The Artist of Disappearance

by Anita Desai

  But Mr Benjamin stayed till punctually at four o'clock Hari Singh brought him a cup of hot tea frothing with milk and thick with sugar. Ah-h, the tutor sighed, and let slip his professional manner enough to pour out a bit from the cup into the saucer and blow on it, then slurp it up blissfully. Ah-h, ah-h. It was not what he would do in front of his employers but of course Ravi was not that and all Ravi was thinking was that Hari Singh needed somehow to be persuaded to bring in the tea earlier. When Mr Benjamin came reluctantly to the end of this sweet pleasure, he gave Ravi a few more taps of the ruler to remind him he was only a miserable schoolboy and ought to be attending to his schoolwork instead of staring at him open-mouthed, then picked up his walking stick and umbrella and disappeared into the floating mists of the monsoon.

  Why did his parents never take him with them when they travelled abroad? The boy never asked and they never explained. It seemed they believed the child belonged at home while they belonged to the wider world where of course they would not have the time for him (or a servant to see to his needs). One day, they said, he would be old enough to accompany them and it occurred to no one that there was no reason he could not accompany them now. (What was not said, never even mentioned, was that they were a childless couple, Ravi the child they had adopted—at the suggestion of a distant, philanthropic aunt—yet as far as anyone could see, they never made up a family.) And of course, in a way, their absence was his vacation, which came to an end when the parents returned.

  Their return coincided with the beginning of the school year—the taking out and putting on of grey flannels and crimson blazer with a crest on the pocket proclaiming a Latin aspiration no one understood, the knotting of a noose-like tie under the shirt collar; each day a slower and more reluctant walk uphill to the prison of the school buildings grouped around a courtyard from which rose a roar that bubbled fiercely as a kettle on the boil till a gong was struck and the kettle was abruptly lifted off the fire. Rows of boys filed off to the regime of lessons administered by furious teachers who threw chalk at one or twisted another's ear, picking on the most miserable targets to punish in inventive and fiendish ways. This was considered the only way in which the Latin motto that no one understood might be upheld.

  After that treatment—and Ravi was too ashamed to tell anyone or even admit to himself that he was the inquisitors' favourite target—he could not turn light-heartedly to the escapades of his fellow victims who lingered around the school gates after classes to watch the girls in their pleated skirts and green sweaters come out of the adjoining school, and attempt to lure them, sometimes, sometimes successfully, with the promise of an ice cream at Magnolia's or a film show at the Picture Palace. Ravi was too crushed by the school day to take the risk of any other failure, and heaved his school bag onto his back to slink home with the hope of going unnoticed—which he mostly was.

  To be released from school meant only being released into the house where the parents now presided. If they did not use a ruler to crack across his head, or throw things at him in a rage, they had other ways to plunge their son into misery. The house, in their presence, had a set of rigid rules. The bell rang at intervals, punctually (punctuality being one cardinal mark of their Westernised ways), table manners had to be observed meticulously (another of those cardinal marks of which they possessed an arsenal), each infraction was pounced on and corrected (spare the rod etc. was the maxim by which they had been raised so they thought of themselves as permissive), and great lengths of time went by at the table as soup was followed by an entrée which was followed by a pudding which was followed by a savoury, some with enticing names—'angels on horseback'!—which they never lived up to.

  And then there was the entertaining they did which required his complete invisibility and silence while the parents played bridge and canasta and drank tea or cocktails. There was a certain pleasure to be had in hiding in the kitchen and watching Hari Singh arrange a tea tray or whip egg whites for a pudding and being slipped a sweet or a savoury titbit—but there were also the hours he had to sit more or less confined to a chair, swinging his legs till his own supper and bedtime could be seen to, also by Hari Singh.

  It was better when his parents dressed up, sprayed themselves with exotic Parisian perfumes, got into their car and went out—but this did not happen nearly often enough for Ravi because his parents went abroad during what was known as 'the season' in Mussoorie, when British society came up to the hills to 'escape' from 'the plains' and brought their plays, balls, charades and garden parties with them.

  Ravi's father sometimes said, wistfully, 'Why don't we spend the summer here for once, Tehmi? It's very jolly, I'm told,' but Tehmi had been brought up—in Bombay and at finishing school in Switzerland—to think summers had to be spent in Nice or Montreux where many of her family were now ensconced. Sometimes the father went on to complain, 'It's a damned expense, you know, Tehmi,' which made her screw her face into an expression of distaste at the mention of anything so unmentionable.

  Fortunately for him, the father, these excursions were brought to an end when war broke out. Although the family liquor business flourished as never before, it was out of the question to risk a sea voyage when ships were being regularly torpedoed. And Mussoorie had never been as gay as now, nor its salubrious climate so needed for the health and recreation of the British soldiers on leave from the war fronts in Burma, Malaya and Singapore, and it was incumbent on the ladies of Mussoorie to provide them with the fun and relaxation that was their due.

  The father was finally able to enjoy their exile in Mussoorie in what had been his father's 'hunting lodge' (once his brothers and uncles had discovered the disasters he could create in their business and the need to keep him away). He could now go to dances at Hackman's every night he liked, in his evening clothes with a silk scarf thrown over his shoulders and the astrakhan cap he had purchased in Berlin set rakishly on his head gleaming with pomade. He literally danced his way through one pair of shiny patent leather shoes after another. He would come home with a breath as fierce as a dragon's and putrid as a tiger's, singing his way to bed, and Ravi in the room next door cowered under his blankets to shut out the horror of it.

  It was his mother who wilted in these years. She went with her husband to the parties and dances but it was clearly not her milieu and not her style. She set out, as exquisitely dressed as always, but drawing her light summer shawl about her as if she needed its protection, and with an expression on her face not radiant or expectant but rather as if she was about to swallow an unpleasant potion. She would not dance with the English officers and watched from among a group of likewise scandalised but dutiful wives, as her Hosni went blithely up to the English WAAFs and invited them to dance. Most of them were amused by this little man who did not seem to understand his place, and many accepted: he was an excellent dancer if a bit of a show-off.

  And he had the comeuppance anyone might have predicted: a British army officer recently up from the battlefields and probably more deeply affected by what he had experienced than anyone knew, and royally drunk, objected to this little dark man dancing like an organ-grinder's monkey with his wife, and followed him out to where his car was waiting. In another age he might have challenged him to a duel but these were more brazen times and he simply lifted his baton and let the upstart have it on the head, the shoulders, the back, till Hosni's chauffeur was able to get him away, bundle him into their car and escape.

  Ravi's mother did not return to what was known as Mussoorie society. The father, on recovering, lifted up his chin—sticking-plastered—and insisted on going out in a show of pride that might be considered nationalistic or merely pigheaded, but he did not go to Hackman's again, nor did he attempt to re-enter British society. He kept to the more familiar Indian scene—bridge games, sedate celebrations of anniversaries of one kind or another, and many hours in the club bar. His wife kept mostly to her room and even to her bed. It was not she who had been injured—not physically—but anyone who cared to analy
se her condition would have said 'her spirit' had suffered a blow. All they actually said was that poor Tehmi's asthma had taken a turn for the worse.

  Ravi was seldom invited into his mother's bedroom; her nerves would not stand it. But at this time a fourth person was admitted into their household and, like a fourth wheel attached to a wobbling carriage, provided some balance to what had become so seriously unbalanced.

  No one would have thought Miss Dora Wilkinson capable of such a feat of engineering. She had been recruited from a home for indigent British ladies although she had few skills to show for herself. She was undeniably elderly and her once blonde hair and once blue eyes had faded to grey. Hosni turned away from interviewing her as a possible companion to his wife with a look of unconcealed disappointment, but for that very reason she was thought eminently suitable for the position: she would certainly not ask for leave to go to an afternoon dance. She could not even join her employers for a game of whist. But she did her best to provide a bit of nursing in the form of a dab of 4711 cologne or a cup of tea, and she could read aloud in a somewhat tremulous voice the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and of Christina Rossetti. Her presence was immensely soothing to the mother for this and also for another reason, unspoken and perhaps unconscious: the woman's pale skin and light eyes and English diction made up in some inexplicable way for the treatment that her husband had suffered, the humiliation of it. Here was Miss Wilkinson bathing her brow with eau de cologne and helping her sip consommé from a cup of delicate china, and it was good to know, soothing to know, that such things could also be.

  Her only fault, apart from her age, was that she had a cat. The cat was forbidden anywhere near the asthmatic's bedroom and expected to be kept confined to Miss Wilkinson's quarters. Ravi would shyly ask if he could enter in order to study the cat, his first experience of an animal as 'a pet'. He was not sure if he liked a 'pet' animal or if it merely seemed a curiosity, unrelated to the wild world where she belonged, but he liked to sit on a stool, his chin cupped in his hands, and gaze at her. She too seemed unsure if she approved of him and, folding her two front paws under her chin and narrowing her green eyes into slits to observe him discreetly, gave no hint that she was doing so other than to start if he made the slightest move. They were held by mutual fascination, nervous apprehension and an irresistible attraction.

  Only Miss Wilkinson smiled and smiled, certain there had never been so harmonious a society. This earned Ravi her undying gratitude. She would ask him to do little favours for her (really for the awkward adolescent's sake as much as for hers), find her a feather for a bookmark or bring her some flowers for her vase. He would flush with pride at being asked and stumble off to pull some passion-fruit flowers off a vine over the veranda balustrade or pick out a blue magpie's tail feather he had found on the hillside, a prized possession of his. She received them with extravagant praise and thanks.

  The father, almost as if he realised he had no further role to play, allowed the car to carry him, after an evening of bridge at the club, into the pouring rain that had washed away large tracts of the sharply curving road and down a landslide that had not shown in the beam of the headlights in the driving rain, halfway into the khud where it crashed into a pine tree with such force that the vehicle was almost split in two. The villagers who found him and the driver, and carried them to the hospital on the ridge, sent a message to the family that he was not seriously injured and would recover (about the driver they could make no such sanguine prognosis for he was already dead), but they proved wrong: he died that night of internal injuries just after asking for a brandy but before he could consume it.

  The years that followed, Ravi did not count. He did not count them because he did not acknowledge them as his: they did not belong to his life because they did not belong to the forest and the hills. They belonged to the family in Bombay, to the business office, to his duties there, his relations to the family, and some years at a college studying 'management' (although they never made clear and he never understood what he was supposed to 'manage'). One might think these would yield a full volume of incident and event, but it was as if Ravi, encased in a block of grey cement, could see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing either.

  He knew the family thought him freakishly backward, a wild creature from the mountains. His cousins sometimes sniggered as he passed them. An aunt would raise her finger to her head and wriggle it like a loose screw when she thought he was not looking.

  Once they picnicked by the sea. It was the only time he recalled seeing the Indian Ocean. Of course this could not be true since Bombay is an island city and the sea lies all around it, but he had never been taken closer to it than in a passing automobile. On this occasion he actually broke free to clamber across some rocks exposed by the receding tide and gulped down lungfuls of soggy sea air as if he were gulping lungfuls of life-saving oxygen. Everywhere were pools left scattered among the streaming wet rocks, and he walked into them blindly, socks and shoes still on, dazed by this glittering aquatic world he had not known existed. He went down on his knees in the wet sand and stared into one such pool, his face dropping lower and lower, very nearly into it. He felt it could take an entire life to study the strange, extraordinary life that teemed in it—minute, multifarious and totally unlike any earthbound equivalent. But the family sent the servant boy they had brought along to facilitate the picnic to seize him by his sleeve, haul him to his feet and lead him back to where they sat, scan-dalised, on a mat spread out of range of the sea.

  He might have been their prisoner and, like any prisoner, was despised and mistreated to the precise degree that mistreatment could go without detection. The room he was given had formerly been a storeroom and was still blocked by broken furniture and packed boxes. Its one window opened onto the garbage chute of the building. Neighbours tossed bags of refuse into the chute out of their kitchen and bathroom windows; its walls were streaked black, yellow and green and the odour rose to his window in thick coils. He became convinced he would die here and then be placed in a garbage bag and dropped into the miasma himself. There was no one to whom he could explain that in order to survive he needed to be at altitude, a Himalayan altitude, so he might breathe.

  He might very well have suffocated if he had stayed longer. As it was he really did not know how long it was—months? years?—before news came that his mother had been moved into intensive care at the hospital, followed by news of her death. Thus, release—hers followed by his.

  Perhaps he babbled and laughed like a madman on the journey back, perhaps not. But he remembered leaping onto the platform before the train had quite come to a halt at the station in Dehra Dun, nearly falling onto his knees, then fighting his way onto a bus to Mussoorie (his relatives in Bombay would not have believed his ferocity). For a while he continued, desperate: it did not look as if the bus could free itself of the city traffic, and then the country traffic—the other buses and huge, lumbering trucks loaded with rocks, logs, sacks and bundles and men perched on top, their mouths and noses wrapped in scarves against the dust and fumes of exhaust. Where was the silence that he remembered, or the solitude? he asked himself in a frenzy of impatience, till he realised that each turn in the twisting road was carrying him higher and higher and the air that blew in through the open windows was cooler, fresher, drier, air he could draw into his lungs in long draughts because it blew, he believed, from the snows themselves, half imagined, half perceived, a pale scribble against a pale sky.

  Here the forest began. Here a monkey clan sat on a strip of wall, grooming each other and watching the passing buses for a handful of peanuts or a banana tossed out by the laughing passengers. Here a rivulet tumbled over rocks and a rough shelter built of stones and sticks straddled it. Here a pine tree leaned precariously over a cliff, its trunk split in two by lightning. Here an orange grove grew in a green clearing, its fruit glowing bright. The dust and odour of the city and plains left behind, the bus rose higher into the mountains where these were replaced by
the sharp sweetness of pine woods, the smoke of wood fires, the glass-like clarity of mountain air.

  He covered the last stretch on foot, rediscovering the paths that led out of the town, downhill into the forest, and through it to where the house stood, its roof showing above the treetops. Birds sent out their long, fluting calls in spirals that he returned to them in long, fluting whistles through the silence.

  Silence, but not solitude: Miss Wilkinson remained. It seemed cruel to send her back, after his mother's death, to the home for indigent British ladies which was by then close to collapse, with no funds now that the British were gone to repair or staff it, so that whoever still lived there and had not been sent or fetched away, lived in a ruin and increasingly resembled one themselves.

  Ravi, finding her in a state of despair at the thought of being made to leave the family of cats she had stealthily acquired over time, assured her she need not, that she could stay and 'run the house' for him—as he thought to tell her in a moment of inspiration. It was clear that Miss Wilkinson could run nothing, not the house nor her own life. She had never confessed to anyone that her eyesight had been deteriorating over the years, the spectacles she wore less than useless, and for years she had been reciting not reading the poems of Christina Rossetti to her employer who did not miss the dropped line or forgotten word. When Ravi returned, he suspected her of being quite blind and only pretending not to be. The manner in which she fumbled and felt her way around the room gave her away and she no longer ventured out of it, though her cats slipped in and out freely, having the run of the place now. Hari Singh had retired and gone to live in his village in Tehri, leaving his son Bhola in charge, and it was Bhola who brought her meals cooked by his wife in the hut below, and provided her with a small paraffin stove on which to make herself tea if she wanted a cup when she could not sleep at night.