The Intrusion and Other Stories

by Shashi Deshpande

  I go quietly into the bedroom without speaking. My packed suitcases stand with an air of finality against the wall. The room has the desolate look of one denuded of all personal articles. His things are still there, but it suddenly strikes me how abandoned they look all by themselves. Hurriedly I throw my bag on the bed and wash my hands, my feet, my face. I am wiping myself with the towel when he enters. And all at once the silence between us is unbearable.

  I’m sorry, I’m very sorry,’ I stammer out. ‘Don’t, please don’t make a thing of it today. Not today, please, not tonight.’

  His calm breaks and the words cascade out of him. ‘I could say the same to you, couldn’t I? Why couldn’t you have come early today? Why did you come late, today of all days? Do you know what time I returned? Do you know how often I’ve looked at my watch? Do you…?’

  ‘I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. You know I didn’t do it deliberately. There was so much to do, so much to clear up….’ My voice trails away.

  Ever since I decided to go, there has been this vague something between us. We had just managed to come to terms with it. Why did I, I ask myself angrily, have to bring the shadows in again?

  ‘So much to do! And I, I suppose, had nothing!’ The rage in his tone withers me. ‘I had planned,’ he goes on after a silence, in which I can see him trying to compose himself, ‘to go out to dinner. It’s too late now.’

  ‘I’ll have something ready. It won’t take any time.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself. I’ve put the cooker on.’

  I feel guilty and resentful. Every way I turn, there’s a ‘No Entry’ lane. He is obsessed with his hurt. I have accepted that. And yet his pain pierces my armour of understanding-but-not-caring. As I set the table, I teeter on the edge of self-abasement. Anything to get over this sullen, hurt-filled silence. Instead I say, ‘Dinner is ready.’

  We sit down to eat. Now is the time to talk of practical details, business matters. But we have been so long preparing for this time that everything has been said and there is nothing left for this last night. Only those futile protestations, those unending demands, those eternal promises all lovers make when parting. These are not for us. What promises can I make him? Or, he make to me? This is the price we have to pay for too deep an understanding. We can never use the small change of love. And yet I know I have to speak now.

  ‘I …’ I begin and choke over a mouthful. He looks at me inquiringly, waiting patiently for me to go on, his raised eyebrows mutely asking a question. I will see him like this so many times, looking at me with that quirk of his eyebrows. And the memory will pierce me like a knife, leaving me limp with longing. Will the memory blunt one day and cease to stab and hurt? Suddenly I’m aware of what I’m doing. I’m putting two years between us. A fearsome period. Two years of experiences we will not share. And each one a brick that can ultimately become a wall between us. It isn’t quarrels that shatter a marriage, it’s doing things apart. Can we stand two years of separateness? Confronted with this thought, the link between us seems tenuous.

  ‘What were you saying?’ he asks me, polite as a stranger. No, no stranger. I will break down the wall.

  ‘You have beautiful eyebrows,’ I say. He stares at me in comical astonishment. I begin to laugh. But as his look changes I begin to feel the fluttering in my stomach that is for me the harbinger of desire. Thank God, we are eating at home. Thank God, we have not gone out. He is so impatient he scarcely lets me wash my hands or rinse my mouth. ‘Oh, don’t, don’t …’ he cries out and suddenly I leave everything and go to him. ‘Why do you …?’ he mumbles and stops as his mouth finds mine.

  And then we are lost. No, not lost. Found, because this is where we really find each other. We do not have to search. Each goes out to the other and we are merged in a oneness that is absolute. I give all of me until I am only a hollow ecstasy. And pain. And then I realize he is holding back. I will not let him do that. I am stronger and fierce and fiery until he melts and responds with equal intensity.

  Later we lie in the usual serenity and peace that descends on us after loving. But I know it is ephemeral and spurious. His hand lies heavy, limp and unresponsive in mine. And now I know I must speak. My body has receded into the background, my mind is active and alive.

  ‘I wish,’ I say angrily, ‘you had refused to let me go.’

  ‘How could I?’ His voice is drowsy. But it is lassitude, not contentment, that makes it so. ‘If you had once, just once, showed the smallest doubt…. But, there never was a doubt, was there?’

  Never was a doubt…. He does not know, he will never know, how I have fought myself. How I have longed to give ambition and success the go-by and stay with him, throttled by his love. No, not throttled, that’s not fair. It’s a soporific, his love and mine, which makes me long to lie down in lethargic bliss. And I would, but for that savage in me, the savage I myself have nurtured, which kills all such self-destroying doubts.

  ‘No,’ I say, hating myself for saying it, ‘I had no doubts.’

  ‘But what intrigues me, Jayu,’ he goes on, his tone no longer angry or argumentative, but reflective, ‘is this… why are you really going? Is it really going to make all that much difference to your work? You know you’ve just begun feeling your own way. And you don’t crave for a foreign-returned tag…’

  ‘You know why I’m going,’ I say lightly. ‘To get a bigger salary when I return.’

  ‘And when have you done anything for so simple a reason as that?’ he asks equably.

  He knows I am frightened of myself. If I give in once, if I give way once, I will walk that road of self-abnegation forever. And shall I then end up like my mother who stripped herself of everything and cried out against us as denuders?

  ‘To go when you need not have gone, when we had made other plans…’

  Other plans. To have a child. Now the child will have to wait. We will not let it be born yet. Can you feel a traitor to someone who does not exist?

  ‘I couldn’t miss this chance,’ I say, sensing that my tone is petulant. ‘If you had been me….’

  ‘…. I would have put ourselves first.’

  Of course. A wife and mother first. Like his mother.

  ‘Don’t let her put you against me by her constant criticism, will you?’

  ‘Who?’

  I stifle my laughter at his facade of ignorance. ‘Your mother, of course.’

  I am thankful she will be here tomorrow, not today. I am thankful I have these last moments with him alone.

  ‘She doesn’t criticise you, Jayu. You’re prejudiced. How a woman as rational and intelligent as you can be so prejudiced…!’

  I laugh again under my breath at his doggedness. To his last breath he will assert his mother likes me. Just as, I suppose, he tells her I am fond of her. But we understand each other better, she and I.

  ‘No, she won’t criticise me directly. But she will tell you that story she had narrated to me umpteen times. Of how—“I never went to my mother’s house even once after my mother-in-law died, because if I did, who would look after HIM?”’

  I say it all in one breath and become breathless. He is silent. I can imagine the blank look on his face. He is intensely loyal. Does he have the same look when she says or hints at things against me?

  ‘You should try and understand her, Jayu,’ he speaks placatingly. ‘For women of her generation, life held nothing, literally nothing, apart from husband and children. She can’t understand how a woman can see beyond that.’

  How can she when even he cannot? To me, our lives are intertwined, yet they are two distinct strands. They are like two lights that shine more brightly together, but to keep my light burning is my responsibility and mine alone.

  ‘I wish,’ I say slowly, ‘that you had met my mother. She died a year too soon.’

  Now, from this distance, I can understand her. Even feel sorry for her. Then, there was only dislike and contempt. And anger at what she was and what she was doing to me. A woman who had
nothing of her own. Who tried to live her life through her husband and daughters. Who was shattered by any tug at the bonds. Who tortured herself and tormented us. Who made her own hell and gloried in it. And so, for me, each step out of home had been a battle, each success a treachery towards her. Now I am free, but the fear remains… will I shackle myself? Or others? And often there’s an abashed feeling that I’m making gestures of defiance at a person who doesn’t exist.

  ‘Forget it, Jayu. You’ve made your plans and they can’t be changed. Let’s not talk about that now.’

  And so we lie together and talk the whole night through of other things. And I know that however often I will long for him when we are not together, the physical longing will be nothing compared to the craving for this intimacy, this effortless communing. As we talk, we doze and wake up again to each other. And once I wake out of a little dream, short and forgotten in the very second of waking, yet leaving behind an impression of sweetness and intense happiness. And once he talks to me of his grand-aunt who looked after him when he was a child. He does not know why he thinks of her now, but I do. He had often told me how totally selfless, totally loving she was. To him, she is always the ideal woman. And though he loves me, he finds it hard to accept me as I am, so unlike that woman who mothered him when he was a child.

  And I cannot change. He knows this too. And more. For once he says, his mouth so close to my ear that his breath tickles me, ‘You know, Jayu, I believe it is not pride or ambition but obstinacy that is your real vice, after all.’

  We long to be understood, but only if that understanding encompasses our virtues. When our vices are uncovered, we are indignant and abashed, as if surprised in the bathroom. Why, I ask myself, did God make me a creature of many parts, not of one alone—and that ambition?

  At last I can see through the window that the night is coming to an end. He sees it too. ‘Time to get up,’ he says.

  ‘Believe me love, it was the nightingale,’1 murmur against his shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not me. Juliet. She said it, trying to hold Romeo back. Believe me, love, it isn’t the lark, it’s the nightingale.’

  ‘You wouldn’t ever say that, would you? If it’s the lark, you’d say it is the lark. You wouldn’t ever fool yourself, or others, and say it’s the nightingale, would you?’

  He sees the hurt in my eyes and bending down swiftly to me says, ‘But who will now quote Shakespeare to me in bed?’

  And so we get up with laughter. We leave the house and reach the airport in the same mood. Two years, I tell myself, are nothing. Lovers have parted since time began and people have stayed apart for ten times two years and come together again. Why am I making such a big thing of it? But I know that each parting is a little dying. And so it is for him and me. And this is my doing and all my life I will carry the burden of this guilt.

  Inside the airport there is a crowd even at this early hour. A babble of noise. Garlands lie in trash bins like coiled snakes. The smell of flowers is heavy and sickening. He gives me a wry smile. ‘All these people. And for you, only me,’

  ‘That’s how I wanted it.’

  And that is why I discouraged all the others from coming. Even my sister Sumi. But now I wish there was someone to go back with him. It saddens me to think of him going back to the empty flat alone. With the pillow having the impress of my head still upon it. The bathroom smelling of talcum. And my teacup, unwashed, on the dining-table. But, perhaps, these little things don’t mean so much to a man. But I am glad I am going to a place where there is nothing of him. I will be starting on a blank sheet, a clean page. No. I’m fooling myself. The memories of hurt are bottled inside me, I will carry them wherever I go.

  At last it is time for us to part. Now I will tell him how little I really want to go. How much I want to be with him. Now I will explain that my going does not mean I care for him less. But the finality of the moment carries away my words. I can say none of these things. I can only cling to him. Even as he holds me close, I feel the reproach in him. And perhaps he can feel the guilt in me. Will they always come between us? We let go of each other and I walk away, my bag cutting into my shoulder, my eyes tearless and dry and burning.

  The Inner Rooms

  Perhaps she looked a little mad. The little boy she had met grazing his cattle had stared at her curiously—only for an instant though. The curiosity had soon turned to something else. Pity? Then he had smiled, a friendly smile. There had been a momentary impulse to sit with him, to talk to him. But he had turned away and she had gone on with her emptiness.

  Strange, it was only the small things that mattered now—the thorns that pricked her feet, her dry throat and tongue, her burning eyes and aching muscles. Pride, anger, hatred, revenge—what were they compared to these? They dwindled into foolish toys she had played with for too long. Even the thought that had thrust itself on her when the child had smiled—if not for Bhishma, I would have had children—had not hurt. She no longer had any desire to bring children into this world. A boy who would become a man, playing the game according to some foolish rules made by men long dead, losing his self in the process. And if she had a daughter? She could only have become a pawn in the game, to be moved and discarded as their rules demanded.

  No, she was glad she had no children. For a brief moment, the thought of her mother came to her—a woman who had had to watch her daughters being carried away by an old man. Had she cried? Protested? In any case, neither her tears nor her protests would have had any meaning, for they would not have reached the world beyond the rooms in which she lived.

  Those inner rooms—how she hated them! As a child, she had imagined that the whole world was hers. But gradually, relentlessly (don’t, don’t, you cannot), the world had closed in on her, pushing her into the women’s rooms. From the first she had felt trapped in them. Today, when she walked out, she had been amazed to find how easy it was. A sense of peace had descended on her. Why hadn’t she done this earlier?

  Once out, the freedom she had never known had gone to her head. For a while, she kept the thought of what she had to do at bay, revelling in the almost forgotten emotion of happiness. How foolish I was, she thought, to let my happiness depend on other people! My nurse at first, then my mother, my father, my sisters and finally Salva. What a burden to put on others, the burden of your own happiness. She felt a fleeting pity for the sisters she had left behind in the inner rooms, stoically waiting for their husband to visit them at night, living in the constant hope of bearing him sons. At least she had escaped that degradation, by rejecting that same husband in an open assembly.

  His face, when he had heard her words, came back to her now—hurt, shamed and finally angry. It was the anger of a weak man, a man who had lived in the shadow of a much stronger personality all his life. Poor Vichitravirya, calling himself king, when everyone knew he was but a puppet in the hands of his much older half-brother, Bhishma. But then, Chitrangada, braver and much more of a man, who had been king so briefly before Vichitravirya, had been Bhishma’s puppet too. Suddenly Bhishma’s ‘great’ act of renunciation appeared to her in its true colours. Of course, she thought, I now know what it is. By renouncing his right to the throne, to have children of his own, so that his father could marry the fisherman’s daughter, Bhishma had let go of the shadow and grasped at the substance. He gained power over all of them, his father, his stepmother and their two sons. Power-drunk, he had become arrogant, uncaring of how he sacrificed others to his own ideas. To bring my sisters and myself here as mates for this idiot, she had thought angrily when she saw Vichitravirya. How dared he, how dared he!

  Her sisters had submitted in silence, but she had declared angrily, ‘I cannot marry this man’. And then she had done what seemed to her unimaginable now—she had invoked their rules to aid her. I had already chosen Salva, King of Saubha, before I was brought here. I had already promised myself to him. You had no right to bring me here.’ Heads had nodded in reluctant approval; and, looking at th
em, Bhishma had let her go. She had been exultant. She was the winner. And how easily victory had come!

  But she had been foolish. The victory had been as illusory as her belief during her swayamvara that she held her life in her own hands. Why and when had she begun to dream of Salva? It was too distant now and she could no longer remember how it had begun. But her eagerness as the swayamvara approached was still distinct. Now it is in my hands, she had thought. I will garland him and become his wife. Now they cannot say, ‘Don’t, you cannot’. As she had entered the glittering, crowded hall, her two sisters a little behind her, she had been conscious only of the soft feel of the garland in her hands. How difficult, impossible almost, to move slowly, to keep her eyes decorously on the ground. She had felt, rather than heard, her two sisters whisper softly to each other. She had known they would be stealthily trying to look at the faces of the princes in the room. No need for the men, however, to give the three sisters furtive glances. Their bold, staring eyes had seemed to pierce through her.

  Not that she had cared much about these things. For her, there had been only an impatience to hear the mention of Salva’s name. But when Bhishma’s name had been pronounced, she had come out of her abstraction with a jerk. Bhishma, the so-called celibate, the life-long bachelor—could it be he? Yes, there was no mistake. ‘Bhishma, son of King Shantanu.’ There had been roars of laughter at the name, drowning out a few angry murmurs. Under cover of the noise, she had heard Ambika’s giggly, throaty whisper to Ambalika, ‘Go and garland him, child.’

  ‘Not for me. He’s for Amba. She’s the eldest, isn’t she?’

  She had ignored the jibe. She had been looking at Bhishma’s face on which outraged pride and fury had battled. And she had sympathized. Yes, ridicule and humiliation were hard to bear. The moment of sympathy had never recurred. The hatred which replaced everything else in her life had been born soon after.