Fasting, Feasting

by Anita Desai

  Twelve

  ALL morning MamaPapa have found things for Uma to do. It is as if Papa's retirement is to be spent in this manner—sitting on the red swing in the veranda with Mama, rocking, and finding ways to keep Uma occupied. As long as they can do that, they themselves feel busy and occupied. She has to write a letter to Arun, to find out if he has received the parcel containing the tea and the shawl they sent him through Justice Dutt's son. In between she has to drive off the urchins who are after the ripe mulberries on the tree by the gate, and see if the cook has bought the green mangoes for pickling and has all the ingredients and necessary spices—but no extra that might be pilfered. Then, when Papa says his winter woollens must be spread out in the sun and sprinkled with dry neem leaves because he has seen moths hovering about them, Uma, who feels dusty and irritable from her many forays down the drive to the gate to shout at derisive little boys from the street and around to the kitchen to listen to the cook complain about having to get to the bazaar when his bicycle is broken and has not been repaired—Uma thumps her hands down on the table in front of the red swing, the table with the faded embroidered cloth dating back to her school days and sewing lessons with Sister Philomena, and stares into their faces with open defiance. She gives her nose a hard rub with the palm of her hand for extra emphasis. 'Not today,' she tells Papa loudly. 'Can't do it today.'

  She walks off to her room and shuts the door behind her. She knows that when she shuts the door MamaPapa immediately become suspicious. But she defies them to come and open it. She stands waiting for them to shout, or knock. Minutes pass and she can picture their faces, their expressions, twitching with annoyance, with curiosity, then settling into stiff disapproval.

  She opens her cupboard and considers her belongings. She could look through her collection of cards again but that is a pleasure reserved for holidays, evenings when MamaPapa are out, not just odd half-hour breaks in the routine. She could look through her collection of bangles, or handkerchiefs, but she can do that without shutting the door since Mama would not consider that subversive or dangerous. She could write a letter to a friend—a private message of despair, dissatisfaction, yearning; she has a packet of notepaper, pale violet with a. pink rose embossed in the corner—but who is the friend? Mrs Joshi? But since she lives next door, she would be surprised. Aruna? But Aruna would pay no attention, she is too busy. Cousin Ramu? Where was he? Had his farm swallowed him up? And Anamika—had marriage devoured her?

  She stands chewing her lip thoughtfully, then reaches out and picks out the small cloth-bound book she won at the Christmas bazaar. Yes: her lips purse with satisfaction.

  She sits down on her bed and lifts her feet up in a comfortable cross-legged position. She can hear the swing creaking and rocking out on the veranda, but the sound fades away when she opens the book and starts to read. She reads slowly, for lack of practice, and she is conscious that she may be interrupted at any minute, called away. But she will read a poem or two, and find the pleasure they deny her. Her lips move as she makes her way through the lines.

  'Before this rosebud wilted

  How passionately sweet

  The wild waltz swelled and lilted

  In time for flying feet!'

  Her toes twiddle with delight, and she thumps her knees to the rhythm.

  'How loud the bassoons muttered,

  The bassoons grew madly shrill;

  And oh, the vows lips uttered

  That hearts would not fulfil.'

  She cradles the book in her lap and riffles through the thick, soft pages.

  'You are wasting your life in that dull, dark room

  (As he fondled her silken folds);

  O'er the casement lean but a little, my queen,

  And see what the great world holds.

  Here the wonderful blue of your matchless hue

  Cheapen both sky and sea —

  You are far too bright to be hidden from sight

  Come fly with me, darling—fly.'

  Outside Mama is shouting, 'Uma! Uma! Papa wants cook to make him a cup of coffee.'

  Uma is frowning over the words: matchless, silken, casement, queen. She will not listen to Mama.

  'Coffee—for Papa! Uma!'

  Finally Uma throws an angry look at the door. Mama's voice is battering it, sharp as an axe. She hears the door splintering, waits for it to give way. Till it does, she will not move. She tightens her hold on the book. She strokes the cover, opens it to the title page, reads the author's beautiful, melodious name: Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Then the publisher's, equally enchanting: Gay & Hancock, at Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and the list of other books by the author: Poems of Pain, Poems of Cheer, The Kingdom of Love, Yesterdays..... If only she could find and read them all.

  But now Mama's hands are slapping at the door. 'Why have you locked the door, Uma? Open it—at once!'

  Uma gets off the bed and goes quickly to the door, on bare feet, holding her book. She throws it open so violently that Mama stumbles in, almost falling. She steadies herself against the door and, to recover her dignity, demands, 'What is going on here?'

  Uma thrusts the book into her face: Ella Wheeler Wilcox's Poems of Pleasure. Through clenched teeth, she hisses, 'Reading—this!'

  Mama bats it away like a fly after a quick, short-sighted glance. 'Reading, reading—didn't you say your eyes were hurting? So now why are you reading? Put it away and fetch a cup of coffee for Papa. It is time for Papa's coffee and biscuits,' she adds very loudly as if afraid Uma will refuse.

  Uma does not refuse. She slaps the book down on the table so that her hair brush and bottle of hair oil jump. She walks past Mama and goes towards the kitchen.

  She returns to the veranda with a tin tray—the cook has started pickling and won't be interrupted—and puts it down on the table in front of the swing. She sloshes some milk into the coffee. 'Rosebuds. Wild waltz. Passionately,' she screams at them silently. She tosses in sugar. 'Madly. Vows. Fulfil,' her silence roars at them. She clatters a spoon around the cup, spilling some into the saucer, and thrusts it at Papa. 'Here,' her eyes flash through her spectacles, 'this, this is what I know. And you, you don't.'

  He takes the cup from her, too startled to protest.

  ***

  IN later years, Mira-masi's visits became more and more infrequent. When she came, she looked gaunt, ill, and her grey hair streamed open down her back, giving her a dishevelled appearance that was a little frightening. Uma was more hesitant in her approaches than she had been, not certain if the bond formed between them by the stay in the ashram still existed. Mira-masi gave no indication if she thought it did; she mostly ignored Uma, although Uma went out into the garden at dawn to collect flowers for her morning rituals, ripping off bright canna lilies and livid hibiscus flowers for lack of anything more suitable for the altar, and Mira-masi did not seem to notice, or care. When Uma asked what she might bring her to cook—the veranda hearth was always swept and cleaned and repaired with fresh clay when Mira-masi arrived—Mira-masi only shook her head: she would cook nothing. 'But what will you eat?' Uma asked anxiously, suppressing selfish thoughts of the sweets Mira-masi had once made for them so willingly and lavishly. 'You must cook something, masi. You don't look strong. I'll bring you spinach, corn-meal—what would you like?' Mira-masi only shook her head. 'I've brought enough food with me,' she snapped, and produced from the folds of her cloth sling some bananas and peanuts and a few shrivelled dates: it was all she would eat.

  She still stalked down the road to the pink temple at the end, but with such an air of determined privacy—as if defying the others to stop her or accompany her—that Uma did not dare follow. Instead, she hovered around the gate, waiting for her to return, and pretending to supervise mali in digging new channels to carry water to a bed where papaya trees had been planted, or to the jasmine bushes that had to be kept alive through the summer drought.

  The night before Mira-masi left, Uma crept up to her as she lay stretched out on the rush mat, and
murmured, under cover of darkness, 'Masi, did you find him—your Lord?' because the idol was still missing from the altar.

  Then Mira-masi let out a sigh so deep it seemed to tear the heart out of her chest. Folding her hands together, she began to pray for the return of her stolen idol, her Lord, her lover, her god, in tones of such anguish that Uma crawled away in order not to hear. She was afraid Mira-masi might become hysterical.

  As for herself, she no longer had fits: it was as if the plunge into the river had caused the fits and hysterics to be carried off by the currents, leaving her limp and drained. She knew they would not come on her again.

  Setting off for the railway station next day, looking somehow stronger and more determined, Mira-masi told her in a private moment of leavetaking, 'I will find Him. You wait and see. I will not stop travelling, from one city to another from temple to temple, ashram to ashram, till I find Him.'

  LILA Aunty, on a visit, told them the sequel.

  'Yes, yes, Mira has found him,' she laughed, making her bangles jingle. In a shop in Benares that sold brassware. The shopkeeper kept him on a shelf as a presiding deity, and garlanded him and burnt incense before him every morning when he opened his shop for trade.

  He did not at all want to part with it. He was alarmed by Mira-masi throwing herself at the shelf and sobbing with joy. He had let her in thinking she was an early customer wanting a brass pot to take down to the river, but she wanted only her Lord, nothing but the Lord Himself. 'Not for sale. Go away, please, it is not for sale,' he begged her, thinking her mad—mad widows were not uncommon in the streets of Benares—but Mira-masi raised such an unearthly row in the narrow lane of the crowded bazaar, people stopped to stare and flocked around, curious to see what it was all about. Mira-masi was able to create such drama about her Lord, her lost Lord, and the dream she had had, in a temple in the Himalayas on a previous pilgrimage, revealing that if she came to this city, visited this bazaar, walked down this lane, this was where she would find Him, and so she had. She acted out her journey, her dream, the discovery; she laughed and wept, the great red mark a priest had drawn on her forehead that morning becoming smeared and running across her face dissolutely, whereupon everyone nodded and agreed that if it was so, if a dream had come true and a prophecy been fufilled, then the Lord was hers. The poor shopkeeper, a peace-loving man, and superstitious too, parted with the idol.

  'After all, he could buy a dozen just like that in the shop next to his!' Lila Aunty laughed.

  Mira-masi carried off her prize, the whole population of the lane accompanying her through the bazaar for the ritual bath in the river with great cries of 'Har har Mahadev!'

  It was rumoured that she had returned to the temple in the Himalayas where she had had her dream, and now lived in its precincts, devoting herself to worship.

  Uma listened avidly. Excitement made the palms "of her hands sweaty and damp. Her eyes grew round behind her spectacles and rolled in wonder at the story—Lila Aunty told it well. But, after giving a gratified sigh at the conclusion, she said nothing. She knew MamaPapa would never let her visit Mira-masi in the Himalayas; it was pointless to ask. They would not meet again.

  Only at night the idea that there was someone who had won what she desired would come winging through the dark, rustling her awake, sweeping across her and making her sit up so she could see its shadowy passage and watch it fade into the paleness of daybreak, the sound of its beating wings overtaken by the cacophony of the mynah birds in the sun-drenched trees outside.

  MAMA screwed up her eyes and got to her feet. Staring into the morning glare, she finally said, in a warning voice, 'There's Dr Dutt coming.'

  'Dr Dutt?' cried Uma, instantly bundling away the mending she had been given to do and preparing to enjoy the visit.

  'US,' Papa grunted irritably, although he was doing nothing at all that she might interrupt. He did not say anything—Dr Dutt's father had been the Chief Justice at one time, it was a distinguished family, and if the daughter was still unmarried at fifty, and a working woman as well, it was an aberration he had to tolerate. In fact, Papa was quite capable of putting on a progressive, Westernised front when called upon to do so—in public, in society, not within his family of course—and now he showed his liberal, educated ways by rising to his feet when Dr Dutt dismounted from her bicycle, unhitched the tuck she had made in her sari to keep it out of the bicycle chain's teeth, and came up the steps with her quick, no-nonsense walk.

  Uma was sent to make lemonade for Dr Dutt. She did so enthusiastically, throwing in an extra spoon of sugar and humming even when most of it scattered over the kitchen table, bringing forth an angry reprimand from the cook who would be the one who had to explain where all that sugar went, as he reminded her. Uma laughed at him and went out with the lemonade slopping over the tray because pleasure made her steps uneven. She had last seen Dr Dutt at the Christmas bazaar when she had bought a packet of cards at Uma's stall.

  '—and this new batch of nurses is already installed in the new dormitory, twenty-two of them, and the Institute has only just realised that it did not employ a matron or a housekeeper to run it for them,' Dr Dutt was telling MamaPapa who sat side by side on the swing and listened with identical expressions masking their lack of interest. Why was she telling them about the nurses' dormitory, the Medical Institute, the arrangements made or not made there? Such talk was neither about their family nor their circle of friends—how could it interest them?

  Dr Dutt nodded at Uma as she saw her come out with the tray of lemonade. 'And so I thought of Uma,' Dr Dutt wound up. Uma nearly dropped the tray and steadied it only after half the lemonade had sloshed out onto it.

  Mama sat up in agitation. 'Tchh! Look what you have done. What will Dr Dutt think of you? Go and get another glass.'

  'No, no, no,' Dr Dutt cried and took the half-filled and dripping glass. 'I came to see Uma and talk to Uma. And I can't stay long. The beginning of term is a very busy time for us, you see. So we really need Uma to come and help us.'

  'Help?' Uma gulped, awkwardly sitting down beside Dr Dutt who put her hand on her arm. Dr Dutt's hold was firm. 'Help?'

  'Didn't you hear? Didn't you hear what Dr Dutt was saying?' Papa asked irritably.

  'No,' said Uma, and Dr Dutt again rattled through the sequence of events that had left the Medical Institute with a new dormitory and new nurses and no one to take care of them while they were in training.

  'So, you see, I thought of you, Uma. A young woman with no employment, who has been running the house for her parents for so long. I feel sure you would be right for the job.'

  'Job?' gulped Uma, never having aspired so high in her life, and found the idea as novel as that of being launched into space.

  Papa looked incredulous and Mama outraged. Dr Dutt still clasped Uma's arm. 'Don't look so frightened,' she urged. 'I know how well you look after your parents. I know how much you helped Mrs O'Henry with her work. I am confident you can do it.'

  But Uma was not confident. 'I have no degree,' she faltered, 'or training.'

  'This kind of work does not require training, Uma,' Dr Dutt assured her, 'or degrees. Just leave that to me. I will deal with it if the authorities ask. You will agree, sir?' she turned to Papa, smiling, as if she knew how much he adored being called sir.

  But Papa did not appear to have noticed the honour this time. He was locking his face up into a frown of great degree. The frown was filled with everything he thought of working women, of women who dared presume to step into the world he occupied. Uma knew that, and cringed.

  'Papa,' she said pleadingly.

  It was Mama who spoke, however. As usual, for Papa. Very clearly and decisively. 'Our daughter does not need to go out to work, Dr Dutt,' she said. 'As long as we are here to provide for her, she will never need to go to work.'

  'But she works all the time!' Dr Dutt exclaimed on a rather sharp note. 'At home. Now you must give her a chance to work outside—'

  'There is no need,' Papa supported
Mama's view. In double strength, it grew formidable. 'Where is the need?'

  Dr Dutt persisted. 'Shouldn't we ask Uma for her view? Perhaps she would like to go out and work? After all, it is at my own Institute, in a women's dormitory, with other women. I can vouch for the conditions, they are perfectly decent, sir. You may come and inspect the dormitory, meet the nurses, see for yourself. Would you like to pay us a visit, Uma?'

  Uma bobbed her head rapidly up and down. She worked hard at controlling her expression; she knew her face was twitching in every direction. She knew her parents were watching. She tried to say yes, please, yes please, yespleaseyes—

  'Go and take the tray away,' Mama said.

  Uma's head was bobbing, her lips were fluttering: yes, yespleaseyes.

  'Uma,' Mama repeated, and her voice brought Uma to her feet. She took up the tray and went into the kitchen. She stood there, wrapping her hands into her sari, saying into the corner behind the ice-box: pleasepleaseplease—

  Then she went back to the veranda—warily, warily. Dr Dutt was sitting very upright in her basket chair. She looked directly at Uma. 'I am sorry,' she said, 'I am very sorry to hear that.'

  Hear what? What?

  Mama was getting to her feet. She walked Dr Dutt down the veranda steps to her waiting bicycle. 'Isn't it difficult to cycle in a sari? she asked with a little laugh, and looked pointedly at the frayed and oily hem of Dr Dutt's sari.

  Dr Dutt did not answer but tucked it up at her waist and stood steadying the bicycle. She did not look back at Uma but Uma heard her say to Mama, 'If you have that problem, you must come to the hospital for tests. If you need the hysterectomy, it is better to get it done soon. There is no need to live like an invalid.' She mounted the small, hard leather seat and bicycled away, the wheels crushing the gravel and making it spurt up in a reddish spray.