by Anita Desai
She had not known she was going to say that till she had said it. She had only walked in to talk to Baba—cut down his defence and demand some kind of a response from him, some kind of justification from him for herself, her own life, her ways and attitudes, like a blessing from Baba. She had not known she would be led into making such a threat, or blackmailing Baba. She was still hardly aware of what she had said, only something seemed to slam inside her head, painfully, when she looked at Baba.
He did not say anything. He only sat on the edge of his bed as he always did, his long hands dangling loosely over his knees, but he seemed to draw back from her, as far as he could, and his mouth was drawn awry as if he had been slapped, hard.
‘I mean,’ she cried, leaning out of her chair towards him, ‘I mean—it’s just an idea—I’ve been wondering—I wanted to ask you, Baba—what you thought.’
But Baba never told what he thought. No one knew if he thought.
‘I didn’t mean,’ she said hoarsely, ‘Baba, I didn’t mean—’
Then Bim’s rage was spent at last. It had reached its peak, its acme, like a great glittering wave that had hovered over everyone and that now collapsed, fell on the sand and seeped away, leaving nothing but a soggy shadow in the shape of Baba’s silence.
No afternoon in all that summer had been so quiet, so empty as the one Bim spent that day, lying as still as a bone left on the sand by the river.
Silence roared around the house and thundered through it, making her press her hands against her ears. She would have relished the sound of the gramophone if it could have drowned out the sound of silence.
Now she pressed her hands across her eyes but the resulting flashes and pin-pricks of light darting and dashing across her eyelids did not amount to an answer. Only the questions thundered and thundered, one dark wave succeeding another. Why had she chosen Baba to vent her hurt and pain and frustration on? Why had she not written a letter to Raja, pouring out all she had to say to him over the years? Or attacked Tara instead since she could never be driven quite away, but always came back crawling to cling out of the habit of affection and her own insecurity? Or Bakul, smashing his complacence into satisfying smithereens with one judicious blow for he would only pretend nothing had happened, remain certain no one could do this to him?
She knew why of course: she could so easily have drawn an answer out of them—she already knew the answers they would have yielded up. Their answers were all so open, so strident, so blatant, she knew every line and nuance of them.
It was Baba’s silence and reserve and otherworldliness that she had wanted to break open and ransack and rob, like the hunter who, moved by the white bird’s grace as it hovers in the air above him, raises his crossbow and shoots to claim it for his own—his treasure, his loot—and brings it hurtling down to his feet—no white spirit or symbol of grace but only a dead albatross, a cold package of death.
Like the smashed egg and the bird with a broken neck outside. Filth to be cleaned up.
Her eyes opened at this sight against her will and she looked around the room almost in fear. But it was dark and shadowy, shaded by the bamboo screen at the door, the damp rush mats at the windows, the old heavy curtains and the spotted, peeling walls, and in their shade she saw how she loved him, loved Raja and Tara and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread. They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she was of them, so that the anger or the disappointment she felt in them was only the anger and disappointment she felt at herself. Whatever hurt they felt, she felt. Whatever diminished them, diminished her. What attacked them, attacked her. Nor was there anyone else on earth whom she was willing to forgive more readily or completely or defend more instinctively and instantly. She could hardly believe, at that moment, that she would live on after they did or they would continue after she had ended. If such, an unimaginable phenomenon could take place then surely they would remain flawed, damaged for life. The wholeness of the pattern, its perfection, would be gone.
She lay absolutely still, almost ceasing to breathe, afraid to diminish by even a breath the wholeness of that love.
Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally. She did not feel enough for her dead parents, her understanding of them was incomplete and she would have to work and labour to acquire it. Her love for Raja had had too much of a battering, she had felt herself so humiliated by his going away and leaving her, by his reversal of role from brother to landlord, that it had never recovered and become the tall, shining thing it had been once. Her love for Baba was too inarticulate, too unthinking: she had not given him enough thought, her concern had not been keen, acute enough. All these would have to be mended, these rents and tears, she would have to mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean.
Somehow she would have to forgive Raja that unforgivable letter. Somehow she would have to wrest forgiveness from Baba for herself. These were great rents torn in the net that the knife of love had made. Stains of blood that the arrow of love had left. Stains that darkened the light that afternoon. She laid her hands across her eyes again.
When she took Baba’s tea in to him later that afternoon, she found him asleep. That was why the gramophone had been silent in the afternoon—not because he was sulking, or wished to punish her, but simply because he was asleep. She ought to have known—Baba knew neither grudge nor punishment. She touched him on the cheek with one finger—its whiteness seemed to be like a saint’s that suffers itself to be kissed. He woke at once and, seeing her, smiled.
‘Your tea, Baba,’ she murmured. ‘I brought you your tea.’ She felt an immense, almost irresistible yearning to lie down beside him on the bed, stretch out limb to limb, silent and immobile together. She felt that they must be the same length, that his slightness would fit in beside her size, that his concavities would mould together with her convexities. Together they would form a whole that would be perfect and pure. She needed only to lie down and stretch out beside him to become whole and perfect.
Instead, she went out. In the garden, a koel lifted itself out of the heavy torpor of the afternoon and called tentatively, as if enquiring into the existence of the evening.
In the evening, the sisters paced the terrace, waiting for a bit of breeze to come and lighten the air. Tara tried to talk—there were not many evenings left to them—but Bim was silent and seemed tired. After a while they stopped and leaned on the balustrade together, looking out over the stretch of sand to the still-standing river and above it the gauzy screen of dust into which the sun was sinking—a serene glass bubble filled with a pale liquid that did not quiver or ripple but was absolutely calm, weighting it down and forcing it to fall. The scene beneath reflected its lack of colour and its stillness. The river did not seem to run, the ferry boat was static and the egrets stood stock-still in the shallows.
‘I’m going to bed early tonight,’ said Tara and Bim nodded, her eyelids drooping with tiredness. She, too, wanted to sleep. She was exhausted—by Tara, by Baba, by all of them. Loving them and not loving them. Accepting them and not accepting them. Understanding them and not understanding them. The conflicts that rose inside her with every word they spoke and every gesture they made had been an enormous strain, she now felt, leaving her worn out. In spite of her exhaustion, she feared the night and the long hours and the dark when she would have to face herself. How would she swim through that ocean and come out again? she wondered.
In the event, she decided not to go to bed. She ignored the bed laid out f
or her at the end of the veranda, next to Baba’s. She dreaded seeing his sleeping shape, unresponsive as a god, guilt-arousing as a saint. She dreaded the unreal light of the moon and Badshah’s crazed barking. She dreaded hearing Tara’s and Bakul’s voices murmuring at their end of the veranda, forcing her to imagine their conversations and tones. No, she would stay in her stifling, dust-choked room, propped up by cushions on her hard wooden divan, the lamp with the brown paper shade lit and her books beside her to help her through the night. While she listened to the others switch off their lights and settle into bed, she rustled through page after page, the leaves of her mind falling one on top of the other as thick as cards, the cards her mother’s, her father’s hands had so expertly shuffled. They still shuffled and the cards, the leaves, fell upon each other with a dry, dusty crepitation, as meaningless and endless as their games.
To try and halt this crazy paper-dance, she reached out towards her bookshelf for a book that would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and plait them into a composed and concentrated whole after a day of fraying and unravelling. It was the Life of Aurangzeb that lay at the top of the stack and came away from it between her fingers. Bim gave a little sigh and sank down on her cushions with relief at finding some history, a table of dates and facts with which to steady her mind. But, as if by instinct, she opened it to an account of the emperor’s death:
Alone he had lived and alone he made ready to die . . . he wrote to Prince A’zam: . . . ‘Many were around me when I was born, but now I am going alone. I know not why I am or wherefore I came into the world . . . Life is transient and the lost moment never comes back . . . When I have lost hope in myself how can I hope in others? Come what will, I have launched my bark upon the waters . . .’
To his favourite Kam-Baksh he wrote: ‘Soul of my soul . . . Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!’
. . . In accordance with his command ‘Carry this creature of dust to the nearest burial-place, and lay him in the earth with no useless coffin,’ he was buried simply near Daulatabad beside the tombs of Muslim saints.
Then Bim’s mind seemed stilled at last. A silence settled upon it as a shroud that is drawn up over the dead. Laying her open book across her chest, she lay with her eyes closed, repeating the emperor’s last words to herself like a prayer. She felt tears seep from under her eyelids involuntarily: they were warm as they ran down the sides of her face into the wells of her ears. They left a map of river-beds in the dust, trickling a little and then drying.
When she moved, it was to go to her desk and carefully draw out the entire lower drawer and carry it, heavily loaded with papers, to the divan where she could kneel beside it as she took out the papers in bundles and read them intently by the dim brown-papered light for the first time in many years.
They were not her papers, they were the translations she had made once of Raja’s poems. They would be difficult to read, she feared, and her face was white as if with fear, or pain. Then it proved easy. The years had made them impersonal. Nowhere in them could she find Raja, not the Raja now and not the young Raja, the child Raja. For the poems were really very derivative. On each of them she could clearly see the influence of the poets he loved and copied. There was no image, no metaphor, no turn of phrase that was original. Each was a meticulous imitation of what he had read, memorised and recited. He had made no effort to break the iron rings of cliches, he had seemed content to link them, ring to ring, so that they clinked and jingled down the lengths of his verses. He had not, it seemed, really set out to startle by originality, to burst upon the literary world as a new star, fresh and vivid. One could see in them only a wish to emulate and to step where his heroes had stepped before him.
Touched, Bim laid them carefully in a heap beside her knees, one sheet on the other, like so many cards in a game. She had not realized that Raja’s ambitions were so modest and unassertive. Far from playing the hero, he had only worshipped the heroes of his youth. Since he had set about imitating them and deriving from them so meticulously and painstakingly, they were not quite so bad as they might have been if he had trusted only in his own worth. Bim had to admit that he had learnt his craft well. He had acquired a surprising command over the craft of writing Urdu verse. He had learnt his lessons in metre, rhyme and rhythm and acquitted himself well.
But would he like her still to keep them? Would he want to be shown them again? Would they embarrass him, pain him, dismay him? She sat half the night wondering. She had thought of tearing them to bits, emptying her desk of them so that no trace should be left of those ‘heroic’ days of theirs. Now she was not certain. Her eyelids flickered with tiredness as her fingers shuffled through them again and again, and even her sand-coloured lips moved silently as she debated with herself what to do.
‘Strange that I came with nothing into the world and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!’
Why load the bark with this accumulation made through a thoughtless life? Would it not sink? Would it not be better to jettison everything, to lighten the bark and go free, with ease?
‘Many were around me when I was born but now I am going alone.’
But they were Raja’s papers, not hers. It was not for her to decide whether he would take them with him or disown them and discard them, the litter and rubble left by the human picnic.
In the end, the only paper she tore that night was the letter he had written her and she had never answered. It was too late to answer it now. The only course left was to pretend it had never been written.
Having torn it, she felt she had begun the clearing of her own decks, the lightening of her own bark. After that, she spent the rest of the night in tearing and throwing away great piles of her own papers—old, dry, impersonal things, examination papers she had set her students, notes she had made in her own student days, tutorial papers she had forgotten to hand back, trivial letters that did not bear re-reading, pamphlets and catalogues sent by bookshops and academic journals, empty cheque books and full pass books, files dating back to her father’s lifetime . . . Why had she kept them all these years? Now she flung them in a heap in the centre of the floor, and her shelves and desk were bare except for dust.
While she worked, she felt a sharp, fiery pining for college to re-open and her ordinary working life to be resumed. Then she would be able to end all this storm of emotion in which she had been dragged back and forth all summer as in a vast, warm ocean, and return to what she did best, most efficiently, with least expense of spirit—the keeping to a schedule, the following of a time-table, the application of the mind to facts, figures, rules and analyses. Once again, she felt with a certain bitterness, what a strain Tara’s visit had been, what it had cost her by constantly dragging her apart into love and hostility, resentment and acceptance, forgiveness and hate. Worn out by it, she threw away the last paper, lifted the empty drawer off the divan and then lay down and slept. Even Badshah had fallen silent by then.
When Bim woke in the morning, she found her nieces sitting on the edge of the divan, looking into her confused face and laughing. They leaned forward to kiss her, and Tara came in, laughing too, to kiss them. Tara and Bakul had been, early that morning, in the dark, to fetch them. ‘Here they are,’ she was saying with such pride, such triumph, that they might have been fruit she had raised, or prizes she had secured. ‘Look, Bim, here are your nieces again,’ she laughed and Bim, struggling to free herself from the night and reach them, reached out to touch their faces and draw them to hers to be kissed.
She had not held anyone so close for years. Their young faces loomed, their brightness and pinkness filled her vision, and the scent of their fresh skin and fine hair and the soap and water with which they had just washed wafted down to her, making her draw back into her cushions
, overwhelmed.
‘Are you tired, Bim-masi?’ they laughed at her. ‘Aren’t you awake yet? What have you been doing all night? Your room looks like a storm’s been through it.’
‘Tired? Not awake?’ She sat up then, as straight as she could, feeling a dreadful pain in her back from the hard wooden divan on which she had spent the night. ‘You just wait—you just see—I’ll be up and have your tea ready and we’ll be out on the veranda, all of us, in five minutes, and then Tara will have her family gathering at last,’ and she plunged past them and stood over them, tall and refreshed.
‘What are you wearing, masi?’ they teased. ‘The very latest fashion—a caftan! Ma, you never told us how fashionable Bim-masi has grown.’ No one mentioned that her face seemed made of clay—old dried clay that had cracked. Only Bim felt it, with the tips of trembling fingers.
