The Way Things Were (23 page)

Toby, feeling Uma’s eyes on him, sensing that she was observing the tension and thought him its cause, and would interpret it as an insult to her friend visiting from Bombay, wanted to put an end to it all. He muttered, ‘Rather have a foreign hand than a blind one.’

This made Viski – and no one else – laugh out loud.

But now, for some mysterious reason – perhaps it was the delayed effect of Hirachand’s earlier remarks – it was Viski who seemed in some drunken and half-mocking way to take real offence. ‘Bilqul sayi keya, main kehnde hun bhaga do pehnchodh firangiyun nu.’

Hirachand, presuming Toby had not understood, replied in curt Hindi, ‘I’m not saying that. But the threat of the foreign hand is real.’

‘Absolutely,’ Viski thundered, still in Punjabi, ‘that’s why I say. Let this son-of-a-bitch foreigner not even play his bloody foreign hand. Now, this minute, let’s send him packing.’

Hirachand, lured into the trap, gave a contented little laugh. He winked at his wife; a boyish wink that seemed to say,
Don’t worry, I’m fine, darling. I’m having fun. Everyone here likes me.
Toby’s face, three-card-poker straight, gave nothing away.

‘What do you say, Uma?’ Viski continued, ‘What should we do with the little foreign spy. Chase him off?’

Uma smoked and made no reply. But Hirachand, now wildly amused, for nothing excites the provincial more than a bit of xenophobia, said, ‘How are you talking, man? To his wife, you are saying such things?’

After a pause, Toby said, mixing Punjabi, Hindi and English, ‘I know, Viski! Tu vi hadd karda’e. Wife de saamne meri beizzati.’

The joke unveiled, a little laughter rose from the table. Hirachand saw that it had been on him all along. But Viski was not satisfied and soon they were at the point where Viski, ever more aggressive, was saying, ‘What say you, Hirachand? Eh? What does your name mean?’

Hirachand, who could see now that sympathy was coming over to his corner, played the victim. He said, in response to Viski’s question, ‘Shashi means moon. And K
ā
nta,’ he added carefully, ‘means beloved, desired . . .’

‘Oh, moon, does it?’ Viski said, cutting him off, ‘We’ll see about that, my little desirable cunt.’

‘Viski!’ Isha said, seeing how upset Uma was becoming.

‘No, now no “Viski!”’ Viski said. ‘I’m going to show this little punk who the foreigner is. Go on, tell me why does shashi mean moon?’

‘Why does it mean moon? It means moon because it means moon. Why does moon mean moon?’

‘Oh, getting clever, cunty-wunty? Brother-in-law, why don’t you tell us, why does shashi mean moon?’

‘Viski,’ Toby said, glancing up at Uma, ‘I’m not playing this game.’

‘And why? Have I been discourteous? Can we not sometimes say something back too?’

‘Very discourteous, Viski. Now stop it,’ Isha said.

‘I will not stop it. This little pilpilla toad thinks the whole bloody country belongs to him. Thinks, just because he’s got a few CR in the bank, and a reedy little moustache, that he’s the great defender of Indian culture. Defender, my foot. When the invader was coming, it was our lot, and Raja saab’s lot, who were defending this country. While this little shopkeeper here was rolling over onto his back and dreaming of akhand Bharat! Ha! I’m not leaving this table,’ Viski said and brought an open palm face down on the surface of the card table, causing it to shudder, the glasses to tinkle and the banknotes in the kitty to fly up, ‘until Raja saab tells him what his damn name means.’

‘Tell him, please,’ Isha hissed, looking desperately up at Toby, who could feel Uma’s eyes on him. The table was rigid with tension. Only Hirachand, knowing that he now had everyone stitched up, was serene.

‘If I tell him, Viski,’ Toby said at last, ‘will you stop all this?’

‘I will,’ Viski said with drunken solemnity, placing a palm on his heart. ‘God swear.’

‘
Ś
a
ś
a,’ Toby said, with a sigh, ‘like the German
Hase
, means hare.
Ś
a
ś
in, of which
ś
as
ī
is the nominative singular, means harepossessed or having a hare. It is called that because the spot on the moon was thought to resemble a hare. For the same reason the moon is known as
ś
a
ś
ā
ṅ
ka – a bahuvr
ī
hi – “whose mark is the hare.”’

‘I say!’ Viski thundered. ‘How lovely! Now was that so painful?’ And suddenly he was playful again. He turned to Isha and said with a broad grin, as if Hirachand was their son, ‘See, I just wanted the boy to learn.’

Hirachand, his wife behind him, her hand coming slowly to rest on his shoulder, rose without a word and left the table.

It all occurred on that practically moonless night. The next day – Diwali morning, the 24th – the sun was late coming up. Its pale wintery disc – sooty, orange, anaemic – rose over Deep Fatehkotia walking to Toby and Uma’s flat in search of I.P. She wore her sneakers and salwar kameez, a harassed lock of silver hair falling over her forehead. Deep, who when she had had nothing to complain about, complained continually, but who now, when faced with a real crisis, and every right to throw her fists up at the sky, was eerily calm. So calm it was as if she feared the force of her emotion; or else, she was insulated by some deep martial instinct which, dormant within her, must have for centuries, like an opiate or paralysing enzyme, protected the women of her tribe from the pain of losing sons in battle; or perhaps it was the doctrine of her faith, which, founded in a time of persecution, was never so contemptuous of anything as it was of weakness, that allowed her to walk over to Toby and Uma’s flat on that dismal Diwali morning in search of I.P., as if she had come looking for a lost pair of spectacles.

*

‘But first,’ Skanda says, ‘there were a few more hours of darkness.’

‘What is this looping,’ Gauri says. ‘Why must we keep going round and round . . . ?’

‘Because that is how things really are. And all the old books, Gauri – the ones that were oral before they were written – were ring-shaped, concentric, more an echo than an arc. My professor at Columbia, Theo Mackinson, his whole study of the epics was this: ring-theory. The repeating and rippling shape of life. But where were we?’

‘I.P.’

‘I.P.! He was such a comfort to them that night, to the couple returning home jangled from an ugly fight. They found him asleep on the sofa,
Midnight’s Children
on his chest, the dregs of a drink on the coffee table. He jumped up when he heard them come in, and, even in his sleepy state, sensed their tension and did all he could to disperse it. He saw that his brother-in-law was distraught and sat up late with him talking of, what, you know?’

‘Of what?’ she says, indulging him.

‘Of the Russians! Such a subcontinental thing to do, no? To bury what is difficult and painful in cerebral things. To let the intellect soak up the blood from a fight. This is what we do. Not because we lack sensitivity, but because we lack the right language for emotion. English has such a jealous hold over us, but it is a hard and brittle thing in our hands. It doesn’t suit the easy melodrama of our natures. And it has a way of making matters of the heart seem at once inert and deeply shameful. So what do upper-class Indian men do when they are too wretched to do anything else? They talk of the Russians! Of Dostoevsky and Belinsky, of “cultural schizophrenia” and “the lackeyishness of thinking”. Ah, Gauri . . .’

‘What is it, janum?’

‘That they should have got I.P.!’

‘Don’t!’ Uma hissed, into the diesel-infused darkness. She sat there frigid, statuesque in shawls and silk. Her features, etched angrily onto the thin plate of her face, shone in the orange light, bullet-sized and burning in the dash board. Toby removed his hand and, in a gesture that was like a sigh, draped it over the gear shift. Priti’s voice, light and airy, broke in from the back, ‘A heater. How quaint, my dear. I haven’t seen one in years. I don’t think we have them in Bombay any longer.’

The Bombay–Delhi rivalry! That was all pretty Priti had picked up of the tensions that arose that night. And it insulated her from the ugliness of the truth, which, in any case, she was in no position to understand. She had remained light and insouciant throughout. Pretty Priti till the end. She saw the job of defending her husband as nothing more than scoring the odd point for the Bombay team.

Hirachand was grimmer. He knew what had been at work that evening; he understood caste and its prejudices. He knew he had been the victim of that one caste prejudice that people still felt free to express openly: the prejudice against the bania. This man, whether he came in the form of a merchant, a moneylender, a trader or businessman, an industrialist or tycoon, was a central feature of social organization. And all society’s tension, its edge, as it were, came from the existence of this avatara of money. A man to whom, beyond the usual accusations of cowardice, weakness and deceit, people even attributed colours and special textures of skin. ‘Oooh that special bania blackness, blue blackness,’ one might hear someone say, ‘I haven’t seen it in years.’ Another might speak of his awful sallow colour: the unhealthy pulpy texture of his skin: the result, no doubt, of generations of vegetarianism. ‘Mota lala pilpilla.’ Even the Shudra, lowly thing, had pluck in him enough to spit on the name of the bania. ‘Aggarwal, thooh! Gupta, thooh, Hirachand thooh . . .’ It was as if the name itself – like Goldman, and all other names which contain gems and precious metals – was branded with caste.

Hirachand, playing at being the aggrieved party, and an insulted guest, kept up a forgiving and generous exterior, which only deepened the bitterness between husband and wife. Nothing like magnanimity to really drive the knife in! He pretended nothing had happened; and when, a little while before, Toby, shamed by his wife, had come up to apologize and to offer him a ride home, he gladly accepted.

In the jeep, making its way through deserted Delhi streets, over which there was the persistent crackle of fireworks, giving the city the air of the capital of an insurgency – Diyarbakir or Jaffna – the Hirachands kept up a lively banter. Their seeming happiness, when seen against the silence in the front, made Toby and Uma, more than the victims, appear the losers of the evening. Unfriendly Delhi people, stewing in their own bile.

‘No, sweetheart,’ Hirachand said, ‘we have them in Bombay too. All diesel vehicles have heaters. Trust me,’ he added leaning forward, and addressing Toby and Uma, ‘my friend, at whose house we’re staying, makes jeeps just like this one.’

‘Oh, you’re staying at the house of a friend,’ Uma said automatically, ‘you should have stayed with us . . .’ And then she stopped herself.

‘Yes, his family used to have the Willy’s franchise in India. They’re an old business family. The group has split and he got the raw end of the deal, but he’s making a lot of what he’s got. A great fellow, a real bloody Hindu nut. Loves America and Israel: the exact opposite of our Indian socialist mindset. Loathes the Gandhis, of course, and is obsessed – I mean obsessed – with ancient India. In fact, Toby, I think you’d find him very interesting.’

‘Yes,’ Toby said, with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. He felt Uma’s gaze on him through the darkness and felt he must drink from the pool of yuppy happiness in the back.

‘Oh, yes. Just the other day he was showing me this paper that a professor friend of his – a fellow called Choate – had written on the Indus Valley. Marvellous stuff. It basically proves that there had been horses in pre-Aryan India.’

‘Horses, Hiru?’ Priti’s voice sounded musically into the dank interior of the jeep. ‘So what, yaar? I mean, what’s the big deal if there were horses?’

‘You say, Toby saab,’ Hirachand said. ‘Tell them.’

‘Horses,’ Toby began mechanically, ‘are the key to proving that there was no Aryan migration. If you can prove that there were horses in pre-Aryan India, then the whole idea of the Aryans having come from elsewhere falls through. Which, it seems, is a comfort to some. Though no one,’ he said quietly, feeling Uma follow his every word, ‘has done that so far.’

Toby knew the professor to whom Hirachand was referring; he knew, too, that he was a fraud who had tampered with his findings.

‘But this fellow has! That is what I’m telling you!’

Toby didn’t reply. The car sped on, over the Safdarjung flyover, past the hulking mass of the All India Medical Institute, heavy and Sovietic, the red illuminated letters of its sign, some unlit, of course, bleak in the foggy darkness.

‘Sarvaujas Enclave?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Priti said, seeming to make fun of the care with which he had pronounced it. ‘B-17, Sarvaujas Enclave.’ Then turning to Uma, she said, ‘Remember, darling, Mrs Randev in Welham?’

‘How can I forget her. Awful little woman. What was that little doggerel she used to teach us about farting?’

‘I remember! “Tarak padyam maha punyam, tooyen phus phus narak gayam.” Ha, that was all the Sanskrit I ever learnt! Or wanted to, frankly . . . no? I hate all that chanting-shanting.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Uma said icily.

The car turned into the dark empty streets of the enclave. And yes, his mind made a cat’s cradle of its name. Ojas: strength, vigour, energy, power: principle of vital warmth: from
vaj
like
vig
ē
re
, vigorous; like
augere
, augur, augus-tus,
auxilium
. These things always spoke loudest to Toby, and most privately, when he felt threatened and unsafe. Hirachand began to direct the way. The numbering of the streets was so illogical that it seemed almost deliberate, as if part of a code.

The jeep came to a halt outside a bungalow with high walls and a gate of dark wood and brushed steel. A frosted glass plaque, brightly lit from behind, and painted thickly onto it, as if part of the inevitability of that evening, were fat black letters enveloped in an aureate mist: Maniraja. B-17 Sarvaujas Enclave.

That night on the way home Toby and Uma fought about the Indus Valley. That ancient and horseless society, with its undeciphered language and famous sewage system, came to inhabit for a moment the bitter tensions of their marriage. In this sense, in the way in which they can remake reality in their image, human relationships are like works of fiction, and often the more oblique the angle to the thing they have refashioned in their likeness, the sharper the reflection.