The Poor Dears

But I went on. “Then again, it is entirely possible that I am no longer quite so anxious to send it off to Naima. The book eats up most of my time. As I work on it, I become completely oblivious of Naima, her dead or living family members. Moreover, a busy writer, in search of new materials for his book, soon forgets the people he meets and photographs he takes of them during the course of his travels, and the promises he makes to them. There comes a time when these people, uniquely individual and vibrant with life, are transformed into mere characters, and all the places he has visited become the stage on which all the different acts of the cosmic drama of life are enacted all at once.”

“I can easily use this material for the Foreword of the book, you know,” Cathy said. But I continued in a slow, halting voice: “It is quite possible that Naima and her family have by now become mere characters to me, and that this packet no more than a mere reminder of the time when I had just returned from my travels in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, of a time when I had noted in my diary what I had to do or send to whom.

“You remember I had told you how at my request Naima’s brother had come to take me to their house, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” Cathy said, putting aside the pen and the notebook on the table.

“Let me go over that scene once again. Then when you have heard the whole story, tell me whether or not I should send the packet on to her.

“Well, every single object in that living room disguised an overwhelming desire to be recognized, to be esteemed. That is why everything that failed to measure up to their standards, that seemed mean or odd or otherwise betrayed poverty, had been spirited away from the scene. Naima’s brother, who suffered from some chest ailment, told me that he worked for the railway. But he never did tell me what exactly his job was. Naima, too, was more than a little diffident about the nature of her own work at the drug company. And time and again the mother kept saying, ‘You cannot even imagine what their father was and all the things he wanted to do for his children.’ But when I asked, ‘Well, what was he?’ she answered, ‘An artist!’ She also told me that Naima was born after her husband’s death. It was at this point that they removed that picture from the wall and showed it to me—the picture of a young man shot on an orthochromatic plate, who couldn’t have been more than thirty years old, I thought, when he left her widowed.

“My earlier excitement at meeting the attractive widow had begun to wane in that stuffy, lackluster atmosphere. I was looking at everything without enthusiasm or interest. I was told that it was Naima’s elder sister who had inherited all the artistic talent of the girls’ father—perhaps because she was fortunate enough to have been raised by him—for she sang very well and was an accomplished vocalist, while Naima, well, let’s just say she had been trained for a career job right from the start.

“I was at a loss. I had no idea what they took me for. Had my movie camera led them to believe that I could, perhaps, put the girls in films? The accolades they liberally showered upon the older girl forced me to ask her for a song. Not unexpectedly, she declined. Ultimately, giving into the persistent, urgent pleas of her mother and younger sister, she did sing, a bhajan, by Mira Bai, I was later told. I was now beginning to pity them. The girl, or woman if you will, simply couldn’t carry the higher notes of the song.

“Next they bragged about their record collection. Some of the discs had been collected by the girls’ father and some, after his premature death, by their mother. One by one they showed off every single disc. As I looked at them I couldn’t help feeling they were light years away from the age of 33- and 45-rpm records. They were all old 78-rpm discs—bulky and awkward, which you played by changing the gramophone needles every so often. Their center labels—depicting the yellow Gemini Twins, an elephant trunk, a lion, a horse—were a novelty to me and I wanted to buy a few of these relics and bring them along. I had seen them being sold, along with used books, in Sadar, the city’s biggest shopping center. Their grooves were all but gone; some didn’t even have any grooves left.