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Published by Vintage 2001
10 9
Copyright © Anita Desai 2000
Anita Desai has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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ISBN 9780099289647
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Praise
About the Author
Also by Anita Desai
Acknowledgements
Royalty
Winterscape
Diamond Dust, a Tragedy
Underground
The Man Who Saw Himself Drown
The Artist’s Life
Five Hours to Simla or Faisla
Tepoztlán Tomorrow
The Rooftop Dwellers
To My Students at M. I. T.
Who Have Been My Teachers
‘Desai writes with deceptive simplicity and gentility, and underlying all these stories runs a subtle vein of acid truth’
Evening Standard
‘An integrity of purpose, not to mention an enviable felicity with language, which runs through the book like a golden thread. Few contemporary novelists look at the world through such sane eyes as Anita Desai’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A superb observer of the human race’
New York Times
‘Throughout this nicely textured, intelligent collection, Desai graces her characters with supple and elegant prose, subtle insights and, above all, an understated, humane sense of comedy’
New York Times Book Review
‘Desai’s genius is in capturing life’s absurdity with benign and understated wit…everything that Desai does best: ruefulness, sympathy, cultural displacement and a Chekovian sense of nostalgia. All this and jokes too’
New Statesman
Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her published works include adult novels, children’s books and short stories. Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Village by the Sea won the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction in 1982. Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and of Girton College at the University of Cambridge. She teaches in the Writing Program at M.I.T. and divides her time between India, Boston, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, England. In Custody was recently filmed by Merchant Ivory Productions.
Many thanks to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for providing me with a summer in Umbria where I revised these stories. The author and publisher are grateful to New Directions and Carcanet Press for permission to reproduce the extracts from ‘In Uxmal’ and ‘Exclamation’ from Selected Poems by Octavio Paz and The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987 respectively, quoted in ‘Tepoztlán Tomorrow’.
ALL WAS PREPARED for the summer exodus: the trunks packed, the household wound down, wound up, ready to be abandoned to three months of withering heat and engulfing dust while its owners withdrew to their retreat in the mountains. The last few days were a little uncomfortable – so many of their clothes already packed away, so many of their books and papers bundled up and ready for the move. The house looked stark, with the silver put away, the vases emptied of flowers, the rugs and carpets rolled up; it was difficult to get through this stretch, delayed by one thing or another – a final visit to the dentist, last instructions to the stockbrokers, a nephew to be entertained on his way to Oxford. It was only the prospect of escape from the blinding heat that already hammered at the closed doors and windows, poured down on the roof and verandas, and withdrawal to the freshness and cool of the mountains which helped them to bear it. Sinking down on veranda chairs to sip lemonade from tall glasses, they sighed, ‘Well, we’ll soon be out of it.’
In that uncomfortable interlude, a postcard arrived – a cheap, yellow printed postcard that for some reason to do with his age, his generation, Raja still used. Sarla’s hands began to tremble: news from Raja. In a quivering voice she asked for her spectacles. Ravi passed them to her and she peered through them to decipher the words as if they were a flight of migrating birds in the distance: Raja was in India, at his ashram in the south, Raja was going to be in Delhi next week, Raja expected to find her there. She would be there, wouldn’t she? ‘You won’t desert me?’
After Ravi had made several appeals to her for information, for a sharing of the news, she lifted her face to him, grey and mottled, and said in a broken voice, ‘Oh Ravi, Raja has come. He is in the south. He wants to visit us – next week.’
It was only to be expected that Ravi’s hands would fall upon the table, fall onto china and silverware, with a crash, making all rattle and jar. Raja was coming! Raja was to be amongst them again!
A great shiver ran through the house like a wind blowing that was not a wind so much as a stream of shining light, shimmering and undulating through the still, shadowy house, a radiant serpent, not without menace, some threat of danger. Whether it liked it or not, the house became the one chosen by Raja for a visitation, a house in waiting.
With her sari wrapped around her shoulders tightly, as if she were cold, Sarla went about unlocking cupboards, taking out sheets, silver, table linen. Her own trunks, and Ravi’s, had to be thrown open. What had been put away was taken out again. Ravi sat uncomfortably in the darkened drawing room, watching her go back and forth, his lips thin and tight, but his expression one of helplessness. Sometimes he dared to make things difficult for her, demanding a book or a file he knew was at the very bottom of the trunk, pretending that it was indispensable, but when she performed the difficult task with every expression of weary martyrdom, he relented and asked, ‘Are you all right? Sarla?’ She refused to answer, her face was clenched in a tightly contained storm of emotion. Despondently, he groaned, ‘Oh, aren’t we too old –?’ Then she turned to look at him, and even spoke: ‘What do you mean?’ Ravi shook his head helplessly. Was there any need to explain?
Raja arrived on an early morning train. Another sign of his generation: he did not fly when he was in India. Perhaps he had not taken in the fact that one could fly in India too, or else he preferred the trains, no matter how long they took, crawling over the endless, arid plains in the parched heat before the rains. At dawn, no sun yet visible, the sky was already white with heat; crows rose from the dust-laden trees, cawing, then dropped to the ground, sun-struck. Sweepers with great brooms made desultory swipes at the streets, their mouths covered with a strip of turban, or sari, against the dust they raised. Motor rickshaws and taxis were being washed, lovingly, tenderly, by drivers in striped underpants. The city stank of somnolence, of dejection, like sweat-stained clothes. Sarla and Ravi stood on the railway platform, waiting, and when Sarla seemed to waver, Ravi put out a gentlemanly hand to steady her. When she turned her face to him in something like gratitude or pleading, a look passed between them as can only pass between two people married to each other through the droughts and hurricanes of thirty years. Then the train arrived, with a great blowing of triumphant whistles: it had completed its long journey from the south, it had achieved its destination, hadn’t it said it would? Magnificently, it was a promise kept. Immediately, coolies in red shirts and turbans, with legs like ancient tree roots, sprang at the compartments, leaping onto the steps before the train had even halted or its doors opened, and the families and friends waiting on the platform began to run with the train, waving, calling to the passengers who leaned out of the windows. Sarla and Ravi stood rooted to one place, clinging to each other in order not to be torn apart or pushed aside by the crowd in its excitement.
The pandemonium only grew worse when the doors were unlatched and the passengers began to dismount at the same time as the coolies forced their way in, creating human gridlock. Sighting their friends and relatives, the crowds on the platform began to wave and scream. Till coolies were matched with baggage, passengers with reception parties, utter chaos ruled. Sarla and Ravi peered through it, turning their heads in apprehension. Where was Raja? Only after the united families began to leave, exhorting coolies to bring up the rear with assorted trunks, bedding rolls and baskets balanced on their heads and held against their hips, and the railway platform had emerged from the scramble, did they hear the high-pitched, wavering warble of the voice they recognised: ‘Sar-la! Ra-vi! My dears, how good of you to come! How good to see you! If you only knew what I’ve beeen through, about the man who insisted on telling me about his alligator farm, describing at such length how they are turned into handbags, as though I were a leather merchant …’ and they turned to see Raja stepping out of one of the coaches, clutching his silk dhoti with one hand, waving elegantly with the other, a silver lock of his hair rising from his wide forehead as he landed on the platform in his slippered feet. And then the three of them were embracing each other, all at once, and it might have been Oxford, it might have been thirty years ago, it might even have been that lustrous morning in May emerging from dew-drenched meadows and the boat-crowded Isis, with ringing out of the skies and towers above them – bells, bells, bells, bells ….
‘And then there was another extraordinary passenger, a young man with hair like a nest of serpents, you know, and when he understood I would not eat a “two-egg mamlet” offered to me by this incredibly ragged and totally sooty little urchin with a tin tray under his arm, nor even a “one-egg mamlet” to please him or anyone, this marvellous person leapt down from the bunk above my head, and shot out of the door – oh, I assure you we were at a standstill, in the most desolate little station imaginable, for no reason I could see or guess at if I cudgelled my brains ever so ferociously – and then he returned with a basket overflowing with fruit, a positive cornucopia. Sarla, you’d have fainted with bliss! Never did you see such fruit; oh, nowhere, nowhere on those mythical farms of California, certainly, worked on by those armies of the exploited from the sad lands to the south, I assure you, Ravi, such fruit as seemed a reincarnation of the fruit one ate as a child, stolen, you know, from the neighbour’s orchard, fruit one ate hidden in the darkest recesses of one’s compound, surreptitiously, one’s tongue absolutely shrivelled by the piercing sweetness of the mangoes, the cruel tartness of unripe guavas, the unripe pulp of the plantains. Oh, Sarla, such joys! And I sat peeling a tiny banana and eating it – it was no bigger than my little finger and contained the flavour of the ripest, sweetest, best banana anywhere on earth within its cunning little yellow speckled jacket – I asked, naturally, what I owed him. But that incredible young man, who looked something like a cornucopia himself, with that abundant hair – it had such a quality of liveliness about it, every strand almost electric with energy – he merely folded his hands and said he would not take one paisa from me, not one. Well, of course I pushed away the basket and said I could not possibly accept it, totally against my principles, etcetera, and he gave me this tender, tender smile, quite unspeakably loving, and said he could take nothing from me because in a previous incarnation I had been his grandfather: he recognised me. “What?” said I, “what? What makes you say so? How can you say so?”’
‘Watch out!’ Ravi shouted at the driver who overtook a bullock cart so closely he almost ran into its great creaking wheels and overturned it.
‘And he merely smiled, this sweet, ineffably sweet smile of his, and assured me I was no other than this esteemed ancestor of his who had left his home and family at the age of fifty and gone off into the Himalayas to live as a hermit and meditate. “Well,” said I –’
‘Slow down,’ Ravi ordered the driver curtly.
‘“Well,” said I, “I assure you I have never been in the Himalayas – although it is indeed my life’s ambition to do so, and therefore I could not have returned from there.” By the way, I began to wonder if it was altogether flattering to be called grandfather by a man by no means in the first flush of youth, more like the becalmed middle years, whereupon he told me – imagine, Sarla, imagine, Ravi – he told me his grandfather had died there, in Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganga, many years ago. His family had all travelled up from Madras to witness the cremation and carry the ashes to Benares, but now, in the railway carriage, that little tin box baking in the sun as we crossed the red earth and ravines of Central India, he claimed he’d seen his reincarnation. He was as certain of it as the banana in my hand was a banana! He would not tell me why, or how, but he was clearly a clairvoyant. And isn’t that a superb combination: clearly clairvoyant! Or do you think it a touch de trop? Hmm, Ravi, Sarla?’
The car lurched around one of the countless circles set within the radiating avenues of New Delhi, now steadily filling with traffic that streamed towards the city’s business and government centres, far from this region of immense jamun trees, large low villas, smooth hedges, closed gates, sentries in sentry boxes, and parakeets in flamboyant trees.
‘But that is the kind of experience, the kind of encounter that India bestows on one like a gift, a jewel,’ Raja was fluting as the car drew up at one of the closed gates. The driver honked the horn discreetly, the watchman came hurrying to unlock it, and they swept in and up the drive to the porch that stood loaded with the weight of magenta bougainvillea. ‘And,’ Raja continued as he let the driver help him out of the car, ‘I was so delighted, so overjoyed to find it still so, Ravi, in spite of that frightful man you have installed as the head of your government – an economist, is he not? – yes, please, I shall need that bag almost immediately, and the other too, if I am to bathe and refresh myself, but,’ he concluded, triumphantly, ‘what further refreshment can one possibly require after one has already been blessed with such, such enchanting acceptance, not, not physical, but positively, positively …’
‘Spiritual?’ Ravi ventured, smiling, as he helped Raja up the stairs into the shaded cool of the veranda with its pots of flowers and ferns, a slowly revolving electric fan and an arrangement of wicker furniture where he lowered Raja into an armchair with a flowered cushion.
It was not that Raja was any more elderly than they. They had all been contemporaries at Oxford, and Raja may even have been a year or two younger. Sarla had complained that his southern ancestry had given Raja an unfair advantage over their northern genes which seemed to produce businessmen and shopkeepers more readily than mathematicians or philosophers. Yet there was about him an air of fragility, of some precious commodity that they had been called upon to cherish. At Oxford Ravi had found himself taking Raja’s laundry to be done while Raja, who had neglected to attend to it till he had absolutely nothing left to wear, had stayed in bed under his blankets till Ravi returned with fresh clothes. He was wryly amused as well as a little annoyed to find that he still fell into the trap.
Sarla was hurrying into the house, to make sure Raja’s luggage was carried carefully into the room prepared for him – the bedroom at the back of the house, which Raja loved because it looked onto a garden full of lemon trees and jasmine vines that he said he dreamt about during that part of the year that he spent in Los Angeles – and against Raja’s wishes to order breakfast, because, after all, she and Ravi had not benefited from the generosity of the young man with hair like a serpent’s nest in the railway carriage, she said a little acidly.
Why her words sounded acid, she could not say. It was all she could do not to go down on her knees and remove Raja’s slippers from his feet, or to bring water in a basin and wash them. She had to sharpen her faculties to fight that urge. But she brought out the coffee pot herself – she had taken the silver coffee service out of storage for Raja’s visit – and poured him a cup with all the grace that she had acquired in her years as a diplomat’s wife in the embassies and High Commissions where Ravi had ‘served’, she ‘presided’. She could scarcely restrain herself, only tremblingly managed to restrain herself from mentioning that last day in May, that last embrace – oh, it would be so unsuitable, so unsuitable –
And then a second car came sweeping up the drive, parked beside theirs – an identical car, a silver-grey Ambassador with tinted glass and window curtains – and her sister tumbled out of the driver’s seat, a woman almost identical to Sarla, and in an equal state of excitement and agitation. And then they were all embracing each other, after all, successively, simultaneously.
Maya had not been with them on the bank of the festive, the bacchanalian Isis that May morning; she had not fetched Raja’s laundry or cooked him rice on a gas ring on foggy winter nights when he could not walk to the Indian restaurant in the cold, not with his asthmatic condition: Maya had been at the London School of Economics a few years later. Maya had also met her husband at university, but his path had been different from Ravi’s. ‘No bloody Civil Service for me; I’ve always thought it most uncivil,’ Pravin had declared when Maya suggested it, ‘and at this stage of history can you really contemplate anything so reactionary? Are we not moving into the future, free of colonial institutions?’ So it had been a political career for Pravin, not the dirty politics of people Raja had just referred to so disparagingly, but politics as practised by the press, idealistically, morally, scrupulously (even if only on paper). And so, when Maya embraced Raja, it was with vigour, with her head tossed back with pride so that her now grey hair hung from her shoulders with as carefree an air as a young girl might toss her darker, glossier locks, and with a laugh that rang out resonantly. ‘What, you’ve travelled by train in a silk dhoti? Oh Raja, must you go to such extremes when you play the the southern gentleman visiting the barbarians of the north?’ and Raja hung upon her shoulder and shook his finger at her, fluting at a higher pitch than ever before, ‘Is that husband of yours still playing the patriot while dressed in Harris tweeds, and does he still wear that mouldy felt hat when following the elections amongst the cow-dung patties and buffalo sheds of Bihar?’ and Sarla was retreating to the wicker sofa with the coffee tray, glowering, turning ashen and tight-lipped once more. But her occupation of the sofa was strategic – now Maya and Raja could not sit upon it, side by side: it belonged to her, and she could preside, icily, silver coffee pot in hand, looking upon the two as if they were somewhat trying children, and Ravi would give her a look – of sympathy, or pity? – from the stool on which he perched, waiting patiently to be passed a cup.
She passed it, then said, interrupting Maya who was giving a humorous account of the last election campaign Pravin had covered, ‘If to go to the Himalayas is your life’s ambition, Raja, then that can easily be achieved. Won’t you consider driving up with us when we go for the summer to Winhaven?’
‘Winhaven? Winhaven?’ Raja twisted around to her. ‘Oh, Sarla, Sarla, the very word, the very name – it recalls – how does it go –
“I have desired to go
Where springs not fail –”
and then? And then? How does it go –
“And I have asked to be
Where no storms come
Where the green swell is in the heaven’s dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea –”
remember? remember?’
Who did not? Who did not, Sarla would have liked to know, but suddenly Simba was upon them, bursting out of the house, his great tail thumping, his claws slithering across the veranda tiles in his excitement as he dashed at Maya, then at Ravi, finally at Raja and, to Sarla’s horror, Raja was pushed back into his chair by Simba’s vigorous attention, but Raja was pushing back at him, laughing, ‘Oh, Simba, Simba of the Kenyan highlands! You remember me, do you?’ and Sarla, cupping her chin in her hand, leaving her coffee untouched, watched as Raja, suddenly as sprightly as a boy, the boy who had bicycled helter-skelter down the streets of Oxford, dark hair rising up from his great brow and falling into the luminous eyes, now ran down the stairs with Simba into the garden, then bent to pick up a stick and send it flying up at the morning sun for the pleasure of having Simba leap for it. Old Simba, usually so gloomy, so lethargic, was now springing up on his hindlegs to catch the falling toy and run with it into the shade of the flamboyant tree, Raja following him, his pale silk dhoti floating about him, his white hair glistening, making the startled parakeets fly out of the clusters of scarlet flowers with screams.
Then both Sarla and Maya released small sighs. Ravi watched their expressions from the stool on which he was perched, and finally asked, diffidently, ‘May I have a lump of sugar and a little milk, please?’
In spite of his poetic response to Sarla’s suggestion that he accompany them to the mountains, Raja continuously postponed the journey. No, he had come to Delhi, all the way to Delhi in the heat of June, to see them, to relive the remembered joys of their beautiful home. How could he cut short his time here? And there was so much for him to see, to do, to catch up on. He wanted Sarla to drive him to the silver market in Chandni Chowk so he could gaze upon the magnificent craftsmanship on display there, perhaps even purchase a piece to take back with him to California where the natives had never seen such art bestowed upon craft, and then if Maya were to accompany him to the Cottage Industries emporium, and help him select a pashmina shawl, then he could be happy even on those chill, rainy days that he was forced to endure. What, didn’t they know, California had such weather? Had they been deceived by posters of palm trees and golden beaches? Didn’t they know the fraudulence inherent in the very notion and practice of tourism, that abominable habit of the Western world? Tourism! Now, when he returned to India, it was not to see the sights, he already knew them – they were imprinted upon his heart – but to imbibe them, savour them, nourish himself upon them. And so when Sarla and Ravi took him to Nizamuddin and beside the saint’s tomb they heard a blind beggar play his lute and sing in a voice so soulful that it melted one’s very being,
‘When I was born
I was my mother’s prince.
When I married
I became my wife’s king.
But you have reduced me
To being a beggar, Lord,
Come begging for alms
With my hands outstretched –’
it was as if the thirst of Raja’s pilgrim soul was being slaked, and never had thirst been slaked by music so sublime as made by this ancient beggar in his rags, a tin can at his knee for alms – and of course he must have whatever was in Raja’s purse, every last coin, alas that they were so few. Now if this beggar were performing in the West, the great theatres of every metropolis would throw open their doors to him. He would perform under floodlights, his name would be on posters, in the papers, on everyone’s lips. Gold would pile up at his feet – but then, would he be such a singer as he was now, a pilgrim soul content to sit in the shade of the great saint Nizamuddin’s little fretted marble tomb, and dedicate his song to him as homage?
Raja, leaving his slippers at the gateway to the courtyard, approached the tomb with such ecstasy etched upon his noble features that Sarla, and Ravi too, found themselves gazing at him rather than about them – Sarla’s bare and Ravi’s stockinged feet on the stones, braving the dirt and flies and garbage that had first made them shrink and half turn away. Sarla had held her sari to her nose as they passed a row of butchers’ shops on their way to the tomb, buffalo’s innards had hung like curtains in the small booths, and the air was rife with raw blood and the thrum of flies, and she asked Raja, in the car, ‘How is it that you, a vegetarian, a Brahmin, walked in there and never even twitched your nose?’ He cast his eyes upon her briefly – and they were still those narrow, horizontal pools of darkness she remembered – and sighed, ‘My dear, true souls do not turn away from humanity or, if they do, it is only to meditate and pray, then come back, fortified, to embrace it – beggars, thieves, lepers, whoever – their sores, their rags. They do not flinch from them, for they know these are only the covering, the concealing robes of the soul, don’t you know?’ and Sarla, and Ravi, seated on either side of Raja on the comfortably upholstered back seat of the air-conditioned Ambassador, now speeding past the Lodi Gardens to their own green enclave, wondered if Raja was referring to himself or the sufi.
That afternoon, as they sat on the veranda, sipping tea and nibbling at the biscuits the cook had sent up in a temper (he was supposed to be on leave, he was not going to bake fancy cakes at a time when he was rightfully to have had his summer vacation, and so the sahibs could do with biscuits bought in the bazaar), Raja, a little melancholy, a little subdued – which Sarla and Ravi put down to the impression left on him by their visit to the sufi’s tomb – piped up in a beseeching voice, ‘Sarla, Ravi, where are those ravishing friends of yours I met when you were at the High Commission in London? The Dutta-Rays, was it not? You must know who I mean – you told me how they’d returned to Delhi and built this absolutely fabulous hacienda in Vasant Vihar. Isn’t that quite close by?’
‘It is,’ Ravi admitted.
Like a persistent child, Raja continued, ‘Then why don’t we have them over? This evening? I remember she sang like a nightingale – those melancholy, funereal songs of Tagore’s. Wouldn’t they be perfect on an evening like this which simply hangs suspended in time, don’t you know, as if the dust and heat were holding it in their cruel grasp? Oh, Sarla, do telephone, do send for her – tell her I pine to hear the sound of her avian voice. Just for that, I’m even willing to put up with her husband who I remember finding – how shall I put it – a trifle wanting?’
Sarla found herself quite unwilling. Truth be told, the morning’s expedition had left her with a splitting headache; she was not in the habit of walking around in the midday sun, leave that to mad dogs and – she’d always said. Even now, her temples throbbed and perspiration trickled discreetly down the back of her knees, invisible under the fresh cotton sari she’d donned for tea. But Raja would not hear of a refusal, or accept any excuse. If she thought the Dutta-Rays had left for Kashmir, why did she not ring and find out? Oh, there was no need to get up and go to the telephone – ‘In this land of fantasies fulfilled, isn’t there always a willing handmaid, so to speak, to bring the mountain to Mohammed?’ and Sarla had to send for the telephone to be brought out to the veranda, the servant Balu unwinding the telephone line all the way, and she was forced to speak into it and verify that the Dutta-Rays were indeed still in Delhi, held up by a visit from a former colleague at India House, but were going out that evening to that party – didn’t Sarla and Ravi know of it? ‘We’re supposed to be away,’ Sarla said stiffly into the telephone. ‘Everyone thinks we are in the hills by now. We usually are.’ Well, the Dutta-Rays would drop in on their way – and so they did, she a vision of grace in her finely embroidered Lucknow sari, pale green on white, to Raja’s great delight, and only too willing to sing for his delectation, only not tonight since they were already late.
So Sarla and Ravi found themselves throwing a party – a party that was to be the setting for a recital given by Ila Dutta-Ray, a woman neither of them had any warm feelings for, remembering how unhelpful she had been when they had first arrived in London and so badly needed help in finding a flat, engaging servants, placing their children in school, all so long ago of course. Instead of helping, she had sent them her old cook, declaring he was the best, but really saving herself the air fare back to India because he proved good for nothing but superannuation. They rang up whoever of their circle of friends remained in Delhi to invite them for the occasion. It was quite extraordinary how many friends Raja remembered and managed to trace, and also how many who were on the point of going away, changed their plans on hearing his name and assured Sarla and Ravi they would come.
Then there occurred a dreadful incident: Sarla was choosing from amongst her saris one cool enough for the evening ahead, which was, of course, one of the summer’s worst, that kind of still, yellow, lurid evening that it inflicted when one thought one could bear no more, and meant that the recital would be held not in the garden after all but in the air-conditioned drawing room instead, when a terrible thought struck her: she had forgotten to invite Maya! Maya and her husband Pravin! How could she have? It was true Maya had told her Pravin was very preoccupied with a special issue his paper was bringing out on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism but that was no reason to assume they might not be free. Sarla stood in front of the mirror that was attached to one leaf of the armoire, and clasped her hand over her mouth with a look so stricken that Ravi, coming in to ask what glasses should be taken out for the evening, wondered if she had a sudden toothache. ‘Ravi! Oh, Ravi,’ she wailed.
The telephone was brought to her – Balu unwinding the coils of an endless wire – and the number dialled for her. Then Sarla spoke into it in gasps, but unfortunately she had not taken the time to collect her wits and phrase her invitation with more tact. Maya’s sharp ears picked up every indication that her sister had been unforgivably remiss, and coldly rejected the insulting last-minute invitation, insisting proudly that Pravin was working late and she could not possibly leave his side, he never wrote a line without consulting her.
As if that was not agony enough, Sarla had to undergo the further humiliation of Raja piping up in the middle of the party – just as Ila Dutta-Ray was tuning her tanpura and about to open her mouth and utter the first note of her song – ‘But Sarla, where is Maya, that aficionado of Tagore’s music? Surely we should wait for her? Why is she so late?’ An awful hush fell – and Sarla again assumed her stricken look. What was she to say, how was she to explain? She found herself stumbling over Maya’s insincere excuse, but of course everyone guessed. Frowning in disapproval, Ila Dutta-Ray began her song on a very low, very deep and hoarse note.
In retaliation, Maya and Pravin threw a party as soon as Pravin’s column had been written and the special issue had gone to press, and their party was in honour of the Minister of Human Resources, whose wife was such an admirer of Raja’s, had read every word he had written and wanted so much to meet him – ‘in an intimate setting’. Since she had made this special request, they had felt obliged to cut down their guest list – and were sure Sarla and Ravi would not mind since they had the pleasure of Raja’s company every day. But when Ravi stoically offered to drive Raja across to their house, he found the whole road lined with cars, many of them chauffeur-driven and with government number plates, and had the humliation of backing out of it after dropping Raja at the gate, then returning to Sarla who had given way to a fierce migraine and was insisting that they book seats on a train to the hills as soon as possible.
‘But don’t we need to wait till Raja is gone?’
‘Raja is incapable of making decisions – we’ll have to make his for him,’ she snapped, waving at Balu who was slouching in the doorway, waiting to take away the remains of their meagre supper from the dining table.
She was still agonised enough the following morning – digging violently into half a ripe papaya in the blazing light that spilt over the veranda even at that early hour – actually to ask Raja, ‘How can you bear this heat? Do you really not mind it? I feel I’m going to collapse –’
Raja, who had a look of sleepy contentment on his face – he had already meditated for an hour in the garden, done his yoga exercises, bathed, drunk his tea and had every reason to look forward to another day – did not seem to catch her meaning at all. Reaching out to stroke her hand, he said, ‘I know what you need, my dear – a walk in the sublime Lodi Gardens when the sun is setting and Venus appears in the sky so silently –’ and went on to describe the ruins, their patina of lichen, their tiles of Persian blue, the echoes that rang beneath their domes, in such terms that Sarla sank back in her chair, sighing, agreeing.
What she did not know was that he had already arranged to walk there with Maya, Ila Dutta-Ray, and the wife of the Minister of Human Resources who, it turned out, had read that book of verses he had written when in Oxford and had published by a small press in London, long expired, so that copies were now collectors’ pieces. All three women owned such copies. And Sarla found herself trailing behind them while Raja pranced, actually pranced with delight, with enthusiasm, in their company. At their suggestion he recited these verses:
‘The lamp of heaven is hung upon the citrus bough,
The nightingale falls silent.
All is waiting,
For a royal visit by night’s own queen –’
and then burst into mocking, self-deprecating laughter, waving away their protests to say, ‘Oh, those adolescent excesses! What was I thinkingthis