The Intrusion and Other Stories

by Shashi Deshpande

  It is only a few moments before I am to enter the operation theatre that I get a strange thought. Out of our dull embrace, made duller by routine and habit, a new life had emerged. A strange and mysterious thing to imagine. A miracle, when I think of how we had willed and acted against it. All at once, the foetus becomes a child and takes on a personality. Stubborn, determined, eager for life. Unwilling tentacles of feeling reach out from me to the thing I’m carrying so reluctantly.

  Then it is time to go in and I stifle the feeling. Withdraw it into myself. And now everything is smothered in the white professionalism I encounter. Once again I’m not a human being. I close my mind and lie on the table. My legs! That hurts! How do you imagine I look in this grotesque posture, I silently ask the masked face that looks down expressionlessly at me. It’s not fair, not fair. The thought thuds into my mind like a hammer. Not fair.

  I close my eyes tight, but the vision of myself in this ridiculous posture persists. This, I tell myself, is the last and worst indignity I have to endure. Soon the small discomforts crowd out the big ones. The shame fades. I’m just a patient. ‘One small prick and you’ll feel nothing,’ a soft voice assures me. The eyes are impersonal, but the voice talks to me as if I’m a child. I can respond to nothing now. Then thoughts too recede. Darkness advances and obliterates everything.

  I wake up to hear a moaning. I move painfully, in twisting, murky labyrinths before I discover they are my own moans. Restlessly I try to move my legs, but I cannot. They are pinioned. There is a pain. Someone, something is hurting me. I am suddenly angry at the indignity of my position. The pain is forgotten. ‘My legs,’ I mumble. ‘Please, my legs.’

  The pain goes on. I begin to make little moaning sounds again. From a distance I can hear murmurs. And scurrying sounds. Everything is far away. Then there is a cool sensation on my arm, a tiny point of pain. ‘I’m sorry,’ I hear someone say. And abruptly everything goes away again.

  I emerge with an awareness of feeling very hot. Where am I? There is a light, a brilliant, white light. The whole scene has a soundless brilliance, as if I’m looking through a glass door. There are people around me, but I’m detached from them. What… what has happened? Then, all at once, I know the answer. I’ve had a baby. The fact emerges, vivid, startlingly clear, out of the haze that surrounds me.

  I wake up gripping this fact. They are standing about me, smiling, pleased, triumphant. And immediately I know what has happened. It is like a burlesque, a travesty of the usual scene. Will they say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve just lost a son.’ Or was it a daughter?

  I dreamt I had a baby,’1 say at once. He winces as if I have struck him. The smiles fade away magically.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ the doctor asks me in her most professional tone, as if chiding me for my words. Maybe I should have said, ‘Thank you for getting rid of it.’

  ‘Yes.’ I am curt too. I try to sit up, but sag. He sits beside me and puts my head gently on the pillow. They have all gone, leaving us alone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘What for?’ I am surprised. Why should he be sorry?

  ‘I feel…’ he hesitates. I wait, expectant. ‘I feel bad about the whole thing.’

  ‘You’re not sorry it’s….’I cannot complete my sentence. How can a thing which has never lived die?

  ‘No, not that. That doesn’t matter now. It’s you I feel sorry for.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I say drowsily, wondering at his words, ‘that doesn’t matter now.’ Strange that I feel no hostility towards him now. I hold his hand tightly, and drift into a heavy, uneasy sleep.

  I wake up sometime in the middle of the night. There is a baby crying somewhere. The cries sound unnaturally loud. And husky, as if the baby has been crying for a long time. I am aware of a sense of impatience. And a feeling—I’ve been through this before. And suddenly a memory rushes in on me with stunning force. My first baby crying. And I had singled out the cry, when there were ten more babies, as my baby’s. My frantic impatience to hold him, to feed him. I had pressed the bell desperately.

  Now, abruptly, there is silence. I imagine the mother feeding it, feeling inexpressibly lighter. The sensuous thrill as the baby tugs at the nipples. And the baby, hands and legs flailing about, sucking eagerly, inexpertly.

  I feel a heaviness in my own breasts. There is a hollow feeling within me. I’m filled with strange thoughts. Where have I heard that, after an amputation, a person continues to feel the amputated limb? It itches, it hurts, it exists. Now, like a phantom limb, my child seems to cling on to me. Now, when he does not exist, he asserts himself. I am conscious of a piercing pain in the place he had filled. Grief becomes real. I swing, like a monstrous pendulum, between grief, guilt and shame. Guilt conquers. I welcome it and shoulder the burden with a masochistic fervour. But for me, my child would have lived. I try to delude myself into thinking it is fate. But I do not believe in fate. Only in inevitability. And this was not inevitable. But, yes, it was. I could have done no other thing, acted in no other way. The thought calms me for a while.

  Then, odd sentences from nowhere float into my mind.

  Abortion is easy.

  The law is on your side.

  You have the right to decide.

  Angrily I shoo these thoughts away. I have to sleep. And strangely enough, I fall asleep in the midst of these chaotic thoughts.

  The next morning we leave the place.

  ‘Well, that’s over,’ he says. Then he asks sympathetically, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It’s true. I am all right. All my morbid thoughts of the night before have vanished. And I am not hostile to him any more.

  ‘Good,’ he says, his mind retreating thankfully from me. From the problem. For him, it is already the past.

  It is the past for me too, I tell myself. And so it is. Last night has nothing to do with this morning. Yet I have an eerie feeling I cannot understand, cannot explain even to myself. I feel, as we walk away, that I am not alone. I feel that the ghost of my dead child walks with me.

  My Beloved Charioteer

  I smile as I hear them at last, the sounds I am waiting for. A rush of footsteps, the slam of the bathroom door and then, bare feet running towards me.

  ‘You shouldn’t bang doors that way,’ I say reproachfully. ‘You might wake Mummy.’

  She sits opposite me, cross-legged, on the low wooden stool, hair tousled, cheeks flushed. ‘Oh, she won’t wake up for hours yet,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Have you had your tea, Ajji?’

  This is part of our daily routine. I can never confess to her that I have had a cup an hour earlier. This is her joy, that I wait for her.

  ‘No, I’ve been waiting for you. Have you brushed your teeth?’

  She makes a face. ‘I’ll do it later,’ she says, trying to be brusque and casual.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing. Go and brush them at once.’

  ‘Only today, Ajji. From tomorrow, I promise I’ll brush them first,’ she pleads.

  ‘Nothing doing,’ I try hard to be firm but I can’t fool her. She knows I am on her side. She lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Mummy won’t know, she’s sleeping.’

  Now, of course, she leaves me no choice. I have to insist. She goes reluctantly and is back so fast, I have to ask, ‘Did you really brush? Properly? Show me.’

  ‘Look.’

  I have to smile at the grinning, impish face.

  ‘Now, tea for me.’

  ‘No, tea for me, milk for you.’

  Ultimately, as always, we compromise and her tea is a pale brown. I switch off the Primus and without the hissing sound, our voices seem loud and clear. We look at each other guiltily, thinking of the sleeper and try to speak in lower tones. Happiness can mean different things to different people. For me, it is this—the beginning of a new day with this child. We talk of many things; but too soon it is time for her to go to school. Bathed and fresh, she sets off.

  When
she is gone, silence settles on the house. A silence that will not lift till she returns. I had got used to this silence in the last seven years. It had never seemed terrible to me. It was a friendly silence, filled with the ghosts of so many voices in my life. They came back to keep me company when I was alone—my younger brother, my aunt who loved me when I was a child, my two infant sons who never grew up, and even the child Aarti who seems to have no connection with this thin, bitter woman who now shares the silence with me. Since she came, the friendly ghosts have all gone.

  It is late when she wakes. I have had my bath, finished my puja and am halfway through cooking lunch when I hear her stirring. I take down the dal from the fire and put on the tea. By the time tea is ready, she comes into the kitchen. Wordlessly she takes a cup from me, drinks the tea in hungry gulps as if she has been thirsting for hours, then thrusts the cup back at me. I pour out some more. I too say nothing. Earlier I used to ask, ‘Slept well?’ And one day, she had put the cup down with a trembling hand and said, ‘Slept well ? No, I never do that. I haven’t slept well since Madhav died. I’ll never sleep well again all my life. I have to take something every night so that I can close my eyes for a few hours. Now never ask me again if I slept well.’

  Nine months I carried this daughter of mine in my body. I had felt every beat of her heart, every movement of her limbs within me. But—and my doctor had told me this then—my pains and shocks could never penetrate to her, she was insulated against them. Even now, she is protected from my pains, even now, I have no protection against her pains. I suffer with her but, like all my other emotions, it is a futile suffering. For I cannot help her. I can only fumble and blunder and make things worse.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know earlier?’ she had asked me angrily when she had come home after her father’s death. ‘Why didn’t you send for me earlier?’

  ‘Don’t tell Aarti yet,’ he had said. ‘I don’t want to frighten her, not now, especially.’

  Habits of obėdience die harder than any others. I had not dared to inform Aarti. And the next day he had another attack and died instantly. Three months later Priti had been born. She never saw her grandfather.

  ‘Who is that, Ajji?’ she had asked me once, pointing to his photograph.

  ‘Your grandfather, Priti.’

  ‘My grandfather?’ She had pondered over it. And then asked, ‘And what was he of yours?’

  What was he of mine? The innocent question had released a flood of feelings within me. ‘My husband,’ I had said bluntly at last. As I settle down to cooking lunch, I wonder whether today Aarti will like what I’m cooking, whether she will enjoy her food and eat well. I know she will not, but the hope is always in me. Just as I hope that one day she will talk and laugh again. But the day she had laughed, her laughter—loud laughter that shattered the tenuous peace of the house—had frightened me.

  ‘What is it?’ I had asked nervously, wondering whether to smile, laugh, to respond in some way to her.

  She had looked at me in surprise, as if she hadn’t expected to find me there with her, had hesitated just a moment, then said, ‘I always used to think I was very different from you. And look at us now, both of us alike. A pair of widows.’

  She didn’t mean to be cruel to me, I know that. Nor was I hurt by her words. What pained me was her calling herself a widow. My mother had been widowed when I was a girl and I can only remember her as one, her head shaven, wearing coarse red saris and shorn of all ornaments. While Aarti, after neglecting herself for days, suddenly dresses up, makes up her face and does up her hair. But it is her face that has the arid look of a desert; no smile, no happiness ever blooms there. Life has been cruel to her. It was her father whom she had loved and he died, while I live. It was her husband she had loved even more than the child, and he died, while Priti is left to her.

  Children are more sensitive than we think. They understand so much we think they don’t. Otherwise why would Priti have said to me one day, ‘Ajji, can I sleep in your room at night?’

  I am old and grey and have lost most of what I have loved in life except these two persons; but at her words, my heart had leapt with happiness. Yet, I had restrained my joy and asked her, ‘Why, Priti?’

  ‘I’d like to. You can tell me stories at night. And there are so many things I suddenly remember at night and want to tell you. And….’

  ‘But Mummy is with you.’

  The child’s face had fallen. ‘But, Ajji, if I try to talk to her, she says—“Go to sleep, Priti, don’t bother me.” And she never sleeps at all, she just reads and smokes. And I don’t like that smell.’

  The child has a high and clear voice and I had hushed her in sudden fear that she might be overheard. But it’s true, she smokes incessantly now. At first, she had tried to hide it from me; but not for long. When I was a child, it had been considered wrong even for a man to smoke in my father’s house. But today, I would of my own accord let my daughter smoke if I thought it brought her happiness. It doesn’t. She puffs out smoke as if she is emitting bitterness. There is an infinity of bitterness in her. And I cannot help her. I can only try to look after her body. Such a small thing, but even in that I fail. She is thin and brittle. Most of the time, she never dresses up, just goes around in an old gown, her hair confined by a rubber band. Priti, looking at an old photograph, had wistfully said once, ‘My Mummy was so pretty, wasn’t she, Ajji?’

  The child’s pride in her mother had roused in me a rage against Aarti. She seems to me like a child, sulking because she does not have what she wants, wilfully ignoring the things she has. Has anyone promised us happiness for a lifetime, I want to ask her.

  ‘Why don’t you go out?’ I had asked her once.

  ‘Where?’

  I had mumbled something she had not heard. She had gone on, ‘There is nowhere I want to go. Everywhere I see couples. I can’t bear to see them. I could murder them when I see them talking and laughing.’

  This kind of talk amazes me. I cannot understand her. My niece had once told me of something she had read in an American magazine. Of young children who stab and throttle and rape and gouge out eyes, often for no reason at all. And I had wondered—what kind of parents can they be who give birth to such monsters? Now I know better. The accident of birth can be cruelly deceiving. We fool ourselves that our children are our own, that we know them. But often, they are as alien to us as baby cuckoos born in a crow’s nest. And yet we cannot escape the burden of parentage. If my daughter is so empty that she can hate people who are happy, the fault is, to some extent, mine.

  These bitter thoughts do not often occupy me. I have my work. The quiet routine of my day is like balm to my soul. Daily chores are not monotonous but soothing. Now that the child is with me, the day is full of meaning. I wait, eager as a child myself, for her to return from school. When she has a holiday, I don’t know who is happier, she or I; if it is an unexpected holiday, we are equally full of glee. But when she, my daughter and her mother, comes to us, we feel guilty and hide our happiness.

  ‘Do you remember your Papa?’ Aarti had asked her one day with a sudden harshness.

  ‘Papa?’ There had been a moment’s hesitation. Then she had replied, ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Don’t lie to me.’

  The child had stared at her with a frightened face, feeling she had done something wrong, though she didn’t know what it was. When Aarti had left us, she had burst into sobs, clinging to me. And I had been full of pity, more for Aarti who could turn happiness into a wrong. But I can say nothing to her. She has never shared anything with me and now she hides her sorrow like a dog its bone. She guards it jealously and will not let me approach. And I have kept my distance, too. It was only in my imagination that I cuddled her as a child, only in my imagination that I shared her happiness and confidences when she was a girl. And now I assuage her grief in the same way. ‘Look,’ I tell myself I will say to her, pouring some water into my cupped palms. ‘Look,’ I will say as the wate
r seeps through, leaving nothing. ‘You cannot hold on. You will have to let go.’

  But I know I am fooling myself. I have no courage to speak. I am only a foolish, middle-aged woman who has never known how to win anyone’s love. Priti’s affection—that is a gift from heaven, the ray of sunshine God sends even to the darkest corners.

  For Aarti, it was always her father. Even now, she spends the whole afternoon prowling in what was his room. It is seven years since he died, but the room is unchanged. I have kept everything as it was. I dust and sweep it meticulously myself; but strangely, in spite of this, it has a neglected look, like Priti has at times. Priti is well-fed and well-dressed, she has her tonics and vitamins and all the other things they give children these days. And yet, a neglected child peeps out of her eyes sometimes, filling me with sadness.

  Now I can hear Aarti moving in his room. Even after his death, he can give her something I can’t. The thought hurts. Hurts? It’s like having salt rubbed into a raw wound. Suddenly it is unbearable and I go and open the door of his room. She is sitting on his chair, her feet on the table, smoking and staring at nothing. Her feet are the feet of a young woman, but I see with a sense of shock that her face is that of an old woman. She hears me and turns round, startled, the movement knocking down his photograph which stands on the table. It lies on the floor, face down and when she picks it up we see that the glass has cracked. Long splinters of glass lie on the floor. The photograph seems somehow naked and pathetic. She looks up at me, something showing through the deliberate blankness.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother, I’m sorry.’

  I stare down at the photograph and say nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeats. ‘Don’t look like that.’ She passes her hand over the photograph, uncaring of the bits of glass. ‘I’ll get it fixed tomorrow, I promise I’ll do it.’