Anita Desai | The Man Who Saw Himself Drown | Reading

Paying off the taxi in the portico in front of the hotel, he went up the steps, nodded to the doorman, picked up his key at the desk where the receptionist was talking dreamily on the telephone, evidently to a friend not a customer, and took the small elevator up to the second floor. Letting himself into his room, he saw it had been cleaned during the day so that it looked uninhabited: everything was put in its place, out of sight, and the bedcover had been stretched over the bed and smoothed immaculately. He tossed his briefcase into the armchair — there, now the room knew someone had entered it and made it his own — and went into the bathroom to wash. It was what he had looked forward to all through the long drive from the business centre to the hotel. In the creaking old taxi with its seats slick with usage, going through streets where people and traffic pressed in from both sides, and from front and behind too, so that he felt they were being carried forward by it. All the grime and soot of the city had seeped in at the windows and under his clothes, filling in every crevice and fissure of his body. Now he luxuriated in soaping his hands and face and then washing off the suds and splashing his ears and neck as well. 'Ahh,' he sighed, wiping himself with a clean, rough towel. Ahh, now he was himself again.

He went back into the room, drew aside the curtains and opened the door which led to a veranda. Here there were wicker chairs and potted palms lined up against the white wall, and he chose one under a slowly revolving fan. Lowering himself into it, he uttered another 'Ahh'. But immediately he realised that he lacked something and had to get up and go back to the room to ring the reception desk and ask for a bottle of beer to be sent up. Then he went out onto the veranda again and settled down to wait.

He spent the evening on that veranda, drinking the cold beer that was brought to him on a tray. Gradually it grew dark. Small bats began to skim through the veranda and out into the garden that lay below, the crowns of trees filling it first with shadows, then with darkness. Small electric lights were strung from one to the next; these came on like buds opening all at once. He could see some of the hotel guests sitting in their light with drinks. Music was being played, but softly, unobtrusively, as he liked it.

When his business associate telephoned to invite him out to dinner, he made an excuse: he was very tired, he wanted to go to bed early in order to be rested and ready for the meeting tomorrow. Actually, he could not stand the thought of spending the evening in the company of the man who had been annoying him and irritating him all day. Although it might have helped to discuss their business privately over a meal before going to the meeting tomorrow, he could summon no interest in it at all: it seemed no more important to him than anything he had been doing for the last twenty-five years. He would go through the motions tomorrow but he could not pretend that he thought it important enough for him to give up an evening like this. He sipped his beer, ate the sandwiches and potato chips they had brought him when he decided not to go out to dinner, and contentedly watched the lights bob and sway in the pool of darkness below the veranda.

What he found he could not do was go to bed and fall asleep early, after an evening so relaxing and calm. He was not sleepy at all, in spite of the long, frustrating day at work. He was, instead, totally relaxed but wide awake. So he decided to go for a stroll, although the evening was warm and humid, telling himself a little fresh air would help to make him sleepy. Besides, he might as well take a look at some other part of the city before returning home tomorrow night.

The hotel was in the residential district, not the business quarter of the city. In fact, it had once been a private residence — a large villa, with a garden — and essentially had remained itself. So the street outside was as streets are in such an area: lined with trees, the lamps dim, few passersby and little traffic. The houses showed their lights through screens of trees, and over high walls. He whistled as he walked down those streets because he felt so calm and at peace.

Then he came to a great avenue where many lines of traffic moved. Here neon lights flashed, the cars' headlights beamed, and there was both noise and confusion. He waited on the pavement for the traffic lights to change, then crossed the avenue and found himself on the edge of a great park in which dark trees loomed as well as the pale bulbous shapes of the monuments for which this city was known. He had seen them by daylight, driving past, but they had seemed tourist sights then, both intimidating and slightly disappointing. Now at night, in the dark, they appeared more intimate, closer to him and his life. Again, he felt a happy calm and whistled, although he was also growing a little tired and his feet moved slowly over the dry grass. Sometimes someone would appear out of the shadows at his side, hiss at him, 'Psst! Psst!' and make suggestions or threats. He strode past them, refusing to stop and listen or be turned back by fear.

In this way he came to another avenue, also wide but with less traffic. The big lamps blazed on what was mostly empty tarmac. He crossed it easily and found it was lined on one side with boats, and that he had come to the bank of the tidal river that flowed through this city and that the tide was running high. A breeze sprang up, salt and sticky because it came from the sea but also murky and swampy because it was the delta. The sails of some big, flat-bottomed boats flapped with heavy, dull thuds against their masts. Small lamps burnt on decks, here and there, the wind making their reflections shiver in long snakes across the water.

He walked along and now his calm was ruffled by a sensation of adventure, of both fear and delight. Seeing the water glint, the waves heave, the boats lift and sink, he had a mad idea: what if he stepped onto the deck of one, untied its ropes and let the boat carry him up the river! It was ridiculous, at his age, to have this boyish, this childish urge, and he almost laughed out loud. He even clambered up onto the bank, looked at the distance between it and the deck, trying to gauge the length of a jump. His body impelled him forward but at the same time he threw himself backward to avoid the jump and the fall. He lost his balance for a moment, then righted himself, looking around to see if anyone had observed him. No, there was no one and he walked on, rapidly.

But he had to slow down and halt soon enough because a little further up, where there were broad steps leading down to the water, a group of people had gathered. From their attitudes and gestures, he could see they were agitated — they were crowding around something that one or two of them were dragging out of the water onto the bank. Water gushed from the object they lifted and from the men who raised it, and everyone was drenched. But they crowded around and called out in high, excited voices.

He didn't want to see, or hear. It was evidently a drama, and a moment ago drama was what he had longed for, but now he shrank back, ready to turn — he did not want to be drawn in. A shrinking and dwindling of his former urge overtook him, and he wished miserably that he had stayed back at the hotel, on the veranda, safely drinking beer.

But he had been seen. One of the people, a young man, called out, 'Police? Police? Will you go for the police?' Another, of a practical nature, shouted, 'Do you have a car? Can you take —?'

First he shook his head. Then he said 'No!' very loudly, 'No, no,' and thought of turning around and hurrying away. Just then the men who had lifted the drenched, streaming object from the river pressed past him as they laid it on the bank. He found himself, along with the others, in a circle around it, standing over it and peering down.

The body lying in the mud on the bank was of course sodden, and water ran from it in streams, but it could not have been in the water long, it was intact, and what I saw was a man five feet ten inches tall, with straight black hair that the river had swept off his face, a face that was square and brown, that had a cleft in its chin, a somewhat flat nose, and a mouth that parted slightly to show his teeth. Although it was dark, I could make out that the man wore a short-sleeved white shirt and the pants were of khaki material — that is, not very dark but not white either. He had taken off his shoes for some reason but still wore socks. The socks might have been green or black, I could not tell in the dark and the wet.

I stared at him, taking in every detail. Then I stared again, harder, and more details came into focus: the Tissot watch with the metal strap, the ball-point pen still attached to the shirt pocket. The face with the hair swept away from it, the flattened cheekbones, the cleft in the chin, the eyebrows black and heavy, the teeth uneven, crowding each other here, parted from each other there, and the glint of a filling. Every detail, in every detail, he was myself: I was looking at myself— after having spent half an hour, or an hour, underwater, sodden with river and mud — but it was I, in every detail, I. It was as though I was lying full-length, suspended in mid-air, and gazing down at my reflection below, soaked and muddy, but myself, I, after an accident in the river.

I do not know for how long I stared. But gradually I became aware that I was alone in standing stock-still, staring, that the others were all talking, hurrying away and hurrying back, bending over the man, touching him, and talking to each other in rough, rapid voices. Police, doctor, telephone, call . . . I heard these words, and then I saw them bend down and lift him up, three or four men putting their arms under and around the corpse, and together they hurried down the bank towards the lighted road. I did not follow them but stood on the bank and watched as they carried it away, shouting to each other in the dark.

It was only when they managed to stop a vehicle — or perhaps they had summoned it and it stopped deliberately - and lifted the body into it that I became seized by agitation. Just as I had felt a few moments ago when I contemplated leaping onto the deck of a boat, now one part of me felt impelled to run after them, and plead to be allowed to go with the body - my body - and another part of me held back, pulled back with violence in fact, and once again I stumbled because I had made a clumsy, lurching movement, although whether forwards or backwards, I really cannot say. I think I may even have fallen on my knees at that moment; later I discovered the knees of my khaki pants were muddy, and that my hands were also dirty. By then I had walked away, in another direction. As I hurried along the lighted highway, I was in great confusion, wondering if I should have followed the body to the morgue and claimed it, or whether I was right to flee from the scene.

I did find my way back to the hotel — I remembered the address clearly — and I did spend the night in the safety of my room and my bed. Next morning I might have dismissed the whole event as a nightmare — a delusion caused by the unfamiliar scene, the darkness, the solitude — but when I was brought my tea in in the morning, and a newspaper, I tried to divert my mind from the horror of the night by reading the news while I drank tea and ate toast.

I found myself skimming the pages, regardless of what news was printed there, searching for a particular item that would bear my name. When I found none, I repeated the whole procedure in case I had missed it the first time. I repeated the act more and more frenziedly, as if I had to confirm what I had seen. I sent away the maid who came to clean the room. I did not answer the telephone which rang and rang at regular intervals. I stayed in my room all day, too afraid to leave it. I could not say what it was I feared, but I found myself trembling. When I was exhausted, I slept, but never deeply — I kept waking, each time in a panic.

I am not sure how long I stayed in the hotel in this state, whether it was two days or three. It certainly was not longer before the newspaper that was brought to me, and that I went through in such a state of panic that I nearly choked, finally revealed the news I had all along expected — and feared — to find: there was my name printed half-way down the column on page 7 in the local news. Of course my name is not so singular that I imagine no one else could possess it — there must be many men who have both the very common first name and the last. But it went on to give my exact particulars — the firm for which I worked, my designation, the reason why I was in this city — and ended by saying I had been found in the river at midnight, drowned. That I 'left behind' a wife and two children in the city of X. That no foul play was suspected.

No foul play? Then what was this that was happening? I had been declared dead. I was here in the hotel room, washed, shaved, ready for work, and I was informed that I did not exist, that I had drowned in the river.

For some reason, at that instant I found this comic, grotesquely comic. I think I laughed — I felt the ripping sound erupt from my throat, I assume it was laughter. How does a man react to such news — the news that he is no more?

Again I was in such a state of agitation that I could not proceed. I was to attend a meeting that morning: that was my reason for being in the city. But if I was dead, if my death was reported, how then could I proceed with my life and keep appointments and attend meetings and continue as though nothing had happened? My colleagues and associates would be thunderstruck to see me, even horrified. How could I submit them to such an experience? Or myself submit to it?

While I pondered over the best course of action to take, I kept to the hotel room. The telephone did not ring. Then it struck me that someone might very well come down from the office to collect my belongings, perhaps to go through them in search of some telling evidence such as a suicide note (if 'no foul play' is suspected then suicide usually is), and this threw me into such agitation that I decided to flee the room. For a while I considered packing and taking my suitcase with me, but then I thought the matter over and decided it would make my disappearance even more suspicious. If I left my belongings where they were, at least the death by drowning would remain plausible. So I hurried away without a single piece of luggage.

I have always been a conscientious person and it was very hard for me to slip out of the hotel without paying the bill, but when I went down the stairs to the hall, I was afraid the receptionist might have read the paper and seen my name in it. If so, he would be terribly shocked at seeing me. On the other hand, since he had not come up to examine my room or clear it, it would seem he had not. However, if I were to stop and pay the bill, he would inform my business associates of the fact when they came, as inevitably they would. The only course open was for me to leave, and leave the bill unpaid. This caused me a considerable amount of disquiet which I had to suppress as I hurried out of the lobby and into the driveway. There was a taxi idling there and I could have stepped into it and so hastened my disappearance but I stopped myself with the thought: 'Where would I go?'

Now I was truly perplexed. My previous life had ended, but did that mean I now had to construct a new one?

This is a hope, a fantasy many of us entertain in the course of our lives. What happiness, we think, to end the dull, wretched, routine-ridden, unfulfilling life we lead, and to begin on another — filled with all that our heart desires. Yes, but try to do that and you will find you are suddenly faced with hundreds of questions, no answers, doubts and no certainties. There is really no experience so perplexing. A new life — but what is it to be? And how to begin it?

I confess that I blundered around for the next few days — I no longer know how many — trying first one route, then another. Of course I considered escape; I knew it would be best to flee to another city, some part of the country where I knew no one, and no one would have heard of me or of my 'death'. But I found I simply could not embark on flight. A part of me was consumed by the desire to see what would happen now that I had 'died'. I even entertained the idea of going to my own funeral. It fascinated me to think I could stand beside a funeral pyre and watch my own body, my closest, most intimately known and familiar body, reduced to ash. In fact, it was the image that hovered before my eyes both in sleep and in waking. The only reason I did not follow this compulsion was the thought that I would be forced to see my family, who would naturally also be present, that my young son would come towards me with a torch to light the pyre, that I would have to witness his pain and my wife's sorrow . . . I knew I would not be able to control myself and remain 'dead' to them. Once when I was driving home, and had just turned in at the gate, I saw my son, then a small child, falling out of a swing that hung from a great tree, tumbling down into the dust. I leapt out of the car before it had even stopped moving — I simply sprang from it, abandoning it, in my rush to go to him and lift him in my arms and make sure he was not harmed. He was, slightly, and he was also to have several injuries later when he started playing cricket at school and bicycling and swimming, but that moment when he was so small and I saw him hurtling through the air into the dust like a bird was the moment that I felt our bond most intensely. Now that I was 'dead', were those bonds broken? Or would I become aware of them as soon as I was in another situation where they were tried?

I did not trust myself to have the nerves or the self-control required for such a bizarre experience, and so I stayed away, but all the time in a kind of anguish that made me clench and unclench my fists and often wipe the tears that streamed down my face. I could not even tell the exact cause of my anguish — was it for myself, the old self that had died, or was it for those I had been parted from and could not go to comfort?

I began to see that all of life was divided in two or into an infinite number of fragments, that nothing was whole, not even the strongest or purest feeling. As for the way before me, it multiplied before my eyes, the simplest question leading to a hundred possible answers.

This led me to blunder around in a state of still greater indecision. When the time came to an end that my body may have lain in a morgue, or possibly in my home in preparation for the funeral, and I knew — I cannot explain how, but I did with a certainty feel it within me — that I had been cremated and was no more, I was relieved. At least I ceased to see the scene of the cremation before my eyes in all its horrific detail — the smoke, the oils, the odours, the cries, the heat — and was able to put it behind me.

Yet I found I could not take the next step. I still felt caught, wrapped up in my life, my 'former' life as I needed now to think of it. It did not leave me free to think of what the next step might be. I was so absorbed in it that I can hardly provide any details of my existence at that time. I slept wherever I ended up — on a bench in the park, on a doorstep or a piece of sacking, or upon a sheet of newspaper. I ate whatever I could find; sometimes hunger made me see black and reel, sometimes I ate and was promptly sick. I know children followed me, laughing, down one street; on another, dogs barked and snapped their teeth at me ferociously and had watchmen come running out to chase me away. Somehow I escaped from them all, and mostly was left alone. Of course I must quickly have begun to look like a beggar, in just the one set of clothes in which I had walked away, and with next to nothing in my pockets.

It was in this state that I finally climbed onto a train — without a ticket for I could no longer afford one — and returned to the city where I had once had my home. By then I was reduced to a sorry state by being out in the sun and the rain, unwashed, mostly unfed. I felt, and possibly even looked, much as a lost dog does when it finally finds its way home, whipped, injured, frightened and hungry. Like that lost dog, I thought I would creep in at the gate of my house — I was still capable of such possessive thoughts — and go up the drive to the veranda, and I was certain, or at least ardently hoped, that my family would come out and find me, and treat me as they might a recovered pet, lavishing their attention and care upon me.

Somehow I did creep back to that gate, I did stand there by the hedge. I did look over it and see that the house was still standing, its verandas and doors and windows and roof, just as in the days when I had lived there myself. Even the tree by the portico — strange that I had never thought to learn its name — though it no longer had a swing dangling from its branches, was still large-leafed and shady, even if its fruit had never been edible except to the birds whose droppings spattered the driveway with white splashes and undigested seed.

So welcoming, so sheltering, yet I stayed out in the road, not even daring to touch the gate and unlatch it. The reason was that I saw many cars and people and much activity in that driveway and that portico. People were coming out of the house, carrying boxes, trunks, crates and cartons, and heaving them into a truck that stood waiting. After what must have been many hours, the truck rolled down the drive towards the gate. I made myself small against the hedge and watched as it drove away with the furniture and belongings with which I had filled my house. There was a moment when I thought of leaping onto the truck and going with my belongings to wherever they were being taken, but my body was much too weak for such acrobatic feats. Instead I huddled by the gate and watched as my wife — my wife! I called her that to myself, and yet the words already sounded strange now that I was no longer certain I possessed her and wondered how I could ever have imagined I did — came out of the house, dressed in white as a widow, with her parents on either side of her. They were all dressed in the colour of mourning. This distressed me greatly. I wished to run out and plead with them to change to bright colours once more. Had they forgotten how much I liked bright colours, had bought my wife clothes in every colour of the rainbow, and insisted my daughter wear reds and yellows and oranges? But here came the children behind them, carrying small boxes and baskets that contained, I felt sure, their most precious belongings. All of them came down the stairs to the portico where a grey car waited that I recognised as my father-in-law's. I watched them climb into it, and then there was a pause. Were they looking back at the house, saying goodbye to it? Or did they stop to think of me, whom they had last seen here? Then the car started up, quickly, with decorum, and smoothly rolled down the drive and came towards the gate.

Once again I pressed myself instinctively into the hedge. The last days that I had been through in the city had taught me to shrink, to make myself invisible, and so I did instead of springing out and standing there before them, in the middle of the road, and crying, 'Look, I am here! I have returned!' Neither the words nor the gestures came to me; it was as if they had been strangled inside me. How could I say them when they no longer rang true?

So the car passed by me, I crouched in the hedge, and none of those seated in the vehicle so much as turned their heads to glance at me. If only they had, surely those words, those gestures would have been wrung from me? Surely I would have cried out, at least to say, 'Please! Oh, please?'

As it happened, they did not. Not one of them turned to look back at the house they were leaving after so many years of occupation. Did they not feel any pang on departing? Their faces were all fixed, staring ahead as if into the future. Was that what concerned them — the future? Were they, perhaps, looking forward to it, eager for it?

And when I saw that, when I saw that they had a future, one that they looked forward to, or at least moved towards with resolution, I admit that I also felt, mixed with the bitterness of disappointment, a certain relief. It was as though I had at last shed them. My wife, my children, my house, they were all gone from me, and curiously, I did not feel bereft so much as lightened of my load.

The   car   disappeared   down   the   road.   Someone   in   a watchman's uniform came and locked the gate. The click of the latch reminded me the house was not mine, had in fact never been mine; it had belonged to the company for which I worked but no longer did. It was apparent they had asked my family to vacate it and move. And they had, to my wife's parents' home in another town. She belonged there, she was returning to it. She had been mine, my wife, for a stretch of time that now was over.

After a long time of sitting in a state of sorrow and exhaustion, I left my house and, not wanting to walk on the streets where I might meet neighbours or friends, I went by small back-streets that normally only servants and peddlers used, and came to the river that ran around the outskirts of the city. This was no wide, grand river as I had seen in the city where I died, but only a muddy, slimy trickle that ran through a wide sandy bed in which washermen spread out the clothes they washed, and alongside which stood a few straw-roofed shacks housing I had no idea whom. By then it was evening and I stayed on the bank and watched as the washermen folded up the washing, loaded it on the backs of small donkeys and led them away. Small fires were lit in the straw-roofed shacks which began to smoke in a dark, smothering drift. A child with a pot came down to the stones beside the river and filled it, then turned and wandered away.

By then it was growing dark and I felt it was safe for me to make my way down unobserved. I took off the shoes that somehow I had retained till now and left them in the grasses by the side of the road, then walked down and across the sand, which felt gritty to my feet, and came to the water. It looked more like a drain than a natural stream but I was in such need that I bent with cupped hands and scooped up some water to first wash my face, then splash some on my head and finally even to drink.

I could not have drowned myself in such a trickle if I had wanted to. That thought led me to wonder, as I stood up on the stones and stared into the murky opaqueness of the water, if that was what I wished: to drown this self that had remained, to drown the double of the self that had already died.

But that self, my other self, the self that had had a job and a wife and children and a home, that self was already gone. I wondered what it meant, that death of my mysterious double. It seemed to me that I had died with it; I was so convinced of this that I was not able to resume my life. But was that the only possible interpretation? Once again I felt my mind splinter into fragments that whirled wildly in some great vacuum, and one fragment that I seized upon as another possibility was this: could that death have meant that my double had died on my behalf, that his life was finished, freeing me, my new self, my second self, to go on with another life, a new life?

I searched in myself for an instinct, an urge that would provide the answer. Was it to be death, or life? I remembered how I had once stood on a river bank — in how different a condition, how different a state! — and considered leaping onto a boat and letting it carry me down the river and out to sea, but now I felt no impulse at all, not even one that needed to be confronted and stifled.

It seemed to me that by dying my double had not gifted me with possibility, only robbed me of all desire for one: by arriving at death, life had been closed to me. At his cremation, that was also reduced to ash.

Then I was filled with such despair that I sank onto my knees in the mud.

At daybreak the child with the pot returned to the river for water. What he saw made him stop and stare, first from the slope of the bank, then from closer up, the stones in the shallows. When he made out it was a man's body that lay in that trickle, face down, he dropped the pot on the stones in fright. Its clattering rang out so loud and clear, a flock of crows settling on the sands in curiosity took off in noisy flight.