The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai Page A

The dogs came running up to meet him with their own eager, hungry barks.
    Up at the burnt house, Ravi finished his meal and set the plate down on the step beside him, then took a biri out of his shirt pocket, lit it and leaned back against one of the veranda posts which was still standing, and waited for the sounds of the household below to subside into silence and the light to withdraw from the valley and climb the hills till only their peaks were lit by the sun. Then they too faded into dusk but he continued to sit there, listening for the last calls of a lone cuckoo to die out and the rustle of the flying squirrel that lived under the eaves as it crept out and launched itself into the evening air where the bats were now swooping and plunging after insects.
    He stubbed out the biri, then drew a matchbox out of his shirt pocket and began to play with it, thoughtfully; he might have been a monk with his prayer beads. When he looked up from it he found the woolly dusk had knitted him into the evening scene, inextricably. Silence had fallen on the homestead below and the light of its small fire had sunk and gone out.
    He got to his feet and made his way to the bushes encroaching on the house. He lowered his trousers and there was a sound of urine trickling on the stones at his feet. Then he turned and retraced his steps. Picking up the empty dish, he carried it across the veranda to the one area that might still be called a room: it had walls, it was covered, and it held the string cot that Bhola had fetched for him from the hut below, and the few remnants salvaged from the fire, lined up against the blackened wall. Ravi fumbled his way to a table, scarred by the knives and choppers of its kitchen past, on which a kerosene lantern stood. He lit it—there, another match gone—and surveyed the sorry items: an overstuffed chair on which he never sat, a hatstand which held neither a hat nor a walking stick—and saw they were all still there, mute and untouched, as if waiting for the day when they would be chopped up for firewood.
    All else that the house had once contained—and there had been an abundance—was gone, just like the leather suitcases that used to be lined up in the hall—the hall!—waiting to be carried out, past the grandfather clock and the portraits of his ancestors, tinted photographs that leaned away from the wall to look down as his father unhooked his favourite walking stick from the hatstand and the astrakhan cap that he liked to wear when travelling, then gave the soft, polite whistle with which he might summon his wife who was detained in her dressing room—her dressing room!—by some last-minute adjustment to her toilet.
    While they waited for her to emerge, the father turned to look at the boy standing half hidden by the door to his room, one leg locked around the other, and gave him a playful wink as he set the astrakhan cap jauntily on his head. 'Like it? I bought it in Berlin, I'll have you know, on the Kurfürsten-damm. Can you say that—"Kur-fürst-en-damm"? It had started to snow and I went into this very elegant shop and a most polite gentleman came out from the back to see what I wanted. I pointed it out to him and when I walked out, I had it on my head—just so!' and he gave another wink. 'I'll let you wear it one day—when you can say "Kur-fürst-en-damm",' he offered, and the child knew it was an offer that would evaporate along with all the others and looked away in embarrassment at how glibly his father lied.
    Then his mother emerged, smelling powerfully of flowers—rose and lily of the valley—dressed in a sage-green sari with a narrow trim of embroidery. 'We must hurry or we'll miss the train,' she cried as if it were the others who had kept her waiting.
    Hari Singh, who was waiting at the foot of the stairs, came up to lift one suitcase onto his head and grasp two others in his hands, then carried these out to the waiting