Silverfish, page 18
My husband hadn’t been the only one who had passed away in these years. Many others had died too, including Sarala-didi, three of my brothers-in-law. The ironclad rule of the past had loosened over time. Women still didn’t go outdoors, but some of the newer brides were far less meticulous about observing the rituals and the fasts, and no one was outraged, or at least voice their objections brutally enough, as would have been natural in the older days. There were also those rumours about the increasing corrosion of the estate’s prosperity, the drying patches in its fountain of wealth; the determination of some of the younger men to stay away from ancestral lifestyles, the reckless days and nights of wine and women, hunting and travelling abroad, the most expensive prostitutes and singers of the land. They wanted different things these days. A couple of them had left for England to study law, and there was talk about young men entering high echelons of the government service, jobs long reserved for the British.
There were winds of change, even behind these high stone walls.
In the days to follow, Pratap and I sat in his study before the books I’d long lost on the way, crawling my way back through stronger and stronger sentences and intricate passages. And most wondrous of all, without trying to hide any of it. A few stinging words did fly around in the women’s quarters about a widow’s obscene wishes to flout the rules of the scriptures, but there was no one to snatch the books away from us any more.
Once in a rare moment, through a haze of smiles and tears, a confused, scared and stubborn nineteen-year old girl would float before my eyes, sitting right here, in this room, many, many years ago, hiding her only book under her sewing, groping her way through the shower of words in the next room. Once in a rare moment, maybe. But most of the time I surged ahead, through the tales and legends for children, finally to the novels of Bankim-babu, even to the forbidden Bishbriksha, the poison tree for the ruin of men, the destruction of family.
Sometimes the scrap of an unsettling memory would come back, the correct pronunciation of a tricky consonant, a strange rule of the inflection of words, a throwaway speck of wisdom on the compounding of letters and words, disturbing tremors all from a past life. I would not know what to do with the unruly scrap of memory, how to cripple it, kill its last trace, revive it in its new life without looking away from my son’s smiling eyes, the spectre of honesty in them clear as crystal.
Back in those days I would tell them that I had to sit close as my child studied, to keep him from crying out for his mother. One day he had heard it all. With the gravest face a five year old had ever had, he had looked up at me, ‘Mother, I don’t cry while studying, and I can study without you watching me all the time, you know.’ I had hugged him and said, ‘But my moonbeam, I can’t stay a moment with you far away, that’s why I sit in the next room while you say your alphabets before the tutor.’
The ways of the gods were mysterious, beyond the reach of the human mind. They had not struck me down then, not that very instant.
The tremors would come back to my voice, my eyelids would flutter; I wouldn’t dare look up to my son, but would he know anything, remember anything, what with a hundred thousand things swimming in his head!
Just the words grew in life, meaning flowed back into the strange arms and antennas.
One by one, thirteen years passed.
To think widowhood to be my moment of liberation, the ashes of dead vermilion, to think that it would bring back the power and meaning of the written word!
Would my vanity stop at that!
Instead, I create the mockery of words on paper, words on which the ink will dry, and time will wizen into papery flakes, crumble, make its way back to the dust it came from.
I steal away time from the hours I should be spending in prayer. I steal away time from those hours, sit in my bare room, a ghostly memory of the lavish, regally furnished bedroom with Venetian mirrors and mahogany dressing tables that I had as a wife. I sit in this spare-shadowed room of clear, mean lines and write these words, scouring the depths of my memory of the years within these stone walls.
They call me strange names in the women’s quarters, the wives and the widows and the maids, the crazy witch-widow who dabbles in ink and paper, steals away prayer time to sit in the maze of paper. But times have changed within these stone walls, behind the lion-gates, and no one comes and snatches the quill away from my hand. The words just swirl around like screeching bats in the dark evening air.
My name is Kamal.
My first child-lisping on paper, the telling of my name, a common one, possessed by hundreds of women in this land who would never see the world outside their doors more than a few times in their lives; a weak line drawn on water that would melt away before getting etched in its wholeness.
I am a widow.
After etching the water patch of one’s name, nothing more remains to say about oneself.
Once, I had been a wife.
The red-draped, bejewelled wife in a great family.
And then, as one practises the nuances of the past tense, it’s time to return to the past when there had been life inside this dry shell of a body, when I could show my pretty face in auspicious moments and be treasured for it, not whisked away as an ill-omened shadow.
Before that, I had been a little girl in a happy family, in a pretty village, river-nourished, grain-blessed, all green below, all blue above.
The words grow with each sentence.
From the river-nourished country to the marbled-arched city palace; matchstick-armed, scantily-dressed girl to jewellery-bedecked, vermilion-smeared bride, and back, back to brandish the intricacies of the past tense, the fresh-sprouting words on paper, words I’d swirled around in my mouth for ever and for ever. Words growing like leaves in the monsoon-moist, gangly shoots that my scribbled sentences had been, in the cobwebbed bareness of my present, time stolen from the chants and flower-offerings before the clay icons in the prayer-room.
The story of a life, a past life beyond this river of death, in the sun-warmed country of Bengal, of the softest, richest soil, cows with the largest eyes, the shadiest banyan trees, the quiet tanks and ponds, the life of forest-picnics and household chores done in tiny hands, the design of rice-paste drawn on the thresholds, the mud-moulded courtyards, the story of a life left on the other side of the great river. All growing through strings of sentences before me as if I’d been talking to my long lost mates, in the bird-whistling, cricket-whirring riversides, the windswept, pickle-fragrant terraces under the midsummer sky. The story of the rare-cobalt stretch of sky over the open courtyard in the heart of a palace of massive stone pillars and iron and silver beams, many-bricked obelisks, the open courtyard of crying, shrieking, laughing, loving, hurting, shackled women with the fragrant red dye of alta on their silver-belled ankles, the aroma of fragrant oil on flowing tresses of black hair.
Is the pain ever less?
My mind goes back to the story Pratap had told me one day, struck with shock, of the hare-lipped baby daughter born to one of the sweepers’ wives, of the despair the tiny wretched piece of female flesh had brought into her parents’ lives, the darkness in which she had been born. ‘Babu, who’ll marry a sweeper’s daughter with a twisted mouth? Who’ll look after her when we’re gone? Would she have died in her mother’s stomach!’ Six months later, as it so often happened in the families of this land’s starving, sickly millions, perhaps with an extra helping of negligence, the tiny ugly thing contracted a high fever, throwing her parents in despair. One afternoon, a week later, the sweeper turned up on my son’s doorsteps, with red-rimmed eyes, hair like a madman’s. His daughter had died, and he wanted money for alcohol, just like on New Year’s Day, festivities, births. ‘She’d have died anyway, the little wretched thing, she’d just come in our household for a few days to torture us, my lord.’
The cow dung fire of the widow’s meal for me to get drunk on, the cow dung fire like the flames leaping out of fragrant firewood that would have burned my red sari-draped, bejewelled body next to my husband’s wrinkled corpse even a few decades ago.
The ravings of a madwoman, the soft indulgence of one who lives in death, crawls closer to the real end of it all on the day of every fast, every chant of god’s name, the recording of bubbly gossip on sun-burned terraces, musty hallcorners, the claims of dowries over dolls’ weddings, the plucking of wild fruits, the words stifled up inside over years, words that can only come up on ink-dipped quill-tips in the dead silence of the stone walls around.
Half-mad gypsy women spread tall tales from village to village, spin their strange yarns across weed-infested woods, the saffron-clothed minstrel pulls on his one-stringed instruments to sing his yearning ballads across the country, through the fragrant air of this land where the songs float like a cloud of tears on a breeze. I sit between these dead walls, strain my soul dry, play my little game. I talk to the papers, the papers I soil daily with the gossip of my mind, my dreams and nightmares of the past.
I talk to them of fear.
An unknown fear clouds my mind, a fear of violence ahead, of the sharp smell of metal in the air, the fear I see casting long shadows on my son’s face, mingling with the anger and promise tightening his jaws. These past few months, I’ve only seen him a few times, but a mother knows her son’s mind when she sees him, knows of the unknown lurking inside him, tormenting him day and night.
It’s been years since he has stopped sitting with me, reading passages from novels out to me, helping me with my reading. I did not try to stop him when he started moving away from my daily life. He was a man, and a man’s world is outside the house, in the great gushing river of life outside the walls of this house. I wasn’t going to try to hold him back. After all, as much as my child loved me, I never had him close to me as much as I craved, as much as I would have, had it been a daughter as she grew up before my very eyes. My boy was over twenty-five years of age now, and I couldn’t hold him back from the world even if I wanted to.
That would have saddened me deep inside. But what I sense around the fleeting, shadowy figure of Pratap these rare moments spills a cold, grainy fear.
I see him between weeks these days, sometimes months. Often during these times, I know, he’s not in the house, as on many occasions I send for him, sometimes have a maid take one of his favourite desserts or pickles over to his rooms. The maid would come back every time with the news that the young lord was out, and that he hadn’t come back the previous night, or the night before. I’d spend my days in worry; but who’s heard of a man that loves the inside of his own house? Hadn’t his father kept me waiting with dinner ready, night after night after night? Pratap was different, sprung from the same loins but worlds apart. And yes, this was different too. With my husband, I always knew of those dark caverns he vanished into, sucked away from home and wife, into the houses of the dancing girls, courtesans, drinking houses, hunting in forests, sometimes away to the western states for weeks with his favourite concubine. I always knew them. He never tried to hide, and they were so few and so easy to name, from the dark bags under his eyes, from the smell of alcohol on his breath, from the perfume. It killed me daily inside, to lose a husband daily to the dark caverns, but it was all within the realm of the known, the age-old, the stonecast script of wives’ lots in this great house.
And it was a big house, a palace of endless caverns, endless fears and worries in times that had none of the earlier certitudes, the steadiness of yore. It was a huge many-branched tree of a house whose trunk had started breaking away, the elder men who had held it together dying, the new families in the different wings sucked in their daily whirlpool of pain, and happiness, and worry. No one had time to notice if one of its young men wasn’t to be seen for weeks, months, maybe.
Sometimes, other men would come in with Pratap, men of his age, many older, a few in their teens.
I would hear of it from the maids; sometimes I saw it myself – men who carried the same silent shadow around them, all of them. Friends who used to come before, in the earlier years had been full of robust talk, laughter and spirit as they debated matters I had never heard inside these walls – the education of women, new laws of the British, anger and unrest in distant parts of the country, of the globe, poetry and painting from distant lands, passionate, eager crystals of words that echoed and echoed again in the rooms, arguments sparked off at every corner, swirling around me as I stood on the threshold, with a bowl of sweets I had brought for Pratap, wondering at the strange man that was my son, wondering at his friends, some rich like him, some poorer than our sweepers, wondering at them, the rush of alien wind in this house, in this land.
But these new friends never raised their voices above a whisper, and they fell to a silence at the sound of footsteps outside the door. If there was passion in their voice it was muffled. One man was here for about two weeks, staying back in Pratap’s room even as my son left the house for days. He was a strange man, in his late thirties maybe, with a cheek full of unshaven beard, matted hair, never leaving the room, scaring the maids with his ways, taking his meals in the room, served by the servant with whom Pratap had left his instructions.
One of these days, when Pratap was back home for a few hours before dashing out again, alone in his room, looking like a man marooned on an island, his clothes old and unwashed, his eyes red from lack of sleep, I had entered the room, burst out in words long withheld.
‘What do you do these days, Pratap? Where are you gone for days and who are these strange men around you all the time?’ I stood near him; something in the air stopped me from touching his chin lovingly as I always did. ‘Don’t lie to your mother, Pratap, tell me the truth.’
He looked up to me, and for a moment I saw the crystal image of the innocent five-year old in his eyes, the image that vanished like lightning, leaving in its place, the tired, hunted face of a fugitive.
‘The truth, mother, is that the winds of change are coming, and this time there is no running away, for none.’ He sighed, looked out of the window, quickly packed up the cloth bundle he had before himself, pushed it inside a desk.
‘You don’t eat properly these days; you’re not home for weeks. Did you take a look at yourself in the mirror? I am really worried for you, my son.’ I cried out, but I couldn’t touch him still. There was something about him that pushed me away farther.
‘My heart breaks too, when I look at you,’ he said slowly, mysteriously. ‘My heart breaks too when I look at my mother, our mother.’
He left the room as softly as he had spoken.
He would only speak in riddles, in that tone of mystery and apocalypse, his eyes forever away. I would never get anything out of him but a congealing of fears that something loomed in the horizon, something dark and unknown.
After he hadn’t been home for another two weeks, I stepped inside his room, sensing, as I crossed the threshold, the tense knots in the air, the dank smell of secrecy, of the airless interior of closely-shuttered rooms, the whispers I’d heard echoing in this room a hundred thousand times. The maids had cleaned the room as they did every morning, but they didn’t have to do the bed, it was untouched, unslept on for many days, not a wrinkle on the tidied linen. My son’s clothes hung in the corner clotheshorse, his beautiful, rich-blue Kashmiri shawl, the silken, embroidered panjabi and dhoti he hadn’t worn for now well over a year; but they were there, brushed and tidied carefully by the servants. I walked up to his study table. There were many English books that I could make nothing of; I didn’t know a letter in that language. But there was a copy of the novel Anandamath, the tale of the armed revolt against British rulers led by the ascetics of Bengal, and a play called Nildarpan. Going through the first few pages, I realized it was something about the uprising of the indigo farmers against the British plantation owners.
‘My heart breaks too, when I look at you,’ his strange, slow words came back to me. ‘My heart breaks too when I look at my mother, our mother.’
The drawers of his desk were locked. The servants were not allowed to touch these. But I knew where he kept the keys, and I opened the top drawer.
It was chock-a-block with more pamphlets, paper, and the one below had some old clothes. With confusion clumping my insides, I had opened the third drawer. The cotton bundle I had seen in his hand that day lay there. Carefully, I unwrapped it.
A pistol lay inside, and pieces of unused cartridge.
Slowly, I locked the drawers, stepped back inside my room. A pistol, or even larger guns were not unusual in this house. I’d seen many with my husband, brothers-in-law. The servants and gatekeepers had many guns; robbers attacked rich households sometimes, and they also came handy with stubborn peasants who refused to pay taxes, I had heard my husband say many times; and of course there was hunting in the country estates. But it was the way the pistol lay in Pratap’s desk-drawer, bundled in that soft, grimy cotton rag, in that empty room of the unslept bed, of the air of thick, solid whispers still looming heavy. There was something worlds away from the massive double-barrelled gun that hung in my husband’s living room, oiled and cleaned by his servants every now and then, proud and gleaming in the sunlight. There was a slithering shadow around this gun that clogged my throat.
Pratap had never cared about guns or hunting before, my soft, fresh-limbed son, almost feminine in the curve of his mouth, the suppleness of his skin, the tenderness of the passion with which he rushed into the prayer-room and threw his arms around me.
Pratap didn’t come back the following week, or the week after. But soon one evening, my life changed again.
The sun had set about an hour before. The last of the red hues had disappeared beyond the western sky, and dark shadows had engulfed the terrace.
Even today, nearly thirty years after life inside these walls, I come away to the terrace alone when I was sad, hurt, lost to my own self.
