Passage on RUNNING IN THE FAMILY

MONSOON

NOTEBOOK  (ii)

The bars across the windows

did not always work. When huts would invade the house at dusk, the beautiful long-haired girls would rush to the corner of rooms and hide their heads under dresses. The bats suddenly drifting like dark squadrons through the house—for never more than two minutes—arcing into the halls over the uncleared dining room table and out along the verandah where the parents would be sitting trying to capture the cricket scores on the BBC with a shortwave radio.

Wildlife stormed or crept into homes this way. The snake either entered through the bathroom drain for remnants of water or, finding the porch doors open, came in like a king and moved in a straight line through the living room, dining room, the kitchen and servant's quarters, and out the back, as if taking the most civilized short cut to another street in town. Others moved in permanently; birds nested above the fans, the silverfish slid into

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steamer  trunks  and   photograph   albums—eating   their

way through portraits and wedding pictures. What images of family life they consumed in their minute jaws and took

into their bodies no thicker than the pages they ate.

And the animals also on the periphery of rooms and porches, their sounds forever in your ear. During our visit to the jungle, while we slept on  the verandah at 3 A.M., night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the night.

One evening 1 kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. .Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them—Inaudible then because they were always there like breath, In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, fluorescent light) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocussed by the brain — nothing more than darkness, all those sweet, loud younger brothers of the night.

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