The Way Things Were (14 page)

‘At the raid? How?’

‘Ironically, my father, who had met him some months before in Delhi, called him in to help.’

‘Isn’t it always that way? With certain people.’

‘What way?’

‘They put in place the mechanism for their own undoing.’

‘You’ve been reading too much Marx. I think he just thought of him as someone who might be able to help. He felt he spoke the same language as the taxmen.’

‘Yes. But these things are never as random as they seem; they always represent something important, a shift, you know. And women are better able to discern these things.’

‘What things?’

‘Shifts of power. The irrelevance of one class, the rise of another. Over-refinement in one place, vitality in another.’

‘Why?’

‘Why, what?’

‘Why are women better able to see these things?’

‘I’m not sure. And not all women, you know. Only some.’

‘What kind of women?’

‘The ones who are made uneasy by weakness, by what is obsolete and therefore dangerous.’

‘I thought women liked men who were dangerous.’

She laughs. ‘That’s another kind of dangerous, bozo.’ Then, after a pause, ‘Where is he?’

‘Who?’

‘Your Dad,’ she says somewhat coyly.

‘Dead.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘How long?’

‘How long what?’

‘How long ago did he die?’

‘Eight weeks ago.’

‘What?! Holy shit.’

She sits bolt upright in bed.

‘What?’

‘No, no, no!’

‘No, no, no . . . what?’

‘Skanda, you do
not
look and behave like someone whose father died eight weeks ago. There’s something wrong.’

‘Wrong? Why? How does someone whose father died eight weeks ago look and behave?’

‘Like he might still be dealing with it. Skanda, you don’t seem to be dealing with anything. If this is not easy for you, it should be impossibly hard. You’re either some kind of sociopath or you’re suppressing something . . . Your mother said your father was passive?’

‘Pathologically passive.’

‘Skanda, you have some strain of the disease too.’

Toby and Uma were married in August. A small irregular procession consisting of both men and women – whoever could be found of the drawing room set in August – snaked its way through the streets of Lutyens’ Delhi. Many who ordinarily would have been in London were in attendance, due to the Emergency. Marukshetra; Chamunda and Ismail; Nikhil Mohapatra, even though Gayatri Mann, having bitterly prophesied – ‘I give it six months’ – had returned to New York; Viski, but not Isha, obviously: she waited with her sister at Fatehkot House. Bapa, who, though still in white, had draped a beautiful old jamavar over his shoulders. There was almost no one from Toby’s side, except for his half-sister, Usha Raje, who was, in fact, the true Rani of Kalasuryaketu – Toby being of a morganatic marriage – but was not thought of as such. And she, in turn, by marrying a Mr Malhotra from Bombay, had ruled out all chance of her children inheriting.

At Fatehkot House, the Brigadier awaited the procession with his brother, cousins and eighteen-year-old son, Inder Pratap, known as I.P., Isha and Uma’s beloved brother and the apple of Deep Fatehkotia’s ever dimmer eye. Fresh out of the Doon School, and on his way to Stephens to read English literature, I.P. was full of a natural intellectual curiosity and loved Toby within hours of meeting him.

His father, the Brigadier, liked Toby too.

The Brigadier’s nature was very different from his wife’s. He did not share her pessimistic view of the world. Nor did he have any time for her feeling of historical grievance. His own family had known such gains and setbacks – had seen honours turn to shame – that history was nothing to him, if it was not irony. And he delighted in its reversals and bitter symmetries.

The Fatehkotias were among those families whose fortunes had been made during the Mutiny of 1857. An ancestor had collaborated with the British in defeating the Mughal in Delhi, for which – awful phrase: ‘services rendered’ – he had been generously remunerated with land and honours. In a cantonment somewhere in, say, Hoshiarpur, where Hodson’s or Skinner’s or Somebody’s Horse was headquartered, there hung in the officers’ mess a portrait of this ancestor. He was dressed in a dark-blue tunic with scarlet facings, the cuffs heavily laced with gold, and, round his waist, he wore the embroidered red cummerbund of the 9th Bengal Cavalry. He carried a sword; his beard was long, white and a little straggly; medals and decorations hung from his breast. The caption – galling to the Brigadier! – read, Risaldar Major M– Singh, C.I.E. Sardar Bahadur, Order of Merit.

But, though honoured and decorated in his lifetime, history, as it does so often on the subcontinent, had trifled with him. Once the pride of his tribe and community, he had finished by being a source of embarrassment to his descendants. The Brigadier and I.P. regarded him as a collaborator, a soldier of fortune: the archetypal man the British made easy use of to gain mastery over India. When, in the 1947 Partition, the Fatehkotias lost all that had been gained in 1857 and more, the Brigadier saw the tragedy as a kind of retribution. He felt almost relieved of a historical burden, felt he had paid his dues. There was something fitting, he thought, something neatly symmetrical, in arriving penniless in 1947 to the same city his ancestor, in cahoots with the British, had helped subdue only one hundred years before.

Unlike his wife, the Brigadier, when he cast his mind back on the past, did not see a dhobi list of wrongs done him, but rather a sweetly painful record of equal and opposite ironies. In fact, his special sensitivity lay – and what a dangerous sensitivity in a soldier! – in being able to see the mirror image of the troubles he (and his community) had endured, in the lives (and communities) of his enemies. His eyes could still well with tears at the thought of the Japanese soldier he had killed in Burma. ‘He was no older than me, you know. And, when I collected his effects, I found letters from his family to him in English. In English! So, you can imagine . . .’ Here, he would pause, and prodding his listener to the natural conclusion with a smile, add softly, ‘must have been of good family.’

Then there was the story from his childhood in that part of Punjab that was today Pakistan: of the car, carrying him and his grandfather to Fatehkot, breaking down at the side of the road. Evening is falling; two Muslim truck drivers offer them a lift. They arrive in Fatehkot late at night and his grandfather tries to offer the men some money for their troubles, but they refuse. ‘Sanu sharminda na kar na.’ Once they leave, his grandfather discovers a little briefcase containing his pistol and quite a lot of money has been left in the glove box of the truck. The next day the drivers, who would already have been hundreds of kilometres away, return with the money and the pistol. Again they refuse payment. Again they say, ‘Sanu sharminda na kar na.’ ‘Who would do it today?’ the Brigadier would say at the end of his story. ‘Who would do it? You tell me.’

Deep, listening, would become irritated. She knew that behind this ostensibly benign story, a tale of graciousness from another time, a clean chit was being handed the Muslims of Pakistan. The very same Muslims who had brought about the Partition that had snuffed out the hopes and dreams of her young days. And, every time the story was told – and it was told many times – Deep would let out an angry ‘Pfffffff’, and then rise to attend to some errand, till now forgotten about. The Brigadier, if ever he noticed her annoyance, batted it away, with a fanning of the hand. He seemed to say that his stories, with their special nuance, were not for people of his wife’s sensibility. Not for the daughters of contractors.

In Toby, the Brigadier immediately recognized a kindred spirit.

‘You know,’ he said, on their first meeting, ‘it was me who gave her this name, Uma.
Not
, I think you’ll agree, a very common name amongst us Sikhs. But I thought it beautiful. It is, of course, you being a student of Sanskrit will know . . .’

‘A name for Parvati.’

‘Yes, but do you know how it actually comes about?’

‘It means,’ Toby said, catching Uma’s eye, ‘oh no! It is what her mother says when she decides to undergo austerities to win the love of Shiva.’

The Brigadier’s wife gave a contented laugh, as if all her own trouble with her daughter was contained in this story. The Brigadier saw, did not like what he saw, and gave Toby a secret look, as if to say,
Don’t mind her, she’s a fool
. As far as he was concerned, Toby was passing all his tests. But he had one more little one up his sleeve, to really separate the gandham from the chaff.

‘“T
ā
ṃ
P
ā
rvat” îty
ā
bhijanena n
ā
mn
ā
”,’ he began by rote, though his Sanskrit pronunciation was hardly good, and he was forced quickly to switch to English. ‘“Dear to her kinsfolk, they gave her the name of Paravati, derived from her father’s . . . ”’

‘“ . . . u m” êti”,’ Toby completed in Sanskrit, for by happy chance the Brigadier was quoting the Birth. ‘“It was only later when her mother tried to stop her asceticism by saying ‘U ma, Oh no!’ that the fair-faced girl went by the name of Uma.”’

‘Yes, yes,’ the Brigadier said, throwing up his hands, ‘that’s it. Excellent. I’m so pleased,’ he said, looking at his eldest with love, ‘that your real name has been restored to you, not that foolish name my wife’s family’ – by which, he meant, his wife – ‘used to call her by. Uma. Lovely!’

And, with this, Toby had all the Brigadier’s approval. Which, though not easy to come by, once given was irrevocable. Later, when Uma herself tried to persuade him that he had been wrong about Toby, he would listen, as fathers must, but once she had finished speaking, he would pretend he had heard something altogether different: ‘Yes, yes. Quite right, quite right. A very fine man. Do you remember that day when I quoted something to him from Sanskrit literature? The only bloody verse I knew. And he completed the verse for me. You won’t find two in this town who can do that. Very fine man.’ Then he would look mistily away, as if the rest of the conversation was for the women to have.

Toby had the Brigadier’s approval, yes, but Deep, who put her name to unhappy prophecies as easily as some people signed petitions, was less sure. ‘Pffffff! Raja-types. Khamagani-this, khamagani-that. Their back never straightens only. Can’t imagine my headstrong daughter kowing and towing like that.’

‘Kow-towing, Mama,’ Isha said.

‘Pfffff. Can’t see it working, but chalo! We say thank you for little mercies: at least the air-hostessing days are over!’

On account of the weather – it was August, virtually the first auspicious day after the summer – the wedding was short. A small sangeet at Fatehkotia House, which Toby and his friends crashed; a 10 a.m. wedding and reception lunch.

It was from this lunch that the majority of the wedding pictures came. They were black and white photographs of a clouded late-monsoon day. They showed the groom in a linen suit, with flared trousers, a pair of aviators propped into his longish hair. The bride was in heavy clothes and, with her face virtually concealed in jewellery and fabric, she had something of the expression of livestock being led to the shambles.

The raid began on a hot night in September, a few weeks after they were married. The rains were late that year, and the air, weeks away from Dussehra, was still moist and gassy. The power had failed many times through the night. At last, Uma, in frustration, had thrown open the windows of their room in the Raj, which let in nothing like a breeze, but only a soft tepid damp, suffused with the singing of crickets.

‘Try to go back to sleep,’ Toby said.

Just then, seeming to shake the suite to its foundations, the phone rang.

Toby returned from answering it, his body drenched in sweat. And, though it was a warm night, Uma would always recall that sweat as cold. It seemed to flow from all the wrong places; it gave to his attractive body a sad and drooped aspect. The hair about the nipples pasted down; the rich axle line, wet and shining, sunk into its crevasse; the outline of his shrunken penis visible through the soaked muslin, showing fear and alarm.

‘That was Laban calling from the bazaar.’

‘At this time? What’s the matter, Janum?’

‘They’ve raided the city palace.’

‘In Kalasuryaketu?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘We should go.’

‘Let’s go. Now?’

‘Now.’

‘Do you want to call anyone?’

‘Like who?’

‘Viski? Ismail? Someone close to government? Someone who might be able to help should it get ugly.’

‘No. Let’s wait. Usha Raje is already down there. We might yet get off lightly. And if it comes to that,’ he said – thinking no doubt of Maniraja’s offer of assistance during these ‘delicate times’ some months before – ‘I know someone who might be able to help.’

The trip south was not what it had been a few months before. They fought all the way down. About big and small things. About whether to take a private car or a hotel car. Whether to pack lightly or to be prepared to stay a while. ‘Toby, you took me down there once already with nothing. I’m not doing it again. I’m your wife now.’

They fought about what to say, and when. About what would happen if the government men questioned Toby in connection with what he had said on the night of the Emergency. They fought about whether they should take their passports or not. They fought about where they would stay. At the Shiv Niwas or the City Palace? The City Palace belonged to Toby’s sister. ‘Over my dead body am I staying there. I can see that woman’s contempt for me a mile off.’

‘That woman, Uma? That woman? My sister!’

‘Sister-shister, she thinks I’m trying to usurp her place as the Rani of Kalasuryaketu. Kalasuryaketu! Bloody joke of a tin-pot kingdom. Not worth one air-gun salute. Like I would want to take it from her.’

When she said this, Toby fell silent, as if a line had been crossed. He could see that in the attack on the sister was a more serious assault on him, on who he was. And Uma, to her credit, the moment she saw his expression, clutched his hand and said she was sorry. It was that first frightening moment when a fight brings to the surface things no one knew were there. Toby, in turn, did something that would become part of the grammar of their marriage: he withdrew.