Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  At last it found what it searched for – or at least a fleeting, ephemeral glimpse of it: Laila’s bright, sequinned cap that she stood holding at her side and twirling and twirling upon her finger. That flashing saucer caught the panther’s eye and might have seemed a forest butterfly or fluttering bird; at least, it paused in its furious ambulations, and the paws faltered to a halt for just an instant before it turned its eyes away and went relentlessly, restlessly on. But when it came round again, its slant eyes fastened on the bright beads, the winking sequins, and again it paused – a little longer this time. Laila, noticing, stopped spinning the cap and held still. This made the panther veer away and race on, intent on its pursuit. She stared in wonder at the muscles that flowed like water under the sheen of black skin, the frantic eyes that would not meet hers but glanced away as if in wild rejection.

  Unconsciously she began to twirl the cap again and this brought the panther to a stop directly before her at last. Reaching out one of its gigantic paws, it dangled it before her, quite gently, as if inviting her to shake hands. She held her breath, overcome by its size, its closeness, the hot, steaming wildness of the beast, and the cap twirled more slowly now. When it came to a halt, the panther’s paw flashed out between the bars, caught it on a nail and, drawing it into the cage, set about worrying it as if it were a toy or a kitten.

  Laila had gone white with shock as the cap was ripped from her hand; now she watched the panther toss it in the air, send it skimming across the floor of the cage, pounce on it, bury its muzzle into it, toss it up again, make of it a skimming, shining, dazzling thing that seemed to light its eyes by its reflection. She began to smile, then laugh, as one might laugh at the play of a child, merging into its delight in a moment of unconsciousness, a moment when time either pauses or even moves back instead of forwards.

  A huddle of boys on the other side of the cage stood pale and scandalised: it went against everything they believed in or found acceptable – a young girl and a black wild beast sharing a game; it went against nature, it excluded them, it filled them with agitation and outrage.

  Both panther and girl were oblivious. They were the only two that existed in that enclosed world they had made. When Laila moved, the panther rose and moved beside her. She walked the length of the cage and the panther kept pace beside her, docile and calm, with just a hint of playfulness in its eyes. When she turned and walked back, it too turned, as a stream turns, with a rushing, rippling motion, and walked with her. She circled the cage, and the panther circled too, making the boys retreat in a shambles. They ambulated together, panther and girl, keeping pace, sending out messages of mutual admiration, building a web between them of delicious complicity.

  So the game might have continued had it not begun to draw so many onlookers: Laila had not thought of her complicity with the panther as a public performance. It was a relationship to her, and when the boys who stood watching began to boo and catcall or urge her on as if she were a circus trainer and the beast her victim, she threw them looks of withering contempt. What did they know of such relationships, such communion?

  ‘Where’d you go?’ Yvette and Claudette interrogated her; they were already bathed and in their dressing gowns, smelling of soap and powder in a room lighted with pink lamps.

  ‘To meet a friend,’ Laila told them with a twist of her lips that could not be described precisely as a smile.

  ‘Oh? Who? Where?’

  ‘In the Jardin des Plantes,’ Laila said, and now she did smile, broadly and openly into their shocked faces. Lying back on her bed, she let her dusty sandals fall onto the rug. She was utterly, deliberately infuriating.

  ‘Oh, we’ll tell Mama,’ they threatened in retaliation.

  ‘Tell,’ she challenged them airily, ‘tell.’

  Laila returned to the gardens, to her new friend. But she could never find a time when she might be alone with the panther. She needed her communication with it to be private, even secret, convinced that its depth and intensity depended on that. If her tormentors were already there, hoping for some further entertainment, she would turn away, knowing they would distract her and distract the panther, making what passed between them, so electrically, an impossibility. In a way it was a repetition of the experience in the eurhythmics class: the exercises came in the way of her communion with the music, and that was what she wanted of it.

  Darkness fell earlier, the gates of the park closed in the twilight, and soon she ceased to go there altogether and wondered how long she would continue with the eurhythmics, and what would replace these in her life which appeared to grow steadily narrower and bleaker.

  Now she walked up and down the long straight avenues of the Luxembourg Gardens – what was this passion the French had for long straight lines? she wondered – under trees so vigorously pruned and pollarded as hardly to appear trees any more but more like bunches of fingers, or fists, at the end of long arms. Laila walked, listening to her feet on the gravel, and ignored the boys who followed, whistling, as she ignored the old man on a bench with a drop hanging from the end of his nose, who sat with his bottle in a brown paper bag and his toes protruding, green with mildew, from his cracked shoes.

  Out by the round pond the scene was brighter but for her equally charmless – the beds with stridently coloured flowers, the boys in sailor suits sailing their boats, the lovers on the benches, inextricably clasped. Then she came upon the Fontaine de Médicis and found the plane trees closely clustered on either side still heavy with dark foliage, and between them chrysanthemums in rich saffron and golden shades strung as garlands from trunk to trunk and reflected in the black water of the pool. She thought they might rise up and break through the surface of the water and flower for her, like golden lotuses on a lake. As she waited for that magical happening, the words of the hagdah swam back into her memory, opening out their petals for her: ‘In the north, a city stands in water. There, god and goddess meet . . .’ But with darkness the words faded, the reflections faded, and it was not only night but it was cold. Russet leaves fell from the trees into the water, small empty boats staying afloat.

  In that dark autumn, Laila found herself driven down the streets, along with the jostling crowds simply for warmth and light.

  She hovered about the shopfronts, standing close to the lighted windows for comfort, staring at objects, whether bowls of flowers or painted china or hats fashioned out of ribbons and feathers. Every time the shop door opened and someone went in with a dripping umbrella or came out with an armful of parcels, there was an accompanying waft of warm moist air and excruciatingly brief as it was, it went through Laila like a physical experience of the heat she had known in Alexandria and Cairo. She knew better than to go in without any money to spend – a special hostility was reserved for a woman who was not only dark and foreign but also penniless.

  In the Métro, pressing through the damp, steaming crowds without knowing where she was going, she heard a voice sing out as if it were a banner, flaring out above their heads with strident colours. She looked and saw it was a dark man, perhaps from Africa, perhaps from the Caribbean, selling pineapples which he had sliced and held up by their green tops, one half in each hand, running with juice, while he sang, ‘From far to near, from away to here –’ and when he caught her eye, he gave her a wink, as if in recognition.

  It seemed she was being edged, little by little, almost imperceptibly, down the rue Descartes to be brought up short by a shop window in which a strange statue of some dark metal struck a dancer’s pose within a circle of flames. Stopping to decipher its expression, pose and gesture – one that said, so authoritatively, ‘Stop! Look! Pay heed!’ – she saw piled around it untidy heaps of books, all with titles referring to l’Orient or l’Inde. They were books of travel, art, philosophy and religion, and after gazing at them for a long time, trying to read some of the unfamiliar words – Rig Veda, Samhita, Ratnavali, La Kama Sutra, Brhadanayaka Upanishad, La Bhagavad Gita, The Sacred Books of the East – she straightened the bag sl
ung over her shoulder and went in. Partly it was curiosity that made her take the step and partly it was the feeling that this shabby, hidden place would not reject her: perhaps there was more that she could not, or did not, analyse. The regally calm expression on the face of the exotic statue conveyed a sense of welcome and greeting that she could not define and did not stop to.

  A ringing ping of the bell announced her entry a bit disconcertingly and in the small poorly lit room crowded with tall bookshelves there was a faint stir behind the counter, against the dark green wallpaper, where a woman, with her grey hair cut very short like a man’s under a thick and unshapely felt cap, coughed and looked up from under heavy black brows that were startling in a face so pale and grey. It was all the more curious seen as it was under brightly tinted oleographs that hung on the wall, displaying a pot-bellied elephant dancing on two delicate feet, a blue-bodied shepherd playing a flute under a flowering tree, a dark ascetic seated upon a tiger skin with a serpent poised above his forehead, and other such startling scenes in rainbow hues. These were lit by a lamp that shone on the counter, leaving the rest of the room even more shadowy by contrast.

  A little unnerved, yet by no means frightened, Laila turned into one of the aisles, laid with worn coir matting, and began to browse her way through the books on the tall shelves that made it clear she had come to an Orientalist bookshop, and more specifically, an Indological one. She slid a great heavy volume off the shelf, the Aitreya Brahmanan of the Rig Veda, and read:

  There is no happiness for him who does not travel, Rohita! Thus we have heard. Living in the society of man, the best man becomes a sinner . . . Therefore, wander!

  The feet of the wanderer are like the flowers, his soul is growing and reaping the fruit; and all his sins are destroyed by his fatigues in wandering. Therefore, wander!

  The fortune of him who is sitting, sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!

  Once again, for the second time that autumn, the words of the hagdah rose in Laila’s mind. She browsed on for an hour that day, for two hours the next, and for the whole of Saturday morning thereafter. The grey-haired woman never stirred from behind the counter, merely coughing slightly to indicate she noticed Laila’s arrival and departure. The only other movement was of the steady upward drifting of thick cigar smoke from her corner. It drifted through the small, overheated shop and lay in clouds amongst the books that also smelt of tobacco as a result. Laila found herself developing a small, sympathetic cough.

  Of course, other customers entered the shop. Most were young men in large, long coats, and Laila noticed from the corner of her eye that the book most frequently placed on the counter for the old woman to make up a parcel was the Kama Sutra which they surreptitiously slipped into their coat pockets. After leafing through a volume, she decided against making the same purchase herself, although the idea of smuggling it into the pink-and-white bedroom of her aunt’s house did titillate her for a moment. Instead, she made an occasional purchase of a postcard from the Musée Guimet collection, or a small volume of verse, Tagore’s or Toru Dutt’s, that were second-hand and damaged and therefore reduced in price. She bought them partly to justify the long hours spent in the bookshop for which she could find no satisfactory explanation even for herself, and partly to have some communication with the hagdah-like figure at the counter, even if only commercial, which was ridiculous when one considered what an intimacy there was between them, thickening like the cigar smoke in the closed and ill-ventilated room.

  Glancing at a tattered copy of Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia that Laila brought to her, the woman reduced the price still further, pointing out its loose pages and battered binding. Laila gave her a smile. She had to speak. ‘Are these Egyptian cigars?’ she asked without thought, confirming that it was the familiarity of the odour that drew her to the shop.

  In reply, the woman turned to the shelf behind her, untidy with papers and envelopes, and picked up a narrow wooden box and placed it on the counter. She pointed at the words – Tiruchanapally, S. India – stamped on the pale wood in violet ink.

  ‘People who go to India bring me back things,’ she explained in a voice hoarse with smoking and from disuse, and half-turning on her seat, jabbed a finger at the oleograph that hung on the wall behind her, so surreally bright. ‘Cigars, prints,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘India,’ Laila noted politely. ‘Do you smoke Egyptian ones too?’

  The woman gave a shrug, turning down her lips. ‘Never,’ she said.

  ‘I can get you some. I come from Cairo, and my father smokes them,’ Laila said, feeling foolishly ingratiating. That evening she wrote to her father and requested a box.

  When it arrived, she hurried to deliver it. The woman said nothing but opened the box, lifted out a cigar and sniffed it with the critical appraisal of a connoisseur. ‘Mmm,’ she finally murmured, and put the box away on the shelf beside the Indian one.

  Her visit was noticed by a group of students from Laila’s language class who were sitting in the window of the café next door and when she went for one of her rare cups of coffee that evening, they called her over to their table and laughed, ‘You’ve become a regular at Madame Lacan’s, eh?’

  ‘You know her?’ Laila’s eyes widened, looking at them: they had not seemed to her particularly interesting young men or women, being as aimless and adrift as she in Paris.

  ‘Ah, who does not go to Madame Lacan for a copy of the Kama Sutra?’ chortled one of them in a way she found distasteful.

  ‘But who is Madame Lacan really?’ asked Laila.

  One of them told her, ‘Her father was some kind of civil servant – employed in the post office, I believe – who in his youth found a book on yoga and was so fascinated by it that he set off for India to find himself a guru – you know, a teacher – and returned filled with enthusiasm for the mysterrr-i-ous East –’ he rolled his rs drolly, being himself from Turkey – ‘and started this funny little bookshop and had dreams of starting a yoga school here in Paris. Then he took against trade and commerce and wanted only one thing – to return to India. Finally he did – like the Buddha, abandoned his wife and child and disappeared in the East. So, the child had to take over the bookshop in order to survive and support the mother till she died, and there she sits, trapped.’

  ‘Oh, non, non, non!’ another of the students cried. ‘What a boring, what a bourgeois interpretation that is, Ahmet! You have no imaginative bone in your whole body. The story is, I assure you, much more romantic than that. Madame Lacan fell in love with a young man from India, don’t you know. He taught yoga, I believe. She thought he would take her back to India with him when he left, but all he did was send her letters and books. Books, books, books, and the message she was to stay and instruct the West on Eastern mysticism and spirituality. So there she sits, poor thing, carrying out his wishes and waiting, waiting for the call that does not come, oh!’

  ‘Banal, banal – only a woman could think such banality romantic,’ Ahmet retorted.

  Clearly they were all embroidering on a few fragments of known facts, and Laila was free to do the same. She would observe Madame Lacan from over the top of a book she had taken off the shelves to study, and add to what she had been told. The most fruitful area for observation and interpretation was Madame Lacan’s reaction to Indians who came to the shop; Laila noted her attitude towards them – it seemed to her especially brusque, and at the same time especially attentive, as if they represented what she most feared and distrusted and at the same time what she felt most fascinating. Surely it had to be so, or why was she here, running this obsessive, obsessed little bookshop and sheltering within it such commercially unpromising curiosities?

  What Laila did not admit to herself, possibly because she barely noticed or understood it, was that this fascination was proving as infectious as Madame Lacan’s smoke-fed cough in that tobacco-saturated atmosphere.

  She did notice it, admit it and understand it
the day she came to the bookshop and saw, pinned to the door, a poster. In large letters at the top, it advertised: ‘DANSES ET MUSIQUE HINDOUES PAR KRISHNA RAJA ET SA TROUPE’. Beneath it was a picture of two figures – one indigo blue, the other a pale gold – beneath a flowering tree. Their feet were bare and on their ankles were rings of bells. They gazed at each other with the elongated eyes of desire. The caption for the picture was

  Krishna Lila

  The words caught at Laila with a snare so sharp that she almost cried out. Krishna, and Lila. The words, together and separately, were what struck her so sharply between the eyes. Krishna Lila. Krishna. Lila. Each seemed to point a finger at her, and she drew herself up, stood very upright, a little open mouthed, gazing back as if in recognition. Later she was to say that at that moment she was confronted by her true self, that she at that moment discovered it. Laila, Lila. Laila, Lila. Krishna Krishna. Krishna Lila.

  Pushing the door open, she went directly to Madame Lacan at the counter. ‘Who has put up that poster?’ she demanded.

  Madame Lacan seemed faintly taken aback by the tone: up till then, the girl had been mostly ingratiating, and deferential, but now she sounded demanding. ‘Some Indians who are, I believe, sponsoring the dance troupe.’

  ‘And the dancers? Do you know them?’

  Madame Lacan leant backwards, away from the girl’s demands – she did not care for such persistent questioning. ‘You want to meet them? Why not go to their performance? I can sell you a ticket, I have them here.’

  There was something feverish about the way the girl opened her purse and spilled out all the coins. Together they did not amount to the price of a single ticket, but Madame Lacan swept them up and gave her one anyway.