The Intrusion and Other Stories Read online

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says carelessly. Then, firmly, ‘Teacher said so. Teacher said a robin.’

  Foolishly I ignore the finality of her words and blunder on. ‘Why not a bird we know something about? A sparrow, or a… a… a… myna, or even… a peacock?’

  ‘No. Not those. I want a robin’ she says with childish petulance. Her lower lip is thrust forward, her forehead is furrowed, her eyes are angry. But I am amazed at her beauty. How did I, so plain, so common, get a daughter like her? Her beauty always gives me a physical wrench. And saddens me. It puts distances between us. Can one envy one’s own daughter? I think I do. She gets so much out of life, effortlessly, gracefully. While I…?

  ‘Tell me something about the robin.’

  This is almost the first time my daughter is appealing to me for help. And I cannot help her. I frown in my turn, perplexed and worried. What shall I say?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. ‘I know nothing about it. Except that it’s a pretty bird. With a red breast…? And it comes in winter…? Children feed it bread crumbs…?’

  The words come out haltingly, hesitantly; I feel like I did when I was a child, answering questions I was not very sure of. Her expectant look unnerves me even more. She is looking at me, head held on one side, almost like a bird herself. But not one that will let me ruffle its feathers. Not one that will come and peck from my hands.

  As I stop, she bursts out, ‘Oh! Is that all! What’s the use of that? I’m supposed to do a two-page composition on the robin and you tell me two words. You can’t help me, you’re no use at all.’ I’m conscious that I’ve failed her, I try to make amends. ‘Why don’t you write about a peacock? That’s a beautiful bird.’

  ‘Teacher said no ex-o-tic birds.’ She pronounces the new word carefully and with pride.

  ‘But a peacock isn’t exotic. It belongs here. In some places it’s quite common.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she says scornfully, looking down at me. Already at twelve, she seems taller than me. Already at her age, she knows more than I do. There is no awkwardness in her; she holds herself with a grace and poise I have never achieved. ‘We can’t choose the subject ourselves. You don’t understand. You don’t know anything.’

  I look at her terrified. She has already judged me and found me wanting. There is nothing more I can say.

  ‘I’ll ask Papa. He’s sure to know, he’ll help me.’

  She begins to gather her books. For some reason, I don’t want her to go. I want to hold on to the moment, to her.

  ‘A peacock,’ I say helplessly, feebly. ‘I’ll tell you about a peacock.’

  ‘I said a robin.’ She bites off her words sharply, irritated and impatient with my obtuseness. She is sharp, almost like a blade. When I was a girl, a friend told me to use a blade to keep my legs smooth and clean. I was clumsy and the sharp blade gave me little nicks, cuts that bled profusely, briefly, then healed fast. Now my daughter’s words, her glances, lacerate me that way. Sometimes I feel I have bleeding nicks all over me, cuts that bleed profusely and heal fast.

  ‘Why a robin?’ I ask again, and this time I’m talking to myself. She isn’t there any more. Why a robin?

  How often have I wanted to ask my husband—why me? But I know he would walk out on me the way the child has, irritated, impatient, but not angry. He is rarely moved to anger. But his silences, more eloquent than any anger, freeze me. And I don’t really need to ask the question—why me? Because I know. It was because of the speeding truck which rammed into a car on the highway. And a girl who died. Anyone, he is supposed to have said, my husband, just anyone. But why was it me?

  As I sit thinking about this, she comes back into the room and I am filled with hope and eagerness. I half rise from my chair. ‘I have a peacock’s feather, let me show it to you,’ I say to her. But she picks up a book and walks away from me, her long, slim brown legs taking her away from me remorselessly. I stare at her slender back, at the thin neck, where little curls grow, endearingly feminine, giving her a childish, vulnerable look. I long to fondle her, to pass my hands over her neck. But I am afraid of being rebuffed. I know she won’t respond. I don’t have the key to open up this beautiful child, though she is mine. I don’t have the key to her father, either. It is as if I am, in my own house, confronted with two closed rooms. I am condemned to sit outside and gaze helplessly at the closed doors.

  I force myself to get up. I begin rummaging among my things for the peacock’s feather. I have lost, misplaced so many things in my life, but I find the peacock’s feather. As I look at it, I am overcome by an onrush of memories. My grandmother used to take me to a temple. I would go with her, quivering in delighted anticipation, for there were peacocks there. I had taken it for granted then, but now I wonder—peacocks in a temple? I can remember how breathless I would be when I reached the temple. Would the peacocks come out and dance for me?

  ‘Can I get a feather? Can I?’ I would ask over and over again.

  ‘If you’re a lucky girl,’ she would say.

  And one day I did. I want to share it with my daughter—the peacock, my excitement, the memory of my beautiful grandmother and the peacock’s feather. But she won’t listen to me, it’s too late.

  Sometimes I think we are all chameleons. We change colour, become different beings with different people. With my servants I am authoritative, with my parents, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky, but with my husband and child I am foolish, stupid, inarticulate. When I am with them, I become dull and brown—no, not even that. I lose colour completely. And with his family too. They can never forget that he married ‘beneath him’. Neither can I. Before they visit us, I take endless trouble to tidy the house. But it remains dull, dead. Till he, or the child, does something. A small touch and the house looks different. I slog in the kitchen for his family; I must impress them, show them he’s well looked after. They sit at the table, carelessly eating the food I have prepared, and talk of many things, ignoring me. The talk flows above and around me, leaving me untouched. An outsider in my own home. Have they locked me out or have I locked myself in?

  I am full of guilt these days. I am a failure—as a wife, as a companion, as a mother. Between my husband and myself there is a blankness—we never even quarrel. And with my daughter, I am helpless. Her fits of excitement, her questions, her rage, her tantrums, her ideas—I can cope with none of these. She fills me with the same delight the peacock did. And I have no more in common with her than I had with the beautiful peacock I saw that day in the temple.

  Now she is asking her father about the robin. She listens eagerly as he talks and explains. They are looking at a book, their faces eager and alive. The reading lamp casts a halo of light around their glowing faces but the light does not reach the corner where I am sitting. I am conscious of an ache within me, an ache I cannot dignify with the name of grief. Even my emotions and feelings refuse to take on larger dimensions. But nothing can ease my ache. I get up and go closer to them. The vivid colour of the birds in the book dazzle my eyes after the dark. I am suddenly reminded of my childhood, filled with nostalgia for a home that exists no more.

  When I was a child, we lived in a house surrounded by trees. I often woke up to see a sparrow hopping into the window near my bed. Plain, brown and dull, it was sure of itself. Self-assured and confident. And there were also vivid streaks of colour flying out of trees. I never knew the names of these birds, I could never identify the various cries that blended in some mysterious way into a harmonious melody. But they were part of my life. Now, listening to my husband telling the child about the robin, I am conscious again of my ignorance.

  ‘Let me tell you about the peacock,’ I had said. But what could I have told her? Only that I saw it dancing once, brazenly exhibiting the glory of its fan, the sunlight flecking the blue and green and bronze with a golden dust that dazzled my eyes, made it for me, forever, the most enchanting moment of my life. But I cannot say any of this to these two—my husband and my child. We belong to
different species. I am an interloper. I do not belong. I move away from them resolutely.

  I dawdle over my work deliberately, so that I am late going to bed. Two single beds. Two islands that nothing can bridge. Not the child. Not even the bridge of passion. He has not come to bed when I go into our room. He sits and listens to music every night. I lie on my bed, eyes open, listening to the music streaming across the dark. I cannot understand this music, it is as incomprehensible to me as he is. At first, I wanted to sit with him, to try and share his enjoyment, to ask him to open my ears to the sounds so that they would become a melody. But I was afraid. Now I know I will never do it. It is his special place, his retreat, the place where he can be most alone. I will not intrude. And the worst, most frightening thought is that he may ask me—what do you want?

  What do I want? What a large, what a cosmic question that is! What do I want? I will have to live the whole of my life to know what I want. And even then I will have no words to frame my wants. And now I realize I have no wants. I have whittled them down out of fear. I have hoped to give myself a stature I think I do not have by self-abnegation. Instead, I have dwindled. Without wants, there is no ‘I’. That is why they so often look at me without seeing me.

  The music comes to an end. He comes to bed. I lie still, not wanting to reveal that I am awake. After some time I hear his steady breathing. I can look at him now. He is lying in his usual hunched position, his back towards me. The back is mute, but his neck is like the child’s, thin and somehow vulnerable. It makes him seem accessible. I can almost imagine myself going to him, talking to him without inhibitions, without fears. But I know I will not.

  As I try to force myself to sleep, I hear a muffled sound from the other room. I hold my breath, waiting for the cry to be repeated. Perhaps he will hear, perhaps he will get up. When she was a baby, he woke up for her feeds, he never let me do it. I hear the sound again, but he does not stir. I know now that she is crying into her pillow. I hesitate to intrude, but the sounds tear at me. I stare, almost in anger, at his humped figure, willing him to wake up, to go to her. As I stare at the motionless figure, the conviction grows within me that bridges have to be built. They do not come out of nothing, they have to be created.

  I get hurriedly out of bed, I pull my sari around me. The ground feels cool and smooth to my bare feet.

  Her face is buried in the pillow. The young body is utterly still, but there is a tenseness about it that tells me she knows I am there, though my feet have made no sound. I bend down and call her name. She does not respond.

  ‘Shall I get Papa?’ I whisper, remembering how, when she had the measles, she had wanted him all the time. She gets up abruptly, showing me her tear-stained face. She has given herself totally to grief. Whatever the cause, her grief is large, real.

  ‘No’, she says. ‘No, not him.’

  ‘You want me?’ Joy is surfacing through the scum of my distress.

  Her eyes are distant. ‘No,’ she says again. ‘No one.’ Suddenly her eyes fill with tears, they spill over. Her face is contorted, her mouth is working. She looks almost ugly. I sit down and put my arms around her. ‘What is it?’ I ask her.

  When she can control her sobs, she tells me. I look at her with conflicting feelings. My daughter—on the brink of womanhood? This child a woman? Suddenly I feel joyous, exalted, as if I have found one key, opened one door. But her frightened eyes bring me back to myself. I remember how I had once tried to tell her about the process of growing up. She had impatiently rebuffed me. ‘Pooh! That! Who doesn’t know about all that!’

  Now all her self-possession has deserted her; she is only a woeful, frightened child. It is as if she is facing forces she cannot understand or control. I talk to her gently, trying to make her feel it is natural, a part of growing up, something to be welcomed, accepted. She listens to me silently, lying with her knees drawn up to her chest. Like an unborn foetus—waiting to be born again.

  ‘I have a pain,’ she says. The tears spill over. I wipe them with the end of my sari. I make her get up and show her what is to be done. I get her a hot water bottle for the pain. I bring her a cup of hot milk and sit by her side as she drinks it. She is unexpectedly docile and childlike, this child who has just become a woman. But the clouds of hurt and bewilderment are dissolving from her eyes. As she sips the milk, she sits up with a new dignity and grace that shows me she is accepting what has happened.

  ‘Can you sleep now?’ I ask her when she finishes the milk. She does not reply. I switch off the light and go to cover her up. Her fingers suddenly tighten round my hand. ‘No, don’t go,’ she says with her old vigour. ‘Talk to me, talk to me of something.’ And suddenly I am my old self too. What can I talk to her about, what can I tell her?

  ‘Were you frightened too?’ she asks me shyly.

  Yes, I tell her. I tell her how I too had cried and how my grandmother had held my hand as I am now holding hers.

  ‘Your grandmother…?’ she says wonderingly, as if surprised I had one. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘She was beautiful,’ I say. ‘You look like her.’

  ‘Do I?’ I can’t see her distinctly, but I can visualize her lips curving into an enchanting smile. ‘Tell me about her,’ she repeats.

  I begin to talk. I tell her how I went to the temple with her every day. And how one day I saw the peacock dance. I tell her how the sunlight had glinted on its many-hued fan and dazzled our eyes so that the world had become a different place. ‘I still have the peacock’s feather’ I tell her.

  Bridges have to be built. I feel I am doing just that.

  ‘Show it to me tomorrow.’ Her voice is slurred with sleep. Drowsily she says, ‘I’ll ask teacher—why not a peacock?’

  ‘Why not a robin?’ I say slowly, trying to formulate my thoughts. I remember the sparrow that had hopped onto my window-sill every morning. What if it had seen the peacock? And what if the peacock were more beautiful? It would have strutted just the same.

  ‘Why not a robin? We all belong.’

  But she is sleeping, her fingers loosely clasped round my hand. I sit still and quiet. Unmoving.

  Can You Hear Silence?

  We’ve been sitting here watching the road since the morning. When I woke up, I knew, even without opening my eyes, that it was not like every day. The noises were different. Splashing sounds on the road. A car starting, sputtering and dying away. A funny lap-lap sound as if the sea had come close to us. And, above all this, a loud drumming sound. I opened my eyes and it seemed dark. And there was Papa reading the newspaper instead of rushing about getting ready. Then I knew what it was.

  ‘Is it raining, Papa? Is the road flooded?’

  ‘Go and have a look,’ he said, his eyes still on his paper.

  It was flooded. You couldn’t see even the tops of the drums they put round the new trees to protect them. I rushed back in.

  ‘Rashmi, hey Rashmi,’ I shook her. ‘It’s flooded, no school today.’

  ‘Good,’ she said and promptly went back to sleep.

  It is still raining, but not as heavily as it was in the morning. The water on the road has gone down. At the edge of the pavement, there is a crooked line of rubbish left by it. All kinds of trash, even—ugh!—a dead rat. A crow is pecking at it daintily, as if choosing the tastiest bits. Rashmi shudders when I say that and makes a vomiting sound and face.

  ‘Lunch,’ Mummy announces.

  ‘Mummy, you’re not going to work!’ Chhaya says accusingly, seeing Mummy dressed to go out.

  ‘I have to. But after you’ve had your lunch.’

  ‘You promised you wouldn’t,’ Chhaya says, half-angry, half-crying.

  ‘No, I didn’t. I said if it kept on raining and if the roads were still flooded, I wouldn’t go. I don’t have any leave, Chhayu,’ Mummy says coaxingly.

  But Chhaya doesn’t relent, she picks at her lunch. I can’t eat much, either. I think of the crow and the rat.

  As soon as we’ve finished eating, we rush back
to watch the road. The door bangs. Mummy has left. She waves to us from the pavement. She looks very small from up here. In a moment, she’s lost among all the umbrellas.

  With Mummy out of sight, I’m suddenly bored with looking at the road. ‘Come, let’s go out and play,’ I say to Rashmi.

  ‘No, we can’t. We have to wait until Tarabai finishes the clothes.’

  Tarabai came late today and in a worse mood than usual. It was almost like the band we hear in the park sometimes, the way she clanged the pots and pans. Mummy hates it, but she didn’t say a word. She’s a bit scared of Tarabai, we guess. Now Tarabai is banging away at the clothes. Thwack, thwack—the sounds come from the bathroom. In a while, she comes out muttering angrily to herself and begins pulling yesterday’s clothes off the line. She throws them at us. ‘Here, do something about them,’ she says. They’re still damp. Rashmi and I look at them helplessly. Where do we put them? Tarabai is draping the wet clothes everywhere, wherever she gets some place, shoving us rudely out of her way as she walks about.

  ‘Tarabai, what about these?’ we ask.

  ‘Hang them round your necks,’ she says rudely.

  I want to retort angrily, but Rashmi stops me. And I remember Mummy’s, ‘Now, don’t fight with her, girls. I need her.’

  ‘Tarabai, why are you so angry?’ Chhaya asks.

  ‘What do you want me to do? Sing and dance?’ she retorts, but not so angrily. She’s fond of Chhaya. They have long conversations and Chhaya knows all Tarabai’s problems—her drunken husband, her son who’s with the ‘daruwalas’ as she says, her daughter who goes sneaking out with boys ….

  ‘Can you really sing and dance?’ Chhaya asks curiously, while Tarabai goes on mumbling, ‘No sleep the whole night, the rain kept pouring in, and I have to start making the chappatis at four….’ She goes on and on, while we chivvy her, asking her to hurry up, for we want to go out and play.

  When she has gone, the room looks most peculiar. The curtain which divides the room into two has been pushed aside; instead, there is a curtain made of towels, petticoats and pyjamas. The fan flaps them into strange, exciting shapes. I would like to watch them, but Chhaya says, ‘Oooh, I’m feeling cold’ and Rashmi hustles us out.