Fatimah rose from her bed like a panic-stricken doe as he called out her name softly through the window bars. It took some anxious moments for it to sink in that it was Najab. Her lustrous eyes lit up the dark of the room as she opened the door.
Two hours before dawn, Kaley Shah was woken up by the beat constable banging on the door. ‘A smuggler has come across the Rann, Kaley Shah. You wouldn’t know anything about him, would you?’
‘Kasam tumhari, not a sparrow has entered the house, or the village. Even the dogs have not been barking tonight.’ Then he added with a knowing wink, ‘Why should a smuggler come to me?’
But the law was not amused. ‘Kaley Shah,’ he said sardonically, ‘your belly is stuffed full with silver. It would outweigh even the dirt in your heart!’
The constable’s words rattled like a sack of empty cans in his head and prevented him from sleeping.
‘You have a guest,’ said Fatimah as she brought him his tumbler of hot, steaming milk next morning. ‘It is Najab. He stayed the night in the cattle-shed.’ For a moment he was terrified. A smuggler in the house, the police prowling all around and he did not even know of it!
His meeting with Najab was brief. The wretched fellow had brought no tendu leaf.
‘First you come unannounced, dragging the police behind you, and then I find you have come with nothing. Trading with you is going to be a dead loss, son, with the cops on your back and your hands empty.’
Najab thought that Kaley Shah’s waist cloth, with its black-and-white checks looked like a chessboard. He would have to make his moves carefully. He showed the gold bracelet. ‘I have come for cloves, Chachajan. And I shall pay in gold.’
The next two days Kaley Shah was busy buying cloves and arranging to get Allaharakha grazed a few miles away, by a cowherd. Otherwise the presence of a strange camel would have let loose a babble of tongues. Najab slept in the cattle-shed in the evening and slipped into Fatimah’s room late at night.
‘They want me to marry Mahfuz Ali,’ she told him. ‘He is related to us from my mother’s family. The way he stammers! You should hear him! Urchins start mimicking him the moment they set eyes on him. It is just a step removed from being hounded like a madman and pelted with stones.’
‘Has it never occurred to you to take a ride on Allaharakha across the Rann?’ She had kept silent and silence was assent. It was as simple as that.
The first lurch of the camel next evening and they were off. He had waited with his camel at the outskirts of the village and she had slipped out after her father had started snoring. The moment was too big for them and they did not speak. It was only in passing that she thought of the village she was leaving for good. As for quitting one country and entering another, she never gave it a thought. Where did one have the time for Pakistan and Hindustan when one was eloping with one’s love and crossing the desert which divided, both physically and symbolically, the two countries? For her it meant just a shift in dialect, a smear of Kutchi added and a little of Sindhi sandpapered away.
And the camel lurched and bumped onwards and Najab drove him hard. By the time they reached Sarbela she was exhausted and fell asleep.
She woke up in the afternoon to find the sky overcast. It turned ominous in the evening with depth upon depth of dark-edged nimbus gathering at the summons of a storm god. Another night they journeyed facing the wind which hurled the sand in their faces. As they neared Khavda, the thunder started rolling and reverberating across the skies.
Three times during the night Aftab had opened the door, thinking his son had come. But it was only the wind knocking against the door. This time the banging was persistent. When he unlatched the door he found Allaharakha shying away from a streak of lightning. Huge, isolated drops of rain were falling, kicking up the dust. Aftab steeled himself. He would not allow any relief, any expression of joy to show on his face.
‘Son, have you brought anything?’ he asked, an edge of iron deliberately introduced into his voice.
‘Yes,’ replied Najab, as he ushered Fatimah in.
The rain stormed down and swept away three years of drought.
The Valley in Shadow
SHASHI DESHPANDE
Green forests covered the slopes of the two hills, leaving identical bare crowns on top. At the base, too, the lush growth gave way with a shocking abruptness, so that the valley in between was stony and arid as if a giant hand had scooped all the greenery out of it. I had thought it a beautiful view on the first morning. Now, as I stood alone on the veranda of our room for the fourth day in succession, the view was already stale, tainted, as it were, by my vision. I avoided it and looked instead at the garden that lay before me, the usual hotel garden with potted bougainvilleas and cemented walks bordered by wilting flowers. There were all the appurtenances of a holiday spot in it . . . swings, sandpits, and at this time of the day, the men who made their living out of the hotel guests. The man who sold curios and picture postcards was moving purposefully from room to room, while the one with ponies squatted patiently for the children to come out and claim their ponies. The monkey man had settled down with his rattle, and the monkey, off duty as yet, gazed round in a kind of bewilderment. Sounds and sights already as familiar to me as the cries of hawkers on the road outside our home. Now the children gathered round the monkey and the man’s voice rose, speaking to the monkey in a peculiar sing-song tone, a tone that never varied in volume even by a decibel.
And then, everything else receded. For a moment, the world narrowed to a pair of hands. The hands that now appeared on the wooden railing of the veranda of the next room. ‘Hi,’ the voice greeted me, ‘and how are you this morning?’ I smiled, then realized he couldn’t see my smile. The thin partition wall was between us. He could see me only if I leaned forward as he was doing, with my elbows resting on the railing, my face propped on my hands. Stealthily I felt my elbows. Roughened. It was reassuring, like a symbol of our intimacy. Rub cream gently into your elbows each night, the beauty tips advised. Never again for me, I thought. I will never do that.
‘Family out?’
‘Yes.’
I moved my gaze once again to the valley which the sun resolutely refused to brighten. All day it remained untouched by the sunshine, while the peaks on either side glowed triumphantly.
‘Family out?’ . . . that was what he had said the very first morning. ‘Family out?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cute little fellow you have.’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t gone with them?’
‘No.’
‘Oh good,’ he had said, ‘you do know another word apart from “Yes”.’
He had laughed. I had already noticed that his voice was deep and resonant, but the laughter, however, had been high pitched. I had laughed too, but hesitantly, nervously. My uneasiness encompassing the question . . . why was he talking to me? For me, communication with a man is like exploring foreign territory. A woman’s responses I can guess at, her mind I can follow, whichever way it goes. But with a man it is always a groping in the dark. As we stood there and talked, I had looked at our hands resting on the wooden railings in front of us and they had emphasized the difference between us. Was that why, I had wondered, he was talking to me?
Now I could see he had just had his bath for his wet towel lay on the railing—a bright orange and black striped one. The whiff of soap and after-shave lotion came to me. Suddenly I wished I was bathed and dressed and . . . No, that wish I had abandoned long back.
‘Don’t you ever go out?’ he asked me.
‘No.’
‘You don’t like to walk?’
‘No, I don’t.’
It was not a lie. And yet it was not the whole truth, either. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God . . . But this was not a court, and I was not a criminal or a witness. And we would soon part, this man and I, going our different ways, and he would never know that I had not told him the whole truth. Why, then, did it matter
so much? Why did I feel ashamed to keep the truth from him? ‘The thing is.’ I blurted out awkwardly and shamefacedly, my speech and words, I thought bitterly, as awkward as my walk, ‘I can’t really walk very much. I had polio when I was a child. I’m crippled.’
I used the worst possible word. The word I hated above all, a word which seemed to have nothing to do with the real me. Now he would be silent, uncomfortable; he would say a word or two to me from that height on which he stood as a normal human being. And I would continue to sit here watching the sunshine take over everything, leaving only the valley in darkness, until I saw them returning, my husband and child. My child would run to me, laughing, clamouring for my attention, wanting me to share his excitement with him, and I would forget what I was for a while. But he would soon run away from me and I could not follow him, and the thought of what I was would be forced on me once again. It’s my fault, I thought. I should not have agreed to come here. What would I do on a holiday . . . I who could neither walk, run, nor enjoy like the others? I carried my inability to enjoy with me wherever I went.
Even as a child I had noticed how people looked at my legs first and then, very perfunctorily, at the rest of me. ‘Who will marry her?’ my mother had moaned as I grew up. But my father had gone on doggedly with his proposals to young men, never hiding my disability, so that each time the matter ended there. When one young man had consented to meet me I had thought . . . perhaps he will see me and not my legs. When he agreed to marry me I had thought . . . he has seen me.
‘Well, if you can’t walk, why don’t you ride then?’
This man spoke in a voice so matter-of-fact, so devoid of any awkwardness, sympathy or condescension that I was startled. I leaned forward and looked at him. He was looking at me too. It gave me a strange feeling, as if I was flooded with sunshine. I thought of the valley and of how, if the sunshine ever illuminated it, its ugliness and aridity would be emphasized. And for some reason my thoughts went back to that night, six months after the birth of my son.
Six months now, I had wondered, and still he avoids me. I had not known how to tell him that there was nothing to keep us apart any longer. Each night I had rehearsed the words in which I would say this to him and each night shame and some kind of a fear had held the words back. That night I had gone to him and tried to tell him without using words. Gently, and yet very firmly he had put me away from him and said, ‘It’s better we don’t.’ ‘Why?’ I had asked him stupidly. And he had said, ‘After all, we have a son.’ And all at once I had known that the sight of me was distasteful to him. He had put up with me because of his desire for a son. But why, I had thought in a last spurt of anger, had he married me at all? But I had known the answer to that one as well. I had known it from the first few days of our marriage. He had married me for the usual reason . . . money. Not just the money my father gave us, but the money I earned each month. And even if I was earning more than he did, the fact of my being crippled levelled out the difference between us so that he did not have to feel humiliated as he would have with any other woman. That night I had shut out forever all hopes of any human contact.
And yet now the morning after my confession I had my bath early. I dressed myself in a soft cotton sari, one that I knew I liked. I went out, and seeing the two towels hanging there . . . the child’s, gay and colourful and my husband’s, a sober gray . . . I savagely whisked them off the railing and took them in, telling myself they were dry anyway. When I came out I noticed that his feet were on the railings now, two feet, clean, naked and somehow vulnerable. As I sat down the feet disappeared and the hands appeared. I put my own in front of me.
‘Hi, you smell nice today,’ he said.
‘Sandal soap,’ I said boldly and despised myself for being unable to accept anything gracefully.
The monkey man now came up to us, started his rattling and said to the monkey, ‘Saab ko salaam karo.’ The monkey obeyed and the spectators tittered appreciately. I felt sick. ‘Memsaab ko salaam karo,’ he now said and I uttered a strangled protest.
‘Would memsaab like the poor little monkey to go away?’ the voice said to me across the wall and over the monkey man’s rattle.
‘Yes,’ I said emphatically and immediately he called the man over. I saw some money pass from hand to hand and the man went away leading the monkey which walked with a sort of hideous coquetry emphasized by the skirt it wore.
‘Okay?’ the voice said.
‘Fine,’ I replied and even to me my voice sounded different.
‘Memsaab seems to be enjoying her holiday at last,’ the voice went on. And I wondered . . . had I got away at last from the bitter woman who dragged her resentment with her like the monkey its skirt? I imagined how the monkey would look without that skirt, leaping agilely from branch to branch . . . But I was no monkey, was I? I laughed suddenly and he said, ‘What’s the joke?’
‘I was thinking of those scientists who work on monkeys, guinea pigs and rabbits and apply the results to humans.’
‘I know. Give a monkey coffee to drink and when it gets some kind of carcinoma, they tell you . . . drink too much coffee and you’ll get carcinoma too.’
We laughed and I said, ‘Imagine, I didn’t want to come here for a holiday.’
‘Where did you want to go?’
‘I don’t know. Nowhere. I just wanted to go on working, I suppose.’
‘Absorbing work?’
‘What! Working in a government office?’
Now the feet came up again. I heard the sound of a match scraping. The smell of a cigarette. ‘You make me feel an idler.’ The smoke drifted languidly towards me and in an instant was nothing.
‘I must have a few days off each year. I can’t go on if I don’t.’
‘And where will you go next year?’ I waited with painful eagerness for his reply. A small pause. Then he said, ‘Depends. It’s something I don’t plan too early. And you?’
‘I don’t know, either. I don’t dare to look beyond today. Sometimes it frightens me, the thought that I have to keep going. I don’t know where, or what for. So I stop thinking about it and just drift.’
Silence. It doesn’t do to be too serious. People aren’t interested in your miseries. ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine, thank you.’ What if you say . . . ‘I’m wretched, I’m absolutely miserable’? Nobody will ever ask you that question again.
The feet disappeared again. I heard his voice say, ‘Shall I come over there? We’ve had enough of this Pyramus-Thisbe stuff, I think. Though that doesn’t really apply here, does it? All right by you if I come over?’
I panicked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’
I heard him settle back in his chair. I cursed myself for my cowardice. Why did it matter so much that he would see me, see how clumsy and graceless I was?
‘You make too much of it, you know,’ the voice came to me remote, all expression carefully kept out of it. ‘It doesn’t matter all that much really.’
Doesn’t matter? To whom? To you? A group of youngsters ran out into the garden. A boy playfully pulled at a girl’s arm and she shrieked, shrieks that turned into laughter. I smiled. I could have laughed. And then I saw the valley again, dark, brooding and barren. I shivered.
‘Can I come out with you?’ I asked my husband the next morning.
‘What, for a walk?’ The disbelief could have been insulting but somehow wasn’t.
‘We could ride.’
‘You couldn’t.’
‘No, I couldn’t.’
‘Of course, if you’re bored with being alone, we’ll stay here with you.’
‘Daddy, let’s go, I want to go.’
‘No, you go on, both of you. I’m all right.’
‘Do you have something to read?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sure you don’t mind?’
‘No, you go.’
Go, please go. At last they went. And I sat in the room telling myself . . . I won’t go out, no, I won’t. And yet, each time there was a kn
ock at the door, I was aflame with hope. Once it was the dhobi to take away our dirty clothes. Once the boy who came to polish shoes. And I wondered whether I would be able to identify his steps if he came. Maybe I would. And then there would be the knock at the door, my gruff, ‘Come in.’
‘Are you all right?’ he would ask.
‘Fine,’ I would reply.
‘You didn’t come out today.’
‘No.’
‘I was a little worried. I thought . . .’
My heart would be pounding . . . surely he would hear it . . . my hands trembling. He would see them and say, ‘What’s the matter? Why are you so scared?’ He would hold both my hands in his and . . .
I came out of it with a start and stared stupidly about me. The fantasy had been so strong I could almost feel the taste of his lips on mine, the smell of his cigarette in my nostrils. For a moment, revulsion against my own self filled me; until the thought came . . . what the hell is wrong with me, a thirty-year-old woman with a responsible job, that I should behave like a hysterical adolescent? The words steadied me somewhat, giving me a kind of spurious courage that pushed me out of the room. I went and stood at my usual place, staring ahead of me. Clouds today so that one of the hills was dark and shadowy, while the other gleamed brightly. The valley in shadow, as usual, as always.
And then I saw the hands. Hands on the railing beside me. Hands like mine. A woman’s hands, but the nails shaped and painted so that the hands had an edge of sophistication. I stared at them as they lay on the orange and black towel in a kind of caressing intimacy. And then I heard the voice from inside, ‘Mamata . . .’
‘What?’
‘What are you doing out there? Come on in.’
I went in myself and lay rigid on the bed. I imagined the voices next door. I imagined even more and was engulfed with shame to think of the fantasies I had woven round him. Me with my crippled body.
Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1 Page 12