As I stood there somewhat helplessly I suddenly noticed Miss West.
She was staring at me and had, in fact, been doing so for some time, her expression alternating between frank curiosity and puzzlement.
She turned away now as our glances met, and it was in profile that I saw the small lopsided smile on her lips: the then unreadable smile that, in retrospect, appears as much bitter as benevolent.
5
RAJESH REAPPEARED at the library one afternoon after an absence of ten days.
These recurring periods of absence from the university struck me as odd, but he never disclosed where he had gone. He had been away, he would say, on urgent work.
What kind of work, I wondered, but the question always stayed with me.
This afternoon, Rajesh said that he was on his way to visit his mother, who lived in a village forty miles west of Benares. He added that I could come with him if I wished to.
It wasn’t like him to make such invitations; and he extended it to me with some shyness. His eyes were turned away as he spoke, and he looked as if he would be relieved if I said no as quickly as possible.
I almost did. I knew little of Rajesh’s background, and in the past many weeks, I had been intermittently curious about it. But my interest in him, as in a lot of other things, had dwindled since I came back from Kalpi. I was preoccupied with different matters altogether, and my first reaction was to decline his invitation.
It was when I was ready to present him with an excuse that the depressing thought came to me of another empty evening on the ghats.
We left one morning from Benares railway station, on the steam-engined and usually empty shuttle that in those days used to run on the narrow-gauge line between Benares and Allahabad. It was unusually cold and foggy for March. The newspaper I bought at the railway station spoke of fresh and unexpected snowfall in the Himalayas, and I thought immediately of Kalpi, imagining it snowbound, the chokidar drinking himself into a stupor in his outbuilding, the sadhu at the temple serenely going on with his small, restricted life.
A chilly wind, gritty with coal dust, blew in through the iron-barred windows as the train puffed and wheezed through an endless flat plain. The loud rattle of wheels made it impossible to talk for more than a few minutes, and we stretched ourselves on hard wooden bunks, wrapped from head to toe in coarse military blankets that Rajesh had brought with him, and gazed out of the window, where stubbly fields stretched to tree-blurred horizons and coils of smoke stood torpid above ragged settlements of mud huts and half-built brick houses.
A tea vendor, wearing a monkey cap with flaps that covered his ears, kept walking up and down the corridors. He looked inquiringly at us every time he passed. Rajesh finally summoned him, speaking in a local dialect I had never before heard from him, but the cardamom-scented tea seemed to turn cold the moment he lifted the kettle off his tiny coal stove and poured it into glass tumblers.
Rajesh sat up and hurriedly put on his tennis sneakers as the train clanked and rattled to a stop at a station that resembled one of the many small stops we had passed. The platform was deserted; the station building had a red-tiled roof and, unexpectedly, bougainvillea curling out of hanging wood baskets. Outside, on a concourse littered with horse dung, three tongas stood waiting, a couple of emaciated, mangy dogs staggering around the still horses.
Rajesh said that it was another half-hour tonga ride from there.
The view cleared as soon as the tonga left the concourse, the horse’s hooves clattering loudly against the cement surface, his long brushy tail swaying and flicking against his hind legs. On both sides sprawled mustard fields, divided into compact squares by muddy ledges on which peasants, diminished against the surrounding vast flatness, walked in orderly rows. Water gushed out in thick jets from tubewells, and raced and gurgled through narrow drains to the fields. The narrow tarmac road was corroded at the edges, as if infested by termites, and the tonga lurched ominously each time a bigger, faster vehicle — usually a snot-nosed tempo — forced it into the dusty rutted roadside. From under the hooded roof at the back, we watched as the tempo receded whimperingly down the tree-lined road and dust swirled up slowly from the ground, to be caught and illuminated in hundreds of criss-crossing sunbeams.
*
Mango groves appeared on both sides, the dust thick on the leaves of the trees closer to the road; then, in small clearings, a few buildings: box-shaped houses of naked brick and mud huts with large courtyards where men slumbered on string cots; cold-storage warehouses; tiny shuttered shops. Swarthy blouseless women squatted on the ground before thatched huts, slapping together cakes of cow dung, little igloos of which lined the road. A few half-naked children with distended bellies ran around screaming at the tops of their voices.
Finally, at the end of a row of identical buildings, there was Rajesh’s mother’s house, one room, the walls undistempered, with the brick showing through. The children went very quiet as the tonga slowed to a stop, and then as we got down, they crowded around us in a little mob, their mouths open and eyes wide with frank curiosity.
Their hair had turned rust-blond from malnutrition. The mucus from their running noses was white against the dark skin. I looked at Rajesh for a reaction of some sort, but his face was expressionless as we walked up to the house. The children followed us. One of them reached out a hand and caressed my khadi kurta. I looked down to see curiosity and fear alternating wildly in his eyes.
The door, its wooden frame warped and chipped, was opened by Rajesh’s mother, a tiny, shrunken, fair-skinned woman in a widow’s white sari, one end of which she wore over her head as a kind of veil. There was a restless quality about her wizened face, which spoke of continuing struggles. In this first moment of meeting her, I didn’t notice much resemblance between mother and son; it was a little while later that I saw that Rajesh had inherited her eyes, so full of uncertainty and now, on seeing me and the children behind us, puzzlement.
But when Rajesh introduced me as a friend from the university she suddenly grew very welcoming, and invited me into the room with an old-fashioned gracious gesture of her hands.
After the early-morning light, it was dark and damp inside the high-ceilinged room. There was a solitary window, but it was closed. In one corner, partitioned off by a flimsy hand-loomed sari, was the kitchen. The wall there was a sooty black, and on the wet floor a few brass utensils gave off a dull gleam. In another corner lay a string cot, under which was a tin trunk, leprous with rust. On the walls were garishly coloured religious calendars: a benign Shiva, Ram with lips painted bright red and at his feet Hanuman, hands clasped and head bowed in his usual pose of devotion.
It was unsettling: the half-naked screaming children outside and the bareness of the room. I hadn’t been prepared for this; the poverty these surroundings spoke of wasn’t immediately apparent in Rajesh’s life in Benares. I could have guessed previously that he wasn’t well off, but one could have said the same of almost all students at the university.
Rajesh, who since the morning had become increasingly silent, left the room as his mother busied herself with breakfast. I sat stiffly in a straight-backed wicker chair and tried to make some conversation. Both of us had to speak very loudly to make ourselves heard above the fierce hiss of the kerosene stove.
It wasn’t easy to express sympathy in that high-pitched voice, and sympathy was what was required of me as she began to tell me stories from her past.