Читать книгу A Matter of Time - Shashi Deshpande - Страница 9

SHE IS LYING full length on the sofa, watching a movie on TV, her eyes fixed unblinking on the screen as if she has never seen these things before: a circus. A clown in the centre of the arena, singing and dancing. And the spectators, in the manner of the spectators in any movie, gazing ahead in complete unison. Perhaps, in a sense, it is true that she has not really seen this before. She had never been to the circus as a child; children don’t go, they are taken. And who could have taken them, Premi and her? In fact, the first (and the last) time she saw a circus was when Gopal and she had taken their daughters to one. The girls, four and five then, has been enthralled and Gopal’s enjoyment had been almost as childlike as theirs.

But she had been appalled. She had hated all of it—the dust, the noise, the smell of the animals and their fears, almost as malodorous as the stench of their dung. It had made her sick. Even the acrobats had made her uneasy. She had sensed an enormous despair behind the bravado of their feats, a fear under the star-spangled gaiety of their costumes. Skilful, yes, but desperate. Like a statement—‘we have to do these things in order to live, yet ....’

It was only the music that had made it bearable for her. There was something about it, rousing her expectations to a pitch so that her heart seemed to expand in her chest, throbbing like a powerful drum. The music created an illusion of magnificence, of drama to come, an expectation that was never fulfilled. Everything that came after, every act, seemed slightly tawdry, like tinsel crowns seen in the daylight, after the play is over.

Now she is watching the circus at a safe distance. Diminished by the size of the screen, yes, but with the dirt, the smells, the fear and despair left out. Sanitized. Bacteria-free. And the clown, prancing and skipping in the centre of the ring, allowed a dignity a clown in a real circus never has. And instead of the heart-throbbing music, this melodious song ....

Gopal comes in. Thinking that he will join her, she draws up her feet, making room for him on the sofa. But he goes to a chair opposite her, from where, she knows, he cannot see the TV. She gestures to him to turn it round. When he does nothing, scarcely, in fact, notices her gesture, she begins reluctantly to get up to do it herself. This time he stops her with a word—‘don’t!’ And only then, for the first time, she turns her eyes away from the screen and gives him her whole attention. Something unusual about him that has nothing to do with the fact that he has not changed into his pyjamas ... She can’t pinpoint anything specific, just this odd feeling that he seems—disjointed? Uncoordinated?

And then, suddenly she has a feeling as if someone has nudged her, telling her that something unpleasant is approaching, that she should get up and walk away. Later, she will wonder if she could have escaped, if, in fact, the moment of speaking would have passed for Gopal if she had walked away. But that is not how it is to be. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he says and abruptly begins. And she sits and listens in silence to what he has to say to her.

The TV goes on through his talk, neither of them thinks of turning it off, or turning down the sound either, so that his words come to her against the background of the clown’s song: Jeena yahan, mama yahan, iske siwa jana kahan.

The telling of what he has come to say takes him so little time that when he has done, the song is still going on. He looks at her for a reaction, but she is gazing at him just as expectantly, waiting for him to go on. The realization that there is nothing more to be said—by either of them—comes to them almost simultaneously and he goes out as quietly as he had come in.

She continues to watch the movie until the end, when the clown, tragic, doomed victim, dies. She goes to bed with the song still going on in her head, the slightly off-key voice of Mukesh singing ‘jeena yahan, mama yahan,’ the nimble feet of the clown dancing to its tune. And as if this is all there is at present to trouble her, her mind puzzles over the meaning of the words: what do they mean? That this world is all we have and therefore there is nowhere else for us to go? That we have to live here and die here? Or does it mean: this is what we have, this area of action is enough for us, we live here and die here, we need no more?

Her mind slides from one interpretation to another, over and over again, until in sheer exhaustion she falls asleep. And gets up abruptly at three in the morning, a panicked waking as if someone has prodded her awake. She finds herself alone in bed, the pillow by her side cold and smooth, the other half of the bed unrumpled, the blanket still folded. So it is true what he told her, he meant it, he’s already done it.

Having reached this conclusion, she lies still, waiting for the dawn. There is none of the tangle of the internal colloquy of last night in her now. Her mind is crystal clear, she knows what has happened, she sees the picture with a detachment that will not be hers, not for a very long while. With infinite patience she waits until the early morning light dispels the shadows and makes every object in the room clearly visible. Only then does she get out of bed, wash, make tea for all of them and go into her daughters’ room to tell them what has happened. And now the thought comes to her—he could have spared me this, he could have spoken to them himself. But she does not draw back from what she has to do; she tells them about it, almost exactly repeating Gopal’s words, leaving out nothing.

And so it is that Aru, a few days before her seventeenth birthday, wakes up to the knowledge that her father has walked out on them.

Once, years back, when Aru was only a child (but she was born an adult, Gopal used to think, when he remembered this incident), she had been separated from Gopal in a crowd. Gopal, frantically searching for her, had found her at exactly the same spot where she had realized he was no longer with her.

‘I was not lost,’ she had said to him after their initial hysteria had subsided. ‘It was you who got lost.’

Now, it is as if the same thing has happened all over again. But this time, though it is her father who has gone away, Aru knows the panic, the disorientation of being lost. It will be very long before she will realize that something ended for her, for all of them, that morning. Perhaps it is Sumi’s behaviour that makes it so difficult for them to understand the enormity of what has happened. She answers all their questions with infinite patience, she listens to their repeated exclamations with what looks like composure; there are no signs of irritation or annoyance. Aru is adult enough to be conscious of the curtain beyond which her parents lived their life together as man and woman. Yet Sumi seems to give the impression that the room did not exist, that whatever life they lived together was with their daughters. And she has revealed all of it to them.

To the astonishment of her daughters, Sumi’s routine that day is as usual. They are baffled, but as if she has set the tone for them, they go through the motions of their normal routine as well. Sumi’s calmness, her normality, make it possible for them to think—‘it was only a quarrel’; it makes it possible for them to hope—‘he will come back’. When she returns home in the evening, Aru looks around quickly, eagerly, for some sign that he has returned; but nothing has changed since the morning.

In the next few days the girls can almost imagine that there is, indeed, nothing wrong, that their father has gone out for a few days and will soon return, but for the fact that Sumi, despite her facade of normality, has a quality about her—a kind of blankness—that makes them uneasy. The two older girls feel that they should do something, but they do not know what it is they can do. They are waiting for a lead from their mother, but she gives them none. In fact, after that first morning when she spoke to them about it, she has not mentioned Gopal’s name; nor, when they speak of him, does she show either distress or anger.

And then their grandfather arrives. The sight of him in their house is so rare that it is loaded with significance. There is no doubt that he knows, that he has come for a definite purpose. It is Sumi who tells them that he has come to take them to the Big House.

‘For how long?’

Sumi does not know; in fact, she makes it clear she does not care about it either way. She seems, in a strange way, relieved at having the burden of decision taken off her. The girls cannot argue with such indifference; they cannot speak with their grandfather, either. His authority has been too long established for them to think of questioning it.

Yet, Aru lingers. ‘You go on,’ she says. ‘I’ll follow you later on my moped.’

What had she hoped to achieve by staying on? There is nothing in the house to hold her there. The momentary desire to rebel, to be by herself, not to follow her grandfather meekly at his beckoning, leaves her. It seems pointless. She has to be with her mother and sisters. And there is her grandmother, Kalyani.

But Kalyani does not know what has happened, she has not been told that they are coming. Her surprise at seeing them, her open-mouthed stupefaction when she realizes they are staying, speak of her ignorance.

‘But what’s the matter?’

‘We’ll speak of it tomorrow. Right now, we need to sleep.’

Suddenly abandoning her questions, Kalyani throws herself with a frenzy into making arrangements for them to sleep. She pulls out sheets, old saris, pillows, cushions, and flings them about, speaking ceaselessly all the while.

‘Sumi, you take my bed, I’ll sleep here on the floor. Aru, this is for you ....’

And then Seema tells her. Throwing off the blanket Kalyani has covered her with, she sits up and announces the fact. Bluntly, matter-of-factly. And bursts into tears. The exaggerated, purposeful tears of a child, who, seeing her mother, dredges up her sorrow over an old hurt. Kalyani looks at Sumi’s face for confirmation and finds it there.

Kalyani’s reaction astounds her granddaughters. ‘No,’ she cries out, ‘no, my God, not again.’ She begins to cry, sounding so much like an animal in pain that Aru covers her ears against the sound. Suddenly, the dam that Sumi had built with her silence gives way and they are submerged in the awareness of loss. Aru is overcome by a sense of unreality; she finds herself unable to connect herself to her surroundings, to these people around her and their distress. My God, what’s happening to us and what am I doing, lying here on the floor like a refugee?

‘We’re staying the night,’ Sumi had said, but it is obviously going to be a much longer stay. The girls who have brought nothing with them but a nightdress and a toothbrush apiece have to keep moving up and down between the two houses, getting the things they need for each day, living, not out of suitcases, but out of plastic bags. Aru, with her innate sense of order has to work hard at not becoming part of the house, putting things in a kind of temporary order, so that the mattresses, rolled up each morning, are left on the floor and the clothes, folded as soon as they are dry, are not put away but piled on the table. The room is like a guest’s, who, having to catch a train in the evening, is almost packed and ready to leave. Kalyani enters the game, too; the extra cups, plates and glasses go back into storage after every meal, from where they have to be retrieved each time they are needed.

‘How long do we go on like this?’

Aru has just returned from her third trip of the day, getting some books, and her face is hollow with exhaustion. ‘Do you think, Charu, he’s dead?’

‘Don’t you think Sumi would have known if he was? No, I don’t think he’s dead.’

‘But then what? My God, we’ve got to do something.’

‘What do we do? Put an ad in the paper saying—“Come home, Papa, Sumi ill, all forgiven”. Or do we stick him among the missing persons on TV?’

My father a missing person? Do we put him among the juvenile delinquents, the retarded children and adults? And what do we say? Missing, a man of—forty-six? No, forty-seven. And—but how tall is he? He’s thin—so thin you can count his ribs. So we say ‘of slender build’. And a wheat complexion—that’s how it’s put, isn’t it? He has a scar over his left eyebrow. Wears glasses. Speaks English, Kannada, some Marathi, and a kind of Hindi we all laugh at. Fingers like mine—knobbly, large-knuckled, tapering at the tips. Feet like Seema’s—long and narrow. When he’s pleased with you, he says ‘Shabaash’ and when he speaks English, he begins almost every third sentence with a ‘You see’, pausing after that. And I said to him once, ‘But what is it we have to see, Papa?’ and he laughed.

Suddenly, Aru stops. But I don’t know him, I don’t know him at all, she thinks despairingly. All these things mean nothing, they don’t add up to anything, certainly not to a reason for walking out on us. Even Sumi says she doesn’t know why he did it and I have to believe her, she doesn’t lie, but ....

‘You see,’ Charu says in reply to Aru’s long silence, ‘there is really nothing we can do.’

Aru is soon to realize something else: they are trapped into inactivity by that greatest fear of all—the fear of losing face. Gopal’s desertion is not just a tragedy, it is both a shame and a disgrace. There was a time when a man could have walked out of his home and the seamless whole of the joint family would have enclosed his wife and children, covered his absence. Now the rent in the fabric, gaping wide, is there for all to see. Nevertheless it has to be concealed, an attempt made to turn people’s eyes away from it. Aru realizes that none of the family have visited them, not Goda, sharer of all Kalyani’s joys and sorrows, or her daughter Devaki, Sumi’s special ally, or even Ramesh, so close to Gopal, and such a constant visitor to their house. Their staying away is deliberate; they know, but they don’t want to come to us with the knowledge. Only Nagi, after ten years of working with Kalyani, has no such scruples. She knows—has Kalyani told her? Or is she guessing?—and makes this clear to them by her repeated ‘poor things’, her clucks of sympathy.

‘Stop staring, Nagi,’ Aru exclaims angrily. ‘Have I suddenly grown an extra nose?’

‘What’s the use of getting angry with me? It’s all our luck, it’s written here, we can’t escape it. Look at my poor Lakshmi, we thought he was such a good man and he left her for that other woman ....’

‘Oh God!’

‘What’s wrong with your sister?’ Nagi asks Charu when Aru stalks out.

‘Nothing, you know how she is. And for God’s sake, Nagi,’ Charu tries to change the subject, ‘what is that you’re wiping the floor with?’

‘It’s Amma’s petticoat. What can I do? I don’t want to ask Amma to get me a mopping cloth, not at such a time, I know she has troubles, and you—don’t you waste your time talking to me, you go on with your reading. Yes, you study and get a job soon so that you can help your poor mother.’

Aru hears her and thinks—maybe Nagi’s way of saying it straight out is better, after all. Anything is better than this deviousness, this circling round the truth.

But the truth is that there is no moment when tragedy is certain. Each moment they are balanced on the edge of hope; every time the gate creaks, it could be Gopal, each time the phone rings there is the possibility that they will hear Gopal’s voice saying ‘Gopal here’. Even Sumi, despite her apparent stoicism, is not immune from this hope. Aru realizes it the day she comes home with Gopal’s scooter and Sumi, alerted by the sound, rushes out. Aru, getting off the scooter, sees the eagerness on her mother’s face, watches the hope dying out. For a moment they stare at each other wordlessly. Then Sumi goes back in and Aru thinks, I’ve got to do something.

That same night she rings up Premi.

Premi’s arrival is like the acknowledgement of a crisis. For the first time something is spelled out that none of them has admitted so far. Perhaps it is this that makes Sumi say abruptly to her sister, ‘Why have you come?’

She recovers and corrects herself almost immediately. ‘That’s a stupid question to ask. Who told you?’

‘I did.’

The way Aru stands next to her aunt, confronting her mother, is like a challenge. But Sumi ignores it. She reverts to a normal tone, speaks of the usual things—how is Nikhil? And Anil?

To Premi this conversation conveys a message—not so much ‘we’re not going to talk about it now’ as ‘I’m not going to talk to you about it.’ She finds it impossible after this to say the things she had wanted to say, to ask the questions that have been thronging her mind since Aru spoke to her.

The questions come only after Sumi has gone to bed. Sumi has moved out of the room she shared with her daughters into a bedroom in the other wing. With the large hall between them, it is almost impossible for her to hear them; nevertheless they speak in low tones. The conversation centres around: where is he? Has no one any idea? Only when they have exhausted all the possibilities of this do they go on to the ‘why’.

And now Premi, practical and matter-of-fact as she had decided she would be, brings out the list she has ready. Quarrels? Money? Is it because of what happened in the Department? His resignation was a hint that Gopal was not in a very normal frame of mind. No man gives up a University teaching job just like that! Perhaps the attack on him by his students threw him—here Premi hesitates, for these are Gopal’s daughters—off balance?

But the girls have nothing to offer her, no answers to any of these questions, only an acceptance of the fact of his having gone away as opposed to her disbelief.

Premi ventures on her next question with even more hesitation, and this time not because she is speaking to Gopal’s daughters but because she is talking of Gopal and Sumi. (And this is the thought that has been beating in her mind since last night—Gopal walking out on Sumi? I can’t, I never will believe it.) Is there any other woman? she asks.

She is astonished that there is a pause, a kind of jerk before a reply. The two sisters give an impression of having spoken about this, of having argued about it.

‘There was an anonymous letter to Sumi a year back.’

‘Don’t be silly, Charu. Nobody believed that. Sumi laughed, you know that. Kantamani and Papa! She was such a—so pathetic! And anyway, Premi-mavshi, she isn’t here any more, she’s gone abroad.’

‘What does Sumi say?’

‘Nothing.’

Premi shouldn’t be surprised, not if she remembers Sumi’s response to Gopal’s resigning. ‘For Heaven’s sake, does it matter why he’s doing it! He doesn’t want to go on and that’s that!’

‘But, Sumi, what about money? I mean, how will you live?’

‘He’ll get a job—he told me someone has already approached him, they want him to write some articles, maybe even work for them. Oh, I’m not worried!’

But, for God’s sake, this is her husband and her marriage of twenty years, Premi thinks ....

Their talk becomes rambling and inconsequential after this. They keep pulling things out of the past, each memory like a grappling hook bringing up a question—was it because of this? At times the talk gets snagged on the unsaid things that lie between them: They must have quarrelled, I heard them once, late at night ....

Perhaps it’s because of me, the things I said to Papa when he decided to resign ....

Sumi took Gopal and her marriage too casually, she never cared as much as she should have ....

‘Fate.’

The word, thrown into their midst by Kalyani, startles them. Premi had been both anxious and apprehensive about her mother’s reaction. How has she taken it? Will she create a scene? But Kalyani has been surprisingly silent, especially this last hour, and entirely still, except for the ceaseless movement of her hands stroking her tiny feet as if they hurt her. She has made her presence felt only by her loud yawns at regular intervals. And now suddenly she says ‘Fate’. And just as abruptly walks out, leaving the word lingering among them. None of them is inclined to pick it up. In fact, no more is said.

Lying in bed, listening to the easy breathing of her two nieces on the floor, Premi is thinking of how they are always on the same side of the invisible dotted lines that mark out alliances and divides in families. The relationship between them arouses a sense of deprivation in her. Sumi and I, we were never like this. She was ahead of me and I was forever trailing behind, never able to catch up with her. And it makes no difference that I am now a successful professional, mother of a seven-year-old son, wife of a prosperous lawyer. The moment I come home, all this dwindles into nothing and I can feel myself sliding back into adolescence, getting once again under the skin of that frightened child Premi who’s always waiting here for me.

‘Why are you here?’

At the question, all Premi’s sense of being needed, of being able to offer solace and help, had seeped away from her, leaving her again the child who, heart thudding in fear, had climbed up the forbidden stairs, opened the door and met the blank stare, the question: Why are you here?

‘My father never spoke to me until I was ten,’ she had told Anil after their marriage and he had not believed her. Just as she wouldn’t have believed, if she had not seen it herself, that there could be families like Anil’s. At first it had been like watching a movie—it was pleasing, interesting, pretty, but it could not possibly be true. People did not really talk to each other so easily, they did not hug and touch and use words of endearment so casually. No, it was a false picture. The truth was a father who stayed in his room, who never came out, never spoke to you, a mother who put her hand on your mouth so that you did not cry out ....

‘My father did not speak to me until I was ten.’

But that’s not true. ‘Why are you here?’—those four words he had said then had meant nothing. He had scarcely looked at her when he spoke. The first time he really talked to her was when she had completed her medical finals; he had called her up to his room then, summoned her actually, to tell her she would be marrying Anil.

Since then, going to his room has been a formality she has scrupulously observed on every visit home. And he speaks to her—no, not as if she is his daughter, she has seen Gopal with his daughters and she knows that this is not how fathers speak to their daughters—but as if she is an acquaintance. But even this is an ordeal for her; the early years have so marked their relationship that she finds it difficult to speak to him. She is stiff, uneasy, often, like a stupid child, repeating his words as if bereft of her own. It will be the same this time too, she thinks, climbing the stairs slowly, reluctantly, as if there is still the possibility of being dragged down, of her fingers being prised away from the railings.

And it is—exactly the same. He asks her about Nikhil, speaks of Anil and of Anil’s father, who had been his colleague at one time. Nothing is said about Gopal and Sumi.

Of course, he cannot speak of Gopal. To mention Gopal, to speak of what he has done, is to let down the drawbridge into his own past. Nothing has changed, nothing ever changes here. I was a fool to imagine I could do something, that I could be of any use.

‘I think I’d better go,’ she tells Aru apologetically. ‘I’d stay if I thought I could help, but there’s nothing I can do. If we knew where Gopal was, perhaps, but ... You’ll call me, Aru, won’t you, when you find out where he is?’

‘That may never happen.’

‘Don’t be silly. Any time you need me, for anything, even if it’s not important, just ring me up and I’ll come right away.’