The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  In fact, my husband didn’t want me dancing at all, and I did so only in secret. If we had been living already at his parents’ house I wouldn’t have dared—the walls have ears in such places—and even the chaali would have frowned at my behavior, hearing, as they would, the distinct, gold-textured noise of the bells. Here, no one marked me. In our neighborhood, screenwriters, bankers, high-level civil servants, and their wives spent their weeks and weekends in unpredictable bursts. Their fellowship was more casual, though no less competitive, than that of the chaali, if I could glean anything from the murmuring and laughter of the kitty-parties that drifted up some afternoons into our open window. I was never invited, which was a relief to me, the pleasant scorn they regarded me with was the most comfortable thing they could offer for us both, and this indifference emboldened me: I even danced with the accompaniment of the record player, a record of Zakir Hussain, and sometimes, a record of the Beatles, especially “Here Comes the Sun,” whose crenellated rhythm was a pleasure to pass around and elaborate with my feet. I lifted the needle and placed it at the beginning of the song. Here I played, softly and desperately, letting myself off kathak’s swift track, and instead putting my feet in pursuit of the music I heard and the movements I had, through the week, accumulated. I felt as though I had crept up to my own balcony and called to myself, and I had come to myself when I was called, letting myself be held, quick and sorrowful, in my own arms.

  Then my body was tired and I drove it forward. The sweet feeling had passed. My body didn’t want to move so quickly and finely, but I halved the beat, quartered it, dancing in silence now, but for the ghungroos. I parceled time into its smallest slivers with each of my feet, and each time the foot hit the floor, it sent time ringing through me, hard as a knife I hoped. I had a half-thought I might dislodge it, and my body and my future would come again into my possession. It would be a secret I folded and ate. If, god (no god, god-habit), I was free of this burden I would be more careful next time. I didn’t like to say no to my husband, he who had once accused me of feeling no desire, but if on some dangerous nights I refused him, then on other safe nights I could become doubly pliant. (Farnaz had taught me the method of accounting, though, at the time, I had accepted her knowledge with only academic interest, sure I would never have a husband or a lover.) I danced against myself like this until my head began to have that curious floating-up feeling that told me I must stop, and after this I washed very quickly and heated my lunch. I had, I knew, about a half an hour before my headache would obliterate me, for now the lightness was becoming tinged with the beginning of pain: I could feel it touching its cold fingers against the ball of my skull. Still, my body had a tired feeling that was earned, and the food tasted very good to me, though very simple, so as not to turn my stomach, bland dhal with only a little ginger and haldi and some plain rice. I sat down on the floor and ate it quickly, before the headache came. Then I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.

  She stuck fast.

  “You’ve returned, Eklavya,” said my dance teacher, and looked me down. “I guessed as much. I should offer you my congratulations.”

  By her voice I could not guess the sincerity of her words: her tone was dry. How she stood in her doorway—just stood—so simple and neat, her sari the palest yellow.

  “I’ve disappointed you again.”

  “Yes and no,” she said. But she caught me as I knelt to take the dust from her feet—she held me in her arms as she never had before, close, and kissed my head, and my body responded like water to her touch. Oh. I had needed to be touched like this, with the softness and gentleness of a woman’s body—a touch that didn’t ask anything, only offered itself. She smelled of rose at her neck, and let me go.

  Inside, her house seemed spacious in a way it never had before: large, light-filled and gracious, clean and free of sordidness, the site of a good life. I thought of the branch Radha had given me, which I had thrown away after the semester had finished, but which I should have kept, I realized now, for it was such an object that could make a room feel large, open, or deep: it could make a room feel possible. I would never find another branch like that, for each fallen branch to my eye was the same, equally unlovely. It took a special eye to pick one up and say look. It took a life lived for oneself only to keep such an object in a room, an object that might cause only its owner pleasure. My flat, so tasteful, though it never before felt small, felt so now: there was no room for such objects.

  “Have some tea,” she said, “nice and strong. It always makes me feel better,” and her face, like her house, was clean, simple, and beautiful, though, I saw now, undergoing a kind of translation, somewhat belatedly, from youth to middle age, especially around the kohl-dark eyes, where kindness had creased the skin with its own history. Onstage she would retain her youth forever; it was a gift of intimacy to receive a close look, to allow a loving eye to track the changes time brought. Her face showed age as my mother’s never had—and as I crossed this birthday into another year of life I too would stride forward into the vast field of time from which my mother had vanished, and the unknown years would mark my face as they had never touched hers.

  “I was pregnant too,” she said. Pouring milk from a metal bowl and she didn’t look up.

  “I didn’t mean to—” I blurted, and then, absorbing her words, “You were?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had it taken care of,” she said. “I wasn’t married.”

  “I—I can’t. It’s too late.”

  “I know.”

  “I tried.” And I had. But after the doctor had refused me, I had not sought another: I had not eaten the quantities of papaya he had warned me against—I had not written to Farnaz and asked what had happened to Sita, all those years ago when she was in trouble. Shame—and my husband, so happy, bursting in each evening to the cottage with a smile.

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  With a bright hiss, the tea fizzed up the sides of the vessel. She clicked off the stove.

  “You so wanted to come to Delhi.” She came to me where I sat at her small table and wiped my cheek. “You wanted to come to New York too.”

  “New York?”

  “Yes, darling,” she said, “I’m leaving. I’ve been invited to perform at a dance festival in New York—not in the city, but in the country, north, very green, I’m told, and dancers come from all over the world. Then I’m going to New York City itself to start a company and to live, I’ve been offered a residency. It’s for two years, but who knows. Maybe I’ll like it too much to leave.”

  “And you were going to ask me to come with you?”

  “Yes, though I knew it was going to be tricky with your husband.”

  I was silent. Her birds were singing. It was not a music you could dance to, it was not even beautiful. She went to the cage, opened the door, and offered them her finger, one hopped out easily, and then the other, she brought them close to her mouth and said something to them quietly. I had never seen them out of their cage before: they looked brighter, greener, almost wet with their color, and they threw themselves into the air and began to fly, chattering happily, filling the space as easily as the silence, with a kind of joy. After a while they seemed to grow tired and returned to her finger. Back in the cage they groomed themselves as luxuriously as cats.

  “You said you’d dance in your mind if you couldn’t dance with your body.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you?”

  I shook my head. “Yes. But it’s difficult.”

  “Difficult,” she said. “More difficult than not dancing?”

  “I don’t know. No.”

  “You know, no one understands the story of Eklavya.”

  “It’s a story about the way the world is ordered,” I said. “We use religion to justify why some people are advantaged and some have to suffer. We call it destiny.”

  “Not destiny, dharma.”

  “Dharma, even wo
rse.”

  “You don’t understand the story either. By submitting to the demand of his teacher, by cutting off his thumb, Eklavya becomes the arrow, the bow. The intensity of his desire and his devotion sharpens him into a weapon: an instrument. And then he fulfills his dharma—not his dharma to be less than Arjun, but to be the truest archer, the gift he was born to. Do you see?”

  “No.”

  “You will,” she said. “Come, I forgot our tea. I hope it’s not cold.” But it was still steaming as she poured it into cups. She set my cup in front of me, a cloud of scent, cooked milk and ginger, bloomed around me.

  “It’s a terrible mess,” I said. “My husband—he wants to return to his family. Everything we had planned, it’s different now. He wants to live with his family and let them raise our child and he wants me to come there and live like a good daughter-in-law who serves her family—not to perform, not to dance. He wants me to come and live there quietly my whole life like that. And what else can I do?”

  “Drink your tea,” she said and paused, considering her words carefully. “Don’t hesitate. You keep moving forward. Don’t look over your shoulder now. Keep moving forward.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  She looked at me sternly. “Don’t you?”

  I felt small under her gaze. “When will you leave?”

  “For New York? Only after the new year.”

  “Can I come again to see you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I should be going.”

  “Vidya.”

  “Yes?”

  She took my hand. I could feel the warmth of her blood through the palm. “Take care. Take care.”

  The monster grew: my body. When my condition was evident, I stopped leaving our cottage. Out the window the quiet streets grew even more still, and thus the sea seemed louder, dull and angry, occupying all the silence it had been given. What of the advice my dance teacher had given me? Perhaps I was not the kind of dancer I thought I would be, one who danced for her own pleasure only. Perhaps I was the kind of fickle dancer I had once scorned. For I could not, even in my mind, dance. I was not a mind: I was a body: my body would not dance. My body, who for so long had worked side by side with my will, as though horse and rider, working so closely as to be almost one as they raced forward, for the joy of racing, now became stubborn, oppositional in its lethargy. She wore me. She wanted to eat. She wanted to lie on the divan late afternoon after eating, stretching into a soft, dozing state, not quite asleep, porous to the noise of the outside, which poured into her open ears. She—my body—was not unhappy. The roiling unwellness of the last few months—what I had begun to think of as seasickness—began to ebb, a long wave pulling back from the shore. My body was sleepy and calm. In the afternoon she wanted to walk.

  Around the apartment she walked and walked. Though my body no longer danced it still could not help but keep an even beat in its steps and its heavy gait: one-two, one-two, one-two, one-two, one-two. My mind did not like afternoon, it twitched inside the body, especially at this angle of light; if the body were to stray too close to the window and see the light flooding through the closed shutters she would wince. Outside, afternoon obliterated the streets, it turned the sea and the backs and bumpers of cars into unbreakable flats of blinding shine. In this high, terrible heat, there was no room for thought, only dread. Why should this light bother me if it did not bother the body? The body could simply narrow her eyes and look away from the window. Around and around, not looking where the feet were placed, only walking forward in a tight, endless circle.

  It seemed to come from somewhere, the step and step. Slowly, over many afternoons, an image became clearer. I remembered a woman room-walking from end to end. The woman had a dark look and a swollen belly. As she walked she kneaded the belly and muttered in time to her walking. The movements and the words came from the body of a sleepwalker, I walked with her, following her motions, until I could see even deeper, to an earlier time, when I myself was rocked and rocked within an endless, wary walker, one whose body walked and walked without the mind, against the mind, long and long hours damp of afternoon, for no light would reach the room in which I slept, still the feeling of light—red light—

  Walking, remembering, I felt a strange mixture of feeling: so close: seeing her, being within her, being her: my mother. I was frightened. It should have felt like sweetness. My body was a house built by her, inhabited by her, and no matter where I made my home—Versova, Paris, the moon—I would not escape her. Yet, at the same time as I experienced this suffocating closeness, I felt the yawning gap. I could not ask her a single question. We shared a body but her mind I could not reach. Why was this. Why was any of it. Then I was tired, and slept.

  When I awoke the sun had set, and my husband returned home. In those waking minutes, it took a long time for me to locate myself. It felt like much time had passed since I lay down to sleep, and that I was now old, possibly dead, while life continued on outside without me, with all its heartbreak and commerce. “Sleeping?” my husband said, amused, switching on the light. When he leaned down to kiss me I could smell the evidence of outside upon him, mixed with his sweat, and the deep green of his French cologne, one of the many extravagances of his old life he had carried into the new one, and with it, I could glean from his cheeks the scent of cigarette smoke and laughter, and the sharp smell of outside air. “Have you eaten, love?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But you’ve been asleep.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Oh fine,” I said. And my body glowed: she was fine, large, beautiful, docile, calm. The belly humped beneath my petticoat held a creature whose movements I was beginning to discern, movements that felt arrhythmic and unsettling. I had the image of a creature in there with the gold-ringed, alien eyes of my dance teacher’s birds. Had the soul come into the body? Almost willfully it had, rebelliously, she had come where she was not wanted—barged into my body. As I had too, I think, so sick my mother had been. How unlike me to come without being called. For my mother, seventeen, surely had not called.

  “You’re not suffering so much now? No headaches?”

  “Not suffering so much now,” I said.

  “That’s just smashing,” he said. “Look what I have for you.”

  He had entered with a package, which I had not noticed, and he picked it up and placed it in my arms, watching me as I opened it, pulling off the brown paper to reveal a shining white box tied with a red ribbon. The lid of the box lifted to reveal a shock of violent color, and the faintest whiff of perfume: the single most beautiful sari I had ever seen: red as the marriage sari I had not worn at our courthouse wedding, shot through all over with gold thread, gold thread along the border inscribed dancing-girls and jungle birds, and men and women and birds danced together down the generous pallu: how such fine silk held the heavy gold thread I could not understand, and I could not keep my greedy hands from traveling over its length, which felt cool against my palms. “My mother wants to see you.”

  “Did she send me this?”

  “Yes, she said it would suit you.”

  “She said that?”

  “Yes, and she’s right. Look. The colors suit you exactly. Will you put it on?” He sat down beside me on the bed.

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  “She wrote you a letter,” he said.

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to read it.”

  “Don’t be so unreasonable, Vidya.”

  “I’m being unreasonable? Not the woman who came to my father’s house and slapped me and called me a whore? Why do you want me to read it?”

  “It’s all wrong, Vidya. It’s not what she’s like. It was a mistake—”

  “A mistake?”

  “Why can’t we even discuss it? I’m never supposed to think about them again? The people who raised me and cared for me and gave me everything?” And he was up from the bed. He opened his hands helple
ssly. “I don’t understand this about you. So many girls would trade anything to be in your position.”

  “Aren’t you glad I didn’t marry you for your money?”

  “Well why didn’t you?” he said lightly.

  I made an exasperated noise. If anything, the ease with which he had spent money during our courtship discomfited me, physically—to see his money fly out of his pocket and into so many open hands, and especially for my benefit, gave me a queasy feeling that I could not disguise: a new shirt when your old one tore, or simply because it struck in you desire; a taxi when you were tired; a watch for a girl after she arrived late to your previous date—trace the wrist before the watch is placed around it, and tell her, “See, now you’ll always be on time.” I was glad when we lost the extra income his family supplied before they learned of our relationship and we were forced by circumstance to stand on our own feet.

  Still, I consistently admired the gentle confidence that shaped his stride and his dealings with the world, and that was not quite money—as often as not, money could make a person cruel—and he approached each person he met with a democratic respect, almost a deference, regardless of their station. No, he had been mothered sweetly, and well. A mother had cleared the obstacles from his path with a gentle hand, and presented the world to him as a toy that existed for his pleasure: someone had lifted him while he was crying and brushed the tears from his face. I had imagined him as a boy in a hand-sewn costume, the stripes of the child-sailor matched at the seams by his mother’s careful fingers, and I had imagined someone nearly as lovely as Mrs. B brushing the tears from his cheeks and the corners of his nose as he cried. In fact, I myself had brushed my hands across the plains of his face, tracing the path of those vanished fingers. Did I hope that his mother would see how wholly and excellently I loved her son, and open her arms to me? Ah, not even I was that naive.