Indian Tango , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Ananda Dev

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66 pages

English

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'To say that, in fact, writing has been no more than a way of talking about the body and nothing but the body...'Lost to the meaning of her life, a foreign writer arrives in Delhi seeking the wordless company of strangers. Delhi is an exploded sun, bleeding everywhere its untrammelled chaos: the feral dampness of bus fumes; the suicidal rush of scooters; the autorickshaw seats impregnated with thousands of odours-nauseous accretions of India's muddy human tide. The men with their stinking bidis rule as masters and the women remain walled in by centuries of tradition. The author, infatuated by a quiet lady on the street, begins to seek the untamed and undiscovered country that lies below her sari, the delicate throbbing hidden beneath her silence. As she rediscovers her voice and the ability to write a story, and as monsoon arrives, low and heavy-bellied, washing away the concrete barricades of custom, a secret encounter in a music store opens up an ancient darwaza of forbidden pleasures. Bursting with sharp irreverence, Indian Tango is a story of fleshly transgression and unlikely liberation in the patriachopolis of New Delhi.

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	20 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184005257
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0480€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Translated from the French by
Jean Anderson
Published by Random House India in 2013 First Published by ditions Gallimard in 2007
Copyright ditions Gallimard 2007 Copyright Host Publications 2011 English translation copyright Jean Anderson 2011
All rights reserved.
Ananda Devi has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184005257
APRIL 2004
T he kneeling happens as they take their first few steps into the house.
There s no warning. Scarcely a second s hesitation or wavering, before the gesture and the collapse; a silken tide subsiding.
Kneeling is no innocent act. Adoration or humiliation? What did she take it to mean?
She blinks to clear her eyes of all thought. She tries to shake off the images that keep stubbornly landing, like hurried flies, on her retina. She collides with the memory. What happened. How it happened. What followed: colors, sensations, tastes.
She feels calm. She slips into position, unmoving, beside herself. But she can t get rid of this feeling of ordinary danger.
As they take their first steps, kneeling. Not innocent.
What else did she do? She can t remember.
No matter. These words echo through the rest of her day. She ll keep on walking on tiptoe, an unquiet dance, the sidestepping movement of a lucid self that won t let go.
And so, after the kneeling, there she is, walking without suffocating through the cloud that lies over the city and lends a false softness and a look of warm amber to everything. She hardly notices this dusky fog, a sign of the pollution that in defiance of government decree, continues to poison the air of Delhi and its inhabitants. A part of her is detached and refuses to connect with reality, even though her eyes distantly perceive that everything is in a state of advanced decay. The buses and trucks vomit fumes that wrap themselves round everything they touch with a feral dampness. Scooters and motorbikes crowd the streets and launch themselves in a suicidal rush into the tiniest available gaps. They zigzag through the space of their deaths, endlessly threatening, never realized, because there is a god of motorbike riders, truck and taxi drivers. She narrowly avoids an entire family on a scooter, the father steering, a little boy about ten years old in front of him, holding a bag of groceries, and the mother sitting behind, clinging to him with one arm, a baby clasped in the other. The boy gives her what seems to be a lecherous wink. The baby stares at her with its big, kohl-rimmed eyes. It gazes at her steadily until it s out of sight. She s stunned by its look of weary wisdom, and its imperious eye.
Through that baby s eye, someone else envelops her. She turns away from the threat, the temptation.
A sudden urge seizes her, to be enclosed, immersed in fumes, eroded, and she decides to hail a rickshaw instead of a taxi. She would have liked the wordless and copious company of the nameless, but instead encounters the driver s sweat, the dampness of seats impregnated with thousands of odors, the dense reality of human excretions. Perhaps she wants to be sure she s still alive and hasn t disappeared, as she believes, from her own sight? There are statuettes of saints swaying at the corners of the rickshaw. They catch the light and flash out smiles instead of blessings. She dares not look at them. Her finger finds a gash in the plastic seat and mechanically enlarges it. She can feel a spongy, crumbly substance inside that gives way at the touch of her fingernail, and then even deeper, a secret rottenness: in strange exploration, her finger sinks into it.
The driver starts chattering as soon as she sits down, and stops only when they come to a halt. He talks about the murders in his neighborhood, the confrontations between different castes or religious groups, international terrorism, the early arrival of the monsoon, the lateness of the harvest. Of course he talks about the coming elections as well, his comments inspired by the vaguely repulsive faces decorating the posters that appear at intervals along their route. One of these faces, however, with its grave and direct expression, stops his flow. The Italian woman, he says, unsure whether to admire her the way he admires her surname and its prestige, or to despise her as a woman and a foreigner. The Italian woman, the Mother of Rome, as the nationalist BJP party ironically calls her, who might soon control everyone s destiny. Since, like many Indians, he hasn t made up his mind yet about how this unknown factor fits the equation, he doesn t expand on his ideas and the candidate s poster disappears in a swirl of soot.
He moves on to the subject of Muslims, a greater concern to him than the elections and the Italian woman. His voice immediately becomes razor-sharp, but his passenger can hardly hear him and doesn t see his eyes flushing red with blood: she s too busy noticing the tiny details that, like the gash in the seat, are spreading their cracks through the surface of her habits. Underneath, in the same way, you can sense a quiet rottenness. She doesn t know either at what point he started to tell her about the last film he saw. It was a seamless transition, the number of dead bodies and the lack of control are identical in both cases. He sings a song, puts on a falsetto voice to imitate the heroine, recites the good guy s and the bad guy s lines. He announces greedily that there s a real kiss in the film. He goes on at length about how beautiful the actress is, but in his choice of words there s a hint of contempt. Their eyes meet in the rear-view mirror and she looks away at once, from the sucking blackness. She wonders if he can read in her face, or her appearance, or in the deformed shadow clinging to her shoulders, something that encourages him to talk to her this way, with this overly familiar and unpleasant tone.
She checks her hair, pulled into a bun at the back of her neck as she left the house. Adjusting a loose hairpin, she drives it hard into her scalp. She remembers that her hair came down. But she doesn t remember putting it up again. Something, the tyranny of habit or some instinct stronger than any change, must have taken control to make her restore her usual tidy and austere appearance before she left. Not a strand of hair is out of place. She knows that her face as well is smooth and untroubled even though on the inside an entire forest of thornbushes is growing.
Has the rickshaw been traveling longer than usual? She feels as though she has aged already, that the vehicle s unpleasant smell has soaked into her clothing and her skin. When they arrive, the driver calls her ma-ji, mother, as a sign of respect. She is briefly irritated. It s true that he isn t very old. Twenty-five or thereabouts. She could in fact be his mother. But it was mockery she heard in his voice as he spoke these words, not respect. She stops and looks at him. Drops of sweat run down her spine, the man s face is so unpleasant and his smile is needlessly knowing.
Her footsteps slow as she enters the building. For the first time, this show of respect - if that s what it is - doesn t fit with her image of herself.
When she opens the door, the hot, stench-laden air from the entrance hall strikes her face. In the evenings homeless people crowd in together to sleep here. In the morning they disappear in a swirl of stinking air that lingers for several hours. At nightfall they reappear, a muddy human tide. No one knows if it s the same people or an ever-changing populace: no one sees them. Neither their faces, nor the nightly suffering against which everyone shuts their door - not from indifference but from practicality. It s the watchmen, themselves almost shadows, who benefit from their racketeering with these people of the night. Survival here takes on a brutality that it s best to ignore.
She looks at the empty hallway, the staircase that in a few hours will be cluttered with shadows anxious to find a tiny space, anxious in their destitution to find some semblance of security. On the wall there s a handprint, a tiny child s handprint, much more alive than all these other presences that have left only faint traces, barely recognizable as human. She stops and looks at the print. She can almost make out a clumsy shape, the soft dimpled flesh of a little child, eyes dark with kohl. She feels a brief tenderness but quickly pulls herself together. She walks, like the other residents of the building, inside her bubble. She steps inside it, as if into an airlock that will allow her to return, on the other side, to her state of respectability.
The elevator, for once, is working. She has just realized her legs are trembling. Her knees are frail, the beginnings of osteoarthritis. In the striped mirror of the elevator, she catches sight of a woman. She speaks her name aloud: Subhadra Misra. But she s still not entirely convinced that it s really her. Some changes are irreversible. Some journeys out of yourself are journeys of no return.
Inside the apartment, she takes the time to recenter herself. To inhale and exhale gently, to smooth away from her face any tiny crease of concern or laughter. To become as flat as