Fasting, Feasting

by Anita Desai

  Mama worked hard at trying to dispose of Uma, sent her photograph around to everyone who advertised in the matrimonial columns of the Sunday papers, but it was always returned with the comment 'We are looking for someone taller/fairer/more educated, for Sanju/Pinku/Dimpu', even though the photograph had been carefully touched up by the local photographer, giving Uma pink cheeks and almost-blue eyes as she perched on a velvet stool before a cardboard balustrade in his studio.

  The man who finally approved of it and considered it good enough for him was not so young; 'he was married before,' his relatives wrote candidly, 'but he has no issue.' He was 'in the pharmaceutical business, earning decent income', which was taken to mean that he was a travelling salesman who received a commission in addition to his salary. 'He is a good family man with sense of responsibility,' they wrote, which was interpreted to mean he was living with his parents in an extended family. Since it was clear Uma was not going to receive any other offer no matter what a good job the photographer had done with his unpromising material, Mama and Papa decided to proceed with the negotiations. The dowry offered by Papa, although modest since he had already thrown one away—as he never stopped reminding the women in the family—must have seemed like a bonus to a man who may not have expected more than one dowry in a lifetime. It was accepted with alacrity.

  Since the previous meeting between the prospective bride and groom had proved so unpropitious, it was tacitly decided to do without one in this case. And so the bridegroom's party was on its way. Mama frantically supervised the cooking of meals and making of sweets for three days in a row. Papa was seeing to the marquee being set up on the lawn, the priest and all his requirements in the way of ceremony and ritual, and the musicians to play during the reception. Uma found herself richer by a dozen saris, a set of gold jewellery and another of pearls, then was handed a garland and posted at the entrance to the marquee to wait for the bridegroom.

  He came from his town by train along with his brothers, cousins, father and other male relatives as well as a party of male friends. At the railway station they got into taxis and auto rickshaws and arrived at the head of the street where they were met by a brass band and the horse they had hired, a rather spindly and knock-kneed one but brightly dressed in garlands and tinsel. This he mounted, with help from his brothers and friends, and so proceeded to their gate, his friends dancing and turning somersaults the whole length of the street while the band played 'Colonel Bogey'.

  Uma felt the drum and the trumpet sound in the very depths of her chest, pounding on it as if it were a tin pan. Her henna-painted hands, holding the garland, trembled. Mama stood behind her, securing the jasmines in her hair, and Aruna danced from one foot to the other, her lips stained red with the lipstick she had been allowed to use at last, and cried, 'Uma, he is coming! He is coming!'

  He slid off the horse, making it crash its knees together and nearly fall, then approached Uma with a damp and wilting garland. His hands, too, shook a little. His brothers, who supported him on each side, steered him towards Uma, then raised the curtain of silver and gold tinsel from his face. He looked at Uma glumly and without much interest. What he saw did not seem to make him change his attitude. He handed over his garland and Uma was made to drape hers over his head. She bit her lips as she did so, he seemed so reluctant to accept it. The man looked as old to her as Papa, nearly, and was grossly overweight too, while his face was pockmarked. None of this disturbed her as much, however, as did his sullen expression. He so resembled all the other men who had ever looked her way—they had all been reduced to precisely this state of unenthusiasm—that she relinquished all her foolishly unrealistic hopes.

  So it was in this spirit that they sat through the long ceremony; afterwards Uma remembered only that the smoke from the ceremonial fire over which the priest presided blew into her face all the way through it (and ayah, who squatted on her haunches nearby in the new sari given for the occasion, whispered in her ear, 'That means he will follow you everywhere,' and tinkled her many new glass bangles gaily by clapping her hands at her own wit). Every now and then Mama nudged her and that was a signal for her to throw rice, or oil, into the fire at which the priest cried loudly, 'Om swa-ha! Om swa-ha!' after which he dropped his voice to a mutter again while running through the interminable Sanskrit verses audible and comprehensible to him alone. Not that anyone was listening, apart from Uma and her husband who had no choice. All the guests and the family wandered around the marquee, drinking soft drinks and shouting with laughter. Occasionally one of them would come by and sit for a while to watch by her side. Uma caught a glimpse now and then of Bakul Uncle and Lila Aunty, Mrs Joshi, the others. She watched to see if Ramu would appear, but he did not—he was on his farm, his parents said (they had bought it for him in a plan to keep him from drink—or drugs, whatever it was) and no one knew if he had received the invitation; he had become very uncommunicative, they said. And Anamika—Anamika was with her husband and in-laws, they had not given her permission to come. 'They just can't let her out of their sight for even one day, they love her so much,' Lila Aunty assured them.

  The ceremony wound on at its own ponderous pace. Finally the sullen bridegroom broke in and said curtly to the priest, 'Cut it short, will you—that's enough now.' The priest looked offended, Uma was mortified. If he could not even tolerate the wedding ceremony, how would he tolerate their marriage?

  When it was over, her husband took her to the railway station—not on his horse, Uma was relieved to find, but in a car hired for the occasion. All his relatives were already on the platform with the luggage, carrying the presents of boxes of sweets that Mama had given them, discussing the wedding—and particularly the wedding feast that had followed—in loud voices; Uma gathered they had considerable complaints to make about it. She was heaved into a four-berth compartment with him, his elder brother and sister-in-law. None of them paid her any attention once they had found her a place to sit on the bunk. They pulled out a pack of cards, sat themselves cross-legged on the next bunk and began to play rummy.

  The train clattered through the dusty night, stopping frequently at stations that were luridly lit with naphtha flares and swarming with tea and peanut vendors, then rattled on. Uma tried to sit upright and stay awake, but the exhaustion of the entire day and the rocking motion of the train made her sag, then collapse on her side and fall asleep with her cheek and her flower garlands pressed into the grimy green rexine of the bunk. She woke once in the dark, with only the blue night light gloomily lit above, and found herself pressed against the wall by a heavy figure dressed in slippery nylon garments and many bangles: it was her sister-in-law, rhythmically snoring. She raised her head in a panic to see where her husband was—she knew she must stay with him, Mama had said so—and saw mounds of flesh heaped on other bunks; he was one of them, she told herself, and tried to go back to sleep, suffocated as she was by her sister-in-law's thick fleshy back and odour of perspiration.

  At daybreak they arrived at a small but crowded and clamorous station in the town where Uma now was to live. The marriage party climbed down from the train, yawning and unwashed, looking much the worse for wear. They got into tongas tiredly and crossly and made their way through bazaars full of bicycle rickshaws and barrows to their family home, a low yellow house in a lane where cows munched garbage and dogs slunk about, growling. Here Uma was handed over to her husband's female relatives—a hardbitten mother who kept her teeth tightly clenched on a betel nut as she examined Uma with shrewd small eyes, and the wives of his brothers, and their children. Having shown Uma into a room that led off the kitchen, and put down the trunk that held her clothes—those containing the things Mama had bought for the house were to follow—her husband muttered, 'You may rest. I am going to work.'

  'To work?' Uma asked in surprise, for the wedding had surely been an unusual event, a kind of holiday, and she had not expected it to end quite so abruptly.

  He nodded and mumbled something like, 'In Meerut,' and disappeared.
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  Uma sat down on the bed. It was a string bed with the bedding rolled up at one end. There was nowhere else to sit. There was a string across the room on which a few clothes were hung—men's clothes, her husband's clothes, she thought, quickly averting her eyes from the pyjamas and striped drawers. But there was nothing else to look at.

  After a few minutes the women started appearing—first one sister, then another, then the children, finally the mother. They stood in a ring around her, staring. They spoke to each other, making remarks about her complexion, her hair, her jewellery, her sari, the size of her hands and feet. Some lifted her hand and examined the ring, the bangles, the henna pattern. Then one sister marched to the trunk. 'Open it,' she said. Uma got up and knelt beside it to unlock it. She found her hands shaking again. They came up close, pressing against her, in order to reach into the trunk and go through its contents. They addressed each other only, making comments on her saris, her jewellery, the bottle of Evening in Paris perfume Aruna had given her, but saying nothing to her. Then they withdrew to the kitchen, one after the other, and the last one looked back over her shoulder and said, 'Change your clothes and come—we have to prepare food now.'

  Uma did as she was told, uncomfortably aware as she undressed and dressed, of their presence on the other side of the door which she had not the courage to lock and bolt. Dressed in one of her new cotton saris, she went out to the kitchen to join them, hoping they would speak directly to her, ask questions of her and so begin some communication at last. But although they gave her instructions about what to do—slice the onions and peel vegetables, pick the dhal clean and wash the rice, which she did clumsily and awkwardly because she was not used to squatting on the floor to work and had not much experience with such work anyway—they continued to talk to each other, in lowered voices, but still loud enough for her to hear their remarks on her clumsiness, her awkwardness, her clothes and her looks. She gathered they were not impressed by her and worked with her face sunk into her cotton sari and her ears burning.

  When the men returned from work, they too gave Uma a silent scrutiny as they settled down to eat. Uma was surprised that Harish was not amongst them. She did not dare ask them where he was for fear of not getting an answer. After helping the women wash the pots and pans under a splashing tap in the corner, and soaked through by the exercise, she went to her room, thinking he might come late, he was working extra hours to make up for his time away at the wedding. She lay awake on the string cot the whole night, listening to the kitchen tap drip—it was tied up with a rag and water ran from it constantly—and the stray dog in the lane outside whine, coughing and talk in the other rooms, and then, when at last it was grey with dawn and he had still not come, she got up and went into the kitchen in an anxiety that was like a choking of her throat, wanting to ask for news of him.

  His mother was making tea in a great pan, boiling milk and tea leaves and sugar together. 'Did he not tell you, he has gone to Meerut?' she asked crisply and, Uma thought, contemptuously.

  For several weeks, Uma kept writing home to tell the family that Harish was away in Meerut on work and had not returned. In those weeks she learnt how to cut vegetables in pieces of exactly the same size, how to grind spices into a wet paste and how to tell one dhal from another. All the speech directed at her was in the form of instructions; there was no other.

  THEN one day Papa arrived at the house. Uma's mouth fell open with shock and alarm when she saw him storming in at the door, and hurried towards him, afraid that he had brought bad news. It was bad, but it was not anything she had expected: Papa had learnt that they had been duped. Harish was married already, had a wife and four children in Meerut where he ran an ailing pharmaceutical factory to save which he had needed another dowry which had led him to marry again.

  The scene that followed was surely a unique and memorable one but Uma's response to it was to shut not only her eyes and ears to it—she had gone into her room, shut the door and sat on the bed, wrapping her sari over her head, around her ears and mouth and eyes, till it was all over—but even her mind, so as to block out a memory she could not have lived with. It consisted of Papa raving and ranting at one end, the mother-in-law screaming and screeching at the other, the brothers shouting and threatening in between, and the sisters-in-law clustering together to watch all the parties in a kind of bitter satisfaction.

  So Uma went home with Papa. By doing the same journey on a day train, it was as if the entire process was being reversed. The compartment was crowded this time with strangers, but Papa had so lost control of himself, was so beside himself, as not to behave normally or sanely: he beat his head with his fists, and moaned aloud about the dowry and the wedding expenses while everyone, all of them strangers—women with babies and baskets of food, men reading papers or playing cards or discussing business—turned to listen with the keenest of interest, throwing significant looks at Uma who kept her head wrapped up in her sari in an effort to screen her shame. By the time they reached their own station, everyone along the way knew of her humiliation and her ruin. It was fortunate that none of them were the lawyers and magistrates Papa ordinarily met: he would not have cared so to lose control of himself and betray his gullibility before them. It was necessary to get himself under control by the time he returned to his own circle and his normal round. Stepping out at the station that looked so large, so orderly and civilised by comparison with the others they had passed—electric fans hung from the high ceiling, magazines and paperbacks were arrayed on the shelves of Wheeler's stall—he fell silent and resumed his ordinarily grim appearance. Uma was relieved; the disintegration of Papa's personality had pained her as much as that of her marriage.

  At home Mama opened every one of the trunks Papa had insisted Uma pack and bring with her, and checked every item in them. Papa had managed to retrieve her jewellery by threatening the family with legal action—oh, what a mistake they had made by choosing a bride from a legal family, an educated family!—but it had been too demeaning to fight for every pot and pan they had contributed to the kitchen, and there was a great deal, Mama lamented, that was lost. While these scenes were being played out in the centre, the heart of the family and household, Arun withdrew to its outermost limits, hiding in his room under a blanket of comic books. If anyone were to look in, Arun was not to be found; in his place were Captain Marvel, Superman and Phantom.

  At night, in the dark and the silence, Aruna whispered to her sister, 'Uma. Uma. Did—did he touch you, Uma?' making Uma bury her head in her pillow and howl 'No! No!' so that Aruna fell back with a little sigh of disappointment. Next day she reported it to ayah who reported it to Mama. Mama and ayah appeared relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from them.

  The marriage was somehow cancelled, anulled. Uma was never told of the legal proceedings involved. It was assumed she would not understand, and was never quite certain if she had never actually married or if she was now divorced. Divorced—what a scandalous ring to the word! She could hardly bring herself to pronounce it, she knew no one who was. Once when she asked Mama—hesitantly, out of a curiosity she could not restrain—Mama smacked at the air as if at a mosquito, and snapped, 'Don't talk about it! Don't remind me of it!'

  Having cost her parents two dowries, without a marriage to show in return, Uma was considered ill-fated by all and no more attempts were made to marry her off.

  ONCE Uma overheard Mama telling Mira-masi, who was visiting, 'All those astrologers we consulted about her horoscope, what liars they proved to be,' only to have Mira-masi reply, 'It was not to astrologers you should have taken her, but to the Lord Shiva, to pray for His blessing instead.' 'And you think your Lord Shiva would have blessed her?' Mama cried. Mira-masi gave her a severe look, and Uma heard her say in her most dignified manner, 'She is blessed by the Lord. The Lord has rejected the men you chose for her because He has chosen her for Himself.'

  Uma, thunderstruck, crept away in the dark of the shadows flung by the neem tree across the terrace wher
e they sat talking, after Papa had gone to bed (Papa did not tolerate such talk). The thought that the Lord Shiva was pursuing her made her no more comfortable than the thought of all the men who had fled from her. The Lord Shiva may have been an acceptable husband to Mira-masi but even He, at least in the form of the brass image that had been stolen from her, had proved Himself elusive. She wanted to point this out to Mira-masi and Mama, to say, 'You see? It is not so easy,' but the two women sat silently beside each other, darkly brooding, and Uma knew, seeing them, their grim presences throwing dark shadows upon the wall, that she had not had their experiences, that hers was other: that of an outcast from the world of marriage, the world which, all the murmuring and whispering and muttering implied was all that mattered.