The Intrusion and Other Stories Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE INTRUSION AND OTHER STORIES

  Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, daughter of the renowned dramatist and Sanskrit scholar, Shriranga. At the age of fifteen she went to Bombay, graduated in Economics, then moved to Bangalore, where she gained a degree in Law. The early years of her marriage were largely given over to the care of her two young sons, but she took a course in journalism and for a time worked on a magazine. Her writing career only began in earnest in 1970, initially with short stories, of which several volumes have been published. She is the author of four children’s books and six previous novels, the best known of which are, The Dark Holds No Terrors and That Long Silence, which won the Sahitya Akademi award. Shashi Deshpande lives in Bangalore with her pathologist husband.

  Books by same author

  The Legacy

  It was the Nightingale

  The Mirade

  It was Dark

  The Dark Holds No Terrors

  Roots and Shadows

  If I Die Today

  Come up and be dead

  That Long Silence

  The Binding Vine

  The Intrusion

  And Other Stories

  Shashi Deshpande

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  The First Lady

  Why a Robin?

  Can You Hear Silence?

  It was Dark

  The Intrusion

  Death of a Child

  My Beloved Charioteer

  An Antidote to Boredom

  Ludd Moments

  Ghosts

  It was the Nightingale

  The Inner Rooms

  The Last Enemy

  The Pawn

  A Wall is Safer

  The Cruelty Game

  ‘Hear me Sanjaya…’

  The Stone Women

  ‘And Then…?’

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following magazines in which these stories first appeared: Femina, Eve’s Weekly, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Decca ‘Hear Me, Sanjaya’ was read out on Akashvani, Bangalore.

  My special gratitude to Professor P. Lai for generously allowing the use of stories included in the Writers Workshop collections.

  The First Lady

  She was all ready. ‘You look very nice,’ the servant said, with a kind of respectful admiration, as she moved off towards the bathroom, a pile of crumpled clothes in her arms. Toadies! Nice! Why don’t they tell me frankly that I am old and ugly and fat, she thought bitterly. Ugly… the word gave her a pang even as she thought of it. But then, she consoled herself, what can you expect when you’re nearly seventy?

  She moved heavily towards the dressing-table and sat before it, staring anxiously at her reflection. My pearls, she thought wistfully, they’re the only nice things about me. And even they can’t do anything for me now. What a pity I got them forty years too late! She tried to visualize her own face and figure at the age of thirty, but failed. I must look up those old albums tomorrow. She continued to stare unseeingly into the mirror, until he came in and said, ‘Aren’t you ready? We have to go.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ she replied and got up, smoothing down her heavy silk sari. Life is a circle, she thought. One always goes back to one’s beginnings—if one lives long enough, that is. As a young girl, she had been used to wearing heavy silks in her father’s home. Later, in the austere atmosphere of her husband’s home, she had worn only white khadi saris. How often she had groaned at their weight, specially when she had to wash them herself. And now, back to silks again!

  She kept pace with him walking through the large, silent rooms. But as they neared the big hall where the reception was being held, she suddenly felt tired. I don’t want to go there, she thought with a touch of petulance. I don’t want to smile and fold my hands and mouth inanities to people I don’t care for. And who care nothing for me, either. Only for what I am. I wish I was sitting in my own room, with my feet tucked under me, and my bra, that is constricting me so, off, my petticoat strings loosened, my false teeth out. She remembered her grandmother at meals, champing her toothless gums together in unashamed gusto, oblivious of the saliva dribbling down her trembling chin. And how she used to embarrass them all by her uninhibited behaviour, belching loudly, even breaking wind sometimes, so that they were all ashamed of her. At least, she thought complacently, my grandchildren are not ashamed of me. Unless, her mind suddenly took alarm, they too have learnt sycophancy from the people around us.

  As the large doors were obsequiously flung open for them, she arranged her sari over her shoulder and put on her public look. ‘The first lady’ the magazines called her. Even, sometimes, ‘Our gracious and dignified first lady’. God! If only they knew what an effort it was to keep up the pose all the time! She responded mechanically to the respectful smiles, the polite masks, the soft murmurs and looked admiringly at her husband who smiled and spoke with the right mixture of dignity and condescension. I can do it too. What is it, after all, but a performance that we go through? All that we need are the correct gestures … a smile, a faint inclination of the head, folded hands, the right word for the right person. We’ve been doing it these six years now and God knows how many years more!

  There had been, some time back, a rumour that her husband had displeased those who mattered, that he would be put on the shelf when his term ended. He had been panic-stricken. ‘My God, what shall I do?’ he had exclaimed. But, seasoned politician that he was, he had known what to do and the powers had relented. ‘I’ve gone to jail twelve times,’ he said, when he heard that. As if that mattered! Whatever the reason, they had charitably allowed him to continue to hold on to his position—all splendid trappings and no power. Pompously he had put out a statement that he was ready to serve the people as long as he could, to the best of his ability. Why can’t you be frank, she had thought irritably and unreasonably, knowing it was impossible, and say that you enjoy this kowtowing, this feeling of being important, and that you intend to cling on to it as long as you possibly can? But she had some compunctions about destroying his illusions about himself, especially the one that he was indispensable and powerful. She had said nothing.

  In the meantime, the reception went on. Faces came close to her, smirked, said a few polite words and moved away to make room for more faces behaving in the same way. And then yet more. So many receptions, so many occasions, so many banquets. Her mind moved along a long vista of such formal, dull functions. Cold and correct. And meaningless; as meaningless as a word becomes by constant repetition. What was this reception for? She suddenly found she couldn’t remember.

  ‘What’s this for?’ she asked the guest who stood before her. The face stared, blank, astonished, with goggling eyes. ‘What’s this reception for?’ she repeated doggedly, knowing she was making a fool of herself.

  The young man whose job it was to hover behind her (as if, she thought testily, I’m a lunatic and he’s my keeper) now moved forward and with a scarcely perceptible gesture, waved the guest away. But the face turned for a curious backward look and, becoming a human being for the first time, said loudly, ‘Independence Day’.

  Independence Day? Her mind jolted with a jerk from the present and she was happily unaware that the young man behind her was struggling to keep up a stolid front, trying not to exchange mocking smiles with someone else. Independence Day? And I didn’t know. I didn’t remember. And all these people—how many of them know? Or care? What does it matter to them what day it is? It’s enough for them to be here, a chance to show others how important they are. That they belong. All that they care about is a job, a contract, a pos
ition, profits. And then she realized how much she despised them—these people, her husband too, and yes, even herself. Suddenly, standing there in the midst of the reception, all solemnity and no spontaneity, the memory of the first Independence Day came back to her vividly.

  It had rained that day. God, how it had rained! Like water spouting from an elephant’s trunk, as her grandmother used to say. She had been in a tonga with the children, trying to reach the place where her husband was to hoist the flag at midnight. The rain had pelted down furiously and in a minute they had been drenched. The driver had ineffectually wielded his whip on the poor frightened horse, who had reared up, whinnying frantically. The children had screamed and clutched at her in fear. But she had not been frightened, only desperate that she would not get there in time. ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ she had urged the man breathlessly. And he, knowing who she was, had done his best, so that they had reached there in time, though only just. The children and she had huddled in their wet clothes on the fringe of the large crowd that had watched, in pindrop silence, the tricolour flutter up. And then, there had issued from the throats of that vast crowd an indescribable sound—an aaaaah of absolute rapture.

  Later, after the people had quietened down, her husband had given a speech. Brief, dry and simple. ‘I’ma plain, matter-of-fact man,’ he always boasted. He could never have thought of phrases like ‘our tryst with destiny,’ she had thought wistfully after she had heard that speech. But for the crowd, his little speech had been enough. A kind of joyous madness had seized them. They had discovered her and the children there at the back. ‘What are you doing here?’ they had yelled. And in a light-hearted frenzy she had been passed on from hand to hand, until she had reached the dais. Someone had given her a hand and she had clambered up. And standing there, watching all those ecstatic faces wet with rain and tears, she had thought—this … this is the beginning of glory.

  Only, she thought now, looking sadly at the faces in the room, it had not been the beginning but the end of glory. And life has lost it’s meaning because it relates to nothing but one’s own petty concerns.

  She had tried to say this to her husband once. ‘What’s wrong with the present?’ he had asked her crossly. ‘You live too much in the past.’

  ‘Well, there’s a lot of it,’ she had retorted with spirit. He had snorted irritably; he hated any reference to his age. But she had persisted. ‘Don’t you find all this …’ she had gestured vaguely round their splendid room, ‘don’t you find all this futile and meaningless?’

  He had put down his glasses and stared at her in amazement. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ And then, after a pause, as if trying to justify himself, ‘One can’t go on struggling forever. What’s wrong with being comfortable?’

  Perhaps, she thought, we had been too exalted, too uplifted for too long a time. So that we had to come down to earth from that rarefied atmosphere with a vengeance. And that’s why ‘want’ and ‘have’ have become the keywords instead of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘self-denial’. And ‘I’ is the invariable prefix.

  ‘What’s wrong with being comfortable?’ he had repeated aggressively.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I love my comforts too. I wouldn’t like to go back to being just any housewife, struggling to make ends meet, to get the ration and the milk, to run after buses. I enjoy being served by bustling, efficient servants, I enjoy the good food, the good living. After all, she often thought wryly, remembering the fragrance of the expensive cigars her father had smoked, I’m my father’s daughter. Yes, I love my comforts. But the whole price has not yet been paid. For me, this is part of the payment for those comforts, these public functions that I’m finding more and more irksome.

  Gracious and dignified! No, I’m only a tired, old woman, whose feet swell up to grotesque proportions after an evening like this. And then the doctors come and look concerned and murmur comfortingly about exertion and strain, about medicines and rest. When they know, and I know, that the real trouble is I’m too fat. And I’m fat because I eat too much. And I eat too much because I’m bored. And I’m bored because there’s no truth in anything we do or say.

  Her mind had wandered and she was distraught. People were looking at her curiously. She didn’t notice them, but she saw the look of displeasure he shot at her. She struggled to get back to the present. What a pity, she thought, looking at him, smiling and suave, I can’t do this as well as you do. You do it as if you were born to it. And perhaps you were. Who knows?

  She remembered how reluctant her father had been to agree to their marriage. ‘They believe in all the Gandhian stuff,’ he had warned her. ‘How will you adjust to that kind of life?’ He himself had been a well-to-do man, fond of the good things of life. But she had seen the young man at a public meeting, she had heard him talk and had been unable to get him out of her head after that. His white khadi clothes and his burning patriotism had given him a romantic halo. And so she had brushed away her father’s fears.

  And she had been right. Adjustment had not been difficult for her. She had given up all her rich saris without a pang. Perhaps, she thought wryly at times, it has been easy because simplicity had been the fashion then; and any woman likes to be in fashion. The only thing she had missed had been tea. How she had longed for a cup of tea, especially during her pregnancies! But even to talk of tea in her husband’s home would have been blasphemy.

  Luckily, there had been very little time for regrets. After her wedding, she had immediately been swept into the whirlwind of the independence movement. There had been no time even to think. Certainly no time for love. But then—it had taken her a long time to realize the truth—the passionate and dedicated face she had fallen in love with was incapable of loving another human being. By the time she found out, they already had three children and it didn’t seem to matter so much. There had been too many things to do. She felt nostalgic when she remembered the quality of excitement that had filled their lives then. Her husband more often in jail than out of it, the whole burden of the household on her shoulders, all kinds of people in the house all the time. And, of course, the police. But how alive we were. Not half-dead like these people. We were taken out of ourselves, carried away by an immense emotion and our lives were never dull, never petty. No, I regret nothing. Except ….

  It was after the birth of their third child. He, her husband, had come to her and unusually nervous and awkward, had told her something that had shocked her. Celibacy? Why? Recovering his composure, he had quoted to her all his Master’s principles. He had almost harangued her. The purpose of sex is procreation. And since we don’t intend to have any more children ….

  She had agreed. There had been, in those days, a kind of perverse satisfaction in denying oneself pleasure, a kind of hysterical urge for self-denial, to which she herself had succumbed long back. It made matters simple. But perhaps it was her deprivation that had made her sensitive to the young man’s admiration, so that she had sensed it, perhaps even before he had been aware of it himself. At first she had felt only the pleasurable thrill any woman feels when she knows she’s admired. But it had not stayed that way for long. She had found herself longing for something more than just surreptitious looks and nebulous signs. She had wanted him to touch her, to hold her, to have her. It had shamed her terribly. She, a mother of three!

  But she had shown him nothing of this. She had kept aloof, and his privileged position in their house had been due to her husband’s fondness for him, his most devoted disciple. And one day, he had come to them with a distraught face, saying ‘I’m going’. She had listened silently, while her husband had tried to battle with his resolution. She had known why he was going, she had known that one word from her would have held him back. And she hadn’ t said it. But now, she could no longer remember how he looked, could no longer recall even his name, she often sighed that she had sent him away. And then laughed at herself, an old woman, for lusting, even in retrospect, after the body of a young man who had been dead for so many years.
For he had died soon after, in a police firing. And now he lived on in her mind, eternally young, eternally loving and admiring her. And how glad I am, she often thought, that he is dead and can’t see me as I am now. It’s not that I am old and fat; it’s what I have become, what we have all become. He, I, all of us. We’ve betrayed all those who died.

  Time for them to leave. She could see her husband signalling to her. The gorgeously dressed flunkeys opened the doors for them with a flourish. She adjusted her sari over her shoulder and walked out. Thank God that’s over. Another boring function done with. And what does it matter that it’s Independence Day? The words left her cold. No, nothing matters now except to go to my room, take off all my finery, my false teeth, to eat my food, loosen my petticoat strings and go to bed. To sleep and not to dream. That is happiness enough now.

  ‘Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.’ Wasn’t that in the Bible? Well, the old don’t want to dream now and the young men see no visions. And suddenly, as they walked through the rooms that always seemed empty in spite of being impeccably furnished … suddenly she remembered the face and the name that had eluded her for so many years. The young man who would never grow old, never stop loving her. She said the name aloud so that it should not escape her again.

  ‘What?’ he asked her disinterestedly, and she knew the name meant nothing to him.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. Thinking, how lucky he is that he is dead. He has never known the disenchantment of success.

  ‘We’ve lived too long,’ she said loudly and clearly as they reached their rooms. ‘We’ve lived too long.’

  But he had removed his hearing aid and didn’t hear her.

  Why a Robin?

  ‘Tell me something about it,’ she says. ‘About a robin.’ ‘But why a robin?’