by Anuradha Roy
There was a radio as well at one of the shops near Dada’s clinic and I used to stop there on my way back from school because this one was always tuned to Germany. Maybe I would hear Mr. Spies’s voice on it—he was German wasn’t he? He might talk directly to me through the machine. I knew this was not likely. Even if Mr. Spies were on German radio, he would be speaking of art or Beethoven or the book he was writing with Beryl de Zoete. What would he say to me? Might he tell me how to come and find him and my mother? I knew this was unlikely. Two years had passed. My mother wrote to me as usual, and although she spoke of her paintings being bought and sold and said she was saving money, she no longer said she would come for me.
20
ON THE DAY of the concert at Dinu’s, Lipi dressed up. She put on the lime-green sequined sari that Dada had given her. It was a year old now, but had never been worn. She pinned a strand of jasmine into her hair and wore the long earrings and necklace he had given her. Ila was in an embroidered skirt and blouse, and had a red rose in each of her pigtails.
Lipi came out into the drawing room, appearing triumphant as well as self-conscious. I saw her stealing a glance at herself in the long mirror on the far wall of the room. Her lips were painted red, while a thick dusting of talcum powder on her face had made it clownishly white. Despite that, the shimmering sari made her appear delicate and festive in a way she had never been before. She smiled at Dada and me.
My father walked in from his college, raised a brief, skeptical eyebrow at her. He went into the outbuilding without a word and emerged half an hour later, bathed and changed into a fresh kurta and churidar. Now we were all ready to go and gathered in the front verandah: I was in a white kurta too, Dada even had a rosebud in his buttonhole. He walked ahead and unlatched the gate, saying, “Come on, I can hear them tuning their instruments.” He turned the corner and we heard him talk to the watchman as he walked into Dinu’s house. I sped off after him and was halfway to our gate when I heard my father say to Lipi, “Where are you going?”
She stopped in her tracks. “To Dinu’s . . .”
“Surely you have some sense. Ila will ruin the concert. She cries so often, Arjun will hate that. You wait at home with her. I will send word.”
“Send word? About what?”
“You can come at dinnertime. Noise won’t matter then . . . although really, to bring this child into company is asking for trouble. She’ll probably spill something . . . well, that can’t be helped.” He started to walk off, then turned to Lipi again. “Wait till I send for you. You can listen to the music quite as well from here. In fact, if it were not for neighborliness, I would not go either, I have an article to finish. This is time wasted.”
My father strode past me towards the gate, saying, “Come on, Myshkin, what has to be done has to be done.”
Lipi did not take a step forward or back. She stood by the gate through which my father had gone, and nothing moved but her sari, which slid off her shoulder to the ground. Ila babbled her nonsense words. It was already dark and Dinu’s garden was shimmering with tiny flames. One thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine diyas had been lit around the house and lawns to mark the year, an extravagance my father said even the nawabs would have considered flagrant. The little earthen lamps flickered in rows along the roof, in each window niche, among the trees, and even at the back where the servants’ quarters were. You could smell jalebis and gulab jamuns being fried in ghee. A moment passed and a plaintive sarangi sounded its first notes, then a voice starting to sing. At that, I ran out of the gate and into Dinu’s, leaving Ila and Lipi marooned on the drive.
It was during the second raga of the evening that someone shouted, “Fire, fire!” The singers kept singing, perhaps they had not heard the cries. They had reached the part of the raga where they took turns with the instrumentalists, dazzling everyone with the way they transformed the same notes. They had no eyes but for each other’s cues and gestures. It was only when we rose from our bolsters, brushing off rose petals and jostling each other to move, that the singing faltered.
When we came out of the tent we saw that people were not pointing at anything nearby but across the wall—towards our house. The flames were high, reaching the top of the tamarind tree. Dinu vaulted over the wall first. A pile of things was burning in the area just beyond the outbuilding—we could see chairs and tables in the fire, clothes and books, and Lipi struggling nearby as puny Golak tried to pull her back. The sequins on her sari glinted in the firelight. There were voices shouting, “Stop her!” but the roar of the fire tore them to shreds. Shadows danced and darted as we pulled things from the flames. I can still see the scene in every detail. My grandfather is on the other side, near the broken carriage, trying to stamp out the sparks flying onto it. There is my father. He is running towards Lipi. Lipi has something in her hand—my mother’s notebook. She has flung it into the fire before he can stop her. Dinu dives forward, plucks it out, and throws it to one side. Even today, the book’s charred edges bring back that evening each time I turn its pages. I can see saris on fire: my mother’s. Her blouses, her shawls. My father’s papers and books, his clothes, his chair, his typewriter, even his pillow. My mother’s framed portrait, its glass shattered. Her paintings. The one with the boat that used to hang in the kitchen corridor. My mother had said often enough she wanted to burn the lot. Now it was done.
People said later that Lipi fought those trying to pull her away from the flames with the strength of four horses. She bit Golak, she tore the skin on my father’s neck with her nails. “I want to die,” she repeated in a high-pitched howl. “I want to die.”
Afterwards, my grandfather examined her. Her left hand was burnt, she had a fever and was delirious. But she was safe, he said. My father had managed to stop the fire from touching her sari. “If that flimsy sari had caught fire,” Banno Didi said, relishing the possibility, “she’d have become a kabab in one minute. Another motherless child and one more wife—vanished!”
Lipi lay in her bed and refused to move. Her hand began to heal, her fever cooled, yet she would not leave the room. Twice I came in to find her lying face to the wall, sobbing. I crept out like a thief, not knowing what to do. She hardly ate, her chubby roundness turned to sagging skin. Dark patches spread like eclipses under her eyes. My grandfather sat with her and tried to make her talk to him, but to almost every question she had roughly the same answer:
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Won’t you come to the garden for some fresh air?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Ila wants to play with you.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
Dada said to my father, “Her mind and heart have gone on strike. This is beyond the reach of my medicines. Maybe a change will do her good. Take her on a holiday.”
In the first week after the fire, when Lipi was incoherent and feverish, my father had taken leave from work to sit beside her all day, covering her if she seemed cold, fanning her if she appeared to sweat, giving her medicines at the intervals Dada had prescribed, forcing drops of sugary water into her mouth. She refused to eat anything. Even so, he would bring food on a plate to her bedside and coax morsels into her mouth. It was as if he was seeking forgiveness through these gestures of atonement. He gave up his early morning walks, he gave up most of his activity at the Patriotic Society, and he stopped sleeping in the outbuilding, going there only when he needed to write his articles. He read the Hindi newspaper to Lipi. He read out short stories. He bought a joke book and at the end of every joke he read out, he said in an eager voice, “Now, that’s funny, Lipi, isn’t it?”
But my father was performing in a play with no audience. The theater was empty, the listeners had gone, the clown was tumbling around and nobody was there to laugh. Lipi lay inert through all his readings and jokes.
Ila cried for her mother. She was brought into the room and Lipi turned over on her side and shut her eyes. Banno Didi’s voice rolled around the kitchen all day.
Was she an ayah as well? Who was this madwoman from a village my father had gone and saddled us with?
I have never discussed this time of our lives with Ila—what is there to say? The more intense the emotions, the stronger the wall of reticence I tend to build around it. The other day I lay awake at dawn, thinking of that dark, long-ago time as I listened to the morning sounds: the honk of trucks racing to reach the highway, an ambulance’s urgent wail, silence for a while with birds clucking outside and then the distant siren of the 5:30 a.m. express that tears through Muntazir without stopping. How lonely it is, the sound of that train. It is a distillation of the sound of all the trains I used to wait for in the hope that one of them would bring my mother back. The delusions of a daydreaming eleven-year-old. I was adrift and alone then. Overnight, with her mother beyond her reach, Ila was alone too.
Had it not been for her mother’s long illness, she and I might never have become close. Left to her own devices, she toddled about all day occupying herself with shiny pebbles or flowers she plucked from the garden. She examined her pebbles with intense concentration, as though her gaze might turn them into precious stones. As soon as I came back from school, she appeared on the verandah, gurgling and lisping. I went to wash, and she was there outside the bathroom. I sat down to eat and she stood by the table, tugging at my clothes. Instinctively, she stuck to my side for protection, a brother and sister brought together by the disappearance of our two mothers.
The first few days, I turned away from Ila and went off to get my air gun and fishing rod and go down to the river as usual. I lay there and lost myself in my mother’s latest letters. Soon, I was by the river that flowed towards Tjampuhan. Its name was Ayung. Blue lotus grew in ponds and at the royal palace in the evening there was music and feasting. Masked dancers came and went in great flocks, wearing headdresses, trailing feathers. After the dances, I climbed down a hillside to the rushing river. My mother sat on the rocks above, watching me. The still pool where the river water collected had flat rocks all around it where I could sit. It was easy to reach the rocks, then slide into the water. Far away the stream disappeared into mist and mountains and blue-green fields of paddy. The water was gentle and cool and the river’s current was barely perceptible in the pool. Before I slid into the water, I looked up for my mother, and there she was. Smiling down at me. Waiting for me.
I whiled away the days as I had ever since Dinu left for his new school, but by degrees, without noticing it myself, I started to come back home sooner and when I came back, I went to find Ila, though I did not play with her even if she hovered nearby. After some time I gave in entirely. I showed her my aquarium and my collection of butterflies. She clapped her hands and spoke her nonsense words. She chased a ball on unsteady feet with Rikki and Tavi. She rode on my shoulder.
One day I took her into the broken-down carriage with me and we squeezed into its mildewed interior together, Rikki, Tavi, she, and I. I found myself telling her, “We are in a rain forest on an island in the Indian Ocean. There are strange fruits there. You and I shared a rambutan and you spat it out because you did not like the taste. We are sitting very still in the forest, waiting for the deer to come out. Sampih is with us. You won’t be scared, I will take care of you. Afterwards, we’ll eat a roasted duck.”
As I spoke, it came to me that I no longer believed any of it. I no longer felt any of it. It was just a story I was making up for her, I could stop the minute I wanted.
I cannot explain even now quite what used to happen to me and how real the travels in my mind were. They had sounds, smells, sensations, even though they were—I suppose—mere daydreams that I drew from my mother’s letters. I floated about in a tissue-thin world of my own construction that was more real and present to me than anything else. But now my fragile cocoon had split wide open and I was out in the open daylight with no place to hide.
21
November 1939
My dear Mamma,
Dinu has gone to boarding school. After that he will join the army. He says he will fly planes and shoot with real guns. Everything is very expensive here. Dada says that is because the government has printed lots of money to pay for their war with Germany. Yesterday Mantu and Raju came back very happy. They had big white tick-marks on their chests. They had to stand in a line in their underwear if they wanted to join the army. The British officer tick-marked them with chalk if he wanted them. Now they will get loads of nice things and go to nice places. They will go to the Atlantic Ocean. They will be on a ship. They will be something called a Lascar. It’s super. I wish I could be a Lascar too. They cannot take me because I am not yet seventeen. I will join later. I am very bored here. Papa takes me to his meetings sometimes. They all wear white caps and seem angry and when they leave the meeting they pat me on my head and say, “We were slaves, but you will live free. Everyone will be equal.” Two of them got arrested last week so now they are in jail. Mukti Devi is in jail again also. Papa is in charge of the Society now. Dinu and Mantu and Raju are all gone away, but there is Ila. I have not told you before that Papa has a new wife. Her name is Lipi. She is my new mother. Ila is her baby and she is my sister now. I will also become a soldier soon. I will not have time to come to Bali. I don’t want to go there anymore. I want to go to Europe and bomb the Germans from a plane. I hate Germans. I hate Mr. Spies also. Dinu said he is a German and we are on the British side and we have to kill Germans. All of them are Nazis. Nazis are evil. We burnt your saris and pictures and things in a big fire. Rikki and Tavi are well. I am well. I caught three fish yesterday. One fish was six inches long. I will keep it in my aquarium.
Myshkin
My outbuilding is an archive: letters, newspaper clippings, notes, plant drawings, diaries, work papers. I cannot bear to throw anything away. Ila says that I will die a slow death like the captives of old, immured in my own books and papers.
Among my papers was that not-posted letter I had written to my mother. More than fifty years after it had been written, it was still sealed. There are many words, over a lifetime, that I have wished I could spool back after unleashing them into the world and it is always too late, of course, to unsay things. I could not remember why I had not posted that particular letter, but when I read it the other day I was grateful that this particular missile had never been launched.
Through the next two years, our town began to appear embattled in a determined sort of way—as if it were only good form, now that there was a war, for trenches to be dug, windows to be painted black. On the riverbank, something mysterious was being built by the army. A bomb shelter, people said, because there were rumors that the Japanese would bomb us. In a burst of enterprise, the principal had the college dome and all its windows painted black, and the keeper of our zoo announced he was setting up a big game squad, just as the zoo in Calcutta was doing. Members of the squad would be armed with guns to shoot the larger captive animals through the bars of their cages should the Japanese bomb us. Arjun Chacha signed up for the assassination squad the day it was announced. It was accepted far beyond the borders of our town, he told anyone who would listen, that Arjun Sinha was the sharpest shooter in all of Upper India. The zoo in our town had one yellow-toothed senior tiger, its cub, a lion, two leopards, and six gray jackals who smelled as if they were long dead and putrefying. Chacha circled the tiger and lion cages at the zoo every few days to establish his rights. He searched the spotless sky for signs of Japanese planes, his ears pricked for the slightest hint of an airplane’s drone that might allow him the grandeur of raising his rifle and saving the world.
One afternoon, I came back home to find my father, my grandfather, a gaggle of maids and cooks from Dinu’s, even Jagat from the clinic, standing in a huddle by the verandah. In the inner courtyard at the back, on the wall by the servants’ quarters, was a splatter of red where Banno Didi was banging her head again and again. Dada had followed me into the courtyard. He pulled me away, took me into the living room. Every small sound was unnaturally magnified. S
parrows chirruped in the window slats, the cows mooed in their shed, the refrigerator hummed, Dada’s asthmatic breath rustled near my ears. “Let her be,” he said as he stroked my hair.
Mantu was dead. The ship in which he was a pantry boy had been torpedoed close to Canada.
Images of Mantu scattered in me like a circle of marbles. I tried to cry, he was the second of my daily playmates to vanish. But Lambu Chikara’s departure had been different: he had been killed by a drunk father, I had seen his body, I had been partly responsible for his death. Mantu was a soldier taken by the war. Far away. It did not seem real. In a house wearily accustomed to disappearances and reappearances, might he not return?
But what if he were really dead? I could not shed a single tear, nor think of an adequately weighty response. Feeling it was too momentous a loss to do nothing, I walked out to the pavement and from old habit kicked a stone around, first to the pir’s tomb, then the other way, towards Dinu’s gate. Kharak Singh, the old watchman, the only person missing from the crowd at our house, was sitting there on his stool, dozing, unaware. “Did you hear the news, Kharak Singh?” I said in my most somber voice, tapping him on the shoulder. He stirred, gave me a smile of complicity, gestured at me to wait, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a moldy onion. “See this head?” he said. “I sliced it off in foreign lands. I keep it safe.”
A year passed. The town turned khaki with new soldiers. Vast swaths of Arjun Chacha’s cane fields were taken away by the government to build an airstrip, making him bellow with a rage that carried to our house as though on a megaphone. There was talk that his cars might be requisitioned too and that the rich were being forced to pay large amounts of money into the war fund. My father observed that the war was not proving so good for the economy after all, certainly not Arjun’s economy.