Clear Light of Day Page 3

  She had said the right thing at last. Quite inadvertently, even out of cowardice. It made Baba raise his head and smile, sweetly and gently as he used to do. He even nodded, faintly, in agreement. Yes, Bim, he seemed to say, Bim will decide. Bim can, Bim will. Go to Bim. Tara could not help smiling back at his look of relief, his happy dependence. She turned to leave the room and heard him lift the record and turn it over. As she escaped down the veranda she heard Bing Crosby’s voice bloating luxuriantly out into ‘Ah-h’m dream-in’ of a wha-ite Christmas . . .’

  But now something had gone wrong. The needle stuck in a groove. ‘Dream-in’, dream-in’, dream-in’’ hacked the singer, his voice growing more and more officious. Shocked, Baba’s long hands moved with speed to release it from the imprisoning groove. Then he found the needle grown so blunt and rusty that, as he peered at it from every angle and turned it over and over with a melancholy finger, he accepted it would do no longer. He sighed and dropped it into the little compartment that slid out of the green leather side of the gramophone and the sight of all the other obsolete needles that lay in that concealed grave seemed to place a weight on his heart. He felt defeated and infinitely depressed. Too depressed to open the little one-inch square tin with the picture of the dog on it, and pick out a clean needle to insert in the metal head. It remained empty, toothless. The music had come to a halt. Out in the garden a koel called its wild, brazen call. It was not answered so it repeated the call, more demandingly.

  For a while Baba paced about the room, his head hanging so low that one would have thought it unnatural, physically impossible. Now and then he lifted his hands to his head and ran his long bony fingers nervously through his white hair so that it was grooved and furrowed like the lines of an aged face. The silence of the room, usually so loud with the rollicking music of the ’40s, seemed to admit those other sounds that did not soothe or protect him but, on the contrary, startled him and drove him into a panic—the koel calling, calling out in the tall trees, a child crying in the servants’ quarters, a bicycle dashing past, its bell jangling. Baba began to pace up and down faster and faster as if he were running away from it. Then, when he could bear it no longer, he went to the cupboard and pulled open its door, searched frantically for clothes to wear, pulled out whatever seemed to him appropriate, and began to dress hurriedly, dropping his pyjamas onto the floor, flinging others onto the sagging canvas chair by the bed, hurriedly buttoning and lacing and pulling on and off till he felt sufficiently clothed.

  Without a glance into the mirror on the cupboard door or an attempt to tidy the room, he fled from it.

  Tara, still sitting on the steps with an arm around the veranda pillar, waiting for Bakul to emerge so that she could go in and dress, saw a pale elongated shape lurching and blundering down the veranda and onto the drive, bent almost double as if in pain or in fear—or perhaps because of the sun beating down with white-hot blows. She stood up in fright and it took her a minute to realize it was Baba.

  By then he was already at the gate and had turned out of it into the road. Tara hurried down the steps onto the drive, shading her eyes, her mouth open to call him, but she stopped herself. How old was Baba now? If he wanted to go out, ought he at his age to be called back and asked to explain?

  If she had, Baba would have been grateful. If anything, anyone had stopped him now, he would have collapsed with relief and come crawling home like a thirsty dog to its water bowl. Once, when he had ventured out, a bicycle had dashed against him as he stood hesitating at the edge of the road, wondering whether to cross. The bicyclist had fallen and cursed him, his voice rising to a shrill peak and then breaking on Baba’s head like eggs, or slivers of glass. Another time, he had walked as far as the bus stop but when the bus had arrived there was such a scuffle between those trying to get off and those trying to get on that people were pushed and bumped and shoved and when one man was somehow expelled from the knotted mob, Baba saw his sleeve torn off his shirt, hanging limply as if he had no arm, were an amputee. Baba thought of the man’s face, of the ruined shirt. He heard all those shouts again, the shouts that had been flung at his head, knocking into him till he was giddy with blows.

  He was small. He was standing on the dunes. There was nothing here but the silver sand and the grey river and the white sky. But out of that lunar stillness a man loomed up, military in a khaki uniform and towering scarlet turban, and roughly pushed past him shouting ‘Hato! Hato!’ to make way for a white horse that plunged up out of the dunes and galloped past Baba, crouching on his knees in the sand, the terror of the horse hooves beating through his head, the sand flying back into his face and the voice still commanding ‘Hato! Hato!’

  His knees trembled in anticipation, knowing he would be forced down, or flung down if he continued down the road. But it was as if Tara had given him a push down a steep incline. She had said he was to go. Bim had said he was to go. Bim and Tara, both of them, wanted him to go. He was going.

  His feet in their unfastened sandals scuffed through the dust of Bela Road. Sharp gravel kept slipping into them, prodding him. His arms swung widly, propelling him along. His head bobbed, his white hair flopped. His eyes strained and saw black instead of white. Was he going to faint? Would he fall? Should he stop? Could he? Or would they drive him on? ‘Hato! Hato!’

  Then he heard the crash he knew would come. Instantly he flinched and flung up his arm to protect his face. But it was not he who had crashed. It was a cart carrying a load of planks that had tipped forwards as the horse that drew it fell first onto its knees, then onto its nose and lay squirming in the middle of the road. Baba shrank back, against the wall, and held his arm before his eyes but still he saw what happened: the driver, a dark man with a red rag tied about his head, leapt down from the mound of planks and raised his arm, and a switch or a whip, and brought it down with all his force on the horse’s back. The horse gave a neighing scream, reared up its head with the wet, wringing mane streaming from it, and then stretched out on the stones, a shiver running up and down its legs so that it twitched and shook. Again the man raised the whip, again it came down on the horse’s back, neck, head, legs—again and again. Baba heard screams but it was the man who screamed as he whipped and slashed and beat, screamed abuse at the animal who did not move but seemed to sink lower and lower into the dust. ‘Swine! Son of a swine!’ the man panted, red eyes straining out of the dark face. Suar! Sala! Suar ka bachcha!’ All the time his arm rose up in the air and came down, cutting and slashing the horse’s flesh till black stuff oozed onto the white dust and ran and spread, black and thick, out of the horse.

  Baba raised both his arms, wrapped them about his head, his ears and eyes, tightly, and, blind, turned and stumbled, almost fell but ran on back up the road to the house, to the gate. His shoulder hit the white gate-post so that he lurched and fell to his knees, then he rose and stumbled, his arms still doubled over his eyes so that he should not see and about his ears so that he should not hear.

  Tara saw him as he came climbing up the steps on his knees and ran forwards to help him to his feet. Tugging at his arms to drag them away from his face, she cried ‘Are you hurt? Baba, Baba, say—are you hurt? Has someone hurt you?’ Pulling his arms away, she uncovered his face and saw his eyes rolling in their sockets like a wild horse’s, his lips drawn back from his teeth as if he were racing, and the blue-black shadows that always lay under his eyes spreading over his face like a bruise, wet with his tears. Then she stopped demanding that he should speak, and helped him to his room, onto his bed, rushed out and down the veranda in search of Bim, in search of water. There was no one on the veranda or in the kitchen. The cook had gone out to market. She tilted the earthen water jar to fill a tumbler and hurried back with it, her legs cutting into her nightgown and the water spilling in splashes onto the tiles as she hurried, thinking of Baba’s face. She lifted his head to help him drink but most of it ran down his chin into his shirt. When she lowered his head, he shrank into a heap, shivering, and she stayed a
while, smoothing his hair and patting his cheek till she thought he was quieter, nearly asleep, then went to find Bim.

  But Bakul stepped out of their room, his tie in one hand and his shoes in another, to ask ‘Aren’t you getting ready, Tara? We’ll be late. The car will be here any minute and you know Uncle is very punctual. We mustn’t keep him waiting.’ He went back to finish dressing without having seen Tara’s face or anything there to stop him.

  He noticed nothing—a missing shoe-horn and frayed laces having presented him with a problem meanwhile—till she came in, her shoulders sloping, her hair hanging, and sat down on the foot of the bed instead of going in to dress. Then he spoke more sharply. ‘Why aren’t you getting ready?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll come after all,’ she mumbled. She always mumbled when she was afraid, as if she hoped not to be heard.

  She expected him to explode of course. But even for Bakul it was too hot, the atmosphere of the old house too turgid and heavy to push or manipulate. Bending down to tie two perfect bows, he merely sighed ‘So, I only have to bring you home for a day, Tara, and you go back to being the hopeless person you were before I married you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she muttered, ‘hopeless.’ Like Baba’s, her face looked bruised.

  ‘And you won’t let me help you. I thought I had taught you a different life, a different way of living. Taught you to execute your will. Be strong. Face challenges. Be decisive. But no, the day you enter your old home, you are as weak-willed and helpless and defeatist as ever.’ He stood up and looked down to see if his shoes were bright enough to reflect his face. Nothing less would do. Yes, yes. He shrugged his shoulders inside his shirtsleeves. ‘What should I do with you? I ought to take you away immediately. Let us go and stay with my uncle in New Delhi.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Leave me here.’

  ‘You’re not happy here,’ he said, and the unexpectedness of these words made her look up at him, questioning. ‘Look at your face—so sad, so worried.’ He even came close to her and touched her cheek, very lightly, as if he could hardly bear the unpleasant contact but forced himself to do it out of compassion. ‘If only you would come with me, I would show you how to be happy. How to be active and busy—and then you would be happy. If you came.’

  But she shook her head. She felt she had followed him enough, it had been such an enormous strain, always pushing against her grain, it had drained her of too much strength, now she could only collapse, inevitably collapse.

  Bakul had married her when she was eighteen. He knew her. He left her, saying ‘Then I’ll tell Uncle you are busy with your own family and will come another time,’ and went out to wait for the car.

  He passed Bim as he went through the drawing room. Bim was holding court there—seated on the divan with her legs drawn up under her—like Tara, she had not dressed yet and was still in her nightdress—and on the carpet below sat the students, a brightly coloured bunch of young girls in jeans and in salwar-kameez, laughing and eyeing each other and him as he went through. He raised his eyebrows at Bim and gave her a significant look as if to say ‘This—your history lesson?’

  Bim nodded and laughed and wriggled her toes and waggled her pencil, completely at ease and without the least sense of guilt. ‘No, no, you won’t,’ he heard her say as he went out onto the veranda, ‘you won’t get me started on the empress Razia—nor on the empress Nur Jehan. I refuse. We must be serious. We are going to discuss the war between Shivaji and Aurangzeb—no empresses.’

  The girls groaned exaggeratedly. ‘Please, miss,’ he heard them beg as he sat down on a creaking cane chair to wait, ‘please let’s talk about something interesting, miss. You will enjoy it too, miss.’

  ‘Enjoy? You rascals, I haven’t asked you here to enjoy yourselves. Come on, Keya, please begin—I’m listening—’ and then there was some semblance of order and of a tutorial going on that Bakul could almost recognise and approve. He wondered, placing one leg over the other reflectively, as he had sometimes wondered when he had first started coming to this house, as a young man who had just entered the foreign service and was in a position to look around for a suitable wife, if Bim were not, for all her plainness and brusqueness, the superior of the two sisters, if she had not those qualities—decision, firmness, resolve—that he admired and tried to instil in his wife who lacked them so deplorably. If only Bim had not that rather coarse laugh and way of sitting with her legs up . . . now Tara would never . . . and if her nose were not so large unlike Tara’s which was small . . . and Tara was gentler, more tender . . . He sighed a bit, shifting his bottom on the broken rattan seat of the chair. Things were as they were and had to be made the most of, he always said. At least in this country, he sighed, and just then his uncle’s car appeared at the gate, slowly turned in, its windshield flooded by the sun, and came up the drive to park beneath the bougainvilleas.

  Bim did get Tara to smile before the morning was over, however. Tara was leaning against the veranda pillar, watching the parrots quarrel in the guava trees, listening for a sound from Baba’s room, hoping to hear a record played, when Bim came out with her band of girls and suddenly shouted ‘Ice-cream! Caryhom Ice-cream-wallah!’ and, before Tara’s startled eyes, a bicycle with a small painted van attached to it that had been rolling down the empty, blazing road, stopped and turned in at the gate with its Sikh driver beaming broadly at the laughing girls and their professor.

  Seeing Tara, Bim called out ‘Look at these babies, Tara. When they hear the Caryhom ice-cream man going by they just stop paying any attention to my lecture. I can’t do anything till I’ve handed each of them a cone. I suppose strawberry cones are what you all want, you babies? Strawberry cones for all of them, Sardar-ji,’ she ordered and stood laughing on the steps as she watched him fill the cones with large helpings of pink ice-cream and hand them to the girls who were giggling, Tara realised, as much at their professor as at this childish diversion.

  Bim noticed nothing. Swinging her arms about, she saw to it that each girl got her cone and then had one of them, a pretty child dressed in salwar-kameez patterned with pink and green parrots, carry a dripping cone down the veranda to Tara. ‘Tara,’ she called, ‘that’s for you. Sardar-ji made it specially for you,’ she laughed, smiling at the ice-cream man who had a slightly embarrassed look, Tara thought. Embarrassed herself, she took the slopping cone from the girl and licked it to please Bim, her tongue recoiling at the synthetic sweetness. ‘Oh Bim, if my daughters were to see me now—or Bakul,’ she murmured, as Bim walked past holding like a cornucopia a specially heaped and specially pink ice-cream cone into Baba’s room. Tara stopped licking, stared, trying to probe the bamboo screen into the room where there had been silence and shadows all morning. She heard Bim’s voice, loud and gay, and although Baba made no audible answer, she saw Bim come out without the cone and knew Baba was eating it, perhaps quite happily. There was something magnetic about the icy pink sweetness, the synthetic sweet pinkness, she reflected, licking.

  Now Bim let out a shout and began to scold. One of the girls had tipped the remains of her cone onto the veranda steps for the dog to lick—she had seen him standing by, watching, his tongue lolling and leaking. ‘You silly, don’t you know dogs shouldn’t eat anything sweet? His hair will fall out—he’ll get worms—it’ll be your fault—he’ll be spoilt—he won’t eat his bread and soup now.’

  ‘Let him enjoy himself, miss,’ said the girl, smirking at the others because they all knew perfectly well how pleased Bim was to see them spoil her dog.

  Tara narrowed her eyes at the spectacle of Bim scolding her students and smiling with pleasure because of the attention they had paid her dog, who had now licked up all the ice-cream and was continuing to lick and lick the floor as if it might have absorbed some of the delicious stuff. Remembering how Bim used to scold her for not disciplining her little daughters and making them eat up everything on their plates or go to bed on time, she shook her head slightly.

  But the ice-cream did
have, she had to admit, a beneficial effect all round: in a little while, as the students began to leave the house, prettily covering their heads against the sun with coloured veils and squealing as the heat of the earth burnt through their slippers, the gramophone in Baba’s room stirred and rumbled into life again. Tara was grateful for it. She wished Bakul could see them now—her family.

  When Bakul did come, late in the afternoon, almost comatose from the heat and the heavy lunch he had eaten, to fall onto his bed and sleep, this passage of lightness was over, or overcome again by the spirit of the house.

  Tara, upright in a chair, tried first to write a letter to her daughters, then decided it was too soon, she would wait till she had more to say to them, and put the letter away in her case and tried to read instead, a book from the drawing room bookshelf that had been there even when she was a child—Jawaharlal Nehru’s Letters To A Daughter in a green cloth binding—and sitting on the stuffed chair, spongy and clammy to touch, she felt that heavy spirit come and weigh down her eyelids and the back of her neck so that she was pinned down under it, motionless.

  It seemed to her that the dullness and the boredom of her childhood, her youth, were stored here in the room under the worn dusty, red rugs, in the bloated brassware, amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases, behind the yellowed photographs in the oval frames—everything, everything that she had so hated as a child and that was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of some dull, uninviting provincial museum.

  She stared sullenly, without lifting her head, at a water-colour above the plaster mantelpiece—red cannas painted with some watery fluid that had trickled weakly down the brown paper: who could have painted that? Why was it hung here? How could Bim bear to look at it for all of her life? Had she developed no taste of her own, no likings that made her wish to sweep the old house of all its rubbish and place in it things of her own choice? Tara thought with longing of the neat, china-white flat in Washington, its cleanliness, its floweriness. She wished she had the will to get to her feet and escape from this room—where to? Even the veranda would be better with the pigeons cooing soothingly, expressing their individual genius for combining complaint and contentment in one tone and the spiky bougainvilleas scraping the outer walls and scattering their papery magenta flowers in the hot sulphur-yellow wind. She actually got up and went to the door and lifted the bamboo screen that hung there, but the blank white glare of afternoon slanted in and slashed at her with its flashing knives so that she quickly dropped the screen. It creaked into place, releasing a noseful of dust. On the wall a gecko clucked loudly and disapprovingly at this untoward disturbance. She went back to the chair. If she could sleep, she might forget where she was, but it was not possible to sleep with the sweat trickling down one’s face in rivulets and the heat enclosing one in its ring of fire.