by Anuradha Roy
See, I say to the dogs, that’s where the road to the river used to go when it had not been blocked off. The river? Well, the power plant has taken over the banks so we don’t want to go there anyway, but let’s walk back towards the house that used to be Dinu’s. That is a five-story fortress now, where strangers live, and the low wall between the two houses that Dinu and I vaulted over a dozen times each day is ten feet high and ends in barbed wire, so we will walk past it towards my house. The only things that have not changed on Pontoon Road are the pir’s tomb and my own run-down bungalow and its overgrown garden. Even the name Pontoon Road, which reminded me of a long-dismantled bridge of boats that used to straddle the river, has been changed. It does not matter to me what it is called now, in my mind it is the same.
The dogs race in through the gate, I shut it after them. The banyan tree Mr. Spies liked to draw has a full-blown bird fight on, feathers and leaves flying. And here’s the stone bench where my mother sat when Beryl told her the story of Aisha cutting off her hair and turning into a man. (The swing that hung from the tree next to the bench is long gone.) Looking at the bench is easy. I can even go and sit on it and nothing happens to me. I pat a spot next to myself and both the dogs climb on, then try to push each other off. They are always tumbling around in amiable combat. The absurdity of their antics and the innocent violence of their play makes me forget everything else for a while.
Beyond us is the neem tree and then the patch at the back where I plant vegetables. I have a great ally. A gardener who used to work with me at the government nursery. He was young then, but is a middle-aged chap now, Gopal, and comes to the house once or twice a week on a creaking bicycle, with his khurpi tucked into his waistband. He smells of fresh manure and smoke. We have our routines, he and I. Now, in springtime, the two of us will walk around the vegetable patch and work out where to plant the bottle gourd and yam and ladies’ finger—they are the only things that grow in my garden in summer and the trick is to find them spots under trees so that they have some shade. There is very little water to give the plants. I know I sound like Mr. Percy-Lancaster when I tick off Gopal for leaving the hose-pipe on yet again.
I stayed in touch with Mr. Percy-Lancaster for years after I came back to Muntazir and even now, when I run into a horticultural problem for which there seems no solution, I think him up and talk to him, I ask him what I should do. I imagine his reply, all his possible replies, and it moves me towards something like an answer to my problem. I have had long years of practice speaking to absent people, those who left too early, our conversation unfinished. There are days when, in retrospect, my questions seem foolish, and I feel I should never have asked them. At such times I am reminded of Mr. Percy-Lancaster’s habit of coming up with Chinese proverbs. He produced them like rabbits out of a hat, he had one for every occasion. “Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open mouth and remove all doubt” was one with which he shut me up when I asked him something particularly foolish, and though I forget what the provocation was now, the horse sense of the proverb remained and has worked well for me, making me cherish the value of reticence, recognize the maddening ability that words seem to have to slip your grasp and say what you never intended, or to fall far short of saying what you so badly wanted them to.
One of Mr. Percy-Lancaster’s frequent complaints was that the gardeners did not know the difference between light and heavy watering. “They’ll leave the hose on till the bed is entirely flooded, and the next lawn and the road beyond.” Managing the greenery of the city of Delhi was his passion and anything that stood in his way incensed him. It could be parakeets ruining baby corncobs or jackals digging up flower beds. It could be gardeners sowing things awry and disregarding instructions in spite of years of training. Despite all the frustration, though, there was nothing other than gardening that he wanted to do.
Once, when I told him I was thinking of finding a more lucrative occupation and getting married (there was that time in my life too), he had his Chinese proverb ready: “If you wish to be happy for an hour, drink wine; if you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for eight days, kill your pig and eat it; but if you wish to be happy forever, become a gardener.”
“The horticultural department,” he told me, “is unable, for lack of facilities, to assist in getting you wine, wife, or pig, but we can help you become a gardener.”
6
WALTER SPIES CAME to see my grandfather much more often than his friends did, almost every day when he was not out in the villages. He came back from his rural outings laden with crude little string instruments, terra-cotta cups, clay animals, bamboo flutes he tried without success to play. He brought them to Dada and their heads together, one blond, one white, bent over some broken-down bit of clay, became an everyday sight at the clinic. Afterwards they would sit wreathed in the smoke from their two pipes, drinking cups of the sweet, thick tea that Jagat, my grandfather’s man Friday, made in the lulls between patients. Mr. Spies told Dada he felt at peace in the clinic, and considered it an eccentric shop where one could find anything: good health, tea, knowledge, or an antique chaise longue. Once he found crackly old piles of sheet music someone had left, and these kept him occupied for days. If Mr. Spies had to wait while Dada examined patients, he was content to sketch people waiting their turn outside the folding doors or to scribble notes into a book he carried with him.
They were strange drawings, Dada told my mother. “You’d be puzzled, Gayatri, how oddly childish they are, and yet they are not childish at all.”
“I’ve seen his drawings, they are very good,” my mother said.
“It’s what they call modern art,” my father said. “Maybe he can’t draw.”
“He is no amateur. I’d say it’s likely we are in the presence of genius—no, really, don’t make a face, how many of us are able to know a genius when we meet one? We can’t because we are ordinary.”
“Genius! That is like saying Brijen is a real writer. He is not. He’s a hack. This Spies seems ordinary enough to me,” my father said.
“Not at all, Nek. I think we haven’t been able to . . . to grasp his brilliance.”
“Brilliance!”
“Yes, that is what I said. The man is neither boastful nor dismissive nor temperamental so you take him for ordinary. Actually, I’m sure I’ve never met anyone so unpretentious before who calls himself an artist,” Dada said. “Beryl tells me Walter had the best teachers in Europe. She says he worships a painter called Rousseau and has learned from some very famous artists called . . . what did she say now? Otto Dix and . . . ?”
“Clay,” I said, “Paul Clay.”
“Yes, of course, Paul Klee. Myshkin, what would I do without you?” Dada said, patting me on a shoulder. “Gayatri, please tell Banno the potatoes need more butter.”
“I think she feeds all our butter to her children,” my mother said. “I can’t make sense of where it’s going if not into the potatoes. We made a great big tub of butter the other day—Myshkin and Dinu helped to churn it, didn’t you? And now it’s half-empty.”
“What’s all this fuss about butter? Mukti Devi eats just two meals a day—daal-roti and boiled vegetables, sometimes a bit of milk at dawn after her prayers. A little goes a long way when you understand that you eat to live, not live to eat. That is what Gandhiji says you should do. Control your appetites, all appetites. I wish I were strong-minded enough.”
“Worse than a Bengali widow’s food,” my mother murmured.
“A Bengali widow’s diet is a good one. Wholesome and plain. The food on this table? It could feed a poor family for two days. In a country where half the population gets nothing to eat. Try to learn from others. We can’t be born knowing everything. At least have an open mind, Gayatri.”
“Open mind?” my mother whispered. “Where is your open mind when it comes to paintings?” With my father, her voice was usually low and controlled, in contrast to his declamatory tones. Yet he never failed t
o hear things that appeared to contradict him.
“I like paintings where I can tell what I’m looking at,” he said. “I understand abstractions when they are in words. But why should a picture on your wall need explaining? Shouldn’t pictures be beautiful? What else should they be? Would you like flowers to turn into frogs in real life?”
“Walter was imprisoned in a camp in Russia during the war—because he was German—and he discovered new things. Cubism, futurism, expressionism, he calls them. He found beauty and meaning in lines and squares and circles,” Dada explained, helping himself to more fish. “And after that he discovered the work of this Rousseau, he says, and it changed him forever.”
“I don’t blame him, if he was imprisoned. Lined up and encircled,” my father said, with a sarcastic smile.
“Come, come, Nek, don’t be prejudiced. That’s not what a scholar should be,” Dada said. “Especially a teacher of history.” Dada had a rueful way of shaking his head that made you feel you had disappointed him. He had a hooked nose, a forehead that swept up from it into thick silver hair and bright, appraising eyes that made people feel they were in the presence of someone they needed to impress but might not manage to. Maybe my father had felt this way all his life.
“I have a very open mind, I read all kinds of literature . . .” my father began.
“How can you condemn pictures you have never seen?” my mother said, putting another piece of fried fish on my plate. “They may be good in a different way. Myshkin, eat that, please, don’t just push it around. Literature has nothing to do with it, people who understand words often cannot understand other things.”
“I’m not condemning anything,” my father burst out. “I was just joking.”
“You make these opinions sound like jokes, but that’s not what they are,” my mother said.
“A man can have an opinion, can’t he, even if he isn’t an artist? That Englishwoman in black is ridiculous, she springs about on the verandah at the guesthouse and calls it dance. Why don’t you tell Lisa to put a stop to it? I come across people gawping from the pavement. Do they even know what dance is, in the West? All they have is ballet and all ballet is swans pirouetting on toes. Think of the number of dance forms we have! It’ll take them a lifetime to write their dance book. Shakeel was saying the other day that this German artist struck him as a fraud. And Shakeel’s been to Europe and seen all the art there is to see.”
It was my father’s habit to quote either Mukti Devi or his advocate friend Shakeel as the final word on everything under the sun. Shakeel was widely read, my father liked to say, he was a true scholar, a man who could turn his mind to anything.
Shakeel Uncle held his head at an angle and had one eyeball that did not move—Dinu said it was made from the bottom of a soda bottle. Each time he came, he fixed his good eye on me while the soda-bottle one aimed opaquely at something else, and he ordered me to name the Mughal emperors in the correct sequence.
“Why stop at Aurangzeb?” he demanded when I faltered. “What happened between him and Bahadur Shah? Is not all of our present misery contained in those years? Well, young Master Rozario, any thoughts?” He would wave a peeling, gray-skinned forefinger at me before sinking into a chair to slurp tea and discuss politics with my father.
My mother’s dislike of him bordered on loathing and the mention of his name ignited one of her sudden, scorching tempers now. She put a spoon down with a clang into the serving dish. My grandfather shifted uneasily in his chair and made as if to get up. “Some people have no time for what doesn’t match their view of the world,” my mother said. “They think they know all there is to know and nobody can bring them anything new. They squeeze the joy out of life, dry it up, and chop it into a set of pellets they call rules. What is a good picture, what is a good book, what is the food you should eat—they know it all.”
When she realized her voice was raised and her words were coming out in a torrent, my mother stopped and pushed the dishes on the table around, passing the fish to Dada and the butter to me although neither of us had asked for anything. I kept my eyes on my plate and chewed the cold fried fish. I did not know then that Dada felt as much at a loss as I did when my parents fought this way at the dining table. Were we to carry on eating as if they were not fighting? Should we speak up too, take sides? My head was a muddle at such times. I wished the meal would end, I kept stealing glances at the long wall clock whose uncompromising arrows jerked no faster than usual to nine o’clock, the hour I was allowed to leave the table. A giant spider was exploring the green curtains that covered one side of the dining room. It might have been the Englishwoman in the black tunic stepping long-legged on grass. In a lame aside Dada said, “Today a patient told me he was losing his sense of smell. What could be done? What did it mean? He can’t taste food anymore because he can’t smell.”
For some time nobody could think of anything to say. Sounds outside the room amplified. Someone squabbling in the kitchen; the fan whirring, the frog croaking in the garden as it always did at this time of night. The high-pitched whine of Dada’s breath that made him cough and replenish his stock of air. At last Banno Didi came in with a golden dome of a pudding shivering on its platter. Ribbons of syrup trickled down its sides and it stood in a pool of shining caramel. When Banno Didi set it down on the table all of us just looked at it for a while.
“Now, that is what I call art,” my father said. “Someday there will be art you can eat. First you observe it and make deep, learned notes on it for an essay, then you eat it and write more notes.”
My father could sometimes produce the most mischievous of smiles and when it came, however brief its effect, it was miraculous. My mother remained unmoved, but Dada heaved a sigh of relief and said, “Now, won’t that be delicious, eh, Myshkin?” The pudding, which had seemed enormous when it was brought in, began to shrink fast. A small last piece remained that everyone pretended not to notice until my father took his spoon to it. He held the spoonful of pudding poised over his plate for a second, after which he tipped it onto my mother’s. My mother gave him a polite, tight smile. She picked up the piece with her spoon. We waited for her to eat it. “Myshkin should have that,” my mother said. “He remembered the artist’s name.”
My father sat in silence as I ate the last spoonful. Once dinner was cleared away, my mother retreated to their bedroom. She had a terrible headache, she said.
We slept on the roof in summer, my parents and I. Dada said the night air no longer suited him and kept to his bedroom, however stifling the heat. Our rooftop cots had bamboo posts to hang mosquito nets from and once I was inside, it was a room of my own under the open sky with my parents a little distance away. That night my father sent me up, saying he would follow soon. I lay in the dark with my head covered so that the ghosts in the trees would not see me. I could hear Brijen Uncle on the roof next door, singing a slow, meandering thumri. He usually sat on their roof drinking till late into the night and occasionally his voice stopped as he took a sip, then it came back again. The mad rooster which crowed only at night interrupted the singing, but Brijen Chacha went on with his mysterious, melodious song as if oblivous. I was starting to fall asleep when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I threw the sheet off my head and cried, “Where were you? I was scared.”
“What’s there to be scared of?” my father said in a tired voice. “You sleep here every night, has anything ever happened?” He had a jug in his hand. He made me get up from the bed and sprinkled water over the mattress to cool it down. He did not sprinkle any on the other bed where he and my mother slept. Instead of getting into their bed, he lifted the mosquito net on mine. “Is there room for me?” he said.
We lay on the cool, damp sheet inside our mosquito net, looking up at the night sky through its sieve. My father waved a breeze over us with a palm-leaf fan, letting it fall every now and then when his arm tired. Brijen Chacha started on another meditative song in a voice that now sounded somewhat drowsy.
“Tell me
again about how I was born.”
“You’ve heard it so many times, Myshkin, be quiet and listen to Brijen. He is singing well today.”
“No. Again.”
“One summer morning your Dada was in the garden and a very, very old man in a faded blue kurta opened our gate and entered. How old? Maybe a hundred years old. He had no teeth. His head was shriveled up like an ancient lemon. His shoulders were bent. Dada thought he was tired so he asked the old man, would you like a glass of water? Some sharbat? The old man said he needed to catch a train all the way to Kanpur to meet his daughter, but he had lost his money. Someone had stolen it from his bag, now what was he to do? He had nobody in Muntazir, no home, no relatives, no friends. Dada got up and went inside, brought his wallet out, and gave the old man enough money for his train and more, enough to eat on the way and to find his daughter.”
“Was it stupid of Dada to trust a stranger or was it kind?”
“You tell me, Myshkin.”
“Dada was kind. It is wiser to be stupid and kind than to be clever and cold. The old man told him, you have been kind to a stranger so I will be kind to you. I am actually a wizard and I grant you two wishes.”
“And what was the wish your grandfather made?”
“You tell me.”
“Your grandfather’s first wish was that he should have a grandson just like you. So you were born. His second wish was that all of us, Dada, you, your mother, and I, would live here happily ever after with many dogs, lots of food, and flowers in the garden. And he made a third wish I never told you about before. That this grandson should go to sleep early at night.”
The next afternoon, Beryl de Zoete arrived carrying a bag with her dresses. She handed it to my mother saying, “If you would be such an angel and have your woman launder them. Miss McNally’s washing is . . . well, the kindest thing one can say is that the clothes in her washtub cry out for soap, but soap rarely answers their call.” Beryl de Zoete had often asked these things of my mother in the weeks they had been there. She begged for music, ink, dressmakers, shopping tips, notebooks, washed clothes, boiled drinking water, Flit spray, books to read. This infuriated my father.