by Anuradha Roy
I bend down to pet the two dogs at my feet. They grunt in their sleep and shift and make it clear they do not like being disturbed. They have no compunctions, on the other hand, about waking me, and I wonder again how they have trained me to love them all the more for the innocence with which they harass me for their every need. At night they are in my bed, heads on my pillow, sometimes pawing me, sometimes whimpering aloud. I stroke them back to sleep. I need nobody else. I am contented and complete with my animals in a way I never have been with human beings. People think of my solitude as an eccentricity or a symptom of failure, as if I am closer to animals and trees because human beings betrayed me or because I found nobody to love. It is hard to explain to them that the shade of a tree I planted years ago or the feverish intensity of a dog fruitlessly chasing a butterfly provides what no human companionship can.
It may be because I had animals and trees in my life from the start. There were our cows, of course, but my friend from the very beginning, and sometimes my only friend, was a dog, Rikki. It was my grandfather who found her—or she found him—he had many one-sided discussions with her about this in the years afterwards. One cold December when I was three, there was a puppy on the street outside the clinic, playing alone, chasing bits of paper and her own stump of a tail. Sometime later this fawn-colored scrap slipped into the warm clinic. My grandfather picked it up and took it outside to the courtyard—could he leave it there? He consulted Lisa McNally, hoping she would offer to keep an eye on it, but Lisa said she would not look at it, no dogs she had told herself after her own died. Lisa was only a little older than my mother, but old enough in those days for people to write her off as a lifelong spinster who ought to be grateful for any companion, even a dog. “Oh, that Lisa,” her relatives sighed. “So funny where her high horse took her, it’s left her on the shelf.” Lisa said she loved her shelf. Only decorative objects lived on shelves.
Lisa’s obduracy in the matter of shelves and puppies settled it. Dada brought the puppy home and said we would call her Rikki after Kipling’s mongoose. I have had other dogs, but none have been as distraught as her at partings or as boisterous with joy when reunited. It was as if the fear of being left again on a pavement was her ruling emotion. Or maybe the truth is that all dogs understand from their infancy that when you have found your friend, you need to spend every moment of your lives together. Why part?
The thought of persistent human companionship is abhorrent to me. I have never married. The words of Gabriel Oak to Bathsheba, although meant romantically, struck me as a threat: “And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be—and whenever I look up, there will be you.” There was a woman forty years ago who wanted me to be there each time she looked up. Kadambari. She was not alone, a man does not have to do very much to be coveted. Once I was taller than my father, and the jug ears that my mother used to press back had miraculously flattened, and I had acquired a degree and a job in Delhi, I became conscious that when I came home for holidays, girls were merrier around me and their parents kept inviting me home and praising me for taking after my grandfather. “Ah, old Dr. Rozario, such intellect and wit, such a handsome profile,” they said. “If only he had lived twenty years more! But you are his mirror image, Myshkin, that is a consolation.” I knew this was not in the least true but I was just too unthinking at that time to understand what they were after.
Last night, probably because of all this dredging up of memories, I woke from a dream in which I was with Kadambari, the heavy, dark scent of her in me again. She would come to my rooms in Delhi at night, when her parents thought she was safely in bed. She would enter, lock the door, throw off her sari, pop the buttons on her blouse, clamber out of her petticoat, and stand by the door in the lamplit room, stripped and triumphant, to let me look at her before we had said a word to each other. She insisted on the oil lamp. No electric lights.
When I woke from my dream yesterday, I closed my eyes again, to preserve for a few moments her glowing face contorted as if in pain, her hair disheveled. “Don’t stop. Go on forever,” she breathed in my dream.
I switched on the light.
4
IT MUST HAVE been soon after Mr. Spies’s first visit to the clinic that he came to our house. I have no recollection of what my mother said or did when she saw him again after a lifetime—maybe I was not there when they met again. What I do remember is the woman he used to come with to our house and how she walked around the garden dipping her head to smell a flower, darting with an excited shriek towards a peacock strutting on a nearby wall, then plucking a green mango off a low branch. I regarded all the mangoes as my personal property to distribute as I thought fit, and Golak and I protected them from monkeys with our catapults through long, hot afternoons. What right had anyone to pluck them without asking permission? At first I was afraid to protest—she was British after all—but I could not contain my indignation and said, “That mango is too small, it was not to be plucked. Anyway, you can’t eat it, it’s sour and hard.”
The woman was as thin as a pencil. A curtain of jet-black hair was plastered against her face. She wore long black clothes that flapped around. A magician or a witch. Her dress was loose and long enough to hide anything. A wand. A broomstick.
She stopped her wandering and turned to fix her gaze on me. “Do you know the things I eat? I eat raw eggs with a spoonful of sugar. I eat beans from tins and grapes off vines. I eat little boys baked in the oven. With extra salt.” I stepped back. “I loathe children usually,” she said. “But you—I like the look of you. Come along. Show me around.”
She did not smile as she spoke, and returned to her strolling as if expecting me to follow as a matter of course. When I didn’t she stopped again and held her hand out, saying, “Come on, what are you waiting for?” Her fingers were covered with rings and she had beads around her neck, long strings of them. “See? Seven rings. All silver. And they clack if I do this. Do you want to see?” I had trouble understanding all she said, her English sounded different from the kind I was used to. But I had not missed the part where she said she ate boys and I kept my distance.
“Beryl,” Mr. Spies turned and called out to her. “Please behave. Don’t steal their fruit, don’t scare the child. Here, come meet your guide to Indian dance. This is the lady I told you about, she found me on that raft in the lake.”
Beryl de Zoete stopped talking to me and turned her gaze to my mother, then sprang towards her. She towered over her—they both did. She put her hands out and in an earnest voice said, “Delighted . . . finally! I need to watch a thousand dances. Kathak, Bharatanatyam, all. Understand them. I need someone who speaks the language and tells me what is going on. I am all at sea. Will you help me?”
Beryl de Zoete had learned dance from Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in Hellerau, Dresden, she said, who taught a form called eurythmics. It was one of life’s coincidences, she said, that long after the dance academy had ceased to be, Walter Spies went to live there in the artists’ colony it turned into. In her early days, until an inheritance made it possible for her to stop working, Beryl taught dance. She was said to be a remote figure, strange in her clothes and manner; but everyone admitted she could instill a sense of rhythm even in those who had no musical sense.
Beryl was British but spoke three or four other languages as fluently as English and I have a vague memory that she carried around a book which went back to front. It may have been in Persian, which too she tried to learn. My grandfather found out soon enough that she had a degree from Oxford and traveled the world writing on dance. She told him she had experimented with marriage and failed, then lived most of her life with a translator from Chinese who was blind in one eye and twelve years younger than her.
“He does not speak at all, but since I talk enough for both of us, it works wonderfully,” she said.
Arthur Waley was his name and I came across it not long ago on a book he had edited, of Beryl de Zoete’s essays. Names from a vanished time. Names from when my
universe was real and dreamlike in equal measure. Until I saw that book, I was not sure I had considered Beryl to be a real person. In the private mythology of my childhood, I had her down as someone who was a person by day but changed into an old crone by night who really did eat humans. I did not know then that in fact she saved lives, rescuing Jewish dancers in Germany from being put to death by the Nazis, spiriting them away to Britain, enlisting the help of every friend she had.
Not long after their first meeting, Beryl de Zoete must have decided that Gayatri Rozario—young, beautiful, gifted, tortured, stifled—was an obvious subject for rescue. Some days later, or maybe weeks later, by which time she was a regular visitor to our house, she narrated the story of a man-woman she had met on her travels in the Libyan desert, at the oasis of Siwa.
I can still hear the story today as Beryl told it one evening, her musical voice spreading over the garden. They think nobody else is home. Beryl sways on the swing that hangs from one of our trees, my mother sits on a stone bench nearby. I am back from playing, and as I flit through the shadows at the back of the garden on my way into the house, I stop at the sound of that voice. My mother has eyes only for Beryl, so intense is her attention she does not see me though I tiptoe closer until I am not far from them. She has her elbows on her knees and her chin in her palms. Her sari has slipped down her chest, but my father is not there to chide her for immodesty and she does not set it right.
“On the way back through the oasis, we knocked at the door of a young woman called Aisha, famous in Siwa for her singing and dancing and defiance of convention, and to whom I had an introduction. But she was out. That a woman would live alone in Siwa is as shocking as it would be in England for her to live with ten husbands. Her story is this. She was formerly the wife or mistress of an English captain, very well known out there, who used to keep a little hotel in Siwa. After his desertion Aisha could no longer bear to return to the absolutely cloistered life of a woman in Siwa, so she had the originality to become a man, just as in modified form certain strong-minded English women did at the end of the last century, not wearing stays, cutting their hair short, going about freely and heartily returning the dislike which men felt for them. Aisha’s case was much harder and she solved it in a different way and less respectably than our New Women. But she is like them in having cut off her hair and she wears the long white shirt or jibbah, which the poorest Siwan men wear. She supports herself by machining and by selling bangles, rings, and baskets and her room by night is a kind of low-class salon where she entertains men by drumming and singing.”
I had thought Siva was a Hindu god, but it appeared that the name had other lives elsewhere. Is this why the story has never left me? Or because it became clear later what a powerful impression the story had made on my mother?
The year they came into our lives, Beryl de Zoete and Walter Spies had already completed a book on Balinese dance. Documenting India’s dance was their next plan. Walter Spies had first met my mother at a time when she was a young girl learning Indian classical dance. He half-remembered the things she had spoken of, her dreams of joining a troupe like Leila Roy’s or Uday Shankar’s, dancing in ballets at Santiniketan. Dance was changing in India, she had told him. They were shedding the coy gestures, the biting of lips, the batting of eyelashes, and turning to athleticism and music instead. She would dance in one of those troupes—this she had declared with the conviction of the young, who have no reason to believe life usually turns out different from everything they planned. Walter Spies could not have known that dance and the passionate Indian girl he had met were to be separated forever.
My mother had a pair of heavy anklets from the days when she was trained in Delhi by her tutor. She would take them out of their box sometimes, shake them to hear their jhan-jhan sound, then put them back again. I had never seen her dance but once, when she waltzed in Lisa McNally’s drawing room to Strauss on the gramophone. The room was crammed with peg tables and knitted cats and miniature Big Bens that went tumbling and flying as she and Lisa whirled around. They went on until the music stopped and then they collapsed in a heap of crimson and turquoise silk on the sofa.
No other house down the road, no other friend of our family’s, no other boy in school—nobody else we knew had visitors from another country. And these people were not merely from elsewhere, they lived on an island, surrounded on all sides by the Indian Ocean that held thousands and thousands of islands, some still unexplored, some no more than rocky outcrops in the sea, and some that were like the world in miniature, with mountains, temples, palaces, seas, rivers, fields, villages, and cities. My mother told me you could walk around their country end to end in a few days and to go anywhere else you had to take a boat. Dinu and I began to play games which had sharks, alligators, ships. We lived off wild pigs and fish roasted over open fires. We ate imagined figs and climbed imagined trees for coconuts to drink from. We split the coconuts with the same machetes with which we killed deer for meat.
My mother went off with the visitors in a tonga one morning, soon after they first came to our house. She had found out about a Kathak dance maestro who lived and taught in the old part of Muntazir, a maze of narrow alleys from the last century crammed with old houses, mosques, markets, brothels. As she climbed into the tonga and seated herself next to Beryl de Zoete, the wizened watchman at Dinu’s began to shout, “Bibiji! Tell those sahibs I have seen their country! I have crossed the black water for them. I have fought for them! I have killed for them! Tell them to give me land! Tell them I need a house! Khabardar!”
The watchman could hardly see or hear any longer, but he still wore the army cap that had been issued to him when he fought in the First World War and every night he marched up and down outside Dinu’s gate shouting his warning to all intruders, “Khabardar, Khabardar!” as loudly as if he were still on a battlefield. A bullet was said to be lodged somewhere inside him still. My grandfather, woken at night by the watchman’s war cries, said the man should be sent back to Ypres or to an asylum, but Dinu’s father felt that retired soldiers had earned our respect, mad or sane. My mother thought so too. She waved from the back of the tonga and cried out, “I will! I will tell them, Kharak Singh! They will write to the King of England.”
Had my mother sought my father’s permission before she went off on her expedition with her new friends? I don’t know. It must have crossed her mind that it was like poking a snake’s pit of gossip and speculation. I wonder if that is precisely what made her do it. She went off on her adventure after my father had left for work and she came back home before he returned. She was unusually demure that evening, stirring one pan and then another in the kitchen, making bright, cheerful conversation at dinner. My father too had an amusing story to tell about a student who had taken to tying his Brahminical pigtail to a hook in the ceiling as the Bengali scholar Vidyasagar was said to have done, to stop himself from nodding off during late-night study sessions. All was well until I added to the chatter.
“Ma, next time you go in a tonga with Mr. Spies, take me also.”
Everything went still.
I knew that stillness. I dreaded it. I put my head down and examined my feet. I swung them. The lingering vanilla-and-milk smell of the bread pudding we had eaten was making me feel sick. I wanted the clock to strike, the dog to bark, a branch to fall: any noise at all.
Dada ruffled my hair, then took my hand. “Let’s go and see if the owl has come back to the roof, Myshkin,” he said.
This was how my mother had always been. She was the kind of reckless person who read the weather report after her boat was already miles away from shore. I could not imagine her any other way. When I was older I understood how different she was from other women—the wives of relatives, the mothers of my friends. Dinu’s mother would never have dreamed of leaving her house in a tonga with two strangers, to go to the red-light area of the old city in search of a traditional dance teacher whose work it was to train courtesans. Dinu’s mother was known only as �
�Dinu’s Mother”; nobody remembered her name anymore. She rarely came out of the house and met no men other than Dinu’s relatives and my father and grandfather. Her year-round attire was a starched sari with matching gold jewelry, and an immaculate circle of red between her brows. What need had women to go tramping about the town, she asked anyone within earshot. Would some divine spirit drop in to supervise the household? It was a disgrace, it really was—and, well, anyone could see now where all of it had been leading—the way Gayatri was given to sleeping on after daybreak when the household was up, how once she bolted to Delhi leaving a child ill at home, how she chattered away with Arjun’s reprobate brother Brijen whenever he went to their house. His brains had been addled by drink, but what of hers? A hundred other things too tedious to list, each of them a sign of what was bound to happen.
Dinu’s father, Arjun Chacha, was more emphatic. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” he said to my father the day after my mother’s tonga ride. “Study Indian dance? What is there to study, my friend? Dance was invented so that men could look at women, not for women to look at women.” He slapped the bonnet of his car and laughed. “You keep an eye on that girl-wife of yours, Nek. Remember the time she was dancing about in your garden? All your servants . . .”
My father cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow, gesturing at me. “Was she?” he said, his voice very even. “Your memory for the trivial is better than mine.” Whatever my father said to my mother at home, he took care never to betray the slightest hint of discord to outsiders. And in some curious way, opposition from Dinu’s parents could persuade him that my mother had done nothing wrong. Why shouldn’t she go where she pleased (within reason, naturally)? Women had rights too. This was what he had heard Mukti Devi say only the other day at a Society for Indian Patriots meeting when she made a fiery speech exhorting men to bring their wives out of purdah, make them join the fight for independence.