The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
First Feminist Press edition, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by Shashi Deshpande
Afterword copyright © 1999 by Ritu Menon
All rights reserved.
First published in 1996 by Penguin Books India, New Delhi, India
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of The Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deshpande, Shashi.
A matter of time / by Shashi Deshpande ; afterword by Ritu Menon.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-935-7 (epub)
I. Title.
PR9499.3.D474M38 1999
823—dc21
98-52896
CIP
The Feminist Press is grateful to the Ford Foundation for their generous support of our work. This publication is made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. The Feminist Press would also like to thank Elizabeth Janeway, Joanne Markell, Caroline Urvater, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this publication.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
The House
The Family
The River
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The lines quoted on p. 112 are from A.K. Ramanujan’s translation of early classical Tamil poetry in Poems of Love and War and reproduced here by the kind permission of Oxford University Press.
The verses from the Upanishads on pages (1), (91) and (181) are Dr. S. Radhakrishnan’s translations, taken from The Principal Upanishads and used here by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
The lines on p. 186 are from Robert Ernest Hume’s The Thirteen Principal Upanishads.
THE HOUSE
‘Maitreyi,’ said Yajnavalkya, ‘verily I am about to go forth from this state (of householder).’
—Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad (II.4.1)
THE HOUSE IS called Vishwas, named, not as one would imagine for the abstract quality of trust, but after an ancestor, the man who came down South with the Peshwa’s invading army and established the family there. The name, etched into a stone tablet set in the wall, seems to be fading into itself, the process of erosion having made it almost undecipherable. And yet the house proclaims the meaning of its name by its very presence, its solidity. It is obvious that it was built by a man not just for himself, but for his sons and his son’s sons. Built to endure—as it has. Perhaps the simplicity of the design helps; apart from the two delicately fluted columns that hold up the porch, there is none of the ornamentation that was so common in the time it was built. Just a bare square facade that offers no room for dilapidation; there are no edges to be frayed, no frills to hang untidily. Signs of wear and neglect lie elsewhere: in the wide gaps in the stonework of the compound wall, the large gate that looks as if it would fall to pieces if touched, the smaller one that sags on a single hinge.
The front yard is bare. Nothing, it seems, has ever grown or will grow on the hard unyielding ground. A star-shaped sunken pond is now only a pit harbouring all the trash blown in by the wind. A festoon of cobwebs, hanging in a canopy over the huge front door, speaks of its being rarely used. The family entrance is obviously at the side of the house, where stone steps, eroded with use, lead through a wooden wicket-gate to a veranda. The house is the Big House to its inhabitants, getting its name from the comparison to an outhouse built for the live-in help of a cook. Renovated since then and rented out to a family, the outhouse now looks as if it has been placed there to show off the size and grandeur of the Big House. The doll’s house effect is carried over into its miniature garden, which, with its tiny stone-paved path, dainty tulsi brindavan and dwarf bushes, forms a startling, almost comical contrast to the garden behind the Big House. The coconut palms here tower beyond neck-straining vision, the drumstick trees branch out in exuberant generosity and the usually dainty curry-leaf tree has a trunk that rivals that of the neem tree.
The fourth side of the house shows yet another face. Everything grows wild here, nothing is scaled down to a cultivated prettiness. The bougainvillaea has become a monster parasite clinging passionately to its neighbour, the akash mallige, cutting deep grooves in its trunk, as if intent on strangulating it. But high above, the two flower together amicably, as if the cruelty below is an event of the past, wholly forgotten. The champak seems to have no relation to the graceful tree that grows in other people’s yards. Grown to an enormous height, its flowers can neither be plucked nor seen, but the fragrance comes down each year like a message that it is flowering time again. The branches of the three mango trees are so tangled together it is as if they have closed ranks to protect the walls of the house, which remain damp, months after the rains. And during the monsoon, dark, woolly, itchy insects cling to them in colonies, covering them in a thick, horrifying, moving mass. The scabrous bark of the mango trees is, however, given over to more innocuous creatures, large black gangly ants that move, not in an orderly line, but in a wild, frantic scurrying, and yet, miraculously, never losing their hold on this hazardous, uneven terrain. Strangely enough, no birds nest in these trees; in the daytime, there is absolute silence, though at night there are ominous rustlings, sounds of unknown creatures of the night.
Inside, the house seems to echo the schizophrenic character of its exterior. A long passage running along the length of the house bisects it with an almost mathematical accuracy, marking out clearly the two parts of its divided personality. The rooms on the left, uninhabited for years, are dark, brooding and cavernous. The rooms on the right, where the family lives, though too large to be cosy, have a lived-in look, with the constant disorder of living. An L-shaped veranda running from the back of the house is a workplace where it encloses the kitchen, storeroom and bathroom. The smaller arm, outside the dining room and bedrooms, is not only the family entrance, it is also their sitting room, a built-in stone seat being the centre of it.
The small hall into which the front door opens is no-man’s land, belonging to neither zone. It has the look of a set for a period movie, with its antique hat-and-umbrella stand, portraits on the wall, and a staircase that curves gracefully up into an unseen landing. The staircase raises expectations of an entire floor above, but there is in fact only one room, obviously added on later. Looked at from the outside, it looks like an excrescence perched on top of the house, detracting from its main quality of integrity.
The