Greatest Short Stories (19 page)

21

The Silver Bangles
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The lines on the corners of her mouth became deeper, the faded texture of her pale face turned livid, and her sleek brows knitted into a frown, as soon as Shrimati Gopi Goel saw the silver bangle on the wrist of the sweeper girl, Sajani…

She drifted away from the kitchen where she was frying sweet bread to please her husband on the first day of the welcome month of rains, shravan, and she took position by the
jallied
window of the living room, overlooking the verandah. She wanted to see what effect Sajani’s silver bangle, would have on the owner of the house.

She had seen, passing on his face, the ghost of a smile every time he had seen Sajani arrive. Sometimes, there had been a light in his eyes which she could not help mistaking for a mischievious twinkle. And, once or twice, she felt, she had caught him ‘red-handed’ or rather ‘red-headed’, because he had looked up to the untouchable girl with the segment of his lascivious lips slavering and wet, even as he had hummed the phrase of the folk song:

“Sajani, I wake up in a hot sweat in the night…”

As she had surmised, she saw from the window the confirmation of his interest in Sajani quite clearly. A smile brimmed over his face, the eyes lit up, the mouth puckered, and he said with a hearty bluff designed to hide exaltation on seeing the girl:

‘Ao ji, Ao, come, Sajani, you are late this morning…’

Shrimati Gopi Goel felt her heart throb, in spite of herself, at the intimate strain in her husband’s voice as he greeted the sweeper girl, specially in the lilting manner in which he pronounced her name: ‘sajaniai…’

She heard the girl respond, shyly draping her headcloth across one side of her face, but with obvious pleasure at being taken notice of, on the other side of her face: ‘the rains…

Shrimati Gopi Goel tried to explore the young woman’s visage. In the half concealed, half revealed profile, she thought she could detect a radiance, which seemed to rise from the flush of youth, as well as from the vanity of being admired, and the meaningful exaggeration, the emphasis of near song in his pronounciation of her name.

‘Oh, Mundu, ask, ‘them’ to give Sajani a sweet poora…’ Shri Ram Goel called to the servant boy as he lifted his gaze from the
Tribune
to caress the trim, small crouching figure of the sweeper, girl wielding the broom on the verandah. ‘them’ will give Sajani everything.’ commented Shrimati Gopi Goel.

‘Bibiji, I am unworthy,’ said Sajani apologetically. ‘Master is king to the poor’…

Could she restore between herself and him, asked Shrimati Gopi Goel in her nerves, the actuality of any connection now. At the end of her heart’s echo, there was the sinking feeling that there had been no connection at all.

Only he had taken her after their marriage as a kind of ritual, because the orthodox brotherhood put them on the terrace of the family house in Amritsar by themselves. She had been so frightened. The shame of exposing any part of her body, including her face, instilled into her by her mother had suffused her face with blushes, soaked her clothes in sweat, and she had lain back supinely, offering no resistance and no help. And he had turned away and soon begun to snore… Since then the ritual had been repeated for five years, becoming completely mechanical, without the intervention of words-automatic, like the gestures of old puppets… In spite of this routine, however, because of the commencement of some kind of feeling in her body, which would make her limbs warms and opulent, which would send swirling waves of desire, pushing her from side to side in the ocean of hell, which would torment her in the nights floating in the incandescent air, she would respond with a frightened apathy couched in the form of blandishments of ennui…

Thus her underjaw hardened, her lips were parted, almost as though by a tremor, and her eyes jutted out. She wished she could confront them both with the accusation:

‘Lovers!’ But she knew that her husband would stave off any direct words with the evasive calm of the practised hypocrite in some neat little phrase from the poem.

To be sure, even without her uttering a sigh, he had scanned her spying figure behind the jailed window and recited a made-up verse:

‘Ah, between me and this bird here, there stands the shadow of despair…’

‘What are you talking about?… I came to say: are you going to get ready to go to office or not?’… Breakfast is ready!!! It is no use having the
pooras
cold!!!

The shrillness of her voice compelled Shri Ram Goel to be sweeter still.

‘In this opaque heart of mine, there is only poetry but no office — I hate the outline of that prison…’

‘Poetry will not give us bread!…’

‘Ah there is no way to tame this shrew’, he mumbled and he folded the paper, stole a glance at the shapely curves of Sajani’s body, yawned to cover the retreat of his eyes from the innocent pleasure of his ascending soul, and got up.

Shrimati Gopi Goel believed that her husband had deposited bits of his poetaster’s soul in her every time he had come near her… And she did not want to allow any of this deposit to be left anywhere else, especially in the body of Sajani, to whom he had already addressed his insinuating love words, in that half-joking, half embarassed manner of the heart-squanderer, even as he deposited on the palm of the sweeper girl’s hand occasional tips of money.

As she sat down to make
pooras
for him with her own hands, she fancied the feeling her secret heart, had conferred upon her the right to the exclusive possession of his glances, his words, his embraces, and that none could have the privilege of encroaching upon her vested interests.

‘You have burnt every second poora for the one you have made — and anyhow they are all cold,’ Shrimati Goel said. ‘Let me make them…’ She said this to Mundu, as she really wanted to admonish someone just now.

And as though this irritation with the servant boy had heightened her devotion to the fictional image of her husband, she burr-burred:

‘I am burning’.

Actually, the hot glow of the fire in the earthen chulha had induced heat in her body, which she mistook for the warmth for him.

‘My life,’ she said, ‘do finish dressing up. You are, standing before the mirror like a bridegroom today…’

‘I would not mind going through a marriage, again!’ he answered lightly.

‘With whom?’ She asked, disturbed by the ambiguity of his speech.

‘With you’, he said, cornered.

This reassured her. She paused for a moment, put all the
pooras
fried so far, back into the pan sizzling with hot butter, and then craning her head to see if he had addressed his remarks to her or to Sajani, she found that the sweeper girl was, in fact in the room where he confronted the looking glass.

She stirred the hot oil with the perforated spoon and, with a histrionic ability far in excess of her usual placid manner she asserted:

‘Already, we are one, my life… Already, you have changed me, from my shyness into a wanton… Like Mira, I am the Gopi of my Krishna…’

‘I should not seek the Lord in this way, if I were you!’ he said cunningly. ‘such devotion will bring pain…’

‘But, my life-why?’ she protested. ‘I am your…’ She wanted to say. ‘I am your servant’, but the presence of Mundu prevented her from mouthing his intimate, servile utterance.

‘Oh why, Oh why, oh why…’ Shri Ram Goel intoned the words, trying to clothe the atmosphere with the aura of a bluff, because he was waiting for the moment when he could meet Sajani’s eyes just once before going to the office, so that the day should pass happily, poetically, specially in this lover-like weather, when the clouds hovered over the town, spreading the cool of heaven everywhere and making the green parrots fly in droves towards the freedom of the skies.

‘But why?’ she insisted. ‘Why will my devotion bring more pain?’

‘Because, in one of the two, who have become one, takes it into his head to depart, as when you suddenly decide to go to your mother’s home in a sulk, the pain which this causes is the most virulent disturbance… There is an emptiness in one’s life. And the partner who is left behind has to try to fill the vessel again with nectar…’

This profound decorative speech was made in so deliberately light-hearted a voice that Shrimati Goel was amused flattered and reassured.

At the moment, she saw Shri Ram Goel pressing a ten paisa coin on the palm of Sajani. Actually, he had merely placed the coin on the sweeper girl’s open hand and not pressed it. But the insensate imagination of Shrimati Goel fancied as though this act of charity had established the connection of love between those two in a final and clear manner. She even thought that she had seen them exchange glances which were like shooting stars.

The wife felt like upsetting the cauldron of boiling butter on the heads of the two lovers. But the imperturbable calm on the countenance of Shri Ram Goel offset any such wild action. Instead, she dipped her head coyly and cooed to him like an innocent lover.

‘I am going to give you the
pooras
fried with my own hands-not those done by Mundu!’… Did you notice the silver bangles on that low woman’s wrist! How she preens herself-this sweeper! I wish her mother would come to do our house and not this film star.

The eyelids of Shri Ram Goel dipped before these words. He carried the hot
pooras
to his mouth and pretended to have burnt his tongue. And he rolled his eyes with a mock humour to cover his retreat from the defence of his innocence and poetry to the fool’s paradise where the illusion of marriage must go on, so that Shrimati Gopi Goel may believe that she was his only love, his otherself, the better half.

‘And what about the silver bangles you are wearing?… Which lover has given them to you?’ Shrimati Gopi Goel asked Sajani as though her mouth was that of a loud policeman’s.

‘Bibiji, we survive by your grace…’ Sajani said meekly.

‘God is looking down on the oven of fire in your heart, and he will condemn you to burn in the hell of your own making, if you don’t look out!’, Shrimati Gopi Goel challenged the girl.

‘Hai Bibiji — What have I done?’ the sweeper girl sighed and turned pale.

‘What have you not done? You have seduced all the men of the neighbourhood with your smiles. ‘Bag of dirt that you are! And you ask me innocently ‘What have I done?’

From the hot air of the kitchen, the blue anger of Shrimati Gopi Goel travelled like sparks of fire and thus hung in the atmosphere like festoons of smoke over the trembling figure of Sajani.

‘My mother brought the silver bangles — they are the first offering for my betrothal!’ the untouchable girl explained. And then she looked up to the mistress with her nose bedewed with perspiration, her frank forehead clear, and her eyes filled with tears of innocence accused of guilt by someone.

‘Lies won’t help to make you people honest!’ charged Shrimati Gopi Goel. ‘Let me see if these were not stolen from my house…’

Sajani put her hand forward.

‘How can I be sure that this profligate husband of mine, who is so generous to you, has not taken them out of my box of jewellery and given them to you.’

‘Bibiji’, protested Sajani.

Shrimati Goel answered without listening:

‘I know the kind of lovers who look separate, but are drawn by the invisible words of mock poems, and who indulge in all the extravagances of connection, without an embrace…’

‘I only like to hear Babuji talk’ the girl said. ‘He is a learned man and speaks so many fine words…’

‘Don’t you be familiar with me and talk of his fine words you like to hear!!! Only take off those silver bangles which he has stolen from my box and given to you!”

The perfume of Shri Ram Goel’s words evaporated before the disillusioned gaze of Sajani. She realised that she should never have uttered her admiration for the Master of the house. Their eyes had once met. But she was not guilty. Her head swirled. And she crumpled up in a swoon on the floor.

‘Get up and go out and don’t you come into this house again. You have raised your head to the sky — low people, wearing silver bangles!!! Don’t your know that untouchable in the south are not supposed to wear silver at all… And you go posing like a cheap film star… Go die!’

Sajani had lost the use of her muscles, but not of her heart. She began to sob as she sat huddled in a corner of the verandah. But each movement of her throat was like a knife jab, bringing more sobs, as though the fainting fit had been succeeded by hysteria, the sobs welling from the belly where lay years of humiliations, now thrusting up like daggers on her sides.

The sorrow of the sweeper girl made Shrimati Gopi Goel more angry.

‘Go, get out and never enter this house again! Thief! You have not only stolen the bangles, but also my—‘

She dared not finish her harsh words, because the acknowledgement of the loss of her husband to Sajani might turn out to be the confirmation of the fact-and that would be inauspicious, because if you say that’, it often comes…’

Sajani lifted her head as a dove updives off the earth to fly across the valley, threatened by a rough wind…

^*
From
Lajwanti and Other Stories
.

22

The Thief
^*

The ‘hoom’ of the summer months in India is inexplicable, except in terms of an arilessness which seems to dissolve everything about one slowly and surely into a vague nothingness. Perhaps only a graph could illustrate it, because it is as much a sound effect as sense data, and sound can be drawn. Or, may be, one could dispose certain daubs of paint in such a way as to break the exact symbolism of the Wheel of Life in a Tibetan scroll, and show all the concrete objects falling away, crumbling like the edges of the earth on judgment day, the stars breaking, the comets shaking, the seas full of fire and the Sun alone standing there on high, a magnificent orb of brightness; A cruel, blood-sucking demon, scorching all sentient things as in some prehistoric war of the elements…

Ganesh always felt the listessness of half death when he got up in the mornings, the heavy lids on his eyes literally ached as they opened, and no amount of stretching would stir the cells of his body into a sense of more than the doubt that he existed. So he generally crawled out of bed and proceeded towards the small balcony on the first floor of his ancestral mansion, there to inhale deep breaths of any air that was going. But there was seldom even a movement of a: leaf or a dust speck such as could be called a breeze. Only the ‘hoom’ mixed here with certain asafoetid smells which rose from the open drains of damp lanes, the smoke of centuries and the rubbish of days that like a sore out of the huge bin on the corner of Gupta Road (named after his family) and King George’s Road (named after George V, ‘the Sailor King,’ who stood enshrined in marble fifty yards away in his coronation robes).

Although the ‘hoom’ persisted and there was no fresh air to breathe, there was a good reason why Ganesh Prashad reappeared to the balcony with such unfailing regularity. For, since the scarcity in the South, the town’s population had swelled with beggars, and among these was a woman with a child who had taken shelter on the marble steps at the foot of old King George’s statue.

The slippery pads of her buttocks swayed before his gaze in zig-zags, as she walked away from the rubbish bin to the steps of the statue, after collecting a crust or a raw vegetable peel to chew. And as she drifted about like this, Ganesh felt a yearning in his blood, and his breath came and went quickly, until he was nearly in the utter hush of the mornings with the heat produced by the maddening waves of desire. His aching eyelids ached more sharply in the blinding glare and yet he could not keep his eyes from groping across the blaze, among the group of people who clustered round the steps of the statue or the rubbish bin, for the form with the swaying hips.

The fascination had been overwhelming from the start, for the first impression of the triangle formed by her things had made his sensations swirl in a giddy wave. But the memory of this impact had been sucked in by the sagging nerves of his sleep doped body, and had gradually become a vague reaction with which other elements had mingled.

For instance, he had felt a distinct wave of nausea cum pity when he had seen her pick up a rotten banana peel from the rubbish bin and lick it. And he had wanted to run down and tell her that she would get cholera if she ate anything out of that bin. But he was afraid that if he went and singled her out for sympathy the other beggars might notice him and beat him up, for they still seemed to have enough strength left to guard the honour of their women-folk vigilantly. And as he could not do much about it he had just stood and stared at her, with the dull thud of an ache at the back of his head.

On another day, Ganesh had seen the beggar woman feeding her child on a bared breast. And that had aroused a feeling of unbearable tenderness in him, a tenderness, however, which gnawed at his vitals and aroused a lust of which the nether point was fixed somewhere in the memories of his own childhood.

And later, all these feelings had mixed with yet another — with a disgust he had suddenly felt on imagining her unwashed, dishevelled body in his arms, the putrid sore of her mouth touching his, the mouth which had eaten dirt and the filth of the rubbish bin, which had drunk the scum of the drains.

And yet, in spite of all the contradictory feelings, the first fascination of her swaying buttocks lasted, and the irresistible feeling which spread the confusion of a cloud over his senses, so that time and space ceased to exist and no consideration of duty or shame baulked his drunken gaze. And under the impulse of this distended desire, he would stand fixed to the balcony the whole morning though he be late for the office, until his elder brother, with whom he worked in the family firm of solicitors, began to notice the waywardness of his behaviour.

Once, he had tried to work up enough audacity to attract the woman’s attention. But, being a timid, respectable creature, he had to summon all the crazy impulses in his being to exercise the demons of destruction in him and beckon them to help him. The whole thing was a joke, he had sought to tell himself, the whole world was a joke and nothing was really stable. He himself, inheriting half the wealth of his dead father, was yet a slave to all the inhibitions and prohibitions of his elder brother and sister-in-law, living a confined, conventional life contrary to everything he had learnt at college, and in full view of the disintegration, death and disease about him. And if it was all a joke, then this woman was a leer, an abject, worthless nothing, an ignorant, illiterate and dumb creature except that she possessed a pair of hips like boulders, the swaying of which excited him and from which he might get the pleasure of a moment, a mere particle of time in the long aeons of eternity where nothing counted or mattered. But, though the need for hypocrisy and circumlocution to build up an argument resulted in coining of a number of euphemisms, he could not get away from the basic human feelings of pity and tenderness.

For, every day he was reminded of the incident in his youth when he had accused a beggar, who used to come up the lane on the right hand side of this house, of stealing a silk dhoti from his study on the ground floor, and had stood by while the servants beat up the beggar. In his younger days he had willed himself into the belief that he had actually seen the beggar rush out of his room with the dhoti, but since then he had felt less and less sure about it, and was, in fact, convinced that he had been guilty of snobbery with violence against an innocent man. And how, this hangover of an unkind act against one beggar had become an undertone beneath the lust for another, and the mingling of these made for a restlessness which was obvious in the increasingly frequent nervous twitch of his neck.

As he stood there one day, he felt he could not bear it. He could see the woman’s breasts undraped, where her sari had slipped off as she crouched by the statue and washed the grit out of her child’s eyes. And he felt the rustling of a strange song in his ears, the loam-song of dizzy desire mounting to the crescendo of a titanic choir. And the flow of a passionate warmth spread from his loins upwards to his eyes, making them more heavy-lidded and soporific than they had been when he had just awakened.

For long moments he tried to check his instinct to look deeper, to caress the amplitude of her haunches, an instinct which was driving him crazy. But he could feel her presence inflaming his body like a slow forest fire, which comes creeping up from the roots like smoke but becomes a wild red blaze suddenly in one crucial moment.

And as he was choked with desire, his neck twitched like that of a snake in the burning forest, and his vision was clouded altogether. Breathing heavily, hot, suffocated, he lifted his elbows from the wooden railings on which they rested and tried to steady himself.

The woman had now picked up her child and was feeding him at her right breast as she sat cross legged on the ground. But the little one was whining, and shrieking, partly from the pain he had felt at having the thick crusts of grit removed from his eyes, but mainly because there was hardly any milk in his mother’s breasts.

Ganesh’s passion seemed to congeal as he heard the cries; he could feel an almost tangible loosening of his flesh, and though he was still soporific he realised that he must go and bathe and dress.

But, even as he was withdrawing his gaze after a furtive stare at her haunches, he saw her hit the child with the palm of her hand and trust the nipple of her left breast into the mouth of her son. As Ganesh lingered to see what her second breast looked like, he heard the child yelling continuously. And, now, as though it were a revelation, the fact dawned upon him that there was no milk in the woman’s breasts, and that her child, who gnawed at her like a hungry rat, was shrieking with the need of his young life for sustenance.

He stood tense, as though he had a vision, and his head was bent with a humility such as he had never known before, a craven, abject feeling of shame that a mother should have to hit her child in his presence because she had no milk in her breasts to give him, that she should have no milk because probably she had no food herself. The joke, if it was a joke, the leer of her mouth, as well as the general ridiculousness of the world, was far too grim a joke to be merely laughed at. And, though she was unknown to him, an utter stranger, here today and dead tomorrow, she concerned him, if only because he had allied himself in his mind with desire for her.

As soon as the passion had become compassion in his body he had decided upon a course of action.

He turned round with a face knotted as though with revulsion against himself, and rushed downstairs towards the kitchen. It was just possible that by some miracle his sister-in-law might still be having her bath or lingering over her prayers. If so, he could get to the storeroom and get out a bag of grain and give it to the woman and her family on the steps of the statue.

When he got to the kitchen, he found that the course was, indeed, clear. There was only Biju, the servant boy, peeling vegetables there. But the storeroom was locked and the keys, ostensibly, hung at one end of his sister-in-law’s sari.

‘Where is Bibiji?’ he asked the servant impetuously. ‘she is having a bath,’ Biju said, Ganesh swayed histrionically as though to yawn and stretch in order to bluff the boy. Then he drifted away up the stairs towards the bedroom occupied by his brother and sister-in-law. His brother would be away on his morning’s constitutional in the garden, and, with luck, his sister-in-law had undressed in the bedroom and left her bunch of keys there.

With beating heart and anxious face he sneaked into his brother ’s bedroom and looked around. He was lucky. The bunch of keys was on the dressing table. He took it.

But, before rushing down with it, as the wild cries of the begger woman’s child were terrorising him to do, he sought to cover his manoeuvre and to give himself time. He went towards his room and called out:

‘Will you be long in the bathroom, sister-in-law?’ He knew that she would be longer out of sheer cussedness if only he showed any anxiety to make use of the bathroom.

‘Yes, I am washing my hair,’ came the answer.

Ganesh’s face coloured with glee at the success of his ruse. The only thing that remained was to get the servant boy out of the way. So he called out from the inner balcony:

Biju, go and get me a packet of razor blades from the shop… ‘Here’s a rupee coming down.’

The servant boy knew that he could always keep any change that was left over from a rupee when Ganesh Sahib sent him shopping. He came eagerly enough into the compound and, picking up the money ran.

Ganesh went down quickly and opened the lock of the storeroom door. He felt he heard a chorus of accusing voices and paused for a moment, but realised that it was only his heart pounding against his chest. And though he could not remember the shrill cries of the beggar woman’s child any more, he remembered the way the little rat nibbled at his mother’s breasts. For a moment he felt a fool going into the storeroom, a place where he had seldom entered. But then he plunged into the dark.

His brother had hoarded quite a few bags of wheat and rice. So it was not difficult to spot them. Only, he didn’t know whether it would be a bag of wheat or rice that he would be taking away. He did not pause to deliberate any more, however. He merely strained to get a grip on the nearest bag.

After rubbing his hands, which were moist with perspiration, on his pyjamas, he caught hold of the bag and lifted it coolie-wise on his back. Then he scrambled out and made for a small alley on the side of the house.

Hardly had he got to the middle of the passage way when he met Biju, who had come back after buying the razor blades.

‘Let me carry it, Babuji, let me carry it,’ the boy said. Ganesh was in a panic.

‘Get away, get away,’ he said.

But as the boy persisted, he thought that he might as well give the load to Biju, as, at any rate, he himself wouldn’t look too dignified crossing the stretch between the opening of the gulley and the crowd of beggars by the statue.

‘Where shall I take it?’ Biju said.

‘Give it to the beggars out there,’ Ganesh said.

The servant boy looked askance but obeyed the orders. Ganesh returned towards the storeroom to lock it up and restore the keys to his sister-in-law’s dressing table.

‘Where are my keys?’ he heard a voice. But he thought that it was his own bad conscience shouting as it had done before.

‘Who has taken the keys? Biju? Where are you? Have you taken my keys?’

Ganesh could not now mistake the source of the voice. He drifted away from the storeroom door and ambling along as though he had come from a leisurely session in the lavatory below, he said:

‘ The storeroom is open. Your keys are lying here. Of course, the servant must have taken them…’

His heart beat like a tom in hell now that he had lied. And he cursed himself for his lack of self-control.

The sister-in-law returned to her room, thinking that the servant had, indeed, taken the keys to get some condiments out of the storeroom.

Ganesh waited for Biju to come back, so that he could conspire with the servant boy to cover up what he had done.