My Nine Lives (21 page)

L.K. reappeared on a day when I had bought a new set of clothes for Vidia. Vidia was trying them on before the little mirror attached to Dharma's dressing table; this was at floor level so that he could see only his legs and feet and was complaining at there not being a decent mirror in the house. L.K., who had entered in his usual way with his stick held aloft as though announcing some victory, burst out laughing: “You won't have need of many mirrors where you're going,” and then, waving his stick at the new outfit: “Or of fine clothes.” He sucked in his cheeks to keep himself from saying anything more, like someone relishing a secret.

“What, no tea?” he asked Dharma, who at once began to grumble how was she to know he was going to walk in the door after not even a postcard—but at the same time she was whispering to me to go down for the milk rusks that he liked. And it was only when he was dipping these rusks into his tea that he came out with his secret. Vidia would not have to wait five years before contesting the next election. A seat had fallen vacant due to a death or resignation or expulsion, and L.K. had persuaded his party to let Vidia stand for it.

“Now we'll show them,” L.K. said. “Now they'll see something new.” He extended his hand to pinch Vidia's cheek in his usual way, but Vidia moved out of reach. L.K.'s enthusiasm was not dampened. “Tell your mother how you'll drive them out from all the seats and portfolios they're keeping warm for themselves,” he went on. “No more shirts washed in Paris! No more rose in the buttonhole!” He laughed out loud, but Vidia only responded with a faint smile.

L.K. wanted them to leave on a new election tour at once, but Vidia said this would not be possible as he had some affairs to attend to in Delhi. And next morning he had no time at all to discuss anything because the official car came for him again and was waiting outside. I stood on the balcony to watch him leave; as usual, he never glanced back but looked straight ahead with his thoughts already fixed on the places and people he was being driven to. So he was unaware that L.K. stood on the balcony with me and that he too was looking down at the car. Although he made no comment, there was a peculiar expression on L.K.'s face, and it was then I noticed for the first time that the car driving Vidia away carried the flag and the number plate of the ruling party.

Later that day I saw Vidia and his new girl friend (subsequently his wife). I was standing outside the American Express
office together with some of the others who had also come to collect their money. The office was next to an opulent restaurant that none of us cared to patronize; we had not come to India for luxury and display. But the place was popular with a modern type of Indian businessman and their elegant girl friends. We watched with disdain as their chauffeured cars drove up and the tall doorman in splendid tunic and turban opened the brass-studded doors for them.

One sleek sky-blue limousine delivered Vidia and his girl friend. I watched them get out and walk toward the restaurant. Even if he had not been with her, I would have noticed her, she was so beautiful, spilling over with jewelry, with happiness, and with laughter at what she was telling him. He was leaning toward her, listening to her with the half-smile I knew well, indicating his acceptance of his good luck. It was the way he received things I was able to buy for him—in fact, he was wearing the same new outfit he had tried on the day before while grumbling that the mirror wasn't big enough.

I thought Vidia hadn't seen me, but he had. When he came home that evening, he at once began to reproach me for standing around on the street like a common person with hippies and bums. “What about you?” I said. “I saw you were not with a common person.” He didn't blink an eyelid, but went on, “You don't understand anything.”

And the next day I heard Dharma say the same words to L.K. She was sobbing as he collected the few clothes he kept in the flat. “You don't understand anything,” she said. “He's my son. My
son
.” L.K. didn't respond but bundled up his things. He was ready to go, while she went on pleading: “Is there a mother on earth who wouldn't want everything for her son?” He proceeded toward the door with his bundle and his stick. He stopped for a moment in front of me—perhaps
he wanted to say something but didn't. He looked deeply grieved, his face pulled down in the lines of sad old age. Calmer now, Dharma was wiping her eyes. She asked him at least to take some food for his journey, but L.K. said he wouldn't need anything, he was taking a train and there would be food and tea sold at every station platform on the way. When she asked him if he had money, he waved her away majestically. Then he was gone, we heard his stick thumping down the stairs.

Now, whenever I think of him, it is not the way I saw him that last time but as I imagined him on the train that took him away from us. There he is not at all the L.K. I had first seen on the bus giving speeches to his fellow passengers. Instead, he has become like other gaunt old men I had met in third-class carriages—sitting upright, staring straight ahead with eyes that don't want to see anything more. When others, unpacking their bundles, offer him bread and pickle, he holds up his hand in refusal. At station platforms he doesn't buy anything for himself but only some candy for the children in his carriage, wailing from heat and weariness.

And the way I remember Dharma is as she was after L.K. left: sitting on the floor by her little dressing table, she talks to me about love and longing; about meeting and parting; about sacrifice, and the passing of all things good and bad. But Life goes on, she says, and we with it. She is resigned, both for herself and me. She explains that often the people who mean most to us have to be left behind because they cannot follow us along our destined path. We may be born into a high-caste Indian family or as a foreign girl, a free spirit, dedicated to travel, but for each of us Life has many stages.

She turned out to be right; I did pass through many stages. When I look back at the time with her and Vidia and L.K.,
it seems separate from the rest—of a different quality like a dream, or one of those dances she showed me, made up of graceful gestures executed in the air to the accompaniment of ankle bells, drum, and some sort of lute.

8

Refuge in London

A
LL THE
people—the lodgers—in my aunt's boarding house had a history I was too young to have known. I had been brought to England when I was two—“our little Englander,” they called me. I knew no other place, and I felt that this made me, in comparison with them, rather blank. Of course I liked speaking English as naturally as the girls at my school, and in other ways too being much the same. But I wasn't, ever, quite the same, having grown up in this house of European émigrés, all of them so different from the parents of my schoolfellows and carrying a past, a country or countries—a continent—distinct from the one in which they now found themselves.

They were not always the same lodgers. There was a fairly quick turnover, for some of them prospered and moved on, others had to make different arrangements when they could no longer come up with the rent. My aunt, with whom I lived in the basement, was a kind landlady, but beyond a certain point she could not afford to be generous. Also—for my sake, she said—she had to be more strictly moral than it was perhaps in her nature to be. The way émigrés live is determined not so much by conventional morality as by the emotional refuge they find in each other. There is always some looseness in these arrangements, odd marital and extramarital situations: for instance, Dr. Levicus, who had started off in one of the rooms with his wife to whom he had been married for thirty years, replaced her with a young lady of
twenty, also a refugee but nowhere near his level of refinement. My aunt was prepared to wink at such behavior; she knew how difficult life could be. But she did give notice to Miss Wundt who, having taken her room as a single lady, had different men coming out of it in the mornings and could often be heard screaming insults after them as they made their shamefaced way down the stairs.

The Kohls, however, were tolerated year after year, though they were not at all regular with the rent, or in their morals. They were not expected to be; they were artists. Kohl was a painter, and in pre-Hitler Germany had been famous. His wife Marta said she had been an actress and a dancer, though not famous in either capacity. They rented the two top rooms but lived in them more or less separately. One room was his—his studio; she also referred to hers as a studio, though she didn't do anything artistic in there. She was much younger than he, and very attractive, a tiny redhead. It was unlikely that, if he had not been famous, she would ever have married someone so much older and so undistinguished in appearance. He was short and plump, and bald except for a fringe of hair at the back; he had an unattractive mustache that she called his toilet brush. He didn't seem to care that lovers came to visit her in her room; when that happened, he shut his door and went on painting. He painted all the time, though I don't think he sold anything during those years. I'm not sure what they lived on, probably on an allowance from some relief organization. For a time she had a job in the German section of the BBC, but she soon lost it. There were too many others far more competent and also more reliable than she, who found it impossible ever to be on time for anything.

Mann was another of our lodgers. His first name was Gustav, but no one ever called him anything except Mann. I disliked him. He was loud and boastful and took up more
time in the second-floor bathroom we all had to share than anyone except Marta. Another reason I disliked him was that he was one of the men who spent time with Marta in her room, forcing Kohl to shut his door. I had no such hostile feelings toward her other male visitors but was as indifferent to them as Kohl seemed to be. He too was not indifferent to Mann. Whenever they met on the stairs, he said something insulting to him, which Mann received with great good humor. “Okay okay, my friend, take it easy,” he said and even soothingly tapped his shoulder, at which Kohl cried out, “Don't touch me!” and jerked away from him. Once he stumbled and rolled down several steps, and Mann laughed. Mann also used to laugh whenever he passed me. I was sixteen at the time and not attractive, and he made me feel even less so by pretending that I was. “Charming,” he said, fingering the navy blue school tunic I wore and hated. I was in my last years at school—too old for it, I felt, and longing for what I thought of as the real world.

Those particular years are probably difficult for most girls, and it didn't help that they happened to be the post-war ones in England, with drab food, drab climate, and clothes not only rationed but made of a thick standard so-called “Utility” material. But that didn't really matter: I wasn't so responsive to what was going on outside as to what was going on inside me. My surroundings were only a chrysalis, I felt, waiting for me to burst out and become something else. Only what? I didn't feel that I could ever be butterfly material, and whenever Mann looked at me and said his tongue-in-cheek “Charming,” it was obvious that this was also his opinion.

It was different with Kohl. I often sat for him while he drew me. Unable to afford a model, he had already drawn most of the people in the house, including my aunt. She had looked at her portrait with round eyes and her hand before
her mouth in only partly amused distress: “No—really?” she said. But it really was her, not perhaps as she was meant to be—as, in more hopeful years, she had expected to be—but how she had become, after the war, after survival, after hard unaccustomed domestic work, and the habitual shortage of money that was also unexpected. It was my aunt who had brought me to England, more or less tearing me out of my mother's arms, promising her that she would soon be reunited with me. This never happened: after the age of two, I never again saw my mother, nor my father, nor any other relative. Only my aunt—her name was Elsa, but I called her La Plume (from my French lesson—“La Plume de ma Tante”). She was nearly fifty at the time; some nights I saw her asleep on her bed in the kitchen alcove—her heavy red swollen face, her greying hair bedraggled on a pillow, her mouth open and emitting the groans she must have suppressed during the day. It was this person whom she did not recognize in Kohl's drawing of her.

I was always ready to sit for my portrait. Once I was home from school, I had nowhere else to go. I didn't share many of the interests of my classmates nor was I involved in then intense relationships, which were mostly with each other. When invited to their homes, I found them smaller than mine, more cramped in every way. They lived in semi-detached or terraced houses, with a rectangular stretch of garden at the back where their fathers dug and grew vegetables on their days off from their jobs as postmen or bus conductors. Only one family lived in each house whereas ours swarmed with people, each one carrying a distinct history (the load of their ruined past). The unruly lives of our lodgers were reflected in the state of our back garden. It was wildly overgrown, for no one knew how to mow the grass, even if we had had anything to mow it with; buried within its rough tangle lay
the pieces of a broken statue, which had been there ever since we moved in. Ours was one of the few tall old houses left that had not been pulled down in the reconstruction of the neighborhood in the 1930s, or bombed during the war. Its pinnacle was Kohl's studio on the top floor, and when I sat for him, I felt myself to be detached from and floating above the tiled roofs of the little English villas among which our boarding house had come to anchor.

Kohl worked through the night, painting huge canvases in oil that one only saw in glimpses, for he either covered them with a cloth or turned them face to the wall. These paintings were not interesting to me—in fact, I thought they were awful: great slashing wounds of color, completely meaningless like someone else's nightmare or the deepest depths of a subconscious mind. But when he drew me, it was always by day. He perched close to me, knee to knee, holding a pad on his lap and drawing on it in pencil or charcoal. While he was working, Kohl was always happy. He and his hand were effortlessly united in one fluid action over the paper on to which he was transferring me. He smiled, he hummed, he whispered a little to himself, and when his eyes darted toward me, that blissful smile remained. “Ah,
sweet
,” he breathed, now at his drawing, now at me. I too felt blissful; no one had ever looked at me or murmured over me in such a way; and although I had of course no sentiment for him—this small paunchy middleaged man—at such moments I did feel a bond with him, not so much as between two persons as in something else coming alive between us. With so many people living in it, there was always movement in the house, noise: doors, voices, footsteps. But there at the top, we felt entirely alone and bound to each other by his art.

The one person ever to disturb us was his wife Marta—and she was not only a disturbance but a disruption, an eruption
into our silence. Although they lived separately in their separate rooms, she entered his as of right, its rightful mistress. Without a glance at me, she went straight to look over his shoulder at the drawing: she stood there, taking it in. I felt the instrument in his hand stumble in its effortless motion. There was a change of mood in everything except her who stood behind him, looking, judging, one little hand on her hip which was slightly thrust forward in a challenging way. Her glinting green eyes darted from the drawing to me and took me in, not as the subject of his drawing but as an object of her appraisal. After a pause, she returned to the drawing and pointed to something with her forefinger extended. “Don't touch,” he hissed, but she only brought her finger closer to show what she judged to be wrong. He pushed her hand aside roughly, which made her laugh. “You never could stand criticism,” she said and walked away from him, sauntering around the room; if she found something tasty left on a plate, she ate it. He pretended to go on working, but I could feel his attention was more on her, as was mine. She took her time before leaving, and even when she was half out of the door, she turned again and told me, “Don't let him keep you sitting too long: once he starts, he doesn't know when to stop.” It took a long time for Kohl to recover his concentration; sometimes he couldn't manage it at all and we had to stop for the day.

Once, when this happened, he asked me to go for a walk with him. I had noticed that he always took an afternoon walk and usually to the same place. This was a little park we had in the neighborhood—an artificial little park, with small trees and a wooden bridge built over a little stream which rippled over white stones. The place seemed dull to me—I was reading the Romantic poets for my Higher Secondary, and my taste was for wild landscapes and numinous presences. Now I saw that this park, which I despised,
represented something delightful to him. It was a spring day the first time I accompanied him, and I had never seen anyone so relish the smell of the first violets and their touch—he bent down to feel them—and the sound of starlings that had joyfully survived the winter. He made me take his arm, a gallant gesture that embarrassed me, and we paraded up and down the winding paths and under the trees that were not big enough to hide the sky. He said he loved everything that was young and fresh—here he slightly pressed my arm, tucked under his; when a blossom floated down and landed in my hair, he picked it out and said, “Ah
sweet,”
the way he did when drawing. We sat on a bench together, romantically placed by the rippling stream, and there he recited poetry to me: far from being young and fresh, the lines seemed quite decadent—something about a poet's black mistress or a rotting corpse. According to Kohl, this had been a favourite poet of his in his younger days, when he had lived in Paris and sat in the same cafés as Braque and Derain.

After that first walk, he often asked me to go with him, but I usually refused. It embarrassed me to be seen arm in arm with someone older than my father or my uncle—had I had one. He never tried to change my mind, but when I saw him walking by himself, he looked so sad and lonely that I went with him more often than I wanted to. It was a strange and entirely new sensation for me to see another person happy in my company when I myself had no such feeling at all. He was undoubtedly happy in that pathetic little park, listening to birds and smelling flowers, walking up and down with me, aged sixteen, on his arm. But when we sat on the bench by the stream and he recited Baudelaire in French, I became wistful. I realized that the situation was, or should have been, romantic—if only he had been other than he was, an old man in a homburg hat with an ugly mustache.

He began to invite me on other outings, such as his Sunday afternoon visits to galleries and museums. I did go with him a few times but did not enjoy it—starting from the long tube ride where we sat side by side and I wanted people to think we were not together. Looking back now, all these years later, I see that it should have been regarded as a great privilege for me to see great paintings with an artist such as Kohl who had once been famous (and became so again). He kept me close beside him, standing in front of the paintings he had come to view—usually only two or three. He made no attempt to explain anything to me, only pointed at certain details that I wouldn't have thought extraordinary—light falling on an apple or a virgin's knee—and saying, “Ah ah ah,” with the same ecstasy as when he was working. Afterwards he would treat me to a cup of coffee. At that time there were only certain standard eating places in London that he could afford: dingy rooms with unfriendly elderly waitresses, especially depressing if it was raining outside, as it often was, and we had to remain uncomfortable in our wet coats and shoes. But he seemed to enjoy these occasions, even the bad coffee, and continued to sit there after the waitress had slapped down the bill in front of him. At last I had to tell him that my aunt would be worried if I came home too late. Then he regretfully got up; and it was only at that last moment, when he was picking up the bill, that his hand brushed against mine very delicately, very shyly, and he smiled at me in the same way, delicate and shy.