Shankaranand Jha
“Cry, the Peacock” : A Study of Human Bonds and Relationships
Anita Mazumdar Desai, one of the major Indian English Women novelists, was born on June 24, 1937, at Mussorrie, a hill station north of Delhi, India. Her father , D. N. Mazumdar, was a Bengali businesss-executive and mother, Toni Nime, was a German expatriate. As a child, Desai spoke German at home and Hindi among her friends. At primary school, she learnt to read and write English---which eventually became her literary language. At the age of nine, her first short story was published. Although she regularly wrote short stories since adolescence, Desai officially launched her career as a novelist in 1963 with the British publication of “Cry, the Peacock”.
The essence of art is to reveal truth; the truth about the complexities of life, about the founding and nurturing of individual character. Every creative artist attempts to chart out human life through ramifications of thought, action and conflict, what is, according to Geoffrey Hartman, “An intermediate middle between over-specified poles always threatening to collapse it. The poles may be birth and death, father and mother, heaven and earth, first things and last things.”(Berkland, 247)Evidently, creative art masquerades the complex human nature as the simulacrum of revealed or natural truth. As one of the leading contemporary Indo-Anglian novelists, Anita Desai explores such truth. In her words : “ If art has any purpose, then it is to show one, bravely and uncompromisingly, the plain truth---------. Once you have told the truth, you have entered the realm of freedom.”(TLS, 976) The basic aesthetic concern of Anita Desai is goaded by the said contention in all her works.
Desai, as a writer, as M. K. Naik says, “is more interested in the interior landscape of the mind rather than in political or social realities.”(Naik, 241) Writing, for her, “is an effort to discover, and then to underline, and finally to convey the true significance of things”.(TOI, 29th April,1979)Most of her works engage the complexities of modern Indian culture from a feminine perspective highlighting the female Indian predicament of maintaining self-identity as an individual woman. Desai’s protagonists are “mostly women, who, though they have reached different stages in life (from school-girl to grandmother) are all fragile introverts ‘trapped in their own skin’. Their emotional traumas sometimes even lead to violent death”. (Naik, 241)As a contemporary Indian woman writer, Desai has been identified with a new literary tradition of Indian writing in English, which is stylistically different and less conservative than colonial Indian literature and concerns such issues as hybridity, shifting identity, and “imaginary homelands”, a phrase coined by Indian novelist Salman Rushdie. Discussing the novels of Anita Desai, Meena Belliappa affirms that the novels of Anita Desai clearly indicate the “new direction that Indian fiction is taking in the hands of the third generation of Urban centers-------a deliberate growing away from a debased tradition, of fiction as romance, to a more meaningful wrestle with reality”.(Belliappa)
Desai’s fictional milieu is the India in transition with its cultural and ethical values in the melting pot. In each of her novels, one could sense the novelist’s urge for a way of living, which would respond to the innermost yearning of the Indian woman for self emancipation and self-dignity. Dealing with the thoughts, emotions and sensations at various levels of consciousness, Desai found that technique used by D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Henry James quite suitable for her purpose of character delineation. Her characters are almost sick of life and listless playthings of their morbid psychic longings. Most of her female protagonists------Maya in “Cry, the Peacock”(1963), Monisha in “Voices in the City”(1965), Sita in “Where Shall We go this Summer”(1975), or Nanda in “Fire on the Mountain”(1977) are abnormally sensitive and unusually solitary to the point of being neurotic. Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar rightly observes: “Since her pre-occupation is with the inner world of sensibility rather than outer world of action, she has tried to forge a style supple and suggestive enough to convey the fever and fretfulness of the stream of consciousness of her principal characters.” (Iyengar, 464)
In “Cry, the Peacock”, Anita Desai portrays the psychic tumult of a young and sensitive married girl Maya, who is seen haunted, almost from the beginning of the novel, by a gloomy prophecy of an Albino astrologer of a fatal disaster . According to the prophecy, she or her husband would die during the fourth year of her marriage. The novel “gives expression to the long smothered wail of a lacerated psyche, the harrowing tale of a blunted human relationship being told by the chief protagonist herself.”(Pathak, 18)
Maya, is the daughter of a rich advocate in Lucknow. Being alone in the family, her mother being dead and her brother having gone to America, she gets the most of her father’s attention and affection. Her father, without thinking much, married her off to his own lawyer friend- Gautama, who was a middle aged man. Maya’s abortive marriage to Gautama and its lack of emotional attachment stands in sharp contrast to her jolly and love-laden infancy. Her childhood memories overshadow her present with gloom. What pains Maya most is her “utter loneliness in this house”.(9)She can establish no effective communication with her husband Gautama. Maya’s worldly nature makes her well inclined to derive the fullest satisfaction from the intimate experience of sex. But for Gautama’s age and attitude to sex, she remains a much disappointed woman. Even when they do make love, the act is utterly devoid of passion. Maya admits frankly of her sexual dissatisfaction born of Gautama’s unpardonable negligence : “How little he knew of my suffering, or of how to comfort me------. Telling me to go to sleep while he worked at his papers, he did not give another thought to me, to either the soft, willing body, or the lonely wanting mind that waited near his bed”.(9)
Maya’s life is intricately woven to her instincts and she expects emotional and physical satisfaction in married life but both of these are denied to her, one by Gautama’s cold intellectuality and the other by his age. Maya’s longing for the sensuous enjoyment of life is dampened by a liberal dose of the Gita’s philosophy of non-attachment. Their marriage becomes unfruitful and is punctuated all along by “matrimonial silences”.(12) Desai attempts to bring into focus the physical and the spiritual modes of life’s aspirations. In a subdued manner, the novelist, wants to say that the physical aspect cannot be totally ignored, instead it is the means and medium for the spiritual. Gautama, who indulgently quotes from the Gita and explains the theory of Karma, blissfully ignores his marital responsibility towards his wife---an unquestionable command of the theory of Karma.
“Childless women develop fanatic attachment to their pets”.(10) Three plus years of married life without a child and the prospect of a passionless and unchallenging life for next forty or fifty years is like a nightmare for her. Maya’s childlessness haunts her and the death of her pet dog Toto immensely anguishes her and has made her inconsolable as she feels that her last straw of attachment is snatched away. Reacting to the untimely death of her pet dog, she rushes to “the garden tap to wash the vision from her eyes”(15) but her husband remains undisturbed.
Maya perceives that she might lose her self as nothing eventful and significant is taking place in her life. The sphere of her social intercourse is a restricted one and she feels suffocation. Her secure home, earning husband, and well-defined future are insufficient to her. She longs for outdoor life, which is always nullified by Gautama. She wants to visit Darjeeling to refresh the childhood memory of its scenic beauty and cool weather. But Gautama refuses the proposal. The Kathakali Dances of Southern India had a great attraction to Maya-------“ I want---- I want;----to see the Kathakali dances”,(92) but her husband coolly suggests her to wait till a Kathakali troupe comes to Delhi.
Maya has tried her best to love Gautama. Like the peacocks, longing for sexual communion, Maya craves for the company of Gautama, his touch and tickle. The cry of the peacock becomes the cry of Maya---her bruised soul. She asks her husband : “ Do you not hear the peacock’s call in the wild? Are they not blood-chilling, their shrieks of pain?” “Pia, Pia”, they cry. “Lover, Lover, Mio, Mio. I die, I die”-----“ Have you seen peacocks make love, child? Before they mate, they fight. They will reap each other’s breasts to strips and fall bleeding with their beaks open and panting. When they have exhausted themselves in battle, they will mate”.(95) But, Gautama remains listless to the cry. Maya, the ‘pea-hen’ fails to get response from Gautama, the peacock. For gratification of body’s needs, Maya, within the permissible limits of the society, can look forward to her husband. She longs the life that would permit her to “touch him, feel his flesh and hair, hold and tighten her hold on him”. But the lack of understanding and viewing love, and void of passion and oomph, on the part of her husband Gautama has left Maya wanting and unfulfilled. Both Maya and Gautama are ranged against each other. When Maya wants to involve him in her world, she is rebuffed being considered as childish, boring and distasteful. She is not strong enough to rebel against physical and emotional deprivations and has to suffer her fate. An ever-widening gap in communication between the husband and the wife is felt throughout the novel. There is no real bond between them as Maya confesses: “Had there been a bond between us, we would have felt its pull----But, of course, there was none----there was no bond, no love----hardly any love”.(108)
Normally, in the course of psychic mobility, the incompatibility of reality with our desiring imagination makes the negation of desire inevitable. But to deny desire is not to eliminate it; in fact, such denials multiply the appearances of each desire in the self’s history. In denying a desire we condemn ourselves in finding it everywhere. After being frustrated by Gautama’s coldness, Maya starts seeking shelter to her surroundings. By the passage of time she begins to lose grip over herself, suffers from Neurosis, and turns into a psychopath. She is caught between two worlds : one lost permanently and the other unbearable, both physically and emotionally. She is aware of her failing health and pities herself : “ My blouses hang on me, my rings slip off my fingers. Those are no longer my eyes, nor this is my mouth”.(179) All order has gone out of Maya’s life alongwith physical deterioration. There is no plan, no peace, nothing to keep her within the pattern of day-to-day living and doing. Maya has entered into another world, the world of insanity.
Maya’s rootlessness keeps on increasing everyday and turns her into a psychopath whose emotional needs are seen to be in collision with the extremely practical outlook of her husband, his philosophical detachment and his gross unconcern over the basics of life. Her childhood memories overshadow her present with gloom. Gautama begins to appear to her as a “guest who might never be encountered again” and as an “unreal ghost”. In immense hostility against her husband she says : “I strolled with him slowly across the lawn, feeling that an unreal ghost stalked beside me----a body without a heart and a heart without a body---what is he?”(196)
It is Gautama who is solely responsible for Maya’s condition. Her intense absorption only enslaves her. What Gautama taught her, she thinks, was pain : “ He taught it pain, for there are countless nights when I have been tortured by a humiliating sense of neglect, of loneliness, of desperation that would not have existed had I not loved him so, had he not meant so much.”(201) In the typical condition of an unfortunate woman who is alienated through and through, her obsession, her frustrated state of mind, her total withdrawal from the world of purposeful action and meaningless relationship, Maya, pushes Gautama off the parapet of their house. Thus, she murders her husband in a fit of insane fury and commits suicide.
Man, being a social animal, makes numerous relationships and attachments, that determine the essence of his existence. These are like thin threads that bind one human being to other fellow human beings. In “Cry, the Peacock”, Desai, while bringing forth the inner recesses of human mind has laid ample focus on the intricacies of relationships in whose acrobatics mind involves itself. The very concept that women need something more than just food, clothes and accommodation is very aptly illustrated in the novel. Through Maya, the novelist has tried to stress the great yearning of the woman to be understood by her male partner. Thus, “Cry, the Peacock” is a pioneering effort towards delineating the psychological problems of an alienated person. Maya’s moods, obsessions, dilemmas, and abnormality are conveyed very effectively in the novel. Her uneasiness and infantilism have found a powerful expression in the novel. To sum up in the words of Meena Belliappa : “ The ardent introspection of Maya marks a valuable introversion in Indian fiction. It points to a line of significant development—exploration not of the ‘social’ man, but ‘the lone individual’.”(Belliappa)
Works Cited
Anita Interview with Yashodhara Dalmia, The Times of India, 29th April, 1979
Bande, Usha; The Novels of Anita Desai : A Character and Conflict, Prestige Books, New Delhi, 1988
Baral, Dr K C & Naik, Mrs C K; Desire and Death in Anita Desai’s “Cry, the Peacock”, in
Triveni, Madras, Jan—March, 1992
Belliappa, Meena ; Anita Desai : A Study of Her Fiction, Writers’ Workshop, Calcutta, 1971
Brekland. Elmer; Contemporary Literary Critics, St. Martin’s Press, New York,1977
Desai, Anita; Cry, the Peacock, Orient Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1980
Desai, Anita; “A Secret Connivance” in TLS
Gaijan, M B & Prasad, A N (edited) ; Indian Women Writers: A Critical Reinterpretation, Sarup Book Publishers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 2009
Iyengar, K R Srinivas; Indian Writing in English, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. ,New Delhi,1985
Naik, M K; A History of Indian English Literature, Sahitya Academy, New Delhi, 2002
Pathak, R S; The Alienated Self in the Novels of Anita Desai