Steps in Darkness

Baldev Vaid Krishna

Description

Beero lives through a succession of days and events. His father gambles, his mother screams and gets hit by her husband, his sister flirts rather desperately. Beero searches for love and kindness in his strife-torn family. The spare delicacy of Vaid s prose illustrates a child s joy of play in fragile balance with the violence and poverty of his circumstances.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351186625
• Langue: English

Extrait

Krishna Baldev Vaid

STEPS IN DARKNESS
Translated from the Hindi by the Author
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Granny
Beero
Mother
Beero
Father
Devi
Beero
Rain
Aslam
Beero
Footnote
Granny
Read More
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Steps in Darkness
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 Champa
Granny
Granny is in her bed, cramped and withered, her knees touching her chin, swaddled in a dirty quilt-an unshapely bundle, ever on the verge of total collapse.
Heaped up thus in the well of her bed, she looks like a wrinkled, oversized baby who may have cried itself to sleep or death.
The bed is in a corner of the hallway whose other corners are empty, so that the one with the bed also looks quite desolate.
The door of the hallway is the mouth of this house. It opens and shuts with a creaking noise. When it is open, smoke from the kitchen moves through the hallway towards the lane, like a prisoner just released but either too tired or too reluctant to quit the dungeon at a greater pace. And when it is closed, the smoke begins to whirl about in the hallway like a spoilt child showing off before strangers. And Granny is gripped by a horrible fit of coughing.
The walls of the hallway are torn at several places. Thick layers of mud-plaster keep constantly peeling off, like layers of dead skin off a sick man s parched lips. Bare feet are coated with damp earth which sticks to them like rubber soles. The beams are black with soot, and the cobwebs hanging from them seem to be perversely decorative.
Around Granny s bed there is a constant slimy movement of the mice; Granny s rasping breath seems a part of this movement.
Granny s ears are always alert to the sound of footsteps in the lane. She keeps herself busy guessing who is going where. Occasionally, she puts her conjectures to test by calling out at random to someone; she seldom fails in the test. The person thus called comes and sits by Granny s bed. Granny s ears are very sharp but Mother s are even sharper, perhaps, for she never fails to rush to the spot as soon as she hears someone responding to Granny s call. At her approach, Granny s whispers are at once transformed into loud blessings for the sitter-by.
Poor Mother is reduced to gnashing her teeth and beating a sorry retreat to the kitchen where she spends most of her time. Granny s voice at once resumes the intimacy of a whisper. Mother is convinced that Granny is always pulling her to pieces before the neighbours.
Such occasions are very dangerous for little Beero, particularly when he happens to be within Mother s reach. He serves as a scapegoat and Mother beats him with a complete absence of malice. (When he is not at hand she quenches the intensity of her anger by beating herself.) Beero passes through the passage, lingers a second near Granny s bed, ignores her consolatory kiss-sound and walks out into the lane.
An open drain runs through the lane-a liquid line of pitch-black stink festering with worms and humming with flies and hornets.
Beero begins to prod the drain with a stick. The hornets are disturbed and buzz with unmistakable irritation; they attack him. He pretends to be more panicky than he is and fortifies his head with his arms. The hornets fly back to the drain as if challenging him to his next move.
He watches for a minute, moves forward with utmost caution and cunning, his lips pursed and his feet catty, pushes an inalert hornet deep into the mud with the tip of his stick and runs back to the door of his house. The hornets pursue him but he has already closed the door on them.
He is very fond of this game.
The cloth of Granny s quilt has worn as thin as the peel of an onion. Places where it has disappeared altogether are indistinguishable, thanks to the uniformity produced by dirt. Granny is always wrapped up in this quilt, winter and summer, day and night, morning and evening. Sometimes she gets so completely lost in its folds that Beero gets anxious lest she should be really lost. On hearing no response to his anxious shouts he begins to tug at her quilt. Granny assures him of her existence through an affectedly angry tone, and he is satisfied.
He loves to sit in Granny s lap in that quilt, whose foul smell is to him an intoxicant. Granny s toothless mouth moves and her lips flutter in barely audible whispers and Beero s sleep deepens and becomes sweeter; his lips reflect his dreams: Granny s lap is full of flowers.
Presently, however, he is pulled out of this garden by Mother, bent upon uprooting his arms. He is perplexed as well as pained as he opens his dreamy eyes. And his face is at once dark with horror. He looks at Mother, bewildered. Where are my dreams, Mother?
Mother drags him to the kitchen, her headquarters.
Must you lie in that filth? Haven t I asked you not to, a hundred times?
Everything that Mother says is for the hundredth time .
Does her lap grow sweets?
Mother must make use of an ever-new idiom in every sentence.
Can t you even die anywhere else?
Mother is almost always preoccupied with the fundamental questions of Life and Death.
Does my lap bite you?
Mother s honeyed tongue perhaps gives some idea of her soothing lap.
God knows what charm she has cast on my boy!
This perhaps is her affection.
I forbid you to sit in her lap and listen to the nonsense that she pours into your ears.
She gives him a final push and shuffles off to the only other room in the house.
Soon enough she returns to the kitchen and begins to throw the utensils about in a mad search for the matchbox. The matchbox disappears several times a day.
God knows where it has gone! It was here just now. I myself put it here.
It is there even now and Beero knows it but keeps quiet.
God knows where !
She crushes the matchbox under her feet. Beero could have spoken, for she is still looking for the thing.
Go and bring a matchbox from the shop.
His tears dry up as soon as he comes out of the house. He throws the coppers in the drain and begins to search the slime for them. Soon he forgets what he is looking for. There are many other, more absorbing things in the drain. He is lost in them, muttering their names to himself.
His cheeks are fresh with smiles revived. He is back with his dreams once again.
Mother is on her toes near the oven, blowing. Smoke is promenading in the house like a ghost. The mouth of the house is shut. Mother blows into the oven hard enough to raise a cloud of warm ashes. She rubs her eyes with the back of her hands.
These damp faggots! Water would be drier!
Granny believes that Mother throws a bucketful of water every morning over all the fuel in the house.
Mother rearranges the faggots in the oven, strikes one against the other, blows hard and long till there are more clouds of smoke but no fire.
The smoke is bitter, full of poison.
These damp faggots! Water would be drier!
Everybody is coughing-Mother, Granny, Beero. Granny s cough is the driest of all. She is being twisted into all possible contortions of face and limb.
The smoke is like a black cobra.
These damp faggots! Water would be drier!
Mother s eyes are full of water, with perhaps a portion of tears; but Beero feels no sympathy for her. On the contrary, he feels like kicking her from behind so that her head is buried in the oven and she comes to her senses; the faggots will then blaze into fire, the smoke will be killed and so will end Granny s coughing.
Smoke is Mother s ally and Mother is Granny s enemy.
He steps forward, lifts a foot as if about to execute his strange design, mutters something and comes back to Granny.
Shall I fetch you water, Granny?
Granny nods her head in acceptance and in appreciation of this gesture.
Mother, Granny needs water.
Water! Are you blind? Have I ten hands? Run away!
He returns to Granny and joins her in her coughing as if to console her. With each stroke of the cough Granny blurts out a word, a curse .
The fury! The she-devil has choked my eyes with her smoke. Ram!
Beero is now familiar with all these words and curses. The vocabulary of the family is very rich in this respect. In fact, the first word that he himself pronounced with absolute clarity was she-devil .
Those days Granny was not with them. But he has hardly any distinct memories of those days. Sometimes Mother does refer to them although this looking back is never accompanied by a smile or laughter. As she talks of the past her eyes begin to look like two little heaps of cold ashes.
He knows the meanings of these expressions and can use them very aptly. Mother is a she-devil. She doesn t give water to Granny. Smoke is all her creation. Damp faggots are just an excuse. She is always quarrelling with everybody. Her rotis are uneatable, either underdone or overdone. That s why Father beats her so often. (But he beats her even otherwise?) She has no respect for the old. She wants Granny to die. She has often said so.
His understanding of all these intricate issues is often reflected in his restlessness, in the shadows flitting across his face, in the disturbance thus caused and in his eternally downcast looks.
He would make you think of an old age that didn t begin with infancy.
These faggots are worse than water. Should I put my hands and legs i