by Anita Desai
Wandering about with a glass in one hand and a plate of cheese biscuits in another, she gave a start now and then to see an acquaintance emerge from the darkness which had the gloss, the sheen, the coolness but not the weight of water, and present her with a face, vague and without outlines but eventually recognizable. ‘Oh,’ she cried several times that evening, ‘I didn’t know you had arrived. I’ve been looking for you,’ she would add with unaccustomed intimacy (was it because of the gin and lime, her second, or because such warmth could safely be held to lead to nothing now that they were leaving town?). The guest, also having had several drinks between beds of flowering balsam and torenias before launching out onto the lawn, responded with an equal vivacity. Sometimes she had her arm squeezed or a hand slid down the bareness of her back – which was athletic: she had once played tennis, rather well – and once someone said, ‘I’ve been hiding in this corner, watching you,’ while another went so far as to say, ‘Is it true you are leaving us, Bina? How can you be so cruel?’ And if it were a woman guest, the words were that much more effusive. It was all heady, astonishing.
It was astonishing because Bina was a frigid and friendless woman. She was thirty-five. For fifteen years she had been bringing up her children and, in particular, nursing the eldest who was severely spastic. This had involved her deeply in the workings of the local hospital and with its many departments and doctors, but her care for this child was so intense and so desperate that her relationship with them was purely professional. Outside this circle of family and hospital – ringed, as it were, with barbed wire and lit with one single floodlight – Bina had no life. The town had scarcely come to know her for its life turned in the more jovial circles of mah-jong, bridge, coffee parties, club evenings and, occasionally, a charity show in aid of the Red Cross. For these Bina had a kind of sad contempt and certainly no time. A tall, pale woman, heavy-boned and sallow, she had a certain presence, a certain dignity, and people, having heard of the spastic child, liked and admired her, but she had not thought she had friends. Yet tonight they were coming forth from the darkness in waves that quite overwhelmed.
Now here was Mrs Ray, the Commissioner’s wife, chirping inside a nest of rustling embroidered organza. ‘Why are you leaving us so soon, Mrs Raman? You’ve only been here – two years, is it?’
‘Five,’ exclaimed Bina, widening her eyes, herself surprised at such a length of time. Although time dragged heavily in their household, agonizingly slow, and the five years had been so hard that sometimes, at night, she did not know how she had crawled through the day and if she would crawl through another, her back almost literally broken by the weight of the totally dependent child and of the three smaller ones who seemed perpetually to clamour for their share of attention, which they felt they never got. Yet now these five years had telescoped. They were over. The Raman family was moving and their time here was spent. There had been the hospital, the girls’ school, the boys’ school, picnics, monsoons, birthday parties and measles. Crushed together into a handful. She gazed down at her hands, tightened around glass and plate. ‘Time has flown,’ she murmured incredulously.
‘Oh, I wish you were staying, Mrs Raman,’ cried the Commissioner’s wife and, as she squeezed Bina’s arm, her fragrant talcum powder seemed to lift off her chalky shoulders and some of it settled on Bina who sneezed. ‘It’s been so nice to have a family like yours here. It’s a small town, so little to do, at least one must have good friends …’
Bina blinked at such words of affection from a woman she had met twice, perhaps thrice before. Bina and her husband did not go in for society. The shock of their first child’s birth had made them both fanatic parents. But she knew that not everyone considered this vital factor in their lives, and spoke of ‘social duties’ in a somehow reproving tone. The Commissioner’s wife had been annoyed, she always felt, by her refusal to help out at the Red Cross fair. The hurt silence with which her refusal had been accepted had implied the importance of these ‘social duties’ of which Bina remained so stubbornly unaware.
However, this one evening, this last party, was certainly given over to their recognition and celebration. ‘Oh, everyone, everyone is here,’ rejoiced the Commissioner’s wife, her eyes snapping from face to face in that crowded aquarium, and, at a higher pitch, cried, ‘Renu, why weren’t you at the mah-jong party this morning?’ and moved off into another powdery organza embrace that rose to meet her from the night like a moth and then was submerged again in the shadows of the lawn. Bina gave one of those smiles that easily-frightened people found mocking, a shade too superior, somewhat scornful. Looking down into her glass of gin and lime, she moved on and in a minute found herself brought up short against the quite regal although overweight figure, in raw silk and homespun and the somewhat saturnine air of underpaid culture, of Bose, an employee of the local museum whom she had met once or twice at the art competitions and exhibitions to which she was fond of hauling her children, whether reluctant or enthusiastic, because ‘it made a change,’ she said.
‘Mrs Raman,’ he said in the fruity tones of the culture-bent Bengali, ‘how we’ll miss you at the next children’s art competitions. You used to be my chief inspiration—’
‘Inspiration?’ she laughed, incredulously, spilling some of her drink and proffering the plate of cheese biscuits from which he helped himself, half-bowing as though it were gold she offered, gems.
‘Yes, yes, inspiration,’ he went on, even more fruitily now that his mouth was full. ‘Think of me – alone, the hapless organizer – surrounded by mammas, by primary school teachers, by three, four, five hundred children. And the judges – they are always the most trouble, those judges. And then I look at you – so cool, controlling your children, handling them so wonderfully and with such superb results – my inspiration!’
She was flustered by this unaccustomed vision of herself and half-turned her face away from Bose the better to contemplate it, but could find no reflection of it in the ghostly white bush of the Queen of the Night, and listened to him murmur on about her unkindness in deserting him in this cultural backwater to that darkest of dooms – guardian of a provincial museum – where he saw no one but school teachers herding children through his halls or, worse, government officials who periodically and inexplicably stirred to create trouble for him and made their official presences felt amongst the copies of the Ajanta frescoes (in which even the mouldy and peeled-off portions were carefully reproduced) and the cupboards of Indus Valley seals. Murmuring commiseration, she left him to a gloomy young professor of history who was languishing at another of the institutions of provincial backwaters that they so deplored and whose wife was always having a baby, and slipped away, still feeling an unease at Bose’s unexpected vision of her which did not tally with the cruder reality, into the less equivocal company provided by a ring of twittering ‘company wives’.
These women she had always encountered in just such a ring as they formed now, the kind that garden babblers form under a hedge where they sit gabbling and whirring with social bitchiness, and she had always stood outside it, smiling stiffly, not wanting to join and refusing their effusively nodded invitation. They were the wives of men who represented various mercantile companies in the town – Imperial Tobacco, Brooke Bond, Esso and so on – and although they might seem exactly alike to one who did not belong to this circle, inside it were subtle gradations of importance according to the particular company for which each one’s husband worked and of these only they themselves were initiates. Bina was, however unwillingly, an initiate. Her husband worked for one of these companies but she had always stiffly refused to recognize these gradations, or consider them. They noted the rather set sulkiness of her silence when amongst them and privately labelled her queer, proud, boring and difficult. Also, they felt she belonged to their circle whether she liked it or not.
Now she entered this circle with diffidence, wishing she had stayed with the more congenial Bose (why hadn’t she? What was it in her that made her r
etreat from anything like a friendly approach?) and was taken aback to find their circle parting to admit her and hear their cries of welcome and affection that did not, however, lose the stridency and harshness of garden babblers’ voices.
‘Bina, how do you like the idea of going back to Bombay?’
‘Have you started packing, Bina? Poor you. Oh, are you having packers over from Delhi? Oh well then it’s not so bad.’
Never had they been so vociferous in her company, so easy, so warm. They were women to whom the most awful thing that had ever happened was the screw of a golden earring disappearing down the bathroom sink or a mother-in-law’s visit or an ayah deserting just before the arrival of guests: what could they know of Bina’s life, Bina’s ordeal? She cast her glance at the drinks they held – but they were mostly of orange squash. Only the Esso wife, who participated in amateur dramatics and ran a boutique and was rather taller and bolder than the rest, held a whisky and soda. So much affection generated by just orange squash? Impossible. Rather tentatively, she offered them the remains of the cheese biscuits, found herself chirping replies, deploring the nuisance of having packing crates all over the house, talking of the flat they would move into in Bombay, and then, sweating unobtrusively with the strain, saw another recognizable fish swim towards her from the edge of the liquescent lawn, and swung away in relief, saying, ‘Mrs D’Souza! How late you are, but I’m so glad—’ for she really was.
Mrs D’Souza was her daughter’s teacher at the convent school and had clearly never been to a cocktail party before so that all Bina’s compassion was aroused by those school-scuffed shoes and her tea-party best – quite apart from the simple truth that she found in her an honest individuality that all those beautifully dressed and poised babblers lacked, being stamped all over by the plain rubber stamps of their husbands’ companies – and she hurried off to find Mrs D’Souza something suitable to drink. ‘Sherry? Why yes, I think I’ll be able to find you some,’ she said, a bit flabbergasted at such an unexpected fancy of the pepper-haired schoolteacher, ‘and I’ll see if Tara’s around – she’ll want to see you,’ she added, vaguely and fraudulently, wondering why she had asked Mrs D’Souza to a cocktail party, only to see, as she skirted the rose bed, the admirable Bose appear at her side and envelop her in this strange intimacy that marked the whole evening, and went off, light-hearted, towards the table where her husband was trying, with the help of some hired waiters in soggy white uniforms with the name of the restaurant from which they were hired embroidered in red across their pockets, to cope with the flood of drinks this party atmosphere had called for and released.
Harassed, perspiring, his feet burning, Raman was nevertheless pleased to be so obviously employed and be saved the strain of having to converse with his motley assembly of guests: he had no more gift for society than his wife had. Ice cubes were melting on the tablecloth in sopping puddles and he had trouble in keeping track of his bottles: they were, besides the newly bought dozens of beer bottles and Black Knight whisky, the remains of their five years in this town that he now wished to bring to their end – bottles brought by friends from trips abroad, bottles bought cheap through ‘contacts’ in the army or air force, some gems, extravaganzas bought for anniversaries such as a nearly full bottle of Vat 69, a bottle with a bit of creme de menthe growing sticky at the bottom, some brown sherry with a great deal of rusty sediment, a red Golconda wine from Hyderabad, and a bottle of Remy Martin that he was keeping guiltily to himself, pouring small quantities into a whisky glass at his elbow and gulping it down in between mixing some very weird cocktails for his guests. There was no one at the party he liked well enough to share it with. Oh, one of the doctors perhaps, but where were they? Submerged in grass, in dark, in night and chatter, clatter of ice in glass, teeth on biscuit, teeth on teeth. Enamel and gold. Crumbs and dregs. All awash, all soaked in night. Watery sound of speech, liquid sound of drink. Water and ice and night. It occurred to him that everyone had forgotten him, the host, that it was a mistake to have stationed himself amongst the waiters, that he ought to move out, mingle with the guests. But he felt himself drowned, helplessly and quite delightfully, in Remy Martin, in grass, in a border of purple torenias.
Then he was discovered by his son who galloped through the ranks of guests and waiters to fling himself at his father and ask if he could play the new Beatles record, his friends had asked to hear it.
Raman considered, taking the opportunity to pour out and gulp down some more of the precious Remy Martin. ‘All right,’ he said, after a judicious minute or two, ‘but keep it low, everyone won’t want to hear it,’ not adding that he himself didn’t, for his taste in music ran to slow and melancholy, folk at its most frivolous. Still, he glanced into the lighted room where his children and the children of neighbours and guests had collected, making themselves tipsy on Fanta and Coca-Cola, the girls giggling in a multicoloured huddle and the boys swaggering around the record-player with a kind of lounging strut, holding bottles in their hands with a sophisticated ease, exactly like experienced cocktail party guests, so that he smiled and wished he had a ticket, a passport that would make it possible to break into that party within a party. It was chillingly obvious to him that he hadn’t one. He also saw that a good deal of their riotousness was due to the fact that they were raiding the snack trays that the waiters carried through the room to the lawn, and that they were seeing to it that the trays emerged half-empty. He knew he ought to go in and see about it but he hadn’t the heart, or the nerve. He couldn’t join that party but he wouldn’t wreck it either so he only caught hold of one of the waiters and suggested that the snack trays be carried out from the kitchen straight onto the lawn, not by way of the drawing room, and led him towards a group that seemed to be without snacks and saw too late that it was a group of the company executives that he loathed most. He half-groaned, then hiccuped at his mistake, but it was too late to alter course now. He told himself that he ought to see to it that the snacks were offered around without snag or error.
Poor Raman was placed in one of the lower ranks of the companies’ hierarchy. That is, he did not belong to a British concern, or even to an American-collaboration one, but merely to an Indian one. Oh, a long-established, prosperous and solid one but, still, only Indian. Those cigarettes that he passed around were made by his own company. Somehow it struck a note of bad taste amongst these fastidious men who played golf, danced at the club on Independence Eve and New Year’s Eve, invited at least one foreign couple to every party and called their decorative wives ‘darling’ when in public. Poor Raman never had belonged. It was so obvious to everyone, even to himself, as he passed around those awful cigarettes that sold so well in the market. It had been obvious since their first disastrous dinner party for this very ring of jocular gentlemen, five years ago: Nono had cried right through the party, Bina had spent the evening racing upstairs to see to the babies’ baths and bedtime and then crawling reluctantly down, the hired cook had got drunk and stolen two of the chickens so that there was not enough on the table, no one had relaxed for a minute or enjoyed a second – it had been too sad and harrowing even to make a good story or a funny anecdote. They had all let it sink by mutual consent and the invitations to play a round of golf on Saturday afternoon or a rubber of bridge on Sunday morning had been issued and refused with conspiratorial smoothness. Then there was that distressing hobby of Raman’s: his impossibly long walks on which he picked up bits of wood and took them home to sandpaper and chisel and then call wood sculpture. What could one do with a chap who did that? He himself wasn’t sure if he pursued such odd tastes because he was a social pariah or if he was one on account of this oddity. Not to speak of the spastic child. Now that didn’t even bear thinking of, and so it was no wonder that Raman swayed towards them so hesitantly, as though he were wading through water instead of over clipped grass, and handed his cigarettes around with such an apologetic air.
But, after all, hesitation and apology proved unnecessary. One of them �
� was he Polson’s Coffee or Brooke Bond Tea? – clasped Raman about the shoulders as proper men do on meeting, and hearty voices rose together, congratulating him on his promotion (it wasn’t one, merely a transfer, and they knew it), envying him his move to the metropolis. They talked as if they had known each other for years, shared all kinds of public schoolboy fun. One – was he Voltas or Ciba? – talked of golf matches at the Willingdon as though he had often played there with Raman, another spoke of kebabs eaten on the roadside after a party as though Raman had been one of the gang. Amazed and grateful as a schoolboy admitted to a closed society, Raman nodded and put in a few cautious words, put away his cigarettes, called a waiter to refill their glasses and broke away before the clock struck twelve and the golden carriage turned into a pumpkin, he himself into a mouse. He hated mice.
Walking backwards, he walked straight into the soft barrier of Miss Dutta’s ample back wrapped and bound in rich Madras silk.
‘Sorry, sorry, Miss Dutta, I’m clumsy as a bear,’ he apologized, but here, too, there was no call for apology for Miss Dutta was obviously delighted at having been bumped into.
‘My dear Mr Raman, what can you expect if you invite the whole town to your party?’ she asked in that piercing voice that invariably made her companions drop theirs self-consciously. ‘You and Bina have been so popular – what are we going to do without you?’
He stood pressing his glass with white-tipped fingers and tried to think what he or Bina had provided her with that she could possibly miss. In any case, Miss Dutta could always manage, and did manage, everything single-handedly. She was the town busy-body, secretary and chairman of more committees than he could count: they ranged from the Film Society to the Blood Bank, from the Red Cross to the Friends of the Museum, for Miss Dutta was nothing if not versatile. ‘We hardly ever saw you at our film shows of course,’ her voice rang out, making him glance furtively over his shoulder to see if anyone were listening, ‘but it was so nice knowing you were in town and that I could count on you. So few people here care, you know,’ she went on, and affectionately bumped her comfortable middle-aged body into his as someone squeezed by, making him remember that he had once heard her called a man-eater, and wonder which man she had eaten and even consider, for a moment, if there were not, after all, some charm in those powdered creases of her creamy arms, equalling if not surpassing that of his worn and harassed wife’s bony angles. Why did suffering make for angularity? he even asked himself with uncharacteristic unkindness. But when Miss Dutta laid an arm on top of his glass-holding one and raised herself on her toes to bray something into his ear, he loyally decided that he was too accustomed to sharp angles to change them for such unashamed luxuriance, and, contriving to remove her arm by grasping her elbow – how one’s fingers sank into the stuff! – he steered her towards his wife who was standing at the table and inefficiently pouring herself another gin and lime.