Translator Translated_ A Novella - Anita Desai [4]
Not knowing the exact address and coming across the same surnames repeated over and over, Prema gave up, suddenly conscious of the dust gathering between her toes and invading the folds of her neck and elbows, sticky and gritty at the same time. She could not continue to trail up and down the maze of little streets with dogs barking at her through closed gates, men staring at her from bicycle and radio repair shops and concrete bus shelters under stunted, lopped trees. Defeated, she returned to the hostel.
It did not matter, she told herself as she packed for the long journey back to the capital; she had found the subject of her studies and that was all that mattered. How could she have returned without one?
Her thesis supervisor accepted the subject with the greatest reluctance: it was not part of the regular syllabus and it was hard to see how it could be made to fit in. But then Prema showed she could be stubborn when she chose: her subject was not the language itself but the author and how her work belonged to the greater world. She wrote the thesis and, rather to her supervisor's surprise, it was accepted.
She might have anticipated what followed. After so many years of thinking this would be the climax of her life, she discovered that instead everyone expected her to continue as if there had been no such climax. What next? she was asked continually, by family and friends, what next?
After a wait of too many unhappy and discouraging years—the first sighting of stray white hairs a defining moment—she finally accepted a junior position in a minor women's college in a bleak and distant quarter of the city. And even here her thesis counted for little. What an odd subject, they all thought, a writer in Oriya? Why, what had made her pursue such an unpromising course of study? Why had she not gone to Jawa-harlal Nehru University and studied French, Russian or Chinese? What good was this provincial author in a provincial language to her or to anyone here? So Prema found herself in the department of English literature after all, teaching Jane Austen and George Eliot (though not Simone de Beauvoir).
This left a small, smouldering ember deep inside her soul (so she designated its location, no other would do), where it released an odour of heated rubber, threatening to destroy whatever pleasure or satisfaction she might court. It burnt two deep grooves across her forehead as if with a stick of charcoal, and two more from the corners of her nostrils to the edges of her mouth. Sometimes, when passing a shop window filled with spangled and sequinned saris that encouraged reflection, or catching a glimpse of herself in the small, chipped mirror over her bathroom sink, she was startled by the grimness of her expression. No wonder she was rarely invited out, or made part of any gathering for celebration or enjoyment. She turned away and trudged along to the bus stop with the satchel of books weighing down her left shoulder. She put in the necessary hours of work, meeting her colleagues in the staffroom during the lunch hour which they all utilised to complain of their workload and the perfidy of the principal and heads of departments, and the disrespectful, boisterous and unruly students. At the end of the day she trudged back even more depressed than when she had set out. That was when she wondered if her life was any different from that of the crows dividing their time between the telephone lines and the dying tree in her street with equally raucous disorder and dissent.
This was what had made her accept the invitation to attend the Founder's Day function at her old school. Her schooldays had not been a particularly happy period in her life either—she had already shown signs of a failed life there, it seemed, something that attracts no friends—but at least it was now so far back in the past that