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

to write, had quite died inside her.
    She realised that all she had needed was this opportunity, this invitation held out to her—by Tara, of all people—to discover her true vocation. It was surely the right one since it had given her this new-found ease, and speed, and delight.
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    So the work was done sooner than she, and perhaps Tara, had expected, and it was with a certain sense of regret, and trepidation, that she typed it out, then had a typist she knew at a copy shop down the road retype it for neatness—'Don't worry, auntie,' he said, 'it will look just like print'—and carried the bundle ceremoniously to Tara's office. Mailing it was of course possible and perhaps more professional but she couldn't resist the satisfaction of handing it over herself and seeing Tara's face register approval. The completion of this labour needed somehow to be marked and rewarded.
    Unfortunately, Tara was away. Her secretary informed Prema that she was at a conference in Prague, would be back in a week. If she left the manuscript, it would be given to Tara on her return. Prema could expect to hear from her very soon.
    She did not. Tara took her time, a very long time it seemed to Prema. In fact, Prema advanced from disappointment to impatience to annoyance at being treated in this manner and kept waiting as if she were only one of many people in a queue for Tara's attention. Had she no consideration for what an author—all right, a translator—might feel at being ignored, left in the dark, waiting, hoping?
    She could feel the grooves across her forehead and from her nostrils to her mouth deepening by the day. She snapped at her students. She marked their papers with increasing severity. She knew they found her unfair, ill-tempered and dull. But why did they consider themselves worthy of her attention? They were not, not. She was a translator, an author.
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    Then, just like that, a change in the atmosphere, a sudden breeze to fill her sails, give her hope and move her forwards at last.
    A telephone call from Tara—first her secretary, then Tara herself—to say she was pleased, she approved the translation and would publish it; it would appear in the first list of translations by her press.
    It was true she did not exactly convey enthusiasm. She was certainly not effusive. In fact she did not even say she thought the translation 'good'. She said it was 'quite good'. Could there be a more tepid qualification?
    That might have crushed Prema as much as an outright rejection but Tara followed that limp opinion by saying she would get in touch with Suvarna Devi to draw up a contract, and asked if Prema knew how she might do that.
    So suddenly Prema had not only to see to the few notes and suggestions Tara made about the translation—just as the students were sitting their exams which meant their papers would soon be pouring in for her to mark—but she also had to busy herself with finding out about Suvarna Devi's whereabouts.
Why
had she not done that when she was actually there in her home town? And why did the publisher of her book, evidently a local one in the same town, not reply to her queries?
    It all proved incredibly difficult and frustrating. Until she thought of writing to the principal of the women's college where she had spent that one summer. To that she received a reply with an address but also a warning that she was often away in the tribal regions with her husband who ran a string of clinics there (and where she obviously found the material for those heartbreaking stories that Prema found so moving).
    Weeks went by without a response to Prema's letter in which she had introduced herself and informed her of Tara's publishing house and its new imprint. Would their proposal to publish her short stories meet with her approval?
    There was a long stretch, a very long stretch, of waiting again and Prema found it hard to maintain her hope of a new career in the face of such silence. She