by Anita Desai
Deven nodded. They did this every year, he knew. He himself was convinced that one day the response would come from Stockholm, and shake the literary world of India to its foundations. He felt it beginning to shake already, under his feet. The two o’clock bus from Moradabad roared by. When it had passed and he could make himself heard, he asked, ‘So you will print some of the old poems after all? The great Rose poems, or the Winter ones? You know –’ and he made ready to declaim his favourite lines, the ones that contained all the enchantment and romance he had ever experienced in his life.
But Murad cut him short by leaning forward on his elbows and speaking almost into his ear. ‘No, I won’t, Deven. I don’t print stale old stuff in my journal. Even if I have to wait two, three, four months before I get all the material I want, I get it – then I print. I want a full feature on Nur – Nur in his old age, the dying Nur before he is gone, like a comet into the dark. I want you to do that feature.’
‘I?’ breathed Deven, so overcome that he quite forgot for the time the noisy surroundings, the empty plates, even the foul breath from Murad’s mouth so close to his face. It was the comet he was seeing, swift and pale in the dark like a bird of the night.
‘You go and see Nur,’ Murad continued. ‘You know his work well – oh, as well as anyone, I suppose. You wrote a book about him once, didn’t you?’
‘A monograph, yes. Will you publish it?’ Deven asked breathlessly, thinking that when a comet appeared all kinds of strange happenings might occur. For a moment he became confused and thought it was not Nur who was the comet but Murad who had come from Delhi to visit him, to show him a light: he was willing to believe anything.
But Murad snapped crossly, ‘No, I won’t. Of course not. I don’t want to become bankrupt. I want to bring out my journal. That is what I’m talking about, idiot. Try and listen. Be serious. I want you to track him down in his house in Chandni Chowk –’
‘Oh, they say he does not like visitors,’ Deven said quickly. The comet was something to be feared, he just remembered, it was a bad omen, not lucky He could not have said why but he was frightened.
‘Look, will you do this feature for me or not?’
‘Of course I will, Murad.’ He became meek. He hung his head, looking at his fingers clutching the edge of the table. On each fingernail a pale cuticle loomed bleakly.
‘Then do as I say. Find him. Go to him and interview him. Discuss the Urdu scene with him. Ask him for his new work. He must have some, dammit, and I want it. I need it for the special issue, see?’
Chapter 2
THE BUS SOON left Mirpore behind. It came as a slight shock to Deven that one could so easily and quickly free oneself from what had come to seem to him not only the entire world since he had no existence outside it, but often a cruel trap, or prison, as well, an indestructible prison from which there was no escape.
Although it lacked history, the town had probably existed for centuries in its most basic, most elemental form. Those shacks of tin and rags, however precarious and impermanent they looked, must have existed always, repetitively and in succeeding generations, but never fundamentally changing and in that sense enduring. The roads that ran between their crooked rows had been periodically laid with tar but the dust beneath was always present, always perceptible. In fact, it managed to escape from under the asphalt and to rise and spread through the town, summer and winter, a constant presence, thick enough to be seen and felt. During the monsoon, always brief and disappointing on this northern plain more than a thousand miles from the coast, it turned to mud. But the sun came out again very soon and dried it to its usual grey and granular form. The citizens of Mirpore, petty tradesmen rather than agriculturists, could not be blamed for failing to understand those patriotic songs and slogans about the soil, the earth. To them it was so palpably dust.
History had scattered a few marks and imprints here and there but no one in Mirpore thought much of them and certainly gave them no honour in the form of special signs, space or protection. The small mosque of marble and pink sandstone that had been built by a nawab who had fled from the retaliatory action of the British in Delhi after the mutiny of 1857 and wished to commemorate his safe escape to this obscure and thankfully forgotten town, and also to raise a memorial to the grace of God who, he believed, had made it possible, was now so overgrown by the shacks, signboards, stalls, booths, rags, banners, debris and homeless poor of the bazaars that it would have been difficult for anyone to discern it beneath this multi-layered covering. Its white marble facings had turned grey and pock-marked through urban pollution, the black marble inlay had either fallen out or been picked out by sharp instruments held in idle hands, the red sandstone of the dome had turned to the colour of filth from the smoke of open fires, the excreta of pigeons, and the ubiquitous dust of Mirpore. It was by no means forgotten, it was still used, five times a day the priest gave the call to the faithful, and many men came in, washed in the shallow pool and knelt and prayed in the small courtyard amongst the brooms and cooking fires, but not one of them thought of it as an historical landmark or remembered the man who had built it or his reasons for doing so.
The temples were more numerous but had no history at all. There was literally not a man in Mirpore who could have told one when they were built or by whom. If one inquired, one might be told that a bright pink and white concrete structure with a newly-painted clay idol and fluorescent tubes for lights was five hundred years old; not strictly true of course but when one considered that its site might have been used for prayer that long, it was not all that false either. The temples had the same kind of antiquity that the shacks of the poor had, and the stalls of the traders – they were often wrecked, rebuilt and replaced, but their essential form remained the same. There were also small stone shrines, mere apertures in walls, or half-smothered by the roots of rapacious banyan trees, that might have been truly old, but although some might have been able to provide them with legends, none could supply them with a history. The fact was that no one knew the difference.
Lacking a river, the town had an artificial tank in which people bathed and from which they fetched water although there was no water to be seen in it, only a covering layer of bright green scum on which bits of paper, rags and flowers rested as on a solid surface. There were wells, too, in which the water was even more successfully concealed. Mirpore spared no effort to give an impression of total aridity. Lately a canal had been dug to water the fields of an agricultural college but it was dug behind the houses that lay on the outskirts, hidden by their walls, and few town dwellers knew of its existence. Their lives were lived almost entirely within the bazaars that joined – and separated – the different religious shrines.
Naturally the area around the mosque was considered the ‘Muslim’ area, and the rest ‘Hindu’. This was not strictly so and there were certainly no boundaries or demarcations, yet there were differences between them that were not apparent to the eye but known and observed by everyone, so that pigs were generally kept out of the vicinity of the mosque and cows never slaughtered near a temple. Once a year, during the Mohurram procession of tazias through the city, police sprang up everywhere with batons, sweating with a sense of responsibility and heightened tension, intent on keeping the processions away from the temples and from hordes of homeless cows or from groups of gaily coloured citizens who unfortunately often celebrated Holi with packets of powdered colours and buckets of coloured water on the same day as that of the ritual mourning. If these clashed, as happened from time to time, knives flashed, batons flailed and blood ran. For a while tension was high, the newspapers – both in Hindi and Urdu – were filled with guarded reports and fulsome editorials on India’s secularity while overnight news-sheets appeared with less guarded reports laced with threats and accusations. Then the dust of Mirpore rose and swirled and buried everything in sight again; the citizens of Mirpore returned to their daily struggle to breathe. The Hindus slaughtered pigs in their own quarter, the Muslims took to slaught
ering buffaloes in place of cows, realizing that the latter would have been tantamount to suicide. The few Christians of the town ate the meat of both and attended the one small whitewashed brick church set in a cemetery shaded by dusty neem trees.
But where was the centre of this formless, shapeless town on the plain that had not even a river or a hill to give it any reason for its existence? Was it the main bazaar, skirted by mosque, temples, stores, shops and cinema houses, or was it the shabby municipal park where concrete benches stood in a circle around an empty fountain painted blue – again, Mirpore’s addiction to total dehydration – and broken bricks edged flowerbeds that contained empty tins and paper bags but no flowers? Here, through parched hedges of oleander and the yellowed foliage of neem trees, the bungalows of some of the town functionaries, such as the sub-divisional officer and the superintendent of police could be seen, as well as the Public Works Department’s rest house, the college where Deven taught, and some of the schools. These educational institutions were named after, respectively, Lala Ram Lal, Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Dayanand, Annie Besant, bluebells and sunshine. Except for the latter, none had ever visited Mirpore but their fame and the power of their images had not left the town unimpressed, for Mirpore was isolated but not cut off from the world, as Deven had come to believe. It had its railway station, after all, at one end of the bazaar, and the bus depot at the other, and the constant comings and goings of trains and buses gave it an air of being a halting place in a long journey, a caravanserai of a kind. People went up to Delhi to consult doctors in the big hospitals there, present petitions to various government departments, appear in the courts, sell goods or else take delivery of them. Others merely passed through, peering out of smeared train windows and wondering how much longer it would take to Delhi, or reaching out to buy oranges, lengths of sugar cane, dry gram or the particular sweet for which. Mirpore was known. (This latter consisted of a shiny yellow stuff that was shaped into balls on which flies crawled as if in animated illustration of the laws of gravity.) Then they would move on, unreluctantly. This had the effect of making Mirpore seem in a state of perpetual motion. There was really more of bustle than doldrums and it was often deafening. Yet the bustle was strangely unproductive – the yellow sweets were amongst the very few things that were actually manufactured here; there was no construction to speak of, except the daily one of repairing; no growth except in numbers, no making permanent what had remained through the centuries so stubbornly temporary – and it was other cities, other places that saw the fruits of all the bustle, leaving the debris and the litter behind for Mirpore.
Its solidity, its stubbornness had formed a trap, Deven felt, and yet it was so easy to leave it behind. No sooner had he got into the bus that waited at the depot between the grain and vegetable markets, than it started off with a snarl and jerked its way over the railway crossing, edging out of the way a herd of sluggish buffaloes, a bullock cart loaded with sugar cane and several bicycles, every one of which seemed to carry not only a bicyclist and a milk can but also an aged mother on the carrier seat, and then rumbled past the graffiti-scarred yellow walls of the Lala Ram Lal College, its dust field and barbed wire fencing, past the red brick walls of the Swami Dayanand Veterinary and Agricultural College which seemed to have no human population but was set in surprisingly lush grounds of green, waving grain and bougainvillaeas that ran rampant along the boundary fence, several outhouses full of mud and dung and domestic beasts, and then it was out in the countryside.
Of course the stretch of land between Mirpore and the capital was so short that there was no really rural scenery – most of the fields looked withered and desolate, and tin smokestacks exhaling enormous quantities of very black and foul-smelling smoke, sugar-cane crushing works, cement factories, brick kilns, motor repair workshops and the attendant teashops and bus-stops were strung along the highway on both sides, overtaking what might once have been a pleasant agricultural aspect and obliterating it with all the litter and paraphernalia and effluent of industry: concrete, zinc, smoke, pollutants, decay and destruction from which emerged, reportedly, progress and prosperity. There were many huge signboards proclaiming this hard-to-believe message, with pictures of small, smiling families and big tractors and tyres.
Deven was determined, however, to enjoy it purely for its novelty. As a student he had known the countryside only as a background for an occasional picnic with his friends: they had gone out into it on their bicycles, bought sugar cane from some surly farmer and sat in the shade of a ruined monument to chew it and sing songs from the latest cinema show and talk lewdly of cinema actresses. That countryside had had no more connection with the landscape celebrated in the poetry he read than the present one. Then, after he graduated and married and came to Mirpore to teach, it became for him the impassable desert that lay between him and the capital with its lost treasures of friendships, entertainment, attractions and opportunities. It turned into that strip of no-man’s land that lies around a prison, threatening in its desolation.
Now he peered at it through a glass pane filmed with dust and gave an apprehensive shiver, just as a released prisoner might. This made his pale green nylon shirt crackle with latent electricity, reminding him how it had arrived, with his wife, after her last visit to her parents’ home in Haldwani, an ingratiating present to their sullen son-in-law who had to be placated and kept contented if their daughter was not to suffer from ill treatment. He had tossed it on to the floor in an obligatory fit of temper – the meek are not always mild – saying the colour was one he detested, that the buttons did not match, that the size was too large – how could they have chosen such a cheap garment for their son-in-law? Did they think him worth no more than this? Sarla had picked it up, folded it silently and put it away in a shoe-box – for malice is often mute. This morning he had ordered her to take it out for him to wear on his trip to Delhi. He had tried to ignore her smirk as she shook it out and laid it across his bed. Now he fingered the buttons he had said did not match and stared through the streaked and stained windowpane at a grove of neem trees outside, an occasional Persian wheel and slow, dragging buffaloes, and tried to convince himself that he was actually on his way to Delhi to see a poet, his hero, and talk to him. Nothing in his life had prepared him for an occasion of this scale. Neither the bus drive nor the nylon shirt helped.
His large, turbanned neighbour, noticing his occasional tremors of apprehension, offered him some peanuts in a paper bag, asking at the same time, ‘Going to Delhi?’
Deven refused the peanuts but had to admit to the latter since the bus went nowhere but to Delhi where it turned around and brought back another load of passengers to Mirpore.
‘I am also going,’ his neighbour confided with some pride, spreading out his thighs in an expansive gesture. ‘My nephew’s first birthday. His mother said come, you must come, it is the first birthday. So I closed down my shop for the day, gave up a day’s earnings to go. You know what sort of people we are –’, he put his hand on his shirt pocket, pressing it with spread fingers. ‘When it is a choice between head and heart, we always choose heart, na? Not much head after all,’ he guffawed and crunched down upon a peanut shell, cracking it open.
He was about to give a full account of his business when the bus swerved suddenly and wildly to avoid a stray dog slouching across the road, struck it on its hindquarters, sent it rolling and howling into the roadside ditch and plunged on through a bank of yellow dust, leaving the occupants choking, coughing and crying out in protest, anger, warning and commiseration.
It made Deven give another, more violent shiver. Again the nylon shirt responded with an electric crackle, as if it were an embodiment of Sarla’s malice and mockery. His fear and loathing of acts of violence and pain were overcome by irritation. It was sadly disappointing to him that he was not travelling up to Delhi on this important occasion in a style more suited to a literary man, a literary event. He had never found a way to reconcile the meanness of his physical existence with th
e purity and immensity of his literary yearnings. The latter were constantly assaulted and wrecked by the former – as now in the form of the agonized dog, the jolting bus, the peanut-crunching neighbour, the little tin box in which Sarla had packed his lunch and which he kept wrapped in a newspaper, the smallness of the sum of money he carried in his pocket: all these indignities and impediments. How, out of such base material, was he to wrest a meeting with a great poet, some kind of dialogue with him, some means of ensuring that this rare opportunity would not also turn to dust, spilt blood and lament?
He turned and peered out of the window to see if the dog lay on the road, broken, bleeding, or dead. He saw a flock of crows alight on the yellow grass that grew beside the ditch, their wings flickering across the view like agitated eyelashes.
‘It seems to be dead,’ he murmured, unable to contain his unease. Was it an omen?
‘Fortunate for the dog if it is,’ said his neighbour philosophically, and drew a deep breath that made the mucus gurgle in his large nostrils. It might have been done in sorrow, or in satisfaction; it was hard to tell from his impassive expression. ‘Birth and death, and only suffering in between,’ he added, quite cheerfully. This seemed to have no relation to what he had told Deven previously of his life. ‘When God calls us away,’ he went on, ‘it is a blessing.’
The lack of connection between the man’s thought and speech made a break in Deven’s own line of thought. He surprised himself by suddenly quoting aloud some lines of Nur’s that rose in his mind, the ones about the first white hair on a man’s head appearing like a white flower out of a grave. Having recalled these lines, he went on:
‘Life is no more than a funeral procession winding towards the grave,
Its small joys the flowers of funeral wreaths …’
Silence followed this quotation while the bus bumped loudly and ground and overtook a bullock cart and a lorry while the two men, sitting uneasily side by side, tried to adjust themselves to the exacting presence of poetry between them.