Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1

by Indira Srinivasan

  ‘I had dinner with them last evening,’ I said, watching her face, ‘and do you know, they have eleven cups exactly like the one you showed me.’

  She never turned a hair. Her face betrayed nothing. She started at me with something like a smile. ‘Eleven cups! Fancy that. Some people have all the luck.’

  I let it go, but I was very careful to keep a sharp watch on my cups and my spoons when she was around. From time to time she would show her latest acquisition—a beautiful crystal candle-holder made in the shape of a star, a polished wooden statue, a delicately embossed silver vase to hold a single flower, a tiny jade Buddha, and once a jewelled watch with a fine gold mesh strap.

  And yet her cottage was extraordinarily bare—there seemed to be nothing of any value or beauty anywhere. No wonder, I thought, the poor thing craved for beautiful things to look at. One day she produced from her bag a small Burmese lacquered box in black and gold. ‘For you,’ she said, holding it out to me, ‘to put your paper clips and things in.’

  I thanked her politely but refused. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I never accept presents from anyone.’ Miss Krishna looked a bit sulky but she never offered me anything again. In time I even began, in a vague sort of way, to believe in her ‘little shop’ which she had so fortunately discovered.

  She seemed spry and full of energy, so it was something of a shock when the mali came running to me one morning to say that Miss Krishna was lying on her bed and had not woken for her morning tea.

  I dressed hurriedly and went over after telephoning for the doctor. Miss Krishna was dead—a heart attack, the doctor said. She had suffered at one time from a very mild attack of angina, but that had been years ago, and she took her pills regularly.

  I sent a telegram to the sister, who was her only living relative and made arrangements for the funeral. The sister arrived in time for the funeral and I was astonished to see the number of people who turned up. I had no idea that Miss Krishna knew so many people.

  Afterwards the sister asked me to stay on. She was sullen and stared at me with something like distrust.

  ‘I suppose you know,’ she said, ‘that Maya left everything to you. She made a will on a sheet of ordinary letter-paper and I am told it is perfectly legal, since it has been duly witnessed.’

  I was both astonished and dismayed. I had not even known that Miss Krishna was called Maya.

  ‘I’m afraid I cannot accept anything,’ I said firmly. ‘I have no wish to be rude, but really, I hardly knew your sister. We were simply casual acquaintances. It would be quite improper for me to take her things. Who is the next beneficiary?’

  ‘I am,’ she said, smiling agreeably. ‘The letter said, only you would really appreciate her things. Do come in and see what she has in those trunks.’

  At last the black trunks that had so intrigued me, were opened, the lids flung back to expose the contents. I gasped.

  Every single trunk was spilling over with glass, silver, statues, carved figurines, watches, jewellery, monogrammed ice-tongs and spoons, silver trivets, egg-cups made from polished wood, cigarette lighters and fountain pens.

  ‘Do you suppose some of these things are valuable?’ the sister asked.

  ‘Extremely valuable,’ I said, picking up a beautiful cup made from some thin metal that gleamed like gold. She seemed puzzled. ‘I wonder where Maya got it all from. Have you noticed there are no sets of anything? One cup, one glass, one spoon and so on. And everything is small.’

  ‘To fit into her bag,’ I said absently. She was startled.

  ‘What did you say?’ But I was staring at a little nine-inch clock half-hidden by a chiffon scarf. It was white, with a cordless transistorized mechanism that worked for a year on a battery before it needed recharging. I had lost it almost three months ago.

  I said, ‘Do you mind, if I just take something to remember her by?’ The sister was agreeable. ‘I really meant to ask you myself.’

  I picked up my little clock and it began to chime prettily. The sister smiled, perhaps with relief, that I had not chosen anything more valuable. The clock stands again on my bedside table. Miss Krishna, it seems, had an unexpected sense of humour!

  Martand

  NAYANTARA SAHGAL

  Martand took his lean length out of the comfortable depths of our best armchair and said reluctantly, ‘I’d better be going.’

  Naresh, my husband, did not reply.

  I looked up at Martand but he was not looking at me. He never did, eye-to-eye, except when we were alone, and then hungrily, as if each time were going to be the last—as it easily might have been.

  I got up, too. I wanted to cry out every time he left me, to hear my own voice wailing like a lost child’s. We had been talking politics, if the chaos caving into everyday life could be called that. Strain and suspense had become part of office and home. There was no getting away from it. Crying would have been a release from that as well.

  Refugees glutted the district, and more and more kept straggling in. Not one big flood with an end to it. This was an endless, haggard human sea of people who knew with profound instinct that there was no going back. They were here to stay. And here, food and medicine were short. Space was getting harder to squeeze out. There had been little enough before. And time was running out.

  ‘In other countries men can dream,’ Martand had said earlier in the evening, ‘but our dreams remain food and shelter, shelter and food, year after year. We’ve never had enough for ourselves and now we have to provide for these extra God knows how many.’

  ‘We know how many,’ said Naresh bitterly, ‘Millions. Why beat about the bush? It’s going to get desperate, wait and see, unless the refugees ease off.’

  It was clear that a serious crisis, the worst yet, might soon be upon us. Martand had agreed.

  ‘It already is,’ Naresh had said with harsh finality, ‘We should have sealed the frontier long ago.’

  ‘And let them die,’ lay unspoken between us.

  ‘Well, it’s not our problem,’ Naresh threw at us defiantly, as though either of us had protested.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Martand had looked at my husband consideringly, compassionately as he said it, and I at the wall. I was caught between fact and vision, between the two men, belonging mind and body to each. I loved and believed in them both, but Martand, I knew, was trying to do the more difficult thing. He kept trying to hold a tide at bay, to turn it off its dreadful course, if he could, with the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes—such instruments as human beings are left with when hardly any other resource remains. Inner religion pitted against destruction. For Martand still had visions of a good world. For months Naresh and I had shared them, here in this very room till late into the night. Now, only I did.

  We had talked all evening about the refugee crisis, but what a nerve-racking thing our own three-cornered companionship had become. What a lot of gaiety I needed simply to get through each day without continual mention of disaster. Disaster was always there. Was there ever a time it had not been? But now ordinary everyday happiness had become part of it. I felt happy only when I was near Martand and then I would have to be careful not to let it show. That was how it had become, the once easy natural give and take between the three of us. Now only its outer crust remained, a paper-thin but sheltering wall that hid my private torment. I had lived inside it these six months, ever since we had met Martand soon after our Kashmir holiday.

  Martand is the Kashmiri name for the sun god and there is a temple to him in Kashmir—miles of drive past brilliant young green rice, in the earth’s most beautiful valley flanked with tall, straight poplars, fringed with feathery willows, under serene expanses of sky. I had needed to go to Kashmir, quite apart from the pilgrimage I wanted to make to the temple. I had longed to get away from the frantic, teeming district in Naresh’s charge to clean open space; Kashmiri space. There were other nearer hill stations but I couldn’t bear the thought of any other. And then, incredibly, Naresh had go
t his leave. With every Government officer so heavily overworked, we had hardly expected it.

  Naresh had grumbled goodnaturedly about the distance. ‘What a prejudiced lot you Kashmiris are, convinced there’s no place like Kashmir.’ But he had given in.

  There isn’t, of course. Kashmir is unique. I did not want the rationed beauty of other places, a glimpse of hill and cloud. I wanted a pageant of it, the immense incomparable valley unravelling as we drove through it. I wanted to surrender to something bigger than necessity, and I had to visit the Martand shrine. Where science had failed, faith might work.

  The temple was off the motor road. It was thirteen hundred years old, a massive burnt-out saga of ruined glory with a broken Grecian colonnade surrounding it. When we got there, it seemed afire under the late afternoon sun, a tiger gold, its energy rippling visibly through its carvings. Then the light changed and softened before our eyes, sinking deeply into the stone, leaving it flesh-warm and pulsating. I put the flat of my hand on a lovely broken column, leaned my forehead against it and felt it all taken into me.

  ‘Have you had enough?’ Naresh asked indulgently.

  He was sitting against one of the columns smoking his pipe.

  ‘How’s that going to get you a child, granted Martand is the fount of fertility?’ he asked.

  Reluctantly I gave up my hand’s contact with the stone and came to him with my answer.

  ‘Now? Here?’ he protested.

  ‘Why not,’ I pleaded, ‘there’s no one for miles around.’

  ‘But the village is less than a mile away. Anyone could come along.’

  ‘Please, we’re wasting time.’

  And we wasted no more. The gold fire in me caught up with Naresh as he pulled me down beside him.

  Martand, when we first met him just after that holiday, reminded me of that ruined splendour. He looked descended from an ancient, princely lineage. I felt a shock of recognition and betrayal.

  ‘You look frightened,’ were the first personal words he said to me.

  I was. I should have waited for him. But I couldn’t tell him that. Instead I told him he had an unusual name and asked him about his ancestry, and Martand laughed.

  ‘If I tried awfully hard,’ he said, ‘I suppose I could find out my great-grandfather’s name.’

  I must have looked scandalized.

  ‘Is that very dreadful?’ he had teased. ‘No, there’s no blue blood in my veins. I come from solid middle class stock. Scholarships all through medical college. But there’s romance in the ordinary. Romance isn’t the heights. It’s what a passing stranger recognizes. It could even be in working in an inferno like this, and learning to love it.’

  Naresh saw Martand out to his car and came back into the room. He was bone tired and irritable.

  ‘He never knows when to leave. I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow. He probably has to be up at the crack of dawn too.’

  I said, to take his mind off Martand, ‘When do you think this refugee business will let up?’

  ‘On Doomsday,’ he said violently. ‘That’s when any problem in this country is going to let up.’

  He went into the bedroom to put away the whisky bottle while I rinsed out the glasses. A lot of whisky got drunk whenever Martand came.

  Naresh came back. ‘He drinks like a fish, too,’ he said, helping me with the glasses.

  Naresh was angry, but not about the drinking. He was angry with Martand for still having dreams, and with me for being enmeshed in them.

  When we were in bed he said, ‘How long are we going to make excuses for not being able to meet targets, not having enough to feed and clothe people and make life livable for them? And now with this ghastly deluge going on and on, we’ll never have enough of anything in our lifetime. Have you thought of that? I want to get out of this hell-hole and live a decent life somewhere where people have enough of everything. It doesn’t seem too much to ask. Let’s get out for a year or so.’

  I felt paralysed.

  ‘I’m making some inquiries,’ he went on, ‘I could ask for a temporary posting at one of our missions abroad. Just for a breath of fresh air. I’ve had a bellyful here.’

  I lay in bed, trying to empty my mind of all thoughts. A lot of whisky had got drunk—by all of us. Martand had once said, ‘It helps to numb feelings. One can’t watch all this unprotected and remain human.’ It was one of the few times he had admitted to strain.

  ‘Do you agree we should get out then, darling?’ Naresh mumbled.

  And he fell asleep without waiting for an answer.

  There was a crowd as usual outside Martand’s clinic next morning, looking torpidly, dully at me as I walked through. Flies, dust, heavy, hopeless heat. Another day of learning to love it, I thought, and another minute till I open that door to Martand.

  He was sitting at his desk, his sleeves rolled up, his feet in slippers, his stethoscope still around his neck. He had forgotten to take it off, like he sometimes forgot to eat, and continually forgot the huge dishevelment around him. He asked his assistant to bring some coffee.

  ‘Sorry the cup isn’t every elegant,’ he said when it came.

  He was always saying things like that. Sorry, when he repaid a debt, about handing me grubby-looking change or a tattered note. Sorry that we could not see the hills from his window—there were none to see.

  There was only a grim growing mass of humanity, almost machine-like in its menacing immobility as it waited. I couldn’t see these people as individuals any more. It was It. Waiting for cholera shots, for rations, for clothes, for space, for air, for life, for hope, as if It could do nothing, nothing for Itself. A monster robot seeking succour, devouring the pitifully little we had.

  ‘Do you think the kingdom of heaven is a germ-free place?’ asked Martand, giving me his smile over his coffee cup.

  I put mine noisily down, spilling coffee. I felt a rush of hysteria and horror at all the sights and smells of suffering interminably around us. How could he stay so untarnished at the heart of them?

  ‘Who cares? It’s here in this mess we have to live. Oh Martand, I can’t bear to stay or to go away. I can’t bear anything any more.’

  ‘You must,’ he warned, no longer smiling. ‘There’s a very long road ahead of us yet. Don’t lose your nerve now.’

  He meant the refugee crisis, as well as the time span left to him and me to find our way to each other on the dangerous, joyful, heartbreaking road we were travelling together. He got up to go into the dispensary and carry on his work, and I remembered why I had come.

  ‘I found these peaches in the bazaar. There hasn’t been any good fruit for such a long time. I had to bring them for you. I’m taking some home for us, too.’

  ‘Then take these with you. I’ll come and eat them at your house. I’ll come to dinner,’ he said.

  ‘No, don’t. Naresh won’t like it. He was very irritable last night.’

  ‘Was he? Why?’

  There was that untouched innocence about Martand, a purity without which I could no longer live. That was why I couldn’t give him up, however long we had to wait for this to work out. There was so little time to talk about personal problems, and when we were alone together we did not talk.

  At the door to the dispensary Martand turned around to say, ‘Let me speak to Naresh about us.’ It was not the first time he had urged this.

  ‘No!’ I cried.

  ‘He is too good a man to deceive.’

  ‘Don’t you know anything about human nature?’ Panic made me shrill.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Martand softly. ‘I must go now, my love. Take care, won’t you, as you drive home. It’s a bad day today. Some of my staff are giving trouble and refusing to work. And thank you for the peaches.’

  I left his share on the table. For my cheap ideas of safety—my safety—I would deprive myself of the sight of him and the sound of his voice this evening. Safety in a mad world did not make much sense, and I was not made for living a double life. My
endurance was wearing thin. One of these days I would throw myself on Naresh’s mercy and tell him. One of these days, but not today.

  At home I washed the peaches and put them on the dining table. When I went back into the dining room with plates and cutlery, Naresh was standing there staring at them.

  ‘You’re home early,’ I said and I knew in a flash it was time—if at once—to tell him about Martand.

  Naresh was waiting, a queer stricken look on his face of half-knowing, fearing, unbelieving, and the tension grew intolerable. I went up to him and he put his arms around me.

  ‘Then you hadn’t heard,’ he said. ‘That’s why I came—to tell you.’

  I looked up at him, all my terrors realized.

  ‘Martand was stabbed,’ he said, ‘less than half an hour ago. Not by a refugee, by one of his own assistants. They sent for me immediately. I was with him when he died.’

  Naresh sobbed while I stood holding him, deadly calm, as if I had known this would happen. I still had my sight and hearing, but that was all. Nothing could move me any more.

  ‘We’ll go away,’ he wept, ‘we’ll go away.’

  Yes, I thought, to a place where there was enough of everything and charity could be a virtue, not a crime. We would go where my child could be born in safety, and where a man would not be murdered for loving mankind. As we clung together I knew we had both changed invisibly beyond recall. Naresh, mourning Martand, had found his faith in goodness again, while I, surely as I breathed, knew that everywhere within hand’s reach was evil.

  The Copper-tailed Skink

  MANJULA PADMANABHAN

  Devanahalli, 3 October

  Dearest Jem—wrote Madeleine—From where I sit, I can see little Mrs Rao walking across the yard with her tummy sticking out, looking like a cartoon of a pregnant woman . . . Madeleine looked up from her letter again, just to confirm that this was really true.—Oh dear—it doesn’t sound very polite to say that, does it? Well, she’ll never know; I don’t think she reads English, so . . .