The Way Things Were (8 page)

‘But what if it had not been me?’ the voice probed, making her laugh out loud.

‘Then I would have raised a hue and cry.’

‘Oh, would you have?’ he said, and she could sense he was smiling too, but she could not gauge the distance at which he stood.

‘You know, I really do need to finish peeing.’

‘Go ahead. Please.’

And it was so odd: the way he said it, she felt she could.

Later, she never forgot the feeling of safety he had given her, the steadiness of his hand; the sense, very early on, that she could be naked before him. Later, she found other things, but never again that security. It was the closest thing she had known to the protections of childhood, and it stayed with her forever: the running tap, the entombing darkness, her allowing herself to pee in the presence of a stranger, who stood waiting, as if he had been waiting forever, and would go on waiting, until she was ready.

But, of course, she was ready. For she had been waiting too.

‘But what is this waiting?’ the girl Skanda has just been introduced to asks.

She is tiny, scrawny as a bird – her wrists scarcely two inches round – but her eyes are vast and liquid, full of the alarm and wonder of a child. Kitten Singh brought her over with a triumphant, ‘Meet Gauri! She was married to a Sanskritist.’ But it is not Sanskrit that draws them to each other; it is their need for a quiet corner away from this brunch of politicians, TV anchors, writers and journalists. The moment he is with her the room recedes. The guests, so threatening till a moment ago, become like a carousel of half-familiar faces, gliding by them as they speak.

He notices his father’s old friend, the Raja of Marukshetra: a heavy-set, elegant man, with a stern moustache and large eyes. He’s dressed that afternoon in a tight white churidar and a pale blue kurta; he has a spittoon in one hand, a Bloody Mary in the other. Skanda can also make out a dark-skinned woman, a little fat, magnificently unmade-up, with no jewellery save for a gold star anise in her nose. Chamunda! Beside her, a much larger woman, full of laughter and boisterous conversation. Vandana, he suspects. It is still the city of his childhood, but there are changes: Gayatri Mann is in a wheel-chair. Her head drops to one side and she speaks with difficulty out of the corner of her mouth.

‘It happened,’ Kitten Singh had said earlier, trying to catch him up on everyone’s news at once, ‘when she was in New York. Bapa is not with us anymore either. He passed on last year. But, you know who’s flourishing? Nixu Mohapatra. He’s Chief Minister of Odra, for the umpteenth time! He still doesn’t speak a word of the local language. Can you believe it? But the people, they love him for it. They say it protects him from corrupting voices. This must be what your father used to describe as “that innate Indian distrust of oneself”.’

Soon after this survey of the room, Kitten Singh had brought Gauri over. And it was a relief.

‘This waiting?’ Skanda says now. ‘It is a description of those periods in our lives when we suffer . . . for love – or for our art . . . You said, you were a writer, yes?’

‘Hardly a writer. I write copy for websites.’

‘Well, anyway, the canto I’m referring to is called “Asceticism Bears Fruit”. And it is Uma who has taken up the ascetic’s robes.’

‘But what is the fruit?’

‘The love of Shiva.’

‘Oh, romantic. Is this what the English call sentimental poetry?’

He feels his gorge rise.

‘More sentimental than the sonnets?’ he says.

‘Ah, but there the language is very specific. Very concrete. It brings something real to mind. Here it is all red lotuses and thunder clouds. Moons, creepers, rivers, submarine fires. It’s so stylized. What was that funny word you just used? You know, for the colour of Uma’s robes?’

‘Babhru?’

‘Yes, that’s the one! Babhru to you too! Sorry! I’m being a little supercilious, aren’t I?’

‘It’s a word for brown,’ Skanda says calmly. ‘Reddish-brown. Tawny. It is described as the colour of a young or infant sun. It has the same origin as brown in English or
braun
in German.’

And now, for the first time, into those elongated eyes some respect seems to creep. She says something he likes; she says, ‘We, in India, prefer to take the long road back to India, don’t we? Via the West, preferably. Like this house – look at it: all this beaten brass and floral ceramics, the block print cloth . . . it feels like India . . .’

‘ . . . Returned to India via the Kings Road?’

‘Yes!’

Emboldened, he says, ‘And, Gauri, this colour she wears, it is very specific. It is the most Indian of Indian colours. It is that smoky-saffron-brown colour. Which is the colour of the rising and setting sun here, and practically nowhere else. I’ve seen it a thousand times myself from the window of a train or car, leaving the city at dawn.’

‘I haven’t left the city much recently; and never at dawn, at any rate.
I
have a young son myself . . .’

Something about the way she says this makes him feel that there is more to her antipathy for Sanskrit than he first thought.

Kitten Singh returns.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ she says, with sudden urgency. ‘Did you tell your mother you were coming here?’

‘No, we haven’t spoken . . .’

‘Good move. I’m fine with her, of course; and I’m in touch with your Isha Massi—’

‘Will she be coming?’ he interrupts.

‘Here? No, no. But I see her occasionally. Your mother, however, I think she still bears a grudge from the old days, from Gulmarg, you know.’

He feels a stab of guilt – he should not have come, he knows – but before he can say anything more, she says, ‘But the reason I came to find you is to tell you – I can’t believe I just thought of it! – you know what day it is today?’

‘No?’ he says.

‘It’s 26 June! The day I first met your father, some thirty-five years ago. Would you believe it? And what a night we had that night. We were at Bapa’s house, I remember – it was just after the Emergency was declared. And we went from there to the Cellar after Bapa’s . . . you’re too young to remember: it was a famous nightclub of that time. And then, finally, we ended up, all of us, at the Oberoi coffee shop. We must have been out till dawn that night. Drinking, smoking joints, phalana-dhimkana . . . What times those were, mad times! There was such a . . . I don’t know. I see you children today and you’ve seen it all. We were such innocents. But willing to try anything. Once, you know! And, your father – tobah! – was
he
a wild thing! So bold.

‘We had to get him out of town that night, you know. Because – this is so funny! – while we were in the Oberoi, the lights suddenly went out – you know, the usual power cut/shower cut. And, with everyone several sheets to the wind, he leaps up onto a table, your father, and makes an announcement in the dark, if you please. He says he will give any man willing to assassinate Mrs Gandhi £1,000. Now, my God, Skanda, all hell broke loose. Can you imagine: a man, just after Mrs Gandhi has declared a state of Emergency, offering money to an assassin to kill her. Meri to uddhar hi nikal gayi. When the lights came on, pin-drop silence. Not a squeak. I said, “Toby, tu iddron nikal. There are intelligence men everywhere; the management is up in arms; you’d best get out of here.” He said, “Kitten, I was meant to leave for Hampi in a few days.” I said, “Leave now. This minute. Phoran. Just go.”’

Gauri says, ‘But how would they have known it was his voice if the lights were out?’

He likes her for asking this; nothing passes her by.

‘Gauri, my dear, don’t be so silly. They have their ways. And the accent, no? Unmistakable. How many people would have spoken like that? And a prince, to boot; they would have flayed him alive. Old Mrs G, you know how she despised the princes!’

‘And did he leave, my father?’

‘Oh, that very night. Or morning, rather. At sunrise.’

‘With my mother?’

‘I don’t think she was in the picture yet.’

‘I’d always heard they met that night?’

‘Well, maybe she was there. I don’t remember. But romantic, no? Foolhardy! An outlawed prince leaving town at dawn . . .’

‘When the sun was but an orange-brown infant?!’ Gauri offers.

‘Screw you,’ Skanda says, laughing.

‘It’s straight out of . . .’ Kitten begins, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Mills and Boon?’

‘No, no, silly girl, Shakespeare, Cervantes. Not Mills and Boon. Chalo, I must tend to my guests. You two are fine?’

‘Fine.’

‘Good. I’m sure you’ll get along famously.’

He thinks not, but then he wonders . . . It feels like one of those remarks one remembers later. And even this meeting, it has an odd feeling of significance to it. There’s something about Gauri.

Once Kitten Singh has gone, she says abruptly, ‘It has a bad reputation, you know, your great language. Here, at least, it has been co-opted by all the worst people. Every Hindu nut from here to Kanyakumari.’

‘I know.’ He wants to say,
More than you could ever know
, but he stops himself. ‘What can I say? People will have the past speak in ways that have more to do with the present than the past.’

‘You’re smart,’ she says prissily, spoiling the intimacy that has grown between them. ‘I hope to see more of you. There are not too many people in this town who – to steal a phrase from Proust – are part of “the aristocracy of the mind”.’

He wants to get away again, but she unexpectedly says, ‘Skanda, if you’re in Delhi for a while, I’d like you to meet my son, Kartik.’

‘Your son? Why?’

‘Oh, because,’ she says, coolly, ‘I think it will be nice for him to meet a likeable Sanskritist for once. It’ll be a change after that swine, his father.’

‘I knew it!’ Skanda says and begins to laugh.

‘Knew what?’ She says defensively.

‘That you had married a rotter, and that it had coloured your view of Sanskrit . . .’

‘My view of Sanskrit is not coloured.’

‘Come on!’

She laughs now too. ‘Well, a little perhaps. Yours would be too, if you lived with an abusive little shit who thought he was Shiva, and found all the validation he needed in Sanskrit texts.’

As they’re leaving, she says, ‘I mean it, Babhru. I really do want you to meet Kartik. I’ll call you soon.’

A fat orange sun, sulphurous as a bomb, rose over the land outside Delhi. It burnt away every trace of the night, under whose cover so much had been possible. The two people asleep in the back of the Ambassador were in that state before wakefulness, when the mind tries frantically to reconstitute the fragments of the night. Which, having known no unity save the now dispersed darkness, resist being threaded together.

The car barrelled south; they came in and out of sleep. But, every now and then, an eye, red and sticky, glued together, would open and gaze furtively at the semiconscious form of the other. The lolling head; the drawn lines; the faces soggy with sleep and drink; the muscles around the mouth tightening and flexing – the hint of stale breath – the sudden flicking back of the head in the eternal (and futile) search for a better resting place. It was such intimate company for two strangers to find themselves in. And it was with a mixture of wonder and awkwardness, the night’s memories returning as a flood, that they became aware of their flight from the capital.

*

The night before, there was this exchange outside the coffee shop of the Oberoi.

‘In Sanskrit, Mishi . . .’ Toby said, and stopped. ‘Mishi? What kind of name is that?’

‘It’s short for Michelle!’

‘Michelle? Is that your real name?’

‘It’s actually Uma, but—’

‘Uma! You can’t have as grand a name as Uma and call yourself Mishi! No, no, no. You must go back to Uma. And, as I was saying, Uma – yes, Uma! Much better . . . So, as I was saying, in Sanskrit we have a dual number. A whole declension for things that come in twos, such as Toby and Uma . . .’

‘If I’m no longer Mishi, surely you can’t be Toby.’

‘All right then. What shall I be?’

‘Whatever you really are!’

‘But I’m really Toby.’

‘I mean whatever you are, if you’re not Toby, the way I’m Uma, if I’m not really Mishi.’

‘Oh, you mean what I really-really am!’

‘Yes. What you really-really are, if you’re not really Toby.’

‘No.’

‘No? Why no?’

‘It’s too long.’

‘What do you mean too long?’

‘It won’t work. What I really-really am is too long.’

‘Try me.’

‘Ghanashyama Mayurdhvaja Pashupati Rao . . .’

‘OK, OK. Toby.’

‘But you are definitely still Uma.’

‘I’ve never been called Uma.’

‘But now you will be. And as I was saying, Uma, in Sanskrit we have a dual number, devoted solely to those things that come in twos. So, for instance, if I were to say, we go, as in we all, you, me and this rather annoying woman called Kitten Singh – and we thought we had problems! – who has attached herself to me and won’t let go, and who wants me to leave town for what I just said, a moment ago, when the lights were out, but who I suspect is one of those women who creates false intimacies just so that she can get into one’s trousers . . .’

‘One’s trousers?’

‘My trousers. Now, if I were to say, we all go, and I meant to include her, I would say, gacch
ā
ma
ḥ
.’

‘Gacch
ā
ma
ḥ
?’

‘Correct. The first person plural. But, if for instance, Uma, I wanted to say, let’s you and I—’

‘When the evening is spread out against the sky?’

‘Yes! If I wanted to say, let’s just you and I, having successfully ditched this old bore Kitten Singh, go, then I would say – wait for it – gacch
ā
va
ḥ
. The first person dual.’

At this Uma, for that was who she was now, drove her index finger into the front of his trousers and drew him close. ‘OK, Ghanashyama Mayurdhvaja Pashupati Rao of Kalasuryaketu, aka Toby. Gacch
ā
va
ḥ
!’

Moments later, as the sky brightened, they stood outside the Oberoi Hotel before a sleeping encampment of Sikh taxi drivers.