by Rumer Godden
‘Before you go,’ said Alix in the mirror, ‘and I should like you to go, I think you should beg my pardon.’
Una got off the bed.
‘Una, beg my pardon.’
‘I can’t,’ said Una – and was gone.
‘I have brought two new problems for Miss Una,’ said Hem. ‘Come, I will show you how to work them.’
‘She hasn’t done the last two yet,’ said Ravi.
‘Tell me about the inside of your house,’ Una had asked him.
‘The rooms are low,’ said Ravi, ‘dark and cool, too cool in winter; our servants have to light braziers. The floors are covered with durries, cotton-made carpets, and the rooms would seem bare to you: little furniture – low stools with woven-string seats and painted legs, cushions, those takias, a low table, a desk like mine and, in the bedrooms, light beds and chests where we keep our clothes. There are two courtyards: the inner one was built for the women; my mother still uses it; my father likes her to be private.’
‘Private – a mother?’
‘You don’t know a Brahmin household. We each keep a little distance from the other. You and your father and sister and the Lamont sit round the table for family dinner, but we eat separately, no matter how many people in the house; children apart; my mother now and again with the other women; my father invariably alone, usually any time will do. Everywhere you go in our house,’ said Ravi, ‘you see someone coming or going carrying a silver tray with bowls, the food strictly orthodox.’
‘No meat, of course,’ said Una.
‘Meat! Our dogs have to be fed out of the house not to contaminate it. My mother always says she can tell the smell of a meat-eater; no meat, nor fish, nor eggs; not even onions.’
‘Why not onions.’
‘They make one coarse, interfere with meditation. My father, you see, has endless taboos. Taboo! taboo! taboo! No, I can never go home,’ said Ravi. ‘I have become intolerably coarse; it is contact with Hem, to whom these things are superstition, but,’ and Ravi was serious, ‘seeing Hem’s work has made me boil for my mother. She wanted so much to be doctor. She went to school in England and to college. Now she spends her days counting degs of dal and corn and vegetables, in drying chillies, making papars.’
‘Those thin big biscuits that are spiced?’
‘Yes, and making mango pickle and waiting on my father. What a waste!’
‘Is it a waste?’ asked Una. ‘She must have taught you English.’
‘Yes. Of course I had a tutor but I gave him nothing but trouble. It was she I obeyed.’
‘I think she started your poems,’ said Una. ‘So it wasn’t a waste.’ She looked down at the rough table and the pads and pencils, Hem’s carefully worked neglected problems, the closed Elementary Mechanics, and, ‘Ravi, will you read me your poems?’ she asked.
‘If you will come to my hut tonight.’
‘Tonight?’ For a moment Una was startled and then saw he was not thinking of her but of the poems.
‘This is not right,’ he said, meaning the summer house. ‘It is too lazy. For mathematics you can combat that – they are clear, precise …’
‘If we did them,’ said Una, with a moment’s guilt.
‘We will do them,’ said Ravi, but went straight on, ‘For poems you must be wide awake to listen, feel. Come tonight.’
‘But … would it be safe?’
‘Why not? Your nightwatchman smokes and dozes. Twenty thieves could break in and he would not hear or see. Your little Hal will be asleep. As for your lady and gentleman – I understand they are occupied with one another or often there are guests and they stay late talking. The Lamont seems usually to be there.’
Una’s face hardened. ‘I will come.’
Six
‘Lady Srinevesan, do you know a poet called Ravi Bhattacharya?’ and Una dared to ask, ‘Or does Mrs Mehta?’
The flower-arranging classes had brought an unexpected bonus for Una. Mrs Mehta held them in her own house – ‘One of her houses,’ said Alix. ‘The classes are not for herself, of course not – the Mehtas must be millionaires; they have money all over the world. They are for her especial charity.’ All ladies prominent in Delhi’s social life were patrons of especial charities. ‘Tuesday is my leper day,’ said Bulbul. ‘I take tea and sweetmeats and cigarettes to the leper settlement.’ Lady Srinevesan’s charities were legion.
Bulbul, Alix and most of the Indian ladies were deft at Ikebana. ‘One white camellia with maidenhair fern in a pottery vase,’ crooned Bulbul, or ‘Lotus roots and two red roses with grass sprays in a basket.’ Narcissi with pebbles in a hollow log was Alix’s best success. Mrs Mehta had admitted Alix. ‘Well, Parsees are more open-minded than other Indians,’ said Alix. ‘They have travelled more and are widely cultured.’
‘She couldn’t be more cultured than Lady Srinevesan,’ Una was loyal, but had to admit that Mrs Mehta, slim, big-featured with a gold pince-nez, wearing her sari on her right shoulder in Parsee fashion, was in a class apart. Lady Srinevesan obviously thought so. ‘It’s a privilege for you to meet her.’ ‘Amina Srinevesan has told me about you,’ Mrs Mehta had said, but she refrained from asking Una any questions about Edward or Alix. ‘She is interested in things, not gossip,’ said Una thankfully and now, ‘A poet called Ravi Bhattacharya?’ she asked.
She had waited, that night, until eleven o’clock, then rolled up her quilt and arranged it in her bed in a sleeping shape; for the face she used a conch shell she had bought in the bazaar and for hair spread a soft brown-greenish scarf; in the shadowed room, anyone looking in expecting to see Una ‘would see her’, she told Ravi.
Hal was asleep. There had been business guests staying at Shiraz Road, but their rooms were in darkness as was Alix’s room and the drawing room; only in Edward’s was there a light, though a glimmer came from the watchman’s lantern where he sat against a pillar. Stealthily, Una had slipped off the verandah on to the grass, pale under the waxing moon; it had been wet to her bare feet and the pavilion floor was cool as she had stepped through its arches. Then she had gone boldly out across the lower lawn to the hedge of flowers, Queen of the Night – Raat-Ki-Rani – Ravi had told her their Hindu name. ‘The darker the night, the more scented it becomes.’ Una had not thought she would ever go beyond that scented hedge but now she was in the courtyard at the hut door. ‘Ravi,’ she whispered. ‘Ravi.’
He was ready for her. Una wondered what he had been doing all this time. ‘There is always the empty quiet before you come,’ he was to say. Now, ‘I had better pull the chiks down,’ he said and had untied the rolled-up matting that hid doorway and window; closed, the little room was intimate. A mat was spread and on the table were saucers of nuts and sweets, saffron-coloured balls of sugar and grain flour. When Una had tasted them, she sat like a child on the matting, hands clasped in her lap, eyes fixed on Ravi as he began to read.
‘This poem is a poem of water. Water in light, but not moonlight, sun. Water reflects all life.’ He was gracefully fanciful. ‘In sun, colours are more true; water lilies are not pink or the colour of cream, they are white and red …’
‘Water lilies are often pink and cream.’ Una felt obliged to point that out but, ‘Hush, or how shall I read?’ said Ravi.
It was warm in the hut room; the small light enclosed them in a circle, Ravi and her; of the night outside, Una could see nothing, only catch the scent from the Raat-Ki-Rani. There is no one else in the whole world but Ravi and me, thought Una. Ravi, me, and his poem – if only it had been another poem.
He finished and Una was silent – had to be silent. ‘You don’t like it?’ and, though it cost her a pang, Una had to say ‘No.’
She thought she would be expelled from the hut but, to her surprise, Ravi was exuberant. ‘Now I really respect you. That poem,’ he said, ‘goes no deeper than my skin.’
‘It sounded beautiful,’ said Una, ‘but …’
‘Meaningless.’
‘And … not true,’ said Una.
/> Ravi nodded and from the desk shelf took a book of a kind that was new to Una, a thin book, its pages unlined, bound in a red-cotton cover; quilted with white stitching, it was tied round with a soft white string. A secret book, thought Una, the most secret I have ever seen; more secret than Hal’s diary even if that were locked. It appealed to her secretive self. ‘You see, even the book is Indian,’ said Ravi. ‘So many of my friends, other Indian poets, are busy, very busy; they are writers of poems of Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, all your poets. I am not busy. I look and listen, taste and smell. I feel. That takes a long time but these poems are of nobody but myself. I have not shown them to anyone, not even Hem.’ He meant particularly not to Hem. ‘They are Indian; yes, folk poems of the city and village – and true!’ Ravi spoke with sudden fierceness.
‘What I call truthful writing. Those others are not true. Listen—’ but Una was suddenly bold enough to interrupt.
‘Let me read them,’ she said and held out her hand for the book.
Ravi had not read well; as soon as he started the poem, he had dropped into the sing-song drone in which, she was sure, he had been taught to read poetry. The water poem had not only been a disappointment, ‘It made me squirm,’ said Una afterwards, but those in the red quilted book she knew, with certainty, would be different and, ‘Please let me read them,’ she said.
‘But … will you know them so quickly?’
‘I shall know them.’ He glanced at her, was reassured, and handed her the book. ‘I wrote them in Hindi and in English,’ he said. ‘I hope they are plain.’
They were plain and spoke of plain, intrinsic and indigenous Indian things, as much as if they were made of India’s fine cotton, pure wool, real silk; her wood, strong as teak or resilient as bamboo – there was much of bamboo in these poems: ‘Strong as a man, yielding as a woman, simple as a child,’ Una had heard Edward say of the bamboo, ‘and in the country it costs nothing,’ Ravi added when she quoted this – useful bamboos but resilient, answering with a rustle of sharp pointed leaves to the least breath of wind, making shadows that danced in sun or moonlight. ‘And the shoots are delicious to chew,’ said Ravi. In these poems were Indian sounds to which Una was growing accustomed: the creaking of bullock-cart wheels besides motor horns and the light hiss of bicycle tyres; the chinking of bangle against bangle; the chants coolies used as they strained at their loads; the plod and pattering of hooves, big and little, buffaloes or goats, in the dust; the cheap tinkle of a temple bell, or the minute silvery clash of a pair of rare cymbals; a baby’s wail; the callousness of a monkey-man’s drum, but always, distinct and unexpected, a flute – Krishna’s flute, thought Una? Krishna, the handsome young bold god who enticed the milkmaids.
There was the taste of Indian food: the luddoo Ravi had provided for her just now; of other sweets tinged with the taste of rose water; of warm fruit and coconut milk; of curries.
There was the smell of sweat and hot dust, of dung smoke from fires or, acrid, from burnt leaves; of Ravi’s own hair oil and the heavy night flowers.
As Una read, she saw flat-topped houses, huddled as in the city or lonely in the plain; she saw thatched huts, clay-walled; palm trees and flowering trees; a sky of paper kites; meadows of the yellow mustard Alix and Ravi both talked of; pools and rivers that reflected the sky. A boy set paper boats in a stream to join the mile-wide rivers – so many Indian toys were made of paper. A corpse lay, lonely and small, on the bank while the mourners picnicked round it, lighting their own small family fire before they set the pyre alight.
Who saw the hoopoe fly? asked Ravi in one of these poems; there were hoopoes, black and white and crested in Delhi; there were also hawks and vultures, those birds like rocs, waiting as they circled patiently above a dying cow or pai dog, or the corpse of a Parsee, wrote Ravi. There were parakeets, peacocks.
There was the touch of hands: young men walking with their hands linked; a dancer’s hands painted with henna; the old gardener’s hand leading the child Ravi with a thumb and finger round his wrist. There was the feel of a girl’s wet hair, of the wet clinging cloth of her sari as she came from bathing. There was pain, of bellies swollen by starvation; the rack of fever; of bleeding from sores, human and animal; the shriek of pain when a bird-seller put out a bird’s eyes to make it sing more beautifully.
As Una read in her clear, schoolgirl voice, Ravi sat motionless except that once, when at the end of a poem she paused and turned the page, he lifted his hand and, with the back of it, rubbed his eyes as if disbelieving; then he let the hand drop helplessly as she began again. Una did not notice; she was immersed in the poems. She read the last one and, in the silence that followed, looked up. Ravi’s face was wet with tears.
‘Ravi! Did you mind my reading as much as that?’
‘Mind!’ Ravi dashed the tears from his eyes. ‘I am “ullu” – an owl. Silly ullu! But I didn’t know they would sound like that.’
‘Nor did I.’ Her voice was husky.
‘But … do you like them? Like them?’ he demanded.
Una had no words to say what she felt; her joy and, yes, pride, were choking her. Years ago – it was not six months but it felt like years to Una – she had turned in a Latin translation for Mrs Carrington and, ‘It is seldom,’ Crackers had said, ‘seldom that I can say I am completely satisfied, but I am satisfied now; Una, I congratulate you.’
From Crackers that had been supreme praise and Una reproduced those schoolmistress phrases now. ‘It is seldom,’ she said, ‘that one is completely satisfied, but I am satisfied now. I congratulate you, Ravi.’
He was radiant. ‘Read them again, I command you. No one else,’ he informed the room, ‘no one but Una is ever to read my poems. But wait,’ he told her. ‘I must give you a drink, some fruits before you go on. This is more hard work than maths.’
He brought her milk in a tumbler of brass, a slice of papaya. She read his poems through again, then they began to talk them over. When Una reached her room it was past two o’clock.
‘Ravi Bhattacharya? There are so many Ravis,’ said Lady Srinevesan.
‘Only one,’ Una wanted to contradict her but, ‘I remember a Ravi,’ said Mrs Mehta. ‘So do you, Amina. Yes, Ravi Bhattacharya. He was a St Thomas’s College boy, one of the few worthwhile ones.’ For Mrs Mehta to say that was worth having, thought Una. Mrs Mehta had opened vistas for Una far beyond Lady Srinevesan’s amateur poetry evenings. Poets, musicians, artists from over the world came to stay with the Mehtas and, ‘Sophia is particularly kind to the young,’ said Lady Srinevesan. Una herself had found that; though she was a failure at the flower-arranging. Mrs Mehta had singled her out, taken her to concerts, lent her books.
‘Perhaps she thinks I’m a charity,’ said Una, but secretly she was pleased. Mrs Mehta – the Mrs Mehta – thinks me worthwhile; so does Lady Srinevesan – and not because I am Edward’s daughter – they don’t take much notice of Hal. Mrs Porter seems to like me. Bulbul does too. That perhaps was oddest of all. I should have thought Bulbul would have liked Hal, but it was Una Bulbul invited, and Una had made friends with Bulbul’s husband Som, ‘And Som is not easy to please,’ said Bulbul.
‘Ravi, do you think I am very plain?’ Una had asked him.
‘Plain?’ He did not know what she meant and, ‘Not pretty,’ said Una.
‘You are not pretty,’ he said certainly, ‘but you have such a white skin – most white people are not white, they are yellow, yellow-pink. You are white. I like that – and your funny eyes.’
‘Una is much happier,’ Hal told Edward.
‘Has she been unhappy?’
‘Didn’t you know that?’ asked Hal.
‘How did you come across this Ravi Bhattacharya?’ Lady Srinevesan asked Una now.
‘I … read some of his poems.’
‘I didn’t know they had been published.’ The bright birdlike eyes were alert and, Be careful, thought Una; she said aloud. ‘They were not published. I found them in a St Thomas’s College book,’ whic
h was not wholly untruthful; Ravi made his notes in his old college exercise books.
‘He wrote a poem that I remember,’ said Mrs Mehta. ‘It was about a river. I liked it so much I learnt it.
‘Here in the river is life,
life in the river and pearl,
life in the wings of the bird, in the boat that is painted with eyes,
in the porpoises, joyously turning, wet and blue in the sun,
and the river is Ganges water with a ritual life of its own …
‘Yes,’ said Una and, almost unconsciously, went on until:
‘the finality of the pearl, the gentleness of the flowers,
are evenly swept away; the boat of itself floats down
till the nets are lifted and gone and the fangs of the night come again,
and the little influence of daylight is lost along the plain.’
She finished it.
‘You know it as well as that?’
Una blushed. ‘I … I learn easily by heart.’
‘You say poetry well,’ was Mrs Mehta’s only comment, but Una knew Lady Srinevesan was studying her.
‘I remember him now,’ and Lady Srinevesan said, ‘Ravi Bhattacharya ought to have tried for the Tagore Prize.’
‘What is that?’
‘Sophia, as usual, started it. Many a young musician’s first concert is given with Mehta money,’ Edward had told Una. ‘Many a young poet supported while he is writing his book.’ Ravi wouldn’t take money, thought Una proudly, he works, but she wanted to test out her swan and if, thought Una, if …
‘The Tagore Prize is awarded every year in memory of Rabindranath Tagore,’ said Mrs Mehta, ‘by the Institute of Fine Arts of which Amina is President.’
‘It was once for Bengal only,’ said Mrs Mehta. ‘Now I am glad to say it is for all India. It carries a grant of five thousand rupees – and publication, of course – so it is our most important poetry award.’
