Afternoon Raag Read Free Page A

could listen to the voice of the invisible girl, and to her rising peals of laughter. For ten minutes they would say goodbye to each other, until there came a rounded silence, and Mandira closed the door. What was missing was the background sound of old people and children, of babies and mothers, of families; instead one heard people running up and down the staircase, or visitors approaching and knocking. There was a toilet near the room whose cistern gurgled candidly each time someone flushed it, and a bath to which men in dressing-gowns went solemnly in the evening, and women with towels around their heads, less solemn and with an air of freedom. From the bath everyone returned radiant and clean, and slightly ashamed. As I passed to or fromMandira’s room, I would encounter them but not look at them, for I had learnt that the English do not consider it polite to look at each other, but nevertheless I remember the embarrassment of the men, and the opulent towels like Moorish turbans around the women’s hair.

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    E arly mornings, my mother is about, drifting in her pale nightie, making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. Water begins to boil in the kettle; it starts as a private, secluded sound, pure as rain, and grows to a steady, solipsistic bubbling. Not till she has had one cup of tea, so weak that it has a colour accidentally golden, can she begin her day. She is an insomniac. Her nights are wide-eyed and excited with worry. Even at three o’clock in the morning one might hear her eating a Marie biscuit in the kitchen. At such times, she moves gently as a mouse; we know it is her, and feel no danger. In the afternoons, she sleeps as a maidservant rubs cream on the soles of her feet. ‘My feet are burning,’ shesays. At the base of her ankle is a deep, ugly scar she got when a car ran over her foot when she was six years old. That was in a small town which is now in Bangladesh. Thus, even today, she hesitates superstitiously before crossing the road, and is painfully shy of walking distances. Her fears make her laughable. The scar is printed on her skin like a radiant star.
    Her hair is troublesome and curly; when she was young, it was even thicker than it is now. It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, that gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note. It is this tremolo that makes her hair curly and unmanageable and has caused her such lifelong displeasure. The easiest way she disposes of it is by gathering it compassionately into a humble, medium-sized bun, rendering it graceful with a final plastic hair-clip, or by thoughtfully metamorphosing it into a single serpent-like plait that looks paradoxically innocent. When the maidservant cleans the room and sweeps thedust to one corner, one may notice there, among other things, a few black strands with delicate, questioning curves that always float away with the merest breeze.
    In the bedroom there is a weighing-machine with a flat, featureless face. Solemnly, in the morning, when my father is still asleep, my mother slips off her nightie, which weighs no more than a feather, and, quite naked, embarks upon the machine; for she will leave nothing to chance, let no extraneous factor prejudice its judicious needle. When she is satisfied with what she has seen, appalled or happy, she will alight on to earth again, and slip on her nightie. Then with short steps (for she is no more than five feet and one and a half inches) she will cross all the way from the bedroom to the corridor to the hall to the veranda, making this long and lonely journey in the still hours of first light; there (on the veranda) she stands with the teacup balanced in one hand, pausing now and then in her thoughts (for she is always thinking) to sip her weak tea politely, watching the lane, in which Christian men in shorts are walking