The Way Things Were (11 page)

They made a journey south over several days, stopping at Dak bungalows on the way, skirmishing with the approaching rains. Toby and Vijaipal, perhaps because Uma was seeing with fresh eyes what they had seen before, made a great fuss over her.

At first it had seemed like an odd grouping, the two lovers and Vijaipal. But, in fact, it worked very well. In the day they would go out separately – Uma and Toby together, Vijaipal alone. They had an arrangement to meet at a given time at the giant statue of the Nandi if they were interested in having lunch together. Otherwise, they would spend the day apart and meet for drinks in the evening, at the cottages where they were staying. A place in the paddy fields owned by a friend of Toby’s, where the coffee was very good and strong, and where a bottle of whisky was kept for them in a locked cupboard. After a day on their own, some of it spent swimming in the Tungabhadra, some climbing to a high summit with views of the surrounding land, some spent sleeping and making love in the shadows of giant rocks, Vijaipal’s company in the evening was a welcome thing.

His learning, when it came to Indian things, was not as extensive as Toby’s. But he was, in a sense, the shrewder observer, less romantic, less invested in pleading the cause of one culture over another. And the men would frequently argue. Over whether India had a history-writing tradition or not; or whether there was anything resembling the realism of Virgil’s
Georgics
in Sanskrit literature; any writing, that could be compared, in its specificity, to Varro’s description of his Aviary. Uma listened with interest, but could not make out the contours of their conversation. She did feel though that beneath everything they said, so dispassionate and cerebral, there was a great underlying tension.

One morning Toby felt unwell, and said he would not go out. Uma thought she would stay in with him, but Vijaipal offered to take her, and Toby insisted she go. ‘His view is not mine,’ he said to her quietly, ‘but he’s thought very hard about these things. And you should go out with him. It’ll be a real learning.’

Soon after, she sat pillion on Vijaipal’s Enfield, as they made their way along dirt roads, past the glassy fields, to the main site. It felt strange, so much was she full of Toby, to be so near another man. She tried holding on with her knees alone – this felt less intimate – but she didn’t trust herself and had eventually to rest her hands on his waist; with the rush of air, his smell – something oil-based and discreet – would occasionally reach her; turning a corner or accelerating, their bodies would collide lightly against each other.

It was a still hot day, the impression of the sun keen and hard in the reflecting fields. Gone now, now appearing as a dancing ball some distance away, now on their left, now on their right. Sometimes the fields would darken and a breeze would blow over them, rippling their surfaces and obstructing their powers of reflection. Then, in a blaze, as if in revenge, sun and sky would return at once, bringing a greater and more ominous stillness, ionizing the air with uncertainty.

Vijaipal was dressed that morning in jeans, hard brown shoes and a pale blue (almost white) oversized shirt, which was tucked in and gave a sense of the smallness of his frame, the clothes seeming to balloon off it. His mood was very different – more sombre and serious – from when they would meet for drinks in the evening. He seemed to be working, adding what was useful to a narrative already forming in his head, discarding what he did not need. And, though he seemed closed-off, private, absorbed in what he saw, he was full of a kind of generosity for Uma, as though wanting her, with her gaze unsullied by politics, to be able to see what he saw.

‘I find it helpful,’ he said, even before they had approached the site, while he was still looking for his notebooks and pens, ‘when considering the history of a place like Vijayanagara, to think of what was happening in other places. To think of history laterally, as it were. And Vijayanagara, which was founded in 1336, and only lasted two hundred years before it was destroyed – and destroyed completely – by a confederacy of Muslim princes, has a very interesting history in that respect. For we have literally – and, I think, 1336 is the date it began – the Hundred Years War between France and England, on one end, and the birth of Shakespeare, with all that that signifies, on the other: 1564 he was born, 1565 Vijayanagara was destroyed. Don’t do anything with this information; just keep it in mind. It will help lay out the field.’

She had no idea what the Hundred Years War was; Shakespeare, she knew, but not what his birth signified. Still, she liked the intensity with which Vijaipal spoke, and didn’t want to interrupt him. He seemed to sense the dull impact of this information on her, for just as they were entering the monuments, he said, with fresh urgency, ‘And please don’t believe these things don’t matter; or that they are trivial. I know, despite Toby’s protestations, that Indians have no time for history, no way even to assess the passage of time. A hundred years, two hundred, a thousand, five thousand: it’s all the same to them, isn’t it? They have no markers, no points of reference, and, so, no way to value the past. I know, too, that for most Indians history begins for them with the birth of their grandfather; everything else is prehistory. But please, do not, for one moment, believe it was always that way. When Toby says that, in his commentaries, a man writing in fourteenth-century Andhra Pradesh might effortlessly reference another writer, writing eight centuries before him, in an altogether different part of the country, with a casual “iti-da
ṇ
ḍ
in” – as Dandin says – he has a point. I don’t know if it establishes what he thinks it establishes, that Indians had a history-writing tradition, but, yes, they certainly seemed to have been able to go back further into their past than they can go today. So that inability now, to be able to go no further than fifty or seventy years, is not to be seen as a feature of your culture. It is new, this ignorance; it is part of the shattering of a wholeness, part of
your
ruin. But we will not get into the cause of it or Toby will accuse me of poisoning your mind.’

Toby, Toby, Toby! She’d never seen such vehemence about things that seemed, well, hardly to inspire it; things that to her, at least, were so insignificant. But as fast as it had come over him, this mood – and it was a rage – it was gone. Once they entered the enclosure of the monuments, either in response to the soothing effect of their beauty or to her own quiet and puzzlement, Vijaipal was calm.

‘You don’t take pictures?’ she said, hoping to restart conversation.

‘No, I don’t. I find they erase the impressions my mind makes. Which, though less detailed, are often stronger.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, take this day, for instance, Uma. A day of sun and clouds, of brief breezes and strong sunshine, of sudden stillness . . . And I would remember it in this impressionistic way: I would remember your company: my uneven mood, seeming to correspond to the changes in weather . . . I would remember the enduring splendour of the monuments; there, even after multiple viewings . . . Well, if suddenly I was handed a photograph from this day, this broad range of impressions would not survive the exactness of the photograph; they would be subsumed by it. Do you know what I mean?’

‘When you put it like that . . .’

‘Intuitively, you do.’

‘Intuitively, yes. I do.’

‘Good. Come with me. I don’t want you to make too much of my earlier outburst. I am not a man of prejudice, but I feel strongly about these things. They can upset me. But, please: don’t, for a moment, believe I romanticize the past of this unfortunate city.’

He had a way, Vijaipal – it was an aspect of the intensity with which he spoke – of making you feel you understood what he was saying, even when you didn’t, of making you take seriously the things he took seriously.

They stood now on the central axis of the city. The great avenue, still partly facaded, and occupied by people Vijaipal referred to as ‘matchstick folk’, stretched up before them. Behind them was a temple, still in use, where pilgrims came, their bright clothes visible even at a distance.

‘They still come, you see,’ Vijaipal said, ‘but none of your lot ever will. Unless, of course, some foreigner makes it fashionable.’

She laughed, and then he, looking at her, laughed too. In a lot of what he said there seemed to be either the possibility of further rage, bordering on violence, or great comedy, big, dangerous laughter. And, for the first time now, she was able to see that though he was, in fact, an ugly man, short, dark, built like a sparrow, he was a very attractive man. The kind of man, who, as you grow to know him, seems a man apart from the one you first met.

It was a long day. They had lunch; they rested; at one point there was a mild drizzle, large warm drops of rain landing in dusty splashes on the stones and dry earth; then the sky cleared and they carried on with their ‘looking’. They saw palaces, and stables, and royal baths, before returning more or less to where they began. At about 4 p.m., they found themselves in a room enclosed on four sides by high stone walls; its roof was gone and it was open to sky; at the centre was a statue of Narasimha. The sky had clouded again, and the return of afternoon darkness gave the lion-headed statue, fanged and fierce, a special menace.

Vijaipal tired at last, rested on the statue’s pedestal, washing his face and neck with water from a flask.

‘In the end, you see,’ he said wearily, ‘a place like this does not speak of a vital culture. It is almost inevitable that it was destroyed.’

‘I thought you found it painful, its destruction.’

‘I do. But I can also see that what they were doing was not an expression of genuine renewal.’

‘What were they doing?’

‘Repeating the past. Shoring up what had already been done before. And though anyone, from anywhere, visiting Vijayanagara in the early sixteenth century would certainly have been impressed by it, by the scale of it, they might perhaps have also found it decadent. Oppressive, heavy, too filled with ghosts, if you know what I mean. And so, I suppose, the question arises: how does genuine renewal occur? How does a modernizing spirit enter a moribund culture and transform it completely? Release it, either from a state of perpetual decay or from imitation, either of itself, in the form of parody, or of others, as mimicry?’

She had walked over to the statue and was inspecting it, when suddenly she felt him behind her. Not threateningly, not advancingly, but there. Breathing. Still. Observing her observe the statue. And she knew – and what frightened her was her own fragility, her own lack of resolve – that he was very near to making a pass at her. Very near to acting on a tension, as distinct as the possibility of rain, that had arisen between them over the course of the day. What would she do if he did? What would she do if, at that moment, his body had so much as grazed against hers, or his hand come to rest on her waist? And she, supposedly, in love with someone else . . . Was she mad even to consider it, mad to half-want this small, ugly, brilliant man to fuck her on the stone floor of this room, exposed to the vagaries of louring monsoon clouds?

The force of her desire made her start; and, with that sudden movement, the gaping tension of that second when anything could have happened was shattered; she had pulled away. She had swung around, and smiling, a smile almost of aggressive placidity, cold water over what had passed between them, she said, ‘How does it happen? How does genuine renewal occur?’

He smiled; there was a trace of bitterness in his face. Not the full bitterness of a man thwarted in his advance, but something residual and lingering.

‘I don’t know, Uma. It is one of the great mysteries of the world: how an old culture, moribund and decayed, regenerates. I suspect it comes at a time when men acknowledge the past as dead. But what kind of men are these . . . who see what no one else has seen till then, who have the courage to admit that the past is dead, and that they must begin again . . . I don’t know. It’s impossible to conceive of such men till they exist; and then, once they do, it is impossible to imagine the world without them.’

‘Men like Toby, perhaps?’

For a moment Vijaipal had the stunned expression of a man who’d been hit in the face, then it melted fast into a livid mask of scorn and contempt. He could see what she was doing – making up for what had almost occurred between them earlier – and he was determined not to spare her.

‘Toby, Uma? Toby? Toby! Are you . . . ? Toby, with all his weakness and dilettantism, the little Sanskritist, a man so drunk on his safety and security that he would have a renaissance unto himself, a drawing room renaissance! . . . You think a man like that could be the agent of genuine renewal? Oh no, no, no, Uma. Either you’ve misunderstood me or you’re lying!’

‘Vijaipal!’

‘Don’t you see what Toby is? Don’t you see that his little rebellion against the Anglicized ways of his friends is a society stunt, an affectation? Like that foolish business of him offering a reward to someone willing to kill Mrs Gandhi. Don’t you see how they love him for it, his society friends? He’s a performer . . . these are the actors and the actresses of society, Uma! These are not serious people. And now that you’ve brought it up . . . I’ve been meaning to ask you: I hope you won’t be so foolish as to marry a man like him? Like Toby. All very well to have a little fling with an Indian prince, something for the diary, but Uma—’

‘Vijaipal, stop. You know I—’

‘You’ll need someone more dynamic than that, more real, Uma. You’re a passionate intelligent woman. Toby fiddling about, now deriving cognates, now writing little textbooks that no one is going to read . . . that won’t satisfy you. You’ll be bored to tears in five minutes flat.’

‘Vijaipal!’ She made for the doorway of the little sanctum, open to sky.

‘Well, since I have gone this far,’ he said, blocking her way for an instant, ‘let me go a little further: let me answer your question: that other kind of man, the anti-Toby, rougher, less polished, less precious than him – the kind of man you, Uma, might really be happy with, might really love – he might also be the one to usher in an era of change into this deadest of dead countries.’