by Anuradha Roy
Yet she did not speak to the poet. She would not add to his sense of being besieged.
For a day or two she kept her distance on the deck, never coming close to where he sat, nor going so far that he would not notice her. Her calculated reserve worked: one day he called out to her. She ran to the empty chair next to him before he could change his mind. He had a presence that illuminated the deck like the glow from a second sun, she was stricken speechless, she sat straight-backed and tense, waiting to be spoken to. He said nothing. As far as their eyes could see were dancing waves and blueness paled by sunlight, above them lacy white clouds in a clear sky. All of a sudden, he asked her if she had noticed that when the ship cut a path through the foam and waves it sighed constantly. Did that never-ending sigh not sound as though the waters of the ocean were washing the earth with tears of grief?
She did not know what made her so rude, but she burst out laughing. “I’m not sad, I’m not thinking of tears. The water is blue and beautiful, I want to paint it.” Then she clapped her hand to her mouth, aghast at having contradicted him. Would he be too offended to speak to her again? But it must have been precisely her spontaneous refusal to be worshipful, so refreshing after the fatigue of being relentlessly adored, that made him seek out her company. He asked her to come and sit by him on the deck every day. She told him about her dance lessons and her painting in such garrulous detail it made her abject with shame to think of later, but if he found it vain or absurd he did not let it show. It was he who told her father about the German man they were to find on the raft. This artist, Walter Spies, knew more than anyone else about the dance and arts of that part of the world, Rabindranath said. He had been told that Spies would be his guide on his travels there. Gayatri too must meet him.
“One day you will go to Bali and Java, Myshkin,” my mother would say when ending these stories. “I’m going to take you. We’ll make the same voyage. We will find Walter again, and he’ll show us a thousand things.” She told me about her journey so many times, adding a new detail, leaving out an old one, remembering and forgetting, that I knew it backwards. When she started off on her stories, what I listened to was the hum of her voice. It was a clear voice, as if it had been washed in a mountain stream, and she could do things with it that nobody else did. It turned into a low growl when she told stories with lions in them, it became rich and melodious when she sang, it rose and fell like a high-pitched songbird’s when she tried enticing me to finish my glass of milk, it reached the corners of rooms when she whispered.
The journey to Bali would be Gayatri’s last with her father. He collapsed on his way to work days after their return. She never said much about the weeks that followed, and I imagine it is because she had never before known such grief. She had for all her life been her father’s adored child and he had made her everything her mother was not: accomplished, educated, aware of her gifts. Following some perverse logic, her mother blamed her for his death. If Gayatri had not been so headstrong about traveling the world, her indulgent father would not have dreamed up that misguided trip. All those journeys—more than two months away from home! Train journeys, sea voyages, car rides, and strange food. Didn’t those people in Java even eat an animal that lived off ants?
In the photographs my mother had of her childhood, it is just her and her father. It did not strike me as odd when I saw the pictures as a child, but when I was older this intrigued me more and more. Why were none of her brothers in those pictures? Did Agni Sen never take his sons anywhere? Where was his wife during these travels?
I saw my grandmother just twice, once as a toddler and once when I was six or seven. Of the first time I have no recollection; of the second, I remember gagging at the smell in her room of something putrid mixed with something chemical. Her skin was like stale dough and she complained in a shrill voice the entire time we sat with her: she was not fed properly, the daughters-in-law were witches, her own daughter was no better. My mother, grim-faced, kept asking me to go and play outside, but my grandmother ordered me to remain in the room. When we got up to leave, my grandmother reached inside her blouse and drew out a crumpled rupee note that she pressed into my hand. It was still warm from being stored against her old skin, it felt as if I was touching her. I dropped it on the floor and ran out, right down the corridor, down the stairs, and out of the main door into the road, and only then did I let out my breath and draw in a gulp of air greasy with the smell of hot oil from a nearby samosa shop. My mother reached me a minute later and took my hand and pulled me away from the road. “Happy?” she said. “You wanted to come to Delhi, didn’t you?”
Gayatri was so much younger than her five brothers that she was only ten when the last of them married. The tumult and festivity of that wedding, the mounds of flowers, the shehnai players perched high up on a platform above an ornate gateway, these became her most vivid memories. At the wedding she had stood enthralled before the red and gold bride, crying, “I want to be married! I want to be a bride!” She could not have guessed the irony of that childish wish.
Gayatri’s tutors for dance and music were dismissed as soon as her father died. It was decided by the family that she must be married off without delay; a young, fatherless daughter was too much of a responsibility for her brothers. What happened next was represented by my father as a romance, and he loved retelling it, each time with new flourishes. My mother listened poker-faced, doodling with her fingers on her sari. My father told us how the word about finding a match for her went around. Names of possible grooms were suggested by relatives—not many, because word had also got around that my mother was taze, sharp-tongued, over-clever; besides, the girl danced and took singing lessons. And who knew what she had been up to during her travels? What on earth did a young girl need to cross the oceans for? It was all a little too much. At this point my father stopped his narration to glance at her and say, “I was never scared off by brains and spirit. What is a woman without brains?”
My father was a regular visitor to my mother’s house before they were married. Whenever he went to Delhi he looked up his old college professor, Agni Sen. He had encountered my mother over the years: first as a young girl, then as a teenager, and as soon as he heard his old teacher had died, he turned up at their door unannounced—to offer his condolences, he would say. It happened to be an opportune moment; Gayatri was being paraded before a possible groom’s family. The groom and his relatives sat in a row in the drawing room being served tea by my mother so that they could examine her as well as her drawing-room manners up close. Soon enough they would ask her to sing a song or show them how long her hair was. My father said he could tell even from a distance, as he waited, that Gayatri was about to fling the tea-tray to the floor. After a few minutes he saw her stumble out of the room and run up the stairs two at a time, to another part of the house. This strengthened the resolve he had come with: he would rescue her. At this point my mother stopped her doodling and sat up shaking her head. “That is not how it was! That is not at all how it was!”
“Isn’t it true you left the room in a huff? That you spilled hot tea on the groom’s clothes? Did they come back with an offer? No? Q.E.D.!” My father was fond of ending arguments with a Q.E.D., which he wrote in the air with his forefinger.
My mother was a Bengali Hindu from Delhi, my father was a part-Anglo-Indian from north India. In Muntazir, my father’s family was considered by Hindus to be a godless bunch of Christians, while to Christians they were a heathen gaggle of Hindus. But my father had contempt for categories such as caste and religion, he maintained that all humans were born equal in the eyes of nature. God he did not believe in. He had been an atheist since he was a boy. The only god he followed was the Nation, and this was what he told Gayatri’s family, who had not seen in him a possible groom.
Why then did they agree that my father fitted the bill? Were they afraid my mother would smash all their tea sets on future suitors? Was he the only one on offer for a fatherless girl with no dowry who sang and danced and had done thi
ngs in foreign lands that one could not speculate about in the presence of children? Was my mother asked her opinion about this startling new prospect? I do not know. Probably not. So anxious were they to be rid of her that they were willing to put up with the scandal of a daughter marrying an outsider. The troubling difference was in my parents’ ages: she was seventeen, he thirty-three. But she would catch up with him, they said to each other, differences of age became more insignificant with every passing year. Besides, motherhood was bound to temper her wild spirits. They were married in September, within a month of Agni Sen’s death.
My father repeated his notions of motherhood and maturity when he forgot about what he called my jug ears. He ended, “Painting, singing, dancing, these are wonderful things. Everyone needs hobbies. But there are hobbies and then there are serious matters. Try and read something other than novels—I’ve given you so many books and . . . what about that history of India? Have you read the first chapter even? Think of Myshkin.”
“Myshkin? Myshkin! What has he to do with this?”
“He looks to you as an example. Now, what sort of example are you setting, dancing like that in the garden? With Ram Saran and Banno sniggering behind a bush. Dignity, Gay, our most precious possession.”
“I would have thought imagination or happiness, not dignity. And that was just once. Five years ago. Myshkin was too little to learn anything.”
“He’s older now.”
“And I have not been dancing in the garden. I haven’t been dancing anywhere. I’ve stopped everything. I don’t sing. I don’t dance. I hardly ever paint. What more do you want?”
“I don’t want you to stop any of it, I just beg you to be less . . . what shall I say . . . impulsive.”
“Im. Pul. Sive.” My mother said the word as if she were trying it on for size.
“Have you any idea how tolerant I am? I despair sometimes. Everyone admires me as a progressive man. Allows his wife every freedom, they say in my staffroom, lets her do anything she pleases. And yet the other day . . .”
“So my freedom is something you store in a locked iron safe? To dole out when you see fit?” When my mother flared up like this, the clock stopped ticking, the dog hid under the bed.
“All I ask is that you don’t speak to me this way,” my father said. “As if we’re in a fish market—and in our son’s hearing. What will he learn? I despair.”
My father’s bewilderment was genuine. They were like two people stranded on an island together with no common language. An incident concerning a paint box comes back to me. My mother once ordered paints and brushes from a shop in Calcutta, which in turn ordered the goods for her from England. After a long, impatient wait, the paints arrived in a brown paper package tied with twine. The plump new tubes of cobalt blue, viridian green, and her favorite, burnt umber, lay newly exposed to the world in a bed of torn paper. My mother admired the perfection of those tubes for several days, picking them up, putting them back into her box of paints, before she could bring herself to twist open one of the lids and squeeze out the first slug of color.
Then one day my father took those paints with him to his college and put them away—I cannot remember why, perhaps to teach her the difference between hobbies and higher matters. He brought them back after a week, left them on the dining table, and walked into the bathroom as if he had done nothing that could be construed as a violation. My mother saw her paint box, dropped what she was doing, and picking it up stalked outside and flung it into a corner of the back garden. The precious tubes and squirrel-hair brushes were strewn far into the undergrowth. “They’re gone for good. Happy?” she shouted at the bathroom’s closed door.
My father made me crawl on my knees in the wildflowers and brambles and spiky grass that day, sweat pouring from my body, to search out every last paintbrush and tube. He followed my mother to the kitchen, the storeroom, even to the terrace when she went to hang her saris to dry, and kept repeating, “It was just a joke, Gay, can’t you see that?” Some weeks later he came back from work bearing as a peace offering an unattainable, lavish art book.
A fragile contentment held us together for several days after that. My mother sang as she worked and my father read out nuggets from the newspaper. He declared he would not allow her to go to Delhi that summer because the house was too still and dull without her. I longed for our lives to be this way forever.
Although the quarter of an hour in my grandmother’s sickroom in Delhi had revolted me, I was happy enough through the rest of that trip. My father had dropped us off and gone back to Muntazir after a day, not pausing in his strictures until his tonga had turned the lane’s corner: “Don’t wander about on your own. Don’t swim in the river, it’s much deeper than it seems. Don’t let your cousins take you to a cinema house, you’re still too young.”
My mother’s childhood home was so big I could not finish exploring it in the week we were there. I found myself in courtyards that opened out into more courtyards, a tank filled with lotus in the corner of a patch of green, verandahs from which dark staircases vanished upwards, who knew where, room after room along narrow corridors, terraces at different levels. Each set of rooms contained one of my uncles and his family and each one looked and felt different. If one had a long Belgian mirror that swung on its stand, another had songbirds in a cage. The food for the whole family was made in a mud-plastered kitchen where fires blazed and cooks stirred giant pots with ladles as long as brooms. At mealtimes we sat on the floor, bell-metal plates and bowls before us, children at one end, grown-ups down the other side. At the head of the row sat my mother’s oldest brother, a weedy, ash-haired little man. He had a voice like a saw on wood and when it rasped around the room everyone stopped eating to pay respectful attention.
I developed a doglike adoration for the son of the third uncle, who was a few years older. He took me under his wing, an eager and worshipful protégé. He would say, “Come on, let’s go and have some fun,” and thump my shoulder in a way that made me swell with pride. He was lanky and tall and had a smile that turned his eyes into slits. Everyone called him Tobu. As soon as my father left, having delivered his warnings against all life’s pleasures, Tobu took me to the Yamuna, which flowed quite near the house, and told me to strip down to my underpants. Dark green watermelons as big as footballs grew on the sandy bank of the river. He slashed a stem with a knife and rolled the melon towards me. “Hold that to your chest,” he instructed me, “and I’ll teach you to swim.” After that he tore his own clothes off, jumped into the brown water. I stood on the bank inching backwards, away from Tobu, the river, the melon. “Get in. I’ll take care of you,” he shouted towards me. “Come. I won’t let you drown.” That was how I learned to swim—holding a melon to stay afloat, Tobu’s arms steadying me, his voice in my ears. “Move your legs, move your legs, idiot!”
One of those days, Tobu and I, along with some of the other children in the house, went to the Olympus Circus with my mother and my youngest uncle. The circus was taking place in a multicolored cloth tent pungent with the smell of animal hide. We had seats in the front row because my mother had bought the tickets and she was never one to be sensible when she could be extravagant. I entered the tent clutching Tobu’s hand, afraid and wanting to leave, to go right back home where I was safe, but I could not confess it for fear of ridicule. My mother would have been the first to mock me. Tears and fears never got anyone the Victoria Cross, she would say. If I cried, she would turn away saying, “Come on, Myshkin, we are made of stern stuff, you and I. Have you ever seen me cry?”
The first few acts of the circus came and went: Mr. Doso on his one-wheel bicycle, the wire dances of Miss Olga and Miss Zulla, the tigers who sauntered into the ring with Captain Gavin, who held up a board saying R.B. TIGERS as he introduced himself. A tusker elephant and an African lion were next. Then came an Indian lion in a harness by which he drew a rickety cart. He was egged on by a scrawny boy in a dhoti who tapped the lion with a switch and stuck his tongue out when
we laughed. Three girls, Juanita, Pepita, and Senorita, made up the trapeze trio. The middle one, Pepita, smiled at me each time her swing came towards the front. She had plaits that were flung out by the air as she swung high above. After the third or fourth time, she leaped off the bar, turned a few times in the air, and landed on her feet right in front of us. She gave me a wink.
Then came the act we had been waiting for. The magician, Ivan the Terrible, who appeared to the sound of trumpets, wearing the same scarlet cloak and golden silk trousers he wore on the Olympus Circus hoardings. It was as if he had walked down from the billboards into real life by a sleight of hand. He worked through the tricks I was to become familiar with over the years: He showed us an empty pot and then began pouring water from it, more water than could be held by a whole bucket. He pulled birds from hats. Blindfolded, he opened a cupboard with a key and read out a letter someone from the audience had put into its drawer. He freed himself from chains in which he had been trussed and padlocked. And then all at once he fixed his gaze on my mother and said, “Come. I need a volunteer. If you are brave enough, madam, come up here.” He stepped back theatrically and waited. “Our show cannot go on without you.”
My mother was sitting with me on one side of her and a small nephew on the other. From down the line, my youngest uncle craned his neck towards her and said, “Gayatri, you are not to go. Stay where you are. What sort of absurd demand is this?”
Her brother’s words were a cast-iron guarantee that she would do the opposite. Propriety, sobriety, obedience: these were the very things she had made it her life’s mission to annihilate. The magician had his eyes on her, mocking, challenging. So had her brother. The choice was clear. She got up, settled the gray sequined stole she was wearing over her dark blue sari, walked into the ring, and climbed onto the platform in the middle. There was a tooting of trumpets and a rolling of drums. Silence in the tent, as if all the people in it were holding their breath wondering what the magician would do to my mother. I had heard they cut people into two with swords or locked them in a box and sliced them into pieces. My hands went cold with fear. My knees were knocking. I felt Tobu give me a friendly slap on my head and whisper, “Nothing’s going to happen.”