A Matter of Time

by Shashi Deshpande

‘ “Come back in three months.”

  ‘My father went back exactly three months later,’ Kalyani goes on, more easily now, having successfully negotiated the ‘miracle’. ‘And there it was, the idol, just as he had ‘seen’ it—down to the minutest detail.

  ‘And then my father brought it home and installed it in the niche he had got ready by then. My mother was not too pleased about it. It’s too high, she complained. How do we do our puja? But my father said it was just as well. He doesn’t need any pujas, just leave him alone, he said. My mother didn’t give up, though. Twice a month, a servant climbed up a ladder to clean it and put some flowers on the idol.’

  And so Bora, Sumi thinks, is following a tradition when, standing on a ladder, he cleans the idol with Nagi assisting and Kalyani watching. He wipes it with a wet cloth until the god emerges glossy and shining, clear of his filmy veil of dust and cobwebs, his pot belly gleaming, one leg daintily crossed over the other. Finally, putting a dot of kumkum on the forehead, Bora tucks a hibiscus behind one ear and another in the loop of the trunk. Then, climbing down the ladder, he looks with satisfaction at his work before folding his hands reverently.

  Kalyani, too, perhaps unconsciously imitating her mother whom she must have seen doing this as a child, folds her own hands and mutters, ‘Look after us, Ganapati, protect us.’

  ‘He doesn’t do such a good job of looking after the women in the family, does he?’

  Sumi’s question takes even her own self by surprise. As for Kalyani, she seems stunned. She stares at Sumi for a while, silent, as if she is thinking of a rejoinder. Finally she says, ‘What can even the gods do against our destinies?’

  Even the gods cannot fight human destiny—it’s a queer, strange logic that defeats Sumi’s understanding. But the dignity with which Kalyani speaks blocks out any response. And when Kalyani goes away, Sumi turns to the idol and thinks: maybe, in a way, though this is not how Amma meant it, she’s right. It’s only a piece of stone after all.

  But as if the god has now come out of his anonymity for her, Sumi begins to notice things about the idol. A kind of patient, dignified sadness on the face. A sense of incongruity about the figure. It isn’t the elephant-head that seems wrong; on the contrary, the wonderfully proportioned, large flapping ears, the tusk, the trunk, the very wrinkles on it—all these are so beautifully sculpted that they seem absolutely lifelike. It’s the human torso, with its exaggerated pot belly, the rows of necklaces on the flabby chest and the short legs that seem wrong. For some reason the creator, the silent man in the dark grove of trees, springs into Sumi’s mind. Did he put something of himself into this? What was he trying to say? Or did the two of them, the sculptor and Vithalrao, create this god between them?

  The discomfort that the story has aroused in Sumi has apparently not touched Aru. Obviously she has not thought of it as anything more than ‘an interesting story’. That it is in any way connected to her, that these people Kalyani speaks about are part of her life, is something that occurs to her only when Kalyani says abruptly, ‘You look like my mother.’

  ‘I do?’ Aru is at first startled. Then she grimaces slightly, showing that she is not flattered by the comparison.

  ‘My mother was a beautiful woman,’ Kalyani says reprovingly as if she has read the thought in Aru’s mind.

  ‘Beautiful?’

  Aru’s disbelief comes from her impression of the picture of Manorama in the hall. A stern, if rather voluptuously rounded face, almost blank in its inscrutability—is she beautiful? Perhaps, Aru thinks, that was the way people presented themselves for a picture in those days, for Vithalrao in the companion picture is just as serious and grave as his wife. In fact, the thick gold chain, giving the hint of a pocket watch, and his gold-rimmed glasses add even more weight to the sense of solidity he conveys. And yet there’s something, a glint of humour in the eyes perhaps, that hints at a man consciously presenting the facade that is expected of him for such a picture. The lips, half-hidden under a bushy moustache, lifted in a small quirk at the corners, add to this impression. Whereas Manorama seems to be all of a piece : the pose is the woman.

  ‘I don’t see any resemblance,’ Aru demurs.

  ‘You would if you dressed better.’

  Kalyani looks disapprovingly at what she calls Aru’s ragpicker’s clothes—a cotton skirt of indeterminate length and a T-shirt two sizes too large for her.

  ‘Silk saris and diamonds, eh, Amma? And a helmet on my head when I’m riding the scooter!’

  But Kalyani is in no mood to be sidetracked. ‘You should have seen my mother’s saris. She never wore anything but silks. Such silks! And her diamonds—you could see them flashing a long distance away. My father used to say you didn’t need a lantern at night if she was with you.’

  The floodgates of memory have been opened and Kalyani can’t stop. Goda, who has joined them, is puzzled at first. What is Kalyani-akka about, she wonders, speaking of the past to this child? But she is soon drawn into it; it becomes a duet, Goda’s panegyric even more extravagant than Kalyani’s.

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as Mami. She was as fair as milk. And so tall—she was like a queen, wasn’t she, Kalyani-akka?’

  ‘But she didn’t like that. She hated her height.’

  ‘I know. I remember Mama teasing her, saying that if they’d known how tall she would grow, his father would never have chosen her.’

  ‘She cried when he said that—remember, Goda?’

  ‘She didn’t like jokes about such things. Especially about their marriage. It made her furious. Her anger was—my God!’

  When Kalyani and Goda speak of Vithalrao and Manorama’s marriage, their voices carry the ring of people retelling myths, of troubadours singing of love, of storytellers relating the wondrous things that happened in the past. Sumi, overhearing them, thinks of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhavam. Just so did the poet sing of the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, making of it a magical, awe-filled story, yet one that falls within the realm of belief because it sings of love, of the love of a man and a woman. And you think—this is how it must have happened.

  The two women speak of the marriage as a miracle. What else, they seem to imply, can explain this marriage between the daughter of a poor village Brahmin, who often had nothing more than the coin with which he tucked in the extra length of his dhoti, and the educated intelligent son of a well-to-do man from Bangalore?

  Kalyani calls it destiny. It will be much later that Aru will realize that Kalyani uses the word destiny for a great number of things. Here, it carries within it the truth that all the characters in this drama were unusual people. Not just the two main characters, Vithalrao and Manorama, the hero and heroine they may perhaps be called, but the others as well. In fact, the hero and heroine don’t matter so much in the story of an arranged marriage. It is the parents. There was Vithalrao’s father, who didn’t hesitate to do what could have damned him in the society he lived in, and maybe did: make an offer to a girl’s father for his son. That he noticed her confidence, self-assurance and intelligence more than her shabby clothes, speaks volumes about the kind of man he was.

  Manorama’s parents didn’t come out of the usual mould, either. It was her mother who had sent her daughter to Yamunabai’s ‘school’, such as it was, at a time when schooling for a girl was something that could come in the way of her marriage prospects. And she did this in spite of the fact that Yamunabai and most of her students were not Brahmins. (Yamunabai, actually, is the most unusual character in this story, though for long her role will remain unknown. It was Yamunabai who was really responsible for the metamorphosis of a sulky overworked child, trapped in the drudgery of looking after her younger siblings, into the girl who caught the attention of the visitor from Bangalore.)

  Manorama’s mother was an honest woman as well, for it was she who induced her husband to write a letter to Vithalrao’s father about the disaster that struck, just a month before the wedding was to take place: Manorama ‘grew up’.
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br />   To her father, a man who prepared the yearly Hindu almanac, both for the little extra money it gave him and because he found the calculations immensely fascinating—to this man, Time was something to be calculated, divided and charted on paper. That it could work on humans, that it had made his daughter a ‘woman’, came to him as a total surprise. He was not too unworldly, though, to know that by making this revelation he was risking the marriage which was to him such a godsend. He was a poor man even by the standards of the time and he had four daughters, of whom Manorama was the oldest, to be married. Nevertheless, he wrote to the groom’s father confessing what had happened. And promptly came a reply saying that it made no difference at all. The wedding would take place as planned.

  And so they were married. Kalyani and Goda give a deep sigh when they reach this point and so much does it seem like the ending of a fairy-tale that Charu adds: And they lived happily ever after. So indeed it would seem from the response of the two women.

  ‘The past comes to us filtered through our memories.’ Aru remembers having read this line somewhere and she sees the truth of it when she watches Kalyani and Goda reviving, perhaps reliving the past. For, even while the past seems to flow rich and thick between them, there is, at times, a queer sense of disharmony. Not when they speak of Vithalrao, for Vithalrao emerges from their stories as a warm, affectionate man with a sense of humour. No, there is no dissonance here. It is when they speak of Manorama that there is the hint of a discord, a sense of something missing, something held back.

  When the two women speak of Manorama, and they continue to do so, as if having once invoked her, they cannot easily let go, they seem to be churning the ocean, out of which Manorama emerges, full-blown, in her silks and diamonds, like Lakshmi on the lotus. But the slime in which the lotus is anchored is not spoken of. The girl in the patched skirts and running nose, a younger sibling constantly sliding down her skinny hips, never appears in this story. In fact, Manorama’s natal family remains cloaked in silence.

  It is possible, of course, that the two women know little, maybe almost nothing of Manorama’s childhood, for Manorama ruthlessly cut herself off from her family after her marriage. (And perhaps, in the process, denuded herself of her childhood, of the innocent part of her being.) It seems strange, it would seem strange to any woman, that she deprived herself of that emotional sustenance that only a girl’s own family can give her. The songs, the stories, the legends that have sprung up around women’s ‘mother’s homes’ as a fountainhead of love and caring grew out of a reality: a woman’s need for love that took account of her as a person, not as a figure fitting into a role. ‘When I was a girl ...’a woman wistfully says and it is as if that girl is the real her.

  But Manorama rejected this. The fact that her mother died just a year after her marriage made it easier perhaps, for her to distance herself from them. Not that she broke off ties completely. She gave what help she could, specially during any crises; but she rarely went home, nor were any of her brothers and sisters invited to visit her, except a younger sister, and that only once. And, this was much later, the youngest, a boy left motherless at the age of one. It is possible that Manorama had a soft corner for this motherless child. Or, perhaps this boy, born after her marriage, was the one child she had never carried about, and therefore brought her fewer reminders of a past she wanted to forget.

  Whatever her reasons, he was the only one of her siblings to visit them. A silent, withdrawn boy, Vithalrao discerned both intelligence and ambition in him. He decided to help him, sending him to a good school, later to college, and when he had done his law, getting him into the office of a friend of his, a renowned lawyer in Bombay. And when the time came, Manorama had no qualms about reminding him of what he owed them, what he owed her, his elder sister. Vithalrao was unhappy about what his wife was doing, but knowing her determination, he had no choice.

  It does not take Aru very long to realize that when the two women, Kalyani and Goda, speak of the past, they are playing cat’s cradle, skilfully transferring the thread from hand to hand, from finger to finger, creating a design between them, a design that allows certain facts to slip through. Clearly, there are stories concealed in the interstices of silence. One of these is of Kalyani’s marriage to her own uncle, Shripati.

  Kalyani, in the relating of her memories, goes back to the earlier part of her life, making it seem as if she was only a daughter, as if there was no more to her life than that. Yet the part of her life that she has edited out is there, the dark looming cloud of its absence making itself felt, even to Aru, who knows nothing about it.

  ‘Kalosmi’—‘I am Time risen to destroy the world.’

  Listening to Kalyani and Goda speaking of her grandparents, Sumi gets a sense of the power of time. Time, not as the destroyer, though, but as the creator. Kalyani and Goda, she thinks, unlike people at a seance, who want to conjure up the spirits of the dead, are bringing the old world alive, recreating it out of their memories. And Sumi thinks: will this happen to us, too? Kings and queens had their chroniclers; for ordinary mortals, there are only the children—if they live long enough, that is, for their parents to become a distant, nostalgic memory. But will our children, in this post-Freudian age, speak of us this way, one day? Will time remove all the dross, leaving only the gold behind?

  That Goda and Kalyani should be partners in this exercise in nostalgia seems perfectly natural to Sumi; it is Aru’s involvement that surprises her. In a way, it is a relief. Aru’s withdrawal from all of them, her frequent absences from home, for which she often gave no explanation, had made Sumi uneasy. Even worse, perhaps, had been the days when Aru stayed home; she spent her time by herself in her room, her face, when she finally emerged, flushed, slightly swollen, making Sumi wonder: Has she been sleeping or crying?

  This new occupation has brought the girl back into the family circle. And closer to Kalyani with whom she has had a troubled relationship. But Sumi, if less anxious, is nevertheless puzzled. What is there in this for Aru? Is it an escape? Is she looking for something?

  If she is, it is a purely impersonal search, for Aru reminds her mother of a jeweller picking up stones, grading them for size, colour and purity, putting them in different heaps, for some use that only he, the jeweller, knows about. I could have done this, too, after Gopal left, Sumi thinks—retracing my steps, picking up things, thinking—is this it? But she has turned resolutely away from even her immediate past, she is preparing herself for the future, for the job which she is soon to start on.

  Sumi has given up the idea of making a separate home for herself and her daughters. She has not gone back to Nagaraj, not since the day she watched the bereaved mother break down. Ultimately, however, it was not this memory that had put an end to her search for a home of her own, nor her father’s appeal to her to not move out—though that had been disconcerting enough. To have the feeling that he was appealing to her had made her acutely uncomfortable. Power and authority, which had always flowed out of him, suddenly seemed poised between them. And will I, some time soon, be in control? Unthinkable!

  But this had nothing to do with her decision to continue living in the Big House. It was, once again, the economics of the situation that had made the decision for her.

  Ironically, it is after she has come to this decision that Ramesh comes to her with a proposal, a proposal which, if she could have accepted, would have made it possible for her to have a home of her own.

  Ramesh looks as if he has been nerving himself to this, he finds it hard to begin, to explain what he has in mind.

  ‘My God, Ramesh!’ Sumi exclaims when she finally grasps what he is trying to say. ‘I can’t possibly take money, that kind of money, from you.’

  ‘But it’s your money, didn’t you hear me, Sumi? It’s yours. My father intended Guru to have it, but, poor man, he never had enough. That flat in Bombay is as much Guru’s as it was my mother’s, don’t you see? And Guru got nothing out of it.’

  ‘You know, Ramesh,�
�� Sumi’s tone is reflective now, ‘I’ve begun to think that what Gopal has really done is to take sanyas. I’m surprised none of you have thought of that. But look what’s happened—it’s not he who’s going around with the begging bowl, it’s I who am doing that.’

  ‘Begging bowl? What a horrible word, Sumi.’ Ramesh is stammering slightly, as he always does when he is angry, a rare occurence with him. ‘This isn’t charity we’re offering you. We are not giving you even half the value of the flat, we can’t do that. It’s only a token.’

  But Sumi knows it’s a way of helping her out. She also knows that though Ramesh says ‘we’, including his sisters in his intention, he will be be doing it alone.

  ‘What will Chitra say?’

  ‘Chitra has nothing to do with it. I don’t interfere in her family affairs, and she doesn’t interfere in mine. That’s how it has always been with us.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m being high minded, Ramesh. It isn’t easy for me to turn my back on money. I want it, my God, I want it so badly! I want so much to feel secure, I want to know that my girls won’t lack for anything. It’s so stupid of me, Ramesh, I never imagined such a thing happening, I never prepared myself for this. I gave up teaching when Seema was born and ....’

  ‘Look, Sumi, don’t think too much about it. I’ll deposit the money in your account, maybe we’ll make it a joint account with Aru. Let it be there, you can use it in times of need—perhaps for the girls’ weddings?’

  ‘Weddings! Now you’re talking like Amma.’

  Sumi laughs, but the topic of her daughters’ marriage is one she cannot really ignore. Kalyani and Goda won’t let her forget it. It’s always on their minds, in their conversation, something which seems to them both a problem (who’ll marry them?) and a solution to Sumi’s problem. Sumi, like Aru, is amazed by Kalyani. How can she, of all people, think of marriage with enthusiasm? She’s angry, too. Gopal and I never thought of our daughters’ marriage, never as a problem, anyway. Maybe we should have taken out marriage policies in their names like so many parents do, maybe we should have ....