Animal Imagery in Anita Desai - In Custody

Mrs. Ritu Bajaj

Associate Professor

Department of English

Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya

• In this novel the animal imagery is predominantly drawn from circus animals. It is significant in two ways. It explores the predicament of the characters as imprisoned creatures aspiring desperately for their freedom and secondly, men are as much starved and harassed as the animals. Never before in her novels do we find such thematic importance attached to his image nexus. Besides depicting ingratitude, unkindness and disruption of traditional human values and relationship, this imagery encompasses the universal and human predicament.

• Animal imagery is woven artistically in the novel. Deven goes to Nur’s house during his resting time. The poet, in his annoyance shouts. It can only be a great fool : Fool, ,are you a fool?. The words of Nur for Murad prefigure Nur and Deven’s position “That joker — he should paint his face, wear a false noose, and perform in a travelling circus. Nur asks Deven : Are you a part of his circus?

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• From Circus image only springs the image when Nur’s wife screeches in agony, “She were as though fire-eater to his middle of a performance. The very words of the poet for Deven are the words of his wife for the poet. “He is foolish, foolish to spend time with you. The fight between Nur’s wives is “as between jealous tigresses”.

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• Nur’s house is “this house is this home of ferocious felines ?” Nur’s young wife has “reptilian hand” and for her Deven is “a jackal”. Her attendants keep a distance as “from a poisonous snake”. It is because of its great significance that the objects Deven sees for the first time on his entering Nur’s house are repeated. They are a tap dripped, a broken bicycle and a cat slept.

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• Animal imagery is used to describe Nur’s various attitudes of nervousness, impatience, regret and his imprisoned self Murad in annoyance tells Deven. Please wind up your circus, send your star performer home. It links up with Nur’s words for Deven and Murad, already referred to Nur’s white dress and white beard have added significance in the context of star performer.

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• These three images explore Nur’s indisciplined life and Nur as a broken and useless man and his wives as ferocious as tigresses. Deven’s miserable life with unsympathetic and sarcastic wife makes him think that “he must look like a caged animal in a zoo to any creature that might be looking down at earth from another planet.

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• Therefore, he thinks “marriage a family and a job had placed him in this cage, now there was no way out.” For Deven it was an illusion to think that Nur’s world was an escape into a wider world, but it was only a kind of zoo in which he could not hope to find freedom, he would only blunder into another cage inhabited by some other trapped animal.

• Deven doubts whether Siddiquis and the registrar are helping him or “simply locking him up more and more firmly in a barred trap?” Deven intends to slip out from the babble of Nur’s company, but is unable to do that as he is “like a fish in a trap.” His wife is as much a victim as he is. He thinks “like her, he had been defeated too, like her he was a victim.

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• His white dress and beard symbolize his imaginative world and illusory status. The gloomy room highlights his low connections and animal life. The dead life of the poet and his poetry are evoked through “the marble form” and “his body had the density, the compactness of stone.” The corpse of Urdu poetry spoken by the poet refers as much to the poetry as to the poet himself.

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• Even the cycle rickshaw driver is described by circus imagery. “Acrobatic as a monkey with a red cap managed to swerve in time. Besides the circus animals’ image of imprisonment, there is the figure of a dog to describe Deven’s dejected and futile life. On his way to Delhi, he thinks of the dog which had come under the bus.

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• He identifies his fate with it. This image come to his mind through the malice and mockery of his wife over the marriage shirt that he had dislike. Therefore, he goes in the “form of an agonized dog”.. The image of the dead dog culminates into the fly that he notices in the cup of tea that he drinks. In it lay the struck dog, the triumphant crows, the dead fly—death itself, nothing less.

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• “Now you see its corpse lying here, waiting to be buried. His play-acting the image of circus and star performer are again gathered are again gathered through this image. When the poet looks at Deven, the circus animal’s image is evoked “A wrinkled eyelid moved, like a turtle’s and a small, quick eye peered out at Deven if at a tasty fly.”

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• Even pigeons, “symbol of flight and song would cease to be a poet’s inspiration and become a threat?”, the narrator comments. And we see the pigeons hungry for Nur’s flesh and blood and the birds not only seethed around him but perched and teetered on his bald head and hands, furiously scrabbling with their hooked claws, raw and pink and their gluttonous beaks as if they would tear the flesh from his bones and devour it if he had nothing else to give them.

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• He pig-like life, has unclean and greedy habit of mind are hinted at by his wife. “Do you call that a poet, or even a man? You have reduced him to that, making him eat and drink like some animal, like a pig.” Nur’s gorging is aptly suggested by comparing him with “a great bolster”.

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• He feeds on the obvious, therefore, he is compared with “fish like skin and fish like spattering of the brown freckles of age”. His imaginative urge to live beyond his means is hinted at by calling him “a whale in a pail of water.” The circus animal’s image comes to our mind while Deven describes the head of his department.

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• “a small vicious ferret of a man called Trivedi…He looked at everyone with the same expression of maniac hatred and as if he were calculating the right time to dart out and bite.” Nur as a star performer changes into an actor practising rudra rasa for Trivedi.

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• Again the circus image is evoked : “Pulled dreadful faces…opening his mouth, baring his teeth, narrowing his eyes, cupping his ear with one hand and scowling.” An analogy with the insect comes to Deven’s mind in describing the tailor with whom he shares his room and food. “droming on in his corner like a trapped mosquito.”

• Though, it is an insignificant image concerning a minor character, its thematic connection with the novel cannot be undermined. A picture of prey and predatory comes to our mind while the tailor makes Deven “a captive listener. With similar significance Deven sees his colleague, Jayadev who makes “reptilian movements as though he was insinuating himself through cracks.

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• We see animals in Zoo wandering restlessly and striking against the walls and dropping helplessly. Our imaginative sympathy is dead so far as their agony is concerned, but not so with human beings. We see the desperate situation of Deven after his failure in his attempts at winning the minimum things in life.

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• If he had been alone, he would have howled, one long animal howl after the other, struck his head against the wall, beaten upon it with his fists, and wept. Cry the Peacock makes use of stellar images. Maya’s obsession with death is conveyed through this image, “the stars each one isolated from the other by so much.

• Apart from one stellar imagery in Bye-Bye, Blackbrid, Desai has not used this analogy to explore her thematic vision in her earlier novels. In Custody is a unique exception in her use of the stellar imagery. The comet is the very interpretative focus of the novel. It prefigures how Deven, instead of bringing a little respect, daintiness and order in his life, courts turmoil

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