Three Continents (26 page)

But at home, in the flat she shared with the Rawul and Crishi, she was as soft and opulent as when I had first known her; but what I hadn't realized was that Renée was terribly untidy, squalid even. When she took off her clothes, she simply dropped them wherever she happened to be. She stepped out of her luxuriant bath without pulling the plug to let the water out. When she ate, she liked to pick up bones and gnaw them, and wipe her hands on whatever was nearest. Her underclothes, more soiled than one would have thought possible for someone so outwardly elegant, appeared mysteriously in the living rooms as well as her bedroom; so did flakes of pressed powder and the combings of her rich hair. She never noticed; nor did the Rawul and Crishi—they didn't care what happened with their own discarded clothes, or the wet towels they left on the bathroom floor. When the followers came to clean up, they had to work hard for many hours, but a day or two later everything was as before. The three of them were too grand to notice; or maybe they even felt comfortable—they liked lying around on their unmade beds, surrounded by crumpled newspapers, opened letters and telegrams, and the remains of some meal that had been brought to them on a tray.

The Bari Rani hated this aspect of our lives. “It just shows what sort of a background she comes from,” she said with that downward turn of the mouth that accompanied most of her references to Renée. I thought what it showed was that she had always had servants to look after her, but the Bari Rani said “No—look at my house, and
I
've always had servants, not she. You come from a nice family, Harriet—how
can you bear to live like that with them? The number of times I've asked him that,” she went on, referring to the Rawul. “‘How can you bear it?' I ask him. Of course he pretends he doesn't know what I'm talking about—what else can he do, poor man.” She often said she pitied the Rawul, and I think in a way she did. She firmly believed that Renée had put some spell on him—given him some potion or other—she really believed it.

Bari Rani prided herself on being a modern, cosmopolitan person. She was the daughter of a rich Bombay industrialist and had gone to boarding school in England, with a year at a finishing school in Switzerland. It was there she had met the Rawul, who had come on a skiing holiday. Her family didn't care for the match—Indian royalty was pretty much played out by that time, and the Rawul wasn't very big royalty either, not compared with states like Hyderabad or Jaipur; but in the end her father had given his consent—“Daddy would do anything for me”—and they had had a big wedding in Bombay, and after that had divided their time between Bombay and London. When the Rawul had to go to his state of Dhoka, he usually went without her, because “It is such a backward place, Harriet, no civilized person can stand it.”

She told me that it was in Dhoka that he had met Renée. She had come for his collection of paintings, which had been in his family for centuries, although no one, including himself, had ever cared about it. It was rediscovered, and was brought up from the storerooms where it had lain moldering for all those centuries, and Renée arranged to have it taken out of India. She had had a lot of experience getting art objects illegally out of the country—in her own luggage or in that of unsuspecting friends, or in the diplomatic bags of various embassies. “I don't want to say anything bad about her,” the Bari Rani said, “but sometimes I think she is just a crook.” She also thought that Renée had cheated the Rawul and had made far more than her percentage out of the sale of his paintings. “What would he know about it?” Bari Rani said. “He would be a child in the hands of a person like her”; not to speak of the potion or whatever it was she had administered to him—“It's a
fact
, Harriet”—to bind him to her will.

Because of my own situation, I understood something of
Bari Rani's attitude to her marriage. I didn't like Crishi living downstairs with Renée any more than Bari Rani liked the Rawul doing so, but I was willing to put up with it just as long as I was near and kept seeing him. That was what I waited for and was there for. At this stage, Bari Rani didn't care about the movement any more than I did, but we were bound to it by our feelings as firmly as everyone else was by their beliefs. And the movement was gathering force day by day. The Rawul's lectures in various halls were becoming more popular and plans were made for speaking engagements in other parts of the country, and for weekend courses. The continuous stream of propaganda issuing from the office and the Earl's Court house was beginning to have an effect; and around this time we took what the Rawul said was a giant step forward when Anna's article appeared in the color magazine of a Sunday paper.

It was just as well that Crishi had told me about being in jail, or I would have had to learn about it from Anna's article. He had told me that it was for political reasons, but that was not what he had told her—maybe because he knew she would put in some research and discover his record on her own; whereas I wanted to believe everything he said. There were other discrepancies in the versions he had given us—for instance, he had told me that his mother was Italian and his father Assamese, but to her he had told it the other way around. When I took it up with him, he didn't seem concerned. “Did I tell you that?” he asked. He was so pleased with the article—they all were—that it didn't matter to him what it said. It was the first major media exposure the movement had had, and it put him in a very good mood. When I wouldn't let up about the discrepancies, he said “What's it matter? As long as people read about us.” “Yes but what's true?” “It's all true.” He made innocent eyes at me: “Surely you don't think I'd tell lies?” He added “I used to, but not after getting married to a good woman who taught me right.”

I was beginning to agree with him that facts didn't matter in his case. He had such a many-sided personality, and it was in his nature to show different facets of himself to different people. He had given Anna a very romantic version of his first meeting with the Rawul. When he had come out of jail in New Delhi, after his wrongful confinement there, his plan
was to get to Tehran, where he had friends to help him reestablish himself in business. Since he had no money, his only means of getting there was to hitch rides on trucks and as a ticketless traveler on the railways. One of these free rides had left him somewhat off course in the Rawul's state of Dhoka, and here he prepared to spend the night in a tomb he found on a hill. Anna said that everything in Dhoka was on a hill. It was a very beautiful tomb, or mausoleum, a small octagonal pillared structure open to the winds, which a fourteenth-century ancestor of the Rawul's had built for a Persian poet. Anna even gave the story of how the poet had been on a pilgrimage to Delhi, where the saint Nizamuddin held court; passing through the Rawul's kingdom, he had accepted a slice of watermelon, after which he developed a severe case of dysentery and was dead within twenty-four hours. Crishi didn't know anything about the poet, but he welcomed his tomb and, exhausted from his travels, fell asleep in it immediately. Meanwhile the Rawul was also sleeping—in his palace, on another hill. He was sleeping and dreaming. Here Anna's tone became a bit ironic—she seemed to say, Believe it or not, but anyhow it makes a good story. The Rawul's dream was that a beautiful boy had come to Dhoka and was at that moment lying asleep in the poet's tomb. This boy had been the Rawul's son in several previous incarnations, but not in the present one, where only daughters were born to him. At dawn, before anyone was up, the Rawul made his way through his palace, down the hill, across the town, up another hill, till he came to the tomb; and there he found the beautiful boy.

When the Bari Rani read this account, she was outraged and arrived at our house to brandish the magazine at the Rawul. He didn't know how to defend himself; he too had been puzzled by the publication of the story, for when Anna had questioned him about it, he had smilingly denied it and said it was just one of Crishi's jokes. All the same, she had printed it. “I didn't know you were so disappointed in our girls that you had to go and find a boy in the streets,” said the Bari Rani; and the Rawul muttered “It was a misunderstanding.” He looked for help to Crishi, who didn't give him any—he was pleased with himself and with the story. Renée was also pleased, but she made some attempt to rescue the
Rawul: “You know what these sort of people are; writers and people; they'll make up anything.”

“Oh she made it up? Out of the air?” Bari Rani said. “Someone must have given her some information—because they do have that tomb, on one of those hills—I remember the police raided it and arrested two clerks who had set up a still for illicit liquor. That's the only thing I ever heard about happening in there. And your photograph was terrible,” she said to the Rawul. “Those two came out all right, but you look years older.”

“No—really?” said the Rawul and took up the magazine. Copies were strewn around the room—hundreds had been ordered. “I don't think so,” he said, having studied his photograph and then himself in the mirror over the marble mantel.

“Well I do,” said the Bari Rani. “People will say What's happened to your husband, haven't you been looking after him properly? You look very fat too in that picture, but that's because you
are
getting very fat—you'd better watch out and not eat so many sweet things.”

“I don't,” protested the Rawul. “Only when you and the girls bring all those pastries.”

“I thought you like them, that's why we bring them. . . . Yes, and what about my girls? What are they going to tell their friends when they ask about all this nonsense? We'll be a laughingstock from here to Bombay for the rest of our lives. Dreams and beautiful boys asleep, who's ever heard such rubbish and lies.”

“But it's what the common reader wants,” Crishi said. “Ask Harriet—you liked it, didn't you? There, see, Harriet liked it and she's a very common reader. You have to give them these sort of stories.”

“Every movement has to have legends,” Renée said. “Look at Christ—look at Mohammed—those are very colorful stories and people have loved them for centuries.”

“My goodness!” cried the Bari Rani to her husband. “Christ and Mohammed! I thought you were supposed to be this ultramodern person who didn't believe in religion.”

The Rawul shut his eyes and said: “If you ever listened to anyone but yourself you would have heard me say repeatedly that the movement is a religion for a world which has outgrown
religion. I'm a rationalist, through and through; a modern man; a leader for modern men, and women of course.”

“You don't have to give us any speeches,” said the Bari Rani, “we've all heard you, including Harriet, I'm sure, a thousand times—though what she makes of it, poor child, I can't think.
Any
of it,” she said—I suppose meaning our complicated family as well as our world movement.

Unlike the rest of us, who pored over Anna's article for days, Michael only glanced at it once and threw it aside. I don't think he bothered to read what she wrote about him and me, how we were these rich uptight American kids. He dismissed everything as gossip. The story of the Rawul's dream didn't disturb him any more than the rest of it; it was all on the same level for him. And he was equally lofty or indifferent toward our unusual family situation. He never commented on the fact that he and I lived upstairs and Crishi with the others downstairs—maybe he considered it quite natural, or maybe it was too trivial for him to think about. I had heard Michael called subhuman and superhuman—strange, spaced-out, and I knew that most people, including our own parents, were uneasy with him. No one understood him, and neither did I, though that never made any difference to my feelings for him. I couldn't understand the way he kept on making these trips to Holland or Switzerland, usually with just a briefcase that Crishi gave him to carry. He accepted that his journeys were necessary for the work of the movement, so he went without question. He probably didn't even bother to ask what was in the briefcase.

He and Crishi were like brothers—well, they were brothers! Crishi had involved Michael in every aspect of the work, including what they called the military exercises. These took place in the Earl's Court house and were carried on in such secrecy that for a long time I didn't know about them. The way I found out was when Michael sprained his wrist and came home with it in a sling. At first he wouldn't tell me what had happened. That didn't surprise me, for whenever he had hurt himself, even when we were very little, he wouldn't let on. It was part of never allowing anyone to see him cry, never feeling in any way sorry for himself, or giving anyone else a chance to. He hated that worse than anything; he was
so proud. But he couldn't tell a lie, and when I persisted in asking him about his wrist, he told me he had sprained it during the military exercises. He wasn't aware that I hadn't known about them. “Yes of course we have them,” he answered me impatiently; “every day.” “Why didn't anyone tell me?” Michael was surprised: “I thought you knew.” It never struck him to keep anything secret from me, or that anyone else would want to. He told me quite openly, though not in any detail—Michael wouldn't waste time on detail—that all the followers took part in these exercises, which consisted of classes in various martial arts and learning how to handle weapons. “What weapons?” I asked. “Oh we have some,” he said vaguely; “naturally, anyone who is serious about their principles has to know how to defend them. I thought you knew all that, H.” “No I didn't.” I tried to extract more information, but the most I could get out of him was how there weren't enough weapons to go around, so they had to take turns learning to handle them. They were taught by one of the followers who had been in some army in South America, and Michael himself was in charge of the cache of rifles, which was kept locked in a closet under the stairs. Before he took them out, the doors and windows of the house were shut and blinds drawn against the neighbors. That was all Michael would tell me—it wasn't that he didn't want me to know but that he was tired of talking, which happened quickly with him.