The Way Things Were (17 page)

‘Out of the blue. She heard I was in town from Kitten Singh and called. She said they were having a party.’

‘Not much of a party, Janoo,’ she says, wrapping her shawl more tightly around herself.

‘Maybe we’re in the wrong place.’

Breathing in the thick night air, and letting her teeth chatter for effect, she says, ‘What a night!’ She draws him close to her, and, seeming now to want his attention, says, ‘How do you say night in Sanskrit, baby?’

‘R
ā
tri, of course,’ he says easily.

‘Ah, yes, of course.’ Then, half teasing, half humouring him, she says, ‘And does it have any cognates?’

She turns away, missing the smile her question brings to his face. The cognate game, introduced to him by his father – and something of a joke between him and Mackinson – has, in the six months Skanda and Gauri have been together, been appropriated by them.

‘Making fun of me or what?’

‘No, truly! I want to know.’

‘Well, the answer is, no. No cognates.’

‘How boring!’

‘Baby.’

‘What?’

‘Baby!’ he says, now wrapping his arms around her.

‘What?!’ she says, embarrassed.

‘
Any cognates
?! I love you!’

‘Shut up, fool.’

‘No cognates for r
ā
tri, but I might be able to rustle some up for nakta.’

‘Nakta?’ she repeats carefully. ‘Is that night too?’

‘Yes, a long dark nocturnal thread.’

‘Go on.’

‘On one condition?’

‘What?’

‘A kiss for every one.’

‘Silly fool.’

‘Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘
Nox
.’

‘Uffff, I knew that.’

A grudging peck.

‘
Núx
.’

‘Again?!’

‘No!
Nox
Latin,
núx
Greek.’

‘Oh, fishy, but OK.’

A taut and withheld one; a have-a-good-day-at-the-office kind of thing.

‘Then?’

‘
Nakht-uru
.’

‘Eeeks! What is that? German?’

‘Zend-Avestan.’

‘Oh, baby. Come here. You’re so sexy.’

A real kiss, something long, and ponderous.

‘Go on.’

‘
Nacht
.’

‘What?! Bloody cheat. Making a fool of me?’

No kiss; a shove instead.

‘No. I promise. This is the German,’ he says, extracting his due.

‘The next one better be wildly different.’

‘
Naktis
,’ he says sibilantly into the night, seeming now not even to want a kiss.

‘Oh, what’s that?’

‘Lithuanian, my love,’ he says airily.

‘Come here, little bugger.’ And she gives him a kiss that’s like a spanking.

‘And?’

‘We may already be at the end of the thread.’

‘Oh! That’s not so impressive.’

‘
Nahts
!’

‘What’s that?’

‘Gothic.’

And now she takes his face in her two hands and gives him the best kiss of the night.

Still being kissed, he murmurs, ‘
Neaht
,
niht.
’

‘What . . . ?’ she mumbles with her mouth full.

‘Anglo-Saxon,’ he mumbles back, and the kiss deepens.

‘Any more?’

‘
Nošti
, Slavic.’

‘Not cheating, I hope.’

‘No, Gauri. Deep all-enveloping night, Finnegan’s Night – the dark night of the soul – where under the cover of fog and darkness, we enter this shell of a house together. Look,’ he says, and points to the light in the portico of the house. A few naked bulbs extend from long wires. They reveal a construction site of sorts, and, hanging from a line, the frayed vests and paint-spattered trousers of labourers.

‘Inside?’

‘Inside, yes. We have to find this party.’

Only once they enter is it possible to see the extent to which the wall has shattered the wholeness of the house. Undetected, it has followed them down a handsomely proportioned central corridor. A floor of marble diamonds, coated in a fine white dust and strewn with nails, rushes to meet the pale glow entering at the end. Now inside the baggy husk of the house, the wall separates bedrooms from adjoining bedrooms, blinds corridors and casts sunny terraces into gloom. It appears framed in a teak doorway, lit by the light of a single naked bulb. And, though the strangeness of seeing it in the house distracts from the impression of destruction, this is an illusion: all beautiful and complex things when they are crudely destroyed – or partitioned – produce at first a kind of wonder before the horror of their destruction sinks in.

Gauri draws her head back from peering up into a cavity, out of whose damp darkness a black and yellow braided wire descends magically.

‘Uffff! So sad. Such a beautiful old house.’

‘But always gloomy, for as long as I can remember. It was the first thing that hit you as you came in: the gloom!’

‘Bad history or what?’

‘Very bad. My uncle Viski’s mother – Teji – was a famous beauty. “And she vuz,” as my grandmother used to say, examining her nails, “a pross.”’

‘Tch, Skandu. What a word.’

‘She slept with half the Punjab.’

‘In those days?’

‘Yes. And when her husband, old man Aujla, got to know about it, he threw her out from this house on Curzon Road. Not that she cared much, mind you. By that point, she had moved on from small-town doctors and the staff of his hotel to a rich industrialist called Reggie Hotelier. A pincushion of a man, with his own chain of hotels and a magenta Mercedes.’

‘Embellishing or what?’

‘No, no. God swear. And the worst part was – awful irony: I tell you, these things only ever happen in real life! – he had a twenty-year lease on the Raj. Which meant that when old man Aujla threw his wife out, he had to suffer the ignominy of her, newly disgraced, leaving his house in her lover’s Mercedes, only to move into the presidential suite of
his
own hotel.’

‘No!’

‘I’m telling you. And, to really drive the knife in, she was forever decorating and redecorating it, according to her whim and fancy, as if it were her own drawing room.’

‘Then?’

‘Then, what! The old man did a terrible thing. The thing that is responsible for the unhappiness of this house, and for this wall.’

‘What?’

‘He threw out his youngest two children – a boy and girl – with his wife, bag and baggage, refusing to acknowledge them as his own.’

‘And your uncle, Viski?’

‘Viski, he kept. But, with the other two, he was a veritable Leontes:
Hence with it, and together with the dam / Commit them to the fire.
Viski spent his whole life trying to make up for what his father had done. He tried to give his siblings their fair share of the properties, gave them half the Raj. He was eaten up with guilt and managed, in the bargain, to spoil his own marriage – which became pretty violent – all in the most desperate attempt to regain the love of his mother and siblings.’

‘And?’

‘And what? They took everything, while all the time hating him for being the one who could give, and, when the time was right, they turned on him. It destroyed Viski. Not that they had conspired to do him out of his property – he cared nothing for money; but that even after all his efforts his brother and sister, who he adored, still despised him. Gauri?’ he says into the dark.

‘Yes. I’m here. Come and look at this, Skandu.’

She is in the dining room where there is now a bladeless fan and a long table, its white cloth flecked with dried cement. The wall, though only partially built here, rises up between the hub of the fan and the table, then smashes past the gaping jaws of a smallish fireplace, dislodging and cracking its pretty lintel of mustard stone. There are still photographs on the walls, still modest works of art, still a jib cabinet, which, on being prodded with one knee – as Skanda does now – springs open to reveal breakfast things. Marmite. Jam. Churan. A Japanese toaster. A funny little green-handled cutter which can be pressed down on a piece of fruit to cut it into eight pieces.

‘You know it so well, this house.’

‘I told you: I virtually grew up here.’

‘How so?’

‘We were here for many of the difficult periods in our life.’

‘In ’84?’

‘No, not then; not during the riots, at least. But others.’

‘Such strange things on the walls!’

There are photographs and posters, the height marks of growing children engraved on the long flank of a crockery cupboard.

‘Fareed, Iqbal,’ he mouths the names after an age.

‘Who are they?’

‘Cousins. Isha’s children.’

He points to black and white pictures of them on plastic potties, looking up at the camera, the top-knot of Fareed’s long hair coming loose and falling to the side.

‘I’m sure they don’t look like that now,’ she giggles. And, as she says this, he realizes he has no adult picture of them in his mind.

There are photographs from Gulmarg and Pahalgam too. Of Viski playing golf; of tattu rides; of the frothy Leedar river; of their cottage, CM1, and him in his mother’s room.

‘You?’ she says, pointing to one of the photographs.

‘Me.’

‘Baba! In your little Kashmiri dressing gown. How sweet you were.’

The picture brings up a painful memory, which his mind shies away from unpacking.

‘Do you know
Rama’s Last Act
?’ he asks Gauri.

‘No. What is it?’

‘It’s a famous Sanskrit play that my father translated. It was part of a compilation of his called
Three Sanskrit Plays
. It’s by the eighth-century playwright Bhavabhuti.’

‘Bhava-who?!’

‘Bhavabhuti.’

‘Why did you think of it?’

‘Because this – us, here – reminded me of it. It opens just like this: Ram and Sita in a picture gallery. And they’re looking at a painting exhibition of events from their lives. The whole epic is there in pictures on the wall for them to see. The breaking of the bow, the abduction of Sita . . . And they’re laughing, and crying, and at times fearful.
Lacrimae rerum
, you know.’

‘
Lacrimae
. . . ?’

‘Tears of Things.
Lacrimae
: tears, like a
ś
ru in Sanskrit and
dákru
in Greek.’

‘Tears of what things?’

‘All things, and no things, Gauri. Things past and present.’

‘Strange.’

‘It is. It’s there as a framing device. The play begins in the picture gallery, where they, Valmiki’s epic characters, are looking back on the events from the epic. And it ends with a play within a play, a new offering by Valmiki.’

‘What is that? Meta-fiction?’

‘Meta-fiction, yes. Bhavabhuti, Sheldon Pollock says, was the most
meta
of all the pre-modern writers. Which is really saying something because they were all deep into this stuff, the Sanskrit writers. Valmiki, Vyasa, you name it. Meta-fiction was like the biggest game in town. Inductions. Plays within plays . . . Are you cold, by the way?’

‘No, not at all. I have my shawl. Here, give me your hands.’

‘We should really find this party, you know.’

‘We will. But slowly. I’m enjoying being here with you in this house. It reminds me of my childhood, of exploring – I don’t know! – some ruin or something. But, go on: why the meta-elements?’

‘In drama, it’s obvious: I mean the reason why someone would want to do it. Because it’s right there, the line, you know, between the audience and the stage: the line between the real and representational, art and reality. It’s so tantalizing and physical. How can one not play with it? How can one not consider its implications, its tension? Shakespeare loved it too. His plays are full of reflexivity. In Bhavabhuti . . .’

‘Bhava-who?’ she says and grins.

The teasing is her way of keeping his pedantry in check. And he likes her for it, likes her for protecting him from his genetic fate.

‘Am I boring you?’

‘No. But look: this amazing picture. All the different generations together. Who is that?’ She points at a boy in shorts and a blue and red striped T-shirt.

‘My cousin Iqbal.’

‘Will I meet him tonight?’

‘I hope so. The toddler, in case you were wondering, is me.’

‘Oh, look, baba. All sad-eyed and staring up.’

‘The young man in the white turban and jeans, standing by the bar . . . that is my uncle I.P. as a young man. This picture would have been taken in the early eighties.’

‘Real uncle?’

‘Mother’s brother.’

‘Will I meet him tonight?’

‘No. He had trouble with the police in 1984 and he now never comes to India.’

They are halfway around the room. In the semi-darkness, above a facing fireplace, there is a kitschy picture of the Golden Temple, its outline beaded with red and blue flashing lights.

‘And this?’ she says, pointing to a picture of children with black painted moustaches and wooden bows covered in chintzy satin.

‘The Playhouse school, my nursery. My mother taught there for a while.’

‘How old were you when your father started teaching you Sanskrit?’

‘It was there right from the start. He taught me all the way through, from when I was a child. He just worked it into my upbringing, I suppose.’

‘And your sister’s too?’

‘No.’

‘No? Why?’

‘I don’t really know. Perhaps he saw some kind of native interest or ability in me. He could be very intuitive in these ways.’

‘And he was a good teacher?’

‘Oh, the best, Gauri. They still use his textbook, you know. The one he wrote in the seventies when he was with my mother. It’s very special: it was my textbook at Oxford.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. So, in a sense, even when he stopped teaching me, he continued to teach me.’

‘What made him such a good teacher?’

‘He had this way of always teaching from within the tradition, and of bringing alive the Sanskritic world. The play I mentioned earlier,
Rama’s Last Act
, he taught it to me when I was still a child. Not all of it. Just the benediction. And, even though I didn’t understand it, I fell in love with the sound of the words.’

‘How does it go?’

‘In Sanskrit or in English?’