by Anita Desai
‘Ha, that is wonderful,’ said the turbanned man, slowly shaking his head as if it had received a blow. ‘You are a poet,’ he added respectfully, turning to look at Deven with open curiosity. He had a cast in one eye that made him look as if he knew something that Deven didn’t, and that put Deven on the defensive.
‘No, no,’ he muttered, ‘only a – a teacher.’ Hunching his shoulders, he relapsed into his usual anxious and sullen persona.
This information appeared to make his neighbour distinctly uneasy. His large, heavy buttocks shifted away from Deven’s meagre shanks. He neither spoke to Deven again nor offered him any more peanuts. Instead, he turned his garrulous attention to the man across the aisle from him who had a milk can wedged between his feet, a dusty turban wound round his head, a green eye-patch covering one eye, and with whom he fell to discussing the rising prices, the increase in lawlessness and the last harvest.
Excluded, Deven stared out at the white dust and the yellow weeds, the leafless thorn trees, the broken fences, isolated tin and brick shacks and the scattered carcasses of cattle that littered the landscape and yet rendered it more bleak and more bare under the empty sky. His chin sank low as he wondered what had made him set out this morning with such confidence and excitement. Now he was convinced that Murad had not meant any of what he had said, that he would let him down as so often before and that he would not meet the illustrious poet after all. How could he, insignificant and gullible nobody that he was? And if he did, if somehow such a miracle did come about merely to prove him wrong once again, then what could he possibly say to him? Why had he not been content to recite his verse, draw solace from it and impress others with the source of his solace? What madness had drawn him out to undertake this journey into what could only be disaster?
He hung around the Inter-State Bus Terminal on Ring Road for a long time, not daring to enter the city walls and search out Murad’s office in Kashmere Gate and so set in motion the events of the day to which he knew he would not measure up. What vainglory to have accepted Murad’s challenge, to have agreed to a task for which he was not qualified, for which he had neither the experience nor the confidence. He realized that he and Murad were no more than a pair of undeveloped, clownish students who could not hope to pass the examination of life. Clowns: that was how Nur would see them when they impudently burst upon him, uninvited, self-invited, and put to him their presumptuous questions and requests.
This reminded him – he clutched at his pocket – was the questionnaire still there? The questionnaire he had been working on night after night ever since Murad’s visit? Yes, he could feel the wad of papers under his fingers, consoling in their number and solidity. He was a scholar after all, and a lover of poetry. There was that. Sighing, he drew out a cigarette from between its folds and went towards a teashop to light it at the smouldering length of rope that hung from one of the doorposts precisely for this purpose.
Seeing him there, the teashop owner called, ‘Come in, come in. Don’t stand outside. You need a cup of tea after your long journey, my son,’ and although Deven had resolved to spend nothing on extras, to keep to only the most essential expenditure, he was led by the teashop owner’s suggestion just as helplessly as he had been led by Murad’s, and he shambled in to sit down on a wooden bench along the wall and accept a glass of sweet, milky tea: he did, after all, need something to see him through the most momentous day of his adult life. Certainly he had never felt more inadequate and the measure of his inadequacy must be in proportion to the importance of the task that had been set him. By whom? By Murad of the betel-stained teeth, the toothbrush moustache, the fiddling, shifty, untrustworthy ways? Impossible. He saw the hand of God as clearly as if it were the shaft of dust-laden light filtering through a hole in the corrugated iron roof of the teashop and striking the handle of a ladle with which the owner was stirring a great pan of steaming milk upon a small charcoal fire.
When he had drunk to the bottom of the glass, he saw a dead fly floating in the dregs of his tea.
The gasp he gave was only partly of horror at the teashop owner’s filthiness and the wretched standards of hygiene in his shop. Or even from a fear of typhoid and cholera. It was the revelation that all the omens of the day had come together and met at the bottom of the glass he held between his fingers. In it lay the struck dog, the triumphant crows, the dead fly – death itself, nothing less. Coming together in the separate prisms of the fly’s eye, drowned but glittering in the tea, it stared back at him without blinking.
Putting down the glass, he got up and crept out of its way quietly while the teashop owner shouted jovially at the passengers who were tumbling out of the next bus: ‘Come this way, friends, come this way. Here you will find pakoras fried in purest oil, sweets made of purest milk, and the tea with most sugar. This way, friends, this way!’
Murad came charging down the steep wooden staircase to meet him on the pavement outside the drycleaner’s shop where Deven was still studying the clutter of signboards above the door, saying, ‘Snowflake Dyers and Cleaners’, ‘K. K. Sahay & Sons – Printers and Publishers since 1935’, amongst a plethora of others, all equally aged and faded. Murad arrived at his side, gasping for breath: it seemed he had either been watching for Deven from an upstairs window or had posted someone else to do so. But who else would have recognized him in this city? He had not returned to it since he left after his graduation when, one might have said, the dew was still fresh on him, while now he was, or at any rate felt, withered and grey. Murad stood breathing hard, holding on to the doorpost on either side of him. Did he not want Deven to see his office, evaluate the degree of the success or failure of the journal and ascertain if Murad really was in a position to commission poets and scholars to write for him?
Deven had to have verification. He said testily, ‘What is all this hurry?’
‘Of course there’s a hurry,’ Murad gasped. ‘Didn’t I tell you – the appointment is for three o’clock? There’s just time to go and have lunch.’
‘I’ve had my lunch,’ Deven said loudly and positively: he was not going to be taken in by Murad again, so soon after the last time.
‘Tea then,’ Murad pleaded.
‘I’ve had tea, too,’ Deven insisted. ‘Let us go and see Nur!’
Murad’s shoulders sloped precipitously and he seemed to be having some trouble with his right eye: he kept dabbing at it with a corner of a large and dirty green handkerchief. Stooped and sniffing and silent, he set off, pushing his way through the lunch-hour crowds of Kashmere Gate, and Deven had to hurry after him. But when Murad stopped, it was only at an electrician’s shop to ask if some repair work to an electric lamp had been done. Deven stood beside the gutter, trying to avoid being pushed in by the crowds, while Murad argued heatedly with the electrician who had been interrupted while eating his lunch out of a small tin box and was not very polite either.
‘Once you put something into the hands of these rogues, you can just say goodbye,’ Murad said bitterly, turning away when the electrician shouted loudly over his shoulder for a glass of buttermilk, and starting back the way he had come.
‘But, Murad – where is Nur’s house? Aren’t we late?’
‘Late? Who says we are late? Do you think that old man has any idea of time? Let him wait,’ said Murad, showing yet another switch of mood as if playing with some interior kaleidoscope. Deven had been watching these shifts and switches helplessly since their schooldays in the back lanes of Darya Ganj but found himself still amazed and enraged by them.
‘We can’t let him wait,’ he said with some heat. ‘He mustn’t be kept waiting. We are to be there at three – is it far?’
‘Who knows?’ Murad shrugged with maddening nonchalance. ‘He lives somewhere in the bazaars of Chandni Chowk – it’s not a quarter I know,’ he added loftily, with a sniff and a dab at his eye.
‘But then – how are we to go there? I thought you must know it,’ Deven cried in dismay. He often had nightmares in which he struggle
d towards an unspecified destination but was repeatedly waylaid and deflected, never in any stretch of sleep arriving at it any more than he did in waking. His feet seemed to be enmeshed in the sticky net of the nightmare that would not let him escape at any level of consciousness.
Just then an ash-smeared sadhu wearing a python draped over his neck and shoulders and a garland of marigolds on top of his head but nothing on the lower regions, thrust his begging bowl at Deven’s face and stood firmly between him and Murad. Deven looked helplessly into the bowl which made the sadhu rattle the few coins he had there loudly as if he were addressing a deaf man. Intimidated, Deven took out a coin from his pocket and dropped it in so that he would be left alone. He waited cautiously to make sure the python would not rear suddenly at him and strike – who knew what the creature had been taught to do by its savage trainer? – then ran after Murad who was slipping through the crowds as if the way was greased.
‘That snake scared you, didn’t it?’ Murad grinning at him sideways, mischievously, when he caught up with him. ‘What a fool you are to give it money – don’t you know their fangs are removed and they are harmless?’
‘Pythons are not poisonous – any child knows that,’ Deven replied with dignity, glad of an opportunity to recover some. ‘I just had to get rid of the sadhu. What are you in such a hurry for now? You said Nur doesn’t care about time.’
‘But I have to get back to the office, don’t I? D’you think I earn my living by loitering in the streets? I’ve work to do.’
‘Look, Murad,’ Deven said heatedly, ‘you are supposed to take me to Nur. That is what you called me to Delhi for and I have spent my free day and a good deal of money on the bus fare for this purpose. Now you tell me you are not going to take me to him.’
‘I’m not stopping you. Go. Why must I take you? Are you a baby? Are you frightened of him? D’you think he might be a python?’ Murad gave a jeering laugh. ‘Go, go and see him, interview him, write an article for my paper – I will see it, I will print it. But I can’t nurse my contributors as if they are babies, can I?’
‘Then give me his address,’ Deven said furiously, ‘and I will go myself.’
‘Don’t shout,’ Murad said with a sudden grin, slowing down and taking his arm. ‘Don’t shout in the street. This is not your village, you know. People don’t need to shout as if they are at opposite ends of a potato field. You are in a city now. Better act like a city dweller if you want to work for my paper. Come along with me to my office and I’ll write out a letter of introduction for you and send along my office boy to show you the way. Will that do, my lord?’ Deven couldn’t tell whether his grin was malicious or merely mischievous. Not being able to tell made him helpless.
‘All right,’ he muttered, just as he had done when, as schoolboys, Murad had come to stand outside his house and bellowed an invitation to join a cricket game in the fields below the city walls. Reluctantly, because he was no sportsman and saw both bat and ball as unnecessary and hostile, he had changed from his pyjamas into his shorts and gone down only to find Murad strolling away, whistling and pretending that now there had been such a delay he did not feel like playing after all. Enraged because he had been made to change and give up his reading, he had turned hysterical in his insistence that they go and join the game. When he had got him thoroughly maniacal, Murad would suddenly grin and agree to go along. Deven remembered the shifting expression on the boys’ faces as Murad approached – his inconsistency and contrariness threatened the precise rules and progression of their games, leading them inevitably to collapse in temper, tantrums and uproar. He could see Murad had not changed, yet he had no alternative, having come so far, but to say ‘all right’.
At least he would see Murad’s office and find out how much of his description of it was truth and how much fantasy. So he followed Murad doggedly along the pavement, edging past the bicycle repair shops, the fried fritter stalls and the shoeshine boys and lottery ticket sellers, weaving through crowds of office-goers returning after their lunch and housewives with large shopping bags and bemused afternoon faces. He was thinking that the great city was no different from his own small town and that the dissimilarity lay only in scale: this was certainly larger, noisier, more crowded and chaotic, but that was all, and it was the scale and not the unfamiliarity that made him feel so small, weak and inadequate, when they arrived at the staircase beside the drycleaner’s shop that bore the sign ‘K. K. Sahay & Sons, Printers and Publishers since 1935’, but nothing closer than that to paper or periodical. So he was relieved when he found, at the head of the stairs, not only the dark, clattering and clanking printing works but also a corner that seemed actually to belong to Murad. Here were desks, shelves, even a clerk rolling up magazines in brown paper and addressing them in sticky black ink, as well as an office boy squatting on his heels and washing some cups and spoons in a bucket of water that had already seen much washing. This office appeared to spill out on to the wrought-iron balcony where files and bundles of magazines were stacked high against the railing. Bamboo screens hanging by strings from the rafters had been lowered and attached to the railing to prevent them from being blown out into the street below by the dusty gusts of March wind, but all the same there was a great deal of litter blowing around in restless eddies.
Deven could not help staring open-mouthed at these arrangements. They were not at all what he had imagined – and no one could possibly have been impressed by the scene, yet the very fact that it existed seemed a miracle and he stood summoning up gratitude for the fact out of the conflict of disappointment and amazement.
Murad was clapping an elderly, bewhiskered man on the shoulder as he stooped over a tray of newsprint, grinning proudly at Deven and saying, ‘This is my landlord, my patron, my mentor – Mr V. K. Sahay, son of K. K. Sahay, the founder of the best Urdu printing press in Delhi. When I told him I was going to start a high-class Urdu magazine, he offered me a part of his premises, he was so impressed – na, V. K. Sahib?’
The old man squirmed and gave a vague smile, settling the spectacles on the bridge of his nose with a nervous push of his ink-stained fingers. ‘That is not quite the way I remember it, Murad-bhai,’ he murmured. ‘Wasn’t it you who –’
‘Of course he hasn’t given me an electric point for a lamp or a fan yet,’ Murad interrupted quickly, ‘and it seems he is slowly edging me out on to the balcony now that he is getting more and more orders and becoming a success –’
Now it was the printer who interrupted him. ‘It is the UP Government schools’ text books, Murad-bhai, a very big order, you know, and they have to be ready before the new term begins. When I have them out of the way, you will get more room.’
‘For six months you have been saying that.’ Murad gave his shoulders one last squeeze and then let him go. ‘Come, Deven, now let me see what I can do for you. These writers, these contributors,’ he threw over his shoulder at the old man, ‘they never leave an editor in peace, and one has to look after them, na?’
Deven sat bemused upon a wooden stool in the shadows, watching Murad pass through one act after another like some chameleon giving a bravura performance. Considering the full range of his moods and shifts in temper, his contradictions and discrepancies, he wondered why he had trusted his word, taken it seriously enough to use his one free day to catch a bus to Delhi and let himself in for making a fool of himself in the presence of no other than the greatest living poet of Delhi, his hero since childhood. Ought he to approach him with a letter of introduction from so unworthy a go-between as Murad? Was that not a kind of sacrilege to the life of his imagination, his mind?
Murad was bent over the desk, writing out a letter on a large sheet of paper with many a flourish, knowing he was being watched, studied. Handing it over at last and instructing the small office boy to show him the way, he gave Deven a hint of a wink, as though admitting it was a practical joke he was playing. He covered it up immediately with a corner of his dirty green handkerchief but Deven turned grey
with apprehension.
He stood hesitating, wondering if he ought to go. But when Murad looked at him in inquiry, he said only, in a mumble, ‘I’ll leave this here – pick it up later,’ and dropped the tin box containing his lunch on the stool from which he had risen, then left holding only the newspaper wrapping.
Chapter 3
IF IT HAD not been for the colour and the noise, Chandni Chowk might have been a bazaar encountered in a nightmare; it was so like a maze from which he could find no exit, in which he wandered between the peeling, stained walls of office buildings, the overflowing counters of shops and stalls, wondering if the urchin sent to lead him through it was not actually a malevolent imp leading him to his irrevocable disappearance in the reeking heart of the bazaar. The heat and the crowds pressed down from above and all sides, solid and suffocating as sleep.
With the accuracy of his malevolence, the boy suggested ‘Cold drink?’ at a stall where poison-green and red sherbets in bottles topped with lemons and carrot juice in damp, oozing earthen jars were in great demand.
Deven shook his head contemptuously and they walked on down the sari lane where lurid Japanese nylon saris covered with octopi and spiders of flower patterns and nets of gold and silver embroidery flashed from doorways like gaudy but shimmering prostitutes propositioning the passers-by, while the rich soft traditional silks were folded and stacked in sober, matronly bales at the back. Shopkeepers eyed them casually but did not rise from their bolsters or cease to pick their toes, in order to attract their attention; they were so obviously not worth any.
They turned into the food lanes where there was little custom at this hour and flies were allowed to nuzzle the pyramids of crystallized fruit undisturbed and milk steamed and bubbled in drowsy pans.