The Temple-goers (18 page)

A few Indians, middle-class-seeming people with cameras, sauntered in. The writer’s wife took this as an opportunity to challenge her husband’s earlier claim that English-speaking Indians were not interested in India’s antiquities. ‘Look,
they’ve
come,’ she said.

‘They’ve come for the jewels. Yes, yes, they’ve come for the Nizam’s jewels. Their grandparents were taxed to death for the Nizam to have those jewels. And he didn’t do a thing; he just handled his jewels. The Left adores the Nizam.’

Then suddenly, our visit seeming to wind down, the writer became urgent. ‘You’ll come back,’ he said, ‘and you’ll look at these things. You’ll look at what we’ve seen and then move on.’

Walking out, we passed a map of the places from where the antiquities had come. It annoyed the writer; it seemed to show nothing but the actual digs, with no historical or geographical points of reference. He saw one place somewhere near Calcutta; ‘the Calcutta Museum,’ he said, ‘had a good collection, but kept badly. I think they would like to destroy them,’ he added, ‘but they can’t. So they do the next best thing: they let the workers watch them. Yes, they let the workers watch them.’

Another group of Indians, in bold colours, were coming in just as we were leaving. They seemed from the south, with teekas on their foreheads and flowers in their hair. They were laughing and visibly excited by what they saw.

‘You see my point,’ the writer said. ‘The people who come are the temple-goers and the ones who stay away are…’

‘The anglicized…’ his wife started.

‘The green-card folk,’ the writer offered, and laughed deeply.

15

Sanyogita didn’t like the writer. She felt he wasn’t kind; that was her word. She had begun many books of his. I think she read them for my sake rather than out of any real interest; and later I felt she left them unfinished for the same reason. One lay by her bedside now.

‘I can’t!’ she said, standing in front of a dressing-table mirror, her head cocked to one side as she put in an earring, ‘I just can’t. I’ve tried, but they’re so dry. And he’s not kind to his subjects.’

‘What do you mean “not kind”? What’s kind got to do with it?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t think he shows any compassion to the people he writes about.’

‘Isn’t just being plain honest a kind of compassion? Doesn’t it give back to people a kind of dignity, just to judge them by your own good standards and not as people who’ve been colonized, defeated, oppressed or enslaved?’

She didn’t answer; she was having trouble finding the hole. The earring slipped and clattered across the floor. Sanyogita, already in her heels, squatted down in one movement. But when she found it, it was broken. It was one of Ra’s earrings, the one with the moonstone and the ruby. The moonstone was missing. It left a visible vacancy.

‘Baby!’ Sanyogita cried, and squatted down again, feeling around the floor for the stone. We found it under her dressing table, covered in wisps of dirt and dust. She handled the little paisley-shaped stone as though it were a chick that had fallen from its nest. She found these small, inauspicious tragedies very moving; they could almost reduce her to tears. Then she saw that I was squatting down next to her and she smiled. She reached a long arm up to my ear, rubbed its rim between her fingers and rose in one movement.

‘No big deal, right? I’ll get Ra to fix it. When are we meeting your mother?’

‘Now.’

‘OK, I’ll hurry.’

My mother had flown in from Bombay for two nights. She was having dinner with Sanyogita and me tonight; the following night, she was having her dinner for the writer. We were meeting her at the new Italian restaurant in the Oberoi.

Outside on the garden terrace, the frangipani, its branches now completely bare, had shrivelled in its pot. But my premonition had been wrong. It was not the first casualty of a larger pestilence; the other plants were flourishing. From the shaft of light falling on the corridor, I could see the door to my study. Its brass Godrej lock hung heavily from the bolt; it hadn’t been opened since my return.

Sanyogita herself had only come back the night before. She appeared in the corridor a few seconds later.

The Oberoi Hotel attracted a variety of people. Politicians in white waited for white cars with red lights. Young men in maroon shirts with black trousers and brushed-steel belt buckles wandered in. A woman in a pink salwar kameez stepped out of a blue Mercedes. The hotel’s lobby was of black granite and heavily air-conditioned. There was a white marble fountain in the middle, with red rose petals circling on its glassy surface. On the way to the restaurant, we saw the hotel swimming pool through glass panels many metres below, brightly lit and blue in the darkness.

The restaurant had tall grey leather chairs. The tables were made of a faux-rustic stone and were very far apart. My mother, bejewelled and in a black and gold silk sari, tapped out a text message in front of a wavy, illuminated panel of frosted glass.

Because my mother had brought me up alone and our closeness was almost embarrassing since I was now technically a man, we played at being offhand with each other. And so even after not seeing me for months, she gave me a brief hug, said I was looking skinny and fell into Sanyogita’s arms. While they spoke about jet lag and the summer, a young man in white brought a bottle of Himalaya water to the table, then bowed in a deep namaste and went away.

‘That’s new!’ I said to my mother as we sat down.

‘I know! Isn’t it amazing? Biki has them all doing it.’

Biki was Biki Oberoi, the owner of the hotel.

‘He must have picked it up in the East,’ I said, remembering the time when you couldn’t even come into the hotel’s restaurants in Indian clothes.

‘Isn’t that strange,’ my mother said, ‘that it should have gone from here to there as a greeting, hundreds of years ago, and has now returned via Biki Oberoi?’

We had barely sat down when I felt my phone vibrate for the third time since we had arrived. I didn’t answer it, but was curious as to who it was: Aakash, all three times. My mother and Sanyogita were talking about Chamunda, about the dinner the next day, about the blasts and demonstrations in the old city as a result of a police encounter. I was sending a text message, asking Aakash what the matter was, when my mother suddenly said, ‘Baba, have you called Zafar to see if he’s OK?’

The question put my back up. Both because I hadn’t spoken to Zafar since I arrived and because Sanyogita, having seen me check my phone for the third time, and guessing who it was, compressed her lips. My mother, an observer of these currents, badgered me for many minutes about how wrong it was. ‘Your poor old teacher,’ she said, ‘alone in the walled city at a time like this. How uncaring can you be, Aatish! And to a man who has given you so much, really.’

‘Ma, he’s not alone! He has a family. I’ll call him.’

‘It’s the bad Pakistani blood,’ my mother said, shaking her head, and withholding a smile, turned to Sanyogita. ‘It’s from the father. I’ve done what I can to improve it, but still it remains.’

A man in a dark jacket appeared to take our order. I ordered lamb, my mother a starter as a main course, and Sanyogita sea bass.

My mother, finding me more sensitive than she had expected, brought up the writer’s treatment of his wife, taking pleasure perhaps, after not seeing me for so long, in winding me up.

‘It can’t be easy for her,’ she said, ‘married to a man like him. He’s very demanding. It’s a twenty-four-hour job. She can’t go anywhere, you know? She’s his wife of course, but that’s it. And he can be savage to her. I’ve seen it. Stingy beyond words. She lives as he does, which is well, but I don’t think she has five rupees of her own.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but she
is
a writer’s wife. The man has his vocation. That’s the most important thing in his life; everything else is secondary. She married him knowing that.’

‘She’s given him her everything, given him her life,’ my mother replied, no longer playful. ‘He’s the famous writer, but what does she get out of it?’

‘To be his wife. Some men need that and some women are made to give that.’

No sooner had I made the remark than it seemed to crumble and change like one of those unstable compounds, returning to their baser elements with the slightest exposure. Defending something stupid can make the world feel beyond grasp. And that night, before my mother, the woman who’d raised me, and my girlfriend of many months, who might have considered spending the remainder of her life with me, I took a shred of a thought, this little idea that the life of vocation required the sacrifice of anyone who came within its circle, and ran with it. I poured my energy into qualifications and amendments, trying to pull out of a rhetorical train crash. My mother became grave. Sanyogita’s face shrank, till it was like a pinpoint of pain and hurt. But she didn’t say a word.

I said that certain people were touched with energies and talents that weren’t theirs, and in acting on them, they weren’t expected to meet normal standards of decency and good behaviour.

‘What about love?’ my mother said.

‘What about it?’

‘What about your responsibility to the people you love and who love you?’

Our food arrived. Sanyogita pushed behind her ear a lock of hair that had fallen forward and began quietly to pick at her fish. I thought I saw her eyes glisten. I took refuge in my lamb.

‘The person who embarks on this kind of life,’ I said at last, ‘can’t think of those things. He has to think of his vocation, whether it makes him happy or not, or those around him.’

‘That’s nonsense, Aatish. You really talk nonsense. What is life if not in the end to have been a good friend, a good wife or lover, or mother, to have a house by the sea that you love, and five beagles running about the place?’

‘Not everyone has a house by the sea and five beagles.’

‘Don’t be cussed, you know that’s not what I mean. I mean to have lived a full, balanced life, to be surrounded in the end by the things you love.’

‘It’s funny you mention that, the being surrounded in the end by
things
you love. Almost exactly the same conversation came up at the end of the museum visit the other day. And the writer said he wanted to die, like Van Gogh, “with hatred for no one and love for his art”. Perhaps that’s the difference, wanting in the end to be surrounded by art you love and which you have spent a lifetime creating, rather than by things you love.’

Sanyogita, who hadn’t said a word so far, who had driven me to the depths of despair with her silence, said at last, ‘What about the people who give their lives supporting you?’

I was about to speak when she anticipated me and stopped me.

‘Who do it not from any sense of vocation, but out of love. Only out of love.’

At that moment, my phone vibrated for the tenth time.

I said, ‘I don’t know, baby. This is not personal or about me. Listen, I’m going to take this call because there seems to be some kind of serious problem. It’s been ringing all evening. Will you excuse me for a second?’

And so, in this way I tried to put a rushed, modern ending to a conversation which, when I later tried to downplay to my mother, describing it as a slip of the tongue, she further described as, ‘Yes, but a very revealing one.’

In the lobby outside, Aakash, using a Hinglish classic, said, ‘Aatish, man, I’m taking a lot of tension.’

‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I asked, beginning now to think of my own problems.

‘Megha just called me. Her brother knows for sure.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He just confronted Megha.’

‘Saying what?’

‘ “We sent you there,” ’ Aakash began, employing his distinctive ability to take on other personas, ‘ “to get into shape so that you could make a good match, not so that you could run off with the gym trainer. Who is he? He is nothing. He doesn’t know his station. If I wanted I could call Deepak…” ’

‘Who’s Deepak, Aakash?’

‘The owner, man. The fucker with the ponytail. “I could call Deepak,” Aakash said, stepping back into character, ‘ “and have him thrown into the street, his legs broken. The only reason I’m not doing it is because I don’t want a public embarrassment. But end this relationship this minute, I warn you. Mummy has high blood pressure. If she gets to know her daughter has run off with such a low-grade person, it would kill her. You have one younger sister. Think of her. Do you realize you’re compromising her marriage prospects as well?” ’

‘He said all this?’

‘Yes, man! I think they’re going to disappear her if we don’t do something.’

‘Maybe you should back off?’

‘Whaddyou saying, man? We have once to live, once to die. We’ll love once too.’

‘Aakash, stop giving me these bullshit filmy lines.’

‘They’re not filmy. There’s another reason; I’ll explain later. What should I do, man? If her brother tells Junglee, I’m gone. Taking too much tension.’

‘What kind of man is her brother? Big, small? Could he have you killed, your legs broken?’

‘That homo, no chance! Aatish, man, he’s a gay. And I have my people too, in Sectorpur. You’ve seen the guy. What can he do to me?’

‘I’ve seen the guy? Where?’

‘In Junglee only. A friend of Sparky Punj’s? He even came that time to Sanyogita’s house. Remember, when –’

‘Who?’

‘Lul! The guy we call Lul. Kris, Krishna. He is Megha’s brother.’

‘What? Lul is Megha’s brother? Aakash, how could you not have told me?’

‘I didn’t tell you? I must have!’

It was a suppression of truth greater than a lie. It didn’t just alter one reality but several that had come before. And it was the multiple deceptions contained in this one deception that gave it its particular sting, the sting of making me feel like a fool. It was also the reason it had been kept from me. It made Aakash seem like a man with secrets, a man playing for higher stakes, someone who didn’t need to make confidences to friends. I wanted very much in that instant to turn away from him for good. How easy it would have been in this slippery-floored lobby, into which he’d never come, with my mother and girlfriend in the other room, to get a new trainer and never think again of Aakash. I could turn away and he would vanish.

There was also, beyond questions of truth and lies, my genuine amazement that Megha and the creative writer could be brother and sister. Not only were they nothing like each other physically, but they were so different in their concerns and values, with almost nothing, save their taste for the rough side of Sectorpur, in common.

‘Ash-man.’

‘Yes, man.’

‘Let’s meet tomorrow and discuss this thing properly,’ I said, putting away the question of his deception.

‘OK, man,’ he said with disappointment. The time to tell me about Megha’s brother had no doubt been carefully chosen; I thought he would have liked to have better relished the surprise it produced in me. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, suddenly excited, ‘tomorrow’s Saturday, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why don’t you come with me to the Shani temple? Megha and I go every Saturday; after that, we’ll talk as well.’

‘Done.’

‘Done-a-done done. Oh, and sir, one more thing, bring a briefcase of money.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m going to take you shopping after the temple, and when I shop I like to…’ He made a sucking noise to indicate, I thought, a credit card swiping.

I stood for a moment by the glass panels in the lobby, looking down at the pool, still bright blue in the darkness, then went back into the restaurant.

My mother and Sanyogita were talking like women do after a man has behaved badly, conciliatory, making a show of having a good time, but wounded somehow. I told them what had happened with Megha and her brother, but didn’t mention who he was.