The Artist of Disappearance (10 page)

Sometimes, on the bus going home from work, I look at the others seated beside me and across from me. Or, rather, since I don't like staring at people's faces, I look down at their feet, shod in slippers or sandals or dusty shoes of cracked leather, and the packages they are holding on their knees, and I think: that is how I must look to them—a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about. Whyever did I imagine I was different, and could live differently from them? We are all in this together, this world of loss and defeat. All of us, every one of us, has had a moment when a window opened, when we caught a glimpse of the open, sunlit world beyond, but all of us, on this bus, have had that window close and remain closed.

It is not that I did not try to open that window again. I gave up, of course, the idea of translating another book, though it meant giving up the language I had acquired with such ardour. In the course of those sleepless nights I spent, a thought did come to me—that I might write a book of my own. It would be an original work, it would draw from no one else and no one else's work. I did feel I owed Suvarna Devi a debt for teaching me, but now it was for me to prove I could establish my own worth as a writer.

For a while I felt excited by that idea—as if the window had opened again, a little, and some light was slanting through it. I had had an idea that bifurcated into more ideas, and I followed these paths with a stirring of hope and delight. The one that drew me more powerfully than any other was the story of my parents' marriage. Their short-lived marriage and its sad end. By writing their stories, I could bring in all the different aspects of my life—the ones I inherited from my mother, her language and her background, and the ones I inherited from my father. I felt the story had promise and even sat down with a large new notebook I purchased from the store across the street, propped my feet up and started scribbling, trying out these themes.

I worked hard at it but whatever pleasure or hope I had had at the outset dissipated. There were scenes I could write in English but other scenes called out to be written in my mother's language. I was torn between the two and could settle on neither. I wrote scraps in one, then scraps in the other, but tore them all up and threw them away: who would read such a jumble?

I was sitting in the dark one evening, listening to the crows on the telephone lines and the lopped tree outside as they quarrelled over their roosting places for the night, hoarse with combat, when it occurred to me that only Suvarna Devi could write this story. Only she had the voice for it; I did not. I had been writing under her influence, with her voice; it was not mine. In adopting hers, I had lost mine.

 

Then, browsing through a bookshop as I often did on a Saturday morning, I looked up from a display of discounted books spread out on a table and saw a young man I recognised at once as Suvarna Devi's nephew. He had his little son with him, now a toddler, and was pointing out to him some colourful children's books.

For a second I felt panic and wondered if I could slip away unseen. But then I decided that would be cowardly, and I went round the table to face him.

I wondered if he would recognise me but it was clear that he did. I greeted him and asked after his wife and daughter, and then his aunt. He seemed perfectly pleased to see me again and told me they were all well. After that I hesitated, not sure whether to refer to her books, her writing. Perhaps he hesitated too, slightly, but then, smiling, informed me that not only was she well but 'working as hard as ever. Now she has started a school—a primary school for tribal children. She was always so interested in their education. She is working full-time with them and asked me to select some books to send them.' He beamed with pride, then became distracted by his son who had grabbed at some books and was pulling them off a shelf with delight.

So I said goodbye, asking him to convey my regards to his aunt, and in the hubbub of the shopkeeper coming to reprimand the child and the young father's flustered apologies, I left.

N
OBODY CLIMBED THAT
hill any more. Not unless they wished to retreat. It was a good place for that: a retreat. Just the burnt-out remains of the house that had stood there. Only a few walls still standing, a makeshift roof of zinc sheets in place of the turrets and towers that had been there, the rest just blackened stones, ashes, rubble, charred beams, weeds crowding into gaping windows. An occasional newt slipping silently by.

But Ravi was there, sitting on the stone steps that led up to the veranda. It was what he had always done in the evenings when he returned to the house, to listen for the sound of a cowbell ringing faintly and intermittently downhill, then more clearly and metallically as the beast drew closer. Mingled with that tolling was the noise of goat hooves clicking smartly on the stony path, and the goats' small eager bleats as they anticipated the food that would be waiting for them. They were the first to arrive at the homestead below, hunger quickening their pace and dancing approach. Then the cow, eager too but with more body to trundle along a path too narrow for her bony breadth. She had to be encouraged by the flick of a switch that her owner wielded with one hand while with the other he steadied on top of his head the bundle of firewood he had gathered.

And when these shapes appeared in the clearing below, the dogs that had been slumbering the afternoon away scrambled to their feet with an air of importance to show they were alert to their duties, and let out sharp yelps of welcome to announce their arrival to the family that lived there.

The children began to chase the chickens into their pen for the night. The mother called for firewood to be brought in. Smoke unwound in a spool from the gaps in the thatch of the roof. The goats were directed into an enclosure, walled with thorns, by showing them a tin basin in which bits of broken bread had been soaked in warm water, and the cow was led into her shed, with its comfortable smells of dung and straw, to be milked.

Then there was a lull as the activity shifted indoors where a fire of sticks crackled, a pot boiled and the aroma of food was conjured. Around it the children gathered on their haunches, tin plates before them, waiting. The father lowered himself onto a stool, and the mother was finally ready to ladle out the meal she had prepared.

But the older of the two boys remained standing by the door, knowing his role in the day's duties. He took the enamel dish from his mother's hands: she had filled it with rice and dhal into which she threw a handful of green chillies. She gave him a tin lid to cover the plate and by a slight shift of her chin—which bore a small blue tattoo—she indicated he was to take it, take it up.

The boy nodded, then set off up the hill: he knew he should be quick so as not to let the food cool and congeal. Besides, he was eager to return for his share. So he climbed the hill as quickly as he could without tripping or spilling.

When the boy appeared with the covered dish, instead of merely nodding to indicate he should put it down, Ravi startled him by speaking instead. His voice was hoarse, he used it so seldom, and it was clear it cost him great effort to speak.

His voice rasping, he asked, 'Have they gone?'

The boy nodded, yes.

'You are sure?'

Yes, the boy nodded again.

Then Ravi took the dish from him, and even mumbled thanks, adding, 'Tell your father I will not be coming down tonight.'

Yes, the boy nodded, he would. Duty done, he turned and went flying downhill to his own meal, and gave three sharp whistles as he leapt from one stone to the next, to mark his freedom. The dogs came running up to meet him with their own eager, hungry barks.

Up at the burnt house, Ravi finished his meal and set the plate down on the step beside him, then took a biri out of his shirt pocket, lit it and leaned back against one of the veranda posts which was still standing, and waited for the sounds of the household below to subside into silence and the light to withdraw from the valley and climb the hills till only their peaks were lit by the sun. Then they too faded into dusk but he continued to sit there, listening for the last calls of a lone cuckoo to die out and the rustle of the flying squirrel that lived under the eaves as it crept out and launched itself into the evening air where the bats were now swooping and plunging after insects.

He stubbed out the biri, then drew a matchbox out of his shirt pocket and began to play with it, thoughtfully; he might have been a monk with his prayer beads. When he looked up from it he found the woolly dusk had knitted him into the evening scene, inextricably. Silence had fallen on the homestead below and the light of its small fire had sunk and gone out.

He got to his feet and made his way to the bushes encroaching on the house. He lowered his trousers and there was a sound of urine trickling on the stones at his feet. Then he turned and retraced his steps. Picking up the empty dish, he carried it across the veranda to the one area that might still be called a room: it had walls, it was covered, and it held the string cot that Bhola had fetched for him from the hut below, and the few remnants salvaged from the fire, lined up against the blackened wall. Ravi fumbled his way to a table, scarred by the knives and choppers of its kitchen past, on which a kerosene lantern stood. He lit it—there, another match gone—and surveyed the sorry items: an overstuffed chair on which he never sat, a hatstand which held neither a hat nor a walking stick—and saw they were all still there, mute and untouched, as if waiting for the day when they would be chopped up for firewood.

All else that the house had once contained—and there had been an abundance—was gone, just like the leather suitcases that used to be lined up in the hall—the hall!—waiting to be carried out, past the grandfather clock and the portraits of his ancestors, tinted photographs that leaned away from the wall to look down as his father unhooked his favourite walking stick from the hatstand and the astrakhan cap that he liked to wear when travelling, then gave the soft, polite whistle with which he might summon his wife who was detained in her dressing room—her dressing room!—by some last-minute adjustment to her toilet.

While they waited for her to emerge, the father turned to look at the boy standing half hidden by the door to his room, one leg locked around the other, and gave him a playful wink as he set the astrakhan cap jauntily on his head. 'Like it? I bought it in Berlin, I'll have you know, on the Kurfürsten-damm. Can you say that—"Kur-fürst-en-damm"? It had started to snow and I went into this very elegant shop and a most polite gentleman came out from the back to see what I wanted. I pointed it out to him and when I walked out, I had it on my head—just so!' and he gave another wink. 'I'll let you wear it one day—when you can say "Kur-fürst-en-damm",' he offered, and the child knew it was an offer that would evaporate along with all the others and looked away in embarrassment at how glibly his father lied.

Then his mother emerged, smelling powerfully of flowers—rose and lily of the valley—dressed in a sage-green sari with a narrow trim of embroidery. 'We must hurry or we'll miss the train,' she cried as if it were the others who had kept her waiting.

Hari Singh, who was waiting at the foot of the stairs, came up to lift one suitcase onto his head and grasp two others in his hands, then carried these out to the waiting automobile that would take them to the railhead in Dehra Dun. The chauffeur came up to carry down the rest.

At the foot of the stairs the parents remembered to turn round and wave at the boy. 'We're off now!' the father announced. 'Be good!' he added, and the mother called out, 'We'll bring you back—' but forgot what she had promised to bring back and left it up in the air. This didn't matter because whatever expensive or elaborate toy it was, it would only be locked up for safe keeping once unpacked and briefly revealed for his tentative admiration.

He sidled down the stairs to the front door and watched the car proceed slowly down the gravelled drive, then disappear under the oak trees that closed behind it like dark stage curtains. For a while he could hear the engine grinding uphill to the motor road, then gave up trying to follow its progress. If it had been night he would have been able to see the lights as they slowly descended downhill to the valley, but it was still afternoon.

And then he could let out the breath he had been holding inside his chest till it swelled into a balloon, tight against his ribs. A balloon he held pinched between his thumb and forefinger and could now set free. Off it went with a whistle, twisting and turning and wriggling, till it descended, hollowed, into the limp rubber norm of normality.

Not only he but everyone, everything experienced that moment. Hari Singh, recovering, took his cloth cap off his head and was suddenly upright, divested of the posture and demeanour of servanthood. Coming back up the stairs to the veranda, he shouted, 'Come on, come on! Let us go and hunt tigers, you and I!'

Not that they would—Hari Singh was no more given to keeping his promises than were the boy's parents, but just to hear the invitation made, loudly and heartily, changed the air, the atmosphere, and Hari's son Bhola, who had been waiting behind the bushes, catapult in hand, appeared to see if Ravi would now come out to play.