Binding Vine , livre ebook

Shashi Deshpande
The Binding Vine
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents

About the Author
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Author
Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, daughter of the renowned dramatist and Sanskrit scholar, Shriranga. At the age of fi fteen she went to Bombay, graduated in Economics, then moved to Bangalore where she gained a degree in Law. The early years of her marriage were largely given over to the care of her two young sons, but she took a course in journalism and for a time worked on a magazine. Her writing career only began in earnest in 1970, initially with short stories, of which several volumes have been published. She is the author of four children s books and five previous novels, the best known of which are, The Dark Holds No Terrors and That Long Silence , which won the Sahitya Akademi award. Shashi Deshpande lives in Bangalore with her pathologist husband.
What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?
Emily Bront Wuthering Heights
Part One
The fragrance of the night-queen
crosses the hedge of thorns
touches the pinnacle of the shrine
and is no longer mine.
W e all of us grow up with an idea of ourselves, an image rather, and spend the rest of our lives trying to live up to it. But for me, I suddenly realise as Vanaa talks to me, it s been a constant struggle against an image of myself imposed upon me by Vanaa.
Do you remember, Urmi, how you once fell off a bike when you were learning to ride?
Once? I must have fallen at least a dozen times.
Yes, but this was a particularly bad fall. You hadn t yet learnt to balance yourself properly. I was holding the bike to steady you and you kept yelling at me to let go. I can manage, you kept screaming. So I let go . . .
And, pedalling furiously, I lost control and crashed on a pile of stones by the roadside.
Yes, I remember that. I still have the scars.
It was ghastly - both your knees were terribly gashed. We tried pressing your skirt on them to stanch the blood, but in a minute your skirt was red.
She stops, looks at me, waiting perhaps for me to say something, then goes on.
You couldn t walk properly, you hobbled, but you were more concerned with your wheels being out of alignment; you wanted to straighten them out. And when we went to your Baiajji, the first thing you said to her was I m not going to stop cycling, Baiajji, I m not going to stop . Again she pauses.
Well, what are you trying to say? She continues to gaze at me helplessly. Why don t you say it straight off, Vanaa? I know what you re trying to tell me. But that was just a hurt, a small hurt, and this is my child, Vanaa, it s my child.
I know, I didn t mean . . .
She can t go on. In the silence that falls between us the thought comes to me that I ve always had a sense of being privileged, that it s Vanaa who made me feel this way.
Hubris . The word comes out loud. Vanaa gives me a startled look. Now I know what it is. Yes, it s right I should suffer.
Urmi, that s morbid. What do you mean?
I had too much, don t you see? That s why I had to lose Ami.
You re talking nonsense, Urmi. This isn t like you.
But Vanaa, it was you who made me feel that, you who said it to me, that I had too much.
I did? I can t remember.
Well, maybe you didn t use those exact words, but that s what you meant. I can remember how indignant I was. I felt you were accusing me of a wrong and I had to do something to put it right. You remember all the clothes Inni used to get me - those smart frocks, skirts and jeans? I managed never to wear them, remember?
I can remember what you did wear - God, those awful clothes your grandmother stitched for you!
I preferred them. Inni s clothes made me feel I was different.
You looked different all right in your Baiajji s clothes. You must have been the worst dressed child in school.
I didn t mind that. It was better than being distinctive in Inni s expensive clothes. That s why I kept on wearing the things Baiajji stitched - however old or shabby they got. I made her let them out until there was nothing to let out. And Inni s dresses stayed in the cupboard until I could say - truthfully - that they were too small for me.
Vanaa s face is troubled. Urmi, I think you re making too much of something I said as a child. And we were friends, Urmi. Surely I would never have said that.
You know, Vanaa, the funniest thing is that we were not well off at all - my grandparents, I mean. Oh, they were not poverty-stricken, I don t mean that. But for Aju there was only his pension and it wasn t very much. In fact Papa was horrified when he found out, after Aju s death, what his bank balance was. It was just a fa ade of splendour.
But the house, Urmi, the house . . .
Yes, even the house, it was the same, wasn t it. Only a splendid fa ade. Remember how it was inside, Vanaa? None of the rooms matched the outside, except the durbar hall.
It was grand, she says, unwilling to let go her idea of the house. Her face is admiring and wistful and it reminds me of the child Vanaa, saying to me the first time I took her home, You live here? In this house?
There can be no vaulting over time. We have to walk every step of the way, however difficult or painful it is; we can avoid nothing. And I have no desire to leap into the future, either, to project myself into a time when all this pain will be a thing of the past, healed and forgotten. This pain is all that s left to me of Anu. Without it, there will be nothing left to me of her; I will lose her entirely.
But I can escape into the past. Vanaa s face, when she speaks of the Ranidurg house, as if she is seeing it as a child, takes me back there and I can see it myself, not diminished and dingy as it seems now, but the way it was to me when I was a child. I have to raise my head to take it in, the porch with its lofty pillars, the buttressed terrace above, the huge front door with large canopied windows on either side. I quail at the thought of entering the house through the front door; we never do that, but this one time I will. With an effort I push the heavy door open and enter the small drab hall, which is merely the prelude to the grandeur of the durbar hall. It is Papa who calls it that, with a smile on his face; but to me it is truly magnificent. It subdues me with its size, its high-raftered ceiling, panelled walls and fireplace, its polished black and white tiled floor, and the chandelier - above all the chandelier.
We come into this room, Baiajji and I, once a month to clean it. We open all the windows before we begin and the breeze sets the chandelier tinkling.
Listen, Baiajji, listen, I appeal to her. She strains to hear, her head cocked, her face screwed up in concentration. And there it is, a small, infinitely musical tinkle. We smile at each other and go back to our work.
I am allowed to help. I clamber up a chair to get down the photographs of the Raja and his Rani from the mantelpiece. As I begin to dust them Baiajji warns me, Be careful with those gods . She smiles, the way Papa does when he says durbar hall . And I will know only much later, that they are both making gentle fun of Aju s exaggerated reverence for the Raja who gifted him this house in a burst of generosity when his son, whom Aju tutored, graduated.
Nothing else interests me here, neither Papa s and Inni s bedroom - though I linger for a moment, fascinated by a trace of Inni s perfume which seems to have stayed behind - nor the large dining room which is never used. I am eager to get into our domain, the new extension, which is where my grandparents and I really live. There is a faint quiver in me as I run through the long dark corridor which links the two parts of the house, as if the horror of the future is crouching somewhere in a dark corner. It is a relief to be in our familiar hall with its shabby, sagging sofa and the ancient GEC radio enshrined on a high table. But it is in the dining room that we spend most of our time, Baiajji and I; the table is always littered with my school books, Baiajji s letters and the bits of paper on which she does her accounts.
Now there are two doors before me, absolutely identical, except for a paper stuck on one door which says Baiajji s and Urmila s room . I have written this and Amrut has added and Amurts , squeezing the letters into the little space left. The rooms behind the doors are two halves of a large rectangular room, divided by a wooden partition running along its length. Aju s room is neat and dull, there is nothing interesting here, except the large globe, a relic of his teaching days. Baiajji s and my room, though the same size as Aju s, is so cluttered it looks much smaller. And chaotic. But it isn t. Nothing is ever moved from its place. Baiajji and I never have to search for anything, we can find things even in the dark.
The furniture, however, leads a peripatetic existence. Baiajji has a craze for moving things, and when I wake up I never know where I am. Sometimes I am facing the wall, sometimes the wooden partition, from behind which I can hear the faint sounds of Aju coughing and moving about, and some mornings I wake up to see a bit of the sky through the branches of the neem tree. But there is never any disorientation, because always by my side there is Baiajjj s bed, already neatly made, the blanket folded into a square at the foot of it.
I go into the garden and there she is, squatting before a freshly-planted mango sapling, her two assistants standing before her with an air of resignation, while she harangues them about something. They nod their heads, seeming to agree with everything she says, but we know they will go on doing things their own way.
Don t go near the tamarind trees, Baiajji calls after me as, bored with them, I run off. I don t bother to reply. There is no time when the tamarind trees do not hold temptation for us. We eat the tend