A Matter of Time

by Shashi Deshpande

  Yes.’

  ‘He is up there. Go up, aunty.’

  The door is open. Gopal is at the table reading and having his meal at the same time. The different containers of a tiffin-carrier are spread out before him and he is eating directly out of them. He looks up at the sound of her steps. For a moment his face gives her the impression that he has not identified her. Then he closes the book and says, asks rather, in a puzzled sort of way, ‘Sumi?’ And then again, ‘Sumi.’ He gets up, pats the bed with his left hand and says, ‘Come, sit.’

  She feels the need to explain. ‘I was passing by. I saw the board and came in.’

  ‘What are you doing in this area?’

  ‘House hunting.’

  She has a strong, almost overpowering desire to talk to him about it, about the woman and her grief, but he does not follow this trail and she is forced to let it go. In a while, she realizes she could not have spoken to him about it, anyway.

  They have not met since the day he left home, since the night he told her of his desire to get away. A burden of unsaid things lies between them, but neither is able to speak of these; they suddenly seem irrelevant. Yet they have to talk, for silence is even more dangerous, more treacherous. And so they speak of Shankar and his family, of the children playing outside, of Gopal’s work in the press.

  The conversation between them is spasmodic, punctuated by the clink of his stainless-steel containers, the voices of the children in the courtyard calling out numbers—‘tonty-two tonty-three’. A film song floats in from somewhere in the locality. There is a tension between them that both are aware of, and their dialogue is clipped, a parody of a husband and wife speaking at the end of the day.

  Sumi can see the effort Gopal makes to speak of something personal.

  ‘Ramesh told me you’re likely to start on a job soon.’

  ‘Hopefully. Do you know Aru’s thinking of consulting a lawyer?’

  ‘She told me that.’

  ‘She was here?’

  ‘Yes. She’s on your side, do you know that?’

  ‘This is not a war, I don’t want the children to take sides, Gopal,’ she flashes out.

  ‘It’s inevitable. Don’t you remember Yudhishtira’s “we are five Pandavas against a hundred Kauravas. But when an enemy comes, we are a hundred and five against the enemy”? I’m the enemy now. She can’t help seeing it that way.’

  He has finished eating, he begins piling the containers together. ‘I’ll be back in a moment, I have to wash my hands.’

  She has been looking around the room, not examining it like Kalyani had done, but with a feeling of deja vu. And like Gopal himself, she connects it to his room in the outhouse.

  I like a bird that flies in,

  perches in the courtyard

  and then flies away

  the very same instant.

  So should one live.

  Gopal used to sing this Purandaradasa song, I can remember him singing it. This is how he lived in our outhouse room, it is how he is living here now. Does he still sing it? What does he think of when he comes to the lines, ‘like children at play/who build a mud house and then/tiring of the game/destroy it and go away’? Does he think of himself?

  Restless, she gets up and starts moving about. The children are singing a song now, she can’t catch the words for a while. Then, as the voices rise to a crescendo, she gets them: ‘We’ll catch a fox, put him in a box and never let him go.’

  The voices rise in triumph on the ‘never’, emphasize it gleefully.

  ‘My God!’

  Smiling, she moves to the window, but she can’t see the children. Only a small patch of the yard is visible—a woman’s blue sari vanishing as she moves away, a flash of light on a gleaming surface, the wheel of a scooter. She moves to the other end of the window and now it’s a pile of coconut fibres that comes into the range of her vision. And empty coconut shells, a jerry-can lying on its side—all the rubbish of a household. It’s like seeing Gopal’s life, tantalisingly disjointed, bits and pieces she can’t put together, can’t make any sense of.

  And then she hears his voice. He is responding to someone, perhaps a servant woman, offering to wash up for him. The children call out to him and she hears him laugh. And, as if his voice knits everything together, she can suddenly see the substance, the reality of his life apart from her and their children. All these lives, contiguous to his, spell out the actuality of their separation.

  We can never be together again. All these days I have been thinking of him as if he has been suspended in space, in nothingness, since he left us. But he has gone on living, his life has moved on, it will go on without me. So has mine. Our lives have diverged, they now move separately, two different streams.

  She comes back into the room and sitting at the table, idly begins turning over the pages of the book Gopal was reading when she entered. A book of poems. She begins reading.

  Gopal, coming in, finds her resting her head on the table.

  ‘Sumi!’

  Her face, when she raises it, is tearless. They stare at each other in silence.

  ‘I must go,’ she says.

  He does not speak, he does nothing to stop her.

  This is the moment I was waiting for, the moment of accounting. But when Sumi came, it was not to call me to account; in fact, she seemed distracted, only half aware of me, blown in by some violent feelings I had no clue to. I could only sense her distress; something had happened, but she did not, perhaps she could not, share it with me. And I felt I had no right to ask her, either. Nor could I ask her why she left as abruptly as she did.

  Sumi has changed: they have said it to me—Kalyani, Aru, Devaki, Ramesh—in varying tones of sadness, reproach and anger. Changed from what? Is there one inviolate self, deviation from which becomes change? It was Sumi who made me think of this when, laughing at her own idea, she spoke of Draupadi’s disguise as Sairandhri, the queen’s maid.

  ‘Don’t you think this was something she had often wanted, to be by herself, to sleep alone, to be free, for a while, of her five husbands?’

  Why not? Sumi is right, it’s very possible. (But only a woman could have thought of this.) To have the pleasure, the liberty of being alone, her own mistress, not to have to share her bed every night with a husband—yes, she must have longed for it. And therefore, perhaps, the role of Sairandhri, when she had to adopt a disguise.

  We had followed the thought with pleasure, I remember it now, Sumi and I, losing ourselves in surmises. What about Arjuna becoming Brihannala? Yes, that was easy; Arjuna, tired of the male world of war and violence, of relating to woman only as lord and conqueror, became Brihannala, the eunuch, so that he could enter the gentle world of women, of music and dancing and become an insider in this world.

  Myriad selves locked in one person. I can see Sumi before the dressing-table, one of those with three mirrors. And the triptych of images in the three mirrors, each image slightly different. From which self has Sumi changed?

  I think of the girl on the stage acting the bereaved mother, Kisa Gotami, with all the stage accoutrements of grief: hair loose, white sari and tear-choked voice. And the other Sumi, the girl I saw flashing about her home, was there too, darting out of those eyes, in the face framed in those two sleek wings of her hair, asking us, her audience: Am I not doing this well? Am I not a good actress?

  And then the girl, my landlady’s daughter, walking home with Kalyani and me, staggering a little in her sleepiness, floating on the cloud of euphoria of her success on the stage. As we moved out from under the shadows of the trees into the bright moonlight, I saw her face—the make-up inexpertly wiped off, patches still clinging to the corners of her mouth and nose, behind her ears, under her chin, the eyeblack smeared round her eyes, traces of it on her cheeks. Innocent, clownish, vulnerable—a self towards whom my mind leapt out in a startled tenderness.

  But of all her various selves, it is the Sumi I saw that evening by the river who seems to me the essence of her being
, the Sumi I always see lurking behind the person she presents to the world.

  We were visiting Hegde, Sumi and I, and Aru was with us. I can remember my disappointment when I met Hegde; it was as if in the ten years since we’d last met, he had become a much smaller man. It was my fault, of course, that I had expected to see the larger-than-life hero I had made of him in our college days. He seemed much subdued too, as if chastened by his prison term during the Emergency. A man, he gave me the impression, who had accepted his lot as headmaster of a school in a small town with no regrets, no more ambitions left in him.

  But I soon realized that the old Hegde still lay within. At Sumi’s remark that he looked a little like the pictures of Shakespeare (and it’s true that with his high forehead, long nose and slightly exophthalmic eyes, he had a look of the Bard), he jumped effortlessly, almost with glee, into his old arguments about the continuance of our bondage to the British—cultural now, not political, and therefore much worse and more difficult to fight. But through it all, his unreserved pleasure in my visit, in meeting my wife and child, revealed itself; reviving the old comradeship lit a spark in him, almost brought back the fiery, opinionated Hegde.

  He took us to the river in the evening. There were others with us, the local doctor, I think, another man who never spoke, I can’t remember who he was, and their wives. But it is only Sumi I can think of when I remember that evening. She was—what is the right word for the way she was, that evening? Joyous? No, it was more than that. Irradiated perhaps, as if a spotlight was shining on her. None of us could take our eyes off her. Even Hegde, the die-hard bachelor, Hanuman as he was called in college, seemed bemused by her; his eyes kept lingering on her face in an innocent, childlike wonder.

  Yes, that was how she was that evening. I can remember Aru—only two then—putting her arms around her mother’s neck, whispering in her ears, and Sumi laughing, a laughter holding so much happiness within it that it spilled over, spread, and the women were laughing with her, too. A little later the women went into the river—Sumi persuaded them—and though we decorously turned our backs on them we could hear the sounds of their splashing, the laughter and the frolicking. And the silent man, as if this brought back some remote past of which we had all been a part, began to sing. I can remember the song too—it was part of the enchantment of that evening. It was a song strung in the language of women, bringing to your mind pictures of girls, pots on head, going to the river for water.

  ‘Come, sister, let us go ....’

  The women’s voices were silenced when the song began and they joined us a little later, sitting with us this time, as if the song had erased the dividing line between us. Sumi’s face was tranquil, all the effervescence settled down, leaving behind a clear sparkle like that of crystal. And her skin, the skin for which I had so often tried to find a comparison and failed, was glowing after her bath, reflecting the pearly glow of the evening.

  The sun sank as we sat there and it was the hour of twilight, poised between day and night. The world was bathed in a mellow light, a light that had a kind of distilled clarity so that everything, even the smallest blade of grass, was clearly and distinctly visible. A little later we went to the temple by the river, so tiny a place that it was no more than a shelter for the two idols inside. We stepped over the high, broad stone threshold and were instantly engulfed in darkness. And a chill that reached out to us from the stone walls, from the stone floor under our feet.

  Someone rang the bell, as if to announce our arrival to the gods, and it clanged and reverberated in that small space. My heart began to beat a loud tattoo in response to that boom boom, I felt it expand in my chest, suffocating me. Aru was in my arms and she clung to me convulsively, I could feel her breath, warm and sweet on my cheeks. The smell of oil hung heavy and cloying in that low-roofed space, the lights dim to the point of extinction. Suddenly they spluttered—the priest had come in on seeing us, I could see his fingers moving about the wick; and then there was a steady glow. He lit the other lamps, too, and the lights shone clear and steady, an aureole about them. And it was as if the gods had suddenly moved forward into being amongst us, there was a palpable sense of their presence in our midst.

  Venkatesh and Padmavati—the priest spoke of them with affection and familiarity as he made his preparations for the aarti. When the aarti began, the silent man began to sing, again a Purandaradasa song, this time that most beautiful and joyous song, resounding with the word ‘Ananda’. His voice had a resonance like the bell, but strangely, now there were no echoes. I had the fanciful thought that the gods were accepting the song as their naivedya, absorbing all of it, leaving nothing behind but the sweetness of the word ‘Ananda’. And Sumi’s face, with its diaphanous veil of light and shadows, flickering as the aarti lamps moved, was as serene as the stone face of the goddess.

  That night, in Hegde’s bachelor home, I drowned myself in Sumi. Ananda, Ananda—the word swung in my mind like a bell, it pealed and echoed in it. I repeated the words of the song to Sumi, worshipping her from head to toe and it was not sacrilege but an echo of the same supreme joy Purandaradasa had found in his Lord, Vithala. I felt my being drown in hers, I was close to that great mystery, the otherness of my self. And I got it, a glimpse of the purest joy, the purest metal, untouched by any base alloy.

  And then Aru woke up and cried and Sumi got up and went to her. And lying there, feeling bereaved, as if my child had been torn from me, I thought—the bliss is only for a moment. We can never possess it. It touches us and goes on, it is never ours.

  And when Sumi returned, how strange it is, she had the face of the Sumi I saw here, in this room, today, as if she was there even then, waiting for me, the Sumi who raised her tearless face from the table.

  Ananda. The word comes back to torment me. How could I have imagined myself to be that Sananda Govinda whom Jayadeva sang of, how did I think I could hold love and joy within me forever?

  THE FAMILY

  Whatever wrong has been done by him, his son frees him from it all; therefore he is called a son. By his son a father stands firm in this world.

  —Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad (1.5.17)

  IT WAS THEIR preoccupation with the past that brought Gopal and his landlady, Kalyani, together. And yet, no two persons could have viewed the past so differently. For Kalyani, everything is preordained, we are only the instruments. Even Bhagiratha’s bringing the Ganga down to earth is not, as it is to Gopal, a magnificent act of human determination, but the story of a man playing out his destined role. In Gopal’s view, however, the plot of humankind evolves through our lives, it is the human will that sets things in motion. Even if the pattern that finally emerges is nothing like what was intended, even if the human will fails in achieving its object, it can never be discounted. Human history, according to him, is fired by human desire. ‘The beginning lies in desire’—what the Natyashastra says about the plot of a drama is for him, true about the drama of humankind as well.

  And yet, however different their thinking, sometimes, somewhere, the two theories collide, criss-cross one another. Gopal is not immune to the fascination of strange, unknown forces operating on our lives, shaping them in spite of ourselves, while Kalyani is conscious, too, of certain human actions that shape events. Kalyani’s family document is one of the points of conjunction. If each sees in it her/his theory validated, nevertheless, both of them realize that there is something more to it, something that, if not contradicting the theory, is yet the exception that proves the general rule.

  ‘You married me because of my family.’

  Sumi had said it to Gopal, not accusingly, not even reprovingly, but laughing at him, at the idea. And Gopal had to admit to himself, to her, that there was some truth in it. After hearing Kalyani’s family history, he could never look at Sumi without seeing the subterranean stream of the past running under the clear runnels of her young girlhood; the honeycomb texture of her being was, for Gopal, soaked in the history of her family.

  ‘Two pear
ls have been dissolved, seven gold mohurs have been lost and of the silver and copper the total cannot be cast up.’

  The aftermath of Panipat. That disastrous defeat which changed the history of the country. These words which had conveyed the news of the disastrous loss of the hopes of an entire people were what had propelled Gopal into studying the history of the Marathas. It fascinated him, the story of these people who, from their hilly, coastal homeland, set out to conquer and spread themselves through vast territories from the Punjab to Cape Comorin. And Kalyani’s family was part of this history. For a man whose own history stopped, as he saw it, with the bodies of his parents crushed against a wall, this thought fascinated him, it set his imagination alight.

  Kalyani showed him her family document only after she realized that Gopal’s subject was history, that his interest lay in Maratha history. He knew, from the way she spoke of it and handled it, that it was sacred to her. It had been written sometime in the first half of the 19th century by one of the family. Additions had obviously been made later; the eulogising of a nondescript person gives the hint that it was his son who did it. But the basic facts, the early history, is clear and unmuddled.

  Vishwasrao, the man with whom the family history begins for Kalyani, came down South with Madhavrao Peshwa on one of his expeditions to the Karnatak. The date is not mentioned, though Gopal makes it to be 1766. It was when the army, in the course of its march, was camped on the banks of the Kaveri that Vishwasrao, bathing in the river one early morning, found a stone idol of Ganapati. A significant event which changed his life, for not only was Ganapati the Peshwa’s family deity, the battle which was fought a few days after this resulted in the Peshwa’s victory. Connections were inevitably made between the finding of the idol and this victory and the finder’s fortunes were made. Vishwasrao was asked to install the idol in a temporary shelter, to stay there as its guardian, and as a reward and incentive was granted all the lands surrounding that area.