In the Country of Deceit , livre ebook

Shashi Deshpande

In the Country of Deceit
Contents
About the Author
Also by Shashi Deshpande
Praise for the book
Dedication
Ground Zero
Epiphany
The Country of Deceit
Unspooling
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
In the Country of Deceit
Shashi Deshpande is the author of eight novels, most notably, The Dark Holds No Terror ; That Long Silence , which won the Sahitya Akademi award; Small Remedies ; and Moving On . She also has four books for children, a collection of essays and several volumes of short stories to her credit. In addition, Deshpande has translated the memoirs of her father, the renowned dramatist and scholar Shriranga, from Kannada into English, and has also completed translating a contemporary Marathi novel.
Shashi Deshpande and her husband live in Bangalore.
Also by Shashi Deshpande
Novels
Roots and Shadows
The Dark Holds No Terrors
Come Up and Be Dead
If I Die Today (novella)
That Long Silence
The Binding Vine
A Matter of Time
Small Remedies
Moving On
Short Story Collections
The Intrusion and Other Stories
Collected Stories: Volume I
Collected Stories: Volume II
Non-fiction
Writing from the Margin and Other Essays
Books for Children
A Summer Adventure
The Hidden Treasure
The Only Witness
The Narayanpur Incident
Translations
Opening Scenes: The dramatic memoirs and a play of Shriranga (translated from Kannada)
Nirgathi by Gauri Deshpande (translated from Marathi) (to be published)
Praise for the book
One of our finest writers of English Her style is elegant, substantial, full of the surprises of exactitude - Lakshmi Holmstr m
One cherishes in Deshpande s stories the descriptions of the daily lives of women her ability to record and celebrate the many-layered richness of relationships with family and friends - Indian Express
[A] tightly-focussed and compelling narrative - New Indian Express
Love is not mere pleasure, a thing of memory, it is a state of intense vulnerability and beauty.
-J. Krishnamurti: Commentaries on Living

A fantasy feast, That s what love is.
-Poems of Love and War (A.K. Ramanujan s translation)
Ground Zero
W e had stayed away until the demolition was complete. This was the way we had planned it. Not because the demolition was painful for us-neither of us minded the destruction of the house; but we did not want to watch the process of destruction. To see the end of anything is painful; both of us realized that. Now, finally, it was over and there was nothing to show that a house had stood on the spot. All the debris had been carried away and even the gashes in the earth, where the foundation stones had been dug up, had been filled. There was only the bare land, a large open space. This was the sight we had wanted to see: the house wiped out of existence, the land as it must have been when my father bought it. I had a vague memory of my father telling us, with an expansive gesture that took in everything in sight, including the hill some distance away, all this is mine . I had thought then that the hill too was ours; in fact, before the house was built, the hill had seemed part of our land. Later, when other buildings came between us, it had receded. Now, with the house gone, it was dominating the landscape once again.
Ground Zero . It was I who said the words. And, in spite of the death knell sound of the words, in spite of their association with destruction, Savi knew what I meant. For us, this was not an end, but a beginning. A fresh start. A clean slate. She smiled at me and moved away to speak to the contractor standing near the demolition van. You make, we break -the words were blazoned on the van and I wondered at the tactlessness of the statement, at its bravado. Why couldn t they have put it the other way- We break, you make ? Wasn t this what Savi and I were doing now? But, in any case, weren t both equally true? Isn t it an endless cycle of creation and destruction?
The contractor s scooter sputtered away and the van drove off. Savi came to me. They will begin the work in two weeks, she told me and added, I wish I could be here. I ve told them you ll come every day, I ve said you ll keep an eye on things. You better! she added threateningly.
I did not really need to be on the site every day, both of us knew that. She would be in constant touch with the local architect and the contractor. My role would be that of an extra pillow, kept by for possible need, for extra comfort. Nevertheless, I went to the site every day. The house went up with an astonishing rapidity. I thought of the pauses and delays when my father was building his house. For months after the foundation stones had been laid, nothing happened. Even when we moved in, the house remained incomplete and the foundation stones of the rooms that were never built became a playground for us. Finally, weeds and grass grew between the stones, obliterating the map of my father s futile intentions. But this time the walls seemed to race up to meet the roof. Once the roof was laid, the house became real and for the first time I got an idea of what Savi had done. She had deliberately worked towards something that was a complete reversal of the old house, a denial of everything our old home had been. The large rooms, the light and air that came in from the huge windows, the broad sills on which we could sit, the sense of openness-all these were a total contrast to the dingy, dark small rooms we had lived in. The most startling change was in our bedrooms, Savi s and mine. Large, spacious and opening out on to the back where a walled garden was to be, they were Savi s belated defiant statement against the tiny dark room the two of us had shared as children.
Savi, Shree and the children came after the house was complete. Savi and I walked through it together. She was in a daze, unconscious of everything, even of her children running excitedly through the bare spaces of the house. She seemed to be walking on tiptoe like a ballerina, holding her breath in awe at her own creation. When we had gone through the house, she turned to us, to Shree and me, and spreading her arms wide, said, I did this.
Her gesture was as expansive as my father s had been when he had said, This is mine. We laughed. But we knew this was Savi s moment, that for her this was a new beginning. She was suddenly catching up with her life, with all that she had given up when Arjun was born. Both birth and death make you take your eyes off the clock. Time comes to a standstill; the hands of the clock cease to move. For Savi it was the birth of her two children, for me, my mother s dying. Two years when I did nothing but watch her struggle to breathe, fearful that at any moment she would stop and it would be over. It had cut me off from everything else. Now time had begun moving once again for both of us.
We had the usual puja before moving in- to drive out the devils, to get rid of evil spirits , Sindhu, who didn t believe in pujas, joked. But, watching Savi and Shree sitting for the puja, Shree, barechested, in his dhoti, Savi in her silk sari, I had a sense of a new spirit in the house. A cleansing spirit. We were putting a closure to all the memories of the old house. Memories of my father s despair, memories of my mother s suffering-they seemed to have permeated the walls of the house. As if she had read my thoughts, Sindhu suddenly said, This is the one reason why I like pujas. It s a sight to remember. You will always remember this.
Yes, I thought, I will. The rhythmic chanting of the mantras, the flickering of the lamps, the smell of flowers, the two beautiful young people with their children by them-this was something I would always remember. A picture that in time would be alchemized into gold.
We were to sleep in the house that night; custom dictated that it could not be abandoned and left empty the night after the gruhapravesh puja. Mattresses were spread on the floor in the two bedrooms and the children, tired after the excitement of the day, went to sleep the moment they fell on them. Most of the guests had gone; only Gundu, Asha and a few friends were left. Sindhu sat with us for a while, then, saying she would join the sleeping children, she left us. I felt a little grain of fear within me. This was unlike Sindhu. As if to assuage my anxiety, she said, You children will want to be by yourselves.
Children? We were all adults now, all but me married, and all but Gundu and Asha with children of their own. But with Keshav and Sindhu out of the room, a kind of adolescent excitement came into the room. One of Gundu s and Savi s friends, who had just returned from abroad, had brought two bottles of champagne. They were opened with a lot of whispered jokes and hushed laughter. Glasses were handed out to everyone. I had never drunk champagne; in fact, I had never tasted alcohol and I was not sure what this would do to me. To my surprise, Shree, a teetotaller, accepted a few drops in his glass and urged me, Come on, have a sip, it won t harm you. We have to drink a toast. And, lifting his glass high, he said, To the two sisters, my wife, Savitri, and her sister, Devayani. And to their house. And to their happiness in this house. Happiness always and everywhere, he ended sedately, having ignored the cries of hear, hear and get on with it .
Savi and I clinked our glasses like veterans. It was more than a social gesture; we were promising ourselves we would make it a happy house, we would put a closure to the memories of sadness and pain.
We sat up till after midnight. It was almost like the old days, with Shree, Savi, Gundu and their gang, though much depleted now, talking and laughing and I listening to them silently. It had always been like this. I was the youngest and allowed to be there only because I was Savi s sister; I was on the fringe, never really one of them. Now the age difference no longer mattered as much as it had