by Anita Desai
Since the tenant was always out at that time of day, they could explore at leisure, and what they found surprised them: at the bottom of the mouldering backstairs that ended in a tumble of rhododendrons were a stone head, bald, blind, rising out of the ivy, its shoulders submerged in all the dark groundcover, and other bits of statuary – petrified hands and limbs pushing out of the soft mould like gravestones, or lying scattered under the branches of the spruce trees. They might have been the remains of a battle, or else ploughed up out of a graveyard.
Polly and Tom said nothing to each other, but breathed hard and noisily as they turned over and kicked at various bits of stone and clay and plaster – mostly human shapes, thick and clumsy, and some abstract ones that could not be called squares or circles or anything at all, just contortions, blunted ones. There was something disquieting about these ugly, abandoned pieces that appeared to have been flung out of the windows of the cabin, only one, the bald head, evidently planted. The children, unnerved, were silent, as if they had walked into an invisible spider web in a forest or come upon bones in the wilds.
Polly thought of the yellow stack of National Geographic magazines piled up beside the sofa in the den, with photographs of steaming jungles, vast ruins, ancient idols tumbled from their pedestals and lying prone on the forest floor. She caught a wisp of her hair between her teeth and chewed on it. ‘Miss Abigail at the camp was a sculptress,’ she said. ‘She made a ballerina out of plaster. She said she’d help me if I wanted to try. It was real pretty. Not like this stuff—’ and she kicked at it, but not hard, being barefoot.
‘But that ole Miss Dodd didn’t make this stuff, did she?’ Tom said, striking out with his switch at a flattened nose. ‘Bet she got it from somewhere – some witch doctor, maybe. Maybe she does voodoo,’ he growled; he’d looked through the National Geographics too.
‘Voo-doo!’ Polly echoed him, in an even deeper voice. They began making spitting sounds of condemnation. There was an unpleasant smell about the place too. As they came around the back of the cabin, they saw the cause of it: under the kitchen window lay a pile of refuse, household garbage, kitchen waste, simply tossed out and lying in a heap, some brown, some black, some wet, some solid.
‘Ugh! Did you see that?’
‘Gross!’
‘Diss-gust-ing!’
‘We better tell Dad!’
That evening they did and he allowed some wrinkles to work their way through his forehead, but only said, ‘Guess the raccoons’ll eat it up,’ and went back to staring at the TV screen in the den: a sign he did not mean to get up and get involved.
For a while their mother did her best to make him do something about it. ‘Think of the flies,’ she urged. ‘It’s a health hazard.’
‘Christ,’ he said, turning red – he’d been looking forward all week to this match. ‘I’ve put two garbage cans outside her door – what more am I supposed to do? Clean her yard for her? With the rent she’s paying us, it’s not worth it.’ The ball game was coming to an end in a frenzy of waving flags and blowing whistles. Frustrated, he got up. ‘And that cabin isn’t worth more than the rent she’s paying – we’re lucky she wants it,’ he added. That was that, he implied, switching off the television.
But their mother would not let it drop: the thought of flies, and disease, was something she would not tolerate in her own backyard. Finally she brought out an unopened box of garbage bags and handed them to him, ordering him to take them across to her. ‘If she won’t come out, leave them on her porch. She’ll have to get the message.’
He went off grumbling and they waited for him to come back and report. He returned with a hurried gait, his head lowered, and still clutching the garbage bags.
‘Didn’t you give them to her? She’s there – her car’s there – I saw it,’ began the mother, but he flung them onto the table, muttering something about, ‘You can’t just go bursting in on people like that,’ and disappeared into the den.
‘What do you mean?’ the mother demanded, following him. She stood in the doorway, questioningly. The children could not see him, he had sunk onto the sofa, and it was difficult to hear what he said since he had switched on the television again, but they were almost certain – later, when they discussed it, they found their certainties matched – that he’d said, ‘What was I supposed to do? She was there, she opened the door – nekkid as the day that she was born. Stark nekkid. Not a stitch. What was I to do – hand over the garbage bags for her to dress in?’ The mother quickly shut the door to the den. Polly and Tom stared at each other till sputters of laughter began to erupt from them. Tom’s sputters turned to spit. Then Polly’s did. They dribbled their laughter till it ran.
By what had to be an odd coincidence, the next Sunday morning they looked up from their breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup, and saw the maroon Dodge come bumping slowly over the ruts past their kitchen window, then turn around the lilacs and disappear: their tenant had already been out that sleepy summer Sunday morning and was already back, this time bringing with her a visitor. She had never been known to have a visitor before. That he was a black youth whose upright, only slightly inclined head they had briefly glimpsed was equally extraordinary – in their neighbourhood.
After breakfast, the children edged out into the backyard before they could be caught up in any busy activity their parents might think up for them. They made for the maple tree and took turns at swinging in the tyre seat, then climbed into the branches to see if anything remained of their tree house. That was what they told each other – ‘D’you think there’s anything left of it?’ ‘Can’t see.’ ‘Let’s go look.’
There was still the platform although the roof and walls had blown down in the previous winter’s storms and snowfalls, and from it they could look across the yard and over the lilacs to the cabin. What they saw there was the black youth, in oversized jeans and a military-looking shirt hanging out below his hips, wearing a baseball cap turned backwards, sweeping up the porch with a broom, then coming down the rotten steps to sweep that area. Then he returned to the house and they saw his head at the kitchen window, bent over what must have been the sink and taps.
It was mysterious, and unsettling. Had she heard them, somehow, discuss the filthy state of her house? How? She would have had to be a witch, hovering in the air above them, invisibly. And who was the youth? A guest? But no one had a black boy for a guest. Had she employed him as a cleaner? What was going on? Was he going to stay?
The last question was soon answered: before noon they saw the car going up the driveway and edging onto Route 2, the tenant with her great flabby jaw sunk upon her chest as she drove, and the youth on the front seat beside her, also in a sunken posture. There was no explanation for this unusual visit, this departure from habit – none at all.
And it was repeated the next Sunday, so that it seemed to be a new habit. Quite failing to keep their curiosity to themselves, the children disengaged themselves from the rubber tyre and the maple tree – Polly had also quietly abandoned the paint pots in the attic – and found games to play on the gravel of the driveway in front of the battered old cabin. Hopscotch – something they hadn’t played in years. The black youth, coming down the steps with a broom and a rag, unexpectedly stuck out his tongue, then grinned at them. He started to sweep the dust and cobwebs off the walls and from under the eaves where they hung in swags, then started to wipe the windows, so long obscured by dirt as to make them opaque. Turning around suddenly, he caught them gaping at him. ‘Dirty, ain’t it?’ he said conversationally. ‘Ugly, too.’
They did not know how to reply. Ugly it was, and dirty too, but it was theirs. Was it a comment on them, and their lives, and status? Certainly the facts were undeniable and they said, uneasily, ‘Yeah,’ and ‘Guess so.’
‘Y’know what,’ he added, ‘t’owner’s ugly, too. An’ dirty as hell.’
They retreated, shocked. The boy and his efforts at cleaning up the slovenly shack became even more mysterious. He was not a
guest, then. So what was he – to their sullen, black-browed tenant?
‘Oh, a cleaner, I guess,’ their mother said when they told her of this exchange. ‘She must have hired a cleaner. High time, too. Never thought she’d do it.’
‘D’you think she heard us? She’d have to be a witch!’
But their father only said, ‘Good, place getting cleaned up at last,’ with as much satisfaction as if it were his own achievement.
Instead, a shocking event took place that did not result in cleanliness at all. School had reopened by then, and the children had forgotten such trivial moments of their summer. Tom was launched on his project of getting into the swimming team but finding it far from easy, and Polly was struggling to maintain her identity as an artist (she had taken her roll of paintings to show the school art teacher who had looked at them down her nose and said, ‘Yes, well, we’re going to be doing pencil sketches and still lifes this term’). The routine of catching the school bus, going off every morning, bringing back homework, was settling into its usual monotony. It was early fall, the leaves grey and tinged with yellow, like the beard of an old man, when one morning Miss Mabel Dodd arrived at their back door and stood, in her heavy boots, her battered jacket, her hands in her pockets, and her chin sunk into her collar, addressing their father. Their mother, when summoned, went at once to see what it was about. So did the children, at risk of missing the school bus, and there in the drive stood the tenant’s car, at which she was gesturing. It was scrawled all over with what was obviously excrement, since it stank, and in excrement someone had written the word PIG across the front and rear window. Some of it had been smeared over the hood, and over the trunk. When they tore their eyes away from this mound of desecration, they went out, walked around the lilacs and saw the cabin with bags of garbage strewn all around it, across the steps and over the porch. Miss Mabel Dodd stood with them, huddled into her jacket – worn, they saw, over a pair of faded flannel pyjamas – surveying it with them. Here finally was something she wished to share.
After a moment, the mother, audibly gulping, said, ‘I’ll call the police,’ and fled.
It was a great pity, but the children missed the police visit – the parents would not, absolutely would not, allow them to miss school. And when they returned, the police had come and gone. The car was gone, too. Nothing to console them but their mother’s explanation – as if it could.
‘They thought it might be the boy she hired as a cleaner in the summer. Maybe she didn’t pay him enough. Maybe she said something bad to him, something mean.’
‘But who was he? Will they catch him? Will they put him in gaol?’
‘Oh, I don’t think he can get away – he was one of the boys she taught – in that school for delinquents, in Holyoke.’
‘She taught—?’
They might have known – mathematics, spelling, history, all those rigours took over teachers like terminal illnesses; it was what made them so dried-up, so impervious to life. They should have known all along. Only the word ‘delinquent’ added a novel element to that grim pattern – and Holyoke, the gutted red-brick tenements, the emptied streets, the boarded-up shops, the groups huddled in corners of playgrounds where no one ever played, that they passed by on their way to Hartford, to Spring-field and beyond …
‘Yes,’ said their mother, cutting bread for peanut butter sandwiches without missing a stroke. The slices fell into pairs, like the leaves of books, on the wooden board, then were thickly smeared with the oily paste, rising to a mound in the centre, thinning at the peripheries, before she slapped the leaves together, two by two, and drew a knife through each pair, pressing down, then releasing each triangle to puff up and rise, ready for sets of teeth to bite into, as luxuriously as sinking into soft beds of warmth and sweetness. ‘She’s taught art there for twenty years, the police told me. Those kids, they must be real hard to deal with – most of them from broken homes, or orphanages, and some of them with spells in prison. Imagine teaching them art! Imagine her teaching them art! Poor kids,’ she said, laying out the sandwiches on a plate in a layered, fanned pattern before them. ‘Can you imagine?’
Polly’s mouth opened to form a protest. Her lips formed the letter ‘O’ or else ‘NO’. She wanted to protest, she was not sure against what, but against something that had been presented to her, interposed between her and what she wanted and believed in – something objectionable, inadmissible, an imperfection. How was she to protest, to deny? Her lips stretched to form the word ‘How?’ but then she broke down and what burst from her was a surprising, ‘Oh, Ma-ma.’
Her mother looked at her, questioningly. What was she protesting? Polly had no idea. All she knew was disillusion. It made her stretch out and grab a sandwich, then bury her teeth into it, despairingly.
Five Hours to Simla or Faisla
Then, miraculously, out of the pelt of yellow fur that was the dust growing across the great northern Indian plain, a wavering grey line emerged. It might have been a cloud bank looming, but it was not – the sun blazed, the earth shrivelled, the heat burned away every trace of such beneficence. Yet the grey darkened, turned bluish, took on substance.
‘Look – mountains!’
‘Where?’
‘No! I can’t see any mountains.’
‘Are you blind? Look, look up – not down, fool!’
A scuffle broke out between the boys on the sticky grime of the Rexine-covered front seat and was quietened by a tap on their heads from their mother at the back. ‘Yes, yes, mountains. The Himalayas. We’ll be there soon.’
‘Hunh.’ A sceptical grunt from the driver of the tired, dust-coated grey Ambassador car. ‘At least five more hours to Simla.’ He ran his hand over the back of his neck where all the dirt of the road seemed to have found its way under the wilting cotton collar.
‘Sim-la! Sim-la!’ the boys set up a chant, their knees jouncing up and down in unison.
Smack, the driver’s left hand landed on the closest pair, bringing out an instant flush of red and sudden, sullen silence.
‘Be quiet!’ the mother hissed from the back seat, unnecessarily.
The Ambassador gave a sudden lurch, throwing everyone forwards. The baby, whose mouth had been glued to the nipple of a rubber bottle like a fly to syrup, came unstuck and let out a wail of indignation. Even the mother let out a small involuntary cry. Her daughter, who had been asleep on the back seat, her legs across her mother’s lap, crowding the baby and its bottle, now stirred.
‘Accident!’ howled the small boy who had been smacked, triumphantly.
But no, it was not. His father had stopped, with the usual infuriating control exercised by robotic adults, just short of the bicycle rickshaw ahead. The bicycle rickshaw had, equally robotically, avoided riding forwards into the bullock cart carrying a party of farmers’ families to market. Then there was a bus, loaded with baggage and spilling over with passengers, and that too had shuddered to a halt with a grinding of brakes. Ahead of it was a truck, wrapped and folded in canvas sheets that blocked all else from sight. The mountains had disappeared and so had the road.
Also the first cacophony of screeching brakes and grinding gears. There followed the comparatively static hum of engines, and drivers waited in exasperation for the next lurch forwards. For the moment there was a lull, unusual on that highway. Then the waiting very quickly began to fray at the edges. The sun was beating on the metal of the vehicles and the road lay flattened across the parched plain without a tree to screen them from the sun or dust. First one car horn began to honk, then a bicycle rickshaw began to clang its bell, then a truck blared its musical horn maddeningly, and then the lesser ones began to go pom-pom, pom-pom, almost in harmony, and suddenly, out of the centre of all that noise, a long piercing wail emerged, almost from under their feet or out of their own mouths.
The two boys, the girl, the baby, all sat up, shocked, more so when they saw it was their father who was the perpetrator of this outrage. Clenching the wheel with both hands, h
is head was lowered onto it and the blare of the horn seemed to issue out of his fury.
The mother exclaimed.
He raised his head and banged on the wheel, struck it.
‘How will we get to Simla before dark?’ he howled.
The mother exclaimed again, shocked, ‘But we’ll be moving again, in a minute.’
As if to contradict her, the driver of the mountainous truck stalled at the top of the line swung himself out of the cabin into the road. He’d turned off his engine and stood in the deeply rutted dust, fumbling in his shirt pocket for cigarettes.
Other drivers got out of and off their vehicles – the bullock cart driver lowered himself from the creaking cart, the bicycle rickshaw driver descended, the bus driver got out and stalked, in his sweat-drenched khakis, towards the truck driver standing at the head of the line, and they all demanded, ‘What’s going on? Breakdown?’
The truck driver watched them approach but he was lighting his cigarette and didn’t answer till it was lit and between his fingers. Then he waved an arm – and his movements were leisurely, elegant, quite unlike what his driving had been, on the highway in front of them, maniacal – and said, ‘Stone throw. Somebody threw a stone. Hit my windshield. Cracked it.’
The father in the Ambassador had also joined them in the road. Hand on his hips, he demanded, ‘So?’
‘So?’ said the truck driver, narrowing his eyes. They were grey in a tanned face, heavily outlined and elongated with kohl, and his hair was tied up in a bandana with a long loose end that dangled upon his shoulder. ‘So we won’t be moving again till the person who did it is caught and brought to a faisla.’