Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  The door is slightly ajar, and Sophie stands looking in. The flat seems empty, the room is entirely bare. But the red terrazzo floor is worn with use and Sophie can tell that dancers’ feet have trodden it for years. The room beyond it seems to be the domestic heart of the house as sounds of cooking emerge from it. Everything seems strangely familiar. There is a sudden hiss of a pressure cooker, the equally sudden switching off of steam, and then, in answer to Sophie’s call, there is a rustle of garments and a woman appears.

  She is middle-aged, thick-set and heavily built. She seems to have no waist and her curving bosom is covered with a purple cotton sari that swathes her whole. Her face is square too, and blank of expression. The only decorative or frivolous touches are the vermilion dot on her forehead and a small diamond in her nose.

  Staring at Sophie, the woman assumes a dancer’s pose – both hands placed to one side of her waist, and the hip slightly jutting. Her face, too, takes on an expression of query that is exaggerated in the way a dancer exaggerates expression.

  ‘Does Krishna-ji live here?’ Sophie asks. ‘I wrote – I am Sophie.’

  The woman maintains the pose for a long moment, regarding her.

  Then a man’s voice calls from another room, querulously, and the woman comes to life, nods and beckons Sophie to follow her, holding aside a curtain of striped cotton in the doorway to let her in.

  There, in a room painted green and lit with a blue fluorescent tube, on a mattress spread with a white sheet upon the floor, sits Krishna. Sophie recognises him although there is little resemblance to the photographs she has seen of the young dancer in Paris, Venice and Lausanne. These tumble through her mind now in the stark black and white of xeroxed copies that so highlight smiles and grimaces. When they recede from her mind, she is able to take in the figure that has replaced them: a shrunken creature whose grey skin hangs in folds from his spare form. He has propped himself up on one bony arm, and from the way his jaw droops onto his chest, Sophie sees that he is toothless. Yet there is still an elegance about the way his sparse white fair falls onto his shoulders, and something both languid and commanding about the way his eyes shift under the heavy lids. But his face is as blank as the woman’s, and Sophie cannot tell if he welcomes her visit or even if he can see her.

  There are no chairs and, after a moment or two of standing awkwardly before him so that he can see nothing but her legs, she lowers herself onto the floor. At least now she is in the direct line of his vision. The woman has vanished behind another striped cotton curtain into the area that is evidently the kitchen, for it is lively with the clatter and clink of pots and pans and spoons.

  The old man suddenly calls out in a very loud, harsh voice, ‘Bring the visitor tea, will you?’

  Sophie murmurs that it is not necessary, that she has only come to see –

  ‘To see? Yes?’ he urges her when she hesitates.

  ‘To see – you,’ Sophie admits.

  ‘You are interested in my dance?’ he questions immediately, with a certain eagerness.

  Sophie flushes. It is not what she is prepared for although she sees now that she should have been. What else would the old man still be interested in if not dance, and particularly his own? It is a moment when it would have been a relief to lie. Sophie regrets, not for the first or the only time, not having the skill.

  She had hoped to lead up to the subject while she should have foreseen that the old have no time to waste, nor large areas of interest. If their world has shrunk, so should it for others.

  This gives her a clue and she snatches at it. ‘In your European tour,’ she tells him. ‘In your time in Europe.’

  ‘Ahh,’ he sighs, as if with relish, and relaxes. His bony upright arm folds up on his lap and he gives his knees a waggle, settling into a space he knows, that is familiar. His mouth twists in a smile. Yes, he is toothless. ‘The nineteen twenties, that is when I toured Europe. Between the wars you understand. My time in Europe was – was –’ His voice founders, his eyes swivel under the heavy lids that droop lower, and Sophie fears she has lost him. He appears to be looking inwards, brooding upon whatever he sees there.

  ‘Paris?’ she prompts him softly. ‘Venice?’

  ‘Ah-ah,’ he cries, his jaws seizing upon these morsels, and finding them feasts. The contortions of his face and the sounds he utters become so frantic that Sophie is clutched by remorse and fear. She wonders if she should stop what she has set in motion when the woman appears from the bright and noisy room beyond, bearing a small tin tray on which are balanced two glasses of tea. Seeing his state, she hurries forward and, setting down the tray, bends over the old man. It is not clear what she does to calm him and compose him but when she rises it can be seen that she had handed him his dentures and fitted them in his mouth, given him his glass of tea and helped him sip some. Then, instead of leaving, she settles down on the floor, crosslegged, to keep watch.

  Now the old man begins to talk in a rush, in spasmodic outbursts, repeating words and sentences over and over again, spraying them out over the glass of tea and the thin mattress in Sophie’s direction. She feels them squirted at her, like gobbets of spit – she is inundated, she struggles to catch a straw here and there.

  ‘Paris. Paris. The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in – in nineteen twenty? Twenty-one? Twenty-two! The programme. Where is the programme? I have it somewhere. What did it say? What? Do you know? “Danses Hindoues par Krishna et sa troupe” – yes! Yes, that was my troupe, my dance. It was like magic to them, like paradise.’

  The woman coughs.

  He hears, half turning his head, and laughs. ‘Yes. To them I was a Hindu god, they had never seen one before. “Bronze Shiva” they called me. Our ancient dance –’

  He might wheeze and stammer on without stop. Sophie tries to interrupt and ask, ‘And the dancers? Who were they?’

  ‘Ah, my dancers. Radha, Parvati, Durga – all the goddesses. Our religious art –’ he goes on, and his eyes glitter like fishes under the dark lids, the hands twist and twine in elaborate gestures, miming the grace and beauty of the creature he tries to recreate for Sophie, his fingers clustering together, then opening like the petals of a lotus, one hand poised in mid-air like a deer leaping, arms rippling like a banner in the breeze, his face coming awake with delight.

  Sophie, embarrassed, looks down at the floor: she does not want to watch an old man miming a beautiful and bewitching dancer. How to stop him?

  The doorbell rings. Providentially. The woman gets to her feet and goes out, calling something over her shoulder in Marathi. Sophie hopes this will stem the flood and save her from the falling debris of the dancer’s past, but he does not seem to have noticed, although he had waved one hand vaguely in the woman’s direction; he continues to babble.

  Sophie decides she must dare. She interrupts, firmly. ‘And Laila – or Lila – was one of them?’

  He babbles on, ‘In Paris, they called them goddesses from India. Yes, the press – the press –’ and then he pauses, and stops, giving her a blindly unfocused look. He falls silent and his hands come to rest on his knees.

  ‘Lila?’ Sophie repeats softly, ‘or Laila? From Egypt – or France? Was she one –?’

  He has clenched his teeth together tightly, setting his jaw. Now he snaps them apart with a click and barks, ‘Why are you wanting to know? Who is sending you here? She has sent you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Sophie assures him with obvious sincerity. ‘She does not know I am here. She would not want me to come, or send me.’

  ‘Then –?’

  ‘I am trying to learn something about her. She is very famous. She is called the Mother. People come from all over the world to her ashram. I would like to learn about her life, her past.’

  He has closed his eyes. Now he tilts his head back, far back, so that it rests against the wall, and then opens his mouth, and out of it comes a series of laughs, so dry, so unpractised, they are like coughs, rasping through his throat.

  Sophie stops exp
laining. She watches and listens to him, not certain if he is coughing or sneezing or choking or actually laughing. If he is laughing, why is he doing so? No one has expressed amusement about the Mother, ever. ‘You have heard about her?’ she asks. ‘The Mother?’

  He is shaking his head from side to side, as if uncontrollably. ‘Too good, too good,’ he cackles, and tears seem to glisten in the corners of his eyes. ‘That Lila – I trained her. She was a child, she came to me for training. I taught her Indian dance. She had never seen Indian dance before. The first time she saw me, she said, “Teach me.” I was like a father to her. I took her everywhere – to Paris, Venice, New York – everywhere. But here in India – when I brought her to India –’

  ‘Yes?’ Sophie leans forward so as not to miss anything. ‘Over here –?’ she prompts.

  ‘Here she began running after gurus. She said dancing was not for her, she wanted to live a spiritual life. What is dancing, I asked her, if not spiritual? But she was mad! The Mother! Oh, too good, too good,’ he begins to hawk and cough again, incoherently. His face is distorted by a grimace – of laughter, or of derision; whatever it is, it is laced with spite and malice and rage, Sophie is sure of that – he looks so like a grinning gargoyle.

  She had not wanted anything so emotional, so excessive. Just information, photographs, proof, corroboration – solid, substantial things, not emotion, and certainly not such a tangle of emotions. She reminds him, ‘I am doing research, I plan to write a book. Can you give me photographs, press releases, reviews, anything to do with Lila – the Mother?’

  He stops laughing to stare at Sophie. ‘I have everything,’ he states flatly. ‘Everything – photos, reviews. Why do you want them? There is nothing there. Nothing. But what I have of Lila, that no one else has, no one else knows!’ He has raised his voice, his excitement is once again rising.

  This brings the woman back from the front room. She parts the curtain and looks at them questioningly. He tries to wave her away, impatiently, but she says, ‘I am talking to my new student. The student has come with her parents –’ Sophie catches the word student, student repeated – then she turns away, the curtain falling into place behind her.

  ‘What?’ Sophie asks urgently. ‘What?’

  He beckons to her. ‘Listen. Go to that box there, in the corner. Open it. It is full of papers – photos, reviews, posters. Many, many, many. But look underneath. At the bottom you will find a notebook. Red. Bring it to me.’

  Sophie had thought the room is bare – that is the impression it had made on her. Now she realises that there is a tin trunk in one corner, so old and battered it has the air of being a part of the room itself, like a shelf or a hole. It is covered with some sheets of newspaper and a variety of objects – scattered bills, some tins of talcum powder, small bronze images of gods and goddesses. She removes them in order to lift the lid. It creaks rustily; it is clearly not opened often. Inside, as he has said, there are stacks of yellowing papers, some wrapped in cloth or paper folders and tied with bits of string, others in loose sheets. She sifts through them, wishing there could be time to sort them and go through them. She might be able to find them in libraries or archives but being possessions of Krishna gives them special value. But there is clearly little time to waste and so she plunges in her arms and feels around the bottom of the trunk till she comes up against something hard-edged and thick. She draws it out and sees it is a notebook with many loose sheets interleaved with its pages, a cover of red paper peeling back to the cardboard underneath.

  She brings it to Krishna who snatches it from her roughly. ‘See?’ he hisses. ‘See? Her book. She wrote it. This is what she wrote here in India. Then she went away – to that guru, to that ashram. She did not want the discipline, the struggle, the sadhna of being a dancer, she ran away. You will read here –’ he turns the pages, fumbling through them – ‘how she went mad. She began to think she was holy – she was the Mother. Oh, what lies, what lies, what lies,’ he cackles, thrusting the book at Sophie. ‘This diary she sent me from the ashram. “Read this,” she wrote to me, “this is the truth. Read the truth about me. It is here.” He pushes it into Sophie’s hands but will not relinquish his hold on it – in fact he tugs at it when he finds Sophie holding it. ‘Read,’ he spits through his teeth. ‘You will see she was mad. She ran away to that guru. Was I not her true guru?’

  The curtains are swept aside again, and now not only the woman re-enters but with her is her new student, and the student’s parents, all dressed for a special occasion – silk saris for the women, fine cotton dhoti and shawl for the man, and all coming towards Krishna in a group with their hands folded in respectful namaskars, and their heads bowed. Gold glints, anklets tinkle, the scent of jasmine garlands swirls headily around.

  The woman announces, ‘They want to pay their respects,’ and she gives the young student a little push so that the girl goes down on her knees before the old man with greater precipitation than planned. She touches his feet with her hands, then her forehead. He draws back, confused, making little sounds of refusal, but then he relaxes, he smiles in a distraught way, and the student’s mother comes forward with a tray on which they have placed their gifts – squares of silk neatly folded, a green coconut, some sweets, some flowers. She bows, offering them, while the father and the woman stand back, watching proudly.

  Sophie creeps backwards, thrusts the notebook into her bag, and slips away while they are so occupied, only to hear the old dancer’s voice raised querulously, ‘But the other student, the foreigner? Where is she? I will initiate her too, I will initiate both –’

  Sophie’s feet, in slippers, clatter down the stairs at a run.

  Only when she reaches the bottom does she realise why the flat had seemed so familiar when she first entered it: it had been so like that flat where she and Matteo had visited the first holy person they had met when they arrived in Bombay, many years ago.

  Standing on the railway platform, waiting for the train north, Sophie straddles her old, patched, filthy backpack that contains the notebook, and wishes, when she realises that the train is late, and that she will be here under the ringing iron roof and rafters in the cruel heat of afternoon for several hours, in the press of coolies and passengers, baggage trolleys and luggage, flies and pai dogs, that she had arranged to stay a day longer. It would have meant putting up with a filthy hotel room for a night, but it would have given her time to go out into the suburbs of the city she remembers, revisit that flat and see the holy person who created perfumes in honour of God. What god? she would ask. And why? Tell me, she would beg, explain – why?

  In the urgency and anxiety she feels, Sophie sweeps her hair off her neck and shoulders and shakes her head angrily, ordering herself to be calm, to be controlled, not to give way to panic. She places her hands on her hips, keeping her feet on either side of the denim backpack, and guards it with such ferocity that the young men who have been eyeing her speculatively over the bottles of soft drinks they are sipping, drop their eyes and simulate boredom instead.

  She waits for the train that will take her north. It will be a long journey, and she will be able to read through Lila’s diary.

  *

  On Board the Kaga Maru

  The great boat rides the waves of subconscient darkness. We travel this vast distance in order to arrive at the borderland where the light will rise above the eastern horizon and the great truth will be revealed.

  Now I am still trapped in its dark hold, and all around me are the ignorant and the unenlightened. I see their cattle bodies and their cattle faces as they troop past on their way to ‘Sunday service’. I hear their cattle voices lowing the mournful words of a hymn. The captain and his officers stand showing their glittering medals. I cover my eyes to shield my self from the sight of such idiocy. I cover my ears so I may not be invaded by the sounds of their ignorance.

  I know that what I am travelling towards is not the world of this ship’s passengers – the meals, the laughter, the fli
rtations, the deck games, the Sunday services and the pompous authority of those in charge of it. All these I shall leave behind – oh, deep at the bottom of the great, green ocean! I am travelling away from them, l am travelling eastwards to meet the great sun, the great light. I must prepare my soul for the sweet union.

  We are in the harbour at Bombay. The boat has docked and at dawn we will disembark. The night air is a heavy purple cloak wrapped about me. There are lighted lamps on the mainland and on the islands, and invisible people awake, moving and talking.

  O mysterious India, I can feel you stirring in the dark. The morning sun will reveal your face to me, just as the hagdah in the coffee shop in Cairo predicted you would, so long ago. I know it, I know it for a certainty now.

  I am excited, my body is trembling with eagerness to rise and meet this ancient world. India! I am come. When the sun rises, I shall set foot on Indian soil, the land of Shiva and Parvati, of Radha and Krishna, of the Buddha, the Light of Asia. When the sun rises, I will step off the boat and be amongst them at last. May this vision be shown me. May the Light shine on me. I tremble. I bow to it in worship.

  In Bombay

  I do not know where I am. Krishna led me and I came. This house is no temple where I may worship. It is dark and filled with noise and stench. Outside black crows are fighting and screaming. A woman in a ragged sari comes out and throws a bucket of refuse to them. They swoop upon it and tear it from each other’s beaks with screams. They frighten me so, I stay indoors. But this is no refuge and I have no peace. The women I travelled with and came to know have become as strangers; no longer silent and subdued, they now shriek and laugh and chatter, and not a word can I understand. My Krishna is gone from me, I do not know where. Outside I hear the trams in the street and blind beggars wailing.

  Where is the river, the scented grove, the jasmine garlands? Where is the music of flutes and the sound of the conch?