by Anita Desai
No, he had not escaped. He had travelled and he had stumbled into what was like a plastic representation of what he had known at home; not the real thing—which was plain, unbeautiful, misshapen, fraught and compromised—but the unreal thing—clean, bright, gleaming, without taste, savour or nourishment.
IF Mr Patton ever noticed or watched this arrangement between his wife and the Indian boy they were giving shelter to that summer, he never referred to it or acknowledged it. He stopped on his way back from work to shop for steak, hamburger, ribs and chops. 'Thought you might not have enough,' he told Mrs Patton as he marched out onto the patio to broil and grill, fry and roast, and Mrs Patton looked suitably apologetic and deceitful. When she finally brought herself to tell him that Arun was a vegetarian and she herself had decided to give it a try, something she had meant to do for a long time now, he reacted by not reacting, as if he had simply not heard, or understood. That, too, was something Arun knew and had experience of, even if a mirror reflection of it—his father's very expression, walking off, denying any opposition, any challenge to his authority, his stony wait for it to grow disheartened, despair—and disappear. Once again, its grey, vaporous chill crept into his life, like asthma.
Twenty
THE television set flickers with nocturnal life in the darkness of the den. On his way back to his room after the usual fiasco of the dinner, Arun pauses a moment to see what or who is heaped upon the sagging sofa in front of it. It interests him how that heap might draw itself together, separate and present itself. But the steady crunching of peanuts gives away the identity of the viewer without any movement: it is Melanie, Melanie alone, cross-legged upon the plaid cushions with her bag of peanuts—surely by now another bag?—sturdily eating her way through it during a commercial break. He stands at the door and watches advertisements for an insurance company (a young and radiant family floating through a flowery meadow), a dental appliance (a blue-haired lady placing a bowl of cereal before a grey-haired man and embracing him bravely), an automobile (an angelic apparition leaping through a sunset into the dark while below a long, low vehicle proceeds through desert sands and cacti while a choir sings 'The great American road ... the great American car ...').
The commercial break shows no signs of breaking. Arun detaches himself from the door to sidle away when Melanie becomes aware of him watching. She turns her pale face towards him and even in the darkness he can read its expression: Get out, it says, and he does.
IN his room he has his own television set. Mrs Patton has insisted he have one—perhaps she knows with what ferocity Melanie monopolises the one in the den. His is old, black and white, and occupies too much space on his small desk under the window. In order to work, he has to move it to one corner and somehow ignore its presence. He does so, and stares out of the window: the shade has been raised by someone, he does not know who, and he does not pull it down again. So he must confront the woods, in the dark.
MUCH later, in the stillness that is underlined by the steady drizzling of the cicadas in the trees, he glances out and sees, on the patio, which seems illuminated because it is made of squares of pale stone, the smouldering remains of the barbecue at its edge. And there is a forager standing beside it, peeling the shreds of leftover meat from the implements that lie scattered about. From the size, the bulk and the clothing, he sees it is Rod. Rod has returned. His hair is still held back by the luminous band he wears while jogging. He is wearing shorts but no shirt, and his chest is wet and gleams, greasily. He is standing there at the edge of the patio, legs apart, gnawing at whatever nourishment he can find.
Arun moves behind the curtain so that he cannot be seen watching.
STILL later that night, when he has without knowing it fallen into a deep pit of unconsciousness, he is woken by a brittle clatter. Instantly, he leaps towards the window, clutching his blanket to him. He stares down at the patio, wonders if Rod is still prowling there, in search of victuals.
Instead of Rod, he sees a burglar with the traditional mask over its eyes, small gloved hands helping themselves to the contents of the garbage can. It stands on two feet and only the white bar of fur across its face gives it away in the intense dark. It is prying a hole into a paper bag which crackles. Then it drops to its four feet and disappears into the trees, heavily, as if dragging with it whatever it can take.
Bugs are still hurling themselves at the blue electrocutor with all the frenzy of kamikaze pilots, and meet their deaths with sudden poignant pings and the rush of eerie sizzling in the night.
HAVING been awakened, Arun decides to slip across the landing before going back to sleep. Opening his door, he is dismayed to see the light is on, shining onto him. Someone has left it on in the bathroom. He hobbles over to the open door, blinking, and receives a second shock. Melanie kneels there at the toilet bowl, in white pyjamas that are printed all over with lipstick marks in the shape of lips, and she is retching heartily into it. She has heard him, or seen his shadow, and swings around frightenedly. Her face is beaded with perspiration, and white as the flesh of a fish fillet in the supermarket. The dark rings under her eyes make her resemble the raccoon at the garbage can—but frighteningly, not comically. She pushes her hair back from her clammy forehead and glares at him. 'Go 'way,' she hisses. 'Get lost.'
Twenty-one
ARUN is making his way back from work at the library; it has been a long day there and now his feet are dragging along alternately through grass and dust on the verges of the highway. He has missed the last bus to Edge Hill again. Cars swish by every second; everyone is on their way home, fanning out into the great wilderness of suburbs for their evenings around the grill or before the TV. If he were not also, in one sense, joining them, he might have felt trapped in the web of life through which he struggled.
But now it is not a car coming too close to the verge that makes him shrink, but the sound of thundering feet pounding closer, then overtaking him and passing him by. The jogger raises his hand and, without turning his head, shouts, 'Hi.' It is Rod, in his jogging briefs, his luminous headband, bare-chested, and in enormous white jogging shoes. The figure slows, comes to a kind of halt, knees still pumping, feet still lifting and pounding but in one place. Rod has stopped, for Arun. 'Hey,' he says, panting, the sweat pouring from under his headband down his rufous face. 'Come jogging?' he pants.
Nervously, Arun shakes his head, then smiles to show he means no offence: the idea, in one sense glamorous and flattering, of jogging beside the transcendent Rod, is too fanciful to be entertained. There is no way that a small, underdeveloped and asthmatic boy from the Gangetic plains, nourished on curried vegetables and stewed lentils, could compete with or even keep up with this gladiatorial species of northern power. 'Ehh—not today,' he stutters, shaking his head as if in shame.
Rod gives a good-natured nod that makes his reddish hair fall over his headband onto his forehead, like a horse's lick. 'Okay,' he agrees, 'another time,' and raising his hand in midair, jogs off alone, along the grass verge, towards the ripe sun and the horizon arched over the hill. Arun watches him meld into the radiance and is once more confirmed in his own shadowiness by the dust through which he trudges in his dusty brown leather shoes.
WHEN he gets back to the house, Rod and his father are sprawled across the plaid cushions of the sofa in front of the television screen. Arun sees their outstretched legs and their uptilted shoes before he sees anything else in the dim light from the screen: Rod's sneakers heavy with dust, Mr Patton's well polished office brogues and diamond-patterned socks. Later, he makes out the beer cans on the floor beside them, and the baseball match that is being played on the screen, small agitated figures in white crouching, leaping and running for their lives—a cartoon version of combat. He hesitates by the door, wondering if he could go in—the scene is so convivial, so inviting, and the salt smell of tacos tickles his taste buds. But having rejected Rod's earlier overture, he knows he cannot expect it to be repeated: life deals in singles, not doubles, essentially.
Mrs Patton is washing bean sprouts in a colander at the kitchen sink; they spill over and scatter across the draining board. She gives Arun a conspiratorial smile. 'It's the big game tonight,' she tells him. 'They're eating a TV dinner. Shall we have bean sprouts together? I thought I'd steam them.' She shakes the colander and it drips onto the floor.
Arun finds himself nodding since he cannot convey to her what he would give to join the two men in the den instead; he can hear the cracks and cheers of the game, the pounding of cushions and the shouts of monumental approval and pain.
She notices. 'Oh dear,' she says bleakly, 'maybe you don't like bean sprouts?'
What can he say?
'Then we won't have them,' she says decisively and, folding them all up in her hands, thrusts them into the garbage disposal unit, stuffing them in so forcefully that she might be angry. Arun is alarmed, but then she turns around with a cloudless smile, inviting him to cook an Indian dinner for himself. 'That's what you must be missing,' she says, and begins to line up the bottles and packets of spice, the jars and boxes of lentils and rice that she has so painstakingly collected for him.
There is nothing for it but to take the lentils she discovered in a health food store from her hands and sift the small seeds through his fingers, wondering what is to be done with them. He has an urge to spill them across the table, and leave them to Mrs Patton and run. Down the grassy verge, up the blazing slopes, out of the town, into the next one, out of that and along the endless highways that ribbon through the state, through the continent. But, looking out of the window, he catches sight of the woods there, the leaves in their summer exuberance creeping up, rank and riotous, green and grasping, closing in. He can feel their damp stir of breath on his face, the rankness of compost.
He turns on the faucet and runs water over the lentils, washes them. With Mrs Patton watching, admiringly, he sets the pot on the stove and adds the spices she hands him, without looking to see what it is he is adding. Their odours are strong, foreign—they should be right. They make him sneeze and infect him with recklessness: he throws in some green peppers, a tomato, bay leaves, cloves.
'Is it the way your mother made it?' she blinks and asks when steam begins to rise and enfold them in smells not altogether appetising.
He cannot tell her that he has never seen his mother cook; she would understand that to mean that he never ate at home but starved, and at the moment he has had enough of her compassion. He merely nods and stirs. His glasses become fogged with the grease of turmeric-tinted steam.
'Now if more Americans ate that food, we shouldn't be making ourselves so sick—with heart disease and cancer and—and dreadful diseases all due to a terrible, terrible diet,' she says.
'Americans are very healthy people, Mrs Patton,' he says, 'more healthy than Indians.'
'Oh, shoo, don't you believe that. Just ask me about American health—I'll tell you,' she cries. 'The statistics are just awful. You go into any doctor's clinic and you'll see things that'll astonish you. We don't know how to eat,' she repeats. 'We've got to learn.'
It happens that just when he has poured out the lentils into a dish to eat—khaki-coloured, lumpy, at the same time thick and runny—Melanie walks in, back from school, carrying her book bag on her back like a sack of stones. She pauses as if she cannot believe what she sees, and stares—with increasing indignation—at the lentils dribbling out of the pot and into the bowl.
'Yuck!' she exclaims finally, the word exploding out of her like a bubble of masticated gum. 'What's that?'
'Melanie!' her mother cries. 'It is Ahroon's dinner. Ahroon cooked it. Please do not make rude sounds about what you know nothing of. I do believe you don't know what cooking is any more. Cookies and candy bars and peanuts is all you ever will eat but please don't make offensive remarks about other people's food.'
'Eeeuuuh, you call that food?' Melanie asks furiously, as if outraged by the very idea. 'I call that shit!'
She slams her book bag onto a chair and walks out, hunching her shoulders like a pugilist, while her mother's reprimands follow her out of the room.
Arun sits in front of his bowl of dhal. He stares at it, nauseated. He quite agrees with Melanie: it is revolting. He would much rather chomp upon a candy bar than eat this. But Mrs Patton comes and sits by his side, commiseratingly, coaxingly. She smiles a bright plastic copy of a mother-smile that Arun remembers from another world and another time, the smile that is tight at the corners with pressure, the pressure to perform a role, to make him eat, make him grow, make him worth all the trouble and effort and expense. Mrs Patton's smile contains no hint of pressure, it is no more than a mock-up. Gently, it flashes a message as if on a flickering screen: 'Eat. Enjoy.' Helplessly, he does.
WHEN he finally gets away from the kitchen and goes upstairs to his room, Melanie is sitting on the landing as if to intercept him. She does not move her legs out of his way and he steps over them gingerly. As he does so, he sees her lap is full of Hershey bars. She has eaten some of them, and she crackles the empty papers in her hands as he passes, again as if to draw attention. He is reminded, fleetingly, of beggars on Indian streets and the manoeuvres required to step past them on crowded pavements, their strategies to prevent this.
Unexpectedly, she speaks. 'Had your dinner?' she asks, with heavy malice.
He fights the urge to flee to his room and hide. He mumbles, 'Will you not have any? Aren't you hungry?'
She opens her mouth wide so he can see the sticky brown stuff of the candy adhering to her square teeth and stretching webs across her tongue. 'I'm so hungry I've got to eat this shitty candy,' she hisses. 'I can't eat that goo you and Mom cook down there,' she adds in bitter complaint.
He is consumed by both horror and contrition. He wishes to explain why the meal he had cooked had been so poor: it had been his first effort. He wishes to apologise for her having to eat candy instead. He is on the point of doing so when he realises it would mean a criticism of her mother, and so he desists. On the other side of the world, he is caught up again in the sugar-sticky web of family conflict. Desist, O desist. Edging past her towards his room, he gets away from her accusing glare.
Twenty-two
MRS Patton, with her hand on the cart that Arun is rolling as rapidly as he can along the aisles of tinned soup, pasta and rice, tries to slow him down. 'We haven't enough yet, Ahroon,' she protests. 'You should have seen the way I'd load a shopping cart when the children were small. I'd have Melanie sitting up here on the shelf, and there'd be such a heap of groceries under her, she'd have to stick her feet right up on top.'
Arun has seen mothers of young children do precisely that—lift their babies onto the collapsible shelf where they sit above hills of cereal and cat food and diapers, usually sucking the candy they have been given in return for allowing their mothers to get on with the shopping. He tries to picture baby Melanie in the cart, queen of the groceries, but what he visualises is a baby monster with elephantine legs.
'And do you know, that load wouldn't last us even a week. Three days and I'd be back for more,' she chuckles, hurrying to keep up with him. The wheels of the cart squeal, the rubber-soled shoes squeak, Arun swivels to avoid another loaded cart trundling past.
'Do they eat less now?' he asks. There is scarcely room in the cart for another package. He feels revulsion rising in his throat as if from too gigantic a meal.
'My no, they eat all the time,' she laughs, a little out of breath. 'But—but it's different now. We don't sit down to meals like we used to. Everyone eats at different times and wants different meals. We just don't get to eating together much now that they're grown. So I just fill the freezer and let them take down what they like, when they like. Keeping the freezer full—that's my job, Ahroon,' she declares, and grasps the handle to stop him so she can study the labels on the soup cans. Although he hardly felt that mealtimes at home had been models of social and familial gathering—Papa chewing each mouthful like an examiner on duty, Mama's eyes like bright bea
ds, watching, his sisters perched in preparation to flap and fly, the only conversation permitted to do with the grim duty at hand: eating—there seems something troubling about the Pattons' system, too.
'Mushroom,' says Mrs Patton. 'You'd eat that, wouldn't you, Ahroon?'
He wants to point out that he is not her family. He considers saying something about Melanie's needs, the way she had flung them before him on the landing, making it impossible for him to ignore them. But he does not know how to bring up her name without leading Mrs Patton to think he was taking an undue interest in her. At last he says, 'But what about the rest of the family—do they eat it?'
'Oh,' she replies, tossing it into the cart and moving on, 'I told you, they take down what they like. Out of the freezer, you know. Or,' she adds vaguely because she is examining the cookies now, 'they make a sandwich. You see,' she goes on, with the faintest frown, 'what I cook, they don't like. And they don't like sitting at a table either—like you and I do,' she smiles at Arun with unmistakable significance, making him look away and redden.
'Counter number six looks free,' he mumbles, and trundles wildly away.
Twenty-three
ARUN is jogging. With great deliberation he has folded and put away his spectacles, pulled on and laced up his newly bought sneakers, and now he is jogging. With the same deliberation and caution he jogs up Bayberry Lane, down Potwine Lane, along Laurel Way into Pomeroy Road. Amazed at his own daring, he jogs past lawns abandoned to the morning sun and past porches where old men sit, their baseball caps lowered over their noses, allowing the passing traffic to lull them into dusty sleep. He jogs past driveways where families sit expectantly around tablefuls of used clothes and shoes, carpet rolls and picture frames, table lamps and electrical gadgets, all surmounted by a sign saying Yard Sale, and other driveways where old ladies in straw hats prod with small trowels at beds of zinnias.