by Anita Desai
‘Why not? I want to go to Goa and eat shrimp. I want to go to Kashmir and live on a houseboat. And lie in the sun and shampoo my hair and eat omelettes all day.’
Matteo was disgusted. ‘That isn’t India.’
‘What is?’
‘What is? We must search for what it is.’
She got up and pulled a sarong off the line to wrap around herself. ‘I suppose you think the ashram is India – the loudspeakers at dawn and the crows and everyone eating off the floor.’
‘No,’ Matteo contradicted her, ‘it is not here in the ashram. We have to leave.’
She stopped tucking the ends of the sarong about her and waited expectantly for more but what he added was, ‘I have heard that many are leaving to go on a pilgrimage. To a shrine outside the city. I asked them, and they will take us along.’
Four o’clock in the morning, the sky like a basin of dirty dishwater, the city sunk in listless, tepid murk. The ashramites with their bundles and baskets – some containing offerings to the deity of the shrine, some pots and pans, others stores of cereals to be eaten on the way – set off in the darkness for the bus depot not far away. It was deserted except for the guard in the kiosk by the gate and a few sleeping cleaners stretched out on concrete benches. One woke and showed them which bus had been hired for their journey and they struggled onto it with their belongings, making a din that sounded all the more raucous for the silence around them in that harshly lit but deserted depot with its ancient, grime-streaked buses and pools of oil spread upon the tarmac.
Their early enterprise seemed to stir up the city and by the time they were on the move shutters were being lifted from shop fronts with a great clatter, queues beginning to line up at milk booths, handcarts loaded with vegetables trundling towards the markets and the families that slept stretched out on the pavements rising and performing their ablutions at public water pumps. The office-going traffic started to grind bitterly through the streets. The bus crawled, the heat and airlessness within it accumulated. Matteo and Sophie slept, slumped on each other’s shoulders in exhaustion, while babies leaked puddles across the floor, chickens cackled in baskets of straw, and some of the passengers managed to gossip, argue and even play drums and sing in order to remind everyone of the high purpose of their journey.
It was noon before they had left behind them the cotton mills and warehouses and workers’ shanties and emerged into the straggling outskirts of the city where dwellings made of battered tins and plastic sheeting stood by pools of city sludge and effluents, and palm and drumstick trees made smudges of green upon a landscape otherwise uniformly grey. Finally even these shanty towns dwindled and ran out in flat fields of mud that stretched as far as the horizon. Here, unexpectedly, the bus drew to a halt and they were ordered off.
Sophie woke unwillingly to the heat and glare of the empty, desolate fields. She stood there in the mud, her face an angry red from sleep. Matteo scratched himself in his tattered pink vest: he was infested with bugs, or convinced that he was – the effect was the same. They watched dully the excitement of others tearing around and collecting the baggage that was being flung down from the roof of the bus by the driver’s attendant with destructive energy. Everyone rooted out their separate belongings, lifted their bags onto their heads and determinedly set off behind a band of swamis who supported a small palanquin by bamboo poles slung across their shoulders. The palanquin, a frilly object of red velvet, bore a pair of silver slippers. Pierre Eduard informed them that they represented the saint who had travelled on foot to the shrine where he obtained enlightenment; they were now to replicate his journey. The devotees were shouting themselves hoarse with enthusiasm. Sophie had no idea how so many had emerged from the bus: they made up a sizeable procession. Some carried orange pennants on bamboo flagpoles and these were the most vocal of all.
‘Now we must walk,’ Matteo told Sophie bleakly.
She stood rooted in the mud in disbelief when a group of ragged urchins came shouting out of nowhere, followed by a pack of pai dogs that barked frenziedly, whether out of excitement or ferocity it was hard to tell. The three foreigners seemed to be the focus of their attention, possibly of an attack. Sophie decided they could not stay: she lifted her rucksack onto her back and set off.
There was sometimes a slippery track to walk on, between the sharp, rustling grass that grew in the ditches, and sometimes only a mudbank between two flooded fields on which they had somehow to balance themselves, getting splashed and spattered if they slipped. The walking required all their attention. They could not lift their eyes and scan the scenery to see if anything loomed on the horizon. The pilgrims who had been chanting, with such enthusiasm:
‘Hari, Hari, come to me,
Hari, Hari, I pine for thee’
slowed their tempo, even fell silent at times till someone roused them with a hymn that had a brisker pace or a song to cheer them:
‘The crow is cawing,
What is it telling?
Good news, bad news,
What is it bringing?’
The wits amongst them shouted out answers that made the others laugh.
The sun, polished like brass by the rains, beat down on them with the stridency of metal. Occasionally a lingering monsoon cloud puffed up out of nowhere and obscured it, casting a shadow on the huge empty stretch of land, then moved on and let the sun drum on their heads and backs again. Still, gradually they felt it lessen; they found the perspiration dripping instead of pouring down their bodies. The muddy track turned into a wider stretch of road and when they did look up they found, as if by a miracle, a village standing in a grove of mango trees. Outside it, a group of women in bright Maharashtrian saris of blue and purple, with flowers in their hair, stood with brass trays in their hands with rice, coconuts and ritual lamps with which to pay homage to the saint approaching in the palanquin.
Sophie and Matteo held back as the palanquin was carried into an open space in front of a small pink temple and set down in the centre, where people rushed out of their houses to greet it. They realised now what they had hardly dared to hope – that they were to rest here. Everyone was lifting their bags and bundles off their heads, groaning with relief. Sophie sank down on her haunches, her head in her hands, too tired to speak, and was ashamed to see the other women – some much older than her, others with babies clinging to them – already bustling about, unpacking their pots and pans, sending their children off to collect twigs and brush, lighting fires, fetching buckets of water from a well, getting the cooking going.
Sophie sat as if sunstruck in that haze of dust and wood-smoke, watching the cauldrons bubble, the steam rise. By the well the men were washing, turning the dust to slush around them. When darkness fell and the fires flared like torches, providing the only light, the food was ready and the pilgrims sat down to eat, the younger and stronger amongst them hurrying up and down to serve the others on squares of banana leaf. Sophie saw that there were two distinct groups of eaters, with the low brick wall of a ruined or unfinished yard to separate them: one group had washed and changed into clean clothes, the others still wore their soiled, dusty garments. She knew enough to realise that it was caste that separated the groups and Matteo and Pierre Eduard agreed that it might be so.
Not having helped to cook the meal, Sophie did not expect to share it. Moreover, she was so bone tired, it was not food she wanted. She took some peanuts out of her cloth sling bag and was sitting on one end of the brick wall, shelling and eating the nuts, when she found herself being beckoned by the women in the everyday clothes. They patted the ground, spread out a banana leaf for her and were clearly inviting her to eat along with the men who were eating in the first shift, Matteo and Pierre Eduard looking sheepish amongst them. Evidently their lack of caste was not being held against her, and she was even being raised to the status of an honorary man. She did not know if she should feel pleased about that but suddenly discovered she was hungry after all, ravenously so; she even picked up and ate the green
chillies placed alongside the hills of rice and dal on the leaf. When her mouth went up in flames and she turned scarlet and tears ran down her cheeks, they laughed and offered remedies – rice balls, or bits of banana, they urged. Sophie, who had become inured to a mixture of contempt and curiosity from the Indians she had met at ashrams, found the pilgrims extended neither or, if they did, it was so generously mixed with the irrefutable claims of hospitality that it did not show. Pierre Eduard told her later that on a pilgrimage extremely good behaviour was expected of all. That might have been what the children who were quarrelling or spilling their food were being told in scolding tones by their mothers; it might have been what so quickly drew apart two men when an argument flared up in anger. Sophie found herself nodding, smiling out of politeness if not genuine goodwill; she had turned into a pilgrim herself – although only in her behaviour, she qualified.
Matteo, as he walked past to go and wash, stopped and put his hand on her knee, caressed it. ‘Better?’ he asked.
The women, watching, began to giggle behind their hands and Pierre Eduard hissed, ‘You are not supposed to touch, you know.’
Sophie flushed. ‘If not, how do all those come about?’ she snapped angrily, pointing to the children who were rolling on the ground or tearing around like puppies. As if they understood, the women giggled harder, and Matteo hung his head in embarrassment for her, for both of them, and disappeared.
It was all so wearing, and it seemed hours before she was able to roll herself up in her sarong and stretch out on the ground to sleep. She thought she would fall asleep instantly and remain asleep until the trumpets raised her but, for all her weariness, it proved impossible. She was too acutely aware of all the others wrapped in their white sheets and stretched out beside her, their breathing, their twitching in a collective unrest. Some seemed to go on and on talking in a low monotone, or else praying. Her lack of the language excluded her even when she was physically in such close contact that they could touch, even smell each other, sharing the same stretch of earth for a bed. The pai dogs that barked in the village and in other villages, plaintively or aggressively, pleadingly or even conversationally, as though addressing each other over great distances in the dark, were more comprehensible to her: she listened to their dialogues with greater understanding and sympathy. Once she was certain she heard a pack of jackals howling, as eerily as wolves, and this roused the dogs to a frenzy: she felt their fear in her own veins. It was nearly dawn before they fell silent, and Sophie had watched the stars turn in the sky, shift their positions according to mysterious mappings and diagrams, and was trying to think of them as pilgrims too, on a journey or a search which would end, it seemed, in the light of dawn when she woke, or was woken, by the wail of pipes, the beating of drums and cymbals.
As she stumbled towards the well to wash, she saw others were already streaming towards the palanquin, going up to bow to the silver slippers held out to them on a tray by the priest who had fresh prayer marks drawn across his forehead, while hymns were being sung with the special clarity and intensity given to them by a new day. Sophie felt very much the outcaste again as she stood throwing tumblers of water over herself and slunk off into the fields to find herself a private place in some rushes. Overhead, on telegraph wires, grass-green bee-eaters sat teetering, then launched themselves into the brilliant air to swoop after insects. A herd of buffaloes was driven out to graze, rustling through the grasses; the herdsboy bringing up the rear chewed upon a stem and turned his head to look at her with curiosity. She scrambled to her feet and returned to eat some bread from the night before and drink a tumbler of tea given her, and even smoked a cigarette furtively behind a hut while the women conducted a great wash of clothes and pots and pans by the well, feeling both guilty and grateful to be excluded. Determinedly, she ignored the looks that Matteo and Pierre threw at her.
Then they were on the road again, their number greatly increased by fresh groups of devotees from the villages around as well as a few bullock carts. To her relief, she was able to load her rucksack into a cart; some of the older women and younger children were even allowed to ride in them. Orange pennants fluttered everywhere, and there were men in red and blue turbans to add to the river of colour that flowed along the dusty road between fields of black earth and groves of mango and coconut trees under a sky alternately sunlit and blue and thunderously grey. Sophie found her feet, sore and blistered as they were, falling into the rhythm of the songs that were being sung, ‘Gyanadeva, Gyanadeva . . .’
Occasionally a bus or a truck ploughed through the dust, forcing the pilgrims onto the banks on either side, and then passengers leant out of the windows to stare at them, some with curiosity, some with admiration, even crying out, ‘Jai jai Rama!’ and ‘Jai jai Hari!’ which the pilgrims answered full-throatedly.
Of course the vibrancy of the early morning could not last. The day was as hot as the last and Sophie was exhausted by the time camp was struck, the washing that had been done earlier spread out on bushes and grasses to dry, fires lit and last night’s food warmed up. There was to be no rest, however: they soon rose to go on.
Sophie found herself falling back, behind Matteo and Pierre Eduard who were marching easily and well today. She was left behind with the women, slowed by their various burdens. One of them, although young, was so pale as to look ashen. She did not sing or talk but breathed heavily as she walked for she was carrying a child on her hip. The child looked old enough to walk but was clearly too weak to do so; his head lolled on the woman’s shoulder as if he were asleep, or unconscious.
When they sat down on the roadside, by a field of sugarcane, to rest, Sophie asked her, ‘Is he sick?’ The woman of course did not understand but spoke a few sentences and a young man who stood listening explained to Sophie, ‘She has eight children. Seven are dead. This one only is living. She is going to the shrine to ask the saint to spare him. But he has fallen ill. There is no doctor or medicine. She will pray for him at the shrine.’
Sophie stared at the woman’s thin, narrow face and sunken eyes under the fold of the sari she wore over her head. How could she bring her only child out on this arduous march and take such a risk? she wanted to know. But already the woman was lifting up the child and they were on the road again, marching as the others sang, ‘Tukaram, Tukaram . . .’
Later they paused at a roadside stall that sold cigarettes and soda water, and Sophie bought an orange drink and held it out to the woman, indicating that she should give it to her child to drink but the woman turned her head away. Sophie was angry enough to throw down the bottle; she was sure it was her lack of caste that made the woman refuse. Later she saw the young man fetch an earthen tumbler of tea and watched as they tried to dribble it into the boy’s mouth. Thinking he might be the father or a relative, she said sharply, ‘She should not have come.’ He replied ‘What can she do? If you have nothing else, you must have faith in God.’ He threw the tumbler down in the dust and added, ‘If this boy dies, she cannot go back to her husband. His family will blame her.’ Then he picked up an orange pennant and marched ahead, disappearing into the crowd around the palanquin, all singing:
‘Hari, Hari,
Bliss in my heart,
Hari . . .’
Sophie lost sight of the woman too. More people joined them, the dindi grew larger and larger and straggled through a landscape that was changing from muddy slush to the drier earth of a plateau where veins of black rock ran through the grassland and the air seemed drier even though clouds crouched on the horizon, waiting for a current of air on which to rise. Low hills bulged out of the earth, and eagles wheeled above them, wings outspread, circling slowly as if keeping a vigilant eye on the people crawling ant-like beneath them.
Yet another hill rose, on its peak another small pink temple like so many others they had passed. But now the dindi halted and Sophie saw it could not proceed – in front of them, at the foot of the hill, in a square field, crowds had assembled and a fair was in full swing. There
were ferris wheels rotating in the air, with excruciating squeals, a loudspeaker was blaring music, a man with a bioscope was charging a few paise for the chance to peer into it, magicians squatted with their packs of cards and their cages of fortune-telling birds in front of them, and everywhere stalls were set up with goods for sale – heaps of onions and potatoes, hills of chilli powder and turmeric, glass bangles, mirrors, plastic buckets, bolts of printed cloth and toys of pith and paper dyed a lurid pink or violet. The crowds milling in the field were from other villages and towns, who had arrived earlier and already clambered up the hill for a darshan of the saint enshrined in the temple.
Matteo appeared at Sophie’s side and clutched her arm. ‘We are there, Sophie!’ he cried, with such emotion in his eyes and on his face that she stared, bewildered. As far as she was concerned, they had arrived nowhere.
She did not try to follow the others up the hill to the temple which seemed too small and insignificant to be the goal of their long journey. She sank down on a flat bit of rock to smoke a cigarette and watched the crowds swarming up the hillside in a cloud of dust tinged saffron by the sun which was setting over the horizon, a great globe of pale light, before the darkness of another night fell. She was disturbed to find herself disappointed at the anti-climax of arrival, even reluctant to have their journey end.
Eventually she became aware that while everyone else had surged forward and upwards, there was one other person who had stayed back, not moving. Of course it was the woman with the child; she had placed him on a fold of her sari spread on the ground, and he was terribly still. The woman was not looking at him or at anyone; she held her head in her hands and stared at the ground.
Sophie got to her feet. She knew she ought to go to the woman and see to the child, but she could not move. She whimpered ‘Matteo! Pierre Eduard!’ finding that she was afraid to look at death.