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She saw, that afternoon, on Oxford Street, a woman crushing ice cream cones with her heels to feed the pigeons. She saw her fish out from a polythene bag, a plastic tub that she filled with water for the pigeons, water that they would not be able to drink, for pigeons, her grandmother had told her many years ago, can only quench their thirst by opening their beaks to drops of rain. And she remembered a baby starling that, in the exhilaration of her first English spring, she had reached to hold, her hands sheathed in yellow kitchen gloves, for within her, as her husband had once observed, compassion had always been mingled with disgust.
Even he, the first time she ever set eyes upon him, had disgusted and fascinated her, the dark hairs plastered to his chalk-white legs, for this was in the flood of ’78, and he had just waded through kneedeep water, he and her brother, all the way from the Academy of Fine Arts to their house in Ballygunge. He had rolled up his jeans revealing his alabaster calves which dripped the sewage of Calcutta onto the floor of their veranda, and that was what caused her to tremble in excitement and loathing as she pushed aside the curtain with a tray of tea and toast, his large, corpse-white, muck-rinded toes pushed against the bamboo table, soiling the mats she had crocheted in school. She set down the tea, her brother did not bother to introduce her, but Anthony asked, is this your sister? And she had nodded vaguely and smiled, picked up the book that she had been reading all afternoon, there on the veranda, all afternoon, watching the rain.
In her room, which she shared with her grandmother, the moldy smell of a deep, long rain was settling in, compounded by the muddy strokes of the maid, who had picked this unlikely hour to wash the floors. She tiptoed gingerly across and flung open the shutters, letting in a spray of rain. Her grandmother, coming in with the sewing machine, pleaded with her to shut them, her old bones would freeze, she said, so she drew them in again and switched on the much-despised fluorescent light, and lay with her face towards the damp wall, lulled by the whirr of the sewing machine, and the ever loudening beat of the raindrops, until the lights went out, as they did every night, and every morning – the inevitable power rationing – and she was summoned to take out to her brother and his white friend a kerosene light. And so she appeared to him a second time, lantern-lit, in the damp darkness, a phantom of beauty, and his eyes roamed for a time after she had disappeared inside, the ghost of light that her presence had left, there beside him, in the rain-swollen dark. He saw her again at dinner, candlelit, their first dinner, and she sat well back in the darkness, so that he could only gaze upon the flames that danced upon her delicate fingers, the drapes of her sari that fell upon the formica tabletop, and as they were being served yogurt, the lights came on again, the house sprang into action, the fans whipped up the clammy cold air, the water pump revived, Beethoven resumed on the record player. I’d rather you didn’t leave the player on during load shedding, said their father, their grandmother shivered, the rain will go on for a few days now, she said, I can feel it in my bones, those poor villagers.
She noticed he had changed into some clothes of her brother’s, the long punjabi shirts that he wore over jeans or loose paijamas, which together with his thick beard (gnat-infested, I’m sure, she would tease him, a veritable ecosystem, their ornitholgist uncle called it) set him apart as a man of letters, reaffirmed his association with an experimental theater group. Last year her brother had visited her in London, he had been touring in Germany, and he had sat all day in his hideous check jacket which he always kept on, in front of the television, smelling of alcohol, Anthony had had no patience with him, they were glad when he left. And yet, the first evening that he was here, the two of them had sat and argued late into the night, and she had felt again the soggy wind of that first rain-filled evening upon her limbs, as she folded clothes in the laundry room, their voices drifting towards her, the quivering ring of heat around the edges of the iron. Later as she lay upstairs staring through the bedroom curtains at the haze of the streetlights, their voices rose in thin wisps to edge the darkness, as they had done that moldy evening, when all of Calcutta was one large sea of mud and dung, and floating waterlogged Ambassador cars, and children disappeared on their way home from school into open manholes, their covers wrenched off and sold long ago, to drown in the city’s choked sewers, on a night like this, he had come to dinner, and been forced to stay, she had been ordered to spread clean sheets on her brother’s bed in the living room, which during the day they called the divan, and make one up on the floor for her brother, and so she heard them talk, wide-eyed in the dark of her own bedroom, heard their laughter amid the gentle snores of her grandmother, the vacillating rain. She heard her brother’s footsteps, the corridor light came on, she heard him rummaging at his desk, which lay in an alcove in the corridor where, as children, they had kept their toys, the little red tricycle that they rode together on the roof terrace, the silver-haired dolls her aunt sent from Canada. She emerged cautiously from her bedroom to meet his excited eyes.
“You’re not asleep yet!” he exclaimed.
“You woke me up,” she retorted, but he brushed by her without a rejoinder, she struggled with the heavy latch on the bathroom door until it slid down suddenly, as it always did, and once within, she stood in the mossy darkness, and heard through the thin walls her brother translating to his English friend a play that he had just finished writing last week, his first (there, he had said to her, a week ago, after an afternoon of furious scribbling, what do you think, do you think your brother will make it as a playwright, tell me, Moni, if this isn’t better than most of the crap that they call theater, and she had put down her Agatha Christie novel to pick up with her calm fingers the foolscap booklet that he had flung on the bed, at her feet), the play was set in rural West Bengal, where, her brother had wanted to show, the peasantry were still as oppressed as they had been the past thousand years under feudalism, you must take me out there, she heard Anthony say, you must acquaint me with rural Bengal, that was what she had heard him say, her cheeks pressed against the damp bathroom walls, on a night of mad thunder and rains that swept away half the peasantry of their land, left them without the mud walls within which they had sheltered their grains, their diseased children, their voracious appetites, and their stubborn ignorance. For she had come to this island, this demi-paradise, from a bizarre and wonderful land, so Anthony’s friends called it, was it true, they asked, that they still burn their wives, bury alive their female children? And she would nod numbly, although she had known only of those children that had escaped death, whether deliberate or from disease, those that had been sent out to serve tea in tall grimy glasses in roadside stalls, or to pluck the gray hairs of obese turmeric-stained metropolitan housewives, fill the gentleman’s hookah, blow, blow until the green flame gushes, while the mother, helpless domestic, watches silently and trembles. And even these were often graven images, culled from film and fiction. From such a land Anthony had rescued her, a land where the rain poured from the skies not to purify the earth, but to spite it, to churn the parched fields into festering wounds, rinse the choked city sewers onto the streets, sprinkle the pillows with the nausea of mold, and yet the poet had pleaded with the deep green shadows of the rain clouds not to abandon him, the very same poet who wrote,
You, who stand before my door in this darkness
Who is it that you seek?
It has been many years since that spring day, when there came a
young wanderer
And immersed my parched soul in an endless sea of joy;
Today, I sit in the rain-filled darkness, in my crumbling shack
A wet wind snuffs my candle, I sit alone, awake;
Oh, unknown visitor, your song fills me with sweet awe
I feel I will follow you to the depths of uncharted dark.
Excerpted with permission from Memories of Rain, Sunetra Gupta, Westland in association with Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.
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