It was curious how he thought of his sleepiness when he had to work, but miraculously forgot it when he came upon something that interested him. On his way home, he recalled a postcard he had seen of an ape with a very big and alarming red bottom.
5
A few months later, at the beginning of winter in Shahkot, when the nights were cool and the town was full of flowers, the wedding day of Mr D. P. S.’s daughter arrived. Soon after sunrise, as instructed by their boss, the entire post-office staff was on hand to perform such necessary tasks as hanging marigolds and chillies in the doorways, procuring strings of party lights for the trees, fetching young and tender goats for the biryani. Miss Jyotsna and Mr Gupta rose to the occasion with tremendous enthusiasm, shouting at the band members and the tent men for laziness, tasting kebabs for tenderness, meeting relatives at the train station, running with joy to the tailors and back again with bursting bags. This was not the time to let anyone down.
Sampath had been allotted the job of filling glasses with sherbet, of washing the glasses once they were emptied by the guests, and then filling them up again; it had been decided by group consensus that even Sampath could be counted on to manage this simple task. But, after all, it is very boring to sit filling and washing hundreds of glasses, especially after you yourself have drunk your fill. Sampath began to toss choice bits of food to the stray dogs that had gathered at the back of the wedding tent to see what they could scrounge from the feast. Then, when the cooks began to threaten — ‘You stop that or we’ll chop you up with the onions’ — he decided to look around to determine the layout of the house. He opened doors and peered into cupboards. He went through the contents of a drawer. But things were rather old and dusty. Nothing in Mr D. P. S.’s residence seemed terribly interesting until, at the end of the corridor, he came upon a room piled high with wedding finery in which the cousin-sisters had dressed each other and departed in a rush, leaving their belongings strewn higgledy-piggledy over the place. It was not the bride’s dowry, which was under lock and key, of course, or the aunties’ precious jewels, which had been locked up as well, but it was quite exciting all the same. The clothes for several days of celebration were scattered upon the floor, the beds and chairs.
He could see ruffles of peacock silk and tiny pleats of rosy satin; lengths of fabric and saris of every colour imaginable. Fabric run through with threads of gold, scattered with sequins and bits of glass, with embroidered parrots and lotus flowers worked in silver. There were mango patterns in rich plum and luminous amber shades. There were dark velvets and pale milk-like pastels tinted with only the faintest suggestion of rose pink or pistachio. There were unbroken stretches of crisp white petticoats in waves about Sampath’s feet.
He uncorked a bottle of rose-water and its fragrance escaped to mingle with the rich mutton biryani smells rising from cauldrons outside. Sampath, whose sense of smell had been refined during years of paying close attention to the olfactory curiosities offered by the world, could also discern the scents of musk, of mothballs, marigolds and baby powder. Of sandalwood oil. Oh, scented world! He felt his heart grow light. He held the fabrics to his cheek, let their slippery weight fall from one hand to the other and slide over his arms. He swathed lengths of pink and green and turmeric yellow about himself until he looked like a box of sweets wrapped up for the Diwali season. In a box full of a cousin-sister’s jewellery, he examined unusual iridescences: pearls hung upon stalks of silver; a stone lit with the brilliance of an eye; the delicacy of shell. He imagined the sun deep in the ear of a flower. He put a blue stone in his mouth, then took it out and rolled it, cool and round, up and down his arms. To his nose he attached a nose ring decorated like a chandelier with glassy, glinting drops. He wondered if he could be considered beautiful.
The room was quite dark, since he had closed both the window and the door so he might conduct his exploration undisturbed. In order to survey himself in all his finery, he lit a candle by the mirror and watched as he metamorphosed into a glorious bird, a magnificent insect. The mirror was mottled, slightly cloudy, speckled with age. He felt far away, lifted to another plane. Held within this frame, he could have been a photograph, or a painting, a character caught in a storybook. Distant, tinged with mystery, warm with the romance of it all, he felt a sudden sharp longing, a craving for an imagined world, for something he’d never known but felt deep within himself. The candle attracted his finger like a moth and he drew it back and forth through the yellow and blue flame.
He remembered how, not so long ago, the rest of the family asleep, he had spent dark hours over his books, always some examination to study for, some test or some long question to answer. He had wrapped a wet cloth around his head, hoping for coolness, but the sweat had trickled down his back like the quick run of a beetle, his fountain pen had grown slippery in his hands, ink smearing into monster tracks, blue and black across the page. How, even then, candle at his elbow, his finger had been distracted from the lines of print he hoped to follow all the way into memory; and like the moths that joined him, his finger too had sometimes been caught and singed.
The next day, he had known, he would leave blanks instead of answers to the questions chalked up on the blackboard — the ten most important political reforms introduced by King Asoka, the advantages and disadvantages of the caste system. They had retreated into the trembling scene before him, along with the soil and altitude requirements for a good crop of wheat; the stages of reproduction in the paramecium; and the proof, in an isosceles triangle, that an exterior angle is equal to the sum of the interior opposite angles.
He had watched as a piece of paper flared up in the night and crumpled. Collecting the dripping wax, soft and greasy, into a dozen balls of varying size, he had sliced through them with instruments from a geometry box; studied the wobbling globe of light cast through the belly of an empty glass; fingered the warped wood of the table. He had salvaged only odd words here and there from the pages in front of him. Slips of sentences. The thought of a river dark through pale country. The cool ‘o’s in Colombia, drawing the tongue over them as easily as water. He had traced the outlines of a map that showed the savannah grasslands of the world, run his finger over the backbones of the mountains in his atlas, down the veins of blue rivers. But he had forgotten the urgency of finishing the night’s work, the importance of the next day’s examination.
He had held the candle far enough away to lose its heat, yet close enough to keep its light around him. He remembered carrying it to the mirror. How, with its hot, eager breath in his face, the flame had illuminated into strangeness a chin and a cheek, or a hand, a nose, a mouth. He had watched his lips form words, any words: just ‘hello’ sometimes, or even ‘mmmm’. The memory of them hanging in the air for a moment, then disappearing into the silence of the room, spreading to stillness like the ripples cast by a small pebble. Sometimes, though, he had made no sound at all, just worked his lips like a fish in the deep-shadowed light, mouthing the air like water.
Now he traced the outline of his face and drew in the fantastic costume. He smiled and bowed at his reflection as if he were his own honoured guest. The lizards on the wall watched him with severe eyes. He stuck out his tongue at them, felt suddenly and ridiculously happy. Perhaps he was made for a life hung with brocades, worked out in fine patterns of jewels. Perhaps he was made to wear silk slippers and, with a wave, demand the world’s attention. Striking a pose, nose in the magical air, hand raised for a touch of drama, he sang, making up his own words to a popular tune: ‘My suit is Japanese, tra-la-la, my lunch was Chinese, tra-la-la, but though I may roam, tra-la-la, don’t worry, Mama and Papa, my heart belongs to home. Oh, my heart belongs to home.’ He gyrated his hips in perfect circles.