The Way Things Were (7 page)

They spoke rapturously of India, but dreamed of the West. Of European cities, of shops and duty-free goods. They spoke of eternal India, but, in their hearts, they were hungry materialists, who wanted nothing so much from life as a Japanese washing machine or a German toaster. Their contradictions were glaring and, in trying to hide them, they fell into cynicism and hypocrisy.

For this class of person, Toby was irresistible.

‘Come here, this minute, you, Lawrence of Belgravia!’ Vandana bellowed, on seeing him enter the room. ‘Giving lectures on Ram, little swine. I’ll tell you about Ram. He was a bloody weakling. A wimp! Come here!’

She was a great fat woman, loud and boisterous, with a fierce red bindi and the expressive eyes of a dancer, a Bharatnatyam dancer; she had, though it was hard to believe now, been trained as one. Like many bullies, she was painfully shy and unsure of herself, easily wounded. The daughter of Marxist intellectuals, and a graduate of the National School of Drama down the road, she would perhaps have wanted a career in the political theatre of the time, which was so vibrant; or the new-age cinema, of the Shabana Azmi ilk, who, incidentally, was a classmate. But nothing had materialized and her talents had been squandered on very successful impressions of politicians in general, and Mrs Gandhi in particular. This had given her a modicum of drawing room celebrity. Taking leave of Toby’s old friend, Mahijit, the Raja of Marukshetra, whom she had been flattering quietly in a corner, she rollicked across the room, swaying her great backside as she moved, flailing dimpled arms, spilling Scotch and ash.

She was getting ready to do one of her famous performances, in which she mocked the epic hero, Ram, for forcing his wife, Sita, under public pressure, to prove her chastity through a trial by fire.

‘Sita, my dear, forgive me,’ she said, in a simpering voice, ‘you see Mummy says that your reputation is now tainted. And, because I’m a typical ball-less Indian wimp – the first, I might add, but not the last! The
ā
di-wimp! – I will please be requiring you to self-immolate your own good self.’

Cries of laughter and amusement went up in the room. ‘O Vandana!’ ‘You’re too much!’ ‘Such a little performer.’

Mahijit, spitting into his brass spittoon, jumped his eyebrows at his friend, who, all too familiar with Vandana’s antics, smiled at the others in the room, but was inwardly fatigued at her approach. Bapa, their host, the second son of a second son, and a great social figure in Delhi in those days, famous for organizing music recitals in his garden, came up quickly. He was dressed, as he invariably was, in white from head to toe. ‘Don’t listen to a word of it,’ he said to Toby. ‘You were brilliant. This lot are too colonized to know a thing.’

‘“Yes, yes, Sita,”’ Vandana pressed on, her eyes flashing wildly, ‘“Go on, jump in, burn yourself alive. So that Mummy and the rest of us can be assured of your purity. And then we’ll probably burn you alive anyway because your dowry was not large enough. Come on. Jump!”’

She swung her bottom into the air, and made a little pushing gesture with her hands, as though really prodding someone to enter a pyre. Then she threw her head back and laughed raucously. ‘If it was me, I would have been on the first flying chariot back to Lanka. Give me dark sexy demons – dripping coconut oil – over wimpy Ram any old day. Or perhaps I would have stayed, and had a naughty little affair with Lakshman, who seems so much sexier . . .’

Vandana, still performing, now firing invisible arrows into the air, now prancing around the room in imitation of the epic hero, was intercepted by those who could see – Gayatri Mann, namely – that Toby was in need of rescuing.

‘Namo Nama
ḥ
, Raja saab,’ Mann said smokily into his ear.

He gave her a relieved smile.

Gayatri Mann was the consummate professional Indian. She lived abroad with her husband, the publisher Zubin Mann, and, at a time when her country felt closed and remote, when the news was all famine and insurgency, she wore saris and high heels in Belgravia. She made documentary films on Bangladesh, on secret India, on the timelessness of Hinduism. She wrote books on pseudo-spirituality and the Princes, many of whom were her friends. She appeared on television shows to chasten those who threatened to spoil the magic by overplaying the wretchedness of India. ‘Poverty?’ she once told Louis Malle, ‘I don’t know why people keep going on about poverty. Everyone I know in India has a car.’ And everyone she knew did.

In the West, she traded on India; and, in India, starved for news of the West, she carried back stories of the latest fashions, of books and movies, of Polanski and Kapuscinski, of how London was changing. She had sole monopoly on the exchange of pop culture and exotica, and she could only have thrived in a world where the exchange of goods and ideas was restricted, where news and information were scarce, where distances were real. Anyone might have told her that she would not survive the Internet. And, truly, much later, in that other time, when change came at last, it singled her out for extinction with a fury that till then had only been reserved for such inanimate things as the post and the landline.

Her father, the politician Sarat Mohapatra, was among those arrested the night before. And it was one of the many pretensions of this political family to refer to him – Mohapatra,
their
father – in the English way as simply Father, as though he were everybody’s father.

‘Wow-zee, Toby saab,’ she now began, ‘what times we live in! Father, you know, he was so stoic. He was ready for them when they arrived. And he, of course, was great friends with Pundit Nehru. So what a blow, so personal, you know. The daughter of your old friend sending around the police to arrest you. Horrific, and so bad for India, for her image. Forgive us for not being able to host you. Nixu’s been in a flap about it all morning.
Because
,’ and here, looking over at her brother who was in earshot, she gurgled with pleasure – nothing pleased her more than to run someone down, even her own brother – ‘apparently when they came around to take Father away, he told the servants not to bother to wake Nixu. So it was only this morning, when the servants brought him his orange juice and paper, that my darling brother discovered Father was gone.’

‘Shut up, Gayatri,’ Nixu said. ‘He’d have done just the same if it was you.’

‘Nonsense! Father and I, you know, Toby, were very close.’

‘
Are
very close, Gayatri. He’s in jail, not dead.’

Ignoring her brother, she said, ‘If he was not so staunchly opposed to all this dynasty business, which frankly he considers the height of vulgarity, he would have quite liked me to follow him into politics. I was the only child of his that he would discuss these things with,’ she said, glancing at Nixu. Then seeing Toby’s attention drift, she added quickly, ‘But enough, enough political gup-shup, Toby ji.’

Toby, even in that quick survey of the room, had seen the person who’d been on his mind since that afternoon.

‘Who—?’ he began.

‘Who?! Who, what! Tell me about yourself. You were marvellous today. I tell you, if only we’d grown up knowing these things. All they ever taught us, in bloody Tara Hall, was Billy the Bard, the Brontë-Shrontes, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” . . . It’s such a handicap, you know. They were so systematic, Les Angrez, in stamping out our culture.’

‘And a very good thing too,’ Nixu said. ‘Where would we be without them? Chanting-shanting. Burning women. Drowning girl children. The Horror that is India, I tell you . . .’

‘Gayatri, who—?’ Toby tried again.

By this point, Mahijit had approached. Nixu, on seeing him, sang, ‘There was a rich Maharaja of Magador . . .’

Bapa heard and came over. Making a little napkin dance by its corners, he sang in a strong tenor, ‘Who had ten thousand camels and maybe more.’

Nixu snatched the napkin, and flourishing it over his head, went on with abandon, ‘He had rubies and pearls and the loveliest girls.’

Then they slipped their arms into Mahijit’s.

‘But he didn’t know how to do . . . ?’

Mahijit, who’d clearly been through this many times before, looked straight at Toby, and muttered deadpan into his moustache, ‘The rumba.’

At which, Bapa and Nixu laughed and laughed, till they had tears in their eyes.

Mishi had seen Toby come in. They had stopped just short of meeting each other’s gaze. Or had they? It was hard to tell. There were such treacherous currents swirling around them that evening. Gayatri, for one, she could see, would sooner die than let him come over to her. She was, at that very moment, probably saying: ‘Oh, some little air hostess, I don’t know. Vapid as hell. I don’t know why Bapa invites this lot . . . The B-team, if you ask me.’

And how could she, Mishi, just go over? Her boldness from earlier that day had deserted her.

She sat with Isha and Chamunda, whose large solemn eyes grew wider and wider, as her boyfriend, the green-eyed Ismail, gave a long praising account of the Emergency, interspersed with the filthiest language:

‘This madarchodh country, you think it can be ruled by anyone not willing to, bhenchodh, give it to them in the gandh? For centuries they’ve, bhenchodh, been getting it up the you-know-what, had people rogering the hell out of them. Country with her damn legs open. Lying back, and enjoying herself. You think they understand any other language here? Let me tell you: they don’t. And, let me tell you also, it was not her idea; it was his. It was her son, my friend, who finally decided that, bhenchodh, enough is goddam enough. Have to take this place into hand. Give this swine JP any more rope, and he’ll, bhenchodh, hang the lot of us with it. Democracy-shamocracy, it’s a damn good thing this has happened. The guy’s a visionary. He’ll whip this namby-pamby country into shape, you watch. Give him five years. Bloody place will be looking like Singapore.’

Chamunda had her bare feet on a stool, and though she remained perfectly still through this torrent, her dark toes, with their rings of faded gold, occasionally twitched, as if out of nervousness. She was beautiful, but her self-confidence had been damaged in a bad marriage. It had left her the kind of woman who either sought out men like Ismail, who were rough and abusive and treated her a little badly, or settled for men so tame and domesticated that she soon tired of them and was forced to have affairs on top of her affairs, forced to find new lovers to compensate for the inadequacies of her existing lovers.

Mishi, until now, had shown an exaggerated interest in the conversation. She laughed at key moments, energetically asked questions: the kind of thing we do, when our night has a secret purpose and we don’t want to be found out. But, as the evening wore on, and dinner was served, and the lights guttered with a fluctuation, and an even layer of noise and laughter began to settle over the room, a mild depression took hold of her. She began to doubt anything would happen. She began to feel she had misjudged the situation. To be sure, she had felt his eyes on her through the lecture; and, later, when she had come up to him, she was certain she had seen something dazzled and grateful in his expression. He was speechless, and she was the cause, she knew. But had it been only temporary? Had he arrived at Bapa’s, seen his friends, and changed his mind? Perhaps he was already committed, attached, and his reaction had been that of a helpless man. There had been no time to speak to Viski about it. But, surely, if this man was interested, he would have found some way, by now, to approach, to send her word of some kind . . . ?

She felt her earlier energy leave her; it, too, had been part of her secret hope for the evening. And, now that that was thrown into doubt, she was suddenly hot and bothered, bored of the conversation. The room felt congested, the air thick under the wheeling monotony of ceiling fans.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To have a fag.’

‘Have one here!’

‘No. I want to sit in the cool for a while.’

‘Should I come?’

‘No, no, stay. I’ll just be back.’

In those days, most houses had a single air-conditioned bedroom. During parties, it became a smoking room, with people lying louchely on the bed, the sheets in a squalid swirl, the bedside tables cluttered with glass ashtrays. Mishi, receding into the back of the house, prayed it would not be like that today. She needed a moment alone. And, opening a door at right angles to a tube-lit kitchen, from which there came the steady exchange of food and dirty plates, she was relieved to find an empty room. The bed undisturbed; the air smoke-free and cool. She was tempted to lie down, put her feet up, and, with her head against the board, close her eyes for a moment. Her body felt so heavy, every joint hard and strained. It was so good to rest it, to feel its new waxy smoothness. To feel the ribbed contours of the Fabindia bedcover under her body. To gaze with a dreamy eye at a bookshelf lined with P.G. Wodehouse. She now stood up, went into the bathroom, and, leaving the door open a crack, began to pee in the dark.

Who has not done something similar? Not answered the urge to have something happen to you by creating the glimmer of a situation in which it might. Oh, and the peace of the bathroom, away from the harsh sounds of the party, with nothing but a laser-slim strip of light breaking in! The torrential rush of at least one kind of release and beyond, the small risk that she might be discovered, that there might suddenly be voices in the bedroom. But of course there weren’t. It was quiet. And she had only just eased into it, let a light and defenceless swoon come over her, when the quiet was broken into by a thievish flash. The bathroom door gaped, a figure entered, and, with the firm click of a bolt, the darkness returned, pitchier and more closeting than before.

‘Who’s there?’ she said, feigning panic. ‘Who’s there?’

Silence. This new and securer darkness did not respond. A tap came on. And, over the chortling sound of water, the consumptive wheeze of a drain, she heard a voice say, heard
him
say, quite softly, ‘It’s me.’

She smiled. A smile into the darkness is like a smile on the telephone: one of those rare moments, when we make an expression of joy purely for ourselves.