by Anita Desai
Luis fell back, allowing a party of curious tourists to edge up in front of him, in the hope they would conceal him from Alejandro. But of course Alejandro was not looking at him – he was plucking his guitar with his eyes closed and his head thrown back as he sang:
‘Who dares to come and steal
My paradise, Tepoztlán?’
Someone was going around selling tapes of, presumably, Alejandro’s songs. A young woman in a flowered skirt circled the crowds with a straw hat outstretched, collecting donations. She smiled into Luis’s face: hers was like a ripe peach, so round and sweet. He dug into his pockets and brought out a crumpled note for her.
Now Alejandro was waving at the crowd and turning to run back up the post office steps and vanish among his friends there while another figure leapt into their midst: a lithe young man dressed entirely in black but with his pants cut off at the knees and his shirt open on his chest. In his hands he held an empty rum bottle and with it he performed a dance of a kind Luis had never seen in the clubs and parties to which he had been. He could hardly maintain his composure as he watched the man crouch, roll on the ground, leap, fall, clutch the bottle and fling it away, all with such abandon and fury that it had Luis flinching.
There was a comic interlude to follow: a fool-faced vendor of eggs strolled through the audience and tried to sell them, a clown-faced policeman accosted him with a rubber truncheon and dragged him off to a frowning judge with a cotton-wool beard who made a fool of himself by asking the vendor totally absurd and irrelevant questions till the egg vendor, exasperated, seized the policeman’s truncheon and brought it down on the judge’s head. The crowd roared. Luis felt he should now edge away and disappear. There was no need to be an onlooker at a market sideshow along with vegetable sellers and tortilla eaters.
But the dancer had returned to the ring and Luis, looking back, saw his feline body stalk across the space with the kind of authority that rivets an onlooker. Besides, Luis caught sight of another figure strutting across the ring from the other direction, towards him and past him – a girl in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, ordinary laced black shoes, her hair cut short to her shoulders, no make-up or costume, but with a dancer’s controlled grace and carefully considered movements that invested the faintest turn of her head or twist of the wrist with significance. Luis was held by that grace and authority, and as he stared it dawned on him who she was: Arturo’s kid sister, one of the two little girls who had smiled at him when he visited, sometimes played basketball in the garden with the boys, and for whom he had developed boyishly sentimental feelings he never confessed to anyone, scarcely even to himself. Ester and Isabel – he remembered their names now: which one was she? He glanced across at Arturo who was standing at the top of the stairs, watching, his arms folded about him, and his expression – watchful, proprietorial, concerned – confirmed his impression: this was Isabel, or perhaps Ester, grown into this astonishing young sylph, dancing with the man in black as he had never seen anyone dance in the city, at clubs or parties. Where had she learnt to dance like that – in that man’s embrace, or rejected by him and on her own, then with a second dancer who entered the arena and prowled around, waiting for his chance and taking it? Here was Ester – or Isabel – and now she was grown-up, and dancing amongst grownups, performing, acting out those rites of attraction, infatuation, rejection and recovery that Luis had not only not experienced yet but not witnessed anyone in his circle of family and friends experience with such ardour, abandon and intensity.
The trio met in the centre of the ring and performed their dance together, then parted, stalking off in different directions, and Alejandro was returning, holding his guitar above his head, when Luis broke away and pushed his way out past the onlookers.
He hurried past the lurid murals, the huarache sellers and the comic-book stalls under the trees by the bandstand and out onto Avenida de la Revolución 1910 without thinking. It was the wrong direction, he realized, and he would have to walk down its length before he could take the turn that led him back to Matamoros – Matamoros where Doña Celia kept the old house as it had always been, and the world at bay.
The entire street was jammed with the gaieties of the Sunday market, shoppers strolling in the sun, picking through stalls of silver trinkets, scarves and blouses, paper flowers and painted mirrors. The ice cream and sorbet stall, festooned with pink and blue pompoms, was so busy it was hard to get past it. The middle of the street was taken up by the young, sipping margaritas from clay mugs, or large families enjoying helados. The women wore high heels and low-cut blouses, dark glasses and jewellery, the young girls had tinted hair, painted nails and laughing mouths and young men pressed against them, admiring.
These were the people from Cuernavaca and Mexico City to whose parties Luis went when he was at home; these were the girls with whom he danced, the young men with whom he played tennis. If there were a golf club here, then these were the people who would play on its course. His family would urge him to join them: he belonged, they belonged, to the same society. He did not belong to the people under the marquee – they would have been strangers to his family, and they would have looked upon him as an onlooker, and an outsider.
Then what made him push his way out of their company and stumble through the gate to the convento and seek out its calm, cool cloisters? He had always liked to come here, for its quiet and shade and vast views of the mountains and valleys from its deep windows. It had always been an oasis to which he could withdraw, for contemplation.
In the court, the sun stone, immobile;
above, the sun of fire and of time turns;
movement is sun and the sun is stone.
Now he walked down the shaded veranda under a ceiling painted with crimson roses not quite faded into the stone, and entered the courtyard where water dropped quietly from a fountain set amongst grass paths and potted bougainvillea. But above it hung a strange, unfamiliar shape fashioned out of wicker and fastened by ropes to the belfry. What was it? He climbed the stairs to the upper galleries for a closer look at the wicker basket – or was it a trap? – and found the galleries hung with art exhibits and remembered that that was the use to which the convento was nowadays put. If this could be called an art exhibit: the exhibition clearly had to do with Tepoztlán’s environment – the subject could not be avoided, it confronted him wherever he went. Here were photographs of its flowers and birds, here were installations of sand scattered with ugly litter – Coke cans, plastic bolsas – and paintings of devastated landscapes, pitted and marred by modern, urban blight, photographs of the aged, their weathered faces looking out of doorways and windows, watching.
Luis caught his breath. Was there no escape from Tepoztlán’s issues and involvements, its demands and accusations? And whose side was he on? Everything, everyone he encountered seemed to ask him to decide, to declare.
It was late afternoon when he finally turned into Avenida Matamoros, and early clouds had begun to descend from the mountains. The bamboo grove threw long shadows across the white dust and in it sprawled men he’d seen earlier, heavily asleep. He had to avoid stumbling on their limp figures and empty bottles. He turned in at the gate and shut it quickly behind him.
In the shadowy drawing room Doña Celia was seated stiffly as an idol but on seeing him began at once to complain about how the town had gone to pieces and wanted to know if he had noticed the deterioration. Who, what is it that has deteriorated but you, you old ghost? he wanted to ask and to say that everyone else was moving on, on, but instead he muttered his impressions as non-committally as possible. Nadyn, who was poking at a Raidolito with a hairpin and blinking against its fumes, interrupted to ask if he had met any of his old friends. What were they doing now? she wanted to know as if confident he would reply ‘Nothing’ at which she could pull a face, but he turned it into ‘I don’t know’, disappointing her.
‘There’s nothing to know. The young today – pah!’ snorted Doña Celia, drawing her shawl about her throat wit
h a malevolent glare.
It was a relief when Teresa announced dinner and they rose to go and sit at a table where she had placed a pot of pozole and stood waiting for Luis to take his first spoonful. ‘Good?’ she queried. ‘As good as before, eh?’
Nadyn looked up and frowned at her but Doña Celia herself was giving the soup her approval, slurping it up with indiscreet sounds that expressed relish – in spite of everything, expressed relish.
Luis had to wait till Teresa was gone before saying to his aunt, ‘I will be leaving in the morning. Please don’t let me disturb you – so early – I’ll let myself out—’
What? Doña Celia’s expression managed to say, after another quick, delicious swallow. Slowly her look of pleasure was overtaken by the habitual displeasure. So soon? He had only just come. ‘And are you not staying for Cousin Heriberto’s birthday celebration? It is to be a very big celebration, you know. He is eighty years old this week.’ All his children were coming, from Monterrey, from Toluca – even Luis’s parents had spoken of coming. Why then—
His thesis. His classes. The university—But not in the summer, surely? Research had to be continued, you see, no rest for the weary. He flushed as he stumbled over his excuses and Nadyn watched with a tightening of her lips – she of course saw through them instantly. Her pride at never having made them herself gave her mouth a bitter twist.
‘We’re too old for you, not up to date, eh?’ she said. ‘Ah, the gringo—’
He wanted to protest but the words disintegrated in his mouth, useless. He lowered his eyes to the bowl of soup, Teresa’s excellent pozole. He felt ashamed of not doing it the honour it deserved.
The Rooftop Dwellers
Paying off the autorickshaw driver, she stepped down cautiously, clutching her handbag to her. The colony was much further out than she had expected – they had travelled through bazaars and commerical centres and suburbs she had not known existed – but the name given on the gate matched the one in her purse. She went up to it and rattled the latch to announce her arrival. Immediately a dog began to yap and she could tell by its shrillness that it was one of those small dogs that readily sink their tiny teeth into one’s ankle or rip through the edge of one’s sari. There were also screams from several children. Yet no one came to open the gate for her and finally she let herself in, hoping the dog was chained or indoors. Certainly there was no one in the tiny garden which consisted of a patch of lawn and a tap in front of the yellow stucco villa. All the commotion appeared to be going on indoors and she walked up to the front door – actually at the side of the house – and rang the bell, clearing her throat like a saleswoman preparing to sell a line in knitting patterns or home-made jams.
She was finally admitted by a very small servant boy in striped cotton pyjamas and a torn grey vest, and taken to meet the family. They were seated on a large bed in the centre of a room with walls painted an electric blue, all watching a show on a gigantic television set. It was an extremely loud, extremely dramatic scene showing a confrontation between a ranting hero, a weeping heroine and a benignly smiling saint, and the whole family was watching open-mouthed, reluctant to turn their attention away from it. But when their dog darted out from under the bed at her, she screamed and the servant boy flapped his duster and cried, ‘No, Candy! Get down, Candy!’ they had no alternative but to turn to her, resentfully.
‘You have come just at Mahabharata time,’ the woman crosslegged on the bed reproached her.
‘Sit down, sit down, beti. You can watch it with us,’ the man said more agreeably, waving at an open corner on the bed, and since they had all transferred their attention back to the screen, she was forced to perch on it, fearfully holding her ankles up in the air so as not to be nipped by Candy, who had been driven back under the bed and hid there, growling. The two children stared at her for a bit, impassively, then went back to picking their noses and following the episode of the Mahabharata that the whole city of Delhi watched, along with the rest of the country, on Sunday evenings – everyone, except for her.
There had been too much happening in her life to leave room for watching television and keeping up with the soap operas and mythological sagas. In any case, there was no television set in the women’s hostel where she had a room. There was nothing in it except what was absolutely essential: the dining room on the ground floor with its long tables, its benches, its metal plates and utensils, and the kitchen with its hatch through which the food appeared in metal pots; and upstairs the rows of rooms, eight feet by ten, each equipped with a wooden bedframe, and a shelf nailed to the wall. She had had to purchase a plastic bucket to take to the bathroom at the end of the corridor so she could bathe under the standing tap – not high enough to work as a shower – and had arranged her toilet articles on the shelf and left her clothes in her tin trunk which she covered with a pink tablecloth and sat on when she did not want to sit on her bed, or when one of the other women in the hostel came to visit her and climbed onto her bed to have a chat.
The minimalism of these living arrangements was both a novelty and a shock to her. She came from a home where the accommodation of objects, their comfortable clutter and convenience, could be taken for granted. Nothing had been expensive or elaborate but there had been plenty of whatever there was, accumulated over many years: rugs, chairs, cushions, clothes, dishes, in rooms, verandas, odd corners and spaces. So for the first two weeks she felt she was trapped in a cell; whenever she shut the door, she was swallowed by the cell, its prisoner. If she left the door ajar, every girl going past would look in, scream, ‘Oh, Moyna!’ and come in to talk, tell her of the latest atrocity committed by the matron or of the unbelievably rotten food being served downstairs, and also of their jobs, their bosses, their colleagues, and homes and families. Some were divorcees, some widows, and some supported large families, all of which led to an endless fund of stories to be told. In order to get any sleep, she would have to shut the door and pretend not to be in. Then she began to wonder if she was in herself.
But such was her determination to make her new life as a working woman in the metropolis succeed, and such was her unexpected, unforeseen capacity for adjustment, that after a month or so the minimalism became no longer privation and a challenge but simply a way of life. She even found herself stopping at her neighbours’ open doors on her way back from the office, to say, ‘D’you know what they’re cooking for our dinner downstairs?’ and laughing when the others groaned, invariably, ‘Pumpkin!’ because that was all there ever was, or else to give the warning, ‘Matron’s mad! I heard her screaming at Leila – she found out about her iron. Hide yours, quick!’ It became a habit, instead of a subject of complaint, to carry her bucket down to the bathroom when she wanted to bathe, and bring it back to her room so it wouldn’t be stolen: thefts were common, unfortunately. Even the tap, and water, began to seem like luxuries, bonuses not to be taken for granted in that hostel.
After a breakfast of tea, bread and fried eggs, she went out to stand at the bus stop with the other women, all of whom caught the Ladies’ Special that came around at nine o’clock and carried them to their work places as telephone operators, typists, desk receptionists, nurses, teachers, airline hostesses and bank tellers, without the menace of crazed young men groping at them or pressing into them as if magnetized, or even delivering vicious pinches before leaping off the bus and running for their lives. Some women had had to develop defensive strategies. Lily, known to be ‘bold’, instructed others to carry a sharp pin concealed in their fists and use that to prod anyone who came too close. ‘I’ve made big men cry,’ she boasted proudly, but most women in the hostel preferred to pay the extra rupee or two to travel on the Ladies’ Special instead of the regular DTS. Like tap water, it was a luxury, a bonus, which had their gratitude.
Moyna’s descriptions of these strategies of living earned her the admiration of her family and friends back at home to whom she described them, but trouble began for her just as she was settling into this new, challenging
way of life. She came across the hostel cook kicking viciously at the skeletal yellow kitten that had crept in from outside in the hope of one of life’s unexpected bonuses – a drop of milk left in someone’s tumbler, or a scrap from the garbage bin. Instinctively she lowered her hand and called it to her – she came from a home that was shelter to an assortment of cats, dogs, birds, some maimed, some pregnant, some dying. She shared her bread and fried egg with the kitten, and soon it started weaving in and out of her sari folds, then followed her up the stairs and darted into her room. This was novelty indeed: having someone to share the cell with her. It was curious how instantly the room ceased to be a prison. The kitten settled onto the pink tablecloth on the trunk and began to lick itself clean, delicately raising one leg at a time into the air and making a thorough toilet, as if it were preparing to be fit for such luxurious accommodation. Later, that night, she woke to find it had sprung from the trunk to her bed. Knowing it probably had fleas, she tried to kick it off, but it clung on and started to purr, as if to persuade her of its accomplishments. Purring, it lay against her leg and lulled her back to sleep.
One day the matron was inspecting during the day, when they were all away, for such forbidden items as irons and hot plates, and came out holding the kitten by the scruff of his neck. Moyna pleaded innocence and swore she did not know how he had got into her room. But when she was caught red-handed, emptying the milk jug into a saucer for Mao under the table, the matron slapped her with the eviction notice. Had Moyna not read the rule: No Pets Allowed?
Instinctively, she knew not to mention Mao to this family. Somehow that would have to be sorted out, if she took the room they had to offer. But, glancing round at their faces in the flickering light from the television set, she began to feel uncertain if she would take it. At her office, Tara, who was experienced in these matters, had told her, ‘You don’t have to take the first room you see, Moyna. You can look around and choose.’ But Moyna had already ‘looked around’ and while, by comparison with the cell in the women’s hostel, all the rooms had seemed princely, shamingly it was she who had been turned down by one prospective landlord or landlady after the other. She had been scrutinized with such suspicion, questioned with such hostility, that she realized that no matter what they stated in their advertisements, they had nothing but fear and loathing for the single working woman, and the greatest dread of allowing one into their safe, decent homes. Moyna wondered how she could convey such an impression of sin and wantonness. She dressed in a clean, starched cotton sari every day, and even though her hair was cut short, it was simply pinned back behind her ears, not curled or dyed. And surely her job in the office of a literary journal was innocent enough? But they narrowed their eyes, saw her as too young, too pretty, too unattached, too much an instrument of danger, and dismissed her as a candidate for their barsatis. These rooms had once been built on Delhi’s flat rooftops so that families who slept out on their roofs on summer nights could draw in their beds in case of a sudden dust storm or thunder shower. But now that Delhi was far too unsafe for sleeping alfresco, these barsatis were being rented out to working spinsters or bachelors at a delightful profit.