The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  ‘I’m sure I’ve never seen anything like that before,’ Pat murmured then.

  ‘What, not even in Vermont?’ he teased, but received no answer.

  They ate their dinner in silence, Pat hugely although reflectively, while David sipped a cup of soup and felt as peevish as a neglected invalid.

  Perhaps it was only the smallness of Manali – barely a town, merely an overgrown village, a place for shepherds to halt on their way up to the Pass and over it to Lahaul, and apple growers to load their fruit onto lorries bound for the plains, suddenly struck and swollen by a seasonal avalanche of tourists and their vehicles – that led Pat so quickly to know it and feel it as home. It presented no difficulty, as other Indian towns of her acquaintance had, it was innocent and open and if it did not clamorously and cravenly invite, it did not shut its doors either – it had none to shut. It lay in the cup of the valley, the river and forest to one side, bright paddy fields and apple orchards to the other, open and sunlit, small and easy.

  She bought herself a cloth bag to sling over her shoulder and with it strode down the single street of Manali in her friendlily squeaking sandals. She stopped at the baker’s for ginger biscuits and to smile, somewhat tentatively, at the hippies who stood barefoot at the door, begging for loaves of bread from Indian tourists who seemed as embarrassed as stupefied to discover that it was not only Indians who could beg, and always gave them far more than they did to poorer Indian beggars. She eyed the vegetable stalls and the baskets of ripe fruit on the pavements with envy, wishing she could set up house and do her own marketing. This walk through the bazaar invariably took her to the Tibetan quarter, a smelly lane that took off to one side. Pat could not explain why she had to visit it daily. David refused to accompany her after one visit. He could not face the open drain that one had to jump over in order to enter one of its shops. He could not face the yellow pai dogs and the abjectly filthy children one had to pass, nor the extraordinary odour of the shops in which sweaty castaway woollens discarded by returning mountaineers and impecunious hippies made soft furry mountains along with Tibetan rugs, exquisitely chased silver candlesticks and bronze icons that democratically lived together with tawdry plastic and glass jewellery, all presided over by stolid women with faces carved intricately out of hard wood. So David thought them. To Pat they were wise and inscrutable old ladies who parted with objects of great value at pathetically low prices. Pushing through old dresses and woollen pullovers that hung from the rafters, she knelt on worn rugs and shuffled through the baubles and beads in order to pick out a lama carved in wood with the elegance of extreme simplicity, bits of turquoise, a ball of amber like solidified honey, a string of prayer beads as cool as river pebbles between her fingers …

  ‘Junk, junk, junk,’ David groaned as she spread them out on the bed for him to see. ‘Couldn’t you walk in some other direction? Must it be that bloody bazaar every day?’

  ‘It isn’t,’ she protested. ‘I walk all over. Just come with me and I’ll show you,’ she offered, but rather indifferently, and he saw that she did not care at all if he came with her or not, while in Bombay or Delhi she would have cared passionately. This needled him into closing his typewriter, laying his papers in the dressing-table drawer and coming with her for once, stepping gingerly over the goat droppings and puddles in the yard, out onto the dusty road.

  He found she did know, as she had claimed to, every path and stream and orchard in the place for miles, and was determined to prove it to him. To his horror, she even waved and beamed at the drug-struck, meditative hippies as they swung past the Happy Café where they invariably gathered to eat, talk, play on flutes and gaze into space in that dim, dusty interior where a chart hung on the wall offering the table d’hôte: daily it was Brown Rice, Beans and Custard. What hippy had carried his macroculture to Manali, David wondered, pinning it to the wall above the counter where flies circled plates of yellow sweetmeats and Britannia Biscuit packets? The faces of the pale Europeans who gathered there seemed to him distressingly vacant, their postures defeated and vague, but when he mentioned this to Pat, she was scornful.

  ‘You’re just making up your mind about them without really looking,’ she claimed. ‘Now look at that man in white robes – doesn’t he look like Christ? And it isn’t just the bone structure. And see that young man who’s always laughing? That’s his pet loris on his shoulder. There’s another I see in that bazaar sometimes, who has a pet eagle, but he lives way off in the mountains. It’s true they don’t talk much – but you often see them laugh. Or else they just sit and think. Isn’t that beautiful, to be able to do that? I think it’s beautiful.’

  ‘I think they’re stoned,’ he said, happy to leave the Happy Cafē to its shadowy, macrocultural bliss and climb the steep hill into the deodar forest. ‘Lord, must we go to the temple again?’ he moaned, as she led him forward, having already seen it till he could no longer keep his yawns from cracking his jaws apart while he had again to sit outside, on some excruciating roots, and wait for his wife to pay it a ritual visit. He was not really sure what she did in there, nor did he wish to know. Surely she didn’t pray? No, she came out looking much too jolly for that.

  But no, today she was taking him for a walk and for a walk she would take him, she said, with that new positivism in her jaw-line and swing of her arms that he rather feared. She led him along a stream in which a man and a woman in gypsy dress – and bald patch, and red curls, respectively – were scrubbing some incredibly blackened pots and pans, like children at play – ‘Aren’t they charming?’ Pat enquired, as if of a painted landscape tastefully peopled with just a few rural figures, and David retorted ‘Damn vagabonds’ – and down lanes that wound through orchards overhung with apricot trees from which fruit dropped ripe and soft onto the stones under their feet, past farm houses screened by daisies and day lilies from which issued bursts, sometimes of tubercular coughing and sometimes of abstract, atonal music, both curiously foreign, and then uphill, beside a stream that leapt over the rocks like a startled hare, white and flashing between ferns and boulders, to a village of large, square stone and wood houses – the ground floors smaller, built solidly of square blocks of stone, the upper floors larger, their elaborately carved wooden balconies overhanging the courtyards in which cows ate the apricots swept up in hills for them, and children climbed crackling haystacks. Apricot trees festooned with unhealthy-looking mistletoe shaded that village and Pat stopped to ask an old man in a blue cap if he had some to sell. They waited in his courtyard, amongst dung pats and milk pails, standing close to the stone wall to let a herd of mountain goats go by, silk-shawled, tip-tapping and bleat-voiced as a party of tipsy ladies, while the man climbed his tree and plucked them a capful. Eating them out of their pockets – they proved not quite ripe and not as sweet as those sold in the bazaar, but Pat wouldn’t say so and David did – they continued uphill, out of the village (David glimpsed a lissome brunette in purple robes and biblical sandals climbing down to the stream but averted his eyes) into the deodar forest again. David was so grateful for its blue shade, and so overfull with bucolic scenes and apricots, that he was ready to sprawl. His wife sprang on ahead, calling, and then he saw her destination. Another temple. He might have known.

  Catching up with her, he found Pat fondling the ears of a big tawny dog that had come barking out of the temple courtyard, with familiarity and a wag of its royal tail. ‘We can’t go in, it’s shut,’ she reassured him, ‘but do see,’ she coaxed, and led him through the courtyard and eventually he had to admit that even as Kulu temples went, this one in Nasogi was a pearl. It was no larger than Hansel and Gretel’s hut, its roof sloping steeply to the ground, edged with carved icicles of wood. Its doors and beams were massive, but every bit was elegantly carved and fitted. There was a paved courtyard opening into others, all open and inviting, possibly for pilgrims, and around it a grandeur of trees. David lowered himself onto a root, put his arms around his knees, tilted his head to one side and said, ‘Well yes, yo
u have something here, Pat, I’ll give that to you.’

  She glowed. ‘I think it’s the most magical spot on earth, if you’d like to know.’

  ‘Aren’t you funny?’ he commented. ‘I take you the length and breadth of India, I show you palaces and museums, jewels and tiger skins – and all the time you were hankering after a forest and an orchard and a village. Little Gretchen you, little Martha, hmm?’

  ‘Do you think that’s all I see in it?’ she enquired, and he did not quite like, quite trust her sudden gravity that had something too set about it, too extreme, like that of a fanatic. But what was she being so fanatical about – the country life? A mountain idyll? Surely that was obtainable and possible without fanaticism.

  She gave only a hint – it was obvious she had thought nothing out yet, however much she had felt. ‘This isn’t like the rest of India, Dave. It’s come to me as a relief, as an escape from India. You know, down in those horrible cities, I’d gotten to think of India as one horrible temple, bursting, crawling with people – people on their knees, hopeless people – and those horrible idols towering over them with their hundred legs and hundred heads – all horrible …’ (David, tiring of that one adjective, clicked his tongue like an impatient pedagogue, making her veer, only slightly, then return to her track, sifting dry deodar needles through nervous brown fingers) … ‘and then, to walk through the forest and come upon this – this little shrine – it’s like escaping from all those Hindu horrors – it’s like coming out into the open and breathing naturally again, without fear. That’s what I feel here, you know,’ she said with a renewed burst of confidence, ‘– without fear. And you can see that’s something I share with, or perhaps have just learnt from, the mountain people here. That’s what I admire so in them, in the Tibetans. I don’t mean the ones down in the bazaar – those are just like the greasy Indian masses, whining and cajoling and sneering – oh, horrible – but the ones one sees on the mountain roads. They’re upright, they’re honest, independent. They have such a strong swing and a stride to their walk – they walk like gods amongst those crawling, cringing masses. And they haven’t those furtive Indian faces either – eyes sliding this way and that, expressions showing and then closing up – their faces are all open, and they laugh and sing. All they have is a black old kettle and a pack of wood on their backs, rope sandals and a few sheep, but they laugh and sing and go striding up the mountains like – like lords. I watch them all the time, I admire them, you know, and I got to thinking what makes them so different? I wondered if it was their religion. I feel, being Buddhists, they’re different from the Hindus, and it must be something in their belief that gives them this – this fearlessness. When I come to this shrine and sit and think things out quietly, I can see where they get their strength from, and their joy …’

  But here he could stand it no longer. ‘Pat, Pat,’ he cried, jumping up and striking his sides. ‘You’re all confused, Pat, you’re so muddled, so hopelessly muddled! My dear, addled wife, Pat!’

  She frowned and squinted, her fist closed on a handful of needles, ceased to sift them. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, in a tight, closed voice.

  ‘What do I mean? Don’t you know? You’re sitting outside a Hindu shrine, this is a Hindu temple, and you’re making it out to be a source of Buddhist strength and serenity! Don’t you even know that the Kulu Valley has a Hindu population, and the shrines you see here are Hindu shrines?’ He whooped with laughter, he pulled her to her feet and dragged her homeward, laughing so much that every time she opened her mouth to protest, he drowned her out with his roars of derision. In the end, that laughter gave him a headache.

  He tired of his thesis – the notes he had collected while in Bombay and Delhi and the typescript he was now preparing – long before it was done. The whole job had begun to seem totally irrelevant. Ramming the cover onto the little flat Olivetti, he pushed his legs out so that the waste-paper basket went sprawling, and yawned angrily. The cock on the woodpile at the window caught his eye and gave a wicked wink, but David looked away almost without registering it. Where was Pat?

  That was the perennial question these days. Pat was never there. What was more, he no longer asked her where she had been when she appeared for meals or to throw herself down on the bed for the night, her feet raw and dirty from walking in sandals, her cloth bag flung onto the floor. (Once he saw a ragged copy of the Dhammapada slip out of it and hastily looked away: the idea of his poor, addled wife poring over ancient Buddhist texts embarrassed him acutely.) He merely eyed her with accusation and with distaste: she was playing a role he had not engaged her to play, she was making a fool of herself, she was embarrassing him, she was absolutely outrageous. As she grew browner from the outdoor life and her limbs sturdier from the exercise, it seemed to him she was losing the fragility, the gentleness that he had loved in her, that she was growing into some tough, sharp countrywoman who might very well carry loads, chop wood, haul water and harvest, but was scarcely fit to be his wife – his, David’s, the charming and socially graceful young David of Long Island upbringing – and her movements were marked by rough angles that jarred on him, her voice, when she bothered at all to reply to his vague questions, was brusque and abrupt. It was clear there was no meeting point between them any more – he would have considered it lowering in status to make a move towards her and she clearly had no interest in meeting him halfway, or anywhere.

  He had not cared for the answers she had given him when he had first, mistakenly, asked. On coming upon her one morning, while slouching through the bazaar to post a packet of letters, in, of all places, the Happy Café, round-shouldered on a bench, drinking something cloudy out of a thick glass, in the company of those ragged pilgrims with the incongruously fair heads, he had questioned her with some heat.

  ‘Yes, they’re friends of mine,’ she shrugged, standing with her new stolidity in the centre of the room to which he had insisted on taking her back. ‘I could have told you about them earlier if you’d asked. There’s no need for you to spy.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped. ‘Spy on you? What for? Why should it interest me what you do with yourself while I’m slogging away in here—’

  ‘Then why ask?’ she snapped back.

  His curiosity was larger than his distaste in the beginning. Over dinner he asked her the questions he had earlier resolved not to ask and, pleased with the big plateful of food before her, she had talked pleasantly about the Californian couple she had taken up with, and told him the story of their erratic and precipitous voyage from the forests of Big Sur to those of the Kulu Valley, via Afghanistan and Nepal, in search of a guru they had indeed found but now discarded in favour of communal life, vegetarianism and bhang which seemed to them a smooth and gentle path to earthly nirvana.

  ‘Nirvana on earth!’ he snorted. ‘That’s a contradiction in terms, don’t you know?’ Then, seeing her nostrils flare dangerously, went on hastily, but no more wisely, ‘Is that what you were drinking down there in that joint, Pat?’

  She gave a whoop of delight on seeing the pudding – caramel custard – and buried her nose in a plateful with greed. ‘Gee, all this walking makes me hungry,’ she apologized, ‘and sleepy. Jesus, how sleepy.’ She went straight to bed.

  On another and even more uncomfortable occasion, he had found her while out taking the air after a particularly dull and boring day at the typewriter, in the park in front of the Moonlight Hotel and Rama’s Bakery where the hippies were wont to gather, some even to sleep at night, rolled in their blankets on the grass. One of the Indian gurus who held court there was seated, lotus style, under a sun-dressed lime tree, with an admiring crowd of fair and tattered hippies about him, his wife Pat as crosslegged, as smiling and as tattered as the rest. He was too far away to hear what they were saying but it seemed more as if they were bandying jokes – what jokes could East and West possibly share? – than meditating or discoursing on theology. What particularly anguished him was the sight of the Indian tour
ists who had made an outer circle around this central core of seekers of nirvana and bliss-through-bhang, as if this were one of the sights of the Kulu Valley that they had paid to see. They stood about with incredulous faces, smiling uneasily, exchanging whispered asides with one another, exactly as if they were watching some disquieting although amusing play. There was condescension and, in some cases, pity in their expressions and attitudes that he could not bear to see directed at his fellow fair-heads, much less at his own wife. He turned and almost raced back to the boarding house.

  That evening he had tried to question her again but she was tired, vague, merely brushed the hair from her face and murmured ‘Yes, that’s Guru Dina Nath. He’s so sweet – so gay – so—’ and went up to bed. He sniffed the air in the room suspiciously. Was it bhang? But he wouldn’t know what it smelt like if it were. He imagined it would be sweetish and the air in their room was sour, acid. He wrenched the window open, with violence, hoping to wake her. It did not.

  The day he gave up questioning her or pursuing her was when she came in, almost prancing, he thought, like some silly mare, burbling, ‘Do you remember Nasogi, David? That darling village where we ate apricots? You remember its temple like a little doll’s house? Well, I met some folks who live in a commune right next to it – a big attic over a cowshed actually, but it overlooks the temple and has an orchard all around it, so it’s real nice. Edith – she’s from Harlem – took me across, and I had coffee with some of them—’

  ‘Sure it was coffee?’ he snarled and, turning his back, hurled himself at the typewriter with such frenzy that she could not make herself heard. She sat on her bed, chewing her lip for a while, then got up and went out again. What she had planned to say to him was put away, like an unsuccessful gift.

  She kept out of his way after that, and made no further attempts to take him along with her on the way to nirvana. When, at breakfast, he told her, ‘It’s time I got back to Delhi. I’ve got more material to research down there and I can’t sit here in your valley and contemplate the mountains any more. I plan to book some seats on that plane for Delhi.’