The Way Things Were (22 page)

On the night before Diwali, when everyone was due at the house on Curzon Road, Isha had made Viski promise: ‘Please, I beg of you, no politics tonight. No Punjab, no Blue Star, no nothing.’ And, in truth, he was not in the mood either. He was in a festive mood and dressed splendidly in a peach-coloured pug with an olive-green safa, his grandfather’s buttons gleaming on his bandgala. The same grandfather whose name wound its way around the perimeter of the drawing room in curly mosaic letters, and where that evening there was a great feeling of pre-Diwali cheer and festivity. Of card tables; of bank notes; of clear beakers of soda in which bubbles fizzed and died on the surface. Men in white, the blue R of the Raj embroidered onto their pockets, threaded their way around the Formica tables – not baize, for even the rich were not rich in those days! – laying down bottles of whisky and unopened decks of cards.

It was the kind of room where the chandeliers were crystal but the light in them was dim, the drops a little dusty. Viski’s grandfather – because he had worked on the Vice-Regal palace itself – had had special access to the best stone. And it was these aspects of the room – the floors, the Jaisalmer stone around the fireplaces, the art deco pelmets, of a rich honeyed wood – the things that endure, and that socialism cannot beggar, not, at least, immediately, that survived the ravages of that time and remained beautiful. Otherwise, the upholstery on the sofa, though with an attractive patina, had grown stiff and coarse over the years; the cutlery was fine silver, mixed in with stainless steel; there were some beautiful glasses, but others no better than what one would find in a cheap hotel. Everywhere, as with the fine old cars outside, Jaguars and Pontiacs whose engines had collapsed, and into which Viski’s parasitical cousins threatened to install Suzuki engines, there was the evidence of decay. Of genteel poverty. Of great personal style whose decline was being painstakingly managed. It was a room that awaited either further destruction, final and swift; or else breath-taking renewal from the ground up.

Viski circled it, a cigarette in his hands – for that was the kind of Sikh he was: irreligious to his nicotine-stained fingertips – checking to see if there was enough Scotch in the bar, if the coals in the angithis on the veranda burned brightly enough, if the giant slab of ice he had ordered had arrived, if the caterers from the hotel, in their bulb-lit encampment of great iron vessels and red gas cylinders, were setting up. He was in a festive mood, but an unsettling thought – for once, unrelated to Punjab – played darkly at the back of his mind.

He had received a call that morning from his sister-in-law, Mishi – still Mishi to him. She had a friend in town, from her days in the airlines. A girl who’d made good. Married some businessman in Bombay. Priti Purie; he remembered her vaguely, Admiral Purie’s daughter: pretty Priti. Mishi wanted to bring her and her husband – Shashikanta Hirachand, a biscuit tycoon – to their dinner that night. Such a small thing; she needn’t even have asked. ‘Of course,’ he had said, ‘this is your house.’

But it had sat badly with him, the idea of having a businessman, who no one knew, come to his house; which, it was true, would spoil the intimacy of the evening. But no; Mishi could bring whoever she wanted. It was not that; it was something else. Something in the decorousness of her tone which had made him suspicious; something clipped and over-polite, as though formality were being used to conceal some rougher emotion. And, as he went about his inspection of the house, Viski realized that he knew what that tone was: it was the unmistakable tone of a woman wanting to bring to the house of an unsuspecting friend or family member the man she is having an affair with. Had it been a man Mishi wanted to bring over, Viksi would immediately have drawn those connections. But a woman? An old friend from the airlines? Why did her voice have that note of strangled excitement?

Whatever it was, it made him sorry for Toby. This city, this country, he had seen it wear down his old friend’s confidence. He had seen it bring a note of apology to his face, seen it shame him for his sensibility and knowledge. There had been nothing more dazzling than the Toby of the seventies; the Toby of Oxford, of the flat on Cheyne Row. Toby, who used all his royal connections so as just to be able to sit for hours on end in some musty library in Bikaner, studying old manuscripts. The Toby who had told him of eighth-century literary theorists in India and who had patiently answered all his questions about history and migration; Toby, from whose lips he had first heard the words Proto-Indo-European; the same man, who, mildly and persuasively, had corrected each of his prejudices. Viski had watched Delhi, through the cold light of its neglect, make Toby’s great erudition seem worthless.

‘I say, Shashi-cunt, fellow . . . !’

‘K
ā
nta, Viski,’ Isha said, trying hard to calm the tension that had arisen between the two men sitting at the card table. ‘K
ā
nta.’

‘Hello, fellow! I thought it was cunt, like n
ī
la-cunt, the blue-throated one . . .’

‘Firstly, Viski,’ Isha said, emphasizing the third of Sanskrit’s five nasals, ‘that’s ka
ṇ
ṭ
ha.’

‘Cun
ṭ
?’

‘No, a
ṇ
ṭ
ha,
ṇ
,
ṇ
,’ Isha said, exposing her teeth, and drawing her tongue back into her mouth, in a retroflex motion, so that its ridged back and blue vein were visible.

‘
Ṇ
,
ṇ
,
ṇ
,’ Viski repeated, like a chastened child.

Everyone at the table smiled slyly into their cards. Except, of course, Shashikanta Hirachand.

‘Ka
ṇ
ṭ
ha, k
ā
nta, can’t you hear the difference?’

‘I say, fellow,’ he said, his eyes bright with mischief, ‘she’s like bloody Professor Higgins . . . ka
ṇ
ṭ
ha, k
ā
nta, can’t. You tell us, O Sanskritist, which is it: Shashi ka
ṇ
ṭ
ha, k
ā
nta or Shashi-can’t, can or won’t. Or just plain cunt . . .’

‘Viski!’ And, flaring her eyes, Isha silenced him.

‘Why don’t you ask him, whose name it is?’ Kitten Singh said, with that syntax that was every bit her own. In the pause that followed the arch musicality of her question, her thin red lips gleamed. She rearranged her three-card hand in her soft and veined fingers, which, large and blazing with rings, had the immobility and heavy ornamentation of a pair of cicada wings.

‘
Because
, Kitty-kat,’ Viski said, taking a deep sip of his Scotch, ‘my dear brother-in-law, my dear, dear, brother-in-law, he knows more about these things than – please forgive me, Shashi-can or can’t – the average native. Shall we do a test? What say you, fellow? First we ask Shashi-can or can’t – I don’t know! – what his name means? Then we ask brother-in-law, here, and see who gives us – how does one put it? – the fuller answer. Yes: the fuller answer. What say you, Hirachand? Eh? What does your name mean?’

The businessman smiled insolently into his moustache. He had for some time now become the target of a scarcely suppressed rage in Viski, but he was not without his share of blame. When they had first sat down at the table, Viski had been courteous enough. But one or two things had occurred in quick succession to set the evening on its unfortunate path. The first little irritation was Hirachand’s request that they introduce variations into the game, ridiculous things with ridiculous names, like AK-47 and Tambu mein Bambu, which for that generation of purists was an inadmissible corruption of the game. When everyone on the table objected, Hirachand began churlishly to play his every hand blind. Then, when three rounds later, he had still not picked up his cards and Viski said, ‘What, fellow? Blind again?’, Hirachand gave a pedantic answer, which only further annoyed Viski. He detected in it that smiling Indian smugness which was just the thing he had in mind when he spoke pejoratively of the badhbadh-ding-ding Hindu.

‘I know, you Delhi-wallas,’ Hirachand said, ‘are very fond of your teen patti. But speaking strictly on the level of probability, which must ultimately be the level upon which all games of chance are decided, this beloved game of yours is extremely flawed.’

‘Oh,’ Viski said.

‘Yes. Because, speaking strictly on a probability basis, a Trio should not rank higher than a Pure Sequence. It is analogous to a pair being higher than a sequence. So, please, I will, in light of this logical flaw, play my every hand blind.’

Had he said nothing else all evening – into which Viski would have read many things:
chippy little Bombay businessman
;
greedy Gujarati bania can’t bear to part with his money
;
coward Hindu
;
nerdy snitch
;
vegetarian!
;
just the kind of punk I used to thrash in school
– this remark alone would have been enough to damn him in Viski’s eyes. But Hirachand, blithe and contented, seemed bent on a course of further self-destruction. And, as conversation turned, as it so often does in Delhi, to politics – to the toppling, in fact, of Tariq Mattoo’s government in Kashmir earlier that year – Hirachand, in a tone of studied boredom, as if concealing the pain of exclusion, said, ‘Ah yes, you Delhi people, you like so much to talk about politics.’

Isha saw Viski’s face sour and said, ‘He’s a friend, you see, Tariq. That’s all. We were up there when his government fell. He was giving the kids rides on his motorbike in Pahalgam, while Mrs Gandhi was toppling him in Srinagar!’

She had meant it as a joke, something to lighten the air. But it was lost in what Hirachand said next.

‘Friend or no friend,’ he said, his voice full of taunting righteousness, ‘she had no choice but to dismiss his government. What else could she have done? Muslim CM conspiring with Khalistanis to break the country up again. She had to fight these fissiparous tendencies. Someone had to!’

Fissiparous tendencies! So quaint and obscure a phrase today, almost like irredentism. But, in those days, it was as much in vogue as Islamo-fascism today. And, on that table, the echo of this remark, more for its banality, its
Pravda
-ish adherence to the party line, than any offence it caused, reverberated in the long silences that are an invariable part of the rhythm of conversation on a card table. In the heavy interim, between the making of a move and the resumption of conversation, no one said anything, but everyone seemed to look longer and harder at their cards; the sipping of a drink, the lighting of a cigarette acquired a noirish significance.

It was Toby’s turn.

And he might well not have said anything either. He had seen an ugliness creep into the public discourse over the past many years, an ugliness that seemed, as with so many other evils, to have been introduced into the system in those years after the Emergency. More and more, Toby had learned to hold his tongue. The remark which in 1975 would have produced a severe rebuke – akin to the one he had once given Maniraja – was in 1984 the kind of thing he might let slide. For one of the peculiarities about prejudice is that it seems always to speak from the heart; it seems, in some daring way, to be speaking the truth, to be saying what others secretly believe, but do not have the courage to say themselves. And the man who speaks against prejudice can often come to seem like the peddler of shopworn banalities, while the voice of prejudice can seem bold and original; a lone voice with the power to drown out others, the power to subdue.

But that night, for a number of reasons, Toby did not feel subdued. He did not feel the crippling effect of a reserve that had become second nature to him. For one, he was drinking large drinks – Viski’s trademark – Old Monk, nimbu and soda. Two, he had a brilliant hand – a seven trail – which is enough to make even the meek feel bold. And, three, Uma was provoking him.

From the time they had arrived at Curzon Road there was something exaggerated about her. In her excitement at seeing Priti Purie; in her embraces and girlish laughter; in the showy fun she seemed to be having. It was as if, compared with her earlier sullenness in the car, she was trying to tell him how relieved she was to be out of the house, away from him, away from their life together. These things can always seem – in fact, they’re intended to seem – like figments of our imagination. But he knew he was not imagining it. Her excitement was contrived and stagey. It had an edge; it was as if she wanted to ward him off. Never had fun seemed so much like rage.

Rebuffed a few times, and gradually drunker, he seemed to absorb the rage too. He let the old enemy of their relationship, Kitten Singh, her hair now wilfully grey, bringing to her yet unlined face a severity and gravitas, flirt shamelessly with him. He allowed Viski to make him drink after stronger drink. He began also to make a show of having a good time. In this mood, angry and a little wretched, he sat down to cards on Viski’s table. The room, by then, was full of people. In the din of noise and laughter the card tables felt, as with clearings in a forest, like pools of calm and quiet, with a life all their own. It was soothing to withdraw to them.

But there was that one discordant note on their table: Hirachand. Everyone noticed and slowly the table began collectively employing long silences and hidden allegiances to undermine him.

‘Fissiparous tendencies!’ Toby said, with a smile, laying down his chaal in the cut-glass bowl at the centre of the table. ‘I suppose we’ll be hearing of the foreign hand next.’

Viski gave a snorting laugh. Kitten smiled; Isha, being the hostess, suppressed hers. Nikhil Mohapatra, who hadn’t said a word thus far, and was precariously balancing a Dunhill in the same smooth dark fingers in which he held his cards, mumbled, ‘Charges of treason? Blasphemy? The burning of a witch perhaps?’

‘Fellow!’ Viski cried. ‘An auto-da-fé, I say!’

Everyone began to laugh. The noise of it drew Uma and Priti, who had been smoking at a distance, nearer. Hirachand, seeing his wife approach, felt emboldened. He said to Toby, his English suddenly in retreat, ‘You, as foreigner, must best be knowing about the foreign hand.’