The Way Things Were (41 page)

He did not want to let go of the man who suffered. The suffering, he felt, kept the place of love in his heart. And, as long as it remained . . . as long as
he
remained a man enduring the pain of viraha, he felt his love for Uma – and the hope of their being reunited – would remain too.

The appearance of Sylvia in his life was distressing, precisely because it raised the possibility in his mind of moving on. It also made him confront the fact that Uma had perhaps never been the right person for him; that someone else, nearer to him in interest and sensibility, could give him a more nurturing relationship, a feeding relationship. But well-reasoned as this notion was, it had no hold on him. He was pained by the idea that he should sacrifice the man he was at present, a man in pain – but one, who, on any given day, he would have preferred as a dinner companion – for someone wiser, but infinitely more dull. He had no interest in this future person, this man, who had the good sense to love – not well, but wisely – the right person.

His ideal of love, helplessly romantic, was modelled on his first love: his love of Sanskrit. There had been nothing practical or sensible about that; he had simply fallen in love; it had required no mental effort. During this period of separation and recovery, Toby, with long hours on his hands in Kalasuryaketu, gazing out at the depleting expanse of the Tamas
ā
, and the dazzling heat, had on many occasions thought of the people who had come before him, his antecedents and rivals in love: the fallen heroes of Sanskrit.

At the top of the list there was William Jones. Toby imagined the great philologist coming to Calcutta in 1783 to take up his position as a judge. At that stage, he had displayed hardly any interest in Sanskrit at all. In those first letters – in the memorandum composed aboard the
Crocodile
– there was not so much as a mention of the language. It was all Persian this, Persian that; Persian, which Jones knew, and had translated out of, and considered among the grand languages of the world. Sanskrit, when it came up, was only a means to the jurist’s end of codifying Hindu laws. And, when finally he expressed some interest in the language – arising, no doubt, out of an insatiable linguist’s appetite for any new language – he was blocked at every step by the Brahmins. They told him, when he asked after something called n
ā
ṭ
akas, that they were works full of fables, and consisted ‘of conversations in prose and verse, held before ancient Rájás in their publick assemblies, on an infinite variety of subjects, and in various dialects of India’. One sensed – just as they later refused to teach him the language – that the Brahmins were doing what Brahmins do best: hoarding knowledge. Finally he met – and it was Toby’s friend, Michael Coulson, who told him this – one ‘very sensible Bráhmen [sic],’ who told him that these n
ā
ṭ
akas were, well, an awful lot like those things which in the cold season in Calcutta went by the name of ‘plays’. That was how Jones discovered the existence of Sanskrit drama, in general, and Shakuntala, in particular. By pure accident.

Everything at that stage had the feeling of an accident. But they each excited Jones’s interest and Toby noticed creeping into his letters things like: ‘Daily Studies for the Long Vacation of 1785: Morning . . . one letter; Ten chapters of the Bibles; Sanscrit grammar. Hindu Law, &c . . .’ Or, a little while later: ‘ . . . I would rather be a valetudinarian all my life, than leave unexplored the Sanscrit mine which I have just opened.’ Or – the following year from Calcutta – ‘By rising before the sun, I allot an hour every day to Sanscrit, and am charmed with knowing so beautiful a sister of Latin and Greek.’ The signs are all there and, of course, Toby recognized them: Jones was a man falling in love.

What a dangerous love it would prove to be, for it was accompanied – and the theme runs right through the letters – by an ever greater concern for his health, a fear of the climate that would eventually kill him.

Prophetic words, but it was Anna who would live, and Jones who would die. Jones who – wanting only to make enough to be his own man in England, £30,000 – seemed almost marked for death. There was something unspeakably moving, Toby felt, about those last eight or so years of Jones’s life: the years of immense intellectual discovery when, working round the clock, there was, ever-present in the background, Death. But it could not stop him: driven on by the sheer excitement of what he had found, he carried on working, using his every reserve of strength. The days must not have had hours enough! And for a sensibility like his, informed, on the one hand, by the myth of the Tower of Babel, on the other, by a debt to Greece, the discovery of Sanskrit would have been like coming upon the fount of language itself.

The similarities between Sanskrit and the other classical languages Jones already knew would have astonished him. He must not have believed what he was hearing. A voice neither active nor passive, called the
ā
tmanepada? Well, he knew of such a voice, of course, because he knew of the middle voice in Greek. A dual number? Again, that was nothing new; there was one in Greek. Verb formations he recognized easily to be aorists; paradigms with identical cases; the locative absolute: vartir api d
ī
pe na
ṣ
ṭ
e dh
ū
mit
ā
bhavati: when the lamp has gone out, the wick becomes smoky and blackened. How long would it have been before he was reminded of the ablative absolute from his school days:
Ovidio exule, Musae planguntur.
With Ovid exiled, the Muses weep. And would he not have paused at this word na
ṣ
ṭ
a: to destroy: and thought to himself,
Noceo
,
nocere
– to injure, to harm –
nuocere
in Italian,
nuire
in French, noxious in English?

They would have come flying at him, these resemblances. And, when finally he makes his great conjecture, the cornerstone of comparative philology – delivered before the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1786 – it is made, as with certain mathematical discoveries, even before the proof exists. It seems to break from Jones with all the tragic force of a discovery that he must have sensed would be his death:

A common source that may itself have decayed: the spring of all language run dry: it must have been so beguiling an idea! It must have spoken to him of a lost wholeness, a dream of underlying unity, that we, as human beings, are never quite able to let go of. It was what Toby’s imagination had seized on too. That, and the fact that as cultural decay in the East deepened, Toby saw that India was increasingly unable to converse with herself. ‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots – a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

Coomaraswamy! Another of Toby’s heroes. Even more than Jones, the Ceylonese art critic – perhaps because he was half-Asian and, like Toby, half-European, and perhaps because he, had he wanted, could also have lived a life of leisure in the West – had been a model for Toby. Few stories were nearer Toby’s heart than the one Vijaipal once told him of Coomaraswamy in 1917, when he was forty, offering to donate his entire collection of Indian art to the newly opened Benares Hindu University. His only condition was that they institute a chair of Indian art, and make him the professor. ‘And what did they say?’ Toby had asked Vijaipal. ‘They told him to go away,’ Vijaipal had said, and begun to laugh cruelly. ‘They told him to take his art collection and go away.’

The story had been told as a cautionary tale, a tale that was meant to jeer at Toby’s innocence when it came to India. It was meant to remind Toby that India would always let him down. And though he recognized that, of course, he could not help but be moved by the sacrifices that were part of the life of pure intellectual endeavour, the life of the mind, even when –
especially when
– things ended badly.

It was like the story of his friend Michael Coulson, one of the finest Sanskritists of their generation. He was a professor at Edinburgh and had completed work on a number of very good translations; they had all found publishers, but the publication had been indefinitely held up. In those days a publisher could sit on a book for years. The waiting was terrible. And it was not the only kind of waiting Coulson had had to endure. Some years before, he had met someone and fallen in love. A relationship had blossomed and the man had promised to come to Edinburgh. Coulson, leveraging one hope against the other, had suffered the disappointments in his professional life by clinging onto this one hope in his personal life. Then, on a grey and depressing day in Edinburgh, the call had come to say the man would not be coming. Not then, not later, not ever.

Coulson lost his nerve. Or, depending on which way you look at it, he found it. When Toby asked his colleague at Balliol, reporting the sad news of Coulson’s suicide to Toby over the telephone in 1975, how Michael had done it, the man had replied – and Toby never forgot, for it was phrased in a way that seemed to contain the essence of the story, ‘He opened his veins in the bathtub.’

Michael Coulson. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. William Jones. These were the men, the martyrs – witnesses, in the true sense – of Sanskrit: the men who had helped shape the character of his love for the language, and that mixture of futility and devotion it inspired. It was no surprise then that Toby’s notion of romantic love would be an extension of his love of Sanskrit. It was why that morning at the Kumbh, a morning of clouds and light rain, as the dh
ū
ni tap got underway, and he had admitted into his heart for the first time the prospect of a sensible love, something more pragmatic, he had the terrible feeling of having betrayed the person he was.

He watched her watch the rite. The sadhus, after the sacrifice, gathered in the courtyard. With their two steel vessels, their measure of white cloth, and iron tongs. They each made a ring of burning cow patties around themselves. And they each settled down at the centre of their smoking circles in padm
ā
sana. Then, when the smoke began to rise, they draped the white cloth over themselves, and became like rocks in a school play. There was a light drizzle, moistening and slightly besmirching the white shrouds of the sadhus. ‘The fierce pupils motionless, their brightness slightly lessened, their eyes, directed downward, and focused on the nose, the eyelashes stationary, the stilled eyes stilling the brow . . . they were like clouds without the vehemence of rain, like an expanse of water without a ripple, like lamps in a windless place.’

Sylvia was transfixed. But Toby could think only,
Look, how affected she is by it all; Uma never cared for these things. And I showed her so much more than this.

Outside, Babaji, covered already in ash, was having Chottiya mark his forehead with broad streaks of yellow, sandalwood and saffron, at the centre of which came a single red flame. The markings of the sect. Everyone was preparing for the procession to the river and the am
ā
vasy
ā
bathing.

‘Tell me again,’ Sylvia asked, ‘am
ā
means?’

‘Together. And
vas
. . .’

‘Ah, yes, you said: like our German
w
ā
san
,
ge-wesen
,
war
. . . Amazing. The being together?’

‘The dwelling together, yes. Of the sun and the moon.’

Their affair began on a soupy moonless night once they were back in Kalasuryaketu. Toby remembered every detail. Sharada and Laban, as they had once been before in another time, laying drinks outside.

He was reading; Sylvia, in the light from a battery-powered tube light, was working through certain verses of The Birth. Every now and then she would interrupt him with a question, usually from the commentary, and he would help her easily. He no longer had even his children to teach, and, though he didn’t say it, it was a pleasure for him to teach again.

Looking up from the text, she said, ‘I don’t want to rush you. But have you thought more about what you’d like to do with the Kidd endowment?’

‘I have. I’m actually seeing Tripathi tomorrow to discuss it. We need to do something that would be significant here as well as abroad.’

‘But, Toby,’ she said with stress, and with that illusion of fluency foreigners derive from the use of adverbs, ‘I
absolutely
agree.’

‘We’ll think of something. I have a few ideas. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across the Loeb library . . .’

At that moment Sharada came out to where they were sitting, her face lined with anxiety, to say that Rani saab had called.

‘From Delhi?’ Toby said, betraying the blind hopefulness of his condition.

Sharada nodded, almost wringing her wrists with concern.