The Complete Stories
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anita Desai
Title Page
Preface
Games at Twilight
Private Tuition by Mr Bose
Studies in the Park
Surface Textures
Sale
Pineapple Cake
The Accompanist
A Devoted Son
The Farewell Party
Pigeons at Daybreak
Scholar and Gypsy
Royalty
Winterscape
Diamond Dust: A Tragedy
Underground
The Man Who Saw Himself Drown
The Artist’s Life
Five Hours to Simla or Faisla
Tepoztlán Tomorrow
The Rooftop Dwellers
The Landing
The Museum of Final Journeys
Translator Translated
The Artist of Disappearance
A Note on the Author
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Complete Stories gathers together Anita Desai’s short story collections Diamond Dust and Games at Twilight and the novellas of The Artist of Disappearance, with a new preface from the author. From the icy suburbs of Canada to the overcrowded B&Bs of Cornwall, via the hill towns and cities of India, Anita Desai observes human behaviour unflinchingly but not unkindly, recognising our ordinariness and our strangeness, and capturing both with quiet precision.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.
ALSO BY ANITA DESAI
Cry, the Peacock
Voices in the City
Bye-Bye, Blackbird
Where Shall We Go This Summer?
Games at Twilight
Fire on the Mountain
Clear Light of Day
Village by the Sea
In Custody
Baumgartner’s Bombay
Journey to Ithaca
Fasting, Feasting
Diamond Dust
The Zigzag Way
The Artist of Disappearance
Preface
I was always a scribbler. As soon as I was taught the alphabet I scribbled – even before I could spell so that I was always harassing everyone in the household (including the cook who knew no word of English) ‘How do you spell “house”? How do you spell tree, fire, bird, fish … ?’ (He responded by making me a magnificent gift on my birthday of an inkwell carved out of soft soapstone which I unfortunately ruined by pouring real ink into that delicate, decorative object.) I filled notebook after notebook seated on a cane stool at my round green table and was labelled, with an understandably resigned sigh, ‘The Writer in the Family’.
What was I writing? Consciously, with awareness and intent, very little. I simply had an urge to put everything, everything that I saw, heard and experienced on paper, in ink. I had little awareness of categories – books were books to me, the imposing leather-bound books behind the glass on my parents’ bookshelves, the worn, dog-eared paperbacks on my siblings’ bookshelves and boxes, and the exciting, inviting ones in all their diversity in the bookshop where I spent my pocket money. I can’t remember when I learnt to differentiate between the short story and the novel – no, actually I can: it was when I first decided to send a piece out to be published (publishing was important, I knew writing had to be in print if it was to earn its name) and it was of course of a short length to fit into a magazine or journal. But I was also always writing at length with the idea of a book, a proper book, in my mind, and a part of me believed short stories to be failed novels.
But a short story is not a failed novel any more than a novella is an extended short story. Each has an altogether different set of rules and effects. Length is one of them but lengths vary wildly. As Hortense Calisher said, ‘How long should a short story be? As long as a piece of string. I mean – to tie up the parcel with.’ I like her practical, workmanlike approach but there is in addition the element of chance. How did one piece I scribbled end up a short story, another extend, unwrap itself, wander, digress and venture onto a path, a road to a further destination – novella, or novel?
It is all a matter of instinct really, and exploration, a conviction that dawns upon one while one works that one has said what one set out to say, there is no need to go further. It may be just one small episode, stumbled upon unexpectedly, a glimpse out of a window, the fall of light on one object while bypassing another, that gives one pause and for some reason is not forgotten. Why has it stayed in the mind when so many other impressions, encounters and experiences have turned into a blur and disappeared? And when one has found the answer to that – the story is done. It can come to one quickly or it may take long, very long, to discover. In the short story it need not be pursued further. Many writers have commented on its identity being closer to a poem than a novel.
I have written only a few short stories that have provided me with that sensation that one craves: ah, I have done what I set out to do, no more is needed. The stories that constitute this collected edition are those that I ended upon that note. For the most part I have taken longer and watched the stone I’d flung into the pond create ripples that extend further, ripple on ripple, arc on arc, struggling to reach the far shore, and wondered: where will this go? How will it end? And that search has turned into a novel.
It is the latter mode that I have mostly chosen. It is the one that offers space both dangerous and forgiving, and lays one open to what may be years of discouragement, dejection, doubt and isolation while one considers options, takes one direction and then another, makes errors, corrects them, picks oneself up and struggles on, only gradually building up the momentum needed for narrative. But while involved in so much that is frustrating and exhausting, one may be granted – briefly and sporadically – that mysterious breath of air that comes up unexpectedly, creating a ripple, a stir, a tide that thrusts one forward and sends one soaring, sailing, flying through space and time.
It is the pursuit of that elusive and mysterious sensation that one undertakes in the short story, so different a form. Instead of those long stretches in which a novelist becomes stranded, the short-story writer must launch forth on what is a high-wire act, refusing to look back or down into the abyss, running the length of it at a sprint so as not to lose balance: quick, quick before you fall! You may go back and start all over again, or change sentences and scenes, but that initial urge must retain its urgency from beginning to end.
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)
In this the short story is the more challenging form – as I realized when I had the temerity to ‘teach’ the writing of it to students who came to the writing of fiction as complete novices, simply because it was easier to fit into the space of a class, a term – that ‘length of string’ again. But it was the very brevity and confinement of the form that demanded skill, learning and understanding to make it ‘work’, i.e. to create the desired effect.
But every once in a while, when completing that frantic dash of the short story, even after it is in print, one finds it won’t let go of one. It pursues one – or, rather, one pursues it because there is more to be said, more to be delved into, discovered and exposed. So every once in a while I have found, years and years on in time,
a short story written long ago insisting on becoming a novel.
It is the experience I had when I wrote the short story ‘The Accompanist’. I felt then that I had put on paper all I knew – very little – about that minor figure of the musical world, the musician in the background, barely noticed, all attention being given to the maestro, the soloist. Was he content for it to be so? Was he – or not? There was so much in the life and work of that overlooked artist, and I wrote the novel In Custody to give him his due although I changed the two characters into a poet and scholar. And again, later still, into the novella ‘Translator Translated’. One of my earliest short stories, ‘Scholar and Gypsy’, eventually carried on a whole new life as the novel Journey to Ithaca, something I did not even know till a reader pointed out the development of the theme: the difference between the character who feels the world is all we need and the character for whom the world is limited, beyond it there surely lies more. The search for that other world – physical or spiritual – that compels them on their journeys, had carried on from the short story into the novel as a sketch might lead to a painting. This subterranean element rising to the surface surprised me, I had not been conscious of that development.
Each form requires a different set of abilities, even materials – as an artist might need pencil or pen and ink or water colours or paint for one work or another. Brevity and concision will do for one while the other requires doubt, mystery, mistake and stamina. If one writes both, which gives the greater satisfaction? Now one, now the other – that is the only answer.
Anita Desai
November, 2016
Games at Twilight
It was still too hot to play outdoors. They had had their tea, they had been washed and had their hair brushed, and after the long day of confinement in the house that was not cool but at least a protection from the sun, the children strained to get out. Their faces were red and bloated with the effort, but their mother would not open the door, everything was still curtained and shuttered in a way that stifled the children, made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun and feel the air, they would choke.
‘Please, Ma, please,’ they begged. ‘We’ll play in the veranda and porch – we won’t go a step out of the porch.’ ‘You will, I know you will, and then—’
‘No – we won’t, we won’t,’ they wailed so horrendously that she actually let down the bolt of the front door so that they burst out like seeds from a crackling, overripe pod into the veranda, with such wild, maniacal yells that she retreated to her bath and the shower of talcum powder and the fresh sari that were to help her face the summer evening.
They faced the afternoon. It was too hot. Too bright. The white walls of the veranda glared stridently in the sun. The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid balloons. The garden outside was like a tray made of beaten brass, flattened out on the red gravel and the stony soil in all shades of metal – aluminium, tin, copper and brass. No life stirred at this arid time of day – the birds still drooped, like dead fruit, in the papery tents of the trees; some squirrels lay limp on the wet earth under the garden tap. The outdoor dog lay stretched as if dead on the veranda mat, his paws and ears and tail all reaching out like dying travellers in search of water. He rolled his eyes at the children – two white marbles rolling in the purple sockets, begging for sympathy – and attempted to lift his tail in a wag but could not. It only twitched and lay still.
Then, perhaps roused by the shrieks of the children, a band of parrots suddenly fell out of the eucalyptus tree, tumbled frantically in the still, sizzling air, then sorted themselves out into battle formation and streaked away across the white sky.
The children, too, felt released. They too began tumbling, shoving, pushing against each other, frantic to start. Start what? Start their business. The business of the children’s day which is – play.
‘Let’s play hide-and-seek.’
‘Who’ll be It?’
‘You be It.’
‘Why should I? You be—’
‘You’re the eldest—’
‘That doesn’t mean—’
The shoves became harder. Some kicked out. The motherly Mira intervened. She pulled the boys roughly apart. There was a tearing sound of cloth but it was lost in the heavy panting and angry grumbling and no one paid attention to the small sleeve hanging loosely off a shoulder.
‘Make a circle, make a circle!’ she shouted, firmly pulling and pushing till a kind of vague circle was formed. ‘Now clap!’ she roared and, clapping, they all chanted in melancholy unison: ‘Dip, dip, dip – my blue ship—’ and every now and then one or the other saw he was safe by the way his hands fell at the crucial moment – palm on palm, or back of hand on palm – and dropped out of the circle with a yell and a jump of relief and jubilation.
Raghu was It. He started to protest, to cry ‘You cheated – Mira cheated – Anu cheated—’ but it was too late, the others had all already streaked away. There was no one to hear when he called out, ‘Only in the veranda – the porch – Ma said – Ma said to stay in the porch!’ No one had stopped to listen, all he saw were their brown legs flashing through the dusty shrubs, scrambling up brick walls, leaping over compost heaps and hedges, and then the porch stood empty in the purple shade of the bougainvillea and the garden was as empty as before; even the limp squirrels had whisked away, leaving everything gleaming, brassy and bare.
Only small Manu suddenly reappeared, as if he had dropped out of an invisible cloud or from a bird’s claws, and stood for a moment in the centre of the yellow lawn, chewing his finger and near to tears as he heard Raghu shouting, with his head pressed against the veranda wall, ‘Eighty-three, eighty-five, eighty-nine, ninety …’ and then made off in a panic, half of him wanting to fly north, the other half counselling south. Raghu turned just in time to see the flash of his white shorts and the uncertain skittering of his red sandals, and charged after him with such a bloodcurdling yell that Manu stumbled over the hosepipe, fell into its rubber coils and lay there weeping, ‘I won’t be It – you have to find them all – all – all!’
‘I know I have to, idiot,’ Raghu said, superciliously kicking him with his toe. ‘You’re dead,’ he said with satisfaction, licking the beads of perspiration off his upper lip, and then stalked off in search of worthier prey, whistling spiritedly so that the hiders should hear and tremble.
Ravi heard the whistling and picked his nose in a panic, trying to find comfort by burrowing the finger deep-deep into that soft tunnel. He felt himself too exposed, sitting on an upturned flower pot behind the garage. Where could he burrow? He could run around the garage if he heard Raghu come – around and around and around – but he hadn’t much faith in his short legs when matched against Raghu’s long, hefty, hairy footballer legs. Ravi had a frightening glimpse of them as Raghu combed the hedge of crotons and hibiscus, trampling delicate ferns underfoot as he did so. Ravi looked about him desperately, swallowing a small ball of snot in his fear.
The garage was locked with a great heavy lock to which the driver had the key in his room, hanging from a nail on the wall under his work-shirt. Ravi had peeped in and seen him still sprawling on his string-cot in his vest and striped underpants, the hair on his chest and the hair in his nose shaking with the vibrations of his phlegm-obstructed snores. Ravi had wished he were tall enough, big enough to reach the key on the nail, but it was impossible, beyond his reach for years to come. He had sidled away and sat dejectedly on the flower pot. That at least was cut to his own size.
But next to the garage was another shed with a big green door. Also locked. No one even knew who had the key to the lock. That shed wasn’t opened more than once a year when Ma turned out all the old broken bits of furniture and rolls of matting and leaking buckets, and the white ant hills were broken and swept away and Flit sprayed into the spider webs and rat holes so that the whole operation was like the looting of
a poor, ruined and conquered city. The green leaves of the door sagged. They were nearly off their rusty hinges. The hinges were large and made a small gap between the door and the walls – only just large enough for rats, dogs and, possibly, Ravi to slip through.
Ravi had never cared to enter such a dark and depressing mortuary of defunct household goods seething with such unspeakable and alarming animal life but, as Raghu’s whistling grew angrier and sharper and his crashing and storming in the hedge wilder, Ravi suddenly slipped off the flower pot and through the crack and was gone. He chuckled aloud with astonishment at his own temerity so that Raghu came out of the hedge, stood silent with his hands on his hips, listening, and finally shouted ‘I heard you! I’m coming! Got you—’ and came charging round the garage only to find the upturned flower pot, the yellow dust, the crawling of white ants in a mud-hill against the closed shed door – nothing. Snarling, he bent to pick up a stick and went off, whacking it against the garage and shed walls as if to beat out his prey.
Ravi shook, then shivered with delight, with self-congratulation. Also with fear. It was dark, spooky in the shed. It had a muffled smell, as of graves. Ravi had once got locked into the linen cupboard and sat there weeping for half an hour before he was rescued. But at least that had been a familiar place, and even smelt pleasantly of starch, laundry and, reassuringly, of his mother. But the shed smelt of rats, ant hills, dust and spider webs. Also of less definable, less recognizable horrors. And it was dark. Except for the white-hot cracks along the door, there was no light. The roof was very low. Although Ravi was small, he felt as if he could reach up and touch it with his finger tips. But he didn’t stretch. He hunched himself into a ball so as not to bump into anything, touch or feel anything. What might there not be to touch him and feel him as he stood there, trying to see in the dark? Something cold, or slimy – like a snake. Snakes! He leapt up as Raghu whacked the wall with his stick – then, quickly realizing what it was, felt almost relieved to hear Raghu, hear his stick. It made him feel protected.