Our Favourite Indian Stories (35 page)

Translated by
Motilal Raina

 

 

 

 

A. G. Athar

I walked past the Indian picket. It was about noon. No one was in sight. Perhaps they were fast asleep or relaxing. They could not imagine that any mother's son would dare cross the border in broad daylight. Bathed in sweat, I raced like a train. My brother's face danced before my eyes. The messenger had said that his condition was critical. In that habitation on the Neelam River bank, he could call no one his own.

I lived on the other bank and bore the stamp of India on my brow while he, right across the narrow river, had Pakistan carved on his. The messenger's words were, 'He only mutters your name in delirium.' How could I check myself after such news? After all, it was a bond of blood.

I had reached the Athmuqam Bridge. His hut lay on the bank right ahead. It would take me just five minutes to get there. Like a thief, I stole a glance left and right, clenched my fists and darted across. Barely had I run a few steps when there was a loud shout — 'Halt!' I stood, paralysed. I looked up and saw them — two towering soldiers, rifles ready, straddling the bridge and heading my way.

They read the stamp on my brow and one of the two spoke, 'Indian!' The other pronounced, 'Arrest him.' 'No, no, sir, I am not an Indian. Neither am I a Pakistani. I am only a Kashmiri. Do you see sir, that log hut at Keran? That is my home. And you see that log hut on the other bank? That is where my brother lives. He is very ill and has no one but God to call his own over there. Please, sir, give me just half an hour — I need only to ask him how he is, get him some medicine, a drink of water, maybe.'

A rifle butt hit my neck and the earth shook under my feet. They dragged me to their bunker. More soldiers — they also read the tell-tale stamp and declared, 'Indian. An enemy spy.' And then began the torture. I was told that I must confess straightaway that I was an Indian spy and an enemy of Pakistan.

What was I supposed to confess? That I was my brother's enemy?

I was taken to the headquarter, adjacent to my brother's hut. Again I pleaded with them, 'Please sir, my brother is in a hut next door. He is seriously ill, sir. Please let me go to him, handcuffed as I am — just to ask him how he is.'

But they would not listen. They peeled off my nails, threw salt on the wounds and I fell unconscious. Next I found my brother lying alongside, gasping for breath, begging for water and I, manacled and bound in chains. No sign of water anywhere. The sharp point of a handcuff pierced my left arm and blood poured out. I cupped my right hand, collected the liquid and stretched it towards my brother to quench his thirst. The chains binding my hand did not let it reach his parched lips. At last, a desperate cry for water, a hiccup, and then the death rattle. I screamed — 'It is all over, finished, the human mind, its thinking — which breaks God's kingdom into fragments and calls a brother his own brother's enemy.'

I woke up with a start and saw tears flowing from the eyes of the mustachioed soldiers. They asked me to look out of the window and I saw it — my brother's shrouded body placed in a coffin.

'Let me go — let me see my brother's face — offer a last prayer for him — that's my brother, do you know?'

They said that they knew very well that the dead man was my brother but they could not let me participate in his burial rites. 'We are helpless,' they concluded.

'Seek permission from your officers, please,' I begged.

'They too are helpless,' they said.

'From the officers' officers then,' I pleaded.

'They too are helpless,' was the reply

'Who is it that can help? Who has the power?' I asked.

'That is something we do not know.'

Translated by
Neerja Mattoo

Kamala Das

It was only last year that I decided to stop living in the big cities and settle down in Kerala. I had the occasional feeling that with my art products winning greater fame, my fingers were losing their skill. I feared that this might be due to my poverty of experience. Gradually, all my statues became mere repetitions. Art can imitate life. I don't complain about that. But what if art gets endlessly repetitive?

All those who came to model for me in the city seemed to have the spiritual poverty of city creatures. Their faces were pale and their hair appeared lustreless, with dust from the streets. Their muscles were slack like wet cotton. I noted with unease the boils on their bellies, the scars left by surgical operations, and their blue veins. During leisure time, they inserted cigarettes between burnt lips. They pecked at
pooris
and potatoes, brought in tins of candy, and urinated and defecated noisily in my bathroom. The briskness of their movements got on my nerves. They always showed the impatience of individuals disciplined by buses and electric trains.

I had always wanted to slow down time. I consciously cultivated in myself the patience of a seed lying dormant under the earth. My figures took shape slowly, like a plant growing luxuriantly into a tree.. I worked on verandahs without roofs. My statues, exposed to the scorching heat, wind and rain, underwent changes I never intended. Nature patted and stroked them and made them glitter. Perhaps on account of this, people said they were alive. The statues shone with a glow which should have been present in my models. The sale of my figures brought me wealth. But those without any love for art spread scandals about me, probably because my work involved looking at naked bodies. My husband once told me that those who spread scandals were like the sick with viscous liquid oozing from their lips. He taught me that the habit was nothing but a filthy sickness. After that the taunts of such people never brought tears to my eyes.

Then there came a time when my husband, at the age of forty-three, was laid up for three months with high blood pressure. His right leg and right hand became totally paralysed. For some time he even lost his power of speech. It was then that I took on the breadwinner's role and became a professional sculptor. Time went by. Gradually, he regained enough strength to speak and to walk about in the house with the aid of a stick. But by then he had lost his job. He would stand by my side, leaning on his walking stick, as I chiselled away uninterruptedly. He would say in the softest voice: 'Poor girl! How unfortunate you are! Fated to live as a total paralytic's wife!'

I did not deserve the sympathy in his words. Before getting transformed into the breadwinner I had just been a plaything in the hands of my oversexed husband. It was only through a sacrificial offering of my body that I could satisfy him. If I had been paralysed in his place he would not have put up with me for more than a year. He would not have fed and clothed a wife who did not perform her duties in bed. The priority he gave to sexual satisfaction had filled me with fear. Perhaps due to this I found a secret delight in supporting him. The belief that now he could not be unfaithful to me added to my health.

'You don't look into the mirror these days?' he asked me once.

'I am too busy. How can a working woman find time for amusing herself by looking in the mirror?' I answered.

'You should look in the mirror. You should see for yourself how beautiful you've grown these days. Even without applying beautifying liquids and paints, you are simply flaming.'

I used to feel immeasurably happy whenever he praised my beauty in the old days of idle comfort. Such praise is quite essential for a plaything. Such words will help one forget one's dependence on another. But, as I gradually realised, the one who is financially supporting one's husband and relatives and servants with a sense of responsibility never needs such praise. I did not have to make him happy by exposing him to visions of beauty. No such obligations remained any more. I thought with pride: I'm free. I'm not a slave. I've become free from traditional duties.

My friends advised me to take him to Kerala and give him Ayurvedic treatment. This advice became one of the reasons for our displacement. A broker showed me an old
naalu kettu
situated on the beach outside city limits. He said the rent would be very low, as it was an old house. The walls and the roof-tiles had gathered moss. The iron gate appeared rusty and corroded at many places. Beyond the gate and the wall there was a stretch of unused land with nettles growing on it. Beyond that there was the blue sea. The sky above the sea had a peculiar whiteness owing, perhaps, to the glitter caused by the sunlight on water. One look at the sea and the clouds and the sky and I told the broker: "I don't want to look at another house."

Opening the door of the house I entered into the darkness. The stench of the excrement of bats and rats hit us. Brushing away the dust on the doors and windows, the broker turned to me and said:

'Your never-do-well neighbours will tell you many lies. They're envious. They'll even tell you that someone was beaten to death in this house. These are just cooked-up stories to keep away the tenants.'

The windows were pretty small. From the central yard could be seen the courtyard paved with black stones and the cylindrical pillars. The house had passages through which air could move from south to north and from east to west.

I decided to place my statues in a row along the edge of the inner courtyard. I would get plenty of air and light when I worked on my statues there.

'This house will suit me.' I told the broker.

'You don't want to see the bathrooms?' asked my husband.

I shook my head. 'I don't want to see anything now,' I said.

The house became mine — the house that had waited alone for years, dreaming of me. Indeed, wasn't it this dream which had kept the old house alive? Otherwise, the wind and the rain would have brought down its roof beams and pillars long ago.

I had had a vision of such a house in my dreams for many years. Its rusty gate, the unused land covered over with brambles, the waves that dashed and rolled over, had all appeared in my dreams many times. The porch, the windows, the central courtyard, the pillars, the soft black floor, the mossy roof-tiles and the loft resounding with the beating of bats' wings — I had seen them all.

I engaged an old man to massage my husband with medicinal oils and to bathe him. An old woman joined us for cooking and for other household chores. The first few months were happy.

Then a rustic girl arrived to model for me. Sridevi. Hardly seventeen years old. Initially she was terrible shy and hesitant. Later, she started proudly displaying her nudity. I sculpted many figures, asking her to pose for me sitting, standing and lying down. By noon the girl used to collapse on the floor, exhausted. But my figures seemed to acquire a peculiar vitality, as though they had sucked her life-blood. As she collapsed like a lifeless doll, I watched with wonder the statues, merely her imitations, brimming over with a new vitality, as if they were showing off. Perhaps due to exposure to the sun, they had the warmth of human bodies too. The warmth remained in the stone and the wood until midnight.

One day my husband said, looking at the girl, 'Stop this sculpting! This girl is dead-beat.'

There was only anger on his face — anger directed at me. I was surprised. This man had never entered my studio, and he was now commanding me to stop making statues.

The girl was lying to her left on the black floor. Her eyes were closed.

'She's okay,' I said.

'Perhaps. But if this continues, she'll definitely die. You're like a vampire, sucking blood. Your statues will steal the life of your models.'

I looked at the girl's face again. Pale, beautiful face. Cheeks like water lilies. Eyes with long lashes.

'Do you think she's beautiful?' I asked my husband.

'My view has no relevance,' he muttered.

Sridevi. I learned to see through his eyes the beauty of that slim body from which you couldn't scrape out even a grain of flesh. Meticulously, I transferred to stone the little highs and lows and eddies of her body which looked like the peeled twig of a jack-fruit tree. Sridevi would collapse, exhausted, whenever I was about to complete a figure. It was the weariness of a wild beast. By the time I had completed six figures, she had started displaying the utter exhaustion of a woman who had given birth six times in quick succession.

Once she begged me with half-closed eyes, 'Ma, let me go. I'm quite tired.'

I gave her hot milk to drink and massaged her body with fragrant oils.

I loved Sridevi with all the love a sculptor was capable of feeling for her model. My husband asked me whether my love would fade abruptly once I was finished with her. I did not reply. Or, was it that I did not have the courage to reply? I did not have the heart to reveal my dearth of emotions. Perhaps I was afraid that I, who was regularly clothing and feeding him might lose part of the respect he had for me. As I was the breadwinner, I secretly despised his dependence and at the same time desired its permanence. I knew that he would need me only when he was living in luxury with no anxiety of the future, sucking my blood like a bug. He had not even pretended to adore me when he had his job.

How did I wake up on that accursed night? How did I wake up even though I did not hear the drizzle pattering against the window? An unnatural, pervasive stillness seemed to have enveloped everything. Could silence wake you up from sleep? Carrying an electric torch, I searched for my husband in every room. .... I found him in the corridor outside the kitchen. He was making love to Sridevi in the moonlight. They had the facial expressions and muscular spasms of creatures in agony as well as the tension which race-houses feel at the end of a race. I fled from the corridor. It was as if I had accidentally witnessed some primitive ritual.