The Way Things Were (40 page)

Did the memory of her unhappiness with Toby that night lie buried somehow in the returning echo of that name? Had she not at the time thought of that modern house into which her friends had disappeared with something of the longing with which the citizen of a closed society might look upon the gates of the embassy of a better and freer country? Had it not filled her with a feeling of lack? Perhaps. But it did not come to her with any association as direct as that. In fact, a great part of the appeal of that name for her, when she heard it down the phone that March morning, wrapped up ever so slightly in the warmth and freshness of the changing season, was that it felt utterly new.

‘What will you do?’ Gauri asks.

They are in the flat. It is the morning Uma is due in Delhi. The question feels loaded. Skanda’s love for his mother, as if it is an extension of his father’s, needs always to be checked, always to be balanced against what she is prepared to give back. There is a perpetual danger of the scales tipping too much in her favour. And Gauri’s tone, the alarm with which she asks, ‘What will you do?’ . . . It is as if she is speaking to an addict in danger of relapsing.

The day begins with an exchange of BBMs. ‘Janum, in Delhi for the day. Mani has some work with Modi. Lunch? Longing to see you.’

He already has lunch plans with Gauri in Gurgaon, arranged weeks in advance.

Gauri, still half asleep, says, ‘What, baby?’

‘My mother.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s going to be here, in Delhi, today.’

‘Oh,’ she says, now sitting up herself. ‘But that’s wonderful. Why don’t you ask her to join us for lunch?’

He weighs the unlikelihood of that happening with the feeling that it would be good for his mother, or for their relationship, at least, to ask anyway. People must own their demurrals.

He writes, ‘Gauri wants to know if you’d like to join us for lunch at hers,’ and a moment later, despite her having been told on a number of occasions about Gauri, his mother replies, ‘Gauri?’

‘My girlfriend.’

Silence.

Her dismissal of his emotional life – her sublime lack of interest in anyone he’s with – is among their ancient problems.

‘Darling,’ she writes, ‘I really don’t want to leave the plane. I have all my magazines and DVDs here. The pedicurist is coming. But please thank Gauri from me. Another time.’

‘She says thank you,’ he tells Gauri. ‘But she doesn’t want to leave the plane.’

‘What, the whole day?’

‘She has her magazines.’

‘Oh,’ Gauri says, with something like wonder. ‘
What will you do?
’

He considers not going, but he is tired of these negative stances, tired of having nothing but ‘no’ on his side. And, besides, not doing these things, he knows, affects him much more than it does his mother. There is no point in fighting her autonomy. One might quibble and say, ‘Well, could she be so, if Maniraja did not bankroll it?’ But that would be churlish. The world is full of people bankrolled to their eyeballs who are not autonomous.

And this is the point: he admires her autonomy – in his best moments, he aspires to it. But his is not like hers: his is like his father’s: it needs an object. The language. His mother needs nothing but herself.

Still, she must have felt that Mani had eroded her autonomy, for Skanda recalls her saying to him once in relation to Maniraja, ‘For so long, you see, it was I who had the power in the relationship. Because if there was one thing I learned from your father, it was never to fall in love. Toby never fell in love; he never gave himself completely; it was never the centre of his being. He had that quality certain artists and writers have where no matter how loving or generous they can be on the surface, there’s a part of them that belongs always to their vocation. And some of that must have rubbed off on me, because, in those early days, it used to drive Mani mad. It was he who pursued me, you know; he who wanted me to move to Bombay; I was quite happy where I was. For a long time, that was our dynamic: him pursuing, me reluctant. It gave me the illusion of power,’ she had said and laughed.

That voice of hers, Skanda thinks now, hard and cynical, full of laughter, it had never been her voice before. It was new. It was the voice of the Louis Vuitton years. Of private planes and compromise. Of Maniraja and Bombay: the voice of safety.

But, as much as she had been full of lost illusions, his father, working by a different logic, was also making his peace with safety. He was also ridding himself of illusions. His idea of love, no less than Uma’s, was a thing in flux.

Summer approached. The light on the Tamas
ā
grew white and still, the surrounding land drier and more bleached, even as the jade of the river, with every passing day, grew a deeper and deeper green.

It was the year of the Kumbh and Toby – as he had done twelve years before, in 1977, when Mrs Gandhi used that vast congregation assembled at the Confluence to announce fresh elections – had driven down to Allahabad with Tripathi for the Basant Panchami, the fifth day of the Hindu month of Magha, and, according to that calendar, the official beginning of Spring. Toby was in time for one of his favourite rituals. The ‘dh
ū
ni tap’: the austerity of smoke – and it was more powerful than he remembered it, seeming almost to enfold the onset of the heat.

It began one morning after many days spent at the camp, drinking chai, and smoking chilams with Babaji. Babaji, who went between long periods of listlessness and sudden activity, where he would polish the chilam’s stone with a red rag and furiously rearrange the few objects that lay scattered about him – a green-handled knife; tongs; a Vicks inhaler; a packet of Rothmans; a box of chandan; a prayer book. Then, with no warning, he would launch into long tirades about Ayodhya, where the demand for a temple at the spot where Ram was said to have been born had revived in recent years. The contested site, on which there stood a sixteenth-century mosque, had been closed for decades. But, in 1986, the Rajiv Gandhi government, playing a cynical brand of minority politics, now giving to Muslims, now taking from them, had reopened it to Hindu worship, which, in turn, had reopened an old historical wound, and the air that year was tense.

‘Why won’t we have a temple there?’ Babaji said to Toby, who, with eyes expressionless and glassy, stared blankly at the fire of burning cow patties from which a red and intensely hot glow was visible. ‘We will have a temple there. Of course we’ll have a temple there. Toby saab, you watch, we won’t even have to break the mosque. It will fall by itself, and a temple will rise. You’ll see. This is the power of faith. This cannot be stopped by any government.’

Toby continued to stare at the fire: a long slow-burning blaze, which crept into the bracketed structure of the patties, and appeared wavy and mesmeric in those easy-forming shelves, on which it was still possible to see the imprint of hands.
For by the fire of the idea of the abyss, it is said, there are destroyed beyond recovery the five factors of ego-consciousness.
Babaji nervously adjusted the coffee table book that a French photographer had made of his ashram, and which he used as a backrest, and turned to Tripathi.

‘You’ve been coming here for over a decade, Tripathi. Have you ever seen me indulge in politics? Why should I indulge in politics? I’m a sadhu. I don’t care for politics. Have you ever seen me angry? I’m a sadhu, I’m beyond anger.’

Both statements were wildly untrue. Babaji was intensely political, and given to outbursts of anger, directed mainly at his sous-sadhu, a roguish and slim-limbed ascetic, known in the camp as Chottiya, who, after a stint with hard drugs, smack mainly, had ended up in the care of Babaji. He was wild-eyed, with a deranged and gap-toothed smile. He liked to sit for long hours, in nothing but yellow sunglasses and a matching yellow loincloth, massaging himself with an electric masseur.

Sylvia – the girl from the Sachler, who, on Toby’s request, had been given special permission to stay at the camp – had, when she first saw Chottiya running the bright plastic instrument over his long black legs, asked, ‘Is he shaving them?’

‘She wants to know what you’re doing,’ Tripathi said, jumping his eyebrows at Chottiya. Who, as if bowing to some cultish requirement that sadhus be fierce, flared his eyes, then grinned maniacally. ‘You can tell her that even the chela needs a chela.’

Babaji’s black lips parted in a smile; a chuckle rose from deep inside his damaged lungs.

‘A battery-operated chela,’ he said, ‘I like that.’

Then, turning again to Toby, he said, ‘There will be a great movement, you watch. The country will rise. A new temple will be built. For too long we’ve tolerated the desecration of our places. You see that, over there?’

‘See what, Babaji?’ Toby said, though he knew exactly what. ‘We’re in a tent.’

‘That damn fort. Hanging over our heads. Akbar’s fort. Why do you think he built it there?’

‘To protect an important trading station on the doab. Why else?’

‘Rubbish. Nonsense. He wanted to show us we were nothing. You know very well how long this place has existed. You know that there would always have been an embankment here. Otherwise, it would have flooded; it’s a flood plain. He built it because he knew, as you do, that it is on record that people have been bathing here in the month of Magha for – this is recorded history, Toby saab! – at least fourteen centuries. And this rite, the dh
ū
ni tap, that you will witness tomorrow, how old is it, Toby saab? Tell them. I know you know. Go on, tell them: how old is it?’

Sylvia, her green eyes and pale features glowing in the light from the fire – and for whom Babaji’s latest outrage had been rapidly translated by Tripathi – looked at Toby now with an expression of admiration.

‘It was the
Ś
ā
kyamuni Buddha,’ Toby said at length, and with a sigh, ‘from whom we have a mention of the dh
ū
ni tap.’

‘Twenty-five centuries!’ Babaji said, giving a wet cry of astonishment. ‘That is our tradition. That is what they set out to destroy. But it didn’t get destroyed, did it?
They
were destroyed instead. We have endured.’

‘Tell me, Babaji,’ Toby said finally, and with great irritation, ‘you go on about this bloody temple now, in Ayodhya, in a place you claim to be the very spot where Ram was born. Why is it you’ve never mentioned it before? Tripathi and I have known you, as you say, for over twelve years. You’ve never so much as uttered the word Ayodhya. Now suddenly you can speak of nothing else.’

At that moment, a visiting sadhu from another camp, a stout old man, jaunty and jovial, with thick bifocal spectacles and a little silver trident lodged in his jatas, entered Babaji’s enclosure.

‘Jai Shri Ram!’ the men thundered at each other.

The greeting enraged Toby. ‘Jai Shri Ram,’ he imitated, ‘what the hell is this? Like a bloody brick over one’s head. Jai Shri Ram! Just listen to the violence of it. Jai Shri Ram! May as well say bloody Heil . . .’

Then catching Sylvia’s eye – she was Swiss German – he stopped himself. The sadhus, hearing this outburst, chuckled among themselves, and began talking sadhu politics: which businessman was patronizing which sadhu, which bit of land had been bought by whom . . . Toby turned to Sylvia.

‘The greeting at the Kumbh,’ he said, ‘for decades has been Sita-ram. Very simple, very musical. A long Sita, a short Ram. S
ī
t
ā
-r
ā
m. But, ever since this damn movement for a temple in Ayodhya began . . .
Jai Shri Ram! Jai Shri Ram!
’

The sadhus looked over and smiled.

Babaji said – and Tripathi translated – ‘It means Victory to Lord Ram! It is our way of expressing solidarity.’

Sylvia looked at him with that mixture of alarm and perplexity that comes over us when we try to translate the chauvinisms of an alien culture into our own terms. Then, with a tenderness that went right through him, she looked at Toby.

He had watched as she endured every aspect of camp life. The bucket baths under taps, in a cemented area in full view of everybody; the corrugated steel sheds, with a fly-infested mud pit for shitting in; the sleeping on the floor with half a dozen strange men; the blaring religious theatre that went on all night; the long repetitive cycles of chilams, of tea, of visits from other sadhus.

For Toby it had all been part of his recovery. Even the long drive up from Kalasuryaketu had soothed him. The U.P. of his childhood. A place of fields of unripened wheat edged with flowers; of pale sky and kilns, and canals; of scorched elephant grass; of the sight of brightly dressed women, always in threes, working in the fields; of the bunch-backed rear of an old mosque; of the earth blackened with the deep shade of heavy trees, where, occasionally, there might be the little whitewashed grave of some local saint. All this had to some degree taken his pain from him. But surely this was more than this slip of a girl, wanting nothing more than to improve her knowledge of Indian languages, had bargained for?

He felt her attraction for him. He knew it was founded on who he was, on his achievement, his lifework and scholarship. And, at a time when his self-confidence was badly wounded, it flattered him deeply, this attention. But it also made him feel guilty. Not because he felt he owed Uma anything – no! – but because – as much as he was able to appreciate the appeal of her attraction to him intellectually – he could not return it. It made him wonder what kind of man he was. Someone drawn perhaps to those people who held him in contempt, who wounded him, who showed a philistine’s disregard for the things he loved most: was that what excited him? And why, when confronted with a beautiful young woman, devoted to all that he was devoted to, did it leave him cold? Well, not cold. But if he was to share it, her interest in him – and this was not a route anyone should have to take – he would have to think himself into feeling attracted to her, just as one day he would have to think himself into being in love with her.

She had come from the Sachler with a clear brief. An old student of Toby’s – an American called Arthur Kidd, rich and retired – wanted, out of his great love for the language of his college years, to do something for Sanskrit. But he didn’t know what. That was for Toby to figure out. He wanted him to head the project, and the money was considerable. Had Toby been in a better position in his life, it was the project of a lifetime. But she had come, this Sylvia, at the most difficult moment in his separation from Uma. When, having equipped himself to deal with something short-term, something put in place to salvage the relationship, he now found, with all the sick-making feeling of a premonition, that the separation was permanent. He knew this, not from anything that Uma said, but rather from the dull charge of his own suffering, its low-grade intensity, which, as with certain fevers, seemed to hint at something more serious than the usual cycles of flus and viruses.