The Way Things Were (38 page)

‘Are you OK . . . ?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, sticking her finger in her mouth.

‘Go on. You were saying,’ she said indistinctly. ‘The South African writers . . .’

‘No. It’s fine. It was nothing . . .’

‘No. Go on, please. I don’t want to break your flow. I was listening.’

He began nervously: ‘Coetzee perhaps . . . I can’t quite remember. I think he says – and they, sir, you can imagine, know a thing or two about history! – that a historical understanding must, in the end, be an “understanding of the past as a shaping force upon the present”.’ Uma, having removed her finger from her mouth, now squeezed out a tiny bead of blood from under her nail. Toby could not help but stare.

‘Go on,’ she said, with a suppressed shout in her voice.

‘And, in this sense,’ he said – but the air was heavy – ‘“our historical being is part of our present.” Which is why, I feel, the response cannot be borrowed from other places. It must spring naturally from the circumstances of that particular place, for it to bring real closure.’

‘Yes, but these things take many forms, Raja saab. Not all cultures are the same.’

‘Oh, I agree, sir,’ Toby said, relieved to have his father-in-law’s voice in the mix. ‘Take the blacks in America. What a moving response they have had to their experience of the past. In recent times, with men like Baldwin and Ellison, it’s taken a written form. But its soul was music. “Trouble in mind
and
. . .”’ he began, smiling at the children.

They knew the song. They had heard it played, the Sam Cooke version – almost to the point of erasure – on their father’s tape deck. They knew the words and could sing along at their father’s prompting. ‘I’m blue,’ they sang back. And when he gave them their cue about laying one’s head on that lonesome railroad track, they knew what came next. Loudly – and in unison – they begged that 2:10 train to ease their troubled mind. The Brigadier, though he did not know the song, was delighted and laughed out loud. Deep Fatehkotia, the food now all on the table, and steaming in the light from the lamp, put her hand on her husband’s shoulder, tapping it in time with the children’s singing.

Uma sat away from the rest. Skanda, seeing her isolated, could not help but reach out and take her hand, forgetting it was injured. On being touched, Uma let out an awful moan, hardly commensurate with the pain. Then silence. The next thing Skanda knew his mother was lurching across the table towards him and, like an animal driven to madness, she sank her teeth into his arm.

That was December 1984. The 2nd, to be precise. Afterwards – once the grandparents had managed to clear the scene away, in tears, in bandages, in bedtime stories, bringing with the benefit of their age, some comfort, a cooing assurance that things were only slightly out of true, and would soon be put right – Uma and Toby sat alone in the drawing room for the last time. He had given her a rasai, which she had wrapped about herself, and a stiff drink. Her hysteria gone, there was little doubt, in his mind, who suffered most; but, more importantly, who had been the true target of her rage. In what was almost an automatic response to what had happened, he put in place preparations for his departure to Kalasuryaketu the next morning. Even as they sat there, in that front room, he waited for a lightning call to go through to Laban. There was something cold and decided and final about him that night, perhaps at having glimpsed for the first time the depth of her animus for him.

Later she recalled, in those moments, when he had been full of his own quiet and wintry anger, that he had been attractive to her for the first time in years. At the end of a cycle, she felt herself released of a number of violent emotions that, without her knowing it, had for a while now defined her. She was more than their sum for the first time in a long time. She felt borne in on her something of the philosophical temperament that had always come so easily to Toby. She thought she could almost see around their situation. And she wondered – such a relief to be able to see the world again as others see it – how he saw things, how he saw her, how he thought of the little experiment their life together had been.

A kind of transfer took place, an exchanging of roles. If so far it had been Toby who was always able to take the long view, always able to see life in philosophical terms, and not in the mean light of a personal joy or dissatisfaction, it was in Uma that this faculty seemed now to grow.

Every failed marriage has its victors. There are those who walk away from its ruins with its vitality, its lessons, its experience; and then there are those who are undone by it, who are left with futility and nothing else. It did not seem that evening that things would go in Uma’s favour. She was wretched and full of shame – a danger to her children. She sat there with her rasai, clutching the whisky with both her hands, her toes gnawing at the rounded edge of a cushion. Toby, in contrast, though feeling a grief too deep to reach, was calm and businesslike, sitting with his legs crossed by the wicker telephone table. Nobody witnessing this scene could have anticipated that it contained in it the seeds of the man’s diminishing and the woman’s renewal. It seemed so much the other way round. But, as time went by, it became clear that it was Toby who was the real casualty of their marriage: Toby who would later behave in a petty way about money; Toby who would remarry first, and hastily; Toby who would find his heart empty of anything but the most arid love for his children. Most of all, it was Toby who, never so blind as not to see his own diminishing, would be filled with bitterness for the man he became.

That night, as if too timid to inhabit some future and yet unimagined life, they clung to the old configuration. They were more husband and wife to each other than they had been in years. They filled the new silences with that mixture of banality and tenderness that is the stock-in-trade of married life.

‘Will you be taking the train or are you thinking of driving?’

‘I’m not sure. Let’s see what Laban says.’

‘He hasn’t called yet?’

‘No. There seems to be some trouble with the phone.’

‘Do you have critical editions of the texts you’re working on?’

‘The plays?’

‘The plays.’

‘Yes, but I might ask you to send me a few commentaries in a few weeks. Parts of the Vishakhadatta are confusing.’

‘I’ve never liked him, I must confess. I’ve always preferred Bhavabhuti.’

‘Bhavabhuti is a very great playwright. The jewel in the court of Ya
ś
ovarman.’

‘Tell me. What is it the Tamas
ā
says about rasa?’

‘Oh, you remember that! She says, “What a course this story has run . . .”’

‘I envy you seeing the Tamas
ā
tomorrow; I love that river. I’ve put the Samsonite out, by the way. It’ll be easier; it has wheels.’

‘Might be too big; I’m not taking much.’

‘How long do you think . . . ?’

She was cut off by the phone ringing. Toby picked up the pale green receiver. But the voice coming through its dust-encrusted holes was not Laban’s; it was the operator, informing them that the call couldn’t be put through; the lines were jammed; there had been some trouble in Bhopal.

The next day they heard about the gas. Methyl isocyanate, the somnambulist murderer, seeping out of the Union Carbide plant into the lives of sleeping people. But first, as if in response to the period of uncertainty that lay ahead of them, they made love one last time.

He left the next day without saying goodbye to anyone, except his brother-in-law, Viski, for whom he inscribed a copy of the new edition of
Three Sanskrit Plays
. It was not the usual unthinking inscription; he took some trouble over it. He was, more than at any other time in his life so far, intensely concerned with what his work, and especially his engagement with language, had amounted to. The visit from Choate – the talk of a holocaust museum – had disturbed him more than he was prepared to admit. He felt a reckoning of some kind, a reckoning with the past – the very past he had devoted his entire life to – was on the horizon.

The form it was to take was very far away from anything Toby envisaged, but it did not, in his mind, absolve him of responsibility.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
But he had it wrong, Oppenheimer. K
ā
la, here, was Time, Time grown old. And k
ṣ
aya was not so much destruction as it was decay. I am Time grown old, decayer of worlds. The difference was tonal, the Christian finality of one versus the Hindu inevitability of the other.
All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.
And yet he was not able to treat as inevitable what he saw happening to old India: how does one stand back, when the knowledge to which one has given one’s life is weaponized?
My dear Viski, Literature is a product of language. Its medium is words, as colour is that of painting, stone of sculpture. And language is the product of society.
That’s right; that’s the difference, isn’t it? Language is a consensus. It is a social activity. It cannot stand aloof from men.
Not like stone and colour, which existed before man and exist – will exist
, he inserted –
without man
. That’s it: we brought it into the world, the material of literature. We imbued it with meaning, we gave to its sound a hidden resonance, a deep tissue. A music that seems to contain our past. Isn’t that what we feel when the
ś
loka rises, that there is, though undecipherable to us now, buried in its anu
ṣ
ṭ
ubh meter perhaps, some historical memory to which we crave to give utterance?

But what if there is other music, competing with the music to which our idea of the past has become fused . . . what if there is an overlay of other sounds, like a muzak in the foreground, and it drowns out the secret music we want to hear? My dear Viski, when there is this, we are like people who stand with bated breath on the bank of some ocean or river, waiting for a voice to come off the water, and speak to us, but we hear nothing. Nothing but dissonance and the dispiriting sadness of an irrecoverable past.
Language and literature, more than any other Art, are directly related to social life. This is
– and he drew one across the page –
a clear line.

In his heart he sensed the reckoning that was coming. And well before the great passion of his life would take the form of men in saffron cracking open, like an egg, the dome of an old Mosque in Ayodhya, he was sick with worry at the way the things he loved would one day be used. He wanted to clear his debts, his conscience, to explain himself, to say – like Virginsky in
Demons
– ‘“This is not it, this is not it! No, this is not it at all!”’

That day – the day Uma arrives in Delhi, with the inevitability of the heat returning – was to have been set aside for Gauri. It was the day Skanda was to meet Kartik. It is a point of friction between them that he has, despite Gauri’s urging, never met her son.

Sensing his reluctance, she says the night before, ‘What are you afraid of?’

‘The timing,’ he replies easily.

‘But is there ever a good time?’

‘No. But there are bad times,’ he says, and laughs.

‘I don’t know if this is any worse than another. He has his holidays. And besides, at this stage, you’re just “mummy’s friend” coming for lunch.’ A look passes between them. Something probing, something half-hopeful. Skanda does not respond and Gauri, as if suppressing the little expectation that had arisen momentarily in her, says quickly, ‘Why? Do you think he’ll sense something? Do you think he’ll know?
Did you know?
’

‘Did I know?’

‘Did you know – the first time you met Maniraja – that he was your mother’s . . . well, beau,’ she adds coyly.

‘No, I didn’t know that till much later,’ he says, casting his mind back, and finding it – his memory – fragment fast into the broken lines of a German expressionist painting. ‘The sequence is unclear in my head. I know I came to associate it with many things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like with a violent fight between Isha and Viski. With my father’s marriage to Sylvia. With going to London alone for the first time. But, most of all, with my mother’s vulnerability in those days.’

‘Your father,’ Gauri inserts, ‘married Sylvia
before
your mother got together with Maniraja?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t mind that?’

‘No. Not as much.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s the way of the world, Gauri.’

‘Sounds bloody unfair to me.’

‘Perhaps. But the two things – the two relationships, I mean – had a very different character. My father’s, though it came first, felt so much more like a settling for less, a scaling down of hope. It was pitiable, an act of desperation. My mother’s . . . well, what can I say? There was something of the “rank sweat of an enseamed bed” about it?’

‘Skanda!’

‘“Honeying and making love . . . stewing in corruption.”’

‘Stop it!’

‘“Frailty,”’ he says – then stops laughing, and recalling what he just said about his mother’s vulnerability, realizes he has imparted onto the lines a new meaning. ‘“Thy name is woman.”’

‘Pig,’ she says, studying the changes in his face.

‘I don’t know, Gauri,’ he begins again, with exasperation. ‘These things have an embedded logic. That summer in Gulmarg; the bad night at my aunt Isha’s; my father’s wedding in London: throw these things up in the air and, no matter how they fall, they always add up to the same thing, they have only one inevitable outcome: Maniraja. It just could not have been otherwise. They conjured him up, those events; and if there had not been a Maniraja at hand, we would have had to invent one . . .’

‘Silly fool,’ she says turning over in bed – for it is late. ‘Do you, at least, remember meeting him for the first time?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What was your first impression?’

‘I’d rather not say. I’m a bit embarrassed of it now.’

‘Come on . . . you were a child, Skanda.’

‘I remember thinking,’ he says, and stops.