Diamond Dust Read online

  Diamond Dust

  STORIES

  Anita Desai

  * * *

  A Mariner Original

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON • NEW YORK

  2000

  * * *

  Copyright © 2000 by Anita Desai

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York,

  New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.hmco.com/trade.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

  data is available.

  ISBN 0-618-04213-x

  First published in Great Britain in 2000

  by Chatto & Windus

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  To my students at M.I.T.

  who have been my teachers

  * * *

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for providing me with a summer in Umbria where I revised these stories. The author and publisher are grateful to New Directions and Carcanet Press for permission to reproduce the extracts from 'In Uxmal' and 'Exclamation' from Selected Poems by Octavio Paz and The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957—1987 respectively, quoted on pages 148 and 154 of 'Tepoztlan Tomorrow'.

  * * *

  Contents

  Royalty [>]

  Winterscape [>]

  Diamond Dust, a Tragedy [>]

  Underground [>]

  The Man Who Saw Himself Drown [>]

  The Artist's Life [>]

  Five Hours to Simla or Faisla [>]

  Tepoztlan Tomorrow [>]

  The Rooftop Dwellers [>]

  Royalty

  ALL was prepared for the summer exodus: the trunks packed, the household wound down, wound up, ready to be abandoned to three months of withering heat and engulfing dust while its owners withdrew to their retreat in the mountains. The last few days were a little uncomfortable—so many of their clothes already packed away, so many of their books and papers bundled up and ready for the move. The house looked stark, with the silver put away, the vases emptied of flowers, the rugs and carpets rolled up; it was difficult to get through this stretch, delayed by one thing or another—a final visit to the dentist, last instructions to the stockbrokers, a nephew to be entertained on his way to Oxford. It was only the prospect of escape from the blinding heat that already hammered at the closed doors and windows, poured down on the roof and verandas, and withdrawal to the freshness and cool of the mountains which helped them to bear it. Sinking down on veranda chairs to sip lemonade from tall glasses, they sighed, 'Well, we'll soon be out of it.'

  In that uncomfortable interlude, a postcard arrived—a cheap, yellow printed postcard that for some reason to do with his age, his generation, Raja still used. Sarla's hands began to tremble: news from Raja. In a quivering voice she asked for her spectacles. Ravi passed them to her and she peered through them to decipher the words as if they were a flight of migrating birds in the distance: Raja was in India, at his ashram in the south, Raja was going to be in Delhi next week, Raja expected to find her there. She would be there, wouldn't she? 'You won't desert me?'

  After Ravi had made several appeals to her for information, for a sharing of the news, she lifted her face to him, grey and mottled, and said in a broken voice, 'Oh Ravi, Raja has come. He is in the south. He wants to visit us—next week.'

  It was only to be expected that Ravi's hands would fall upon the table, fall onto china and silverware, with a crash, making all rattle and jar. Raja was coming! Raja was to be amongst them again!

  A great shiver ran through the house like a wind blowing that was not a wind so much as a stream of shining light, shimmering and undulating through the still, shadowy house, a radiant serpent, not without menace, some threat of danger. Whether it liked it or not, the house became the one chosen by Raja for a visitation, a house in waiting.

  With her sari wrapped around her shoulders tightly, as if she were cold, Sarla went about unlocking cupboards, taking out sheets, silver, table linen. Her own trunks, and Ravi's, had to be thrown open. What had been put away was taken out again. Ravi sat uncomfortably in the darkened drawing room, watching her go back and forth, his lips thin and tight, but his expression one of helplessness. Sometimes he dared to make things difficult for her, demanding a book or a file he knew was at the very bottom of the trunk, pretending that it was indispensable, but when she performed the difficult task with every expression of weary martyrdom, he relented and asked, 'Are you all right? Sarla?' She refused to answer, her face was clenched in a tightly contained storm of emotion. Despondently, he groaned, 'Oh, aren't we too old—?' Then she turned to look at him, and even spoke: 'What do you mean?' Ravi shook his head helplessly. Was there any need to explain?

  Raja arrived on an early morning train. Another sign of his generation: he did not fly when he was in India. Perhaps he had not taken in the fact that one could fly in India too, or else he preferred the trains, no matter how long they took, crawling over the endless, arid plains in the parched heat before the rains. At dawn, no sun yet visible, the sky was already white with heat; crows rose from the dust-laden trees, cawing, then dropped to the ground, sun-struck. Sweepers with great brooms made desultory swipes at the streets, their mouths covered with a strip of turban, or sari, against the dust they raised. Motor rickshaws and taxis were being washed, lovingly, tenderly, by drivers in striped underpants. The city stank of somnolence, of dejection, like sweat-stained clothes. Sarla and Ravi stood on the railway platform, waiting, and when Sarla seemed to waver, Ravi put out a gentlemanly hand to steady her. When she turned her face to him in something like gratitude or pleading, a look passed between them as can only pass between two people married to each other through the droughts and hurricanes of thirty years. Then the train arrived, with a great blowing of triumphant whistles: it had completed its long journey from the south, it had achieved its destination, hadn't it said it would? Magnificently, it was a promise kept. Immediately, coolies in red shirts and turbans, with legs like ancient tree roots, sprang at the compartments, leaping onto the steps before the train had even halted or its doors opened, and the families and friends waiting on the platform began to run with the train, waving, calling to the passengers who leaned out of the windows. Sarla and Ravi stood rooted to one place, clinging to each other in order not to be torn apart or pushed aside by the crowd in its excitement.

  The pandemonium only grew worse when the doors were unlatched and the passengers began to dismount at the same time as the coolies forced their way in, creating human gridlock. Sighting their friends and relatives, the crowds on the platform began to wave and scream. Till coolies were matched with baggage, passengers with reception parties, utter chaos ruled. Sarla and Ravi peered through it, turning their heads in apprehension. Where was Raja? Only after the united families began to leave, exhorting coolies to bring up the rear with assorted trunks, bedding rolls and baskets balanced on their heads and held against their hips, and the railway platform had emerged from the scramble, did they hear the high-pitched, wavering warble of the voice they recognised: 'Sar-la! Ra-vi! My dears, how good of you to come! How good to see you! If you only knew what I've beeen through, about the man who insisted on telling me about his alligator farm, describing at such length how they are turned into handbags, as though I were a leather merchant...' and they turned to see Raja stepping out of one of the coaches, clutching his silk dhoti with one hand, waving elegantly with the other, a silver lock of his hair rising from his wide forehead as he landed on the platform i
n his slippered feet. And then the three of them were embracing each other, all at once, and it might have been Oxford, it might have been thirty years ago, it might even have been that lustrous morning in May emerging from dew-drenched meadows and the boat-crowded Isis, with ringing out of the skies and towers above them—bells, bells, bells, bells....

  'And then there was another extraordinary passenger, a young man with hair like a nest of serpents, you know, and when he understood I would not eat a "two-egg mamlet" offered to me by this incredibly ragged and totally sooty little urchin with a tin tray under his arm, nor even a "one-egg mamlet" to please him or anyone, this marvellous person leapt down from the bunk above my head, and shot out of the door—oh, I assure you we were at a standstill, in the most desolate little station imaginable, for no reason I could see or guess at if I cudgelled my brains ever so ferociously — and then he returned with a basket overflowing with fruit, a positive cornucopia. Sarla, you'd have fainted with bliss! Never did you see such fruit; oh, nowhere, nowhere on those mythical farms of California, certainly, worked on by those armies of the exploited from the sad lands to the south, I assure you, Ravi, such fruit as seemed a reincarnation of the fruit one ate as a child, stolen, you know, from the neighbour's orchard, fruit one ate hidden in the darkest recesses of one's compound, surreptitiously, one's tongue absolutely shrivelled by the piercing sweetness of the mangoes, the cruel tartness of unripe guavas, the unripe pulp of the plantains. Oh, Sarla, such joys! And I sat peeling a tiny banana and eating it—it was no bigger than my little finger and contained the flavour of the ripest, sweetest, best banana anywhere on earth within its cunning little yellow speckled jacket—I asked, naturally, what I owed him. But that incredible young man, who looked something like a cornucopia himself, with that abundant hair—it had such a quality of liveliness about it, every strand almost electric with energy—he merely folded his hands and said he would not take one paisa from me, not one. Well, of course I pushed away the basket and said I could not possibly accept it, totally against my principles, etcetera, and he gave me this tender, tender smile, quite unspeakably loving, and said he could take nothing from me because in a previous incarnation I had been his grandfather: he recognised me. "What?" said I, "what? What makes you say so? How can you say so?'"

  'Watch out!' Ravi shouted at the driver who overtook a bullock cart so closely he almost ran into its great creaking wheels and overturned it.

  'And he merely smiled, this sweet, ineffably sweet smile of his, and assured me I was no other than this esteemed ancestor of his who had left his home and family at the age of fifty and gone off into the Himalayas to live as a hermit and meditate. "Well" said I—'

  'Slow down,' Ravi ordered the driver curtly.

  '"Well" said I, "I assure you I have never been in the Himalayas—although it is indeed my life's ambition to do so, and therefore I could not have returned from there." By the way, I began to wonder if it was altogether flattering to be called grandfather by a man by no means in the first flush of youth, more like the becalmed middle years, whereupon he told me—imagine, Sarla, imagine, Ravi—he told me his grandfather had died there, in Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganga, many years ago. His family had all travelled up from Madras to witness the cremation and carry the ashes to Benares, but now, in the railway carriage, that little tin box baking in the sun as we crossed the red earth and ravines of Central India, he claimed he'd seen his reincarnation. He was as certain of it as the banana in my hand was a banana! He would not tell me why, or how, but he was clearly a clairvoyant. And isn't that a superb combination: clearly clairvoyant! Or do you think it a touch de trop? Hmm, Ravi, Sarla?'

  The car lurched around one of the countless circles set within the radiating avenues of New Delhi, now steadily filling with traffic that streamed towards the city's business and government centres, far from this region of immense jamun trees, large low villas, smooth hedges, closed gates, sentries in sentry boxes, and parakeets in flamboyant trees.

  'But that is the kind of experience, the kind of encounter that India bestows on one like a gift, a jewel,' Raja was fluting as the car drew up at one of the closed gates. The driver honked the horn discreetly, the watchman came hurrying to unlock it, and they swept in and up the drive to the porch that stood loaded with the weight of magenta bougainvillea. 'And,' Raja continued as he let the driver help him out of the car, 'I was so delighted, so overjoyed to find it still so, Ravi, in spite of that frightful man you have installed as the head of your government—an economist, is he not?—yes, please, I shall need that bag almost immediately, and the other too, if I am to bathe and refresh myself, but,' he concluded, triumphantly, 'what further refreshment can one possibly require after one has already been blessed with such, such enchanting acceptance, not, not physical, but positively, positively...'

  'Spiritual?' Ravi ventured, smiling, as he helped Raja up the stairs into the shaded cool of the veranda with its pots of flowers and ferns, a slowly revolving electric fan and an arrangement of wicker furniture where he lowered Raja into an armchair with a flowered cushion.

  It was not that Raja was any more elderly than they. They had all been contemporaries at Oxford, and Raja may even have been a year or two younger. Sarla had complained that his southern ancestry had given Raja an unfair advantage over their northern genes which seemed to produce businessmen and shopkeepers more readily than mathematicians or philosophers. Yet there was about him an air of fragility, of some precious commodity that they had been called upon to cherish. At Oxford Ravi had found himself taking Raja's laundry to be done while Raja, who had neglected to attend to it till he had absolutely nothing left to wear, had stayed in bed under his blankets till Ravi returned with fresh clothes. He was wryly amused as well as a little annoyed to find that he still fell into the trap.

  Sarla was hurrying into the house, to make sure Raja's luggage was carried carefully into the room prepared for him—the bedroom at the back of the house, which Raja loved because it looked onto a garden full of lemon trees and jasmine vines that he said he dreamt about during that part of the year that he spent in Los Angeles—and against Raja's wishes to order breakfast, because, after all, she and Ravi had not benefited from the generosity of the young man with hair like a serpent's nest in the railway carriage, she said a little acidly.

  Why her words sounded acid, she could not say. It was all she could do not to go down on her knees and remove Raja's slippers from his feet, or to bring water in a basin and wash them. She had to sharpen her faculties to fight that urge. But she brought out the coffee pot herself—she had taken the silver coffee service out of storage for Raja's visit—and poured him a cup with all the grace that she had acquired in her years as a diplomat's wife in the embassies and High Commissions where Ravi had 'served', she 'presided'. She could scarcely restrain herself, only tremblingly managed to restrain herself from mentioning that last day in May, that last embrace—oh, it would be so unsuitable, so unsuitable—

  And then a second car came sweeping up the drive, parked beside theirs—an identical car, a silver-grey Ambassador with tinted glass and window curtains—and her sister tumbled out of the driver's seat, a woman almost identical to Sarla, and in an equal state of excitement and agitation. And then they were all embracing each other, after all, successively, simultaneously.

  Maya had not been with them on the bank of the festive, the bacchanalian Isis that May morning; she had not fetched Raja's laundry or cooked him rice on a gas ring on foggy winter nights when he could not walk to the Indian restaurant in the cold, not with his asthmatic condition: Maya had been at the London School of Economics a few years later. Maya had also met her husband at university, but his path had been different from Ravi's. 'No bloody Civil Service for me; I've always thought it most uncivil,' Pravin had declared when Maya suggested it, 'and at this stage of history can you really contemplate anything so reactionary? Are we not moving into the future, free of colonial institutions?' So it had been a political career for Pravin,
not the dirty politics of people Raja had just referred to so disparagingly, but politics as practised by the press, idealistically, morally, scrupulously (even if only on paper). And so, when Maya embraced Raja, it was with vigour, with her head tossed back with pride so that her now grey hair hung from her shoulders with as carefree an air as a young girl might toss her darker, glossier locks, and with a laugh that rang out resonantly. 'What, you've travelled by train in a silk dhoti? Oh Raja, must you go to such extremes when you play the the southern gentleman visiting the barbarians of the north?' and Raja hung upon her shoulder and shook his finger at her, fluting at a higher pitch than ever before, 'Is that husband of yours still playing the patriot while dressed in Harris tweeds, and does he still wear that mouldy felt hat when following the elections amongst the cow-dung patties and buffalo sheds of Bihar?' and Sarla was retreating to the wicker sofa with the coffee tray, glowering, turning ashen and tight-lipped once more. But her occupation of the sofa was strategic—now Maya and Raja could not sit upon it, side by side: it belonged to her, and she could preside, icily, silver coffee pot in hand, looking upon the two as if they were somewhat trying children, and Ravi would give her a look—of sympathy, or pity?—from the stool on which he perched, waiting patiently to be passed a cup.

  She passed it, then said, interrupting Maya who was giving a humorous account of the last election campaign Pravin had covered, 'If to go to the Himalayas is your life's ambition, Raja, then that can easily be achieved. Won't you consider driving up with us when we go for the summer to Winhaven?'

  'Winhaven? Winhaven?' Raja twisted around to her. 'Oh, Sarla, Sarla, the very word, the very name—it recalls—how does it go—

  "I have desired to go