The Way Things Were (15 page)

They swept through Delhi’s empty streets and reached the U.P. border in less than an hour. A sandstone arch, and a frail yellow-armed barricade, policed by two sleeping men. Beyond, dark open fields and faintly lit villages. The occasional thunder of a truck. The heat and stillness of night; the permanent unhealthy rattle of the car. In the morning a damp and steaming light that broke over fields to which the rains had brought the first signs of life.

They stopped for tea. In a thatched hut, where a sleepy boy in a frayed vest cleared away steel plates, still smeared with the hard remains of rice and dal, blue flames crept cautiously out of a mud stove and licked at the base of a heavily dented aluminium kettle. The earth, wet with dew, turned to a gritty paste at their feet. An expression of remorse and forgiveness passed between them. But there was also a kind of surprise. The overwhelming return of love, coming, as if to a room where a party has been held, and finding, in the unforgiving morning light, a scene of devastation: the remains of half-drunk drinks, cigarette butts unpeeling in them, stains and spilled peanuts, broken glass.

Suddenly Toby rose and went to the back of the hut, where their driver, a thin-faced and moustached man from U.P., after a night of driving, rested on one of the wooden benches. After a brief exchange with him, she saw the driver get up and escort Toby out of the hut.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To make a phone call. I’ll be back in a second.’

They reached the City Palace just before 8 a.m. Outside its black wrought iron gates a small army of policemen had assembled. At first, they prevented the car from entering, but then one of the men – a boy, whose education had been paid for by Toby’s family – recognized Toby, greeted him apologetically and waved the car through. They drove along the red earth drive lined with gulmohar, in whose ferny canopy there was still the occasional scorched blossom. The lawns had begun to revive after the monsoon and there were islands of thick clumpy grass spread across them. The palace, a pale pistachio jewel box, had never looked more beautiful. Some mixture of rain and decay, and perhaps the violation of the government cars, with their carbuncular red lights, parked in its porch, gave it a pitiable and fragile aspect, as if something old and refined and graceful was on the verge of destruction.

Its entrance hall had been turned into a government office. The interior, a cool block of churchy shade, was rent, as if from the ground up, by the violent and rhythmic clacking of typewriters. The wicker furniture had been swept aside and in its place had come four workmen’s tables, at which Usha Raje’s staff were lining up to give testimonies, recorded with assiduous care by the typists. When they saw Toby, they broke ranks and came in floods of enthusiasm and hopefulness to greet him. They clasped his ankles, they reached up to touch his hands; some of their faces were wet with tears. It was a scene at once moving and repulsive; it could tolerate no witness. And, though the raid was an official affair, when the interrogator emerged out of this commotion to break it up it was clear from the distaste in his face that, for the power he represented, nothing was more threatening than the mixture of servility, affection, attachment and reverence that had brought these men and women to their knees at the first sight of Toby.

The interrogator was a short bald man in his forties, thin-lipped with large protruding eyes. At seeing what had occurred he was forced to remove his thick bifocal glasses and wipe them clean, as if they had deceived him. He was in plain clothes, sandals; there was a red-bodied Parker in his hand – a gift, of course! – whose springy button he thumbed furiously, as if extending a tic from his person to the pen. Finally, having taken Toby in, passing a cool uninterested eye over Uma and the staff gathered at Toby’s feet, he cried with something like anguish, into the vault of the room, ‘Who is this?!’ Then, a hushed shriek, ‘Who is this?’

Someone from the crowd at Toby’s feet said, in a tone that seemed to urge him to kneel too, ‘This is our Raja saab.’

‘Did I ask you?’ the interrogator spat out. ‘Did I ask you? There are no rajas in this country. Understand? Our leader got rid of them, so that you . . . But what could she do, if slavery courses through your veins. Give the whole damn country a blood transfusion?’

At this, his joke, he gave a shrill little laugh. His assistant, a darker man, with wavy strands of white in his thick oily hair, joined in. And, for a moment, the drama, which had seemed to be building up to a boiling rage, was suspended in comic relief. The interrogator, it seemed, was a man of many colours. In what was now a very calm voice, he said, ‘You can’t be here. I don’t know who you are; I don’t know why you were let in; who told you there was a raid going on. I don’t know. But you can’t be here. You must leave. Please, immediately, this minute—’

‘Usha Raje is my sister—’

‘But you haven’t answered the question.’

‘What question?’

‘Who told you there was a raid going on?’

‘Someone called—’

‘Find out who it is,’ the interrogator shrieked, ‘find out who it is.’ Anger and urgency returned at once. Speaking rapidly to his assistant, ‘I don’t care if you have to round up the whole jingbang lot of them, I want to know who is calling out. Find out, Reddy. This is not a joke.’

Reddy went half about his task, as if expecting any moment for another mood to come, and for the order to be rescinded. And he was right. Suddenly the interrogator was prying and curious; he seemed even to smile.

‘Are you foreigner?’ he said to Toby.

‘No.’

‘Looks like foreigner.’

‘My mother was Scottish.’

‘And your father?’

‘Indian. He was the old Raja.’

‘Oh, Raja saab had foreign wife.’

‘Yes. Like Rajiv Gandhi have foreign wife.’

‘Who said that? Who said that?’

It was Uma.

‘Who are you?’

‘My wife,’ Toby said, throwing a scolding look back at her.

‘Madam, please let me inform you. Not to be speaking in this way of Madam PM’s family.’

‘In what way?’

‘In this . . . in this . . . Why are you people here?’ He cried again, as if in pain. ‘I have already told you there is a raid going on. You cannot be here. Please go.’

Then Reddy whispered something in his ear and a bright wheedling smile rose to his lips.

‘But maybe,’ he said, ‘you know about the tunnels.’

‘They’re full of snakes,’ Toby said, bringing an expression of astonishment to his wife’s face. ‘No one’s been down there in centuries.’

‘Yes, we know about the snakes. Snakes guarding treasure, no doubt. We know what you people have been up to. We know how you have looted us common people. We found gold in Kusumapur, you know. Hundreds of kilos of it. It is this that our leader wants to get back, to distribute among the common man.’

‘I can’t help you into the tunnels. I’ve never been there myself.’

‘Can’t? Won’t. I think you will, I think you will.’

In the face of this new menacing tone of inquiry, Toby fell silent. But the interrogator had now decided that they should stay. He gestured to two women inspectors in khaki saris, with thick oily plaits and discreet red ribbons in their hair.

‘Take them upstairs to where Usha Raje is. We’ll deal with this lot later.’

On the wide marble staircase, leading up to the bedrooms, Uma said, ‘What is the matter with you?’

‘What do you mean what is the matter with me?’

‘Why are you being so meek, such a coward? These people are dirt, and they ought to be treated that way.’

‘It won’t help our case . . .’

‘Ay, ay,’ one of the women inspectors said, annoyed to hear this whispered conversation in English. ‘No talking. There’s a raid going on.’

As they passed the rooms whose doors had been sealed with an untidy splatter of red stamped wax, the inspector said, ‘You will only be allowed to use one room for the duration of the raid. You cannot leave it unaccompanied, even if you want to go to the bathroom. Understand?’

They did not reply.

Murky sunlight poured in past a glazed veranda at the end of the corridor, where painted wicker furniture stood in front of a console on whose green marble surface there were crested silver frames of the old rajas of Kalasuryaketu. They showed them standing next to animals they had hunted and killed; they showed them jewelled and in fine clothes photographed by Man Ray. Faintly visible beyond the high garden walls of the palace was Kalasuryaketu, still enveloped in a morning mist: a town of low whitewashed houses, arranged as a petticoat, over the steep escarpment of the Shiv Niwas, past whose ramparts lay the Tamas
ā
.

They came around a corner and found themselves, for a few moments, in near pitch-darkness. Then the door of Usha Raje’s room swung open and they saw, in the light breaking into the corridor, that they had been standing under the vacant, glittering eyes of mounted animal heads.

A stale stench of socks carried out of Usha Raje’s room. And immediately its source was clear: a woman police officer, with her hair in greasy pigtails, had removed her shoes and sat on the bed, dangling her feet like a child. Small dark feet with badly chipped red nail polish. Next to her was a stack of old fashion magazines; she flipped through the pages with a studied mixture of boredom and intense curiosity, as if she needed one as a cover for the other. Her face was small and cherubic, her skin gleaming with oily good health, the lips tense with garish red lipstick and mischief. On seeing Toby, a shy and demure look entered her eyes, as if a suitor was being presented to her, but, at the sight of Uma, her malice returned.

‘Why is the maid being allowed in?’ she said to her fellow police officer.

The woman blushed, then giggled; Usha Raje, sitting by the dressing table in a peach chiffon sari, choked with laughter. She had, beneath the pinched respectability of chiffon and pearls, that distinct bitterness – Mrs Gandhi-like – of a woman who has married a man many times her father’s inferior. Mr Malhotra, standing by her, gave a happy snort. Uma was about to answer the police officer when Toby stopped her.

‘She’s my lawful wedded wife,’ he said rigidly in formal Hindi.

‘Dharmapatni!’ the officer shrieked. ‘How chweetly the white man speaks Hindi. Hay!’

‘His father was Indian only,’ her colleague chimed in.

And for a while the two women were beside themselves at the rare and wonderful sight of the white man who spoke heavily Sanskritized Hindi. The rules about silence were abandoned, and they did everything in their power to make him speak, asking their questions in English and howling with laughter when he answered in Hindi. How long you driving? Stopping on way? Having breakfast? Here, she did a little imitation of a man eating. You show us gold in gupha? Big, big snake! Very scaredy!

At his every answer, which he gave with reserve and patience, the women laughed till they cried.

‘Did you hear he said “sarpa” for snake! “Swarna” for gold! Cho chweet. Hay, I’ve never seen something like this. He could put the pundit in my village to shame!’

Uma watched all this with creeping horror. She had never seen him out of his element, never seen him as anything but the most stylish man she had ever met; and now, before her eyes, he became a kind of clown. She felt almost frightened for him. She sensed his vulnerability. She wanted to get away from the room, away from the smell of socks, away from her husband as an object of ridicule. She made for the door.

‘Ay ay, where you going, madam?’ the officer said.

‘To the bathroom.’

‘Not going unaccompanied,’ the other officer said, and reached to touch her arm.

At this she swung around and growled under her breath: ‘Khabardar. Don’t you dare touch me!’

Usha Raje and Malhotra gasped. ‘Uma . . .’ Toby began.

But the officers seemed, in fact, to fall in line.

‘I’ll take her,’ one said quietly.

As they left the room, the devilish poopie yelled after them, ‘No bathing. Just bathroom.’

When the door shut behind her, she put her face in her hands. No tears, just a dry and wrenching feeling of helplessness. A strange glut of emotion rose in her like an ache but died in her throat, leaving a raw and unswallowed lump. Was she overreacting? Were they right to behave as they did? Was it naive of her to believe that if they showed some gumption these jumped-up creatures of officialdom would back down? In front of her, through the gaps in her hands, a Lalique dressing table caught the morning light. On its white glass surface were two sets of Mason Pearson hairbrushes, Oil of Olay, a bottle of Miss Dior, a silver tray filled with Revlon lipsticks. Artefacts that spoke both of luxury and isolation. The little things they lived by! In the room beyond she could hear Usha Raje and Toby, with the odd insertion from Malhotra, arguing in hushed tones about how her behaviour would make things worse for them. Then Usha, in P-language, began to tell Toby that she had smuggled out an emerald Ganesh from the Puja room before the raid began. It was concealed in her blouse; they needed to get the women officers out of the room for a moment so that it could be saved. And that was when, from the depths of a feeling of irrelevance, she heard Toby say:

‘Ap
ā
i hap
ā
ve cap
ā
lled apa map
ā
n whup
ū
ap
ā
i thapink cap
ā
n hapelp.’

‘Whup
ū
?’

‘Ap
ā
n ap
ā
wfapul lapitaple map
ā
n cap
ā
lled Mapanap
ī
rap
ā
jap
ā
. Hap
ī
wapill knapow hapauw tup
ū
tap
ā
lk tup
ū
pap
ī
ppul lap
ī
ke thapis.’

‘Hai, hai,’ she heard the evil nymphet say, ‘enough you two. There’s a raid going on. No talking.’

A few moments later Uma, washing up in the sink, a solid silver tub flashing in the mirror before her, felt her stomach churn. She was violently sick.