All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  When I think of these house calls now, I smile to myself even though it is all so many years ago. I see Dada at the mirror, combing his silver hair, which is standing on end because he has just shed his night kurta and put on a fresh one. Once he is dressed, down to his wallet and fob watch, he says, “Is my assistant ready?” When we reach the patient’s house everyone is overcome with relief, and the whole family flocks around Dada and speaks over each other in a bid to explain the symptoms. I decide I will never be a doctor, the stomachs of the ailing are so hairy, their tongues so gray, their smell always sour, stale, anxious.

  My grandfather has taken to bringing some patients home now, and he tells me to watch over them when he has to go out. These are young men with broken bones or wounds whom he patches up and cares for until they are able to slide off into the darkness or to a room in Home Away from Home to be made battle-ready again. They have injuries from police batons or bullets and cannot go to a hospital, Dada says. To him they are merely patients, but he knows the police do not share his point of view and he could be arrested for treating them and not reporting them. We are not to tell a soul, he repeats to the whole household. Talk to no one. To me he says, especially not Dinu, nor Dinu’s father. There are nights when nobody can sleep because the men moan and swear in pain. I stay up memorizing the swear words.

  After the house calls are done and the clinic is closed, we come back to Banno Didi clattering plates down onto the dining table. Every few days, if there are no patients at home, Dada pushes his plate away, food untouched, saying, “Let’s go to Lisa’s.” Then the evening changes: bright lights, rose-printed curtains, Boy in and out with tureens in which chunks of soft mutton and fat potatoes float in a broth that smells of ginger and onions. There is bread and butter, then crunchy fritters that ooze syrup and bananas. There is noise from the street, noise from the guests down the corridor, the raised voices of women fighting in the shanties behind the main road. Dozens of Lisa McNally’s ancestors in gowns and suits beam from the wall in approval while she plays Cole Porter records after dinner. “So deep in my heart, you’re really a part of me,” she sings, matching her voice to the one on the record, and winks at Dada, who tries to sing along. He goes off-key in a minute and switches to whistling.

  I want the music to go on forever so we don’t have to go back to our empty house where it is so quiet I can hear the owls breathing as they sleep in the corners of the verandah and I can hear my mother singing on the roof, her voice coming closer, then drifting off again. I feel her spinning me around, my head starts to swim, I want to stay awake, wait until she finds me, but everything goes into a jumble and when I open my eyes it is morning.

  15

  MY FATHER’S FIRST letter came to Dada from Kashi—which is what he called Benares. His hope that he would live like a monk, off whatever people gave him, did not appear to be working very well. “There are several charitable places here that give food to monks and seekers,” he wrote, “but the ones I have encountered are ruled by caste. You are fed with respect if you are some variety of Brahmin, but otherwise you are treated as a beggar. At the places that will feed someone like me whose caste is indeterminate, whose religion is nonexistent, a mere beggar, in short, I have to fill my stomach with a few dry rotis and water. To be poor and of low or unknown caste in our country—I now have an inkling of what it is like. You will ask me: Why do this? I do not know. There is a storm inside me. You will say I need to return to my duties, and bring up my son. I know that and I will. In the meantime, can you send me two hundred rupees by money order to the address below? Our postal account has enough. I will remain here until the money order arrives, then make my way further north.”

  The postman came in the afternoons, a little after I was back from school, and I willed him to stop at our gate, counting his steps as they approached. If the letter was from my father and not my mother, I felt my spirits plummet. My mother’s letters were for me, but my father’s were always to Dada, with a few lines directed at me. Even when Dada read out my father’s letters, I could not understand them. He put them away saying, “I’ll keep them safe. One day you will want to read them.”

  My mother’s letters took much longer to come. They were usually a month or more old by the time they arrived. They felt very foreign, with one- and two-cent stamps saying Nederlandsch-Indië, which made me think they were special stamps for people writing from the Netherlands to India and that Bali was in the Netherlands. Sometimes my mother put a real dead butterfly in, sometimes a leaf or dried flower. She wrote to me of a volcano you could see from Mr. Spies’s house in the mountains in Iseh, she wrote of the sea mango tree with big globes of green that were both poison and medicine. She drew the sea mango as well as clove and avocado trees for me, she painted their temples and houses.

  At night when I lay half-asleep, I was at the foot of Mount Agung, separated from it by a few miles of paddy fields. I could see my mother and Mr. Spies. He sat in the shade of a fern-leafed tree, a figure in gray and white, and beside him was an empty chair, a discarded bag, a green bottle. Beyond him, the mountain reared up blue and gray and green, massive and sudden at the end of the flat fields. White clouds hid it halfway up and the mountain’s tip above the clouds was so high that it touched the sun, the way it did in my mother’s painting.

  When Mount Agung exploded, at first there was only smoke, and the air was heavy with a smell that made it hard to breathe. Then came a thick cloud of ash that climbed out from the mountain’s tip as if there were a whole second mountain inside it, in flames. I could see the orange glow of fire at the top of the mountain. The heat spread from it and entered the little house in Iseh and in minutes the leaves on the plants curled up and dried to paper, the roosters stopped crowing, the cat fled into a corner. The plume of smoke grew bigger and thicker and moved westward with the wind. In a few hours the smoke stopped, the heat dwindled, the black cloud began to clear, and pale light lingered until the stars came out, far into the night.

  I gazed out of the window in my room. Through the open door I could hear my grandfather mumbling in his sleep. I slid out of myself away to the sky above the village of Iseh. Iseh in Sidemen, a province of Karangasem. Karangasem in the east of Bali, I whispered. Iseh.

  When one of my mother’s letters came I would examine the envelope and stamps for a long time before I opened it. Once the letter was read, it would be over and I would have to start waiting again. I willed myself not to open the letter till the next day or the day after. I thought of it glowing and pulsing in a corner of the desk in my room, waiting for me as I did my classes at school, as I went fishing with Dinu, as I went on rounds with my grandfather. Something of my mother, waiting for me.

  My mother’s most recent letter said Mr Spies was working on a huge painting, one of twelve he had been commissioned to do, she said, and to make the paintings he had to travel all over the island in search of ruins. His monkeys went with him in his car and Mr. Spies bought bananas for them at one of the roadside markets. I could see the market as I read the letter, I could feel the air rushing past the car. One of the monkeys sat on my head and searched through my hair and when my mother happened to turn back and see that, she screamed. This made all three monkeys leap out of the moving car and scamper up to the top of a coconut tree. Mr. Spies had to stand below the tree and coax and croon for them to come down.

  The monkeys went everywhere with him. Once we went to a party in Den Pasar, the capital town. Lights glittered in a ballroom, people chattered nonstop, and all of them wanted to speak to Mr. Spies. Women in long gowns, men in black-and-white suits, holding glasses with stems. One of the men was loud and self-important. “A pompous ass, that Dutch Resident,” Mr. Spies said. When we reached the car at the end of the evening, he kissed the monkeys on their heads and sighed with relief. “At last some humans,” he said.

  On the next collecting trip, he left the monkeys at home and when he came back he found that they had torn up the newest of the twelve pictures. I
t was four months of work, and the picture, almost complete, was in a hundred pieces. The shreds of canvas fell through his fingers like rain. My mother knelt on the floor and picked them up, weeping over the fragments of arms, legs, eyes, trees, cows. She put a few of the pieces in her next envelope for me: the paint shone like lit gold. The shadows and light made me feel as if the bits of canvas were alive. Mr. Spies did not appear in the least annoyed, my mother wrote. He tickled the monkeys around their necks and advised them not to be disrespectful with great art in the future. Then he locked himself up to paint the same picture again from the start.

  Wherever they drove, gleaming paddy fields were strewn about the slopes like shards of a mirror. People knew Mr. Spies all over the island. Even if they had not met him before, they knew who he was and as soon as his car appeared, they came out, as if to welcome a friend. He sat on their verandahs, lit a cigarette, and listened to their stories. When they stopped at the Raja of Karangasem’s my mother went into the great big kitchens while Mr. Spies sat in the outer courtyard with the Raja drinking arak. My mother’s new notebook filled up with fresh recipes, drawings, and notes. In the margins she drew the things she did not have a name for and later asked Mr. Spies or one of his friends what those things were called. In this way she picked up little bits of Balinese, Dutch, even German. Enough to get by.

  My mother wrote of her new notebook in her letter to me and asked, “Where is my old book? I wish I had brought it with me.”

  My mother’s notebook was where she had left it, on her dressing table. It used to be my standby for the weeks when no letters came. I have it still. It is a diary dating from the year of her first trip to Bali, 1927. She has written Gayatri across the front page using a brush, the strokes of the letters long and sweeping. One drawing I still linger over today is from July 1927. It shows a young girl, beatifically smiling, lying back in a meadow of flowers and grass which is framed by a sky full of stars. It is a self-portrait that needs no words to convey the feelings of the artist.

  During her first sea journey, my mother kept a fitful journal. One page says in block capitals, “Rabi Babu spoke to me today. He asked me to sit beside him.” As the pages progress, the words are fewer and pictures more frequent, as if she were too impatient for prose when a few lines or brushstrokes would do. For some pages my mother has turned her diary into a record of household accounts: groceries bought, wages paid. There is my schedule of medicines for convulsions and fever. Things fall out of the book: pictures clipped from magazines, tickets for The Kid. She had taken me for the matinee, defiantly ignoring my father’s strictures on the evils of movies. When we came back from the cinema my father was pacing the verandah, cold with fury. After that, my visits to the cinema house with my mother had ended.

  Between the pages in her notebook with her recipes for Kheer Scented with Oranges and Begum Farhana’s Pulao my mother has stuck on photo corners and inserted a photograph of a younger version of herself with her father. Her eyes are shining, she has ropes of plaits hanging at her shoulders, her father is smiling at her, not at the camera. There are other photographs in the diary, including one of a family picnic by a lake. The lake is as flat and white as a bed and we are ranged in a row in front of it. I am between my mother and my grandfather. There is an uncle from Karachi and his wife and son, even Banno Didi, Dinu, Raju, Mantu, Lambu, and Golak. But not my father. The diary has no trace of him.

  16

  FOR MY TENTH birthday, knowing I coveted Dinu’s air gun, my grandfather gave me one too, an imported nickel-plated Daisy. After I had practiced for several days, shooting at mangoes, Dinu came up with the plan that we would try out my new gun away from the house. Shoot at the evening train as it passed. “Moving targets, Myshkin,” he said. “Hitting old tins and fruits in the garden is for babies.”

  Dinu now smoked, and he had a bottle of rum—pilfered from his uncle’s stash—hidden away in his room. He claimed he had kissed a girl. He was so far ahead of me in the ways of the world that I deferred to him in all such matters. Accordingly, I put my pellets and gun into my bag late that afternoon, and climbed through tall grass and lantana bushes to the railway line. I was quite a lot shorter than him and had to scramble to keep up with his long-legged lope. Near the railway line, we lay on our stomachs by the cutting to wait for the evening train. We talked in whispers to each other and Dinu put a blade of grass into his mouth to chew as he had seen cowboys do in Westerns. He pushed back an imaginary hat. Not a cloud wrinkled the sky, the world was enormous, I had no parents, I had my own gun. I plucked a blade of grass to chew on as well.

  Sometime before sunset, we heard a distant hooting. Dinu turned on his stomach and readied himself. He narrowed his eyes. The thought crossed my mind that it might be a passenger train and not a goods train. I sat up with a jerk. Our bullets might go through the window, they might set the train on fire. I clutched Dinu’s arm to make him stop. He shook me off and aimed again.

  The train hooted again and then it was upon us, so close that we felt the wind throw us back. What if my father were on it, coming home from Nepal? What if my mother was in it? The train boomed past us, Dinu pressed the trigger, I jogged his elbow, shouting in blind panic, “No, no! Don’t!”

  When the train had gone, the noise receded, there was not another sound to be heard. The dry grass tickled me, I wanted to sneeze, I struggled not to sneeze. I could sense that Dinu was gathering his forces to pummel me half to death, but then I heard him whistle. “My first moving target. Myshkin, I’ve got us a bird for dinner.”

  He got up from where he was and edged closer to something in the grass some distance away. The grass was moving. Then came a whimpering sound, followed by a moan and then a man’s voice crying, “My leg! They’ve killed me! Help! They’ve killed me!”

  Dinu turned and fled. I did not think or pause, but scrambled to my feet and pelted after him. He bounded over rocks and humps of earth, I struggled to stay close. I caught up with him and clutched his arm. “Who did you hit? What happened?”

  Dinu shook off my arm. “Don’t do that, you donkey.”

  “But what if he is dead? We should go and check.”

  He stopped walking abruptly and turned towards me. His face was very close to mine, his mouth smelled of smoke, he had two red pimples on his cheek, crusted with white. “And if he’s dead, what’s the good of checking? Not a word about this to anyone, understand? Who told you to blab about Lambu to my brother? You’ve got dung between your ears. You grabbed my elbow. You spoilt my aim. The man’s got hurt, he’ll go to your grandpa. That’s all.”

  For days after, I stiffened at the sight of any man with a limp. I put my air gun away. Every now and then I asked Dada with elaborate casualness about his patients, hoping he would tell me he had treated a man with a pellet in his leg. Dada raised an eyebrow after a day or two of my questions. “So, Myshkin,” he said. “Do you want to be a doctor after all? Shall we lance a few abscesses together?”

  Dinu and I did not talk about what had happened, as if mentioning it would bring forth batteries of wounded men on the warpath from behind the bushes. I did not see him for almost a week except in passing at school, where I avoided him, and although I could not have articulated it then, I think I knew we had begun the slow process of breaking away from each other.

  Yet the sheer length of childhood friendship can keep it sputtering along despite every kind of failure. There is safety in the familiar. It is to Dinu that I turn when I have to verify details about my past and our effort to recall one thing takes us to another and in this way with one incident, then a second and a third, there is before us a series of signposts leading back to the ordinary happiness of days unclouded by adult differences. It was Dinu who reminded me about the forbidden films he took me to see on the sly, the booklets with pictures of film stars that we hoarded till they became greasy with handling. How we sat on the floor right in front of the screen and wolf-whistled through the final kiss. I had all but forgotten about our fasci
nation for Fearless Nadia, the heat in our bodies at her length of bare thigh, and our determination to seek her out, whip and all, and free her of her clothing.

  17

  MY FATHER CAME back on a muggy day several months after he had left. Sometime before his arrival, he had sent a telegram saying only, Arriving Soon. Clean Rooms. Unsure which rooms he meant, Ram Saran spent a week spring-cleaning both the outbuilding and my parents’ old bedroom. He chased out lizards petrified high on the walls, put brooms through the glassy webs of spiders, dusted, mopped, polished, then put everything back as it had been and locked up.

  The entire household came out when my father appeared at the door and shouted, “Anybody there?” I sprang out of the broken-down carriage in the back garden where I had been saving people from an exploding volcano with Sampih, a boy my mother often wrote about. Rikki bounded towards the gate, her tail a blur of joy. Dada was at the clinic, but Golak, Ram Saran, and Banno Didi and two of her children—all hurried out on hearing the sound of his voice.

  I had already reached the front garden and seen what they had not. My father was not alone. There was a woman with him.

  “Myshkin, come here, I am back.” My father held his arms out in a way he never used to. He looked awkward, like a picture-book scarecrow in a field with a carrot smile on his face.

  The woman was holding a toddler. She kept rocking her whole body and crooning to it in a language I did not understand. The toddler whimpered, then wailed, sounding like the cats that fought at night in a corner of our garden. I stayed where I was. I could not bring myself to go towards my father, it felt as if my feet had grown roots and would never move again.