The Artist of Disappearance (6 page)

One day, in class, her teacher named this very writer whose book lay open before her—Suvarna Devi—and spoke of her as the unsung heroine of Oriya letters. She told Prema, the most ardent student she had ever had, that it was worth learning the language simply to read the work of Suvarna Devi. 'She will not only reveal the sweetness of the language to you but open your eyes to what you don't even know exists here.' So Prema stopped in the bazaar on her way back to the hostel and found this very paperback amid the magazines, calendars and greeting cards with which the so-called bookshop was mainly stocked. She showed her find to the women at the hostel who expressed amazement that she had not known about this writer: they had been made to read her short stories in school—not always with reverence, it seemed. One of the women who stood out from the others because she wore her hair cropped in a place where all the other women had long pigtails or tightly wound and carefully pinned buns, and even wore trousers if she was not going to classes, said, 'Why do you want to waste your time reading Suvarna Devi? You won't get a job at a university if you do. You need to read Jane Austen, George Eliot and Simone de Beauvoir. No university will look at you if you haven't read
The Second Sex.
Forget Suvarna Devi, read the feminists, read Simone de Beauvoir.' This reduced many of the others to helpless laughter; they tried out the foreign name in many different ways, all of which sounded absurd.

Prema not only read the collection of Suvarna Devi's short stories but returned to the bookshop to see if they had any more of her work. They did not, but in the college library she came across a journal the writer had kept while living in the tribal areas to the south; it was bound in green Rexine and the library flap at the back showed that it had been issued to readers exactly twice in the last seven years. Prema borrowed it and took it back to read in the hostel and found that the journal entries, many of them of an anthropological nature, and the notes on village life in the forest, provided a backdrop for the fiction she had already read but were otherwise disappointingly dry. Prema had little interest in nature or the rituals and ceremonies of tribal society per se and found the notes lacking in the characters and events that had made the short stories so lively and engaging.

She asked her companions at the hostel if they knew anything of the life of this author, so oddly divided between literature and anthropology. 'Oh, she goes to those areas with her husband,' they told her. 'He is a doctor and runs clinics there. Who wants to read about
that?
' It suddenly occurred to Prema that the writer might live in this very town. She was told, casually, that yes, they believed she did. 'Where?' cried Prema. 'Can you tell me
where?
' Her mind leapt ahead to that prized objective of any serious student: a personal interview. Besides, such a meeting might create another link to her mother's world. And there was so little time left, she was due to return to Delhi in just a week. Someone told her in which part of the town Suvarna Devi's husband had his practice but no one could give her a specific address. They knew Suvarna Devi's work from their school syllabus but that did not make her a local celebrity: instead, it just made her one of them.

Prema went there on foot one day, after her class, to see if she could find it for herself. It was a neighbourhood rather like a suburb on the far outskirts of Delhi where the city petered out into the dusty plains, a jumble of small bungalows no longer new, many with signboards on their gates to denote their middle-class status: doctors, lawyers, advocates, specialists in gynaecology, homeopathy, ayurveda, urology, and also schools that gave evening classes in typing, shorthand and tailoring.

Not knowing the exact address and coming across the same surnames repeated over and over, Prema gave up, suddenly conscious of the dust gathering between her toes and invading the folds of her neck and elbows, sticky and gritty at the same time. She could not continue to trail up and down the maze of little streets with dogs barking at her through closed gates, men staring at her from bicycle and radio repair shops and concrete bus shelters under stunted, lopped trees. Defeated, she returned to the hostel.

It did not matter, she told herself as she packed for the long journey back to the capital; she had found the subject of her studies and that was all that mattered. How could she have returned
without
one?

Her thesis supervisor accepted the subject with the greatest reluctance: it was not part of the regular syllabus and it was hard to see how it could be made to fit in. But then Prema showed she could be stubborn when she chose: her subject was not the language itself but the author and how her work belonged to the greater world. She wrote the thesis and, rather to her supervisor's surprise, it was accepted.

She might have anticipated what followed. After so many years of thinking this would be the climax of her life, she discovered that instead everyone expected her to continue as if there had been no such climax. What next? she was asked continually, by family and friends, what next?

After a wait of too many unhappy and discouraging years—the first sighting of stray white hairs a defining moment—she finally accepted a junior position in a minor women's college in a bleak and distant quarter of the city. And even here her thesis counted for little. What an odd subject, they all thought, a writer in Oriya? Why, what had made her pursue such an unpromising course of study? Why had she not gone to Jawaharlal Nehru University and studied French, Russian or Chinese? What good was this provincial author in a provincial language to her or to anyone here? So Prema found herself in the department of English literature after all, teaching Jane Austen and George Eliot (though not Simone de Beauvoir).

This left a small, smouldering ember deep inside her soul (so she designated its location, no other would do), where it released an odour of heated rubber, threatening to destroy whatever pleasure or satisfaction she might court. It burnt two deep grooves across her forehead as if with a stick of charcoal, and two more from the corners of her nostrils to the edges of her mouth. Sometimes, when passing a shop window filled with spangled and sequinned saris that encouraged reflection, or catching a glimpse of herself in the small, chipped mirror over her bathroom sink, she was startled by the grimness of her expression. No wonder she was rarely invited out, or made part of any gathering for celebration or enjoyment. She turned away and trudged along to the bus stop with the satchel of books weighing down her left shoulder. She put in the necessary hours of work, meeting her colleagues in the staffroom during the lunch hour which they all utilised to complain of their workload and the perfidy of the principal and heads of departments, and the disrespectful, boisterous and unruly students. At the end of the day she trudged back even more depressed than when she had set out. That was when she wondered if her life was any different from that of the crows dividing their time between the telephone lines and the dying tree in her street with equally raucous disorder and dissent.

 

This was what had made her accept the invitation to attend the Founder's Day function at her old school. Her schooldays had not been a particularly happy period in her life either—she had already shown signs of a failed life there, it seemed, something that attracts no friends—but at least it was now so far back in the past that she could look back on it forgivingly, almost benignly.

And, as it happened, it had turned out well. She had not only met her old school idol Tara, after so many years of following her brilliant career in the press, but Tara had recognised
her,
and by showing an interest in the book that had so providentially fallen out of her satchel, given her a nod.

A nod. Such a small gesture, almost inconspicuous, but it was what Prema had been waiting for, she now realised, a nod no one had been willing to give her before. It must have been the sign she needed because now, sitting over the empty plate from which she had eaten her dinner—some slices of bread with pickles—the book propped up beside the pickle jar, the sugar pot and the bottle of antacid pills, she began to have thoughts that ought to have come to her earlier: thoughts, plans, like a hand of cards dealt to her that were worth studying.

She began nodding to herself, unconsciously but encouragingly. In the street below, quieter now than an hour or two earlier, a car with a siren tore past, screeching its metallic nail across her eardrum. But Prema barely noticed, even though it set all the neighbourhood dogs howling.

 

Having made an appointment—costing her an anguish of indecision no one else would have understood—Prema was at Tara's office in Sri Aurobindo Market punctually at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon. She was somewhat disappointed to find Tara's office was not in a shiny new high-rise but in somewhat obscure quarters above a grimy copy shop with a small arrow on the wall pointing up the stairs, stairs just as unswept as in her own building, she noted. The office itself, she was relieved to find, was bright and neat, freshly painted, with a tall potted plant in the corner that appeared to be flourishing, and a row of shelves on which the latest publications of Tara's press were lined up, the newest of them facing out. These were so attractive—small in size but with covers of terracotta, lapis lazuli and moss green, each with a small miniature painting printed in the centre above the title and below the author's name—that Prema felt deeply ashamed of the state of the paperback she had brought with her to refresh Tara's memory. While the secretary dialled Tara's number to announce the visitor, Prema gazed at these delectable, desirable objects, recognising some of the authors' names and wondering about the others. Then the door opened and there was Tara, dark glasses pushed back over her hair, which Prema now saw had a fashionable red glow of henna, and wearing a sari that was elegant in its extreme simplicity—fine white cotton, black-bordered, such as Prema would never have considered wearing. She looked a bit preoccupied but remembered having made the appointment—flattering in itself—and had Prema come into her office which was larger and untidier than the little reception room, with ceramic coffee mugs amid the books on her desk, and a lingering odour of cigarette smoke.

'It was wonderful to see you the other day,' Prema began, determinedly smiling to keep those depressing wrinkles away, but, on seeing Tara assume a somewhat impatient air, decided to hurry along to the purpose of her visit. Placing the book she had brought with her on the desk between them, she went on: 'When you said you were thinking of commissioning translations from indigenous languages—our many great languages—and bringing writers to the notice of those readers who don't know them—I thought of Suvarna Devi.' She had to stop for breath, she had spoken so fast and was almost panting. 'She is such a great writer and no one here even knows her name. It is very sad but I am sure if you publish a translation of her work, she will become as well-known as—as—Simone de Beauvoir,' she ended in an inspired burst.

Tara was listening, although she was playing with a pencil and occasionally glancing at her watch—she clearly had something on her mind, probably another engagement coming up—but after calling her secretary to send in a bottle of Fanta for Prema—such a hot day—she did begin to tell Prema her plan for this new division of her publishing house and what she hoped to publish under its imprint. 'Of course, I am no linguist myself,' she apologised, 'and I will have to depend on others—academics and critics—to tell me what they think worthwhile.'

And by the time the Fanta had been drunk (bringing on an embarrassing sequence of barely suppressed burps) and Prema, the academic and critic, was on her way out, it had been decided she would write a synopsis of the book, a brief biography and bibliography of Suvarna Devi's work, and a few pages—oh, five or ten—of her translation as a sample. Once she had sent that in, she would hear from Tara. Yes, definitely, within a month—or two at the most.

Then the secretary rang to announce the next visitor and Tara flew out of her chair to receive the young man who had come in with his arms flung wide, no longer merely polite but positively exuberant. Of course, he
was
young and attractive, Prema could see that before she left.

 

What actually saddened me when I left was not the sight of masculine youth and its attraction for Tara but the thought, now settling on me as I sat on the bus—it was a Ladies' Special which was why I had a seat—that Tara had not asked me a single question about my involvement with this language. I had been given no opportunity to explain how I came about it, what it meant to me and why, while teaching the usual, accepted course of English literature in a women's college, I had maintained my commitment to it. I could have told her so much, so much—but was given no chance and so I had to keep the information withheld, a secret. No one knew what a weight that exerted, one I longed to relieve.

But, getting off the bus and climbing the stairs to my room at the top, I found I could, in a quite miraculous way, unload myself of that weight. As soon as I took out the little paperback—its pages were coming loose from the binding, I noticed—and pulled a piece of paper to me and began to translate the first line, it was as if I had been given a magic key that would open the rest.

'It started to rain. It was getting dark'.

But no—immediately I could see how blunt that looked, how lacking in spirit. Where was the music, the lilt of the original?

'Rain began to fall. The village was in darkness.'

Yes, and yes. How easy to see that these words worked, the others did not. I hurried on, hurried while that sense lasted of what was right, what was wrong, an instinct sometimes elusive which had to be courted and kept alert. Selecting, recognising, acknowledging. I was only the conduit, the medium between that language and this—but I was the one doing the selecting, the discriminating, and I was the only one who could; the writer herself could not. I was interpreting the text for her because I had the power—too strong a word perhaps, but the ability, yes. I was also the one who knew what she meant, what worlds her words evoked. They were not mine but they were my mother's. I barely remembered her or those earliest years spent in her lap; I only imagined I did. I was not sure if I had ever seen the shefali tree's night-blooming flowers in the morning, or the pond where blue lotuses bloomed and intoxicated bumblebees buzzed, or heard the sound of cattle lowing as they made their way homewards at twilight, but at some subconscious level, I found I knew them just as she did. Translating Suvarna Devi's words and text into English was not so different, I thought, from what she herself must have felt when writing them in her own language, which was, after all, a kind of translation too—from seeing and hearing and feeling into syntax. And I, who had inherited the language, understood it and understood her in a way no one else could have done, by instinct and empathy. The act of translation brought us together as if we were sisters—or even as if we were one, two compatible halves of one writer.