by Anita Desai
Here was the oasis of the Agricultural College at last, with its fertilizer-fed greenery, and the railway track, the granary and the bus depot, the waiting crowds and their luggage, the barrows of fruit and peanuts for the travellers, the cacophony of the bazaar so familiar to him. As he rose and stumbled out of the bus on bent, disobedient legs, he saw the face of one of his students going past on a bicycle. In the moment that they stared at each other with mutual shock, a verse of Nur’s fell into Deven’s mind as casually as a discarded bus ticket:
Night ends, dawn breaks, and sorrow reappears,
Addressing us in morning light with a cock’s shrill crow.
For a while he stood there as if his limbs had been filled with cement. He was pushed from both sides by passengers who were getting off and those who were getting on, but could make no move in either direction. Then he shook his head, wincing to feel large-sized stones rattle inside it, and told himself he must decide where to go, what to do next. This initial uncertainty was followed by a rapid decision: he could not go home and face Sarla’s stony face, her sulks or her open fury; it would be better to go straight to college. There would be no one there so early in the morning. He would go to the washroom and put his head under the tap. He would go to the canteen and have a cup of coffee. He would go to class, give his lecture, stumble a little perhaps but climb on to the familiar track again eventually. No doubt something or someone would come along to give him a push and send him moving along it. Once back on it, he would never stray again. Never, oh never. And, hunching his shoulders to protect his ears, his head, he left the crowd.
When he did get home, Sarla was standing in the doorway with her arms and her sari wrapped about her shoulders and her face bent under the thin straggling hair as she talked to a neighbour outside – the picture of an abandoned wife. The neighbour was one Deven particularly disliked – the widowed mother of a colleague of his, stout and shapeless in her white widows sari, and a face that was both sanctimonious and martial, like a hatchet in the hands of a fanatic.
As he pushed open the gate with its familiar rusty sound of protest, both women raised their drooping heads and stared at him as if he were a stranger, an interloper. Then Sarla twitched a fold of her sari over her head. She didn’t normally cover her head when he appeared; it was evident that she was preparing for a scene. He tried to smile, then lifted his hand to cover his mouth because he felt he shouldn’t.
Mrs Bhalla started to sidle away in her characteristically deceitful manner. As she edged past him at the gate, she said, ‘I told Sarla not to worry, my nephew saw you getting off the Delhi bus in the morning when he was going to the homoeopathic clinic for his father’s medicine. That was at six o’clock I told her.’
‘Ye-es, I missed the last bus at night,’ he said hoarsely, ‘and caught the first bus in the morning and – and decided to go straight to college.’
‘But a message you could have sent,’ said Mrs Bhalla in her sweetest, most wheedling tone. ‘It is a small thing only, but means much to the poor ladies waiting at home.’ She gave Sarla a benign smile. ‘Accha, sister, then I will go,’ she sighed, and disappeared around the corner on her shuffling widow’s feet.
Sarla abruptly detached herself from the doorpost and turned to go in, holding the fold of her sari firmly over her head as if she were in mourning or at a religious ceremony. Sighing, Deven followed. He knew this manner would be his punishment for many days to come. The tedium of it settled upon him like a grey, crumbling mildew. He felt aged and mouldy. He was sure his teeth had loosened in the night, that his hair would come out in handfuls if he tugged it. That was what she might well do, he feared, to teach him not to venture out of the familiar, safe dustbin of their world into the perilous world of night-time bacchanalia, revelry and melodrama. Now he would sink back on to the dustheap like a crust thrown away, and moulder. It was not only all he deserved but all he was fit for and therefore could expect from life, from fate. Justice was not unrelated to fate, after all; was not that the teaching of – of…? He couldn’t remember. But what vainglory it had been to try to find an entry into Nur’s world – the world of drama and revolving lights and feasts and furies; how inadequate he had proved to its demands and expectations. No, all he could measure up to was this – this shabby house, its dirty corners, its wretchedness and lovelessness. Looking around it, he felt himself sag with relief and gratitude. At the same time his shoulders drooped in defeat.
Deven had been more a poet than a professor when he married Sarla – he had only been taken on as a temporary lecturer and still had confidence in his verse – and for the wife of a poet she seemed too prosaic. Of course she had not been his choice but that of his mother and aunts, crafty and cautious women; she was the daughter of a friend of an aunt’s, she lived on the same street as that family, they had observed her for years and found her suitable in every way: plain, penny-pinching and congenitally pessimistic. What they had not suspected was that Sarla, as a girl and as a new bride, had aspirations, too; they had not understood because within the grim boundaries of their own penurious lives they had never entertained anything so abstract. Sarla’s home had been scarcely less grim but on the edges of it there flowered such promises of Eden as could be held out by advertisements, cinema shows and the gossip of girl friends. So she had dared to aspire towards a telephone, a refrigerator, even a car. Did not the smiling lady on the signboard lean seductively upon her crowded refrigerator, promising ‘Yours, in easy instalments’? And the saucy girl in the magazine step into a car as though there were no such things in her life as bills, instalments or debts? Her girl friends had a joke about it – ‘Fan, ’phone, frigidaire!’ they would shout whenever anyone mentioned a wedding, a bridegroom, a betrothal, and dissolve in hectic laughter. While her mother collected stainless steel cooking pots and her sisters embroidered pillowcases and anti-macassars for her, she dreamt the magazine dream of marriage: herself, stepping out of a car with a plastic shopping bag full of groceries and filling them into the gleaming refrigerator, then rushing to the telephone placed on a lace doily upon a three-legged table and excitedly ringing up her friends to invite them to see a picture show with her and her husband who was beaming at her from behind a flowered curtain.
But by marrying into the academic profession and moving to a small town outside the capital, none of these dreams had materialized, and she was naturally embittered. The thwarting of her aspirations had cut two dark furrows from the corners of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, as deep and permanent as surgical scars. The droop of her thin, straight hair on either side of her head repeated these twin lines of disappointment. They made her look forbidding, and perhaps that was why her husband looked so perpetually forbidden, even if he understood their cause. He understood because, like her, he had been defeated too; like her, he was a victim. Although each understood the secret truth about the other, it did not bring about any closeness of spirit, any comradeship, because they also sensed that two victims ought to avoid each other, not yoke together their joint disappointments. A victim does not look to help from another victim; he looks for a redeemer. At least Deven had his poetry; she had nothing, and so there was an added accusation and bitterness in her look.
Usually he was enraged by her tacit accusations that added to the load on his back. To relieve it, he would hurl away dishes that had not been cooked to his liking, bawl uncontrollably if meals were not ready when he wanted them or the laundry not done or a button missing or their small son noisy or unwashed; it was to lay the blame upon her, remove its clinging skin from him. Tearing up a shirt she had not washed, or turning the boy out of the room because he was crying, he was really protesting against her disappointment; he was out to wreck it, take his revenge upon her for harbouring it. Why should it blight his existence that had once shown promise and had a future?
But now the blight settled on his own existence and he submitted to it; it suited his mood, it seemed fitting. Sprawled upon the broken cane chair in th
e veranda, he listened to Sarla moving about the house inside, and watched his son playing on the steps. They were busy, he idle. They were alive, he in a limbo. If he made no effort to rise from it, there he would remain.
‘Manu,’ he called at last, softly, moved by his own isolation into making his first overture since his crestfallen return.
If Manu heard, he made no response, merely wiped his nose with the back of his hand and continued to play with a tin top on the stairs.
‘Manu, son,’ called Deven again, sorrowfully. ‘Come to Papa. To Papu.’
Now Manu looked up from under his dusty thatch of hair at the unexpected appeal in Deven’s tone.
‘Come, talk to Papa, son,’ Deven coaxed, moving his legs to make a lap. ‘Tell me about your school.’
Silence from Manu; only a twitch of a finger, nervous.
‘Show me your books,’ Deven went on trying. ‘Where are they?’
Suddenly a voice came from the dim room behind them. ‘Go fetch your books,’ Sarla called. ‘Show them to your father.’
Both Deven and his son gave a jump, her voice sounded so close; then the child climbed up the steps and went in to fetch his school bag while Deven sank back into his chair, weak with relief that the punishment period was over. Tension had snapped. It lay in dead coils at his feet, exhausted.
He smiled at Manu as he came back across the veranda, lugging his school bag sullenly for he seemed to have preferred his father to remain in eclipse. He looked unwilling and apprehensive while his father drew out the limp, greasy exercise books and opened them with every expectation of pleasure, if not pride. But it would have been difficult if not altogether impossible for a poet and a lecturer at a local college to take any pride in the filthy, scrawled pages, stained by erasures and slashed by an angry red pencil, the dismal marks, the sharp comments in the margins. A cry of protest rose to Deven’s lips, and died. He was aware that this was not an occasion for parental censure. He was also aware of Sarla’s watchful presence in the room behind them, hidden but listening. He knew he had too often already said, ‘When I was a boy, I tried to please my father by bringing home good marks, neat copybooks and fine handwriting. He never gave me rewards but it pleased him – he felt proud. I wanted my father to be proud of me.’ He knew how Sarla curled her lips up at that, how his son sulked, and how unbearable that was. So he only sighed.
‘And what have you been reading?’ he tried again, heroically. ‘This book? Ah, very good, it is very good,’ he chuckled, looking through a book of rhymes about peacocks and crows, tortoises and hares, monkeys and crocodiles – that bestiary which pranced through every childhood, which he remembered from his own and fully endorsed as a proper background to his son’s. Or did he? Staring at the classic opposition of different species that made for the bright energy of the primary colours of the illustrations, he hesitated and a shadow fell across his face as he saw superimposed upon them pictures that seemed to fall out of his heart like badly concealed cards at a game: pictures of a thin, vividly-painted face taut and dragged out of proportion with disgust and rage; of a twisted figure bent in pain on the floor – and upon these pictures a third one, older and more faded and yet as fraught with pain, a picture of his father, emaciated with illness, shrivelled upon a pallet on the floor, holding a tattered copy of poems in his hands and reading from them with an expression of ineffable joy, poems that were inscribed, strangely enough, upon the other two cards, so much more harsh and livid in their fresher colouring. What made all these dissimilar memories come together to form one image?
Rising from his chair, he stammered, ‘Let us go for a walk. Come, Manu, come and walk with me.’ He put out his hand blindly and the boy cautiously inserted one finger into his father’s fist and felt it tighten. Then they went down the steps and through the gate on to the road, the mother in the house watching in astonishment and coming as close to that mother in the glossy magazine as she was ever likely to come.
Deven and the boy walked down the road between the small yellow stucco houses that belonged to the same grade of low-paid employees as he did and which were all waiting for a coat of paint some day when the funds were collected for such an unlikely project. In the meantime they peeled and mouldered under bean and pumpkin vines and red dusty bougainvillaeas. Broken furniture spilled out of their small verandas. Strings of washing hung on lines outside. Beneath them, chickens scratched diligently and children played fiercely. Radios blared forth so that as they walked along they heard the same programme in uninterrupted instalments.
Deven breathed it all in, finding it reassuring. For once he did not resent his ‘circumstances’. Their meanness was transformed for him by his new experience and the still raw wounds it had left. Also by the feel of his son’s thumb enclosed within his fist. He walked along with a light step, breathing in the close stuffy air of the small colony, its odours of cooking and dust and chicken dirt and washing, as if it were invigorating. The calm exhilaration of the evening and the walk gave him an unaccustomed peace of mind, contentment with things the way they were, and a certain modest, suburban wellbeing.
He walked as if he were walking away from the debris of his Delhi trip, his visit to Nur, the failed interview – leaving it all behind. The first desolation at his loss of them was being gradually filled this evening, as an empty glass with water, with the realization that that loss had simplified his existence, reduced it once again to a pure emptiness with which he knew how to cope, having coped so long. He had made a timely escape from complexities with which he would not have known how to contend. Compared to the horror of that threat, this grey anonymity was sweet.
He told himself how lucky he was to have exchanged the dangers of Nur’s poetry for the undemanding chatter of a child. The boy was telling one of his monotonous stories of school life that he often prattled to his parents, only they never listened. Now Deven looked down at the top of his head and smiled when Manu told him, ‘My teacher, he has hair growing out of his ears. Why does hair grow in his ears, Papa? He puts his pencil behind his ear – like this –’ Deven laughed and swung the boy’s hand – ‘and when he is angry he takes the pencil and throws it – like this.’ The boy flung out his fist and a crow rose from the barbed wire fence and flew off with a squawk. Manu’s face reddened with surprise and pride at the effect his story was having. For almost the first time in his life since the early days of infancy which he could naturally not remember, he had a feeling of power, of being able to impress people and influence events. He rushed along at his father’s side instead of dragging behind as was more usual with him. The boy, who was so often querulous with hunger and sleep by the time Deven came back from work, seemed quite unlike the protesting, whining creature he usually was; he too seemed to find something pleasant and acceptable in the uncommon experience of a walk with his father.
When his mother took him for a walk, it was invariably to the market or to a friend’s house, but his father seemed to be launched upon a more adventurous expedition. They had left behind the colony of low-grade employees’ quarters. They were walking past the back of Lala Ram Lal College and its barbed wire fencing through which could be seen the dusty empty playing fields where no one ever played and the row of whitewashed huts where the non-teaching staff lived amidst buffaloes, washing, string cots and buckets of water. Then the path veered away from the barbed wire fence that marched through rough grass and patches of saltpetre, and ran down to the canal that separated the town proper from the chemically lush grounds of the Agricultural and Veterinary College whose purple bougainvillaeas crept down to the canal bank and flowered profusely behind clumps of pampas grass. Here the path narrowed to a muddy track that was used by the college servants who came to squat behind the bushes and the buffaloes that came to drink. The clay had dried and was pleasant to walk on as it cracked beneath their feet. The canal was narrow but deep and never ran dry, even in the hottest weather. Pampas grass grew thickly along the bank and buffaloes and bees stirred in the reeds at
its edges.
‘Look at the parrots,’ Deven instructed his son and pointed at a flock that exploded out of an acacia tree and streaked over the fields, acid green against the pale yellow of the western sky.
‘I know a song about a parrot,’ Manu claimed at once, and launched lustily into a nursery rhyme familiar even to Deven who laughed with delight at being reminded of its simple nonsense. ‘My father taught me that,’ he said lightly. It was perhaps not strictly true, he could not honestly claim to remember, but it could be true because he did remember it and felt his father’s apologetic smile somewhere in it. His father, who had been a chronic sufferer from asthma, and whose career had foundered upon his invalidism, had appeared always to be apologizing to his wife who had expected more from a husband and felt grievously disappointed at the little he had made of his life; as a child Deven had barely understood this but now that he himself occupied a not very dissimilar position at home, he felt protective towards the dead man, and in his imagination glorified and deified him as he had not done when he was living. At magical moments like this the fantasy took on the stuff of truth. It positively glowed – like the sunset.
Then the flock of parrots wheeled around, perhaps on finding the fields bare of grain, and returned to the tree above their heads, screaming and quarrelling as they settled amongst the thorns. One brilliant feather of spring green fluttered down through the air and fell at their feet in the grey clay. Deven bent to pick it up and presented it to his son who stuck it behind his ear in imitation of his schoolteacher with the pencil. ‘Look, now I’m master-ji,’ he screamed excitedly.
Yes, that was the climax of that brief halcyon passage. It was as if the evening star shone through at that moment, casting a small pale illumination upon Deven’s flattened grey world. Of course it could not be maintained, of course it had to diminish and decline. Yes.