The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai Page B

automobile that would take them to the railhead in Dehra Dun. The chauffeur came up to carry down the rest.
    At the foot of the stairs the parents remembered to turn round and wave at the boy. 'We're off now!' the father announced. 'Be good!' he added, and the mother called out, 'We'll bring you back—' but forgot what she had promised to bring back and left it up in the air. This didn't matter because whatever expensive or elaborate toy it was, it would only be locked up for safe keeping once unpacked and briefly revealed for his tentative admiration.
    He sidled down the stairs to the front door and watched the car proceed slowly down the gravelled drive, then disappear under the oak trees that closed behind it like dark stage curtains. For a while he could hear the engine grinding uphill to the motor road, then gave up trying to follow its progress. If it had been night he would have been able to see the lights as they slowly descended downhill to the valley, but it was still afternoon.
    And then he could let out the breath he had been holding inside his chest till it swelled into a balloon, tight against his ribs. A balloon he held pinched between his thumb and forefinger and could now set free. Off it went with a whistle, twisting and turning and wriggling, till it descended, hollowed, into the limp rubber norm of normality.
    Not only he but everyone, everything experienced that moment. Hari Singh, recovering, took his cloth cap off his head and was suddenly upright, divested of the posture and demeanour of servanthood. Coming back up the stairs to the veranda, he shouted, 'Come on, come on! Let us go and hunt tigers, you and I!'
    Not that they would—Hari Singh was no more given to keeping his promises than were the boy's parents, but just to hear the invitation made, loudly and heartily, changed the air, the atmosphere, and Hari's son Bhola, who had been waiting behind the bushes, catapult in hand, appeared to see if Ravi would now come out to play.
    Outdoors was freedom. Outdoors was the life to which he chose to belong—the life of the crickets springing out of the grass, the birds wheeling hundreds of feet below in the valley or soaring upwards above the mountains, and the animals invisible in the undergrowth, giving themselves away by an occasional rustle or eruption of cries or flurried calls; plants following their own green compulsions and purposes, almost imperceptibly, and the rocks and stones, seemingly inert but mysteriously part of the constant change and movement of the earth. One had only to be silent, aware, observe and perceive—and this was Ravi's one talent as far as anyone could see.
    Outdoors, Ravi had watched as a snake shed itself of its old skin, emerging into a slithering new length, leaving behind on the path a shroud, transparent as gauze, fragile as glass. Once he had come upon a tree with long, cream-coloured cylinders for flowers, attracting armies of ants coming to raid their fabled sweetness and sap, armies that would not be deflected by the intervention of a stick, a twig, and would persist till they reached the treasure, and drowned.
    Outdoors, the spiders spun their webs in tall grass, a spinning you would not observe unless you became soundless, motionless, almost breathless and invisible, as when he had seen a praying mantis on a leaf exactly the same shade of green as itself, holding in its careful claws a round, striped bee buzzing even as it was devoured, which halted when its eyes swivelled towards him and became aware it was being watched.
    And there was always the unexpected—lifting a flat stone and finding underneath an unsuspected scorpion immediately aroused and prepared for attack, or coming across an eruption from the tobacco-dark leaf mould of a family of mushrooms with their ghostly pallor and caps, hats and bonnets, like refugees that had arrived in the night.
    Or a troop of silver-haired, black-masked monkeys bounding through the trees to arrive with