by Anita Desai
Bakul gave an uncomfortable laugh. ‘Only if they stop to think, surely, and children don’t. They are too busy playing, or chattering, or—’
‘Or dreaming,’ mused Tara, dreamily.
‘No.’ Bim rejected that. ‘We were not busy—we hardly ever chattered. Most of the time we simply sat there on the veranda steps, staring at the gate. Didn’t we, Tara?’
Tara nodded silently. She felt Bim’s hold on her again—that rough, strong, sure grasp—dragging her down, down into a well of oppression, of lethargy, of ennui. She felt the waters of her childhood closing over her head again—black and scummy as in the well at the back.
‘Or we lay on our backs at night, and stared up at the stars,’ Bim went on, more easily now. ‘Thinking. Wondering. Oh, we thought and we felt all right. Yes, Bakul, in our family at least we had the time. We felt everything in the air—Mira-masi’s insignificance and her need to apologise for it, mother’s illness and father’s preoccupation—only we did nothing about it. Nothing.’
Tara gave a sudden small moan and dipped her face into her hands so that her long curls fell about her head. ‘Oh Bim,’ she moaned through her fingers. ‘I didn’t come and help—help chase those bees away—’
‘What can you be talking about?’ Bakul asked in amazement.
‘Bim knows,’ moaned Tara. ‘Bim knows what I’m talking about.’
Bim flapped her palm-leaf fan with a brisk clatter as if to call Tara to attention, remind her of the need to be sensible. Bakul said, when a little light dawned, ‘You’ve always had this thing about bees, Tara.’
‘So would you,’ she cried, ‘if you’d seen that swarm that attacked Bim—that huge black swarm.’
‘Oh,’ said Bim, seeing at last what Tara saw. She laughed and flapped her fan airily. ‘You mean in the Lodi Gardens. That awful picnic when the Misra girls were being looked over by those boys. And we felt so awkward, we walked away to that tomb. And a boy threw a stone, I think, and that was how the bees were disturbed and attacked us.’
‘And I ran away,’ moaned Tara, rocking back and forth. ‘I just turned and fled.’
‘What else could you do?’ asked Bim, genuinely surprised that Tara should find in it any matter for debate.
‘They would have attacked you too if you had stayed,’ Bakul agreed.
‘You ran for help,’ said Bim in the voice of a sensible nurse applying medicine to a wound. ‘I sent you to fetch help.’
Tara raised her face and gave her a quick look to see if she were aware she was telling a lie, if she were deliberately doing to it salve Tara’s conscience. It was too dark that moonless night to make out an expression on any face, and Tara had to calm her agitation by accepting that Bim had genuinely forgotten the details, not blurred or distorted them for Tara’s sake. She felt a certain relief that time had blurred the events of that bizarre day, even if only in others’ minds and not hers.
‘You still remember that?’ Bim asked. ‘I had quite forgotten.’
Tara opened her mouth to say something more—now that she had brought it out in the open, even if only under cover of darkness, she wanted to pursue it to its end. She wanted to ask for forgiveness and understanding, not simply forgetfulness and incomprehension. But neither Bim nor Bakul was interested. They were talking about the Misra family.
‘It is very strange,’ said Bakul, ‘meeting them at intervals of several years.’ He drew on his cigar. ‘One imagines they too have spent the time in travelling, working, having all kinds of experiences—and then one comes back and finds them exactly as they were, exactly where they were.’
‘Only more so,’ said Bim, laughing.
‘Yes, that is true—more so,’ he said and gave her an approving look. He had always admired Bim, even if she infuriated him often, and Tara sensed this admiration in the murky air. She sensed it with a small prick of jealousy—a minute prick that simply reminded her how very close she was to Bakul, how entirely dependent on him for her own calm and happiness. She felt very vulnerable that evening. Perhaps it was the prickly heat spreading over her skin like a red map.
‘The boys never were any good,’ he was saying, ‘and now they are grown men they are even more silly and idle and obese. Where are their wives, by the way? The last time we came to Delhi, I think we saw a wife or two.’
‘The wives come sometimes but soon go back to their families in disgust. Women like change, you know,’ said Bim. "The wives wanted the new life, they wanted to be modern women. I think they wanted to move into their own separate homes, in New Delhi, and cut their hair short and give card parties, or open boutiques or learn modelling. They can’t stand our sort of Old Delhi life—the way the Misras vegetate here in the bosom of the family. So they spend as much time as they can away.’
‘And Jaya and Sarla,’ Tara said sympathetically, almost tearfully, feeling for them as well as for herself, feeling for all women, helpless and abandoned. ‘Poor things.’
‘Yes, abandoned by their husbands. Isn’t it odd how they were married together and abandoned together?’
‘Abandoned? Are they actually divorced?’
‘I think they are—but it’s not a word that’s used in their family, you know. In their case, it was the husbands who were too modern, too smart. They played golf and they danced and gave cocktail parties. Imagine, poor Jaya and Sarla who only ever wanted to knit them sweaters and make them pickles. They soon came home to Papa and Mama—were sent home, actually. For years they used to talk of going back to their husbands and make up reasons for not joining them where they were—they were in the army and the navy, I think, which was convenient. Now I notice they no longer do. Now all they talk about is their school.’
‘At least they have that.’
‘Least is the right word—the very least,’ said Bim with asperity. ‘I think they hate it really—they hate children, they hate teaching.’
‘Do they?’ said Tara, shocked. Hate was a word that always shocked her. The image of a dead dog immediately rose before her, bleeding. ‘Then they shouldn’t teach.’
‘Oh they don’t say they do—perhaps they don’t even know they do—but you can see it by the way they look, so haggard and eaten up.’ Having said that, she fell silent quite abruptly and would say nothing more. Tara wondered if she were drawing a parallel between her own life and those of the Misra girls. There had been that doctor once, she recalled. The memory came whining out of the dark like a mosquito, dangling its long legs and hovering just out of reach. Tara could not remember his name. How stupid, when he had been in and out of their house all that year that Raja had been ill. And Aunt Mira. Tara recalled his narrow, underprivileged face, his cautious way of holding his bag close to him as he came up the drive as if afraid that Bim would bark at him or even bite.
Amused in spite of herself, she uncharacteristically interrupted some tediously long-drawn platitude of Bakul’s to say ‘Oh, and Bim, do you ever see Dr—Dr—what was his name?’
Bim sat very still, very rigid, a shape in grey wedged into a canvas chair. She turned her face slightly towards Tara like an elderly bird inclining its beak. ‘Who do you mean?’ she asked, and her voice was like a bird’s, a little hoarse, cracked.
‘Oh, the doctor who used to look after Raja,’ said Tara, striking her forehead with her hand. But she sensed Bim’s disapproval—or was it distress?—and wished now to withdraw. ‘I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Dr Biswas,’ Bim told her flatly. ‘No, I haven’t seen him since Mira-masi died,’ she added.
Then they were all three silent. All three were annoyed—Bakul at not being listened to, Tara at her own obtuseness, and Bim at having to listen to her and Bakul and not be left alone. She gathered her feet under the hem of her sari and looked straight ahead of her, into the screen of shrubs, absolutely remote from them.
And Tara, who had thought of redeeming herself tonight from years of sticky guilt, felt she had thoughtlessly plunged into greater depths—murkier, blac
ker depths—and was coated with the scum of an even greater guilt. She looked despairingly towards Bakul to help her out. But Bakul was glaring. Bakul was wagging his foot in disapproval and distaste at this unsatisfactory audience.
They all sat together as if at the bottom of a well, caught by its stone walls, trapped in its gelatinous waters. Till Bim gave her arm one loud thwack with her palm-leaf fan and exclaimed ‘Mosquitoes! They are impossible.’
Badshah started up out of his sleep at the whack which had resounded like a shot in the night. Ready to charge, he looked wildly about him. It made Bim laugh. ‘Lie down, lie down,’ she placated him, pushing at him with her bare foot and he lay down again with a sigh, edging a little closer to her.
The mosquitoes that night were like the thoughts of the day embodied in monster form, invisible in the dark but present everywhere, most of all in and around the ears, piercingly audible. Bim could hear Tara’s voice repeating all the cruel things she had so gently said—‘Do you ever see Dr—Dr—what was his name?’ and ‘When one is old, one has all kinds of fears, apprehensions’—and Tara reading aloud a letter from Raja, a letter Raja had written to her, not to Bim. Her own name was not mentioned in that letter. Raja had not written to her or referred to her. Had there not been a quiet, primly folded-up pride in Tara’s tone as she read that letter addressed to her? At last the adored, the admired elder brother was paying attention to her, whom he had always ignored, for now he had turned his back on Bim.
Bim saw all their backs, turned on her, a row of backs, turned. She folded her arms across her face—she did not want to see the ugly sight. She wanted them to go away and leave her.
They had come like mosquitoes—Tara and Bakul, and behind them the Misras, and somewhere in the distance Raja and Benazir—only to torment her and, mosquito-like, sip her blood. All of them fed on her blood, at some time or the other had fed—it must have been good blood, sweet and nourishing. Now, when they were full, they rose in swarms, humming away, turning their backs on her.
All these years she had felt herself to be the centre—she had watched them all circling in the air, then returning, landing like birds, folding up their wings and letting down their legs till they touched solid ground. Solid ground. That was what the house had been—the lawn, the rose walk, the guava trees, the veranda: Bim’s domain. The sound of Baba’s gramophone and the pigeons. Summer days and nights. In winter, flower-beds and nuts and cotton quilts. Aunt Mira and the dog, roses and the cat—and Bim. Bim, who had stayed, and become part of the pattern, inseparable. They had needed her as much as they had needed the sound of the pigeons in the veranda and the ritual of the family gathering on the lawn in the evening.
But the pattern was now very old. Tara called it old. It had all faded. The childhood colours, blood-red and pigeon-blue, were all faded and sunk into the muddy greys and browns of the Jumna river itself. Bim, too, grey-haired, mud-faced, was only a brown fleck in the faded pattern. If you struck her, dust would fly. If you sniffed, she’d make you sneeze. An heirloom, that was all—not valuable, not beautiful, but precious on account of age. Precious—to whom?
Turning on her side, her cheek glued with sweat to the thick fold of her elbow, she stared at Baba lying stretched out so peacefully, so passively on the cot next to hers on the dark veranda. Was she precious to him? But he was unaware of her, as unaware in waking as in sleep. He never raised his eyes from the gramophone turntable, never noticed if she were gay or sad, grey or young. If she were to vanish, if a loop of the Jumna river were to catch her round the waist and swirl her away like an earthen pot, or urn of ashes, then Baba would not know. He would not see. He would beautifully continue to sleep.
And that was for the best, that was how it should be, she told herself. But a mosquito came circling round her head, inserted its drill into her ear and began to whine. She flapped at it in fury.
When a letter arrived from their father’s office in the familiar long brown envelope, she marched straight into Baba’s room with it and said, abruptly, ‘Baba, here’s another letter from Sharma. He wants one of us to come to the office to attend a meeting. He doesn’t say what it’s about but he says it is important for one of us to come. Will you go?’
Baba, who had given a start when she bounded in, her hair streaming, with such decision and determination, shrank against the pillow on his bed, shrivelled up as at some too great blaze of heat, while the gramophone wailed on. He compressed his white lips, inclined his head towards the record with the most acute attention, as though it might supply him with an answer.
Bim paced up and down quickly, making abrupt turns. ‘Or would you like me to go? Hmm, yes, I suppose I should. But Sharma hates that—I embarrass him. He hates having to talk to me, so he doesn’t. Shall I send Bakul? Ask Bakul?’ She looked at Baba so fiercely that his head began to wag as if she had tapped it. ‘Yes? You think so? I could ask him—but I won’t,’ she immediately added, grimly. ‘He’ll go, and he’ll be so patronising, and he’ll come back full of advice. I have to make up my own mind. And yours,’ she said, with a small, vicious stab. Then seeing him helplessly wagging his head, she clutched her head and burst out ‘Oh, if only Raja would take care of these things.’
Baba’s head wagged in agreement and, when she had stalked out of the room, continued to wag as if he could not stop. Then the record ran down and he put out his hand to wind it up again. As he wound, he became intent on the winding, and it calmed him. His head steadied itself. He forgot Bim. Music unfurled itself. On and on like a long scroll that he held in his hands.
‘You see,’ she pounced on Tara next when she saw Bakul leaving the house, freshly redolent of shaving cream, lotions and colognes, in his uncle’s chauffeur-driven car, and found Tara folding clothes and packing them into suitcases opened out on her bed, with a happy air of preoccupation and of imagining the busy days ahead with her daughters, at the wedding, in Raja’s house. Bim’s sudden interruption made her drop a bag of shoes onto her toes and start.
‘This is what I mean,’ Bim was almost shouting, waving a letter in her face. ‘It’s all very well for Raja to write sentimental letters and say how he cares, and how he will never, and how he will ever—but who is to deal with Sharma? He writes letter upon letter to say we must attend an important meeting, he wants to discuss—then who is to go down to Chandni Chowk and do it? Where is Raja then? Then Raja isn’t there—ever, never.’
‘But he hasn’t been here for years, Bim,’ Tara said in amazement. ‘He’s been in Hyderabad all his adult life. Sharma knows that. He must be used to dealing with you.’
‘He may be—but I am not. I don’t understand the insurance business. Father never bothered to teach me. For all father cared, I could have grown up illiterate and—and cooked for my living, or swept. So I had to teach myself history, and teach myself to teach. But father never realized—and Raja doesn’t realize—that that doesn’t prepare you for running an insurance business. Sometimes I think we should just sell our shares in it—sell out to Sharma. What do you think?’
Tara sat down on the edge of the bed and frowned to show she was considering the matter although she was too alarmed by Bim’s wild appearance and wild speech to think. ‘Why not speak to Bakul first?’ she said at last, with great relief at this piece of inspiration. ‘Let me discuss it with Bakul—he may be able to advise you.’
But although this had been Bim’s own initial idea, now she pulled a sour face at it and went on with her tirade as if Tara’s suggestion were not worth considering. ‘Because one’s parents never considered the future, never made provisions for it, one is left to feel a fool—to make a fool of oneself,’ she stormed on. ‘Why must I appeal to Bakul, to Raja, for help? Yet that is what I am doing, going down on my knees to them—’
‘Oh Bim, just asking for a bit of advice,’ Tara clucked, a little afraid of her tone.
‘How my students would laugh at me. I’m always trying to teach them, train them to be different from what we were at their age�
��to be a new kind of woman from you or me—and if they knew how badly handicapped I still am, how I myself haven’t been able to manage on my own—they’d laugh, wouldn’t they? They’d despise me.’
‘I don’t see why, Bim,’ Tara said as consolingly as she could. She was so frightened by this revelation of Bim’s fears and anxieties that she was too unnerved to be tactful. ‘Don’t see it as a man’s business or a woman’s business—that is silly nowadays. Just see it as a—a family business. Yes, a family business,’ she repeated, happy to have come upon such a felicitous expression. ‘The whole family should be consulted—Raja and Bakul and everyone—before you do anything. Yes, we should have a family consultation,’ she said excitedly, seeing a way at last to bring about the family gathering she pined for.
‘And will Raja come?’ said Bim bitterly, in a quieter tone, as she settled down on the windowsill and leaned against the netting that covered it. It sagged beneath her weight, holding her back like a hammock.
‘If you asked him to—I think he’d be thrilled,’ Tara assured her at once.
‘Oh yes, thrilled,’ Bim made a sour face. ‘Who would be thrilled to return to this—this dead old house?’ She thwacked the wire screen with her fist so that the dust flew out of it. ‘Anyone would be horrified to return to it. Weren’t you horrified?’ she demanded. ‘To see it so dead and stale—just as it’s always been?’
‘But it’s not,’ Tara assured her earnestly. ‘I mean—only superficially, Bim. Yes, when we arrived, I did notice the house hadn’t been painted and the garden is neglected—that sort of thing. But I think the atmosphere has changed—ever since you took over, Bim. The kind of atmosphere that used to fill it when father and mother were alive, always ill or playing cards or at the club, always away, always leaving us out, leaving us behind—and then Mira-masi becoming so—so strange, and Raja so ill—till it seemed that the house was ill, illness passing from one generation to the other so that anyone who lived in it was bound to become ill and the only thing to do was to get away from it, escape . . .’ she stuttered to a halt, quite pale with the passion she had allowed into her words, and aghast at it.