The Way Things Were (13 page)

At last, when Dhanalakshmi said, ‘The only reason I’m not . . .’ – and paused, Toby said, ‘Oh, don’t be silly! You can talk freely in front of Uma.’

At hearing her name Uma swung around. And, now looking at Dhanalakshmi, she said, ‘Would you like me to leave the room? I can.’

‘Oh, no, no! Don’t be silly, darling,’ Dhanalakshmi began. ‘A friend of Toby’s is a friend of mine.’

‘I’m not his friend.’

‘Uma?’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Dhanalakshmi said, ‘foolish of me to have said that. I was just being extra cautious, you know. So, it’s nothing. It’s just that the PM’s daughter-in-law frequently buys antiques from me, which is why I have been spared
la terreur
. That’s all; nothing, really, you see. Shall we go outside and take a look at the new things, Toby? I’ve had some fabulous stuff come in. What with everyone trying to get rid of it as quickly as possible! Come, come. Uma, I hope you’ll join us.’

‘I’d love to, Dhanalakshmi.’

And so, with everything a little on edge between them, they went out to the warehouse and showroom Dhanalakshmi had behind her house. Evening was falling. Not the long melancholy evening of the north, but something swifter and spongier, an expansive humid darkness of big leaves and naked bulbs.

‘I wish I could have done more bandobast,’ Dhanalakshmi said, gesturing to a trolley on which there was ice and soda and a bottle of Black Dog. It stood at a pebbled intersection between the warehouse – a corrugated roof with canvas curtains for walls – and the showroom, a well-lit place, beyond whose glass doors the bright colours of paintings and the long shadows of bronzes were visible.

‘You don’t have anything softer, do you, Dhanalakshmi?’

‘No! Uma, dear! I only wish,’ Dhanalakshmi said, with an incredulity that had the effect of making her apology seem both exaggerated and insincere. ‘We’re all Scotch drinkers in this house.’

‘That’s fine. I’m happy with Scotch.’

They made their drinks and were heading towards the warehouse that housed stone sculpture, when Uma said, ‘You know, I think I’ll see the showroom first, then join you outside.’

‘But it’ll get dark,’ Toby said, ‘You won’t be able to see a thing.’

Dhanalakshmi’s large lawyerly eyes swelled in anticipation, as if to say, ‘See, Toby, what a fool of a woman you’ve found.’

‘Never mind,’ Uma said. ‘I’ll see what I can.’ And with a long meaning smile, as if to say goodbye, she peeled away from them.

‘OK. We’ll see you outside then,’ Toby said airily.

As she walked away, sipping her strong and unfamiliar drink, Uma had the first taste of a feeling that she would come to know well. It was not, as Vijaipal, had anticipated, a feeling of contempt for Toby’s weakness; Toby was not weak, it was something else. Without trying too hard to analyse its cause, it was a feeling of being alone around Toby, even when –
especially
when – Toby was present. It was a kind of metaphysical solitude, confined to the unit of two. And this feeling, at least, of being alone when he was there, of which she had the first taste that evening, would prove to be a corrosive influence on their relationship, especially when blacker times approached.

Apart from the force of her emotion, making her receptive in ways she might not have been, deepening her sense of solitude in the showroom, a place of gleam and shadow, where the antiquities seemed still to possess something of the violation of being torn from their natural nooks, she was aware of the earliest beginnings of a sensibility she had never possessed before. These objects of devotion, the gods alone, or with their consorts, sometimes seated, sometimes standing, now in bronze, now in stone, had never made any kind of impression on her. She had never even thought to consider them as objects of beauty. She would not have known what to look for. They had no context for her; they were simply of the past. A vast and amorphous past, without feature or point of reference. She might more easily have been able to give shape to the history of England: she might have been able to locate the Battle of Hastings, Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, the Industrial Revolution on a timeline. India’s history – British presence excepted, events such as Plassey and the Mutiny of 1857 – was all fog.

But, now, fresh from the past few weeks with Toby and Vijaipal, she had, for the first time, the vaguest impression of the terrain, its contours and its fault lines. The coming or not coming of the Aryans; the role of Sanskrit, purely liturgical for a period, a language of literature and statecraft thereafter; the contest between Buddhism and Hinduism; the emergence of vernaculars at the same time as in Europe; the arrival, violent or non-violent, of Islam. She now also had a scatty knowledge of the gods and their lives. And these things had changed her way of looking. They made her look with feeling at what had been closed to her before. She did not have knowledge as yet, but she had the whisper of a way in.

Walking by a Kushan Bodhisattva, ashen-faced and long-moustached, Uma saw that the label read Gandhara, second to third century
AD
. Gandhara! Such an evocative name, seeming to contain resonance even to the untrained ear. And had she not heard Toby just the other day say, ‘I can never look at the art of Gandhara without seeing in it the faces of the Frontier.’ Or the fat Khmer Ganesh she passed . . . Had Toby or Vijaipal not said, ‘It was one of the most amazing transmissions of culture the world has known. No army, not a drop of blood spilt, no colonization, as such, and yet, by the end of a few hundred years, south-east Asia, all the way to Java, was dripping with Sanskritic culture . . .’ Or, most wonderful of all, after their conversation about peacocks, a twelfth-century Ganga period Skanda, astride his peacock.

It was, by far, the most beautiful thing in the room. From the hard realism of its clawed feet, to the graded and stony play of light on its tail, to the Skanda himself, god of war. His many arms casting wild shadows over the room. His one exposed leg, blacker and shinier than the rest of his body, gave an indication both of the height he would have sat at in the temple from which he had been wrenched, and the regard people had had for him over the centuries: touching what was beautiful, bringing it to shine.

It was like this, her anger slaked, that she, in a reverie of sorts, found herself in a distant room at the back of the showroom. A storage area of a kind. Damp and musty, illuminated by the light of a bulb hanging from a long wire.

It housed what the showroom could not hold. Uma went through a pile of miniatures stacked neatly on a table;
nothing so special
, she thought to herself. She sat on her haunches and fanned through a dozen or so Tanjore paintings that had been left leaning against the cemented wall of the backroom. She was about to go out when she heard voices in the showroom, and, from a childish desire to be found, rather than to find and risk appearing aimless and lost, she decided to stay on in the dingy backroom. She spotted several large picchvais – she recognized them from Toby’s descriptions – leaning one against the other. She went over and began to go through them, when she stopped at the picchvai of the peacocks.

Even from the limited view she had of it, she could see it was something very special. Even in that dim light it stood out from the rest. Its near-total whiteness made it seem like a blank or unfinished canvas. She had just about managed to get it out when Toby entered. The sight that greeted him was of Uma standing in front of the most beautiful picchvai he had ever seen.

The painting adhered to every convention of the form while subverting them all. The dark hills; the monsoon sky; the play of thunder on the crests of the hills; a river meandering down: virtual clichés of the form had been compressed into a six-inch band at the top of the painting: a panoramic miniature. The rest of the canvas was devoted to great pluming explosions of white, feathers ostrich-like in their size and flamboyance. White on white: a joyful homage to this – what does one even call it? – shade, pigment, colour, this notoriously difficult thing to bring texture and distinction to. There was something euphoric about the way the paint, almost like plaster or lime, had been smeared on to the canvas. And, from this formless pallor, the artist made the smallest concessions to form, to the reality of what was, in fact, being represented. White dancing peacocks. Here, barely distinguishable, was the outline of a plumy eye, there a pair of real and beady eyes, small and black and hard; now a beak, now a vicious clawed foot. At the centre of this formless eulogy to white was a single perfectly realized blue peacock.

‘The Krishna,’ Toby breathed.

He was behind her now. She could almost feel him against her. And for a moment she did not understand what he meant.

‘You see what he’s doing? Instead of taking the Krishna, the god, as his subject, he’s playing on the very meaning of that word K
ṛ
ṣ
ṇ
a, which before it is applied to the god, simply means black, like
Č
ernyi, in Russian. He’s taking this essentially devotional form of art and making colour – he’s a painter, after all! – the object of devotion And, look: at the centre of his tribute to white, there is – in disguise, mind you – the god whose name means black. It’s exquisite, Uma. A mor kuti picchvai. And we were only just talking about peacocks.’

‘I thought of you the moment I saw it.’

‘It should be ours. I’ll speak to Dhanalakshmi. It must be ours.’

‘Ours?’

‘Yes,
ours
. And then his whose inheritance it will be one day.’

‘Who’s that, Toby?’ she said, though she knew perfectly well. She wanted to hear it from him.

‘Skanda, of course.’

‘Toby?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘Are you asking me to marry you?’

Gauri is in the flat, standing before the picchvai of the peacocks.

‘They’re in disguise!’ she says casually. ‘Krishna and his gopis. Krishna is the blue peacock, the white peacocks his gopis. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

He knows that he will sleep with her. Not because he is attracted to her, but because it is not frightening to sleep with her. Her frail, small-boned body, seeming to speak of pain and damage, comforts him. He knows, if his mother or sister met her, they would say, ‘Skanda is drawn to birds with broken wings.’ But they do not think of him – and here an exocentric compound would have been useful – as one whose wings are broken too.

He is at the
ṣ
a
ṣ
ṭ
ha sarga, the sixth canto: the betrothal.

‘Who is being betrothed?’ she asks, on the first afternoon they sleep together. It is raining at last. And even in that dark flat, into which Narindar has never allowed white light to enter, there is now an imperceptible softness. Like the passing of a threat, like a fear proved false.

‘Shiva and Uma, of course. And it is she who proposes: “d
ā
t
ā
me bh
ū
| bh
ṛ
t
ā
ṃ
n
ā
tha
ḥ
pram
ā
ṇ
ī
| kriyat
ā
m iti . . . ”’

‘Easy, Tiger. Slow down.’

She is lying on her stomach. Her hips are wide, her bones visible, her breasts sallow and low-slung. It is a miracle she’s forty-three; she seems like a child, a knowing child, but a child nonetheless.

‘D
ā
t
ā
me?’

‘“The giver of me – my father: the Lord of Mountains gives me in marriage,” she says, “you must recognize his authority.”’

‘Bold,’ Gauri says.

‘Yes. The women in this poem have nothing to do with what the men in saffron say the ideal Hindu woman should be like.’

‘In the sense . . .?’

‘In the sense that they are far from demure; they are sexually liberated and experienced; they drink wine. Even if you take the moment when Shiva’s wedding procession passes through the streets of Himalaya’s capital, O
ṣ
adhiprastha . . . The windows of the town are filled with the faces of women who reek of rum or spirit. And whose eyes are vilola . . .’

‘Vilola?’

‘Moving to and fro. Agitated. Tremulous. Like swarming bees. And their girdles are only half-done up. They’re dropping jewels as they run to the window. One woman’s waistband comes undone as she goes to see Shiva go by, and she doesn’t even bother to do it up. She just stands there holding it. And Kalidasa describes the rings of her hand as illuminating her navel. Another has only a single eye kohled – such is her urgency. Still another has lost the ribbon in her hair and the mass of it has come undone.’

‘Are these prostitutes?’

‘No, no! These are the beautiful women of the town. My father would always say, “These goons in saffron, they say they want a Hindu renaissance, they have no idea what a Hindu renaissance would entail. Their shitty little values about sex and food would be the first thing to go out of the window”. But try telling them that!’

‘Did he try, your father?’

‘In his way, he did, yes. But he was very passive.’

‘And your mother?’

Ah! That moment when a girl first asks you about your mother.

‘Not passive,’ he says and laughs.

‘Not passive? What kind of answer is that?’

‘An evasive one. I’m joking. She was a dragon and she ate him up.’

‘A dragon!?’

‘Well, maybe, not a dragon. But tough. And she couldn’t stand what she thought of as his weakness, his aloofness, his fatalism. Call it what you want.’

‘How did it manifest itself?’

‘In many ways. But the first time was soon after they were married. There was a raid on our palaces in Kalasuryaketu.’

‘On our palaces in Kalasuryaketu! . . . Oh, look at you, the little lord Fauntleroy . . .’

‘Trust me, if you saw them, you wouldn’t be saying that.’

‘Why! In bad shape?’

‘Holes in the ceiling. Returning to dust, virtually.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry. Go on.’

‘Well, it was the time of the Emergency so the raid in itself was nothing out of the ordinary. Everyone was being raided in those days. It was more the way my father reacted to it. His equanimity in the face of it, his resignation. A foretaste of things to come. And my mother, I think, was alarmed. It was also incidentally the first time she met my stepfather.’