The Way Things Were (49 page)

At last the celibacy and the discovery of the love poems became too much for her. But she was surprised herself at how much she had been willing to bear. ‘We were alone a lot in his university house. And, I suppose, in that isolation, it was easy to lose sight of how things were really meant to be.’

Kartik returns in shorts and a lime green T-shirt. He flips through the heavy pages of a spelling book. ‘W for vhale,’ he says mechanically, and at such a pitch that he seems determined for no one else to talk. His intelligence is forbidding. The kind of intelligence that will make school hard for him. He forms connections effortlessly across languages. On the ‘K for Kite’ page, he defiantly says, ‘P for Patanga.’ At X for X-ray, he says X for ‘Skeleton!’ Gauri has talked so much about him – his love of religious movies, his strange atavistic feeling for the sound of Sanskrit – but she has never once said how difficult he is. Skanda feels the pressure not to disappoint, for the meeting not to be a failure. It has taken as long as it has, he sees now, not just because he was reluctant; she must have been reluctant too: her son is a nightmare, like his father, and it must chill Gauri to see that, especially since the boy has not seen his father since he was one.

She leaves the room for a moment to get Skanda another beer. Kartik and he are alone together. And that is when Skanda, in his wish to please, makes a fatal mistake. He picks up Kartik and roughs him up a little, tousles his hair. There is a moment’s pause as Kartik becomes aware of what is happening, becomes aware of the physical overpowering, then a shriek breaks from his lips. He writhes in his arms like a wild and possessed thing. He throws his tiny clenched fists at Skanda, bites his hands, kicks him wherever he can. His eyes are moist and black with rage. Skanda pretends to laugh it off, but it is terrifying. The pure violence of his emotion is terrifying.

Gauri hears the shrieks and comes rushing in just as he puts Kartik down. He runs up to her and starts beating her with his fists, kicking her shins.

And now the full moral outrage that he has been suppressing, his disgust at returning home to find his mother entertaining a strange man, comes frothing out of him. He stands by the door of the room, pointing a finger at them both. ‘Tum gandi ho, tum buddhi ho, tum gaddhi ho.’

Again and again, every insult he can think of wrenched from his tiny lexicon like a dry heave. There is mania in him, but fear too. He seems as if frightened by his inadequacy, as if burdened by a responsibility too great for him to take up. But, at the same time, there is something enviably direct in this experience of fear; it produces anger; it brings him to his feet and hardens his fists.
It was never that way for me
, Skanda thinks,
never so direct, always hidden
.

There was a kind of acting that came easily to Skanda. The trip to London had seemed to require it from the very beginning, from the moment his mother, with an expression of suppressed amusement, had told him of its strange purpose to when, after a cycle with travel agents and foreign currency marketeers, she woke him one hot night in June for his flight.

Delhi airport. Their goodbye, self-consciously casual, among the high emotions of immigrant send-offs. He flew unaccompanied, and adopted an air of jaded familiarity in front of the British Airways air hostess, who was American, and fawned over him, bringing him toys, and food, attending to him during their various stopovers. Once in Dubai – which was dazzling – and again in Kuwait, which was dull, except that she – Dawn was her name! – pointed out from the air that the airport was made in the shape of a plane. Furlongs of amber dots, as if the crust of the earth had been punctured, to release the light within. Then the handover in London. London! Of which, later, his only memory was the smell of high-octane fuel in the cold morning air. These were his impressions and the stranger they became, the more he pretended they were ordinary. They became part of his acting: the air of adulthood he had assumed, and which seemed like nothing so much as treating what was new and unfamiliar as if it were old and known.

He did not feel the acting as fraudulence; he felt it as a responsibility to his mother. And, if responsibility was the foundation of being an adult, perhaps its first duty was pretending to be an adult. He saw, too, that it was only in the moments when he was found out – when someone commented, usually Sylvia, on the wideness of his eyes, or his unnatural silence – that he felt anything at all; it was almost as if the very business of feeling had become its reflection in the people around him.

On his own, he felt nothing. His interior life was consumed by the task of keeping its contents hidden from view. And, as he grew older, no question was more embarrassing than: what are you feeling? Or worse: what are you
really
feeling? Because, so often, the truthful answer was nothing, nothing at all.

Everyone, in a sense, was acting. His mother was acting at being cool. His father . . . well, that was harder to gauge. His father was acting at not acting: pretending to be natural. He certainly seemed to be acting at being a husband to his wife-to-be. But he seemed also to be acting at being a father to Skanda. Everything about the way he was, from his wish to make him breakfast to his taking him to Huntsman to be fitted for a suit, seemed laboured. Skanda knew, too, that all this acting was not for his benefit, but for the benefit of an invisible audience of one: his mother. He knew his father wanted him to report back on the kind of father he had been during Skanda’s time in London. And, since such a report could only ever consist of tangible things, his father, who had never been a conventional father, seemed to externalize the notion of fatherhood, seemed to be ticking boxes that had never been there before. Breakfast, suit, visit to museum . . . It made their already stilted conversation more stilted.

It was only when his father was teaching him that Skanda felt he was still in the company of the man he had known. Then, everything else fell away, and he became as relaxed as he had ever been. It was also from this time that Skanda formed the deepest impression of his father’s vocation and truly understood what he meant when he said, ‘I am only a teacher.’ Not in the sense of belittling the vocation, but making it clear that Toby was nothing beyond it. When he became the teacher, Toby’s conversation grew more sophisticated, but it was also easier to understand. He dumbed nothing down, and yet what he said had a semantic force that was lacking in his day-to-day conversation.

They read every evening from a new set of books, a library of Sanskrit classics, that Toby was putting together. They were still in manuscript form but he displayed them with great pride, showing off their cover design and the Ki
ḍ
in Devanagari. He wanted them to be published in shades of an orange-tawny-brown colour that he said was the most Indian of Indian colours.

Toby was so excited about the new books that they read together even on the day of his wedding to Sylvia. Skanda was leaving for India the next day and, after the lunch, they came home to the flat on Cheyne Row. It was a summer evening, and in the long windows of the flat the glitter of the river was visible, a leaden Thames. Sylvia was making dinner, and his father, still half in his wedding clothes, a glass of ros
é
at his elbow, was slightly drunk, slightly sentimental. In that frame of mind he always became, especially in relation to Skanda, concerned about transmission, concerned about passing on what he knew. He insisted they read, even if only a little. His thoughts were scattered, but it was in these moments that Toby was at his best, when the evening sun, passing over the landscape of his mind, turned unseen channels of water to molten silver. There was a reference to Yama, god of the underworld – or so Skanda thought. But it was in the dual. Yamau. ‘Two Yamas?’ Skanda said in confusion. He looked up to see his father’s eyes full of a glassy ardour.

‘Not that Yama,’ he said with the excitement he felt when the language accidentally revealed – with something of the charm of a lifetime partner still able to surprise – one of its chief delights. ‘Yama, here, is twin-born, twin, forming a pair; it applies to the god only as an extension: because he was one of a pair of twins. And it comes, the word, from a very old set of Indo-European sounds: aim-, aiem-, iem-,’ Toby said, with difficulty, ‘to mean similarity and resemblance. From where we have the Latin,
imago
.’

‘
Imago
?’

‘Like image. A likeness, a copy, an imitation.’

He took a big sip of his wine, and was suddenly playful: ‘“Accurate scholarship can unearth” . . . so on, so forth . . . “what occurred at Linz, What huge
imago
made /A psychopathic god.”’

‘Baba, what are you talking about?’

‘You don’t know that poem?’ he asked him, as if trying to remind an old friend of something from their shared youth. ‘The Auden poem?’

Skanda shook his head.

‘Sylvia! What is the line from the Auden poem: “Find what occurred at Linz . . . what huge imago made . . .”’

Sylvia appeared from out of the kitchen, smiling, her pale skin beaded with sweat.

‘Ooops,’ Toby said, and, winking at Skanda, whispered, ‘Shouldn’t have asked her? Don’t mention the war!’

‘Toby!’ Sylvia scolded. ‘Don’t put funny ideas in him. We are not
those
Germans.’

Skanda, though vague about the reference, laughed at their tone.

‘“I and the public know,”’ Sylvia began, as if asked to recite a poem before a group of visiting dignitaries, “What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done /Do evil in return.”’

Toby looked at Skanda, and expanding his eyes while turning down the corners of his lips, made the face of a man impressed.

‘There,’ Sylvia said, and swinging around, went back into the kitchen.

Skanda watched his father for a moment. At length, he said, ‘Baba, are you happy now?’

Toby looked at him questioningly, unsure of whether he meant right now, as in, in that present moment, or more generally.

‘I mean after your marriage,’ Skanda clarified, using the word as if it were something clinical, and very far removed from what his own parents had been engaged in.

‘Yes, Skandu. This will be a good relationship for me, I think. A feeding relationship.’

A moment of silence followed, then a sudden awkwardness. Skanda, like an actor pushed too hard, could no longer sustain the front of adulthood he had put up, and had no idea what to say next.

‘So imago is image?’ he said haltingly.

‘Ah, no. Not here. Not in the poem, I mean. Here it’s being used in the Freudian sense to mean an idealized mental image of someone, a parent usually. Especially an absent one.’

Skanda looked blankly at his father. ‘What’s Freudian?’

Toby seemed confused, then laughed, as if he could only now see that he was speaking to a twelve-year-old. ‘It’s a long story!’

That was London. A few days later he was in Gulmarg, and a very different set of demands were made of his newfound acting talent.

His mother was in a strange mood. At times she was distant and withdrawn, spending her time walking or reading, or just staring out of the gallery windows at the meadow. Other times there was something frantic and urgent about her; a hint of desperation; she wanted him around, as if in need of comfort of some kind. He sensed her instability and restlessness, and it alarmed him so much that he found himself compensating with an exaggerated composure. And though this annoyed her – ‘Don’t always be so buttoned-up,’ she would tell him – he felt he needed to bring a measure of calm to her disturbance. She was also drinking more than he had ever seen her drink and then, her mood amplified, she became every bit the tragic heroine, full of bluster and indignation, at once pathetic and magnificent. In those moments, his acting talent deserted him and he just kept away. The force of her emotion frightened him. But the more agitated she became, the more she needed him – not Rudrani, just him. His presence was a palliative of some kind. For what, he couldn’t say.

The night of her birthday party, she was frantic. She wanted a showdown. Skanda stayed away, spending his time with Chamunda’s son – Bhaiya – whose troubles were so much more considerable than his own that it was a comfort just to be around him.

He was a little older than Skanda; at that age when the physical marks of being a man exceed the psychological; and it was this deficit between the child inside and the man outside that his mother’s boyfriend, Ismail, had exploited all summer. The physical changes in Bhaiya – and Ismail watched them with the grim displeasure of a man seeing a puppy he has mistreated grow into a large dog – aroused an animal hatred in him. He was a small man himself, but fierce and abusive, and he seemed to take the changes in Bhaiya’s physicality, the hardening of the limbs, the thickening of the voice, the knotty appearance of a lump in his throat and the wispy growth of facial hair, as a personal affront. He did everything in his power to humiliate him. ‘Oh, here comes the royal oaf,’ he would say every time Bhaiya entered the room. Or ‘Oye, come here, Raja of Dufferpur.’ It was as if he meant to discredit the appearance of manhood in him: to impress upon him that his becoming a man meant nothing.

The two boys spent a good portion of the evening outside, where there was a bar and a fire. It was a soft July night; at times clear, the disc of the moon brilliant overhead; at times, overcast and wet. A faint drizzle drowned out the noise of chat and laughter that came from the cottage. A parade of headlights, confusing the boundary between light and darkness, interior and exterior, made uneven and clumsy progress up the road leading to CM1. Sometimes their beams flashed wildly into places where there was nothing but earth and exposed roots, rock and grass, the piercing gaze, green, empty, intent, of some small animal.

Inside, a tired and ugly energy had come over the party. The children, all in their nightclothes, threaded their way through the party, refusing to go to bed. They were full of a frenzied wish to please and to surprise. But their jokes had a grating quality, and the less they amused, the more they repeated them, the louder they laughed. In one corner, Iqbal, who now many moments ago had made Nixu Mohapatra laugh briefly by saying, ‘May I have a cigarette please,’ had, on the partial success of that one joke, repeated it at least ten times in new iterations: ‘May I have a cigarette please: may I have a whisky soda please: may I have a Bloody Mary please: may I have a vodka and bitters please . . .’ On and on, with that indefatigable capacity children have for making lists, till finally, Nixu Mohapatra, who was trying to discover from Chamunda why Ismail and Tariq Mattoo were having so heated a conversation, snapped at him, ‘Fuck off, you freak.’ Iqbal wilted, then scurried off. ‘Nixu, you don’t talk to a child like that!’ Chamunda protested. ‘Monster,’ Nixu said, and looked away. ‘Now, tell me: why are they so het up?’