved by both of them, excluding her, her standards, too rough and too austere for them, made anger flower in her like some wild red tropical bloom, and a kind of resentment mixed with fear made her stutter, half-aloud, ‘I mean—I mean she’s only five years younger than I am and she thinks I’m old. And she spies on me—she’s been spying. She is cruel, Tara, and cold. And Raja selfish, too selfish to care. And what about the letter he wrote me? Oh yes, he writes beautiful letters to Tara—all wedding, all gold—but what about the letter he wrote me? My letter? Has Tara forgotten it—in my desk? And I—’
She pottered about the kitchen for a while—Janaki must have gone out to roll herself a betel leaf and chew it quietly out by the servants’ quarters—washing the plate, putting it away, seeing if there were any more oranges left in spite of her sister’s and brother-in-law’s wasteful ways, and then went out on the veranda to find that the dust-storm had left the whole garden shrouded in grey. Each leaf, each bush drooped with the weight of dust. Even the sun appeared to be swathed in grey cobwebs. Everything seemed ancient and bent. Everything seemed to have gone into eclipse. The house would need a thorough cleaning. She stood on the steps and shouted ‘Janaki! Janaki!’ both angrily and desperately.
Tara began to keep an eye on Bim as she moved about the house, watchful and wary. She wondered why she had not noticed before how very queerly Bim ran the house—or was this queerness something new, something that had happened just now under pressure? She could not help noticing Bim’s excessive meanness—the way she would scrape all left-overs onto saucers and keep them for the next meal so that some of the meals that arrived on the table were just a long procession of little saucers with little portions smudged onto them, like meals for a family of kittens. Tara felt ashamed of them, knowing how Bakul’s fastidious nostrils would crinkle at the sight. She noticed that he tried to have luncheon and dinner engagements in the city as often as possible, telephoning old colleagues and cronies, finding something he had to discuss with them over a meal, at the club, almost every day. She was glad. She was more relaxed sitting at the meagre table with just Bim and Baba. At the same time she worried that they didn’t eat properly. Then she noticed a pound of the best, the most expensive tea turning to dust on the kitchen shelf. Bim had bought it long ago, in a moment of largesse, then obviously suffered pangs of remorse and not been able to bring herself to use it. And yet packets of books kept arriving—expensive volumes of history and art. They must cost a great deal. When she hinted at the expense, Bim said of course, but she needed them for her work. Were they not available at the library? ventured Tara, and Bim gave her a withering look.
Then, while perambulating the garden early in the morning when it was still fresh although the day’s heat was beginning to rise at the fringes and form shimmering banks like cumulus clouds, she found a great mound of manure lying behind the garage. When she asked the gardener who was squatting by the garage door, mending some broken tool, she learnt Bim had ordered a cartload of manure one day and then claimed to have no money left for seeds. The gardener began to wheeze self-pityingly to Tara, ‘What am I to do? Times are bad. I have to grow vegetables, I have to grow food—but how? When there is no fertilizer, no seed, and whenever I turn on the tap, Bim—missahib comes and tells me not to waste water?’ Tara, embarrassed, gathered her kimono about her and walked on, confused.
She had always thought Bim so competent, so capable. Everyone had thought that—Aunt Mira, the teachers at school, even Raja. But Bim seemed to stampede through the house like a dishevelled storm, creating more havoc than order. Tara would b
e ashamed to run a house like this. Bakul would have been horrified if she did. Then how had Bim acquired her fine reputation? Or had her old capability, her old competence begun to crumble now and go to seed? Tara saw how little she had really observed—either as a child or as a grown woman. She had seen Bim through the lenses of her own self, as she had wanted to see her. And now, when she tried to be objective, when she was old enough, grown enough and removed enough to study her objectively, she found she could not—her vision was strewn, obscured and screened by too much of the past.
‘What did we really see?’ she wondered aloud in the evening when the dark laid a comfortingly protective blanket on her and no one could make out too much in the dark or the dust as they sat idly flapping palm-leaf fans against the turgid heat and the swarming mosquitoes that rose from the lawn or dropped from the trees, making walls about them: a form of torture that was well-known to them; it was simply summer. ‘I think it’s simply amazing—how very little one sees or understands even about one’s own home or family,’ she felt obliged to explain when the silence grew too strained.
‘What have you seen now that you had not known before?’ Bakul asked in a slow, amused tone. He was smoking a cigar. It made his voice riper than ever. Juice might run, through the cracks, purple.
‘Only that I had noticed nothing before,’ Tara said, thrown into confusion by his measured tone. She would have preferred simply to ramble.
‘What else do children ever do?’ Bakul asked. He had been out all day, he had eaten and drunk well, he was in a mood to be indulgent this evening. ‘Do you think our own daughters notice anything about us? Of course not—they are too occupied with themselves. Children may see—but they don’t comprehend.’
‘No one,’ said Bim, slowly and precisely, ‘comprehends better than children do. No one feels the atmosphere more keenly—or catches all the nuances, all the insinuations in the air—or notes those details that escape elders because their senses have atrophied, or calcified.’
