clear light of day 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. Published by Vintage 2001 46 8 10 975 3 Copyright © Anita Desai 1980 Anita Desai has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint lines from The Waste Land' and 'Little Gidding' in Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 by T S Eliot, published by Faber & Faber Ltd and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publishers; lines from Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems published by Little, Brown 8c Company and Faber 8c Faber Ltd; lines from 'The Ship of Death' in The Complete Poems ofDH Lawrence. Copyright © 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C M Weekly, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Reprinted by permission of Lawrence Pollinger Ltd, Estate of the late Mrs Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, and Viking Penguin Inc. Vintage Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5A Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 www.randomhouse.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 009 927618 6 Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey For Didi and Pip Memory is a strange bell Jubilee and knell - Emily Dickinson & Jffr See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. T.S. Eliot ^5^, i ^5^ The koels began to call before daylight. Their voices rang out from the dark trees like an arrangement of bells, calling and echoing each others' calls, mocking and enticing each other into ever higher and shriller calls. More and more joined in as the sun rose and when Tar a could no longer bear the querulous demand in their voices, she got up and went out onto the veranda to find the blank white glare of the summer sun thrusting in between the round pillars and the purple bougainvillea. Wincing, she shielded her eyes as she searched for the birds that had clamoured for her appearance, but saw nothing. The cane chairs on the veranda stood empty. A silent line of ants filed past her feet and down the steps into the garden. Then she saw her sister's figure in white, slowly meandering along what as children they had called 'the rose walk'. Dropping her hands to pick up the hem of her long nightdress, Tar a ran down the steps, bowing her head to the morning sun that came slicing down like a blade of steel onto the back of her neck, and crossed the dry crackling grass of the lawn to join her sister who stood watching, smiling. The rose walk was a strip of grass, still streaked green and grey, between two long beds of roses at the far end of the lawn where a line of trees fringed the garden - fig and silver oak, mulberry and eucalyptus. Here there was still shade and, it seemed to Tara, the only bit of cultivation left; everything else, even the papaya and lemon trees, the bushes of hibiscus and oleander, the beds of canna lilies, seemed abandoned to dust and neglect, to struggle as they could against the heat and sun of summer. But the rose walk had been maintained almost as it was. Or was it? It seemed to Tara that there had been far more roses in it when she was a child - luscious shaggy pink ones, small crisp white ones tinged with green, silky yellow ones that smelt of tea - and not just these small negligible crimson heads that lolled weakly on their thin '-stems. Tara had grown to know them on those mornings when she had trailed up and down after her mother who was expecting her ; youngest child and had been advised by her doctor to take some exercise. Her mother had not liked exercise, perhaps not the new baby either, and had paced up and down with her arms folded and her head sunk in thought while the koels mocked and screamed and dive-bombed the trees. Tara had danced and skipped after her, , 'Chartering, till she spied something flashing from under a pile of N fallen rose petals - a pearl, or a silver ring? - and swooped upon it with a cry that broke into her mother's reverie and made her stop and frown. Tara had excitedly swept aside the petals and uncovered - a small, blanched snail. Her face wrinkling with disgust, her mother turned and paced on without a word, leaving Tara on her knees to contemplate the quality of disillusion. But here was Him. Him, grey and heavy now and not so unlike their mother in appearance, only awake, watchful, gazing at her with her fullest attention and appraisal. Him laughed when she saw Tara panting slightly in her eagerness. Tara laughed back. 'Him, the old rose walk is still here.' 'Of course,' said Him, 'only the roses grow smaller and sicker every year,' and she bent to shake a long spindly branch from which a fully bloomed rose dangled. It came apart instantly, revealing a small naked centre and a few pathetic stamens clinging to the bald head while the petals fell in a bunch to the chocolate earth below. Tara's mouth opened in dismay at the destruction of a rose in full bloom - she would never have done what Him did - and then she saw the petals that had clung together in a bunch in their fall part and scatter themselves. As she stared, a petal rose and tumbled onto its back and she saw uncovered the gleam of a - a pearl? a silver ring? Something that gleamed, something that flashed, then flowed - and she saw it was her childhood snail slowly, resignedly making its way from under the flower up a clod of earth only to tumble off the top onto its side- an eternal, minature Sisyphus. She brought her hands together in a clap and cried, 'Look, a snail!' Him watched her sister in surprise and amusement. Was Tara, grown woman, mother of grown daughters, still child enough to, play with a snail? Would she go down on her knees to scoop it up on | a leaf and watch it draw its albuminous trail, lift its tiny antennae,; gaze about it with protruding eyes and then, the instant before I leaf dipped and it slid downwards, draw itself into its pale pod? As Tara performed the rites of childhood over the handy < ture, Him stood with lowered head, tugging at the hair that hi loosely about her face as she had done when she had sat beside I brother's bed that summer that he was ill, with her forei lowered to the wooden edge of the bed, a book of poetry open < her lap, reading aloud the lines: Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens . . . Her lips moved to the lines she had forgotten she remember aw the crimson petals fall in a heap on the snail in the mud, but would not say them aloud to Tara. She had no wish to use the i an incantation to revive that year, that summer when he had e ill and she had nursed him and so much had happened in a To bury it all again, she put out her toe and scattered the jl-evenly over the damp soil. Tara's hand trembled, the leaf she held dipped and the I creature slid soundlessly back to earth, 'both stood staring as it lay there, shocked and still, i murmured 'You looked so like Mama from a distance, Him 1, it's so - the sun -' for she realised at once that Him would I the comparison. i did not seem to hear, or care. 'Did you sleep at all?' she Stead, for last night on arriving from the airport Tara had I chattered and claimed to be too excited to sleep, aid I?' cried Tara, laughing, and talked of the koels in the -and the dog barking in the night, and the mosquitoes stinging in the dark, as they walked together up the Tara in her elegant pale blue nylon nightgown and slippers and Him in a curious shapeless handmade It Tara could see she had fashioned out of an old cotton agit up at both sides, leaving enough room for her arms ugh and cutting out a wide scoop for her neck. At the r of blue and green peacocks redeemed the dress from i and was - Tara laughed lightly - original. 'How he ated. 'Don't the neighbours complain?' vt grown used to him at last, or else they've realised I to complain -1 never will chain him up and, as I tell do protest, he has such a beautiful voice, it's a him. Not like the yipping and yapping of other > dogs,' she said with a toss of her grey head. ' spoke softly, no louder than a pair of birds to each ;-must have heard his name or realised he was being i Tara had come out onto the veranda he had been wooden divan, hidden from her by the striped lich it was covered, and he had only twitched his |lie heard her pass by. Now he was suddenly out there """: with them, standing with his four legs very wide Ntiving down into the clods of earth where the snail ^struggling to upright itself. As it finally flipped onto la thunderous sneeze. I Him, delighted with his theatrical performance, amed at the approval in her voice while the other But it disappeared under the rose petals once more and he came lolloping towards them, stubbed his moist nose into their legs, scuffed his dirty claws into their heels, salivated over their feet and then rushed past them in a show of leadership. 'He does like to be first always,' Him explained. 'Is he nine now, Him, or ten?' Twelve,' exclaimed Him. 'See his old whiskers all white,' she said, diving forwards at his head and catching him by the ears, making him stand still with his head against her thigh. He closed his eyes and smiled a foolish smile of pleasure at her attention, then drew away with a long line of saliva dribbling from his jaws onto the grass, more copious and irregular than the fluent snail's. 'He is Begum's son, you know, and she lived to be - fourteen?' Tara lifted her hair from the back of her neck and let it fall again, luxuriantly, with a sigh. 'How everything goes on and on here, and never changes,' she said. 'I used to think about it all,' and she waved her arm in a circular swoop to encompass the dripping tap at the end of the grass walk, the trees that quivered and shook with birds, the loping dog, the roses - 'and it is all exactly the same, whenever we come home.' 'Does that disappoint you?' Him asked drily, giving her a quick sideways look. 'Would you like to come back and find it changed?' Tara's face was suddenly wound up tightly in a frown as if such a thought had never struck her before and she found it confusing. 'Changed? How? You mean the house newly painted, the garden newly planted, new people coming and going? Oh no, how could I, Him ?' and she seemed truly shocked by the possibility. 'But you wouldn't want to return to life as it used to be, would you?' Him continued to tease her in that dry voice. 'All that dullness, boredom, waiting. Would you care to live that over again? Of course not. Do you know anyone who would - secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self- really prefer to return to childhood?' Still frowning, Tara murmured meaninglessly 'Prefer to what?' 'Oh, to going on - to growing up - leaving - going away - into the world - something wider, freer - brighter,' Him laughed. 'Brighter! Brighter!' she called, shading her eyes against the brightness. Tara's head sank low, her frown deepened. She could not trust Him to be quite serious: in her experience, the elder sister did not take the younger seriously - and so all she said was a murmured 'But you didn't, Him.' 'I?' said Him flatly, with her eyes still shaded against the light that streamed across the parched lawn and pressed against the trees at the fringe. 'Oh, I never go anywhere. It must seem strange to you and Bakul who have travelled so much - to come back and find people like Baba-and me who have never travelled at all. And if we still had Mita-masi with us, wouldn't that complete the picture? This faded old picture in its petrified frame?' She stopped to pluck the dead heads off a rose bush dusted grey with disease. 'Miramasi swigging secretly from her brandy bottle. Baba winding up his gramophone. And Raja, if Raja were here, playing Lord Byron on his death-bed. I, reading to him. That is what you might have come back to, Tara. How would you have liked that?' Tara stood staring at her silver toes, at the clods of upturned earth in the beds and the scattered dead heads, and felt a prickle of distrust in Him. Was Him being cruel again? There could be no other motive. There could be no reply. She made none and Him swung away and marched on, striding beside Badshah. 'That is the risk of coming home to Old Delhi,' she announced in the hard voice that had started up the prickle of distrust that ran OVer the tips of the hairs on Tara's arms, rippling them. 'Old Delhi does not change. It only decays. My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping place. I never go. Baba never goes. And 1^ here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened long ago - in the time of the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Sultanate, j^tte Moghuls - that lot.' She snapped her fingers in time to her j/words, smartly. 'And then the British built New Delhi and moved ; out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting er and greyer, I suppose. Anyone who isn't dull and grey goes Mtway - to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. | they don't come back.' *I must be peculiar then,' Tara's voice rose bravely. 'I keep Incoming back. And Bakul.' ' U'fhey pay your fare, don't they?' her sister said. "'But we like to come, Him. We must come - if we are not to lose i, I with all of you, with home, and he with the country. He's l planning this trip for months. When the girls arrive, and we go ^Hyderabad for the wedding, Bakul wants to go on from there and "i*tour of the whole country. He did it ten years ago and he says it : to do it again, to make sure -' ^^Ofwhat?' 'Jpfae question was sarcastic but Tara gave her head a toss of assu : and pride. Her voice too had taken on the strength and sure It that Him noticed it usually did when she spoke of her husband. *told Him evenly 'That he hasn't forgotten, or lost touch with the f things are here. If you lose touch, then you can't represent your |r, can you?' she ended, on an artificial note. Him of course detected that. She grunted 'Hmph. I don't know. If that is what they tell you in the diplomatic service then that is what you must say.' 'But it's true,' Tara exclaimed, immediately dropping artificiality and sounding earnest. 'One has to come back, every few years, to find out and make sure again. I'd like to travel with him really. But there's the wedding in Raja's house, I suppose that will be enough to keep us busy. Are you coming, Him? You and Baba? Couldn't we all go together? Then it will be a proper family reunion. Say you'll come! You have your summer vacation now. What will you do alone in Delhi, in the heat? Say you'll come!' Him said nothing. In the small silence a flock of mynahs suddenly burst out of the green domes of the trees and, in a loud commotion of yellow beaks and brown wings, disappeared into the sun. While their shrieks and cackles still rang in the air, they heard another sound, one that made Him stop and stare and the dog lift his head, prick up his ears and then charge madly across to the eucalyptus trees that grew in a cluster by the wall. Rearing up on his hind legs, he tore long strips of blue and mauve bark off the silken pink tree trunks and, throwing back his head, bellowed in that magnificent voice that Him admired so much and that soured - or spiced - her relations with the neighbours. 'What is it?' called Tara as Him ran forwards, lifting the peacock edged nightie in order to hurry. It was her cat, crouched in the fork of the blue and pink tree, black and bitter at being stranded where she could not make her way down. Discovered first by the mynahs and then by Badshah, she felt disgraced. Him stood below her, stretching out her arms and calling, imploring her to jump. Badshah warned her not to do anything of the sort in a series of excited barks and whines. Tara waited, laughing, while the cat turned her angry face from one to the other, wondering whom to trust. At last Him coaxed her down and she came slithering along the satiny bark, growling and grumbling with petulance and complaint at her undignified descent. Then she was in Bim's arms, safely cradled and shielded from Badshah's boisterous bumps and jumps, cuddled and cushioned and petted with* such an extravagance of affection that Tara could not help raising her eyebrows in embarrassment and wonder. Although Him was rubbing her chin on the cat's flat-topped head and kissing the cold tips of her ears, she seemed to notice Tara's expression. 'I know what you're thinking,' she said. 'You're thinking how old spinsters go ga-ga over their pets because they haven't children. Children are the real thing, you think.' m fe ..g . .3£v m Tara's look of surprise changed to guilt. 'What makes you say that? Actually, I was thinking about the girls. I was wondering ' 'Exactly. That's what I said. You think animals take the place of babies for us love-starved spinsters,' Him said with a certain satisfaction and lowered the rumpled cat to the gravel walk as they came up to the house. 'But you're wrong,' she said, striding across the sun-slashed drive. 'You can't possibly feel for them what I do about these wretched animals of mine.' 'Oh Him,' protested Tara, recognising the moment when Him went too far with which all their encounters had ended throughout their childhood, but she was prevented from explaining herself by the approach of a monstrous body of noise that seemed to be pushing its way out through a tight tunnel, rustily grinding through, and then emerged into full brassy volume, making the pigeons that lived on the ledge under the veranda ceiling throw up their wings and depart as if at a shot. It was not Bakul who was responsible for the cacophony. He was sitting - flabbily, flaccidly - in one of the cane chairs on the veranda with the tea tray in front of him, waiting for someone to come and pour. The noise beat and thrummed in one of the curtained rooms behind him. 'Sm-o-oke gets in your eyes,' moaned an agonised voice, and Tara sighed, and her shoulders drooped by a visible inch or two. 'Baba still plays the same old records?' she asked as they went slowly up the wide stairs between the massed pots of spider lilies and asparagus fern to the veranda. 'He never stops,' said Him, smiling. 'Not for a day.' 'Don't you mind the noise?' 'Not any more,' said Him, the lightness of her tone carefully contrived. 'I don't hear it any more.' 'It's loud,' complained Tara in a distressed voice. 'I used to look for records to send Baba -1 thought he'd like some new ones - but they don't make 78s any more.' 'Oh he doesn't want any new records,' said Him. 'He wouldn't play them. He loves his old ones.' 'Isn't it strange,' said Tara, wincing at the unmodulated roar that swept across the still, shady veranda in an almost visible onslaught of destruction. 'We are strange, I told you,' laughed Him, striding across the tiled floor to the cane chairs and the tea tray. 'Oh, Bakul - bhai, you're up. Did you sleep?' she asked carelessly, sitting down in front of the tray. But instead of pouring out the tea she only lifted the milk jug and, bending down, filled a saucer for the cat who crouched before it and began to lap even before Him had finished pouring so that some drops fell on her ears and on her whiskers, a sight that made Him laugh as she held the jug, waiting for the cat to finish the milk. Then she bent and refilled the saucer. Tara, who had poured out a cup of tea for Bakul, waited for her to surrender the milk jug. When she did, there was very little left in it for Bakul's tea. Tara shook it to bring out a few reluctant drops. 'Is that enough?' she asked uneasily, even guiltily, handing the cup to Bakul. He shrugged, making no reply, his lower lip thrust out in the beginning of a sulk. It may not have been the lack of milk, though, it might have been the din that stood about them like sheets of corrugated iron, making conversation impossible. As he stirred his tea thoughtfully with a little spoon, the song rose to its raucous crescendo as though the singer had a dagger plunged into his breast and were letting fly the heartfelt notes of his last plaint on earth. Then at last the rusty needle ground to a halt in the felt-embedded groove of the antique record and they all sighed, simultaneously, and sank back in their chairs, exhausted. The pigeons that had retreated to the roof came fluttering back to their nests and settled down with small complaining sounds, guttural and comfortable. The bamboo screen in the doorway lifted and Baba came out for his tea. He did not look as if he could be held responsible for any degree of noise whatsoever. Coming out into the veranda, he blinked as if the sun surprised him. He was in his pyjamas - an old pair with frayed ends, over which he wore a grey bush-shirt worn and washed almost to translucency. His face, too, was blanched, like a plant grown underground or in deepest shade, and his hair was quite white, giving his young, fine face a ghostly look that made people start whenever he appeared. But no one on the veranda started. Instead, they turned on him their most careful smiles, trying to make their smiles express feelings that were comforting, reassuring, not startling. Then Him began to bustle. Now she called out for more milk and a freshly refilled jug appeared from the pantry, full to the brim, before Bakul's widened eyes. Baba's cup was filled not with tea at all but with milk that had seemed so short a moment ago. Then, to top it, a spoonful of sugar was poured in as well and all stirred up with a tremendous clatter and handed, generously slopping, to Baba who took it without any expression of distaste or embarrassment and sat down on his little cane stool to sip it. Even the cat was transfixed by the spectacle and sat back on her haunches, staring at him with eyes that were circles of sharp green glass. Only Him seemed to notice nothing odd. Nor did she seem to 8 think it necessary to speak to or be spoken to by Baba. She said, 'Look at her. You'd think I had given her enough but no, if we take any ourselves, she feels it's come out of her share.' After a minute Tara realised she was speaking of the cat. Tara had lost the childhood habit of including animals in the family once she had married and begun the perpetual travels and moves that precluded the keeping of pets. It was with a small effort that she tore her eyes away from her brother and regarded the reproachful cat. 'She's too fat,' she said, thinking pet-owners generally liked such remarks. It was not a truthful one: the cat was thin as a string. Him put out her toe and scratched the creature under her ear but the cat turned angrily away, refusing such advances, and kept her eyes riveted on Baba till he had sipped the last drop of milk and put the cup back on the saucer with an unmistakably empty ring. Then she dropped sulkily onto the tiles and lay there noisily tearing at her fur with a sandpapered tongue of an angry red. While the two women sat upright and tense and seethed with unspoken speech, the two men seemed dehydrated, emptied out, with not a word to say about anything. Only the pigeons cooed on and on, too lazy even to open their beaks, content to mutter in their throats rather than sing or call. The dog, stretched out at Bim's feet, writhed and coiled, now catching his tail between his teeth, now scrabbling with his paws, then bit at fleas and chewed his hair, weaving a thick mat of sound together with the cat who was busy with herself. Bakul could bear it no longer. When his expression had grown so thin and so sour that it was about to split, he said, in a voice meant to be sonorous, 'Our first morning in Delhi.' To Bim's wonder and astonishment, Tara smiled at this radiantly as though he had made a profound remark on which he was to be congratulated. He gave her a small, confidential smile in return. 'What shall we do with it?' Him suddenly scratched her head as if the dog had started up something there. 'I don't know about you,' she said, 'but I have some of my students coming over this morning.' 'Students? But Him, I thought your summer vacation had begun.' 'Yes, yes, but I wanted to give them some reading lists so they don't waste all their time walking up and down the Mall in Simla or going to the pictures. Then they reminded me I had missed a tutorial and had to see some of their papers. You see, it isn't just I who make them work - they make me work, too. So I asked them to come down here - they love to come, I don't know why. I'll go and get ready - I'm late. And you? You two? What will you do?' Tara gazed at her husband for answer till he finally lowered his eyes by careful inches from the plaster moulding under the ceiling where the pigeons strutted and squatted and puffed themselves, and said 'Perhaps I could ask my uncle to send us a car. Then we could go and call on some of my relations in New Delhi. They will be expecting us.' Til get ready,' said Tara, instantly getting to her feet as if in relief. Him, who remembered her as a languid little girl, listless, a dawdler, noted her quick movements, her efficient briskness, with some surprise, but said nothing. Instead, she turned to Baba and drawled, slowly, 'And Baba,' as she bent forward and started stacking the cups onto the wooden tray. The others got up and stretched and walked about the veranda except for Baba who sat calmly with his long white hands dangling loosely on either side of him. When Him said 'Baba' again, he smiled gently at the floor. 'Baba,' she said again in a very low voice so that Bakul, standing on the steps and scrutinizing the bougainvilleas at the pillars, would not hear her, 'do you think you might go to the office today?' Tara, who was at the door at the end of the veranda, about to lift the bamboo curtain and go in, paused. Somehow she had heard. Even in her rush to get dressed and be ready for anything her husband might suggest, she paused in shock to find that Him still made attempts to send Baba to the office. Considering their futility, she thought they must have been given up long ago. She could not help stopping and turning round to see Him piling up the tea tray and Baba seated on his small child's stool, smiling, his hands helplessly dangling, the busy dog licking, scratching, while the morning took another stride forward and stood with its feet planted on the tiled floor. 'Won't you go today, Baba?' Him asked softly, not looking'at him, looking at the tea cups. 'Do go. You could catch a bus. It'll make a change. We'll all be busy. Then come home to lunch. Or stay if you find it interesting.' Baba smiled at the bare tiles. His hands swung as if loose in their sockets, as if in a light breeze. But there was no breeze: the heat dropped out of the sky and stood before them like a sheet of foil. Then Him got up and lifted the tray and went barefoot down the other end of the veranda to the pantry. Tara could hear her talking to the cook in her normal speaking voice. She turned and went into the room herself, unable to face the sight of Baba alone and hopeless on the veranda. But Baba did not stay either. He must have gone back to his room, too, for in another minute or two she heard that ominous roar pushing its way through the tunnel and emerging as the maudlin clamour of 'Lilli Marlene'. 10 'Now this is precisely what I told you,' Bakul said, bustling into the bedroom after making his phone call. 'I pointed out to you how much more convenient it would be to stay with my uncle and aunt, right in the centre of town, on Aurangzeb Road, how it would save us all the trouble of finding a car to travel up and down in . . .' Tara, who was bending over the bed, laying out his clothes, straightened and said in a strained voice 'But I had not meant to go anywhere. I only wanted to stay at home.' He flicked his silk dressing gown open and said impatiently 'You know you can't do that when there's so much to do -- relations to visit, colleagues to look up, all that shopping you had planned to do-' Til wait till the girls come, I'll go shopping with them,' said Tara with an unaccustomed stubbornness. She held up a cluster of ties and waited, a bit sullenly, for him to choose one. He put out his hand and picked one of broadly striped raw silk and said 'You surely don't mean that. You can't just sit about with your brother and sister all day, doing nothing.' 'But it's what I want - just to be at home again, with them. And of course there are the neighbours - I'll see them. But I don't want to go anywhere today, and I don't want to go to New Delhi at all.' 'Of course you will come,' Bakul said quite sharply, going towards the bathroom with an immense towel he had picked up. 'There's no question about that.' When the bathroom door had shut, Tara went out onto the veranda again. The veranda ran all around the house and every room opened out onto it. This room had been hers and Bim's when they were girls. It opened onto the dense grove of guava trees that separated the back of the house from the row of servants' quarters. Bright morning sounds of activity came from them - a water tap running, a child crying, a cock crowing, a bicycle bell ringing - but the house was separated from them by the thick screen of low, dusty guava trees in which invisible parrots screamed and quarrelled over the fruit. Now and then one fell to the ground with a soft thud. Tara could see some lying in the dust with chunks bitten out by the parrots. If she had been younger - no, if she had been sure Bakul would not look out and see - she would have run down the veranda steps and searched for one that was whole. Her mouth tingled with longing to bite into that hard astringent flesh under the green rind. She wondered if her girls would do it when they arrived to spend their holidays here. No, they would not. Much travelled, brought up in embassies, fluent in several languages, they were far too sophisticated for such rustic pleasures, she knew, and felt guilty 11 over her own lack of that desirable quality. She had fooled Bakul into believing that she had acquired it, that he had shown her how to acquire it. But it was all just dust thrown into his eyes, dust. Further up the veranda was Baba's room and from behind the light bamboo curtain that hung in the doorway came the guttural rattling of 'Don't Fence Me In'. For a while Tara leant her head against a pillar, listening. It was not unfamiliar, yet it disturbed. A part of her was sinking languidly down into the passive pleasure of having returned to the familiar - like a pebble, she had been picked up and hurled back into the pond, and sunk down through the layer of green scum, through the secret cool depths to the soft rich mud at the bottom, sending up a line of bubbles of relief and joy. A part of her twitched, stirred like a fin in resentment: why was the pond so muddy and stagnant? Why had nothing changed? She had changed - why did it not keep up with her? Why did Him allow nothing to change? Surely Baba ought to begin to grow and develop at last, to unfold and reach out and stretch. But whenever she saw them, at intervals of three or five years, all was exactly as before. Drawing away from the pillar, she moved towards his room, propelled by her disturbance, by her resentment at this petrified state in which her family lived. Bakul was right to criticise it, disapprove of it. Yes, he was right, she told herself and, lifting the dusty bamboo curtain, slipped into Baba's room. He was sitting on his bed, a string cot spread with a cotton rug and an old sheet, that stood in the centre of the room under the slowly revolving electric fan. He was crouched low, listening raptly to the last of 'Don't Fence Me In' unwinding itself on the old HMV gramophone on a small bamboo table beside his bed. The records, not so very many of them - there must have been breakages after all were stacked on a shelf beneath the table in their tattered yellow sleeves. The string cot, the table, the HMV gramophone, a canvas chair and a wardrobe - nothing else. It was a large room and looked bare. Once it had been Aunt Mira's room, and crowded. Baba looked up at her. Tara stood staring, made speechless by his fine, serene face, the shapeliness of his long fingers, his hands that either moved lightly as if in a breeze or rested calmly at his sides. He was an angel, she told herself, catching her lip between her teeth - an angel descended to earth, unsoiled by any of it. But then why did he spend his days and years listening to this appalling noise? Her daughters could not live through a day without their record-player either; they, too, kept it heaped with records that slipped down onto the turntable in a regular sequence, keeping 12 i supplied with an almost uninterrupted flow of music to which worked and danced with equal ease. But, she wanted to to him, theirs was an ever-growing, ever-changing collec their interest in it was lively, fresh, developing all the time. 1, she knew they would outgrow their need of it. Already Maya [friends who took her to concerts from which she returned with a of uplifting pleasure spread across her face and talked of aing to play the flute. Soon it would be behind her - this need an elemental, primitive rhythm automatically supplied. But i would never leave his behind, he would never move on. j pounds JHer anguish and impatience made her say, very quickly and Uy, as the record ground to a halt and before Baba could turn it r, 'Are you going out this morning, Baba? We've sent for a car - jjtita we give you a lift?' Baba lifted the smoothly curving metal arm off the record and sat ^tttth his hand resting on it, protectively. It was clear he would have I liked to turn over the record but he hesitated, politely, his eyes cast udewn, flickering slightly as if with fear or guilt. Tara too began to squirm with guilt at having caused him this j" panic. 'Are you, Baba?' , He glanced at her very quickly, with a kind of pleading, and then looked away and shook his head very slightly. This made her cry out 'But don't you go to the office in the.mornings?' He kept his head lowered, smiling slightly, sadly. 'Never?' The room rang with her voice, then with silence. In the shaded darkness, silence had the quality of a looming dragon. It seemed to roar and the roar to reverberate, to dominate. To escape from it would require a burst of recklessness, even cruelty. Was it to keep it at bay that Baba played those records so endlessly, so obsessively? But it was not right. She herself had been taught, by her husband and by her daughters, to answer questions, to make statements, to be frank and to be precise. They would have none of these silences and shadows. Here things were left unsaid and undone. It was what they called 'Old Delhi decadence.' She knotted her fingers together in an effort to break it. 'Do you think you will go to the office today?' she persisted, beads of perspiration welling out of her upper lip. Now Baba took his hand off the gramophone arm, relinquishing it sadly, and his hands hung loosely at his sides, as helplessly as a dead man's. His head, too, sank lower and lower. Tara was furious with herself for causing him this shame, this distress. She hated her probing, her questioning with which she was 13 punishing him. Punishing him for what? For his birth - and for that he was not responsible. Yet it was wrong to leave things as they were - she knew Bakul would say so, and her girls, too. It was all quite lunatic. Yet there was no alternative, no solution. Surely they would see there was none. Sighing, she said in a tone of defeat Til askBim.' She had said the right thing at last. Quite inadvertently, even out of cowardice. It made Baba raise his head and smile, sweetly and gently as he used to do. He even nodded, faintly, in agreement. Yes, Him, he seemed to say, Him will decide. Him can, Him will. Go to Him. Tara could not help smiling back at his look of relief, his happy dependence. She turned to leave the room and heard him lift the record and turn it over. As she escaped down the veranda she heard Bing Crosby's voice bloating luxuriantly out into 'Ah-h'm dream-in'of a wha-ite Christmas . . .' But now something had gone wrong. The needle stuck in a groove. 'Dream-in', dream-in', dream-in" hacked the singer, his voice growing more and more officious. Shocked, Baba's long hands moved with speed to release it from the imprisoning groove. Then he found the needle grown so blunt and rusty that, as he peered at it from every angle and turned it over and over with a melancholy finger, he accepted it would do no longer. He sighed and dropped it into the little compartment that slid out of the green leather side of the gramophone and the sight of all the other obsolete needles that lay in that concealed grave seemed to place a weight on his heart. He felt defeated and infinitely depressed. Too depressed to open the little one-inch square tin with the picture of the dog on it, and pick out a clean needle to insert in the metal head. It remained empty, toothless. The music had come to a halt. Out in the garden a koel called its wild, brazen call. It was not answered so it repeated the call, more demandingly. For a while Baba paced about the room, his head hanging so low that one would have thought it unnatural, physically impossible. Now and then he lifted his hands to his head and ran his long bony fingers nervously through his white hair so that it was grooved and furrowed like the lines of an aged face. The silence of the room, usually so loud with the rollicking music of the '40s, seemed to admit those other sounds that did not soothe or protect him but, on the contrary, startled him and drove him into a panic - the koel calling, calling out in the tall trees, a child crying in the servants' quarters, a bicycle dashing past, its bell jangling. Baba began to pace up and down faster and faster as if he were running away from it. Then, when he could bear it no longer, he went to the cupboard 14 and pulled open its door, searched frantically for clothes to wear, pulled out whatever seemed to him appropriate, and began to dress hurriedly, dropping his pyjamas onto the floor, flinging others onto the sagging canvas chair by the bed, hurriedly buttoning and lacing and pulling on and off till he felt sufficiently clothed. Without a glance into the mirror on the cupboard door or an attempt to tidy the room, he fled from it. Tara, still sitting on the steps with an arm around the veranda pillar, waiting for Bakul to emerge so that she could go in and dress, saw a pale elongated shape lurching and blundering down the veranda and onto the drive, bent almost double as if in pain or in fear - or perhaps because of the sun beating down with white-hot blows. She stood up in fright and it took her a minute to realize it was Baba. By then he was already at the gate and had turned out of it into the road. Tara hurried down the steps onto the drive, shading her eyes, her mouth open to call him, but she stopped herself. How old was Baba now? If he wanted to go out, ought he at his age to be called back and asked to explain? If she had, Baba would have been grateful. If anything, anyone had stopped him now, he would have collapsed with relief and come crawling home like a thirsty dog to its water bowl. Once, when he had ventured out, a bicycle had dashed against him as he stood hesitating at the edge of the road, wondering whether to cross. The bicyclist had fallen and cursed him, his voice rising to a shrill peak and then breaking on Baba's head like eggs, or slivers of glass. Another time, he had walked as far as the bus stop but when the bus had arrived there was such a scuffle between those trying to get off and those trying to get on that people were pushed and bumped and shoved and when one man was somehow expelled from the knotted mob, Baba saw his sleeve torn off his shirt, hanging limply as if he had no arm, were an amputee. Baba thought of the man's face, of the ruined shirt. He heard all those shouts again, the shouts that had been flung at his head, knocking into him till he was giddy with blows. He was small. He was standing on the dunes. There was nothing here but the silver sand and the grey river and the white sky. But out of that lunar stillness a man loomed up,.military in a khaki uniform and towering scarlet turban, and roughly pushed past him shouting 'Hato! HatoT to make way for a white horse that plunged up out of the dunes and galloped past Baba, crouching on his knees in the sand, the terror of the horse hooves beating through his head, the sand flying back into his face and the voice still commanding 'Hato! Hato!' 15 His knees trembled in anticipation, knowing he would be forced down, or flung down if he continued down the road. But it was as if Tara had given him a push down a steep incline. She had said he was to go. Him had said he was to go. Him and Tara, both of them, wanted him to go. He was going. His feet in their unfastened sandals scuffed through the dust of Bela Road. Sharp gravel kept slipping into them, prodding him. His arms swung widly, propelling him along. His head bobbed, his white hair flopped. His eyes strained and saw black instead of white. Was he going to faint? Would he fall? Should he stop? Could he? Or would they drive him on? 'Hato! Hatof Then he heard the crash he knew would come. Instantly he flinched and flung up his arm to protect his face. But it was not he who had crashed. It was a cart carrying a load of planks that had tipped forwards as the horse that drew it fell first onto its knees, then onto its nose and lay squirming in the middle of the road. Baba shrank back, against the wall, and held his arm before his eyes but still he saw what happened: the driver, a dark man with a red rag tied about his head, leapt down from the mound of planks and raised his arm, and a switch or a whip, and brought it down with all his force on the horse's back. The horse gave a neighing scream, reared up its head with the wet, wringing mane streaming from it, and then stretched out on the stones, a shiver running up and down its legs so that it twitched and shook. Again the man raised the whip, again it came down on the horse's back, neck, head, legs again and again. Baba heard screams but it was the man who screamed as he whipped and slashed and beat, screamed abuse at the animal who did not move but seemed to sink lower and lower into the dust. 'Swine! Son of a swine!' the man panted, red eyes straining out of the dark face. Suar! Sola! Suar ka bachcha!' All the time his arm rose up in the air and came down, cutting and slashing the horse's flesh till black stuff oozed onto the white dust and ran and spread, black and thick, out of the horse. Baba raised both his arms, wrapped them about his head, his ears and eyes, tightly, and, blind, turned and stumbled, almost fell but ran on back up the road to the house, to the gate. His shoulder hit the white gate-post so that he lurched and fell to his knees, then he rose and stumbled, his arms still doubled over his eyes so that he should not see and about his ears so that he should not hear. Tara saw him as he came climbing up the steps on his knees and ran forwards to help him to his feet. Tugging at his arms to drag them away from his face, she cried 'Are you hurt? Baba, Baba, say - are you hurt? Has someone hurt you?' Pulling his arms away, she un16 covered his face and saw his eyes rolling in their sockets like a wild horse's, his lips drawn back from his teeth as if he were racing, and the blue-black shadows that always lay under his eyes spreading over his face like a bruise, wet with his tears. Then she stopped demanding that he should speak, and helped him to his room, onto his bed, rushed out and down the veranda in search of Him, in search of water. There was no one on the veranda or in the kitchen. The cook had gone out to market. She tilted the earthen water jar to fill a tumbler and hurried back with it, her legs cutting into her nightgown and the water spilling in splashes onto the tiles as she hurried, thinking of Baba's face. She lifted his head to help him drink but most of it ran down his chin into his shirt. When she lowered his head, he shrank into a heap, shivering, and she stayed a while, smoothing his hair and patting his cheek till she thought he was quieter, nearly asleep, then went to find Him. But Bakul stepped out of their room, his tie in one hand and his Shoes in another, to ask 'Aren't you getting ready, Tara? We'll be late. The car will be here any minute and you know Uncle is very punctual. We mustn't keep him waiting.' He went back to finish dressing without having seen Tara's face or anything there to stop him. He noticed nothing - a missing shoe-horn and frayed laces having presented him with a problem meanwhile - till she came in, her Shoulders sloping, her hair hanging, and sat down on the foot of the bed instead of going in to dress. Then he spoke more sharply. 'Why aren't you getting ready?' 'I don't think I'll come after all,' she mumbled. She always mumbled when she was afraid, as if she hoped not to be heard. She expected him to explode of course. But even for Bakul it was too hot, the atmosphere of the old house too turgid and heavy to push or manipulate. Bending down to tie two perfect bows, he merely sighed 'So, I only have to bring you home for a day, Tara, and you go back to being the hopeless person you were before I married you.' 'Yes,' she muttered, 'hopeless.' Like Baba's, her face looked bruised. 'And you won't let me help you. I thought I had taught you a different life, a different way of living. Taught you to execute your will. Be strong. Face challenges. Be decisive. But no, the day you enter your old home, you are as weak-willed and helpless and defeatist as ever.' He stood up and looked down to see if his shoes were bright enough to reflect his face. Nothing less would do. Yes, yes. He shrugged his shoulders inside his shirtsleeves. 'What should I do with you? I ought to take you away immediately. Let us go and 17 stay with my uncle in New Delhi.' 'No.' She shook her head. 'Leave me here.' 'You're not happy here,' he said, and the unexpectedness of these words made her look up at him, questioning. 'Look at your face - so sad, so worried.' He even came close to her and touched her cheek, very lightly, as if he could hardly bear the unpleasant contact but forced himself to do it out of compassion. 'If only you would come with me, I would show you how to be happy. How to be active and busy - and then you would be happy. If you came.' But she shook her head. She felt she had followed him enough, it had been such an enormous strain, always pushing against her grain, it had drained her of too much strength, now she could only collapse, inevitably collapse. Bakul had married her when she was eighteen. He knew her. He left her, saying "Then I'll tell Uncle you are busy with your own family and will come another time,' and went out to wait for the car. He passed Him as he went through the drawing room. Him was holding court there - seated on the divan with her legs drawn up under her - like Tara, she had not dressed yet and was still in her nightdress - and on the carpet below sat the students, a brightly coloured bunch of young girls in jeans and in salwar-kameez, laughing and eyeing each other and him as he went through. He raised his eyebrows at Him and gave her a significant look as if to say 'This your history lesson?' Him nodded and laughed and wriggled her toes and waggled her pencil, completely at ease and without the least sense of guilt. 'No, no, you won't,' he heard her say as he went out onto the veranda, 'you won't get me started on the empress Razia - nor on the empress Nur Jehan. I refuse. We must be serious. We are going to discuss the war between Shivaji and Aurangzeb - no empresses.' The girls groaned exaggeratedly. 'Please, miss,' he heard them beg as he sat down on a creaking cane chair to wait, 'please let's talk about something interesting, miss. You will enjoy it too, miss.' 'Enjoy? You rascals, I haven't asked you here to enjoy yourselves. Come on, Keya, please begin - I'm listening -' and then there was some semblance of order and of a tutorial going on that Bakul could almost recognise and approve. He wondered, placing one leg over the other reflectively, as he had sometimes wondered when he had first started coming to this house, as a young man who had just entered the foreign service and was in a position to look around for a suitable wife, if Him were not, for all her plainness and brusqueness, the superior of the two sisters, if she had not those qualities - decision, firmness, resolve - that he admired and tried to instil in his wife who lacked them so deplorably. If only Him had 18 not that rather coarse laugh and way of sitting with her legs up ... now Tara would never. . . and if her nose were not so large unlike Tara's which was small. . . and Tara was gentler, more tender . . . He sighed a bit, shifting his bottom on the broken rattan seat of the chair. Things were as they were and had to be made the most of, he always said. At least in this country, he sighed, and just then his uncle's car appeared at the gate, slowly turned in, its windshield flooded by the sun, and came up the drive to park beneath the bougainvilleas. Him did get Tara to smile before the morning was over, however. Tara was leaning against the veranda pillar, watching the parrots quarrel in the guava trees, listening for a sound from Baba's room, hoping to hear a record played, when Him came out with her band of girls and suddenly shouted 'Ice-cream! Caryhom Ice-creamwallah!' and, before Tara's startled eyes, a bicycle with a small painted van attached to it that had been rolling down the empty, blazing road, stopped and turned in at the gate with its Sikh driver beaming broadly at the laughing girls and their professor. f''. Seeing Tara, Him called out 'Look at these babies, Tara. When they hear the Caryhom ice-cream man going by they just stop paying any attention to my lecture. I can't do anything till I've handed each of them a cone. I suppose strawberry cones are what ? you all want, you babies? Strawberry cones for all of them, Sardarji,' she ordered and stood laughing on the steps as she watched him fill the cones with large helpings of pink ice-cream and hand them to the girls who were giggling, Tara realised, as much at their professor as at this childish diversion. Him noticed nothing. Swinging her arms about, she saw to it that each girl got her cone and then had one of them, a pretty child dressed in salwar-kameez patterned with pink and green parrots, 'Carry a dripping cone down the veranda to Tara. Tara,' she called, 'that's for you. Sardar-ji made it specially for you,' she laughed, smiling at the ice-cream man who had a slightly embarrassed look, Tara thought. Embarrassed herself, she took the slopping cone from the girl and licked it to please Him, her tongue recoiling at the i synthetic sweetness. 'Oh Him, if my daughters were to see me now or Bakul,' she murmured, as Him walked past holding like a cornucopia a specially heaped and specially pink ice-cream cone into Baba's room. Tara stopped licking, stared, trying to probe the bamboo screen into the room where there had been silence and shadows all morning. She heard Bim's voice, loud and gay, and although Baba made no audible answer, she saw Him come out 'without the cone and knew Baba was eating it, perhaps quite 19 happily. There was something magnetic about the icy pink sweetness, the synthetic sweet pinkness, she reflected, licking. Now Him let out a shout and began to scold. One of the girls had tipped the remains of her cone onto the veranda steps for the dog to lick - she had seen him standing by, watching, his tongue lolling and leaking. 'You silly, don't you know dogs shouldn't eat anything sweet? His hair will fall out - he'll get worms - it'll be your fault he'll be spoilt - he won't eat his bread and soup now.' 'Let him enjoy himself, miss,' said the girl, smirking at the others because they all knew perfectly well how pleased Him was to see them spoil her dog. Tara narrowed her eyes at the spectacle of Him scolding her students and smiling with pleasure because of the attention they had paid her dog, who had now licked up all the ice-cream and was continuing to lick and lick the floor as if it might have absorbed some of the delicious stuff. Remembering how Him used to scold her for not disciplining her little daughters and making them eat up everything on their plates or go to bed on time, she shook her head slightly. But the ice-cream did have, she had to admit, a beneficial effect all round: in a little while, as the students began to leave the house, prettily covering their heads against the sun with coloured veils and squealing as the heat of the earth burnt through their slippers, the gramophone in Baba's room stirred and rumbled into life again. Tara was grateful for it. She wished Bakul could see them now - her family. When Bakul did come, late in the afternoon, almost comatose from the heat and the heavy lunch he had eaten, to fall onto his bed and sleep, this passage of lightness was over, or overcome again by the spirit of the house. Tara, upright in a chair, tried first to write a letter to her daughters, then decided it was too soon, she would wait till she had more to say to them, and put the letter away in her case and tried to read instead, a book from the drawing room bookshelf that had been there even when she was a child - Jawaharlal Nehru's Letters To A Daughter in a green cloth binding - and sitting on the stuffed chair, spongy and clammy to touch, she felt that heavy spirit come and weigh down her eyelids and the back of her neck so that she was pinned down under it, motionless. It seemed to her that the dullness and the boredom of her childhood, her youth, were stored here in the room under the worn dusty red rugs, in the bloated brassware, amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases, behind the yellowed photographs in the oval frames - everything, everything that she had so hated as a child and that 20 was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of some dull, uninviting provincial museum. She stared sullenly, without lifting her head, at a water-colour above the plaster mantelpiece - red cannas painted with some watery fluid that had trickled weakly down the brown paper: who could have painted that? Why was it hung here? How could Him bear to look at it for all of her life? Had she developed no taste of her own, no likings that made her wish to sweep the old house of all its rubbish and place in it things of her own choice? Tara thought with longing of the neat, china-white flat in Washington, its cleanliness, its floweriness. She wished she had the will to get to her feet and escape from this room - where to? Even the veranda would be better, with the pigeons cooing soothingly, expressing their individual genius for combining complaint and contentment in one tone, ^. and the spiky bougainvilleas scraping the outer walls and scattering -their papery magenta flowers in the hot, sulphur-yellow wind. She actually got up and went to the door and lifted the bamboo screen 'that hung there, but the blank white glare of afternoon slanted in and slashed at her with its flashing knives so that she quickly dropped the screen. It creaked into place, releasing a noseful of : dust. On the wall a gecko clucked loudly and disapprovingly at this ontoward disturbance. She went back to the chair. If she could sleep, she might forget where she was, but it was not possible to ^ ep with the sweat trickling down one's face in rivulets and the P&eat enclosing one in its ring of fire. gr Bakul said one could rise above the climate, that one could ? Ignore it if one filled one's mind with so many thoughts and acti Ifvities that there was no room for it. 'Look at me,' he had said the iter that they froze in Moscow. 'I don't let the cold immobilize |*aae, do I?' and she and the girls, swaddled in all their warm clothing |