A Matter of Time

by Shashi Deshpande

  And then he is back into himself, left with the thought: nothing is over. Whether our lives are long or short, we leave our marks on the world. Like the wall memorial to the Vietnam dead, our names are inscribed on it, visible to those who look for them. Nothing is lost, each moment remains, encapsulated in time.

  Gopal sees a solitary figure in the distance moving towards him. It is Charu, holding an umbrella, carefully picking her way through the slush. He knows she is coming for him and getting up, mindless of the rain, he moves towards her. He takes the umbrella from her and holds it, futile shelter, over their drenched bodies. They walk back together to the room where the others are waiting for him so that they can return home.

  THE HOUSE IS crying out ‘biko, biko’, Nagi says, weeping, and the words she uses for emptiness seem to carry traces of the cavernous echoes the house gives back to them. Sometimes they feel that it is not the dead who have become insubstantial, but they, the living, whose lives lack substance and solidity. Their voices sound thin and tinny, and their actions as illusory as the shadow play of someone’s fingers on the wall.

  Aru, sitting in her mother’s room, thinks she can hear her grandfather’s steps (as her mother did though she does not know that), slow, tired steps climbing up the stairs. She hears (or are they echoes of the past stored in her mind?) Sumi’s quick footsteps, her voice calling out to them, speaking on the phone, saying ‘Yes? Tell me.’

  Aru is reading ‘The Gardener’s Son’, the typescript that was brought back the day after Sumi’s death. It’s only for children, she said to me, but it’s not, I know it’s so much more. Sumi is saying something here which I must know. But I can’t get it, not now, it’s impossible, I can’t think of anything but Sumi dead. Her figure keeps coming between me and her words, it won’t let anything come through. I wish I’d read it earlier, I wish I had spoken to her about it. I thought she didn’t care about what Papa did, I thought she was uncaring, indifferent, I said angry words to her, but I know now that was not true. It’s too late now, I can never speak to her, it’s too late.

  She can’t cry, that relief is still not possible for her; she can only stoically endure the pain-spiked guilt that lies heavy and sharp within her. In fact, they are all of them carrying their own burdens of guilt, though the luxury of tears seems reserved for Charu alone, whose bouts of sobbing frighten them.

  ‘I was selfish, I should have spent more time with her, I kept saying “my exams, my studies,” I never sat down with her, if only I had known.’

  Gopal, who is present during one of these self-flaying bouts of Charu’s, remembers her as an infant, crying, wanting her mother, so inconsolable that he could do nothing with her. Sumi had come rushing out of her bath then, her sari draped carelessly about her wet body, she had taken the child from Gopal and rocked her until Charu had hiccuped herself into an exhausted sleep.

  Gopal has the same feeling of helplessness now as he had then. He is angry that he can do nothing to assuage his daughter’s grief. His own grief, of course, he cannot share with anyone, that is impossible. He is still living with Shankar, though he visits the Big House every day. The day he comes to tell them he is leaving Bangalore, he has to walk through empty, silent streets. Life has come to a standstill, people driven into their homes by the terrible shock of another assassination. There is none of the violence that followed the mother’s death, only this stunned silence, this wholly voluntary cessation of normal life.

  Gopal finds them huddled together in front of the TV. Shocked and grieved as they are, there is for the time being, some respite from their own personal sorrow, they can lose themselves for a while in a larger calamity. But the relief does not last. They cannot ignore the gruesome pictures of violence the TV brings them, they cannot avoid a despair at being part of such a world.

  ‘We’ve progressed, Gopal,’ Kalyani says. ‘They killed the Mahatma with a pistol, Indira with a machine gun and now they’ve used a bomb on Rajiv.’ Looking at the young people about her, she cries out in despair, ‘Such a young man—how could anyone have hated him so much! Can people hate so much?’

  The answer is ‘yes’, but it is not the answer Kalyani can take now and so they are all silent.

  ‘How will our children live in this world, Gopala? Where did we go wrong? What have we done to them?’

  Gopal, appealed to directly, tries to speak and gives up, his hands falling helplessly by his sides. And Aru, coming out of her preoccupation for the first time, gives him a curious look.

  Aru has stayed out of it so far; she has watched the TV silently, saying nothing, not even exclaming in pity, as the others have done, over the pictures of the family, the young wife and children, in their grief. If only she could cry like Charu, Gopal thinks, if only she had Seema’s armour of self-centredness. No, Seema is not self-centred’, she is different, she is this way because we treated her differently, we set her apart from her sisters.

  Suddenly Gopal catches himself up and thinks: We? Did I say we? There’s no more we, there is only ‘I’ now. My daughters have only me.

  And so he goes to Seema and sits by her, talking to her of his plans. For some reason, he thinks of the birds pecking on the roads, which fly away, miraculously it seems, the instant a vehicle gets close. Escaping death in that needlepoint of a moment. Always, somehow, unharmed. Seema is like that. And then he sees she is crying—large tears that plummet down with their weight. He moves forward instinctively to hold her, but Kalyani is there before him, Kalyani who comforts the girl with words and caresses. This is how it is now, this is right, he thinks, I have forfeited my place in their lives.

  There have been no visitors since morning, it is the first day since the deaths that they have been by themselves. The condolence visits have been a kind of punishment to be endured, making demands on them that have been difficult to meet. Yet now, without any visitors, they find themselves at a loss. Their own sorrow seeps back into them at the sight of Seema’s tears and, without strangers to remain composed for, they feel themselves in danger of losing control. Kalyani gets up and brings them coffee. Looking at the midget-sized stainless steel glasses, Gopal remembers Sumi’s habit of drinking minute amounts of strong milky coffee during the day, quaffing it in one gulp, then shuddering, a shudder not of distaste, but of intense pleasure; almost, Gopal had said to her once, laughing at her, like an orgasm.

  The mood has changed, they are no longer able to be involved in watching television, that tragedy seems remote and irrelevant to their lives. Premi goes away silently to her father’s room where she has been spending a great deal of her time. She is cleaning it up, she says, she wants to do as much as possible before she has to go back to Bombay, she says. And it is true that she began with great energy (the first thing that she did was to get rid of the bell, even the wires have gone, there is no reminder, except the marks on the wall, of its existence), opening the doors and the windows so that the staircase is flooded with light, light that seems to bridge the room to the rest of the house. But the frenzied activity soon faltered. It has become a kind of search now, though what Premi is searching for is not here, in her father’s room. It is her father’s mind that Premi is trying to probe into and that became impossible the moment his skull cracked open, spilling the grey slithery mass onto the road.

  Now Premi sits in the room, silent and still, staring into the dark abyss that the deaths of her father and sister—the two people against whom she has always measured herself—has confronted her with. It is here, in this room, that Premi can so clearly see the face of death, it is here that she is beginning to realize what it means: an emptiness, a monumental disruption of the universe.

  None of them can reach her; only Nikhil, they know, can bring her out of it. For the first time Kalyani is anxious for Premi to go back to Bombay, to her home and family. But Premi is adamant, she will not go until Charu’s results are out. She is leaning heavily on the hope that Charu will get admission in Bombay, that she will live there, with her, in her hou
se.

  ‘Go to her,’ Kalyani tells the girls, and though Charu obeys, she knows it is no use, Premi does not want anyone. It is a relief when Devaki, struggling to get back to her competent self, comes to take them to her home. Just to get away for a while, she says, it will do us all good. She succeeds in persuading all of them except Kalyani, who refuses to be tempted even by the bait of Goda’s being there. And Aru, who stays back with her.

  ‘I’m your daughter, Amma, I’m your son.’

  Aru has taken the promise she had made to her grandmother very seriously, she is almost always by her side. Since she heard Kalyani’s story from Premi, her imagination has oscillated between pictures of extreme cruelty, even of violence, in her grandparents’ life, but they refuse to take shape, to gel and she is finally left with just two pictures: a woman, her two daughters by her side, frozen into an image of endurance and desperation. And a man, moving all over a city, tirelessly searching for his lost son.

  All this has now ended. It ended for her the day Kalyani cried out, ‘I lost my child, Goda.’ Even at that moment Aru could not help wondering—is it that lost child she means? Is this a declaration of her innocence, now, when it is too late, when it no longer matters? Or, is she crying out for Sumi?

  And then Aru saw Goda put her arms around Kalyani, she saw her envelop Kalyani in the folds of her love and compassion. And Aru gave up guessing. It no longer seemed important, it changed nothing about Kalyani. Forgiving, she realizes, has no place in this relationship; acceptance is all.

  Now the others have gone with Devaki and only the three of them are left. It suits Gopal, because it is to these two that he wants to speak of his plans first. He had thought it would be hard, he had wondered how he would explain to them; except for the fact that he has to go, he can tell them very little.

  It has to be done, though, and he tells them that he is taking some of Sumi’s ashes for immersion in the Alaknanda, a river Sumi and he had seen together long ago. But there are things he cannot say; he cannot tell them that the river, flowing down the hills with a youthful exuberance, had seemed then to be, in its unsullied purity, like Sumi herself. He does not tell them, either, that there is more to this journey than this immersion. How can he and what can he say when he is not clear about it himself? Can he confess to them his hope—such a frail hope—that this ritual may help to exorcise his past of some ghosts?

  Surprisingly, they ask him no questions. It spares him the explanations he had dreaded having to give. Kalyani, looking at his face, seems to understand he is being driven by a need he does not know himself, she seems to realize that he has to go to make peace with himself.

  ‘Yes, go, Gopala,’ she says. She holds his hand and strokes it tenderly, compassionately, and it is as if she is seeing again that strange young man who had been her tenant, the young man for whom she had felt such sympathy and affection. I know it has been very hard on you.’

  ‘I’ll be back, Amma, I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Don’t I know that? We’ll be here, Aru, Seema and I. I’ll always be here in this house.’

  The house is now Kalyani’s. They have found Shripati’s will which left it to ‘Kalyani, daughter of Vithalrao and Manoramabai’. Goda had looked anxiously at Kalyani when Anil read the will, but for Kalyani, clearly, there was no sting in the words that took away her marital status. On the contrary, it is as if the words have given her something more than the house, restored something she had lost; they seem, in fact, to have strengthened her.

  ‘Aru?’ Gopal turns to her.

  She has said nothing until now. Suddenly, and to their consternation, Aru breaks down. It is the first time she has given way since her mother’s death, except once, when she had burst into angry, stormy tears, crying out to Surekha, ‘Look at us, ma’am, look at us. Charu adored her and Sumi was so happy, she was happy after such a long time.’

  Now she cries bitterly, the tears of an adult. ‘Sumi, Sumi,’ she says the name over and over again. This time Kalyani does not move; it is left to Gopal to comfort her. Holding the thin quivering body, listening to the piteous heart-rending cries, Gopal is invaded by a piercing pain. This is what I wanted to avoid, this is what I had hoped to escape.

  Aru, with an enormous effort, controls herself and moves away from her father’s arms. They look at each other, father and daughter and then Aru says, echoing her grandmother, ‘Yes, Papa, you go. We’ll be all right, we’ll be quite all right, don’t worry about us.’

  No words of farewell are said. They are not necessary. As he is leaving, Gopal looks back once and sees them standing side by side, two women, the two faces, one old and the other so young, linked by a curious resemblance. It is the steady watchful look on their faces, the smile of encouragement they have for him that makes them look alike.

  ‘If it is indeed true that we are bound to our destinies, that there is no point struggling against them, even then this remains—that we do not submit passively or cravenly, but with dignity and strength. Surely, this, to some extent, frees us from our bonds?’

  It is this thought that Gopal will carry with him on his wanderings, it is this picture of the two women that will be with him wherever he goes.

  We leave them there.

  AFTERWORD

  NO LONGER SILENT

  One of the problems I’ve had to face as a writer is the isolation one works in when one writes in English in India—an isolation that is emphasized when one is a woman ... For me the problems amounted to this: there was nothing, nobody I could model myself on ... I could only tell myself, I don’t want to write like this, not like this, not like this ...

  —Shashi Deshpande, “The Dilemma of the Writer”1

  I

  By 1996, when A Matter of Time was published in India, Shashi Deshpande had seven novels, four books for children, more than eighty short stories, and a screenplay to her credit, making her one of the most published women writers in English in contemporary India. Her books are available in much of the Western world, either in English or in translation, and she is the recipient of a string of literary awards, including the prestigious national Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990 for her novel That Long Silence.

  Yet she remains curiously “invisible” in her own perception, as well as that of the general public. At a time when a writer’s stature seems to be determined by the number of column inches she gets in newspapers and periodicals and the amount of media attention her new work attracts, Deshpande’s presence is low-key. Although her work has been published in English in India and the United Kingdom and has been translated into German, Russian, Finnish, Dutch, and Danish, she still doesn’t attract the critical or popular attention that writers like Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, or even Ruth Prawer Jhabvala do. This is only partly explained by her location—distant from the media capitals of Bombay and Delhi—and her own modest, almost reclusive, lifestyle. Much more likely an explanation is the fact that she is almost completely “homegrown,” a writer so rooted in her reality and her social and cultural milieu as to feel “alienated” from what she refers to as the Westernized literary landscape of English writing in India. “I am different from other Indians who write in English,” she said in an interview with translator and editor Lakshmi Holmström in 1993. “My background is very firmly here. I was never educated abroad, my novels don’t have any westerners, for example. They are just about Indian people and the complexities of our lives ... My English is as we use it. I don’t make it easier for anyone, really.”2 Elaborating on this five years later, she said to me that “all those writers writing in English then—R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Nayantara Sahgal, Kamala Markandeya—were totally alien to my feelings as an Indian writer ... I had no desire to feel any literary kinship with them.” Explaining what she meant by “alienated,” she went on to say that their world was “not my world,” that what they created was seen from a certain “angle” that didn’t allow a sense of intimacy either with the place or with the people. “Now when I think of
it I realize that [this writing] was intended for a Western readership, so when I started writing I certainly wasn’t using them as my role models. I had no role models. My path was totally unliterary, in one sense, because I was not a student of literature, so writing was never a literary exercise, it was just a means of self-expression.”3

  Shashi Deshpande came to writing quite late in her life, and she came to it by accident. Thirty years old and in England, where she had accompanied her husband for a year, she was encouraged by him to write about all they had seen and done so that she would not forget it. She began putting her experiences down on paper and sent her articles to her father, who in turn sent them on to the Deccan Herald, a southern Indian newspaper. Much to her surprise, they published her pieces and almost without her knowing it, her writing career had begun. “It was only much later that it struck me how discontented I had been with my life,” she told me. “Not unhappy, just discontented. Everything changed after I started writing.”

  Three factors in her early life shaped Deshpande as a writer: her father, Adya Rangacharya, was one of the most well-known Kannada writers of his time; she was educated exclusively in English; and she was a woman.4 Born in 1938 in Dharwar, a small town in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, she grew up surrounded by books and literary personalities. Their house was redolent with an atmosphere of discussions, of teatime conversations on books and ideas, a place where play readings and rehearsals took place all the time. “I was happily submerged in it,” she recalls.5 Although the family could be defined as a typical middle-class professional and scholarly one, in actuality it was rather unconventional for the times. Her parents did not belong to the same region or community—her mother came from an affluent family in Maharashtra in western India—and their marriage was most unusual. In a country where marrying outside your class and community is still frowned upon, the fact that her parents had an arranged marriage that transgressed these norms was most remarkable. They didn’t even speak the same language.