Translated fiction: A woman walks into a room where a group of men gather at night to talk and drink

The drawing room is like a monstrous prehistoric octopede. People fear to go in. They have a strange feeling that its enormous lips are taunting them, ridiculing them. It alarms them. They do not want to go where they might find themselves unknowingly trapped. A drawing room either accepts people or rejects them.

Sitting in the drawing room, you become, at once, a nonentity.

This is Rajani Mehta’s house. But it causes him discomfort too. The elusive sense of being a stranger there is with him, always. There he is, even now, sitting on that oversized stool in the corner like an outsider, shaking his dangling legs.

“You shouldn’t shake your legs like that. Doesn’t look nice,” Tatyaba Gokhale whispers. Tatyaba wants the dense stillness of the air to remain intact. He always sits next to Rajani or Ram. These bastards always manage things, he thinks. How do they do it? I wish I could try living like them just once, on the quiet. Or at least dream their dreams, dammit. If only I could enter their sleep and watch their dreams. Tatyaba does not dream. Nor does he understand what they talk about.

Even now he sits there beady-eyed, wondering, what are these fellows doing?

Rajani Mehta is a college principal. He teaches Psychology. The subject frightens him. He knows, deep down, that he too is an outright case. He could go crazy anytime. Is there any telling?

His grandfather built the house. He was a proper eccentric, his grandfather. Constantly looking out for something to amuse himself with. This octagonal drawing room is a sign of his bizarre brain. Closed on all sides. Connected to the main house by a small corridor. No way to tell where the door is.

It has aged, looks battered. But the woodwork and furniture are solid teak. It can, occasionally, deliver a throbbing, searing shock to the observer’s eye. The furniture is Victorian, ample, spacious. The enormous chairs and settees are in the nasty habit of swallowing up people, making them vanish. Tatyaba never goes their way. When Hari Vedpathak, cursing and swearing, nears the edge of a chair, it grabs and gulps him down like one of those jungle trees. It upsets Hari Vedpathak to be tricked. Chairs and settees unfailingly pick him to torment. These ancients are like the grandfather, elegant but full of mischief and pranks.

“Get rid of all this old furniture,” someone once suggested to Rajani. “There’s new stuff coming out every day. Redesign this sitting room.”

It cannot be done. Rajani Mehta knows it only too well.

“This house, this sitting room, all of it will remain as grandfather made it. New furniture will look vulgar here. Like an upstart. Unwanted. It will make you laugh the moment you set eyes on it.”

The sitting room will not tolerate anything other than what has been. It is forever frozen in a moment from the past. This time of ours, this present does not even begin to exist for it. Rajani has tried hard to change things. Perhaps he could hang a calendar – a fashionable Life Insurance Corporation calendar, with its yogakshema vahamahyam motto assuring clients of security and protection for their material goods. Or else one of those terrifyingly grand Russian calendars. But the walls rejected them. They expressed their disapproval in all sorts of ways. Rajani bought a wall clock once. An old man stepped out of it silently to ring the hour. Melodious. Like birds flying. Two tiny sparrows peck-peck-pecked at grain on either side of the gently swinging pendulum. But the sitting room revolted like a human being. It got so bad that he shifted the clock quietly to the corridor. An ancient floor clock now stands in the sitting room, silent, its minute hand still. It is one of them.

Only Savita could create what chaos she pleased in the sitting room. With her, all was forgiven. She had hung a tiny and quite irrelevant painting of a caravan among the splendid and relevant gold frames that adorned the walls holding pictures that had faded into blankness. The gold frames were enormous and splendid. This painting was tiny, framed in wood. The shadowy caravan, seen through the rays of a setting sun, cast a tender romantic sadness over the other frames. Your feet clung to the threshold and your heart ached at the sight of those dreamy shadows.

Then there is Devaki. She is connected by blood to every inch of the house. But these days she too has grown distant from it. After Savita left, the sitting room lost all its dignified glory. When she was around, the elegant chandelier hung proudly from the ceiling like a lotus stalk, its hidden buds of light scattering their tiny diamonds around. She was the one who did all the looking after. She talked to all these folk as she worked. Even now, as she sits in that photograph with a bounty of flowers in her hair, you feel she might step out at any moment to plant a new sapling in the brass pot, a flame like the light buds in her eyes.

What happened should never have happened.

He had only one daughter. He contended that all great men had only one daughter. He meant Nehru and himself. He taught her driving. He taught her painting. He engaged a famous and haughty ustad to teach her singing. They say her sitar is very expensive. It is a pedigreed instrument with rich inlay work. So they say. The word pedigreed suggests a slithering cobra suddenly raising its hood in anger. This entire place would have come to her when he died.

Then they got her married. It was not a bad home to send her to. The young man was bright, would do well. He also turned out to be a favourite with Rajani’s uncle.

“If you marry her into that family, I’ll throw myself into the well,” Devaki had threatened. Rajani turned a deaf ear to her and proceeded to do just that. We might wonder today what kind of spell he had fallen under. Why was he so adamant? Devaki has not spoken to him since, except for practical things. She never had a daughter named Savita. None of this happened.

The scoundrel said, “I don’t want her here. Enough. That’s all. My heart is not in it. Wait, I’m going to throttle you.”

After that Savita never felt safe. She never felt she belonged even in her own home. Nothing could convince her that she had a roof over her head. She found everything around her alien. She was like someone returning unexpectedly from the realm of the dead, unable to reforge links with the living. It was as though the whole world had turned on her in anger, rejected her. The world had fallen silent, decided not to talk to her. It is pitch dark outside. Deadly cold. The lamp in her hand has blown out. Open the door! Open the door! Late. Too late. No. No.

That is why she set off on a pilgrimage. The road was for everybody. She kept walking down it. Stubbornly. Who knows in what changing states of mind.

Rajani had pampered her silly. She’s not a child anymore, but must have chocolates, the devil. The moment she comes home, her call rings out, “Papa I’m here.”

This is how the house must be. That is how the house must be. She would change things around, again and again. How does this look? Do come and see Papa. You don’t care about anything. She had planted a foreign sapling in a brass pot that touched you to the quick, like a beautiful Keats sonnet that makes you sad. And a crescent-shaped lamp besides.

In the old days, she would flit around the house chirping like a bird. Now she was terrorised by everything. She held herself in, squeezed into a tiny ball as she walked about. She was nothing, nowhere. Not the faintest mark left of the tiny bird feet. Her food had to be hot. When she wanted dal dhokla, she had to have it. Her bedsheet had to be freshly laundered, creaseless. She would wipe the soles of her feet before drawing them up.

When she was in Kashi, she contracted cholera. She died in agony.

What could have happened in the end? An acquaintance had brought him the news, but had not been able to gather clear details.

Even now Rajani believes she will return. Devaki says nothing. He waits secretly. She will return and demand, “Why did you do it? Why? Say something. Talk…”

Excerpted with permission from The Woman Who Wore a Hat, Kamal Desai, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books.