The Way Things Were (28 page)

‘You are, sir. Very much so.’

‘Thank you. Thank you for saying that. But I wonder, Raja saab, will it be OK? Even for you, I mean. Will it be OK?’

‘For me?’

‘Because you, you
are
an intellectual. And not just an intellectual, but devoted to the thought and learning of this country. Will they not hate you for it, our people? For reminding them of what they want to leave behind. Will they not make you feel so small and worthless that you will want to leave?’

Toby looked confused for a moment, but then the Brigadier said something that revealed the true direction of his thought.

‘My daughter, she is a great pragmatist,’ he said. ‘There is a lot of passion and romance in her too. But, at bottom, she’s a pragmatist. Not as much as her mother, but a pragmatist nonetheless. What is right in her eyes – what is moral, even – is simply what is, not what should be.’

Toby laughed. ‘Sir, that must be one of the best definitions of a pragmatist that I’ve ever heard.’

The Brigadier smiled. ‘I told you I’m not an intellectual, but I like to think of myself as a thinking man. And, besides, stupidity, I’m sure you’ll agree, is not an absolute value, but a deficit.’

‘A deficit?’

‘Yes: the gap between what one is fit to be doing and what one, in fact, does. Take the witch, for instance. Had she been a housewife, no one would have thought her stupid. Nor her son, had he remained an airline pilot. But put the same person in a job that is ill-suited to them, like that of the PM, and they suddenly seem completely bloody daft. People who are right for what they do never seem stupid. Don’t you agree? I was a soldier, and, for that, I think I had brains enough.’

‘Yes, yes.’

Then, as if his emotion was working its way out in the form of a willingness to face all life’s cold hard truths, he said, ‘Perhaps you’ll leave too. Perhaps you’ll take the children and my daughter, and go away. To England perhaps, where they value you, value your work, where you might live the life of the mind.’

‘That’s the second time this evening that someone has urged me to leave India.’

‘Well, Raja saab, one is concerned. One sees what’s happening, you know. Not always easy to put into words, but one sees.’

‘What is happening?’

The Brigadier looked long at him. At the face in which, more and more, happiness was indistinguishable from sadness. A face where all expressions of joy had come into the service of concealing sorrow.

Then, changing the subject, or enlarging it perhaps, he said, ‘It was late afternoon when they arrived back, Hodson and the princes. M-Singh was with them, of course. A crowd had collected at a gate on the outskirts of old Delhi. They pressed close on the horses of the sowars, and assumed every moment a more hostile appearance. “What shall we do with them?” Hodson said aloud. To his lieutenant, or to M– Singh perhaps. I don’t know. But he answered the question himself. “I think we had better shoot them here; we shall never get them in.” With this, he halted the guard, put five troopers across the road, behind and in front, and ordered the princes strip. Of swords, of arm bands
and
– this is what came down to us – of signet rings . . .’

‘Sir, behind every fortune . . .’

‘No, no, listen. Once their personal effects had been removed, he declared them fugitives before the crowd, murderers of innocents, women and children, and ordered them back into the cart, where he shot them, by his own hand, with a Colt revolver. And, with this small act of vigilante justice, he brought to an end the Mughal dynasty in India. Dusk fell, the city smoked; the bodies were left on display outside a kotwali in Shahjehanabad.’

At this the Brigadier rose and walked over to his cupboard. He returned a moment later with a green satin pouch which he handed to Toby.

‘Open it,’ he said.

It contained a large ring of dull smooth gold. The stone was a murky yellow diamond in the shape of a heart. Shattered and full of cobwebs.

‘It’s a large stone,’ the Brigadier said, ‘but worthless. Save for what historical value it has, it’s absolutely valueless.’

‘It’s a terrible story, sir.’

‘Yes, but I say this not because worse has not happened elsewhere, but because here, in India, it is all unprocessed, all undealt with. But it is there, somewhere, in the blood and memory of men. The past. And in this form, undealt with, it is, if anything, more dangerous. Who was it who said, “The past has to be seen as dead; or the past will kill.”’

‘A very good writer, sir, a very good writer indeed.’

‘Well, let’s not make things heavier for ourselves than they already are. Just remember – and I say this with Skandu as much in mind as you, for his nature is identical to yours – in certain places fineness of feeling is indistinguishable from weakness.’

‘But how did it manifest itself?’ Gauri asks.

‘Oh, once these things find roots,’ Skanda says, ‘once a person becomes aware of an intrinsic weakness in their partner, the manifestations show up everywhere. In the smallest things – from his decision to stay with the Brigadier that night – to much bigger things.’

‘Such as?’

‘His general state of calm. Which to her seemed like resignation and helplessness. His concerns, his occupations, even his touch and smile came all to seem to her like manifestations of that same weakness. And she felt her system revolt against it; she could hardly bear to be near him. It was Darwinian, Gauri: what began to happen in their relationship after I.P. It may seem strange to you: nine years of marriage suddenly up in smoke over something that, horrible as it was, was, in the end, external to their marriage. But these things have their own logic. Sometimes an event like this, an intrusion from the world beyond, can make apparent the flaws within.’

Gauri has come outside. She trails her fingers along the rough red surface of the wall that has carved up the house on Curzon Road. It has followed them invisibly, like a lost river, in their progression through the house, appearing now framed in a teak doorway, now climbing the shallow stairs of a pillared entrance, now bursting out into the open to cleave in half what had once been large terraces. At the back of the house, it comes again into full view. After partitioning the badminton court at the short service line, it runs along an area where the earth is bare and cold and wet. Then, as if acknowledging a claim on the earth greater than its own, it peters out in haste before the giant roots of a pilkhan. In the fog and murk of that cold December night, under whose canopy Delhi’s fragmentary history, its past and present, is brought together, Skanda and Gauri glimpse a narrow opening in the wall.

It is three feet wide and some five feet high. A doorless doorway in the wall. And drifting through it, like the unwieldy fog, which squares itself up on passing through, there is the murmur of voices.

‘I think we may have found your party, Skanda.’

And, mad as it seems, she is right.

They must have come to the wrong side of the house. The decayed side: the side that is yet to fill with the energies – and airiness – of a new time.

Twice a year there is a distracting wind in the north. Once in March, when, after Holi, it bears along the summer, and again, in October or November, when, soon after Diwali, it contains a chill. It was there on the morning of 31 October 1984. One could feel it in the smooth-floored corridors of the medical institute. In those heavy passages, painted in two tones, brown and yellow, in two textures, oily and chalky, over which it seemed the thickest Nehruvian sleep lay, the unruly wind created a mood of restlessness. Beige-brown curtains, drab and hung from dented aluminium rods, flapped wildly in their metal frames; the open panes, dusty and spattered with brown paint, which gave on to balding rectangular gardens, creaked against their stays; now and then, a nurse, gliding down these empty stretches of corridor, with their white doors and fire hydrants, would lightly touch her nurse’s cap, perched primly on a thick head of netted hair.

A wind-blown day of flapping curtains and sudden bursts of sunshine. Was there any escape from its mood? Was there any way a silently seething couple, awaiting admission to a patient’s room, could not be affected by it? Dark shapes flitted across the smooth sun-washed surface of labyrinthine corridors. Toby and Uma waited for news of I.P. from behind a privacy screen.

I.P., before anyone had seen him, had made a strange demand through his doctors: he would see only Toby. And, when he was discharged, he wanted to go, not to Fatehkot House, but to Toby and Uma’s flat. That was where he would spend his convalescence.

‘If he knew how little you had to do with his release, he might perhaps have thought differently.’

She stood in a shaft of flickering sunshine, gazing out at the hospital grounds whose neglect spoke of a winter deeper than the one that was approaching, and on whose damp and litter-strewn surface, a tatty sheet of dew glistened. A bitch, udders full and exposed, warmed herself in the sunshine. Toby, entranced by the visual power of the scene, of his wife, dressed in an aubergine sari with little white diamonds, standing in a column of municipal sunlight, her back turned to him, tried to immerse himself in the moment, tried not to let its impressionistic power blow away the reality.

‘It’s not what you think, Uma.’

‘What do I think, Toby?’ she said with an acidity that contained a note of surprise, as if she didn’t believe he had ever known what she was thinking.

She swung around briefly, as though to catch him out in his distractedness.

‘It’s not some expression of how he feels about you or his mother or anyone else, it’s just sometimes . . .’

‘Sometimes?’

‘The humiliation, Uma. Sometimes it’s easier to bear in the company of people who . . .’

He fell silent.

‘Who what? Who don’t judge? Who are accepting of weakness?’

‘This is not about us, Uma,’ he said automatically, without thinking of the implication of what he had said.

‘Isn’t it? Aren’t I being painted again as the tough little bitch, who no one will go to when they need comfort, and you, ever generous, ever compassionate, ever able to take the long view.’

‘But he’s staying in our flat . . .’

‘Because you’re there.’

‘Uma, you’re falling into a trap.’

‘What trap?’ she said with genuine curiosity.

‘What happened to I.P., to your brother, is not meant to happen to anyone. People cannot be expected to have a response. There is no question of strength and weakness here, Uma. It’s the state we’re talking about. It can destroy anyone. It has that power, a power given to it in trust. If it misuses that power – or uses it casually, to harm people at will – no one can be expected to be brave or cowardly before it. There is no question of humiliation.’

‘You’re contradicting yourself. You said a moment ago—’

‘I know. I was saying it because it is my guess that that is what I.P. is feeling. That was why he sent for me. That doesn’t mean he should feel it.’

‘I want to get away from it, Toby. From the heaviness of it all, from the boredom. When I think of Skandu and Rudrani, I think how will they escape the gloom of this time, how will it not enter their soul, and stay lodged there inside them . . .’

‘They’re very sheltered, Uma . . .’

‘Who will shelter them from this?’

‘We will. We’ll tell them that their uncle is unwell, and staying with us for a few weeks. What is there to that?’

‘It’s not so easy. These things have their effect. And they’ve been witness to it all.’

‘To what?’

How much she wanted to say: To my growing unhappiness, but she said instead, ‘To I.P.’s disappearance, to the worry in everybody’s faces, to the wrangling to get him out.
You
were not witness to it; you were consoling my father; you were being philosophical or whatever it is you are . . .’

‘Uma—’

‘But
they,
they saw it all. And it will leave its mark. You see, for you, Toby, none of this is real.’

‘None of what?’ Toby said, with exasperation.

‘Delhi. India. Whatever. For you it’s all just some pale impression of the grand idea you have in your head. All just some thin and “imperfect articulation” of that other place.’

‘What place?’ he said, with curiosity.

‘I don’t know! Somewhere else. Some place of sages, of semi-divine beings, of Gandharvas, and Kinnaras and Apsarases. And whatnot, Toby! Someone says H.P. to me and I think: Oh, good old Himachal Pradesh. Mountains, hill stations, busloads of tourists. Little H.P. Tourism guesthouses with white bread and weak tea. But you, you’re thinking, hima: snow, cold, frost; must be related to
hiems
and
hiver
and hibernate; and a | cala, that’s a non-goer, immovable, and like na | ga, means mountain. Snow mountain. How pretty!’

Toby smiled. He thought,
For all the bad blood, how much I still love her.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ he asked finally, fighting off the approach of something querying and philosophical in his voice.

‘Because for you the modern country doesn’t exist. Not the place that, on a whim, hauls in your brother and thrashes him within an inch of his life.
That
India doesn’t exist for you. You don’t see it; you don’t expect anything of it; you have nothing invested in it. It’s just something going on in the foreground of your grand, grand background.’

‘It’s not true: I
do
see it. It just doesn’t speak to me.’

‘It
shouts
at the rest of us, Toby. For the rest of us it is the only India there is. A shoddy little shit-hole, by turns violent and crushingly boring—’

‘But why are you saying all this? Why now?’

‘Because I’m fed up with how easily you seem to bear it all. And I want to rub in your face the fact that you can bear it because you live in a fantasy world. A place that exists in your head, and in your head alone. And there is no escapism – you complain about Hindi movies! Ha! – no escapism more complete than yours. My brother, he wants to see you right now, and not his family . . .’

‘I am his family.’

‘His blood family. Because he wants you to help him escape too. He wants you to make a little room for him in the cocoon.’