The Way Things Were (29 page)

‘Uma, what would you have me do?’

‘Give him a little dose of reality.’

‘Don’t you think he’s had enough already?’

‘Give him more. Make him understand who has worked tirelessly to get him out, tell him about his mother, his half-crazed mother, who hasn’t slept or eaten in a week. Tell him about the phone calls and the waiting, the running from this politician to that bureaucrat to this policeman, tell him about the cups of tea with callous stupid women. “You
must
understand: he was
very
rude to them, dear.” Tell him what a shallow and casual thing evil is in this country. Tell him about his sisters, who have their first streaks of grey from worry for him.’

She lifted her hair near her temple and it was indeed grey.

‘Isha has the same thing.’

‘So? What does that mean?’

‘It means we worry, Toby. It means we strive and feel fear; we get angry; we cry and grieve, we love . . .’ she said, as if asking a question. ‘We live in the real world, not in our heads. I want Skanda to live like that too. I don’t want him to be part of some effeminized elite.’

‘Is that what you think I am part of?’

She paused. The doctor had appeared from a door behind the privacy screen. He was a man of medium height and sallow complexion; the sharp cut and tension of his moustache seemed to make up for something flaccid in him; there was, halfway up his white doctor’s coat, a yellow stain near the button. An expression of great agitation was apparent in his small sunken eyes.

‘Is something the matter?’ Uma asked, observing his expression. ‘Something wrong with my brother?’

The doctor looked blankly at her, then some irritation showed in his face, as if, in the middle of an important consideration, he had been disturbed with a matter of little importance. Addressing himself to Toby, in deference, no doubt, to his being a man, and a white man, at that, he said, ‘No. Mr Inder Pratap is fine. Ready to be discharged. In fact, I would take him home this instant, if possible.’

‘Why? What is the problem, doctor?’

‘Some complications have arisen.
Not
with the patient. With
our
. . . how best to say it?
Our facility
here. It would be much better if he went home as soon as possible.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘Yes, yes, by all means.’

He stepped aside. Then said, ‘I’ll organize the paperwork. It will be just a few minutes.’

‘I’ll handle that with you, doctor,’ Uma said meaningly. ‘
While
. . . Let my husband see my brother. Toby, I’ll meet you downstairs?’

Inside, past the privacy screen, and the white door, the little room was flooded with sunshine, a steady stream of pale golden light. The room overlooked the main intersection outside – in those days there was no flyover – and provided, in a city where one was rarely high, a glimpse of the Delhi skyline. A pale green expanse, pierced now and then by a tomb, a tower, a Sovietic pile, over which there hung a thin mist. I.P., with his face turned to the window, seemed, with eyes open and intent, a little swollen, to be studying the view from his room when Toby came in. His solemn face, bathed in sunshine, made for an odd contrast with the foolery of the hospital gown he wore, and over whose low rounded collar some thick chest hair peeked. He didn’t turn around when Toby came in – not even when he said, ‘Hello, I.P.’ – but his lips made as if to smile, then, freezing in a wince, were at rest again. Toby interpreted the silence as voluntary. But he was wrong, when he drew up a chair, and came to sit at his bedside by the window, I.P., with some strain, lifted up his lip in explanation. For an instant, the sunlight that flashed in bedpans, and gilded the metal frames of hospital beds, blazed along the line of steel wire, as thick as a zip, that had been used to bind I.P.’s jaws together.

Toby did not flinch. He caught his reaction in time, and converted it into an exaggerated and mocking curiosity.

‘Going to be a hell of a job preventing the kids from calling you Jaws.’

I.P. shook a little with laughter.

‘Or Hanuman!’

I.P. looked questioningly at Toby.

‘Yes,’ Toby said, encouraged to have I.P.’s attention. ‘He cracked his hanu trying to reach for the sun. Saw it rising in the forest, thought it was a fruit – and
woosh!
’

But I.P. was not listening. He was searching his bed for something, and looking distractedly out of the window. Toby could not divine his meaning, and was about to accept defeat, when from somewhere deep within his sheets, I.P. triumphantly pulled out a small notebook and a pen.

‘Voilà!’

‘Indeed!’ I.P. scribbled and showed Toby, who laughed.

Then he wrote, ‘Two things . . .’

‘Go on,’ Toby said.

‘1,’ he wrote, ‘What the F— is a hanu?’

Toby smiled and came over. Taking the pad from him, he wrote: ‘Jaw, chin. Hanuman = (big)-jawed.’

I.P. took the pad back and wrote, ‘nice!’

‘And two?’ Toby said, his own interest now aroused.

‘2,’ I.P. wrote, glancing out of the window as he scribbled, ‘is a little more urgent.’

‘What?’

I.P. pointed agitatedly with his pen out of the window. Toby looked down and saw for the first time what I.P. had been staring at. Not the Delhi skyline. Outside the hospital’s wrought iron gates a crowd had gathered. Ordinary office-going men, in baggy dull-coloured trousers and Terylene shirts, who had parked their scooters on the side of the road, and stood, grim-faced, awaiting some kind of news. There was also among this crowd – on its periphery, in fact, Toby could see now – a couple of foreigners with video cameras. An armed guard. Photographers. Some people taking notes.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Toby said, barely aloud.

When he looked around, I.P.’s eyes danced.

‘You know?’

I.P. held his gaze and seemed even, though his lips did not part, to smile. Then he took his notebook and wrote, ‘The witch is dead.
’

Downstairs, Uma, in her battered black Fiat, tried with great difficulty to bring the car around. But every time she did, a lathi-wielding security man, or else another kind of man – in a baggy black faux-leather jacket – would stroll up to her and tell her to move off. It was the strangest thing. When they arrived, a few hours before, she could have parked right in front of the black metal gates had she wanted. But in the time it had taken her to go upstairs, fill in the paperwork and come back down, a crowd had gathered outside the hospital. At first, she had thought: Some old neta must be sick or dying. But as she drove around – she was forced to circle the hospital – the crowd grew larger, and grimmer. The odd foreigner with a heavy camera on his shoulder stood among security men, intelligence men and ordinary citizens. By a mysterious process, each one of them discovered within seconds what was now drawing them there. They ceased to do what they were doing, and joined the crowd with a solemnity and seriousness that contained in it a note of menace. Their watchful faces, though varied, somehow suggested kinship, like a band of conspirators.

What the F— am I going to do?
she thought.
Just keep circling the compound till they come around? How will I see them in this crowd? And what is it about? Why are they all standing here?

Automatically, as if the thought had passed from mind to body to machine, she slowed the car. She was on the edge of the crowd. Her window was open. She could hear the murmur of men’s voices. She heard one say, ‘She’s been shot.’

In that instant, Uma knew everything. She – and moreover everyone around her – knew everything. Who. Why. How. The consequences. It was as if something that had been brewing in men’s minds for months had, by an act of collective will, become suddenly manifest. Now the wrought-iron gates of the hospital flew open. A cavalcade of white Ambassadors sped out. In the half-curtained windows, the awaiting mob picked out family members, saw the shock written into their faces. A sigh of grief no longer than a breath, a brief exhalation, went through them and before she was out of earshot, Uma heard someone say, ‘She’s dead.’

Later she wished she had stopped the car. She felt sure that, before she drove around again, she had seen Toby and I.P. appear at the entrance of the hospital. Who knows? Here, the mind is wont to make mistakes. She probably didn’t. It was probably her regret and guilt that afterwards set to work rearranging the chronology of events, punishing her for what she could not have helped, but that – had she been able to – would have made so great a difference. Whatever it was, she found herself in the extraordinary position of having to take another round of the hospital, having only heard what she just had, having guessed at the consequences. And it was in that round, channelled back into the oppressive ordinariness of traffic, that all that was bad – and later seemed avoidable – occurred.

Toby and I.P. had seen the cavalcade too. From the moment they had left I.P.’s ward – Toby wheeling him along – they had found themselves in proximity to a terrific internal tension in the building. Large corridors that, till a moment before, had seemed so sleepy and deserted came alive with a furious and urgent energy. Everyone, from the peons they passed to the nurses to the doctors, had the self-important air of people entrusted with a national secret.

As Toby and I.P. made their way through the hospital, they were more than once asked to stop and wait. The building trembled to the vibrations of the great and terrible event that had entered its system, and brought all its parts into a jangled and dissonant harmony. But then, just as the energy had spread like hope, it now turned caustic. With the same fury that it had come into the building it now receded from it. The nurses, doctors, patients, paramedics and plainclothes policemen with walkie-talkies followed it out, as if following an empty promise of deliverance, to the front of the hospital, where they stood, in a lobby of fluorescent lights and potted plants, their faces stricken with grief. There was a flurry of slamming doors and screeching tyres. A moment later a tearful cavalcade of white Ambassadors streamed out of the drive of the All India Medical Institute.

I.P.’s mood, which had been jubilant in his room, when he first suspected the news, grew heavier as they made their way out. He sensed his isolation; perhaps he already had an intimation of ‘consequences’ and felt something of the solitude –
and threat
– of a man whose team wins the cricket, even as he finds himself in a town filled with supporters of the losing side. Victory might have been his, but there was no triumph, and the thing that had seemed to him a moment ago so good and true and just – the cutting down of a woman who had cut down so many – curdled into a kind of shame within the vault of secrecy where he was forced to conceal it. Moreover, he felt – though in his baseball cap and sunglasses he was hardly identifiable as a Sikh – people around him, as hope turned to despair, probe him for his reaction. He felt a scrutiny from the eyes that were following out the cavalcade, as though they were taking time off from their grief to look askance at him.

The violence of a repressed society, though men may dress it up as anger or grief, has the quality of a celebration. Those who participate in it know that at bottom what they are feeling is release and euphoria. And, even before Toby had wheeled I.P. up to the gates of the hospital, even before they had witnessed the scene that awaited them, which was itself only an intimation of things to come, he saw a change in the man he was wheeling out. He saw in this man, newly acquainted with the nature of his place, fear, naked and instinctual.

I.P. began to shake and tremble in his chair. His hands clutched the rests, his head crumpled into his collar bone. At first he himself did not seem to know what was happening to him. They had not come halfway down the drive; nothing yet was visible; he was in the sun and open air for the first time. There was nothing to be afraid of, nothing but a clear and breezy day, cloudless. And yet, as if truly he could smell the thing that was to be feared, his nerves, at the sight of the crowd behind the iron rails, began to give way.

‘It’s just some people,’ Toby found himself saying aimlessly. ‘People waiting. We’re going straight home from here. I’m just looking for Uma. She has the Fiat. Can you see her?’

I.P. nodded his head and tried to look too. But he could not tear his eyes away from the crowd, which, having only just parted for the cavalcade, was trying en masse to process the finality of what it now knew before anyone else in the city. This early knowledge of something for which there would be consequences made the people restless. They felt an obligation to retain their advantage: to act first, having been the ones who knew first. They felt the pressure of performing before the press whose attention, until then focused on the hospital gates, was now directed at the people who would set the agenda, who would say how it would be.

A riot requires an audience. Sometimes that audience is a crowd of reporters, sometimes the terrified residents of a housing colony, sometimes – and this is when the line between riot and pogrom blurs – that audience is comprised of representatives of the state. A cluster of policemen. A local politician. Whoever it may be, to every riot there is an aspect of street theatre.