by Anuradha Roy
* * *
The upper dining room had along its length large windows that washed it in the still-cool morning light. It was the morning after Chotu-da had left. Kananbala had finished bathing and changed into a fresh sari. She began the walk towards the stairs, holding the walls and chairs along the way and then the banisters for support. She climbed down the thirteen stairs of the first flight and the fifteen of the next. The walls seemed to tilt too close to her. On the landing, she paused and panted, staring unseeing out of the window that lit the stairs and framed the tree over the small terrace on the first floor. She could hear Shanti singing in the kitchen. The girl was petite and soft-spoken, but when she sang it was a low, rich voice that emerged, as if from a much larger body. She was singing of holidays, and clouds in the sky.
Kananbala dragged herself towards the kitchen, then paused outside in the corridor to get her breath back. She could hear Manjula, who sat chopping vegetables, saying, “Ah, I used to sing that too, long ago when I still had a voice. Sing another one. At least now there’s some entertainment in this dull old house. You’ll know in a while how stifling this little hole of a Hindustani town can be. How I miss all my relatives, I hardly see them once in three years.”
Shanti’s quiet voice said, “I’m used to small places. Whenever I went to Calcutta I always felt like running back to my village by the river.”
“Oh, just wait and see. You’re happy now, all newly married, Nirmal rushing home to come to you, sitting with you, talking and doing God knows what else, hm … ?”
“Oh, no!” Shanti seemed to giggle.
“But wait until you’ve been married a few years, then this place will show you its true colours.”
No-one spoke for a while. Kananbala heard the grinding stone going across its slab, a soft sound, as if something wet was being crushed. It must be the mustard for the fish, she thought. She wondered, trancelike, if the fish had been cut. Her mind rehearsed the daily ritual. Gouranga would come early in the morning with the fish he had bought – in Songarh it was usually carp – and he would show it to Manjula for approval. Manjula would stand away from it, protecting her fresh, post-bath sari from fishy impurities. Her lips would curl in an impatient sneer, and she would say, “Rui again! And Gouranga, couldn’t you find any smaller? Or more dead? Eh? Tell me: did they starve these fish before they sold them to you? Did they suck out the blood first? Oh, for some live fish that swim in a bucket for a while and show real blood when they’re cut!”
Kananbala swayed, sickened by her memory of the daily fish-cutting ritual. She held the door to steady herself. She had delegated that work to her daughter-in-law as soon as she had one. She had always been nauseated by the raw, fishy smell, by the sliminess of cut fish. She had never been able to make herself wash or cook it, though she ate it – all parts but the head – with tolerance if not relish.
Now, with that old sensation of tossing her head out of water for air, she gasped and became aware of her daughters-in-law’s voices in the kitchen.
Manjula was saying, “Go on now, sing us another.”
Again, that low, husky voice snaked out from the kitchen, this time with a melancholy song. Kananbala edged closer. Shanti sang on, cutting a messy jackfruit, as if oblivious of her oily hands and of the others in the kitchen. Damp, hessian bags of vegetables lay around her, spilling out their contents. Ponytails of spring onions stuck out of one, alongside creamy heads of cauliflower. She sang as if transported to a different place and time, chin resting on her raised knee, eyes focused on the jackfruit she was cutting, but far away from it, from Songarh and from Manjula who sat slicing potatoes nearby. Shibu ground the masalas just outside in the courtyard, trying to make less noise than he usually did.
Kananbala stood by the door, massaging her knee and looking at the tranquil scene. “What a voice,” she said. “You whore, why don’t you get a job on the streets?”
Manjula’s bonti clattered and fell to the floor. Shibu ran in from the courtyard and stood at the door, his mouth open. Shanti’s song stopped and turned into a brief, horrified gasp as she leapt up and ran out of the room, her oily hands smearing her new sari.
“Is the jackfruit cut? Let me see what spices you’ve ground, Shibu. Why is everything such a mess today?” Kananbala went on as if she had said nothing at all out of the ordinary.
The next day, as Amulya was dressing to go to the factory, Kananbala asked him, “You dandy, who’re you fucking these days? Is it a Brahmo lady in a georgette sari?” She turned away before the stunned Amulya could say anything, and went into the verandah. Amulya rushed after her. Nirmal was sitting at the dining table at the far end of the verandah, the Statesman crossword beside him, abandoned again without a single square filled.
“Do you know what you said?” Amulya looked at her as if at a monster who had sprouted four heads in place of two.
Nirmal got up from his chair so quickly it almost fell back. He lunged out to stop it falling. “Baba,” he quavered, “I didn’t say anything.”
Amulya paid him no attention. He seized Kananbala’s arm. Nirmal stared at them in disbelief. In his twenty-four years, he had never seen his parents touch except once, a lifetime ago, when he had run into their bedroom one afternoon in pursuit of a marble.
Amulya was shaking Kananbala’s arm. “Do you know what you said?” he repeated, his face contorted beyond all recognition, inches from hers. Strands of his waxed hair stood up where he had clutched it.
“I just asked when you’d be back,” Kananbala said, looking bewildered. “Why are you so agitated? Will you be very late?”
“That is not what you said!” Amulya shouted.
“Why are you shouting? What did I say?”
“What did you say? Don’t you have any shame? How can I repeat it before other people?”
“But there’s no-one here,” she said, “Only Nirmal. Do we have secrets from our children?”
* * *
Shanti had stopped singing.
She had stopped singing once before, when her mother died. At that time she had thought she would never want to smile again, let alone sing.
But slowly the songs had come back. Her father had coaxed her as soon as he felt able. “I need to hear your songs,” her father would say. “It’s bad enough having to get used to your mother’s absence, why your songs as well?” She had tried, her voice breaking every few lines at first, but then she began fiercely to school herself, walking alone by the river every afternoon, singing to the water. Unknown even to herself, she had begun to hum under her breath as she did her chores. One day, catching her father looking at her, she realised what she was doing and turned away to hide her shame at being happy again.
My mother-in-law called me a whore. Her mind churned with the thought. She saw me singing to her son, she burst into our room, not once but twice, and the next day she called me a whore. That servant boy, what must he think? Being called a whore before everyone by my mother-in-law. And Nirmal – how can I tell him this? Would he believe me? He adores his mother. And he hardly knows me. And I? I hardly know him, really. Despite all the things he says to me and all the things we do. They’re all strangers. What is this household I’ve been married into? What am I doing here, without a single friend? If I could run back for a day and see everyone and be in Manoharpur in my own room! I wonder if they’ve changed anything in that room. And Mala, Khuku, Bini, do they ever think of me? Has some new friend replaced me for them? Do they still walk along the river laughing about everyone in Manoharpur? Should I tell Baba about this? No, that would only worry him. Is he all alone? What is he doing with his time all alone? Does Kripa remember that he liked the lemon pickle I made? And his mango saplings? Does he still measure them every week with that foot ruler?
She sat down with a thump on her bed and rested her head in the crook of her arm, exhausted.
* * *
The next ten days passed with no further outbursts from his wife, and Amulya began to think he had dreamed
what Kananbala had said to him that unbelievable morning. Had she actually said “fucking”? Was that possible?
Was it possible he had imagined it all, a waking dream perhaps? It was true that his memory was wobbling these days. Sometimes, things he needed to remember would slip past him like the morning mist: he saw it, knew it – that fact, that phrase, that word, that name he needed – but when he tried to grasp it, utter it, it was no longer there. Wasn’t it a fortnight ago that he had said to Shrikant, his accountant, “I made the monthly payment to that orphanage. Where’s the receipt?”
Amulya had been meticulous about paying the orphanage the sum he had settled on, to ensure the child was properly looked after.
“You didn’t make the payment,” Shrikant replied, not looking up as he continued to tot up his columns of figures.
“What nonsense, I wrote out the cheque here at this table. I remember doing it along with all the salary cheques.”
“Sir,” Shrikant hesitated, “you said you would, but it was late and you left it … “
“Bring me the cheque book, I’ll show you,” Amulya said.
Shrikant was right. Amulya had not written out the cheque.
In his garden that evening Amulya’s anxiety over his wavering memory prevented him noticing anything, even the baby mangoes that had begun to replace the flowers on the mango trees. He was so troubled by the incident that he remained cocooned in himself all through dinner as each member of his family tried separately to recall if they had done anything to ignite his wrath.
It was the day after his argument with Shrikant over the cheque, he now calculated, that Kananbala had uttered those unspeakable words. She had said nothing unusual since. Amulya found it harder and harder to believe she had indeed said what he thought she had said; perhaps, like the unwritten cheque, it was his imagination alone. Chaos seemed to retreat to the cloudy, cobwebbed corners of the ceiling. Like all the secrets it seemed able to wrap into itself, the house had soaked up Kananbala’s singular outbursts, hiding everything from the world outside its walls.
That was not the end of it, of course, thought Amulya, memory proves all too accurate just when you wished it had failed.
It was two weeks later that Shanti watched as her mother-in-law told Kamal he was a donkey with syphilis.
The very next day she said to Manjula, “Milk-white skin, hm, just like a marble cow. Nobody vainer than this simpering slut in all of Songarh!”
The week after, at dinnertime, Kananbala spoke pleasantly enough to Amulya, but her words were, “If I chopped your head in half with a cleaver, I’m sure I would find nothing but cowdung inside.”
By now it was no longer a secret. Amulya was sure that the two young women, his daughters-in-law, were comparing notes. More than Manjula, he was concerned about Shanti. Picturing her certain disillusionment and bewilderment, he felt especially culpable: a new bride he had brought into the house … to be insulted the way she had been! And then the servants. It was unlikely that they valued discretion and loyalty over the human urge to tell a juicy story – and even less so in Songarh, hungry for happenings, where the illness of some neighbouring cow or a squabble between relatives provided conversation for days.
“Do you know what she said today?” Manjula sighed to Shanti one afternoon soon after as she sat on her bed, folding betel leaves into neat thirds and chewing on a paan.
The fragrance of the tobacco in the paan wafted towards Shanti. She picked up a bolster and put it on her lap, getting comfortable. “What?” she enquired as the paan reduced Manjula to mumbles for a moment.
“I heard her telling Kamal’s father he has the testicles of a goat! And then downstairs, in the courtyard, she stroked Shibu’s head. Imagine! Stroked the servant boy’s head! And said … “
“Oh yes, I heard that as well,” Shanti said, not wanting to hear it again.
“ … that he is her only true child, the only boy who cares! Her other sons are bastards born of the tongawallah!”
Troubled, Shanti looked up at Manjula’s merry face. “Don’t you think it’s worrying?” she said, “What will happen now?”
“Oh nonsense, what’ll happen? Nothing will happen. The old woman is losing her marbles. They all do,” Manjula said. “We’ll have to do a lot of looking after, just wait and see, she’ll get her pound of flesh. Apparently she had to slave for her mother-in-law – and that one was completely senile by the time she was fifty-five. She used to smear her shit on the wall and our ma-in-law had to clean up. No wonder she’s gone mad now – she’s getting herself a five-year head-start, she’s only fifty.”
Manjula stuffed another paan into her mouth and with her mouth full, said, “You know that saying, don’t you?”
Shanti never knew any of Manjula’s sayings and could seldom make sense of them; she thought Manjula made them all up.
“What saying is that?”
“When the silent begin to speak, the mango will fruit in winter.”
* * *
She is not mad, she cannot be, Amulya said furiously to himself that afternoon as he strode along the rutted fields to the edge of the forest, even as Shanti and Manjula sat gossiping on Manjula’s bed. He had not been able to calm himself to do any work at the factory and, to Shrikant’s astonishment, had got up, collected his umbrella, summoned a tonga, and left.
He was on his way to the ruined fort. It comforted him to sit soundless among the fallen stones, thinking of nothing in particular, waiting for his sense of calm to return. The fort was his ivory tower; he went to it whenever he needed to think anything through in solitude. Perhaps it was the suggestion of evanescent empires, the grittiness of centuries-old stone, or perhaps the memory of people who, in those ruined rooms and dark passages, had lived lives as real as his own. It might have been the twisted grey-brown bark of that tree with its suggestion of the Buddha’s face.
He reached the rim of the fort and sat on a block of fallen stone, a tall, greying, angular figure watching the blue and brown flash of a kingfisher swooping into a large shallow pool at the edge, which at this time of year had some water still. The folds of his dhoti spilled wavelike on his stone, lifting a little at times in the breeze, picking up dust. Amulya did not notice. In an hour or so the sun would begin to set. The birds would know and begin to call out to each other.
He willed himself to listen to the birds and think of nothing else, yet wave upon wave of yearning churned his insides as he longed for the Kanan he had known to return. How had he let her slip away? To him she was still the teenager he had married, her collarbones jutting out, dimples piercing her cheeks, her spine ridging her back when she bent, her eyes doubtful when he joked about something, with that second’s delay as she understood, and then laughed. I’ve watched her grow into a woman, a mother. She’s always been so sensible, so full of common sense, so gentle. She’s hardly ever argued with me, never said anything cruel even when scolding the children.
Am I forgetting? Were there signs all along … ?
He tried puzzling out what had happened to her, blamed himself, forgave himself, blamed it on her age, her difficult time of life, thought he should have spent more time with her, thought he should not have taken her such a long distance from her family in Calcutta.
At last he stood up and straightened his stiffening back. He began to walk home. She would not be allowed to wander the house any longer, he had decided. He would not let her become the local joke.
TWO
Nirmal was writing a letter of application to the Archaeological Survey of India. “Dear Sir … ” he began, and then paused, fingers poised over his typewriter. “I beg your indulgence with regard to my application for the post of … ” He crossed that out, and tapped the keys again, “Dear Sir, I have the honour to … ” He stopped, restarted, “I am a lecturer in History at Songarh Degree Coll … ”
It was five years since John Marshall had written in the press about the discovery of ancient civilisations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and at that
time Nirmal had cut out and kept Marshall’s article from the Statesman. He had then collected clippings from whatever he could lay his hands on, though few newspapers came to Songarh. The particular edition of the Illustrated London News in which Marshall had first published the discovery in 1924 had been the hardest to find. Eventually, by asking a friend of Amulya’s who knew a man in the Indian Civil Service, Nirmal had obtained a copy of the paper with its lavish pictures of all the Indus seals and the enormous mounds.
Inside the packet for Nirmal, the man from the Civil Service had also enclosed a letter that a British official had written some years earlier. The letter described hillock-like mounds all over northern India that people took to be natural formations when, in truth, they were the accretions of ancient civilisations. “When wolves still howled where Notre Dame and St Paul’s now stand,” the letter went, “and the very names of Athens and Rome were unheard of, there lived and toiled on these sites the remote ancestors of the villagers who tenant them today. It is with some feeling of reverence, then, that the Western parvenu should view these populous ruins and know himself to be but a creature of yesterday.”
In later years Nirmal wondered at the disproportion between the brevity of the note and the conceptual apocalypse it had caused inside him. He had read it once, looked at the pictures in the Illustrated London News of seals and pots and bricks glimmering against a dark background, then gone back to the note and read it again and again. It was as if he had simultaneously been robbed of all individual will – for his future had been decided for him at that moment – and charged with an energy he had never known. For the next three years he went on private expeditions, modelling his techniques on whatever he had been able to glean from reading articles here and there. He went to the Songarh ruins and looked at the hillocks behind it afresh, as if a layer of fog had been peeled away from his eyes. He began to call them mounds instead of hills and yearned for the day when he could start digging to find what they concealed. He went to the outskirts of Songarh, where there were old temples and scattered ruins, and scrabbled around with a garden khurpi and measuring tape until knots of village children gathered and chattered to each other and laughed at him.