by Anita Desai
Laila barely thanked her. She went instantly to the bookshelves and began to comb them in search of a book on dance in India. Impatiently she went through the books on temples, on Hinduism, on wild life and jungles, travels and philosophy, and then came upon a large, heavy, cloth-bound volume that had on its cover – providentially, she was certain – a small print of exactly the same painting she had seen reproduced on the poster, and bearing the same words: Krishna Lila. Tearing it open, she found it was a volume of miniature paintings from India, and sank down on a step to leaf through its pages. The paintings, each sheltered beneath a sheet of fine tissue paper, blazed up in the shadows with primal colours – purple skies in which cranes flew in streaks of blinding white, lawns of veridian green in which flowers clustered in groups of pinks and yellows, walls and roofs painted ochre and vermilion, arched gateways through which caparisoned elephants paraded in gold finery and palanquins passed in flowered drapes, trees in which green parrots fed on saffron mangoes and beneath which women with jet hair and fish-shaped eyes danced in gauzy robes or sat smoking hookahs with silver mouthpieces or lay in the laps of turbaned lovers under a night sky with a sickle moon. In many of them the lover had a body of indigo blue and wore about his waist a cloth of saffron yellow while his head was crowned with peacocks’ feathers. Usually he stood beneath a tree, playing upon a flute, and around him danced either a single or a whole ring of ecstatic women in gold and silver blouses and skirts of gauze or brocade; in one, they had stripped off their garments, strewn them on a bank and plunged into a river from which pink lotuses sprang. In others, storm clouds were pierced by lightning, or serpents reared and towered over small cities and fleeing rivers, but it was to the paintings of the blue god and the dancing maiden that Laila returned again and again, watched from a dark corner by the perturbed and silent Madame Lacan.
In the small, shabby auditorium, poorly heated and smelling of the damp clothing of the sparse audience, these paintings revealed themselves on the stage and sprang to life.
A maid in a saffron costume edged with gold plucked flowers from invisible trees in an enchanted grove, strung them into garlands with her long, exquisite, ringed fingers, lifted them to drape them on the god she awaited, circling the stage in search.
The god appeared, in a loincloth of celestial blue, wearing on his head a crown of dazzling peacock feathers, holding an invisible flute to his lips and half-closing his eyes as he played a piping music almost too sweet to bear.
A ring of damsels in rainbow colours – colours Laila had only seen before in the parakeet house of the Jardin des Plantes – came holding hands and were joined by the maiden with the garland and all together performed a dance vibrantly rhythmic and angular as well as graceful and swaying.
The music that welled out of a flute and some drums that were being beaten in one corner of the stage where incense had been lit in a censer, and cymbals that were being struck by a singer seated crosslegged and singing in a voice at once harsh and pellucid, appeared to surge through those dancing bodies in their sweeping, leaping, elegant, ecstatic, joyous, anguished, effortless poses and postures, and Laila found herself knotted in agony upon her seat, so intense was her desire to leap up and perform to that music. This, she knew, was what she had sought so long and missed.
Now the ring ceased to circle. Now it broke and dissolved and the maidens disappeared with a suggestive tinkling of their anklets, leaving only the one with the god. Now they performed their final rite of union, and the union was that of the worshipped and the worshipper, the god and the devotee, and the music rose to its climax, so piercing, so ecstatic, that it seemed to Laila the very roof would lift and fly into the sky.
‘I must see them, Madame Lacan,’ she cried in the bookshop next day, ‘with my own eyes I must see them. I can’t believe they are real – and yet they are more real than you and I, far more –’
‘Ah,’ said Madame Lacan with a caustic smile that was just a twist of her grey lips. She was doing her accounts, had not removed her spectacles from her nose, and was ostentatiously keeping her pen going, dipping it into the ink well and scratching with it loudly while the cigar grew its knob of ash in a bowl nearby. ‘You are not real? And I am not real? I did not realise.’
‘Not in the way they are,’ Laila assured her, pressing on the counter with both hands in her eagerness. ‘We don’t dress like that in Paris, or dance like that, or move or sing like that –’
‘And have you been to the opera? Or the ballet here in Paris?’
Laila made a dismissive sound, quite rude; the urge to express herself was now bursting out in the most unseemly way.
Madame Lacan, too, could be rude. ‘You have not? So what have you seen of Paris, or France?’ She took off her spectacles and glared at Laila. ‘Without finding out what exists here, you want to go running after those heathens from the East –’
‘Yes,’ Laila agreed, ‘I want to run, run and catch them,’ and her teeth gleamed in a smile, and her eyes half closed with delight as she mimicked her words with the extravagance she had witnessed on the stage of a shabby, gloomy hall for people who coughed and sneezed and shifted on their seats and yawned. She had felt a certainty then that she belonged to those on the stage, not to the audience. Could Madame Lacan not see that? What she did not tell Madame Lacan was her certainty that she had once been one of them, possessed what they had, lost it but now saw she must grasp and recover it – for surely that was why she had come to Paris.
Madame Lacan only shook her head to indicate her lack of both interest and understanding, and Laila dashed out of the shop and went to wait at the theatre for a glimpse of her celestial god and goddesses. She did not have the money to go in but she watched them arrive – bundled in their unsightly Western coats and scarves – and leave. She stared with a painful jealousy at the audience that filed in and noticed that it had dwindled down to a few Indians, poor students to judge by their appearance, and a few French friends they had brought along.
At their last performance, desperation made her push past some sleepy, yawning ushers, find backdoors that could be unlocked, and make her way up steep, clanking iron stairs and long dimly lit corridors with ragged, dusty carpeting, to a dressing room where there was light, a smell of food and oil and heat, and the sound of voices, and there she found them – not the butterfly creatures of the stage to be sure, in gauzy draped costumes and glittering jewellery, but seated around a small gas stove on which tea with a spicy odour was being brewed in a kettle while they sat with their bare feet tucked up on the chairs, swaddled in shawls, their faces still encased in stage make-up like grotesque masks.
Yet Laila recognised them instantly as objects of her ardent desire, even though the male dancer who had danced Krishna had removed his crown of peacock feathers, draped his bare torso with a thick shawl, tucked his feet under him and was holding a saucer to his lips and loudly sucking up the sweet, spicy tea. But his face was the one she had seen on the stage – celestially calm, powerfully noble, the eyes half closed and dreamily smiling. It was the face she had first seen in the miniature painting in the bookshop – the same playfully glinting eyes, the same teasing half-smile, the same large calm brow and skin so dark it made her think of cinnamon and peppercorns. Or perhaps it was the scent of the tea that led her to think of them.
She became confused and unsure now, standing in the doorway in her aunt’s purple cloak that was too big for her and that she had to hold about her shoulders like an Indian shawl. Dressed in that oversized cloak, staring with her frightened eyes, she looked to them like an alarmed child, and it made them turn to her and smile.
‘You are wanting –?’ one of them asked, a woman whose pink make-up was heavily streaked with perspiration.
‘Yes?’ queried the god-like dancer, who stared at her the hardest.
‘I want,’ she said, knotting the cloak in her hands, ‘I want to dance. I want to dance Lila, to be Lila.’
They all laughed then, including Laila, unc
ertainly, but the woman with the liquefying pink and red face beckoned her to come in with an arm on which a gold armlet was pushed up above the elbow and fingers weighted with rings. She wore a diamond in her nose that she touched frequently. ‘Lila is the dance, not the dancer,’ she instructed Laila. ‘The dancer is Radha, beloved of Krishna.’
‘I will learn!’
‘But we are gypsies,’ the god-dancer smiled at her. ‘We will go away, like gypsies.’
‘I will come with you,’ Laila said to him, and stepped away from the woman and closer to him. ‘Please take me, and teach me.’
‘Teach you? Teach you?’ His dancer’s brows rose mockingly in arcs, and his painted smile became mocking too, as if he were miming surprise, alarm and amusement.
The women dancers turned to each other and began to chatter, and Laila was reminded of the parakeet house again, this time for the sounds and not the colours. She tried to decipher from their tones how her proposal was taken, but the male dancer was not joining in the talk, he was smiling at her from over the saucer that he held upon his fingertips, delicately.
‘Are you a dancer?’ he asked, and she nodded rapidly, blinking. ‘Oui, oui.’
The women were speaking to him, addressing him, in loud tones. She could not make out if they spoke so loudly out of enthusiasm or out of anger and warning. So she continued to gaze at him, addressing her plea entirely to him, and at the same time exposing her eagerness to his frank, probing appraisal. The gift of acceptance had to come from the god, she knew. But he turned away, and spoke to the women. They all talked together, no one waited for one to finish before the other began. The noise rose. Laila might have been at an auction, herself on the auction block. When would she learn their decision? She stood trembling with the tension of waiting.
Then the door banged open rudely and the stage manager – or someone with some authority – entered and threw up his hands on seeing them still seated at the stove with their tea, and began to shout at them in French to wind up, pack, leave.
Laila looked around in horror to see if they understood his French. They were laughing again, and getting to their feet with a ringing of bells. They began to collect their boxes of make-up and jewellery, their stage props and shawls, and stuff them into large cartons that stood around the mirrored dressing table. Some of the women handed her a bundle and pointed at one of the boxes, clearly asking her to help. When she had filled the box with the objects she had been given, she lifted it in her arms and watched to see the dancers leaving. One of them turned and called, ‘Come, come,’ and she hurried after them.
The four cousins turned their faces to her. Their mother did not. She kept hers scrupulously turned away as Laila entered, bending over a very small circle of embroidery held taut in a brass ring, stabbing at it rapidly with her needle.
Laila kicked off her shoes at the door and wandered in barefoot over the carpet. The cousins looked down at her bare feet. The mother looked at her embroidery, stitching and stitching at the circle of silk. When the thread was so short that she could stitch no more, she bent and bit the thread in two. Everyone’s teeth were set on edge by the sound of that bite.
Then Aunt Françoise looked at Laila at last and said, ‘Did you take the purple silk cloak out of my closet, Laila?’ and the cousins’ faces turned pale, almost transparent, as foreboding enveloped them.
Laila had stopped by one of the gilt-legged tables. She had picked up a small onyx ball that her mother had once sent her aunt. She caressed its chilly silken surface playfully and said, ‘Yes.’
‘Why,’ asked her aunt, through lips that still seemed to feel the bitter thread between them, ‘did you take what does not belong to you without asking?’
Laila tossed the onyx egg in the air with a laugh and caught it as it plummeted. ‘Because you were not at home and I needed it.’
‘Needed it,’ repeated her aunt. ‘For what?’
‘I was going to a dance.’
Now the cousins let out the sounds they had held back so long, in one spurt. The younger ones pressed their hands to their mouths and sputtered through their fingers. The older ones threw back their heads and laughed with derision. They had seen Laila’s muddy shoes at the door, and her grimy feet. How could she have been at a dance?
‘A dance?’ enquired the aunt. ‘Can you tell us more about this – affair?’
‘Not an affair,’ Laila said, shaking her head emphatically. ‘It was a dance of the gods,’ she added and then withdrew abruptly and hurried to the bedroom, eager to be alone.
The cousins exchanged looks. Some smirked, and one put her finger to her head and rotated it like a screw. Their mother gave them a severe look and her lips were so tightly set and her face so drawn, they subsided with only a murmur.
Over a pot of stew, a fine rich stew in which herbs simmered and onions bubbled and meat made thick and solid, Aunt Françoise glanced at Laila who sat with her roll of bread and reminded her, ‘Tomorrow morning we will all go together to church.’
Laila raised her heavy brows to meet her aunt’s eyes. Crumbling the roll between her fingers, she said, ‘But I told you, Tante Françoise, I do not go to church.’
Uncle Bertrand, lowering his head and settling into the plateful of stew he had been handed, muttered something about Moslems and mosques that made Aunt Françoise throw him a pained look.
Laila too had heard him. ‘I am a seeker after truth and have given up all orthodox religions,’ she said, looking around the table to see the effect of her words on her cousins’ faces. ‘I find them the repositories of ignorance and suppression –’
‘That will be enough, Laila,’ her aunt’s voice rang out, and to emphasise the strength of her feeling, she rapped a silver spoon against the pot of stew in front of her. ‘May I remind you, we are Christians here at this table.’
‘So perhaps I should leave it,’ Laila replied, and rose.
She stood between his knees, placing her hands on his shoulders, and rubbing them slowly over his skin.
‘Shall I come?’ she asked in a barely audible voice. ‘Do you want me to come?’
He put his hands around her waist, as if it were a wand. He smiled a sleepy smile, heavy-lidded both with sleep and kohl. Beneath the lids, the eyes seemed both mysterious and mischievous, playful and elusive as fishes in a pond. She traced his eyebrows with a fingertip and repeated, ‘Do you?’
He pushed her slightly away from him although his knees still held her. ‘And what will your family say if I take you away?’
‘They are not here. My parents live in Egypt.’
‘Egypt,’ he said, taking the word from her as if it were a curious fruit, one he had not tasted before. Then he smiled, enjoying its flavour. ‘That is what the others said, that you are Muslim. But why are you here, alone?’
‘I came to study. But what good is it to study what does not interest one?’ She gripped his shoulders more urgently, saying, ‘I will not be a European dancer. I want to be an Indian dancer.’ She swayed in his grasp, urging him to respond.
He drew her close again. ‘An Indian dancer,’ he murmured against her waist. ‘So white. So small. Muslim. Egyptian. How can you be an Indian dancer?’
‘I will, if you teach me. If you take me and teach me, I will.’
He drew her down beside him on the ege of the bed, its iron rail cold under their knees. ‘I cannot, without the permission of your family. You don’t know, but in India we have a special ceremony when the parents bring a new student to a guru. They come with gifts on a tray – a piece of silk, a coconut, some betel leaves. They make an offering and ask the guru to take their child and give it the training. The training is his gift, you see.’
She laid her hand on his knee, gripping it. ‘Then give it to me,’ she said with a fierceness that made her narrow-eyed and white-lipped.
He lay back on the mattress, folding his arms under his head so that his long hair fell over them in a fold. His face had a brooding expression on it; he was not l
ooking at her any more but at an inner picture. It made her wild to think of this picture to which she had no access and in which she played no part. It was not only him that she wanted but his whole world. A great deal, perhaps, but she wanted it intensely and passionately.
‘Why can’t you?’ she broke out, and then felt chagrined to hear herself wail like a small child. ‘Why? I will make a good dancer. I know it. I have never been so sure or wanted anything so much –’
‘It is not for you to want,’ he said in a lordly way, silencing her. ‘It is for your family, your parents. I cannot take you. They must come to me, and offer you to me. Only then can I say yes.’ He mimed this with his eyes and hands – their pleading, his acceptance.
She stared at him in a kind of rage. His indolent attitude upon the bed infuriated her now. She wanted him to rise and strike the pose, perform the gesture, assume the expression that would transform him from a heavy-set young man in his underwear in a cheap hotel room into a god of grace and authority, visiting from another realm. She could have fallen upon him with her fists, or her nails and teeth, pounded and clawed him and drawn from him the divinity she desired. But a part of her remained controlled, calculating, even cold, and she found herself saying, ‘I can’t bring them to you. But I can take you to my aunt. She will speak to you.’
‘Yes?’ he raised his eyebrows languidly, only half interested. ‘And she is – your guardian?’
Madame Lacan was knitting. Laila had never seen her knit before, but on that afternoon of pouring winter rain, she sat in a tailored suit of black-and-white stripes, a red wool scarf tied raffishly around her neck, its bow under one ear, slightly askew, and in her hands were the knitting needles that she worked assiduously, click-click-clack. She gave him the most fleeting glance when he entered, in his own black-and-white suit, Western style, with an astrakhan cap on his head, also slightly askew.