The Artist of Disappearance (7 page)

Of course there were instances—small stumbles—when I could not find the exact word or phrase. In Suvarna Devi's language, each word conjured a whole world; the English equivalent, I had to admit, did not. Cloud, thunder, rain. Forest and pool. Rooster and calf. How limited they sounded if they could not evoke the scene, its sounds and scents—images without shadows. Perhaps an adjective was needed. Or two, or three.

I tried them out. In the original, adjectives were barely used, but I needed them to make up for what was lost in the translation. Of course I could see that restraint was called for, I had to hold fast. Not too fast, though. A middle way. A golden mean.

I laughed out loud and struck my forehead with my hand to think of all the different strains and currents of my life and how they were coming into play. I had never felt such power, never
had
such power, such joy in power. Or such confusion.

I stopped only when I became aware it was night outside, the crows silent, the street lights burning, the traffic thinning, its roar subsiding into a tired growl. The television set in my landlady's flat was turned on, the evening soap opera at full volume—and I hadn't even noticed it earlier.

Pushing back my hair—as if I too had a pair of dark glasses perched up there, or a gleaming strand of distinguished white like Tara!—I got up, picked up my purse, went downstairs and crossed the street to the small shop where I sometimes bought essentials, a bar of soap or a packet of candles during a power breakdown. Tonight, though, I bought a packet of cigarettes—not the brand I had seen on Tara's desk and that I wanted but a cheaper one that the shopkeeper stocked. I had never bought cigarettes from him before and he gave me a strange look. He recognised me of course but I didn't care what he thought. This was something I was now discovering—that there were things about which I did not need to care. I recrossed the street with the packet in my purse, stepping aside just in time to avoid an autorickshaw that came careering round the corner, its driver singing at the top of his lungs with the joy of going home, free, at the end of a day's work. I almost could not restrain an impulse to join in before I went up the stairs to my room to see what the cigarettes could do for me, for my new career—Pre ma Joshi, translator.

Smoking one was another matter, I admit, and not very successful. I was glad no one was there to observe how I doubled over, coughing, and stubbed out the obnoxious weed, in disappointment.

 

The synopsis and the sample pages were quickly done. Perhaps a little too quickly, Prema worried, but found she really did not wish anything to slow or halt the momentum, and so she slipped them into a brown paper envelope and took them to be posted in the same flush of high excitement with which she had written them.

Tara had her secretary call Prema—that was a disappointment, Prema had not expected to have to deal with an intermediary—to tell her to go ahead with the translation. So the first step had been taken, and Prema drew a deep breath, poised now on the brink of this new career.

Her old career began to seem irksome. Her lectures became perfunctory; she no longer cared if they did not inspire her students with the same passion she felt for literature.
The Mill on the Floss, Emma, Persuasion
—what did they mean to these girls? She marked their papers impatiently, merely skimming them, not stopping to put right their grotesque errors and misrepresentations. She could not be bothered: every one of these girls would leave college to marry, bear children and, to everyone's huge relief, never read another book.

All that mattered now was to do as fine a translation as possible of Suvarna Devi's stories, so simple in their language and structure, but how forceful and powerful for all that!

The experience had aspects to it that Prema had not imagined when she set out. It reminded her, for instance, of how she had struggled to write stories herself when she was young—younger—and how she had sent them out to magazines only to have them returned with curt rejection slips, the hurt and bitterness with which she had mourned them as she put them away, and how discouragement had made her admit she was probably no writer after all.

Now she could laugh at those rejections and the way she had taken them to heart, letting their poison seep into her till the urge to write, the ambition to write, had quite died inside her.

She realised that all she had needed was this opportunity, this invitation held out to her—by Tara, of all people—to discover her true vocation. It was surely the right one since it had given her this new-found ease, and speed, and delight.

 

So the work was done sooner than she, and perhaps Tara, had expected, and it was with a certain sense of regret, and trepidation, that she typed it out, then had a typist she knew at a copy shop down the road retype it for neatness—'Don't worry, auntie,' he said, 'it will look just like print'—and carried the bundle ceremoniously to Tara's office. Mailing it was of course possible and perhaps more professional but she couldn't resist the satisfaction of handing it over herself and seeing Tara's face register approval. The completion of this labour needed somehow to be marked and rewarded.

Unfortunately, Tara was away. Her secretary informed Prema that she was at a conference in Prague, would be back in a week. If she left the manuscript, it would be given to Tara on her return. Prema could expect to hear from her very soon.

She did not. Tara took her time, a very long time it seemed to Prema. In fact, Prema advanced from disappointment to impatience to annoyance at being treated in this manner and kept waiting as if she were only one of many people in a queue for Tara's attention. Had she no consideration for what an author—all right, a translator—might feel at being ignored, left in the dark, waiting, hoping?

She could feel the grooves across her forehead and from her nostrils to her mouth deepening by the day. She snapped at her students. She marked their papers with increasing severity. She knew they found her unfair, ill-tempered and dull. But why did they consider themselves worthy of her attention? They were not, not. She was a translator, an author.

 

Then, just like that, a change in the atmosphere, a sudden breeze to fill her sails, give her hope and move her forwards at last.

A telephone call from Tara—first her secretary, then Tara herself—to say she was pleased, she approved the translation and would publish it; it would appear in the first list of translations by her press.

It was true she did not exactly convey enthusiasm. She was certainly not effusive. In fact she did not even say she thought the translation 'good'. She said it was 'quite good'. Could there be a more tepid qualification?

That might have crushed Prema as much as an outright rejection but Tara followed that limp opinion by saying she would get in touch with Suvarna Devi to draw up a contract, and asked if Prema knew how she might do that.

So suddenly Prema had not only to see to the few notes and suggestions Tara made about the translation—just as the students were sitting their exams which meant their papers would soon be pouring in for her to mark—but she also had to busy herself with finding out about Suvarna Devi's whereabouts.
Why
had she not done that when she was actually there in her home town? And why did the publisher of her book, evidently a local one in the same town, not reply to her queries?

It all proved incredibly difficult and frustrating. Until she thought of writing to the principal of the women's college where she had spent that one summer. To that she received a reply with an address but also a warning that she was often away in the tribal regions with her husband who ran a string of clinics there (and where she obviously found the material for those heartbreaking stories that Prema found so moving).

Weeks went by without a response to Prema's letter in which she had introduced herself and informed her of Tara's publishing house and its new imprint. Would their proposal to publish her short stories meet with her approval?

There was a long stretch, a very long stretch, of waiting again and Prema found it hard to maintain her hope of a new career in the face of such silence. She tried to be patient, telling herself that the mail in those jungle outposts had to be slow and unreliable, but at the same time she felt that a matter of such importance
ought
to break through and elicit a reply.

Eventually it did—a letter written on several small sheets of yellow stationery, each sheet with a red rose printed in the top corner, the stationery of someone who was not accustomed to writing letters except on special occasions requiring a rose. Prema was both touched and a little apprehensive: it did not denote professionalism.

Still, she took it across to Tara in a state of some excitement and translated the few lines expressing thanks for the interest shown in her 'humble work'. Tara wondered how to draw up a contract with someone who might not be able to read it but Prema assured her it was quite possible that she did—after all, she
was
a published writer—and besides, her husband who was a doctor would surely be able to go over it with her. Tara was encouraged to proceed.

Happy times followed for Prema—feeling free to visit Tara's office, sharing her editorial notes with her, going over them together, discussing such matters as footnotes and glossaries, then seeing through the galleys and the proofs, picking the right illustration for the forest-green cover they chose, and the artistic lettering to go with it—roman of course but with Sanskritic embellishment.

Prema brimmed over and shone, gleamed as never before. Tara began to search for other titles to publish under the new imprint. Sometimes Prema was included when she discussed another literary gem she had discovered or consulted regarding a suitable translator. Prema became so light-hearted, she smiled and laughed even with her students who began to speculate as to whether she had a lover. The idea made them sputter with laughter, it was so ridiculous, and Prema occasionally caught them at it and felt a twist of suspicion.

Then, through her new contact with the publishing world, she learned there was to be a conference of writers in the 'indigenous languages' who had no outlet to the larger market and a wider readership.

'Tara,' she found herself saying with a new-found confidence and optimism that made her push back the (invisible) white strand in her hair and the non-existent dark designer glasses, 'we must make sure Suvarna Devi is invited to attend!'

 

The publication of her book was hurried along so that it could be brought out in time for the conference. Prema could think of nothing else—college, students, exams, all receded page by page, face by face, into a blur in the distance. The central place in her mind was occupied by the beautiful little moss-green book with the Kangra painting of a forest glade on the cover and Suvarna Devi's name in elegantly Sanskritised roman letters. The young man who had burst into Tara's office at their first meeting was the 'genius' behind the design. Inside were the words:
Translated by Prema Joshi,
not in the same painterly script but in print nevertheless, black on white, irrefutable.

When she arrived at the convention hall which was hung with purple and orange bunting for the occasion, Prema went straight to the stall set up in the foyer for the books by authors who had come from all over India for the conference, almost trembling with the anticipation of seeing the book she—well, she together with Suvarna Devi—had created.

Surely this was the crowning moment of her life even if there were no golden bugles to proclaim it. She had prepared for it as nervously as if for a party. Taken out a sari she had bought to wear to the wedding of a young cousin but never worn since; it had a broad red border with a gold trim and was certainly an assertion in itself. But, on putting it on, draping it carefully fold by fold around her middle, she became bitterly critical of the foolishness of dressing up, and changed it for everyday garb. This made her late. She arrived at the convention hall in a fluster with no time to comb her hair, and rushed straight to the bookstall. Her eyesight blurred for an instant as it alighted on the book but that may have been because it was somewhat obscured by other titles in bigger letters, on brighter, glossier and, she thought, rather vulgar covers. After taking in this slight, Prema reached out surreptitiously and quickly reordered the books so that Suvarna Devi's lay on top, others beneath, then moved on: the conference was due to be inaugurated by the Minister of Education, and all were requested to be in their seats before he entered with his entourage.

The loudspeaker whined excruciatingly. Then sputtered, then brayed. Harassed men ran around trying to fix it, alternately shouting 'Stop, stop' and 'OK, go'. The minister slumped into his chair, looking disgusted. The 'honoured guests' who occupied the front rows sat very stiff and upright, waiting for things to be fixed and proceedings to start. Prema found herself embarrassed that things were not going more smoothly but of course this was how all such affairs began, and probably in the regions from which the writers came things were no different.

Eventually the minister made his speech. He read it slowly—as if he did not think the honoured guests, representing so many different languages, could possibly follow, or perhaps he just was and always had been a slow reader (the speech was, after all, written for him by someone else). Then a younger man, perhaps a junior minister, spoke, very rapidly so as to get the greatest number of words into the allotted time—which still seemed to most of the audience far too long. Everyone had come not to hear the bureaucrats but the authors after all, and most of them had travelled a great distance to come to the capital, bringing papers to read which they had written themselves. They were staying at various government hostels scattered about the city and had come together for the first time with much to say for themselves and to each other.

Prema, seated further back, stared at the backs of their heads, wondering which one belonged to Suvarna Devi, her protégée, as she thought of her fondly, protectively. But there were quite a few women among the delegates, none of whom Prema knew by sight. She had to wait till the official speeches were over, the minister escorted out into the foyer, to prowl among the delegates and try to guess who was hers—
her
trophy.