The Museum of Final Journeys_ A Novella - Anita Desai [3]
The only release to be had was to find an excuse to go 'on tour', summon my jeep and driver and make for the further reaches of the district. At its northern rim was tea country and the sight of that trim landscape of tea bushes and shade trees on softly rolling hills that rose eventually into the blue mountain range—alas, not my territory—was as reviving as a drink of cool water to me.
Seated in the ample cane furniture on the broad veranda of one fortunate tea-estate manager's bungalow over a whisky and soda, I could not help a sigh of relief tinged with melancholy that this salubrious place was not mine and I would soon have to return to my sorry posting below.
My host enquired how I was faring. When I told him—I admit with an openly pathetic plea for sympathy—he said, 'I know the town. I have to visit it from time to time. It doesn't even have a club, does it?'
'No! If only there were a club where I could play tennis after work...' I gave another sigh, drawn out of me by his evident sympathy.
'No social life either?'
'There's no one I could have a conversation with about anything but work. There's no library or anyone who reads. I'm running out of books too.'
My host got up to pour me another peg at the bar constructed of bamboo at the other end of the spacious veranda. My eyes followed him, admiring the polished floor, the pots of ferns that lined the steps and the orchids that hung in baskets above them.
When he returned to his seat, he handed me my drink and said, 'In the old days there used to be wealthy Calcutta families who owned land around here and who would come to visit it from time to time, throw parties and organise hunts. Of course, those times are over and their estates must have gone to rack and ruin by now.'
We talked a bit longer about this and that till I had to leave, and as I walked past the open door on my way to the steps and stood waiting for my jeep to be driven round to the front, my eye fell on a small object on the hall table—two small Chinese figures in flowered tunics and black slippers carrying a kind of palanquin between them. It was both unusual and pretty and I looked at it more closely: the details were exquisite and there was a gloss to it such as you see on the finest china. My host saw me lingering to study it and said, 'Oh, it's one of those objects one sometimes comes across in these parts that belonged to the old houses I was telling you about. One of them even had a museum once: perhaps this came from there. My wife picked it up, she has an eye for such things. I told her she had paid too much—it's only a wind-up toy, you know, and has lost its key.'
'A wind-up toy!' I exclaimed. 'It looks too precious for that. Is it very old?'
'I couldn't tell you, I don't know a thing about it. It's a pity my wife is in Shillong—our daughters are at school there—she would have been able to tell you more.'
'Beautiful,' I said, and reluctantly took my leave.
I can't say I gave that beautiful object or its provenance any more thought. Inevitably, I grew more involved in my work and had to see through various projects I had started on as well as the daily routine of attending court to hear cases that grew drearily familiar, and going through the bottomless stack of files in my office. I even stopped asking for milk and sugar to be brought separately for my tea and resigned myself to drinking the thick, murky liquid I was served.
I became so settled in a state of apathy—it was like an infection I had caught from those around me—that I felt quite irritated when the chowkidar at the circuit house roused me from it one evening as I sat slumped in the reclining chair under the