Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1

by Indira Srinivasan

  She stopped again and looked out. The light was blinding outside. The pale earth might have been a mirror, from the way it reflected the blazing overturned bowl of the sky.

  In five minutes Rao will be here, she thought. Eight hundred and fifty million Indians in India, and I have to be working with the only one who is always on time. Like a precision chronometer, she thought, as if he doesn’t exercise any choice in his punctuality, as if it’s hardwired into his system. Negating the virtue of it, really, when you stop to think of it. After all, the point of having a quality is when you can choose not to have it. She smiled to herself, faintly. Such a European idea, that! Not Indian at all.

  In India—or so it seemed, given her three-month acquaintance—the aim appeared to be to make automata of everyone, eradicate the whole tiresome issue of choice altogether. She looked out of the window. There was Mrs Rao, waddling back across the yard, her belly like—but no, there is nothing that a pregnant woman’s belly is like except itself. Other things could be compared to pregnant bellies, but not the thing itself. It was just too gross, too grotesque to be in any way metaphorized. And there she was, Mrs Rao: three small children wriggling about in the little hut in which she and Rao—Dr Rao, Madeleine corrected herself—lived. And now a fourth one on its imminent way . . . had she planned her life that way? Thought about it? Dreamt of something else?

  Madeleine sighed to herself and shut her eyes. It didn’t seem likely. The subcontinent seemed to tick away according to a schedule set by a handful of naked sages in some bygone era. And whenever you asked any questions about why something was done in a particular way or why it couldn’t be done in some other way, the answer, through howsoever roundabout a route, always came back to: ‘But . . . it is our tradition! Our custom. Our habit.’ Or whatever else. No effort at thought or change. Just beetling on, like . . . animals she thought angrily to herself—angry because she hated to admit such thoughts to her mind, because she wanted to believe that such abjectly racist notions could not find a lodging place in her person. And yet—they did. They had. That’s what India’s done to me, she thought, suddenly in a spasm of the same anger, that’s what . . .

  There was a knock on the door. And: ‘Dr Whitely?’ came Rao’s thick-accented voice. And: it was precisely ten after three.

  ‘Coming!’ called Madeleine, trying to add a smile to her voice. He was always smiling. Always. Like the punctuality . . . She sighed, then hurriedly found her straw hat, her sunglasses, the specimen box and an expiring packet of Marie biscuits to take along with her kit for the afternoon’s expedition. A quick check to ensure that her bottle of Bisleri for the day was still in her knapsack, then she went out on to the veranda, and into the glare of the yard, where Dr Rao now stood, smiling.

  ‘Not too early, I hope? he said.

  She posted the letter to Jeremy the next morning—or rather, she gave it to Rao, who would give it to the caretaker of the PWD guest house compound in which she and Rao lived, who would then saunter down to the post-office to actually post it. As luck would have it, a letter came from Jeremy that very afternoon, telling her of his travel plans. It arrived along with Rao at the hour appointed for the afternoon excursion to the ‘field’ and she was so delighted that she insisted on sitting right down and reading the whole thing before they left. It took her all of fifteen minutes, during which time she forgot about Rao and his ridiculous grin so entirely that when she finally did look up from the letter, it took her a few seconds to remember who he was, this dark-skinned little man, much too tubby for his thirty-two years, staring out at nothing, with a busy-looking frown on his forehead and his hands behind his back, the fingers automatically popping knuckles as he waited. In penance for that wait, all the way to the search-areas she allowed herself to be cross-examined about the letter.

  ‘Madam is very happy today, I think!’ said Rao as an opening device. ‘Is letter coming with good news, must be!’ Despite his Ph.D. his English was atrocious.

  ‘Yes,’ said Madeleine, ‘it is good news! Jeremy’s . . .’ a pause to recall: had she called Jem a husband before this? Or had she left things vague?’ . . . my—uh—friend Jeremy’s coming—next month!’ It was wonderful. It meant that they would actually manage to have two whole weeks together, at last, after so long.

  ‘I see . . .’ said Rao, frowning and smiling at once. ‘She is . . .’

  ‘He!—’ said Madeleine in irritation, ‘He! Jeremy’s a man!’ A little rude, her tone, but she couldn’t bear it, not even for an instant, to have that misunderstanding of the name to contend with.

  ‘He,’ continued Rao, ‘is taking train? Plane?’

  ‘Train, I think,’ said Madeleine, making a mental note to look into his bookings right away, It was hellish, getting that sort of thing done. But they would have to get the timing exactly right. It was really now or never.

  ‘He is . . . family friend?’ asked Rao, in what she had come to recognize was his ‘delicate’ voice. He used this voice whenever he wanted to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about her personal life. It was in this voice that he asked her about her age (forty-one), family (mother, divorcee); father (living though unseen for many years); siblings (none); financial status (by Indian standards, very wealthy; by Western, comfortable) and so on and on. Whatever else they discussed, these issues of family and social typecasting seemed to be what he really cared about.

  ‘Well, yes, in a way,’ she said, thinking, I’ll have to make up some story to explain why he sleeps in my bed! Or—what the hell, it can’t matter, no one can possibly object. Then the sort of thought that she didn’t like to acknowledge the existence of asserted itself: they wouldn’t dare to object. As a Western woman, a visiting scholar attached to the University of Mysore, she had a racial, hierarchical immunity.

  And in order to dispel the shadow of this thought, she said, aloud, ‘I mean, I’ve know him for eleven years . . . he’s also a biologist.’

  By the time they reached the vast stony plain in which they were working, Jeremy was pretty thoroughly described: a molecular biologist, working with rat enzymes, exciting research, many international seminars and assignments . . .

  Madeleine and Rao usually spent a little over three hours carefully screening designated areas of the field. Rao, an entomologist, found an endless supply of beetles to forage and there was a goodnatured bantering between the two of them about her relative paucity of ‘finds’. In the three weeks that she had been searching in the district, she had found only ten specimens. But among those ten, was one of the kind that biologists thrill to discover: a hitherto unnamed, undiscovered species.

  She had found it on the third day after her arrival in Devanahalli. Rao had been assigned to her as he was conveniently working in the locality in which she had an interest and he had taken her to the huge barren property, over forty acres of almost wholly uncultivable land over which they were now slowly and methodically searching. The understanding was that he would assist her in bagging specimens while conducting his own research. And in the bargain, of course, he would serve as a convenient interpreter, guide and chaperon.

  The skink had been basking on a rock when she first sighted it. Right off, even at a distance, she had recognized that it was unfamiliar, with that prescience which field researchers develop over the years, waiting for just such an experience to come their way. A prickling of the nerves, a heightening of every faculty. She caught the cocky little creature easily enough, perhaps it had been a little dazzled by the sun. It practically fell into her fine-meshed long-handled net though it had had several avenues of escape. And then it had lain there thrashing a few moments before accepting its fate with the same calm dignity of countless small captives before it.

  Madeleine had seen this stoic reaction often in her career and always admired it; for them, these diminutive entities, there was none of that screaming, cursing and railing against fate of larger beings! Instead, the stillness, the bright, alert eyes, the fragile limbs, the tiny claws held tense for
the slightest opportunity of escape; and only the painfully rapid pumping of the narrow chest betraying the panic which must surely be overwhelming its smallness.

  What had caught her attention in her first glimpse was confirmed: her specimen was a true skink and its tail was a bright copper pink, delicately metallic. The colour was probably a diversionary tactic to attract potential predators to the relatively expendable tail. Like that well-documented blue-tailed skink whose cerulean blue appendage would break off and wriggle delectably while its owner scampered away to freedom. But copper? No copper-tailed skink had been recorded or described so far as Madeleine was aware!

  And her heart had raced. So foolish, at her age, with her experience behind her, her standing in academic circles, to be so wildly excited! But her mind had already started composing its Latin name: Mabuya . . . Mabuya cupranus perhaps. Followed by, in discrete parentheses, and only in textbooks read by other scholars like herself, her surname: (Whitely). Such a small thing, so trivial an achievement, yet it seemed to make everything worthwhile. The years of study, the travelling, the hours in the hot and pitiless sun and yes, even the time away from Jeremy.

  The specimen she had caught had been a female, of medium size. She hoped now to consolidate her find with one more individual, preferably, of course, a male. Not much was known about the genus of skinks, even the better known species. Local people tended to regard them with fear, perhaps because of their resemblance to snakes—it was easy, with the shiny scales, the quicksilver, pouring movements, and the pigmy limbs, to be mistaken. But they were harmless, like so many creatures which excited fear in humans. Madeleine had encountered her first skink as an undergraduate in the modest reptile garden maintained by a handful of enthusiasts in her college in Scotland. She had been charmed by it, and in later years built her career around others of its kind.

  Which was what had brought her to India and thence to her personal discovery.

  Ever since that first heady afternoon, however, she had drawn a blank. Whatever companions her captive skink had sported with, they had all, apparently, vanished into the solid rock. She had caught a pair of common skinks and then a rarely sighted snake skink, but she already had specimens of these. Every night, as she did the rounds of her ten specimen-boxes, with fresh water and a newly caught caché of insects to dole out, she would come to the copper-tail last of all and gaze at it fondly as it gulped and swallowed its dinner with undignified gusto.

  Lizzie, she would think, I just have to find a mate for you! Or else—wry smile, here—you might end up like me! Childless, that is. Though of course it was quite possible that Lizzie was already a matron, several clutches of successfully hatched and dispatched eggs behind her. But something tells me not, thought Madeleine, looking at the slender graceful body. Definitely nubile, I’d say, maybe even a virgin—!

  After ten days of captivity this theory seemed to suffer a setback, with the discovery, in Lizzie’s cage, of one small white egg. Naughty girl! thought Madeleine reprovingly at first, getting preggers then running off to bask in the sun, only to be caught!

  But some days later, when she held the egg up against a light to check for signs of development inside, she saw that it wasn’t viable. It happened sometimes with reptiles, as with domesticated chickens, this issuing forth of ‘vegetarian’ eggs. It seemed in Madeleine’s eyes to make Lizzie’s celibacy all the more poignant. Like me and my monthly ovum, thought Madeleine, every twenty-eight days, wandering hopefully down all the long lonesome length of a Fallopian tube, pining in its mute, hormonal way for the company of a couple of thousand suitors, whip-tailed and frantic . . .

  She and Jeremy had been ‘trying’—that dreadful word—for some years to have a child. They had started out casually, with a light-hearted abandonment of contraceptives. Then gradually, as the months bled by, a vague urgency crept in, a sense of time running out and opportunities to ‘fecundate’, as Jeremy put it, growing scarcer. It was now five years since they had abandoned altogether any pretence of spontaneity in sexual matters. They plotted the time they could spend together, on ovulation charts instead of ordinary calendars.

  Finally, they had even been to a fertility clinic. But they gave up after seven months of enduring the white-walled, tube-lit squalor of it all. As Jeremy had said, ‘masturbating into a red plastic flask five times a week, with an adjoining roomful of healthy young lab-technicians waiting impatiently to process the “sample”—if that isn’t a perversion of all that is sacred in the temple of the body, what is?’

  They reverted to ovulation dates and taking diurnal temperatures. But by then there was a different kind of problem. The schedules of the global community of bio-scientists seemed to preclude procreation. Either they were together at the wrong moment in Madeleine’s ovulation cycle or even if they got that part right, their commitments immediately afterward made it seem madness to plan a baby. Madeleine could swear that there had been two occasions at least when she had felt the glow of a microscopic consciousness forming in the depths of her being, only to feel it fade away and die at the prospect of her professional agenda in the months ahead.

  They had finally agreed upon a cut-off date: if she hadn’t got pregnant by her forty-second birthday, they would close shop on the whole circus. Adopt a Vietnamese, breed terriers, grow bonsai. Or whatever.

  The India trip had come about in such a way that it had seemed, initially, that Jeremy might have been able to take a sabbatical in time to spend the entire four months with her. But by the time she reached India that hope had been pared back, until now it was clear that the last fertile two weeks left to them before her birthday were going to be on the dates he mentioned, in October.

  Oh Lizzie, whispered Madeleine to the specimen box, late that night, after she had reread her letter for the nth time, Oh Lizzie, hope for me that he will be able to come! But the skink, gorging itself on a succulent moth, merely blinked its delicate eyelids and paid no heed at all.

  The Rao’s child, their second boy, was born three days before Jem was due to arrive. Madeleine went to the clinic unwillingly, on the afternoon of the birth, just to be polite. She had feared that the arrangements would be unbearably primitive. But when she got there she was relieved to find a small, reasonably clean building, with dazzlingly white lime-washed walls.

  The baby was wee, red-faced and hirsute: a surprise for Madeleine who was used to the bald newborns of her country. She felt out of place in the clinic, with her blondness and her height, towering over the nurses, over Rao and the couple of nameless female hangers-on who crowded the cubicle in which Mrs Rao lay, big-eyed and smiling weakly. There were four other recent mothers in the clinic. There was a smell of damp warm cloth, warm bodies, hair-oil and flowers: not bouquets, but the small chaplets that the women wore in their hair.

  But Madeleine stayed only just long enough to observe the civilities. She walked along the quiet lane back to the guest house, feeling disturbed. She knew from past experience that the pills she had taken to stimulate ovulation made her feel slightly weepy. But that knowledge did not make it easier to dispel the vague horror she had felt in the clinic.

  It had come from facing, suddenly and without anticipation, the reproductory behemoth that is India. Suddenly, there, in the humble village clinic it had sprung into view, this awesome organic factory. Fuelled with blood and semen, its employees working around the clock, ceaselessly cranking out new lives, one for every thirty seconds. Amidst all the squalor, the chaos, the endless queues, the bungling and the waste, the forge of reproduction was burning bright. Its primordial technology was intact, its efficiency unchallenged.

  And then, Rao. Normally, she saw him as the mildly comic figure, decent in the main, with whom she had spent the better part of each day for the last four weeks. I’ve never really thought of him as a man, she acknowledged to herself, not merely in the sense of not being attracted to him—rather, as if I hadn’t noticed his masculinity at all. He had been one more detail in the landscape, neutral, neit
her male nor female. When they were together in the field she often stripped down to a T shirt and shorts for the sake of comfort, and had not thought twice about it, not for an instant, what his opinion of her or of her body might be.

  But there, in the clinic, he had suddenly been revealed as an Active Male, busily passing on his genetic data in the honoured and time-tested fashion. Was he a thoughful and considerate lover? . . . But no, she told herself, there are some avenues of thought not worth pursuing, and the speculation was forced out of her mind.

  On the last day of October, on the day that Jem arrived in India, in Delhi, the Indian Prime Minister Mrs Gandhi was assassinated. There were riots in the capital. Buses were burnt, trains were cancelled. Madeleine got a message by telegram from Jeremy telling her to delay her departure for Mysore, where she had planned to meet him.

  And then, for four days of agonized waiting, no news. The local paper and the radio were awash with the tide of shock, grief and blood which attended the shooting. Even the little hamlet of Devanahalli seemed to stiffen in the grip of the tension which spread quickly to all parts of the nation. But of passengers arriving from Helsinki, no news. Then a second telegram arrived: STUCK IN DELHI STOP STOMACH INFECTION STOP AM WRITING LETTER LOVE JEM—and no indication whatsoever of how she could be in touch with him!

  Rao and she had ventured out to the field on the morning of the day the telegram was delivered. But when he came to fetch her for the afternoon’s expedition, he found her sitting in front of the copper-tail’s box, holding the telegram and crying silently. He said nothing and left on his own for the field.

  Later, of course, it all came out: the first telegram had included the address of Jem’s hotel but that vital information had been deleted from the version she received. His third telegram with a little more detail arrived after he did and the letter, written from the clinic recommended by the British High Commission, never arrived at all.