The Way Things Were (3 page)

Driving in from the airport, he had seen sandbags in the shade of trees still festive from their May blossoming. In the dead white light of that June day, he saw men, Jats invariably, in olive-coloured uniforms, their handsome faces beaded with sweat, take their positions behind barricades. He had observed the blue metal barrels of guns cast their blank and cyclopean gaze over the still and scorching streets. It had been a day of stealth, and heat, and the crackle of radios, whispered conversations in darkened shops and houses. A day without newspapers, save for a few – where the government had forgotten to turn the power off.

‘Will it last long, Tripathi? This Emergency?’

‘Who can say, Raja saab? At the moment the elites are most affected, the newspapermen, the politicians. The public, the truth be told, are quite relieved. They feel there’ll be some proper governance for once.’

‘It’ll be bad in the long run, Tripathi, you watch. This kind of thing always is.’

They stood like that for a while, the occasional IIC member, tea and samosa in hand, giving a little bow or a smile as they went past. Observing the descent of evening over the IIC, and the park at its rear, ornamented with tombs, Tripathi muttered, ‘Go-dh
ū
li.’

‘Yes!’ Toby said, feeling his spirits lift a little at this reference to the earth-dust hour, so resonant in poetry.

He had intended to say something about it in his lecture. But he had forgotten. Rifling through his reference cards, he handed Tripathi one dated 26 June 1975. Tripathi put on his spectacles and read aloud in a low murmur, ‘The majestic sun is setting bringing on gracious night . . . here, carrying their water pots, are the sages returning in a group . . . their bark-cloth garments soaked with water . . . the smoke, pearly as a dove’s neck, carried by the wind . . . the trees all about . . . seem to have grown dense; the horizons are all lost to view . . .’

‘That is my India, Tripathi,’ Toby said, when Tripathi looked up. ‘A place of sages returning home in the evening, of smoke visible from their sacrifices; of trees filling, as they do here, with the sudden violet density of dusk. This, for me, is the real India, the India that lives on. Not this shabby Sovietic state the witch and her son want to shove down our throats.’

‘Careful, Raja saab,’ Tripathi said, and laughed. ‘You’ve only just arrived.’

‘The hell I care. By what I gather, I have more friends in jail than out. But, listen, Tripathi, we’ll have some good times together now that I’m here.’

‘Will you stay for a while this time?’

‘Maybe,’ Toby said with a grin. ‘Maybe for a long while.’ Then, recalling the secret cause of the elation he felt, he said, ‘Tripathi, tell me: did you see that lady sitting next to Isha Singh Aujla? The one in the green sari?’

‘Viski saab’s wife?’

‘Yes. No, I mean. Not her, but the one next to her.’

‘Her sister? Mishi madam, I think.’

‘Mishi? Is that her name?’

‘No. Uma, I believe. Odd choice of name for a Sikh girl. Punjabis, I tell you! They give a girl a name like Uma, then call her Mishi. Ishi and Mishi!’ Tripathi said and laughed. ‘Why? Some problem?’

‘No, no, nothing.’

Skanda is alone after what feels like days. And back in Delhi.

He had feared dislocation, feared things not ringing true. But it had not been like that. From the moment he set eyes on the Tamas
ā
he had known a great sense of familiarity. And later, when they had all come down to the banks of the river – to the uninhabited left bank, at the shmashana ghat – and the Tamas
ā
was visible behind the veil of sooty smoke and orange oblation-fed fire, he had known a sense of purpose too. When in the hour before the cremation the sky darkened, robbing the river of its glitter and threatening rain, he had, despite the entreaties of the Collector to wait for the arrival of an important MLA, given the priest permission to begin. Just as well. For the MLA did not arrive for another hour. And by then it was dark.

He had feared passivity, withdrawal, his tendency to retreat behind the walls of some inviolate system or structure; what his sister, Rudrani, angry that he was angry (for her not coming) had called his ‘little fortresses’. ‘That’s right. I’m really to learn how to take things head on from you, Mr Let-me-find-the-most-complicated-language-in-the-world-to-lose-myself-in – a dead one at that! – and-if-I’m-lucky-it-might-just-get-me-through-my-entire-life. Give me another one, Skandu. At least I have a relationship with a human being, someone I love; I have children. It could be said that I’m living my life. That I don’t want to come to India is my business. Everyone deals with these things in their own way. And Baba, more than anyone, would have understood.’

But grief was not purely a private matter. There was Kalasuryaketu to think of. His father had made it clear what he wanted; and someone had had to execute his wishes. He, Skanda, had done that. He had cremated his father. He had watched as the fire rose and darkness fell; watched as the flames, overcoming their initial reluctance, coaxed the flesh off his father’s body. He had watched them make a cathedral of his ribcage and give to his mild face a fierce and aboriginal aspect. Then, when the priest instructed him, he, Skanda, had smashed open the back of his father’s charred skull, so that there would be an aperture for the spirit to escape its earthly prison.

Had that not all been real life? What could be more real than death? And had he not lived through it? Had he not done all that was asked of him? He had taken his father’s body from Geneva to Kalasuryaketu, returned with his ashes in a terracotta urn so that they could be immersed at the Confluence.

A message on Skype informs him, ‘Theo Mackinson is online’. He has been fighting to keep awake. Drinking black coffee, eating peanuts. Narindar has left him a Coke on the desk, his father’s old desk. And, in a moment, he brings up his class in New York on his computer. He can see them all ranged around a large brightly polished table: Liese, the yoga teacher; Diksha, the exchange student; Kris(hna), a Californian Brahmin; and Alexis Dudney, a thin pale-faced scholar of Indo-Persian, who adds Sanskrit to his repertoire of languages the way a sexual adventurer might add a red head to a catalogue of other conquests.

‘Skanda Mahodaya!’ Theo Mackinson says, his image lagging. He is from the west coast, Oregon perhaps. He is in his early thirties, with short brown hair and brilliant blue eyes; his handsome face has hard edges, and a glow: a real tranquillity, Siddhartha-like, a mixture of Indic and west-coast serenity.

‘Skanda Mahodaya,’ he repeats in a more solemn tone now, then looks about the classroom and thinks better of it. Hurriedly he types a message: ‘Everyone is here at the moment. But I’m very sorry for your loss. If you’d like, we can arrange a chat next week.’

Skanda: ‘I’d like that very much.’

Theo: ‘Great!’

Then aloud, Mackinson says, picking up the thread of an earlier discussion, ‘What we have here, in
The Birth of Kumara
, is a dual narrative. There is the realm of the gods and the realm of men. The two narratives breathe easily next to each other; rarely is it made explicit that one is aware of the other, but we, the readers, on some implicit level, will always sense the presence of the other. Here, in the second canto, the gods, harassed by a demon called Taraka, have been told by Brahma that only a son born of the seed of the great god Shiva can kill Taraka. For this to happen Shiva must fall in love with Uma, the beautiful daughter of Himalaya. Uma, who, like an embodiment of the female principle, is central to this poem. Uma, “whose waist is altar-shaped, with three beautiful folds, which are like a ladder for Love to climb.” The only trouble is that Shiva is deep in meditation and cannot be disturbed. Which is why, at the end of this canto, the gods will recruit Kama – Love – to go into the forest and disturb Shiva’s austerities. And, for this,’ Theo says, with mock solemnity, ‘Love will die. Skanda Mahodaya, 2.10, if you will:
ā
tm
ā
nam
ā
tman
ā
vetsi . . . You know the self by the self.’ Then, teasing him for his love of cognates, he prods: ‘
Vetsi
? From
vid
, like
veda
, cognate with . . . ?’

In the world of Indology, these are the cheapest of cheap thrills. But his father had understood.
After the material from which we’re made
, he would say,
this shared history of sound and meaning is our deepest affinity
.

‘The Latin
videre
, to see,’ Skanda answers. An old beautiful root, which fuses words of seeing with words of knowing. ‘Related also to the Dutch
weten
, the German
wissen
; in Old English
witan
. And wot: singular present of wit.’

‘Right, Skanda Mahodaya!’

Now, Dudney, the most Indo-European of them all, cannot contain himself either. He says, ‘It’s the source of such words as video and vision. And I read somewhere – in Calasso, I think – that the reason veda has the same derivation is because the seers did not, as is commonly believed, hear the Vedas. They saw them!’

When it is over, he is drained. Over-caffeinated and sleepless. It is only 10.20 p.m. or so. Not yet 1 p.m. in New York. On his iPad, the Leonard Lopate show is still playing. They are predicting clear skies over Central Park, and temperatures for the first time in the high 70s. He is not homesick, but a feeling of dislocation is setting in. And the flat is eerily unchanged, a monument to his parents’ relationship. When, at length, his mother calls, she says, reading to the bottom of his mood, ‘And so, then? Are you going to just stay on there? Indefinitely? You can, you know. I have no objection. In fact, it’s nice for me to have you there, nice for the flat to be used. But what about your college? Your degree?’

‘Well, we’ve broken for the summer. I just had a make-up class via Skype.’

‘Great! Well, then, stay. Stay as long as you like. Skype, did you say? I love it: a man sitting in India learning Sanskrit via Skype from New York. Your father would have loved that: no greater comment,’ she says in a heavy voice, ‘on the state of Indian learning in India. Good. Well, you have everything you need?’

‘Yes.’

And now, as he rings off, in earnest, he wonders,
Why not?! Why not stay a while? I do have everything I need, why not stay and let the heat build and the rains come? Why not translate – for this is due quite soon –
The Birth of Kumara
here, in this place where my father has lived, and was for a while at least very happy, and where the city beyond is full of acquaintances, if not friends? Why not?!

He drags his status from Do-Not-Disturb to Invisible, and watches for a while as his Skype contacts, their day in New York under way, check in and out.

Turning over thoughts of leaving and staying, he remembers the ashes. His father’s ashes, and their immersion at Prayaga. With this in mind, he calls his mother back.

‘Darling, how should I know? Your father would have known. But he’s not here to ask. Why don’t you ask Tripathi?’

‘OK. I will. Just tell me this: is there any particular time before which I must immerse them?’

‘I suppose,’ Uma said. ‘You can’t just leave your father’s ashes in a biscuit tin on top of the fridge.’

‘They’re in an urn.’

‘Ah, good. Then relax. Ashes don’t go off.’

It was 1972 when Uma Fatehkotia decided to become an air hostess. It happened after a conversation with her friend, Priti Purie, the daughter of a navy admiral. Uma sat in a chair by the telephone table, in the great gloom of Fatehkot House, as Priti’s brassy voice came down the line.

‘Mishi, darling, I just went to him, my father, and I told him I’m doing it. He said, in his best Admiral’s voice, “Prits, are you asking me or are you telling me?” I said, “Daddy, I’m telling you.” And then . . . he let loose. “Air hostesses, little better than whores. Sailors of the modern age. The kind of women who become stewardesses . . . Admiral’s daughter this, Admiral’s daughter that . . . Did I send you to the best schools in the country so that you could mince up and down aisles serving white men their coffee?” I let him have his fill, Mishi. But my mind was made up: I was doing it, regardless of what he thought. I wanted to get out and it was the only way. And, let me tell you, Mish, it’s been what . . . three years now? . . . and I’ve loved every minute of it. Nairobi five days . . . Singapore, the Raffles Hotel . . . Mauritius, Dubai, Hong Kong; I’ve lived in London. Gloucester Road . . . King’s Road . . . free tickets, phalana, phalana. And when I began, haw, nothing could have been more shocking; and, now look, the doors are wide open: girls of the best families are doing it. Meeting their husbands on planes, if you please. The eternal promise of trolley to lolly.’

Priti Purie was a beautiful green-eyed girl; tiny, fair-skinned, articulate. She spoke in that accent known as ‘educated subcontinental’ and Mishi drank in her words, making all her reasons and experiences her own. No one had spoken more directly to her. For she also longed to get out, longed to slip the leash of an evil bureaucracy with its P-1 forms, host letters and currency restrictions; most of all, she longed to escape her mother and the stifling gloom of Fatehkot House. Within days of this conversation she went off to the British Airways office in Connaught Place, with its darkened windows and potted plants. It was as busy and social as the Oberoi Hotel, and Priti was right: everyone from the daughters of army chiefs and bureaucrats to those of businessmen, old feudals and even a few princes wanted to be air hostesses.

Six months later she was in the air. She was twenty-two.

Mishi’s decision gave her already strained relationship with her mother, Deep, a new line of tension. The announcement came only weeks after the wedding of her younger sister, Isha, to the heir of a rich Sikh family and it seemed to Deep like some final act of self-destruction. True, many good families, in those lean days, had become acquainted with air-hostessing. But that was not to say it did not shock. The idea of girls from good families, who had never so much as made a cup of tea for themselves, scurrying up and down the aisles of aeroplanes, serving strange men their meals, was abhorrent even to Mishi’s father, the Brigadier, who generally had a more philosophical outlook on life. For Deep, bourgeois to her entrails, it was worse than being an actress. A dance girl. ‘You’ve done it now,’ she said bitterly, ‘you’ve signed away all hope of your ever marrying. So, bas, my work is done. What is left? I wash my hands of the situation. We’ll put something aside. And you, you make do the best you can. What else is there to say?’