Fasting, Feasting

by Anita Desai

  Uma stopped twitching her hands in a fold of her sari and looked towards Mama. Hysterectomy—what was that?

  Mama came up the steps and linked arms with Uma, giving her an affectionate little squeeze. 'And so my madcap wanted to run away and leave her Mama? What will my madcap do next?'

  THE next time MamaPapa went to the club and Uma was alone in the house, she slipped into Papa's office room. The phone which had once stood on a three-legged table in the drawing room and then moved to his desk was now locked in a wooden box, but Uma knew where he kept the key. She scrabbled around in the inky pencil box and found it amongst defunct pens and split nibs, unlocked the box and quickly dialled Dr Dutt's number. It was Dr Dutt's residential number and she felt guilty about disturbing the doctor at home on a Sunday evening. But it was an emergency, of a kind.

  Dr Dutt did sound a little unhappy at being disturbed. 'Yes, Uma dear,' she sighed, 'I wish your parents had agreed, but what could I say when your mother told me she was not well and needs you to nurse her?'

  'Dr Dutt,' Uma cried, 'Mama is not ill. She's not!'

  There was a minute's silence. Was Dr Dutt thinking over the situation or was she brushing one of her pet dogs, or drinking from a cup of tea? What did Dr Dutt do in the luxury of her solitude? Uma stood on one leg and wished passionately that she knew.

  Finally Dr Dutt's voice emerged, guarded. 'I don't know about that yet—we'll find out when she comes for her tests.'

  'She won't, Dr Dutt, she won't. I know it. Mama's all right! I know she is. You can ask Papa—'

  'Your mother may not like that, Uma.'

  Uma clenched her teeth so as not to let out a wail of anger and protest that welled up in her mouth like blood when a tooth is drawn. 'Then tell her to come for the tests,' she begged. 'Phone Mama and tell her to come. You will see, she won't.'

  Dr Dutt tried to placate Uma. 'Let's wait till she comes, and then we'll see what is wrong. If it turns out nothing's wrong, perhaps we can talk about the job again.'

  'But will the job still be there? If the Institute gets someone else—then? Couldn't you tell Mama to be quick so I can get the job?'

  Dr Dutt sighed. 'All right. Call her to the phone and I will speak to her.'

  'She is out now,' Uma had to admit.

  'Oh.' Dr Dutt seemed to put something down heavily—or perhaps there was someone else in the room who did. 'I will telephone her later,' she promised, and rang off.

  She did, next day, but Mama did not tell Uma what was said between them, and Uma could not ask. Uma was in disgrace: she had forgotten to lock up the telephone in its box and Papa had returned from the club to find the evidence of her crime staring at him from his office desk.

  'Costs money! Costs money!' he kept shouting long after. 'Never earned anything in her life, made me spend and spend, on her dowry and her wedding. Oh, yes, spend till I'm ruined, till I am a pauper—'

  Thirteen

  DINNER is over, the table cleared. They go out onto the veranda and sink onto the swing which seems to rock upon an ocean of heavy, sultry air that heaves with the expected monsoon. They swing and rock, creaking, waiting for a breath of air or a drop in the sweltering heat before going in to bed, when there is a sudden slump in the air: the electricity, dim enough at the best of times, has switched off and disappeared into the pit of darkness. A collective groan goes up in the neighbourhood—if not exactly audible, certainly palpable. A collective dismayed outrage.

  MamaPapa make it instantly audible.

  'Go and fetch candles, Uma,' Mama cries in agitation.

  'Wait, wait, Mama. It may come back in a minute,' Uma grumbles.

  'No, no, it is a major breakdown. Can't you see, even the street lights have gone off? It will take hours to repair.'

  'We must inform the sub-station. Go, Uma. Inform, must inform.'

  'You want me to walk down to the sub-station in the dark? Now?' Uma squawks indignantly.

  'Don't talk like that. Go and tell mali to go.'

  'US,' groans Uma, getting to her feet heavily. 'He must be sleeping.'

  'Wake him then.'

  'Mali! Mali!' Uma bellows from the edge of the terrace. No answer comes from the forest of darkness around so she goes down the steps to the lawn. It is not so dark that she cannot make out the familiar path beside the hedge of night-flowering jasmine, or the dusty bush from which pink oleanders hang in bunches, or the trunk of the ancient tamarind tree. Her feet crunch the sparse gravel of the driveway and she follows it to where mali lives in a shack he has built for himself by the garden tap so that he can guard it and use it to maximum benefit. In fact, he tends never to turn it off completely but to let it trickle just a little: it keeps the earth around his shack enviably moist and cool. Greenery thrives in that damp circle when everything else in the garden has died, withered in the summer heat. A small fire smoulders—just a few embers in a pan that he also likes to keep alive, like the garden tap. All around there is a powerful aroma of the cow-dung pats he uses for fuel, and the raw rank odour of the tobacco he smokes in his chilam.

  Mali had been a young man when he first came to work for them. He had astonished the children by such feats as climbing the huge tamarind tree and smoking the bees out of a great hive and bringing it down, filled with wild honey. He had entertained them with stories of the brief time he had been a recruit in the army. He had kept Mama pleased with occasional baskets of tomatoes and beans, and by chasing off urchins who swarmed over the guava trees when the fruit was green, and scaring off the girls when they wanted roses to take to the teachers in school. Now he is too old for such activity, such energy. Now he dozes over his chilam by both day and night.

  Uma stands at the edge of his private domain and gives a huge, blood-curdling yell. He comes to life with a gratifying start. 'Ji!' he cries and comes crawling out on all fours from his dark, smoky, odorous cave like some misshapen, bow-legged insect. Seeing it is only Uma, he gives a smile as toothless as an infant's. 'Baby?'

  'Wake up, wake up,' she shouts, 'don't sleep so much. Thieves and murderers might be around! Don't you see the electricity is gone?'

  'Gone? Gone?' he looks about him enquiringly. It is difficult for him to understand the importance of electricity in other people's lives, but he is willing to give it a try. 'Yes, gone,' he agrees with Uma and shakes his head in sympathy with her indignation.

  'Go down to the sub-station and ask how long it'll take to repair,' Uma orders. 'Sahib says,' she adds for effect.

  'At once! At once!' he assures her. 'Just give me a minute.' He draws back into his shack to collect a length of cloth that he wraps around his head in a turban, then hobbles off down the drive, the turban bobbing in the shadows like a dusty light bulb. He is an aged glow-worm bumbling through the dark.

  'Left right, left right,' Uma calls after him approvingly. 'Like a young recruit, mali, like a young recruit!'

  His laugh rings out and carries back from the gate where he stops to give a smart salute, but the laugh is the cackle of an old man, cracked and crusty, and Uma cannot see the salute, she is far too myopic.

  She fumbles her way back to the veranda and the swing and sits with MamaPapa, staring into the dark. When they hear steps on the gravel and see the gleam of white clothing, they call, 'Mali? Did you go? What did they say?'

  But it is not mali. A voice shouts, 'Telegram!'

  Telegram?

  'Telegram!'

  Uma hurries to fetch a torch. She shines it for the man to see his way to the veranda, then shines it on his register which she has to sign. Papa mutters and Mama clicks her dentures in agitation. This is no ordinary occurrence.

  They are opening the envelope, taking out the sheet of pink paper with strips of print glued over it, spreading it out to read by the light of the torch when the electricity suddenly comes to life, blindingly, with a thump, and lights up the message: Anamika is dead.

  Mali is coming up the drive, shouting, 'Bijlee, bijlee—see, it has come!' beaming with toothless pride.r />
  No one answers. The news has struck like lightning although what it reveals has no reality.

  The details that make it real follow later.

  THEY learnt that Anamika had risen from her bed at four o'clock in the morning, only a little earlier than she usually did to take the milk from the milkman who came to deliver it at the kitchen door. If anyone heard her, they thought nothing of her moving about at that hour, it was usual. What she did next was not usual. She turned off the gas cylinder they used for cooking. She filled a can with kerosene oil. She unlocked the kitchen door and went out on the veranda. Then she removed her cotton clothing. She wrapped a nylon sari about her. She knotted it at the neck and knees. Then she poured the kerosene over herself. Then she struck a match. She set herself alight.

  At five o'clock her mother-in-law woke to hear a whimpering sound. Earlier she had heard a tin can fall and thought it was a stray dog nosing through the garbage outside the kitchen door. At the whimpering sound, however, she got up and went into the kitchen to investigate. Through the screen door she saw a small fire flickering on the veranda. She went out and found Anamika charred, dying.

  That was what she said. To the police. To Anamika's family.

  What some of the neighbours said was that she herself, possibly in collusion with her son, had dragged Anamika out on the veranda at that hour when it was still dark—possibly before four o'clock—and that they had tied her up in a nylon sari, poured the kerosene over her and set her on fire.

  What the husband said was that he had been away on a business trip and returned only that afternoon on hearing the news.

  What the mother-in-law said was that she always had Anamika sleep beside her, in her own room, as if she were a daughter, her own child. Only that night Anamika had insisted on sleeping in her own room. She must have planned it, plotted it all.

  What Anamika's family said was that it was fate, God had willed it and it was Anamika's destiny.

  What Uma said was nothing.

  ANAMIKA'S parents come, as eventually they have to come, for the immersion of her ashes in the sacred river. Uma goes to the station with Papa to receive them, Mama waits at home. When they arrive, they sit together—not on the veranda, not on the red swing—but on the floor of the drawing room where Mama has had white sheets spread for mourning. MamaPapa try to make Anamika's parents eat, and rest, and talk, but they sit motionlessly, their heads sunk onto their chests, silent. Bakul Uncle who always strode with his head held high and an air of invincible superiority, now seems almost invisible: he has retreated into a grey shroud of sorrow, while Papa recovers his authority and individuality, and shows that he can command. Lila Aunty, who had always awed them by her urban sophistication, her elegance and—it had to be said—her snobbishness, has collapsed into a heap of rags in a corner, and it is Mama who is in charge, active, concerned, showing both sympathy and care. Uma sits clasping her knees and looks across at the earthen jar they have brought with them and placed against the wall with a garland of marigolds about its neck and more marigolds strewn on the white cloth beneath it. She tries to convince herself that it contains Anamika's ashes, cousin Anamika herself, but she cannot. Anamika was forty-five years old that year, two years older than her. She had been married for twenty-five years, the twenty-five years that Uma had not. Now she is dead, a jar of grey ashes. Uma, clasping her knees, can feel that she is still flesh, not ashes. But she feels like ash—cold, colourless, motionless ash.

  Suddenly Uma stirs, puts her hand on Lila Aunty's arm, and asks: 'The letter—the letter from Oxford—where is it? Did you—did you burn it?'

  'Uma!' Mama's horrified voice calls out. Papa makes a sound in his throat, a cross between a threat and a warning. Fortunately, the parents do not seem to have heard, or, if they have, have not understood: they do not react.

  'Are you quite mad, Uma?' Mama hisses later when she has dragged Uma out. 'You must be mad to ask about that letter now.'

  'I wanted to know,' Uma mutters, stubbornly.

  VERY early next day the car takes them to the river's edge. A boatman, standing knee-deep in water, steadies his boat for them. They haggle over the price for some time, an intolerably long time, it seems to Uma, Papa raising his voice officiously, drowning out the drone of recitations from the people who are lining the bank, some ankle-deep and others waist-deep in water, praying to the sun that is a pale white disc lifting over the horizon into the heavy, dull haze of the sky. Uma huddles inside her sari which she has drawn over her head and shoulders as the other women have and wishes he would for once stop arguing and pay. For once. Finally Bakul Uncle manages to indicate that he is willing to pay the price. 'Then let's go,' says Papa grumpily, and hurries them in as if it is he who has settled the matter.

  Anamika's parents climb into the boat very slowly, as if with pain, because they are holding the jar. There are other relatives who have come with them from Bombay—but not Aruna who is in Singapore on a shopping trip with her husband, not Arun who cannot be expected to break off his studies in America and return, and not Ramu who has become a hermit and communicates with no one in the family any more—and then MamaPapa, followed by Uma. Mama begins to complain about the boat as soon as she steps into it: it does not seem safe to her, and they should look for another.

  'Mama, sit down,' Uma hisses at her miserably. Mama gives her a look and is about to reprimand her but does not because now she has discovered there is an inch of water at the bottom of the boat, wetting her feet, that requires her foremost attention.

  But it is too late to do anything now; the boatman has pushed away from the bank and is slowly raising then lowering the pole in the mud, grunting heavily each time he does so. The boat has swung around when someone hails it loudly. They turn to see a priest wrapped in an orange robe hurrying across the sand, swinging his bowl. He raises an arm and shouts angrily: how can they perform the final ceremonies without him? What are they thinking of? Have they no care for the proprieties? Without him, would the dead find their way to the bliss of salvation? He stands there on the bank, an irate, unkempt man with red, accusing eyes, threatening them with such dire repercussions that Anamika's mother fearfully speaks up and suggests they go back to collect him. The boatman poles the boat back. MamaPapa fume as only they know how to fume, but they have to shift and make room for him. Mama glares but he seems not to notice, and makes his way through the inch-deep water, climbing over several benches to the prow where he seats himself with affronted dignity and, setting out the tools of his trade, begins to recite the prayers. Anamika's parents try to make the responses he demands of them, but they fail: their throats are dry, the words will not come.

  Once Uma has got over the disturbance caused by this interruption of private grief, she finds she forgets it altogether. The rhythm of the boatman's oars—he has put away the pole and is rowing them now they are in deeper water—is steady and strong. The glassy water of the river, swollen by rains up in the mountains from which it comes, seems solid, weighty, a huge mass of grief holding them up on its heaving surface, flowing swiftly and unheedingly beneath. The boat goes with the current now, further and further from the bank, drawn along as if by an invisible rope. The sun is rapidly turning from a small white disc like a shell in the sand to a shimmering blur like a fire in full daylight.

  Then her eyes fall on the bowed figures seated in the boat—Anamika's parents, MamaPapa, other relatives—and reminds herself: Anamika, Anamika—

  She has cried out aloud, she fears, and claps her hand over her mouth, but it is a lapwing on the bank that is crying, frantically, over and over. 'Did-you-do-it?' it cries. 'Did-you, did-you, did-you-do-it?' The figures in the boat are bending low—they are lowering the jar into the river, into the powerful, swirling current where the two rivers meet and meld. For a moment the jar seems to rest on the surface of the water as if it were a pane of glass; then it breaks through. Briefly it remains visible, bobbing like a swimmer trying to keep its head above water, the garland of marig
olds floating about its rim. Then as the boat rocks and steadies itself, it sinks. The marigolds float free, then the current carries them away.

  The boatman holds his oars across his knees, watching. The priest's recitation rises in a crescendo, till it arrives at a note of triumph. But abruptly he stops reciting, empties his little jars and vessels over the edge of the boat, refills them, wipes his face with a bit of cloth, and tells the boatman, 'Turn back now, it's done.'

  Uma suddenly finds a hand clasping hers tightly. It is Mama's. When Uma turns to look she sees Mama's eyes are closed and there are tears on her cheeks. 'Mama,' she whispers, and squeezes the hand back, thinking, they are together still, they have the comfort of each other. Consolingly, she whispers, 'I told cook to make puri-alu for breakfast and have it ready.' Mama gives a sob and tightens her hold on Uma's hand as though she too finds the puri-alu comforting; it is a bond.

  The boat wheels around, slowly, with a great swirling of water against its sides. They return to the bank where worshippers still stand praying and bathing, their silhouettes turned by daylight into a common huddle of greys and browns. The boat nudges into the soft clay of the bank, the boatman climbs out to steady it and help them out, one by one. They descend into the shallow, muddy water and huddle with the others, dipping their vessels into the river and emptying them over their heads and garments while the priest intones his prayers.

  Those who have completed the rituals climb out and watch from the sandbank. One of them assumes the yogic posture of the salutation to the sun, as stiff as a crane posing against the sky. Another is singing a hymn to the sun in a voice as reedy and high as a bird's. Someone has taken it upon himself to distribute sweets out of a basket.