The Artist of Disappearance

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

The Museum of Final Journeys

Translator Translated

The Artist of Disappearance

Acknowledgements

First U.S. edition

Copyright © 2011 by Anita Desai
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Chatto & Windus

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Desai, Anita, date.
The artist of disappearance: three novellas / Anita Desai.—
1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN
978-0-547-57745-6 (hardback)
1. India—Fiction. I.Title.
PR
9499.3.
D
465
A
88 2011
823'.914—dc23
2011028560

Printed in the United States of America
DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my brother
Dinu Mazumdar
I owe him much

One thing alone does not exist—oblivion.

—'Everness', Jorge Luis Borges
translated by Alastair Reid

W
E HAD DRIVEN
for never-ending miles along what seemed to be more a mudbank than a road between fields of virulent green—jute? rice? what was it this benighted hinterland produced? I ought to have known, but my head was pounded into too much of a daze by the heat and the sun and the fatigue to take in what my driver was telling me in answer to my listless questions.

The sun was setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers along the horizon when he turned the jeep into the circular driveway in front of a low, white bungalow. This was the circuit house where I was to stay until I had found a place of my own. As a very junior officer, a mere subdivisional officer in the august government service, it was all I could expect, a temporary place for one of its minor servants. There was nothing around but fields and dirt roads and dust, no lights or signs of a town to be seen. Noting my disappointment and hesitation at the first sight of my new residence—where had we come to?—the driver climbed out first, lifted my bags from the back of the jeep and led the way up the broad steps to a long veranda which had doors fitted with wire screens one could not see through. He clapped his hands and shouted, 'Koi hai?' I had not imagined anyone still used that imperious announcement from the days of the Raj: Anyone there? But perhaps, in this setting, itself a leftover from the empire, not so incongruous at all. Besides, there was no bell and one cannot knock on a screen door.

I didn't think anyone had heard. Certainly no light went on and no footsteps were to be heard, but in a bit someone came around the house from the back where there must have been huts or quarters for servants.

'I've brought the new officer-sahib,' the driver announced officiously (he wore a uniform of sorts, khaki, with lettering in red over the shirt pocket that gave him the right). 'Open a room for him. And switch on some lights, will you?'

'No lights,' the man replied with dignity. He wore no uniform, only some loose clothing, and his feet were bare, but he held his back straight and somehow established his authority. 'Power cut.'

'Get a lantern then,' the driver barked. He clearly enjoyed giving orders.

I didn't, and was relieved when the chowkidar—for clearly he was the watchman for all his lack of a uniform—took over my bags and the driver turned to leave. It was night now, and when I saw the headlights of the jeep sweep over the dark foliage that crowded against the house and lined the driveway, then turn around so that the tail lights could be seen to dwindle and disappear, I felt my heart sinking. I did not want to stay in this desolate place, I wanted to run after the jeep, throw myself in and return to a familiar scene. I was used to city life, to the cacophony of traffic, the clamour and din and discordancy of human voices, the pushing and shoving of humanity, all that was absent here.

While I stood waiting on the veranda for a lamp to be lit so I could be shown to my room, I listened to the dry, grating crackle of palm leaves over the roof, the voices of frogs issuing low warnings from some invisible pond or swamp nearby, and these sounds were even more disquieting than the silence.

A lighted lantern was finally brought out and I followed its ghostly glow in, past large, looming pieces of furniture, to the room the chowkidar opened for me. It released a dank odour of mildew as of a trunk opened after a long stretch of time and a death or two, and I thought this was surely not a chapter of my life; it was only a chapter in one of those novels I used to read in my student days, something by Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle or Wilkie Collins (I had been a great reader then and secretly hoped to become a writer). I remembered, too, the hated voice of the gym master at school shouting 'Stiffen up now, boys, stiffen up!' and I nearly laughed—a bitter laugh.

All the actions that one performs automatically and habitually in the real world, the lighted world—of bathing, dressing, eating a meal—here had to be performed in a state of almost gelid slow motion. I carried the lantern into the bathroom with me—it created grotesquely hovering shadows rather than light, and made the slimy walls and floor glisten dangerously—and made do with a rudimentary bucket of water and a tin mug. To put on a clean set of clothes when I could scarcely make out what I had picked from my suitcase (packed with an idiotic lack of good sense: a tie? when would I ever wear a tie in this pit?) and then to find my way to the dining room and sit down to a meal placed before me that I could scarcely identify—was it lentils, or a mush of vegetables, and was this whitish puddle rice or what?—all were manoeuvres to be carried out with slow deliberation, so much so that they seemed barely worthwhile, just habits belonging to another world and time carried on weakly. The high-pitched whining of mosquitoes sounded all around me and I slapped angrily at their invisible presences.

Then, with a small explosion, the electricity came on and lights flared with an intensity that made me flinch. An abrupt shift took place. The circuit house dining room, the metal bowls and dishes set on the table, the heavy pieces of furniture, the yellow curry stains on the tablecloth all revealed themselves with painful clarity while the whine of mosquitoes faded with disappointment. Now large, winged ants insinuated their way through the wire screens and hurled themselves at the electric bulb suspended over my head; some floated down into my plate where they drowned in the gravy, wings detaching themselves from the small, floundering worms of their bodies.

I pushed back my chair and rose so precipitately, the chowkidar came forward to see what was wrong. I saw no point in telling him that everything was. Instructing him abruptly to bring me tea at six next morning, I returned to my room. It felt like a mercy to turn off the impudent light dangling on a cord over my bed and prepare to throw myself into it for the night.

I had not taken the mosquito net that swaddled the bed into account. First I had to fumble around for an opening to crawl in, then tuck it back to keep out the mosquitoes. At this I failed, and those that found themselves trapped in the netting with me, furiously bit at every exposed surface they could find. What was more, the netting prevented any breath of air reaching me from the sluggishly revolving fan overhead.

Throughout the night voices rang back and forth in my head: would I be able to go through with this training in a remote outpost that was supposed to prepare me for great deeds in public service? Should I quit now before I became known as a failure and a disgrace? Could I appeal to anyone for help, some mentor, or possibly my father, retired now from this very service, his honour and his pride intact like an iron rod he had swallowed?

Across the jungle, or the swamp or whatever it was that surrounded this isolated house, pai dogs in hamlets and homesteads scattered far apart echoed the voices in my head, some questioning and plaintive, others fierce and challenging.

If I had not been 'stiffened up' in school and by my father, I might have shed a tear or two into my flat grey pillow. I came close to it but morning rescued me.

***

I resolved to look for another, more amenable place to live during my posting here, but soon had to admit that the chance of finding such a place was very unlikely. The town, if you could call it that, was not one where people built houses with the intention of selling or renting them for profit; its citizens built for the purpose of housing their families till they fell apart. Many of the houses were embarked on that inexorable process, larger and larger families crowding into smaller and smaller spaces while roofs collapsed and walls crumbled. Families did not move even when forced onto verandas or into outhouses. The whole town appeared a shambles.

It must have had its days of prosperity in the past when the jute that grew thick and strong in the surrounding fields gave rise to a flourishing business, but that was now overtaken by chemical fibres, plastics and polyesters. Their products—the bags, washing lines, buckets and basins that hung from shopfronts—littered the dusty streets where their strident colours soon faded.

Every morning I went to court, a crumbling structure of red brick that stood in a field where cattle grazed and washermen spread their washing, and there I sat at a desk on a slightly raised platform to hear the cases brought before me. These had chiefly to do with disputes over property. You would not have thought the local property was anything to be fought over but the citizens of this district were devoted to litigation with an ardour not evident in any other area of life. A wall that had caved in or two coconut trees that had not borne fruit for as long as anyone could remember, even these aroused the passion of ownership. I began to see it as the one local industry. I took back files with me to read in the evenings on the veranda of the circuit house while the power cuts held off.

In my office in the administrative buildings, I attended to more urgent matters like power and water supplies and their frequent breakdowns, roads, traffic, police—very important that, the police force—communications, security, trade and industry. (The litigators, and especially their lawyers, were always willing to have their cases postponed from one hearing to the next.) My secretary brought in the files to me, tied with red tape—I was amused to see these existed, literally—and ushered in visitors with their requests, demands and complaints. I would order tea for them, but try as I would, I could never have tea, sugar and milk served in separate pots as my mother would have: these would always arrive already mixed in the cups, and for some reason this irritated me greatly and I never ceased to complain about it.

I must have complained in my letters to my mother, too, because she worried that I was not being looked after as I would be at home. She even made efforts to find a bride for me, convinced that a wife was what I needed, a woman who would order my life and make it comfortable and pleasant for me. I was lonely enough not to discourage her, even though the idea of some stranger entering my life in such an intimate fashion did somewhat alarm me. No such thing came to pass, however. When my father discovered she was interviewing the unmarried daughters and nieces of her friends and acquaintances, dangling my position in the Civil Service and my prospects for promotions to high and important posts in the future as incentives, he put a stop to all such machinations: there was to be no marriage till my training was over and confirmation in the service achieved.

In a very short time the routine of my working life became oppressive. When I entered the service it was with the thought that it would be an endless adventure, and each day would bring fresh challenges and demand new solutions. My father and my senior colleagues had all assured me it would be so. They talked of their own adventures—shooting man-eaters that had terrorised the locals and 'lifted' their cattle, confronting dacoits who had been robbing travellers on highways, hunting down 'criminal elements' that dealt in smuggling goods or illicit liquor, and, most threatening of all, instigators of political insurgencies. To me these remained rumours, legends, and I came to suspect that my leg had been pulled.
My
most strenuous activity seemed to be wielding the fly-swatter and mopping my face in the thick damp heat that clung like wet clothing in the most debilitating way.