The Artist of Disappearance

by Anita Desai

  I worked hard at it but whatever pleasure or hope I had had at the outset dissipated. There were scenes I could write in English but other scenes called out to be written in my mother's language. I was torn between the two and could settle on neither. I wrote scraps in one, then scraps in the other, but tore them all up and threw them away: who would read such a jumble?

  I was sitting in the dark one evening, listening to the crows on the telephone lines and the lopped tree outside as they quarrelled over their roosting places for the night, hoarse with combat, when it occurred to me that only Suvarna Devi could write this story. Only she had the voice for it; I did not. I had been writing under her influence, with her voice; it was not mine. In adopting hers, I had lost mine.

  Then, browsing through a bookshop as I often did on a Saturday morning, I looked up from a display of discounted books spread out on a table and saw a young man I recognised at once as Suvarna Devi's nephew. He had his little son with him, now a toddler, and was pointing out to him some colourful children's books.

  For a second I felt panic and wondered if I could slip away unseen. But then I decided that would be cowardly, and I went round the table to face him.

  I wondered if he would recognise me but it was clear that he did. I greeted him and asked after his wife and daughter, and then his aunt. He seemed perfectly pleased to see me again and told me they were all well. After that I hesitated, not sure whether to refer to her books, her writing. Perhaps he hesitated too, slightly, but then, smiling, informed me that not only was she well but 'working as hard as ever. Now she has started a school—a primary school for tribal children. She was always so interested in their education. She is working full-time with them and asked me to select some books to send them.' He beamed with pride, then became distracted by his son who had grabbed at some books and was pulling them off a shelf with delight.

  So I said goodbye, asking him to convey my regards to his aunt, and in the hubbub of the shopkeeper coming to reprimand the child and the young father's flustered apologies, I left.

  The Artist of Disappearance

  NOBODY CLIMBED THAT hill any more. Not unless they wished to retreat. It was a good place for that: a retreat. Just the burnt-out remains of the house that had stood there. Only a few walls still standing, a makeshift roof of zinc sheets in place of the turrets and towers that had been there, the rest just blackened stones, ashes, rubble, charred beams, weeds crowding into gaping windows. An occasional newt slipping silently by.

  But Ravi was there, sitting on the stone steps that led up to the veranda. It was what he had always done in the evenings when he returned to the house, to listen for the sound of a cowbell ringing faintly and intermittently downhill, then more clearly and metallically as the beast drew closer. Mingled with that tolling was the noise of goat hooves clicking smartly on the stony path, and the goats' small eager bleats as they anticipated the food that would be waiting for them. They were the first to arrive at the homestead below, hunger quickening their pace and dancing approach. Then the cow, eager too but with more body to trundle along a path too narrow for her bony breadth. She had to be encouraged by the flick of a switch that her owner wielded with one hand while with the other he steadied on top of his head the bundle of firewood he had gathered.

  And when these shapes appeared in the clearing below, the dogs that had been slumbering the afternoon away scrambled to their feet with an air of importance to show they were alert to their duties, and let out sharp yelps of welcome to announce their arrival to the family that lived there.

  The children began to chase the chickens into their pen for the night. The mother called for firewood to be brought in. Smoke unwound in a spool from the gaps in the thatch of the roof. The goats were directed into an enclosure, walled with thorns, by showing them a tin basin in which bits of broken bread had been soaked in warm water, and the cow was led into her shed, with its comfortable smells of dung and straw, to be milked.

  Then there was a lull as the activity shifted indoors where a fire of sticks crackled, a pot boiled and the aroma of food was conjured. Around it the children gathered on their haunches, tin plates before them, waiting. The father lowered himself onto a stool, and the mother was finally ready to ladle out the meal she had prepared.

  But the older of the two boys remained standing by the door, knowing his role in the day's duties. He took the enamel dish from his mother's hands: she had filled it with rice and dhal into which she threw a handful of green chillies. She gave him a tin lid to cover the plate and by a slight shift of her chin—which bore a small blue tattoo—she indicated he was to take it, take it up.

  The boy nodded, then set off up the hill: he knew he should be quick so as not to let the food cool and congeal. Besides, he was eager to return for his share. So he climbed the hill as quickly as he could without tripping or spilling.

  When the boy appeared with the covered dish, instead of merely nodding to indicate he should put it down, Ravi startled him by speaking instead. His voice was hoarse, he used it so seldom, and it was clear it cost him great effort to speak.

  His voice rasping, he asked, 'Have they gone?'

  The boy nodded, yes.

  'You are sure?'

  Yes, the boy nodded again.

  Then Ravi took the dish from him, and even mumbled thanks, adding, 'Tell your father I will not be coming down tonight.'

  Yes, the boy nodded, he would. Duty done, he turned and went flying downhill to his own meal, and gave three sharp whistles as he leapt from one stone to the next, to mark his freedom. The dogs came running up to meet him with their own eager, hungry barks.

  Up at the burnt house, Ravi finished his meal and set the plate down on the step beside him, then took a biri out of his shirt pocket, lit it and leaned back against one of the veranda posts which was still standing, and waited for the sounds of the household below to subside into silence and the light to withdraw from the valley and climb the hills till only their peaks were lit by the sun. Then they too faded into dusk but he continued to sit there, listening for the last calls of a lone cuckoo to die out and the rustle of the flying squirrel that lived under the eaves as it crept out and launched itself into the evening air where the bats were now swooping and plunging after insects.

  He stubbed out the biri, then drew a matchbox out of his shirt pocket and began to play with it, thoughtfully; he might have been a monk with his prayer beads. When he looked up from it he found the woolly dusk had knitted him into the evening scene, inextricably. Silence had fallen on the homestead below and the light of its small fire had sunk and gone out.

  He got to his feet and made his way to the bushes encroaching on the house. He lowered his trousers and there was a sound of urine trickling on the stones at his feet. Then he turned and retraced his steps. Picking up the empty dish, he carried it across the veranda to the one area that might still be called a room: it had walls, it was covered, and it held the string cot that Bhola had fetched for him from the hut below, and the few remnants salvaged from the fire, lined up against the blackened wall. Ravi fumbled his way to a table, scarred by the knives and choppers of its kitchen past, on which a kerosene lantern stood. He lit it—there, another match gone—and surveyed the sorry items: an overstuffed chair on which he never sat, a hatstand which held neither a hat nor a walking stick—and saw they were all still there, mute and untouched, as if waiting for the day when they would be chopped up for firewood.

  All else that the house had once contained—and there had been an abundance—was gone, just like the leather suitcases that used to be lined up in the hall—the hall!—waiting to be carried out, past the grandfather clock and the portraits of his ancestors, tinted photographs that leaned away from the wall to look down as his father unhooked his favourite walking stick from the hatstand and the astrakhan cap that he liked to wear when travelling, then gave the soft, polite whistle with which he might summon his wife who was detained in her dressing room—her dressing room!—by some last-minute
adjustment to her toilet.

  While they waited for her to emerge, the father turned to look at the boy standing half hidden by the door to his room, one leg locked around the other, and gave him a playful wink as he set the astrakhan cap jauntily on his head. 'Like it? I bought it in Berlin, I'll have you know, on the Kurfürsten-damm. Can you say that—"Kur-fürst-en-damm"? It had started to snow and I went into this very elegant shop and a most polite gentleman came out from the back to see what I wanted. I pointed it out to him and when I walked out, I had it on my head—just so!' and he gave another wink. 'I'll let you wear it one day—when you can say "Kur-fürst-en-damm",' he offered, and the child knew it was an offer that would evaporate along with all the others and looked away in embarrassment at how glibly his father lied.

  Then his mother emerged, smelling powerfully of flowers—rose and lily of the valley—dressed in a sage-green sari with a narrow trim of embroidery. 'We must hurry or we'll miss the train,' she cried as if it were the others who had kept her waiting.

  Hari Singh, who was waiting at the foot of the stairs, came up to lift one suitcase onto his head and grasp two others in his hands, then carried these out to the waiting automobile that would take them to the railhead in Dehra Dun. The chauffeur came up to carry down the rest.

  At the foot of the stairs the parents remembered to turn round and wave at the boy. 'We're off now!' the father announced. 'Be good!' he added, and the mother called out, 'We'll bring you back—' but forgot what she had promised to bring back and left it up in the air. This didn't matter because whatever expensive or elaborate toy it was, it would only be locked up for safe keeping once unpacked and briefly revealed for his tentative admiration.

  He sidled down the stairs to the front door and watched the car proceed slowly down the gravelled drive, then disappear under the oak trees that closed behind it like dark stage curtains. For a while he could hear the engine grinding uphill to the motor road, then gave up trying to follow its progress. If it had been night he would have been able to see the lights as they slowly descended downhill to the valley, but it was still afternoon.

  And then he could let out the breath he had been holding inside his chest till it swelled into a balloon, tight against his ribs. A balloon he held pinched between his thumb and forefinger and could now set free. Off it went with a whistle, twisting and turning and wriggling, till it descended, hollowed, into the limp rubber norm of normality.

  Not only he but everyone, everything experienced that moment. Hari Singh, recovering, took his cloth cap off his head and was suddenly upright, divested of the posture and demeanour of servanthood. Coming back up the stairs to the veranda, he shouted, 'Come on, come on! Let us go and hunt tigers, you and I!'

  Not that they would—Hari Singh was no more given to keeping his promises than were the boy's parents, but just to hear the invitation made, loudly and heartily, changed the air, the atmosphere, and Hari's son Bhola, who had been waiting behind the bushes, catapult in hand, appeared to see if Ravi would now come out to play.

  Outdoors was freedom. Outdoors was the life to which he chose to belong—the life of the crickets springing out of the grass, the birds wheeling hundreds of feet below in the valley or soaring upwards above the mountains, and the animals invisible in the undergrowth, giving themselves away by an occasional rustle or eruption of cries or flurried calls; plants following their own green compulsions and purposes, almost imperceptibly, and the rocks and stones, seemingly inert but mysteriously part of the constant change and movement of the earth. One had only to be silent, aware, observe and perceive—and this was Ravi's one talent as far as anyone could see.

  Outdoors, Ravi had watched as a snake shed itself of its old skin, emerging into a slithering new length, leaving behind on the path a shroud, transparent as gauze, fragile as glass. Once he had come upon a tree with long, cream-coloured cylinders for flowers, attracting armies of ants coming to raid their fabled sweetness and sap, armies that would not be deflected by the intervention of a stick, a twig, and would persist till they reached the treasure, and drowned.

  Outdoors, the spiders spun their webs in tall grass, a spinning you would not observe unless you became soundless, motionless, almost breathless and invisible, as when he had seen a praying mantis on a leaf exactly the same shade of green as itself, holding in its careful claws a round, striped bee buzzing even as it was devoured, which halted when its eyes swivelled towards him and became aware it was being watched.

  And there was always the unexpected—lifting a flat stone and finding underneath an unsuspected scorpion immediately aroused and prepared for attack, or coming across an eruption from the tobacco-dark leaf mould of a family of mushrooms with their ghostly pallor and caps, hats and bonnets, like refugees that had arrived in the night.

  Or a troop of silver-haired, black-masked monkeys bounding through the trees to arrive with war whoops, or sporting like trapeze artists at a circus, then disappearing like actors from a stage that the forest provided.

  And everywhere were the stones—flat blue splinters of slate, pebbles worn to an irresistible silkiness by the weather and that could be collected and arranged according to size and colour in an infinite number of patterns and designs, none of which were ever repeated or fixed.

  Infinite—unless you were like Bhola who always brought with him a catapult and almost automatically raised it whenever he saw a dove or a squirrel that could be brought down with a shot. Ravi was not for such sport; a heap of dead feathers or fur were for him as unnatural as for the slain creature. Ravi was interested only in the variations and mutations of the living, their innumerable possibilities.

  It was as if the curtains came down on all this, if not entirely obliterated it, when the monsoon rose up in thunderous clouds from the parched valley below to engulf the hills, invade them with an opaque mist in which a pine tree or a mountain top appeared only intermittently, and then unleashed a downpour that brought Ravi's rambling to a halt and confined him to the house for days at a time, deafened by the rain drumming on the rooftop and cascading down the gutters and through the spouts to rush downhill in torrents.

  Everything in the house turned damp; the blue fur of mildew crept furtively over any object left standing for the briefest length of time: shoes, bags, boxes, it consumed them all. The sheets on the bed were clammy when he got between them at night, and the darkness rang with the strident cacophony of the big tree crickets that had been waiting for this, their season. From the pond down in the clearing below came the gleeful bellowing of bullfrogs. Lying awake, listening, Ravi wished he could slip out with Hari Singh's big flashlight and catch them in its beam, but perhaps the gleam emitted by the fireflies flitting among the trees by the thousands would be light enough. He shivered with cold and anticipation.

  But Hari Singh locked him in carefully every night, and by day filled his ears with tales of the leopards that came out of the forest to prey on any poor goat or calf left outdoors and were known to carry away even the fierce bhutia dogs people kept to guard their homes and livestock. What chance had a small, thin boy like Ravi against such creatures? Hari Singh demanded as he served Ravi his dinner at one end of the dining table, standing by with a dishcloth over his shoulder. While Ravi picked at his food, Hari Singh talked of his glory days when Ravi's grandfather had taken him on hunting expeditions and allowed him to carry the guns with which he shot the bears, deer and panthers whose pelts, horns and glass-eyed heads watched Ravi make his way through his meal. Of course the boy ate very little, his mouth hanging open with wonder as he listened, and consequently Hari Singh gave up setting a place at the table with the requisite glass and silverware, and took to letting Ravi eat his meals at a small table out on the veranda where he would not be separated from the outdoor world that provided all the nourishment he wanted. When it rained he gave Ravi his food on a plate and set him on a stool in a corner of the kitchen by the sooty glow of the kitchen fire while he himself smoked a biri which he was strictly forbidden to do wh
en the parents were present.

  The only visitor to the house during the long summers when the parents were away was the teacher they had employed to supervise Ravi's homework, a Mr Benjamin who taught at one of the many boarding schools strung out along the ridge, and supplemented his income by giving private tuition on the side. The parents approved of him because he always wore a suit and tie and spoke in what approximated to 'good English', so they did not look too far into his qualifications for teaching their son mathematics whose strong subject it was not (nor was it Mr Benjamin's). Ravi wished the subject might be something else—ornithology, for instance, or geology, but Mr Benjamin regarded himself as far above such frivolous matters. He cleared his throat on arriving, hung up his walking stick and umbrella, scraped his shoes ferociously on the doormat to dislodge the dirt they had collected on the way to the house on the hilltop, wondering aloud what had possessed Ravi's parents to live so far from the civilised centre of Mussoorie (though he knew perfectly well that Ravi's father had inherited the house from his father who had owned a brewery in these parts and used to come up from Bombay ostensibly to inspect the brewery but actually for the shikar and its trophies). Then Mr Benjamin would tell Ravi to open his books and get to work.

  As the afternoon dragged sluggishly on, Ravi drooped lower and lower over the smudged and spotted copybook, chewing at his pencil till it splintered and had to be spat out, for which he received a smart whack on the head from Mr Benjamin's ruler. He could hear Hari Singh's children playing in the clearing below, their rooster crowing, their goats bleating, and he grew despondently aware of the afternoon light dying all the while.