A Matter of Time Read online

  The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  www.feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition, 1999

  Copyright © 1999 by Shashi Deshpande

  Afterword copyright © 1999 by Ritu Menon

  All rights reserved.

  First published in 1996 by Penguin Books India, New Delhi, India

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of The Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Deshpande, Shashi.

  A matter of time / by Shashi Deshpande ; afterword by Ritu Menon.—1st U.S. ed.

  p.cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-935-7 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PR9499.3.D474M381999

  823—dc21

  98-52896

  CIP

  The Feminist Press is grateful to the Ford Foundation for their generous support of our work. This publication is made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. The Feminist Press would also like to thank Elizabeth Janeway, Joanne Markell, Caroline Urvater, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this publication.

  111009080776543

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  The House

  The Family

  The River

  Afterword

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The lines quoted on p. 112 are from A.K. Ramanujan’s translation of early classical Tamil poetry in Poems of Love and War and reproduced here by the kind permission of Oxford University Press.

  The verses from the Upanishads on pages (1), (91) and (181) are Dr. S. Radhakrishnan’s translations, taken from The Principal Upanishads and used here by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.

  The lines on p. 186 are from Robert Ernest Hume’s The Thirteen Principal Upanishads.

  THE HOUSE

  ‘Maitreyi,’ said Yajnavalkya, ‘verily I am about to go forth from this state (of householder).’

  —Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad (II.4.1)

  THE HOUSE IS called Vishwas, named, not as one would imagine for the abstract quality of trust, but after an ancestor, the man who came down South with the Peshwa’s invading army and established the family there. The name, etched into a stone tablet set in the wall, seems to be fading into itself, the process of erosion having made it almost undecipherable. And yet the house proclaims the meaning of its name by its very presence, its solidity. It is obvious that it was built by a man not just for himself, but for his sons and his son’s sons. Built to endure—as it has. Perhaps the simplicity of the design helps; apart from the two delicately fluted columns that hold up the porch, there is none of the ornamentation that was so common in the time it was built. Just a bare square facade that offers no room for dilapidation; there are no edges to be frayed, no frills to hang untidily. Signs of wear and neglect lie elsewhere: in the wide gaps in the stonework of the compound wall, the large gate that looks as if it would fall to pieces if touched, the smaller one that sags on a single hinge.

  The front yard is bare. Nothing, it seems, has ever grown or will grow on the hard unyielding ground. A star-shaped sunken pond is now only a pit harbouring all the trash blown in by the wind. A festoon of cobwebs, hanging in a canopy over the huge front door, speaks of its being rarely used. The family entrance is obviously at the side of the house, where stone steps, eroded with use, lead through a wooden wicket-gate to a veranda. The house is the Big House to its inhabitants, getting its name from the comparison to an outhouse built for the live-in help of a cook. Renovated since then and rented out to a family, the outhouse now looks as if it has been placed there to show off the size and grandeur of the Big House. The doll’s house effect is carried over into its miniature garden, which, with its tiny stone-paved path, dainty tulsi brindavan and dwarf bushes, forms a startling, almost comical contrast to the garden behind the Big House. The coconut palms here tower beyond neck-straining vision, the drumstick trees branch out in exuberant generosity and the usually dainty curry-leaf tree has a trunk that rivals that of the neem tree.

  The fourth side of the house shows yet another face. Everything grows wild here, nothing is scaled down to a cultivated prettiness. The bougainvillaea has become a monster parasite clinging passionately to its neighbour, the akash mallige, cutting deep grooves in its trunk, as if intent on strangulating it. But high above, the two flower together amicably, as if the cruelty below is an event of the past, wholly forgotten. The champak seems to have no relation to the graceful tree that grows in other people’s yards. Grown to an enormous height, its flowers can neither be plucked nor seen, but the fragrance comes down each year like a message that it is flowering time again. The branches of the three mango trees are so tangled together it is as if they have closed ranks to protect the walls of the house, which remain damp, months after the rains. And during the monsoon, dark, woolly, itchy insects cling to them in colonies, covering them in a thick, horrifying, moving mass. The scabrous bark of the mango trees is, however, given over to more innocuous creatures, large black gangly ants that move, not in an orderly line, but in a wild, frantic scurrying, and yet, miraculously, never losing their hold on this hazardous, uneven terrain. Strangely enough, no birds nest in these trees; in the daytime, there is absolute silence, though at night there are ominous rustlings, sounds of unknown creatures of the night.

  Inside, the house seems to echo the schizophrenic character of its exterior. A long passage running along the length of the house bisects it with an almost mathematical accuracy, marking out clearly the two parts of its divided personality. The rooms on the left, uninhabited for years, are dark, brooding and cavernous. The rooms on the right, where the family lives, though too large to be cosy, have a lived-in look, with the constant disorder of living. An L-shaped veranda running from the back of the house is a workplace where it encloses the kitchen, storeroom and bathroom. The smaller arm, outside the dining room and bedrooms, is not only the family entrance, it is also their sitting room, a built-in stone seat being the centre of it.

  The small hall into which the front door opens is no-man’s land, belonging to neither zone. It has the look of a set for a period movie, with its antique hat-and-umbrella stand, portraits on the wall, and a staircase that curves gracefully up into an unseen landing. The staircase raises expectations of an entire floor above, but there is in fact only one room, obviously added on later. Looked at from the outside, it looks like an excrescence perched on top of the house, detracting from its main quality of integrity.

  The house attracts a great number of stares from passers-by, and not just because of its size and age. There is, to the fanciful at least, a sense of expectancy about the house, as if it were holding its breath, waiting for something.

  Kalyani, whose father built the house, is enormously proud of it.

  ‘People used to come just to look at it,’ she says. ‘There was no house like it in the city,’ she adds.

  However exaggerated the statement, it has now taken on the colour of truth, for now the house is, in a sense, unique. It is the only one of its kind, of its size and period, left in the neighbourhood. The sharks who have devoured all the rest are eyeing it greedily, but the curious history of the house and of its two occupants has kept them at bay. Until now.

/>   SHE IS LYING full length on the sofa, watching a movie on TV, her eyes fixed unblinking on the screen as if she has never seen these things before: a circus. A clown in the centre of the arena, singing and dancing. And the spectators, in the manner of the spectators in any movie, gazing ahead in complete unison. Perhaps, in a sense, it is true that she has not really seen this before. She had never been to the circus as a child; children don’t go, they are taken. And who could have taken them, Premi and her? In fact, the first (and the last) time she saw a circus was when Gopal and she had taken their daughters to one. The girls, four and five then, has been enthralled and Gopal’s enjoyment had been almost as childlike as theirs.

  But she had been appalled. She had hated all of it—the dust, the noise, the smell of the animals and their fears, almost as malodorous as the stench of their dung. It had made her sick. Even the acrobats had made her uneasy. She had sensed an enormous despair behind the bravado of their feats, a fear under the star-spangled gaiety of their costumes. Skilful, yes, but desperate. Like a statement—‘we have to do these things in order to live, yet ....’

  It was only the music that had made it bearable for her. There was something about it, rousing her expectations to a pitch so that her heart seemed to expand in her chest, throbbing like a powerful drum. The music created an illusion of magnificence, of drama to come, an expectation that was never fulfilled. Everything that came after, every act, seemed slightly tawdry, like tinsel crowns seen in the daylight, after the play is over.

  Now she is watching the circus at a safe distance. Diminished by the size of the screen, yes, but with the dirt, the smells, the fear and despair left out. Sanitized. Bacteria-free. And the clown, prancing and skipping in the centre of the ring, allowed a dignity a clown in a real circus never has. And instead of the heart-throbbing music, this melodious song ....

  Gopal comes in. Thinking that he will join her, she draws up her feet, making room for him on the sofa. But he goes to a chair opposite her, from where, she knows, he cannot see the TV. She gestures to him to turn it round. When he does nothing, scarcely, in fact, notices her gesture, she begins reluctantly to get up to do it herself. This time he stops her with a word—‘don’t!’ And only then, for the first time, she turns her eyes away from the screen and gives him her whole attention. Something unusual about him that has nothing to do with the fact that he has not changed into his pyjamas ... She can’t pinpoint anything specific, just this odd feeling that he seems—disjointed? Uncoordinated?

  And then, suddenly she has a feeling as if someone has nudged her, telling her that something unpleasant is approaching, that she should get up and walk away. Later, she will wonder if she could have escaped, if, in fact, the moment of speaking would have passed for Gopal if she had walked away. But that is not how it is to be. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he says and abruptly begins. And she sits and listens in silence to what he has to say to her.

  The TV goes on through his talk, neither of them thinks of turning it off, or turning down the sound either, so that his words come to her against the background of the clown’s song: Jeena yahan, mama yahan, iske siwa jana kahan.

  The telling of what he has come to say takes him so little time that when he has done, the song is still going on. He looks at her for a reaction, but she is gazing at him just as expectantly, waiting for him to go on. The realization that there is nothing more to be said—by either of them—comes to them almost simultaneously and he goes out as quietly as he had come in.

  She continues to watch the movie until the end, when the clown, tragic, doomed victim, dies. She goes to bed with the song still going on in her head, the slightly off-key voice of Mukesh singing ‘jeena yahan, mama yahan,’ the nimble feet of the clown dancing to its tune. And as if this is all there is at present to trouble her, her mind puzzles over the meaning of the words: what do they mean? That this world is all we have and therefore there is nowhere else for us to go? That we have to live here and die here? Or does it mean: this is what we have, this area of action is enough for us, we live here and die here, we need no more?

  Her mind slides from one interpretation to another, over and over again, until in sheer exhaustion she falls asleep. And gets up abruptly at three in the morning, a panicked waking as if someone has prodded her awake. She finds herself alone in bed, the pillow by her side cold and smooth, the other half of the bed unrumpled, the blanket still folded. So it is true what he told her, he meant it, he’s already done it.

  Having reached this conclusion, she lies still, waiting for the dawn. There is none of the tangle of the internal colloquy of last night in her now. Her mind is crystal clear, she knows what has happened, she sees the picture with a detachment that will not be hers, not for a very long while. With infinite patience she waits until the early morning light dispels the shadows and makes every object in the room clearly visible. Only then does she get out of bed, wash, make tea for all of them and go into her daughters’ room to tell them what has happened. And now the thought comes to her—he could have spared me this, he could have spoken to them himself. But she does not draw back from what she has to do; she tells them about it, almost exactly repeating Gopal’s words, leaving out nothing.

  And so it is that Aru, a few days before her seventeenth birthday, wakes up to the knowledge that her father has walked out on them.

  Once, years back, when Aru was only a child (but she was born an adult, Gopal used to think, when he remembered this incident), she had been separated from Gopal in a crowd. Gopal, frantically searching for her, had found her at exactly the same spot where she had realized he was no longer with her.

  ‘I was not lost,’ she had said to him after their initial hysteria had subsided. ‘It was you who got lost.’

  Now, it is as if the same thing has happened all over again. But this time, though it is her father who has gone away, Aru knows the panic, the disorientation of being lost. It will be very long before she will realize that something ended for her, for all of them, that morning. Perhaps it is Sumi’s behaviour that makes it so difficult for them to understand the enormity of what has happened. She answers all their questions with infinite patience, she listens to their repeated exclamations with what looks like composure; there are no signs of irritation or annoyance. Aru is adult enough to be conscious of the curtain beyond which her parents lived their life together as man and woman. Yet Sumi seems to give the impression that the room did not exist, that whatever life they lived together was with their daughters. And she has revealed all of it to them.

  To the astonishment of her daughters, Sumi’s routine that day is as usual. They are baffled, but as if she has set the tone for them, they go through the motions of their normal routine as well. Sumi’s calmness, her normality, make it possible for them to think—‘it was only a quarrel’; it makes it possible for them to hope—‘he will come back’. When she returns home in the evening, Aru looks around quickly, eagerly, for some sign that he has returned; but nothing has changed since the morning.

  In the next few days the girls can almost imagine that there is, indeed, nothing wrong, that their father has gone out for a few days and will soon return, but for the fact that Sumi, despite her facade of normality, has a quality about her—a kind of blankness—that makes them uneasy. The two older girls feel that they should do something, but they do not know what it is they can do. They are waiting for a lead from their mother, but she gives them none. In fact, after that first morning when she spoke to them about it, she has not mentioned Gopal’s name; nor, when they speak of him, does she show either distress or anger.

  And then their grandfather arrives. The sight of him in their house is so rare that it is loaded with significance. There is no doubt that he knows, that he has come for a definite purpose. It is Sumi who tells them that he has come to take them to the Big House.

  ‘For how long?’

  Sumi does not know; in fact, she makes it clear she does not care about it either way. She seems, in a strange way, rel
ieved at having the burden of decision taken off her. The girls cannot argue with such indifference; they cannot speak with their grandfather, either. His authority has been too long established for them to think of questioning it.

  Yet, Aru lingers. ‘You go on,’ she says. ‘I’ll follow you later on my moped.’

  What had she hoped to achieve by staying on? There is nothing in the house to hold her there. The momentary desire to rebel, to be by herself, not to follow her grandfather meekly at his beckoning, leaves her. It seems pointless. She has to be with her mother and sisters. And there is her grandmother, Kalyani.

  But Kalyani does not know what has happened, she has not been told that they are coming. Her surprise at seeing them, her open-mouthed stupefaction when she realizes they are staying, speak of her ignorance.

  ‘But what’s the matter?’

  ‘We’ll speak of it tomorrow. Right now, we need to sleep.’

  Suddenly abandoning her questions, Kalyani throws herself with a frenzy into making arrangements for them to sleep. She pulls out sheets, old saris, pillows, cushions, and flings them about, speaking ceaselessly all the while.

  ‘Sumi, you take my bed, I’ll sleep here on the floor. Aru, this is for you ....’

  And then Seema tells her. Throwing off the blanket Kalyani has covered her with, she sits up and announces the fact. Bluntly, matter-of-factly. And bursts into tears. The exaggerated, purposeful tears of a child, who, seeing her mother, dredges up her sorrow over an old hurt. Kalyani looks at Sumi’s face for confirmation and finds it there.

  Kalyani’s reaction astounds her granddaughters. ‘No,’ she cries out, ‘no, my God, not again.’ She begins to cry, sounding so much like an animal in pain that Aru covers her ears against the sound. Suddenly, the dam that Sumi had built with her silence gives way and they are submerged in the awareness of loss. Aru is overcome by a sense of unreality; she finds herself unable to connect herself to her surroundings, to these people around her and their distress. My God, what’s happening to us and what am I doing, lying here on the floor like a refugee?