The Way Things Were (19 page)

‘I don’t think so, Toby. We have no memory in this country. Just amnesia. I was reading this novel on the bus down from Dehradun.’

He took a big sip of his drink, then went over to his canvas bag and removed a dog-eared copy of the novel from somewhere near the top of the bag.

Seeing it, Toby said, ‘Oh, I know Rushdie, I.P. I may not follow contemporary literature, but who doesn’t know Rushdie? He won a big prize for it.’

‘Yes, he did. But listen to this . . .’ He took another big sip of his drink, drenching his moustache and the little triangle of beard below his lip.

‘Listen! Have you read it?’

‘No, not yet. But I hear it’s very good, so is the new one apparently.
Shame.
’

‘Listen, listen,’ he repeated, reading and pacing. ‘“Today, the papers are talking about the supposed political rebirth of Mrs Indira Gandhi; but when” . . .’ he paused to smirk at Toby, ‘“
but when
I returned to India, concealed in a wicker basket, ‘The Madam’ was basking in the fullness of her glory. Today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into
the insidious clouds of amnesia
; but I remember, and will set down”. . . so on and so forth. But look at that phrase, Toby: “
the insidious clouds of amnesia
”. That is what gets this place time and again. It never learns from the past; it just keeps forgetting. Look at the Emergency, that’s what Rushdie is referring to . . . Nine years ago. The year you were married. I remember. And less than a decade later . . .?’

‘Forgotten. It is true.’

‘A lifetime away. The witch is back in power, turning her evil eye to Punjab this time, which is already in flames, and no one says a thing. No one even remembers. It’s maddening. It’s enough to make you want to retire early, as my mother will have me do, and farm some land somewhere, live a quiet life, you know, of reading and contemplation.’

There was a rustle of cloth behind them; the noise of heels, sounding out like shot; the wafting herald of perfume. I.P. saw his sister and a smile of pure pleasure broke over his face. But it soon darkened again. Toby sensed Uma behind him, and reached his hand back, which she took, standing there quietly, allowing her brother to finish.

‘And I’ll tell you something, Toby. There’s nothing benign about this amnesia. It conceals some pretty awful things. I don’t want to make some Santayana-like pronouncement about the price people who refuse to remember the past eventually pay. But, let me say this much to you: there is nothing benign about this amnesiac fog, nothing benign at all.’

There was now the slapping sound of wet rubber slippers. And soon I.P. was enveloped in the affection of his sister and nephew.

The mention of Punjab made Toby aware that I.P. was not wearing his turban. Just a baseball cap over his juda. And, recalling the new hostility against Sikhs, he wondered for a moment if I.P. was trying to conceal the signifiers of his faith.

He said, ‘I.P., you’re not wearing your turban?’

I.P., with Skanda in his arms, gave him a sidelong look that seemed to say,
And so?

‘I hope it’s not because—’

‘Toby! Are you insulting me? You think I’m afraid of these coward cops. I’m a Sikh, for Christ’s sake. I’m not wearing my turban because I was wearing my helmet. That’s all.’

‘Toby, really?’ Uma said. ‘What a thought! We’re not like your lot, you know, quaking at the knees every time a government inspector shows up. We’re not religious people, but we would never hide the fact that we’re Sikhs.’

‘I just . . . Never mind. I’m happy to be wrong. I.P., we’ll see you at the other end? Once we’re back.’

‘Of course. I have a party to go to afterwards. But I’ll be here till you get back. Are they meant to be asleep?’

‘Rudrani already is. And Skandu will fade soon.’

‘I won’t!’

Uma looked at I.P. and mouthed, ‘Five minutes.’

They stand – Gauri and Skanda – in the shell of the drawing room. The fog comes in through the high transoms and seems, even on this moonless night, to be full of light. At the centre of a large balding carpet, a chandelier lies on its side. Crawling along the maroon margin of this vast room are white mosaic letters. Gauri, following them down, reads haltingly, ‘Rai Bahadur Rajwant Singh, 1936.’

‘Who was that?’ she asks.

‘Viski’s grandfather,’ Skanda replies. ‘He was one of the earliest occupants of this city. A real frontiersman. A peasant-contractor from Sargodha who, under Lutyens’ supervision, helped build this necropolis from the ground up.’

‘Necropolis? Why do you keep calling it that?’

‘It has the air of one, doesn’t it? The air of something built and abandoned, the lifeless majesty of the mausoleum or tomb?’

She nods, but does not answer. Instead she follows the mosaic margin right to the end of the room. He watches her go, putting one foot after the other. His thoughts drift into silence, but Gauri remains their focus: And Rajwant Singh, he almost says aloud, knew this city from its inception, knew it when it was just brown scrubby land surrounded by the ruins of other Delhis. He had been witness to all the original arguments. Over site. Over style. Over significance. Over the choice of architect. He had seen the case being made for the northern site, which would have given the new city a closer relationship to the Muslim town it was meant to supersede, a closer relationship to the river. He had seen that case demolished on the grounds that the malarial swamps in the north were a hazard. He had seen the Ridge – where the British made their last stand in 1857 – dismissed on the basis of – what? Bad memories? Perhaps.

Rajwant Singh – Skanda imagines – had seen the planners’ eye drift south, even from that spot where their monarch had laid a token foundation stone in the year of the durbar. He had seen that eye continue on its southbound journey till it rested on the wilderness that was Raisina. And the old contractor must have asked himself, Why? Why this arid plain, cut away from nature and history, with nothing to recommend it but ruins on all sides? Why this necropolis?

Then, one day
he must have seen
, Skanda thinks, his eyes still fastened on Gauri. Rajwant Singh must have seen the English, for the first time, as they saw themselves. They would have been laying down the roads of the city and fixing upon perspectives, and vistas. ‘This avenue must run into the humped mass of the purana qila. And from here the Qutab must be visible, from there the Jama Masjid. And we must do something about the grouping of Lodhi tombs.’ Hearing this talk – ‘Tughlakabad this, Indraprastha that’ – the contractor must have seen, for the first time, the extent of their ambition. And it would have been far grander, far more hubristic, than anything he had imagined until then.

The planners wanted this site, this blank page with history pressing against it on all sides, precisely because it answered their needs like no other. They did not just want to build an adjunct to an existing Delhi; they did not want simply to add on to what had come before; they wanted to build a final Delhi, an ultimate expression of their belief that they were the last stage of Indian history. It was as if they sought to knit together the different cities of Delhi, to make a whole of the disconnected past. And this imperial capital, this city on a hill, with the ruins of other Delhis on her petticoat, was to have been the capping stone of history. The end of history. That was their ambition, even as the next decade saw them wrapping up their empire and abandoning the newly built capital.

Gauri, having walked around the room, returns. Skanda, thinking still of the building of this imperial city, says, ‘And don’t forget: this was the age of Mussolini. The agency that built EUR was created in 1936. It was an age of utopias. Which,’ he adds, ‘ – I mean, the idea of utopia itself – are always violent. Violence by another name.’

‘By what name?’ Gauri says, with interest.

‘By the name of purity,’ he answers, seeming half to be asking himself a question. ‘Every man who ever dreamt up a utopia was animated far more by the wish to purge, Gauri, than to build.’

‘Pakistan was a utopia,’ she says, as if challenging him.

‘It was. And we need go no further in making the case for their intrinsic violence than that.’

‘But what was being purged?’

‘India, of course! By which I mean Hindu India: the contamination of it, you know.’

‘Khalistan . . .’

‘A Utopia too.’

‘What was being purged there?’

‘The same thing.’

‘The same thing? Surely not, Skanda. Sikhs are Hindus.’

‘Try telling a Sikh that.’

‘But, come on—’

‘No, no, Gauri. A Sikh is not a Hindu, not merely a Hindu. He is more like a Hindu looking at himself through Muslim eyes. And he does not like what he sees. He wants to be rid of it,
purged
of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of cowardice, of weakness, the taint of defeat.’

‘You go too far . . .’

‘I grew up with a Sikh mother, Gauri. And nothing the Muslims have to say about Hindus can compare with what Sikhs have to say about Hindus.’

His answer silences her. She begins slowly, as if measuring the room, to walk down its short side.

‘Believe me,’ he says, somewhat imploringly, ‘it was something that had begun to affect my parents’ relationship. Just look at that remark: “We’re not like your lot, you know: quaking at the knees every time a government inspector shows up.” Many things had seeped into their lives by this point. Things they were dimly aware of, and things they knew too well. Some came from the environment – and what a toxic environment it had become! – some they generated themselves. A lot had changed, you see, and . . .’ he trails off, as she walks out of earshot, driving his thoughts inward.

Two dates less than a decade apart, he thinks – 1975 and 1984 – and what a gulf lies between them! Mullahs in Tehran. Soviet tanks in Kabul. Bhutto’s head in a hangman’s noose. The return of religion, of conservatism. Of Reagan and Thatcher. How keenly my father must have felt it when an English friend of his in 1981, soon after John Lennon was killed, said – and truly, it could not have been said earlier – the Sixties are over.

When Gauri returns, Skanda, as if all this while she has been following his train of thought, says, ‘And Baba, Gauri, was such a child of the Sixties.’

‘In the Western sense?’ she asks. ‘In the sense of flower power and free love?’

‘Yes, but not just in that sense: in the Indian sense too. In the sense of innocence. In the sense of that time of chiffon saris and sweetly melancholy film songs, of bougainvillea and cantonment towns. Of the sight, as evening fell in Delhi, of a cream-coloured car with a single red light, negotiating the city’s broad streets. “And to anyone who knew,” he would tell my uncle I.P., who himself was too young to know that time, “it meant that a gentleman prime minister was on his way to dinner.”
That
innocence – one may blame the Emergency, though perhaps it could not have lasted anyway – was irrecoverably lost by 1984. Rage had entered the system, Gauri, rage and criminality.’

‘But, Skanda,’ she says, answering urgency with urgency, ‘what has all this to do with a marriage? Especially when two people are weathering these things together?’

‘That is the point: they were not weathering them together. To one, India was becoming every day more remote, every day beyond grasp. And to the other? Well, she was better able to cope, better able to take things head-on. And – I don’t know! – people always say our literature is crammed full of big events. Of riots, and partitions, and emergencies. Some must ask: is this really the stuff of everyday life? Surely some people must just be living quiet lives with quiet problems, unaffected by these cataclysms? My answer is no. It is as Naipaul says, “The train has many coaches and different classes, but it passes through the same landscape. People are responding to the same political or religious and cultural pressures.” And the difference, I feel, between places that work and those that are in turmoil is that, in the former, people don’t have to think about politics; in the latter, they can’t help but think about them.’

‘Look at Punjab . . .’ Gauri says with energy.

‘Exactly,’ he replies, ‘just look at Punjab, look at how it had crept up on everybody. 1978,’ – the history of those years, like a verse learnt by heart, is always ready on his lips – ‘Bhindranwale, still an unknown village priest, clashes with the Nirankaris, whom he considers to be apostates. A classic move, by the way: purge the faith first, before you move on to the enemies of the faith. He was like an early bin Laden, Bhindranwale. 1980, the Nirankari guru is killed and Bhindranwale expresses his approval. The next year – 1981 – the cops arrest him for the assassination of a local newspaper editor, Lala Jagat Narain . . .’

‘Then Blue Star?’ Gauri inserts casually.

‘No, no, not yet,’ he says, with irritation, as if she has misquoted a line of the verse. ‘First, there’s Bhindranwale’s bungled arrest at Mehta Chowk, which turns into a show of strength for him. Then, in 1982, the year of the Asian Games, Sikhs are pulled off buses on the borders of Delhi. The next year – 1983 – brings massacres and terror on night buses. Bhindranwale, taking Shabeg Singh with him, moves into the Golden Temple, into the precincts of the shrine itself.
And then
, in June, 1984 . . .’

‘Blue Star?’

‘Blue Star, yes: Mrs G sends tanks into the temple, signing, in effect, her own death warrant.’

Recalling this roll call of events, he wonders why the history of these years possesses such power for him. Some of it must come from the fact that it lies on the edge of his memory, on the edge of lived life. But some of it is surely real. The details! Done, as if by an artist’s hand. First, the shrine – later, the scene of the siege – in whose frilled arches there is always the reflection of water, always dancing veins of gold; then the liturgy that never ceases, even once the firing begins; and then, the cool and magical impression the tank around the temple makes even on a hot day. And June would have been hot! What menace there is in thinking of this beguiling shrine as the backdrop for the battle. The water clouded purple; blue-turbaned men firing from the gaps in the marble stairs; the trapped pilgrims, the white sky, the dazzle of sunlight on water; and then, the village priest and renegade general caught in a Hitlerian trap, even as the army closes its clumsy circle around them.