All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  Mr. Spies sat looking down from the hill at the few lights that twinkled at that hour in the far-off town—our town. “Have you ever been on a ship, Myshkin?” he said in a faraway voice. “When it became unbearable for me to live in Germany, I decided to leave and go to Java. But how to go to Java? I needed a ship and so I signed on as a ship hand. I was twenty-eight—the oldest on board. Good for nothing! I pretended to know only Russian so they would put down my stupidity to language trouble. They gave me very light duties. One duty was to keep watch in the crow’s nest. What’s a crow’s nest? You climb a ladder to a very small, swaying basket on a ship’s pole and from there you observe the sea around you, if anything is coming at you . . . I sang songs, and the water around me was black. Water, white froth, stars. Nothing but sky and water and stars! And I thought, this is what I want life to be! I don’t want to be wasting time with art when I can live. This is life! To be right in the middle of life, living each minute intensely. Hearing those girls sing tonight. I’ve never heard anything so moving from a human voice. On this hilltop. Nothing above us but the moon and sky. Nothing around us but silence and dry heat and wind in the grass. This is the center of everything.”

  He took a harmonica out of his pocket, put it to his mouth, and began to play. The sound filled the air as if there was an orchestra on our hilltop. As he played, he moved in time to the music and his bare feet tapped the ground. The melody he was playing seemed to leap and dive in the night air.

  Mr. Spies put the instrument away. “A song by Schubert. ‘The Trout.’ Do you know it, Dr. Rozario? It’s better on a piano. Or violin.” For a time he was still, gazing at the lights below us. He was with us, but he was not with us. Then he took off his shirt, bundled it into a pillow, and flung himself onto the grass. He ruffled my hair and said with a quick grin, “I’m happier than a pig in mud! Happiness somehow just comes to me.” He shut his eyes, still with a smile on his face.

  Flat on the ground, his stomach had caved in and his ribs stood out like the frame of a boat. His face too was sharper now: angles and hollows. Eyes shut, he was defenseless, a man to whom anything could be done. He was something that had washed up after a long journey. Driftwood. A shipwreck. A message in a bottle that I could not decipher.

  Soon after that night in the open, Mr. Spies decided he had to understand Indian classical music with some seriousness. He made my mother persuade Brijen Chacha to get him entry to private music soirées and to the homes of old masters so he could listen to them practicing. He started sarod lessons with a young man called Afzal Khan who was himself still a student. Afzal was slim and graceful, long-fingered, long-haired. He lined his eyes with kohl, wore gold studs in his ears, and always smelled of cloves. Mr. Spies found him so fascinating he would take him into his room at the guesthouse and photograph him for entire afternoons. Several times, he kept him back at night to photograph him at first light, which was best for portraits, he said.

  One unforgettable, candlelit evening at Lisa’s, after Mr. Spies had told him of the shadow theater of Bali, Afzal made a friend of his play notes on the sarod while he created an arabesque of delicate shadows on a wall using just his hands: now a bird, now a flower, two deer. In the end, Walter Spies knelt on his knees and gave each of Afzal’s hands a theatrical kiss, first one, then the other.

  The sound of twanging strings added to the general cacophony at Lisa McNally’s guesthouse, where Beryl was trying to dance the Kathak. She did not enjoy it. “It is dull, dull, dull! Like flamenco without the eroticism! And in two weeks I’ll have feet as flat as an ironing board!” A traveling salesman who was in Lisa’s third room at that time complained of the noise of drumming feet, and the teacher did not take to her. In private he told my mother he had never taught a stork to dance and certainly not in an Anglo-Indian guesthouse. He was a widely respected teacher and if she wanted to learn, she would have to come to his house, where he taught his other disciples.

  Our lives appeared to have found a new pattern that now included the visitors. The seismic movements that followed after my mother’s first expedition to the old city with them had arrested any further attempts of the kind. Things settled into a routine. Beryl even found an old British acquaintance in the cantonment, an officer who had a piano he let Mr. Spies use. Maybe uneasy, fractious adjustments were being made at home, but I was not aware of all that. I did not feel the heat of the summer, I lived in my make-believe world with Dinu, the weather was different there. We took turns to be the Nazis that Mr. Spies had fled from or we stood in the crow’s nests of ships, sighting pirates to shoot down. Sometimes we became soldiers on the revolutionary side in Spain, living off olives and wine and killing every priest in sight. I yearned to be in a real war where I could hide in jungles, shoot. I could not see that battle had already begun in Muntazir, both at home and outside.

  My sense of how long the visitors had been around is hazy, and the sequence and details of most events I have been describing may be more conjecture and reconstruction than the kind of truth given as evidence in law courts. But one evening, clear in every aspect, will never leave me. Now when I think back to it, I know that was the day when the ground shifted, and a crack appeared in the earth that would turn into an abyss.

  The evening plays in my head scene by scene like a film watched too many times. My father comes home, he finds Walter Spies settled in a cane chair, drawing our banyan tree, and Beryl de Zoete giving a demonstration of eurythmics in another part of the garden. Lisa is there too, in a red dress with a flared skirt, which she is holding with dainty fingertips as she tries following Beryl’s steps. “Let your body flow, let it move with the earth, feel the joy,” Beryl says, “and let go of your skirt!” She says the dance form is based on the principle that music’s emotion must be expressed through the whole body, it should come from intense feeling. To us it appears to involve a lot of energetic waving around of hands and legs in apparently contradictory rhythms. Perhaps it looks less good to viewers than it feels to the dancer. Nevertheless, my mother whistles and cries, “Lisa, you are born to it!”

  Brijen Chacha, lounging on the grass with his legs stretched out, says, “Wah, wah!” in the ardent manner of a visitor to a soirée of Urdu music. He has his bottle of rum with him even at that hour, and a steel glass from which he sips between his cries of appreciation. A grasshopper appears from nowhere and begins a tentative exploration of his kurta; he notices nothing but the women dancing until my mother leans forward and uses a leaf to brush the insect off his back.

  My father has two students with him, earnest boys in black-framed glasses, piles of books in their arms. They gape at the dancers. Banno Didi, Ram Saran, Golak, having abandoned their work, are watching from the steps that separate the back garden from the front. For a better view, and at enough distance for our shouts of laughter to be inaudible to the grown-ups, I am standing with Dinu, Mantu, Raju, and Lambu-Chikara on the wall between Dinu’s house and mine.

  His students surely expected their teacher’s house to be a hushed temple for books and scholarship, my father later says, and it would be all over his college the next day that Professor Nek Chand held dancing classes in his garden of a kind never before seen in Muntazir, while his wife sat there with strange men whistling at an Anglo woman in a dress. My father does not find this funny. Lose face and you lose authority; lose authority when you are a teacher and you have lost everything.

  “Authority. Respect. Discipline. When has anything new ever been done by obedient little slaves? Your college sounds like a prison cell.”

  “Discipline does not signify slavery, Gayatri. Everything has to have method. Anarchy does not lead anywhere.”

  I am in the shadows outside their bedroom door and I can see my mother sitting at the dressing table tearing hairpins out of her bun one by one. On her dressing table is an overripe mango I had left there that morning and she stabs it with each uprooted hairpin until the mango turns into a messy porcupine. She throws out the yellowing strand of jasmin
e from her hair and shakes her head in exasperation. “I am going to take a pair of scissors and chop all this off and throw away the pins.”

  “What has that to do with anything?”

  “Do you know there are women flying planes now? And you lecture me about authority and respect for just sitting in the garden with some friends!”

  “Friends? Since when are these your friends? You did not know them a few weeks ago and now they are your friends? Is that because they are foreigners? Aren’t Indians good enough for you?”

  “That is ridiculous, and you know that. It is narrow-minded of you,” my mother says. “Besides, Brijen was there too, and he is not a foreigner as far as I know. Neither is Lisa.”

  “Brijen makes the whole thing more disreputable, not less. The amount he drinks I wonder how he ever gets his books written. And I—narrow-minded! How many times have I begged you to come to the meetings with me and listen to Mukti Devi? Open your eyes to something new. Meet people who think beyond trivial selfish needs. Our country is in turmoil, our people are fighting for freedom, and you think only of yourself.”

  “What good will the great nation’s freedom do for me? Tell me that! Will it make me free? Will I be able to choose how to live? Could I go off and be alone in a village as Walter has been doing? Could I be there and paint as well? Or walk down the street and sing a song? Could I spend a night out under the stars away from the town as your father did the other day? Even Myshkin is freer than I am! Don’t talk to me about freedom.”

  “There’s a time for everything, Gay. Now is not the time to think of your needs alone,” my father says with a sigh. He is quiet for a while. When he speaks again it is in slow, patient tones, as if explaining to an especially dim student. “This is your fundamental problem. Your notion of freedom is superficial, you can’t tell the difference between personal and national freedoms. What we have on our hands is a monumental battle. We are fighting to free a whole nation from foreign oppression. Men and women are sacrificing everything. They are setting their own desires aside for this. One day, after the British are thrown out, centuries of oppression will be gone and we’ll all be free. The untouchables. The poor. We will wake to a new dawn in which the very air will be different. And you? You can only think of hairstyles and singing songs.”

  My mother turns from the dressing-table mirror to my father, her eyes blazing. “Do you know what I would do if I were free at this minute? I would leave this house. I would go away and never come back. I would go to Santiniketan and fall at Rabi Babu’s feet. I would beg him for sanctuary. I would paint. I would be able to look at the sky without feeling it’s a glass jar under which I’m trapped. The air would certainly be different there.”

  My mother flings the pin-stabbed, oozing mango into a corner of the room. She throws herself on the bed, puts her head into her hands, and starts to sob with rage. Her shoulders shake, her hair covers her face like a shawl. My father watches the yellow mess of mango-pulp trickling down the wall vomit-like, then turns back to her. He puts a cautious hand out towards her shoulder and places it there. She shakes it off.

  “Listen, Gay, you are making it sound as if you are in jail,” he says in pleading tones. “I don’t want you to feel that way. I want you to be happy. I want you to be as happy as when I first saw you. With your father . . . those days when I used to come to see him? But really to see you, you know I loved you from the start. You always waited by the door and let me in. You led me up the stairs into his study. You brought up a tray of tea. I brought you a book of Renaissance paintings. You still have it, the one with the Botticelli angels you love so much. Don’t tell me I don’t care for your feelings. I can’t have you feeling caged, of course not. I know you had hobbies, I want you to have them. Everyone needs hobbies. Especially women, who are so bound up in the home.”

  My mother’s sobs become louder and more uncontrollable. She is mumbling words incoherent with tears.

  “I wish we didn’t fight this way . . . everyone can hear us, I am sure. Can you imagine the effect on Myshkin? Don’t cry, Gay, please stop. Think of him.”

  “Myshkin. Myshkin.” My mother’s voice is choked. “As though nothing else matters. As though every other part of the world stopped after Myshkin came into it.” For the next few minutes the only thing audible is my mother trying savagely to stifle the spilling over of her desperation. She is scornful of tears, but today the dam she has built up inside herself has broken. My father sits beside her, wordless. Finally, he gets up from the bed.

  “If that is how you feel about your own child, there is little point in continuing this conversation.” He picks up a book from the side table. “Have you ever thought of my feelings? That I might have some too? That maybe you are not the only person in this house who feels imprisoned?”

  My father comes towards the door and I inch into the darker part of the passageway. I stand by their bedroom for a long while after he is gone. My mother’s sobs are muted now, at times nothing is audible. The moments of silence grow in length until I think it safe enough to peer into the room. I see that my mother is lying flat on her stomach, her face in a pillow buried in a dark tangle of hair, her outstretched hands clenched as if she is fighting.

  The story goes about Picasso that he had an unusually accurate visual memory and when he looked at things, his gaze was deep, still, intense, as if his eyes were taking a photograph and printing it onto his brain. If he wanted to paint a new interpretation of an old picture, he would spend hours studying it at the museum, day after day, then paint from recollection. I do not know how his way of working affected the men and women who sat for him. When he was to make a portrait of Gertrude Stein he observed her for almost a year, seating her and standing before her, but he did not draw or paint a line. When he did paint her, it was from memory.

  I am no Picasso. I am not an artist. Nor can I add and subtract very well as men who know how to survive do. This must account in part for my affinity with plants and is the reason why I turned my love for them into my life’s work. Plants don’t ask you to shape a sentence or solve an equation, they ask only that you are regularly, consistently, caring and watchful. I was. And as I observed trees and plants, I started to draw them. This was long after my mother had gone. I am a good draftsman, I have stacks of sketchbooks covered with leaves, buds, flowers, trees. I had watched how Mr. Spies drew the banyan tree at our house, concentrating on each leaf and hanging root as if every separate millimeter had to be imprinted on his mind. That tree is still in the garden, almost double its girth, and I have lost count of the number of times I have tried to draw it in his style. I watched him draw insects and flowers and dogs too. I do not have his ability to transcend mere precision, but I did imbibe from him the attention to detail I witnessed early in my life.

  Mr. Percy-Lancaster was impressed by my botanical drawings, and if I was trying to describe a plant I had seen, he would always say, “Stop the talk, my boy, draw it for me.” I know I can still bring back almost every line of a plant I might have seen two days or a week ago. Even though I no longer had the plant to hand, I swiftly produced an impression of it, enough for him to be able to identify it, and sometimes to compliment the drawing as “observant,” or even “beautiful.” Once he used the word exquisite and suggested I frame some of my drawings. For days after he pronounced his words of praise, they lit me up with a satisfied glow, for he was hard to please.

  The reason for my digression is this: I was unsure at the start of writing down these memories what I might be able to remember. I find that as I dwell more and more intensely in the time I am describing, it is as if incidents from my childhood are playing out before my eyes again. I am not sure I want to go on. I have been waking up at night confused about where I am, and my nightmares and dreams bring up things from long ago in unrecognizable forms. There is nothing unrecognizable about my parents’ terrible argument that night, though; it is as if it happened yesterday, and my mother’s cry is branded on my mind.

 
; Myshkin. Myshkin. As though nothing else matters. As though every other part of the world stopped after Myshkin came into it.

  My arrival had stifled my mother, it shrank her world, it tormented her. That was how she felt about me. It had struck like a punch in the stomach then, and it has been years since I allowed myself to dwell on it. But I had to. I am writing about it.

  Every now and then I wonder why I am doing this: to revisit, recall, write all of it down, who is it for? Are we our deeds, or are we the record we leave behind? Neither, maybe. I have read somewhere that someone asked Rabindranath Tagore, towards the end of his life, to write his autobiography. The poet wanted to know why. Was it because the world wanted to know about his romantic entanglements? Did prurience demand life stories? He was not going to do it. He had lived through phases so painful he could not bear to revisit them.

  It is not easy for me to revisit pain either, nor is it with the idea of telling other people about my life that I am writing this. I have no descendants with questions for me, neither am I a famous man who excites curiosity. Maybe it is just a way of buying time: I have still not opened the envelope from Lisa McNally’s relatives in Vancouver. It is weeks old now, locked away so that I don’t see it too often and wonder what is in it. Why don’t I just open it? What am I afraid of?

  I am afraid of fresh pain.

  Just as our feet shape new shoes for themselves so that in time they stop hurting, I have shaped my past for myself. It fits me well enough now, I can live in it. It is a shell into which I can retreat without fear of injury. I do not want to change it for a new version of the past.

  As I write this, however, I also find it surprising how much I am able to revisit with perfect equanimity. Happiness, even. It wasn’t so bad, not really, I said to my dogs when we went for a walk this morning. So much fishing, so much cricket. My grandfather’s long-ago antics with his tiger skin and sola hat. My explorations on the big black bicycle.