Sculptor in Exile

Baldev Vaid Krishna

Description

Bringing together the best of Vaid s highly experimental short stories, The Sculptor in Exile makes for exhilarating reading. Rigour and wit inform these complex and transgressive meditations on time, love, death, marriage, ageing, selfhood and creativity. While they vary widely in form, tone and length, recurring through the collection are stories that reflect on the figure of the artist in self-imposed exile. In his explorations of interior darkness, Vaid often pushes his experiments to the edge but never loses his footing.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351186632
• Langue: English

Extrait

Krishna Baldev Vaid

THE SCULPTOR IN EXILE
Translated from the Hindi by the Author
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
The Soul of Darkness
The Magic of the Blank Book
The Missing Thing
A Stroll in the Night
An Evening with Bhookh Kumari
We Indians
Leela
My Mortal Enemy
A Blind Alley
Portrait of Old Maya
The Old Woman and Her Bundle
Shades of My Father
The Blue Dark
After I Am No More
The Old Man in the Park
Another Death in Venice
His Statements
Acknowledgements
Read More
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
The Sculptor in Exile
KRISHNA BALDEV VAID, born in 1927 in Dinga, now in Pakistan, is a major Hindi writer known for his iconoclastic and innovative work. He survived the horrifying carnage that accompanied the partition of the Indian subcontinent, and regards his involuntary transplantation to the Indian side of the border as his most traumatic existential experience.
Vaid was educated at Punjab and Harvard universities, and has taught at Indian and American universities. He has published novels, novellas, short stories, plays, diaries, literary criticism and translations. His work has been translated and published in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Japanese and several Indian languages.
For Ram Kumar
The Soul of Darkness
There s a narrow dungeon in my house. It s cluttered with all sorts of junk I ve saved all my life and forgotten the purpose, if any, for which I saved it. And it s also cluttered with darkness-the useless darkness I ve saved all my life and forgotten about as well as the useless darkness that oozes out of every day that passes. The door of this dungeon has been eaten at several places by time and darkness. That s why, perhaps, it is always ajar in a way that suggests to me that the dungeon emits darkness and swallows it simultaneously. The light bulb of the dungeon burnt out years ago. Until a few years back, I used to play with the idea of changing that bulb but I ve given up that game now. Until a few years ago I used to squeeze into the dungeon, every now and then, and start puttering around, in a manner of speaking, arranging and disarranging the long-forgotten junk, staring at some arbitrarily selected items in the unsteady glow of a candle. Until a few years ago I used to make feeble resolutions about throwing everything out in the street. Then, gradually, I got rid of this habit. Now the very thought of entering the dungeon fills me with consternation.
Every now and then I throw some new piece of junk into it with a fury that would suggest I m delivering a blow to the darkness stored inside. Until a few years ago, on some arbitrarily selected days, I used to enter the dungeon before the crack of dawn and somehow manage to sit down somewhere, naked, my eyes closed, my body motionless in a yogic posture, like a man praying in the dark to the dark for more darkness. I felt as if I was on the verge of establishing an ineffable rapport with the darkness of the dungeon. Then I dropped this stupid practice. These days, sometimes, just as I m about to step out for my morning stroll, I stop short in front of the ajar dungeon door like a man seized by uncertainty at a forked path. During that brief seizure I m assailed by many dark and beautiful longings. I keep playing with them during my morning stroll.
This morning also I was seized by uncertainty wrapped in dark and beautiful longings as I stopped short before the dungeon door. I should ve overcome the seizure, as I always do, but I pushed the dungeon door open and stepped in. Instead of arranging or disarranging the barely visible junk or stripping myself naked and sitting down somehow in a prayer-like posture, I started prodding the darkness with my cane in a manner that would suggest I was provoking a corpse or a demon or a serpent into life. Soon I was dancing in furious ecstasy in that narrow overcrowded space even as I beat that darkness and that junk I d saved all my life and forgotten. I made fancy fencing passes with my cane, parodying an imagined master swordsman. For a while nothing happened. Then suddenly an invisible hand snatched my cane and started giving me a thrashing the like of which I never got even in my naughty childhood. Anyone else in my place would have been finished then and there; I didn t even lose my consciousness.
I m lying now in a nursing home, recovering slowly from those blows, experiencing them again and again in my imagination with perverse pleasure.
The Magic of the Blank Book
Seated on her throne in solemn silence, old Joan Fisher looks like an American avatar of Queen Victoria. A dim smile perches on my lips. I fancy that the Queen, as she sits there, lays golden eggs which change in due course into the rare books that fill Joan Fisher s rare-book store.
I ve been coming here occasionally for the past several months. On entering the store, as I see Joan Fisher sitting entranced on her throne, I smile dimly and get lost in the forest of rare books and my own not so rare thoughts. I come here in order to get lost. I always come after midnight when I can t sleep and feel desolate; or when it is snowing and I lose my bearings; or when it becomes necessary to flee my ghosts and impossible to chase them away; or when a stale odour begins to ooze out of myself and a stale anguish out of my memories; or when dread seizes me and I feel like ripping my clothes off and pulling my eyes out; or when sleep denies me its oblivion and more booze means more nausea; and when Cynthia is sleeping with another of her several lover-friends.
Cynthia doesn t approve of my fixation on this rare-book store. She thinks rare books are stinking corpses. I agree with her, which is why I keep coming here. Sometimes I even buy a corpse or filch it. Rare-book lifting is an old habit. Cynthia says if I keep coming here I ll go even crazier. She says I should return to my own old country. She says if I continue to rot here, I ll become completely rotten.
This store remains open seven days a week, day and night. This information is pasted on the door in Joan Fisher s handwriting. I always stop short at the door before pushing it open. A bell rings querulously as I push the door. It feels like a chain clanging in my inner darkness.
Joan Fisher has seen me enter without raising her eyes. She s never exchanged a glance or word with me but I know she knows all about me and, like Cynthia, wants me to return to my own old country before going completely crazy. Joan Fisher s wrinkles are like those of witches in folktales, her eyes like those of all-knowing serpents. I fear her, which is why I come here. Whenever I come I don t see any other customer but I feel the presence of many. I suspect that on seeing me enter Joan Fisher makes all of them invisible or turns them into rare books. I want that she should make me invisible some night or turn me into a rare book.
At this instant I m lurking in a corner, all atremble, before opening a book, at the thought that Joan Fisher is looking at me through her third eye. I press my palpitating heart hard with the book.
I d called Cynthia before stepping out. If I d reached her, I wouldn t have come here. I would ve talked to her some, mentioned my anxiety attack, told her about my latest nightmare. Then she might ve come over or met me in a bar, advised me again to return to my own old country, before agreeing readily to spend the night with me.
The last time, when Cynthia accompanied me here at my insistence, I became suddenly panicky because of an apprehension that Joan Fisher had either made her invisible or turned her into a rare book. What had happened was that I lost sight of Cynthia for a few seconds. I should ve known that she was somewhere in the store out of my sight, turning the pages of a book, or gone out for a breath of fresh air or a smoke but I felt as if I d suddenly lost a limb in an ocean. I almost started running wildly in the store the way I do often in my nightmares after speeding trains. I saw the bookshelves changed into so many railway coaches, Joan Fisher into a stationmaster with a whistle, and myself into an anxious passenger who had missed several trains simultaneously. And then I saw Cynthia standing near the door, smiling her surprise to me: Why this panic! I noticed Joan Fisher gazing at her and urging her to urge me to return to my own old country.
Why had I become so panicky that night? Was it really out of fear that some night Cynthia would disappear just like that and I d waste away the rest of my life looking for her in that store and elsewhere, sometimes in the voices and faces and embraces of unknown women, sometimes in a train or a memory or a book or a blues bar; and I wouldn t find her anywhere; and the void of her absence would make me so desolate and woebegone that people would pity me and I d shout at them, Don t pity me, and the wound of her absence would become the only achievement of my entire misspent life and a day would come when that wound too would stop yielding any painful pleasure and I d wait wearily for the end as I lay in the gloom of her absence. This morbid memory should have quickened my palpitation but it has slowed it down. Thanks to some wizardry of this store and Joan Fisher I feel that people and things and states of mind are constantly changing or disappearing here and I keep coming for lack of other alternatives while Cynthia keeps trying to stop me. She says this store and that witch will play havoc with my mind, which is what I really want perhaps, she says and starts parroting her old advice that I should now return to my own old country or I ll lose my mind. Sometimes Cynthia s concern for me seems more like that of an over-concerned psychotherapist than that of an ardent bedmate. I agree with her but I m perhaps waiting for the right sign. It may well be that I keep coming here in search of that sign just as some superstitious f