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Literary Review
Spaces of encounter
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Exclusive extracts from Susan Visvanathan's The Visiting Moon, published recently.
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IT was raining when I left the guest house early next morning. The boys were sleeping, legs locked against one another in the slumber of ancient gods. I blew them a kiss and lugged my suitcase — heavy with blankets and woollens and the painting of the moth that Gautam had given me — to the bus stop.
The hill people, gnawed by political indifference, no water, military correctness and hierarchy looked pallid and hungry. The tourist season had barely begun. They were after all the hewers of wood, the breakers of stone, the hungry and the dispossessed, while the offspring of merchants lived under the eaves of beautiful bungalows. An old man with earrings and a blue and yellow checked muffler made me some hot tea and asked about the boys.
"They're sleeping."
"You're leaving them and going?"
"Their father and his wife are coming today."
"Father and his wife?"
"Yes, I am their mother."
"But not his wife."
The old man was slow to understand. I explained it to him.
"Go back to them. Wait, wait, till their father comes."
"But they are 20 and 19 — grown men. They often go trekking from college. Go back? But my bus is due now."
"See them awake, then go."
So lugging my box in the cold and pelting rain I went back. The boys were still sleeping in the old-fashioned shelter and courtesy of a guest house where one could sleep with doors open to the world. Inder and Anita would be here in another hour. I changed into a dry pair of black jeans and a red checked shirt. I sat watching over the boys feeling very uncomfortable and idiotic. With the glancing of sun through the windows they got up almost at the same moment.
"God, mother, you're still here. That means you accepted Bannerjea's proposal," Rajeev muttered.
"No, I didn't."
"You missed the first bus to Delhi?" Satish asked looking at the rain.
"In a way, yes." I felt it was too foolish to tell them about the old patriarch at the tea-shop worrying about motherless adolescents.
"You'd better get away from Dad and Anita," Rajeev scowled. "They'll moralise."
"It's okay. I've met them before," I said, shaking the rain out of my still damp hair like a wet dog.
As we sat there waiting, the boys loathe to get out of bed in a hurry, we could hear the roar of metal as a car crashed into the driveway. Inder. He is what is known as a dangerous driver. We could hear slaves rushing about in all quarters, and then horrors — the tinkle of keys on a silver belt. They were here.
She was as pretty as a picture — not beautiful, not stark raving mad like me, just pretty. She had dusky skin, swirling organza in beige and would you believe it, embossed with seed pearls ("Plastic not mollusc" I muttered to Satish who grinned into the blankets). She had straight soft long brown hair and like Inder she was all of fifty. "Love and Beauty in the Middle Ages" I said bitterly to myself. My God, how could she. My heart turned bitter, my hands to sweat, my knees to knock, my breathing turned shallow, my eyes to flitter.
"Rashmi," she said softly. "How lovely to see you. We thought you'd have left by the early morning bus."
...
I kissed the boys goodbye, which they submitted to with courage. If Anita had not been there they would have howled protest. I waved goodbye to Anita from the door, at a safe distance. She nodded without smiling. When I turned back in the corridor, she was folding the bed covers and the boys were looking so young, so childlike, that I almost stopped in my tracks. But Inder was making a great deal of noise with the horn, which was yowling like an abandoned baby. I leapt in beside him, since he had already stacked my bags at the back.
We went downhill at great speed in silence. Every time he yanked at the gear his knuckles touched my knees which caused him even greater irritation. He unloaded my suitcase at the busstand, found my seat for me, and then went to find out where he could put my bags without causing any one any distress. Then he shook my hand with great fervour through the window as if saying goodbye to me was the greatest favour a man could ever do to himself, and said "Look after yourself. It's good to see you looking normal."
I didn't reply since there was no audience for a returned barb, and I saw no reason why I should waste my wit on Inder, who definitely belonged to my past. He looked vaguely guilty as I stared blankly at him, then he put me out of his mind as I did him, while the bus heaved off over the unfinished metalloid road. Had I said we all got on well? Perhaps in Delhi, when we only met occasionally at other people's houses. But there was one thing — you could always depend on Inder if ever you were in trouble.
Being with the boys this summer had been wonderful. I wished that Inder and I had waited for one another, waited for our lives to cross even as we lived separate existences in the same household. But he was happy; I ought to have been happy that he was happy, but I wasn't human enough for that, or too human perhaps?
Going downhill has always been exciting for me — the trees pass by in a blur, people seem temporary and inconsequential. It was difficult to imagine that each one had a soul, a life, a destiny, companions, enemies, hopes, dreams, disappointments. I slept most of the way, only the moon remaining constant in the play of dreams that ran across the canvas of my sealed lids.
When we reached Delhi it was another steel grey dusty day. Life in the metropolis had rushed along in the way in which I had left it, and sunflowers grew in empty grease cans outside people's houses.
I have nothing, I thought — just this body which I take along with me from place to place, just these thoughts which are somehow so alien, so rootless. The memory of the boys came back to me — warm and laughing and ruthless in a way only the young can be. It was hot as hell, the wind blew through my ears and out of my mouth like a furnace blast. The flowers died inside me, as the rain in my body steamed out, as the soft hillside earth vanished from memory, as the pine-cones stopped grazing the soft soles of my feet.
The Visiting Moon, Susan Visvanathan, IndiaInk, p.153, Rs. 250.
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