by Anita Desai
‘Only darkness remains, to sit facing
Banalata Sen of Natore.’
But the darkness was filled with hideous sounds of business and anger and command. The radio news commentator barked, the baby wailed, the kitchen pots clashed. He even heard his wife’s voice raised, angrily, at the child, like a threatening stick. Glancing again at his pupil whom he feared so much, he saw precisely that lift of the eyebrows and that twist of a smile that disjointed him, rattled him.
‘Er – please read,’ he tried to correct, to straighten that twist of eyebrows and lips. ‘Please read.’
‘But you have read it to me already,’ she laughed, mocking him with her eyes and laugh.
‘The next poem,’ he cried, ‘read the next poem,’ and turned the page with fingers as clumsy as toes.
‘It is much better when you read to me,’ she complained impertinently, but read, keeping time to the rhythm with that restless foot which he watched as though it were a snake-charmer’s pipe, swaying. He could hear her voice no more than the snake could the pipe’s – it was drowned out by the baby’s wails, swelling into roars of self-pity and indignation in this suddenly hard-edged world.
Mr Bose threw a piteous, begging look over his shoulder at the kitchen. Catching his eye, his wife glowered at him, tossed the hair out of her face and cried, ‘Be quiet, be quiet, can’t you see how busy your father is?’ Red-eared, he turned to find Upneet looking curiously down the passage at this scene of domestic anarchy, and said, ‘I’m sorry, sorry – please read.’
‘I have read!’ she exclaimed. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’
‘So much noise – I’m sorry,’ he gasped and rose to hurry down the passage and hiss, pressing his hands to his head as he did so, ‘Keep him quiet, can’t you? Just for half an hour!’
‘He is hungry,’ his wife said, as if she could do nothing about that.
‘Feed him then,’ he begged.
‘It isn’t time,’ she said angrily.
‘Never mind. Feed him, feed him.’
‘Why? So that you can read poetry to that girl in peace?’
‘Shh!’ he hissed, shocked, alarmed that Upneet would hear. His chest filled with the injustice of it. But this was no time for pleas or reason. He gave another desperate look at the child who lay crouched on the kitchen floor, rolling with misery. When he turned to go back to his pupil who was watching them interestedly, he heard his wife snatch up the child and tell him, ‘Have your food then, have it and eat it – don’t you see how angry your father is?’
He spent the remaining half-hour with Upneet trying to distract her from observation of his domestic life. Why should it interest her? he thought angrily. She came here to study, not to mock, not to make trouble. He was her tutor, not her clown! Sternly, he gave her dictation but she was so hopeless – she learnt no Bengali at her convent school, found it hard even to form the letters of the Bengali alphabet – that he was left speechless. He crossed out her errors with his red pencil – grateful to be able to cancel out, so effectively, some of the ugliness of his life – till there was hardly a word left uncrossed and, looking up to see her reaction, found her far less perturbed than he. In fact, she looked quite mischievously pleased. Three months of Bengali lessons to end in this! She was as triumphant as he was horrified. He let fall the red pencil with a discouraged gesture. So, in complete discord, the lesson broke apart, they all broke apart and for a while Mr Bose was alone on the balcony, clutching at the rails, thinking that these bars of cooled iron were all that were left for him to hold. Inside all was a conflict of shame and despair, in garbled grammar.
But, gradually, the grammar rearranged itself according to rule, corrected itself. The composition into quiet made quite clear the exhaustion of the child, asleep or nearly so. The sounds of dinner being prepared were calm, decorative even. Once more the radio was tuned to music, sympathetically sad. When his wife called him in to eat, he turned to go with his shoulders beaten, sagging, an attitude repeated by his moustache.
‘He is asleep,’ she said, glancing at him with a rather ashamed face, conciliatory.
He nodded and sat down before his brass tray. She straightened it nervously, waved a hand over it as if to drive away a fly he could not see, and turned to the fire to fry hot puris for him, one by one, turning quickly to heap them on his tray so fast that he begged her to stop.
‘Eat more,’ she coaxed. ‘One more’ – as though the extra puri were a peace offering following her rebellion of half an hour ago.
He took it with reluctant fingers but his moustache began to quiver on his lip as if beginning to wake up. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Won’t you eat now?’
About her mouth, too, some quivers began to rise and move. She pursed her lips, nodded and began to fill her tray, piling up the puris in a low stack.
‘One more,’ he told her, ‘just one more,’ he teased, and they laughed.
Studies in the Park
– Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off! First he listens to the news in Hindi. Directly after, in English. Broom – brroom – brrroom – the voice of doom roars. Next, in Tamil. Then in Punjabi. In Gujarati. What next, my God, what next? Turn it off before I smash it onto his head, fling it out of the window, do nothing of the sort of course, nothing of the sort.
– And my mother. She cuts and fries, cuts and fries. All day I hear her chopping and slicing and the pan of oil hissing. What all does she find to fry and feed us on, for God’s sake? Eggplants, potatoes, spinach, shoe soles, newspapers, finally she’ll slice me and feed me to my brothers and sisters. Ah, now she’s turned on the tap. It’s roaring and pouring, pouring and roaring into a bucket without a bottom.
– The bell rings. Voices clash, clatter and break. The tin-and-bottle man? The neighbours? The police? The Help-the-Blind man? Thieves and burglars? All of them, all of them, ten or twenty or a hundred of them, marching up the stairs, hammering at the door, breaking in and climbing over me – ten, twenty or a hundred of them.
– Then, worst of all, the milk arrives. In the tallest glass in the house. ‘Suno, drink your milk. Good for you, Suno. You need it. Now, before the exams. Must have it, Suno. Drink.’ The voice wheedles its way into my ear like a worm. I shudder. The table tips over. The milk runs. The tumbler clangs on the floor. ‘Suno, Suno, how will you do your exams?’
– That is precisely what I ask myself. All very well to give me a room – Uncle’s been pushed off on a pilgrimage to Hardwar to clear a room for me – and to bring me milk and say, ‘Study, Suno, study for your exams.’ What about the uproar around me? These people don’t know the meaning of the word Quiet. When my mother fills buckets, sloshes the kitchen floor, fries and sizzles things in the pan, she thinks she is being Quiet. The children have never even heard the word, it amazes and puzzles them. On their way back from school they fling their satchels in at my door, then tear in to snatch them back before I tear them to bits. Bawl when I pull their ears, screech when Mother whacks them. Stuff themselves with her fries and then smear the grease on my books.
So I raced out of my room, with my fingers in my ears, to scream till the roof fell down about their ears. But the radio suddenly went off, the door to my parents’ room suddenly opened and my father appeared, bathed and shaven, stuffed and set up with the news of the world in six different languages—his white dhoti blazing, his white shirt crackling, his patent leather pumps glittering. He stopped in the doorway and I stopped on the balls of my feet and wavered. My fingers came out of my ears, my hair came down over my eyes. Then he looked away from me, took his watch out of his pocket and enquired, ‘Is the food ready?’ in a voice that came out of his nose like the whistle of a punctual train. He skated off towards his meal, I turned and slouched back to my room. On his way to work, he looked in to say, ‘Remember, Suno, I expect good results from you. Study hard, Suno.’ Just behind him, I saw all the rest of them standing, peering in, silently. All of them stared at me, at the exam I was to take. At the degree I was to get. O
r not get. Horrifying thought. Oh study, study, study, they all breathed at me while my father’s footsteps went down the stairs, crushing each underfoot in turn. I felt their eyes on me, goggling, and their breath on me, hot with earnestness. I looked back at them, into their open mouths and staring eyes.
‘Study,’ I said, and found I croaked. ‘I know I ought to study. And how do you expect me to study – in this madhouse? You run wild, wild. I’m getting out,’ I screamed, leaping up and grabbing my books, ‘I’m going to study outside. Even the street is quieter,’ I screeched and threw myself past them and down the stairs that my father had just cowed and subjugated so that they still lay quivering, and paid no attention to the howls that broke out behind me of ‘Suno, Suno, listen. Your milk – your studies – your exams, Suno!’
At first I tried the tea shop at the corner. In my reading I had often come across men who wrote at café tables – letters, verse, whole novels – over a cup of coffee or a glass of absinthe. I thought it would be simple to read a chapter of history over a cup of tea. There was no crowd in the mornings, none of my friends would be there. But the proprietor would not leave me alone. Bored, picking his nose, he wandered down from behind the counter to my table by the weighing machine and tried to pass the time of day by complaining about his piles, the new waiter and the high prices. ‘And sugar,’ he whined. ‘How can I give you anything to put in your tea with sugar at four rupees a kilo? There’s rationed sugar, I know, at two rupees, but that’s not enough to feed even an ant. And the way you all sugar your tea – hai, hai,’ he sighed, worse than my mother. I didn’t answer. I frowned at my book and looked stubborn. But when I got rid of him, the waiter arrived. ‘Have a biscuit?’ he murmured, flicking at my table and chair with his filthy duster. ‘A bun? Fritters? Make you some hot fritters?’ I snarled at him but he only smiled, determined to be friendly. Just a boy, really, in a pink shirt with purple circles stamped all over it – he thought he looked so smart. He was growing sideburns, he kept fingering them. ‘I’m a student, too,’ he said, ‘sixth class, fail. My mother wanted me to go back and try again, but I didn’t like the teacher – he beat me. So I came here to look for a job. Lalaji had just thrown out a boy called Hari for selling lottery tickets to the clients so he took me on. I can make out a bill …’ He would have babbled on if Lalaji had not come and shoved him into the kitchen with an oath. So it went on. I didn’t read more than half a chapter that whole morning. I didn’t want to go home either. I walked along the street, staring at my shoes, with my shoulders slumped in the way that makes my father scream, ‘What’s the matter? Haven’t you bones? A spine?’ I kicked some rubble along the pavement, down the drain, then stopped at the iron gates of King Edward’s Park.
‘Exam troubles?’ asked a gram vendor who sat outside it, in a friendly voice. Not insinuating, but low, pleasant. ‘The park’s full of boys like you,’ he continued in that sympathetic voice. ‘I see them walk up and down, up and down with their books, like mad poets. Then I’m glad I was never sent to school,’ and he began to whistle, not impertinently but so cheerfully that I stopped and stared at him. He had a crippled arm that hung out of his shirt sleeve like a leg of mutton dangling on a hook. His face was scarred as though he had been dragged out of some terrible accident. But he was shuffling hot gram into paper cones with his one hand and whistling like a bird, whistling the tune of, ‘We are the bulbuls of our land, our land is Paradise.’ Nodding at the greenery beyond the gates, he said, ‘The park’s a good place to study in,’ and, taking his hint, I went in.
I wonder how it is I never thought of the park before. It isn’t far from our house and I sometimes went there as a boy, if I managed to run away from school, to lie on a bench, eat peanuts, shy stones at the chipmunks that came for the shells, and drink from the fountain. But then it was not as exciting as playing marbles in the street or stoning rats with my school friends in the vacant lot behind the cinema. It had straight paths, beds of flapping red flowers – cannas, I think – rows of palm trees like limp flags, a dry fountain and some green benches. Old men sat on them with their legs far apart, heads drooping over the tops of sticks, mumbling through their dentures or cackling with that mad, ripping laughter that makes children think of old men as wizards and bogey-men. Bag-like women in grey and fawn saris or black burkhas screamed, just as grey and fawn and black birds do, at children falling into the fountain or racing on rickety legs after the chipmunks and pigeons. A madman or two, prancing around in paper caps and bits of rags, munching banana peels and scratching like monkeys. Corners behind hibiscus bushes stinking of piss. Iron rails with rows of beggars contentedly dozing, scratching, gambling, with their sackcloth backs to the rails. A city park.
What I hadn’t noticed, or thought of, were all the students who escaped from their city flats and families like mine to come and study here. Now, walking down a path with my history book tucked under my arm, I felt like a gatecrasher at a party or a visitor to a public library trying to control a sneeze. They all seemed to belong here, to be at home here. Dressed in loose pyjamas, they strolled up and down under the palms, books open in their hands, heads lowered into them. Or they sat in twos and threes on the grass, reading aloud in turns. Or lay full length under the trees, books spread out across their faces – sleeping, or else imbibing information through the subconscious. Opening out my book, I too strolled up and down, reading to myself in a low murmur.
In the beginning, when I first started studying in the park, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. I’d keep looking up at the boy strolling in front of me, reciting poetry in a kind of thundering whisper, waving his arms about and running his bony fingers through his hair till it stood up like a thorn bush. Or at the chipmunks that fought and played and chased each other all over the park, now and then joining forces against the sparrows over a nest or a paper cone of gram. Or at the madman going through the rubble at the bottom of the dry fountain and coming up with a rubber shoe, a banana peel or a piece of glittering tin that he appreciated so much that he put it in his mouth and chewed it till blood ran in strings from his mouth.
It took me time to get accustomed to the ways of the park. I went there daily, for the whole day, and soon I got to know it as well as my own room at home and found I could study there, or sleep, or daydream, as I chose. Then I fell into its routine, its rhythm, and my time moved in accordance with its time. We were like a house-owner and his house, or a turtle and its shell, or a river and its bank – so close. I resented everyone else who came to the park – I thought they couldn’t possibly share my feeling for it. Except, perhaps, the students.
The park was like an hotel, or an hospital, belonging to the city but with its own order and routine, enclosed by iron rails, laid out according to prescription in rows of palms, benches and paths. If I went there very early in the morning, I’d come upon a yoga class. It consisted of young bodybuilders rippling their muscles like snakes as well as old crack-pots determined to keep up with the youngest and fittest, all sitting crosslegged on the grass and displaying hus-mukh to the sun just rising over the palms: the Laughing Face pose it was called, but they looked like gargoyles with their mouths torn open and their thick, discoloured tongues sticking out. If I were the sun, I’d feel so disgusted by such a reception I’d just turn around and go back. And that was the simplest of their poses – after that they’d go into contortions that would embarrass an ape. Once their leader, a black and hirsute man like an aborigine, saw me watching and called me to join them. I shook my head and ducked behind an oleander. You won’t catch me making an ass of myself in public. And I despise all that body-beautiful worship anyway. What’s the body compared to the soul, the mind?
I’d stroll under the palms, breathing in the cool of the early morning, feeling it drive out, or wash clean, the stifling dark of the night, and try to avoid bumping into all the other early morning visitors to the park – mostly aged men sent by their wives to fetch the milk from the government dairy booth just outside the g
ates. Their bottles clinking in green cloth bags and newspapers rolled up and tucked under their arms, they strutted along like stiff puppets and mostly they would be discussing philosophy. ‘Ah but in Vedanta it is a different matter,’ one would say, his eyes gleaming fanatically, and another would announce, ‘The sage Shanakaracharya showed the way,’ and some would refer to the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Puranas, but in such argumentative, hacking tones that you could see they were quite capable of coming to blows over some theological argument. Certainly it was the mind above the body for these old coots but I found nothing to admire in them either. I particularly resented it when one of them disengaged himself from the discussion long enough to notice me and throw me a gentle look of commiseration. As if he’d been through exams, too, long long ago, and knew all about them. So what?
Worst of all were the athletes, wrestlers, Mr Indias and others who lay on their backs and were massaged with oil till every muscle shone and glittered. The men who massaged them huffed and puffed and cursed as they climbed up and down the supine bodies, pounding and pummelling the men who lay there wearing nothing but little greasy clouts, groaning and panting in a way I found obscene and disgusting. They never looked up at me or at anyone. They lived in a meaty, sweating world of their own – massages, oils, the body, a match to be fought and won – I kicked up dust in their direction but never went too close.
The afternoons would be quiet, almost empty. I would sit under a tree and read, stroll and study, doze too. Then, in the evening, as the sky softened from its blank white glare and took on shades of pink and orange and the palm trees rustled a little in an invisible breeze, the crowds would begin to pour out of Darya Ganj, Mori Gate, Chandni Chowk and the Jama Masjid bazaars and slums. Large families would come to sit about on the grass, eating peanuts and listening to a transistor radio placed in the centre of the circle. Mothers would sit together in flocks like screeching birds while children jumped into the dry fountains, broke flowers and terrorized each other. There would be a few young men moaning at the corners, waiting for a girl to roll her hips and dart her fish eyes in their direction, and then start the exciting adventure of pursuit. The children’s cries would grow more piercing with the dark; frightened, shrill and exalted with mystery and farewell. I would wander back to the flat.