The Way Things Were (25 page)

‘And what was the message?’

‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you . . .’

A realization as heavy as the fall of evening began to descend over the Fatehkotias that, whatever else had happened to I.P., it was not an accident. An accident, by now, they would have heard of. Something less serious perhaps. He might have passed out drunk at the house of a friend, say; he could have left unexpectedly for Dehradun; he might have decided to take a beautiful woman fishing. All these things, though unlikely, were possibilities. But they would have been uncharacteristic; I.P. was not without a sense of duty. And, as much as he rebelled against his mother’s wish to make a feudal out of him, he would have been mortified to cause her any distress. Especially on Diwali.

The other possibility was too grim to contemplate. Neither did it really inspire the imagination. No one could think what it might be. And, yet, it was this possibility – that something worse than an accident had occurred to I.P. – that hung over the latter part of the day.

At 5.30 p.m., just as everyone was getting ready for the puja, Skanda burnt his hand. He had been trying to put a chakri on his fingers in imitation of Vishnu’s flaming disc. And suddenly, as the white fire of that burning coil began slowly to unwind, it scorched him. There was no one around to hear his shrieking and, in his panic, he couldn’t get the thing off. At last it was Narindar – getting ready to take off for the evening – who heard and, running up, tore the lethal little wheel from Skanda’s hand.

‘I’d better take him to Dr Arya,’ Toby said to Uma a few minutes later. She was still in her blouse and petticoat and stared in horror at the pouchy pus-filled blisters spreading like a rash over her son’s hands.

‘How did he burn them . . . ?’

‘Main Vishnu banna chahta tha . . .’ His sobbing voice, thick with tears and panic and blame somehow, filled the apartment.

‘It’s nerves,’ Toby said over him to Uma.

‘From what?’ she cried, her partially made-up face distorting her expression, making it seem clownish.

‘They can sense it. Rudrani’s been in a state all day too.’

‘Uffffff!’ she replied, turning back to the mirror, and feeling in that moment overwhelmed with the emotion she had been suppressing all day. If she had so much as let the phrase,
Oh, I don’t know what to do
, enter her mind, her tears would have forced their way out. She banished them, with an anger that felt like strength, and reshaped them into, ‘I don’t know what to say! Yes, take him, I suppose.’ Which sounded colder and more heartless, but she felt she was obliged to project strength in compensation for the weakness of the men around her.

The strength of her personality put a strain on the relationship between father and son. They felt, with the exception of when Toby was teaching Skanda Sanskrit, a great awkwardness around one another. It was not edged with something unpleasant, but was more akin to what two strangers feel, when, in those first moments of entering a lift, they wait uncomfortably for its motion to impart upon them a sense of purpose. It was not that they did not love each other; it was that they did not know how to speak to each other when she was not around. Their entire communication was shaped around her existence. And later, when she would not be there, they would both feel a degree of resentment for the dependence she had instilled in them.

Skanda later remembered that visit to Dr Arya’s clinic, which was in a south Delhi house, with sliding doors and a rusting slide in the front, as one of the few times he had been alone with his father. And, if it was uncomfortable, it was not because it felt bad or good, but because it felt like nothing. It felt insubstantial, a dream, with that same sense of being present and not present, of being ferried along from sequence to sequence, but possessing no power to influence the course of events. The arrival; the waiting; the plywood and brown Rexene examination bed; the painted alphabet on the wall; the diagnosis; the prescription; the stop-off at the chemist; the little brown paper bag, with creams and a mild painkiller. Did they talk? Did his father try to console him? The impressions were so distinct. The empty roads; the setting sun; his father, with his floppy hair and whitening sideburns, at the wheel of the jeep. He even remembered the red burgundy sweater, with its leather buttons, that he wore that day. And yet, just as in a dream, the vividness of the images bore an inverse relationship to the substantiality of the experience. The clearer the pictures became, the more it felt that none of it had ever happened.

They made a quick stop at the flat. Uma, now fully dressed, waited outside with Rudrani, who wore a shiny blue salwar kameez, and a Doon School visor over her chaotic curly brown hair.

‘I can’t get her to take it off,’ Uma said, in reply to the question in Toby’s face.

‘Leave it, leave it,’ he said, and smiled, swinging her into the back.

‘Where’s Narindar?’

‘I thought you gave him the evening off.’

‘No. He was meant to come and help out at Fatehkot House. I told your parents.’

‘How strange. I haven’t seen him since he rescued Skanda.’

‘He’s very restless, that boy. I tell you, if he wasn’t Labu and Sharada’s son . . . Champ, you want to let your mother get in the front?’

‘No, no, leave it. We’ll make a concession to his poor burnt fingers. Wanted to be Vishnu! You’re really the limit, Skandu. What next? Jumping from buildings like Hanuman?’

Rudrani laughed uproariously in the back.

‘Shut up!’

‘What? Who are you telling to shut up? Your mother?’

‘Her, obviously!’

‘Setting your tail on fire?’

Rudrani, at that age, when nothing was funnier than different iterations of the same joke, laughed still louder.

‘Swallowing an ocean of poison? Where does it end, Skandu?’

And suddenly it was all real. The sound had been restored, the magic element put back into life, which now again was more than a mute reel of pictures. His sister’s laughter; the jeep setting off on the short journey to Fatehkot house; his mother’s voice in the back; his father at the wheel. The family was complete; a thing of flesh and blood again, an organism. So, there was no other way to put it: she, and she alone – Uma – had the power to make their life feel real.

At Fatehkot House the older cousins were setting off patakas in the garden. An H-bomb smoked now under a tangerine tree laden with rotting fruit. A man on one of the slim ledges of that large forties house laid clay diyas in a line. Dim electrical light was visible in the double doors and windows whose gauze screens were bent out of true and in places thick with grime. It felt, even by its own gloomy standards, like a house in mourning.

The decision to have Diwali had been made a few hours before. And now there was Diwali.

‘O
ṁ
ś
r
ī
ṁ
hr
ī
ṁ
kl
ī
ṁ
mah
ā
lak
ṣ
myai nama
ḥ
. . .’ The words rang out; a smoky fire was lit; and Skanda, ever protective of his father in relation to Sanskrit, came and sat by his side. Others gathered behind them.

‘I say, fellow! Very nice to have our own in-house pundit.’

Viski made the remark as a joke, but, in the new political climate, it acquired an edge. He seemed half to mock the Sanskrit prayer. It was a language, which, in any case, had the potential to cause embarrassment among those whose sacred language it no longer was. It had an in-built air of authority, which, like some old law or the deposed monarch of an
ancien régime
, it exerted blithely, regardless of whether those in earshot respected its authority or not. And it had an odd way of stirring in people mixed feelings of reverence and rebellion.

Especially among the Sikhs who found themselves besieged that winter: the face of terror, in a way that would not have seemed possible after 1947. True, the idea of persecution had never left them; it was almost an article of faith. But it was also true that persecution, in the past, had always had a specific context, and the persecutors a specific faith, namely Islam. So, in 1947, when their persecutors were Muslims again, the Sikhs, at least on the level of historical memory, had been prepared. What they were not prepared for, once a curtain came down, in the form of a border, on that bad time in 1947, was persecution from Hindus. And, after the violence was over, it was not so much outrage at its perpetrators that the Sikhs expressed, but outrage at themselves, for not having seen it coming. ‘We never thought . . .’ a taxi driver later said, and broke down before he could complete his sentence. ‘We never thought it would happen again. But just let them come now; now, if they come, we’ll be ready . . .’

But, of course, they never came again.

Prejudice in polite society – and the Fatehkotias were nothing, if they were not that – did not come to the party dressed as prejudice; it came as humour. And that night, almost as if in anticipation of what had happened to I.P., there was a lot of humour of this kind.

‘I say, fellow! Very nice to have our own in-house pundit,’ Viski might say. The Brigadier, reading to the depths of the place from where the joke had come, might add, ‘When I was a junior officer, and posted in U.P., there had been a riot of some sort. The army had been called in to put it down. If I remember right, old General Kumaramangalam was our commanding officer. I said to him, “Sir, was it Muslims?” And he says – though he was a Hindu himself, but a pukka angrez, you know, an Etonian, “No, no! Bloody Hindoos!” Bloody Hindoos!’ the Brigadier repeated, and everyone laughed.

Their jokes contained a trace of racial superiority, for, in this country where the general population had until 1947 been ruled by foreigners, the Sikhs were like people who had broken from themselves. They were Hindus remade, free of all that they felt had made the Hindu ripe for enslavement, and they were never more contemptuous of anything – the British and the Muslims, they could handle more easily – than that old Hindu past, the past of ritual and magic, on which they had turned their backs.

The puja over, Uma retreated to I.P.’s old room, where she dealt privately with the pain of her homecoming. The room was full of I.P.’s things: his trunk from school – black and battered, under the bed, with his number – 250-J – painted on it; a stack of Tintin and Asterix comics in a bookshelf; some novels of Evelyn Waugh, to whom he had introduced her. Many Russian novels published by Moscow’s Progress Publishers, who had their bookshop in the People’s Publishing House in Connaught Place. Books, a narrow bed, a polished desk, a terrazzo floor with no carpets, and so little else. All the sad gentility of post-colonial life was to be found in the room. It was like a microcosm of their cultural world. Of the inherited British cities, with their dreary bougainvillea and empty streets, to which, like shabby annexes to a grand house, there had been the addition of colonies. Colonies that had come to fill in the empty spaces of that pale hard land dotted with tombs and mosques. Beyond that, a near perfect erasure. Nothing, save texts and literature, from which, in any case, they were cut off, to say there had been a past at all. That there had not just been nothing before. It felt small and inconsequential, their claim on the land, easily reversible.

If men’s stories tell you anything about how they see themselves, it is significant that the Fatehkotia stories were all about violence and futility. Wars they had not meant to fight, but into which events had dragged them; blood they had not meant to shed. They were like people encircled by history. Never actors, always acted upon. It produced in them a kind of fatalism – a belief in magic, almost – as well as some measure of guilt. Their misfortunes – and there had been quite a few since the Mutiny of 1857 – all felt to them deserved. Corrective, even, especially where the Brigadier was concerned. His stories were almost always self-indicting and he was only too ready to embrace as historical justice every calamity life sent his way. Even now, with his son mysteriously missing, and the events in Punjab, out of no fault of his own, closing their circle around him, he took the line of a man deserving of unhappiness.

He wore a peach-coloured turban and a grey herringbone jacket; the Brigadier never wore Indian clothes. And he stared, with a kind of amazement, at the domestic scene around him – daughters and grandchildren milling about; wife, worry written into her face, having dinner served; servants coming in and out with ice and soda. It was almost as if he didn’t believe that he had engendered it. He didn’t feel responsible, didn’t feel attached. The idea of place had been disrupted for him so early in life by the Partition; and, he had, in embracing the nomadic nature of army life, re-enacted that original disruption. He lived with a deep feeling of homelessness, and, seeing perhaps in his son-in-law a fellow alien, he would always say to him, in the tone of a man forced to repair a car he had not intended to buy, or caught in bad weather on a holiday he had not wanted to go on, ‘You know, Raja saab, we’re not even
from
here.’

‘How do you mean, sir?’ Toby said, smiling.

‘Well: there’s this rhyme we were all taught as children, a bit of oral history: “Ghaznion chade warraich, leke lakh sawar . . .” Do you understand? It means: from Ghazni rose the Warraich: we are Warraich; that is our clan . . .’

‘Tad tad tambe tarti . . .’

‘Oh, you know it? How wonderful! How do you know it?’

‘Sir, I’ve heard it from you.’

‘Yes, yes. Tad tad tambe tarti. It means the earth shook with the sound of hooves. Guru banaye Sardar: the Guru made us Sikhs, you see. But we were probably, in all likelihood, Muslims from Ghazni. Never from here at all, you see!’

Muslims from Ghazni! In India, where the great majority of people – even Muslims – could be scratched to reveal an underlying Hindu, often cognizant of caste, the Brigadier loved the shock value of this little remark. He might as well have been saying the Fatehkotias were not, in fact, mammals. It was the kind of statement that has special resonance in those places where the tensions of a great historical upheaval, like the Islamic invasions, though papered over, can still be felt. And where the authenticity of origins – “I’m actually one-sixteenth native American, didn’t you know!” – has become fraught with significance: an expression of legitimacy, a way of asking to whom, after all, does this land really belong? In India people fell over themselves both to belong and to not belong, as though balancing legitimacy with a feeling of historical defeat that belonging would implicate them in. That defeat made India feel like a beautiful, but heavily mortgaged house, where to own the house was to own the defeat.