The Way Things Were

To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo; suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country: substituting Sanscrit for Greek, the
Brahmans,
for the priests of
Jupiter
, and
V
ā
lmic
,
Vy
ā
sa
,
C
ā
l
ī
d
ā
sa
, for Homer, Plato, Pindar.

William Jones

The god of love invented the strangest arrow in the world, one that can kill you if it strikes – and kill you if it doesn’t.

A Prakrit verse from the
Ś
ṛ
ṅ
g
ā
raprak
ā
ś
a of Bhoja

I

The Emergency (1975)

II

The Riot (1984)

III

Gulmarg (1984–9)

IV

The Mosque (1992)

ANTA

Skanda is deep into his translation of
The Birth of Kumara
when his mother calls to say his father is on his deathbed.

Uma has many flaws, but falsity is not one of them. She does not even pretend to be sad. In that special way of hers, part convent school, part cafe society, she says, as if Toby were dead already, ‘Well, darling, it was bound to happen one day. I hope you’re not too sad. You must be. He is your father after all. Skandu? Jaani? Say something. Are you in shock?’

‘A little, Ma. It’s only 6 a.m. . . . How do you know?’

‘Sylvia called me.’

‘Sylvia?’ he asks, wondering why his stepmother would have called his mother before him or his sister.

‘Yes. One has to be gracious in times like these. And she’s very good in these respects. Very correct. “
I vaunted to geev the cheeldren som tayme, Uma
.” Must have been such a relief after me.’

And here she gives the first of many little laughs.

‘Have you spoken to Rudrani?’ he says, thinking of his sister in Connecticut.

‘She won’t go. She’s on one of her trips. India doesn’t exist for her. She’s Mrs Glowitz and that’s the end of it. That girl, I tell you, she will wake up one day unable to remember the life she escaped to find herself in the one she’s in now. So unlike me! I always took things head on, even when I was just an air hostess without a clue about the world.’

His mother does not mention that time in her life very often. It makes him wonder what the prospect of his father’s death is making her feel.

‘Should I go?’

‘Of course, you must. To Geneva first, and then India—’

‘Ma!’

‘I just want you to be prepared. He’ll have to be taken to Kalasuryaketu. And I’m certainly not . . . Women, besides, have no role in these things.’

‘What condition is Baba in?’

‘Sylvia says hardly conscious, unable to recognize anyone. But it may just be, now that he’s passing on,’ – and, here, she gives her little laugh – ‘that he’s in no mood to recognize her.’

‘Will you come to Geneva?’

‘No, not to Geneva. It’s no place for me. And your father . . . Who knows! Might be a nasty shock after all these years, might hasten him on his way! I’ll see you in Delhi, should that be the way things go.’

‘But how do you know he wants to be taken back?’

‘He does want it.’

‘Really, Ma? He left for good in 1992. Never went back. Why take him now?’

‘Apparently he gave Sylvia some indication before he . . . well, before he couldn’t.’

‘That he wanted to be taken to Kalasuryaketu?’ Skanda says cautiously.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you come?’

‘I won’t, darling. It’s been too long. It feels like a buried life. But you must go. There’ll be a lot to handle, mind you,’ she says, changing the subject. ‘Indian customs. The drive down there. The cremation. Bureaucrats, collectors, local bigwigs. I’ll make sure someone from Mani’s office is there . . . ’

‘Ma.’

Mani is Maniraja, Skanda’s stepfather of many years. They try usually to avoid him in conversation.

‘Oh, come on. What does it matter? Just to get you through.’

He doesn’t say anything.

‘And at the other end, there’ll be plenty of people to help. Tripathi and gang. The people there have great regard for Toby. Listen: get your act together; go to Geneva. You must, it’s your duty . . . ’

‘I will.’

Once he is resolved to leave, he leaves Manhattan quickly, in the modern way: hurried calls to friends to say goodbye, a chat with Rudrani, emails to professors. The parting glimpse of a long glittering city, islanded and on the verge of summer, supremely indifferent to his departure.

The night his father dies, a late spring storm plays mutely in the windows of the Geneva clinic. Electric spiders appear in the darkened glass, which, like a doubly exposed photograph or a matting effect in film, already bears the motionless reflection of foam ceilings and tubelight. He and Sylvia keep vigil. His father, tubed-up and hardly breathing, eyes dim, is visible past the door’s long pane of wire mesh glass. The fear, even more than of death, is of an extended period of unconsciousness, the pacemaker heart continuing to beat even as the body fails. Who will bear responsibility? Sylvia, nurse to the long illness, already looks in need of release.

But at 2 a.m., just as he’s stepped out for a cigarette, and is trying to protect its papery tube from the rain, he receives a text from Sylvia. His father’s blood pressure has crashed. 80–40. By 4 a.m. it’s over.

A kebab and a beer at dawn. The wet tarmac of the street brightens with the first light, a petrol rainbow eddies and opens out gently in a puddle.

Inside – eager to get the dead weight off their hands – the hospital management assail him with forms, and the names of funeral homes. Sylvia’s soft but insistent crying mingles with the clipped but urgent tone of a Swiss German nurse. By morning, with the broadening of day in the city outside, a set of interlocking agencies and institutions have taken over. It may seem daunting to move a body from Geneva to Delhi, but it has been done before, a process need only be initiated. Sylvia won’t come; she took him away from India alive three decades before, she does not want to take him back dead. This is where her responsibility ends.

Night, his father in tow. The embers of unvisited cities burn below him while his ears ring with the screams of the deportee. She boarded in Brussels, escorted by two men in grey uniforms. She was short and plump and dark, with lifeless shoulder-length hair. And she was sick with hysteria. ‘India,’ she yelled, the ‘d’ hard and bludgeoning. ‘No want to go to India. Hate India. My life in India is bitch. Hate India. No want to go to India.’ Again and again, her screaming, wild and full of ill omen, rang through the nervous silence of the plane. When at last Skanda stopped one of the stewards, he said, ‘It’s only for now, sir. It’ll stop as soon as we’re in the air. You see, sir, the only way she can get off is if the captain refuses to fly her.’

When they are cruising – and the plane is quiet again – he asks the men in grey, her escorts, what her life in Belgium had been. They explain, with her in earshot, that most of it was spent in a detention centre outside Brussels. So: no boyfriend? No job? No nice little apartment? No, they say, and smile. She listens, then with a sidelong glance, she says, in Hindi, ‘But it was better than India. They gave me a cappuccino every morning. I felt free.’

In the morning, the light of India presses red against the shuttered ovals. He lifts it a crack and a fierce blaze sweeps searchingly over the cabin walls. Gr
ī
ṣ
ma, Skanda says almost aloud, as they descend. From
gras
: to swallow, to devour, to consume. Summer, in a word. Indian summer, real Indian summer. Not some mere extension of good weather, but a season of glare and hot winds, of bleached land, its beige-brown parcels visible from the air: a season of white skies, of wheeling kites; a season of death.

A game of cognates – a game his father had taught him – begins on the plane with the flight map. Distance to destination. Destination:
gantavya
. The place to be gone to. Gerundive of
gam
, an old Indo-European thread which takes little leaps of meaning as it travels west: turning go to come. In Gothic,
qvam
; in English,
come
; in Latin
venio
for
gvemio
. He makes an effort to stop. Theo Mackinson, his professor at Columbia, mocks him as a collector of cognates. But it is oddly comforting; it gives an illusion of continuity, helps thread past and present together.

And there is a lot to thread together, a lot that is erased with this new arrival. The airport of his childhood is gone. In its place, a many-armed sprawl of green glass and moving walkways. Gone, too, are the red-painted buckets labelled ‘Fire’ whose sand was hard and paan-stained, littered with cigarette butts; gone, the heavily tinted windows, from whose corners the peeling laminate left long sticky triangles of undarkened glass. Instead, there are springy carpets in a red and beige Kandinsky-esque pattern, and swift-moving carts, driven by men in attractive uniforms.

He spends six hours at Indian customs, though here the men his mother has arranged from Maniraja’s office take charge. And they, in a deep sense, deeper than he will ever know, speak the same language as Mr Sitamani, the customs officer, a caste-marked Tamilian, who wetly stamps his documents red. His office, with its red ink pad and its yellow desk sponge, still suggests the old country. The game resumes: ma
ṇ
i, like Maniraja – cognate with the Latin
monile
, necklace; the English mane – is jewel.

Once his late father is loaded in – reappeared magically now like a piece of lost luggage, his air-conditioned coffin bearing a wide range of stamps – they leave the wastes of Delhi in convoy, he in one car, his father in another. A pale iodine sky darkens and brightens in cycle after futile cycle. Occasionally there is a gulmohar in bloom, the tendrils of its flowers a scorched red, dark as sunspots. It’s years since he has felt the breath of summer against his skin. The wet cotton of his shirt scorches his back. And he’s happy for it all, happy for its intensity; he feels a swell of relief.

Tea and snacks in Dholpur. By evening, the landscape has changed. The old eggshell hills, bare and worn down to their core, are covered in a burnt yellow grass; in places they appear charred, as though someone has extinguished a giant cigarette on their furrowed faces. This is the landscape he has always associated with the approach of the Tamas
ā
. The river. He can see it now in his mind’s eye: broad and green, the surrounding land white. And little Kalasuryaketu on its banks. The landscape brings on a feeling of anticipation, as certain Mediterranean landscapes bring on an anticipation for the sea.

His phone vibrates. An email from his mother:

He BBMs her back: ‘His Highness?’

‘To many, he was,’ she replies.

‘And no “spontaneous farewell” so far.’

‘Don’t worry; there will be.
’