The Way Things Were (20 page)

‘And when it was over,’ Skanda says aloud, ‘Blue Star, that is, people were left with a terrifying spectacle: the charred shell of the Akal Takht – the seat of the Timeless one.’

Gauri’s face is turned away, but he can sense she’s listening.

‘It had been built a foot higher than the throne of the Mughal Emperor in Delhi, and it was the ultimate symbol of Sikh defiance, of their unwillingness ever to accept overlords. So, the sight of it destroyed like that was a signal to every Sikh, believing or unbelieving, that there would be retribution. Paid and repaid in double measure. That now the blood would begin to flow.’

‘You’re such a drama-baaz,’ she says, laughing.

‘But it’s true, Gauri. That must have been what it felt like, for people going into that terrible winter of blood and gas.’

‘Or not? Probably it just felt like any other year, with everyone caught up in the usual Diwali festivities, no?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘I mean, what did people feel in August ’47? Or 1914? Or even 2001. I’m sure they sensed trouble was on the way, but probably you always just go around a corner before you realize that it was a turning point. And October in Delhi, as you know, is so hectic, with Diwali shopping and card parties and whatnot. Such a beautiful month, no? Not like tonight.’

‘No, and especially evocative for my father.’

‘Why, for religious reasons?’

‘No. Because of the literature. It’s a big trope in Sanskrit poetry, that season. It’s the time when the skies are at last free of clouds, the autumn night washed with moonlight; a time of festival, of activities resumed after the heat and rains, a beneficent time, you know, when – what is it they say? – In the mansions of the sky, auspicious configurations become possible again; and “rivers, little by little, reveal their sandbanks as bashful women, in their first sexual encounter, reveal their loins . . .”’

‘You naughty boy,’ she says and laughs. ‘Should we just do it here? Right now? In this dark abandoned house. On this rickety . . . what do you even call this thing?’

‘An opium bed?’ he offers, watching her raise herself on to its rotting mattress. ‘Then? Should we go for it on this termite-infested opium bed, or will your massi find us and give us two tight ones . . . ?’

Observing his smile fade, she says: ‘Skanda . . .’

‘Gauri.’

‘Tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘So, it all came together that October, or what?’

He nods.

Yes, he thinks, that October, with the air in the evenings, now chilly, now smoky, now cloyingly sweet with the scent of saptaparni, it did all come together.

It was in October that Uma, after nine years of marriage, first became aware of her restlessness. It came upon her almost as a memory of restlessness from another time. A time when it was not so much that her dissatisfactions were acute as that her wish for change was strong. The moment of discovery came as it had in 1975: in the form of signs. She looked feverishly for them in the world around her. Skanda might ask, ‘Mama, does aberrant mean something repugnant, something hateful?’ ‘No, Skandu, that is abhorrent you’re thinking of.’ And, suddenly, not one paragraph down, in the book she was reading there it was: abhorrent. Why had the word appeared magically like that at the very moment when Skanda had asked its meaning? It was not a common word. What was it that attracted these coincidences? And, in those days, there seemed to be many. Numbers; dates; words. Odd, and seemingly pregnant, synchronicities showing up out of nowhere. Odder still was her wish for them to keep coming, and for them to mean something.

She was surprised to find herself reading horoscopes. She waited for hers every day in
The Hindustan Times
, reading it over Rudrani’s shoulder as she brushed her hair, trying to make its brief and elastic message fit the contours of her life. She ignored the romantic bits, as one does temptation and infidelity. She concentrated instead on the career advice, which she adapted to her life as a housewife. She looked, all the while, for hints of change: for cataclysm, even; anything that would reconfigure her life. One day, well into her having become a hawkish addict of the future, her daughter asked her a question with that cruel simplicity that is a child’s alone.

‘Mama,’ she said, as Uma, putting Rudrani’s hair into pigtails, pulled apart thick black bands baubled with red plastic strawberries, ‘why do you read the horoscope?’

There was no reason to have felt it as an accusation; no reason to have felt it as sharply as she did; it was an innocent question; it could easily have been deflected. But, for some reason, it tore off the protective screen behind which reflection and self-examination lay. And what was laid bare in that instant was her unhappiness. She felt come thick and choking into her heart, mind and throat, pulling at the lachrymals, an answer:
Because I desperately want something to happen to me.

She did not say it aloud, but no sooner had it been admitted into her heart than it set to work, undoing her faith in what till then she had believed to be nine happy years of married life. She was perhaps especially sensitive that morning to such an anti-narrative. For only a few hours before she had received a call from Priti Purie – yes, the very same one! The Admiral’s daughter who had first got her into flying. But not Purie now: Hirachand. She had made good on the eternal promise of the airlines: trolley to lolly. She had found a rich businessman husband – a biscuit tycoon! – while flying, ‘and, Mishi darling, what can I say? He grounded me.’

To hear that clear crisp voice, still full of the shrill optimism of the convent, was disconcerting. After a gap of a decade, for it was at least that long since she had last heard it, it came through over the telephone that October morning like a broadcast from another country. Uma felt the light of appraisal fall over her own life. It made her contemplative; it was a sudden reminder of the passing of time. She found her own voice – not faltering, no . . . but unable to compete with the rich timbre of Priti’s. There was something busy about that voice: it was full of news. Priti’s life, which she had made in Bombay, seemed more vital than her own. It was a life of travel, of dinner parties and turnovers; it reeked of sex.

It made Uma aware of the placidity of the morning scene around her, in her own flat, a scene that was like a microcosm of her life: Skanda watching a film on the VCR; Toby, reading the newspaper – full of bad news from Punjab – about to sit down to a morning of work. Which, even after all these years, remained impenetrable to her, seemed to lack an arc or sense of purpose, but consumed him entirely. It was not that Uma was dissatisfied with what she saw around her; it was just that she was, for the first time, aware of it. So, it was not that she thought:
Oh, how awful my life is
, but, rather,
Oh, this is my life
. All of it, and there might never be anything more.

Had she thought there would be? Yes. Yes, she had. Not necessarily in material terms. True: Toby was not as rich now – or, at least, did not have as much money on hand – as when she married him. Court cases with his sister; land ceiling acts; a portion of the rent lost from the flat in London; translations and the publication of his textbook held up – these things had eaten away at his income. But Toby would never be poor. And there was very little she wanted that they could not afford. There had been foreign holidays; months in Gulmarg over the summer; the children’ school, clothes, birthday parties . . . No, none of this had been a problem. In fact, she almost wished it had. For it might have given their life together a kind of urgency? A pulse? A charge? All the things that she sensed the presence of in Priti’s voice – sex, money, travel – were there in her life too, but in smaller amounts with each passing day. Her life had widened out like the Tamas
ā
at Kalasuryaketu and, though full of breadth and volume, it seemed hardly to flow.

She had done things to give it meaning. She had, when the children were very young, worked at the Playhouse school; that was fine so long as the children were there. But once they went on to real schools, it had not held her. Neither had the various interests she had tried to cultivate: the sitar, which she had played in school, and tried unsuccessfully to take up again; the painting, for which she had once believed she had a genuine talent, and which had fallen away from her; she had tried to read more seriously – the classics – the canon, a concept she would hear debunked later that evening; she had even, at the height of her love for Toby, tried to learn Sanskrit. But it hadn’t worked. In fact, she had come to resent Toby’s passion for the language, an all-consuming passion with no care for a result. She learned with something like horror that he could be immersed in the scholarship of this language all his life, and it mattered not a jot to him whether it yielded anything. She had nothing like that in her own life. And when she asked him – first gently, and later aggressively – what he wanted from life, even in the narrow sphere of Indology, he had replied, with a smile and a phrase from the Gita: ‘M
ā
karmaphalahetur bh
ū
r.’

‘What does that mean, Toby?! Really, what does that mean?’

He tried to explain. ‘It is an important verse . . .’ he began.

‘Important?!’ She gave a sharp and mocking laugh. ‘Why is it
important
? For what, Toby?’

‘It’s not
for
anything, Uma.’

‘Well it must be for something. You’ve devoted your whole bloody life to this stuff, this language. It’s the only thing that excites you, and now you’re teaching it to our son, as if his life depended upon it. The other day he says to me, “Women neither like nor dislike anybody; they are like cows in the forest, always seeking fresh grass” . . .’

Toby began to laugh.

‘It’s not funny! This is the kind of crap that you’re bringing him up on.’

‘Uma, it’s from the Hitopade
ś
a.’

‘I don’t give an F where it’s from . . .’

‘He’s reading it because the Sanskrit is simple. It’s over ten centuries old; it’s bound to contain a few anachronisms. But there’s more hita in it – more benefit – than harm.’

‘What benefit? How will it help him to learn this dead language?’

‘It’ll give him a feeling for the country he lives in, for its past, for its other languages; it’ll give him a sense of how things hang together; it will deepen his sensibility.’

‘But what will be gained by this “deepened sensibility”?’

‘Everything, Uma. Everything is sensibility. Not just in my work; in all work, in science, in mathematics . . . Men need an idea of human possibility, of who they are, and Sanskrit—’

‘Sanskrit what?’

‘Sanskrit will automatically give that to him. It will help him join the dots—’

‘How, Toby? How will losing himself in a lifetime of futile study help him join any dots?’

Silence.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please tell me what you were going to say . . .’

He looked long into her face, as if to search it for any remaining rancour. Then he said, ‘It will give him the ability to see through language. Not just in India, but across the Indo-European belt. It will give him an instinctive idea of the past. And, in a country like India, where people have so few means to possess such an idea, it will give him a kind of confidence. There is a world coming into being, Uma – not just here, but everywhere – in which nobody from here to bloody Peking on one end, and Rabat, on the other, is going to be able to tell his arse from his elbow. What Skanda knows of language will protect him; it will put him on sounder footing; he’ll have a higher idea of things.’

She gave a weary smile. ‘What were you saying earlier? The verse from the Gita?’

‘It’s nothing. It just says, one should . . .
you
should not let the fruit be the aim.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of action.’

She rolled her eyes; he laughed.

Some part of her growing impatience with him came, no doubt, from the impatience she sensed among others.

It was a country with a very strange relationship with foreigners; and Toby, for all practical purposes, was a foreigner. In India – unlike, say, Russia, or China – the foreigner was welcomed as a king at first. People regarded him as something rarer and more precious than they were themselves, someone who stood neutral to their own violent differences and internal suspicions. The foreigner, flattered by the attention, was feted; invited everywhere; he was encouraged to believe he had made lasting friends. And, so far so good. If, at this point, he was to leave, if he was to refresh his foreignness, as it were, he was safe. But if he stayed on and became more implicated in Indian life, if he let his foreignness wear too thin, if he married an Indian woman, say, and had half-Indian children, he was doomed. He became something repugnant to the Indians; neither a man they could assimilate into their own familiar likes and dislikes, many of which had their origin in caste, nor one they could raise above themselves. Worse: he became a fallen reminder of the glamour and power they had once invested him with. They hated him for standing aloof, they hated him even more for trying to draw nearer; he became an annoyance; a faulty mirror, rusted and flaking, in which they could see their own self-loathing. A deposed Kurtz who, in another time, they might even have sought to destroy.

Had something along these lines begun to happen to Toby? In some respects, yes. So long as he had come and gone, he had been a novelty; he had brought cheer, and news of the West, to the boredom and malaise of drawing room life; he was someone the ladies could fight over, someone through whose favour hostesses could show up their rivals; they loved that he knew them all, and yet was not compromised by belonging to any particular camp; they giggled over his exaggerated reverence for the Indian past, and allowed themselves to feel a degree of feigned shame at their own ignorance and deracination. But all this was contingent on Toby being a man of hotel rooms, of linen and safari suits, in whose pockets there might be the stubs of boarding passes – Heathrow–Palam – and loose foreign change, a large dark blue British passport, say, with the mysterious name – G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu – written in blue ink on the white oval window at the front. A man, in short, who could at any time be asked when he was leaving, and, from whose date of departure and port of arrival, the imagination of a Delhi grand-dame, on a hot dusty day, might extract some pleasure – from the distant and clement dream of a day spent shopping in Knightsbridge.