by Anita Desai
The exams drew nearer. Not three, not two, but only one month to go. I had to stop daydreaming and set myself tasks for every day and remind myself constantly to complete them. It grew so hot I had to give up strolling on the paths and staked out a private place for myself under a tree. I noticed the tension tightening the eyes and mouths of other students – they applied themselves more diligently to their books, talked less, slept less. Everyone looked a little demented from lack of sleep. Our books seemed attached to our hands as though by roots, they were a part of us, they lived because we fed them. They were parasites and, like parasites, were sucking us dry. We mumbled to ourselves, not always consciously. Chipmunks jumped over our feet, mocking us. The gram seller down at the gate whistled softly ‘I’m glad I never went to school, I am a bulbul, I live in Paradise …’
My brains began to jam up. I could feel it happening, slowly. As if the oil were all used up. As if everything was getting locked together, rusted. The white cells, the grey matter, the springs and nuts and bolts. I yelled at my mother – I think it was my mother – ‘What do you think I am? What do you want of me?’ and crushed a glass of milk between my hands. It was sticky. She had put sugar in my milk. As if I were a baby. I wanted to cry. They wouldn’t let me sleep, they wanted to see my light on all night, they made sure I never stopped studying. Then they brought me milk and sugar and made clicking sounds with their tongues. I raced out to the park. I think I sobbed as I paced up and down, up and down, in the corner that stank of piss. My head ached worse than ever. I slept all day under the tree and had to work all night.
My father laid his hand on my shoulder. I knew I was not to fling it off. So I sat still, slouching, ready to spring aside if he lifted it only slightly. ‘You must get a first, Suno,’ he said through his nose, ‘must get a first, or else you won’t get a job. Must get a job, Suno,’ he sighed and wiped his nose and went off, his patent leather pumps squealing like mice. I flung myself back in my chair and howled. Get a first, get a first, get a first – like a railway engine, it went charging over me, grinding me down, and left me dead and mangled on the tracks.
Everything hung still and yellow in the park. I lay sluggishly on a heap of waste paper under my tree and read without seeing, slept without sleeping. Sometimes I went to the water tap that leaked and drank the leak. It tasted of brass. I spat out a mouthful. It nearly went over the feet of the student waiting for his turn at that dripping tap. I stepped aside for him. He swilled the water around his mouth and spat, too, carefully missing my feet. Wiping his mouth, he asked, ‘BA?’
‘No, Inter.’
‘Hu,’ he burped. ‘Wait till you do your BA. Then you’ll get to know.’ His face was like a grey bone. It was not unkind, it simply had no expression. ‘Another two weeks,’ he sighed and slouched off to his own lair.
I touched my face. I thought it would be all bone, like his. I was surprised to find a bit of skin still covering it. I felt as if we were all dying in the park, that when we entered the examination hall it would be to be declared officially dead. That’s what the degree was about. What else was it all about? Why were we creeping around here, hiding from the city, from teachers and parents, pretending to study and prepare? Prepare for what? We hadn’t been told. Inter, they said, or BA, or MA. These were like official stamps – they would declare us dead. Ready for a dead world. A world in which ghosts went about, squeaking or whining, rattling or rustling. Slowly, slowly we were killing ourselves in order to join them. The ball-point pen in my pocket was the only thing that still lived, that still worked. I didn’t work myself any more – I mean physically, my body no longer functioned. I was constipated, I was dying. I was lying under a yellow tree, feeling the dust sift through the leaves to cover me. It was filling my eyes, my throat. I could barely walk. I never strolled. Only on the way out of the park, late in the evening, I crept down the path under the palms, past the benches.
Then I saw the scene that stopped it all, stopped me just before I died.
Hidden behind an oleander was a bench. A woman lay on it, stretched out. She was a Muslim, wrapped in a black burkha. I hesitated when I saw this straight, still figure in black on the bench. Just then she lifted a pale, thin hand and lifted her veil. I saw her face. It lay bared, in the black folds of her burkha, like a flower, wax-white and composed, like a Persian lily or a tobacco flower at night. She was young. Very young, very pale, beautiful with a beauty I had never come across even in a dream. It caught me and held me tight, tight till I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move. She was so white, so still, I saw she was very ill – with anaemia, perhaps, or TB. Too pale, too white – I could see she was dying. Her head – so still and white it might have been carved if it weren’t for this softness, this softness of a flower at night – lay in the lap of a very old man. Very much older than her. With spectacles and a long grey beard like a goat’s, or a scholar’s. He was looking down at her and caressing her face – so tenderly, so tenderly, I had never seen a hand move so gently and tenderly. Beside them, on the ground, two little girls were playing. Round little girls, rather dirty, drawing lines in the gravel. They stared at me but the man and the woman did not notice me. They never looked at anyone else, only at each other, with an expression that halted me. It was tender, loving, yes, but in an inhuman way, so intense. Divine, I felt, or insane. I stood, half-hidden by the bush, holding my book, and wondered at them. She was ill, I could see, dying. Perhaps she had only a short time to live. Why didn’t he take her to the Victoria Zenana Hospital, so close to the park? Who was this man – her husband, her father, a lover? I couldn’t make out although I watched them without moving, without breathing. I felt not as if I were staring rudely at strangers, but as if I were gazing at a painting or a sculpture, some work of art. Or seeing a vision. They were still and I stood still and the children stared. Then she lifted her arms above her head and laughed. Very quietly.
I broke away and hurried down the path, in order to leave them alone, in privacy. They weren’t a work of art, or a vision, but real, human and alive as no one else in my life had been real and alive. I had only that glimpse of them. But I felt I could never open my books and study or take degrees after that. They belonged to the dead, and now I had seen what being alive meant. The vision burnt the surfaces of my eyes so that they watered as I groped my way up the stairs to the flat. I could hardly find my way to the bed.
It was not just the examination but everything else had suddenly withered and died, gone lifeless and purposeless when compared with this vision. My studies, my family, my life – they all belonged to the dead and only what I had seen in the park had any meaning.
Since I did not know how to span the distance between that beautiful ideal and my stupid, dull existence, I simply lay still and shut my eyes. I kept them shut so as not to see all the puzzled, pleading, indignant faces of my family around me, but I could not shut out their voices.
‘Suno, Suno,’ I heard them croon and coax and mourn. ‘Suno, drink milk.’
‘Suno, study.’
‘Suno, take the exam.’
And when they tired of being so patient with me and I still would not get up, they began to crackle and spit and storm.
‘Get up, Suno.’
‘Study, Suno.’
‘At once, Suno.’
Only my mother became resigned and gentle. She must have seen something quite out of the ordinary on my face to make her so. I felt her hand on my forehead and heard her say, ‘Leave him alone. Let him sleep tonight. He is tired out, that is what it is – he has driven himself too much and now he must sleep.’
Then I heard all of them leave the room. Her hand stayed on my forehead, wet and smelling of onions, and after a bit my tears began to flow from under my lids.
‘Poor Suno, sleep,’ she murmured.
I went back to the park of course. But now I was changed. I had stopped being a student – I was a ‘professional’. My life was dictated by the rules and routine of the park. I still had my book
open on the palms of my hands as I strolled but now my eyes strayed without guilt, darting at the young girls walking in pairs, their arms linked, giggling and bumping into each other. Sometimes I stopped to rest on a bench and conversed with one of the old men, told him who my father was and what examination I was preparing for, and allowing him to tell me about his youth, his politics, his philosophy, his youth and again his youth. Or I joked with the other students, sitting on the grass and throwing peanut shells at the chipmunks, and shocking them, I could see, with my irreverence and cynicism about the school, the exam, the system. Once I even nodded at the yoga teacher and exchanged a few words with him. He suggested I join his class and I nodded vaguely and said I would think it over. It might help. My father says I need help. He says I am hopeless but that I need help. I just laugh but I know that he knows I will never appear for the examination, I will never come up to that hurdle or cross it – life has taken a different path for me, in the form of a search, not a race as it is for him, for them.
Yes, it is a search, a kind of perpetual search for me and now that I have accepted it and don’t struggle, I find it satisfies me entirely, and I wander about the park as freely as a prince in his palace garden. I look over the benches, I glance behind the bushes, and wonder if I shall ever get another glimpse of that strange vision that set me free. I never have but I keep hoping, wishing.
Surface Textures
It was all her own fault, she later knew – but how could she have helped it? When she stood, puckering her lips, before the fruit barrow in the market and, after sullen consideration, at last plucked a rather small but nicely ripened melon out of a heap on display, her only thought had been Is it worth a rupee and fifty paise? The lichees looked more poetic, in large clusters like some prickly grapes of a charming rose colour, their long stalks and stiff grey leaves tied in a bunch above them – but were expensive. Mangoes were what the children were eagerly waiting for – the boys, she knew, were raiding the mango trees in the school compound daily and their stomach-aches were a result, she told them, of the unripe mangoes they ate and for which they carried paper packets of salt to school in their pockets instead of handkerchiefs – but, leave alone the expense, the ones the fruiterer held up to her enticingly were bound to be sharp and sour for all their parakeet shades of rose and saffron; it was still too early for mangoes. So she put the melon in her string bag, rather angrily – paid the man his one rupee and fifty paise which altered his expression from one of promise and enticement to that of disappointment and contempt, and trailed off towards the vegetable barrow.
That, she later saw, was the beginning of it all, for if the melon seemed puny to her and boring to the children, from the start her husband regarded it with eyes that seemed newly opened. One would have thought he had never seen a melon before. All through the meal his eyes remained fixed on the plate in the centre of the table with its big button of a yellow melon. He left most of his rice and pulses on his plate, to her indignation. While she scolded, he reached out to touch the melon that so captivated him. With one finger he stroked the coarse grain of its rind, rough with the upraised criss-cross of pale veins. Then he ran his fingers up and down the green streaks that divided it into even quarters as by green silk threads, so tenderly. She was clearing away the plates and did not notice till she came back from the kitchen.
‘Aren’t you going to cut it for us?’ she asked, pushing the knife across to him.
He gave her a reproachful look as he picked up the knife and went about dividing the melon into quarter-moon portions with sighs that showed how it pained him.
‘Come on, come on,’ she said, roughly, ‘the boys have to get back to school.’
He handed them their portions and watched them scoop out the icy orange flesh with a fearful expression on his face – as though he were observing cannibals at a feast. She had not the time to pay any attention to it then but later described it as horror. And he did not eat his own slice. When the boys rushed away, he bowed his head over his plate and regarded it.
‘Are you going to fall asleep?’ she cried, a little frightened.
‘Oh no,’ he said, in that low mumble that always exasperated her – it seemed a sign to her of evasiveness and pusillanimity, this mumble – ‘Oh no, no.’ Yet he did not object when she seized the plate and carried it off to the kitchen, merely picked up the knife that was left behind and, picking a flat melon seed off its edge where it had remained stuck, he held it between two fingers, fondling it delicately. Continuing to do this, he left the house.
The melon might have been the apple of knowledge for Harish – so deadly its poison that he did not even need to bite into it to imbibe it: that long, devoted look had been enough. As he walked back to his office which issued ration cards to the population of their town, he looked about him vaguely but with hunger, his eyes resting not on the things on which people’s eyes normally rest – signboards, the traffic, the number of an approaching bus – but on such things, normally considered nondescript and unimportant, as the paving stones on which their feet momentarily pressed, the length of wire in a railing at the side of the road, a pattern of grime on the windowpane of a disused printing press … Amongst such things his eyes roved and hunted and, when he was seated at his desk in the office, his eyes continued to slide about – that was Sheila’s phrase later: ‘slide about’ – in a musing, calculating way, over the surface of the crowded desk, about the corners of the room, even across the ceiling. He seemed unable to focus them on a file or a card long enough to put to them his signature – they lay unsigned and the people in the queue outside went for another day without rice and sugar and kerosene for their lamps and Janta cookers. Harish searched – slid about, hunted, gazed – and at last found sufficiently interesting a thick book of rules that lay beneath a stack of files. Then his hand reached out – not to pull the book to him or open it, but to run the ball of his thumb across the edge of the pages. In their large number and irregular cut, so closely laid out like some crisp palimpsest, his eyes seemed to find something of riveting interest and his thumb of tactile wonder. All afternoon he massaged the cut edges of the book’s seven hundred-odd pages – tenderly, wonderingly. All afternoon his eyes gazed upon them with strange devotion. At five o’clock, punctually, the office shut and the queue disintegrated into vociferous grumbles and threats as people went home instead of to the ration shops, empty-handed instead of loaded with those necessary but, to Harish, so dull comestibles.
Although government service is as hard to depart from as to enter – so many letters to be written, forms to be filled, files to be circulated, petitions to be made that it hardly seems worthwhile – Harish was, after some time, dismissed – time he happily spent judging the difference between white blotting paper and pink (pink is flatter, denser, white spongier) and the texture of blotting paper stained with ink and that which is fresh, that which has been put to melt in a saucer of cold tea and that which has been doused in a pot of ink. Harish was dismissed.
The first few days Sheila stormed and screamed like some shrill, wet hurricane about the house. ‘How am I to go to market and buy vegetables for dinner? I don’t even have enough for that. What am I to feed the boys tonight? No more milk for them. The washerwoman is asking for her bill to be paid. Do you hear? Do you hear? And we shall have to leave this flat. Where shall we go?’ He listened – or didn’t – sitting on a cushion before her mirror, fingering the small silver box in which she kept the red kumkum that daily cut a gash from one end of her scalp to the other after her toilet. It was of dark, almost blackened silver, with a whole forest embossed on it – banana groves, elephants, peacocks and jackals. He rubbed his thumb over its cold, raised surface.
After that, she wept. She lay on her bed in a bath of tears and perspiration, and it was only because of the kindness of their neighbours that they did not starve to death the very first week, for even those who most disliked and distrusted Harish – ‘Always said he looks like a hungry hyena,’ said Mr B
hatia who lived below their flat, ‘not human at all, but like a hungry, hunch-backed hyena hunting along the road’ – felt for the distraught wife and the hungry children (who did not really mind as long as there were sour green mangoes to steal and devour) and looked to them. Such delicacies as Harish’s family had never known before arrived in stainless-steel and brass dishes, with delicate unobtrusiveness. For a while wife and children gorged on sweetmeats made with fresh buffalo milk, on pulses cooked according to grandmother’s recipes, on stuffed bread and the first pome-granates of the season. But, although delicious, these offerings came in small quantities and irregularly and soon they were really starving.
‘I suppose you want me to take the boys home to my parents,’ said Sheila bitterly, getting up from the bed. ‘Any other man would regard that as the worst disgrace of all – but not you. What is my shame to you? I will have to hang my head and crawl home and beg my father to look after us since you won’t,’ and that was what she did. He was sorry, very sorry to see her pack the little silver kumkum box in her black trunk and carry it away.
Soon after, officials of the Ministry of Works, Housing and Land Development came and turned Harish out, cleaned and painted the flat and let in the new tenants who could hardly believe their luck – they had been told so often they couldn’t expect a flat in that locality for at least another two years.