Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1

by Indira Srinivasan

  ‘Dr Chatterji—really!’ she cries.

  The next day, Monday, instead of getting a ride home with Fran—Fran says she likes to give rides, she needs the chance to talk, and she won’t share gas expenses, absolutely not—Maya goes to the periodicals room of the library. There are newspapers from everywhere, even from Madagascar and New Caledonia. She thinks of the periodicals room as an asylum for homesick aliens. There are two aliens already in the room, both Orientals, both absorbed in the politics and gossip of their far-off homes.

  She goes straight to the newspapers from India. She bunches her raincoat like a bolster to make herself more comfortable. There’s so much to catch up on. A village headman, a known Congress-Indira party worker, has been shot at by scooter-riding snipers. An Indian pugilist has won an international medal—in Nepal. A child drawing well water—the reporter calls the child ‘a neo-Buddhist, a convert from the now outlawed untouchable caste’—has been stoned. An editorial explains that the story about stoning is not a story about caste but about failed idealism; a story about promises of green fields and clean, potable water broken, a story about bribes paid and wells not dug. But no, thinks Maya, it’s about caste.

  Out here, in the heartland of the new world, the India of serious newspapers unsettles. Maya longs again to feel what she had felt in the Chatterjis’ living room: virtues made physical. It is a familiar feeling, a longing. Had a suitable man presented himself in the reading room at that instant, she would have seduced him. She goes on to the stack of India Abroads, reads through matrimonial columns, and steals an issue to take home.

  Indian men want Indian brides. Married Indian men want Indian mistresses. All over America, ‘handsome, tall, fair’ engineers, doctors, data processors—the new pioneers—cry their eerie love calls.

  Maya runs a finger down the first column; her fingertip, dark with newsprint, stops at random.

  Hello! Hi! Yes, you are the one I’m looking for. You are the new emancipated Indo-American woman. You have a zest for life. You are at ease in USA and yet your ethics are rooted in Indian tradition. The man of your dreams has come. Yours truly is handsome, ear-nose-throat specialist, well-settled in Connecticut. Age is 41 but never married, physically fit, sportsmanly, and strong. I adore idealism, poetry, beauty. I abhor smugness, passivity, caste system. Write with recent photo. Better still, call!!!

  Maya calls. Hullo, hullo, hullo! She hears immigrant lovers cry in crowded shopping malls. Yes, you who are at ease in both worlds, you are the one. She feels she has a fair chance.

  A man answers. ‘Ashoke Mehta speaking.’

  She speaks quickly into the bright red mouthpiece of her telephone. He will be in Chicago, in transit, passing through O’Hare. United counter, Saturday, 2 p.m. As easy as that.

  ‘Good,’ Ashoke Mehta says. ‘For these encounters I, too, prefer a neutral zone.’

  On Saturday at exactly two o’clock the man of Maya’s dreams floats toward her as lovers used to in shampoo commercials. The United counter is a loud, harrassed place but passengers and piled-up luggage fall away from him. Full-cheeked and fleshy-lipped, he is handsome. He hasn’t lied. He is serene, assured, a Hindu god touching down in Illinois.

  She can’t move. She feels ugly and unworthy. Her adult life no longer seems miraculously rebellious; it is grim, it is perverse. She has accomplished nothing. She has changed her citizenship but she hasn’t broken through into the light, the vigour, the bustle of the New World. She is stuck in dead space.

  ‘Hullo, hullo!’ Their fingers touch.

  Oh, the excitement! Ashoke Mehta’s palm feels so right in the small of her back. Hullo, hullo, hullo. He pushes her out of the reach of anti-Khomeini Iranians, Hare Krishnas, American Fascists, men with fierce wants, and guides her to an empty gate. They have less than an hour.

  ‘What would you like, Maya?’

  She knows he can read her mind, she knows her thoughts are open to him. You, she’s almost giddy with the thought, with simple desire. ‘From the snack bar,’ he says, as though to clarify. ‘I’m afraid I’m starved.’

  Below them, where the light is strong and hurtful, a Boeing is being serviced. ‘Nothing,’ she says.

  He leans forward. She can feel the nap of his scarf—she recognizes the Cambridge colours—she can smell the wool of his Icelandic sweater. She runs her hand along the scarf, then against the flesh of his neck. ‘Only the impulsive ones call,’ he says.

  The immigrant courtship proceeds. It’s easy, he’s good with facts. He knows how to come across to a stranger who may end up a lover, a spouse. He makes over a hundred thousand. He owns a house in Hartford, and two income properties in Newark. He plays the market but he’s cautious. He’s good at badminton but plays handball to keep in shape. He watches all the sports on television. Last August he visited Copenhagen, Helsinki and Leningrad. Once upon a time he collected stamps but now he doesn’t have hobbies, except for reading. He counts himself an intellectual, he spends too much on books. Ludlum, Forsyth, MacInnes; other names she doesn’t catch. She supresses a smile, she’s told him only she’s a graduate student. He’s not without his vices. He’s a spender, not a saver. He’s a sensualist: good food—all foods, but easy on the Indian—good wine. Some temptations he doesn’t try to resist.

  And I, she wants to ask, do I tempt?

  ‘Now tell me about yourself Maya.’ He makes it easy for her. ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But many have loved you, I can see that.’ He says it not unkindly. It is the fate of women like her, and men like him. Their karmic duty, to be loved. It is expected, not judged. She feels he can see them all, the sad parade of need and demand. This isn’t the time to reveal all.

  And so the courtship enters a second phase.

  When she gets back to Cedar Falls, Ted Suminski is standing on the front porch. It’s late at night, chilly. He is wearing a down vest. She’s never seen him on the porch. In fact there’s no chair to sit on. He looks chilled through. He’s waited around a while.

  ‘Hi.’ She has her keys ready. This isn’t the night to offer the six-pack in the fridge. He looks expectant, ready to pounce.

  ‘Hi.’ He looks like a man who might have aimed the dart at her. What has he done to his wife, his kids? Why isn’t there at least a dog? ‘Say, I left a note upstairs.’

  The note is written in Magic Marker and thumb-tacked to her apartment door. ‘Due to personal reasons, namely remarriage, I request that you vacate my place at the end of the semester.’

  Maya takes the note down and retacks it to the kitchen wall. The whole wall is like a bulletin board, made of some new, crumbly building material. Her kitchen, Ted Suminski had told her, was once a child’s bedroom. Suminski in love: the idea stuns her. She has misread her landlord. The dart at her window speaks of no twisted fantasy. The landlord wants the tenant out.

  She gets a glass out of the kitchen cabinet, gets out a tray of ice, pours herself a shot of Fran’s bourbon. She is happy for Ted Suminski. She is. She wants to tell someone how moved she’d been by Mrs Chatterji’s singing. How she’d felt in O’Hare, even about Dr Rab Chatterji in the car. But Fran is not the person. No one she’s ever met is the person. She can’t talk about the dead space she lives in! She wishes Ashoke Mehta would call. Right now.

  Weeks pass. Then two months. She finds a new room, signs another lease. Her new landlord calls himself Fred.

  He has no arms, but he helps her move her things. He drives between Ted Suminski’s place and his twice in his station wagon. He uses his toes the way Maya uses her fingers. He likes to do things. He pushes garbage sacks full of Maya’s clothes up the stairs.

  ‘It’s all right to stare,’ Fred says. ‘Hell, I would.’

  That first afternoon in Fred’s rooming house, they share a Chianti. Fred wants to cook her pork chops but he’s a little shy about Indians and meat. Is it beef, or pork? Or any meat? She says it’s okay, any meat, but not tonight. He has an ex-wife Des Moines, two
kids in Portland, Oregon. The kids are both normal; he’s the only freak in the family. But he’s self-reliant. He shops in the supermarket like anyone else, he carries out the garbage, shovels the snow off the sidewalk. He needs Maya’s help with one thing. Just one thing. The box of Tide is a bit too heavy to manage. Could she get him the giant size every so often and leave it in the basement?

  The dead space need not suffocate. Over the months, Fred and she will settle into companionship. She has never slept with a man without arms. Two wounded people, he will joke during their nightly contortions. It will shock her, this assumed equivalence with a man so strikingly deficient. She knows she is strange, and lonely, but being Indian is not the same, she would have thought, as being a freak.

  One night in spring, Fred’s phone rings. ‘Ashoke Mehta speaking.’ None of this ‘do you remember me?’ nonsense. The god has tracked her down. He hasn’t forgotten. ‘Hullo,’ he says, in their special way. And because she doesn’t answer back, ‘Hullo, hullo, hullo.’ She is aware of Fred in the back of the room. He is lighting a cigarette with his toes.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I remember.’

  ‘I had to take care of a problem,’ Ashoke Mehta says. ‘You know that I have my vices. That time at O’Hare I was honest with you.’

  She is breathless.

  ‘Who is it, May?’ asks Fred.

  ‘You also have a problem,’ says the voice. His laugh echoes. ‘You will come to Hartford, I know.’

  When she moves out, she tells herself, it will not be the end of Fred’s world.

  The Connoisseur

  NERGIS DALAL

  I knew who it was even before I went to the door. Miss Krishna always stabbed at the bell as though it were a serpent, coiled and ready to spring, if she kept her finger there too long.

  She had a nervous, slightly frenetic appearance, which her clothes did nothing to diminish. I sighed, put away my papers and typewriter and went to the door. She was always pathetically eager to see me, full of apologies as she came in and took up her favourite position on the divan.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t come in the morning,’ she said, her voice high and rapid. ‘I know I shouldn’t be disturbing you when you are writing, but I just felt I had to see you today.’

  Every second word that she spoke was underlined, as it were, giving the words an urgency they did not possess. Miss Krishna was the cross that I bore with as much good humour as possible. She was about sixty-five, a spry, thin spinster, who had spent all her life looking after an ailing mother. When the mother died she had been left a small annuity and a tiny cottage in which to live.

  Miss Krishna had a younger sister who was married and had left home many years ago. Perversely, the mother had lavished all her love and tenderness on the younger girl and Miss Krishna had been left in the cold. All this Miss Krishna told me at our first meeting at an art exhibition, where we found each other staring bemusedly at an enormous, life-size nude.

  Something about me perhaps seemed sympathetic to her, for she attached herself to me like an abandoned dog and I was impelled to take her home for a cup of tea. It was then that I first learnt of her passion for beautiful things.

  She went into raptures over my teaset. Holding her cup as though it were a beautiful flower, she traced the design with sensitive fingers, marvelling at the delicate fluted edges and at the translucence of china when she held it to the light. She said, ‘All my life I have been starved of beautiful things. My early life was one continuous struggle. Poverty is so ugly. All those thick coarse sheets on the beds, uncarpeted floors, pottery cups and plates and ugly, discarded furniture. How one’s soul craves for beautiful things.’

  She looked around my little sitting room, at the Chinese carpet, blue as storm-dark seas, at the crystal ashtrays, the red ceramic bowls filled with roses and carnations and the petit-point footstool and chair covers.

  ‘Oh! How I envy your darling little house—so different from my own hovel.’

  Once, long ago, in a weak moment, I had invited her to stay with me while her own cottage was being distempered and painted. She was delighted and accepted at once, moving in with an astonishing array of black tin trunks which arrived on the heads of a string of coolies, one after the other, as though she were setting out on safari into the wilds of the Amazon. She arranged all the trunks neatly against the wall of her room.

  ‘But what on earth have you got inside them?’ I asked, half amused, half annoyed that she should clutter up my house like this.

  ‘Oh nothing much. Just a few of my things which are precious to me.’

  Behind her locked door I would hear her shifting the trunks around, opening them and presumably unpacking their mysterious contents. Whatever she took out went right back in, however, because when the door was opened eventually, everything would be once again inside, the locks firmly fastened. I shrugged the whole thing off—the sort of mild eccentricity common to ageing spinsters.

  She was an irritating guest, fidgeting about the house, picking up things and asking questions, endless questions. I was at a particularly difficult stage in the book I was currently writing and her presence was distracting. She was astonishingly fussy about food as well, and insisted on brown sugar for coffee and fresh butter on all her vegetables. At the end of two weeks I wished I had never seen Miss Krishna. I felt it would be impossible to exist even one more day with her under the same roof.

  She was extremely inquisitive and would look at the picture of my late husband and ask if I had been happy with him. She wanted to know how much money he had left and how much I earned from my books and articles. She sent out feelers about pooling our resources and sharing the house permanently with me, and I began to be seriously alarmed. I enjoy living alone and the comfortable feeling of arranging my time and life to suit no one but myself. I was free of financial worries and could afford all the small luxuries which make life run so smoothly. I had no intention of cluttering up my house or my life with Miss Krishna.

  On an impulse one morning, when Miss Krishna had gone out shopping, I took the car and drove to her house. To my astonishment I found no signs of workmen anywhere. No ladders, no cans of paint or distemper. Everything was tidy and clean. I walked around the house and at the back, found the mali potting geraniums in the garden shed. He knew me well and asked when Miss Krishna would be returning. Producing a key he opened up the house and showed me the place, clean and dry, smelling very faintly of paint. Even the windowpanes had been cleaned and shined up to match the rest of the house.

  When I returned I found Miss Krishna at my desk, reading my latest manuscript. She flushed and overturned her chair in her haste to get up.

  ‘Oh there you are,’ she said in confusion. ‘I was looking for a stamp and couldn’t help just peeping into this. You don’t mind, do you?’

  I did in fact mind, very much. If there is one thing I positively cannot bear, it is to let anyone read something of mine which has not yet been published. There is something essentially private about a manuscript that has not been published. I was now very angry indeed.

  ‘I have just come from your cottage,’ I told her coldly, ‘and you will be glad to know that you can move in right away. The distempering and painting was completed a week ago.’ There was nothing she could say and all the black trunks went right back, safari style, to her house and I was left to myself again.

  She visited me from time to time—her sari untidily hitched around her ankles, her thinning gray hair straggling over her bony forehead. She would sink back against the cushions of the sofa with a luxurious sigh, while I resigned myself to entertaining her for half an hour.

  She always carried with her a large battered, leather purse, the handles looped over her wrist securely. She never put the bag down, but always kept it with her, as though it were an extension of herself.

  She talked endlessly of her mother, a domineering woman with whom she seemed to have had a curious love-hate relationship.

  ‘No matter what I did,
or how I looked after her, she always preferred my sister,’ she said. ‘She was the pretty one, you see. I was always being urged to give up things so that she could have a new dress, pretty shoes, an outing with other girls. Finally, when she got married and left home, I spent every evening for ten whole years, listening to my mother tell me how much she missed her beloved younger daughter.’ She shrugged. ‘And all that time we lived on the barest pittance, scraped together just enough to live on.’

  She opened her handbag and took out for my inspection a tiny, exquisite coffee cup and saucer, glazed red and gold, delicately translucent.

  ‘This is my panacea for all ills,’ she said. ‘When I find life quite unbearable, I go out and buy myself something beautiful.’

  I stared at the cup in astonishment. ‘But this must have cost a great deal,’ I said. She laughed, pleased with my admiration.

  ‘Some shares of Mother’s have suddenly started paying good dividends,’ she said airily. ‘And actually this cup was not at all expensive. There is a little shop in the bazaar where you can pick up things like this sometimes for a song.’

  She put the cup and saucer back into the bag and I noticed there was not even a bulge. I eyed the bag with suspicion. I had forgotten all about the cup until the night I dined with the Lalls. Rina was an old friend and I enjoyed the evening. When coffee was served I sat up and stared fascinated at the red-and-gold cups.

  Rina said, ‘You like my cups? I bought them last year in Paris. I had a dozen but unfortunately one has been lost or broken. I suppose the cook was too frightened to confess. I’ll never be able to match it here, even if I could afford the money.’

  Her husband said, ‘I told you to wash these cups yourself, and put them away. I’ve told you a hundred times.’

  The next time I saw Miss Krishna I said casually, ‘I didn’t know you know the Lalls.’ She looked at me sharply and said, ‘I know them very slightly. They were friends of my sister.’