Fasting, Feasting

by Anita Desai

  And there had been, in that family, once, a major disagreement, one on the scale of a physical disaster, that left the family in a state of shock, as after a fire or flood. Mama, not Papa, administered that shock.

  With Uma a grown woman—by some standards, at least—and Aruna newly discovering what it was to have periods, Mama it was who found herself pregnant.

  It had taken the girls a long time to find out what was happening, what was the cause of so much whispering, furtive discussion, visits by the doctor and to the doctor. Older relatives were sent for, consultations were carried on. Mama's eyes were swollen with crying as she lay across her bed and wept. Papa scowled his concern and embarrassment. Like a blister with blood, the air was thick with secrets. The girls felt their ears creep as they strained to hear what was being said. It was incomprehensible, in some way risqué, even lewd, but they failed to understand the language although they caught the tone, and even the meaning. Something grossly physical—sexual. The word squealed loudly in their throats and they pressed their lips together so it should not escape. Uma had a vision of a frantic pig she had once seen in the bazaar, wriggling to escape from the butcher, and a memory of the whines and cries of mating dogs behind the servants' quarters, Papa's orders to the mali to drive them out with sticks. Aruna's vision was more domestic—petticoats and saris lifted, legs thrashing, naked legs, in the night, under the mosquito net. They'd heard sounds, muffled, escaping involuntarily from behind curtains. No doors were ever shut in that household: closed doors meant secrets, nasty secrets, impermissible. It meant authority would come stalking in and make a search to seize upon the nastiness, the unclean blot. Unclean, with human blood, woman's blood. But when it came to parents, one did not look. One looked down at oneself, ashamed. But still they strained to hear. Eventually, the servants told—ayah told them what might have been clear to anyone with eyes: it was a late pregnancy.

  Mama was frantic to have it terminated. She had never been more ill, and would go through hellfire, she wept, just to stop the nausea that tormented her. But Papa set his jaws. They had two daughters, yes, quite grown-up as anyone could see, but there was no son. Would any man give up the chance of a son?

  The pregnancy had to be accepted. Mama lay supine upon the bed, groaning through the summer from being overweight and sick. Above her the ceiling fan revolved with a repeated squeak and on the walls geckos clucked as they chased each other around. At her feet ayah, who had looked after Aruna when she was little and had to be called out of retirement in her village, sat massaging her legs with accompanying sounds of comfort and pacification. Uma and Aruna, alternately stricken by the atmosphere of the sickroom and titillated by expectation, hardly knew how that difficult summer unwound itself to the end. Then, when the monsoon came and the air became sticky and sweltering and mosquito-ridden and the geckos were scurrying around to snap up the flies, Mama was driven to Queen Mary's Hospital for Women and Children and there delivered of what she had suffered so much for—a son.

  A son.

  The whole family came to a standstill. Around Mama's bed, in the hospital, peering at this wonder. Even if Aruna did say, 'So red—so ugly!' before she was nudged into silence, and Uma proved incapable of holding something so fragile and precious, they were acutely aware of the wonder of it. Mama's face, still tense from the difficult delivery, began to relax and broaden into long-suffering pride. It struck Uma later that from that hour onwards this became her habitual expression. But, to begin with, it was Papa who held their attention. In the hospital he seemed to be bottling up his emotions, to be holding them down with his formidable self-control. His face was quite contorted with the effort and perspiration broke out on his neck and soaked his shirt. He allowed himself to express his feelings only by uttering sharp orders to the nurses, to ayah, the girls, even supine Mama. Then he hurried his daughters away, almost before he had really looked at his son. In fact, he had looked away, as if that puny physical presence were irrelevant to the moment, and might even disappoint.

  Arriving home, however, he sprang out of the car, raced into the house and shouted the news to whoever was there to hear. Servants, elderly relatives, all gathered at the door, and then saw the most astounding sight of their lives—Papa, in his elation, leaping over three chairs in the hall, one after the other, like a boy playing leap-frog, his arms flung up in the air and his hair flying. 'A boy!' he screamed, 'a bo-oy! Arun, Arun at last!' It turned out that when a second daughter had been born, the name Arun had already been chosen in anticipation of a son. It had had to be changed, in disappointment, to Aruna.

  Uma and Aruna, in the portico, looking in, drew together, awe-struck.

  Uma never overcame her awe of that extraordinary event, really far more memorable than the birth itself. As for Aruna, it could be said to have started a lifetime of bridling, of determined self-assertion.

  When Mama came home, weak, exhausted and short-tempered, she tried to teach Uma the correct way of folding nappies, of preparing watered milk, of rocking the screaming infant to sleep when he was covered with prickly heat as with a burn. Uma, unfortunately, was her clumsy, undependable self, dropping and breaking things, frightenedly pulling away from her much too small, too precious, and too fragile brother.

  'I have to go and do my homework,' she told her mother. 'I've got to get my sums done and then write the composition—'

  'Leave all that,' Mama snapped at her.

  Uma had received such directions from Mama before; Mama had never taken seriously the need to do any schoolwork, not having gone to school herself. 'We used to have a tutor,' she said airily when the girls asked her how it was possible that she had not gone to school. 'He used to come to the house to teach us—a little singing—a little—hmm—' she became vague. 'We used to run away and hide from him,' she admitted, with a giggle. So Uma tried to explain that if she did not get her homework done, she would be sent to Mother Agnes with a note.

  'But we are not sending you to Mother Agnes—or to school—again,' Mama said.

  Uma's face, looking up from the stack of nappies she was trying to fold, seemed to irritate Mama. She twitched her toes and snapped 'We are not sending you back to school, Uma. You are staying at home to help with Arun.'

  Uma turned around to look for explanation and support. In matters educational, Papa would surely support her. He was educated; it was he who sent her to the convent school in the first place.

  UMA would have found it difficult to articulate where the appeal of the convent school lay. The visible details would have sounded banal: the strict rules of the morning assembly to which the girls were not admitted unless they had been examined at the door to see if their shoes were polished, their fingernails short and without paint, the ribbons on their hair white and not coloured; then the piano on which Sister Teresa banged out the hymns with such pounding certainty, such unvarying rhythm; the wonderfully still and composed figure of Mother Agnes, planted squarely on her feet in large sandals, holding the prayer book from which she read in her deep, unhurried voice that seemed to move between the girls like a slow brown river; the orderliness of her office room to which Uma was fairly frequently sent with a note from the teacher, and where she looked around avidly, at the picture on the wall of a golden-haired Jesus holding a lamb, the tinted print over the mantelpiece of the tear-stained face of a child gazing up at a corner of the gilt frame where a silver star shone, or the polished brass vase with its spray of stiff fresh flowers on the desk and the clean white linen runners on top of the bookshelf, the immense clock near the door immensely ticking, and the view from the window of a garden of marvellous tidiness, the long verandas enclosing a courtyard that they could look on but not jump into because the grass was so precious and the roses so rare...

  She would probably have listed the games they played hectically on the playing fields to the sharp blasts of a whistle blown by Miss D' Souza; the spotless condition of the sickroom where there was certain to be a remedy for every headache, every bruis
e and cut; the new copybooks with lined pages and the crisp inky textbooks they were handed out at the beginning of term along with a new wooden ruler and a clean eraser; the sayings and proverbs the nuns employed in their speech that sounded so wise, so indisputable ('It's no use crying over spilt milk' and 'A stitch in time saves nine'); the celebration of Christmas and of Easter and the saints' days.

  She would have confessed how the order pleased her, the rationality of the whole system, each element having its own function and existing for a reason. She would have explained how it satisfied her that every question was answered, every doubt dealt with. As an infant she had sung louder than any other child in class:

  'Jesus loves me; this I know,

  For the Bible tells me so!'

  She knew that something secret went on in the small chapel where the children were not allowed, where one could only catch a glimpse, occasionally, of a nun in prayer, kneeling before an altar where a streak of gilt showed in the shadows; she knew it was in some manner linked to the subterranean feelings stirred within her by the words intoned during prayers:

  'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

  He leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restored! my soul....'

  Clearly, the outer plainness and regularity of this convent world contained within it secret chambers dark with mystery, streaked with golden promise.

  So she could not understand when others, like Aruna, cursed it and loathed it with such bitterness. Why? Uma was at school before any other child, and every day she searched for an excuse to stay on. School was not open long enough. There were the wretched weekends when she was plucked back into the trivialities of her home, which seemed a denial, a negation of life as it ought to be, sombre and splendid, and then the endless summer vacation when the heat reduced even that pointless existence to further vacuity. She prickled with impatience for the fifteenth of July when school would re-open and a new term begin. She hurried to buy the new books, gloated over their freshness, wrapped them in brown paper covers to keep them clean, eager for the day when they would be put to use.

  True, there was one uncomfortable fact that could not be denied: in spite of her raging enthusiasm, she was an abject scholar. Why? It was so unfair. The nuns clucked and shook their heads and sent for Mama, wrote notes to Papa, and every year, after the exams, said sorrowfully that they would have to hold her back—she had managed to fail every single test: in English, Hindi, history, geography, arithmetic, drawing, and even domestic science! There was not a thing Uma put her hand to that did not turn to failure. Uma rubbed and rubbed at her exercise books with an increasingly black and stumpy eraser, struggled to work out her sums, to remember dates, to spell 'Constantinople'; and over and over again she failed. Her record book was marked red for failure. The other girls, their own books marked healthily in green and blue for success and approval, looked at her with pity on the day the record book was handed out. She wept with shame and frustration.

  SO now Mama was able to say, 'You know you failed your exams again. You're not being moved up. What's the use of going back to school? Stay at home and look after your baby brother.' Then, seeing Uma's hands shake as she tried to continue with folding the nappies, she seemed to feel a little pity. 'What is the use of going back to school if you keep failing, Uma?' she asked in a reasonable tone. 'You will be happier at home. You won't need to do any lessons. You are a big girl now. We are trying to arrange a marriage for you. Not now,' she added, seeing the panic on Uma's face. 'But soon. Till then, you can help me look after Arun. And learn to run the house.' She reached out her hand to catch Uma's. 'I need your help, beti,' she coaxed, her voice sweet with pleading.

  Uma wrenched her hand free.

  Three

  'UMA, pass your father the fruit.'

  Uma picks up the fruit bowl with both hands and puts it down with a thump before her father. Bananas, oranges, apples—there they are, for him.

  Blinking, he ignores them. Folding his hands on the table, he gazes over them with the sphinx-like expression of the blind.

  Mama knows what is wrong. She taps Uma on the elbow. 'Orange,' she instructs her. Uma can no longer pretend to be ignorant of Papa's needs, Papa's ways. After all, she has been serving them for some twenty years. She picks out the largest orange in the bowl and hands it to Mama who peels it in strips, then divides it into separate segments. Each segment is then peeled and freed of pips and threads till only the perfect globules of juice are left, and then passed, one by one, to the edge of Papa's plate. One by one, he lifts them with the tips of his fingers and places them in his mouth. Everyone waits while he repeats the gesture, over and over. Mama's lips are pursed with the care she gives her actions, and their importance.

  When she has done, and only pith and peel and pips lie on her plate, and nothing at all on Papa's except for the merest smear of juice, she glances over at Uma. Her dark eyes flash with the brightness of her achievement and pride.

  'Where is Papa's finger bowl?' she asks loudly.

  The finger bowl is placed before Papa. He dips his fingertips in and wipes them on the napkin. He is the only one in the family who is given a napkin and a finger bowl; they are emblems of his status.

  Mama sits back. The ceremony is over. She has performed it. Everyone is satisfied.

  ***

  IT was that time of day when the cook had closed up his kitchen and gone off to his quarters behind the guava trees to stretch out on his string bed and sleep till teatime, Mama and the baby were both silent in the dark, shuttered bedroom, and the girls left to themselves under the revolving fan, on the stripped-down beds of the room they shared, for the time being, with Mama's elderly cousin who was still around to help. The elderly cousin was beyond the need for sleep—she thought it an indulgence of the young—and coaxed the girls into playing a game of cards. They sat cross-legged on the bed, slapping down the cards in a desultory way, now and then letting out an exclamation of disgust or triumph and leaning forward to gather up their gains.

  Uma muttered, 'I'm going to get a drink of water—I'll come back—' and slipped out of the door. Aruna watched her sharply because she had seen that Uma's mind was not on the cards. But Uma was prepared for the afternoon—in spite of the distress that had made her throat dry and her hands shake, she had planned carefully. Now she went quietly to that corner of the pantry where, behind a tall stack of dinner plates, she had hidden her purse containing all the money she had, in a tight roll. Soundlessly she slipped into the sandals she had left behind the water jar on the veranda outside the kitchen, dropped down off the parapet and darted into the shade of the guava trees. She knew all the rooms in the house had their curtains drawn against the midday sun, all the verandas their reed mats unrolled and hanging down in the dull yellow air. She counted on the servants' families, scattered about the compound, being heavily asleep. True, a koel was calling in the neem tree—piercingly, questingly, over and over again—but its voice was the voice of summer itself; noticeable when it first arrived, along with the blaze and the lethargy of the season and then just a part of the background, a thread in its worn faded fabric.

  Keeping close to the hedge, she held her head down and darted along. The mali lived in a hut close to the gate, but had screened himself so heavily with vines and bushes and hedges, he hardly even noticed the comings and goings along the drive unless specifically asked to do so. As she hoped, he was lying on his string cot by his hibiscus bush where the tap dripped pleasantly into a pool of mud whereby he kept himself cool. He was asleep with his mouth open, his breath coming and going in a tuneless song. Uma was uncharacteristically quiet this afternoon, making her sandals shuffle through, not slap at the gravel.

  Then she went out of the gate with a sudden whisk and broke into a run. Clutching her purse to her—a tiny yellow plastic one the elderly cousin had brought her as a present—she ran along the ridge of heaped earth and garbage between th
e road and the ditch. Uma was always unsteady on her feet—much as she loved the games played at school, she was inept at all of them—and the ridge was uneven, so she hobbled and stumbled in a way that would have made any passerby nervous to see. Only there was no passerby at that rime of day, not in their part of town which had little traffic at any time. She ran all the way to the crossing where she knew rickshaws waited for custom, and she was right: there were three drawn up in the shade of a large rain tree. Their drivers lay across the benches, asleep, legs hanging over the sides, but Uma made such a din, crying, 'Take me to St Mary's School, to St Mary's School, quick,' that one of them stirred, sat up, adjusted his red and white checked turban and with a twitch of his mouth indicated that she should get in. Then he panted and huffed so hugely as he pedalled down the road in the midday blaze that Uma feared he would collapse with heat stroke. Then she would not get to St Mary's and Mother Agnes. And she would not—

  Hrr, hrr, hrr, the rickshaw driver's lungs and legs pumped, and the dust flared up from the road into their faces and eyes, stinging. So, out of breath and cloaked in dust, they arrived at St Mary's. After paying him off—he loudly demanded more, then more still, and finally bullied her into handing over all she had—she stood at the gate and realised that it was the hour for the nuns to rest as well as everyone else, and that Mother Agnes ought not to be disturbed. She had never dared disturb Mother Agnes before.

  Yet, knowing that, she still dared. There was no alternative. Flying down the stone corridors, she ran past classrooms shut for the summer, up the stairs to the nuns' private quarters where the schoolgirls never went, were not permitted. All the doors leading off the verandas here were shut as well. In addition, their glass panes were curtained. How was she to tell which was Mother's? The curtains were the same blue cotton at every door. Unlike the classroom doors, their panes were polished and the brass handles shone. There were pots of ferns beside them, and doormats outside them. But no sign of anyone.