The Artist of Disappearance

by Anita Desai

  Ravi had not thought, after his time in Bombay, that he would ever want to live in proximity with anyone again. He would have revelled in clear space inhabited by no other than a line of ants creeping across the floor by day on their endless forages, the flying squirrel that lodged in the eaves launching itself into space at dusk to go hunting by night, and an occasional snake or scorpion that had lost its way and strayed into his. He was relieved to find that Miss Wilkinson, in her room upstairs next to his parents' empty one, was in no need of anyone either. Her wan aura was tinged by nothing more visible, or audible, than gratitude. She had never learned Hindi and could exchange no words with Bhola when he brought her a bowl of porridge in the morning, her cup of lentil soup at night, but murmured her thanks in English. Only the occasional hiss or growl of one of her cats in combat or competition with another roused her to speak and then she would murmur, 'Oh, Pusskins, is that you again? You naughty you, hmm? And where's old Billy then? You're not fighting poor Billy, are you?' and they would come up and rub themselves against her legs till she herself uttered a kind of low purr of delight.

  When Ravi came in at dusk—it was at this time that he had developed the habit of staying outdoors all day, invisibly engaged in an art no one witnessed and he himself barely acknowledged—he would find himself going upstairs to her, surprised that he would seek out anyone's company. Hers was the one presence that did not make him turn and flee. She neither wanted nor asked anything of him. She would hear his step and look up, sightlessly, and the cats would rise to their feet or descend from their perches and come towards him, confident that he would make no loud, sudden movement but simply sink into an armchair beside Miss Wilkinson's where one might reach up to his knees to be stroked or else curl up and go back to sleep. Ravi, on enquiring after Miss Wilkinson's health that day, would reach out to the small row of books on a spindly bamboo stand between them and ask, 'Would you like me to read to you, Miss Wilkinson?'

  She nodded but made no suggestion and he would choose something at random. No one else had discovered his talent for reading aloud in a low, modulated voice that scarcely broke the quiet. He found he could not adapt it to the dramatic pauses and the rising and falling tones of poetry which embarrassed him, so he read to her from the books he had brought across from his parents' room, the novels of Trollope and Sir Walter Scott, and she would listen, her head lowered, till she began to nod and her mouth to fall open, her breath coming and going audibly. Sometimes he left her like that, replacing the book and leaving without waking her. Having her in the house was like having a very old pet cat that continued to doze through what was left of its life and did not disturb him beyond an underlying concern over its inevitable end.

  No one could have imagined the end she would create for herself, unwittingly or not. Did she merely wake one morning and automatically fumble at the little paraffin stove to make herself tea? Or did she light it to invite an explosion, a conflagration of light in her dark world? Would this harmless, almost ectoplasmic creature choose to light it, then knock it over—she who took such care not to knock into anything—and so set the curtains alight? Was she aware of how one flame split into many within seconds, into an army of advancing swords of fire that charged through the room as if it were made of paper, then poured through the house in an ocean of smoke, sending sparks upwards into the roof beams and downwards along the banisters and stairs?

  Probably Ravi became aware of it at almost the same moment she did, opened his door to find the smoke surging towards him, preceded by Miss Wilkinson's crazed, leaping cats, and had to fight against it up the stairs which was already a river of fire.

  No one could explain how he made it to Miss Wilkinson's room or, on finding her on her knees attempting to crawl out, lifted her—she might have been a paper doll or a rag in his arms—and brought her down seconds before the stairs cracked and crashed in a great cascade of fire.

  Bhola was at the front door, trying to break it down, and the villagers who had been up early and seen the great bonfire billowing up over the oak trees like the millennial sun, were running forward when the two of them emerged, blackened and smouldering themselves. They were caught up and flung down in the dirt to put out the flames, and when the firemen finally arrived they were found seated on the grass, shrouded in ash. The fire had already reached its zenith, and the remains of the house within it a blackened skeleton knee-deep in soot and smoke, contorting and writhing in the heat. Miss Wilkinson was asking for her cats, for Pusskins and Billikins, reaching out her blackened, peeling fingers as if she might encounter them and draw them to her. 'Ravi, Ravi, where are they? Do you see them? Are they here?' 'Don't worry, Miss Wilkinson, don't worry, they'll be back,' he kept saying, for they had either perished in the flames or fled into the forest, he could not know. When an ambulance arrived and he helped to lift her into it, she began to wail, 'I can't go, Ravi, not without them, I can't,' but she did, she had to, and she went, wailing 'Pusskins, Billikins, my dears!' like a ghostly siren. Some of those present were to swear later that it was the cats who were heard wailing.

  Ravi knew he could not, although he wished to, leave the scene himself. He knew he had to wait for the firemen to quench the flames and then enter the ruins with Bhola to see what could be salvaged. By then half the town seemed to have arrived. This was not really so: the house was too far out of town for news to have travelled that fast, but the people from nearby villages up and down the hillside had come running to see the blaze, uncommon at this time of year, just after the rains, although common enough in summer when the forest was dry as tinder and a bolt of lightning could set it on fire. And a fire is always a fine thing to see, a fine thing. So now they milled around, shouting, trying to help and also to catch a glimpse of the recluse who had occupied it. 'Look!' shouted a boy who led a tribe of urchins. 'He's there! I saw him!' 'That's not him, that's Bhola the chowkidar.' 'But look what I found—a spoon. Look, a spoon!' and the firemen had to chase them off to a safe distance from which to watch the undoing of the house.

  So Ravi withdrew into the woods and did not return till everyone was gone and Bhola came looking for him with a large flashlight that cut swathes of light through the night forest, startling owls and nightjars. Then he voiced his wish to stay on in the house. He entered the ruin and found the walls of one room still nearly intact as well as its roof. After standing around in disbelief and disapproval for a while, Bhola finally went and fetched him a string cot from his own hut below, and food when he saw Ravi had not given that a thought. He also brought him a kerosene lamp which seemed something of a travesty in that burnt house, and lit it, turning Ravi into a shadow that leapt and clawed at the walls.

  He went once to see Miss Wilkinson in the hospital. But she was in the general ward—it was a small one and clean but inevitably there were other patients there and their visitors too. He found he could not sit and he could not speak with all of them watching and listening. The news of the fire had become common knowledge and there was much curiosity, as Ravi ought to have known. All along the road to the hospital people had come out to stand in the doorways and watch him go. He had felt he was being stalked by them and now he was hunted down and trapped.

  Aware of his presence in spite of his silence, an unrecognisably shrunken and damaged Miss Wilkinson parted her parched lips to croak, 'You don't need to stay, Ravi. Don't stay.'

  He could not bring himself to visit her again. It was agony to him knowing he ought to, that he was the only person who could and should, but he did not.

  It cost him an almost unbearable effort to appear when he heard of her death. Instead of following the funeral cortège, which was made up of a priest who had visited the home for indigent ladies (from whose name the word 'British' had long been removed) and a few of the able-bodied still left there, he slipped around the hillside and waited for them at the foot of the British cemetery.

  A grave had been dug out at the lower end where it stopped in a thicket of oak trees and mounds of mos
s. On the upper slope were tumbled gravestones, mostly covered in lichen, leaving few decipherable words, always the same ones—'the beloved', 'the devoted'—and here and there a headless angel or a cross in pieces among the ferns. The air at the lower depth was always in the shade and perpetually chill and dank.

  Standing to one side, concealed by a tree trunk with low branches—almost as if he were a criminal at the scene of a crime, said those who spied him—he watched the shuffling, mumbling ceremony, before Miss Wilkinson in her plain pine coffin was lowered into the earth. He hoped they had dug the earth deep, that jackals would not come in the night to dig it up, that the heavy rain that fell would not penetrate it, nor the frost in winter. He hoped she had been wrapped in a shawl for warmth, that a pillow had been placed under her head. It seemed the most cruel end to be placed in a pit in the ground and sealed into it so no light reached her and the world of cats and books, tea and touch was shut off. When he heard the earth being shovelled over the coffin, falling on it in clods, he fled.

  The children in the villages said he had buried the cats the old lady was said to have had, some of them alive. Others claimed the cats had escaped into the forest and turned into bagad-billas whose glowing amber eyes could be encountered in the dark if you were out late. Some said the cats could be heard wailing as they prowled the ruins at night, and some that the house was haunted by the old lady. They said the recluse had the power to turn himself into a ghost in the night, a bhoot, so he could keep company with her ghost and the cats', then turn back into the wild-haired man in rags who would sometimes emerge from the house by day but immediately disappear if encountered, leaving behind a whiff of smoke. He had that power, they observed, to disappear as if by magic.

  They tried to get Bhola to tell them some thrillingly bloodcurdling stories about what went on in the ruin, but Bhola had grown as taciturn as his employer, and only grunted a refusal. As for the children he had after his marriage to Manju Rani of Tehri, they never heard such tales either; to them Ravi was the harmless man in the burnt house to whom they carried a plateful of food or a can of kerosene for his lamp and who thanked them without looking up.

  He was encountered sometimes by a goatherd or men looking for firewood in the forest, an occasional villager with a bundle on his head and a switch in his hand, on a path leading downhill—never the path uphill to town. The wild raspberry bushes closed in on the path and one came to a great boulder that looked as if it might fall and block the descent completely in the next monsoon; there the path twisted away and continued down through the lantana bushes and blue-flowering ageratum of the lower hillside to a scattering of stone huts with sheaves of corn and pumpkins drying on their roofs and a stream running past that was straddled by a watermill where the great grinding stones could be heard milling the corn and wheat brought to it. Occasionally they saw Ravi on the path, but always above the level of the boulder, and murmured a greeting as they hurried after their goats or steadied the heavy load on their head, receiving only a grunt in reply.

  But at that point, by the boulder, he ceased to be on the path. The boulder might have been a hulking black magician that waited for him to appear, then threw its shadow down on him like a cloak, and spirited him away.

  The boulder presented a block to others but not to Ravi: he would slip around and let himself through the crease between it and the hillside, and so into the hollow below where only the merest trickle of water made its way from the lip of the cliff above, if the weather was not too dry. Then he had only to part the branches of the chestnut tree that drooped over the opening to the glade, curtain-like, and let them come together again to conceal him. The liquid flow of this path then entered into the hidden pool of the glade that no one else knew existed.

  All signs of the outer world vanished: the distant halloos criss-crossing the terraced fields in the valley below, the barking of a dog in the village on the other side of the stream, the grinding of the stones of the watermill. Only a bird sang, with piercing sweetness, till it noted Ravi's appearance, and took off.

  He then prowled around like an animal returning to its shelter: some ferns might have unfolded their tight knots of brown fur and transformed themselves into waving green fans; the family of pallid mushrooms of the day before might now be scattered and lie in shreds of fawn suede tinged with mauve. The leaves of the chestnut could be studied for signs of turning and he would watch and wait for the precise shade of dark honey that he wanted before he collected the leaves and filled the clearing he was making around the strange conical stone at the centre of the hollow. And the broken branch he had found on the way and dragged in with him, once dried and bleached to suggest a skeleton, could be added to the design. The berries he picked along the way could be worked into the creases of the rock so it might seem inlaid with strands of gleaming gems or as if it had sprung veins of precious ore.

  He considered enlarging the design by bringing enough pebbles, or perhaps some sand from the stream-bed below, to see how they could be arranged to suggest a pool in which the rock formed an island.

  Spider-like, Ravi set to work spinning the web of his vision over the hidden glade. And each day it had to be done before night fell.

  It was already dark when the visitors drew up at the tea stall on the ridge, tired and hungry and not too good-tempered. Balram lit the Petromax and it roared to life, its blue flame flaring out and hissing like a demon, making them wince at its aggression.

  The girl made a face of annoyance and shaded her eyes.

  Chand laughed and shrugged as if it could not be helped, and poured out the beer Balram had brought them. 'Ready to eat?' he asked, because he was.

  'You think they'll have anything to eat?'

  'Ask.'

  They called over to Balram who was making a show of wiping the counter. 'D'you serve food?'

  Of course he served food. What did these city slickers up from the plains in their too-heavy jackets and too-new boots take him for, him and his establishment and his town? Resentfully he allowed he could give them samosas, bhajias, two-egg omelettes, three- and four-egg omelettes, as much as they wanted, and in double-quick time.

  'Any roti?'

  'Roti of course, the best you've ever had,' he told them, at once proud and rude.

  'We'll have that, lots. And more beer.'

  Sitting at a tin-topped table, they juggled their beer mugs, their plates of food, wolfing it all down ravenously in silence. It was the first meal they had had that day, travelling from the city in the dust of the vast plain, the jeep breaking down again and again in the most inconvenient places, far from any habitation, so that the two men had to take turns at trekking out, cursing and complaining, in search of motor workshops and spare parts to get them moving again. They had done the last stretch, winding steeply uphill, as darkness fell.

  Had it really been such a good idea, coming up here to shoot a film on environmental degradation in the Himalayas? It had seemed so, but now they found themselves sinking into the familiar sense of defeat at the start of a project, the stage at which they began to doubt if it could be done.

  'Wait till tomorrow, we haven't seen anything yet. We've been told about the quarries and the landslides, the tunnelling and the logging. There should be a lot.'

  'Where will we find all this, in a holiday resort? We'd better get a guide,' Chand said, and called over to the tea-stall owner, manager, whoever he was. But how were they to explain what they wanted? Soil erosion, cattle grazing, deforestation: could he ever have heard these terms or given a thought to such matters in his world of a chai dukan and its beer and omelettes?

  The man came over reluctantly, flinging his dishcloth over his shoulder. 'My name is Balram,' he told them, sensing he might have further dealings with this lot than just providing them with a meal. These people from the plains needed a lot of help when they came up here, especially if they came outside the tourist season. During the season you could count on them moving in a herd; they could be left to themselves, t
o promenade on the Mall, eyeing the flashy women, looking for bars, hotels, the kind of thing they were used to in the cities. But when they came out of season they came for other reasons.

  He had seen the jeep they had driven up in, with its Delhi licence plate and a lot of what looked like expensive luggage, stuff they brought in with them, not wanting to let it out of their sight. Then there was this girl, wearing pants, dark glasses, her hair cut short. Balram was not at all sure he approved. Any daughter of his who went around like that would have got a tight slap from him. People came up from the plains, thought they could get away with that here. He had better show them they couldn't fool him. He saw a lot of that around here, knew a lot. He also had a very fine moustache—small, but kept well trimmed. He touched it for reassurance.

  The two men had the decency to half rise from their chairs and shake his hand. Now he knew they really needed him, he relaxed. 'What can I do for you?'

  'We have come here to do a few days' shooting,' the older man, who had been picking his teeth and still had a toothpick to chew on, began to explain. Seeing Balram's moustache twitch slightly in curiosity—what kind of shoot: boar, deer, panther, partridge?—he went on: 'To make a film.'

  'Oh, a fill-um.' Balram was not nearly as impressed as they seemed to think he might be. Mussoorie had seen any number of films made, actors coming up from Bombay, plump and glossy with success, to dance down the Mall and pose against the mountainscape. Crowds would gather around, gape, shout out lewd comments and hoot with laughter, enjoying the tamasha. Traffic would get blocked, police would be called. 'So you are from Bombay, are you?'

  'No, no,' Chand, the younger, the quicker, corrected. 'We make documentaries, for television.'