Read Online The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai - Free Book Online

what was lost in the translation. Of course I could see that restraint was called for, I had to hold fast. Not too fast, though. A middle way. A golden mean.
    I laughed out loud and struck my forehead with my hand to think of all the different strains and currents of my life and how they were coming into play. I had never felt such power, never
had
such power, such joy in power. Or such confusion.
    I stopped only when I became aware it was night outside, the crows silent, the street lights burning, the traffic thinning, its roar subsiding into a tired growl. The television set in my landlady's flat was turned on, the evening soap opera at full volume—and I hadn't even noticed it earlier.
    Pushing back my hair—as if I too had a pair of dark glasses perched up there, or a gleaming strand of distinguished white like Tara!—I got up, picked up my purse, went downstairs and crossed the street to the small shop where I sometimes bought essentials, a bar of soap or a packet of candles during a power breakdown. Tonight, though, I bought a packet of cigarettes—not the brand I had seen on Tara's desk and that I wanted but a cheaper one that the shopkeeper stocked. I had never bought cigarettes from him before and he gave me a strange look. He recognised me of course but I didn't care what he thought. This was something I was now discovering—that there were things about which I did not need to care. I recrossed the street with the packet in my purse, stepping aside just in time to avoid an autorickshaw that came careering round the corner, its driver singing at the top of his lungs with the joy of going home, free, at the end of a day's work. I almost could not restrain an impulse to join in before I went up the stairs to my room to see what the cigarettes could do for me, for my new career—Pre ma Joshi, translator.
    Smoking one was another matter, I admit, and not very successful. I was glad no one was there to observe how I doubled over, coughing, and stubbed out the obnoxious weed, in disappointment.
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    The synopsis and the sample pages were quickly done. Perhaps a little too quickly, Prema worried, but found she really did not wish anything to slow or halt the momentum, and so she slipped them into a brown paper envelope and took them to be posted in the same flush of high excitement with which she had written them.
    Tara had her secretary call Prema—that was a disappointment, Prema had not expected to have to deal with an intermediary—to tell her to go ahead with the translation. So the first step had been taken, and Prema drew a deep breath, poised now on the brink of this new career.
    Her old career began to seem irksome. Her lectures became perfunctory; she no longer cared if they did not inspire her students with the same passion she felt for literature.
The Mill on the Floss, Emma, Persuasion
—what did they mean to these girls? She marked their papers impatiently, merely skimming them, not stopping to put right their grotesque errors and misrepresentations. She could not be bothered: every one of these girls would leave college to marry, bear children and, to everyone's huge relief, never read another book.
    All that mattered now was to do as fine a translation as possible of Suvarna Devi's stories, so simple in their language and structure, but how forceful and powerful for all that!
    The experience had aspects to it that Prema had not imagined when she set out. It reminded her, for instance, of how she had struggled to write stories herself when she was young—younger—and how she had sent them out to magazines only to have them returned with curt rejection slips, the hurt and bitterness with which she had mourned them as she put them away, and how discouragement had made her admit she was probably no writer after all.
    Now she could laugh at those rejections and the way she had taken them to heart, letting their poison seep into her till the urge to write, the ambition