by Anita Desai
Sophie, who remained by herself in their room upstairs, found herself kept awake by the loudspeakers although she was determined to take no part in Matteo’s life any more. She had of course to go down for meals and baths but the others seemed to be aware of her angry resistance to the regulations and eyed her with animosity. She found that the foreign contingent in this ashram worked sternly and hard at their lessons to prove themselves equal to and perhaps superior to the Indian disciples, who clearly felt they had a natural right to all the ashram offered, and both groups were equally contemptuous of Sophie although they showed it in different ways. The foreign disciples became tight-lipped and silent when Sophie was present to show they did not approve of the loose-living, fun-loving flower children of Goa to whose company they knew she had once belonged, and were quick to point out any mistakes to her, while the Indian disciples were chiefly concerned that she knew her place when it came to such ritual activities as baths and meals. Collecting water at the hand pump in the bathing enclosure at the back of the buildings was a perpetual occasion for bickering: it seemed to Sophie that she was always being edged out of the queue and never came up to the front of it and was made to wait for what seemed hours to fill a bucket. Once she was holding only a drinking mug to be filled when the swami in front of her had a row of buckets and pots and jars lined up. ‘Here, let me just fill my mug,’ she said repeatedly but it was ignored, whereupon she lost her patience and held out the mug over his bucket to fill. The next minute she found he had seized the bucket and emptied it over her feet in outrage and was screaming hysterically that she had polluted the water. Even Matteo came to see what the row was about, the news of it spread all over.
Meals were served to the foreigners not in the dining hall with the Indian disciples but on the verandas outside and they were served on leaf plates that could be thrown away after a meal and were not re-used; in other words, there was no chance of the Hindu disciples being polluted. When Sophie understood this arrangement, she refused to eat in the veranda and went to sit on the steps behind the kitchen where a pack of stray dogs lived by licking the discarded leaf plates clean. She ate a bag of peanuts instead, cracking the shells between her teeth and spitting them out on the steps. Loud complaints were made and Matteo came to hiss, ‘Sophie, please, do you mind! If you don’t like it here, please remember I have to stay in order to study. Can’t you behave?’ She got to her feet, gathering her sarong about her, stared into his angry face as if she were about to reply, then turned and trailed away helplessly. The spirit to fight him required a strength she no longer had: it had dwindled away.
It was difficult to remember, let alone regain the spirit of adventure with which they had set out for India. To begin with the possibilities had seemed endless and fascinating: with the money from Sophie’s parents they might have trekked in the Himalayas, lived as beachcombers in Goa or even as rajas in a palace for a while. Then how was it they were living in this filth and squalor, this meanness and hardship amongst people who despised them even as they exploited them? Sophie tried to retrace their steps, but the speed with which they had moved left her dazed and bewildered. Sitting on the steps, plucking at her sarong, scratching at her arms and legs, Sophie was baffled by what it had all come to, and the dark inexplicable gulf that now existed between them. Then she shook her head fiercely, her hair whipping around her face in angry denial of that gulf. They had come to India together, to share an adventure: they would go through it together, stay together, recover their unique and essential love. She pushed out her underlip and scowled to persuade herself of that, but the flies bothered her, the heat of the sun made her wilt and soon she was wondering if her strength had not already run out. Then she was ready to cry.
She kept out of the ashram as much as she could, shuffling down the city streets, trying to find a bench to sit on, or a tea stall in which she would not be harassed by the curious. She missed her friends in Goa and the beaches, but Matteo had brought her to a city where there were no tourist attractions, where the people all seemed as hard and driven as he himself was becoming in their company. Was it for this that they had come to India?
Looking out of a bus window – she had wandered further than she had meant to and was obliged to take a bus back to the ashram – an improbable signboard, hanging askew on a gatepost, caught her eye: Zoological Gardens it said, in rusty letters on a tin board, Entrance Re. 1, adults, 50p. children. She could hardly believe the words but there was a ticket booth, a gate and a barrow with peanuts for sale – and then the bus trundled on through the traffic and she lost sight of it.
With some determination she made her way back to it, however, and discovered it was the back entrance to the municipal park, one portion of which had been fenced off as a zoo. After that, she went there almost daily, even when she had no money; she found ways of slipping through a gap in the hedge and throwing flirtatious smiles at the gardeners who noticed her unorthodox entry. To begin with, the relief of sitting under a shady tree quietly was enough to please her for hours on end but soon she fell into a routine of visiting the cages by turn: first the small brown rhesus monkeys who sat on their leafless tree in a concrete yard with expressions of total dejection on their wizened faces, then the cage of Himalayan mynahs and whistling thrushes that clung to the wire netting and shrieked, and even a hyena with a hunched back and bristling hair that seemed to have just emerged from its lair and its meal of bloodied flesh, it smelt so offensively. For all its slouching ugliness and malodour, Sophie found she preferred its company to that of the inmates of the ashram, its cringing, snarling defensiveness more compatible. But always she was drawn in the end to linger by the most beautiful beast of all, a black leopard. Still young, perhaps new to the zoo, it was not broken in, and paced in its small cage without ceasing, up and down, up and down, on restless silent paws, and only by the faintest twitch of its whiskers or a glint in its glassy green eyes betraying what churned in its unquiet heart. Sometimes it glanced at Sophie who stood there, holding onto the railings and admiring it, but mostly it pretended she was not there, that it was alone with no one to observe its humiliation.
As she did the round, she tried to get free and shake off the onlookers she always seemed to attract, just as the beasts in the cages attracted them: bands of children or, more often, of young men who seemed to have nowhere to go and nothing to do and to be endlessly in search of diversion. Mostly they achieved this by devising ways of infuriating Sophie, by loudly smacking their lips or making obscene gestures with long, supple fingers, or bursting into rollicking songs when they were within her earshot, of which some words were in English so she would understand:
‘Lovely-si-madam,
O lovely-si-madam,
Come he-re, my de-urr –’
they yowled, maddening her. Or else they drew her attention by teasing the animals – poking sticks at the hyena and throwing lighted cigarette butts into the monkeys’ cages. She scolded and cursed them but what made all reserve break in her was to see them torment the leopard, pelting it with gravel, throwing rocks into its cage or striking the cage with sticks till it snarled in protest and clambered up the bars in an effort to break out and demolish them.
Seeing that, Sophie lifted her sarong and came at them, screaming, even bending to scoop up pebbles to fling at them and make them retreat, although they continued to jeer and call out obscenities from behind the hibiscus bushes and canna lilies. Then she could only hope for a gardener to come to her rescue.
Why did she go there anyway? Why did she let this happen to her again and again? She wept with her head in her hands.
‘We have to leave, Matteo,’ she said at night, ‘we have to.’
‘No, we don’t,’ he protested. ‘I have to stay and study. This is where I have come to learn –’
‘Learn what, Matteo? To be like them?’
He stared at her and then said something extraordinary to her. ‘It would be better than to be like you,’ he observed coldly, and amended tha
t a moment later to ‘like us’.
‘Why do you hate us so much?’ she asked. ‘What do you find so hateful that you must become someone else?’
He said nothing but he tried to avoid her and keep to the company of his teachers, barely acknowledging her presence when they met in public areas. He came to their room late at night, having sat up and listened to the swami’s discourse downstairs while she lay on her strip of matting, shutting out the bright lights trained on the assembly outside by laying her arm across her eyes and wishing she could somehow shut off the sound. Occasionally at this hour he would make love to her and this he did with a new contempt, and a violence that was so unlike him, it shocked her. He would grasp her and manhandle her as if to hurt her and, in fact, when she cried out in pain or fear, he would let out a small laugh, exultant, as if he had achieved his end. Sometimes, if she felt strong enough, she struck at him and fought him but this made him more violent. Then he would leave her to go and sit against the wall, his face twisted with revulsion, or he would grab his roll of matting or a sheet and fling out of the room to go and sleep on the veranda.
His disgust infected her as if it were a disease. She came to loathe herself, scratching at the scabs and boils on her body with something more than physical revulsion. Nausea rose in her throat and she often lay on the ground, sick till she was drained. Once it came upon her when she was on the street, at the gate of the zoological gardens; a rickshaw driver picked her up and pedalled her back to the ashram, depositing her there and demanding payment from the sullen guard. A quiet Australian who spent most of his hours meditating alone behind the banana trees in the back garden, even removing his meals to the privacy of their shade, happened to see the fracas as he picked his way through the courtyard, and came to pay off the rickshaw driver and lead her into the ashram. She had never heard him speak before and could hardly believe it when she heard him say, ‘You’re ill, you need a doctor.’
No one had mentioned a doctor to her earlier, and she had not considered seeing one; it had gone out of her mind that anyone could help her, or might want to. ‘Doctor?’ she repeated foolishly.
‘The ashram has a doctor, and a dispensary. You should go there.’
She laughed: the idea seemed so incongruous, something she had left behind in her past. But he evidently spoke to Matteo, or possibly to the doctor, and she found herself taken there and sat upon a stool beside the doctor’s desk in a small gloomy cell where there was a bed with a rubber sheet, a glass cupboard filled with bottles of tiny pills, and even an enamel bowl. Throughout the examination she stared at the enamel bowl – its whiteness, its glaze – as if it were a remnant of the past that had curiously caught up with her here. She paid no attention to the doctor’s probings or questioning and let Matteo lead her back to their room upstairs. At least, he tried to but she collapsed on the stairs, doubling over, and was very sick.
Unexpectedly, Matteo did not withdraw or push her away in disgust. He held her head and when she had finished, told her the doctor had said she was pregnant.
‘I am?’ she asked stupidly, shivering now because although her face was wet with perspiration, she felt icily cold.
Matteo took the corner of his shirt and wiped her face.
It did not help their situation at all. The news that she was pregnant made everyone shun her even more zealously. One of the women disciples was heard to say, during a meal, ‘What do they think, that they can come here and live like animals in our ashram?’ She was ladling out food from a pail and Sophie, hearing her, turned away without any. Some sniggered.
This attitude was made plain not only to Sophie but also to Matteo who had until now felt he was making progress and achieving the status of an exceptional student of Sanskrit and yoga. His Sanskrit teacher who had come to regard him as his star pupil and hold him up as an example to those like the Australian, Richard, who were slower and clumsier, now shouted, ‘You are making no progress, no progress at all.’ Matteo had just handed in a page of careful handwriting and read half a dozen verses without faltering, and looked at him in amazement.
It was not the first or only time that someone had fallen out of favour. The making and unmaking of favourites was a perpetual drama at the ashram. During Matteo’s and Sophie’s stay a particularly dedicated disciple had gone so far in his meditative practices that he had fallen into a trance from which he could not be roused. Another time he had had a violent seizure. Thereupon he was asked to leave and when he refused, weeping, ‘Why are you so cruel to me? What have I done wrong?’ his parents were summoned to fetch him away. Another disciple had been dismissed from the ashram because a servant girl was found to have become pregnant, it was rumoured by him. However, he was already back, forgiven, although the girl was no longer to be seen. Matteo found the man particularly revolting, with yellow eyes and a stubble beard. Did he himself resemble this bestial fellow? Is that how the others saw him now?
The Australian waited until the Sanskrit lesson was over and then, putting his books away carefully in a cloth bag, said quietly, not looking at Matteo, ‘Why don’t you go away for the summer? I know an ashram in the hills – well, not real mountains, but at the foot of them. Your wife will like it. It’s different from here.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘It’s different,’ Richard repeated. ‘The head is a – is a –’ he stammered, for the first time revealing this flaw in his speech, ‘a – a woman –’
Matteo stared.
‘It’s not – not – not like this – this place. She l–lets families stay. You can h-have a f-family there,’ he finished, red-faced. Having done so, he retreated to the safety of his silence. Matteo waited till he seemed composed and then asked him for the address. Richard did not attempt to utter it but wrote it out on a piece of paper. Handing it over, he brought himself to say some words that puzzled Matteo further. ‘The m-mother,’ he said, ‘m-m-mother.’
But Matteo had no intention of following this well-meant piece of advice. He had sworn to be a disciple and it seemed only right that the disciple’s life should be hard: humility and penance were lessons he set himself to learn. Of course he could not be blind to the thickening and darkening of the atmosphere in the ashram and finally realised that it was egoistic folly to imagine he and Sophie were at the centre of all the acrimony and censure. No, from the talk he heard in the dining hall and during baths, he learnt that far greater issues were being debated than the teaching of lessons to one more poor disciple.
There had always been much talk of various court cases in which the ashram was involved; some of the disciples – the Indian disciples – were lawyers who handled these cases for the swamis, so reports were frequently presented and freely discussed. Most of the cases had to do with property: it appeared the ashram owned extensive properties in the town and also outside it. Several of these were under dispute of one kind or another, and whenever one was brought to court, the atmosphere became quite charged.
Of course the disciples had little to do with these except observe their development although occasionally there was a celebration of a successful court case when the lawyers, or others involved, brought to the ashram special treats of rice pudding and fruit and distributed it amongst all the inmates. They would enjoy the treat even if they knew little of the reasons for it. Sometimes the lawyers would bring along their wives and daughters to serve the food. It was evidently considered a meritorious act. These women dressed in fine clothes and gold jewellery and hurried about with their heads covered, showing how aware they were of the privilege.
At this time a case came up that did directly involve them all. Matteo learnt that a house next to the ashram grounds, a three-storeyed stucco structure with a flat roof and deep verandas, had been left to the ashram by a devout disciple in his will at his death. His tenants had steadily ignored the eviction notice served them and continued to occupy it.
One morning when the disciples were having their breakfast of black tea and lentils in the veranda,
one of the swamis came in at the gate and shouted out an excited account of what had happened in the night: a band of hooligans had attacked the house and looted it, throwing the furniture out into the street and driving out the occupants. Some of the younger swamis sprang up to go and have a look, others discussed the matter loudly and with many gesticulations, but there were some who fell silent and did not seem to know what to say. One who got up and began to shuffle away was heard to mutter ‘Very bad, very bad. Head swami should not have given such orders. Not in accordance with dharma. Bad, bad.’ He spoke in a low voice but those who were sitting on the steps as he passed by heard him and so learnt where the orders had come from.
Matteo was one of them. Like the others, he hung his head and considered the implications of what he had heard. Then he rose and slipped away, intending to fade away into the back garden till the furore had died down. He found his pyjama leg seized and grasped so fiercely that he nearly fell. It was Sophie who had been huddled against a pillar on the veranda, dull-eyed and sick but now looking like an animal about to spring.
‘Sophie!’ he exclaimed.
‘You heard?’ she hissed at him, dragging at his leg. ‘Don’t say you didn’t, Matteo. Don’t lie.’