DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (88 page)

She had a laughing face, mischievous, always ready to break into smiles or peals of laughter. Sparkling brown eyes. How can I ever forget those eyes? Peeping at me from behind a window curtain, following me as I climbed the steps to my room—the room that was separated from her quarters by a narrow wooden landing that creaked loudly if I tried to move quietly across it. The trick was to dash across, as she did so neatly on her butterfly feet.

She was always on the move—flitting about on the veranda, running errands of no consequence, dancing on the steps, singing on the rooftop as she hung out the family washing. Only once was she still. That was when we met on the steps in the dark and I stole a kiss, a sweet phantom kiss. She was very still then, very close, a butterfly drawing out nectar, and then she broke away from me and ran away laughing.

‘What is your work?’ she asked me one day.

‘I write stories.’

‘Will you write one about me?’

‘Some day.’

I was living in a room above Moti Bibi’s grocery shop near the cinema. At night I could hear the soundtrack from the film. The songs did not help me much with my writing, nor with my affair, for Kamla could not come out at night. We met in the afternoons when the whole town took a siesta and expected us to do the same. Kamla had a young brother who worked for Moti Bibi (a widow who was also my landlady) and it was through the boy that I had first met Kamla.

Moti Bibi always sent me a glass of
kanji
or sugarcane juice or lime juice (depending on the season) around noon. Usually the boy brought me the drink but one day I looked up from my typewriter to see what at first I thought was an apparition hovering over me. She seemed to shimmer before me in the hot sunlight that came slashing through the open door. I looked up into her face and our eyes met over the rim of the glass. I forgot to take it from her.

What I liked about her was her smile. It dropped over her face slowly, like sunshine moving over brown hills. She seemed to give out some of the glow that was in her face. I felt it pour over me. And this golden feeling did not pass when she left the room. That was how I knew she was going to mean something special to me.

They were poor, but in time I was to realize that I was even poorer. When I discovered that plans were afoot to marry her to a widower of forty, I plucked up enough courage to declare that I would marry her myself. But my youth was no consideration. The widower had land and a generous gift of money for Kamla’s parents. Not only was this offer attractive, it was customary. What had I to offer? A small rented room, a typewriter, and a precarious income of two to three hundred rupees a month from freelancing. I told the brother that I would be famous one day, that I would be rich, that I would be writing best-sellers! He did not believe me. And who can blame him? I never did write best-sellers or become rich. Nor did I have parents or relatives to speak on my behalf.

I thought of running away with Kamla. When I mentioned it to her, her eyes lit up. She thought it would be great fun. Women in love can be more reckless than men! But I had read too many stories about runaway marriages ending in disaster and I lacked the courage to go through with such an adventure. I must have known instinctively that it would not work. Where would we go and how would we live? There would be no home to crawl back to for either of us.

Had I loved more passionately, more fiercely, I might have felt compelled to elope with Kamla, regardless of the consequences. But it never became an intense relationship. We had so few moments together. Always stolen moments—on the stairs, on the roof, in the deserted junkyard behind the shops. She seemed to enjoy every moment of this secret affair. I fretted and longed for something more permanent. Her responses, so sweet and generous, only made my longing greater. But she seemed content with the immediate moment and what it offered.

And so the marriage took place and she did not appear to be too dismayed about her future. But before she left for her husband’s house, she asked me for some of the plants that I had owned and nourished on my small balcony.

‘Take them all,’ I said. ‘I am leaving, anyway.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To Delhi—to find work. But I shall come this way sometimes.’

‘My husband’s house is on the Delhi road. You will pass that way. I will keep these flowers where you can see them.’

We did not touch each other in parting. Her brother came and collected the plants. Only the cactii remained. Not a lover’s plant, the cactus! I gave the cactii to my landlady and went to live in Delhi.

And whenever I passed through the old place, summer or winter, I looked out of the window of my bus or taxi and saw the garden flourishing on Kamla’s balcony. Leaf and fern abounded and the flowers grew rampant on the sunny ledge.

Once I saw her, leaning over the balcony railing. I stopped the taxi and waved to her. She waved back, smiling like the sun breaking through clouds. She called to me to come up but I said I would come another time. I never did visit her home and I never saw her husband. Her parents had gone back to their village. Her brother had vanished into the great grey spaces of India.

In recent years, after leaving Delhi and making my home in the hills, I have passed through the town less often, but the flowers have always been there, bright and glowing in their increasingly shabby surroundings. Except on this last journey of mine …

And on the return trip, only yesterday, I looked again, but the house was empty and desolate. I got out of the car and looked up at the balcony and called Kamla’s name—called it after so many years—but there was no answer.

I asked questions in the locality. The old man had died, his wife had gone away, probably to her village. There had been no children. Would she return? No one could say. The house had been sold. It would be pulled down to make way for a block of flats.

I glanced once more at the deserted balcony, the withered, drooping plants. A butterfly flitted about the railing, looking in vain for a flower on which to alight. It settled briefly on my hand before opening its wings and fluttering away into the blue.

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