The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  ‘Rest?’ he snapped at her, but shuffled off into the bedroom and allowed her to make up his bed with all the pillows and bolsters that kept him in an almost sitting position on the flat wooden bed. He shifted and groaned as she heaped up a bolster here, flattened a cushion there, and said he could not possibly sleep, but she thought he did for she kept an eye on him while she leafed through a heap of film and women’s magazines on her side of the bed, and thought his eyes were closed genuinely in sleep and that his breathing was almost as regular as the slow circling of the electric fan above them. The fan needed oiling, it made a disturbing clicking sound with every revolution, but who was there to climb up to it and do the oiling and cleaning? Not so easy to get these things done when one’s husband is old and ill, she thought. She yawned. She rolled over.

  When she brought him his afternoon tea, she asked ‘Had a good sleep?’ which annoyed him. ‘Never slept at all,’ he snapped, taking the cup from her hands and spilling some tea. ‘How can one sleep if one can’t breathe?’ he growled, and she turned away with a little smile at his stubbornness. But later that evening he was genuinely ill, choked, in a panic at his inability to breathe as well as at the prospect of a hot night without a fan. ‘What will I do?’ he kept moaning in between violent struggles for air that shook his body and left it limp. ‘What will I do?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ she suddenly answered, and wiped the perspiration from her face in relief. ‘I’ll have your bed taken up on the terrace. I can call Bulu from next door to do it – you can sleep out in the open air tonight, eh? That’ll be nice, won’t it? That will do you good.’ She brightened both at the thought of a night spent in the open air on the terrace, just as they had done when they were younger and climbing up and down stairs was nothing to them, and at the thought of having an excuse to visit the neighbours and having a little chat while getting them to come and carry up a string-bed for them. Of course old Basu made a protest and a great fuss and coughed and spat and shook and said he could not possibly move in this condition, or be moved by anyone, but she insisted and, ignoring him, went out to make the arrangements.

  Basu had not been on the terrace for years. While his wife and Bulu led him up the stairs, hauling him up and propping him upright by their shoulders as though he were some lifeless bag containing something fragile and valuable, he tried to think when he had last attempted or achieved what now seemed a tortuous struggle up the steep concrete steps to the warped green door at the top.

  They had given up sleeping there on summer nights long ago, not so much on account of old age or weak knees, really, but because of their perpetual quarrels with the neighbours on the next terrace, separated from theirs by only a broken wooden trellis. Noisy, inconsiderate people, addicted to the radio turned on full blast. At times the man had been drunk and troubled and abused his wife who gave as good as she got. It had been intolerable. Otima had urged her husband, night after night, to protest. When he did, they had almost killed him. At least they would have had they managed to cross over to the Basus’ terrace which they were physically prevented from doing by their sons and daughters. The next night they had been even more offensive. Finally the Basus had been forced to give in and retreat down the stairs to sleep in their closed, airless room under the relentlessly ticking ceiling fan. At least it was private there. After the first few restless nights they wondered how they had ever put up with the public sleeping outdoors and its disturbances – its ‘nuisance’, as Otima called it in English, thinking it an effective word.

  That had not – he groaned aloud as they led him up over the last step to the green door – been the last visit he had paid to the rooftop. As Bulu kicked open the door – half-witted he may be, but he was burly too, and good-natured, like so many half-wits – and the city sky revealed itself, in its dirt-swept greys and mauves, on the same level with them, Basu recalled how, not so many years ago, he had taken his daughter Charu’s son by the hand to show him the pigeon roosts on so many of the Darya Ganj rooftops, and pointed out to him a flock of collector’s pigeons like so many silk and ivory fans flirting in the sky. The boy had watched in silence, holding onto his grandfather’s thumb with tense delight. The memory of it silenced his groans as they lowered him onto the bed they had earlier carried up and spread with his many pillows and bolsters. He sat there, getting back his breath, and thinking of Nikhil. When would he see Nikhil again? What would he not give to have that child hold his thumb again and go for a walk with him!

  Punctually at eight o’clock the electricity was switched off, immediately sucking up Darya Ganj into a box of shadows, so that the distant glow of Cannaught Place, still lit up, was emphasized. The horizon was illuminated as by a fire, roasted red. The traffic made long stripes of light up and down the streets below them. Lying back, Basu saw the dome of the sky as absolutely impenetrable, shrouded with summer dust, and it seemed to him as airless as the room below. Nikhil, Nikhil, he wept, as though the child might have helped.

  Nor could he find any ease, any comfort on that unaccustomed string-bed (the wooden pallet in their room was of course too heavy to carry up, even for Bulu). He complained that his heavy body sank into it as into a hammock, that the strings cut into him, that he could not turn on that wobbling net in which he was caught like some dying fish, gasping for air. It was no cooler than it had been indoors, he complained – there was not the slightest breeze, and the dust was stifling.

  Otima soon lost the lightheartedness that had come to her with this unaccustomed change of scene. She tired of dragging around the pillows and piling up the bolsters, helping him into a sitting position and then lowering him into a horizontal one, bringing him his medicines, fanning him with a palm leaf and eventually of his groans and sobs as well. Finally she gave up and collapsed onto her own string-bed, lying there exhausted and sleepless, too distracted by the sound of traffic to sleep. All through the night her husband moaned and gasped for air. Towards dawn it was so bad that she had to get up and massage his chest. When done long and patiently enough, it seemed to relieve him.

  ‘Now lie down for a while. I’ll go and get some iced water for your head,’ she said, lowering him onto the bed, and went tiredly down the stairs like some bundle of damp washing slowly falling. Her eyes drooped, heavy bags held the tiredness under them.

  To her surprise, there was a light on in their flat. Then she heard the ticking of the fan. She had forgotten to turn it off when they went up to the terrace and it seemed the electricity had been switched on again, earlier than they had expected. The relief of it brought her energy back in a bound. She bustled up the stairs. I’ll bring him down – he’ll get some hours of sleep after all, she told herself.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she called out as she went up to the terrace again. ‘The electricity is on again. Come, I’ll help you down – you’ll get some sleep in your own bed after all.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he replied, quite gently.

  ‘Why? Why?’ she cried. ‘I’ll help you. You can get into your own bed, you’ll be quite comfortable—’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he said again in that still voice. ‘It is cool now.’

  It was. Morning had stirred up some breeze off the sluggish river Jumna beneath the city walls, and it was carried over the rooftops of the stifled city, pale and fresh and delicate. It brought with it the morning light, as delicate and sweet as the breeze itself, a pure pallor unlike the livid glow of artificial lights. This lifted higher and higher into the dome of the sky, diluting the darkness there till it, too, grew pale and gradually shades of blue and mauve tinted it lightly.

  The old man lay flat and still, gazing up, his mouth hanging open as if to let it pour into him, as cool and fresh as water.

  Then, with a swirl and flutter of feathers, a flock of pigeons hurtled upwards and spread out against the dome of the sky – opalescent, sunlit, like small pearls. They caught the light as they rose, turned brighter till they turned at last into crystals, into prisms of light. Then they di
sappeared into the soft, deep blue of the morning.

  Scholar and Gypsy

  Her first day in Bombay wilted her. If she stepped out of the air-conditioned hotel room, she drooped, her head hung, her eyes glazed, she felt faint. Once she was back in it, she fell across her bed as though she had been struck by calamity, was extinguished, and could barely bring herself to believe that she had, after all, survived. Sweating, it seemed to her that life, energy, hope were all seeping out of her, flowing down a drain, gurgling ironically.

  ‘But you knew it would be hot,’ David said, not being able to help a sense of disappointment in her. He had bought himself crisp bush-shirts of Madras cotton and open Kolhapur sandals. He was drinking more than was his habit, it was true, but it did not seem to redden and coarsen him as it did her. He looked so right, so fitting on the Bombay streets, striding over the coconut shells and betel-stained papers and the fish scales and lepers’ stumps. ‘You could hardly come to India and expect it to be cool, Pat.’

  ‘Hot, yes,’ she moaned, ‘but not – not killing. Not so like death. I feel half dead, David, sometimes quite dead.’

  ‘Shall we go and have a gin-and-lime in the bar?’

  She tried that since it seemed to do him so much good. But the bar in the hotel was so crowded, the people there were so large and vital and forceful in their brilliant clothes and with their metallic voices and their eyes that flashed over her like barbers’ shears, cutting and exposing, that she felt crushed rather than revived.

  David attracted people like a magnet – with his charm, his nonchalance, his grace, he did it so well, so smoothly, his qualities worked more efficiently than any visiting card system – and they started going to parties. It began to seem to her that this was the chief occupation of people in Bombay – going to parties. She was always on the point of collapse when she arrived at one: the taxi invariably stank, the driver’s hair dripped oil, and then the sights and scenes they passed on the streets, the congestion and racket of the varied traffic, the virulent cinema posters, the blazing colours of women’s clothing, the profusion of toys and decorations of coloured paper and tinsel, the radios and loudspeakers never tuned to less than top volume, and amongst them flower sellers, pilgrims, dancing monkeys and performing bears … that there should be such poverty, such disease, such filth, and that out of it boiled so much vitality, such irrepressible life, seemed to her unnatural and sinister – it was as if chaos and evil triumphed over reason and order. Then the parties they went to were all very large ones. The guests all wore brilliant clothes and jewellery, and their eyes and teeth flashed with such primitive lust as they eyed her slim, white-sheathed blonde self, that the sensation of being caught up and crushed, crowded in and choked sent her into corners where their knees pushed into her, their hands slid over her back, their voices bored into her, so that when she got back to the hotel, on David’s arm, she was more like a corpse than an American globetrotter.

  Folding her arms about her, she muttered at the window, ‘I never expected them to be so primitive. I thought it would all be modern, up-to-date. Not this – this wild jungle stuff.’

  He was pouring himself a night-cap and splashed it in genuine surprise. ‘What do you mean? We’ve only been seeing the modern and up-to-date. These people would be at home at any New York cocktail party—’

  ‘No,’ she burst out, hugging herself tightly. ‘No, they would not. They haven’t the polish, the smoothness, the softness. David, they’re not civilized. They’re still a primitive people. When I see their eyes I see how primitive they are. When they touch me, I feel frightened – I feel I’m in danger.’

  He looked at her with apprehension. They had drunk till it was too late to eat and now he was hungry, tired. He found her exhausting. He would have liked to sit back comfortably in that air-conditioned cool, to go over the party, to discuss the people they had met, to share his views with her. But she seemed launched in some other direction, she was going alone and he did not want to be drawn into her deep wake. ‘You’re very imaginative tonight,’ he said lightly, playing with the bottle-opener and not looking at her. ‘Here was I, disappointed at finding them so westernized. I would have liked them a bit more primitive – at least for the sake of my thesis. Now look at the Gidwanis. Did you ever think an Indian wife would be anything like Gidwani’s wife – what was her name?’

  ‘Oh, she was terrible, terrible,’ Pat whispered, shuddering, as she thought of the vermilion sari tied below the navel, of the uneven chocolate-smooth expanse of belly and the belt of little silver bells around it. She didn’t care to remember the dance she had danced with David on the floor of the nightclub. She had never even looked at the woman’s face, she had kept her eyes lowered and not been able to go any further than that black navel. If that was not primitive, what could David, a sociology student, mean by the word?

  It was at the Gidwanis’ dinner later that week that she collapsed. She had begun to feel threatened, menaced, the moment they entered that flat. Leaving behind them the betel-stained walls of the elevator shaft, the servant boys asleep on mats in the passage, the cluster of watchmen and chauffeurs playing cards under the unshaded bulb in the lobby, they had stepped onto a black marble floor that glittered like a mirror and reflected the priceless statuary that sailed on its surface like ships of stone. Scarlet and vermilion ixora in pots. Menservants in stiffly starched uniform. Jewels, enamel, brocade and gold. Gidwani with a face like an amiable baboon’s, immediately sliding a soft hand across her back. His wife’s chocolate pudding belly with the sari slipping suggestively about her hips. Pat shrank and shrank. Her lips felt very dry and she licked and licked them, nervously. She lost David’s arm. Her feet in their sandals seemed to swell grotesquely. She sat at the table, her head slanting. She saw David looking at her concernedly. The manservant’s stomach pushed against her shoulder as he lowered the dishes for her. The dishes smelt, she wondered of what – oil, was it, or goat’s meat? It was not conducive to appetite. Her fork slipped. The table slipped. She had fainted. They were all crying, shoving, crowding. She pushed at them with her hands in panic.

  ‘David, get me out, get me out,’ she blubbered, trying to free herself of them.

  Later, sitting at the foot of her bed, ‘We’d better leave,’ he said sadly. Was it Gidwani’s wife’s belly that saddened him, she wondered. It was not a sight that one could forget, or discard, or deny. ‘Delhi’s said to be dryer,’ he said, ‘not so humid. It’ll be better for you.’

  ‘But your thesis, David?’ she wept, repentantly. ‘Will you be able to work on it there?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said gloomily, looking down at her, shrunk into something small on the bed, paler and fainter each day that she spent in the wild jungles of the city of Bombay.

  Delhi was dryer. It was dry as a skeleton. Yellow sand seethed and stormed, then settled on wood, stone, flesh and skin, brittle and gritty as powdered bone. Trees stood leafless. Red flowers blazed on their black branches, golden and purple ones burgeoned. Beggars drowsed in their shade, stretched unrecognizable limbs at her. I will pull myself together, Pat said, walking determinedly through the piled yellow dust, I must pull myself together. Her body no longer melted, it did not ooze and seep out of her grasp any more. It was dry, she would hold herself upright, she would look into people’s eyes when they spoke to her and smile pleasantly – like David, she thought. But the dust inside her sandals made her feet drag. If she no longer melted, she burnt. She felt the heat strike through to her bones. Even her eyes, protected by giant glare glasses, seemed on fire. She thought she would shrivel up like a piece of paper under a magnifying glass held to reflect the sun. Rubbing her fingers together, she made a scraping, papery sound. Her hair was full of sand.

  ‘But you can’t let climate get you down, dear,’ David said softly, in order to express tenderness that he hardly felt any longer, seeing her suffer so unbeautifully, her feet dusty, her hair stringy, her face thin and appalled. ‘Climate isn’t important, Pat –
rise above it, there’s so much else. Try to concentrate on that.’ He wanted to help her. It made things so difficult for him if she wouldn’t come along but kept drifting off loosely in some other direction, obliging him to drop things and go after her since she seemed so uncontrolled, dangerously so. He couldn’t meet people, work on his thesis, do anything. He had never imagined she could be a burden – not the companion and fellow gypsy she had so fairly promised to be. She came of plain, strong farmer stock – she ought to have some of that blood in her, strong, simple and capable. Why wasn’t she capable? He held his hand to her temple – it throbbed hard. They sat sipping iced coffee in a very small, very dark restaurant that smelt, somehow, of railway soot.

  ‘I must try,’ she said, flatly and without conviction.

  That afternoon she went round the antique shops of New Delhi, determined to take an interest in Indian art and culture. She left the shopping arcade after an hour, horror rising in her throat like vomit. She felt pursued by the primitive, the elemental and barbaric, and kept rubbing her fingers together nervously, recalling those great heavy bosoms of bronze and stone, the hips rounded and full as water pots, the flirtatious little bells on ankles and bellies, the long, sly eyes that curved out of the voluptuous stone faces, not unlike those of the shopkeepers themselves with their sibilant, inviting voices. Then the gods they showed her, named for her, with their flurry of arms, their stamping feet, their blazing, angered eyes and flying locks, all thunder and lightning, revenge and menace. Scraping the papery tips of her fingers together, she hurried through the dust back to the hotel. Back on her bed, she wept into her pillow for the lost home, for apple trees and cows, for red barns and swallows, for ice-cream sodas and drive-in movies, all that was innocent and sweet and lost, lost, lost.