The logic was so impeccable that it threw Ritwik off wondering if there had been an implicit recrimination in her words. He sat at the kitchen table, held his head in his hands and bleated, ‘What else can I do?’
‘For a start, you could stop walking around as if you’d been buggered by the entire squadron of the Queen’s Horse Guards and their horses.’
‘I wish, Anne, I wish. And you should wash your mouth out with carbolic. Look at you, at your age, using language that would make a sailor blush,’ he said, in between sobs of laughter.
Anne couldn’t stop giggling. Ritwik never disclosed what it was that was making simple, unquestioned things such as sitting down, bending, turning around, climbing up or down the stairs so painful and stiff, as if he had just been put together by a hamfisted joiner. And anyway, he thought, it was just lack of regular physical exercise; he would be fine after a week or so.
Those nights, with sleep coming down on him heavy and seductive, the very sight of the sheaf of papers containing Miss Gilby’s unfinished story set him afloat on a deep ocean of exhaustion. How would he ever find the time or the energy to finish it? On those nights he told Anne, in installments, the story of Duo-rani, the wicked queen who, wanting to divert the king’s attention from his favourite wife, Suo-rani, pretended to be ill with an incurable bone disease by putting light, hollow twigs of birch and willow and broom under her mattress so that when she tossed and turned it seemed that her very bones were snapping loudly into bits and pieces. Anne lay awake, her thoughts inhabiting god knew what world; Ritwik was certain at times that Anne’s attention couldn’t be farther from the story he had spliced from his childhood folk tales on to the current aches in his lower back, thighs and legs.
He stopped abruptly in the middle of the story one night, kept quiet for a few minutes, then said, ‘I leave all these notes because I don’t want to come back one evening and find you lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs just because you forgot to take the stair lift or misplaced your stick.’
He wasn’t really hoping for an answer — it was spoken more to himself, as a kind of summing up, rather than addressed to the drifting woman — so he was surprised when she whispered, ‘Yes.’
And then the cold jolt of being read with such ease again: ‘What story is it that you keep scribbling down all the time?’
‘How do you know it’s a story? It could be letters, or anything,’ he said, too tired to ask her if she has been going through his stuff.
She didn’t reply. After a while, she said, ‘You could read that out to me, couldn’t you?’
Why not? ‘Do you know who she is?’
‘What do you mean who she is? Isn’t she the heroine of your story?’
‘Yes, she is, but she exists elsewhere. She is a very minor figure, appearing for all of four or five paragraphs in an early chapter in a Tagore novel, Ghare Bairey. Did you know that? Then Satyajit Ray made it into a film in the early eighties and, in keeping with the book, she was a fleeting, walk-on figure there too.’
‘No. But you could still read it out to me, what do you think?’ Adamant and tenacious as always.
‘Yes, yes, I could. Do you want me to start from the very beginning or read the latest installment?’
‘Whichever is easier.’
So Ritwik reads to Anne the chapter in which the great ferment outside enters, in an unsuspectingly malevolent form, the home of Nikhilesh and Bimala:
IX
First, she doesn’t show up one morning. Miss Gilby waits, unworried, not even registering the delay for half an hour because their arrangements are so informal and fluid; after all, one doesn’t need appointments and rule books and enslavement to the hands of the clock among members of the family. But after an hour has passed, without any sign of Bimala, she decides to send Lalloo to look for her. Lalloo comes back and says Bimala is not in the andarmahal. Miss Gilby leaves a brief note for her saying that if she needs her, she will be in her study upstairs. Bimala doesn’t call that day.
The next morning, Bimala is on time. She says, ‘Miss Gilby, I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. I have important things to do in the andarmahal. I couldn’t leave.’
Miss Gilby says, ‘That’s all right. Shall we start by practising scales this morning?’
Next week, she is absent again, once more without any advance warning or subsequent explanation. Miss Gilby’s note gets ignored. This time she asks Bimala the reason for her absence because none seems to be forthcoming on her part, not even an apology.
Bimala replies, ‘Naw jaa is not well. I look after her all day.’ She refuses to meet Miss Gilby’s eyes when she says this.
The next day Miss Gilby asks after naw jaa. Bimala says, ‘Naw jaa? Naw jaa?’ before awareness strikes and she stammers out, ‘Yes, yes, she’s well.’
That week Bimala is listless and restless in turns, if such an apparently paradoxical condition can be imagined. But there is also something else, a hint of insolence, a defiance somewhere struggling to manifest itself but too weak to come into being. She makes flagrant grammatical errors and when Miss Gilby corrects her, she doesn’t incorporate them into her next sentence, instead repeats her mistake stubbornly. She expresses a desire to read only Bengali books and sing Bengali songs. Her vocal accompaniment gets more and more careless to the extent that Miss Gilby wonders if Bimala is deliberately doing all this for some unknown reason.
The following week, Bimala doesn’t appear for two consecutive days. This time Miss Gilby doesn’t leave a note for her; she waits for Bimala to contact her. When Bimala eventually knocks on her study door, after two days, she tries to pretend as if there has been no hiatus in their daily lessons. Miss Gilby patiently enquires if anything is wrong. Bimala, once again refusing to make eye contact, says something about helping out with swadeshi business.
Three days after this, when Bimala doesn’t turn up for three consecutive days, Miss Gilby decides that enough is enough; she has no option but to write to Mr Roy Chowdhury about the predicament.
Mr Roy Chowdhury has such prominent dark circles under his eyes that Miss Gilby is moved to asking after his health even before the formalities of greeting have been completed.
‘I’m afraid I’ve not been sleeping very well. I have a number of things weighing on my mind, but, Miss Gilby, I’m so sorry to hear of Bimala’s. . what should I say. . truancy. . except I had no idea of it. . you must excuse me, please. .’ He gives up before he can complete the sentence.
‘I’m sure it is something very minor, something unimportant, which she feels she cannot tell me. I’m not even very certain that something’s bothering her,’ Miss Gilby tries to reassure.
‘She seems well to me, if a bit fired up about swadeshi. I expect she’s told you all about it. She seems quite obsessed with it, doesn’t talk about much else.’
‘Oh, yes, that must be it,’ Miss Gilby says, unconvinced. ‘She has appeared to be somewhat careless and distracted of late. Her mind is elsewhere. I was wondering if there is anything in particular which she feels she could tell you but not me.’
‘I can’t think of anything at the moment. I’ve always thought that if something was on her mind, she would be far more likely to tell you about it. If it is not a language problem, that is.’
‘Ah, that might be it.’