The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  But then they stopped, perhaps remembering how my father himself had made me unmarriageable by making it known he would refuse to pay the bride-price. That man—they almost said, they would say it to each other when I was just out of earshot—that man is impossible, he needs a sensible wife to help him make good decisions for his daughter. And just remember her mother—and touched my chin and cheeks with something like pity, and with gratitude that I was not their problem. “Well, well, go up, I’m sure your father will be overjoyed to see you.”

  My father, overjoyed? I almost laughed, thinking of him leaping to his feet as I walked through the door. In fact, the flat was empty when I arrived, but for the bai my father had hired and who squatted in the kitchen, sorting through the dry dhal. I greeted her, first in Hindi, then in Marathi, though I knew only little of this language, hers, and she greeted me in return, not pausing her work, neither happy nor bothered by my arrival. She was a tiny woman, taking up so little space in the flat as she rested on her haunches, her thin white hair was pulled into a knot at the base of her skull. Her sari was a lush, eggplant brown undimmed by at least a decade of hard use. Fatherji was out, she told me, but he would be back soon. The boy that rascal was out too. She didn’t know when he’d be back or where he’d gone. The flat looked very tidy: her doing. I felt tugged, guilty, watching her curved back, her efficient fingers. “I brought some karela.”

  “You can fry it when I’m finished. Ah, here’s your father.”

  And there he was, bending to take his shoes off at the door, the old man, my father. He was nearly bald—no balder than when I had left, but I saw it anew—his pate a lovely, even bronze, and shiny with the day’s sweat. I took the dust from his feet quickly, and he put a distracted blessing upon my head, walking into the house with an uneven gait, a limp in his right leg, and sat down heavily on the divan. And suddenly I remembered the old feeling I had as a child reaching up for someone, reaching for the gaze of my father or more often my mother, just to be seen though blushing hard in it if I ever received it whether for my goodness or for my evil.

  “So?” he said, and then, when I said nothing, “Your studies?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Are you working hard?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What happened to your leg?”

  “My leg?” he said, and then, “Ah, my leg, it’s nothing. I was getting off the bus a few months ago and some rascal pushed me off and I fell on it. It’s not so bad now.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, and then to the bai he asked, “Have you made any tea?”

  She hadn’t. She started to put down her work to take up this task, but I stopped her; I would make it. The thoughtless series of actions, so practiced in this kitchen for so many years, was as familiar as a dance. But the placement of things had changed: the pots on a new shelf that had been built in my absence, ground elaichi in a small bowl was offered to me by the bai, and my body moved with a half-grace, interrupted from its thoughtless rhythm by the new, unlearned steps. When the tea was foaming up the sides I clicked the stove off and brought my father the steel cup.

  “The Mehtas have a refrigerator now, do you know that?”

  “Yes, they got it before I left.”

  “Yes, that’s right, isn’t it. But they have a television too. The whole chaali crams in there when there’s a cricket match on.”

  “I’m surprised Mrs. Mehta lets anyone walk on her freshly washed floors.”

  “She’s so proud. She sits right in front and narrates the game for the people in the back who can’t see it.” He blew on the tea, and then slurped it down, not waiting for it to cool. If he had his way, I would never marry. I would come home and be my father’s wife; make his tea every day, supervise the bai, and do the final stages of cooking myself. There would be no child to raise—my brother was already grown—but my father’s body was showing age, and would age further and need care. I could occupy myself in my dance when I wasn’t needed for the household duties; some freedom, but I felt something inside me shrinking. I took his cup and washed it. When he was in his bath I sliced the karela and pressed the juice out of it with my palms. I caught the juice in a cup to give to my father to drink to cool his blood and keep his heart strong. Then I fried the rounds of karela in oil. When my father came out of the bath the bai and I had made dinner and I served it for him. I couldn’t tell if my presence gave him pleasure but he did enjoy the karela.

  “Where is Rishi? The food will be cold.”

  My father looked wan. “He stays out late. He doesn’t listen to me. He’s doing badly in his studies.”

  This was not surprising. In the months before I left for college something had been brewing in the boy. He stayed out late with his friends and sometimes I saw him smoking a bidi like a taxi driver in the evenings on the street just outside the chaali, in a half-attempt at brazenness. Or so it had seemed to me. The other boys, fourteen or fifteen, were smoking too. They looked to me like boys who were courting a scolding, who wanted to be witnessed and punished for their brazenness. I could tell my father, or I could issue the scolding myself instead, but I did neither. Let him make his choices on his own, I thought, passing them with a cold look.

  “Maybe you can talk to him, maybe he’ll listen to you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He used to listen to you,” my father said.

  “He listened to you.” He listened to the flat of father’s hand, at least, or, later, the sting of his belt.

  “He is running headfirst into ruin.”

  In fact, it was long after dark that my brother returned home. My father was tired and went to sleep not long after dinner, but I stayed up sitting by the window, back in my old sari, not wanting to spoil the dress with overuse now that its effect had been noted (as much as it would be anyway, for my father had barely glanced at me, not remarking at all on my changed appearance, and the small compliment offered to me by the neighbors seemed to mark the limits of the dress, though I distinctly remember two years before how Mrs. Mehta’s daughter left the chaali for her college wearing a similar frock, at that time so spectacularly rare that all the neighbors came out of their houses to watch her go), with my book angled toward the lights from the other apartments, since father had shut off ours, and the new streetlight that shone proudly from the opposite side of the street. Now and then my eyes cast downward to the empty courtyard: I wanted to see him coming. At this hour of evening the cats began to emerge, slender as shadows, and I would catch their darting movements from the corner of my eye and turn to look, but I could never quite get them in the center of my vision, only its edges. The noise from the chaali was lulling—the Mehtas’ TV turned up to its highest volume for the benefit of the neighbors, the nightly news broadcast, two siblings bickering over a loved toy (when I left the younger had been a baby; now look, both of them walked and spoke, had grown impossibly taller in the months I had been away), a wife shouting at a husband, another husband shouting at a wife, someone singing, loudly and off key, with a cigarette-roughened voice. I began to doze with my cheek pressed against the open slats. Then I woke suddenly. A figure moved across the courtyard, stooped and wavering, not struggling, but walking with an altered gait. He was taller than I remembered. Up the stairs he carried the round, bitter smell, his sweat colored by it: whiskey, I learned, a vast golden liquid that charmed and lulled you and then spat you out after you’d made bad decisions. As he kicked off his shoes the alteration in his movements struck me again—it was as though he were the shadow and alcohol the body that cast him, alcohol oddly beautiful in its clumsiness, finding obstacles where the body would find none. In the dark I could see only the length of him, and the slurred grace of his limbs, but not his face, not his eyes, but for the crescents of light they caught from the window. He walked to the clay water-pot in the dark and drank many cups of water, and I watched him, silent: he was so focused on his task he didn’t seem to register my presence at all. It was a
bright hurt to watch him, for I had allowed myself to imagine him and miss him while I had been away, but I had not imagined him like this. It was only after he was finished drinking water, his eyes sharpened to the dark, that he saw me and let out a yelp of surprise, which, though loud, did nothing to disturb my father.

  “What are you doing here?” And even his voice was lower, pitched nearer to the register of a man’s. How much had changed in the span of a few months, like the months of babyhood, when if separated from the child even by weeks you would return to find the body altered, the mouth smiling and able to form new words.

  “Do you never read my letters?”

  He put a hand over his heart. “I thought you were my mother.”

  “Where have you been?” I said. “Have you eaten?”

  He was silent, so I continued, “Dinner’s cold now. I kept some for you. Go sit, I’ll bring it to you.”

  We went both to the kitchen. I stood on my tiptoes at the high shelf and found a clay lamp and matches, struck one and it lit, giving off the mild smell of sulfur. By this small light I could look at him: fair, skinny, narrow-faced, sooty-eyed, with still the soft skin of a child, bare cheeks and upper lip; I could see the face of the boy stretching and deepening like the voice—he was handsome. He looked nothing like our father. It was our mother who unfolded in his face. “What?” he said, brushing his hand in front of his face as though waving away a mosquito—it was my searching gaze he was trying to brush away.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “So?” And he cast his eyes downward suddenly bashful. “What’s wrong with it. You eat eggs.”

  “That’s not the same.” I put the cold rotis on the plate, with the sabzi, dhal, and bitter vegetable. He took it. Even drunk he ate carefully, just like I had taught him, as though he weren’t famished, though the food was quickly gone from the plate.

  “You like it?” I put more food on his plate without waiting for an answer.

  “I thought you were my mother,” he said again, shaking his head as though at his own foolishness.

  “Why is it you say my? She was mine too.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not used to talking about her.”

  I saw the two of us as though in a movie, and felt unprepared for the movie role that I had been cast in, the virtuous sister to the stumbling drunk, I pure and clean in my sari, he falling down in his stinking clothes. In the movie, she would drag him to a temple, weeping; she would fall down at the feet of god and beg him to save her brother; she would beg her brother to listen to reason, to fear and love god and give up drink, and he, moved by her purity, and by her love for him, would repent, and a god-promised miracle would occur. No. We were too small and plain, our flat too ugly, the light too dull for such a scene.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said. And then he said, “It feels good.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  He thought for a minute. He wanted to explain it to me. “Like all day you’ve been waiting to be happy. And then suddenly you are.” He thought again. “Like those carnival rides at Juhu. The ones that take you up and down the wheel.”

  “We never went on those rides.”

  He became silent, eating his food. When he was finished I offered him more, but this time he refused it. I was disgusted and I understood. I think I understood wanting to be happy. And then this thing made you happy. Looking at him, I thought, I’ve already had a child, and he came out spoilt. Yet he was perfect in the light, all but his ruined teeth. The brown, jagged teeth of an old man, that had come in crookedly after his sorry milk had fallen, and had become rotten down with bad habits and bad luck.

  “You go watch cricket at the Mehtas’?”

  “No,” he said, thinking it was what I wanted to hear, but when he saw indifference in my face he said, “Sometimes.”

  When he looked at me again his eyes were red and I could feel his desire. He wanted me to say something; no, worse, to slap him hard across the face, to call him a dog and accuse him of darkening the family honor; he wanted me to reason with him in sweet words, to beg him, in the style of the movie-role; he wanted me to touch his face with tears in my eyes until I exacted from him a promise to mend himself and mind our father until I finished my studies or he found a wife, a promise he would break, and break again, if another and another was garnered as violently or lovingly as the last. But I couldn’t. I felt, suddenly, quite tired, as though I had been walking all day through sand. Oh, the voice, the boy, didn’t fool me, it was a child that sat before me, his face stripped bare.

  “Let’s sleep now, it’s late,” I said, and blew out the lamp.

  I practiced my dance daily, even on the days I went to see my teacher. Previously I had not worn my ghungroos when I practiced in my room, not wanting to disturb others with the noise. But now that I was not going almost daily to my teacher’s house where I wore the ghungroos for hours, my legs were getting used to their bare lightness and weakening, so I received permission to practice in the auditorium on campus that occasionally hosted cultural events, but more often larger lectures and sometimes religious services. Needless to say, this space was unlovely—it had been constructed with no thought for aesthetics, acoustics, or even airflow, windowless, bunker-like, I entered clean and dry and left dripping with sweat, and hurried back to my room, hoping not to be seen in such a filthy state.

  But I liked dancing upon a stage. I imagined myself watched, looking out at the empty chairs in the auditorium, imagined them sweetly filled by all my enemies, the professors who were dismissive of me, the schoolgirls of my youth, and all the men who ever teased me on the street or tried on the bus to grope my breasts. If I danced well, I thought, they would all be sorry. I forced myself to focus on my task and not let my mind drift up and away, but remain tethered to its posture, its feet, its expression, its eyes, and its core, the tall weird column I felt inside me like a whirling fire lifting as I moved, and which I fed as I would a fire with the fuel of my attention. As I danced I could feel the air heat around me. Sometimes. Less. I was entering a restless period with my dance. My teacher had gotten stuck on my chakkars, the whirling turns that I loved to perform at great speed, and which I had mastered many years ago with my previous teacher. My new teacher, coming from a different gharana than the old, took issue with the way I had been previously taught to blend my turns together into one continuous motion, spinning like the earth on its axis, day fading to night brightening to day, marking within each turn no particular moment where day became night or night became day, one being only a shade of the other. My teacher disagreed. She wanted each turn punctuated by a point of stillness, however brief, a pose so precise even the eyes had to point in a certain direction when the body came to pause. The stillness was a cord that kept me from whirling out into infinity. I simply could not satisfy her. She slowed me down to a beginner’s pace; we worked together and I worked alone, glumly, for I had not given my heart over to her way of doing things, and I think she could sense it. To pause between movements, for the space of a breath or a blink, was to blunt the delicious force of the movement, pleasing neither to the dancer’s body nor the watcher’s eye. I practiced so that she would let me move on, but still she didn’t. I’d spend my whole life like this, slowly turning, never with enough speed to feel dizzy.

  After class one day I was approached by the boy I had seen out the window that afternoon of the mango harvest, Anand, one of the pair. The other I had not seen since, not on campus or in class, though I had not quite been looking for him. For some reason I thought that if I saw him, even unconsciously, I would notice, since he seemed so moody and odd. Anand’s hostel was putting together a play for the Dramatic Society’s annual production, and he said that someone had told him I dance. Did I dance?

  “Yes,” I said.

  Well, would I join them? They were making a play out of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-eaters” and there was a section in which they needed a girl. Did
I know the poem?

  I did. “There aren’t any girls in it.”

  “All the wives of the sailors left at home.”

  “Oh yes, the wife and the child and the slave?” I said this sarcastically, but he said, “Exactly!

  “Who will play the slave?”

  “We just need one girl for the wife,” he said. “She’ll symbolize all three. I asked Sushmita,” (this made sense, she was the prettiest of the hostel, and boys were constantly manufacturing questions to ask her) “but she said I should ask you, because you’re a dancer and used to performing.”

  This information flattered and insulted me at once, and I paused, not knowing if I should accept. I was conscious that the whole interaction was being watched by a group of girls who were walking back to the hostel, too far away to glean what we were actually discussing and therefore misinterpreting it completely. Radha, though, would have her performance.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You will? You will?” He was so pleased he gripped me in a quick, impulsive hug, which shocked my whole system but was over before I could wriggle free.

  So I started attending their rehearsals. They took place in the same airless auditorium where I practiced my dance, but the presence of the men’s bodies in the seats gave the space a charge that never fully left it, even when I was again alone in it, perhaps because, after I had finished my training routines, I was also working on my element of the play, which was thoroughly self-contained within the play, so much so that there was almost no practical need for me to come to rehearsals at all. The men that gathered there were for the most part not the men I remembered from my classes, though there was some overlap: people like Anand and the director, who were semi-serious students, relying on their intelligence to bridge the gap between the requirements of their studies and the hard work needed to fulfill them (these students were satisfied with merely fulfilling the requirements, rather than wildly exceeding them, their fathers having already lined up jobs for them once they completed their studies). Stranger was the small sub-group of boys I was sure I had never come across at all, for they sat in the back of the class while I sat in the front, nor were they ever seen at the library or studying in the small groups that sometimes informally arose. Among the vigorous strivers of our college, this was a small contingent of vigorous non-strivers, rich boys who grew their hair long, sometimes binding their foreheads with kerchiefs in the manner of American hippies, and who spent many afternoons and evenings, I was told, drinking or smoking dope and listening to the records of Joni Mitchell and Ravi Shankar. These boys were, in the theater’s parlance, technicians, or so they said, for I could not discern a single useful thing they did, technical or otherwise, sitting in the back of the auditorium and making noise, slipping out to return glassy-eyed and even more rambunctious, giggling at nothing until they were kicked out by a growling Anand.