All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  My mother took the laundry bag from her with a tired smile. Beryl de Zoete narrowed her eyes and said, “It’s not that time of month, is it? You’re like an owl blundering in daylight.” My mother turned away and Beryl pursued her. “It’s pointless for me to go to those dances just with Walter. Neither of us understands anything. What will I do? I am not at all good at being learned. Everything I speak of I have seen with my own eyes and felt with my heart. You help me to see and feel. Can’t you come with us?”

  My mother’s head drooped. “I . . . actually, there is so much to do at home. And I haven’t been feeling very well.”

  Why had my mother got it all wrong? I could not understand how she had forgotten all the things my father had told her just the other night. I said, “My father has said she must not leave the house and go running about the city with foreigners.”

  “Shhh, Myshkin. Be quiet!”

  “My father says all of you are welcome to come home when the rest of us are here . . .” At this point a rap on my head stopped me saying anything more.

  “Haven’t I told you a hundred times not to talk out of turn? When older people are talking?”

  “In Bali, something always happens to revive your spirits when something has happened to crush them. Here too. It will be the same,” Beryl de Zoete said, paying no attention to my mother’s exchange with me. “Whatever feels insurmountable today—we will glide through it tomorrow, we will pirouette and twirl through it.” She took her purple scarf off her neck and draped it over my mother’s shoulders. “Now, that suits you much better than that drab brown you’re wearing today, don’t you think? Brings color to those lovely golden cheeks. You have enchanting eyes, child, go and wash them, put a smile and some red lipstick on. Think of tomorrow—which is always, but always, a new day. That’s such a comfort.”

  My mother’s face lit up, as if she had had an idea. “Wait, Beryl,” she said, “sit and read something. I won’t take a minute.” She put the scarf aside on a chair, tucked the end of her sari into her waist, and gathered her hair into a tight bun as she ran to the kitchen and summoned Golak. Together they fried the whole pile of samosas she had filled with stuffing through the day. They were meant to be for our teatime, and I knew my father was looking forward to them, but she handed the warm, aromatic package to Beryl. “For you and Walter,” she said. “To say sorry for no longer being able to help you with your dance work.”

  My father came home from work and I heard him say, “Only toast? I thought you were making samosas.” He pushed the toast around on his plate. He had a long, gentle face and now it suddenly became longer. His dominant feature was large, dark eyes which seemed to concentrate a private universe of anguish and passion in them. One of his colleagues told me much later—with some envy even though he was by then past retirement—that most girl students at the college were in love with my father when he was their teacher and thought of him as impossibly handsome, unbearably tragic, and in need of succor.

  My mother remained unmoved.

  “I thought you had lost your taste for fried food,” she said. “I thought Mukti Devi had told you gluttony was a sin greater than pride or dishonesty?”

  My father dipped his chewy, cold toast into his tea to soften it. A part of it plopped into the teacup.

  7

  WHATEVER THE CRISES in my parents’ lives—their contrary sense of wrongdoing and right-thinking, their clashing views of necessities and indulgences, freedom and captivity—the first crisis in my personal moral universe came that summer from an entirely unexpected quarter.

  Those days, mealtimes apart, neither Dinu nor I were much seen inside our homes. We fished or played, mainly with Banno Didi’s sons Raju and Mantu and Dinu’s driver’s son, Lambu, who was a few years older than us. His face was already volcanic with pimples. He resembled nothing so much as a coconut tree: his long, thin, somewhat stooped frame had the same narrow girth from hip to shoulders and culminated in a giant bush of hair that stood on end no matter what. We used to dance a jig around him, singing out a nonsensical rhyme making fun of his height that began, “Lambu chikara, Doh anne may barah.” He would join in with gusto even though the jingle was in no way complimentary to him. But he was wiry and strong and we relied on his narrow shoulders to reach tree branches or shelves too high for us.

  Lambu was our bridge to the adult world. He taught us to smoke, he knew which of the garden weeds was marijuana, and it was from him that we acquired a rudimentary acquaintance with sex and the body parts relevant to it. This happened one evening when Lambu was making a pile of rotis in a shed outside the kitchens of Dinu’s house. He beckoned us with a dough-encrusted finger. “Want to see something? Keep it to yourselves.”

  The shed was lit by an oil lamp. Beyond the reach of the lamp were dark shadows in which bales of hay, alive with mice, were piled one on top of the other. Nobody from Dinu’s family ever came here.

  We squatted beside Lambu as he patted his mound of dough into a round, shaped it some more, then bisected it carefully with the tip of his little finger. “See?” he said.

  “Of course,” Dinu said. “It’s easy.” Dinu never liked to confess ignorance, he was happier bluffing when he was out of his depth. All I could see was a big lump of dough. I said so.

  “Buttocks, you ass,” Lambu said, following it up with more sculptures of the same kind. He accompanied his artwork with a lecture on the sexual possibilities of every body part he was molding out of the dough. We were spellbound.

  The next day, Dinu put his knowledge to use by drawing dirty pictures on the walls of our school toilets. I never found out how the pictures were traced back to the artist, but it was followed by a summons to Dinu from his father. Dinu went to his office room, where Arjun Chacha locked the door and kept it locked for a long time. I was not told what transpired inside. All that Dinu would say afterwards was that he would break the neck of the person who had tattled to his father about Lambu’s role in the saga because his father had come to the conclusion that Lambu was a bad influence on Dinu, and needed to be sent away. He had sacked the driver and ordered him to clear out of the servants’ quarters with his family by the evening. When the driver groveled and wept, Arjun Chacha consented to give him work at the family cloth mill in Kanpur on condition that when he left Muntazir, he would take his misbegotten son with him.

  I know now that a move to a cloth mill then was practically a prison sentence for a man used to living in the countryside. The machinery at those mills was old and badly maintained and the men worked long shifts month after month under asbestos and tin in broiling heat until their bodies collapsed or a machine killed them. Lambu’s father knew what was ahead.

  The night the driver was condemned to the cloth mill, we were woken by guttural cries, high-pitched wails, men’s voices, women’s voices, a child crying, things falling. From our roof we saw Banno Didi, Golak, and Ram Saran hurrying to Dinu’s, lanterns in hand. We could see people come and go into the compound behind Dinu’s house, crowd around, disperse. Then a few heart-rending screams and silence for a moment, after which the noise started all over again, even louder now.

  In the morning, from Banno Didi, who told it with much relish, we came to know that Arjun Chacha’s driver, blind drunk and crazed with rage at losing his job, had beaten up Lambu. Who told him to make friends with Sahib’s son? Didn’t he know servants needed to keep a distance?

  Lambu, taller and stronger than his father, had hit back. His mother had tried pulling her husband and son apart. Others jumped into the fray. And then the driver charged at his son with a grinding stone and bludgeoned him with it. Blow after blow. Nobody could stop him. The stone smashed one side of Lambu’s face, shattered his rib cage, and broke an arm. Lambu was in hospital now, in a coma. One side of his face was like jelly.

  “If he’d had a cleaver he’d have chopped the boy to pieces,” Banno Didi said with relish. Golak could produce no response macabre enough to match this and said, “Why, I have a cousin
who once sliced his thumb clean off with a knife.” Banno Didi snorted with the contempt this pathetic accident called for.

  That day, I did not seek out Dinu. I spent it lurking in the broken-down old carriage in a corner of our garden and when everyone had eaten lunch and the usual afternoon lull had taken over, I ran down to the river. I lay flat on the riverbank, arms outstretched, ears to the scorched ground. The grass was yellow, the reeds on its bank were burnt brown, the river had receded, baring several yards of dark, fissured earth. The sun hung in a haze of dust and the water was too dazzling to look at for long. If I opened my eyes, I saw the shadows of black kites wheeling overhead like omens, so I shut them and pressed my ears closer to the ground. Maybe I was crying, although now, hardened by Ivan the Terrible of Olympus Circus and my mother’s view of tears, I did not often give in to them. I started to feel the grass scratchy against my nose, hear the buzz of insects. I heard a voice next to me, very soft, saying, “What is it you are listening to?”

  It was Walter Spies. He had swum across from the other side as he did almost every day, and now he spread his towel and lay on the grass beside me, still wet and smelling of river water. “Is it the earth you are listening to?” He pressed his ear to the ground as well.

  “Can you hear the sound of the earth?” I said.

  Walter Spies’s face was next to mine, and his eyes were shut as he concentrated. “I can. A sound like thunder, everlastingly, yes,” he said. He pressed my head down with his hand, gently. “Listen! The mighty being is awake.”

  “What mighty being?”

  Walter Spies burst out laughing. He ruffled my hair. “It is from a poem. An English poem Beryl likes a lot and she recites it every time the sun sets nicely. I think the poet means God. But how can we ever know what poets mean?”

  We turned and lay on our backs. It was hazier still, the kites were gone, the light was yellow and murky, a storm was coming. The wind was gathering somewhere, you could sense it.

  Before I knew what I was saying, I had said it. “Lambu will die. It was my fault.” While Dinu was sitting in detention at school for drawing those pictures the way Lambu had shown us, it was I who had run home bursting with knowledge that nobody else had, needing to tell someone. The minute Dinu’s older brother asked me a few questions about why Dinu was late, I had blurted out Lambu’s role in his disgrace. Dinu’s brother had told Arjun Chacha and he had sent away the driver and now Lambu might die.

  “But it was the boy’s father who hit him,” Mr. Spies said. “Not you. If you had not said anything someone else might have. Such things, they are never hidden for long.”

  Tears did fill my eyes now and water ran down my nose. I tried not to sniff or sob. I did not lift my head.

  I heard the rustle of paper and the familiar sounds of a pipe being tapped, a match struck. I could smell tobacco smoke. I thought of how Beryl de Zoete hated tobacco smoke. Then I thought of Lambu, and how I might never see him again even if he lived, and misery clutched at my throat again.

  “I was very sad this morning,” I heard Mr. Spies say. “I was thinking of someone I was close to. My cousin, Conrad. Kosya I used to call him. He came to Bali because of me. His work was to take care of my animals—I have many, you know.”

  “How many?” I did not raise my head.

  “Oh, monkeys, birds. Frogs. Many animals. I always thought nature was the best thing, jungle the best place of all. That is what I told Kosya. We walked in the jungles and swam in the sea. It was joy. One day someone told him that in the Balinese astrological calendar, something they use to tell the future—it said Kosya would be eaten by Kala Rau. What is Kala Rau? A big fish. What is the future? Who knows the future? I laughed my head off, told him to just go and swim and not be stupid. Some weeks later, the water was cloudy so nobody wanted to swim, but Conrad stripped off his clothes and raced in. He fooled around, he screamed and shouted, he made faces. So much that when he really did scream for help, we paid no attention. I worship nature. But terrible things happen in nature all the time. His right leg was bitten off by a shark. We took him to hospital, he didn’t live. For a long time I was tormented. I was in great grief. I thought, Bali is saying go back, you will be destroyed here. You have done something wrong. You did not warn Kosya about the sharks.”

  Mr. Spies put a hand on my shoulder and said, “But that was not it. Bali was not telling me anything.”

  His eyes were very blue in the afternoon light. His gaze had the intensity of a magnifying glass trained on paper to burn it with refracted sunlight. “The calendar was nothing,” he said. “The shark did what nature told it to do. Some combination of forces larger than Kosya or me or the shark had driven him to his death. It was a tragedy. A tragedy is too big for you to see it coming or stop it. If we could see ahead and know the future there might be no tragedies.”

  I told nobody else about my conversation on the riverbank with Mr. Spies. I do not know why I had broken my habit of reserve to speak to him, almost a stranger, but it was as if the world had contracted for some moments to the riverbank that day, he and I sitting on it, and in that contracted world I was safe, I could say anything and be comforted. For years afterwards, I would speak to an imaginary Mr. Spies if I was troubled, as if he were really there, a friend I could trust. In some intangible way, what he said that afternoon diluted the intensity of my horror at what had happened to Lambu, though for many weeks after that, when I was alone in my cot in the darkness, all I could see if I shut my eyes was his face, as misshapen as melted wax, resting in a nest of flowers on the bier which the servants were to carry on their shoulders to the cremation ground. The head kept lolling to the right, whatever Lambu’s mother, broken with weeping, did to keep it still in the center.

  8

  YESTERDAY, I PAUSED in my writing and drew up a calendar. I had to use reasoning rather than memory to do this. As far as I can be sure about months and weeks during that summer of 1937, Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete came in early May—they had been there awhile when Lambu was killed, sometime in late May or early June. Our summer holidays must have started soon after—the next thing I remember is the few weeks when we went as usual to the Kumaon hills for the holidays. I used to count the days till the journey, the excitement of it building up in me as I crossed out squares on the calendar. After the train dropped you off at the railhead, you had to go on horseback the rest of the way, halting at night in wayside villages. Almost our whole household traveled with us on mules: pots and pans, stoves, bedding, lanterns, blankets. Golak and Rikki. Nothing more thrilling happened all year.

  We would troop into the courtyard of the cottage my grandfather rented each summer and go from room to room, then out into the garden, exclaiming over the baby peaches on trees or a new bird’s nest. From the windows you could see the snow peaks, and far below in the valley squares of yellow and green fields quilted around white village huts. In the mountains I did not need to be shaken awake in the morning, my eyes opened to the sun pouring through the skylight.

  My mother had a feverish lightheartedness about her through the holidays. Maybe this was because my father only came up to the hills for a week, or ten days at most. “It’s the best time for research and real work. Summer,” he wrote to us. “Peace at home, to read and write as long as I please. Library empty at the college.” He spent his days working alone, meeting Shakeel in the evenings, going on his early morning walks. “I can concentrate wholly and entirely on ancient India through the morning and on philosophical works in the evenings. I have made a notebook in which, each day, I write down an important thought that has crossed my mind. Yesterday my thought was this: that every thinking man needs solitude and freedom if he is to realize his full mental potential. In the days of old, ascetics went away to meditate. We can no longer do so now, we have jobs, we have families. But could the Buddha have been the Buddha if he had stayed home? What a laughable thought. I will bring up the notebook and read out my list of thoughts to you all when I come. I am impatient t
o be there. How contradictory feelings are! We want to be hermits one day and family men the next.”

  Neither my father nor his notebook of virtuous thoughts had arrived when Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete appeared one day. I do not know if Dada had invited them or if they had hatched the plan with my mother. All I recall is that one afternoon there was a great deal of noise just as we were sitting down to lunch and they were there, followed by an extravagant caravan of mules laden with bottles of whisky and gin for Dada, and boxes of food for us. Our days became festive. Golak would go off to buy provisions and come back followed by a woman with a basket on her head in which chickens squawked anxiously under a net, their heads poking out between bottle gourd and brinjal. My mother went off with the visitors to distant hillsides, painting and sketching, far beyond the need for food or drink. When the three of them came back laden with pinecones and stories of the animals they had sighted, my mother refused to tell me why she would not take me with her.

  “I can’t take you everywhere. Besides, your grandfather needs company” was all she would say, locking me into sulks that I could not free myself from for half a day. Her joy had a wild edge that made me wary of her, as if she had turned into a stranger: eyes sparkling, hair loose, she gathered armloads of wildflowers and flitted around the house turning every spare jar or bottle into a vase. The slightest thing would charge her with excitement. “Come and see,” she would cry out. “A giant moth on this windowsill!”

  We lost track of days of the week. Every morning began with the luxurious promise of a whole day and evening and night of enjoyment. But my father was to arrive quite soon and Mr. Spies and Beryl had already been with us for a week. They were thinking of departure. It was left unsaid, but it was understood that they would leave before my father came.