Authors: Aatish Taseer
The mention of marriage alarmed me; I felt a joke had been taken too far. At the same time I could see how a girl like this, rich, strong-willed and clearly in love with him, could be a great asset to Aakash. Though he enjoyed stressing her ‘healthiness’, deriving from it a kind of boisterous fun that Shakti also shared in, Aakash seemed to see a kind of virtue in her form. It was as if some notion of strong traditional values – of a woman who supports her man, and there were songs about this kind of thing in India – had become tied up with her substantial size. By choosing her, he expressed his contempt for the lithe modern girls he trained at Junglee. And I was not at all certain whether her weight was really so off-putting to him. His mother was fat; the begum had been fat. Certainly behind Shakti’s laughter there had been a note of understanding, as if Shakti was congratulating him on making so robust a choice. In fact, the only person who was deeply uneasy was me. And Aakash, for whatever reason, whether pre-empting me or aware of my discomfort and hurt by it, or simply taking a kind of pleasure in offending my soft tastes, did all he could, after months of secrecy, to include me in his relationship with Megha.
Now smoking at will, sipping his beer, his turban still on, he read into my silence. As was so often the case with him, he had not introduced me to Megha without a purpose. He said, ‘Our love match is not going to be easily accepted by this world. I’ll need my friends. If things become difficult, you’ll help me, no?’
‘Me? How can I help you?’
‘You can. You know people. Your mother’s a journalist. The owner of TVDelhi just hangs out in your girlfriend’s house.’
‘The owner of TVDelhi, who do you mean?’
‘You know that woman who was there that day at Sanyogita’s when Lul was reading his homo story.’ At this Megha’s wet lips opened and her laughter rang out. I looked at Aakash in puzzlement. A private moment passed between them. Her eyes were full of some unexplained significance, which Aakash dismissed with a firm look. ‘The woman,’ he continued, ‘with the red bindi and the grey hair, and those huge silver bangles, owns TVDelhi.’
‘I had no idea,’ I said, genuinely surprised.
‘Please, man. You have to do this for me. In this country, we can’t trust the police, we can’t trust NGO workers, we can’t trust government people, but we can trust the press. You have to speak to this woman about our situation. Just so we have help, if we need it.’
I couldn’t understand his urgency. ‘For what?’
‘For nothing yet,’ he said, draining his glass and sitting forward. ‘But maybe later.’ Removing his turban, his messy look pasted to his head, he added, ‘Should things get ugly.’
14
The first pale sky of the winter was reflected in the tanks of dark water outside the National Museum. Pedal boats glided over its glassy surface, dark small-leaved jamun trees dotted the esplanade and bright ice-cream trucks crowded the edge of the grass. In the distance, a runway-sized road led up to the President’s Palace, and Parliament, a low, punctured cylinder, brooded on the side. Nearer to the domed, sandstone museum, a black rubber hosepipe lay in the grass, choking out a wide puddle of smelly water.
A writer had come to town. My mother was a friend of his wife and was hosting a dinner in their honour. He was a writer I had come to admire. I had first met him in London when I was eighteen and on my way to college in America. He had advised me not to go: ‘Indians go to these places and all they ever learn is the babble.’ At the time the remark offended me, not because of what was said but because of his tone: cold, dismissive, uncaring that he had upset my plans. I went anyway.
The next time we met was in Delhi and I was in my last year of college. I was writing a thesis at the time on how the Mahatma, through a programme of celibacy and dietetics, had sought to overcome the body. In doing so, he negated the source of interests in Western society, interests such as property and self-preservation, making it possible for him to fight the British with a coin different from theirs. For all their threats to his body, they would never have any purchase over his soul. The writer listened for a while, sipping a martini he had been complaining about earlier, then said, ‘But there’s a great flaw in your theory. Because the British could have killed him; they could have destroyed his body. Then there would have been nothing to house his soul. What kind of victory is that?’ The adviser in college who had fed me the idea for the thesis hadn’t thought of that. When I went back to him with it, he confessed that the true rewards of the Mahatma’s programme were not temporal but metaphysical. I did the thesis, but lost interest. I read the writer’s books instead, all of them, carefully. He was the first writer I had read in this way. I felt a great feeling of release reading the books. He could take big ideas such as colonialism, defeat, occupation and show their effects in small human ways like lying and boasting, in hidden anger and resentments. I felt the writer release me from a sense of entitlement that I had about the West, a feeling that since they colonized us they owed us education, technology, duty-free goods. He released me by exposing the attitude as not post-colonial in any real way, but still very colonial; one that some in the West might happily endorse. It was an attitude that would forever leave us robbed of responsibility and the privilege of blaming oneself for one’s failures.
My mother was hosting a dinner for the writer, but first he wanted to go to the National Museum to see the bronzes; he asked that I come along. I’d never been to the National Museum, though I’d been to many museums in many countries; I had never seen any bronzes. I was waiting in the porch of the museum when the writer’s Ambassador drove in. His wife was with him, a handsome Punjabi woman with green eyes.
‘Leave it, leave it in the car,’ she said of the writer’s green felt hat. She thought it would make him look English. It would mean us all paying the foreigners’ entry fee, which was thirty times as much as the regular fee. I had already anticipated this and had sent Uttam in to buy three tickets in advance. The security was tight, both because of the blasts and because there was an exhibition in the museum of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels. Mobile phones had to be left outside, handbags were searched, a fuss was made over the writer’s brown leather shooting stick. Then the security guard in his olive-green uniform wanted to know why we had bought the Indian ticket.
‘Because we’re Indians,’ I answered in Hindi.
‘Show me your passport or ration card,’ he said.
We weren’t carrying any identification, but neither were a group of young men in polyester shirts and baggy trousers.
‘Why aren’t you asking them for identification?’ I said.
‘Because they look like Indians,’ the security guard replied.
‘And why don’t we look like Indians?’ the writer’s wife intervened.
The man was stumped; it was just a feeling, a class feeling.
‘We’re speaking Hindi, aren’t we?’ the writer’s wife pressed him. ‘Would we be speaking Hindi if we weren’t Indians?’
The man smiled. ‘Some foreigners have learned as well,’ he said, shaking his head from side to side. ‘But never mind, carry on.’
The writer had watched the whole scene. His eyes were dim and old, but intent somehow. They were set in a faintly Asian cast. They could make events occurring right in front of them seem far away. The writer had recently had back trouble and needed help up the stairs. He took my hand in his small, firm hand, and once he’d got going, he moved fast. When we went in, inhaling the musty smells that surround any organization linked to the government of India, he wanted to rest for a few minutes. We sat down in the lobby in front of an eleventh-century stone statue of a man and a woman; the woman was leaning into the man and gentle rolls of fat were visible on the sides of her waist. The writer caught his breath, then looked up and said, ‘Why don’t you sit down? You’ll be able to consider it better that way.’
His wife, who was dressed in a green, black and yellow salwar kameez, continued to stand. I sat down; a few awkward moments of silence passed between us as I tried entering the world of the statue.
The writer started us off. He said that the statue was from Khajuraho and that he had a special feeling for the Chandela dynasty as he was named after one of its kings. ‘The son in fact,’ the writer said, ‘of the man who was king when the invaders came. He had to move away. And that saved the Khajuraho temples. The bush grew over them. I fear that now they’re admired for their erotic content, which is foolish.’
I looked harder at them, but I noticed only outside things: the spotlight and its loose wires; the roughly made pedestal on which they stood. They seemed closed to me; I still had nothing to say. I felt as I had with Aakash in the temple.
‘What is nice,’ the writer said, ‘is the absolute confidence in the faces. These people are…’
‘Complete,’ his wife finished for him.
‘Yes, yes.’ Then rising, he said, ‘We won’t look at everything or we’ll get tired; only at the fine things.’
We walked into the museum’s main rooms past long pieces of carved stone.
‘Lintels,’ the writer said, pointing with his shooting stick. ‘We didn’t have the arch; we had lintels.’
We entered a circular passage with a grubby marble floor. On one side, past glass walls, was an open courtyard with a stone chariot in the middle. On our right was a red-painted sign for the bronzes. I was wondering when the building that housed the collection had been built and asked the writer about it.
He misunderstood my question or chose to answer it differently. ‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,’ he said, as we entered a room with chalky-green walls. ‘These bronzes used to be in the viceroy’s house. They were collected by the Archaeological Survey of India. A British institution. It is safe to say that not a single Indian prince made a collection like the one we see displayed here, though he easily could have. The Maharaja of Patiala went to England, where he had his portrait painted, that was the thing to do, and he picked up a few nudes and brought them back. They gloried in their ignorance,’ the writer said, ‘gloried in their ignorance.’
The room we entered was in spotlight and shadow. And though in places a crucial light was fused, a pink bucket left in a corner, the glasses of the display cases fingerprinted and dusty, there was something entrancing about the green, dimly lit room with the bronzes and the shadows they cast.
The writer, as if wishing to give me the best of his energies, wanted to see the Natraj first. On our way to it, he stopped in front of an unfinished Chola Natraj. He looked for Shiva’s drum, but it wasn’t there. Next to the bronze was a black and white picture of an artisan working on the floor, illustrating how the object was made. The writer, as if anticipating a buried judgement in me, said, ‘That man seeming to hammer out the image would have had all kinds of fine ideas going through his smooth head.’
Then following my eyes drift to the Natraj, he considered Shiva’s dance of creation and destruction. He said it was very close to him; he described it as having entered his soul, this idea of the nearness of creation and decay. ‘How did that idea, the twin forces of creation and decay,’ he asked, as we approached the bronze Natraj, with its floating hair, and one leg filled with the tension of both rising and swinging, ‘become enshrined in human form?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘I don’t think anyone knows. I think the thing just appeared like Venus rolling in from the sea in Cyprus in rock form. It was created wholly by the imagination of men.’
The Natraj had been turned into a national icon in India, appearing in airports and on HB pencils; the writer knew this.
‘The image,’ he said, ‘is much debased. It’s used everywhere, like some of the Leonardo da Vinci drawings.’ Then looking at the little man, gasping for his life, on whom the dancing Shiva stood, the writer said, ‘I will interpret it in my own way. He is standing on the monster of ignorance.’ That monster the writer saw as representing ‘the snare of life’. He didn’t mean appetite, but irrationality, darkness and cruelty especially; the possibility men always have of being less than men.
Standing before this most Indian of Indian images, the writer could not have been oblivious to its context. He was a man who always knew where he was. He seemed to stand there considering the dark history that had landed the bronze image before him in a glass case, unseen, unthought of, in the country from where it came. He began to draw a historical thread. But even before he began, I had been thinking of Aakash. I don’t know why; perhaps only because of his feeling for the gods, and my removal. The writer spoke directly to my thoughts.
‘Many people don’t know,’ he said, ‘that in the nineteenth century there was an anti-Brahmin movement and that the Brahmins were driven out of town. That was when there was a looting of their works of art and devotion. The people who were doing the looting didn’t think what they would replace these images with. It was then that they began to appear in the salerooms of Europe and America.’
A nineteenth-century anti-Brahmin movement! Had that been the history behind the magical story of Aakash’s ancestor? Had his run-in with the village, and his subsequent disappearance, ‘the driving out of town’, been part of a larger story, part of an anti-Brahmin movement that the writer, living thousands of miles away, could have read about? Was the statue I had seen of Aakash’s ancestor, with his saffron robes and three streaks of turmeric across the forehead, a gesture of historical remembrance? It was amazing to consider.
The Natraj had been rubbed to shine in some places. The writer liked that. ‘It’s to me a nice idea, rubbing the parts they thought beautiful. No polish…’ he began.
‘Is as good as the human hand,’ his wife finished for him.
We moved on from the Natraj and the writer’s mood lightened. His earlier solemnity lifted, he spoke more generally about the figures. ‘Someone asked me,’ he said, ‘why the figure had four hands. “It’s not a human figure,” I told him. “It’s a human figure representing something. The arms are there to represent what is being honoured.” ’ But when we came to a Shiva in a relaxed human posture with Parvati by his side, the writer chuckled. ‘Here, when the figure has a consort and comes down from its pedestal, things become a little more complicated.’
In another glass case, there were Vijaynagar bronzes. The figures were squatter, thicker of limb. ‘We were talking of security earlier,’ the writer began, and speaking of the Muslim invaders and Vijaynagar respectively, said, ‘They destroyed it and destroyed it completely. This destruction is made beautiful by the Left. You know, by the drawing-room intellectuals, the ladies with their fashionable grey hair and ethnic saris, ambassadors of the Caliph to the Republic of Letters. They say that it was destroyed by the Indians themselves. They are so completely degraded, they can’t deal with their own defeat, but we mustn’t let that spoil the beauty of what we’re seeing.’
The writer began to get tired. We sat down, his wife and I on a bench, him on his shooting stick, with its Air India tag still hanging from it. He began advising me on books I might read about the bronzes. They were all by German and British writers. ‘It’s cause for shame,’ he said, ‘that Indians don’t write these books themselves.
‘You see, the English-speaking people of India don’t come here. They think this is local stuff. They want to go to America and have their self-portrait painted and buy nudes, like the Maharaja of Patiala. And then they complain that the British looted them. These were in the viceroy’s house. It was Nehru’s idea to bring them here; it was a good idea, but no one wants to come.’ He raised his hands, open-palmed, in despair.
The mood excited a story of Coomaraswamy, the Sri Lankan art critic. ‘His dates are 1877–1947. He was half Sinhalese and rich,’ the writer said. ‘It was open to him to start up life as a Mayfair gentleman or in the country, but he decided to devote himself to Indian art. In 1917, when Coomaraswamy was forty,’ the writer added, calculating fast, ‘he heard that the Hindu University was being built in Benares. He offered them his, by then, vast collection of Indian art, which he was ready to give them free on the condition they started a chair of Indian art and made him the professor.’ The writer paused.
‘What did they say?’ I asked.
‘They told him to go away. They told him to go away. They told him to take his art collection and go away,’ the writer said, laughing, his eyes widening. His repetition made simple and ordinary something shocking, in turn deepening its effect. His laughter rang out as if no calamity was great enough to smother its rumble.
‘Where is it now?’ I asked.
‘It’s in Boston.’ He chortled. ‘It’s in Boston.’