A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  My pear had been eaten, the soft pulpy core tossed in the lake’s water. I carried my notebook everywhere I went at the villa. I had to be patient, I told myself, I had to wait for my memories to reveal themselves. My half-forgotten world was precious to me; I somehow felt that the past would protect me from the ravages of the present. The outside world was threatening. At breakfast, there could be discussion, largely based on hearsay, about the possibility of a terrible new disease breaking out in that world outside—but, inside the walls of my study here, I was distant from it all, and, removed from that reality, I felt safe to quietly pierce the cocoon that the years had wrapped around my earliest memories. In this private, even intimate, space I was trying to remember the earliest lies I was told about others and the stories I invented about myself. Opening my notebook, I spent the rest of the afternoon recording in its pages the following story.

  MY EXPERIMENTS WITH ANTS

  There are lizards—girgit, thin, brown, scaly—in the small garden.

  The boy is scared of the girgit. These reptiles have long tails although their thin bodies are no longer than the span of his palm. Many of them have bloated red sacs under their chins. These creatures scare him, but he also wants to kill them. He often daydreams about catching them unawares with a throw, lifting them from their perches with a sharp stone. As they fall back in the air, he imagines seeing their pale, exposed bellies.

  Brij Bihari has told him that the lizards are Muslim.

  During the riots that accompanied the partition of India, the Muslims were running scared from the Hindus. If the Hindus found the Muslims, they would kill them. If the Hindus did not kill the Muslims first, the Muslims would kill the Hindus. Or they would take the Hindus to the new country, Pakistan, where they would be converted and become trapped forever.

  Once, Brij Bihari said, the Hindus saw a bearded Muslim running away. They caught him and were about to chop off his head. The man was a coward. In order to save his life, he pointed with his beard toward the well where the other Muslims were hiding. Because of this act of treachery, that man was turned into a reptile with a sac under his chin. That is why when the boy and other Hindus look at these lizards they bob their heads as if they are pointing toward a well.

  * * *

  —

  THE YEAR IS 1979. He is four years old.

  A crack about an inch and a half high separates the bottom of the bathroom door from the cement floor. When Mother takes her bath, the boy slides his toes under the door and waits. He can hear the water running and the sound of the radio inside.

  Whenever Mother notices his feet, she switches off the radio. He hears the clink of her bangles as she comes closer on the other side. He stands with his body pressed against the painted wood, and he can feel his own warm breath on his face. A quiet moment passes. And then Mother sprinkles talcum powder on his toes.

  No matter how many times this ritual is repeated, he feels surprised and intensely happy. The slight heat of early spring and the smell of talcum powder will evoke in him years later the memory of his childhood.

  The giant aerials of All India Radio stand only two hundred yards from their home. Their house is at the end of a short side street. Outside, on the left, is a small khataal for cows and buffaloes. The milk that is needed for the neighborhood comes from this cowshed. Brij Bihari is the owner of the khataal. He is a milkman because that is his caste. His full name is Brij Bihari Yadav. Brij Bihari does not know how to write, but Mother says that he is very smart. He is from Samastipur, where he goes by train during the Holi festival.

  Mother bathes during that long hour of midday, after she has finished cooking. She first washes a few clothes and then she fills the buckets for her bath. After she emerges from the bathroom—the jingles on the radio announcing her return—they wait for Father to come home for lunch.

  Today, the boy hears her open the bathroom door. “Satya,” she shouts out to him. “Did Father call?”

  He shouts back the answer. He hasn’t heard the phone ringing. Mother walks into the living room and dials the number for the office. He knows Father is not there because her conversation with Bose Babu at the office goes on longer than is usual. She says, “My daughter is at school. I can’t leave her there with this trouble in town.”

  Father is a magistrate in our small town. He goes to his office in a government car, a white Ambassador, with an old driver named Aziz at the wheel.

  The boy asks Mother how his sister, older than he by two years, is allowed to come back early from school.

  Instead of answering him Mother asks him to fetch Brij Bihari from the khataal right away.

  The two buffaloes are sitting at their assigned places outside the straw enclosure. The boy looks inside. It is dark and cool under the thatched roof. The four cows stand in front of their empty tubs chewing on their cud. But Brij Bihari isn’t there. Then the boy sees him outside the gate to the radio station talking to two men. He runs up to say that Mother is calling him.

  Brij Bihari nods his head but does not move. The men continue to talk in low voices. One of the men has three metal keys and a penknife hanging from the yellow thread that drops in a diagonal across his torso. This man is sitting on the saddle of his bicycle. Brij Bihari and the third man stand on either side of the bicycle. The conversation proceeds in this preoccupied way for another few minutes.

  When they arrive home, Mother is inside standing at the bathroom door listening to the radio. Brij Bihari says in Hindi, “There is a storm breaking in the city.”

  Mother says, “They are not telling us much. But they just announced that there is a curfew.”

  Brij Bihari says, “Arre, the public when it is angry cannot be controlled by a curfew.”

  The boy does not know who the public is. He is thinking of the two men he had just seen talking to Brij Bihari. The one sitting on the cycle perhaps cannot be controlled when he is upset. He uses the small knife hanging from his sacred thread to kill the curfew.

  Mother is worried. She has not been able to contact Father. But she doesn’t want to use the phone. “I am afraid he might be calling us here,” she says.

  Mother tells Brij Bihari why she has called him. “Please take your bicycle and go to the convent school. Stay there till I am able to send a car. Please do this much for me.”

  Brij Bihari laughs at Mother’s tone and he tries to set her mind at ease by saying, “There is nothing to worry about at the school. The public is looking only for Muslims.”

  Brij Bihari says to the boy outside, “The Muslims have been making a lot of noise lately. Now the postman is going to come.” What can he possibly mean? The postman? Brij Bihari puts on his cotton vest over his naked chest because he is going to the convent school. “A few of the bearded ones,” he adds mysteriously, “are going to be stamped and mailed today.” He points above at the sky. He has a sly look in his eyes, as if he were joking. Then he is off quickly on his bicycle.

  When the boy looks out of the window on the ground floor of his home, he can see that the white football an elder cousin, Pappu Bhaiya, had given him for his last birthday is still where he had kicked it under the bushes. A single lizard is sitting on it, its tail drooping over the curve of the ball. The girgit makes a swallowing gesture, and, for a second, he sees its pink mouth. He wonders whether it has eaten an ant.

  The boy likes killing ants. There is a matchstick fallen at the edge of the veranda floor. He squats down near it and uses the matchstick’s burnt, black head to slice in half the bodies of the ants that are climbing the yellow wall.

  He starts with the ant at the bottom and works his way up quickly. But, by then, a new column of ants has started climbing up again, and he has to hurry back to the beginning of the line. Though this is hard work, it commands his full attention, and gives him pleasure. The ants have no idea what he is doing to them. Now and then, however, they break the
line and start scurrying in a curve, like the cars that turn on a detour when there has been a bad accident ahead.

  He looks up and sees that the lizard has not moved. He puts three dead ants on a small leaf and begins to walk slowly toward the ball on which it sits. But the lizard disappears on the other side of the football and then he catches sight of it diving into the foliage. He places the leaf carefully on top of the ball, a food offering or a trap for the lizard, and slowly retreats to his place next to the wall. He tells himself that he must practice stealth as a hunter, and, making as little noise as possible, he takes up the matchstick again.

  His experiment relies on observation. Once an ant is dead, another ant will eat it. If he keeps at this task near the wall, the boy thinks, he will have killed enough ants to feed the rest of the ant colony. He has seen ants carrying other ants on their backs. They are not taking the dead ants to be cremated. Brij Bihari has told him that the ants will take the dead ones into their homes and eat them like toast when evening comes.

  The ants live inside the ground. The boy would like to see their tiny rooms, one bedroom separated from another, and all linked by thin lines that are actually hallways. In each house, there is a living room, where ants sit around and drink tea and eat their dead neighbors whom the boy has killed.

  * * *

  —

  BRIJ BIHARI IS a tall, thin man. His mustache hangs over a part of his face. Brij Bihari’s voice comes out from deep inside his stomach, which he holds tight when he walks. He is clad, for most of the time, only in a blue lungi wrapped around his waist. Bare-chested, he roams the neighborhood with his cows each morning, selling milk door to door.

  For as long as the boy can remember, Brij Bihari has been a part of their household. Brij Bihari uses the bathroom in the servant quarters behind the house, and some of his belongings are stored in the garage. In return, his parents use Brij Bihari’s services for a variety of tasks. When guests arrive and cold bottles of Coca-Cola need to be brought from the shops near Vijay Chowk, or the doctor needs to be fetched, like the night when Father started vomiting and the phone wasn’t working, or when crackers and big chocolate bombs need to be exploded during Diwali, Mother always summons Brij Bihari.

  For a few months, the family had a maidservant who had come from Mother’s village. Her name was Bimla. The boy’s sister let Bimla oil her hair and then weave it into plaits. There was some problem one morning. Bimla was upset. Mother had the red tooth powder in her hand—she was still in the middle of brushing her teeth—and she was speaking angrily to Brij Bihari. Then Father appeared and asked the boy to go away and play. From the window above, the boy saw Father berating Brij Bihari, who, for hours afterward, could be seen laboring silently in the sun, cutting the maize in the backyard. He was being punished, but for what?

  Bimla did not make rotis during lunch that day. The boy looked for her. She was lying down on her thin mattress in the small room at the back. The room was next to the bathroom that Brij Bihari and she shared. He asked Bimla why she was not in the kitchen and she said, “I have a stomachache.”

  The boy did not believe her although he did not know why. He said to Bimla, “I want some water.” She turned her face to the wall and began sobbing. He saw how her back heaved as she wept, and he left the room quickly because he had made her cry. He did not immediately notice that Bimla had left their house the next day. It was many days later that he heard Mother telling someone that Bimla had returned to her village.

  Brij Bihari is very different from Father. Father is a government officer, and people like Brij Bihari call him saheb. Father does not joke with anyone. He travels in the car with Aziz, and he signs files and gives to the people what they need. Aziz, their driver, is a Muslim. The boy imagines Brij Bihari taking the small and dark-skinned Aziz and putting him in a brown-paper parcel. Stamped and mailed. This thought troubles him and he is afraid for Aziz and then for himself and then for everyone. He would like Father to come back home. And his elder sister too. They will all be unexpectedly together, sitting down for a surprise lunch.

  Tifflin is the term that Brij Bihari uses for lunch. He cannot really speak English; the boy laughs when Brij Bihari uses foreign words. One evening, his parents were sitting down in the living room with some guests. Brij Bihari was asked to bring tea. In the kitchen, he held the tray bearing the teacups in both hands and walked back and forth in the manner of a woman. Periodically, he stopped in front of the boy. A cup appeared in front of him, but, before the boy could take it, Brij Bihari lifted the cup to his own pressed lips. He simpered, and said over and over again, “T.P.” The boy laughed but felt guilty about laughing at the guests and, perhaps, at his parents.

  He is often amused by the way Brij Bihari speaks to him although he does not always understand what he is being told. Often, Brij Bihari’s words are dark and mysterious, like a trapdoor in the floor. From his place in the present, the boy sees himself falling through the trapdoor. He lands in a dark pit and stumbles into a dimly lit tunnel that opens into the future, where, unknown to him, he will struggle to become a writer.

  In that distant future, he will find words to describe his childhood. Words will liberate him. But he will also discover a distrust of the promise of language. Words will fail him. He will not be able to undo the confusion around him. One day he will tell himself that he is a writer because the childhood fascination as well as unease with what he is being told has not yet left him. At the place where the trapdoor will finally lead him, people will find words to justify any injustice. People will kill and they will use words to sharpen their knives. Words will join the battle. Faced with the walls blackened by the fires and then the sight of the corpses, he will feel bereft of language.

  In the present, however, in the present of his childhood, which he will later think of as being neither happy nor unhappy, he likes talking to Brij Bihari. This is because, unlike his parents, Brij Bihari speaks to the boy as if he were a part of his larger world. The world that Brij Bihari lives in is very exciting to the boy. Mother knows this and does not like it at all. The boy has just begun writing the alphabet in English. When he does not write in his notebook, or acts irresponsibly, the boy hears Mother asking him, “What will you do when you grow up? Just milk cows like Brij Bihari?”

  He wants very much to take care of Brij Bihari’s cows. He wants to feed them grass and hay mixed together with a little bit of water in the trough. He likes the smell of hay. He does want to milk the cows, binding their hind legs with rope so that they don’t kick at him. Fascinated, he has watched Brij Bihari pulling at their udders so that the milk squirts into the bucket held between his knees. He wants to make the milk foam like that. And he wants to sleep in the open like Brij Bihari does, on a string cot at night, with the red light atop the aerial above the radio station glowing in the dark like a star.

  * * *

  —

  A BLUE JEEP with police written in red on the sides comes to their door and the boy’s sister jumps out of it. Brij Bihari is at the back with his bicycle resting on the Jeep’s footrest. Mother is delighted. Her voice becomes girlish. Fluttering like a bird on the veranda, she says, “Munni! Munni!” Using her sari, Mother wipes the girl’s face, but it is she herself who is crying. This display of emotion from Mother makes the girl burst into tears. She stops only when Mother gives her a glass of water to drink and, as abruptly as she had started crying, the girl says, “I am hungry.”

  A constable brings the sister’s school bag to the door. He is a young man with a steel bangle on his wrist. He says, “Order hai wapas jaane ka.” The police Jeep has been ordered to return.

  The boy wants the Jeep to stay so that he can admire the red lights and the red and blue flag that droops on its hood. When the Jeep is gone, Brij Bihari begins to tell Mother a story. The public is likely to get interested in Munni’s school very soon. The nuns there have begun taking in the Muslim families
from the surrounding areas. Brij Bihari has seen this while he waited with his cycle leaning against the giant peepul tree. Women in burkas with children in tow, all being led by groups of intense young men. The main metal gate at the school is locked. But the side gate is open. The Muslims are using that gate. They are all gathering inside the school’s walls.

  The boy knows those walls that Brij Bihari is talking about. They are tall and have shards of broken glass embedded at the top. The walls are painted gray with a horizontal red line running in the middle. The colors on the walls are the same as those of his sister’s uniform.

  Munni says, “Mother Superior has a very big heart.”

  Mother says, “They have dedicated their lives to the poor.”

  Both Mother and sister look a bit like the nuns when they say this. But, Brij Bihari says, “The Muslims have been building such a big mosque in town for months. Why are these people not hiding there on that roof under the giant loudspeaker?”

  Mother listens to Brij Bihari as if he has presented her with a puzzle. The boy and his sister both look at Mother, who must have an answer to the question posed by Brij Bihari. Mother says, “Should the Muslims not have their mosque?”

  Brij Bihari is tickled by Mother’s question, or maybe by the fact that she knows so little. He is still smirking when Mother says to him, “What are you saying in front of the children? Have you even fed your cows today? Go to them…At least they do not find differences between Hindus and Muslims.”