Dark Holds No Terrors , livre ebook

SHASHI DESHPANDE

The Dark holds no Terrors

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Note From the Author
Preface
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Four
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE DARK HOLDS NO TERRORS
Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, India, daughter of the renowned dramatist and Sanskrit scholar, Shriranga. At the age of fifteen she went to Bombay, where she graduated in Economics; she 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 also the author of four children s books and four other novels- That Long Silence, If I Die Today, Come Up And Be Dead and Roots And Shadows , which won a prize for the best Indian novel of 1982-83. Shashi Deshpande lives in Bangalore with her pathologist husband, and has recently completed her MA in English literature.
For my husband
Note From the Author
All authors, like most parents, have their favourite children; but, unlike parents, authors can, without any compunction, declare their partiality. The Dark Holds No Terrors is, of all my novels, the one dearest to me. Perhaps this is because it is the one that came closest to the vision I had of it when I conceived it. Perhaps it is because it was this book that gave me the never-to-be-experienced-again happiness of a first acceptance. And I was lucky to have it read and accepted by Mr Samuel Israel (on behalf of Vikas, who first published this novel) whose encouraging letters made me feel, for the first time, a real author.
I would like to thank Prof. G.S. Amur for so patiently, kindly and promptly going through The Dark Holds No Terrors and for offering such helpful and encouraging comments.
The book has been out of print for some time and I have been unhappily and uneasily conscious of it languishing in the dark. I am most grateful, therefore, to Penguin India for reissuing it.
Bangalore 22 March 1990
Shashi Deshpande
T HE BEGINNING was abrupt. There had been no preparation for it. There were no preliminaries, either. At first it was a nightmare of hands. Questing hands that left a trail of pain. Hurting hands that brought me out of a cocoon of a blessed unreality . . . I m-dreaming-this-is-not-real . . . into the savage reality of a monstrous onslaught. And then, the nightmare was compounded of lips and teeth as well. Hands and teeth? No, hammers and pincers. I could taste blood on my lips .
The hands became a body. Thrusting itself upon me. The familiarity of the sensation suddenly broke the shell of silent terror that had enclosed me. I emerged into the familiar world of rejection. My rejection that had become so drearily routine. I struggled to utter the usual words of protest, to say . . . No, not now, stop it. But the words were strangled in my throat. The face above mine was the face of a stranger. Blank, set and rigid, it was a face I had never seen. A man I did not know .
Strangely, this brought an odd relief. The experience became the known instead of the unknown. It was my nightmare again, the nightmare that had, for some time, haunted me with fearful regularity. This was him, the stranger who had come into my dreams for a few nights, leaving behind a fear that invaded even my waking hours. The stranger with the brown scarf whom I discovered standing that night at the head of my bed. And I, so frozen with terror that I could not move. Not even when his hands moved slowly, like some macabre slow motion sequence, towards my throat. I tried to call out, to scream. Nothing issued out of me but silence. Panic and terror mounted in me as the hands, deliberately, with a kind of casual cruelty, gradually tightened round my throat. Oh god, I was going to die!
And then he spoke. A voice that came from somewhere deep in his throat. Words carrying with them their own echo as if they had been flung into an enormous, empty cave. What was he saying? I never found that out, because it was at that moment that I always woke up .
Now there was no waking. The dream, the nightmare, whatever it was, continued. Changing now, like some protean monster, into the horror of rape. This was not to be death by strangulation; it was a monstrous invasion of my body. I tried to move, twisting my body, wriggling under the weight that pinned it down. It was impossible. I was pinioned to a position of an abject surrender of my self. I began, in sheer helplessness, to make small whimpering sounds, piteous cries. The small pains merged all at once into one large one. And still the body above mine, hard and tense, went on with its rhythmic movements. The hands continued their quest for new areas of pain. Now the horror of what was happening to me was lost in a fierce desire to end it. I could not, would not, bear it. I began to fight back, hopelessly, savagely .
And suddenly, when I thought I could bear it no longer, the body that was not mine relaxed. The release was so abrupt it shocked me into an unfamiliar faintness. When the syncope wore off, I realised I was free. There was no weight pinning me down now. But I could not move. It was not just exhaustion, though there was that too. It was more as if my mind had deserted my shamefully bruised body, disowning it, making it insensate .
And then the two came together. I knew where I was and what had happened. Panic and sensation came back simultaneously. I turned my head slightly, fearfully, and saw him beside me, snoring softly. No more a stranger, but my husband .
You are your own refuge; there is no other refuge. This refuge is hard to achieve .
- The Dhammapada
Part One
Chapter One
I T WAS THE Krishna Sudama story that suddenly came to her mind. That, and the illustration which had accompanied the story in one of her school texts, showing Krishna and his queen Rukmini running joyously to greet poor, ragged Sudama standing at the palace gates. As she knocked at the door, softly at first, then harder, she wondered why the story had come back to her now. She herself was certainly no Sudama in rags, bare feet and humility. She had none of these. Only a suitcase of clothes. She shifted it from hand to hand, finally putting it down at her feet, reluctant to knock again. She was not apprehensive, though not eager either, for the moment of confrontation. She glanced back at the rickshaw in which she had come. She hadn t paid the man as yet, as if keeping a route open for retreat. The driver, bored now, had got out of his seat and was yawning, a huge, animal yawn, arms stretched straight overhead. A different breed of men, she thought, from the tonga drivers who had brought her when she came home during vacations. That man would have carried her suitcase for her, knocked at the door with his whip and cursed them for their tardiness in opening the door. This indifferent man . . . was he a symbol of the changes she could expect?
Inside here, though, there were no changes. The same seven pairs of large stone slabs leading to the front door on which she had played hopscotch as a child. The yard was bare as always, the ground beaten down to a smooth hardness, in which nothing grew, not even weeds. There had never been an attempt to grow anything, either. It had merely been a place to dry things in summer. The tulsi had been the only spot of green. But that had gone as well. Of course, it had served its purpose. She had died before her husband. Wasn t that what all women prayed to the tulsi for? For a moment she saw her mother standing in front of the tulsi , eyes closed, hands folded, lips moving. The memory was as violent as an assault and angrily she rejected it. Then she noticed the flowers in one corner against the wall. Hollyhocks, tall, colourful, and ridiculously incongruous in that place. Who could have planted them?
Deliberately she turned round and knocked again. Loud and long this time. Now, at last, there was the sound of approaching feet. Slithering sounds of bare feet toughened by years of contact with the ground. The bolt was shot back with a loud, groaning, protesting squeak. The doors opened with the reluctance of disuse.
They stared at each other. She smiled slightly to see the look of inquiry turn into a blank looking-at-a-stranger one. It was, she supposed, the unexpectedness of her presence. She felt a faint triumph as if she had scored something.
Baba, she said.
His Adam s apple moved. His eyes moved from her to the suitcase at her feet, and then beyond her to the rickshaw standing on the road. And now back to her, with an awareness of her identity in them. As if it was only by relating her to these other things that he could recognise her.
Can I come in, Baba?
He moved aside, composing his face into a normality.
I didn t expect you.
No, how could you?
You didn t write.
He had changed. No, not just older. Something more profound than that. An alteration that made him not just the same man so many years older, but another man altogether.
No, I made up my mind just two days back. She put the suitcase down. I must pay the rickshaw man.
By the time she came back into the house, he had adjusted himself to her presence. Surprise was a thing of the past. Inside the house, the silence was palpable, throbbing and heavy. She felt herself enclosed, with an astonishing immediacy