by Anita Desai
The only thing that made them tolerate her behaviour was the evidence that she directed it not only towards them but even at her husband Arvind, who came to deposit his family there and would collect them later. Mama was astonished at the way Aruna scolded him continuously. 'Oh, you have again spilt tea in your saucer. Now it will drip all over you,' she would cry, or pull at his shirt and say, 'But this shirt does not go with those trousers. Why didn't you ask me first?' Clearly Aruna had a vision of a perfect world in which all of them—her own family as well as Arvind's—were flaws she was constantly uncovering and correcting in her quest for perfection. It made for a very uncomfortable household but it was, in a way, touching. Seeing Aruna vexed to the point of tears because the cook's pudding had sunk and spread instead of remaining upright and solid, or because Arvind had come to dinner in his bedroom slippers, or Papa was wearing a t-shirt with a hole under one arm, Uma felt pity for her: was this the realm of ease and comfort for which Aruna had always pined and that some might say she had attained? Certainly it brought her no pleasure: there was always a crease of discontent between her eyebrows and an agitation that made her eyelids flutter, disturbing Uma who noticed it.
Once even Mama asked if she had something in her eye to make her blink so, and when Aruna angrily denied this, Mama told her about the optician's suggestion that Uma have her eyes examined by a specialist in Bombay. 'A specialist—in Bombay!' Aruna gave a shriek. 'Do you know what that would cost?' She seemed so horrified by the idea that Uma felt bound to reassure her and say she was sure Dr Tandon was really quite good enough. 'Of course he is!' Aruna exclaimed.
ALL that Uma enjoyed of that visit was the trip on the river in the big flat-bottomed boat they hired to hold all the guests who had come to take the ritual bath. Uma was excited—Mama had never permitted her family this dangerous rite; she saw no reason why one should place one's life in danger to prove one's religious belief which could surely be taken for granted.
The boatman poled the boat slowly to where two rivers met, throwing up a sandbar where the water ran shallow in the very centre of the great green depths. He steadied the boat by plunging the pole deep into the rippled sand and advised them to bathe at this point, cautioning them against stepping off the bar and against currents.
Everyone was in a state of high excitement, all the women in light cotton saris worn specially for the occasion, now clambering over the side, screaming when the boat rocked and clutching each other in pleasurable panic. Uma, thrilled by this license, simply sprang off the prow and plunged in without hesitation, as if this were what she had been preparing to do all her life. Immediately she disappeared into the water, having leapt not onto the sandbar where the others stood splashing but into the deep dark river itself. She went down like a stone while the women screamed, 'Uma, Uma! Where is she?' Someone caught at the end of her sari as it floated by, a scrap of white muslin, then the arm that it enfolded, and the shoulder, and hauled her out onto the sandbar. She knelt there, in the shallows, water pouring from her mouth and hair. She rose, gasping for breath, struggling, flailing her arms and choking like a big, wounded water bird. Aruna's voice called out in warning, 'Uma, don't! Don't you dare, Uma—' and Uma shook herself and wrapped her arms about her and blinked the water out of her eyes and stared back at her. No, she was not going to have a fit, she assured Aruna with a pleading, pacifying look; this was not a fit, she promised.
What it was was that when she had plunged into the dark water and let it close quickly and tightly over her, the flow of the river, the current, drew her along, clasping her and dragging her with it. It was not fear she felt, or danger. Or, rather, these were only what edged something much darker, wilder, more thrilling, a kind of exultation—it was exactly what she had always wanted, she realised. Then they had saved her. The saving was what made her shudder and cry, there on the sandbar, soaking wet, while the morning sun leapt up in the hazy, sand-coloured sky and struck the boat, the brass pots that the women held, and their white drifting garments in the water.
Ten
MRS O'Henry is giving a coffee party. She has invited Uma. Uma is flushed with delight, the bottle-thick lenses of her spectacles gleam with pleasure as she listens to the voice on the telephone, that deep, sing-song burr. MamaPapa, watching her intently from the swing, purse their lips.
'Who was that?' they ask, although they have already guessed.
'Mrs O'Henry—she has invited me to a coffee party.' Uma can hardly speak; she would like to keep this treasured invitation to herself—it is for herself alone, after all—and would have preferred not to divulge it. Of course that is out of the question.
'Why?' asks Papa.
'Coffee? Why coffee?' asks Mama.
Uma jerks her head back. 'Why?' she snaps back at them. 'She is giving a party—a coffee party, not a tea party—and she has invited some ladies, and me.'
'Tchch!' Mama pronounces her opinion of this ridiculous, outlandish invention, and moodily swings back and forth.
'Why? What is wrong?' Uma demands heatedly.
'Nothing is wrong,' Mama replies sourly, 'only I don't see the need for such parties. Coffee parties. Mrs O'Henry invites you to a party, then you will have to invite her to a party—'
'Yes, then what?' Uma is defiant. She rubs her nose with the flat of her hand and makes it gleam with defiance. 'Isn't that what you do with your friends—go to their homes for dinner, then invite them to ours?'
Papa's frown has grown so deep he has become locked inside it, he can't emerge into speech, and Mama speaks for him because displeasure always makes her articulate.
'That is different,' she says, waving a hand as if dismissing a fly. 'That is because of Papa's work. We have to invite certain people, and we have to visit them. But where is the need for you to go running after Mrs O'Henry?'
'Papa has retired—he doesn't have any work,' Uma flares up, 'and still you go to dinner parties and to the club. And I don't go running after Mrs O'Henry—she invited me—you heard her.'
'Why does she keep telephoning you?' Papa speaks up, needled beyond endurance at this mention of his retirement. He has kept his office open, has his clerk come twice a week to do his correspondence, and does not like to think his life is in any way diminished by such a thing as retirement. What would become of his status, his standing, in this town or even in his family, if he gave up these vestiges of his authority and power? It could not be permitted. It must be nipped immediately in the bud. He lowers his brow and directs his blackest look at Uma. 'Is she trying to get you to—'
'Papa,' Uma interrupts in exasperation, 'what can she get from me? She only wants me to come and meet other ladies she has invited for coffee!'
'Tchch,' Papa says disgustedly, turning his head away as if it is no use talking to someone as naive and as backward as his older, his old daughter.
'It is not good to go running around. Stay home and do your work—that is best,' Mama opines with an air of piety.
'I do my work all the time, every day,' Uma cries tearfully. 'Why can't I go out sometimes? I never go anywhere. I want to go to Mrs O'Henry's party.'
Mama summons up all her patience and tries another tack. 'When we tell you to come to the club with us, you won't come. You don't want to come. So now why are you running to Mrs O'Henry? These Christian missionaries—they really know how to entice simple people, and you don't understand they want something from you in return.'
Uma is amazed. 'From me? What can Mrs O'Henry want from me? She gives me her Christmas cards, she sends us Christmas cake—'
MamaPapa exchange looks. Then Papa says, 'Can't you think? She is trying to convert you of course.'
Uma gasps. She tries to digest this idea. It is so grave, it takes time to comprehend. When she does, she becomes agitated, as if she is trapped. 'Convert me? What makes you say that?'
Mama sits forward and her face narrows. 'What does she give you all those cards for—those angels and crosses and things—eh?'
'Mama! Those a
re just Christmas cards—she knows I collect them. You know I have a card collection. And the angels and crosses—they are Christmas decorations.'
Mama purses her lips as if to say she knows better, and Papa looks darker. But Uma has got to her feet and flounced off to her room and banged the door shut in rage and determination.
MRS O'Henry has spread her plastic lace tablecloth over the low table in her dim, somewhat bleak drawing room with its few pieces of battered wicker furniture and gloomily green curtains. On it she has placed plates with sandwiches and cakes and a coffee pot with only a small chip knocked off its spout. The sandwiches are made with peanut butter and the cakes are called cookies and are very dry. The guests giggle as they try to bite into these rocky lumps, and Uma flushes, feels she must make up for their impoliteness.
'Very nice,' she nods at Mrs O'Henry, holding one in her hand and, with her feet planted apart on the cotton rug, tackles it with every show of pleasure. 'Where did you get from—Bhola Ram's?'
'Oh no, not that Bhola Ram,' Mrs O'Henry dismisses the name of the local baker with the greatest scorn. 'I order my peanut butter from Landour and the cookies are baked according to a recipe in the Landour cook book. The ladies in our mission wrote it especially for Indian conditions, you know, which are different from those at home. But they have lived in this country for a long time and they know what ingredients are available and how Indian ovens work. They've taught a local grocer to make peanut butter, and pickle relish, and blackberry jam, and other things for folks like us. It sure helps.'
'Pickle relish?' one lady enquires, through sticky lips and teeth coated with peanut butter.
'Yes, pickles like you have, but sweet, not hot.'
'Sweet pickles?' the lady explodes with astonishment.
Uma flashes her an angry look through her spectacles. Her spectacles are very expressive. 'It must be nice,' she says, and swings one leg over the other inside the tent of her flowered sari. 'One day I will try to make it. Papa is fond of sweets.'
Mrs O'Henry throws her a grateful look—Uma is certainly the most promising of that circle of ladies. Perhaps because she has had some years at the convent school? Not that nuns are the best influence for young people. 'You should persuade him to send you to Landour one summer,' she says. 'It's real nice, up in the mountains. Cool. Real refreshing.' She sighs and looks up at the slowly revolving fan which has a squeak and a rattle they have never managed to get rid of. 'One needs to get away, from time to time,' she sighs again, with real feeling. Mrs O'Henry has two shining braids of hair that cross over the top of her head and are pinned reatly in place, but her eyes have wrinkles around them and are so faded that they are the colour of washed pebbles.
'Once we went to Simla,' one of the ladies ventures. 'But the water there is not good. My children fell ill.'
'Uh-oh,' Mrs O'Henry says with automatic sympathy.
'Yes, they had very bad diarrhoea. Very bad. With great difficulty we brought them back by train. My husband said better not go again if they only become ill.'
'I always feel better when I am in the mountains,' Mrs O'Henry insists and the washed pebbles of her eyes come to life momentarily. She turns to Uma who seems the most likely to sympathise. 'All of us from the mission collect there from all over India, in the summer. It's great. We have concerts and lectures; we get visiting preachers from other parts, to talk and show us slides. At the end of June there's a big fair at Woodstock School. Folks come all the way from Mussoorie for the fair. Last year, I was in charge of the Christmas card stall. Guess how much I made? For the church? Two hundred rupees in one morning!'
'For the church?' the incorrigible ladies twitter.
'You made the cards yourself?' Uma says. 'Please show us—I would like to learn.'
And Mrs O'Henry seems greatly relieved to lead them away from the coffee table to the latticed veranda at the back where she works. She sets out her coloured papers and scissors and sequins and ribbons and stencils and, instead of educating the ladies in the appreciation of peanut butter and cookies, she is able to impress them—or at least Uma—by a demonstration of leaf-pressing and stencilling.
When they leave, the ladies laugh gaily all the way back to their own homes and families where no one expects any such talents or expertise from them, but Uma clutches a large envelope full of Mrs O'Henry's failures, each pressed fern and violet and pastel paper frill to be added to her collection—tokens of a fairytale existence elsewhere. Elsewhere. Elsewhere.
On saying goodbye, Mrs O'Henry asks her, 'Now isn't your brother in the States? At a university there? Mr O'Henry said something to me—'
'Oh yes,' Uma nods, 'Arun is at the University of Mass-a-chew-setts,' she enunciates carefully.
'My!' exclaims Mrs O'Henry. 'I've got a sister lives in Masssachusetts. It's real cold there in the winter, she says. Hope he's warm!'
Uma nods and goes off down the drive. What fills her head is the idea of Landour—would she ever dare to ask Papa to let her go there, perhaps together with kind Mrs O'Henry?
On seeing her parents' faces when she returns, she puts the idea away along with the cards, at the top of her cupboard.
***
IF one word could sum up Arun's childhood—or at least Uma's abiding impression of it—that word was 'education'. Although this was not what loomed large in the lives of his sisters—who were, after all, being raised for marriage, by Mama, competently enough, or at least as well as she could manage considering the material at hand—if there was one thing Papa insisted on in the realm of home and family, then it was education for his son: the best, the most, the highest. Was this not what his father had endeavoured to provide for him and his brother Bakul, and had it not been the making of them? So what Uma remembered most vividly was seeing him set off for St John's School, his thin legs emerging sadly from his wide khaki shorts the way his scrawny neck did from his khaki shirt; he was often still coughing or snuffling or purplish from the last round of illness, his hand compulsively tearing at a tie round his neck, reduced to little more than a string but still an essential part of his equipment. He carried his bag of books and pencil boxes and geometry tools as a coolie might stagger along under an oversized load. Then he staggered back, late in the afternoon, ink on his fingers, chalk on his clothes, socks slipping down into his grey canvas shoes, to the glass of milk that was Mama's contribution to his education—and after that it was the turn of the tutors.
Tutors came in a regular sequence, an hour allotted to each, for tuition in maths, in physics, in chemistry, in Hindi, in English composition—in practically every subject he had already dealt with during the hours at school. Uma and Aruna were warned to keep away, not to provide the faintest distraction, but Uma often peeped into Papa's office room which was given over, in the afternoons, to Arun's education. There he sat, at Papa's desk, squirming, chewing his pencils down to the lead, his erasers to mousy shreds of rubber, while the tutors leant back in Papa's armchair, some fiddling inside their ears with a pencil, others scratching dandruff out of their hair in clouds, or wiggling a foot frantically up and down under the desk, to help them through the rigours of drumming theorems, dates, formulae and Sanskrit verses into Arun's head which began to look like one of the rubbers he liked to chew, or the bitten end of a pencil.
The sun would have sunk, there would be perhaps half an hour left of dusty daylight—in the summer, but not in the winter—when Papa would stride into the office, see off the last of the tutors (who also got the very last dregs of Arun's dwindling attention), and magnanimously tell Arun, 'Now go and play. Go and stretch your legs. Have a game of cricket—or something.' Arun would rise creakily to his feet, scrabble together his books and notes in a great pile, and shuffle off to his room with the gait of a broken old man. Throwing them down in a series of dull thuds, he would himself collapse onto his bed, limply put out a hand to lift a comic book from a stack of Supermans and Captain Marvels, and disappear under it. Papa would shout, 'Son! Bring your badminton racquet ou
t—or your cricket bat. You must have some exercise—healthy mind, healthy body—' but Arun would not stir, and Mama would make a little clucking sound of sympathy and prevent Papa from dragging him out bodily.
Then there were the exams when the pace of study would work itself up in its annual crescendo, the tutors in a frenzy, having to make sure their wards performed creditably in order to ensure another year of lucrative tuitions, Arun staying up night after night, sunk into his books while mosquitoes hovered above his head and perspiration slid stickily down his collar. Papa sat out on the veranda, perspiring too, bags collecting under his eyes with weariness but by his vigilance making certain that Arun would not slacken.
After the last of the school examinations—the most frenzied, the most panic-stricken, the most gravely consequential of all—Mama and Uma thought that at last the boy would be free. Mama had ideas about sending him to Aruna in Bombay for a little holiday. Papa treated the suggestion with contempt. 'Holiday? In Bombay? Is that what will get him into a good university? He has to take his entrance tests now, he has to prepare his applications, we have to make lists, collect information—' and it was Papa's busiest time, bustling around to the club, meeting old friends he had not seen in years, gathering advice, references, information, sending Arun off to the bank, the post office, signing statements, filling in applications: there was no end to the paperwork involved, if Arun were to go abroad for 'higher studies'.