Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1

by Indira Srinivasan

  It seemed that he had acquired the infection from the sandwiches he had eaten at the airport while waiting with all the other stranded passengers for the situation to normalize in the city. He had required immediate hospitalization and was semiconscious for almost two days. He had had to remain in a fearsomely expensive private clinic for a week before he was strong enough to travel again. By that time, of course, all his train bookings had been rendered meaningless. In the bureaucratic mayhem which followed the assassination, new bookings were almost impossible to confirm and being in touch with Devanahalli by telephone was out of the question.

  All in all, by the time Madeleine collected Jem from the railway station it was three weeks from the anticipated date of his arrival. Much, much too late. Madeleine had already started bleeding. They held hands all the way from Mysore to Devanahalli in the taxi, saying very little. Rao was surprisingly circumspect when they finally got back to the guest house. He left them alone even to the extent of suggesting to Madeleine that she take her ‘goodfriend’ on the afternoon’s field visit instead of ‘himself’.

  They had walked about that rock-studden barren plain, the two of them, tall, pale-skinned, fair-haired, alien. The sun was still scorching where it touched the napes of their necks, but there was a wind twitching in the grasses and gusting the crows out of the sky. The weather was turning in its sudden way and there was a freshness, a sharpness. It rained that night.

  Jem stayed for ten days. While he was there, they found another copper-tail, but it was also female.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Jem, back at the guest house that night, sitting out on the veranda. ‘Bring them both back with you, no harm done.’

  The lights were off to discourage the squadrons of moths and beetles which otherwise served as an excellent air-borne supermarket for the captive lizards in the boxes.

  ‘Would it be quite right, do you think?’ said Madeleine after a slight silence. ‘Without a male, I mean.’

  ‘You’ll want living proof of your new species, surely,’ Jem said.

  But in the darkness Madeleine was shaking her head. ‘It seems wrong, it seems unfair . . .’

  There was another slight pause. She could almost hear Jem’s eyebrows being raised in mild consternation. ‘Biologists can’t afford to be sentimental, you know,’ was all he said.

  ‘I’ll have enough slides,’ she said, ‘and measurements—and in any case, they could easily die en route. They’re notoriously delicate—’

  Jeremy shrugged, causing the cane settee they were sharing to wobble slightly. ‘Come on! It won’t destroy the planet’s equilibrium if two miserable lizards don’t get their chance to mate and reproduce!’

  Madeleine tucked in the corners of her mouth; for a moment she felt as if she might burst into tears, there and then. But she was no longer taking her pills and her eyes were dry. ‘You’re right,’ she said, evenly. ‘It’s silly to think of them as . . .’ But she didn’t end her sentence.

  They parted company in Mysore and made plans to meet again in England at Christmas. Madeleine extended her stay in India by another month, which she could choose to spend in Devanahalli, but decided against. There were two other locations, one in Orissa and another in Bengal, to which she had open invitations.

  Rao and his family bade her a sweet-laden farewell, more festive than solemn. I guess they’ll move back into the main building now, from the hut, was how she rationalized it, as she waved from the taxi which was hired to take her to Mysore. I wonder what they really think of me, she thought. Of course I’ll never know.

  The taxi took a route which followed the outer boundary of the field area of her survey. When they had gone far enough for her to be reasonably sure that Rao could no longer see her even if he had tried, Madeleine put out a hand and signed to the driver that she wanted him to stop.

  Hopping quickly out of the car and careless of the goggle-eyed interest of the driver, she strode out to a shallow dip in the rock. From her shoulder bag she brought out a pouch in which the two lizards lay, coiled and attentive. She shook them loose from the bag, half kneeling on the rock. Then straightened up and smoothed the wrinkles out from her skirt as she watched them dart away immediately. She watched them till they had vanished from sight, then turned back to the car, the breeze lifting her fine hair off her shoulders and tugging her skirt around her knees.

  Her Mother

  ANJANA APPACHANA

  When she got her daughter’s first letter from America, the mother had a good cry. Everything was fine, the daughter said. The plane journey was fine, her professor who met her at the airport was nice, her university was very nice, the house she shared with two American girls (nice girls) was fine, her classes were okay and her teaching was surprisingly fine. She ended the letter saying she was fine and hoping her mother and father were too. The mother let out a moan she could barely control and wept in an agony of longing and pain and frustration. Who would have dreamt that her daughter was doing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, she thought, wiping her eyes with her sari palla, when all the words at her command were ‘fine’, ‘nice’, and ‘okay’? Who would have imagined that she was a gold medallist from Delhi University? Who would know from the blandness of her letter, its vapidity, the monotony of its tone and the indifference of its adjectives that it came from a girl so intense and articulate? Her daughter had written promptly, as she had said she would, the mother thought, cleaning her smudged spectacles and beginning to reread the letter. It had taken only ten days to arrive. She examined her daughter’s handwriting. There seemed to be no trace of loneliness there, or discomfort, or insecurity—the writing was firm, rounded and clear. She hadn’t mentioned if that over-friendly man at the airport had sat next to her on the plane. The mother hoped not. Once Indian men boarded the plane for a new country, the anonymity drove them crazy. They got drunk and made life hell for the air hostesses and everyone else nearby, but of course, they thought they were flirting with finesse. Her daughter, for all her arguments with her parents, didn’t know how to deal with such men. Most men. Her brows furrowed, the mother took out a letter-writing pad from her folder on the dining table and began to write. Eat properly, she wrote. Have plenty of milk, cheese and cereal. Eating badly makes you age fast. That’s why Western women look so haggard. They might be pencil slim, but look at the lines on their faces. At thirty they start looking faded. So don’t start these stupid, Western dieting fads. Oil your hair every week and avoid shampoos. Chemicals ruin the hair. (You can get almond oil easily if coconut oil isn’t available.) With all the hundreds of shampoos in America, American women’s hair isn’t a patch on Indian women’s. Your grandmother had thick, black hair till the day she died.

  One day, two months earlier, her daughter had cut off her long, thick hair, just like that. The abruptness and sacrilege of this act still haunted the mother. That evening, when she opened the door for her daughter, her hair reached just below her ears. The daughter stood there, not looking at either her mother or father, but almost, it seemed, beyond them, her face a strange mixture of relief and defiance and anger, as her father, his face twisted, said, why, why? I like it short, she said. Fifteen years of growing it below her knees, of oiling it every week, and washing it so lovingly, the mother thought as she touched her daughter’s cheek and said you are angry with us . . . is this your revenge? Her daughter had brushed away her hand and moved past her parents, past her brother-in-law who was behind them and into her room. For the father it was as though a limb had been amputated. For days he brooded in his chair in the corner of the sitting room, almost in mourning, avoiding even looking at her, while the mother murmured, you have perfected the art of hurting us.

  Your brother-in-law has finally been allotted his three-bedroomed house, she wrote, and he moved into it last week. I think he was quite relieved to do so, after living with us these few months. So there he is, living all alone in that big house with two servants while your sister continues working in Bombay. Your sister says that com
muting marriages are inevitable, and like you, is not interested in hearing her mother’s opinion on the subject. I suppose they will go on like this for years, postponing having children, postponing being together, until one day when they’re as old as your father and me, they’ll have nothing to look forward to. Tell me, where would we have been without you both? Of course, you will only support your sister and your brother-in-law and their strange, selfish marriage. Perhaps that is your dream too. Nobody seems to have normal dreams any more. The mother had once dreamt of love and a large home, silk saris and sapphires. The love she had got, but as her husband struggled in his job and the children came and as they took loans to marry off her husband’s sisters, the rest she did not. In the next fifteen years she had collected a nice selection of silk saris and jewellery for her daughters, but by that time, they showed no inclination for either. The older daughter and her husband had had a registered marriage, refused to have even a reception and did not accept so much as a handkerchief from their respective parents. And the younger one had said quite firmly before she left, that she wasn’t even thinking of marriage.

  The mother looked at her husband’s back in the veranda. That’s all he did after he came back from the office—sit in the veranda and think of his precious daughter, while she cooked and cleaned, attended to visitors and wrote to all her sisters and his sisters. Solitude to think—what a luxury! She had never thought in solitude. Her thoughts jumped to and fro and up and down and in and out as she dusted, cooked, cleaned, rearranged cupboards, polished the brass, put buttons on shirts and falls on saris, as she sympathized with her neighbour’s problems and scolded the dhobi for not putting enough starch on the saris, as she reprimanded the milkman for watering down the milk and lit the kerosene stove because the gas had finished, as she took the dry clothes from the clothes line and couldn’t press them because the electricity had failed and realized that the cake in the oven would now never rise. The daughter was like her father, the mother thought—she too had wanted the escape of solitude, which meant, of course, that in the process she neither made her bed nor tidied up her room.

  How will you look after yourself, my Rani beti, she wrote. You have always had your mother to look after your comforts. I’m your mother and I don’t mind doing all this, but some day you’ll have to do it for the man you marry and how will you, when you can’t even thread a needle?

  But of course, her daughter didn’t want marriage. She had been saying so, vehemently, the last few months. The father blamed the mother. The mother had not taught her how to cook or sew and had only encouraged her and her sister to think and act with an independence quite uncalled for in daughters. How then, he asked her, could she expect her daughters to be suddenly amenable? How could she complain that she had no grandchildren and lose herself in self-pity when it was all her doing? Sometimes the mother fought with the father when he said such things, at other times she cried or brooded. But she was not much of a brooder, and losing her temper or crying helped her cope better.

  The mother lay aside her pen. She had vowed not to lecture her daughter, and there she was, filling pages of rubbish when all she wanted to do was cry out, why did you leave us in such anger? What did we not do for you? Why, why? No, she would not ask. She wasn’t one to get after the poor child like that.

  How far away you are, my pet, she wrote. How could you go away like that, so angry with the world? Why, my love, why? Your father says that I taught you to be so independent that all you hankered for was to get away from us. He says it’s all my fault. I have heard that refrain enough in my married life. After all that I did for you, tutoring you, disciplining you, indulging you, caring for you, he says he understands you better because you are like him. And I can’t even deny that because it’s true. I must say it’s very unfair, considering that all he did for you and your sister was give you chocolates and books. When her daughter was six, the mother recalled, the teacher had asked the class to make a sentence with the word ‘good’. She had written, my father is a good man. The mother sighed as she recalled asking her, isn’t your mother a good woman? And the daughter’s reply, Daddy is gooder. The mother wrote, no, I don’t understand—you talk like him, look like him, are as obstinate and as stupidly honest. It is as though he conceived you and gave birth to you entirely on his own. She was an ayah, the mother thought, putting her pen aside, that was all she was; she did all the dirty work and her husband got all the love.

  The next day, after her husband had left for the office, the mother continued her letter. She wrote in a tinier handwriting now, squeezing as much as possible into the thin air-mail sheet. Write a longer letter to me, next time, my Rani, she wrote. Try and write as though you were talking to me. Describe the tree, the buildings, the people. Try not to be your usual perfunctory self. Let your mother experience America through your eyes. Also before I forget, you must bathe every day, regardless of how cold it gets. People there can be quite dirty. But no, if I recall correctly it is the English and other Europeans who hate to bathe. Your Naina Aunty, after her trip to Europe, said that they smelled all the time. Americans are almost as clean as Indians. And don’t go into the dirty habit of using toilet paper, all right?

  The mother blew her nose and wiped her cheek. Two years, she wrote, or even more for you to come back. I can’t even begin to count the days for two years. How we worry, how we worry. Had you gone abroad with a husband, we would have been at peace, but now? If you fall ill who will look after you? You can’t even make dal. You can’t live on bread and cheese forever, but knowing you, you will. You will lose your complexion, your health, your hair. But why should I concern myself with your hair? You cut it off, just like that.

  The mother lay her cheek on her hand and gazed at the door where her daughter had stood with her cropped hair, while she, her husband and her son-in-law stood like three figures in a tableau. The short hair made her face look even thinner. Suddenly she looked ordinary, like all the thousands of short-haired, Western-looking Delhi girls one saw, all ordinarily attractive like the others, all the same. Her husband saying, why, why? His hands up in the air, then slowly, falling down at his sides, her son-in-law, his lazy grin suddenly wiped off his face; she recalled it all, like a film in slow motion.

  I always thought I understood you, she wrote, your dreams, your problems, but suddenly it seems there is nothing that I understand. No, nothing, she thought, the tiredness weighing down her eyes. She was ranting—the child could do without it. But how, how could she not think of this daughter of hers, who in the last few months had rushed from her usual, settled quietness to such unsettled stillness that it seemed the very house would begin to balloon outwards, unable to contain her straining?

  Enough, she wrote. Let me give you the news before I make you angry with my grief. The day after you left, Mrs Gupta from next door dropped in to comfort me, bless her. She said she had full faith you would come back, that only boys didn’t. She said a daughter will always regard her parents’ home as her only home unlike sons who attach themselves to their wives. As you know, she has four sons, all married, and all, she says, under their wives’ thumbs. But it was true, the mother thought. Her own husband fell to pieces every time she visited her parents without him. When he accompanied her there he needed so much looking after that she couldn’t talk to her mother, so she preferred to go without him. With her parents she felt indulged and irresponsible. Who indulged her now? And when she came back from her parents the ayah would complain that her husband could never find his clothes, slept on the bedcover, constantly misplaced his spectacles, didn’t know how to get himself a glass of water and kept waiting for the postman.

  With all your talk about women’s rights, she wrote, you refuse to see that your father has given me none. And on top of that he says that I am a nag. If I am a nag, it is because he’s made me one. And talking of women’s rights, some women take it too far. Mrs Parekh is having, as the books say, a torrid affair with a married man. This man’s wife is presently
with her parents and when Mrs Parekh’s husband is on tour, she spends the night with him, and comes back early in the morning to get her children ready for school. Everyone has seen her car parked outside his flat in the middle of the night. Today our ayah said, memsahib, people like us do it for money. Why do memsahibs like her do it? But of course, you will launch into a tirade of how this is none of my business and sum it up with your famous phrase, each to her own. But my child, they’re both married. Surely you won’t defend it? Sometimes I don’t understand how your strong principles coexist with such strange values for what society says is wrong. Each to her own, you have often told me angrily, never seeming to realize that it is never on one’s own that one takes such a reckless step, that entire families disintegrate, that children bear scars forever. Each to her own indeed.

  Yes, she was a straightforward girl, the mother thought, and so loyal to those she loved. When the older daughter had got married five years ago, and this one was only seventeen, how staunchly she had supported her sister and brother-in-law’s decision to do without all the frills of an Indian wedding. How she had later defended her sister’s decision to continue with her job in Bombay, when her husband came on a transfer to Delhi. She had lost her temper with her parents for writing reproachful letters to the older daughter, and scolded them when they expressed their worry to the son-in-law, saying that as long as he was living with them, they should say nothing.

  The mother was fond of her son-in-law in her own way. But deep inside she felt that he was irresponsible, uncaring and lazy. Yes, he had infinite charm, but he didn’t write regularly to his wife, didn’t save a paisa of his salary (he didn’t even have a life insurance policy and no thoughts at all of buying a house) and instead of spending his evenings in the house as befitted a married man, went on a binge of plays and other cultural programmes, often taking her daughter with him, spending huge amounts on petrol and eating out. His wife was too practical, he told the mother, especially about money. She believed in saving, he believed in spending. She wanted security, he wanted fun. He laughed as he said this, and gave her a huge box of the most expensive barfis. The mother had to smile. She wanted him to pine for her daughter. Instead, he joked about her passion for her work and how he was waiting for the day when she would be earning twice as much as him, so that he could resign from his job and live luxuriously off her, reading, trekking and sleeping. At such times the mother couldn’t even force a smile. But her younger daughter would laugh and say that his priorities were clear. And the older daughter would write and urge the mother not to hound her sister about marriage, to let her pursue her interests. The sisters supported each other, the mother thought, irritated but happy.