The Way Things Were (9 page)

‘Where are we going?’

‘To Hampi.’

‘What? In a car? I thought it was hundreds of miles away.’

‘It is.’

‘Satzriakal, ji. Sanu taxi di lodh si gi.’

‘You speak Punjabi?!’

‘Just a little.’

‘Kithe jaana e ji?’

‘Gwalior.’

‘Gwalior?’

‘Gwalior?’

‘We can’t tell him Hampi; he’s never heard of it. Let’s just take him out of his comfort area gradually. Lunch in Gwalior; then, with a little incentive, cocktails in Kalasuryaketu; and once we’ve picked up my writer friend, old Vijaipal, we’ll head south. Then, on the banks of the Tungabhadra, I will ask you to marry me.’

‘Bloody fool!’

But, even as she said it, she could see it was not a joke. Not, at least, in the sense of the very idea of it being a joke. And if she’d been having lunch that afternoon with a friend, instead of going south with him, and the friend had said, so, what is he like?, she might have said, ‘He is the kind of man who, having only just met a girl, can tell if he means to marry her.’ ‘Wow, ya, really? Sounds great. Romantic, yaar.’ ‘Yes. In the sense of him knowing who he is. But don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying he has drive or ambition or any of the other things we associate with this kind of confidence. In fact, I wonder if his certainties are not just a way to keep the world out.’

Would she have known so much so early? Hard to say. But – as much as she would later tell her children, ‘Oh, you kids, you’re so cautious these days! With me, I just jumped into a taxi with your father one morning and that was it’ – when she saw the tall sleepy sardar driver emerge from the canvas tent outside the Oberoi Hotel, she was not acting as spontaneously as she liked later to make out. She was, in fact, thinking,
If getting into this taxi now means, goodbye to air-hostessing, goodbye to respectability, goodbye to my relationship with Mama, even if it means goodbye to Delhi, for a
long, long time, then so be it, and good riddance – for, as far as I’m concerned, someone has shown me an out, thrown me a line, and I would be a fool not to take it.

The car barrelled south; the sun rose; the heat was exquisite. It was worse with every hour; it was as if they were making a journey to the source of the parching breath that blew in through the open windows. The enemy of moisture. It did not even make them sweat; to sweat would have been better; but it seemed by just blowing over them to rob their body of its liquids. They soaked her shaneel dupatta in water and draped it over the Rexene seat. They took turns lying in each other’s laps. By 3 p.m., the arid hills had begun to appear, and the land grew scorched and ravined.

The driver, alone, was serene. He had a wet handkerchief rolled up behind his neck. And, save for a brief query at Gwalior as to whether they wished to go further – receiving, in reply, new and more generous terms – he said nothing. By late afternoon the bare and eroded kernels of hills that must once have been mountains began to appear. Hills covered in burnt yellow grass.

‘You can see why we have so many words for brown,’ Toby said. He was sitting up; the sight of the hills had revived him, the hills that anticipated the Tamas
ā
.

‘I can’t think of even one.’

‘Oh, there are many. It’s like ice and the Eskimos: aru
ṇ
a, pi
ṅ
gala, kadru . . .’

‘Go on!’

‘It’s true.’

‘I mean: go on.’

‘Oh, what, just off the top of my head? Babhru. Like
brun
and brown.’

‘Wait. Are you making this stuff up?’

‘What stuff? The cognate stuff?’

‘Yes. What does that mean anyway, cognate?’

‘It means born together with,
co
+
natus
. And
natus
from
(g)nascor
is cognate with the Sanskrit root
jan
from where we have janma and the Ancient Greek genná
ō
, to beget. Genesis, too. Or, here is another one:
lubh
, to be perplexed or disturbed, become disordered, go astray; to desire greatly or eagerly; to entice, allure . . .’

‘Oooh, how exciting. What
cognates
does that have?’

He smiled. The car had begun to climb for Kalasuryaketu. The heat was gone. Soon the Tamas
ā
would be visible. Soon they would be having drinks on his terrace. Soon she would be bathed and dressed. And beautiful again. But, for now, she was sprawled out on the car seat, her head in his lap. Her face was covered in a film of sweat and dust; her hair was rough and dishevelled; even her dark breasts, pressing against the black cloth of her kurta, had a moist and begrimed look about them.

‘With the Latin
lubet
,
libet
,
libido
; the German
liob
,
lieb
,
lieben
; the Anglo-Saxon
leof
.’

‘Toby!’

‘In English?’

‘Yes, in English.’

‘Love only.’

The Shiv Niwas was less a palace than it was a fort, a line of rooms and terraces on a high rampart overlooking the river. Which, at that hour, was dark and scarcely visible. There was no moonlight on its broad expanse, no riverfront as such. The only sign of the river at all was the weak reflection of electric light, lapping black and yellow on its margin.

Most of the year, the place was closed up. And there was great excitement that Raja saab had arrived from Delhi. In one day, and with a lady friend!

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I would have driven up to fetch you.’

‘Oh, there’s no need, Labu, it was painless.’

‘No, but really: it’s the limit. And madam, can you imagine making her drive up in heat like that?’

‘She’s a tough old thing, Sharada.’

‘Haw! The way you talk. Now, tell me quickly, should I set drinks on the terrace? Or will you eat something first? I’ve put two buckets of hot water, for you and madam.’

‘Drinks, then dinner. Has my guest arrived?’

‘Yes, yes. He’s been here for days. Reading, writing, visiting temples and whatnot. Such a strange man. Looks just like an Indian, but speaks like a pukka Angrez.’

‘He’s never lived here, Sharada; he is a pukka Angrez. And show some respect: he’s a famous, famous writer in the West.’

‘But, on the face of it, he could be from here. Not like you, Raja saab. So fair and European-seeming, but, in your heart, a pukka desi.’

On the terrace, some moments later, Vijaipal said, ‘And your friend, Toby? Will she be joining us?’

‘Any moment, Vijay. She’s still recovering from the drive up, I imagine. I’m dying for a drink. What are you having?’

‘I’ll have whatever you’re having. I bought some whisky for you from the duty-free in London. Do you want that?’

‘No, let’s save that for the trip. Here, I have . . .’ He tried in the faint tube-light from a battery-powered torch to make out the labels. ‘There’s some Scotch, some Indian whisky, which you don’t want . . .’

‘Yes, let’s give that a miss.’

‘Beefeater—’

‘Lovely, Toby. I’ll have the gin with what? . . . Soda, I suppose.’

‘Soda.’

Once Toby’s back was turned, his mind raced. In the early hours of a romance, when you think you have it in you to be holed up for days, there is nothing more tantalizing than not being able to do so, to have to come down for drinks or dinner, to behave normally in front of a guest, to conceal your desire, to speak of the Emergency and of the decay of Hinduism, when all you want to be doing . . .

And it had been so much stronger than anything he could have imagined. Seeing her unbathed in her kurta, searching for clothes in his cupboard, for soap, for shampoo, her legs exposed, the most evil reek wafting past him. Of armpits, of unwashed hair, of sweat turning to vinegar in the crevasses, pits and folds of her body. It had produced in him the unquenchable arousal of the morning, when it seems like nothing will release you from it. And when he blindsided her on the way to the bathroom, and she stood on her tiptoes clenching her fists against the wooden cupboard and muttering, ‘But your friend, Toby, your friend,’ he had, inhaling her, feared something would not give, and would leave him aching with desire. Right to the end, when she was a flood under him and he could still smell her on his mouth, he had feared that. And nothing had helped: not the nails she dug into his back, not the fist she fastened around his testicles as if meaning to tear them off, not her arcing her body up and driving his face into her armpits, nothing, till, at last, she had, with a surgeon’s precision, dug her one red-nailed digit an inch into what was like the source of his resistance, conquering, in a sharp stab of joy and surprise and release, the little redoubt of sphincteral tension.

Then, for many minutes, with the gratitude and fatigue of a child, he had watched himself make his way out of her: a cautious, nacreous stream picking a course through the inflamed folds of dark skin.

‘Extraordinary, Toby, to have done it all in a day, the drive. I think the staff here are quite amazed!’

‘Well! I had a supportive team. And, besides, it’s such a relief not to be spending the night on the way, Vijay. What about yourself? Did you get here easily enough? I suppose this Emergency business has thrown your writing plans into a swivet?’

‘Not at all, you know, not at all. India has this way of distracting one, of luring one into her little problems, so that you forget the big ones, the ones you could see easily when you first arrived . . .’

‘A pageant / to keep us in false gaze!’

‘Yes! Very nice. Nice to hear it used like that.’

He handed him his drink. The weak but constant white light, edged now with a better though less reliable light from the fanooses, sank deep into the patchwork of Vijaipal’s face, which was drawn and pulpy by turns. There was something serious, and a little embittered, in that face. Toby had never minded it before. But his mild impatience now told him how much Uma already possessed him, how much he wished her there, with her femininity and laughter, to cut the gaunt seriousness of this man.

‘No, I think all it will do, this Emergency, Toby, is allow Indians to see themselves a little more clearly.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, by shattering the illusion of liberal democracy. It’s very bad, you know, Toby, when you’re such a third-rate place, to parade around high notions of liberalism and democracy, which, as you know, developed at the height of another civilization’s achievement; and which, in a place like India, only mask the reality. Hide the decay. Much better the end come fast.’

At this Vijaipal laughed and Toby was surprised to find that, though he said nothing he did not agree with, he was unable to share in his pessimism. He found himself distracted, looking back at the dimly lit rooms behind him. Without even being asked, he said, ‘I’m sure she’ll be here any minute. We had a very late night, then the drive . . .’

‘But, Toby, you must tell me of your own interest in Indian things, in Sanskrit. Because in my experience with Indians, the privileged ones, at least, they either have open contempt for their culture or they revere it away with foolish pieties.
Sanskrit is the mother of all languages
, that kind of thing, you know? Which is another way of not dealing with it.’

Toby nodded his head vigorously, then, unable to control himself, cried into the back of the house, ‘Sharada, take a look to see if the Dilli-wali-madam is all right, see if she needs anything. Tell her we’re sitting out here.’

When he turned back he saw Vijaipal was smiling, a smile at once generous and accusing.

‘Is it all very new?’

‘Yes!’ Toby said sheepishly, and felt a great sense of relief, felt he could now talk to Vijaipal properly, now that he knew.

‘You look very much
in
. . .’ Vijaipal paused, searching for the right word.

‘In something! Yes. I fear so.’

‘You’ll tell me about it later, Toby, you’ll tell me all about it later, yes?’

‘I will.’

Now they stopped talking, for there were padding sounds of footsteps behind them, and, a moment later, out of the darkness, with the rustle of a bush or some potted plant, Uma appeared. In grey Adidas track pants, her hair wet and twined, pulled over one shoulder, where it soaked the thin muslin of an oversized kurta, making visible, even in the darkness, her bra strap and skin.

‘I’m so sorry. You won’t believe it . . .’

‘You fell asleep?!’ he said without thinking, in his enthusiasm at seeing her, in his wish to suppress with words, any words, the power of the impression she had made on him. But it had the opposite effect, for the look that passed between them contained all the secrets of the bedroom. And she was twice – no, three times – embarrassed: for her lateness, for the way she was dressed, for the intimacy that had become evident, and that excluded Vijaipal. Vijaipal, in whose easy admiration of Uma, in the frank pleasure of his gaze – his evident delight that she had joined them – Toby was able to relive his own pleasure at seeing her.

He left them to get her a drink and to recover his equanimity, to revel in the passive pleasure of listening to someone, for whom your feelings are new and strong, make conversation with someone who is a stranger to them, but not to you. He poured the drink slowly, as conversation began behind him, with the shy discomfort of musicians warming up, every note seeming at first to sound false.

By the time he’d returned with Uma’s drink, he had almost to fear for his own inclusion.

‘Toby, Mishi was just . . .’

‘
Uma
,’ he said, handing her her drink.

‘Uma?’

‘It’s true. It’s my real name.’

‘Is it really? And they called you Mishi? I’m afraid Toby is right . . .’ He stopped himself. ‘These names! Where do they come from? From an embarrassment with Indian things, no doubt, an embarrassment even at the sound of Sanskrit?’

‘It’s funny you ask,’ Toby said, suddenly at his ease. ‘People have a strange relationship with these things. No one would seriously give their child a name like Mishi or Toby, never as their real name – they would only ever give them a Sanskrit name – but as—’