by Shruti Swamy
No. She would come out of the building alone, she would walk, alone, to her room, and in to that room I could not penetrate, even with the keen eye of my imagination.
“There’s a boy for you,” Farnaz announced at my door, unnecessarily, as the watchman was already shouting from his post, “Number forty-one, your man has arrived!”
“For me?” I said, already blushing under my dark. “Who?”
“I’ve never seen him before,” she said, then laughing, “would you like to tell me something after all?”
I thought briefly of the pale-faced man I had seen from my window, but that had been many months ago: why would he come now? Yet who else could it be? Against Farnaz’s obvious, gossipy pleasure, I felt a confused revulsion: when someone makes their want for you evident, they put themselves in your power; you almost feel sorry for them, I thought then, though later I felt differently: I did not not feel pity, later, but I felt something else too. I followed Farnaz hangdog down the stairs, where indeed there was a boy waiting for me, halted at the office of the Assistant Warden, where all visiting men were detained: not a suitor at all, but my brother. It was a Sunday and the campus was mostly empty, and those that were around were studying in the library. My brother stuck his hands in his pockets, American pockets, they seemed, in his thin, bellbottom jeans. The pockets were not deep enough to contain his fingers past the first knuckle, yet he was so proud that there were pockets at all he could not seem to stop himself from bringing attention to them. “What are you doing here?” I said instead of hello.
“Can’t I come visit my own sister?”
The Assistant Warden, for we were standing in her office, frowned; too many couples had already tried this lie: as far as she was concerned, the relation of brother to sister had ceased to exist.
“Oh, it’s your brother?” asked Farnaz, disappointed, who still believed in siblings.
“Yes,” I said, and then, “has something happened?”
“No.”
“You’re not allowed to come up.”
“Take him to the visitor’s room,” said Farnaz, who had sat many times in that dim, stuffy room, holding herself flirtatiously apart from the man across from her, increasing his desire for her by holding herself away from him: she could, after all, have taken him out, they could have walked together in the forest and had a little more privacy, away from the punishing gaze of the Assistant Warden and the curious glances of passing women: like a dancer, she knew the power of spectacle, and used it.
I took him out, my false suitor. It was still quite hot outside but it was worse to be inside with him, where someone might see us, so I took him on the illicit path that lovers took, curving past my window, then disappearing into the trees, out of sight. Except if Radha could have seen us together, not knowing his true relation, I would have been pleased; if she had, at the right instant, happened to have been looking out the window. I knew if she saw us she would mark the question in her mind without ever asking anyone about it, though what feeling the sight would provoke, if any, I could not guess. I looked up at her window as we passed, but it revealed nothing of its interior. My brother had a high, agitated step he tried to cool and match to my slow one and thrust his hands deeper into the thin pockets of his pants. Maybe Radha would see us returning.
“Can’t I come live with you?”
“Me? Here?”
“Yes,” he said, “why not, Farnaz likes me.”
“Are you joking?”
“Yes. But I think Farnaz does like me.”
“She thought you were my beau.”
The trees were not bunched here; there were gaps between them, where light fell around their fingers. There was a feeling of spaciousness on the path, and it was as cool as a room, with a light breeze like a thread that wove itself through the large and small gaps. I liked looking at him from the side, as he seemed not to notice being observed. He walked with an upright bearing, his shoulders squared instead of slouched: light slid down his neck. “You could come here yourself if your grades were better.”
“I did well on my exams,” he said.
“How well?”
“Well enough.”
“For here?”
“Well—no. Maybe not.”
“That’s a shame,” I said, trying to hide my relief. “You’d like it here.”
I could imagine it. He had intelligence but no will, so he would never distinguish himself unless provoked to do so, but he could pass his exams with only some effort, and could spend his days arguing with the Marxists at the tea stall near the physics building, or wooing the girls, who, in a few years, would occupy the rooms my classmates and I absented. Because he was a boy, he wouldn’t have to try—not as hard as me anyway—though the thought of him, grown, healthy, grinning, twisted up in me a feeling almost like pleasure. What then? He could do anything: find a subject he liked and study it, get a good enough job to afford a car and a flat and a good doctor for our father, he could travel and teach, go to an American university—the world was waiting for men like this: skinny, smart, and charming, with a mouth full of crooked teeth.
“I can’t believe how quiet it is here.”
“It’s not quiet,” I said. “Listen.”
Between the beats of our rubber sandals slapping the soles of our feet and against the soft, thick earth, there were so many birds in the trees of the college, so many birds whose names I did not know, but who never let the air grow too still, trilling and chattering and flapping their wings to make always a comfortable noise that was easy to ignore except in the silence lapsing between two people, for alone, you were always engaged in your own thoughts.
“You remember those games we used to play when we were young?”
“Yes.”
“I used to imagine it like this. But with more rivers.”
“More tigers.”
“Just one tiger,” he said. Then he said, “We had a fight, me and Dad.”
“So apologize.”
“I hit him.”
“You what?” I stopped walking.
“Not—hard—I was—angry.” Heat came up from his neck to his cheeks, he wiped his forehead with his hankie.
“Is he okay?”
“Yes, I didn’t hurt him. I just got angry. You know Dad—he wants to force you into his way of not just doing, but thinking. I can’t tolerate it.”
“I’ve never seen him that way.”
“It was different with you. He doesn’t expect anything from you.”
“No, nothing—except to cook and clean and run the house and make sure you’d done your schoolwork.”
“It’s different.”
“Yes,” I said, “very different. Were you drinking?”
“What?”
“When you hit him, were you drinking?”
“Why does it matter if I was or wasn’t?”
“Rishi, listen. You’re smart, you’ll go far in this world, you can attain whatever you want to achieve, you’ve had so many opportunities, a good education, and the benefit of your gender, but you’ll ruin yourself—”
“I didn’t come here for a lecture.”
“I’m not lecturing you. You asked me for my opinion—”
“I didn’t ask. I haven’t asked for anything from you for a long time.”
I made an unkind noise, a snort. “Well then, I don’t understand why we’re arguing.”
“When are you coming home?” he said. When I looked at him, the mahua tree had cast across his face a continent-shadow, but the eyes that looked out at me from that shadow seemed bright.
“What do you mean?”
“When are you coming home? To live?”
“When school is over.”
“And you’ll stay? You won’t go back again?”
“I’ll stay until school starts again. Then I’ll go.”
“What about after?”
“After? I don’t quite know about after. I’ll work, I think.”
“And where will you
stay?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go abroad.”
“Abroad? Abroad where?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“But will you come home?”
“Of course not,” I said, exasperated. “Not forever.”
There was a strange cast to his face. I could feel him suppressing whatever he was feeling from showing in his face, which seemed almost clenched in its concentration to do so: a tightness around the eyes and mouth. The expression produced an eerie feeling in me. Because I could not see my father’s features on his face, I think he must have looked like my mother, though I could not, not quite, remember her face, not clearly, only the ones captured in photographs. Myself I could not see in there, either, neither in feature nor movement: we were separate creatures. Yet he had always reached for me and not for her, the one that wore a version of his face; he had always reached for me as though he could sense our directions, the two mothers returned, but one pointing south, away from him.
“Rishi,” I said gently, more gently than I felt. “You’ll have to apologize to Father. You’ve hurt him; if not his body then his pride. But you must apologize to him and apply yourself to your studies. Then all will be set right.”
“Yes,” he said, in a strange, cold English. “Of course. I’m sorry I came here and disturbed you before exams.”
As the date of the play grew nearer, I confess that it slipped to the back of my mind, while to the other participants it had barreled into the feverish front, and when I rejoined the practice of the boys, I saw an idea realized: lines had been memorized, costumes obtained, lights arranged, and they had even found another girl to be their audience, once I had stopped being theirs—a girl I didn’t know and who might have been procured from another college, or perhaps was someone’s teenaged sister; a perfect, silent girl, who performed her attention so naturally it had to be genuine, and whose voice, when I finally heard it, was pitched only slightly above a whisper, and very sweet. The play was polished now if not expert, and that I couldn’t help but admire. They had made it with care. Quiet, quiet everyone. Can we have the sailors take their places? And here, Vidya, here you will come, you will enter from the left here, and you will come to center stage, and stand in your first pose until the lights change, they’ll go from yellow to a sort of blue—Chuffy, can you show her?—see, like this, and when that happens the music will start too, you’ll do your dance and hold your final pose, the lights will change back, and I want you to exit quietly from stage right, not my right but your right you understand?
Of course, but quietly? My legs were heavy with bells. I had already shown him the dance a few weeks prior, though I had made some embellishments and improvements since then—to be honest, I had changed it radically since he had last seen it, and I had a small fear now that Anand would not like what I had done, but he watched distractedly and said yes fine when I was finished, yes, yes, that will do fine, and though weeks ago I had worked hard to make it, I now felt so melancholy and distracted as I danced that his mild response seemed fitting. I exited the stage loudly, doing nothing to soften my step or muffle my ghungroos.
Though the days were brutally hot, the evenings were violet and gentle, the clouds gathered and swollen with light, diffusing it without bursting with rain. It was the last of the weeks before the heat of exams would start; already the most serious, like Radha, had buckled themselves to their studies, but the lovers became more romantic, and friends more social, like farmers working hard to pull in the abundance of wheat to last the bitter months of dust. I practiced my stage makeup in the mirror. I had gotten good at drawing on new eyes around the eyes I already possessed, such broad strokes did not require a skilled hand, eyes that were meant to be seen from far away, and from far away they could strike you dead. I did not own lipstick and had to borrow from Farnaz to give myself a carmine mouth. I did not have foundation so didn’t bother with it. I asked Anand to get me some flowers to braid into my hair. He showed up at my hostel with a useless bouquet of red roses, long-stemmed, heavy, and expensive, tied with a long, silly ribbon printed with teddy bears. “Anand, what am I supposed to do with these?”
“Girls love roses.”
“But I told you, Anand, it’s for my hair.”
He shrugged. “What do I know about hair?”
No man had given me flowers before, let alone such velvet roses. I snapped the heads off the flowers and pinned them down my braid, wet-ink black punctuated by drops of blood. They were too heavy for the turns I would make onstage; they would weigh me down and throw me off balance when I made my quick and final turns. No matter. My mirror showed me the mask of my face and I was pleased. I walked across the soft grass to the auditorium already dressed in my white costume, a cotton salwar kameez, and my alarming face visible to all who passed me, and backstage I sat down to tie the ghungroos. The boys, my boys—for they were mine, suddenly, I felt for them the affection a mother must feel, watching her children from a distance—they gave off the pleasant stink of nervous energy, ribbing one another until it was time to be quiet and take their places. I stood half-watching from the velvet wing, the boys on stage, the ripple of the audience, illuminated only by reflected light, light vaguely outlining noses and lips and the gleam of glasses in the dark. But I wasn’t watching anything, I was listening to the poem, which was read first by Anand very seriously in English, slowly and a little too theatrically if you asked me for the poem by itself was enough; still, the poem, which I hadn’t truly listened to in months, had an odd effect on me: it dampened the light, it softened my breath, it lifted me out of myself. The texture and the tone of the words, the rise and fall of them, felt as familiar, at that moment, as my own breath: like something sprung out of my own mind or from my own dream, long ago dreamt and only half forgotten, existing like a ghost at the periphery of my consciousness, not a terrible ghost but a sweet one. For many minutes after Anand finished reading, and the actors were onstage, speaking their Hindi lines, I was not conscious of the play at all, even where I was standing. I felt like I was on the edge of something and I wanted to reach it. Before an idea becomes an articulation it hangs before you like a cloud: you cannot grasp it. It was Anand who shook me out of this reverie, and pushed me onstage, for I had nearly missed my cue.
The actors were slumped onstage, dreaming. They had chewed their lotos and made a dream: I was that dream in white. The light changed, but the music didn’t start. Between the time I lifted my foot and set it down I realized I needed no music, the first blow of my foot against the stage drove me hard into my dance, it nearly crushed me into it. I was a dream, beautiful at first, but of my own accord I grew angry, I was not a good dream: I was not a good wife, content forever to wait. I was not a good woman but a rageful one, and my rage was terrible. I gathered it and thrust it up between my eyes. I was crossing the stage to look and look against the sea for my lost husband, I was nursing my son into a man, feeding and dressing him, growing him into a warrior. Again and again my hands shaped a lotus at my breast, but each time they did so the lotus became sharper, like a star-pointed blade. So much time was passing: I grew older, but the intensity of my dancing increased with my age instead of lessening. It was against everything I had been taught, to dance like this, so wildly, not building the column of energy up from the cool center, not filling the limbs with remote movement, practiced to the point of sleepwalk perfection, and then infused with the subtle emotions of the eyes and brows and mouth. My dance teacher was right to be shocked. The movements my body made were almost out of my control: the body wanted to vibrate out of its shell. Since there was no one there to speak the bols, I spoke them. It was a shock to hear my voice so rough out of my mouth: at another time I might have felt embarrassed. For this rough anger-filled voice was my true voice, I knew as soon as I had heard it, the one I had strove to disguise from everyone, and from myself. My legs hurt with the force of their exertion, and I felt it even as I pressed onward. I turned, the huge, heavy braid wra
pped around my neck like a rope. I turned: I grew older. The beat of my heart was quick, subdivided into fifths and eighths by my feet. From the rafters a soft snow fell, white petals that stuck to my skin where they touched me, glued by sweat. I had not known it would happen, and for a moment I was startled, as though I had myself conjured it from the force of my dancing. The white petals looked blue in the light, as I did. Again I felt myself close to something, very close, but not enough to grasp. I could not push myself over the brink. Then it was over, I stood posed on the stage. Panting. I had not been on a stage with the eyes of the audience on me in several years, and when I returned to myself and the room that held me I could make out individual faces in the crowd. I saw the black muzzle of a camera, and when it was lowered, I saw the face I had half-looked for since I had seen it last so many months ago from my window, the pale face of the man who walked with Anand. One row behind him, and slightly to the right, was another face I had looked for, the dark face whose familiar contours I had long gazed at, these weeks, in the privacy of my memory. When I lifted my eyes to her, her eyes looked back. And was it my eyes, the cold light, or were her cheeks wet with tears?
IV
We lived then in Versova, in a small cottage by the sea. We couldn’t see the ocean from our window, but with the window open we could hear its dull noise, the terrible crying of the gulls, and the calls of the coconut vendors, along with the conversation of the sophisticated kitty-parties of the neighborhood ladies leaking out through their windows or wafting, on mild days, from their verandahs, the sounds of the neighbors’ servants chatting, or sometimes singing to themselves as they worked, the shouts of children playing in twos and threes instead of tens and dozens like the chaali of my childhood, and, very distantly, the traffic noises of the arterial road where I bought my vegetables and caught the bus that I took to reach my dance students’ houses, and to the theaters in which I performed. I did not particularly like teaching, for none of my students were very good; they were all rich, which is why they could afford an individual lesson, the space to host it, and a tabla player to score it. Their homes were vast, lavish, and gleaming, like the sprawling sets of movies, almost as opulent as the home in which my husband had been raised, and these surroundings made me drive the girls quite hard, I wanted to scar their feet with thick, black calluses they could never erase. Oh, they were good girls, their bodies were soft and fresh, but they did move them into the proper shapes, without feeling but with the desire for feeling, their eyes looking almost alarmed out of their faces, wanting me to smile. I never smiled, because none of them were very good. But I myself danced alone in the mornings when my husband had left for work, and I danced too in some festivals and in some small shows in some ordinary halls, small and ordinary, but I danced, and once my picture appeared in the Gujarati newspaper (the caption identified me under my married name, Mrs. Rustom B, which displeased me but would have horrified the Bs—though of course they had neither the will nor the ability to read the Gujarati newspaper). I was never paid more than it cost to pay the tabla player, but it made no difference to me, for my true payment was the chance to perform itself, which often, though not always, left my body pounded and sweet, as though filled with honey.