The Museum of Final Journeys_ A Novella - Anita Desai [8]
Only time, and dissolution.
But here came my acquaintance, the clerk/caretaker, tumbling recklessly down the irregular stairs while adjusting the cap on his head and the buttons of his long black cloth coat as if these gave him his identity and status. Yet his manner on greeting me was gracious and courtly in a way that could only be called 'cultured' or even 'aristocratic', and I felt a twinge of shame at recalling how brusquely I had dismissed him. Although, when he launched into a flowery speech of gratitude at my coming, his joy at seeing me, the honour it accorded him and the house he served, I could not help cutting him short and being curt once again. I suggested we set about doing our tour.
He insisted, however, that I first rest a little and take some refreshment. On the broad veranda spread around the rooms like a lap on which they had settled, a table had been set with an embroidered cloth and a tarnished silver tray on which was a jug, covered with a square of net edged with beads, and some tall metal tumblers. A servant boy emerged from somewhere— a coal-hole, I conjectured—to pour out some coloured sherbet drink that I was not able to refuse.
'Bring the keys,' my host the clerk commanded, assuming the posture of one whose right it was to give orders. Before my eyes he became stiffly upright—still small of course but upright nevertheless—his mouth set in a firm line, his eyes sharp and watchful, his bearing almost arrogant. Here was a person, I saw, who was much more capable of commanding than I was. I observed him and the air with which he accepted the ring of keys from the servant boy as though they were the keys to a castle, his castle. Then, to my surprise, he held them behind his back with one hand, and with the other gestured to me to precede him through an open door. Were the keys only some part of a charade?
We entered the hall of the palace of the past between two marble—or highly polished ceramic—slave figures holding up lamps filled with dust and dead moths; they had onyx for eyes that bulged grotesquely out of their heads.
The room itself was empty except for a small marble-topped table on ornate legs, carved like dragons. Under it was what looked like a china chamber pot—but could that be? Perhaps I have imagined or misinterpreted it, and other details. On the faded, mottled walls portraits hung from long ropes and huge nails, tilting forward as if to peer down at us. They were photographs in the main but tinted by hand to look like paintings, a strange technique by which one art was imposed on another, leaving the surface oddly ambiguous. One was of a small man in a large turban who stood in front of a dead tiger with its mouth propped open in a snarl; another of a large man with whiskers that bristled like the tiger's, seated upon a gilt chair. Yet another image of perhaps the same man standing, his foot on a recently murdered elephant, a gun in his hand and a row of barely clad servants—beaters?—on either side.
And then one of a woman, scarcely more than a child, slender, her cheeks tinted pink and with strands of pearls around her neck from which hung one large gem tinted green. She wore an old-fashioned blouse with long puffed sleeves that ended in lace at the wrists, and a sari that fell in sculpted folds from her shoulders to her slippered feet, its silver trim draped over her head where her hair was parted in two wings over wide-set eyes. This was the only female portrait, and as we passed it, I heard the clerk sigh, 'Srimati Sarita Devi.' Or perhaps I imagined that because I wished it to be her, the child bride. Since he had not said 'The late Srimati' I still did not know if she was alive, somewhere in the recesses of this faded mansion, and if I would be taken to meet her, or if she was the late, departed Srimati S. My escort remained silent on the matter.
He was already showing me into an adjoining hall where the beasts slaughtered by this family