All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  And then one afternoon, the newspaperman arrived to deliver a special issue. Just two pages. On the first page it said, Japan Declares War on U.S.A. and Britain. On the second, Dutch East Indies Declares War on Japan. The special issue cost only a pice where the daily paper was an anna.

  “Bad news comes cheap,” Dada said.

  “Well, that means Gayatri is in big trouble, doesn’t it? The Dutch East Indies is at war,” my father said. And he gave a grim smile.

  Shortly after that, as if in punishment, he was arrested—along with seven other workers of the Patriotic Society—for disturbing the peace, protesting against the war, writing seditious articles. By then, almost all the leaders of the Congress had been in jail for almost a year—Nehru, Gandhi, Asaf Ali. Twenty thousand others. Dinu’s father was given to sneering that jail gave people an exalted status, turning ordinary men into heroes, and that an arrest warrant was the certificate that every freedom fighter craved. He told his friends that my father had been feeling overlooked, as if denied recognition.

  The policemen waited while my father went in to Lipi. He remained for a while behind closed doors, then came out holding a cloth bag in which he had long packed his books and papers and a few clothes, knowing his arrest was inevitable. The policeman was at the verandah table, drinking tea. We were waiting beside him in a respectful row. My father said his goodbyes down the line to Ram Saran, to Golak, to me and Ila.

  He stopped in front of Dada and said with a smile that twisted his face, “Well, now? Do you still think I am a dabbler?”

  My grandfather opened his mouth to reply, but my father had turned away.

  We were not to know then that my father would not be released from jail for several years. Perhaps he had an inkling of it. His face, shadowed with weariness as he left, was fragile and steely at the same time, as if his mind would be kept alive by the strength of his convictions long after the deprivations of prison had killed his body. By now a great many people from the Society had gathered in our garden and stood waiting with anxious expressions, talking in murmurs, breaking out sporadically into patriotic slogans. It reminded me of the time I had seen Mukti Devi being taken away in a police jeep.

  Until that afternoon, I had no notion of what my father meant to the larger world. In later years, whenever I thought of him, it was this last sight before his long prison term that came back to me. He waved to us, climbed into the police jeep, and was gone. He had never appeared more solitary.

  22

  WHEN I FINISHED writing about Mantu and about my father’s arrest, I pushed my sheaf of paper away and got up from my chair. Almost immediately, I had to sit down again. My legs were lifeless from sitting still for hours and if I moved them just a fraction, they were pierced with a thousand pins and needles. Once I could walk again, I put on my sandals and left the room. My vision was blurred, I did not know where I was, in the year 1941 or in the present. I went out towards the front of the garden and saw Ila plucking jasmine from the bushes by the banyan tree. I creaked down onto the stone bench where, a lifetime ago, Beryl and my mother used to sit and talk.

  “You’ve come out of there?” Ila said, lifting her head from the bush. “You are like your father, always stuck in that outbuilding. Writing endlessly. What are you writing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing of importance. A man has to keep himself occupied.”

  “Go for a walk. Inspect your trees. Get some air.”

  Ila went back to plucking jasmine. Neatly. A forefinger and thumb pinched each delicate blossom from its stem, dropping them into a cane basket that was steadily filling up with a white, scented cloud.

  “Do you remember, Ila, the day that Mantu died? I have been thinking of his brother Raju. I never saw him again.”

  “How would I remember all that? I was only two or three. I don’t have the vaguest memory of them.”

  “Do you remember Ishikawa? The dentist? We called him the Toothless Dentist.”

  “I don’t know if I remember or if you told me.”

  I got up from the bench. There were fewer and fewer people who could share any memories with me, either about people or about places. I decided to go for a stroll—perhaps the park at the other end of the road. I knew every tree and the trees would know me. I walked down the street in a daze, scarcely registering the new landmarks, the bright-lit signs, the shoe shop where Rozario & Sons used to be, the row of luggage stores and clothing stores and offices that have replaced the old shops in the arcade. Through some anomaly of ownership, the arcade itself still stood, in bad repair but intact. More curious was the fact that two of the signs in the upper row have survived, even though the one saying Ishikawa Dentist has faded so badly that only I, who know it, can still tell what it says.

  At the park, I found my old gardener Gopal pottering about among the hibiscus bushes. He tucked his khurpi into his waistband and started walking with me. He showed me a new clump of chandni, starry with white flowers, and the bamboo at the edge of the artificial lake at the center of the park. The bamboo drooped towards the water as if trying to drown in its own reflection.

  By now a straggly group of his colleagues had joined us. I knew some of them—their fathers had worked as gardeners in my day and the sons had inherited their jobs. Gopal’s monologue turned into animated chatter about the developments in the park, about the new head of the horticultural department who wanted them to plant flowers in color schemes that would reflect the Indian flag. Gopal shot a jet of spittle into a corner to show what he thought of that. The light deepened to dusk and we stopped again by the lake, watching shadows and reflections change color on the shining water. I heard a noisy set of screeches and tilted my head up. A bright green flight of parakeets against the half-dark sky, heading for home.

  My legs had been almost too heavy to move when walking to the park, but now I felt as if I could walk for miles more. Gopal had shown me the saplings of laburnum and silk-cotton along the park walls. A new generation of trees was growing. The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, there must be reasons why the leaves decay, Ila had said. When was that? The night I had spent out in the open under the neem trees? It seemed a lifetime ago.

  That evening, I ate with Ila and listened to all her news, then took the dogs for a stroll. Late at night, when I was sure nobody would intrude or interrupt, I took out the packet that Lisa’s children had sent me. I found a sharp knife and slit its sides. I wrestled with the tape that held the thick packet together. At last it opened. Inside was another layer of packaging. Much older. Across the paper, in Lisa’s handwriting: “To be given to Myshkin Rozario upon my death. (Swear you will do this, or my soul will haunt you forever.)”

  I smiled at that. So like Lisa to threaten from beyond the grave. I opened the second envelope. I took a breath and then put my hand into it, to take out the bundles of papers I could see inside. One of the pages was stiffer than the rest. A portrait of my mother.

  Her face is unfamiliar because her hair is short. A red flower is tucked behind her ear and the jade brooch I know from long ago is holding her sari to her shoulder. Her smile is the same. There is a scrawl in her handwriting on the back. “Here I am, Lisa! I painted this! Isn’t it better than a boring photograph?”

  The other papers in the envelope are letters arranged by date and clipped together. All in my mother’s familiar handwriting: impatient, long-looped. With arrows going upwards, downwards, and sideways into the margins to continue thoughts she had left behind and needed to return to, lines cut out and scribbled over, dashes and abbreviations, dozens of underlined words on each page when she wanted to be forceful. Little doodles and diagrams where words failed her. Every millimeter of each page covered so as to make the most of the money she was going to spend on the stamps.

  23

  10th July 1937

  (from the train)

  My dearest Lis,

  Half the way down to Madras, the heat still & stifling, the shaking monstrous. The air coming in throug
h the window was fire. There was no rain. WS worries about my misery at leaving home, B says What’s Done is Done. You need to be tough, she says, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Maybe they’re rather alarmed at the thought of having me on their hands, like a suitcase someone’s left you in charge of. It’s one thing finding a joyous friendship out of the blue, another to have the friend land on you forever—not what B & WS had bargained for, I am sure, when they came on their little trip to India. The other Indians in the stations & on the train seem scandalized/disgusted. You’ll say I’m dreaming up things. But I heard one man say to a woman (loudly so that I would hear & in Hindustani so that only I would understand) Some women are so shameless they don’t mind selling themselves to white men. They weren’t the only ones—mutterings & sneers in the train all around me. W asks me, What did they say? What did they say? But I don’t tell him. It makes me cringe. I want him to think well of us—whatever “us” is meant to be.

  At one of the stations was a food stall with a board saying Adarsh Hotel. A man was ladling out the most delicious-smelling daal pakoras & steaming-hot tea. By this time two Englishmen were in our compartment—faces very sweaty, noses puffing with each word, big stomachs straining at the buttons, but polite to me, madam, madam after every sentence. Railway guards on holiday, they said. When you go to that stall would you bring us some food too, ma’am, they said. They said the food from there is delicious, but the Adarsh Hotel man won’t serve foreigners. So I went there feeling v. useful & got enough for everyone & we had a picnic inside the train. Then we trundled off again & in the evening, we were over the Godavari river & it was raining so I held my face to the window & the spray cooled it. Cool breezes at last through the window & for as far as the eye can see, brown wide water & green earth. I remembered from long ago Rabi Babu talking about this part of the journey & it came back to me after all these years—that time when I did this journey with my father. Rabi Babu had said about this very stretch that its beauty moved him so powerfully he knew he wants to be reborn in this country every time.

  That thought made me wretchedly miserable about leaving home—as if all of life is lost somehow—all that I had dreamed on the deck of that ship when I was with the poet & my father—I had thought I would learn painting at Santiniketan, I’d have a life that would be different from the suffocation I saw around me at home—stupid, stupid. Ignorant. I’ve destroyed everything. I can never go back now, the doors are shut forever & I don’t know if this destruction will lead to anything good. It is as if a giant black mouth of a volcano is before me & I am about to fall into it, no idea what’s at the bottom.

  In the train I was struck by a violent fit of crying & one of my ghastly headaches. My eyes throbbed enough to pop out of my head for the pain. Fear & misery to think of little Myshkin all alone. What must he be doing at this exact time of day? I should write to him, but I can’t bear to. Not yet. Once I am calmer. He must not know . . . will I ever be calmer? I lay with my back to WS & B, wept till my heart broke. Two nights running I had a horrible dream, such a fearful dream. It kept coming back to me even when I woke, of a fetus that was like Myshkin as a baby. Bloodied & dead, swollen eyes shut. Oh Lis. I couldn’t remember anything else about the dream, but I woke feeling terribly sick. How pleased my mother will be—she always thought the worst of me. This’ll exceed all her expectations. She will think I’ve betrayed my husband for another man & run away. Didn’t care for my child. What’s more evil than a woman who does not love her child?

  Myshkin was meant to be here with me. How he’d have loved sitting by the window. I keep thinking of those times he got fever when he was tiny and I spent nights bathing his little head over a bucket of water. Now I sit by the train window, looking out, out, out. Even when it is dark. I haven’t much conversation. I listen to the others—Beryl: Say something; Beryl: Eat something. WS: Life is a painting & you’ve just applied the first strokes of the new brush. Still I can find nothing to say, I am afraid I will start crying if I speak. So I keep scanning the scene outside. I feel as dead as a stone for the grief & for the hideous sense of having made a mistake. Then in the next hour my thoughts change & I know I needed to leave or I might have gone mad. Actually mad—babbling, screaming mad. I cannot tell you how frightened I was the days it was almost unfightable—my sense that I was falling over an edge. Some nights, every part of my body was covered with misery inside out, like pond scum. I slept on the roof yet it felt as if I was in a room where, one by one, every window that led to air and sky was being slammed shut until I was all alone in a black cell. Once—only once—I ransacked my father-in-law’s medicine chest for pills to end the misery. But maybe he knew—wise old owl—I found only cough syrups & suchlike.

  I wouldn’t have managed to board the train if not for you. If you had not given me the money—all your savings, isn’t it, Lis? I know it must be. One of the worst things with NC was the way he made me feel guilty about every expense. The household money counted out at the start of every week & the little extra given magnanimously to me for any foolish little thing I might want to buy, a hairclip or face cream, a bauble, a tube of paint. I was surprised the other day when I counted how much I had saved over the past ten years—by not buying hairclips! All hidden safely in your house. Yet another thing to thank you for. I am going to earn now & the first thing I will do is return your money to you. You might say no & call it a gift but I need to start this new life with no debts, even to you, Lis, however generously you give things away—money, your shawl, dresses (will I ever wear them? I haven’t worn a frock since I was a child, only saris!)—with no thought of getting anything back, only wanting me to be on my way, with M or without. If you had not pushed me into that coach, if you had not convinced me this was my only chance, I’d never have found the will. Life is full of regrets & thoughts going back & forth—mine are like a ping-pong ball, off goes a thought & back it comes before I know it, exactly the same. I am in pain—terrible pain that hurts my body as well as soul—these sickening headaches & stomachaches that feel as if my gut has turned into a rope knotted up & can’t be undone. I cannot keep down a morsel.

  B says it is all in my mind. She reads me Arthur Waley’s Chinese poems to calm me down & I think that makes it worse. One more lost Chinese child from the 4th century bc weeping for his home & I will fling myself into the sea when I reach it, I promise. Her intensity scares me—a little. One morning I woke up & she was sitting quietly at the foot of my bunk, watching me. Just watching. When I opened my eyes, she pressed my ankle & said, “There. See, how it gets easier. You’re smiling.” She calls me her sunbird. Small, bright, flitting. Drink up all the nectar, she says, life doesn’t come twice.

  I feel out of my element. They will go back to their lives. And I?

  Oh, I can’t write any more, Lis. I’ll come back later.

  All my love, Gay

  (still from the train, 11th–12th)

  Dearest Lis,

  I am trying to chat, smile, to make things less annoying for W & B. I sketch on the train. It jogs a lot & the lines move around, but I still do it: faces of people, stations where we stop. Trees & hillocks. The folds of the valley in Chambal. Keeps my mind off things. Makes my hands move easier on the paper. It feels so long since I could draw & not be called to my duties. You are lucky not to be married, Lis, how often I have envied your freedom! The feeling of being trapped—trapped forever—I honestly thought I would know nothing but misery for my entire existence. There is a time after which the doors close & then where do you go? Nowhere.

  When WS turned up out of the blue again, I thought for a fanciful moment that my father had sent him as my guardian angel. All the things that my heart & mind & soul were starved for ever since my father died—it is not just finding people who understand me, my sense of myself has been restored to me. As if all of life’s possibilities had been locked away behind a door which has opened again. Is it arrogant of me to be certain I have something that other people don’t have? At
home there was a desert inside me, winds howling, scorching away every blade of green. I could not paint anything that satisfied me. Everything I do, every single thing, is meaningless when I am not able to do my own work well enough to please myself. It has been so long since every part of my mind was set alight with new ideas—oh this sounds vain, doesn’t it? Don’t you live in Muntazir too? Don’t you make happiness for yourself? But it is not the house or the town or the country, it is more tangled up than that. If you knew everything—what would you have done if you knew it all?

  But you do know the agony of misunderstandings and petty quarrels my life has always been ever since I was married, you know how your life is different from mine. You are yourself, you answer to nobody. Though you had to fight for that, didn’t you? Or else your Aunty Joyce & Aunty Cathy would have had you roasting chicken for a brood of children by now, wearing a checked apron all day instead of a pretty red dress & high heels & matching nails!

  NC is not a bad man in his own way, I can see that. I can see how principled & strong he is, just one encounter with Arjun & you know what a good man NC is. People respect him because he lives by rules that come from long thinking & much reading & he is not easy on himself. He is not easy on anyone else either. Not a minute’s rest! Always the striving to be meaningful. It’s such a bore! Before you know it you’re listening to a lecture & he thinks he knows best of course & you are no more than a foolish deluded woman if you don’t agree with him & his Mukti. One day I was listening to him—talk, talk, talk—and I could hear nothing, could only see how his spittle comes out of his mouth when he talks & how he sucks it back in with a “sss,” & I closed my eyes & thought of someone else so that I would not run that very day. He humiliated me every chance he had. He wanted his friends to laugh at me & condescend. He ridiculed the books I read & the paintings I made. And I thought I’d never, ever hear the end of the time I danced in the garden—when I was only eighteen—if just to not hear about that again, it’s worth running away!