Читать книгу Saraswati Park - Anjali Joseph - Страница 8

When Ashish ambled towards the grocer’s at ten thirty the next morning the dosa man was already at his stall, under a tree near the roundabout. He was growling at two put-upon young men. One was sweating, and chopping onions; the other scrubbed the enormous griddle on which, at mealtimes, the dosa man would drop a splodge of batter, then, using a knife so large that it resembled a ploughshare, sweep it into a thin circle that sizzled while it crisped. For now, the lackeys sweated and the dosa man stood in the shade, arms folded; between blasts of sarcastic sounding invective he smiled to himself. He was very dark, with the brave moustaches, flourishing sideburns and bouffant hair of a south Indian film star.

Ashish walked back from the grocer’s carrying a packet of semolina wrapped in newsprint. It was hot; the early freshness was gone and he smelled traffic fumes in the air and felt the sun on his face.

He was exhausted. The first time he’d woken it had still been dark; he’d been startled by a moment of dead silence and then by the screaming. It was birds, he realized after the initial horror, shouting about something; perhaps, incredibly, the dawn. Not just the crows, pigeons and seagulls that he was used to, but many more: mynahs, koyals, and another that let out insane, rising whoops then waited for an answering burst of mad laughter.

There was too much space in the room. He’d got up again, gone past the bookshelf, peered out of the window suspiciously and seen no one in the darkness below. This is where I live now, he’d thought, but it had seemed unreal.

When day broke and he saw the first figures in the lane, walking for exercise, he felt better. The crisis seemed to have passed, and he slept in the pale, early light, his body cool and soothed under the fan.

There was another memory of having woken, but this was more vague, like a dream one has when sleeping on a long-distance train: mashed memories of the sulphur-yellow overhead light, the swaying of the bogey, and the abiding sense of transit. When he woke it was with an erection, and in the middle of a confusing dream in which he and another boy, possibly Sunder, chased each other in the colonnade of the college.

From another room, he heard his uncle’s voice, and his aunt laughing.

He ducked into the bathroom, locked the door with relief and set about waking up.

By the time Ashish had bathed, Mohan had already left for work. Lakshmi had discovered that there were ants frolicking in the semolina and sent Ashish out for more; she was going to make him breakfast.

He let himself back into the house now, handed over the semolina, and sat at the table drinking tea and flicking through the newspaper.

His aunt came to talk to him. ‘It’ll be ready in five minutes,’ she said, and her face lit up. She wiped her hands on the cloth she had been holding and sat down near him. He was fond of his aunt; unlike his mother, she had a soft face that seemed to crease easily. She was often vague, unless she was angry, and then she was extremely specific.

‘It’s changed a lot here, you must have noticed,’ she began to tell him sorrowfully. ‘Gopal building, that probably hadn’t been reconstructed the last time you were here.’

‘Oh yes, the white one.’ It was almost opposite, a six-storey tower that stood out next to the small, faded 1960s blocks in the rest of the lane.

Lakshmi made a ‘what can you do’ grimace. ‘These builders are offering a lot of money – they pay you to let them redevelop and take the FSI and then they put up a taller building and sell the extra flats.’

‘Hm.’ Ashish drained his tea and, slightly bored, covertly eyed the newspaper’s city supplement, where the image of a popular film actress on the masthead had been misprinted; the blues and yellows were marginally separated instead of overlaid, and her famous smile, as a result, was scattered.

‘We’ve also had offers,’ Lakshmi went on. ‘But luckily the Gogates, you know, they own three flats, they don’t want to sell. None of us does really, at least not so far. You can’t tell when these people start offering more and more. And then there’ll be construction work going on endlessly – something’s going to start soon, in the empty plot, a builder’s already bought it. I don’t know if they’ll begin now, or wait till after the rains.’

A toasty, pleasant smell came out of the kitchen. She got up and hurried inside; there were sounds of the lifting of a lid, and the scraping of a spoon. She came back with a plate of the hot upma, which smelled delectably of ghee and a roasted red chilli.

‘Here, eat well. You should, since you have so much studying to do,’ she remarked, and, unsure whether the comment was pointed or just another part of her morning conversation, Ashish nodded and picked up the spoon. His aunt put on her spectacles, frowned, and went back to the kitchen. She reappeared with a cup of instant coffee, picked up the city supplement, and moved towards the living room window.

In his room, he half closed the door and wandered around, inspecting the drawers, the bookshelves, the old comics. Later, when lunch smells began to float down the corridor towards him, he panicked. His books waited officiously on the desk, next to a jumble of pens. He sighed and sat down. It was best to be methodical – first of all, he’d draw up a timetable.

Half an hour later, he’d wedged his shoulders and elbows at awkward angles, the better to concentrate, and found a ruler. He was nearly done with plotting out the grid, which accounted for each day in half-hour units from six a.m. to midnight.

‘Ashish!’

He threw out a medium-distance grunt.

‘Lunch!’

Carefully, he finished colouring in the last of the green squares that denoted time allotted to bathing and ablutions in the morning, from seven to seven thirty.

Lakshmi was probably a better cook than his mother; she was usually in a better mood, and that seemed to affect the food. And she was less stingy with the oil, salt and chilli; Ashish’s father, though he had turned fifty only last year, already had cholesterol, and the doctor had hinted darkly at ‘BP’.

Ashish had hogged slightly too enthusiastically at lunch, and now he sat slumped at the desk and eyed the bed and its handloom cover, which was striped, with a prominent slub. It would feel reassuringly rough against his cheek while he slept; but he looked at the bright squares of the study timetable and sighed.

He stared into the sun. A little later, some boys came out to play football in the lane. They seemed to be engaged in a strange dance whose purpose was to cover every inch of the lane with the ball, which slipped between them as though attached to their feet by lengths of elastic. It never got away, nor was it ever caught. Occasionally it flew up, and was knocked down by one of the players, who used his forehead; another dived for it. Ashish read:

The date is out of such prolixity:

We’ll have no Cupid hoodwink’d with a scarf

Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath,

Scaring the ladies like a crow-keeper;

No, nor without-book prologue, faintly spoke

After the prompter, for our entrance:

It was enough. He couldn’t understand, and had been a fool to try. At the same time as the words drew him in with their rhythm, they barred his passage. Lath? Tartar? Without-book prologue? He should have stuck to the books of notes that everyone else used to pass. His eyes wandered outside, where the football was making a lovely long curve towards the goal at the mouth of the lane. The watchman grabbed the ball and waved the boys out of the way; Dr Gogate’s new car turned in.

Ashish bent his head down to the page.

The date is out of such prolixity:

His elbow leaned on the desk and his cheek found a resting place in the palm of his hand. He looked into the sun and wondered what had become of Sunder, but the question didn’t seem as urgent as a few days ago. For diversion, he went looking for the book that his uncle had picked up.

‘Aren’t there any family photos?’ he asked his aunt in the afternoon.

‘Photos? You mean of your mother’s childhood?’

‘Yeah, from the old house.’

She paused, and blew on her tea. ‘I’ll have to see, they’re probably in the chest here. You want to see them?’

‘Hm,’ Ashish nodded.

‘We’ll ask your uncle when he gets home.’

‘Okay.’

But a little later, he heard her calling to him from the living room and left Romeo and Juliet to wander out. She had removed the ornaments from the top of the tea chest and opened it; bits of newspaper, cloth, and a few albums lay on the low table. Her face was amused. ‘Come, see?’

He sat next to her on the floor, and they began turning the enormous pages, on which card-like black and white prints were affixed by decorative corners. Here was Mohan mama, about six years old, swinging on the gate of the house at Dadar: he looked small, skinny, and mischievous, but ultimately well behaved. Ashish’s mother was in another picture, a young child, pugnacious in a frilly frock with a large bow at the waist. His grandparents, looking young and self-conscious; his grandfather wore a suit, his grandmother wore a nine-yard sari and carried a baby, presumably Vivek mama, in her arms. Various other cousins, aunts and uncles; his aunt speculated about their identity.

They heard the door catch: Mohan was home.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. He took off his sandals and came to stand near them, tentative but eager.

‘He wanted to see some of the old photos,’ Lakshmi explained.

Mohan reached down and took the picture Ashish was holding. It had a white border and scalloped edges, and showed a formal group. A plant stood in one corner; on a sofa sat a woman in a sari, now the ubiquitous six-yard variety, holding a toddler on her lap. Two boys stood next to her; at the side was her husband, his hand on the elder boy’s shoulder.

‘That’s my grandparents with my mother, Vivek mama and you, isn’t it, Mohan mama?’ Ashish glanced up; his uncle’s face was inscrutable.

‘Yes, the three of us and our parents. Look at your mother’s face.’

‘Hm.’ Ashish reached up for the photo. The toddler, fatkneed, had the familiar aggressive expression. ‘So Vivek mama was about twelve. You must have been six or so? Everyone looks so different.’

Mohan snorted. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ Ashish said. ‘You all seem more serious or something.’ The photographs were different, say, from those of him and his sister growing up. The figures here regarded the camera with greater intensity; they seemed more present than people in pictures today.

His uncle looked down at him. ‘Well, these photos were taken in a studio, we had to pose. Best clothes, a lot of waiting. Your mother used to get very bored and start shouting.’

‘I bet.’ Ashish looked back at the photo. The elder boy, Vivek, already looked pompous; he was sticking his small chest out, and his brilliantined hair showed the marks of a comb. Ashish’s grandfather seemed preoccupied; his grandmother was a definite entity, as though the photographer had drawn a thin black line around her. The middle child, his uncle, appeared to be elsewhere. His eyes were remote, and his smile engagingly goofy, as though he were gratified to have been included. Already, he looked like a person used to spending a lot of time on his own.

‘Can I have this?’

Mohan looked startled.

‘Can I keep it in my room?’ Ashish modified.

‘I suppose. There’s no frame.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’ He thought perhaps he should explain why he wanted it. ‘I don’t really have any old pictures of the family,’ he said. It would be a warning, he thought, feeling a kind of self-doubting impatience towards the boy in the photo. Wake up! he wanted to shout at him. Get on with it!

‘All right, take it.’ Mohan started to put the other photos in an ancient envelope that he slipped into the back of the album. He wrapped it in a piece of old sari that acted as its shroud, and replaced it carefully in the tea chest; he shut the lid. Aha, thought Ashish: only people who’ve had truly happy childhoods can afford to forget about them. He went to his room and stood the photo on his desk, against the window ledge.

After dinner he prowled around his uncle, who was sitting in the cane chair reading.

‘Mohan mama.’

‘Hm.’

Ashish circled the chair. The light glinted through his uncle’s steel-coloured hair and onto his scalp, which showed, oddly pale, at the crown.

‘Have you ever thought of writing something?’

‘Ha! Apart from letters and money order forms, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

No answer. Ashish continued to hover about the chair, dragging one rubber slipper along the tiles until it squeaked. His uncle lowered the book and looked at him.

Ashish grinned. ‘I was looking at that book, Become a Writer. You should try writing some stories, you know, short stories. You must know a lot of stories, from all the people you meet.’

Mohan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s a very different thing. It’s difficult to be a writer, not everyone can do it,’ he muttered.

‘Yes, but you already write a lot anyway.’

‘That’s different.’

‘And also you read so much.’

His uncle regarded him for a moment, frowning. Then his face cleared. Unexpectedly, he laughed. ‘I was published once,’ he said. ‘Have I ever shown you?’

‘No!’

‘Hm, I wonder where it is now. It was in a magazine.’ His face had begun to gleam. ‘Come, I think it might be in your room.’

He bustled out of the living room and into the kitchen. Ashish had just begun to follow him when Mohan reappeared with the stepladder. He went into Ashish’s room and planted it between the bed and the window.

‘Do you want me to do that?’ Ashish mumbled, but he enjoyed the sight of his uncle hurrying up the pyramid-like stepladder, which creaked loudly under his weight. In the upper reaches of the shelves near the bed Mohan began to rummage in various piles of paper.

‘Chhi,’ he said perfunctorily. The dust here was thick and silky; it floated down to the floor in flakes. ‘Got it.’ He descended the ladder, his face triumphant, eyes bright, and a dirty smear on the bridge of his nose. Ashish, long-suffering, folded up the stepladder and carried it back to the kitchen. When he’d restored it to its dark corner he hurried to the living room. His uncle stood under the bare bulb; he had gingerly unfolded the ageing, brittle newsprint.

‘See, here.’

Ashish bent, and read:

Dear Sir,

I am a faithful reader of the Junior Diplomat and I am writing to ask you print more short stories.

Yours faithfully,

Mohan V. Karekar (age 4½).

‘Aged four and a half! Mohan mama!’ Ashish crowed. He was still more entertained when his uncle removed the paper from his grasp. ‘We used to get the Diplomat every Sunday, and I loved reading the Junior Diplomat, the children’s section, it was very popular. Here, this paper’s old, it’ll crumble.’ Carefully, he refolded the page and put it on the reading table.

‘So you were already published at four and a half?’

Mohan smirked, and sat down in the cane armchair. ‘There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,’ he said. He opened his book again.

Ashish had heard a familiar music in the distance; he listened, part of his brain thinking it might be a song he knew. Then he ran towards his room: it was his phone.

Later that night, he was about to go to sleep when an electronic shrieking began in the flat below; it was in the room underneath his. He cocked his ear and listened: an urgent trill of three rising notes. It must have been Madhavi, the plump girl: she was of the right age to have exams. Setting an alarm for revision, or to signal the end of a timed question, was the kind of thing serious students did. But no one came to switch off the alarm; it shrieked itself into catalepsy and, with a squeak, died out.

Ashish sat at the desk and thought he would read a little more. He was thinking about Sunder, about his lazy, deep voice, and his inarticulateness, and about how they were to meet the next day; at the same time, he was reading, but too fast to notice any of the words that passed his eyes like long distance trains at night, noisy but unmemorable. At once he felt eyes fixed on him, and heard a gobbling sound. Very slowly, hairs rising on his neck, he looked up. Two round white faces, enormous, dark, knowing eyes, and a look of surprise modulated by the polite pretence of disinterest. In the open window of the empty flat opposite sat two white owls. They rocked slightly, their eyes scanning the darkness. As his eyes met theirs, one of the birds unfolded like a threat suddenly swept aside and Ashish’s heart contracted; the whiteness of its wings flashed into a V, then a line; it swooped through the glow of the street lamp and was gone.

His aunt, who couldn’t remember whether the apartment door had been double-locked, came out of her room after midnight to check. On her way back she saw the line of light under Ashish’s door and was surprised; none of their children had studied this late, especially so far before the exams. He must really be serious, she thought. She went back to her room and quietly closed the door.