by David Miller
“You will. Are you tired, darling?” her husband asked.
“Not too tired. Darling.”
Five days went by before Fergus and Barbara could get together with Bernard and Anna – five days of meetings, of house hunting, of the hiring of a tutor. “Though I’m not sure I have the stomach for another language,” Barbara said. “I’ll mime my way around.”
At last the four met on a Saturday night in the dining room of the inn. Under his vest Bernard wore a button-down instead of a T-shirt. He looked like a woodman. Anna wore a cocktail dress – Fergus remembered that his mother had once owned one like it: blue taffeta, with a wide skirt.
The innkeeper sent over a bottle of wine. They bought a second bottle. Guests of the inn and citizens of the town came into the big room in pairs and groups.
“Saturday night,” Anna remarked. “It’s always like this.”
At ten o’clock the innkeeper brought out his collection of big band records, and there was dancing in a glassed-in terrace that overlooked the square. Fergus danced with Barbara, then with Anna.
“I like your wife,” she said.
“I like your village. I think we’ll be happy here.”
“I suspect you’re happy everywhere.”
“Happy enough,” he said, cautiously. “We have a taste for small things.”
“Here you can make a lot out of a little. Old tragedies like the news vendor’s. His father had a fit and chopped off his fingers when he was twelve …”
“Good Lord.” The music stopped.
“He speaks half a dozen languages, more when he’s sober. Life’s a game to him.”
Music again: the big band records repeated. Couples again took the floor. Fergus smiled at the people he’d already met and wondered which would become intimates, which only friends.
“What other scandals can you tell me?” he asked.
“Bernard and I are a bit of a scandal … not being married, you know.”
“I didn’t know. That’s not much of a scandal these days,” he said lightly.
She gave him an offended stare. Though the floor had become crowded, he maneuvered her sideways, backward, forward, without colliding with anyone. He had always been a skillful dancer.
“I am married,” she said at last. “Bernard isn’t. I’ve seen you watching the photographs. Isn’t she pretty?”
“She is your image.”
“We lived in Paris. My husband owned jewelry shops. I designed brooches, necklaces. Ten years ago Bernard persuaded me to move in with him. I thought to divorce.”
Divorce was not on his list of unbearables; it was simply unthinkable. “Custody?” he asked.
“We’d divide her.”
“She liked dolls.”
“She was careless with the antiques.”
“Yes, well …”
“The bastard sent the whole collection in a taxi across town,” she said, heatedly now. “As if they were groceries. He sold his business, and decamped with our daughter. I traced them to New York but never any further.”
“That’s kidnapping,” Fergus said. “It can’t be done.”
“No? It was done.”
“She would be … eighteen?”
“She is eighteen,” Anna chided softly.
The song had not ended but they had stopped dancing. He stood with his heels together, stiff as a palace guard. Her fingers caressed the silk of her skirt. He took her right hand in his left and placed his own right on the small of her back and moved forward lightly, mechanically. “You and Bernard were young enough to have children together.”
“Oh, young enough,” she said, and nodded; this time she was not offended. “But I would have no further children until my first child was returned. Loyalty. It’s how I’m made.”
She smiled that brave little smile. Her spite uncoiled like a paper snake; Fergus felt its twitch. He imagined Bernard beset by his own longings: raising a rifle to his shoulder and training its sight on the hollow of her neck … Because the music was ending at last, and because Anna’s outdated dress demanded some appreciative flourish, Fergus whirled her once and then urged her backward over his left arm. He did not bend over her as custom demanded, but instead looked fiercely at Barbara and the toyman standing profile to profile against the floodlit square.
Barbara felt the beam cast by his eyes, and turned to face it. He was holding Anna so oddly, like a garment. Anna, one hand clawing his upper arm, righted herself, looking aggrieved. Barbara tactfully shifted her own gaze to the square, where smoke rose from the pipes of standing men; and a café waiter stacked chairs, one on top of another on top of another; and the news vendor, the hour of repose come round, lifted the handles of the barrow and trundled it across the cobblestones, his footfalls managing to keep time with the church clock; ten unsteady steps … click; ten steps … click; ten steps …
“Tomorrow is Sunday,” she heard Fergus loudly saying. His shoulder brushed hers. “We have to call the States early, because of the time difference,” he said, somehow getting it wrong even after all these years, or pretending to; anyway, he rushed her away from their new friends with only the skimpiest of good-byes.
Fergus, in pajamas, sat on the billowing quilt, clipping his toe-nails into the wastebasket. Barbara, in her nightgown, brushed her short hair.
“I thought they’d lost her,” he said.
“They lost sight of her.”
“Bernard, a bereaved father, I thought. Well, bereaved in a way. His children were never allowed to be born.” He got up and moved the wastebasket back to the corner of the room and put the clippers on the highboy.
“He’s made other people’s children his,” Barbara said. Fergus, considering, put his elbow on the highboy. “A reasonable alternative to the terrors of parenthood, some would say,” she added.
He gave her a look of distaste.
She countered with one of boldness. “Maybe even preferable.”
“Some would say,” he hurried to supply, sparing her the necessity of repeating the phrase, she who had experienced motherhood’s joys in such reassuring milieus – just listen to that faithful clock. “Well, we know better,” he said.
And waited for her assent.
And waited.
PRIVATE TUITION BY MR BOSE
Anita Desai
One of the quietest writers I’ve read, Anita Desai (b.1937) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for In Custody, later filmed by Ismail Merchant. She has also been awarded the RSL’s Benson Medal and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship as well as, in 2014, the Padma Bhushan. Her work includes The Zigzag Way, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Clear Light of Day and Fasting, Feasting.
Mr Bose gave his private tuition out on the balcony, in the evenings, in the belief that, since it faced south, the river Hooghly would send it a wavering breeze or two to drift over the rooftops, through the washing and the few pots of tulsi and marigold that his wife had placed precariously on the balcony rail, to cool him, fan him, soothe him. But there was no breeze: it was hot, the air hung upon them like a damp towel, gagging him and, speaking through this gag, he tiredly intoned the Sanskrit verses that should, he felt, have been roared out on a hill-top at sunrise.
“Aum. Usa va asvasya medhyasya sirah …”
It came out, of course, a mumble. Asked to translate, his pupil, too, scowled as he had done, thrust his fist through his hair and mumbled:
“Aum is the dawn and the head of a horse …”
Mr Bose protested in a low wail. “What horse, my boy? What horse?”
The boy rolled his eyes sullenly. “I don’t know, sir, it doesn’t say.”
Mr Bose looked at him in disbelief. He was the son of a Brahmin priest who himself instructed him in the Mahabharata all morning, turning him over to Mr Bose only in the evening when he set out to officiate at weddings, puja and other functions for which he was so much in demand on account of his stately bearing, his calm and inscrutable face and his sensuous voice that so suited the Sanskrit language in whic
h he, almost always, discoursed. And this was his son – this Pritam with his red-veined eyes and oiled locks, his stumbling fingers and shuffling feet that betrayed his secret life, its scruffiness, its gutters and drains full of resentment and destruction. Mr Bose suddenly remembered how he had seen him, from the window of a bus that had come to a standstill on the street due to a fist fight between the conductor and a passenger, Pritam slipping up the stairs, through the door, into a neon-lit bar off Park Street.
“The sacrificial horse,” Mr Bose explained with forced patience. “Have you heard of Asvamedha, Pritam, the royal horse that was let loose to run through the kingdom before it returned to the capital and was sacrificed by the king?”
The boy gave him a look of such malice that Mr Bose bit the end of his moustache and fell silent, shuffling through the pages. “Read on, then,” he mumbled and listened, for a while, as Pritam blundered heavily through the Sanskrit verses that rolled off his father’s experienced tongue, and even Mr Bose’s shy one, with such rich felicity. When he could not bear it any longer, he turned his head, slightly, just enough to be able to look out of the corner of his eye through the open door, down the unlit passage at the end of which, in the small, dimly lit kitchen, his wife sat kneading dough for bread, their child at her side. Her head was bowed so that some of her hair had freed itself of the long steel pins he hated so much and hung about her pale, narrow face. The red border of her sari was the only stripe of colour in that smoky scene. The child beside her had his back turned to the door so that Mr Bose could see his little brown buttocks under the short white shirt, squashed firmly down upon the woven mat. Mr Bose wondered what it was that kept him so quiet – perhaps his mother had given him a lump of dough to mould into some thick and satisfying shape. Both of them seemed bound together and held down in some deeply absorbing act from which he was excluded. He would have liked to break in and join them.
Pritam stopped reading, maliciously staring at Mr Bose whose lips were wavering into a smile beneath the ragged moustache. The woman, disturbed by the break in the recitation on the balcony, looked up, past the child, down the passage and into Mr Bose’s face. Mr Bose’s moustache lifted up like a pair of wings and, beneath them, his smile lifted up and out with almost a laugh of tenderness and delight. Beginning to laugh herself, she quickly turned, pulled down the corners of her mouth with mock sternness, trying to recall him to the path of duty, and picking up a lump of sticky dough, handed it back to the child, softly urging him to be quiet and let his father finish the lesson.
Pritam, the scabby, oil-slick son of a Brahmin priest, coughed theatrically – a cough imitating that of a favourite screen actor, surely, it was so false and over-done and suggestive. Mr Bose swung around in dismay, crying “Why have you stopped? Go on, go on.”
“You weren’t listening, sir.”
Many words, many questions leapt to Mr Bose’s lips, ready to pounce on this miserable boy whom he could hardly bear to see sitting beneath his wife’s holy tulsi plant that she tended with prayers, water-can and oil-lamp every evening. Then, growing conscious of the way his moustache was agitating upon his upper lip, he said only, “Read.
“Ahar va asvam purustan mahima nvajagata …”
Across the road someone turned on a radio and a song filled with a pleasant, lilting weltschmerz twirled and sank, twirled and rose from that balcony to this. Pritam raised his voice, grinding through the Sanskrit consonants like some dying, diseased tram-car. From the kitchen only a murmur and the soft thumping of the dough in the pan could be heard – sounds as soft and comfortable as sleepy pigeons. Mr Bose longed passionately to listen to them, catch every faintest nuance of them, but to do this he would have to smash the radio, hurl the Brahmin’s son down the iron stairs … He curled up his hands on his knees and drew his feet together under him, horrified at this welling up of violence inside him, under his pale pink bush-shirt, inside his thin, ridiculously heaving chest. As often as Mr Bose longed to alter the entire direction of the world’s revolution, as often as he longed to break the world apart into two halves and shake out of them – what? Festival fireworks, a woman’s soft hair, blood-stained feathers? – he would shudder and pale at the thought of his indiscretion, his violence, this secret force that now and then threatened, clamoured, so that he had quickly to still it, squash it. After all, he must continue with his private tuitions: that was what was important. The baby had to have his first pair of shoes and soon he would be needing oranges, biscuits, plastic toys. “Read,” said Mr Bose, a little less sternly, a little more sadly.
But, “It is seven, I can go home now,” said Pritam triumphantly, throwing his father’s thick yellow Mahabharata into his bag, knocking the bag shut with one fist and preparing to fly. Where did he fly to? Mr Bose wondered if it would be the neon-lit bar off Park Street. Then, seeing the boy disappear down the black stairs – the bulb had fused again – he felt it didn’t matter, didn’t matter one bit since it left him alone to turn, plunge down the passage and fling himself at the doorposts of the kitchen, there to stand and gaze down at his wife, now rolling out purees with an exquisite, back-and-forth rolling motion of her hands, and his son, trying now to make a spoon stand on one end.
She only glanced at him, pretended not to care, pursed her lips to keep from giggling, flipped the puree over and rolled it finer and flatter still. He wanted so much to touch her hair, the strand that lay over her shoulder in a black loop, and did not know how to – she was so busy. “Your hair is coming loose,” he said.
“Go, go,” she warned, “I hear the next one coming.”
So did he, he heard the soft patting of sandals on the worn steps outside, so all he did was bend and touch the small curls of hair on his son’s neck. They were so soft, they seemed hardly human and quite frightened him. When he took his hand away he felt the wisps might have come off onto his fingers and he rubbed the tips together wonderingly. The child let fall the spoon, with a magnificent ring, onto a brass dish and started at this discovery of percussion.
The light on the balcony was dimmed as his next pupil came to stand in the doorway. Quickly he pulled himself away from the doorpost and walked back to his station, tense with unspoken words and unexpressed emotion. He had quite forgotten that his next pupil, this Wednesday, was to be Upneet. Rather Pritam again than this once-a-week typhoon, Upneet of the flowered sari, ruby ear-rings and shaming laughter. Under this Upneet’s gaze such ordinary functions of a tutor’s life as sitting down at a table, sharpening a pencil and opening a book to the correct page became matters of farce, disaster and hilarity. His very bones sprang out of joint. He did not know where to look – everywhere were Upneet’s flowers, Upneet’s giggles. Immediately, at the very sight of the tip of her sandal peeping out beneath the flowered hem of her sari, he was a man broken to pieces, flung this way and that, rattling. Rattling.
Throwing away the Sanskrit books, bringing out volumes of Bengali poetry, opening to a poem by Jibanandan Das, he wondered ferociously: Why did she come? What use had she for Bengali poetry? Why did she come from that house across the road where the loud radio rollicked, to sit on his balcony, in view of his shy wife, making him read poetry to her? It was intolerable. Intolerable, all of it – except, only for the seventy-five rupees paid at the end of the month. Oranges, he thought grimly, and milk, medicines, clothes. And he read to her:
“Her hair was the dark night of Vidisha,
Her face the sculpture of Svarasti …”
Quite steadily he read, his tongue tamed and enthralled by the rhythm of the verse he had loved (copied on a sheet of blue paper, he had sent it to his wife one day when speech proved inadequate).
“‘Where have you been so long?’ she asked,
Lifting her bird’s-nest eyes,
Banalata Sen of Natore.”
Pat-pat-pat. No, it was not the rhythm of the verse, he realized, but the tapping of her foot, green-sandalled, red-nailed, swinging and swinging to lift the hem of her sari up and up. His eyes
slid off the book, watched the flowered hem swing out and up, out and up as the green-sandalled foot peeped out, then in, peeped out, then in. For a while his tongue ran on of its own volition:
“All birds come home, and all rivers,
Life’s ledger is closed …”
But he could not continue – it was the foot, the sandal that carried on the rhythm exactly as if he were still reciting. Even the radio stopped its rollicking and, as a peremptory voice began to enumerate the day’s disasters and achievements all over the world, Mr Bose heard more vigorous sounds from his kitchen as well. There too the lulling pigeon sounds had been crisply turned off and what he heard were bangs and rattles among the kitchen pots, a kettledrum of commands, he thought. The baby, letting out a wail of surprise, paused, heard the nervous commotion continue and intensify and launched himself on a series of wails.
Mr Bose looked up, aghast. He could not understand how these two halves of the difficult world that he had been holding so carefully together, sealing them with reams of poetry, reams of Sanskrit, had split apart into dissonance. He stared at his pupil’s face, creamy, feline, satirical, and was forced to complete the poem in a stutter:
“Only darkness remains, to sit facing
Banalata Sen of Natore.”
But the darkness was filled with hideous sounds of business and anger and command. The radio news commentator barked, the baby wailed, the kitchen pots clashed. He even heard his wife’s voice raised, angrily, at the child, like a threatening stick. Glancing again at his pupil whom he feared so much, he saw precisely that lift of the eyebrows and that twist of a smile that disjointed him, rattled him.
“Er – please read,” he tried to correct, to straighten that twist of eyebrows and lips. “Please read.”